Melissa T. Miller, Contributing Writer
The Program at Tuskegee
"Hands down, Tuskegee was much harder," says Harold Hoskins, shaking his head.
As a former student both at Tuskegee and later at an integrated pilot school at Texas' Randolph Air Force Base, and having served under Colonel Benjamin Davis and logged 9500 flight hours in the Air Force, Hoskins is in a unique position to compare both experiences. Since retiring from the Air Force, he has become Assistant V.P. of Student Affairs at California State University in Hayward.
"The Tuskegee program was so rigorous, you didn't have time to think," says Hoskins. "A history master's student, who happened to be Jewish, was interviewing me for her thesis, asked me if I knew anything about the Holocaust. Honestly, all that was on my mind was 'Can I get through this program?' I didn't have the faintest idea about the Holocaust, nor about anything else that was happening in American society either, for that matter."
An initial part of the Tuskegee experience was getting hazed by upper classmen, a tradition brought over from the military academies and four national Black fraternities where many cadets had gone to school before enlisting in the Army Air Corps. Cadets were forced to "eat a square meal": they were only allowed to sit on one corner of their dining room chair, made to sit perfectly straight, and bring their forks from their plates to their mouths at a perfect right angle, without moving their heads. If food was dribbled, the cadet had to stand up and scream the humiliating phrase, "I am a sloppy dummy."
Pre-flight cadets were also awoken in the middle of the night, ordered to put on their rubberized ponchos and gas masks, and made to do various physical drills all night -- while still being expected to do their full physical training regimen in the morning, which began at 6 a.m., as well as class all afternoon.
"I guess it was supposed to make you tougher," explains Hoskins. "But when I got to Texas, I found out those white boys had no idea what hazing and fazing was all about. I didn't let on, but Texas was a piece of cake.
"Just to give you an example, we had to hem our own pants and sew on our own buttons on our shirts at Tuskegee. At Texas, we had tailors!" he laughs. "At Texas, they even customized our shirts so they fit just right and we looked sharp. At Tuskegee, we had to make sharp folds in our shirts, wrapping them sometimes all the way to our backside, to make them fit properly."
It is important to note that at the time African-American pilots trained at Tuskegee, the military was still completely segregated, which means the pilots' planes serviced by African-American mechanics and other specialists. Armament specialists trained at Lowry Field in Colorado, radio specialists at Scott Field, Illinois, and mechanics at Chanute Army Air Field in Illinois.
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