Mr. Dart was of a generation when black people were apart. In many areas of our country Mr. Dart couldn’t sit at the same area of an eating place as a white person; he couldn’t get water from the same drinking fountain; he couldn’t sit next to whites on a bus; he couldn’t sit in the same train carl although his father worked on that train. He certainly couldn’t march, fight or fly next to a white man. The civil war was over, the prejudice remained. I remember, as a young person, during the war a Senator got up in Congress and said black people couldn’t serve in the military because their brains were smaller.
And yet when our country went to war, none of this mattered to Mr Dart and his fellow black military men. When they got their “greetings” from Uncle Sam they responded with the same post Pearl Harbor enthusiasm as every other American. And the prejudice didn’t end when they were inducted. They were separated into black units; they were either put in service units or put out as forward observers to get killed first.
But Mr. Dart knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to fly and he kept at it until he was allowed to fly although not with the best planes and not in the bombers that delivered the blows to the axis powers. Mr. Dart and his group flew as they were “allowed” to live, serving - flying protection for those great bombers making sure that they were protected from enemy fighters. And those black flyers did it as they did everything else, competently. They did it so courageously that soon those white bomber crews were requesting that the black fighter squadron fly protection for them.
I don’t know if Mr. Dart was a Democrat or a Republican. But I am glad that he lived to see a black man in our White House. I’m glad that he lived to see the Democracy for which he fought, become a reality. If Martin Luther King talked the talk, Clarence Dart walked the walk. It is up to those of us still here to make sure that the America
