The Air Force had a long-standing policy of institutional racism. At the beginning of the war, Eleanor Roosevelt joined black leaders to pressure her husband to integrate the historically all-white Army Air Corps and to put black pilots into combat. Hap Arnold grudgingly established an all-black fighter unit, the famous Tuskegee Airmen, named for the Alabama base where they trained. These pursuit pilots served with distinction in the Mediterranean Theater, but the Air Force drew the line on integrating bomber crews, insisting that blacks and whites—especially Southern whites—could never
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