‘Red Tails’ hits mark with Tuskegee Airmen
BY CASEY TONER ctoner@southtownstar.com January 24, 2012 10:44PM
Lawton Wilkerson, center, and Louis Irons, both Tuskegee Airmen, stand with a statue of Col. Benjamin Davis at the Irons residence in Olympia Fields, IL on Wednesday January 17, 2012. | Matt Marton~Sun-Times Media
Updated: January 25, 2012 5:36PM
The blockbuster movie “Red Tails” that opened Friday is getting good reviews from at least two Southland men with personal ties to the film.
Produced by “Star Wars” mastermind George Lucas, the action flick spotlights the fighter pilots from the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black military members who broke racial barriers by serving in the Air Force during World War II.
Olympia Fields resident Louis Irons, Markham resident Lawton Wilkerson and Country Club Hills resident Marshall Knox all were members of the famous, decorated group. Irons and Wilkerson have seen the flick, but Knox said he wasn’t healthy enough to make it out to the theater.
Wilkerson, 85, was trained to be a B-25 bomber pilot. Irons, 85, was a flight engineer. Knox, 92, was a mechanic. None of the three was deployed overseas during the war, however.
Wilkerson and other members of the Tuskegee Airmen Chicago “Dodo” chapter were picked up in a limousine and driven to an early VIP-only screening of “Red Tails” on Jan. 5 in Chicago. After the viewing, he got to meet Lucas and some of the film’s stars, including Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard.
“The movie was very good,” Wilkerson said. “It was exciting and an accurate representation of what went on.”
Irons saw the movie opening weekend and said he thought it was good — but not complete.
“The movie started off in Italy and these guys were over there fighting,” he said. “To me, it should have started out when they first went to Tuskegee and had to learn to fly and all the crap they had to do to get there.”
Irons also said the film never mentioned the bomber groups that were trained or any of the Tuskegee Airmen who didn’t fight overseas.
“The Tuskegee Airmen were more than the Red Tails,” Irons said. “That’s the story they wanted to tell.”
He said about 1,000 pilots trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Macon County, Ala., while more than 10,000 black aviation maintenance personnel trained at Chanute Army Air Field in Rantoul, Ill.
From 1941 to 1946, about 445 Tuskegee Airmen were deployed overseas, and 150 were killed in combat or in accidents. Thirty-two others were taken as prisoners of war. As a group, the Tuskegee Airmen destroyed 112 German aircraft in the air and another 150 on the ground, according to “The Tuskegee Airmen: The Men Who Changed a Nation,” by Charles F. Francis.
Irons claimed the film, in order to please audiences, underplayed the racism black soldiers experienced during the war. Racism was institutional during the 1940s and reached all the way up to some generals, he said.
“Some of those commanders were pure racists,” Irons said. “They didn’t hold back.”
Wilkerson and Irons, Chicago Heights natives who graduated from Bloom High School in 1944 before enlisting, recalled being moved to the back of the bus on their basic training trips to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Miss.
Knox, who also trained at the Mississippi base, recalled leaving Chicago in a posh sleeping train car and arriving in the state in “just a coach car with seats in it.”
“No eating facilities or anything else,” he said. “If you didn’t pack your chicken in a brown bag, you didn’t eat. It was like going from a classy carriage to a wagon.”
The movie made more than $19 million in its opening weekend. Lucas said he had trouble financing the film since all the leads are black, a claim Wilkerson and Irons believe.
“It’s a positive black film; they don’t think they’ll make a profit off it,” Irons said.
Many black pilots continued to experience racial prejudice after they left the service, according to Ken Rapier, president of Tuskegee Airmen Chicago “Dodo” chapter (which takes its name from the bird that went extinct because it lost the ability to fly).
When he returned from the war, Wilkerson said no one would hire him to fly commercial jets.
“We applied and they didn’t take any of our applications,” Wilkerson said, adding that he went on to be a program manager at NBC Radio. “I didn’t let it destroy me.”
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