Tuskegee Airmen

President Bush and his former secretary of state, Colin Powell, will join with some of their administration's harshest critics — including Senators Levin and Reid, Speaker Pelosi, and Rep. Charles Rangel — at the Capitol today for a cause so just that it bridges partisan divides. The event is to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the Tuskegee Airmen. In an editorial last year, when Rep. Rangel's resolution to award the medal passed by a vote of 400 to 0, we wrote:

The resolution itself tells a remarkable story: "The Congress finds the following: In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt overruled his top generals and ordered the creation of an all-Black flight training program. President Roosevelt took this action one day after the NAACP filed suit on behalf of Howard University student Yancy Williams and others in Federal court to force the Department of War to accept Black pilot trainees."

It goes on, "Due to the rigid system of racial segregation that prevailed in the United States during World War II, Black military pilots were trained at a separate airfield built near Tuskegee, Alabama. They became known as the 'Tuskegee Airmen'. The Tuskegee Airmen inspired revolutionary reform in the Armed Forces, paving the way for full racial integration in the Armed Forces. They overcame the enormous challenges of prejudice and discrimination, succeeding, despite obstacles that threatened failure."

A success it was. Of the pilots trained at Tuskegee, 450 served in combat during World War II, destroying many enemy targets in Europe and North Africa. Two of the pilots — Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., and Daniel 'Chappie' James — eventually became four-star generals in a military integrated by President Truman's order. The name Tuskegee has become notorious for the secret government syphilis experiment for which President Clinton apologized in 1997. But the Institute in Alabama founded by Booker T. Washington deserves to be known as a place where patriotic African-Americans trained to serve their country as airmen in a war against a racist enemy — and by their service helped conquer racism at home.

Today we are yet again at war against an evil enemy animated by anti-Semitism and seeking to impose its rigid way of life on the whole world. The Tuskegee Airmen rallied to America's cause and to America despite all our country's faults and divisions, and they fought bravely for freedom. Sixty six were killed in combat. Their sacrifice and service ennobles us, and remembering them, as Congress is doing, inspires us today.

And today as well, a point marked by the high-level crowd of bipartisan dignitaries expected at the ceremony on Capitol Hill and at the reception that will follow. At the event the biggest crowds will gather around and the most admiration will attend not the country's powerful politicians, but the surviving airmen themselves, whose heroism has been validated by history and the passage of time.