Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart, a member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and one of the last surviving members of the all-Black fighter pilot squad, has died.
Stewart passed away “peacefully” at his Bloomfield Hills home on Sunday, according to the Detroit chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen. He was 100 years old.
A Queens, New York native, Stewart was 18 in 1943 when he began pilot training with what would become the 332nd Fighter Group in Tuskegee, Alabama. The regimen was made up entirely of Black men, since the U.S. military was still racially segregated during the Second World War.
Even by the standards of the now-revered unit, Stewart had a particularly remarkable career. The 332nd’s primary job was to escort American bombers on missions over Europe, and Stewart distinguished himself in action. He flew 43 combat missions, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for heroic actions in combat. He was also one of only four Tuskegee Airmen credited with downing three enemy aircraft in one day.
Stewart’s feats in the air continued after the war ended. He was part of a team from the 332nd that won the Air Force’s first Top Gun Aerial Combat competition in 1949–despite flying inferior, outdated aircraft compared to some of the other teams.
Stewart called that win “a feather in our cap.”
“And I think it put an end to any doubt in people's minds, as far as the abilities of the Tuskegee Airmen were concerned,” he said.
But their incredible feats in combat and elsewhere didn’t prevent Stewart and the other Tuskegee Airmen from facing stubborn racism and discrimination after returning home. In a 2019 interview with the American Veterans Center, he recalled interviewing for several commercial airline pilot jobs in the 1950s.
“I was not hired. And the reason was that they were not hiring any African American pilots or crew members at the time,” Stewart said.
As a result, after the war Stewart was forced to start at what he called “the bottom” — as a baggage handler at New York’s Penn Station. But he eventually got a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from New York University, and went on to work for Detroit’s ANR Pipeline Company, where he retired as a vice president.
Looking back on his life at age 94, Stewart told the American Veterans Center he had no regrets.
“I wouldn’t change any of it for anything,” he said. “It's been a beautiful, beautiful odyssey for me."
With Stewart’s passing, there is now only one documented Tuskegee Airmen combat pilot still living.
You can watch a video of Stewart talking about his experiences here.
