Traveling African Americans in aviation museum to stop in Sewickley
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The son of a famous pilot who pioneered the creation of the Tuskegee Airmen will make a stop in Sewickley this month to talk about African Americans in aviation.
Chauncey Spencer, 64, will park his “traveling museum” outside Sewickley’s Tull Theater on Walnut Street from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Aug. 26. He will allow four guests to enter the museum, a trailer he transformed into an educational exhibit with information about aviation in America from 1917 to 1942.
Spencer said guests walking through the museum will be able to properly distance themselves. He said he will also have a pop-up tent outside, also decked out with some of the same information found inside the trailer.
During his visit, Spencer will visit the Sewickley Cemetery and the Pittsburgh International Airport’s Tuskegee exhibit.
Spencer, of Palm Springs, Calif., will also begin his education tour in Chicago on Aug. 17. From there, he hopes to stop in cities like Sewickley before ending up in Washington, D.C. to participate in the March on Washington on Aug. 28.
The Western Pennsylvania stop is part of a cross-country tour Spencer is making in honor of his father, Chauncey Spencer Sr., who in 1939 flew a plane with Dale White from Chicago to Washington, D.C. in an effort to convince Congress that African Americans had a place in aviation.
During the 1939 journey, dubbed the “Goodwill Flight,” the pilots stopped in Pittsburgh – but only after a precarious flight from Morgantown, Spencer said. After being rejected by that airport to store their plane overnight, they took to the sky again for the short 50-mile flight to Pittsburgh in the dark.
The airmen could not see the landing strip. So, they followed a commercial plane that led the way. They landed in Pittsburgh safely, but the Civil Aeronautics Authority grounded them the next day. The legal proceeding prompted Robert Lee Vann, then publisher and editor of the Pittsburgh Courier who also worked as an attorney, to defend them legally.
When White and Spencer finally made it to D.C., they met with Edgar Brown, who was a Black lobbyist and founder of the National Negro Council. Brown’s connection led to a chance encounter with then Sen. Harry S. Truman.
Spencer said Truman was inspired by his father’s and White’s “guts,” so the senator promised to look into their requests. Truman has been reported saying “If you guys had the guts to fly this thing to Washington, I’ve got guts enough to see you get what you are asking.”
The airmen’s advocacy led to Congress allowing Black people to be included in the pre-World War II Civilian Pilot Training Program at an airbase in Tuskegee, Ala. The graduates of the program later became known as the Tuskegee Airmen. Neither Spencer nor White flew for the group, having been too old to join when it began.
Truman, who became the nation’s 33rd president six years after that encounter, integrated the armed services by presidential order in 1948, according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
John Dunn, who heads Sewickley’s effort to hang banners of veterans throughout the borough, said he read about Spencer’s cross-country tour and reached out to him to see if he’d be willing to stop in Sewickley.
Dunn said the Pittsburgh region is home to one of the largest groups of Tuskegee Airmen in the United States, with 84 men and 1 woman.
“I want to get them all a banner and make a trail from Sewickley to the cemetery – a sort of memorial walk,” he said. The walk would start at buildings historically set aside in Sewickley for Black people, he said, such as the Sewickley Community Center – which Dunn said was built for Black people to attend instead of the YMCA – and the former Walter Robinson American Legion.
Dunn said he hopes Spencer’s visit will kick off the borough’s effort to raise funds for the banner project, so that, by Memorial Day 2021, all the banners will be hung.