George Lucas's Next Project to Focus on Tuskegee Airmen

BuzzSugar — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:30:52 -0700

The black airmen trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field during WWII were the first to prove that black men could pilot aircrafts in the U.S. military, and now these Tuskegee Airmen - some of whom are still alive today - will be the focus of George Lucas's next film, Red Tails.

The surviving airmen say they're glad to have Lucas tell their stories - about both the war they fought against Adolf Hitler and the racial wars waging here in the U.S. Here's some backstory:

At first called the "Tuskegee Experiment," the first aviation cadet class began with 13 students at the Tuskegee Army Air Field, about 40 miles east of Montgomery, in July 1941. Black people weren't allowed to fly in the military at the time and the "experiment" was to see whether they could pilot airplanes and handle heavy machinery. Over the next four years, the airmen went on more than 15,000 combat trips throughout Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa.

And yet, despite the respect they earned, the men returned to an America in which "German prisoners of war [were] being treated better and afforded rights that were withheld from black American citizens."

For more about Red Tails, read more.

The Tuskegee Airmen have been the subjects of several film and TV projects, most notably in a 1995 HBO movie starring Laurence Fishburne, which one ranger at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site says was "about 50 percent Hollywood, but it gave a good overview and got the word out. People all over the world saw it and it whetted their appetite to want to know more."

And Lucas is one of those hungry people. He wants the story in Red Tails to be drawn from the airmen's personal accounts and has begun collecting oral histories from some of them at his Skywalker Ranch. Personally, I can't wait to see what comes out of this.

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