In His Own Words: A Tuskegee Airman Tells His Story

JUDITH BROWN: I am interviewing today Dr. Charles S. Johnson at his home in Dayton, Ohio.  The date is May 23, 2001.

Dr. Johnson, thank you so much for allowing me into your home and allowing me to interview you today.  For the record, could you please give us your name, your date off birth, and your place of birth?

DR. CHARLES JOHNSON:  I am Charles S. Johnson, Jr. My date of birth is 9/10/21. I was born in Flushing, Long Island, New York, where I lived my first seven years of life.  Then I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where I spent my younger years on the campus of Fisk University, where my father was positioned as a professor and later college president.

BROWN: What was your father professor of?

JOHNSON: Sociology. Sociology.

BROWN: Professor of Sociology?

JOHNSON: I am named for him. He was a strong influence on my life. He later became President of Fisk University until his death in 1956.

BROWN: How did he influence your life?  How did your father influence your life?

JOHNSON:  Pushing,  pushing.  [chuckles]  Pushing  and  encouraging   me in every  direction  I moved, until after the war was over, when he did put his foot down and insisted I was not going to South America to start up an airline there.

BROWN: [laughs]

JOHNSON:  He insisted that I go back to school. I had just graduated when the war began, and so my career was interrupted.  But he insisted that I go back to graduate school to prepare myself for a career in law, religion, or medicine, and I chose medicine. That's the way I got to where I am.

BROWN:  Okay.  So  you  grew  up  in  Nashville,  Tennessee,  basically surrounded   by  a  very educated group of people--

JOHNSON:  Yes.

BROWN:  Nashville, however, is in  the  South.  What was  segregation  like  when  you  were growing up in Nashville?

JOHNSON: We lived through it. We lived through it. We knew it was there. We were fortunate enough to be fairly well traveled, and we knew the difference between the North and the South. But my perspective is somewhat unique because as a well-known sociologist--that was my father's field, and he wrote several books on the subject of racial segregation, which are being used as textbooks now. He and his circle of friends were in the forefront of the effort to attempt to desegregate America. So segregation and its influences and its impact were bound to have a strong effect on me, although I did not experience much of it because the campus environment was a rather protective circle. We exposed ourselves to segregation when we wanted to, when we wanted to, but we carried on our normal lives and normal activities in spite of segregation. So it had very little impact on my life.

Of course, the hope and aspiration of all young people at that time was to live in an unsegregated America, which we are still moving toward. But segregation had little influence on me other than historical influence on me, because I knew so many people, so many other places, who were intimately exposed to segregation and its evils. And I had spent time and years of my early life on three college campuses where I would meet people from all over the country, who were raised in different environments, South and North, so I knew segregation first-hand through the lives of others. But it didn't have any serious impact on me.

BROWN: Did you go to school, to a public school in Nashville?

JOHNSON: I was in public schools in Nashville. Yes, I was.

BROWN: They were segregated, weren't they?

JOHNSON: They were segregated, yes, but Fisk campus was an integrated campus. We had Quakers and other--and Jewish professors, and we had--about half of our professors were white, and we were exposed to whites through those contacts and the contacts of their friends, who were attracted to the campus community. And also to the many people who visited our school during the years I was there as a youth. And we had friends in all areas, all races, practically most of my younger life. So my exposure to racial diversity was far more broad than, I would say, the average youth of my time or the average youth in Nashville.

BROWN: Did you go to Fisk as an undergraduate?

JOHNSON: I went to Virginia Union University for one year in 1938, but I left and came back to Fisk for the last three years, and I graduated from Fisk University in 1942.

BROWN: June of 1942?

JOHNSON: 1942, yes. But I incidentally had spent one year at Tuskegee in the high school, in Tuskegee, in 1936.

BROWN: Ah. How did you happen to do that?

JOHNSON:   Well,  [chuckles]   my  father  had  the  notion  that  young people  should   prepare themselves for something,  and Tuskegee was a new concept. They had trade schools down there which were not available in other places, and it was his idea that we learn something about labor, working trades, careers, different occupations.  And my brother and I spent one year at Tuskegee High School, there.  That  was a failure,  because  we went down  there  and  loafed  and  did  not follow  my father's  hopes. [Brown laughs]  He was hoping  that  we would  take  something  like electricity or drafting or plumbing or tinning or any of the many things that Tuskegee  offered at that time,  but  we went down  and  took photography,  which  was  a total  waste  of  my  father's money. [Brown chuckles]

But that gave me a year, at the age of fifteen, in the state of Alabama.  But that was also an isolated community and isolated environment, where there was very little contact with discrimination  or racial discrimination--except for the fact that Tuskegee,  the city of Tuskegee was highly segregated,  and it was [in] very close proximity  to the school  and pretty  much off limits  to the  students,  unless  they  had  business  there.  But it was something you  had  to  pass through coming in and out of Tuskegee [Institute].

BROWN: Would you go to the movies at Tuskegee while [you were there]?

JOHNSON:  Yes, they had a segregated movie theater down there we attended sometimes,  yes. We did do that. They had one little theater there. Maybe one or two little theaters down there. They had a black section, where the students would come or the faculty.  People would come if they wanted to attend the movies. But Tuskegee campus--I think they had movies on campus occasionally anyhow. So we weren't totally cut off from movies at that time.

But I had the opportunity after 1936 to come back to Tuskegee, which I considered old stamping grounds, back in 1942, when I was looking for some place to fit myself during the war effort, which started just about six months before my graduation from college.

BROWN: Okay. Well, of course the war starts in December of '41.

JOHNSON: Yes.

BROWN: And you're a young college student. Would you have been drafted from college?

JOHNSON: I probably would have been drafted. So it was the idea of most people with college training  to  try  to  find  something  that  would  be suited  to  their  talents,  rather  than  allow themselves to be drafted as unskilled or untrained [labor]. That was the time I volunteered for the Air Force.

BROWN: Had you always been interested--or had you been interested in aviation for a long time?

JOHNSON: I went through a period from the ages of eight to twelve years old when I was active with the Boy Scouts, and with peer groups that went through a plane-building phase of their development, along with other kids who had interest in aviation. And we built model planes and read some of the literature, and we knew of the heroic exploits of military pilots as youth. And when the opportunity to fly presented itself, it was probably the most attractive of all the options that were available to me at age twenty-one, when I came out of school.

BROWN: Okay. So how did you get into the Tuskegee program then?

JOHNSON: Well, I took the military examination for officer training in school, and I gave consideration to the aviation cadet  program.  I flunked the examination  [coughs]  because  of a hearing deficiency,  so I had to reconcile  myself  to a secondary  option  of military  flying  as a service pilot,  which  would  be less exacting  and which  was  possibly  acceptable to me with a hearing  problem.  So  I volunteered  for the Air  Force Reserve  in order  to  participate  with the Civilian  Pilot  Training  [CPT] program  at that  time,  because  it was training  pilots  to  become instructors for the military effort.

BROWN: Okay, so you went into the Civilian Pilot Training program?

JOHNSON:  Civilian Pilot Training, as a Reservist, as a Reservist. That protected  me from being drafted while I was being trained.

BROWN: Where did you go for your CPTP training?

JOHNSON:   At Tuskegee.  There  were  about  six  black  colleges  that had aviation  programs, Civilian Pilot Training programs.  But due to the war effort, most of them had closed down and their teachers and their instructors were all converging on Tuskegee as a big, major effort. So those other programs closed and they probably were not available in 1942.

BROWN: Okay, because I've talked to people who have had CPTP at Hampton and at other places.

JOHNSON: Yes, that was before '42.

BROWN: Okay.

JOHNSON: And they all ended up at Tuskegee anyhow.

BROWN: So when did you arrive at Tuskegee for your CPTP training? When did you get to Tuskegee?

JOHNSON: September of 1942.

BROWN: Okay. And you already knew when you arrived what Tuskegee was like because you had been there.

JOHNSON: I had been there before. I knew a lot of people around there, yes, in the area.

BROWN: Okay. So you weren't surprised at all at--

JOHNSON:  I knew the scene. [chuckles]  I knew the scene.  I knew the locale.  And I knew all about Tuskegee.

BROWN: Okay. Could you tell us something about your CPTP training? What it consisted of.

JOHNSON:  It was exposure to primary   instructions in aviation aerodynamics and ground instruction  in  maintenance,  safety.  And  we took  Piper  Cub  training  as our  first  exposure  to aviation, and I took my first solo in a Piper Cub, as a primary pilot.

BROWN: How long would it take for you to solo in a Piper Cub?

JOHNSON: It took between six and eight hours.

BROWN:  Was that the standard amount of flying experience--?

JOHNSON:  That was standard about that time, yes. Some  took  longer, and some  exceptional people were able to solo in less time than that, people who had had previous exposure,  who had flown,  you know,  as passengers  or who  had been  taken  up for flights,  people  who  had been around  CPT  programs,  had  had  a little  bit  of  flying.  But  going through  ground  school  and navigation  and things,  I took  mine at a leisurely  pace. I finished that program in about eight weeks, I think, the primary program.

BROWN:  Okay. Was that just the primary phase of CPTP, or was--

JOHNSON:  They had a primary and a secondary  phase, but what was happening  was Tuskegee was having  a hard  time  getting  funded  for the programs  that they  were  planning.  They made plans, but the government had not funded the programs.  And  there  was often  delay  and  stall between one program and another program, because there was always an air of uncertainty  as to whether  the  government--which was considering Tuskegee  an experiment--whether the government  program  was going to be worthwhile  or whether  it was going  to be a worthwhile effort--or whether they would even permit completion of the training that had been offered to the Reservists.  So there was a three- or four-month lull between primary and secondary programs.

BROWN:  So  you  had  your  primary  and  then  you  just  stayed  at Tuskegee  for  three  or  four months?

JOHNSON:  No, I left Tuskegee and went to Washington and worked and got a little part-time job until the program got ready for the next phase, see.

BROWN: Oh, okay. So you went to--you finished your primary training, and then you went up to Washington?

JOHNSON:  Well, my brother was in Washington, so, you know I spent a couple of months there till--because there was nothing to do on Tuskegee campus if there was no training.  Most of the fellows scattered. Some of them stayed around and got part-time jobs, but there was so much uncertainty that the program would be completed.

BROWN: How many people were in your program with you?

JOHNSON:     I would say maybe about fourteen or sixteen,  in the group that I was with. And some of those guys were in their forties!

BROWN: Oh!

JOHNSON:  Because they were fellows who were still--some of them were professionals;  some of them were schoolteachers--people who were threatening  to be drafted. And they thought they were better off if they found a niche where they could serve and stay home and stay out of the infantry or serve in a more noble capacity. And they may have had--some of them had indifferent love  for  flying,  but  the  younger  boys  all  wanted to  get  up in the  air.  And  so  we,  as  far  as scholastically,  we had a lot of competition  with a lot of more mature people,  who were older, who also had aspirations  to fly, because they had promised the fellows that they could  become service  pilots  as well  as  instructors.  That was in an attempt  to plan  an ongoing  program  for continued recruiting.

It sounded  very  adventuresome   and  very  enjoyable,  and  a  lot  of  the fellows  looked forward to moving along in their program. They would fly behind the scenes, behind the lines, transport messages, artillery observation flights.  And they probably would  see  some  military duty, but most of it still behind the lines, not as fighter pilots, though.

BROWN: As a service pilot, as you understood it, would you have gone overseas or would you have been working in the U.S.?

JOHNSON:  Theoretically the service pilots would have worked both places. They would have been in the islands during the war or they would have been overseas as artillery spotters and messengers. And they're flying smaller planes, carrying three to five passengers, but they were primarily for behind-the-lines support. They would probably have no military combat exposure. That sounded very good to a lot of the fellows, who never otherwise could have visualized a career in aviation for themselves.  And they got to be pretty good at it except that very few of them--that program never matured. They never completed that program.

And  the  unfortunate  problem,  was  that  after  the  secondary  phase  of our  secondary training, the government  abandoned  the program, abandoned  the program.  And they  put all of those fellows  who were in training,  put them on active duty while they tried to make up their minds what they were going to do with them--since there were still some bit of infighting in Washington  about  whether  they should continue  to support the black flying  effort,  or in what manner they could support it.

They promised these guys that they could fly, but they weren't sure they were going to have something for them to do, you know, when it was over. So as a result, they never really completed the program.  They never turned out any service pilots.  And  the fellows  who  were drafted  had a choice,  or an option  of going into active  duty as cadets  for military training  or being discharged, with Section 10 discharges, "for the convenience  of the government," because they were not serving in the capacity for which they had volunteered.  So the government owed them a discharge. This group was merged with a group from Chicago, from Willa Brown School of Aviation. You've heard of that  before.

BROWN: Yes.

JOHNSON: There were about twelve to fifteen fellows from Chicago who mixed with the twelve to fifteen fellows who were down in Tuskegee, and so I guess there may be about thirty or thirty­five altogether.

BROWN: Okay. Now, you, if I understand, you had your primary at Tuskegee, then you went to Washington for three or four months, and then you came back and you did secondary.

JOHNSON: And guess what! I got a little part-time job [in Washington] in a very historical spot. I became a messenger boy for the Zionist Organization of America. [laughs] You ever hear of them? You know who they are?

BROWN: Zionist?

JOHNSON:  You know what they are?

BROWN: Well, I know the Zionists were instrumental—

JOHNSON: They were just beginning. They were just beginning.

BROWN: --to get Israel as a state.

JOHNSON: That's right. They had a publishing house there, and they put out some Yiddish-­ Jewish newspapers. And they were trying--there was a worldwide effort to organize Hebrews all over the world into supporting the Jewish nation. That began during the war, and I was involved in publishing them, mostly as a messenger and helping with printing and bundling. And I got familiar with the Zionist movement during that summer.

My brother was in Washington at that time. He worked for the War Production Board as a mathematician. He had a sociology degree. But he later volunteered for the Air Force and was accepted as a cadet in the bombardier-navigation program. And they sent him to Texas around the same time they sent me back to Greensboro [North Carolina].

BROWN: Greensboro?

JOHNSON: Greensboro. That's where they shipped the boys off after they put them on active duty. Biloxi, Mississippi, first, and they didn't know what they were--they stayed four months down there. And then they went to Greensboro at the basic training center, and they stayed around nine months there. And then they finally decided to go ahead and discharge them.

BROWN: So, now, did you go to Biloxi and Greensboro?

JOHNSON:  When we were put on active duty, the whole group was put on active duty, with no exceptions, and--really to have us in uniform under military discipline, in the military, while they were trying to decide what to do with these half-trained, partially-trained black service pilots that had no duties, even on completion of the training. So they felt in Washington that was a waste of effort, waste of money, and they didn't think black people were--they didn't think the Tuskegee experiment was going to be a success anyhow!

BROWN: Yes.

JOHNSON:   So  they  had  lots  of  trouble  funding  and  completing   support  programs  for  the Tuskegee Airmen.

BROWN: Okay. I just want to get my chronology straight. You have your primary at Tuskegee, then you go to Washington and you work for the Zionist organization--

JOHNSON: For about five months. And then they called us back to Tuskegee.

BROWN:   You get called back to Tuskegee and you finished secondary training.

JOHNSON: Yes.

BROWN: And then the program is ended.

JOHNSON:  Abruptly ended.  Before they were able to--before they had even planned the third stage, which would have been the final stage, which would probably have been under military supervision, probably in another setting, may not even have been at Tuskegee.  They didn't even have the planes for it, or the instructors. They just abandoned the program and said, "Let's do something else."

BROWN: Okay. So from Tuskegee you went to Biloxi?

JOHNSON:  Biloxi for basic training and then Biloxi to Greensboro.

BROWN: Greensboro, North Carolina?

JOHNSON:  Yes.

BROWN:  Okay. What was it like in both Biloxi and Greensboro?  I've heard people talk about basic training in Biloxi.

JOHNSON:  Well, you know, in Biloxi, Mississippi, there were probably very, very few of these Northern  boys  and  these  college  boys  leaving  the  post  at  any  time  for  anything--except  for weekend excursions  to New Orleans,  which was always an opportunity  and a fun thing.  But it was quite isolated and quite primitive.  There was nothing off the post, off the base that would attract anybody.  All the units were segregated.  But they gave basic training, marching, military gun, archery--

BROWN: Archery?

JOHNSON: I mean with the--not archer, but marksmanship! Marksmanship.

BROWN: Oh, oh, okay.

JOHNSON: And drilling. And mostly we didn't have any classroom education at all. We just loafed, loafed, because we knew they were twiddling their thumbs, trying to figure out what to do with us. We didn't know what we were going to end up in.

BROWN: So then you got sent to Greensboro, North Carolina.

JOHNSON: For more of the  same.

BROWN: And by this time--is it 1943 by this time?

JOHNSON: Yes, it was early '43, yes.

BROWN: Okay. So you're loafing around Greensboro, then.

JOHNSON: Yes. That wasn't too bad because there were two black colleges there. And I spent a lot of time off the post there, because it was close to the heart of the black part of the city. And so there was quite a bit of leave and a lot of wandering around town. Nothing else to do, but I was only one year ahead of the college kids who were still in school there, so I had made friends with people who were in the community,  so I enjoyed it socially. But it was no enhancement of my military career, whatever.

BROWN: So how long did you stay at Greensboro?

JOHNSON: About eight months.

BROWN: About eight months. And how did you get back to Tuskegee?

JOHNSON:  After discharge, I made contact with the people who were there.

BROWN: Oh, okay. So you were essentially--

JOHNSON: All of us were discharged at the same time.

BROWN: And when was that?

JOHNSON:  That was the summer of '43, I believe it was. And that was the summer when we had  the  protest.  We  had  a  minor  protest  down there  because  one  boy,  who  was  a  Howard [University] graduate, went to school in Washington--and  he was quite showy and quite a leader and quite outspoken,  didn't want any part of the military anyhow. He wanted to get out. He tried all kinds of devious tricks to get out of the service. And he found out he wasn't going where he planned to go, so he went to Washington on a leave, a weekend leave, and slashed his wrists on the White House steps [chuckles]--

BROWN: Oh, my goodness.

JOHNSON:  --in protest of the military's mistreatment of this group.  He was mostly concerned about himself. He was hoping that he'd be considered crazy so he could get discharged.  [Brown chuckles]  But the black press took it as a military protest against the indecision [about] what to do with their committed soldiers. So as a result of that--partly as a result of that and other things­-they  went  and  discharged  the  whole  group  and  gave  the  fellows  who  were  in  the  military already--they gave them the option of going into the cadet corps and becoming cadets and pilots­-and the other people who were not qualified or who were too old for it or too tall, too big or too fat, a chance of getting out of the military completely.

BROWN: Okay. And you couldn't be a cadet because of your hearing—

JOHNSON:  I have a hearing problem. Yes, I couldn't pass the exam.

BROWN: So you got discharged, then.

JOHNSON:  I got discharged.

BROWN: Okay. And after that, you got in touch with Tuskegee?

JOHNSON: Well, that's the tricky thing, and that's the thing I used to brag about all the time. That's where Lewis [A.] Jackson comes in. See, I was one of Lewis Jackson's pilots, one of his students. And he had always told his students that his students could outfly, outperform any comparable student from any other location and that his students were superior, and that's been proven in many an area. But he was quite a braggart about the thoroughness of his training and the skill of the people he turned out.

So he told me to come back to Tuskegee, because they were still short of instructors. And I only had sixty-five hours of flying time, and he said he would give me an airplane and let me go up and practice my maneuvers, and he would convince the military brass that I had 250 hours of flying time--

BROWN: Oh, my goodness!

JOHNSON: --so that I could pass the flight check. And in about four or five days with this airplane, practicing the maneuvers that he had told me to practice for this flight check, the government hired me [laughs] as an instructor, on the assumption that I had as much time as Mr. Jackson said I had, because I was his student and he had my logbooks and everything. So I was misrepresented as a fairly experienced pilot, who really was not experienced at all. And I had, I was told that  I  had to fly like I had that amount  of time that the man said  I had, or  I would embarrass him and his school. So I was very proud I've been able to do that and complete that. And I think several of us, about five or six fellows who were in this Greensboro group who came back and became instructors. He told the government that his students were as good as anybody.

BROWN: Who else came back from Greensboro? Do you remember?

JOHNSON:  Salone, Mr. Salone from Chicago. Let me see who else is in that picture [a picture of about thirty-five  primary  flight instructors  taken at Moton  Field on February  24, 1945].  He was  my  running  buddy. Steve Waltz,  W-a-1-t-z, who  promptly  disappeared   after  the  war. Cabanzo Hyde from New Jersey. Still.

BROWN: Oh, Lewis Still?

JOHNSON:  Still wasn't there. No, he wasn't in there. Still was from Hampton.  He was in the Hampton group. Let's see. I'm not sure who else there was in there.

BROWN: When did you arrive back in Tuskegee?

JOHNSON: Summertime.  Probably August of '44. No, no, it was probably about April of '44.

BROWN: April of'44.

JOHNSON: Yes, because the war was over in '45.

BROWN: And by this time the Tuskegee program is in full swing.

JOHNSON:  It was in full swing. Yes, yes in full swing. We had already been on the Tuskegee campus for a year, even though we were in training part of that time. But it was in full swing. And I lived in Thrasher Hall, which was right across the street from the cadet barracks, so we were exposed to the cadets as they came through for that entire period of time. Even when I went back to teach, I still lived in Thrasher Hall. That's the same building I lived in when I was in high school--

BROWN:  [laughs]

JOHNSON:   --six years earlier.  So  I   intimately   knew  most  of  those  guys,  and  I  had  the opportunity  to see  many  fellows  who  were in college  with  me or who  I had  known  at other colleges,  who  had  come  through  there,  and  people  who  had  national  renown.  Some West Pointers came through there; and some well-known football stars, who were well known black athletes came through there. They were already big names in the black community and would be considered celebrities. They came through there. We had a nice little community right over there, between those two buildings there, because we all ate in the same building down the street. They marched down there; we sauntered down there.

BROWN: [laughs]

JOHNSON:  And then when they were off duty, which wasn't too often they were off duty, we mingled with those guys on the campus, so we knew them pretty well, first-hand.

BROWN: A lot of them were about your age, weren't they?

JOHNSON: Yes, they were. I'd say 80 percent of them were college boys.

BROWN: Did you ever have any trouble with any of them because of the age factor?

JOHNSON:  No, no. I mean, with the students?

BROWN: With the cadets, you know, whom you were teaching.

JOHNSON: No, no, no, no. I would say--1 was about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and I would say that about 40 percent of them were younger than I was, and the rest of them were either my age or older. I think they took them up to about thirty years old at that time, so a lot of them were older,  had been out and already  had careers  started.  But they chose the Air  Force rather than be drafted, and after they had acceptance as officers--!think that's a different  kind of physical examination than what they would use for recruits--they  figured that Tuskegee  was the place to be.

And then, Tuskegee had quite a community that grew up as a result of logistic support for the  primary  effort  and  for  the  military  base,  so there  were  lots  of  professional   jobs  in  the Tuskegee area. It was pretty much of a magnet for a lot of black intellectuals  and skilled people and careerists,  who  otherwise  would  not  have  been  able  to  find  their spot  in the  war  effort somewhere.  And they would prefer the Tuskegee effort anyhow. It became quite a large community there for a while.

BROWN: Could you--

JOHNSON: But it was an extremely boring place to be [laughs], extremely boring. There was absolutely  nothing  there,  nothing  there  but a large college  with  ugly  women--and  [the]  ugly women said they had these [unclear word] guys, meant two or three years enjoying the company of each other. So they didn't mingle much with the students.  There was some activity between faculty families there, on a professional level, but most of them, they hung out with each other. There  was  really  no actual activity  within  a  hundred,   150  miles  of  Tuskegee   except  for Montgomery,  which  was close  by, but nobody  had access  to it. There was gas rationing,  and nobody had cars, nobody had gasoline, so they didn't do very much moving around.

BROWN: Did you ever get to Atlanta? I've heard that people would go to Atlanta if they would get a three-day pass.

JOHNSON:  Yes, yes, I got to Atlanta a couple of times. Yes, we did. Two or three times we flew to Atlanta in some of our cross-country  training and spent the afternoon  there, because  we had some instructors  who were quite regular guys, who had the same kinds of interests,  knew about our ages, anyhow, maybe one or two years older. But we didn't get to Atlanta too much, not too often. It was quite a major effort to get off, to get away--first, to get away  from  flying,  from training,  except  on weekends.  You weren't  making  any  money,  so  you  couldn't  go very far. Some of them would pool up their gas ration tickets and get enough money to go out of town, occasionally, but we'd stick pretty much around campus there.

BROWN: Oh, okay. How much would you get paid as a civilian--as a primary flight instructor?

JOHNSON:  Two hundred fifty dollars a month.

BROWN: Now, did you have to pay for your room and board out of that?

JOHNSON:  I don't remember.[laughs] I don't really remember I paid room and board, because I think all the instructors  stayed in that building. I think that may have been a building that was assigned to us and we didn't have to pay for it. And I don't know what we did about our food. I don't remember what they did. But anyhow, $250 was a lot of money in 1943, '44. It was not a lot of money, but there wasn't, you didn't have anything else to do with it, you know, so it was not a painful thing. I think the guys who were up there, who were advanced instructors who had been teaching much longer--the most they made would be--the highest salary was probably $400 for those guys.

BROWN: Would there be a lot of gambling around there if there isn't much to do?

JOHNSON:  Drinking, drinking.  Tuskegee  was  dry,  and  there  was  drinking  and  bootlegging [laughs], and bringing  in whiskey from Montgomery  or from Atlanta.  That would  be the main place, was to go to Atlanta, and they'd just sit around and drink it up on weekends,  and enjoy each other's company.  There wasn't very much else to do. And watch the news or listen to the radio, or a lot of them would go out and participate in some activities out at the base, the main base. And the cadets had the option of going back and forth to the base. The civilians had the occasional  option,  because  they  were  invited  by officers,  fellows  who  had  previously  trained them. And then they had the officers club and--what did they call it?--the USO, the USO. That was the hub of activity down there.

BROWN: But you were a civilian, so you could not use those facilities unless you were invited. Is that correct?

JOHNSON:  Unless I was invited. The USO, you could, because that was right in the middle of the campus, in the basement  of the cafeteria  there. And that's where you see girls! You know. And across from the school's post office, and it's a hub of activity there. But I don't think I visited the base more than one time the whole time. and I didn't even get out of the car then, at that time.

It would  have  been  the eventual  destination  for  the  pilots  we thought  we  were  being trained to be, but it never got that far along, the program.

BROWN: Could you tell us something about what you did as a civilian primary flight instructor? What the work of a civilian primary flight instructor was and how you did it?

JOHNSON:    Well, each instructor takes a--every six weeks they take a class of four students, and you give them ground instruction, navigation training, aircraft maintenance, aerodynamics, and you do that in a classroom setting. And then you show them about the airplane, and in the afternoon--that's when they did the flying, they did the flying in the afternoon. And you'd take them up in 45-minute flights, take them out to practice areas that you were assigned to and go through the maneuvers and go through the cockpit training, forced landing expertise, emergency calls--like forced landing or mishap landings--and accident prevention. And every six weeks you would graduate those students to the advanced training, and then they  would  go back--they would go to the military base for the secondary phase of their training.

BROWN: Would you take them up as far as soloing?

JOHNSON: Oh, yes. I soloed off all of my students, yes.

BROWN: Would you also wash students out at that phase? If they did not learn how to solo quickly enough, would you wash them out?

JOHNSON: Yes, I'd wash them out, yes. I only washed out one student. He didn't want to fly in the first place. He said he didn't want to fly in the first place, but he kept volunteering for new positions, so that the military kept moving him around from camp to camp. He finally came through the military [flight] training. He had no interest in flying whatever. He just loafed eight weeks and he didn't even attempt to solo. But the rest of the guys were all eager-beaver guys who were anxious to get in the air.

BROWN: What planes were you teaching--

JOHNSON: Stearmans [PT-17], Stearman biplanes, yes.

BROWN: Let me see. [looks at photograph]

JOHNSON: These here in the background.

BROWN: Oh, this is a primary trainer here. Is that the Stearman?

JOHNSON: This is a Waco. No, let's see. No, this is a Stearman. Yes, this is a Stearman. The

Waco had shorter wings on the bottom. The lower wings were a little bit shorter than those.

But my biggest thrill came when one of my home boys came down there, a fellow who used to build model planes with me in Nashville when we were young kids.

BROWN: He used to be where with you in Nashville?

JOHNSON: When I was between eight and ten years old, some of the fellows who--

BROWN: Oh, he was building planes with you.

JOHNSON:   He  and  I--yes,  we  were  Boy  Scouts  together,  and  community   center  fellows together.  We used to talk aviation as young kids.  And he had been drafted and was  in  the military. He volunteered for military [flight] training, and he came down there as a cadet! So I was already an instructor then. And, being a homeboy, I was glad to see him. And then he was so proud of me because he knew an instructor!

BROWN: [laughs] What was his name?

JOHNSON:  His name was Coleman Holt.  Coleman Holt.  I just got a letter from his--he died. He became a lawyer. But he was in the primary phase of the training, he was quite awed by the airplanes and the flight and the prospect of becoming a pilot. He was quite an eager beaver, very happy about it.  So I told his instructor to let me fly him. So they gave me the chance to take him up and to participate in his training,  and relive those early years, while we talked,  while I flew around with him. And I thought that was a very memorable thing to me, because he and I had known each other since we were seven years old. And we ran together up until we went to different  colleges,  and  we  came  out  of  college  around  the  same  time.  And we ended up converging on Tuskegee, as most eligible college graduates of that era ended up, trying to see if there was a future for them in military aviation.  He ended up there, and I got a chance to fly around with him, so that was a very important, big thing to me.

I remember--I  got a letter from  his lawyer  daughter  [looks  for letter]  and  I thought  it would be kind of pertinent to this conversation. She's an attorney in Kansas City. And this was-­ she's bragging about--

BROWN: Ah!

JOHNSON: Yes, that's him [in a photograph]. She's bragging about his years as a pilot. He finished training. He went overseas. I don't think he flew any combat.

BROWN: Coleman Thompson Holt.

JOHNSON: But this is a letter that--he used to talk military to his children. She was a girl. And that's all he had to talk about. But these guys relived the war, relived their experiences in military training over and over again. They passed it on to their children, and they went on and forgot about it. But he never forgot about it.

BROWN: He just died a year ago.

JOHNSON: There was a notice in here [looks through papers]--oh, this is typical. All these people when they die, they brag about Tuskegee Airmen participation.

BROWN: Yes. And it says here in the first sentence--

JOHNSON: It was the highlight of their lives! None of them ever visualized [thumps on table twice] having an opportunity to fly, you know, when they were young kids growing up. All of a sudden [it] exploded in their face.

BROWN: So, and he was your friend from when you were--oops! [something hits microphone]

JOHNSON: Yes. Oh, yes, we were buddies. Yes, from third grade on, through high school. We played on the same football team.

BROWN: So you both went to Pearl High School.

JOHNSON: Oh, yes, yes. He lived in south Nashville, and I lived in north Nashville, but we saw each other every day for twelve years. We were that kind of friends. But anyhow, that's the way-­ And then the Dean of the Chapel at Fisk University--his son was a pilot, and he's one of

the fellows that got killed in the early air battles over Italy. His name was William [J.] Faulkner. Faulkner. That was when the impact of death hit everybody.

BROWN: Did you ever see--when you were training these students, as an instructor--were there any accidents while you were there? Was this something--

JOHNSON: I never saw any. I never saw any. But you hear about them. See, those planes that they had [chuckles] were--they called them flying coffins, anyhow, you know. They didn't have very good airplanes. But those were the planes that were flying in China, the P-40s. They were terrible! They were aerodynamically unstable, aerodynamically unstable. And they were difficult to teach people how to handle them. You couldn't--you had to solo the guy in this thing and hope he gets back, that's all, because you couldn't copilot the guy through his early years with a P-40. It had a big liquid-cooled engine on it that was very nose heavy, very nose heavy, and an unreliable engine.  And those  guys, some  of the  guys  killed  themselves  due  to  plane  failures, plane failures.

My most memorable  thing is something  else over here [refers  to document]  that--it's  a tale I tell, and I probably exaggerate  or embellish  it a little bit, but it's something  that happened very early, when we were first exposed to flying down there. There was scuttlebutt  going around on the campus about the early graduates, the first graduates  going to have an opportunity  to go down to Pensacola,  where the white boys are. And they're  going to give them  a chance--they really  were  trying  to show  them  [the  African-Americans] up-really show  them  they  didn't belong in airplanes.

The first  group  that  they  sent  down  there  to aerial  gunnery--[pause; speaks  in a tight voice;  Note:  Dr.  Johnson has a breathing problem and sometimes   his voice becomes tight because of it.]--they broke the records that had been standing for years.  And every group that they sent down there afterward broke the previous record. [in a tight voice]

BROWN: This was when they sent people down for gunnery training at Pensacola.

JOHNSON:  [still trying to catch breath] Yes, gunnery,  yes. They had said earlier about, maybe they can fly, but they can't shoot. They disputed that, too. They came back and bragged, and after that, then, they knew they were  in.  [voice is  recovering  now]  They  knew  that  people  were developing  confidence  in  their  ability  and  their  organizational   ability and  their  capacity  for handling military  discipline.  And they developed confidence in black leadership,  which they'd never had before. And gradually, as things moved along, they decided, well, maybe we'd be all right after all.

There was a lot of doubt. There was an awful lot of infighting in Washington going on as to whether the effort should be supported. So there was always uncertainty as to whether the program was worth the trouble or whether it was worth the diversion of needed military time and personnel and  equipment  to  train  these  black  people,  who  probably  wouldn't  do anything anyhow. But they earned their spurs.

BROWN: Yes.

JOHNSON: And they went overseas, and they did the job.

[tape interruption; malfunction on mini-disc recorder causes about 10 minutes loss of tape. In that section Dr. Johnson stated that after the war he went home, his father having disapproved of the plan he and two friends had of starting an airline to South America and the Caribbean. He had graduated from college with a degree in economics. Having decided to become a physician, he needed some pre-requisites for medical school. Therefore, in the summer of 1946 he took a chemistry course at Howard University in Washington, DC and then in the fall began a year of pre-med at Fisk. Because he had thirteen months active duty in the service, before becoming an instructor at Tuskegee, he was eligible for GI Bill educational benefits. He used them at Meharry Medical College in Nashville, TN for four years, graduating in 1950. He got married his first year in medical school. After Meharry, he spent a year in Durham, NC as an intern. Then he went to Dayton, OH because there were no young doctors there, many having been called up for service during the Korean War.]

BROWN:  --with Dr. Charles Johnson at his home in Dayton, Ohio, on May 23rd, 2001.

Now, Dr. Johnson, when we left at the end of the last tape, you were saying that you came to Dayton because there weren't any young doctors around here.

JOHNSON: Some of the doctors were doing military time, between '51 and '54. And so there was space for a person who wanted to have a short-time commitment. And then my wife had relatives close by, over in Indiana. That made it a very cozy situation here.

BROWN: Now, these doctors who had left--they had been drafted for the Korean War?

JOHNSON: They hadn't been drafted, but they were paying back military time that they owed the government for sending them to medical school. Each of them, I think they had three years. They had to pay back three years, for three years in medical school.

BROWN: Were you ever in any danger of being re-drafted for the Korean War?

JOHNSON: No.

BROWN: No?

JOHNSON: No, I wasn't in danger of that. They did not reopen the old flying schools. There was probably some talk about it, but they didn't expect the Korean War to be a major undertaking, and I think they had facilities for turning out military people.

BROWN: No, the reason I asked was that I interviewed a gentleman out in California who had been in the military for something like one week less than two years during World War II, and because he had not been in for two years, he got drafted again in Korea. And so I was wondering, given your position of having been--

JOHNSON: No, I was not in-what did you say? [to Mrs. Johnson]

MRS. JOHNSON: No, I was saying, because you were exempt.

JOHNSON: I wouldn't have been high on the draft list anyhow because I was already on record as having had impaired hearing anyhow. And I was a physician then, so I didn't owe them any time. I didn't owe them any time. So I got most of my medical school training under the GI Bill, most of it, about 70 percent of it.

BROWN: Had you been interested in going into the North instead of into the South, or was it just because of your family connections here that you came here?

JOHNSON: No, I had looked at two or three towns in North Carolina. I looked at Burlington, and I thought about Mount Olive and High Point, Hickory, North Carolina, as possible places, because I had been stationed in Durham and I knew that there were places where physicians were needed. But I wasn't exactly sure that I wanted a small town at that time. I also thought about Bristol, Virginia, where my father was--it was my father's hometown. But there were lots of opportunities in lots of places, so I picked Dayton, Ohio. And it seemed like a pretty good thing at the time.

BROWN: How big a town was Dayton at that time?

JOHNSON: It was about 150,000 people at the time, about 150,000, just a little smaller than it is now. But it had industries: General Motors, Wright-Patterson [Air Force Base], NCR, Mead-­ some major industries, major employers that looked like it would provide a stable economic base for working, and it turned out to be pretty much as I had hoped it would be. A pretty good place to raise a family, have children and raise afamily. I had one son when I came to Dayton, and I had a daughter later on, after I had been here a few years. And it's worked out pretty well, pretty well for me.

BROWN: But you only came here thinking that you'd stay a few years?

JOHNSON: That was the original plan, original plan. I had thought I would want--because postwar, most of the younger physicians were getting opportunities for further training that they didn't have before the war. And there were residencies opening up in many of the specialties that I thought I would be attracted to, like surgery and GYN, gynecology and obstetrics, but I decided against those things and decided to stay in family practice. And that's what I'm still doing.

BROWN: What was Dayton like when you came? Was this a segregated area?

JOHNSON: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they still had segregated theaters when we came here, when we came to Dayton. Things opened up very, very quickly, but the main thing--another thing about Dayton, another attraction about Dayton--Dayton's hospitals were receptive to black physicians at that time. And they're uniquely receptive, compared to other cities of its size, and the Dayton hospitals were taking interns and residents and accepting black physicians who had been wartime-trained, black physicians, as staff members here, which was still--in 1950 to '55, it was still a very touchy thing in those postwar years. The fellows who were well trained sought out Dayton because Dayton had a receptive medical community, and there was no problem with accepting to the hospitals. There had been before the war. So, pretty much, physicians, very much like the physicians in the South--as a matter of fact, they opened up around the same time. The hospitals in the South began to accept black physicians. It became a universal effort anyhow. You could almost go anywhere then. But Dayton was among the earliest to accept them into full membership participation and full training opportunities for residencies and internships in the early fifties, and it became a town where we were able to attract some very good specialists here.

JOHNSON: And so it became a very healthy medical community for somebody just out of school. And so, I was able to get about four or five guys to come right after I did. And after I had spoken of the Dayton reception, a lot of folks checked out Dayton as a place to be. So medical-wise, it was an opportunity I might not have found in other cities. So it made a very good fit, very good fit for the time.

But I still think the biggest attraction [chuckles] of Dayton was my wife's family. She had a sister living here whose husband was a lieutenant in the service. He was a chemist at Wright­ Patterson. Her home in Shelbyville [IN] is just ninety-five, a hundred miles from here. I enjoyed her family. I enjoyed the small town over there. I enjoyed the opportunity of running back and forth, and it made Dayton quite attractive at the time.

Housing was awful when I came here. Housing was very bad. It was a boom town, a wartime town, and it had a lot of temporary housing to accommodate a wartime influx around the defense plants and at Wright-Patterson, and there was not much home-building going on at the time. So it took several years before we were able to find suitable housing. We've been in this house fifty years now. [chuckles] Our first choice at a house, we got a chance to get the house that was our last choice. So we decided to stay here. It worked out very well, very well. So now I think I'm the oldest practicing physician here now. Don't bother me none. [laughs] I can still pay the rent!

 BROWN: Are you still practicing full time?

JOHNSON: I don't work in hospitals anymore, but I'm still practice full time, yes. Yes, I do. A smaller practice, a leisurely practice, a comfortable practice. I figure I pretty much own the town. I got all the old folks!

BROWN: [laughs]

JOHNSON: The kids coming out of high school are on Medicare now, so. They were coming out of high school when I came there. They're all retired and on Medicare, so I've got some old associations that go back fifty years. It's my fiftieth year here.

BROWN: Ah, fiftieth year here.

JOHNSON: I came here in '51.

BROWN: Mmm! And in the same profession all that time.

JOHNSON: Yes.

BROWN: Any plans to retire?

JOHNSON: When, I can't walk! [both laugh] No, I don't have plans to retire. I don't think I'd do well retiring. I wouldn't do well retiring. I like to keep moving, keep busy, and so I'll be here for a little while.

But I was a little bit amazed at the toll that fifty years has taken on my Tuskegee co­ workers, and also the physicians who were in the Dayton community. They've come and gone, come and gone, and I seem to have survived. You know, I'm a little surprised, a little bit amazed that all that happened. I feel good. I'll be here for a while, maybe a little while.

In the country, in the South, you know, you practice till you drop, if you want to. So I never looked forward to any retirement. My wife's been looking forward to it, [both laugh] but I never looked forward to retirement. I don't know. I'd deteriorate if I didn't have anything to do. So, keep up with my kids and my family and do a little practice. It suits me fine and all. I can pay the bills. I'm okay. I'm all right that way. So it's working out.

BROWN: Yes. Well, you've really had a very interesting life, and I'm sure a very fulfilling one.

Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think we should talk about, either about your life and what you've seen or about your experiences with Tuskegee?

JOHNSON: Well, this young brother of mine, who was a bombardier-navigator, ending up marrying Booker T.'s granddaughter. [chuckles]

BROWN: Really?

JOHNSON: Yes.

BROWN: Oh, wow!

JOHNSON: And she's over at Wilberforce [College] over in Xenia [OH]. She's lived in this Dayton area. He had been at Cornell and NYU and Antioch [College]. And he knew this young lady from Tuskegee because she was a twelve-year-old in grade school down there when we were down there in high school! And so he ran into her again, I guess twenty years later, and they courted and they got married. He died early. He died in '66. So our family expanded into Booker T.'s family. And so actually she still considers Tuskegee her second home anyhow, so we still keep our Tuskegee connections alive. She's a Tuskegee encyclopedia anyhow. She knows everybody who ever came through there, so we're always talking Tuskegee. She knows all the military people and lots of the cadets.

So the Tuskegee memory stays alive in this household. Very much so. Of course, I've had a lot of my life around campuses anyhow, between Tuskegee and Nashville and Meharry [Medical College] and Fisk and Virginia Union, where I went to school. So I was almost thirty­ one years old before I got exposed to the real world. [Brown laughs] Campus life is pretty much of a sheltered environment anyhow.

So as far as segregation and integration and Southern prejudice is concerned, we taunted the system occasionally when we were Young Turks, but I never had any real bad exposure to it. You knew what you could do; you knew where you were; you knew where you stood. Nashville was not a very bad place to live anyhow, because it was pretty much of a--it wasn't a music city then, you know--it was an educational mecca. They had about seven colleges there, with liberal faculties, and there was a very large community of liberal-thinking people. And then Nashville was pretty easy to integrate because there had been a lot of race-mixing in Nashville on the professional level for twenty years, before the war. So Nashville wasn't bad.

It's like Atlanta. Atlanta had a large cultural community of black and white people that had some interactions, so it wasn't--blacks in the Atlanta suburbs are. The suburbs are very rigidly segregationist, but they were able to spread from that hub into the rest of the state so that integration wasn't all that bad in those two places.

It was kind of bad in between, but in those meccas, I think--and now North Carolina was another place that was quite ahead of its time, the Chapel Hill-Durham-Raleigh area. I like that area there, that, the Golden [sic; Research] Triangle area over there. I thought that would have been a nice place to have stayed if I had wanted to stay.

BROWN: There's some pretty territory around there.

JOHNSON: What?

BROWN: It's pretty land around there.

JOHNSON: Yes. But they have five cities with huge universities in that thirty- or forty-mile radius, and it's quite a cultural community. It is a hub for many old, proud, middle-class black families in that area also, established people living in that area. So they moved out from under the heel of segregation pretty early, just like Atlanta and Nashville did. The rest of the nation finally caught up, but it didn't really impact very much upon me in my younger years. I knew all about it because I was a sociology minor, and my father founded a race relations institute [at Fisk] back in the forties and fifties. Nashville was always a hub for race-relation interaction and conventions and conferences. And it was always at my dinner table, always in front of me.

My father was not--he was a theorist and idealist and a writer. He wrote The Negro in Chicago back in the twenties, which was the first postwar book regarding the impact of the great postwar migration in teens and in the twenties. He was a World War I veteran. He lived through some times--trying times--also, and that's why he steered himself in sociology, and he became very renowned as a sociologist, although he was not primarily an integrationist. He was a sociologist.

BROWN: Did you never think of following in his footsteps and going into education?

JOHNSON: My brother was in his footsteps, and my sister took sociology also, but I never thought very seriously about it. I took sociology--well, I worked summers and lived among sociology and sociologists all my life, but I never thought about taking a sociology role, no. I could have gone into the law maybe, but not with a hearing problem. I don't think I'd be very good, although my son's got a worse problem than I have, and he's a very successful lawyer! He's smarter than I was. He's got his mama's genes in him. He's much smarter than I am, and he's a workaholic like I am. He's a very successful lawyer. But I never thought about--I never thought about those things.

Taunting the system probably would have appealed to me. I wouldn't have been a Freedom Rider, but my brother was!

BROWN: Oh!

JOHNSON: He was. But he was also a tactician. He tutored students who were part of the movement in Antioch and Wilberforce position, right in the heart of the movement at the time. But that didn't really have any impact on my life, either then or now. It didn't really bother me too badly. So I survived it without any hassles, without any trauma. And I enjoy--at the age--I'm on the verge of going into eighty. I'll be eighty in September. I enjoy stopping and thinking about the people who I interacted with in my teenage and my college years and my postwar years and wondering if they have done as well, done as well as they had hoped to, or as I have done--if they have fulfilled their expectations.

I always wonder about people when I run into them. You know, I ask this question. You got to feel your way through it, but you ask, "It's been fifty years, sixty years since we've known each other. Did you have a good life? Is it what you wanted? Is it what you expected? Is it what you hoped for, or did you have any disappointments?"

One other thing that impacted on me, and I can't get over this--it came from the San Antonio [Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.] convention, which was extremely well planned and organized, and I got a chance to see a lot of people who I knew well and some of the people I knew casually. But I was struck by one guy who came from Oregon, and I've been trying to find out what his name was, because he was a very seedy-looking derelict, apparently a depraved alcoholic. [in a tight voice] Except for one week in his life when the convention took place, you can tell he was poorly kept, but he was sober. He wore street clothes, and he was extremely shabby. He had the Tuskegee Airmen patch on his clothes, and he was proud. And you wonder what kind of life he had.

That's why I asked the California [TAI] people if anybody knew who he was, because they are a highly organized group on the West Coast, many of them in very influential positions. A lot of the fellows who retired with high military ranking settled in California, and many of them were in a position to have been some help to this guy, you know, if he had reached out. But he didn't talk very much to anybody. But you could tell this was about his umpteenth convention, so you know that his Tuskegee years-I mean the convention going on was a major sacrifice to him, getting from Portland, Oregon, down to San Antonio, Texas. This is something he probably thought he had to do, but you'd think his circumstances probably were far from the best. And somebody, if he had known who he was or where he was or what his circumstances were, could have or should have reached out to him.

BROWN: So how would you say--

JOHNSON: You treat those guys like you would a fraternity [brother], because you shared a common undertaking with them, and you survived, and you exceeded your expectations of the general public, and you have a feeling of accomplishment. I'm sure a very high percentage of people who were part of the Tuskegee experiment were successful. They had unusual successes. Not that Tuskegee contributed to them. They probably would have had them anyhow. But they came away from the war refocused, you know, refocused. And having made contacts and friendships that were destined to last a lifetime. They were an unusual group.

BROWN: Yes. How--

JOHNSON: And they're still talking about the mutiny [at Freeman Fiend in 1945].

BROWN: Yes.

JOHNSON: My own brother was very, very vague about--1 have a baby brother ten years younger than I. He's a New York architect. He's still very vague about my [other] brother's participation in this mutiny. He and I were close. We're a year apart. My younger brother's ten years behind us. But after the first four or five years after the war, he didn't talk about it. There has been renewed interested in it, I guess in the eighties and nineties, when some of the boys wrote books about the experience. [See, for instance, James C. Warren, The Tuskegee Airmen Mutiny at Freeman Field (Vacaville, CA: Conyers Publishing, 1995).] You know, they say you can't realize or can't appreciate where you are until you look back at where you've been. So we like to talk about those things. It's something that worked out successfully for them, and everything seems to have worked out very well for that generation, you know. [Not] the baby boomers--they're too old for baby boomers. Worked out very well. And it worked out far better than they probably could have predicted, you know, fifty years ago.

BROWN: Yes. How do you think your life was affected by your participation in the Tuskegee experiment?

JOHNSON: It was primarily an interruption, a loss of momentum, but I did get a chance to refocus. I had four years out of school. When I thought I knew what I wanted to do, until my daddy told me I wanted to do something else. [both laugh] And he would support me if I did something else, and he would give me no support if I followed these wild dreams I had. So I refocused and I jumped into something else that I thought I could enjoy, and I've enjoyed [as] a career.

I don't know. I think I had to look at the Tuskegee thing as something that happened to me that I was able to expose myself to, and I could never have dreamed of happening, you know growing up. So it was a very memorable experience. I still fly every night, fly in my dreams.

BROWN: Did you fly in your own plane?

JOHNSON: No, no. It would have been--well, I thought about buying a plane thirty years ago [chuckles], but bills kept me from buying it. I couldn't have enjoyed it because I figured I would probably be inadequate for radio work, you know, in inter-city communication. I could have afforded one. I would have flown--I wouldn't have found the time. You talk about that big motor home out there [in the driveway], these boats I have, I don't have time to enjoy those things.

But I had the potential. I flew for about a month after I had been here about ten years. I went out and took a refresher [course] and went out and flew. That's when I said I was going to buy an airplane. But I said, When am I going to fly it? When am I going to fly it? I don't have time to fly it. So I didn't. I didn't get it. But after about ten years--what year was it I took these flying lessons?--around the time that Mother died, wasn't it? Yes.

MRS. JOHNSON: No, no.

JOHNSON: In the sixties.

MRS. JOHNSON: That was when Winifred was young.

JOHNSON: Winifred? Yes. In the sixties, because I know the guy--when my mother died down in Nashville, the fellow who had been instructing me at the local airport around here--I hired him to fly my brother and I down to my mother's bedside when she died. And that was in the sixties, '66. So I think between '63 and '64 I took a little flying, twelve or fifteen hours. I enjoyed it, but I said, Nah, nah. I won't do that. Because I had two kids, a wife and two kids and lots of bills, [chuckles] lots of bills, so I said--and I wouldn't be able to fly inter-city very well, unless you are very adept at radio work. You know, you've got to talk your way in and talk your way out of there, to do it right, unless you're going to fly from one pasture to another. I wouldn't have enjoyed that. So I didn't do any more flying after that.

But I had a cousin who finished Air Force Academy and flew helicopters in Vietnam. He's in Washington now. [chuckles] He hasn't flown since he's been out of the service and he lost his. He flew enough! You know, I mean, you fly Vietnam, I don't think you want to fly anymore.

BROWN: Yes. Okay, well, as my final question: As I've told you, these tapes are going to go in the research center that will be built at the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site at Tuskegee. In the future, many people will come visit the historic site who have very little knowledge of World War II or of conditions in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. What do you think should be the most important idea or impression they should take with them from their short visit to Tuskegee?

JOHNSON: I think the Tuskegee experiment provided an excellent outlet for [the] youth of the forties. It provided an opportunity for them to achieve and accomplish things they never would have dreamed of, if the war hadn't occurred and if the opportunity hadn't presented itself. And I think the men of the thirties and forties, who provided the personnel for the Tuskegee production should be extremely proud of themselves, with the way they conducted themselves and the success they achieved. They were a bunch of wide-eyed young guys who had been exposed to an opportunity to fulfill some of their childish dreams. And in the performance of their training they came out with some unusual accomplishments, which could have had some impact on their outlook regarding what they might accomplish later on in their life. They came out with the attitude that anything is possible. They could do anything and do it well, and they had reinforcement and the notion that they are as good as anyone else, probably better than most.

And I think it was a very confidence-building thing for these guys. Some of them admittedly were people who were escapists, who were finding the easiest gig they could get to survive a war. But they got caught up with the fervor and pride of the Tuskegee exposure and they had an opportunity to experience something they could talk about for the rest of their lives. And they're still talking about it!

BROWN: [laughs] Well, I want to thank you again for allowing me to come into your home and for taking the time to talk to me with your busy schedule.

So I'll just finish this tape by saying this is Judith Brown of the National Park Service's Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. This is the end of Tape 2 of the interview with Dr. Charles Johnson in his home in Dayton, Ohio, on May 23rd, 2001.

Thank you so very much, Dr. Johnson.

JOHNSON: As an addendum to your conversation you might add that I've been waiting [in a tight] fifty-five years for somebody to ask me what I thought of my exposure to the Tuskegee project. And as an afterthought, it's something that I think instead of fading has been growing ever since it happened. It's been growing, and then having greater and greater impact, and I'm still running into people who lived this experience with me fifty-five or sixty years ago. And it'll be with me for the rest of my life.

BROWN: Ah. Well, again, thank you so very much, Dr. Johnson.