Decorated pilot Harry Stewart, Jr., one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, dies at 100 Retired Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr, a decorated World War II pilot who broke racial barriers as a member of Tuskegee Airmen and earned honors for his combat heroism, has died.
Stewart had dreamed of flying since he was a child when he would watch planes at LaGuardia airport, according to a book about his life titled “Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airmen’s Firsthand Account of World War II.” In the wake of Pearl Harbor, an 18-year-old Stewart joined what was then considered an experiment to train Black military pilots.
“Harry Stewart was a kind man of profound character and accomplishment with a distinguished career of service he continued long after fighting for our country in World War II,” Brian Smith, president and CEO of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum, said.
“I got to really enjoy the idea of the panorama, I would say, of the scene I would see before me with the hundreds of bombers and the hundreds of fighter planes up there and all of them pulling the condensation trails, and it was just the ballet in the sky and a feeling of belonging to something that was really big,” Stewart said in a 2020 interview with WAMC.
Stewart was one of the last surviving combat pilots of the famed 332nd Fighter Group also known as the Tuskegee Airmen.
