Harold Brown, One Of Last Surviving Tuskegee Airmen, Has Passed Away At 98

Lieutenant Colonel Harold Brown, one of the last surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, has sadly passed away at the age of 98.

Brown overcame racial prejudice in the American South when he was a teenager and went on to become an Army Air Corps fighter pilot during World War II.

As a Black pilot from the famed Tuskegee Airmen, he was faced with an angry lynch mob after parachuting from his P-51 over Austria during the war.

In that moment, Brown truly believed he was going to die, after they brought him to a hanging tree with a rope.

Luckily, he was rescued just in time by a constable, who threatened to fire on the angry mob to protect Brown as a prisoner of war.

Brown was then turned over to military authorities and served six weeks in prison camps until he was liberated when the war ended.

During Brown’s 23 years in the military, he flew 30 missions during the war in Europe and then went on to serve in the Korean War before eventually retiring as a lieutenant colonel in 1965.

After retiring, he went to school and earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Ohio University and a master’s and doctorate in vocational-technical education from the Ohio State University.

He became a college administrator and worked until retirement in 1986.

In 2007, Brown and fellow Tuskegee Airmen were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and in 2020, he was inducted into the Minnesota Aviation Hall of Fame.

Brown, who died at his nursing home in Huron, Ohio, was one of the last surviving members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. The group consisted of 355 pilots who served in segregated units after their training at the historically Black Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

Fewer than ten men from this group are still living.

“What the Tuskegee Airmen did is not Black history,” Dr. Brown told The Plain Dealer in 2019. “It’s not military history. It’s American history.”

Learn more about Brown’s life in the video below: