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Mr. Speaker, I thank Mr. Watt and certainly Mr. Rangel for their leadership on this, and Mr. Ney of Ohio for his leadership on this.

What an honor it is for me to stand here and to speak some words about the extraordinary contributions that the Tuskegee Airmen have made. Let me begin by simply setting the stage, because I think it is very important for us to understand the environment, the time that this activity happened in American history, for us to truly understand the significance of the Tuskegee Airmen. Let us go back for a moment to that time, and let us take a look at what was going on at that time.

In 1921, Benjamin O. Davis had early on, as one of our leading African Americans in the military, put forward the proposition that black men should be trained to fight, but yet there was great hesitation. As a matter of fact, the Federal Government issued a study which said that African American men were incapable, did not have the skill, the courage, the fortitude, and, in fact, they felt inferior to white people, so that they did not have the courage to do this, this at a time in 1921 when the first woman to even get a license to fly was an African American woman by the name of Bessie Queenie Coleman, and she flew as a daredevil.

Circle back to 1941. It was not until then that they gave the Tuskegee Airmen an opportunity at Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, founded by Booker T. Washington. And the story tells it all. For there is no greater story of freedom and American democracy than that story of the Tuskegee Airmen who, with bravery and courage, went and fought for the freedom of this country and the world while yet back at home African American citizens were second-class citizens.

So when we talk about the Tuskegee Airmen, it is more than just their flying. It is their extraordinary stand for courage in the face of difficulty. We salute the Tuskegee Airmen.