DENVER – Colorado lawmakers gave 102-year-old Colonel James Harvey III a standing ovation Friday, Feb. 6 during part of their legislative session set aside to honor veterans from many different backgrounds at the state capitol.
Harvey was a Tuskegee Airman, part of the first-ever group of African American military pilots in the United States armed forces. In 1949, he was one of the Tuskegee Airmen who won the Air Force’s inaugural Top Gun team competition.
In a 2024 interview, Harvey reflected on his life and the challenges Black soldiers faced training in the Jim Crow South.
Black History Month
100-year-old Colorado man reflects on barrier-breaking career as Tuskegee airman
Harvey was born in Montclair, New Jersey, in 1923 and grew up in northeastern Pennsylvania. When he enlisted in the United States Army to become a pilot, a trip to Tuskegee, Alabama, led to his first experience with racism.
“It started before Tuskegee. It started when I got off the train when I left home and arrived in Washington, D.C.,” Harvey said. “The train was early, so I went and got me some breakfast. Came back, went to get on the car, then there was a conductor who says, 'No, no, no, no. Get your stuff. And we're gonna put you in this car where negroes ride. Welcome to the South.'”
Harvey said more discrimination greeted him when he arrived in Tuskegee.
“Tuskegee wasn't a good place for us as a race of people," he said. "The sheriff there made it be known, ‘You come back here and you won’t leave in a vertical position.'”
For the thousands of Black veterans who served their country, returning to civilian life meant returning as a second class citizen due to segregation laws.
“I can't imagine what that was like to risk your life overseas and then come back and then not get that sense of respect for serving,” Dexter Nelson II, museum and archives supervisor for Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver, said.
Blair-Caldwell’s archives hold many items with direct ties to Black history, including some related to Harvey and one of the libraries namesakes.
“Omar Blair, he himself, he was a Tuskegee Airman, and he's actually an armorer, and so he helped to modify the planes and things like that to go into combat,” Nelson said.
Blair served in the segregated U.S. military during World War II and returned to Denver, where he joined the school board. There, he worked to integrate Denver Public Schools.
Nelson said many of Colorado’s Black veterans became business owners, community leaders and helped make Colorado, the great state that it is today.
“Colorado was seen as a place for a lot of veterans of color to go to because of the altitude and the health benefits there. And so we see, we definitely see an influx of African Americans migrating after the war to seek, you know, the benefits of the altitude,” Nelson said. “Colorado is home to several notable African American veterans. We have some members of the 10th Mountain Division, obviously, but then also Tuskegee Airmen. And so we've definitely been pioneers in that and setting the tone.”
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