Tuskegee Airman Wilfred DeFour Dead at 100

Wilfred DeFour, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen — an all-Black squadron of World War II pilots— died in his Harlem home Saturday; he was 100.

“You would never know he was 100,” neighbor Joanne Wells said. “He had a little cane, but he walked. He had all his faculties. His mind was as sharp as a whip.”

Neighbor Naomi Crawford, 92, said the war hero was modest and never spoke about his time with the Tuskegee Airmen. “He received two plaques on Friday from the senior center. One for turning 100,” she told New York Daily News.

DeFour worked as a postal employee for more than 30 years after his military service. “The impact he had on our community, around the nation, and the world will forever be cherished and remembered,” Rep. Adriano Espaillat said on Twitter.

DeFour was an aircraft technician for the famed squad, which got its name from the group’s training facility in Tuskegee, Ala. History.com, of the crew:

The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black military aviators in the U.S. Army Air Corps (AAC), a precursor of the U.S. Air Force. Trained at the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, they flew more than 15,000 individual sorties in Europe and North Africa during World War II. Their impressive performance earned them more than 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses and helped encourage the eventual integration of the U.S. armed forces.

During World War II, the pilots ran missions over North Africa, Sicily, and Italy. DeFour painted the tails of the aircraft from which the squadron drew its “Red Tails” nickname (A 2012 war film shares the name.)

Roughly 20,000 men, the Tuskegee Airmen refers to all who were involved in the “Tuskegee Experiment*-- pilots, navigators, bombardiers, maintenance, instructors, and support staff. These men overcame segregation and prejudice to become one of the most highly respected fighter groups of World War II, proving convincingly that Blacks could fly and maintain sophisticated combat aircraft. 

As of 2015, some 600 were still alive, according to the Tuskegee Airmen National History Museum in Detroit.

*Note: This Tuskegee Experiment is to not to be confused with the Tuskegee Study, as recorded by the CDC, “the 40-year experiment run by Public Health Service officials follow[ing] 600 rural [B]lack men in Alabama with syphilis over the course of their lives, refusing to tell patients their diagnosis, refusing to treat them for the debilitating disease, and actively denying some of them treatment.”