Airman battled Nazis and discrimination

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A few months ago a shopper at the A&P market on Riverdale Avenue couldn’t help noticing that the elderly man in front of him on the checkout line was wearing a leather World War II flight jacket emblazoned with the logo for the movie Red Tails. It looked just like those worn by the African-American fighter group known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The jacket was a replica. The man wearing it — Roscoe Brown — was the real thing. 

Mr. Brown, a longtime Riverdalian who died at 94 on July 2, was one of 450 African-Americans who became the first group of black pilots admitted into the U.S. Air Force. With his death, just 31 of the fliers remain.

During his service, Mr. Brown flew 68 combat missions, during which he shot two fighters out of the air, including a German jet that flew 150 miles per hour faster than his own plane. He destroyed three Luftwaffe planes on the ground and wrecked 13 locomotives in ground attack missions.

In 2007, Mr. Brown was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his accomplishments and for his special place in the history of both World War II and the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

Born on March 9, 1922, the native of Washington D.C., said that his love for flying began when he visited the Smithsonian Institute as a child. It was the capital’s only non-segregated museum at the time.

He joined the Air Force when the government announced it would build an airbase in Tuskegee, Alabama in order to train black pilots.

“To show how silly things were at that time, the government spent over $1 million to build a separate airbase to train the black pilots because they didn’t want them to train with the white pilots,” Mr. Brown said in a 2012 presentation to Riverdale Country school students.

The Tuskegee Airmen — who flew P-51 Mustang fighters with distinctive red tail wings — quickly developed a reputation as the best bomber escorts in the Air Force, for the way they stayed tight to bomber planes, even when locked in battle with German fighters, earning them the nickname Red-Tail Angels. 

Mr. Brown also gained recognition when he shot a German Messerschmidt Me 262 out of the sky over Berlin. No other pilot had ever shot down a jet plane.

“I said drop your tanks and follow me. I turned the plane upside down, as you saw in the movie [Red Tails], went down under the bombers, made a hard right turn, caught the jet in my gun sight, brrrrrr-boom, right in the middle, blew him up, first jet that was shot down in the war over Berlin. That’s what we did on March 24, 1945,” he said to the RCS middle school students in 2012. 

Mr. Brown named his “red-tail” fighter “Bunnie,” after his daughter who was born shortly before his deployment in 1943.

College President

After coming back to the States, Mr. Brown went on to earn a Ph.D., in exercise physiology and taught in at New York University before a 17-year stint as president of Bronx Community College. 

Mr. Brown took part in the Community Oral History Project “Remembering Riverdale” at the Riverdale Library on May 12, where he spoke about his life in the military and Riverdale, where he moved in order to be closer to Bronx Community College in 1990. 

“I would eat at the Food Emporium, at A&P Fresh, which is now a Key Foods,” he said in the interview with the New York Public Library. “It was a very, very convenient place to live. Fieldston and Horace Man Schools were here, so not only was it a great place but [I came] for the educational environment.” 

In Riverdale, he was best known for his role as the first chairman of the Friends of Van Cortlandt Park. Christina Taylor, the current executive director of the Friends said that she remembers Mr. Brown for his kind heart.

“He was just so sweet and he was always smiling and he was always happy,” she said. “He was just always a wonderful person.”

From the time the organization was formed in 1992, to 2008 Mr. Brown served as its chair. 

“He loved to run in the park,” Ms. Taylor said. “He was always asking if there was anyway he could help.”

He was also the director of the Center for Urban Education Policy at CUNY’s Graduate School and University Center, where he taught courses in environmental urbanism.

Film consultant

In January 2012, George Lucas, who produced Red Tails, the first major motion picture about the Tuskegee Airmen, called on Mr. Brown to act as a consultant, telling the film’s writers about both his love of flying and the double-sided war he fought against Nazi Germany and racial injustice within the U.S. Armed Forces.

Among the long list of accolades and awards Mr. Brown achieved, he was particularly proud that he and the other surviving Tuskegee Airmen were invited to President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009. He received an invitation to the White House for an audience with the president and first lady in 2012 after he was honored at the BET Awards for his work on Red Tails.

“We feel, as Tuskegee Airmen, that we did what we should have done, defended our country, showed that excellence comes in all sizes, shapes and colors, that African-Americans could be excellent and because of that [President Harry Truman] recognized that segregation … was wrong, it was inefficient and it had to be stopped,” he said.

Mr. Brown is survived by his four children Doris Bodine, Dianne McDougall, Dennis Brown and Donald Brown, as well as his six grandchildren Lisa  Bodine, Brandi Neuwirth, Donna Bodine, Harold Masai McDougall and Tia Brown and four great-granchildren Corey O’Brien, Christopher O’Brien, Maxwell Neuwirth and Zoe Neuwirth.

Roscoe Brown, Tuskegee Airmen, WWII, Bronx Community College, Anthony Capote