For Ticket Information To The October 27th Tuskegee Gala
Email Willie Shellman at [email protected] or Buy Your Tickets Online At: http://bit.ly/2dBwCwQ
Focus On Empowerment can be heard every Thursday at 1pm Eastern.
Log Onto: www.blogtalkradio.com/globalcarole Listen LIVE or Download Anytime At This Blog Post. Each broadcast can be replayed immediately following the show. ======================== They piloted great airplanes during the critical days of World War II despite the naysayers who declared that black men could not possibly fly. Men of honor and integrity. Men who stared American bred racism and foreign hatred down and fought on anyway. They were the grounds crew. The flight crew. The administrators and leaders of their soldiers. Those who flew the planes. And those who supported or led the squadrons on the ground. And the military and civilian champions following World War II who continue to keep their legacy alive. This is great American story of the Tuskegee Airmen, whose roots go back 75 years to their beginning in 1941. I am proud to be the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman who bravely served from 1941 to 1946. As we celebrate Global Diversity Awareness Month throughout October, we salute the 75th Anniversary of the Tuskegee Airmen with our special guest, Willie Shellman. The New England Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen will celebrate this great story with a75th Anniversary Gala set for Thursday October 27th on the Boston Campus of the University of Massachusetts. -------------------------------------- History of the Tuskegee Airmen For More Information visit: www.tuskegeeairmen.org This is the official organization for the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. The term, "Tuskegee Airmen," refers to the men and women, African-Americans and Caucasians, who were involved in the socalled "Tuskegee Experience", the Army Air Corps program to train African Americans to fly and maintain combat aircraft. The Tuskegee Airmen included pilots, radio operators, navigators, bombardiers, aircraft maintenance, support staff, instructors, and all the personnel who kept the planes in the air. Virtually all black military pilots during World War II received their primary flight training at Moton Field and then their basic and advanced flight training at Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF). Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (TAI) is headquartered in Tuskegee, Alabama (about 35 miles east of Montgomery), where the training of black military pilots during World War II began. There are currently 57 active chapters of TAI located in major cities and military installations throughout the United States. ------------------------------------- October is Global Diversity Awareness Month, a celebratory time period I created more than 18 years ago to highlight the importance of expanding your reach beyond your own race, culture or ethnicity. Click Here To Learn More About Global Diversity Awareness Month
0 Comments
Carole's Father Tuskegee Airman Wilson Copeland Honored at The March 3, 2016 Black History Breakfast3/1/2016 His stories and expansive capacity to understand world issues were unrivaled. From an impoverished background to graduating from college and survived the bitterness of American racism and discrimination, my father, the late Wilson A. Copeland, was indeed a unique individual. I yearn to travel and understand the world just like him. I navigate the world as an entrepreneur because of him. Our relationship was sometimes topsy turvy, but he was my dad and I loved him. He was a Tuskegee Airman, and we will honor him at Thursday's Black History Breakfast. =================================== The Late Wilson Albert Copeland was born in 1917 in Clinton, South Carolina to Carrie and Bradley Copeland. When his parents divorced he moved to Bel Air, Maryland with his mother and older brother, Eugene. (His mother eventually remarried John Brown in Bel Air, Maryland. Brown was a World War I Veteran.)
Mr. Copeland was enrolled in the then segregated Bel Air/Harford County school system, a system which at that time only provided educational opportunities for Blacks through the ninth grade as further education and training were discouraged beyond that point for people of color. Because of those circumstances, his brother sought employment, soon married his sweetheart Marguerite, and had one son, Charles (now all deceased). Encouraged by his mother and driven from within, he rented a room from the Marshall family who lived in Baltimore directly across the street from Douglass High School, some thirty miles from Bel Air. Working in Baltimore during the week and hitchhiking and working back in Bel Air on the weekends, he graduated from Douglass High School in 1937 and won a scholarship to Virginia State College for Negroes. He went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the college in 1941. After a brief period working in Maryland, Wilson Copeland joined the military as America entered World War II. Mr. Copeland trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Tuskegee, Alabama as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Air Corps during the war. He would later be known as one of the Tuskegee Airmen. (An ulcer prevented him from completing pilot school, although he continued on in a leadership role in the US Army Air Corps.) A bitter remembrance of racism for him was traveling with other Black soldiers on a military train in the South. Arrangements had been made with restaurants in the region to feed the soldiers. On one occasion the Black soldiers were brought cold box lunches and were forced to eat their meals onboard the trains. In another car, the German prisoners of war were escorted off the train and were allowed to eat hot meals inside of the restaurants along the route. Later he served as the Adjutant Officer assigned to the B25 Bombers at Selfridge Air Force Base in Michigan. Following his honorable discharge, he found employment and moved to Detroit, renting a room in a boarding home in the Black section of the city. The owner of the building, Rev. James A. Charleston, lived next door with his wife, Nora Dean and school teacher-daughter Gwendolyn. One thing led to another when Wilson and Gwendolyn met. They married on December 22, 1946. From this union two children are born, Wilson A Copeland II in 1949 and Carole Dean Copeland in 1953. (Carole was named after both grandmothers—changing Carrie to Carole and using “Dean” from Nora Dean. Instead of a “Junior,” the son became Wilson A. Copeland II.) Active as a Trustee at St. Paul AME Church (pastored by his father in law, Rev. Charleston), Mr. Copeland was engaged in successful business ventures in Detroit including co-ownership in Blue Flame Oil Company. Despite that success, he yearned to build a business in one of the newly independent and developing nations on the African continent. His widespread travels throughout Africa led to marginal and less than successful business projects in Ghana (West Africa) in 1959, shorty after its independence. One of his American business partners was Rev. Albert Cleage, father of the celebrated writer Pearl Cleage. Sadly his marriage failed and he divorced in the early 1960s. Although he married briefly years later, he would never lose affection for his beloved Gwendolyn. He was eventually recruited by the United States Department of State and spent twenty years working for various posts at the American Embassies in Ghana, Nigeria and Liberia. His last eight years of government service were in Nairobi, Kenya. Mr. Copeland retired in 1979, lived briefly in Pennsylvania near his daughter and her family before relocation to Los Angeles. He enjoyed telling stories of his numerous adventures, which included safaris, participating in several historical events, including the first meeting of the Organization of African Unity in Ethiopia in 1963. Mr. Copeland also rescued an American diplomatic pouch and was stranded in Accra, Ghana in the middle of a military coup. At great risk to himself, Mr. Copeland was able to get to the airport, extract the courier and the pouch, and in spite of having to get by several army road blocks and being shot at and chased by rebels, was able to safely return the courier and the pouch to the American Embassy. For this act, he was awarded a State Department Commendation and was made an honorary member of the Embassy Marine Corp Guard. Travel was second nature to Mr. Copeland and the world was his living room. Even after being diagnosed with lung cancer in the late 1980s, he continued to live life to the fullest, frequently driving cross country from California to the East Coast to visit friends and family. He enjoyed his 50th college reunion in Petersburg, Virginia in 1991 and then traveled to Detroit, where he visited with his son and his family and attended the Tuskegee Airmen Convention. His travels took him to Costa Rica in October 1991, before returning to his home in Los Angeles. Wilson A. Copeland departed this life on October 31, 1991, with his spirit, pride and dignity intact. He was buried in the family plot at Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit. Years later in 1998 his first wife, Gwendolyn would be buried next to him. Wilson Copeland was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, the Masons and the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. The Black History Month Breakfast will be held on Thursday March 3, 2016 at the Boston Colonnade Hotel from 8:30 am to 11:00 am. He was a barber to the stars, and won a Purple Heart during World War II. He lived to be 104 years old before passing away last December 2015. We will the late James Guildford, Jr. at the March 3, 2016 Black History Breakfast. Lest we forget.... ======================== Article Source: The Boston Globe by Byran Marquard A master barber, James E. Guilford Jr. was a stylist to stars of a storied era in Boston jazz, when a shave and a trim cost barely a buck at his Tremont Street shop. He could also spin stories as elegant as the fine lines that filled his sketchpads after he traded scissors and razor for the pen and a paintbrush of an artist later in life. Mr. Guilford, who died in December 2015 at 104, liked to tell how singer Billie Holiday performed a run of shows at Boston’s famed Storyville club in April 1959 “and gave beautiful performances. I was there every night.” After Holiday’s Saturday show, less than three months before she died, a party was thrown in her honor at another Boston club and “I drove her from Storyville in my Cadillac,” he recalled in a 2005 Globe interview. “She was wearing all black. Her lips were black and her nails were black. We were sitting at a table with about 10 people having cheese and crackers, and they wanted her to sing, and she says to me, ‘Jimmy, what do you want to hear?’ I said, ‘Well, “Lover Man,” ’ and she got up, took the mike, and sang it right next to where she’d been sitting.” A Roxbury resident since birth, Mr. Guilford was the oldest living graduate of Boston Latin School when he died in the Laurel Ridge care facility in Jamaica Plain after his health failed. He began barbering at age 12, cutting hair from 1923 to 1979, and he was awarded the Purple Heart after being injured while serving as an Army sergeant during World War II. When the war ended, he returned to his Roxbury barbershop. “People who were traveling could always come to Boston if they wanted their hair done and have a do. They could come to Jimmy Guilford’s hairstyling salon,” he said in an interview for the WGBH program “Basic Black.” “I had acquired quite a name where I was called ‘the hairstylist to the stars,’ ” Mr. Guilford said. “In my business were such stars as Sugar Ray Robinson and Duke Ellington. Nat Cole and Oscar Peterson. I even did Sammy Davis’s father, but Sammy, he did his own hair. A lot of show people that came to Boston came to me.” Over the years he also sold real estate before devoting much of his time to art. His portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was unveiled in January 1982 in the Central Square branch of the Cambridge Public Library, when Mr. Guilford was 70. “I think the creative part that comes along with being a hairstylist started to express itself on canvas,” said his daughter Marsha Guilford Davenport of Owings Mills, Md. “My home is filled with his artwork. He’s worked in every medium – charcoal, acrylic, watercolors, oil. He even does pen and ink sketches. Art is just something that blossomed in him.” One of four children, James Edward Guilford Jr. was born Oct. 7, 1911, in a third-floor apartment in Roxbury. “He would tell you he grew up in what they called a cold water flat,” his daughter said. His father, James Sr., was from Petersburg, Va. His mother, the former Nannie Belle Haskins, was from Lynchburg, Va. At Boston Latin, Mr. Guilford was the only African-American on the track team in 1926 and was part of a relay squad that set a record while defeating Boston English in late March. His teammate fell behind on the first leg, “but on the back stretch of the second lap James Guilford of Latin passed M.I. Linsky of English and handed over a four-yard margin,” the Globe reported. Latin’s anchor runner held on to win by inches. The Black History Month Breakfast will be held on Thursday March 3, 2016 at the Boston Colonnade Hotel from 8:30 am to 11:00 am.
Click Below And Listen To The Radio Broadcast Anytime
Focus On Empowerment can be heard every Thursday at 1pm Eastern.
Log Onto: www.blogtalkradio.com/globalcarole Listen LIVE or Download Anytime At This Blog Post. Each broadcast can be replayed immediately following the show. ======================== The military assumption of the 1930s was that Black men didn’t have the mental or physical capacity to fly airplanes. White wisdom, widespread racism and the steady hand of Jim Crow reinforced that assumption. So when America entered World War II in 1941, where would they turn to get the military and aviation manpower to fight off the Japanese, Germans, Italians and Austrians while protecting the American home front? The answer rested in the very Black men who were maligned and mistreated and assumed unfit for aviation duty. Their ranks would grow and their dignity and courage prevailed through unending discrimination and mistrust. They started out as members of the US Army Air Corps. They would later be known as the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II. Today as Black History Month comes to a close, we pay tribute to the brave men who flew the planes, repaired them, maintained them, conducted military missions overseas and supervised the soldiers…The Tuskegee Airmen. And we’ll pay special tribute to the men we’ll honor at the March 3rd Black History Breakfast, including my father the late, 2nd Lieutenant Wilson A. Copeland who served with his fellow Tuskegee Airmen with dignity, pride and excellence. ​ Black History IS American History! =============================== History of the Tuskegee Airmen For More Information visit: www.tuskegeeairmen.org This is the official organization for the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. The term, "Tuskegee Airmen," refers to the men and women, African-Americans and Caucasians, who were involved in the socalled "Tuskegee Experience", the Army Air Corps program to train African Americans to fly and maintain combat aircraft. The Tuskegee Airmen included pilots, radio operators, navigators, bombardiers, aircraft maintenance, support staff, instructors, and all the personnel who kept the planes in the air. Virtually all black military pilots during World War II received their primary flight training at Moton Field and then their basic and advanced flight training at Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF). Tuskegee Airmen, Inc. (TAI) is headquartered in Tuskegee, Alabama (about 35 miles east of Montgomery), where the training of black military pilots during World War II began. There are currently 57 active chapters of TAI located in major cities and military installations throughout the United States. ============================= The Black History Month Breakfast will be held on Thursday March 3, 2016 at the Boston Colonnade Hotel from 8:30 am to 11:00 am. |
* * * * * * * *Archives
August 2024
|
©2025 All Rights Reserved Carole Copeland Thomas • (508) 947-5755 • [email protected]