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Freeman Field: The 477th Bombardment Group and the Club They Would Not Be Barred From

They were officers of the United States Army Air Forces, training in B-25 bombers for a war their country was still fighting — and their own base commander built them a separate, dilapidated officers' club and ordered them to stay in it, in defiance of the Army regulation that said he could not. In April 1945 the men of the 477th Bombardment Group answered in the only way left to them: they walked into the club they were entitled to, and then, when ordered to sign away that entitlement, 101 of them refused — knowing the refusal could, in law, be punished by death. This page is the documented record of what happened at Freeman Field, what the institution did to them for it, and the fifty years it took the Air Force to take it back.

The service and the promise

The 477th Bombardment Group (Medium) was the first and only Black bombardment group in the Army Air Forces — the bomber arm of the men the country would come to know as the Tuskegee Airmen. Reactivated on January 15, 1944, under Colonel Robert R. Selway Jr., it trained Black pilots, navigators, and bombardiers to fly the twin-engine B-25 Mitchell, in four squadrons — the 616th, 617th, 618th, and 619th. Its aircrews had trained at Tuskegee, Alabama; some of its officers were combat veterans transferred in from the 332nd Fighter Group in Europe, men who had already flown, fought, and been decorated in the war the 477th was still preparing to join. The group was scheduled to enter combat on July 1, 1945.

From its first station, the group’s command made its position plain. At Selfridge Field, Michigan, the commander of the First Air Force, Major General Frank O. Hunter, addressed the unit and stated, as the National WWII Museum records it: “The War Department is not ready to recognize Blacks on the same level of social equal to white men… I will not tolerate any mixing of the races…” The group was moved to Godman Field, Kentucky, in May 1944, and then, in March 1945, to Freeman Army Airfield near Seymour, Indiana — a larger field, big enough for all four squadrons and suited to the B-25. Army Regulation 210-10, Paragraph 19, prohibited any public building on a military installation from being used “for the accommodation of any self-constituted special or exclusive group,” and required that an officers’ club occupying a public building extend full membership to all officers on duty at the post. That is the promise at the center of this page, and it was not a promise made in speeches. It was in the regulations, in black and white, before the 477th ever reached Indiana. What follows is what the institution did when its own officers asked it to keep its own rule.

What happened — April 1945

Freeman Field had one officers’ club area and some 400 Black officers, listed by the National Park Service against some 250 white officers. Selway’s answer was to manufacture two clubs and a distinction to justify them. One club was designated for “base and supervisory personnel” — in practice, the white officers. The other was designated for “trainees” — in practice, every Black officer of the 477th, including the combat veterans among them. The trainees’ club, Club #1, was, in the Park Service’s description, an old, dilapidated building badly in need of repairs; the supervisors’ Club #2 was new and fully functioning. The Black officers called their assigned club “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and refused to use it. The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, working from the record, is blunt about the scheme: transcripts of Selway’s and Hunter’s own telephone calls show both men referring to the instructors’ club as the “white” club while making sure the written orders said nothing about color.

The officers planned a disciplined, nonviolent test of the regulation, organized by Lieutenant Coleman A. Young — a former labor organizer, later mayor of Detroit. On the evening of April 5, 1945, in small groups, they went to Club #2 and asked to be admitted as officers of the post.

Selway’s response to the collapse of the first arrests was paperwork. On April 9, he drafted Base Regulation 85-2, assigning officers to housing, mess, and recreational facilities by the trainee/supervisor distinction, and — the point of the exercise — requiring each officer to sign a statement certifying that he had read and understood it. On April 10, the Black officers were assembled, the regulation was read to them, and they were ordered to sign. Effectively none did. On April 11, a board interviewed the non-signers one by one and laid out the choice: sign, write a substitute certificate, or face arrest under the 64th Article of War — willful disobedience of a superior officer in time of war, an offense that, as every source on the record states, could technically be punished by death.

One hundred and one officers refused to sign, and were placed under arrest. Many of them put their refusal in writing, in statements the Smithsonian preserves. Obedience, one wrote, “would have done violence to the conscience of the undersigned; it would have constituted moral conduct less than that required of an officer and a gentleman in the Army of the United States.” Another: “The undersigned wishes to indicate over his signature his unshakable belief that racial bias is Fascistic, un-American, and directly contrary to the ideals for which he is willing to fight and die.”

The two numbers in this story are often confused, so this page states them plainly: 61 officers were arrested in the club entries of April 5–6, and 101 were arrested in the signature refusals of April 11 — 162 arrest events in all, with some officers counted twice. The National WWII Museum records that 42 of the 101 had also been among those charged in the April 5–6 entries. On April 13, the 101 were flown back to Godman Field and held under arrest — in the Park Service’s account, under armed guard and guard dogs, while German prisoners of war held at the same field moved freely and mocked them for the treatment their own country was giving them.

What saved them was that the protest had been built to be seen. The officers complained through channels — 110 of them wrote to the Army Inspector General — and they had alerted the Black press and civil-rights organizations in advance. Master Sergeant Harold J. Beaulieu, who ran the Freeman Field photo laboratory, photographed the arrests with a hidden camera; the picture reached the Pittsburgh Courier, and the War Department was flooded with protest telegrams. On April 23, 1945, on orders from Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall, the 101 were released.

Released — not cleared. General Hunter placed a letter of reprimand in the permanent file of every one of them.

What the institution did afterward

On May 18, 1945, a War Department committee reached the conclusion the officers had been arrested for asserting: Selway’s Base Regulation 85-2 violated Army Regulation 210-10. The segregation order at the heart of the arrests had been unlawful from the day it was written. No consequence for its authors is on this record — neither Selway nor Hunter was tried for it — but Selway was relieved of command. Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who had commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group — the Red Tails — was appointed to command the 477th on June 21, 1945, and took command on July 1, becoming, that same day, the first Black officer to command a major air base when he also assumed command of Godman Field. The group was redesignated the 477th Composite Group, the 99th Fighter Squadron was added, two bombardment squadrons were inactivated, and Black officers replaced white officers throughout its command structure. The 477th never deployed: the war ended in August 1945 with the group still training at Godman. It moved to Lockbourne Field, Ohio, in 1946 and was inactivated in 1947. The men who had been right about the regulation dispersed into a still-segregated Army.

Three of them still had a trial to face. In the first week of July 1945 — the National WWII Museum dates the courts-martial to July 2–3 — Thompson, Clinton, and Terry were tried by general court-martial at Godman Field. The defense was directed by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP, with Cincinnati NAACP president Theodore M. Berry as lead counsel. The Smithsonian’s account of the testimony is damning in the institution’s own words: it became obvious that skin color had determined admission to the club; Selway, called as a witness, objected to question after question until he was declared a hostile witness, and his testimony contradicted his own recorded telephone transcripts. Thompson and Clinton were acquitted of all charges. Terry was acquitted of disobeying an order — and convicted of “jostling” Lieutenant Rogers at the club door. The Smithsonian records that the prosecution had asked for the death penalty. What Terry received was a $150 fine — $50 a month for three months, paid, the Smithsonian records, out of a collection taken up by his fellow officers — loss of rank, and a dishonorable discharge. His was the only conviction out of 162 arrests. He carried it for fifty years.

The wider institution did, eventually, move the way the 101 had pointed it. The Army Air Forces pressed the War Department for a new regulation prohibiting racial segregation in base facilities. The Air Force, once independent, ordered an end to its own segregation policies ahead of the other services, and on July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed forces — a step the Air Force itself, in 1995, traced in part directly to Freeman Field. The policy the men had demanded became the policy of the United States. The letters of reprimand, and Terry’s conviction, sat in the files untouched.

For fifty years the file was carried by the men themselves and by the organization they built — Tuskegee Airmen Inc., which Terry, among others, helped found and later led as its president. The correction, when it finally began, began the same way the protest had: with one officer writing through channels. Retired Lieutenant Colonel James C. Warren, one of the 101, wrote to the Air Force asking it to correct the records of everyone involved in the Freeman Field incident. That letter opened the review that ended the matter — half a century after the arrests.

Where it stands now

On August 12, 1995, at the Tuskegee Airmen annual convention banquet in Atlanta, the Air Force officially vindicated the officers of the 477th.

Assistant Secretary of the Air Force Rodney A. Coleman announced the decision, and Chief of Staff General Ronald R. Fogleman presented the official documents to Warren and to Terry. In the Air Force News Service’s contemporary report, Coleman stated the institution’s verdict on itself without qualification: “With this action, a terrible wrong in the annals of U.S. Air Force and U.S. military history has been righted.” He called the Freeman Field incident a “bellwether for change with respect to integrating the U.S. military,” and said the officers had taken “a giant step for equality” nine years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in Montgomery.

For Terry, the vindication was complete in the record: the Air Force set aside his court-martial conviction and restored all the rights, privileges, and property he had lost because of it. The Park Service records the personal terms: a full pardon, restoration of his rank, and his $150 fine repaid. Terry, who lived to receive the Tuskegee Airmen’s collective Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 and died in 2009 at 87, is reported by the Los Angeles Times to have taken the long view of the fifty years: “This is the benefit of being a nation of laws. They sometimes catch up with you if you’re right.”

For the other officers, the vindication was real but deliberately incomplete in its mechanics. At the Atlanta ceremony, the Air Force removed the letters of reprimand from the permanent files of 15 officers — Warren and 14 others. For the rest, Coleman announced, the Air Force would remove the letters as soon as it received their requests. The Air Force’s own arithmetic that day framed the reprimanded group as 104 officers; 15 files were cleared in the room, and 89 were left to be cleared on application. The National WWII Museum adds a human complication the record should keep: some officers never asked, because they regarded the reprimand itself as a proud legacy of having fought institutional racism. Others — men who had died in the intervening fifty years, or who never learned of the process — could not ask at all. An on-request remedy, offered fifty years late, reaches only those still living, still reachable, and still willing to file the paperwork for a wrong the institution had already admitted in public.

The ground is kept. On October 14, 2022, two historical markers and two life-size statues of Tuskegee Airmen were dedicated at what is now Freeman Municipal Airport in Seymour, beside the Freeman Army Airfield Museum — one figure in an officer’s uniform, for the discrimination faced; one in flight gear, for the defense of the nation. The 477th itself flies again: reactivated in 2007 in Alaska as the 477th Fighter Group, flying the F-22 — the lineage of a unit that never got to fight the war it trained for, because it first had to fight its own command.

That is the pattern this site exists to document, in its clearest arithmetic. The men were right in April 1945 — about the regulation, about the club, about the country they were offering to die for. Their own institution has now said so, in its own name, in writing. It took fifty years, a conviction carried for a lifetime, reprimands that outlived many of the men who bore them, and the survivors themselves to ask, one more time, for the institution to correct its own file.

The ledger

The accounting, in three lines — what the record shows has been done, what it shows has not, and what is still being sought.

What has been done

What has not been done

What is being sought

The record, on video

No camera rolled in Club #2 on April 5, 1945 — the one photograph of the arrests had to be taken with a hidden camera. What the record has instead is the place itself, the Park Service’s film, the airmen in their own words, and the Army’s own wartime portrait of the men it was prosecuting that same spring. Five films:

At Freeman Field itself. WTIU's Journey Indiana at the Freeman Army Airfield Museum in Seymour: the segregated club, the 61 arrests, the 101 refusals — told where it happened, with the museum's curator. (WTIU Public Television.)

The Park Service film. The National Park Service's centerpiece film for Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site: surviving airmen recount the fight abroad and the fight at home, in their own voices. (National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center.)

In their own words. The National WWII Museum's oral histories: Tuskegee Airmen recorded for the museum's collection, describing the training, the combat, and the America they came home to. (The National WWII Museum.)

The long interview. The Pritzker Military Museum & Library's Citizen Soldier program: airmen interviewed at length about the war, the discrimination inside it, and what the record should say. (Pritzker Military Museum & Library.)

The Army's own film, 1945. "Wings for This Man," the Army Air Forces' 1945 portrait of the Tuskegee Airmen, narrated by Ronald Reagan — released the same spring the Army was arresting the 477th for asking to be treated as the officers this film celebrates. (U.S. National Archives.)

Sources

Further record

Part of Betrayed, Not Forgotten — this site's accounting for the service members and veterans their own institutions failed. Videos are embedded from their publishers; nothing here is re-hosted.