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    You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
    You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
    You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
    Ebook85 pages39 minutes

    You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen

    By Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Boston Weatherford

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    About this ebook

    In this “masterful, inspiring evocation of an era” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford “wields the power of poetry to tell [the] gripping historical story” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) of the Tuskegee Airmen.

    I WANT YOU! says the poster of Uncle Sam. But if you’re a young black man in 1940, he doesn’t want you in the cockpit of a war plane. Yet you are determined not to let that stop your dream of flying.

    So when you hear of a civilian pilot training program at Tuskegee Institute, you leap at the chance. Soon you are learning engineering and mechanics, how to communicate in code, how to read a map. At last the day you’ve longed for is here: you are flying!

    From training days in Alabama to combat on the front lines in Europe, this is the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the groundbreaking African-American pilots of World War II. In vibrant second-person poems, Carole Boston Weatherford teams up for the first time with her son, artist Jeffery Weatherford, in a powerful and inspiring book that allows readers to fly, too.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9781481449403
    You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
    Author

    Carole Boston Weatherford

    Carole Boston Weatherford is the author of numerous award-winning books. Her picture book BOX: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom, illustrated by Michele Wood received a Newbery Honor. Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre, illustrated by the late Floyd Cooper, was a National Book Award longlist title, won the Coretta Scott King Award for author and illustrator, and received a Caldecott Honor and a Sibert Honor. When she's not traveling or visiting museums, Carole is mining the past for family stories, fading traditions, and forgotten struggles. She lives in North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      You Can Fly - Carole Boston Weatherford

      CONTENTS

      Head to the Sky

      The Civilian Pilot Training Program

      Train Ride to the Clouds

      A Shot

      The First Cadets

      Officers

      The Odds

      Keep ’Em Flying: Tuskegee Army Airfield Nurses

      Ground School

      Solo, At Last

      Sugar, Sugar

      The Other War

      Downtime

      Training Planes

      Pearl Harbor

      Dorie Miller Earns the Navy Cross

      Private Joe Louis

      Fighting Boredom

      Second Lieutenant

      William Henry Hastie

      The Double V Campaign: Pens Mighty as Swords

      Anxious

      Fight Song

      Facing the Enemy

      Operation Prove Them Wrong

      Routines

      Lena Horne: More than a Pin-Up

      Red Tail Angels

      The Black Birdmen

      Your Record

      No Hero’s Welcome

      A Long Line

      Epilogue

      Author’s Note

      Time Line

      Resources

      About Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffery Boston Weatherford

      In memory of my father, Joseph A. Boston Jr., a World War II veteran.

      To all who fly in their dreams

      —C. B. W.

      To my mom, my dad, and my tribe

      —J. B. W.

      Head to the Sky

      No matter that there are only 130

      licensed black pilots in the whole nation.

      Your goal of being a pilot cannot be grounded

      by top brass claiming blacks are not fit to fly.

      Your vision of planes cannot be

      blocked by clouds of doubt.

      The engine of your ambition will not brake

      for walls of injustice—no matter how high.

      The sky’s no limit if you’ve flown

      on your own power in countless dreams;

      not if you’ve raised homing pigeons

      on Harlem rooftops;

      or watched crop dusters

      buzzing over rows of cotton;

      not if you’ve gazed at stars

      and known God meant for you to soar.

      The Civilian Pilot Training Program

      You see the posters: Uncle Sam Wants You.

      If only that meant in the cockpit.

      But the Civilian Pilot Training Program—

      the CPTP—is for whites only

      until the NAACP and black newspapers push

      Congress to fund programs at several black colleges—

      including Howard, Hampton, and Tuskegee—

      and at the Coffey

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