You Can Fly : the Tuskegee Airmen

When an opportunity not yet afforded to people of your race presents itself, what do you do?

You take the chance to move beyond your circumstances, believe in yourself and go for it!

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen by Carole Boston Weatherford is the poetic account of members of the inaugural civilian pilot program established in the 1940’s at Tuskegee Institute.

Complete with personal accounts of the men who made dared to change and make history and a timeline, this book is a great read for those who want to learn more about people who did not let the color barrier stop them from soaring.

You Can Fly: the Tuskegee Airmen

Award-winning author Carole Boston Weatherford’s innovative history in verse celebrates the story of the Tuskegee Airmen: pioneering African-American pilots who triumphed in the skies and past the color barrier. 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.