Black Horizons; General James

On August 28th, 1975, two very significant and historic events took place in the Colorado Springs, Colorado. The first event was a ceremony in which General Daniel Chappy James became the first black man to become a four -star general in the history of the United States Armed Forces. This historic event was followed by another event of equal importance. Approximately one hour later, General L .D. Clay Jr., who has retired after 33 years of outstanding military service, turned over to General James, the command of all the air and space attack warning forces for the United States and Canada. The official title for these combined military forces is the North American air defense command or NORAD. Thus, General

Daniel James, a veteran of 32 years of service and a combat flyer in two wars, has become the eighth commander -in -chief of NORAD since his establishment in 1957. NORAD is based in beautiful Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Let's take a brief look at this fantastic military facility that has become the key to our country's military defense. The North American air defense command located near Colorado Springs, Colorado is responsible for strategic warning of an attack on our continent and for limited defense against the missile or bomber attack. Central control of all aerospace defense activity is carried out from the Cheyenne Mountain Combat Operations Center. It is one of the most secure installations ever constructed by man and is located in a four and a half acre chamber under hundreds of feet of solid granite deep inside 100 million -year -old

Cheyenne Mountain. A major segment of the overall NORAD defense surveillance operation is the Space Defense Center. The men and women of this ultra -sophisticated activity have the job of detecting and tracking all man -made objects in near -earth orbit. First indication of a missile launch would probably come from one of NORAD's orbiting satellites. The warning would be passed to the Combat Operations Center by communication satellites. Data flowing from all over the world would feed into the computers in Cheyenne Mountain. The ballistic missile warning system with sites in England as well as Greenland and Alaska would take this data and precisely track the rising missile. This new information would flow back to NORAD. Battle staff duty officers in the NORAD command post would study the computer data and direct the Space Defense Center to analyze the now orbiting missile to determine its orbit around the earth. This warning would be instantly analyzed and passed to the national command authorities in Canada and the United States from the Cheyenne Mountain Combat Operations Center. The underground headquarters of

NORAD Good evening. I'm Bubba Jackson. The new commander of NORAD is my guest tonight, General Daniel Chappy James. General James, we like to welcome you to Black Horizons. One question that we'd like to ask you is where did you get the nickname Chappy? Well, it's really nothing newsworthy about it. It happened to be my brother's nickname. My brother Charles. At that time when I was going up in northwest Florida, all Charles were Chappy's like all rich at the dick. And he happened to be an all -American football player, a tremendous football player. The only reason he's not in the history books are the great professional teams as blacks weren't accepted in football. Can you imagine a guy could pass with either hand, kick with either foot, wait about 240 and do your 100 and about 10 seconds flat. That's my big brother Charles, Chappy James. And I was Chappy James little brother. And I was always being compared to my big brother when I came along and played football, not as well as he of course. So that's where you got the nickname Chappy. Yes.

Okay, what I'd like to do is to go back to your your early time in terms of getting into the military, your training at Tuskegee. Can you just tell us a little bit about that? Well, Tuskegee became a natural place to to start out blacks in the Army Air Corps because at that time Tuskegee had a civilian government sponsored program called a civilian pilot training program. And I was the largest several other black schools predominantly black schools had them. But Tuskegee had the largest program. We had both the primary, secondary, cross -country and advanced. So you could go right up to flight instructor. And although the airlines were not hiring blacks and no blacks were being admitted into the armed forces, many of us had gone through this course and had gotten up to the instructor reading. So when the decision was made to allow blacks to come into the Army Air Corps, and it was the first of the services to accept them. The Navy didn't accept them until after the war. Then they put the program in at Tuskegee. And they made it a segregated program.

All of the blacks went to Tuskegee. Went to black to Tuskegee for pre -flight, for primary advanced, basic and advanced, and fight a transition. It was quite a thing just to survive the traffic pattern because they wanted to keep us all in the same area. The white whites went to one place for primary, one place for basic, then another place for advanced, to round off in Kelly and then combat crew training centers. But they had had us very carefully segregated, very closely handpicked. Most of the guys were either college graduates or had at least two years college. I don't know of anybody that came through at the time that I was there that didn't have at least a couple of years of college. And so it was a pretty select group. Holly motivated the majority of them. They went a lot of human indignities because there were some people, naturally it could be expected in a case like that, who were trying to prove that we couldn't fly

rather than to teach us to fly. All of the instructors that the army had then were white. And many of them told us outright that they wanted to see the program fail. To those of us who determined that it would succeed not only heightened our motivation. And so it did succeed. And that story has been documented very well, I think. Do you feel that the training that you guys received at Tuskegee because it was segregated? Did it help the black pilots more or did it hamper them? Dependent on the individual. I think some young men who would have been able to get through today's program without the hazing and the kind of dehumanizing things that happened down there. And they washed out because they were declared attitude cases. They got disgusted and they lost that motivation and would say nothing is worth it. But the tough guys, I don't want to say the tough guys, I want to say the guys who had determined before they ever got there. Like one

good example is the late Hubert L. Jones from this town in Denver, who was one of the guys that kept saying keep your eye on the mark man. You know what we came down here to do. That guy has got his wings. We don't have ours. And that's what we came. I remember one night they had a very bad situation downtown where they had a big fight and a couple of the black enlisted men got shot down at a segregated theater. And the majority of the guys on the base, especially the enlisted men, were saying let's go down here and take this town apart. And I remember General Davis, who was then a captain and saying now just a moment, you know, wait a minute. Now what we came down here to do was not to solve the social problems. This may be a byproduct of what we achieve later on if we're successful in this. But I think we came down here to learn to fly. I think that was our objective when the first night. If I'm wrong, you guys tell me. But I want to suggest that we're not getting involved in this. We're not going to win any physical confrontation with those people down there. Let's go on

with what we're here to do. And there were numerous episodes like this that would crop up where we had to be reminded by some cool heads. They would step up to some of the guys who were a little more volatile like myself and say, hey man, you know, now's not the time later. Okay and reference to now is not the time. Later on, you did do a few things and I believe one was in Kentucky that you participated in a sitting at that time. Can you just tell us just a little bit about that incident? Yes, you see the plan that we had all along and that had been we had some pretty good advice incident. Maybe because we had as highly educated guys as I told you like you know, you but Jones, but we had others who had been educated specifically in constitutional law. And like William Mel Coleman who is now a member of the president's cabinet at Secretary of Transportation. And we had we were getting advice from Thurgood Marshall who was then the General Counsel of

NAACP and they had all told us Truman Gibson of Chicago who was Joe Lewis's attorney Leon. And they would say, listen, don't go rushing out there right now breaking the regulations that are existing. Let's stay right inside the system. And let's try the system all the way before we move outside the system to try to get this thing soft. Let's challenge the system to do what it's supposed to do. And that's what we did. We went to the office's club. We started out with public accommodations because they were the most visible. And for some reason, that seemed to get under bigot skinned more than you're going to a classroom to sit down and learn a skill with him. He didn't want you to sit at the bar and have a beer with him. You know, a bigotry has always been unexplainably stupid. But that was one of the things. So we said, okay, let's kind of touch these guys where they're sensitive. And we went to the clubs. We went to the theater. We refused to sit in the places that had been roped off for us. And they wanders a few

times and then they arrested 101 of us. Thurgood Marshall came down and as the General Counsel of the NAACP, they sent him down to try the case. They took three of us and made a test case of it. And those three were acquitted and the case was thrown out. Now, I must explain right here that young people who have heard me speak in various auditoriums and college campuses where I'm urging young black people to work within the system, saying, well, Chappy, you went outside the system. Then when you did that, you know, well, actually we had tried the system all the way through. And the system was not responsive at that time. The laws were on the books. They were the ones that were breaking the laws. We were not breaking the laws at all because there was a law on the books right then that said there would be no segregated public accommodations on any military installations. And so when President Truman, as an outgrowth of all of this, came out with his

public law that said there will be no more segregated facilities on any military establishments and cut out all the separate but equal. All he was saying was obey the law, man. The law was there all along. And what I'm telling the youngsters today is that you don't have to go to that end because the system is receptive now. It's not as receptive as it could be. I'm not saying everything is all right. Mark me well because I get misquoted on this. I'm saying that things are so much better and I'm trying to get the young people to assess the progress we've made from those early days at Tuskegee to my position now in Shandon, Shion Mountain. It's a long way from Tuskegee to Shion Mountain but I can still see every painful step. And I can see how less painful they got as I got towards the top with the authority. And that's what I'm trying to get that young black lad to do or any other minority to do. It's to hang in there with the system and get prepared to compete and to take advantage and to solidify the gains that we've made. Everything's not all right. We've still got another mile to run in this race for total equality but we've got a better track surface

to run it on now. And I just want these youngsters to stay in the race because the trophies out there at that finish line are much better now than they've ever been before. Quoting something you said in an article in every every magazine, you mentioned something about unity and you feel that this is one of probably the best phenomena that has happened to the black experience in America. And does that feeling tie into what you're just saying? Yes it does but not just unity along racial lines. I'm talking about total unity with all of the people of this country. One of the things that I have heard more than anything else is polarization because that's limiting. You see we have too many minorities. There's too much reverse racism right now. You know some of the best practices in bigger. So I see right now black. And they had a lot of training because they got segregated against a lot. But I see a lot of people that are screaming about the back of the bus that never sat there. Well I did. And I know how dehumanizing it is. It was. And I'm not going back there. I hear people talking about going back to Africa. My answer is heck I didn't come from there. 1606 North Albany Street,

Pensacola Florida. That's me. United States citizen. My heritage is here. My future is here. I will contribute and I tell them don't get so busy practicing your right to dissent that you forget your responsibility to contribute. And your prospering proportion is you contribute to this country. And you're in a position to demand when you have the talent to produce. And you prosper in proportion is you exhibit that. My mother talked about something called a power of excellence. The power she says it's the only power on this earth. It's worth your investing in my son is the power of your own individual excellence. And you develop that and develop it well and you use that to spring forward your way to the top of your field. Whatever it is. And you'll find that you can exert more influence from on top with authority to solve the ills that still beset your people under the bottom. And you can with a brick or torch your sign. So get up there. And I heard it and she's right. And it's possible here. You can't stand there banging on that door of opportunity. You'll let me in, let me in, let me in. And all of a sudden somebody snatches over and they're doing it. And I got

to go get my bag. And you stand there armed with your bags of knowledge and your bags of intelligence, your bags of desire and your bags of driving when they crack that door. You walk in and take charge. It's possible here. More than it is in any other country in the world. They say they're going into the military when you go in and from the time you go in until the time you come out there's a change. What would what would you tell Black youth or other minority youth today about the opportunities or lack of opportunities depending on how one would like to look at it in the military today. There is a change but from the time naturally that you go into anything because of the way you apply yourself or a different stimuli that comes just from being there. The military is no different. There's so many learning situations that don't happen in the in the classroom. And the fact that you mature if you stay in there for 20 year to or 30 year to or whatever you decide to do. Now as you apply yourself it's just like any other highly competitive feel like this

or like United Steel. You know if you decide that you want to be a branch manager you've got to work to be a branch manager. You don't just have to say listen we've got to have a quarter of 15 Black branch branches. And then when they started looking around for that 15 quarters they got the same old cop out that said I couldn't find one that's qualified. You got to take that excuse away from them by getting more young Blacks qualified. And so that's how you change in the service. You don't just make Black generals. You know one of the most insulting questions that gets asked to me sometimes is did they give you your fourth star just because it's a bicentennial year coming up and they want to say we got a Black. In one word one question this guy has wiped out all the blood and sweat and tears and preparation and effort that it took me to prepare myself to fill the squares to fight the wars to go to the schools to go to air with university and to study deep into the night to put on my skills as a fighter pilot and to get out there over

way north and skies much less friendly than those of you United and fight my way back home in the name of the foreign policy of my country. Now they didn't give me anything and they don't give away stars in my service you've got to earn them generals made they're not born and you'll find that in most any worthwhile endeavor that you find and so I want young Black people young white people young red people everybody to turn loose the crutch that used to be there when there were these inequities I want them to prepare themselves now to take advantages of all of the games solidify the games that we have made over the years and this is certainly possible in the military there's absolutely no comparison in the military of 20 years ago even to the military of today we've got good example I can't name you all the Black generals in the military yeah I used to be able to do that real easy because there wasn't but two father and son both of them the name was Davis and

I have people sometimes black people come at me and say how you doing general Davis I'll be easy to meet you you know but this I can't name you all the black generals anymore because there's so many and the same way with Congress in civics class in high school I used to like for them I'd look all the way down the paper to find that question name the black congressman all the one one's name was Dawson I find that question I knew I had that one but now I might miss that one because I can't sit here right off without thinking very hard and name you all of the black members of Congress because that's progress my mother used to say there's two Negroes we can do without at first one and that only one to do that I'm looking forward to the day when so many of us will be doing so many things noteworthy no longer be news with we've arrived in the military we are arriving that way in the Congress of the United States and other worthwhile endeavors the same way and I just want to keep pressing and keep prepared and just keep moving five it sounds as though the two comments you made in reference to your mother that she has a a degree

on on life in terms of how to live it in a way that you can benefit the most in the short time that we are you know here on this particular earth no doubt about it she was the strongest single influence on my life my father contributed a lot to my father was a more I don't want to say crude but he was just a no -nonsense guy he was bringing in the bread all the time and we were a tight family and he stayed right with my mother until he died and she never married you come from a large family large family I'm number 17 or 17 kids and they used to say sticking at my mother taught all of us that grew to be that age through the eighth grade because she didn't like the segregated school systems of Pensacola Florida and she established her own little private school and that's where I went to school through the eighth grade and she was a philosopher so she taught us all of these things about you know contributing excel perform perform excel excel contribute contribute you know and very great patriot and she was the one that said don't you abdicate your citizenship in that country this is

your country right here and you prepare yourself to reap the rewards that are yours here as an American citizen don't you abdicate that citizenship to anybody and she said don't you along the way while you're preparing yourself don't you ever turn your back on your god or your country or that flag she's yours and you make it better by having been here and she believed that and again I heard it and she was right things assess the progress that's what we want to get the young people to do today assess the progress when I'm talking about that unity again I'm talking about all of us of all colors races and creeds now we're not going to ever reach that Val Hall I in your time of mine that the practicing bigot isn't going to get his Dorian they're still around and they're still making progress some of the hate groups are still stronger now in some places than they've been before but so many of them had died out and they'll continue to die out because the thing that defeats that more than anything else is knowledge and understanding and

communications and it's got to cross racial lines that polarization and separatism never only together you know you talk about security that's one that's one of the biggest things that will contribute to my not having to practice my skills as a warrior again a lot of people think that that warriors like war that's a very popular misconception nobody dislikes war worse than warriors because we're the ones that have to fight and get shot at but we will not accept peace in any cost and when you're going around shot and freedom now first of all you got to have a place for be free and well this is mine right here in states of America and the thing that preserves that unity and that peace more than anything else the thing that deserves that peace more than anything else and that will preserve is unity within the people no would be world conqueror is willing to jump on any nation that's not divided within itself it makes it easy for him when we start squabbling among ourselves about whose side of the street is this you see but as we band together and as we try to understand each other better as we break down

the old cliches and as we eliminate one by one people's excuses for hating each other stop finding so many ways to hate each other because of race creed religion social strata section of the block political party falling on somebody else's scandal my goodness gracious life forget war to get press ahead that's the only way to go as far and and that's what we need in this country and that's what scares the pants off of any enemy on the other side and that's the only way to fly there's in terms of what you were just saying there's a I believe well I guess you would call him a saying his name is John Cassandra and he has a record I'll call a color me human one of the things he says and the record is we as human beings ought to stop working with what's wrong and begins to work with what's right to to deal with with life itself in terms of solving some of our problems you were talking a minute ago about warriors and you picked up another name a nickname which was the original black Panther can you tell us where that came from well that black Panther is a different breed of cat he's the one that's popular

all in on today it had nothing to do with the black Panther party I was in the Philippines was the first integrated outfit that I went to when they broke down the segregated outfits in 1949 and the first guy that walked out and stuck his hand out to me was a southern white lad from Louisiana named Sput Taylor and he was a musician and I'm a musician of sorts I like music and you played drums I brushed low drums and sang a little bit and for our own amusement we did an old spot he came over and stuck out his hand what he said what do you say my name Sput Taylor what's yours and from then on we had a real tight relationship so we were putting different symbols on our helmets you know and things like that and he said boy I got just a one for you because you're swinging black cat I'm gonna draw a black cat on your helmet advisor and he did he drew a leaping black Panther and so I wore that helmet all through the Korean War days and a Chinese reporter came in and wrote a story the first story that came out they referred to me as the black Panther of the Korean War

and they thought it was no newsworthy at that time because I was a flight leader and all the other members of my flight were white Sput Taylor was killed incidentally in that war and my youngest son is named for him Claude Taylor the third and his name was Claude Taylor the third and mine is Claude Taylor James and then everybody calls him Sput and he's a swinging cat like a Claude Taylor what about some of the the the other tours that you've had what 78 missions over Vietnam North and Vietnam we we counted the ones only the ones that you went north of the Red River is north now you are now the commander of Norat and how do you see this role right now as a four star general well it's a very it's so much responsibility involved here that it's frightening I wouldn't like to use the term frightening it's humbling to realize that you are trusted with this kind of

responsibility and that the chief of staff of my service feels that I can hack this job in the president of the United States concurred you start from there and you start with a lot of pride and this is another thing in my mind that taught me she said always maintain your pride sometimes that might be the only thing you got left and I start from there with a lot of pride in the fact that I was chosen for this job and a lot of a confidence in my ability to do the job I love my country fiercely so it follows that it's fitting that I should be given the job to defend it at the time ever comes and to put up such a great possibility of defense that can be perceived by any would be enemy that it will deter him from trying to attack us and so I've got the job of early warning and surveillance and I've got the job of a limited air defense capability and so I feel like I can do both I have a very good rapport with my people we have a mutual respect I have led people before and we relate to each other I believe in

getting the job done and having as much fun as we can while we're doing it and so far I've been able to do both General James we would like to say thank you for coming here and sharing your views here on our show tonight we really really appreciate it it has been very enlightening well thank you very much it was a pleasure to be here this is Bubba Jackson good night