Harry Stewart Jr., a decorated former combat pilot who was among the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black unit of the Army Air Forces in World War II, and who, after being denied a civilian career in aviation, made a late-life return to the skies, died on Sunday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 100.
The death was confirmed by Philip Handleman, who collaborated with Mr. Stewart in writing his biography, “Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airman’s Firsthand Account of World War II” (2019).
Mr. Stewart was one of a tiny handful of still-living Tuskegee pilots who saw combat in the war. He flew 43 missions — almost one every other day — from late winter 1944 into the spring of 1945.
On one mission, to attack a Luftwaffe base in Germany, Lieutenant Stewart and six other American pilots were baited into a dogfight with at least 16 German fighter planes. Firing his machine guns and performing risky aerial maneuvers, he downed three enemy aircraft in succession, fending off a potential rout.
He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, cited for having “gallantly engaged, fought and defeated the enemy” with no regard for his personal safety.
Four years later, in a southern Nevada desert known as Frenchman Flat, the military held its first aerial gunnery competition for both jet and propeller-plane pilots, a contest of precision bombing, gun firing and flight maneuvers of the sort later made famous by the 1986 movie “Top Gun.” Lieutenant Stewart and three other Tuskegee Airmen won the first-place trophy in the propeller-plane category.
In that contest Lieutenant Stewart earned a perfect score in “skip bombing,” in which a low-flying plane drops bombs that hit the ground and roll into a target.
Months later, he was mandatorily discharged from the military. He soon discovered that, as a Black pilot, he would have no further chance of a career in the skies.
Harry Thaddeus Stewart Jr. was born on July 4, 1924, in Newport News, Va. His father, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, took a job as an assistant galley cook on a passenger liner and made his way to New York City, where he became a postal worker in 1929, right before the Depression. He was soon joined by his family, who settled in the working-class Corona section of Queens.
Harry’s mother, Florence (Bright) Stewart, aspired to raise her four children in a colorblind world — so much so, according to his biography, that she made sure that the family did not subscribe to any Black newspapers or magazines.
In 1931, Harry’s father took him aboard a 62,000-pound German flying boat that had touched down in the waters off Manhattan. Harry started building model airplanes and reading magazines like Flying Aces. In 1939, joining a crowd of 325,000, he attended the dedication ceremony of New York Municipal Airport (now known as LaGuardia).
Harry told his junior high history teacher that his dream was to be a pilot. By his account, she responded sadly, “Colored people aren’t accepted as airline pilots.”
That was the conventional wisdom of the time, but the barrier was being challenged in the still-segregated military. In 1939, the U.S. government began funding training for Black pilots, and in early 1941 a Black aviation unit, overseen by white officers, was activated.
The attack on Pearl Harbor came later that year. Within weeks, Harry went to a local Army recruiting station and announced that he wanted to train to be a fighter pilot. He was turned down: At 17, he was too young.
He returned the day after he turned 18. On his second try, he passed a written exam to join what was then called the Army Air Corps. Dropping out of high school, he was sent south for training in April 1943. On the train ride, the conductor told him to move to “the colored car” — his first experience of Jim Crow.
In June 1944, Lieutenant Stewart became one of 992 African Americans who completed the advanced flight training program at Tuskegee, Ala.
After the war, he became a flight instructor at the Tuskegee airfield and, in 1947, married Delphine Friend, the sister of a squadron-mate.
In January 1950, amid a postwar drawdown of active service members, his commanding officer told him that he could not afford to keep him on active duty. Mr. Stewart retired as a lieutenant colonel.
Out of the military, he found himself back in the world that his junior high teacher had warned him about.
Mr. Stewart saw ads from Trans World and Pan American airlines seeking pilots and requiring no more than a few hundred hours of flight experience, a fraction of his total. He went to a local Pan Am office and explained his qualifications to a woman sitting behind a desk in the lobby. She said the airline was not hiring. He responded that he had seen an ad. A personnel manager appeared.
“Mr. Stewart, I’m sure you can understand our position,” he said, according to the Stewart biography. “Just imagine what passengers would think if during a flight they saw a Negro step out of the cockpit and walk down the aisle in a pilot’s uniform?”
Mr. Stewart instead found a job in the New York City government’s engineering department. In 1963, after years of night classes, he earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering from New York University. He went on to work for a series of large corporations, including a natural gas supplier in Detroit. The city became home to many other Tuskegee Airmen.
Mr. Stewart retired to Bloomfield Hills, an affluent Detroit suburb, with his wife, who died in 2015, and his daughter, Lori Stewart, who survives him, along with nieces and nephews.
In 1994, he heard that an annual Air Force almanac had listed the winners of the 1949 aerial gunnery event as “unknown.” He had saved a copy of the official scoring tabulation.
With the newfound evidence and their memories still intact, Mr. Stewart and others began pressing for recognition of Tuskegee’s 1949 “top gun” victory. They received a boost from an independent researcher, Zellie Rainey Orr, who located their trophy in storage at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It was put on display there in 2004.
The next year, Mr. Stewart did something for the first time in decades: fly an airplane. At Detroit’s Coleman A. Young Municipal Airport, using motor gliders owned by the city’s Tuskegee Airmen National Museum, he spent several years giving rides to youngsters.
In 2018, as recounted in his biography, Mr. Stewart and his daughter happened to be driving by the Air Force museum in Dayton and paid a visit.
There, he strolled by an open-cockpit trainer he could have used at Tuskegee and a P-51 Mustang, his combat plane.
His eye was soon drawn to an object illuminated by an overhead lamp: the pewter “top gun” trophy from 1949. Its base includes a bronze plaque, which, in faded font, bears his name. Near the trophy was a blown-up photograph of Mr. Stewart as a 24-year-old.
Other museum visitors noticed the nonagenarian gentleman who was lost in reverie. They asked Ms. Stewart if her father had anything to do with the exhibit.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “My dad is a Tuskegee Airman.”
Some visitors started asking him questions. More people appeared. A line formed. Strangers wanted his autograph.
After an hour, Mr. Stewart and his daughter excused themselves. They had a four-hour drive ahead of them. Before leaving, Mr. Stewart paused for one last look at his old trophy.