“You are itching to fight. / How can America win, you wonder, / with one arm tied? With black troops / stuck as second-class soldiers, / barred from the skirmishes / in the skies?” (from “Anxious”). The story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African American pilots trained by the U.S. military, is told through finely crafted poems that use the second-person voice to great effect, giving a sense of immediacy to a narrative that takes place in the early to mid-1940s. The “you” of the poems goes from training, to waiting to be called into battle by a reluctant military, to flying with fellow Airmen as bomber escorts on missions over Germany. The Tuskegee pilots earn the nickname “Red Tail Angels” for the “jazzy” paint on the tails of their planes and the life-saving accuracy of their guns defending Allied flyers, all as racism rages at home. An “Epilogue” states, “You’ll sit up front with lawmakers / when the first black president is sworn in. / And you will know your fight / was worth it.” Understated scratchboard illustrations provide an affecting accompaniment to a narrative that concludes with an author’s note, timeline, and resources. (Ages 10–14)

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.