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Then one day, what seemed like bad luck turned into good fortune. Richardson was riding in a truck, helping his driver/partner deliver jukeboxes in Center City. The driver got into a fender bender and the white policeman who stopped them asked for IDs.
"Usually, you produced a draft card, but I was only 17 - the draft started at 18 - and I didn't have one," said Richardson, now a retired Philadelphia teacher and principal. "We started talking and the policeman said they were giving tests for airmen at the Customs House at Second and Chestnut. I zipped down there as soon as I could. It was a car accident that gave me my dream."
Richardson is one of about 350 surviving black World War II military air corps members - now familiarly known as the Tuskegee Airmen because they all trained in Tuskegee, Ala. He will be among those attending the group's 37th annual convention this weekend at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown near 12th and Market Streets.
The Tuskegee alumni will have several open activities to give the public a chance to share their vaunted history. There will be a memorial service this morning at 8:30 to honor the many airmen who have died.
A more joyous event, though, will be a public forum on the Tuskegee group starting at 1:30 p.m. Saturday in Salons I and J at the Marriott. Guests will be able to talk to airmen - 10 of whom, like Richardson, come from the Philadelphia area - who did all sorts of tasks and served as ground crews to escort pilots and some who actually did missions as bomber and fighter pilots and crews in Europe. There will be autograph signing immediately after the session.
Richardson, an Ohio native who came to Camden to live with relatives and then went on to Temple University after World War II, said that he was particularly proud of the record of the members of the Tuskegee group.
"Though we were often only the escort group, we never once, in 200 missions, lost a plane under our escort," said Richardson. "Those white pilots would say, 'Give us those Tuskegee boys.' It was always gratifying to hear that."
Richardson said he would always refer to his group the same as any military man, by its number - in his case, the 99th Fighter Squadron. Training in the South, he sometimes got discouraged, like the time he was on a bus with German prisoners.
"They got to sit in the front, when we, in the military, had to sit in the back. Imagine that. Prisoners, and they were in the front of the bus," he said.
But with the recognition of the Tuskegee Airmen by the 1970s and a group Congressional Gold Medal last year, things have changed, he said.
"I was in Huntsville for a meeting and the woman driving the shuttle for my rental car was white," he said. "I got out of the van and she carried my bags over to my car for me. Imagine that. Forty years before, I might have gotten lynched for even looking at a white woman, and now she was polite and smiling. I believe we, the Tuskegee Airmen, by doing what we did for the country, had a lot to do with those changes."
The final public ceremony for the convention will be the Benjamin O. Davis Jr. Awards Gala Dinner, tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Marriott. Davis was the first African American general in the U.S. Air Force and one of the commanders at Tuskegee during the war. The keynote speaker will be Col. Guion "Guy" Bluford, the first African American astronaut, a Philadelphia native who was on four Space Shuttle missions in the 1980s and 1990s. Admission is $130 per person.
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