These photos of the Tuskegee Airmen show cool dedication in the face of wartime segregation

By the time World War II broke out, African Americans had already been pressing for access to elite military training for decades. They knew the U.S. government was not keen on integrating its military—a stance so pervasive that one black pilot even enlisted in the French air service after being rejected by his own. But the interwar period saw civil rights groups and professional organizations like the NAACP pressing for greater access to military training, and in 1939 they were rewarded when a House Appropriations Bill earmarked funds for training African American pilots at any civilian flight schools that would have them. The historically black university in Tuskegee, Alabama, had such a program. Its graduates would come to form an elite squadron of all-black military pilots, known colloquially as the “Tuskegee Airmen,” officially the 332nd Fighter and the 477th Bombardment groups.

In April 1943 the airmen shipped out to North Africa and Sicily, where they promptly garnered distinction for their effectiveness in clearing Axis forces from strategic Mediterranean naval routes. Soon the 332nd was escorting bomber missions into central Europe and Germany, shooting down the Luftwaffe’s technologically superior fighter jets and earning the nickname “Red-Tail Angels” for their aircrafts’ custom crimson-dipped nose and tail paint jobs.

Antoinette “Toni” Frissell was a Manhattan fashion photographer who volunteered for war in 1941 and became an official chronicler of the American Red Cross and Women’s Army Corps activities in Europe, producing inspirational images for use as propaganda. To that extent her pictures from the war are persuasive, though they also function as powerful vignettes of wartime humanity.

In 1945 Frissell became the first professional photographer allowed access to the 332nd’s “Tuskegee Airmen” when she visited their base in Ramitelli, Italy. The 280 medium format images she shot there show a tight knit band of modern warriors preparing for the next mission. In their leather jackets and bomber caps the airmen in her pictures stylishly embody American wartime cool. But their stoicism is the result of years of training, their resolve a product of the Jim Crow-era discrimination they’ve overcome just for the chance to fight for their country. That they might be killed doing so underscores the dark irony of a military that would offer up its young men for battle, but only in the company of those with the same color skin.