The United States’ first African American military pilots, who flew more than 15,000 sorties and destroyed more than 200 German aircraft during World War II, first had to fight racial inequality at home. J. Todd Moye, associate professor of history and director of the Oral History Program, tells the story in the pilots’ own words in Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (Oxford University Press).

Moye draws on more than 800 interviews recorded for the National Park Service’s Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project, which he directed from 2000 to 2005, to describe the Army Air Corps’ training program for black pilots in Tuskegee, Ala. He says the program began over the objections of top generals, but by the end of the war, the Tuskegee aviators and support crew had helped prove the inefficiency of racial segregation in the nation’s armed forces.