Memorializations of Tuskegee Airmen's Contributions to WWII: Maxwell Air Force Base and Montgomery, Alabama as Spaces for the Transmission of Democratic Values

Tuskegee Airmen are memorialized in the halls of Air University through photographs, newspaper articles, artifacts, and dedicated spaces on campus chronicling their contributions to the U.S. military in World War II. Students are invited to visit other sites on campus and in the Montgomery community, the site of many struggles in the civil rights movement to learn about leadership. Air University and Montgomery, therefore, constitute interacting spaces where students can engage and reflect on the ways in which these communities seek ways of memorializing the struggle for democratic values. These spaces become places with specific meaning, a rhetorical process where conversations among visitors seeking ways of making sense of the nation's contested history enact democratic values of equality and leadership values of commitment. Understanding and commitment to values of equality and sacrifice emerge from the latticed and layered meanings developed across time, place, and experience based on how the Tuskegee Airmen took up the call to arms to defend a nation that did not treat them equally. Such memorializations provide opportunities for conversations about leadership capable of transmitting positive values of character to members of these communities.