Not Forgotten: A Tuskegee Airman, POW, and FAA Employee
His experiences with discrimination, war, and captivity never sullied Edgar Lewis Bolden’s outlook on life.
By Terry Kraus, FAA Historian
Edgar Lewis Bolden was a father of 10, one of the original Tuskegee Airmen. Tuskegee Airmen, an aerospace engineer, and a long-term FAA employee. Bolden died in Portland, Oregon in 2007 at the age of 85. Few, however, know of his accomplishments. Not one to brag, live in the past or dwell on the discrimination he faced, Bolden focused on the here and now, on making his part of the world a better place.
Bolden was born on June 1, 1921, in Arlington, VA. Because of Virginia’s strict segregation laws, he travelled into Washington, D.C., every day to attend Armstrong Manual Training School, one of two high schools in D.C. that admitted black students. From its founding, Armstrong operated as an important institution for D.C.’s African American community and worked to improve the quality of life for its students.
Built between 1900 and 1902, the school’s original name was Manual Training School #2. It served as the African American counterpart to Manual Training School #1, which served white students. In 1903, Manual Training School #2 became Armstrong Manual Training School in honor of General Samuel Chapel Armstrong, a white commander of an African American Civil War regiment and founder of the Hampton Institute, attended by Booker T. Washington.
After completing high school, Bolden registered for the draft in February 1942. Although he did not list a job title, he indicated he worked at the Washington (DC) Navy Yard. At the age of 21 he joined the Army Air Corps and took flight training at Tuskegee Air Field in Tuskegee, AL. He graduated on December 5, 1943, as a second lieutenant with a rating as a single-engine pilot (class number 43-K-SE, serial number 0439271). He flew a P-47 fighter.
Upon graduation, he joined the 332nd Fighter Group, commonly known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The Air Corps called the late 1943–1944 graduates replacement pilots, because they deployed in place of a returning airman.
From 1941 to 1946, 992 pilots were trained at Tuskegee. Some 450 men deployed overseas, and 150 lost their lives in accidents or combat. The toll included 66 pilots killed in action or accidents, 84 killed in training and non-combat missions, and 32 captured as prisoners of war (POW).
Bolden was one of those 32 captured and held as a POW. After flying several missions from his base in Italy, the German Luftwaffe shot Bolden’s plane down over Linz, Austria. He was held at Stalag Luft I, near Barth, Germany, a POW camp for captured Allied airmen. The German forces probably shot down Bolden’s plane in March 1945 when the 332nd was active in the Linz area, protecting U.S. fighter and reconnaissance aircraft. Russian troops liberated the camp on April 30 1945. On May 7, 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered to the Allies in Reims, France, ending the war in Europe.
With his wartime service over, Bolden enrolled at Howard University College of Engineering. A stellar student, he earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering. He graduated in 1948, and in 1949 the university asked him to teach engineering after one of his professors became ill.
With his teaching duties over, he moved to Dayton, Ohio, to accept an engineering position at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where he worked from 1949–1952. He then moved to the Washington, D.C., area for a job with the Bureau of Standards. In 1956, he accepted an aerospace engineering job at Radio Corporation of American (RCA) in Camden, NJ before transferring to RCA in Princeton, NJ, where he worked on space and defense communications systems. In 1964, while at RCA, he co-published a paper titled “Redundancy as Applied to Analog Circuitry for Project Relay.”
He joined the FAA in 1969 and held an engineering job in the Systems Research and Development office until his retirement in 1980. It seems few knew of his role as one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. In 1976, a FAA employee magazine did a story on those airmen who went to work for the agency. The article included the names of 22 employees who had trained at Tuskegee. Edgar Bolden’s name was not on the list. The article’s writer had attended a convention of the Tuskegee Airmen in Philadelphia to get information. Mr. Bolden did not attend the reunion.
When discussing the Airmen, the writer said, “They don’t talk about it much anymore. But they haven’t forgotten it either.” Similarly, Bolden, a wartime pilot and POW, found no need to talk about his wartime experiences. He seemed more interested in concentrating on his current job and raising his large family.
In 1994, Edgar Bolden moved from Washington D.C., to Portland OR, where he enjoyed a quiet retirement with his oldest son and grandchildren. He enjoyed bridge, golf, painting, and watching the planes take off and land at Portland International Airport.
In a ceremony on March 29, 2007, President George W. Bush and Congress awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian recognition awarded by the U.S. Congress, to the Tuskegee Airmen. The medal recognized their “unique military record that inspired revolutionary reform in the Armed Forces.”
