Meeting the Tuskegee Airmen through Data Visualization
For this week’s #TidyTuesday, I participated in the Tuskegee Airmen Challenge as a part of Black History Month. For those who don’t know who the Tuskegee Airmen were, they were the first African-American combat aviators in the U.S. military. They served in the 332nd Expeditionary Operations Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the Air Force during World War II, a time when racial discrimination was prevalent and segregation was the law.
I had the opportunity to visit the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site back in 2014, during a mission trip in Alabama with my church. It was a short visit since my group was flying home to California later that day, but it was still an awe-inspiring moment. We took a close look at the planes, the uniforms, and the little moments from the Tuskegee Airmen’s training sessions. I watched the orientation video that showed their accomplishments on the battlefield and their ability to overcome adversity in the mainstream society of the 1940s. We were surrounded by civic rights history wherever we went in Alabama, but it felt empowering to learn about this part of Black history that rarely appeared in my history textbooks.
Almost a decade later, I am visiting the Tuskegee Airmen again, this time through data visualization. It’s not the same as physically visiting their training area, but it was still a learning experience. I composed a line graph that showed the number of Tuskegee graduates by rank from 1942 to 1948. (Data can be found from the Commemorative Air Force.) The number of graduates who earned their 2nd Lieutenant (2nd Lt) rank peaked in 1943 at 250. In contrast, only two men ranked as Captain at the time of their graduation: Benjamin Davis (1942) and William H. Shannon (1943).
I also created the graph in the style of W.E.B. Du Bois after getting inspired by #DuBoisChallenge2022. This line graph is interesting because the time unit is on the y-axis and the measure is on the x-axis, whereas most of us are trained to place them vice versa. I would like to pick Du Bois’ brain for why he did this for his line graphs, but that’s another question for another day. (See this PDF for more information about “DuBois-style” data visualization.)
Overall, I’m glad I shared a part of the Tuskegee Airmen story by creating this graph and learned more about them on the way. It makes me appreciate data science even more as a powerful storytelling tool, especially for honoring and remembering Black Americans and their contributions to American society.
See the original tweet for my #TidyTuesday submission here.
