Daniel ‘Chappie’ James Jr.

Daniel James Jr. was born on the eleventh of February 1920 at Pensacola, Florida, the youngest of seventeen children of Daniel James Sr., who worked for the Pensacola city gas company, and Lillie Anna Brown James, a teacher who ran a private school for Black children in the family's backyard during the era of segregation. From her he took an abiding creed — that excellence was the answer to prejudice — and her "eleventh commandment," Thou shalt never quit.

He entered the Tuskegee Institute, cradle of the celebrated Tuskegee Airmen, and there learned to fly. Commissioned in 1943, he served through the Second World War as an instructor pilot, training the airmen who would break the color line in the skies. In the Korean War he flew 101 combat missions, and over Vietnam he flew 78 more, helping lead the famed Operation Bolo aerial sweep of 1967.

Rising through command, James became known as a commanding orator and a forthright advocate for equal rights within the armed forces. On the first of September 1975 he was promoted to the four-star rank of general — the first African American to attain it in the regular United States armed forces — and took command of NORAD and the Aerospace Defense Command, holding operational charge of the strategic air defenses of the United States and Canada.

He retired on the first of February 1978 and died of a heart attack on the twenty-fifth of that month, aged fifty-eight, and was laid to rest with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. He rose as high as his nation's uniform allowed, and opened that sky for all who would follow. Honor to his name.