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“I came into the Army at Gunter Field and left the Army at Maxwell Field… You want to know when integration really started? When the Air Force or the Army Air Corps decided to let Black folks fly their best equipment and train them to fly and give them command to fly - that’s when the integration started. Because the Air Force proved to the world that Black guys had enough sense and that they were physically fit to fly. That’s when it started.”
– Dr. Hillard Pouncy, Tuskegee Airman
“Because I was the only black officer stationed at Maxwell, we were curious about how we would be received. Our neighbors treated us cordially, and a few of them invited us to their quarters shortly after we arrived. Not until the first get-acquainted cocktail party for our class were we made to feel uncomfortable. When we walked into the gathering, which was held at the previously segregated officers’ club, we were stared at like monkeys in a cage… At Maxwell, we had no social life of any kind off base, and Montgomery was like a foreign country.”
– General Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., first African-American general in the Air Force
“I could ride on an integrated trolley on the base but when I left the base, I had to ride home on a segregated bus… You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up. It was an alternative reality to the ugly racial policies of Jim Crow.”
– Rosa Parks, leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and employee at Maxwell during World War Two
“When I came back for the second time (to Gunter) that was the time that they had started the walking – the Bus Boycott was going on… We would go in to Montgomery and you’d see people walking with bags… So if we saw somebody and if they looked loaded down we would stop and pick them up and take them to where they wanted to go. We didn’t care if we were in uniform or not – we just did it.”
– Virginia Ladson, World War II veteran and WAF (Women in the Air Force) officer
“During the Bus Boycott, someone from Maxwell came walking off of the base and came out to our church to my office and wanted to let me know that he was aware of a lot of papers, written reports what was happening in the civil rights movement. And the airman who had access to these papers and found out there were many papers with information about me in particular.”
– Reverend Robert and Jean Graetz, leaders in the Montgomery Bus Boycott
“The city’s economic life was heavily influenced by the presence there of the Maxwell and Gunter Air Force bases ... One in every fourteen employed civilians in Montgomery worked at these bases, and approximately one in every seven families was an Air Force family, either civilian or military. Four thousand families living outside base reservations occupied homes in the city. Yet ironically, although the bases, which contributed so much to the economic life of the community, were fully integrated, the city around them adhered to a rigorous pattern of racial segregation. One could not help wishing that the vast economic power of the federal agencies were being used for the good of race relations in Montgomery.”
– Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., civil rights leader
“I wanted to jump for joy when I would ride around the base and see the whites and the blacks going in the dining hall, coming out of the dining hall, you know, and going to the PX together.”
– Jeremiah Parks, Maxwell employee from 1957 to 2018
“(Joining the Air Force) was the most important thing that ever happened in my life….I was in the Air Force for one thing – to become a general ... But, I kept my butt in the noncommissioned ranks. However, who do you think kicked Mississippi’s butt up at Ole Miss? ... I had 33,000 troops under my command and they kicked Mississippi’s ass.”
– James Meredith, Air Force veteran, Maxwell trainee, and first student who desegregated University of Mississippi
“And my attention step was when the bell would ring, the auditorium would go black. ‘Aww here we are go again.’ You would hear a voice somewhere. ‘More of this race relations stuff.’ ‘Yeah, here we gotta sit through all this garbage. We got better things to do.’ These were voices in the dark because the auditorium was black at the time. And suddenly… the scene would come up on the screen of riots. Back then the riots were occurring… And I would walk out on the stage and I said ‘well here we go, more of this race relations stuff.’ Then I would transition to why if we knew more about each other, about what causes people to tick in the community at large and in the Air Force we can avoid that.”
– Dr. Edmond Collier, retired Lieutenant Colonel and first African-American faculty member at Air University
“Matter of fact, I put in a suggestion that all of the jobs at Maxwell and Gunter that they would advertise the positions. Because even within an organization, individuals may not be aware that positions are available at Maxwell and Gunter. But now the civilian office disapproved my suggestion… (because) I was saying that discrimination was going on.”
– Charlie Foster, Jr., retired GS-14 employee and plaintiff in the Schlesinger versus Penn case
“Our goal was to have more diversity in the military’s civilian workforce for women, African-Americans, and others. And that’s why we filed the lawsuit because of blatant discrimination at Maxwell and the other bases and we won the case.”
– Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center which represented the plaintiffs in the Smiley versus Orr case
“Her passion was doing the right thing. This lawsuit brought it to a climax for her professional career. She was just a catalyst and a woman for that season… Whenever they decided to do that, it was about propelling a more diverse, yet unified staff to get the work done.”
– Lydia Garnier, Equal Opportunity attorney and daughter of plaintiff in Smiley versus Orr
“I’m the first one to admit that we made a tremendous amount of progress. And I think the military being here in Montgomery, knowing what I know now, I think it did play a role in it.”
– Fred Gray, civil rights attorney whose mother worked at Maxwell
