Milton Pitts Crenchaw

Little Rock’s Milton Pitts Crenchaw was one of the first of the famous Tuskegee Airmen who trained hundreds of African American pilots during the 1940s. An alum of Dunbar High and Junior College, Crenchaw attended Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute to begin a mechanical engineering degree. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Crenchaw became a flight instructor through the Civilian Pilot Training Program. After training African American pilots at Tuskegee, Crenchaw served as a flight instructor at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, Camp Rucker in Alabama, and Fort Stewart in Georgia. He also taught an aviation training program at Philander Smith College, as well as serving as a Department of Defense equal employment opportunity officer and as a race relations officer at Fort Stewart. In 2007, along with other Tuskegee Airmen, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. I’m John Kirk of the UALR History Department and this has been an Arkansas moment.