Tuskegee Airman George Franklin Henry dies; FDNY retiree was 95

George Franklin Henry lived long enough to do many of the things he loved, including helping prepare America's first black military pilots during World War II and doting on his wife until the day she died in August.

Henry, who was 95 and lived in Sag Harbor and the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, had been in declining health recently. He died Nov. 1 at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Henry served as a staff sergeant who led a mechanics crew at the Tuskegee Airfield in Alabama. The crew worked on Vultee BT-13 training aircraft flown by aviation cadets in an experimental War Department program to determine whether black men were capable of flying military aircraft.

The pilots and their support staff, Henry among them, would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The successful trainee program -- which graduated his brother, William T. Henry, as a pilot -- produced some of World War II's most skilled aviators. By 1948, the program's success helped persuade President Harry S. Truman to end racial segregation in the military.

A resident of Corona, Queens, when he was drafted in 1942, George Henry said in a 2006 interview that extreme examples of white supremacy shocked him when he arrived at his military station at Tuskegee.

"It was rough at that time for a black man to be in Alabama," Henry recounted to his daughter, Patricia Mapp of Dix Hills, who did the interview as part of a Dowling College project she completed on her family's roots. "When we traveled you had to sit on the back of the bus, you had to watch what you said, people looked at you like you were crazy."

Honorably discharged in 1945, he was decorated with the American Campaign Medal and the Victory Medal.

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In 1946 Henry married Mazie Esmeralda Butts, a graduate of the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing. He became a New York City firefighter that same year. A decade and a half later, he began working as a Fire Department spokesman, giving lectures on fire prevention to the students in New York City's public school system. After retiring in 1963, he went into the real estate business.

Described as quick-smiling photo buff who loved buying flowers and clothes for his wife, Henry was a member of two organizations for African-American men: the Brooklyn-based Comus Club, and the Guardsmen, a national organization.

Mapp said her father's health declined after his wife died Aug. 13. In addition to Mapp, Henry is survived by daughters Marilyn Henry-Howell, of the Prospect-Lefferts Gardens community in Brooklyn, and Yvonne Neely, of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn; sisters Betty Brown and Lucille Watson, of Washington, D.C., and Juanita Jones of Philadelphia; seven grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His brother William Henry died several years ago.

A funeral will be held at 10 a.m. Friday at the Lawrence H. Woodward Funeral Home, 1 Troy Ave., Brooklyn. A private burial follows at The Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn.