Photo: L to R, Earl Graves and Roscoe Brown. Lee Archer is in the wheelchair. Photo by Herb Boyd
By Herb Boyd
Managing Editor, Our World Today
Famed Tuskegee Airman Lee A. Archer, whose exploits during World War II earned him recognition as an ace pilot, died last Wednesday at Cornell University Medical Center in Manhattan said his son, Roy Archer. A cause of death was not immediately determined. He was 90.
While Archer was widely view as a war hero, having flown 196 missions during World War II with his legendary unit, he also distinguished himself in the world of business as an executive at General Foods and as a founder of his own venture capital firm.
“Lee had two great careers,” said Dr. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr., himself a renowned Tuskegee Airman and currently Director of the Center for Urban Education Policy and University Professor at the Graduate School and University Center of The City University of New York. “He was a true American hero and an ace pilot and a very successful businessman and entrepreneur.”
Brown was effusive in recalling the time when he first met Archer. “He was five classes ahead of me flight school in Tuskegee,” he began, “but eventually we ended up flying missions together, however, in different squadrons. He was in the 302nd and I was in the 100th.”
Archer, Brown continued, “is generally considered an ace pilot because he is credited with shooting down five enemy planes.” For several years there was an ongoing dispute about whether Archer was actually an ace since there was some question about the fifth plane shot down.
“After an investigation by the Air Force, it was decided that Lee in fact shot down the fifth plane, and is thereby the first and only black ace pilot,” Brown concluded. Though Brown shot down the first German jet, he is not considered an ace.
Archer came home from overseas in November, 1944, Brown said and subsequently taught pilot training at UCLA before returning to teach ROTC at New York University.
Born in Yonkers, Sept. 6, 1919, and raised in Harlem, Archer enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1941 but because of his race he was rejected for pilot training. However, he was welcomed to the all-black unit of the Army Air Corps, then training at the airbase in Tuskegee, Alabama. The late Percy Sutton and Coleman Young, the first black mayor of Detroit, were members of the famed unit.
Four years after the war was over, President Harry Truman desegregated the armed services, where Archer was content to live out his days. But in 1970, having become a Lt. Colonel, he retired and entered the world of business.
“I first met Lee at General Foods in 1972 when I was there as an intern,” said Alfonso Carney. “I think he arrived there two years before in 1970 and was soon working as a director of urban affairs. When I returned to the company in 1974 as division attorney, Lee was a vice president, the first African American to attain that position.”
What most impressed Carney about Archer was the unflappable way he conducted himself and made sure minority institutions received financial support from the company. “The NAACP, the Urban League, TLC Beatrice, Essence and the Black Enterprise Magazine are to some extent indebted to Lee for making sure they were the recipients of funds,” Carney related. “He was my mentor and a great story teller. And the one thing that sticks in my mind about him is that he was sometimes wrong, but never uncertain.”
“He could be very demanding,” said Brown, “and always confident.” Brown agreed that he did not suffer fools kindly.
In 2007, Archer was among others to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, emblematic of his magnificent service, which, as President Bush told him, “the country couldn’t repay” him enough for his service.
Archer and some 300 Tuskegee Airmen were invited by President Obama to his inauguration in the nation’s capital, and though confined to a wheelchair he endured the chilly weather to attend the ceremony.
“This is a great moment,” he told a reporter before asking Brown to push him on so he could get on the bus without anymore fuss.
After retiring from General Foods in 1987, Archer founded the venture capital firm Archer Asset Management.
He is survived by three sons and a daughter. His wife, Ina Archer, died in 1996. Funeral services are planned for Thursday, February 4, at 11:00 am at Riverside Church.
