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Page 7
Just before leaving West Point the boys of Ben's class were given an opportunity to register for special training in the Army Air Corps. A board was provided, and those interested were asked to write their manes. Ben liked the idea. He wrote his beside the others. Later those who has signed up were examined to determine their special aptitude for flying. When the returns from these examinations were in, Ben was number-two man in the whole class It was a far cry from the spring day, five years earlier, when he had flunked the first entrance examination to the Military Academy.

Young Ben did not immediately get into the flying service for which he had qualified, however. There was more struggle ahead. Many people were not yet ready to see Negro Americans take an active part in the defense of their country. Those fifty years and more during which West Point had graduated no colored cadets had done something to the minds of people. A generation of Americans, in and out of the army, had never had a chance to see what dignity and honor and assurance and success a fellow like Ben can wear the uniform of his country's officer corps. In 1936 the air corps had not yet opened its doors to colored flying officers. Instead Ben was sent to Fort Benning.

For one year he served as company officer of the 24th Infantry stationed at Benning. For another he was a student at the Infantry School at the same post. During the two years that followed he was professor of military science and tactic at Tuskegee Institute, the post his father had hels when young Ben was seven years old. In 1940 the elder Davis became the first Negro general in the United States Army and young Ben was sent to Fort Riley in Kansas to become Aide-de Camp to his father. While there Ben got the break he had been waiting for since the spring morning in '36 hwen he put his name on the board at West Point. The Air Corps changed its policy. It arranged to give training to a limited number of colored trainees. Ben Davis, Jr., came in with the first group.

Here again the young officer found himself in a position where he simply [[underlined]]had[[/underlined]] to make good. He was no[[strikethrough]]e[[/strikethrough]]w the son of a general, the only Negro graduate of West Point serving in the U.S.Army, andhe was entering with a group of other young college men into a branch of service never before open to them. The eyes of the nation turned upon this group and especially upon young Ben. If everybody else in the group washed out, Ben could not. For if a boy with his advantages could not make the grade as flyer, them unfriendly and un decided would say that [[underlined]]no[[/underlined]] colored boy could., Well, the pressure was on again, and Ben was not sorry he had learned during his plebe year at the Military Academy how to take it. There are different kinds of pressures, but in some ways they are all alike. At least one is likely to be a preparation fot the other. Again a curtain fell between Ben and the outside world, with million