When Col. Fitzroy “Buck” Newsum was 10 years old, he saw an airplane taking off from a field near his home in Barbados and decided right then and there that he wanted to fly.

After being rejected from flight school three times because he was black, he was finally admitted to flying school at Tuskegee, Alabama in 1943, the first triumph of a long, distinguished military career.

Newsum is now among the 330 surviving Tuskegee Airmen, a group of about 16,000 to which President-elect Barack Obama has acknowledged his own debt.

Even before Jackie Robinson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the?nation’s first all-black force of elite pilots began to chip away at the wall of segregation?that only now has fully crumbled with Obama’s election as the country’s first black president.