Cuba Gooding Jr. might grab the spotlight in the new film “Red Tails,” about African-American fighter pilots in World War II, but one of the men behind the character Gooding plays* was a pilot with Sacramento ties.

George Roberts served as the operations officer in the 99th Pursuit Squadron in World War II, and he was one of the first five graduates out of the group that would later be known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

Roberts came to Sacramento with his wife, Edith, in the 1960s, where he worked for Wells Fargo. Though he died in the 1980s, Edith, 92, still lives in the area, and she proudly visits local schools and civic groups to educate them on the history of pilots.

“It was a different time back then,” she said Wednesday. “The government had actually done a study after World War I to determine if black people were capable of leading men in combat.”

Battling deep-seeded institutional racism, the young cadets training to be fighter pilots at an airfield in Tuskegee, Ala., wore their uniforms with pride and dreamed of the day they would take to the skies to fight the enemy, Edith Roberts said.

The “washing out” rate was high, with only five of the 13 in George Roberts’ class graduating, and those who graduated continued to train.

George and Edith Roberts married the day he graduated from pilot training, March 7, 1942. George then moved off the airbase to live with Edith, but that wasn’t easy, either.

“There were no places for blacks to rent houses, so we had to stay in a house with another local black family,” she said.

The 99th Pursuit Squadron was put on alert in January 1943, and none of the men were allowed to leave the base, since the order to ship out could come at any moment. But those orders didn’t come until April.

“They stayed on alert there forever,” Edith Roberts said. “The Army didn’t know what to do with them because they were black, and they were fighter pilots.”

George Roberts missed the birth of his first child since he couldn’t leave the base, and it wasn’t until a brief trip home in 1944 that he was reunited with his family.

When the Tuskegee Airmen did eventually get the call to go fight the Germans, they arrived in Morocco, in North Africa, where British Royal Air Force pilots trained them further on combat techniques.

Occasional letters home and stories in African-American publications were the only communications Edith Roberts and the other families of the African-American fliers got.

The Army – at the time, there was no U.S. Air Force, just the U.S. Army Air Corps – was reluctant to send the pilots into combat, and it took top squadron officers appealing to Congress to get the men into action.

“They had terrible equipment,” Edith Roberts said, mentioning that the squadron flew the outdated P-40 Warhawk plane made famous by the Flying Tigers several years earlier. “When they got their new planes – the P-51 Mustangs – well, they loved those planes more than they loved their wives.”

Edith Roberts said that the airmen were being tested – with many in the Army hierarchy looking for an excuse to can the program and take the pilots out of action because of their race.

To counter that, the men had strict orders to stay with the bombers they were assigned to escort and not go chasing German fighters across the skies, leaving the bomber formations open to attack.

At the time, American bombers flew daylight raids on strategic targets, dropping explosives on munitions plants, oil refineries and other targets essential to the German war effort.

The British, by contrast, flew at night, preferring to bomb entire cities and use the darkness to hide from enemy fighters. For the Americans flying in the day, raids could be disastrous if the Germans could shoot down the bombers without American fighters flying close for protection.

Every bomber shot down meant its crew of 10 Americans didn’t return to base.

“One of The Tuskegee Airmen’s claims to fame is that they never lost a bomber they were escorting to enemy fighters,” Edith Roberts said.

She added that the film, “Red Tails,” has a scene in which bomber crews see the 99th Pursuit Squadron’s red-painted tails and nose cones. The crews are surprised to see that the fighter pilots are African Americans.

It was after the other fliers began to respect the African-American pilots that their stories started appearing in Life Magazine and other prominent publications.

Photo of news clippings from 1943. (Image by: Brandon Darnell) “The film is good,” Edith Roberts said. “It takes some liberties, but overall they did a good job with it.”

She was invited to the home of George Lucas, who bankrolled the film, and spent a weekend with some of the other people who lived through the time to help the young actors understand what it was like.

“They asked us all sorts of questions, and we spent a lot of time with them,” she said.

Edith Roberts said she was happy to talk to the actors and share the story, and that February – Black History Month – is always a busy time for her. Part of her collection of newspaper clippings is on temporary display at the California Museum, 1020 O St. The rest, she said, she needs to keep as she goes to schools and other functions to share the story.

“When I tell kids today about segregation and the racism we lived through, most of them are shocked,” she said. “It’s good that they’re shocked, because they’re not living it. But we lived it, and it’s important to tell them about it so they know how things were.”

“Red Tails” is currently in theaters. For more information on the film, visit the website by clicking here.

For more information on the Tuskegee Airmen, click here.

*Gooding's character is named Major Emanuelle Stance, the same name as an African American soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor in the late 1800s, according to the National Park Service.

Brandon Darnell is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press. Follow him on Twitter @Brandon_Darnell.