Flags in New York City began flying at half-staff Monday, in honor of Roscoe C. Brown. He died Saturday at age 94 and was one of the last few "Red Tail" pilots, a subset of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Airmen were part of a grand experiment in racial integration that the Army reluctantly undertook.As a Red Tail, Brown was a pioneer. He was one of the first black pilots in the Army Air Forces. Back before Brown and his colleagues took pilot training, the common assumption among the U.S. military's higher-ups was that black people could not fly airplanes. They weren't coordinated enough, or smart enough, or brave enough, so the thinking went. To test that, the Army Air Forces agreed to provide pilot training to a select number of black men.Brown was among them. And the training program proved so successful, the pilots were assigned to escort bombers on their runs. In the beginning, "many people didn't know we were African-American," Brown said in a 2015 interview.But the planes flew so
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