Former Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. John Mosley, a Denver native who was a trailblazer in collegiate sports as well as the civil rights movement, died Friday, days before the day set aside to honor the sacrifice of those who like him defended the nation.
He was 93.
During World War II, Mosley aggressively sought the right to fly and fight for this county.
“He always said that he had to fight in order to fight,” said his son Eric. “He used that saying as a benchmark in his life. He had to struggle to be able to fight for his country.”
“He always had the determination to be the best he could be and be someone extraordinary,” Eric recalled.
Mosley excelled despite segregation and the prejudice that once existed. In his youth, blacks were confined by covenants and standards to living in an area just east of downtown. He refused to become bitter.
“I looked at it as an opportunity to move ahead,” he recalled in a 2008 interview. “I was too busy trying to ensure that I got everything I possibly could out of school and also to participate in athletics.”
A National Merit Scholar and valedictorian at Manual High School, Mosley refused to let bigotry limit him. He enrolled at Colorado State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. At that time, there were just nine black students at the school. He tried out for football as a freshman, in 1939, and became the first black football player in the record-keeping era there, excelling at what now is Colorado State University.
Some teammates didn’t accept him, but he responded by tackling and running the ball hard. Mosley was named vice president of his college class as a junior and senior.
Eric recalled how his father told him of his dreams back then of becoming a pilot. “At that time, most people had never even seen an airplane let alone flown on one,” Eric said.
Mosley hoped to become the first black in Advance ROTC at A&M. He took a physical at Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Denver but was told he had a heart murmur, which he believed to be bogus.
He paid for his own flight physical and started taking flying lessons. An all-black 99th Fighter Squadron was formed at Tuskegee in June 1941, but upon graduation Mosley wasn’t drafted to join them. Instead of being sent to Tuskegee, he was dispatched to a segregated artillery unit in Fort Sill, Okla. He protested, writing letters to those in Congress and the White House.
Finally, he became part of the Tuskegee unit. Even then, it took pressure from newspapers owned by blacks and the White House for the first black airmen to actually see combat.
“He was unique among individuals, but his type was also common as a member of the world’s greatest generation,” Eric said of his father. “They looked to service before self. Sacrifice was the code of the day.”
That sacrifice continued well after WWII. He was an operations officer in Thailand as U.S. pilots flew bombing missions over North Vietnam. He retired from the Air Force in 1970 and was a special assistant to the undersecretary in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Washington before returning to Denver.
He is preceded in death by his wife, Edna Mosley, who also was a pioneer as the first African-American ever to serve on the Aurora City Council, and by a son John Mosley. He is survived by son, Eric, and another son, Brian Mosley, and daughter, Edna Futrell.
Funeral services have not been scheduled. Eric said his father would have preferred to see donations in lieu of flowers to the John and Edna Scholarship Fund, run by the Denver Foundation, or to the Mile High Flight Program run by the Hubert L. “Hooks” Jones local chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen Inc.
Christopher N. Osher: 303-954-1747, cosher@denverpost.com or twitter.com/chrisosher
