Kay Smith Paints the Red Tails Documentary

Comissioned by the Museum & Library to create a painting for the Coleman T. Holt Oral History Room, and a video documenting the journey, Smith digs deep into the history of the Tuskegee Airmen.

This video documents Kay Smith's research and interviews with three Tuskegee Airmen, Flight Officer Julius Echols, Judge John Rogers, Sr. and Dr. Quentin Smith, as well as WWII B17 navigator Don Casey, as she worked to ensure an accurate representation of arial combat in the second world war.

“I was a teenager during World War II, but I never heard about the Tuskegee Airmen,” said Smith. “Coleman Holt and I were friends and he never talked about it. I learned about them 75 years later with the commission to do this painting about Red Tails for the Pritzker Military Library.”

With esquisite attention to detail, this painting shows the famed Red Tails of the US Army Air Corps' 332nd Fighter Group escorting B17 Flying Fortress bombers over occupied Europe. African-American fighter pilots flew over 1,500 such missions during WWII, but were only a portion of the more than 15,000 Tuskegee Airman, a group that included bomber pilots, navigators, bombadiers transport pilots, and more. 

Film by Steven Rosofsky.