LYNCHBURG, Va. (WSET) — A traveling museum made a pit stop in Lynchburg on Monday, honoring African Americans in flight. The African Americans in Aviation Traveling Museum set up shop at Liberty University throughout the day, sharing the history that has roots in Lynchburg.
Chauncey Spencer was a Tuskegee Airman, born and raised in Lynchburg. His son, Chauncey Spencer II, co-founded the museum in 2020 to help share the aviation history.
I’m trying to teach people that African Americans were involved in every part of technology when it comes to American history. Though, in our classrooms, they’re not teaching that portion of American history. They’re leaving African Americans out of part of America’s story,” Spencer II said.
Spencer II said his father helped pave the way for African Americans across the country.
“American history is not a history of color, it’s a history of individuals,” Spencer said. “America is the country of opportunity, and my father proved that to be so because what they told him he couldn’t do, he did it, and he did it not for himself but he did it for others.”
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The museum is a trailer full of artifacts, honoring multiple aspects of African American aviation.
“My traveling museum is a 1937 Pierce Arrow trailer, there’s only 25 registered in the United States that are road-worthy. The trailer was put together in Palm Desert, California, in 2020 for the March on Washington, celebrating Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream,'” Spencer said. “It went on its first cross-country trip in August of 2020, and since then for the last four years going on five years, it’s traveled 73,000 miles, 42 states, 47 major cities, and has educated more than 250,000 kids on a part of American aviation history.”
Spencer said Black history is often left out of the classroom, so he’s doing what he can to help continue the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen.
To be a part of it, to be a part of something that belongs to American history. It’s a way of teaching race relations within a community by using education as a tool to do so,” he said. “It’s very meaningful, very inspiring and uplifting, to be an individual blessed with so much information that belongs to all the people. God’s chosen me as a messenger to do so, and that has to be inspiring to anybody, to have a mission by God, and I happen to have one.
If you want to visit the museum, it will be parked at the Lynchburg Regional Airport, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Tuesday, October 22.
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