With the premiere of George Lucas’s new movie Red Tails, there’s a renewed interest in the Tuskegee Airmen who trained in Alabama.

In recognition of this important movie, NewSouth has released new print and ebook titles by military historian Daniel Haulman exploring common misconceptions about the Tuskegee Airmen, coinciding with our book The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 by Haulman, Joseph Caver, and Jerome Ennels.

As Haulman writes in his introduction to What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails, “For anyone who wants to know what in the Red Tails movie is not historically accurate, I have noted some cases. This list of differences between the Red Tails depiction of the Tuskegee Airmen and the real Tuskegee Airmen story is not intended to denigrate the movie — Red Tails is dramatic and thrilling and is a great contribution to the depiction of black servicemen in World War II — but merely to caution those who might mistakenly take the fictional account as history.”

The Airmen commander, for instance, never demanded that the Airmen be able to trade their old planes for new ones as depicted in the movie; the Airmen also did not protect the bombers alone in Berlin. These differences and more Haulman points out with praise for the Red Tails movie but with an eye toward historical accuracy for interested readers.

Haulman’s Red Tails title joins two others: Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen (available in print and ebook) and The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth (ebook exclusive). These books look at additional “myths” that have cropped up around the legend of the Tuskegee Airmen, including the myth that the Tuskegee Airmen were the first to shoot down German jets, and that the Airmen once robbed an Allied train to get fuel tanks for their planes.

These three books serve as handy companions both to the Red Tails movie, and to the Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History book written by Haulman, Caver, and Ennels. The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History is a lush, detailed volume that spotlights not just the pilots themselves, but also the doctors, nurses, mechanics, navigators, weathermen, and parachute riggers who contributed to the Airmen’s success. The book includes hundreds of photographs of the Airmen, many never before published, to truly bring the triumphs and struggles of the Tuskegee Airmen to life.

CNN included a number of these photographs in their story “A midair courtship: Tuskegee’s historic love story,” which profiles Herbert Carter and Mildred Hemmons. Carter was a Tuskegee Airmen and Hemmons one of the first black women in Alabama to receive a pilot’s license, who later worked as a civilian at the Tuskegee airfield. CNN details their romance and also how they broke racial barriers, including when Hemmons was photographed with first lady Eleanor Roosevelt after flying her plane.

Lt. Col. Carter appeared with Tuskegee Airmen authors Caver, Ennels, and Haulman decades later at the release of the book in 2011.

Authors Joseph Caver (left), Daniel Haulman (top middle) and Jerome Ennels (right) with former Tuskegee Airman Lt. Col. (ret.) Herbert Carter (bottom middle).

We hope that all of these books continue to preserve the well-deserved interest in the Tuskegee Airmen generated by the Red Tails movie.

* The Tuskegee Airmen, An Illustrated History: 1939-1949 is available in print direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer.

* Eleven Myths about the Tuskegee Airmen is available in print and ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite book retailer or ebook store.

* The Tuskegee Airmen and the “Never Lost a Bomber” Myth is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite ebook store.

* What Hollywood Got Right and Wrong about the Tuskegee Airmen in the Great New Movie, Red Tails is available in all major ebook formats from NewSouth Books or your favorite ebook store.

Dr. Ellen Weiss’s new lushly-illustrated biography of African American architect Robert Taylor is helping bring this figure the recognition he deserves. The January 12 New York Times “Antiques” column called Taylor a “pioneering architect,” and the Mobile Times-Register called Weiss’s book on Taylor, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington, “long overdue.”

The Times-Register article “Southern Bound: Tuskegee architect finally gets his due,” by John Sledge, calls Weiss a “thorough researcher and a graceful writer who nicely balances Taylor’s personal and professional lives.” Indeed Weiss describes Taylor’s early life and includes both Taylor’s own letters, and writing about Taylor by his contemporaries, along with detailed accounts of the buildings that Taylor designed at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, later Tuskegee University. Many of those buildings are still in use.

“I feel I know him,” Weiss told New York Times reporter Eve Kahn for the “Antiques” column, given the volume of documents Weiss studied related to Taylor.

Weiss contextualizes Taylor’s accomplishments, examining them against the Jim Crow laws of the 1900s. As the Times-Register notes:

Weiss is also very good on the difficulties that black architects and tradesmen faced in a constricted society. Though extremely careful, Taylor did push for increased opportunities for minority professionals, and on at least one occasion he had to deal with a racist white tradesman. Like [Booker T.] Washington, Taylor remained relentlessly optimistic, though Weiss reveals that after 1919 when whites were viciously assaulting entire black neighborhoods, “he wrote privately that he could no longer assume that white people were fair minded.” It was a rare pessimistic comment from a man focused on work, family and surviving in a hostile world. But in finding that reference, Weiss has given us the whole man, in his glory and his despair.

Ellen Weiss’s Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington is available from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite book retailer. At 300 pages and including over 100 photographs, including a full catalog of Taylor’s work at Tuskegee University, Weiss’s book will be of interest to social and architectural historians and the general reader alike.

Two NewSouth Books authors, Fred Gray and Constance Curry, will be added to the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame during the 2012 Trumpet Awards on Friday, January 6, at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta.

Attorney Fred D. Gray served as the Montgomery Bus Boycott’s lawyer in 1950 at the age of only 24, defending such civil rights figures as Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. He has worked on numerous civil rights cases since that time, including defending the Freedom Riders, the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers, and the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Gray chronicled his civil right career in his memoir Bus Ride for Justice and the book The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, published by NewSouth Books; an updated edition of Bus Ride will be published in spring 2012.

Constance Curry’s most recent publication from NewSouth Books was co-authoring Bob Zellner’s autobiography, the award-winning The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement, currently in production as a movie with executive producer Spike Lee. During the Civil Rights Movement, Curry worked for a number of organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She is a documentary filmmaker and the author of a number of books; she has twice received the Lillian Smith Book Award, including for Wrong Side of Murder Creek.

2012 marks the ninth year for the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame, sponsored by the Trumpet Awards Foundation. The Foundation states that the purpose of the Walk is “to give recognition to the foot soldiers of justice who sacrificed and struggled to make equality a reality for all.” Learn more at the Foundation website, trumpetfoundation.org.

Bus Ride to Justice: Changing the System by the System by Fred Gray and The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement by Bob Zellner and Constance Curry are both available direct from NewSouth Books or your favorite bookstore.

Politician and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, in his December 22 column “Recommended Holiday Reading for the Caring, Agitated Mind” posted on his website, recommended Jack Shelton’s Consequential Learning: A Public Approach to Better Schools as “a wake-up call to parents and students.” NewSouth published Consequential Learning in 2005. From the column:

[Consequential Learning is] a wake-up call to parents and students so indentured to sterile, high-frequency multiple-choice standardized tests. Mr. Shelton stresses that student learning comes from both the classroom and the community, with the lessons of the former applied to the benefit of the latter. He shows from his experience in Alabama’s schools and colleges how students become “self-aware learners” from connecting school and community “in the formation of their personal characters.” Filled with examples and strategies for both civic and academic growth.

Jack Shelton has worked with rural schools and communities for thirty years, and has served as an education consultant in the United States and Australia. In 1979, he organized the Program for Rural Services and Research at the University of Alabama to foster rural education, economic development, entrepreneurship, cultural documentation, and community health.

Consequential Learning: A Public Approach to Better Schools by Jack Shelton is available direct from NewSouth Books, Amazon, or your favorite bookstore.