An airport in Southern California now bears the name of a Tuskegee airman.
The small Oceanside Municipal Airport, right next door to Camp Pendleton near San Diego, was just renamed the Bob Maxwell Municipal Airfield, after the Tuskegee airman who died in 2010, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“My father was always very interested in transportation and aviation and thought that anything was possible if you had goals and put your mind to it,” Maxwell’s daughter Margaret was quoted in the Union-Tribune as saying. “Nobody could ever tell him ‘no’ or that something couldn’t be done.”
After World War II, Maxwell served on the board of directors of the San Diego Regional Airport Authority, the San Diego Air and Space Museum, the Oceanside Transportation Committee and the San Diego Airports Advisory Committee, according to the U-T.
“When (African-American soldiers) were told they couldn’t be in the Army, he said, ‘Yes, we can,’ and as a Tuskegee Airman he showed them it could be done,”Margaret said.
