The first thing you notice about Lt. Col. Alex Jefferson, retired, is that you can take the man out of the Army, but you can't take the Army out of the man.

The second thing you see as he walks you around his three-bedroom house is that he should charge admission. If Detroit's Museum of African American History really wants to prosper, it need do no more than establish a wing for one of the great stories of the Second World War, the tales of the Tuskegee Airmen, the military's first black pilots, who were trained at a remote training complex near Tuskegee, Ala.

The Airmen, formally the 332nd Fighter Group, comprised three black squadrons. The Black Red Tail Angels, so named because the tails of their planes were painted red, flew 15,553 sorties and 1,578 missions, mostly escorting bombers as they hit strategic targets across North Africa, Sicily and Europe. The black bomber escorts made history because they never lost a bomber to the enemy.

That Tuskegee museum wing would have a special place for Jefferson, who was shot down while flying over France and was held in German prison camps for nine months. It would be the perfect home for the former prisoner of war's history, which is documented in thousands of photographs, artifacts, awards and medals that now reside with Jefferson in his east side Detroit home.

Like much of American history lived by black heroes, the Tuskegee Airmen's exploits took decades to gain the national attention they deserved. They fought in a war that changed the world, but it didn't change their world in America. They returned home not to recognition of their contribution, nor appreciation for the prisoners of war, but to an America where black people were segregated, denigrated and treated with disdain. They returned to a country whose commercial airlines would not let them be pilots.

"I went back home after being treated as an officer and a gentleman in Germany because of the Geneva Conventions," Jefferson said, "and coming back, we walked down the gangplank in New York harbor and a little white soldier at the bottom of the gangplank said, 'Whites to the right, niggers to the left.' " Coming back home. Back to racism. Segregation. 1945.

"There was no sense of saving the world. We knew that we were knocking down barriers, but to be able to fly! The government gave me a $40,000 airplane to play with. ..."

For a young man who had dreamed of flying since he was 4 years old, growing up with his family in a little house off Michigan Avenue, the dream far outweighed the hurts. And his parents had taught him a valuable lesson that carried him through the war and through his life: "I was taught by my mother and my father, just because somebody calls you a dirty name, you're angry on the inside, that's that person's problem. He's the stupid one. He's the ignorant one. Because if you become so torn up, you lose sight of your objective, then that person controls you.

"Many guys who went south as Tuskegee Airmen encountered racism. Many times, it caused them to not complete the mission," he said. "I knew that I wanted to fly. I knew the system. I knew how to cope with the system. And I was determined to become a pilot."

Many of the nearly 200 surviving Tuskegee Airmen live in metro Detroit, where they've established the National Museum of the Tuskegee Airmen at Historic Fort Wayne on the Detroit River. Their story should be a part of the required curriculum in American high schools. And few of the stories are as compelling as that of Jefferson, who was flying his P-51 Mustang, named Margo, over southern France when he was shot down. It was Aug. 12, 1944, three days before the invasion of southern France.

Jefferson spent nine months as POW, knitting his own socks, listening to BBC broadcasts of the Allied advances, doing camp chores and drawing sketches of his imprisonment and about the war. Those last months were spent at Stalag VII-A, 20 miles north of Dachau. It was the camp featured in the movie "The Great Escape." Jefferson arrived a month after the mostly failed escape attempt led to 50 recaptured POWs being executed.

His history, historic photos and sketches are featured in his new book, "Red Tail Captured, Red Tail Free" (Fordham University Press, $29.95). The book, 56 years in the making, is the result of thousands of hours of Alex Jefferson working in his basement. It should be a part of every public school and community library in America.

It's the story of a young Detroit man who graduated from Chadsey High and Clark College in Atlanta, went to the airbase where he learned to fly -- then went off to help save the world.

Alexander Jefferson was born Nov. 15, 1921, the year that the General Motors Building was completed on Grand Boulevard. His father was Alexander Jefferson, a lifelong Republican with an eighth-grade education who was a math whiz but spent his entire life as a laborer at Detroit Lubricator Co. His mother was Jane White Jefferson, a 1910 graduate of Clark, whose grandfather was instrumental in founding Morehouse College in Atlanta.

The family lived on 28th Street, two blocks north of Michigan, in a house that became a stopping point for Southern relatives looking for better lives. Jefferson calls his father an "unofficial railroad conductor for those travelers."

Jefferson was an exceptional student because his mother demanded it and because he had the acumen. He dreamed of flying, built model airplanes. He knew he'd be a pilot. But he also knew racism.

"Four years in Atlanta, I had a Model A Ford. I was a big man on campus. But I weighed 90 pounds dripping wet," he said. "So what did I do? I became a cheerleader, with all the pretty girls. I made all the games. But that's all a part of life. Calculate. Know what you want to do and go to it.

"During my senior year at Clark, the Army came through with recruiters to recruit guys going to Tuskegee. We had to be college graduates, and I wanted to quit during my senior year and my dad said, 'Hell, no, graduate first.' As soon as I graduated, June 1942, I went down to the Federal Building down on Lafayette and took the exam. I passed the written exam and flunked the physical because I weighed only 115 pounds. I went to drink some water, eat bananas and they swore me in July '42 into the Reserves. I thought I was going to go to Tuskegee. They said go home and wait."

Jefferson attended Howard University until April 1943, when he got his notice to go to Tuskegee Army Air Field, where he spent nine months in pilot training.

"After 4, we're free so we drive to Detroit to go to the Valley, and the Valley is vibrant. It's kicking," he said, referring to Paradise Valley, where black jazz and clubs and life abounded. "If I can get to my house at 28th and Michigan Avenue, if I can get there before 11 o'clock, I've got a bed. But my dad said don't come into his house after 11 o'clock.

"Today, I realize and remember that I respected his house. I don't even question. Kids today say, 'I'm going to go home and tell him I can sleep in my bed.' I never had that kind of an attitude."

In Europe, Jefferson's job was to escort the bombers at high altitude "and then go down on the deck and look for opportunities -- trains railroad stations, barges on the river, look for things of opportunity," he said.

He had flown 18 long-range bomber escort missions before Aug. 12, 1944, when he was assigned to knock out radar stations on the coast of southern France.

"The group had four or five targets," he said. "These radar stations sat up on a cliff. Sixteen airplanes ... went in by groups of four. The first would fly through. Then the second. The third and fourth. I was the last member of number 4. I was number 16.

"By that time the whole side of the cliff was alive with anti-aircraft ... At about 50 feet, the darn shell came up through the floor right in front of me. Fire. And I had to pull up. I pulled up to get some altitude to bail out."

"I remember watching the tail go by with all the fire and I pulled the D ring" on his parachute. "You're supposed to count 1-2-3. I was too darn close, so I just pulled it. And all I could see was green.

"When I hit the ground and rolled over, a German said, 'Ach zo.' ... I landed right in the middle of the guys who shot me down. That was the beginning of nine months in Germany."

Jefferson was taken to a villa, to an officer. "As I walked in ... I saluted. And in perfect English, he said, 'Lieutenant, have a seat.' Turns out the guy had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1936 and had gone back to Germany, and they put him charge of artillery." The German asked Jefferson questions, but then shared information. "He could describe how you catch the Oakland streetcar behind the library behind J.L. Hudson. He knew more about me than I knew about myself, my grades in high school and Clark ... He even knew how much taxes my dad paid on his house."

"I saw Dachau, where the ovens were still warm. You opened the door with the half-burned bodies," he said. After the war, the Tuskegee base closed, and the unit moved to Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio, where Jefferson met his wife, Adella McDonald, who packed parachutes. The couple married there and stayed in Columbus until 1947, when they came to Detroit. He worked for the post office while attending Wayne State to get his teaching certificate, and later a master's degree. He spent 30 years with the Detroit Public Schools before retiring as a vice principal in 1979.

"You've got to remember, a lot of guys got killed. We came back, we survived. We were too busy raising families. We got mortgages, buying houses, raising kids, fighting this new job under racist circumstances. We were too busy living."

Between them and the hundreds of speeches he gives each year all over the country, he is living the appreciation he earned 60 years ago. Now enshrined in the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame, and wearing his Tuskegee Airmen wings as a bracelet on his right arm, history has given him something that no one can take away.

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