From Preservation Online, the online magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation

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Saving Fort Worth's Tuskegee Airmen House


Story by Margaret Foster / Feb. 22, 2006

Rather than allowing the Fort Worth, Tex., home of two Tuskegee Airmen to be sold on the real-estate market, a local nonprofit plans to buy and restore the two-bedroom house as a youth center.

The brick Tudor revival house was the boyhood home of Claude and Attral Platte, two members of the Tuskegee Airmen, a squadron of African American pilots in the U.S. Army Air Corps that was formed during World War II. From 1940 until 1946, 992 pilots were trained in Alabama's Tuskegee Institute, and about half of those graduates fought overseas.

Last month, the six-month-old Claude R. Platte DFW Tuskegee Airmen Chapter heard that the house's owners, Claude Platte, now 86, and his sister, Mary, wanted to sell the one-story structure, which has been empty for the past two decades.

"Mrs. Platte told me she was going to sell the house because someone had broken into it," says Tanya Starks, a member of the chapter's board of directors. "They were just going to sell it, and I said, 'Oh no, it's a historic site. We cannot have that house be sold to someone who doesn't understand its historic value.'"

Starks' chapter has decided to buy the house from the Plattes, update it for its youth program, and designate it as a local and national landmark. The house has been assessed for about $80,000, and Stark doesn't anticipate an expensive renovation.

"It's in very good condition even though no one has lived there for 20 years," Stark says.

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