George Franklin Henry
1920 – November 1, 2015

During World War II, George Franklin served as a staff sergeant in charge of 20 technicians who maintained and repaired aircraft flown by the first African-American soldiers trained as pilots. The crew worked on Vultee BT-13 training aircraft flown by aviation cadets in an experimental War Department program to determine whether black men were capable of flying military aircraft.

“The pilots and their support staff, Henry among them, would become known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The successful trainee program — which graduated his brother, William T. Henry, as a pilot — produced some of World War II’s most skilled aviators.”

Henry (later) became an FDNY firefighter. Before his 1963 retirement and foray into real estate, he was a department spokesman and talked about fire prevention at city schools.

Henry was living in Corona, Queens, when he was drafted in 1942. The experience in Alabama was shocking.

“It was rough at that time for a Black man to be in Alabama,” Henry recounted to his daughter, Patricia Mapp, in an interview for a 2006 Dowling College project she completed on her family’s roots.

“You had to sit in the back of the bus, and they had a separate car on the trains for African-American soldiers.”

Honorably discharged in 1945, he was decorated with the American Campaign Medal and the Victory Medal.

In 1946, Henry married Mazie Esmeralda Butts, a registered nurse who had graduated from the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing. That same year, Henry became a New York City firefighter. A decade and a half later, he began working as a Fire Department spokesperson, giving lectures on fire prevention to the students in New York City’s public school system. After his retirement from the Fire Department in 1963, Henry joined the real estate firm Marvonne, started by his wife and his mother-in-law, Adella Butts. The Henry couple raised three daughters: artist and retired attorney Marilyn Henry Howell; retired school teacher and guidance counselor Yvonne Neely; and program manager for defense electronics Patricia Mapp.

Henry became a devoted member of the Comus Club, the Brooklyn-based organization of African-American men, and of the Guardsmen, a national association of African-American men.

Sources:
AL.com
New York Amsterdam News