My great-grandfather Isaac Westmoreland was born a slave in Georgia in 1837. He had 11 children, nine of whom survived to adulthood. Almost all of them had children.

Two of Isaac's grandchildren, Frederick Douglas Funderburg Jr. and Walter Drake Westmoreland, were Tuskegee Airmen, black fighter pilots trained during World War II. Both were killed in combat in Europe.

The new movie "Red Tails," produced by legendary filmmaker George Lucas, tells a Hollywood version of the Tuskegee Airmen. Funderburg and Westmoreland were two real-life Tuskegee Airmen.

I had heard about the two from my mother, Eva Rutland. Fred and Walter were her cousins. As a child, she spent her summers in Monticello, Ga., where Fred, the son of a country doctor, was raised. Walter's older sister, Edwina, was my mother's closest childhood friend and her roommate in college.

My parents began their married life at Tuskegee, where my father worked as a civilian logistics officer. As they trained for war, mom's cousins Fred and Walter were frequent guests at her base apartment. My sister was born there.

In her 1964 memoir, "When We Were Colored, A Mother's Story," mom described Tuskegee:

"On a puddle of mud not too far from where the great Negro philosopher and educator, Booker T. Washington, had urged Negroes to 'let down your buckets where you are,' Uncle Sam quickly erected runways, hangars, barracks, offices, cafeterias, hospitals and recreation centers; and the first United States Negro Air Force Base came into being. Here the cream of the Negro crop – the healthiest, handsomest most intelligent brown men ever gathered in one spot – were stationed."

Mom said they had a great time at Tuskegee. The leading black entertainers of the day regularly performed at the base. Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie and his band all stopped by more than once. The Negro press of the day followed the story avidly.

But even though the men were hotshot fighter pilots, officers in the U.S. Army Air Corps, Tuskegee was still the deep South, so there were daily humiliations, which my parents recounted for me. German prisoners of war were served in local restaurants where black soldiers could not enter. The cafeteria at the base was divided. Blacks ate on one side and whites on another.

My mother recalls that the divisions went deeper than segregated cafeterias.

"Of course, it did remind me," she wrote, "(and forgive the comparison) of what plantation days must have been like – the white master ruling millions of slaves with a few slaves having the privilege to 'blow the whistle.' For in charge of all the divisions were white majors and captains. The Negro officers were only puppets, second in command."

According to mom, my dad, Bill Rutland, was the only one who dared to "out-cuss the white major in charge." As a girlfriend reported to her one day, "Eva, Bill's in the major's office, and the cuss words are just aflyin."

But I digress.

My interest in the two long-dead airmen was piqued after I saw "Red Tails," the new film about the Tuskegee Airmen. When I returned home from the movie, I Googled both Funderburg and Westmoreland to get the details of how they died. And this is what I learned.

First Lt. Walter D. Westmoreland was returning from a bomber escort mission over Blechhammer, Germany, on Oct. 13, 1944. He was lagging behind the formation as his plane began losing altitude. He attempted a forced landing, but other pilots reported he crashed into a tree near Lake Balaton, Hungary.

Just two months later, on Dec. 19, Westmoreland's cousin, my mother's second cousin to die in the war, 1st Lt. Fred Funderburg, was last seen during another bomber escort mission, this one over Landshut and Mahldorf, Germany. He was flying a P-51 Mustang, nicknamed Stinky III, when he was caught "in a concentration of flak," a fellow pilot reported.

Fred became separated from his squadron and was never heard from again. His name is included on the Tablets of the Missing at the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial in Italy.

Fred left behind a wife and a baby son he never met.

As a kid growing up in California, my older sister was always ashamed of having been born in Tuskegee, Ala. Dixie was not cool back then – not for a black child. All that has changed. The story of what black pilots accomplished at Tuskegee is part of the transformation.

Two cousins, two grandsons of slaves, killed on battlefields far from their Georgia roots more than a half century ago. "Red Tails" reminds me and the nation of their heroic struggle to defeat fascism in Europe, and Jim Crow at home.

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