AURORA, Colo. (AP) — With members of a trailblazing Black Air Force unit passing away at advanced ages, efforts to remain true to their memory carry on despite sometimes confusing orders from President Donald Trump as he purges federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Col. James H. Harvey III, 101, is among the last few airmen and support crew who proved that a Black unit — the 332nd Fighter Group of the Tuskegee Airmen — could fight as well as any other in World War II and the years after.
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101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, wears a jacket adorned with pins and patches at the Veterans Community Living Center in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
Medals are draped around the neck of 101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, at the Veterans Community Living Center in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
He went on to become the first Black jet fighter pilot in Korean airspace during the Korean War, and a decorated one after 126 missions. He was one of four Tuskegee Airmen who won the first U.S. Air Force Gunnery Meet in 1949, a forerunner of today’s U.S. Navy “Top Gun” school.
“They said we didn’t have any ability to operate aircraft or operate heavy machinery. We were inferior to the white man. We were nothing,” Harvey said. “So we showed them.”
Shortly after Trump's January inauguration, the Air Force removed new recruit training courses that included videos of the Tuskegee Airmen.
The removal drew bipartisan outrage and the White House’s ire over what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described as “malicious implementation” of Trump's executive order.
The Air Force quickly reversed course.
Announcing the reversal, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in a statement that the initial removal was because the service, like other agencies, had to move swiftly to comply with Trump’s executive order with “no equivocation, no slow-rolling, no foot-dragging.”
The videos were shown to troops as part of DEI courses taken during basic military training. Some photos of Tuskegee Airmen were also among tens of thousands of images in a Pentagon database flagged for removal.
“I thought there was progress in that area, but evidently there isn't," said Harvey, who blamed Trump for contributing to what he sees as worsening prejudice in the U.S.
“I’ll tell him to his face. No problem," he said. “I’ll tell him, ‘You’re a racist,’ and see what he has to say about that. What can they do to me? Just kill me, that’s all.”
The Tuskegee Airmen unit was established in 1941 as the 99th Pursuit Squadron based at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The 99th became the 332nd Fighter Group, which by war's end destroyed or damaged more than 400 enemy aircraft in North Africa and Europe during the war and sank a German destroyer in action.
Of the 992 Tuskegee Airmen trained as pilots starting in 1942, 335 were deployed, 66 were killed in action and 32 who were shot down became war prisoners.
In 1949, two months after the airmen's gunnery meet victory in the propeller-driven class, the U.S. Air Force integrated Black and white troops and the Tuskegee Airmen were absorbed into other units.
It took the Air Force almost half a century to recognize 332nd's last achievement: Its success in aerial bombing and shooting proficiency in the gunnery meet at what is now Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
For decades, the winners were listed as “unknown” and their trophy was missing.
“We won them all,” Harvey said. “We weren’t supposed to win anything because of the color of our skin.”
Harvey trained during World War II but was not deployed to combat before the war ended. In Korea, he flew the F-80 Shooting Star jet fighter and earned medals including the Distinguished Flying Cross.
He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1965 and received an honorary promotion to colonel in 2023.
Trump in 2020 promoted another of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, Charles McGee, to brigadier general. McGee died in 2022 at age 102.
Harvey still regards the Air Force Gunnery Meet as his biggest accomplishment, one the Air Force finally recognized in 1993.
Their missing trophy was found in a museum storeroom not long after.
“We were good, and they couldn’t take it away from us,” Harvey said. “We were good. And I’ll repeat it until I die.”
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, wears a jacket adorned with pins and patches at the Veterans Community Living Center in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
Medals are draped around the neck of 101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, at the Veterans Community Living Center in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
101-year-old Col. James H. Harvey III, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, sits for a portrait in Aurora, Colo., Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.
West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.
The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.
Decisions are expected by early summer.
President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.
Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.
“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”
She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.
Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.
She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.
Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.
“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.
Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.
The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.
About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.
Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.
"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”
But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.
“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”
Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”
“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.
One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.
Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”
The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.
The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.
The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.
The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.
If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.
“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)
