7 Questions with Pia Jordan, Author of Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse

 

Pia Marie Winters Jordan is producing a multi-media documentary on the Army Nurse Corps members who served with the Tuskegee Airmen at Tuskegee Army Air Field during World War II. Her mother, Louise Virginia Lomax Winters, was a First Lieutenant and one of those nurses.

She is a retired associate professor in the Department of Multimedia Journalism, School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. She was also one of the advisers to the Morgan State University Association of Black Journalists. She came to Morgan in August of 2008. She taught students in broadcast news writing, reporting and producing as well as internship preparation, senior capstone and media studies. For more information about her Tuskegee Army Nurses Project:  http://www.tuskegeearmynurses.info/

1. How and when did you get hooked on history?  

I was more hooked on journalism, but my uncle, Dr. Edgar A. Toppin, Sr.,  was a historian, author and a professor at the former Virginia State College in Petersburg, Virginia.  He wrote several books dealing with the Black Experience and had a television show dealing with Black history in the 1960's.  One of his books was A Biographical History of Blacks in America Since 1528. I have learned he wrote ten books in his lifetime.  He was also a past president of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH).  I was proud of his work.  I also loved to visit Harper's Ferry, West Virginia where I saw where my father attended courses at Storer College which provided an education for blacks and the story of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry.

 

   2.  What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

I have come to value the roles different people have played in determining the direction of history in our world.  I like knowing the backstories of incidents that are happening today.  It goes back to the saying by Edmund Burke-"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."

3. How does history play  a part of your professional life/career?   

Since learning about my mother's participation during World War II as a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse, I have come to appreciate how the participation of people in history, no matter how large or small, can play a great part with regard to the world's stage.  Now that I am retired from broadcast journalism and teaching the subject, I have spent more than a decade researching and learning about the period of World War II.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?  

Studying and knowing history is important because it can provide answers to future concerns of a nation good or bad.  We can learn what has worked or what hasn't in policy decisions and conflicts between countries.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?  

I personally like learning about and looking at the history of the Elizabethan Era.  I find it fascinating understanding the hierarchy of the lords and ladies, etc.,  dress, health concerns, political environment, transportation, etc.

   

6.       How did Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse come about and how did you research the book?  

When I started teaching multimedia journalism at a university in Maryland, a colleague saw I was distraught after not having done anything about my mom being a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse--especially after she had some minor strokes and ended up in a nursing home.  My colleague encouraged me to get started now by first interviewing the nurses.  Well that was in 2008 and in 2009 I began interviewing the nurses and any Tuskegee Airmen who knew them while on the base.  I literally have been visiting archival sites around the country to research the period when the Tuskegee Army Flying School was in operation. I have visited nurses and airmen in California, Maryland and New Jersey.  I have visited archives and museums in Washington, D.C., College Park, Maryland, Riverside, California, Detroit, Michigan, Montgomery, Alabama, Tuskegee, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana.

 

7.       One of your ultimate goals is to make a documentary. Where does that project stand and how can people help?   

Raising the money to produce the documentaries will be the next goal.  It will take funds to hire, videographers, graphic artists and a producer to help complete a first rate project.  I have been asked about curriculum for students in studying my book, Memories of a Tuskegee Airmen Nurse and Her Military Sisters.  Maybe, that could also be a goal.  I have set up a GoFund Me site for future projects. ( https://www.gofundme.com/f/b84v9y-tuskegee-army-nurses-project?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=widget&utm_campaign=p_cp%2Bshare-sheet )