Palm Desert Man Building Traveling Museum to Bring Forgotten American History to Students

[bc_video video_id="6165883056001″ account_id="5728959025001″ player_id="Hkbio1usDM" embed="in-page" padding_top="56%" autoplay="" min_width="0px" max_width="640px" width="100%" height="100%"] Chauncey Spencer has a dream. "Inside the trailer here … it’s going to be set up with a panoramic history story," says Spencer, who is standing inside a travel trailer that’s empty inside, as he waves his hands around to help me envision what it will be. His dream is to transform the trailer into a mobile museum that brings a forgotten history to the masses. "It’s a piece of American history that’s been left out of America," he says about what most people refer to as "Black history". On the outside of the trailer shows that his dream looks closer to becoming a reality. Printed on the trailer are the words "African Americans in Aviation" with an image of his father and other aviation legends. To Spencer this history is personal. "My father played a very important role in the integration of the military," he says with a proud look. His father, Chauncey Spencer Sr. was an aviation pioneer. What he was told when he tried to learn to fly drove him to greater heights. "He said, ‘We don’t teach colored to fly, they don’t have the intelligence,'" says Spencer quoting the words of an instructor to his father when he was just 16-years-old," adding that didn’t deter his father, "that hurt my father but that didn’t break him." Despite the odds, he found a way to learn and pay it forward. During a cross country flight to encourage black colleges to promote aviation he had a chance encounter with future President Harry Truman who was amazed by their talent and courage to fly an old plane. He says his father offered then Senator Truman a ride, "And Truman said, ‘No you can’t take me for a flight but if you’ve got the guts enough to fly this thing I‘m looking at I‘ve got guts enough to find out why you can’t become part of the United States Army Air Corps,’ it was that step that Truman got on with Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McCleod Bethune to encourage Franklin Roosevelt to include the negro in the Civil Pilot Training Program which is a precursor to what we call the Tuskegee Airman." In August he plans on making his own cross country trip, making stops along the way to teach the history of the Tuskegee Airman, a group of African American pilots that fought in World War 2. "Chauncey Spencer broke the barriers of racism allowing individuals like the Tuskegee Airman to take flight," says Spencer as he stands next to the tribute to them on the trailer. His destination will be the March on Washington in our nation’s capital on August 28, 2020, that will coincide with the original Civil Right’s March or the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech. He hopes his dream of integrating Black history with American history will create change that leads to understanding and mutual respect. "Because American history is no color, it’s an invisible history of individuals that have sacrificed for the rights that we have today," says Spencer. Spencer is trying to raise money to finish this project, if you want to help email him at: Chauncey.spencer2.gmail.com.