Tuskegee Airman still serving in connecting cousins decades after his death

A North Carolina family is finally starting to get closure about one of their relatives – a Tuskegee airman who went missing in 1944.

2nd lieutenant Fred Brewer Jr.’s remains were identified Aug. 10, 2023 — nearly 80 years after his plane went down in Italy.

WRAL’s Destinee Patterson talked with his first cousin, Brenda Brewer, over the phone Friday. Brenda Brewer lives in Charlotte, where Fred Brewer Jr. is from.

DESTINEE: What kind of background did you learn about Fred over the years?

BRENDA: Maybe my parents thought I didn’t have ears, but they talked about Fred Jr. around me all the time. I never met him to talk to him, but I knew he was a casualty of war.

DESTINEE: What has that been like even for you, thinking about what it caused for your family?

BRENDA: I grew up as a little girl knowing I had to try to bring him home. I didn’t know how I was supposed to do that, but I always wanted to bring him home. I just wanted to repair the whole situation. As I grew older, I knew that things just weren’t in place for him to be brought home. The history surrounding what was called his death changed.

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They thought he went down one place, he went down, it turns out, in another. Science had not been developed, so that he could be identified. Now we have DNA.

DESTINEE: When you think about how long it took for him to come back home, was there ever a time that you felt resentful or angry?

BRENDA: No, because they didn’t give up as the history developed and the science developed. [The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency] mission is to keep trying.

DESTINEE: I want to switch gears here. I found that he was really involved with Shaw University. Tell me a little bit about that.

BRENDA: He was the editor of the Shaw Journal and also The Bear during both his junior and senior years at Shaw. He was a student representative at the National intercollegiate Christian Council at Lake Geneva, in Wisconsin, in 1941. And he was a delegate to the National Conference of Negro Youth in 1942, which leads me to believe that if he had been able to return, regardless of what his employment opportunity would have been about, he would have added service to that. That’s why he went into the Army, from what I understand. He wanted to serve his country.

DESTINEE: Is there anything else that you want to add?

BRENDA: Fred died at 23, but I think he did a lot in his 23 years. I want people to know about him because of that legacy he leaves behind.

In order to identify Fred Brewer Jr., Brenda Brewer said DNA was required from a male family member. She worked with a genealogist to find other relatives on the family tree. They found Clement Brewer, a distant cousin.

When he was contacted, he got to make a new family connection.

“Brenda stays half a mile away from us. I had no idea I had a relative that close, so that was mind blowing,” Clement Brewer said.

All Clement Brewer had to do was swab his cheeks and send it off. Now, he says he feels honored to find out he’s related to Fred Brewer Jr.

“It’s a good feeling to be connected with somebody who’s really considered a hero,” he said.

Brenda said she is planning to hold another formal service for her cousin.

“Now that he has been identified, he gets his name back,” she said.