Granville Coggs, Tuskegee Airman and Renaissance man, dies at 93

Granville Coggs, who was one of the nation’s first black military pilots during World War II, has died at the age of 93.  He was also a doctor, inventor, musician and athlete.  As a Tuskegee airman in the segregated Army Air Corps, he earned military badges for aerial gunner, aerial bombardier and multiengine pilot as a member of the Tuskegee Airmen from 1943 to 1946. He then went on to become a doctor, invented a non-invasive patented device for breast cancer detection, played and sang with a variety of musical groups, and was a gold medalist in the Senior Olympics. Coggs recounted his first solo flight in Tuskegee, Ala., for Nebraska Magazine in 2012. "For black people all over the South back then, such an accomplishment seemed almost unthinkable,” he said.