George Franklin Henry of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and Sag Harbor, Long Island, one of the soldiers who served at the celebrated Tuskegee Army Air Force Base in Alabama and a retired New York City firefighter, died Nov. 1. He was 95.
During World War II, Henry was a staff sergeant and in charge of 20 technicians for the maintenance and repair of aircraft flown by the first African-American combat pilots.
Henry was living in Corona, Queens, when he was drafted in 1942. The experience in Alabama was shocking.
“It was rough at that time for a Black man to be in Alabama,” Henry recounted to his daughter, Patricia Mapp, in an interview for a 2006 Dowling College project she completed on her family’s roots.
“You had to sit in the back of the bus, and they had a separate car on the trains for African-American soldiers.”
Honorably discharged in 1945, he was decorated with the American Campaign Medal and the Victory Medal.
In 1946, Henry married Mazie Esmeralda Butts, a registered nurse who had graduated from the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing. That same year, Henry became a New York City firefighter. A decade and a half later, he began working as a Fire Department spokesperson, giving lectures on fire prevention to the students in New York City’s public school system. After his retirement from the Fire Department in 1963, Henry joined the real estate firm Marvonne, started by his wife and his mother-in-law, Adella Butts. The Henry couple raised three daughters: artist and retired attorney Marilyn Henry Howell; retired school teacher and guidance counselor Yvonne Neely; and program manager for defense electronics Patricia Mapp.
Henry became a devoted member of the Comus Club, the Brooklyn-based organization of African-American men, and of the Guardsmen, a national association of African-American men.
After 69 years of marriage, Henry’s wife Mazie passed away Aug. 13 of this year. He is survived by his three daughters and their husbands, Ron Howell, Tony Mapp and Mel Neely and his three sisters, Betty Brown and Lucille Watson of Washington, D.C., and Juanita Jones and her husband, John, of Philadelphia. Henry also leaves seven grandchildren, five great grandchildren and many nieces and nephews.
Henry’s funeral is Friday, Nov. 13, 10 a.m., at the Lawrence H. Woodward Funeral Home.