Coming up next on this special edition of Arizona Horizon, Phoenix Pastor Warren Stewart talks about his decision to retire after half a century of service.

Also tonight, we hear from the author of a book that highlights Arizona's connections to the famed Tuskegee Airmen and how an annual City of Phoenix event celebrates local black authors and their contributions to children's literature.

Those stories and more.

Next on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

Arizona Horizon is made possible by contributions from the Friends of Arizona PBS, members of your public television station.

Good evening, and welcome to this special Martin Luther King Junior Day edition of Arizona Horizon.

I'm Ted Simons, pastor Warren Stewart senior is a long standing advocate for civil rights.

He's perhaps best known for working to get Martin Luther King Jr Day recognized as a state paid holiday in Arizona.

In 2025, Pastor Stewart retired after serving nearly 50 years at the First Institutional Baptist Church in Phoenix.

We spoke to Pastor Stewart about his half a century of service.

We've welcomed you a lot of time.

It's good to be back with you.

Yeah, it's good to have you.

You're retiring as senior pastor?

Yes.

I because it's time.

It's time to pass the baton.

I've been working at the same address for 40 years.

Wow.

And it's time.

Was there an moment?

Was there was there something that said, okay, this, that.

It's time.

Well, my wife and I were on a mission trip in Africa in November of 1920.

Of 2023.

And the Lord spoke to me.

He said, it's okay.

You don't have to prove anything to anyone else.

You can retire.

Did you feel like you did have to prove something to someone?

Is that part of the process?

It's an interesting thing that you said.

Well, you want to make sure that you've done the work that God has called you to do.

And, I came here in July 1977.

I thought I'd be at 2 or 3 years, but obviously God had something else in mind.

Yes.

And so I've been here for nearly 50 years, and, no, I don't think there's anything else I have to prove to anyone.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, you proved a lot during the Martin Luther King junior day.

The whole hullabaloo there is in all of your memories.

The 48 years.

Is that the one that stands out?

Is that what?

Well, it stands out because.

Because we were able to educate, enlighten and inspire the state that Martin Luther King Jr.

Was just as important to this nation.

And what it stands for as George Washington was in the 18th century, as Abraham Lincoln was in the 19th century, Martin Luther King called this nation to practice what it preaches when it comes to justice and equality for all.

And this was, correct me if I'm wrong, an example of expanding, beyond the pulpit.

Oh, sure.

Sure.

I mean.

But look at Jesus's pulpit.

He really didn't have a pulpit.

His work was done out in the community.

And so for us to be involved in the King holiday was the one work out in the community.

What turned the tide in that?

Do you think that whole debate, that whole argument.

What what do you.

Was there an moment there?

Well, I would like to think it was that people got it and saw the importance of that.

King.

But also the Super Bowl was involved.

Yes.

And the Super Bowl was the 1993 Super Bowl was taking away from Arizona because we didn't have a King holiday.

And so people got on board because they wanted a Super Bowl.

But but that didn't drive the majority of the people who passed it by vote of the people on November 3rd, 1992.

It was the right thing to do at the right time.

Was that an example?

And I've heard you mentioned this before.

The quote is Jesus and justice work.

I've been about Jesus and justice for all of my ministry.

I'm in, actually in my 56 years of being a clergy person, but 48 years here and and I've been about Jesus and justice all that time.

Faith-Based Community Development part of it as well, I would imagine.

Yes, sir.

Yes.

And, with you racial equity voter engaged in economic empowerment.

Yes.

I mean, you've been out there, public education.

We want more, more equitable public education funding, all of that.

Yes.

Yeah.

And, you know, we're talking a lot about you.

And obviously you're very successful and have had just a tremendous career.

I'm going to ask you something.

Sure.

What makes a good pastor?

One who loves the people God has called him or her to oversee, to shepherd.

You gotta love the people.

Love God, love yourself, but to gotta love the people.

Is that a challenge, do you think for some clergy?

It shouldn't be.

But I do.

What do you think it should be?

I mean, if you if you there for the right reason, it should not be a challenge.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, speaking of challenges, what?

What kind of challenges that you face for 48 years.

I mean, do it.

What?

Anything.

Well, to be fresh, to be relevant, to be effective over generations.

I mean, come.

I have pastor there for ABC for at least two and a half generations.

And how can you remain effective for that long?

Yeah.

Does it it has the message changed a little bit over those generations, or is the message I would imagine would.

Be the message remains to stay the same Jesus and justice.

The methods have changed, especially with technology and social media, Covid 19, all of that change.

Your successor, whom do they know?

Who will be your success?

No.

Only God, no.

Yeah.

Well, we're working on.

Okay.

We're working on it when God makes his decision.

What's your advice to him?

To the successors?

To love the people?

That really is a biggie, isn't it?

That is the really the only thing God is calling the pastor to do.

To love the people over which he has been given.

That grace, that greatest commandment comes into play, doesn't it?

Love your neighbor as yourself.

Love God with your mind so body and soul.

All right.

You're going to deliver a final, message, I believe June 29th.

Correct.

There's going to be a big celebration through 27 through the 29th.

All big weekend coming up for you.

Is there was that final message difficult to come up with, or was it just did it just flow right out?

Well, God has given it to me, but it's about it's from, acts of the apostles, the 20th chapter about Paul, the Apostle Paul finishing his work.

And I've just about finished.

And you look happy.

You look like you're you're happy with that decision.

God has been good to me.

I am.

Happy.

So with that in mind, the the what are you going to do.

After this rest?

Yeah.

All rest.

Rest.

All right.

Once you're done resting, then what?

Do you have plans?

Do you have.

I want to mentor.

I want to pour into other person's lives about servant leadership.

I want to do more of our work in Africa and in India.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, Pastor Warren Stewart, senior again, I mean, so many years of great service.

And you have affected so many lives.

When you're resting, I'm sure you will rest quite comfortably knowing that you've made a really big impact in this community.

Thank you so much for everything you've done.

And thank you for being a welcome guest here at Arizona Horizon.

God bless you, sir.

Thank you sir.

Thank you.

At the entrance of Bullhead City's community park on State Route 95 is a marker honoring northeastern Arizona's vital relationship with the Colorado River.

For nearly 30 years in the mid 1800s, commercial steamships served the mining communities of northern Arizona, hauling supplies from as far down river is Yuma.

Cargo was unloaded at nearby Hardy Ville, often returning downstream with barge loads of local or Bulls Head rock, from which Bullhead City derived its name, was located just upstream.

The escarpment was used as a navigation marker and the point where Mojave Indians forded the river.

Bullhead Rock was submerged in 1953 with the building of Davis Dam.

Today, the Colorado is still Bullhead City's lifeblood.

Jet skis have replaced the steam ships and lost in Nevada's casinos just across the river have replaced the mines, mining tourist wallets instead of the ore from the mountains.

A recent book focuses on Arizona's connections to the famed Tuskegee Airmen.

The book is titled Black Wings Over Arizona, and it's written by Colonel Richard Dick Tolliver, Tuskegee trained retired Air Force pilot.

Good to see you again.

It's been a while for you.

It's been.

A while.

Yes it has.

Time flies when you're having fun.

There you go.

First of all, I got the title Black Wings Over Arizona.

That's a cool title.

Yes, I thought about it for a while and I wanted to reflect the character of the people, the image of the people, the beautiful backdrop of Arizona, which I love so dearly and which they loved so dearly.

And so what we did was find a way to merge.

And the topography of Arizona and what they did with the aircraft and the lives themselves.

And this basically is that it's a compilation of stories of Tuskegee Airmen with Arizona connections.

And the Archer Ragsdale Arizona chapter.

Explain what that is.

The Archer Ragsdale Arizona chapter was the name that we gave, to the establishment of the Tuskegee Airmen Incorporated chapter here in Arizona, 18 years ago.

And the double L name, Archer Ragsdale is the name of the first black chief master sergeant assigned to Arizona, Fred Archer.

And then we wanted to he's an NCO, and then we wanted the pilots tied to that.

Lincoln Ragsdale senior was the the first one of the first Tuskegee Airmen sent to Arizona in 1945, along with ten other guys.

So we combine both the enlisted and the officer pilots to get the name Archer.

There you go.

And both Lincoln Ragsdale was a very familiar name to those of us who've lived in Arizona a while.

Okay, these young men and we'll get to the women in a second.

But the young men that were profiled in here, who are these guys?

Who were these guys?

These were representatives of the quality of the Tuskegee Airmen experience that started back, prior to World War two, when the winds of war were raging across Europe.

President, Roosevelt realized we were not prepared.

We didn't have enough pilots.

And at that time, no law allowed blacks to join the military as pilots, officers, etc.. So, a bill was passed in 1939, that created a civilian pilot training program, and it allowed historical black colleges and universities to participate, Tuskegee Institute at that time, and hired a man to come down and again to, build an airfield and set up a training program at Tuskegee.

So they got the nod to be selected, first in the program in 1941.

Wow.

And that's how the Chesky Airmen legacy began.

And you looked at their military careers here.

Early life, military service.

Post military service.

You looked at retirement years.

That sounds like a lot of research.

Well, it was, and we were fortunate enough in our chapter to have about ten children or grandchildren of the original Tuskegee, and we call them the Heritage Chapter members.

Yeah.

And so I we collected those kids and began to ask them for documentation, photographs of things that they had or things that they remembered.

We led that effort for about, oh, two and a half years collecting the data.

And once we got the data together, we began to look at how to layout the story, how they began, what led them to join the Tuskegee Airmen experience, how they wanted to become pilots, what they did during that time, out of the 15,000 Tuskegee Airmen of World War and to 450 of them went overseas, to fly and and they came back, to the States and they were back in the the way they left.

And so they had what we call fighting two wars.

Yeah.

The one at home and the one overseas.

Indeed.

And, That's how we.

Got be at the forefront in many ways of, civil rights, their educators, entrepreneurs, civil rights leaders, these sorts of things.

And I we're kind of running out of time a little bit, but not too much.

I want you to talk about you've chronicled African American women and these women that were sent to Europe in World War II to talk about that.

Well, we were very fortunate to have one of the, 855 black women who were collected to go over to England to unscramble the mail that had been stacked up, and old, dilapidated hangars and roads, and in some places, the morale was going badly.

The generals were looking for ways to include to improve the morale.

Some of the get these women over there and saying they can fix this problem and the fix the problem they did 865 of.

Yeah was sent to England.

They arrived in very, rigid conditions, whether, facilities to live in.

They had to create those things for themselves.

And they created a system, uniquely designed to try and attract the soldiers, the women and others by serial numbers and so on.

But and they were given a six month period to unscramble the mail.

They did it in three months, created and did such a fine job they sent the next to France.

By the time the war ended, they had sorted through and dispense and distributed millions of pieces of mail packages and so on.

That's just a great story.

We got about a minute left here.

What inspired you to write this book and to again chronicle these folks?

Well, I was blessed to be touched by the Tuskegee Airmen when I was a youngster, 18 years old, and I wanted to go to Tuskegee, arrive there.

I wanted to be a pilot.

After growing up in World War Two, in California, where the war was over and my family's back in the South, my older brother went to Tuskegee, found a way to work.

You go to school.

I fall to.

That's when I met my first black pilot in my life.

One month later, I was getting my first flight, and then I was trained by them, motivated by the courage by them, they became part of my life.

Well, as you became a part of your life, and it's just helps us to understand and appreciate the history.

Good to have you.

Good to see you again.

Thanks for joining us.

My pleasure.

You bet.

Take care.

Now.

Nearly 5 million people a year travel to Arizona from all over the world for a chance to peer into the sublime expanse of the Grand Canyon.

It's hard to imagine that any of them noticed the giant Navajo sandstone slab jutting from the earth just outside the park's eastern entrance at milepost 268 on highway 64.

A plaque was once affixed to this stone.

It honored the victims of one of the gravest air tragedies in American history.

On the morning of June 30th, 1956, TWA flight two and United Airlines Flight 718 left Los Angeles within minutes of each other.

One was enroute to Kansas City, the other for Chicago.

They would collide over the Grand Canyon.

Both airlines and the government would recover, identify, and return home as many of the victims as the rugged wilderness would yield.

67 of the TWA victims, 63 unidentified, are buried in the Citizens Cemetery in Flagstaff.

Services were performed by Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Mormon clergymen.

29 unidentified victims from the United Flight were interred below a memorial in the Grand Canyon Cemetery on the South Rim.

Public outcry from the accident resulted in the creation of the Federal Aviation Agency, and a modernization of the country's air traffic control system.

Nobody knows what happened to the plaque that once paid tribute to the victims of flight two and 718, but their deaths were honored by the safe arrival of the many tourists that fly to the Grand Canyon each and every day.

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In 2025, the City of Phoenix hosted its first annual Black Children's Book Week, the event celebrating local black authors and their contributions to children's literature.

The second annual event is set for next month.

We learn more about how this tradition got started from Doctor Neal Lester, founding director of Aces Project Humanities, and Erica Maxwell, who served as chair of the first Black Children's Book Week.

Erica will start with you.

Give me a good definition here.

This is a weeklong event that celebrates its authors readers.

Everyone writes.

So the founder of Black Children's Book Week is Veronica Chapman.

She founded this in 2022.

It has been on my radar as a local children's author and decided this year we're going to celebrate it.

And it's a global celebration of black children and of those that ensure that children are seeing themselves in our books, and also that media that also represents black children.

And Doctor Less is some of the some of the scheduled events here that are going to go on throughout the week?

Yes.

Well, we did our kickoff on Sunday, and that was essentially a kind of meet and greet.

The authors.

There are about ten authors local who are writing for and about young black children and youth, and we've got book readings going on at one of the elementary schools this week.

And on Sunday there will be the culmination from 12 to 4, which will be a whole lot of family activities, games, giveaways, and the authors will be engaging with various audiences.

Very good.

You know, talk about children's literature or Black Children's Book Week.

What makes a good children's book?

A good children's book is one in which children can see themselves.

They can dream up, they can think about their futures, what they can be, what they are, their families, and things that they can read together and separately.

So a good children's book is anything that engages a child in reading.

And shows a challenge, and the child facing the challenge.

I would hope succeeding and handling the that's kind of there's got to be a story there, right?

Yes.

And it represents a multitude of these books.

They represent a multitude of narratives.

Yes.

So and that's that's what makes it special.

It's it's I understand the notion of the challenge, but we we want to talk about this in terms of the, the spectrum of what good stories can be, because the stories are not always challenges.

Well, guess it can be celebrations.

Yeah.

Story arcs, those kinds of, you know, you got the hero's journey and all that kind of.

Yeah.

But in children's book is are they the same thing or a little bit like us?

I think it's harder to write a children's book because we underestimate the value of these stories and the fact that adults are writing the stories, not children.

So we have the adult politics.

There that tell us about all kinds of lessons, all kinds of ways to experience the world.

And I would say, which is what Toni Morrison has said as a teacher of children's literature and adult literature.

The more specific it is, actually the more general it can become.

Although these may be about black and brown children, and they're really about children and about human connection.

So the audience is not just for but you can be very specific and still reach out to people very generally.

Yeah.

And stories, just the importance of sharing stories.

Absolutely.

It's very important.

And even as an author sharing my daughter's story of her life with her first mark, and again, that that represents a small portion of the books that we have.

But I think, again, creating those windows and mirrors for our students and not just black students, but other students, so they can see and have a different perspective than is often portrayed in the media of black children and black people.

Especially now, especially now, when there's a kind of urgency.

There's always been an urgency and a need.

But there's something about now where books are being banned and these very books are being banned.

Wow.

Not because of what the stories are about, but what they look like and what people presume the stories are about and don't want the stories to be about.

Do you approach that kind of thing in a children's book, or do you let that kind of thing be on the outside of the house?

What do you mean, that kind of thing?

What you just talk about?

Well, what I'm saying is that anything about race, anything about validation of one's gender identity, anything that validates class identity, anything that validates people in terms of who they are, it's threatening to some folks.

And these are the books that will validate and supplement those things that are being taken out of libraries, because they are being banned.

They're not being in classrooms.

And so this is a way to say these stories will not be erased and the voices will not be silenced.

And this is also a way to celebrate libraries.

So to celebrate places where these stories can be found.

Correct?

Absolutely.

Because in Phoenix, we I started with about ten listed local authors, and my list is up to 25 local black authors.

We are here.

We want to celebrate the authors and their work, and we want to have the communities see these authors at their schools and their communities.

Because again, it's about exposure.

And when students see themselves and connect to the content, they're more likely to engage in reading.

Congratulations on this and best of luck and good to have you both there.

Good to see you both again.

Thank you again.

Thank you for having us back.

That's it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us.

You have a great evening.

And.

You.