Daniel Keel credits his Northeastern education with helping him become a Tuskegee Airman. Eighty years later, he asked for his academic records — sparking a hunt through university archives.
Daniel Keel, 102 years old and among the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen from World War II, recently contacted Northeastern University. He was seeking his college transcript from more than 80 years ago.
So began a mystery of record-keeping that would be no easy thing to solve.
“I said to him, ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why did you want the transcript?’” says Lacetia Foster, director of registrar services at Northeastern. “He said, ‘I wanted to share it with my grandkids and great grandkids.’”
After graduating in 1941 from Boston Latin School, where he studied Latin and German, Keel said he enrolled at Northeastern and majored in aeronautical engineering. During the day, he worked at a shipyard south of Boston; at night, he attended classes at the Huntington Avenue YMCA starting in 1941.
In 1943, Keel was drafted as an aviation cadet. Although the war interrupted his studies after two years and prevented him from graduating, he said his education at Northeastern was crucial to his pioneering military career.
The legendary Tuskegee Airmen included nearly 1,000 Black pilots whose wartime excellence — earning 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses and flying more than 15,000 individual sorties — helped persuade President Harry Truman to desegregate the U.S. military in 1948.
“I had to take a test before they would even accept me into the Air Force,” Keel told Northeastern Global News. “And then I had to take another test to see whether I was qualified to become a pilot or navigator or bombardier. That was a two-part test.”
The two rigorous exams included an eight-hour psychological evaluation.
“Three hundred of us took the tests,” Keel said. “And of that 300, they only took the top 10%. I believe that my education, which I received while going to Northeastern, played a role in my being in that top 10%.”
During his subsequent training, Keel became a navigator, a bombardier and a pilot — one of only three Black officers during World War II to earn a triple-rating.
From his home in Florida eight decades after the war, Keel went online to Parchment, a third-party website, hoping to retrieve his college transcript. But that initial attempt was thwarted.
“On the site you have to put in your date of birth,” Foster said. “But his wasn’t there. There was no selection for him.”
The oldest year of birth available on Parchment was 1925. Keel, who was born in 1922, found humor in his omission.
“He emailed my team and said, ‘Hey, do you think everybody’s dead [from 1922]?’ It was so funny,” Foster said.
Foster’s team of registrars was unable to locate a digital copy of Keel’s transcript in the university database. Foster, who recently celebrated her 25th anniversary at Northeastern, made an additional computer search.
“I looked in the normal places electronically,” Foster said. “And then I said, ‘OK, I’m going to make a trip to the warehouse.’”
Northeastern maintains original paper copies of more than 100,000 academic records at a warehouse a few miles from the Boston campus.
“We keep the transcripts forever,” Foster said. “Some schools will scan everything and then discard the originals. We don’t do that — because look at what happened with Mr. Keel.
“There could be human error. The third party may not have scanned something you meant to scan, right? So I love that about Northeastern, that we keep everything. We even keep the grade sheets.”
Visits to the warehouse are rare. Foster hadn’t been there for more than two years. But the mystery of the missing transcript was eating at her. Over a few days, she had become something of a Daniel Keel expert, having explored his rich history and the pioneering importance of the Tuskegee Airmen.
Their fight for equality during World War II had come at a steep personal cost, as Keel and his fellow airmen encountered racism throughout what would become known as the “Tuskegee Experience,” a broader movement that included more than 13,500 Army Air Force (AAF) women, armorers, bombardiers, navigators and engineers.
Keel and other Tuskegee Airmen faced threats of court-martial for protesting unequal treatment and segregated facilities at military bases. A letter of complaint to the inspector general in Washington — with Keel as the first officer to sign it — led to the desegregation of social facilities at Midland (Texas) Army Air Field.
“You would be surprised what we went through,” Keel said.
At the completion of his training, Keel was assigned to fly missions from Okinawa, Japan, the final major theater of the war. But he was never deployed. Japan formally surrendered on Sept. 2, 1945, following the detonation of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Foster took time from her vacation to visit the off-campus warehouse.
“I looked in the normal places,” Foster said. “Mr. Keel said he was in the engineering school here at Northeastern and he told me the years. I knew where those books were — those big dusty books. I searched through them and I could not find him. And I’m like, what in the world?”
She was making her way down the aisles when she noticed a file associated with the Lincoln Technical Institute, which had been established in 1904 (six years after the opening of Northeastern) as the Evening Polytechnic School. In 1990 it merged formally into what is now the College of Professional Studies at Northeastern.
“So we have all their records,” Foster said. “Back in the day some of their classes were connected to Northeastern.”
In that file she found Daniel Keel’s transcript issued — a four-by-six-inch salmon-colored document, typewritten, with his grades, birthdate and other information. It was slightly torn on one side.
“The date of birth on this transcript was a year off — you know, human error,” Foster said.
Before making copies of the transcript and sending them to Keel, Foster made a call to share the good news.
“I was so excited to tell him,” Foster said. “When I tried to call, his daughter said he had gone to drop his son off at the airport. I was like, this man is amazing.
“Then he did call me back. He told me that when he was at Northeastern, Richards Hall was just being built. We had a wonderful talk.”
Keel did not return to Northeastern after his military discharge in 1946.
Instead, he earned a commercial multi-engine pilot’s license, hoping to continue flying. But he soon realized that opportunities for Black aviators in the United States were almost nonexistent.
“I could see from what I went through while I was in the service that aeronautical engineering didn’t seem to be what I thought it would be, as far as Black people were concerned,” Keel said.
It was not until 1964 that David Harris, a former U.S. Air Force captain, became the first Black pilot hired by a U.S. commercial airline. Harris had grown up visiting Lockbourne Air Force Base in Columbus, Ohio, where many Tuskegee Airmen were stationed after the war.
“So I became an electrician,” said Keel, who, along with his wife, Barbara, raised eight children. “I got my master electrician license. Then I opened up my own electrical contracting business, which I ran successfully for over 30 years. I retired in 1998 to Florida and I have been living here comfortably ever since.”
Recently, Keel was invited to an event in Campomarino, Italy, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
“They wanted Tuskegee Airmen to be there,” said his daughter, Lynn Keel. “Unfortunately, dad is the only person alive today who is healthy enough to make the trip.”
Keel said he never imagined that the Tuskegee Airmen would one day be honored after enduring so much racism intended to diminish their contributions.
“I feel honored,” Keel said. “I never believed that I would live this long to see this happening to me and to the Tuskegee Airmen as well.
“I’m surprised at this happening, I’m telling you, because so much of the history of the Tuskegee Airmen was buried. And now I’m surprised to see it coming to life today.”