PHILADELPHIA (AP) - John L. Harrison Jr., who served as a World War II pilot with the famed all-black Tuskegee Airmen, has died. He was 96.

Harrison died March 22 at a hospice in Philadelphia, according to the Murphy Ruffenach Funeral Home. A funeral with military honors was held Friday.Harrison was 22 when he became one of America's first black military airmen, one of nearly 1,000 pilots who trained as a segregated unit with the Army Air Forces at an airfield near Tuskegee, Alabama."We were Americans, we were young, and we wanted to defend our country, just like everyone else," Harrison said in a 2009 oral history.