William H.M. Thomas, 85; Tuskegee Airman, Engineer

William Henry Maurice Thomas Jr., 85, a retired Tuskegee Airman who in later years was a government research engineer, died April 6 at Southern Maryland Hospital Center in Clinton of congestive heart failure. He was a St. Charles resident.

Mr. Thomas, known as "Moe," was born in Portsmouth, Va., and grew up in the Jamaica neighborhood of New York. In high school, he was a member of the Aviation Society, sang bass in the Senior Glee Club and lettered in track and cross-country.

He studied commercial photography at the New York Evening School of Industrial Arts and became a reproduction technician at the Brooklyn Army Base Terminal.

He enlisted in the Army and was prepared to begin an Army specialized training program when he came to the attention of the Army Air Corps and trained at Tuskegee. Commissioned a second lieutenant, he became lead navigator of Flight C of the 617th Bomb Squadron.

He also was base information director and education officer at the Tuskegee Army Air Corps base and a photographic officer at Lockbourne Army Air Base in Ohio. He left active duty in 1946.

As a civilian, he worked as a missile ordnance technician at the National Bureau of Standards, performed research on rhenium bolometers (devices for measuring electromagnetic radiation) used in the first weather satellites at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt and was a logistical systems analyst for Contractual Industrial Engineering.

Profoundly affected by the discrimination he encountered as an Army Air Corps officer in the South, he was active in the civil rights movement throughout the 1960s. He was president of the South County Organization for Public Education and a board member of the Fellowship for Equal Rights. He also worked with the NAACP and various churches in Prince George's County.

He and his son helped set up wiring for Resurrection City, a project of the Poor People's Campaign of 1968, and helped organize a school for disadvantaged young people on behalf of the National Warm Air Heating and Air Conditioning Association. Mr. Thomas was president of the Men's Club of Grace United Methodist Church in Fort Washington, president of the Prince George's County Civic Federation and president and historian of the Chapel Hill Citizens Association in Fort Washington.

His marriage to Lizzie Lou Whitacre Thomas ended in divorce.

His second wife, Gloria Winter Askew Thomas, died in 1980.

Survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Yvette Morton of Leawood, Kan.; five children from his second marriage, Maurice Thomas III and Patricia Yorkman, both of Fort Washington, Hugh Thomas of Herndon, and Helen Goode and Rosa Thomas Lawrence, both of Santa Rosa, Calif.; 12 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.