WASHINGTON  — They sat in wheelchairs as honored guests at President Barack Obama’s second inaugural, attended to almost minute-by-minute by active duty members of the military. For these Tuskegee Airmen, members of the famed all-black unit of World War II and several years beyond, the tables surely turned.

From the terrace of the Capitol, they watched an African-American president being sworn in for his second term. And they were cared for reverently by many whites in uniform, who more than six decades ago would have had no contact with these two dozen veterans now sitting with green Army blankets across their laps. Several of them said they were at Pres. Obama’s first inaugural but were just as excited to attend his second.

The tables certainly were turned for Homer Hogues, 85, who marched with his segregated unit in President Harry Truman’s inaugural parade in 1949.

The Black troops were quartered in a hangar with little heat, while the white military marchers were in a barracks.

As a civilian, Hogues tried to get a job as an airline mechanic, but was told he only could work cleaning planes. He went to work instead in the metalworking industry. He looked forward to seeing Pres. Obama again at the Commander In Chief’s inaugural ball.

Clayton Lawrence, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, was among some 100 black troops disciplined in Indiana in 1945, during a protest when Black officers attempted to enter an all-white officers’ club. A trainer of B-25 bomber pilots, the 89-year-old former New York City employee received a written reprimand and three officers faced courts-martial.

Transposing that day with the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president, Lawrence said, “I never thought I would live to see it.”