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CHAPTER 1
The Army Diversifies
Fort Des Moines
I wanted to prove to myself, maybe the world, that we would give what we had back to the U.S. as a confirmation that we were full-fledged citizens.
— Veteran Elaine Bennett, quoted in B. Moore, To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race
The four young women who made headlines during World War II were but school girls when the mechanisms that set the course for their once improbable journey began falling into place. In 1940, wars were igniting across Europe and Asia; the U.S. War Department, with watchful eyes on the unfolding crises, was readying plans to expand its forces; and civil rights leaders, wary of the nation's call for African American troops only in emergencies and to serve in segregated units, were leveraging their rising influence to negotiate the treatment of black servicemen. Alice Young, Mary Green, Johnnie Murphy, and Alice Morrison would have taken little personal note of such high-level discussions. In their mid- to late teens, they had futures to forge, and as women, military service was not an option. In 1940, no U.S. military service enlisted women.
Hailing from different regions of the country and various family and economic backgrounds, the four teens represented a diverse cross-sectional slice of African American women and their circumstances in the mid-twentieth century. Eighteen-year-old Alice Young was finishing high school in her Uncorrected Advance Proof hometown of Washington, D.C. Reared in a middle-class family that encouraged educational achievement, she planned to attend college. Farther west, in Chicago, Johnnie Murphy, though Young's junior by two years, had already earned her high school diploma and was enrolled in vocational training, most likely a clerical course. She liked school, she said, perhaps because it offered a reprieve from an otherwise disjointed childhood. Murphy was born in Georgia but spent her early childhood in Pennsylvania, first in Pittsburgh and later in nearby Rankin, a small industrial town. Her father died when she was six and her mother three years later. Following the loss of her parents, Murphy also lost touch with her siblings after loved ones separated the children and sent her to live with relatives in Chicago. The changes took their toll, and Murphy was restless. Apparently eager to strike out on her own, she graduated at sixteen looking for a fresh start — or perhaps simply a return to her abruptly curtailed Pennsylvania childhood. Down South in Richmond, Kentucky, Anna Collins [Morrison] was also eager to move. Like Murphy, she lost her mother when very young. For a short while, she lived with her father, although his alcoholism left him "a helpless invalid" and the family destitute. County services stepped in when she was no more than six years old and sent her and at least one of her brothers to a farm in nearby Tates Creek. It was not an ideal childhood, noted Morrison years later as she recalled the hard work she had to do. By 1940, she had returned to Richmond, found work as a maid, and, desiring another line of work, contemplated trying her luck in the North. Out west in Texas, just north of Houston, Mary Magdaline Amerson (Green) lived in all-black Tamina, a small town on the outskirts of all-white Conroe. There, according to a longtime resident, "everyone knew their place" and "if you could not remain in your place, there was a group that would remind you." The daughter of a minister in his seventies and his wife thirty years his junior, the "quiet, soft-spoken and genteel girl" was part of a large, close-knit family of twenty-seven siblings. Young Mary Amerson struggled to balance both school and romance, and when romance won, she left school after ninth grade, found employment as a maid, and soon married. By 1940, Green was expecting her first child. Regardless of regional locations or personal aspirations, as African American women all four expected their futures to necessitate a lifetime of paid employment. Most black women in the 1940s — when nearly 70 percent of wage-earning black women worked in the service industry and overwhelmingly as domestic servants — eventually worked as maids. Given its poor pay, long hours, and lowly social status, domestic service was less a desired option than a default position in the absence of other opportunities.
Then came the war.
Desperate for additional personnel, the army created its first women's corps in 1942, an event that Young, Murphy, Green, and Morrison could not have foreseen two years earlier. Suddenly, the army flung open hundreds of specialized jobs to women and a year later was offering them the same rank pay and many of the same benefits that white male soldiers earned, a racial and gender parity virtually unknown elsewhere in the United States. Additionally, most Americans traditionally showed respect to members of the armed forces, which African Americans felt would naturally extend to them. By the summer of 1944, all four had enlisted. Each entered the WAC assured of employment opportunities and citizen status that they previously could not have fathomed — not as women, and most certainly not as black women.
U.S. military leaders also could not have predicted the enlistment of women, yet hostilities abroad and understaffed forces at home forced them to expand their ranks beyond their preferred population of white men. As the armed forces' largest service, the army took the lead by acting quickly, decisively, and at times surprisingly. In two stunning reversals of its usual practices, the army began to admit African American men in larger numbers than at any time since the Civil War and, for the first time in its history, enlist women. It took another unprecedented move by enlisting black women. As a result, the nation's largest force would look far different by war's end than it had in 1940 when an all-male and virtually all-white entity. By 1945, 9 percent of the army consisted of black men and 2 percent consisted of women, including, over the course of the war, 6,500 African American women.
Occupying the lower rungs of civil society as both African Americans and women, black Wacs faced challenges distinct from those of other personnel, yet they also gained through their enlistment an important vehicle not available to their civilian counterparts to confront those challenges. Following the tradition of civilian policies, the War Department divided its troops by race, rank (class), and gender. Just as these delineations marginalized African American female civilians, so did they marginalize African American women in the military. . Consequently, black recruits who enlisted expecting the army to respect their rights as service personnel encountered instead a lack of training opportunities, specialized jobs, and timely promotions. Conflict was inevitable though black Wacs had two important advantages to call upon in the ensuing contests: World War II army policies, unlike civilian laws and conventions, clearly documented the entitlement of all military personnel to fair and uniform treatment in accordance with military protocols; and the legacy of their foremother's legacy that they shared with their civilian sisters. Generations of African American women's struggles against labor exploitation and assaults on their character provided this new category of soldiers well-honed strategies to resist discrimination and assert their rights. As the Fort Devens incident illustrates, black Wacs serving during World II would need both.
There was never a question that the War Department would open its ranks to African American men during World War II, but rather how many it would accept. Since colonial times, black men had stood reliably as the nation's ready reserve. In crises, the state called on them and they proudly served despite conditions rife with racial exploitation and ridicule. In return, the state relegated them to menial labor in segregated units and discharged them after the urgency subsided. By demeaning their intelligence, leadership skills, and masculinity, the army justified segregating African American troops from its main white force, denying them useful training and regular promotions, and excluding them from combat units where they could distinguish themselves and their race.
Despite these degradations, African Americans championed military service. The army offered a decent salary and the respected uniform to men typically consigned to menial labor and subservient status. Military service also provided a rare platform for black men to claim earned citizenship as defenders of the nation. The military's declared democratic mission lent further appeal to a population yearning for democratic freedoms. During World War I, for instance, when the army once again called on black men to shore up its forces, many civil rights leaders urged African Americans to unite with their fellow Americans in support of the war. They hoped that their solidarity with the nation, best symbolized by their men who served, would encourage white Americans to recognize the disconnect between fighting for democracy overseas while subjugating its own citizens at home. Instead, African Americans suffered in the wake of a postwar upsurge in violence, particularly against veterans who presumably entertained notions that they had earned their rights to equal citizenship. The experience spurred a militant impatience among African Americans who had tired of the empty rhetoric of a nation united under the banner for liberty and justice for all. Taking little note of the rising sentiment of resistance, the War Department, when needing additional soldiers to meet the challenges of yet another world war, expected African American men to patriotically enlist as they always had.
Civil rights leaders continued to regard military service as a tool to advance their cause, yet by the late 1930s they would not offer their full support without concessions. Representing over 10 percent of the nation's population, they understood the state's need for African Americans in its military — and its factories and farms — and that this yielded them significant wartime bargaining powers. From this emboldened stance, the movement made demands of the state, both its civil and military arms, in exchange for African American support, labor, and troops. Desperate for a reliable labor force and domestic peace, the state at last began to budge, most notably on the civilian front in 1941, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order banning discrimination in defense industry hiring. On the military front, the War Department agreed to a 10 percent quota of black male enlistment (in proportion to the 10 percent representation of African Americans' in the population). It commissioned the army's first black general, Benjamin Davis Sr., and approved the appointment of a civilian aide of Negro affairs to advise the Secretary of War on racial matters, a position that Judge William Hastie immediately filled. In a seemingly groundbreaking policy shift, the War Department also announced that "Negroes will be utilized on a fair and equitable basis."
Despite their new wartime clout, black leaders were unable to secure their most important demand, the racial integration of the armed forces. Throughout the 1940s, the War Department stood firm on its position that racial segregation was the only reasonable way to avoid racial problems. Insisting that "the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organization," it concluded that "this policy has been proven satisfactory over a long period of years." African Americans vehemently contested the "satisfactory" aspect, yet military officials countered that, with the nation at war,, their priorities could not, and would not, include race relations.
In rare circumstances, the sheer impracticality of segregation in terms of cost and efficiency compelled the army to relax the practice. During World War I, the army integrated its officer candidate training schools due to so few African Americans it had at last allowed into the program, and during World War II, it directed the integration of recreational facilities on bases. These were not major attitude shifts, however, as noted by the army's refusal to allow black officers to command white troops and the persistence of segregated recreational facilities throughout the war. (In the final year of the war, Fort Devens still maintained separate clubs for its black personnel.) Piecemeal compromises without genuine concessions underscored the War Department's contention that racial issues were not part of its purview. "The immediate task of the army is the efficient completion of our Defense Program," declared a senior War Department spokesperson in December 1941. "Nothing should be permitted to divert us from this task."
To the frustration of African Americans in and out of the service, the War Department consistently prioritized its segregation policies over its racial equality policies. As a result, white officers who ignored the military's racial parity directives rarely suffered consequences while black service personnel who asserted their rights granted under these same directives frequently faced charges. News of disciplinary actions against African Americans in uniform filled the pages of the black press, as did reports of white civilians attacking black military personnel for breeching, purposely or not, color lines. Countless racial incidents during the war years testify to the reluctance of many white Americans to come to terms with African Americans' increasing confidence to assert their rights. Being female offered little protection. In 1944, police officers attacked two black Wacs traveling on a civilian bus after they refused to vacate their seats for white passengers. "Just because you're in the uniform," shouted one of the officers, "you think you're smart. You're still a God-damn nigger down here in the South with us." So rampant was the problem of civilian hostility to black troops that the National Lawyers Guild alerted the Justice and War departments that "civilian violence against the Negro in uniform is a recurrent phenomenon." Astounded by the hypocrisy, a young black man in 1941 poured out his frustrations in a letter to a newspaper asking if it would be "demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life." Succinctly expressing the feelings of African Americans everywhere, James Thompson gave voice to the two-front war that African Americans understood they were fighting, the one against fascism abroad and the other against racial discrimination at home. Drawing on Thompson's protest, the black press — boldly led by Pittsburgh Courier editor Percival L. Prattis — launched the "Double V" (Victory) campaign. Anchoring African Americans' demands for full citizenship rights to their patriotic support of the war and its democratic mission, the black press inspired its readers around the world to raise two fingers on both hands in a double-V fashion. The black women who began enlisting the following year soon had cause to consider what might be called a Triple V campaign as African Americans and as African American women.
Unlike their countrymen, neither black nor white American women at the beginning of World War II had definitive historical roots in the military. Wartime armies had traditionally utilized them as nurses and cooks as needed and occasionally as spies and guides. The army's rapid buildup during World War I and the increasingly bureaucratic nature of the modern military opened a new chapter for their service as the army hired them as clerical and communication specialists. The experience demonstrated to military officials that women formed an ideal reserve force to tap in a crisis. Indeed, women's restricted employment options, low salaries, and perceived status as temporary workers (before marriage and children), ensured a ready and affordable workforce that the army could employ when needed and discharge after the urgency subsided. This was the same pattern it had perfected with black soldiers, though with a major difference. The army enlisted men whereas it hired women as civilian employees, who were therefore not entitled to military status or benefits.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Glory in Their Spirit"
by .
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