VOICES of HISTORY
Drastic changes on horizon

Yvonne Walker-Taylor, associate professor of education at the University of Kansas.

ELLEN LEE JACKSON: My husband went into the military, but he only stayed three months because of his health. He didn't make it, but the next two brothers under me went. Joseph W. Lee went into the Air Force. He never went any farther than California. Wallace Lee went into the Army and went to Europe.

Did he survive? Very much.

YVONNE WALKER-TAYLOR: There were dozens of men I knew who were drafted. Oh my God. All of my classmates, some of my ex-boyfriends that I dated when I was in college. One of the students in the high school went overseas today and tomorrow he dead. His first name was Mark. Oh, there was sorrow around when Mark died.

GEORGE COOPER: I went back to Hampton, where we were training metalsmiths for the Navy. By that point, I was old enough to rationalize that if I worked in a defense industry, I was indeed making a contribution to the country. And I would much prefer doing that than to go into the service.

I literally did not want to go in the service. I had an impression that the service was very, very restrictive. And that you had to do anything that they said to do. That sort of concept just sort of rubbed me the wrong way.

I had gone to Hampton with the promise of being kept out of the service. But while I was on this job, maybe a couple of years later, the commanding officer said, `I can't do any more. You've got to go in. But you will not be sorry. As a matter of fact, I think you might be pleased.'

He never would tell me what he had in mind. What he had in mind was officer candidate school.

NED WOOD: I went to Fort Sill, Okla. I was in an artillery unit. It was segregated. The Army was segregated all through the war. It wasn't until the late 1940s that they integrated.

We were treated fairly good. But they lured a lot of the blacks into battle where they would be slaughtered, heavy casualties.

I was in the quartermaster service, though. We took supplies to the fighting forces.

JACKSON: I thought the men should enlist. I thought they should go. I thought if you were an American you did what you were supposed to do.

WALKER-TAYLOR: The white folks' war. That's what it was. That's how it went down. But you still were struggling for recognition and freedom; therefore, to do a Muhammad Ali was just out of the question. You're not going to refuse to go. You're gonna go because that's the way to prove that you're glad you're in America.

Now, all of this did not make you sorry you were an American. You're glad you're an American, but you just hated the fact that the white folks never gave you a chance to participate in a good life. You had to fight for everything.

COOPER: I don't know who made the detailed decisions, but they made the decision that they would pull 16 guys out of the service, from the ranks of the enlisted men, and send them up to Great Lakes, Ill., and start them through officer training.

We didn't really know what our orders said until we got there and were in the barracks, and discovered that here we are, 16 black guys, and were supposed to go into Officer Candidate School.

At that time, there were approximately 100,000 black sailors. The first night we were together, we said, `Now, here we are. We're here to be tried and tested. And what happens to us is going to determine the fate of black participation at the officer level for decades to come in the United States Navy.'

We represented thousands of black sailors, each one of us did. That's an awesome responsibility, if you take it seriously. If George screws up, he ain't screwing up just for George. He's screwing up for a hell of a lot of other people.

Because the country as a whole didn't want it. Not just the Navy, the country didn't want it. Because at that point in time, we were still very much a segregated society.

WOOD: The war was just about over when we got there. We landed in Liverpool on New Year's Eve, 1944. The Englishwomen met us. We weren't supposed to go out because one of the soldiers died from meningitis. We were supposed to be quarantined. We didn't pay attention to that. We ran out of there.

There was a man shortage, because most of the men between 18 and 45 were all in the service. The women didn't have any men, so they were real vulnerable. We started keeping company with them.

That wouldn't have been a possibility in the South. No way, uh uh. No. But it wasn't a hard transition. We were glad!

WALKER-TAYLOR: We did pretty well out here with the rationing. I remember even getting nylons some way and those were key items. I think our dietary demands precluded any suffering or want. We ate things that white folks didn't like most of the time.

COOPER: We pledged that we would either sink or swim together. We were going to make the damn thing work, or we would all fail together. There were 16 of us in the class. They commissioned 12 of us and made one a warrant officer.

It hurt him so that he didn't make it, until a year later he committed suicide. He didn't make it because of grades. The other three, nobody knows why they didn't make it. We have finally decided amongst ourselves that the Navy intended to do 12. They said, `We'll put 16 in and four will drop out.' And when the four didn't drop out, they stuck with the 12.

The commanding officer at Great Lakes at that time was a General Armstrong, who was the son of the founder of Hampton Institute, where I had went to college, and obviously had ties to the institution. Under normal circumstances, when a class would go through training, you'd have a commencement exercise, the whole 9 yards. We never had that. We were called in individually, and handed our certificates over a desk from the CO and a handshake, then back to the barracks where you get your orders.

So I walked in and he said, `Cooper, you're what we call a hell-raiser in the Navy.' I said, `Sir, I haven't even been on report since I've been in the Navy. I don't understand what you're talking about.'

`Well, don't you remember in your young life you getting in a fight with a white boy down in Washington, N.C.?'

I said, `Yes, sir. If that's what you call being a hell-raiser, I'm a hell raiser. He called me a nigger on the wrong day, and we went at it.'

That obviously had to be someplace in the record, in my personnel folder. Because the FBI, we subsequently discovered, went back to the time each of the 16 of us were born. The FBI had records on us that were half a book.

I don't think what was in his mind ever adversely affected me in the service, because we were immediately transferred out of there, and each of us went our separate ways.

WOOD: I just loaded and unloaded trucks. Most of the time I rode with the driver. I was his helper. I didn't do much loading or unloading. I was kind of slick.

One part of England we were stationed in was called Birmingham. The white soldiers, they wanted the pubs to be segregated. They didn't want the blacks in the same one they were in. So one of the guys came back to camp and told the sergeant, and the sergeant blew the whistle and called everyone out to attention. He told us, `Right face and forward march,' and we marched down to the pub.

There wasn't much of a fight. One Southern guy said, `You know, if we were down home we wouldn't be in the same place.' This guy grabbed him by the collar and said, `You're not down home now!'

Pow! He hit him and the guy slid down, like a snake sliding down on the wall.

The owner of the pub was going through with the segregation. It was an exclusive place with music and dancing and microphones. He suggested that we go upstairs and the white soldiers stay downstairs. We went upstairs and got on that microphone and started crooning. All the women came up to where we were, left the white soldiers down there.

COOPER: The Navy sent me back to Hampton, where I became personnel officer. I was the only black man within 500 miles in a naval officer's uniform. If you are familiar with Tidewater, Va., it's nothing but Navy. They build the ships in Newport News, which is right around the corner. The Norfolk Naval Base is right across the water. Everywhere you go, there's Navy. So a black officer in that situation stuck out like a sore thumb, naturally.

And now, as always, there are good people and bad people in this world. Decent people and not so decent people in this world. And a goodly number of those sailors just didn't want it to happen, as evidenced by this young man who walked up in front of my face in Newport News one day, my wife and my daughter to my side, put his fingers to my face and said, `I never thought I'd see one of you, and I hope I never see another one.'

He was going to beat me or I was going to beat him that day, because he said this in front of my wife and baby. But Peg put her hands on my shoulder and said, `George, it's not worth it.'

WOOD: After we went to France, they took us way out to rest up. We were supposed to get rested up and get ready to go to Japan. We were supposed to go to the Pacific. But instead of us resting, we went to Paris. I was in Europe nine months.

WALKER-TAYLOR: I got married in 1941. My husband was substituting in the Air Force. I went down to Tuskegee with him in 1941.

He was a member of the 332nd and he did 61 missions over Italy and all of that good stuff. We were right on the military base. We had these long, connected houses and maids that came in and cleaned. He was a captain, a real big shot, you know, and we had everything that you could want to eat from the PX.

COOPER: As personnel officer, I had to sign your leave request, whether it's normal, sick, whatever. If I had trouble with you on the base, I had the authority to call you in for captain's mast. That's where you are brought on the carpet. We raise hell with you and hand out punishment.

But I would say to one of my yeomen in the personnel office, `When John gets ready to go on leave, for whatever reason, you send him in to see me.' And I would bring you into my office like we're talking here now, with the idea in mind that by the time you left my office, you would perceive of me as being a human being and not a black son-of-a-bitch. It worked most of the time. I'm sure it did not work all of the time.

WALKER-TAYLOR: When the war ended, a few people felt things were going to change for black people, but the average person knew better. They knew that that wasn't going to do it because when our fellows came back, the prejudice was just as great to the black men in uniform as it was to the black men not in uniform.

JACKSON: You could get jobs more often at that time. And there was a lot of black people that had businesses on Fifth Street. There was a lot of restaurants and clubs.

Things were better there after the war.

WALKER-TAYLOR: When my husband got out of the war, we moved to Boston. Then I lived in Europe for a year, lived in Germany. That's where he was stationed.

I left Germany in 1953 or 1954 and went back to Boston. Then, my father died in 1955 and I was about to divorce this guy anyhow. So we got a divorce and I moved back to Wilberforce to be with my mother. She was in a house by herself.

Then I started teaching in the college.

WOOD: When we got back to the states, we had 60 days to go back to work. I went back to General Motors/Frigidaire, where I had been working before.

They interviewed me and I had gotten everything but the ID. A guy told me, `You can have the same job, same rate.' Seventy-nine cents. That was top pay. I said I'd be back tomorrow. I didn't even get my ID.

So I left and went to Universal Inn and started working for 95 cents an hour. In 30 days, I got another 10 cent raise.

They went on strike at Frigidaire very soon after that.

COOPER: We stopped through Dayton and made a headquarters here with some friends. I was questioning about what he did for a living, because he was really living well. He said, `Well, if you really want to know, get up in the morning and come to work with us.' I did that. What we did was go in and clean a house.

It was a fairly big-size house. We washed all the walls, the woodwork, the carpet, the whole house, in one day.

When we come back home, we were sitting around the table having dinner, and he said, `I'll make you a proposition. If you come out here, we'll work together, and I'll sell you half of this business.'

At that point in time, my thinking was beginning to tell me that in higher education we were doing more in the business of teaching people how to make a living than teaching them how to live. I was disgusted to the point that I said, `This may be an opportunity for me to get out of education.'

I took a half-year's leave of absence from Hampton Institute and came to work with my friend. And I never left.

Significant events of 1940-1959 1940: World War II: Hitler invades Denmark, Norway, Holland (May), Belgium, France. 1940: Franklin Roosevelt meets with black leaders to discuss employment matters. November 1940: FDR re-elected, in first election with significant Negro voters. Dec. 7, 1941: Japanese attack Pearl Harbor: U.S. enters World War II. 1941: After considerable protest, the War Department forms the all-black 99th Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps, later known as the Tuskegee Airmen, commanded by Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr. 1942: Charles Richard Drew, developer and director of blood plasma programs during World War II, resigns as the armed forces begin to accept the blood of blacks but resolve to racially segregate the supply. 1942: The interracial Congress of Racial Equality is founded in New York City. Its Freedom Rides in 1961 achieve national prominence. 1943: Dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson appears with singer Lena Horne in the wartime all-black musical film Stormy Weather. 1943: All war contractors barred from racial discrimination. 1944: Irene Morgan arrested for not giving up Greyhound seat to white passenger on a Virginia to Maryland trip. (Action leads to 1946 Supreme Court anti-segregation decision.) 1944: GI Bill of Rights signed, providing veterans benefits. 1945: Allied forces attack Berlin; Hitler commits suicide. World War II ends. 1945: Ebony magazine, a magazine intended for the black middle class, is founded by John H. Johnson of Chicago and becomes an instant success. 1945: Adam Clayton Powell Jr., pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, is elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Harlem, serving 11 successive terms. 1946: First year of the baby boom (1946-64) postwar birth rise. (U.S. population: 1945: 2.8 million; 1946: 3.5 million; 1947: 3.75 million) 1946: Lynchings in the South approach 1918 levels as Negro G.I.s return, talk of getting the rights they fought for. 1947: Congress of Racial Equality sponsors interstate bus ride to test 1946 Supreme Court ruling that black passengers could not be forced to the back. 1947: Jackie Robinson joins the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black baseball player in the major leagues. Historian John Hope Franklin gains international attention with the publication of From Slavery to Freedom, an enduring survey of black history. 1948: President Truman, in first civil rights' message to Congress, asks for anti-lynching law. 1948: Satchel Paige, legendary baseball pitcher of the Negro leagues, finally enters the majors after the "gentlemen's agreement" prohibiting the signing of black players is relaxed. 1950: North Korea invades South Korea, beginning the Korean War. 1950: Sen. Joseph McCarthy announces he has a list of 205 State Department employees who are Communist Party members. 1950: Ralph Bunche is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work as United Nations mediator in the Arab-Israeli dispute in Palestine. Gwendolyn Brooks, author of Annie Allen (1949), becomes the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. U.S. State Department withdraws passport of Paul Robeson after he refuses to disavow his Communist Party membership. 1953: Korean War ends. 1954: U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that racial segregation in public schools violates the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. 1955: Lynchings continue in the South with the slaying of Chicagoan Emmett Till, 14, in Mississippi. Jet magazine publishes a picture of the mutilated corpse. 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to surrender her seat when ordered by a local bus driver, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56. 1956: Arthur Mitchell, future director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, becomes the only black dancer in the New York City Ballet. 1957: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference is established by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others to coordinate and assist local organizations working for the full equality of blacks. Bombings of four Montgomery churches and two black leaders' homes. Civil Rights Act (first civil rights legislation since 1875) protecting voting rights is passed. 1957: President Eisenhower orders federal troops into Little Rock, Ark., after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Gov. Orval Faubus to give up efforts to block desegregation at Central High. 1958: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is formed. Composed primarily of blacks, the dance company tours extensively in the United States and abroad. 1959: Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry, becomes the first drama by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. 1959: Motown Records is founded in Detroit, Mich., by Berry Gordy Jr. The "Motown sound" dominates black popular music through the 1960s and attracts a significant white audience as well. - Compiled by Charlotte Jones SOURCES: Everythingblack.com An Abridged History of the United States