The Black Female Battalion That Stood Up to a White Male Army - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/17/magazine/6888th-battalion-charity-adams.html
More than 6,500 black women ultimately served in the auxiliary corps during the war, as both officers and enlisted women. They came from all over the country, many in search of opportunities unavailable to them in the civilian sector. The Six Triple Eight veteran Elizabeth Barker Johnson quit housekeeping to become a soldier. She hadn’t realized that military service was even an option for her until a pamphlet for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps landed on her doorstep in Elkin, N.C. “There was a picture of Uncle Sam, and he was pointing a finger,’” recalled Johnson, 100. “It said, ‘Uncle Sam wants you.’ So I picked it up and looked at it. I read some of the information, and after I’d finished reading, I said, ‘Well, maybe you just got me.’ ”
Johnson completed basic training at Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky and then became a truck driver — a job not typically held by African-American women in the 1940s. But for many black servicewomen, the Army proved hardly less oppressive than the places they signed up to escape. Some commanders simply refused to allow African-Americans onto their posts, and those who did often assigned them menial tasks, like cleaning or handling supplies. Overseas postings were usually not an option, even though white servicewomen began deploying to Europe and the Pacific promptly after the corps’s creation.
In December 1945, Adams and much of the Six Triple Eight sailed back to the United States. That same month, the Army promoted [Charity] Adams to lieutenant colonel, making her the first African-American woman to achieve that rank. She left the service the following year to finish graduate school before working at the Veterans Administration and as a college dean. “The problems of racial harmony, black acceptance and opportunity were still unresolved,” she wrote in her memoir, “but these were problems I could still work to help solve as a civilian.” After marrying and spending a few years in Switzerland studying Jungian psychology and learning German while her husband attended medical school, Charity Adams Earley spent the rest of her life applying her talents and energies to issues of racial justice as a community leader and activist in Dayton, Ohio.
Despite the enormous sacrifices made by black soldiers overseas, the military wasn’t officially desegregated until 1948. It would take another two decades for the country as a whole to follow suit — and that process is still far from complete. Five more decades passed before the Six Triple Eight, as a unit, received any formal recognition for its contributions during World War II.