Tom Brokaw (20 page)

SHAME

The World War II years will forever be testimony to America's collective and individual resistance to tyranny, its awesome and ingenious industrial machinery, and what may be its greatest strength, the common values of its richly varied population when faced with a common threat. Any celebration of America's strengths and qualities during those years of courage and sacrifice, however, will be tempered by the stains of racism that were pervasive in practice and in policy. As it was an era of great glory for America and its people, it was also, indisputably, a time of shame.

One does not cancel out the other, but any accounting of the war years is incomplete without the stories of those who were serving their country while fighting to protect their individual rights and dignity. What they experienced would be shocking enough if the acts of prejudice had been simply the work of a few misguided bigots, but the most shameful acts of discrimination and oppression were officially sanctioned by the highest officials in the land.

Black Americans were called Negroes or Colored in polite company and official documents, but the hateful epithet
nigger
was a common expression, even when referring to black Americans in uniform. They had few champions of racial equality outside their own ranks. Eleanor Roosevelt spoke up for them, but her husband, the president, the great champion of the common man, was mostly quiet on the subject.

Japanese Americans were subjected to even greater discrimination during the war. Their fundamental rights were swept aside in a campaign organized by some of the most distinguished figures in public life. The relocation of Japanese American citizens from their homes and businesses on the West Coast was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the name of military security. In a contemporary review of that decision, the current chief justice, William Rehnquist, concludes that civil liberties are not expected to have the same standing in wartime as they do in peacetime, but he does believe the courts in the future will review more carefully the government's arguments for curtailing fundamental rights.

Past practices and court decisions aside, the most compelling arguments against the wartime racism and official acts canceling civil liberties can be found in the lives and attitudes of the people who were the victims of those shameful episodes.

MARTHA SETTLE PUTNEY

“I knew when World War II approached it would be a terri
ble thing, but afterward I was so grateful. . . . It provided op
portunity.”

T
HE FACES OF AMERICAN WOMEN
in the thirties ranged from the classic Yankee beauty of Katharine Hepburn, the strong-willed movie star, to the haunting, defeated expressions of the migrant worker mother in Dorothea Lange's photographs documenting the terrible toll of the Great Depression. There are, however, very few black women in our album of memories. Lena Horne, yes, but her beauty and talent were so blinding she seemed to occupy a universe of her own.

Imagine, then, the world of Martha Settle Putney, now a retired history professor after a distinguished teaching career at Bowie State and Howard universities, the latter her alma mater. In the thirties, Martha was one of eight children of Oliver and Ida Settle; she was an ambitious young black woman in Norristown, Pennsylvania, an industrial town where most black women could find work only as domestics. That was not for her, but how to find a way out?

Her county was a Republican stronghold even during the height of FDR's popularity, so when she heard a Republican candidate for Congress speak, she offered to help him get out the vote of the black community. She kept her word, but she didn't tell her political patrons she wasn't voting Republican. She was for President Roosevelt and for Martha Settle. Nonetheless, when the Republican congressman got to Washington, he agreed to help her get an academic scholarship to Howard University.

Martha Settle in WAC uniform

Martha earned a master's degree in history and applied for a teaching job in Washington, D.C. She says political cronyism dominated the school system, however, so she went to work as a statistical clerk for the War Manpower Commission, where she quickly encountered the institutional racism endemic to the nation's capital in those days. So, in frustration, she resigned and volunteered for the newly formed Women's Auxiliary Corps—the WACs, women in the Army.

It was not an idle choice. As a student of history, Martha understood that the war “was the turning point of the century. When it was over the world would change. And I wanted to profit from it.” She also wanted to be an officer and told the WAC official she would accept nothing less than a commission. It was an elite group: the Army had agreed to recruit blacks, but no more than their representation in the population. In other words, a quota. Forty black women were selected after they had been personally approved by Mary McLeod Bethune, the founding president of Bethune-Cookman College and the formidable president of the National Council of Negro Women.

Bethune was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt and she saw the WACs as a great opportunity for young black women. Through the war she closely monitored what she called “my WACs,” especially when it came to racial slights and worse.

Martha Settle was exactly the kind of young black woman Bethune had in mind, and after a six-week training course she was shipped off to Des Moines with her new lieutenant's bars.

She helped train women recruits, but her duties were confined to teaching calisthenics and drills, the kinds of assignments reserved for blacks. There were other forms of discrimination, some shocking even during that time of racial apartheid in America.

Martha remembers to this day the anger she felt when a group of German officers, who were POWs at a garrison in the Des Moines area, were invited into the Fort Des Moines officers' club while the black officers were barred. She also remembers there was nothing she could do about it.

Black musicians were routinely banned from the base band, so they formed their own—maybe the first all-black, all-female military band in the world. Martha recalls that Army officials in Washington sent word to Des Moines: “We don't need two base bands. Get rid of the black band.” Martha, who normally kept her objections in race matters to herself, raised the band issue with her superior officer, although she acknowledges now that she did it in a low-key way since it might have jeopardized her chances for promotion. Others got involved as well, including the musicians' guilds, and eventually word reached the White House and Eleanor Roosevelt. Not long after, the black band was back in business.

Martha does believe she was personally responsible for the integration of the base swimming pool. Black WACs were to swim on Fridays only but Martha says, “After every Friday they would clean the pool! It didn't make me angry because I expected it.” All of the units at the base were segregated by color except one. It was made up of recruits who were struggling with basic training and it contained a half dozen black women. Since the swimming schedule was organized by unit, Martha saw her chance. She took the black recruits aside and said, “Swim with your unit.” After that, she says, “The pool rules became more relaxed and people more or less swam when they wanted to. I don't know if that would have happened at the men's camp. I think the women had a little more fellowship.”

That was never more clear to Martha than when she applied for additional specialized training. She wanted to avoid the plight of most blacks, being sent to the “unassigned pool,” which generally meant menial tasks. So she asked for and received permission to go to the Army's adjutant general school to train as an executive officer or administrative commander.

En route to her new assignment in Texas, it was clear that other passengers on the train didn't want to share their car with a black woman, but Dr. Putney remembers how her fellow officers, all white, rallied to her side, making sure they sat in the same car with her all the way to Houston. Later, as she was returning from Texas to the Midwest, there was a much uglier incident.

The train conductor refused to accept her Pullman car tickets and directed her to a freight car at the rear of the train. She protested but then started for the rear before deciding, “No, I won't do this.” She stood between two cars, refusing to move. The conductor, quite angry now, called the Military Police. Dr. Putney chuckles now when she remembers that when the two MPs arrived, they saw her lieutenant's rank and saluted her as the conductor watched, astonished. She was courteously escorted back to the base, where other officers hurriedly arranged for her to make the trip to Chicago and her new assignment in a military plane. She was heading for what she called “choice assignment,” the Women's Army Corps Hospital in Chicago. Before she could begin work, however, she had to endure yet another uncomfortable round of discrimination.

Martha Settle Putney

Her all-black unit of medical technicians was to be housed near Gardner General Hospital, not too far from Chicago's tony Lake Shore Drive. The Army had built a barracks for the WACs, but several local residents protested. They wrote city officials, demanding that black WACs be moved to another neighorhood. Local civil rights organizations heard about the protests and sent word to the War Department in Washington not to buckle. Dr. Putney remembers it took the War Department a while to do the right thing, and when it did, it said, in effect, “We'll send you to that neighborhood, but if anything happens, we'll move you out of there.”

Lieutenant Settle spent the rest of the war supervising medical technicians at the hospital with no difficulties. It was an assignment that she remembers with pride to this day.

After the war Martha returned to her old assignment as a statistical clerk with the Manpower Commission, work that is now a part of the Labor Department. She met her husband, Bill Putney, in Washington and they were married in 1947. They had one child, Bill Jr., now a product engineer with Ford in Detroit. Her husband died in 1965.

By then Martha's ambitious intellect had kicked in again, this time prompting her to take advantage of the GI Bill and enroll in a doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in European history and was hired by Bowie State College, a mostly black institution in Maryland.

She stayed for sixteen years and then went on the faculty at Howard for another nine years. Martha attributes her success in life to the opportunities she would not have had without the war. “I knew when World War II approached it would be a terrible thing, but afterward I was so grateful. . . . It provided opportunity. The army has a way of teaching personnel, and it sticks. At Bowie they had a book on teachers the students passed around. Under my name it said, ‘Don't take her unless you want to study.' ”

Dr. Clifford Muse, Jr., now a professor at Howard, did his graduate work under Dr. Putney, an experience he remembers well. “She worked me to death. I really learned from her. She tried to prepare you for discrimination in the sense you had to be very good to be accepted.” In fact, that was how Dr. Putney had always dealt with discrimination, and she was determined to pass along to all of her students the lessons of her own life.

William Missouri, another former student, recalled, “I was in Dr. Putney's African American history class and, let me tell you, it was tough.” Missouri, now a circuit judge in Maryland, dreaded the days he arrived in class unprepared. “She would bring you up short in front of the class. She wouldn't chastise you, but she'd say, ‘How can you be an African American and not
want
to learn African American history?'

“She'd say, ‘Work hard. If you fail, don't look around for others to blame. Look in the mirror. You have to accept responsibility for your own life.' ” When Dr. Putney did discuss her military experience it was always in that context: she felt she had to do extra well because she was so conscious that she was representing other black women with her success. In her conversations with Dr. Muse, Judge Missouri, and her other students, she used her life during World War II as a teaching tool for them.

Since retiring from Howard, Dr. Putney has been volunteering at the Smithsonian and working on her histories of the role of blacks in the armed forces. She's already written
When the Nation
Was in Need: Blacks in the Women's Army Corps During World War
II.
She's also been working on a history of blacks in combat from the Revolutionary War through Operation Desert Storm.

For all of the changes she's witnessed, for all of the successes she's enjoyed personally, Dr. Putney is saddened by the recent turn against affirmative action in California and other states. She knows what can happen when government programs provide opportunity. “We still have honor in America within a basic core of people. . . . But you can't make all people [share that sense of] honor unless you respect them. If you push them around they're not going to respond.”

She's persuaded she was accepted for graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania because of her whole life, including the military, and not just because of how well she performed on tests. Dr. Putney is convinced more emphasis must be placed on essays and backgrounds rather than SAT scores for college admission or the situation will not change much.

Dr. Putney and her husband were in Washington the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made his “I Have a Dream” speech. “I really thought it was going to be a new day after that. There has been a lot of progress but I have been disappointed. People need to be accepted on their merits and their character. Not everyone gets the same opportunity.”

Martha Settle, a working-class black female from a tough town in Pennsylvania, didn't have affirmative action when she was coming of age. She had a national crisis in which the need for the bright and able was so great she could take advantage of opportunities that would not have been available otherwise. Racism was still the order of the day, but it gave way just enough for Dr. Martha Settle Putney to remind everyone that the premise was false and the consequences were unworthy.