Honoring Sergeant Carter Read Online Free

Airmen—stationed in Italy. One press release applauded the hundreds of black troops originally assigned to service units who, like Eddie, had volunteered for combat duty as riflemen.
    The other documents I found with Schlessinger’s help were more disturbing. For example, there was a series of reports assessing the use of Negro rifle platoons in the Army during the war. Although the reports generally concluded that the black infantry units, composed of volunteers, performed well in combat, almost all of the authors recommended against forming racially integrated fighting units. Instead they recommended continuation of the policy at that time of limited use of all-black units under white (or possibly black) officers within larger white combat units. In other words, black troops might be allowed into combat, but only in segregated units.
    Evidence of discrimination against and mistreatment of black soldiers was plentiful in a file of letters and reports that had been sent to William M. Hastie, a respected black judge who was dean of the Howard University Law School. In 1940 he was appointed CivilianAide on Negro Affairs by Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Among other things, Hastie tracked racial incidents in the military. The material in the file was chilling. It included a report of the lynching in 1941 of a young black soldier, Felix Hall, at Fort Benning, Georgia. There was also a report of what Hastie called the “wanton slaying” of an unarmed black soldier, Albert King, by a military policeman at Fort Benning in the same year. The military policeman was acquitted; Hall’s slayers were apparently not found. In June 1942, Eddie was a sergeant in a service battalion at Fort Benning. Did he know of these killings?
    Schlessinger recommended that I review some additional files that proved to be equally troubling. These were military weekly intelligence reports for 1944–1946. I was surprised to see that the Army collected detailed information on the involvement of black soldiers in so-called racial situations around the country, and special attention was given to the reaction of the Negro press to these incidents. The situations commonly involved acts of racial discrimination, mistreatment, or violence against black soldiers, including incidents on military bases, or black citizens in general. The activities of the NAACP and other civil rights groups were also closely monitored. The reports were organized under headings such as “Organizations Fomenting Racial Agitation” and “Potential Racial Disturbances.” Black soldiers or sailors observed speaking out against or actively resisting discrimination were described as “attempting to create racial unrest.”
    No part of the country seemed exempt from the prying eyes of military intelligence. Some areas, however, were described as “sensitive.” Los Angeles, where Eddie and his family lived before and after the war, was often high on the list of “sensitive” areas because, as a report on January 5, 1946, stated, “of the heavy concentration of Negro workers, unrest in the Los Angeles Harbor Area and current government cutbacks.” Other cities in California, and sometimes Washington state, were occasionally identified as sensitive for similar reasons.
    Some of the weekly intelligence reports included sections on “communists and fellow travelers.” Reading these I came across a reference to the Daily World, the Communist Party’s newspaper. I remembered that one of the news clippings about Eddie’s heroism that I found in Mildred’s trunk came from the Daily World. Now, a few pages further on in the intelligence report, I found a reference to a “Welcome Home, Joe” dinner held in Los Angeles and sponsored by an organization called American Youth for Democracy. A parenthetical comment in the report described this group as a “CP [Communist Party] organization.” I felt a