Honoring Sergeant Carter Read Online Free Page A

cold shiver: this dinner was mentioned in the same Daily World clipping I had found in Mildred’s trunk. The intelligence report went on to quote an unidentified Negro newspaper as writing that “embittered” World War II veterans honored at the dinner denounced the “so-called democracy for which they fought.” These veterans said that they returned “to findAmerica more prejudiced than before and intolerance at an all-time new high.” Having just read of the “racial situations” encountered by black soldiers and civilians, I didn’t find the views expressed by the veterans at the dinner very surprising. But it was disturbing to find an event that Eddie attended alluded to in these intelligence reports. His name was not mentioned specifically, but I knew his attendance had been mentioned in the newspaper coverage.
    An FBI report I examined did not relieve my worry. Entitled “Foreign Inspired Agitation Among American Negroes in the Los Angeles Field Division,” the November 21, 1944, report stated that white homeowners protective associations were “becoming more active against negro encroachment” and were trying to establish restrictive covenants to prevent blacks from buying homes. Anonymous literature was being circulated, it continued, advocating the boycotting and disenfranchisement of Negroes. The U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles had advised that circulation of such literature did not constitute a violation of civil rights. However, the black press and civil rights groups had “expressed considerable concern over the circulation of such literature.”
    As I browsed through the seventy-eight-page report, a subhead that read “Eastside Chamber of Commerce—Negro” caught my eye. The name rang a bell. Again I remembered clippings from Mildred’s trunk, articles published in May 1946 reporting some upheaval in the leadership of the Eastside Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles, resulting in Eddie being appointed director of public relations for the organization and chairman of its veterans committee. The FBI account seemed innocuous enough. An informant described the organization as “vitally interested in improving health conditions among the negroes, especially wiping out venereal disease, which, according to military and naval authorities, was showing an alarming increase among the servicemen.” Then I came to the lines: “There are certain members of the organization which might be considered ‘striped.’ By striped he [the FBI informant] meant radicals whom some people might consider as Communists. These members, however, kept their activity on such a plane so as not to reflect on the chamber or the community as a whole and were therefore allowed to maintain their membership.” Of course, Eddie was in the war in 1944, but was the Eastside Chamber of Commerce still under surveillance in 1946? Was Eddie suspected of Communist Party involvement?
    Â 
    I returned from the National Archives with more questions than when I left. I worried that perhaps Eddie did have some connection with communists, and that this was the source of his problems. There seemed to be a fear in the family that Eddie’s problems with the Army might have been his own doing. Could those problems rise again to be his undoing now? For the most part all that the government’s extensive spying on black soldiers and the black community turned up was a determined refusal by African Americans to any longer accept segregation, discrimination, and mistreatment. The government was treating civil rights activism as criminal. Anytime black people voiced or acted out their objections to racism, both the military and the FBI saw this as subversive. Eddie was not the kind of man to meekly accept mistreatment. He was not belligerent, but he would have voiced his objections. He would have said that the country needed some serious improvement, as he did in the