Honoring Sergeant Carter

by Allene Carter

  Although Eddie was ambivalent about civilian life, he decided to give it a try. But he was not cut out for domestic service as a cook. He tried his hand at business, purchasing a surplus military landing craft for $200 and using its attention-getting quality to advertise local movies. Whimsically named the Ruptured Duck, the odd vehicle served for a time to take people out on fishing trips. Eddie, however, was not the kind of person to easily slap people on the back and keep them entertained with fishing stories. His days as a businessman were numbered, although he remained in business long enough to become briefly an officer of the troubled Eastside Chamber of Commerce.

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  The chamber of commerce was established in 1937 with the purpose of advancing commercial, cultural, and civic interests in the east section of the city. The organization also fought actively against racial discrimination in employment. Composed mainly of local black businessmen and a handful of whites, the chamber of commerce boasted a membership of two hundred by 1944. I knew from my research that the FBI took an active interest in the organization that year. In fact, in its November 1944 report on so-called foreign-inspired agitation among blacks in Los Angeles, the FBI devoted considerable attention to the doings of the Eastside Chamber of Commerce. On at least two occasions FBI informants, identified only as T-7 and T-8, reported on the chamber of commerce’s activities.

  According to the FBI report, on October 20, 1944, informant T-7 advised the FBI that the Eastside Chamber of Commerce was vitally interested in improving health conditions in the black community, especially with regard to venereal diseases. Apparently, military authorities were disturbed by an “alarming increase” of venereal disease among servicemen. Concluding that the “breakfast clubs,” which operated during the hours from midnight to 8 a.m., were the main cause of the spread of venereal infection, the military had placed a number of these clubs off limits to military personnel.

  This move by the military provoked a howl of protest from local tavern owners and civic leaders, especially when it became known that the military was considering placing the entire Central Avenue area, a thriving black business district, out of bounds. Meetings between community leaders and the military were hastily arranged. It was brought to the military’s attention that such a change in policy might lead to black servicemen seeking recreation in white areas of the city, which, as the FBI report observed, would likely lead to racial unrest. The timely intervention of the Eastside Chamber of Commerce, in collaboration with military and naval authorities, produced a solution. Of course, any solution had to be in accord with the military’s belief that it was best to keep black soldiers “within their element.” After some discussion, the military and the businessmen agreed to a set of guidelines for bar and tavern owners to follow with regard to serving military personnel. Printed in the form of a circular, the plan was distributed to business owners in the Central Avenue area, to the apparent satisfaction of all concerned.

  The FBI report shed light on the uneasy relationship between the military and the black community, but informant T-7 had a more direct interest in the Eastside Chamber of Commerce: sniffing out potential radicals in the organization. The chamber of commerce’s policy was to accept businessmen as members regardless of their personal political beliefs, so long as they had no criminal record and did nothing to cause problems for the community or the “colored race” as a whole. This apparently left the door open for radicals to slip in, people whom T-7 referred to as “striped”—“radicals whom some people might consider as Communists.” These members, however, kept their activity on such a plane as to not reflect on the chamber of commerce or the community as a whole and were therefore allowed to maintain their membership. The names of these “striped” members were not given in this summary report, though presumably T-7 passed them along to the FBI. There was no explanation of what they might have said or done that led T-7 to label them in such a way. Nor was there any suggestion that the FBI questioned T-7’s characterization of these individuals. Apparently T-7’s word alone was good enough for the FBI.

  Informant T-8 was charged with the more mundane task of gathering statistical information, such as membership (200), annual dues ($12), and budget ($15,000, financed through subscription pledges).

  Whether T-7 and T-8, or their equivalents, were still spying on the Eastside Chamber of Commerce in 1946, when Eddie was a member, is something I do not know. I found no records in my research to suggest that the chamber of commerce was under surveillance at that time, but given the FBI’s intense interest in the threat of “racial unrest,” it would seem likely that the agency was still keeping watch. By May 1946, Eddie was the chamber of commerce’s director of public relations. Apparently, trouble of a financial nature had developed in the organization and an investigating committee was appointed to look into it. Two of the officers were queried and, according to accounts I found in the Official East Side News, refused to turn over records of bank balances and other information. The two officers were suspended by the executive committee in a meeting that Eddie was reported as attending.

  Eddie and another board member were named to occupy the two ousted men’s positions while the books were being checked. At the same time, it was announced that Sergeant Carter had agreed to become chairman of the Veterans Bureau of the organization. Eddie was highly regarded in the chamber of commerce. After all, he was a hero of many European campaigns and winner of the Distinguished Service Cross. According to the announcement, Sergeant Carter’s first move would be to build a strong interracial veterans committee and to stage a big fund-raising supper to help build the committee. Perhaps Eddie’s experiences in the war made him feel that black and white veterans might be able to work together and set an example for improving relations between the races.

  He didn’t get very far with his plans. His business ventures were not going well and he was worried about how he could support his family. With millions of white veterans returning from the war, black workers were pushed out of the skilled jobs they had gained as a result of President Roosevelt’s desegregation of the defense plants. I’m sure Eddie did not relish the thought of seeking work as a common laborer or household servant.

  At the same time, racial assaults on black people had increased after the war. For example, a huge battle was taking place in Los Angeles and throughout California over racially restrictive housing covenants that sought to prevent black families from buying homes in white neighborhoods. Black families that dared to challenge the covenants by moving into white neighborhoods were met with cross burnings, and other acts of intimidation. The black community was fighting back with lawsuits, protests, and various mobilizations—and in 1948 the California Supreme Court would finally outlaw restrictive covenants. It was a tense time as black veterans and civilians fought back against racist attacks. Government informants were busily looking for “subversives” in community organizations all over the place. Although I couldn’t prove it, I had a strong feeling that Eddie’s involvement in promoting an interracial veterans committee would have been viewed as suspicious by the authorities.

  While Eddie may have seen in his interracial veterans committee a way to help the struggle against discrimination and mistreatment, his pressing need was for income to support his family. Once again, in the Army he would see a way to support his family in a manner that he felt was dignified and honorable. While the medals he had won meant little in civilian life, in the Army they were badges of recognition. In September 1946, he reenlisted, and by mid-October he was stationed at Camp Lee, Virginia, assigned as a staff sergeant to the First Group’s Special Service. It didn’t take him long to come to the attention of the camp newspaper. An article about his exploits in the war appeared on October 30 in the Lee Traveller. The article was completely laudatory and gave no hint of gathering clouds.

  As he had done during his previous tour of duty, Eddie wrote faithfully to Mildred. By
the end of October he was writing about plans for Mildred and the children to come to Virginia. He had investigated and found apartments suitable for the family. The weather was agreeable, and the cost of living was low. “We can live a darn sight cheaper than we could ever live in California,” he wrote on October 28. “Virginia,” he told Mildred, “is 90 percent better than Georgia. You haven’t anything to fear.”

  Eddie had good reason for thinking so positively about his new life at Camp Lee. As a winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, he was held in high regard as a war hero. His experience and skills as a combat veteran were valued. At Camp Lee, Eddie hoped to find the success that had eluded him in Los Angeles. “The officers seem to think that I am an expert soldier. So I might as well stay where I am well thought of. I can make good here.”

  He promised to send Mildred some money to help her with the move to Virginia. The plan was for her to come there around January 10, after Eddie had arranged for a temporary apartment. Eddie said that the commanding general had promised to make available a three-bedroom apartment on the post in the late spring of 1947 as their permanent home. Eddie was overjoyed.

  But instead, Eddie found himself on a train headed to California. The Army had other plans for him. Eddie was right in thinking that he was highly regarded by his immediate superiors. Those who worked directly with him always held him in high regard and considered him an outstanding soldier.

  After the war the government made plans to reorganize state-level National Guards as federally recognized National Guard units capable of serving as trained reserves for the regular Army. In the view of military planners, the experience of World War II underscored the need for highly trained reserves that could be rapidly deployed in case of total war. Planners noted that the key to meeting this critical need was to select an elite group of expert soldiers from the regular Army to be detailed as instructors of the citizen-soldiers in state National Guard units, whose readiness for active duty would be certified by a federal recognition board. Because of his previous experience and outstanding war record, Eddie was handpicked by his officers at Camp Lee to join this elite group of instructors.

  But a national controversy erupted over the plans of some states, including Connecticut and California, to form new racially segregated National Guard units. Civil rights groups, especially local branches of the NAACP, strongly objected. California state officials responded that segregation was necessary to conform with Army racial policy. At its annual convention in 1947, the NAACP urged the secretary of war to order the integration of National Guard units.

  War Department officials replied that the Army had no objections to integration; it was left up to each state to decide racial policy for Guard units. This was a rather disingenuous statement, since the Army was on record as opposing federal legislation to end racial segregation in the armed forces. Moreover, despite objections from the NAACP, the Army at the end of the war had routinely detached black combat volunteers from the white units in which they served and reassigned them to segregated service units. Nevertheless, the controversy, which was widely reported in the press, prompted the governor of Connecticut to voice his opposition to segregated Guard units. In California, on the other hand, there was no report of intervention by Governor Earl Warren. The state’s adjutant general went ahead with plans to form headquarters companies of two battalions of an all-black Sixth Engineer Combat Group of the California National Guard.

  Sergeant Carter reported to the adjutant general’s office in Sacramento, where he met Sergeant Major Woodfred Jordan, the feisty veteran whom I later encountered at the Medal of Honor ceremony. Woodfred, another Army veteran, was also assigned to train guardsmen. The two were then posted to the National Guard Armory on Exposition Boulevard in the center of black Los Angeles, where the headquarters for the Sixth Engineer Combat Group was to be set up. At the armory, Sergeant Carter met and befriended other black soldiers, including Master Sergeant Rance Richardson and Sergeant John Pulliams, who were assigned to the Guard.

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  From Los Angeles, Sergeant Carter was assigned to work as an instructor and adviser to the 1402d Engineer Combat Battalion at San Bernardino, under the command of Captain Frank W. Cleveland, a black veteran and respected community leader in Los Angeles.

  By the summer of 1947, Sergeant Carter was at Camp Roberts in the mountains near San Luis Obispo giving the men their annual two weeks of intensive combat training. He also trained them in handling heavy equipment. Eddie was a regular presence at the weekly National Guard meetings during the rest of the year as well.

  Eddie’s assignment was both ironic and exciting. The irony was that during the war Eddie had fought side by side with white soldiers and only a year earlier he was working on plans for black and white veterans to work together, but he now found himself assigned by the Army to a segregated National Guard unit. He could not have thought of this as progress. Nevertheless, it was exciting to be training young black men (and other men of color) in an environment where the best that he had to offer would shine. Sergeant Carter was a challenging teacher, a true mentor, and an appealing older brother figure to dozens of young black men. He was an empowering model of dignified, competent, and self-confident manhood. He looked the part as well, with his immaculate, neatly pressed uniform, polished boots, chest emblazoned with medals. From a heroic warrior Eddie remade himself into an inspiring teacher. It gave him enormous satisfaction and pride.

  In 1997, I met Neale Henderson when National Guard veterans invited me to speak about Eddie. Henderson was one of the young men Eddie had trained. “It was at Fort MacArthur, just outside of Los Angeles on the coast, that I first met Sergeant Carter when I went for my two weeks’ training with the Guard. He gave us our basic training—marching, drilling, M1 rifle training, and so on. Later, at San Luis Obispo, he trained us in the use of heavy equipment. Then, at Camp Roberts, when we were called up for the regular Army, he trained us in how to put up steel treadway bridges, how to build an abutment for the foundation and slope it properly. He taught us to operate bulldozers in road building, and put in gulleys and drainage. He trained us up in the mountains on thirty- and fifty - caliber machine guns, too. He was a hell of a guy. He could do it all. He was a soldier that I wanted to be like, and he taught me how to be a good soldier. With the training that he gave me, I soon made corporal and then sergeant in the Army.

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  “Another time at Camp Roberts,” Henderson recalled, “we were laying a mine field, and he was showing us how to do the mapping of a mine field. Afterwards, he showed us how to breach a mine field with a special torpedo. Three of us were being trained. We put the torpedo in, we pulled the pin, and then we took off running. But this young recruit who was with us went down before we reached safety. When David McCoy and I saw that he was down, we turned and ran back to get him out of danger so he wouldn’t get hurt. Sergeant Carter told us we did the right thing.”

  Eddie worked with the National Guard for a year and a half. During that time he and the other Army instructors succeeded in expanding the Guard from an undermanned, poorly prepared outfit into a full-fledged, well-trained military organization fully capable of being called up on a moment’s notice for regular Army duty. This was a major accomplishment for which the Army instructors were largely responsible. Eddie knew that what they were doing was important and he took pride in their achievement. He had been determined to excel in this assignment, and he did. He was happy and so were his commanding officers. The black Army instructors had turned segregation in the National Guard to their advantage and proved that black officers and instructors could turn out top-notch soldiers and engineers.

  Despite the appearance that all was going well, it was while he was serving as an instructor with the National Guard that Eddie discovered he was under surveillance. The men Eddie
worked with also became aware of the surveillance. John Pulliams, an Army Air Force man who was assigned to work as an administrative assistant in the armory on Exposition Boulevard, recalled being questioned by a man from Army intelligence. “I remember Ebony magazine had published a big article that talked about Sergeant Carter,” Pulliams said. “Carter was something of a celebrity. I got to know him when we worked at the National Guard Armory. He was a very quiet person, but he was a better soldier than me. One day in 1947 this man from Army intelligence came and asked me about Carter. Was he a communist? I said I never saw anything that indicated he was associated with any communist activity. So I knew they had him under surveillance, and sometimes I saw their cars parked outside.”

  Woodfred Jordan recounted an incident he witnessed. “Carter knew he was under some kind of surveillance. Sometimes when we were at [battalion instructor] Richardson’s house, Carter would pull aside the curtains and look out the window. ‘Come over here and look at this,’ he’d say to us. ‘See that car sitting there,’ he’d say, pointing to a car parked on the street with men inside it wearing civilian clothes. ‘They have me under surveillance.’ He said they kept track of where he was. One time, he even walked outside and approached them, but they drove away.”

  The government’s interest in black personnel in the California National Guard was not new. In 1944, according to an FBI report I found in the National Archives on alleged foreign-inspired agitation among blacks in Los Angeles, the FBI had at least one informant reporting on black California state Guard units. The informant, identified only as T-1, seemed especially interested in any weapons in possession of the all-black Seventh Battalion. “The officers of this [unit] wear side arms. The men carry rifles and machine guns,” the report stated. “Informant T-1 advised that some of the officers take their side arms home; however, they are requested to unload them. They are required to turn in their machine guns and rifles at the armory before departing after drill.”