by Tonya Bolden
Bethune’s vision was in keeping with Black America’s Double V campaign.
Victory for democracy overseas.
Victory for democracy in the States.
Inevitably Bethune became very involved with Black WAACs. Denied the post of WAAC assistant director, she secured a position as a special assistant to the Secretary of War on the selection of Black officer candidates, known as the First Forty. All were “handpicked and approved” by her, stated Putney.
Yes, this was what Bethune had in mind for Dovey in the summer of 1941, anticipating that the WAAC bill would pass.
Before May 1942 was out, Dovey was back in Charlotte to hand in her application for Officer Candidate School. But when she visited the army recruitment center (located in the post office) she met with resistance. Mister Army Recruiter, a white man, refused to take Dovey’s application. He claimed to know nothing about the WAAC. When she pleaded her cause, he ordered her to get out of his sight, threatened her with arrest.
Dovey, undaunted, went to Richmond, Virginia. Things were “more open” there, Bethune had said. And, fortunately, Dovey had family there: Mama’s brother Ally, a movie projectionist, and his wife, Bessie, lived with their boy and girl in what seems to have been a rather nice home at 502 S. Harrison Street.
There was nothing nice about Richmond’s recruiting center, also in a post office. There, a white Mister Recruiter took Dovey’s telephone number but then never called her. During her second visit, a different Mister Recruiter “interrogated” her “at length” and “seemed stunned by my educational background.” Finally, her persistence paid off.
On the Fourth of July 1942, the Baltimore Afro-American saluted her with the headline “Miss Dovey Johnson Passes WAAC Exams.”
About a week later, in Richmond, twenty-eight-year-old Dovey Mae Johnson was one of five women sworn in as a WAAC officer candidate.
On July 14, Staunton, Virginia’s News-Leader reported that Dovey and the four other women (all white) were soon to report to Iowa’s Fort Des Moines where they’d be issued “uniforms and other equipment, including two girdles” and “train under strict military discipline.” Dovey, five-foot-four and 123 pounds, probably wouldn’t need a girdle.
A page from a WAAC newsletter featuring a piece on Dovey. In it, we learn that before she became a recruiter she was in motor transport (likely driving a truck) and in public relations. She is referred to here as a first officer, which is equivalent to captain.
7
ALL-IN
ON MONDAY, JULY 20, 1942, Dovey M. Johnson, serial number A-308002, reported for duty at Fort Des Moines.
“I was dumped out—no other word will do—at the entrance to Fort Des Moines.”
The vehicle that dumped out Dovey at the training camp gates was an army truck tasked all day with ferrying recruits from the train station. The driver had “shunted” Dovey, the only Black woman on that run, to the rear of the truck.
When Dovey emerged from it—
“Negroes on one side!” a white officer commanded. “White women on the other!”
Dovey soon learned that “white” included Asians and light-skinned Puerto Ricans.
Negroes on one side!
White women on the other!
Though stung, Dovey couldn’t have been shocked. Like everyone else in America, she knew that Jim Crow ruled in the US armed forces.
________
FOR DOVEY AND OTHER Black women who arrived at Fort Des Moines on that July day, the presence of Mary McLeod Bethune was a godsend. Her encouragement, however, came with pressure.
“I know that you understand very clearly why you are here,” she told Dovey. “You must see to it that the others do not forget. I’m counting on you to do that.”
“That” was being a credit to the race, proving that they had what it took to lead, something countless women and men, children too, of African descent in America had been doing for more than three hundred years.
And thousands of Black Americans were beyond proud of the First Forty (actually the first thirty-nine because the fortieth never showed).
These Black WAAC officer candidates included teachers like Dovey, a waitress, a beautician, a musician, a housekeeper, a homemaker, an insurance agent, an office manager, a chiropodist. On August 1, the Black-owned New York Age trumpeted their presence at Fort Des Moines.
“Though a high school education is the minimum requirement for officer training,” said the Age, “77 percent of the successful applicants had college backgrounds, and the majority of them received degrees.” Some of those college degrees were from historically Black institutions such as Spelman, Howard, Prairie View in Texas, and Tuskegee in Alabama. Others were from majority-white schools such as Simmons College in Boston and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
The New York Age quoted Director Hobby as saying that as she reviewed the Black applications, she was “impressed by the integrity of their devotion to their country, and I was moved by the intensity of their desire to serve that country.”
What some of these Black women said to the New York Age bore that out.
Cleopatra Daniels, a schoolteacher from Birmingham, Alabama, declared, “If we are to win the war, it must be won with the help and cooperation of all of us.”
“I want to do my part to make America safe for my children and their children’s children,” stated Ruth Freeman, a graduate of Prairie View and a schoolteacher in Liberty, Texas.
Dovey seconded those emotions while being initiated into life army-style. She was all-in.
All-in while being outfitted with everything from pink bras and girdles and light-brown thick stockings to khakis (shirt, skirt, jacket).
All-in while learning to make a bed military-style with mitered corners and “so tight on the blanket fold that a quarter would bounce,” remembered WAAC-mate Charity Adams Earley.
That bed was a cot with a flat, hard mattress. At the head, a tall locker. At the end, a footlocker. With that cot and the lockers came instructions on how to hang and pack things and the right way to shine government-issued brown leather oxfords.
REVEILLE AT 6:30 A.M. Lights out at 9 p.m.
Between those hours there was training in close order drill along with classes in hygiene, first aid, map reading, military courtesy and customs, and other subjects. Physical training, including swimming, was another requirement.
“You are a member of the first Women’s Army in the history of the United States,” stated the WAC Field Manual, published a year after Dovey reported to Des Moines. “You are one of the small percentage of women qualified in mind and body to perform a soldier’s noncombat duties.” According to the manual, “The demands of war are varied, endless, and merciless. To satisfy these demands, you must be fit.”
A training day at Fort Des Moines in 1943. The caption on the back of this photograph states: "Swinging along in perfect cadence," these Black WAACS "demonstrate their proficiency in infantry drill."
The WAC Field Manual recognized that women in the corps had already passed “a rigid examination.” But now the real army training would start. “Now you must build the strength and stamina, the control and coordination, to do a man’s work any hour of the day, every day of the month.”
This manual tells us what Dovey’s physical training was probably like. It listed cadence exercises, from arm swings and flings to shoulder hunching and jumping jacks.
There were push-ups and sit-ups. There were full knee bends with hands on knees and with hands on the floor. There was falling and crawling, two arm tugs, duck waddles, crab walks, crane walks, half swans.
The manual also included training in self-defense, against a left-hand grip, against a two-hand grip, against body holds and choke holds.
WHILE DOVEY WAS DEALING with the grind of basic training, she had Jim Crow cramping her life.
Negroes on one side!
White women on the other!
No living in the same barracks.
&nb
sp; No sharing tables in the mess hall.
No Black officers would be permitted to kick back and relax in the one-and-only officers’ club.
Dovey and the other would-be officers were not without recreational outlets. They could rent bikes at a place near the base and avail themselves of the tennis court on base and, at scheduled times, the swimming pool. But the pool had to be purified after Black women used it—at a time when the nation was fighting Nazi Germany with its calls for racial purity, its propaganda about the superiority of the Nordic race.
It was also at a time when President Roosevelt was maintaining that people the world over had the right to four freedoms: “freedom of speech and expression,” “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” “freedom from want,” and “freedom from fear.”
One WAAC slogan was “We Shall Not Fail Freedom.”
Despite America failing true freedom at home, Dovey stuck it out.
On August 29, 1942, graduation day, she made history as a member of the first class of officers in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. Of the thirty-nine Black officer candidates she was one of thirty-six that had passed muster.
Dovey had endured, she wrote, a “serious, challenging, and often strenuous experience.” But it was also a bonding experience. “The Hup-two-three-four of infantry drill, the classroom lectures and tests, the thrill of being one of hundreds of women marching in step at a retreat parade, the sharing of company miseries caused by swollen feet and tetanus shots all crystalized to make a common denominator in experiences for many who but a few years ago had nothing in common but their sex.”
And Lieutenant Dovey M. Johnson was still all-in after a slap in the face in downtown Des Moines at the Savery Hotel, where the army held special training sessions.
IN DOWNTOWN DES MOINES there was no Jim Crow in public places. So while in town, Black and white WAACs exercised their right to go to the movies together and sit together in the Savery Hotel’s dining hall.
“You darkies move those trays, and sit where you belong,” barked a white male officer one day in that dining hall.
Lieutenant Dovey M. Johnson, along with Lieutenant Irma Jackson Cayton, whose husband, Horace, wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier, and eight other Black WAAC officers, sent a telegram to Mary McLeod Bethune about the incident in the Savery Hotel and other indignities they had been subjected to since arriving in Des Moines.
When word of this telegram reached Fort Des Moines (thanks to a snitch), Colonel Albert C. Morgan, acting post commandant, had Dovey and Irma report to his office.
Dovey Johnson and Mary McLeod Bethune at a luncheon at Fort Des Moines around 1943.
He upbraided them as “agitators.” That telegram to Bethune was tantamount to an act of treason, he claimed. He asked them to resign.
Did Dovey scurry like a frightened mouse into a corner of the office?
“Colonel Morgan’s scare tactics did not work,” wrote Martha S. Putney. Dovey and Irma “knew the definition of ‘treason’ and knew that what Colonel Morgan was talking about was not it.”
Remembered Dovey: “We might be agitators, I told him, but we were not traitors. When we refused to submit our resignations, as he demanded, he stared at us in stony silence for a moment, then waved us out of his office.”
Still Lieutenant Dovey M. Johnson was all-in.
All-in when she was sent out on the road as a WAAC recruiter and induction officer in Black communities, initially in the South.
All-in when doing her duty meant navigating Jim Crow —finding, for example, safe and decent places to grab a twenty-five-cent sandwich, a ten-cent cup of coffee.
Her uniform wasn’t necessarily a shield. A Black person in uniform, male or female, was a prime vexation for many white people.
Dovey remained undaunted: “I believed in the war effort, in the critical role of women in that effort, and in the right of blacks to fight alongside whites—not later, not at some distant future date when America and the army walked out into the light and abandoned Jim Crow, but now.”
When Dovey went out on the road in November 1942 with Tuskegee graduate Lieutenant Ruth Lucas, she knew that recruiting would not be easy. Not a single Black woman had applied for the WAAC Officer Candidate School since they arrived at Fort Des Moines four months earlier. The overall number of Black women enlistees was dismal: less than two hundred.
Segregation within the WAAC was one reason for the low numbers. An even greater turnoff was the nasty rumor that WAACs were really being groomed to be prostitutes for GI Joes.
Dovey sought to win Black women over at schools, at churches, NAACP meetings, YWCAs, community meetings, in people’s homes. In Orangeburg, South Carolina, in mid-December 1942, she and Ruth addressed faculty and students at South Carolina State A&M, at Claflin College, and at Wilkinson High.
In January 1943, in Macon, Georgia, Dovey and Ruth spoke one day at an AME church and on another set up their recruiting center in a post office.
In February they were in Florida, where the Orlando Morning Sentinel wrote: “Lt. Dovey M. Johnson, colored WAAC, will be in Orlando at the Army Recruiting Station, 204 Post Office Bldg, through Thursday for the purpose of interviewing colored girl applicants for the WAACS.”
Later that month Dovey and Ruth were in Tampa, speaking at Black churches, at Gibbs High, and at a community center. In seeking Black WAACs, the duo also took to the airwaves of radio station WTSP. “NEGRO OFFICERS BEGIN WAAC RECRUITING” reads the caption of a photograph in the Tampa Sunday Tribune showing a confident, cheery-looking Dovey, flanked by Ruth Lucas and third officer Thelma M. Brown, in the midst of an interview with substitute schoolteacher Dillie Boyd Ivey.
WHATEVER CONFIDENCE, CHEER, SENSE of purpose Dovey had while in Florida was blunted one evening at a bus station in Miami. Dovey was on her way to another Florida town where she was to meet Ruth Lucas.
With the back of the bus filling up, Dovey took a seat in the front. She was feeling army strong in her uniform, feeling even a “sense of oneness” with white soldiers and sailors boarding that bus. That is, until Mister Bus Driver demanded that Dovey surrender her seat to a white soldier.
Dovey protested. “I am traveling on army business.” She reached for her itinerary. “And I have orders to depart Miami by this bus.”
Mister Bus Driver wasn’t having it. He ordered Dovey off the bus and to the very back of the line.
Dovey acquiesced, perhaps figuring that by the time she got back on the bus she’d end up having to stand. But the outcome was worse than that.
With all the white soldiers and sailors on board, Mister Bus Driver shut the doors and pulled out of the bus station.
Lieutenant Dovey M. Johnson stood there in the darkness.
With her duffel bag.
With humiliation weighing her down.
With rage grabbing at her heels as she trudged to the near-empty bus terminal where she waited for another bus.
For more than an hour.
For more than two.
For more than three.
All-in?
8
OF COURAGE AND CONVICTION
“MY JOB IS TO impress upon every Negro woman that her obligation to her country is just as real as the obligation of any other citizen,” Dovey said to a reporter. This was in Dallas, Texas, in March 1943.
Dovey wrote to Florence Read, still Spelman’s president, telling her that she found Dallas “beautifully planned.” The city’s downtown was “particularly attractive. Tall clean cut buildings—modernistically designed, provide an amazing skyline,” but—“If only the heart of the people might soar heaven ward like the buildings!”
Dovey told Read that she had been called “n----er WAAC” numerous times and had been denied office space in the recruiting office because Blacks and whites weren’t allowed to use the same restroom. Also, one day a cop stopped her and insisted on checking her credentials “to see if I had the right to wear a WAAC uniform.”
In April, Dove
y wrote to Read with good news: “Dear Pres. Read, Just a note to say I was promoted to Captain April 12!”
That summer Dovey and all the other WAACS got glorious news. Come September they would no longer be WAACs but WACs: members of the Women’s Army Corps.
Dovey M. Johnson and Ruth Lucas during a visit to Spelman in the spring of 1943. The woman in the middle is Spelman's president, Florence Read. Ruth will one day become the Air Force's first Black woman colonel.
This was no simple name change.
Thanks to the efforts of Representative Edith Nourse Rogers, the WAC would become, like the Army Nurse Corps, a branch of the US Army. Dovey and the other women doing that behind-the-lines work would be entitled to all the rights and benefits that men in the army had.
Before the conversion became official, in early September 1943, Dovey and other Black WAACs at Fort Des Moines were dealt a blow: There was to be an end to integrated training.
During a meeting headed by Commandant Colonel Frank U. McCoskrie about the particulars of a new Black regiment, a few Black women, including Dovey, expressed their objections to the plan. On her feet and with permission to speak, Dovey removed her captain’s bars from her uniform, indicating that she was prepared to resign her commission or be discharged. “Sir, you are setting us back a hundred years.”
Martha S. Putney, who joined the corps in 1943, wrote that Dovey “stated that if the lessons taught to her and other WAACs by the training films Four Freedoms and Why We Are Fighting were to have any meaning, then the regiment should not exist. It was an emotional speech, and Johnson practically preached to the group. When she finished, the meeting was summarily dismissed.”
A few days after the meeting, that plan for more Jim Crow at Fort Des Moines was scrapped.
