Dovey Undaunted

by Tonya Bolden

  Putney added that other Black WAACs had offered their resignations and that Mary McLeod Bethune’s NCNW had expressed its opposition to the plan.

  CAPTAIN DOVEY M. JOHNSON returned to the road, keeping the faith in America, in Bethune’s vision, in herself.

  In the winter of 1943–1944 she was in Ohio. “I am interested only in women of courage and conviction,” she told a reporter at the start of a recruiting drive that would take her, among other places, to Columbus, Akron, and Warren, with detours to inspect Black WACs posted in Indiana (at Camp Atterbury) and in Kentucky (at Camp Breckinridge and Fort Knox). What she found at those posts made her smile.

  “Brown America may well be proud of the fine representation they now have in the WAC. I saw our women engaged in over fifty vital jobs,” Dovey told a reporter. At Camp Atterbury, she met Black women who served, for example, as dental and physician assistants and drove ambulances—sometimes twelve hours a day.

  In the spring of 1944, Pittsburgh Courier editor and columnist Toki Schalk proudly reported on an event in Cincinnati sponsored by Alpha Kappa Alpha, a Black sorority. Dovey Johnson was, said Schalk, “without doubt one of this age’s most forceful speakers.”

  RUSSIAN FORCES HAD TROUNCED German troops on the Eastern Front by then.

  American and British forces had beaten Axis forces in North Africa.

  Then came D-Day—June 6, 1944—when some 160,000 Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy, France. This was the start of Operation Overlord, whose goal was to wrest control of Western Europe from Nazi hands.

  Ten months later, on April 12, 1945, America was in mourning. President Roosevelt, the only person to serve as a US president for more than two terms, died of a massive stroke, leaving his vice president, Harry Truman, to see the war effort through.

  A little over two weeks after President Roosevelt died, Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler committed suicide. Within days, Nazi forces in Italy, then in Germany, Holland, and Denmark, surrendered. Four months later, in early August, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  “PEACE! It’s Over,” declared the Charlotte Observer on August 15, 1945.

  Captain Dovey M. Johnson was soon homeward bound with a stop along the way in New York City, where her sister Bea lived with her husband, Gene.

  On Broadway, the Big Apple’s most famous boulevard, Dovey had a fantastic time at one of what would be many postwar ticker-tape parades. “All around me, grown men wept openly and complete strangers hugged each other. I stood a-tiptoe in my starched dress uniform, cheering and waving a flag amidst a blizzard of ticker tape so thick it obscured the edges of the shops and theater marquees and office buildings that lined both sides of the street.”

  For a moment in time “black and white alike, it made no difference. . . . If every day could have been like the golden afternoon of that victory parade, when millions of people of every race cheered the arrival of peace . . .”

  PEACE! It’s Over.

  An estimated 50 million to 80 million people, military and civilian—men, women, girls, boys—died in World War II.

  From bombs, bullets, flamethrowers, armored tank shells.

  In fires.

  In below-zero cold.

  Of hunger.

  Of disease.

  In POW camps.

  In concentration camps.

  PEACE! It’s Over.

  In America’s fight for those “four freedoms,” millions of Black Americans had seriously rallied ’round the flag.

  More than 900,000 Black men served in the US Army, many consigned to noncombat duties stateside and overseas. Only one division of Black soldiers, the 92nd Infantry Division, saw combat in Europe.

  The Army Air Corps had its first Black flyboys, the Tuskegee Airmen. Of the nearly one thousand pilots trained at Alabama’s Tuskegee Army Airfield, about half saw action overseas, proving their bravery by flying roughly 1,500 missions and more than 15,000 sorties in Europe and North Africa.

  Roughly 167,000 Black men had served in the Navy, early on only as cooks or mess stewards.

  About 18,000 Black men had served in the Marine Corps. Roughly 12,000 of these Leathernecks saw action in the Pacific, including on the Japanese island of Iwo Jima, site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles, one stamped on American memories by the famous photograph of six white Marines raising a US flag on Mount Suribachi.

  Black men, roughly 5,000, also served in the Coast Guard. Three became ship commanders.

  Troops of American women had proved themselves ready and brave as well. Some 59,000 served in the Army Nurse Corps, which accepted only about 500 Black women. Still, that was better than the Navy Nurse Corps (with roughly 11,000 women), which didn’t admit a Black woman (Phyllis Mae Dailey) until March 1945.

  As for Dovey and other Black WACs, they numbered a little over 6,500 of the corps’s more than 150,000 women.

  WACs had paved the way for women to serve in other branches of the military, ones not very—or not at all—welcoming to Black women.

  A mere 72 of roughly 90,000 WAVES (the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) were Black.

  Only five Black women were among the nearly 12,000 SPARs (the Coast Guard’s Women’s Reserve—the name derived from the Coast Guard’s Latin motto Semper Paratus—“Always Ready”).

  Of the roughly 1,100 WASPs (Women’s Air Force Service Pilots), a few were Asian and one was Native American but no Black women were accepted. The Marine Corps’s Women’s Reserve also barred Black women.

  PEACE! It’s Over.

  But racial discrimination, surely, wasn’t over in America. Neither was sexism. Still, so many Black people and so many women who served in the armed forces had a sense of new possibilities.

  So what would thirty-one-year-old Captain Dovey Mae Johnson, a Black woman with serious leadership chops, do now?

  Remain in the armed forces as her friend Ruth Lucas would do?

  Return to teaching?

  Work again for Mary McLeod Bethune?

  9

  HER LEGACY TO ME

  EDITH WIMBISH STEERING HER to Spelman . . .

  The Hurleys’ move to Atlanta . . .

  Mary Mae Neptune encouraging her, rescuing her . . .

  Mary McLeod Bethune handpicking her for that “something else” . . .

  Luck?

  Or was there something about Dovey that compelled Life to pave the way for her, open doors, put her in the right place at the right time?

  It was because of a chance meeting with A. Philip Randolph during the war that, after it, Captain Dovey M. Johnson became a warrior in a different sort of war.

  CHARISMATIC ACTOR TURNED ACTIVIST A. Philip Randolph had as a young man taken on an upper-class British accent and had a penchant for “vouchsafe” and other quaint words. But behind his genteel ways was the heart of a street fighter.

  Randolph, whose threat of a March on Washington had helped propel FDR to issue Executive Order 8802 and to create the Fair Employment Practice Committee, was in the forefront of the fight to save that agency, which was set to shutter on June 30, 1946.

  A flyer for a labor rally in Chicago in 1937. In 1925 Florida-born Asa Philip Randolph founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a labor union dedicated to getting better working conditions and higher pay for the Black men and women who worked as porters and maids on railroad cars manufactured and operated by the Pullman Car Company, which once dominated the railroad car industry.

  During the war, Black employment in the defense industry had nearly tripled, rising from 3 percent to 8 percent. Many of these Black hires were limited to the lowest paying jobs, as janitors and cafeteria workers, for example. But a job was a job. Without the FEPC, Black people might lose those jobs. Without a watchdog agency to investigate claims of discrimination, plants could not only fire, but also refuse to hire Black people.

  The FEPC was also a watchdog on discrimination in federal government jobs. This
opened the way for more Black women and men to become civil servants, from cleaners, clerks, and messengers to stenographers and even supervisors in, say, the Treasury Department. Without the FEPC, those doors might slam shut. By war’s end, Black employment in the government had more than tripled, to some 200,000 jobs.

  To save the FEPC, back in 1943, Randolph had launched the National Council for a Permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee. In letters, in articles, in speeches, Randolph was relentless.

  “Where there is no freedom of opportunity and no economic security we cannot speak of democracy,” he wrote to Du Bois during the war, urging him to join his council to save the FEPC. “That is the ‘why’ of our fight against the Axis; that is the ‘why’ of our insistence that the F.E.P.C. be made permanent by Congressional act.”

  Also during the war, before a Senate subcommittee on labor and education, Randolph billboarded the fact that with so many white men off to war there was a shortage of white skilled railroad workers. This shortage led to delays (including in troop transports) and to accidents because of botched work by inexperienced men.

  But this shortage did not have to be. There were ample qualified Black railroad workers—from brakemen and switchmen to machinists and boilermakers—who were unemployed because of a catch-22. Many railroad companies refused to hire skilled workers who were not in a union. Many white-run unions refused to have Black members.

  “There cannot be full employment unless there is fair employment,” Randolph told that Senate subcommittee. He stressed, too, that racial prejudice and racial discrimination were two different things.

  One was an emotion.

  The other was a practice.

  Instead of waiting for white people’s emotions to change, Randolph was out to stop a discriminatory practice.

  DOVEY FIRST MET RANDOLPH when she was seeking Black WACs in Kansas City, Missouri, at a gathering in the home of a fellow WAC. After Randolph watched Dovey hold forth in a recruiting pitch, he invited her to look him up if she was ever in New York City.

  While visiting Bea, after celebrating at that ticker-tape parade, Dovey telephoned Randolph. The result was an appointment to see him in his offices at 217 West 125th Street, a three-story walk-up near the world-famous Apollo Theater. When Dovey left Randolph’s office that autumn morning, she was thoroughly committed to his crusade, feeling as if she had “been fired from a cannon.”

  Before long, hup-two-three-four, Dovey was in Washington, DC, to get her assignment from the Black woman who ran Randolph’s council: the whip-smart, savvy midwesterner Anna Arnold Hedgeman.

  At Hedgeman’s headquarters on F Street, NW, in DC, Dovey learned that she was to be the West Coast representative, to campaign for a permanent FEPC in California, Oregon, and the state of Washington, all home to major aircraft and ship manufacturers, employing thousands.

  Before Dovey went west, she went home as planned. Neither Mama nor Grandma Rachel was thrilled about her taking a job that would put three thousand miles between her and them.

  “Mama’s face fell and Grandma grew quiet” on that early autumn day.

  Dovey knew they would miss her terribly, as they’d missed her when she was at Spelman, when she taught in South Carolina, when she served as a WAC. Now, again, they would have to contend with sporadic visits. But Dovey assured them that she wouldn’t be out on the West Coast forever. And of course, when Dovey left 921 East Hill Street, she left with their love.

  After that, Dovey traveled farther south to fulfill a pledge.

  “ALWAYS, SHE’D LIVED MODESTLY, sustained by her students and surrounded by her books. Even now the works of the writers she’d taught me to love—Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Austen, Dickens—lined the walls of the tiny one-room apartment.”

  It was late October, 1945. Mary Mae Neptune, retired and in her seventies, was living in Decatur, Georgia. She served her guest tea.

  “But as I surveyed the familiar volumes my gaze wandered to the threadbare furniture, the frayed draperies and worn rugs.” Professor Neptune was living on a very small pension.

  Mentor and mentee had kept in touch. Dovey had continued repaying that loan in pieces. A money order for two dollars here, ten dollars there, more during her military service when her monthly pay was $166 as a lieutenant, $200 as a captain.

  Now Dovey was in Professor Neptune’s home to pay off the balance she owed—plus a little extra.

  “What on earth is this, Dovey Johnson?” asked a shocked Mary Mae Neptune as Dovey placed bill after bill on a table for a grand total of $250.

  Bill after bill after bill with Dovey “groping for some way to put into words the full weight of my indebtedness, the impossibility of ever repaying her legacy to me.”

  Dovey soon left that tiny apartment with its crowd of books, threadbare furniture, frayed draperies, worn rugs. When she did, she had Mary Mae Neptune’s blessing on the FEPC work ahead of her.

  WITH HER EXCELLENT PUBLIC relations and public speaking skills fine-tuned in the military, Field Representative Dovey M. Johnson sounded the alarm about the need for a permanent FEPC to Black people, white people, Latinos. In San Diego. In Los Angeles. In San Francisco. She worked with a range of civic and religious organizations. She raised funds for Randolph’s National Council too.

  Dovey described her work to Florence Read as “stimulating.” Something desperately needed. “Somehow I have not been able to switch over to routine living. . . . I’ve got to be busy.” After all those weeks and months of recruiting Black WACs, her new venture for the FEPC, talking to group after group, was perfect.

  “California has a peculiar social chemistry,” Dovey remarked in December 1945 to a group in the Bay Area community of Vallejo. By social chemistry Dovey meant California’s racial and religious diversity. She urged the crowd to see the strength in that diversity and to recognize that when any one group “suffers discrimination, no other group is secure.”

  This was according to the Vallejo Observer, a Black-owned biweekly. The newspaper also reported that Dovey “cited recent United States Employment Service figures which list 75 per cent of unemployed persons as members of minority groups while 50 per cent of available jobs are marked ‘for white only.’ ” Dovey called on the crowd to write to their senators and representatives urging them to vote yes on a permanent FEPC.

  But a bill for a broad-based, muscular FEPC was not to be. It would fail to clear Congress thanks to opposition from white southerners in the Senate.

  Though the FEPC died, Dovey’s work on the West Coast was not in vain. She did raise people’s consciousness. What’s more, had she never gone west, she might never have met that “soul on fire” who inspired her to blaze another trail.

  10

  SHATTER THE MONSTER

  “THE ANSWER FOR BLACK PEOPLE, she told me in one of our first conversations, lay in the law. It was the law, misapplied, twisted, disingenuously interpreted, that had generated the monstrosity known as separate but equal. And it was the law just as surely, she argued, that could—that would—shatter the monster.”

  “She” was Pauli Murray, that “soul on fire,” who in 1933 had earned a bachelor’s degree in English from New York City’s prestigious then all-woman Hunter College. Pauli had been one of only four Black students in a class of 250.

  In 1944 she graduated from Howard University School of Law at the top of her class, the only woman in a class of seven.

  Before Howard Law, Murray had applied to the graduate school of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  She was rejected because she was Black.

  After Howard Law, she applied to Harvard Law—with a letter of recommendation from none other than President Roosevelt.

  She was rejected because she was a woman.

  Pauli Murray hadn’t been naive. She knew the all-white University of North Carolina and the all-male (and nearly all-white) Harvard Law would reject her. She wanted to make a case, a point, to have a paper trail of the injustice of Jim Crow
and of what she termed Jane Crow, the subjugation of women to second-class citizenship.

  Pauli Murray in 1946. In December of that year, this native of Baltimore raised in Durham, North Carolina, received a Mademoiselle Merit Award, as one of the magazine's 10 picks for "Young Women of the Year." At the time she was practicing law in New York City. Murray, also a gifted writer, became the first Black person to earn a doctorate in law from Yale Law in 1965. The following year she was a cofounder of the National Organization for Women. In 1977, she became the Episcopal Church's first Black woman priest.

  Dovey had known Murray by reputation. What an absolute thrill it was to meet her in the fall of 1945 at a forum in Southern California where Dovey spoke on the FEPC. Murray, then at work on a master’s in law from the University of California at Berkeley, was in the audience. After Dovey’s speech the two got talking.

  The answer for black people, she told me . . . lay in the law.

  “As I studied her,” Dovey wrote, “watched her quarterback discussions with her Berkeley colleagues, soaked up her cerebrations on the Constitution and the wrongs it could right if properly applied, I felt the power of an intellect that swallowed me up.”

  Dovey began reading all manner of things legal, from Pauli Murray’s articles in the California Law Review to US Supreme Court opinions. Dovey grappled with the intricacies of the Constitution, of rulings, of laws.

  “The more I processed Pauli’s gospel—and a gospel it truly was—the more the law drew me like a magnet.”

  Once again there was Dovey with a big-deal dream. Black intellectual prowess was widely doubted outside the Black community—despite the Frederick Douglasses, the Du Boises, the Carter G. Woodsons, the Mary Church Terrells, the Mary McLeod Bethunes, the A. Philip Randolphs, the Pauli Murrays. What’s more, in and outside the Black community, many people deemed lawyering men’s work, believing that women—“the weaker sex”—lacked the mental muscle, the stamina to master the law.