-We'll be doing is sending every registrant
this recording after the program is over
so you can access it at any time
or show it to multiple class sessions if need be.
So what you're going to see now is,
you're going to see your screen sort of shift and change,
and you will hopefully see me in just one second here.
All right.
Good morning, everybody, and I want to tell you,
before we get started with our presentation,
below me here is this Q&A pod,
and it kind of works similar to the chat
that you've been using before.
We will be dedicating some time at the end
for questions for me or Tanita,
and just populate those questions right there.
I will be kind of monitoring them
during Tanita's presentation,
and then after that, we'll, as I said,
save about 10 minutes at the end
to answer everything that you all have been typing in.
So today, how we'll do the program is,
I am going to present for maybe the first 20 minutes or so,
giving you a brief overview of our special exhibit
and talking about African-American,
specifically African-American women in World War II,
showing a couple oral histories from our collection,
and you'll be, of course,
answering questions, poll questions,
and hopefully typing in questions for me.
Then in the second half of the program,
Tanita Davis will be joining us from California.
The wonders of technology here.
We're in New Orleans.
She's in California.
And she'll be giving a presentation, of course,
on her wonderful book, "Mare's War."
If you haven't read it yet, I highly suggest that you do.
It's also available for purchase here at the museum.
She'll be talking about some of the research that went into it,
her motivation for writing this book
and really what it means today.
Of course, she'll be showing some really wonderful images
and some historical film footage throughout.
So to get started today, we here
at the National World War II Museum
have a special exhibit now on view
called "Fighting For The Right To Fight:
African-American Experiences in World War II."
Now, this exhibit is on view
until really the end of the school year,
so if we have any groups that are relatively local,
relatively nearby, please come
and see it before it leaves here and goes somewhere else.
Hopefully this exhibit will also be traveling around the country,
so if you miss it here in New Orleans,
maybe you can catch it in another museum
around the country.
But based on that whole idea,
"Fighting For The Right To Fight,"
I love that title, and so I thought actually today
I would ask you your first poll question
about that title and kind of to lead off our discussion today.
So what we're going to see here is a poll question
come up onto your screen.
Now we'll be answering some multiple-choice ones later,
but this one, I actually wanted your input.
So I want to hear from you all.
Type in what you think fighting for the right
to fight actually means,
and I'll give you a second to kind of type it in,
and then I'll broadcast your results,
so think about that title,
"Fighting For The Right To Fight."
Okay, some good answers coming in right now.
As you all are typing... Oh, good, oh, awesome.
I'm just going to broadcast them so you all can look at them.
I love this description,
"Working to be accepted as full citizens
in the sense of being able to go into combat rather
as second-class citizens who are not up to it."
I don't think I could explain it any better.
Very good.
"Perhaps having one's views considered for changes."
"To be able to fight for something you want to do
or something that you believe in."
Very good, "Struggling to join in."
"African-American soldiers receiving
the same benefits as white soldiers."
Oh, my goodness.
Everybody, these are wonderful responses, exactly,
and that's really what our exhibit here
at the museum is all about.
We look at both the African-American experience
in the military but also here at home
and especially in defense factories, as well.
As I said, today, we're taking a specific look
at African-American women,
and we'll be talking about that in just one second,
but these are awesome responses,
so I hope you're using your scroll button
to check out what other students are saying.
I'm going to kind of save that so I can check out
all of your wonderful responses later,
but great job. Exactly.
So I'm going to move that out of the way
and give you a little bit of a preview of our special exhibit.
So you'll see some images from right below me
here on your screen.
Now, if you all are studying World War II right now,
you know that the United States got into the war
at the attack on Pearl Harbor
December 7th of 1941,
a surprise attack on our Pacific fleet in Hawaii.
The next day, the president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
asked Congress to declare war on Japan.
That happens.
Three days after that,
Germany declares war on the United States.
So now the U.S. is at war.
This is the scene that we're setting in the 1940s, 1941.
Now, with the attack on Pearl Harbor
came this even greater change.
The country wasn't totally ready for war,
wasn't totally prepared.
Another good vocabulary word for that is mobilized.
And so that required a lot of different groups of people
to be involved and using
and utilizing all these different
people and groups and businesses
and whatever it may be all across the country.
So in 1942, President Roosevelt, he began to issue
these directives to increase opportunities
for African-American enlistment in the military,
but that doesn't mean, you know, it was all equal,
it was all fair.
It doesn't mean that the military wasn't segregated,
and that brings us to another great vocabulary term,
so I'm going to ask you all.
We're going to do poll questions back-to-back-to-back here --
What is segregation?
Is it, "A," unfairly treating a person or group of people
differently from other people?
"B," an unfavorable opinion not based on reason or knowledge?
"C," the action of setting someone apart from other people?
Or "D," an oversimplified image of a person or group?
This is a tough one, I think. [ Chuckles ]
See if you guys can...
And I'll broadcast the results in just one second.
All right.
Give you maybe one more minute to vote here.
Okay. I'm going to broadcast and see what you all say.
None of these things that are listed here
are obviously good things.
They're all about prejudice and discrimination,
but actually, "C" is segregation,
the act of setting someone apart from other people,
and that means that the military, as I said,
was totally and completely segregated,
so African-Americans served in all-black units.
There were separate training facilities all the way
down to separate medical supplies
as we're going to hear in an oral history in just one second.
Separate jobs for African-Americans
in general not based on merit
or, you know, where you deserve to be or your training
but solely based on race,
and there was a tremendous amount of discrimination
in the military at the time.
In many branches of the military,
as we're going to see as we look through
a couple other images of the exhibit, African-Americans,
they were essentially assigned to only serve
in these kind of logistical roles or support roles,
like transporting supplies or mess attendants, stewards,
because of this deep distrust
the military had for African-Americans
in anything that they could do to support the military.
There were a few groups that didn't serve
in this sort of capacity.
You all have maybe heard of the Tuskegee Airmen
or a couple Army groups that served in combat in Italy,
but as a whole, African-Americans
were relegated to these kinds of jobs
that, you know, I mentioned earlier.
Great job, everybody, on this poll.
Actually, that hid the wrong thing.
Let me get back to my presentation.
That's Tanita's.
Let me move that one out of the way for a second.
All right. So as we move forward here,
we can see a couple more images of the exhibit,
and so here you can see we developed...
Each branch of the military is mentioned
with, of course, artifacts from our collection.
And you can see here's another shot.
Of course there are oral histories
throughout this exhibit.
As I said, a variety of artifacts,
so here we could see a uniform
from the Marine Corps in our view
and, of course, historical film footage
and even a video piece that we produced,
and a really amazing thing that we have here, too,
if I have time at the end, I'll talk about it.
We have Medals of Honor from five of the seven
African-American Medal of Honor recipients.
Now, these men did not receive the Medal of Honor,
the military's highest award for bravery,
during World War II, but after that,
and so we'll actually talk about that at the end
if we have some time and if anybody has questions.
But what I want to turn it to now
is African-American women in the military
because that is really what "Mare's War" is all about,
and so, you know,
it's tough to be an African-American in the military
because you're being treated unfairly.
It's also tough to be an African-American women.
There was also this sort of distrust that people were unsure
if women even had a role in the military at the time.
The military was very different than it is today.
Women served in auxiliary units of each branch of the military.
So, as we see in "Mare's War,"
Mare served in the WAC, or the Women's Army Corps,
and we can actually see
in this next picture some WACs right here.
These are WAC mechanics.
There were about 4,000 African-American women
who served, for example, in this group called the WACs.
Now women in uniform, they did a lot of different types of jobs,
so, of course, here you can see these are female mechanics.
They took office jobs and different sort of clerical jobs
in the armed forces to essentially free men to fight.
They did a variety of things, drove trucks,
repaired airplanes,
lab technicians, rigged parachutes,
radio operators,
flew military aircraft,
and as we see in "Mare's War,"
and as we see some other examples, too,
women even were in charge of sorting the thousands
upon thousands and thousands of pieces of mail
that were going to the fronts to our soldiers.
So these were all critical jobs to make the military function
far, far away from home.
And what I want to play for you,
instead of me telling you all about this,
I would like for you to actually hear it from
a firsthand perspective,
and who we're going to hear from today at least first
is a WAC named Lavenia Breaux.
She actually grew up not too far from here in New Orleans,
in Slidell, Louisiana,
and after the attack on Pearl Harbor, she joined the WAC.
She always dreamed of traveling, and so she figured
that this would be, you know,
the military would allow her to do it,
so it'd be a great way to see different parts
of the world potentially.
So, in this clip from her oral history,
which I'm about to play for you here,
she is going to talk about segregation within the barracks,
so your living quarters, right after basic training.
Now what I'll do for this clip
and for all the other clips throughout is,
so you all can see and hear everything okay,
I'm going to pause my video and audio
so the streaming is cooperative,
and then I'm going to come back after that.
Just as a note, these oral histories are always
just slightly quieter than my voice, so teachers,
you might want to just turn up the volume.
-The barracks that I was in, the French barracks
I was in
after basic training,
they had
about 29
or 30 of us in that barracks,
and they had brought in a company
that had just come in from basic training,
and bless goodness, the women was white.
And they spread the sheet,
the blankets in a rope
across the middle of the barracks,
and the black women
in the --
laying in the back got up...
and one of them said, "Oh, we don't like this.
We don't appreciate this kind of carrying on."
And the others got up,
and they started pulling blankets
off of that line
that was separating us
from each other
and pulled them down and said, "We don't want this.
We don't like it, and we're not going to have it,
and we don't want separation.
You don't want to sleep in here with us,
go out there and get under the tree."
And the girl that was supposed to be in our company,
and that show you how raw
our existence was.
She was to be our...
-All right. So those women hanging up that line
to separate the African-American women from the white women,
and, you know, she said those women, you know,
raising up and saying, you know, "This is not right,"
and how Lavenia says that, at least in her opinion,
that was the beginning of integration,
so we're talking about the military being segregated.
We'll talk a little bit at the end about integration
and maybe the legacy of African-Americans
fighting for this right to fight during the war.
We're going to hear one more oral history in just one second,
but, of course, I'm going to show you a couple more pictures
of African-American women serving in the military.
So this is the Navy Auxiliary, called the WAVES.
That's a cool name, right?
WAVES stands for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service,
and these were the first black WAVES
to be commissioned in 1944 that you see here.
And probably the women that were closest to the front
were Army and Navy nurses,
and you can see some Army nurses training here
and doing kind of an early-morning workout
at their base in Australia.
They were assigned to Army hospitals
throughout the Pacific Theater,
and we are next going to hear
from a woman named Prudence Burrell.
She is an Army nurse, and she's going to tell you
about the conditions in the Pacific,
so you're going to hear about New Guinea
and how hot and how kind of unbearable it was,
but you're also going to hear about segregation
and segregation
not just, you know, being trained
and working in all-black units
but even down into, as you're going to hear her say,
to the medical supplies and to treating soldiers
and sometimes how this...
This doesn't make sense in general, segregation,
but especially in combat situations,
she's going to tell you how it just didn't work,
and in this next clip, you'll hear her talk all about that.
-I was sent with the 268th Station hospital to Milne Bay,
New Guinea.
Well, it would rain one minute,
and the next minute, the sun would be burning,
and the mud...
We had to wear high-top shoes,
and 6:00, the anopheles mosquito
that carried malaria was out,
so you had to have your ankles and your wrists
and your neck covered
because that's where they would bite,
and you would develop malaria.
We adjusted to it because you were busy nursing the soldiers
and worried about whether we were going to be bombed or not,
so therefore you accepted all conditions.
We were an all-black unit.
That's when the whole Army was segregated,
and you could not nurse any white soldiers.
Well, this soldier was down there near our hospital,
and he was injured and began hemorrhaging.
The whites brought him up there because here was a hospital,
and we told him, "We cannot give you this blood
because it's labeled, A, Afro-American."
He said, "I don't give a damn! Don't let me die!"
That's the way the blood was.
Everything was segregated.
The blacks were over here and the whites over there.
There was no mixing.
-So segregation everywhere as Prudence said,
and actually that brings in my fourth poll question,
and I'll set this up with,
we ask students a lot of times here,
we actually have a little permanent exhibit about this,
"What would you do?" in these very difficult situations,
putting yourself in the shoes of someone else,
and it's during World War II.
In the case, I'm going to ask you to put yourself
in the shoes of Prudence Burrell
or really any African-American nurse
who would be in this kind of situation.
What would you do?
Would you... Let's see.
Let me open this up here.
As we can see here, would you --
"A," disregard protocol and treat that wounded soldier
even though he was white?
Or "B", send the soldier to be treated elsewhere?
I'll see what you guys vote for.
All right.
I think it's pretty unanimous.
Maybe I'll give it a couple more seconds here.
Oh. No, it's actually changing.
I think there's some discussion going on
in the classrooms and probably...
I know it's hard to choose one
if you're watching with an entire class.
It's not really fair, right?
But if I broadcast the results now,
we can see the overwhelming majority
is thinking to disregard protocol and treat
that wounded soldier.
Remember, he was asking for it, he said, "Don't let me die."
And so you can imagine having to deal with segregation
and dealing with those sorts of protocols,
but it not working,
especially when you're in the midst of combat and chaos
as Prudence was in New Guinea.
All right. I'm going to hide that for now,
and so, of course, there's a big legacy
to this fighting for the right to fight
and fighting for double victory,
so actually, behind me here,
you can see this is the double victory symbol,
so double victory kind of in the same sense
of fighting for the right to fight,
victory abroad over fascism,
over Hitler, over Japan,
but also victory at home,
victory over discrimination and prejudice at home,
and many African-American men
and women returned from the service in World War II,
some of them sacrificing their lives,
and finding the United States kind of in the same spot.
Here in the South, there were Jim Crow laws,
separate but equal,
but we know that they certainly weren't equal.
There was discrimination all throughout this country
and segregation,
especially here, whether it was buses,
schools, drinking fountains, movie theaters,
you all know all these things.
Also, there was discrimination in housing,
discrimination in voting practices,
discrimination in unions,
discrimination in many of these defense factories
here on the home front, as well, race riots.
So this is the atmosphere that many African-American soldiers
and men and women are returning from overseas,
and they simply, you know, say,
"We can't stand for this anymore,"
and as we heard Lavenia Breaux say,
that was really the beginning of integration,
and many African-Americans who served in World War II
would become leaders of the civil rights movement
in the 1950s and the 1960s.
When they returned to their civilian life after the war,
they could no longer accept being second-class citizens.
Another important legacy of this story
is the integration of the military.
So, remember, the military is segregated during World War II.
The integration, so in 1948,
President Truman signs an executive order
to begin the integration of the military,
so the military does look very different
than 70 years ago during the war,
and units are integrated.
So those are two major legacies as we talk
about African-American experiences in World War II.
And we could really do a deep dive into this subject,
but unfortunately we only have an hour,
so that's my very quick overview.
What I would love to do now actually is welcome Tanita Davis
and turn it over to her and her presentation.
You all, if you aren't familiar,
Tanita is the writer of this young adult fiction
book called "Mare's War,"
and, Tanita, I welcome you to turn on your mic and webcam now.
And, while you do that,
I actually found your lovely biography on your website,
and I think I'd like to read it for everybody
or at least read portions of it.
It starts off, it says, "Tanita prefers to sit
in the corner of a coffee shop,
her hot chocolate getting cold,
listening to the world around her.
Born in the well-known California City by the Bay,
Tanita was a chatty youngest child,
the last in a line of girls all born 18 months apart.
In defense of her sanity,
Tanita's mother begged her to just write it all down
when Tanita wanted to share another endless singing,
dancing, or story time performance."
So I'll skip.
A little later, it says, "Most of her life,
she wished she was adventurous enough to go somewhere
and to do something different and exciting,
and though it took her until she finished her MFA
at Mills College in 2004
to gain her courage, she finally took off
and spent the last 5 years living in Scotland,
singing and dancing and telling stories on paper.
She had to listen a little harder,
hope to understand what the world was trying to say.
After 5 years of trying,
she moved back to Northern California,
back close to the Bay and to family.
Eventually she'll set off someplace else,
but for now is enjoying the fog and the sunshine."
I love that.
So I would love to welcome Tanita.
I'm wondering if... -Here I am.
-Feel free to turn on your webcam
and mic so everybody can see and hear you.
-Can you hear me? -I think we can hear you.
-Okay, great. Hi.
-Yeah, you're coming through loud and clear.
Awesome. -Oh, the camera is not working.
I can see it.
-Hopefully you'll pop up. Hello.
Hopefully you'll pop up below me in just one second.
Hit...
If you see, there's a little thing that says Start Sharing.
There we go. Now I think you'll pop up.
There we go. [ Laughs ]
Hey, awesome. Wonderful.
Well, Tanita, I am just so...
I've been looking forward to this webinar for months.
We booked this, like, probably in the summer, right?
So I just have been, as I said,
counting down the days to this program,
and, after reading "Mare's War" and just loving the story,
I just couldn't wait to share it with the audience out here,
so what I'm going to do is,
actually I'm going to go away for now.
I'm going to pause my video.
-Everyone, I'm going to talk about the American history
that's included in "Mare's War."
I'm going to show you a little footage of that history.
I'm going to discuss why I believe the study
of the past is important,
read to you a little from my book,
and I have the hardback cover,
so it's different from the cover that Chrissy has, but anyway,
and then we're going to kind of open up the floor
for questions between the two of us.
First, a little bit of background.
In 2004, I was finishing at graduate school,
and as part of the final assignment was a gigantic paper
which was going to be our thesis project,
and the best place, you know,
if any of you have a writerly bent,
to find stories is always,
you know, to begin with your own family.
Your family will forgive you for this eventually.
Anyway, my mother always had told me
that my grandmother on my father's side
had run away from home when she was 15 or 16
and that she ended up working on an Army base in Florida,
and I always thought that there was more to that story,
but we didn't know the more to that story,
and my grandmother was not the sort of person
you asked about details of her life.
She was very closed-mouthed,
and she always said that bringing up the past
was basically more trouble than it was worth,
so we didn't ask, and we respected her privacy,
but after she passed away, I thought,
"You know, it couldn't hurt to look."
Ancestry.com, I think, was having a free weekend
when they had just started their website,
and they were allowing people to come for free
to search out information on their families,
and so I poked through their records,
and I found my grandmother's name
on the rolls of the Army as having enlisted,
and so it wasn't just that she had ended up
working there after running away.
She was actually a soldier, and I thought, "Wow!"
Because, you know, I didn't actually know a lot about,
you know, the history of the American Army,
U.S. Army, and didn't know that,
when women were included in the Army,
and so it was actually pretty exciting to find this.
A lot of research was involved in "Mare's War."
For me, the biggest part was images,
and actually, Chrissy, would you play the little video
I have of the soldiers working overseas?
We kind of figured out that I can't actually...
I can run my slides forward,
but this is what I wanted to show you,
some moving pictures while I talk about this.
A lot of research was involved.
For me, looking at images was the best part
because I started to feel like
I knew the people in the pictures
after looking at them over and over.
I read personal letters in journals to find out
about Army history,
and I did find out that, indeed, black women
weren't any more welcome in most branches of the military
than black men until the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt
was asked to start speaking up about women in the...
allowing women to take part in the military.
And Mary Bethune actually asked her to do so.
She was an African-American activist at the time,
and it was really close to her heart.
Everybody was galvanizing as a country to take part
in supporting the war effort,
and so many people were being left out,
including African-American women.
What these images are are this
is actually the Army's footage of the soldiers working.
This is the Women's Army Corps, which is what WAC stands for,
Women's Army Corps.
They were in Birmingham, England, and in this dim room,
and they were also very cold a lot of the time,
this was where they were working.
I found the images really arresting.
Here they were, the Six Triple Eighth
as they called themselves,
Central Postal Directory Battalion.
It was a unit of 885 black Women Army Corps members.
They were charged with clearing up this huge backlog of mail
that had been sent to military personnel overseas
because undelivered mail was hurting morale
because you can imagine these people were soldiers,
they had been away from home for months
and months and months overseas,
and they had heard nothing from home.
Well, the job was expected to take 6 months.
When the Army finally decided
that these women were okay to send,
here they sent all of these women,
and they expected them to get there,
dig in, and do the work of,
you know, looking at all of this mail,
digging it out, organizing it
and getting it sent to the fronts
wherever the people were.
The job was expected, as I said, to take 6 months,
but they worked around the clock in 8-hour shifts,
and they finished the job.
They handled 7 million pieces of mail in 3 months,
and because they'd done such a great job,
as it always happens when you've done a great job,
there's more work to do,
and so they sent them on to France for a similar assignment,
and I always imagined, you know, I looked at those pictures,
and I thought, "You know, those women arrived in England
on Valentine's Day in 1945."
It is cold and dark, and they are wobbly
because they've been on a boat
for I believe it was something like 11 to 14 days
to get across the Atlantic,
and they had been chased by a German submarine.
They had run into winter storms, and they marched off the ship,
and the first thing that happened was a V-1 rocket,
one of the German rockets they called buzz bombs,
it exploded right as they were marching off the boat,
and they thought to themselves, "Oh, what did we do?"
They probably wondered what they were doing there,
and, of course, the other first thing
that they had to do right when they got there,
and I'll show you a little bit of footage of that later,
is that there is...
They have to go in a parade and review.
Their troops had to be reviewed by the general.
These are people who have been on a boat for a very long time,
and they are very cold and tired,
and the first thing they have to do
is stand up and salute and look good.
But, you know, I loved looking at all of these images
and thinking of all of these things because I imagine
that this was what galvanized these women
into doing the best job that they could do
because you know, here they came.
There were three airplane hangars full of mail,
backlog mail,
and they were dealing with mail from people, you know.
Here's World War II.
There are a lot of people from the country
whose sons had gone to the front.
These are people whose experience
with sending and receiving mail
was fairly limited, you know,
and in the country, you know,
people didn't always send that much mail,
or if they did, it was like sort of a once-a-year thing,
and it would be figured out
because they maybe weren't sending it very hard,
but they were sending letters
that were addressed to things like,
"To Bobby Jr., US Army."
Well, we have no last name.
We have no battalion.
We have no squad.
So not only did we have these three airplane
hangars full of mail.
We had people who may or may not have had a last name.
They had no idea how to get this mail anywhere to the people,
but these women knew, though.
The soldiers knew that their job was important
because there were people fighting and dying
sometimes without ever having heard a word from home.
They needed to know that they were loved
and that they were appreciated
and that they were necessary to protecting democracy,
and these are some of the things that just came to me
and were really inspiring as I sort of pulled together history
and personal family history
and Army history
as I wrote "Mare's War."
Now, this novel is told in alternating parts.
If you haven't had a chance to look at it,
it's separated between now and then.
In the "now" sections, the title character,
Mare, is an old woman,
and she's driving her very reluctant granddaughters,
Talitha and Octavia,
on a cross-country trip during their summer vacation,
and let me tell you.
Tali and Octavia are not into it.
I mean, they're stuck in a car with an old woman
who refuses to get on an airplane.
It's just not on.
In the "then" sections, Mare is Marey Lee.
It's 1944, and she's just run away from home
to join the Women's Army Corps during World War II.
She ends up training in Iowa.
Then, they move on to Georgia,
and she eventually travels by ship
all the way to Birmingham, England,
and she ends her service in the European theater in France.
Let me go ahead, Chrissy, and have you pull up the other video
because this one is just silent,
and it's just basically showing them doing the same things,
but this next piece is only a couple of minutes long,
and this is the film in England,
and so you'll see the guys with different kind of hats.
They're bobbies in England, different helmets,
and this is the video of their parade
when they first arrived in England.
♪♪
I could kind of watch that pretty much every day.
You know, just, I would look at the faces of those women
and over and over again in still images and videos
and start to feel like I knew them.
That really just was so much inspiration.
On a personal note, my grandmother did not go overseas.
There's no record that she left the Army base
where she had done her training,
but she was one of thousands of American women
who serviced as drivers and mechanics
and cooks and secretaries
and teletype operators and welders and riveters,
putting together ships and aircrafts
that were used to win the war elsewhere.
I was really intrigued by the women
who worked in the war effort and even more so
by the battalion of African-American women
who served,
and I thought, "Who were they, and how did they get involved,
and what special challenges did they face far from home,
and how come no one ever told me about them?"
Now, I'm going to attempt to remember to do slides
at the same time here.
Chrissy taught me how to do this,
and then I promptly forgot.
We have a lot of images, information about World War II,
that's part of the national sort of American consciousness,
basic man-on-the-street stuff that you could walk down,
you know, the road and ask people about it.
They could give you buzz words about World War II.
There were Nazis.
There was Pearl Harbor.
There was Normandy, D-Day.
So there are things that people kind of know in general.
Better historians than most can tell you about the London Blitz,
the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima.
Most people could not tell you
anything about Executive Order 9066,
which sent American citizens of Japanese descent
into internment camps.
Most of them don't know anything about the Double V campaign
because that wasn't, you know, the common part of what we know.
Most people don't know anything about the March
on Washington movement,
which was very early civil rights march effort,
nor they probably couldn't tell you about Executive Order 8802,
which was, as Chrissy mentioned earlier,
started to change the laws about the national defense industry
and discrimination in those workplaces.
It was, I guess, basically the first steps
to ending racial discrimination in the workplace,
and it's in part that we don't see a lot of this
in the general things that we know about World War II
is because, in part, the entertainment media's stories,
movies, still images and all of that,
only show part of the picture.
We don't show the America that was still clinging
to segregation and Jim Crow laws.
We don't show the America
that was terrified of Japanese Americans
and were taking their property and their land and their money.
Historically in America,
we've privileged some voices over others,
but, you know, that's how we did things in the past,
but as people who are in the present
who are trying to learn from the past and steer our future,
we've got to think about what we did before
and keep from making the same mistakes, essentially.
A lot of times, people wonder when we get to looking at,
you know, the Double V campaign
and looking at African-Americans in history
and, you know, looking at how things were,
how come it's so important that we talk about this?
Why is it something which we are putting so much time
and effort into?
And it's not so that we can ruin people's
sort of image of the greatest generation
or our image of the past,
but it is important
because African-Americans
are part of America.
Therefore, African-American history is American history,
and we never should have any fear for the future
unless we forget what happened in the past,
and that's really very important.
So these are the types of things that I wanted
to explore in "Mare's War."
I wanted to show readers what small-town America
was like for this young woman who was,
you know, coming from a past that had,
you know, discrimination and poverty and hard work in it,
and I wanted her to have some adventures
and find out about the world
and begin to realize what she had to offer
as so many other women did during that time.
And so I'm going to...
I knew that I would probably talk too much,
so I'm going to speed up.
I'm going to read a little bit from "Mare's War,"
and this is the portion in which Marey Lee,
and this is in a "then" section, so this is in the 1940s.
This is when Marey Lee is just learning
what it means to be in the Army,
and she and her cohort are working together,
and they're doing well at the work that they've been assigned,
but they're also learning that sometimes
there's some extra work
that comes along just for black women.
"Saturday afternoon, just after we get off,
Lieutenant Hundley come by, her face looking hard.
She holler out like we're doing drill, 'Peaches Carter!'
'Man,' Peaches said.
Now, Peaches been working in one of the offices
since she went to commercial high school
and took up short-hand typing.
She says she doesn't want to be no Army grunt,
but Lieutenant Hundley has always got another job for her.
'Carter, front and center,' she say.
'We had a request for you.' 'A request, ma'am?'
Peaches put her hands on her hips.
Our company just got showered,
and Peaches in her wack-issue maroon bathrobe
getting ready to paint her toenails.
'I'm off duty, ma'am.'
'I am aware of that, Carter,'
Lieutenant say, and she act like her face got frozen.
Peaches straightened up fast.
'Yes, ma'am.' she says.
Hundley does not play around when she's got that look.
'Captain Jennings is in need of a sitter
for General Craig's twins tonight.
Their regular housekeeper is ill.
He knows your work and considers you conscientious
and feels like you would like to earn some pocket money.'
Well, Peaches looked like her jaw just broke.
Her mouth hangs open, and every girl in our company
looks like she's just been slapped.
Now we know why Hundley looks like she's about to spit.
Nobody in their right mind
is going to ask any of the white girls
to watch after some general's babies
after 8 hours on their feet,
but they're after the colored girls
all the time to fetch and carry and help out.
'Get a load of that,'
Annie Brown mutters under her breath.
'I'd shake my head.'
Peaches worked hard in that kitchen, harder than anybody,
and since she don't like to cook nohow,
she's got to try twice as hard.
She says cook hollered at her all day,
and she about cut her fingers off
with all the chopping she did.
She's tired like we all are.
Peaches lets out her breath like a popped tire.
She looks like someone kicked her in the stomach.
Her shoulders slump, and she puts down her polish
and picks up her shoes.
'I'll go, Lieutenant Hundley,'
I say. I can't stand Peaches' broken-down look.
Peaches cuts her eyes at me, and I ignore her.
'Peaches hurt herself doing KP. I'll go see to those twins.'
Hundley looks at me
like she's trying to drill nails in my head.
'They are babies, Boylen, children.
Do you know anything about children?'
'Yes, ma'am. I helped to raise my sister.
I will take good care of them, ma'am.'
'Boylen.'
'I like children, Lieutenant Hundley,"
I say standing tall,
daring her to shut my mouth for speaking up.
'Peaches whipped. We all see that.
I'll go.' Peaches mutters, 'They asked for me, Boylen,'
but we both know it don't make no nevermind
who goes to see after those twins.
The brass don't be too picky about
when they're asking for a colored girl
to work in the house.
'I got it, Peaches,' is all I say.
Hundley stares at me for a moment,
then looks around the barracks.
We all stand there in complete silence.
There is something in her face
that says she's got a lot to say,
but she doesn't say it to us.
I roll my stockings up over my knees
and lace up my shoes while she watches.
Annie hands me my jacket. 'This isn't right,'
Lieutenant Hundley says finally, her voice quiet.
'You girls, you women are in the Army.
Someone will hear about this.'
Hundley looks at the floor, clears her throat.
She straightens her shoulders and nods to me.
'Let's go, Boylen.'"
LIFE magazine in the 1940s
was doing huge spreads on female service personnel
and all the work that they did to support the war effort,
but I read that even high-ranking American women
could be asked as a matter of course to do domestic work
because for some Americans,
it was hard to see African-Americans
as anything but janitors
and maids and seamstresses and cooks.
Black Americans had to fight to be counted as soldiers
and as members of the armed forces who were trusted,
and that's what the Double V campaign
and the March on Washington movement
were about in part.
African-Americans wanted to serve,
wanted to be counted, really, as Americans,
and this was a time of tremendous strain
on the idea of being American,
so I wanted to show Mare and her sister, Josephine,
exploring some of these ideas,
and these were also questions that Octavia and Talitha
in the "now" sections of the book talked about, as well.
As they interacted with each other and with their history
as their grandmother presented it to them,
I wanted to show that teens growing up in World War II
and teens growing up now in the present still struggle,
you know, with some of the same ideas of who we are.
What does it mean to be an American,
and what is it like to want to do something great
but be afraid that your efforts and your interest
in that will be rejected,
and what happens if you fail?
"Mare's War" talks about some of the challenges of segregation,
which were still in effect,
and some of the issues that people in history
cared about that are issues that we care about now,
and when we study history,
we see just how much people in the past achieved
based on their bravery and their courage, basically,
and their ability to stick to something
and see it through even if they wanted to go home
because I'm sure those girls did as soon
as the bombs started dropping,
but I just really looked at all of them in woe of what they did,
and I took courage from what they did,
and it just gave me the idea that I could make history, too,
and the good news is, is so can you.
Chrissy, that's basically all I've got today.
-Great. And, yeah, no problem, Tanita.
I should have given you the floor for the whole hour.
That was just a, you know, beautiful presentation,
and as you said,
I think the historical film footage, you're right.
I could just watch that on loop over and over and over again,
you know, just such an intimate kind of glimpse
as to what, you know,
Mare would have been, you know,
in the book, would have been going through,
and, of course, real women, as well.
So I know you had some slides.
Actually, I'll ask the first question
as people are kind of typing some in.
You had some slides about doing research.
This was your master's thesis.
How did you find all this stuff?
We had this conversation where, you know, now, today,
there's a lot more at our fingertips with,
of course, you know,
so many resources on the Internet,
so many digitized collections,
but what did you do to find out all of this information?
-[ Laughs ] I used books.
Well, the reason there was so much less is that, you know,
here I was in 2004.
There was 5 years between me doing the research
and when the First Lady awarded the remaining
surviving members of the 6888 in 2009,
and suddenly then the Army was releasing things
and digital collections and things,
so what I had to do was go
through people's personal collections,
what little was on the Internet.
I used a lot of journals.
I used a lot of the libraries,
spent a lot of time at the library.
There were things there, but you just really had to know
where to look, and it was rabbit trails.
You know, I am chasing down a specific name,
and then once I had a name,
I could, you know, sort of cross-check
and look somewhere else, and it was a lot harder than it is now,
and I'm really excited about how much is on the Internet.
-Yeah. Now, as you were doing your research,
was there anything that really surprised you
about what you found out, whether it was,
I know you said, researching your own past
and researching your grandmother,
but just in general about African-Americans
and African-American women in the military?
-Well, as I said, I didn't really know very much
about the Women's Army Corps, period,
and it really was.
It was a surprise not to find that they were still segregated
because unfortunately segregation is...
That went on for forever it felt like,
but I also just discovered that even when they were overseas,
even when they came into, you know, places like France
or they came into, you know, England,
where this wasn't their history,
this wasn't a part of their world,
the Army and the Red Cross
even tried to keep things on a segregation basis,
and they kept saying,
"Well, you'll be more comfortable this way.
You'll be happier this way," and they were sort of having...
Even though they were having this adventure
and they were being in this new place
and they were being given all these responsibilities
and doing this new thing,
segregation was sort of a top down,
"I'm telling you this is what you'll need to be happy,"
and how...
I read a lot in people's personal accounts
about going and staying in a hotel
and where they tried to start segregating the hotels by floors
even though they were not hotels that belonged to Americans.
They were just being rented by the Red Cross
for the service people,
but they still were very concerned
with keeping this appearance of separate but equal.
One very interesting thing I heard
was that when the women were in...
Well, this is actually I read in Charity Adams...
She was the major that we actually saw
doing the review parade,
is everyone saluting her and everything.
She wrote the book that I had shown earlier in the slide show,
"One Woman's War."
Yeah.
Thank you, "One Woman's Army."
She had written in that book that when they went to England,
they actually were allowed to break curfew at one point
because there was a belief in this small part of England
where they were that black people had tails
and they came out at night.
I mean, this is the most ridiculous thing
I've ever heard of,
but if you have never been exposed to someone,
then you are predisposed to believe
just about whatever silliness,
and so they were actually allowed to stay out
so that they could show that, "Look. Here we are,
still walking upright like human beings,
and, look, no tails."
They were actually... Even though in our own country
we're still struggling with ideas
of who is an American and what American looks like,
they are still being used as sort of, you know, missionaries.
-And I like that how you even touch on it in "Mare's War,"
that relationship that Marey Lee
has with that little British girl
who initially was, you know, like, frightened of her,
but then they kind of became chummy, you know,
and they became buds at the end.
So seeing how that relationship changes with exposure,
you know, and that this is, you know, all myth, you know.
It's all ridiculous, so,
and putting a personal face to that I think.
I love that little tidbit in the book.
Now, what was, I guess, for you...
This is kind of a dual question, you know.
What was the most challenging thing that you found
while writing this book but also,
then, in turn, then, the most rewarding?
-Well, it just... This just, as I said,
it was sort of like opening
a present that just kept giving
and giving as I kept finding,
you know, images and just, you know...
I mean, we got a...
You know, I had a chance to... I lived in Glasgow in Scotland.
This is where they landed when they came,
and so, you know, we sort of wandered around the city,
and I would just keep looking at it through the eyes of,
"Yeah, this is what they saw.
This is what... You know, this is where they were,"
and, you know, it was brief,
the time that they were there, before they got on a train
and went to Birmingham, England, but still, it was just...
I got to be the places that the people were in, in my research,
and it was so much fun to keep...
You know, I would read, for instance,
the journal of someone who had been in the Red Cross,
and they would be talking about they were at this place,
and they did this, and there would be a situation here,
and then someone else's letters would refer to that same thing.
They may not have known each other.
They may not have realized they were there at the same time,
but the commonality of human experience,
the things that bring us together,
the things that we hold in common
were so much more obvious.
It didn't matter if I was looking at the journal
of a white nurse
or a white serviceman or a black, you know,
person who was part of the postal battalion who was,
you know, from a farm or who had gone to a secretarial college.
It didn't matter.
This war, in a dreadful way, was kind of a unifying thing
because it made Americans Americans, you know?
We came from a bunch of different backgrounds
and a bunch of different areas of belief and opinion,
and we reacted to basically a threat in the form of Hitler,
but eventually I think that that,
what we learned through war,
we turned to sort of looking at ourselves,
and we reacted or continued to react to the racism
and the erroneous beliefs that we,
you know, hold ourselves.
I really felt like the biggest challenging thing
was just putting it all together because just like now,
I can talk about this all day,
and so cutting the things I left out,
those continue to sort of haunt me.
I think, "Oh, but I wish I had, you know,
included this or that."
-Don't worry, I have that same difficulty too.
If anybody has done a virtual field trip with me,
they know that I take the entire hour even if I'm not trying to.
And I guess, since we only have about a minute left,
I would love for you...
Maybe tell us a little bit also about your other books,
and aren't you coming out with another book
just in a couple months, correct?
Oh. Oh, my gosh.
Wow.
-Actually, February 9th, in a couple of days.
-Thank you for doing this webinar from that regard.
My goodness. -Yeah.
Yeah. That just happened to be...
This is... [ Laughs ]
Well, yeah.
It's a good break from that.
My brain is happy to focus on something
that I've already done well,
so that's been a good thing.
Yeah.
I tend to write books about families.
I do enjoy history, and I continue to read
a lot of history and dig into it,
and I know someday I'll find...
There's so many stories in American history
that haven't yet been told,
that haven't yet been turned into more accessible
works of historical fiction,
and I'm going to get back there, and everyone keeps asking.
Someday, I'm going to get back there,
but in the meantime, there's lots to talk about...
-Awesome. -...and I'm always happy
to write stories about American families,
and that's one of my big interests.
-Well, Tanita, now that we're...
Well, officially it's 1:00 Central Time,
so 11:00 a.m. by you.
As I said, I tend to take the entire hour and sometimes,
as other people know, maybe a little longer than that,
so I try to respect people's time in the lunch hour here,
but I just wanted to say thank you so much
for sharing your story with us today,
and, I mean, I felt like I certainly learned a lot,
and I loved reading "Mare's War,"
so I hope the rest of the audience does, as well.
Thank you so much for your time today.
-Well, thank you, and I just really appreciate everybody
who came out, and it was fun
to see all the lists of names.
-Well thank you, Tanita, and thank you, everybody.
I'm going to transition kind of into one more area,
so you see our screen shift,
and we're going to go away at least visually.
What is going to pop up on your screen,
if you're still hanging out for a little bit,
is you'll see this kind of rolling slide presentation
of some future programs we have coming up here.
So we do these student webinars
periodically throughout the entire school year.
As you know, they're free, and we have a couple more
coming up
in the remainder of the school year.
As the slide will hopefully change,
so maybe it will cooperate.
Let me tell you, in April, on April...