Author Mary Cronk Farrell

Here's a warm-up to get you excited for my new book. Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Help Change the Course of WWII tells the story of the first African American women to join in the U.S. army.
 
At least I thought it did. Turns out a black woman soldier in the 1860s beat them to it.

Cathey Williams disguised herself as a man and enlisted in Company A of the Thirty-Eighth Infantry Regiment in St. Louis, November 1866.
 
She switched her name to William Cathey, and after what must have been a cursory exam, the army surgeon declared her fit for duty.
 
Private Cathay was 22-years-old and had actually been serving as an cook for the army throughout most of the civil war. Cathey told her story to a reporter for the St. Louis Daily Times in 1875.
 
"My Father a was a freeman, but my mother a slave....While I was a small girl my master and family moved to Jefferson City, [Missouri]....When the war broke out and the United States soldiers came to Jefferson City they took me and other colored folks with them to Little Rock. Col. Benton of the 13th army corps was the officer that carried us off. I did not want to go. He wanted me to cook for the officers, but I had always been a house girl and did not know how to cook."  

She had little choice. She learned to cook. At sixteen, swallowed by the union army, Cathey saw the Battle of Pea Ridge, a major battle of the Civil War fought near Leetown, northeast of Fayetteville, Arkansas, after which her unit traveled to Louisiana. "I saw the soldiers burn lots of cotton and was at Shreveport when the rebel gunboats were captured and burned on Red River." As a servant under General Phillip Sheridan, Cathey saw  the soldiers' life on the front lines as his army marched on the Shenandoah Valley. 
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After the war,  African American soldiers were posted to the Western frontier, where they battled Native Americans to protect settlers, stagecoaches, wagon trains and railroad crews. They became known as “Buffalo Soldiers,” apparently so-named by Native Americans, though history's a little thin on when and why.

​After working for the army throughout the war, it's little wonder Cathey came up with the scheme to enlist as the fighting came to a close. With cunning and courage she found a way to survive when opportunities for black women were few to none.
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As a Buffalo Soldier, Cathey learned to use a musket, stood guard duty and went on scouting missions. After serving at Fort Riley, Kansas for some months, her company marched 563 miles to Fort Union, New Mexico.
 
Official reports show Buffalo Soldiers were often sent to the most bitter posts and suffered racist officers, severe discipline and crummy gear, food and shelter. In two years of service, mostly in New Mexico, Cathey needed hospital care four different times for illnesses ranging from "the itch" to rheumatism, yet maintained her secret.

Cathey enlisted for three years, but after two, she was tired of army life and wanted out.  She told the St. Louis reporter, “I played sick, complained of pains in my side, and rheumatism in my knees. The post surgeon found out I was a woman and I got my discharge." 

All indications are that she was a good soldier. 

​After her honorable discharge, Cathey worked as a civilian cook and washer woman.  Until she could not longer work due to diabetes and nerve pain which required the amputation of her toes. She was unable to walk without a crutch. 
 
In 1891, Cathey petitioned for a veterans pension and benefits. The government rejected her claim, not because she was a woman, that was never argued. The army doctor who examined her found her to be fit, not disabled enough for benefits. There's no record of the life or death of Cathey Williams following that denial of benefits.
 
Sources:
 http://blackhistorynow.com/cathay-williams/
 http://www.buffalosoldier.net/CathayWilliamsFemaleBuffaloSoldierWithDocuments.htm

​Despite the risk of discovery and probable execution they found the strength to continue the grueling work for months. Starving and emaciated, disease-ridden and sleep-deprived, inch by inch they carved the tunnel in oxygen-starved darkness, directly under the feet of one hundred armed guards.​​​​​​​

In The Escape Artists, Bascom focuses on Davy Gray, the leader of the digging operation. Gray tried and failed to escape from five different camps in one year before Holzmiden.

Bascom was struck my the young pilot's determination and motivation for continually trying to escape. "He was driven by wanting to get back to his squadron and back into the fight. Less about being free, less about his own individual drive, but to get back into the fight knowing that he could be shot down again and killed."

The original conspirators had hoped to keep knowledge of the escape plan to a small group, but July 23-24, 1918, twenty-nine officers belly-crawled through the 16-inch high tunnel to freedom.  Unfortunately some were recaptured, and just ten made their way to Holland and eventually Britain, including Gray, Kennard and Blain.

​​​​​​​Bascom told me there are similar over-arching themes in every book he writes that stem from his teenage years. "I remember to this day sitting in classroom in 8th grade, the teacher wasn’t even talking about history, but she said. 'Never make a decision out of a fear of failure.' Defy the odds and keep going despite the fear of failure."

You can find out about all Neal's thrilling books here: www.nealbascomb.com 

Richard Huganir, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine says trauma would only help a woman remember an attack more clearly.​

“The person lying on top of you — who she’d previously met — you’re not going to forget that,” he told the Washington Post. “There’s a total consensus in the field of memory ... If anything, fear and trauma enhances the encoding of the memory at a molecular level." It's the reason people never forget details of where they were on 9/11, or the day President John F. Kennedy was shot.
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​Martha and John Mitchell came to the white house from Arkansas in President Richard Nixon's first term, he as attorney general. She publicly and loudly supported the president for a second term as her husband took over the president's re-election campaign.

​Today's featured story is about an African American woman who served in the Army Nurse Corps. She had the extraordinary courage to stand against hate in the most personal way, all day every day. 

Elinor Powell fell in love with a German POW and chose him, for better or worse, knowing their interracial marriage was against the law in 29 states. 

Elinor grew up near Boston, in a small town that was integrated. She played with white children, went to school with them and never saw a drinking fountain labeled “White’s Only”.  (Photo courtesy Smithsonian Magazine and Chris Albert)

When America called for nurses during WWII, Elinor wanted to serve her country.
But the segregated Army Nurse Corps came as quite a shock. Elinor deployed to Camp Florence, near Phoenix, Arizona, where her army uniform did not exempt her from Jim Crow laws. 

Off base, Elinor was refused service at a Woolworth's lunch counter. On base, she suffered further indignity, forced to tend German POWs, soldiers from the army gobbling up territory to expand Hitler’s white supremacist regime. 

Some POWs called the black nurses derogatory names, and the U.S. Army wasn't a whole lot better. There was a shortage of nurses to treat American wounded, but hundreds of black nurses were turned away. Elinor wanted to use her skills to aid men who'd been wounded fighting the Nazis. The Army posted her to the Arizona desert at a hospital for German POWs that rarely needed medical care. 

This was a case of labeling, the type still prevalent in America that allows us to immediately discount a group of people and their concerns. As you know, the words we choose to describe what we see are not idle, they determine what we see.
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One award-winning curriculum developer offers teachers a lesson plan on the Haymarket that asks students to "read like a detective" to gain a clear understanding of a newspaper article published the following day by the Chicago Hearld.  
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Only this one source is offered on the subject and the event is called a riot by teachers following this guide.  At the time, there were numerous English newspapers in Chicago, as well as German and Irish newspapers that would have reported on this event, many of the striking workers were German and Irish immigrants.

 
​The Post is getting great reviews, and I recommend it as good entertainment that raises issues very relevant today. Of course, we can't depend on Hollywood movies to teach history, but I am now inspired to watch the documentary film about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, for a more complete understanding. Click below to watch the trailer.

The earlier March 31 date of Anne’s death was set by Dutch authorities after the war when they did not have the resources to establish an exact date. The new evidence includes statements from a friend who saw Anne in Bergen-Belsen and remembered the Frank sisters showing signs of typhus in early February. Dutch health authorities say typhus deaths happen around 12 days after the first symptoms.
 
“In view of this, the date of their death is more likely to be sometime in February. The exact date is unknown,” the researchers said.
 
In the words of Bergen-Belsen survivor Rachel van Amerongen, "One day they simply weren’t there any more."
 
Seven decades after her death, Anne Frank stands as an example of resistance and courage in the face of inhuman cruelty and persecution.
 
To view a short video showing friends talking about seeing Anne in Bergen-Belsen, click here...
 

One of the leaders, Mary Skubitz, had 
immigrated from Slovenia as a child. 
​According to her son Joe, "Hunger drove most of those women. They just wanted something to eat and a house."
 
Mary spoke German, Italian, and Slovene, which allowed her to rally a broad spectrum of women in the mining camps. Fluent in English as well, she was persuasive with the mine bosses and strikebreakers.
 
Kansas Governor Henry Allen dispatched four companies of the Kansas National Guard, including a machine gun division to get the women back to their kitchens. The women, armed only with their pots, pans and red pepper spray, marched from mine to mine singing hymns and waving American flags.