In California Dreamin', the Mamas and the Papas sang of their longing on a winter’s day, to be safe and warm in L.A. The tune launched the group, which became a defining voice in 1960's counterculture. Say the Mamas and the Papas time-traveled to 2020 and joined #BlackLivesMatter. Might they sing a lament for California dreams dying this way? Most recently, 18-year-old Andres Guardado, killed last week by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies. He was running away when he was shot dead, the third and youngest of three Latinos shot by California law enforcement this month. In the heart of sunny SoCal, a virulent history of racism casts a cold, dark shadow. Making lives matter today requires understanding this long road of injustice we've been walking. Ever hear of the Murder at Sleepy Lagoon? The 1942 case of José Gallardo Díaz? Detectives had scant evidence and the murder was never solved. But that didn't stop police from arresting nearly 600 Latino men, a jury from convicting 17 of them and a judge sentencing them to San Quentin. Read on for that story below. But first, details on the heartbreaking death of Andres Guardado. "He was a baby, he was a baby," Andres' cousin Celina Abarca told CNN through her tears. "I feel like I'm dead inside," said his mother Elisa Guardado. People who gathered to protest the killing on Sunday were dispersed by police using pepper spray and rubber bullets. Andres worked as a security guard at an auto body shop. Speaking to CBS LA, Andrew Heney, owner of the shop said: "We had a security guard that was out front, because we had just had certain issues with people tagging and stuff like that. And then the police came up, and they pulled their guns on him and he ran because he was scared, and they shot and killed him. He's got a clean background and everything. There's no reason." If police had bodycams running, the video has not been released. Andres' family alleges the deputy shot him in the back, but the sheriff refuses to release autopsy results for "security" reasons. According to Lieutenant Charles Calderaro, here's how the shooting went down. "Deputies observed the individual, at which point he observed the deputies. The individual then produced a handgun and began running southbound away from the deputies through businesses nearby. At some point, deputies contacted the suspect and that's when the deputy-involved shooting occurred." Bullshit. Pardon my French. Today the U.S. president uses various derogatory names for immigrants from south of the border. In the 1940s, they were simply referred to as “the Mexican problem.” But young Chicano men in the border states baptized themselves pachucos. In Los Angeles they dressed to stand out, wearing zoot suits featuring wide lapels and baggy pants pegged at the ankles. Pachucos rejected assimilation into Anglo-American culture speaking their own slang derived from the Calo gypsy language of El Paso. The resisted prejudice and inequality with their unique style of jazz and swing music. Yes, they had attitude. The pachucos subculture defied American racism and oppression. In 1942-43 some pachucos refused to yield to whites on the sidewalks and tried to bar them from their neighborhoods. Whites couldn't understand pachucos "secretive" language and grew suspicious because the pachucos didn't look and behave as they should. In the eyes of white citizens, they were trouble. Police believed the zoot suiters were gang members and trouble-makers. L.A. officials believed the "Mexican problem" had to be solved. The outbreak of WWII fired up fear and animosity that led Americans to distrust foreigners. Many experienced LA cops had gone off to war leaving locals uneasy about their safety. In the fall of 1942, the “Mexican problem” appeared to be the only story newsworthy enough to make the front page alongside war updates in Los Angeles newspapers. The death of a young Chicano man reported on August 2, 1942, in Commerce, California, created an opportunity for local law enforcement to crack down on the pachucos. Apparently, a fight had broken out at a birthday celebration near a swimming hole known as Sleepy Lagoon. A party guest José Gallardo Díaz was found unconscious along side the road near the reservoir and abandoned gravel pit near Slauson and Atlantic boulevards. An ambulance rushed Díaz to hospital, but the 22-year-old died without regaining consciousness. An autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily and suffered a fracture at the base of his skull. There was no evidence that proved what caused the fracture, which could have been the result of Díaz falling and hitting his head, or an automobile accident. Police swept through the Mexican American community, rounding up some 600 young men on charges related to Díaz' death. The way the newspapers told it, "the Mexican problem" had incited a juvenile gang war and the "Sleepy Lagoon Murder." According to court records many of the pachucos taken into custody were severely beaten by police. Los Angeles citizens and government officials wanted action to curb the alleged violence. A grand jury assembled to interview hundreds of Mexican-American teens and young adults, both witnesses and accused. In addition, county sheriff’s officers defined the problem as they saw it, submitting a report to the Grand Jury titled "Statistics." Capt. Edward Duran Ayres wrote the law enforcement document beginning with how Latino youth faced discrimination, lack of educational opportunity and poor job prospects. But Ayres concluded his report with a nasty, racist attack on Chicano people in their entirety. Latinos were a different breed, he wrote, whose ancestors crossed the ice bridge from Asia to settle North America. Ayres continued, “The Indian, from Alaska to Patagonia, is evidently Oriental in background – at least he shows many of the Oriental characteristics, especially so in his utter disregard for the value of life.” Even so, police had to cut loose hundreds of the young men they had arrested. The County Grand Jury indicted 23 youths for the alleged gang murder of José Díaz. Prosecutors charged 22 of the young men in the largest murder trial in California history. Presiding was Judge Charles Fricke, known as "San Quentin” Fricke, due to his propensity to sentence defendants to the state's high-security prison. In the People v Zammora, part of the prosecution's case rested on the “distinctive appearance” of the accused, arguing that their fondness for fashion and taste for jazz proved their social deviancy. After the four-month trial, the jury found 17 of the young men guilty: three of first degree murder, nine of second degree murder and five of assault with a deadly weapon. Their sentences ranged from life in prison to one year in the county jail. Five were found innocent. The defendants appealed their verdicts and two years later the appellate court threw out all 17 of the convictions, citing lack of evidence, coerced testimony, deprivation of the right to counsel and judicial misconduct. All accused were released. Henry Leyvas, 21, and Gus Zammora, 22, two of the eight youths who were released from the County Jail, Monday, October 29, 1944 with all charges dismissed, after serving two years on conviction in the "Sleepy Lagoon" murder, are shown as they were greeted by relatives and friends. Left to right, Mrs. Lupe Leyvas, Seferino Leyvas, Henry Leyvas, Alice Greenfield, Gus Zammora and Ruth Amparay. LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY HERALD-EXAMINER COLLECTION Interesting to note, of the 10,000 people arrested across the nation during protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's killing, Los Angeles led all cities in the number of people arrested. More than a quarter of the arrests came in the City of Angels, many for low-level offenses like curfew violations and failure to disperse. Back to the police shooting of 18-year-old Andres Guardado. The Los Angeles County Sheriff promises "transparency". He invited California's attorney general to oversee the his department's internal investigation. Nu-uh! says the LA County Supervisor, mentioning a "trend" in the sheriff's office not to cooperate with outsiders looking into its business. The case needs an independent inquiry into Guardado's death. Let's hope it happens. Another Latino man shot by California police earlier this month was kneeling with his hands above his waist when he was killed. An officer in Vallejo responding to a looting call shot 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa. He fired five times at Monterrosa through the windshield of his unmarked police car, saying he thought Monterrosa had a gun. Family and supporters of Monterrosa have demanded that authorities release body camera video of the shooting. They refuse. The police union has now filed for a restraining order to block release of the name of the officer who fired the shots. Four days after Monterrosa died, California highway patrol officers opened fire on the car Erik Salgado was driving in east Oakland, killing the 23-year-old and injuring his pregnant girlfriend. CHP says officers suspected a stolen vehicle and attempted to make a traffic stop, but that Salgado started ramming CHP vehicles. In response, officers fired three shots. Salgado, who was unarmed, died at the scene. His pregnant girlfriend, shot in the stomach, was taken to the hospital. She survived, but miscarried the baby. All three of these men killed by California law enforcement in the last four weeks were suspected of property crimes. #Black, #Latino and #Native lives matter. These young men of color deserve to be safe in California and alive to pursue their dreams. There's a book detailing the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon murder case. More than a courtroom drama, The Sleepy Lagoon Murder Case by Mark A. Weitz is a study of race discrimination and the Mexican American struggle for equal rights. According to the publisher, as the case unfolded, the prosecution and local media drew ominous comparisons between the supposed dangers posed by the Mexican-American defendants and the threat allegedly posed by thousands of Japanese Americans, whose sympathies had been called into question after Pearl Harbor. Weitz shows how Zammora demonstrates what it is like to literally be tried in the court of public opinion where the "opinion" has been shaped before the trial even begins. Sources: https://www.newsweek.com/los-angeles-shooting-police-andres-guardado-gardena-1512057 https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871083536/police-kill-a-latino-man-in-california-admit-he-didnt-have-gun https://www.sbsun.com/2013/05/31/zoot-suit-riots-the-sleepy-lagoon-murder-case-that-helped-spur-the-wwii-era-los-angeles-race-riots/ https://news.yahoo.com/probe-demanded-over-latino-police-shooting-death-los-015002720.html https://www.gwinnettdailypost.com/news/world_nation/an-18-year-old-latino-man-shot-and-killed-by-a-los-angeles-county-sheriffs/article_b5e3d699-edaa-5c08-b3ed-aced5e47c43e.html https://www.insider.com/over-10000-arrested-us-george-floyd-police-brutality-protests-ap-2020-6 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/12/latinos-police-brutality-protests-george-floyd
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They Called 1919 The Red Summer. Much of the trouble in the summer of 1919 revolved around people trying to get decent work for a living wage. But underneath boiled and bubbled rampant white supremacist ideals and corporate greed. Here's a look at conditions pervading the United States at the time.
Both black and white veterans went looking for jobs in a post-war economy. Employment couldn't be found in cities or rural America. Labor strikes turned bloody when wartime price controls lifted and industrial companies tried to preserve wartime profit levels, often hiring blacks from the south to break strikes. You know that story if you've read my book Fannie Never Flinches. At a time when most unions denied African Americans membership, Fannie was one of the few labor leaders to welcome blacks. And she became one of the hundreds of Americans to die that bloody summer. Fannie Sellins was shot to death late in the summer of 1919, when Allegheny Coal and Coke hired armed guards to badger strikers and provoke violence. This year, to mark the 100th Anniversary of Fannie Sellins' death, folks in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia will gather to remember her love of working people, her courage and the ideals for which she gave her life. See News & Links below for my speaking schedule at these events. Warning: Graphic images accompany the article below. The Red SummerThere was no justice for Fannie's killing. Authorities and jurors agreed she died as a result of a "riot" perpetrated by union strikers. Even more atrocious—hundreds of black Americans killed in cold blood that summer—their killers never facing charges or trial. Their deaths blamed on "race riots" supposedly started by the blacks themselves. Major clashes between whites and blacks broke out in more than three dozen cities and towns across America, from Chicago to Washington D.C., from Bisbee, Arizona to Syracuse, New York. See a map of the deadly violence here... In separate incidents, white supremacists lynched at least 100 African Americans. All this, with no repercussions for the killers, in fact they were sometimes aided in the murders by local law officers and U.S. Army troops called in to police the violence. Civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson called the time period Red Summer but the wanton killing went on from early 1919, through the spring, summer, and early autumn of that year. The episodes of deadly violence often lasted for days. In Chicago, the killing and destruction of property in black neighborhoods went on for a week, as mobs tried to drive African Americans from industrial jobs and white neighborhoods. Often the excuse was the need to “protect” white women against the alleged assaults of black men. Denied protection of the law, African Americans took up arms to defend themselves. Especially in Chicago and Washington D.C., newly returned black veterans of World War I organized and carried out armed resistance against the white mobs. This added fuel to the false accusations of "race riots" instigated by blacks. The most heinous attacks, a racially-motivated massacre, took place over several days in Phillips County, Arkansas. In the area of cotton plantations, blacks, mostly sharecroppers, outnumbered whites ten to one. African American sharecroppers attempted to unionize. When several whites showed up to harass a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. Debate remains over who fired first, but a white man was killed and the deputy sheriff injured. The next morning, a posse formed to arrest suspects in the shootings. Up to one-thousand white men from surrounding counties and as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee gathered in Elaine, Arkansas. The armed force met little opposition from the blacks in the county, but hysteria and an imagined black insurrection swept through the group. The mob started indiscriminately killing black men, women and children, and ransacking their homes. Federal troops were sent in to "put down the rebellion" and joined the killing spree. An unknown number of African Americans were killed, though the black community estimated at least 240 dead in the largest known massacre of blacks in American history. White newspapers reported the insurrection of blacks had been brought to heel with the deaths of five whites and approximately one-hundred blacks. That's the way it happened with all the violence involving blacks and whites that year. White newspapers blamed the victims for starting the violence and reported false stories to justify the murders. Image shows newspaper report following the massacre of blacks in Phillips County, Arkansas. Similarly, 1919 headlines misrepresented legitimate labor strikes as crimes against society, conspiracies against the government and plots to establish Communism. And so, history was written. The truth of what happened in Arkansas has only begun to be reported accurately in the last decade. And a look at most any U.S. history textbook, if it mentions the events of 1919 at all, calls the mob killings of blacks "race riots" and distorts the truth, giving short shrift to racism and efforts by African Americans to defend themselves, framing the violence as the fault of "both sides." Looking clearly at our history is necessary to understand current events and to end the echoing of the dangerous words that twist the truth and manipulate us. Sources: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-red-summer-of-1919-explained https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/the-transition-to-peace-1919-1921/ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=56186312471f47eca8aff16a8a990aa8 https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/remembering-red-summer One of the things that fascinates me is the discovery of historical details and connections that add layers of meaning to our understanding, and to the stories we tell about the past. Recently, I learned of the threads that connect Audrey Hepburn and Anne Frank. The girls were born within one month of each other in 1929, Anne in Germany and Audrey in Belgium. Audrey lived with her English-Austrian father in England for several years, but by the time the war broke out, both girls had moved to the Netherlands, where they ended up living just miles apart. After Nazi Germany invaded Holland in the spring of 1940, Jewish Anne Frank would become known to the world for the diary she wrote while hiding for her life. She would die in a Nazi death camp. Audrey Hepburn's parents supported Adolf Hitler, her father an agent for the Nazi regime, her mother an admirer of the Fuhrer. But Audrey joined the resistance and suffered near starvation under German occupation resulting in her often-admired slender figure, famous in the movies Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. At the end of World War II and the Netherlands' Hunger Winter, Audrey, aged sixteen, stood five foot six, but weighed only 88-pounds. She was one of the first to read Anne Frank's diary, but asked to play in a movie based on Diary of a Young Girl, Audrey declined the role, saying it was too painful. Her son Luca Dotti told People Magazine his mother knew passages of Anne Frank's diary by heart. “My mother never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne. She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.” Audrey Hepburn's British-Austrian father and Dutch Baroness mother both held fascist sympathies in the 1930s. Ella van Heemstra had a private meeting with Adolf Hitler, where, to the Baroness's bliss, the Nazi leader kissed her hand. Audrey's father left the family before the war, and apparently in 1942, her mother had a change of heart about Hitler after the Nazis executed her sister's husband. Otto van Limburg Stirum was arrested in retaliation for sabotage by the resistance movement. He and four others were driven to a forest, made to dig their own graves and then shot. Before that, the realities of the war had come gradually to Audrey. “The first few months we didn’t know quite what had happened … I just went to school,” Hepburn said. “In the schools, the children learned their lessons in arithmetic with problems like this: ‘If 1,000 English bombers attack Berlin and 900 are shot down, how many will return to England?’" Audrey had started to learn ballet as a young girl in England, and as conditions became strained and dangerous, she turned back to dance to relieve the pressure of Nazi rule. "When I would go to the station, there were cattle cars packed with Jewish families, with old people and children,” Hepburn once said. “We did not yet know that they were traveling to their deaths. People said they were going to the ‘countryside.’ It was very difficult to understand, for I was a child. All the nightmares of my life are mixed in with those images.” A quiet, withdrawn child, Audey bloomed on the stage and soon began to perform at illegal events in hidden venues with the windows blacked out. These by-invitation-only zwarte avonden, black evenings, raised money for the Dutch Resistance. “Guards were posted outside to let us know when Germans approached,” Hepburn would later say. “The best audiences I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.” Audrey Hepburn Aides Nazi ResistanceAudrey also helped deliver tiny-sized copies of a resistance newspaper, Oranjekrant. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.” As a teenager, she avoided the suspicions of police and was also able to carry messages and food to Allied pilots shot down over the Netherlands in 1944. Though Audrey's mother had been known as a lipstick Nazi for being friendly with German soldiers early in the war, she sheltered an English pilot in their home. Luca Dotti wrote that it was a thrilling experience for Audrey. "It was risky, he was a stranger in uniform, a savior, and therefore a knight and hero. [But] if you were caught hiding an enemy, the whole family would be taken away.” Dutch people in the countryside felt the deprivations of war acutely in the winter of 1944-45, later known as Hongerwinter, Hunger Winter. Families went without heat and electricity and food grew scarce. Audrey sometimes didn't eat for as long as three days, and sometimes subsisted on bread made from brown beans and potatoes. According to Hepburn's son, “Twenty two thousand people died from hunger in Holland during the final months of World War II, my mother escaping death by a hairbreadth.” Audrey's town was finally liberated by Allied troops in spring 1945. Throughout her life, Audrey Hepburn spoke very little about the war years, some say out of fear that her parents' Nazi sympathies might harm her acting career. A good number of books have told the story of Audrey Hepburn's movie star career, jet-setting life and generosity as an ambassador for UNICEF. But a new biography out this month focuses specifically on her life during World War II. I wrote about new evidence concerning the arrest of Anne Frank's family here... Sources: Audrey at Home, Memories of Mother's Kitchen by Luca Dotti https://infosurhoy.com/cocoon/saii/xhtml/en_GB/news/how-audrey-hepburn-feared-her-moms-admiration-of-adolf-hitler-would-break-her-profession/ https://forward.com/schmooze/422225/why-audrey-hepburn-refused-to-play-her-soul-sister-anne-frank/ https://people.com/celebrity/audrey-hepburns-personal-connection-to-anne-frank/ But first... I discovered a wonderful author whom I should have known about before at the recent Association of Writing Programs conference. I presented on a panel about writing nonfiction for kids in the age of fake news. Luckily, a panel I picked to attend featured Thi Bui and a reader's theater performance of a section of her book The Best We Could Do. Thi Bui is an author/cartoonist and the book is a graphic novel memoir. It tells the story her family’s immigration to the United States during the Vietnam War when Thi was three, combining the personal and political as it follows the family's life as refugees in America. What's Thi working on now? Here's what she said in an interview with Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. I spent a long time thinking about Vietnam’s past, and now I’d like to spend some time thinking about its present and future. I’ve been following news stories about droughts, floods, and the saltwater intrusion that’s been wreaking havoc on the rice farmers of the Mekong Delta. Climate change is a reality there, and much closer than in the U.S. because the Mekong region is only six feet above sea level and grows half the country’s rice. About a million people will be displaced by the sea rising, possibly in my lifetime. [In light of] the climate change denial that’s happening here, this is maddening. I have to explore this. Read the full interview here. And now for this week's feature story. Her dad told her to stop whining and complaining. Here's what she did. A Black Woman Spy Breaking BarriersCaptain Gail Harris confronted racism and sexism to become the U.S. Navy’s first black and female intelligence officer, and the highest-ranking black woman in the navy when she retired in 2001. As a five-year-old watching the movie Wing and a Prayer, Gail saw actor Don Ameche’s character gave an intelligence briefing to Navy pilots after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Then and there, she decided she wanted that job. “My father was in the army in the after-math of WWII when it was still segregated, so he could have bust my bubble right there and told me that it was rare that the navy only had a handful of African-American male captains, let alone female," Gail says. "But he didn’t. He turned to me and said, 'This is American, you can be whatever you want to be.'” If Gail had known then that women were not allowed combat roles in the U.S. military, she may have given up the idea. Or maybe she would have wanted it all the more. Gail believes that her sense of humor, as well as her intellect helped her break an important barrier in 1973, when she became the first female assigned to an operational combat job as an intelligence officer. Her first years as the only woman in a squad of 360 men demanded every bit of her confidence and nerve. "People would look at me and refuse to salute me and I would smile and salute them first and say “Good Morning! Isn’t this a great day? That usually embarrassed them," Gail remembers. "Those first few years were pretty brutal. But my father told me to stop whining and complaining....He told me that if I couldn’t stand the heat, get out of the Navy and get a job as a janitor. Most importantly, he told me that if someone had a problem because I was a woman or Black, it was their problem, don’t make it mine." In her 28-year naval career, Gail served a crucial role in naval intelligence during every major conflict from the Cold War and El Salvador to Desert Storm and Kosovo. She carved out a string of firsts for African American woman, including working as an instructor at the Armed Forces Air Intelligence Training Center where she built the navy's first course on Ocean Surveillance Information Systems. When Gail retired, she thought her work for civil rights was done. Until Donald Trump became president. For the first time in her life, Gail joined a political march. "I was of the mindset I could change things by excelling in my work, by proving doubters and haters wrong," Gail says. But she had begun to feel an unease, that was confirmed for her on a visit to her mother in Arkansas, when she and a white friend encountered looks of hate and disgust from white shoppers at the grocery store. "I realized at that moment, in all of the times I’d traveled to the new south, I had never seen a black person and a white person sitting together at the same table in restaurants or hanging out. We had broken an unwritten social code. It was obvious to any observer we were old friends who treated each other as social equals. "Those attitudes are so backward to most Americans, many may prefer to believe I misread that situation. But I know “hate” when I see it." Gail showed up for the women's march for the sake of the next generation of women and minorities, saying, "I don’t want the clock pushed back on my watch." In her retirement, Gail also keeps a close watch on what's happening in the field of cyber security. In the Navy, Gail final assignment was developing an intelligence architecture for cyber warfare. She's worried now, that it may take a catastrophe on the level of 9/11 to get all the different federal, civilian and international agencies to cooperate in fighting cyber warfare and crime. The bad guys and girls are just scratching the service of the havoc they can bring about. Technology is changing at the speed of thought and the rules and regulations dealing with it are moving at the speed of a glacier. [We] must work with our allies to develop a common cyber lexicon and agree on what constitutes a cyber attack, a cyber act of war, etc. Does this include malign influence operations via social media, for example." To protect American interests, government and industry will have to work together more closely and share information as private industry owns 90% of the critical cyber infrastructure. Are you wondering if this woman ever relaxes? Why, yes, she does. While playing air guitar during her stint as a disc jockey for an R& B radio show on KDUR, a public radio station in Durango, Colorado. "Music for me, even without being a disc jockey, it saved my soul. My job [in navy intelligence] was so intense that when I left my job frequently I couldn’t go to sleep."
Retired Navy Captain Gail Harris Role sleeps well now, and believes the outlook for women in general and the military in particular is positive. Gender equality in on the agenda, on the radar scope as we say in the military and it’s not going to get kicked off.” Gail predicts within less than ten years, Americans will see a female Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and/or a female Secretary of Defense. Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NSoDkOpOtI (The BBC) https://limacharlienews.com/veterans/captain-gail-harris/ https://limacharlienews.com/cyber/gailforce-blinking-red-cyber-war-and-malign-influence-operations-today/ https://limacharlienews.com/op-ed/gailforce-reflections-from-the-womens-march/ You just never know where your research will take you. Searching for information on a surviving member of the the all-black 6888th Battalion spotlighted in Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII, I discovered the debate surrounding a growing market for black memorabilia. I've never actually seen one of the hitching post figures of a cartoonish young black boy with exaggerated features, which I thought was now universally considered racist. But I've learned a lot about racism in America in the last couple years and maybe shouldn't have been surprised by the Little Black Sambo cookie jars and Mamie salt and pepper shakers being sold on E-bay. I also didn't expect to find them while researching Fran McClendon, a 101-year-old African American Veteran of WWII. In late summer of 1943, the Allies won important victories in Italy and New Guinea, and the Nazis and Japanese were retreating. But the war was far from over and the U.S. Army needed more manpower. Congress voted to raise the status of women in the army from supplemental support to official members of the military. All over the country, the Women's Army Corps recruited volunteers, telling women they could "free a man to fight" and help win the war. Fran McClendon went with a group of girl friends to talk with a recruiter and they all decided to enlist. A year later, Fran was assigned to the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. It would be the only unit of black women deployed overseas during the war. Fran would end up serving 26 years in the military, first the army, then the air force, posted Korea and Vietnam, and retiring at the rank Major. But it was her WWII assignment in Birmingham, England, where she developed an appreciation for fine crystal and china. The Black WACs' job in England was to sort a huge backlog of mail and re-direct it to soldiers in the field. They worked in shifts around the clock because the packages and letters were crucial to troop morale. But Fran and the others did have days off to explore the town. Birmingham citizens welcomed the WACs and invited them to tea in their homes and out to restaurants. Crystal and china were everywhere. Fran saw it in shop windows at the weekend markets and soon gained a love of fine craftsmanship. Many years later, after her military career, Fran went into the antique business. “I love the study of the glass industry and china industry,” she told a reporter recently. Yes, recently. To this day, she runs an antique shop, the Glass Urn in Mesa, AZ, where she deals mostly in American crystal, but has some glassware from Ireland, Sweden and Germany. Over the years, the Glass Urn has carried a large variety of antiques, occasionally items made in the image of a black person. These types of collectibles, almost always demeaning, have been manufactured in America since the beginning of the slave trade and remained common and popular up through the 1950s. At times, Fran McClendon has questioned whether to sell certain items of black memorabilia, but she considers them art. “My husband and I loved art and in art you find all kinds of things." Where Fran sees art, some see historical artifacts that can be educational, and other find these black collectibles racist and offensive. As an African-American history professor, Donald Guillory, has mixed feelings about black memorabilia. The items can spark conversation about the negative portrayal of blacks, which might be a teachable moment. “If it’s anything other than learning the context or teaching about it, why would you want something that offensive, or that overtly offensive, in your home?” He concludes. What I found startling when I happened upon this topic, is the burgeoning popularity of black memorabilia, so much so, that replicas are now being manufactured in China. A documentary on the topic debuted earlier this month on PBS. Read about it here... Or watch the one-hour documentary Black Memorabilia here... As for Fran McClendon, after forty-years of selling antiques, she's preparing to retire. “I’m downsizing,” she said. “I want to do things and I know I can’t hold on to everything.” I hope she holds on to at least one set of glassware that reminds her of Birmingham, England, and her time in the Women's Army Corps. For further interest, there's a book that goes into some depth about how these racist depictions of blacks continued to be reinvented over the decades of American history. Mamie and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Sterotyping. Sources: http://www.eastvalleytribune.com/local/mesa/mesa-antiques-store-owner-liquidating-life-s-work/article_8d388c76-3163-11e2-b6e4-0019bb2963f4.html https://www.pinalcentral.com/arizona_news/antique-dealers-see-controversial-african-american-memorabilia-as-part-of/article_eed8b251-42b2-5978-8fc8-682fa9eefb32.html |
I'm fascinated to discover little-known history, stories of people and events that provide a new perspective on why and how things happened, new voices that haven't been heard, insight into how the past brought us here today, and how it might guide us to a better future.
I also post here about my books and feature other authors and their books on compelling and important historical topics. Occasionally, I share what makes me happy, pictures of my garden, recipes I've made, events I've attended, people I've met. I'm always happy to hear from readers in the blog comments, by email or social media. Archives
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