Author Mary Cronk Farrell

Here's a new book you'll want to put in the hands of young people you care about.
​ Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News takes an in-depth look at fake news. 

Though it has been several decades since I officially worked as a journalist, freedom of the press is bone deep in my body. So, I've invited author Linda Barret Osborn here today to tell us about her new book, including the part about people living on the moon! 

Praise for the book— 
"Deeply researched and beautifully written, Guardians of Liberty enlightens and entertains readers of any age."  — Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post
 
Welcome, Linda. Tell us how you came to write this book.
 
In 2017, I became alarmed at the way President Donald Trump was disparaging the press and questioning its validity. 

I had some knowledge of the First Amendment, which reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”
 
But as with all my books for middle school and young adults, I learned a lot more about freedom of the press along the way than I knew at the beginning.
 
It seemed important that young people understand how today’s issues are connected to the beginning of our history as a country.  Actually, I wish more grownups understood this history too.
 
One of the most delightful things I found in my research was that in 1835 the New York Sun reported that men were living on the moon. 
 
These were no ordinary men.

“They averaged four feet in height, were covered . . . with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings” like bats. Unicorns also roamed the moon. So did a strange kind of beaver that walked upright on two legs.
 
The Sun explained that a respected South African astronomer had made the discovery using a huge telescope. New Yorkers rushed to buy the newspaper and read each day’s installment. When the story was revealed as a hoax—a great entertainment—sales of the Sun continued to rise.
 
The Sun’s moon story was an example of actual fake news. The paper’s editor knew it was false when he published it.
 
Fake news is not, as President Trump sees it, press about himself that he just doesn’t like.

By attacking journalists, by undercutting the idea of factual reporting, it seems that President Trump was going against the intentions of the Founding Fathers who wrote that amendment.
 
Men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison envisioned a press that would be a watchdog against government abuses of power.
 
Remember, they were reacting to the British royal government’s treatment of the colonies.
 
They also believed that a democracy needs an active, vital press representing all points of view: a press that would encourage debate and open discussion of ideas to create an informed citizenry.
 
Because Americans do hold widely differing points of view, no president can count on only “good” press.
 
So from the early days of our country, the First Amendment put the president—no matter what his political party—and the press at odds with each other. No president likes negative press. 
 
Here was something else I wanted to explore and it soon became clear that combative, hurtful words about presidents are not new in our history. John Adams, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as President Trump, have been ripped apart in the news. 
 
Even George Washington got bad press. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson wrote that Washington had encouraged “political iniquity and . . . legalized corruption."
 
Sometimes the presidents remained silent. Sometimes they fought back against their critics. Sometimes they let partisan newspapers fight it out for them.
 
But by 2017, the “press” did not just include printed papers. Radio, television, the internet, and social media had all changed the way the news was delivered.

And because the technology had changed, President Trump could bypass the press, using social media directly to reach the public. He could continually attack the press as often as he wished, tweeting many times a day.
 
Since I wrote Guardians of Liberty, people have asked me why I think Trump is different from other presidents and their attitudes towards the press. Nixon, after all, called the press “the enemy.” 
 
But only Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people."  "Don’t believe the crap you see from these people—the fake news,” he said to a VFW convention, pointing to the reporters. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
 
I think all press, no matter what the medium, has its biases.

In addition, more Americans get their news from social media. Much of that “news” is opinion. Some of it is definitely fake, though not in the way President Trump defines it. So we all need to become better judges of the accuracy of what we are reading.
 
In many ways, professional journalists, who have a standard of accuracy, are our best bet. But there are fairly easy ways to check anyone’s sources and statements. Tweets, press briefings, and speeches are on record. They are filmed and recorded. The White House itself posts the transcripts of speeches, so you can see what the president actually said and if and when he said the opposite.
 
Since the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court cases on press freedom I covered in my book have tended to uphold the First Amendment. The need for national security during war has been the biggest challenge to this freedom.
 
New technology has changed the nature of news. It should not change our belief in the importance of free expression in a democracy, the same belief the Founding Fathers held. I think we are at a turning point.
 
We can agree that disparaging and attacking the foundations of one of our most precious freedoms is acceptable; or we can believe, as a society, that freedom of the press is a principle we need to defend, practice, and value. 
 
Thanks so much, Linda!  

I'm going to be giving away several copies of Linda's book to middle school teachers. Sign up for my weekly newsletter to stay in the loop and find out how you can win.

In the early 1900s, some American women campaigned for suffrage, picketed, went to jail...
 
Other women formed a massive movement to erect monuments glorifying the Confederacy, re-write the history of the Civil War and indoctrinate children using a Confederate Catechism. (Link to catechism below.)

These women wrote and controlled history textbooks in Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and other southern states for three generations.
 
Textbooks that described a close friendship between "old massa" and slaves, picnics and barbeques thrown where slaves had a "great frolic," and stated how enslaved people sang as they worked in the fields, "the beat of the music and richness of their voices made work seem light."
 
Is it any wonder the confederate flag means so much to so many people? That Robert E. Lee is such a vaunted hero? They learned it in catechism! (See video after feature story below)
 
Today, Brandon Marie Miller, author of Robert E. Lee, the Man, the Soldier, the Myth, is here to help us separate fact from fiction. Welcome, Brandon!

I never thought my YA biography of Robert E. Lee would be so timely. But one way to fight racism and white supremacy is by accepting truths about our past. 150 years after his death, Lee remains in history’s spotlight.
 
Some people today still claim Lee did not own slaves, he hated slavery, he favored emancipation, and he promoted reconciliation after the Civil War. Let’s take a closer look. 
 
Lee and Slavery 
“Slavery as an institution,” Lee wrote his wife in 1856, “is a moral & political evil in any country.” Sounds good, right? But a sentence down in this same letter Lee explains “I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race.”  
 
Lee believed God approved slavery as a means to civilize Black people. Even the “painful discipline” inflicted was “necessary for their instruction as a race.” For Lee, Black people were morally unfit for freedom and not as capable of learning as whites.
 
Photo below: Selina Norris Gray, the enslaved housekeeper at Robert E. Lee's home, Arlington, shown with two of her daughters. (Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial.)

He felt slavery was messy, though, an inefficient system forcing “unwilling hands to work.” He disliked having to feed, clothe, and house people he found lazy and ungrateful.
 
Lee wrote his new bride about their household slaves, “you may do with them as you please…But do not trouble yourself about them, as they are not worth it.”

After his father-in-law’s death, Lee inherited around 200 enslaved people. They were to be freed within five years. But Lee petitioned a court to keep these men, women, and children in bondage while he made his father-in-law’s plantations profitable.
 
The enslaved sabotaged Lee’s efforts. They ran away, broke items, and stole things. Lee had people whipped or rid himself of troublemakers by hiring them out or sending slaves to Richmond to be “disposed of…to the best advantage.” ​

Although against secession, once war loomed, Robert Lee resigned the U. S. Army commission he’d held for nearly 35 years. Within days, he accepted a commission as major general of Virginia’s forces.

Lee knew the Confederacy existed to protect slavery and the right to expand slavery into the western territories. He had resented the North’s attempts to block the spread of slavery into the west which threatened, he wrote, the “equal rights of our [Southern] citizens.” “The South…has been aggrieved by the acts of the North” he told his son, “... I feel the aggression.” 
 
Did Lee believe in emancipation for enslaved people?
Lee believed in gradual emancipation which would only come when God decided, maybe not for thousands of years in the future. Lee did not free his family’s enslaved property until a court ordered him to obey his father-in-law’s will in 1862. Does that make him an emancipator?

Lee did approve one method for freeing slaves. In January 1865, three months before he surrendered, Lee advocated using slaves to fight for the Confederate Army.
 
However, across the trenches, tens of thousands of former slaves wore Union blue uniforms.
 
Lee needed soldiers and proposed giving “our negroes” freedom upon enlisting and freedom for their families at the end of the war, though this came too late in the war to matter. Does this make Lee an emancipator? 
 
Did Lee work for reconciliation after the war? 
Lee urged fellow Southerners to “promote harmony and good feelings” as the quickest means to regain voting rights for white men and rebuild southern prosperity.
 
After the war Lee served as president of Washington College where he implemented rigorous programs to educate and uplift young men of the South.

But Lee’s words of reconciliation gave way to anger as the “evil legislation of Congress” granted civil rights to the former enslaved. Washington College students harassed African Americans, destroyed a Freedman’s Bureau school, and nearly lynched a man.
 
The President's House that Lee designed and built at Washington College. (Special Collections Department, Washington and Lee University)  

Lee disciplined a few ring leaders but never spoke out publicly against the violence toward African Americans sweeping the South. His response emphasized instead how students disturbed “the public peace, or bring discredit upon themselves or the institution to which they belong.” 
​
Lee rejected this new world where “the South is to be placed under the dominion of the negroes.” Publicly he claimed he wished the former enslaved well, but privately Lee wrote, “Remember, our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”
 
In 1868 Lee signed a political statement known as the White Sulphur Springs Manifesto. The signers pledged to treat Blacks with “kindness and humanity,” while opposing any “laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race.”
 
This statement, and others, helped justify continued violence against African Americans for participating in the American political system.

How did the reality of Lee’s racism and white supremacy get turned around?
 
In June of 1870 Lee wrote a cousin he hoped to shape “the opinion which posterity may form of the motives which governed the South in their late struggle.”
 
He began reframing the war as a political quarrel-- the North strayed from the ideals of the Constitution while the South fought to maintain “those principles of American liberty.”
 
He’d fought for state’s rights, not the cause of protecting slavery, Lee claimed. He disregarded the fact that the state’s rights insisted upon in 1860 and 1861 had been the right to own slaves and spread slavery into the west.
In the decades after Lee’s death in October 1870, the handsome hero image of Lee grew to saint-like perfection. The ugliness of slavery could not tarnish this mythical man.
 
Over time, the myth that he didn’t own slaves and supported emancipation became truth in the South and the North. Lee became a symbol of a righteous South. For many white Americans the soothing myth of Lee as a kind, honorable, Christian Gentleman, was more important than the economic suppression, voting suppression, and murder of African Americans. 
Groups like the United Confederate Veterans (founded 1889) and The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894), worked tirelessly to vindicate the Old South, intentionally rewriting history.
 
The UDC distributed a booklet nation-wide to control what appeared in textbooks, shaping our Civil War memory for generations.

Among the reasons listed to condemn a book: “Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves. Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves. Reject a text book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis….” 
 
Lee’s portrait graced thousands of Southern classrooms; many celebrated his birthday. Members of The Children of the Confederacy recited from A Confederate Catechism, first published in 1904.
 
It included lessons like this one: “What did the South fight for? It fought to repel invasion and for self-government, just as the fathers of the American Revolution had done.”
    As Jim Crow laws stripped civil rights from African Americans and sharecropping became a new form of slavery, statues of Confederate heroes rose in cities across the South.
 
Dedication ceremonies included parades, speeches, and hundreds of children arranged into “living” Confederate battle flags. The monuments reinforced white Southerners’ pride in the past, romanticized the Old South and slavery, and warned African Americans to keep to their place. 
I spent years researching and writing this book and have used Lee’s own words, and the words of his family and friends, to tell the story. I’m grateful ROBERT E. LEE, THE MAN, THE SOLDIER, THE MYTH was named a National Council of the Social Studies Notable Book and a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year. If you’d like to know more, order a copy from your favorite bookstore or online here...
 
Thank you, Brandon!  I'm so appreciative of you taking time to tell us about your new book, and to help us understand more about the roots of racial injustice in our nation and the concerted efforts to re-write history. 
 
Also thanks to author Claire Rudolf Murphy for alerting me to this video below about the women who helped distort the truth of the Civil War, construct a false legacy and indoctrinate children.

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.

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. 

​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.

• Government policies reflected a hyper-nationalist attitude prevalent throughout America 
• People demanding a more equal distribution of wealth, especially union strikers, were labeled far-left wing and denounced as un-American
• Immigration from Mexico was on the rise and African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers.
• Newspapers exacerbated fear and xenophobia 
• The anti-immigrant Sedition Act of 1918 and subsequent state statutes allowed deportation of people with undesirable politics, and gave police unspoken authority to physically harass or arrest anyone considered suspicious or thought to be causing trouble 

With the Great War at an end, the U.S. military discharged four million soldiers, promising them benefits which did not materialize. This is said to have been the spark that inflamed the violence in 1919, though it appears America seethed with enough hatred to breathe fire all on it's own.

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. 

​There 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 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.​

Captain 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

White guys like John Wayne personify our image of the American West, so it might surprise you to know that roughly one in four cowboys riding the range was black.
 
On Saturday night when they went to town, these men couldn't stay in hotels or eat in restaurants. I'm not sure if they could drink and play cards in the saloons, but during the workweek, their skill with a horse, a rope and a gun, could gain them a level of respect. 

In the three decades following the Civil War at least 25 (probably more) African American men served as deputy U.S. Marshals for the U.S. government. There's some evidence to suggest that one of those rough-riding, straight-shooting black lawmen formed the basis for the iconic Lone Ranger. 

Deputy Marshal Bass Reeves grew famous in the late 19th Century, during his 30-years pursuing and arresting bandits and murders throughout what was called Indian Territory. The former slave has some distinct resemblances to Lone Ranger of radio, comic book, TV and movies.

​Bass was born a slave in Arkansas in 1883, and was taken to Texas his owner William Reeves as an 8-year-old boy. When the Civil War broke out, Reeves' son joined the Confederate Army and took Bass with him to the front lines as a servant.

 Before the war's end, Bass escaped, heading west to what was then called Indian Territory and now the State of Oklahoma. Historians say there he learned horsemanship and tracking skills from Native Americans and also became handy with Colt 45 and a rifle. After emancipation, Bass was just one of many black men looking for work.
 
“Right after the Civil War, being a cowboy was one of the few jobs open to men of color who wanted to not serve as elevator operators or delivery boys or other similar occupations,” says William Loren Katz, a scholar of African-American history.

The Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Cherokee, and Chickasaw tribes had been forcibly moved from their homelands to "Indian Territory" where they governed themselves, but the federal government was responsible for rounding up the lawless element hiding out there, thousands of thieves, murderers and fugitives.

​The call went out to hire 200 deputies for the job, and Bass Reeves fit the profile. Strong, steady, 6-foot-2, with a deep voice and commanding presence, he was appointed the first African-American lawman west of the Mississippi.

By all accounts, he was one of the best, serving for more than 30-years in relentless pursuit of lawbreakers. The Oklahoma City Weekly Times-Journal reported, “Reeves was never known to show the slightest excitement, under any circumstance. He does not know what fear is.”
 
True to the mythical code of the West, Bass Reeves never drew his gun first. Though many outlaws aimed to shoot him, their bullets always missed. He was never even grazed by a bullet. Reeves admitted he shot and killed 14 men, but all in self-defense. 
 
He's credited with bringing in 3,000 outlaws alive. More than once, showing up at the District Courthouse in Fort Smith with ten or more prisoners in tow.

From the “Court Notes” of the July 31, 1885, Fort Smith Weekly Elevator: “Deputy Bass Reeves came in same evening with eleven prisoners, as follows: Thomas Post, one Walaska, and Wm. Gibson, assault with intent to kill; Arthur Copiah, Abe Lincoln, Miss Adeline Grayson and Sally Copiah, alias Long Sally, introducing whiskey in Indian country; J.F. Adams, Jake Island, Andy Alton and one Smith, larceny.”

Though he couldn't read or write, Bass Reeves always knew which arrest warrant matched his man, and he used his brains, as well as his brawn and firepower to enforce the law. He often wore disguises to catch criminals unaware, and that may be the first clue that connected Bass with the famous "masked man."

He rode a large light gray horse and gave out silver dollars as a calling card, similar to the Lone Ranger's trademark silver bullets.
 
At least one biographer says the deputy marshal at times worked with a Native American partner tracking criminals. And like the Lone Ranger, he demonstrated an unshakable moral compass, even arresting his own son on a murder charge, after which the son was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. 

So far, historians have not proven the Lone Ranger was based on the exploits of Bass Reeves, but the most convincing piece of evidence seems to be that many of the prisoners he captured and turned into authorities at Fort Smith, went to serve their jail sentences in Detroit, the city where George Trendle and Fran Striker created the character of the Lone Ranger.
​
A children's biography Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal, won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Award. It was written by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson and illustrated by R. Gregory Christie.

One reviewer on Goodreads says, "This is a children's book, but still very informative." Because, of course, most children's books are not informative. (heavy sigh) 

For more reading on the topic, check out Gary Paulson's historical novel for teens called the Legend of Bass Reeves: Being the True and Fictional Account of the Most Valiant Marshal in the West. Publishers Weekly called it a "compelling fictionalized biography...Effectively conveying Reeve's thoughts and emotions, the author shapes an articulate, well-deserved tribute to this unsung hero.

Sources: 
https://blackdoctor.org/482030/this-week-in-black-history-the-real-lone-ranger-was-a-black/
​
https://www.history.com/news/bass-reeves-real-lone-ranger-a-black-man

Standing Up Against Hate is out in the world!
​
It's the story of how black women in the U.S. Army changed the course of WWII. It's an honor and a privilege to tell the stories of these courageous women. Here's a sample of feedback I've gotten on the book.
★Starred Review, School Library Connection:
"A nonfiction writer for youth audiences, Farrell settles in to explain with depth and precision the fight black women faced both in and out of the military as World War II surged. Focused specifically on black women in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), the book profiles several key figures, including Major Charity Adams who commanded the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion.

"In addition to the deft writing, images are presented every few pages that reveal a score of brave women who persevered despite suffering discrimination. The women had to proclaim their equality in the face of segregation in the mess hall and in dispatching the unit overseas.

"The text also details how some servicewomen were jailed for disobeying orders or even beaten by civilians while wearing their uniforms. Organized chronologically, the text is accessible for middle school and high school historians who are intrigued by institutional racism or women in the military for research. It profiles milestones in the 6888th’s preparation and deployment, providing a well-researched understanding of the time period for black women in the military.

"The book is a gem that profiles an underrepresented narrative in American history."
​
Available at the links below or your favorite bookstore.

If only we could bottle it.

She grew up working in the tobacco fields of Wake County, North Carolina. Her parents had a large family, ten children, because sharecropping required many hands and all-consuming labor.

How did Clara Leach make the leap from the Jim Crow south to Brigadier General in the U.S. Army?
 
She wrote the story of her life after retirement to set the record straight. "I was increasingly encountering people who assumed that I was successful because I was born with a “silver spoon” in my mouth or I just “got lucky.”

At age five Clara cooked and tended younger siblings in a house with no electricity or running water, while her parents and older siblings grew and harvested tobacco for a white landowner.

Soon Clara graduated to field work. That included planting, hoeing, pulling weeds, walking the rows "topping" off the buds to stimulate growth, and picking worms off the leaves and squishing them.

​"Growing tobacco...is a very difficult crop...labor intensive," Clara says. "So my father and mother had ten children, and we were all employed full time on that farm in tobacco." 

Photo: The daughter of an African American sharecropper at work in a tobacco field in Wake County, North Carolina. Credit: Dorothea Lange, July 1939.

Clara's parents believed in education as well as hard work. And though she missed a lot of school due to farm work, Clara skipped two grades and graduated at sixteen, salutatorian of her class. 

The painful experience of prejudice at her segregated school in Wake County launched the attitude that would carry Clara from the soil of North Carolina to the halls of the Pentagon.

"Many members of the African-American community considered dark skin ugly. Unattractive. Undesirable. That message came across loud and clear in terms of which students were favored by teachers, and by other students," Clara says. "When I raised my hand, the teacher would never call on me."

"Instead, a kid with straight hair and fair skin always got picked. Some of them were really smart, but so was I. It was all part of a warped value system that some black people still embrace today-the closer you are to being white, the better off and more beautiful you are."

Clara's mother told her beauty was skin deep and that what others thought of her didn't matter. "It's what you think of yourself that matters," she said. It was a good lesson but it didn't take away the sting of being passed over.

Clara made a decision. ​

"I spent a lot of time getting even smarter, because I knew knowledge could never be snatched from me, regardless of whether I was high yellow or black as midnight," says Clara. Those early snubs and slights I experienced due to skin color further motivated me to excel. They lit a fire under me that drove me to succeed not just at academics, but at whatever endeavor I tackled."
 
She went college at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study nursing. There Clara took part in the the famous Greensboro sit-ins at the Woolworth's lunch counter. 
 
She told an interviewer for the Women Veterans Historical Project about her experience with non-violent protest. "When people push you, spit on you, curse you and do those kinds of things, it’s very difficult not to raise your hand. But in reality, when you think about it, it’s quite a powerful thing to be able to sit and do nothing while people do that." 

To fund her last two years of college, Clara signed up for the Army Student Nurse Program scholarship. After graduation in 1961. she entered the U.S. Army Nurse Corps as a 2nd Lieutenant.

​Her values of hard work and a positive attitude continued to serve her well as she met obstacles as a woman and a black in the army.

"Obstacles are not really there to stop one’s progress. They are really opportunities for us to decide how we will overcome them to reach our goals. If we keep the goal in mind, then we can decide if we will go over, under, around or through the obstacle to accomplish it."

​In 1965, Clara became a  medical-surgical nursing instructor at Fort Sam Houston where she became the first woman in the army to earn the Expert Field Medical Badge.  She continued to rise in the ranks and continue her education, the first nurse corps officer to graduate from the Army War College and the first woman to earn a Master’s Degree in military arts and sciences from the Army’s Command and General Staff College.
 
Assigned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Clara trained a generation of nurses and then became the first African American to serve as vice president and chief of the department of nursing at the hospital. In 1987 she was promoted to Brigadier General and named Chief of the Army Nurse Corps and Chief of Army medical personnel.

The list of Clara Leach Adams-Enders' accomplishments in the army is long and impressive, including formal distinctions like the Distinguished Service Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster and informal such as recruiting minority student nurses at Walter Reed. 
 
She led the Army Nurse Corps through two major combat operations, Just Cause and Desert Shield/Storm. Clara is also known for her remarkable warmth and humility.
 
Retiring after a 34-year career in the army, she wrote a book about her life to inspire others, My Rise to the Stars: How a Sharecropper's Daughter Became an Army General.  She also runs a management consulting firm Cape Incorporated  with the mission of helping organizations manage their people with care and enthusiasm. 

With hard work, education and the right attitude, Clara Leach Adams-Ender made the journey from sharecropper's daughter to the highest ranks of the U.S. Army.  Her success also stands on the shoulders of those who trod this path before her.  Thousands of African American women overcame obstacles to serve with distinction in the U.S. Army during WWII. Read their story in Standing Up Against Hate: How Black Women in the Army Helped Change the Course of WWII.

​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