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 The stories of individual people make history real in our imaginations. Norm Haskett strives to preserve those stories on his website The Daily Chronicles of World War II. Norm has kindly agreed to help us remember D-Day, June 6th, a day that should live in our consciousness as an critically important military victory that came at a staggering human cost. Norm gives us a brief overview of D-Day through photos and captions, and the story of the young men from Bedford, Virginia, part of the first wave of the historic invasion. Allied Naval forces crossed the English channel overnight June 6, 1944. Soldiers started landing at 6.30am on the coast of Normandy, France. Below: Coast Guard-manned flatbottom boat, better known as a Higgins boat, carries one of the first companies of U.S. solders to invade Omaha Beach. As the boat approaches, smoke on the bluff-restricted shore most likely emanates from seagrass set on fire by naval shells. Below: “Into the Jaws of Death” is the description of this image taken by Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert Sargent of the United States Coast Guard. Taken at 7:40 on the morning of June 6, it is one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the D-Day landings. It shows troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division departing their landing craft and wading through waist-deep water towards the “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach. Earlier, U.S. Eighth Air Force heavy bombers were supposed to hit German defenses, and leave bomb craters to form instant foxholes, on the stretch of exposed beach, but the 13,000 bombs missed their target by 3 miles. The battle-hardened U.S. 1st Infantry Division joined by the untested 29th Infantry Division, advanced up Omaha Beach into 4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests. The two divisions suffered some 2,000 killed or wounded on Normandy beaches. Two-thirds of Company E, the soldiers seen in Sargent’s photograph, were among the casualties. German forward units reported to headquarters that the invasion had been halted at the water’s edge, though by 12:30 p.m. there were 18,772 men on Omaha Beach with thousands more arriving each succeeding hour. Among those soldiers in the first wave of the murderous assault on Omaha Beach were thirty-five young men from rural Bedford, Virginia. The men from Bedford had enlisted in the Virginia Army National Guard. When their unit was mobilized into the regular army the men were assigned to the untested U.S. 29th Infantry Division, Company A. Only nineteen Bedford Boys survived as the first wave hit the beaches that dreadful day. Three lost their lives later in the campaign. Thirteen sons of Beford survived the war to come home to their small town after the war. This is kind of personal story that helps us understand the war better, and that Norm shares on his website. Here he tells us how he the project started. After thirty years as a history teacher and a technical writer, in retirement, freed of workplace demands, I chose to begin researching and writing on a subject that had long interested me: World War II. My carrier aircraft designer father and his two brothers who served in the U.S. Army were part of that “greatest generation” who answered their country’s call and gave us the world we live in today. Other people of that generation, in this country as elsewhere, lost their lives or survived, though millions were scarred mentally or physically by their wartime experience. Heroes, average Joes, victims, and villains—all these people had stories to tell us from the period—some still do. I decided I wanted to be a part in sharing them. On my website, The Daily Chronicles of World War II, I strive to preserve the stories of those who lived through that watershed era. Every day of the year I share a different story from a different theater of war and year, stories heroic or tragic or both. Of course heroism and tragedy can commingle in the same narrative. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw, showed me a perspective on heroism I’d never considered before. He quoted the sister of one of the thirteen Bedford survivors: “People say the men who died on the beach were heroes. I think the heroes are the ones who came back and had to live with it for the rest of their lives.” Soldiers who survived the Omaha beach landing faced 4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests. George A. Taylor, commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment on Omaha Beach, encouraged his men, most of them traumatized crossing the killing ground, to move up on to the bluffs where the German positions were, stating perhaps the obvious: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die.” Below, assault troops of the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Infantry Division survived, gaining the comparative safety offered by the chalk cliff at their backs. Here they take a breather before pushing inland. Toward evening on D-Day itself the Omaha beachhead bustled with activity, having been reported safe for wheeled and tracked vehicles. Kitchens were set up and served beans and wieners and hash browns to the survivors of the nearly 40,000 men who were landed there that day. D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. More than 4,100 landing craft and ships were deployed to Omaha and the other four assault beaches that stretched across a forty-mile front. By D+26 the vessels had delivered one million troops, 566,648 tons of supplies, and 171,532 vehicles. Below: With the beaches secured, badly needed tanks, heavy equipment, artillery, rifles and ammunition come ashore at Omaha Beach at low tide on D+3. Barrage balloons overhead were meant to deny German aircraft low-level airspace. Many people who lived through World War II waited until their senior years to tell their stories; sadly, most of them took their stories to their graves, having shared little if anything beyond telling at the most a few people.
Like Kershaw and other students of history, I desire to rescue as many stories of World War II as I can by discovering and recording them and then playing them back to a new audience on my website. My twin goals are to inspire this generation and caution its members about their responsibility to preserve and honor these legacies. It’s this desire that drives and energizes me every day. Thank you, Norm! I really appreciate the way you tell events day by day, including pieces from different perspectives and sources, all in one place. His website includes maps and photos, videos and books, as well as succinct snippets about the major campaigns and battles of the war. Click here for a map and overview of Operation Overload, which went down in history as the D-Day invasion. What if I told you there was a civil rights leader who mentored Rosa Parks years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott? Who spent the early 1940s in small towns across the south, calling on barber shops, beauty parlors, grocery stores, churches, talking with sharecroppers, talking about how black people could fight Jim Crow. And who convinced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that blacks needed a civil rights base in the south like the NAACP in the north, but more activist. And urged an initially reluctant King, then a young minister, to capitalize on the momentum of the bus boycott and expand protest throughout the south. You are probably guessing this is a woman. And you would be right. Ella J. Baker was known as a difficult woman. She didn't care. Working for the NAACP 1940-1946, she encountered men who doubted women's capabilities and who wanted to hold tight to their hierarchical structure and middle-class membership. Ella wanted to involve poor blacks and women, and she believed ordinary people could organize and lead themselves and change unjust structures in society. She also didn't care that her accomplishments went unnoticed. She worked behind the scenes helping people empower themselves, saying "Strong people don't need strong leaders.” In her years of grassroots work for the NAACP, Ella admitted the seemly endless small church meetings could often be “more exhausting than the immediate returns seem to warrant, but it’s a part of the spade work....Give light and people will find the way.” By 1946, Ella had become so fed up with the NAACP for it's resistance to grassroots organizing and lack of inclusion, she quit. Though she still participated in the local chapter where she lived in New York. Ella Baker, standing third from the right with a group of girls at a fair sponsored by the NAACP, early 1950s, courtesy New York Public Library. After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of sixty black ministers gathered for a conference and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South. It was Ella's idea. Not to sound like a school kid, arguing about who had an idea first, but leaving Ella out of the story of the SCLC is like forgetting you have a backbone. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is lauded by everyone as the SCLC's first president. Google its founders and you'll find the names of Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others. And others is Ella Baker. In 1960, when the Greensboro Four staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, Ella had served two years as SCLC Executive Director. She saw the energy and commitment of the students staging sit ins. She saw their potential and wanted to support them. Within three months she organized a conference of hundreds of college students.“[I] felt there had to be some contact between the various student groups which had sprung up, or they might peter out of a lack of the nourishment of ideas and sustenance of morale that come from such contacts.” Diane Nash attended. “We felt a real kinship with the students who were working in other cities, to bring about the same things that we were.” Ella urged the students to see the sit-in movement as “bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke....[But as a movement to scourge America] “of racial segregation and discrimination – not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.” From this gathering of students sprouted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, pronounced "Snick." Built from the bottom up, SNCC turned the tide of the Civil Rights Movement to direct action. To protests, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides against segregation, the 1963 March on Washington and Freedom Summer voting registration drives in Mississippi. Martin Luther King had wanted the students to become become an arm of the SCLS, but Baker urged them to form their own group, and to include women and the poor. She clashed with King, pushing for more voices to be heard, and for more people to be empowered. "To be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." Ella said once. "This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be." Scholar Cornel West says Ella was like a jazz musician. "She's antiphonal, call and response, she's in conversation. She's not pontificating from above, she's having conversation on a horizontal level." “I wasn’t one to say yes, just because [an idea] came from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was not an easy pushover," Ella said. "It’s a strange thing about men,… if they haven’t ever had a woman say no to them, they don’t know what to do sometimes.” Andrew Young articulated the feelings of the male leaders about Ella Baker. "The Baptist church had no tradition of women in independent leadership roles, and the result was dissatisfaction all around." Ella resigned from the Southern Leadership Council to work with the SNCC young people, shock troops in the battle for equal rights. “The young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going," Ella said, "the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organization.” Perhaps the influence of Ella's enslaved grandmother helped her speak up and believe in fighting for equality. Her grandmother was offspring of a slave and master. And because of that, the day after her birth the jealous mistress of the plantation poisoned the newborn's mother. Ella listened to her grandmother's stories of resilience and bravery, of being raised in slave quarters and put to work in the big house. "But at the point at which she was of marriageable age...the mistress wanted to have her married to a man whom we knew as Uncle Carter. He was also light. And she didn't like Carter. And so when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped." Instead of the whipping, Ella's grandmother was forced to plow in the fields. When plowing began each year February, it was so cold she'd have to stop work to warm her hands on the horse's belly. Ella said, "I've heard her say that she would plow all day and dance all night. She was defiant." The SNCC flourished with Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement. It grew quickly in the fertile soil of all that spade-turning Ella had done in the 1940s. Diane Nash, (in photo) explained how Ella inspired her. “I could count on Miss Baker being truthful and she would explain many things very honestly to me, and I would leave her feeling emotionally picked up dusted off and ready to go.” Another young woman who was there at the founding of SNCC, Bernice Johnson Reagon, took Ella's words and set them to music. Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize. That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive The anthem of freedom, Ella's Song, recorded by "Sweet Hone In The Rock" still rings true today. We who believe in Freedom cannot rest until it comes Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons. People called Ella Baker by the nickname Fundi, a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. She continued to work for civil rights until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986.
The more recent civil rights groups Occupy and Black Lives Matter Global Network embrace Baker's organizational ideals. Both have been criticized for their lack of leadership. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter responded by saying, "We are not a leaderless movement, we are a leaderfull movement." We shortchange ourselves when we overlook the leadership of Ella Baker. Yes, because she is an example of a powerful black woman, and a woman who maneuvered her way through gender stereotypes, but also because the work of her life demonstrates that successful enterprises need various kinds of leadership, that investing in a charismatic leader without cultivating a leadership base may jeopardize the cause. Tell me what you think! Did you know all this about Ella Baker? Leave your comment below. I'm sure glad I stumbled on her name and dug deeper. It gives me pause now, to think how often I've longed for a charismatic leader to pull Americans together to work for justice, and to take climate change seriously. Sources: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/ https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/ https://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/baker-ella-josephine https://ncwomenofcivilrights.wordpress.com/ella-baker/the-sclc-and-the-birth-of-sncc/ 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/ |
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.
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