Glory in Their Spirit by Sandra M Bolzenius

Author:Sandra M Bolzenius
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2018-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Civilian Reaction

[The trial was] NOT a Massachusetts case, [but rather] a showdown between the United States Army’s jim-crow, Anti-Negro element and the American Democracy this country is seeking to bring to the world.

—Marty Richardson, Boston Chronicle

Following the March 20, 1945, court-martial and conviction of the four Wacs, the army transferred Anna Morrison, Johnnie Murphy, Alice Young, and Mary Green from Lovell Hospital North’s wards to the security section of the facility, where bars on the windows provided a harsh reminder of their new status. There they bided their time awaiting the appeal, utterly devastated by the guilty verdict. “If things don’t … change soon,” Young wrote to a friend, “I think I’ll just finish things up my way by ending it all in a long, long sleep and tell them I’ll see them in heaven on Judgment Day and finish my Courts-martial in Hell.”1 Morrison admitted years later that after the verdict she “had a hate for the whole world.” Like the others, she resented the army reneging on its promises, the prosecutor dismissing their concerns, and their defense lawyer’s seeming disinterest in their case. Several days after the trial, each received a trial transcript, a weighty document an inch and a half thick. They promptly discarded their copies into the nearest trash receptacles.2 Held incommunicado and surrounded by officers who opposed their actions and censored their mail, the distraught women had no way of knowing how strongly their strike was resonating among African Americans and with the domestic aims of their Double V campaign.

By opting for the court-martial, four Wac privates had carved out an opportunity to air their grievances in a military court and, due to the emboldened civil rights movement of the war years, in the court of public opinion, too. The civilian reaction to their conviction was swift. “All of Boston is rife with speculation this week as to the pros and cons of the … strike,” proclaimed Leotha Hackshaw, a Pittsburgh Courier reporter who had attended the trial. “Because the strike of the Negro Wacs is the first of its kind,” she added, “the case has aroused unusual interest in this city—especially among the Negro residents.”3 In fact, the case was of keen interest to blacks and to whites in Boston and beyond. After the guilty verdict and the stunning sentence, Marty Richardson, editor of the Boston Chronicle, predicted that “the Fort Devens Wac case may well become one of the leading court-martial cases of this war.” Since the first day of the strike, the case had rapidly gained national attention and stoked readers’ passions across racial and gender lines. A hopeful Richardson effused that the trial was “NOT a Massachusetts case” but rather “a showdown between the United States Army’s jim-crow, Anti-Negro elements and the American Democracy this country is seeking to bring to the world.”4 Green, Morrison, Young, and Murphy had taken part in the strike to call attention to grievances of discrimination—and so they had.

A court-martial featuring female defendants was bound

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