They Raised Me Up by Carolyn Marie Wilkins

Author:Carolyn Marie Wilkins [Wilkins, Carolyn Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826273086
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

Chapter Sixteen

Alberta

Harlem, 1943

Humor is laughing at what you haven't got when you ought to have it.

—Langston Hughes

As World War II raged in Europe, Alberta Sweeney worried about her three sons.1 Samuel Jr. was eighteen, John was seventeen, and Paul was sixteen. All three were bright, handsome, and popular, and all three would soon be eligible for the draft. On New Year's Day 1943, her worst fears were realized. Samuel Jr. was drafted and ordered to report for duty on July 3.2 A few months later, John received a similar notice. World War II, which had seemed merely a distant threat, had now become deeply personal.

Of all the Sweeney boys, Samuel Jr. looked the most like his father. He was tall, thin, and rakishly handsome, with a pencil thin mustache and a winning smile. Sam Jr. had graduated from high school in 1940 and was now singing with the Hall Johnson Choir.3 Known for his group's crisp attacks, dead-on intonation, and complex arrangements of African American spirituals, Hall Johnson had established himself as a force on the New York scene. Only a few months after Sam was drafted, the Hall Johnson Choir would perform alongside Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington in the Hollywood musical Cabin in the Sky.4

Samuel Sweeney Jr. had been surrounded by beautiful things all his life. He'd had music, a loving family, and access to a decent education. As the handsome nineteen-year-old waved good-bye to Alberta from the train at Grand Central Station, Sam could not imagine the monsters that prowled just outside the protective cocoon his mother and father had worked so hard to build.

Sweeney's unit was sent to Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, for basic training in July 1943. The army made it a policy to send African American units to the Deep South for basic training where it was felt that the hostility of the local whites would reduce the possibility of interracial sexual encounters. Camp Claiborne was home to seventy-five thousand troops, and sixteen thousand of these were African American. The year before, the camp had exploded in a race riot. According to one press report, the trouble began when a white woman honked at a black soldier in the street, rudely ordering him to move out of her way. Another report claimed the riot started when black soldiers refused to ride in the back of the bus on the way into town. Whatever its initial cause, the anger of Camp Claiborne's black soldiers soon turned deadly. When the smoke cleared, eighteen people were killed and another twenty-six were wounded in the fracas.5

When Sam arrived the following year, the same discriminatory conditions that had provoked the riot remained firmly in place. White soldiers lived in tents on the high ground next to the road into town. Black soldiers were ordered to pitch their tents in a mosquito-ridden, swampy, roach-infested area next to the sewage treatment plant. Even the German POWs staying at the camp were given better treatment: allowed to sleep on the high ground, the POWs were given passes into parts of town that remained off-limits to blacks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.