Greatest Generation by Tom Brokaw

Author:Tom Brokaw
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Biography, War, Azizex666, History
ISBN: 9780375504624
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Martha Settle Putney

Her all-black unit of medical technicians was to be housed near Gardner General Hospital, not too far from Chicago’s tony Lake Shore Drive. The Army had built a barracks for the WACs, but several local residents protested. They wrote city officials, demanding that black WACs be moved to another neighorhood. Local civil rights organizations heard about the protests and sent word to the War Department in Washington not to buckle. Dr. Putney remembers it took the War Department a while to do the right thing, and when it did, it said, in effect, “We’ll send you to that neighborhood, but if anything happens, we’ll move you out of there.”

Lieutenant Settle spent the rest of the war supervising medical technicians at the hospital with no difficulties. It was an assignment that she remembers with pride to this day.

After the war Martha returned to her old assignment as a statistical clerk with the Manpower Commission, work that is now a part of the Labor Department. She met her husband, Bill Putney, in Washington and they were married in 1947. They had one child, Bill Jr., now a product engineer with Ford in Detroit. Her husband died in 1965.

By then Martha’s ambitious intellect had kicked in again, this time prompting her to take advantage of the GI Bill and enroll in a doctoral program in history at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her PhD in European history and was hired by Bowie State College, a mostly black institution in Maryland.

She stayed for sixteen years and then went on the faculty at Howard for another nine years. Martha attributes her success in life to the opportunities she would not have had without the war. “I knew when World War II approached it would be a terrible thing, but afterward I was so grateful. . . . It provided opportunity. The army has a way of teaching personnel, and it sticks. At Bowie they had a book on teachers the students passed around. Under my name it said, ‘Don’t take her unless you want to study.’ ”

Dr. Clifford Muse, Jr., now a professor at Howard, did his graduate work under Dr. Putney, an experience he remembers well. “She worked me to death. I really learned from her. She tried to prepare you for discrimination in the sense you had to be very good to be accepted.” In fact, that was how Dr. Putney had always dealt with discrimination, and she was determined to pass along to all of her students the lessons of her own life.

William Missouri, another former student, recalled, “I was in Dr. Putney’s African American history class and, let me tell you, it was tough.” Missouri, now a circuit judge in Maryland, dreaded the days he arrived in class unprepared. “She would bring you up short in front of the class. She wouldn’t chastise you, but she’d say, ‘How can you be an African American and not want to learn African American history?’

“She’d say, ‘Work hard. If you fail, don’t look around for others to blame.

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