Read Double Victory for Free Online Page B

“cinema” for movie, “tram” for streetcar, and “married but not churched” for a love affair without benefit of marriage. But Bettye hadn’t come to England to report on the oddities of the English language.
    Before leaving for the war zone Bettye had said she hoped to do the job of a regular correspondent. But she also planned toget into “some places where a man can’t go.” She wanted to see how the soldiers were faring in London and Paris and learn what they were thinking. She wanted to discover what England and France “think of our boys.” Bettye was able to do what she had hoped—but it was from a hospital bed in London. Soon after her arrival she was afflicted with paralysis of her left side. She was hospitalized for a couple of months and then sent back to the States. But her hospital stay didn’t stop her from reporting. She sent “dispatches” from her hospital bed based on reports brought to her from visitors to her bedside.
    Some of those visitors were black soldiers who were eager to talk to a woman from back home. They “tell me their troubles, ask my advice, inquire what I think about people back home,” she wrote. Most had been injured in France and were recovering in the London hospital before being sent home or back to the war zone.
    One of her visitors was Seaman Alexander (Jake) Williams, a 17-year-old sailor whose ship had been torpedoed by enemy subs in the port of Antwerp, Belgium. He described to Bettye how he had been asleep when the attack occurred. He was forced to abandon ship and jump into the icy waters. After about 30 minutes in the water, he and his shipmates had managed to get to a lifeboat, and they were later picked up by an Allied ship. The sailor was in the hospital undergoing treatment for a spine injury. Bettye reported that Jake said while he was in the water he pictured his mother’s face when she got the telegram reporting that he was dead. Happily, that was one telegram that was never sent.
    Unwise to Forget
    In April 1945 the Women’s Bureau of the US Department of Labor issued a bulletin titled “Negro Women War Workers.”The document highlighted the work that black women had contributed across a variety of industries and businesses. Readers were reminded that “their contribution is one which this Nation would be unwise to forget or to evaluate falsely.” But throughout the war years the nation ignored and devalued the contributions black women made in every facet of war work. And after the war ended, the nation
did
forget. It was not only unwise; it was wrong.

2
POLITICAL ACTIVISTS
“I Am Not a Party Girl, I Want to Build a Movement”

    Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze…
    The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth …
    â€”“Strange Fruit” by Abel Meeropol

    Those words are the haunting lyrics of a protest song made famous by black jazz singer Billie Holiday in 1939. The symbolism of rotting fruit hanging on trees was used to tell the story of the lynching of a black man in the South in the 1930s. The words from the song “Strange Fruit” were still meaningful during the war years of the 1940s.
    Some people believed there was good news in the Tuskegee Institute report released at the beginning of 1944: lynchings in the United States were down. Only three persons were reported lynched in 1943—down from five in 1942. Those numbers were little comfort to the families of two 14-year-old black boys from Shubuta, Mississippi.
    Ernest Green and Charlie Lang were good friends who wanted to do their part for the war effort. They were almost always together. When people in Shubuta saw Charlie, they knew Ernest wasn’t far behind. And when they saw Ernest, they knew Charlie was right around the corner. It would be difficult to find anybody in Shubuta who would say the two were good students, but everybody said they were ace scrap collectors.