I Never Had It Made (4 page)

Colonel Bates, who was in charge of the battalion, was proud of the showing made by my platoon. He called me in to praise me and to ask if I would go overseas with the organization as morale officer. I told the colonel two facts of life: that it had been my men who got the job done—not me—and that while I would be willing to go overseas, I would probably be unacceptable since I was on limited service because of a bad ankle. The colonel replied that he didn't care how my men had got the job done. He was happy that it had been accomplished. He said that, obviously, no matter how much or how little I knew technically, I was able to get the best out of people I worked with. The business about my ankle could be resolved, he said, if I were willing to go to a nearby Army hospital and sign a waiver relieving the Army of any responsibility if anything happened to me during overseas duty because of my inability. I said I'd be willing to do that.

The hospital to which I was assigned for examination was a long bus ride away from the post. One evening, while I was there, I found myself with time on my hands and decided to come back to the post and talk with some of my friends at the officer's club. When I arrived, I found the whole outfit had gone off on maneuvers. I started back toward the bus to return to the hospital and met the wife of one of my fellow lieutenants. She was returning to her home, which was halfway between the hospital and the Army post. We sat down together in the bus, neither of us conscious of the fact that it made any difference where we were sitting. The driver glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw what he thought was a white woman talking with a black second lieutenant. He became visibly upset, stopped the bus, and came back to order me to move to the rear. I didn't even stop talking, didn't even look at him; I was aware of the fact that recently Joe Louis and Ray Robinson had refused to move to the backs of buses in the South. The resulting publicity had caused the Army to put out regulations barring racial discrimination on any vehicle operating on an Army post. Knowing about these regulations, I had no intention of being intimidated into moving to the back of the bus.

The driver had returned to his seat, assuming, I suppose, that I would obey his order. When he noted that I was not moving, he returned, even more angry. He shouted that if I didn't move to the rear of the bus he would cause me plenty of trouble. I told him hotly that I couldn't care less about his causing me trouble. I'd been in trouble all my life, but I knew what my rights were. When we reached the last stop on the post, where we were to get off and transfer to a city bus, the driver jumped out of the bus and rushed off somewhere, returning quickly with his dispatcher and some other drivers. Pointing me out, he cried, “There's the nigger that's been causing me trouble.” I put my finger right in his face and warned him that he'd better get off my back, although I didn't say it exactly in those words. I turned away from him, with my lady companion, to go toward the city bus. We heard the screeching of tires and a military police jeep pulled up. The two military policemen asked a few questions, then, with great politeness, asked if I would be willing to go along with them to talk to their captain. They were enlisted men and they called me “sir” and seemed only interested in doing their duty under the circumstances. I agreed to go see their duty officer. My friend's wife volunteered to come with me. She was afraid someone was going to try to frame me. I told her that it wouldn't be necessary for her to get further involved. I was confident that it would be easily established that I had acted well within my rights.

I was naïve about the elaborate lengths to which racists in the Armed Forces would go to put a vocal black man in his place. My first indication that I might be up against a tougher situation than I thought came when I was interviewed by the duty officer, a Captain Gerald M. Bear. There was a civilian woman with him. I don't know whether she was his secretary or aide or what. But she was doing all the talking, asking all the questions. They were real, nice, objective questions like, “Don't you know you've got no right sitting up there in the white part of the bus?” It wasn't bad enough that she was asking that type of question. She wasn't even pausing long enough to hear my answer. At one point she snapped that one of my replies made no sense. I became very annoyed. In the back of my mind was a serious question as to whether she was the proper person, legally, to question me anyhow. So I replied sharply that if she would let me finish my sentences and quit interrupting, maybe my answers would make sense. At this point, traditional Southern chivalry for wounded white womanhood took over; Captain Bear came out of hibernation to growl that I was apparently an uppity nigger and that I had no right to speak to that lady in that manner. I objected. “She's asking the questions,” I said. “I feel I have as much right to tell my story as she has to ask questions.” The captain was very annoyed because I wouldn't back down. He began to rave. I interrupted him, asking, “Captain, tell me, where are you from anyway?” He stormed that that had nothing to do with it, that he wasn't prejudiced, that back home he owned a laundry, and that he employed a number of blacks—and all the rest of that stuff that bigots talk when confronted with the charge of being bigots.

As serious as the situation was, I had to laugh. It was so obvious what was happening. I was up against one of those white supremacy characters. Everything would have been all right if I had been a “yassuh boss” type. When the interview was over, the captain ordered an escort to take me back to the hospital. When we arrived there, we were met by a colonel and several military police. There was talk of a court-martial. The colonel advised me that he had been alerted to expect a black officer who had been drunk and disorderly and had been trying to start a riot. It must have been obvious to the colonel that I wasn't drunk, and when I told him calmly that I had never had a drink in my life, he said that for my own protection I must immediately have a blood test to prove that there was no alcoholic content in my blood. After I did that, I was advised to report to Colonel Bates. The news was not good. He told me there was rumor of a court-martial and recommended giving me leave. He wanted to ease the pressure while we waited to learn if the “limited service” issue had been resolved at the hospital so I could go overseas. Also he felt it would be better if I was not on the scene while the court-martial issue was being settled. He advised me to forget about my problems at Fort Hood, Texas, and suggested a trip to San Francisco.

In San Francisco after a joyous reunion I found Rae facing herself honestly. She had begun to wonder if she had made her choice to someday marry me without sufficient background of experience and contact with other people. She had a stack of letters from me and almost every week a box of chocolates, but she began to doubt whether we should be tied to each other. Her loneliness and her frustration when all her companions around her were having fun began to work on her. To aggravate matters, Rae's family received news that her brother, a pilot, had been shot down over Germany. She began to feel that perhaps she owed it to him to become personally involved in the war effort. There was another compelling reason. Money. For the first two years of her college career, Rae had been on a scholarship. Now she was responsible for paying her own tuition. She learned that if she joined the Cadet Corps, a student organization, the government would pay her tuition and give her a small monthly allowance. She would remain in school and in her chosen field of nursing. She would also be helping to make up for the sacrifice of the brother she presumed to be dead. When Rae told me that she was thinking of becoming a Cadet, this aroused unreasonable but definite thoughts in my mind. I'd been around so often when guys in the service were discussing women soldiers. It really wasn't fair, but GI's had those conceptions about women in the Armed Forces—and particularly nurses—as being very loose morally. I can honestly say that I never thought of Rae except on the highest level. However, my pride in her being my fiancée and my need for her as the most important person in my life made me stubborn, even adamant. But in my heart I knew we would resolve our problems. I told her of the problems and decision I faced on my return. When Rae got home from work every evening, I was right there waiting. Then things began looking up for her; one day she heard that her brother had been found alive. Rae was happy to forget about going into service.

There were still clouds on my horizon. I had to report back to duty and face the court-martial. My leave was over. Anyone who knows about the Army court-martial system can tell you that it's loaded mostly in favor of those bringing the charges. I was really fortunate. In spite of the obvious smell of frame-up in my case, it would have been an easy matter for me to be railroaded into some kind of punishment for simply insisting on my rights. My first break was that the legal officer assigned to defend me was a Southerner who had the decency to admit to me that he didn't think he could be objective. He recommended a young Michigan officer who did a great job on my behalf. He had a way of rephrasing the same question in so many clever ways that anyone who was lying would have a hard time not betraying himself. It became obvious during the proceedings that the prosecution had rehearsed and schooled witnesses—and had done a bad job of indoctrinating them. My lawyer tricked several of the witnesses into confusing testimony, and luckily there were some members of that court-martial board who had the honesty to realize what was going on. I was acquitted on all charges. There had been another factor which worked in my favor. Some of my black brother officers were determined to help me beat the attempted injustice in my case. They wrote letters to the black press. The Pittsburgh
Courier,
then one of the country's most powerful weeklies, gave the matter important publicity. The Army, sensitive to this kind of spotlight, knew that if I was unfairly treated, it would not be a secret.

The court-martial had caused me to miss going overseas with my outfit. I knew that I would be transferred into some new and strange organization. I was pretty much fed up with the service. So I did something which is very much frowned upon in GI procedure. I sent an airmail special delivery letter to The Adjutant General's office in Washington, D.C. This was in violation of the standard procedure of going through channels, forwarding any correspondence up through your own company, battalion, regiment, and division headquarters. On the way up, such correspondence, if it ever reaches its intended destination, can get marked up with disapproving notations from your superior officers. The disapproving endorsements have great weight with the top brass, which is very likely to turn down any request you make which is not favorable in the eyes of your superiors. I bypassed all that. My letter was timed to reach The Adjutant General's desk about the same time my court-martial papers got to his desk. I was gambling that he would notice that I had been acquitted in an obvious attempt to frame me, that perhaps the top brass would view me as a potential troublemaker who would be better off in civilian life. I guess someone was really anxious to get rid of me fast. In November, 1944, I was transferred to Camp Breckinridge and received my honorable discharge.

While waiting for discharge, I ran into a brother named Alexander who, before going into uniform, had been a member of the Kansas City Monarchs. The Monarchs were one of the teams of the professional black baseball world. I saw him one day, throwing ball. The ball got away and I threw it back. I watched him for a while. He was throwing curve balls. I saw the way they broke off. I asked another guy who was catching if I could play with him and catch some of his pitches. Alexander and I got into a conversation, and he told me there was good money in black baseball. He said the Monarchs were looking for players. I was looking for a decent postwar job. So I wrote the Monarchs. After checking me out, they responded rather quickly and accepted me on a tryout basis for spring training. I was ordered to report to Houston. The pay of $400 a month was a financial bonanza for me. My pitcher friend had told the truth about the pay. He had also said that I would enjoy the life of a baseball pro. Well, maybe he enjoyed it. For me, it turned out to be a pretty miserable way to make a buck.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go. When you look at television today or scan the sports pages, and see how many blacks and Latins are starring in the game, it is almost impossible to conceive of those days, less than twenty-five years ago, when world series champs literally meant white champs. That was the way it was, and although there were spirited campaigns to break down the racial barriers in 1944, it appeared that it would be years before segregation in baseball was eliminated.

Blacks who wanted to play baseball could sign up on black teams only. These teams were poorly financed, and their management and promotion left much to be desired. Travel schedules were unbelievably hectic. Our team played in Kansas City, moved throughout the entire Midwest and sometimes went south and east. On one occasion, we left Kansas City on a bus on a Sunday night, traveled to Philadelphia, reaching there Tuesday morning. We played a doubleheader that night and the next day we were on the road again. This fatiguing travel wouldn't have been so bad if we could have had decent meals. Finding satisfactory or even passable eating places was almost a daily problem. There was no hotel in many of the places we played. Sometimes there was a hotel for blacks which had no eating facilities. No one even thought of trying to get accommodations in white hotels. Some of the crummy eating joints would not serve us at all. You could never sit down to a relaxed hot meal. You were lucky if they magnanimously permitted you to carry out some greasy hamburgers in a paper bag with a container of coffee. You were really living when you were able to get a plate of cold cuts. You ate on board the team bus or on the road.