Free Honoring Sergeant Carter by Allene Carter Page B

child used to being the queen bee, enjoyed Miriam’s boldness, and they became great friends.
    Mildred had married very young, but her husband, an alcoholic, died of liver disease, leaving her with two small children, Iris and Charles. Although she was a parent, Mildred was also a young woman who enjoyed going out and having fun with her friends. In fact, her parents had once put her in a convent for a year to slow her down. She introduced Eddie to her circle of friends as the two of them began going out. So Eddie not only gained a girlfriend, he acquired surrogate parents, children, and a whole social world. Through Mildred’s family and Mildred’s friends he became intimately familiar for the first time with the culture and aspirations of middle-class African Americans. The stage was set and all he had to do was show up.
    It wasn’t long before nature took its course and Mildred became pregnant. Edward III, nicknamed “Buddha” for his rotund appearance and bald head, was born March 27, 1941.
    Meanwhile, as the fighting in Europe and Asia spread,calls for U.S. intervention were increasing. Ever since Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the black community had watched these developments with growing concern. Many black men were willing to heed the call to arms, but there was also a degree of skepticism. Black men had fought in World War I only to come home to renewed racism. For the black community, World War II would be regarded as a war on two fronts. Labor leader A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s largest and most powerful black labor union, set the tone in January 1941, when he and other civil rights leaders called for a march on Washington to protest discrimination in the war industries and the armed forces.
    Faced with the threat of 100,000 black people marching on Washington, in June 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, ordering an end to racial discrimination in the defense industry. Although the armed forces remained segregated, Roosevelt’s order represented an important step forward. The war itself would bring about more changes. In December 1941, Japanese fighter planes attacked the U.S. Navy fleet at Pearl Harbor. A Navy messman named Dorie Miller became the first black hero of the war when he seized an antiaircraft gun on the stricken USS West Virginia and single-handedly shot down four of the attacking Japanese planes. Early in 1942, as the United States launched a full-scale war mobilization, the Pittsburgh Courier, an influential black newspaper, gave symbolic expression to the feelings of black Americans when it proclaimed its immensely popular “Double V” campaign: victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home.
    Eddie had decided to enlist in the Army well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. A veteran of the struggle against Japanese invaders in China and of the Spanish Civil War, he was acutely aware of the military threat presented by fascism. No doubt his familiarity with military life and his lack of a civilian career also contributed to his decision to enlist. He signed up on September 26, 1941. Shortly afterward, he found himself on a train headed for boot camp in Camp Wolters, Texas.
    Eddie was shocked by the racial conditions he found in Texas. “Conditions down here are pretty bad,” he wrote to Mildred on October 6. “I mean the South. The rotten South. Only the damned live here.” He didn’t give any details in the letter, but given his background and youth spent abroad, this was probably his first encounter with overt racial segregation and discrimination. In a letter on October 14 he mentioned that some of the other new recruits got into trouble and were jailed. Whether the trouble was due to racial incidents, youthful brawling, or problems with white officers was not made clear, but Eddie made it plain that he wanted to avoid trouble.