Notes
notes 1. skippy: the formative years 1. David M. Tucker, Memphis Since Crump: Bossism, Blacks, and Civic Reformers, 1948–1968 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 14. 2. Ibid. 3. Virginia Pasley, 21 Stayed: The Story of the American GI’s Who Chose Communist China-Who They Were and Why They Stayed (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955), 132–34. Pasley ignored the reasons why the three African American POWs decided to go to China, and her description of the other eighteen was equally distorted; for example, she wrote, “So far as possible the Communists chose the twenty-one from what they termed the peasant and the beggar class: poor marginal farm dwellers and town-bred relief clients” (229). In truth, the economic, social, and educational background of the twenty-one was as varied as that of their fellow soldiers. 4. Lucie E. Campbell was indeed famous in the development of gospel music, having composed more than one hundred gospel songs, including “The Lord Is My Shepherd ,” “Heavenly Sunshine,” “The King’s Highway,” “Touch Me Lord Jesus,” and “He Understands, He’ll Say, ‘Well Done.’ ” So well connected was she in gospel circles that she was able to help the careers of promising young singers and composers such as Marian Anderson and J. Robert Bradley. Both she and brother Charles were graduates of Booker T. Washington High School, although at that time it was called Kortrecht High School. Only fourteen years old when she graduated valedictorian, she immediately begin teaching at Carnes Avenue Grammar School. In 1911 she returned to Kortrecht High School as an American history and English teacher. She also earned her B.A. from Rust College in Holy Springs, Mississippi, and her M.A. from Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College. She was named the music director of the National Sunday and Baptist Training Union Congress in Memphis in 1915 and remained a driving force in the National Baptist Convention. She later served as vice president of the American Teachers Association and as president of the Tennessee Teachers Association . In addition, she was a civil rights activist who crusaded for the elimination of salary and benefit inequities for black teachers. In 1960, just three years before her death, she married the Reverend C. R. Williams. 5. After Joe Louis knocked out Max Schmeling, white newspapers were either condescending or filled with warnings about what black celebrants might do. For example, a June 23, 1938, headline in the New York Times intoned, “Detroit Negroes Joyful: Sing and Dance in Streets to Celebrate Louis’ Victory,” while another stated, “Harlem Celebrants Toss Varied Missiles.” The St. Louis Post Dispatch’s headline for the same day blared, “Negroes Parade Here After Louis Victory: Cheers, Horns, Tub-Thumping Fill Air.” 2. u.s. army combat soldier 1. Adams was certainly familiar with the historical myths that African Americans were too cowardly or inept to bear arms for their country, myths that had prevailed among military leaders despite the fact that blacks had fought heroically in all of America’s wars. Adams might also have known about a 1925 U.S. Army War College memo titled “The Use of Negro Man Power in War,” which concluded, “The black man was physically unqualified for combat duty [and] was by nature subservient, mentally inferior, and believed himself to be inferior to the white man [and] was susceptible to the influence of crowd psychology, could not control himself in the face of danger, and did not have the initiative and resourcefulness of the white man.” 2. The U.S. Army did not acknowledge the effect that racism could have on its troops’ willingness to fight until Vietnam, when, as we will see in chapters 8 and 9, the radio broadcasts Clarence Adams beamed at African American soldiers in Vietnam may have heightened the military’s awareness of the negative effects of racism on both black and white soldiers. During the Korean War some military leaders did urge that blacks be slowly integrated into white units, but often for the wrong reasons. Basing their arguments on long-standing historical myths, these proponents were convinced that all-black units were incapable of fighting courageously and effectively unless their alleged social and psychological shortcomings were overcome by the leadership of white soldiers and officers. See T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History (1963; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1998), 357–59. 3. What undoubtedly saved Clarence Adams’s...
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