Then, on an August night at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home to more than six thousand black troops, all hell broke loose. It was “colored payday,” when soldiers went into nearby Fayetteville to spend their monthly pay. Shortly after midnight, a group of fifty black soldiers boarded a military bus to return to base. The white driver told them that he wouldn’t leave unless accompanied by military policemen. The soldiers asked for black MPs—who were deployed only on paydays—but the driver insisted on white ones. When the white MPs arrived, one of them struck a talkative black soldier with a club. Another soldier took a defiant tone and received blows as well. Suddenly the second soldier pulled a revolver and shot at several MPs, killing one. “I’m going to break up you MPs beating us,” the black soldier cried out before being gunned down himself.
That was only the beginning of what became known as Fort Bragg’s “Night of Terror.” After the bus incident, MPs rounded up hundreds of black servicemen who were in the Fayetteville area that night. The soldiers were stripped of their weapons, herded onto trucks, and driven back to the camp, where they were thrown into a guardhouse and subjected to several days of beatings and verbal abuse.
After Prattis reported on the Fort Bragg story in the Courier, the NAACP called for an investigation. When the War Department agreed, Prattis was asked to deliver an official report. As a peace gesture to Bill Nunn, Prattis asked his newsroom rival to coauthor the report, and they gathered eyewitness accounts of the Fort Bragg crackdown as well as similar stories of indiscriminate racial violence at bases in Georgia and Arkansas. Several months after the “Night of Terror,” the Army announced an unprecedented response to the Courier findings: Fort Bragg’s commandant would be transferred. The chief of the military police who ordered the Fayetteville roundup would be replaced. For the first time, a unit of thirteen black military policemen would be put on full-time duty at Fort Bragg, not just on “colored paydays,” and given the same authority as white MPs.
Within a month after the Fort Bragg shakeup, the news of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached Pittsburgh. The next day, President Roosevelt delivered his “date which will live in infamy” speech and declared war against Japan. By midweek, America was at war with Germany and Italy as well. At the Courier, Prattis and Nunn huddled with their counterparts on the business side: Ira Lewis, now president, and Jesse Vann, who had taken the post of treasurer. As they debated how to cover the war, a complicated question confronted them: how to demonstrate patriotism while continuing the Courier’s crusading tradition?
Prattis and Nunn knew that many blacks were skeptical about supporting the war. Indeed, it was a view that some of the Courier’s own opinion writers were already voicing. In a column entitled “We Remember 1919,” Joseph D. Bibb recalled what had happened when blacks heeded the appeal of W. E. B. Du Bois to “rally around” the flag during World War I. Instead of the hero’s welcome that white veterans received, Negro soldiers returned to vicious attacks during the “Red Summer” race riots that swept the country that year. In another column, Joel Augustus Rogers voiced his own support for the war but shared the views of “a friend” who questioned why Negroes should join a military that discriminated against them, fight another colored race in the Japanese, or help to rescue British imperialism.
Yet the editors also knew that Robert L. Vann would have wanted them to rally black America yet again, and in the days after Pearl Harbor P.L. Prattis saw a way. Some of the first accounts of the attack came from a wire service reporter named Ralph Burdette Jordan. In one dispatch, Jordan reported hearing the story of a black kitchen worker who had fired at a Japanese plane from the deck of a U.S. warship. The Navy confirmed the incident, but refused to identify the sailor. So Prattis set out to discover the sailor’s name. Over the next two months, he spent some $10,000 on travel, hotel, and other expenses to shuttle from Pittsburgh to Washington, chasing down every possible lead.
Three months after the attack, the Courier announced the results of Prattis’s reporting. “MESSMAN HERO IDENTIFIED!” a front-page headline cheered. He was Doris Miller, a twenty-two-year-old from Waco, Texas. “Dorie,” as he was called, had enlisted just shy of his twentieth birthday and been assigned to the USS West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. On the morning of the attack, Miller was standing on the signal bridge with several white officers and enlisted men. A Japanese plane dove out of the sky and opened fire, striking the ship’s captain in the abdomen. As the other men pulled the commander behind an antiaircraft gun for cover, Miller and a white lieutenant manned guns on deck and fired back at the plane. They kept up the brave fusillade even as flames engulfed the deck. Near death, the captain ordered the men to abandon ship, and Miller was one of the last sailors to escape by climbing down a rope suspended from a crane on the dock.
Comparing Dorie Miller to the black heroes of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the Courier demanded that he be recognized for his bravery. A bill was introduced in Congress calling for Miller to receive the Medal of Honor. But Frank Knox, the Republican businessman whom FDR had named as his navy secretary, refused to see the military’s highest award go to an untrained Negro. Instead, Knox hastily arranged for Miller to receive the Navy Cross, news that still made headlines across America and gave blacks a sense that they, too, had a stake in the war.
In February 1942, a second opportunity to rally black support arrived at the Courier in an unexpected form: a letter from a young reader. James Gratz Thompson was a cafeteria worker in a Cessna plane factory in Wichita, Kansas. At age twenty-six, he personified the hopes and frustrations of the children of the Great Migration. Thompson’s father had moved to Wichita from Greenville, Alabama, and worked his way up from a custodial job to running a grocery store. James’s mother was a native of Natchitoches, Louisiana, who volunteered at the AME church and black YMCA in Wichita. The Thompsons had managed to buy their own home, a modest, five-room, one-story ranch house. After attending a segregated elementary school, their children had gone to Wichita High School North, where James became a star athlete.
Yet for all that progress, Thompson was keenly aware of how limited opportunities for blacks in Wichita remained. Apart from a few undertakers and storeowners like his father, most blacks could find jobs only as laborers and domestics. James himself was one of only 150 Negroes who worked in Wichita’s four aircraft manufacturing plants. Despite his good looks, polite manner, and gift for reading and writing, Thompson was never able to advance out of the cafeteria, and he eventually quit after being denied a 5-cents-a-week raise.
As Thompson weighed the prospect of enlisting, he wrote a letter to the Courier expressing his mixed emotions. “Dear Editor,” the letter began, “Like all true Americans my greatest desire at this time, this crucial point of our history, is a desire for a complete victory over the forces of evil, which threaten our existence today.” However, Thompson continued: “Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: ‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ ‘Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?’ ‘Would it be too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?’ ”
Then Thompson shared an idea that had come to him after seeing pictures of Winston Churchill making the gesture that symbolized the fight against Fascism in Europe. “The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all the so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny,” Thompson wrote. “If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory: The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.”
As soon as they read Thompson’s words, Prattis and the other editors were struck by the power of the “doub
le VV” image. In the next edition of the paper, they printed Thompson’s entire letter, along with a picture of the handsome young Kansan. Meanwhile, they asked Wilbert Holloway, a Courier cartoonist, to create a symbol to capture the concept. The following week, without any explanation, Holloway’s drawing appeared at the top of the front page: a bald eagle, perched above two stacked Vs, framed by the words “Double Victory” and “Democracy At Home-Abroad.”
The response from Courier readers was overwhelming. Within days, hundreds of telegrams and letters poured into the Pittsburgh offices commenting on the “Double V” drawing and congratulating the newspaper on its message. A man from Los Angeles wrote that he had cut out Holloway’s illustration and posted it on his car windshield. Another from Manhattan was having the design knit into a sweater. Dozens more asked how they could get replicas—so many that the editors began producing pins and posters and selling them through classified ads in the newspaper. A Baptist minister from Ohio summed up the hope behind all the excitement: that embracing the emblem and everything it stood for would change the image of Negroes in white America. “The ‘Double V’ will teach the Mr. Charlie of the South a new lesson and will shake the foundations of a hypocritical North!” the preacher wrote.
In the next edition, the editors officially announced a “Double Victory Campaign.” “WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT,” they proclaimed on the front page. “WE ARE AMERICANS, TOO!” Soon readers began sending photographs as well as letters to demonstrate their support. Beatrice Williams, “Miss Bronze America” for 1941, modeled a “double V pose”—arms crossed over her chest, with both hands flashing Vs. Singer Marian Anderson cradled a Double V statuette. A Philadelphia baker displayed a Double V cake. A Hollywood bathing beauty held up a Double V poster. Newlyweds at Niagara Falls flashed the Double V sign.
As Easter Sunday approached, the National Baptist Convention declared the holiday “National Negro Double Victory Day.” Putting aside his past differences with the Courier, Walter White issued an official proclamation of support on behalf of the NAACP. The Elks, the largest black fraternal organization, devoted their annual convention to the “Double Victory” theme. The Pullman Porters and Maids Association endorsed the campaign, and the United Automobile Workers passed a unanimous resolution of support on behalf of its seventy thousand, mostly white, members.
Other influential white figures also spoke up. Thomas Dewey, the mob-busting district attorney who was eyeing a race for governor of New York, invited a Courier reporter to his office in lower Manhattan to praise the campaign. “All Americans must participate in the terrible struggle ahead,” Dewey agreed. Addressing book publishers in New York, Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning author, echoed the paper’s dual message. “Unless we can declare ourselves whole for democracy now, and do away with prejudices against colored peoples,” Buck said, “we shall lose our chance to make the world what we want it to be.”
From Hollywood, Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, and Humphrey Bogart sent messages of encouragement. In New York, Clare Boothe Luce, the conservative socialite and author who was running for a House seat in Connecticut, sounded the Double V theme in a radio interview. “Let us, for the sake of our boys’ lives as well as for the sake of our own souls, co-operate at home as well as aboard with our loyal colored citizens and aliens of different races,” Luce declared. “We will not only feel better, but fight better, and the peace we will then win will have a far, far better chance to endure.”
By spring, the campaign even had a theme song. Andy Razaf and James C. Johnson, the composers of some of Fats Waller’s and Bessie Smith’s greatest hits, collaborated on “A Yankee Doodle Tan (the Double V Song).” Three of the country’s top black bandleaders joined the chorus. Jimmie Lunceford traveled to Wichita and took James Thompson up in his private plane. Lionel Hampton performed “A Yankee Doodle Tan” on national radio. Louis Jordan opened his act with the theme song during a sold-out six-week tour of the South and Midwest.
In the early days of the campaign, Julia Bumry Jones suffered a stroke, and her young secretary, Edna Chappell, took over editing the Women’s Activities pages. Excited to play a part in the war coverage, Chappell filled the section every week with news of Double V dances, Double V bake sales, Double V quilting bees, and Double V gardens. There were pictures of Double V dresses, Double V hats, even a Double V hairdo, the winner of a contest at the Madam C. J. Walker College of Beauty in Chicago. The paper took to naming a “Double V Girl of the Week” and, as summer arrived, there were photos of Double V bathing suit contests.
By June, the Courier announced that membership in “Double V Clubs” across the country had surpassed 200,000. Along with generating tens of thousands of dollars for the war effort from the purchase of pins and posters, the clubs had sold millions of dollars’ worth of war bonds and sent tons of clothes, shoes, books, magazines, candy, cigarettes, and ashtrays to black enlistees reporting for duty across the country.
Yet instead of gratitude for the Courier’s help in mobilizing black support for “Victory Abroad,” the Double V Campaign was met with a very different response in Washington. President Roosevelt and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover chose to focus instead on the demands for “Victory At Home,” and what they saw as the threat to wartime morale posed by the Courier’s continued coverage of racial injustice.
Hoover had been suspicious of the Negro press from his first days as an agent for the “Alien Enemy Bureau,” the precursor to the FBI, investigating ties between black and communist newspapers during World War I. As long as the Courier’s circulation remained modest, and Robert L. Vann was alive to trumpet his pro-American and pro-capitalist views, it had been spared Hoover’s scrutiny. But now the Courier was squarely in the FBI director’s sights. As early as the fall of 1941, Hoover had sent a request to an FBI agent in Pittsburgh to investigate whether P.L. Prattis was acting as a foreign spy when he went on his tour of segregated military bases and reported on the bloody roundup of black soldiers at Fort Bragg. The agent reported back that Prattis had done nothing to threaten “the national defense program,” so Hoover backed off, temporarily.
Then, on the day after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt put Hoover in charge of “censorship matters”—the president’s euphemism for monitoring the press to identify stories that should be suppressed in the name of the war effort. Hoover began gathering and passing along evidence of seditious reporting gathered by the FBI, Army intelligence, and the ironically named Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), the wartime agency Roosevelt had created to ensure “the dissemination of factual information . . . on the progress of the defense effort.” In one report analyzing the contents of five black newspapers, OFF singled out the Courier and the Double V Campaign in particular, concluding that its “basic concern” was to carp about racial discrimination.
Exploiting his back channel to Roosevelt, Hoover complained that his efforts to crack down on the press were being thwarted by FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle. Biddle, a Philadelphia patrician and disciple of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, believed that the press had a constitutional right to criticize the government, as long as it did not directly assist the enemy. In several tense confrontations, Roosevelt mocked Biddle’s restraint and pushed him to get tougher. “When are you going to indict the seditionists?” the president demanded in several cabinet meetings. In one, he specifically brought up black newspapers and suggested that Biddle and Postmaster General Frank Walker lean on their publishers. According to Biddle’s notes, FDR’s instructions were “to see what could be done about preventing their subversive language.”
By March 1942, FBI agents began showing up in the newsrooms of black newspapers. In Los Angeles, they barged into the California Eagle and interrogated its publisher, Charlotta Bass, about whether she had received money from the Japanese or the Germans to print articles critical of the U.S. military. In an editorial voicing support for Bass, the Courier reported that the FBI had also visited an unnamed second black paper, and there is
good reason to believe that it was the Courier itself. Years later, Frank Bolden, then a city desk reporter, recalled being in the newsroom one day in early 1942 when a group of FBI agents appeared. They asked to speak to the editors, Bolden said, and “expressed dissatisfaction at what we were doing . . . [and] suggested that we protest in another way or wait until the war was over.”
When the agents left, P.L. Prattis told his reporters not to be intimidated. He “just called them scared white people—Hoover’s flunkies,” Bolden recalled. “We all said that . . . . We just ignored them.”
What Prattis and his colleagues couldn’t ignore was the possibility that the Courier might not get mailed. By May, Post Office chief Frank Walker had reluctantly joined the sedition hunt after repeated goading by Roosevelt. Tipped by the FBI, a Post Office examiner concluded that one edition of the Courier was “unmailable.” The report singled out a brief account of a speech by Harlem pastor Adam Clayton Powell Jr. in which Powell used words like “Gestapo” and “pogroms” to describe conditions for blacks in the United States. (Apparently the Post Office examiner missed the bemused tone of the story, which described the bombastic Powell as “hurling similes like a Bataan Island battery of machine guns.”) The same examiner later recommended suppressing three more editions of the Courier, although no action was taken because the papers had already been mailed. Around the same time, Billy Rowe, the Courier’s well-connected Broadway critic, heard talk in New York circles that the Post Office was looking to shut down black newspapers and passed those rumors along to Pittsburgh.
Eventually Prattis became so concerned that he reached out directly to Roosevelt. Although it’s not clear how he got through to the president, in May Roosevelt sent a memo to his press secretary, Stephen Early, telling him that Prattis was planning to be in Washington and had requested a meeting with Early to discuss “disconcerting reports concerning their own newspaper—coming from various sources.” Early never followed up, however, and there is no record that the meeting ever took place.
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