Instead of Prattis, it was John Sengstacke of The Chicago Defender who went to Washington to plead the case for the black press. Shortly after becoming the Defender’s publisher, Sengstacke had persuaded his competitors to form a trade group called the Negro National Publishers Association (NNPA). In June 1942, acting as president of the NNPA, Sengstacke approached Mary McLeod Bethune, the leader of FDR’s “Negro Cabinet,” and asked if she could arrange a meeting with Attorney General Francis Biddle to discuss the suppression threat.
When Sengstacke arrived at the Justice Department, copies of the Defender, the Courier, and several other Negro papers were strewn across a conference table. According to Sengstacke’s account, Biddle warned that he was “going to shut them all up” if the papers didn’t tone down their coverage, and the publisher defiantly told Biddle to “go ahead and attempt it.” By the end of the meeting, however, it became clear that both men wanted to avoid an escalation. Sengstacke agreed to urge his fellow publishers to seek more official comment on stories critical of the government. For his part, Biddle offered assurances that the Justice Department would resist formal sedition charges. After Sengstacke briefed his fellow NNPA members on the meeting, P.L. Prattis told his reporters in Pittsburgh that the threat of being shut down had passed.
In a wide-ranging history, The African American Newspaper, journalism scholar Patrick Washburn ranked The Pittsburgh Courier’s Double V Campaign as one of the three most influential crusades every undertaken by the Negro press—along with Ida B. Wells’s battle against lynching and Robert Abbott’s appeal for Northern migration. But Washburn also noted that virtually all of the nearly one thousand articles, letters, photos, and drawings devoted to the campaign were published in the space of six months. By the fall of 1942, mention of the campaign fell off dramatically—except for a small “vv” symbol that continued to run at the end of Courier stories until the end of the war.
So what happened? In The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, an award-winning documentary film, director Stanley Nelson suggested that the pullback was a response to the government’s campaign of surveillance and harassment. Washburn, meanwhile, cited the Courier’s stake in not jeopardizing its wartime financial windfall, as a special tax on excess corporate profits encouraged cigarette and other consumer goods giants to spend money on advertising in black newspapers for the first time.
Yet if Prattis and the other Pittsburgh editors were motivated by anything in the final months of 1942, it wasn’t fear or greed as much as a new sense of optimism. After years of advocating for a greater role for Negroes in the military, they were finally seeing those dreams realized. At Fort Bragg and Fort Huachuca in Arizona, all-black Army units were at last receiving combat training. Having acknowledged Dorie Miller’s heroics, the Navy was starting to allow blacks to serve in other than kitchen and custodial roles. The Marines and the Coast Guard were accepting their first black enlistees. At the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Negroes were training to become Army pilots.
On the home front, black labor was suddenly in wide demand. By the fall of 1942, the War Production Board had decreed that government contractors hire more Negroes. From Goodyear rubber to Kaiser shipyards to Forstmann textiles, manufacturing giants were increasing employment of black workers. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, the country’s largest labor union, had restated its policy of welcoming black members and was pushing the American Federation of Labor to end its discriminatory practices. By the end of the year, the Courier was running weekly photographs of black women working at defense plants. In one photo, smiling riveters at the Curtiss-Wright plant in Buffalo put the finishing touches on the nose and wing sections of P-40 Warhawk fighters, the planes that Tuskegee-trained black pilots would soon be flying in the skies over the Mediterranean.
When the Courier recapped the year, its headline was “1942 in Retrospect Shows Gains Outweigh Losses.” The story didn’t ignore the year’s bad news: six lynchings, failure to repeal a poll tax, housing riots in Philadelphia and Detroit. But it heralded “gains on the job front” as the year’s biggest story. Along with all the new opportunities in the military, the paper cited advances in pay equity for black teachers and increased government benefits for black farmers. In a blow to Jim Crow, the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously in favor of Arthur Mitchell, the lone black member of the U.S. House Representatives, in his lawsuit against a Southern railroad line that had ejected Mitchell from his first-class sleeping car while he was traveling through Arkansas.
In a column entitled “We Gain by War,” Joseph D. Bibb, the skeptic about U.S. intervention after Pearl Harbor, now extolled the war’s benefits for black America. “No longer will the racketeer, the gambling mogul nor the vice magnate be the criterion for our youth,” Bibb wrote. “War heroes will challenge their admiration and fire their ambition . . . . Those who are keeping the home fire burning are bound to receive benefits, too. They are learning new trades, are being absorbed into new industries. They are being required to buy bonds, which is compulsory saving, and every day, they are building social security by paying for unemployment insurance. When the war ends the colored American will be better off financially, spiritually and economically. War may be hell for some, but it bids fair to open up the portals of heaven for us.”
When Courier reporter Frank Bolden reflected back on the Double V Campaign decades later, he compared it to a firework that fell to earth only after it had lit up the night sky. “We had knocked on the door and gotten some attention and so the editors said, ‘Let’s concentrate on what the people are doing,’ ” Bolden recalled. “For example, why would I want to read about the Double V when people are working in a war plant down the street? I wouldn’t. These gains showed good faith intentions by the government and other people, and we felt we should follow suit . . . . In other words, the Double V was like a Roman candle. It flared up, it did its work and then it died down. It wasn’t the sole reason things opened up, but it certainly woke people up.”
By the end of 1942, P.L. Prattis had another good reason to move on from the Double V Campaign. As black troops began to ship out to the war zones of Africa, Italy, and Northern Europe, Prattis took charge of securing War Department accreditation for reporters to cover them. After the Italian-Ethiopian conflict, he and the other Pittsburgh editors knew that when it came to selling newspapers, nothing could compete with war stories from the front lines. By the end of the war, the Courier would dispatch a total of ten accredited war correspondents—far more than any other black newspaper—and that investment would lift its circulation to an all-time high of 466,000 copies a week by 1946. Of those reporters, the city desk’s Frank Bolden would be one of the first to leave Pittsburgh, and the last to return home from the Pacific four years later.
• • •
BLAZING TRAILS WAS NOTHING new in Frank Bolden’s family. Before the Great Migration, his grandfather had been the first colored man to serve on a jury in Nashville, Tennessee. After Bolden’s parents moved north, his father became the first black mail carrier in the town of Washington, south of Pittsburgh. Frank was the first in his family to go to college, enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh in 1930 at the age of seventeen. A moon-faced redhead with charming freckles and a loquacious manner, he made scores of black and white friends, pledging the colored Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity but also integrating the school marching band, playing the clarinet. So it was no surprise that Bolden would major in biology and set his sights on becoming a doctor.
But when Bolden went with a Jewish friend to apply to Pitt’s medical school, they were both turned away. The quota for Jewish students was filled, they were informed, and the school didn’t admit Negroes. Bolden pursued a graduate degree instead, hoping to go into teaching. When he was finished, he discovered that the Pittsburgh public schools didn’t hire black teachers. While in grad school, he worked part-time for The Pittsburgh Courier, keeping an eye on Crawfords and Grays games for Chester Washington while Ches was off covering J
oe Louis. So with his other paths forward blocked, Bolden was ready to listen when Robert L. Vann offered him a full-time job.
Bolden was assigned a column on Hill District nightlife, entitled “Orchestra Swirl,” and he began to display a gift for coining colorful phrases. He called the prostitutes who emerged after dark on the Lower Hill “the sisterhood of the nocturnal order.” He dubbed Gus Greenlee and Woogie Harris “digitarians”—or “numbers runners with class.” After covering his share of stories at the John Wesley AME Church in Sugartop and the Allegheny County Prison downtown, Bolden came up with a particularly memorable description of Wiley Avenue. It was “the only street in America that begins with a church and ends with a jail,” he wrote.
In the months after Pearl Harbor, P.L. Prattis summoned Bolden to propose another first. Prattis was looking for reporters to cover black soldiers who were being deployed to the front. Under War Department rules, newspapers were required to submit candidates to be assigned to specific troop units. Once approved, “accredited war correspondents” were issued uniforms and given the honorary rank of major, while agreeing to submit their reporting to Army censors. Prattis had come to see that in reviewing Negro candidates, the War Department was impressed by one qualification above all others: a college education. Although Bolden had no military or foreign reporting experience, he did have two degrees from the University of Pittsburgh.
Thus it was that Frank Bolden became one of the first black war correspondents of World War II. In June 1942, he packed his bags for Fort Huachuca, the Army training camp in southeastern Arizona, just miles from the Mexican border. During World War I, Fort Huachuca had been home to the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the 10th Cavalry Regiment. Now it was serving as a base for the 93rd Infantry Division, the first black contingent to be designated for combat training after Pearl Harbor.
As soon as Bolden arrived at Fort Huachuca, he saw why the Courier had once described it as the “worst location in the U.S. for Negro soldiers.” The remote location was no accident. Tucson, the nearest big city, was eighty miles away. There wasn’t a town with more than a few hundred white people within twenty miles. Inside the base, white commanders enjoyed their own dining hall and social club. But for the black soldiers, there was nothing to do for recreation except buy swigs of whiskey sold out of kegs along the road outside the camp and visit tin-shack brothels crawling with venereal disease in the tiny, aptly named town of Fry nearby.
Bolden also discovered that the 93rd Infantry wasn’t going anyplace soon. Although the division had fought in World War I—earning the nickname the “Blue Helmets” for the French-issued trench hats they wore—it had been disbanded afterward. Now the Army would force the Blue Helmets to undergo two years of training before giving them a chance to fight again. So for the rest of 1942 and into 1943, Bolden labored to turn the drudgery of tank maneuvers and bayonet drills into readable copy for the Courier. Occasionally there was an outbreak of racial violence to cover, but Bolden had to be careful. To bypass the military censors, he typed those stories on onionskin paper and gave them to black laundresses to smuggle out of the camp. After one story about a gunfight between a black private and a white MP appeared in the Courier, the FBI summoned Bolden to Pittsburgh for questioning.
In the middle of 1943, the Blue Helmets left Fort Huachuca for other training bases in California and Louisiana. Instead of following them, Bolden returned to Pittsburgh. The circumstances aren’t known, but they may have had to do with a troubled marriage: once the war was over, Bolden’s first wife, Helen, filed for divorce and ran off with another man from Chicago. So for the next year, before he finally got a chance to go overseas, Bolden watched as other Courier reporters beat him to the front.
The first was Edgar Rouzeau, a reporter in the Harlem bureau who was the very first black reporter to receive war correspondent accreditation. Rouzeau was placed with the first Negro unit to ship out: the 41st Engineers Regiment, known as the “Singing Engineers” because of the spirituals they chanted while training. The Engineers were sent to Liberia, to construct an airfield to serve as a transport hub for the North Africa campaign. But unhappily for Rouzeau, military censors refused to allow him to report on the mission, because Liberia’s prime minister hadn’t told his parliament that he had given permission for the airfield. Seven months passed before Rouzeau was able to sing the praises of the Singing Engineers in the Courier. He was rewarded for his patience, however, when President Roosevelt made a surprise visit to the new airfield on his way back from the Casablanca conference. For the first and last time, FDR inspected black troops in the field, and Rouzeau got the scoop.
From Africa, Rouzeau went to Italy, to cover the arrival of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first deployment of black pilots trained at the Tuskegee Institute. It was a rocky debut. In Rouzeau’s words, the squadron was treated like an “orphan” unit and forced to complete on-site training on its own. When its single-engine P-40 Warhawk planes flew cover for Allied bombers in the invasion of Sicily, they were no match for Germany’s Focke-Wulfs. In the fall of 1943, the squadron’s captain, Benjamin O. Davis Jr.—the son of the black general—returned home to a hostile congressional hearing. Time magazine reported that Army commanders were “not entirely satisfied” with the Tuskegee “experiment” and that the only thing keeping them from confining black pilots to noncombat duty was because “the Negro press has campaigned against it.”
Yet the Courier continued to publish Rouzeau’s upbeat accounts of the 99th Squadron’s occasional successes. The stories helped buy time for Davis to complete training of a full Tuskegee fighter group. When those pilots arrived in Europe with new red-tailed P-51 Mustang fighter planes, they performed heroically for the rest of the Italian campaign and later downed dozens of German planes over the skies of Northern Europe.
The white press was even more hostile to the black ground troops who fought in the Italian campaign. In 1944, the 92nd Infantry Division, the latest incarnation of the “Buffalo Soldiers,” arrived in Italy, led by a white general, Edward “Ned” Almond. Also placed under Almond’s command was the 366th Infantry Regiment, which had a black leader, Colonel Howard Queen. When Almond ordered men from both forces to attack Italian positions in the hills of the Serchio Valley that winter, they suffered heavy losses and had to retreat. They were pushed back again in the spring when they tried to clear out enemy positions around the Cinquale Canal on Italy’s western coast.
After that setback, Newsweek magazine published a story entitled “A Behaviour Pattern” concluding that blacks in combat roles had been “more productive of disappointments and failure than anything else.” In The New York Times, correspondent Milton Bracken wrote that only the “supersensitivity of some Negro papers at home” kept white commanders from telling the truth about the unpreparedness of black troops.
In Pittsburgh, P.L. Prattis had made two unlikely choices to send to the Italian front. Ollie Harrington was a cartoonist, the creator of a popular weekly strip called Bootsie. But Harrington was also a graduate of Yale, so Prattis submitted his name for accreditation and sent him to cover the arrival of the 92nd Division in Italy. Collins George was a former French professor who had served as a conscientious objector and only just started working in the Courier’s “Missing Persons Bureau,” taking classified ads from people looking for runaway loved ones. But George had an even more valuable college credential: a degree from Howard University, which Howard Queen and many of the other black officers of the 366th Regiment had attended.
George arrived in Italy just in time to report a very different version of the Cinquale fiasco. According to George’s sources among the officers of 366th Regiment, Ned Almond had rejected Howard Queen’s request for additional training before his men were ordered into battle. Almond also told the black troops that they were only there because of pressure from “your Negro newspapers” and that he would make sure they got “their share of casualties.” Then Almond sent the soldiers on the attack just as unusually muddy cond
itions created by a snowy winter and a wet spring had caused the rest of the Fifth Army to delay its assault on Italy’s Gothic Line.
After the war, the Buffalos were widely mocked as the “hapless 92nd,” and Ned Almond was hailed for exposing the failure of segregated military training. It would be decades before one of the division’s regiments, the 370th, was properly recognized for its role in the final assault on the Gothic Line, after the regiment was removed from Almond’s command and assigned to a mixed division with white and Japanese American troops. (One hero of the 370th was Vernon Baker, the lone surviving recipient of the Medals of Honor that were belatedly bestowed on black soldiers who fought in World War II.) But the Buffalos never forgot Collins George for sticking up for them. “He did for us what Ernie Pyle was doing for the American white soldier,” a 92nd Infantry artilleryman named Hondon Hargrove wrote when George passed away in 1992. “He made us feel like we were great patriots, accomplishing great deeds for our country.”
For Prattis, covering the role of black troops in D-Day and the liberation of Northern Europe proved a frustrating ordeal. Early in the war, he hired George Padmore, a black intellectual who happened to live in Europe, as London correspondent, only to discover that Padmore was better at pontificating than reporting. Then Prattis took a chance on a college graduate named Randy Dixon who until then had only reported on sports for the Courier. A handsome charmer with a rakish mustache, Dixon looked the part of a war correspondent, and the Courier spent some $18,000—a hefty investment at the time—to train him and put him up in London for fifteen months. But Dixon was more interested in reporting on the London social scene and parties thrown by British women for Negro soldiers than making his way to the front. He missed the first deployments of black troops on D-Day, and only arrived at the beaches of Normandy two weeks later.
Smoketown Page 21