Dovey Undaunted

by Tonya Bolden

  Dovey told the lawyer most emphatically that she was not and had never been a thief.

  After he left, Dovey, still unsure of her fate, kept on hoping, believing, praying, during what must have been the longest night of her life.

  Spelman, a chance of a lifetime . . .

  Slipping through her fingers?

  And her family—the last thing Dovey wanted to do was bring shame upon them.

  DAYBREAK CAME IN THE CITY of a hundred hills, and on the horizon, a greater miracle. That lawyer returned. This time when he left the jail, he took Dovey with him, took her back to Spelman.

  Thanks to that lawyer, the charges of theft were gone with the wind, as were the Hurleys from Dovey’s life. But so was her job, her room and board at the Hurleys’ home.

  If you but believe.

  Professor Neptune and Phern Rockefeller fixed her up with housing on campus. Dovey came to her own rescue too. She took on as many jobs as she could get. She cleaned dorms, did research for Neptune, worked as a lab assistant in the biology department.

  But it wasn’t enough. There came a day when she faced the prospect of having to drop out of college. She owed the school several hundred dollars.

  She found herself walking aimlessly around the Spelman campus, then standing before the faculty apartment building in which Professor Neptune lived. “I climbed the steps of the cement stoop of the apartment building, sat down, and began to cry.”

  Someone called out to her.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” Professor Neptune asked.

  If you but believe.

  The next day in a meeting with Neptune and Phern Rockefeller, another miracle.

  A scholarship had been found.

  What’s more, Professor Neptune, not a wealthy woman, agreed to pay off Dovey’s debt to Spelman: a little over $300. Neptune also advanced Dovey the $13.32 needed to pay the first quarterly premium for a life insurance policy that made Neptune the beneficiary. If Dovey suddenly died, then Neptune would get the death benefit and so recoup the money she had spent paying off Dovey’s debt (and the first insurance premium).

  Dovey pledged to repay Neptune in pieces: at least five dollars monthly—or “oftener.” She also agreed to keep up with the insurance policy’s quarterly premium payments. (After paying Neptune back, Dovey would be free to make anyone she pleased the beneficiary of that life insurance policy.)

  ON JUNE 8, 1938, in Sisters Chapel, Dovey Mae Johnson, double major in English and biology, received a bachelor’s degree along with forty-seven other young women. And her family had been able to afford travel expenses for at least one member to be there, her sister Eunice.

  That year’s commencement speaker was the esteemed Dr. Frederick K. Stamm, pastor of the Clinton Avenue Community Church in Brooklyn, New York. “If young men and women are going into life to win, it is necessary for them to face the battle with some inner resources,” he said, “and there is no place for fear in the life of one who works steadily.”

  Dovey's loan agreement with Neptune.

  Dovey Mae Johnson possessed in abundance the three inner resources Dr. Stamm stressed: Stamina. Sound thinking. Love.

  And dreaming big had paid off for her.

  5

  NO

  “NO,” SAID THE FORMIDABLE Mary McLeod Bethune to Dovey M. Johnson. “There are things for you to do right here.”

  This was in July 1941, three years after Dovey graduated from college.

  “Right here” was Washington, DC, which was about as segregated as any other Southern town.

  Though eclipsed years back by Harlem, New York, as the “capital of Black America,” Black DC was still a force, home to a host of living legends.

  Carter G. Woodson, the second Black person to earn a PhD from Harvard (in history in 1912) and the “father” of Black history was one. Another was civil rights and women’s rights activist Mary Church Terrell, a graduate of Oberlin College (1884), who in ten years’ time would spearhead the campaign that led to the outlawing of Jim Crow in DC restaurants.

  Washington, DC, was also home to the prestigious historically Black Howard University with its college of liberal arts, law school, pharmacy school, and medical school.

  Dovey hadn’t gone to DC in the summer of 1941 for Howard’s medical school. After Spelman, with money tight, she set aside her dream of being a doctor. Instead, she took a teaching job in a place nothing like the intellectual hub she had enjoyed in Atlanta.

  Dovey had put her stamina, sound thinking, and love to use at Finley High School in the rural town of Chester, South Carolina, some fifty miles south of Charlotte.

  At Finley High, Dovey taught English and General Science. She counseled seniors on courses of study, on possible careers, on finding jobs, on pathways to college. For two summers, she made extra money training Black teachers at Piedmont Junior College in Rock Hill, South Carolina, about twenty-five miles from Chester, and where her little sister Rachel was attending Friendship College. (Her sister Eunice had opted for Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina.)

  Dovey initially earned $68 a month at Finley High. For the teacher training, $100 a month. Bit by bit she was paying off her debt to Mary Mae Neptune. Month after month Dovey sent much of her money to Queen City. Dovey’s family, long since living at 921 East Hill Street, really needed that money. Mama, still doing domestic work, was the chief breadwinner.

  Grandpa Clyde, who years back had taken to drink, hadn’t been the pastor of a church for a while. A 1934 city directory identified him, then in his late fifties, as doing some kind of menial labor, for it had him down as a “helper.” Perhaps he was sweeping up in a barbershop or stocking the shelves of a grocery store.

  Six years later, in early April 1940, in the space for his occupation, the US Census record had a blank. As it did for Grandma Rachel. Mama, forty-eight, was working as a “maid” for a private family, as were Eunice, twenty-three, and Rachel, twenty, both with three years of college. Like Dovey, they were all in mourning before April 1940 was out. Sixty-four-year-old Grandpa Clyde died on April 25. He had suffered a brain hemorrhage brought on by a serious kidney disease.

  “Ill as he had been for so long, I found myself unprepared for his death. It was Grandpa who’d given me my love of books and an abiding hunger for things spiritual. He was the first minister I had known.” And it was Grandpa who “had stepped forward to take the place of the father I’d barely known. Grief filled the house that summer, not in the desperate, wrenching way it had when my papa died, but with a stillness that slowed our days and blanketed everything in quiet.”

  Chester, South Carolina, proved too quiet for Dovey. And how long could Mama keep working herself to the bone?

  In July 1941 Dovey went up to DC hoping to get a job in the defense industry.

  WAR WAS RAGING IN EUROPE with the Axis powers, led by Nazi Germany, battling the Allied powers, led by Britain. America, not yet technically in the fight, was aiding the Allied powers as the “Arsenal of Democracy”—producing tanks, planes, munitions. And the doors of opportunity were opening to Black people in the defense industry where workers could earn from about thirty to maybe sixty dollars a week.

  These opportunities were the result of Executive Order 8802, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) signed on June 25, 1941. Executive Order 8802 outlawed racial and ethnic discrimination in the defense industry. (Before that executive order, a survey showed that 50 percent of defense contractors would not hire Black people.)

  With Executive Order 8802 came the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC), tasked with investigating defense contractors who violated the president’s order.

  Executive Order 8802 and the FEPC didn’t exactly spring from the goodness of FDR’s heart. It was born of pressure from Black civil rights activists. One was Walter White, chief of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Another was A. Philip Randolph, a prominent labor leader. Randolph had threatened to lead at least 100,000
people in a march on Washington on July 1, 1941, if something wasn’t done to prevent Black people from being locked out of defense industry jobs.

  After FDR signed Executive Order 8802, Randolph called off the march.

  MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE WAS just as tireless an advocate for her people as Walter White and A. Philip Randolph.

  Back in 1904 she had started a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, with $1.50—“We burned logs and used the charred splinters as pencils, and mashed elderberries for ink.” Roughly twenty years later her school, with its motto “Enter to learn, depart to serve,” was the coed Bethune-Cookman College (now University).

  When Dovey went to DC in the summer of 1941, Bethune was in her fifth year as head of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration (NYA). The NYA was one of the many agencies in FDR’s alphabet soup of initiatives to get America out of the economic depression, to give Americans a better life, a new deal.

  The NYA sought to combat despair and juvenile delinquency by providing young men and women, age sixteen to twenty-five, with jobs (such as clerical work) and job training (such as auto repair). As an NYA administrator, Bethune was determined to see that young Black people got a fair deal in accessing NYA-sponsored opportunities. (Dovey’s job as a lab assistant at Spelman had been thanks to the NYA.)

  Mary McLeod Bethune, around 1911, with students from the school she founded, Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School, in Florida.

  When Dovey alighted from a train at DC’s wondrous Beaux Arts–style Union Station in the summer of 1941, Bethune was also in her sixth year as president of the National Council of Negro Women, an umbrella organization of roughly thirty women’s clubs—clubs devoted not to the likes of bridge parties and lah-di-dah afternoon teas, but to improving Black lives, especially those of women and children. At the time, 60 percent of Black women could find jobs only as domestic workers. These women, said one report, “often worked 12-hour days for pathetically low wages.”

  On top of heading an NYA division and the NCNW, Bethune was also a member of the Federal Council of Negro Affairs, better known as the Black Cabinet: FDR’s top policy advisers on Black America, which numbered nearly 13 million, about 10 percent of the population.

  DOVEY NEVER KNEW THE HOW, why, when of it, but she knew for a fact that Grandma Rachel and Mary McLeod Bethune were friends. When Dovey was ten or so, Bethune came to Queen City to speak at its Emancipation Day celebration and Grandma Rachel introduced her granddaughters to the great woman.

  Straightaway young Dovey sensed in Bethune “something powerful, almost regal. Ebony-skinned and crowned with an enormous feathered hat that matched her silk suit, she spoke in a voice so rich, so cultivated, so filled with authority that it held me fast.”

  Years later, when Dovey decided to go to DC, Grandma Rachel insisted that she get in touch with Bethune. When she did, she was hoping that Bethune might be able to help her get a defense industry job. But Bethune told her that she had “something else in mind.”

  In the meantime, what Bethune needed Dovey to do “right here” was to be a research assistant, to scour newspapers, Black-owned, white-owned, for articles about Bethune’s work, about Black setbacks and strides. Dovey did that work in a row house at 1812 Ninth Street, NW: Bethune’s home and NCNW’s headquarters.

  “Every clip was logged into her files, as were the statistics she charged me with ferreting out and placing at her fingertips for the moment when she might need them in her fight for better schools, better housing, better lives for children.”

  Dovey watched Bethune “turn those cold numbers into tools, working them into letters to this or that official, citing them in phone conferences, packing them away in her briefcase for meetings at her NYA headquarters across town, slipping them into discussions with the colleagues who sought her out in [NCNW’s] office for support and advice.”

  Dovey was left practically “speechless” on that fall day of 1941 when she first laid eyes on First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in Bethune’s headquarters. Like a scared mouse, Dovey promptly “retreated” to her corner of the office “in a state of awe.”

  In her crusade for social justice, Bethune had a powerful ally in Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Spirited.

  Forward-thinking.

  One of the most progressive white women of the era.

  Dovey soon discovered that the First Lady was not one to inspire fear. “No person,” she recalled, “could remain ill at ease in the presence of a woman who arrived without an entourage and sailed past ceremony as she did. After our first introduction, she greeted me by name each time I saw her and unfailingly inquired for my welfare before sinking into one of the old armchairs and getting down to business” with Bethune.

  It was months after Dovey settled in DC, bunking at the Phyllis Wheatley Y on Rhode Island Avenue, NW, about a five-minute walk from Bethune’s headquarters, that she learned what Bethune’s “something else” was.

  6

  NO GLAMOUR GIRLS NEED APPLY

  WHEN WORLD WAR II erupted on the heels of Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Americans were caught up in a great debate.

  Isolationists clamored for the United States to stay out of the fight.

  Interventionists wanted the nation squarely in it, not just by supplying Allied forces with weapons of war, but also with boots on the ground, fighter planes and bombers in the air, torpedo boats and cruisers on the high seas.

  A draft for military service for men ages twenty-one to thirty-five began in October 1940. Soon the question wasn’t if the nation would enter the war but when. Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, had invaded Denmark and Norway, had blitzkrieged Belgium and Holland, had occupied France. Its Luftwaffe had pounded Britain with a four-month air assault. What’s more, fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan had entered into a pact with Germany.

  In this growing global conflict, when the United States stepped in big it would need all the resources that it could muster.

  A few months before Dovey went to DC, in early May 1941, one of the first women elected to Congress, Massachusetts representative Edith Nourse Rogers, sponsored a bill to create the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). This corps wouldn’t be a part of the US Army, but attached to it.

  WAACs were to serve as army support staff: to work at army bases, hospitals, and other military installations as accountants, bakers, clerks, cooks, cryptographers, truck and ambulance drivers, radio, teletype, and telephone operators. Women in such “behind-the-lines assignments” would free up men for combat duty.

  Though no one dreamed of women serving in combat, many Americans were appalled by the very idea of the WAAC. Asked Michigan representative Clare Eugene Hoffman, “Who will do the cooking, the washing, the mending, the humble homey tasks to which every woman has devoted herself; who will nurture the children?”

  Then came the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, when the Empire of Japan pulled off a spectacular air attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Within two hours, more than three hundred Japanese planes, dive bombers and torpedo bombers among them, destroyed or damaged eight battleships and nineteen other naval vessels, along with more than three hundred aircraft.

  The attack left roughly one thousand Americans wounded and resulted in more than two thousand deaths. And it had America on high alert, especially in Dovey’s temporary home, DC.

  “Heavy Guard Thrown Around Capital’s Most Vital Spots,” reported the Washington Post on December 8, the day President Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress requesting a declaration of war against the Empire of Japan. In the Senate the vote was 82–0. In the House of Representatives the vote was 388–1.

  That bill to create the WAAC was soon back in play. On March 12, 1942, after a three-hour debate, it passed in the House with a vote of 249–86.

  New York congressman Andrew Somers was apoplectic. He lambasted the bill as the “silliest piece of legislation” he ha
d ever seen. “A woman’s army to defend the United States of America. Think of the humiliation. What has become of the manhood of America, that we have to call on our women to do what has ever been the duty of men?”

  Two months after his rant, on May 14, 1942, Somers had to live with that “humiliation.” The WAAC bill passed in the Senate (38–27). FDR promptly signed it into law.

  THE WAAC ACT CALLED for up to 150,000 women volunteers. At the start 440 women were to be slated for Officer Candidate School. Of that number only forty could be Black.

  The person tapped to head the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was white: thirty-seven-year-old Oveta Culp Hobby, a former Texas First Lady.

  Hobby had achieved great things in her own right. Before she became a Mrs., she had gone where few women had: to law school, in her case the University of Texas Law School at Austin. She later served as a parliamentarian (or adviser) in the Texas House of Representatives. Hobby had also worked as an assistant to Houston’s city attorney.

  Director Hobby’s prospective WAACs had to be US citizens with no dependents under the age of fourteen. They had to be between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five, stand between five and six feet tall, and weigh at least a hundred pounds. WAAC candidates would have “to pass a physical examination and an intelligence test comparable to that required of an officer in the regular army,” reported the New York Times Magazine.

  One of Director Hobby’s slogans was “No glamour girls need apply.”

  LIKE ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, MARY McLeod Bethune had been, as Dovey remembered, among the “grand lobbyists” for the WAAC bill. It “consumed” them “in the dark, terrifying months” after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

  In her history of Black WAACs, Martha S. Putney laid out Bethune’s position clearly: “Bethune saw in the WAAC an opportunity for black females not only to help the nation in its hour of need but also to share in the fruits of victory. She stressed the benefits of being in the service. She spoke in terms of democracy, equality, improved race relations, women’s rights, and employment opportunities.”