This Day in Labor History: March 20, 1945
By 
On March 20, 1945, four leaders of a strike among Black WACs at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, were convicted of disobeying orders and sentenced to hard labor. Privates Anna Morrison, Mary Green, Alice Young, and Johnnie Murphy had refused offers to return to their duties and chose court-martial instead, bringing serious publicity to the discrimination that Black WACs faced at the fort and in the military at large. This was a huge risk for them and would change their lives, but they are also heroes in the fight for justice in this nation.
On March 9, fifty-four orderlies decided to strike against their discrimination at Fort Devens. Now, the entire existence of Black WACs was not something the military was ready to deal with. When it had decided to accept women into some roles in the military, it very much had white women in mind. Moreover, the military was still racially segregated. So accepting Black WACs meant taking women who joined the military to do their part to fight fascism and putting them in the most demeaning roles possible. The women came from a wide variety of backgrounds, as represented by the four who preferred court-martial to acquiescence. Alice Young was older and wealthier, coming from a well-off Washington DC background. Johnnie Murphy was a pretty tough woman who had gotten in trouble already for swearing and drinking in barracks, but she was a northerner and quite explicitly framed her resistance in terms of the larger civil rights movement. Mary Green was a single mother of two from the South who had known service work and how demeaning it was. Anna Morrison was from Kentucky and deeply resentful over the racial discrimination she and her fellow Black WACs faced.
See, when the military realized it needed Black WACs, it had no real sense of what to do with them. So at Fort Devens, they were just all thrown into what military leaders considered appropriate work for Black women–cleaning and dealing with the worst and nastiest work on the base. That’s not why these women had signed up. For five months, these four and other women had worked as orderlies in the fort’s hospital. They routinely complained about the discriminatory treatment. They demanded equality. They went up the chain of command in doing so. No one would listen to them, no one cared.
It’s worth noting here that military labor is indeed labor. That’s more clear in a situation like this than it might be with rank and file troops. People have talked about soldier unions in the past but that has never happened in the United States and perhaps that’s for good reason. But when you sign up for the military, you are absolutely a worker doing labor and we should consider military labor very much part of our labor history.
About 6,500 Black women signed up as WACs during the war. But they were totally forgotten about for generations. Part of that is the celebration of the white woman as a big symbol of the war–Rosie the Riveter is definitely a white woman, and that includes both the Rockwell original and the anti-union image frequently tattooed on feminists’ bodies today that is not in fact Rosie. Part of that is that the celebration of Black soldiers in the war very much focus on groups such as the Tuskegee Airmen. And part of it is that the number or Black WACs was relatively small. But part of it is that the Army didn’t know what to do with them forced them into the most menial labor possible, which few people would want to talk about as part of a war memory.
Now, the women at first agreed to this. They figured it was a temporary arrangement and they knew they needed to prove themselves. But the officers at Fort Devens had no intention of ever giving any kind of decent work to these women. White WACs were frequently assigned there too and given training for more important tasks. Some were trained to be things such as meteorologists, cryptographers, or radio operators. That was never to come for the Black WACs. After a month, the fort’s commanding officer told the women that this was the reality and they had to live with it. He told them they were there to do the “dirty work.” White WACs were given nice white uniforms; Black WACs were given blue hospital scrubs.
Morale went into the toilet, as you can imagine. So on March 9, the 54 WACs refused to work. The Army definitely did not expect this. They immediately put the screws down on the workers and tried to get them all back to work. Most caved pretty fast, but the four workers featured here refused. Interestingly, Murphy had been on leave the day of the strike. But when she came back and found out what happened, she stated, “I would take death before I would go back to work.”
Now, the military realized it was dealing with a hot potato here. A. Philip Randolph’s March on Washington movement had already placed massive pressure on the Roosevelt administration to desegregate the defense industry and support was growing for a larger desegregation of the military, which would happen in 1947 and 1948. So rather than charge the women with mutiny, they charged them with disobeying orders for the court martial.
The lesser charges did not work. The Black press jumped on this case. The WACs were quickly convicted and sentenced to a year of hard labor and a dishonorable discharge, but the Black press really intensified the pressure. The Baltimore Afro-American, for example, ran several articles on the story. These and other stories got the attention of left-leaning congressmen such as Adam Clayton Powell and Vito Marcantonio, who demanded investigations and a change in military policy. Thurgood Marshall announced he would personally lead the legal defense for the four women.
In April, the military caved, sort of. They transferred the offending officer, who was an incompetent fool anyway. They overturned the court martial on a technicality and reinstated all four women. It created something of a training program for the Black WACs. But it refused to deal with any of the serious problems that caused this or the significant discrimination against Black women in the military. That would have to wait until after the war, with the broader desegregation of the armed forces during the Truman administration.
I borrowed from Lynn Dumenil, American Working Women in World War II: A Brief History with Documents, to write this post. I also used this book to have my labor history students write their papers. In addition, Sandra Bolzenius’ Glory in Their Spirit: How Four Black Women Took on the Army During World War II is an excellent exploration into the women who stood up for justice.
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