To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race ：The Story of the Only African-American WACS Stationed Overseas During World War II

Publication subTitle ：The Story of the Only African-American WACS Stationed Overseas During World War II

Author： Moore Brenda L.

Publisher： NYU Press‎

Publication year： 1996

E-ISBN: 9780814763247

P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780814755877

Subject： C91 Sociology;E3/7 States military;K15 contemporary history (1917 ~);K5 European History;K7 Americas History

Keyword：欧洲史,美洲史,现代史（1917年~）,社会学,各国军事

Language： ENG

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Description

I would have climbed up a mountain to get on the list [to serve overseas]. We were going to do our duty. Despite all the bad things that happened, America was our home. This is where I was born. It was where my mother and father were. There was a feeling of wanting to do your part.--Gladys Carter, member of the 6888th To Serve My Country, to Serve my Race is the story of the historic 6888th, the first United States Women's Army Corps unit composed of African-American women to serve overseas. While African-American men and white women were invited, if belatedly, to serve their country abroad, African-American women were excluded for overseas duty throughout most of WWII. Under political pressure from legislators like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the NAACP, the black press, and even President Roosevelt, the U.S. War Department was forced to deploy African-American women to the European theater in 1945.African-American women, having succeeded, through their own activism and political ties, in their quest to shape their own lives, answered the call from all over the country, from every socioeconomic stratum. Stationed in France and England at the end of World War II, the 6888th brought together women like Mary Daniel Williams, a cook in the 6888th who signed up for the Army to escape the slums of Cleveland and to improve her ninth-grade education, and Margaret Barnes Jones, a public relations officer of the 6888th, who grew up in a comfortable household with a politically active