OURstory: Colonel Charles Young (1864-1922)

One of most courageous African Americans in the history of the U.S. military was Colonel Charles Young. I'm pleased to see that a saber owned by Col. Young was included in the America I AM exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center a few years ago.

Young was born March 12, 1864 to ex-slaves in Mayslick, Kentucky. His family moved to Ripley, Ohio, where he attended high school. After he graduated he taught in the Black high school in Ripley. Young was a professor at Wilberforce University. His house near Wilberforce is a National Historic Landmark.

He was the third African American to graduate from West Point in 1889. He graduated in spite of the hatred, bigotry and discrimination he encountered as an undergraduate.

His first assignment after graduation was with the Buffalo Soldiers in the 10th Cavalry in Nebraska, and then in the 9th and 10th Cavalries in Utah.

Young was then awarded a commission as a Major in the Ninth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Later, during the Spanish-American War, he was in command of a squadron of the 10th Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers in Cuba.

After the war with Spain, Young was reassigned to Fort Duchesne in Utah where he encouraged Sergeant Major Benjamin O. Davis ... who later became the first African American to reach the rank of Army General.

In 1903 Captain Young was in command of the 10th Cavalry, who were segregated at the Presidio of San Francisco. He was assigned as the acting superintendent of Sequoia National Parks. During his supervisory tenure his troops built a road longer than all previous roads combined. Soon wagons and automobiles were winding their way to the mountain-top forest for the first time.

Young was sent to the Philippines to join his 9th regiment and command a squadron of two troops in 1908. Four years later he was once again selected for Military Attaché duty, this time to Liberia. For his service as adviser to the Liberian Government and his supervision of the building of the country's infrastructure, he was awarded the NAACP Springarn Medal.

Because of his exceptional leadership of the 10th Cavalry in the Mexican theater of war, he was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and was briefly Fort Huachuca's commander in Texas.

Young was devoted to his wife Ada and their two children; son, Charles Jr. and daughter Marie. He was a renaissance man who played several instruments (piano, violin and guitar) and spoke several languages.

Colonel Charles Young was the highest ranking African American officer in the army when World War I started.

With the explosive arrival of WW1, the public, and especially African Americans considered the possibility of Young receiving a major leadership role in the war. He had met challenges of racism, bigotry, and discrimination embedded within society and within the military. He had shown himself to be exceptional, not only as an military officer, but also as a leader of men.

But justice and the rule of equality in the military were not for Lt. Colonel Charles Young. When he took his scheduled army physical, the doctors said his blood pressure was too high. Young and his comrades, his supporters, and the African American news media believed otherwise. On June 22, 1917, Young was retired, under protest.

The forced retirement didn't sit well with Lt. Col. Young. In June 1918 he made his way on horseback ... over 500 miles ... from Wilberforce OH to Washington DC to demonstrate that he was fit for duty. Once in DC, he asked the military for immediate reinstatement and command of a combat unit in Europe. Young was reinstated and promoted to full Colonel.

Col. Young, was assigned to Liberia as Military Attaché. He died at that post on January 8, 1922, while on a research expedition in Lagos, Nigeria.

OURstory: Charity Adams Earley (1918-2002)

The folks at the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) recently issued a provocative slideshow called 'The Facts'. It talks about the challenges faced by women in the IT industry.

If it is tough for women in 2010 ... how much tougher must it have been for a Black woman back in the 1940s?

That is the thought that came to me as I learned that Charity Adams Earley will be honored in the America I AM exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center on June 19, 2010 thru January 2, 2011.

It turns out that Earley held a degree in math and physics while attending Wilberforce University and the Ohio State University. She taught and attended graduate school before joining the Army. She did not let racism hinder her superior work. In fact, our BDPA Dayton chapter often celebrates their annual banquet at the auditorium in Sinclair Community College named after her.

At a time when a segregated military provided few opportunities for Blacks, Charity Adams was one of only two to hold a wartime rank in the WACs as high as major. A subsequent promotion made her a lieutenant colonel briefly before she left military service in 1946.

The Army first permitted Black members of the WACs to serve overseas in the winter of 1945, when it created the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, an all-Black unit, and assigned some 850 African American women to it. The unit, based in Birmingham, England, and later in Rouen, France, and Paris, routed mail to millions of members of the armed forces in Europe.

The assignment of Major Adams as the battalion commander seemed a natural choice. Having grown up in Columbia, S.C. -- her father a minister in the A.M.E. Church, her mother a teacher -- she joined the WACs in 1942. She was among 39 Black women in the corps's first training class, at Fort Des Moines, Iowa, and became one of its first Black officers. She then held administrative and command positions at Fort Des Moines for two and a half years.

The members of the 6888th postal unit were the first Black women many Britons in Birmingham had ever seen, and they shattered stereotypes.

"These WACs are very different from the colored women portrayed on the films, where they are usually either domestics or the outspoken old-retainer type or sloe-eyed sirens given to gaudiness of costume and eccentricity in dress," The Birmingham Sunday Mercury said. "The WACs have dignity and proper reserve."

After her military service, she received a master's degree in vocational psychology from Ohio State, then became a dean at Tennessee A&I College and Georgia State College. The Smithsonian Institution has included her in its listing of the historically most important Black women.

In 1996, Mrs. Earley was honored at the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum for her wartime service. Before leaving Dayton for the ceremony in Washington, she said: "When I talk to students, they say, 'How did it feel to know you were making history?' But you don't know you're making history when it's happening. I just wanted to do my job."

We need to know OURstory for inspiration and direction. I hope that this blog post has been an eye-opener for you ... and for our daughters!