Congress passed the resolution creating the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in May 1942, and the War Department answered it with a ten percent quota on Black women.
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, one of the first Black women commissioned as an officer, had been working on that resolution since May 1941 alongside Mary McLeod Bethune, Eleanor Roosevelt and Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers. Thirty-nine of the 440 women in the first officer candidate class were Black. By the end of training, 36 of the 436 who graduated as third officers were Black. Overseas, Maj. Charity E. Adams and Capt. Abbie N. Campbell inspected the first contingent of Black women in the Women’s Army Corps sent abroad.
Archuleta Chisolm, an Army veteran who served eight years, wrote about that line of women for Veterans Day. She enlisted at 20, after two years of working and saving failed to cover the HBCU she wanted. “All I could visualize was getting yelled at, doing grueling pushups, and running until I threw up,” she wrote. “I really had nothing to lose.”
Of the Black women who applied for officer training and were turned away, she wrote: “I can only imagine the level of discouragement, yet, they persisted.”
Her conclusion about Black women in uniform is one sentence. “They are not more fragile and definitely no less adaptive.”
