1945: The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the 93rd Engineer General Service Regiment, Tuskegee Airmen, White Allies & Influential Black Americans
Anne Frank is murdered, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies, Adolf Hitler commits suicide, Uncle Frederick Steele Blackall III graduates from Yale University & KKK leaders are ousted
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, nicknamed the “Six Triple Eight,” was a predominantly Black battalion of the Women's Army Corps (WAC).
The 6888th had 855 women, amongst whom were three Latinas, both enlisted and officers, and was led by Major Charity Adams.
It was the only predominantly Black US Women's Army Corps unit sent overseas during World War II.
The group motto was “No mail, low morale.”
The 93rd Engineer General Service Regiment (93rd) was a segregated general services regiment of the United States Army.
The 93rd was one of several Army units composed entirely of Black enlisted personnel that constructed the Alaska-Canada highway.
The 92nd Infantry Division (known as the 92nd Division during World War I) was a Black American, later mixed, infantry division of the United States Army that served in World War I, World War II, and the Korean War.
The military was racially segregated during the World Wars.
The division was organized in October 1917, after the U.S. entry into World War I, at Camp Funston, Kansas, with African American soldiers from all states.
In 1918, before leaving for France, the American buffalo was selected as the divisional insignia due to the “Buffalo Soldiers” nickname, given to Black American cavalrymen in the 19th century.
The divisional nickname, “Buffalo Soldiers Division,” was inherited from the 366th Infantry, one of the first units organized in the division.
The 92nd Infantry Division was the only Black American infantry division that participated in combat in Europe during World War II.
Other units were used as support.
It was part of the U.S. Fifth Army, fighting in the Italian Campaign from 1944 to the war's end in 1945.
Attorney, civil rights advocate, and author, Angela Glover Blackwell, born.
Professor of Afro-American Studies, African American Religion and the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African American Studies at Harvard University, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham born.
Higginbotham wrote Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880–1920, which won several awards.
She has also received several awards for her work, most notably the 2014 National Humanities Medal.
Political activist, Medical Doctor and Professor, Chief of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of Illinois at Chicago Hospital and Health Sciences System and white male ally, Peter Orris, born.
Raised in New York City by his parents, Trudy and Leo Orris, Orris was involved with the civil rights movement from age eleven.
While known for his work in the field of medicine, Orris is also known for his work in the Civil Rights Movement.
January 14, 1945: Actress Vonetta McGee born
January 30, 1945: Businessman, minister, and former politician, Floyd Flake, born
February (or March) 1945: Anne Frank is murdered in a concentration camp at age 15
February (or March) 1945: Soldier and musician most noted for his leadership of the Philippine Constabulary Band, Walter Loving, dies.
The son of a former slave, Loving led the band during the 1909 U.S. presidential inaugural parade, where it formed the official musical escort to the President of the United States, the first time a band other than the U.S. Marine Band had been assigned that duty.
Loving is believed to have been the first Black American to conduct a musical performance in the White House.
In addition to his long career in military music, Loving also worked with the U.S. Army's intelligence division during World War I, and, in private life, as a real estate investor in the San Francisco Bay area.
Toward the end of his life, he returned to the Philippines.
Loving was killed in 1945 during the Battle of Manila in dramatic, though unclear, circumstances.
He posthumously received the Philippines' Presidential Merit Award.
February 4, 1945: A second-generation Black American race car driver, a rarity in the motor racing industry, Benny Scott, born.
Scott's father, Bill “Bullet” Scott, inspired his son racing midgets in Southern California in the 1930s.
February 5, 1945: Politician serving as the U.S. representative for New Jersey's 12th congressional district since 2015, Bonnie Watson Coleman, born.
A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served in the New Jersey General Assembly from 1998 to 2015 for the 15th legislative district.
She is the first Black American woman to represent New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives.
February 6, 1945: Reggae singer, guitarist, and songwriter, Bob Marley, born (click on link to listen to music)
Considered one of the pioneers of the genre, he fused elements of reggae, ska and rocksteady and was renowned for his distinctive vocal and songwriting style.
Marley increased the visibility of Jamaican music worldwide and made him a global figure in popular culture.
He became known as a Rastafarian icon, and he infused his music with a sense of spirituality.
Marley is also considered a global symbol of Jamaican music and culture and identity and was controversial in his outspoken support for democratic social reforms.
Marley also supported the legalization of cannabis and advocated for Pan-Africanism.
In 1976 [the year after I was born], Marley survived an attempted assassination in his home, which was believed to be politically motivated.
February 9, 1945: Educator and clubwoman, Ella D. Barrier, dies
February 21, 1945: Politician and activist who served as a member of the nonpartisan King County Council, Larry Gossett, born
March 5, 1945: Lena Baker is executed in Cuthbert, Georgia.
She was a Black American maid who was convicted of capital murder of a white man, Ernest Knight.
Baker was the only woman in Georgia to be executed by electrocution.
The execution came during a decades-long period of state suppression of civil rights of Black citizens in white-dominated Georgia.
The state had disenfranchised Black people since the turn of the century, and imposed legal racial segregation and second-class status on them.
At the time of the trial, a local newspaper reported that Baker was held as a “slave woman” by Knight, and that she shot him in self-defense during a struggle.
What I done, I did in self-defense, or I would have been killed myself. Where I was I could not overcome it. God has forgiven me. I have nothing against anyone. I picked cotton for Mr. Pritchett, and he has been good to me. I am ready to go. I am one in the number. I am ready to meet my God. I have a very strong conscience.
— Baker's last words
In 2005, sixty years after her execution, the state of Georgia granted Baker a full and unconditional pardon.
A biography was published about Baker in 2001, and it was adapted for the feature film The Lena Baker Story (2008), chronicling the events of her life, trial, and execution.
March 7, 1945: Journalist and former op-ed columnist for The New York Times, Bob Herbert, born.
His column was syndicated to other newspapers around the country.
Herbert frequently writes on poverty, the Iraq War, racism and American political apathy towards racism.
March 8, 1945: Entrepreneur and chemical engineer, Lilia Ann Abron, born.
In 1972, Abron became the first Black American woman to earn a PhD in chemical engineering.
March 8, 1945: Phyllis Mae Dailey is inducted into the United States Navy Nurse Corps.
Dailey was the first Black American sworn in as a Navy nurse following changes in Navy recruitment and admittance procedures that had previously excluded Black women from joining the Nurse Corps.
A graduate of Lincoln School of Nursing in New York and student of public health at Teachers College, Columbia University, Dailey had previously been rejected from entering the U.S. Air Force.
Determined to serve, she stated that she “knew the barriers were going to be broken down eventually and felt the more applicants, the better the chances would be for each person.”
March 15, 1945: Army soldier Herman Perry is hung during World War II.
He deserted after fragging an unarmed white lieutenant attempting to arrest him.
After being sentenced to death, he escaped custody, and a manhunt was launched while he lived in the jungle.
Perry was eventually recaptured once more and court-martialed.
He was hanged for murder and desertion, making him the only American soldier executed in the China Burma India Theater during World War II.
March 30, 1945: Theoretical physicist, academic and author, Ronald Mallett, born.
He has been a faculty member of the University of Connecticut since 1975 [the year I was born] and is best known for his position on the possibility of time travel.
April 3, 1945: Fighter pilot of the primarily Black American Tuskegee Airmen, Walter Manning, dies in action.
He flew 50 missions and was awarded the Air Medal for heroism six times.
After being shot down in 1945, he was captured in Austria and subsequently lynched by a mob.
He was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 along with all other Tuskegee Airmen.
Manning is the only known Black man to have been lynched in Austria during World War II.
April 5, 1945: Writer, artist and white woman ally, best known for her work Historic Sketches of The South (1914), Emma Langdon Roche, dies.
She was the first writer to publish a book based on interviews with Cudjoe Lewis, also known as Kazoola, a survivor of the Middle Passage.
He was a captive on the last known slave ship, Clotilda, which a group of Americans used to illegally import slaves to Alabama in 1860 from present-day Benin, decades after the 1807 prohibition of the Atlantic trade.
Her book included an original photograph of Lewis and his wife, as well as her drawings of him and other survivors.
April 8, 1945: Private first class who was killed in action while running to the aid of his wounded platoon leader during World War II, Willy F. James Jr., dies.
In 1997, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military decoration for valor, for his actions on April 7, 1945, in the vicinity of Lippoldsberg, Germany.
James and six other Black Americans who served in World War II were awarded the Medal of Honor on January 12, 1997.
The Medal of Honor was posthumously presented to James by President Bill Clinton on January 13, 1997, during a Medals of Honor ceremony for the seven recipients at the White House in Washington, D.C.
The seven recipients are the first and only Black Americans to be awarded the Medal of Honor for World War II.
April 8, 1945: Author, anthropologist and professor, Leith Mullings, born.
She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA.
Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
Her research and writing focused on structures of inequality and resistance to them.
Her research began in Africa and she wrote about traditional medicine and religion in postcolonial Ghana, as well as about women’s roles in Africa.
In the U.S., her work centered on urban communities.
She was recognized for this work by the Society for the Anthropology of North America, which awarded her the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America in 1997.
Mullings was working on an ethnohistory of the African Burial Ground in New York City at the time of her death on December 13, 2020.
April 12, 1945: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies.
Roosevelt was viewed as a hero by many Black Americans, Catholics, and Jews, and he was highly successful in attracting large majorities of these voters into his New Deal coalition.
Black Americans and Native Americans fared well in two New Deal relief programs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Indian Reorganization Act, respectively.
In contrast to Presidents Harding and Coolidge, Roosevelt stopped short of joining NAACP joining NAACP leaders in pushing for federal anti-lynching legislation.
He asserted that such legislation was unlikely to pass and that his support for it would alienate Southern congressmen, though by 1940 even his conservative Texan vice-president, Garner, supported federal action against lynching.
Roosevelt did not appoint or nominate a single Black American as secretary or assistant secretary to his cabinet.
About one hundred Black Americans met informally, however, to provide the administration with advice on issues related to Black Americans.
Although sometimes described as a “Black Cabinet,” Roosevelt never officially acknowledged it as such nor did he make “appointments” to it.
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt vocally supported efforts designed to aid the Black American community, including the Fair Labor Standards Act, which helped boost wages for nonwhite workers in the South.
In 1941, Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to implement Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial and religious discrimination in employment among defense contractors.
The FEPC was the first national program directed against employment discrimination, and it played a major role in opening up new employment opportunities to nonwhite workers.
During World War II, the proportion of Black American men employed in manufacturing positions rose significantly.
In response to Roosevelt's policies, Black Americans increasingly defected from the Republican Party during the 1930s and 1940s, becoming an important Democratic voting bloc in several Northern states.
April 15, 1945: Military pilot and Tuskegee Airman, Wendell O. Pruitt, dies.
He was killed during a training exercise.
After his death, his name, along with that of William L. Igoe, was given to the Pruitt–Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis.
April 16, 1945: Painter who made pioneering contributions to Black portraiture and conceptualism, Barkley L. Hendricks, born
April 27, 1945: Playwright, August Wilson, born.
He has been referred to as the “theater's poet of Black America.”
Other themes range from the systemic and historical exploitation of Black Americans, race relations, identity, migration, and racial discrimination.
Viola Davis said that Wilson's writing “captures our humor, our vulnerabilities, our tragedies, our trauma. And he humanizes us. And he allows us to talk.”
April 29, 1945: Politician and businessman, Bruce Bolling, born.
He was a member of the Boston City Council and served as the council's first Black president in the mid-1980s.
He unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Boston in 1993 [the year I graduated from a Massachusetts high school].
April 29, 1945: Singer-songwriter, Tammi Terrell, born (click on link to listen to music)
She widely known as a star singer for Motown Records during the 1960s, notably for a series of duets with singer Marvin Gaye.
April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler shoots himself in the head. Good riddance!
May, 1945: Frederick Steele Blackall III, an Army veteran of World War II, graduates from Yale University with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering.
May 2, 1945: Sociologist who founded the Department of Records and Research at the Tuskegee Institute in 1908, Monroe Work, dies.
He helped expand Tuskegee Institute's national reputation, worked to advance anti-lynching campaigns, and promoted the National Negro Health Week movement.
His Negro Year Books and A Bibliography of the Negro in Africa and America—a bibliography of 17,000 references on Black Americans, were the largest of their kind in an era when scholarship by and about Black Americans was highly inaccessible and overlooked or ignored by most academics in the U.S.
Jim Crow laws were increasing and there was periodic violence against Black Americans at the time.
May 8, 1945: Civil rights attorney, based in Oakland, California, known for his work in police brutality cases representing plaintiffs, John Burris, born
May 10, 1945: Politician, a member of the Democratic Party who served as the 58th mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, from 2002 to 2010, Shirley Franklin, born.
The 58th mayor of Atlanta, she was the first woman to hold the post and the first woman to be elected mayor of a major Southern city.
Franklin was Atlanta's fourth Black American mayor.
May 12, 1945: Student at Jackson State University active in the civil rights movement, killed on campus during a standoff between law enforcement and students, Benjamin Brown, born.
Upon encountering the standoff (at the sidelines) after picking up a sandwich from a cafe to bring back to his wife, he was shot by two stray shotgun blasts from law enforcement firing into the crowd.
No arrests were ever made.
In 2001, a Hinds County grand jury reviewed the case and blamed two deceased officers: Jackson police officer Buddy Kane and Mississippi Highway Patrolman Lloyd Jones.
The Brown family filed a lawsuit and settled for $50,000 from the city of Jackson.
There has been no marker on the JSU campus recognizing the events that took place.
The Southern Poverty Law Center memorialized Benjamin Brown as a civil rights martyr on a memorial designed by Maya Lin.
May 13, 1945: Law professor and activist, known for her involvement with the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party, a political and revolutionary, Kathleen Cleaver, born
May 18, 1945: Preacher and fraternal organizer, William Joseph Simmons, dies.
He founded and led the second Ku Klux Klan from Thanksgiving evening 1915 until being ousted in 1922 by Hiram Wesley Evans.
Good riddance to this white supremacist!
May 20, 1945: Politician and Democratic former member of the United States House of Representatives, Harold Ford Sr., born.
He represented the area of Memphis, Tennessee, for 11 terms—from 1975 [the year I was born] until his retirement in 1997.
He was the first Black American to represent Tennessee in the U.S. Congress.
June 4, 1945: Experimental composer, educator, music theorist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist who is best known for playing saxophones, particularly the alto, Anthony Braxton, born (click on link to listen to music)
June 5, 1945: Former track and field athlete and professional football player, John Carlos, born.
He was the bronze-medal winner in the 200 meters at the 1968 Summer Olympics, where he displayed the Black Power salute on the podium with Tommie Smith.
June 25, 1945: Politician who was U.S. Representative for Michigan's 13th congressional district from 1997 to 2011, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, born
Indispensable.
OMG WOWW CHANDRA!--THIS IS BEAUTIFULLY AWESOME!🥰--LOOK👀 AT THOSE #NUMBERS!!!🕉
THERE IS NO HISTORY WITHOUT BLACK HISTORY. M.Wilson
🙏NAMASTE💜
♏️Seer
Lo siento! Miss you🩷 been so busy!