Every year veterans who have served our country are honored on a national holiday November 11, a date that marks the anniversary of the end of World War I, also known as the Great War. There are parades, ceremonies and festivals, with tributes aplenty. The veterans honored on these occasions are most often men. In most Americans’ minds, the very word “veteran” summons an image of a man wearing a helmet and a green or camouflage uniform, or maybe a dress uniform of green, white or blue.
Most of the nation’s veterans are indeed men, in part because of barriers to women in the military that took far too long to fall. Without diminishing the contributions of male veterans, let us this Veterans Day also remember and honor the women who have served in the military. That includes Black women.
Harriett Tubman was never formally enlisted into the U.S. Army. But the fabled, prolific conductor of enslaved Black people to freedom volunteered to gather intelligence behind Confederate lines during the Civil War. Dressed as a field hand to conceal her surreptitious activities, Tubman passed life-saving intel to a Union commander in South Carolina. The upshot was a successful raid, which Tubman helped lead, that freed 700 slaves—an artful, effective combining of her roles as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a spy.
During World War II, receiving a letter from back home provided a morale boost to troops stationed in theaters of combat in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the first predominately Black unit of the Women’s Army Corps to go overseas, assigned to Birmingham, England, then Rouen, France, and Paris. Its members sorted, sacked and shipped millions of letters caught in a backlog of mail that went back several years in the European theater. To fulfill their mission, they worked in cold, dirty, drafty, vermin-infested aircraft hangars. The battalion’s motto was, “No Mail, Low Morale.”
In early 1945, Maj. Charity Adams Earley became the commanding officer of the battalion nicknamed the “Six Triple Eight.” She was later promoted to lieutenant colonel, becoming, at war’s end, the highest-ranking African-American woman in the military. After leaving the Army, she worked for a time for the Veterans Administration in Cleveland.
Other individual Black women have made their mark in the military.
Mildred C. Kelly, a career solider who served in the Army from 1947 to 1976, became its first Black female sergeant major in 1972. Two years later, she achieved another milestone by becoming the first Black woman to hold the highest enlisted position at a major Army installation with a predominantly male population. Unlike Earley, Command Sgt. Maj. Kelly was giving orders to mostly men at her post.
Members of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division are known as the macho men of the sky who parachute down and turn out the battlefield. After four years in the Marines, Staff Sgt. Joyce B. Malone married and completed college at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. In 1971, she joined the Army Reserve of the 82nd at what then known as Fort Bragg, crassly named after a Confederate general. At 38, Malone made history in 1974 as the first and oldest Black woman to earn Airborne wings in the Army Reserve. She made 15 parachute jumps.
Brig. Gen. Hazel W. Johnson-Brown began her professional career as a nurse who had studied at the Harlem School of Nursing before tending to patients in Harlem Hospital’s operating room. In 1955, she enlisted in the Army, going on to serve in various positions across the world, including Japan, where she trained nurses on their way to Vietnam. In 1979, Johnson-Brown became the first Black woman general officer to take charge of 7,000 nurses in the Army Nurse Corps.
Sgt. Danyell Wilson became the first African-American woman to earn the prestigious Tomb Guard Badge when she became a sentinel at the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in 1997. She had joined the Army in 1993 as a military police officer. Wilson completed rigorous training to become a member of the Honor Guard Company of The Old Guard.
Maj. Gen. Marcelite J. Harris graduated from Spelman College, originally aiming to be an actress. But she changed plans and signed up for the Air Force, completing Officer Training School at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, in 1965. Harris was one of the first two female air officers commanding at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. She retired as a major general in 1997, the highest ranking female officer in the Air Force and the highest ranking African-American woman in the Department of Defense. She died in 2018.
Not every woman or every Black woman who served in the military can be heralded as firsts of one kind or the other. But all deserve our collective respect, appreciation and gratitude for their service, on Veterans Day and every day.
Women who have served must be also afforded equal veterans benefits. The nation can do better by all veterans — too many are homeless, jobless or in need of better care for PTSD and the more obvious physical wounds of war. Elected officials in Washington are always promising to do better. Do better they must.
While women are on active duty in branches of the all-volunteer services, they must be provided equal opportunity, treatment and protection under military command and law. The old boy network in the ranks needs to be broken up, for good. Here’s a Veterans Day proposal that could help make it happen. How about a woman as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest ranking officer in the military? That would send a strong signal down the chain of command and encourage more women to volunteer, eventually yielding even more women veterans and a stronger military.
— Ron Mitchell
