The story behind the play was more intriguing than the play itself. That’s what I determined after watching a very small cast tell the story of two black women who refused the indignity of scrubbing floors when they were trained as technicians in the Women’s Army Corps in the 1940s.
The play was called “Court-Martial at Fort Devens,” written by a Chicagoan named Jeffrey Sweet who came across their story while looking through microfiche of a 1945 New York newspaper. It was a little discovery that opened up a whole chapter of American history for him and for us.
Sweet’s play at the Castillo Theater in New York is based on the true story of four black female WACs who refused an officer’s order that they clean bathrooms and mop floors. They had come into an Army whose sensibilities of race and gender were in tune with the world outside it – that black women weren’t fit for anything more than that. On stage, their change in status was shown as much by a bucket and mop as their stripping from white to blue uniforms. Two of them decided to disobey the order and face court martial. They were tried in military court and found guilty.
I enjoyed the plot for its historical context, and I especially thought the dialogue was natural and the actors seemed at ease with their roles. I found the play, though, a bit awkward in its presentation. The nine-member cast assumed several different roles, and it was jarring to see a person playing one role one minute and another the next with little costume change. Cast members sat around the wall as observers when their characters were not in a scene – which was disconcerting. Couldn’t they have waited behind the set?
My theater buddy Kristin nodded off a few times, and later said that the off-Broadway play was not engaging. Her assessment wasn’t too far off from a 2007 review of the play when it was first performed in Chicago. That reviewer found it “emotionally uninvolving.” Another said that it was too limiting for such an expansive story.
The play was not heavy on drama; you could say it was mild. It did make me curious about the story behind it. Who were these women? And what compelled them to do such a brave thing?
I could find very little via Google on the incident. A 1943 article in the Lewiston Daily Sun newspaper in Maine noted that four women were on trial for court martial, accusing the Army of racial discrimination. According to a Time magazine article in 1945, the women were stationed at Lovell General Hospital at Fort Devens and were members of a company of 99 African American WACs. They had been among 60 of them, mostly orderlies, who contended in a sit-down strike that they “were given menial jobs and treated badly because they were black.”
These four were found guilty of disobeying a superior’s order and received dishonorable discharges.
The women were protesting their treatment up north – where life was supposed to be better for blacks – at a time when down South black men were being trained as pilots. We know the story of the Tuskegee Airmen (they, too, faced the demons of discrimination), but little about the African American women who served in the military. Interestingly, the program notes for the play were offered by a Tuskegee Airman, who wrote mostly about a similar incident related to the pilots rather than the real story of the Fort Devens’ women.
Black women, it seemed, were among the first to join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC) when it was formed in 1942 at the prodding of a female Massachusetts congresswoman named Edith Nourse Rogers. Working with the American Red Cross during World War I, she had seen a British model of the corps and wanted the same here.
The WAAC was not part of the military but worked with it. The first contingent of 400 white women and 40 black women (there was a 10 percent limit on black recruits) started training in Fort Des Moine, IA. They were segregated in their housing, training, recreation and where they ate. They worked in a variety of positions, including postal clerks, motor truck drivers, typists, and laboratory, surgical and dental technicians.
In 1943, the WAAC melded into the WAC, whose members were given military status. More than 150,000 women served in the WAC during the war, and one site noted that more than 6,500 black women were among them. Women were not exactly welcomed (as shown in the play). They were recruited for a number of reasons, mostly to free up men for combat. According to several sites, though, some men were not too eager to head off to fight – and possibly die – in a war.
One of the first group of black WACs to go overseas was the 6888th Central Postal Battalion headed by Charity Adams (Earley), the first African American woman officer in the WAC. She was a major then, and later became a lieutenant colonel. She apparently bumped heads with the brass, too, after an officer admonished her for not having all her WACs available for an inspection, according to a New York Times obituary in 2002 relating an incident from her memoir. He told her he’d show her how to handle her battalion. She adamantly said no and was threatened with a court martial, which never happened.
Adams and more than 800 other women arrived in Birmingham, England, in 1945, then moved on to Rouen, France, before ending up in Paris. Working around the clock in three shifts, their job was to get the mail from back home out to American soldiers and others in Europe.
The New York play had its own black female WAC officer, who did a superb job of trying to walk a tightrope between a by-the-books military adherent and a black woman who faced the same tyranny as the women who shared her skin color.
Go see the play for its history and not necessarily its drama. It’s time well spent.
