Photos tell story of a love forbidden by race

They were loving each other at a time when it was taboo in his country. But the couple in the photographs did not betray any hint of the turmoil that their love could cause them for the rest of their lives once he was back home.

In this album of photos where time stood still and love transcended all, they simply seemed happy. This was the 1940s, and thankfully they were not in the United States but in a European country where love trumped skin color.

I came across several albums of black and white photos of the couple in a box lined up among a row of other items waiting for auction near a pavilion outside an auction house recently. I always pick up and pick through photo albums to see who the occupants were, and get a glimpse into the world they lived in and had left behind.

This album was both surprising and intriguing because the photos were different from most that I see. Staring out at me were the images of an African American soldier – sometimes in uniform, sometimes not – and a white woman with her hair in the popular pompadour style of the 1940s.

In most of the photos, they were demurely embracing each other and smiling for the camera. A few other photos showed them at a table in a nightclub with another interracial couple – possibly his best buddy.

The inside page of one of the albums held this inscription in French:

“18 Novembre 1947. A mon meilleur ami Heureux Anniversaire. Berlin 1941.”

Translation: “To my best friend, Happy Birthday.” I could not make out the signature on the message. Was this album a memento to the couple from a dear friend?

The photos were neatly glued to the black construction paper pages or tucked into those four corner pieces that you used to see in old photo albums. They showed the two first as a young couple on the cusp of a new life and then in their later years after growing old in the United States. I assumed that the photos had ended up at auction because both of them had passed.

I loved the photos for the stories that they held. Embedded in the images were a history of African American soldiers fighting a war in Europe for a country that treated them as lesser beings, a country loaded with people who would have killed them if they had walked down the street with a white woman on their arm.

In a country like France, black soldiers were free to be in a land where people saw beyond their brown skin – something that African American artists and entertainers had learned in the decades before.

The soldier’s name was Bennie and hers was Erna, based on an inscription she had written on a photo of herself to him. And there were plenty of photos, taken at a time when folks chronicled their lives and their travels in both pictures and slides. I used to come across hundreds of slides at auctions.

The photos offered a peek into their lives at one period in time but concealed much much more. None of them had descriptions or id’s on the back, so it was unclear when and where they were taken.

He was an American soldier stationed overseas during and after World War II. One photo showed a unit of African American soldiers with what appeared to be a white officer on the front row and a black man without a uniform seated next to him. I assumed Bennie was assigned to this unit and was somewhere in the photo. Another showed the couple on a ship; in the background, two black men stood with a surveyor’s scope. Other photos were of her posing near a 1957 Buick and walking along a foreign street with an African American woman.

There also appeared to be wedding photos of the two of them, with her holding a bouquet of carnations. Among the photos was an Army document giving him permission to travel to Madrid and Barcelona, Spain, in 1958.

With the album bearing dates from the 1940s, Bennie would have been among the first wave of African American soldiers stationed in Europe. Those who were in the Army – which at that time was the only branch that accepted them – served in segregated units headed by white officers. Most were relegated to subservient duties and construction work.

By the end of the war, more than one million African Americans had served and fought, the most famous of them being the Tuskegee Airmen. The auction photos gave no hint of what Bennie did in the war. The album contained none of his thoughts about being in Europe and fighting for his country.

In my online research, I did find the recollections of a soldier who was with the 761st Tank Battalion, known as the Black Panther that fought with Gen. George Patton Jr. in his trek from France into Germany:

“The French had a certain kind of openness and warmth that they exhibited towards minorities that was just unexplainable. You wouldn’t know you were black when you were in their company.”

In the country of his birth, Bennie like most black men had been raised to never ever cohabitate with a white woman or he’d surely be killed. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting or whistling or talking to a white woman. Most states had anti-miscegenation laws that made interracial marriage a crime.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the laws unconstitutional in the Loving case in 1967. The case was brought by Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial husband and wife living in Virginia who had been imprisoned for marrying each other.

It is not clear from the photos when Bennie and Erna settled in the United States, but later photos in the album showed them as an older couple who had survived it. I found an obituary for Bennie, who died in May at age 89 (Erna, who was born in Czechoslovakia, died in 2007). He had also served in the Army during Korea and Vietnam, and had been a professor at Burlington County Community College in New Jersey and Temple University in Philadelphia.