The Quiet Pioneers - Book Four

“Do not die off convenient, and do not let the proof get quiet.” — A mother’s ruling, Raleigh, 1946

Book Four of the Six Triple Eight Saga, and the end of it.

Spring 1946. Staff Sergeant Millie Dunn, veteran of three nations and three mountains of mail, comes home to Raleigh with a service record that reads like a course in operations management, goes looking for work nine blocks from the State Capitol, and finds no vacancy. The war is over. The longest campaign of the 6888th has just begun.

For the next sixty years the women fight on new ground. The GI Bill. The classroom. Dovey Johnson, thrown off a Miami bus in uniform in 1943, becomes the lawyer whose case ends segregation on the interstate buses on November 7, 1955. Charity Adams Earley builds a life in Dayton and writes the memoir that makes the record impossible to erase. The lunch counters, the March on Washington, and the long years when nobody asks.

And then, at last, the recognition: a bronze commander on Buffalo Soldier ground, the last of the line, and a Congressional Gold Medal in Emancipation Hall.

Twenty-eight chapters, from no vacancy to Emancipation Hall. Every dated event is drawn from the record, and the author’s note at the close of the book separates record from invention, item by item.

EPUB edition. Read it on any e-reader, tablet, phone or computer.