The Fight to Serve - Book One

Her waiting room was a nation in miniature.

Book One of the Six Triple Eight Saga.

Washington, 1941. Mary McLeod Bethune is choosing the first Black women who will wear an American officer’s uniform, and Dovey Johnson is sitting in her waiting room with her hat in her lap, more frightened than she has ever been. Within a year she and Charity Adams are in the first officer class at Fort Des Moines, and the Army is already showing them what it means to keep them separate.

The Women’s Army Corps wanted their enlistments and did not want them overseas. Four women carry the fight. Charity Adams, the first Black woman commissioned in the corps, who will command the 6888th. Dovey Johnson, the recruiter of the Deep South, thrown off a Miami bus in uniform. Private Anna Morrison, one of four Black WACs at Fort Devens who chose court-martial over surrender in March 1945. And Staff Sergeant Millie Dunn of Raleigh, who sails with the first contingent.

Then the sealed orders come. Two years of undelivered mail is piled to the ceilings of warehouses in England, soldiers at the front have not heard from home in months, and the Army has run out of other answers. The answer is 855 Black women.

Twenty-six chapters, from the door in Washington to the mountains of mail. 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.