They served, too. New database shows Black women’s service in World War II.

At the same time Yvonne Giles has been unearthing military history at African Cemetery No. 2, one of her friends and colleagues decided to ask a slightly different question: What about Black women who served?

Reinette Jones, co-founder of the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database at the University of Kentucky, was introduced to the idea by Barbara Kent, director of military and veterans affairs at Eastern Kentucky University. Kent had arranged a showing of the documentary “the SixTripleEight” at the Lyric Theater. The documentary is about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, a unit of 800 Black women who were sent to Europe during WWII where they sorted 17 million pieces of mail for troops. They worked in England and in France.

So Jones got curious about whether any of those women were from Kentucky, and like every obsessive researcher, she started to research.

“I went down a rabbit hole,” she said. “I needed to know more.” initially finding 18 Black women from Kentucky who served with the Women Army Corps in World War II.

While many books have focused on white women in the military, very little has been done on their Black counterparts, Jones said. “It was very revealing because of the difficulty in just getting the names.”

Jones started a list of people like Norene Harris, whose father was a coal miner who moved from Alabama to Hazard. Jones found a Cinncinnati Enquirer story about her 1942 swearing-in with the WACs at Fountain Square, one of four Black women among 31 whites.

Jones is still researching their experiences, the racism they faced at home and abroad before and after the war. “It seems the opportunities they thought would be there for employment and job training and education were not there after all,” she said.

That’s from the story of Anna B. Collins Morrison of Richmond, who went on to great civil rights fame: “She was one of the four WACs who took on the U.S. Army in 1945 in the fight for better work assignments for African American WACs at the Lovell General Hospital at Fort Devens, MA,” Jones writes. “The four women were Johnnie Murphy from Rankin, PA; Alice Young from Washington, D.C.; Mary Green from Conroe, TX; and Anna Collins Morrison from Richmond, KY. The women led in the work strike that started March 9, 1945. The four refused to go back to work and were court-martialed on March 19, 1945. The next day the women were sentenced to one year of hard labor in prison with a dishonorable discharge for each woman. News of the trial and the convictions were carried in a few Kentucky newspapers including The Courier-Journal, Owensboro Messenger, The Park City Daily News, The Lexington Herald, and the Lexington Leader.

“After the trial, the Black press, Black women’s organizations, and Civil Rights organizations and leaders responded in force with their support for the four WACs. Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund was chosen as the attorney to represent the four women in their appeal. The women were confined to rooms in the Lovell Hospital during the appeals process.The appeals worked in the women’s favor. On April 2, 1945, their sentences were revoked and they were allowed to return to duty at the Lovell Hospital. Captain Myrtle Anderson was placed in charge of the segregated 4th WAC Company of African American women. The African American WACs continued to be assigned the most menial jobs and they did not receive the training that was promised when they signed up.”

If you have information on the Black WACs, contact Reinette Jones at rjones@uky.edu.