their fleeting time together was ending.
Charles' future was tied to the draft. As it happened he was never called. A member of Lewis Sr.'s AME church who was also a member of the local draft board knew of his acceptance to the Tuskegee flight school. Charles didn’t know it at the time, but this benefactor arranged for his position in the lottery to be "suspended" until he received his orders to report to the special program.
"Years later, on a visit back to Gary, she told me she would just slide my card out of the bunch so they'd pass over it until I got called."
Returning to school in September, 1942, Frances and Charles faced two big decisions. Frances had graduated cum laude from U. of I. and worked for a professor; Charles had two more years. Considering the options, they agreed he would not enroll for the semester as money was too hard to come by to be spent on a semester which in all probability would not be completed. In the face of so much uncertainty, the two knew the main thing they wanted was to spend whatever time they had together.
"We had to make another decision. If I was drafted or called up to Tuskegee where would that leave us? We finally decided to get married."
They set the date, completed hurried arrangements while Charles worked on in the mills, and married on Saturday, October 17. Lewis Sr. came to officiate at his son's wedding. The ceremony took place in Frances' Hickory Street home which had been gaily decorated for the occasion with fall foliage. Momma Nellie and Grandmother Gay were present. A fraternity brother, Nathaniel "Nate" Green, from Chicago served as best man. Stella, Frances' sister-in-law, was the matron of honor. Frances' brother Leonard, like Lewis Jr. and Cecil, was already in the service and unable to attend.
The traditional honeymoon was not in their plans. The morning after the wedding, Charles and Frances headed to Gary to begin their life together. Living with a friend, they had a room to themselves and the bonus, a shelf in the ice box.
I imagine it could not have seemed closer to perfect.
Forgetting the mounting turmoil around them, their world was fresh and new and ever so briefly, time stood still.
On Monday, October 19, 1942, the mail brought Charles' orders. On October 26, he was sworn into the enlisted reserves in preparation for entering Army Air Corps aviation cadet training.
III: The Tuskegee Experience
1942-1943
• The first successful nuclear chain reaction ushered in the atomic age.
• After numerous delays, the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron left Tuskegee to join the war in Northern Africa in April, 1943.
• Racial violence erupted on the home front in Detroit and Harlem during the summer of 1943.
•The Allies invaded Sicily in July, 1943; Italy surrendered unconditionally in September and in October joined Allied forces against German troops still fighting on Italian soil.
•Allied leaders Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin held a summit in Tehran, Iran, to plan war strategies.
Charles reported to Tuskegee Air Field Field on November 24, 1942. He and Frances only had a few weeks to pack their belongings, which was more than ample given the few items they had accumulated. The newlyweds had no intentions of being so quickly separated and together they made the trip to Tuskegee, Alabama, 47 miles east of Montgomery. Frances planned to find a job and room close to Tuskegee Air Field, where Charles would be occupied with training six or seven days a week.
In 1942, the trip south was more than a notion for the young black couple accustomed to life north of the Mason-Dixon line. Patterns of discrimination in the North were more subtle, but in the South of the 1940s, rigid Jim Crow laws of segregation were the way of life. The Air Corps had no intention of disrupting these established practices. To the contrary, they were as deeply ingrained in the culture of the Corps as in the wider society.
For cadets making the trip south on troop trains, the transition was immediately apparent. At the last stop in the north, they had to move from their coach seats, occupied at the beginning of the trip, to those directly behind the engine and coal cars. There, recruits contended with cinder filled smoke and fumes from the train's engines and for the remainder of the trip were denied entry to the dining car. Stations along the way prominently displayed "colored" and "white" signs separating drinking fountains and rest rooms. This was standard treatment for black soldiers preparing to fight and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
Rolling along the Illinois Central railway, Charles’ thoughts were full of the excitement of taking on a new challenge and worry about how he and Frances would be treated in the south. They did not miss the first appearance of "White Only" signs in southern Illinois, directing Negroes who needed food or rest to out of the way locations and substandard facilities. Charles' days in the south in Florida were a faded memory and Frances was sheltered from the cruel realities of racial hatred during childhood visits to Momma Nellie's family in Moss Point, Mississippi. There had not been much to prepare them for Tuskegee, Alabama, but strictly enforced segregation introduced during their travel began to acclimate them even before they arrived.
Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF) was in Macon County, Alabama, near the towns of Tuskegee and Tuskegee Institute. The school, founded by Dr. Booker T. Washington in 1881, was a private Negro college with technical and professional emphases and a trades program. Before the "Tuskegee Experiment" was embarked on, the college operated Moton Field airstrip where Negroes could earn a private pilot license. Tuskegee Institute had successfully bid for the primary training phase of the experimental program. (The Tuskegee Experiment was the War Department’s name for the program to determine if blacks had the mental capacity to fly and fight in combat. The Department’s documented contention was that "these people" were not smart nor disciplined enough to pass the training; and should by some quirk of fate any survive training, they surely did not possess the courage or moral fortitude to face combat. Some believed the placement of the program in the deep south was only one of the many factors designed to contribute to its expected failure, although Tuskegee Institute had an established record of achievement in the Civilian Pilot Training Program.)
In addition to acclaimed Booker T. Washington, Dr. George Washington Carver, one of the world's foremost chemurgist and leader of Tuskegee's recognized research program in biological sciences, was a professor in residence. The presence of learned Negroes of noteworthy stature might have predisposed the white citizens of Tuskegee to greater tolerance of their colored population. In reality, the town was so harsh in its treatment of both permanent and transient Negroes, cadets longed to avoid it when making the nine miles trek from the air field to the Institute. The geography made that impractical, however, and on every commute they risked encountering die hard racists in the town of Tuskegee.
"Even though you were breaking no laws, you proceeded vigilantly. You never knew what to expect."
Whatever happened, the law was not going to be on Charles’ side. He learned with the help of a classmate who happened to be from a well-to-do family in Montgomery to be extra careful and steered his way through the black community whenever possible.
With anticipation and trepidation, Charles and his new bride made their home in Tuskegee. Luckily they found a room on campus in Dorothy Hall for Frances. She got a job working as secretary to Dr. Kenny at the Institute's hospital. As she established her new routine, Charles entered the demanding world of the cadets. Housed in barracks on the Air Field, their regimen was long hard hours of instruction, grueling physical exercises and strict military discipline.
Contrary to the enthusiasm of the
