To Serve My Country, to Serve My Race

by Brenda L. Moore

To Serve My Country, To Serve My Race is the story of the historic 6888th, the first United States Women's Army Corps unit composed of African American women to serve overseas. While African American men and white women were invited, if belatedly, to serve their country abroad, African American women were excluded from overseas duty throughout most of World War II. Under political pressure from legislators like Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the NAACP, the black press, and even President Roosevelt, the U.S. War Department was forced to deploy African American women to the European theater in 1945. African American women, having succeeded, through their own activism and political ties, in their quest to shape their own lives, answered the call from all over the country, from every socioeconomic stratum. Stationed in France and England at the end of World War II, the 6888th brought together women like Mary Daniel Williams, a cook in the 6888th who signed up for the Army to escape the slums of