By Dante R. Brizill
Headshot Credit: Courtesy photo
In 2024, many Americans were introduced to the legendary “Six Triple Eight” for the first time through Tyler Perry’s movie of the same name. The inspirational story of these amazing women who sorted the mail during World War II, captured the attention and imagination of millions. Within the story we met the remarkable Maj. Charity Adams who was the group’s fearless leader. Without her superb leadership and prowess, the Six Triple Eight’s story might have remained buried in our history forever.
Toward the end of WWII, Adams was selected to command the 6888th Battalion, an all-African American unit created in 1944 as part of the Women’s Auxiliary Corps. The daughter of a minister, Adams was certainly a history-making person in a couple of ways.
She was the first Black woman to be commissioned as an officer and was the highest ranking one in the war. Prior to her service in WWII, Adams was the valedictorian of her high school class at Booker T. Washington in Columbia, S.C. This achievement allowed her to gain a scholarship at the HBCU Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she was a triple major. After graduation, she taught math and science in Columbia, S.C.
In 1942, the Women’s Army Corps was created. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt along with her friend, the educator and civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune, successfully advocated for Black women to be included in the program. Adams decided to apply to the program and was accepted. She trained at the officer training school at Fort Des Moines in Iowa; she was commissioned in August of 1942.
The U.S. military she was entering was rigidly segregated and she experienced the insulting nature of this early on in her career. Near the end of 1944, she was chosen to command the 6888th. By January 1945, she received sealed orders of what the team’s mission would be and was sent to England. By the following month, the first group of her battalion arrived after a difficult and tumultuous trip over the Atlantic.
Once the women arrived in Birmingham, England, the women had some serious problems to solve and challenges to overcome. First and foremost was how to get 17 million packages and letters to our men in uniform in a timely fashion. What the women did not know was that the whole concept of their unit was merely an experiment to see if they were up to the task. Adams knew this, and with her superior organizational skills honed as a teacher, she brilliantly set her unit up to be successful, even protecting them from a bigoted higher-ranking officer who upon inspection had threatened to replace Adams. “Over my dead body,” was her reply. She remained as commander of her unit.
The women wore extra layers of clothing in the poorly lit drafty warehouse that was stacked from floor to ceiling in mail and rat-infested packages. She organized them into three separate eight-hour shifts around-the-clock for seven days a week. They came up with a tracking system of approximately 7 million information cards with serial numbers to distinguish service members with the same name. They also had to deal with returning mail to families of soldiers that had died in battle, as well as anything sent to the wrong address.
While processing this mail, they also had to decipher the handwriting, which could be difficult to understand, as well as repackage packages that were falling apart. Amazingly, this innovative system processed an average of 65,000 pieces of mail per shift and cleared a years-long backlog – about 17 million pieces of mail – in three months. As a result, Maj. Charity Adams and the women under her command provided some solace and comfort to the families who had sent their sons, fathers and uncles to war to fight for democracy.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.