A little over four years ago, my husband and I were privileged to be guardians on the inaugural Big Apple Honor Flight. The Honor Flight organization honors World War II, Korean, and Vietnam veterans for their amazing feats during the war by pairing them with guardians and flying them from their home base to Washington, D.C. for a day to tour the memorials remembered. World War II veterans became known as the greatest generation.
The Greatest
The men and women who traveled with us were humble and in awe of the fanfare they experienced that day. These men and women were serving their duty in fighting for their country and did not expect anything in return. My vet, a youngster at the time at 89, honestly could not understand what all the fuss was about. These men and women were given their due the day they were hailed as heroes when they returned home from World War II. Yet, it is crucially important to continue to honor them for their roles in defeating a dangerous regime determined to target and eradicate people for their Jewish faith and others for their sexual orientation or political beliefs.
There Goes My Hero
While it was acceptable to fight these foreign enemies as their duty to the United States, why then did some come home to the same caste system they fought for? They fought for democracy overseas while being treated like second class citizens by their own country.
1.2 million African-Americans served and then returned home to fight the battle for equality. They returned after the war to face the same socio-economic problems and racist violence during Jim Crow America. They struggled to get hired for well paying jobs, more often than not, accepting menial low paying work as a means to survive.
Charissa Threat, a history professor at Chapman University, who wrote extensively on civilian-military relationships and race, said, “At the heart of it was a kind of nervousness and fear that many whites had that returning Black veterans would upset the racial status quo.” It is amazing to me that there are still people in this country who think this way.
Mobs of white people engaged in unspeakable violence against Black Americans, including honored service men and women. In 1946, veteran Isaac Woodard, who served and was honored with several medals, was discriminated against by a bus driver while traveling from Georgia to South Carolina while wearing his uniform. He was ordered off the bus in Batesburg-Leesville, SC and beaten so badly by the local police chief, he became permanently blinded. In August of that year, veteran John C. Jones was lynched by a mob in Minden, LA after he was accused of looking at a white woman through a window of her home. The stories go on and on.
Present Day Programming
The Greatest were all men and women who served in World War II. All colors, all faiths, all with their own sexual identities. We must honor them as their numbers are dwindling. Not just the white cisgender individuals, but all of them.
In order to overcome racial inequality, we must not allow stories of our heroes at home, like Isaac Woodard and John C. Jones, to get lost in the context of our American history. Our world is at a critical point in humanity’s history. War, although inevitable in the past, looks very different now and the rhetoric currently used to control the narrative of our human history can be very manipulative and confusing. NIOT Daniel Island aims to inspire reflective thought on our past to heal the present for our future.
