A wartime literary history uncovered — spelled with a ‘Double V’

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If we’re still allowed to celebrate it, this is a story for Black History Month.

And if we’re not, because of the Trump administration’s ban on “identity months,” then just call it family history.

The subject is my late father, Atlee D. Washington, who was among a handful of Black officers in what later became known as the Tuskegee Airmen — though he never called them that when I was growing up in the 1960s. That moniker and their fame, particularly in the movie "Redtails," came later.

A month ago, a part of his history I never knew of surfaced.

“Dear Robin,” read a message on the Geni genealogical site. “My name is Sarah Nestor Lane, and I’m an educator who writes lesson plans for the National Park Service. I think you are probably familiar, but your father wrote many articles for the Casper Army Air Base — the Slip Stream newspaper. I am really excited to share that we will be including his writings about the 377th as part of the student readings to celebrate Casper Wyoming’s Heritage City designation.”

I was blown away. He wrote what?

I knew he wrote poetry, both before and after the war. In a wild-but-true story, his work was endorsed by Robert Frost in the 1950s and published, only to fall into obscurity. But this was the first I’d heard of him being a newspaper columnist — meaning I wasn’t the first one in the family.

On the phone, Lane filled in the blanks. The armed forces were strictly segregated in World War II, and the 377th Squadron was all Black at the otherwise white base. The base newspaper was also inserted in the Casper Tribune-Herald.

Atlee — as everyone called him, even my brother and I as kids — was born in Alabama in 1915. He was 3 when his family moved to Chicago, led by his Baptist minister father. Graduating from high school early, he took the civil service exam and, according to my mother (whose many impossible-sounding stories I later confirmed were entirely true), scored No. 2 in the nation. That earned him a job at the post office during the Depression.

He registered for the draft in 1940 but wasn’t taken, consistent with the military’s policy of turning away Black people during the war’s early years. He eventually enlisted in March 1943, and in quick order completed basic training and Army administration school and reported for his assignment in Wyoming.

There, he somehow convinced the base’s all-white brass that the newspaper should cover the Black squadron. That was highly unusual, say scholars of the military’s race relations of the day, especially the idea that a Black serviceman would be the one writing the column.

“I’m not familiar with any other examples of that,” said Matthew Delmont, a Dartmouth history professor and author of “Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad.”

Even more astounding, Delmont said, was the title Atlee chose for the column: “Under The Double V.” The reference was to a campaign championed by the Black press calling for victory over the Axis powers abroad and victory over Jim Crow at home.

“It’s exceptionally rare that it was published under that heading because ‘Double V’ was really seen as dangerous by a lot of military leaders at the time,” Delmont said. “They’re really concerned about the idea of double victory because they thought it meant that Black Americans were being only conditionally loyal to the country. It definitely isn’t the kind of thing I would expect to see in a base newspaper from Casper, Wyoming in 1943.”

The title wasn’t the only thing unusual about the column. Like other African American units, the 377th was relegated to menial work, under the prevailing attitude that Blacks were unfit for battle, as codified in a 1925 U.S. Army War College report.

Atlee found a way to portray their work with dignity.

“One of my favorite pieces he wrote was about fighting a fire in the Bighorns,” Lane told me. “There’s some really great writing in it, sharing an officer’s comment that ‘no one could wish for better soldiers under fire.’ That’s a double entendre there, because they had thought that they would go overseas, and instead they’re firefighting on the home front.”

That report also touched on the racism they faced. “Many comments have been given concerning the friendliness of the townspeople of Buffalo,” he wrote. “Perhaps everyone wouldn’t know, but one of the greatest morale builders is the feeling that you are not an alien in your land. … Too many of us have remembrances of passing through places where the populace only gazed in stony silence or disdainful unconcern.”

Thomas Guglielmo, another historian, called that passage “moving.”

“I’m sure when your father’s unit arrived in Wyoming, there were a lot of people not happy about it,” said Guglielmo, a George Washington University professor and the author of “Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military.” “But it sounds like maybe the firefighters had a positive impact on some of these townspeople, and maybe they changed their minds.”

Atlee also tackled discrimination with humor, writing in one column: “Pfc. William Webb offers the information that his application to join the paratroopers was turned down because of one physical defect which the doctors cannot cure — a certain skin ‘ailment.’”

That Atlee got away with writing like that is what really struck Lane, who is white and whose research has been as much on her own time as that of the National Park Service, for which she is a consultant. As the White House sends mixed messages over whether or not to celebrate Black History Month, she said, she looks forward to continuing to share perspectives from the home front in wartime.

“I love reading his writing because he was very carefully communicating what these issues were, but not getting kicked out of the paper, which was really something at that time,” she said.

As for after that time, Lane found little record of him after his acceptance at Officer Candidate School in Miami Beach in late 1943.

“What did he do after the service?” she asked me.

That part I know. Attaining the rank of lieutenant, he was stationed in 1944 at the Tuskegee Army Air Forces base as an officer of Black air cadets (and the Wyoming base column was continued by another Black GI). Discharged in late 1945, he entered Chicago’s Roosevelt University on the GI Bill. There he met my mother, Jean, along with Harold Washington, no relation and later Chicago’s first Black mayor. (In 1987, I met the mayor and told him I was Jean and Atlee’s son. “Atlee Washington!” he guffawed for a minute-long elevator ride — then got off explaining nothing. Three months later, he died.)

Atlee went on to receive a master’s in English at the University of Chicago and also attended the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference at my mother’s alma mater, Middlebury College. That’s where he met Robert Frost, who recommended his own publisher for “A Soldier’s Sonata,” a volume of poetry Atlee wrote about his war years. It was accepted, with the caveat it would take a few years to bring it to print. Not wanting to wait, Atlee found another publisher, the Decker Press. They agreed, set the type in galleys and prepared for printing — when the publisher was shot in the head by his lover and co-worker, who then killed herself.

Atlee was devastated, as my mother recalled (did I say she told outrageous stories that turned out to be true?). Too embarrassed to return to Frost’s publisher, Atlee eventually excerpted the manuscript in “Mainstream,” a far-left journal whose audience was more political than literary.

He went on to a career in plastics, including recycling ahead of his time. But he made few other attempts at getting published — an exception being articles about vacations to Europe submitted to the Chicago Tribune. His pitch said, “Here you have a Black travel writer who doesn’t write like a Black writer” — though in my opinion he did. In one account of our reception in Ireland, he mused, “We wondered if all of this was because we were Black.” The Tribune passed.

Still, he never stopped writing, poetry at least, with verses interspersed with shopping lists on scraps of paper found after his 1983 death, just before his 68th birthday — my age today.

And with the discovery comes a new mystery: Why hadn’t he pursued journalism after the service? Had he, as countless other Black writers, been rejected by the white press? Or did he himself eschew the Black press, wanting to be viewed as a writer, not a Black writer?

His words from 1943 in his recently discovered newspaper column will have to speak for him: “We overcome the enemy not only in combat, but within ourselves as well. Relinquishing prejudices, reactionary tendencies and selfishness. To the degree that we work not so much for four freedoms, but for one freedom, full and complete for all men, even to that degree, do we come into our heritage.”

Heritage of us all, and not just during Black History Month.

Robin Washington is a producer-host for Wisconsin Public Radio and a former editor-in-chief of the Duluth News Tribune. He lives in Duluth and St. Paul and can be reached at robin@robinwashington.com.