Auxiliaries at Fort Huachuca, Arizona
268th Station Hospital, Australia
Lt.(jg.) Harriet Ida Pickens and Ens. Frances Wills, first African-American WAVES to be commissioned.
6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, England - inspection
U.S. Army nurses in Greenock, Scotland
WAC members in New York - the first contingent of Black American WACs to go overseas for the war effort
U.S. Army nurses at a training center in England
WAAC Capt. Charity Adams drills her company in Fort Des Moines
During World War II, African-American women enlisted in the WAAC (and later the WAC) and other women’s reserves organizations (along with the nurse corps) by the thousands. Like the rest of the U.S. military, the WAC, WAVES, and SPARS were segregated; of the 80,000 women serving in the WAVES, only a few dozen were African-Americans serving under integrated conditions. Still, thousands of women served in the WAVES and SPARS, and even more served in the WAC. Black women also served as nurses, but they usually only attended black troops or prisoners of war.
A famous WAC battalion, the first to be composed entirely of African-American women serving overseas, was the 6888th Central Post Direction, which operated in Birmingham (later in Rouen, France) and was responsible for handling the tremendous amounts of mail that passed through the station. It was headed by Charity Adams Earley, the WAC’s first African-American officer, who best described the barriers that African-American women faced when she said: “we didn’t mix it up. We were segregated two ways, because we were black and because we were women”.