In 1917 World War I, the “war to end all wars,” was raging across Europe. After three years of neutrality, the United States had entered the fray. In France, American soldiers—including thousands of African Americans—were fighting to defend liberty and democracy.
At the same time, African Americans in the United States were also struggling to defend liberty and democracy. In 1905, a group of activist black leaders created the Niagara Movement to fight for the political and civil rights of African Americans. Called together in Niagara Falls by scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, this movement was composed of blacks whom Du Bois labeled the “talented tenth”—those with sufficient ability and education to assume leadership among African Americans.1 The platform of this movement called for manhood, suffrage, civil rights, equal opportunity in economic life, the abolishment of Jim Crow, and fair treatment of “colored” soldiers.2 In 1909, outraged by a riot and lynching in Springfield, Illinois, several members of the Niagara Movement joined forces to create a new organization to fight segregation and other forms of racial oppression: the NAACP.3
Blacks hoped that their sacrifices in the battle for liberty abroad would ensure progress toward racial equality in America. An idealistic and perhaps naive Du Bois even urged African Americans “to put aside their just grievances, close ranks with white citizens, and help win the war.”4 Du Bois echoed the earlier assertions of abolitionist Frederick Douglass that military service would make the right to citizenship undeniable.5
Nevertheless, Du Bois’s hopes of achieving equal treatment for blacks in the United States as a result of their sacrifices during World War I were not realized. Even as Americans were fighting for freedom in France, the civil rights of African Americans, so dearly purchased on the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg, continued to vanish. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which respectively granted them citizenship, guaranteed equal treatment under the law, and gave them the right to vote, were undermined by Jim Crow laws that sanctioned violence, intimidation, and second-class citizenship. Such laws affected every aspect of southern life. For blacks, failure to conform could be dangerous—and often fatal. Between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 persons, the vast majority of whom were black, were hanged, shot, or even burned alive at the hands of lynch mobs, while many others just disappeared.6
The fate of Daniel Barber and his family is but one example. On January 14, 1915, Barber, his sixteen-year-old son Jesse, and his two married daughters, Eula and Ella, were lynched in Monticello, Georgia. When Police Chief J. P. Williams attempted to arrest Daniel Barber and his wife, Matilda, on a bootlegging charge, and the Barbers allegedly forcibly resisted arrest, Matilda was shot and killed by Chief Williams. The Barbers then beat Chief Williams. Following the arrest and jailing of Barber and his three children, a mob of more than one hundred angry white men overpowered the jailers, dragged the Barbers from their jail cell to a tree in the center of Monticello’s black section, and lynched them one by one. Barber was forced to watch the lynching of his three children before he met the same fate.7
By 1917 lynching had become a common spectacle for the purpose of keeping blacks in line. In 1919 the NAACP published a volume titled Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, which provided a chronological list of lynching victims by state along with the purported reason for each act of violence. Sadly for blacks in the Jim Crow South, there was virtually no legal recourse. Legislatures and city councils were all white, as were the police, prosecutors, judges, juries, and prison officials.
With the help of organizations such as the NAACP, by the time the United States entered World War I, blacks were beginning to take the offensive in response to the Jim Crow social order. This was also the year that Donald Lee Hollowell entered the world. Born December 19, 1917, in Wichita, Kansas, he was the younger of Harrison and Ocenia Hollowell’s two sons and the third of their four children.
Harrison Hollowell had moved to Kansas from the small farm near Senatobia, Mississippi, where his parents eked out an existence.8 A labor depression in the South, extensive boll weevil damage to the cotton crop, blatant racial injustice in the South, and a labor shortage in the North made life in the North seem appealing.9 Yet despite Harrison and Ocenia’s college educations, job opportunities for blacks were scarce, and Harrison worked as a custodian and porter to support his family. During Hollowell’s early life, his family moved between the Kansas cities of Wichita, Augusta, Eureka, and Emporia, usually seeking improved employment opportunities.
Before Donald completed the first grade in 1922, Harrison Hollowell had moved his family to Augusta, where he performed janitorial work for many of the town’s businesses. Ocenia, who possessed culinary skills, baked for many of the town’s businesses and restaurants. Two years later, the Hollowells returned to Wichita, and the entrepreneurial Harrison opened a taxi service and later a restaurant, where his wife prepared and served meals.10
Harrison, determined to continually improve his family’s lot, moved his family again a year later, this time to Eureka. After the discovery of oil there, Eureka became a boomtown, and Harrison was set on taking advantage of this boom. He performed various services for wealthy white families, including washing cars and cleaning buildings, and Ocenia worked as a domestic for Ward McGinniss, rumored to be the richest man in the city.
The family moved to Emporia in 1931, and Harrison ventured into the restaurant business again. However, the effects of the Depression led Harrison to seek the security of a full-time job, and four months after moving to Emporia he obtained employment as a guard at the state prison in Lansing. The family experienced yet another upheaval when they relocated to Leavenworth, a few miles from the prison in Lansing.11 While residing in Leavenworth, the enterprising Harrison operated a recreation hall that included a billiards room. According to Leavenworth’s chief of police A. C. Mistler, the billiard room was the source of some trouble to the police department. Mistler recalled several incidents in which individuals were arrested at the establishment for disturbing the peace, excessive drinking, and alleged gambling. He noted, however, that there were no serious difficulties in these encounters.12
Despite such reports of morally questionable behavior at the billiard room, in Harrison and Ocenia’s family, as in so many African American families, faith, hard work, and education—but especially education—were central values. Ocenia attended Lincoln Institute (now Lincoln University) in Jefferson City and later Western University in Kansas City. Harrison attended Arkansas Baptist College in Little Rock. Hollowell recalled his parents’ deep appreciation for education and the way they pushed their children to excel in school.13
Although Hollowell earned relatively good academic grades, his grades for deportment ranged from Cs to Fs because of his defiant behavior. Such behavior occurred at home as well, generally resulting in corporal punishment by his mother. Hollowell recalled receiving a spanking from his mother for failing to perform a chore. Determined to defy his mother, after enduring the spanking Hollowell ran into the yard yelling, “It didn’t hurt! It didn’t hurt!” His mother ordered his older brother, Harry, to retrieve him, and she disciplined him until he recanted.14
On another occasion, Hollowell recalled testing the limits of authority when he was six or seven years old by sneaking off to puff on cigarettes and chew tobacco. Although his parents did not discover these misdeeds, discipline was not necessary in this case as the smoking and chewing tobacco made him painfully ill.15 Ironically, while his rebellious behavior resulted in punishment and poor grades for deportment in childhood, later in life he was celebrated for his defiance of the Jim Crow system.
Despite Hollowell’s challenge to parental authority, he was among an elite group of blacks at this time who had college-educated parents; the legacy of slavery put a college education out of reach for most blacks.16 Hollowell’s parents were the beneficiaries of black institutions founded after the Civil War to educate the newly freed blacks.17 The advent of black educational institutions helped overcome the prevailing belief that uneducated or poorly educated blacks would remain “in their place” in society. For example, many white southerners opposed education for blacks on the grounds that it raised blacks’ aspirations and ruined them as plantation laborers.
Blacks, however, persisted in their determination to develop systems of education that would prepare them for full and equal participation in a democratic society and be compatible with their resistance to racial subordination.18 The black institutions attended by Harrison and Ocenia provided a good education but also encouraged them to seek full equality and autonomy. Harrison, for example, was considered a “Progressive Negro in that he frequently made remarks about the Negro being treated on an equal basis with the white people.”19 Hollowell and his siblings were inspired by their parents to seek a first-class education and to resist second-class citizenship.
Perhaps surprisingly, most of the schools that the young Donald Hollowell attended in Kansas were integrated. Unlike the rigidly segregated schools of the Deep South, Kansas schools included both segregated and integrated institutions. Hollowell attended first grade at the all-black Toussaint L’Ouverture Elementary School but enrolled in an integrated school when the family moved to Augusta in 1922. Upon their return to Wichita in 1924, he reentered Toussaint L’Ouverture, but in 1925 when the family moved to Eureka, he attended the integrated Mulberry Elementary School. Despite the relative social inequality, Hollowell was an outstanding student academically and excelled in music and sports. He played the tuba and sousaphone in the school band and was a star on the basketball team.
Black migration was in full force during the years following World War I, and the majority of Hollowell’s black peers were also children of families who had left the South during the great migration in search of freedom from day-to-day oppression, better job opportunities, and access to quality schools. For example, to escape the widespread racial oppression in the South, almost half of Georgia’s black males ages fifteen to thirty-four left the state during the 1920s.20 However, although less blatant in Kansas, racism was still a fact of life, and Kansas was far from the promised land. Blacks were restricted from many neighborhoods, denied equal access to professional job opportunities, and barred from many social activities.21 Such realities were interwoven into Hollowell’s early life and education. As he observed, “The system of segregation, you must understand, was a bitter pill for anyone who used it, but the great weight of it fell on persons of color”22
Blatant racial oppression was less intense in the Kansas schools that Hollowell attended, and he was not exposed to the rigid segregation and brutal violence of the Jim Crow South. Nevertheless, the reality of inequality was woven into his early life and education. Despite Hollowell’s superior academic performance and his star status on the racially integrated basketball team, he nevertheless faced racial prejudice. For example, he was exposed to the Jim Crow social order when he was forbidden to eat with his white teammates after returning to Eureka from a game in Fredonia, Kansas. The team was hungry and went into a restaurant adjacent to the Greenwood Hotel. While his teammates ate together in the dining area, Hollowell was relegated to eating his meal on a wooden chopping block in the kitchen. He recalled: “That was my first experience with segregation. It affected me deeply”23
By the time Hollowell was twelve years old, the Great Depression was under way, and within a few years the entire nation was suffering economic hardship. Black families already living in poverty suffered even more and were the most disadvantaged group in American society, due to the combination of economic hardship and racial oppression.24 The Hollowells were no exception, and the family struggled to make ends meet. Harrison was a rigid taskmaster, and Donald and Harry were forced to help support themselves by doing odd jobs outside the home. Usually by shining shoes, they earned enough money to buy their own clothing.
In 1935, Hollowell’s family lived in Leavenworth, and he was preparing to enter his senior year in high school. However, his father asked him to quit school and get a full-time job to help support the family.25 Frustrated with his father and the economic conditions that forced him to leave school, Hollowell decided instead to join the army. Hollowell resented his father for forcing him to quit school, and his defiance, in part, led to his decision to enlist. On September 6, 1935, he joined an all-black cavalry regiment, commonly referred to as the “buffalo soldiers,” which had gained national fame for its exploits on the American frontier in the late 1800s.26
During the Civil War, 180,000 black soldiers served in the Union army. Before the end of the war, “taps” had sounded over the bodies of more than 33,000 who sacrificed their lives for their country. The post-Civil War Congress recognized their contributions and specifically “set aside six regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Thirty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forty-first Infantry for black enlisted men.”27 On September 6, 1935, Hollowell enlisted in the Tenth Cavalry at Fort Leavenworth, close to the family’s home in Lansing.
Even while serving as a buffalo soldier, however, Hollowell’s mind was still very much on education, no doubt influenced by his parents’ strong emphasis on education and the fact that they both held college degrees. Determined to finish high school, he earned his diploma by taking correspondence courses through the state of Kansas college extension department while completing his tour of duty. Continuing his zeal for sports from his high school days, he played on the regiment’s football team.
On January 25, 1936, Hollowell was joined in the regiment by his older brother, Harry, who enlisted as a private. Harry completed Eureka High School in 1934 and enrolled at Wichita State University beginning in fall 1934 and continuing through spring 1935. Impressed with his younger brother’s experiences in the buffalo soldiers regiment and with his steady income, Harry did not return to Wichita State in fall 1935. Interestingly, Harry quit college about the same time Donald Hollowell was asked to quit high school to seek a full-time job. In an interview with Harry’s daughter, Janice Hollowell, she stated that family circumstances during the bleak economic times likely influenced her father’s decision to enlist in the army rather than returning to college. Harry served as a troop clerk, recruiting sergeant, squadron sergeant major, and later chief warrant officer.28
On September 3, 1938, after three years of service as a buffalo soldier, Hollowell received an honorable discharge from the army and left the Tenth Cavalry to continue his education. Before his discharge, he had advanced to the rank of private first class specialist 5, a ranking that rewarded personnel with higher levels of experience and technical knowledge. An old friend, Frank Holbert, who knew of Hollowell’s desire to continue his education and make use of his talent as an athlete, encouraged him to try out for the Lane College football team.29 Holbert had been invited by Lane’s football coach to try out for a football scholarship, and he persuaded Hollowell to do so as well. Hollowell agreed, and his academic and athletic talents earned him admission to Lane and the position of starting quarterback on the football team. At age twenty, a few weeks after his discharge from the army, Hollowell headed south to predominantly black Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee.
Lane College, formerly the CME High School, opened its doors in 1882. Lane was founded through the Methodist Episcopal Church to help provide educational opportunities for the illiterate, newly emancipated slaves.30 Lane, like other black colleges in the South, was a cultural haven in an otherwise racially hostile environment. In one of the curious unwritten codes of the time, black college campuses stood as protected enclaves against overt hostility. The institutional resources and influx of students, faculty, and staff that buttressed local economies encouraged the tolerance of white communities. Moreover, the predominantly black institutions served the useful purpose of providing an outlet for black students and indirectly helped to maintain all-white institutions under the “separate but equal” doctrine.
In addition to his starting position on the football team, Hollowell displayed outstanding academic achievement, student leadership, and excellence in other sports. He was elected president of his freshman, sophomore, and junior classes; served as editor of the student newspaper; and was a member of the basketball and the track and field teams. Hollowell also helped establish a chapter of one of the leading black fraternities, Kappa Alpha Psi, on the Lane campus. Hollowell served as the chapter’s first polemarch, or chapter leader.
Overall, Hollowell found campus life at Lane a positive experience insulated from the Jim Crow atmosphere outside the college walls. He was overwhelmed, however, by the racial discrimination he experienced when traveling with the football team to black colleges throughout the South. Hollowell recalled that everywhere he traveled he encountered a “white-dominated society” whose primary passion seemed to be the relegation of all African American citizens to an inferior status. Although he had been exposed to racial prejudice in Kansas, it did not compare to the demeaning of black citizens in every imaginable way that he observed in the South.
Overwhelmed with the immediate challenges of academic achievement and a plethora of extracurricular activities, Hollowell did not confront the segregated system. Never having been subjected to such pervasive discrimination, he recollected later that he really did not know what he could do to bring about change. Also, other than his father’s insistence on equal treatment for blacks, he had not been exposed to civil rights activism growing up in Kansas. Hollowell was perplexed by how southern blacks seemed to have adjusted to the Jim Crow system and remembered his simmering outrage at their second-class citizenship.31
Just as Hollowell was settling into college, shortly after the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940 and a few months before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor—which led the United States to enter World War II—he was called back to rejoin the army on July 3, 1941, at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia. He joined thousands of black men and women who were called once again to fight for democracy. But separation of the races was still the custom and tradition, propped up by the Plessy doctrine. In several states, especially in the Deep South, state laws forbade any form of racial desegregation. Just as in the Civil War and World War I, blacks served in segregated units in the armed forces. Hollowell recalled the disparate treatment and blatant racism he endured, noting that the army universally treated black soldiers with disdain and contempt.
Every black soldier in the whole of the army, and who was in the military in World War II, every black soldier would have his story to tell of what it meant to be in that kind of segregated situation.32
Reflecting on the racist conditions, Hollowell said:
You have no idea what impact that situation made upon me during those nine days at Fort Oglethorpe. Here I was, a black man in the United States, who had been in the Army for three years, had been in college for three years and was now being called back to serve my country—yes, even to give my life if necessary. Yet I was treated with less dignity, less acceptance, and less common courtesy than even prisoners.33
When Hollowell arrived at Fort Oglethorpe, the only African American at the center, he was assigned to an eight-bed tent by himself, away from the white soldiers. The next morning, which was, ironically, Independence Day, he was not allowed to eat in the mess hall but instructed to eat in the kitchen. In perhaps his first civil rights protest, he refused to eat in the kitchen and reported the incident to the sergeant of the guard. Although his complaint did not result in an equitable resolution, the sergeant allowed him to eat in the mess hall but restricted him to eating alone at a rear table. Such indignities also characterized his treatment during the remaining eight days of his stay at Fort Oglethorpe.
On July 12, 1941, Private Hollowell was transferred to Fort Benning Army Training School near Columbus, Georgia. He discovered that Fort Benning was as rigidly segregated as Fort Oglethorpe. Hollowell recalled that black soldiers there were also relegated to eating in the kitchen, sleeping in segregated quarters, and riding buses reserved for blacks when traveling from Fort Benning to Columbus.34 Nevertheless, by September 1941 he was a corporal, the first stage of his rapid rise to the officer corps.
During a leave from the military drills and accompanying racial conditions, on September 28, Hollowell organized a social mixer at Fort Benning that included women from the Apex News and Hair Company in Atlanta. It was at this mixer that he met Louise Thornton.35 Louise managed the Apex Beauty College, located on historic Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta. The two young people corresponded with each other and visited frequently during Hollowell’s tour of duty in Georgia. In an interview with Louise Hollowell, she recounted, “We found we had a lot of things in common. He liked drama, he liked music . . . we just liked the same things. He was good in English, and I was good in English, so you see that all the things were right for us to sort of fall in love.”36
As the romance blossomed, so did Hollowell’s military career. On May 12, 1942, he completed officer candidate school at Fort Benning. As a new second lieutenant, he was assigned to the 795th Tank Destroyer Battalion at Fort Custer, Michigan, for further training prior to overseas deployment. A few days before he was to leave for Fort Custer, he asked Louise to be his wife. Louise Hollowell remembered that he asked, “‘When are we going to get married?’ I said, ‘Married? What are you talking about? I don’t know.’ And I said that if we’re going to get married, it wouldn’t be before the fall, so he said, ‘What’s wrong with now?’”37 The couple had courted with intensity and great ardor, and when Hollowell realized he was about to be shipped to Fort Custer and ultimately overseas, “he moved fast to cement the relationship”38
The two were married just a few days later, on May 19, 1942, and the honeymoon was even faster. Louise recalled that she worked all day at her salon on May 18, and shortly after midnight the couple exchanged vows before Rev. R. R. Reid, one of Hollowell’s classmates from Lane College and a recent graduate of Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta. At about 3:00 a.m. the couple returned to Louise’s beauty salon on Auburn Avenue, and the newlyweds spent their first night together on a cot in a small back room of Louise’s salon. In an interview with the author, Louise, now ninety-nine, remembered fondly that she and her new husband did not get much sleep before they were awakened by a few of Hollowell’s buddies who would be traveling with him to his new assignment.39
Just a few hours after marrying Louise, Hollowell boarded a segregated train from Atlanta to his new tour of duty in an equally segregated United States Army. Hollowell resented the Jim Crow conditions in general, and they were even less acceptable to him in light of his readiness to go into battle for his country. In an interview, he related:
To be wearing the uniform just as I was after graduating from ocs [Officer Candidate School] and was spending my break en route to my first assignment in Fort Custer, Michigan; to be riding on the Decatur streetcar, which was full and not being able to even get through the crowd to get to the back; to get to the point where I was to get off and have the driver look up and tell you, “What are you doing here? . . . Get back there and get off at the back!” I had on my tropical uniform, and I thought I looked good. I was a new second lieutenant getting ready to go to war and, you know, that doesn’t do much for your spirit.40
Hollowell was assigned to Fort Hood, Texas, in 1943 for more training. He quickly discovered that racial indignities were also part of the ethos of Fort Hood. Hollowell recalled an incident when he went to see a movie on the post. After he entered the theater and took a seat in the officers’ section, a white corporal approached him and asked him to move to the back row of the theater.41 Hollowell said,
I remember as an officer in Texas, I was there in school and went to the movie, and I had taken a seat along with all the other officers. And the first thing I know, a corporal, white, came up and asked me, didn’t ask me, he said, “You’ll have to sit in the back . . .” I said, “I won’t go to the back, I will leave, but I won’t go to the back.” He said, “You can take your choice,” so I left.42
This kind of humiliating experience was common for blacks in the military during this period, which makes the heroism of black soldiers during World War II even more impressive. Although grappling with war while confronting second-class treatment and numerous indignities within their own ranks clearly affected the spirits of black soldiers, they nonetheless mustered the will to perform feats of bravery on the battlefields. While their contributions have yet to receive the attention they deserve, a few scholars have chronicled the courageous and valiant contributions of black soldiers, including, of course, the unmatched triumphs of the Tuskegee Airmen.43
Despite their extensive training, the Negro 795th Tank Destroyer Battalion was dissolved as a unit and saw no action. The headquarters company of this battalion was converted into a port company and dispatched to the European theater. The line companies, including the detachment commanded by Hollowell, reported to Camp Pickett near Petersburg, Virginia, for training in firefighting. In November of the following year, Hollowell shipped out from Boston for France. His unit spent a month assembling equipment, then traveled across France to Dijon to a combat zone on the Moselle River. Although trained primarily as soldiers, the unit was called on to serve as firefighters to protect the field hospitals. Soldiers in his unit desired a more active role in the war effort, but “they swallowed their frustration and settled in for the better part of a relatively quiet year, away from the fighting”44
By March 1946, Hollowell had completed his tour of duty. After nearly two years of service overseas, he boarded a ship in Antwerp bound for the United States to begin a new chapter in his life. He was eager to return to his wife, with whom he had communicated regularly through letters during his time in Europe.45 He was also ready to return to life as a civilian and to finish his college education.
The harsh racial incidents he had endured in the armed services left bitter memories of his military experience that steeled his resolve to fight for justice. Recalling his second-class treatment in the army and how his faith in God helped him overcome bitterness, he said:
I grew considerably in the military. . . . I learned how to work with men and to guide them; to administer an office; to be disciplined in conduct and habits. At the same time there were many bitter experiences that were sufficient to cause a man to hate. And I am confident but for the fact that I found Jesus along the way back when I was about 15 and had practiced a relationship with Him, I would have entered civilian society with a heart full of hate . . . but I also knew that hate consumes one and that one has to use that energy constructively in an effort to change those diabolical aspects of life which impinge upon him and others of his race. That’s what I chose to do.46
By the summer of 1946, Hollowell had resumed the life of a college student. With eight years of military service under his belt, he returned to Lane as a biology major, his mind set on becoming a dentist. But the scars from his career in the segregated military were still fresh, and the burgeoning civil rights movement attracted him. World War II had exposed the persistent contradictions between the American ideal of democracy and the American reality of second-class citizenship for its black citizens. Black veterans resolved to eliminate that contradiction: they would not only fight for democracy abroad but would also pursue democracy at home. They resisted racial oppression and sought to make real the promises of democracy in their homeland.47
Hollowell, along with thousands of other black men, had followed W. E. B. Du Bois’s call for blacks in World War I to “put aside their just grievances, close ranks with white citizens, and help win the war.”48 Yet he returned home, as had other blacks who fought in the two world wars, to a society steeped in racial bigotry and intolerance. Despite his strong interest in science and dentistry, Hollowell prepared himself to address the “just grievances” of blacks in America and help win the war against racial oppression. He was driven to become a lawyer instead of a dentist and to devote his career—and ultimately his life—to the fight against racial oppression.49