Certain events have a way of splitting one’s life in two. There is a before, and there is an after, marked by the changes wrought by that pivotal moment where one realizes that nothing can—or should—be the same again. For young Raye Jordan, the catalyst happened a world away from Little Rock, when a slender periscope pierced the moonlit surface of the Pacific Ocean at 3:42 AM on December 7, 1941. Its lens was trained on the US Navy base that was nestled in a lagoon at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Although the United States had declared a neutral stance in World War II, it had begun to supply Germany’s enemies with armaments and ships. The Americans had also been building up their military presence in the Pacific in hopes of stemming the tide of Japanese expansionism throughout the region.
Although it was early in the morning, Ensign R. C. McCloy and Quartermaster B. C. Uttrick stood on the deck of the minesweeper USS Condor on lookout duty, some thirteen miles southwest of Pearl Harbor’s entrance. McCloy had his binoculars trained on this unexpected viewfinder, some fifty yards from the port side of their ship.
“What do you think?” McCloy asked, before handing his binoculars to Uttrick.
“That’s a periscope, sir, and there aren’t supposed to be any subs in the area,” Uttrick replied, as the sub quickly turned 180 degrees.
Uttrick signaled a nearby destroyer that was also on patrol, and both ships searched the area with sonar for an hour. They found nothing. At almost 5:00 AM, the protective nets to Pearl Harbor opened to allow both boats to enter. Neither vessel reported that they had seen a submersible, and the nets were never closed. Fifty minutes later, 353 Japanese warplanes roared toward that station from aircraft carriers in the area, ready to rain hellfire down on the ships and aircraft stationed there. An hour before those enemy planes arrived, the first of five twoman Japanese submarines entered the mouth of the lagoon.
The mini-subs were a last-minute addition to what was originally planned as a blistering airstrike on the Pacific fleet. Just seventy-eight-feet long, the battery-powered Type A Ko-hyoteki-class sub could hold two torpedoes that had double the explosive power of those carried by Japanese bombers. They could also creep through waters too shallow for larger subs. The Japanese navy viewed them as a secret weapon and decided to give them a combat test run in the Pearl Harbor assault. Several hours before Japanese planes began assailing the enemy, larger submarines would deploy their smaller cousins seven miles from the entrance to Pearl Harbor. The subs would maneuver into the harbor, and once the aerial attack began, they would surface and fire torpedoes at the American ships.
The bombs and bullets from above—and more than two thousand deaths below—would be what Americans remembered about the day that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said would live in infamy, and which forced the United States to enter World War II.
The little subs would become something of a footnote. US ships struck four of them. A fifth, called HA-19, had a defective gyroscope and got stuck on a coral reef as it tried to enter the harbor. An errant shot from the USS Helm sprung the vessel free and knocked the crew unconscious until midnight, when they awoke to realize that they had drifted to the other side of Oahu. The duo tried to scuttle the sub, but the fuse wouldn’t ignite. One of the men drowned, while the second, Kazuo Sakamaki, washed ashore, and was taken as the United States’ first prisoner of war. The Americans also hauled in HA-19 so they could search it for intelligence before dismantling it and studying its parts. When they were done, HA-19’s components were shipped to the Mare Island Naval Shipyard near San Francisco, where they were reassembled.
As shipbuilders reconstructed the Japanese sub, the United States’ entry into the war helped some struggling Arkansans put their lives back together. New ordnance plants within the state provided people with much-needed jobs, and housing and transportation were built near those factories. At the height of production, at least twenty-five thousand workers, most of them women, produced millions of pounds of explosive material, and millions of tons of detonators, fuses, and explosive primers. The wages were still too low for some workers, who were forced to seek better pay elsewhere; more than 10 percent of the state moved away in search of more lucrative jobs between 1940 and 1943. Many never returned. Half the state’s teachers, who were paid $700 a year, left their jobs to earn more than three times as much in the defense industry. Schools across Arkansas struggled to provide children with the education they needed to thrive.
Meanwhile, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had begun arresting Japanese immigrants who were identified as community leaders. In the two days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the FBI jailed nearly thirteen hundred priests, Japanese-language teachers, newspaper publishers, and organization heads, all of them men with families. For the next month, it continued searching Japanese homes on the West Coast, confiscating shortwave radios, cameras, heirloom swords, and explosives used for clearing tree stumps. Two thousand more Japanese immigrants were arrested by the US government as paranoia spread about national security. Newspaper headlines stoked fears with talk of Japanese untrustworthiness, spy rings, and fifth columnists working in concert with their mother country.
“Perhaps the most difficult and delicate question that confronts our powers that be is the handling—the safe and proper treatment—of our American-born Japanese, our Japanese-American citizens by the accident of birth, but who are Japanese nevertheless,” W. H. Anderson wrote in the Los Angeles Times on February 2, 1942. “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched.”
Two weeks later, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the Secretary of War power to set up “military areas with which to exclude certain people.” FDR wrote that a successful war effort “requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage.” One month later, the president created the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which identified ten sites across the nation where more than 110,000 Japanese Americans could be held. All of the centers—or, more accurately, concentration camps—were located on federal or public land that was far from strategic war facilities and large enough to hold at least five thousand people. Two of those centers—Rohwer and Jerome—were built in southeastern Arkansas on bleak, marshy lands in need of clearing, leveling, and drainage.
When local officials announced that the state would be home to two of these facilities, many Arkansans were indignant that the enemy would soon be living right in their backyards. The outcry was met with justifications: the WRA would be spending plenty of money in the state, the Japanese internees would be growing much-needed food, and those internees would remain within camp boundaries. Although those living closer to Rohwer and Jerome had the hardest time with the news about the camps, they accepted their presence as a consequence of war.
In Little Rock, the Arkansas Gazette appealed for tolerance, reminding readers that 75 percent of the Japanese who were being “relocated” (a euphemism) were American citizens too. One reader wrote back disapprovingly, saying Arkansas had become a dumping ground for the unwanted. Others railed against what they perceived as favorable conditions in camps that had not even opened yet. The teachers who did not leave state jobs to work in the defense industry went to teach for better pay at Rohwer and Jerome. When a local congresswoman went to look into the matter, she was told that the teachers would be working in adverse conditions, and only for twelve months. By the time both camps opened that autumn, detainees moved their scant belongings into numbered and tarpapered A-frame buildings that they shared with at least 250 other people. Anyone who felt his or her living circumstances were too stark was cautioned against escape by barbed wire fencing and strategically located guard towers.
The relocation took a psychological toll on these prisoners. Many of them had supported the United States in the war. When the government decided that they were untrustworthy, some of these Japanese Americans renounced their US citizenship and sided with the Japanese government. Those who remained US loyalists were shocked that they were deprived of their homes and liberty, and sought ways to prove their devotion. Many young male internees who were born in the US volunteered for a combat unit that was comprised of others who were also American-born. Women also stepped up, some of them volunteering for the Women’s Army Corps and the Red Cross.
Overall, as political scientist Morton Grodzins wrote, “The sentiment against the Japanese was not far removed from (and was interchangeable with) sentiments against the Negroes and Jews.” Although several civil rights groups supported the fair treatment of the Japanese, many of them accepted the government’s argument that the measures they were taking with these camps were necessary, legal, and appropriate. The racist undertones of these roundups and this paranoia were left unaddressed.
Prisoners working outside the fenced area of Camp Rohwer sometimes were brought back to jail at gunpoint by local residents who feared they were Japanese paratroopers. At Camp Jerome, a farmer who had just finished deer hunting came across three detainees who were on a work detail in the woods. He thought they were trying to escape and shot at them, wounding two of the men. When asked why he shot at the men while a White supervisor was present, the farmer told authorities that he assumed the overseer was trying to help the prisoners escape.
“A Jap’s a Jap,” Western Defense Command head General John L. DeWitt told the House Naval Affairs Subcommittee. “There is no way to determine their loyalty.”
As Arkansas grappled with how to manage the enormous influx and incarceration of this ethnic minority, families around the state worried about relatives being called up to fight overseas. Raye’s uncle, Willie Maurice Graves, enlisted in the army, and she said she didn’t see him again until after the war. She and her relatives gathered around the radio to hear FDR’s fireside chats for updates on the war’s progress, just to get a taste of what Willie was facing on the battlefield. Raye said no one tried to shield her from the harsh realities of the conflict, and she enjoyed these evenings listening to the president talk about the world beyond Little Rock. For a girl who loved to explore, it was a way to imagine the many people, places, and things she could encounter in her future. Her present was focused on the day-to-day.
After school, Raye came home to Aunt Pet’s lemonade and relatives sharing family lore. For a curious little girl who was coming to terms with who she was and grappling with who she might become as the world was seemingly coming apart at the seams, these moments were a perfect way for her to fade into the woodwork and learn by listening to the adults speak. Their stories formed a vibrant patchwork quilt, like the ones that the enslaved once draped over their so-called master’s fences; the proud patterns came together in a way that not only looked beautiful, but also quietly pointed the way to freedom and a future.
“From those days when I would just sit back and listen, I learned that I could trace my ancestry back to 1608, when my Scotch-Irish ancestors, the Graves brothers, arrived on the second supply ship to land at Jamestown, Virginia,” Raye said. “This was before the Pilgrims arrived, and before they even had states. My grandfather’s name was Oscar Graves and he fought for the Confederacy; he was probably White, but he classified as mulatto. He married an African American woman named Winnie from Tennessee who was also Blackfoot Indian. My grandfather, John O’Bryant, fought for the Union and married a woman named Angeline Griffith who was part Black and part Cherokee Indian. So I am a daughter of the Confederacy and the Union. People look at me strange when I tell them that, but that’s the way it is. People also ask me if I can take sides, and I tell them no, I can’t.”
That was her mother’s side of the family. On her father’s side, Raye said there was also Native American blood. Her great-grandfather was a slaveholder who had both Black and White children, all of whom he made sure were educated. When that great-grandfather died, he freed his Black children and left them a block of his plantation, mandating that it was not to be divided or sold until grandchildren came along. He wanted to give something to future generations, but he also wanted to be sure those generations could stand on their own without it.
Self-sufficiency. Education. Planning for the future. These weren’t just themes that were drilled into young Raye’s head about her present, they were time-tested values her kin had embraced and perfected long before her birth. No matter the tale, Raye noticed a common theme of love and respect for others, no matter who they were or where they came from.
“I grew up feeling loved and cherished by my family and neighbors,” Raye said. “My mother always wanted to keep me in the limelight because she felt I had so much going for me. So she made sure I was included in things, because I guess I was a little different. She didn’t want me feeling left out.”
Nighttime changed that though, as the glories of Ninth Street weren’t always suitable for little girls Raye’s age. Sometimes the adults just wanted to go out dancing.
“They’d want to go out dancing, and they’d ask me if I wanted to come along,” Raye said. “I always said yes, but they told me I needed to show them what kind of dancing I could do if I wanted to come. I would jitterbug and do all these other kinds of dances, and by the time I was done, I was worn out, and they’d tell me it was too late for me to come out with them. Someone stayed behind with me while they went out to dance all night.”
Though she wasn’t allowed to go out dancing with the adults in the evening, Raye’s grandmother made sure she learned how to play the piano during the day. Raye’s grandfather gave her mother, Flossie, the money to take music lessons while she was away at college, but Flossie decided to spend the cash on anything and everything else. When Flossie came home to visit her parents, she was surprised to find a brand-new piano sitting in the family’s living room. Mr. Graves encouraged Flossie to play it for him, but all she knew how to do was find middle C.
“My grandparents wanted someone to play that piano, and that someone turned out to be me,” Raye said. “Twice a week, my grandmother gave me twenty-five cents to go down the street to a music teacher named Ms. Collins. She was an oddball-type person who didn’t socialize that much. Her world revolved around music and her son, but you never really knew anything about her or her family.”
Although Raye said she didn’t have a natural ear for music, she continued to take lessons from Ms. Collins because her grandmother told her she had to do it. Raye memorized all the music she was taught and started playing in recitals.
“Everybody thought I was going to be a concert pianist,” Raye said. “That was not my forte, but music and math are aligned to engineering and people don’t realize that. For a child like me, who was always treating things like a big puzzle that needed to be solved, it was much more interesting for me to see how all these notes on the pages came together to create a whole song.”
Music was one of the things that drew soldiers from nearby Camp Robinson to Raye’s neighborhood in the early evening. They were looking for fun and a bit of good food after a long day of basic training. They also had money to burn.
“The soldiers had to be off the streets by midnight, so people would let them come into their homes to play cards and laugh and talk because they didn’t want to go back to camp,” Raye said. “My family would welcome them, of course.”
Raye’s aunt Gladys rented rooms in the back of her house to some of the Black soldiers who needed a place to stay because hotels in the city were segregated. In time, Gladys found she could also rent to men who needed a short-term place where they could canoodle with prostitutes. She had a nice parking pad built in the back of her house, and her back door had a buzzer with a special ring that let her know she had a renter waiting. After Gladys let the patron in, she directed him and his companion through a beaded divider to their room.*
But the main goal was to help weary soldiers, especially after a March 22, 1942, incident where White military policemen beat Private Albert Glover, a Black soldier they had arrested for public drunkenness. After seeing the scuffle, Sergeant Thomas Foster, another Black soldier, confronted the officers about their unduly rough treatment of Glover. The military police then attempted to arrest Foster, but he resisted and ran. Foster was chased by military and local police, backed into an alcove in front of a Black Presbyterian church, beaten, and then shot three times in the abdomen. Foster died, and Abner Hay, the officer who pulled the trigger, was acquitted of the crime. Black community leaders lamented Foster’s death, saying that he was “the highest specimen of military manhood training to make the world safe for democracy, that now, he will never know.”
Raye’s family opened their doors to soldiers to prevent future incidents like this. In gratitude, some of these men took up a collection for her so she could buy war bonds. War bonds were sold to finance a conflict that was now being fought on multiple fronts for an unknown amount of time. Private companies and government agencies built support for the effort with advertising that also bolstered morale. “If you can’t go across, come across. Buy war bonds!” one advertisement read. “Keep him flying! Deliver us from evil! You buy ’em, we’ll fly ’em!”
No matter the slogan, no matter the image, these ads were designed to connect Americans to their fighting men and make them feel like they were part of the battle too. On October 27, 1943, the US Treasury Department unleashed a new secret weapon in their bid for higher bond sales: the captured two-man Japanese sub, the HA-19. It had been reassembled since Pearl Harbor and fitted with folding steps, catwalks, and portholes for the viewing public. The sub embarked on a national tour that began in San Francisco. Admission was one dollar in war bonds for children and five dollars in war bonds for adults. All over the country, people clamored to climb down into what newspaper reporters called an “oversized sardine can.” It was a reminder of the fateful day in December that started it all, and a perfect way to coax patriotic Americans to donate to the cause. Best of all: it was on its way to Little Rock.
However, war bonds and patriotism could only unify the country so much. The truth was that Black Americans looked to the rhetoric about fighting dictators who deprived people of their rights and couldn’t comprehend how their fellow citizens didn’t see the parallels between what was happening in Germany with its treatment of the Jews and what had been happening in America since African men and women were deprived of all of their rights and worked to death in the fields. Perhaps it was willful blindness. But Black Americans still joined their White neighbors in decrying the Nazi government’s systematic abuse and humiliation of the Jewish people, hoping that their loyalty would result in equal treatment.
Five months before Pearl Harbor, FDR signed Executive Order 8802, which prohibited racial discrimination in the defense industry. It was the first federal action—but not law—that prohibited employment discrimination in the United States. FDR said that “the democratic way of life within the nation can be defended successfully only with the support of all groups.” Civil rights activists had planned to march on Washington to protest discrimination in the military, but Roosevelt’s action led them to call off the march. He said fair employment in the military would be good for national unity and morale.
Although patriotic fervor swelled across the country, some of the ordnance plants in Arkansas turned away Black workers simply because of the color of their skin. And the four thousand Black people who enlisted in the military that year discovered that while they were fighting to uphold freedom in Europe, they were battling a culture that treated them worse than White people at home. Those who had not been passed over by draft boards were relegated to noncombat duties such as maintenance and transportation. As troop losses rose, the military was forced to reconsider its stance on Black troops. By the end of the war, at least 1.2 million Black men and women had joined the military, serving as pilots, infantrymen, officers, nurses, and more. The world’s greatest democracy fought the world’s biggest racist with a segregated army. It was ironic, but it was also a sign of the times. Nothing, not even war, would force White Southerners to stop treating Black people as their inferiors.
“Black people were fighting for the rights of White people, but when we rode public transportation, we’d have to sit in the back of the bus, give up our seats to White passengers, or stand,” Raye said. “Because of my mother’s heritage, she was fair-skinned with beautiful bright green eyes and red hair. She could pass for a White person. She was even listed as White on her drivers permit. I was brown, but I never saw myself as different from her.”
One day, Raye said she got on a city bus with her mother and a White soldier gave up his seat. Flossie said “God bless you” to him and sat down. As the bus driver drove off, Flossie pulled Raye onto her lap. When the driver looked up, he saw a young Black girl sitting on what he thought was a White woman’s lap and stopped the bus.
He told Raye, “You give this White woman her seat.”
Raye didn’t understand what she had done wrong. This was her mother, and it made perfect sense to sit on her lap. Raye began to cry and Flossie started hushing her, before the soldier stood up and said, “If she can’t sit here, then nobody else can.”
Raye continued crying as she and her mother stood for the rest of the ride.
“When we got off the bus, my mother tried to explain the laws of the land to me, that Blacks were treated as inferior to Whites and forced to live, eat, learn, and ride separately from them,” Raye said. “That’s what this bus ride was about. She told me I had done nothing wrong, but if I wanted things to be different, I would have to vote someday to change these laws.”
Not that voting would come easy. Flossie explained that Whites were also trying to restrict Black people at the ballot box.
“I remember her taking me with her to vote one day and telling me about the poll tax that everyone had to pay so they could register to vote,” Raye said. “Those who couldn’t pay the tax couldn’t vote, and the rule impacted Blacks more than Whites. It also impacted Native Americans, women, and poor people, too.”
Of course, there were loopholes to the rule. There were clauses that allowed any adult male whose grandfather or father voted in a year prior to the abolition of slavery to vote without paying the tax. There were also literacy tests and intimidation, any act that White people could use to keep Black voters disenfranchised.
“Although the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments should have protected our rights as American citizens, it wasn’t always that way,” Raye said. “People tried to keep us in our so-called place in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. Although I may not have understood that as much when I was a little girl, the older I got, the clearer it would become to me.”
On a blustery fall day in November 1943, Raye began to see a way out. She said her grandfather grabbed her hand and took her for a slow, ten-block stroll to the harbor in downtown Little Rock. The area was usually full of fishing boats bobbing in the Arkansas River. On this particular day, the HA-19 submarine that had been winding its way across the country stopped right in Raye’s hometown, and crowds clamored to see it in person. Raye said she pulled up the collar on her jacket as they neared the crowd of people that surrounded the vessel. As she stood in line waiting to tour the U-boat, she said she thought it looked like a baby whale.
“My grandfather wasn’t able to go inside, but he gave me permission to take the tour,” she said. “When it was my turn, I climbed up the little ladder and down the hatch into the belly of this miniature submarine.”
She recalled descending into darkness and being overcome by the distinct smell of sweat and diesel fuel. As soon as her shoes clanged against the catwalk, she was enchanted by what she saw. A tall man in a neatly pressed uniform led her through the vessel and told her all about it, saying it was launched by a larger ship that was lurking in the waters around Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
“That was exciting to me, but probably of great concern to the adults who understood the realities of World War II,” she said. “Still, I looked in awe at all the dials and switches. There was a thick silver steering wheel, copper tubes, brass fittings, and steel bolts. There was a panel with interconnected mechanisms and moving parts that looked like the inside of a watch that had been taken apart.”
The guide pointed to a long metal tube that he called a periscope and invited Raye to look through it. When Raye peered through the viewfinder, she saw tree leaves, buildings, and cars far from the harbor. She also caught a figurative glimpse of her future.
“Wow!” she said. “What do you have to know to do this?”
“You have to know how to be an engineer,” the man in the nice white suit said. “But you don’t ever have to worry about that, little girl.”
Though she didn’t realize it at the time, the White man’s comment was an insult, designed to make a young Black girl believe that she had no future in engineering. Still, Raye daydreamed about the knobs and devices on the slow walk back to her house, where she informed her mother about her future career.
“You have three strikes against you, Raye,” Flossie said. “You’re female. You’re Negro. And, you’ll have a southern, segregated-school education.”
She looked at her daughter’s hopeful face. “But,” she added, “you can do or be anything you want to be, provided you have a good education.”
The question was what that good education might look like, if her daughter wanted to pursue what would have been considered an unconventional career path for a woman or person of color. Flossie walked Raye to the library to find out more.
“I needed to learn math and science, and I had to be good at thinking outside of the box,” Raye recalled. “My mother told me I could be whatever I wanted to be as long as I was educated, so I was going to educate myself in these subjects and become an engineer who worked on ships.”
As Raye would learn, this path would not be easy or straightforward, but her mind was made up, and she took the first steps toward her goal.
* David Montague said that after Aunt Gladys died, he and his family moved into her old house for two years when they first relocated to Little Rock. “It was a cute little place,” David said. “But after a while some of her old customers started coming back around looking to borrow a room for a little bit. I told them no way.”