No Back of the Bus

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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I don’t want July to end without acknowledging the wisdom and integrity of George Horkan. It was 82 years ago, in July 1944, the U.S. Army formally prohibited segregation on buses at military bases. I think it is worth reading the following in light of efforts by Pete Hegseth and the Defense Department to discriminate against black military officers.

First, some background on Horkan. Born in 1894 in Georgia, he served as a young infantry captain in France in World War I. Post-war, he received several promotions. In World War II, he was the commandant of Camp Lee in Virginia. Horkan gained some fame after the war when, in 1948, he was appointed Chief Quartermaster of the European Command and he was thrown into a key role in a notable engagement of the Cold War—supplying West Berlin by air during the months of ground blockade by Soviet forces around the city. He retired as a major general in 1954 and died 20 years later at age 80.

Let’s go back to the Camp Lee assignment. When Horkan became commandant in February 1943, he was presented with an intensifying problem. The drivers of civilian buses transporting soldiers to and from nearby Petersburg often refused to pick up black soldiers, and when they did, they sent those soldiers to the back of the bus. This was no small matter because of the 35,000 soldiers at Camp Lee, 6000 were black, and this form of discrimination was becoming more difficult to tolerate.

Virginia law required segregation on buses, but the Georgia native came up with a solution. Horkan persuaded the bus company to reserve buses for soldiers only. This way, there would be no civilian passengers to insist that Jim Crow segregation rules be enforced. The commandant also set up an integrated soldiers-only depot in Petersburg to guarantee that buses picked up all soldiers, regardless of race.

Horkan had more on his to-do list. While stopped at a traffic light in Petersburg, he observed five white sergeants harassing two black privates. Horkan pulled over and took the sergeants’ names. The next day, he called them into his office, handed them a knife, and ordered them to cut the stripes off their uniforms. The five men suddenly became very dejected privates. Word spread fast throughout Camp Lee.

In early 1944, Orrin Evans, a black reporter for The Philadelphia Record, toured 10 military bases in seven southern states. About Camp Lee, he wrote, “I found morale unusually high, and virtually no evidence of race friction.” The Army took notice and it approved sending Evans’s article to base commanders throughout the South.

Then on July 8, the Army went further by prohibiting segregation on buses at military bases. It would be years before the rest of the country followed suit.

Asked about this military milestone, General Horkan said, “Whenever you find a camp” – Or a country? – “where there is constant racial friction, you know the man at the top isn’t right.”

On a very different note, a toast in memory of Gertrude Ederle. Next week is the centennial of when she became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. (There could be many more if those fires in France keep spreading.) Among other nicknames, the press called the American swimmer the “Queen of the Waves.”

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, the latest being Vengeance: The Last Stands of Custer, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, published by St. Martin’s Press. Please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com to purchase a copy.