Flight Paths

 “Real courage is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.” Justin Cronin

Historian Ray Boomhower wrote: “On this day in 1943, Charles Hall of Brazil, Indiana, became the first African American pilot, and Tuskegee Airman, to shoot down an enemy fighter aircraft in World War II, blasting a German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 Würge out of the sky while escorting B-25 bombers in his P-40 fighter on a mission over southwestern Sicily. Hall flew 198 mission during the war, becoming the first African American to win a Distinguished Flying Cross. A real Hoosier hero.” After the war Major Hall worked at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma until 1967, four years before his death.Terry Allen in center

In “They Marched into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967” David Maraniss described the death of Lt. Col. Terry Allen, Jr. during the battle of Ong Thanh.  The son of General Terry Allen, a veteran of both World Wars known as “Terrible Terry,” he left a wife and three daughters behind in El Paso and began having second thoughts about a military career after realizing that his marriage was on the rocks and another man was living in their house.  Commanding the famed 28^th infantry regiment known as the Black Lions, Allen died in an ambush while directing an assault on an enemy base camp.  He preferred overseeing his troops by helicopter but was ordered to be on the ground, where an overall view of events was denied him.  Cautioned by Lieutenant Clark Welch to wait for re-enforcements, Allen, prodded by superiors, was overconfident that he could accomplish the mission.  Maraniss wrote:

    His determination to stay on the battlefield was a manifestation of the pressure coming down, all the way down, from President Lyndon Johnson, who wanted good news and enemy body counts, to General William Westmoreland, who believed the war could be won by search-and-destroy missions in which the First Division pursued the enemy overland relentlessly, to General John Hay, who was feeling the heat for being too cautious, to Colonel George Newman, who wanted the Black Lions and their commander out there on the ground, not just searching but destroying, to Lieutenant Colonel Allen, who wanted to prove that he could do it.

Terry Allen’s father had written in a booklet on combat leadership, “The battle is the payoff.”  His son died slumped behind an anthill, cut down by AK-47 machine-gun fire, his body riddled with bullets and an eye shot out, one of 161 casualties, including 64 dead.  Against all evidence, the military brass declared Ong Thanh a great victory. By the time the senior Allen learned of his son’s death, he had already begun a decline into dementia.  As his condition worsened, he’d tell people, using the present tense, “Terry is a good soldier.  Terry would never get ambushed.” Though he took no part in the tragic fire fight, General Hay would be awarded a Silver Star for it.

 

Confirming through contacts that his son was dead, General Allen, according to Maraniss, went on a long walk and asked himself, “Why my son?  Why not me?”  As he prepared to get official notice from the commander of Fort Bliss, “Terrible Terry” steeled himself, muttered “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and thought, “This is the house of an infantryman.  There will be no tears.”

 

Mary McDowell

I watched the final two episodes of historian Heath Carter’s series on unsung heroes whose religious faith made a difference in people’s lives and in the course of American history.  “The Angel of the Yards” described the half-century of settlement house work by Mary McDowell, a protégé of Jane Addams who ministered to the needs of poor people at Chicago House, located in the Windy City’s notorious “Back of the Yards” neighborhood. “A voteless people is a hopeless people” examined the lifelong activism of Amelia Boynton, who was knocked unconscious by troopers in 1965 on Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, an event that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Acts.  More than three decades earlier, Boynton had started the Dallas County Voters League in an attempt to secure the ballot for African Americans. In 2015 at age 103 Boynton crossed Edmund Pettus bridge next to President Barack Obama.

Amelia Boynton in 1965 ad 2015

Elizabeth Wuerffel interviewed Heath Carter on May 25, 2020, about why American cities such as Gary, Indiana, were so rigidly segregated after World War II despite the opportunities supposedly available to returning African-American servicemen during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.  One factor Carter emphasized was the practice of redlining:

    Black veterans found themselves effectively unable to take advantage of the G.I. Bill’s offer of a cheap FHA subsidized mortgage. This was because of the practice of redlining. Redlining is named for these maps that were used in conjunction with FHA mortgages. If you pull up one of these maps, you’ll see neighborhoods that are color-coded: yellow, green, blue, and red. Red were what the Homeowners’ Loan Corporation thought, at least, were the highest-risk neighborhoods and those were neighborhoods that had high concentrations of persons of color. Fundamentally, at some level, the grading system governing these maps reflects kind of just a racist point of view on the mid-20th century American city where, in many ways, race is being taken as a proxy for risk.

    If you’re an African American veteran who’s going into a bank to try to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, the banker would say, “Oh, where’s the home you’d like to buy? Oh, it’s in this neighborhood? Let me pull up my map.” They’d look on the map, if they didn’t already know. And that neighborhood’s graded red which means that it’s considered too risky for them to give you an FHA subsidized loan. And so what redlining meant [ was that] Black Americans were effectively boxed out of the housing market, and Black residents find themselves crammed into very tight quarters and are paying, often, an incredible premium. They’re often paying vastly more for rent in a kind of very challenging neighborhood than they would pay for a mortgage in a middle-class white neighborhood. So this was one of the sort of central obstacles for Black Americans seeking to kind of make their way in postwar America.

Mayor Jerome Prince of Gary, like his predecessor Karen Freeman-Wilson and longtime state legislator and educator Vernon Williams, grew up with a mother who stressed the value of education as a necessary path to a productive life.  Though a teenage mother living in modest circumstances, DaNita Marshall never wavered in that belief, Prince recalled in an interview on June 22, 2020 by Elizabeth Wuerffel for the Valparaiso University Flight Paths Project.

 

Born in St. Louis, DaNita Marshall moved from Chicago to Gary with her mother, stepfather and ten siblings from in 1956 at age ten to live with her grandmother in a one-story, three-bedroom, 700-square-foot flat on Indiana Street, later renamed Martin Luther King Drive.  When she was 17, DaNita frequently visited her grandmother, who had moved back to Chicago after deeding the house over to DaNita’s parents.  On one such visit DaNita established a relationship with Lloyd Williams and subsequently became pregnant.  On August 16, 1964, DaNita gave birth to a son at Gary Methodist Hospital, whom she named Abner Jerome Marshall in honor of her grandfather.  The baby’s first bed was a bassinet made out of a drawer.  In 1969 DaNita married David Prince, and the young family moved to the newly built East Point Terrace apartments.  They were its first residents; in fact, the cement was sill moist, so DaNita etched her and David’s names outside their unit.  Neighbor kids teased their son incessantly about his name, which was the same as a character in the TV series “Bewitched” and the comic strip “L’il Abner.”  Eventually he persuaded DaNita to change it to Jerome Abner Prince. His dad, meanwhile, had joined the marines and served in Vietnam. In 1973 the couple split up, and DaNita moved in with an aunt in Glen Park.

Prior to fourth grade, Jerome Prince, who presently is Mayor of Gary, had gone to a virtually all-black school.  Recognizing that he could use more structure and discipline with a father figure no longer on the scene, DaNita enrolled him at St. Mark’s School on Ridge Road.  His teacher was Sister Elise, and for the next four years he had mostly white classmates.  He learned how to fit in and with DaNita’s prodding spent many long evenings doing homework. Jerome went to Lew Wallace High School and in his junior year became a father. He decided to follow David Prince’s example and join the marines immediately after graduating in 1983.  After 13 weeks of boot camp, Jerome married his teenage sweetheart De Anna Slaughter, and she and their son moved to Concord, California, I the San Francisco Bay area to be with him. 

 

One reason Jerome had enlisted in the marines was because the employment situation in Gary had become dire by the 1980s, with U.S. Steel employing far few workers than in previous decades. Returning to Gary in 1986 after completing his tour of duty, Jerome asked his mother for advice.  DaNita, a sales director for Mary Kay Cosmetics, suggested he seek a career in sales.  His work in real estate led to a position in the Calumet Township Assessor’s office as a real estate deputy.  In 1998 he was elected a Gary Precinct Committeeman.  One of his goals was to get streets in his neighborhood repaved.  Prince remembered:

  I thought that all I had to do was make some noise and get other people to join me, and so we took that path. I actually initiated a petition, took it around my neighborhood, and we submitted it to the administration at that particular time, and I don’t think it got a second look. It became very clear to me that you have to do a little bit more than this, but more importantly, you have to be in the position to effectuate change.  I quickly discovered that I could have a greater impact and connection to the constituents as a councilperson.

In 1999 Prince unseated longtime incumbent Cleo Wesson and became city councilman for Gary’s Fifth District.  Twice re-elected, he became a member of the Lake County Council in 2014 to fill a vacated seat. From there he successfully ran for Lake County Assessor, and in 2019 he defeated incumbent mayor Karen Freeman-Williams.  Crediting DaNita with setting him on the right path at critical times in his life, Prince claimed that she was his toughest task master, more than any marine drill instructor.

Mayor Jerome Prince and wife De Anna