Only Black female WWII unit receives Congressional Gold Medal
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, commonly known as the "Six Triple Eight," addressed a backlog of roughly 17 million pieces of mail in three months before serving in France and eventually returning to the U.S.
Alongside Congressional bipartisan leaders, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) presented the honor, which is the highest civilian honor awarded by Congress, to the family of the unit commander, Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley. Over 300 descendants and family members of the Six Triple Eight battalion were present for the ceremony, according to Johnson in his speech.
"This remarkable story has brightly captured imaginations, it has now inspired books and movies, stirred the consciousness of millions of Americans, who are just now hearing and sharing this incredible story," Johnson said.
Earley's children, Stanley Earley III and Judith Earley, received the award from the House and Senate leaders.
During their service in 1945, the 855-member battalion did not gain any fanfare or recognition for their feats. This medal comes after years of campaigning for the overlooked battalion that many say set an example for Black women in the military.
Congress voted 422-0 to award the 6888th with this honor back in 2022. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.), who co-sponsored the legislation, spoke at the ceremony, praising the "unsung heroes" receiving the acknowledgement 80 years later.
This honor marks the latest development in the unit's overdue recognition. A monument was erected in 2018 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in their honor, and the 6888th was given the Meritorious Unit Commendation by the U.S. Army in 2019.
The 2024 Tyler Perry-directed Netflix film about the unit, which starred Kerry Washington, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.
Retired Col. Edna Cummings, who shared a few words of acceptance at the ceremony, directed a documentary on the unit in 2019.
"This history has now restored the passion of service, as evidenced by young girls who now dress up as members of the Six Triple Eight," she said.
House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) shared a few words at the ceremony, emphasizing the importance of a bipartisan celebration in today's political climate.
"We gather here today to salute these mighty veterans. We salute the ingenuity with which they sprang into battle," Jeffries said. "We salute the barriers that they broke in the system designed to push them aside. We salute their trailblazing spirit and the road that they paved for others."
The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion joins the less than 200 recipients to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.
Only Black female WWII unit receives Congressional Gold Medal originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
'We were never friends': A massacre on the eve of WW2 still haunts China-Japan relations
Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato's 1.9 million followers are used to his funny clips about exploring China, where he has been living for several years. But on 26 July he surprised them with a sombre one. "I just watched a movie about the Nanjing Massacre," he said, referring to the Japanese army's six-week rampage through Nanjing in late 1937, which, by some estimates, killed more than 300,000 civilians and Chinese soldiers. Around 20,000 women were reportedly raped. Dead To Rights, or Nanjing Photo Studio, is a star-studded tale about a group of civilians who hide from Japanese troops in a photo studio. Already a box office hit, it is the first of a wave of Chinese movies about the horrors of Japanese occupation that are being released to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War Two. But a sense of unfinished history - often amplified by Beijing – persists, fuelling both memory and anger. Speaking in Chinese on Douyin, China's domestic version of TikTok, Kato recounted scenes from the film: "People were lined up along the river and then the shootings began… A baby, the same age as my daughter, was crying in her mother's arms. A Japanese soldier rushed forward, grabbed her, and smashed her into the ground." He said he had seen many people on the Japanese internet denying the Nanjing Massacre had happened, including public figures, even politicians. "If we deny it, this will happen again," he continued, urging Japanese people to watch the movies and "Iearn about the dark side of their history". The video quickly became one of his most popular, with more than 670,000 likes in just two weeks. But the comments are less positive. The top-liked one quotes what has already become an iconic line from the movie, uttered by a Chinese civilian to a Japanese soldier: "We are not friends. We never were." For China, Japan's brutal military campaign and occupation are among the darkest chapters of its past – and the massacre in Nanjing, then the capital, an even deeper wound. What has made it fester is the belief that Japan has never fully owned up to its atrocities in places it occupied – not just China, but also Korea, what was then Malaya, Philippines, Indonesia. One of the most painful points of contention involves "comfort women" - the approximately 200,000 women who were raped and forced to work in Japanese military brothels. To this day, the survivors are still fighting for an apology and compensation. In his video, Kato seems to acknowledge that it's not a subject of conversation in Japan: "Unfortunately these anti-Japanese war movies are not shown in Japan publicly, and Japanese people are not interested to watch them." When the Japanese Emperor announced on 15 August that he would surrender, his country had already paid a terrible cost – more than 100,000 had been killed in bombing raids on Tokyo, before two atom bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan's defeat, however, was welcomed in large parts of Asia, where the Imperial Japanese Army had claimed millions of lives. For them, 15 August carries both freedom and lingering trauma – in Korea the day is called 'gwangbokjeol', which translates to the return of light. "While the military war has ended, the history war continues," says Professor Gi-Wook Shin, of Stanford University, explaining the two sides remember those years differently, and those differences add to the tension. While the Chinese see Japanese aggression as a defining, and devastating, moment in their past, Japanese history focuses on its own victimhood - the destruction caused by the atom bombs and post-war recovery. "People I know in Japan don't really talk about it," says a Chinese man who has been living in Japan for 15 years, and wished to remain anonymous. "They see it as something in the past, and the country doesn't really commemorate it - because they also view themselves as victims." He calls himself a patriot, but he says that hasn't made things difficult for him personally because their reluctance to talk about it means they "avoid such sensitive topics". "Some believe the Japanese army went to help China build a new order - with conflicts occurring in that process. Of course, there are also those who acknowledge that it was, in fact, an invasion." China fought Japan for eight years, from Manchuria in the north-east to Chongqing in the south-west. Estimates of the Chinese who died range from 10 to 20 million. The Japanese government says around 480,000 of its soldiers died in that time. Those years have been well-documented in award-winning literature and films – they were also the subject of Nobel laureate Mo Yan's work. That period is now being revisited under a regime that holds patriotism as central to its ambitions: "national rejuvenation" is how Xi Jinping describes his Chinese dream. While the Party heavily censors its own history, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to more recent crackdowns, it encourages remembering a more distant past – with an outside enemy. Xi even revised the date the war with Japan started – the Chinese government now counts the first incursions into Manchuria in 1931, which makes it a 14-year war, rather than eight years of full-fledged conflict. Under him, Beijing has also been commemorating the end of World War Two on a bigger scale. On 3 September, the day Japan formally surrendered, there will be a major military parade in Tiananmen Square. Also in September, a highly-anticipated new release will focus on the notorious Unit 731, a branch of the Japanese Army that conducted lethal human experiments in occupied Manchuria. The date of release – 18 September – is the day Japan attempted its first invasion of Manchuria. That is apart from Dongji Rescue, a film inspired by the real-life efforts of Chinese fishermen who saved hundreds of British prisoners of war during Japanese raids; and Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness, a documentary from a state-owned studio about Chinese resistance. And they seem to be striking a nerve. "That one generation fought a war on behalf of three, and endured suffering for three. Salute to the martyrs," a popular RedNote post on Nanjing Photo Studio reads. "We are not friends...", the now-famous line from the movie, "is not just a line" between the two main characters, says a popular review that has been liked by more than 10,000 users on Weibo. It is "also from millions of ordinary Chinese people to Japan. They've never issued a sincere apology, they are still worshipping [the war criminals], they are rewriting history – no-one will treat them as friends", the comment says, referring to some Japanese right-wing figures' dismissive remarks. Tokyo has issued apologies, but many Chinese people believe they are not profuse enough. "Japan keeps sending a conflicting message," Prof Shin says, referring to instances where leaders have contradicted each other in their statements on Japan's wartime history. For years, in Chinese history classes, students have been shown a photo of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt kneeling before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970. The Chinese expect a similar gesture from Japan. This wasn't always the case, though. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the turbulence in China did not end. For the next three years, the Nationalist Kuomintang – then the ruling government and the main source of Chinese resistance against Japan – fought a civil war against Mao Zedong's Communist Party forces. That war ended with Mao's victory and the Kuomintang's retreat to Taiwan. Mao, whose priority was to build a communist nation, avoided focusing on Japanese war crimes. Commemorations celebrated the Party's victory and criticised the Kuomintang. He also needed Japan's support on the international stage. Tokyo, in fact, was one of the first major powers to recognise his regime. It wasn't until the 1980s - after Mao's death - that the Japanese occupation returned to haunt the relationship between Beijing and Tokyo. By then, Japan was a wealthy Western ally with a booming economy. Revisions to Japanese textbooks began to spark controversy, with China and South Korea accusing Japan of whitewashing its wartime atrocities. China had just begun to open up, and South Korea was in transition from military rule to democracy. As Chinese leaders moved away from Mao – and his destructive legacy – the trauma of what happened under Japanese attack became a unifying narrative for the Communist Party, says Yinan He, associate professor of international relations at Lehigh University in the US. "After the Cultural Revolution, Chinese people for the large part were disillusioned by communism," she told the BBC. "Since communism lost its appeal, you need nationalism. And Japan is [an] easy target because that's the most recent external [aggressor]." She describes a "choreographed representation of the past", where commemorations of 1945 often downplay the contributions of the US and the Kuomintang, and are accompanied by growing scrutiny of Japan's official stance on its wartime actions. What hasn't helped is the denial of war crimes - prominent right-wing Japanese don't accept the Nanjing massacre ever happened, or that Japanese soldiers forced so many women into sexual slavery - and recent visits by officials to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honours Japan's war dead, including convicted war criminals. This hostility between China and Japan has spilled over into everyday lives as nationalism online peaks - Chinese and Japanese people have been attacked in each other's countries. A Japanese schoolboy was killed in Shenzhen last year. China's economic rise and assertiveness in the region and beyond has changed the dynamic between the two countries again. It has surpassed Japan as a global power. The best time to seek closure – the 1970s, when the countries were closer - has passed, Prof He says. "They simply said, let's forget about that, let's set that aside. They've never dealt with the history – and now the problem has come back to haunt them again." Japan's 75-year pacifism hangs in balance as new threats loom China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness Disfigured, shamed and forgotten: BBC visits the Korean survivors of the Hiroshima bomb Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past
New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Trump's inspired Kennedy Center Honors picks spotlight liberals' own performance art
The Kennedy Center Honors are the nation's top performing-arts-achievement awards and their celebration the highlight of the capital's cultural calendar. Yet the honorees are typically announced in that most artless of ways — a press release. Not this year. You'd think liberals who decry conservatives as contemptible Philistines would be pleased to see a Republican president focus the country's attention on the arts with something of a show itself. But no — not when that president is Donald Trump. They slammed the selections too, though the list isn't much different from those under Democratic presidents such as Barack Obama — and reflects a wide swath of what Americans appreciate and admire in the arts. Of course, the small spectacle Trump held Wednesday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts wasn't exactly establishment Washington. The president walked to a podium in front of five pictures on easels, all covered with red cloth. Two attractive women in sleeveless dresses and high heels assisted — distinctly reminiscent of ring girls in boxing and Trump's beloved UFC — dramatically unveiling each honoree on cue. 'Rocky' creator-star Sylvester Stallone, glam-metal rockers KISS, country king George Strait, disco goddess Gloria Gaynor and Broadway luminary Michael Crawford will receive the 48th annual Kennedy Center Honors. Trump himself — also the center's chairman — will host the gala tribute Dec. 7, which CBS will air later that month. DC doesn't have a lot of glitz, so the December weekend honorees and those paying tribute to them spend in town is a big deal. I know because I covered the cocktail parties, the rehearsals, the red carpets and more for years when I lived in Washington. And the political and performing elite can't stand the idea of Donald Trump taking part in the ritzy rituals. Trump didn't attend a single Honors gala in his first term after 2017 honoree 'All in the Family' creator Norman Lear said he'd skip any White House event to protest the president. But Trump 2.0 is bolder and brasher — and wants to make real his 'vision for a Golden Age in arts and culture,' as he put it. The media fawned over First Lady Michelle Obama's White House Kitchen Garden. They published deep think pieces about her husband's summer playlists. But the same people who believe right-wingers want to cut all cultural education are annoyed when a GOP president spends an hour talking about great artists. 'You might be wondering why you haven't heard much about important issues like inflation, health care or infrastructure lately, but there's a very good reason: Donald Trump doesn't care,' late-night talker Seth Meyers said. Conservatives 'want to go on Fox News and whine about woke,' he continued. 'This is what the right really cares about. This is why Trump is spending his precious time announcing the Kennedy Center Honors.' Cue the subtle — and not-so-subtle — digs about the choices. 'The line-up explains a lot about him, his power and why he's president,' CNN's Stephen Collinson intoned. It's 'more populist than 'high' culture.' 'At the Kennedy Center, Trump Puts His Pop Culture Obsession on Display,' The New York Times headlined its story. Time Senior Correspondent Philip Elliott declared, 'The Kennedy Center Honors Is Now Just Another Trump Show,' and likened the Florida man to Stalin, who made the genius Shostakovich's life a living nightmare. This year's choices, Elliott wrote, 'signal yet the latest example of Trump putting his thumb on the scale of American culture and tossing it back to yesteryear.' Who's going to tell the storied Time the Kennedy Center Honors are lifetime-achievement awards whose winners always send us 'back to yesteryear'? Liberals howling this isn't the highfalutin' list it should be forget the first awardees under Obama included Bruce Springsteen, Robert De Niro and Mel 'Blazing Saddles' Brooks. LL Cool J won in 2017. Trump's is not a way-out-there list. It's true one spot usually goes to classical music or dance, and I'm disappointed that's missing — though to Trump, Michael Crawford is operatic. And he did originate the title role of 'The Phantom of the Opera,' which Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote for his then-wife, classical soprano Sarah Brightman. KISS is an inspired choice — a great American story. Two Jewish New York kids whose families had fled the Holocaust, Stanley Bert Eisen and Chaim Witz, transformed themselves into the makeup-laden, otherworldly Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. And in doing so, they transformed concert touring itself. Texan George Strait helped bring back a very American genre as a trailblazer in neotraditional country in the 1980s, when pop crossovers were stealing stages in Nashville and beyond. Now young country-not-crossover stars such as Zach Top and Parker McCollum cite his influence. As a Strait fan from Alberta, the Texas of Canada, told me, 'People like him because he's real. He's not fake ass. And he can actually sing.' Authenticity — it reminds me of my time covering the Honors. At the various events, the rest of the press wanted to talk only to the cool kids. At the cocktail party the year Steve Martin won, for example, their sights were set on well-known actors. That let me have Ricky Jay, Steve Martin's friend who appeared with him in the David Mamet film 'The Spanish Prisoner,' all to myself. He was one of the greatest magicians of our time, a learned man with an amazing medieval collection. Another year, it was just me and an AP reporter left on the red carpet for Chris Cornell, there to perform for The Who — the super famous stars had walked it already. The AP fellow knew nothing about him, so I was able to ask all of the questions of one of rock's greatest voices. Speaking of David Mamet, can Trump turn his attention to Mark Twain Prize for American Humor next? The Kennedy Center refuses to give it to politically incorrect geniuses like him and Woody Allen. Washington could certainly use some intelligent laughs these days.
Buzz Feed
6 hours ago
- Buzz Feed
Here Are The Most Hilarious Black Twitter Tweets From The Week
Hey, friends! We're back with another week of Black laughs from Black Twitter. So, let's get into it: That's all for this week! Let us know which tweet was your favorite, and check out last week's roundup below if you missed it.
