"The Black Nurses Who were forced to..." Topic

… CARE FOR GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR

"On the summer afternoon in 1944 that 23-year-old Elinor Powell walked into the Woolworth's lunch counter in downtown Phoenix, it never occurred to her that she would be refused service. She was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, serving her country during wartime, and she had grown up in a predominantly white, upwardly mobile Boston suburb that didn't subject her family to discrimination.

But the waiter who turned Elinor away wasn't moved by her patriotism. All he saw was her brown skin. It probably never occurred to him that the woman in uniform was from a family that served its country, as Elinor's father had in the First World War, as well as another relative who had been part of the Union Army during the Civil War. The only thing that counted at that moment—and in that place, where Jim Crow laws remained in force—was the waiter's perception of a black army nurse as not standing on equal footing with his white customers…"

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Armand

You got me.

In the time now it is crime. Yet we can not use today's standards for back then.

Funny thing. Britain went the other way. Pre War very few coloured folk. In the War, Black GIs were very popular as so polite, well behaved and also a novelty. Many a fight broke out over the US Army's attempt to introduce segregation in UK pubs, with the locals and British Army ready to roll their sleeves up and get into a brawl.

Post War came Caribbean immigration (desperately needed to staff hospitals and the LOndon Underground system). Suddenly racism appeared here, as jobs were seen to be threatened, then came the race riots in the late 50s. For a long while it was "No Blacks and No Irish" in windows, seeking to let out rooms.

The world has changed. Not there yet, but en route.

Thanks!

Armand