Background

Charity Adams Earley was born on December 5, 1918, in Kittrell, North Carolina and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina. Her father, a minister, and her mother, a former teacher, were well educated and sought to instill in their children a love of books and learning. Charity was the oldest of four children.

Education

Earley was intellectually gifted and began elementary school as a second-grader. During her last year in elementary school, she, along with other students in her class were tested for early advancement to high school. Earley and twelve others passed the test for high school. However, her parents did not allow her to move up early, because she has already several grades ahead of her peers. She graduated valedictorian from Booker T. Washington High School. Graduating top of her class enabled her to gain a scholarship so that she could attend Wilburforce University in Ohio, one of the best African American higher educational institutions at the time. While at university, Earley majored in mathematics, Latin, and physics, while she minored in history. She graduated in 1938 with Bachelor of Arts.

After graduation, she studied part-time for a Master of Arts degree in psychology at the Ohio State University, receiving her master's degree in 1946.

In 1946, she attended Minerva Institute for ten months to learn German in Zurich. When she had mastered the language, she attended courses for two years at the University of Zurich. In her second year, Earley also studied at the Jungian Institute of Analytical Psychology, but she did not pursue a degree.

Career

Towards the end of Charity's studies at Wilburforce University, she also took courses in education, so that she could teach after completing her degree. From 1938 until 1942, she taught math and science in a junior high school in Columbia, South Carolina. In the summers, when she was not teaching, she took graduate courses at Ohio State University, later declaring her major as vocational psychology.

Adams enlisted in the U.S. Army's Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in July 1942. She was the first African-American woman to be an officer in the WAAC. At the time, the U.S. Army was still segregated, so she was placed in a company with fellow female African-American women officers and stationed at Fort Des Moines. In 1943, she was assigned to be the training supervisor at base headquarters.

In early 1944, Adams was reassigned as the Training Center control officer in charge of improving efficiency and job training. She also had other responsibilities, such as surveying officer (finding lost property) and summary court officer (handling women's minor offenses). In December 1944, Adams led the only company of black WACs ever to serve overseas. They were stationed in Birmingham, England. The women began to socialize with the citizens and broke through prejudices on both sides. Adams was put in charge of a postal directory service unit. Another part of her job included raising the morale of women. Adams achieved this by creating beauty parlors for the women to relax and socialize in.

In March 1945, she was appointed the commanding officer of the first battalion of African-American women, the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion. They were stationed first in Birmingham. three months later, they were moved to Rouen, France, then to Paris. They were responsible for the delivery of mail to over seven million soldiers during World War II.

By the completion of the war, Lieutenant Colonel Adams was the highest-ranking African-American woman in the military.

After her service in the Army, she worked at the Veterans Administration in Cleveland, Ohio, but soon left to teach at the Miller Academy of Fine Arts. She moved to Nashville, Tennessee and was the director of student personnel at Tennessee A&I College. She then moved to Georgia and became the director of student personnel and assistant professor of education at Georgia State College.

Achievements

• Charity Adams Earley was the first African-American woman to be an officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later WACS) and was the commanding officer of the first battalion of African-American women to serve overseas during World War II. Adams was the highest-ranking African-American woman in the army by the completion of the war.
  
  She was the founder of the Black Leadership Development Program (BLDP) in Dayton in 1982, which seeks to educate and train African Americans to be leaders in their communities. Parity, or Parity Inc. as it is now known, which Earley helped create in 2000, facilitates the BLDP’s training program.

Works

More photos

• book

  • One Woman's Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC 1995

Views

Growing up in the south, Charity Adams Earley experienced the hardships of segregation. When she entered the Army, she still faced discrimination but was not afraid to speak up and fight for desegregation in the Army. One of the first battles Adams fought for equality was when the Army proposed segregating the training regiment. When she was told she would head one of the segregated regiments, she refused. Fortunately, the Army decided against creating separate regiments.

On another occasion, when a general stated, "I'm going to send a white first lieutenant down here to show you how to run this unit", then Major Adams responded, "Over my dead body, sir." The general threatened to court-martial her for disobeying orders. She then began to file charges against him for using "language stressing racial segregation" and ignoring a directive from Allied headquarters. They both dropped the matter.

When the Red Cross tried to donate equipment for a new segregated recreation center, Adams refused it because her unit had been sharing the recreation center with white units.

Adams encouraged her battalion to socialize with white men coming back from the front and even the residents of wherever they were stationed. She wanted to create comradeship between enlisted personal and ease the tensions of racism.

Quotations: "I had been raised in the South and I knew there was no such thing as separate but equal."

Membership

When Charity Adams was in Wilberforce University, she was very active in school groups, participating in the university’s branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Women’s Self-Government Association, and the Greek sorority, Delta Sigma Theta.

Connections

In 1949, Charity Adams Earley married Stanley A. Earley Jr. and moved with him to Zurich, Switzerland where her husband was studying at the time. In Zurich, Adams took courses in psychology and languages from some German institutions. The couple eventually moved back to the US and lived in Dayton, Ohio where they raised two children: a son and a daughter.

husband:

Stanley A. Earley Jr

References

• Amazons to Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women
  2003