Tag: world war ii

When Marines rejected Japanese-Americans

“Beside refusing enlistment to Negroes [at the beginning of World War II], the Marines also refused enlistment to all non-Caucasians. At the end of December 1941, George Keshi, a Japanese-American juggler with the Wallace Brothers Circus, tried to enlist at the Charlotte recruiting station, but he was informed by Sgt. Homer E. Tinklepaugh, ‘So sorry — the Marines no acceptee any Japs for enlistee rightee now.’

“Undaunted, Keshi joined the Navy.”

— From “The Queen City at War” by Stephen Herman Dew (2001)

 

As WWII ends, Quakers look back in sorrow

On this day in 1945: Meeting at Guilford College during the last week of World War II, North Carolina Quakers declare, “We bow in penitence for helping to cause this war through selfishness, isolation and lack of vision, for now having loosed history’s most barbaric instrument of destruction.”

Rubber recycling rejected in Raleigh

On this day in 1942: Alice Broughton, wife of Gov. J. Melville Broughton, orders a rubber mat ripped off the servants’ staircase in the Executive Mansion to donate to the war effort.

Accompanied by a reporter and photographer from the Raleigh Times, she then delivers the 58-pound mat to a service station for recycling. “Either the attendants never heard of the drive,” the Times reports, “or they didn’t care whether the nation got the rubber as a means of whipping the Axis. . . .

“So the rubber was placed back in the box and carted across the street. There the fellows seemed to know what it was all about, and gladly accepted the rubber.

“Perhaps it is because of stations like the first that more rubber has not been turned in.”

When nation goes to war, kids go to work

“Booming war industries have already increased child labor….  During 1941 North Carolina issued 10,000 new labor certificates to 17- and 18-year-olds, 1,000 to 12-to-15-year-olds. ‘The situation,’ observed State Labor Commissioner F. H. Shuford, with a dead pan, ‘is as healthy as the war that brought it on.’ ”

— From Time magazine, June 15, 1942