Sergeant Smack, page 4
“I had a friend named Willie Wesby who would go swimming with me at the Neuse River,” Ike recalled. One day out of the blue he started calling me ‘Stimp.’ I really don’t know why he did it, but everybody in Goldsboro started calling me by that nickname, and it stuck. Then about 1959 while I was in the military, I got transferred to Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany. I met a man there who would eventually have a big impact on my life. His name was Ellis Sutton, a hulking heavyset man who looked like a grown up Fat Albert. He was a military policeman at the time. One day, Sutton saw me at the NCO (non commissioned officer) club and asked someone: ‘Who is that guy?’ ‘That’s Stimp,’ someone said. For whatever reason, which I still don’t know, Sutton started calling me ‘Ike.’ The next thing you know, everybody who wasn’t from Goldsboro started calling me Ike. It never bothered me, but you just don’t have any control over some things in life.”
At an early age, Ike moved with his family to Goldsboro, where his mother found work as a domestic at the county courthouse and his father as a sawmill operator for M.E. Robinson Lumber Company. “We lived in a rented house. At the time, it was not common for Blacks to own property, but in our neighborhood one Black guy owned his own house. His name was Doyle Baker. I remember him well because my family and neighbors identified him as the man with the steady job on the railway. He was like a star athlete, a real celebrity. He was just a worker on the train who stoked the coal while the engineer drove, but it was one of the best jobs Blacks could find at the time. The truth was—everybody in our neighborhood felt lucky if they had a job.”
One day, when Ike was about five or six years old, his father walked out on the family. His father would come around the family house, bringing his friends to talk and drink alcohol. At times he would even have some money for his family, but his support could not be counted on. Ike saw little evidence that his father tried to help his family, and Ike never became close to his father. Money was so scarce that brother Essell went to live with a couple on the other side of town who did not have any children. After that, Ike did not see much of him.
Ike’s two oldest brothers, Dallas and Essell, worked at the sawmill with their father, and they helped supplement their mother’s meager income. “My brothers did all they could to keep the family together,” Ike recalled. “Later, I had major differences with Dallas and Ed; they stole dope from me when I was in prison, so I didn’t put them on my visitor’s list. But when I lay in my prison bed at night, I would think about how they tried to keep food on the table. I never disliked or resented them.”
At age nine or ten, Ike got a job at a drug store delivering prescriptions. He was able to save enough money to buy an Ivory Johnson bicycle, a popular bicycle at the time. Juanita Atkinson, who was born in 1920 and married Ike’s brother Dallas in 1942, remembered Ike as an ambitious boy, full of energy, popular among his friends, who, at an early age, showed that he had a head for business. “He was a mama’s boy who tried to take care of his mother when he got old enough to work,” Juanita explained. Ike stayed down at the river all summer, swimming, so he was lean and fit, as a young boy should be.
Ike’s mother was his role model and his relationship with her helps to explain Ike’s courteous and gentlemanly manner. “She believed good manners were important,” Ike said. “She always treated people with respect when they came around the house or when I saw her in public talking to them. I was taught to take my hat off when I entered a home or building, and I still do today.”
In the early twentieth century, life was difficult for African-Americans, especially so for a large Black family in rural North Carolina. It was the age of Jim Crow, when the laws, in effect, mandated segregation of all public facilities, and Blacks had to live and operate within a system that treated them as second-class citizens. Thousands of Blacks eked out a living as tenant farmers, but outside of agriculture, employment opportunities were limited to what was considered “traditional” Negro jobs, such as railroad maintenance, construction and lumbering; those in the better paying textile and furniture industries were off limits.
Juanita Atkinson recalled how the Depression of the 1930s made life even worse for Black people. “What jobs there were dried up and the unemployment rate was terrible. The only opportunities we had were in the tobacco factory, the state hospital and sawmill, but the work didn’t pay much. I found work as a domestic for $7 a week.”
The lack of opportunity for North Carolina Blacks extended to education. In 1916, Professor Charles H. Moore, a respected African American educator in North Carolina, conducted a survey of the state’s Black schools. Professor Moore’s conclusion: “The average Negro school house is a real disgrace to an independent civilized society.” The Great Depression only exacerbated this dire situation. In their book, A History of African Americans in North Carolina, Jeffrey J. Crow and Paul D. Escott provide these grim statistics: “Some Black classrooms have 60, 70 or even 100 students. Only seven percent of Black students—compared to a meager 17 percent of White students—attended high school.”
Ike attended the elementary School Street School and Dillard High School, a free school for Goldsboro Black children that opened in 1869 when the Quakers offered to provide a school for African American children, if their parents could furnish a building. The land where School Street School is now located was purchased and the school opened as the Goldsboro Normal and Classical Institute. Ike, like other Black children, had to trek across town to get to school. Still, the boy took his schoolwork seriously and became a good student. “If you can find anyone in Goldsboro who is alive today and went to school with me, they will tell you I was an outstanding history student. The teacher would always call on me to answer questions about history.”
Reading history and learning about far off places stimulated the young boy’s imagination, and Ike dreamt of leaving Goldsboro and finding adventure. “My life in Goldsboro was oppressing. I don’t remember the Ku Klux Klan running around in white sheets, but everything was segregated: schools, water fountains, bathrooms, restaurants and movies… thinking back to those days, the symbol of segregation for me was the community center that the city built right in the heart of Goldsboro. It included a big beautiful swimming pool, but only the White kids could use it. The Black kids would go up to the fence and look in, but the White folk would chase us away. We had to swim in the Neuse River or a river that ran into it called the Little River. There were no lifeguards and we took a risk when we jumped into the water. Logs from the sawmill upstream could break away at any time and kill us. That swimming business was one of the major things that helped me make up my mind not to stay in the South. I wanted to go anywhere in the world where I thought I would be accepted for who I was. So from a very young age I dreamt of leaving Goldsboro. I wanted to change my life.”
One program at Dillard High helped Ike to make the big move. Dillard was the only Black high school in North Carolina to have ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corp)-like training. “Professor Hugo Victor Brown introduced the program,” Ike recalled. “He was a former commissioned officer in the army during World War I, who had come to Goldsboro from Louisiana. We learned how to use a .45 pistol and assemble a M1 rifle, and we studied how the military was organized and what it expected from recruits. I got really good at the military drills. Professor Brown became one of the biggest influences on my life; I really liked the man. Later, when I joined the military, I knew what was expected of me. That was why I adapted so well to military life.”
Ike’s first opportunity to leave the South came in the summer of 1942 when he traveled to Brooklyn to visit his cousin Leonard Peacock. A few years older than Ike, Leonard had a friend who had a contract to hire people to work in Ithaca, New York, on the construction of the Sampson Naval Base. Ithaca sits on the southern shore of Cayuga Lake in Central New York State and, with its Cornell University and Ithaca College, the town is a bastion of higher learning. The town has some notable African American connections. On December 4, 1906, for instance, seven Black Cornell students recognized the need for a strong bond of brotherhood among African descendants in the US and established Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter Black fraternity. Noted African-American writer Alex Haley, the author of Roots: A Saga of an American Family, was born in Ithaca in 1921. In 1942, Ithaca was far removed from Ike’s rural conservative hometown, not only by distance but also by culture.
The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the World War II effort was in high gear. The naval construction project was hurting for manpower. Anybody who wanted to work, Blacks as well as Whites, were welcome. Ike called home and his brother Dallas and Juanita Atkinson headed for Ithaca. Construction began on May 13, 1942, and was completed 270 days later at a cost of about $56 million. The Sampson Naval Base covered 2,535 acres, and during its three-and-a-half-years of operation, the base trained 411,429 recruits.
“Ithaca was such a great experience”, Ike recalled. “I can honestly say there was no racial discrimination. We did our job in constructing the base and we were paid the same as Whites. I was the youngest of the group I came with, but I didn’t cause any problems. I had my first interracial girl friend. We were just friends. Back home, our friendship would have been a big problem, but not in Ithaca. Our group lived in a boarding house on the same block as the girl’s family. Her mother was friendly towards us.”
When the first payday came around, Ike and his brother Dallas sent money to their mother who was having a serious health problem. Her bad teeth were poisoning her system; in fact, her health got so bad she had to learn how to walk again.
“That summer was a fabulous experience,” Ike added. “I made more money than I had seen in my life. Before I returned to Goldsboro, Leonard took me shopping and I bought clothes that were in style in New York City. I was really something with the girls at school. Nobody in Goldsboro had my ‘New York’ clothes. All girls love a sharp-dressed man, and they were real friendly towards me. I told the girl in Ithaca I would miss her but would return, but I never saw her again. I was in Ithaca for just three months, but the experience really helped mold my character. I got to see White people in a different light.”
UPON RETURNING TO Goldsboro, the town seemed much smaller and parochial to Ike. The Ithaca experience had given the young man a taste for travel and adventure, and he figured the best way to find it was to join the military. In November 1942, Ike went to the local military recruiting station to inquire about joining. The Navy recruiter took one look at the eager young boy and told him he needed to provide a birth certificate because a recruit had to be 18 years of age to join. Ike was barely 17, and he told the recruiter that he did not have a birth certificate on him. Ike began to walk away, dejected, when a recruiter from the Army overheard the conversation and called Ike over to his recruiting table. “If you can provide a signed letter from your mother that says you are 18, I will accept your application,” the recruiter told the teenager. Ike knew his mother would never give him that letter. Boys were dying overseas and she wanted her son to stay in school. Besides, Essell had already joined, and one son was enough to give to Uncle Sam.
Undeterred, Ike simply forged the letter and brought it back to the recruiting station. The army recruiter looked at the letter and did not blink. “Okay, be ready to go to Fort Bragg for your physical next Thursday,” he instructed. “My mother was upset, but she never knew I had to be 18 to join the service,” Ike recalled. “I guess you can say it was the beginning of the life of a guy who would make up stuff and manipulate the military system for a very long time. The strange thing—no one ever said anything about it.”
ON NOVEMBER 25, 1942, Ike Atkinson was sworn into the Army at nearby Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Established in 1918 and named for native North Carolinian General Braxton Bragg who fought in the Civil War. The base was just a few miles from Ike’s home. With the outbreak of the war, the population of Fort Bragg ballooned to 67,000 and eventually reached 159,600 military personnel later into the war. Various famous units trained at Fort Bragg, including the 9th Infantry Division, The 2nd Armored Division, the 82nd Airborne Division and the 100th Infantry Division.
Given Fort Bragg’s vital mission and its swirl of activity, Ike found the base and military life exciting, and he was proud as a peacock to be a part of the war effort. “I felt really special. They gave me a field jacket, boots, socks and a khaki uniform. I couldn’t stay away from the mirror. I would strut and pose.”
Ike became part of the largest segregated army in U.S. history, and at times he wondered if the U.S. government really appreciated his desire to serve his country. The U.S. military had initially resisted having Blacks participate in World War II, but then relented and agreed to ban racial discrimination in so far as ensuring that every tenth man inducted into the armed forces would be Black. But it was still not certain whether Blacks would be allowed to perform meaningful service in defense of the homeland. Black leaders adopted a so-called “Double V” campaign: victory against fascism abroad and discrimination at home. “Blacks would serve in all-Negro units and possibly as parts of larger White units,” wrote A. Russell Buchanan, the author of Black Americans in World War II. “There were differences of opinion concerning mixing of units, but it was agreed that the races would separate within the small units: officers for Negro units could be Negro or White, but Negro officers would be placed in command of only Negro units. Facilities for Negro and White troops would be of equal quality.”
The military’s policy reflected that of mainstream American society: separate but equal. “The majority of Black troops continued to be employed in service units around the world, performing important duties, but ones that tended to reinforce old stereotype about Blacks as soldiers,” Ulysses Lee explained in his book The Employment of Negro Troops. Operating through the Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies, John J. McCloy, the Assistant Secretary of War, and General George C. Marshall, two powerful figures in the U.S. war effort, were able to shake the status quo somewhat. By war’s end, two Black Infantry Divisions, as well as a number of separate tank and artillery battalions and combat support troops, saw action in the ground war.
DESPITE THE RACISM and discrimination, Ike assumed his military duties with enthusiasm and determination. He took basic training at Fort Huachuca in Arizona. A product of the Indian Wars of the 1870s and 1880s, the fort, beginning in 1913, was home to the famous Buffalo soldiers for 20 years. During the World War II years, the troop strength at Huachuca reached 30,000. Ike did not mind the dry heat and loved the training and the education, even though it put him in class for four weeks. “The military was so easy for me; I think I was born to it. I could take apart a 30-calibre machine gun and do it blind folded. I could hardly wait to get overseas.”
Ike was assigned to the all-Black Veterinarian Company at Fort Bliss, Texas, a vast military outpost that sprawls from Texas into New Mexico and makes the base comparable in size to Rhode Island. The young recruit was not there too long before his company was sent to the infantry school at Fort Carson. Established in 1942, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, and located in El Paso County, Colorado, Camp Carson was named in honor of the legendary Army scout, General Christopher “Kit” Carson, who explored much of the West in the 1800s. The 89th Infantry Division was the first major unit to be activated at Fort Carson. During World War II, over 100,000 soldiers trained at the camp, including the 71st Infantry Division, 89th Infantry Division, 104th Infantry Division and 10th Mountain Division.
Ike wanted to join the all-Black paratroop battalion, the 555th , better known as the “Triple Nickel,” that was being organized, but the number of applications was overwhelming. So Ike volunteered for the all-Black 372nd Infantry Regiment, 93rd Infantry Division, which was activated in the spring of 1942 and based at Fort Huachuca. Rumors swirled that the division would actually be going overseas.
In 1943, Ike’s sister Nelly Mae got in a car accident, and he was granted a six-day emergency leave to return home. His sister recovered, but while on leave, Ike married Helen, his high school sweetheart, whom he had known since age ten and was in his class at Dillard High. “Helen was a light skinned girl with a nice personality and fine hair. She lived about a block from us. It was a spur of the moment thing that many soldiers did during the war. Helen said: ‘Let’s get married,’ and I said, ‘Okay.’” Marriage was great at first, but it didn’t last. After the war, our relationship wasn’t the same. I was traveling around and she had a boyfriend. We divorced in 1947.”
WHILE IKE FELT privileged to serve his country, he soon faced the harsh conditions all Blacks experienced in the service of their country during the “Good War”. “Coming from the South, I was used to racism and being a second-class citizen, but it was still hard to take. We faced a hostile reception in many of the communities located near the military bases. There was definitely a morale problem among my brothers.”
The U.S. military tried to improve morale by recruiting Black celebrities to meet with the troops. A highlight of Ike’s World War II service was seeing two legendary boxers, Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson, up close. Joe Louis, one of the greatest heavyweights of all-time, had reclaimed the heavyweight championship in 1937 by knocking out Max Schmeling, a German fighter praised by Adolph Hitler as the paragon of Teutonic manhood. As a World War II soldier, Louis traveled 20,000 miles and staged 96 boxing exhibitions before two million soldiers. Robinson, who is often hailed as, pound for pound, the greatest boxer in history, was inducted into the U.S. Army on February 27, 1943. While Louis maintained the status quo, Sugar Ray challenged it, refusing to fight exhibitions when he was told Black soldiers would not be allowed to watch him.
