Charity Adams Earley

December 5, 1918 – January 13, 2002

Commander of the "Six Triple Eight" who became the highest-ranking Black woman in the Army in World War II.

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Charity Edna Adams was born on December 5, 1918, in Kittrell, North Carolina, and grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, the daughter of a minister and a teacher who prized education. Graduating at the top of her high school class, she earned degrees in mathematics, physics, and Latin from Wilberforce University, a historically Black college in Ohio. She was teaching school when the United States entered World War II and the Army opened a new corps for women. In 1942 Adams was among the very first group accepted, becoming one of the first African American women ever commissioned as an officer in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, soon reorganized as the Women's Army Corps, or WAC. The Army she joined was segregated, and its rules followed her at every step. During officer training at Fort Des Moines, Black women were housed and drilled apart from white recruits, a daily reminder that the country asked them to serve while treating them as separate and lesser. Adams refused to let the insult define her. A demanding, dignified leader, she rose quickly, training other Black WACs and running afoul of officers who expected her to accept second-class treatment quietly. She later recalled the balancing act of proving herself twice over, once as a woman in uniform and once as a Black American, a stand that foreshadowed the arguments of the civil rights movement that gathered force after the war. Her defining assignment came in early 1945, when she was sent to Europe to command the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-Black, all-female WAC unit to serve overseas in the war. The roughly 855 women of the 'Six Triple Eight' faced a mountain of undelivered mail: warehouses in England packed with millions of letters and packages that could not reach American soldiers scattered across the front, and the backlog had defeated everyone before them. Adams organized her battalion into round-the-clock shifts under the motto 'No mail, low morale,' built a tracking system to find soldiers who moved constantly, and cleared a backlog the Army had expected to take six months in about three, then did it again in France. When a white general threatened to replace her with a white officer, she stood her ground and refused to be intimidated. By the end of the war Charity Adams was a lieutenant colonel, the highest-ranking Black woman in the United States Army. She left the service in 1946, married Stanley Earley, and became Charity Adams Earley. She earned a master's degree, worked in higher education, and devoted herself to opening doors for others. In 1989 she published a memoir, 'One Woman's Army,' one of the few first-hand accounts of a Black woman officer's wartime service, so that a story the country had largely overlooked would be preserved. Charity Adams Earley died on January 13, 2002. For decades the achievement of the Six Triple Eight went almost unrecognized, but history caught up: the unit received the Congressional Gold Medal in the years after her death, and her leadership is now honored as a landmark for both Black Americans and women in the military. Her life is a clear-eyed lesson that the same nation could ask a woman to serve it faithfully while denying her equality, and that people like Adams answered that contradiction not with bitterness but with excellence that demanded respect.

Charity Adams Earley

Further reading