April 10, 1945
The date doesn't mean much to most people. That's because most people have never heard of the Freeman Field Mutiny. 101 US Army Air Force officers faced a possible death penalty when they refused a direct order from a superior officer while World War II raged. This exposed each man to a possible death sentence.
Years later, the men also earned Congressional Gold Medals in 2006 from former president George Bush.
This is a nonfiction book I wrote last year and that will be published by Scholastic in 2022 titled Unlawful Orders.
The book is a biography of one of those young mutineers, following his journey from farm boy who enjoyed shooting rattlesnakes and not having to bathe every day, to renowned Chicago surgeon with a patient list that included Dr. Martin Luther King and jazz great Muddy Waters.
This is the first of a set of posts that will follow this manuscript from idea to sale to eventual publication. Today I will show you how the idea came to me, a question I hear about almost everything I write.
In the height of World War II, James was a Lieutenant, training to become a Tuskegee Airman. At the end of March, 1945, he was transferred to Freeman Field in Indiana. There, he and the other black officers on the base were confronted by segregation. The commanding officer ordered them to sign a document agreeing they were unequal and accepting segregation.
James and 100 other officers were arrested after they refused to sign their humanity away and obey their commanders order to admit their black lives did not matter when compared to the white officers on the
base. I think I fell a little in love with James Buchanan, and came to envy his future wife, Willeen Williams. (Pictured are James and Willeen in front of the New Mexico State University English department building named after his mother) I enjoyed reliving the day he graduated from medical school and asked her to marry him because he could not travel to Chicago to begin his internship without her. He became a first at many things in his life, and learned that even after studying in both the US and Canada, earning a masters degree in surgery and becoming chief of surgery at a major Chicago hospital, he still had to face people who thought he couldn't be a good doctor simply because he was black.
He went through life quietly, working for change to help tear down racial discrimination in the military, in medical schools, and in hospitals at a time when Separate But Equal was a way of life. Like Forrest Gump, he was present at many of the turning points in American history. Unlike Forrest, he served as an active participant in many of those changes.
I wanted to write about him. I had no choice, especially since I had learned to love that man who spent many years in Chicago, not far from me. As a woman who grew up with zero interest in history, the path to Unlawful Orders included months of in depth research to really see the man below the surface, and details of the time he grew up and practiced medicine.
In future months I will return to the subject of Unlawful Orders to discuss how the story helped me get my agent back, taught me some important differences between writing fiction and non-fiction, how the acquiring editor and author work together, the cover process, marketing, and other steps until the final publication.
4 comments:
Great post, and an important part of our history! I look forward to hearing more about this, Barbara.
I had never heard of the Freeman Field Mutiny. The book you are writing on Dr. James Buchanan Williams journey sounds fascinating. Looking forward to hearing more about this.
I also had never heard of the Freeman Field Mutiny. However, I asked my husband who was a history major with a specialty in military history. He has written and edited series books for Time Life on WW2. He said there was a fiction book written during that period shortlly after the war which included this incident (though not named as the Freeman Field Mutiny). The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. It is called "Guard of Honor" by James Cozzens. At the time many critics called it a "race" novel. That was code to let readers know there were black characters in the book who were honored in some way.
My husband also warned that the book is almost unreadable by today's standards. The writing is very old-fashioned, meandering, and more of a philosophical treatise disguised as a novel. Also the Freeman Field Mutiny was one part of the longer novel. What the book does have is accurate accounts of planes, what was happening in the War during that time, and an accurate portrayal of the bureaucracy and personality of many people in charge (though disguised with fictional names. Evidently Cozzens had been a top communications officer in WW2 and his primary job was helping defuse potentially embarrassing military incidents by putting a positive spin on them. However Cozzens was considered a liberal in terms of acceptance of black soldiers in an integrated military, so he saved his observations for his fictional work after he left the military.
It sounds to me like YOUR book, Barbara, is VERY much needed to provide a more expansive look into the experience of those men to put a real face to their lives and to their fight for equality. Though the military claimed they had integrated the base, and instructed bases there was to be no segregation (i.e., at the officers club), they didn't necessarily enforce it and it was quite easy to arrest people by claiming a white officer was touched, pushed, or shoved.
Like so many things in history, the Black experience is rarely mentioned. When it is mentioned, it is perhaps a single paragraph among pages of details involving the experience of the dominant culture.
Scholastic is the perfect publisher for this! They have great inroads to educational distribution as well as the more general commercial market. Huge Congrats, Barbara! This may open an entirely new door to you and the stories you want to tell, whether fiction or nonfiction. I'll be looking forward to hearing more about this progress of Unlawful Orders and its availability in 2022.
Barbara, You are a gift, a treasure for me as I navigate my way through lost history, disguised history, ignored history and purposefully lied about history. Please do keep us updated on Unlawful Orders. Congratulations on the work you are doing to help all of us understand at a visceral level our history here in the United States.
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