Her Father's Daughter

Allene Carter’s eyes dance and her words race. She is a passionate storyteller, rejoicing in her heroes’ triumphs, pained by their hardships.

She is speaking from the heart, after all. Eddie Carter was her father-in-law. Jesse Vaughn was her father.

Carter has researched and documented their biographies with a librarian’s precision. She keeps painstakingly organized files that universities would envy. Each new tidbit of information, an anecdote she hasn’t heard, a picture she hasn’t seen, thrills her.

“I’m so pleased and excited to do this research,” says Carter, a steward in a Los Angeles County unit of five police dispatch supervisors represented by CWA Local 9400. “It makes me proud.”

It was her research that revealed what the U.S. Army had done to destroy Staff Sgt. Eddie Carter’s reputation without cause, and her refusal to back down that finally led the government to apologize in 1999.

She has signed a deal with a publishing company to co-author a book on her father-in-law’s life — a story in which the battlefield heroics are merely a chapter. She’s also met with film producers.

But she’s become equally fascinated by her own father’s life. Since reading a history of racial and labor struggles in Chicago’s packinghouses, a book that references her father, she’s come to realize how remarkable he was, too.

“Now,” she says with a determined smile, “I’m hoping to put my father on the map.”

The seventh of Jesse and Sandalia Vaughn’s nine children —three girls and six boys — Allene Carter grew up in a “tiny house with lots of bunk beds” on Chicago’s south side.

Labor organizers were frequent visitors. Carter remembers overhearing “scary” snippets of conversation about riots and guns, about police brutally trying to break the unions her father and others were fighting to build.

She also remembers her father’s courage, his refusal to be intimidated. That he stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and had “the voice of thunder” didn’t hurt. Still, his family worried.

“Organizing back then could mean your life,” she says. “For my father, being black and being an organizer, it was especially dangerous. But the cause was too important to let fear stop him.”

In spite of his forceful presence, Vaughn was known for his kindnesses. He set up soup kitchens during packinghouse strikes. He sent hungry visitors home with hams tucked under their arms. He helped people find work, helped widows make ends meet, gave time to charities. “He was always very aware of what was going on in the community, what people’s needs were,” Carter says.

She remembers how he “absorbed everything, read everything,” in the news, even ordering the printed programs once available from the weekly “Meet the Press” debates on TV.

His charisma, wisdom and strength of character made him a natural for politics. But he didn’t run for public office. Instead, he was a vital player behind the scenes, a Democratic advisor, campaigner, precinct captain and ward chairman. And he was a pioneer in efforts to get out the vote.

“He organized senior citizens’ carpools and arranged for day care for children — whatever you needed to get to the polls,” Carter says. “And he’d have his kids out there handing out flyers.”

Vaughn had long worked to bring blacks and whites together in the workplace and in union leadership. He never forgot the Irish butcher in the packinghouse who taught him the trade on breaks in the 1920s, when racial and ethnic tensions ran high. Butchering jobs paid well and many whites tried to prevent blacks from learning the necessary skills.

As Vaughn fought to organize workers, Carter said he faced “strong mistrust” from white union leaders. But his persistence paid off. “He told them, ‘If you don’t organize with us, we’ll all go down together,’” she says.

In 1959, when Carter was 15, Vaughn sent her and her sisters to Washington, D.C. to walk with Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of followers at the “Youth March for Integrated Schools.”

She was being groomed for a life of activism, she says, even though it took her years to realize it.

It first dawned on her when she went to work as a police dispatcher and became a steward in her Teamsters local. “From day one, I was an activist for justice, for fairness,” she says.

In 1983, Carter was promoted to super-visor in the dispatch center, where a small Service Employees unit of supervisors had been decertified. Knowing the value of a union, Carter contacted CWA and set out to organize her colleagues. She succeeded.

“My heart is with the union,” she says. “The union is an invisible umbrella. You have no idea what might happen if the union wasn’t there for you.”

It was union experience, she says, that taught her the practical skills and perseverance she would need to bring her father-in-law’s story to light.

She credits the guidance of Local 9400 President Mike Hartigan and Vice President Bill Demers Jr., recalling their help through a series of difficult grievances that became a lawsuit.

“Bill was so methodical and thorough. I would want to storm in there, and he would say, ‘Do your research. Document, document, document.’ It would infuriate me,” Carter says, smiling. “But he taught me that all of the theatrics mean nothing by themselves. He taught me to build a case so airtight that we couldn’t lose.”

Demers said Carter deserves the credit. “She was tenacious,” he said. “They threw labor attorneys at her, five different city councils, police departments. It was really a David-and-Goliath thing.”

Which is why he says he’s not surprised that she went after the federal government, and won. “I’m really proud of her,” he said. “But I wasn’t surprised.”

Carter never met her father- in-law. He died years before she married Eddie Carter Jr., a member of Teamsters Local 692 in California. But she felt close to him through old letters, photos and family stories.

Determined to find out why the Army disgraced him, she started writing the government letters, dozens of them, demanding records under the Freedom of Information Act. No matter how many times she was denied information, refused help, she kept pressing. She spent vacation time in state and national archives doing her own research.

Slowly, the answers emerged. She learned that Eddie Carter was watched — spied on — by the Army from the moment he enlisted. His superiors filed secret reports. Neighbors, landlords and bosses throughout his life were interviewed. He was a black man with a colorful past, and those were two marks against him.

Especially damning, the Army decided, was that Carter spent his early life in China, where his parents were missionaries. His ability to speak Mandarin Chinese and Hindustani was viewed with suspicion. That he’d briefly joined the Chinese Nationalist Army as a teenager, fighting the Japanese, was another blot on his record.

Carter tried to join the U.S. Army when his family returned to the United States in the 1930s. When he was rejected, he joined the American volunteer unit, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. The brigade was organized by the Communist Party in America, though its recruits weren’t all communists. Many, including eminent public figures such as novelist Ernest Hemingway, were motivated by anti-fascism. Allene Carter says her father-in-law — who was captured by Franco’s forces and escaped — didn’t have a political agenda. He simply loved being a soldier.

In World War II, Eddie Carter finally got his chance to join the U.S. Army. He was eager for combat duty but the Army believed black soldiers were best used as service troops. He was assigned to be a mess sergeant in a truck company. Every day after the company arrived in Europe in 1944, Carter volunteered for combat. He was refused until February of 1945, after the Battle of the Bulge left the Army badly in need of reinforcements. To be allowed to fight, though, Carter had to give up his rank and serve as a private. He did so without hesitation.

A month later, he was on the back of a tank headed into the skirmish that would make him a hero. After the episode, Carter was impatient as he healed from his wounds. “I am on my way back to the front,” he wrote in a letter home while hospitalized. “I’ll be darn glad to get back into the fight.”

Carter was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his heroics, one of only nine given to black soldiers during the war. He “was an outstanding soldier,” Carter’s commanding officer, Lt. Russell Blair, said in a 1999 U.S. News & World Report story. “He was always neat and soldierly. There was no malarkey about him. He soldiered 24 hours a day. He was one of the best.”

Carter had married during the war and he returned home to Los Angeles in 1946. Known as a war hero, he and his wife, Mildred, were popular guests at social events in both black and white communities. After a brief stint in business, he went back to the Army for a three-year tour. He was promoted to sergeant first class and was chosen to help organize a new all-black National Guard unit.

Yet the Army hadn’t given up its secret probe of his political leanings, even though two officers earlier tried to call off the investigation. They filed papers recommending the case be closed, saying Carter was “not considered potentially subversive.”

But in the 1930s and 40s, an era that had seen communist spies infiltrate the U.S. government, mere rumors of leftist leanings could devastate a career. And the Army decided that Carter’s career was over. He wouldn’t be allowed to re-enlist.

Backed by the NAACP and helped by an ACLU lawyer, Carter fought the Pentagon bureaucracy for years. He sought a hearing to clear his name, but was refused. He was fired from jobs when employers found out that the Army thought he was a Communist. His heart and spirit broken, he died of lung cancer in 1963 at the age of 46.

More than 40 years passed before the government began to admit to the wrongs it committed against black soldiers in World War II. An Army study in the mid-1990s questioned why no blacks had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the military’s highest honor. It determined that Eddie Carter and six other men should have been recipients.

At a White House ceremony in 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded the medals. Only one of the seven honorees was still alive, but all had family there, including Eddie Carter’s widow, Mildred, Allene Carter, her husband and their two children.

But the medal alone didn’t relieve the Carters’ sorrow and anger. “They destroyed him before the world,” Eddie Carter Jr. said. “Let them apologize before the world.”

Two more years passed, two years of Allene Carter’s letters, phone calls and diligence. In 1999, her efforts and her father-in-law’s story were featured in a 10-page spread in U.S. News and World Report magazine. Two months later, a letter came from the White House for Mildred Carter.

“Had I known when I presented his Medal of Honor, I would have personally apologized to you and your family,” Clinton wrote. “On behalf of all Americans, I want to do so now. It was truly our loss that he was denied the opportunity to continue to serve in uniform the nation he so dearly loved.”

For Allene Carter, the fight to restore her father-in-law’s reputation and honor his memory continues as she works on a book with a writer chosen by the publishing company.

Her own father died in 1995, but she believes he would be proud to know how his values — the commitment to fairness he instilled in his children — help bring an injustice to light. And he’d be proud that a labor union played a role in it, too.

“My father and my union prepared me well,” she says. “When I took on the United States government, I was ready.”