Book Review: Roi Ottley’s World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist

Abstract

Ottley's World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist. Mark A. Huddle, ed. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011. 200 pp. $29.95 hbk.While Nazi gunners dropped shells on African American soldiers on the Anzio beachhead in the first half of 1944, Ernie Pyle, after talking to black cartoonist Ollie Harrington of the Pittsburgh Courier, offered to write several columns about them. He did, about the blacks who kept the military supplied with food and ammunition, but he didn't mention any issues they had to face because of their race.That helps explain the importance of the small number of black correspondents who wrote about the half-million black service members for black newspapers. John Stevens profiled twenty-seven of these correspondents in a pioneering study. Stevens chose not to include blacks who wrote for white publications. That meant leaving out Ottley, even though Ottley became the first black to write for a major American newspaper, and who thus could communicate black concerns to a white public.Roi Ottley's World War II provides an introduction to the life of Vincent Roi Ottley. The book presents his incomplete workbook of diary entries and letter and article drafts, June-December 1944, and offers thirteen selected articles from his journalistic work-ten from the liberal newspaper PM, 1942-1946. Mark Huddle, now an assistant professor of history at Georgia College, discovered this material in the St. Bonaventure University Archives when he was on the faculty at St. Bonaventure, where Ottley (1906-1960) spent the first two years of his college career on a track scholarship and where he began to develop as a writer before transferring to Michigan.Ottley became an important figure in the cultural life of Harlem in the 1930s, where he was a reporter, columnist, and editor for the Amsterdam News. Forced from the paper for his political views, he joined the Harlem branch of the Federal Writers' Project, which led to him supervising a team that included Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Among his friends he counted Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Fats Waller, and W. C. Handy Jr.When the United States entered World War II, Ottley was swept up in the debate over issues and strategies that African Americans should employ to advance their cause while serving their country. Ottley contributed New World A-Coming, published in 1943, in which he described for a white audience what it was like to be an African American and how African Americans viewed their past and future. He criticized violence against black soldiers in the South, which was detrimental to the US cause. The book appeared in the middle of a summer when race riots broke out in Los Angeles, Harlem, Detroit, Mobile, and elsewhere. …