WWII Veterans by the Numbers
16.1 million Total war-time service members.
2.5 million Black Americans who registered for draft, 1941-45.
50,000 Black Americans permitted to serve in World War II combat.
2.3 million Projected surviving World War II veterans of all races, as of Sept. 30, 2009.
94,000 Projected surviving black World War II veterans, as of Sept. 30, 2009.
850 Average number of World War II veterans of all races dying per day.
Source: National Center for Veteran Statistics and Analysis
MIAMI TWP. — Like most of the 2.5 million black Americans called to duty during World War II, Cedell Pearson was shoved to the background during his military service and kept in his place. After boot camp and clerical training, he was assigned as a sergeant to an all-black Army Air Force supply unit, with no hope of promotion.
“You just accepted it in those days,” recalled Pearson, now 89. “There wasn’t a darn thing you could do about it.”
And yet like so many other members of The Greatest Generation, Pearson returned to America after the war determined to stake his family’s claim to the American Dream — a dream that, for many blacks, would run head on into the nation’s still-lingering racial bias.
On Memorial Day weekend, it’s good to remember not just those who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country but also veterans such as Pearson, who returned to America after World War II and helped build the nation into the greatest power in world history, said Cathy Castle, a former neighbor and longtime friend of the Pearson family.
Remembering is important, too, because the number of surviving World War II veterans is dwindling daily, Castle said. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in that war, about 2 million are still alive. An average of 850 die each day, according to the National Center for Veteran Statistics and Analysis.
Pearson “is a hero in our eyes because he has done so much for his family and has remained a steady rock in the lives of many others over the years,” Castle wrote in an e-mail to the Dayton Daily News last week. “After his return from the war, he married his high school sweetheart, started a family, built a house in Miami Twp., raised three girls (and sent them all to college) and worked in management at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base” and the Defense Electronics Supply Center for 35 years.
Pearson and his wife, who died in 2003 after nearly 58 years of marriage, made sure they gave back to their communities along the way, Castle said. Pearson volunteered as a black history lecturer in local schools and has been a deacon at his Middletown church for more than 50 years. His wife was a longtime volunteer for West Carrollton schools, the Girl Scouts and Sycamore Hospital.
After the war, “I never thought I couldn’t accomplish anything I wanted,” Pearson said. Still, he keeps an ax handle, signed by segregationist Gov. Lester Maddox of Georgia, as a reminder of “how things used to be.” Maddox and his supporters wielded ax handles to keep black activists from entering his restaurant in 1964. Maddox later sold signed ax handles to help pay his legal fees.
Pearson said he isn’t bitter about his service during the war, which gave him extensive managerial experience in supplying the needs of the Tuskegee Airmen, the black pilots famed for their combat victories during World War II. But segregation still was a fact of Army life back then. When Pearson and others in his unit complained to white superiors that none of their officers had been promoted after 30 months of service without leave, the entire command structure of the unit was replaced with whites, he said.
Pearson returned to his hometown of Middletown and found racism thriving there as well. Despite his war-time experience, he was told by a manager at the Sorg paper plant that they had “no openings for a janitor,” he said. Eventually, a white jeweller in town hired him and helped him get certified as a watch repairman.
By then, Pearson and his wife, Ollie Mae, had saved enough money to offer a $5,000 down payment on a $10,000 house in Middletown. Pearson said he was not only turned down for a loan, but the real-estate agent who worked with them “was driven out of town.”
Pearson’s wife, who was then working as a secretary at the base, encouraged him to apply there as well. In 1951, as war broke out in Korea, Pearson was hired as a manager in a department that purchased electronics for the military.
By 1957, the Pearsons were doing well enough that they decided, like millions of other Americans at the time, to move out to spacious suburbia. They became the first black family to be sold a home in West Carrollton in nearly 40 years, their real-estate agent told them. And in 1969, they built their first home in Miami Twp., where Pearson continues to live.
Pearson says he has never “had trouble for a minute” with discrimination in either West Carrollton or Miami Twp.
“I’ve been very fortunate,” he said. “I have never wanted for anything that I didn’t get.”
On Memorial Day, he said, he’ll take time to remember those who gave their lives so that he and others who returned from the war could build better lives and a better nation. He especially recalls a high school friend he met in a passing convoy in Italy during the war, only to hear he had been killed in action two weeks later.
“I can’t hardly think about it now without breaking down in tears,” Pearson said. “You can’t ever forget.”
Contact this reporter at
(937) 225-2437 or jdebrosse@
DaytonDailyNews.com.
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