Les Green Archives - Page 20 of 20

The good news is that a check came to my parents’ house in North Carolina this week. It was a substantial amount, in the low four figures, in response to some class-action lawsuit settlement; not positive which drug was involved. The company issuing the check is a pharmaceutical company who I won’t name; we’ll just call it A-Z.

The slightly not-so-good news is that the check is made out to Leslie H. Green, my father, who is deceased, has been deceased for nearly ten years. This is quite annoying since my mother filled out paperwork back in April informing A-Z of this fact. At least the check came to my father c/o my mother, but it doesn’t make it any easier to cash.

At my sister’s request, I contacted A-Z. After going through a myriad of telephone menus, I reached a real person, who transferred me to another real person, who expressed her condolences at my father’s passing. “How long ago did he die?” “Ten years.”

I was then transferred to the nurse. This was not for MY benefit, but rather CYA for A-Z since the deceased (i.e., my father) died around the time he was taking their medication. The nurse wants to know when he died – “August 10, 2000” – and from what “prostate cancer”. After she was done, she too expressed her condolences at my father’s passing.

Then she transferred me to someone who was going to transfer me to the person who could address my question. She expressed her condolences at my father’s passing.

I was told I would be on hold for three minutes, then someone would pick up and help me. Instead, I was on hold for two minutes, then I was disconnected.

OK, so I call A-Z back. After eventually getting a real person again, I conveyed to her why I had called, and also that I had already spoken to the nurse. I was transferred to someone who was going to transfer me to someone else when I indicated that was the point I had gotten disconnected the LAST time I called. She stayed on the line the full three minutes (or more – I didn’t time it) that I was waiting, then made the transfer, after expressing her condolences at my father’s passing.

I explain the situation to this guy. He says my mom should deposit the check. I say my mom no longer has an account in my father’s name, so she cannot deposit the check. He said that she could mail back the check, but that she would need to write VOID on it, write a letter explaining the situation, provide his death certificate, provide proof that she is his primary heir, etc.

As I explained this to my sister, it becomes clear to us that since my mother had the check in hand, and that who knows how long it would take A-Z to reissue a check – and they don’t relish the expense of doing this again – they should try to deposit it. If that didn’t work, they (my mother and sister) would set up an estate account for my father and deposit the check; this might require setting up a DBA of some sort, but it would be worth it.

So I spent a half-hour during the week leading up to Father’s Day being reminded that this is the 10th Father’s Day I’ve spent without my father. I knew that already, of course, but I did want to thank A-Z, who COULD have, I’m thinking, written the check to my MOTHER, and keep me from all this rigamarole. Just saying.
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I state this every year, but it is no less true for that: I wish my father had had the opportunity to meet my daughter.

Back at the end of February 2010, I did a presentation for the Underground Railroad conference about Black Soldiers in Post WW II Germany. I’m certainly not to replicate it here, but a few points I’ll mention.

Even though the first casualty of what would become the American Revolution was Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre of 1770, the American colonial powers fighting Great Britain were resistant to allowing black soldiers to serve. It wasn’t until the British offered freedom to black fighters that ultimately got George Washington’s attention. Ultimately, blacks fought on both sides of the conflict, but their reason was singular: freedom.

Again, in the American Civil War, many black men felt that serving in the military was a way they might gain freedom and full citizenship. As Frederick Douglass asserted that if blacks fought, “no power on earth can deny that he has earned the right” to freedom.

General David Staunch took it upon himself to free slaves, not just on islands controlled by Union forces, but in south Florida, where he recruited men capable of bearing arms to form the first black regiment. This was ultimately opposed to, and disbanded by President Lincoln, fearing moving more quickly than “public opinion would bear.”

There was a modicum of freedom for the newly emancipated but this was negated by the Jim Crow laws and other restrictions. During World War I, WEB DuBois wrote in The Crisis magazine, “First your Country, then your Rights”. A by-then familiar refrain.

So, most of the wars fought by the United States, starting with the Revolutionary War, included a subtext, even the promise, of justice for, and fair treatment of African-Americans. World War I and especially the Civil War brought the issue to the fore.

But it was with World War II, with large numbers of black soldiers in uniform, that the contradiction between fighting for freedom for others and a lack of freedom back at home reached a tipping point.

Germany in post World War II was occupied by thousands of American soldiers, many of them black. While Hitler’s mantra of racial superiority might suggest that the black soldier might have a difficult time in the former Nazi-led country, the experiences were far more mixed. A huge part of this involved the black GI and the German fraulein, something that clashed with the norms of two countries. What took place during that period changed both the condition of African-Americans back in the United States and the occupied German people as well.

Due, in part to the pressure by the black press, reporting on the superior conditions for the black troops in what was Hitler’s country, the armed services were integrated in 1948.

So, was it a sense of history or a more personal connection that my father to keep a Newsweek article delineating this phenomenon for 54 years, from 1946 until his death in 2000, or was there something more? My father was in the European Theater of operations from February to November 1946, but we never really talked to him about the war.

There is a surprisingly large bit of literature on this topic of race and Germany after the war. It doesn’t cite the Newsweek article, but rather an article from a then- relatively new magazine called Ebony (October 1946).

I would particularly recommend The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany, a research project and digital archive. The creators received a prestigious award from the storied civil rights organization, the NAACP.
I’d also note Historians study black vets’ role in civil rights for the very first paragraph: In the words of retired Gen. Colin Powell, postwar Germany was “a breath of freedom” for black soldiers, especially those out of the South: “[They could] go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date, whom they wanted, just like other people.” Or, as it notes in the Ebony article, Berlin was freer than Birmingham (Alabama) or Broadway (New York City).

Additional bibliography:
Blacks during the Holocaust.

An unexpected freedom: Black U.S. soldiers found acceptance and tolerance in post-war Germany – and sometimes even the love of their lives. By Peter H. Koepf