Trezzvant W. Anderson

Left portrait: Trezzvant W. Anderson (born in Charlotte, NC November 22, 1906 and died March 25, 1963) began his career in journalism and activism in the late 1920s. Not long after he dropped out of Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, and after he landed a job with the federal Railway Mail Service, this official photograph of Anderson was taken in 1938.

Right portrait: Portrait of Trezzvant W. Anderson in his military uniform. Circa 1945. World War (1939-1945)
Sourced from: Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Bottom left image: Trezzvant William Anderson was a member of the 761st Tank Battalion of the U.S. Army during World War II. Anderson wrote the unit's history book "Come Out Fighting: The Epic Tale of the 761st Tank Battalion, 1942-1945" , exploits during World War II.
The battalion was made up of Black soldiers.
Image sourced from: Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library.

Right bottom image: Gunner Cpl. Carlton Chapman poses in the hatch of his M4 Sherman tank near Nancy, France, Nov. 5, 1944. Chapman served in the 761st Tank Battalion, the first African-American tank unit to go into combat. The unit's first engagement came Nov. 8, only.
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army).
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Trezzant W. Anderson. (1906-1963)

"Only a few in his hometown know the name. He wasn’t much for self-promotion. But Anderson was a crusading journalist in the South during Jim Crow, and his work exposed discrimination against Black people long before what we think of as the civil rights era."

"During World War II, the U.S. Army mobilized a huge public relations campaign to glorify its soldiers and boost public support for the war. But that effort largely ignored America’s segregated Black troops, who were given second-class treatment and often relegated to menial support roles.

Journalist Trezzvant Anderson fought to fill that gap and give Black troops the recognition they deserved—in part by embedding with the 761st Tank Battalion and documenting their role in winning the war.

The 761st, the first Black tank squad to see combat, would go on to earn nearly 400 decorations for heroism in just seven months of combat."

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"Anderson was born in Charlotte in 1906 and lived much of his life here. For most of his 56 years, Anderson worked as a journalist and, in the age of Jim Crow, uncovered example after example of discrimination against Black people at a time when few dared tell those kinds of stories. He went on to write and publish a book, Come Out Fighting: The Epic Tale of the 761st Tank Battalion, 1942-1945,about the first all-Black tank battalion in U.S. Army history."

"Anderson attended JCSU but dropped out in 1927. He’d written for the student newspaper, and although he had gotten a good job in another field, he wanted to continue his work as a journalist. The Charlotte Post, the city’s established Black-owned newspaper, hired Anderson soon after he left school.

Anderson had landed a job with the Railway Mail Service (RMS), a branch of the Postal Service that processed mail and shipped it throughout the country by train. The work provided him with a good monthly paycheck, $154, and required him to work only 10 to 12 days a month, which gave him the perfect pretext to work as the Post’s “roving reporter” throughout the Southeast.

Anderson’s route usually took him from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta to Knoxville, Tennessee, and all the cities and towns along the way.

Anderson, who was young and unmarried then, would deliver the mail, stop in a city or town for a few days, find a story of interest to Black readers, and send dispatches back to the Post.

Within three years, his missives from the South appeared in prominent Black papers throughout the country, and he held staff positions at the Associated Negro Press, The Norfolk Journal and Guide, The Carolina Times, and The Afro-American, the renowned Baltimore-based paper founded in 1892.

He kept riding from place to place and reporting on discrimination against Black people, especially in their search for jobs and economic opportunity, as the Great Depression gripped the country.

He reported on a lynching in Tarboro, NC in 1930. In 1932 in New Orleans, he wrote about a protest of Mayor Thomas Semmes Walmsley’s efforts to prohibit anyone not registered to vote—which meant, overwhelmingly, Black people—from holding jobs as longshoremen, a vital occupation in the South’s leading port city.

Several hundred Black residents attended the protest, and even white newspapers and political leaders spoke out against the measure. But the mayor enacted the ban, and nearly 2,000 Black longshoremen lost their jobs.

Anderson’s work was dangerous. White business interests of the day frequently targeted Black publications, and Anderson was concerned enough to sometimes write under pseudonyms.

“There would be efforts to intimidate me, or perhaps even lynch me,” he once told his editors, “should my name appear over the story.”

Yet he kept at it throughout the 1930s, balancing his journalism with the RMS job, which provided money and mobility.

In 1939, Anderson convinced the publisher of The Carolina Times, the venerable Black-owned paper in Durham, NC, to open an office in Charlotte and hire him to staff it.

The Times did. Anderson also continued to write for The Afro-American—which turned out to be the vehicle he used to report on the discriminatory practices of Charlotte’s postmaster, a prominent civic leader whose name still takes up public space in this city: Paul Younts."

Griffin already knew that Anderson had stirred up something that involved the Postal Service. Some of the interview subjects for his master’s thesis had mentioned it. Richardson had told him that Anderson wrote about discrimination in the Postal Service’s Charlotte office and organized the 1940 student protest in response.

Richardson and Griffin’s grandfather, the trucking pioneer Fred Griffin, were members of the Charlotte Black Shriners chapter, one of numerous and influential Black fraternal organizations that formed during segregation.

During his research, Griffin learned that in the ’50s, Anderson had exposed the misdeeds of leaders in another of those organizations, the national Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World, and that the Elks likely would have “blackballed” anyone who crossed them. It was the first time Griffin had considered the possibility that it wasn’t just entrenched white interests that had buried Anderson’s legacy."

"Among the papers in Atlanta, Griffin discovered a 1941 letter from Kelly Alexander Sr.—then the Charlotte NAACP chapter president and later national NAACP chairman—that recommended Anderson for the presidency of the national postal workers’ union.

The year before, Alexander wrote, armed local NAACP members had protected Anderson after midnight in his home on Beatties Ford Road against “car-loads of whites, probably Ku Kluxers,” who were responding to “the recent Post Office investigation.”

The reference eventually led Griffin to write the Postal Service to request any records they’d kept on Anderson. He expected a few pages that detailed his employment history, maybe his mail routes.

What the Postal Service sent Griffin in 2010 was a 200-page dossier that covered all 14 years of Anderson’s employment—and spelled out how Anderson learned of Younts’ discrimination against Black employees and job candidates, how Anderson’s reporting led to Younts’ conviction of a federal crime, and postal officials’ reactions to them. Griffin was ecstatic. As far as he knew, no one else had the records. No one else even knew to look for them."

Narrative source: https://www.history.com/.../761st-tank-battalion...

Narrative source: https://704shop.com/.../fact-friday-259-the-charlotte...