Grad Student Works to Add Color to Military History
Black World War II veterans have largely been left out of historical accounts, but one historian is attempting to change that.
By Pamela Martineau
SACRAMENTO, Calif.
A few years ago, historian Lisa Daniels discovered a fascinating morsel of buried history in her own family.
Daniels learned that her grandmother, Rita Hernandez, was a civilian riveter and blueprint reader during World War II, serving on the USS Franklin Roosevelt in the Brooklyn shipyard.
As a Black woman, Hernandez’ visage would never be immortalized in posters like “Rosie the Riveter.” She rarely talked with her family about her wartime service, in part because it had never garnered much recognition from anyone else.
The discovery of her grandmother’s service to America led Daniels to ask a couple of big questions: How many other Blacks have served the armed forces and what are their stories?
Currently a master’s student in social history at California State University-Sacramento, Daniels launched the Unsung Heroes Living History Project to answer those questions. The quest has led her to collect the oral histories of more than 280 Black veterans. She is chronicling the histories so they may be catalogued at the Library of Congress.
