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Residents gathered Saturday in a meeting room in a building named for one of the heroes of the African American struggle for freedom and equality to dine and celebrate Black History Month. 

Convened by the Residents Council of Harriet Tubman Terrace Apartments, the gathering featured addresses by poets, a psychologist and Max Anderson, the city councilmember whose district includes the apartments. 

Berry Gardner, president of the residents council, hailed Anderson’s presence.  

“I don’t remember our city councilmember ever coming here three times,” said Gardner. In addition to his most recent appearance, Anderson attended the complex for a Christmas party in December and again last month when the building’s new owners unveiled their remodeling plans. 

Anderson’s address focused on African Americans who were part of the troops who battled the Axis in World War II. 

“Black Americans were denied the full blessings of liberty” during the war, he said. 

The civil rights movement, he said, was driven in large measure by those such as slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers who had had played their parts in the great war effort. 

“Black soldiers wanted to be involved,” Anderson said, “and they helped liberate the Nazi death camps.” 

Anderson contrasted the roles of African American soldiers as portrayed in two memorable films, A Soldier’s Story and Patton. 

The background of the first story was a Louisiana military base where highly visible African American soldiers in a segregated army were chomping at the bit to get into combat. 

In Patton, conversely, the film’s opening depicts Gen. George S. Patton delivering a stirring address praising the soldiers before him, who remain invisible to the camera. 

The address was real, “but he was actually talking to these same units from Louisiana who had finally been called up,” Anderson said. “Yet there was only one black person shown in the movie, and that was his aide.” 

One of those soldiers in the unseen audience is a neighbor of Anderson’s, who commanded a tank battalion in Patton’s Third Army that later played a major role in the breakthrough that relieved Bastogne in Nazi Germany’s last great gamble, the Battle of the Bulge. 

“Both movies had their lessons for me,” Anderson said, “when I understood the intersection between these two realities.” 

Black American soldiers developed their own gesture to signify their place in the historical moment, the double-V sign, with one V symbolizing victory over Germany and the other symbolizing victory over the institutionalized repression at home. 

It was also World War II that sparked the great migration of African Americans to the factories and shipyards in California where jobs once reserved for whites were suddenly thrown open to people of color. 

Anderson also singled out the mass of African Americans who formed the backbone of the civil rights movement. 

“For every Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, there were thousands of people like you who ran off the flyers and cooked the meals,” he said. 

After Anderson finished and the applause died down, Gardner recalled an uncle stationed in Louisiana when one of the African American troopers was arrested and lynched the night before his unit was scheduled to ship out. 

Following the program, residents and guests settled down for a dinner of Louisiana soul food cooked by Gardner and fellow resident Bill Chapple.3