She now stood on the desolate grounds of Fort Huachuca, breathing in the thick hot air and taking in the 360-degree view of the mountains and desert with amazement and mild trepidation. She was in the middle of no-man’s-land as a brand-new addition to the United States Army. Joining the military was a way of asserting authority over her life at the time, as well as carrying on her beloved father’s legacy of serving the country during wartime. Arizona—a western state that adhered to Jim Crow doctrine, which oppressed African Americans nation wide but most pervasively in the Deep South—was worlds away from anything Elinor had ever known growing up. Her skin color hadn’t been much of a problem in her progressive, solidly middle-class hometown, but as she made her way to the formation line for nurses and saw the separate hospitals for blacks and whites, she suddenly realized that the transition before her would be more extreme than she’d anticipated.

THE ATTRACTIVE Dutch colonial with the meticulously manicured yard at 33 Emerson Road was similar to most of the houses on the street—a wholesome-looking single-family, two-story dwelling with a narrow driveway and lush shrubbery that lined the steps to the front door. Emerson Road was in Milton, a white upper-middle-class suburb of Boston, with a rich history dating back to the Puritans’ arrival in the late seventeenth century. According to the 1940 census, William L. Powell, age fifty-four, lived in the house with his wife, Gladys, forty-four, and their three daughters: Gladys, twenty, Elinor, nineteen, and Ruth, seventeen. William, who went by his middle name, Lawrence, listed his occupation as “government clerk” and his wife as not employed—the same status that had been selected for all the other wives in the neighborhood. Lawrence recorded his home’s value at $5,000 and his annual income at $2,100, a few hundred more than the salaries of some of his neighbors who worked as salesmen, cooks, or clerks in the shipyard.2

Nothing about Lawrence Powell’s personal data seemed unusual except for one particular detail. Unlike the other residents of Emerson Road, a “W” did not follow the entry that identified the family’s race. Instead, the abbreviation “Neg” appeared. The Powells were the only blacks on Emerson Road and one of the few African American families in Milton at the time.