Charity Adams Earley inspects members of the 6888th Postal Battalion in Birmingham, England, in 1945. (Provided/U.S. Army Women’s Museum)
COLUMBIA — When Charity Adams Earley was sent across seas in 1944 , she was faced with a monumental task: Get millions of pieces of mail to the soldiers meant to receive them.
Under her leadership, a battalion of Black women nicknamed the Six Triple Eight (for the 6888th) sorted and sent the mail in three months — about half the time one general predicted. Their story disappeared in much of the history of World War II, but with a new movie, the Columbia native has hit the spotlight, more than 20 years after her death.
After achieving the highest possible rank for a woman in the Army at the time, Earley became a fixture of the Ohio city where she lived. She died Jan. 13, 2002, 23 years ago Monday.
Charity Adams Earley
Born in Kittrell, North Carolina, Earley’s family moved to Columbia when she was young. Growing up in Columbia, Earley excelled. She was among a dozen elementary school students whose test scores were high enough to skip middle school entirely, though her parents decided to keep her in her grade, since she was already several years ahead of her peers.
Earley graduated as valedictorian in 1934 from Booker T. Washington High School, the first Black public high school in Columbia and the largest statewide.
She received an academic scholarship to Wilberforce University in Ohio, a prestigious Black college, where she studied math, Latin, physics and history, according to the National Women’s History Museum.
After graduating college in 1938, Earley returned to Columbia, where she taught math and science to middle school students. Over her summer breaks, she studied vocational psychology at Ohio State University.
When the United States joined World War II, Earley applied to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps. She was one of 40 Black women chosen to be part of the first officer training class.
By the time she left the service in 1946, Earley was a lieutenant colonel, the highest possible rank for a woman at the time.
The Six Triple Eight
As the military postal service tried to get billions of pieces of mail to soldiers stationed overseas, a backlog piled up. Letters and packages sat in warehouses and airport hangars, sometimes for years at a time, as morale dropped because soldiers hadn’t heard from their loved ones.
By the time the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was sent to Birmingham, England, in 1944, millions of pieces of mail sat untouched. Rats had gotten into some packages containing food, and the warehouses were poorly lit and unheated, according to the U.S. Army.
On top of that, sorting was not as simple as matching names and addresses. Many pieces of mail were addressed using nicknames or common names, meaning the women had to search through thousands of soldiers to find the correct one. Troops often moved before the letters reached them, so the addresses listed were no longer correct. And some soldiers had died, meaning the women had to return the letters to the senders.
Earley, who was commanding officer of the battalion, scheduled the 855 women to work in three, eight-hour shifts each day. She later estimated the women went through 65,000 pieces of mail each day, for a total of more than 17 million packages and letters.
The officials who sent the women there expected the task to take them six months. Instead, it took them three.
“She was a very determined woman,” her daughter, Judith Earley, told the SC Daily Gazette. “To her mind, she was probably doing what needed to be done.”
After sorting all the letters in England, the battalion went to Rouen and Paris, France, to organize more letters. By 1946, all of the women had returned to the United States, where the unit was disbanded.
Delayed accolades
After disbanding, the Six Triple Eight received several medals recognizing their accomplishments. In the years following the war, however, their story was lost to history, said Stanley Earley III, Earley’s son, who lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland.
“Things happen when they happen,” the 71-year-old told the Gazette. “They should’ve received recognition decades ago.”
That began to change in 2018, when Fort Leavenworth in Kansas dedicated a monument to the unit. The next year, the battalion received a Meritorious Unit Commendation. In 2022, the battalion received the Congressional Gold Medal.
Earley became the first Black woman to have an Army fort named after her in 2023, when Fort Lee in Virginia was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams. The hyphenated title came from Earley’s maiden name and Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg, the first Black Army officer to receive the rank of lieutenant general.
The South Carolina House recognized her with a resolution last year.
“Her hard work and contributions have not gone unnoticed, and the impact she has had on this great nation is remarkable,” reads the resolution sponsored by former Rep. Ivory Thigpen, D-Columbia, and adopted unanimously in February 2024.
A 2019 documentary, also called “The Six Triple Eight,” brought more attention to the story. A magazine article that same year inspired director Tyler Perry’s movie, which debuted on Netflix in December. A stage musical is also in the works.
The recent interest in the women, though belated, is a reminder of other forgotten stories about Black women, said Crissandra Elliott, who has been researching Earley for Delta Sigma Theta, the sorority of which both were members.
“Finally, somebody let the world know that what they did mattered,” Elliott said.
The movie
Judith Earley was apprehensive when she first heard from the filmmakers that they were interested in turning her mother’s story into a movie.
“You never know how these kinds of things are going to turn out,” the 66-year-old said from her home in Dayton, Ohio.
Judith Earley and her brother, Stanley Earley, did not play a major role in making the film, other than answering some family questions that came up. But at early screenings, they both decided their mother had been portrayed well.
The movie seemed to be accurate to what they know of their mother’s history, both siblings said. At the same time, though, they didn’t know their mom as the soldier who Kerry Washington plays in the movie.
To Stanley and Judith Earley, Charity Adams Earley was the mom who remade a ragdoll lost in a house fire to look like her daughter and who played ping-pong with them on the family’s table.
Earley sometimes talked about her time in the Army, but the siblings didn’t realize until adulthood that their mother was a significant historical figure, they said. When historians several years ago got excited to see Earley’s journal from the time, for instance, her daughter was shocked anew at her prominence, she said.
“It’s just now coming into focus, because she’s my mother and I don’t think of her that way,” Judith Earley said.
Still, they saw the mother they knew shine through during certain moments in the film.
Soon after Stanley Earley had started a new job for the city of Dayton, Ohio, he found himself across the table with his mother, negotiating an agreement with the Red Cross board of which his mother was a member. She singled out one line of the contract, and Stanley Earley realized she had read every document all the way through.
That level of organization, as well as her ability to negotiate without disrespecting anyone, shone through in Washington’s depiction, Stanley Earley said.
“She was always really prepared, and that was always something that made her very successful,” Stanley Earley said.
Work after the war
While she told her children stories about the Six Triple Eight and her military service, that was only a small part of her life, Stanley Earley said.
“My mother was never really a person who focused on the past,” Stanley Earley said. “She did many, many things after this.”
After finishing her master’s degree at Ohio State University, Earley worked for the Veterans Administration in Ohio. She worked for several colleges, including as dean of students at Georgia State College.
Earley and her husband, Stanley Earley Jr., spent some time in Switzerland before settling down in Ohio. There, Charity Adams Earley sat on boards for the Red Cross, the local community college and a utility company.
The house in which she grew up still stands on Fairfield Road in Columbia. The Columbia chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, of which Earley was a member, now uses the home as its office, Elliott said.
“We’re very, very proud of her,” Elliott said.