His Life · Chapter 3 of 8 · 1937 – c. 1946
Meharry & War
A dental degree from his father’s alma mater, then Pearl Harbor. He served in a segregated army, first with the tank destroyers in Texas and then as a dentist with the 92nd “Buffalo Soldier” Division in Italy.
After Talladega the Rodgers brothers went separate ways. Samuel went to medical school at Howard University in Washington. Gordon went to Nashville.
“I went to Meharry — that’s the same school my daddy went to.”
Meharry Medical College had a medical school, a dental school, a nursing school and a pharmacy school, and together with Howard it trained most of the Black physicians and dentists in the United States. Gordon Jr. told Frederick Burger the college’s founding story as he had heard it, and was careful to call it “the folk tale.”1
Pearl Harbor
He finished dental school in 1941. Early in the 2002 interview he said 1937, then later corrected himself while working out the dates, and Burger’s notes from that day record 1941.2 It was the last year of peace.
“And in [19]41 — June of ’41, I think — I graduated from dental school, and December was the Pearl Harbor bombing. That ended my schooling; I was interning when that happened.”
“Everybody got a commission,” he said. Medical and dental students across the country were taken into the service. Samuel entered the Army Medical Corps. Gordon was commissioned as an Army dental officer. He described the army he joined without softening it.
“I was in the Black army — they had a Black army and a white army.”
His first posting is the least clear part of his record. Sixty years later he thought he might have been stationed briefly at Fort McClellan, just outside Anniston, but said, “I wouldn’t bet on it.” What he did remember was Black officers with nowhere else to go in a segregated town dropping by his family’s house on Cooper Avenue for a drink. “All I know,” he said, “is that I ran a ‘Black officers’ saloon’ out of my house.”3
Tank destroyers and Buffalo Soldiers
His clearest memory was Texas. The Army had built a large new program at Fort Hood around the “tank destroyer,” its answer to the German panzers, and he spent “a year or more” there.4 When the tank-destroyer program was cut back, he was reassigned to the 92nd Infantry Division. The 92nd was one of the Army’s segregated Black divisions, and it carried the name of the Buffalo Soldiers, whose buffalo appeared on its shoulder patch.
“They put me in an infantry regiment of the 92nd Division.”
The 92nd was the only Black infantry division to see combat in Europe. It went to Italy in 1944 and fought for months in the Apennines and along the Ligurian coast against German defensive lines. He summed up his division’s job simply: the Germans were retreating up the Italian peninsula, and “we were there to make sure they didn’t reverse their retreat.” He also recalled time in France.5 He was clear about what his own role was.
“Yeah, I was a dentist in the infantry.”
When Burger asked whether he had been on the front lines, he answered just as plainly: “No, I didn’t shoot the guns.” His job was to care for the men of a division that fought for a country that still segregated them. His obituary would later sum up this part of his life in a single phrase: he “served in the Army in Italy during World War II.”6
Coming home
He could not say exactly when he left the service. “I think the war was over,” he told Burger. “I’d sort of lost interest in it by that point.” He did remember deciding, back in Anniston, whether to make the Army a career. He decided not to, and he never regretted it.
“And I still think I did the right thing, and if I had to do it over again I would do the same thing — get out of the army after the war and get to doing some work on civilians.”
The men who came home from the segregated army in 1945 and 1946 had seen what their country asked of them and what it still refused them. Many of them would register voters in Alabama in the years ahead. Gordon Rodgers came home to the sixteen-hundred block of Cooper Avenue, which he said was “just like it was when I left,” and opened an office.
Footnotes
-
Dr. Gordon A. Rodgers Jr. on Blacks in Anniston (2002 interview), Side A, 3:04–5:26 and 9:08–9:17. ↩
-
2002 interview, Side A, 9:23 (“1937”) and 38:42–40:09 (“June of ’41”); Frederick Burger’s notes (“1941: grad from dentistry school”), Burger research file, p. 1. ↩
-
2002 interview, Side A, 40:24–42:51. He stressed that he “never did any dental work as a dentist at Fort McClellan” and that his memory of the posting was “very vague.” ↩
-
2002 interview, Side A, 43:19–44:31. Burger’s notes record the 92nd Division assignment and his reserve serial designation, DC USAR (Dental Corps, U.S. Army Reserve). ↩
-
2002 interview, Side B, 1:44–2:19. The 92nd Division’s service in Italy (1944–45) is well documented. The dates of his own time overseas are not yet known. ↩
-
William Thornton, “Gordon Rodgers, Anniston dentist, civil rights leader, activist dies at 92,” The Birmingham News, Dec. 27, 2007. ↩