Frances Wills, one of first two Black Women in the WAVES

A couple of weeks ago, we featured a profile of Harriet Pickens with the promise to also do one about Frances Wills, who shared the spotlight with Pickens as the first two African American female officers commissioned by the U.S. Navy. This week, we keep that promise. 
Wills, like Pickens, was an outstanding member of the WAVES.  
Born on July 12, 1910, in Philadelphia, Wills moved with her family to New York, where she later attended Hunter College. She continued her education at the University of Pittsburgh, earning a master’s degree in social work. Her fortuitous meeting with poet Langston Hughes led to her becoming his secretary. Along with this task, she spent several years working with the YMCA as an organizer and social aide. 
Wills had returned to New York City and was working as a social worker when she enlisted with the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), which was established in July 1942. Many African American women sought to join the WAVES, but were rejected by U.S. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. When Knox died suddenly in April 1944, it led to a renewed effort by Black women for admission. By that October, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized Black women to be included in the WAVES, which was to be entirely integrated. Pickens and Wills were selected as the first recruits and enlisted in the WAVES on November 13, 1944. 

As we noted in the profile of Pickens, both women were sent to the WAVES training facility in New York City, where Wills became a classification test administrator for the enlisted. By the end of the war, more than 70 more African American women had joined the ranks of the WAVES. Wills was discharged from the Navy at the end of the war and later published a memoir about her experiences called “Navy Blue and Other Colors: A Memoir of Adventure and Happiness.” 
Here is an excerpt from the prologue: “On the morning of July 10, 1987, I was waiting for an elevator on the banquet floor of the Marriott Hotel in Chicago…It was my first time and first day ever to participate in a reunion of Navy women. I stood near the elevators, plotting how best to locate Chris, assistant to the reserve officer who was responsible for the logistics of this meeting. I had met her the night before and she had suggested that we go together to the memorial service to be held this morning in a nearby church. The service would honor all women of the Navy who had died in the year just passed.
“Suddenly a buxom woman of commander rank emerged from the elevator, stopped just before me, and looked startled. She said, through nearly clenched teeth, ‘Weren’t you the first, first…?’ and then faded away, unable to complete her query. Her companion, younger, of lower rank, and evidentally in better mental health, tried to help. ‘Go ahead. Just spit it out,’ she said, the first black officer in the WAVES?’ ‘Yes.’ The Commander repeated now, almost firmly, ‘The first black officer in the WAVES?’”When I answered ‘Yes,’ she said without inflection, ‘You’ll be on the dais at lunch.’ Several hours later I was there—on the dais. The commander, presiding, was at center stage behind the speaker’s stand….    
“The commander stood to introduce the dais guests and had no problem until she came to the very end—me. This time she was able to say without hesitation, ‘the first black’— but then, after a pause, she finished with ‘yeoman.’ Someone nearby must have sent her a strong signal because she corrected immediately, in a firm tone, to ‘officer.’ That morning in front of the elevators, when the commander had had such a difficult time asking me a simple question, I had thought: Forty-three years later and she still has not accepted the idea that we were all in there together. “Now, on the dais, as my anger rose, I thought of Harriet Pickens, my roommate at Northampton where we had trained. We had been roommates not only because we were the only black officers who had come in immediately when the Navy had invited us, but also because, by the time of our arrival three weeks after the class had begun, everybody else had roommates. Harriet used to say every morning during those arctic November and December risings when we would pry our frozen washcloths off the ends of the metal bed frames, ‘Here we go again.’
“After more than four decades, I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ In the intervening years, there must have been hundreds of African-American WAVES. There was something bizarre, I thought, while the speeches droned on, that this woman in charge had been left so far behind.’
Wills also became president of the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Auxiliary in Palm Coast, Fla. Her husband was Charles L. Thorpe. She died on January 18, 1998. A memorial service was held for her in Sag Harbor, N.Y.