I am grateful to Stephen Goodell for his assistance in writing this paper.
He was a rising Black football star at the University of Southern California, a successful Army soldier with training in Japanese and counterintelligence, an outstanding pre-med student at Yale University, and a recently married man with a beautiful white wife. In spite of this, his mother had him committed in June 1949 to Camarillo Hospital for the Insane. Except for a few brief escapes, Edmond (Ed) Whitfield spent the remainder of his life as a mental health prisoner, either at Camarillo or at Napa State Hospital. What happened to turn this handsome, successful young Black man into a figure whom the newspapers referred to as a “violent patient,” “maniac,” and “psycho”? Ed could not give any reason for his change in character. “I’m not angry at any one,” he argued in one brief interview, “only the circumstances which placed me in this position. I have no feeling against society….”2
Indeed, Ed had always appeared to be one of those young Black men who would succeed in America despite the severe societal restrictions of the nation’s Jim Crow Laws. He was born
on December 5, 1924, in Kansas City, Kansas.3 His father, Luther T. Whitfield, was a postal employee, his mother, Ella née Smith, was a school teacher and president of the PTA. Ed was the second of their five children.
The newspaper The Call, a weekly newspaper that covered the activities and achievements of the Black population in Kansas and Missouri, frequently mentioned Ed in its pages. There one learns that he and his older sister Geraldine were honor roll students throughout elementary and middle school. Ed took music lessons, was a member of the Harmony Club, and performed in public as part of an instrumental trio. In a Middle School challenge, he was recognized for reading 20 books beyond his regular class assignments, and he was a featured speaker at his graduation. He continued to excel as a student at Sumner High School, where he became a member of the National Honor Society in his sophomore year. He was an active member of the Hi-Y (High School YMCA) and served as spokesman to local churches for the Community Chest Drive.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1940. Ed’s father continued working for the postal service, while his mother worked at a job placement office. She also ran a small eatery that was part of a chain of budget restaurants opened by Father Divine and the Peace Mission, and she got all her children involved in helping out there.
The family even had contacts with Hollywood. Ed’s sister Geraldine was given roles in two “sepia” films (films made by and for Blacks). And his mother became close friends with
actress Hattie McDaniel, who had just won an Oscar for her role in Gone with the Wind.
Ed and his sister entered the the University of Southern California; this was their first experience in a non-segregated school setting. This did not deter them; in his mother’s words, Ed continued to experience “an unbroken series of triumphs.” By the end of his junior year he had made his mark as the only Black on the USC Junior Varsity football team. Starring as a stellar halfback and defensive safety on the unbeaten 1943 Junior Varsity team, he was making a strong bid for varsity honors at the school’s spring practice in 1944. Majoring in pre-med, he boasted a B+ grade point average, and was one of the first Blacks to become a member of the university’s Pre-Med Fraternity. He was also steadily dating Sadie Weems, a fellow student majoring in fine arts. They made a handsome Black couple: she, the beautiful and gifted artist, and he, the husky 6’ 2” football star.
Ed’s life, however, changed after he was drafted into the US Army on August 9, 1944. We know that he must have performed well above average in the Army because, following his basic training at Camp Lee, Virginia, he was promoted to corporal and selected to study Japanese in an advanced program that was part of the Army’s Specialized Training Program at Yale University. He began his studies there in November 1944 and remained there until May 1945. During the two terms he completed at Yale, he received grade point averages of 89 and 88, well above average, and was designated for scholastic excellence. And in January 1945 he became engaged to Sadie Weems.
Soon after that, however, he became acquainted with a white student at Yale: Dorothy Atcheson Kendall, a physical education teacher, who was enrolled in a sports course at the university. She and Ed shared both a love of sports and a mutual interest in Japan, and they began dating.
Dorothy Atcheson Kendall was a rather remarkable woman. She was the daughter of a traveling salesman and was born and raised in Stoneham, Massachusetts. She was 9 years older than Ed, a graduate of the Bouvé Boston School of Physical Education, who, through the school’s affiliation with Simmons College in Boston, also earned a degree in nursing and health sciences from that institution. Following graduation she took a teaching position in Japan at the Taliko Shihomba, a YWCA-affiliated school patterned after the Bouvé-Boston school. She had returned to the States right after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Before things got too serious between them, Ed was removed from his Yale program. He had scarcely begun his third term of study when he was reassigned to Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and enrolled in its 30th class. The dates explain everything: the new term at Yale began on May 7, 1945, and in the early hours of that day Germany signed an instrument of unconditional surrender to the Allies. A day later, the official document, with some additions and alterations, was signed in Berlin. The Army’s training programs were being reevaluated and shifts were being made in program and personnel direction. At Camp Ritchie, for example, the program emphasis changed from military intelligence training for Germany to military intelligence training for Japan. And Ritchie also increased the number of Blacks assigned to train as Ritchie Boys. Before this, Ritchie had never had more than two Blacks in any of its classes. But now Ritchie’s 30th class had eleven Black students.4 Eight of them were trained in Counterintelligence, three in Japanese Order of Battle.
Ed’s Ritchie classes began on May 18th and ran through July 17, 1945. Ed was one of the Black students selected to specialize in counterintelligence, perhaps with the notion that the war with Japan would soon be over and they could be assigned there for the postwar occupation. Following the completion of their coursework, however, most of the eight were not held for transfer to Japan but were assigned to other American camps. Five of the eleven blacks in his class were promoted to Sergeant; Ed remained a corporal and was sent back to Camp Lee.
Camp Lee, named for the Confederate General Robert E. Lee, served as the home of the Quartermaster Replacement Training Center. Quartermasters were the backbone of army operations, since they supervised logistics and requisitions, managed the storage of the requisitioned goods, and most importantly, distributed supplies and provisions to the men in the field. Since the Army did not allow Blacks to rise above the status of non-commissioned officer, the young officer trainees in the Quartermaster program were all white. Those who performed the supply and service functions on the battlefield—the Quartermaster Corps—were overwhelmingly Black. As one white officer who was assigned to command a Black supply company in France, described it, on the battlefield these men were responsible for “hauling mines, explosives, bridges, wounded, ammunition, rations, and any damn thing else they have a notion to use us for.”5 One Black Quartermaster Corps veteran, Benjamin Berry, remarked that, although he helped transport bombs, food, gasoline and water to soldiers on the front lines, he had very little protection. “We had rifles, but we never had any ammunition,” he recalled. 6
The corpsmen, too, had to go through intensive training before being sent into the field. The wartime mechanization of the army required advanced skills in driving, maintenance, and vehicle repair. The training was vigorous and difficult, since the Black corpsmen not only had to learn to drive a variety of vehicles over the roughest terrain, but also to maintain and service the same variety of vehicle. Ed was assigned to transportation security at Quartermaster Headquarters.
It was not a job he enjoyed. But at Camp Lee he could at least return to football. There he befriended Levi Jackson, a young Black football player from New Haven, Connecticut, whose extraordinary skills as a running back caused Camp Lee, for the first time that fall season, to end its Jim Crow policy and allow Black players to play with the Camp Lee “Travelers.” Ed, too, was allowed onto the team as running halfback and reserve end.
He was discharged from the Army on February 13, 1946.
Yale had made a promise to those servicemen who had trained at Yale during the war that they could return to study at the university upon completion of their military service without having to go through the normal application process. Ed returned to Yale, and began a pre-med course of study. Young Levi Jackson entered Yale under the GI bill as a freshman, and, for a brief time, he and Ed were roommates. Although Levi would once again break racial barriers by joining Yale’s all-white football team and, in November 1948, become its first Black captain, he was very unsure of his academic footing. “I had the feeling that I did not belong in a rich man’s institution,” he said. “I’m a high school graduate and I’m going to school with a lot of prep school grads who went to Choate and Exeter.”7 Classmates recalled that Ed helped tutor Levi during his first year of study.
That year Ed also renewed his relationship with Dorothy Kendall. It rapidly grew serious. He broke off his engagement with Sadie Weems and, although family and friends advised against it, he and Dorothy married in January 1947.
Despite their two-year acquaintance, things changed shortly after the wedding. Ed’s grades had been excellent until then, but now he lost interest in his studies and his grades dropped accordingly. The professors wrote to inform his mother of their concern for him. He was, they
told her, “a man of great intelligence and sensitivity” but had become distracted to the point that “he could not face so commonplace an event as taking a walk with his wife.”8 When his depression continued, Ed and Dorothy made the decision to move to Los Angeles, where Ed would be close to his family and where, it was hoped, he could be restored to good mental health. He dropped out of Yale, and Ed and Dorothy came to Los Angeles in November1948.
Unfortunately, his “depressed mental condition” intensified, and his behavior became highly unpredictable. His mother admitted that neither she nor Dorothy was able to help him, and she had him committed to the Camarillo State Hospital for the Insane in June, 1949, about 50 miles up the coast from Los Angeles.
Ed was not imprisoned there for long. He learned in July that Dorothy was pregnant, and he escaped from the facility in order to be with her. He was allowed to remain free for the birth of his son, in the hope that this might help stabilize his condition. It did not, and his mother had him recommitted to Camarillo in March, 1950.
Three more escapes followed, the first a mere week after his March recommitment. In that attempt Ed headed north, and was captured about 44 miles northeast of the hospital in Castaic. Neither this nor the earlier escape were covered by the newspapers.
But the third escape in late April became a nation-wide event, watched in person by hundreds of onlookers and vicariously by millions of readers through nationwide newspaper coverage that included photos of his pursuit and capture.
Once again, Ed headed north. His plan for this escape was to reach Seattle, Washington, where he hoped to be joined by his wife and son; failing that he would go on to a friend’s home in Vancouver. This time his flight lasted a little over a week. During this time he traveled over 350 miles, partly on foot and partly by bus, and disembarked just north of San Francisco at the bus depot in Marin City. The Camarillo Hospital had alerted the local sheriff there to be on the lookout for him, since he was expected to call for a money order there. He
was spotted by a deputy sheriff, but Ed saw the officer’s uniform and dashed out of the station, across the highway, and down to Richardson Bay. “Go ahead and shoot,” he yelled, as the deputy sheriff fired four wanting shots in his direction. He took off his shoes, tied his pants high up on the legs and waded out into the mud flats of the bay in the direction of De Silva Island, about half a mile away. All traffic was halted; it was estimated that at least 2,000 people watched for two hours as deputies commandeered a barge, which ran aground in the mud about a quarter mile from where Ed was standing. The deputies then launched a skiff from the barge which also ran aground. Ed, meanwhile, walked “leisurely on a zig-zag course, taunt[ing] ‘Come and get me, you fools’.” Two deputy sheriffs and the bus station agent then jumped into the knee-deep mud and managed to herd Ed toward shore. There other deputies were awaiting him, and Ed was subdued after a brief fist fight.
He was taken to the Marin County Jail in San Rafael and the family was alerted of his capture. Dorothy immediately set off to San Rafael with their son, but when she arrived she learned that Ed had already been picked up by Napa State Hospital authorities. There he was to be held until he could be returned to Camarillo. Before he was removed to Napa he was asked by the press about the motivation for his escape; he stated that, rather than treatment, “What I need more than anything else is a chance for a normal married life.”10
Instead, Ed was taken to the Napa State Hospital and confined in a violent ward. But he managed a fourth escape just one month later.
This time, Ed was being transferred to a new unit of the Napa hospital compound. As new furniture was being moved into his room, Ed managed to reach the door, push the attendant aside, and dash down the corridor, where he pushed aside another attendant and made his escape from the building. Although he was pursued by several staff members, he easily outdistanced them and disappeared in the scrub oak and manzanita brush of the Napa hills. The assistant superintendent of the hospital issued an all-points bulletin stating that, because Ed was “delusional and unpredictable,” he should be considered unarmed but dangerous. Roadblocks were set up throughout the county, posses combed the hillsides, and three private planes criss-crossed the Napa hills in an effort to spot Ed from the air. A representative of the Napa County sheriff’s office predicted that Ed “could hide out there for weeks if he can find something to eat.”11
Instead, he was captured after only 28 hours by two sheriff’s deputies who saw him walking along the county road five miles east of Napa. They drove alongside him and opened their car door. “You’d better get in, Ed,” one of the officers said.12 Ed obediently did so, telling the officers that he was “tired and hungry” after “running through the brush and looking for the road to Los Angeles.”13 He was also apologetic. “I’m ashamed I caused so much commotion,” he said, but he had just wanted to go home to see his mother.14
Ed had begun his marriage with joy. What were the reasons for his descent into depression and delusion? Ed’s and Dorothy’s families gave different theories as to the cause of Ed’s illness. Dorothy’s father claimed that he had “suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of over-study.”15 That seems at first glance to be unlikely, since Ed had always been an honors student. The only argument in favor of this thesis might be that it was the stress of combining his demanding medical studies with the adjustment to married life that proved debilitating.
Ed’s mother was firmly convinced that his mixed racial marriage was the root of the problem. Ed had been fine until he had married Dorothy, she said, arguing, “Young people have a hard enough time as it is,” but “the world is not ready for inter-racial marriages.”16 The nation’s newspapers apparently agreed. Headlines screamed “Marriage to White Girl Blamed for Negro’s Mental Crack-up” (Burlington Daily News, (VT, 1 May 1, 1950) and “Negro Patient Wed to White Girl Is Hunted” (New York Daily News, June 1, 1950).
We do not know what the relationship between Dorothy and Ed’s mother was like, but it seems reasonable that his mother would have been upset right from the beginning that Ed married a white woman from New England rather than the talented and beautiful Black girl to whom he’d been engaged. And she may have projected this disappointment onto Dorothy as the source of Ed’s breakdown.
We know practically nothing about Dorothy’s thoughts on her husband’s breakdown; she gave no interviews during this trying period. What does seem apparent is Dorothy’s commitment to trying to make the marriage work. She visited him at the Camarillo facility, she rushed up to see him after his spectacular capture in Marin City, and she remained living in Los Angeles until it became quite clear in 1951 that Ed was never going to get better. Even so, she waited another two years before petitioning the court for a divorce, and she retained Ed’s last name as her own.
Ed’s mental illness had, of course, placed intense strains on Ed and Dorothy’s marriage, but Ed never placed any blame on Dorothy and denied vehemently that “the prejudices of society against interracial marriage” had anything to do with its breakdown. “Both my wife and I had liberal backgrounds,” he said. “Dorothy, during our marriage, never showed any awareness of any differences. Nor have I any feeling against society or white people.” “Nor did our marriage actually break up,” he added. “It has been one in which we have spent time together at irregular intervals. My only hope now is that my wife and son are not in want.”
He insisted that “the only difficulty has been within myself. […] I’m not angry at any one—only the circumstances which placed me in this position. I have no feeling against society….” As for his escape attempts: “The confinement was worse than my experiences in Army counterintelligence. But confinement, I suppose, is a purely relative matter….”17
Ed’s words suggest that his “mental breakdown” may have been a case of PTSD—Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder. Certainly he shared its symptoms (severe depression, inability to function in everyday life, sudden, irrational outbursts and fight/flight responses). While not yet properly recognized by the military in World War II (or by civilian psychiatrists), it was known only as a problem for combat veterans who were diagnosed as experiencing what was called “battle fatigue.” Today it is recognized as a disorder that can affect a person of any age or sex who has experienced a severe traumatic experience—or repeated traumatic experiences—in their past.
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But if Ed’s mental breakdown seems to mimic the symptoms of PTSD, what, then was the single severe trauma, or the pattern of traumatic events, that caused it? And why did his marriage to Dorothy trigger his illness? What “circumstances” caused it?
We cannot be certain of the pressures Ed felt, but two possibilities suggest themselves, and both would seem to lend credence to the causes named by Ed’s father-in-law and by his mother.
The first is his record. Ed was always an honor student at his all-Black high school. In Los Angeles he was one of a tiny fraction of Black students at what was essentially a lily-white university. He achieved amazing success, both as an honor’s student in pre-med—an admittedly challenging field of study—and as an athlete so talented that the university let down its racial barriers and made him a member of its junior varsity football team. LA’s Black newspaper featured Ed’s remarkable success, by publishing his picture under the headline “Hopeful.” This headline, read in retrospect, seems to be a cruel irony.
In the Army, Ed, too, broke barriers. He was selected for a rigorous program in Japanese studies at one of America’s leading universities with the notation that he was designated for academic excellence; he was selected for intense training in Counterintelligence as one of only 32 Black soldiers out of a total of nearly 20,000 “Ritchie Boys.” One can only imagine the stress of having to “prove” himself in the white world; he had to be more exceptional than his white counterparts in order to be accepted by white society.
But if, as Ed himself stated, “circumstances” caused his breakdown, and his “experiences” in counterintelligence were bad ones, this suggests that he had found that he was one of those Blacks who could not cross all the barriers erected by a Jim Crow society. It is here that his mother’s theory gains credence. It is interesting to note that Ed struggled with these circumstances especially when other Blacks achieved what he could not. At Camp Ritchie, five of his fellow Black students were promoted to sergeant; he was not. Nor did any of his service at Camp Lee gain him a promotion. While Levi Jackson’s athletic prowess at Camp Lee helped him leave the Army with the rank of sergeant, Ed was discharged at the end of the war with the rank of corporal.
The University of Southern California had at least recognized Ed’s achievements. But he had been able to achieve no official recognition from the US Army: not for his excellent grades in Japanese studies at Yale, not for his advanced training in military intelligence at Camp Ritchie, and not for his honorable service at Camp Lee. One wonders if the reason for Ed’s
deep depression and loss of interest in his studies may have been caused by seeing other Blacks effortlessly achieve what he could not. And one wonders if his breakdown was triggered, not by his marriage to a white woman, but by seeing his young friend Levi Jackson, an admittedly weaker student, achieve national recognition by breaking racial barriers at Yale to become a member and then captain of its football team.18
After his recapture on a Napa roadway, Ed didn’t attempt any more escapes, and his name disappeared from newspapers and from public memory except for one brief mention in a legal hearing as “an incompetent person.”19 When his mother died in 1959, his older sister Geraldine took over her legal affairs and assumed the role of Ed’s legal guardian. She was an elementary school teacher, and, although she had, at one time, been engaged, she had never married. Ed died in 1977; she died in 1988.
The other figures with whom Ed had been emotionally involved all moved on with their lives. His former fiancée Sadie Weems became a member of the Allied Arts league of Los Angeles, went on to get a master’s degree in education and married Willie Patterson, an LA fireman. Levi Jackson, after integrating the football teams at Camp Lee and at Yale University, went on to become the first Black executive at Ford Motor Company.
Ed’s wife Dorothy moved to Hawaii in 1951, to be near her brother Paul. She took her one-year-old son with her. She had already acquired a job there as director of Honolulu’s YWCA health education department. There she initiated and strengthened programs ranging from women’s gymnastics to children’s dance classes. From there she moved into an executive position with the Girl Scouts of Oahu before landing a job as executive Director of the Hawaii Council of Camp Fire Girls. She earned a Mater’s Degree in Social Work from the University of Hawaii when she was in her late 40s. Finally, in 1966, at age 51, she got married again, to a Black social worker living in Oregon. Ed’s son Steven, now 16 years old, served as witness.
Beverley Driver Eddy
September 2024
“Negro Ex-Star of USC Talks of Breakdown,” The San Francisco Examiner, 30 Apr. 1950.
When Edmond filled out his registration form for the draft, he stated that his birthplace was Kansas City, Kansas; however, the 1940 US Census states that his birthplace was Kansas City, Missouri.
32 Blacks have been documented as Ritchie Boys.
Lawrence Cane, Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War, ed. David E. cane, Judy Barrett Litoff, and David C. Smith. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003, 94.
Wakisha Bailey, “World War II veteran Benjamin Berry celebrates 100th birthday.” 21 Sept. 2023. https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/wwii-veteran-benjamin-berry-100th-birthday
Richard Goldstein, “Levi Jackson, a Pioneer at Yale, Is Dead at 74,” The New York Times, 29 Dec. 2000, C-10.
“Negro Ex-Star of USC Talks of Breakdown,” The San Francisco Examiner, 30 April, 24.
“Chase Ends in Mud Flat, Oakland Tribune (CA), 29 Apr. 1950, 3.
“Escapee Is Sent To Napa Hospital After Flight Fails,” Daily Independent Journal (San Rafael, CA), 1 May 1950, 24.
“Napa Is Combed For fugitive Mental Patient,” The Sacramento Bee, 31 May 1950, 28.
“Caught After Fourth Escape,” The San Bernardino County Sun, 1 June 1950, 1.
“Maniac Just Wanted to Visit Mother,” The Oakland Post Enquirer, 1 June 1950, 4.
“Caught After Fourth Escape,” The San Bernardino County Sun, 1 June, 1950, 1.
“Stoneham, April 30,” The Boston Globe, 1 May 1950
“Napa Escapee Gives Up: Had Wanted to Go Home,” The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, CA), 1 June 1950, 1.
“Negro Ex-Star of USC Talks of Breakdown,” The San Francisco Examiner, 30 April 1950, 24.
It's interesting to note that in 1947 Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers publicly stated that he was interested in bring a Negro pitcher Dan Bankhead, up to the big leagues and thus integrate the team—the newspaper sports pages are full of stories about that prospective titanic move. That didn't happen before Rickey did, indeed, integrate the Dodgers, in the same year, with 2nd baseman Jackie Robinson. Which brought about the first cadre of African Americans entering the all-white Major Leagues, all within the year, including Larry Doby, Henry Thompson, Willard Brown, and Bankhead.
“Notice of Hearing of Petition to Borrow Money and Execute a Mortgage,” California Eagle (LA), 26 July 1962, 11.
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