Robert Child Author Interview - "Immortal Valor: The Black Medal of Honor Winners of World War II"

Since the start of the pandemic in early 2020, the St. Louis County Library has turned their regular live, in-person series of author talks into a virtual author series, by necessity. They have always had a broad range of nationally and internationally known authors come to St. Louis for their talks when the writers have been on tour.

Previously with HEC Media and the library, I produced and podcast hosted a series called “Talking With Authors” where many of the authors that they were about to speak to would come for an in-studio conversation on camera and talk about their work and their process.

Now I’m working with the library doing the on-camera interviews myself and performing the video edits too.

This is one of the more recent interviews that I conducted. It was targeted for the 2022 iteration of Black History Month here in the United States. The author is Robert Child (who’s also an Emmy nominated screenwriter & TV producer and many other things), and we talked about his latest book “Immortal Valor: The Black Medal of Honor Winners of World War II”.

For some background, the Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration awarded to US soldiers. During World War II, upwards of 450 Medals of Honor were awarded. It wasn’t until more than 50 years after V.E. Day that the names of Charles L. Thomas, Vernon J. Baker, Willy James Jr., Edward A. Carter Jr., George Watson, Ruben Rivers, & John Fox were added to the list. Why? Because these men were Black. In the still racially segregated American military of the early 1940s, there was a silent policy of never allowing any Black soldiers to be recommended for a Medal of Honor. In the book, Child explores the WW II lives of 7 black men that only came to light after a special 1993 commission combed through half a century of old records.

In this interview conducted in January of 2022, we talk about the soldiers, and the policies and people that kept them from being recognized for so long.

And if you’d like to see any of the other author interviews that I’ve don in this series, just go to my Author Interviews Page here.