The Remarkable History Behind Netflix’s The Six Triple Eight

The women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the largest unit of Black women to serve overseas during World War II, certainly put their stamp on the war effort—processing about 65,000 pieces of mail per shift. The roughly 850 officers and enlisted personnel were in charge of delivering mail from the home front to the soldiers fighting in the European theater from 1945 to 1946.

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Now, an operation that was totally behind the scenes is front-and-center in a major Hollywood production for the first time. The Netflix movie The Six Triple Eight, out Dec. 20 and directed by Tyler Perry, boasts a star-studded cast. Kerry Washington plays the leader of the battalion, Charity Adams, as she strives to prove that Black service members deserve the same respect and opportunities that white service members get. Sam Waterston plays President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, while Susan Sarandon plays First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. And Oprah Winfrey plays Mary McLeod Bethune, the first Black woman to run a federal agency, who briefed FDR on the issues that mattered to Black Americans.

The Six Triple Eight follows the story of Lena Derriecott King (Ebony Obsidian), a woman from the Philadelphia area who joins the Army hoping to become a nurse after her boyfriend is killed while serving overseas. King was a real person, as was her suitor, a man from her neighborhood named Abram. In the film, King’s mother, a caterer at a local synagogue, disapproves of the match, worried about the discrimination that her Black daughter could face dating a white Jewish man. After Abram goes overseas, King writes many letters to him that go unanswered—foreshadowing her later work with the 6888—until she finds out that he has died. In the most dramatic scene of the film, King’s colleagues find a letter that Abram wrote to her that never got delivered, and Adams says the discovery made her realize why their work organizing the mail was so important.

Here’s what to know about the real women who inspired the movie and their battalion’s major accomplishments.

What it was like to be in the 6888

The women of the 6888 had to overcome a lot of discrimination, despite boasting many high achievers. Adams, a native of Columbia, S.C., graduated from high school as Valedictorian and was a member of the first officer class of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). 

White women and Black women trained together, but they couldn’t sit next to each other on buses or share living quarters. The movie shows Black women soldiers donning gas masks in rooms filled with tear gas and climbing rope ladders as part of training, and yet, being asked to give up their seats in a theater. Those kinds of indignities were par for the course, according to an article about the 6888 by military history writer Kevin M. Hymel that inspired the film.

When Adams was deployed, she didn’t know she was going to be tasked with organizing mail until a sealed envelope was plopped on her lap mid-flight. In the film, Bethune is telling President Roosevelt that the troops trained by Adams are up for the task. 

The women of the 6888th battalion went straight to work in a dark warehouse in Birmingham, England, that used to be a school. The movie shows the 6888 women hurrying to turn it into an office. Apparently, in real life, the warehouse was overrun by rats, climbing over mail bags, according to Major General Mari K. Eder’s The Girls Who Stepped Out of Line: Untold Stories of the Women Who Changed the Course of World War II. 

“I know how this looks, ladies,” Adams said, according to Eder’s book, “And I know what you’re probably thinking. But we have a job to do, and we’re going to get it done. Now let’s get organized.” 

They had to deal with letters addressed to soldier’s nicknames, not real names, like “Junior, U.S. Army” or “Buster, U.S. Army.” Care packages often fell apart mid-transit, and the battalion was in charge of putting the contents back inside. 

“They clear the backlog faster than any civilians or military personnel who had been there before,” Lena S. Andrews, author of Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II, told TIME in 2023.

“By making sure all the mail got delivered, she really helped to keep up morale for troops in the European Theater,” Matthew F. Delmont, author of Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, told TIME in 2022.

Eder says some of the 6888 members found they had more freedom in England than in the U.S., where everything was segregated. They made friends with locals, and some even went on dates with English men.

After the war

After organizing 17 million pieces of mail, the 6888 was sent to France, where they had six months to clear up a two-year backlog of mail. The 6888 did it in three months. Adams was promoted to lieutenant colonel, making her the highest-ranking Black woman in the U.S. Army. 

After the war, the 6888 did some work in Paris organizing civilian mail and then the unit was deactivated in 1946. King stayed abroad for a bit, enrolling in design school in Leicester, England, and later lived in Las Vegas, Nevada for many years.

In 2022, the battalion was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the United States Congress. On one side of the medal is a portrait of Adams, and on the other is a large stack of letters and packages with the inscription “clearing the backlog.” In 2023, a U.S. Army base named after the Confederate General Robert E. Lee was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams, in honor of the 6888’s Adams and Arthur Gregg, another trailblazing African American in the Army.

The Six Triple Eight director Tyler Perry got to show King the movie shortly before she died. She watched it from a hospital bed. In a video he posted on Instagram, King says, “Thank you for reminding the world of the Black woman’s contribution.” King died Jan. 18, 2024, at the age of 100.

Two decades before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the 6888th battalion showed what Black women were capable of. “What we had was a large group of adult Negro women who had been victimized, in one way or another, by racial bias,” Adams wrote in her memoir. “This was one opportunity for us to stand together for a common cause.”