The Netflix movie about an all-Black, all-female World War II battalion sent overseas has just snagged two five-star actresses.
Kerry Washington and Oprah Winfrey have enlisted in Tyler Perry‘s Six Triple Eight, along with Law & Order and the Kominsky Method vet Sam Waterston, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The based-on-real-life film is already underway, with a cast that includes Milauna Jackson, Ebony Obsidian, Kylie Jefferson, Shanice Shantay, Jay Reeves and Sarah Jeffery.
Officially, the real-life group was known as the U.S. Army’s 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion; 855 Black women, both enlisted and officers, were deployed to Europe after combat training to deal with a massive backlog of letters and packages sent back and forth between millions of the country’s fighting men and their loved ones back home.
Their diligence and a unique organizational system they created to track each soldier in theater was considered key to the morale of American GIs, and therefore the overall war effort.
Maj. Charity Adams was the group’s commanding officer, and when the war was over, she’d achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel — at the time the highest-ranking Black woman in the Army.
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
