Phila. museum showcases minorities in WWII

he question stunned Althea Hankins, a Germantown family physician on a flight from California to Philadelphia.

"You're a Negro, aren't you?" asked an older white man.

Taken aback by the outdated term, Hankins said, she replied, "Yes, I guess so."

Hankins said the stranger on that 1999 trip then told her that he collected memorabilia, and showed her an old pamphlet bearing the headline "Negro soldiers party - 5801 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania."

"I told him, 'That's impossible. My practice is located there,' " Hankins said.

But, of course, she was curious. So later that year, she had a wall removed that blocked the third floor of the building at Germantown Avenue and Price Street.

She found a vintage ballroom with a wooden floor, hidden behind that partition for many years and clearly large enough to have hosted the soldiers' party.

"I couldn't believe it. I decided that we had an opportunity here to do something totally different," Hankins said.

What she did was launch the Aces Museum, a 3,000- square-foot facility spread over the second and third floors above her community medical practice. The museum - admission is free - tells the stories of black servicemen in World World II through photographs, military medals, and memorabilia that include historical uniforms and other artifacts.

"It's a museum that includes all the ethnic groups that were underrepresented in the battle against fascism in World War II," Hankins said.

Hankins said her late father, Tommy D. Hankins, who she said served four tours of duty in Europe and Japan during the war, was an inspiration for the project.

She named the facility Aces because as a child growing up in Detroit, she said, she once asked her father whether it was true that whites called blacks "spades." Her father told her it was, and she replied: "Well, Daddy, if you had to be a spade, I know you were an ace."

Solomon Williams, codirector of the museum, noted that individual rooms are devoted to Hispanic, Asian and Native American veterans of the war. Posters also honor minority recipients of the Medal of Honor.

Williams said the ballroom, which has been outfitted with vintage tables and chairs and murals of black soldiers, harks back to the 1940s.

"This is how it was," Williams said as he walked into the ballroom while jazz flowed from a period radio. The room also contains a piano from that era that was found inside the building.

Researchers at the Germantown Historical Society identified the museum's ballroom as Parker Hall.

"It was a nightclub. It was like a USO place" for black soldiers, said Iris Fairfax, an official with the Germantown Historical Society.

Eugene Stackhouse, a past president of the society, said researchers found a few photographs of Parker Hall and an article about a serious fire there in 1903.

The museum is also the headquarters for the Philadelphia chapter of the National Association of Black Veterans, an advocacy group.

Since October, Hankins said, the museum has offered an educational program for children. The program, which features puppets and other play activities, "is exceeding our expectations. We've taken kids who were unruly, and now they say 'please' and 'thank you,' and they share."

Hankins declined to say how much it cost to create the museum, other than that "I put my heart and soul and every penny I have into this building."