Last updated: July 26, 2024
Person
George Fields
The Michigan Chronicle
Quick Facts
Significance:
Valet to Franklin Roosevelt
Place of Birth:
Lyles Station, Indiana
Date of Birth:
July 21, 1911
Date of Death:
1991
George Clinton Fields (1911-1991) was the fifth of seven children of Clinton and Mary Fields. George was born 21 July 1911 in the small all-Black community of Lyles Station in Southern Indiana. The town grew from a place of settlement for free Blacks and runaway slaves in the early 1840s. George’s father ran a general store and his mother a boarding house inhabited by railroad hands. They moved their family to Indianapolis sometime before 1920. George was working as a butler at the White House with his brother, Alonzo Fields, when about 1938 he was advanced to President Roosevelt’s valet. (He appears on the 1940 census as one of four servants living in the White House.)
His decision to join the Navy came while accompanying FDR on an inspection tour of the U.S. Naval Training Station at Great Lakes, Illinois in 1942. The night before he left the White House, Roosevelt grasped his hand and said, “Good luck to you, George. I know you’ll do just as good a job for the navy as you’ve done for me.”1 Following graduation, he earned rank of Seaman First Class aboard the USS Patuxent (AO-44). After the war, George worked as an accountant for the Internal Revenue Service. He later moved to Chicago where he married and had two children. George died in 1991.
NOTES
1 The Michigan Chronicle. (Detroit, Mich.), October 9, 1943, p. 9.