N.J. ‘Six Triple Eight’ star Shanice Shantay on film debut, trailblazing World War II battalion

Dec. 3 has become a day of consequence in Shanice Shantay’s life.

On Dec. 3, 2015, the New Jersey actor made her TV debut as Dorothy Gale in “The Wiz Live!” on NBC.

And on Dec. 3, 2024, she attended the premiere of her first movie, “The Six Triple Eight.”

The film, directed by Tyler Perry and starring Kerry Washington, is based on real World War II history. The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion was the only Women’s Army Corps unit of Black women and women of color who served in Europe during the war.

Shantay has a standout supporting role in the movie, which is out on Netflix Friday (Dec. 20).

Now, not long after throngs of moviegoers flocked to see the film adaptation of “Wicked,” she’s reflecting on the nine years since her own breakthrough in Oz.

“I always am interested in the in-between,” she tells NJ Advance Media.

Shantay, who was first publicly known as Shanice Williams, grew up in Jersey City and Rahway before landing the lead in “The Wiz Live!,” an adaptation of the 1975 musical based on L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.” She joined a cast that included fellow Jersey star Queen Latifah as the Wiz; Mary J. Blige as Evillene, the Wicked Witch; David Alan Grier as the Cowardly Lion; Stephanie Mills (the original Dorothy on Broadway) as Auntie Em; and Uzo Aduba as Glinda, the Good Witch of the South.

The fact that her film debut arrives nearly a decade after that shining musical moment means she had plenty of space for self-discovery.

“I hear celebrity stories and they’re like ‘yeah, two years later, I booked my my big role,’” Shantay says. “And I’m like, well, my in-between lasted about nine years. And though I did do TV shows, I did theater … my career never took off the way that, in my heart, I expected it to after ‘The Wiz Live!’ And I think the entire industry expected my career to take off … it moved very slowly. I had highs and I had lows, but I realized that in those nine years, I had time to actually find out who I was.”

The Rahway High School alum, now 28, was cast in “The Wiz Live!” when she was 18. She’s done a lot of living since then.

“When you look at the industry and what it does to people, you have to be really strong and confident in who you are,” she says. “You have to have strong values. You have to know what you believe in. And in these nine years, I feel like God has been preparing me to come back into the industry in a way where I’m confident and I can be a light in the industry.”

Shantay is now part of a cast that includes Oprah Winfrey and Edison’s own Susan Sarandon. The Perry film was released in select theaters ahead of the Netflix premiere.

Shantay’s character, Johnnie Mae Burton, is a member of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion — nicknamed the Six Triple Eight — led by Kerry Washington’s Maj. Charity Adams, a U.S. Army officer who became the highest-ranking Black woman in World War II.

The Six Triple Eight was able to do what others couldn’t: untangle the Army’s massive backlog of mail — the lone connection and lifeline soldiers had to their families and loved ones. And what a job it was. They found hangar upon hangar stuffed with unsorted mail, including damaged care packages intended for soldiers but missing crucial identifying marks, like names and addresses.

Perry shows how the 855 women of the battalion dealt with segregation, racism, misogyny and low expectations for their work.

“Make no mistake, ladies,” Washington’s Adams tells the women in the film. “They did not send us because they thought we could do it. We are here because they are sure we cannot. They have only given us a six-month ticking clock, and I thought that was a long time until I realized the magnitude of this situation. When there is no mail there is low morale, but all that said, this is our mission and we will not fail.”

The battalion’s motto: “No mail, low morale.”

“If our soldiers have low morale, they have no fight,” Adams says in the film.

Despite the six-month timetable, the women of the Six Triple Eight, who were deployed to Birmingham, England, processed 17 million pieces of mail in 90 days before being sent to Rouen, France, where they tackled another backlog.

And the mission was not without mortal peril. In July 1945, three soldiers from the 6888th were killed in a car accident when their jeep was overturned while they were on duty. As the film shows, the Army did not pay for their burial, so members of the battalion took up a collection. They are buried at Normandy American Cemetery near Omaha Beach.

Becoming a hero

Shantay’s character, the unapologetically expressive Johnnie Mae, worked at a cotton mill before joining the battalion.

“You’re not a nice person at all,” one of her peers says in the film.

“I’m honest,” she replies.

“I knew right away that I had Johnie Mae inside of me and that it wasn’t going to be hard to bring her up,” Shantay says.

“She just showed these were human women who came to the Army for many different reasons. Some of them just wanted to escape the trauma that they were experiencing at home. Some of them, they were funny, they were outspoken, they were sensual, they were excited to talk to men. These were regular women and I wanted to really just have a fun time with her so that people could see anybody can become a hero.”

During the production of “The Six Triple Eight,” Shantay spent one day filming in Chattanooga, Tennessee. That was enough for her to fall in love with the city — it’s where she currently lives. But the former Los Angeles resident was in her first home state when she got the opportunity to audition for the film.

“I was in New Jersey staying at my grandmother’s house because my friend was getting married, so I flew out there for her bachelorette,” she says. “And the thing about my grandma’s house is that’s where my creativity was born, because you can have a one-woman solo show for an hour where you’re singing and screaming in the mirror and dancing, and nobody will ever tell you to shut up. They’ll root you on at the end of it. My aunt’s kids are there right now, 28 years later, doing the same thing, just living loud in that house.”

But that’s also why she nearly turned down the chance to submit a self-tape for the audition.

She didn’t think she was in the right environment to do what she had to do. Her aunt advised her to at least read the script before passing. When she did, she knew she had to go out for the role.

“I never heard that story,” Shantay says of the battalion’s part in the war. Neither had most of the cast.

So she went to her father’s house and taped her audition.

“There’s so many people who we don’t know about who have made a huge impact in our country,” Shantay says. “And when I read the story, I was just like ‘yeah, they deserve a movie. They deserve for a light to be shined on their story.’”

Perry, who wrote the script, based the story on “Fighting a Two-Front War,” Kevin M. Hymel’s 2019 article in WWII History Magazine. The article centers on Cpl. Lena Derriecott, who is portrayed by actor Ebony Obsidian in the film.

After producer Carlota Espinosa acquired the movie rights to the article and producer Nicole Avant brought Perry the project, he met with Derriecott, one of the living members of the Six Triple Eight, at her home in Las Vegas. The stories she told him informed the trajectory of the story, which follows her friendship with a boy named Abram who goes off to war. His death moved her to serve in the military.

Lena Derriecott King, a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal alongside the rest of the battalion in 2022, died in January, at 100. Her voice lives on in the film.

“We were treated better in Europe than we were when we returned back to the United States,” she says at the end of the movie.

The names of the members of the battalion scroll onscreen with footage of the real Six Triple Eight. Most did not receive recognition for their efforts during their lifetimes. The gold medal celebrated their contributions when there were few remaining.

A monument to the battalion was dedicated at Buffalo Soldier Monument Park at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 2018. And in 2023, Fort Lee Army base in Virginia (named for the Confederate general) was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams, honoring Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg (who in 1977 became the first African American Army officer to attain that rank) and Lt. Col. Charity Adams Earley, who died in 2002.

To prepare for the movie, which filmed in the U.S. and England, Shantay read Adams’ 1995 memoir “One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC.”

She says Perry’s take on the history is “going to make people knowledgeable about what they did, and that’s all we can ask for.”

A family legacy, and the ‘magic’ of Jersey

Growing up in Rahway, Shantay wasn’t aware of the history of the Six Triple Eight, but she comes from a family of postal workers.

“My grandmother on my mother’s side worked at the post office mostly her whole life,” she says. “She has four daughters. Every single one of them worked at the post office, including my mother. And my grandfather, my father’s father, worked at the post office until the day he died … So does my aunt on my father’s side.”

For Shantay, knowing specifically that her mother would get to watch her in this film added another layer to telling the story.

“It was really important to her because I don’t even know if she knows the impact of what a letter that somebody who’s been waiting to hear from someone they love does … the importance of that,” she says. “And I think when she watched it at the premiere … she was able to see, like ‘wow, what I have done for all these years, it has so much value to it,’ and what these women did has so much value to it.”

Shantay credits her Jersey family and community with uplifting her through her career.

“My family has been my backbone since I was in middle school at Ezra L. Nolan (No.) 40 School in Jersey City,” she says. “That was my very first time on stage. I played Pepper in ‘Annie,’ and they would just come out in the masses. All my family, my church, they always supported me and when things were tough for me in this industry in the nine-year period, they always reminded me of how talented I was and never give up.”

“I feel like there is a magic in New Jersey,” she says, recalling her formative years.

Shantay lived in Greenville, Jersey City before she moved to Rahway her freshman year of high school.

“Moving to Rahway kind of saved me,” she says.

Because when she was in eighth grade, her musical theater teacher said they were quitting.

“I said ‘fine, I’m done with musical theater. I’m going to do something cooler. I’m going to do sports,’” Shantay says. “And Rahway High School had put $30 million into building up their musical theater program the year after I got there. They just took me and they’re like ‘no, this is what you’re made for.’”

She also spent summers in the musical theater conservatory at Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, where she was nominated for a Rising Star Award her senior year.

“Being there, I never had a doubt that I would end up on a stage somewhere, living my dreams out, because it was just so magical,” Shantay says.

Her high school musical theater teachers, Alison Dooley and Robert Van Wyk, became like family, driving her to her Paper Mill audition and advocating for her to be in rehearsals no matter what. They told Shantay’s mother that she had something special.

It was the support of everyone in Rahway who championed her star turn in “The Wiz” that helped jumpstart her career in 2015. Shantay, whose family calls her Tweety (”I was born with a really big head and a small body”), remembers the advice her aunt gave her before she walked into the open audition:

“Tweety, show them your personality and just be yourself.”

It must’ve worked, because Shantay bested hundreds of actors for the role — her very first professional gig. The timing seemed heaven-sent: she had just quit college in LA.

“I truly believe what will make people love you and want to hire you and give you a career in any field is you just truly being yourself and giving what you have to offer, what God put in your heart to offer the world,” she says.

Prior to the Netflix movie, she made her off-Broadway debut in 2018 with the play “Little Rock,” about the Little Rock Nine, and had a recurring role in the NBC musical comedy series “Perfect Harmony.” The show, which ran for one season in 2019 and 2020, starred Bradley Whitford as a music professor who becomes choir director at a rural church.

“The other thing about being from New Jersey that’s so important is we just have that energy of, like, people keeping it real with you,” Shantay says. “My family from New Jersey has always kept me down-to-earth, and that was my biggest adjustment moving to Los Angeles. People in New Jersey … they tell you the truth and it’s tough love, but it’s love at the end of the day, and I feel like my New Jersey roots have just helped me through everything.”

She still works with the same vocal coach she’s had since sophomore year of high school.

“After ‘The Wiz’ she said ‘you will never ever pay me for another lesson, I will always coach you for free,’” the actor says.

Sure enough, Shantay worked with her on a song she sings in “The Six Triple Eight.”

Oprah Winfrey plays Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the National Council of Negro Women, the sole woman in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet and friend of first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, played by Susan Sarandon.

The high-profile casting of Washington, Winfrey and Sarandon made her flash back to when she was the fresh face cast in “The Wiz” alongside greats like Latifah and Blige.

“There was a peace about it in my heart,” she says of the Perry film. “Like ‘well, yes, I know I’m supposed to be here, and I know I’m meant to do things with them. I know this is right.’”

“The Six Triple Eight,” rated PG-13, runs 2 hours and 9 minutes and is streaming on Netflix starting Friday, Dec. 20.