THEY WERE MEMBERS OF THE SAME “greatest generation,” the age group that fought “the good war.”1 When the United States entered the Second World War, John Hope Franklin was twenty-six years old. Robert Byrd was twenty-four. Franklin, who had just earned his doctorate in history at Harvard University, was starting to teach in Raleigh, North Carolina, at St. Augustine’s College, a historically black institution. Byrd, who is currently the senior U.S. senator from West Virginia, was beginning to work as a welder building ships in a construction yard in Baltimore, Maryland.
Neither served in the military. Franklin sought to enlist. Nearly a half century after Pearl Harbor, at the close of a distinguished career that culminated at the University of Chicago and Duke University, he recalled his effort to join up:
How best to serve became the question uppermost in my mind. The question appeared to have been answered by the United States Navy, which ran a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper. There was a shortage of personnel to handle the crush of paperwork, the navy stated; and men who could type, take shorthand, operate simple business machines, and perform other office chores could look forward to early promotion. I rushed down to the recruitment office and volunteered my services to relieve the navy of its distress.2
The offer was not accepted. “The recruiter looked at me with what appeared to be a combination of incredulity and distress. . . . He simply said I was lacking in one qualification and that was color.” After further nasty experiences, including the refusal of a doctor at a Tulsa induction center to draw his blood, Franklin successfully avoided the draft for the remainder of the war, having concluded that “the United States, however much it was devoted to protecting the freedoms and rights of Europeans, had no respect for me, no interest in my well-being, and not even a desire to utilize my services.”3
Byrd, who was born in North Carolina and who, two years later, would be elected to the West Virginia House of Delegates, wrote a letter of concern about black demands for racial integration in the military to Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, the Senate’s most outspoken racist, in December 1944. “I am a typical American, a southerner, and 27 years of age,” Byrd noted,
and never in the world will I be convinced that race mixing in any field is good. All the social “do-gooders,” the philanthropic “greats” of this day, the reds and the pinks . . . the disciples of Eleanor . . . can never alter my convictions on this question. I am loyal to my country and know but reverence to her flag, but I shall never submit to fight beneath that banner with a negro by my side. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see this old glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.4
Within four years, Byrd’s nightmare had become national policy. On July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, a critical steppingstone on the pathway to racial equality in the military. Writing as commander in chief, he declared “the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”5 By the time the Korean War had ended, all the branches of service were integrated by race, though some all-black infantry regiments remained.6 By 1956, integration was complete. Today, the military is the country’s major institution least marked by racial separation.
Such, of course, was not the case before, during, and just after the Second World War. The Roosevelt administration and its military leaders navigated between black aspirations, like those of Franklin, and white resistance, like that of Byrd. Seeking to forge an effective fighting force, maintain order, and build support in the public and in Congress for its policies, the administration combined mass black participation in the armed services and access to formerly restricted officer positions and leadership roles with an unyielding commitment to racial segregation. Linked in a common military project, the United States, in effect, had two armies—one white, one black. Not entirely separate, they were utterly unequal.
I
THE SECOND WORLD WAR was the last major conflict in which the military policies of the United States accommodated undisguised racism. Though the armed services lessened its force as the war progressed, the racial course of action it still pursued was much closer to the Jim Crow policies of the First World War than to the mostly desegregated practices in the Korean War. When Woodrow Wilson took the country into Europe in 1917, the country’s racial order seemed beyond question. Ironically, the massive expansion of the armed services compelled blacks to declare their loyalty at a moment when any hint of heresy was met with repression. But the chance to join the national crusade also seemed to offer African Americans an opening to claim their standing as citizens.
“First your Country, then your rights,” W. E. B. Du Bois responded to critics of his famous “Close Ranks” editorial of July 1918 in The Crisis, the NAACP monthly, where he had implored his readers to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks.”7 From one perspective, there was little choice. Of course, a war on behalf of imperial and racist powers fought by a rigidly segregated army hardly struck most African Americans as a battle of good against evil. Still, blacks had little option but to answer the question of political obligation with loyalty. Within the country’s charged racial climate, with its incompatible ethnic allegiances and atmosphere of intolerance, any visible black dissent courted danger. Aware that it would be difficult for a downtrodden racial minority to consider a war between white colonial nations a battle for democracy, federal intelligence agents watched leading African Americans during the late 1910s and kept a close eye on the black press. This anxious wartime surveillance often interpreted black skepticism and questioning that stopped well short of opposition, let alone disloyalty, as subversion.8
Once the United States joined the war, many blacks, including Du Bois, sought to achieve civic gains as a corollary to their steadfastness. Seeking to turn ambivalence to instrumental advantage, he offered a historical argument. The history of race relations in the United States, Du Bois claimed, demonstrated a republican principle at work. In peacetime, black oppression remained unshaken. By contrast, when blacks suited up as soldiers to join white citizens in a common national project, they actually had gained some rights. It was, he wrote, their surest instrument for advancement:
Five thousand Negroes fought in the Revolution: the result was the emancipation of slaves in the North and the abolition of the African slave trade. At least three thousand Negro soldiers and sailors fought in the war of 1812; the result was the enfranchisement of the Negro in many Northern states and the beginning of a strong movement for general emancipation. Two hundred thousand Negroes enlisted in the Civil War, and the result was the emancipation of four million slaves, and the enfranchisement of the black man. Some ten thousand Negroes fought in the Spanish-American war, and in the twenty years since that war, despite many setbacks, we have doubled or quadrupled our accumulated wealth.9
The aftermath of the First World War made Du Bois far more cautious as the Second approached. The world had not been made safe for democracy, certainly not for people of color. The leading Allies of the United States, Britain and France, had tightened their grip on their increasingly restive colonial possessions. Racism at home grew more entrenched. In 1919, President Wilson expressed concern after the war that the reasonable conduct black soldiers had experienced in Europe “has gone to their heads.” Earlier, in August 1918, General Pershing’s headquarters had issued a request to French officers “not to commend too highly the black American troops in the presence of white Americans.”10 At Versailles, Wilson joined with Britain and Australia to repel the proposal by Japan that the Charter of the League of Nations should include a commitment to the equality of all people regardless of race. There were “too serious objections on the part of some of us.” During the war, the very moderate black leader, Emmett Scott, who had worked as Booker T. Washington’s private secretary and served in the Wilson administration as the Negro Adviser to the secretary of war, was appalled to discover how an entrenched belief in black inferiority sharply curtailed black training and opportunities.11
When the United States went to war, Du Bois was convinced that active black participation might make the armed forces a vehicle for equal citizenship. He was grievously disappointed. Although there were just over 1,500 black junior officers, the 404,000 black troops—11 percent of the Army’s total strength—were commanded by white officers in all the senior ranks. Most blacks were slotted into labor duties, nearly all menial. Still, blacks were not entirely confined to quartermaster and stevedore service roles; some forty thousand were dispatched to combat units. Their 92nd and 93rd infantry divisions were sent to France, where the 92nd fought alongside three white divisions of the Second Army in attacking the second Hindenburg line.12
At the time, the press was full of reports of black heroism; yet after the war, a disproportionately southern white officer class reported black performance as having been deficient. At the conclusion of hostilities, the most racially progressive view in the Army sought to stop massing black troops separately, arguing instead that black units between the size of a company and a regiment should be placed within white regiments.13 More typical, however, was the mixture of racism and realism found in Major General Robert Bullard’s 1925 memoirs reflecting on his command of the Second Army. “If you need combat soldiers, and especially if you need them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes,” he cautioned, because “if there are any white people near . . . the task of making soldiers of them and fighting with them . . . will be swamped in the race question.”14 No one inside the armed forces suggested an end to military Jim Crow.
As the 1920s got underway, blacks were confronted with near-hysterical racism, the acceleration of lynching, the revival of the Klan, and more than twenty major riotous assaults by whites in northern and border cities who rampaged in black neighborhoods, stoned blacks on beaches, and attacked them on main thoroughfares and public transportation. A broader climate of nativism dominated. Public discourse took an ugly turn. “Think of submitting questions involving the very life of the United States to a tribunal on which a nigger from Liberia, a nigger from Honduras, a nigger from India . . . each have votes equal to that of the great United States,” Senator James Reed of Missouri remarked about the League. Such talk went unrebuked.15
Not surprisingly, disenchantment characterized the mood of black America both at the start of the New Deal and, later, at the end of the 1930s and into the early 1940s when a world war loomed again. In 1934, the dean of Howard University’s Law School, Charles Houston, remonstrated to the Army’s chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, about the military’s failure to incorporate black soldiers in the air, field artillery, and tank corps.16 After MacArthur replied that “I can assure you . . . there has been and will be no discrimination against the colored race in the training of the national forces,” Houston responded with a catalogue of specific complaints. They included the observation that “colored army officers . . . seem to get shunted away from regiments into detached service just as soon as they rank high enough to have seniority and control over any number of white officers” and that black regiments functioned not as fighting forces but as “labor battalions.” He also noted that the Machine Gun Troops in the Colored Cavalry Detachment lacked “machine gun equipment, drills very little, and does not take part in maneuvers except in the capacity of orderlies,” and that black soldiers were not offered access to vacancies in “newer arms of the service.” He concluded: “When I note the complete absence of colored men in the Tank Corps, in the Coast Artillery, in the Field Artillery, in the Air Corps, in the Chemical Warfare Service and other newer arms, I must confess your assurances leave me skeptical.”17
He was not alone. Seven years later, on the eve of American participation in the Second World War, Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, made fighting dictators abroad conditional upon fighting for liberty at home. Reflecting on “bitter green” memories of white betrayal, he pledged that blacks would demand racial equality as their just reward. “It is tragic,” he later remarked in the midst of the conflagration, “that the Civil War should be fought again while we are fighting a World War to save civilization.”18 Soon, much of black America was caught up in a “Double V” campaign, for “victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefields abroad.”19
Du Bois was even more forceful, more skeptical. He had become an exceedingly reluctant warrior. As the country entered the Second World War, he rallied black America very grudgingly. “We close ranks again, but only, now as then, to fight for democracy not only for white folk, but for yellow, brown, and black. We fight not in joy,” he continued, “but in sorrow with no feeling of uplift. . . . Whatever all our mixed emotions are, we are going to play the game.”20
Before Pearl Harbor, he had been disinclined to back American participation. Despite his loathing for Nazism, Du Bois had been appalled by racist depictions of the Japanese and by the manifest double standard of Western imperial powers fighting for democracy. Contrasting the West’s fierce response to the Soviet Union’s incursion in Finland with the moderate reaction that had been displayed to the 1935 invasion of Ethiopia by Italy and to the long history of colonialism, Du Bois tartly observed that “the world is astonished, aghast, and angry! But why? . . . England has been seizing land all over the earth for centuries with and without a shadow of rightful claim: India, South Africa, Uganda, Egypt, Nigeria, not to mention Ireland. The United States seized Mexico from a weak and helpless nation in order to bolster slavery. . . . This is the world that has grown suddenly righteous in defense of Finland.”21 Why, he asked, should not he and other African Americans believe that the war, at least in part, was a campaign to deepen white control? After Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter in August 1940, a document full of regard for self-government and sovereign rights, Du Bois remarked that this drive for freedom was unlikely to include Nigeria, Zululand, Natal, the Gold Coast,22 the Dutch West Indies, “and a hundred other lands of the Blacks.”23 How, Walter White wished to know, could the United States “fight a war for freedom” with a segregated army?24
Under Du Bois’s direction, The Crisis gave voice to a wider black campaign to make their support for the war conditional on gains at home. Though “sorry for brutality, blood, and death among the peoples of Europe,” the magazine editorialized in July 1940, more than ten months after Germany’s invasion of Poland, “just as we are sorry for China and Ethiopia . . . the hysterical cries of the preachers of democracy for Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in Alabama, Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia—in the Senate of the United States.”25 This theme remained prominent after Pearl Harbor. “Now is the Time Not to be Silent,” the magazine argued. “A lily-white navy cannot fight for a free world. A jim crow army cannot fight for a free world. Jim crow strategy, no matter on how grand a scale, cannot build a free world.”26
Both before and during the war, blacks campaigned actively to remove the massive contradiction such an armed force represented. One month before the United States entered the war, Roi Ottley reported that “Negro communities are seething with resentment,” in large measure in reaction to “the treatment of Negro members of the army” which included “race riots at Fort Oswego; fighting at Camp Davis; discrimination at Fort Devens; jim-crow conditions at Camps Blanding and Lee; stabbings at Fort Huachuca; killings at Fort Bragg; and the edict ‘not to shake a nigger’s hand’ at Camp Upton.”27 They were not put off by the kind of propaganda the Office of War Information issued in 1942. Written by the black publicist Chandler Owen, a widely circulated pamphlet, Negroes and the War, contrasted Nazi racism and the insult meted out to Jesse Owens, the black track star, at the Berlin Olympics of 1936 with a U.S. Army that had “two full divisions of Negro soldiers.” Stressing that “Negroes serve in all branches” and that “there are Negro officers,” the document evoked the image of Joe Louis, “our champion,” knocking out “the German champion in one round.”28 Composed in an anxious voice, this Office of War Information publication sought to counter the “Double V” campaign by reminding black soldiers that “our future, like the future of all freedom lovers depends upon the triumph of democracy.”29 Nowhere did the document acknowledge the fierce discrimination they faced.30
Outside government circles, black leaders and the black press rejected this kind of soft-pedaling of segregation. In 1938, the publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, Robert Vann, organized the Committee for Participation of Negroes in National Defense, a lobby of black World War One veterans. “I need not tell you,” he wrote President Roosevelt in an open letter, “that we are expecting a more dignified place in our armed forces during the next war than we occupied during the World War.” And in June 1940, on the eve of that year’s presidential conventions, Walter White proclaimed that the NAACP would assay candidates by their commitment to end racial discrimination in the armed services. “What point is there in fighting and perhaps dying to save democracy if there is no democracy to save?”31 “Who wants to fight,” Roy Wilkins, editor of The Crisis, demanded the following year, “for the kind of ‘democracy’ embodied in the curses, the hair-trigger pistols, and the clubs of the Negro-hating hoodlums in the uniforms of military police?”32
II
THE ADMINISTRATION’S OFFICIAL position insisted that the fight against the Axis powers and the challenge of civil rights at home be distinguished, as if the separate-but-equal tentacles of Plessy v. Ferguson could extend to the military sphere. In 1942, John J. McCloy, then assistant secretary of war, who headed an Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies, thought it reasonable that blacks should suspend their agitation for improvement during the course of the war. Writing in July to William Hastie, the African American civilian aide to the secretary of war, he called for a lessening of emphasis in the black community on discriminatory acts, “irrespective of whether the White or the Colored man is responsible for starting them. Frankly,” he added, “I do not think that the basic issues of this war are involved in the question of whether Colored troops serve in segregated or in mixed units, and I doubt that you can convince the people of the United States that the basic issues of freedom are involved in such a question.” When the war wound down, Walter Wright, the chief historian of the Army, observed that “As to the segregation of Negroes to special units in the Army, this is simply a reflection of the state of affairs well-known in civilian America today. . . . Since the less favorable treatment characteristic of southern states is less likely to lead to violent protest from powerful white groups, the Army has tended to follow southern rather than northern practices in dealing with racial segregation.”33
The black campaign for military integration failed dismally. Writing for The New Republic in 1944, Lucille Miller accurately summarized the wartime situation:
The Navy has refused to commission Negroes in any branch of the service—in the Navy proper, the Marine Corps and the Coast Guard. While it has admitted Negroes to its fighting ranks, Jim Crowism is practiced in training and in service. The Air Corps has discriminated against Negroes in the most complicated and costly way, building a segregated air base for Negroes when there was room in established training centers over the country. The annual output of Negro pilots was 200 when it could easily have been five times that number. The Army trains and commissions colored and white candidates without discrimination, but Jim Crow rules over every Southern camp. Colored women are excluded from every auxiliary service but the Wacs, and here there is segregation. With the Army calling for thousands of nurses, they have held down the quota of colored nurses to about 200.34
Charles Wilson, an African American private, reflected on these circumstances in a long letter he wrote to Franklin Roosevelt in May 1944. Without hyperbole, he criticized military segregation and the exclusion of black troops from active fighting roles in favor of “decidedly menial work, such as BOQ orderlies, janitors, permanent KP’s and the like.” He then offered a more abstract reflection:
The picture in our country is marred by one of the strangest paradoxes in our whole fight against world fascism. The United States Armed Forces, to fight for World Democracy, is within itself undemocratic. The undemocratic policy of jim crow and segregation is practiced by our Armed Forces against its Negro members. Totally inadequate opportunities are given to the Negro members of our Armed Forces, nearly one tenth of the whole, to participate with “equality” . . . “regardless of race and color” in the fight for our war aims.35
There is a treasure trove of such letters from black soldiers that records their disenchantment in the face of brutal segregation. “We are servant and ditch diggers,” Private Jus Hill, at Randolph Field in Texas, wrote to his hometown newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. “They got us here washing ditches [sic], working around officers houses and waiting on them, instead of trying to win this war they got us in ditches.” From Camp Meade in Florida, an anonymous “Negro Soldier” reported that in his third week at the base
they started us cleaning the white officers rooms, making us they [sic] dirty beds and cleaning they latrine and are still doing that right at the present. We cannot go to the church services on the camp . . . the service clubs are off limits to us because a Staff Sgt. went over with some more of our comrades in the Co. to get a couple of sandwiches and were told by a civilian worker we don’t serve colored, and Sir this is an Army post. . . . Sir, we sleep in sand floors with no boards or anything to bed. We stand up and eat each meal which they call a meal. . . . The truth, Sir, are we nothing but slaves.
Addressing William Hastie, Private Bert Babaro complained about the indifference of the company commander to segregated theatres and buses and to “barracks located just in front of the camp cess pool.” Private Latrophe Jenkins, at Alabama’s Camp Rucker, alleged “being driven and down trodden worst than animals in the fields around us. Men losing their lives at the hands of power intoxicated anti-Negro MP’s and Nazi minded Southern whites that take us to exercise their animosities on just as the Japs are branded for treating the Chinese.” He continued: “We have served faithfully” and “this war will be a Victory for us. But then that leaves us to become terribly bewildered, because if this war is won by us (I mean America), then who’s going to help us win ours?” Writing collectively to request a transfer, “We as a group of Negro soldiers, wish to be soldiers in the Army of the United States, not dogs at Jackson Air Base, nor in the State of Mississippi . . . We are treated like wild animals here, like we are unhuman. The word Negro is never used here, all they call us are nigger do this, nigger do that. Even the officers here are calling us nigger. . . . Our food are fixed in such a manner that we can’t eat. We never get enough to eat. In the hospital we are mistreated. . . . We don’t want no more than to be treated like soldiers.” And from Camp Hood in Texas came the complaint that we “are really being treated worse than these German prisoners here.”36
Of course, not all African Americans had experiences quite so dire. For many, there were opportunities unimagined before the war. After 1942, the Navy accepted blacks for general service and as non-commissioned officers. Black women were allowed to join the WAVES for the first time. The Marine Corps, which had never accepted black recruits, finally did so, if only in segregated units as laborers and ammunition handlers. With the exception of the Air Corps, black officers trained and graduated alongside whites and received commissions in all the services and branches (though they always were assigned to black units and never commanded white troops). When at the start of joint officer training black candidates were nominated in puny numbers (from July 1941, when officer candidate schools opened, to October, only 17 of the 1,997 students were black), the chief of staff, General George Marshall, moved to increase their numbers significantly and defended this experiment in integration against southern opposition.37 Overseas, black troops played key roles, particularly after D-Day. There were twenty-two black combat units in Europe. One in five engineering units was black. Black pilots took to the air in two combat air units. Skilled black service units built roads and ports in the Pacific. And in exceptions to the rule, a very small number of black sailors were integrated into oceangoing ships; and black platoons of forty men fought in previously all-white companies of approximately two hundred soldiers when American troops reached the Ardennes in the winter months of 1944–45.38
The exigencies of war, moreover, did compel military leaders to address black unrest, improve base conditions, and open some doors to training and recognition. In 1943, McCloy’s committee, which functioned as the highest-level War Department group concerned with the condition of black troops, sought to eliminate the most egregious violations and develop a coherent approach to training and personnel issues in order to manage the race question effectively. General Marshall, following the committee’s lead, distributed a letter to his three major commanders insisting they improve the racial climate. Taking note of disturbances that had been provoked “with real or fancied incidents of discrimination and segregation” and how “disaffection among negro soldiers continues to constitute an immediately serious problem,” he directed that “under no circumstances can there be a command attitude which makes allowances for improper conduct of either white or negro soldiers.” Concurrently, the War Department ordered base commanders to give blacks greater access to recreational facilities, opening the way to a local option on integrated use by noting that “facilities will be provided without instructions either implicit or implied that certain ones are for the exclusive use of either white or colored personnel.”39 The War Department also instructed the commanders to desegregate transportation on buses and trucks owned by the federal government. The reaction of many southern newspapers and members to this sole breach of Jim Crow was fierce. The Montgomery Advertiser maintained that “even Army orders, even armies, even bayonets cannot force impossible and unnatural social race relationships upon us.” “Social customs rooted in ancient emotions,” the Birmingham News cautioned, “can never be changed by fiat.” Louisiana’s Congressman A. Leonard Allen sent a sharp protest to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, advising that “this is a most unwise step. It is a blow to the Southland and it is a slap at every white man from Dixie wearing the uniform.”40
Despite some ameliorative steps, the war persistently underscored the second-class status of the great majority of black troops in both symbolic and practical terms. Of the fifty camps housing significant numbers of black troops, fully thirty-eight posts were in the South. Their location was selected in part for the weather, allowing easier all-year outdoor training, but mainly because of their proximity to black population centers and to areas where the Department of War anticipated moderate to low levels of resistance to the presence of so many black soldiers. A corollary, never fully enforced because it proved unworkable, was the policy recommended by military planners that “Insofar as practicable, Negroes inducted in the North be stationed in the North” for fear that they might introduce unacceptable standards into the South. Black officers working alongside white officers to command black units usually were excluded from officer housing and officer clubs, living and eating instead with the enlisted men. When Hastie inquired about the Army’s policy on access to various facilities by black officers, he was informed that “The Army has always regarded the officers’ quarters and the officers’ mess as the home and the private dining room of the officers who reside and eat there.”41 This policy extended even to the two weeks of rest and recreation the Army offered many of its overseas troops. White soldiers were sent to top-tier resorts in Miami Beach, Hot Springs, Santa Barbara, and Lake Placid. Black soldiers had to make do with Chicago’s South Side Pershing Hotel and Harlem’s Hotel Theresa, thus extending segregation to the North as official policy. These hotels, the secretary of war explained in 1944, were “the best obtainable for the purpose” in keeping with the “War Department’s long-standing policy not to force the intermingling of the races.”42
Recurrently, black soldiers in the South were confronted with local violence aimed at enforcing indigenous racial restrictions. In just the spring and summer of 1941, black soldiers stationed in Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee were attacked by white civilians; and black soldiers at Camps Livingston and Claiborne in Louisiana and Camp Davis in North Carolina fought military police. Daniel Kryder has commented that “the difficulty with which blacks purchased accommodations, tickets, and means in segregated towns and situation . . . contributed to curfew violations, scheduling snafus, and arguments in bus and train stations. Violence often stemmed from interracial contact on commuter buses and trains, which were governed by widely varying but typically strict local laws and customs. Soldiers arriving at their destinations found themselves in towns and cities that might be openly hostile to their presence.”43
At a December 1941 meeting at the Department of War to discuss this state of affairs, a group of black editors was informed that “The Army cannot change civilian ideas on the Negro.”44 Colonel Eugene Householder, representing the Adjutant General, admonished these molders of black opinion that “The Army cannot be made the means of engendering conflict among the mass of people because of a stand with respect to Negroes which is not compatible with the position attained by Negroes in civil life. . . . The Army is not a sociological laboratory.”45 Both George Marshall, as chief of staff, and Henry Stimson, as secretary of war, shared these views. They turned aside black pleas to consider at least the gradual integration of the military. Marshall was the more sympathetic of the two, but was active in representing the skeptical views of the Army’s staff. That month, he explained that as his first task was dealing with the country’s enemies, reform would have to wait. “The military would be unable to solve a social problem which has perplexed the American people throughout the history of this nation. The Army cannot accomplish such a solution and should not be charged with the undertaking.” Stimson was even more adamant because he was skeptical about the capacity of black soldiers. Mindful that the Army had segregated its units since 1863, in October 1940 he noted in his diary that he had urged FDR not to place “too much responsibility on a race which was not showing initiative in battle.” Some fifteen months later, in January 1942, he recorded his anger at Eleanor Roosevelt’s “intrusive and impulsive folly” in pushing racial integration.46
III
THE KEY DECISIONS about ways to include large numbers of black soldiers in the military without affronting the white South were taken before the onset of the war, and announced by the policy statement issued with President Roosevelt’s approval on October 9, 1940. “Negroes,” The American Soldier, the leading postwar work on the subject, matter-of-factly summarized, “were needed and were not excluded, but neither were they fully integrated or fully accepted.”47 Written at a moment when only one black cadet had graduated from West Point in the last two decades and none from the Naval Academy in Annapolis (the first black graduate finished in 1949), and when there were only five black officers in the entire military, three of whom were chaplains, the document promised that “the services of Negroes will be utilized on a fair and equitable basis.”48 It pledged that “The strength of the Negro personnel of the Army of the United States will be maintained on a general basis of the proportion of the Negro population in the country.” It also promised black access to aviation training, reserve commissions, and entry to all branches of the military.
But not without two crucial caveats. The first concerned the assignment of officers: “Negro reserve officers eligible for active duty will be assigned to Negro units officered by colored personnel.” The second, even more pivotal, affirmed Jim Crow:
The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has been proven satisfactory over a long period of years, and to make changes now would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense. For similar reasons, the department does not contemplate assigning colored reserve officers other than those of the Medical Corps and chaplains to existing Negro combat units of the Regular Army. These regular units are going concerns, accustomed through many years to the present system. Their morale is splendid, their rate of reenlistment is exceptionally high, and their field training is well advanced. It is the opinion of the War Department that no experiments should be tried with the organizational set-up of these units at this critical time.49
This document was confirmed with a presidential “OK.”50
As they had demanded, blacks now would be inducted on the basis of their share of the population, but they would be assigned exclusively to black units. Such segregation was not a military policy. In fact, the decision to organize the military by the racial patterns mandated by law in seventeen of the forty-eight states imposed high costs: the need to provide separate facilities by race limited opportunities for blacks to serve up to their capacity, impeded the organization for total war, and lowered black morale. It forced blacks who lived outside the South to encounter far more segregation than they had previously experienced. It placed “undertrained black soldiers in units that were often inefficient and sometimes surplus to its needs,” and it isolated the best trained black leaders from the most challenging tasks.51 Its core assumption, albeit an unarguable one, was that any attempt to move beyond the policy of separate black units would be met by resistance of the kind Robert Byrd later articulated. Bearing this social reality in mind, the military, led by a primarily white southern officer corps, concluded the instrumental cost of segregation had to be paid.
In the interwar period, black campaigning had moved in three steps. The primary demand during the 1920s into the early 1930s was for an increase in the number of black troops. Chicago’s Congressman Oscar De Priest, for example, complained at the end of this phase, in 1932, in a speech at Howard University, that African Americans made up only some 2 percent of the armed forces.52 “The United States Army is about to be increased,” the Pittsburgh Courier noted two years later. “There should be a larger percentage of colored soldiers in it.” Noting that the Army was proposing an increase of 47,000 enlisted men and 4,063 officers, it objected that “no provision is being made to include the Negro.” Arguing for a 10 percent quota, it observed: “Here is something worth going after.”53
Second, the black press and political leaders increasingly found fault with the way in which black troops were deployed. The problem was not merely insufficient numbers, but their status as “virtually servants . . . doing menial chores for whites.” Blacks in regular Army units had been transformed into “stable boys.”54
When the Courier launched its campaign for the Participation of Negroes in National Defense, it combined both demands. In a February 1938 open letter to President Roosevelt, Robert Vann sought an “opportunity for our men to enter the military and naval service in larger numbers and at the same time to procure enlistment in the higher branches of the services.” Observing that “one American citizen in every ten is black, but only one American fighting man in every 33 is black,” Vann issued four requests: increased black enlistment; openings in the Air Corps and Navy; “formation of an entire division of Negro combat troops composed of all the customary services”; and “training of Negro officers for such a division.”55
This visible campaign, stressing black patriotism, loyalty, and Americanism (“We are not Africans”),56 stopped well short of insisting on an end to racial segregation. Once it became clear that a massive expansion might be just ahead, however, Jim Crow itself, as we have observed, became the central target. Meeting at the White House with the president, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson on September 27, 1940, three black leaders—T. Arnold Hill, adviser on Negro Affairs at the National Youth Administration, A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Walter White of the NAACP—insisted that only individual ability should restrict the placement of black officers and enlisted men. Segregated units should be closed. African Americans should be integrated as individuals throughout the service. “Existing units of the army and units to be established should be required to accept and select officers,” their memorandum for the president insisted, “without regard to race.”57 “Southern Americanism” no longer would be acceptable.58
At each stage, the military and the president said no. The Department of War fashioned black manpower policies at three occasions in the interwar period. Finding black performance in the First World War to have been “not discreditable,” a 1922 plan called for a modest role for small units of such troops, led primarily by white officers. This design was part of the shift of the Army to a much smaller peacetime basis, and it was characterized by “a definite tightening of segregation.”59 A 1937 plan set the goal of a racially proportionate army to assuage concern by whites that they would be placed disproportionately in harm’s way in a future war and apprehension by blacks that they might be excluded from the status of soldier. At the time, the military, including the National Guard, had some 360,000 soldiers, of whom only 6,500, or fewer than 2 percent, were black (by 1940, these numbers had declined to 4,000, or 1.5 percent).60 But as there were many objections to black soldiers by the various branches, including the Army’s Air Corps and Signal Corps, a 1940 mobilization plan limited blacks to under 6 percent of the military (compared to their 10 percent of the population) and channeled them primarily into non-combat roles.61
An Army War College training manual to prepare for the influx of black troops summarized the predominant view that underpinned these various decisions:
As an individual, the negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free, and good natured. If unjustly treated, he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible, and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful, and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior. . . . On the other hand, the negro is cheerful, loyal, and usually uncomplaining if reasonably well fed. He has a musical nature and a marked sense of rhythm. His art is primitive. He is religious. With proper direction in mass, negroes are industrious. They are emotional and can be stirred to a high state of enthusiasm. Their emotions are unstable and their reactions uncertain.62
With such attitudes predominating in a disproportionately southern-dominated institution, the military was slow to bring African Americans into the ranks. When the war broke out, blacks sought to enlist in record numbers. Like John Hope Franklin, many were turned back. In numerous regions of the country, not just in the South, initial call-ups under the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, which required the registration of all men between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-five, filled quotas exclusively with white recruits.
Resembling all New Deal legislation passed by Congress, this statute established national policies, including a prohibition of discrimination based on race and color, but implemented them in decentralized fashion in order to protect southern preferences. Noting this new law and the decision to send black recruits to the South, the Courier wryly, but accurately, remarked: “Northern Negroes who vote a Democratic President in office put the South in the saddle. The South runs our Congress, Army and our Navy, and there is not very much left of the country after that.”63
When a black minister from Memphis wrote to complain about local treatment, the director of the Selective Service, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hershey, responded that “this office cannot assist you, since it is the responsibility of the governor of each state to set up the necessary registration machinery and personnel.” There were 6,442 local draft boards, with at least three members. Outside the South, some 250 blacks served out of a total of at least 25,000. Within the South, with the exception of a tiny number of individuals in Kentucky, North Carolina, and Tennessee, there were none. Across the country, only eleven blacks appeared on appeals boards, and none in the South. In the early period of the draft, no blacks were called. The draft’s national headquarters lacked authority to compel local boards to do so.64
As John Hope Franklin discovered, there also was a good deal of resistance to black troops by the military. Though needed, they were not always welcome. Even after blacks were selected, the Army frequently delayed their induction until segregated facilities could be readied. As late as early 1943, when manpower needs had become sufficiently acute that African Americans could not be kept away, some 300,000 potential black soldiers had been selected by the Selective Service but were still awaiting induction, often after many months. The backlog was so substantial in southern communities that single black men waited while married white men were drafted into service.
Illiteracy also clearly played a part. Throughout the war, gross educational deficiencies continued to be the major reason blacks were accepted for service at a lower rate than whites.65 The 1940 Census had revealed that some 10 million Americans had not been schooled past the fourth grade, and that one in eight could not read and write. This, primarily, was a southern problem. A higher proportion of blacks living in the North had completed grade school than whites in the South.66 Three in four potential black inductees rejected for this reason came from the South, compared to one in four whites. In truth, though, “the War Department apparently seized the opportunity to use illiteracy as a tactic to discriminate against blacks while accepting illiterate whites without question.”67 Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary that “the Army had adopted rigid requirements for literacy mainly to keep down the number of colored troops.”68 As Hershey conceded in 1944, “what we are doing, of course, is simply transferring discrimination from everyday life into the army. Men who make up the army staff have the same ideas [about blacks] as they had before.”69
Thus, in the midst of a war defined in large measure as an epochal battle between liberal democracy and Nazi and Fascist totalitarianism, one that distinguished between people on the basis of blood and race, the U.S. military not only engaged in sorting Americans by race but in policing the boundary separating white from black. Because the draft selected individuals to fill quotas to meet the test of a racially proportionate military and because they were assigned to units based on a simple dual racial system, the notion of selective service extended to the assignment of definitive racial tags. The Selective Service system soon found this often was not a simple task. The issue of classification proved particularly vexing in Puerto Rico, where the population was so various racially and where the island’s National Guard units had been integrated. Even here, registrants were sorted by race and the National Guard was divided into two sections. The large number of mixed race individuals in the border states, the Creole population of Louisiana, and American Indians offered other challenges, as did ambiguous individual cases almost everywhere. Embarrassingly, the Selective Service fell on blood percentages, using racial guidelines not unlike the country’s European enemy, Nazi Germany. Ordinarily, the rule it used was “that 25 percent Negro blood made a person a Negro.” Nonetheless, Hershey made clear that it would be unwise for the local board to disrupt “the mode of life which has become so well established” when a draftee in question had been passing as white.70 After August 1944, the system was sufficiently overwhelmed that he took the decision, at first resisted by Secretary Stimson, to accept the classification an individual claimed for himself when a dispute over a racial assignment came to pass.
IV
THE WAR PROVED TO BE a particularly important junction for white ethnic Americans, chiefly the children of Catholic and Jewish newcomers who had arrived in the United States from the 1880s until the closing of the immigration gates in 1924. Military training, wartime service, postwar benefits, and integration into a common American purpose brought many of these newcomers into their first robust contact with the white and mainly Protestant America from which they had lived at a physical and symbolic distance.
For Jews, in particular, the Second World War produced a shift in standing that was quite radical. On its eve, “Jews were not so confident of their prospects in America.”71 During the period of economic hardship, resurgent anti-Semitism, and grim news from Palestine and above all from the heartland of Europe in the 1930s, American Jews faced quotas on admission to leading universities, markedly to professional schools,72 and a more widespread restrictive system of anti-Semitic practices that impelled the creation of parallel networks of hotels, country clubs, and other social institutions. Before the First World War, most Jews had not sought to enter crowded labor markets outside their areas of economic specialization, notably in the garment trades. But in the interwar period, as the children of immigrants sought to move beyond these niches, they discovered high walls barring many types of employment, in particular in banking, insurance, and engineering. Public opinion polls revealed a great deal of skepticism and many popular myths about Jews. Anti-Jewish expression often was unguarded and unashamed.73 Enhanced Jewish visibility in economic and civic life often went hand in hand with heightened apprehension and nervous efforts to limit Jewish prominence, as in the case of the unsuccessful effort in 1938 by the Jewish secretary of the treasury and the Jewish publisher of the New York Times to persuade President Roosevelt not to appoint a second Jew to the Supreme Court.74
In contrast, by the 1950s, Jewish Americans had achieved remarkable social mobility, high measures of participation in American life, and impressive political incorporation.75 Anti-Semitism had become unfashionable, at least its open expression. University barriers to entry became more permeable. Mobility from one generation to the next accelerated as access to formerly closed occupations quickened. Housing choices multiplied. Jews entered mass culture on vastly more favorable terms.76 The war, in short, proved a great engine of group integration and incorporation. Under arms, American Jews became citizens in a full sense at just the moment that Jews virtually everywhere in Europe were being extruded from citizenship. Jews served as officers in the U.S. military as well as enlisted men in higher proportions than their share of the population. After the First World War, they often were classified with blacks as a racial minority.77 By the 1940s, they were linked with predominantly Catholic groups to compose the category of white ethnics—a grouping that signified the extension of American pluralism and tolerance.78
If, for Jews and Catholics, the war marked the first moment of full inclusion via the pathway of military service and benefits, for blacks, the war was the last moment of formal exclusion from equal citizenship by the federal government. At this critical juncture, the social and political impossibility of integration precluded black gains on these terms. The opening of new opportunities for white ethnic religious minorities did not unsettle dominant social practices the way full black inclusion surely would have. As a result, though the military did offer African Americans tangible gains, these trailed the advantages presented to other outsiders by a dramatic margin. The effect, we now can see, was to produce a critical lag in the rate and conditions of black assimilation into the wider currents of American life.
Like all New Deal policies, the combination of military inclusion, segregation, and condescension offered black Americans more access than they had secured before, but far less than national policies offered to whites. Given conditions at the time, however, especially in the South where 77 percent of African Americans still lived, even such limited terms must have seemed attractive, at least at first, to many black recruits. Writing in 1942 as the highest-ranking black civilian concerned with the war effort, William Hastie took note of the “most spontaneous and most enthusiastic celebrations that have characterized black community send-offs. . . . The Negro soldier is the Negro youth of today. He believes in his ability. He believes in the ability of other Negroes. He expresses something deep inside of him when he says, ‘Show them what we can do.’”79 Despite recurring insults—including the racial segregation of blood contributed to the Red Cross,80 military censorship of the black press,81 movies that depicted servile black characters,82 the forced shift to Jim Crow rail cars on southbound trains when they reached Washington, D.C.,83 and the creation of separate black and white air raid shelters84—the opportunity to serve in large numbers was, in the circumstance, impossible for African Americans to refuse. Once again, the implicit promise of citizenship and social standing via even a partial inclusion in the armed services could not be resisted.85
Once the initial high barriers to entry at the start of the war were overcome by the sheer need for manpower, the black presence in the military grew rapidly, reaching much greater levels of participation than in the First World War. By the end of 1942, just over 10 percent of the total of 4,532,117 soldiers under arms were African American; within a year, their numbers had grown to 754,000, or 11 percent of the 6,778,000 mobilized troops. Their distribution was not comparable, however. Four in ten white troops were allocated to combat units, compared to half that rate for blacks, and many black combat units were used for heavy labor. By contrast, 35 percent of black soldiers served in service units, while only 14 percent of whites received such assignments.86 The Navy, in particular, checked black horizons. By the end of December 1941, there were only some 5,000 sailors, or 2 percent of the total, all of whom served as stewards. Admiral Chester Nimitz explained that enlisted whites would not stand for the possibility of command by black officers at sea. Secretary Knox clarified the Navy’s position, insisting that “we must be realists. If we put Negroes in the navy it would be like putting them in hell. The relationships on shipboard are such that white and colored just cannot be mixed.”87 Not until mid-1944, when James Forrestal took over as undersecretary, did the Navy authorize duties at sea for African Americans.88
Despite all these limitations reflecting a military version of white supremacy, the role of soldier remained very attractive to a great many young blacks. Compared to their day-to-day circumstances, particularly in the South, the military seemed to offer a host of otherwise unattainable opportunities, not least regular meals, fairly decent shelter, and health care. They were paid, most for the first time, on a par with whites doing comparable work. In 1939, the average black wage in the United States was $371; for the country as a whole, $964. In the military, cash wages and in-kind provisions were worth, the Army estimated, between $2,000 and $2,600 per year.89
Above all, military service made it possible for very poor individuals with little experience outside their home environments to enter a “modern” world. The opportunity to travel, witness diverse experiences and patterns of upbringing, meet fellow blacks from all parts of the country with varied class backgrounds, and experience a wide range of world views broadened their horizons. As one study of the impact of the war on the lives of black Americans has observed, “Military service thrust young men into markedly new work relationships. In keeping with modern organizational principles, the military was in theory governed by impersonal, public, rational rules aimed at task-specific efficiency.”90 This leap into modernity was remarkably profound for rural southerners who had lived in isolated, provincial rural environments.
Although the day-to-day experience of military life for black soldiers was deeply marked by the humiliations and limits of segregation, for many this form of institutional membership offered an almost revolutionary experience. To be sure, military segregation contradicted modern values and opportunities; but “service—more precisely training—exposed men at all levels to a universalistic ethos, to the demand for precise and predictable task performance, and to a view of an organization based largely on functionally specific roles rather than on particular persons.”91 Even second-class membership in the military wrenched blacks out of a tightly controlled racial order where access to learning and occupational skills was very meager. And it offered a route of escape from a system of agricultural compulsion that combined peonage and peasant standing. For blacks separated from their home communities, families, churches, social and economic relationships, and patterns of racial power, the Army now served as a powerful socializing “total institution,” a gateway to modern America.92
For some blacks, moreover, the war proved to be a major opportunity for attaining new skills, enlarging contacts, and broadening their experience.93 “Along with many of their white fellows,” the leading student of segregation and desegregation in the armed forces has noted, “they acquired new skills and a new sophistication that prepared them for a different life of the postwar industrial world.” During the war, Army training (as well as work in wartime industries) equipped formerly unskilled blacks to become semi-skilled workers, skilled craftsmen, and supervisors. Although their access to training was not nearly as abundant as that open to whites, the armed services did offer previously unskilled, largely agrarian black soldiers the chance to take courses in “psychology, postal service, water purification, chaplain’s service, carpentry, painting, map reproduction, drafting, fuels and ignition, accounting and auditing . . . physical therapy, optical repair, cooking and baking, instrument repair, tire rebuilding, Diesel mechanics, watch repair, navigation, and a host of other subjects.” Some of these gains came because units were segregated. Thus although, early in the war, out of each one thousand black recruits only three were carpenters, six auto mechanics, one a plumber, and almost none were machinists, welders, or draftsmen, the Engineer Corps to which many African Americans were assigned required these skills, and so “tens-of-thousands of Negroes learned a highly skilled trade in the Services . . . and still larger numbers of men mastered semi-skilled trades and labor discipline.”94 These fields, Robert Weaver observed near war’s end, were “the very types of work from which Negroes have been consistently barred in the past.”95
Arguably even more important, blacks realized that “their economic and political position could be changed.”96 The Army Air Force trained black pilots. Other occupational roles demanding a good deal of proficiency opened up to many for the first time. Some were sent to historically black colleges at Army expense to acquire particular skills. Over the course of the war, an increasing number of African Americans attended both officer training and special training schools on an integrated basis. As black medical facilities were created in Alabama and Arizona, opportunities emerged for black doctors and nurses.97 Practice aside, the dominant articulated goals of the armed services and their war aim were universal in character. Many of the government’s official statements about recruitment and life in the Army spoke of equal treatment as an ideal. Participation in this institution wrenched blacks out of a society of fixed and limited places into a world with a degree of mobility. While still enmeshed in Jim Crow, they lived far closer to its outer boundaries.
Perhaps most important, military service offered black soldiers the most basic and elementary requisite for an active participation in political, social, cultural, and economic life: literacy. As Stimson conceded, the substandard educational opportunities and achievements of blacks, especially southern blacks, had been deployed as an instrument to keep their numbers in uniform down. But, over the course of the war, this had proved an unsustainable policy. Faced with a major crisis in manpower yet coping with a pool of black recruits principally in the Fourth and Eighth Corps areas of the South who were a good deal less educated than whites, the Army was forced to turn to literacy training in combination with confined responsibilities. It could hardly reject something like half the black registrants. Since the military leaders put aside any notion of integrating combat units because of intense southern opposition and their own unwillingness to “experiment,” only two possibilities remained: “make up for the deficiencies with which it [the Army] was presented” and restrict blacks mainly “to support functions and menial jobs in service commands.”98
Estimates of the pool of illiterate recruits, defined as those who had not achieved a fourth-grade level of literacy, varied a good deal. A 1942 conference estimated there were some 430,000, of whom two in three were black. A Columbia University Teachers College consultant placed the overall number at the start of 1943 at 900,000, concluding that of these, 500,000 could be drafted. The decision to take and educate these individuals with marginal education was the result primarily of immense pressures from the field for more soldiers, but it also had another source. Across the South, white leaders, including some of its most vociferous racists like Mississippi’s Senator Bilbo, were insisting that black men be removed from communities from which so many white men were absent but white women were still present. “In my state,” he told a Senate committee in the fall 1942, “with a population one-half Negro and one half white . . . the system that you are using has resulted in taking all the whites to meet the quota and leaving the great majority of Negroes at home.” In these circumstances, he advised the Department of War: “I [am] anxious that you develop the reservoir of the illiterate class . . . so that there would be an equal distribution.”99 Leading civil rights advocates promoted this view because they were keen to reverse the policy that had kept so many blacks who wished to serve out of the military.
The Army’s response was to create a massive crash schooling program of Special Training Units. At the military reception centers, organized into segregated classrooms, two out of every three of their students were black. Once in place starting in June 1943, more than 300,000 inductees passed through this program. Half came from the Fourth Service Command that recruited in the deep South. A high proportion, 11 percent, of new white recruits were classified as illiterate, but fully 45 percent of the black newcomers lacked basic reading skills. Schooling lasted twelve weeks. “Specially prepared textbooks, such as The Army Reader, describing in simple words a day with Private Pete, were used. Bootie Mack, a sailor, enlivened the pages of The Navy Reader.”100 The level of training was modest (the ability to write letters, read signs, use a clock, deploy basic arithmetic), but remarkably the great majority, some 250,000, were lifted out of illiteracy in this brief period.101 Of the black members of these Special Training Units in the first six months of operation, fully 90 percent were assigned to regular units at the conclusion of their schooling, a higher proportion than the 85 percent of whites.
The response by blacks to this unexpected opportunity was quite profound. Many wrote to show appreciation for the chance to rectify the lack of education they had received back home. Fully seven in ten blacks in this program went on to receive further, more advanced training in the Army, and a remarkable 50 percent of the graduating cohort applied for educational assistance after the war under the GI Bill.102 Arguably, this educational initiative later had the ironic effect—certainly unintended by Senator Bilbo and his fellow southern members of Congress—of creating a mass literate public for the postwar civil rights movement.
But if there were striking gains for the poorest and least educated blacks in the military as measured in their overrepresentation in this remedial education project, there were immense, almost impassible barriers in the way for better-equipped blacks who attempted to move ahead and secure advanced training. “The three branches which contained the bulk of Negro troops were traditionally those with many unskilled labor jobs to be performed, such as roadbuilding, stevedoring, laundering, and fumigation.” Further, not much effort was made to assign blacks by taking their level of schooling into account. “Negroes who were high school graduates were assigned to about the same branches as Negroes with at most only grade school education.” By war’s end, some 11 percent of white men in the military were officers, but fewer than 1 percent of blacks, even though their aspirations for leadership were just as high. Whereas black units had both white and black officers, white units were only commanded by white leaders. An Army survey in March 1943 found that “58 per cent of the Negro troops reported that all of the lieutenants in their companies were white, 30 per cent said some white and some Negro, while only 12 per cent reported that all their company lieutenancies were held by Negroes.”103 Very few blacks, certainly far fewer than qualified by objective measures, were admitted to the Army Special Training Program, which placed individuals in civilian colleges to acquire a wide array of skills. The program reached its peak number—105,000—in December 1943; of these, fewer than 1 percent, just 789, were African American. In the great majority of segregated black units, no effort was made to identify qualified individuals. And even where they were singled out, segregation in higher education in the South where most were stationed starkly limited the number of available places although institutions of higher education had signed contracts with the Army that contained clauses proscribing discrimination. In these instances, state laws requiring separate facilities trumped such agreements.
As the leading military historian concerned with the deployment of black troops during the war reports, many units asked for clarification about the kind of skill training these soldiers could receive:
Will there be a separate school for tire maintenance? the Civilian Aide’s Office asked. Can Negro enlisted men be trained as guard patrolmen at Miami Beach? First Air Force wanted to know. May they be sent to the corps area horseshoeing school? Four Corps Area was asked. Are Negroes eligible for the General Mechanics Course at Motor Transport Schools the Replacement and School Command and the Antiaircraft Command inquired. Can Negroes be given observation aviation training? . . . Where can we send medical enlisted men for training? Second Army and the Flying Training Command inquired.104
Over and over again, the rigid separation of blacks and whites under Jim Crow rules hindered significant black advancement. With great regularity, the Army would announce training opportunities, only to hurriedly add a proviso that there were no appropriate facilities for Negro troops. At other times, when black trainees arrived at the relevant agency, they were transferred elsewhere without delay. Both Franz Kafka and Joseph Heller would have recognized a situation like this:
The Air Force, desiring the Signal Corps to train Negro enlisted men for the 1000th Signal Company, 96th Service Group, learned that Signal Corps was training no Negroes in the required specialties. The Air Forces proceeded to make a search to obtain men from civilian life who had already had the required training and experience. Some six weeks later, it learned that Signal Corps was now training Negro soldiers in these specialties. Negro enlisted men arriving at the Parachute School in 1942 were immediately transferred on the grounds that the school had no facilities for training them and the Army had no units to which they could be assigned.105
Of course, the positions, instruction, and final placement that black soldiers did not enjoy were secured by whites, many of whom entered the military with limited experience, weak schooling, poor horizons, and provincial understanding. For them, military training offered a remarkable chance to break away from bounded prospects. Despite their second-class status, blacks too secured tangible gains from their time in the service. For some, there were radical changes in condition. But even in these cases, the limitations were almost immovable and the experience tinged with a regular and problematic imposition of racial borders. As with other New Deal policies, many blacks found and exploited openings that would not otherwise have been possible. But for most African American individuals, and certainly for the group as a whole, war service ended with a wider gap between whites and blacks, as white access to training and occupational advancement moved ahead at a much more vigorous rate.106
Not surprisingly, “the central point” found by a massive survey of black soldiers conducted in March 1943, at the same time as a large survey of white troops, was “the great extent to which Negro soldiers defined situations in ‘racial’ terms.” Half wished to address President Roosevelt with questions about racism: “Will I as a Negro share this so-called democracy after the war?” “If the white and colored soldiers are fighting and dying for the same thing, why cant they train together?” “What are the chances of moving Negro troops from the South?” Where three in four white respondents thought they had been given a fair chance to win the war, only one in three blacks considered that they had. Whereas the replies of whites were consistent across educational levels, black dissatisfaction increased with greater schooling, irrespective of whether they lived in the North or South. “As the war ended,” The American Soldier dryly commented, the black soldier was “less likely than others to think he had a square deal from the army.”107
Even though many blacks gained advancement from their participation in the Second World War, the larger, overall effect created increasing racial disparity. The South held a tight grip on the racial policies of the armed services. Despite the valiant efforts demonstrated by black soldiers, the military, even if it had wanted to practice complete integration, would have found itself more unable to defeat Jim Crow than to decimate Germany and Japan’s massive forces. Moreover, the lasting effects for ex-soldiers mirrored the experience of farmworkers and laborers, for postwar benefits created an affirmative action for white soldiers that contributed to a growing economic chasm between white and black veterans.