NO OTHER NEW DEAL initiative had as great an impact on changing the country as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act. Aimed at reintegrating 16 million veterans, it reached eight of ten men born during the 1920s.1 Even today, this legislation, which quickly came to be called the GI Bill of Rights, qualifies as the most wide-ranging set of social benefits ever offered by the federal government in a single, comprehensive initiative. Between 1944 and 1971, federal spending for former soldiers in this “model welfare system” totaled over $95 billion.2 By 1948, 15 percent of the federal budget was devoted to the GI Bill, and the Veterans Administration (VA) employed 17 percent of the federal workforce.
One by one, family by family, these expenditures transformed the United States by the way they eased the pathway of soldiers—the generation that was marrying and setting forth into adulthood—returning to civilian life. With the help of the GI Bill, millions bought homes, attended college, started business ventures, and found jobs commensurate with their skills. Through these opportunities, and by advancing the momentum toward suburban living, mass consumption, and the creation of wealth and economic security, this legislation created middle-class America.3 No other instrument was nearly as important.
Fifty years after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton affectionately recalled these accomplishments at a commemorative conference in Warm Springs, Georgia. FDR’s “most enduring legacy,” he contended, was not Social Security or any other landmark bill, but the “vision most clearly embodied in the G.I. Bill which passed Congress in June 1944, just a few days after D-Day,” which “gave generations of veterans a chance to get an education, to build strong families and good lives, and to build the nation’s strongest economy ever, to change the face of America. . . . The G.I. Bill helped to unleash a prosperity never before known.”4
President Clinton reflected a widespread consensus. A year earlier, the editor of the journal of the American Council on Education prepared a special issue devoted to this omnibus program. He quickly discovered “the enthusiasm expressed by the friends, colleagues, and even total strangers with whom I had occasion to discuss my assignment.”5 As “the law that worked,” one of his contributors observed, the GI Bill “enabled millions of working class Americans to go to college, buy their own homes, and become, in reality, members of the middle class.” This landmark, he concluded, had produced “a true social revolution,” one that “raised the entire nation to a plateau of social well-being never before experienced in U.S. history.”6
The entire nation? This oft-repeated claim is remarkably misleading. To be sure, the GI Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites. Written under southern auspices, the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow. Its administration widened the country’s racial gap. The prevailing experience for blacks was starkly differential treatment.
At the time, some observers noticed. Two years after the passage of the GI Bill, Truman Gibson, Jr., Veterans Editor for the Pittsburgh Courier, documented “the sorry plight of Negro veterans, and particularly those living in the South” in a story headlined “Government Fails Negro Vets.” He lamented how “the veterans’ program had completely failed veterans of minority races.”7 The next year, Our Negro Veterans, a fact-filled report, drew attention to a “profound crisis” for black ex-soldiers. Summarizing studies conducted by the Bureau of the Census, the Southern Regional Council (an interracial group that promoted gradual change), the National Urban League, and the American Veterans Committee8 (whose active membership included Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and Ronald Reagan), it observed,
There are two major sets of facts surrounding the life of Negro veterans in America today:
(1) Over a million dark-skinned ex-service men are, by training, discipline, sacrifice, and determination, prepared for integration into the nation’s life as first-class citizens. (2) The nation has almost universally failed to grasp the enormous opportunity which is presented through veterans’ benefits for this minority group.9
It was, the document concluded, “as though the GI Bill had been earmarked ‘For White Veterans Only.’”10
What had happened? How could a program so unparalleled and so inclusive be understood so quickly, and with good reason, as a policy “For White Veterans Only”?
I
IN THE MOVEMENT toward victory in Europe and in Asia, no one anticipated the profound ways in which GI Bill benefits and subsidies would help so many of the country’s veterans. More than 200,000 used the bill’s access to capital to acquire farms or start businesses. Veterans Administration mortgages paid for nearly 5 million new homes. Prior to the Second World War, banks often demanded that buyers pay half in cash and imposed short loan periods, effectively restricting purchases to members of the upper middle class and upper class. With GI Bill interest rates capped at modest rates, and down payments waived for loans up to thirty years, the potential clientele broadened dramatically. The balance decisively tilted away from renting toward purchasing. Between 1945 and 1954, the United States added 13 million new homes to its housing stock. In 1946 and 1947, VA mortgages alone accounted for more than 40 percent of the total,11 a remarkable figure considering that young veterans were far less likely to have accumulated the substantial savings needed to buy property than those who had stayed home during the war. These loans were especially important in areas of high growth. In California, for example, the federal government only had insured 6 percent of home mortgages in 1936; by 1950, fully half.12
Residential ownership became the key foundation of economic security for the burgeoning and overwhelmingly white middle class. The social geography of the country altered dramatically.13 The encouragement given to homeownership helped spawn the suburban sprawl that would characterize postwar growth. As Michael Bennett, author of the main history of the GI Bill, noted: “The GI Bill changed where and how Americans lived. Suburbs sprang up like mushrooms around every sizable city. . . . As surely as the Homestead Act of 1862 filled the prairies of the Far West, the GI Bill created and filled the suburbs.”14
Accompanying this revolution in how and where Americans lived was the even more impressive expansion of education benefits. By 1950, the federal government had spent more on schooling for veterans than on expenditures for the Marshall Plan, which had successfully rebuilt Europe’s devastated economic life after the war. On the eve of the Second World War, some 160,000 Americans were graduating from college each year. By the end of the decade, this number had tripled, to some 500,000. By 1955, about 2,250,000 veterans had participated in higher education. The country gained more than 400,000 engineers, 200,000 teachers, 90,000 scientists, 60,000 doctors, and 22,000 dentists. There is ample evidence that GI Bill students, who were older and likely to be more focused, performed at a higher academic level than their non-veteran peers after the war, and did better than any college age group in the prewar period.15 Another 5,600,000 veterans enrolled in some 10,000 vocational institutions to study a wide array of trades from carpentry to refrigeration, plumbing to electricity, automobile and airplane repair to business training. For most returning soldiers, the full range of benefits—the entire cost of tuition plus a living stipend—was relatively easy to obtain, with access facilitated by a very large staff numbering some 225,000 by 1947, some serving in Washington but most in field offices.16
When he spoke at Warm Springs, President Clinton affirmed a long-standing agreement that the GI Bill’s scope, influence, and democratic qualities had made it “the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam,” the moment “when dreams came true.”17 From the start, the bill was enormously popular. It was passed by unanimous votes spanning the lines of party and region both in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Within eighteen months of the law’s passage, Congress made its provisions even more generous.18
Celebrating “this remarkable bill” for making “massive tax-financed investments in young adults and families,” Theda Skocpol, like many other commentators, has remarked on how the GI Bill “encompassed both more- and less-privileged Americans,” and how “it joined benefits with service, citizenship rewards with citizenship responsibilities.”19 By democratizing access to education, diffusing skills, enhancing ownership, placing veterans in good jobs, and promoting geographic as well as occupational mobility, this federal set of policies created a world in the late 1940s in which “private life was aglow with possibilities.”20 The law enhanced the economic prospects of a huge proportion of young American families while producing social change “so sweeping and yet so much a part of everyday life that young people cannot imagine the world in which their grandparents lived.”21
Aware of the possible benefits and advancements that lay ahead, black Americans also looked forward to the war’s triumphant conclusion, hopeful that the GI Bill would improve their prospects. The back pages of Opportunity, the quarterly magazine of the National Urban League, began to fill with advertisements placed by black colleges. “Big post-war program is now laid for curriculum and building expansion,” Maryland’s Princess Anne College announced. “Prepare for post-war leadership,” Kentucky State College exhorted. The larger, better established institutions simply listed their fields of study. Smaller, more vulnerable schools touted their distinct ambience (“home-like surroundings”; “gateway to Christian education”; “school of distinction and personality in the Sunny South”).22 Having endured a period of low wartime enrollment, these colleges sought to compete for the expected upsurge in demand once black veterans came home and took advantage of the higher education benefits in the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944. “It is agreed that never before in history has such an inclusive program been provided for national heroes of any war,” Campbell Johnson, an African American colonel, wrote in the magazine’s Winter 1945 issue. He stressed how this GI Bill of Rights promised each soldier, black as well as white, the status of an “unforgotten man.”23
This did not seem a forlorn hope. The new law was more than the most comprehensive public policy to that moment in American history. It also was formally the most democratic. Unlike Social Security or legislation for minimum wages and maximum hours, no one was excluded who had served at least ninety days on active duty and had received other than a dishonorable discharge. Irrespective of region, class, ethnicity, and race, all veterans were equally recognized as entitled to the bounty of social rights. The GI Bill’s remarkable array of advantages for American troops contained not “a single loophole for different treatment of white and black veterans.”24 It was, as Michael Bennett has put it, “America’s first color-blind social legislation.”25
The package of allowances and guidance—generous educational grants, subsidized mortgages and business loans, job training, and assistance to find work—thus summoned high expectations in black America. Though the armed forces remained segregated as the war drew to a close, each veteran, the law seemed to promise, would gain equal access to benefits that could not have been imagined just a few years earlier. Despite racial inequalities in the period’s military, the legislation’s unprecedented inclusiveness and financial comprehensiveness promised more than a million young black men and their families major improvements to their life circumstances.
Even with its Jim Crow structure, the Army had offered many, perhaps most, black soldiers an environment superior to their civilian situations. The Office of Education put the point in 1945, noting that military service “enabled Negroes to gain extensive and valuable occupational experience” in a wide variety of skilled and semi-skilled jobs. The level of black learning, moreover, had been raised by literacy education and officer training. “Many Negroes,” this report observed, “will have gained some experience and knowledge in many . . . occupations, and with slight encouragement will seek further training. Here is offered an opportunity to lift a whole generation of Negroes onto another rung of the economic ladder.”26
As they prepared to return to civilian life, demobilizing blacks thus seemed positioned to take advantage of the boost their status as veterans offered. By early 1945, the black press was crowded with stories reporting that “many GI’s plan to study; go into business after war” and that “one third of soldiers plan more schooling; many taking interest in GI Bill.”27 Celebrating its official racial egalitarianism, these newspapers widely disseminated digests of the bill, summarizing eligibility for its various provisions.28 All soldiers had access to publications like the brief “handy guide” prepared by the House Committee on World War Veterans’ Legislation or the much longer Veterans Handbook and Guide, running some five hundred pages, published in 1946.29 Opportunity beckoned.30
There is ample evidence that black soldiers expected the GI Bill to provide training and upward mobility, and indeed they applied for as many of its benefits as they could.31 Testimony about the postwar plans of black and white veterans revealed far more similarities than differences. Surveys indicated that a large majority of all soldiers wished to take advantage of the bill. Hundreds of thousands, in fact, gained resources in many cases that were simply unavailable to non-GIs. To this day, many black veterans rightly credit these opportunities as turning points in their lives. There can be no doubt that given the paucity of other benefits and prospects, the GI Bill made a very big difference for these individuals.
“Imagine the excitement of men who could afford higher education under language that called it their right,” the president of Spelman College, Johnnetta Cole, recalled in 1994, taking note of the impact of legislation not directly coded by color.32 The law, as the political scientist Suzanne Mettler has argued, did extend “opportunity across the color line” and gave some, even many, black beneficiaries “boosts in educational attainment, income, and occupational status.”33
Outside the South, some institutions that had discriminated against African Americans began to desist. In a study of the African American 92nd Infantry Division, Mettler found that some of its members had attended integrated institutions, including the University of Chicago, Purdue, Ohio State, Wayne State, and San Francisco State.34 Within the South, enrollment at historically black colleges grew from 29,000 in 1940 to just over 73,000 in 1947, growth made possible, in part, by federal assistance.35 Many famous African Americans, among them Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke and Federal District Court Judge Robert Carter, who gained the means to go to law school, and Harry Belafonte, who received support for training in the arts, were GI Bill graduates. Others, including Oliver Brown, the plaintiff in Brown v. Board of Education, used benefits from the bill to buy their homes.
It was this black section of middle-class America that provided President Johnson with most members of the audience he addressed at Howard University two decades after the end of the Second World War. “The GI bill was largely responsible,” it is quite reasonable to conclude, “for developing a tiny group of professionals into the large, stable, and growing ‘black bourgeoisie’ that exists today, composed of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and mid-level civil servants”; and also that many political activists and civil rights organizers emerged from this group.36 And it is reasonable to stress, if more cautiously, how GI Bill benefits “could take a marginalized population—African Americans—and boost many of its members into a productive middle class citizenry,” or to emphasize how the bill “was creating a far larger black middle class than the past’s cadre of preachers and teachers confined to the old Striver’s Rows of segregated communities.”37
When they could, blacks seized the chance. A systematic study conducted by the Research Division of the Veterans Administration in 1950 based on a survey of soldiers who had left the armed forces between September 1940 and August 1945 found that “the actual participation rates of the 14,571,000 white and 1,308,000 nonwhite veterans were almost identical: 73 and 75 per cent, respectively.” Further, this study revealed that just over half, or 51 percent, of black veterans had participated in more than one GI Bill program, while only 44 percent of whites had done so.38 Yet another study at the time found that the number of black participants was especially high among veterans who had taken part in the literacy program organized by the Army’s Special Training Units.39
II
DESPITE THESE GAINS, Mettler’s conclusion that the GI Bill “represented the most egalitarian and generous program black Americans had experienced, far more inclusive than New Deal social programs,” is not so much wrong as misleading.40 By amplifying the bill’s achievements for returning black soldiers without sufficiently underscoring the high and often impassable barriers placed in their path, such an appraisal can be deceptive. When we take into account the legislative history of the statute and the way in which its various programs were administered, we come to see a rather different, more accurate picture. On balance, despite the assistance that black soldiers received, there was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill. As southern black veterans attempted to gain from these new benefits, they encountered many well-established and some new restrictions. This combination of entrenched racism and willful exclusion either refused them entry or shunted them into second-class standing and conditions.
The playing field never was level. Indeed, one analyst maintains that “Race was contested terrain in the very inception of the GI Bill.”41 When Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, wrote to President Roosevelt on October 5, 1944, four months after passage, to stress that “one of the most important instrumentalities toward assurance of equality of opportunity without regard to race, creed, color or national origin will be the Veterans Administration and the implementation by the Bureau of the . . . G.I. Bill of Rights Act,” his words reflected a mixture of expectation and anxiety.42 His hope lay in unimpeded access to material resources greater than any since Reconstruction, when citizen-soldiers similarly benefited. His disquiet was based on a deep familiarity with American racism and an understanding that the new law was vulnerable to Jim Crow.
It did not take long for reports of obstacles based on race to appear. “The discharged negro GI who returns to Lubbock [Texas] is having difficulty securing a home loan,” one such story reported, in June 1945. Another from Los Angeles recounted how nineteen black Seabees who had been discharged without a hearing after complaining about “intolerable Jim Crow conditions at the Caribbean bases” had written to the secretary of the Navy “to ask for ‘rights’ under the G.I. Bill.” A third from Atlanta described how a delegation “told the Veterans Administration on Friday that discharged Negro soldiers in the South are discouraged from enjoying the benefits of the ‘GI Bill of Rights.’ They are voicing the views of more than a million Negro servicemen and women, the majority of whom came out of the South.”43
How could a program open to all veterans take this turn? The 1947 convention of the United Negro and Allied Veterans of America, a left-oriented group, tried its hand at an answer. It declared firmly that “racial prejudice” in the South “prevents the Negro veteran from securing full benefits under the GI bill.”44 But such a general explanation, true as it was, lacked one crucial political dimension. It missed how the conversion of bigoted values into racist practices had been built into the law’s design and administration from the start.
The deep contradiction between color-blind benefits and profoundly biased allotments of resources invites closer examination. The GI Bill was crafted in the main by the Committee on World War Legislation in the House of Representatives, which was chaired by John Rankin of Mississippi, one of the chamber’s most unashamed racists (he was something of a thug, openly anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-Catholic). Guided by the model of administrative decentralization that the South had achieved in earlier New Deal laws, Rankin led the drafting of a law that left responsibility for implementation mainly to the states and localities, including, of course, those that practiced official racism without compromise.
The main forerunner to the GI Bill had been the unevenly organized benefits for health care, vocational rehabilitation, disability payments, and survivor’s benefits provided for First World War veterans and their dependents between 1918 and 1928.45 Three features of this legacy affected the shape of the new GI Bill. First, unhappiness among veterans with its often amateurish administration led to the creation of the House committee chaired by Rankin. Second, the direct federal welfare provisions that had been offered to families of soldiers during the war had unsettled many white southerners, who observed that with money in their pockets, black women often refused to take on menial household work and black youngsters stayed away from the fields. The supply of maids and farmworkers thus had diminished for a time. Rankin worked hard to avoid a repetition. Third, it gave rise both to the creation of a Veterans Bureau in Washington in 1921 (the Bureau became the Veterans Administration in 1930) and to a powerful American Legion, both of which sought to build support for munificent social provisions by appealing primarily to middle- and working-class whites in all parts of the country.
Moreover, officials at the Legion (which, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, countenanced segregation and lacked any black leaders except in all-black posts) and the Veterans Administration (whose hospitals and housing were racially segregated) knew that legislation for veterans had to pass through southern hands and garner southern backing in Congress.46 To cultivate this support, they made clear that they were disinclined to challenge the region’s race relations and enforce equal treatment for all veterans. And they joined Rankin and his fellow southern representatives to oppose proposals put forward by the administration for a postwar program to be fully directed from Washington.
The suggestion by Roosevelt’s National Resources Planning Board that postwar demobilization and benefits for veterans should be managed by “a strong central directive agency,” with responsibility “for the integration of the administration of all Federal agencies engaged in the post-war readjustment of civilian and military personnel,” was anathema to the South.47 By contrast, as the commander of the Legion, Warren Atherton, put the point in April 1944, “We have endeavored to assure a measure of states rights in the legislation wherein control of many of the features of the bill will still rest with individual states.” In writing to his deputy he further stressed that in the version he preferred, the one that passed into law, the VA would take care not to disturb arrangements within the South. Devolving administrative responsibilities to the state level would leave flexible discretion in the hands of white district officers to manage the law as they thought appropriate under local conditions.48 The alliance of the Rankin-led South, the VA, and the Legion produced a bill combining generosity to veterans with provisions for the dispersion of administrative responsibilities that were designed to shield Jim Crow.
The most immediate precursor was Public Law 16. Providing for the rehabilitation of disabled veterans, it had passed Congress in March 1944, two months before the GI Bill. Rather than adopt the original proposal for a program to be administered centrally by the Federal Security Agency (the period’s equivalent of today’s Department of Health and Human Services), Congress placed day-to-day decisions about eligibility and policy in the hands of local district offices.49 Three partners joined together to direct the legislation: Congress, dominated by southerners in key positions; the VA, happy to cooperate to keep competing bureaucracies at bay and to govern veterans’ affairs one state at a time; and locally based agents who staffed and ran the programs in a manner consistent with their environment’s racial laws and customs. The GI Bill extended and deepened this pattern.
President Roosevelt underscored the postwar economic benefits available to veterans, especially in the area of schooling, in a radio broadcast in July 1943, shortly after the draft age had been lowered to eighteen. The promise was politically appealing. It answered people’s concern that depression conditions of mass unemployment might return, and it dealt with the social adjustment that soldiers, after their firsthand experience with violence and death, would soon be confronting. Almost immediately, members of Congress produced a surge of proposals, more than thirty, to reintegrate military veterans.50 The American Legion sought to combine the most generous elements of these proposals into a wide-ranging program of loans, subsidies, and counseling. The organization’s central strategy attempted to prevent the division of the bill into sections that would be directed to different congressional committees. Instead, the Legion successfully lobbied Congress to turn responsibility for the entire legislation to Rankin’s committee, and a bargain was struck. The chairman now could guard the southern order and offer munificent treatment for veterans, advancing both goals at the same time.51
In the Senate, which played a secondary role, the legislative campaign was directed by Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri. His main task was to prevent Elbert Thomas of Utah, who chaired the Senate Education Committee, from taking charge of the education provisions of the bill, because Elbert preferred to place them in the Office of Education as a direct federal responsibility. With the South in control, a bill was fashioned in both houses that linked tight congressional oversight to locally compliant administrative decentralization. In this way, white privileges could be secured in the face of powerful impulses demanding equal treatment for all veterans.
The GI Bill’s remarkable bounty thus could be directed to the country’s poorest region while keeping its system of racial power intact. “Your bill,” the director of a Mississippi business college astutely wrote to Rankin, “is particularly desirable for the Southern states.”52 He understood the importance of keeping the legislation’s educational provisions out of the hands of the Office of Education, something of a wild card from the South’s perspective. This agency, moreover, would have required 50 percent matching funds from the states on the model of the welfare provisions in the Social Security Act. By contrast, the approach Rankin took combined complete federal funding with state and local control under the auspices of the Veterans Administration. It also empowered private institutions, including banks and colleges, to offer services only to veterans they would choose to assist or admit.
Rankin fought assertively to make Jim Crow safe. He had reason to be anxious. The immense extension of federal largesse, he feared, could threaten segregation. He keenly grasped that black veterans would attempt to use their new status, based on service and sacrifice, along with a new body of federal funds, to shift the balance against segregation. Moreover, given the comparatively young age of the black population in the South, a significant proportion of African American men would be returning home after military service far more ready than before to assert their rights and claim their due.53
When the chairman’s resolve wavered during the course of conducting his committee’s nineteen executive sessions, the Legion mobilized the former governor of Alabama, Frank Dixon, and Stanley Rector, an expert on federalism whom Dixon trusted, to reassure Rankin that the racial status quo would be guarded zealously by the VA. Rector, Dixon informed Rankin, had been advising the Legion on how to prevent the bill “becoming an opening wedge for federalization.” Rector then reported to Rankin just how clearly the approach to decentralization could be distinguished “from that of the social workers and planners in the Washington bureaus,” who were utterly unreliable on racial questions.54
Throughout the process of writing the bill, Rankin was particularly worried about the educational provisions in Title II. With educators lobbying for a clause that would require the VA to consult the Office of Education and funnel funds only to institutions recognized on its approved list, Rankin insisted that the VA alone should administer this part of the legislation. The key paragraph stipulated the limits of federal power without any ambiguity. Rankin wrote that “No Department or Agency, or Offices of the United States in carrying out the provisions of this part, shall exercise any supervision or control whatsoever over any state educational agency.” In explaining this provision, Rankin made clear to General Frank Hines, who led the agency, that “a definite line should be drawn in the schooling on the matter of race segregation.” The minutes of the session, the historian Kathleen Frydl notes, “indicated Hines’ assent, and the VA’s record for sensitivity to local concerns spoke on his behalf.”55 Hines’s successor, General Omar Bradley, recorded in his memoirs that “It was clear to all of us the best way to prepare the VA for the oncoming onrush of veterans was on a decentralized basis.”56
The plan, in short, was designed from the start to mesh with the state and district levels of congressional representation and oversight in order to place vital powers in southern hands. Early in July 1944, one month after the GI Bill was signed into law, the Interstate Conference of Employment Security, a lobby group of state unemployment boards, insisted in a confidential memo to the Veterans Administration and the Bureau of the Budget that agencies of the states should “handle the interpretation” of the unemployment insurance section of the law, including “most of the disqualifying provisions.” Decisions about who qualified should be kept in state hands. Some two weeks later, Hines affirmed to General Frank Yates, Acting Comptroller General of the United States, that the VA would not administer the legislation without the agreement of individual states. He took trouble to reassure not just the Interstate Conference but Congressman Rankin and other southern members that the VA’s administration of unemployment insurance for black veterans would not undercut southern labor markets. Yates, in responding, avowed that “it is clear from the language [of the bill] . . . the administration of the VA should utilize, insofar as possible, existing facilities and services of . . . state departments and agencies under agreements executed with such departments and agencies.”57 As it turned out, local control strongly discouraged blacks from applying. Responding to an inquiry, the Mississippi Unemployment Compensation Committee assured Rankin in July 1946, that after two years of eligibility for veterans, that some 2,600 blacks had submitted applications for unemployment payments, compared to 16,000 whites.58
To be sure, as a national program for all veterans, the GI Bill contained no clauses directly or indirectly excluding blacks or mandating racial discrimination. Even the NAACP’s director of the Office of Veterans Affairs, Frank Dedmon, believed that “the VA administers the law as passed by Congress to both Negro and White alike.”59 But it was, as Frydl acutely observes, “a congressionally federalized program—one that was run through the states, supervised by Congress; one central policy making office and hundreds of district offices bounded, in a functional as well as political way, by state lines.” Operating in this manner, she notes, the “exclusion of black veterans came through the mechanisms of administration,” and this “flexibility that enabled discrimination against black veterans also worked to the advantage of many other veterans.” In this aspect of affirmative action for whites, the path to job placement, loans, unemployment benefits, and schooling was tied to local VA centers, almost entirely staffed by white employees, or through local banks and both public and private educational institutions. By directing federal funding “in keeping with local favor,” the veteran status that black soldiers had earned “was placed at the discretion of parochial intolerance.”60
Sensitized by their experience of prior New Deal legislation, many African Americans understood the troubling implications of this key feature of the GI Bill. Shortly after he was hired by the Veterans Administration in 1946 as a Special Assistant for Negro Affairs, Joseph Albright quietly noted to General Bradley that equal treatment under the act was likely to be a myth. Though the law contained no racial distinctions, the assignment of powers to the states ensured discriminatory treatment for blacks. “The difficulties of the Negro veteran,” he insisted, “are not the same as those of any other minority group of ex-servicemen, for the simple reason that all other minorities are considered as being white, and with but few isolated exceptions are treated as such.”61
Similarly, in reflecting on the bill in 1947, W. A. Bender, an African American minister from Mississippi, acutely analyzed the bind black veterans had been put in by this form of public administration. Writing to Ohio’s conservative Republican senator Robert Taft, Bender identified “the first mistake” of the legislation as the choice “to bring different states into the set-up.” Complaining that his own state’s Department of Education had refused to approve many black vocational schools, he noted that “State committees appointed by Southern governors to control these schools start off with the determination that Negro soldiers shall not be trained under this bill, and they never let up.”62
III
BLACKS ALSO FACED STRUCTURAL and demographic disadvantages—even if institutionalized racism had not been a key feature of the GI Bill, and even if it were the case, as the VA reported, that blacks in their twenties and thirties had been disproportionately underrepresented in the armed forces. A significantly lower portion had qualified for service based on the military’s various tests for physical health, literacy, and aptitude. Throughout the Second World War, the rejection rate for blacks remained a good deal higher than that for whites. In all, only half of blacks in the relevant age group served in the military as compared to three out of every four whites.63 Even in the period when manpower needs were most acute, black enlistments stayed at about 75–80 percent of the white proportion in the relevant pool from which soldiers were drawn.64
It is important to underscore, however, that this difference in eligibility was a good deal less significant in shaping the racial qualities of the GI Bill than the way in which its benefits were distributed by the nearly all-white decentralized apparatus charged with administration. Nowhere was this more true than in the realm of education. Even outside the South, black access to primarily white colleges and universities remained limited. De facto quotas and, in some cases, high selectivity closed these schools to the vast majority of blacks qualified for higher education. A Princeton poll conducted by a campus newspaper in 1942 discovered that nearly two in every three students opposed the admission of blacks, while those who favored a right of entry did so under the stipulation of limitations that “included such demands as a ban from Prospect Street, much higher standards than for white people, and definite quotas.”65 Of the nine thousand students at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 (which, along with Columbia University, had the least restrictive policies in the Ivy League), only forty-six were black.66 Writing about non-southern institutions, President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights found in 1948:
It is clear there is much discrimination, based on prejudice, in admission of students to private colleges, vocational schools, and graduate schools. . . . Application blanks of many American colleges and universities include questions pertaining to the candidate’s racial origin, religious preference, parents’ birthplace, etc. In many of our northern educational institutions enrollment of Jewish students seems never to exceed certain fixed points and there is never more than a token enrollment of Negroes.67
In all, black enrollment in the North and West in higher education remained small, never exceeding five thousand during the late 1940s.68 In principle, southern blacks could have taken their GI Bill vouchers to northern institutions, but this would have required overcoming persistent discrimination as well as discovering options about alternatives without access to adequate counseling.
So it was in the South, primarily in historically black colleges, where 95 percent of black veterans utilized their higher education benefits. As a lead editorial in the Journal of Negro Education underscored when the war was coming to an end, “The overwhelming majority of Negroes obtain their higher and professional education in segregated schools. . . . Thus, whether we like it or not, the problem of higher and professional education for Negroes is a problem of the Negro separate school with all of the disadvantages which that connotes.”69
Still living in a world of segregation that had been sanctioned by the “separate but equal” doctrine the Supreme Court had applied in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson (upholding a Louisiana law that required separate railway cars for blacks and whites),70 seventeen southern states stipulated separate schools at all levels. “White and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school,” the Virginia Codes of 1928 and 1942 instructed. Tennessee law declared: “It shall be unlawful for any school, academy, college, or other place of learning to allow white and colored persons to attend the same school, academy, college or other place of learning.” Mississippi’s constitution was amended in 1942 and 1944 to specify which colleges were open to whites and which to blacks. For example, the state’s code identified the purpose of the Mississippi State College for Women as “the moral and intellectual advancement of the white girls of the State”; in contrast, Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College existed “for the education of the colored youth of the state.”71
The core of opportunity for African American veterans thus lay with black institutions. Seventeen of these colleges had been founded under the Second Morrill Act of 1890, which disallowed federal support to states if they did not create separate schools for blacks when other state colleges excluded them.72 Of all the higher education enrollments in the United States, the region’s historically black colleges accounted for less than 3 percent before and after the Second World War.73 Both in absolute numbers and in proportion to their populations, white students had far more college places than blacks. Within the South, where blacks constituted a quarter of the population, white colleges in 1947 outnumbered black schools by more than five to one. In Mississippi, more than half the state’s population was black, but just 7 of the 33 institutions; in Tennessee, 8 of 35; in all, 102 of 647.74
Throughout the country, colleges and universities struggled to keep up with the demand for higher education, but both quantitatively and qualitatively the problem was significantly more acute for black institutions, the poorest educational establishments in the country’s most deprived region. During the war, as their enrollments decreased severely, their financial condition worsened significantly and their ability to maintain often inadequate facilities diminished.75 It was to these places that the vast majority of the most talented and best qualified black soldiers had to turn. The GI Bill barely raised the ceiling on their ambitions. Before the war, many blacks aspiring to college were not able to go because they lacked the financial ability. Now that they had the means thanks to federal grants, the exclusion of so many and the substandard quality of the institutions, regardless of their teachers’ best intentions, mocked the legislation’s open-hearted promises.
Despite some federal assistance for black schools, the relative absence of support from the southern states left most black colleges unable to take in all the veterans who qualified. In 1947, some twenty thousand eligible black veterans could not find places even under incredibly crowded conditions.76 As many as fifty thousand others might have sought admission had there been sufficient places.77 Insufficient housing in segregated communities was a large part of the problem. “A survey of 21 of the southern black colleges,” a recent analysis reports, “indicated that 55 per cent of all veteran applicants were turned away for lack of space, compared to about 28 per cent for all colleges and universities.”78 Alcorn State, the primary black college in Mississippi, only had room for four hundred.79 Within the South’s seventeen states in 1946, 51 percent of higher education students in white institutions were veterans, but just 30 percent in black colleges.80 Without funds and facilities, there simply was insufficient room. By contrast, “flagship universities like the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan in the North and the University of Texas and the University of Alabama in the South were able to expand rapidly to meet the needs of returning veterans under the G.I. Bill.”81
Though separate, black colleges hardly were equal. “Not a single one of these institutions offers work that is even substantially equal to that offered in the corresponding state institutions for whites,” a 1945 assessment concluded, “and there is nothing to indicate that they will or can ever do so.” At the start of the GI Bill, in Virginia, where Virginia State College was “one of the best of two or three of the Negro state colleges,” the study found that “there is not a single library in any one of the nine white institutions—not even the teachers colleges—which is as small as Virginia State’s. . . . It does not have the library resources, laboratory and other equipment, or personnel to maintain a first-class college,” and the study concluded that “the State of Virginia does not intend to provide equal opportunities for higher education of Negroes in the near future; if at all.”82 Further, these tended to be intellectually and socially conservative institutions, with a “tendency to promote mechanical intelligence to the relative exclusion of both intellectual and social intelligences,” as one 1944 appraisal discerned.83
Most black colleges were small; half enrolled fewer than 250 students and more than 90 percent taught fewer than 1,000 students. On average, the population at a black school was about half that of the average of 1,500 at exclusively or predominantly white institutions. Their budgets were stressed; their facilities often less than basic. Libraries were deficient; laboratories rudimentary. Given postwar pressures, these schools “admitted more students than even their increased plant facilities can reasonably accommodate.”84 Their faculties were understaffed and undertrained. Student-faculty ratios usually exceeded 20 to 1. Few, not more than 5 percent, were accredited by the Association of American Universities. Whereas at southern white colleges only two institutions offered training in trades, “29 fields of specialization were available in all institutions combined and all but 2 of these fields were listed by higher institutions for Negroes.”85 Similarly, there were immense disparities in the range of the liberal arts, and in graduate and professional training. No black college had a doctoral program or a certified engineering program. Only in the field of education was there something like parity across the racial divide, itself a reflection of the pressing need for black teachers in segregated primary and secondary schools.86
The pressure that veterans exerted on black institutions helped enlarge their curricula, which traditionally had been limited to education, theology, and various trades. Here the law’s financial provisions did open doors where previously they had been closed. And those lucky enough to find a place had a much better chance at middle-class status than those who did not. Yet overall these gains were more limited, painfully modest, when set side by side with the vast extension of educational opportunity for returning white veterans.
The gap in educational attainment between blacks and whites widened rather than closed.87 Of veterans born between 1923 and 1928, 28 per cent of whites but only 12 percent of blacks enrolled in college-level programs. Furthermore, blacks spent fewer months than whites in GI Bill schooling.88 The most careful and sophisticated recent study of the impact of the bill’s educational provisions demonstrated no difference in attendance or attainment that set apart southern from non-southern whites. All on average gained quite a lot. But for blacks, the analysis revealed a marked difference between the small minority in northern colleges and those students who attended educational institutions in the South. For the latter group, GI Bill higher education had little effect on their educational attainment or their life prospects.89 White incomes tended to increase quite a bit more than black earnings as a result of gaining an advanced education.90 As a result, the authors concluded, at the collegiate level, “the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites.”91
IV
OF COURSE, OTHER SCHOOLING OPPORTUNITIES, including precollegiate vocational education and on-the-job training, beckoned. Such instruction formed a larger part of the GI Bill. In fact, over 700,000 veterans signed up for training on farms; 1.4 million for training on the job; and 3.5 million for vocational schools. Arguably, these subcollege programs, which cost the federal government $9 billion, were an especially significant means to economic advancement and stable middle-class jobs for the large majority of returning soldiers who lacked the level of schooling needed for higher education.92
Here, too, African Americans found themselves at a considerable disadvantage. Black access to agricultural training programs was limited both because such programs often offered wages higher than the prevailing levels and because southern administrators were reluctant to prepare blacks for farm ownership, one of the goals of the programs. They also worried that there would not be enough black farmers to work the land. A 1947 assessment of black veterans found that “On-the-farm training has usually been limited to owners and tenants, while most Negro veterans come from families who are either sharecroppers or laborers. The program is highly decentralized and the white landholding interests who direct the training in many areas do not seem to be inclined to train Negroes to operate farms which they might some day own.” These limitations proved severe. “Out of 28,000 veterans who have received on-the-farm training in the South, only 3,500, or approximately 11 per cent, are Negro veterans. Thus, only 1 per cent of the 350,000 Negro veterans who were drafted from farms received training for this vocation at government expense.”93
On-the-job training, which paid veterans a subsistence allowance during their preparation for work in a skill or craft, proved a far more limited resource for blacks than whites. By early 1946, Georgia had approved 246 programs for job training; black veterans took part in six. Within the South overall, just 7,700 blacks out of a total of 102,000 veterans participated during the first two years of this program, reflecting the Southern Regional Council’s estimate that only one in every 12 programs in the South was open to African Americans.94 Before any veteran could enroll, he had to find an employer willing to take him on, a stipulation that effectively barred most blacks. White employers saw little reason to augment black skills. The much smaller number of black employers often feared potential competition.
The training usually was very meager. The 1947 report argued, moreover, that “a major obstacle” is “the attitude of state departments of education, who have to approve all programs. Many of these departments have followed tradition in conceiving of all training programs and schooling as being segregated, and have assumed that the on-the-job-training program is ‘for whites only.’ ”95 Often, these programs simply used the living wage provided by the GI Bill as a means to reduce or substitute for the wage paid by an employer. In some egregious instances, black workers were charged a fee by their bosses for the privilege of being trained.96
After he joined the VA as a special assistant, Joseph Albright twice toured its southern branch and regional offices. His first trip focused mainly on the woeful situation in black colleges. The second concentrated on employment. Again and again, he was told by federal officials on the spot that remedies for the problems of African Americans were beyond the scope of their agency. When Albright pressured the VA office in Port Jackson, South Carolina, to enhance black veterans’ chances for job training, the area manager agreed that “all available opportunities for training Negro veterans” should be taken, but that “in doing so no action involving local customs should be taken which might reduce our already limited number of institutions offering training for Negro veterans.” He went on to explain that such possibilities were severely limited “due to the fact that a small per centage of business establishments are owned and operated by members of the Negro race,” while “white owners and operators of business establishments, due to long standing customs, will not accept Negro trainees, veteran or non-veteran, for training leading to objectives which are in the higher paying brackets.”97
Since so many black veterans with high school educations were shut out of higher education, and since the average grade of education for black veterans was the fifth, most sought to enroll in vocational programs. These, too, required admission procedures that reflected a scarcity of slots. The act allowed each state to determine the number of public vocational schools. In the South, these segregated public sector institutions were limited in number, deficient in quality, and geared to send graduates on to “black jobs.” An Urban League survey discovered that “Negro veterans attending trade schools have been particularly anxious to get training in radio and electrical work, machine shop and mechanics, business training, carpentry and woodwork, and commercial photography,” only to be disappointed. “These trades have almost entirely been closed to Negroes.”98 Leading public black vocational schools often lacked facilities in such trades, by contrast to white institutions nearby, while offering classes instead in such fields as tailoring and dry cleaning.99
Side by side with these state-funded institutions were private vocational schools. Their expansion was astonishing. When the GI Bill passed, there were only thirty-five in the whole country. By 1950, the VA had certified 10,143.100 Eager to move up the occupational ladder by acquiring new skills, African Americans were particularly vulnerable targets for all too many white and black scam artists who founded such “for profit” training schools funded entirely by tuition from GI Bill grants to individual veterans. Charging the top rates allowed by the law, many of these private schools were flimsy operations that provided little or no actual training.
A 1947 review by the Urban League of 314 private vocational schools for black students found most to be dreadful; worse overall than the inadequate schools blacks had attended before the close of the war.101 Another report that year concluded: “Although these courses have, in every case, been approved by the Department of Education in the respective states, it is doubtful if many of them meet minimum standards for this type of training. In the absence of other opportunities, the Negro veteran may easily be exploited.”102
Most state departments of education were too understaffed to impose minimum standards on these fledgling institutions. Oklahoma reported it had no ability to approve and supervise such schools operating for a profit. Louisiana and Mississippi lacked any process for approval. In the main, the problem of standards simply was disregarded. As a result, many for profit schools were fraudulent. Others offered training so rudimentary as to be useless. Because the GI Bill mandated state control, the VA could not supervise these schools directly or impose clear standards on the states.
Similar practices also shaped how job placement and access to capital for homes and businesses, the other key aspects of the bill, were administered. In these areas as well, the decentralization of authority from the federal government to states, localities, and private sector institutions vitiated any possibility that veterans of all backgrounds would be treated with at least a serious modicum of equality.
The United States Employment Service (USES) was mandated by the GI Bill to help veterans find jobs at their level of skill. Playing an active role in labor markets, it was the key agency for soldiers who sought information about employment upon their return.103 With a staff of more than twenty thousand, it was well situated to help match workers with employers. The USES was radically decentralized in 1947. All of its responsibilities, still mainly funded by federal grants, were returned to the states. Before that date, in the early years of the GI Bill, responsibility lay with the War Manpower Commission and the Department of Labor.
Even then, the agency operated through local USES centers. When eligible African Americans applied for job assistance, their applications were processed by job counselors who were almost exclusively white and who tailored their advice to area conditions and practices. In the South, virtually no black veteran was given access to skilled employment by the USES, despite having had occupational training and work in the military. By channeling African American veterans into “black jobs” in the North as well as the South, the agency reinforced the existing division of labor by race.104 By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in non-farm jobs by the USES in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semi-skilled positions were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled by blacks.105 Because unemployment insurance was made available only to those who could demonstrate a willingness to take a suitable job, and because suitability was defined by the USES, many blacks were compelled to take work far beneath their skill level. Carpenters became janitors; truck drivers dishwashers; communications repair experts porters.
A black field agent for the interracial Southern Regional Council summarized what the experience of seeking a job was like for many African American applicants:
In trying to find a job he’d visit the local U.S. Employment Service Office. If he’ll accept some laborer’s job they’ll readily place him—if he knows some of the old timey trades they can get him placed, but if he’s qualified in some of the new skills that Negroes haven’t traditionally been doing—or has some kind of professional training, then they just can’t find a place for him and he’ll be offered a job as a porter in a local hotel or the like.106
The case of Reuben Thompson of Rome, Georgia, who had entered the Army as a dishwasher but had been trained as a truck driver, illustrates how the process worked:
I have been out of the Army for about five months. About a month ago I went to the U.S. Employment Service office to apply for a job of truck driving but I couldn’t get one then they wanted to give me a job washing dishes but I didn’t because café jobs here don’t pay enough and I have a mother to support. They wanted to send me to a foundry I have not done anything like that and I am not able to. I put in for unemployment pay but I failed to get it. I am not asking them to give me anything if I could get the kind of job I am capable of doing. Most of the white boys get the unemployment with ease but very few colored get it.107
Blacks also were regularly denied access to the loans that the GI Bill promised. The federal government did not make loans of this or any other kind directly; rather, the Veterans Administration guaranteed them. In consequence, prospective borrowers had to convince banks to lend. And the vast majority of financial institutions refused to approve loans to African Americans. Black veterans were turned down because they lacked sufficient capital of their own, did not have established credit ratings, and lived in neighborhoods thought not to be locations for reliable investments.108 They also were refused loans for nakedly racist reasons, targeted as being high-risk candidates. An irate black veteran in Corpus Christi, Texas, who had informed the NAACP that “financial backers of the GI Bill have so divided locations and placed restrictions on certain areas that as it is . . . NO NEGRO VETERAN is eligible for a loan,” asked the GI Home Loan representative at the city’s largest bank to explain why “a Negro veteran cannot obtain aid under this provision same as a white?” He reported the answer that came back as “It is almost impossible for a colored man to get a loan.”109 These impediments were not confined to the South. In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI Bill supported home purchases by non-whites.110
Applications for self-employment business assistance also were routinely denied to blacks, often on insubstantial grounds. Sharecroppers, for example, were told they were ineligible for small business loans because, having to share their profits with their landlords, they were not by definition self-employed. A survey of thirteen Mississippi cities by Ebony magazine found that of the 3,229 VA guaranteed home, business, and farm loans made in 1947, precisely two had gone to blacks.111
V
IT IS INDISPUTABLE THAT THE GI Bill offered eligible African Americans more benefits and more opportunities than they possibly could have imagined in the early 1940s.112 Yet the way in which the law and its programs were organized and administered, and its ready accommodation to the larger discriminatory context within which it was embedded, produced practices that were more racially distinct and arguably more cruel than any other New Deal–era program. The performance of the GI Bill mocked the promise of fair treatment. The differential treatment meted out to African Americans sharply curtailed the statute’s powerful egalitarian promise and significantly widened the country’s large racial gap. Any celebration of postwar gains for veterans must reckon with these doleful practices and legacies.