The Experience of African Americans
Although the civil rights advances for African Americans during WWII were small, and mostly snatched back shortly after, Black veterans and workers came out of the war ready to challenge the racial discrimination they faced. WWII did not change their status, but it changed their minds.
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In the Armed Forces
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Before
The US airforce would not accept black pilots.
Black soldiers were not allowed to fight in the Marines – they served only
as cooks, transport or labourers.
In the Navy Black soldiers served only as mess men (cooks); in 1943 the Navy
had over 100,000 African Americans in service but not one black officer.
Black soldiers were not
allowed to train to be officers.
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Advances
1.2 million African Americans
fought in the war.
An African American 332nd
fighter group known as the Tuskagee Airmen was set up; by the end of the war
there were 1,000 Black pilots.
The 761st Tank Battalion
– the ‘black panthers’ – fought in the Battle of the Bulge, 1944.
At Peleliu Island in the
Pacific 1944, the 17th SeeBee (Construction Brigade) company not only
rescued wounded soldiers under fire, but picked up their rifles and fought
back.
Black soldiers were
trained as officers.
African American women
were allowed to become nurses.
Some 400 Navajo Americans
served as code talkers.
Asian American recruits
were integrated into European American units; Chinese Americans were
promoted as officers.
The NAACP successfully
launched legal action to have the sentences reduced of the Black soldiers
convicted after the Port Chicago and Guam incidents.
Black servicemen and
women returned from the war having seen a world beyond their homes,
confident and ready to challenge the discrimination they faced.
In Feb-Mar 1945 the 6888th predominantly Black battalion of the US Women's Army Corps, led by Major Charity Adams, travelled to Birmingham, England, and cleared a backlog of 4 million undelivered items of mail.
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Caveats
The military remained segregated, with the ‘Jim Crow Army’ relegated to support roles and facing unequal treatment and inferior facilities. The first Black recruits (1942) were not allowed on base unless accompanied by a white officer, and were assigned to inactive duty when trained.
In PoW camps, German prisoners ate in the white restaurants and used the white
latrines from which Black soldiers were barred.
Black officers were
allowed only to command Black soldiers; Black nurses could only treat Black
men.
The 1944
Port Chicago explosion &
‘mutiny’ highlighted the lack of training and unsafe conditions in which
African American soldiers had to work at the docks.
In 1944 racial tensions
in Guam ended with white Marines killing a number of Black Marines; when a
group of Black Marines chased the killers, they were arrested,
court-martialled, and sentenced to several years in prison.
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In the Workplace
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Maybe a million African
Americans moved from the rural South to urban areas in the North and West during
WWII.
By 1944 nearly 2 million
Black workers were employed in war-production.
When A. Philip
Randolph threatened a 100,000-strong protest march in 1941, Roosevelt issued
Executive Order 8802, which outlawed racial discrimination in the war
industry and set up the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) to
enforce it.
In 1944 the Supreme Court
ruled that US trade unions had a duty of ‘fair representation’ of both Black
and White workers.
Black workers ended the
war having held down ‘white’ jobs, more confident and ready to challenge the
discrimination they faced.
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African Americans still
regularly received lower wages and faced discriminatory hiring and promotion.
Many were dismissed when
the war ended and the white soldiers returned.
African Americans continued to face discrimination in education and housing (e.g.
Levittown was for white veterans).
In 1943, discrimination
and racial tensions led to race riots in Detroit and attacks on
Mexican-Americans in the ‘Zoot Suit Riots’ in Los Angeles.
The FEPC had no authority
over private companies; it was ignored in the South, and in 1946 Congress
stopped its funding.
In a number of places during the war, notably in the automobile industry, white workers went on strike against the recruitment of black workers to ‘white jobs’
(such as that in 1943 at the Packard Motor Company in Detroit, where 25,000
white workers walked off the job when the firm announced it would train 12
African-American workers to positions previously reserved for whites).
The 1944 ‘fair representation’ ruling was not enforced until 1960.
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Civil Rights
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A ‘Double V’ Campaign called
for victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
Membership of the NAACP
rose from 50,000 to 450,000.
The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in 1942, and organised its first
sit-ins against segregated restaurants
in 1943.
In 1944, Irene Morgan, an
African American woman, was arrested for refusing to move from the ‘white’
seating section of a Greyhound interstate bus.
WWII galvanised the
African American civil rights movement.
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22 African Americans –
including war veterans – were lynched 1941-46, and Black soldiers returned to
find white supremacy, discrimination and segregation unchanged, particularly in
the South.
An attempt in 1948 by President Truman to introduce civil rights was defeated in Congress.
He issued Executive Order 9981 desegregating the armed forced instead, but
it was resisted in the military, and not fully implemented until the Korean
War.
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