World War II and African Americans

Most destructive military conflict in Europe, but one that gave America renewed prosperity and established its postwar dominance in world affairs; for African Americans the war provided new economic opportunities, accelerated the black migration from the South to Northern urban areas, and prepared the way for the Civil Rights Movement.

World War II had a transforming effect on African Americans. Despite white reluctance and hostility, the black community took pride in its contributions to the war effort at home and overseas. African Americans served in every branch of the military and in every theater of conflict. The war provided new opportunities on the home front and vastly increased the movement of blacks out of the South. It also encouraged civil rights activism, as African Americans broadened their efforts to secure full citizenship rights.

During the war, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), along with the black press and other organizations, mounted a “Double-V campaign” intended to achieve victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. The war contributed to a complex process of change that would transform the whole of African American life. In confronting the nation with a grave crisis, it swept away much of the rationale for segregation.

Adolf Hitler's racist doctrines—and, to a lesser extent, the chauvinism of his Japanese and Italian allies—came to the attention of African Americans long before fighting actually broke out. During the 1930s international sports provided an important surrogate to war, and blacks exulted in boxer Joe Louis's victories over Italian Primo Carnera and German Max Schmeling, and in the gold medals won by sprinter Jesse Owens and other black athletes at the 1936 Munich Olympic Games. Nazi racism forced some Americans to consider the blemishes on their own democratic principles, above all, America's subordination of blacks and other racial minorities.

American Mobilization

War broke out in Europe after Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, and the United States began to mobilize for war. But the nation was still struggling through the Great Depression, and Americans were little concerned with events in Europe and Asia. They welcomed the defense buildup mainly because it provided much-needed jobs. Indeed, World War II—far more than President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal economic programs—was responsible for ending the decade-long depression and returning the nation to full prosperity.

But there were few opportunities for African Americans in the booming defense industry. In 1941 black labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph took a dramatic step in protesting blacks' exclusion. He began organizing a massive march on Washington, and President Roosevelt, who was eager to head off the protest, signed Executive Order 8802, banning racial discrimination in defense industry and federal government hiring. Executive Order 8802 also established the Fair Employment Practices Committee to implement and oversee the new policy.

Randolph's victory would be the first of many during the war years. The NAACP launched its Double-V campaign in the belief that the war offered an opportunity to “persuade, embarrass, compel, and shame our government and our nation into a more enlightened attitude toward a tenth of its people.” The wartime years indeed yielded a great number of firsts, advancements, and breakthroughs.

Blacks on the Home Front

On the home front, African Americans faced difficulties and great opportunities. The war spurred a renewal of black migration to the North, which had been slowed by the Great Depression. The resulting population movement did not subside for some thirty years. Between the 1940s and late 1960s about 4.5 million blacks would leave the South for the urban North and West. Upon arrival, they faced severe housing shortages and overt hostility from white residents.

There was considerable wartime friction between whites and blacks. In 1943, with the nation in the second year of war, the racial hostilities erupted into violence. During the summer of that year there were more than 250 racial conflicts in forty-seven American cities, including Mobile, Alabama, and Harlem. The worst race riot of the war took place in Detroit, when a controversy over the employment of blacks escalated into thirty hours of violence that left twenty-five blacks and nine whites dead. The federal government did little to address the causes of such confrontations or to prevent their recurrence.

In the aftermath of that violent summer, black poet Langston Hughes posed trenchant questions for American society:

"Looky here, America What you done done—Let things drift Until the riots come—Yet you say we're fightin For democracy. Then why don't democracy Include me? I ask you this question Cause I want to know How long I got to fight BOTH HITLER—AND JIM CROW?"

Blacks rankled at other forms of racial segregation. For example, during the war, the Red Cross segregated the blood in its blood banks, as if there were any real difference between “white” blood and “black” blood.

Yet the war also had undeniably positive effects. The wartime migration northward had major political and economic consequences. Escaping the poll taxes and literacy tests of the South, southern migrants found themselves able to vote freely, in many cases, for the first time in their lives. In many northern cities, black voters came to be a significant factor in electoral politics. Migration from the South also brought a large number of African Americans into industrial manufacturing. More than half a million blacks, including many former southerners, joined Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) unions such as the United Automobile Workers or the United Steelworkers. The war thus helped establish a relatively prosperous black working class.

Serving in a Segregated Military

The war also commenced a process of change that in 1948 would begin the formal integration of the American armed services. But initially, as in past American wars, African Americans encountered resistance from the white majority. Throughout the war, it was American policy “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.” Moreover, the army's mobilization plan on the eve of World War II would have allowed African Americans to contribute only 6 percent of total army manpower, considerably less than their proportion in the overall population.

In 1940 President Roosevelt promoted Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., to brigadier general, making him America's first black general. Roosevelt also committed the nation to establishing combatant and noncombatant black units in each branch of the armed forces. But the military command resisted giving African American soldiers combat assignments. The U.S. Navy remained the most obdurate on racial issues. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and senior naval officers resisted assigning African American sailors to any but the most menial shipboard duties, as servants to officers, in construction battalions, or as messmen or stewards in ships' galleys.

For example, in the heat of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Dorie Miller manned a machine gun and shot down two, and possibly four, enemy aircraft. Miller was a messman, like virtually every other African American in the U.S. Navy, and was ineligible for military training. Moreover, he was ignored for months following the battle. Only after concerted protests in the African American press did he receive a Navy Cross and an invitation to speak to the 1942 graduating class at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Miller was then assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Liscome Bay; but a year later, when a Japanese submarine sank the ship, the black hero of Pearl Harbor died as a messman.

In 1942 the U.S. Marine Corps admitted African Americans for the first time in its 144-year history, taking George Thompson, a former dogcatcher in Nashville, Tennessee, as its first recruit. But the navy did not commission its first group of black officers, known as the “Golden Thirteen,” until March 17, 1944. Three days later, it commissioned the USS Mason, an antisubmarine ship that was the first navy vessel manned by black sailors. Although it sailed under the command of white officers, the Mason at least provided African Americans with an official opportunity for naval combat. But the navy would not desegregate its shore facilities until after the end of the Korean War (1950–1953). Understandably, during World War II, African Americans accounted for just 5 percent of the total navy manpower.

Blacks in the U.S. Army

The U.S. Army was more forthcoming; yet African Americans never accounted for more than 8.7 percent of army manpower, and only 15 percent of that number received combat assignments. In 1941 the army activated its first black tank unit, the 758th Tank Battalion, and established a segregated Army Air Force pilot-training facility in Tuskegee, Alabama. The NAACP opposed the idea of segregated training but believed that the decision was a step in the right direction. On the other hand, the black National Airmen's Association condemned the plan, insisting that they would rather be “excluded than segregated.”

In 1942 the U.S. Army Air Force commissioned its first black pilots, part of the all-black Ninety-ninth Pursuit Squadron—the famed Tuskegee Airmen—that Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., son of General Davis, would command. By 1944 there were 145,242 blacks in the air force, but only one in ninety was an officer; for white personnel, the proportion was one in six.

Most blacks in the army served in support roles. In 1942 the army accepted the first black women for the Women Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), later simplified to the Women's Army Corps (WAC). Black men also found themselves treated as wartime auxiliaries, as in the famed Red Ball Express, an overwhelmingly black unit that drove supplies by truck to advancing American forces following the D-Day invasion and performed yeoman service during the Battle of the Bulge late in 1944.

Red Ball Express drivers were not combat troops, but their jobs involved great danger. One driver recalled that they drove “with those slits … at night [which dimmed the headlights to minimize the danger of attack by enemy aircraft], loaded with high-octane gas and all kinds of ammunition and explosives [at speeds of] 30 to 40 miles an hour no matter what the weather.”

Challenges to Jim Crow

White Americans were wholly unprepared for black servicemen's militant protests against racial segregation. The protesters were in many cases northern blacks unable to abide the Jim Crow policies enforced on U.S. military bases, which were often located in the South. U.S. Air Force historian Alan M. Osur concluded that the story of black airmen in World War II is “a history of attacks on discrimination and segregation.”

The army, which had the largest number of black servicemen, first experienced problems in 1941. In 1942 there were protests within the other military branches. The disturbances peaked in 1943 but continued through the final two years of the war. In 1944, for example, sixteen black officers entered a whites-only restaurant in Fairfax, South Carolina. After being refused service, they shouted “Go to hell” and “Heil, Hitler!” Such protests were by no means restricted to the South. In 1943 four black soldiers damaged a California restaurant after being refused service. In addition, whites instigated race riots on a number of military bases, and white civilians repeatedly assaulted individual black servicemen.

During the war the U.S. Army itself took its first tentative steps against Jim Crow. In 1941 it began integrating its officers' candidate schools. In 1944 the War Department prohibited discrimination in transportation and recreational facilities on all army bases. On a Texas military base not long after this directive was issued, Lieutenant Jackie Robinson—soon to become the first African American to integrate the whites-only world of major league baseball—refused to go to the back of a bus, resulting in his court-martial and vindication.

Robinson's refusal to abide southern Jim Crow practices was by no means an isolated example. Indeed, in the postwar years, the pride and confidence of African American military veterans and their unwillingness to endure further discrimination would help provide the impetus for the Civil Rights Movement.

On December 26, 1944, during the worst days of the Battle of the Bulge, the army issued a directive requesting African American volunteers for racially integrated combat units, a request that marked the beginning of the end for the Jim Crow army. The army found many volunteers among its black cooks, engineers, quartermaster personnel, and truckers. Black veteran Chester Jones recalled, “Those blacks who did volunteer did a creditable job, which shows all they ever needed was an honest-to-goodness chance.”

Conclusion

In the postwar years, no branch of the American military welcomed the prospect of integration. The persistent delaying tactics of the various service heads outraged African Americans, whose pressure in 1948 moved President Harry S. Truman to sign Executive Order 9981, ordering the integration of America's armed forces and establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services.

In civilian life, African Americans were no less committed to achieving full social and political equality. Membership in the NAACP burgeoned from 50,000 in 1940 to 450,000 six years later. In 1942 James Farmer and other civil rights activists founded the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). CORE advocated the Gandhian approach of nonviolent direct action and staged sit-ins at theaters and restaurants in several northern cities, presaging the Sit-In movement begun in 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Thus, in a number of vital respects, World War II prepared the way for the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s.

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