World War II

By: Karen Anderson

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

World War II

For African American women, World War II was a time of fear and courage, struggle and success, opportunity and discrimination. As did all American women, they worried about sons and husbands serving in the armed forces, and they struggled to adapt to the myriad changes transforming everyday life in wartime America. They joined African American men in fighting the “Double V” campaign for victory against tyranny abroad and oppression at home. Once the war ended, they found that the changes experienced during the war served as a prelude to the future. The activism and community-building activities of African American women enabled many wartime migrants to survive in unfamiliar and often hostile environments, and helped to strengthen all the institutions crucial to further racial progress.

Contributions to the War Effort

World War II dramatically accelerated the pace of economic change for black women. The demand for war materials and the entry of millions of men into the armed services created an unprecedented labor shortage in the United States. Millions of new jobs were created in the clerical and manufacturing fields, opening up opportunities for women and racial and ethnic minorities to secure new and better kinds of employment. Given a much wider range of choices than in the past, millions of African American women abandoned household and rural work to take new positions in manufacturing, service, and other previously closed sectors of the economy. Their new jobs generally paid much higher wages and offered more benefits than did those they left behind.

Thus, between the years of 1941 and 1945, black women left the rural South and migrated to urban centers throughout the country. Competition for workers forced southern landowners to shift to mechanized labor in order to cultivate and harvest their crops, and this dramatically changed the face of the southern plantation economy. In the future, rural employers in the South would rely on much smaller numbers of semiskilled workers, mostly men. For African American women, the wartime shift to wage work in the cities would be a permanent one, with dramatic social consequences.

Between 1940 and 1944, the proportion of black women workers employed in industrial work nearly tripled, from 6.8 percent to 18.0 percent. At the same time, the percentage of black women who worked in domestic service declined from 59.9 percent to 44.6 percent. Black women, like white women, entered the defense industry in record numbers. Even in those places in the South where defense plants operated, black women were employed. In the Huntsville, Alabama, Redstone Arsenal, for example, black women represented over 11 percent of the labor force. Economic opportunities, however, were still limited. Other fields remained virtually closed to African American women, as the vast majority of the new clerical and sales jobs, for example, were open only to white women. Even within the industrial and defense sectors, black women remained segregated in work that was characterized by hazardous, dirty, and poor working conditions and that paid substandard wages.

Amanda Smith, airplane worker, at the Long Beach (California) plant of Douglas Aircraft. When this photograph was released during World War II, its caption read, in part, “Workers of many races push plane output.”

National Archives/Douglas Aircraft Photo/ORI; Joe McCary, Photo Response Studio

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As they moved to rapidly growing cities, African American women encountered discrimination in other areas of life as well. The persistence of segregation in public and private housing, coupled with the large wartime migration, resulted in extreme overcrowding and poor conditions in black neighborhoods. Many black workers, whose homes were located a great distance from work, found that their access to public transportation was poor. For women, the lack of adequate publicly supported childcare facilities also created problems.

The ubiquity of discrimination in private businesses and public services meant that African American women faced even greater challenges than white women did in providing meals for their families, supervising and safeguarding their children, and maintaining their homes. The scarcity of retail outlets in some black neighborhoods and housing projects and discrimination in urban transit systems combined with the lower incomes of black women to make shopping and budgeting particularly difficult. At the same time, the difficulties of adjusting to new communities and circumstances heightened the importance of African American women's domestic labor to migrant families and communities. Southern migrants to northern communities sometimes could not find southern foods in neighborhood markets, making it difficult for women to provide familiar foods for their families. Those same migrant women, however, continued southern cultural forms and activities (including religious traditions, self-help activities, music, and food preferences). In doing so, they forged family ties and working class communities, providing the basis for grassroots mobilizations during and after the war.

African American women faced discrimination and segregation in the military as well. Of the 350,000 women who served in World War II, only 4,000 were African American. Segregated and limited in their assignments in the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), they were excluded totally from the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service in the Navy (WAVES) until late in 1944. The African American nursing activist Mabel Keaton Staupers met with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in November of 1944, in order to inform her of the WAAC's quotas on black nurses and the exclusionary policies of the WAVES. Staupers also organized nurses from all races to write to the military to protest its discriminatory policies against African American nurses. With this pressure as well as that from civil rights groups, the WAAC eliminated racially based assignments for nurses in January 1945 and the WAVES started enlisting black nurses.

Civil Rights Activism during World War II

These efforts sometimes took different forms for working-class and middle-class African American women. Some middle-class women continued the class-conscious racial uplift programs of the past, while others focused particularly on expanding women's volunteer work to include war-related activities, like running war bond and salvage drives, creating USO centers for African American servicemen, and working for the Red Cross. The latter activities forced them to confront racist practices in national service organizations like the USO and the Red Cross. In the process, some moved from the concern with African American respectability that had fueled their participation in the uplift tradition to using civic activism to advance claims of equal rights as citizens based on their contributions to the wartime state. In addition, their labor-intensive membership drives for the NAACP and other civil rights organizations helped to build the infrastructure for the civil rights movements that followed the war. Working-class women focused particularly on issues related to economic opportunities. In communities like Detroit, with its strong labor tradition, they worked not only to counter the unions' histories of discrimination, but to empower more egalitarian unions like the United Auto Workers as vehicles for fighting racial discrimination at work and in their communities.

Black U.S. Army nurses waiting to disembark in Greenock, Scotland, 15 August 1944.

Austin/Thompson Collection, from Department of Defense

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Indeed, many African American women actively pro-tested the discrimination they faced in formal and informal ways. They persisted in seeking jobs from employers who were reluctant to accept equal opportunity; they filed discrimination complaints with the U.S. Fair Employment Practice Committee; and they became activists in the cause of civil rights. Through their own efforts, African American women created many of the opportunities they enjoyed during the war and protested the exclusionary practices they encountered. Their efforts and those of other activists resulted in the formation of the Committee to Abolish Racial Discrimination in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1943. In Detroit, ten thousand people rallied to insist that African American women be given equal opportunity for defense jobs in that war boom community.

At Howard University, a prestigious black college located in Washington, DC, three African American women students sat in at a local restaurant that refused to serve African Americans. Employees at the restaurant finally decided to serve them, but overcharged them for their drinks. When they paid only the correct amount on their bill, they were arrested and taken to jail. Their actions sparked a short-lived sit-in movement by Howard students intent on protesting the de facto segregation practiced in the nation's capital. Pickets carried signs with slogans like “We Die Together—Why Can't We Eat Together?” By linking African American claims to equal treatment with the recognition that they fought and died in the war against Nazi and Japanese oppression, the protestors mobilized on behalf of the Double V Campaign.

Black women also wrote poems, short stories, essays, and letters to the editor to protest the discrimination they faced in wartime America. In a poem entitled “Blackout,” Ruth Albert Cook wrote that America “shakes a defiant,/ Half mailed fist/At un-American/Systematized cruelty/ Everywhere—/Except its own. …” Hortense Johnson in “What My Job Means to Me” wrote of her pride in her defense job and her conviction that she and millions of other African Americans were making freedom possible abroad and at home. Foretelling postwar activism, she also noted, “Victory won't mean victory for Democracy—yet. But that will come later, because most of us who are fighting for victory today will keep on fighting to win the peace—maybe a long time after the war is over.”

After the war was over, African American women were among the first to be fired from defense jobs as employers openly reverted to discriminatory practices based on race and gender. Most black women, however, did not return to the homes and jobs they had held before the war. They remained in America's cities, finding work in the growing service sector of the urban economy. The war-generated shift from farm to city proved to be permanent. Before the war, African American women found wage work based in their households or in the households of white employers; after 1940, however, they increasingly supported themselves and their families with paid work outside the household setting. They also supported the cause of democracy and freedom with the tools they had forged in the war years—civil rights organizations, interracial alliances, and a keen awareness of the full meaning of liberty.

See also Staupers, Mabel Keaton; Military, Black Women in the; Vietnam; and World War I.

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