Matthew F. Delmont. Half American: The Epic Story of African-Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad. Viking. 2022. 374 pages.
World War II, the fabled, patriotic legacy of the Greatest Generation, holds a place in American mythology right alongside Valley Forge or Gettysburg. It was the moment America became “empire,” the moment we began to see ourselves as ‘masters of a particular universe,’ a world power. It was a rallying moment, when everyone — EVERYONE — was engaged in a single, American moment.
Or so we have been led to believe. Delmont tells the other part of the story.
Wrote Jonathan Daniels, white southern editor and FDR advisor.
“Sometimes it is easier to ask people to give up their lives than to give up their prejudices.”
Wrote a columnist for the Chicago Defender (of the Black press) channeling a Black southerner:
“I would just as soon die fightin’ for democracy right here in Georgia as to go all the way to Africa or Australia. Kill a cracker in Mississippi or Germany, what’s the difference?”
Wrote Langston Hughes, poet of the Harlem Renaissance:
Looky here, America
What you done done —
Let things drift
until the riots come…
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons from the ku klux klan…
I ask you this questions
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER — AND JIM CROW.
The American military was still segregated when the US entered World War II in 1941. So was everything else about American life, especially American life in the South. Lynchings were still the shameful and violent order of the day; white Americans still believed it was their birthright to be racist overlords (so very many still do). Many Black Americans wanted nothing more than to serve this country in the battle, though for the life of me I can’t understand why.
There were fascists and nazis overseas; at home there were white workers who didn’t want to share defense contracts; white soldiers and sailors who didn’t want to share close quarters and couldn’t imagine saving a Black life or having a Black comrade save them (sort of like the Good Samaritan, one supposes: just let me die in this ditch.) Unsurprisingly, there were southern politicians who spewed garbage; but worse, when a New York Republican Congressman introduced three bills in 1938 to end discrimination, FDR “declined to voice support for the bills publicly because, as a Democrat seeking reelection, he didn’t want Republicans to get credit from Black voters for proposing the legislations.”
There can be no short catalog of the insults and injuries told by Delmont in this history. Black soldiers were denied training, denied opportunities to use skills they already had (including language skills much needed), denied equipment and materials, denied combat deployment, denied accommodation on southern bases, harassed on leave, assaulted on and off base, lynched while in uniform. And blamed for all of this. Black civilians fared as poorly, and were blamed for it, as well.
The Double V campaign in full swing — V for victory at home and victory abroad — many Black would-be enlistees were turned away at recruiting offices and others who did enlist were held on bases doing meaningless work or redundant training; Black soldiers who actually were deployed served mostly as cooks and cleaners for white officers. Black workers at home were hired as janitors and other low-skilled positions rather than accessing the skilled and better-paying jobs that war brought to American manufacturing. And Southern planters were using political influence to keep sharecroppers on the farms and out of the military.
“Mess attendants only!” bellowed activist Roy Wilkins in frustration. “At the same time, we’re supposed to be able to appreciate what our white fellow citizens declare to be the vast difference between American Democracy and Hitlerism.”
None of which is a surprise.
Nevertheless, Delmont manages to intrigue and entice.
In these pages we get an unusual unattractive view of Roosevelt; we meet the Tuskegee Airmen; Mess Attendant Second Class Doris Miller, a hero at Pearl Harbor that December 7; we stumble upon Mary McLeod Bethune, Ella Baker and Arthur Miller; and follow Charles Hamilton Houston, the NAACP lawyer who would defend Black Americans’ right to serve, (and eventually win Brown v Board of Education, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves), and his protégée, Thurgood Marshall, who would repeat in his speeches that “Nazi racial ideology and Jim Crow segregation were two sides of the same coin,” plus J. Edgar Hoover, who convinced Roosevelt that Blacks’ equation of Jim Crow and Naziism was subversive and seditious and must be stopped. We learn that the news was skewed to erase Black fighters: “Black Marines in the Pacific, as well as Black Americans in other theaters, described white photographers and newsreel cameramen turning their lenses away when Black troops were in view.”
Delmont shines a light on the vital role of the Black press — keeping Black soldiers encouraged, reminding families at home that Black soldiers were serving well, calling for strikes and marches as needed on the home front, sharing news of grievances in an age before social media, news that kept Black America rightly on low boil. We also learn of the work of Black women — nurses, mapmakers, air traffic guides, airplane mechanics (serving alongside the Tuskegee airmen), and the Black men who served as meteorologists.
Labor organizer A. Philip Randolph (a name I’d known without knowing why) had the ear of the president and managed to twist Roosevelt’s arm in 1941 by threatening a march on Washington of 100,000 Black people. By such arm-twisting, he gained the concession of an executive order banning discrimination in defense jobs and training and creating a federal agency, the Fair Employment Practices Committee, to enforce it. White people fought it, of course, and lots went on strike, even shutting down factories that were producing what the war needed because they refused to work alongside or share toilets with Black workers. “I would rather lose the war than work with those Negroes,” said one striker. In the summer of 1943, it all boiled over. Race-based violence broke out in 240 cities across the country, as white soldier and sailors attacked black soldiers, civilians, teens and neighborhoods.
Though it turned out that FEPC had no budget, so no enforcement capability, still it was “the most significant gain ever made by Negroes under their own power,” said New York Rep. Adam Clayton Powell. Years later, Randolph would say, “The Negro masses awakened in 1941.” One Black woman who worked at North American Aviation in 1943 said “My sister always said that Hitler was the one that got us out of the white folks’ kitchen.”
And then this damning question I’ve never heard anyone ask: After the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Defender asked: “Was this destructive missile reserved for use on the Japanese, a dark race?” And Langston Hughes replied: “They just did not want to use them on white folks. Germans is white. So they wait until the war is all over in Europe to try them out on colored folks.”
I learned with sadness that Eleanor Roosevelt was not as radical or egalitarian as we’ve been led to believe. In 1947, the NAACP (led by W.E.B. DuBois) published a 150-page report on human rights abuses against Black Americans, then leaked it to the New York Times and other papers, appealing to the UN to investigate. Eleanor Roosevelt thought it was too radical and worked with the US State Department to keep the report off the UN agenda. She also submitted her resignation from the NAACP board (although she was persuaded to stay on).
Delmont’s intention in writing is to shape the common memory of WWII, which is skewed toward whiteness — because history matters, “not just something to be read,” wrote Baldwin, “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways…”
Delmont notes one ongoing effect:
“Stories that downplay the intense violence Black veterans and civilians faced during and after the war make present-day police brutality and racial violence appear anomalous rather than systemic. Stories that ignore the intense battles Black Americans fought against racism and Jim Crow segregation on the home front make it appear that World War II was a simpler and more unified time in America, when in reality it was anything but.”
We need to know this.