THE BLACK AMERICAN EXPERIENCE IN THE U.S. ARMED FORCES
July 27, 2023 at 9:00AM ET
Video Greeting — Sec. of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III
Welcome — Dr. Kari Frederickson & Dr. Jason Parker
Commemoration Video by the U.S. Air Force
Introductory Remarks — Eugene Robinson
Panelists —
Dr. Woody Holton, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina
Dr. Lorien Foote, Professor of History at Texas A&M University
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith, Associate Professor of History at Duke University
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo, Department Chair and Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University
Program Video
Participant Bios
Emcee:
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. The program is about to begin in one minute. [Pause]
Lloyd J. Austin III:
This year, we’re celebrating the 75th Anniversary of the Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces. Americans of all backgrounds have bravely served in the U.S. military throughout our country’s history. But for far too long, Black troops and other service members of color were forced to serve in segregated units. They fought in combat even as they battled discrimination at home. Finally, on July 26th, 1948, President Truman ordered “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Our military has made tremendous progress since then. Today, some 44% of our active-duty force are people of color, and Americans from all walks of life serve alongside one another, and they grow as leaders and they contribute to our military at the highest levels.
One of my mentors was the late General Colin Powell. He served as the first Black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he once said that no matter the color of your skin, the color of our guts, and the color of our courage, and the color of our blood is the same as everyone else’s. Our outstanding military is the strongest fighting force on Earth because it draws on the full talents of all of our citizens. That’s the American way – one nation, indivisible.
So, on this important anniversary, let’s continue the noble work of those who ended segregation. Let’s hold true to the values that make America a beacon, and let’s keep working together to make America stronger and safer, and our world more secure.
Emcee:
Please welcome Kari Frederickson and Jason Parker.
Dr. Jason Parker:
Good morning.
Audience:
Good morning.
Female 1:
Hi.
Dr. Kari Frederickson:
[Chuckles]
Dr. Jason Parker:
I’m Jason Parker. I’m Professor of History at Texas A&M University and a member of the Board of Directors of the Truman Library Institute.
Dr. Kari Frederickson:
And good morning. My name is Kari Frederickson. I’m a Professor of History at the University of Alabama and also a member of the Board at the Truman Library Institute.
On behalf of the Truman Library Institute, we are very pleased to welcome you to the Truman Civil Rights Symposium. We are here today to commemorate Executive Order 9981 issued by Pres. Harry Truman on July 26, 1948. This order declared that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed forces without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin.” Pres. Truman’s decision to desegregate the Armed Forces was shaped by dramatic domestic and international developments, among them the brutal assault on returning Black servicemen and an increasingly hostile relationship with the Soviet Union, and it was issued in the midst of a tumultuous presidential campaign. Now, although Truman’s decision was motivated by multiple impulses and concerns, humanitarian, political, global strategic, one thing is certain, with Executive Order 9981, history turned a page.
Dr. Jason Parker:
Well, what brings us together today is Pres. Truman’s signing of Executive Order 9981 desegregating the U.S. military 75 years ago yesterday. This action would not have been possible or necessary without the honorable service and sacrifice of Black Americans from before the founding of our country in the American Revolution to the present day. Executive Order 9981 did not give anything that had not been fought for, even to the death, by generation after generation of Americans.
Today, we explore and commemorate the long history of service by those who were denied the full measure of our nation’s promised liberty and justice. Exactly a year to the day before signing Executive Order 9981, President Truman established the United States Air Force as a separate and coequal branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. It seems only fitting that the branch that Truman founded would be the first fully integrated branch of the U.S. military.
Please enjoy a short film about how the Air Force led the way.
[Video Presentation]
Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:
As I stand here today on the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial, reflecting on the history of our nation, I also reflect on the history of our Air Force. Fifty years since the All-Volunteer Force, 75 years since the integration of women into the Armed Services, 75 years since Executive Order 9981, The Desegregation of the Armed Services, was signed by Pres. Truman. We are the Air Force we are today because of the leadership it took and the courage it took to sign each of those orders. So, I challenge all of us as airmen to lead at all levels, to drive change and make us the most respected air force in the world.
Jerome Ennels:
Any discussion of the desegregation or integration of the United States military has to begin with a discussion of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee Airmen were America’s first Black fighter pilots who were trained in Tuskegee, Alabama, at an isolated Jim Crow segregated base. In addition to the 992 pilots that graduated from the 44 classes of the Tuskegee Airmen, there were nearly 15,000 men and women who served as support personnel.
The Tuskegee Airmen was designed as an experiment to prove that Blacks had the intellect, the courage, the skills, and reflexes to fly fighter airplanes. It also proved that Black pilots or soldiers or airmen could also be leaders.
One of the things that happened why the Tuskegee Airmen were deployed is that they were attached to the 79th Fighter Group under Colonel Earl Bates. Earl Bates was one of the first to allow the Tuskegee Airmen to actually fully integrate and fly with some of his experienced pilots.
One of the problems that Tuskegee faced is that they had nobody with them who had ever been in combat before. The Tuskegee Airmen were rookies thrown into battle for the first time with nobody who had ever been battle-tested before. But belonging to the 79th, once they were attached to them, not only did their performance improve greatly, but the performance of the 79th as well. So, it’s kind of a testimony to what happens when you take your best resources and put them together and employ them in a manner where you can best use them.
The fact that the Tuskegee Airmen had performed so well during the war and their record was so great by 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses that some people even look back and say the beginning of the modern civil rights movement started with the Tuskegee Airmen and moved on through with the executive order to integrate the military.
W. Stuart Symington IV:
In 1948, Pres. Truman decided that it was time for our Armed Forces not only to look like America but look like America should be, which is to say integrated not just in separate units but together and in fact. About the same time in ‘48, Grandpa Symington, Stuart Symington, was a 47-year-old former businessman who had been asked by the President of the United States to be his first Secretary of the Air Force. Grandpa asked Pres. Truman, “Are you serious about this?” and Truman said, as he could often, “Dead serious,” and Grandpa said, “Okay, then we’ll do it.”
While others might have thought of studying how to integrate or how to move forward on integration, the Air Force had already done the studies and they knew how to do it, which was to say to the commanders, through the chain of command, and then in a way that was followed up, “Now’s the time,” and they did it.
Patrick J. Charles:
The Air Force has pushed integration was really about Secretary of the Air Force Symington coming out immediately. Based upon Sec. Symington’s past, we knew that he was a vocal proponent of civil rights. With that said, I think that’s why he asked Truman bluntly whether he supported this. Because if he did, he was going to carry it out.
Executive Order 9981 was not an immediate transformation of the military. It would take another three to four years for that to happen.
Integration from the moment of the executive order in 1948 through the 1960s was hardest on those people of color that served in the military. So, imagine, if you will, you’re a Black staff sergeant living in 1954. You would have been entitled to equal opportunities and privileges: going to the same mess hall, using the same bathrooms as your white counterparts, working in the same areas. But when you left for that day and let’s say you had to take the bus home, you had to sit in the back of the bus. You were different; you are not the same. You even would have to probably live and/or be discriminated in terms of housing as well. You would not be able to live in a neighborhood alongside your white military counterparts. You would have to live in a completely separate neighborhood, subject to completely separate rules.
Having to live with that every day, if you imagine that, it would wear and tear on you. And that’s what makes them such heroes, the fact that they could persevere through that and through the darkest times, and then to the point that we’re at today that we don’t have to worry about it this much.
Jerome Ennels:
I’ve seen the progress, I’ve lived the progress, and I know how far we have come, and it is a tremendous distance that we have traveled.
W. Stuart Symington IV:
It’s about team building. You find people that are capable of doing things and you give them that job not because of whether they’re a woman or a man, or Black or white, or from your club or not, but because they can do the job. Spending time with people who don’t look exactly like we look, engaged above all in a common important enterprise, is an extraordinary opportunity not just to change our relationship with others, but to change the organization and the world, and there isn’t and there hasn’t been a better place in the entire history of the United States to do that than the United States Air Force.
Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr.:
As I reflect on Executive Order 9981 that was signed 75 years ago, I think about how we, as airmen, set the legacy for the next 75 years. Think about the leadership and inspiration that you will provide to future generations.
[End of Video Presentation]
Dr. Kari Frederickson: Our first panel, “Black Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces,” will examine the African American experience in military conflict, from the American Revolution to the Second World War. Our second panel today, “The Right to Fight,” will focus on the experiences of Black Americans who served in the Armed Forces following Truman’s desegregation order. Our panelists today will be sharing the history of their conflict of expertise and the stories of some of the individuals that served in it. Then, this afternoon, we will turn to four individuals whose distinguished careers were made possible by Pres. Truman’s executive order and the courageous men and women who came before them.
A few housekeeping notes before we begin. There will be a 30-minute break after the first panel. During the break, you are invited to a coffee reception on the second floor. After the second panel, there will be an hour-and-a-half break for lunch. We will have a question-and-answer session at the end of each panel. Please write your questions on the notecards provided by members of the Truman Library Institute staff who will come around and collect them. They also have additional notecards if you have a lot of questions. [Laughter]
Finally, we would like to acknowledge and thank our generous sponsors. The Truman Civil Rights Symposium would not have been possible without the support of title sponsor, Boeing; presenting sponsor, CPKC; and additional support from the Leigh and Tyler Nottberg Family Foundation, the G Kenneth and Ann Baum Philanthropic Fund, Jan and Tom Kramer, Holland 1916, Kristen and Don Trigg, Sheryl and Billy Geffen, M Janine Strenger, M Kristen Steffan.
Dr. Jason Parker:
Now onto our first panel. It is my distinct pleasure to introduce the moderator for our first session today, Eugene Robinson. Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The Washington Post, where he writes a twice-weekly column focusing on politics and culture. In his three-decade career with the Post, Robinson has been City Hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper’s style section.
In 2009, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his “eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture.” Robinson is the author of “Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America,” Last Dance in Havana,” and “Coal to Cream: A Black Man’s Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Eugene Robinson. [Applause]
Eugene Robinson:
Good morning, everybody.
Audience:
Good morning.
Eugene Robinson:
Good morning. Thank you so much for getting up early and coming in for what I know is going to be an important day. I will just talk for a minute about why I’m here.
When I heard about this event, I was very, very happy to be asked to participate because it’s so important amongst such an important moment in American history. Like many African Americans, most that I know, my family has a long history of military service and, in this case, the vast majority of it in the segregated U.S. military. I’m working on a book right now that examines a lot of – examines my family history over the last 200 years, and as did Americans, we lived through and played some role in all of the conflicts that we fought at that time.
So, I have a – Starting with my great-great-grandfather in Charleston, South Carolina, who purchased his freedom in 1851, so he was a free person of color during Civil War. He spent the Civil War in Charleston. He did not serve in one of the South Carolina units as far as I can tell. But I have found records showing that he was part – he was one and a leader of a group of African Americans in Charleston who provided medical attention and food for African American soldiers from the 54th, the Massachusetts 54th, who survived the failed attack on Fort Wagner, but who were captured and taken to Charleston and basically left to rot, but there was a group of African Americans who tended to their needs.
One of his grandsons, a great-uncle of mine, served in World War I. He had trained to become a pharmacist. This was also in South Carolina, in Orangeburg. So, he was put in a medical unit. He was in the, I think it was the 92nd Infantry. He was on an ambulance unit, a mule-drawn ambulance, that went right up to the front to tend to and retrieve the wounded, and they fought in the Meuse-Argonne campaign under overall French command. He was in France on Armistice Day and still in France, and I think didn’t get to come home. They couldn’t find passage until February of 1919.
Then, the Second World War, my father was one of four brothers who grew up in – he actually grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Yes, his family had done the great migration from rural Georgia, and there were four brothers; they all served in the military during World War II – one in the Navy and three, including my father, in the Army.
My father-in-law, Edward Collins, had a – [Laughter] had a more interesting Second World War. He was in the Navy, and he left behind this map. This is just a National Geographic map on which, while during his service, he mapped out where he went. So, there’s a line from San Francisco down to Australia and then it stops at all the islands heading up toward the Japanese mainland as tracing the route, of course, of MacArthur and U.S. forces. He was on an all-Black ship and he was in construction; I guess he was a CB.
The other document he left behind was a ship’s photo, a photo of the whole crew posing, all-Black crew and they all – and on each individual’s picture, he has noted the nickname. So, this is BooBoo. This is Peanut. This is, you know. [Laughter] This is [Laughter] Big Money. This is, this is, you know, this and that, and it’s really – And of course, you know what that generation is like. It was very difficult to get them to talk very much, to share. They didn’t share about [Laughter] their World War II experiences, but his were pretty amazing.
So, and speaking of pretty amazing, that’s the panel we have for this discussion. So, let me introduce our panelists. First, let me welcome Dr. Woody Holton. He is the Peter and Bonnie McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, and he is a leading scholar on the American Revolution. He’s the author of “Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution” and also the author of “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution,” which was a finalist for the National Book Awards. So, please let’s welcome Dr. Woody Holton. [Applause] [Laughter] Good fellow.
Now, let me welcome Dr. Lorien Foote. She is the Patricia & Brooklyn Peters Professor in History at Texas A&M University and has written extensively on the cultural, intellectual, and military history of the American Civil War. Dr. Foote was awarded the Organization of American Historians Civil War and Reconstruction Book Award for “Rites of Retaliation: Civilization, Soldiers, and Campaigns in the American Civil War,” and another book, “The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy” was a 2017 Choice of Outstanding Academic Title. So, let’s welcome Dr. Lorien Foote. [Applause]
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith is an associate professor of history and African American studies at Duke University. She’s a senior fellow in Duke’s Kenan Institute for Ethics. She’s the author of “Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I” and she appeared in the PBS American Experience: Voice of Freedom documentary. She’s been a historical consultant for the BBC. Let’s welcome Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith. [Applause]
Finally, we’ll welcome Dr. Thomas Guglielmo. He’s the Department Chair of American Studies and Associate Professor here at George Washington University. His latest book, “Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America’s World War II Military” won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. Dr. Tom Guglielmo. [Applause]
So, you see what we did there? We have experts here in the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War I, and World War II, and we’re going to ask each of our panelists to give a brief opening statement.
Dr. Woody Holton:
Thanks. I just want to mention two soldiers of the revolution. The first one’s name is Lemuel Haynes, and the other one, since we’re in Washington, is named Washington.
Lemuel Haynes is most famous as the first African American minister of a white congregation, but I think he should actually be more famous for something else, and that begins with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776, where the key phrase that they repeated over and over again was “independent states.” That’s why they had come to Philadelphia was to take 13 states out of the British Empire and make them independent. Now, it’s true that they said “created equal,” but that was only a stepping stone: all men are created equal, and that gives them rights, and one of those rights is the right of revolution – and we are now exercising our right of revolution. So, I kind of think of the “created equal” as they wrote it is the yadda-yadda part of the “Let’s get past that and down to the real thing” which is…
But that same summer of 1776, Lemuel Haynes was serving in the Continental Army outside Boston, and he got a copy of the Declaration of Independence and wrote another pamphlet of his own called “Liberty Further Extended” and he chose as the epigraph to start that pamphlet that phrase that no one had really even noticed before, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” By quoting that, he became the first person ever to do so.
Actually, for the next few decades, that’s about all that most people quoted from the Declaration of Independence were the secession clauses. Other countries, when they copied our Declaration, they copied what I would call the “secession clauses.” But Benjamin Banneker, the African American man who helped design this city, and other anti-slavery people, they kept quoting, “created equal.” By doing that, this is good for me to do under these spotlights, they shifted the spotlight of the Declaration of Independence from “independent states,” which is all these white guys in Philadelphia had cared about, they shifted the emphasis, anti-slavery people did, to “created equal.” So, if you revere the Declaration of Independence the way most of us do as “created equal,” the people to thank for that are Lemuel Haynes, Benjamin Banneker, and other anti-slavery people, starting with Lemuel Haynes.
I said the other person I want to mention is named Washington. I’m not talking about George Washington, but he became, under the laws of Virginia at the time, property of George Washington, and took the name Harry Washington. He was given the name and held onto it after he was free.
He was born in the Gambia River basin in West Africa around 1740. George Washington bought him in 1763. In 1771, Harry Washington escaped, but as usually happened in those days, he was recaptured. So, he was at Mount Vernon in 1776 when African Americans – and the way I’m saying this once and this is really important, African Americans initiated an informal alliance of convenience with the British. Not a [faint] alliance and not a “We love you” alliance, like a marriage alliance, an alliance of convenience.
Governor Dunmore was the last royal governor of Virginia. He had very few white loyalists. He needed fighters, and people like Harry Washington were willing to fight for their freedom, and so they made this deal. If you fight on my side – if you can get to my alliance, that’s the first part – and if you fight on my side, then I’ll free you as a reward for that, and something like a thousand African Americans joined Gov. Dunmore just in those first six months.
Then here the road goes in two directions. One is that really infuriated people like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who also had slaves escape to the British, and it became one of the things that pushed them over the edge into independence. They were already mad about taxation without representation and all the rest, but this pushed them over the edge into independence. So, that’s one road.
But the other road to follow is the road that had Harry Washington on it. He became part of the Black Pioneers construction crew for the Royal Artillery, served in my state, South Carolina. Then when the British left New York in 1783, they did something that empires don’t always do, and that is they kept their promise to people like Harry Washington. He left with them, first to Nova Scotia, where he was still discriminated against, but he was not human property, but he was still discriminated against. So, he accepted, as did 1,200 other those Black Loyalists, as some people call them in Nova Scotia, an offer to go to a new British colony, Sierra Leone in Africa, where after a couple of decades, Harry Washington was a leader in a tax revolt, a revolt against taxation [Laughter] without representation.
So, to me, I’m 16 seconds over, so I’ll just say this: Both Lemuel Haynes and the Continental Army, and his technical enemy – at least by the rules of the time – Harry Washington and the British Army, they were both fighting for the principle that made this country great, we’re all created equal. Thanks.
Eugene Robinson:
Thank you. [Applause] Thank you, Woody. Lorien?
Dr. Lorien Foote:
Well, by the time of the American Civil War, African Americans had been excluded from the regular Army. But by the end of the Civil War, more than 200,000 Black soldiers served in the Army and there were about 87 Black commissioned officers in the United States Army.
So, for Black soldiers who fought in the American Civil War, it was part of their ongoing resistance to enslavement and enslavers, and I think about a man named Fortune Baker. He was a slave in Florida and he escaped when the Union Navy captured the Sea Islands around Charleston Harbor, and he escaped to those Sea Islands and was part of a refugee community of thousands of Black refugees, and he formed military companies. They armed themselves and they fought on those islands. Confederates would raid from the coast onto the Sea Islands to try to recapture people who had escaped enslavement – and Fortune Baker, he fought off these Confederate raiders.
So, when the United States government formed one of the earliest Black units, the 1st South Carolina, Fortune Baker enlisted to continue his fight against enslavers, and I think this is really interesting, the U.S. Army gave him a noncommissioned post as Sergeant in honor of his courage and action in fighting before he enlisted in the regiment.
Women refugees like Susie King Taylor were a part of this regiment as laundresses, nurses, and teachers. The 1st South Carolina, from 1862 to 1863, did constant raids on the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, liberating enslaved people, fighting off Confederate cavalry, burning rice fields, stealing cattle, and doing all kinds of things that just disrupted slavery in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. They also sabotaged Confederate telegraph lines.
So, for African Americans who enlisted in the U.S. Army, they served in segregated units with only white officers, and the discrimination that they felt most severely was a discrimination in pay. They were paid as laborers rather than soldiers, because at first, the Lincoln administration did not think that they would fight in combat. So, they received $10.00 a month instead of the $13.00 a month that white soldiers received, and they had $3.00 taken out for clothing. So, really, they were only paid $7.00 a month.
Most Black soldiers refused to accept this pay. There were some who said, “We’re going to stack arms and we’re not going to do duty unless you pay us equally.” These men were charged with mutiny, insubordination; there were some who were executed by firing squad. But there were other Black soldiers who said, “We want to show that we want – that this is our country and we’re going to fight as Americans. We’re going to do our duty and we’re going to do what you ask, but we’re not going to accept less than equal pay.”
So, if we take the 102nd U.S. Colored Troops, they were a group that was composed of free-born Black men from Michigan. If we take Company E of the 102nd, only 9 men of the 60 men in that company accepted the pay. The rest of them did their duty, never stopped doing what they were supposed to do; they just refused to be paid less than white soldiers.
Amazingly, this protest was effective. In 1864, Congress passed a law equalizing the pay of white and Black soldiers and making it retroactive to the date of enlistment for Black men who were born free. So, notice there’s still a discrimination against the formerly enslaved. But for the 102nd U.S. Colored Troop, in the fall of 1864, they were paid $16.00 a month. They received their equal pay.
The other thing that I think is important to understand is that Black soldiers in the U.S. Civil War fought under the threat of re-enslavement. Confederates did not recognize Black soldiers as legitimate combatants. So, the 44th U.S. CT, which was a regiment raised in Tennessee and Georgia, they guarded the railroad line that supplied Sherman during his campaign for Atlanta. Well, the 44th U.S. Colored Troops were captured and the entire unit was enslaved directly by the Confederate military and forced to work on railroad lines in Mississippi and Alabama.
Interestingly, many of those men from that unit escaped from plantation slavery because they were reclaimed into slavery. So, the last United States prisoner of war to escape during the American Civil War was Corporal Henry Scott of the 44th U.S. CT, who escaped from slavery in Texas in January 1866 when he showed up at the camp of the 1st Iowa Cavalry in Tyler, Texas. [Applause]
Eugene Robinson:
Okay, thank you. Thanks, Lorien. Adriane?
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
I’m the World War I person. [Laughter] And if you know, if you’ve read anything about World War I, you probably have heard about the Battle of Henry Johnson. In case you haven’t, I’m going to give you a quick recap. It’s very like, I always think of myself as Sophia and then go: Picture it. [Laughter] The Argonne Forest, 1918. It’s 2:00 in the morning. Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts are on sentry duty. They’re part of the 15th New York National Guard, which becomes sort of federalized into the 92nd Infantry. They have been given over to the French for the duration of the war. They’re not super well-trained, so they have some qualms about being on the front, but they are brave and they are determined.
At 2:00 in the morning, they hear a German raiding party trying to make its way in. There are two of them. There are at least a dozen Germans, maybe more, and they start firing on Johnson and Roberts. Roberts is quickly hit. Johnson has him hand him grenades. He lobs grenades at the party to keep them back until he runs out of grenades. When he runs out of grenades, he fires his rifle. When his rifle runs out of bullets, he takes it and he clubs them on the – as many of them as they’re swarming, as they come. This lasts all night, right? This lasts until sunset. At one point, the German raiding party tries to take Roberts as a prisoner of war. His rifle’s been broken. Johnson used as a bolo knife, a sort of nine-inch double-sided knife, to slash at them and keep them away. In the course of this, he’s wounded 21 times. His hip is shattered and his foot is shattered. He’s got sort of a metal plate in his hip. He’s really hurt. But they are saved when French and Americans come in. Sort of they hold them off until they have sort of forces come in to save them. I’m taking too long in the pre-story. This is the problem with [Laughter] not reading from your notes.
This is a huge story, right? He’s the first hero of the war. He’s the first name that anybody knows. African Americans trumpet it with pride. Even the white press talks about it. It’s a way to boost morale.
On the return home, he – well, I should say he and Roberts get the Croix de guerre, the War Cross from the French. They return home, parade at Fifth Ave. Smith, the Governor of New York, greets him in Albany, promises him a house, a road named after him, people talk about making a movie. It’s an amazing story, right, if we stop the story right there. It’s a story made for retelling. It’s harrowing, it’s heroic, it’s inspiring, but it doesn’t tell you very much about the African American experience in World War I, and for historians, context is what makes the meaning. So, I’m going to give you a little bit of before and I’m going to give you a little bit of after.
The quick before is that he is part of the 369th. It’s famous in part because they have a great name, Harlem’s Rattlers, they call themselves; Harlem Hellfighters, they’re later called. They have a great jazz band. They spent 191 days under combat, so more combat than any other American unit. It’s a sort of division full of heroes.
They’re also famous because there aren’t that many Black militia National Guard units in the First World War, and that is because, and this is important, 17, almost 20 years before, sort of the turn of the last century, when Southern legislatures were writing rules, rewriting their constitutions to disfranchise African Americans, they realized you can’t demand soldiering from African Americans and deny them their citizenship rights. Those two things were so deeply linked that they took the militias away, right? So, one of the reasons that we know about Johnson is that in an army of 386,000, in which only 40,000 were combat troops, he’s a rarity.
I also want to tell you a little bit about the after because it’s important and it’s devastating. He had his hero’s moment, but he also had his memories and he had his wounds. So, he was making his career, as people sometimes noted, he was used as a speaker, going on a speaker circuit. But in March, I think it was, of 1919, he went off-script and, in St. Louis, decried the racism that he had experienced in the American Army. When I say this, like this is a very generic word for people being lynched even overseas, for beatings, for being overpoliced, right, jailed for talking to white women. Any number of things, right? The being sent to the lines, he thought, because his officers figured another dead one in France means they won’t be in New York to bother us later, right? He said all of this, and because of that, he was blackballed by military intelligence so that he lost his speaker’s thing. They hadn’t recorded his wounds when he was discharged, so he was getting no disability. He was too wounded to work, so he couldn’t work.
Henry Johnson, the hero of 1919, died in 1929 a pauper, right? An alcoholic. His wife had left him. His life had fallen apart. Unremembered for a while, although he is buried in Arlington.
But his story, that part of the story is like so many other people’s stories, right, and African American activists used his story as both inspiration and as cautionary tale. So, they tried to apply the lessons of Black soldiers’ experience, duty and how it doesn’t get you very far, and how performing your duty actually inspired white backlash rather than white support, and tried to apply those lessons when the next war came.
And for that part of the story, I’ll kick it over to Tom Guglielmo.
Eugene Robinson:
The background of the story. [Applause] Thank you, Adriane.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Yes.
Eugene Robinson:
So, Tom, pick up. [Laughter]
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Thank you. Yes, so I’m here to talk about World War II, and I want to, in order to do that in five minutes, let me share a story about a man by the name of Winfred William Lynn. He is almost entirely unknown today, but he was a household name in World War II America, at least in certain communities.
So, picture this. [Laughter] 1942, Winfred Lynn is a landscape gardener living with his brother in New York City. He gets his draft notice. He’s going to be inducted into the Army, and he writes a fateful letter to his draft board and says, “I refuse to comply with the draft, and he’s really clear about his reasons. In this letter, he says, “I have no philosophical objection to serving in the military. I have a philosophical objection to being humiliated in a segregated military. If you integrate me like a first-class citizen, I am more than happy to serve. But if you insist on segregating me and mistreating me, I refuse to go.”
Interestingly, he is convinced by Allies that he, in fact, in order to kind of fight this civil rights struggle against the U.S. military, it makes sense for him to actually join it, to kind of battle from within. So, he does that. He ends up becoming a sergeant, he rises to the rank of Sergeant. He serves in the Pacific in a medical sanitary company, and he’s honorably discharged in 1945. But all the while that he’s in service, he’s continuing his civil rights struggle. So, Winfred Lynn is engaging in sit-down strikes when he faces racist mistreatment.
By the way, he’s doing this with other people. I’m using him as a kind of illustrative story, but he is working in conjunction with lots of other people. Of course, he’s circulating protest petitions. He’s writing letters home to share his outrage about the mistreatment that he and his comrades are facing in the military, in the U.S. training and fighting overseas.
By the way, he’s the plaintiff in a civil rights case that reaches the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944. In this case, he challenges military segregation and he challenges racism in the Selective Service. So, this is the first court case of its kind. This is 1944. This is 10 years before Brown v. Board of Education overturns state-sanctioned segregation in public schooling. Winfred Lynn, 10 years earlier, is doing the same kind of thing with the military and with the draft.
He loses his case, so this doesn’t actually have a happy ending in some sense, but nonetheless, this is a really important civil rights story, particularly with regard to the U.S. military, and again, it’s sadly been long forgotten, Winfred William Lynn.
I bring up his story because I think it highlights some really salient points about African Americans’ military experiences during World War II, and if I had more time, I’d have a whole long list of points, but let me just…
Eugene Robinson:
You can get some time if we go on, so you’ll get to it.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Exactly. So, hopefully, we’ll get to it in the Q&A, but I want to just kind of highlight two points quickly.
So, the first is that I think we often don’t appreciate the heartbreaking scope and devastating impact of military racism in World War II, right? We think of the good war, we kind of romanticize this conflict, but for Black Americans, this was an extraordinarily traumatic and bittering experience. Obviously, in the main – in the main, they faced immense military racism, and again, this is kind of a generic term, but that meant that they were restricted in their access to the military. They were excluded from certain branches for a time. They were restricted in their ability to become officers and to rise in the ranks. They were restricted in the kinds of jobs they could receive, the kinds of pay they could receive. They were restricted in the sorts of awards and decorations and honors that they had earned. They were restricted in their access to the G.I. Bill benefits after the war. They were restricted in the sorts of recreational facilities they could use from Alabama to Australia and all points in between. So, they faced this expansive racism. The U.S. military was this kind of colossal engine of inequity, and Winfred Lynn knew this and was fighting against it, and that’s in large part why he did not want to serve, at least initially. So, that’s the first point.
The second point, however, is that Winfred Lynn and other folks like him created this long-forgotten powerful civil rights struggle in the U.S. military that fought to make the U.S. military live up to the very ideals that it was supposedly fighting for in World War II. So, there were sit-ins, there were strikes, there were marches and boycotts and armed resistance at times, all in an effort to make the military more egalitarian.
So, we’re here to celebrate the desegregation of the military, and I hope we don’t forget these kind of ordinary service members like Winfred Lynn, because without them and without the struggle that they created during World War II, military desegregation would never have happened. This was not an issue that many people were talking about in the 1930s, even in Black communities, but this movement in the military, led by people whose names we do not know at this point oftentimes, they’re the ones that put desegregation on the political map, and without them, there would be no Executive Order 9981.
Eugene Robinson:
Well, we could argue, Tom. Thank you very much, Tom, for this. Thank you. [Applause]
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Thank you.
Eugene Robinson:
I mean, we could certainly argue that coming out of the Second World War and experiences that those soldiers had and they came home, that that jumpstarted the larger civil rights movement that has led us to where we are today. Arguably, we need another one, but that’s we’ll get in. [Laughter] That’s more for – that’s another discussion.
So, thank you, all. That was a great survey course, so let’s dig in a little bit.
Woody, I’m starting again chronologically. I’m curious about the segregation in the Continental Army. Was there segregation per se? How did – the African-Americans who fought in that, how were they a part of the organization?
Dr. Woody Holton:
Right. Well, the short answer to that is 13 independent states. So, there’s tremendous variety from New Hampshire, which was the northernmost state then, down to Georgia, but there is a fascinating story about that from 1775, because African-Americans fought on the American side at Lexington and Concord, and at Bunker Hill, which was the first sort of conventional battle. In fact, the highest-ranking officer killed at Bunker Hill was killed by a Black Patriot. So, they’d established this great record by the time, July 3, 1775, when a slaveholder shows up to be commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Within a couple of months, he had thrown all of them out. It kind of reminds me of Wilson segregating the federal employment. He kicked them all out. Then a couple of months later, he semi-changed his mind, allowing free Blacks back into the army. There’s a huge debate about what changed his mind. Some of those officers did a petition in favor of another Black hero from Bunker Hill. So, that may have persuaded him a little bit. Phyllis Wheatley, the famous Black poet, wrote a very flattering poem about George Washington, and he’d said, “Come out and see me sometime in Cambridge.” So, you kind of wonder whether that might have had some impact on him, but the biggest thing was between when Washington kicked all Blacks out of the army and let free Blacks back in, what happened in between was Governor Dunmore, down in Virginia, issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which is different from Lincoln’s but also similar to Lincoln’s. Washington said very explicitly, “This thing’s going to grow like a snowball by rolling, that these Blacks are going to join the British if we don’t give them a chance to join us.” [00:57:08]
Eugene Robinson:
Exactly. In other words, it’s the British governor of Virginia emancipating the slaves.
Dr. Woody Holton:
Right. So, that’s his bid until Washington felt he had that – not outbid him but at least match his bid by saying, “You can fight if you’re in.” So, another thing I just learned in our research a couple of weeks ago, so that got free Blacks in and a lot of slaves came in unofficially, but by 1777, there were draft riots all over America. Because people were sick of the war. Two years seemed like a long time to be – people didn’t want to fight anymore. So, they needed more soldiers, particularly – soldiers were afraid of getting smallpox. Washington did not care, but some stuff was going on, but they needed more troops. So, they then – the Continental Congress finally said – so servants and apprentices, and of course, servants in those days meant slaves, as well as the other kind of servants. So, as of 1777, even enslaved people are allowed in north of the Potomac River.
Eugene Robinson:
North of Potomac? Right. Not south of Potomac, no?
Dr. Woody Holton:
Dodgy in Virginia, but no way. There was a son of South Carolina named John Laurens, who’s in that play Hamilton. He wanted to recruit a Black regiment and it got like 12 out of 100 votes in South Carolina. So, that would be a no.
Eugene Robinson:
That would be a no. [Laughter] Lorien, that area around the Sea Islands, it’s fascinating, because those were among the first free African-Americans [Laughter] in the South. Yet, the Union forces had a hard time. Well, they never actually conquered Charleston until the very end when they sent Black soldiers parading down the peninsula in what was I suppose the last insult to [Laughter] the Confederacy or to Charleston, at least. Wasn’t there an incident involving Harriet Tubman? Didn’t she actually lead an attack? Would you talk about that for a bit?
Dr. Lorien Foote:
Yes. So, Harriet Tubman was actually hired as a scout by the commanding general of the Department of the South. So, she was in charge of an intelligence network that contacted enslaved people in the interior and learned about river routes, because the Union’s Navy, they had a lot of gunboats in Charleston Harbor. So, they were able to go up rivers in South Carolina and Georgia. So, this intelligent network gave a lot of good intelligence. So, in the summer of 1863, the second South Carolina did a raid at the Combahee River and Harriet Tubman provided the intelligence and served as a guide for that raid.
Eugene Robinson:
In that raid, they liberated quite a number of enslaved…
Dr. Lorien Foote:
They liberated 725 enslaved people.
Eugene Robinson:
Enslaved people, yes. It’s really quite amazing. I’ve seen that described. I don’t know if it’s accurate, I mean, a bunch of people would know, but as the first time a woman had led [Laughter], essentially led a combat unit in US Military history.
Dr. Lorien Foote:
That’s one of the interesting things, I think. I’m glad you brought her up. The one reason I mentioned Susie King Taylor is I think if we’re going to understand the Black military experience in the Civil War, it was truly a community experience, because women were a critical part of military camps in the American Civil War. So, Black women refugees are serving as cooks, as laundresses. In the camp of the first South Carolina, there are not only women, there are babies. I mean, people talk about, “This was the baby of the regiment, and she was our favorite baby in the regiment.” They say “in the regiment.” So, they viewed women and children who were in the camp as part of their military community.
Eugene Robinson:
Also, in South Carolina, there was a famous incident involving Robert Smalls, who was an enslaved man, a leader of the enslaved crew of a Confederate ship, a Confederate cargo vessel around Charleston called the Planter. In one night, he planned and very carefully kept it all secret. One night, the White officers who were in charge of the ship, they were docked in Charleston, they went ashore to enjoy the delights of home. That was kind of normal and then Smalls asked for permission that their families could come and visit. That was also not out of the ordinary. So, they allowed them. The officer said, “Sure.” Then Smalls announced to the rest of his crew and to the family members, “This is the night we sail away to our freedom.” They were like, “What? Seriously, now?” He said, “Yes, seriously, now.” So, they did just that. He put on the captain’s – like the hat, what the captain wore. Late at night, he sailed out and sailed past all Confederate batteries and gave the proper signal, because he had been a pilot. He knew all the right signals to give. He gave them, and it wasn’t until he got past Fort Sumter and on out toward the line of Union ships that was blockading the harbor during the Civil War that the Confederates realized, “Oh, my god, this is not the captain. [Laughter] This is Smalls,” but it was too late. So, they put down the Confederate flag and ran up a White sheet that I believe Smalls’ wife or one of the wives of the crew members had brought on board and surrendered to the Union line, and this was a huge deal. This was a huge propaganda coup, a huge intelligence coup for the Union. Then he went on after the war to become a member of Congress actually, elected from South Carolina during the time of radical reconstruction. That was an amazing, amazing thing. Adriane, I was just in the course of doing some research about my great uncle who served in World War I, I came across an oral history with a gentleman who had been in the same unit. What struck me about his account was that he described the treatment that Black soldiers who went over to France, the treatment they’ve received from White soldiers, vis-à-vis the treatment they received from the people in France, and in many cases, the French commanders that they served under, he described the way they were regarded and treated by White American troops, part of the expeditionary force, as particularly harsh and vile. Is that a generalized experience? Could you talk about that a bit?
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Sure. So, Rayford Logan, who was in World War I as an officer, who would then eventually become a historian and teach at Howard for most of his career, Rayford Logan wrote in his memoirs of World War I, that you can read in the Library of Congress. He said he fought two wars at once, Woodrow Wilson’s and his own, and he wasn’t sure which had done more damage, right? Like he writes with a clear and almost lyrical bitterness about the insults. Some of them, petty, some of them, for many folks, mortal, that he and his fellow soldiers experienced. So, he began – for Logan – I mean, he had stories about being in sort of camps stateside, but even on the ship sailing over, where Black officers were not allowed the same kind of orders that White officers did. He disliked his colonel, Glendie Young, so much that he described him as an SOB, spelling it out, saying it all out, and then wrote, because he knew, he had a good sense of self, that someday, someone would be reading his memoirs. He said, “When you quote me, you make sure that you say that I called him an SOB.” [Laughter] Because Glendie was more invested in deriding and devaluing Black officers than he was in having those Black officers help him prosecute the war, right? Like that was the sort of general experience. He talks about having – he had a sort of what you call an intercambio, a sort of language exchange with a French woman when he was abroad, and they would meet in a café and White soldiers who basically threatened to tear up the café, and then other instances in other places, started riots, White soldiers did, angry that French folks were letting Black people into the same spaces. I think it’s Charles Hamilton Houston, the lawyer who basically trained Thurgood Marshall, who was also a World War I vet, who talks about walking into a town. I can’t remember my own book now. I think it’s Hamilton. It’s Houston, but might be someone else – walking into a town where they had only recently taken down a Black body from the town square because someone had been executed for allegedly assaulting a White Frenchwoman. Sort of understanding of White soldiers in the American Army in this period, that assault could have been a conversation, right? Who knows in these instances what it meant. So, there are stories big and small, right, about the devastation of this. The point about the French, like Black soldiers talked a lot about how the French treated them so much better than the Americans did. Some of that’s political, right? Some of it’s using the outside place to be like, “Look at these people who took your Declaration of Independence and made it better and lived through – lived the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, right?” Some of it is them using France and not really caring about, say, the complicated racial politics of the Empire and the Metropole, which is also happening at the same time. Some of it is that in the complicated racial politics of the Metropole, Black Americans were not France’s problem. So, they didn’t have to police them or worry about what they would do to the sort of dynamics of French Empire in the same way that they had to worry about their own colonial subject.
Eugene Robinson:
Right, exactly, because, yes, France hardly has a pristine [Laughter] record on race if you go that far. One of the, I think, constant themes, at least in the last three more recent wars we’re talking about, is that what serving in arms did to Black men, the sort of skills and confidence and sense of their own rights that serving in the military gave them. Civil War, obviously, ended in liberation, and then there was that period of radical reconstruction when the Union troops still occupied the South, and African-Americans, including my great grandfather, were allowed to fulfill much more of their potential. I’m really interested also in World War I and World War II because most of 1918, the war ends 1919. The soldiers come home, and then we have the Red Summer of 1919 and a series of White on Black riots and massacres throughout the country that has not been written about or taught nearly enough, and the more I’ve researched it, the more horrifying it really is. A big part of that was that these soldiers did come back and they did – really fought for this country. African-Americans had occupied employment spaces that they hadn’t been able to. Those who didn’t go were occupying employment spaces they hadn’t occupied before, because the White guys had all gone off to fight the war, and they didn’t want to give up those jobs. They didn’t feel they had to. Could you also talk about that a little bit, Adriane, the aftermath? Then I want to get to Tom about the aftermath of World War II.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Absolutely. Well, so, two things. One, it struck me about everyone’s conversations. Like we have this narrative, right? For every war that African-Americans go in, the war politicizes them or makes them more militant, and then they come out like ready to fight. That’s part of what happens for some people, sure, but in every story that folks have told on this panel, there are people who look at this war and know exactly what it means for the potential for freedom or empowerment or enhanced citizenship rights. Like people go in being like, “I’m going to come out of this a new Negro,” and that Negro is going to be able to do things like the pre-war Negro could not do, right? So, we have to understand that people have sort of desires and political consciousness going in, and the wartime experience allows them to mold and shape that in particular ways. Also, the case I was struck with yours is that like part of this, when we tell the story of the military, we’re telling stories of like people doing a job and like it has this sort of material consequences. Part of what Jim Crow has always been about is not simply disciplining labor but removing possibilities so that folks can only exist or work in particular spaces, and the war pushes up against that. So, there’re these kinds of different labor opportunities or contestations over labor opportunities, not just domestically for civilians, but also for folks at war. With the Red Summer of 1919, as you said, a series of riots that swept the country – when we say riots, we mean something more like pogroms, right? Like sort of White racial violence, turning on Black communities. Really, I sort of alluded to this in my remarks that African-Americans went in being like, “If we do a good job, we’ll show that conduct, not color, is the measure of a man.” The Red Summer basically said, “We’re not trying to take your measure. We know. Like whatever. We can have a conversation about how you’re okay, but really, we just want to put you in your place, and we are incensed by all of the ways in which you have threatened to disrupt our order.”
Eugene Robinson:
Exactly. “If you have forgotten your place, let us remind you of what your place is.”
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Yes. This isn’t a Southern thing. The worst riot or the most well-known riot is Chicago, right? DC had another huge one, right? This is a national phenomenon of people trying to reestablish the old order in the post-war.
Eugene Robinson:
That’s right. The worst single incident may have been – I think it’s the Elaine massacre in Arkansas, where it’s unclear how many African-Americans were simply massacred, just massacred 100, 200.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
In response to tenant farmers trying to organize.
Eugene Robinson:
Exactly, exactly. Yes. Again, that sense of, “We can assert our place in the society,” and that answer, “No, you cannot, [Laughter] and you will not, and this is the price you will pay.” That was certainly an aftermath of World War II. So, let’s talk about that moment when people were coming out of the service and, really, the Civil Rights Movement is getting jumpstarted.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Yes. As Adriane just said, this is a familiar story about servicemembers becoming newly emboldened by their service, by their sacrifice to the nation. They come back feeling like ever more determined to receive the first-class citizenship rights that they have earned. If they have fulfilled the obligation of citizenship, now they want to receive some of the rights of first-class citizenship. So, that’s absolutely part of what happens after World War II. You would not get the post-war Civil Rights Movement, I think, without over 1 million Black people serving in World War II and experiencing the profound politicization that came through that experience, but I’d kind of tweak it in a few ways, that familiar story. So, first, as Adriane said, some of these folks are coming into the military politicized already. The familiar story among historians is that Black service members come home and are activists as veterans, but the point I was trying to make earlier is they’re activists as soldiers. So, their activism in the post-war years as veterans is an outgrowth of this really powerful movement that happens in the military during the war. So, there’s some continuity there that I think hasn’t always been fully captured. Then the other piece that I just think we don’t want to forget – and this is another theme that I think has really come up – is yes, there were thousands and thousands of Black soldiers who came back and became, as they say, foot soldiers in this post-war Civil Rights Movement. We could name all kinds of different people who were in the service, and then became Medgar Evers-type folks who became central actors in the post-war Civil Rights Movement in the South and elsewhere, but there were people who were broken by the war, never ever to recover, right? So, I think there’s this temptation, in our war stories, to end on a happy note. Again, in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, that is a really important story. So, I don’t want to discount that, but I also want to remind us that, again, military racism was just profoundly destructive for so many people. So, I’ll give you an example. Adriane shared with me yesterday that she lives in the house of John Hope Franklin, the late eminent historian. He tells a story. John Hope Franklin, by the way, refused to serve. Like Winfred Lynn in 1942, he said, “You know, I’ve seen this movie before.” He actually made several attempts to join the Army and the Navy. He’s a PhD from Harvard. At this time, you’d think the military could have used someone with his amazing talents, but after he’s constantly given the runaround and essentially excluded, he says, “You know what, I’m not going to submit myself to this anymore.”
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
“Because I love it.” He says – and I said right then – because they turned him down for the job that he was – they tried to give him. He said, “They will not have me because they do not deserve me.”
Eugene Robinson:
[Laughter] Okay.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Sorry.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Thank you. So, that’s John Hope Franklin, but his brother does enter the service and he’s killed by that service. John Hope Franklin tells this heartbreaking story about how his brother, who I think was a principal of a school, enters the service, is harassed and tormented and terrorized by White servicemembers, so called comrades in the Army during World War II, and dies in 1946 or 1947 from those wounds. James Baldwin, writing about World War II, says that some of his friends were – many of his friends went into the service, most of them destroyed by the experience. So, not to be a downer, but this really is an important piece of the story as well. Yes, empowerment. Yes, civil rights struggle, but there were also immense costs to the pervasive racism that the US military spread and generated.
Eugene Robinson:
Absolutely, absolutely. So, we have just a little bit of time before we get to your questions. Let me give you all a chance. What have I not covered? [Laughter] What are you dying to say that I haven’t allowed you to say yet? Anything? Lorien?
Dr. Lorien Foote:
I guess I would just say real quick. I think because it’s important context for the end of World War II. I’m always struck as a Civil War historian when I read about the African-American experience in World War II, how much more segregated the military was in World War II than it was in the Civil War. Because in the Civil War, Black soldiers and White soldiers camped together. They fought on the battlefield together. Black soldiers did all kinds of duty. Black soldiers challenged White officers when they were on picket duty and everybody thought that was fine. So, I think it’s kind of interesting, that contrast, which is not something we would necessarily expect, but I think is the case.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
This is an enormous missed opportunity for American society, right? Because for Japanese-American soldiers who faced their own expansive racism during the war, obviously, internment but also within the US military, they’re excluded from serving in the military for a time, but they do end up serving and they often serve in much, much more integrated settings than Black Americans. Mexican-Americans, Native Americans, Chinese-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, they’re all serving in much, much more integrated settings than our African-Americans, and it has its effects. There is a leveling effect that military service has – the line is – there are no color lines in foxholes. That’s something that you hear over and over again during World War II. In the rare moments when Black and White soldiers fought together, that is precisely what happened. Color lines broke down, but structurally, it was not allowed to happen very often because of military policy.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
So, Lorien, I’ve been thinking about this since you said it, and somebody correct me if you think I’m wrong, but I think that one of the key differences is emancipation, right, that the sort of ongoing question after emancipation is what are Black people broadly speaking now that most of them don’t belong in the category of enslaved, right? So, you don’t have to worry about the structure when slavery is the deciding thing, but on the other side of that, like this sort of history of emancipation forward is about settling whether it’s going to be a racialized democracy, and once the answer is yes, then how do you structure that and the constitutional conventions of the 1890s that give us the legal architecture of Jim Crow? Then sort of produce. Like, I tend to blame everything on Woodrow Wilson, right? Woodrow Wilson made it all, right?
Eugene Robinson:
I was itching to get to Woodrow Wilson. I’m sorry, but – you know?
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Yes, but it’s not, right? It’s never simply an individual. It’s the larger structure. I think it is the structure of Jim Crow that then produces these hypersegregations.
Eugene Robinson:
That’s absolutely right. It is a structural issue. However, a president had a huge [Laughter] – he had a huge impact, too. Okay, I think it’s time for us – we have some questions from our audience. So, thank you all for this part of our discussion. [Applause] Let us have questions.
Female 2:
Okay. Thank you all for your questions. We’re sifting as quickly as we can. Okay. So, the first question is regarding World War I and World War II, which I would just add were billed as the making the world safe for democracy. How did the blatant racism, segregation practices impact US credibility on the world stage? So, I guess that’s a question for Adriane and Tom.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
I’ll give the – so, it did. How’s that for that? The way that you see it in the Versailles conference is with Japan, which has sort of given itself – I mean, it’s on its way to becoming its own kind of imperial power, but gives itself the role of speaking out for sort of the what they would have called at the time the colored peoples of the globe, right? So, it challenges US credibility on that front as it challenges all of the imperial powers, the White imperial powers on that front. We also know these amazing stories of Black folks making their way, and folks from everywhere, making their way to Paris during that treaty, to try to speak out about racism or empire in the midst of the Versailles conference, including Ho Chi Minh before he was Ho Chi Minh, who buys his first suit to meet with Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, of course, like he can barely imagine sort of self-determination beyond Eastern Europe, he’s certainly not going to talk to someone from Indochina about it. So, that’s what I’ll give as mine.
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Yes. International politics were a really important part of the Civil Rights story during World War II. I’ll just give you a couple examples. So, the Axis powers, their propaganda machines were constantly churning out stories. This happened in the Cold War, of course, but it happened in World War II as well, where they are playing up the racism and the hypocrisy of the Western democracies. So, you say this is about democracy, but let’s talk about the racism in the militaries. So, this is a weak point for the United States government and they understand that it’s not enough of a weak point to affect policy so much during World War II, at least with regard to African-Americans. It does have an effect with regard to some other minority troops, so Japanese-Americans. I mentioned there was a time when they were fully excluded from the military. They gained access to the military over time and part of it is an attempt to convince other so-called colored or darker nations that in fact America means what it says when it talks about democracy. So, they are willing to kind of induct Japanese-Americans again as an effort to make that point. So, yes, the international context matters.
Eugene Robinson:
Woody?
Dr. Woody Holton:
The question wasn’t asked to me but I can’t resist answering, because that propaganda effect existed in the Revolutionary War as well. Samuel Johnson, the famous English writer, said, “Why is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of Negros?” So, it’s always been there. The French, of course, were our allies, but all these French philosophers who were against slavery and some of the officers made – one of them made a deal. They tried to make a deal with Washington, where they were going to free slaves together. It was definitely a problem. I think it’s one reason that most of the northern states put slavery on a very gradual path to abolition, was the international embarrassment of it even then.
Eugene Robinson:
Lorien, anything to add?
Dr. Lorien Foote:
No.
Eugene Robinson:
Okay.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
I was going to say I don’t know if you’ve seen the miniseries, the Watchmen, based on the graphic novel, but the second episode begins with Germans dropping leaflets on soldiers on the Western Front in World War I that is based on Black soldiers, that basically says, “Hello, boys. What are you doing here, fighting? Why for this country that disfranchises you?” right? That’s an actual leaflet, an actual.
Eugene Robinson:
Next question.
Female 2:
Great questions. Okay. So, would the panel address the differences in integration between different armed forces’ branches and the reasons for those differences? Then they give an example, the US Army versus Navy during the American Civil War.
Dr. Lorien Foote:
Yes, no, that’s a great question. So, the Navy was integrated during the Civil War. I mean, there were Black sailors. Later, that actually will change in World War II where African-Americans could only be messmen, if I remember correctly, for a while, but Black served at all kind of enlisted ranks in the American Navy. That was even true before the Civil War. The antebellum Navy was integrated. So, that’s a big difference between the Army and the Navy and the American Civil War. Black served from the beginning in the American Navy. The Navy actually is the first branch, during the Civil War, to formally try to recruit formerly enslaved people and refugees. So, when the Union Navy shows up in Charleston Harbor and in the Sea Islands between South Carolina and Georgia in November 1861, the first thing the Navy does as they see enslaved people running for the boats, they sent out patrols to guard them and let these refugees from slavery get onto the Sea Islands and the Naval commanders were like, “Hey, [Laughter] let’s get them in the Navy.” So, they do that well before the Army does. Then as I addressed, the Army, Black soldiers were serving the infantry, in the cavalry, and in the artillery. In the Civil War, Black soldiers served in all branches and they do all types of duty.
Eugene Robinson:
Adriane?
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
So, I mostly talk about African-Americans in the Army in large part, because…
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
…only in the most menial positions, as has been said. The Army opened itself up. It was strictly, strictly segregated but it did allow African-Americans to fight in a range of different roles, although again, strictly segregated, and that their authority, they could never have authority over White servicemembers, but over time, thanks again in large part to civil rights struggle, those branches that had excluded African-Americans opened up pretty early in the war actually and before the US enters the war.
Dr. Lorien Foote:
I think what you said again is a contrast with the Civil War where you said they could never have authority. So, it’s very common in the Civil War for Black sergeants and corporals to have command over White soldiers. It happens during guard duty and picket duty but also, we know sometimes on the battlefield. So, that, again, is a big difference.
Eugene Robinson:
Fascinating.
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Also, we keep saying sort of menial jobs, but you made this point in an earlier conversation. Menial, again, in the eyes of the folks who sort of created the structure and the things that they saw value of, but you said earlier, like you can’t have a war without the people who do the things, right? You can’t have it without the folks who build the roads. You can’t have mourning without the folks as Black soldiers were tasked with doing – who like bury, dig up, and then rebury the dead, and you can’t have it without the folks who unload ships. So, I keep saying that there were only 40,000 combat troops, as if the folks who did the other work were not doing war work, but I want to make sure that we…
Eugene Robinson:
Yes.
Dr. Lorien Foote:
Well, and in fact, I want to throw in here, one of the reasons that, in Northern states, support for enlisting Black soldiers in the Civil War happened is when White soldiers – they’re landing in Virginia, they’re landing in Louisiana and the Confederacy has impressed enslaved people to work on their military fortifications. Northern soldiers were looking at this and going, “These enslaved people are doing incredibly important military work. We are having to fight harder than we would have to because of how important the military work enslaved people are doing and we need that military work to be done on our side.” [Laughter] I think that speaks to the importance of certain kinds of labor. In a military setting, it’s very important. It’s not just the fighting and combat that makes an army successful.
Eugene Robinson:
I was just talking more about Ukraine, but recently, after the first four or five days, every war is about logistics, right? Apparently, I’m not a military tactician, but it makes sense to me. Next question?
Female 2:
This asks about the G.I. Bill, but I think we can apply it more broadly to things like disability or maybe widows’ pensions, or things like that regarding wartime, but the question is – did the G.I. Bill, in either statute or application, create unequal treatment between White and Black veterans? So, in your particular war, maybe talk about sort of what comes after and what kind of benefits or help were available to Black veterans and their families.
Eugene Robinson:
Well, Tom, you got the G.I. Bill. [Laughter]
Dr. Thomas Guglielmo:
Sure. [Laughter] So, there’s a really good book called When Affirmative Action Was White by Ira Katznelson, who’s a political scientist and historian at Columbia. He has a great chapter on the G.I. Bill, where he’s drawing on other historians who’ve done this work, but it’s a nice kind of 30-page summary on this point. The bottom line is that African-American soldiers did not have equal access to the G.I. Bill and it was by design. Southern Democrats in Congress created clauses in the bill so that, primarily, to create kind of local control of these G.I. Bill benefits. So, there are lots of ways that African-Americans – while the law itself seemed to be written in a kind of egalitarian way, in practice, it was very, very discriminatory. So, I’ll just give you one example. For Black soldiers, Black veterans in the South, they had this benefit to a college education, but if you are only allowed to go to a certain select set of segregated schools, that’s obviously discriminatory. I’ll add to this story that people I don’t think have understood and the scholarship on this point has not made, and that is that – I have a whole chapter on how the US military systematically excluded huge numbers of Black Americans from service throughout the war, throughout the war. They did this through a whole range of different means that, if we had time, I’d get into, but the bottom line is that the Army promised that African-Americans would serve proportional to their representation in the service. They were 10% of the US representation in the population. They’re 10% of the population, about 7% percent of servicemembers during World War II. Why? Because of systematic discrimination on the part of the US military. It was not the Selective Service. So, this is discrimination in induction, is ultimately, after the war, discrimination in access to the G.I. Bill benefit.
Eugene Robinson:
Interesting. I think we have time for one more question.
Female 2:
Provocative one, and we’ll conclude with that – which is – sorry – I think basically, why is it if only 2% of Americans elect to be part of the military, why should African-Americans serve, right? Why, if called, should they serve if only very few people are actually doing it? So, maybe based on sort of the experience that you’ve [Laughter] talked about here, why should the African-Americans continue to serve their country?
Eugene Robinson:
Anybody?
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
So, I’ll answer that in the history as opposed to now because that’s what I do. I mean, this is a question that folks ask, right? Like this is ongoing. It’s not like America declares war and every Black person across the nation goes, “Okay, let’s go,” right? Like the military intelligence files and the Bureau of Investigation files are filled with stories of people in barbershops or churches being like, “The Germans ain’t done nothing to me, and if they did, I forgive them,” right? Because there is this question of like, “Why would I do this thing? They shall not have me because they don’t deserve me,” but on the flipside is an understanding that one makes a claim on a nation that should be reciprocated but is not until it’s reciprocated. We can have a debate about whether or not that is naive or ineffective. We can talk in the context of the symposium about how it pays dividends far longer than – like on longer timelines than sort of people’s – the sort of bulk of people’s lives. We can have a conversation about whether or not people make sacrifices of their hearts and bodies on behalf of others, right? There’s sort of all kinds of ways then to going about it, but I’m not an economist for a reason. One of it is that I think that like trying to use rational actors as the way to explain decision-making won’t give you a lot of insight into human hope and behavior.
Eugene Robinson:
Yes, Woody?
Dr. Woody Holton:
Way outside my specialty but I just want to quote Congressman Cleaver from last night, saying, “This was when my family Zoomed. It was the G.I. Bill.” Of course, it was discriminatory, especially on housing. Yes, any Black person who can get into a White college can get the G.I. bill, but they’re not going to get into the White college in the first place. So, there’s absolute – and all the colleges he named were HBCUs that his family went to, but he said, “My family is middle class because of that bill.” So, I think there is an economic side. It’s not the same economic privilege that Whites get for the same service, but there’s that. Plus, also, the story of Isaac Woodard who became so crucial to the executive order that we’re talking about. He already knew that he was a man but I think for him to be able to stand up to that bus driver and say, “I’m a man just like you,” it was easier to say that after 18 months in the Philippines and Guam.
Eugene Robinson:
That’s a whole another story. Yes, another story, [Laughter] and we’ll get to that in later panels. I want to thank you all. This was a tremendous panel. [Applause]
Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith:
Thank you.
Dr. Woody Holton:
Five historians.
Eugene Robinson:
No, no, four historians, one amateur, who is going to be in touch with the other four historians [Laughter] constantly after this, and I would like to thank our audience for participating as well. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Now, we’re going to have – we’re going to have a break. It’s I think a half-hour break or actually, less than a half hour, since we ran a bit over, but enjoy the rest of the day. I’m going stay for as much of it as I can, because I think this is such an important observance of such an important step in the history of this country. Thank you so much. Thank you. [Applause]
Dr. Woody Holton:
Thank you.
– End of Recording –
