GENERAL SESSION 2: THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: THE IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT OF E.O. 9981
July 27, 2023 at 11:00AM ET
Welcome & Introduction of Michele Norris — Kari Frederickson
Introduction of Panel — Michele Norris
Panelists—
Dr. Sabrina Thomas, Associate Professor of History at Texas Tech University
Dr. David P. Cline, Professor of History and Founding Director of the San Diego State University Center for Public and Oral History
Dr. Kyle Longley, Professor of History and Director of the Masters in War and Society Program at Chapman University
Dr. Robert F. Jefferson, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico
Program Video
Participant Bios
Kari Frederickson:
Hello, I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. So, if you’ll take your seats, please. My name is Kari Frederickson. I’m a Professor of History at the University of Alabama, and I’m also a member of the Truman Library Institute Board of Directors, and I would like to either welcome you back to our second session or to welcome you. This session is entitled “The Right to Fight: The Implementation and Impact of Executive Order 9981.”
The years 1945 to 1948, three years leading up to the executive order, witnessed dramatic developments, both stateside and internationally. Like soldiers returned home, determined to fight for freedom so many have fought and died for, like southerners, who had migrated north for wartime industrial jobs, became registered voters, and formed an increasingly vocal political bloc, putting pressure on both the Republican and the Democratic parties to make civil rights a priority, and violence against returning veterans, in particular, sickened the president and seriously compromised his ability to promote American ideals of freedom and democracy as the Cold War with the Soviet Union accelerated, and that is the context in which Truman issued his monumental order.
I want to remind you that there will be a Q&A session later on at the end of the program, and we ask that you write your questions on the notecards provided by the Truman Library staff.
At this time, it is my great honor to present our moderator Michele Norris. Michele Norris is one of America’s most trusted voices in journalism, earning several honors over a long career. She’s a columnist for The Washington Post Opinions section and from 2002 to 2012, she was co-host of NPR’s All Things Considered. Norris is also the founding director of The Race Card Project, a Peabody award-winning narrative archive where people around the world share their reflections on identity in just six words. It is the focus of her newest book entitled “Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity,” which is set to release next year. Her first book, “The Grace of Silence,” was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Kansas City Star.
Please join me in welcoming Michele Norris. [Applause]
Michele Norris:
Thank you. Good morning, everyone.
Male/Female:
Good morning.
Michele Norris:
It’s an honor to be here. I love the work that the Truman Library does, and anytime I have a chance to do something with them, it is indeed a special honor as a journalist, as an American, and as a daughter of an American veteran. So, let’s have an interesting conversation and, boy, do we have a great panel to do just that. Give me a moment and I’m going to introduce them. One by one, I’m going to tell you a little bit about them, and then they will come out onstage. All right?
Dr. David P. Cline is a Professor of History and he is the founding director of the San Diego State University Center for Public and Oral History. From 2013 to 2020, Dr. Cline was a lead interviewer and research scholar for the Civil Rights History Project of the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. So, he spent a lot of time here in the capital city. His book “Twice Forgotten: African Americans in the Korean War, an Oral History” was nominated for the Oral History Association Book Award and the Museum of African American History Stone Book Award.
We’re also going to be joined by Dr. Robert F. Jefferson Jr., Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of “Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor,” and also a book called “Fighting for Hope: African American Troops in the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II,” and also “Postwar America.” That last book was nominated for the William Colby Book Prize. He’s also currently a residential fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for international scholars, and he’s also a Truman Library Institute recent grant recipient.
Dr. Kyle Longley is also joining us. He is the Henry Salvatore Professor of American Values and Traditions. He’s the Director of the War, Diplomacy, and Society Program, and Professor of History at Chapman University. He joined the faculty in 2020, after more than two decades at ASU, Arizona State University. He also serves as the Executive Director of the Society of Military History. Longley has published nine books on topics ranging from the American presidency to US Latin American relations. His most recent works include “In Harm’s Way: A History of the American Military Experience,” and “Grunts: The American Combat Soldier in Vietnam.”
Dr. Sabrina Thomas is also joining us. She is an Associate Professor of African American History and War and Society at Texas Tech University. Her book “Scars of War: The Politics of Paternity and Responsibility for the Amerasians of Vietnam” was awarded the Best First Book prize from the Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, was also nominated for the Bancroft Prize.
Let’s bring them all out. [Applause] I had a chance to spend some time with these wonderful scholars backstage, so I know that we are in for a wonderful conversation. Just to put this into a little context, it’s the 75th anniversary of a courageous decision that changed not just the military, but changed America. President Harry Truman is to be honored and recognized in a special way, I think, because of the journey he traveled in making that decision.
We talk a lot in this country about revolutions. We don’t talk as much about evolutions, and he had an evolution of the heart, a moral evolution. If you look at the readings from Harry Truman as a young man, he is someone who embraced a casual brand of racism, and probably something beyond that. He made this decision against headwinds. He made this decision, knowing that it was unpopular in the military. He made this decision, knowing that he might not get invited to Thanksgiving that year. [Laughter] Seriously. His family was not happy with him back in Missouri with this, and yet he did it anyway.
We can talk about his motives, and that’s one of the things we will talk about today, and we will also talk about the impact of that, and we’ll also spend a little bit of time talking about the people whose lives he touched, and this is where it’s personal for me.
My father, Belvin Norris Jr., served in the navy. I didn’t know enough about his story, and I learned about it when I wrote my family memoir, “The Grace of Silence,” and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t know as much about this as I should. I am a journalist. I pride myself on writing the first draft of history. I pride myself on knowing a lot about America. As a journalist, I’m the person in my family who is supposed to be the chronicler of stories, and I did not know about my father’s story. I did not know about the segregation that he faced. I did not know about the segregation he faced in the military, and then what he faced when he returned back home. My father was shot by a police officer in Birmingham, Alabama as he was trying to enter a building where he was going to learn as much about the Constitution as he could, so he could pass a poll test, because that was required if you were a man of color and you wanted to vote.
These men fought honorably for democracy overseas, and they came back with the crazy idea that they might get a taste of it back home, and America was not ready for that. My father never told that story. He had a scar on his leg and a little bit of a limp that was so light that you wouldn’t call it a limp. A little lilt in his step. I now recognize what that was, and I now know what that scar was, and I know a little bit more about the scars on his heart and his psyche, because I’ve done this research, and we’re going to learn a little bit more about men like my father, who experienced things like that. He never told me. He never told my mother. In all the years of marriage, all the intimacies of marriage, she never knew about it either. I learned about it after he died when an uncle told me, and then I went back to Alabama and realized that all of my family members knew about it back there, and they all stopped talking about it. That’s one of the reasons we don’t know a lot about this history, because the people who went through this decided that they were going to move forward and stop talking about it. They remind me of distance runners. If you’ve ever run track, you’re told, “Don’t look to the side. Don’t look to the right. Don’t look to the left. Don’t look behind you. Keep going,” and that’s what they did.
So, today we’re going to talk about men who serve this country in two ways, I think. Honorably serving the country as servicemen and women, but also coming back to America and getting on with the business of being Americans, of swallowing their anger and trying to show America what it could be by demonstrating to America what they could be. Let’s have a conversation.
We’re going to begin by hearing opening statements from all of our panelists. They will each talk for about five minutes, and then we will begin a yeasty conversation among us, and we’re going to make sure that we have time to hear from you. So, when we get to about the 15-minute mark, we’re going to get some questions from the audience. I’ll be reminding you of that, and you can pass those questions, and we have two people on the back who are going to be reading those questions for us, and then we’ll answer them. Let’s begin.
David Cline:
All right. Thank you so much. So, in my brief time, I wanted to talk about what I see as the three forces that really led to desegregation, and I had the pleasure of working for some 20 years on [Laughter] a book that’s oral histories of what I called the “Twice Forgotten,” right? So, the African American veterans of the forgotten war, the Korean War. So, I wanted to put that in context, and I’ll start just very briefly with two stories of two of them. One is Lieutenant General Becton who, I’m sure, would love to be here, if he could, today. Long career in the US military from World War II all the way through Vietnam. He told me a story about when the desegregation order was passed, he was at Aberdeen Proving Ground in reserve training. The post commander called everybody together and said, “Truman has just signed this order,” paused. “As long as I am commander, nothing on this post will change.”
The other story is from a gentleman that I grew to know, Master Sergeant Charles Berry, who is in the all-black 24th. Both of those men were in segregated units. Berry was trained in the segregated unit, got to Korea with the 24th, and then was integrated, right? So, a little bit later in the war, this is when units are starting to be more integrated. Half his company was sent to a white unit, and the other half, a white unit was brought in, and his commander said, “We are integrated now. Fall out. Everybody, go back into the barracks, bunk by bunk, black, white, black, white, black, white.” That’s how that man interpreted that.
So, just two examples of how things actually happened in the field and so what I see as the three forces, 9981 is at the center of all of this, of course, but what I see as the three forces were prior to that a sustained pressure campaign largely led by the Black press. So, with the NAACP and other organizations as well, but with the Black press pushing from World War II on, from the Double V Campaign, victory abroad, victory at home, through the years after World War II, pressing for inclusion, and as we’ve heard, African Americans in all conflicts have used those periods as a time of leverage to lever the undelivered promise, right?
So, we’ve got the pressure campaign happening, then we’ve got President Truman as number two, right? I wanted to add a second Truman to this, a name we haven’t heard yet, which is the name Truman Gibson. Truman Gibson was the War Department’s civilian aide on Negro affairs. I would say without Truman Gibson, we might not have this story either. He had a very different style than his predecessor, who is working directly with the NAACP, and Truman Gibson was much more of a sort of quiet backroom kind of guy, gained the president’s trust and ear, and if I may use earthy language, it was to him that President Truman said, after the Woodard blinding, “This shit has to stop,” and then he turned to him and he said, “I’m going to do something for you and your people.” So, I highly recommend reading his autobiography. Truman Gibson is just an unsung hero of this story.
Third is the war itself. So, without the Korean War, we would not have the desegregation, right? Because we entered the war with a still segregated military, and we can talk in the Q&A about how the different branches preceded and what that looked like, but especially in the Army, we entered with three Black infantry regiments, a tank battalion, a ranger battalion, et cetera. So, a lot still quite integrated, but when a warm body is needed as a replacement, as was said to me over and over in interviews, we’ll take anybody, and then as that person fights next to you, everything else goes out of the story, and you realize that this is an individual and this is a person, and so it’s the war itself. So, there are 100,000 African Americans in the Armed Forces when the war broke out. There were 600,000 when it ended, largely segregated, especially in the army when it started, 90% desegregated by the time the army [Unintelligible] has signed. That’s another point too is though there was this stroke of the pen, it did take time. It was a sustained fight, right. So, as we’ve heard, 1954, after the war is when the last army unit is desegregated.
I want to mention quickly, maybe we’ll get to it in Q&A, the difference between desegregation and integration. They are quite different. So, let’s hopefully talk about that in a few minutes, but I want to end quickly here. We heard a roll call last night of all the African American military leaders who wouldn’t have had their lives, but for this history. I wanted to add a couple of more names, not of military leaders, but of others who served during the Korean War, and came back and served the civil rights movement and the public in other ways. So, just very quickly, these are all African American veterans in the Korean War.
Congressman Charles Rangel, Congressman John Conyers, former Virginia Governor Doug Wilder, James Meredith who integrated the University of Mississippi. Modern civil rights activist Clyde Kennard, who attempted to do the same thing at the University of Southern Mississippi and whose fate is one of the saddest stories of the civil rights movement. James Forman, one of the leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Elbert “Big Man” Howard, one of the six founders of the Black Panther Party. On and on all the way to Amiri Baraka, cultural icon and poet; and one person I loved interviewing, Clarence Jones, who wrote the first draft of the “I have a dream” speech. All of these men, and a number of women I interviewed, had real impact after the war as well, having brought this measure of freedom that they experienced, and bringing it back to continue that fight.
In the first couple of months of the war, The Chicago Defender wrote that we’re going to whip the communist back with our blood and it’s going to be led by African American soldiers, but then they’re going to come home and they’re going to return home and it’s still going to be open warfare on them and their rights. So, these people, obviously, put their lives on the line, but knowing that this was a fight that was much longer than 1950 to 1953. Thank you.
Michele Norris:
Thank you, and I see some of you, like me, taking notes. I encourage that, because you’re providing us with a syllabus of things that we can continue to look into, and just one note before we get to Sabrina. Clarence Jones has just published his own memoir, which is available now, and he talks about his service in that. Sabrina, you’re up.
Sabrina Thomas:
So, I’ve got this big clock in front of me, so I’m going to [Laughter] really look at my notes, so that I stay on track, because I tend to ramble a bit.
When A. Philip Randolph and the NAACP pressured President Truman to desegregate the US Military, they knew it would have far-reaching effects for American society. Randolph had already convinced President Roosevelt to ban employment discrimination against African Americans in the US defense industry, and he applied similar pressure to President Truman, insisting that African Americans would no longer serve in a segregated military and they definitely will not vote for a president who supported one. Truman agreed and he acknowledged that he could not deny the service and the bravery of the one million African Americans who served in the second world war, but Randolph had a larger goal. While insisting that African Americans have an equal opportunity to serve their country in all capacities, he also saw that the Cold War could bring international attention to the hypocrisy of American democracy, and help him push forward civil rights.
Randolph and others pointed to the absurdity of US forces promoting democracy abroad with a [Laughter] segregated military, and he leaned in to the uncomfortable comparisons that linked Jim Crow America to Nazi Germany. He and other Black leaders correctly believed that desegregating the US military would open the door to integrate other institutions – education in 1954, transportation in 1955, public facilities in 1964, and marriages in 1967.
So, while the Korean War, as my colleague has just talked about, would initiate the integration of US military forces, social integration took much longer, and it’s here that my – and here, I’m assuming my research of mixed-race children born of war fits in. Seeking manpower, US military commanders in Korea were quickly convinced that race did not matter in the heat of battle, but applying that same rationale when survival is not on the line or was not on the line proved to be more difficult.
Opposition to military integration, in fact, often focused on the social, not the military implications of race mixing. Opponents pointed to the potential dangers of interracial liaisons, relationships or marriages between Black soldiers and local white women, and they worried about what to do if those relationships bore children.
So, it’s this battle for the social integration of the US military that lagged behind the fight for combat readiness and was fought primarily during the US occupation of West Germany between 1949 and 1955, in which over 30,000 African Americans served.
The US mission during the occupation to teach Germans about the benefits of American democracy and to redeem Germany from its history of national socialism proved unconvincing for most Germans, who questioned its value, again coming from a segregated US military that also imposed the Jim Crow on German institutions, its bars and its nightclubs, and its stores, and whose white GIs discriminated against their African American peers.
Black GIs also noted the lack of Jim Crow in Germany, and described the opportunities for them to go where they wanted to go, to eat where they wanted, and to date whom they wanted. So, even Colin Powell who served in Germany in 1958 to 1959 as a lieutenant, described his experience there as a breath of freedom.
So, for many Black servicemen, the ability to fraternize with the white women without fear of violence was perhaps the clearest evidence of racial freedom in Germany. So, during the occupation, African American GIs fathered approximately 5,000 mixed-race children with white German women, only 5% of the 90,000 that all American soldiers fathered [Laughter] during that time, and although most of the Black German children grew up with their white German mothers in Germany, African Americans followed their childhoods through the Black press, and who consistently praised the German leaders and the German people for their racial tolerance, their acceptance of Black German children, most evident in the integration of German schools in 1952, two years before Brown.
So, the Black Americans literally fought and died in segregation in America. Some insisted that Black German children had better lives in post Nazi Germany than African American kids did in democratic America. These kinds of comments were embarrassing for US leaders, but they also fueled African Americans stationed in Germany and living in the United States to agitate for social integration.
So, the freedom African American GIs experienced in West Germany helped push the US military to integrate its soldiers outside of combat zones and the US Government further towards racial equality at home.
So, when African American Chief Warrant Officer Oscar Grammer, who joined the segregated US military in 1989, and his wife Mabel brought their two-year-old adopted Black German daughter, Nadja, home to Washington DC in 1963, the effects of 9981 had finally begun to take hold, both on and off the battlefield in Vietnam, where US soldiers would father another crop of mixed-race children, who would also symbolize the battle over race and rights in America. It’s because of 9981 that 18-year-old Nadja was able to follow in the footsteps of her father and join an integrated US military. In 1982, she became the highest-ranking woman to ever graduate from West Point. In 2015, she was the first Black surgeon general of the US Army, and in 2016, the first female African American three-star general.
So, when we’re talking about 9981, I think we have to consider how American race relations would have evolved differently were it not for the executive order, but also to consider the strengths evident in Nadja’s achievements and its limitations visible in the comparisons between African American and Black German children, and the continuing racial tensions of our social integration that would continue on in the war in Vietnam. Thank you.
Kyle Longley:
Well, I love that she just did the transition for me, [Laughter] because I’m going to zero in on Vietnam and also talk some about Iraq and Afghanistan. Recently, I was at an Orange County World Affairs Council meeting, and a person walked across the room to me and looked at me, saw that I was representing Chapman University, and her question was: “Are you one of those woke professors?” I looked, I thought for a second, and I said, “All right. Here’s how the media approach this. Do you think that it mattered that a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan ran the largest draft board in Louisiana during the Vietnam War?” She looked at me, sort of mumbled a little bit, and walked away. [Laughter] I think I made my point to her that I do think race matters and that supposedly this term “woke” really relates to topics that we discuss anyway and so I would say that – and this carries me into the Vietnam War, because it did matter, and African Americans are drafted in large numbers far disproportionate, especially in the early parts of the war, to those many times whites, especially middleclass, upper class, and who also had escape routes like the National Guard and other options going to college many African Americans did not have, and we know in Vietnam in the early stages of the Vietnam War, African Americans were disproportionately represented on the frontlines. At one point, the numbers of casualties coming out that were African American hovered around 19%, 20%.
So, the military made – especially the US Army made a concerted effort to reduce those numbers, and by the end of the war, it was closer to 12% to 13%, much more in line with the proportion of the African American population in the United States.
So, I think that’s important, and part of that can be explained because many of the African Americans were volunteering for extra types of duty, such as paratroopers and others, because they paid better and gave you more opportunity. So, there was a combination of factors – the draft, everything that was contributing to that.
So, I would make that point that African Americans – this is the first integrated war. Korea it took time, and even by the end of the war, it was not fully integrated. Vietnam is very different. It’s the first test, and the other part of the question, I would say, in relation to Vietnam is the idea that society’s issues came to the battlefield, and many of the race issues that were developing in the United States will be transferred. I mean, if you haven’t read Martin Luther King’s speech in April of 1967 on Vietnam he gives in [Harlem] in which he really calls out the Johnson administration over the war, you should read that. It’s one I feature in my classes when we talk about the Vietnam War.
So, that is really permeating. We know what is going on in Watts. We know what’s going on in Detroit in ’67 and that’s carrying over into Vietnam. So, it’s a direct reflection, and I think you see this in a number of ways. Unfortunately, a year after Martin Luther King gave this speech, he’s assassinated. That day that the assassination is announced, whites in [Da Nang] put on white sheets and marched around, celebrating Martin Luther King’s death. Horrible, but we know this is going on in Vietnam, that again is a reflection, and what happens in 1965 differs very much from what’s happening in 1968.
So, we know that it’s happening, but we can see it play out in many different ways. We know it played out in things like fraggings, where officers and others are killed. The others you want to do a – if someone’s looking for a good book topic, the Kitty Hawk insurrection in 1972, where race riot breaks out on the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.
So, Vietnam has this and race is central, and I could go into great detail talking about Native Americans, Latinos, and others, but what I think I would make one final point, and hopefully this will carry over into Dr. Jefferson’s comments, Vietnam was sort of the low point, but with the all-volunteer army and some changes that occur afterwards, by the time we reach Iraq, Afghanistan, race relations have changed to a significant degree, partly because of the timing, partly because there are now officers that are people of color. The things have changed and the all-volunteer army in military changes the dynamics, but I would say the thing that – I’m writing a book called “The Forever War.” It’s about Americans at war in Iraq, Afghanistan that sort of builds on my book “Grunts,” and the things that I’ve seen are this: one is if there are – and what I’ve picked up on, two things that I think stand out. One is the argument is made if you see racial discrimination, it’s still there, and it depends upon also the branch of the military. Two, if you see it, it’s more likely going to come in the form of promotions and who receives awards. So, it’s changed dramatically, but the final part, I would say, is it has not ended, and race is still a fundamental argument, and I would argue we might consider this as a final point. What would’ve happened if BLM had occurred in 2007, 2008 at the low point of the war, especially in Iraq? Would that have changed the dynamic in terms of race relations? I would argue high probability. So, I will then defer, but I do think you’re going to see the transformation caused by this executive order, and it is going to have a dramatic effect, but race still remains a fundamental organizing factor of our society, including the military.
Robert Jefferson:
I want to open with making a declarative statement, I think it’s probably fairly obvious to everyone here, and that’s that the Executive Order 9981 is a living, breathing document, and I say that as a way of pointing out it’s the language that was used in it, and then also the struggles to implement it, and then also looking at its impact basically well beyond – basically its immediate issuing.
The first thing is this, is that Truman’s issuing of the desegregation order, it ushered in a new – there’s a new era for the utilization of African American personnel in the Armed Forces. In many respects, the measure expanded the scope and also the scale of the – not only the utilization of Black military personnel, but also it challenged the social calculus of race that had long held its grip on American society, but it also created, I think, an atmosphere of increase that raised expectations among citizens of rights that they had been codified in the US Constitution, but the implementation of the executive order proved to be very elusive as many tended to interpret its meaning in various ways.
As many scholars have pointed out, the vagueness and also the obtuse language that was used in the executive order basically were terms that didn’t even – basically revolved around the terms that appeared in the document. For instance, desegregation and integration were not even – were terms that didn’t even appear in the document, but the thing to keep in mind is that the assertions of equality were written large throughout the document as a whole, and I think that meant a great deal of direction and flexibility to the measure in itself, and I think this is why the congressional leaders largely ignored the measure when it was issued. This is why, basically, the senior army leadership tended to ignore it. For instance, you had Army Secretary Kenneth Royall at the time claiming that they railed against the measure, claiming, arguing that the army was not an instrumental social reform, and they struggled to try to implement this from basically army commanders on down, but the thing as it moved to full implementation, Truman’s order, I think, yielded results that may have not been contemplated by the army’s brass, and also observers. For instance, for years, scholars have pointed to the ways in which the events in World War II, the Cold War, and the war in Korea heightened Black self-awareness in the Armed Forces, and also in areas across the country, but we would do well to remember how the executive order was largely the midwife to social reform as it shaped race consciousness and civil rights activism among the privates, the sergeants, and the nurses that entered the ranks of the military, particularly between 1954 and 1965, which leads me to my final point.
I want to share with you the story of Henry Lee Jessie. Born in Union Springs, Alabama, Jessie’s early years were marked by Jim Crow discrimination and segregation. His parents were day laborers. They worked to yield crops from the region’s red clay soil. His public school education took place in a one-room shack that leaked during the rainy season and was cold most of the time. He remembered having to walk to school for miles to get to school, and kids of all grades basically receiving their education using dated schoolbooks. Having heard of the Black military pilots who trained at Tuskegee, but growing up in the heart of the Confederacy, the social and political chances of Jessie and his three brothers and two sisters had them realizing a better life for themselves and their families were extremely limited. You see, once they finished school, they were largely expected to follow the life paths of their parents. What’s more, they had never ventured to Montgomery, which was considered to be the big city, and nevertheless, basically, the presence Birmingham. Birmingham lay way beyond their imaginations.
But young Henry Jessie, he yearned to do much more. He possessed an inquisitive mind. He was curious about the world outside of Bullock County. He wanted to learn as much as he could. He read everything that he could get his hands on. In fact, he told the story to me over and over again about how he would read encyclopedias one entry at a time. After seeing a mortician in his hometown, he wanted to go to school and study mortuary science, but he looked around him and saw that the state licensed very few African Americans in the field.
One day in 1953, he was walking to school when he saw his source of inspiration. A neighbor basically bearing an Army uniform and the possibility of serving in the military. Like so many Black men of his time, Jessie believed that serving in the Army was a source of social mobility. It offered him a chance to leave the state of Alabama. It provided financial support to his family, and also allowed him to pursue additional education while in military service, but he faced an insurmountable obstacle. He was only 16 years old, not old enough to basically sign up for military service without getting his parents’ permission. His mother was adamantly opposed to him joining. She thought that he would go into the military and go to Korea and basically end up dying there, but what did he do? He dropped out of high school. He forged basically the dates on his birth certificate, and went to Montgomery where he was able to persuade an Army recruiter to basically admit him. After undergoing basic training, he was stationed at military bases in New Mexico and Kentucky, and he would later go on to Germany where he saw a new world that was coming into being. Mind you, at that particular moment, the Korean War was grinding to a halt. It was coming to a close, and the world was opening up. The military was turning his attention elsewhere. So what he did while he was in the military was he was able to gain that precious education that he had long since been denied. He got his high school diploma, and he also was able to – he managed to obtain college credits for correspondence courses that he had taken. He decided that once he left basically the military, he was going to go on to school to satisfy that thirst for higher education.
He returned to Alabama and he hoped to enroll in Alabama State University where, at this time, he was curious about science and learning about becoming a pharmacist. But in the state of Alabama, very few Black pharmacists were able to gain licenses. So, while he was there at Alabama State University, he stumbled upon the Montgomery, basically improvement, basically an association where he met associates who had who are like-minded like him where he was also introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was there that he became a part of his security staff, but he basically served Dr. King for a number of years before basically going on to Howard University, coming here to Washington DC, earning his degree in pharmacy where he opened his store along Georgia Avenue over here and retired, but it is that story in itself tells us what the Executive Order 9981. It is the potential that it unleashes. There are thousands of Henry Jessies out there, not just the first and never going to be the last, but it tells us something about the promise of the Executive Order altogether. Thank you.
Michele Norris:
Thank you, thank you. [Applause] So, something interesting was said by David. You want to talk about the difference between integration and desegregation. It’s interesting in my work at the Race Card Project, I collect six-word stories, and one that stays with me is: “Asked for equality, we got integration.” So, equality is not the same as integration and integration is not the same as desegregation. Could you talk a little bit about the difference between those two things, what Harry Truman had in mind even though his language was a bit obtuse, and what actually happened? Was it a form of desegregation or did they effectively integrate? How should we view what happened in the short-term period after the Executive Order was issued?
David Cline:
So, I’m very careful on talking about this, about desegregation and integration. What Truman’s order called for was desegregation, right? In 1962 in Nashville, Martin Luther King defined the difference between them, and it’s incredibly instructive. He basically says that – first, he starts by defining segregation, and then he says that desegregation is a negative. It’s the absence of segregation, whereas integration is a positive. It’s the creation of something new. He said that while desegregation is a necessary first step, integration is the ultimate goal. We don’t have an integrated military by the end of the Korean War. We do have the beginnings of a desegregated military, and we have a crucial ball being pushed out and rolling toward that ultimate goal, whether we’re there even now is a question, right?
Michele Norris:
That’s a very helpful distinction between those things. I’m interested in – the military is a place where there are all kinds of action memos, and after-action memos, and memos of all kinds, and so when something like this happens, I imagine there was a flurry of paper and directives, because the military could tell people what to do, but they couldn’t always tell them what to think. When I was researching my father’s history, I found something called the US Command of Negro Naval Personnel, and it was interesting because it ticked through what has to happen. Were there similar documents in all the branches? How was this actually executed at the ground level, and is that instructive in thinking about how to actually create a more active kind of integration or a more unified America? Are there things that we can learn by looking back at some of these directives?
Kyle Longley:
I would say absolutely. I think one of the things that I’ve been thinking about this, especially working on the current wars or the most recent wars, is the idea this is sort of a road map in some ways or what we saw in our generation of “don’t ask, don’t tell” up into fuller integration. Same goes for women in combat roles and the expansion of women into these new roles, and I think a lot of it is the Army, for example, just said outright, “We’re going to resist…” – Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, and it took Korea to really change the dynamic and change the trajectory. Without that war, I agree with David, I don’t think it would have changed all that quickly. Now, Vietnam accelerates the process. Now, I didn’t make the point that I should have that in the frontlines in Vietnam, integration was very much because you depended on each other for your life. Most of the racial and antagonism and animosities were in the rear bases. So, when they’re in these areas, it’s a very different dynamic. Frontline, you cannot be fighting each other, but now when you go back to those bases, it changed the dynamic, segregation. People go off segregate in their own way, and I think Oliver Stone does a pretty good job of this with Platoon, of highlighting – it didn’t break down just along racial lines, It broke down along whether you’re a drug – or alcohol, things like that. So, I do think that these show us – and again, you can do some comparison and contrast to what we’ve seen most recently in our generation with the gays in the military and women in the military, and I think it is very instructive. You can’t force institutions to change overnight. It’s going to take time, and I would agree with David, we’re still ongoing.
I mean, one of the issues that I still see and what I’ve seen in mind, there’s a wonderful new book about to come out on the Marine Corps from 1942 to 1973 by a African American colonel in the Marine Corps named Cameron McCoy. He talks about this whole idea of the Marine Corps was much slower. Now, the Marine Corps has some unique dynamics, and I could go into great detail about these, but it is a different institution than the Army as opposed to the Air Force as opposed to – and so, I think we can see those different general commands and how they handled this, and see some really good patterns of what’s successful, what is not.
Michele Norris:
Sabrina, you talked about this as a form of social engineering also, because military create communities. They’re people who live together and they mate, they raise their children together, they socialize together. That’s something that is much harder to legislate or to do anything like that by fiat, by edict, through an executive order. Was that a blind spot in some way in thinking about what desegregation, and eventually, integration would mean?
Sabrina Thomas:
I don’t know if it’s a blind spot. It was intentional to not touch that area, it was intentional to legislate against those things. Non-fraternization orders were passed throughout the Second World War, and then there were other ways to ensure, or to try to ensure that the races stayed apart in other places, specifically the way that you would police or you would discuss brothels or meeting with women in other places and how that would that would go about. I think it’s important to remember that integration does not mean equality, that integration does not mean understanding, but that integration as a policy, is really critical because it sets a system, right? So, the system forces us to sit next to each other and, at some point, you hope, “Hey, David. How’s it going?” [Laughter] Yes, right? Like we have some sort of relationship, yes, and then that breeds those things, but that takes a long time. You see that in the inter-relationships between American soldiers and local women of all races, but in particular, in Germany, what happens – what’s very interesting and what is a little bit different than in Vietnam, is that in Germany, that integration happens faster in German society, which is why African Americans are like, “Hey, wait a minute. You guys just had Nazis and you think we’re cool and that we can date you and talk to you? kind of, right? But the US who preaches this sort of thing for hundreds of years, we can’t do this without being in fear of being lynched or not being legally allowed to be married.
So, in Germany, African Americans occupying Germany was really important for the way that the military started to think about – my argument – started to think about what it means to be fully integrated because they’re in Germany. Germany does have a lot of racial animus. They also have a history of racism against Black people. They’re a colonial country, a colonizing country, but within a few years, it’s really common for Germans to say Black soldiers are nicer, kinder, more generous, easier to get along with than white soldiers, and Black soldiers are feeling their oats out there. So, within a few years, Germans who in reaction to the children who are initially were like, “We don’t know what to do with these Black children, these brown children. What are we supposed to do with them? Get them out of here. They shouldn’t be Germans.” By 1952, they’re like, “We love Black children.” There’s issues with that too, and “Black children are kind of the way that we’re going to prove that we’ve redeemed ourselves from Nazi national socialism.” That was a very short period of time, and in that period of time, those interactions mean a lot for the ways that African Americans are understanding what integration means and a lot for what the military has now forced to deal with in terms of the relationships that their soldiers are having with civilians and how that’s supposed to act to work.
That will be a little bit different in Vietnam, and there are some other racial dynamics that go into that that you’re not dealing with in Germany, but in both places, you still have kind of the policing of those relationships based on race. If women in Vietnam who are dating, interacting, or having children with Black soldiers will be treated very differently in Vietnam than those who are dealing with white soldiers and then in a bad way, and that that will continue, and Black soldiers will very much, like they did in Germany, gauge the way that Black Amerasian, mixed race children in Vietnam, are treated by the Vietnamese in terms of what America’s race relations were like. So, they’re not treated well? Well, Jim Crow came here, too. You guys taught the Vietnamese to be racist, and so that is also – see, I’m on a tangent. I told you. Yes. [Laughter]
Michele Norris:
While we’re adding to the syllabus that we’re creating, there’s this interesting documentary called Brown Babies…
Sabrina Thomas:
Yes.
David Cline:
Yes.
Sabrina Thomas:
By Regina Griffin, yes.
Michele Norris:
…where a number of the German-born mixed race children were sent to America.
Sabrina Thomas:
Yes.
Michele Norris:
In some cases, it was decided that they would have been better off if they had stayed in Germany because they faced so much segregation, so much bias, so much other-ness when they were placed back here. You have done something interesting in the course of these mini-lectures that you’ve given us is you’ve named people who are outside of the margins of our thinking about integration or the desegregation of the armed forces. Are there other people whose names we should call in making the case for desegregation and I’m wondering if – I think of William Hastie. I think of I think of even Eleanor Roosevelt who had encouraged servicemen and women to write letters and then ask the War Department to make sure that all those letters were entered into some sort of official file. Was that also part of making the case? Could you talk a little bit about sort of the silent actors or those who are less well known who helped make the case for this executive order?
Robert Jefferson:
Well, I think if you’re thinking about less well known, I’m also thinking about Dovey Roundtree, basically Johnson Roundtree, about how she, as someone who was going into the women’s Army Corps, saw the conditions on the ground that were there in Des Moines, and she was behind the scenes being an active person who was pushing against those barriers, and then in the public sphere, she was also the symbol for, “Okay, this is what it could be for basically any African American woman who’s serving during their time.” Anytime they were walking in these spaces where the larger society felt like they shouldn’t be. They were transgressing. They were breaking barriers and they knew that, so every single – and in fact, one of the individuals with that women’s Army Corps had a chance to meet her some years ago and she talked about how – and these are her words. She said, “We raised hell any way that we could in order to bring attention to what was going on.” What she meant by that was by being active symbols, we were having the having the larger society question as to what a Black woman should be and what they should do.
Then, also, the other thing is – a lot of people don’t know this, but the officer candidate schools of World War II were integrated, that basically Black officers went there. They were commissioned along with their white counterparts, and through that, they saw a whole new world coming into being. They were being seen as, “Officers, how did that happen? There were actors behind the scenes that were pushing to increase their numbers along the way. So, those are some of those unknown stories that we need to basically explore if we’re going to really talk about what this all means. What does the today’s military look like? What is what are the blueprints that are out there that they might follow? Those are the types of stories that we might look towards.
Michele Norris:
That’s why I asked the question, because they left breadcrumbs that we should try to understand, because this doesn’t happen in an anaerobic way. There are a lot of individual actors who are involved in this. Any other names that you want to add to that or…
Kyle Longley:
I don’t think of names, but I think we have to look at this even a little more broadly because point was made earlier that Latinos and others were integrated into units. Now that doesn’t mean they didn’t face discrimination in this whole issue of integration. Again, I made the point about Native Americans, Latinos…
Michele Norris:
Filipinos.
Kyle Longley:
Yes, Asian Americans. There’s a whole group. They’re all working towards the same goal, and I think we have to that these are integrated. It’s like last night we were discussing the issue of Brown v. Board, and I’m sitting there – my office is five minutes from the famous case of Mendez v. Westminster, which was in 1947, used by Latinos to break down barriers, and then that was used in the Brown versus Board. I’m sitting here thinking, “All these things are parallel, and these people are working together and it’s not – race is so complex in so many ways that we want to boil it down into who are the leaders, but there’s so many more…” – I mean, there was a great case from Vietnam, for example, the [Unintelligible] case. Puerto Ricans were drafted in large numbers during Vietnam and put in oftentimes segregated units for a long time, and this guy brought a case against the US government in 1971 and said, “You’re not giving us the training we need to be able to survive in Vietnam, and you’re not giving us Spanish language. You’re not training us.” He won. So, there’s another little cog that we sometimes forget and we sometimes create these parallel stories, but they’re so completely integrated. So, I would say there are so many different levels to this story and as a historian, that’s great because I’m going to be busy for the rest of my life. [Laughter]
Michele Norris:
[Laughter] When we think about civil rights, not you as scholars, but the larger collective “we” in America. The civil rights movement is often depicted as something where Harriet Tubman rolled up to Martin Luther King and gave him a baton and said, “It’s your turn now,” and we kind of skipped over the World War II, the Korean War generation. Even the role that servicemen and women played in Vietnam, the military and its role in the civil rights effort. Can we try to correct the record a little bit today in talking about the importance of not just the executive order, but the role that servicemen and women played in really pushing and shoving America forward in terms of civil rights?
David Cline:
Well, I mentioned to you before we came out on stage that I’ve been sort of hoeing this lonely row for 20 years where I’ve been trying to get military historians who don’t care much for talking about social things and civil rights, and civil rights historians have this almost knee-jerk reaction against talking about the military, getting them both to acknowledge that this particular history is a key part of the civil rights movement, and so I’m just like so chuffed about this symposium. I mean, because it’s like, “Oh, wait. Other people agree with me? [Laughter] That’s nice.” It’s a nice change, so yes, absolutely, and I do think it’s happening. Yes.
Sabrina Thomas:
So, I think it’s important to remember that the military was critical, was central to civil rights specifically and throughout the whole time, but I’m going to talk specifically about the 1960s and that the Vietnam War has two phases. Historians, we like to kind of categorize things and so this is no different, but it is sort of true ’65 to ’68, African American leaders largely are urging and African Americans largely are following in the footsteps of their predecessors, and I’m going to – service equals equality, right? “I’m going to prove to you. I’m going to do what my father did in World War II or in Korea, and I’m going to serve valiantly and you’re going to recognize me. I am a man.” That comes out of the civil rights movement of that decade.
Then, Martin Luther King gives his – things start to change, the realization of disproportionate service, disproportionate deaths are happening, and also fighting for democracy in a country, for a country that’s not giving you that starts to become ingrained into the civil rights discussions. It’s ingrained into the things that Malcolm X had been saying for quite a long time. It’s ingrained into the things that Martin Luther King starts to think about, like, “Why are we sending our children over there to fight for democracy for people who are being oppressed in the same way we are?” and there’s this more internationalization of the understanding of oppression for Black and brown people globally. So, Martin Luther King comes out in ’67 and says, “Don’t send your kids. [Laughter] This war is bad. This is what’s happening. We need to demand things here,” and that’s aligning with the rise of Black Power Movement and the Black Panthers and a younger generation that’s saying the same thing because young people want things now.
We know that now, more than ever, you want it right now. They wanted it right now, and so those are the folks who are now getting drafted and deliberately by draft boards. Folks who are causing trouble in communities, send them to Vietnam. They’re going to Vietnam and they’re taking those same ideas with them to Vietnam, so when King is killed and there’s Klan sheets and confederate flags, and you’re not going to be allowed to wear your Afro and you can’t say bloods and give dap or whatever, the response to that is one that has been viewed more aggressively, but that really is just demanding equality in the military, and so it’s a direct line between those two things and you cannot divorce them, and we’ve done a huge disservice to our history by divorcing them.
David Cline:
By divorcing them.
Michele Norris:
Please, if you have questions, start to pass those back because we’re going to move into the Q&A section in just a minute. So, you talked about the ’60s. I want to dial it back because we just heard from Kari about the impact of Isaac Woodard on the President’s decision, and they’d rather – what did you call it – an earthy language that he used in responding to that. My father was shot and wounded two weeks before I was at Woodard, lost his sight when he was beaten by Lynwood Shull and another police officer in Batesburg, right outside of Aiken, but that was actually happening all throughout America in 1946. Can you just take a minute to talk about the extreme prejudice, and in many cases, the extreme violence that so many veterans face when they came back to America?
Robert Jefferson:
Well, I mean, at the end of World War II, one of the things, from my research and talking to veterans, they talked about how there was a great deal of trepidation that was being expressed by their family members about, “Hey, when you come home, there are certain things that you need to do. For instance, what you need to do is to take your uniform off.”
Michele Norris:
But let’s just say – a word about that. Because there was a shortage of men’s clothing, so it was hard to actually take your uniform off because they weren’t producing enough suits for when they were coming back. Their trouser or shirts.
Robert Jefferson:
That’s right. But the shorthand answer is the family members, the neighbors -basically their neighbors as well as friends, they were hearing stories about these atrocities that were taking place in the immediate post-war period, and looking at places like Columbia, Tennessee and others where veterans were being accosted basically on a daily basis, They said, “You know what, we need to forewarn you with these things that are happening, and these are the ways that you might want to deal with them.” Some of them decided after a short period of time of resettling in their hometowns that they were just going to leave because there was no way they were going to stay in those areas. There was like this channel of network of people talking to them and giving them information about what this country was all about, how resistive to change, how it was moving against the things that they had seen overseas before and all these other sites. They took that to heart and many of them – I heard Medgar Evers mentioned today, but they were also disabled veterans that were coming back, and they were just as militant as those who were there who were coming home in those other areas. So, this was a moment that was pregnant with change, but was also one where everything could happen, and then almost nothing could happen. Very fluid.
Michele Norris:
I have one last question before we go to questions from the audience. Is there another way that these servicemen and women contributed to moving the country forward in just what you were talking about, proximity? Brian Stevenson talks a lot about proximity. I’m wondering – and I know I have heard from several people who talk about their dads and they came back from the war and they talked about Odell or they talked about Gus who we used to play cards with, or they talked about Jimmy that was from someplace Hatchechubbee, Alabama that he still remembers. Did they see something in servicemen and women who served honorably and then they brought that back home with them because they had been so separated because of segregation that suddenly they saw that they – it’s odd to say, but that they saw humanity. They saw a capability. They saw something that made it harder, that chipped away at the fallacy that Black people or people of color were incapable of serving.
Kyle Longley:
I think one of my favorite bumper stickers is in a Torchy’s Tacos in Austin, Texas.
Michele Norris:
Where is that?
Kyle Longley:
Torchy’s Tacos. [Laughter] Highly recommended if you need tacos in Austin, Texas. I’m going to get a little kickback from them here soon.
Michele Norris:
My next trip to Southwest, so I’ll remember that. Yes. [Laughter]
Kyle Longley:
Yes, you go Southwest, Torchy’s Tacos. But behind it says this, “Prejudice rarely survives experience.” Think about that.
Michele Norris:
I like that.
Kyle Longley:
And I think in this case – and we know in Vietnam and others, it is having an effect. We know in the all-volunteer Army, it is having an effect, and we have had change since 1948. Are there problems still? Absolutely. I could list them. Special Forces, still underrepresented with people of color. There are still the promotions issues and things like that. We still have problems, but if you think about that, and I think that this transformation – athletics is another place we could look in parallel to this. You were saying track and field. I’m a track and field coach, and I love sports. I’m a Texas football coach’s son, so no choice. But you think about – I wrote a piece in 2001 that I was always in honors classes and things like this, and a lot of times those were, in some ways, segregated in their own way, but when I went to the football field, it didn’t matter. I went to the basketball court, it didn’t matter. My father treated athletes – if you were an athlete, you weren’t whatever color, and I think that military and athletics and all these things are making them crumble. You can look at the history of like the Southwest Conference and the SEC, and the breakdown of when Bear Bryant goes and gets his butt kicked by USC and comes back and suddenly the University of Alabama is integrated. I know you appreciate that story, but same in the Southwest Conference. When they opened it up, boy did that change the dynamics and look where we are today versus then.
Michele Norris:
And all those secret games that were going on in warehouses and things like that…
Kyle Longley:
Yes. Exactly.
Michele Norris:
And people were having that proximity.
Kyle Longley:
Right.
Michele Norris:
Sabrina, did you have something you wanted to add?
Sabrina Thomas:
I was just going to say, I taught a class last year on the Black experience in the Vietnam War, and I taught that class because I worked with a lot of veterans at the place I was at the time, and all of the veterans were white veterans, and they were fantastic, and they had always come into my class every year, my Vietnam War class, to talk to my students, which was wonderful. It was after one of those classes that a couple of the veterans came up to me and said, “You know, I had this buddy who I served with, and he’s a Black guy, and I don’t see race, but I’ve always wondered what his experience was like. Have you ever thought about teaching a class on Black veterans?” and I was like, “No,” brilliant, “I haven’t…” – and so I taught that class because it was requested by the Vietnam veterans in the area that I was in, and I’m so thankful that they had that conversation with me. When you’re teaching, you’re trying to feed a lot of mouths with the classes that you teach at smaller schools, and so I was super thankful for them for suggesting that. But what it meant to me also was that those veterans were at a point where they were thinking about the experiences of their friends now at this point in their lives in a way that they weren’t thinking about it before, and I very much appreciate that, and I think that’s evidence of the changes that integration makes.
Michele Norris:
Let’s take a few questions. They’re going to be read to us from the back of the room. Jason, go right ahead.
Jason:
Yes, we have a couple here. We can still accept some more if there’s still note cards floating around. Margaret will come and get them. Just to wave the card over your head. So, first question. What has been the role of popular culture in furthering the impact of the order? So, Platoon, M*A*S*H are listed here, but think about TV/movies. What role did this play, I guess, in transmitting the broader change into the culture?
David Cline:
Right from the beginning, I would say – I mean, while the Korean War is still going on, we’re getting cultural products. So, there’s a movie called The Steel Helmet in which a Black soldier is quizzed, “Why are you here? Why are you here fighting for freedom for somebody else when you don’t have it at home?” So, that’s like ‘52, I think, so it’s already there. I’m not going to say the name of the character in M*A*S*H, which some of you may know, the African American character in M*A*S*H, but he’s there representing that whole story, so we get those representations, I think, from the very beginning. What’s the impact? Well, I mean, if you have a character who has an incredibly racist name, maybe that’s the impact from M*A*S*H, but it’s clearly sparking a conversation as well.
Kyle Longley:
Within that context, the person we’re talking about, if I remember right, what was his specialty? Radiology or something like that, so it broke a lot of stereotypes at the same time.
David Cline:
Right. At the same time, yes.
Michele Norris:
Has that response been adequate in telling the story? Because there also have been movies: The Tuskegee Airmen, Devotion, most recently, Dorie Miller Story, and in addition to that, the Army was also producing a lot of films themselves that were shown – the reels that were shown when you went to the cinema and you’d see that before, but is there more to be done in this area?
Kyle Longley:
Absolutely.
David Cline:
Oh, yes, so many.
Kyle Longley:
There are so many stories still to be told. You were asking the question earlier, and I think that’s what our responsibility is, historians and as people in the public, is don’t let these stories be forgotten.
Michele Norris:
Yes. I mean, Isaac Woodard story which has never been – it’s a documentary, but not a film, but if you were living in 1946, you would know a lot about Isaac Woodard. There was a fundraiser for him at Lewisohn Stadium. That Orson Welles was opining about him on the radio. He was on newspapers constantly. Woody Guthrie was writing songs about him, but then there’s this 60-year period where he’s almost all but forgotten. Another question?
Jason:
How did 9981 impact military education in universities? We think that means the Annapolis, the service academies and places like this. What was the rate of implementation among cadets and such compared to active units? Do we know much about that?
Robert Jefferson:
Well, in 1948, there was this public debate about the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps and also about the Universal Military Training, and one of the questions that was in the foremost of the minds of basically sectors of the Black community was, “You’re sponsoring these programs and so forth, but they’re also segregated. They’re racially segregated. So, how do you square that?” and people like A. Philip Randolph and others were counseling young Black men to not basically participate in this because they thought, and they did correctly, that this was only perpetuating the segregation that was taking place in the military at the time, so it was a broader discussion about what this was all going to look like during this period.
Michele Norris:
That is not exactly the question, but I think we would we would be remiss not to, at least, spend a beat on the GI Bill, and the executive order that was issued did not directly address the GI Bill and did not have an impact on the implementation of the GI Bill at the state level where there was a lot of gatekeeping going on, determining who could or who could not get access to the bill. Can you talk a little bit about what happened with the GI Bill and the inequality? I mean, it was one of the largest organization of upward mobility for an entire generation, except for people of color who could not participate.
Kyle Longley:
Well, we were fortunate to hear just a little bit earlier in the session before about this, but I do think it is something to consider because even with the GI Bill being denied to a large degree, because you’re right, there were gatekeepers and it depended on where you were at, again one of the things I would say is one of the important parts of this is people start leaving those areas and going to places like California which are much more open. I mean, Jackie Robinson and all of them figured it out, and this is still an ongoing debate, but they leave and they go to these other areas and places like Oakland and San Diego and LA, and they have so much more freedom in a comparative sense. Not to say there aren’t significant problems, but they have more comparative experience, and that opens these doors to go to UCLA or like earlier, Ohio State and places, and they’re escaping the South, and that opens new doors, and I think that continued migration had started in the ’20s and ’30s, continues in the ’40s and ’50s and dramatically alters demographics throughout the country.
I think that’s important to keep in mind in terms of the GI Bill and what will be open then to those people who are able to do it. HBCUs s mentioned earlier in terms of opening. When you could get in the schools with the GI Bill, it’s still typically through HBCUs, and I think that’s a story we don’t talk enough about. There’s another book – if I was handing out dissertation topics and saying, “All right. Here’s something to go look at.” I think that’s important to keep in mind.
Michele Norris:
Anyone else have anything to say about the GI Bill before we move on?
Robert Jefferson:
But also issues of hospitalization is also a part of that as well. Hospitalization for veterans who are coming back and will need basically medical care or they need healthcare. That’s a part of it too under this umbrella, and they’re finding themselves being shut out of that, and that is also moving them towards becoming more socially active because they realize that particularly at the end of World War II, “I went overseas and I went and I risked my life for this country, and now this country is denying the benefits that I think I earned,” and they are basically having that heightened sense of expectation that they’re acting upon. The one thing about President Truman at that time was that he was somebody who was very sympathetic towards basically disabled veterans, and I think part of the reason why is because he, as somebody who was a veteran himself, he saw them, he felt a kindred spirit with them, a kinship, and they had a voice there. I mean, you see some of the pictures of him standing there with veterans with disabilities and you realize that this is not just something that he’s picking up at a whim. This is something he is deeply ingrained with them.
Michele Norris:
And he and his wife would spend a lot of time with disabled veterans. I just wonder if there was also something in his background because of his religion, did he feel that he was ostracized in some way in the military and did that contribute perhaps?
Robert Jefferson:
That’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that question.
Kyle Longley:
Could I add one thing though? One of the ongoing problems still today is in terms of most of the VA areas, they’re not in poor areas and we’re still seeing people struggle with the VA system because they don’t have access, and unfortunately, it still tends to fall on the shoulders of those people of color.
Michele Norris:
Right. Three bus transfers and several miles away from…
Kyle Longley:
Yes. And that is something that, again, a problem that existed in 1946, is still one that many veterans are battling today, especially people of color, and that’s something that we really need to think much more about.
Michele Norris:
If there are a couple questions, maybe you just want to tick through them and we can see if they can answer…
Jason:
So, we’re down to our last one. So, one more solicitation, I guess.
Michele Norris:
Okay. That’s perfect.
Jason:
The cards keep on flying. [Laughter] This is addressed to Dr. Longley, but I think it can be sort of embellished to the speaker’s prerogative to go a little broader to the whole panel. Would you comment on the lottery system that was started in the Vietnam era? I would say just given the range and chronology that’s represented here, that we maybe think about it in terms of the shift to the all-volunteer force the end of the draft, and how these things end up on the timeline in relation to each other.
Kyle Longley:
Well, I’m going to plug my new book called The Forever Soldiers, and I talk about this, the – I use a lot of comparative analysis between those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan with those who fought in Vietnam, and of course Korea World War II. There are a lot of commonalities, but the Vietnam one seems to be a very appropriate, and your point of whoever asked that question, the draft system is something that is very interesting that most Americans don’t know about, but I’m going to give you a little story that it could make a point. The day the war broke out in Ukraine, my son, the 17-years-old is sitting behind me, you know what his first question to me on the Ukraine war was? “Dad, am I going to get drafted?” It’s still there in their consciousness. They don’t know what it really means. The next day, I went into class and I said, “Screw whatever we’re supposed to be studying in the day.” Sorry, my terminology, but I did say that probably, and the first question, a young woman, “Dr. Longley, are we going to get drafted?”
And so, it’s still there in their consciousness, but they don’t know what a lottery difference between a lottery is and what the drafts were, draft boards and little bunch of neighbors and the inequities and the draft boards, but that was still very much in their consciousness that I find still striking that kids are thinking about that day, and they asked questions like, “What was it?” and I’ll give them a half a dozen books which my students know if you ask me a question, “Here’s my bibliography. [Laughter] You go learn. I can’t give you the quick answer to that, but that that is still lingering and is still discussed, but African Americans, Latinos, poor were definitely discriminated against in the draft in Vietnam, and that was a question I asked. I would ask today, “If we were to re-implement the draft, what would it look like? What have we learned from that experience that we would…”
Michele Norris:
And it would probably include women this time.
Kyle Longley:
Yes. And I found it interesting the young woman was the first one to ask the question on the draft.
Michele Norris:
Yes, it almost certainly will. So, I know you all don’t like short answers, but I’m going to require one right now because of where we’re at. When we come back 25 years from now and we’re celebrating the 100th anniversary of this, what is the one thing that you want to see in terms of progress in this area? One thing.
Robert Jefferson:
Starting with me?
Michele Norris:
Robert, I’m starting with you.
Robert Jefferson:
Okay. [Laughter] I guess…
Michele Norris:
It’s only fair since we started this with David last time.
Robert Jefferson:
I guess the one thing that I’d like to see is for, I guess, the full implementation of the executive order in all areas that were basically mentioned within the document itself. I mean, it is a remarkable document. I had my students go and read that, and I say, “So, what do you think about this?” And they…
Michele Norris:
So, full implementation?
Robert Jefferson:
Then give – right, full implementation.
Michele Norris:
Full implementation. Kyle?
Kyle Longley:
Integration with equality.
Michele Norris:
Integration with equality. Sabrina?
Sabrina Thomas:
Proportionality.
Michele Norris:
Proportionality. David?
David Cline:
Truman. [Laughter]
Michele Norris:
You want him to come back?
David Cline:
[Laughter] Can we do that? [Laughter] [Applause]
Michele Norris:
Just more recognition of his role?
David Cline:
Yes, more recognition of his role, and as our first civil rights President.
Michele Norris:
I think this panel has gone a long way towards setting us in the right direction in giving him the credit that he so richly deserves. Thank you very much for being with us. [Applause] Lunch will be served…
– End of Recording –
