![]() ![]() “To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded,” he wrote. James Baldwin recalled how the people he knew in Harlem believed their relatives would in fact be better off serving overseas than being stationed in the South: “Now, even if death should come, it would come with honor and without the complicity of their countrymen.”īaldwin considered World War II to be a turning point for Black Americans. But soaring words about saving democracy seemed absurd next to the persistence of the flagrantly anti-democratic Jim Crow. If the national rhetoric was to be believed, all of that “efficient troop utilization” was supposed to be in the service of higher ideals. White officer candidates who took a class on “Leadership and the Negro Soldier” were assured by the course manual that such efforts were simply a matter of what was needed at the moment, and nothing more: “The Army has no authority or intention to participate in social reform as such but does view the problem as a matter of efficient troop utilization.” Not that such programming amounted to anything like a moral reckoning. Eventually, the War Department enlisted Frank Capra to produce a film called “The Negro Soldier” in order to convince white troops that their fellow Black troops deserved respect. “Without the Black truck drivers and the supplies they delivered, Allied forces could not move, shoot or eat,” he writes.Įven so, “Half American” conveys how recognition of Black contributions to the war effort was often grudging. Such support, Delmont shows, was decisive. He draws attention to the role played by Black personnel in logistics, or what Time magazine called “the miracle of supply” - the vast challenge of getting the country’s fighting forces everything they needed, from weapons to food. Pearl Harbor had just been attacked, and Thompson wondered what it could mean to fight for democracy on behalf of a country that continued to deny him his rights: “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?”ĭelmont is an energetic storyteller, giving a vibrant sense of his subject in all of its dimensions. (Delmont mentions antiwar sentiment among Black Americans too, but he doesn’t spend much time on it in the book.) The inspiration for Double V originated in a letter to The Pittsburgh Courier, the largest Black newspaper in the country, from a Black 26-year-old in Kansas named James Gratz Thompson. More than one million Black Americans would go on to serve in World War II, many of them buoyed by what became known as the Double Victory campaign (“Double V” for short), pushing for victory over fascism abroad and over white supremacy at home. Matthew Delmont, the author of “Half American.” Credit. In August 1936, a headline in The Chicago Defender, one of the country’s Black newspapers, announced: “WORLD WAR SEEN AS DUCE, HITLER AID FASCISTS IN WARTORN SPAIN.” “Half American” begins with a chapter on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an integrated battalion of Americans who fought against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. For many Black Americans, the real war began several years before Pearl Harbor, with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. would let a small town of a few thousand people rule them like that.”ĭelmont, a historian at Dartmouth whose previous books include “Why Busing Failed” (2016), points out how so much of World War II “looks different when viewed from the African American perspective” - even the start date. As one of those soldiers put it in a letter to the N.A.A.C.P., the mighty federal government seemed to cower before local sheriffs and lynch mobs - the petty tyrants of Jim Crow: “It’s odd that the U.S. Racist violence in the South meant that even something as basic as the homeland safety of Black soldiers couldn’t be secured. Redundant buildings continued to be built and maintained troop transportation continued to be a logistical nightmare. Roosevelt issued an executive order to desegregate private defense contractors, he would continue to resist desegregating the military. ![]() Delmont details in “Half American,” his new book about African Americans and World War II, even the bluntest appeals to the national interest couldn’t get some white Americans to budge. DelmontĪt the time, it should have been an easy argument to make: World War II was a total war, requiring an enormous mobilization of resources therefore anything impeding the efficient deployment of American forces had to be renounced - including the military’s policy of segregation and, most glaringly, the brutal Jim Crow regime in the South.īut as Matthew F. HALF AMERICAN: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, by Matthew F.
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