San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
How World War II looked to African Americans
‘Half American’ honors Black service members who had to fight overseas and at home
At 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.
But as Matthew F. 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. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to desegregate private defense contractors, he would continue to resist desegregating the military. This was despite the obvious costs. Redundant buildings continued to be built and maintained; troop transportation continued to be a logistical nightmare.
Racist violence in the South meant that even something as basic as the homeland safety of Black soldiers couldn’t be secured. As one of those soldiers put it in a letter to the NAACP, 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. govt. would let a small town of a few thousand people rule them like that.”
Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth College 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.
For many Black Americans, the real war began several years before Pearl Harbor, with Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935. “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. 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.”
This turns out to be a running theme in Delmont’s book — the prescience with which Black Americans identified the fascist threat while much of the United States was still in an isolationist mood. Adolf Hitler himself had taken explicit inspiration from American race laws. “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action,” Langston Hughes said in 1937. “We know.” Or as he put it in his poem “Love Letter From Spain”: “Fascists is Jim Crow peoples, honey.”
More than 1 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. (Delmont mentions anti-war 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-yearold in Kansas named James Gratz Thompson. 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?”
Delmont is an energetic storyteller, giving a vibrant sense of his subject in all of its dimensions. 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. Such support, Delmont shows, was decisive. “Without the Black truck drivers and the supplies they delivered, Allied forces could not move, shoot or eat,” he writes.
Even so, “Half American” conveys how recognition of Black contributions to the war effort was often grudging. 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. Not that such programming amounted to anything like a moral reckoning. 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.”
If the national rhetoric was to be believed, all of that “efficient troop utilization” was supposed to be in the service of higher ideals. But soaring words about saving democracy seemed absurd next to the persistence of the flagrantly anti-democratic Jim Crow laws. 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.”
Baldwin considered World War II to be a turning point for Black Americans. “To put it briefly, and somewhat too simply, a certain hope died, a certain respect for white Americans faded,” he wrote. The double standards of “the good war” were too glaring, the hypocrisies too stark. Upon their return, Black veterans in uniform were still vulnerable to the depredations of racial violence — so much so that loved ones would implore them to wear civilian attire so that they wouldn’t be a “target.”
Delmont doesn’t skimp on such sobering stories, explaining that he wants to provide a “definitive history.” But he also clearly sees his book as a chance to honor those Black Americans who fought for the United States but never properly got their due. He quotes Robert P. Madison, a veteran of the segregated 92nd Infantry Division, which saw combat in Italy, recalling how he once leafed through a big book on World War II and couldn’t find a single reference to any Black service members.
“We were a forgotten group of people,” Madison said, adding something that Delmont seems to have taken to heart. “I think we ought to show and represent everyone who fought in that war.”