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Race Policy, Race Violence, and Race Reform in the U.S. Army During World War II*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
Extract
No ceremonies marked the fiftieth anniversary of the wartime riots in New York, Los Angeles, Beaumont, Detroit, and Mobile. American political culture, if not recent historical analysis, continues to associate “the Good War” with national unity rather than unrest. But race tension was palpable to contemporaries. For example, ten months prior to Pearl Harbor and six months before a deadly shoot-out between black soldiers and white military policemen occurred in Fayetteville, North Carolina, that town had already earned the nickname “Uncle Sam's Powder Keg.” Less than ten miles from the city lay Fort Bragg, the nation's largest army camp, and visitors sensed a “seething undercurrent” of race friction coursing through the camp and the city. Thousands of black artillery trainees visited the downtown area each week, drinking and milling about in the streets. Because very few establishments welcomed their business, there was little else for them to do. A cab driver, asked about the city's hostile mood, replied that “the trouble is not ‘Is there trouble,’ but ‘What kind of trouble is it going to be and when is it going to pop?’” Similar questions animate this research, which explores the relationship between the Second World War mobilization and War Department practices and policies, on the one hand, and racial confrontations and violence involving soldiers, on the other.
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References
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11. “Same Gun Used, War Dept. Says,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 22, 1941.
12. “U.S. Removes Fort Bragg Commander,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11, 1941.
13. “Fort Bragg Launches Propaganda Program to Show All is Well,” Chicago Bee, September 1, 1941. Army morale officers also began to plan dances for black soldiers at Fayetteville State Teachers College. “Bragg's First Pay Day After Tragedy, Peace,” Kansas City Call, September 19, 1941; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 351.
14. “Fort Bragg Launches Propaganda Program,” Chicago Bee, September 1, 1941.
15. “Army Opens Its Newest Recreation Camp for Negro Soldiers at Anacostia Flats,” Washington Post, September 21, 1941. All but three of the thirty-one were located in the South and West. “Army Men Not Getting Fair Part of Centers,” Baltimore Afro-American, November 1, 1941.
16. The provost marshall headed a unit of military police; these officials quickly assumed a new prominence in the mobilization. “Army Opens Its Newest Recreation Camp,” Washington Post, September 21, 1941; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 357. Hastie's speech also included a great deal of criticism of War Department policy. McGuire, Phillip, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy: Judge Hastie, World War II, and the Black Soldier (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988), 59–60Google Scholar.
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20. U.S. Bureau of the Census, County Data Book, Washington, D.C., U.S.G.P.O., 1947, 13–55.
21. This was not a new pattern; throughout the thirties, Dixie's Congressional contingent secured a disproportionate number of youth training facilities. By 1942, for example, the Civilian Conservation Corps had spread sixteen camps throughout eleven northeast states; Georgia alone had received thirty-one. Congressional Record, 77th Cong., 2d sess., 5604.
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25. Ibid., 42.
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29. Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 303–04.
30. “Republicans Plan Special Campaign to Win Negro Vote,” Memphis Times, September 23, 1940; “Negroes Hold Deciding Vote,” New York Age, October 12, 1940.
31. Allen, C. B., Charleston [South Carolina] News & Observer, 10 30, 1940Google Scholar. In addition, the press release itself was so badly worded that it implied that the segregation policy actually resulted from a recent White House conference with black leaders. The text of the release is reproduced in Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 76–77.
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33. Wilkins, , “Watchtower,” Amsterdam News, 11 2, 1940Google Scholar; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 308.
34. “Wanted: A Negro Assistant Secretary of War,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 28, 1940. In 1939, the Courier sponsored the creation of the Committee for the Participation of Negroes in National Defense with Dr. Rayford W. Logan, professor of history at Howard University, as president. Wynn, Neil A., The Afro-American and the Second World War (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975), 22Google Scholar.
35. McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 9–10.
36. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 78–79. At the same time, Campbell C. Johnson was appointed assistant to the director of Civil Service.
37. Davis was already 63 and, according to law, faced retirement at the end of the following year. Generally, such promotions occurred at least four years before scheduled retirement. Fletcher, Marvin E., America's First Black General: Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., 1880–1970 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 85Google Scholar; Garfinkel, Herbert, When Negroes March: The March on Washington Movement in the Organizational Politics for FEPC (New York: Athenum, 1969), 34Google Scholar; Allen, , Charleston [South Carolina] News & Observer, 10 30, 1940Google Scholar; “Republicans Say Davis' Elevation ‘Political Trick’,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 2, 1940.
38. Wilkins, , “Watchtower,” Amsterdam News, 11 2, 1940Google Scholar; Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks, 309.
39. “Roosevelt to Study Results of Hampton Defense Conference,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 23, 1940. Prior to his appointment as chief of staff (1914–1917) and his service in the Great War, Scott (1853–1934) – a Caucasian – served in Sioux territory, Cuba, Russia, and the Philippines, where he abolished slavery in the Sulu Archipelago while serving as its governor. Scott, Hugh Lenox, Some Memories of a Soldier (New York: The Century Company, 1928)Google Scholar.
40. Hastie was aware of these considerations. He viewed Scott as merely an “adjuster” and considered declining the appointment rather than assume a comparable appeasing role. He discussed the matter with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter and Thurgood Marshall, who advised him to accept the position while making clear his full opposition to segregation. McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 10–12.
41. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 80. Indeed, Roosevelt had found in Hampton's white director, Malcolm MacLean, a race moderate with a progressive but “realistic” vision of black advancement. While the military and naval defense findings committee of the conference concluded that the navy and marine corps were “the most undemocratic and un-American aspect of our government,” MacLean's recommendations for the full utilization of blacks in the defense effort were far from aggressive. In concluding the conference, MacLean, Hampton Institute's newly inaugurated president, emphasized the black citizen's six responsibilities, which included physical Fitness and “patience for the long-term pull.” In early 1942, Roosevelt would select MacLean to become the second chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Hastie and Walter White supported the appointment. “Conference Findings Section Raps U.S. Military Services,” Newport News Press, November 27, 1940; Reed, Merl E., Seedtime for the Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 48–49Google Scholar.
42. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War, 23; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 142–43; “Plans for Negro Division at Fort Huachuca Revealed,” Atlanta Daily World, December 10, 1941.
43. “Plans for Negro Division at Fort Huachuca Revealed,” Atlanta Daily World, December 10, 1941.
44. With roots in northern party machines, the New Deal “black cabinet” system attempted both to air black grievances and to tie black voters to the Democratic party. By 1941, the system was drawing harsh criticism from an increasingly militant black press and from the main-line leadership. For an account of Dr. Rayford W. Logan's stunning critique of Hastie and two other black defense administrators, see Saunders, John A., “3 Defense Aides Used to Check Pressure Groups,” Pittsburgh Courier, 02 22, 1941Google Scholar. Logan claimed that “they are just being used as ‘barriers’ against ‘pressure groups’.” See also Kryder, Daniel, “Divided Arsenal: War Mobilization, the American State, and the Management of Race Conflict, 1941–1945” (Ph.D. dissertation, New School for Social Research, 1995), 56–62Google Scholar; Kirby, John B., Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980)Google Scholar.
45. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 145. As the war continued, blacks displayed a growing appreciation of the concessions that resulted from their new leverage within a polity destabilized by war. “What is the answer to those people who must remain in the ‘savage’ part of the United States? … Personally, I believe a long war is the cure-all. Porters and Pullman workers with whom I talked agreed … that a long war will help a lot of crackers to see the light of day.…” In “Yes, Leave the South, Now!,” Baltimore Afro-American, February 26, 1944. For similar sentiments, see “Plane Factory Qualifications Don't Mean a Thing When You Are Colored,” Philadelphia Plain Dealer, September 6, 1940; Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1944), 1007–08Google Scholar.
46. “Survey and Recommendations Concerning the Integration of the Negro Soldier into the Army,” submitted to the Secretary of War by the Civilian Aide to the Secretary of War, September 22, 1941, in MacGregor, Morris J. and Nalty, Bernard C., eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, Basic Documents, vol. 5: Black Soldiers in World War II (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1977), 80–100Google Scholar. This insight would be confirmed by findings of Stouffer, S. A. et al. , in The American Soldier, vols. 1 –2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949):Google Scholar additional interracial contact fostered favorable attitudes toward racial integration. See also Ware, Gilbert, William Hastie: Grace Under Pressure (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. For a discussion of his February 1941 report and the Army's reaction to it, see McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 25–27.
47. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 136–38.
48. “Survey and Recommendations,” Hastie to Stimson, September 22, 1941, in MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 100–01.
49. Memorandum, Marshall, George C., Chief of Staff, to the Secretary of War, 12 1, 1941, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 114Google Scholar.
50. As quoted in Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 142. Hastie believed the Army routinely and authoritatively experimented with social forces: “[While] exercising the most extreme authority, literally of life and death over them, the Army is up to its neck – more often, I think, over its head – in sociology.” William Hastie, address to NAACP Emergency Conference, Detroit, June 6, 1943, as quoted in Ware, William Hastie, 99.
51. Memorandum, Smith, W. B., Colonel, General Staff, War Department, to A.C. of S., 11 25, 1941, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 143Google Scholar.
52. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 366.
53. Ibid., 102–06; McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 68.
54. In December 1940, for example, the Memphis police commissioner noted that the city had too few jobs for its large numbers of black unskilled laborers, and suggested that recent migrants would be “better off” if they returned to their farms. “Memphis Police Start Campaign to End Danger of Race Riots,” Nashville Globe &? Independent, December 16, 1940; “Memphis Fears Race Trouble, Reds Are Blamed,” Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, December 21, 1940; “Not Enough Jobs, So Memphis Terror Tries to Drive Out Negroes,” Birmingham Southern News Almanac, December 26, 1940.
55. In Charlotte, in June 1940, a group of blacks freed a criminal suspect from police custody and then attacked two white officers with rocks and bottles (“Negro Riot Against Police Looks Ominous,” Charlotte News, June 24, 1940). The next month, a similar battle was narrowly averted in South Philadelphia after white policemen fired on and beat three teenage blacks for throwing stones (“Riot Near As Police Fire on Youths,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 18, 1940). In early July, a large group of whites leaving a church picnic in South Philadelphia battled with black residents for nearly an hour. After five had been seriously injured, twenty police officers brought the melee under control; police cruisers escorted the white group's buses out of the neighborhood (“White, Colored Fight; 5 Jailed,” Philadelphia Tribune, July 11, 1940). On August 9, four whites and one black suffered knife wounds following sporadic fighting at a Santa Monica oceanside amusement area; a month later, a similar racial fight wounded four (“4 Whites, 1 Negro Injured,” New York Age, August 9, 1940; “Negroes Win Exaggerated ‘Riot’; Police Blasted by Public Opinion and Radio,” Oklahoma City Black Dispatch, September 7, 1940).
56. Soldiers found the partly decomposed body of a black private, hanged, his hands tied behind him, in the woods on the grounds of Fort Benning, Georgia. Although a subsequent Army investigation failed to clarify the circumstances of death, the provost marshall's statement that it might have resulted from a hanging or a suicide indicated to many blacks an attempt to both obscure and close the case (“Southern Youth Congress Issues Stirring Protest,” Nashville Globe and Independent, April 25, 1943).
On the 20th, brawling and stone-throwing broke out between black soldiers from Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and local white boys when one of the former was dunked while swimming in a lake. As black soldiers arrayed themselves in a defensive formation, a large group of white soldiers marched on the black camp, but were intercepted and turned back by military authorities. The trouble, the provost marshall told the press, was not a racial matter (“Probe Pushed into Fort Riot,” Columbia Record, April 22, 1941; “Race Soldiers, White CCC Boys Clash in S.C.,” Atlanta Daily World, April 29, 1941).
On April 5, when two black privates became disorderly while riding a bus from Columbus to Fort Benning, Georgia, the driver stopped just inside the entrance to the camp. While being arrested, one soldier reached into his pocket and rushed the MP. The policeman shot and killed the soldier instantly. Justifying the shooting, the provost marshal announced that “an unrusted open clasp knife” was found in a pool of water at the scene (“Unruly Soldier Killed by MP at Ft. Benning,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 5, 1941.
In early April, a Raleigh policeman beat a black private with a blackjack so thoroughly that he thought it necessary to take the GI to the hospital. The Negro Citizens' Committee of Raleigh immediately petitioned the city's police commissioner to suspend the officer; the subsequent suspension was the city's first (“Of National Importance,” The Raleigh News & Observer, April 7, 1941; “Raleigh Cop Suspended for Attack on Soldier,” Baltimore Afro-American, April 19, 1941). Such organized protests were both increasingly common and increasingly successful. In August, a delegation of twenty-two black Missourians traveled to Jefferson City to complain that Kansas City police routinely beat black men to force from them confessions of crimes, and mistreated and insulted black women. After several days of secret board meetings, the police chief offered his resignation (“Missouri Governor Responds to Police Brutality Request,” Pittsburgh Courier, September 6, 1941).
57. “Negro Soldiers Not Allowed in Windy Hill, S.C.,” Atlanta Daily World, August 7, 1941. Two black soldiers from Fort Custer, walking in Ruston, exchanged words with a white civilian who ordered them off the street. Later, the white man returned in a car with a city policeman and two MPs, who searched the GIs while the civilian struck them with a blackjack. Driven outside of town, where the beating continued, the soldiers were later dropped off and told “to let that be a lesson to them” (“Hold Four for Army Flogging at Ruston, La.,” Chicago Defender, October 4, 1941; “2 White M.P.'s Demoted, Fined for Beating Soldier,” Chicago Defender, November 15, 1941; “White M.P.'s Get Swift Justice at Court Martial for Beating 2 Negro Soldiers Near Camp in La.,” New York Age, November 22, 1941).
58. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 309–14.
59. “NAACP Hears of Trouble,” St. Louis Argus, August 22, 1941. Robert P. Patterson, under secretary of war, told the NAACP that the Judge Advocate General had informed him that the state troopers and civilians involved in the incident were outside of the jurisdiction of the War Department (“War Officials ‘Through With’ Gurdon Incident,” Kansas City Call, December 5, 1941).
60. “Blocks Effort to Chase Men,” New York Amsterdam News, August 30, 1941; “Race Rioting Spreads After Dance in Town,” Chicago Defender, September 20, 1941.
61. “Brutal White MP's Stir Trouble in Army Camp,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 14, 1941.
62. Most of these cities' forces were not fully integrated, however; they employed separate black police units to patrol minority neighborhoods. Of the twenty-seven cities deploying such units, seventeen were located in Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas. The cities were Laurel and Wilmington, Delaware; Charleston and Wheeling, West Virginia; Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky; Knoxville and Memphis, Tennessee; Jacksonville, Miami, Sarasota, Fort Myers, Tampa, and Daytona Beach, Florida; Baltimore, Maryland; Charlotte, North Carolina; Muskogee, Oklahoma City, Okmulgee, and Tulsa, Oklahoma; Austin, Beaumont, Galveston, Houston, San Antonio, Fort Worth, and Corpus Christi, Texas (“Walter Cheevers Says: Atlanta Needs Negro Police,” Atlanta Daily World, September 21, 1941).
63. These included a North Philadelphia disturbance started by dunking of a fourteenyear-old black by white youths at a swimming pool where the races swam separately at hourand-a-half intervals. Fifty police cars and several hundred patrolmen brought order to the area after more than twenty whites were injured (“Relations Strained Over a Week,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, July 2, 1941; “Ducking a Boy in Pool Starts a Race Riot,” New York Telegram, July 2, 1941).
64. “Two Soldiers Protest MP's ‘Nigger’; Shot,” Chicago Defender, July 26, 1941.
65. “Soldiers Flogged by Military Police,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 13, 1941. The next month, Little Rock's black business district produced a street battle that injured 2 black soldiers and 7 other persons; 100 soldiers were involved (“3 Shot as Soldiers Riot in Little Rock,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11, 1941).
66. In August, outside Camp Davis, a black private stabbed a military policeman at a Wilmington, North Carolina, bus depot as a third person held the MP's arms (“4,000 Negro Soldiers Moved to Prevent Racial Clashes,” Hopeville [Georgia] Statesman, August 19, 1941). For a thorough investigation of the seemingly constant resistance to bus and streetcar segregation offered by Birmingham's working class during the war, see Kelley, Robin D. G., “Congested Terrain: Resistance on Public Transportation,” in his Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994)Google Scholar.
67. Dalfiume, Richard M., Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces; Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939–1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 46Google Scholar. The martial training in turn heightened southern anxieties. Writing of World War I, W.E.B. Dubois observed
…The deep resentment mixed with the pale ghost of fear which Negro soldiers call up in the breast of the white South. It is not so much that they fear that the Negro will strike if he gets a chance, but rather that they assume with curious unanimity he has reason to strike, that any other persons in his circumstances, or treated as he is would rebel. Instead of seeking to relieve the cause of such a possible feeling, most of them strain every effort to bottle up the black, man's resentment.
In Dubois, Darkwater (1920, p. 236), as quoted in Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 1012.
68. Memorandum, Army Service Forces to Colonel Roamer, October 7, 1944, OF 4245 (Office of Production Management, Committee on Fair Employment Practice, War Department Material Concerning Minority, October–December 1944), FDR Library.
69. McAdam, Doug, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)Google Scholar.
70. Ibid., 84.
71. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 349–55; Sandier, “Homefront Battlefront”; Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War, 27–38.
72. Groups of black soldiers reacted to Davis in different ways. When he visited MacDill Field in Tampa, roughly one-third of the 1,800 black soldiers stationed there lined up to offer him their complaints. A month later at Fort Dix, New Jersey, the soldiers were uncooperative. See Fletcher, America's First Black General, 96–97.
73. Wiley, Maj. Bell I., “The Training of Negro Troops,” Army Ground Forces Study No. 36 (1946), in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 7: Planning for the Postwar Employment of Black Personnel, 276Google Scholar.
74. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 356–62; McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 62.
75. Wynn, The Afro-American and the Second World War, 27. The problem had not been solved a year later, when the committee itself suggested that varying segregation policies be studied and a “clear-cut policy be formulated and made known to all.” Memorandum, J.S. Leonard, Secretary, Negro Troops Policy Committee, to Patterson, December 17, 1943, as quoted in Wynn, Ibid., 30.
76. Two months before his appointment to the committee, McCloy wrote to Hastie to explain his attitude toward those who justified their work on behalf of racial reform by arguing that waging war against undemocratic practices abroad required questioning such practices at home. “Frankly, I do not think that the basic issues of this war are involved in the question of whether Colored troops serve in segregated units or in mixed units and I doubt whether you can convince the people of the United States that the basic issues of freedom are involved in such a question. … I bespeak greater emphasis on the necessity for greater out and out support of the war, particularly by the Negro press, and I feel certain that the objects for which you aim will come closer to achievement if the existing emphasis is shifted than if it is not.” Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 158–60.
77. Fletcher, America's First Black General, 100.
78. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 158–60.
79. Fletcher, America's First Black General, 100–40; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 160–61.
80. The fact that these black military policemen were often unarmed and often worked in smaller units apparently undermined their capacity to control crowds and arrest and transport those that resisted. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 276–77, 356–62.
81. Ware, William Hastie, 116.
82. The NAACP awarded Hastie the Spingarn Medal in 1943. Ware, William Hastie, 133; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 175–76.
83. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 303–04.
84. In mid-war, the armed forces was absorbing nearly one-third of the white men liable for service; the rate for blacks was roughly one-fifth. Letter, Lewis B. Hershey to Jonathan Daniels, June 25, 1943, OPM, COFEP, Selective Service, FDR Library. Over 75 percent of black inductees who failed the Army General Classification Test (AGCT) came from southern and border states (McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 7). In June 1943, the War Department officially created a remedial literacy program – Special Training Units – for all “salvageable” recruits; blacks would comprise about 45 percent of the 384,000 total illiterates schooled. The program helped to change the meaning of intelligence scores. Once thought to measure “inborn” intellectual aptitude, the AGCT henceforth was taken to measure unequal educational opportunity and socioeconomic background. Fass, Paula S., Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 146–151Google Scholar.
85. While this comparison pairs one of the highest induction rates found in the northern states with the lowest rate found in the South, no southern state's induction rate surpassed a northern state's rate. “Distribution of Black Persons Liable for Military Service and Percent of Such Persons in Armed Forces on June 1, 1943,” memorandum, Lewis B. Hershey to Jonathan Daniels, June 25, 1943, OPM, COFEP, Selective Service, FDR Library.
86. For a case study of the Camp Stewart uprising, see Kryder, “Divided Arsenal,” ch. 6, 271–329. The only book-length history of a single wartime racial incident is Allen, Robert L., The Port Chicago Mutiny (New York: Warner Books, 1969)Google Scholar. The July 17, 1944, cargo-loading accident that claimed 320 lines and led to the largest mass mutiny trial in U.S. naval history was not, due to its extraordinary cause and scale, representative of racial disturbances in the armed forces. Peery, Nelson, Black Fire: The Making of an American Revolutionary (New York: The New Press, 1994)Google Scholar, includes a first-person account of organized resistance within one black unit in the 93rd Division. See also McGuire, Phillip, Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Simpson, William B., “A Tale Untold? The Alexandria, Louisiana, Lee Street Riot (January 10, 1942),” Louisiana History 35 (Spring 1994): 133–149Google Scholar; Burran, James A., “Urban Racial Violence in the South During World War II: A Comparative Overview,” in Fraser, Walter J. Jr, and Moore, Winfred B. Jr, eds., From the Old South to the New: Essays on the Transitional South (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 167–177Google Scholar; Mormino, Gary R., “GI Joe Meets Jim Crow: Racial Violence and Reform in World War II Florida,” Florida Historical Quarterly 73 (07 1994): 23–42Google Scholar. On the soldiers' reception abroad, see Smith, Graham, When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Saunders, Kay and Taylor, Helen, “The Reception of Black American Servicemen in Australia During World War II: The Resilience of ‘White Australia’,” Journal of Black Studies 25 (01 1995): 331–348CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
87. Memorandum, , Ground Adjutant General for Chief of Staff, U.S. Army, 11 28, 1945, “Subject: Participation of Negro Troops in the Postwar Military Establishment,” in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, Vol. 7, 110–23Google Scholar.
88. “C.S. Control Report” for Camp Stewart, in “Fourth Service Command Subversive Activities, Report No. 32,” March 21, 1943–April 20, 1943, Army Intelligence Division, Project Decimal File, 1941–1945, RG 319, National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland.
89. Lee, The Employment of Black Troops, 366. Nationwide, the disturbances clustered in cycles: the fall of 1941, the early months of 1942, Thanksgiving 1942, and the spring and summer of 1943. Sandler, “Homefront Battlefront.”
90. Memorandum, Chief of Staff Marshall, G.C. to the Commanding Generals, Army Air, Ground, and Service Forces, 07 3, 1943, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 270–71Google Scholar.
91. “Gov't Official Discusses Violence Toward Negro Soldiers,” Savannah Tribune, July 1, 1943.
92. Summary of Information, Richard J. Wallace, Jr., Assistant Post Intelligence Officer, May 21, 1943, Exhibit F, “Investigation of Negro Soldier Trouble at Camp Stewart, Gerogia, during the night 9–10 June, 1943,” National Archives, Record Group 159, Inspector General, General Correspondence, Box 729, Camp Stewart, Gerogia, (7)A, 333.9.
93. Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., May 17–21, 1943, Diary, 1939–1943, Archives of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
94. Letter, Edward W. Molette, 846 AAA Bn., to NAACP, May 21, 1943, Papers of the NAACP, Part 9, Discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, 1918–1955, Series A: General Office Files on Armed Forces' Affairs, 1918–1955, Group II, Box A-643, microfilm ed., John H. Bracey, Jr. and August Meier, general editors. Hereafter, NAACP Papers.
95. Letter, George Nesbitt to Walter White, July 17, 1943, NAACP Papers.
96. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 371.
97. “‘Investigation’ of 369th Camp Slows; Who's Kidding Who?,” New York Peoples Voice, May 29, 1943. Davis often reported finding soldier morale excellent, in effect undermining Hastie's and others' claims of systemic race discrimination. McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 66.
98. Memorandum, Gibson, Truman K. Jr, Acting Civilian Aide to the Secretary of War, to the Assistant Secretary of War, 08 23, 1943, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 273, 277Google Scholar.
99. Ibid., 278.
100. Memorandum, Brigadier General B.O. Davis to McCloy, John J., Assistant Secretary of War, 11 10, 1943, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 291–93Google Scholar.
101. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 308. The directive allowed commanders to exercise considerable discretion in enforcing the policy. In many places, it was simply ignored, and overall it failed to affect the recreation question in a significant way.
102. Memorandum, Truman K. Gibson to the Assistant Secretary of War, June 2, 1943, OF 4245 (OPM, COFEP, War Department, 1943), FDR Library.
103. Memorandum, Major General Ulio, A.J., the Adjutant General, to Commanding Generals, All Service Commands, 07 8, 1944, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 340–41Google Scholar.
104. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 324.
105. McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 86.
106. Of the fourteen “typical incidents” of racial disturbances listed in one study spanning August 1944–June 1945, for example, twelve occurred in six southern states; Louisiana alone produced four between September 1944 and January 1945. “Army Service Forces Study Concerning Participation of Negro Troops in the Postwar Military Establishment,” September 19, 1945, in MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 7, 41, 45; McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 67–73.
107. MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 7, 41, 45.
108. Johnson, To Stem This Tide, 87–88.
109. Memorandum, John Edgar Hoover to the Attorney General, July 8, 1943, OF 93 (Colored Matters), FDR Library. Police force levels cannot account fully for the conflict; on the role of white neighborhood associations in the city's race conflict, see Sugrue, Thomas J., “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1940–1964,” The Journal of American History 82 (09 1995): 551–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
110. Nash, Gerald, The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 62Google Scholar.
111. Letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Jonathan Daniels, March 16, 1944; letter, J. Edgar Hoover to Jonathan Daniels, May 17, 1944, OF 4245-G (Office of Price Administration, COFEP, FBI Materials Concerning Minorities), FDR Library.
112. With the attack on Pearl Harbor, many members of the relatively small American intelligence community pressed for the creation of a Counter Intelligence Corps. On January 1, 1942, the War Department established the Corps, whose countersubversive system placed enlisted and civilian secret agents within military organizations to observe and investigate subversion in the army. Other staff evaluated the loyalty of military personnel and civilian employees of the War Department. Memorandum, Major General Peterson, Virgil L., Inspector General, to the Deputy Chief of Staff, “Subject: Intelligence Activities in Service Commands,” 11 6, 1943Google Scholar. Hereafter, SIASC.
113. “History of the Counter Intelligence Corps,” National Archives, RG 319, document 1, in Mendelsohn, John, ed., Covert Warfare: Intelligence, Counterintelligence, and Military Deception During the World War II Era, vol. 12: The Counter Intelligence Corps in Action (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989), 25Google Scholar. Hereafter, HCIC.
114. HCIC, 47; SIASC, 3.
115. This averages to 1 operative per 37.4 persons, and 2.23 reports per operative per month. “Fourth Service Command Subversive Activities, Report No. 29,” December 21, 1942–January 20, 1943, Army Intelligence Division, Project Decimal File, 1941–1945, RG 319, National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland.
116. SIASC, 11.
117. Ibid.
118. SIASC, 11, 14.
119. Memorandum, Truman K. Gibson Jr., to McCloy, John J., Assistant Secretary of War, 11 2, 1944, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 480–84Google Scholar.
120. Memorandum, J.M. Roamer to the Commanding General, Army Service Forces, “Subject: Racial Situation in the United States,” April 17, 1944, Army Intelligence Decimal File, 1941–48, RG 319, Department of War, National Records Center, Suitland, Maryland.
121. Kryder, , “The American State and the Management of Race Conflict,” ch. 5; Eagles, Charles W., Jonathan Daniels and Race Relations: The Evolution of a Southern Liberal (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1982), 108Google Scholar.
122. Davis had raised this issue in the McCloy Committee in March 1943, arguing that black soldier morale would be best served by the deployment of black troops to the battle-field. Fletcher, America's First Black General, 113; Dalfiume, Desegregation, 93.
123. Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 338–40.
124. Ibid., 622–30.
125. Joe Louis and Noble Sissle, a bandleader, had been engaged in such morale boosting since early in the war. McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 62; Fletcher, America's First Black General, 121–49; Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops, 330–47.
126. Hastie, William H., “Only U.S. Action Can Protect Negroes in Army, Says Leader,” PM (New York), 06 14, 1943Google Scholar.
127. These included committing black units to combat, requesting immediate Senate action on the bill providing punishment for those killing or assaulting federal or military officers, moving black troops out of the South, and distributing pamphlets and movies concerning the role of the black soldier in the war. Memorandum, Gibson, Truman K. Jr, to the Assistant Secretary of War, 11 3, 1943, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 5, 288–90Google Scholar.
128. Gibson decried the general pattern whereby “statements of policy were developed on a hit-and-run, trial-and-error basis.” While admitting that progress had been made, he believed that “in no sense has this resulted from advance planning.” The reelection campaign provided the Army with the choice “of initiating some intelligent and constructive steps itself or of being forced again by pressures from outside sources.” Memorandum, Truman K. Gibson Jr., to McCloy, John, 09 5, 1944, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 7, 8–9Google Scholar.
129. McAdam, Political Process and Development of Black Insurgency, 80.
130. Memorandum, Truman K. Gibson Jr., to McCloy, John, 08 8, 1945, in MacGregor, and Nalty, , eds., Blacks in the Armed Forces, vol. 7, 16–18Google Scholar.
131. Memorandum, Robert Carr to Members of the President's Committee on Civil Rights, “Negroes in the Armed Forces,” June 10, 1947, Philleo Nash Papers, Box 37, Harry S Truman Library, Independence, Missouri, as quoted in King, Desmond, “'The Longest Road to Equality': The Politics of Institutional Desegregation Under Truman,” Journal of Historical Sociology 6, no. 2 (06 1993), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
132. The Gillem Report of March 4, 1946, the “Report of Board of Officers on Utilization of Negro Manpower in the Post-War Army,” is reproduced in McGuire, He, Too, Spoke for Democracy, 117–29.
133. Some manage to gain power from the crisis. “Rulers have always found foreign wars useful to blot up discontent, to repress opposition, and to promote unity at home.… That unity is, of necessity, to some extent achieved by the repression of dissident groups.” V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, 15.
134. Hale, J. R., War and Society in Renaissance Europe, 1450–1620 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985), 166–72Google Scholar.
135. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 997–1024, 1008.
136. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 344.
137. “Object to Colored in S.C. Theatre,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, September 6, 1941.
138. Quoted in King, Separate But Unequal, 118.