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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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The definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont.
Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in segregated units and performing unheralded but vital support jobs, only to be denied housing and educational opportunities on their return home. Without their crucial contributions to the war effort, the United States could not have won the war. And yet the stories of these Black veterans have long been ignored, cast aside in favor of the myth of the "Good War" fought by the "Greatest Generation."
Half American is American history as you've likely never read it before. In these pages are stories of Black heroes such as Thurgood Marshall, the chief lawyer for the NAACP, who investigated and publicized violence against Black troops and veterans; Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., leader of the Tuskegee Airmen, who was at the forefront of the years-long fight to open the Air Force to Black pilots; Ella Baker, the civil rights leader who advocated on the home front for Black soldiers, veterans, and their families; James Thompson, the 26-year-old whose letter to a newspaper laying bare the hypocrisy of fighting against fascism abroad when racism still reigned at home set in motion the Double Victory campaign; and poet Langston Hughes, who worked as a war correspondent for the Black press. Their bravery and patriotism in the face of unfathomable racism is both inspiring and galvanizing. In a time when the questions World War II raised regarding race and democracy in America remain troublingly relevant and still unanswered, this meticulously researched retelling makes for urgently necessary reading.
INTRODUCTION
Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, James Gratz Thompson, a twenty‑six‑year‑old Black cafeteria worker from Wichita, could not sleep. He had registered with the Selective Service the prior year, and now, with the U.S. declaring war on Japan and Germany, it was only a matter of time before he'd be drafted. The prospect of war was frightening for many civilians, but something else was on his mind on that cold Kansas night. Sitting in his family's home, in a vibrant Black neighborhood amid a segregated American city, Thompson wrote a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, the nation's largest Black newspaper, expressing the concerns that he and many other Black Americans felt about joining a racially segregated military.
"Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?" Thompson asked. "Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending?"
Thompson's poignant questions about patriotism had an immediate impact. Hundreds of thousands of Black Americans read his letter printed in the pages of the Courier. The influential newspaper used the letter to launch the Double Victory campaign, with the aim of securing victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. The Courier ran hundreds of stories, photographs, and cartoons to support this initiative. Double V clubs formed in communities across the country, and civil rights activists touted the slogan.
I have taught about World War II for more than a decade, but researching this book has forced me to see the war with fresh eyes. Taking the twin aims of the Double V campaign seriously—victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home—it is clear that the United States did not achieve a full victory in World War II. Although the Nazis were conquered on the battlefield, the racial ideas of white supremacy continued to flourish in America—then and today.
Half American aims to tell the definitive history of Black Americans and World War II. Nearly everything about the war—the start and end dates, geography, vital military roles, home front, and international implications—looks different when viewed from the African American perspective. For Black Americans, the war started not with Pearl Harbor in 1941 but several years earlier with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. As soon as Adolf Hitler's regime rose to power in the 1930s, Black Americans recognized the significance of the Nazi threat and the similarities between the Third Reich's and America's racial policies. In the pages of newspapers and in activist refrains, Blacks argued that Nazi racial ideology was not solely a foreign problem. Describing a plan to segregate Jews on German railways, the New York Amsterdam News wrote that Nazis were "taking a leaf from the United States Jim Crow practices." The Chicago Defender noted that "the practice of jim‑crowism has already been adopted by the Nazis" and proceeded to quote from the official newspaper of the SS, the Nazi paramilitary organization, on the American origins of Germany's railway ban on Jews.
In the days after Pearl Harbor, hundreds of Black volunteers were turned away by military recruiters. In a nation mobilizing for war, African Americans first had to fight for the right to serve in the military. Ultimately, over one million Black men and women served in World War II and hundreds of thousands worked in defense industries at home. The trailblazing Tuskegee Airmen, 92nd Infantry Division, Montford Point Marines, and 761st "Black Panther" Tank Battalion served bravely in combat, and Black troops shed blood in the iconic battles at Normandy and Iwo Jima, and in the Battle of the Bulge. Most Black troops, however, labored in unheralded but vital support jobs. Black ...
From Half American by Matthew F. Delmont, published by Viking, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2022 by Matthew F. Delmont.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/624655/half-american-by-matthew-f-delmont/
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad is an impeccably researched and deeply moving story of heroes, villains and white supremacy. With World War II as a grand backdrop, author Matthew Delmont weaves a breathless tale of black men who heroically fought for their country, but returned home to inequality, harassment and joblessness. Along the way, he touches on the heroism of black Americans who contributed to the war effort and racial justice while remaining in the United States.
From the get-go, it's a complicated ask from Delmont to the reader: to reorient their World War II empathy away from the victims of Hitler and towards the victims of Jim Crow. Strategically, he begins not with any widely known WWII event but with the black press and their sphere of influence. Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American inspired their readers towards anti-fascism. While it was somewhat in vogue to not fight the "white man's war," the black press promoted their own creation, a "Double V" campaign which signified victory both against inequality at home and against fascism overseas. This movement was motivated in part by around 80 black Americans who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on behalf of Spain's Republican government. One such man was Walter Garland, a 23-year-old Army veteran who led white men as a lieutenant.
In the meantime, the U.S. Army refused to integrate its segregated units, curiously saying they were not interested in "sociological experiments." West Point graduate Colonel E. W. Plank declared that black soldiers were "akin to well-meaning but irresponsible children" who could not be "trusted to tell the truth," despite 38,000 black men having served in combat in World War I.
In 1939, President Roosevelt called for an expansion of the U.S. Army Air Corps. When more people were needed to fulfill orders for military equipment and weapons, black labor leader A. Philip Randolph interpreted this as a boon for black workers. But the workforce remained mostly segregated. Black workers continued to be maltreated, dehumanized and denied opportunities at defense plants in Detroit and other Midwestern cities. Randolph organized the March on Washington Movement (MOWM) to exact pressure on President Roosevelt regarding segregation in the military and defense plants. Posters were distributed in pool halls, barber and beauty shops, and corner stores. Randolph envisioned a crowd at the Lincoln Memorial, the same site where a year earlier Marian Anderson sang in front of 75,000 after the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused her appearance at Constitution Hall. "This is our own, our native land," Randolph said. "We are Americans. We are patriots."
Fearing the estimated 100,000 marchers, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802. It forbade discrimination in the defense industry, created job training and established the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). However, the order made no mention of segregation in the military, and did not address the barbarity black troops were experiencing at the hands of Jim Crow white supremacists. Southern military bases were epicenters of racist savagery and black soldiers were at their breaking point. They experienced harassment on base, and sometimes violence from locals.
Despite not always being recognized at the time, there are many examples of black excellence and brilliance during WWII, perhaps the best known today being the Tuskegee Airmen. Deployed in June of 1943, they were the first black American pilots to fly in combat. Their first mission was an attack on Pantelleria Island, between Tunisia and Sicily. They bombed machine gun sites, escorted bombers on raids, monitored the skies. They dropped bombs marked "1941" (the year of Pearl Harbor) and handwritten messages addressed to Hitler and Mussolini. The first victory for the Tuskegee Airmen was shooting down a Nazi plane on July 2, 1943. Lieutenant Charles Hall recounted, "It was my eighth mission but the first time I had seen the enemy close enough to shoot at him." General Eisenhower remarked, "I would like to meet the pilot who shot down that Jerry!"
Movies have been made about the Tuskegee Airmen; Red Tails comes to mind. But Delmont focuses on many other examples of black people who participated in the war as well. Rosa Parks' brother Sylvester McCauley is mentioned. He fought for four years and still faced discrimination upon return to Alabama. White supremacists like Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi continually posited the inferiority argument against men like McCauley: "The Negro soldiers have disgraced the flag of their country."
Eastland wasn't an outlier. Black GIs in southern states were denied GI Bill funds. In Mississippi, 86% of skilled and semiskilled jobs given to veterans were given to white veterans. Many black veterans were denied VA loans. Nevertheless, black veterans were resistant to efforts to oppress them after accessing a different level of freedom in the military.
Despite the painful passages in Half American, I appreciated Delmont's scholarship and detail. A quality storyteller, he brings to life a cohort of men and women who are often unseen, shaping them into intimate characters, although reading about their trauma is not cathartic. It left me wondering, what was it all for? They couldn't vote, couldn't use public accommodations, were often jobless once the war ended.
But trees don't all reap fruit in the season they are planted. Liberation can be a slow process when it is a matter of the underprivileged asking to be liberated from racist ideology. Fighting a war, though redemptive, wasn't the cure for racist treatment, but this treatment also didn't subtract from the enormous achievement of stopping Hitler. While it wasn't Double V as the black press intended, World War II was part of the modern emancipation of black people.
Reviewed by Valerie Morales
Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Keisha N. Blain, coeditor of Four Hundred Souls and author of Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America
Peniel E. Joseph, author of The Third Reconstruction: America's Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century
Before he was hanged for his alleged role in the Camp Logan Mutiny, Army Pfc. Thomas Hawkins wrote a letter to his mother and father. It was both poignant and simple. "When this letter reaches you, I will be beyond the veil of sorrow. I will be in heaven with the angels…I am not guilty of the crime that I am accused of but Mother it is God's will that I go now." The crime Hawkins had been accused of playing a part in was the murder of 16 whites during a riot in segregated Houston, Texas in 1917. At least four black soldiers were also killed.
In Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, Matthew Delmont draws attention to the hostile and racist atmospheres that black American soldiers were historically subject to on segregated military bases long before WWII , with one example being Camp Logan in Houston. Hawkins was a member of the Third Battalion 24th Infantry, an all-black regiment. The United States Department of War sent the battalion to Texas to guard Camp Logan, which was under construction and when completed was to be a training site for the Illinois National Guard. The 24th Infantry took the train from Columbus, New Mexico, accompanied by several white officers.
Although many of the Third Battalion soldiers were accustomed to Jim Crow, they expected equal treatment as military servicemen, not dehumanization and racial tension. But the Houston Police Department (HPD) saw the servicemen as a threat. If the black soldiers were treated like white soldiers, then black Houstonians would expect similar equality.
No one expected Armageddon on August 23, 1917. It started when a black woman who lived in the Fourth Ward, a historically black neighborhood, was arrested after HPD officers wrongfully entered her house while chasing a suspect. Refusing to believe she wasn't involved with the suspect's crime, they dragged her out of her house and arrested her. Upon seeing her arrest, Private Alonzo Edwards attempted to intervene, but was pistol whipped and then arrested himself. Corporal Charles Baltimore went to inquire about Edwards, and he was beaten and then shot at by police as he fled.
A rumor circulated that Baltimore had been murdered. A second rumor that a white mob was coming towards the base created chaos. Some soldiers grabbed weaponry and marched downtown, searching for police officers, four of whom were killed, along with several civilians. After inadvertently killing a member of the Illinois National Guard whom they had mistaken for HPD, the soldiers retreated to Camp Logan.
The Army prosecuted 118 soldiers. Seven agreed to testify against the others and were given clemency. Between November 1, 1917, and March 26, 1918, three court martial trials were held — in a San Antonio chapel because the courtroom wasn't large enough.
Of the 118 soldiers tried, 110 were found guilty. Nineteen were hanged and 63 received life sentences. No white civilians ever faced charges. President Woodrow Wilson commuted the sentences of 10 soldiers from death to life in prison on the recommendation of his Secretary of War.
Thomas Hawkins' letter to his parents was a testimony of innocence. His nephew Jason Holt said, "To many, the Houston Riots is simply a footnote in history. But for us, the family members, it's a little different. For us, it's a time when we know that we lost someone dear to our family."
Angela Holder, a history professor at Houston Community College and great-niece of Corporal Jesse Moore, one of the hung soldiers, explains, "They were denied due process guaranteed by the Constitution and died horrible deaths. They were represented by one lawyer and didn't even have a chance to appeal." Charles Anderson, a relative of another one of the hanged soldiers, points out that during the trial, "not one civilian could identify a soldier firing shots that killed people."
"The men did not have a fair trial," says Sandra Hajtman, great-granddaughter of one of the policemen killed, whose career as a legal secretary spurred her interest in the court martial proceedings. "I have no doubt about the likelihood the men executed had nothing to do with the deaths."
Scene during court martial of 64 members of the 24th Infantry United States of America on trial for mutiny and murder at Houston, Texas on August 23, 1917.
Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia Commons
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