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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE "DOUBLE V" WAS FOR VICTORY: BLACK SOLDIERS, THE BLACK PROTEST, AND WORLD WAR II DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Joyce Thomas, B.A., M.P.A ***** The Ohio State University 1993 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Warren Van Tine Stephanie J. Shaw 'Adviser John C. Burnham Department of History Copyright by Joyce Thomas 1993 VITA 1973....................... B.A., History, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania. 1982....................... Masters, Public Administration, Rutgers University, Newark. 1992-Present................Instructor, African- American History, Cleveland State Universtiy, Cleveland, Ohio FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: History Modern U.S. History Modern European History Black Studies 11 TABLE OF CONTENTS VITA.............................................. ii INTRODUCTION......................................... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. "UNCLE MOSE IS DEAD": THE "NEW NEGRO/' 1940.. 32 II. BUT WE "KNOW TEE NEGRO": BLACK PROTEST AND WHITE COMPLACENCY......................... 103 III. "ISOLATED SKIRMISHES," INSIGNIFICANT "INCIDENTS" AND THE "WAR" FOR DEMOCRACY AT HOME................................... 139 IV. THE CONTOURS OF A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT 191 V. THE PROTEST AGAINST "INSULT"................ 228 VI. THE PROTEST AGAINST RACIAL "SEPARATION."... 258 VII. SO, WHAT DID IT ACCOMPLISH?............... 288 CONCLUSION........................................ 325 BIBLIOGRAPHY...................................... 335 111 INTRODUCTION On February 6, 1991, while I was at the National Archives, Leslie Lee's historical play, "Black Eagles," premiered at the Ford Theater not very far up the street. The subject of the play was the Tuskegee Airmen. Theater critic and staff writer Lloyd Rose, reviewing the play for the Washington Post, was evidently disappointed. He found it beneath the standards of Mr. Lee's other works and "certainly not up to the great subject." The men, the critic contended, "seemed to just sit around and discuss their anger at segregation." When two white officers "come to integrate on their own," the Tuskegee Airmen "let them know that 'Things are Not Right'"and then run offstage to dutifully fly their next mission. He thought the author demonstrated very well "what the men were up against," However, he never gives any sense of their taking control of their own destinies, except for the solitary attempt to desegregate the officers' club. Nor do the characters react with any complexity. The characters in the movie "Glory" were stock, but each had his individual response to military service...Lee's characters seem to react pretty much identically: They want to prove themselves, they want to fight, they want to 2 kill." Rose noted further that there was a great deal of "irony and ambiguity" in the Tuskegee Airmen's situation which was not reflected in the play. One of the ironies is that military service, even in a segregated armed forces, could be beneficial to blacks. He cited historian Bruce Catton's contention that because blacks had fought in the Union Army during the Civil War, it became more difficult to disenfranchise them after the war was over." He noted, however, that in more recent times, young blacks had manifested a deep ambivalence toward military service, as was evident in the response to the Persian Gulf War. Despite the benefits of military service, they perceived it as "a form of social oppression." In Lee's play, the Airmen have no misgivings. They seem to want nothing more, in fact, than "the opportunity to kill for their country."" The critique of the play, while warranted, was unfair to Leslie Lee. The play accurately reflected the state of the historical record upon which it was based. The historical record delineates very well what black servicemen "were up against," but that is about where it stops. It rarely "gives any sense of their taking control of their own destinies" or any sense of black 3 servicemen as active participants in the World War II experience. One would have to agree that Mr. Lee, the playwright, was remiss in not informing the audience that the "'solitary' attempt to integrate the Officer's club" at Selfridge Field resulted in the replacement of General Matthew Ridgeway by an African-American officer, Benjamin Davis, Jr. However, even in the historical scholarship, the incident appears isolated. Moreover, it provides further evidence of "what they were up against," since three of the officers were court-martialed and the club remained segregated. With dogged perseverance, Lee could have discovered a few similar "incidents" in the published literature. For the most part, however, the image which he brought to the stage at the Ford Theater is the image of black servicemen as they appear in the historical record. The story that the critic obviously expected Lee to tell is not. Historians have written little about the experience of black servicemen in World War II except to emphasize that they were the objects of discriminatory racial policies. That part of the story is indeed familiar. In the years between the wars, discriminatory military policies severely restricted military service for blacks. If they attempted to join 4 the Air Corp or the Marines, they would simply be turned away. The Navy accepted them, but only in "menial" capacities, such as mess attendants or servants for officers. They could get into the regular Army, but only if there were spaces available in the four segregated units reserved for blacks. Even after the war began, and the armed forces were forced to accept blacks in proportion to their numbers in the population, they were restricted to segregated service units and denied "their right to fight." They were forced to endure segregation and discrimination, at the hands of military officials and civilian whites, both North and South. As black journalists at the time pointed out, even as they sacrificed their lives in the defense of freedom and democracy, they were granted neither at home. When the historical literature does provide a clue to how they reacted to their treatment, they still do not appear to have reacted "with any complexity." In the scholarship, the dominant theme is one of black selflessness and patriotism during periods of crisis and white denial of civil rights. Beginning with Crispus Attucks, black Americans have always been ready to die in the defense freedom and democracy despite the fact that both were denied them.* In sum, the 5 playwright's account was hardly at variance with the historical account. It is impossible to see how Mr. Lee could have written a better play. It was apparent from reading Rose's critique that the playwright had defined black servicemen by inference. In the absence of scholarship to the contrary, he had ascribed to black servicemen characteristics based on what others said about them and on what had been done to them. In this respect, he merely emulated, rather than distorted, the historical literature. The major defect of the existing literature is the absence of studies which focus on the attitudes or behaviors, or the responses of black soldiers to the military experience. The result is a historical picture in which black servicemen appeared, as W.E. DuBois described it almost a century ago, to have "assent[ed] to inferiority, were submissive under oppression and apologetic before insult. This is not the result of any deliberate effort to distort the black experience but rather the result of the fact that, as Richard Kohn contends, "political and policy considerations have...dictated the categories of inquiry."® The net result has been a tendency to study black servicemen almost exclusively as the object of military policies. Kohn contends that this is the fate of all soldiers in the historical literature, but the result has been a distortion of the literature toward the essentially inert and one-dimensional characterization evident in the play about the Tuskegee Airmen. It is not surprising, in the case of black servicemen, that political and policy considerations have "dictated the categories of inquiry. " The question of military policy toward black servicemen was such an important issue during the war. For black Americans, an end to segregation and discrimination in the military was second perhaps only to an end to discrimination in employment as a goal to be attained.