THE LONGEST WAR

Will Black World War II veterans finally get their due?

- Matthew Delmont

IN AUGUST 1944, just two months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act (a.k.a. the GI Bill of Rights), Harry McAlpin, Washington correspondent for the National Negro Publishers Association, warned that the new law, though race-neutral on its face, would exclude Black veterans. The Gl Bill included funding for housing, college, and job training, along with business loans and unemployment insurance, which fueled social mobility for millions of veterans and their descendants. It also included "innumerable loopholes for states to 'rob' returning Negro veterans of the rights and privileges they have earned by risking their lives and limbs for the preservation (?) of democracy," McAlpin wrote.

This discrimination was by design. Southern Democrats including House Veterans Committee Chairman John Rankin-who a quarter century earlier had penned an editorial ridiculing the notion that military service might somehow elevate a Black man to become the "peer of the white man"-took pains to ensure that the bill's benefits would be administered at the state level, where white officials served as gatekeepers.

Sure enough, at their local United States Employment Service job centers, Black veterans encountered white counselors who routinely shunted them into unskilled jobs, even if they had military training as carpenters, electricians, mechanics, or welders. In Mississippi, white veterans received 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled positions, while Black vets filled 92 percent of unskilled and service-oriented jobs. In Birmingham, Alabama, a USES counselor told Willie May, who had maintained communication lines in the Army Signal Corps, that there were no suitable positions available, even though the counselors had placed several white Signal Corps vets with the Birmingham Power Company. May settled for work as a Pullman porter, which paid far less.