American Patriots by Gail Lumet Buckley

Author:Gail Lumet Buckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9781588360267
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

8

World War II

THE DOUBLE V

The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called democratic countries . . . then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces. 1

—James G. Thompson, a cafeteria worker at Cessna Aircraft, from a letter written in January 1942 to the Pittsburgh Courier

I. PEACE

THE BATTLE TO CHANGE THE JIM CROW MILITARY

In December 1941 Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, sent a proposal to General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, urging the creation of a volunteer Army division “open to all Americans irrespective of race, creed, color, or national origin.” 2 White believed that such a division would “set a new and successful pattern of democracy.” He was inspired by the actions of young Roger Starr, a recent graduate of Yale, who had read his article in the Saturday Evening Post about how discrimination against blacks in the army and private industry “was retarding our preparations for what everyone feared but understood was coming.” 3 Starr told White that he planned to ask his draft board to let him serve with black troops, not as an officer but as an enlisted man. The NAACP released his letter to the press. Starr became something of a celebrity, and the NAACP was suddenly inundated with letters from other young whites pledging to follow Starr’s example. Drafted in 1943, Starr was eventually dropped into China by the clandestine Office of Strategic Services (OSS), but his request to enlist in a black unit kept him out of officer candidate school and followed him wherever he was assigned in the Army.

“With elaborate casualness,” Walter White mentioned his proposal for a nonsegregated division at a talk at the University of California at Berkeley in mid-1942. 4 “An avalanche of young men” poured down the aisle at the end of the meeting. “Ah want to be the first as a native of Jawja to volunteah for youah mixed division,” a young southerner told White. “A lettah will be too slow—Ah’m goin to telegraph the Wah Depahtment.” Despite “sympathetic support” from Assistant Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson, the War Department remained unmoved. “The tradition-bound and prejudice-indoctrinated majority,” wrote White, felt that “we must not indulge in social experimentation in time of war.”

Roy Wilkins, editor of The Crisis, had been “bleakly amused” in 1940 when the Nazi theorist Hans Habe described life for black Americans under a global Third Reich. “Germany would control their jobs and all forms of association that might lead to assimilation,” Habe said. Voting, intermarriage, and access to all public accommodations (including roads, streetcars, and motion pictures) would be forbidden under the global Reich. Blacks would also be forbidden to serve in the military, except in labor battalions.

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