Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Post War South (review)

In 1961 James Meredith confronted angry white mobs as they rioted because of his attempts to integrate Ole Miss. In 1963 an assassin's bullet splattered Medgar Evers' blood across his own driveway because he was leading a voting rights campaign. Hosea Williams was viciously beaten and tear gassed as he led the famous Selma march that led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In 1961 Robert Williams fled to Cuba escaping a phalanx of FBI agents in hot pursuit because he advocated self defense by armed black civil rights activists. A characteristic shared by these crusaders, who sought to slay Jim Crow, was their status as veterans of the United States military.

Scholars and participants of the Civil Rights Movement have long recognized that black veterans played a crucial role in the organizing, confrontations and outcomes of this pivotal movement. Indeed, the courageous civil rights activism of veterans was consequential and widespread, and not limited to a few luminaries. Yet, up until now there existed no comprehensive scholarly account of why black veterans gravitated to the vortex of this movement and greatly escalated its influence. Christopher Parker's book, Fighting for Democracy, admirably fills this void. It does so by examining the military experiences and civil rights activism of blacks who served in World War II and the Korean War.

The book's thesis is that the activism of these Southern veterans exceeded that of the general Southern black population precisely because of their military socialization and their experiences as military men. Jim Crow was a vicious regime that programmed Southern blacks in the knowledge that the lynch rope, howling mobs, bombs and economic degradation were the fate of resistors. A frame break of epic proportions was required to challenge this culture of subordination. Military socialization moved black veterans toward such frame breaking because it taught self confidence and the courage to overcome fears associated with defeating an armed enemy. It also taught soldiers the art of physical combat and how to use weapons and muscles to avoid mortal wounds.

Moreover, traveling to foreign countries exposed veterans to alternative and more equal systems of race relations thus delegitimizing Jim Crow. Such exposure was frame breaking even though it usually unfolded within a segregated military. These veterans came home prepared to fight Jim Crow laws because they had already learned to fight racists, even among fellow troops while on foreign shores. Courage and confidence had taken root as black enlisted men learn to wrestle with two enemies simultaneously.

Parker argues that the military provided black men with an insurgent generating ideology – black republicanism. This ideology promoted America patriotism, its ideals of freedom and democracy, rugged individualism and an ability to engage in critical assessments. It emphasized and embraced self-confidence and courage. It also promoted a gendered masculinity where a man's duty is to protect his family and community. Above all, the ideology spelled out both the duty that military men had to defend the American state and the duty of that state to reward veterans and their communities with full rights in the national political community. By performing military service, according to black republicanism, veterans had earned the right to full equality, and it was absolutely owed to them and expected upon their return to the South. Either republicanism would deliver black liberation or serve as the fulcrum igniting a titanic struggle to attain it.

Unyielding Jim Crow laws greeted veterans as they returned home teaming with the fire of black republicanism. Expertly mining interviews and quantitative data based on a superb survey of Southern racial attitudes conducted in the early 1960s, Parker persuasively demonstrates that black veterans threw themselves into the civil rights movement to topple Jim Crow at a participation level exceeding black male nonveterans. This was especially true when it came to dangerous confrontations to actually implement change. Introducing quantitative controls, Parker demonstrates...