CHAPTER TWO
Why Should I Fight?
Black Morale and War Department Racial Policy
Throughout the entire literature on Negro morale, most writers have noted the difference between the status system which fixes the Negro’s position, on the one hand, and his freedom to compete socially, economically, and politically, within certain spheres of social life, on the other. The question which faces every Negro policeman and soldier, is “Am I a Negro first and then a policeman or soldier second, or should I forget in any emergency situation the fact that my first loyalty is to my race?”
Horace Cayton, 1941
As an individual the Negro is docile, tractable, lighthearted, care free and good-natured. If unjustly treated, he is likely to become surly and stubborn, though this is usually a temporary phase. He is careless, shiftless, irresponsible, and secretive. He resents censure and is best handled with praise and by ridicule. He is unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior. Bad leadership in particular is easily communicated to them.
The Employment of Negro Troops, 1966
The Great Depression experiences of black youth coincided with the growing American involvement in foreign affairs during the late 1930s. By the early 1940s, the linkage between their growing international awareness and their pre-war circumstances produced a variety of attitudes among young African Americans regarding possible American foreign involvement and the prospects of military service, ranging from an enthusiastic race-conscious participation in U.S. initiatives in Europe and Asia, to indifferent feelings toward American war aims and military service, to, finally, outright opposition to “fighting in another white man’s war.” Although some, like George Shuffer, perceived a possible stint in the army as a means of improving their material conditions in American society, others saw military service itself as a punitive institution. These divergent and sometimes overlapping attitudes manifested themselves along class, generational, and regional lines. And as the probability of American involvement in the war became more likely during 1941, many black males of draft age agonized over the question “Why should I fight?” As Horace Cayton so eloquently noted in one of the epigraphs to this chapter, a paradox of loyalty dogged the thoughts and actions of black youngsters at almost every turn.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt administration and War Department officials faced an equally serious dilemma. Between 1922 and 1938, army planners had conducted numerous studies that advocated the segregation of black troops and called for the proportional representation of black males to be the same as that in the general population of the country. Using World War I as a benchmark, these studies denigrated the intellectual capacities of African Americans and the leadership capabilities of black officers. And as a result, army policymakers relegated black troops to service support duties and imposed strict limitations on the number of black officers. But with the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1940 and the unprecedented nature of the presidential election that year, army officials found themselves facing rounds of criticism from many parts of African American community after it released its utilization plans in September 1940. In response to public pressure, War Department officials made many policy revisions. By the end of 1941, one of the decisions reached by army planners resulted in the creation of the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division. And as numbers of prospective black citizen-soldiers of the division began to descend on the training camps of the segregated army, most were well aware of the peculiar nexus of military racial policy and political expedience that would shape their encounters with American society at large and the federal government.
Discussions of War and Race
Even though most African Americans in the United States stood on the brink of economic collapse during the 1930s, black residents in cities and towns all over the country expressed a variety of opinions regarding events overseas. Communities that focused on American foreign policy expressed their interest with varying degrees of race consciousness and nationalism. For example, throughout the early 1930s, hundreds of blacks in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and the District of Columbia participated in programs of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization founded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey which advocated the formation of an independent black nation in Africa and offered a trenchant assessment of Europe. Led by Amy Jacques Garvey, the Negro World and UNIA leaders denounced the European and American involvement in Asia and Nicaragua.1 This racial interpretation of international politics was not lost on prominent black intellectuals. After examining the impact of the UNIA in Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods during the period, sociologist St. Clair Drake pointed out, “While the majority of the people in the Chicago Negro community were never enrolled in the Black Internationale, there is little doubt that a large segment of the community was sympathetic with the movement and followed it with interest.”2
In the mid-1930s, news from Africa grabbed the attention of various segments of the African American community. In October 1935, Italy invaded Ethiopia, the only independent country in Africa during the period, and few blacks could ignore the international implications of the event. Ethiopia was one of the wealthiest nations on the continent and in many ways held a key place in biblical prophecy for African Americans.3 Owing to efforts made by the Ethiopian ambassador to the United States, more than 115 African Americans migrated to the country.4 In a matter of days, members of the black press, black churches, and civic organizations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia rallied to the cause of Ethiopia and raised money for supplies and medical aid. In New York, more than a thousand members of the clergy, led by Abyssinia Baptist Church pastor Adam Clayton Powell, held prayer vigils for Ethiopia, and the newly formed Committee for Ethiopia distributed peace petitions to protest against the war.5 In August, the International Council of Friends of Ethiopia was formed, and its executive secretary, Willis N. Huggins, traveled to Europe, where he sought without success monetary as well as military aid for the country from the League of Nations.6 UNIA locals and cults in New York headed by Prophet K. Constonie, Father Divine, and Emmett Parker developed songs, slogans, and banners embracing the defense of Ethiopia.7 And in Chicago, former UNIA members played an active role in both the Ethiopian World Federation and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia, expressing their dissatisfaction over the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.8 Indeed, the interest among black African Americans in the conflict was so strong that one observer remarked that “no other event in recent times stirred the rank-and-file of Negroes more than the Italo-Ethiopian War.”9
In late 1935 and early 1936, events that occurred in the United States as well as in Germany and other countries of central Europe attracted the attention of black communities in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. After knocking out Max Baer during the fall of 1935, boxer Joe Louis continued his phenomenal rise, defeating a string of opponents and becoming the idol of many African Americans as well as increasing the circulation of many black newspapers, particularly the Pittsburgh Courier. Specifically, black intellectuals and artists could not help but notice the sentiments of ethnic pride and racial solidarity that Joe Louis aroused in African American communities throughout the country. Moments after Louis’s victory, Richard Wright, later a prominent black author, described the actions and thoughts expressed by residents who lived on Chicago’s South Side:
Five minutes after the words “Joe Louis—the winnah” were yelled and Joe Louis’ hand was hoisted as victor in his four-round go with Max Baer, Negroes poured out of beer taverns, pool rooms, barber shops, rooming houses and dingy flats and flooded the streets. “LOUIS! LOUIS! LOUIS!,” they yelled and threw their hats away. They snatched newspapers from the stands of astonished Greeks and tore them up, flinging the bits into the air. They wagged their heads. Lawd, they’d never seen or heard the like of it before. They shook like a revival. Really there was a religious feeling in the air. Well, it wasn’t exactly a religious feeling, but it was something, and you could feel it. It was a feeling of unity, of oneness.10
In many ways, Louis’s victories served as a tangible means of refuting the racist ideologies of African American inferiority that were being circulated both at home and abroad. But most important, Joe Louis himself served as a benchmark in the lives of some young African Americans who later entered military service. At the time, longtime St. Petersburg, Florida, resident Frank Little had moved to South Philadelphia, where he made a living as a budding professional boxer. Struggling to make ends meet during the lowest depths of the Great Depression, Little recalled, “There were few jobs to be had and men, in fact whole families, wandered across the country hunting for work.” “I couldn’t find a job and made do with what I had.” After heeding the advice of a neighbor who was a retired army sergeant to “join the army,” Little ventured west, heading to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, in the hope of entering the 25th Infantry Regiment, eventually landing slot in that regiment’s H Company. After Little’s first professional fight in Chicago, he met Joe Louis and the two men became close friends. Describing Louis years later, Little recalled, “He was just a humble man and he was unfailing in his kindness toward those around him.” When Louis suffered his defeat at the hands of Max Schmeling, Little remembered, “It was the most devastating news that I had heard up to that point.” “I can’t recall when I had ever seen so many black men depressed over anything.” Louis’s budding professional career would continue to resonate in Little’s life long after he entered the army. Less than five years later, the two men renewed their friendship when the army assigned the Philadelphia resident to Louis as a trainer while the heavyweight champion served in the military during the early 1940s.11
The linkages between racist ideologies exposed by Adolf Hitler and the treatment of blacks within the United States also resonated with future 93rd servicemen, but in different ways. Reubin Fraser, who had first learned about the Nazi plan for African Americans while attending Sumner High School in St. Louis, he expressed no fear or hatred of Germany. “The way the Germans were operating was similar to the way blacks were treated in this country.” “The cycle was complete as far I was concerned.” Issues of social mobility, racial uplift, and self-empowerment dominated Fraser’s life decisions relating to military service more than anything else, however. After attending the Citizens’ Military Training Camp at Fort Riley, Kansas, from 1935 to 1938, he opted for military service despite objections raised by both his uncle, a World War I veteran, and his father. Fraser subsequently immersed himself in CMTC correspondence work while attending Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri, during the late 1930s.12
Nelson Peery’s perceptions of the events were rooted in a different past and an alternative view of the present. Peery was born in 1923 into a working-class family in Junction City, Kansas. His mother was the granddaughter of Kentucky slaves, and his father, a World War I veteran, was the son of a Kansas dirt farmer and a regular subscriber to the Communist Party’s Daily Worker. Peery had grown up hearing endless stories about his family’s efforts to maintain their dignity under the vestiges of slavery and about his great-grandfather, who had joined the Union army to secure his family’s freedom. He also grew up hearing daily discussions among his neighbors about the Communist Party’s efforts to free the nine black youths involved in the Scottsboro incident and had witnessed the ravages of the Great Depression firsthand as a hobo “riding the rails” from Junction City to Los Angeles. And in Wabasha, Minnesota, he observed countless bouts of racism and violence, but he also saw clear examples of ethnic pride and black solidarity.
Yet it was only after his family moved to Minneapolis in the mid-1930s that Peery found himself drawn to the Communist Party and its international vision for equality, employment, and social programs. Although he had never joined the Young Communist League, his consciousness of the party’s struggles was raised to even greater heights through his acquaintance with feminist activist Meridel Le Sueur while participating in a neighborhood discussion group composed of university students, mill workers, and self-educated intellectuals. By the time Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, 17-year-old Nelson Peery was fully aware of the national and international implications of that event: “I had to do something about it. The Soviet Union was all we had. If it was defeated, there was nothing left to defend us. You must understand, they would have hanged the Scottsboro boys if it weren’t for [the] Soviet Union telling the whole world about it. They would’ve driven us back to slavery or worse.” Peery promptly signed up for the Citizens’ Military Training Corps in June 1941 and was ordered to report to Fort Riley, Kansas, a month later.13
In contrast, young tenant farmers like George Shuffer paid very little attention to international events, as the daily struggle to provide a meager existence for their families dominated their thoughts and activities. Residents of Palestine, Texas, Shuffer and his family roamed through Anderson County in 1936 in search of work after a series of poor crop yields pushed his family’s farm to the brink of foreclosure. Shuffer recalled his indifference regarding world events: “I was so busy those days that I paid little attention to events that were occurring in Washington, D.C., … let alone what was happening in Europe.” By 1940, however, Shuffer saw a sliver of opportunity in the ashes of despair. He graduated from high school and elected to enter the army even though he had received academic scholarships from Mary Allen Junior College, Lemoyne College, and Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Shuffer’s allotment check of ten dollars a month, along with the checks earned by his two older brothers, who were also in the army at the time, provided the only meaningful sources of income for his family.14
African Americans across the country reacted in various ways to the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. During the first weeks of the European war, their initial responses ranged from cynical isolationism to rabid patriotism. George Schuyler, a noted columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier, expressed his belief that there were great similarities between the German invasion of Austria and British colonialism in Africa. “The war is a toss-up,” Schuyler claimed in his newspaper column, and the Harlem-based Negroes Against War Committee urged blacks throughout 1939 and 1940 not to become interested in the events overseas. “Why should Negroes fight for democracy abroad when they are refused democracy in every American activity except tax paying?” they argued.15
Isolationist views were expressed by other prominent black individuals and groups across the political spectrum. For example, a member of the political Left, George Padmore, justified isolationism with this criticism: “If the British government or the French government were sincere in their war rhetoric, let them extend Democracy to their colonies.”16 Recalling bitter memories of World War I, many members of the American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party saw the European crisis as an imperialist war, and they urged blacks to oppose military and economic aid to Britain and France. For example, on 14 November 1939, twenty-two thousand members of the Communist Party met at a rally in Madison Square Garden to celebrate the twenty-second anniversary of the Soviet Union. During the celebration, party members heard speeches given by Earl Browder, general secretary of the party, and James W. Ford, the party’s vice presidential nominee, excoriating both Britain and France. Arguing that the war to save democracy was futile, they concluded that there were forces in the United States that aimed to destroy the civil liberties of African Americans before the country became involved in the war and that the European war was being fought for the control of colonial peoples.17 In a pamphlet entitled Why Negroes Should Oppose the War, noted Afro-Caribbean scholar and activist C. L. R. James argued that no matter who won the war, blacks would continue to face discrimination, police brutality, and poverty worldwide.18 What’s more, between 1939 and 1941, publications such as the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Scribner’s Commentator, PM, Common Sense, People’s Voice, Opportunity, and black newspapers carried articles with captions such as “Should the Negro Care Who Wins the War?”; “Should Negroes Save Democracy?”; “What Have Negroes to Fight For?”; “Is This a White Man’s War?”; and “A White Folks’ War?”19
Black leaders specifically compared the Nazi racial policies of Adolf Hitler to racism in the American South. In a feature article in the Chicago Defender titled “Blitz over Georgia,” sociologist St. Clair Drake and editor Enoch P. Waters offered a stinging critique of American racial relations as well as a sympathetic view of conditions in Nazi Germany. In their description of a possible invasion of the state of Georgia by German forces, they described the racial politics that evolved around the use of bomb shelters in southern cities: “No provisions for Negroes were made in white sections of the city. Many persons were killed running from the white to the colored sections of the city for safety. A story is being told here of a maid who ran past seven shelters in the white section of the city on her way to the black belt. A few minutes after she entered one of the Negro shelters it was struck by a bomb and she, with many others, were killed.”20 Less than six months later, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP penned an editorial in the Crisis that compared the white supremacist doctrine in the American South to the Nazi racial theory of blacks, highlighting their similarities. Even Opportunity, the otherwise conservative journal of the National Urban League, pointed to the comparisons.21 Many black leaders felt that there was little difference between German and American racial policies. For example, when asked by a teacher in early 1942 whether conditions would be worse under Hitler, a young student at a prominent southern black college promptly answered, “They can’t possibly be any worse than they are for Negroes in the South right now.”22 The morale of African Americans on the eve of Pearl Harbor was such that sociologist Horace Cayton noted, “That the Negro might be treated even worse than he is now by a victorious Germany does not seem to worry numbers of black Americans.”23 Although the sentiments expressed by Drake, Waters, and others may appear a bit extreme, they reveal the degree of disillusionment among segments of the African American community regarding the racial attitudes in the United States.
Still other black leaders and intellectuals saw a possible German victory in an even harsher light and advocated a different choice for African Americans: involvement in the fight for democracy. In September 1939, Philadelphia Afro-American columnist William Jones expressed his belief that a possible German invasion of the Western Hemisphere would result in the placement of African Americans in concentration camps, a greater degree of racial segregation, and the complete elimination of black newspapers and cultural institutions. “Once in power, Hitler could bring these things about by the stroke of a pen,” Jones claimed.24 In March 1940, Ralph Matthews of the Baltimore Afro-American railed against African American indifference to the fighting in Europe. “We perhaps do not know that we are faced with a fate almost worse than death itself,” he wrote.25 In mid-1940, A. Philip Randolph joined the Committee to Defend America by Defending the Allies after he had formerly been a member of the pacifist Keep America Out of the War Congress. Urging blacks to support military and economic aid to Great Britain, Randolph later argued that, “without democracy in America, limited though it be, the Negro would not have even the right to fight for his rights.”26
Many of the wide-ranging views expressed by Randolph and other African American leaders across the country regarding the U. S. involvement in the European war stemmed from the debates surrounding black military service throughout 1939 and much of 1940. Before Germany extended its westward plunge into Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Belgium and Congress initiated debate on the Selective Service Act in 1940, segments of the black community held their own discussions regarding the matter, connecting it to other aspects of racism and poverty that blacks faced in the United States. In January 1937, prominent black leaders and spokespeople gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend a conference sponsored by the National Youth Administration on the problems of “the Negro and Negro Youth.” Following three days of reports and open forums on matters affecting African American life such as education, health, housing, tuberculosis, lynching, disfranchisement, and civil rights in the District of Columbia, the group also examined black participation in the armed forces, resolving to demand proportionate representation at all levels within service branches as well as admission to the service academies.27
About a year later, Pittsburgh Courier editor Robert L. Vann penned an open letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, launching a campaign to remove existing racial barriers within the armed forces. Vann demanded equal representation for blacks in the armed forces and called for the creation and maintenance of an all-black squadron and infantry division.28 Adopting a pragmatic stance, he opined that although black taxpayers furnished money for battleships, submarines, cannons, airplanes, rifles, and soldier’s pay, they were being excluded from the various branches of the armed forces such as the Army Air Corps, the Signal and Tank Corps, the Corps of Engineers, and the Marines. An infantry division of fifteen thousand African American troops commanded by black officers, he reasoned, would “be one way for Negroes to get back some of the vast sums they pour into military budgets as taxpayers and inspire black American youth to share the benefits of service.”29
Vann’s 1938 campaign for greater military representation by blacks reflected the anxieties he and other black leaders expressed regarding the dismal state of affairs with respect to African Americans in the armed forces during the interwar period. Between 1931 and 1940, blacks accounted for fewer than 4,000 of the 118,000 men in the Regular Army as vacancies and promotions became extremely rare in most segregated units.30 Thus, for many African Americans, entrance into the U.S. Armed Forces was next to impossible during this period. Stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia; Fort Huachuca, Arizona; and Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the four black regiments—the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry—were reduced to grooming horses and performing other fatigue duties.31 Furthermore, few opportunities to gain a commission in the Regular Army existed for black aspirants, as only one African American, Benjamin O. Davis Jr., had graduated from West Point between 1920 and 1940. Only five black commissioned officers were in the Regular Army—two line officers and three chaplains.32 African Americans accounted for fewer than 400 of the 100,000 officers in the organized army reserves and were largely products of ROTC training at Howard and Wilberforce universities.33 Finally, in the few National Guard and reserve units that survived during the pre-war period, such as New Jersey’s 1st Battalion, New York’s 15th, Massachusetts’s 3rd Battalion of the 372nd Infantry, and Illinois’s 8th Infantry, blacks received very little peacetime training and faced the constant threat of disbandment or conversion into labor organizations.34
Throughout much of 1938, the Pittsburgh Courier surveyed thousands of its readers for their opinions of Vann’s proposal, and the black weekly’s efforts proved to have been of great importance for several reasons. First, the survey sparked a fierce public debate over the nature of black participation in national defense, arousing a flood of responses from black teachers, labor organizers, members of the clergy, social workers, and urban and rural working-class youths across the country. Their comments tended to reflect myriad class and regional distinctions. For example, whereas President Ormonde Walker of Wilberforce University and NAACP executive secretary Walter White favored total integration, other segments of African American society as diverse as leaders of the Southern Negro Youth Congress and Howard University secretary-treasurer Emmett J. Scott supported Vann’s proposal for an all-black squadron and infantry division for various reasons.35 During the second annual meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, that year, nearly four hundred delegates pledged their support for the Courier campaign calling for greater representation in the army and navy. Linking the fascist ideologies of Germany and France to racist practices in the South, members of the Southern Negro Youth Congress heard national secretary Edward Strong claim that black youths in the South should have equal opportunity to participate in the national defense program along with all other rights of citizenship. “The worst scourge that we face today is fascist barbarism, waging war against democratic civilization, it is brazen in its disregard for the rights of man, destroys culture and has raised the mythical idea of racial superiority.”36
Not long afterward, the Courier campaign reached the halls of Congress. In April of that year, Emmett J. Scott, Robert L. Vann, Oscar De Priest, George Schuyler, and Eugene Kinckle Jones formed a steering committee after New York congressman Hamilton Fish introduced three bills for greater black representation in the armed forces in the House Committee on Military Affairs.37 The bills called for an end to discrimination in the army and navy by asking for the opening of all branches of the armed forces, an annual appointment by the president of two blacks to West Point and Annapolis, and the creation of an all-black army division. After months of rallying support for the measure, the bills died in the House Affairs Committee in October, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ranking committee members, and the NAACP failed to provide adequate encouragement.
Undaunted, the Courier formed the Committee for Participation of Negroes in the National Defense to work for the inclusion of blacks in the military establishment during the following year.38 Its members included NAACP special counsel Charles Houston, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, and Chicago Defender correspondent Louis Lautier, and Rayford Logan. Throughout the 1939 and 1940 congressional debates on the size of the national defense program and the Selective Service Act, CPNND members clamored loudly for greater black participation in the army by testifying before the House Committee on Military Affairs and the Senate Military Appropriations Committee, lobbying key members of Congress, working closely with the NAACP, and organizing local branches and committees throughout the country.39 In September 1940, the CPNND leadership persuaded Congressman Hamilton Fish to introduce CPNND-sponsored legislation on the House floor.40 Although Fish’s amendment was defeated, the organization’s efforts reached fruition when Congress passed Public Law 783, which contained two antidiscrimination provisions proposed by New York senator Robert Wagner.41 Its legislative victory proved to be short lived, however. As Rayford Logan noted in his diary later, CPNND members felt that “the Wagner Amendment was virtually meaningless, because it outlawed discrimination only in cases of voluntary enlistment.”42 Furthermore, the question of whether land and naval forces would accept African Americans remained unresolved.43
The CPNND’s campaign coincided with other efforts to achieve black self-determination within the armed forces, however. During late 1938 and early 1939, the NAACP continued its call for total integration, and the National Negro Insurance Association and the Southern Interracial Commission adopted measures against the army’s policies regarding African American servicemen. At its April 1938 annual meeting, held at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, members of the National Medical Association’s executive board voted to endorse the Courier campaign as a part of the association’s fight for greater black representation in the army’s Medical Corps. After days of discussion of issues including the eradication of syphilis, greater opportunities for postgraduate study for black physicians, and the establishment of a national college of black surgeons and physicians, board members authorized chairman William McKinley Thomas to contact the president of the United States and Congressman Andrew J. May, chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, informing them of the association’s decision.44 As an outgrowth of their efforts, National Defense Committees established various subcommittees throughout the states that coordinated their efforts with the national body. Throughout much of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the National Medical Association, along with other black professional groups, employed a variety of tactics to dismantle the Jim Crow practices and white supremacy within the armed forces.
“Greetings”: Black 93rd Youth and the Selective Service
Meanwhile black communities across the country expressed a variety of opinions regarding the status of African Americans in the armed forces. When the Philadelphia Afro-American conducted a survey on compulsory military training in Philadelphia and Baltimore during the summer and fall months of 1940, fifteen black males of draft age responded positively for various reasons. Some stated that it afforded the best means of protection for black soldiers in the event of war. Others expressed the hope that their participation would enhance the political, economic, and social status of blacks in the country. Yet approximately 30 percent of 250 young African Americans interviewed in North Philadelphia and the southeastern sections of Baltimore opposed the idea, basing their arguments on the discrimination that had been practiced in civil society and the U.S. Army.45 For example, one Baltimore native responded, “I do not favor it because I don’t think colored people have anything to fight for.” “They ought to take those who enjoy the privileges of this country.” Several young Philadelphia residents expressed their opposition to the draft measure, stating that the discrimination they faced precluded any commitment to military service.46 In Detroit, Michigan state senator Charles Diggs told members of the St. John Colored Methodist Episcopal, St. Peter African Methodist Episcopal, and Calvary Baptist churches that unless African Americans were accepted for training in all branches of the military service, they should refuse to fight if the United States entered the European war. “It is high time that the colored man wake up and tell America, in no uncertain terms, that we are not going to be targeted in a scientific conflict without knowing something about the science of war,” Diggs argued.47
During the initial stages of the Selective Service Act, more than 1.8 million black males registered, reflecting roughly 14 percent of the total African American population. However, registration totals varied widely by area because of regional and rural-urban differences in population. For example, the percentage of black male registrants between the ages of 21 and 35 in the Midwest and Great Lakes region (Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan) who registered on 16 October 1940 and the percentage of blacks who registered in the Northeast (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey) were remarkably similar, fluctuating between 5 and 6 percent of their total populations. In Chicago alone, nearly 500,000 black youths registered with their local boards, reflecting 14 percent of the city’s black population.48 During the July 1941 registration drive, more than 82,000 draft-age blacks entered the national lottery, reflecting 9.8 percent of their proportion in the general population.49
To be sure, efforts to create self-empowering strategies that had been made throughout much of African American society during the national defense debate motivated many future 93rd Division members. But for most of them, military service epitomized the ultimate dilemma that black youth faced at the time—namely, how to remain close to grassroots efforts to secure democratic rights at home while maintaining a healthy distance from military service. Many of their thoughts and actions about the registration process provide examples of this conundrum. In Cleveland, for example, Thomas White had befriended a member of the all-black Cedar Avenue draft board in Ward 19 in the hope of gaining an occupational deferment. White supported the black struggle to gain equal treatment in the armed forces but was apprehensive regarding his own possible entrance into the military. “I had no desire to go into the army because the military was seen as a form of punishment,” he recalled. “It was something to avoid.” White’s efforts were fruitless, however. Less than a year later, he received a letter from the same draft board informing him that he had been selected during the ward’s first drawing in 1941 after he was given a 1-A classification. But after undergoing basic training at Fort Huachuca three weeks later, White developed a liking for military life and was selected for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. Shortly afterward, in 1942, he was assigned as a lieutenant with a company in the 368th Infantry before being transferred to the 25th Infantry Regiment.50
Thomas White was not the only future 93rd Division member to express such sentiments. In North Carolina, where black draft-age males constituted approximately 28 percent of the state’s total registrants, Asheville native Willard Jarrett approached his draft board with a great deal of foreboding. “Registering is when I first knew for sure that the possibility of military service was no joke.” Jarrett’s apprehensions regarding military service probably had more to do with his background and boyhood images of the military than with anything else. Born into a middle-class family in 1925, Jarrett grew up in a family with a long history of military service; his father, a contractor’s assistant, had served as an enlisted man during the First World War, and his brother had spent some time in the U.S. Navy. “The armed forces was something that my father and brother used to discuss all the time,” he recalled. “They resented the treatment of Negroes in it, but didn’t try to persuade me either way.” In less than a year, Jarrett dropped out of college and enlisted in the army, which assigned him to Fort Bragg in North Carolina; in August 1943 he received orders to report to the 93rd Division.51
Meanwhile, many African American men faced the immediate prospect of either being drafted or ordered to active duty. During the initial stages of the Selective Service process, the number of young black men notified for induction was 96,000, less than 5 percent of the total African American male population eligible for induction.52 By the end of 1942, the figure nearly quintupled to 420,000, or 23 percent of the total population.53 Many black youths expressed very little concern over the Selective Service process, however, because of the logjam caused by the War Department’s system of racial quotas. Throughout 1941 and 1942, nearly 28,000 blacks were passed over. In midwestern and northern industrial centers, approximately 8,000 black registrants were selected, but thousands more awaited induction while the armed forces worked to build separate training facilities and train cadres.54 In southern areas, the number of black registrants awaiting induction notices from local boards may have been higher. In southern states located within the 4th Corps area, more than 6,000 black selectees waited to be placed in army units, as less than 1 percent of the area’s black population eligible for the draft received induction notices.55
In March 1941, nearly 200 black youths from Chicago reported to the 122nd Field Artillery Headquarters to be inducted after months of delay.56 During the first waves of the induction process, local boards in cities throughout the Midwest and Great Lakes region, like Toledo, Columbus, and Milwaukee, called up hundreds of young black men who reported to army reception centers only to be told to wait for the creation of new units.57 The backlog in the racial quota system became more apparent in the District of Columbia as selected African Americans awaited orders for induction while some 1,100 white men were called.58 In New York, more than 900 black selectees who were drafted in January 1941 were sent home because of construction delays at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where they were slated to receive basic training courses. Indeed, between January and September 1941, only 4,449 blacks were in the army. By early 1943, Selective Service officials estimated that approximately 300,000 blacks awaited induction after being notified of their selection.59
After receiving their induction notice, however, thousands of 93rd black youths finally faced the sobering possibility of military service. Nearly 400 black youths who lived in Cleveland’s Seventeenth Ward appeared at the U.S. Army Induction Station at Central Armory, where they received extensive physical examinations and endured a battery of questions posed by psychologists about their relatives, work ability, and schooling. Shortly afterward, more than 70 percent of the inductees were shipped to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, after undergoing basic training at Indiana’s Fort Benjamin Harrison.60
Among the selectees who stood in line for the army’s physical examinations at the time were Charles Rabb, Milton Carnes, Carney Reynolds, James Hutchins, Thomas White, Henry Williams, and Clarence Gaines, all of whom became prominent members of the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division. After hearing unflattering stories about the treatment of African Americans in the army and growing increasingly aware of the mortal dangers that military service presented, each selectee expressed varying degrees of ambivalence and foreboding as he contemplated what he was going to do. For instance, although Clarence Gaines was reluctant to leave his job as a bellhop at a prestigious Cleveland hotel, he didn’t want to avoid the draft. “I had no feelings one way or the other regarding the army,” Gaines recollected. “I felt overwhelmed by the selection process until I realized that most of my friends had been summoned as well.”61
Other black Clevelanders also linked their decisions to answer the call to service to ties of friendship. When Frank Smith, an erstwhile life insurance salesman, received the letter from his local draft board notifying him of his selection, he remembered thinking, “Since my buddies were signing on, it wouldn’t be too bad.” Smith was assigned to a company in the 368th Infantry in February 1941.62 When Cleveland-born Henry Williams was drafted at the time, he also had not given much thought initially to its significance. Recalling his reaction to the letter he received from the local draft board on that fateful day, Williams stated, “I came home from a hard days’ work as a cab driver, and there was a letter which read ‘greetings’ …, but I never thought much of it because I didn’t know anything about soldiering.” However, Williams’s next statement reveals a few anxieties that he may have had over his impending military service. Referring to the tenure of service regulations of the 1940 Selective Service System, he remembered, “I didn’t want to go, but after talking it over with my friends, I figured that I would do the one-year stint in the service and that would be it.”63
The support networks that Williams and other future division members forged among close friends reached their fullest expression in their surrounding neighborhoods. For example, in efforts to assuage apprehensions felt by black recruits after they were inducted, black post members of the American Legion held farewell dances for them in the East End Community Center throughout the early months of 1941.64 During the same period, nearly 100 black former National Guardsmen gathered at the Central Armory for entertainment provided by a Cleveland citizens committee as they prepared to leave for induction centers scattered throughout Ohio.65 When nearly 200 inductees were called up a year later, they were cheered by hundreds of Clevelanders who crowded the streets leading to Union Terminal Station, delaying their departure for more than an hour.66
The activities of the black community in Cleveland in support of its selectees were hardly unusual. In Baltimore, where nearly 160 black youths received their draft orders in November 1941, members of the city branch of the NAACP provided free legal advice for the men before they headed to Fort Meade, Maryland.67 After nearly 70 black men in Georgia’s Fulton and DeKalb counties were summoned to a Fort Benning reception center during August 1941, they attended farewell parties given by neighbors and friends, where they heard toasts and lectures on topics relating to national defense.68 When Jefferson County, Alabama, inductees reported to Birmingham’s Terminal Station, policemen on motorcycles and a local high school marching band escorted them to the Negro Masonic Temple, where they listened to addresses given by prominent black city leaders and World War I veterans, notably Parker High School principal W. B. Johnson and NAACP branch president E. W. Taggart, urging them to “uphold the traditional fearlessness of the Negro soldier.” Yet these speeches also exposed the class dynamics within Birmingham’s black community as prominent black leaders used the event as a political and social vehicle to reaffirm their self-assumed positions of authority as well as to influence the innermost feelings of the young black men regarding military service. For example, Johnson told the audience, “Yours is the opportunity to prove that democracy is not dead.” “If you are proud, so are we whom you represent.” Shortly afterward, the black inductees marched down Fifth Avenue, where they boarded railroad cars for the trip to the Fort McClellan reception center. In the audience that day sat Harvey Herndon, Willie Lambert, Henry Jackson, Demus Ingram, and Albert Talley, all of whom entered the ranks of the 93rd Infantry Division.69
In contrast, some draft-eligible black men faced public censure when they openly sought to evade military service or to appeal their draft status. Throughout much of 1941 and 1942, draft boards and neighborhoods in major metropolitan cities like Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit launched extensive searches to locate black youths who refused to comply with the provisions of the Selective Service Act. In Cleveland, for example, Anne Gibson, chief clerk of local draft boards in the Seventeenth Ward, conducted an extensive campaign during the fall of 1941 to round up delinquent inductees and registrants. “Every effort,” Gibson declared, “would be made to locate the ‘missing’ registrants before the Federal Bureau of Investigation were put on their trails.” To aid the draft board’s search, the Cleveland Call & Post carried articles publicizing the names of the men who were sought.70
The resistive impulse that Cleveland draft board officials witnessed was not an isolated phenomenon, since many black youths openly opposed the draft order. During late 1940, nearly 500 African American selectees were shipped to labor camps in Jamaica after they were arrested and imprisoned at Leavenworth, Kansas, for refusing to comply with the Selective Service Act.71 In Harlem and other New York City neighborhoods, draft boards reported high rates of delinquency. Between 1941 and 1943, of the total number of African Americans in New York City who had received their draft notice, nearly 1,000 (19 percent) refused to report to their induction boards. By 1946, the proportion of black draft violators in New York reached 18 percent of the total that were prosecuted and imprisoned throughout the war.72
In May 1943, fifteen black men were prosecuted and imprisoned in Detroit after they refused to register with their local draft boards.73 Appearing before a local draft board in Wayne County, Michigan, at the time was 19-year-old Raymond Jenkins. Like so many black youths, Jenkins had strong reservations regarding his induction. The exploitative labor conditions and racial struggles of his family in the Deep South had a profound impact on his views of military service: “My grandfather [Will Mobley] was a slave in Mississippi, and he used to tell me how the masters used to treat them, working them all day from sunup to sundown.” “They had no future, and for me military service was in so many ways similar to things he talked about.” “I was sorely tempted to appeal my draft status for an occupational deferment because I couldn’t see fighting for something that we didn’t have,” he recalled. After days of contemplation as well as seemingly endless lectures from his mother and other relatives, however, Jenkins reluctantly complied with his draft orders and was shipped to Fort Custer, Michigan.74
Meanwhile, other black youths who later joined the division saw entering the military in a different light. Although their motives varied, virtually all sought ways to maintain control over their own lives. For example, Leo Logan, a Leavenworth, Kansas, resident, decided to enter the army in August 1941 to preempt his being drafted. Logan remembered, “I volunteered for military service to get it out of the way before going back to college.” “My number was high, and so I figured that I would be drafted sooner or later.” After completing basic training at Camp Wolters, Texas, Logan was chosen for Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.75 In Maysville, Kentucky, 22-year-old Durward Griffey faced a different set of circumstances. After graduating from high school in 1939, Griffey had spent much of his early adult life laboring in a wide assortment of jobs, most of which were characterized by low wages and horrendous working conditions. Faced with either being inducted into the army or continuing to make his living working at backbreaking, low-paying jobs, he decided to enter military service in February 1941. Recalling his decision, Griffey stated, “I thought it was necessary at that time because I had been unable to find suitable employment.” “But I didn’t want to be drafted by any circumstances.”76
Logan’s and Griffey’s sentiments were shared, more or less, by other future 93rd servicemen. Harlem native Elliotte Williams failed to gain entrance into the U.S. Naval Academy in June 1940 and fully expected to be drafted that winter. Two months later, Williams elected to enter the army’s Medical Department and was stationed at the all-black station hospital located at West Point, New York. On his decision to join the army, he recalled, “I thought enlistment would solve my financial problems and provide an opportunity to go to the U.S. Military Academy.” After his stint at West Point, Williams was assigned as a noncommissioned officer to the famous all-black 366th Infantry Regiment commanded by West Hamilton, which was then training in Massachusetts. There he abandoned his dreams of attending the army’s service academy in March 1942, when he was selected for Officer Candidate Training at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.77 John Marshall, 24, a resident of St. Clairsville, Ohio, opted to enlist in early 1941 not only to preempt being drafted but also to evade the drudgery and hard labor of his job as a coal miner. “I thought it was a way of leaving my hometown so I volunteered to get the year out of the way,” he recalled.78
Still others sought to pursue professional aspirations. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1914, Edward Freeman worked as a principal in a nearby Cobb County public school after earning a degree at Clark College in 1939. In addition, he spent some time as a Baptist minister in a local church with a small congregation. Uncomfortable with his career as an educator and expressing a great deal of concern over the prospect of being drafted, Freeman sought the chance to pursue his ministry permanently. His opportunity came in February 1941 when Colonel William Arnold, chief of the army’s Chaplain Corps, announced that forty-five black chaplains would be needed to fill its officer ranks. After agonizing over the decision for nearly a month, Freeman traveled in March 1941 to Hartford, Connecticut, where he joined the army. Recalling his decision, he stated, “I was glad to give up my vocation as a teacher in Georgia’s public schools for the opportunity to serve as an officer because I didn’t want to be drafted and felt that the Chaplain Corps would greatly enhance my ministry and it did.”79
While prospective recruits like Freeman worried about their immediate draft notification, young black reserve officers faced different circumstances. Initially, the army’s lack of consideration regarding the employment of black officers led many to believe that they would not be ordered to active duty. Their belief was justified. According to the War Department protective mobilization plans of 1937 and 1940, cadres for newly created segregated units were to be drawn from the nearly 340 black reserve officers who occupied grades from colonel to second lieutenant in the cavalry, Quartermaster Corps, and medical and chaplain sections.80 More than 70 percent of these reserve officers were products of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps from Howard and Wilberforce universities and qualified for duty in primarily infantry units, however, with the remainder commissioned in the medical and dental reserves. As a result, because of the high number of combat support units (engineer, quartermaster, antiaircraft artillery, railroad, and gas supply) proposed under the War Department’s plans, when mobilization began in late 1940, no black reserve officers were called to active duty even though their numbers hardly approached the total number of positions in the units officered by black personnel.81 Even after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8618 on 23 December 1940, federalizing African American components in the National Guard (the 369th Coastal Artillery, the 372nd Infantry Regiment, and the 184th Field Artillery), and the War Department announced its plans to form an additional black combat regiment the previous month, 150 still remained available for military duty.82 By October of that year, the 222 black officers on active duty represented only half the total in the reserve officer ranks.83
This problem had not gone unnoticed by War Department officials, however. During his ten-month investigation into the status of black soldiers in the army, William Hastie, civilian aide to the secretary of war, noticed that National Guard commanders were reluctant to call up black reserve officers and that many black officer personnel were being relieved of command. Acknowledging the problems that black officers faced, Hastie observed that, “with most Negro troops concentrated in overhead installations, the quartermaster corps, and the Corps of Engineers, there is no policy or plan for utilizing Negroes to command any of these troops.” In addition to recommending that black junior officers in the reserve be assigned to reception centers, replacement training centers, and positions related to morale, he advised the War Department to place black officers in branches of the arms and services other than overhead installations.84
For the civilian aide, the difficulties that the War Department faced in requisitioning black reserve officers stemmed from the limited number of black units available to them, the minimal numbers of African American prospects in officer candidate schools, and the army’s long-standing tradition of racial segregation. He argued that “an extensive training program is prerequisite to the extensive use of Negro officers, yet the absence of extensive plans for their utilization leaves no presently apparent purpose for such an extensive training program and encourages those commanders in the field whose attitudes toward the selection of officer candidates is already conditioned by prejudice against the Negro as an officer.”85 Aware of the attitudes of black youth toward American society and the army, Hastie went on to warn War Department officials that “until the men in our army and civilians at home believe in and work for democracy with fervor and determination, we will not be an effective nation in the face of a foreign foe.”86
However, many of Hastie’s recommendations went largely unheeded. His demands for racial equality and opportunity for black servicemen were anathema to many army planners, and no one within the War Department wanted to abandon the army’s racial division of labor. In early November, members of the Personnel Division and the Operations Division examined Hastie’s memorandum to the secretary of war and expressed their belief that the army should focus on bolstering the nation’s defenses and that the War Department should abstain from involvement in racial and social issues. Chief of Staff George Marshall agreed. Six days before Pearl Harbor, he claimed that Hastie’s recommendations would require a social revolution and that this issue was one that he and other War Department officials should avoid at all costs. He wrote Secretary of War Henry Stimson: “A solution of many of the issues presented by Judge Hastie in his memorandum to you on ‘The Integration of the Negro Soldier into the Army,’ September 22, would be tantamount to solving a social problem that has perplexed the American people throughout the history of this nation. This Army cannot accomplish such a solution, and should not be charged with the undertaking.”87
Significantly, Hastie’s recommendations and the War Department’s narrow response to them prefigured the relationship between black youth, sectors of African American society, and the federal government and the public debate over the very employment of African American troops in the wartime army. But the disagreements among army planners over how far the policy of segregation should be extended in the event of war presented yet another side to the relationship, and it is to this dimension that we must now turn.
Dilemmas of Troops and Race
The reservations that most African Americans expressed regarding the war effort, the army, and possible military service stemmed from the Jim Crow practices of the War Department and the branches of the armed forces. Immediately after the First World War, War Department officials began to develop utilization policies regarding black troops. During the early months of 1920, the army’s General Staff College disseminated surveys to officers who commanded black soldiers during the war, requesting them to comment on the performances of black personnel and to make recommendations for their use in the event of war. Their responses were largely negative and reflected many of the racial mores of the period. Colonel Charles C. Ballou replied that the use of black soldiers during the Civil War up to 1917 revealed that they were liabilities rather than assets, and he used racist generalizations to suggest that black soldiers be placed in labor battalions and regiments commanded by white officers. Ballou contended that the black soldier “has little capacity for initiative, is easily stampeded if surprised, and is therefore more dependent than the white man on skilled leadership.” Reflecting on his own experience as the commander of the U.S. 92nd Infantry Division in Europe, Ballou stated, “I simply forgot that the average Negro is a rank coward” and that “his faults and virtues stemmed from being children of people in whom slavish obedience and slavish superstitions and ignorance were ingrained.” Furthermore, he denigrated the performance of black officers and dismissed the performance of the 93rd (Provisional) Division’s regiments, claiming that the unit’s success were tied to the replacement of its black officers by a white cadre. Advising against the formation of segregated divisions in future conflicts, Ballou recommended that the War Department limit the size of black units to no larger than a regiment.88
The other field-grade officers of the 92nd Division reached similar conclusions, employing racial stereotypes and popular sexual myths to demonstrate the lack-luster performance of black personnel and to advise against the formation of all-black divisions. Responding to the General Staff College study in April 1920, former 92nd Infantry Division chief of staff Allen J. Greer wrote that “the average Negro is naturally cowardly and utterly lacking in confidence in his colored officer.” “Every infantry and other combat soldier should possess mentality, initiative, and individual courage; all of these are, generally speaking, lacking in the Negro,” he claimed. Greer went on to recommend the placement of black troops in service, labor, and pioneer units staffed by white officers, warning that organizations commanded by black officers would result in numerous cases of rape similar to those that had reportedly occurred in the 92nd during the war.89 A white commander of one of the regiments of the 92nd during the war wrote, “My experience confirms in the belief that, with Negro officers, the Negroes cannot become fitted as combat troops.” Like Ballou and Greer, he recommended the assignment of black troops to labor and pioneer units no larger than a regiment, arguing that “it would be unwise to place more than one such regiment in a division.”90 One commander of the all-black 368th Infantry claimed that African American soldiers lacked home training and commented that “the average Negro has the mentality of an overgrown child so naturally it takes longer to train them.” Advising against the formation of all-black divisions, he argued that no part of the country would permit the assembly of black divisions without protest.91 Reacting to the General Staff College survey around the same time, former 370th Infantry commander Major Thomas A. Roberts described the officers and enlisted men in the unit as untruthful, lacking in initiative and sense of responsibility, and illiterate. “I favor no larger unit than a regiment,” he suggested.92
Not all commanders of black troops assessed the performance of black personnel in World War I as a failure. In late March, Vernon A. Caldwell, commander of black units in Cuba, the Philippines, and France, responded, “I think it a mistake to organize colored troops into units as large or larger than regiments, the largest unit of colored troops should be the battalion.” Caldwell defended his position on the grounds that the separation of black troops into large organizations would result in wholesale resentment within the African American population. “Most military men recognize that national defense is no longer a matter of a regular army but that it is, and always had been when correctly grasped, a matter of being able to make full use of its entire manpower,” he claimed. Emphasizing that black units fought best when serving in white regiments, Caldwell urged the War Department to place black companies in every regular army organization smaller than a division.93
In late November 1922, staff members of the War Department’s Operations and Training Section also drew on the General Staff College survey to formulate policies for the employment of black troops in the event of war. Created on the premise that, as citizens of the United States, African Americans should be subject to all the obligations of citizenship—namely, military service—the 1922 policy resulted in a manpower utilization plan that limited black units to sizes no larger than regiments. The study echoed the judgments of Ballou and others by claiming that the performance of black combat units of World War I “constituted an unbroken record of failure” and placing the onus for their difficulties on their intellectual capacities and the leadership abilities of black officers. The study concluded that, in the event of war, “large numbers of Negroes will be found unsuited for combat duty, and for these, other parts in the mobilization must be found.” Its suggestions therefore gave rise to new bureaucratic policies that reflected the prevalent belief that African Americans were largely poor soldiers.
Yet the 1922 mobilization plans developed by the Operations and Training Section staff also recognized the social implications of protest politics that emanated from segments of the black community during the period, and they foretold the dilemma policymakers would face years later: “The War Department has already received communications from prominent Negroes throughout the country indicating their dissatisfaction with the provisions thus far made. If the Negro element of this country does not get satisfaction from the War Department, it will undoubtedly turn to Congress, and it is sufficiently powerful politically to secure a full hearing there. In other words, it will be required to furnish a solution for the problem and to do so under the fire of Congress. The probability of arriving at a satisfactory solution under such circumstances is slight.” Approving the G-3’s recommendations a month later, Secretary of War John W. Weeks informed corps area commanders confidentially of the War Department’s new policy days later, instructing them to mobilize approximately 50 percent of all black recruits available in the event of war.94
Subsequent mobilization plans made adjustments to the number of units under the table of organization based on the 1922 policy. In July 1923, the adjutant general informed corps area commanders that additional segregated units would not be allocated until black personnel presented themselves physically, and decisions regarding personnel transfers were left to the commanders’ discretion.95 Four years later, the G-3 expanded on the 1922 plan by establishing the percentage of black representation in the armed forces in the event of war at 10.73, reflecting the proportion of African Americans in the general population.96 These plans were shrouded in secrecy, however, as no one outside the military establishment was made aware of their existence.
In 1937, members of the G-1, led by Brigadier General L. D. Gasser, conducted another mobilization study that resulted in a major revision of the previous plans. First, they pointed out that the 1933 War Department plan had not provided for an adequate proportion of black troops in the event of war and established the percentage of black troops in the first mobilization at 9.45, reflecting the 1930 census estimates of African Americans’ proportions in the general population. Second, after examining the total number of black Selective Service registrants during World War I, the study recalibrated the number of mobilized black troops in ways that reflected the existing ratios of white and black soldiers within the armed forces. G-1 members reiterated the previous War Department and General Staff College studies of black servicemen in World War I, however, drawing on long-standing racist stereotypes to disparage their leadership and intellectual qualities. What’s more, the study continued the War Department’s policy of segregation.97 Secretary of War Harry Woodring approved the G-1’s findings and directed that copies of the plan be dispatched to corps area commanders. Despite several revisions, major portions of the 1937 plan remained in effect throughout the army’s peacetime expansion of 1940. And the secrecy surrounding the army’s policies regarding African American servicemen continued.
Not surprisingly, the War Department’s expansion plans were deeply ingrained with the racist attitudes of army senior staff officers toward black servicemen from the previous war but cloaked with a high degree of secrecy. At the same time, the General Staff College courses of the 1920s and 1930s were attended by several generations of Regular Army officers who served in the First World War and would assume key army staff positions during the Second World War. The student officers could not help but imbibe the racist stereotypes that circulated throughout American society during the period. During General Staff College courses on the army’s preparation for war that were held in middle years of the 1930s, field-grade officers who later formed the division’s senior cadre received instruction on the employment of black troops from studies that reflected the racist attitudes of World War I commanders. Although it is unclear as to the impact the General Staff College courses had on the thinking of these Regular Army officers, most of the individuals who later held senior positions in the division had southern roots, had attended service academies, had fought in World War I as junior officers, and had virtually no experience dealing with African American troops.98 By evoking popular imagery regarding African Americans, the General Staff College courses also perpetuated the prevailing racial stereotypes regarding black servicemen in the minds of these officers.
Reforming the Army
The manpower mobilization studies, which created a rationale for revising World War I guidelines regarding black troops, also corresponded with descriptions of African American males that were put forth by civilian institutions and professions. As early as 1909, American psychologists had developed individual intelligence tests based on models established by Alfred Binet. By the beginning of the First World War, however, staff members of the psychology division of the army’s Medical Department had devised several intelligence tests to measure the recruit’s knowledge of various occupations as well as to screen out soldiers thought to have been unable to perform military duties.
Two of the most prominent psychologists in the army’s Medical Department and the Classification Division during the war were Lewis Terman and Walter Bingham. Terman, a Stanford University psychologist, had a longtime interest in the intelligence testing of African Americans. Between 1910 and 1918, he had revised Alfred Binet’s French-language intelligence test to examine the mental capacities of black children in the American Southwest and relied on the results to develop the army’s Alpha Tests for literates and Beta Tests for illiterates and non-English-speaking men during World War I. Both tests grouped inductees in eight classifications based on test scores measuring mental age. In 1919, Terman coauthored the National Intelligence Tests and the Stanford Achievement Tests, and after studying the intelligence of nearly fifteen hundred 10-year-old California youths, he determined that the average child had an intelligence quotient of 100.99 In a similar fashion, Bingham, a University of Chicago–trained psychologist, served as a consultant to the army’s Division on Personnel Classification from the summer of 1917 to the end of the war. As president of the Psychological Corporation and consultant to the Western Electric Company and the Personnel Research Federation during the 1920s and early 1930s, he worked to apply classification devices developed in the military service to American businesses, industry, and government agencies.100 By mid-1941, these intelligence standards and quantification methods had dominated American psychology and would remain in effect until the eve of World War II.101
In May 1940, as soon as President Roosevelt asked Congress to expand the armed forces, Adjutant General Emory Adams appointed an advisory committee to develop aids to appraise and classify military personnel and named Bingham as its chairman. Among the distinguished psychologists named to this group were C. C. Brigham, H. E. Garrett, L. J. O’Rourke, and M. W. Richardson. During the initial advisory council meetings held that summer, staff members discussed the classification problems the army faced. After listening to a report prepared by Marion Richardson of the Personnel Testing Section that outlined the specifications of the new test, the group proposed that the new general classification test be devised to include non-English-speaking recruits and illiterates and be administered to recruits reporting to army reception centers. In their 1940 revisions of the First World War standards, Bingham and other framers of the testing methods to be used during mobilization dropped such outdated intelligence terminology such as “mental age” and intelligence quotient. Shortly afterward, members of the army’s Personnel Research Section under the leadership of H. C. Holdridge and his executive officer Donald Baier constructed the first trial forms of what became known as the Army General Classification Test along with special tests for non-English-speaking recruits and women.102
Although a vast improvement over the Alpha examinations administered during the First World War, the AGCT reflected certain preconceptions that may have hampered its effectiveness. For example, the first AGCT test consisted of 150 multiple-choice questions and comprised sections that included the following: arithmetic reasoning, block counting, vocabulary, number sequences, synonyms and antonyms, all implying a certain degree of educational opportunity and a middle-class background. To make matters worse, members of the Personnel Section had scaled and standardized their testing methods by using a nonrandom sample that failed to take variables of race, socioeconomic status, and regional and cultural biases fully into account. When War Plans and Training Division psychologists administered the test to a sample composed of 3,790 Regular Army enlisted men, 600 CCC enrollees, and a few hundred graduate students and institutionalized men in September 1940, they collected results from white males between the ages of 20 and 29 who resided in the northeastern portion of the country, an area known for the highest rates of literacy in the nation. This collection method resulted in a skewed distribution of test results, adversely affecting the employment of black soldiers. For example, with 100 being the average score, nearly 75 percent of the sample had scored in the first three grades, while only 24 percent made scores in the last two grades.103
In contrast, because most black inductees came from communities that lacked adequate school facilities, many scored lower on the AGCT than did white inductees, occupying grades lower than the standardized scores gathered by army personnel technicians. For example, of the AGCT distribution of the 13,800 black soldiers who were assigned to the 93rd Division’s 368th, 369th, and 25th Infantry regiments during the fall of 1943, fewer than 1 percent obtained scores in Grade I, 4 percent were in Grade II, 14 percent were in Grade III, and a disproportionately high percentage fell into Grades IV and V.104
These low scores made an indelible impression in the mind of many army corps commanders and arms and service branch chiefs during the early stages of the Second World War as some army officers used the low AGCT scores of black recruits to confirm racist assumptions regarding black intellectual abilities as well as to substantiate their claims that blacks made poor soldiers. For example, a letter written by 3rd Army commander General Courtney Hodges to army ground forces chief Lesley McNair in April 1943 provides a window into the dominant beliefs that many white Regular Army officers held with respect to the training of black servicemen. During his observations of conditions of the 93rd Division at Fort Huachuca, Hodges noted that the “limited ability on the part of colored junior officers and the fact that 85.85 percent of the enlisted personnel are in grades IV and V constitutes a real training handicap.” “Experienced officers, who have served for extended periods with colored troops, estimate that it takes from 50 to 100 percent longer time to train colored troops than it does white,” he claimed.105
Some of the difficulties that these low scores posed to the employment of black troops did not escape the attention of members of the advisory committee, however. Examining the grade distribution of men processed through army reception centers in November 1941, Bingham and other committee members discovered some of the biases inherent in the War Department’s testing methods and used samples of black registrants to standardized subsequent versions of the AGCT. Realizing that the testing results might unfavorably affect training, Bingham and other members denied that the AGCT was an aptitude test and expressed fears that some nonpsychologists might use the test scores of black inductees as indicators of innate intelligence.106 Yet Bingham and other classification and replacement branch members contradicted their reservations when they linked the AGCT scores to job assignments. At reception centers scattered throughout the country, classification officers used the U.S. Employment Office’s Dictionary of Occupational Titles, which listed and defined nearly seventeen thousand different civilian jobs, occupations, and professions, to identify particular duties for black recruits after they received the results of their AGCT tests.107 Thus, the military job-classification process reproduced popular notions of work performed largely by African Americans in the civilian sphere.
Fighting for the “Right to Fight”
Between 1940 and 1941, as plans were being made for war, a combination of events occurred that exposed the Roosevelt administration to intense criticism from sectors of the black community. Despite the passage of the antidiscriminatory measures in the Selective Service Act, black leaders and intellectuals made the army’s racial policies a key issue during the 1940 presidential election year. In June, branch members of the NAACP from twenty states and the District of Columbia assembled at its annual conference held in Philadelphia, and much of the discussion was centered on the attitudes of blacks toward the armed forces and their relationship to African American equality. Among the distinguished individuals in attendance were William Hastie, Ruth Logan Roberts, Aubrey Williams, George Murphy Sr., and Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, a prominent District of Columbia physician and wife of the future 93rd Division member Claude Ferebee.108 There members listened to a speech given by association president Arthur Spingarn that declared, “Democracy will not and cannot be safe in America as long as 10 per cent of its population is deprived of the rights, privileges, and immunities plainly granted to them by the Constitution of the United States.” Spingarn viewed the military’s policies toward blacks as an extension of the racism in American society and stated: “We must unceasingly continue our struggle against the attempt to weaken the military strength of our country by eliminating from the military forces a tenth of our population.”109 Following the event, legal counsel Charles Houston urged association members to write letters to their representatives in Congress protesting the War Department’s racial polices.110
Two months later, Mary McLeod Bethune, an influential adviser in the National Youth Administration, reported that blacks were demanding the appointment of a black adviser to the secretary of war and warned the White House, “There is grave apprehension among Negroes lest the existing inadequate representation and training of colored persons may lead to the creation of labor battalions and other forms of discrimination against them in event of war.”111 From June to October of that year, black newspapers, especially the Pittsburgh Courier and the Baltimore Afro-American, carried editorials excoriating Roosevelt’s silence regarding discrimination against blacks in the armed forces and endorsed Republican Party presidential candidate Wendell L. Willkie—a well-known proponent of African American equality.112 For example, Baltimore Afro-American editor Louis Lautier noted the restrictions placed on African American recruits in the armed forces during a period when the volunteers were eagerly sought by the services, and he claimed that, “in this regard, President Roosevelt not only forgot us but he neglected us, deserted and abandoned us to our enemies.”113
After Congress passed the first Selective Service legislation in September 1940, members of the Socialist Workers Party’s Political Committee gathered at a national conference in Chicago and adopted a resolution rejecting the measure. “The system of Jim Crowism in the armed forces demonstrates very clearly to the Negro the hypocrisy of slogans about ‘war for democracy,’” they contended. Linking the status of blacks in the army to their social, economic, and political positions in civil society, party members criticized the Roosevelt administration’s failure to obtain greater representation for blacks in all branches of the armed forces. Roosevelt, they concluded, “cannot wipe out Jim Crowism in the armed forces without endangering the whole system of Jim Crowism practiced in civilian life—in industry, civil service, on relief, at the ballot booth, in housing, theaters, and restaurants.” “Stop using Negroes as laborers and lackeys,” they declared.114 Sentiments regarding black self-dignity also were prominent in the thoughts of Eugene Kinckle Jones, executive secretary of the National Urban League. In a fall letter to President Roosevelt, Jones pointed out that blacks’ views of the discriminatory policies in the armed forces were grounded in their acute awareness of their amorphous positions in American society. In unambiguous terms, Jones reminded the president “that no healthy morale can be maintained and no really secure democratic national defenses can be built which do not protect the self-respect of all groups in our population. The racial policy of the War and Navy Department has actually, in this respect, been a threat to democratic ideology.”115
While African Americans waged a constant struggle against the War Department’s discriminatory policies, generational and class divisions hampered their attempts at gaining equality in the army. During the NAACP annual meeting in 1940, members of the association’s youth delegation led by James H. Robinson elected to send Roosevelt a large postcard expressing their opposition to the impending conscription measure, the Burke-Wadsworth Bill, then being hotly debated in Congress. Their motion met with defeat when the organization’s parent body refused to lend its support, however.116 Intergenerational conflicts within the NAACP regarding the prospect of military service also surfaced in other areas. Two months later, a youth delegation led by National Negro Congress Youth Council secretary Louis Burnham, National Negro Congress finance secretary Julius Bostic, NAACP Student Conference chairman Anderson Davis, and Emergency Peace Mobilization Committee member Dorothy Strange appealed to Illinois congressman Arthur Mitchell for his support in their efforts to defeat the Burke-Wadsworth Bill. The youth leaders felt that the measure was discriminatory. Mitchell remained unconvinced, however. “You’re wrong,” he told the young leaders, adding that he would do all he could to see that the bill was passed.117
Meanwhile, members of the Operation and Training Division led by F. M. Andrews struggled secretly to adopt policies that would both quell potential discontent and continue its existing practices. In June 1940, G-3 staff members began to implement changes in the 1937 plan, increasing sizes of black combat units from battalions to regiments. But the G-3 called for the policy change because it felt that separate regiments would preempt demands by African American civilian organizations to create separate brigades of regiments and would greatly facilitate the army’s problem of absorbing black officers during mobilization. The problem of achieving an equitable balance between black combat and service personnel also occupied the attention of the G-3 division. Members felt that the only way to resolve the problem was to require other branches of the arms and services to expand the authorization of units composed of black personnel. “Otherwise, there will be an insufficient number of units in the War Department Protective Mobilization Plan to absorb the Negro Personnel procured by voluntary enlistment and through selective service,” the G-3 declared.118
Yet in their efforts to head off criticism from segments of African American society, War Department officials clashed over the policy changes. First, Andrews and other G-3 members exempted the Air Corps and the Signal Corps from the department’s expansion proposals after Army Air Corps commander General Henry H. Arnold raised reservations regarding the plan. An unreconstructed segregationist, Arnold grounded his objections in policy adopted by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that allowed black pilots to receive training in the Civil Aeronautics Authority at schools in Chicago and other facilities used by the Army Air Corps. Besides that, he expressed his belief that G-3’s manpower plan would disturb the division of labor within the army based on race and stir up racial antagonisms. “Negro pilots cannot be used in our present Air Corps Unit since this would result in having Negro officers serving over white enlisted men,” Arnold claimed. “This would create an impossible social problem.”119 Arnold also held preconceptions about blacks that made it difficult for him to envision them serving in units other than engineer, quartermaster, and service components. Linking reservations about blacks’ military efficiency to questions regarding their intellectual abilities, he told Andrews, “In order to organize an all-Negro Air Corps unit, it would take several years to train the enlisted men to become competent mechanics.”
Signal Corps chief Clyde Eastman echoed Arnold’s reservations. Eastman recommended against employing black servicemen in Signal Corps units because he felt that it would be next to impossible to obtain adequately trained personnel such as radio electricians, telephone electricians, and radio operators. Eastman pointed to the creation of segregated divisions, however, as a viable alternative, claiming that the Signal Corps could make exceptions in the event that such a unit was organized. Although he felt that only way blacks would assume their proportion of battlefield casualties was through the creation of all-black divisions, he also believed that properly trained personnel could not be secured for black divisional signal companies.120
The viewpoints held by Arnold and Eastman were also embraced by higher-ranking War Department officials. In a diary entry recorded at the time, Secretary of War Henry Stimson observed, “Leadership is not imbedded in the Negro race yet and to try to make commissioned officers to lead the men into battle—colored men—is to work disaster to both. Colored troops do very well under white officers but every time we try to lift them a little bit beyond where they can go, disaster and confusion follows. I hope for Heaven’s sake they won’t mix the white and the colored troops together in the same units for then we shall certainly have trouble.”121 Expressing very little confidence in black servicemen, Stimson warned President Roosevelt on numerous occasions of the danger of “placing too much responsibility on a race which was not showing initiative in battle.”122 General George Marshall, army chief of staff, also expressed his reservations about black soldiers, citing their “low intelligence averages” and the evaluations of World War I commanders of black units to claim that the difficulties that black soldiers faced resulted from a lack of confidence in their commissioned and noncommissioned officers.123
But several members of the War Department’s Personnel Division and the War Plans Division disagreed with Arnold’s and Eastman’s recommendations, arguing that black personnel should be employed in all branches of the arms and services, including the Air Corps and the Signal Corps. In drafting a reply to the G-3 assistant chief of staff, Brigadier General William Shedd argued that without black representation in the Air Corps the War Department would be hard pressed to obtain the proportion of black troops sought during initial mobilization.124 Brigadier General George Strong took exception to Arnold and Eastman’s claim that the Air Corps could not train black personnel, arguing that “Negro manpower can be as successfully employed in some capacities in both the Air Corps and the Signal Corps as it is in other Arms and Services.”125
As the summer faded into the fall months of 1940, the Selective Service Act and the presidential election campaign accentuated the dilemma within the Roosevelt administration. On 5 September 1940, President Roosevelt expressed his dismay over the attention that the army’s racial policies had drawn from black leaders and directed the War Department and the navy to prepare a statement publicizing the equal proportion of African Americans in the military.126 At a cabinet meeting held a week later, Secretary of War Stimson informed the president that plans had been developed by the G-3 to organize several new black regiments in the army and to accept 10 percent of the total African American population during the initial stages of mobilization. What followed Stimson’s announcement was a string of press releases aimed at assuring segments of the African American community that blacks would have proportional opportunities within the armed forces.127 This was significant because the press releases represented the first time that the War Departments policies regarding black participation in the event of an emergency had been revealed to the public.
But more important, these statements allowed War Department officials to claim that they promoted equal opportunity for blacks in the army when, in fact, they had no intention of abandoning their racial polices. After the 13 September meeting with Roosevelt, Stimson told the army General Staff that he wanted an “exact statement of the facts in the case and … how far we can go in the matter.”128 In a late September letter to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Marshall pointed out that, although political pressure had forced the Roosevelt administration to announce that African Americans would be accepted in the army on a proportional basis, the War Department’s policies had not changed. “It is the policy of the War Department not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organization.” “The present exceedingly difficult period of building up a respectable and dependable military force for the protection of this country is not the time for critical experiments, which would inevitably have a highly destructive effect on morale—meaning military efficiency,” he claimed.129
Although Roosevelt, during a conference held in late September 1940, had informed African American leaders Walter White, T. Arnold Hill, and A. Philip Randolph that black officers and enlisted men would be employed throughout the army and that black units would be organized in all branches of the armed services, he approved a press release prepared by Assistant Secretary of War Robert Patterson announcing the War Department’s racial policies.130 Left largely unrevised, the oblique policy regarding the status of black recruits would be carried forward into the following year with the creation of the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division.
The Making of the 93rd
Hastie’s recommendation for the provision of higher-level units for black officer personnel echoed what had been debated within the War Department for some time, however. The civilian aide had not been informed that the War Department had planned to create an all-black cavalry division early in 1941. However, the organization and training of the unit was hampered by the slow construction of facilities and the War Department’s adherence to racial segregation. Two months after William Hastie’s memorandum on black units was submitted to Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson, deputy chief of staff General William Bryden met with the undersecretary to discuss measures to be taken in connection with Hastie’s recommendations. Both men agreed with Hastie that new black units larger than regimental size were needed for the expansion of black cadres, pointing to the brigading of the famous 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments with the 2nd Cavalry Division as well as the creation of the 99th Pursuit Squadron and the development of all-black tank battalions as examples of the “new” types of organizations for African American officer personnel. “As expansion continues, this practice may be further extended if it is determined that the resulting divisional organizations would represent the strongest possible combinations of regiments,” they claimed. These events were significant because they represent a total revision of War Department’s policy studies that recommended against the formation of all-black divisions.
This new line of reasoning reached its fullest expression during a conference held between black editors and publishers of the Associated Negro Press and various representatives of the War Department on 8 December 1941, the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. During the opening stages of their roundtable discussions, the conferees heard Marshall state that, although he was displeased with the progress the War Department was making toward revising its racial policies, army planners had contemplated creating a number of all-black units in all branches of the army. He then went on to astonish them by stating that among those units that the army had under consideration was an African American infantry unit of division size to be composed of black officers and enlisted men. Marshall went on to inform them that the House of Representatives had already passed a bill sponsoring the measure and that newly constructed housing would be available for the unit by the early spring.131 By the end of January, Marshall’s announcement had become a reality with the expansion of Fort Huachuca to accommodate an additional twelve thousand troops. In turn, these additional numbers of conscripts were assigned to the 369th Infantry Regiment. Combined with the men of the 25th and 368th Infantry regiments, the unit formed the first all-black triangular unit in the army and was designated the U.S. 93rd Infantry Division.132
African American responses to Marshall’s remarks were mixed. Many black leaders had taken exception to the army chief’s statement, correctly claiming it was nothing short of outright racism. For example, in a letter to Marshall immediately following the conference, NAACP executive secretary Walter White berated the army chief of staff and argued that the War Department should instead create a volunteer division that, in his words, would be “open to all irrespective of race, creed, color, or national origin.” “The organization of such a division would serve as a tremendous lift to the morale of the Negro which at present is at a dangerously low ebb,” he contended.133 Some black newspapers, particularly the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Atlanta Daily World, also excoriated the War Department’s racial policy.134 For example, the Baltimore Afro-American, in an editorial entitled “Sweet Nothings to Twenty-four Editors,” claimed that the conference was a waste of time. “General Marshall,” the editorial claimed, “could have made that address in less than a minute and sent the editors back home with something worthwhile to print.”135 Some black leaders and newspapers, however, embraced Marshall’s idea. P. L. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier, for instance, applauded his announcement, arguing “that his present attitude, in the light of the past, represents an improvement due to greater knowledge of our problem and greater understanding.” What’s more, the editor also claimed that Marshall’s decision was largely due in part to the campaign waged by Robert Vann, the paper’s late editor, more than four years earlier.136
Although they represented different viewpoints, the remarks made by black press corps members reflected the extent to which African American public opinion had influenced the thinking of army officials. Because segregation was a key watchword within the War Department, army planners moved quickly to reconstitute segregated army divisions only when faced with the prospect of creating integrated units in all its branches. Yet questions among War Department officials about the input that African American society would have regarding the division’s training lay on the not-so-distant horizon. Obscured from the public view with respect to the reconstruction of the unit was the impact that prospective division members would have on their training. How black troops framed, interpreted, and shaped their realities in the barracks and on the parade fields would have as much to do with the War Department’s training policies as would their performances in the field. Indeed, Roosevelt administration officials and sectors of African American society had only begun to hear the voices of the young men who were swelling the ranks and whose views of military life presented fundamental challenges to the traditional army structure that they had come to know so well.
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