Divisions, Half-Americans, and Separations

Dr. Melissa Esmacher: In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling striking down the consideration of race in admissions in higher education in two related cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina. However, the Supreme Court majority upheld one exception where race could be considered in admissions: the United States service academies. The majority opinion, in a footnote, ruled that the branches of the armed forces might have “distinct interests” in considering race in admission. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in the dissent, further elaborated why the Supreme Court exempted the service academies from its ruling striking down consideration of race in admissions:

Indeed, history teaches that racial diversity is a national security imperative. During the Vietnam War, for example, lack of racial diversity “threatened the integrity and performance of the Nation’s military” because it fueled “perceptions of racial/ethnic minorities serving as ‘cannon fodder’ for white military leaders.”… Based on “lessons from decades of battlefield experience,” it has been the “longstanding military judgment” across administrations that racial diversity “is essential to achieving a mission-ready” military and to ensuring the Nation’s “ability to compete, deter, and win in today’s increasingly complex global security environment.”(1)

While Justice Sotomayor cites the Vietnam War as an example, concerns over a lack of diversity threatening national security actually go back earlier. Since the American Revolution in the late 1700s, the U.S. had segregated people of color, especially African Americans, into separate units usually led by white officers. Some branches at various times even completely barred people of color from serving. The U.S. armed forces were officially desegregated via Executive Order 9981 issued by President Harry Truman in 1948, with World War II serving as a catalyst to make this change. Traditionally, discussions of the desegregation following World War II rightly credit activists who pushed for this change. But not many histories focused on the attention the government paid to the impact of racial discrimination on national security. While at the National Archives as part of my 2019-2020 Mellon Fellowship research project, I stumbled across a folder labeled TOP SECRET that had once occupied the personal safe of Secretary of War Henry Stimson during World War II.  The file was about issues of discrimination against servicemen of color at U.S. armed forces bases, including Fort Bliss in El Paso. I was intrigued by the fact that discrimination in the armed forces was being considered this way by the national government. The project that my student research assistant Jaime Sparks and I are embarking on for the 2024-2025 collaborative project aims to look more closely at the issue of racial discrimination and national security during World War II. At times, tensions over racism spilled over violence on U.S. bases and they towns they occupied, including in El Paso at Fort Bliss, which I studied in my prior project.

The first step of researching anything in history is to familiarize yourself with the topic’s background and the secondary source literature. So the beginning of our project in Summer 2024 was getting Jaime oriented to the history of World War II, and specifically the subject of segregation in the armed forces.

Jaime Sparks: Our beginning research on this project began with reading the acutely relevant books Divisions by Thomas. A. Guglielmo and Half-American by Matthew F. Delmont. The first book, Divisions, was by far the more detailed and research-driven of the two, a definitive gold mine for incidents across America for us to delve into. As an individual who only had very broad and general knowledge about America on the home front during World War II, Divisions educated me on very key moments in American history that I previously did not know about. This project coincided perfectly with my academic career as I finished my U.S. History to 1877 course in the spring semester and began U.S. History since 1877 in the fall semester. The biggest takeaway was the apparent realization of just how racially segregated America was in this time period, something that was glossed over in previous academic settings for me. While many are aware that racial discrimination through Jim Crow laws existed up until the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not clear and obvious to me that the armed forces would have followed suit during World War II. Despite occurring over 80 years ago, the propaganda for supporting the war at home by presenting a surface-level unified front proves to still be insidiously effective in the present time. I was placed in a position where I had to face this fact and quickly change my previous understanding of America and race during World War II. 

A more academically valuable read, Divisions lays out activists’ struggles in their continued battle to push the government to be more racially inclusive and treat them as full citizens. The most perplexing plea told in every chapter was the full-chested cry of black and non-white civilians that wanted the opportunity to show their love and dedication to our country by volunteering to put their lives on the line, only to have the door shut in their faces at every turn simply because of the color of their skin. In a war where bodies counted enough to require a draft, racism shows itself to be so baffling that it becomes comical as army officials would prefer to scrape the bottom of the white draft barrel than consider racial integration of the armed forces. Divisions made pointed distinctions between the struggles blacks faced in comparison to other non-white enlistees and the effects that had on morale, efficiency, and race relations between soldiers of all races. Out of the two, Divisions gave us plenty of threads to follow as it contained numerous cited accounts of riots, government-sanctioned segregation, and even official reports and memos.

In contrast, Half-American takes on a more traditional storytelling role that sweeps the reader up in the military coup in Spain in 1936 through the eyes of American journalists on site right from the get-go. Half-American focuses more on the triumphant stories of heroic black soldiers like the Tuskegee Airmen and their rise to fame; something Divisions did not focus on. A surprisingly pointed difference between the two texts was that Half-American explicitly discussed the crucial jobs black soldiers performed as part of the Merchant Marine, the supply lines across the Atlantic, and one of the few racially integrated crews. This was something that, as I read on, I was shocked to see such a detailed text as Divisions virtually overlook as their part in the armed forces proved to be crucial to American success and was a role where they served honorably in the face on constant danger. While written in a more romantic tone, Half-American helped cover critical portions of the European theatre for black soldiers and their experiences. 

Combined, these two books provided a crucial background and understanding of the race relations in America leading up to and during World War II. They paint a picture of a racially divided country trying to put on a facade of unity to the rest of the world in the hopes that other countries won’t notice and the absurd desire that soldiers of all races will play nice with each other with no governmental encouragement to do so. Both books proved to be an excellent starting point outside of a general updated knowledge of World War II to fully grasp the tense racial situation in America, and while beyond the scope of our research project, it set the clear stage for the Civil Rights movement that followed. 

Dr. Melissa Esmacher: The next steps for our project include diving into primary sources in databases and archives. Along the way, we have also been examining how segregation in the armed forces has been depicted in popular culture – a topic for our next blog post!

Dr. Melissa Esmacher, Faculty Fellow, and Jaime Sparks, Student Fellow 2024-2025

El Paso Community College, The Humanities Collaborative at EPCC-UTEP

References

1.      Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, Syllabus, 20-1199 and 21-707 (2023) (Sotomayor, J., dissenting)

Banner Image Credit

Activated Oct. 15, 1942, at Fort McClellan, Alabama

NARA and DIVDS Public Domain Archive

https://nara.getarchive.net/media/activated-oct-15-1942-at-fort-mcclellan-alabama-8966b2