A minority report

In its lucidly written detail, Half American is a valuable and eye-opening social history of the second World War from a uniquely different perspective

Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

Author: Matthew F Delmont

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 374

Price:  Rs 2,600

Tucked in almost unnoticed among the celebrities attending Barack Obama’s first presidential inauguration was a group of elderly African-Americans in military uniform. They were the survivors of the fabled Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-black fighter squadron in the American air force, that performed with flying colours over Italy during World War II.
 
Their presence at the inauguration of America’s first African American president was more than a token racial message. The Tuskegee Airmen were not just combatants in the battle to defeat Nazi Germany; they also represented African Americans’ long fight for racial equality.
 
It was a strange battle in the 1930s and 1940s. In the conflagration that engulfed the world, European powers enthusiastically mobilised their African and Asian subjects. In the US, the leading Allied combatant, one section of citizens had to fight for the right to participate. Their seminal contribution to the victory is largely ignored in post-war history and culture.
 
With Half American Matthew F Delmont, a historian specialising in the civil rights movement, hopes to redress that imbalance. As he writes, “Nearly everything about the war — the start and end dates, geography, vital military roles, home front and international implications — looks different when viewed from the African American perspective.” The book title is taken from a phrase in a letter sent to a newspaper by James Gratz Thompson, who was awaiting his call-up after Pearl Harbour, and framed the dilemma of every African American at the time:  “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American? …Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?”  
 
It is hard to miss the irony:  A country that was fighting against — so the official propaganda said — the racial injustice of Hitler’s regime, saw no contradiction in barring black Americans from serving in combat roles or even in the factories producing defence equipment to make the US the “arsenal of democracy”. Eight decades after the civil war, Jim Crow laws were firmly in place and lynchings and murders of blacks an accepted social practice, a depressing portrait of sanctioned majoritarian violence. As one newspaper wryly noted after the Nazis segregated Jews on German railways: “The practice of jim-crowism has already been adopted by the Nazis.”
 
Black Americans understood the larger implications of their struggle, which came to be known as the “Double V” campaign — victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. Ultimately, Dr Delmont tells us, over one million black men and women served in World War II and thousands worked in defence industries at home. To get there, they owed much to a generation of civil rights leaders such as the extraordinary Thurgood Marshall, the barnstorming lawyer for the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People , labour leader Philip Randolph and community organiser Ella Black.
 
It was Randolph’s idea to mobilise African Americans for a march on Washington in early 1941 to lobby for the right to “work and fight” for their country that resulted in a breakthrough of sorts. As the numbers for this rally swelled to over 100,000, Randolph kept up the pressure on the White House. Finally, President  Franklin D Roosevelt reluctantly signed Executive Order 8802 on July 25. This order forbade discrimination in defence industries and job training programmes and established a temporary agency called the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it.  Not that things changed overnight. As Dr Delmont records, southern lawmakers ferociously attacked EO 8802 and white workers across the country struck work or walked out when blacks were employed or promoted. Black soldiers were also routinely humiliated and attacked by their white colleagues  in army camps. One newspaper published an open letter to Roosevelt pointing to the inconsistencies between the high ideals of the Atlantic Charter and the reality of black discrimination in the US.
 
Pearl Harbour forced the US military to grudgingly accept blacks in combat capacities beyond their roles as labourers and stevedores, the Navy and the Marines being the last to do so. But such formations as the Tuskegee Airmen, 92nd Infantry Division, Montford Point Marines and the 761st “Black Panther” Tank Battalion were segregated units almost entirely commanded by white men.  A large number also served in critical support roles, such as the famous “Red Ball” transport network that maintained the Allied supply lines .  Dr Delmont chronicles the contribution of black servicemen and women in the major theatres of war — Europe and the Pacific but also in Burma-India-China, where they put in the grunt work to build the famous Ledo Road (though not mentioned here, so many African-Americans served here that ordinary Indians in the north-east initially thought all Americans were black).
 
Though post-war America didn’t change appreciably for blacks —Dr Delmont records the myriad injustices in the award of war-time honours and benefits to black veterans — the campaign for equal rights in the military marked a giant leap forward for the civil rights movement. It encouraged Harry Truman to order desegregation in the military and indirectly set the stage for the landmark Brown  vs Board of Education  (1954) verdict that ended segregation in schools. 
 
In its lucidly written detail, this book is a valuable and eye-opening social history of the war from a uniquely different perspective.