Jim Crow in Uniform

2021 ◽  
pp. 211-259
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Leaders ◽  
White House ◽  
Military Life ◽  
At Home

Chapter 6 examines the military’s black-white boundaries in the context of troops’ training and stateside service during World War II. These boundaries, the handiwork above all of military officers and leaders, wended their way through nearly every aspect of military life, creating a dense and powerful structure of white domination and black subordination—or in the words of one wartime commentator, “Jim Crow in Uniform.” In the eyes of its creators, this version of Jim Crow was necessary both to win a war for freedom overseas and to shore up faltering white supremacy at home, faltering in part because of the military’s own unwitting actions. As with its civilian cousin, Jim Crow in uniform generated extensive protest, which managed to blur a small but important number of black-white lines. The number would have been higher had protesters not faced formidable opposition in the White House, in Congress, in the courts, and among military leaders.

scholarly journals Jim Crow Democracy: The U.S. South and Racialized Policy-Making in the Aftermath of World War II

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 547-565
Author(s):  
Maarten Zwiers
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
World War ◽  
White Southerners ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
Post War ◽  
The U.S

Segregationist politicians from the U.S. South played key roles in devising plans for the reconstruction of Germany, the Marshall Plan and the drafting of displaced persons legislation. This article discusses how their Jim Crow ideology calibrated the global and domestic order that emerged from the ashes of World War II. Southern advocates of this ideology dealt with national and foreign issues from a regional perspective, which was based on the protection of agricultural interests and a nascent military-industrial complex, but above all, on the defence of white supremacy. In general, they followed a lenient course toward Germany after the country’s defeat in World War II, for various reasons. The shared experience of post-war reconstruction, containment of communism and feelings of kinship between the Germanic people and the Anglo-Saxons of the U.S. South were some of the motives why many white southerners did not endorse punitive measures against the former enemy. For them, an obvious connection existed between the local and the global, which strongly reverberated in the formation of U.S. foreign and domestic policy in the post-war world. The rebuilding of Germany and the fugitive question were shaped on the basis of a Jim Crow blueprint.

scholarly journals Civil Rights, World War II, and U.S. Public Opinion

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven White
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Attitudes ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
World War ◽  
Gunnar Myrdal ◽  
White Racial Attitudes

Scholars of American politics often assume World War II liberalized white racial attitudes. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the Southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not well verified empirically. A common flaw is the lack of attention to public opinion polls from the 1940s. Using the best available survey evidence, I argue the war's impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed. First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this generally does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal anti-lynching legislation actually seems to have increased during the war. Second, there is some evidence of racial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. White veterans were more supportive of anti-lynching legislation in the immediate postwar period, and they offered stronger support for black voting rights in the early 1960s. However, they were not distinguishable on many other issues, including measures of racial prejudice and attitudes toward segregation.

“We of the North were thoroughly wrong”

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond S. King ◽  
Rogers M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
New Era ◽  
The North ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
Over Time

This chapter talks about the complex patterns of racial alliances that emerged during the Jim Crow era. It shows that, shaped by the interactions of a wide range of groups, the patterns and practices of white supremacy during the Jim Crow years varied from state to state, town to town, even neighborhood to neighborhood, and shifted over time in differing ways in all these locales. Within this new era of American racial politics, diminished but determined racially egalitarian actors, groups, and institutions remained important players in American politics, and over time new ones emerged. From their own efforts, aided by changes in a range of domestic and international circumstances, they would gradually grow more powerful through the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, especially during and after World War II.

Cultures in Contact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
At Home

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

When Jim Crow met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain.

1989 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold L. Smith ◽  
Graham Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black American ◽  
World War

The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War, 1945–1948

2019 ◽  
pp. 117-163
Author(s):  
Melvyn P. Leffler
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Civilian Leaders ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Ferment

This chapter considers how the concept of national security evolved. It demonstrates that U.S. military officers and their civilian leaders did not think that the Kremlin was poised to engage in premeditated military aggression during the Cold War. They did not think Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to begin another war. They grasped Stalin's view of his own military vulnerabilities and intuited that he wished to avoid military conflict. Nonetheless, U.S. officials felt threatened. They felt threatened precisely because of the lessons they had learned from World War II itself and the definition of America's vital interests that waging World War II had taught them. They had learned that an adversary, or coalition of adversaries, that conquered other countries could assimilate their resources into their own military machine, wage aggressive war, and challenge America's vital interests. Although the Kremlin seemed unlikely to wage war, it nevertheless had the capacity to gain indirect leverage or control over many countries in Europe and Asia because of the political ferment, economic chaos, social strife, and revolutionary nationalist fervor that existed in the aftermath of war.

The Age of Segregation, 1900–1950

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-152
Author(s):  
Donald G. Nieman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Federal Government ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
World War ◽  
Civil Rights Organizations ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
The New Deal

This chapter argues that segregation generated organized opposition from African Americans and a small group of whites that challenged the system. Segregation was rigid, capricious, and designed to demonstrate white power. While it kept most blacks in menial positions, a small black middle class emerged that produced leaders who attacked Jim Crow. The organization leading the charge was the NAACP, which developed publicity, lobbying, and litigation campaigns. The effort gained steam in the 1930s, as a cadre of black lawyers challenged segregated education, the CIO and the Communist party championed civil rights, and the New Deal gave blacks a voice in federal policy. It further accelerated during World War II as the federal government challenged workplace discrimination, membership in civil rights organizations swelled, black veterans demanded their rights, and the Supreme Court became more aggressive on civil rights.

Agriculture and Rural Life in the South, 1900–1945

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Thomas Okie
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Crop Agriculture

The period from 1900 to 1945 was characterized by both surprising continuity and dramatic change in southern agriculture. Unlike the rest of the nation, which urbanized and industrialized at a rapid pace in the late nineteenth century, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and poor, from the 1880s through the 1930s. But by 1945, the region was beginning to urbanize and industrialize into a recognizably modern South, with a population concentrated in urban centers, industries taking hold, and agriculture following the larger-scale, mechanized trend common in other farming regions of the country. Three overlapping factors explain this long lag followed by rapid transformation. First, the cumulative effects of two centuries of land-extensive, staple crop agriculture and white supremacy had sapped the region of much of its fertility and limited its options for prosperity. Second, in response to this “problem South,” generations of reformers sought to modernize the South, along with other rural areas around the world. These piecemeal efforts became the foundation for the South’s dramatic transformation by federal policy known as the New Deal. Third, poor rural southerners, both black and white, left the countryside in increasing numbers. Coupled with the labor demands created by two major military conflicts, World War I and World War II, this movement aided and abetted the mechanization of agriculture and the depopulation of the rural South.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document