“Highway to Freedom”: African Americans in World War II China, the Gillem Board, the Ledo Road and U.S. Racial Integration

2012 ◽  
pp. 225-234
Author(s):  
Geraldine H. Seay
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
World War

“We Just Can’t Afford to Be Democratic”: Liberals, Integrationists, and the Postwar Suburb of Park Forest

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 330-357
Author(s):  
Will Cooley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
World War ◽  
Melting Pot ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Open Housing ◽  
American Friends Service Committee

Abstract Park Forest, Illinois, emerged as a prototype suburb in the post–World War II era. Scholars have devoted considerable attention to Park Forest but have not thoroughly explored the efforts of the American Friends Service Committee to integrate this village outside of Chicago in the 1950s. Philip Klutznick, the lead developer of Park Forest, advertised the suburb as a melting pot for a new America, drawing the interest of open housing advocates wanting to include African Americans in this mix. Klutznick and most villagers resisted racial integration, but activists persisted, and by the mid-1960s, the suburb became an interracial community. The exhausting and intricate efforts to realize and sustain integration, however, demonstrated the struggles of the open housing campaign.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Kori A. Graves
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Adopted Children ◽  
Transnational Adoption ◽  
World War ◽  
Birth Mothers ◽  
Adoptive Family ◽  
Displaced Children

The introduction provides a brief history of the development of US domestic adoption, and African Americans’ roles in US and transnational adoption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the professionalization of adoption in the United States largely evolved around the needs of birth mothers, children, and adoptive parents who were white, African Americans’ efforts to care for orphaned and displaced children through formal and informal adoptions has been underappreciated. The introduction describes the ways African Americans adopted children in the United States and, after World War II, foreign-born children of African American soldiers. This approach provides a foundation for understanding how African Americans’ participation in Korean transnational adoption was similar to their domestic adoption efforts and their efforts to adopt World War II GI children. It also suggests reasons why efforts to increase the professionalization and standardization of Korean transnational adoption reduced African Americans’ participation in this method of adoptive family formation.

scholarly journals The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History

1999 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Southern Region ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Communism ◽  
The 1960S

This address urges Americanists to take the post–World War II era on board as economic history, using the Civil Rights Revolution to set an example. The speed and sweepof the movement's success illustrates the dynamics of an “unanticipated revolution” as analyzed by Timur Kuran, to be grouped with famous historical surprises such as the triumph of British antislavery and the fall of Soviet communism. The evidence confirms that the breakthroughs of the 1960s constituted an economic as well as a political revolution, in many respects an economic revolution for the entire southern region, as well as for African-Americans.

Promises of Citizenship

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. German
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Central Question ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Mobilization ◽  
Shed Light

Considering their historically marginalized place in American democracy, one wonders why African Americans bothered to fight in any American conflict. This conundrum is especially perplexing in World War II, a war to free millions from tyranny. Scholars have neglected to ask the fundamental question; why did the African American community send thousands of men to fight for a democratic way of life in which they could not fully participate? The answers to this question, and there are undoubtedly multiple responses, may shed light on contemporary quandaries–situations that involve military mobilization for the good, not of the whole society, but of narrow constituencies. This is the central question of this book. The chapters explore the cultural context where citizenship for African Americans was negotiated through military service.

African Americans in the City Since World War II

1995 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 458-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Kusmer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
The City

Race and Relevance: Arthur Garfield Hays and the Integration of the American Bar Association, 1938-1943

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F Hamm
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Issue ◽  
The Press ◽  
Bar Association ◽  
Do So

Abstract This article explores the role of Arthur Garfield Hays and mostly Jewish lawyers in dismantling the American Bar Association’s prohibition of African Americans becoming members. By publicly resigning from the organization and encouraging others to do so over the ABA’s treatment of African-American applicant Francis Rivers, these lawyers made the color bar a public issue in the press. While earlier efforts in the late 1930s had failed, World War II contributed to the success of the activists’ campaign in the early 1940s, as the struggle against Nazi racism had begun to undercut American racial practices. In August 1943 the ABA changed its procedures governing admission that had previously functioned to exclude African-Americans. Other legal professional organizations soon followed its example. Thus the legal profession refashioned itself into part of the liberal order emerging in the wake of World War II.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document