Whereas white residents of the boomtowns might have seen these conflicts as caused by the war, Negroes, long conditioned to racial enmity in close quarters, were weary of the same old battles. Blacks caught sitting in white sections of buses or trolleys, no matter how crowded, were subject to fines. More than a few violators were dragged off city buses, some beaten by police. Members of a ladies’ club called Les Femmes wrote a letter to the bus company complaining of the derogatory treatment their drivers routinely directed at Negro women. A bus driver on a route between Newport News and Hampton denied entry to Negro men in military uniform. Across the country, some equated the uniformed black soldiers with people who had stepped beyond their place, provoking slights and even violence against them.
Negro resistance to this injustice had been a constant ever since the first ship carried enslaved Africans to Old Point Comfort on Hampton’s shores in 1609. The war, however, and the rhetoric that accompanied it created an urgency in the black community to call in the long overdue debt their country owed them. “Men of every creed and every race, wherever they lived in the world” were entitled to “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, Roosevelt said, addressing the American people in his 1941 State of the Union address. He committed the United States to vanquishing the dictators who would deprive others of their freedom. Negroes joined their countrymen in recoiling at the horrors Germany visited upon its Jewish citizens by restricting the type of jobs they were allowed to hold and the businesses they could start, imprisoning them wantonly and depriving them of due process and all citizenship rights, subjecting them to state-sanctioned humiliation and violence, segregating them into ghettos, and ultimately working them to death in slave camps and marking them for extermination. How could an American Negro observe the annihilation happening in Europe without identifying it with their own four-century struggle against deprivation, disenfranchisement, slavery, and violence?
Executive Order 8802 and the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee brought about an upswell of optimism, with many in the black community hopeful that the gates of opportunity, finally opening, would never close again. But nearly three decades earlier, World War I had also been heralded as the event that would break the back of race prejudice. “With thousands of your sons in the camps and in France, out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights—the same as are enjoyed by every other citizen,” President Woodrow Wilson, a native Virginian, vowed to American blacks during the previous conflict. Even then, Negroes were ready to redeem their lives for their long overdue inheritance. But the military forbade them from serving with whites, deeming them mentally deficient for the rigors of combat. Most were attached to labor battalions, as cooks and stevedores, laborers and gravediggers. The few who clawed their way into the ranks of officers still encountered filthy toilets, secondhand uniforms, segregated showers, and disrespect from white soldiers. And a man who survived the dangers of the battlefield courted danger by walking the streets of his hometown in uniform.
Charles Hamilton Houston’s unyielding opposition to America’s institutionalized discrimination came in part from his experiences as a young soldier in France during World War I. The man who would become the NAACP’s top lawyer and the other colored soldiers in his regiment suffered endless abuse at the hands of white officers. Finally back in the United States, Houston and a friend, still in uniform, were returning home on a train when a white man refused to sit next to them in the dining car. “I felt damned glad I had not lost my life fighting for my country,” he remembered in a 1942 column published in the Pittsburgh Courier.
After the Civil War and during the Reconstruction era, the federal government had opened jobs to blacks, providing social mobility particularly for those from educated backgrounds. Civil service reform in the late nineteenth century reduced patronage and corruption and introduced a merit system that allowed blacks to get a foot in the door. During Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, however, the iron curtain of segregation fell on federal employment. A 1915 rule requiring a photo with every application made race a silent consideration for the final decision. From agencies as diverse as the Bureau of Engraving, the US Post Office, and the Department of the Navy, Wilson officials conducted a rout, purging the rolls of high-ranking black officials. Those who remained were banished to segregated areas or hidden behind curtains so that white civil servants and visitors to the offices wouldn’t have to see them.
The intransigence of the forces opposed to the Negro’s drive for equality was made almost unbearably plain in a 1943 comment by Mark Etheridge, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, who had served as the first head of Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee. “There is no power in the world—not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which would now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation,” said Etheridge, a white liberal often vilified for his support of Negro advancement. The system that kept the black race at the bottom of American society was so deeply rooted in the nation’s history that it was impervious to the country’s ideals of equality. Restaurants that refused to serve Dorothy Vaughan had no problem waiting on Germans from the prisoner-of-war camp housed in a detention facility under the James River Bridge in Newport News. The contradiction ripped Negroes asunder, individually and as a people, their American identities in an all-out, permanent war with their black souls, the agony of the double consciousness given voice by W. E. B. Du Bois in his illuminating book The Souls of Black Folk.
The most outspoken members of the community refused to internalize the contradiction, openly equating the foreign racists America was moved to destroy with the American racists it chose to abide. “Every type of brutality perpetrated by the Germans, in the name of race, is visited upon the Negro in our southland as regularly as he receives his daily bread,” said Vernon Johns, the husband of Dorothy Vaughan’s former colleague Altona Trent Johns. The “brilliant scholar-preacher” of Farmville had gained national renown for his eloquent sermons and maverick views on racial progress. His ideas were radical for the time. However, his no-compromise policy on racial slights of any sort would have a direct and indirect influence on the civil rights actions of the 1950s and 1960s.
Black newspapers—unabashedly partisan on issues pertaining to the Negro—refused to censor themselves, despite the federal government’s threat to level sedition charges against them. “Help us to get some of the blessings of democracy here at home first before you jump on the ‘free other peoples’ bandwagon and tell us to go forth and die in a foreign land,” said P. B. Young, the owner of the Norfolk Journal and Guide, in a 1942 editorial. As with all matters that pertained to the Negro’s safety, education, economic mobility, political power, and humanity, the black press put their readers’ mixed feelings about the war on full display.
James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: “Being an American of dark complexion,” wrote Thompson, “these questions flash through my mind: ‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ … ‘Is the kind of America I know worth defending?’ … ‘Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?’ These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believe every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know.”
What are we fighting for? they asked themselves and each other.
The question echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the auditorium at Hampton Institute’s Ogden Hall. It resounded in the sanctuaries of First Baptist and Queen Street Baptist and Bethel AME and thousands of black churches around the country. It hovered in the air at the King Street United Service Organization (USO) Club, one of many centers designed to keep home-front morale high; even the USO was segregated, with separate clubs for Negroes, whites, and Jews. It dominated the headlines of the Pittsburgh Courier, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and every other Negro newspaper in the country. The black community posed the question in private and in public, and with every possible inflection: rhetorically, angrily, incredulously, hopefully. What did this war mean for