Transcript of interview of Prof. Matthew Delmont about "Half American" - Washington Post

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Transcript: Race in America: History Matters with Matthew F. Delmont
November 3, 2022


MR. CAPEHART: Good morning. I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor of The Washington Post. Welcome to Washington Post Live and another in our series on Race in America co-produced with the “Capehart” Podcast. In a 1942 letter to the editor of the nation’s largest Black newspaper, a Black man named James G. Thompson asked, “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?” That intriguing question guided Matthew Delmont’s research for his latest book entitled Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad." And joining me now is historian and author Matthew Delmont. Professor Delmont, welcome to “Capehart” on Washington Post Live.

MR. DELMONT: Thanks, Jonathan. It's great to be here.

MR. CAPEHART: So, let's start with that question from James G. Thompson where he asked, "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American." Explain what being, quote, "half American" means in this context and how that question guided your research for this book.

MR. DELMONT: So, James Thompson was a 26-year-old from Wichita, Kansas. And he writes that letter to the Pittsburgh Courier in December 1941, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thompson knows that he and other Black Americans are about to be drafted in the military, but at the time, the entire U.S. military is segregated. And so he's asking, when he says, "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American," is what does it mean for him and other Black Americans to be drafted into a country and a military that's fully segregated, that doesn't yet treat them as full citizens. The Pittsburgh Courier uses Thompson's letter to launch double victory campaign, which becomes the rallying cry for Black Americans during the war. They're fighting for both victory over fascism abroad, but also a victory over racism at home.

And for me, the reason I ended up titling the book "Half American" is because those words just stuck with me: "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?" I think that sentiment that Thompson was asking about remains relevant today, some eight decades later.

MR. CAPEHART: And there are more questions in that letter, including this one that also jumped out at me: "Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life? Is the kind of America I know worth defending?" You talked about the double victory--the double victory campaign. I would love for you to talk more about that and why that was--why that had such an impact on African Americans then.

MR. DELMONT: So the double victory campaign was powerful because for Black Americans, they recognized that it wasn't just a military battle. Black Americans were among the first to recognize the really dire threat that Hitler and the Nazis posed to the world. If you look at a Black newspaper from the 1930s, you would see dozens and dozens of articles and editorials talking about the rise of fascism in Europe. And so African Americans were among the first in the country to recognize that this wasn't just a problem for Europe, but it was really a problem the United States as well, and that eventually, the U.S. was going to be drawn into this world war. So even years before Pearl Harbor, Black Americans are already ready to fight World War II. And so Black Americans recognized that that fight against fascism abroad was important. They recognized the military aspect of the battle.

But at the same time, Black Americans are living in a country that essentially condones racial apartheid in the United States. Across the Jim Crow South, Black Americans are subject to the lynching, other forms of violence. There's discrimination across all aspects of the country, whether it's New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. And so, for Black Americans, they recognize that it can't just be a military victory, it can't just be enough to defeat the Axis powers, but they have to come home and secure the same kind of freedom and democracy they're fighting for abroad at home. And that's why I think that idea of the double victory campaign is so powerful, is because Black Americans really saw these as intertwined struggles, that they absolutely believed in the military aspects, that they had to defeat fascism. But they recognized that it didn't do any good to defeat Nazism if white supremacy remained the order of the day at home.

MR. CAPEHART: Can I just take a little aside here? Because when I--when I read this in your book, I kept thinking about those of us--you know, Black journalists at newspapers and television stations during the 2015--during the 2016 presidential campaign, but who were watching Donald Trump during his campaign in 2015, and we were saying and writing, trying to raise the alarm about, hey, listen to what this guy is saying, take him seriously and being told--and I've heard from other colleagues in other news outlets where they were like, oh, you're being hyperbolic, oh, you're overreacting. And well, we all know what happened. I would love to get your thoughts on that--basically, African Americans being the not just canaries in the coal mine--coal mines, but also just sort of, in a wild way clairvoyant in being able to spot things that a lot of people can’t.

MR. DELMONT: And it's a great connection, and I commend you and other Black journalists for fighting the good fight on that. And I think what you're pointing to is there's a long legacy, particularly within the Black press of calling threats to democracy out. I think that's what's so powerful about the Black press as a source, particularly for this book--I relied on the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News--that these Black newspapers, they were clear eyed about the threats that Nazis imposed abroad, but they're also clear eyed about the connections between that rise of fascism in Europe and the kind of racial discrimination Black Americans encountered at home. And so if you go back and look at these Black newspapers from 1930s and 40s, the headlines, editorials were clear. There was no dancing around the topic. When they saw racism, when they saw the white supremacy, they called it out, whether that was internationally or at home.

I think the legacy of that is one that the media would do well to learn from today. The Black press was described as a fighting press, because it was always clear what side they were on. They were fighting for real freedom and democracy in the United States, particularly for Black Americans. I think one of the challenges we see in the media today is it's too easy to fall in the trap of playing both sides of an issue where if you report on how one person views the thing and how someone else views the thing, you’ve done your job. But we know historically that when threats to democracy are posed, we have to--have to call them out by the name.

MR. CAPEHART: Yeah, let's talk more about just who these Black folks in the military were and the jobs that they--that they did. What were some of the different tasks that Black men and women were assigned during the war?

MR. DELMONT: So, one thing that’s important to remember is the entire military is segregated in WWII. At the start of the war, the Marine Corps doesn't allow any Black men or women to serve at all. That’s not until a couple years into the war that you get the Montford Point Marines, the first Black Marines in the Marine Corps. Within the Army, by and large Black troops were not allowed to participate in combat for infantry units. Later in the war, there were a number of Black units that participated in combat. But generally speaking, the more than a million Black Americans who served in the military, in the Army, they were in supply and logistical roles. And so they played really important roles behind the scenes in terms of loading and unloading ships, driving trucks, clearing jungles, building runways, a lot of the kind of grueling backbreaking labor that isn't glamorous. It's not the kind of stuff that shows up in Hollywood films. But it was the really vital work that helped to win the war.

Within the Navy, initially, Black men and women are only allowed to serve--Black men are only allowed to serve as mess attendants, where they’ll essentially wait on and serve White officers. And what's important about that is that these were technically non-combat roles. But of course, if you're on a Navy ship or a submarine, and Nazi submarines start firing at you, you're at war. And so some of the greatest heroes from WWII among Black Americans were mess attendants, so folks like Doris Miller in the battle of Pearl Harbor. Even though he wasn't trained on his ship’s machine guns, once the battle started, once Japanese bombers started bombing his ship, he went above board, grabbed one of the guns, and started firing back at these Japanese ships.

So, what’s inspiring about the stories of Black service during WWII is, the military did almost everything they could to try to denigrate Black patriotism and Black service. But despite all of that, Black Americans served their country proudly and played really important roles in helping American allies win the war.

MR. CAPEHART: So probably the most famous of the WWII Black American soldiers are the Tuskegee Airmen. But one thing I didn't know was about an integrated unit of Black Marines and the roles they played in Saipan and Iwo Jima. Talk about that.

MR. DELMONT: Yeah, so as I just mentioned, at the start of the war, the Marine Corps doesn't allow any Black men to serve in the Marines, and that's discouraging. It's an affront to the patriotism of Black Americans who have participated in every military conflict the United States has ever been a part of. But through persistent activism and protest, eventually the Marine Corps starts an experimental unit called the Montford Point Marines training in my Montford Point, in North Carolina. That unit trains for two years stateside, and then eventually deploys to the Pacific theater, where they play a really important role at the Battle of Saipan and Battle of Iwo Jima. What was important about their service there is that they helped to fill out the Marine Corps’ forces, that these were battles that extended much longer than military planners anticipated. And so they really needed the Montford Point Marines there on the ground doing the work that they were doing.

What was also important in terms of the larger story of the war is that they earned the respect of their White Marine comrades and the Marine Corps leadership that initially at the start of the war, the people who were in charge of Marine Corps, they didn't want anything to do with Black Americans. But by 1944, after these Montford Point Marines have demonstrated what they can do in combat, then the commandant of the Marines says these are Marines fully, that they've proven themselves as Marines. That's really an important turning point because it helps one of the most entrenched branches of the military, one that was most reticent to accept Black Americans, it helps them finally see that Black Americans can play a really important role in combat and helps open the door to later desegregation of the military.

MR. CAPEHART: One hero in this book, I think people know from one aspect of his life--and I'm thinking of--I'm talking about Medgar Evers, who's a hero of the civil rights movement. We know about his later work, but he was in the military. He earned, as you write, two Bronze Stars on the beachhead of Normandy, in northern France. He celebrated his 21st birthday in 1946 by leading a group of Black veterans who attempted to register to vote in Decatur, Mississippi, but he was turned away by a White mob with guns. Talk about the fullness of Medgar Evers, maybe how his service in the military informed his civil rights service once he got home.

MR. DELMONT: Medgar Evers’ story really encapsulates the much broader African American experience during the war. So, he actually drops out of high school when he's 17 and volunteers for the Army. He enlisted in 1943, and by 1944, his unit deploys to Normandy. They arrive in Normandy just days after the D Day invasion in June of 1944. He's part of the 325th Port Battalion. And so the kind of work he was doing was indicative of the really important supply and logistical work that other Black troops did. His unit was in charge of unloading allied ships, taking off ammunition, other supplies, and then loading them onto trucks. They loaded them onto trucks called the Red Ball Express, which was a group of Black truck drivers who drove supplies all across Europe after D Day and truly what made it possible for the Allies to push into Germany in those months after the D Day invasion. And so it really helped lay the groundwork for the kind of campaign that the frontline combat troops were able to make. Without the work of these supply units, allied troops couldn't move, shoot, or eat. And Medgar Evers is one of thousands of black Americans playing this kind of on the ground role there.

What Evers ends up saying, though, is that when he’s in France, it opens up his eyes to what's possible. Encountering White people in France, he says was the first time he ever felt like he was treated fully as a human by a White person. And it was radically different than what he encountered when he was in Mississippi. And so he's only 19 at the time. When he comes back at the end of the war, he went back to Mississippi and dedicates his life to fighting for civil rights because he sees another world is possible, another way of engaging across racial divides as possible.

As you just noted, though, he encounters intense resistance in Mississippi. That whole generation of Black veterans, they come back and start fighting for civil rights. But too often, particularly in the South, they encounter White citizens who want to make sure that that system of Jim Crow segregation is maintained, that those racial hierarchies are maintained. So, 1946, on his 21st birthday, Evers leads a group of Black veterans to try to register to vote in Decatur, Mississippi, but they’re turned away by a White mob with guns, which I think encapsulates the real pressure that was going on in those years immediately following the war. Black veterans had just fought for their country, they risked their lives, they wanted the opportunity to be full citizens, they want to go to vote, but they still weren't allowed to vote in most parts of the South.

In Mississippi, for example, less than 1 percent of Black adults were registered to vote because of decades of discrimination and intentional racial violence and intimidation. Whatever Evers later says about that incident of trying to register to vote is that, you know, he and other Black troops had been in Omaha Beach, they had fought for America, including Mississippi and after all that, after the Germans hadn't killed them, it looked like White Mississippians would.

Evers continues to dedicate life to civil rights. He takes on increasingly important roles in the NAACP in Mississippi till the 1950s. He helps investigate the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955. And then he keeps fighting for civil rights and voting rights until he's tragically assassinated in 1963.

And I think the final two points I would add here would be the killer of Medgar Evers was Byron De La Beckwith, who himself was a military veteran. And in fact, it's his fingerprints on his registration for the Marine Corps that helps to lead to his eventual capture and arrest, and also the decades-long advocacy by Myrlie Evers-Williams, Medgar’s widow. And the last piece I would add is Evers is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

And so it's where I conclude one of the chapters about the homecoming of Black troops, that for me, when we tell the story of Medgar Evers, tell the story about how he dedicated his life to civil rights and how the whole generation of Black veterans fought for civil rights, we think about how he's buried at Arlington National Cemetery. When we think about what it means to be an American, we should be thinking about people like Medgar Evers, because he truly gave everything in his life to make America a better place.

MR. CAPEHART: Indeed, he did. And listening to you recount just the fullness of his life there--his military service and his civil rights service--I'm sitting here thinking, how galling must it have been for those soldiers to live the life they were living here in the country, go overseas to fight for this country, and be proud to do it in a lot of instances--conflicted, let's just be clear--but proud to serve their country only to come back and be treated worse than they were on the battlefield. I would love to hear from you just any stories, any evidence you have of soldiers just opening up their hearts to what it meant to them to come back to the United States and to be treated so horribly.

MR. DELMONT: I should say this was a difficult book to write for that reason, to read these stories, to listen to the oral history interviews of Black veterans and the utter disrespect they encountered when they returned to the country. Stories Black veterans shared was that when they got back to the country, there weren't parades for them. In fact, when they got off ships, they were directed to go to the Black only section of town--right?--that they immediately came back to segregation. They were in some cases threatened and attacked while still wearing their military uniforms. In the book, I recount that at least 12 Black World War II veterans were killed immediately after the--in the years immediately after the war, in part because they were starting to fight for civil rights, and that the communities they came back to, the White communities, didn't want anything to do with that. They wanted to maintain the status quo in the racial hierarchy.

I think what's inspiring about the stories of these Black veterans is that they didn't give up, that they were truly fighting for America, not only in the military sense, but fighting for the country to be a better version of itself to actually have real freedom and democracy for everyone in the United States. And I hope more than anything with the book that I've tried to do justice to the service of these Black veterans, because they truly are--if we're going to use the term "the Greatest Generation," I think they truly are members of the greatest generation.

One of the stories that stuck with me was an oral history interview with a man named Robert P. Madison. He was a member of the 92nd Infantry Division who fought in Italy and earned a Purple Heart in combat there. After the war, he comes back, he uses the GI Bill to earn architectural degrees from Case Western and from Harvard University. He ends up opening a pioneering architectural firm in Cleveland, Ohio. In his 70s or 80s, he goes to a bookstore--and he's telling the story. He says he goes to bookstore, goes to the great shelf of books on WWII, he takes a book off the shelf. It’s a great big book, flips through it, and sees no reference at all to the work of Black soldiers during the war. And his quote which stuck with me said, "We were a forgotten group of people."

And I think for us today, when we think back to WWII, it's too easy--particularly for White Americans, it’s too easy to think about that time being a period of racial unity when somehow the country was more united than we are today. But the reality is, that just isn't true. During WWII, the United States was deeply divided in terms of race. In 1943, there were more than 240 race riots or racial clashes all across the country. And so I think we think about the relevance of this history today, we need to understand that America has been trying to reckon with this history of racism and racial discrimination for decades and decades, and we have to include WWII as part of that story.

MR. CAPEHART: You know, you just mentioned the GI Bill there, talking about--I believe you said Mr. Robert P. Madison. And that gets to an audience question that I want to bring up as part of talking about the larger issue of the GI Bill. Craig Howell from here in Washington, D.C., asks was the GI Bill of Rights deliberately written to exclude as many Black veterans as possible?

MR. DELMONT: That's a good question. And so if you look at the language of the GI Bill, it never explicitly says that it's going to discriminate against Black troops. It uses what we would now call colorblind language. But when you look back at the records, it was intentionally written to be distributed at the state and local level. And so it comes through committees that are dominated by southern segregationist politicians. And it's important because everyone at the time recognizes that if you do things at the federal level, it means that there's a chance that it will be distributed equitably, that you’ll actually have the federal backing to make sure that everyone has equal access to these benefits. But if you distribute it at the state and local level, that means that different states and localities can use their local preferences and their local race laws to be able to determine who does and does not get these benefits. And so the fact that the southern segregationist senators made sure that it was distributed at the state and local level does mean that it was intentionally set up in a way that everyone knew it was going to discriminate against Black veterans.

And that's what happened. If you look at the years immediately following the war, Black veterans weren't able to get these VA-backed mortgages at the same rate that White veterans were. They weren't able to use the college tuition benefits at the same rate that White veterans were. And they weren't able to get the job placement benefits at the same rate that White veterans were. The GI Bill is perhaps the most important piece of legislation in the 20th century. It's what helped White veterans and their families move into the middle class. But for thousands and thousands of Black veterans, they weren't able to access those benefits in the same way.

And that has real repercussions today. There's a group at Brandeis University that's calculated what this means in terms of everyday funds today. And they found that on average Black veterans’ benefits, GI benefits from WWII, were only worth about 40 percent of those that White veterans received. Over a lifetime, that's about $100,000 difference. And so when we look at the vast racial wealth gap that exists in the country today, a lot of that can be traced back to the GI Bill and the discrimination that was written into it.

MR. CAPEHART: And in fact, you also say that this lack of access to GI Bill benefits prevented the country from benefiting from a whole generation of Black professionals.

MR. DELMONT: Exactly. I think it's an important point to not get lost, in the story of the GI Bill, is that while the vast majority of African Americans met discrimination when they tried to access the GI Bill benefits, there were thousands and thousands of Black Americans who were able to use the GI Bill. I mentioned Robert Madison earlier. He used it to earn architectural degrees. Dovey Johnson Roundtree, who was a woman in the Women's Army Corps, used the GI Bill to earn a law degree from Howard University. And she opens up a law firm in Washington, D.C., and wins very important civil rights cases in 1950s and '60s. There are dozens of stories like that, that Black veterans who were able to use the GI Bill, use it to do tremendous, tremendous things. And so I think beyond just the overt discrimination, there's also an opportunity cost to the country, that if we imagine the GI Bill had been distributed equitably to Black veterans, we would have had a whole nother generation of Black engineers and lawyers and doctors and teachers that we didn't have because of discrimination there.

MR. CAPEHART: You write this--your book is all about Black men and women who were part of the military. We've talked a little--we've talked about the journalists who are at home writing about Germany and the war and what was happening with fascism. But you also--you also include Thurgood Marshall and Langston Hughes. They are part of this story. Why include them? Why was it important for you to include them in this book?

MR. DELMONT: What I think is so important about looking at WWII from the African American perspective is that it really forces you to bring together the home front aspects of the story and the military aspects of the story, what was happening abroad. So, Thurgood Marshall is best known as the first Black Supreme Court justice. But during the war, he's the head of the NAACP’s legal branch. And his job is to travel all across the country to investigate these cases of violence against Black troops. One of the things that a lot of people might not realize is that when Black troops got sent to the army training bases, particularly in the U.S. South, they encountered intense, intense violence, both on base and off base. Things got so bad that Black troops were writing to the NAACP and to other Black newspapers and saying we would feel safer if we actually deployed to the European theater or the Pacific theater than we feel on these military bases in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.

And so it's Thurgood Marshall's job to investigate those and to try to hold military leaders to account, to force them to actually do something about it. And so the kind of work he does during the war really lays the foundation for the civil rights career he has afterwards with Brown versus Board and everything that comes after it.

With Langston Hughes, he is in the first chapter of the book because he was a war correspondent beyond being an acclaimed poet. He was a war correspondent for The Baltimore African American. He travels to Spain in 1937 to report on the more than 80 Black volunteers who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. And so this is part of the story of how for Black Americans WWII really starts before Pearl Harbor. Black Americans see the rise of fascism in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain, and they want to do something about it. And there's more than 80 volunteers who are courageous enough to go fight in the Spanish Civil War to fight against fascism and General Franco's forces there.

Langston Hughes is fascinated by that fact. He's wondering what would it mean for these Black Americans to do that. Why are they going over there? And so he goes there. He's in the frontline trenches with these volunteers. He's in hotels that are getting bombed and shelled by Nazi and Italian planes. And he writes stories that report back on this, back to Black Americans at home. And so for Black Americans on the home front, by 1937-38, they were already reading stories from Langston Hughes and from others about this rise of fascism and the fight against it.

And what's important about the Spanish Civil War example is that these Black volunteers were in combat units. So, at the same time, they couldn't be in combat units in the American military, they were in combat units in Spain, and they're fighting in integrated units, shoulder to shoulder with White volunteers from all around the world. And so at the same time that the U.S. military was segregated, you have these volunteers fighting in integrated combat forces in Spain. Later in the war, there are other Black generals who take up Hughes' role as a war correspondents, folks like Ollie Stewart, Trezzvant Anderson, Roi Ottley, who really telling important stories about the unglamorous and largely unsung work that the Black troops did during the war. They're roughly the equivalent of Ernie Pyle who's the famous White correspondent during the war. And so I tried to rely extensively on their coverage because they tell stories about the war that you just don't find elsewhere.

MR. CAPEHART: You know, to be clear, not everybody was wild about fighting--putting on the uniform and fighting for the United States. You examine the perspectives of those within the Black community who thought the United States wasn't worth fighting for. What --why? Why include those perspectives?

MR. DELMONT: So that quote we started off with from James Thompson, "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American, is the America I know worth defending," almost every African American who was of draft age was asking some version of that question to themselves, and they were answering in different ways. And so it's important in the larger story of the war, that while more than a million Black Americans served in the war, there were thousands that refused to serve, because when they looked at the race record of the U.S., looked at their daily conditions and Mississippi or in New York or in Los Angeles, they couldn't bring themselves to fight for a country that was treating them terribly, that was treating them as half American and treating them as second-class citizens.

Even more broadly, they were worried about what it meant for the United States to join forces with Great Britain and France, countries that had extensive colonies all across the world. They didn't see the United States and its allies fighting for a kind of world that they wanted to create. They envisioned a different version of the world. These were a relatively small number of Black Americans overall, but they're vitally important stories to tell because it gives us a sense of the different political opinions within the Black community. Someone like Bayard Rustin, for example, who goes on to have an esteemed civil rights career--he's the architect of the 1960s at March on Washington--he spends three years in a federal penitentiary during the war because he's a pacifist and refuses to accept the draft order to join the U.S. military. And he's just one example of a Black American at the time who looked at the war effort, recognized the real threat that Nazi Germany posed, but didn't see the United States and the military structure, the segregated military as something that they saw fit to join.

MR. CAPEHART: I want to close out by reading something at the end of your book and get you to in the closing couple minutes that we have to talk a little further. You write, "It is impossible to understand activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to protest police violence by kneeling during the national anthem and the uproar that followed without first understanding the history of Black protests during WWII." I thought that was a nice linkage between the past and the present. Close us out by telling us more about that.

MR. DELMONT: I hope one thing that comes through clearly in this story about WWII is that patriotism and dissent have always gone hand in hand for Black Americans. And I've been thinking a lot about the meaning of the American flag as I was writing this book. The examples from the book are there were--there was a race riot in Beaumont, Texas in 1943. A group of Whites went into a Black community and they burned down several buildings, including a radio store, that was one of the sort of key businesses in town. One of the images that gets circulated after that is a American flag that's been burned because White townspeople in Beaumont burned this building to the ground. And so I kept looking at that picture and think about what it meant for White townspeople in Texas to burn the American flag alongside this Black community.

Later in the war, after Normandy and the D Day invasion, Black troops recounted seeing their White counterparts, their fellow White troops raised the Confederate flag either alongside or instead of the stars and stripes when they would take over these towns in France. And they just had to shake their head, because they recognized what the Confederate flag meant. It meant slavery and it meant a return to the kind of racial hierarchies that they were trying to fight for--to fight against and trying to leave behind. What shows up in a Black newspaper after that was an editorial that’s asking what's wrong with the stars and stripes that you would have these White troops flying the Confederate flag instead?

And so I think it's important for us today to understand that for Black Americans, the American flag has always been a very, very complicated symbol and that WWII helps to give us a perspective on what it meant for these Black veterans to both fight for the flag, but also fight to make the flag worth something to fight for, that patriotism and dissent were always intertwined for these Black veterans. And if we can't understand that history, if we can't reckon honestly with that history of WWII, we really have no chance of understanding the kind of America we're living in today.

MR. CAPEHART: Matthew Delmont, author of "Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting WWII at Home and Abroad," thank you so much for coming to "Capehart" on Washington Post Live.

MR. DELMONT: Thanks a lot, Jonathan. It was a pleasure being here.

MR. CAPEHART: And thank you for joining us. To check out what interviews we have coming up, go to WashingtonPostLive.com. Once again, I’m Jonathan Capehart, associate editor at The Washington Post. Thanks for watching “Capehart” on Washington Post Live.

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