On September 27, 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph and Walter White to discuss the role that African American people would play in the rising war effort. This conversation, which took place in the Oval Office, was captured on audio tape. Walter White suggested that, where prudent, the armed services should be desegregated. “Mr. President,” stated White, “may I suggest another step ahead?”:
It has been commented on widely in Negro America, and that is that we realize the practical reality that in Georgia and Mississippi it would be impossible to have units, of uh, where people’s standard of admission would be ability…
I’d like to suggest this idea, even though it might sound fantastic at this time, that in the states where there isn’t a tradition of segregation, that we might start to experiment with organizing a division or a regiment and let them be all Americans and not black Americans or then white––working together.
President Roosevelt responded that, “the thing is we’ve got to work into this.” He suggested Black and White segregated regiments working side by side:
John Prados, ed. The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President, (New York: The New Press), 2003, p. 31–32.
After a while, in case of war those people get shifted from one to the other. The thing that sort of [unintelligible] you would have one, one battery out of a, out of a regiment of artillery, ah, that would be a Negro battery, and, and gradually working in the field together. You may back into what you’re talking about.1
The racial violence which took place in the northern city of Detroit, Michigan, in early 1942 points to just how complicated it could be to achieve even the President’s less daring suggestion. To house the growing numbers of African Americans arriving in Detroit, Michigan, to work in the defense industries, the Federal Government paid for the construction of the Sojourner Truth Housing Project in 1941. The project would be located in a lightly populated area near both a White and a Black neighborhood. A riot broke out on February 28th, as White protestors tried to prevent the new Black residents from moving into their homes. People remember hearing gunfire throughout the entire day. Forty people were injured. Three White people and 217 African Americans were arrested.
The story of United States District Judge George Howard, Jr. illustrates how confusing military service could be for African Americans. When he was drafted at the age of 18, George assumed that he would be sent to serve in the Army. Much to his surprise, however, he was given the choice of the Army, Navy, or the Air Force. He chose the Navy and was trained to serve in the construction battalion called the Seabees. After basic training in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he and other Black and White Seabees, learned to build military infrastructure such as airstrips, bridges, roads, and hospitals, they were sent to Gulfport, Mississippi, for advanced training. Although White and Black Seabees worked side by side within the unit, the group was not socially integrated. When, one day, an African American Seabee at the end of the lunch line vocalized a complaint that he and the other Black troops were served chicken instead of the steak which the White troops had earlier received, a scuffle broke out. The next day all of the African American Seabees were separated from the rest of the troop and sent back to Virginia. From that point to the end of the war, George Howard served in an essentially all–Black Seabee unit.2
Footnote 2. Bill Wilson and Beth Deere, “Seabees Serve in the Second World War A Judge in the Making,” Arkansas Bar Association website, retrieved April 23, 2009.
Ray Elliott was a surveyor during the war, creating maps which were used in the construction of airfields, or by troops as they advanced. Despite the efforts of A. Philip Randolph and Walter White, Ray, like his father before him, served in a segregated military. The nation’s written policy on African Americans serving the Second World War effort had been approved in October of 1940 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The document ended with, “The policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations. This policy has been proved satisfactory over a long period of years, and to make changes now would produce situations destructive to morale and detrimental to the preparation for national defense…”3 In July of 1948, President Truman signed an executive order which desegregated the Armed Forces. The order read, in part, “it is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”4
Footnote 3. “Statement of Policy” submitted by Robert P. Patterson, Assistant Secretary of War and approved by President Roosevelt, October 9, 1940.
Footnote 4. President Harry S. Truman, EXECUTIVE ORDER 9981, July 26, 1948.
Ray Elliott arrived in Okinawa shortly before the end of World War II. Before serving in Okinawa, he explains, “we were hop–skipping from one island to another, building airstrips and then move to the next one. We finally got to Okinawa…it was just before they had…dropped the…the A…atomic bomb.”