Belated Benefits for Black GIs
warontherocks.com
Dear Leading Ladies,
The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill, was a bi-partisan effort to help returning servicemen adjust to civilian life by providing funds for education, government backed loans, unemployment, and job-finding assistance.
Veterans flocked to take advantage of the educational and mortgage opportunities that were offered. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, “In 1947, World War II veterans accounted for nearly half of all college admissions and half of all World War II veterans participated in some form of education or job training with the benefits.”
At the same time, home loans to veterans burgeoned. “The Veterans Administration guaranteed over 2 million home loans by 1950,” according to the museum.
The expansion of education and home ownership led to sprawling suburbs, and a wider transportation infrastructure. The changes grew the American middle class. Some even say the GI Bill created our middle class.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is that the GI Bill was created at the federal government level but administered at the state and local level. As a result, Black veterans were excluded, particularly but not exclusively, in the South. Consequently, while white working class families were becoming educated homeowners and acquiring generational wealth to pass on to their children and grandchildren, Black veterans were systematically being left out and behind.
Again.
To get a clearer picture of what Black veterans faced, we turned to an NPR interview with the families of Black vets. The piece described how their fathers were sometimes treated better than German prisoners of war, forced to sit in the back of the train as they returned home after putting their lives on the line in Europe or the Pacific. Lynchings were still commonplace and wearing a uniform often proved an invitation for such violence. When it came to GI benefits, segregation and Jim Crow laws made it impossible to get a loan from all but a Black insurance company, and redlining made buying a house in a nice neighborhood impossible.
But even in the North, suburban developments like Levittown in New York were segregated and wouldn’t sell to Blacks who were able to get mortgages.
How did it happen?
How did it happen that a federal bill was structured so that it could exclude the 1.2 million Black veterans of WWII? The chair of the House Veterans Committee, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, had a lot to do with it. He insisted the bill be administered at the state level. He and his fellow racists employed methods they had used to make sure the New Deal benefited as few Blacks as possible, according to an article at history.com. Vocational training centers for Blacks lacked adequate equipment; blacks were stoned when attempting to move into housing where white people lived; postmasters were even suspected of not delivering forms that Blacks needed to fill out to receive their benefits.
In other words, “the postwar housing boom almost entirely excluded Black Americans, most of whom remained in cities that received less and less investment from businesses and banks,” while white people flocked to the new suburbs and took the vast majority of skilled jobs, according to History.com. In 1947, only two out of 3,200+ home loans administered by the VA in Mississippi went to Black borrowers. Out of 67,000 VA mortgages in New York and New Jersey suburbs, less than one percent went to non-whites.
A plan to undo some of the damage
While Black veterans in recent years have been able to receive benefits guaranteed by the GI Bill, those from World War II have never been compensated to make up for economic inequality that was exacerbated by the GI Bill. Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton hopes to do something about that. Earlier this month he filed a bill with Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina that would restore benefits to these veterans and their families who were denied what was rightfully theirs because of racism.
The Marine veteran and Harvard graduate believes the time is now and the expense is necessary. “It costs $70 billion because that’s the impact this massive injustice has had on America,” he said. “[W]hile it may not be the fault of my generation, it’s my generation’s responsibility to make it right.” He noted also, that if not for the GI Bill, he would not have had the opportunities that allowed him to become a member of Congress.
“We can never fully repay these American heroes, but we can fix this for their families going forward. That’s why Rep. James Clyburn and I introduced the Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. and Sgt. Joseph H. Maddox GI Bill Restoration Act.”
Sgt. Woodard, a decorated WWII veteran, was traveling home in uniform on a Greyhound bus to Winnsboro, SC, in 1946 when a police officer boarded the bus and forcibly removed him. The police officer then blinded Woodard with a nightstick and imprisoned him, without getting him medical treatment. The police officer was charged but acquitted. The story of this abuse led President Truman to integrate the U.S. Armed forces.
Sgt. Maddox, after serving in WWII and receiving a medical discharge, was accepted into a Master’s program at Harvard. He was denied tuition assistance for fear of “setting a precedent” until the NAACP and the VA in Washington, DC stepped in to get the benefits he was due.
How many of us are white and have fathers or grandfathers who bought houses and received college educations because of the GI Bill? Can we imagine what their lives or ours might be like without the generational wealth that was accrued and passed on, helping us to buy homes, be educated, educate our children, and have them buy homes?
Let Rep. Moulton know you support this bill. You can read the bill here.
Then write to him here.
Smell the flowers.
Therese (she/her/hers)
Judy (she/her/hers)
Didi (she/her/hers)
Mackenzie (she/her/hers)