Across the Color Line: Using Text Networks to Examine Black and White US Soldiers’ Views on Race and Segregation during World War II

Abstract

"Across the Color Line" is part of a larger digital project, The American Soldier in World War II. The project has made accessible sixty-five thousand pages of uncensored handwritten commentaries composed by US service members, along with quantitative datasets produced by a novel interdisciplinary US Army research branch. This small organization of leading psychologists and social scientists was tasked with analyzing and reporting on soldier morale, including the rank-and-file effects of segregation and relations between the races. This article showcases initial findings derived from a cross-sectional survey of Black and White soldiers administered in February and March of 1943, only months before race rebellions erupted in Detroit, Los Angeles, Harlem, and elsewhere over the country's maintenance of Jim Crow while the US and its allies were at war to save democracy. Text correlation networks reveal in striking visual detail the effects of segregation on the experiences, habits, and opinions of both White and Black US citizen-soldiers, individually and collectively. Network-based visualizations are particularly effective at revealing the inverted epistemology of American racial thought and of W.E.B. Du Bois's popular characterization of Black America's "double consciousness," or "twoness."