Civil Rights Pioneers: Building Race Consciousness in the WWII Armed Forces

Abstract

During the Second World War, the British colonial forces and the US armed services reflected the general racial attitudes of the day: black men were inferior to white men and thus as soldiers, black men had to be segregated and contained. Military planners in the US and Britain believed that people of color acted and behaved similarly and they sought to craft policies to control black soldiers with their race policies. While all of the black soldiers who migrated were sent to conduct a war, as a by-product, many of the men engaged in a range of cultural activities that brought about a diasporic identity. The men gained a worldview of strength and resistance that allowed them to exercise their full citizenship rights as civil rights leaders, legal experts, elected officials, and labor organizers. Certainly, neither colonial government believed that the outcome of their racial policies toward the black soldier would imbue him with such a sense of power and a call to action. They meant to control the colonial subject, not put him on the world stage with his brothers in the diaspora. World War II is a significant event of comparison because of the policies of governance practiced by both governments and the number of black soldiers who participated in the worldwide conflagration. WWII soldiers of color went on to lead freedom struggles post-war that placed many veterans in the vanguard of black independence movements across the globe. This paper outlines the racial policies and the migration realities black soldiers experienced.