Soldiers and Buses

Abstract

The field of retrospective justice has spawned interesting scholarship on the complexities of redress for histories of slavery and Jim Crow, including reparation, official apologies, judicial remedies, and truth commissions. Although numerous studies of Jim Crow in the South have captured the social, economic, and political dynamics of the practice, in the realm of retrospective justice, adequate attention has not yet been given to the massive failure of criminal law enforcement agencies, state and federal, to respond to homicidal racial violence. Still underexplored are the patterns and prevalence of the violence, the specifics of federal/state collaboration, and the character of community resistance. This essay is based on a larger project that examines these questions; the project uses legal case studies to develop a comprehensive and qualitatively rich account of racial homicides in the 1930s and 1940s. and to engage affected communities in restorative justice practices. This particular study describes a range of harms, with a particular focus on homicide, experienced by soldiers and veterans in their encounters with Jim Crow transportation in the World War II era, and it argues that the incidence of violence was sufficiently acute and widespread so as to warrant current remedial measures, including official investigation and appropriate acknowledgment of government failures.