The Supreme Court and Racial Equality During World War II Mary L. Dudziak The battle ofIwo Jima has been remembered by historians for its courage and its carnage. The capture of that strategic island is also remem bered as a step toward V-J Day, as it opened up the route for American bombers to encoun ter less resistance to their flights to Japan. At the end of the battle itself, however, a Marine chaplain on Iwo Jima saw in the struggle and death before him another, and broader, meaning. Approximately fifty years ago, Chaplain Roland B. Gittelsohn stood over newly dug American graves in Iwo Jima and delivered a eulogy. Here lie men who loved America . . . , Here lie officers and men, Ne groes and whites, rich and poor, to gether. Here no man prefers another because of his faith, or despises him because of his color.... Among these men there is no discrimination, no prejudice, no hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy.1 The equality these soldiers had found in death was, for Gittelsohn, at the heart of the war’s meaning. Whoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony, and of the bloody sacrifice it com memorates, an empty, hollow mock ery. Thus, then, do we, the living, now dedicate ourselves, to the right of Prot estants, Catholics and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them have paid the price.2 There was an irony in the equality Gittelsohn found among the fallen soldiers, a point not men tioned in the chaplain’s eulogy. The military forces that fought in Iwo Jima were racially seg regated. Yet the limitations on the military’s practice of equality did not dampen Gittelsohn’s passionate argument that out of the carnage of Iwo Jima came a commitment and an obligation to give democracy meaning across the divisions of race, religion, and class. Too much blood has gone into this soil for us to let it lie barren. Too much pain and heartache have fertilized the earth on which we stand. We here 36 RACIAL EQUALITY solemnly swear: it shall not be in vain. Out of this will come, we promise, the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere.3 Chaplain Gittlesohn’s interpretation of the meaning of the war, with its embrace of equality as a central democratic value, was widely shared during the war years. At least on an ideological level, the notion that the nation as a whole had a stake in racial equality gained increasing cur rency. And according to Wendell L. Willkie, out of the war would come a commitment to social change: “Our very proclamations of what we are fighting for have rendered our own inequi ties self-evident,” he said. “When we talk offree dom and opportunity for all nations the mock ing paradoxes in our own society become so clear they can no longer be ignored.”4 This thinking influenced members ofthe Su preme Court, just as it did other Americans. From Justice William O. Douglas’s perspective, World War II provided a context in which to re examine American ideals. “What kind of people are we?” he asked an audience in 1943. “What is the foundation of this society that today faces the mechanized might of the totalitarian states?” Answering his question, Douglas said that: The foundation of our society is the minority.... Recognition of the small est minority is written in blood as well as ink in our Bill of Rights. ... We know that the constitutional safe guards of equal justice under the law are absolutely essential to the preser vation of liberty. For history has shown that once persecution is unloosed on one minority, it spreads like a blight.5 Douglas suggested that the greatest power the nation had against the Axis was the power of its ideals. “Hitler has challenged this society of ours,” he said. Both Germany and Japan used American race discrimination in wartime pro paganda, and were, according to Douglas, “at tempting...