Resisting racism within America’s WWII military: stories from the frontline

America’s World War II military was a force of unalloyed good. While saving the world from Nazism, it also managed to unify a famously fractious American people. At least that’s the story many Americans have long told themselves…

But the reality is starkly different. The military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them, separating white Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans in various configurations—effectively institutionalizing racism and white supremacy throughout the military to devastating effect. The segregation impeded America’s war effort; undermined the nation’s rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites’ investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people. 

Yet freedom struggles arose in response to the color lines, and succeeded in democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent Civil Rights movements. From the women who were the first Black WAVES to a decorated Japanese American soldier and his friendship with a white comrade, the following slideshow is just a portion of the sweeping, yet personal, stories of resistance to racism within America’s World War II military.

Puerto Rican 65th Infantry

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During World War II, the US Army’s efforts to segregate its troops between white and Black outfits faced complications. Some white units, like the Puerto Rican Sixty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, seen here training in Salinas, Puerto Rico, in 1941, still had numerous members who, according to one War Department memo, “would have to ride the jim crow car in the [United States].” Indeed, when the army shipped the regiment to Panama, where the United States had previously promised “that no colored troops would be stationed,” it reassigned more than six hundred “unmistakably colored” men to another unit. Soldiers of the Puerto Rican 65th Infantry at Salinas, Puerto Rico in August 1941. Courtesy National Archives, SC 121824.