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.

Tuskegee Airmen

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101 Tuskegee Airmen, some of whom are pictured here, were arrested for peacefully protesting segregated officers’ clubs at Freeman Field in Indiana in April 1945. Dubbed a “mutiny” by army commanders, their courageous act of civil disobedience was but one example of Black GIs’ and their supporters’ sweeping campaign to uproot what they called “Jim Crow in uniform” during World War II. President Truman often receives credit for the postwar desegregation of the US armed forces, but for their fearless, principled wartime activism, Black troops deserve at long last their fair share. Some of the 101 black officers arrested for entering a “white” officers’ club at Freeman Field in Indiana in April 1945. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records, LC-USZ62-138740.