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Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military

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.

Winfred Lynn

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Long forgotten today, Winfred Lynn was a household name in parts of 1940s America. A landscape gardener from Queens, New York, he refused at first to be drafted into the segregated US Army in 1942. In time, he was convinced to join up and rose to the rank of sergeant, serving in a medical sanitary company in the Pacific. But, even in uniform, he continued his battle against “Jim Crow in uniform,” in grassroots actions against discrimination and as the plaintiff in a civil rights case that reached the US Supreme Court in 1944. A decade before Brown v. Board of Education, his case challenged state-sanctioned racial segregation. He lost, but his courageous activism contributed to the postwar desegregation of the military and to the Black civil rights movement. Winfred Lynn, c. early 1944.

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  1. Raj Kumar Singh

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