Reckoning and Restitution:  Remembering and Honoring Black American Veterans

Written by Becca Williams, SBT Copywriter

(Cover art from this article by the Equal Justice Initiative.)

Nikole Hannah-Jones begins the first chapter of her book, “The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story” by telling us about her father, army veteran Milton Hannah.  Milton flew an American flag in their front yard.  Hannah-Jones writes, “…he went into the military for …a reason common to Black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.”  As November 11^th is Veteran’s Day, this post will be about White Supremacy as it relates to Black veterans, from their experiences in war to the experiences of racism and benefits denial upon their return.  Perhaps not so surprisingly, this is wrapped up in reparations, patriotism, freedom, systemic racism, and the building and hoarding of white generational wealth. 

(Milton Hannah in his army uniform.)

Growing up, I didn’t have too many connections to the military.  My deceased grandfathers fought in WWII, my parents lived through the Vietnam draft, some others in my extended family had joined the military and a few had been deployed but it wasn’t something we regularly talked about. When I was younger and my grandparents did speak about it, it seemed so far away that I had no real foothold into that reality. For my parents, much of their response to Vietnam centered on their activism and protests against it, with a few stories of friends of theirs who returned and were never the same again.  As kids, we were strongly encouraged to not sign up for the military whenever it was brought up, as were many of my friends.  I have a vague memory of speaking to my high school boyfriend about the recruiting booth that the Marines set up on campus, and listening to him tell me about how he would have to sign up for the draft when he turned 18.  This marks one of the distinct times in my adolescence that I felt a keen sense of difference – signing up for the draft was not something I would have to do for my 18^th birthday.  I absorbed that information in all my white femininity, angry at the system for forcing men to do something against their will and also relieved that I didn’t have to (this was in the early 2000s when our news cycle was flooded with stories of gore from Iraq and Afghanistan). My perception of the military and the draft was formed from the fertile ground of coastal elite whiteness:  that the military was too dangerous and reckless to be about patriotism, and that it was something I wouldn’t need to rely on because of the state’s interest in protecting my womanhood and since I was going to college anyway, which was the main perceived benefit in enlisting. 

The military, then, always seemed a bit far from my grasp.  I never flocked to the feel-good and triumphant movies about it and formed concrete ideas around masculinity and the military industrial complex that there wasn’t much room for nuance or human experience.   Ideas around patriotism have become so deluded for me lately, and I grapple with how that relates to my whiteness.  For many years, I was the loud and proud “un-American” liberal, the one who would joke about telling people I was Canadian when traveling abroad during the Bush years as a way to cement my progressivism and feel slightly rebellious.  I look at this differently now as the American flag has taken on terrifying new [for me] symbology and as I become more fully aware of the ways in which I continue to invest in the same system of White Supremacy that invests in this symbology.  In terms of looking at veterans, White feminist liberalism enabled me to gloss over this experience and chalk it up as the one of the most overt expressions of toxic masculinity and misogyny.  Racism, intersectionality, and real lived experience played no part in that.  This post may land in a different place for those among us who have had close relatives or friends in and out of the military, and if that’s you, I encourage you to think about where whiteness exists in those experiences. 

Earlier this week, I read an article about the death of Daniel Smith, who at age 90 was the last known child of an enslaved person.  As I had been preparing this post, I have noticed that I felt more and more disconnected from the reality of enslavement and its long-lasting impacts.  I got into the mode of providing information from a detached place and if I’m being honest, this excavation into whiteness and Black history has been a bumpy and tiring road, as it should be.  I am reminded of the absolute luxury of being able to detach from this as though I had nothing to do with it, as many politicians these days would allude to.  There is so much revelatory pain and beauty in examining my whiteness.  More than that, there is the added haunting of the privilege to step away and catch myself doing so knowing that many white women, especially us Hannah’s, have stepped away when it got difficult or when justice and liberation felt ambiguous and far away.  (For more on Hannah and the profiles of white womanhood, please follow Start By Talking on Instagram @startbytalking).  The article about Daniel’s death reminded me how close this history is and how absolutely critical it is for white women to catch ourselves straying from the road of anti-racism.  In the article, Daniel tells a story from the 1950’s about pulling a drowning white woman from a flooded quarry and attempting to resuscitate her only to be ordered to stop by a white police officer, who then stood by as the woman died.   Smith said, “he let the girl die, rather than have a Black man touch her lips.  I’ll never forget that.” The hooks of white supremacy are deep. 

(A photo of Daniel Smith.)

Smith’s story is pertinent here because the story of Black veterans is a story about many things:  Bravery, valor, liberty, worth, who we value as heroes and how we demonstrate that.  Whether or not we agree with what the military represents, we must pay attention to those who have fought and lost their lives and livelihoods for our country only to return home to encounter the racism Smith so chillingly describes.  For historical context, Veteran’s Day originated in 1921 as a way to commemorate the ending of World War I, on the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month (11am on November 11^th).  Called “Armistice Day” for a few years before the realization set in that WWI would not be the last World War, the day was marked with burials of unknown soldiers.  A law passed in 1968 that changed the name to Veteran’s Day.  Contextually speaking, all of these celebrations and commemorations occurred in a time and place in which Black soldiers experienced significantly brutal racism both within their military units and when they returned to the US after fighting. 

The first Armistice Day came just two years after the Red Summer, in which Black communities all across the country experienced racialized violence.  Black veterans were targeted, not only for engaging in self-defense, but for what they represented.  White Americans feared that Black veterans asserting their right to freedom would disrupt social norms sustained by White Supremacy and white economic control.  They believed that Black veterans armed with training and weaponry would lead other Black folx to challenge racial segregation and violence.  I’ve written about the Black codes before, a set of post-Civil war laws that restricted the lives and rights of newly emancipated Black folx.  Black codes in Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, and Louisiana eliminated Black gun ownership, enabling the seizure of Black veteran’s weapons when they returned home from the battlefield.  I see the same mentality present in politics today:  The 2^nd Amendment is written to protect gun ownership for white men out of the White Supremacist ideal that whiteness needs to be protected at all costs, particularly protected from the menace of Blackness.  This is why the reaction in the face of young white men carrying out mass murders often centers the maligned narrative of the dangers of Black gun ownership in “urban” (read: Black) locales, like Detroit and Chicago.

While over one million Black men enlisted to fight in WWII, very few Black service members held leadership or combat positions.  This video outlines some of the ways in which the armed forces were segregated, relegating Black soldiers to menial labor, separate sleeping quarters, canteens, and church services.  Black soldiers were deemed too cowardly to fight and too incapable of executing wartime strategies to lead others.  While we often hear that WWII ushered in a newfound appreciation for women’s contribution to the work force, that appreciation was reserved largely for white women.  Black women were less welcome in the labor force and were not treated well when they joined the Civilian Corps. 

(The women of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion, 1945.)

I noticed some contradictory feelings arising when learning about some of the more famous Black military units, such as the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black Devils, the Harlem Hellfighters, and the 6888^th Central Postal Battalion.  War is steeped in control, violence, and power.  We believe these elements represent our bravery, and that representation glosses over and glorifies a lot of atrocity.  This is bolstered by the “feel good” war stories about resilience and the idea that through hard work, sacrifice, personal grit and determination, these Black military units beat the odds and succeeded in a world bent on watching them fail.  We see this shininess in a lot of stories about Blackness told from a white perspective (like: The Help, Green Book, etc.) and I noticed myself fall into that trap when reading about the Tuskegee Airmen, for example.  These portrayals continue our glorification of violence while making it about the individual ability to succeed despite massive obstacles, all while ignoring that our investment in this structure is what makes these conditions hostile enough that someone has to embody a dangerous amount of grit and resilience to receive even the slightest recognition. 

In June of 1944, President Roosevelt signed the G.I. Bill into law, enabling returning veterans various benefits administered through what was later known as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).  The G.I Bill is a very progressive set of benefits, offering free healthcare, college tuition, home loans, and unemployment insurance, and contributed to a massive expansion of the American middle class after WWII.  However, these benefits have not been distributed equitably. The son of a Black army veteran interviewed for this NPR story tells about his father’s experience upon returning home to the Jim Crow South after fighting in Normandy.  His father noted that the Black veterans sat in the back of the train, while the Nazi Prisoners of War were up in first class.  “Just wearing a uniform could be a provocation”, he said, speaking about the commonplace lynchings of veterans that harkened back to the Red Summer decades earlier.  While this was certainly overt racism, covert racism took the form of Black veterans being denied their benefits under the G.I. Bill.  In a concession to Southern States, the G.I Bill was to be administered on a state-by-state basis.  Eighteen states were segregated in the 1940s, meaning that even if Black veterans received housing and tuition benefits, they were only allowed to buy houses in poorer parts of town due to redlining, or were not accepted into the universities they applied to.  This disparity has had significant impacts on the capacity of Black veteran families to build and pass along generational wealth.  Further, nearly 1/3 of current VA employees are people of color,  and a study done a few years back detailed that nearly ¾ of VA staff witnessed discrimination either among colleagues or with patients, and more than 80% of VA staffers said that racism is a moderate or serious issue.

Today, the Black Veterans Project is leading an effort to get the VA to release racially disaggregated data that will help in proving systemic racism and in identifying the real consequences of Black veterans being denied benefits.  This recent study, for example, points to some of the racial disparities between Black and white veterans receiving benefits from the G.I. Bill, noting that “the real cash equivalent of benefits for Black veterans was only 40% of the value of benefits for white veterans.”  The G.I. Restoration Bill, introduced in late 2021 by Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), among others, has the goal to provide families of Black veterans a transferable benefit that their descendants can use to build generational wealth. 

I realized while writing this that the bulk of what I had written centered Black men. I wanted to put some information in here about Black veterans who identify as women, trans, and/or gender nonconforming and found that there wasn’t nearly as much accessible information out there, which I know is intentional and reflective of the overarching narrative.  I also know that we lose a lot when we don’t center these stories, and that misalignment is very much here.  I plan on dedicating a future post about Black women, trans, and gender nonconforming veterans. In the meantime, take a look at the National Association for Black Military Women, watch this video on the mental health challenges faced by Black women veterans, or read about the issues facing trans service members. 

When I think about the confluence of factors impacting Black veterans, and I know I’m merely at the tip of the iceberg, I’m reminded of the post I wrote about the USDA.  There are similar barriers there as well: Black codes, failed Civil War Reconstruction efforts, overt and covert racism, and how we have been carried by those gale force winds to this precise political moment.  I wonder about the difference of being armed with concrete evidence versus listening to the actual lived experiences of humans, which we know does not always fit neatly into the boxes that concrete evidence demands.  On a daily basis, facts and history are being diluted in our government systems and in our social interactions. They are reworked to fit a broader, blameless narrative that releases the entirety of people’s struggles into their own control and moral failing, while washing White Supremacy clean of any wrongdoing.  The push against massive institutions and belief systems makes the pathway toward antiracism feel more like a war than a battle. It reminds me to prepare for the long haul and to pay attention to when, how, and why I stray from this work so that I can get back into it.  As the midterm elections and holiday season approach, we run the risk of becoming insular and focused on ourselves and our immediate circle’s needs.  I encourage you to take some time to reflect on how you’ve shown up to this work, and where you need to stretch more into your own discomfort.