![]() Southern postmasters were even accused of refusing to deliver the forms Black veterans needed to fill out to receive their unemployment benefits.īlack veterans and civil rights groups protested their treatment, calling for protections like Black involvement in the VA and non-discriminatory loans, but the racial disparities in the implementation of the GI Bill had already been set into motion. Men who applied for unemployment benefits were kicked out of the program if any other work was available to them, even work that provided less than subsistence wages. Though Rankin had lost the battle to exclude Black men from VA unemployment insurance, it was doled out inequitably. Thousands of Black veterans were attacked in the years following World War II and some were singled out and lynched. In 1947, for example, a crowd hurled rocks at Black veterans as they moved into a Chicago housing development. Simple intimidation kept others from enjoying GI Bill benefits. Black veterans in a vocational training program at a segregated high school in Indianapolis were unable to participate in activities related to plumbing, electricity and printing because adequate equipment was only available to white students. Veterans who did qualify could not find facilities that delivered on the bill’s promise. Some could not access benefits because they had not been given an honorable discharge-and a much larger number of Black veterans were discharged dishonorably than their white counterparts. The GI Bill’s Effect on Black Veteransįrom the start, Black veterans had trouble securing the GI Bill’s benefits. It ushered into law sweeping benefits for veterans, including college tuition, low-cost home loans, and unemployment insurance. Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act into law on June 22, 1944, only weeks after the D-Day offensive began. The American Legion ended up tracking down the Congressman who had left his proxy vote with Rankin and flying him to Washington to break the deadlock. Rankin knew this would represent a significant gain for Black Southerners, so he refused to cast a critical proxy vote in protest. When the bill came to a committee vote, he stonewalled in an attempt to gut another provision that entitled all veterans to $20 a week of unemployment compensation for a year. Rankin was known for his virulent racism: He defended segregation, opposed interracial marriage, and had even proposed legislation to confine, then deport, every person with Japanese heritage during World War II. To make sure the GI Bill largely benefited white people, the southern Democrats drew on tactics they had previously used to ensure that the New Deal helped as few Black people as possible.ĭuring the drafting of the law, the chair of the House Veterans Committee, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, played hardball and insisted that the program be administered by individual states instead of the federal government. When lawmakers began drafting the GI Bill in 1944, some Southern Democrats feared that returning Black veterans would use public sympathy for veterans to advocate against Jim Crow laws. While the GI Bill’s language did not specifically exclude African-American veterans from its benefits, it was structured in a way that ultimately shut doors for the 1.2 million Black veterans who had bravely served their country during World War II, in segregated ranks. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill’s implementation ended up helping drive growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans. Though the bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn’t deliver on that promise for veterans of color. The Burnetts weren’t the only Black Americans for whom the promise of the GI Bill turned out to be an illusion.
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