This special edition of Central European History is concerned with how America viewed Germany, and my contribution focuses on how, beginning with Hitler's rise to power, Germany became a point of reference for the emerging American civil-rights movement. By looking at Crisis, published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Opportunity, published by the National Urban League, as well as African-American newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, Afro-American, Negro Digest, Ebony, and Jet, I will show how the black community discussed developments in Germany, America's struggle against Nazi racism, and the black soldiers' experience in postwar Germany.

Beginning in 1933, African-American activists and the black press used white America's condemnation of Nazi racism to expose and indict the abuses of Jim Crow racism at home and to argue that “separate” can never be “equal.” America's entry into the war allowed civil-rights activists to step up their rhetoric significantly and to call for an end to segregation. The defeat of Nazi Germany and the participation of African-American GIs in the military occupation only strengthened the determination of activists and the black press to call for change. They drew on the experience of soldiers stationed in Germany to make the case that it was in post-Nazi Germany that black GIs found the equality and democracy denied them in their own country. Civil-rights advocates also used the soldiers' experiences in Germany to indict America's continuing system of segregation and discrimination as undemocratic. Because of the widely read and immensely influential African-American press, discussions of postwar Germany reverberated powerfully among America's black community.

Significantly, it was also in the struggle against Nazi Germany and the de-Nazification and re-education of Germany after 1945 that many white Americans came to understand the international implications of the “American dilemma.” Because of the unrelenting attack on Jim Crow by civil-rights activists and the black press between 1933 and 1945 and their strategy to equate Nazism with Jim Crow, white Liberals woke up to the grievances of African Americans and came to embrace Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 conclusion that the American race question needed to be solved if democracy was to survive and if America was to take on the leadership in the postwar world.Footnote ¹ That intellectual shift was further clarified during the occupation of Germany, when black civil-rights activists and the black press kept up the pressure to ensure that black America's contribution to the war had not been in vain. White Liberals were increasingly embarrassed by the fact that a Jim Crow army was deployed to de-Nazify and reeducate Germany and made the case in the mainstream U.S. press that the time for change had come.

By bringing a transnational approach to the German-American encounter, this essay adds a corrective to the work of those scholars who have documented the close connection between Cold-War imperatives and the advancement of civil rights in the U.S. Crucial as this research is in internationalizing American history, it focuses almost exclusively on how the competition with the Soviet Union over decolonizing nations in Africa and Asia forced policy makers in Washington to support the demands of African Americans at home.Footnote ² What receives almost no attention in the Cold-War interpretation of the civil-rights movement was America's involvement in Europe and the role that the expansion of the American military base system after WWII played in the unfolding drama of the civil-rights struggle. Yet, by bringing a segregated Jim Crow army to military bases across Western Europe and other parts of the globe, the U.S. literally transposed its racial conflict and the actors in that conflict onto foreign soil.Footnote ³ Thus, through its postwar mission of democracy in Germany, the U.S. expanded the boundaries of the civil-rights movement beyond the continental U.S., i.e., to the very country Americans had come to conquer, occupy, and reeducate.Footnote ⁴

My essay does not argue that the civil-rights discourse that emerged in the U.S. was shaped solely by America's growing entanglement with Germany after 1933.Footnote ⁵ The African-American debates on Germany provide merely another piece of the puzzle, although an essential one that shifts the focus to the African-American activists on the ground and an earlier time period. My contribution suggests furthermore that the narrative of twentieth-century African-American history needs to be expanded beyond the physical boundaries of the U.S.Footnote ⁶ As the African-American journalist Roi Ottley, one of the most thoughtful African-American observers of the occupation in Germany, pointed out in 1951, “American racialism would come into dramatic focus on German soil.”Footnote ⁷ David Brion Davis, the distinguished historian of slavery and racism, came to a similar conclusion reflecting on his military service as an eighteen-year-old in Mannheim. He recalled Germany as “a microcosm of the racial and civil rights struggle that would dominate America in the 1950s and 1960s,” and a place where he first “glimpsed the contours of the United States into which [he] would mature.”Footnote ⁸

“Now is Not the Time To Be Silent”Footnote ⁹

The publications I am drawing on for this paper reached millions of African Americans and played a central role in their lives. Crisis and Opportunity, the official mouthpieces of America's largest and most influential civil-rights organizations, were published once a month and informed black as well as white middle-class readers about the progress or set-backs in the civil-rights struggle. Their narrow readership of mostly middle-class readers increased significantly beginning in the mid-1930s and especially after America's entry into the war in 1941. Membership in the NAACP grew from 50,556 to 450,000, and Crisis reached a significant number of African Americans and white readers committed to the cause of civil rights.Footnote ¹⁰ The black newspapers discussed in this paper served a more comprehensive role, but also reached a more diverse audience. Because the white mainstream press ignored all aspects of African-American life other than crime, these papers provided the glue that held the black community together. It was in the black press that African Americans could read about social events in their own communities, accomplishments of their own race, and what implications political developments in the U.S. and the larger world had for their own lives. The papers also provided a vast platform for black civil-rights advocates and served as coordinators for mass action.Footnote ¹¹ During its golden years (World War I to the 1960s) the black press was judged the “greatest single power in the Negro race” and had a following second only to that of the black church.Footnote ¹² Black newspapers that in 1930 had an overall circulation of some 600,000 copies increased their circulation to 1,276,600 by 1940 and 1,808,060 by 1945.Footnote ¹³

Among the most outspoken and influential of the black papers were the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier, weeklies that were produced in the North but largely read in the South where the local black press had to tread carefully with its criticism of Jim Crow racism.Footnote ¹⁴ Notably, these papers also reached audiences outside the educated middle class. Legions are the stories of the Chicago Defender's message of racial pride and uplift, demands for an end to lynching, and calls for equal rights being read aloud in churches, barbershops, lodges, and pool halls across the American South. The newspapers were not only read out aloud, but they were also passed from family to family, and barbershops kept free copies for customers who could not afford their own. It is estimated that out of thirteen million black Americans, between three and a half and six million regularly read one of the black newspapers to supplement information provided by the mainstream white press.Footnote ¹⁵

The phenomenal growth of the African-American press after 1930 was largely possible because America's struggle against Nazi racism; its unquestioning support of the European colonial powers, especially Great Britain; and the establishment of a segregated military to fight fascism and racism abroad allowed the black press an unprecedented opportunity to take on racism at home.Footnote ¹⁶ Black newspapers had always identified themselves proudly as a “fighting press,” and they exposed and attacked American racism and discrimination on their front pages in graphic and often sensationalist detail. As the editor of the New Republic pointed out in 1943, “when a white man first reads a Negro newspaper, it is like getting hit with a bucket of cold water in the face.”Footnote ¹⁷ That mission of speaking up for the rights of their African-American readers took on a whole new quality in the 1930s when America, both white and black, began to debate the rise of fascism in Europe. It was also then that white America became increasingly aware of what was being written in the black press.Footnote ¹⁸

Beginning with Hitler's rise to power, African-American civil-rights activists and the black press began to educate their readers about developments in Germany to highlight and indict the unresolved “racial question” in the U.S. The contradiction between America's stated ideals of democracy and the reality of life of America's black population had first been exposed during WWI, when America entered the war to “make the world safe for democracy.” The rise of Nazism, which posed not only a threat to democracy, but was also ideologically grounded in racial inequality, provided the black press and civil-rights advocates with a whole new arsenal to take on discrimination at home. African-American publications understood that Nazi racism also targeted people of color, but they discussed the emerging racial state in Germany foremost in terms of anti-Semitism, because it was the policies and violence aimed at the Jews, and not the persecution of other racial minorities that caused white America to condemn the Nazi state.Footnote ¹⁹ Significantly, Hitler's assumption of power, the passing of the Nuremberg Race Laws, and the escalating violence against German Jews all took place at the same time as a massive campaign was underway in the U.S. to make lynching a federal crime. That almost decade-long struggle, as well as the unwillingness of the U.S. Senate to pass a federal anti-lynching bill in 1938, provided civil-rights activists and the black press untold opportunities to draw comparisons between Germany's treatment of the Jews and America's treatment of its black minority.Footnote ²⁰

African-American activists and the black press pointed out the contradiction between America's democratic ideals and the reality of life for African Americans as soon as the Roosevelt administration, the American mainstream media, the churches, unions, and civic organizations expressed their outrage over Nazi racial legislation aimed at excluding Jews from German life. A 1934 article, for example, stated that the “the persecution of the Jews in Germany by the Nazi government is deplorable, stupid, and outrageous.” The author then continued that, “the persecution of colored Americans by Americans is deplorable, stupid, and outrageous.”Footnote ²¹ As the persecution of Jews in Germany worsened, Crisis and Opportunity condemned this development, but Crisis also insisted that African Americans suffered “practically the same persecution visited upon the Jews of Central Europe.”Footnote ²² After giving detailed comparisons of all the legal forms of discrimination and mob violence inflicted on the two minorities, an editorial in Opportunity concluded, “Between Hitler's treatment of the Jews and America's treatment of the Negro, you may pay your money and take your choice.”Footnote ²³ In an article entitled “Hitler in America,” the black press came to the same conclusion when it informed its readers that “The Bilbos [senator from Mississippi] of the South are as truly fascist on the Negro question as the Hitlerites are on the Jewish question.”Footnote ²⁴

African-American commentators were clearly appalled at what was happening to German Jews, and they understood earlier than most Americans the full scope of Nazi racism. After Kristallnacht, Walter White issued a statement in the Amsterdam News to call for solidarity with the Jews “because what happens to one minority can happen to another.” He reiterated that the black community's expression of solidarity against the mob violence was grounded in the very fact that “we Negroes know what this means since it has happened to us.”Footnote ²⁵ While expressing their sympathy, activists and the black press also expressed deep dismay that white Americans were willing to stand up for the Jews in Germany but not for the rights of African Americans in the American South. Crisis sneered at former Brigadier General Hugh Johnson, a senior member of the Roosevelt administration, who had fought vigorously to help defeat the anti-lynching bill in the U.S. senate in 1938, yet declared that it made him “physically sick” to hear what Hitler did to the Jews.Footnote ²⁶ A December 1938 Crisis editorial, entitled “Negroes, Nazis, and Jews,” made the same point when it asked why white America was so appalled by storm-trooper violence in Germany, but “remains so quiescent over raiding mobs in Dixie.”Footnote ²⁷

Black civil-rights activists were keenly aware of the difference between the state-sanctioned racism of Nazi Germany and the unwillingness of the federal government in the U.S. to interfere more forcefully in the southern states. Until the black community came around to supporting the struggle against Hitler after the fall of France, however, most insisted that there was no difference between Nazi state-sanctioned violence and the mob violence of the South: As one such observer asked in 1939, what is the difference to a “murdered man—between the government sanctioning his murder by decree, or permitting his murder” by sheer disregard for his humanity?Footnote ²⁸

Once it became clear that America was preparing to enter the war, African-American activists and the black press were handed even more forceful ammunition to make their case against Jim Crow. Because the federal government, just as in wars past, mobilized a segregated military, and even insisted on a racially segregated blood supply, civil-rights activists and the black press launched a frontal attack on segregation in the armed forces.Footnote ²⁹ They were able to step up their attack because the federal government, through the mobilization of a segregated military, had given official sanction to the southern system of Jim Crow segregation. Furthermore, the U.S. military now brought southern segregation to military bases in states where no such practices had ever existed and even took these practices overseas. This happened during the Spanish-American War and WWI as well, but by 1940/41, the U.S. government faced a better educated and much more politicized and organized African-American community. Civil-rights activists and the black press could now make a powerful case that “southern traditions” of Jim Crow were not merely an aberration in an otherwise admirable democratic system as white northern liberals liked to claim. Indeed, with the officially segregated units, blasted one critic, the U.S. military made “‘white supremacy’ which is simply Hitler's ‘Nordic Supremacy’ in Cracker Lingo” its official policy.Footnote ³⁰ The distinguished African-American poet Langston Hughes, who posted regular columns for the Chicago Defender, made that point just as forcefully when he stated that “the army put its stamp upon official Jim Crow, in imitation of the southern states where laws separating Negroes and whites are as much part of government as are Hitler's laws segregating the Jews in Germany.” Therefore to the “ears of the black American, most of the speeches about freedom … sound perfectly foolish, unreal, high-flown and false.”Footnote ³¹

Given the reality of life for Blacks in America, African Americans were hardly enthusiastic about fighting in a war in which they had no stake. The Chicago Defender gave voice to that sentiment when it quoted a young soldier who asked, “Why die for democracy for some foreign country when we don't even have it here?”Footnote ³² But black leaders and the black press also understood that the war offered unprecedented opportunities to improve the lives of black Americans. To encourage a largely reluctant African-American community to support the American war effort, civil-rights activists and the black press shifted gears. The NAACP, despite widely shared misgivings, made clear that a real choice was to be made. They reminded African Americans of Hitler's hateful language in Mein Kampf where he had compared them to semi-apes. “If Hitler wins, every single right we now possess and for which we have struggled here in America for more than three centuries will be instantaneously wiped out by Hitler's triumphs. If the allies win, we shall at least have the right to continue fighting for a share of democracy for ourselves.”Footnote ³³ Langston Hughes reiterated that same point in the Chicago Defender when he argued that Blacks were right to insist “that Jim Crow is Hitlerism.” But they are wrong to think, he continued, “that [Hitler] would not be worse. Under him the meanest Cracker in Georgia would set the policy.”Footnote ³⁴

Given the larger threat, black leaders pushed African Americans to step up to the plate, with the black press taking the lead. This time, and unlike WWI, however, the Chicago Defender assured its readers, “there can be no closed ranks on the race question, and no silence on injustice.”Footnote ³⁵Crisis warned that African Americans had not forgotten that they had been “taken to the mountain top” with promises of democracy during WWI and then were bitterly disappointed after the war. This would not happen again. The so-called Double V (Double Victory) campaign initiated by the Pittsburgh Courier in January 1942 promised to “wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who would enslave us.”Footnote ³⁶ The Negro Newspaper Publishers' Association, all civil-rights organizations, and almost every black church lent their support to this campaign which united and invigorated the black community as never before. The NAACP's Crisis made clear what was at stake in the bluntest terms:

By using Nazi Germany as a mirror to reflect America's own racial shortcomings, African-American activists and the black press were able to mobilize the black community and to sharpen their civil-rights agenda. By arguing that the “Jews in Germany” know that “Nuremberg-Law-segregation is discrimination and the American Negro soldier knows that jimcrow [sic] segregation is discrimination,” African Americans were able to make the case as never before that separate could never be equal.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, white America's outcry against Nazi racism and America's entry into the war in 1941 made possible a much more assertive civil-rights agenda that insisted not just on ameliorating the consequences of segregation, but ending it.Footnote ³⁹ It was no longer a matter of just making the “Negro's side of Jim Crow” more bearable, a strategy that southern liberals and also many northern liberals endorsed because they believed that segregation was a fact of life that could not be eliminated.Footnote ⁴⁰ That more determined discourse is also discernable in the black press. It was no longer just a matter of achieving equitable quotas for African Americans in the defense industry and the armed forces, or getting one more “Negro school” built. The institution of segregation itself, both in its legal form in the South and in its informal manifestation in the North had to be abolished.Footnote ⁴¹ African Americans, as the Chicago Defender put it, were now also insisting on an “unconditional surrender” from the “Hitlers” on the “home front.”Footnote ⁴²

The rise of Hitler, and the willingness of African-American activists and the black press to equate the American South and Nazi Germany also helped to foster a process by which the intellectual foundation of racism became discredited among white liberals.Footnote ⁴³ The Double-V campaign was not just launched to mobilize the black community, but was also envisioned as a strategy to prod white liberals to discover “the paradox within their own democracy and join the struggle for civil rights.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus, beginning in the 1930s, African-American activists and the press chastised white America that its voice in the struggle against Nazi racism would carry a “far greater authority” if it could also “be heard against racial oppression at home.”Footnote ⁴⁵ They also reminded white America that, “we hand [the ugly truth]” to the Nazis “every time an American mob lynches a Negro, every time we discriminate against a Negro soldier.”Footnote ⁴⁶ That strategy paid off. By the early 1940s, northern white liberals had heard that message and expressed their growing concern in progressive publications such as the New Republic, The Nation, Common Sense, P.M., and Survey Graphic. When mob violence ensued in Detroit in 1943 as African-American defense workers tried to move into an all-white housing complex, an editorial in the Nation concluded that, “We cannot fight fascism abroad while turning a blind eye to fascism at home. We cannot inscribe our banner ‘For democracy and a caste system.’”Footnote ⁴⁷ As Roy Wilkins, editor of the Crisis noted in 1944, “Hitler jammed our white people into their logistically untenable position. Forced to oppose him for the sake of the life of the nation, they were jockeyed into declaring against his racial theories—publicly.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Because of America's struggle against Nazi Germany and because of the agitation of the black press, “white supremacy” was no longer a publicly acceptable doctrine in the North by the end of WWII.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the American South, most liberals were not willing to acknowledge that fact. Liberal activists there agreed to ameliorate the discriminatory aspects of segregation but insisted that segregation itself needed to be preserved in order to maintain the “integrity” of the races.Footnote ⁵⁰

The African-American Press on the Black Soldiers' Experience in Germany

By the end of WWII, African-American activists and the black press had made significant advances in convincing white liberals that racism was “un-American.” They had, however, not yet succeeded in getting rid of segregation. Indeed, when the U.S. army arrived in Germany to defeat Nazism, the Army was as segregated as it was in 1941. The obvious contradiction between America's mission of democracy in Germany and the institutionalized segregation of the army as well as the racist conduct of many of its officers did not remain hidden, given the immense political mobilization of African Americans because of WWII and the power of the black press. The black press had its own correspondents in Germany, and the Pittsburgh Courier ran a regular column, “At Home and Overseas with our GIs,” to keep its readers informed of what was happening to black soldiers. African-American civil-rights activists and representatives of the African-American press toured Germany regularly during the years of occupation and through the 1950s to report on the situation of black GIs. Representatives of African-American churches and women's organizations as well traveled to occupied Germany.Footnote ⁵¹ Their findings informed the black community not only about the progress being made in the democratization of Germany, but also alerted white and black America to the widespread discrimination that African-American GIs faced within the segregated military. In this manner, as I will argue in the last section of the paper, America's “race question” became a topic of national and international implications. But first, I want to show how the black press and civil-rights activists used their coverage to depict post-fascist Germany as a space where black Americans and progressive white Americans could imagine a future America without a color line.

A great deal of what we know about the experience of the tens of thousands of black GIs who served as members of the occupation army is concerned with their sexual and romantic encounters with German women.Footnote ⁵² The African-American press riveted on these relationships because they represented the collapse of the very foundation on which the elaborate system of American racial segregation and racial domination was built. Because miscegenation laws still criminalized such relationships in twenty-nine of the states in the U.S. in 1945, the black press relished the fact that the ultimate racial taboo was broken in the very land where, as Ebony, put it, “Aryanism” had “ruled supreme.” Significantly, Crisis and Opportunity, unlike the black press, steered clear of covering interracial sexuality for fear of alienating their white liberal allies.Footnote ⁵³

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this particular instance of the breakdown of the color line was the only encounter that received attention. By providing a more systematic exploration of how the African-American press and civil-rights activists portrayed the experience of black troops in Germany, I will show how centrally Germany continued to figure in the discourse of the black press and the emerging civil-rights movement. I want to emphasize that I am not arguing in this essay that black soldiers encountered no racism in Germany. This was clearly not the case, and, as I have shown in my previous work, resentment toward the soldiers' relationships with white German women was widespread, even if not always expressed openly.Footnote ⁵⁴ Instead, the focus of my essay is to show how African-American civil-rights activists and African-American newspapers portrayed Germany as a sort of “Shangri-La” or “racial utopia” to provide their readers with an alternative model of life than was available for them in the U.S.Footnote ⁵⁵

In the memory of African-American veterans as well as in the pages of the African-American press, Germany was granted a status similar to that which France had enjoyed since WWI. France had won its privileged place in the African-American imagination because it integrated black American troops with its own military during WWI and even awarded the black soldiers of New York's 369th Infantry Regiment—one of only two black combat outfits during the war—France's highest military honor. Consequently, from the early 1920s, Paris emerged as a magnet for black expatriates, especially writers and musicians, who were attracted by a society without Jim Crow discrimination.Footnote ⁵⁶ The black soldiers' experiences in WWII and during the occupation years would bring about a similar status for post-Nazi Germany. Significantly, in Germany, the black press described experiences of thousands of regular soldiers and their families, and not the privileged lives of the black intelligentsia, as was the case in France. Thus, the press coverage on Germany, even more so than that on France, allowed African Americans to imagine a space or locale where “normal” black individuals—rather than celebrities—might experience freedom and opportunities denied them in their own country. At the same time, the African-American newspaper coverage on Germany implied that if transformation toward racial tolerance and acceptance was possible in the land “where Aryanism had ruled supreme,” then perhaps change could also be achieved in the United States of America.

William Gardner Smith's novel, The Last of the Conquerors, is probably the best-known and most-cited depiction of the African-American military experience in Germany. When the book was first published in 1948, it sold more than 280,000 copies and was also widely reviewed outside the black press. During his tour of service in Germany (1947–1948), Smith filed regular news reports under the name Bill Smith for the Pittsburgh Courier, and many of those contributions addressed the same themes depicted in his novel. Smith envisioned both his contributions to the Pittsburgh Courier and his novel as vehicles to protest the Jim Crow army and to indict American hypocrisy. The statement by one of his protagonists—“I like this goddamn country, you know that? … It is the first place I was ever treated like a goddamn man”—is probably one of the most powerful enunciations of how Americans, both white and black, learned about the experiences of African-American soldiers in Germany.Footnote ⁵⁷

When William Gardner Smith was interviewed in 1959 for the New York Post, he acknowledged that the racial landscape in Germany after the war was, of course, much more complicated than the one he had depicted in The Last of the Conquerors. Germans were “no angels,” he recalled. “They were racists, but we were conquerors and the look in their eyes was respect.” Smith explained why service in Germany was such a transformative moment for black GIs:

In his many contributions to the Pittsburgh Courier, Smith used even stronger metaphors to give words to such transformation. In a 1948 article, he described the return of his outfit of some 800 men to New York City from Germany. Smith wrote of the gloomy mood among many of the soldiers and in particular the hopelessness of his army buddy Godette on first glimpsing the Statue of Liberty. Instead of feeling a sense of elation, his buddy despaired because, as Smith told his readers, during his tour of duty, Godette “had tasted his first absolute freedom and it had made him drunk. He never wanted to get sober again.” Smith stressed that the experience of his buddy Godette was not the exception when he concluded his account with the commentary that “there are many Godettes in Germany today.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Narratives of the “good life” in Germany circulated through the African-American community and became an integral part of how African-American veterans remembered their military service in Germany.Footnote ⁶⁰ The son of a black soldier who had married a white German woman in the late 1940s recalled how fondly his parents talked of their time together in postwar Germany:

Such stories of a world without a color line did not just become part of family lore, but were retold nostalgically in locker-room and barbershop conversations. Because of the interest the African-American press took in what the black soldiers were doing abroad, stories about the “good life” in Germany also made their way to broad sections of the African-American community. Civil-rights activists traveling to Germany after 1945 and during the 1950s were crucial in helping to graft this positive perception of West Germany. Marcus Ray, who served as the civilian aide to the Secretary of War, visited Germany in 1946 and reported to President Truman that he and his colleagues observed “no carry over of Nazi racial ideologies against the American Negro soldier” and that the “expected difficulties have not materialized.”Footnote ⁶² Those findings were shared with the larger African-American community, when the Chicago Defender reported on Ray's visit: “Questioned concerning the reaction of the German people to Negro troops, Ray revealed that Negroes were accepted by the native populations on the same basis as whites and that there was no problem whatsoever, as far as the people themselves were concerned.”Footnote ⁶³ Walter White, the president of the NAACP, had similar good news to report. He cited a recent poll taken among black GIs in Germany that revealed that the soldiers were extended “more genuine friendship and democracy by the people who but lately were the guinea pigs of Hitler's racial theories, than they get in the ‘democracy’ which had won the shooting war.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The journalist Roi Ottley, who traveled extensively through Germany after 1945 and whose stories appeared in the Chicago Defender, was equally enthusiastic. The African-American GIs he had talked to compared German acceptance of black soldiers favorably to the mistreatment they regularly experienced at the hands of their white comrades and officers. To emphasize his point, Ottley added that the soldiers, who had also served in France, “uniformly declare the German people freer of color prejudice than the French.”Footnote ⁶⁵

Word that Germany was a more hospitable country for black GIs than the U.S., and even long-admired France, spread quickly. A June 1946 article in the Chicago Defender reported that eighty-five percent of the most recent black enlistees had signed up for service in Europe. Because the majority of these requests were for Germany, the military had to end its existing policy, which allowed enlistees a choice of station if they were sent abroad. That step was necessary because the high proportion signing up for Germany was threatening the military's policy of allowing no more than ten percent of its troops there to be African American.Footnote ⁶⁶

Not only did Germany emerge among African-American soldiers as the favorite locale for overseas military service, but the black press also reported that some black GIs were choosing to make Germany their new home. The Pittsburgh Courier wrote in a February 1947 headline, “Found Freedom in Germany. Few GIs Eager to Return to States.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Many of the black GIs who decided to stay in Germany found work as civilian employees of the U.S. military government, and others were able to make a living in the thriving jazz clubs of Germany's bombed-out cities.Footnote ⁶⁸ Other soldiers took their military discharge in the U.S. and then returned to Germany, as a 1949 Negro Digest story entitled “Why Negroes leave America. Many GIs find more freedom overseas than in their native land” reveals. One such soldier told the reporter, “I am happy here in Germany … I got tired of being a second-class citizen. I feel like a man now, and people treat me like a man—which is more than I can say about the place where I was born.” The report closed by informing the readers that many more men like this veteran could be found all over Europe.Footnote ⁶⁹ While the number of black soldiers taking such a step was small compared to the number of soldiers who returned home, their stories served the important function of reiterating for African Americans that a world without racial boundaries was possible.Footnote ⁷⁰

By 1947, requests for extension of military duty by black soldiers in Germany were skyrocketing, and the number of black GIs asking for a military discharge in Europe was three times higher than that of white soldiers. According to the author of a study on this surprising development, “after having tasted equality, or love and/or marriage” in Europe and particularly in Germany, the black soldiers want to stay abroad.Footnote ⁷¹ As Walter White observed in the Chicago Defender, even though the army was a deeply racist institution, black GIs reported that they extended their tours of duty “for almost the sole reason that doing so would enable them as occupation troops to live anywhere on earth except in their own United States.”Footnote ⁷²

Thus, in the depictions of the influential African-American press, the heartland of Aryanism was converted into a haven of equality and freedom for black soldiers. A September 1946 blurb in the Chicago Defender advertising an upcoming feature story on black soldiers in Germany in Ebony stated boldly, “Paradox in Race Relations. In Berlin … One time Citadel of Race Hatred … Negro GIs Are Living in a New World of Social Equality.”Footnote ⁷³ In the Ebony article that was published shortly thereafter, the magazine also contrasted the experience in Germany with the reality of black life in the U.S. Ebony informed its readers that the “Negroes are finding more friendship, more respect, and more equality than they would back home—either in Dixie or on Broadway.” With an obvious jab at the situation of African Americans in the U.S., Ebony concluded that, “many of the Negro GIs … find that democracy has more meaning on Wilhelmstrasse than on Beale Street in Memphis.”Footnote ⁷⁴

To make their case that even former Nazis had come around to accepting the black GI, the black press reported on a wide variety of interactions that took place between African Americans and Germans. Encounters with Germans took place when jazz enthusiasts would gather at places where black soldiers congregated, and such jam sessions between white and black music enthusiasts were commented on positively in the African-American press. One Chicago Defender article pointed out gleefully that aside from “teaching German girls the delicate art of jitterbug” the “Tan Yanks have also changed the style of the long-haired German musicians who are accustomed to play music which is either too militaristic or sad enough to make you weep in your beer. Now these same musicians are playing boogie-woogie … with skill and gusto.” The African-American press clearly took a lot of pride in the fact that black GIs brought not only democracy to Germany, but also taught Germans a different way of being in the world.Footnote ⁷⁵

Other stories stress the friendships that developed between African-American soldiers and German men by describing the empathy that German friends extended when black soldiers experienced racism at the hands of white Americans, both in Germany and the U.S. The Chicago Defender quoted a letter from a young black sergeant to convey that such caring interracial alliances had become possible in post Nazi Germany. His German friends, Sergeant Brown wrote, commented after a particularly gruesome lynching had taken place in the U.S., that “it is funny that you are over here to protect us from the Russians when there is no one to protect your people from the KKK and white Americans. That is a big joke.” The article implied that Germans had seen the light of day and were now rejecting racism. Indeed just three years after VE-Day, it was the Germans who were calling on the Americans to stop their racist behavior. Sergeant Brown informed the paper that “the German people could not understand how a country advocating ‘freedom for all’ could allow things like the Parker lynching to continue.” According to Brown, his “German friends feel sorry for him and other Negro servicemen. They all want to know why America will not put an end to racial injustice [in the U.S.] … what can I tell them?”Footnote ⁷⁶

The black press also reported that interactions between American Blacks and the German community had expanded significantly since the wives and children of the soldiers arrived in Germany in greater numbers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Such stories served a dual function. They celebrated the contributions of black Americans to their country's mission in Germany and offered their readers examples of interracial friendships that were hardly possible in the U.S. during those years. In one such story, Ebony described black families as popular employers because they tended to be more generous with their food rations and hand-me-down clothing, which was much desired by the German women working for them as maids or nannies. Ebony also reported that African-American families regularly met with their German friends from work, visited each other's homes, attended church, and went swimming at the beach. Naturally, their children also played together.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Chicago Defender was equally delighted at this development, reporting that the wife of a warrant officer had informed the reporter that she “counts among her friends several German families outside the post.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Despite its homage to Germany as a place where Blacks could have a better life than in the U.S., the African-American press was also conscious of the fact that post-fascist Germany was hardly free from racism.Footnote ⁸⁰ A September 1946 blurb advertising a forthcoming Ebony story on interracial dating cautioned, “doubtless this affection [of German women for African-American GIs] is only skin deep, race prejudice cannot be rooted out overnight.”Footnote ⁸¹ In an extensive 1955 essay, Ebony reported that by then the Germans were used to the presence of black men, but that the wives of the soldiers still attracted undue attention. African-American women also did not like that the Germans called them “Schwarze.” A woman reported that, “When she heard the word ‘schwarze’ (black) being tossed around, she turned around and sweetly said, ‘Guten tag mein liebschen dumkopfs [sic].’”Footnote ⁸²

Interestingly, this author of this article went out of his way to argue that staring, unpleasant as it might be, should not be interpreted as an act of hostility, but only as curiosity. He explained such behavior as “part of the German character of hearty extroversion and blunt expression. The Auslanders [sic] have neither the finesse of the French nor the continental dignity of the Swiss. They are earthy like the steins of foamy beer in the gasthaus [sic].” The author went even further in his defense of the Germans when he argued that such behavior should not “cloud the fact that a good many Germans have tossed out any latent Hitler-inspired notions of Aryan purity and have completely accepted a mixed occupation.” The author closed his discussion by emphasizing that in throwing out their racism, the Germans “have been more convincing than the liberal French.”Footnote ⁸³

Germany's reputation as a sort of haven for African-American GIs was to last well beyond the so-called hunger years.Footnote ⁸⁴ Because of existing Jim Crow race laws in the U.S., the African-American press was given plenty of opportunities to draw stark contrasts between the lives African Americans were able to live in Germany and those that awaited them at home.Footnote ⁸⁵ In 1956, Jet magazine reported on a black soldier who returned after three years of military service in Germany where he had “defied Dixie's most sacred tradition” by marrying a white German woman. Problems for him started when he dared to bring his “strawberry-blonde wife” to meet his mother in Halifax County, Virginia. News of the “brash and daring young Negro soldier” who had flouted his state's miscegenation laws spread like wildfire, Jet reported. Within a few hours of their arrival, the Commonwealth's attorney issued a warrant so that the Halifax County sheriff could arrest the audacious couple. The newlyweds were able to flee Virginia by the skin of their teeth, or as Jet put it, “just one step ahead of the posse.” Interviewed by Jet once they arrived safely in Boston, an “amazed Mrs. Lore Lawson,” described as a “bright-eyed ex-secretary from Fürth” told the magazine, “In Europe, Americans brag about what a great country this is. Then they won't even let my husband and I [sic] live in his own home.”Footnote ⁸⁶

In 1957, interracial couples made news again, when twenty-seven soldiers of the Second Armored Division, who had married German wives, were to return to Fort Hood, Texas. Many soldiers chose to stay behind in Germany because their marriages to white women made them criminals in the eyes of the Texas legislature. Jet Magazine reported that the soldiers “involved had shown that they loved their wives more than they loved the 2nd Armored Division. All had asked for reassignment,” with one of the soldiers informing the reporter that, “not for a million dollars would I go to Texas.” Another soldier, Ernest Hoffmann said, “I would rather like to stay in Germany forever. I have no longing for the USA.” Willie Hunter, in the army since 1937, also stated that he had no plans to “unnecessarily complicating [sic] his life by going to Texas.” He had married his German wife in 1952, and had once before extended his tour of duty in Germany. Living in Stuttgart, Jet pointed out, Hunter is driving a Cadillac and is “seriously thinking about making Germany his permanent home.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Jet magazine used such stories to make the case that twelve years after the Americans abolished the noxious Nuremberg race laws with a stroke of the pen, twenty-four states in the U.S. still enforced miscegenation laws that criminalized marriages between Blacks and Whites. The fact that African-American soldiers were able to find love and acceptance in Germany was contrasted with the efforts of Republican Joe Pool of Dallas who had introduced a resolution in the Texas legislature to tighten segregation laws because his “sense of decency [was] shocked by this terrible revelation that the Army might allow such unnatural marriages to be brought to Texas.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Germany in American Civil Rights Debates After 1945

The upbeat coverage on the soldiers' experiences in Germany enforced in many ways the view that Germany was a haven for black GIs and that life there would even be better, were it not for the presence of their white comrades in arms. America might have triumphed over Nazism and was poised to bring democracy to Germany, but African Americans knew that the goals of the Double-V campaign, for which they had worked so assiduously during the war, were still out of their reach. Black GIs still served in a segregated military, and veterans who returned triumphantly to the U.S. were still forced to ride in the back of the bus. As a wave of violence swept across the South after 1945, neither uniforms nor ribbons could protect veterans from racists who were eager to remind them of “their place” in the southern race hierarchy.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus, while stories in the white mainstream press celebrated the fact that the American military government was ridding Germany of Nazi racism, the coverage in the black papers reminded the black community of the work still ahead in the U.S. Just a few days after VE-Day, the Chicago Defender reminded its readers somberly that, “Hitlerism is dead in Germany but not in Dixie.”Footnote ⁹⁰ When the U.S. military government, as one of its first acts, declared invalid all Nazi race laws, a headline informed its readers, “Race Discrimination Ends in Germany—Not America.”Footnote ⁹¹ As this final section will show, by keeping their focus on how the Jim Crow army undermined America's mission of democracy in Germany, African-American activists and the black press continued their campaign for civil rights. In that effort, they would be joined by white allies, who had also become alerted by the discrepancy between America's mission in Germany and the deployment of a segregated military.

If the contributions of African Americans to the war effort had already allowed activists and the black press to argue that the “separate but equal” doctrine was in fact always discriminatory, their participation in the occupation and reeducation of Germany offered a whole new opportunity to elaborate that point.Footnote ⁹² After having convinced America's thirteen million African Americans that they also had a stake in the fight against Nazism, the U.S. military deployed eighty percent of African-American soldiers in labor and service units, keeping them out of the more prestigious combat units. As scholars of the American military have shown, despite all the high-minded statements of official army manuals, the attitude of WWII military officers very much reflected those of their predecessors from WWI. The Department of the Army and the military command structure, dominated by Southerners, remained committed to strict segregation of the races. Military leaders did not believe that African Americans possessed the necessary intelligence to be suited for modern warfare, and they were convinced that black officers lacked the necessary qualities to be effective leaders.Footnote ⁹³ It was this rigidly segregated military and deeply racist institution that was brought to Germany to carry out what military commanders called “the most important job ever undertaken by the United States,” namely the reeducation and democratization of the defeated country.Footnote ⁹⁴

One can only wonder what black soldiers serving in the occupation army must have thought about the military's instructions that it was up to them to teach the Germans “that the whole concept of superiority … and intolerance of others is evil …” and that America is the “living denial of Hitler's absurd theories of a superior race.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The deep gulf between this soaring rhetoric of democracy and racial harmony and the stark reality of the Jim Crow army of occupation was obvious to even the most oblivious observer.Footnote ⁹⁶ African Americans serving in the occupation were employed mostly as manual laborers, cooks, and drivers. They were not allowed in the prestigious Constabulary Force, the postal service, or in positions supervising or guarding German workers.Footnote ⁹⁷ The army defended that decision by arguing that black GIs “ordinarily could not be utilized satisfactorily in a supervisory capacity over German personnel, since they required so much supervision themselves.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Furthermore, the military command suggested that it would be offensive to the Germans to be policed or guarded by African-American soldiers.Footnote ⁹⁹ The army, whose officer corps was disproportionately made up of Southerners, even tried to exclude black GIs completely from occupation duty, and only manpower needs and fears over an outcry by African-American civil-rights groups prevented that step.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The most important officers of the military government had few qualms about saying publicly just how much they resented the fact that African-American GIs were deployed in the occupation of Germany. General Joseph McNarney, the military governor of the American Zone, expressed his opposition to the use of black soldiers by suggesting in 1946 that “it will be one hundred years before the Negro will develop to the point where he will be on a parity with white Americans.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Major General Ernest Harmon, the commander of the fearsome Constabulary Force, informed his audience of all-white soldiers in that same year that “America's stupidest mistake” was to “send colored soldiers to Europe.” He told a cheering audience of white soldiers that he had warned the government not to send any “Niggers” because “now they were a much bigger problem than the Germans.”Footnote ¹⁰² While these two segregationists left for the U.S. in January 1947, Lt. General Lucius Clay, the hero of the Berlin airlift and replacement for General McNarney, also expressed the conviction that African-American GIs might best be used as parade troops if they had to serve in the prestigious Berlin command at all.Footnote ¹⁰³

The segregated Jim Crow army exposed the U.S. to charges of hypocrisy across western Europe and Asia, but it was its deployment first in occupied Germany and then in democratic West Germany that proved most problematic. Civil-rights activists and the black press understood America's predicament all too well, and were fully prepared to take advantage of it. Thus, when they traveled for inspection tours to Europe during the late 1940s and the early 1950s to check on how black GIs were faring abroad, the focus of their reporting was always on Germany. Given the unfolding Cold War and the competition with the Soviet Union, it was in Germany where the U.S. had the greatest stake. Because of America's self-appointed mission of denazification and democratization there, Germany was also the place where the U.S. was most vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The black press's coverage on postwar Germany mocked the U.S. not only for having abolished Nazi racial laws while doing nothing about them in the U.S., but also alerted the American public that the army was bringing American-style racism to Germany. The pages of the black press were full of headlines that decried the “Nazi Attitudes of White Soldiers,” or declared “American Officers Abroad Propagating Race Hatred,” all the while cautioning that America might be “Losing the Peace” because “American Prejudice [was] Rampant in Germany.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Readers of the black press were also informed about such embarrassing Jim Crow incidents as the one that took place in Munich in late 1947 when white military personnel gathered outside the exclusive army-run Exelsior Hotel to express their outrage that African-American singer Marian Anderson was going to spend the night at the hotel.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The black press repeatedly warned of the consequences of such behavior because, according to Ebony, much damage could be done “by spreading anti-Negro propaganda, sometimes as vicious as that of Hitler, among the conquered people.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Roi Ottley reiterated a similar point to his readers when he reported that, “many Germans I talked with were sincerely bewildered by American racialism.” Germans had asked him plaintively, “‘How wrong was the Führer in his hatred of Jews, … when your white Americans encourage us to hate the blacks—their comrades in arms!’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ A bad example was not only set by white soldiers, but their wives were also implicated, according to “Mr. Jim Crow and I” published in Crisis. The wives of white officers stationed in Gelnhausen outside Frankfurt excluded black officer wives from social life and had taken it upon themselves to explain the “rules of Jim Crow” to the Germans.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The U.S. military did not only bring American forms of racism to Germany, but was also importing American-style segregation, and this fact allowed an even more assertive questioning of America's alleged mission of democracy. In a Chicago Defender editorial entitled, “‘U.S. Democracy,’ in Germany and at Home,” the author reported that a black-only training camp had been established “in former Nazi-dominated Germany.” In doing so, he wrote, “it appears that the States'-Rights, Jim Crow formula of Dixie America has been transplanted to famed Kitzingen training center.” The author stressed how ironic this was given that:

He concluded his observations by quoting a black soldier serving in Germany who told him that “America can't teach democracy abroad and practice bigotry at home. The two theories are diametrically opposed.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Langston Hughes also wondered in his column how Germans were to “learn democracy from folks with Dixie-like manners” who “practice only confederate democracy?”Footnote ¹¹¹

The Germans, then, were able to observe on a daily basis not only the racism of individual soldiers, but also the institutional aspects of the Jim Crow army, such as segregated units and installations, substandard accommodations for black soldiers, and the almost complete lack of black officers. While segregated military units and installations were the norm in the U.S. as well, the situation in Germany exposed this fact to the very people the Americans wanted to convert to democracy. The black press was all too willing to drive that point home. The Chicago Defender reported that the Germans noted with astonishment that the “GIs' service club in front of Lt. General Lucius Clay's Berlin headquarters does not permit black soldiers on its premises,” and that the pool at the main barracks has to be “used on separate days by Negroes and whites” with the water being drained after the black soldiers used the pool.Footnote ¹¹² When representatives of the Negro Publishers' Association traveled to Germany in 1946, they reported on the grievous consequences of a segregated army and warned that the “natives reflect seriously on this racial distinction in the army.”Footnote ¹¹³ Walter White informed his fellow Americans two years later that “Germans sneer at pious American enquiries about Nazi racism and how Germans ever fell for it.” Germans, he told the Chicago Defender, “replied irrefutably: ‘How can you talk about German racism as long as you maintain separate white and black armies?’”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Throughout the years of occupation and into the 1950s, civil-rights advocates and the black press evoked America's mission in Germany to achieve first de jure integration of the army in 1948 and then de facto integration (1952–54). This would not be an easy task because southern officers who dominated the army, and southern democrats in Congress as well as the Secretary of War, Royall, insisted that any improvement of the situation of black soldiers in the military “must be made within the framework of segregation.” Given that broad opposition to integration, Truman was compelled to force desegregation of the military by using the presidential prerogative of the Executive Order. Truman was pushed toward that step for a number of reasons. The NAACP had conducted a survey in 1948 that revealed that seventy-one percent of black youth would refuse to register for the planned peace time draft if the military continued to be segregated, and militant activist Philip Randolph, just as in 1941, threatened another march on Washington should the government not relent. The year 1948 was also an election year, and Truman feared that northern blacks would not support the Democratic Party, especially after Henry Wallace, who endorsed integration, decided to run as the candidate for the Progressive Party. Thomas Dewey, the Republican Party's presidential candidate, tried to win black voters by also promising the integration of the military.Footnote ¹¹⁵

The editors of the black press, who had traveled to Germany in spring 1948, were only too willing to join the fray.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Having organized as a pressure lobby during the war, thirteen representatives of the black press had already met with Roosevelt in February 1944 to present him with a twenty-one-point program stating war and postwar aims, and their commitment to “fight for every right guaranteed by the Constitution.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ While some improvements had been made by 1948, the editors found that segregation and discrimination were still a fact, so they decided to draw a hard line with Truman. They all agreed that none of them would continue “serving in any advisory capacity on the basis of continued segregation.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Their public demand for an end to the Jim Crow army was published in all their papers. As the Chicago Defender reported, the editors told Truman that the Soviet threat had convinced them that a strong troop presence in Germany was necessary, but they insisted that “it must not be Jim Crow.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Speedy integration was crucial, another editorial pointed out, because “the Germans know” the reality of the segregated army, and because such a segregated military can “not help promote the so-called democratic way of life being introduced to the Germans.”Footnote ¹²⁰ Another editorial also demanded integration of the army, because “many men in high and public life realize that one of the nation's chief handicaps in its dealings with foreign nations is to be found, according to the editors, in the inconsistency of the democracy we preach and the hypocrisy we practice.”Footnote ¹²¹ As civil rights activist L. D. Reddick pointed out, once the African-American newspaper editors went on record with their demands, more timid and accommodating civil-rights leaders in the black community could no longer back down and had to close ranks.Footnote ¹²²

Thus, on July 26, 1948, two days after Truman had already signed a draft law that still provided for a segregated military, he issued Executive Order 9981 that called on the military to integrate the troops “without impairing [military] efficiency or morale.”Footnote ¹²³ After the Executive Order was issued, African-American activists and the black press understood fully well that the army's leadership would not act speedily, but they could claim victory. Segregation of the armed forces was no longer the official policy of the United States. The first breach of Jim Crow had been accomplished, preparing the way for the momentous 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. It would also take until 1954 before de facto integration would be accomplished in the European Command. The Korean War and manpower needs made integration a reality on that battlefield by 1950, but in Germany, commanders remained resistant. Beginning with the Berlin Airlift, African-American activists and the black press increasingly pointed to the relentless propaganda of East Germany and the Soviet Union to make their case.Footnote ¹²⁴ Segregation had to go, the Chicago Defender reported, because a “growing number of [white] American officers” serving in Germany were getting worried about America's prestige abroad. Unwilling to take on their senior officers publicly, the officers had nonetheless confided to Walter White that they “worry about the picture American democracy is presenting to an increasingly skeptical world.”Footnote ¹²⁵

The integration of the United States Army in Europe became a reality because of the agitation of the black press, but also because their agitation had trickled into white America's consciousness. After VE-Day and into the 1950s, white civil-rights advocates and the progressive mainstream press started taking note of events in Germany as well. While their coverage of the black soldiers' experience was not as extensive as that of the black press, they, too, reported with surprise that black GIs learned in Germany “that there was a place on earth where there was no discrimination against them.”Footnote ¹²⁶ The New Republic, which had already exposed discrimination against black soldiers in the continental U.S. during the war, continued its mission after the war. To prod discussion of the contradiction between America's unresolved race question and its mission of democracy abroad, the magazine shared with its readers the reflections of a black soldier in Germany: “You hear a lot about how homesick the overseas American soldier is for the ‘good old USA,’ he said. But you don't hear much about that from the Negro soldier … Hell, why should they be homesick? Homesick for Jim Crow, for poll taxes, and segregated slums? Homesick for lynchings and race riots?”Footnote ¹²⁷

Journalists Bud Hutton and Andy Rooney brought their dismay about American racism to a broad American audience when they asked what Germans were to think of the practice of lynchings in America. They informed white America that such kind of violence had now been taken to Germany when they described the brutality that white soldiers and often enough white military police inflicted on black soldiers in front of the Germans. They sarcastically called the aftermath of one such incident the “bleeding remnants of an example of American democracy.” The authors informed their readers that America's racial problem could no longer remain hidden given America's prominent role in Germany. What were Germans to think about the prevalence of racial violence against blacks [both in the U.S. and in Germany] given America's mission of reeducation in Germany, the authors asked? “For twelve years Hitler and the Nazis taught” the Germans a doctrine of hatred based on the same racial distinctions that mark life in the U.S. They cautioned their readers that, “the Germans were defeated by an army among whose ideals was that such [racial] distinctions and discriminations were wrong and should be destroyed.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Other observers of the occupation were equally embarrassed by how American racism played out in front of the very Germans the Americans were sent to democratize and cure of their racism. As one commentator pointedly argued, “One learns that the discrepancies between ideals and realities of the American way … can no longer be considered private national business when they are practiced in full view of Germans we hope to re-educate.”Footnote ¹²⁹ White publications, just like the black press, were not just concerned about American prestige in the eyes of the Germans, but also warned of America's role in the Cold-War competition. Integration had to be accomplished, argued the Saturday Evening Post, because Communist propaganda relentlessly attacked Americans as hypocrites and informed the German public that “lynching is the standard treatment of Negroes in the United States.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Thus, because of America's role in Germany, the State Department besieged the Department of the Army to put pressure on the commanders in Germany. By 1951, the Department of the Army finally came around. They forced the commanders in Heidelberg to integrate because they had become convinced that a segregated military provided “a constant embarrassment in foreign relations, [and] also jeopardizes the effective maintenance of our moral leadership of the free and democratic nations of the world.”Footnote ¹³¹