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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Fighting Fascism, Fighting Jim Crow,” on a double-edged World War II campaign that paved the way for Black progress during the civil-rights era, with Christopher Hamner, associate professor of history at George Mason University and author of Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945.
Publicly, the Roosevelt administration presented the American effort in the Second World War as an ideological struggle against tyranny and for liberty, equality, and self-determination. The struggle felt very different, however, for the Black Americans whose contributions and sacrifice federal government depended on to wage the war.
The millions of African Americans who served directly in the armed forces or aided the war effort by working in war industries, buying war bonds, and conserving scarce goods did so on behalf of a country that treated them as second-class citizens. The U.S. sent a segregated military to war, prohibited Black soldiers from serving in combat, and practiced an extreme and long-standing form of racial discrimination at home.
Umbrage over such blatant hypocrisy inspired Black newspapers to launch what they called the “Double-V” campaign, seeking victory abroad over fascism and victory at home over Jim Crow.
Come to Washington D.C. Penn Social on a day when our nation honors the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to learn about a fascinating chapter of American history that helped pave the way for the movement that Dr. King led.
Professor Christopher Hamner, a historian focused on how wars have affected American society, will discuss in detail how the “Double-V” campaign tied Black support for the war effort to the explicit expectation that such service and sacrifice would be rewarded with more equitable treatment after the war’s end.
You’ll learn about the Double V campaign’s roots and progress, and how wartime efforts and expectations prepared the way for the civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a talk that will give you a much more nuanced understanding of where the civil-rights movement fit into the broader arc of American history and built upon previous efforts to get our nation to live up to its values. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: Members of an all-Black Women’s Army Corps unit upon arrival in England in 1945. (U.S. State Department / GPA photo archive.)
