¹ Kellogg, Peter, “Civil Rights Consciousness in the 1940s,” Historian 42 (November 1979): 18–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Plummer, Brenda Gayle, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935–1960 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The focus on the Cold War in the advancement of civil rights also ignores to what degree the Cold War limited the civil-rights agenda because opponents of civil rights associated the demands of the civil-rights struggle with Communism. See von Eschen, Penny, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997)Google Scholar, and Anderson, Carol, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Also, Höhn, Maria, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit.” Afro-amerikanische GIs, deutsche Frauen, und die Grenzen der Demokratie (1945–1968),” in Demokratiewunder. Transatlantische Mittler und die kulturelle Öffnung Westdeutschlands, 1945–1970, ed. Bauerkämpfer, Arnd, Jarausch, Konrad H., and Payk, Marcus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005)Google Scholar, and Höhn, Maria, “‘When Negro Soldiers Bring Home White Brides’: Deutsche und amerikanische Debatten über die ‘Mischehe’ (1945–1967),” in Amerikaner in Rheinland-Pfalz. Alltagskulturelle Begegnungen, ed. Kremp, Werner and Tumalis, Martina (Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2008)Google Scholar, where I show how during the 1950s the Cold War limited how American Liberals debated the still-existing miscegenation laws.

³ See Höhn, Maria, GIs and Fräuleins: The German American Encounter in 1950s West Germany (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar, for a discussion of how the U.S. military brought American forms of racism to Germany and how the encounter with American racism convinced Germans that their alliance with America was an alliance between two white nations, and that their new democracy was fully compatible with a condemnation of interracial relationships and marriages. In my essays, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit” and “When Negro Soldiers Bring Home White Brides,” I show how American civil-rights debates regarding interracial marriages were affected by the experience of black soldiers abroad. For how Germany figured in the civil-rights struggle in the late 1960s and early 1970s, see my essays, “The Black Panther Solidarity Committees and the Voice of the Lumpen,” German Studies Review XXXI, no. 1 (February 2008), and “‘I Prefer Panthers to Pigs’: German Students and Black Panther GIs,” in Changing the World, Changing The Self: Political Protest and Collective Identities in 1960/70s West Germany and the United States, ed. Belinda Davis, Carla McDougall, and Wilfried Mausbach (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2009). See also Heide Fehrenbach's important study, Race After Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005) for the German debates on mixed-race children. She illustrates that the German debates on how to integrate the children born of African-American fathers and German mothers evolved through an exchange of ideas between American and German social scientists and close collaboration between the German and American branches of such organizations as the National Council of Christians and Jews and the National Council of Churches. For the most recent exploration of the experience of African-American soldiers in Germany, see Schroer, Tim, Recasting Race After World War II: Germans and African Americans in American-Occupied Germany (Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

⁴ This paper is part of a larger study of how the civil-rights movement was taken to Germany through the American base system. That project arose out of my earlier work, GIs and Fräuleins, where I first discovered the contradiction between the segregated military and America's mission in Germany. In my essays, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit” and “When Negro Soldiers Bring Home White Brides,” I first argued that African-American civil-rights activists and the black press began taking an interest in events in Germany beginning in 1933.

⁵ As Gleason, Glenda has shown in Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008)Google Scholar, radical leftist interracial alliances in the South during the 1920s and 1930s and their taking on Fascism contributed to sharpening the discourse on civil rights. Gleason also explores how black newspapers framed their attack on fascism. In How Far the Promised Land? World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), Jonathan Seth Rosenberg has shown how the internationalist outlook of African-American intellectuals in regard to colonial struggles shaped how debates on civil rights were framed. See also his “‘Sounds Suspiciously Like Miami’: Nazism and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, 1933–1941,” in The Cultural Turn: Essays in the History of Foreign Relations, ed. Frank Ninkovich and Liping Bu (Chicago: Imprint Publications, 2001).

⁶ Horne, Gerald, “Toward a Transnational Agenda for African American History in the 21th Century,” Journal of African American History 91, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 288–303CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Despite Horne's plea for a transnational research agenda for African-American history, few graduate programs have steered their students to explore that history outside the U.S. That is probably why the history of the more than two million African-American soldiers who have served tours of duty in Germany has yet to be told. Furthermore, academics—unless they are military historians—tend to shy away from the military, and because of that, Diaspora Studies, if they look to Europe at all, continue to focus on Paris and France, even though a larger expatriate black community exists in Germany. Change is coming, though. The conference organized by Maria Diedrich at Münster University in 2006, “Crossovers: African Americans and Germany,” and this year's lecture series on Germans and African Americans at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., show a growing interest in Germany in this transnational history.

⁷ Ottley, Roi, excerpts from his book No Green Pasture (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951)Google Scholar in Chicago Defender, December 15, 1951. In his book, Ottley gives an extensive overview of racial relations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. He had been in Europe as a war correspondent and had reported extensively on Germany during the years of military occupation.

⁸ Davis, David Brion, “The Americanized Mannheim of 1945–46,” in American Places: Encounters with History. A Celebration of Sheldon Meyer, ed. Leuchtenburg, William (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79Google Scholar. Davis provides a wonderful reflection of how his experience in Germany in 1946, as an eighteen-year old soldier, first alerted him to the shortcomings of his own country.

⁹ “Now is Not the Time to Be Silent,” The Crisis, January 1942.

¹⁰ Estes, Steven, I am a Man! Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 36Google Scholar. On the expansion of the NAACP, see Ovington, Mary White, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1947), 280Google Scholar, and The Crisis, April 1945, which lists all the military units abroad that had been sending money and joined the NAACP from abroad. Also “GIs Contribute $2,400 to NAACP,” Chicago Defender, January 6, 1945.

¹¹ On the black press, see Finkle, Lee, Forum For Protest (Rutherford, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1975)Google Scholar, and Washburn, Patrick, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government's Investigation of the Black Press (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. On the centrality of the press in creating and maintaining the black community, see Myrdal, Gunnar, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), chap. 42Google Scholar, and Ottley, Roi, New World A-Coming (New York: Houghton, Mifflin Company, 1943), chap. 19Google Scholar.

¹² Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 924. The golden age of the black press came to an end in the 1960s, when white papers, in the wake of the 1960s race riots, started covering African-American issues but also started hiring the top black reporters.

¹³ Finkle, Forum, 51–2. See also the introduction in De Santis, Christopher, ed., Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942–62 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1995)Google Scholar for a depiction of how crucial the Chicago Defender was in creating what they called “race men.”

¹⁴ Two thirds of their issues were sold in the South. The Chicago Defender had more of a working-class following, and Langston Hughes called it the “journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people.” See De Santis, ed., Langston Hughes, 13. The Chicago Defender is accorded a key role in the Great Migration that brought more than one and a half million rural Blacks to the North after WWI. The paper regularly printed train schedules and fares from southern cities to Chicago and job advertisements in the North. The Pittsburgh Courier had more of a middle-class base. Until WWII, the Defender outsold the Courier, but the Courier's Double-V campaign after 1941 made it surpass the Defender. See also the video documentary by Nelson, Stanley, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Because it would take until the racial crisis in the U.S. military of 1970/71 before the Stars and Stripes bookstores on U.S. military bases abroad started to offer African-American publications, the coverage of the black press reached only the black community in the U.S. See Höhn, “The Black Panther Solidarity Committees,” on the racial crisis and demands of GIs for “black publications.”

¹⁶ In the debates on the European powers and colonialism, France was treated more generously than Great Britain. The black community followed with great interest Gandhi's struggle in India, and despised Churchill, who had declared that the Atlantic Charter only applied to the repressed peoples of Europe and not those in the colonies. W. E. B. DuBois is representative of prevailing sentiments. He stated in the Amsterdam News on April 19, 1941, “If Hitler triumphs the world is lost; if England triumphs the world is not saved.” See Finkle, Forum, 61 and 199. The theme of French imperialism and racism only emerged with the Algerian War. For this shift and the disenchantment of African Americans, see Smith, William Gardner, Return to Black America: A Negro Reporter's Impressions after 16 Years of Self-Exile (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970), especially chap. 2Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Cited in Finkle, Forum, 78. The Chicago Defender's mascot was a black soldier in a WWI uniform, proudly stating, “Always on Guard to prevent any and all attempts to violate our civil rights.”

¹⁸ Finkle, Forum, 78–86, and Washburn, A Question of Sedition, on the government's concern about the antiwar sentiment and militarism over civil rights in the black press. Although Francis Biddle, the prudent Attorney General, refused to shut down the black press during the war, many military commanders in the South refused to have black papers sold on their bases. After the war, the Civil Aide to the Secretary of War gathered all coverage in the black press related to black GIs. See NARA, RG 107, Box 223, Technical Intelligence Reports.

¹⁹ See, for example, “German Farmer Has Negro Blood—Can't Own Land,” Boston Chronicle, August 20, 1938, and “Nazis Claim Black Germans are a Disgrace,” Chicago Defender, February 1, 1936. The 1936 Olympics and Hitler's refusal to shake hands with Jessie Owens were discussed in detail, but so was the fact that Jessie Owens became close friends with German competitors and that he was treated badly once he returned to the U.S. In 1949, the Pittsburgh Courier ran an extensive series of articles entitled, “My 13 Years under Nazi Terror” on the experience of an Afro-German woman (born in 1914) under the Nazis. Those articles stressed that her life was good and just like everybody else's before the Nazis came to power.

²⁰ On that campaign, which came in the wake of some horrific lynchings during the 1920s and early 1930s and which received unprecedented support from white organizations across the country, see Sitkoff, Harvard, A New Deal For Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights As An Issue (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 274–95Google Scholar. The bill was defeated after a seven-week filibuster because southern democrats saw it as interfering with “states' rights” and they suspected that a civil-rights bill might be next.

²¹ “Germany versus America,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 1934. For a similar point of view, see “Race Prejudice in Georgia and in Germany Based on Cross Preferences,” Washington Tribune, June 23, 1933; and “Hitler Embarrasses Uncle Sam,” Afro-American, April 15, 1933. For an exploration of how the black press responded to anti-Semitism in Germany and the presence of anti-Semitism in the black community, see Wedlock, Lunabelle, The Reaction of Negro Publications and Organizations to German Anti-Semitism (Washington: Howard University, 1942)Google Scholar.

²² “Charity begins at Home,” The Crisis, April 1938.

²³ Miller, Kelly, “Race Prejudice in Germany and America,” Opportunity: Journal for Negro Life (Opportunity hereafter), April 1936Google Scholar, and Carter, Elmer Anderson, “On Racial Prejudice at Home and Abroad,” Opportunity, vol. 17 (1939)Google Scholar.

²⁴ “Hitler in America,” Afro-American, March 5, 1938.

²⁵ Cited in Rosenberg, “Sounds Suspiciously Like Miami,” 119.

²⁶ “Charity begins at Home,” The Crisis, April 1938.

²⁷ “Negroes, Nazis, and Jews,” The Crisis, December 1938. For another such example of the U.S. ignoring lynchings of Blacks in the U.S. but speaking up for the Jews, see “Senator Tydings Silent on Mob; Scores Hitler,” Chicago Defender, February 3, 1934.

²⁸ Stack, Kate, “Lily White Democracy,” The Crisis, December 1939Google Scholar.

²⁹ Another rallying point for the activists was the defense industry, which was mostly located in northern and western states. It was only desegregated because the militant trade activist A. Philip Randolph threatened a march on Washington, forcing Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in June 1941 to ensure fair employment practices. See Kryder, Daniel, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During WWII (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, on how the federal government tried to cope with rising demands from the African-American community.

³⁰ Nancy, and MacDonald, Dwight, The War's Greatest Scandal! The Story of Jim Crow in Uniform (New York: March on Washington Movement, Spring 1943), 4Google Scholar.

³¹ Hughes, Langston, “My America,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Logan, Rayford (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 301 and 303Google Scholar. See also the collection of some of his columns in De Santis, ed., Langston Hughes.

³² Chicago Defender, 1940 editorial cited in Mershon, Sherie and Schlossman, Steven, Fox-Holes and Color Lines: Desegregating the U.S. Armed Forces (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 38Google Scholar. For the reluctance of African-Americans to support the war, see Sterling Brown, “Count Us In,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Logan, 308–344.

³³ “Fight for Liberties Here While Fighting Dictators Abroad, NAACP urges,” The Crisis, January 1942. See also the 1944 propaganda film, “The Negro Soldier,” produced by the U.S. government to urge African Americans to fight. An African-American clergyman presents Hitler's rants to an all-black congregation. That film also showed the Germans blowing up a memorial in Rheims, France, dedicated to African-American soldiers who died in France in WWI.

³⁴ “On the Positive Side,” Chicago Defender, October 2, 1943; editorial, Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1942; and “Nazi Butchers,” Chicago Defender, December 26, 1942.

³⁵ “Says Now is Time to Rap Hypocrisy,” Chicago Defender, January 17, 1942.

³⁶ Front page announcement, Pittsburgh Courier, February 14, 1942.

³⁷ “Now is not the Time To Be Silent,” The Crisis, January 1942. See also the 1944 propaganda film, the “Negro Soldier.”

³⁸ N. MacDonald and D. MacDonald, The War's Greatest Scandal!, 9.

³⁹ While the NAACP's platform had from its founding endorsed an end to segregation, the realities on the ground had forced the organization to proceed more pragmatically and often timidly. This was especially the case in the South where civil-rights activists had almost no room to maneuver. In the South, most work was being done by the much more timid Interracial Councils which appealed to the local white leadership for favors on a case-by-case basis. On the important educational work by these councils in reaching out to educated, upper-class whites in the South, see Sitkoff, A New Deal. The councils had less of an affect on lower-class whites.

⁴⁰ Finkle, Forum, 71. See, for example, Cartoon: “LIFT THE BAR—BEAT THE AXIS,” The Crisis, July 1942, 225; Cartoon: “Memo: End All Discrimination in the Armed Forces!,” The Crisis, June 1942, 193.

⁴¹ Gleason, Defying Dixie, 347.

⁴² “Revolution in Dixie,” Chicago Defender, August 5, 1944.

⁴³ Both Sitkoff's A New Deal and Kellogg's “Civil Rights Consciousness” look foremost at debates among white liberals. For the role of the Double-V campaign in this see, Finkle, Forum, 78.

⁴⁴ Finkle, Forum, 189. Since most military camps were located in the South, northern draftees, both white and black, were often exposed for the first time to the reality of Jim Crow segregation.

⁴⁵ Carter, “On Racial Prejudice at Home and Abroad.” For how reluctant African Americans were to support the war, see Brown, “Count Us In,” 308–344.

⁴⁶ “Axis Using Race Trouble as Propaganda,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 7, 1942.

⁴⁷ Cited in Kellogg, “Civil Rights Consciousness,” 33.

⁴⁸ Roy Wilkins, “The Negro Wants Full Equality,” in What the Negro Wants, ed. Logan, 115.

⁴⁹ Kellogg, “Civil Rights Consciousness,” 18. For a specific example, see “Jim Crow in the Army,” The New Republic, March 13, 1944.

⁵⁰ Gleason, Defying Dixie, 358–59. On how even the most liberal newspaper in the South defended segregation, see Grill, Johnpeter Horst und Jenkins, Robert L., “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image?,” in The Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (November 1992): 667–694CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For how the white press came around to covering civil rights, see Roberts, Gene and Klibanoff, Hank, The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Representatives of the African-American newspaper editors traveled to Germany to investigate charges of racism in the military in 1946 and 1948. See NARA, RG 407 Box 719, Negro Newspaper Editors' Report to the Secretary of War, July 1946, for their first visit. For visits to Germany from other African-American institutions, see White, Walter, “What Negro GIs are Doing in Germany,” Chicago Defender, October 23, 1948Google Scholar; “Yanks Hear Dr. Ferebee in Germany,” Chicago Defender, May 19, 1951; “Bishop Walls Blasts Army German Jim Crow Policy,” Chicago Defender, November 1, 1947.

⁵² On these sexual and romantic relationships, see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins and “Ein Atemzug”; Johannes Kleinschmidt, “Do Not Fraternize.” Die schwierigen Anfänge deutsch-amerikanische Freundschaft, 1944–1949 (Ph.D. diss., Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1995); Willoughby, John, Remaking the Conquering Heroes: The Social and Geopolitical Impact of the Post-War American Occupation of Germany (New York: Palgrave, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goedde, Petra, Germans and GIs: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations, 1945–1949 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler; and Brauerhoch, Annette, Fräuleins und GIs. Geschichte und Filmgeschichte (Frankfurt: Stromfeld Verlag, 2006)Google Scholar. Schroer, Recasting Race, has provided a much needed expansion by showing how the U.S. military dealt with the conundrum of a segregated army.

⁵³ “Germany Meets the Negro Soldier: GIs Find More Friendship and Equality in Berlin than in Birmingham or Broadway,” Ebony 2, no. 10 (October 1946): 5–11. See my essay, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit,” for objections of white American liberals to black and white love relationships.

⁵⁴ On racism toward black soldiers, see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins; Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler; and Schroer, Recasting Race.

⁵⁵ Smith used the term Shangri-La in his Return to Black America, 63.

⁵⁶ On the black expatriate community in Paris going back to the 1920s, Stovall, Tyler, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996)Google Scholar. Musicians among this community also toured Europe and played to audiences in Berlin before Hitler.

⁵⁷ Smith, William Gardner, The Last of the Conquerors (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Company, 1948), 67Google Scholar. The novel was reviewed widely in the white press as well. For an insightful discussion of Smith's novel, see Georg Schmundt-Thomas, “America's Germany: National Self and Cultural Other after World War II” (Ph. D. diss., Northwestern University, 1992), which was immensely helpful for my book GIs and Fräuleins. Also Hodges, LeRoy, Portrait of an Expatriate: William Gardner Smith (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Most recently Fehrenbach in Race After Hitler and Schroer in Recasting Race have also drawn extensively on Smith's novel to discuss the experience of black GIs in Germany.

⁵⁸ Smith, William Gardner, “An American in Paris-III,” New York Post, September 29, 1959Google Scholar (Schomburg Clipping file William Gardner Smith). See also Smith's Return to Black America.

⁵⁹ Smith, Bill, “Found Freedom in Germany: Few GIs Eager to Return to States,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Numerous African-American veterans have told me about their own tours of duty in Germany or shared recollections of their buddies' experiences in Germany. Even soldiers who served in Germany during the 1960s or 1970s knew of the stories from the “good old days.” See also Habe, Hans, Walk in Darkness (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1948), 13–15Google Scholar; and Little, Monroe, “The Black Military Experience in Germany,” in Crosscurrents: African Americans, Africa, and Germany in the Modern World, ed. MacBride, David, Hopkins, Leroy, and Blackshire-Belay, C. Aisha (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1998), especially 189–92Google Scholar. For an example of how long this narrative of the good life in Germany reverberated in the black community, see Powell, Colin, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 53Google Scholar, and Paulding, James, Sometime Tomorrow (New York: Carlton Press, 1965)Google Scholar. Smith's 1970 memoir, Return to Black America, brought this story to a whole new generation of African Americans. He writes, “many black Americans came alive for the first time in the ruins of Berlin … Members of a victorious army, they found respect and consideration for the first time—but from the former enemies.” After describing the pitched battle that took place between white and black soldiers because white soldiers resented the presence of black GIs, Smith recalled that “black soldiers often wept like babies when their time was up, when they had to return ‘home,’” 62.

⁶¹ Ronald Noble, e-mail to the author, April 14, 2001.

⁶² Marcus Ray memorandum to Secretary of War, January 7, 1947, cited in Nalty, Bernhard C., Blacks in the Military: Essential Documents (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1981), 217Google Scholar. Ray had traveled to Germany to investigate the inflammatory charges made against African-American GIs concerning their venereal disease rates and their relationships with German women in the Meader Report. For similarly positive comments from the representatives of the African-American press after their visit to Germany, see RG 407, Adjutant General, Box 719. See also MacGregor, Morris, Integration of the Armed Forces 1940–1965 (Washington, D.C.: Center for Military History, 1981), 214Google Scholar.

⁶³ “Ray defends GIs Serving Overseas,” Chicago Defender, December 28, 1946.

⁶⁴ White, Walter, “People, Politics, Places,” Chicago Defender, May 18, 1946Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Ottley, excerpts from his book No Green Pasture, Chicago Defender, December 15, 1951. For another essay that claims that the Germans were more liberal toward the black soldiers than the French, see “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955.

⁶⁶ Chicago Defender: “More Negroes Expected to Enlist in Army,” June 15, 1946, and “Choice of Station Ends as GIs Select Europe,” July 6, 1946.

⁶⁷ “Found Freedom in Germany: Few GIs Eager to Return to States,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947. See also “Nothing to Go Back For,” The Crisis, February 1949.

⁶⁸ “Many Ex-GIs Taking Jobs in Germany,” Chicago Defender, March 30, 1946. Fez Roundtree of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, had served in Germany after WWII and stayed on for a number of years playing in the thriving jazz clubs of Munich.

⁶⁹ “Why Negroes leave America: Many GIs find more freedom overseas than in their native land [sic],” Negro Digest, March 1949, 10–11. On how many soldiers wanted to stay abroad, see also “GIs Come Home Older and Wiser,” Chicago Defender, September 8, 1945, and White, “People, Politics, and Places.”

⁷⁰ These individuals would become an important nucleus of the black expatriate communities that can still be found in German communities around major U.S. military bases. The Frankfurt/Mannheim/Heidelberg area has a substantial African-American community whose members span numerous generations of veterans. A popular meeting place for this community to this day is Sam's Saxophone in Frankfurt. Another community of black expatriates emerged in Munich and Berlin. Given the large number of black GIs in Germany and the black expatriate community around military bases, the NAACP opened a German branch office in 1971. For the black expatriate communities after World War II in cities across Europe, see Smith, Return to Black America, 62. Smith himself had gone to Paris by the early 1950s, where he became part of the black expatriate community of writers and artists. I suspect that one of the reasons the black expatriate communities in Germany have received so little attention is that they are mostly made up of “regular people” rather than the prestigious writers and musicians who started the expatriate community in France in the 1920s.

⁷¹ Weil, Frank, “The Negro in the Armed Forces,” Social Forces 26, no. 1 (1947): 98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also interview with Lt. General Clarence Huebener, cited in MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces, 214, and “Racial: Mädchen and Negro,” Newsweek, September 16, 1946, 29–30. The phenomenon of black GIs asking for a military discharge in Germany or returning after their discharge in the U.S. was noticeable enough that the Nürnberger Nachrichten felt compelled to assure its German readers in 1949 that a “wave of emigration of American Negroes to Germany” should not be expected even as the black soldiers continued to associate Germany with a “dream of equality” that evaded them in their own country. Nürnberger Nachrichten, May 28, 1949, cited in David Posner, “Afro-America in West German Perspective, 1945–1966” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1997), 37.

⁷² White, “People, Politics, and Places.”

⁷³ Advertisement, Chicago Defender, September 14, 1946, 7 (emphasis in original).

⁷⁴ “Germany Meets the Negro Soldier: GIs Find More Friendship and Equality in Berlin than in Birmingham or Broadway,” Ebony 2, no. 10 (October 1946): 5–11, and “Found Freedom in Germany,” Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947. Also, “The New Germany and Negro Soldiers,” Ebony, January 1952.

⁷⁵ Chicago Defender: “Tan Yanks in Germany Destroy Last of Nazi ‘Culture’: Swing Music Big Favorite,” May 8, 1945, and “Negro GIs Play Vital Reconstruction Role,” April 10, 1948. On jam sessions between German Jazz fans and African-American GIs, see Tim Schroer, Recasting Race, 175. See also the 1957 German TV production, “Wie Toxi Wirklich Lebt,” which shows a great depiction of a black-only bar frequented by German women and male German teenagers who obviously enjoyed the music and enthusiastically watched the dance steps of the black GIs.

⁷⁶ “GIs in Germany Ashamed, Confused by Dixie Hate,” Chicago Defender, October 23, 1948. Also “GI Tells of Equality in Countries Overseas,” Chicago Defender, November 3, 1945. For a description of racial violence against black soldiers and black civilian employees and how Germans came to their rescue, see NARA, RG 498 ETO Secretary General Staff, Classified Decimale File, Box 20.

⁷⁷ Very few black families were in Germany during the occupations since only wives of officers and high-ranking NCOs were allowed to come initially. The numbers increased significantly after the build-up of troops in the 1950s, when about 30,000 black GIs were stationed in Germany on a regular basis.

⁷⁸ “The New Germany and Negro Soldiers,” Ebony, January 1952. Also “Germany's Tragic War Babies,” Ebony, December 1952, 78, and “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955. For an article on the occupation years, see “Christmas Finds These Americans in Germany,” Baltimore African American, December 1947. That article also stressed that many African-American families had German friends and that contact with white Americans was more limited.

⁷⁹ “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955.

⁸⁰ Of particular note here is the coverage in the African-American press on the children born of black American fathers. These articles present a complex picture of how Germans tried and at times failed to accept these children. At the same time, these articles also point out that the children were being integrated and that their disadvantage was largely caused by the socio-economic status of their mothers, who were often raising these children without fathers. Often this was the case, because military commanders had refused them wedding permits. See, for example, “Germany's New Pariahs,” The Crisis, May 1952, 296; “Brown Babies,” The Crisis, June-July 1956; “Germany's Tragic War Babies,” Ebony, December 1952, 74–78. For a discussion of how Germans dealt with the so-called “Mischlingskinder,” see Brauerhoch, Annette, “‘Mohrenkopf.’ Schwarzes Kind und weisse Nachkriegsgesellschaft in TOXI,” Frauen und Film 60 (October 1997): 106–130Google Scholar; de Faria, Yara Colette Lemke Muniz, Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung. Afrodeutsche “Besatzungskinder” im Nachkriegsdeutschland (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2002)Google Scholar; and Fehrenbach, Race After Hitler.

⁸¹ Advertisement, Chicago Defender, September 14, 1946, 7 (emphasis in original).

⁸² “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955. For a similarly benign interpretation of staring Germans, see Pittsburgh Courier, February 22, 1947, “Found Freedom in Germany. Few GIs Eager to Return to States.”

⁸³ “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955. For a more critical view of being “on exhibition every time” when one “is out in public,” see letters to the editor section, Ebony, April 1952.

⁸⁴ Smith, Return to Black America, 63.

⁸⁵ The Pittsburgh Courier reported, for example, in January 1952 that most Europeans knew about American racism from war brides who returned with their husbands to their homes in Europe to flee the “abominable conditions … in slum districts.” Smith, William Gardner, “Average European Visualizes U.S. as Being a ‘Land of Terror,’” Pittsburgh Courier, January 26, 1952Google Scholar.

⁸⁶ “The War Bride Virginia Refused to Welcome: GI Whisks White Bride North Just One Step Ahead Of Posse,” Jet, November 1, 1956. See chapter three in my book GIs and Fräuleins on how difficult it was for German women and black soldiers to get wedding permits.

⁸⁷ “Texas Ban on White Wives of 30 Negro Soldiers,” Jet, November 21, 1957. “Negro GIs Must Choose Between White Wives,” Jet, September 19, 1957. For a discussion of how Hanna Arendt interjected herself into this incident and antagonized her liberal white friends, see Höhn, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit.” Oral History Collection at the University of Mainz, IANAS, videos 47 and 53, also comment on how German women returned with their husbands to Germany because they found life in the U.S. too hard.

⁸⁸ “Asks Ban of GIs Wed to Whites,” Chicago Defender, October 15, 1957. For another such unfortunate incident in 1958, see “Married to Germans, 60 GIs Quit Dixie Bound Unit,” Jet, February 20, 1958. In this case, sixty soldiers from the 10th Infantry Division were to be sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, and had to leave their “Dixie-Bound Unit” to ensure their families' safety. See also “Army Refuses Blessings, GI, German Girl Elope,” Jet, February 13, 1958, about a black soldier and his German wife who eloped to Gretna Green after being refused a marriage license. In the South these laws were not overturned until the 1967 Supreme Court decision of Loving vs. Virginia. See Höhn, “Ein Atemzug der Freiheit.”

⁸⁹ Dudley, J. Wayne, “‘Hate’ Organizations of the 1940s: The Columbians, Inc.,” Phylon 42, no. 3 (1981): 262–274CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and O'Brien, Gail Williams, The Color of the Law: Race, Violence, and Justice in the Post-World War II South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sugrue, Thomas, “Crabgrass Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction Against Liberalism in the Urban North, 1949–64,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995): 551–578CrossRefGoogle Scholar, shows that efforts for tighter segregation after WWII were not only confined to the South. On the role of veterans in the civil-rights movement, see Estes, I am a Man!, and Wendt, Simon, The Spirit and the Shotgun: Armed Resistance and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Gleason, Defying Dixie, 414. See also McMillen, Neil, “Fighting for What We Didn't Have: How Mississippi's Black Veterans Remember World War II,” in Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South, ed. McMillen, Neil (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997)Google Scholar. Borstelmann, The Cold War, 54, and Davis, “The Americanized Mannheim,” 88. The fact that veterans returning from abroad were changed men and how their new assertiveness was expressed on their return home were reported proudly in the black press. See, for example, “Alabama Vets Parley Blasts Gillem Report,” Chicago Defender, March 23, 1946. For other stories on the political activism of returning vets in the Chicago Defender, see “Nation in Fear” and “Irate Ex-GIs Defeat Political Machine,” August 17, 1946; White, “People, Politics, and Places”; and “Veterans Move to Free Dixie of Talmadgism,” August 31, 1946.

⁹⁰ “Hitler is Dead but Not Hitlerism,” Chicago Defender, May 12, 1945.

⁹¹ Norfolk Journal and Guide, August 11, 1945.

⁹² The proportion of black GIs was usually between ten and twelve percent of total troop strength. In May 1945 more than one million U.S. troops were in Germany, and about 614,000 GIs remained by the end of 1945. The rather smooth occupation of Germany meant that troop reductions continued in 1946 when another 400,000 GIs returned to the U.S., and by 1948, a mere 90,374 soldiers were deemed necessary to ensure the goals of the occupation. For these numbers, see Kleinschmidt, “Do not fraternize,” 133. Thus, from an initial high of perhaps 100,000 black GIs, only about 10,000 were left by the end of 1948. Beginning with the build-up of troops after 1950 and until the introduction of the all-volunteer army, black GIs made up about 30,000 of the 250,000 GIs stationed in Germany. Their numbers increased significantly after 1978, when they made up almost thirty percent of the troop strength.

⁹³ Ulysses Lee, The Employment of Negro Troops—The United States Army in World War II: Special Studies (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, U.S. Army, 1966), 39–50, and MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces. Also Reddick, L. D., “The Negro Policy of the American Army Since World War II,” The Journal of Negro History 38, no. 2 (April 1953): 202–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁴ Quote is from 1946 commander's handbook, “Occupation,” cited in Kleinschmidt, “Do not fraternize,” 200.

⁹⁵ U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, “Orientation Program for Dependents,” U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, Occupation of Germany 1944–48, Misc. Files, 7 and 17.

⁹⁶ On the segregated army, see Historical Division, “Integration of Negro and White Troops in the U.S. Army, Europe, 1952–1954” (Heidelberg: Headquarters United States Army, Europe, 1956). See also Wilkins, Roy, “Still a Jim Crow Army,” The Crisis, April 1946, 106–125Google Scholar. For an overview of the racism black soldiers serving in Germany faced in the army, see the Negro Newspaper Editors' Report to the Secretary of War, July 1946, NARA, RG 407 Box 719.

⁹⁷ For the military's efforts to keep black soldiers out of positions that entailed police power over white Germans or supervision of white workers, see Margaret Geis, “Negro Personnel in the European Command, 1 January 1946–30 June 1950” (Office of the Chief Historian of Military History, European Command, Historical Division, 1952), 54–56. See also MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces, 214.

⁹⁸ Geis, “Negro Personnel,” 56.

⁹⁹ MacGregor, Integration of the Armed Forces, 214.

¹⁰⁰ On efforts to get African-American GIs out of Germany, see Starr, Joseph, Fraternization with the Germans in WWII, 1945–46, Occupation Forces in Europe Series (Frankfurt am Main: Office of the Chief Historian, 1947), 153Google Scholar; Willoughby, Remaking the Conquering Heroes, 53–55, and Schroer's thoughtful discussion in chapter two of his Recasting Race.

¹⁰¹ For McNarney's views, see Meader Report, November 22, 1946, Special Senate Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, presented by George Meader, Chief Counsel, 33–35. For coverage in the African-American press on the report, see, for example, “The Meader Report. Another Black Eye,” Chicago Defender, December 14, 1946.

¹⁰² Davis, “The Americanized Mannheim,” 91. See also “American Officers Abroad Propagating Race Hatred,” Pittsburgh Courier, June 8, 1946.

¹⁰³ Meader Report, 4.

¹⁰⁴ For a number of reasons, America's mission of democracy in Japan was much less of an issue. The great majority of the troops were stationed in Okinawa, an island that was thousands of miles away from mainland Japan and was also a former colony of Japan. Okinawa remained under U.S. military occupation until 1972, and large sections of the island were basically one extended military camp. The segregated military was thus much less visible. In West Germany, Soviet Military Missions in the West provided a steady stream of anti-American propaganda.

¹⁰⁵ Pittsburgh Courier: “American Prejudice Rampant in Germany,” March 1, 1947; “American Officers Abroad Propagating Race Hatred,” June 8, 1946; and “Nazi Attitudes of White Soldiers,” September 29, 1945. See also “GIs in Germany Ashamed, Confused by Dixie Hate,” Chicago Defender, October 23, 1948. “Germany's Tragic War Babies,” Ebony, December 1952, 74–78, also talks about the racism that white soldiers were spreading to the Germans. For France, see “Three Die in France Because War's End Left Untouched Nazi Race Ideas in Midst of Army,” Pittsburgh Courier, November 3, 1945.

¹⁰⁶ Ottley, No Green Pastures, 159.

¹⁰⁷ “The New Germany and Negro Soldiers,” Ebony, January 1952. A December 1953 article in Ebony, “GI Wives in Germany,” presents a bit more positive assessment, praising that some “interracial” interactions between white and black American families were possible in Augsburg. I suspect that the level of cordiality or lack thereof between white and black families depended on the attitudes of the local military commander and his wife. For other examples of how white Americans were accused of spreading American racism, see Ottley, excerpts from his book No Green Pasture in Chicago Defender, December 15, 1951, and “Germany's New Pariahs,” The Crisis, May 1952, 296.

¹⁰⁸ Ottley, No Green Pastures, 159. See NARA, RG 498 ETO Secretary General Staff, Box 20, for complaints by African-American civilians serving in the military government about violence from white soldiers. They wrote, “The feelings of most of the Germans here are that what the American soldiers are doing to the Negro civilians is not the least bit worse than what the Nazis did to the Jews here on the same streets … . If we are to educate these people in the line of democracy, we should practice it daily and not Nazism on a small basis.”

¹⁰⁹ “Mr. Jim Crow and I,” The Crisis, January 1956. See also “Report From Germany: Integrated GIs Jim Crow Selves When off Duty,” Chicago Defender, July 23, 1955, and “Wives of Negro GIs Still Draw Stares in Germany,” Chicago Defender, July 16, 1955.

¹¹⁰ “‘U.S. Democracy,’ in Germany and at Home,” Chicago Defender, January 21, 1950.

¹¹¹ “U.S. Likes Nazis and Franco Better Than its Own Negroes,” Chicago Defender, October 30, 1948.

¹¹² “Bishop Walls Blasts Army German Jim Crow Policy,” Chicago Defender, November 1, 1947.

¹¹³ Negro Newspaper Editors' Report to the Secretary of War, July 1946, NARA, RG 407 Box 719.

¹¹⁴ White, “What Negro GIs Are Doing in Germany.” Also “Bishop Walls Praises Negro Troops in Germany,” Chicago Defender, August 23, 1947.

¹¹⁵ For a detailed discussion of the 1948 election, see Gleason, Defying Dixie, chap. nine, and Reddick, “The Negro Policy.”

¹¹⁶ “Editors' Confidential Army Report,” Chicago Defender, April 17, 1948.

¹¹⁷ Finkle, Forum, 85.

¹¹⁸ Reddick, “The Negro Policy,” 202–3. Reddick was a civil-rights activist and curator of the Schomburg Archive, and was involved in these debates. See also “The Forrestal Record,” The Crisis, July 1949.

¹¹⁹ “Editors' Confidential Army Report,” Chicago Defender, April 17, 1947.

¹²⁰ “Work of Occupation Troops in Germany Affected by Lack of Officers, Racial Bars,” Baltimore Afro-American, June 22, 1948.

¹²¹ Editorial, Philadelphia Tribune, June 5, 1948. An editorial in the Amsterdam News on the same day also condemned the Jim Crow Army, but praised the fact that such an investigation, unlike in the Soviet Union, was possible.

¹²² Reddick, “The Negro Policy.”

¹²³ Ibid. See also the remarks of Hon. Douglas, Helen Gahagan, Representative from California, in The Negro Soldier: A Partial Record of Negro Devotion and Heroism in the Cause of Freedom Gathered From the Files of the War and Navy Departments (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, February 1946)Google Scholar; and Ginzberg, Eli, The Negro Potential (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

¹²⁴ Smith, “Average European Visualizes U.S. as Being a ‘Land of Terror’”; and “American Negro Problem in European Press,” The Crisis, July 1950. The Army was the only branch of the service that had resisted integration. The Air Force, founded as a separate branch in September 1947, was integrating after 1948, as was the Navy. For a detailed description of how de facto integration was achieved in Germany after 1952, see Höhn, GIs and Fräuleins, chap. 3.

¹²⁵ White, “What Negro GIs are Doing in Germany.”

¹²⁶ Saturday Review of Literature, August 28, 1948, 14–15. See also Crowley, Malcolm, “In Love with Germany,” New Republic, September 27, 1948Google Scholar, and “The Negroes and the Draft,” PM, April 11, 1948. For another example of how black soldiers experienced freedom in Germany, see Habe, Walk in Darkness. Habe was a white participant in the occupation (European émigré), and used his novel to point to American racism. See also “Last of the Conquerors: Important First Novel Against Army Jimcrow,” Daily Worker, August 31, 1948.

¹²⁷ Martin, Ralph G., “Where is Home?,” New Republic, December 31, 1945Google Scholar. Also Lt. ColonelSherman, John, “A Communication: Our Negro Soldiers,” The New Republic, November 19, 1945, 678Google Scholar, and “Big Brass and Jim Crow,” The Nation, October 2, 1948. See also “The Negroes and the Draft,” PM, April 11, 1948 (reprinted in The Crisis, May 1948), and Stone, Vernon, “Baby Crop,” Survey, 1949, 579–580Google Scholar.

¹²⁸ Hutton, Bud and Rooney, Andy, Conqueror's Peace: A Report to the American Stockholder (New York: Double Day, 1947), 54Google Scholar.

¹²⁹ Engler, Robert, “The Individual Soldier and the Occupation,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 244 (1948): 85Google Scholar.

¹³⁰ “For Negroes, It's a New Army Now,” Saturday Evening Post, December 13, 1952, 27. This is an extensive report on the progress that had been made since de facto integration was started in early 1952. On how integration was finally accomplished, see Historical Division, “Integration of Negro and White Troops.”

¹³¹ Nichols, Lee, Breakthrough on the Color Front (New York: Random House, 1954), 173–179Google Scholar. Sociologist Eli Ginzberg from Columbia University was instrumental in convincing the military to change. See his book, The Negro Potential.