During the war. For many African Americans, the war offered an opportunity to get out of the cycle of crushing rural poverty. Blacks joined the military in large numbers, escaping a decade of Depression and tenant farming in the South and Midwest. Yet, like the rest of America in the 1940s, the armed forces were segregated.
The Army accepted black enlistees but created separate black infantry regiments and assigned white commanders to them. The Army Air Corps' black fighter wing was completely separate, training at an all black university at Tuskegee, Alabama. The Navy segregated Negro units and gave them the most menial jobs on ships. And the Marines, at least initially, didn't even accept African Americans. At every training base, black and white soldiers were kept apart.But in the chaos of war, segregation broke down. It's hard to keep the races apart when both are being attacked.
After the war. When Black, Hispanic, and Native American soldiers returned they found a country that still did not grant them full rights, but a movement for the expansion of civil rights had been born. Some black soldiers who had left farm jobs in the South decided not to return home. Instead, they moved to cities, looking for work that was similar to what they had learned in the armed forces. This movement represented an intensification of the black migration that began around the turn of the century.
World War II saw an unprecedented number of women join the workforce - more than any other time in U.S. history. The experience of women, however, was not universal.
White women and some Asians had opportunities to build and fly planes. Japanese Americans had none - it was off to internment camps after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And African Americans suffered, too. Their lives became worse in the Bay Area as the influx of black and white shipyard workers from the deep South brought Jim Crow attitudes to a part of the country that largely had been free of segregationist sentiment.
Some historians believe women's entry into industrial jobs hastened societal and economic changes already occurring in the American landscape and might have lit a fuse that contributed to the women's rights movement 20 years later.
The Army accepted black enlistees but created separate black infantry regiments and assigned white commanders to them. The Army Air Corps' black fighter wing was completely separate, training at an all black university at Tuskegee, Alabama. The Navy segregated Negro units and gave them the most menial jobs on ships. And the Marines, at least initially, didn't even accept African Americans. At every training base, black and white soldiers were kept apart.But in the chaos of war, segregation broke down. It's hard to keep the races apart when both are being attacked.
After the war. When Black, Hispanic, and Native American soldiers returned they found a country that still did not grant them full rights, but a movement for the expansion of civil rights had been born. Some black soldiers who had left farm jobs in the South decided not to return home. Instead, they moved to cities, looking for work that was similar to what they had learned in the armed forces. This movement represented an intensification of the black migration that began around the turn of the century.
World War II saw an unprecedented number of women join the workforce - more than any other time in U.S. history. The experience of women, however, was not universal.
White women and some Asians had opportunities to build and fly planes. Japanese Americans had none - it was off to internment camps after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And African Americans suffered, too. Their lives became worse in the Bay Area as the influx of black and white shipyard workers from the deep South brought Jim Crow attitudes to a part of the country that largely had been free of segregationist sentiment.
Some historians believe women's entry into industrial jobs hastened societal and economic changes already occurring in the American landscape and might have lit a fuse that contributed to the women's rights movement 20 years later.