This D-Day post was meant to publish yesterday but after receiving several articles and posts from my son, I realized that what I thought I knew was grievously lacking, and I scrapped my original piece to tell a more complete story.
Yesterday, June 6, 2020, was the 76th anniversary of D-Day. D-Day commemorates the allied storming of five beaches at Normandy during World War II, according to the Pensacola News Journal, “the largest military movement of its type in history” involving over 2 million troops from more than 12 countries. The D-Day invasion was instrumental in undermining Nazi occupation of France and was the beginning of the end of the European arm of WWII. We found this fascinating and informative post, The 10 Things You Need to Know About D-Day, on the Imperial War Museums (IWM) website.
Shortly before the end of the war, and largely because of it, President Franklin Roosevelt foresaw the necessity to show tangible support for our US troops, following WWII and beyond. He signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, now known as the GI-Bill. The GI-Bill provided financial assistance in the form of housing, education, unemployment and job training, and promised to benefit all honorably discharged servicemen and women. Sadly, though the GI-Bill’s language was originally intended to be race neutral, this wasn’t the case.
This piece in the Military Times documents how “white southern politicians designed the distribution of benefits under the GI Bill to uphold their segregationist beliefs”. African American veterans were systematically denied housing, education assistance and college admittance. This was made possible by the Bill’s stipulation that local Veterans Administrations control distribution of funds. The language that resulted in prejudicial behavior was inserted at the demand of Representative John Elliot Rankin of Mississippi, who argued for the bill to be “a matter of local control and states’ rights.” A must-read article by JSTOR Daily, a research-based website publishing facts and data related to current events, details the ensuing imbalance between benefits dispersed to black and white Veterans. Whether you argue on the side of design or chance, the result at the time was devastating for many of the 1 Million black servicemen and women.
Terry Gross of NPR might illustrate best, the relationship between today’s racial inequality and the 1940’s eruption of housing segregation caused by policies hidden deep inside the GI-Bill, The New Deal, Federal Housing Administration and other federal programs. His FRESH AIR podcast is well worth a listen.
Congress had discontinued the GI-Bill after Vietnam but a new one was passed in 2008, and in 2017 an additional $3 billion dollars were committed for 10 more years of education funding. The Military Times article wraps on a positive note with a caveat; “As active duty service members and veterans begin to take advantage of these provisions, history provides good reason to be vigilant for the way racism still impacts who receives the most from those benefits.”
History does indeed provide good reason to be vigilant for the way racism still impacts everything in our lives.
Feature Photo Credit: Photo by Little Tree on Unsplash
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