By Daja E. Henry
You jim crowed me / Before hitler rose to power- / And you are still jim crowing me- / Right now this very hour.” - langston hughes in 1943 poem, from Beaumont to Detroit
During her senior year of high school in 2016, when all her peers were choosing colleges, Kayla Johnson had already come to a different decision. She was going to join the United States Air Force. She knew she couldn’t afford to go to college and made what seemed to her to be the smartest and safest decision.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard D. Kingsberry, Army retired, made the same decision in his senior year of high school, in 1972, because he just was not ready to go to college. However, the decision wasn’t as safe for him. Kingsberry served two tours in the Vietnam War aboard an aircraft carrier. Other than the US Armed Forces, Johnson and Kingsberry have another thing in common. They're both African-American.
The United States has a long and complex relationship with its African-American military population.
From its inception, African-American soldiers have fought not only to defend their country, but also for the rights to their very existence in the land they fight to protect.
The unique struggles African-American soldiers face have given way for organizations like the National Association of Black Veterans (NABVETS), which Kingsberry currently serves as commander of.
The organization was founded to improve the lives of black veterans after they noticed that black veterans were returning from Vietnam and not receiving proper treatment from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
“A lot of African-Americans when they came back from Vietnam, they went to the VA and they weren’t able to get the same services as the white man. Our brothers and sisters who were serving our nation were either being underserved, or not served,” said Kingsberry. “When they come back to the US seeking treatment, often times they were not treated or misdiagnosed.”
Cases of post-traumatic stress disorder were often mislabeled as “behavioral disorders” or bad conduct cases that resulted from syphilis of the nervous system. “
Kingsberry believes African-American veterans suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) at higher rates than white soldiersbecause African-American soldiers were so often concentrated in combat roles during his time in Vietnam.
“I believe African-Americans were put in those dangerous positions because they were viewed as dispensable,” he said.
This affected African-American soldiers’ disproportionate rates of PTSD both directly and indirectly. Not only were they suffering from seeing and engaging in violent combat, but they also faced racism after serving in the war. A 1982 reporton alcoholism as a symptom of PTSD in black veterans post-Vietnam war cites the causes of a veteran’s PTSD as being “forced to simultaneously cope with combat and intense racism.”
Kingsberry and Johnson have had very different experiences, but racial nuances and tensions still mark both experiences.
Johnson is among the group joining the military at the highest rate of all demographics. African-American women join at higher rates than any other demographic group, even exceeding their representation in the civilian population. They comprise nearly one-third of all women in the military, according to Julia Melin’s 2016 report, “Desperate Choices: Why Black Women Join the U.S. Military at Higher Rates than Men and All Other Racial and Ethnic Groups.”
Melin’s report lists numerous benefits that black people enjoy in the military. Black women received more equal pay and job benefits in the military than in the civilian labor market and reported higher satisfaction levels than other groups. She also reports that since black women are less likely to marry or remain married than white women, many have no one to pool their income with and are forced to deal with poverty alone, thus joining the military is a better alternative. The Insight Center for Community Economic Development reports thatin 2007, 38.5 percent of black women living alone were poor.
Black people were also more likely than white men to give a high rating to the benefits of neighborhood safety and housing, suggesting that military relocation at the time of enlistment can provide refuge from racially segregated inner-city neighborhoods and school districts. Melin’s report also states that because of income and wealth disparity, national recruitment trends show that the military has been an attractive option for the underprivileged to gain upward mobility.
Johnson is in a unique position, however, because most black women in the military are concentrated in administrative and support positions, according to the Population Reference Bureau. She is a mechanic. As a woman, she says, her experience has been challenged by counterparts who do not believe a woman could, or should, do the work she does, which involves a lot of heavy lifting.
The lack of representation in her position presented itself as a challenge. She is the only black woman in her shop and often feels left out. “I got tired of asking for help from people who acted like they didn’t want to help me...Most of my experiences come from me failing and having to learn on my own, ” she said. “Sometimes it can be a little overwhelming.”
Misunderstandings are frequent. “Another thing with being black in the military, you already are deemed more aggressive,” she said. While she respectfully addressed her colleagues and superiors, she felt that respect is not reciprocated. A study done by Protect Our Defendersreports that black service members are between 32 and 71 percent more likely to face disciplinary action than white servicemembers.
A couple hundred years ago, however the products of this disparity were more dangerous, and sometimes even fatal.
According to The Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) report entitled, “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans,” white Americans feared that “black soldiers represented both a viable alternative source of community leadership and a direct physical threat to white supremacy when they came home.”
The report cites instances in which African-American Civil War veterans were brutalized, beaten and murdered, spanning from 1877, following the Civil War, to 1950, during the Civil Rights Movement.
Following the Civil War, life was different for each soldier. Some continued to serve and some went back to their families or started businesses with their earnings from the war. Because they had not received equal pay at the war’s commencement, Congress passed legislation in 1865 for retroactive pay. However, their monetary earnings came with a higher cost. They faced discrimination, and in some cases, violence.
According to the EJI report, in Nelson County, Kentucky, a mob stripped an African-American veteran of his clothes, beat him, cut off his sexual organs, forced him to run half a mile and then shot and killed him.
Some Southern states enforced discriminatory laws that made it a crime for an African-American to possess a firearm, even if they had served in the military. Law enforcement officials waited at train stations to seize black veterans’ guns when they arrived.
Yet, the report says, “Fighting for democracy was emblematic of the equality African-Americans desired, and by serving their country, black veterans displayed their attachment to the nation and commitment to American values.”
Gloria Burleson Thomas, another African-American woman who recently retired from the Air Force after 22 years, was one of those soldiers committed to the nation’s values. “I felt like I was doing something special, doing something for my country,” she said. She was a schoolteacher in Mississippi when she began to feel stagnant and in 1987, decided to drive up to a recruiter in Memphis, Tenn. and enlist in the military.
Thomas’ military experience, though special, was not without hardships. During her stint in Denver, Colo., Thomas and her female African-American colleagues were stagnant in their positions. They all had Master’s degrees, but were constantly overlooked and surpassed by their white superiors.
In instances like these, African-Americans are forced to straddle the line dividing their two identities: African-American people and U.S. soldiers.
The perpetual double identity problem parallels that of the African-American soldiers who fought in World War II. During the war, the black press drove a Double V campaign, representing a victory abroad against the Axis Powers, as well as a victory against racial discrimination on their home soil.
In a 1942 letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, 26-year-old James G. Thompson wrote, “‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ ‘Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?’ ‘Is the kind of America I know worth defending?’”
“The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny. If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces,” he continued.
Olanrewaju Olaleye, currently a tech sergeant in the United States Air Force, possesses a third layer to the identity struggle. He was born in Minneapolis, Minn. and raised in Nigeria, but returned to the United States to study and serve his country. Despite his loyalty to the country, however, some will never see past his Nigerian accent.
“I don’t get discouraged,” he said. “I like to uphold my promises. I took an oath and I have teammates who are depending on me, just as I depend on them. When everybody does their part, we are stronger for it.
Stories like Olaleye’s, Thomas’ and Johnson’s are often overlooked. When asked about their struggles and how they overcome, each of the three gave some variation of, “That’s just the way it is.”
Marquett Awa Milton, an interpreter at the African-American Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C., abruptly ended his studies at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) after being inspired by the stories of the more than 200,000 African-Americans who served the country in the Civil War. He has committed himself to documenting and preserving the history of African-American soldiers, so they are not forgotten.
“These men fought and nobody freed them,” he said. “You freed yourself.”
African-Americans now comprise about 18 percent of Defense Department active-duty military. No matter the way it is, the way it was, or the way it will be, the questions raised in the 1942 letter to the Pittsburgh Courier remain. “Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow? Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?”
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