The 40s were a time of big band, swing, and music to heal the hearts of the men and women serving in World War II. Remember the scene from “A Soldier’s Story” with Big Mary belting out the blues? There were the sounds coming from the USO clubs for black soldiers (the first opening in Hattiesburg, MS in 1942) – Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and of course the incomparable Lena Horne.
No one willing to look could miss the hypocrisy of being asked to fight bigotry abroad while experiencing it at home. “The nation cannot expect colored people to feel that the United States is worth defending,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote early in the war, “if the Negro continues to be treated as he is now.” But even A. Philip Randolph was unable to persuade President Roosevelt to integrate the armed forces. Black Americans served throughout the war on a strictly segregated basis. Blood supplies for saving the lives of the wounded were carefully separated by race. On one base, a schedule listed separate services for “Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Negroes.” Some commanders forbade black troops to read black newspapers. There were violent confrontations between black and white troops at military installations. Off base, black soldiers were harassed, beaten, even refused service at restaurants where German prisoners of war were allowed to eat. The Pittsburgh Courier mounted a “Double-V” campaign, calling for simultaneous victories over the nation’s enemies abroad and discrimination at home. Heavyweight champion Joe Louis got in trouble with his black fans when, after defeating Buddy Baer, he donated his purse to the navy, when that branch of the armed forces still restricted most African-American sailors to menial tasks.
 Armed Forces Band, World War II Image courtesy of The National Archives |
No one felt more alienated from the war effort than young black musicians. They knew that once drafted, they were likely to be sent to the Jim Crow South for basic training, where the relative freedom they had experienced in the North would vanish, and when that ordeal was over, they were less likely than their white counterparts to be offered jobs in military bands.
Many musicians served, anyway. But some simply kept moving, hoping their draft notices would never catch up with them, and a few feigned homosexuality or pretended to be psychotic or addicted to drugs to avoid conscription. The trumpet player Howard McGhee said he won an exemption by assuring an army psychiatrist that if inducted he would ask to be sent South so that he could organize black soldiers to shoot whites: “Whether he’s a Frenchman, a German or whatever … how would I know the difference?” Those attitudes only hardened as musicians became special targets of white policemen and white servicemen who objected to their good clothes, their hipster language, their new assertiveness. “The enemy, by that period, was not the Germans,” Dizzy Gillespie said, “it was above all white Americans who kicked us in the butt every day, physically and morally … If America wouldn’t honor its Constitution and respect us as men we couldn’t give a [damn] about the American way. And they made it damn near un-American to appreciate our music.”
So this week, as we look back on a time of men and women with what has to be a patriotism deeper than any other (HAS to be!) – we’ll listen to the sounds of their time.
Duke Ellington Orchestra – Take the A Train
Ella Fitzgerald – When My Sugar Walks Down the Street
The Ink Spots – Do I Worry