By David Nasaw
Over one million Black men and women served in a racially segregated military in World War II, separate and unequal. Fighting in every theater across the globe, Black Americans saw the war as an opportunity for advancement. In 1942, the nation’s largest black newspaper, The Pittsburgh Courier, urged readers to embrace the “Double V” campaign. Calling for democracy and freedom at home and abroad, the campaign helped set the stage for the rise of the modern Civil Rights movement. But before that struggle could emerge, a ferocious wave of racial violence targeting Black veterans swept the country.
The following is excerpted from historian David Nasaw’s new book The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Nasaw is the bestselling author of The Last Million, named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and, according to The Economist, one of the “six must-read books on the Second World War. He is also the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Professor of History Emeritus at the CUNY Graduate Center and a past president of the Society of American Historians. Nasaw’s father served in the Army Medical Corps in Eritrea during World War II.
The Wounded Generation (Penguin Press) will be released on October 14. Pre-orders are available at www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672253/the-wounded-generation-by-david-nasaw/.
In late September 1945, Marjorie McKenzie in The Pittsburgh Courier described for her readers the advice that the military, the press, and the experts were offering family members as they prepared to welcome home their husbands, sons, and brothers. “The men should be provided with a quiet, relaxed atmosphere, asked no questions, and made to feel that everything and everybody were just as they had left them.” Such instructions, McKenzie observed, might have made sense for White families, but not for southern Black ones who were not going to succeed in creating “a relaxed atmosphere for their boys, no matter how much they may yearn and try. Most of the men I have talked with have told me that tension gripped them in the stomach, clamped itself around their heads and rose in their throats the moment they started walking down the gang plank of the boat that had brought them back to the United States. One young officer said that when he arrived he could feel the burden of jim crow settle like a big, black bird and he hasn’t been able to shake it off as yet.”
As the historian Jennifer Brooks has written in Defining the Peace, “White southerners who adamantly defended Jim Crow during the war steeled themselves for the return of black soldiers, whose uniforms alone were a testament to the threatening consequences of the war….From Fort Valley, Georgia, field agent Horace Bohannon reported to the SRC [Southern Regional Council] that some white citizens anticipated that the ‘returning Negro veteran is dissatisfied with conditions and will inevitabl[y] be a troublemaker.’ Others similarly predicted that ‘the white southerner is going to “pick on” the returning veteran to try and steer him “back into his place.”’”
Southern congressmen, in anticipation of the conflicts to come, fought back attempts to pass anti-poll-tax and antilynching bills. Journalists spread alarms about the coming Black insurrection. White supremacist activists in the Mississippi Delta, where Blacks outnumbered Whites, organized “vigilance committees.” The FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, in a “Survey of Racial Conditions in the U.S. . . . concluded that the war had changed not only the material conditions but also the attitudes of ‘the Negro race,’ now engaged in new forms of resistance to Jim Crow. ‘A new militancy or aggressiveness has been reported to be existent among the Negro population’ that could soon sweep across the country and permanently alter its landscape.”
The preemptive attack against the Black veterans began on the buses and trains they boarded to bring them home from the separation centers. William Heath, who visited relatives in Jackson after being discharged, “caught the bus to go home, and it was just two or three whites on the front and the back was just full of blacks— couldn’t sit down or anything. And I wasn’t thinking about I was a soldier and I guess I wasn’t thinking but I just took the cloth that said ‘colored’ and ‘white’ took it and moved it up two seats further. I looked back and there was some older people on there and I moved it up where they could sit down. And when I got ready to get off the bus . . . the driver reminded me that I’d better not ever do that again…He reminded me that I was back home.”
Purple heart receipient Isaac Woodward with his mother five months after a Carolina policeman gouged his eyes out. (Special Collections and Archive, Georgia State University Library)
Sergeant Isaac Woodard had served in New Guinea, been under enemy fire, promoted, and awarded number of medals, including a Purple Heart. He was discharged from Camp Gordon in Georgia on February 12, 1946. Wearing his uniform and medals, he boarded a Greyhound bus for his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina. When he asked the bus driver to stop so he could use a restroom (there were none on the bus), he was told, “God damn it, go back and sit down. I ain’t got time to wait,” to which Woodard replied, “God damn it, talk to me like I am talking to you. I am a man just like you.”
The bus driver said nothing, but farther down the road stopped the bus and told Woodard, “Get up, some one outside wants to see you.” It was the police chief, Lynwood Shull, who asked Woodard if he had been discharged. “I says ‘yes,’ just like that. So he said, ‘don’t say “Yes” to me, say “yes, sir.”’…He started beating me.” Woodard tried to wrest the billy club from him, but a second officer pointed his gun and told him to drop the billy. Shull continued to batter him with the billy, at one point “driving it into my eyeballs.” Woodard did not get home that day, or the day after. He spent the night in the jail, woke up blind, was taken to court, fined $50, then moved to the VA hospital thirty miles away, where he was told that there was nothing that could be done to restore his sight. Two months later, his sisters arrived at the hospital to take him to the Bronx, where his parents now lived.
Southern Whites were committed to maintaining segregation on public transportation—and punishing black veterans who disobeyed Jim Crow restrictions. But of even greater concern was their fear that the returning Black veterans would attempt to register to vote and pressure others to follow their lead. In Georgia, Eugene Talmadge, a candidate in the July 1946 gubernatorial primary, warned that “wise Negroes will stay away from the white folks’ ballot boxes on July 17…We are the true friends of the Negroes, always have been and always will be as long as they stay in the definite place we have provided for them.”
In Mississippi, Senator Theodore Bilbo was even more direct— and violent—in his attempt to suppress the Black vote. “The white people of Mississippi are sleeping on a volcano,” Bilbo warned, “and it is left up to you red-blooded men to do something about it. The white men of this State have a right to resort to any means at their command to stop it…I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls. If you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb.”
Elected and appointed state and local officials, courts, and police departments, separately and together, retaliated against Black veterans who dared challenge Jim Crow. In Birmingham, where the police force was led by Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor, five Black veterans were, according to the historian John Egerton, murdered by policemen in the first six weeks of 1946.8 In Atlanta, the local Communist newspaper, the Daily World, reported that the police were “beating up discharged and disabled Negro Veterans at the slightest provocation and practicing a general ‘get- them-in-line’ with post-war attitude. A number of veterans have been arrested on vagrancy and loitering charges because they happened not to be at work when stopped by police for questioning.”
In Columbia, Tennessee, a small town forty-three miles south of Nashville, in late February 1946, nineteen-year-old James Stephenson, recently discharged from the navy, accompanied his mother, Gladys, to the radio repair shop, which, she claimed, had taken her money but failed to fix her radio. Billy Fleming, a White army veteran who was apprenticing in the radio shop under the GI Bill, claimed that James had looked at him “in a threatening manner” and punched him in the back of the head. Stephenson returned the punch, and the two veterans, one Black, one White, tumbled through a small window. James and his mother were arrested, pleaded guilty, and paid a $50 fine, but instead of being released, they were charged with attempted murder and removed to the county jail. As word of the confrontation spread through the town, young White men “gathered in the town square, drunk, armed, angry. Many, though not all, were in their late teens and early twenties. World War II veterans,” according to the historian Gail O’Brien, “comprised the most volatile element in the crowd.”
Black Marines from the 16th Marine Field Depot support the 7th Marines on Peleliu Island, September 1944. (National Archives)
The Stephensons were not released until 5:00 that evening. James was hidden in the “Bottoms,” the Black district of town, to protect him from the lynching the White mob was already talking about. Black veterans armed themselves, set up lookout posts, and drove Stephenson away to safety. When four local policemen were shot as they marched into the “Bottoms” to locate and arrest him, the governor ordered the Tennessee Highway Patrol into Columbia. Sixty to seventy-five patrolmen arrived, followed by a crowd of armed Whites, veterans among them. Homes and businesses in the Black district were ransacked, cash registers looted, property destroyed, weapons seized, and hundreds arrested. Three days later, after calm had returned, two of the Black men who had been arrested were shot and killed after one of them grabbed a gun seized in the raid and stored in the jail office where they were being interrogated.
A federal grand jury was empaneled, but the all-White jurors refused to bring charges against any law enforcement officials. Twenty-five Blacks were subsequently tried for murder in state court. In the end, only one served a sentence, which was, in itself, rather remarkable. “Perhaps the most significant message to come out of the Columbia incident,” Egerton concludes in Speak Now Against the Day, “was this: Besieged black citizens had stood up and fought back, and lived to tell about it.”
Excerpted from The Wounded Generation: Coming Home after World War II by David Nasaw. Copyright © 2025 David Nasaw. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.
SAVE THE DATE
A VBC Evening with historian David Nasaw
Author of The Wounded Generation
Thursday, November 20th at 7 p.m.
Join us for an evening with historian David Nasaw as he discusses his new book The Wounded Generation: Coming Home After World War II. Drawing from veterans’ memoirs, oral histories, and government documents, Nasaw illuminates a hidden chapter of American history—one of trauma, resilience, and a country in transition. Nearly 16.4 million Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces in World War II. This book “is an account of the aftereffects that lived on in the bodies, hearts, and minds of those who fought, those who awaited their return, and the nation that had won the war but had now to readjust to peace.”
Zoom link for the Nov. 20th program will be available via the online events tab at veteransbreakfastclub.org.
