Remembering the (too often uncompensated) sacrifice of Black veterans

The all-Black 25th U.S. Infantry Regiment, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, garrisoned at Fort Snelling in the 1880s.  

At the time, Fort Snelling served as a “staging and supply base for campaigns against Native American nations in the West,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society,  

The Buffalo Soldier Museum reports that during the era of the Indian Wars, about 20% of the U.S. Cavalry troopers were Black, and they fought over 177 engagements. 

Native American warriors gave them the name Buffalo Soldiers as a sign of respect. No doubt some of the Buffalo Soldiers believed they risked their lives against the wrong enemy.

Despite their valor, they wore ”secondhand uniforms, rode poor quality horses and had the worst equipment, including their firearms,” according to the Buffalo Soldiers Museum. 

This would become historical pattern: Black soldiers in Minnesota and elsewhere, serving honorably, sometimes in unjust wars, but not receiving the respect or compensation that should have been their due. 

During World War I, Gov. J.A.A. Burnquist, in 1918, consigned Black soldiers to the Minnesota Home Guard’s segregated 16th Battalion, which was not issued uniforms and were distinguished by wearing white gloves. They drilled and marched on Memorial Day in Minneapolis and St. Paul parades. At that, some whites criticized state government for letting them do so under Black officers.  

After World War I, as the New Yorker reported a decade ago, “Black veterans returning home were greeted not with recognition of their civil rights but, instead, with an intense wave of discrimination and hostility…. Many Black veterans were denied the benefits and disability pay they’d been promised. In the first summer after the war, known as the Red Summer, anti-Black riots erupted in more than twenty American cities.” 

The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, known as the GI Bill, was signed on June 22, 1944. It largely shut out 1.2 million Black veterans.  

The GI Bill was often a ticket to the middle class. The original GI Bill ended in July 1956, bestowing nearly 8 million World War II veterans education or training, and 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion. 

But from the start, Black veterans had trouble securing the GI Bill’s benefits. Although written without explicit racial exclusion, it was locally administered, so you can imagine what that meant in most of the country. Southern Democrats feared that an educationally and economically empowered class of Black veterans would work to overcome Jim Crow. 

Employment, college attendance and wealth surged for whites, while disparities with Black GI’s  continued and worsened because the bill’s benefits were denied to Black veterans.  Some didn’t even get benefits that automatically came with an honorable discharge, and many more Black than white veterans were dishonorably discharged.  

As Erin Blakemore writes, the bill’s promise of vocational training was unofficially stamped “whites only.”  In 1947, a crowd stoned Black veterans as they moved into a Chicago housing development. 

Some came home to even more severe racial violence: “I had fought in World War II, and I once was captured by the German army, and I want to tell you the Germans never were as inhumane as the state troopers of Alabama,” Hosea Williams, a veteran and civil rights leader, told The New York Times in 1965, according to a more recent report on the plight of Black veterans.    

You could go and die for this country but not come home and live anywhere you wanted. 

Members of Congress offered up bills (H. Con. Res. 59/S. Con. Res. 23) this past Veterans Day to  honor historic sacrifices, acknowledge systemic inequities and call for the Department of Veterans Affairs to address health and benefit disparities. Congress also proposed the GI Bill Restoration Act, to provide benefits to descendants of Black World War II veterans.  

It’s lip service cosmetics. A congressional proposal and bus fare will get you on a bus. 

The Minneapolis VA Health Care System’s Minority Veterans Program is also working to help Black veterans gain equitable access to VA benefits and services. Good luck with this administration.  

Once the armed services were finally desegregated in 1948, Black soldiers often faced greater casualties than white soldiers in places like Vietnam.

More recently, the 2017 workplace and Equal Opportunity Survey of Active Duty Members showed that 31% of Black service members reported suffering racial discrimination, harassment or both in the past 12 months, compared with 23% of Asian American troops and 21% of Hispanic troops, according to the journal Military Medicine. 

A particular instance in Iraq is an absolute horror. ”LaVena Johnson: The Silent Truth” (Midtown Films) documents the plight of 19-year-old Private First Class LaVena Johnson, who evidently got killed facing the wrong enemy.  She was discovered on a Balad, Iraq military base with a broken nose, black eye, loosened teeth, chemical burns on her genitalia and a gunshot wound to the head. The U.S. Army’s finding: suicide, or, as I put it once elsewhere: She beat herself half to death, poured acid between her legs, then blew her brains out. 

And now after a few decades during which the U.S. military — at least among enlisted soldiers — was perhaps the most integrated institution in America, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a Minnesotan, wants to take us back. Hegseth’s Defense Department tried to erase the contributions of  nonwhite service members, while paying tribute to Confederate soldiers. He’s also been on a bender firing Black flag officers.  

America’s armed forces have a great deal for which to account regarding its exploitation of Black soldiers. For Minnesotans, helping our Black veterans is as good a place to start as any.