By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — It should have been a normal trend of thought for the untold thousands of African American soldiers, sailors, and air corpsmen: having served with valor and shed their blood against the forces of the Axis, they aspired to share in the spoils of victory. Black men helped save the world from the fascists, and they distinguished themselves in the war in tandem with their white counterparts. So they assumed they’d come home to equality. They believed that the old way of racial humiliation would now disappear.
They thought this fervently in 1945—seventy years ago. Now they appear to be random prey for police officers, from Ferguson to New York to Los Angeles to Baltimore. Freddie Gray had no desire to validate history.
Granted: in World War II, black servicemen fought in segregated units. They were too often relegated to inferior or more tedious or treacherous duties, as cooks, ditch diggers, mail runners, mechanics, butlers, mine sweepers. But they carried a vision, against the blinding incongruity of the battlefield, from the Philippines to Normandy, that the war—and their ultimate brotherhood with their better-fed and more often promoted white counterparts—would pave the way to an America that was also liberated.
Sadly, this dream proved as difficult as it was for GIs to traverse the steep cliffs of Pointe du Hoc on D-Day. The lurid grip of state-sanctioned segregation in the South, known as Jim Crow, was unaffected by the military success of the Americans.
“Jim Crow” was unimpressed; he remained grim, unyielding, and evil. Men who had faced an incomprehensible enemy in war came home without a trace of the euphoric aura that seized the nation. The black soldier could die with his white comrade in Italy, but he still could not drink from the same fountain in Louisiana.
He had helped free children of all creeds from despotism in France and North Africa, but he could not send his own children to the same schools as his white equivalent. He could personally recount the history of the greatest armed struggle for human dignity ever fought, but his children could only read about it in substandard, unheated, poorly ventilated school buildings relegated to separate neighborhoods and using hand-me-down desks, chairs, blackboards, and even textbooks that had been disposed of by white schools.
He was drafted to serve his nation, but he returned to still being denied the right to vote. He won the war but still lost the peace.
He was often enough bitter, disappointed, and angry about it. Black Americans had never been passive about the systemic degradation that pervaded their lives, the lynching, the denial of education, unionization, housing, or even the opportunity to own property and gain a promotion.
Freddie Gray, whose spine was severed, and who died while in police hands, must have been feeling something of that wholesale betrayal that all of us silent white folks are underwriting.
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Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer. You may comment to ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com or post your comment on this website provided that the rules below are observed.
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At the moment we do not know the cause of Gray’s death. We do know from his rap sheet that he was a common criminal, although none of his known crimes were deserving of a death penalty. Hts death is being investigated, and I expect if a crime were committed against him it will be prosecuted. While we await the cause of his death we should not portray him as a choir boy. The fact is that many more whites are killed by the police in a year than are blacks. There is an abundance of black on black crime. The protesters in this and all the other recent protests never protest black on black crime; they never even mention it. Some of those protesting Gray’s death would have killed him themselves if he would have accidentally bumped into them on a dance floor. The major cause of problems in the black community are the result of poor life choices, such as dropping out of school and getting pregnant out of wedlock. Dropping a guilt trip on uninvolved whites is pathetic. As for Baltimore, it is a majority Black city with majority Black leadership, who all happen to be Democrats (if that makes any difference), and the top cops are Black. — Jerome Liner, Cincinnati, Ohio