 The US South: A deadly front during World War II The US Army recently gave a full military funeral to Albert King, a Black private stationed at Georgia’s Fort Benning who was killed by a white military policeman in 1941. With this act, the Army completed its acknowledgement of a racial murder it tried to cover up 83 years ago. What the Army or the nation has never fully recognized, however, is that during World War II, in and around Army facilities in the US South (where 80% of Black soldiers trained), an internal war zone raged, one with its own share of casualties, primarily African American GIs. Ironically, the Army’s effort to enforce the laudable goal of nondiscrimination during wartime helped to stoke racial conflict and violence on this home front battlefield. During World War II, the Army built a biracial army, but one where all units remained strictly segregated by race. At the same time, the military tried to enforce the mandate enshrined in the 1940 Selective Service and Training Act, which officially disavowed racial discrimination. Segregation and nondiscrimination, however, were incompatible goals, especially in the South, where racial segregation was inherently discriminatory. The Army’s effort to promote nondiscrimination within its own sphere did challenge existing southern racial practices and drew strident criticism from southern white leaders. In 1940, the Army desegregated its Officer Training School at Fort Benning; Black and white trainees lived and learned together before being assigned to their segregated units. Many army camps did not segregate sick or wounded soldiers by race in what was often a single base hospital. In 1942, the Army ordered a ban on the use of offensive language when referring to Black soldiers, a directive unevenly implemented, often dependent on the attitudes of individual commanders. In the summer of 1944, in large part in response to the racial upheaval ongoing in and around military facilities in the South and elsewhere, the Army made its boldest move to embrace nondiscrimination. It declared all recreation facilities and transportation under its control desegregated, although this order was also not always fully implemented by the officers charged with carrying out the directive. The Army took all these steps and others largely for reasons of efficiency and military necessity. For Black soldiers, these actions gave them some sense that they were part of a unified effort to defeat America’s enemies abroad and emboldened them to assert their rights as American citizens at home. During the war, that home was the local communities that surrounded Army camps. While the Army could try to ensure nondiscrimination on base, off base the Army had no authority to enforce the principle of nondiscrimination. But the Army could not keep its Black soldiers locked on base; every soldier needed time away from their training and their military officers. And outside the camp perimeter, the harsh realities of southern racial segregation remained untouched by the upheaval of war. As a result, many of the Black casualties of World War II’s “southern battlefield” occurred in the communities located near Army training grounds. In addition to Albert King, African American soldiers killed in the frequent wartime skirmishes in these locales include Henry Williams, a private from Birmingham, Alabama, stationed at Brookley Army Air Field and shot by a white bus driver in Mobile; Raymond Carr, a MP from Louisiana’s Camp Beauregard (and a Louisiana native), shot in the back by a Louisiana state trooper after the lawman told Carr to abandon his post in Alexandria, Louisiana; and William Walker, a private from Chicago, killed by local lawmen while fighting with a white MP just outside the fence of Camp Van Dorn, near the village of Centreville in southwest Mississippi. There were other Black casualties—including some deaths for which we will probably never know all the details, a common occurrence during wartime—as well as hundreds wounded in various beatings and assaults that occurred in the US South’s “war zone.” Both Albert King and the MP who murdered him in 1941, Robert Lummus, were Georgia natives. Lummus had been at Fort Benning since the spring of 1940, when it was still a white outpost. After the draft began in the fall of 1940, the facility was soon transformed, as thousands of Black soldiers from all over the country arrived at what became one of the country’s largest training facilities. As the US Army began its experiment in promoting nondiscrimination, white soldiers like Lummus remained unmoved. He and others must have believed that Black soldiers at the facility would continue to abide by the South’s existing racial hierarchy. If not, the traditional use of violence to keep Black men in their “place” was a tried-and-true option, even if it meant opening another front at home in the global war of the 1940s. During World War II, the US Army, through its nondiscrimination efforts, gave African American soldiers a glimpse of America’s racial future. And indeed, the US military would later be the first national institution to abandon racial segregation. The Army’s actions, however, had limits, both within the areas it controlled and certainly beyond. It simply could not change the hearts and minds of most whites, soldier or civilian, overnight. Feature image: Black soldiers pinning their brass bars on each others shoulders, Ft. Benning, GA 1942. Courtesy National Archives (531137). OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Remembering John Hope Franklin, OAH’s first Black president The 2024 OAH Conference on American History begins in New Orleans on 11 April, almost exactly fifteen years after the death of the organization’s first Black president, John Hope Franklin. Franklin’s life embodied the conference theme of “being in service to communities and the nation,” and the annual meeting offers an opportunity to reflect on his extraordinary body of work and how it speaks to the present moment. Franklin’s seven-decade career defies overstatement. He earned his PhD from Harvard in 1941, marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, became the president of the OAH in 1975, was named by President Bill Clinton to lead the Advisory Board to the President’s Initiative on Race in 1997, and, in 2006, won the John Kluge Prize from the Library of Congress for lifetime achievement in the humanities. He published over two dozen books and 100 articles. His influence as a teacher and mentor is incalculable. Franklin came to prominence in the middle years of the twentieth century, and his work during this period, both inside and outside of the academy, continues to resonate as the history profession confronts right-wing attacks on the teaching and study of Black history. In 1947, he published his third book, From Slavery to Freedom, which placed African Americans at the center of a story so long dominated by white figures. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, and other pioneering Black scholars before him, Franklin emphasized what serious historians came to accept as an essential fact: Black history is American history. From Slavery to Freedom revolutionized the field; as historian Paul Finkelman writes in his essay on Franklin for the American National Biography, the book “[made] it possible for African American history to be taught outside of historically black colleges and universities.” It would go on to sell over three million copies across nine editions and remains in print today. A year later, Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund asked Franklin to serve as an expert witness in the case of Johnson v. Board of Trustees of Kentucky, in which African American student Lyman T. Johnson sought to enter the graduate program in history of the University of Kentucky, which only admitted white students. Franklin, with the help of sympathetic white professors at UK, mined official records and showed that the designated Black school, Kentucky State College, did not offer a comparable education. In 1949, the US District Court ruled that Johnson must be allowed to enter the University of Kentucky. In 1998, the university gave Franklin an honorary doctorate. Marshall called Franklin again in 1953. By this point, the NAACP had won significant victories in Supreme Court cases that eliminated “separate but equal” in graduate and professional programs. Marshall and key NAACP lawyers, including Constance Baker Motley, were readying cases that would force the Court to rule on segregation in primary and secondary schools. He asked Franklin to conduct research on the Fourteenth Amendment to bolster the argument that school segregation was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause. “As only Thurgood Marshall could put it,” Franklin recalled in a 2007 interview with historian Ray Arsenault, “he threatened me in a way that I knew that I was going to be in danger if I didn’t accept his invitation or his command.” Franklin arranged his fall schedule so that he could teach at Howard University Monday through Wednesday morning and then travel to New York to work with the NAACP through the weekend. The NAACP won the case that became Brown v. Board of Education, but Franklin was “bitterly mistaken, tragically mistaken” in thinking that the Supreme Court’s ruling would force southern officials to integrate schools right away, or, as the Court so vaguely put it the following year, “with all deliberate speed.” Franklin also knew that segregation was not an issue peculiar to the South. Franklin had studied the problem as an historian, but he also had first-hand experience. He moved to New York City in 1956 to chair the history department at Brooklyn College, but he struggled to find a home within walking distance to the school; realtors refused to show him houses because of his race, insurance companies balked at working with him, and banks refused to approve his loan. When he eventually bought a house—thanks to his lawyer’s father being on the board of a bank—he and his family faced constant harassment from white neighbors. The continuous struggle against racial discrimination, past and present, would motivate Franklin’s work for the rest of his life. Franklin died on 25 March 2009, not three months after the inauguration of Barack Obama as the country’s first Black president. Bill Clinton spoke at his memorial service. In 2015, at Duke University’s celebration of Franklin’s centennial, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust mused, “For John Hope Franklin, history was a calling and a weapon, a passion and a project.” He understood “history itself as a causal agent and on the writing of history as mission as well as profession.” The OAH conference reminds us to consider Franklin’s legacy. It also allows us to celebrate how historians today have followed in his footsteps, untangling America’s past through honest research and skilled interpretation even as politicians and opinionmakers undermine the teaching of race, slavery, and the diversity of American experiences. Feature image by World Maps via StockSnap, CC1.0. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Thinking disobediently? A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed reactions over time, scorned by some; cherished by others. What seems bracingly invigorating can also seem an off-putting mannerism. That’s also a significant reason why Thoreau lingered in provincial obscurity during his life but rose to iconic status after death to become one of the few figures in American literary history besides Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway to achieve something like folk hero status—at least for many. Against-the-grain thinkers are often easier to take from a distance than upfront. Socrates, Nietzsche, and Gandhi are some others who come to mind. Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson observed that “first instinct upon hearing a proposition was to controvert it.” Emerson usually found this cantankerousness energizing, but he also wearied of it; and so, to a much greater extent, did more conventional-minded folk, especially if they’d never seen Thoreau’s sweeter and more vulnerable side, as Emerson had. His author-physician friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had little time for willful idiosyncrasy, dismissed Thoreau as an Emerson clone who “insisted in nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.” In Thoreau’s writing as well, we often find him insisting on the importance of such gestures as rejecting the gift of a doormat for his Walden cabin because “it is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.” This dogged staunchness repelled even some who were closer to him, like one neighbor who quipped that she would no more think of taking Thoreau’s arm than the arm of an elm tree. Never mind that still others who knew him more intimately disagreed, especially among the younger generation of Concord like Louisa May Alcott and Emerson’s son, who remembered him as a kindly playfellow and guide. Standoffish resistance, with a satirical bite, was the face he tended to present to the adult world. This side of Thoreau, however, is also key to the special force and bite of his writing, which for many latter-day readers has made his writing seem more vibrant and provocative over time than Emerson’s more abstract prose. Judged by their writings alone, Thoreau emerges as the far more memorable flesh-and-blood figure, Emerson by contrast as a kind of recording consciousness. Even Thoreau’s cranky niggling can seem like lovable eccentricity. When I put the question, “Which of the two would you rather room with?” to students who’ve read them both extensively, their first impulse is to choose Thoreau, although, on second thought, they grant that Emerson would have been easier to get along with. Thoreau scholars also face a version of this problem. Many of us, myself included, were first drawn to Thoreau in years past by his ringing idealistic denunciations of the social and political status quo (“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the only place for a just man is also a prison,” etc.) In addition to their sheer charismatic vehemence, such pronouncements may ignite a feeling of special kinship in those who also feel themselves on the margins of society, as aspiring academics often do. The autobiographical persona in Thoreau’s writing evokes the sense of being invited into a select circle of intimacy above or apart from the ordinary herd, such as what e. e. cummings conjures up in the preface to an edition of his collected poems: These poems “are written for you and for me and are not for mostpeople [sic].” Only later does one realize that Thoreau might have scorned most who write articles and books about him as obtuse pedants. But that awakening may also have the salutary effect of making a scrupulous Thoreauvian less addicted to his or her pet theories about who the real Thoreau was, and more wary of making “authoritative” claims about the essence of his personhood or writing. That said, the defining arenas of Thoreau’s disobedient thinking are unmistakable. Individual conscience is a higher authority than statute law or moral consensus. True wildness can be found at the edges of your hometown. Scientific investigation of natural phenomenon is formulaic without sensuous immersion in the field. Religious orthodoxies of one’s time or any time are tribalistic distortions of the animating energies whose epicenter lies, if anywhere, in untutored intuition or the natural world, not human institutions. What gives these and other Thoreauvian heterodoxies their special bite is not so much how he lived but how he wrote. Many have practiced a more rigorous voluntary simplicity than Thoreau did during his two-plus years at Walden, often for far longer stretches of time and in places far more wild. Many have suffered for conscience’s sake far longer and far more agonizingly than his one-night incarceration for tax refusal. But no such heroes of nonconformity managed to write the likes of Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” which since Thoreau’s death have become classics of world literature and have helped inspire many more thoroughgoing acts of conscientious withdrawal, political resistance, and environmental activism. In order to make sense of how these—and other—Thoreau works have had such impact, a good place to start is Thoreau’s talent for arresting assertions, often directed as much to himself as to others, that set you back, make you think, urge you on. Such as: “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already”; “If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior”; “For the most part, we are not what we are, but in a false position”; or “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” This, however, is only a starting point for a deeper understanding of the motions of this disobedient thinker’s mind. For that, there’s no substitute for a careful examination of the works themselves. That’s what I’ve striven to do in Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently. Feature image by Chris Liu-Beers via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 American Exchanges: Third Reich’s Elite Schools In the summer of 1935, an exchange programme between leading American academies and German schools, set up by the International Schoolboy Fellowship (ISF), was hijacked by the Nazi government. The organization had been set up in 1927 by Walter Huston Lillard, the principal of Tabor Academy in Marion, Massachusetts. Its aim was to foster better relations between all nations through the medium of schoolboy exchange. However, the authorities at the National Political Education Institutes (aka Napolas), the Third Reich’s most prominent elite schools, had other plans. Lillard and the ISF were informed on 12 February 1935 that they would be exchanging ten American boys for ten Napola pupils. However, the American organizers were wholly unaware that the German pupils and staff were charged with an explicitly propagandistic mission. Their aim: to counteract and neutralize the effect of anti-Nazi accounts in the American media; to form opinions, and influence future foreign views of the Third Reich. To ensure the effectiveness of this pro-Nazi propaganda campaign at the highest level, one of the first German boys to be selected for the program was Reinhard Pfundtner, the son of a high-ranking civil servant in the Third Reich’s Interior Ministry. In his role as ‘state secretary,’ Hans Pfundtner was one of the key architects of the Nuremberg Laws, which demoted Jews, Sinti, and Roma to a pariah status within Nazi Germany, and which were instrumental in the genesis of the Holocaust. He was also a member of the Olympic Committee, and was keen to use the exchange as an opportunity to persuade Lillard, Reinhard’s American headmaster, to lobby in favour of U.S. participation at the upcoming 1936 Winter Olympic Games in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Surviving letters between Pfundtner and Lillard, now preserved in the German Federal Archives in Berlin, show that the principal of Tabor Academy was completely taken in by the Pfundtners’ pretense of friendship. In one letter from 23 November 1935, Lillard even assured Pfundtner that his ‘excellent letter replying to…questions about the Olympic Games’ had been ‘quoted by several of our good newspapers, and was included in the Associated Press service throughout the country… Undoubtedly, this message of yours will be very helpful in submerging some of the false propaganda.’ Even after the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ pogrom in November 1938, known in Germany as Kristallnacht, Lillard was still urging the principals at the eighteen American preparatory schools involved with the Napola-ISF exchange to continue the programme into the 1939-40 academic year. In one of these letters, he asserted that ‘if we continue to bring the boys together, something constructive may be accomplished; whereas, if we abandon all efforts in the direction of Germany, we are closing the opportunity for the future leaders to be enlightened, and we are retreating back toward the condition of ill-will which prevailed after the World War.’ In general, then, the Napola exchanges seem to have achieved their goal, at least in the short term. After 1935, many leading academies took part in the programme each year, including Phillips Academy Andover and Phillips Academy Exeter, St Andrew’s Delaware, Choate, the Loomis School, and Lawrenceville. Between 1936 and 1938, each year fifteen American pupils lived as pupils of the Nazi elite schools for ten months, while two groups of fifteen Napola-pupils spent five months each at the American schools. The Napola-pupils were often able to convince their American hosts that events in Germany were not nearly as dire as press reports might lead them to believe—and were also given the opportunity to put their political point of view across. Reports in school newsletters suggest that the American pupils also enjoyed getting to know the ‘new Germany’ and could quite easily be swayed into displaying some sympathy for their hosts’ political perspective. One American pupil who attended the Napola in Plön claimed that the year he had spent there was the ‘greatest experience of his life.’ Another was even discovered practising the Hitler salute in front of his mirror. Meanwhile, many staff and pupils at the US academies kept in touch with their German partner schools even after the outbreak of war in 1939. Walden Pell, principal of St Andrew’s School, Delaware, continued to correspond with the parents of one of his German exchange pupils for decades, assisting them in their search for their missing son, sending them food parcels and care packages, and donating a large sum of money to enable a pilgrimage to his war grave in Italy once his final whereabouts were known. To a present-day reader, the attitudes towards Nazi Germany depicted here might seem highly naïve. At the time, however, many educated Americans shared similar sentiments—curious, trusting in German good faith, and willing to downplay or disregard prior reports of Nazi atrocities, at least until Nazi belligerence reached its fatal climax. Feature image by Australian National Library via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 African American religions and the voodoo label In 1932, an African American man named Robert Harris killed his tenant on a makeshift altar in the back of his home in Detroit, Michigan. Harris, who was allegedly part of Detroit’s burgeoning Black Muslim community, described the murder as a human sacrifice to Allah. Harris was put on trial for murder; however, following some bizarre courtroom rants during which he referred to himself as a “king” and the murder as a “crucifixion,” Harris was declared insane and sent to an asylum. Even while reporting on his delusions and his confinement in the asylum, newspapers throughout the United States published stories referring to Harris as the leader of a “Voodoo cult” that practiced human sacrifice. Although the authorities knew that Harris had a history of threatening to harm his wife, his children, and his social worker and that his actions were the result of mental illness, they detained leaders of the Allah Temple of Islam—the Muslim community to which Harris allegedly belonged—asking them about their beliefs regarding human sacrifice. They allegedly ordered the Temple’s leader, Wallace Fard, to leave Detroit. Elijah Muhammad took over following Fard’s departure and changed the temple’s name to the Nation of Islam. He also moved their headquarters to Chicago. These name and location changes were designed to shake off the negative reputation that the community had developed following the Harris case. Nevertheless, the first scholarly article about the Nation of Islam, written in 1938, was titled “The Voodoo Cult Among Negro Migrants in Detroit.” Additionally, claims that Fard had promoted human sacrifice resurfaced when the Nation gained notoriety during the Civil Rights era and was a way to discredit the work that they were doing. The founders of the Nation of Islam are not unique. Many African American religions have been labeled as “voodoo” by outsiders and have been falsely accused of barbaric practices. The history of “voodoo” The term “voodoo” is deeply rooted in anti-Black racism. Specifically, the term first came into popular use during the US Civil War and was used to argue that Black people were superstitious by nature and would “relapse” into barbaric practices if not controlled by white people through slavery. After the Civil War ended, similar arguments appeared in a variety of US newspapers, reporting the “primitive” practices that had supposedly become popular since the end of slavery. The authors argued that such practices proved that Black people were not ready for citizenship, the right to vote and hold public office and other rights extended to them by post-war constitutional amendments. Over the following decades, the term “voodoo” evolved and was no longer used simply as a broad term to refer to Black spiritual practices in the US. By the late 19th century, “voodoo” was also a gloss for African based religions in other parts of the Americas. In particular, false allegations that Black people in Cuba and Haiti were engaged in voodoo-related human sacrifice and cannibalism were common around the turn of the 20th century. Such stories often reflected on the horror of such things happening so close to the US and the need for an American military presence to quash these practices. Biases remain in the 21st century The negative perceptions of “voodoo” did not end in the 20th century. They are regularly reinforced through news reports, television, movies, and other sources. Like the founders of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s, the bizarre actions of a single mentally ill individual are often attributed to entire Black religions or communities. Recent cases that have been described as “voodoo” include a mother who set her six year old daughter on fire, two women who caused third degree burns to a five-year-old while trying to cleanse her of “demons,” and a man who stabbed his dog thirty-seven times then stuffed it in a suitcase and left it to die. In other cases, it would go without saying that such senseless acts of violence have no place in religious ritual. However, all these cases were attributed to “voodoo” and linked to Afro-Caribbean, especially Haitian, religious beliefs and practices. Such incidents have a negative impact on devotees who have felt compelled to hide their religion for fear of persecution after such cases are reported in the media. In at least one case, it led a Christian bishop in Massachusetts to denounce “voodoo” before a cheering crowd of hundreds of people. Despite the well-publicized cases of several mentally ill individuals, African American religions do not engage in human sacrifice, cannibalism, or any related acts. However, after more than 150 years of rumors and stereotypes, the term “voodoo” has little life outside of such racist myths about it that were developed to support slavery and imperialism. Aside from a small community of people in New Orleans, devotees of African American religions typically do not use “voodoo” to refer to their own faith. Nevertheless, outsiders continue to mislabel a wide variety of African and African American religions, especially Haitian Vodou, as “voodoo” and attribute barbaric practices to them. These misconceptions cause great harm to devotees who suffer discrimination and violence at alarming rates. Feature image by Tracy Lundgren via Pixabay. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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