"This whole system was in place to stop 1.2 million Black veterans from taking advantage of probably the greatest social welfare program in the history of this country."
-Derek Mosley on the discrimination of the 1944 GI Bill.
June 22, 2023, marked the 79th anniversary of the passing of the GI Bill. Signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the bill provided World War II veterans with funds for college, unemployment insurance, and housing.
While the bill is often credited with helping to launch America’s postwar middle class, it primarily benefited white veterans and their families. About one million Black veterans faced many barriers in securing the GI Bill’s benefits, driving significant disparities in education and wealth that continues today.
Derek Mosley is the director of Marquette University Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. For June’s Monthly with Mosley conversation, he dives into the obstacles Black veterans faced accessing the GI Bill.
The bill was originally called the Servicemen's Readjustment Act and was enacted by the Department of Labor before WWII ended. With the war ending, the U.S. government anticipated around 15 million returning military personnel that would be unemployed. To avoid a post-war depression, the bill provided affordable low-cost mortgages, low tuition, low-interest business loans, unemployment compensation, and tuition assistance.
"It vaulted white families into the middle class, but it also did something else, it created generational wealth... the GI Bill provided housing, which is one way of the ways you pass generational wealth and education ... But that did not apply to the 1.2 million Black veterans who honorably served and put their lives on the line for our country. What happened was when they rolled out this bill, Mississippi Congressman John E. Rankin absolutely would not favor it unless it was worked through the states and not the federal government," explains Mosley.
Mosley continues, "So the states would administer the bill, and that was fatal because remember ... this is 1944. So not only do we have Jim Crow laws in effect: our separate but unequal systems. But we also had legal segregation, which was Jim Crow. But then we just had flat-out discrimination at that time. And so it made it very difficult for those 1.2 million Black veterans, who most of them did reside in the South, to be able to take advantage of this."
Often, Black veterans were discouraged from applying for the GI Bill and were attacked by racist bystanders with rocks while on their way to federal buildings. Postmasters would also not deliver mail containing necessary paperwork to Black veterans. The Jim Crow "separate but equal" laws impacted the quality of education Black veterans received at universities and trade schools. Black institutions were regularly not as well staffed, trained or equipped to educate their students compared to their white counterparts, with fully equipped supplies.
Housing options were also unequal for Black veterans, with valuable homes restricted in the South and redlining forcing Black veterans into depreciating areas in the North. "So, the value of that house was just gonna keep decreasing year after year after year, which is the opposite of why the GI Bill was put into place — so that you would generate generational wealth and not actually lose money," says Mosley. "That's systemic ... Because it started or increased that wealth gap between whites and Blacks, and that wealth gap still exists today."
House Democrats have proposed recent variations of bills to amend some of these actions, called the GI Restoration Act, that would award $180,000 to each veteran. The bill was initially proposed in 2021 failed but was reintroduced in March of this year. But in that time span, many eligible veterans have died. The bill's latest iteration would allow direct descendants of the veterans to receive the money.
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