African Americans have less cause to feel grateful for the G.I. Bill. That’s because the bill was drafted by Representative John Rankin, a segregationist white Democrat from Mississippi and chairman of the House Veterans Committee, to minimize the availability of benefits to the 1.2 million Black soldiers who fought in World War II. This was achieved by administering benefits at the state level. The worst abuses, of course, were in the South, where 79 percent of all Black veterans lived; in some Southern states, a group representing Black veterans said in 1947, postmasters wouldn’t even deliver to Black households the applications necessary to receive terminal leave pay for wartime service.
But of course the G.I. Bill’s effectiveness was hampered in the North too through discriminatory admissions policies by colleges and through redlining by banks. In New York and New Jersey, 67,000 mortgages were insured through the G.I. Bill. Of those, fewer than 100 went to nonwhites. Levittown, the most famous postwar suburban development, explicitly excluded Blacks. As one Levittown lease stated, “The tenant agrees not to permit the premises to be used or occupied by any other persons than members of the Caucasian race.”
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in an excellent new report titled “Advancing a People-First Economy,” suggests we do something about this. The report proposes
extending to surviving Black World War II veterans and their direct descendants the housing and education benefits denied under the 1944 G.I. Bill. Veterans and their descendants could get access to the VA Loan Guaranty Program, as well as post-9/11 G.I. Bill educational assistance provisions, which grant financial assistance for school and job training. This recommendation is consistent with how veterans’ benefits are commonly extended today (that is, to veterans and their descendants).
According to a December 2022 paper from the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity at Brandeis, the long-term effects of the G.I. Bill’s unequal granting of benefits were profound. Black and white World War II veterans alike benefited financially from their service when compared to nonveterans, of course, but there were dramatic racial disparities. The cash value of benefits received by Black veterans was somewhere between 40 to 70 percent of the cash value of benefits received by white veterans. Descendants of Black World War II veterans, the Brandeis study calculated, received a long-term financial benefit of $23,847. That’s less than half the long-term financial benefit received by descendants of white World War II veterans ($59,638).