Civil Rights Act of 1964 Revisited 'Part of this nation': Black WWII veterans central to country's change movement

Feb. 16—JOHNSTOWN, Pa. — Cleveland Floyd Jr. and Willie Palmore were among the more than 1 million Black Americans who served during World War II, risking their lives to defend a country that still had many laws and societal norms in place designed to treat them as second-class citizens.

Over the years, they were also part of a generation that changed the perception of race relations in the nation, which eventually led to the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that marks its 60th anniversary this year.

Palmore spent time in the Pacific Theater as an Army parachute rigger and also helped construct airfields. After the conflict, he bought some land to farm in Alabama, but soon migrated to Johnstown.

Floyd, also a member of the Army, landed in Europe less than a week after D-Day in 1944, joined the Red Ball Express, a well-known truck convoy consisting of mostly Black soldiers, and eventually returned home to Johnstown following his time in the military.

After their military service, both worked in the local steel mills for many years.

And they saw how poorly fellow Black veterans were treated, particularly in the South.

"The generation that went off to World War II and came back, that had to sit on the back of the bus and had to drink out of different water fountains, when they came back, needless to say they were not happy with the way they were received, which spurred the civil rights era of the late '50s, and the '60s, and onto the '70s and even today," said Floyd's son, the Rev. Reginald Floyd, an Army veteran and former Johnstown Police Department officer.

Palmore's grandson, Army Lt. Col. Bruce Jordan, said that generation of Black men who served in WWII and helped forward the civil rights movement "endured all that to watch the progression of a nation."

"I applaud that 'Greatest Generation' for not only standing up for the things that they stood up for, but encouraging us not to turn our back on the nation," Jordan said, "not to use that bitterness as a crutch, but to use that bitterness to say that, 'We are part of this nation. We demand to be respected' and 'We will continue to go shoulder-to-shoulder, arm-in-arm to make this the greatest nation on the planet.' "

'A segregated army'

African-Americans served side-by-side with other Black military personnel, such as with the Tuskegee Airmen, but rarely with whites.

"One of the things that we tend to forget in the historiography of the world is that we go to fight fascism and racism against the Axis countries with a segregated army," National WWII Museum senior historian John Curatola said. "There's kind of an irony there that we're doing this."

Curatola said their experiences abroad revealed a new perspective regarding race relations.

"What's important to realize is that many of these men who go overseas, for example in Europe, in the UK (United Kingdom), they didn't experience that same kind of racism with these foreign populations, specifically like in the UK," Curatola said. "And so they're overseas, they may be treated as second-class citizens by fellow Americans, but yet locals in Europe and in Asia don't treat them as such.

"And so what you have for many of these individuals is kind of an epiphany, 'Hey, wait a minute, I am not a lesser human being. I just lived in various parts of the globe where the color of my skin had no real standing.' It's cathartic for many of these men."

At the same time, The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Black newspaper, and other organizations, championed the Double V Campaign, calling for victory over enemies abroad in the war and victory for the rights of African-Americans at home.

The movement was sparked by a letter — headlined "Should I Sacrifice to live 'Half American?'" — written by 26-year-old James Gratz Thompson, from Wichita, Kansas, that appeared in the Courier in January 1942, shortly after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

"The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery and tyranny," Thompson wrote. "If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict then let we colored Americans adopt the double VV for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetrate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces."

Thompson eventually joined the Army and served in the India-Burma Theater.

Those demands for equality continued after the war.

"When I was a young child, I would hear the old guys talking and they would say, 'We went over and we fought for our country. We fought for other people to be free, and we're going to be free here also,' " Floyd said. "I think that's where that spirit of the civil rights movement got a little bit of its strength, kind of picked up speed a little bit from those people that served from the 'Greatest Generation.' "

Floyd emphasized: "They could not just come back to the nation and have business as usual."

Historic events that transformed race relations occurred in rapid succession from 1945 to 1963.

Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier. President Harry Truman ended segregation in the Armed Services. The Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruling determined segregated schools to be unconstitutional. Emmett Till's mother insisted on a public open-casket funeral for her 14-year-old son to show the horrors of lynching. Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. Federal troops escorted the Little Rock Nine to school. A sit-in occurred at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Freedom Rides took place across the South. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Klansmen bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

Then President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

And men like Floyd and Palmore quietly lived productive lives in which they raised families and supported their communities.

"As we grow as a nation and we continue to transform as a nation through all of our good, our bad and unfortunately our ugly," Jordan said, "we continue to recognize that those folks' sacrifices throughout history and throughout those years have propelled us to the position that we're in.

"If not for them, I am not a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. If not for them, I rest assured that my brother, Rev. Floyd, does not get the opportunity to not only serve his nation, but to also serve his community as a law enforcement officer and do all the other great things that he does in the community. Those sacrifices came at a painful cost, because we're also talking about a group of individuals who came home and watched their enemy get treated better than they got treated."