Black soldiers at Normandy: The Forgotten Ones
On War, Racism and American Exceptionalism
Almost everything Americans know about the history of US wars is what they learn from the movies and media cheer leaders who serve up heroic stories designed to promote patriotism in the populace. Hence it is in the nature of things that the average citizen’s views on this question are shaped far more by propaganda – which attempts to selectively arrange the facts to show America in a positive light – than the work of historians who are committed to showing the good, the bad and the ugly. Hence it is no accident that World War II films are dominating the movie schedules on television.
This was the last war in which the US won a clear victory and the objectives were understood by the majority of Americans – albiet the Rusians played a more decisive role in the Nazi defeat and paid a far greater price: 20 million dead! The wars that followed were based on ambiguous objectives and the outcomes were unclear. We are still officially at war in Korea over a half century after the fighting stopped. Vietnam was by any measure a disaster. And while Operation Desert Storm, directed by Colin Powell, was successful in its objectives it was not a full scaled war like Iraq and Afghanistan, and we seemed destined to leave these lands much as we left Vietnam.
It is no wonder that the nation concentrates so heavily on World War II in our search for serviceable war memories. In the war against the racist genocidal Nazi’s there is no ambiguity about who the good guys were; the same is true of the Japanese fanatics and the Italian Fascist. This contrast is most clear in the minds of the rah-rah America crowd, the American Exceptionalists, who argue that the US is the polar opposite of Nazi Germany in every respect.
However the facts are quite different. Hitler got his basic racial theories from the American Eugenics movement, specifically the writings of Madison Grant in his 1917 tome “The Passing of the Great Race.” In his book, “Defending the Master Race,” historian Jonathan Spiro tells us: “Grant was also the leader of the eugenics movement in the United States. He popularized the infamous notions that the blond-haired, blue-eyed Nordics were the “master race” and that the state should eliminate members of inferior races who were of no value to the community. Grant’s behind-the-scenes machinations convinced Congress to enact the immigration restriction legislation of the 1920s, and his influence led many states to ban interracial marriage and sterilize thousands of ‘unworthy citizens.’”
Madison Grant
Hitler’s Tutor
It is no wonder that a letter from Hitler turned up in Grant’ papers, where Der Fhurer gushes: “Your book is my bible!” The Nazi racial laws, as well as their ideas about sterilization and euthanasia were made in America! Ironically, white Americans were discriminating against its own Afro-American soldiers under “master race” dogma while fighting against such ideas in Germany – even forcing black soldiers guarding German prisoners of war to do their toilet in the bushes, while allowing their white German enemies to use the same bathrooms as them. Black soldiers sent for training in the South couldn’t use their army issued meal tickets to have a meal, they were refused while in uniform while fascist POW’s from the German and Italian armies were readily served. Black soldiers who protested this racist treatment were jailed and sometimes lynched -which means murder by public crucifixtion.
The late Afro-American historian John Hope Franklin personally witnessed this discrimination against black soldiers in North Carolina. He recalls a humiliating incident in his autobiography, where he was packed into an overcrowded segregated train car with black soldiers, while German prisoners rode in comfort in a “Whites Only” car while pointing at them and laughing at the absurdity of their predicament.
There are many such instances of white Americans favoring German Prisoners of war over black American soldiers detailed in the 2004 book “Icons of Insult: German and Italian Prisoners of War in African American Letters during World War II, by the German scholar Matthias Reiss. Added to these humiliations the US government often dishonored the service of Afro-American soldiers by refusing to acknowlege indisputable acts of heroism.
The treatment of the now famous “Tuskeegee Airman” is a national disgrace. The all black fighter pilots of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, commanded by Colonel Benjamin Davis Jr., whose father was an army General, NEVER lost a single bomber on missions over Nazi Germany; where they repeated engaged and defeated the crack fighter pilots of German air force. American Exceptionalism indeed!
As a Black American veteran who comes from a long line of family members who served honorably in the US military, I am especially offended by the attempt to cover up the nation’s betrayal of these black soldiers. My grandfather, Walter “Big Nang” Bellamy,lies buried in a gleaming white grave in the beautifully manicured lawn of the National Cemetary beside the seawall on the bank of the Matanzas Bay. His tombstone reads “Master Sargent Walter Bellamy.
I believe if his skin were white he would have been a General: he certainly had all the right stuff! Uncle Jimmy, who was a generation behind grandad, who fought in World War I, went into the army during World War II. He went in as a private but after he got a good look at the white officers decided while still in basic training that he was going to become an officer. He took the examination, scored very high, and did indeed become an officer. He was assigned to serve with an Australian unit and became perhaps the first black combat officer in the pacific theater of operations. At the wars end he was honorably discharged as a captian with BATTLE DECORATIONS!
My uncles Buddy and Bill served as drivers of big trucks ferrying weapons and ammunition through the Alps, often driving at night with no lights to avoid detection. Uncle Walter served with the black armoured division that served with General George Patton in the Italian campaign. My cousin Charles served in Vietnam and is still suffering from the affects of that misbegotten American War.
I served in the United States Strategic Air Command, on a nuclear strike base whose mission was the nuclear destruction of Russia. And although I escaped the fate of several of my schoolmates who were killed or injured in Vietnam, my experience in SAC left me with the uncomfortable knowlege that the world can be destroyed in a hour should there ever be a nuclear war between the US and Russia.
Like few other Americans, I understood how close we came to nuclear catastrophe during the Cuban Missle Crisis of 1962. Those who still don’t recognise that the human species barely escaped anhilation in that US/Russian confrontation should see, “The Fog of War,” a documentary film by Robert McNamara, who was US Secretary of Defense at the time.
When I was in SAC there were black men all throughout the ranks, including bomber pilots. Yet you never see them portrayed in films about SAC, and few Americans know that at the height of the Cold War in the mid-twentieth an Afro-American Four Star air-force General, Daniel “Chappie” James, a former “Tuskegee Airman” was the Commander of NORAD – North American Air Defense Command – had the power to launch a nuclear attack on Russia WITHOUT consulting the President if a certain scenario developed! Hence it is impossible for any objective observer viewing American Memorial Day Ceremonies, in light of these ignored facts, not to conclude that they are far more propaganda than history!
Firing Artillery at Japanese Troops
Black men fought in the Atlantic and the Pacific Theaters
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Playthell G. Benjamin
Harlem, New York
May 29, 2012
My Life Among the Chattering Classes
Posted in Cultural Matters with tags Black Panther Party., Dr. Muhammad Ahmed, Joe Rainey, Malcolm X, Max Stanford, Opportunities Industrialization Centers, Playthell's Commentary on Radio, Queen Mother, Rev Leon Sullivan, WBAI Radio, WDAS Philadelphia on May 27, 2012 by playthellOn WBAI FM, Live and Direct from New York City
Why I love the Radio
On May 25, 1962, my 20th birthday, I made my debut in the wonderful world of radio. It was a live broadcast over WDAS AM in Philadelphia. I presented an hour long lecture on African history, “Was Ancient Egypt an African Civilization,” analyzing the evidence that they were black and the African character of Egyptian religion and Divine Kingship. At the conclusion of my lecture the producer opened the phones and I took questions for two hours. The response was sensational and I presented a series of history lectures twice a week for four years. My life has never been the same.
The show was called “The Listening Post,” and was hosted by Mr. Joseph H. Rainey. Judge Rainey, as he was known through-out the city, was a retired Magistrate in the Civil Court, a political player in the Democratic machine, which allocated power and privilege in the city, and a militant advocate for Afro-American rights. Judge Rainey was the grandson of Congressman Joseph H. Rainey, the first Congressman seated from the defeated confederate state of South Carolina after the Civil War.
The Black Radical Republicans
Joseph H. Rainey is seated second on the right
Judge Rainey had deep roots in the Afro-American elite, but the militant fighting “Talented Tenth,”who answered the call of Dr. DuBois to assume the leadership of the black community, and guide the masses to higher ground. One of the benefits of my association with Mr. Rainey on “The Listening Post,” was that it was the show all the smart progressive Afro-Americans listened to in Philly, Southern New Jersey and Nothern Delaware. It also had a smaller white audience composed of leftist intellectuals and civil rights activist. The Listening Post would have been right at home on WBAI.
My involvement with the show transformed my life; it was a gift that keeps on giving. Among the highlights of my participation on the show was the fact that Judge Rainey was good friends with Malcolm X. And whenever Malcolm spoke in Philadelphia, Wilmington Delaware or Camden New Jersey, he came on the show the day before his speech.
Hence I got to know Malcolm quite well, and had a bird’s eye seat during the last three years of his life as he went through radical changes and ultimately assassination. I was there for the broadcast that Dr. Manning Marable describes in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography: Malcolm X, A Life of Reinventions.
Judge Joe Rainey Interviewing the Great Jackie Robinson
The “Listening Post” was a pioneer in Progressive Talk Radio
But it was also on The Listening Post that I met Queen Mother Moore, an indefatigable freedom fighter whose resume included a stint with Marcus Garvey and the American Communist Party. A New Orleans Creole who had settled in Philadelphia, she was 65 when I met her and she took me under her wings just days after my birthday broadcast, and tutored me in the art and science of politics and mass struggle.
The Queen Mother aka Audley Moore was one of the great women of the 20th century, and she left an indelible mark on me. I also met the Reverend Dr. Leon Sullivan, “The Lion of Zion,” who was to become one of the most powerful men in America by the end of the turbulent 1960’s.
Queen Mother Moore
My first political Tutor
The Lion of Zion!
A visionary and servant of the people
Suffice it to say that Reverend Sullivan hired me to teach a course on black history in the basement of his church, Mount Zion Baptist. Me and Max Stanford would organize the Revolutionary Action Movement from that class. And it was RAM cadres who went on to organize the black Panther Party of Oakland. Bobby Seales and Huey Newton were students at Merritt Junior College, where one of our Cadres’ got a job teaching sociology, and they were his first recruits. Bobby refers to his teacher and revolutionary tutor as “Kenny Freeman,” but that was his “slave name,” we knew him as Mamadou Dia.
When the War on Poverty began Reverend Sullivan founded The Opportunities Industrialization Centers, which began in Philadelphia and spread to over 100 cities. He hired me to teach in the main center in Philadelphia, “The Proto-type,” and develop a black history curriculum for the national program. A couple of years later the Philadelphia Board of Education hired me as a consultant to work with cirriculum specialist and conduct seminars with history teachers in the school system, preparing them to teach African and Afro-American history. This was around 1966.
Other school boards around the country also began to hire me to conduct seminars or present a lecture series on the subject ranging from witchata Kansas, Minneapolis and Saint Paul Minesota, and Riverside California. By 1969 I was a founding member of the WEB DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies at U-Mass Amherst, the first degree granting Black Studies in the World. That’s what my first foray into radio did for me.
When I left the university and moved to New York, after a stint in the music, boxing and construction business I returned to radio at WBAI around 1986. That’s when I began the series “Commentaries On The Times.” This brought me to the attention of Terry Johnson, the City Desk Editor at the Village Voice, who invited me to write for the paper. The second article I wrote was an 8000 word feature that was publshed as the cover story in 1988 titled “Jive at Five: How Big Al and the Bully Boys Bogarted the Movement.”
It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism. ( see the nominating letter in my bio on this blog) This article brought me to the attention of the Senior Editor of the Manchester Guardian in England who commissioned me to write a feature for the Guardian. Thius began an association that lasted several years, in which I wrote for the front and the back of the paper – politics, the arts, and boxing.
When the Arts Editor, Joslyn Targett, became the Editor of the prestigeous Sunday Times magazine “The Culture,” he invited me to come along for the ride. I was given carte blanche to write as much as I wanted to. When two of my feature stories from the Village voice were selected for study at the Columbia School of Journalism, the top of the food chain for training professional journalists, I was recruited to write by the New York Daily News.
From there I was recruited to write commentary and features for “Emerge” magazine, a nationals Afro-American hard news publication. I was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary at the News, and I was nominated for Foriegn Correspondent of the Year several times. And I won awards at ever othere one of the publications I wrote for. And eventually I held an Adjunct Professorship in Journalism at Long Island University.
All of this grew out of my work at WBAI FM in New York, where I would also host two different talk shows. Radio has been as good to me as baseball was to Chico Consuello! That’s why I’m still droppin science on the radio 50 years after my first broadcast on the Joe Rainey show on May 25th 1962.
Double Click on the link to see Playthell Live on Air at WBAI
http://youtu.be/pnpR9p7Sl1U
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Playthell Benjamin
Harlem, New York
May 25th, 1942