When "Black Blood" wasn't good enough for dying White Troops [View all]
In December 1941, a few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the US entry into World War II, a Detroit mother named Sylvia Tucker visited her local Red Cross donor center to give blood.
Having heard the “soul-stirring” appeals for blood donors on her radio, she was determined to do her part. But when she arrived at the center, the supervisor turned her away. “Orders from the National Offices,” he explained, “barred Negro blood donors at this time.”
“Shocked” and “grieved,” Tucker left in tears, later penning a letter of protest about the whole ordeal to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Today, this discriminatory blood program and African Americans’ determined opposition to it are long forgotten, despite the fact that a few scholars, including Spencie Love, Susan E. Lederer, Sarah E. Chinn and myself, have explored the topic.
This history is worth remembering. It provides an antidote to facile, feel-good stories about the “Good War,” stories that scholars such as Michael C.C. Adams and Kenneth D. Rose have long refuted but that live on in museum exhibits, blockbuster films, best-selling books and war memorials.
The story of how blood got desegregated also reminds Americans that, as novelist Ralph Ellison wrote nearly a half-century ago, “The black American … puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals.”
http://extragoodshit.phlap.net/index.php/desegregating-blood-a-civil-rights-struggle-to-remember/#more-447773
Footnote: Two of my uncles who served in WWII hated the Red Cross and refused to give a penny to them after the war.
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