White progressives’ racial myopia: Why their colorblindness fails minorities — and the left

[gollygee]

8. .

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/when-affirmative-action-was-white-uncivil-rights.html

Katznelson reserves his harshest criticism for the unfair application of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights, a series of programs that poured $95 billion into expanding opportunity for soldiers returning from World War II. Over all, the G.I. Bill was a dramatic success, helping 16 million veterans attend college, receive job training, start businesses and purchase their first homes. Half a century later, President Clinton praised the G.I. Bill as "the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam," and said it "helped to unleash a prosperity never before known."

But Katznelson demonstrates that African-American veterans received significantly less help from the G.I. Bill than their white counterparts. "Written under Southern auspices," he reports, "the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow." He cites one 1940's study that concluded it was "as though the G.I. Bill had been earmarked 'For White Veterans Only.' " Southern Congressional leaders made certain that the programs were directed not by Washington but by local white officials, businessmen, bankers and college administrators who would honor past practices. As a result, thousands of black veterans in the South -- and the North as well -- were denied housing and business loans, as well as admission to whites-only colleges and universities. They were also excluded from job-training programs for careers in promising new fields like radio and electrical work, commercial photography and mechanics. Instead, most African-Americans were channeled toward traditional, low-paying "black jobs" and small black colleges, which were pitifully underfinanced and ill equipped to meet the needs of a surging enrollment of returning soldiers.

The statistics on disparate treatment are staggering. By October 1946, 6,500 former soldiers had been placed in nonfarm jobs by the employment service in Mississippi; 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones by blacks. In New York and northern New Jersey, "fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G.I. Bill supported home purchases by nonwhites." Discrimination continued as well in elite Northern colleges. The University of Pennsylvania, along with Columbia the least discriminatory of the Ivy League colleges, enrolled only 46 black students in its student body of 9,000 in 1946. The traditional black colleges did not have places for an estimated 70,000 black veterans in 1947. At the same time, white universities were doubling their enrollments and prospering with the infusion of public and private funds, and of students with their G.I. benefits.

http://www.nber.org/digest/dec02/w9044.html

The G.I. Bill, World War II, and the Education of Black Americans
"...For those black veterans more likely to be limited to the South in their collegiate choices, the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites."

The unprecedented support for the education of returning World War II veterans provided by the G.I. Bill was notably race-neutral in its statutory terms. More than 1 million black men had served in the military during World War II and these men shared in eligibility for educational benefits, which included tuition payments and a stipend for up to four years of college or other training. Yet, the effects of military service and the availability of educational benefits may have differed by race and geography as black men from the South returned to segregated systems of higher education, with relatively limited opportunities at historically black institutions.

In Closing the Gap or Widening the Divide: The Effects of the G.I. Bill and World War II on the Educational Outcomes of Black Americans (NBER Working Paper No. 9044), authors Sarah Turner and John Bound conclude that the G.I. Bill had a markedly different effect on educational attainment for black and white veterans after the war. While the introduction of generous student aid through the G.I. Bill held the promise of significantly reducing black-white gaps in educational opportunity and long-run economic outcomes, the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites among men from the South.

For white men, the combination of World War II service and G. I. benefits had substantial positive effects on collegiate attainment, with a gain of about 0.3 years of college and an increase in college completion of about 5 percentage points. For black men, however, the results were decidedly different for those born in the southern states versus those born elsewhere. The combination of World War II service and the availability of G.I. benefits led to an increase in educational attainment of about 0.4 years of college for black men born outside the South, while there were few gains in collegiate attainment among black men from the South.

Limited collegiate opportunities for blacks from the South decreased the effect of the G.I. Bill for this group and help to explain why this group did not share the same gains in collegiate attainment as whites and blacks in the North. At the conclusion of World War II, blacks wanting to attend college in the South were restricted in their choices to about 100 public and private institutions. Few of the post-secondary institutions for blacks offered education beyond the baccalaureate and more than a quarter of these institutions were junior colleges, with the highest degree below the B.A. Small in scale and lagging in resources per student, the historically black colleges in the South were ill-prepared to accommodate the rise in demand from returning veterans. What is more, access to information about veterans' benefits and advising services may have differed with racial groups, and the lack of black counselors was particularly marked in the deep South, with only about a dozen black counselors for all of Georgia and Alabama and none in Mississippi. While the G.I. Bill also covered non-collegiate vocational and technical training, the authors find that among black veterans born in the South vocational and technical training was not a substitute for collegiate participation.

The authors conclude that the availability of benefits to black veterans had a substantial and positive impact on their educational attainment outside the South. However, for those black veterans more likely to be limited to the South in their collegiate choices, the G.I. Bill exacerbated rather than narrowed the economic and educational differences between blacks and whites.

http://www.demos.org/blog/11/11/13/how-gi-bill-left-out-african-americans

Research shows there are all sorts of positive outcomes associated with households owning assets. And for that reason, the huge racial wealth gap in America should be deeply alarming -- especially given how that gap has actually grown in the past five years due to an epidemic of foreclosures in communities of color, many of which were systematically targeted by predatory lenders, including respected banks like Wells Fargo.

There are lots of reasons that whites have so much more wealth than nonwhites. How the GI Bill played out is one of those reasons. Whites were able to use the government guaranteed housing loans that were a pillar of the bill to buy homes in the fast growing suburbs. Those homes subsequently rose greatly in value in coming decades, creating vast new household wealth for whites during the postwar era.


This was after a very quick google search and is just the first few hits.

Edit - adding one more! http://www.timwise.org/2000/07/bill-of-whites-historical-memory-through-the-racial-looking-glass/

For blacks returning from military service, discrimination in employment was still allowed to trump their “right” to utilize GI Bill benefits. An upsurge of racist violence against black workers after the war, when labor markets began to tighten again, prevented African-American soldiers from taking advantage of this supposedly universal program for re-adjustment to civilian life. And although 43 percent of returning black soldiers expressed a desire to enroll in school, their ability to do so was severely hampered by ongoing segregation in higher education: none of which the GI Bill did anything to reverse or prohibit. Especially in the South, where segregation was most severe, opportunities for blacks to take advantage of the educational component of the bill were harshly curtailed. Largely restricted to historically black colleges and universities with limited openings for enrollment, nearly as many black veterans were blocked from college access as gained access.

And finally, during World War II in particular, black soldiers often served under openly racist white officers, many of whom issued undeserved dishonorable discharges to blacks in uniform, thereby denying them the benefits of the GI Bill. Black soldiers, on average, received nearly twice the percentage of dishonorable discharges as white soldiers. And even those discharged honorably had to confront another formidable obstacle: the US Employment Service, responsible for job placements. As author and Professor Karen Brodkin has noted, the USES provided little assistance to black veterans, especially in the South, and most jobs they helped blacks find were in low-paying, menial positions. In San Francisco after the war, and even with the GI Bill to assist them, the employment status of Blacks dropped to half their pre-war status. In Arkansas, 95 percent of placements for African American vets were as unskilled labor.

So too, with the VA and FHA loan programs for housing, both of which utilized racially-restrictive underwriting criteria, thereby assuring that hardly any of the $120 billion in housing equity loaned from the late forties to the early sixties through the programs would go to families of color. These loans helped finance over half of all suburban housing construction in the country during this period, less than two percent of which ended up being lived in by non-whites.