The Rise and Fall of 'Free, White, and 21'

[Kind of Blue]

9. What gets me is that it's the government

military precisely that told Hollywood to stop it that had nothing to do with our plight, but because The African-American press had enjoyed pointing out that Adolf Hitler admired America’s discriminatory policies, and as the next great conflict got under way, there was a widespread effort to keep such evidence from view... Though it continued its segregated practice but needed to promote the pretense of integration to the world

And The African-American press, again, also used the saying to critique the contours of the privileges being asserted. Leftist critics at these papers saw the expression as another tool of capitalist oppression. “As the distance between the poor whites and the rich whites widens,” the Philadelphia Tribune noted in 1930, the former will have “nothing to look forward to in life save the dubious satisfaction of being free, white, and twenty-one,” a privilege that is “considerable when there is no other” but nonetheless serves primarily to keep them from growing “restive under exploitation.” ‘I’m free, white, and twenty-one.’ Such arrogant assumptions on the part of a minority in world status is bound to bring reprisals, and Russia has seized upon this weakness in our democracy to exploit it.”