Justice

How Discrimination Against Black Veterans Helped Shape Urban America

A new report from the Equal Justice Initiative reminds us how racial violence and exclusion paved the way for today’s polarized America.
Major L. Anderson, an original Tuskegee Airman, displays his Congressional Gold Medal in 2013. Black servicemen were often targets of discrimination and violence on their return home from wartime. Jacquelyn Martin/AP

A new report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Alabama-based civil rights organization, reminds us that any progress toward racial equality in the U.S. is often short-lived, and few understand this better than black veterans. These were and are African Americans who laid their lives on the line to protect democracy and defend freedom. They expected the rewards of full inclusion, acceptance, and citizenship for their sacrifices, but instead came home to continued humiliation, discrimination, incarceration, and death. Black veterans were primary targets of racialized violence often because of their participation in the U.S. military: “It was risky for a black serviceman to wear his uniform, which many whites interpreted as an act of defiance,” reads the EJI report “Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans.”

The document is an extension of the work EJI founder Bryan Stevenson has been doing to raise awareness about the role of racial terrorization in forming America’s social and geographic landscapes. Anti-black lynchings and mob violence were defining features of America’s development from the years immediately after Reconstruction began until well after the mid-20 century. The new report spells out through numerous accounts how black veterans caught the brunt of that, in part because of the animus white politicians and military officers bore toward black soldiers.