When black soldiers returned home from the war, did segregation and prejudice not allow me to use my G.I. bill to the fullest? Was I able to attend integrated colleges in the North? What about housing? Was I confined to black sector neighborhoods, or did serving my country, help break some racial barriers?
In regards to the G.I. Bill, the Bill itself was colorblind.
But Black veterans returning home returned to find hatred and racism still entrenched in their communities. Fred Jerome writes "The enemy appeared simply to have changed uniforms: it now wore sheets or sheriff’s badges—or both. In the first fifteen months after Hitler’s defeat, a wave of antiblack terror, mostly but not only in the southern states, killed fifty‐six African Americans, with returning veterans the most frequent victims."^1 Another case would be the murder of Sgt. Isaac Woodward of Georgia, one of the more prominent cases, Sgt. Woodward challenged a Greyhound bus driver in North Carolina and was subsequently beaten so bad he was blinded in both eyes. It was this case that would spur Truman to push to desegregate the Armed Forces.
One thing that World War II did was remotivate the flagging Civil Rights Movement of the 1940's. Many members of the NAACP, SCLC and SNCC were veterans of World War II and Korea. In effect, the GI Bill allowed for such things as going to college to happen, but colleges remained segregated till the 1950s and 1960s. Segregated housing wasn't outlawed till 1964 and barriers wouldn't be broken until the large scale Civil Rights Movement was really underway.
In regards to the North, the situation remained the same as well. There were still segregated neighborhoods, segregated hospitals and segregated colleges until The Movement worked to integrate them, sometimes at a slower pace than the South. There are School Strikes in New York in 1968, the Poor Peoples Movement, The extremely violent bus battles in Boston (producing this horrifying image and the birthplace of the Black Panthers and other Radical African-American Civil Rights groups. The Myth of a non-racist North is exactly that, a Myth.
For a look at the Civil Rights Movement in the North you should look at Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North by Thomas J. Sugrue and The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson
