Mixed Race Studies

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  • GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

    GIs and Fräuleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany

    University of North Carolina Press
    December 2001
    360 pages
    6.125 x 9.25, 13 photos, 1 map, notes, bibl., index
    Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-5375-7

    Maria Höhn, Professor of History
    Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

    With the outbreak of the Korean War, the poor, rural West German state of Rhineland-Palatinate became home to some of the largest American military installations outside the United States. In GIs and Frauleins, Maria Hohn offers a rich social history of this German-American encounter and provides new insights into how West Germans negotiated their transition from National Socialism to a consumer democracy during the 1950s.

    Focusing on the conservative reaction to the American military presence, Hohn shows that Germany’s Christian Democrats, though eager to be allied politically and militarily with the United States, were appalled by the apparent Americanization of daily life and the decline in morality that accompanied the troops to the provinces. Conservatives condemned the jazz clubs and striptease parlors that Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe opened to cater to the troops, and they expressed scorn toward the German women who eagerly pursued white and black American GIs. While most Germans rejected the conservative effort to punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs, they vilified the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. Hohn demonstrates that German anxieties over widespread Americanization were always debates about proper gender norms and racial boundaries, and that while the American military brought democracy with them to Germany, it also brought Jim Crow.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Abbreviations
    • Introduction
    • 1 “… And Then the Americans Came Again”
    • 2 Living with the New Neighbors
    • 3 When Jim Crow Came to the German Heimat
    • 4 Heimat in Turmoil
    • 5 Controlling the “Veronikas” and “Soldiers’ Brides”
    • 6 Keeping America at Bay
    • 7 Punishing the “Veronikas”
    • 8 The Kaiserslautern Steinstrasse Affair
    • Conclusion
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

    Introduction

    In October 1952, the German Bundestag declared a large stretch of Rhineland-Palatinate—a poor, rural state in the southwest of Germany—to be a moral disaster area.  The legislators resorted to this dramatic step because the buildup of American military personnel in West Germany in the wake of the Korean War had allegedly wrecked havoc in the provinces. The American troop deployment, they complained, instead of creating a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, had brought striptease parlors, prostitution, common-law marriages, and unprecedented levels of illegitimacy. The Christian Democratic legislators, who dominated the debate, were equally distressed to report that in one small town alone, 343 German women were neglecting their children because they were in the employ of the American occupation power. The counties of Birkenfeld and Kaiserslautern, home to the garrison communities Baumholder and Kaiserslautern, were identified as the key trouble spots. Convinced that the American-induced economic boom had rendered the rural population oblivious to the moral emergency, the conservative Christian Democrats demanded federal intervention. With great dismay, the Bundestag resolved that West Germany’s military rearmament underway in Rhineland-Palatinate needed to be accompanied by a moral rearmament of the state’s population.

    Discovering this anxious Bundestag debate during the preliminary stages of my research significantly changed the direction of this book. When I first began my project on the American military in Rhineland-Palatinate, I set out to explore how West Germans had negotiated their transition from Nazism into consumer democracy during the 1950s. I had chosen my topic because I speculated that the extensive presence of American military personnel and their injection of the “American way of life” would produce a rich collection of sources to comment on those crucial founding years of the Federal Republic. My exploration of the German-American encounter was to provide insights into how economic, social, and cultural changes after 1945 played out in the everyday life of people. How did Germans, after the experience of Nazism, manage to establish a successful democracy in West Germany? Moreover, I hoped that the German-American encounter would reveal how Germans assessed the transformations in their lives. Would they agree with those historians who dismiss “Americanization” as an explanatory model by insisting that the transformation of German society after 1945 was part of a larger process of modernization that had been long underway and was merely disrupted by World War II and the postwar suffering? What would Germans living in close proximity to the American military bases have to say to the Westernization scholars who do not ignore America’s impact on postwar Germany but nonetheless stress that the Bonn Republic succeeded because West Germany’s political and cultural élites abandoned their resistance to the “Western” liberal tradition?…

    …By exploring local reactions to the conservative project, I show that the moral rearmament of German society is only one aspect, albeit an important one, of the 1950s. By the second part of the decade, conservative observers in Rhineland-Palatinate provided exasperated accounts of their failure to keep the population from eagerly embracing the prosperity and social mobility that the American-induced economic boom entailed. Their accounts also bemoan the fact that the strict morality that the deeply conservative Christian Democratic state and federal governments were trying to enforce through the Christian welfare agencies, the police, and the courts did not play well in the provinces. Most Germans were unwilling to return to the rigid pre-Weimar sexual norms that conservatives wanted to reimpose. The unprecedented prosperity of the Korea Boom convinced all too many that the era of deprivation and self-sacrifice was over; indeed, the time had come to “live for once.” In light of their experience with Nazism, many Germans also found the conservative program intrusive and inappropriate for the new democracy. Consequently, the population rejected the conservative effort to stigmatize and punish as prostitutes all women who associated with American GIs. Notwithstanding the concerted efforts of the chruches and of state and federal ministries, even in the deepest provinces, attitudes toward premarital sexuality and women’s sexual expressiveness outside of marriage relaxed considerably by the later part of the decade.

    However, this greater tolerance in sexual matters tells only part of the story. Germans negotiated this overall relaxation of sexual mores by vilifying as unacceptable the sexual relationships between African American men and German women. When Germans, in both East and West, read about the American garrison communities during the 1950s, the focus was increasingly on the “many” black GIs who met “sexually unrestrained” women in the bars that Eastern European Jews made available to them. The prostitution records of Baumholder and the press coverage of the garrison communities reveal that attitudes toward such relationships hardened considerably, especially after Germany regained sovereignty in 1955.

    Historians of postwar Germany have only recently begun to explore how racial hierarchies continued to inform notions of German identity. Exciting new scholarship on German reactions to American popular culture and German policies toward the children born of German mothers and African American fathers make important contributions to the field. That scholarship also shows that it would be too simple to assume a straightforward continuity from Nazi racism to racial attitudes in the 1950s. A process of negotiation was at work as liberal policy makers, influenced by social science research in the United States, distanced themselves from the biologically based racial hierarchies of the past. While the language of eugenics disappeared, this did not mean that racial hierarchies ceased to matter. German policy makers, for example, drew on this psychologically based language of difference to condemn jazz and rock and roll for undermining proper class, race, and gender boundaries.

    My book contributes to this work by expanding the exploration of German racial attitudes beyond those of politicians and policy makers to include such debates at the grassroots level. The fact that millions of black GIs have spent time in Germany since 1945 makes it clear that German racial debates after 1945 did not take place in a vacuum. Because of the national attention the garrison communities received throughout the 1950s—not just in Germany’s tabloid press—these debates on race also did not remain just local affairs but engaged the country as a whole.

    We know from Heide Fehrenbach’s important work that during the late 1940s and the 1950s the German liberal discourse on race shifted from a preoccupation with Jews to an overwhelming concern with blacks. However, in the garrison towns, that shift is less manifest for a number of reasons. Most importantly, debates on race are not driven by the self-conscious efforts of national policy makers to overcome the shameful Nazi past. Just the same, despite the murderous rage of the Nazi regime, Jews were not “absent” from German communities or German consciousness during the 1950s. Germans in these communities encountered Eastern European Jews and American blacks simultaneously and on a daily basis. Consequently, German debates on race were marked by the coexistence of separate but also overlapping discourses on “racial others.”

    This study is also a first attempt to argue that German racial attitudes after 1945 can be understood only if they are examined in light of their face-to-face interaction with those of the American military. Black GIs, and not just those from the Jim Crow South, experienced in Germany a tolerance and acceptance unknown to them in their own country. Their status, first as conquerors and then as occupation soldiers, made possible unprecedented encounters with white Germans. In My American Journey, General Colin Powell gave voice to that experience when he recalled his service in Germany in 1958: “[For] black GIs, especially those out of the South, Germany was a breath of freedom—they could go where they wanted, eat where they wanted, and date whom they wanted, just like other people. The dollar was strong, the beer good, and the German people friendly, since we were all that stood between them and the Red hordes. War, at least the Cold War in Germany, was not hell.” Yet the record also shows that side-by-side with this tolerance existed a profound unease and often even resentment over the presence of black GIs. Nowhere were the limits of German racial tolerance more forcefully expressed than in the condemnation evoked by the relationships between black GIs and white German women.

    Observing the deep reluctance, if not outright opposition, in the American military toward the relationships between German women and black American soldiers convinced many Germans, and not just conservatives, that their own racial prejudices should not mark them as Nazis. Thus, when Germans during the 1950s condemned the relationships between German women and African American soldiers, they cited the model of racial segregation of their American mentor as informing their own convictions. Germans were able to do so with ease because American opposition to interracial sexuality and interracial marriage was so similar to their own pre-Nazi models of racial exclusion. Thus Germans could reject the racial excesses of Nazism while at the same time invoking racial hierarchies of exclusion that were based in timeless laws of nature and tied firmly to the Western liberal tradition…

    Read the entire Introduction here.

  • Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History

    Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History

    Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
    May 2009
    208 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-42939-3, ISBN10: 0-312-42939-8
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-374-28915-7, ISBN10: 0-374-28915-8

    Danzy Senna

    When Danzy Senna’s parents married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history: two beautiful young American writers from wildly divergent backgrounds—a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, the violent, traumatic split felt all the more tragic for the hopeful symbolism it had once borne.

    Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents’ divorce but at the histories that they had tried so hard to overcome. In the tradition of James McBride’s The Color of Water, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is “a stunningly rendered personal heritage that mirrors the complexities of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States” (Booklist).

  • Serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research…

    A number of serious problems with using race/ethnicity as a variable in genetics research have emerged in our analysis of our interviews with this group of genetic scientists. At the most basic level, the common racial/ethnic classifications they routinely use are of questionable value for delineating genetically related groups. The ubiquitous OMB categories in fact were designed for political and administrative purposes; they were not designed for use as scientific variables (Kertzer & Arel, 2002; Shields et al., 2005). These are notably ambiguous and arbitrary categories, based on strikingly diverse criteria such as skin color, language, or geographic location. They do not compose clear classifications, but instead are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. In the absence of clear principles for applying the labels, in practice, different aspects of an individual’s identity are arbitrarily prioritized, in order to fit individual cases into the schema.

    A serious conceptual problem that reinforces the use of these questionable categories is that many of the researchers presume racial admixture is relatively rare and recent, and that specific geographically defined groups, such as Finnish or Japanese, can unproblematically be equated with broad socially designated racial/ethnic groups, such as white or Asian. However, this logic relies on several unsubstantiated assumptions: that historically there were pure racial types associated with particular geographic locations; that migrations were sporadic and relatively rare; and that racial/ethnic groups are primarily endogamous. (A recent study of the views of genetics journals editors reports similar findings: Outram & Ellison, 2006.) These assumptions are contrary to much of what is known about human population history. Genetic isolation among humans is in fact quite rare: human populations have always exchanged mates across broad geographic areas throughout time, producing clinal variation (gradual variation between places), rather than clearly distinct genetic stocks. Furthermore, racial admixture is not an exceptional event; indeed, there has been significant intermarriage between socially designated groups throughout history (Weiss, 1998; Harry & Marks, 1999; Race Ethnicity and Genetics Working Group, 2005). Compounding these conceptual problems is the practical fact that assigning these labels to individuals is often done in the absence of any specific knowledge of their actual familial migration histories.

    Linda M. Hunt and Mary S. Megyesi, “The Ambiguous Meanings of the Racial/Ethnic Categories Routinely used in Human Genetics Research,” Social Science & Medicine, Volume 66, Number 2 (2008): 349-361. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2213883.

  • Monsieur de Saint-George “The American”

    Monsieur de Saint-George “The American”

    Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
    February 2005
    352 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
    ISBN: 978-0-312-31028-8, ISBN10: 0-312-31028-5

    Alain Guédé

    Translated by Gilda M. Roberts

    His life is the stuff of legend: born in 1739 of a slave mother and a French noble father, he became the finest swordsman of his age, an insider at the court of The Sun King, and, most of all, an accomplished musician who came to be known as the “Black Mozart.”

    His name is Joseph Bologne, though he was better known as Monsieur de Saint-George, and, because of his origins, “the American.” Alain Guédé recreates the story of this memorable individual, whose musical compositions are at long last being rediscovered and whose story will never again be forgotten.

  • The Blues in Black and White: A Collection of Essays, Poetry, and Conversations

    The Blues in Black and White: A Collection of Essays, Poetry, and Conversations

    Africa World Press, Inc.
    May 2003
    179 pages
    ISBN-10: 0865438900; ISBN-13: 978-0865438903

    May Ayim (1960-1996)

    Translated by Anne Adams, Professor Emeritus in the Africana Studies & Research Center
    Cornell University

    The ever-engaging work of the controversial activist/writer, May Ayim, covers a fascinating range of themes: biography, politics, love as well as the absurdities of everyday life. Her unique ability to passionately transform diverse subject matters into poetic language is revealed in this important collection of translated pieces. Her play with language is effective and at times transformative, as it expresses and exposes dangerous stereotypes and messages hidden in the everyday use of language and human behavior. Here, her readers will be surprised and frequently confronted with Ayim’s keen and powerful observations of the complexities of life and the compelling richness of humor and irony within them.

  • Talking About Brazil with Lilia Schwarcz

    Talking About Brazil with Lilia Schwarcz

    The New York Review of Books
    2010-08-17

    Robert Darnton, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History
    Harvard University

    On a recent trip to Brazil, I struck up a conversation with Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of Brazil’s finest historians and anthropologists. The talk turned to the two subjects she has studied most—racism and national identity.
     
    I first visited Brazil in 1989, when hyperinflation had nearly paralyzed the economy, favelas erupted in shoot-outs, and Lula, a hero of the union movement but still unsure of himself as a politician, was undertaking his first campaign for the presidency. I found it all fascinating and frightening. On my second trip, a few years later, I met Lilia and her husband, Luiz Schwarcz, who was beginning to build the company he had founded, Companhia das Letras, into one of the finest publishing houses in Latin America. They treated me to a day so packed with Braziliana that I remember it as one of the happiest experiences of my life: in the morning a stroll with their children through São Paulo’s main park, where families of all shades of color were picnicking and playing in dazzling sunlight; lunch, a tour of Brazilian specialties undreamt of in my culinary philosophy (but no pig’s ears or tails, it not being feijoada day); an international soccer match (Brazil beat Venezuela, and the stands exploded with joy); then countless caipirinhas and a cabaret-concert by Caetano Veloso at his most lyrical and politically provocative…

    Since then I have never stopped marveling at the energy and originality of Brazilian culture. But I don’t pretend to understand it, all the more so as it is constantly changing, and I can’t speak Portuguese. I can only ask questions in English and strain to grasp the answers. Has the myth of Brazil as a “sleeping giant” turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy? “He has awoken,” people say today. The economy is booming, health services expanding, literacy improving. There are also prophecies of doom, because Brazil’s economic history looks like cycles of boom and bust imposed on centuries of slavery and pauperization. Still, Lula is completing a second and final term as president. Whatever Brazilians may think of his newly assertive foreign policy, which includes cultivating friendly relations with Iran (most of them don’t seem to be interested in it), they generally agree that he has managed the economy well and has done a great deal to improve the lot of the poor. Lula’s term will end in October, and he has thrown his support behind Dilma Rousseff, his former chief of staff, whose chances of winning are much bolstered by Lula’s own popularity. The first debate of the new presidential campaign, which took place on August 5, was a dignified affair—an indication, I was told, that democracy is healthy and the days of military coups are over. Now foreigners are asking new questions about the character of this new great power. I directed some of the FAQs at Lilia…

    …RD: Yes, like many New Yorkers, I have moments of fear when I get off the subway at the wrong station or wander too far from 125th Street. But when I visit Brazil, I like to think I am in a country that is coping successfully with its history of racism. Could Brazil evolve into a multi-nuanced mestizo society like the one imagined by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre?
     
    LMS: Let me first ask you Bob, do you think of Obama as a “black President”? I am asking this question, because in Brazil the definition of color depends on the context, the moment and the temperament of the person who asks the question and responds to it.
     
    RD: Ask any American, ask Obama himself, the answer will certainly be that he is black. In the US, despite the many varieties of skin color, we do not have a multi-nuanced notion of race. You are black or you are white or you are something not closely linked to color such as Chinese, Hispanic.
     
    LMS: In Brazil, you are what you describe yourself to be. Officially we have five different colors—black, white, yellow, indigenous, and pardo (meaning “brown,” “brownish,” or “gray-brown”), but in reality, as research has demonstrated, we have more than 130 colors. Brazilians like to describe their spectrum of colors as a rainbow and we also think that color is a flexible way of categorizing people. For several years, I have been studying a soccer game called “Pretos X Brancos” (Blacks against whites), which takes place in a favela of São Paulo, called Heliópolis. In theory, it pits eleven white players against eleven black players. But, every year they change colors like they change socks or shirts—one year a player will choose to play for one team, the next year for the other, with the explanation that, “I feel more black,” or “I feel more white.” Also, in Brazil, if a person gets rich, he gets whiter. I recently talked with a dentist in Minas Gerais. As he is becoming old, his hair has turned white, and he is very well recognized in his little town. He started smoking cigars, joined the local Rotary Club, and said to me: “When I was black my life was really difficult.” So one can see how being white even nowadays is a powerful symbol. Here we have two sides of the same picture: on the one hand, identity is flexible; on the other hand, whiteness is ultimately what some people aspire to. But one aspect is common, the idea that you can manipulate your color and race…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy

    Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy

    Farrar, Straus and Giroux BYR Paper (an imprint of Macmillan)
    September 2008
    128 pages
    7 1/2 x 9 1/4 inches
    Grade Range: 5 and up, Age Range: 10 and up
    ISBN: 978-0-374-40023-1, ISBN10: 0-374-40023-7

    Andrea Warren

    An unforgettable true story of an orphan caught in the midst of war

    Over a million South Vietnamese children were orphaned by the Vietnam War. This affecting true account tells the story of Long, who, like more than 40,000 other orphans, is Amerasian—a mixed-race child—with little future in Vietnam. Escape from Saigon allows readers to experience Long’s struggle to survive in war-torn Vietnam, his dramatic escape to America as part of “Operation Babylift” during the last chaotic days before the fall of Saigon, and his life in the United States as “Matt,” part of a loving Ohio family. Finally, as a young doctor, he journeys back to Vietnam, ready to reconcile his Vietnamese past with his American present.

    As the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War approaches, this compelling account provides a fascinating introduction to the war and the plight of children caught in the middle of it.

  • The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930

    The Spectacle of the Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870-1930

    Hill and Wang (an imprint of MacMillan)
    September 1999
    224 pages
    5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
    ISBN: 978-0-8090-8789-1, ISBN10: 0-8090-8789-8

    Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Professor of Sociology
    University of São Paulo, Brazil

    Translated by Leland Guyer, Professor of Hispanic Studies
    Macalester University, St. Paul, Minnesota

    A provocative analysis of racial identity and nationhood.

    “We are a half-breed country . . . We are half-breeds, if not in our blood, then at least in our souls.” With these words, the literary critic Silvio Romero summed up the impression of Brazil a century ago as a “festival of colors.” The spectacle of a mixed-race society in a world that prized racial purity was horrifying to European travelers as well as to Brazil’s intellectuals, who were soon crying out for “one hope, one solution: the whitening of the population within one century.”

    But however attractive European notions of racial superiority might have been to Brazil’s elite, they were not easily adapted into the Brazilian context. In The Spectacle of the Races, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, a leading cultural anthropologist and historian, shows how Brazil’s philosophers, politicians, and scientists gratefully accepted social Darwinist ideas about innate differences among the races yet could not condemn the miscegenation that had so long been an essential feature of Brazilian society-and was at the very heart of a new state-building project as the country modernized. Schwarcz shows how the work of these “men of science” became crucial to the development and survival of Brazil’s basic national structures, affecting the country’s destiny in ways that still apply today, when race remains the basis of Brazil’s self-image.

  • First Annual Black German Cultural Society Inc. Convention

    First Annual Black German Cultural Society Inc. Convention

    German Historical Institute
    1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
    Washington, D.C.
    2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21

    The Black German Cultural Society, Inc. is excited to announce its First Annual Convention to be held from August 19 to 21, 2011, at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC. With the theme of “Strengthening Transatlantic Connections,” the convention will host guests and presenters from our international community in Germany and the United States.
     
    Our keynote speaker will be Noah Sow, the acclaimed journalist, musician, producer and author of “Deutschland Schwarz Weiß” (C. Bertelsmann, 2008), who will speak about “Geteilte Geschichte: The Black Experience in Germany and the US.”
     
    In cooperation with the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the convention will also feature an award ceremony for Hans J. Massaquoi, who will be given the “Champion of the Humanities Award” in honor of his lifetime achievements as an author, journalist, and cultural ambassador. Accepting the award at the convention on behalf of Mr. Massaquoi will be his son, Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr.

    Additionally, the convention will feature a photo exhibit on “The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany,” and “Homestory Deutschland: Gelebt – Erlebte Schwarze Deutsche Geschichte(n).”…

    For more information, click here.

  • “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?”: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955

    “Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?”: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955

    Callaloo
    Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
    pages 342-362
    DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0052
    E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492

    Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria

    This essay explores the debate that arose around the adoption of Black German children by African American parents and the subsequent immigration of these children to the United States. Using a comparative approach, the article probes the underlying internal social and political controversies in postwar Germany and the United States that led to and accompanied these events, concluding that both the plans for and practical implementation of the adoption of these Black German children abroad was an complex and contradictory attempt to solve the “problem” a German-born Black population was seen to pose.

    Scattered throughout Europe today there are thousands of “war orphans”—children of European girls and American soldiers who loved and left. Hundreds of these homeless children are the offspring of Negro soldiers and their mulatto status makes adoption by European families extremely unlikely. But in America there are hundreds of childless Negro couples who wish to adopt these “war babies” and bring them to the U.S. Up to now government red tape has prevented all but a trickle from being adopted. (“German War Babies”)

    In January 1951, an article was published in the African-American magazine Ebony with the above-cited headline. The article chronicled the story of an African-American teacher, Margaret Ethel Butler, who since 1947 had been attempting to adopt two Afro-German children and arrange their immigration to the United States. On 4 October 1951, nine months after the article appeared, Margaret E. Butler fas finally able to welcome her much longed-for adopted children at the Chicago airport. These two German children, born of African-American occupation soldiers and German women, are considered the first such children to be adopted and arrive in the U.S. after the war.

    The adoption of these two Afro-German children (a boy and a girl of five and six years of age) who, until their departure for the U.S., had lived in a Rheingau orphanage was the result of a bureaucratic battle waged by Margaret E. Butler over a period of many years. It was in 1947 that she first learned of the discrimination facing many Afro-German children in Germany through an article in the Chicago Tribune, at which point she decided to adopt two of these children. Her initial inquiries, including a journey to the children’s orphanage in Germany, were followed by countless requests and petitions, as well as further visits to Germany. Soon Margaret E. Butler became known as the Butler Case, a phenomenon widely documented in both the West German and the African-American press.

    In the following pages, will explore several aspects of the public response to this group of German occupation children in Germany and the U.S. I begin with an examination of the motives which led German and American organizations and individuals in both countries to perceive Afro-German children as potential adoptees for the U.S. The first section looks at the crucial role of the Black press and the NAACP…

    Read or purchase the article here.
    Also read, “Reflections on the ‘Brown Babies’ in Germany: the Black Press and the NAACP,” in The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany.