Private First Class Eugene Davis (375th Engineer Battalion) paints over the swastika on a railroad car in Pallenberg, Germany
I talked to a black soldier’s son who was born in Germany. His German mother and American father fell in love and got married in Germany during the late 1940s. But as soon as they got back on the boat to take them back to America, they were immediately segregated into white and black sections. As a child, the son never understood why the family had to travel at night to avoid being attacked just because his parents were an interracial couple. They could never stay together in a hotel as a family or go out to eat. He felt abandoned because his mother was always leaving to stay in a ‘white hotel’ and he questioned if she really loved him.
Kwame Mfume, Maria Höhn, and Martin Klimke
“This story is heartbreaking,” continues Maria Höhn, associate professor of history, who spent the past fifteen years immersed in the stories of African American troops stationed in post-war Germany. Nearly three million African Americans have served in Germany since 1945, yet little is known about their experience abroad. When Höhn began researching in Germany, she found that ironically, “in general, African Americans mainly had a positive experience in Germany because there were no Jim Crow laws and they could enter any store or restaurant and even fall in love with white women. Colin Powell described his military experience there in 1958 as ‘a breath of freedom’.” In turn, the soldiers came home to fight for civil rights, but they also inspired Germans to engage in civil rights issues.
Höhn, who was raised in Germany, published her book GIs and Frauleins: The German-American Encounter in 1950s West Germany in 2002, the first of its kind to examine the experiences of black soldiers. Soon after, she met fellow historian Martin Klimke, who shared an interest in this research. They decided to team up and build a free research database for students and teachers around the world. “The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany” contains digitized documents from the Archive for Soldiers’ Rights in Berlin and from private collections from former civil rights activists, as well as photographs, audio-visual sources and transcripts, newspapers, posters, flyers, governmental records, and the oral histories of African American servicemen.
Interracial German-American couples in the Noncommissioned Officers’ Club, Ramstein Airbase
Students at Vassar and Heidelberg University also became interested in the project, uncovering photos and other materials and conducting video interviews with African American veterans to add to the database. “They found absolutely amazing materials,” notes Höhn. “The project shows them that you can still discover sources and stories of the past that no one knows anything about.”
Last year, Höhn and Kilmke were asked by the Humanities Council in Washington, DC to contribute to a city-wide commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr’s death and to celebrate his global legacy. Höhn and Klimke compiled a selection of previously unseen images (and four cartoons uncovered by students in their research) that documented King’s visit to West and East Berlin in 1964, but also included images of black GIs. “We were immensely proud of the exhibit, but were completely unprepared for the public response,” says Höhn. The show and research project was reviewed in the US military’s magazine and in a major German newspaper, and led to an outpouring of requests for lectures, workshops, and a traveling photo exhibition in the US and Germany.
The project also captured the attention of the NAACP, which honored Höhn and Klimke with its 2009 Julius E. Williams Distinguished Community Service Award. “We were totally blown away,” declares Höhn. “We didn’t even know we had been nominated!”
Despite the project’s sudden mass appeal, Höhn’s objective has remained the same: to capture and preserve these stories before they are lost to history. “We can talk about segregation,” she says. “But these individual stories are so powerful.”