This chapter describes and assesses the racial liberalization hypothesis: the notion that World War II had a liberalizing impact on white racial attitudes. Contrary to the Myrdalian account, however, analysis of rarely utilized survey evidence is used to demonstrate that there is much less evidence for the racial liberalization hypothesis than is often assumed, particularly when the focus is on measures of policy rather than prejudice. Although there is some evidence that the war coincided with decreases in anti-black prejudice (e.g., whether black blood is biologically distinctive from white blood),this chapter demonstrates that white attitudes toward civil rights policies—particularly federal intervention in state lynching cases—did not liberalize over the course of the war. If anything, white opposition to anti-lynching legislation actually seems to have increased. While the available evidence is more limited, whites were also largely opposed to wartime civil rights demands like integration of the armed forces.

This chapter analyzes whites who actually served in World War II, asking to what extent their military service had racially liberalizing effects on them, relative to similarly situated non-veterans. For veterans, the results are somewhat mixed. White veterans were indistinguishable from non-veteran whites on many measures of racial prejudice, and they were equally committed to segregation both in the armed services and in society more broadly. They were, however, more supportive of federal anti-lynching legislation in the war’s immediate aftermath, and southern white veterans were more supportive of black voting rights in the early 1960s. Relying on archival materials related to small-scale experiments in the military, this chapter also considers the counterfactual where Roosevelt had moved to integrated the armed forces during or prior to U.S. entry into World War II, highlighting the potential consequences for white racial attitudes of FDR’s refusal to integrate the armed forces during the war

This chapter examines the Roosevelt administration’s record on civil rights in the context of the Second World War. Relying on internal executive branch documents, as well as attempts by black newspapers to get the administration to comment on the Double-V campaign, the chapter demonstrates the White House’s familiarity with the Double-V rhetoric of civil rights activists, and frames this as part of a larger debate within the Roosevelt administration about whether to maintain a New Deal focus on social policy or focus almost entirely on the military aspects of World War II. The chapter then examines how wartime activism compelled Roosevelt to issue an executive order to combat defense industry discrimination, while similar efforts to integrate the armed forces proved unsuccessful.