WWII Resources: World War II: Home Front Summary & Analysis
African Americans and the Home FrontThe expansion of manufacturing, along with federally-mandated desegregation in the war industries, did enable many African Americans to actively serve their country in a number of new ways. But, perhaps more importantly, mobilization enabled Blacks to secure well-paid jobs. Higher wages and other incentives empowered African Americans, particularly Southern Blacks long stifled by a culture of segregation and racial violence, to move to the Northeast and the West where war industry jobs were plentiful. During the 1940s, over one million Black Americans left their homes in rural regions in the South and the Midwest, seeking freedom and fortune in cities like Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Richmond, Vallejo, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
But many Blacks discovered that material opportunities weren't often accompanied by civil rights or racial justice. Housing discrimination, in particular, limited their mobility. Tarea Hall Pittman, who worked to organize new Black arrivals from the South, explains that African Americans "could see the vestiges of discrimination" in California. Inequality in the West, she explains, "was going to be exactly like Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, and Georgia and every place else if we didn't do something.11" And although the nation was engaged in a war against fascism abroad, legal segregation and lynching continued to hinder and devastate the lives of African Americans in the South.