We need to examine the psychological affects of serving in the army under apartheid segregation. My grandfather, father and uncles all went through this humiliating madness, and very few if any mentioned a word about it. In his new book, Mirror to America, John Hope Franklin discusses this government-enforced racism and the toll it took on his older brother. Franklin’s brother went into depression and either fell or jumped from a hotel window in 1947. Franklin still refers to his brother’s death as murder.
The many black men who lived this horror took their depression out on the bottle. As the Vietnam War produced its share of drug abusers, the segregated army of World War II produced alcoholics. My father was one of those victims. The drinking took him from his family at 63 years old.
What was this psychological affect on young men trying to serve their so-called country in the time of war? Black men were under white officers who in many cases wanted the black soldiers to know they were less than white soldiers in the same army, fighting the same enemy.
Can or will American right this wrong and 65 years later make the children and grandchildren of these black men who suffered to serve know the wrong of this government?
Akbar Muhammad
Via email