Building Bridges: Black GIs, Military Labor, and the Fight for Equality in World War II

by Douglas Walter Bristol

Overview

The previously overlooked story of how the labor of Black GIs helped win the war and advanced racial integration in the US armed forces.

More than 80 percent of Black GIs in World War II served behind the front lines. At the beginning of the war, segregation policies maintained physical separation of Black and white GIs and only allowed Black soldiers to do simple, menial work, maintaining a false sense of racial inferiority. But the mechanization of armed forces during World War II demanded more skilled laborers behind the front lines. The Army Service Forces, created in March 1942, turned to Black GIs to solve the serious manpower shortage and trained them for jobs previously done only by white GIs. In Building Bridges, author Douglas Bristol tells the story of how military necessity led to unprecedented changes in the employment of Black troops. These changes had unanticipated consequences. American military leaders adopted a new racial discourse that emphasized the rights and potential of Black GIs. The new opportunities also exposed racial discrimination, giving Black GIs and their allies more leverage to demand better treatment.

Black GIs built bridges, roads, and runways. They repaired engines and radios. They transported bombs, bullets, food, gasoline, and water to hard-pressed soldiers on the front lines. Their numbers, skills, and necessity only grew as the war continued. By the end of the World War II, Black GIs had cracked the glass ceiling in the racialized military hierarchy behind the front lines and became indispensable to keeping the American war machine running around the globe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780700639014
Publisher:	University Press of Kansas
Publication date:	06/24/2025
Series:	Studies in Civil-Military Relations
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Douglas Bristol is associate professor of history and a fellow of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom and coeditor of Integrating the U.S. Military: Race, Gender, and Sexuality since World War II.

Table of Contents

Series Editor’s Foreword

Acknowledgments

Introduction: War as Labor

1. Separate but Equal? This Mobilization of Black Men before Pearl Harbor

2. The Opportunity Gap: Black GIs and Black Civilians in the United States

3. The “Conservative Revolution”: Transforming Roles for Black GIs in the Army Service Forces

4. Multiple New Roles for Black GIs: The Caribbean Africa, and Middle East

5. Black GIs Become a Critical Lifeline for Allies: Transforming Logistics and Supply in Asia

6. Ending the Distinction between “White Jobs” vesus “Black Jobs”: The Pacific Theater

7. Participating in the Army and in Civilian Life: The European Theater

Conclusion: Transnational Comparisons of Military Workplaces

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Douglas Walter Bristol Jr. has written an important book on the vital work African American troops performed during WWII. Building Bridges takes readers on a kaleidoscopic tour of far-flung locations where Black GIs did their part to help win the war. This history enriches our understanding of military service and illuminates how WWII was critical to the development of the civil rights movement.”—Matthew F. Delmont, author of Half American: The Heroic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad

“The significant contributions of Black Americans in the wars of the United States have too frequently been omitted, deleted, and distorted in the history books. In a new, excellent, revealing study, Bristol demonstrates that ‘Black GIs . . . made themselves indispensable to keeping the American war machine running around the globe,’ and in the process made possible decisive victories in World War II, and in the post-war civil rights movement.”—Adrian R. Lewis, author of The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Enduring Freedom

“Bristol’s Building Bridges narrates the intricate histories of African American troops in service units during World War II, conveying in clear and accessible prose their critical and sometimes surprising roles in US labor and early civil rights history. The US’s longstanding commitments to structural racism and white supremacy churned into the 1940s, keeping Black troops on the war’s sidelines in the process. But, as Bristol’s painstaking research reveals, the war’s labor demands exposed the steep costs of continuing this regime of occupational segregation. Black troops upended racist labor hierarchies by using newly acquired technical professional skills, ultimately serving in the units that enabled global logistical support for Allied operations, from France to the China-Burma-India theater.”—Michelle R. Moyd, author of Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa

“Douglas Bristol’s detailed and deeply researched history of African American military labor during World War II shines much-needed light on a crucial, but neglected aspect of the Black experience. On the home front and in every theater of war, African Americans performed much of the labor that not only sustained US military power but that also helped lay the groundwork for the postwar civil rights movement.”—Chris Dixon, author of African Americans and the Pacific War, 1941–1945: Race, Nationality, and the Fight for Freedom

“Douglas Bristol brings a critical, incisive, and much needed perspective to the African American experience in the Second World War. Vividly textured and cogently argued, Building Bridges is a must-read for anyone who is interested in the intersection of race, labor, and war in the United States military.”—Robert F. Jefferson, Jr., coauthor of Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor

From the Publisher