How America cheated Black GIs after World War II, contributing to the racial wealth gap

By Brett Arends

Their descendants, and the rest of us, are still paying the price

Black veterans after World War II were cheated out of their GI Bill educational rights.

Just in time for Juneteenth come new revelations about how Black American servicemen were cheated out of their GI Bill education rights at the end of World War II - and how that continues to contribute to the shocking wealth disparity between Black and white Americans today.

In "Blindly Discriminating: The GI Bill and Racial Inequality," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Lukas Althoff of Stanford University and Christiane Szerman of the London School of Economics use some fascinating economic analysis to show the economic impacts on Black Americans of the great GI Bill cheat.

To put it in a nutshell, they compare the data from two cohorts of American men: Those born up to around the middle of 1927, who would have been eligible for the World War II draft, and those born soon after, who were too young to serve. That helps isolate the specific impacts of the GI Bill, the landmark 1944 law that effectively provided free college to millions of returning U.S. servicemen.

It is generally acknowledged among economic historians that the law was transformative, setting the stage for the U.S. boom in the white-collar, college-educated postwar economy.

In theory, the law was "colorblind," offering the same educational support to Black GIs as to white GIs. In practice, it was anything but, as Althoff and Szerman reveal. Among the many problems was that the states and local politicians retained enormous control over how the money was actually spent.

Black GIs were blocked from many colleges by overt racism and segregation. But Black GIs were also actively steered away from spending their GI Bill funds on a college degree, and were steered toward supposed "vocational" programs. The problem: Many or most of those vocational programs were worthless or a fraud, or both. (Actually, Black GIs were deliberately barred in many states from actually valuable trade schools.)

Thousands of new "vocational schools" sprung up to soak up the money, many of them bogus. A 1949 government audit found that two-thirds of the schools had dubious accounting. A congressional review in 1952 found that hundreds had been frauds.

In a report that would be funny if it weren't so sad, an investigation in 1948 by Collier's found that while white GIs were going to college, many Black GIs were being taught to become dancing instructors.

"This is no complaint against legitimate dancing instructors," the magazine wrote, "but so many veterans have been induced, often by high-pressure methods, to squander their educational benefits on such instruction that if all of them were actually to become teachers, there would be enough to make the entire population of the United States completely familiar with both the rumba and the samba within a year."

As a result, the GI Bill ended up increasing the racial income and wealth gaps instead of narrowing them, or leaving them the same.

Drilling down into data, Althoff and Szerman show that these outcomes can be most plausibly connected to the way the GI Bill was applied and by the jobs that were available to Black and white workers afterwards. Other factors, such as who had completed high school before the war or who owned a home, played little or no part.

"Among white men induced into WWII service and GI Bill eligibility by the age cutoff, four-year college completion roughly doubled, and these gains persisted across generations, with their sons living in adult neighborhoods with higher college shares and higher median incomes," write Althoff and Szerman. "Black veterans, by contrast, were disproportionately steered toward low-return vocational training programs, and their sons show no comparable shift in adult-neighborhood economic status."

As a result of the GI Bill, they point out, the children of white, college-educated GIs were more likely to grow up in neighborhoods with, and go to school with, other children whose fathers had college degrees. The children of Black GIs: Not so much.

Today, the Federal Reserve estimates that the median white American family earns 76% more than the median Black American family, and has a median net worth more than six times as high: $284,000 to $44,000. Only a third of Black families have retirement accounts, compared to 62% of white families.

This shameful episode regarding the GI Bill occurred 80 years after the end of enslavement celebrated on Juneteenth.

And it illustrates yet again the self-defeating stupidity of selfishness, because the resulting poverty and problems in Black America hurt, rather than help, white Americans as well (including, ironically, all the racists). Nobody wins just because somebody else loses.

-Brett Arends

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06-18-26 1441ET