Contributed by Lucy Bland, Professor of Social and Cultural History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.

From 2014 to 2018 Lucy Bland researched the lives of those born to Black GIs and British women in the Second World War. While many people are familiar with many aspects of the war, this particular history had hardly been known. Lucy’s research led to the book Britain’s ‘Brown Babies’, (Manchester University Press) published in May 2019. ‘Brown babies’ was the name given at the time to these children by the African
American press. Oral history interviews are at the heart of this book – personal memories of growing up in the late 1940s and 1950s as a mixed-race child in what was then a very white Britain. The book combines the interviews with analysis of official records of central and local government and various organisations, reports from children’s homes, newspapers (British and American), letters and memoirs.

During the Second World War, over the period 1942-45, three million GIs passed through Britain. The American troops were based all over the country, but in greatest concentration in South and South-West England, South Wales, East Anglia and Lancashire. Approximately eight percent or more of these troops were African American. It was a segregated army (and stayed segregated until 1948) and to address inter-racial tension amongst their servicemen, which they believed was largely due to white GIs’ hostility towards relations between Black men and white women, the US army authorities introduced segregation of leisure pursuits. Access to towns near to American bases was given on different days for Blacks and whites, while other towns were permanently designated ‘whites only’ or ‘Blacks only’ for the war’s duration. Many village pubs were segregated along colour lines, and dances were held for Black GIs one evening, whites the next. Pubs and dances were the main sites where local
women met GIs.

While the British population were largely in favour of the Black GIs, finding them far politer and more modest than their white counterparts, who were seen as boastful and bumptious, many were not so keen on relationships between Black Americans and local women. Young women, however, often found the Black GIs very attractive: in addition to the Black GIs having better manners, part of the attraction was unfamiliarity, the vast majority of British people never having met a Black person before. The attraction probably also related to the association of Black American culture with new forms of dance and cutting-edge modern music. As the African-American magazine Ebony observed in 1946: ‘The average Negro GI had one advantage over his white army brother: he knew how to jitterbug. English girls love to dance.’

If British women in relationships with Black GIs went on to have a child, they faced a barrage of criticism. An estimated 2,000 mixed-race offspring were born of such relationships to women both single and married. Unlike white GIs, Black GIs in this segregated army, were generally forbidden by their commanding officers to marry their white girlfriends, the rationale being that thirty out of the (then) forty-eight US States had laws forbidding the marriage of Blacks and whites. Nearly half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the double stigma of illegitimacy and of having a mixed-race child, placed their babies in children’s homes. Few of these children were adopted as adoption societies would not take ‘half-castes’ (the negative term of the time) on their books, deeming them ‘too hard to place’.

Since the book came out, more and more people have contacted Lucy, saying that they or one of their parents, are one of these ‘brown babies’. Some of these additional stories, along with those in the book (and a lot of extra photographs) are up on the website The Mixed Museum. (Brown Babies Archive – The Mixed Museum). There are common threads to their stories. Many suffered racism, a rift in the family, a sense of difference and a lack of belonging. They had no role models in their immediate surroundings, for most of the places where GIs, Black and white, were sited and where the children grew up, were very largely white. Very few of the people Lucy has talked to have found their fathers, or even their American relatives. Those who have, feel a huge sense of relief and wholeness. Today, through DNA testing, which has only taken off in the last few years, some who did not even have a name are now tracking down their US relatives. To quote Monica Roberts, the daughter of a Black GI born in the war who eventually found her US family, although her father had recently died: ‘there’s one thing we have in common and that’s the need to know who our fathers are or were. Nothing else seems as important and before we each “shuffle off this mortal coil” then we should do all we can to find the answers’. Many have now met
each other and have built and are still building a community. As Eugene Lange expresses it: ’I have an official history, as a member of a collective, and as a person of indeterminate, hybrid ethnicity. It feels good, it also feels good to have an opportunity to contribute my small piece in the telling of that story…I feel like I belong here in the UK just that little bit more.’

Another very useful book is Graham Smith’s When Jim Crow met John Bull (London: Tauris, 1987).