Posted: Wed 27 Feb 2008 01:54 Post subject: British Mixed-race babies 'were sent to the US'
What happened to these children? Who took charge of them? Was a special law passed to make them citizens? Normally, an illegitimate child of a foreign woman born on foreign soil is not recognized as an American citizen, despite American paternity (especially if the father is unknown or has not admitted paternity).
Quote:
Mixed-race babies 'were sent to the US'
Telegraph.com.uk
By Graham Tibbetts
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 04/02/2008
Thousands of illegitimate mixed-race children fathered by American GIs were given up by their British mothers and shipped across the Atlantic, according to newly released papers.
The issue of how to deal with the unwanted offspring of the illicit affairs divided the country towards the end of the Second World War and exposed the racial prejudices of the time.
Thousands of unwanted mixed-race children fathered by American GIs in Britain were sent to the US
It was considered so serious that there were dire warnings it could harm Anglo-American relations and the Government was urged to treat the children as "war casualties".
The problem began to emerge in 1944, when increasing numbers of US servicemen were stationed around Britain.
Many of the women they fathered children with were wives of British soldiers fighting abroad.
The documents suggest that where the baby was white it was often possible for husband and wife to be reconciled and keep the child. However, this was rarely possible when the child was mixed race.
At a conference on the matter in December 1944 John Carter, of the League of Coloured Peoples, said: "In several cases they are married women whose husbands are in the army, usually overseas, and they usually get letters from their husbands saying 'Well, I am very sorry to hear about it. If you can get the child adopted everything will be all right.'
"Then there is the unmarried mother who would have prospects of marriage if she could get rid of the child and I think the question is whether or not a Home ought to be provided for these children in some part of the country."
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Some wanted the children raised in homes alongside white children, a few said they should be brought up with other black children to avoid racism, and many called on them to be sent to America to be nearer their fathers.
Speaking at the same conference a Miss Steel, general secretary of the Church of England Moral Welfare Council, said: "The suggestion that they should be shipped back to America is terribly cruel, even if it were possible. Their mothers are the people to whom they are linked most closely, and it would add to their sense of being unwanted, not only that their mothers had given them up but the country where they were born had given them up too."
Miss Steel said the war babies should be given places in local authority and voluntary sector homes to solve the problem of finding foster parents.
"In rural areas and small towns…(social) workers found it difficult enough to find foster mothers for any children, and impossible to find for the coloured child…I know of an evacuated family where the father was a coloured man and every visitor to that village was shown the child as an object of local interest."
The files, released today by the Public Records Office in Kew, include a letter from a Miss O. Clarke to her MP suggesting the babies be placed in West Indies mission schools.
However, a Whitehall official wrote to the MP in July 1944: "The proposed solution is high handed and - if confined to coloured illegitimates - has a Herrenrasse (master race) flavour not now popular."
By the end of the war pressure was mounting on the Government to take action.
In letters to the Ministry of Health in December 1945 and March 1946 Harold Moody, founder of the League of Coloured Peoples, said Britain and the US must treat each baby as a "war casualty" and warned: "Our anxiety is to forestall a social problem which might not only affect the life of this country but which might also affect Anglo-American relations."
In response Aneurin Bevan, health minister, said his policy was to encourage mothers to keep their children, or failing that to tackle the shortage of places in homes.
The Home Office, however, differed and one official wrote: "Provided it is clear that the mother does not want the child and there is a reasonably satisfactory home in the US the child will have a far better chance if sent at an early age to the US than if it brought up in this country."
Joined: 29 Aug 2006 {Posts: 24 } Location: Germany
Posted: Thu 28 Feb 2008 17:33 Post subject:
I remember an article in Ebony magazine in the early 1980's about one of these adoptees being reunited with her British mother. Apparently, the children were taken in by Black American families and the Black churches led the drive to adopt them.
In the article, this particular adoptee turned out to uncannily have many of her mother's habits with regard to lifestyle. They both turned up wearing a full length fur coat to see each other for the first time. The mother put the girl up for adoption because of potential racism in her small UK village.
Does anyone else remember this article or can track it down?
I was born to a black American GI soldier and a white English women. They met in Liverpool during World War 2 the home of my mother. Liverpool is a large city port and during the war had the largest continuous stretch of docks in the world, therefore a very important city as it respects the movement of supplies. The Americans joined the war in 1942 and shipped their soldiers to Europe. My father being black was assigned to what was known as a "Coloured Unit", as the US practiced a segregated policy even among their troops. One of these units was sent to Liverpool in a place called Maghull, and it was here that my mother and father first met. These transportation units that my father was attached to were responsible for the movement of supplies, which resulted in very menial tasks on the part of the black soldiers. Major Ulysses Lee, himself a black US military officer has written a standard work, outlining the frustration of black people serving their country under a segregated policy, called "The employment of Negro Troops". The book is now out of print, but most good libraries in America would be able to get you a copy. When I was born in the May of 1944 my father was moved to the European Continent, although he did support me through the military payroll. My mother who was sixteen years at the time kept me for just three months and then abandoned me. Over the years I have always tried to look at the positive elements surrounding my birth, and I can only think of one situation that is worse than being abandoned and that is being aborted. Anything is better than abortion, and so I am very thankful that I was not aborted but given life and the great privilege of raising my own children.
In the 80s there was a documentary about these children, the ones who stayed in Great Britain at least. Can't remember the name of it.
The documentary focused on eight or ten of them born in Yorkshire (?) that the British government refused to send to the U.S. if I remember things accurately.
Some were raised in orphanages and others raised by their single mothers and their mothers' families.
If memory serves, four were interviewed-two men and two women. They had strong regional accents and the two women had married local men and had families of their own. The two men were single, with one being more bitter than the other about the details of his birth and his life in Great Britain.
Today, assuming these people are alive, they would be in their 60s.
I'll search around to see if I can find the title of the documentary.
Meeting Denny Smith, you could be forgiven for thinking that she is West Indian by descent and part of the Afro-Caribbean community in Britain, founded by those who emigrated here in the late 1950s. But Denny was born in Britain towards the end of World War II and has lived here all her life. She is part of an exclusive but little-known group - children born of the relationships between white English mothers and black American soldiers stationed in Britain during the war.
Brown Babies tells the story of people who, like Denny, have been denied their birthright because they are of mixed race. In almost every case, the experiences and circumstances of these children are a result of racial prejudice inflicted on both their parents, for which they can take no responsibility.
The film follows several men and women currently involved in the quest to find their parents, their lost families and their identities, chronicling their frustrations, anxieties, fears, disappointments and emotional reconciliations along the way. Through their powerful and engaging stories, the forgotten wartime experiences of the black American soldiers and their white sweethearts unfolds.
The black GIs
From May 1942 until the end of World War II, some 130,000 black GIs came to Britain. Most contemporary accounts tell how they felt completely liberated in Britain compared to their restricted lives in the United States. Many were at first astonished and then delighted to find a white society that actually showed them hospitality and then respect.
However, when the white GIs arrived, they were adamant that black American soldiers should be treated in Britain exactly as they had been in the United States. US troops imposed their segregationist views as if it were a condition of their supporting the allied war effort. For instance, the United States of America Visiting Forces Act, enacted by the US Congress in August 1942, stipulated that black soldiers abroad were subject to the same restrictions and racial segregation as in their home country. So the luggage of racism was transported across to Britain as if part of American military supplies.
Black soldiers in uniform were only allowed to marry white British women with the permission of their commanding officers (and this permission was almost always withheld), were forbidden from entering official whites-only areas in public places and were subjected to a host of other racial bans which British society had never encountered before. Towns near US army bases - and many of their black British residents - can attest to the heightening of racial tension caused by the arrival of the American GIs. Some of the white soldiers told credulous English country-folk that black men had tails, and others victimised their black comrades-in-arms - one group of paratroopers roamed the streets assaulting any black soldier they could find.
The American brand of racism did not come naturally to British civilians. Many had welcomed the blacks and were adamant that all soldiers - black and white - fighting for European liberty should be treated the same. When rioting between black and white soldiers broke out in a city centre and military police waded in, some British locals lined up alongside the black GIs.
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