Americans learned about the existence of Afro-German children from Black media outlets. The Pittsburgh Courier launched a series of articles on what it called the “brown babies” in the mid-1940s. They were written by Percival Leroy Prattis who reported extensively on the experiences of Black military service men in a segregated army. In a piece in April 1949, Prattis informed his readers that “German ‘Brown Babies’ really need your help.” A week later, writing “Would you like to help one of the brown babies?,” Prattis pointed to the uncertain future multiracial children might face in a country that had just demonstrated its deadly obsession with racial purity. “What might some future Hitler do to rid the nation of this dark minority which belies the claim of the purity of the German people? Would this minority be exterminated? The German people have demonstrated that they are capable of such an act,” wrote Prattis. He goes on to note that many soldiers vanished after they had learned that their partners were pregnant; some because they were married, or they had never supported a family before, others because they were bewildered by the thought of returning home South with a white wife and mixed-race child. Prattis argued that Germans could not determine whether “Negro America cares.” In order to demonstrate that Black Americans did care, he encouraged his readership to send care packages and donations to support the children and their mothers as a means of showing responsibility for the Black soldier’s actions. The response to these articles was overwhelming and it was readers who inquired about adopting the children.
One vocal proponent of adoption to the US was Mabel Grammer, a former journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American and the wife of Oscar Grammer, a GI stationed in Germany. Grammer came to Mannheim in 1951 to accompany her husband. Soon after her arrival, Grammer (who could not have children of her own) went to an orphanage where, in her words, she found herself surrounded by Black German children pleading “I want a mummy!” The couple eventually adopted twelve children over the course of the next decade. In the tradition of the Black women’s club movement, Grammer began to organize aid and acted as an “unofficial ambassador.” Through her volunteer activism on behalf of Black German children, she helped to promote American ideals and “soften” the appearance of the occupation. She also used her contacts at the Afro-American to publicize the situation of Black German children and to reach out to prospective adoptive parents in the Black American community. Hence she came up with a private adoption scheme she called the “Brown Baby Plan.”