Gentry Torian fought bravely with the 92nd Infantry Division, the only all-black infantry division to see combat in Europe during World War II, only to return home to racial discrimination. Reflecting later to his wife, Celeste Torian, he said of postwar America, “The only good thing was the GI Bill.”
“Every black we knew used the GI Bill,” Celeste told political scientist Suzanne Mettler. Gentry used it to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming a public schoolteacher.
Scores of black veterans across the country had experiences similar to the Torians’. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, offered an exceptionally comprehensive list of benefits to World War II (and later Korean War) veterans. Any veteran with at least ninety days of service and without a dishonorable discharge was eligible. The benefits included unemployment payments of $20 per week for up to one year and low-interest loans to buy a house, farm, or business.
But the GI Bill is perhaps best known for how it transformed higher education in this country. Veterans who served for at least ninety days were guaranteed one year of education or vocational training, with another month added for each additional month of service up to four years. Veterans who used these benefits did not have to pay a dime in tuition costs, and they even received monthly subsistence payments.
It has become a popular trope to insist that black veterans did not benefit in any substantial way from the GI Bill. For example, the famous professor of African American history Henry Louis Gates Jr asserted that the “GI Bill systematically excluded most African Americans” in a recent YouTube video. In early 2022, this historical interpretation of the GI Bill compelled the introduction of a bill that would extend certain GI Bill benefits to surviving spouses and some direct descendents of black World War II veterans.
It is certainly true that there were problems and limitations in the implementation of GI Bill benefits for black veterans. But many of those limitations were a product of a Jim Crow system that predated the bill’s passage. The GI Bill did not create these structural limitations, and the elimination of Jim Crow was always beyond the scope of the legislation’s ability.
A wholesale dismissal of the legislation obscures the fact that black veterans’ experience of the GI Bill was far more nuanced and positive than many critics suggest. Their stories are documented in Suzanne Mettler’s work, including her book Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation and her article specifically about black veterans, “The Only Good Thing was the G.I. Bill.”