Analysis: We Love Honor More than We Fear Death
The topic "Analysis: We Love Honor More than We Fear Death" delves into the complex dynamics of African American patriotism during World War II, as articulated by professor Nick Aaron Ford. In a historical context marked by systemic racism and discrimination, Ford's arguments highlight the willingness of African Americans to fight for democratic ideals, despite their own struggles for equality within the United States. He posits that African Americans viewed their support for the war as a commitment to the principles of freedom and justice, which they believed were worth fighting for, even in the face of personal and institutional racism.
Ford emphasizes that while the U.S. was flawed, its foundational laws aspired to equality, contrasting this with the oppressive regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He addresses the internal conflicts faced by African Americans as they grappled with their loyalty to a nation that often denied them their rights. Ultimately, Ford's discourse serves as a prelude to the civil rights movement, suggesting that the fight against external enemies was intrinsically linked to the struggle for civil rights at home. His call to action urges African Americans to continue their fight for freedom, merging the battles against both international tyranny and domestic oppression. This perspective sheds light on the intersections of honor, sacrifice, and the quest for dignity within the African American experience during a tumultuous era.
Analysis: We Love Honor More than We Fear Death
Date: December 8, 1942
Author: Nick Aaron Ford
Genre: speech
Summary Overview
Delivered one year after the United States declared war on Japan and entered World War II, professor Nick Aaron Ford's speech served as a ringing answer to a question he posed, “What are Negroes fighting for?” Ford acknowledged the racial discrimination inherent in US politics and society, but argued that the patriotism of African Americans was so great that they were willing to fight to the death to protect the democratic freedoms and ideals that their nation asserted as its purpose. The United States, Ford contended, was flawed but its laws sought equality, while its German and Japanese enemies stood against the personal liberties in which African Americans deeply believed. According to Ford's arguments, African Americans were willing to fight against racism because it was wrong, even if the nation they were fighting on behalf of was itself struggling to find its way toward ending racism within its own borders.
Defining Moment
By the early 1940s, the African American experience in the United States had been a long and complex one that had known much struggle but few victories. The end of the Civil War in 1865 had paved the way for a series of constitutional amendments that abolished slavery, extended full citizenship rights to members of all races, and affirmed that US law must be applied fairly without regard to race or ethnicity. In practice, however, those rights had often gone unrecognized. The rise of Democratic state governments in former slave states ended direct African American representation in government and allowed for the passage of discriminatory Jim Crow laws that enacted widespread racial segregation. Racist organizations and lynch mobs murdered African Americans without repercussion. Informal segregation and racial discrimination existed nationwide, worsening as African American populations outside the rural south increased during and after World War I. Although historians generally consider the late nineteenth century to be the nadir of race relations in the United States, the period directly preceding the civil rights movement was certainly one of ongoing challenges.
Among these challenges was the reluctance of the federal government to intervene and enact new civil rights policies, or to enforce those that already existed. During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition relied in part on the support of Southern Democrats who fervently supported racial segregation and discriminatory policies. In order to retain this support, the Roosevelt administration did little to push civil rights. Many New Deal programs failed to address the needs of African Americans or even authorize segregated systems or lower pay scales based on race.
As the nation began to ramp up wartime industrial production in the early 1940s, the federal government declined to intervene in defense industry policies that rejected African American employees or otherwise discriminated against them. Civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph successfully challenged this stance by warning Roosevelt that he would lead a march of thousands of African American protesters on Washington, DC, over the issue if Roosevelt failed to act. Knowing that such a public display would fuel negative propaganda over the apparent US hypocrisy in claiming to support democracy around the world while declining to share the fruits of democracy with some of its own citizens, Roosevelt issued an executive order integrating defense industries and establishing a commission to enforce fair employment practices for federal contractors in 1941.
The military continued to use segregated units, however, and draft boards were widely known to reject African American recruits even after the nation entered the war later that year. US opponents used the nation's racial woes in propaganda, and domestic voices questioned the nation's ideals. Many African Americans, however, sought to fight in the military or otherwise work to support their homeland.
Author Biography
As a professor, a literary critic, and an author, Nick Aaron Ford was a leading African American intellectual of the mid-twentieth century. Born in South Carolina in 1904, he studied at that state's Benedict College before pursuing graduate work at the University of Iowa. Much of Ford's career was dedicated to the study and analysis of contemporary works by African American authors and to educating students as the head of the English department at the historically black Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. From the time of his first graduate research in the 1930s, Ford hoped that drawing academic attention to the racial issues and stereotypes raised in works by black authors could inform a better national understanding of racial tensions, and his work in African American literary criticism had little precedent. Ford was also a respected writing educator and administrator. By the 1970s, he had become interested in the development of what were then new university-level black studies programs.
Document Analysis
In his speech, Ford speaks both to his immediate audience and to all those who question African Americans' dedication to support US democratic ideals when they are themselves often denied the fruits of those tenets. He repeatedly asserts that the African American cause is inextricably linked with the overall American cause of protecting democracy; Ford also emphasizes African Americans' special interest in opposing the openly racist policies of German dictator Adolf Hitler, a clear enemy of the kind of equality that black Americans long for, and he rejects the notion that African Americans might join with another “colored” race, the Japanese, who themselves sought to oppress others.
Ford opens by emphasizing the dangers of white Americans' dismissal of the abilities of other races by pointing to the consistent military prowess of the Japanese, the residents of “a little colored nation, that Americans had always regarded as… incapable of engineering a successful war against a powerful white nation.” He cites the unity of American troops with Liberian troops in asserting that people of varying races can find common cause in “fighting for freedom.”
Much of the speech is dedicated to rejecting common objections to engaging African American support for the war. Ford makes rhetorical use of Hitler and Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo to pose and answer the simple question, “What are Negroes fighting for?” He is not shy to admit to the discrimination African Americans have endured in the United States from the era of slavery through segregation and lynching. Yet, he argues, these actions have never been condoned by the national government in the same way that the Nazis have made it German policy to discriminate. He reminds the audience that African Americans have long wrestled with the question of whether to support their nation and have always resoundingly answered yes. Ultimately, Ford contends that African Americans seek to support the four freedoms previously stated by Roosevelt as core to democracy—and “to destroy the false concept, both at home and abroad, that the color of a man's skin or the shape of his nose can determine his capacity for civilization and achievement.”
Ford ends with a ringing call to action that African Americans “shall not forget to fight harder for [freedom] at home… until complete victory is won.” In this, he presages the civil rights movement that emerged during the 1950s to resist racist policies in place around the United States. By linking the struggle against racism abroad with that domestically, Ford's ideas suggest that a victory over Germany would prove that equality in the United States must be attainable.
Bibliography and Additional Reading
“African Americans in World War II.” National World World II Museum. Natl. World War II Museum, n.d. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
Sutherland, Jonathan. African Americans at War: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004. Print.
Wynn, Neil A. African American Experience during World War II. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010. Print.