extending to surviving Black World War II veterans and their direct descendants the housing and education benefits denied under the 1944 G.I. Bill. Veterans and their descendants could get access to the VA Loan Guaranty Program, as well as post-9/11 G.I. Bill educational assistance provisions, which grant financial assistance for school and job training. This recommendation is consistent with how veterans’ benefits are commonly extended today (that is, to veterans and their descendants).
According to a December 2022 paper from the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity at Brandeis, the long-term effects of the G.I. Bill’s unequal granting of benefits were profound. Black and white World War II veterans alike benefited financially from their service when compared to nonveterans, of course, but there were dramatic racial disparities. The cash value of benefits received by Black veterans was somewhere between 40 to 70 percent of the cash value of benefits received by white veterans. Descendants of Black World War II veterans, the Brandeis study calculated, received a long-term financial benefit of $23,847. That’s less than half the long-term financial benefit received by descendants of white World War II veterans ($59,638).
The proposal on G.I. Bill benefits was included in the American Academy report (which also recommends many other actions worth considering) at the prodding of Cornell William Brooks, a former NAACP president now on the faculty at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “The G.I. Bill was certainly not the only 20th-century legislation that harmed Black Americans,” Brooks wrote last December in a Boston Globe op-ed co-authored with the Kennedy School’s Linda Bilmes. “But it was one of the most pernicious, because education and homeownership are the foundation of intergenerational wealth.”
Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, who served four tours as an infantry officer during the Iraq War, and Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, both Democrats, have sponsored legislation in line with the Academy’s recommendation. The bill has 47 Democratic co-sponsors and zero Republican co-sponsors, and it has yet to be taken up by the House Veterans Affairs Committee. In July, 25 state attorneys general, most but not all of them from blue states, urged then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy to move the bill forward. Nothing happened.