Back to The World: Reintegration and Incarceration of Disabled African-American Vietnam Veterans

• In Event: Reflecting and Shaping: traditional and new techniques in oral history to collect and share the military experience

Abstract

In a time when #BlackLivesMatter, it becomes necessary to explore the extent to which institutional racism has restricted African-Americans. The Vietnam War, for the thousands of African Americans who fought it, became an overseas extension of the Civil Rights Movement, another battle for the hearts and minds of White America. The Civil Rights Movement and the veterans’ movement became irrevocably interconnected, forged in the despair of a generation of wounded Black veterans. As these casualties of war reintegrated, the struggle for equality transformed into the fight for disability, veterans’ benefits, and daily survival. “The World” to which African-American warriors returned was not their World. Black Vietnam veterans returned to a nation of white supremacy and systemic racism, as defenders of a democracy which restricted their rights and relegated them as second-class citizens.
My research investigates the problems of reintegration among disabled African American combat veterans of the Vietnam War to determine how institutional racism and social conditions affected postwar readjustment. Primarily focused on oral history interviews, collected and digitized by the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, the central concern of this essay involves veterans’ experiences after the war. Among the array of difficulties facing the returning American soldier during the Vietnam War era, problems of reintegration were complicated by physical and psychological disability and exponentially compounded by socio-economic class and race. Most Black veterans entered the military, expecting opportunities of social advancement, job-training, and the highly regarded status of United States military veteran. Instead, they returned to “The World,” marginalized by their communities, disenfranchised by their government, and in severe cases, institutionalized by the state.

Author

• Jason Higgins, University of Massachusetts Amherst