Brown Babies

The term brown babies was used during and immediately after World War II to describe the offspring of African American soldiers and European women. The African American press popularized the phrase in a series of human interest stories at that time. Because unions between black men and white women were largely considered taboo during this period, the fact of brown babies challenged prevailing American attitudes about interracial sex during the 1940s and 1950s.

The existence of brown babies posed a problem for the U.S. military, which had long struggled over the status of its African American soldiers (the armed services would be desegregated by a presidential executive order in 1948). For the most part, military leadership sought to maintain overseas the racial status quo of the home front, where interracial unions were far from common.

The existence of brown babies attested to the fact that the military's attempts to maintain a racial status quo were not always successful. More important, this effort to uphold American racial mores overseas translated into military policies that showed little regard for the welfare of the babies. In Britain and Italy, for example, African American GIs who had children with women from those countries were rarely allowed to marry. In Germany, interracial marriage was simply forbidden.

While the U.S. military attempted to keep the issue of brown babies quiet, the black press in America broadcast the message of their existence to its readership. During the era of Jim Crow in the South, in which segregation was very much a reality, brown babies garnered a great deal of interest among African Americans. The fact that racial separation was not practiced with the same vigor in Europe piqued the curiosity of African American readers, as did the fact that brown babies represented such a transgression of white supremacist values and practices.

Brown babies were most common in Germany, which posed an interesting case following the Nazi defeat. African American soldiers in Germany after the war were put in an unfamiliar position—they were presiding over a defeated power with a white population. While the U.S. military leadership tried to avoid policies that put black soldiers in positions of power over German men, the chaos of immediate postwar Germany made efforts to prevent interaction between African American men and German women a difficult proposition at best.

In many ways, German women and African American soldiers had a similar status in postwar Germany—both were considered below the status of white men and American women. As a result, contact between the two groups was not all that improbable. However, by the early to mid-1950s, romantic attachments of this sort were far less likely. When Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, criminal prosecution of interracial relationships became much more commonplace, while relations between white Americans and white Germans were left alone.

The most difficult issue posed by the brown baby phenomenon involved the status of the babies. The U.S. War Department refused to provide mothers of brown babies with the addresses of the GIs who fathered them, and U.S. adoption agencies were largely unwilling to take the babies. Moreover, the U.S. military resisted efforts made by African American soldiers to establish their position as fathers of the children.

...