Ohio House of Reps. Supports 16 Year-Old African-American Girl, Victim of American Legion Discrimination
The Ohio House of Representatives, it was reported on this day, adopted a resolution asking an American Legion-related group to reverse its earlier decision and to send Joan Rankin, a 16 year-old African-American girl, to the group’s national event in Washington, DC.
Rankin had just been elected Governor of Buckeye Girls’ State, and as a result was to attend the American Legion’s Girl’s Nation Assembly in Washington. The Ohio American Legion Auxiliary, however, decided not to send her because it was afraid that she might experience racial discrimination in the nation’s capital. In 1949 Washington was a very southern and racially segregated city. The Ohio House resolution also asked President Harry Truman and the Congress to take action to end race discrimination.
A state Democratic Party group, representing an estimated 10,000 Ohio African-Americans adopted a similar resolution. In Washington, DC, meanwhile, the American Veterans Committee, said it would provide housing for Rankin at its racially integrated club in DC.
Since its founding on November 10, 1919 immediately following World War I, the American Legion had been one of the most aggressive anti-communist groups in the U.S. On February 10, 1924, Legion members helped the police in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, block a meeting by the Workers Party of America. On November 28, 1925, the director of the Legion’s “Americanism” program declared that “Reds” had forfeited their right to free speech. Legion members joined with the police on August 3, 1929 in the arrest of Yetta Stromberg for violating the California law making the display of a red flag illegal. (Her arrest led to one of the first Supreme Court decisions affirming freedom of speech, Stromberg v. California.) And on August 6, 1954, the Illinois chapter of the American Legion attacked the Girl Scout Handbook as “un-American.”
The American Legion had no record of being an advocate of racial justice, however. The suspicion arises that the Ohio Legion group had little interest in fully supporting an African-American young person, and was also not interested in challenging race discrimination in Washington on her behalf.
Read about the Cold War hysteria: Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998)
Learn more: David Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy (1983)
Learn more about the two “Red Scares” in America here