Talk:African Americans and the G.I. Bill

Bias

I think that this article is heavily biased, and talks far less about the GI Bill itself than it does about the overall history of African-Americans in education at the time. The GI Bill has allowed millions of African-Americans to attend college in the 60 years since its passage who otherwise would never have been able to pay for it. The text of this article should stick to the effects of the GI Bill itself, and not other factors affecting African-American educational opportunity.

Agree It also needs quite a bit of cleaning up in regard to spelling/grammar. Also, some things are not explained/linked well such as "VA" (the disambiguation page doesn't help). A more appropriate link would be to the Veteran's Administration.

Disagree Discussing other factors that limited the benefits of the bill is perfectly reasonable for this article. It does need some clean up and, more importantly, expanded discussion about the benefits (or lack thereof) of the bill's loan provisions. 6-21-2006

I have heard that many of the black soldiers who were in the military during WWII were discharged without proper paperwork such as DD-214 documents. The lack of such documentation made it far more difficult for them to prove they were elligible for the GI Bill, and undoubtedly would have discouraged many from pushing forward to get a higher education. If a researcher can confirm that allegation, it clearly should be included in the article. Also, although the article mentions black veterans' difficulty in getting housing loans, it doesn't stress the well-known and legal banking and insurance practice of redlining portions of cities and whole towns until redlining was made illegal under the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Also, somewhat anecdotal, years ago when I looked into buying an old house with the help of the GI Bill, I was told they would not finance a house more than 25 years old. In many slums, ALL the houses that a black person might want to or be able to buy would be older than 25 years. 66.245.8.210 08:19, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

That's fine but WP requires reliable sources. This article has very few. Lfstevens (talk) 06:49, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

This article needs much better citation of source material. Many of the statements look like hearsay or the author's interpretation. I think that more work needs to be done to make use of inline citations to show where particular (and not commonly known) claims come from. Further, the current references listed are a short journal article and a short magazine article. Perhaps there are additional reputable sources that have been left out. 06 Jan 2007

This article reads like a critical essay, not an encyclopedia. The subject matter deserves better treatment. --JD79 02:12, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

A lot of this seems to be original research and just attacks on the GI bill. Maybe this should be merged with the main article for GI bill? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 116135 (talk • contribs) 20:15, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

Possibly of interest is this page from the Kinsey report (which is how I got here). 91% of black college attendees had some military service vs. 57% of white college attendees. This suggested to me that the GI Bill was quite influential in getting blacks in to college. --152.2.62.27 (talk) 19:10, 11 February 2011 (UTC)

Agree This article doesn't belong in an encyclopedia at all. Johnnylm (talk) 05:04, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Strongly disagree, this article definitely needs to be part of Wikipedia, ignoring the unequal access to the benefits of the GI bill would leave out a significant part of the story. I do see how including it in the main article on the GI bill makes sense.Pearl2525 (talk) 23:46, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

except blacks received more educational benefit than whites did. The data shows 91% of black college students were GI bill and 57% of white students were. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 108.18.76.56 (talk) 16:21, 7 October 2014 (UTC)

Where do I start?

1. The title of the article is "African-Americans and the G.I. Bill" how is it biased to focus on African-Americans in an article about African-Americans?
2. Saying that 91% of African-American in collage vs. 57% of whites got benefits meanigless; it does not account for how many black were deliberately excluded for getting benefit of the G.I. Bill in the first, which was over 80%.
3. In absolute numbers if every back person alive at the time was in collage that would have meant 9% of overall population where blacks getting aid for collage; for whites that would be 51.2% of the over all population. However, since we know that only 3.6% of blacks actually got a collage education that means 0.36% of the overall population where black in collage getting benefits.
4. 80% of blacks who APPLIED got denied, however there is no figure for the number who where not able to even get that far in the process because of other obsolesces imposed on them by the army and other people in power.
5. As result of 200 years of slavery followed by 60 years of jim crow, exclusion from unions, etc. Black were significantly poorer than whites, so fewer of them would have been able to fund their education. By contrast whites had benefited from the government's efforts to build a middle class so they were able to accumulate more wealth and fund their own education.

Also, how is talking about the unequal access to the benefits of the G.I. Bill black soldier who had severed in the arm forces had an attack on the G.I. Bill? What is the expectation; that anything ugly about US history should be not talked about or if it is it's an attack on the perpetrators? Lastly in what way is this subject not worthy of being included in wikipedia? Hate to break it to you but black history IS american history. Pearl2525 (talk) 00:02, 8 June 2015 (UTC)

Agree that this subject is completely worth including in WP. The question here is whether this is the way to do it. It has survived despite the challenges listed here for many years. However, should it be merged into G.I. Bill? Would that increase its audience? The subject is already discussed there. That material copies much of what is in this one. Why do we need both? Wouldn't we be just as well served with a redirect? Lfstevens (talk) 06:49, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Absent dissent I will shortly redirect this to the main article. Lfstevens (talk) 06:49, 15 December 2015 (UTC)

Bias would be omitting this information from Wikipedia. The G.I. Bill changed everything for Italian Americans; why didn't it do the same for African Americans, who also served in WWII? Because it wasn't implemented fairly. That's important. We're talking about huge numbers of people making it, or not making it, into the middle class. As for making this article part of the section on Racial Discrimination in the main article, I think that's a good idea, as long as all the information makes it in. It's only a few paragraphs, after all, and I think making people click on that one extra link makes it that much less likely that people will read it. Rosekelleher (talk) 14:28, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

I strongly agree that this article is biased. The GI Bill and VA's implementation thereof are and always were race and gender blind. The fact that some education or mortgage institutions were not does not mean that the GI Bill is biased. That notion is a false equivalence. Ews25 (talk) 17:11, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

References

Merging into G.I. Bill

Is there a reason why this article is separate from the G.I. Bill article proper, but never even mentioned there aside from in "see also"? I would argue that this article should be merged with the G.I. Bill article, as it is simply one more (and important) aspect of that subject. At minimum, there should be a subject on the racist impact of the G.I. Bill in the G.I. Bill article. Sanderphi (talk) 14:13, 22 June 2015 (UTC)

I agree that it should be merged. Snooganssnoogans (talk) 23:41, 2 July 2020 (UTC)