Unlike white GIs, it was made virtually impossible for African-American servicemen to marry the women they met and fell in love with in the UK during World War Two. If these couples had children, those so-called "Brown Babies" were stigmatized and scorned - with many ending up in grim children's homes.
Pausing the story of the Blackout Ripper - this episode examines the experiences of those Black GIs, their white partners and two "Brown Babies" - Leon Lomax and Terry Harrison - who have both spent decades trying to piece together their family histories.
Professor Lucy Bland's work can be seen here: http://www.mixedmuseum.org.uk/brown-babies
Further reading:
Bland, Lucy. Britain's 'Brown Babies': The stories of children born to black GIs and white women in the Second World War. (Manchester University Press), 2019
Osur, Alan. Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II. (Office of Air Force History), 1977
Schindler, David and Westcott, Mark ‘Shocking Racial Attitudes: Black G.I.s in Europe’, The Review of Economic Studies. (University of Oxford), 2021
Pushkin. I have a distant memory of being in a car bridon that was part my first car trip. Leon Loo Max was just three years old when dressed in a red English made suit and cap. He'd flown unaccompanied across the Atlantic and arrived on US soil. He was traveling light, caring nothing but a toy and his nightclothes, and when he arrived he was something of a celebrity. They said that I was more handsome than Joe Lewis, and everybody looked up to Joe Lewis because he beat Max Smelling, I think for the world championship in boxing. Leon's arrival was big news. Brown baby adopted. The Pittsburgh Courier, the foremost African American paper, jubilantly declared the white news press they weren't so excited about it, but the black news media was excited because it had to do Black soldiers. The Courier coined the term brown babies to describe children of mixed ethnic heritage who had been born to African American soldiers and white European women during and just after the Second World War. It's estimated that there were two thousands so called brown babies, and Leon was reportedly the first to be brought to live within American couple. He had spent some of his early years in a children's home, which was all too common for children born into his circumstances. But around nineteen forty eight, and after repeated attempts, Leon's father was finally given the green light to bring his son over to Ohio, Leon embarked on a new life. A happy ending was not assured, however, and trouble was already brewing. I'm Hallie Rubbin. Hold you're listening to bad women the Blackout Ripper. We're used to the romantic tales of dashing American soldiers who fell in love and married British girls, the gi brides, But in this bonus episode will focus on the less well explored experience of women who fell not for white but for black American soldiers, and how segregation, racism, and prejudice blighted the lives of their children. In early nineteen forty two, the first American troops arrived on the shores of Northern Ireland to join the fight against Nazi Germany. Several thousand gis and a small number of nurses too. According to Sir Archibald Sinclair, who greeted these soldiers on behalf of the British government. Their arrival marked a new stage in the World War and a gloomy portent for Hitler. Around three million American servicemen would eventually pass through the UK over the course of the war, and hundreds of thousands of them were African American. Many of those African American soldiers came from states in the South, where they were subject to statutes that legalized racial segregation, known as the Jim Crow Laws, and that segregation followed these soldiers into the army. Black troops were placed in separate barracks, They ate away from white troops, and they had their own blood banks, so that even on the operating table, the races would not mix. The US Army imported this injustice to the UK. Black eyes aren't allowed to bear arms in Britain. They do all the dirty work, really, they do the driving, the cooking, the cleaning. This is Lucy Bland, a professor of social and cultural history an Anglio Ruskin University and an expert on the history of interracial relationships in Great Britain. I think people often drawn to things that relate to their own lives. My father married a woman from Guyana he left my mother, so they were in a mixed relationship. Her daughter from her first husband is black. I have an adopted daughter from Guatemala. So mixedness, both interracial relations and mixedness as an identity, are there in my own family. So I was kind of interested in that already. Lucy found an interview the children of black Gies and white British women for her book Britain's Brown Baby. For many of them, people like Leon Lomax, it was the first time they'd shared their stories. What was so incredible is that many of them said, look, I haven't told anybody this. It's so great to have someone who's really interested in my story. Lucy's research also showed just how rigorously the US Army enforced Jim Crow style segregation, not only inside but outside its basis in the UK. So clearly they are doing different jobs and they live in different barracks, but also areas of leisure like pubs and dances. They segregate those and certain towns out of bands. And the rationale is the tension over the black gis having relations with the white women. Britains certainly had its own history of racism, but it didn't have such official and overt policies of segregation. The Brits are are she often quite appalled by this segregation. Not that the British aren't racist, but they are quite horrified by the avert racist attitudes in the way that they are kept apart like that. Still, no official stand was taken against segregation by the British, and sometimes the need to maintain good relations with a crucial ally meant that the policy was enforced de facto by the British people. Royotley, a black American war correspondent, noted that when the manager of a restaurant was questioned about refusing service to a black soldier, he had a ready answer. White Americans had warned him they would boycott his place if people of color were served there. At the same time, black troops were often received warmly by the locals in towns and villages where they were posted. And they ask, you know, about attitudes towards the Americans, and they do say, you know, actually, those black Americans are much nicer than the whites, who just sort of go on at us about having pathetic little houses and we don't have radios and we don't have proper cars, and we don't have this, that and the other. It would be wrong to oversimplify race relations. But on the whole, British people said they found the black soldiers to be kinder and more courteous than their white counterparts, who seemed comparatively conceited and boastful. White British women in particular embraced the black gis, and not just for their good manners. They knew the Lindi Hart which came from Harlem, because there were some who were coming from New York, and they also brought their bands, and I think the women really enjoy this, So I think it's hard for us to appreciate that. In the forties the main leisure pursuit four young women was dancing, which was cheap and something they did on a regular basis young unmarried women. So the black eyes on the whole would dance much better than the white gies. They knew the moves, so yeah, I think that was part of the attraction. Dances would be held for black gis on one evening and then for white gis on another, and they were fertile ground for budding robe mants. So there are quite a lot of interracial relationships we know. But some families were very hostile on local people hostile. Some were more accepting of this. It really depended, but I think generally there was this idea that you had to draw the line and that you know, actually it was all very well then being friendly towards them, but you don't necessarily want them to go a step further. And the women had relationships and had babies with them, this was thought to be beyond the pale. For its part, the British government tried to discourage these relationships too. It compiled suggestions for ways of keeping black g eyes and white women apart, but then marked the document top secret and stored it away under lock and key. The British couldn't afford to be too closely aligned with America's racial segregation, for such a move would surely enraged the millions of people of color who were fighting alongside them for victory. But in some cases Britain did use emergency wartime laws to prosecute luckless young women found with black gis on actual US basis. Nonetheless, relationships continued to form. They probably met at a dance or you know, some type of social event like most of the gis did, but you know the women over in England at the time. Leon Lomax was told little about his parents' courtship, and I don't know how long they were together, what the circumstances were, but he knew the family, and the family knew him because they used to call him Maxie. My last name is Lomax, so that's probably just was a nickname of him. But they knew about him, and he must have had some kind of interaction with the rest of the family. Leon's or Corporal Oscar Leon Lomax, or Leon Senior, already had a wife and child back home in Ohio when he met Leon's mother, Maude Leon was born in December nineteen forty five, after Leon Senior had returned to the United States. American servicemen had to get permission from an invariably white commanding officer to marry their girlfriends. While white giys were often granted such approval, black soldiers were generally denied it, and sometimes they weren't even given the opportunity to say goodbye to their partners before they were shipped out. Thirty US states also still had anti missignation laws that forbade interracial marriage, and so when they departed Britain at the end of the war, the US Army left a raft of bereft single mothers in its wake. Financial and social pressures often meant that these women weren't able to keep their baby. This was the case for Leon Lomax's mother, Maud, who ultimately had to surrender her son to a children's home. Young single women who might be living at home, they will get pressure not only from their parents and their relatives, but often from a local priest or the mother and baby hern They often sent to mother and baby homes who would try and get this child off them. Many mothers tried to keep their babies for as long as possible, but childcare facilities could refuse to take children of mixed ethnic background, and without childcare it was virtually impossible to work and earn the necessary living to support oneself in one's child. Very few of these children were then adopted. Adoption societies assumed that no one would want to take them, and even though there was a long standing Black community in Britain, little effort was made to find black couples or families who might be interested in adoption. Either many babies will bounced between foster families and like lyon they ended up in children's institutions, some of which categorize them as handicapped simply because of the color of their skin. Unsurprisingly, such homes did little to nurture the happiness and well being of these children. You don't have a sense of being loved, you don't know what a family is, you don't experience that. And then they just get thrown out effectively, and they don't know how to live in the world. They get no preparation for that. Some of them become homeless, some go to prison. Those homes were pretty awful. I mean all the kids there will just hit all the time in the face and completely uncalled for behavior by quite sadistic people because I think actually some of these homes attracted people who probably had no skills, no training, wasn't very well paid, and they had power to do what they liked. Some of the stories are horrendous. Over in the US, Leon Senior had confessed to his wife Betty that he had a child in England. She told the Pittsburgh Courier about that conversation. He said, I've been gone a long time, about three years. That's a long time for a fellow to be away from his wife. In the meantime, I met a girl. I was very lonesome. So what I'm trying to say is that there's to be a child. Betty. You don't have to answer right now, but would you agree to take this child? Betty grappled with this dilemma. Inside her, a private war was being waged. She said, My job and friends kept me busy all day, but at night, whenever I was alone, I did a lot of thinking. I knew that a divorce was out of the question. Besides, there was the other son to think about. If I ever felt any resentment, my husband never knew. Eventually, in early nineteen forty six, Betty told her husband she would welcome the child. His honesty, she said, had impressed her. He was surprised, but it made him happy. We wrote to the British Embassy, the American Red Cross, the American State Department, with no results. Then we thought up another idea bad women will be back after this short break. They started the search for me because I guess they lost contact with my mother in England and so they didn't really know where I was. What children's homar was in or anything. So they happened to see something. I don't know where. They saw this in a newspaper or magazine or something. There was a doctor wingate in Sussex. I believe that asked the question, why didn't the US soldiers, they are the black soldiers come and get their children. So they got a hold of him and he helped locate where I was. So that's where the process started of getting me to America. That process took three years and cost the equivalent of thousands of dollars, but at last, Leon Junior was on his way to the United States. When his new parents arrived at LaGuardia Airport, they found him playing with staff in the immigration office. I thought he was the most adorable little boy, said Betty. It was New Year's Day and hopes were high that a happy new chapter was beginning in Leon's life. The Lomaxes appear to be the perfect family, brimming with love and doating on the new addition to their formed but behind closed doors, the cracks quickly began to appear. My case was unusual because Mum decided that she would not give us a way. She decided to keep us this is Terry Harrison, And here was an issue because at that time my stepfather An now her real husband, was still away fighting. Of course, when he returned, how you can imagine the bombshell which she was only natural likely on. Terry and his twin sister, Susan were born to a white British mother and a black gi father, but unlikely on the pair stayed with their mother. She was already married, but her husband, Charlie, was somewhat surprised by the arrival of two new children while he was away at war. Eventually, Charlie moved out of the family home. He'd visit his own children every day, but Terry and Susan were a constant and unwelcome reminder of his wife's infidelity, so he kept them at arm's length because he found it very difficult to accept and as a result my sister in our relationship with it was not as it should be. But it wasn't hateful or bitter. It was just a lack of love and caring and warmth. He came in the house and what have you, but it was as though we weren't there. We were the ghosts, but he didn't see us there. Terry Susan and their mother Edna lived in the pleasant country village of Gadsby, but life for them was far from picture perfect. Charlie wasn't the only person to shun them. Many of my mum's peers would often rilicule her for having brown babies. Mum did suffer and that affected me in some respects because I always stuck up for Mum. When Terry and his mother walked down the street, the villagers shouted racist slurs and menacingly banged on trashcam lids. Some crossed the street to avoid the boy. Close relatives were cruel too. Terry's aunts and uncles treated the young twins with utter disdain and constantly reproached Edna for bringing the children into the family. There was a lot of redemment and anger towards Mum. She came through that, but she cared about Susan and I are the way we would react because as we got a little older, we began to realize that we were different only by skin color. Because basically being brought up in a white family, it became difficult, certainly for me to understand why people were calling me different names, which I didn't really understand. And they used to sort of do dances of going back to Africa. But we didn't understand. We didn't know, but we knew by the tone. It wasn't a very nice thing. Feeling white but constantly reminded of the color of his skin, Terry struggled with his identity and felt a profound sense of dislocation when we went to school. Even I remember some of the school teachers, and they were white school teasues. I remember sometimes they used to talk about Africa and painting faces and doing dances. I remember once they wanted to see an African dance and the teacher pointed to me for some reason and could you dance? And I didn't know what an African dance were like, but nevertheless I did it what I thought it was. But they're the thing that I remember. What why? Why? Me? But Edna's love remained strong and it was a source of comfort amid the hostility. My mother never saw color even when we issue used to or say Terry and to my Susan, and I love you so much, and that was all I wanted, as we all do, want to be of love and caring, and so I had a great respect for mum and she stood at a ground, the very strong lady. All the same, Terry felt that something was missing, that there was a part of himself he needed to examine and explore. I wanted to know who was my father, and she mentioned that he was a black American black and GII. But I had no role model. I didn't have a dad, And at that stage in my life, I began to look at black role models as famous people like Winniver at Well, the great singers and the great sportsman Jesse Oriens because they were black and there so I was some common denominator. I began to feel some kind of empathy with them. And all of most of them were from the United States, so insecretly I used to think they're good old United States because them days, you never had any black figures in books. There's all white. Terry excelled at sports and when he left school he joined the Royal Marines, married and had a family of his own. Still there was always that nagging question in the back of his mind, that sense of something missing. Who was his real father. When Edna passed away in nineteen sixty five, Terry got closer to an answer, cleaning out one of her old drawers, he came across a photograph, a picture of a gravestone bearing the name John Lars Hendrix. Why had she held on to this old snapshot? Could Hendrix possibly be his father? According to the Pittsburgh Courier, Leon Lomax's arrival in the United States represented the pinnacle of a woman's sincere love for her x GI husband. It's a story of patience and devotion, a story that is climaxed by a happy ending, even though it had a surprise beginning back in the middle of nineteen forty five. But the story was far from over, and for Leon, settling into life in Fremont, Ohio was tough. I don't know how soon I developed asthma after I got to the United States, but at one point I thought I was going to die because I couldn't breathe. I missed my whole first year of school because of asthma. I think that was just due to stress. Despite his efforts to bring about the adoption, Leon's father was often cold and distant with the boy. His stepmother, who struggled with Leon's presence in the family home, could also be cruel. I think she was fine whether at first, but my father was always a philander and he always had other women the day she died, basically, and he wasn't around a lot, but she was the one that was around me most of the time. So I noticed a change when I was probably in about the third grade or second grade. I noticed a change in her that she seemed like she was a little bit more strict with me. One aunt told me that she was kind of taken out on me what she felt about my father, And I think she felt resentful that, you know, she had sacrificed so much to be my stepmother and then he still was doing what he was doing. That's why I think she got sometimes physically hard. I was really angry as a child. I remember cutting my finger one time when she told me to go wash the dishes and I grabbed a knife and I stuck it into the front of the sink and the knife just slipped up my hand. I was seven years old at the time, so I had a lot of anger inside of me about just a lot of things. I think bad women will be back in just a moment. Leon's stepmother passed away when he was just eight years old, and he was shunted between relatives, living with his aunts and his grandmother. I had so much movement in my life, you know. I started out being abandoned if I'm a mother, And then when I got to the United States, my stepmother died when I was eight years old, So I only lived with my father and my stepmother for five years after I got here. And then my father left right after she died, so he abandoned me and left me with my relatives to be raised. So I was going through a process of a lot of change when I was younger. I think I was kind of a reticent of a lot of things and a lot of people. They said that I was reserved or shy or whatever, and I just didn't gravitate to a lot of people. Some of my cousins that always tease me in, you know, would just make fun of me. And I had a cousin of mine said that I was a mixed up mess. In spite of his cousin's jibes, his stepmother's coldness, his father's absence, and instability of constant upheaval, Leon is glad that his father brought him to the United States. Bringing me over to America, he gave me a sense of a family, whereas I might not have had that sense over in England. I might have been in a children's home for a long time, or foster care or foster parents or whatever, you know, throughout my life, so it would have been a lot different. So that's one thing I'm grateful to my father and my family here in America for. But as with Terry, there was always something missing for Leon. He never knew his mother, never understood why she gave him up to a children's home to strangers, and I always wondered why she didn't try to find me. Then as I got old her, i'd start raising my own family, and I just kind of put her, that thought of her to the side. Until I finished raising my family and I got almost fifty plus years old, I decided to find out who she was. And then after his father's death, Leon found a letter among his belongings. My mother was writing this letter to my dad stating that he had promised to financially support her with my birth and he didn't keep his promise, so she was struggling to keep me because she couldn't afford me. She was loving with her her mother. She says, I can't keep myself and Leon me on that amount. She was talking about some money that I guess he has already sent her. She said, I paid my mother what I owed her out of it, so there wasn't a lot left. You are as wrong as hell, she says, to think I want to get rid of him. I'm his mother and I love him very much, and I can't keep him. So there's a part in here where it says that she was changing my diaper or something, and I looked up at her and I smiled at her for the first time. It just kind of broke her heart that, you know, she had to give me up. This was a turning point for Leon. Understanding more about his mother and her struggles had a profound effect on him. This letter was so uplifting to my spirit and helped me define more about my mother and myself and everything in my life. I just wanted to talk to her. I just wanted to find out what she was going through. Leon also discovered that he had a half sister, Pauline. When he spoke to her on the phone for the first time, she was flawed. She had no idea that Leon was even out there. Pauline and Leon have since grown close, going to visit their mother's grave together and talking about the woman. Leon never knew. Stumbling upon that photo of a gravestone, the one bearing the name John Lars Hendricks, Terry Harrison knew he had to determine once and for all if he was connected to this man. I went and wrote to the American War Graves Commission to see if this man was related to me, and forgive me if I get emotional. Amazing one of the things that happened that this man was named Hendrix. When I worked to America Wargraves Commission, I got back a big envelope full of papers which has been burnt around the edges as it had been poured out of fire. And what it was. The American War Graves Center had been burnt down and the managed to retrieve this particular package. And in the package it was the way this man was died. And he died in a place called Butte Street in Wales, and he was shot by a white American policeman. But what was interesting within the parcel there was a letter of my mom's handwriting, and it was to the general conducting the court martial of the shooting, and it said did you know that John Larns Hendrix is the father of my two children? So that when I realized that this man must have been my father, and that was a great for me because it was a closure. And from then ARO went straight away to where he was buried, and that was quite emotional day, and there was had some kind of closure. But life is seldom so simple. Every year I went down to see his grave and it wasn't until a few years ago that I had an inquiry to do a DNA test. To Terry's shock, there was no correlation between his DNA and the of John Lars Hendricks. He wasn't Terry's father, I felt. I felt absolutely deflated and emotional. But it did point to another match, and it went to a person called vander Lee Ellis, and that was my father. He died in nineteen eighty five, so if I'd known that, I perhaps could have met him. But what was interesting I also found that he had several children, and thankfully, in a few weeks time, I'm going to meet two sisters in New Jersey and South Carolina, and that to me is amazing. So in June twenty twenty two, Terry packed his bags bordered a plane and crossed the Atlantic to meet his half sisters for the very first time. He sent us a voice note afterwards. It was just an amazing, amazing feeling. I couldn't wait to get inside the thousand greet my sister, and it's something I don't think anyone can explain. I waited so long. After seventy eight years, we see my sister for the first time, and that was dublicated when I'm out with the second sister. I think one of the most amazing moments was when I went to see my father's grave, even now just thinking about it and standing there, and it was such an emotional moment, not only me, but to have my two sisters alongside me. It was a very, very wonderful event and one that I shall never forget. The story of the so called Brown Babies is yet another grim chapter in a history of the Second World War. The cruelty and inhumanity of the segregation forced on black giyes, the hostility shown to the British women who fell in love with them, and then the vileness of the treatment meted out their innocent and bewildered offspring. For Terry Harrison, who's upbringing was so marred by hatred and prejudice. One lesson stands out from all. The most important thing is being good to others. That is crucial. Money means nothing to me. It's being good and treating people wherever there, whatever they're, what color they are, it doesn't matter. It's what's inside, because sooner or later we all end the same way. This bonus episode of Bad Women, The Blackout Ripper, was hosted by me Hallie Rubbinhold. It was written and produced by Courtney Guarno, Ryan Dilley, and Alice Fines. Pascal Wise Sound designed and mixed the show and composed all the original music. The show was recorded at Warder Studios by David Smith and Tom Berry