Breath of Freedom (Broadview Films, Hanns Wolters International, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, June 12) KPBS showed a couple of movies about so-called “buffalo soldiers,” African-Americans who served in segregated military units starting in the Civil War and ending with World War II. They got that nickname from the Native Americans they fought against during the 19th century, who thought the nappy hair on their heads made them look like upright buffaloes, and while I missed the first movie I got to see a quite interesting documentary called Breath of Freedom about the experiences of African-American servicemembers during World War II and its aftermath. It was made in 2014 (one giveaway that it was an older movie was that John Lewis was named as the last surviving speaker at the 1963 March on Washington; he’s died since, though at least two of the musical performers at the March, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, still survive) and was written and directed by Dag Freyer. I suspect it was a German production because the director’s name sounds either German or Scandinavian, and though the production company has the bland Anglo name “Broadview Films,” its imdb.com page designates the “sales representative” as “Hanns Wolters International.” The basic theme of this movie is that the African-American experience in World War II helped kick-start the postwar civil rights movement, at least in part because African-American servicemembers who served in the occupation force in Germany in the late 1940’s (between the fall of Hitler’s regime in 1945 and the establishment of the West German state in 1949) found themselves treated with a surprising level of humanity. During the war a lot of people noted the irony between the principal enemy, Germany, being a racist regime (and a proudly and unashamedly racist regime, at that, with a program of genocide against people considered “racially inferior” by their looney-tunes ideology) and the American armed forces still being racially segregated.

A number of African-American veterans interviewed for the program recalled that, having grown up in the North, they weren’t ready for the openness of Southern racism at its fullest when they were sent to Army bases in the South (many of them still bearing the names of Confederate generals, as if the Civil War either had never ended or had the opposite outcome). One veteran recalled having to stand in a bus for 100 miles rather than take a seat in the front, which were of course reserved for white patrons only. Another said he overheard a white man say, “Here come some of those Pennsylvania niggers. We’re going to have to teach them a lesson to make them properly subservient.” (One thing I applaud Dag Freyer and whoever worked with him on the English-language version of this documentary is that they didn’t censor the so-called “‘N’-word.” Sometimes you have to put the full ugliness of racism on display to make the point against it.) One servicemember recalled being physically beaten, and another who’d been a Black MP remembered an incident in which he and his unit arrested white soldiers – and then a company of white MP’s tried to take custody of the arrestees. When the Black MP’s refused to give them up, a larger group of white MP’s literally fired at them at random. During the actual war, Black units were kept from the front lines because the racist thinking of the time was that Blacks were only suitable for support roles, including making sure the front-line troops were kept supplied. The film mentioned the legendary Tuskegee Airmen, who were reluctantly trained as combat pilots despite a 1925 study supposedly “proving” that Black people weren’t intelligent enough to fly planes. It also mentioned that during the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans’ surprise counter-attack in Belgium in late 1944, Black soldiers supposedly confined to “support” roles actually got to participate in combat and fire at the enemy because they had to; the white commanders needed all the cannon fodder they could muster. Alas, once the battle was won the African-American soldiers who had fought so courageously and had been instrumental in the victory were bounced back to “support” roles again.

One of the most significant interviewees was Charles Evers, civil rights activist since the 1960’s and brother of Medgar Evers, who led the Mississippi chapter of the NAACP in the early 1960’s until he was killed. The Evers brothers were unusually close, and Charles (along with Medgar’s widow, Myrlie Evers) continued the work after Medgar was murdered by a white supremacist fertilizer salesman and White Citizens’ Council and Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963. All-white juries deadlocked in De La Beckwith’s first two trials in 1964 and it wasn’t until 30 years later in a third trial that De La Beckwith was finally convicted. Breath of Freedom included archival interviews with Medgar Evers himself in which he talked about the threats on his life he received on an ongoing basis, as well as retrospective interviews with Charles Evers, who talked about how though they served in different theatres in World War II (Medgar served in Germany and Charles in the Pacific), the experience bonded them closer than ever and made them even more determined to push the struggle for racial equality in postwar America. In addition to the African-American interviewees, the film featured at least one African-German, Theodor Michael, who recalled having been born in Germany and living through the Nazi years. The Nazis’ racial policies banned Black people from most job, but Michael made a living as – of all things – an actor in the Nazi-controlled German film industry. They were making big movies about the white man’s burden and the “injustice” done to Germany when they were stripped of their African colonies after World War I, and the Nazi producers needed Black actors to play the “savages” in “darkest Africa” who needed the Germans to redeem and rule them.

Also, a number of African-American servicemembers stationed in postwar occupied Germany started dating German women and had children with them, with various results. Black American servicemember Harold Linton married his German girlfriend Ingrid and lived with her for years in both Germany and the U.S., but Charles Vernon Johnson decided he couldn’t function in a U.S. that still banned interracial marriages in all 50 states, so he left his partner and their daughter behind to return to the U.S. and become an attorney specializing in civil-rights cases. Perhaps the most poignant story of this type in the film was that of Elvira Rypacek, who was abandoned by her Black American servicemember father after the war and didn’t trace him until 2012 (their reunion is shown in the film). The show also featured interviews with the great African-American jazz singer Jon Hendricks and another Black jazz musician, trumpeter Joe McPhee; Hendricks returned to the U.S. and had a major career (including working with two white singers, Dave Lambert and Annie Ross, in the Lambert, Hendricks and Ross vocal trio in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s) while McPhee stayed in Germany and pursued his career there because he didn’t want to have to deal with American racism. The end of the story is familiar: the progress of the civil rights movement through the 1960’s and the 1963 March on Washington (at which one veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen was sitting on top of the Lincoln Memorial as a spotter, tasked with observing the crowd below and radioing for help in case he saw people getting out of line), and the final footage of retired General Colin Powell signing copies of his autobiography – the message that, at least in 2014, anti-Black racism had receded enough that not only had a Black American become head of the entire U.S. military but another African-American, Barack Obama, had become president of the entire country, seemed like a final victory, though as Obama left office and was replaced by the openly and proudly racist Donald Trump the “final victory” this film presents seems neither as victorious nor as final as it’s presented here.