Brown Babies

brown babies, the offspring of white European women and African American soldiers during and immediately after World War II (1939–45). At that time the term brown babies was popularized in the African American press, which published a series of human interest stories on the topic.

Because romantic and sexual contact between Black men and white women was largely taboo in the U.S. during that period, the presence of brown babies challenged prevailing American attitudes. The U.S. military had attempted to maintain the racial status quo that existed in the United States for troops overseas. (The armed services themselves were not desegregated until 1948, when Pres. Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981.) While the U.S. military worked to cover up the subject, the Black press in the United States broadcast the issue to its readership. Especially in the South—where Jim Crow laws and segregation were part of daily life—brown babies garnered much interest.

But military policies held firm. In the United Kingdom and Italy, for example, African American GIs were rarely allowed to marry the mothers of their children, and in Germany interracial marriage was simply forbidden, though German women bore the greatest number of brown babies. Indeed, after Germany regained sovereignty in 1955, many of those involved in interracial relationships were prosecuted. Some 5,000 such children are believed to have been born in Germany alone.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the War Department refused to provide to the mothers the addresses of the GIs who had fathered their babies, and U.S. adoption agencies were largely unwilling to become involved. Moreover, the U.S. military resisted efforts by African American soldiers to establish their position as fathers of the children. Ultimately the babies who were not adopted by African American families became the responsibility of their mothers’ home countries. In the years that followed, those biracial and bicultural children endured the difficult process of assimilation into their respective European societies.