BONUS: Black GIs and their "Brown Babies"
Bad Women: The Blackout Ripper
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2022
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, it's Jane Marie, back with a brand new season of the dream. |
| 0:06.6 | And after the gnarly couple of years we've all had, have you noticed that suddenly everyone's |
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| 0:19.4 | So this season we're gonna try that by talking to the experts, those gurus, those guides. |
| 0:24.4 | Yes, I'm talking about life coaches. |
| 0:27.6 | I'm talking to one about my messed up life. |
| 0:31.1 | We're gonna see what all the hype is about and if it's worth it. |
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| 1:04.9 | Pushkin. |
| 1:13.3 | I have a distant memory of being in a car, right, and that was by my first car trip. |
| 1:22.9 | Leon Lomax was just three years old when dressed in a red English-made suit and cap. |
| 1:28.9 | He'd flown unaccompanied across the Atlantic and arrived on U.S. soil. |
| 1:34.2 | He was traveling light, carrying nothing but a toy and his night clothes. |
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