A Black Woman’s Activism in Postwar (West) Germany

This post is part of our forum on “Black Women’s Activism in the African Diaspora.” 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Allied forces stationed troops in various European nations, including more than 1.5 million GIs in Germany. Among these soldiers were white and Black American military service members. One result of this occupation/liberation was that—despite an initial anti-fraternization law—the US Army soon realized that its military service personnel and local women did fraternize, including “sex across the color line.” These relationships covered the whole spectrum from sexual violence to consensual sex and love relationships. They were regarded as a social taboo in West Germany and in the United States, where many states still enforced “anti-miscegenation” laws. Some of these relationships resulted in mixed-race babies; the first being born as early as the end of 1945. They literally stood out for their skin color that unmistakably communicated the context of their paternity. Between the mid-1940s and late 1950s, approximately 5,000 Black German children were born to local white women and Black American men. Of course, thousands of “war babies,” “GI babies,” and “occupation children” were born, but among them, despite their relatively low number, the Black German children attracted considerable attention.

Most of these children grew up and remained in Germany, while others were adopted by Black American couples and emigrated to the United States. There was no official policy or official endorsement of transnational adoption to the US by the German government or the American military. Instead early instances of what is now known as international adoption were highly unregulated and facilitated by the activism of private American citizens, particularly by a Black American woman, Mabel Grammer. In my research, I explore the histories of these early international adoptees. I argue that adoption is deeply political, intersecting with national belonging, immigration and citizenship, configurations of race, changing notions of family and parenthood, as well as the struggle for civil rights.

In the United States, those who took an interest in these children were mobilized by racial liberalism and by the burgeoning civil rights movement. The Black freedom struggle had become more vocal and visible in the late 1940s and early 1950s, not least due to the experiences of Black GIs and their service during the war and the early Cold War, and major goals of the movement were full citizenship rights and desegregation. For many Black American couples interested in adopting a German child, this was a political decision. They regarded these children as members of a transnational Black community and they warned against the legacy of fascism in Germany and what this might mean for Afro-German children. They also turned to German children because transnational adoption sometimes proved easier than navigating the domestic adoption landscape with social work standards that historically discriminated against poor and Black families.

Americans learned about the existence of Afro-German children from Black media outlets. The Pittsburgh Courier launched a series of articles on what it called the “brown babies” in the mid-1940s. They wer written by Percival Leroy Prattis who reported extensively on the experiences of Black military service men in a segregated army. In a piece in April 1949, Prattis informed his readers that “German ‘Brown Babies’ really need your help.” A week later, writing “Would you like to help one of the brown babies?,” Prattis pointed to the uncertain future multiracial children might face in a country that had just demonstrated its deadly obsession with racial purity. “What might some future Hitler do to rid the nation of this dark minority which belies the claim of the purity of the German people? Would this minority be exterminated? The German people have demonstrated that they are capable of such an act,” wrote Prattis. He goes on to note that many soldiers vanished after they had learned that their partners were pregnant; some because they were married, or they had never supported a family before, others because they were bewildered by the thought of returning home South with a white wife and mixed-race child. Prattis argued that Germans could not determine whether “Negro America cares.” In order to demonstrate that Black Americans did care, he encouraged his readership to send care packages and donations to support the children and their mothers as a means of showing responsibility for the Black soldier’s actions. The response to these articles was overwhelming and it was readers who inquired about adopting the children.

One vocal proponent of adoption to the US was Mabel Grammer, a former journalist for the Baltimore Afro-American and the wife of Oscar Grammer, a GI stationed in Germany. Grammer came to Mannheim in 1951 to accompany her husband. Soon after her arrival, Grammer (who could not have children of her own) went to an orphanage where, in her words, she found herself surrounded by Black German children pleading “I want a mummy!”¹ The couple eventually adopted twelve children over the course of the next decade. In the tradition of the Black women’s club movement, Grammer began to organize aid and acted as an “unofficial ambassador.” Through her volunteer activism on behalf of Black German children, she helped to promote American ideals and “soften” the appearance of the occupation. She also used her contacts at the Afro-American to publicize the situation of Black German children and to reach out to prospective adoptive parents in the Black American community. Hence she came up with a private adoption scheme she called the “Brown Baby Plan.”

Grammer’s articles in the Afro-American featured photographs, names, and addresses of “Germany’s brown babies” and she encouraged families to adopt them. They had to submit proof of financial stability to the paper, a letter of recommendation from their employer or pastor, and agree to have their story featured in the newspaper. Based on these criteria, Grammer selected prospective adoptive parents (though having no social work training at all) and facilitated the adoption in Germany in cooperation with local German youth welfare offices. The children Grammer adopted as a proxy for the new parents waiting in the US immigrated under the Refugee Relief Act. Prior to their leaving, many were brought to an orphanage in Mannheim and then flown to the US on Scandinavian Airlines at a reduced rate. Couples who were eager, and had the means, to help bring a child from war-torn Europe could demonstrate several things; that they cared deeply about a transnational Black community; that they were able and willing to commit to humanitarian activism and welcome strangers (the children were half-German, after all) into their homes. They performed responsible citizenship that valued parenthood, and they demonstrated responsibility for the actions of the soldiers stationed abroad.

Mabel Grammer herself described her motives as follows: “Being in Europe has made me appreciate the privilege of being an American more than ever and I made up my mind that as many of these children as possible should have that privilege. These children aren’t going to have silks and satins, but they will have good decent American homes and parents.” She considered it a privilege to grow up as an American and to be adopted by an American (military) family. Her patriotic stance might seem surprising at a time of segregation and disenfranchisement back home, yet for Grammer, her activism was also a civil rights issue, a means to overcome the discriminatory practices of domestic adoption agencies.

Confronted with images of the normative American family (white, middle-class, with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker), family for African Americans became exactly the site where inequalities (housing and education discrimination, low paid jobs, exclusion from the GI Bill etc.) were painfully experienced, especially during the early years of the Cold War when paternity meant responsible citizenship. Through her adoption efforts, Grammer therefore exposed the classed, gendered, and raced notions of this family ideal. She considered her adoption advocacy as an act of racial responsibility and “colored solidarity.” In the absence of official adoption records, it is impossible to determine the number of adoptions Grammer facilitated—maybe a couple hundred.

Black American (military) families, though largely absent from the historiography of international adoption, have been key figures in the early instances of transnational and transracial adoption, often acting upon an implicit understanding of “colored solidarity.” Black families’ efforts and the discourses within the larger Black American community add another chapter to the scholarship that seeks to internationalize the civil rights movement. Moreover, while the activism of Black women in East and West Germany since the 1960s, such as Angela Davis and Audre Lorde, has received considerable attention, their experiences in the immediate aftermath of World War II are not fully explored yet. Focusing on Mabel Grammer, a Black woman who acted upon patriotism and “race pride,” also means centering the experience of Black women in postwar West Germany and the United States. It also shows that the construction of the normative postwar American family was a deeply political category and that especially Black Americans were acutely aware of the classed and racialized nature of said powerful notion.

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