Congressman Seth Moulton, who grew up in Marblehead and served four tours in Iraq as a Marine after 9-11, says he wouldn’t be on Capitol Hill today if it weren’t for the GI Bill, which helped pay for his graduate studies at Harvard.
Moulton has written the GI Restoration Bill to make sure the descendents of Black World War II veterans denied their GI Bill benefits due to systemic racism get the same support.
“If you’re the granddaughter of a Black World War II veteran who did not get the GI benefits that he earned, you can now go to school with the government’s help,” Moulton said recently during a Zoom program with the Marblehead Racial Justice Team.
The GI Bill was signed into law in 1941 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, offering a range of benefits to veterans, including low-cost mortgages and low-interest loans to start a business or farm, unemployment compensation and education assistance. These loans were regularly denied to Black veterans due to racism at the time.
In New York and New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 1% of the mortgages insured by the GI Bill went to Black borrowers after the war, according to Moulton. In Mississippi in 1947, only two of the more than 3,200 home loans administered by the Veterans Administration went to Black borrowers.
“Way, way, way less than 1%, which is just shocking,” Moulton said.
He added, “As a result, so many Black families have been denied the two primary post-war vehicles for wealth accumulation and rising up the income ladder: home ownership and an education. That’s not just an injustice to Black veterans but to Black families. It’s a generational injustice.”
The racial wealth gap in greater Boston in 2023 is staggering: The median net worth for white households was $250,000 while for Black households it was $8, according to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office.
Moulton conceded that it has been an uphill battle to win Republican support for his GI Restoration Bill. He doesn’t yet know what it would cost.
However, “the relatively large price tag on this legislation is just a measurement of the size of this injustice, and that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t correct it,” he said.
Moulton continued, “This is not my generation’s fault, but it is my generation’s opportunity to correct this historic injustice and do right by our American values.”
Moulton’s GI Restoration Bill would do the following:
— Extend access to the Post-911 GI Bill education assistance benefits to the surviving spouse and certain direct descendants of Black World War II veterans alive at the time of enactment.
— Require a Government Accountability Office report outlining the number of individuals who received the educational and housing benefits.
— Establish a “blue-ribbon panel” of independent experts to study inequities in the distribution of benefits and assistance administered to female and minority members of the armed forces and provide recommendations on additional assistance to repair those inequities.
To learn more about the Marblehead Racial Justice Team, visit https://tinyurl.com/37sh498p. To watch Moulton’s remarks, go to youtube.com/watch?v=V2zmh_3RJNc.
Editor Leigh Blander is an experienced TV, radio and print journalist.