The Leroy Henry Case: Sexual Violence and Allied Relations in Great Britain, 1944
Abstract
In May 1944, just days before the D-Day invasion, an African-American soldier Leroy Henry was accused of raping a British woman in Bath. Before the case against Henry was resolved in an acquittal, it became an international cause célèbre and an embarrassing scandal for the U.S. military. The British press first brought the case to light, attacking the U.S. military for a miscarriage of justice. British civilians in the Bath region then took up Henry’s cause, running a grassroots petition campaign which produced 33,000 signatures for Henry’s reprieve. The case then caught the attention of the NAACP an ocean away in New York. The Henry case drew in diplomats, army officers, government officials, civilians and human rights activists on both sides of the Atlantic. In this way, the controversy reveals just how much race and sexuality were implicated in allied power relations, and central to the conduct of the war in Western Europe.
References
Cane, Lawrence, Fighting Fascism in Europe: The World War II Letters of an American Veteran of the Spanish Civil War. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.
Dyja, Thomas, Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008.
Gilmore, Glenda, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.
Moore, Christopher Paul, Fighting for America: Black Soldiers, the Unsung Heroes of World War II. New York: Ballantine Books, 2005.
Reynolds, David. Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain. London: Phoenix Press, 2000.
Roberts, Mary Louise. What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American GI in World War Two France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Rose, Sonya, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
Smith, Graham A. When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II Britain. London: Tauris, 1987.
Thorne, Christopher G. ed., Border Crossings: Studies in International History. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
Waldre, Christopher, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era. Lanham, MD: Rowan and Littlefield, 2009.
Webster, Wendy, Englishness and Empire, 1939-1965. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Wynn, Neil, The Afro American and the Second World War. New York: Holmes & Meier,1975.
