about the project

The Truman’s Kids: Truth & Reconciliation Project is the very first exploration in history of the long-term effect on military children of President Truman’s 1948 Executive Order integrating the United States military. Filmmaker Donna Musil has been collecting interviews and photographs about the topic for the past two decades.

In 2020, an integrated United States Armed Forces seems like a given, but in 1948, there was strong opposition. And it didn’t happen overnight. But as soon as the 1950s, military families of all races and religions were living next door to each other, going to school and church together, even dancing with and dating each other. Off base, some states still had anti-miscegenation laws. If a military child uttered a racial epithet on base, it was immediately reported to his military parent’s commanding officer, and he or she could be demoted because of it.

Racism continued, of course. Soldiers protested. Epithets and warnings about interracial dating were issued privately at dinner tables. Black and brown brats were prepared for the “real world” by their parents. But it is still today a very unique upbringing, racially, and has had a profound effect on military brats, often for the rest of their lives.

The Truman’s Kids: Truth & Reconciliation Project wants to know how this "grand experiment" has really fared? How did living in integrated neighborhood twenty years before the Civil Rights Movement affect brats over time? How different, if at all, have the experiences of white, black, brown, and other brats been? How has living outside one's country of origin (and being exposed to different cultures) as a child shaped them as adults? Are brats and TCKs different from more rooted individuals when it comes to race and religion? Does the influence last or fade away? What are some of the benefits and challenges of being raised in this type of racial environment, then moving into a sometimes more segregated “civilian” world? Can we learn something from this "grand experiment?" Can it be replicated in other contentious areas around the world?

These are just a few questions we will explore in the Truman’s Kids: Truth & Reconciliation Project. Here are a couple of excerpts about brats and race from Musil’s documentary, “BRATS: Our Journey Home”:

origins of the project

In 1997, BRAT/TCK filmmaker Donna Musil attended her first military brat reunion with a group of friends she had gone to high school with on a military base in Taegu (now Daegu), Korea. It was a small get-together. There were only ten students in her 1973 freshman class - all races and religions.

She describes this experience in Writing Out of Limbo: International Childhoods, Global Nomads, and Third-Culture Kids, a book of brat/TCK memoirs, edited by Gene H. Bell-Villada and Nina Sichel:

"I had gone to school in Taegu from 1973 to 1975, around the same time Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were exacting carnage on their Cambodian countrymen. Not that I was aware of the bloodbath. We had only one television channel—Armed Forces Radio & Television Service—and it broadcast just a couple of hours a day. The only program I remember seeing with any regularity was CBS’s 'Good Times' (1974), a situation comedy starring Esther Rolle and her 'Dy-no-mite' son Jimmy living in a Chicago public housing project.

The ten kids in my (entire) ninth-grade class didn’t care about television. We were too busy emulating the soldiers who lived a couple blocks away from our school on Camp Walker. While our parents sipped scotch at the Officers and NCO Clubs, we French-inhaled Kool cigarettes on the golf course to the tunes of Eric Clapton, roamed the fish markets with Parliament Funkadelic, and made out at the Teen Club to David Gates and Bread. We wore our hip-huggers low and our afros high. We sewed peace signs and Black Power fists on our jeans and jackets. It didn’t matter if we were black or white—we were equal opportunity rebels.

Within two weeks of my Internet discovery, I was eating bulgogi, Korean barbecue, and dancing cheek-to-cheek with these older and more subdued revolutionaries, while Al Green crooned 'Let’s Stay Together' (1971) at an impromptu reunion in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. We left the house once in four days, for sustenance, and barely slept. The more we talked, the more I realized that while we physically looked like Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, our experiences, insecurities, even our accents, were like the cookie-cutter houses in which we had grown up. I finally 'fit.' I had 'people!' I knew where I was 'from.' I wanted to snuggle up inside that warm cocoon and never leave.

Life goes on, of course, and even as we hugged and cried and promised to stay in touch, most of us didn’t. Still, it made a difference, knowing there were people in this world who knew me as a girl and accepted me as a woman, with all of my peculiarities and peccadilloes.

I also couldn’t shake the feeling that the weekend was somehow significant beyond me and my friends. If Taegu American High School was any indication, Truman’s Grand Experiment was a resounding success and military brats were a living study in race relations.

When I searched the Internet, however, there was no scientific study, no editorial opinion, no mention at all of how President Harry Truman’s Executive Order integrating the military in 1948 had affected its smallest and youngest research participants. I decided to explore the topic myself, to make a documentary about race relations and military children. I hadn’t picked up a camera professionally since college, but I was never one to let a little thing like practicality get in the way.

Musil’s documentary about brats and race eventually grew into the more all-encompassing film BRATS: Our Journey Home, about the life and legacies of growing up military, narrated by Kris Kristofferson. But she has continued to collect interviews, photographs, and other materials in an effort to document, for the first time in history, Truman’s Grand Experiment with military children!

the film

Truman's Kids is a documentary work-in-progress by BRATS: Our Journey Home filmmaker Donna Musil about the long-term effect on military children of President Truman's 1948 Executive Order integrating the United States military. Now it doesn't seem like a big deal, but back then, there was strong opposition.

Truman's Kids explores how this "grand experiment" has fared. How living in integrated neighborhood twenty years before the Civil Rights Movement has affected brats over time. How living outside one's country of origin as a child and being exposed to different cultures and religions has shaped them as adults. Are brats different from more rooted children when it comes to race and religion? What are their strengths and weaknesses? Can we learn something from this "grand experiment?" Can it be replicated in other contentious areas and arenas around the world?

THE dedication - maj. gen. oliver dillard

Truman's Kids features and is dedicated to Major General Oliver W. Dillard, Sr. (1926-2015), the 5th African-American general in the U.S. Army, who served in both the segregated and integrated armies in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. General Dillard was recently buried with honors at Arlington Cemetery, overlooking the Pentagon and the Washington Monument. Here is an excerpt from his interview.

how to participate!

If you're interested in participating in the documentary, Truman's Kids, by donating stories, photographs, or footage, please fill out our Mailing List/Volunteer Form and we will send you more information. (Please do not send us your original photographs or footage in the mail!)

If you would like to support the documentary by making a tax-exempt donation, please go to our Donation Page and follow the instructions.