Military Exempts Vivien Thomas from Draft

Vivien Thomas was thirty years old and had two children when he was required to sign up for the draft, as seen in this photo of his 1940 selective service card. Within a year of the Thomases’ move to Baltimore, the U.S. entered World War II after it was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The U.S. military gave Mr. Thomas an exemption from military service because it recognized his essential research work on traumatic shock, which had killed millions of soldiers over time. At the beginning of the war, there were two million servicemen and women but only twelve Black officers. Had Thomas been drafted in the military, he would have found himself in another segregated organization where Black men were assigned to either highly dangerous labor tasks, like working with dynamite, or to such menial service jobs as janitors, dishwashers, and porters.