PhD Candidate Janine Hubai, "Four Miles to Integration: The U.S. Army, Race, Family, and Community during Desegregation at Fort Dix, 1945-1963"

CHR Summer Doctoral Fellow Talk

Tuesday, February 3, 2026 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EST
Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom

Janine Hubai is a PhD candidate at George Mason University in the Department of History and Art History. Her research interests include military history, historical racial structures, indigenous history, and digital public history. She has worked on projects for the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, the Center for Mason Legacies, the Center for Humanities Research, Dr. Gabrielle Tayac, and the U.S. Army.

Project: "Four Miles to Integration: The U.S. Army, Race, Family, and Community during Desegregation at Fort Dix, 1945-1963"

My dissertation explores racial desegregation and integration of the U.S. Army from 1945-1963 at Fort Dix, New Jersey. After WWII, the U.S. Army faced unprecedented changes that caused an expansion of manpower to mitigate the threat of nuclear warfare during the Cold War amidst the Civil Rights Movement and Executive Order 9981 which pressured the army to desegregate. My dissertation examines the contentious process of integration of the U.S. Army and Black soldiers’ lives at Dix through their work, recreation, housing, and communities as they experienced differing degrees of acceptance; insider and outsider status; and freedom and unfreedom. As a CHR fellow, I will expand on the themes of “Space, Territory, and Mobility,” as I argue that although Black soldiers and their families operated in cultures rooted in racism, they formed new communities and advocated for their full rights of citizenship, economic mobility, and respect.