Race Goes To War

The call to arms that followed Pearl Harbor in 1941 found American blacks in a peculiar position. Could they fight for the freedom of others while their own country denied theirs? And could they fight honorably in a still segregated armed forces? Black newspapers—notably the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, and the Baltimore Afro-American—faced these issues head-on. Their war correspondents were the largest group of black newsmen in American history to be allowed on the frontlines with the same credentials as white journalists, and they were not about to soft-pedal the racial issues they discovered. In this illuminating perspective on World War II reportage, Antero Pietila and Stacy Spaulding show how questions of race followed troops to the battlefields. The response of blacks and the attitudes of military authorities foreshadowed the civil rights struggles of the postwar era.