In the First World War the Black Battalions of the US Army fought under French command ...

"A Double Victory?" Revisiting the Black Struggle for Equality during World War Two

In his 1944 landmark study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Gunnar Myrdal predicted that "there is bound to be a redefinition of the Negro's status in America as a result of this war" (Myrdal 997). Historians have largely agreed with this assessment, considering the Second World War not only as a major turning point in the long African American struggle for justice and equality, but also as the starting point of the modern civil rights movement (see Dalfiume; Polenberg; Dittmer; Biondi). Such an interpretation of the heritage of the war can still be found today in some of the country's most commonly used textbooks (see in particular Brinkley). There are, to be sure, a number of facts to support such an interpretation. Pressed to answer increasing calls from black leaders for equal treatment and determined to maintain peaceful race relations in the name of keeping the war production industries running at full capacity, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order No. 8802 on June 25, 1941, ordering an end to discrimination in defense industry jobs and creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) as an enforcement agency. This constituted the federal government's first substantive act in support of the cause of racial equality since Reconstruction.

African Americans In World War II: A Legacy Of Patriotism And Valor (1997)

○ World War II and the American Home Front

'Sapere aude'