Roosevelt signed an executive order decreeing the end of discrimination in defense industries. To prevent any embarrassment from such a public expression of discontent, President Franklin D. Half American breaks ground by uncovering Black resistance to their country’s pervasive racism, including a threatened march by 100,000 Blacks on Washington to demand civil rights. Conditions in the defense industries were often worse still. Not only was the Army segregated, with few Black officers, but a report from the Army War College deemed Blacks as “mentally inferior to the white man” and “lacking the physical courage of the white.” The Navy relegated Blacks to serving the officers the Air Corps wanted nothing to do with them. Delmont, a history professor at Dartmouth, looks deeply into the situation faced by Blacks as the U.S. “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?” he asked. Pearl Harbor had just been bombed, and the writer knew he would be drafted. The book’s title comes from a letter written by a Black cafeteria worker to the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation’s leading Black newspapers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |