he barons of the Negro press ridiculed the attempt to frame the war as a fight for liberty at a time when the military was segregating by race soldiers, nurses and even plasma in the wartime blood bank, and running Jim Crow military bases in ways that were fully consistent with the German view of Negroes and others as not fully human.

    Editorial cartoonists underscored this point by depicting Hitler and Hirohito together, laughing uproariously, while reading newspaper accounts of lynchings in the American South. The Pittsburgh Courier finally made it palatable to African-Americans to support the war in Europe by recasting it as a struggle to vanquish Nazism abroad and Jim Crow racism at home.




posted 2529 days ago