The black “Citizen Soldiers” who participated in the “Good War” also form part of the “Greatest Generation,” yet they continue to be invisible in many histories of World War II. America and her citizens came of age in those life-altering years, when the conflagration called WWII forever changed international and domestic relations. These basic truths underpin the plethora of histories about WWII, but they miss the clear and measurable way the war changed America’s black citizenry. This period is overlooked in the histories of the civil rights movement, which generally begins the story with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, but does not relate that two of the five fathers who brought the cases to the Supreme Court were black WWII veterans. This unit asks how we can “save the black privates” from obscurity and demands that we broaden the narrative of war to understand this transformative period as key in the battle for equality in America.