While historians agree that World War II was a watershed event that affected people around the world, black soldiers continue to be invisible in the historiography. More than one million black men and women in uniform traveled around the world to carry out a war to end fascism and Nazism, all the while serving in segregated armed forces. In their new environs, both stateside and abroad, they experienced opportunities that broadened their horizons. During their service, they journeyed to adulthood, solidifying their consciousness and identity as American citizens along the way. Upon their return to America, they worked together in groups and as individuals to push for equality. Black soldiers fighting overseas engaged in a staggering number of racialized incidents, and when they returned home, they turned their fighting skills to winning equality.

Black veterans—both male and female—returned matured by their years of military service. Many of the members of this “greatest generation” realized that the war experience had changed their lives, and they returned home with a rising sense of consciousness and solidarity through group action and military-style planning. When they reentered their still-segregated communities, many of the men and women began to agitate for political and social change. Veterans pushed for educational equality, agitated for colleges to accept black veterans, and pushed for their children to go to white schools. They actively pressed the military to integrate its troops, and they organized in every corner of America to fight discrimination. Some of the men stayed in the armed forces after WWII and became the vanguard for the integration of the military, and then used that experience to combat segregation and discrimination in other settings from schools to bowling alleys to transportation systems, among many other settings.

The war touched all of the men and women who served, and black Americans expressed how the war profoundly impacted them. Although generally underutilized, and severely constrained by segregation, more black Americans served in the military in WWII than in any prior war. Many more civilian African Americans left the fields and rural workplaces of the South to migrate toward defense industry jobs in the North and West. African Americans experienced discrimination in the workplace, and they lobbied President Roosevelt to sign an executive order banning prejudicial practices. Some of the veterans never forgot the bitterness of segregated service nor the indignities perpetrated by white racists within the military command. During WWII, as the Racial Incident Reports attest and the oral histories confirm, violence against black soldiers was commonplace across the country. Black soldiers and citizens used a variety of tactics to protest injustice, and these experiences infused the men and women with a heightened sense of racial consciousness. Many became active participants, foot soldiers, in the evolving movement for black rights.