served as a longshoreman: For firsthand accounts of the experiences of Black soldiers in the army, see Phillip McGuire, Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1983).
761st Tank Battalion: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton, Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).
first Black officers: Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in the U.S. Navy, 1932–1943 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004).
Montford Point: Melton A. McLaurin, The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First Black Marines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
fighters of the 332nd: J. Todd Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Charity Adams Earley: Charity Adams Earley, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989).
permanently blind: Gergel, Unexampled Courage.
abolished segregation: Jon E. Taylor, Freedom to Serve: Truman, Civil Rights, and Executive Order 9981 (New York: Routledge, 2012).
Black veterans: Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
1944–1949: The Black Left
manifestos of the day: Gerald Horne, Black & Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 128–50; and Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 37–40.
“subversives”: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 400–44.
everything the far right despised: Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 296–380; Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 59–124.
full democracy at home: Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
African American exodus: Manning Marable, Race, Reform & Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 12–37.
other “colored” populations: Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
aspirations might be realized: Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 13–18; Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 203–15; and Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20–33.
enraged ultranationalists and bigots: John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1995); and Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 74–99.
upcoming recital: Westchester Committee for a Fair Inquiry into the Peekskill Violence, Eyewitness: Peekskill, USA—Aug. 27; Sept. 4, 1949 (White Plains, NY: Author, 1949), 2; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 341–54, 364.
day of the concert: Howard Fast, Peekskill, USA: A Personal Experience (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 20–45; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 364–65.
“Wake up, America!”: Fast, Peekskill, USA, 61–65, 69–91; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 367–75; Horne, Paul Robeson, 124–25.
1949–1954: the road to Brown v. Board of Education
“separate educational facilities”: 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
“these buildings were sawed”: “NAACP Sets Stage to Enter Hearne Suit,” Informer, September 27, 1947.
Sweatt is widely regarded: Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).
Prince Edward County: Robinson and Hill correctly gauged the level of resistance they would find in Prince Edward County. From 1959 to 1964, the county closed the public schools rather than comply with orders to desegregate. Schools opened only after the LDF successfully challenged the school closure in the U.S. Supreme Court. Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Va., 377 U.S. 218 (1964), supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/377/218/.
the four Brown cases: The Hearne case received new attention thanks to Rachel Devlin’s excellent book A Girl Stands at the Door, which explores the courage and sacrifice of Black girls like Doris Raye and Doris Faye Jennings in Hearne, who were often the very deliberately selected “integrators” of Southern schools. Jennings did not directly challenge segregation. Black parents wanted a safe and properly constructed and resourced school for their children. Describing the remedy sought in the case, LDF reported, in its docket report to its board in 1948, that the discrimination “must be remedied either by admitting Negro students to the white high school or by providing Negro students with a new, modern and safe high school”: that is, separate and truly equal education, or admission to the white school.
1959–1964: The Civil Rights Movement
“You have begun something”: Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger,” Southern Patriot 18 (June 1960).
“In government service”: Ella Baker, “Developing Community Leadership,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1973), 351.
1964–1969: Black Power
“This is the twenty-seventh”: Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 142.
“the biggest purveyor”: Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (speech), April 4, 1967, kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/beyond-vietnam.
1974–1979: Combahee River Collective
Since 1969, the Nixon administration: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 55–72.