World War II played an important role in the trajectory of race and American political development, but the War's effects were much more complex than many assume. Steven White offers an extensive analysis of rarely utilized survey data and archival evidence to assess white racial attitudes and the executive branch response to civil rights advocacy. He finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the white mass public's racial policy attitudes largely did not liberalize during the war against Nazi Germany. In this context, advocates turned their attention to the possibility of unilateral action by the president, emphasizing a wartime civil rights agenda focused on discrimination in the defense industry and segregation in the military. This book offers a reinterpretation of this critical period in American political development, as well as implications for the theoretical relationship between war and the inclusion of marginalized groups in democratic societies.

In this sweeping narrative, Cobb covers such diverse topics as "Dixiecrats," the "southern strategy," the South's domination of today's GOP, immigration, the national ascendance of southern culture and music, and the roles of women and an increasingly visible gay population in contemporary southern life. Beginning with the early stages of the civil rights struggle, Cobb discusses how the attack on Pearl Harbor set the stage for the demise of Jim Crow. He examines the NAACP's postwar assault on the South's racial system, the famous bus boycott in Montgomery, the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King in the movement, and the dramatic protests and confrontations that finally brought profound racial changes, and two-party politics to the South.

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD • AN AMERICAN BOOK AWARD FINALIST • A monumental history that has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book ... a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.” Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most ... with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”

"The definitive account of black Americans in World War II and its aftermath, The Afro-American and the Second World War has been expanded to include the wartime experience of black women, how demographic change reshaped the South, and other issues." "In addition to providing a close look at the African American experience in the armed forces, the author discusses the widespread wartime discrimination at glaring odds with American claims to social equality and democracy; the resulting "war on two fronts" in which black newspapers, literature, and songs reiterated the demand for equal citizenship rights; the psychological impact of the war; and the protest campaigns launched by blacks during these years."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Tells how Blacks used radio

For a brief time following the end of the U.S. Civil War, American political leaders had an opportunity—slim, to be sure, but not beyond the realm of possibility—to remake society so that black Americans and other persons of color could enjoy equal opportunity in civil and political life. It was not to be. With each passing year after the war—and especially after Reconstruction ended during the 1870s—American society witnessed the evolution of a new white republic as national leaders abandoned the promise of Reconstruction and justified their racial biases based on political, economic, social, and religious values that supplanted the old North-South/slavery-abolitionist schism of the antebellum era. A Long Dark Night provides a sweeping history of this too often overlooked period of African American history that followed the collapse of Reconstruction—from the beginnings of legal segregation through the end of World War II. Michael J. Martinez argues that the 1880s ushered in the dark night of the American Negro—a night so dark and so long that the better part of a century would elapse before sunlight broke through. Combining both a “top down” perspective on crucial political issues and public policy decisions as well as a “bottom up” discussion of the lives of black and white Americans between the 1880s and the 1940s, A Long Dark Night will be of interest to all readers seeking to better understand this crucial era that continues to resonate throughout American life today.

A comparison of the causes and effects of federal race policy during World War II.