Fog of War

It is well known that World War II gave rise to human rights rhetoric, discredited a racist regime abroad, and provided new opportunities for African Americans to fight, work, and demand equality at home. It would be all too easy to assume that the war was a key stepping stone to the modern civil rights movement. But Fog of War shows that in reality the momentum for civil rights was not so clear cut, with activists facing setbacks as well as successes and their opponents finding ways to establish more rigid defenses for segregation. While the war set the scene for a mass movement, it also narrowed some of the options for black activists. This collection is a timely reconsideration of the intersection between two of the dominant events of twentieth-century American history, the upheaval wrought by the Second World War and the social revolution brought about by the African American struggle for equality.

Kevin M. Kruse is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University and the author of Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism.

Contributors Introduction: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement, Kevin M. Kruse and Stephen Tuck 1: Freedom to Want: The Federal Government and Politicized Consumption in World War II, James T. Sparrow 2: Confronting the Roadblock: Congress, Civil Rights and World War II, Julian E. Zelizer 3: Segregation and the City: White Supremacy in Alabama in the Mid-Twentieth Century, J. Mills Thornton III 4: Movement Building during the World War II Era: The NAACP's Legal Insurgency in the South, Patricia Sullivan 5: Hillburn, Hattiesburg, and Hitler: Wartime Activists Think Globally and Act Locally, Thomas Sugrue 6: "You can sing and punch but you can't be a soldier or a man": African American Struggles for a New Place in Popular Culture, Stephen Tuck 7: "A War for States' Rights": The White Supremacist Vision of Double Victory, Jason Morgan Ward 8: The Sexual Politics of Race in WWII America, Jane Dailey 9: Civil Rights and World War II in a Global Frame: Shape-shifting Racial Formations and the U.S. Encounter with European and Japanese Colonialism, Penny Von Eschen 10: Race, Rights, and Non-Governmental Organizations at the UN San Francisco Conference: A Contested History of "Human Rights . . . without discrimination", Elizabeth Borgwardt 11: "Did the Battlefield Kill Jim Crow?": The Cold War Military, Civil Rights, and Black Freedom Struggles, Kimberley L. Phillips