Illustrates the crucial link between the Second World War and what has sometimes been referred to as the Second Civil War, the black freedom struggle of the 1960s. For what we learn in these pages is that a generation of black men, hundreds of thousands of them, began the most important struggle of our time for equal protection before the laws and for simple human dignity.

Maurice Isserman, author of America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (from the foreword)

Just as we had begun to think that the major stories of African American history had been told, along comes Maggi M. Morehouse with a moving account of black soldiers during World War II. Her report is the all too familiar one of segregation during training at home and discrimination on the battlefields in Europe and the Pacific. Yet the tale comes close to having a happy ending when veterans who had had an opportunity to see the world outside of their segregated communities were then enabled to get an education under the GI Bill of Rights. The result was a generation of young people, many of whom were able to move into the middle class and to join in the struggle for equal rights during the l950s-60s. Told largely in the words of the soldiers themselves who were interviewed extensively by Ms. Morehouse, Fighting In the Jim Crow Army is an engrossing account, skillfully reported.

Dorothy Sterling, author of We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century and The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison