Harlem at War: The Black Experience in World War II

By the spring of 1943 more than a half million blacks were in the U.S. Army, but only 79,000 of them were overseas. Most were repeating the experience of their fathers in World War I--serving chiefly in labor battalions.

Wherever black troops were trained or stationed, Brandt explains, "rage surfaced frequently, was suppressed, but not extinguished." Using eyewitness accounts, he describes the rage Harlem residents felt, the discrimination and humiliation they shared with blacks across the country. The collective anger erupted one day in Harlem when a young black soldier was shot by a white police officer.

The riot, in which six blacks were killed, seven hundred injured, and six hundred arrested, became a turning point in America's race relations and a precursor to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.