Q: The war must have made racism here even more glaring for blacks.
A: World War II exposed a great contradiction in American life. Here you were fighting Hitler, the world's premier ideologue of racism. And in your own country, if you were a black soldier in a uniform, you had to be very cautious about your life. They were still lynching African Americans, hanging them up, setting them on fire, shooting them like they were garbage and dogs, during World War II. You couldn't even get an anti-lynching bill passed during World War II. Franklin Roosevelt, the new great emancipator, never made a speech attacking lynchings, the way he should have. He might have mentioned in passing, but not directly. Roosevelt never made an outstanding reference to black people in any kind of pro-black speech, as did later Lyndon Baines Johnson. He never addressed the NAACP, as Truman did later. The tensions and the definitions of black and white were so sharply desperate that it wasn't advisable for him to ever do that.
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