The American home front during World War II is often remembered as a place of national unity. It was, in public memory, the time when the Greatest Generation shook off the economic and emotional trauma of the Great Depression to defeat Nazism and fascism abroad, when people pulled together to buy war bonds and accepted rationing for the good of the cause.
But such a memory obscures how the home front was crippled by gender, class, and, especially, racial divisions. Because of the moral valence of the conflict, racism at home threatened to become a boon for Axis propaganda and damage the war effort. African Americans, in turn, recognized that the war was an opportunity to force the nation to finally, fitfully, live up to its creed as a nation of equality and justice for all.
The result was the Double V campaign: victory over fascism abroad, and victory over racism at home. The campaign emerged from the pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the country’s preeminent black publications. On January 31, 1942, the paper published a letter from reader James G. Thompson, in which he asked the question: “Should I sacrifice my life to live half-American?” Thompson, like many other African Americans, felt the war would be for naught if nothing changed domestically. He then urged black Americans to take up the fight for democracy at home and abroad: