Good ol’ WWII. The good war that everyone loved!
The treatment of blacks in the American military during World War II was made all the more bitter by the fact that the United States was at war with a German regime that preached a doctrine of racial hierarchy. This cruel irony was not lost on black soldiers. On a crowded troop train in Texas, one reported that “the colored soldiers were fed behind a Jim Crow curtain at one end of the dining car. In the main section, along with the white folks, a group of German war prisoners dined—and no doubt fed their illusions of race superiority on that Jim Crow curtain.”
From
The Fire Is Upon Us