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This article tells the story of the first American military training mission undertaken in Africa. Between 1910 and 1942, seventeen African American officers trained, reorganized, and commanded the Liberian Frontier Force to defend the West African country of Liberia. This stability mission helped Liberia avoid territorial partition by Britain and France and defeat a series of indigenous rebellions, enabling the Americo-Liberian republic to survive a perilous period in its history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The essay discusses the history of African Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces, beginning with the U.S. Civil War. The Reorganization Act of 1866 in 1866 by U.S. Congress regarding the composition of the U.S. Army in the post-Civil War period made provisions for Black troops in the infantry and cavalry. Topics considered include abolitionist Frederick Douglass, black officers, and combat roles of African Americans in conflicts including the Spanish-American War and World War I.

The article discusses political activity by African American military personnel (G.I.s) during World War II as a martial freedom movement. Topics include opposition to segregation within the U.S. Armed Forces, protest strategies used by African American G.I.s, and support from the organization National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The article discusses the service of African American military personnel in the U.S. Civil War, noting photographs and letters depicting their service. Topics include the role of racism in erasing the memories of black soldiers who took part in the war, the roles of slaves and free men as soldiers, and the 1900 exhibition "Exhibit of American Negroes" as part of the Universelle de Paris exposition at the Palace of Social Economy and Congresses in Paris, France.

The article talks about racial tensions and injustice by the U.S. Military in Northern Ireland during the Second World War focusing on African American servicemen. Topics discussed include severe prejudice faced by the servicemen compared to their white counterparts, and American troops in Great Britain being subject to American military law due to the Visiting Forces Act.

In the years following World War I, the Saturday Evening Post continued its longstanding practice of caricaturing and dehumanizing African Americans by portraying black servicemen as bumblers and buffoons. This politics of representation registers and recontains new historical developments in African American experience, but then folds those phenomena back into older, stereotypical forms of knowledge and racially stratified social norms and practices. Hugh Wiley’s Wildcat stories, which were published regularly for more than a decade, exemplify the Post’s practices. A significant response to the Post’s treatment of African American veterans can be found in Edward Christopher Williams’s The Letters of Davy Carr: A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair (republished in 2004 as When Washington Was in Vogue). This epistolary novel, which was published serially and anonymously in the Messenger, a radical little magazine of the Harlem Renaissance, challenges the racist stereotyping of black soldiers by demonstrating that African Americans would be full participants in US print culture and would not be registered and recontained by the phantasms of racism and minstrelsy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Gold Star Mother Program initiated in 1930 by the U.S. government which undertook to send roughly 6700 mothers and wives of fallen World War I soldiers to Europe. The program would arrange for travel of both white and African American women, but the women would travel on separate ships and stay in different hotels. Civil rights activists with the the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested the program. However, 279 black mothers and wives did travel to Europe between 1930 and 1933 and reported the trip was nothing like the NAACP predicted.

At the end of the 1960s, the United States military was rocked by race-related violence and riots. Growing fears of black “militancy” eventually compelled the military's largely white leadership to implement policies aimed at ameliorating racial disparities. One of the most significant changes was the establishment of the Defense Race Relations Institute (DRRI) and the requirement that all troops partake in race relations education. Largely overlooked in histories of military race relations and rarely viewed in terms of its place in the larger landscape of US race relations, DRRI was founded to train the military's race relations educators. Its original curriculum and methodology, during the years 1971–74, represented a radical response to the problems of racism in the military, and central to its framework was a critique of whiteness as a nexus of racialized power. This paper attempts to present a complex understanding of the motivations involved in the founding of the DRRI as it historicizes the military's quest to contain race “militancy” through the establishment of DRRI. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This qualitative investigation examines the collective constructions of the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen and men's perspectives of the impact of their military experiences on their postwar lives. African American men ( n = 93) who participated in the 'Tuskegee Experiment' as pilots, ground crew, and other military personnel were surveyed. The emergent legacy focused on record of excellence and accomplishment in their individual performance and military service, the contesting of American racism and its impact on racial ideology and social policy, and lessons for the next generation that can be drawn from this history. In civilian life, in the military and aviation, and as civic actors the Tuskegee Airmen distinguished themselves as Black men, and as Americans. The meanings of these social identities and the inherent contradictions of race, nation, and war are embedded within the Tuskegee Airmen history and legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the response of the Northern Ireland government to the presence of African American troops in the country during the Second World War, using extensive archival research at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, The National Archives at Kew and the National Records and Archives Administration in Maryland. It examines the pressures placed upon Stormont by both Westminster and, more particularly, the American military authorities in relation to U.S. racial mores. It demonstrates that despite edicts from London and attempts by the Americans to impose racial segregation, the Northern Ireland government fashioned a response which did not endorse ' Jim Crow' racism but, instead, dealt with the problem pragmatically and thoughtfully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores black internationalist articulations of antifascism in the 1930s through a discussion of the “maps of grievance” mobilized by African American volunteers in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. It interrogates how African American volunteers linked the conflict in Spain to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia and to struggles against white supremacy in the United States. Through making such linkages, black internationalist intellectuals and political activists have made significant, if frequently neglected, theoretical and political engagements with fascism and antifascism. By decentering the national in internationalism and situating forms of subaltern cosmopolitanism as constitutive of internationalist political activity, it reconfigures aspects of the spatial constitution of internationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An essay is presented on the role of race in U.S. cultural memory of World War II, with a particular focus on memories and representations of Doris Miller, an African American cook and Navy Cross honoree. According to the author, claims of equality and multicultural inclusion in World War II remembrance do not reflect wartime efforts to suppress black protest and critique. Topics discussed include citizenship, patriotism, and belonging.

An essay is presented on the entertainment of troops at Camp Shelby, a military camp in Mississippi, between 1918 and 1945. It examines the contexts of World War I and World War II and comments on relations with the town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The author considers the work of women in recreation and entertainment through the Hattiesburg-area Girls’ Service Organization (GSO) and the United Service Organizations (USO). Sports teams and recreation for African American troops are discussed.

An essay is presented for the 1973 film "The Spook Who Sat by the Door" directed by Ivan Dixon and produced by Dixon and Sam Greenlee. The film's embodiment of revolutionary philosophy, including in regard to the Black Power movement and anti-colonial movements, is discussed. An overview of the film's depiction of the racial identity of African Americans, including of African American soldiers, is provided.

The article discusses a campaign to end racial segregation in bowling alleys in the U.S. during World War II. It comments on the formation of the National Negro Bowling Association (NNBA), later called the National Bowling Association (TNBA), and protests against the discriminatory practices of the American Bowling Congress (ABC). Other topics include the growth of bowling's popularity in the U.S., support for the integration of bowling in the African American press, and discrimination against African American military personnel.

An introduction is presented that discusses issue articles on topics include black soldiers in the U.S. Civil War, the life of basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and the relation of eugenics to documentary photographs taken by photographer Arthur Rothstein.

A letter to the editor is presented by Michael Cullen Green, author of the book "Black Yanks in the Pacific: Race in the Making of American Military Empire after World War II," in response to a book review written by John Darrell Sherwood which appeared in the December 2011 issue. Sherwood's response is also provided.