Presents the story of the first all-African American tank battalion to see combat in World War II, documenting how its members struggled with racial discrimination in spite of their emergence as a highly decorated unit.

"In The Louis Till File, John Edgar Wideman searches for Louis Till, a silent victim of American injustice. Wideman's personal interaction with the story began when he learned of Emmett's murder in 1955; Wideman was also fourteen years old. After reading decades later about Louis's execution, he couldn't escape the twin tragedies of father and son, and tells their stories together for the first time. Author of the award-winning Brothers and Keepers,...

"He had to sit in a segregated rail car on the journey to Army basic training in Mississippi in 1943. But two years later, the twenty-year-old African American from New York was at the controls of a P-51, prowling for Luftwaffe aircraft at five thousand feet over the Austrian countryside. By the end of World War II, he had done something that nobody could take away from him: He had become an American hero. This is the remarkable true story of Lt....

"Standing Up Against Hate tells the stories of the African American women who enlisted in the newly formed Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in World War II. They quickly discovered that they faced as many obstacles in the armed forces as they did in everyday life. However, they refused to back down. They interrupted careers and left family, friends, and loved ones to venture into unknown and sometimes dangerous territory. They survived racial prejudice...

Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. The son of a former slave and an indigenous Creek woman, Bullard fled home at the age of eleven to escape the racial hostility of his Georgia community. When his journey led him to Europe, he garnered worldwide fame as a boxer, and later as the first African American fighter pilot in history. After the war, Bullard returned to Paris a celebrated hero. But little did he...

"An utterly compelling account of the African Americans who played a crucial and dangerous role in the invasion of Europe. The story of their heroic duty is long overdue." -Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation The injustices of 1940s Jim Crow America are brought to life in this extraordinary blend of military and social history-a story that pays tribute to the valor of an all-Black battalion whose crucial contributions at D-Day have gone...

The forgotten true story of American war hero John Charles Robinson, a.k.a. The Brown Condor of Ethiopia, and the commander of the Imperial Ethiopian Air Corps during the brutal Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935. Simmons brings to life Robinson's success in becoming a pilot, his expertise in building and assembling his own working aircraft, his influence on the establishment of a school of aviation at Tuskegee Institute. More than a biography of a black...

The incredible life story of Eugene Bullard, the first African American military pilot in WWI, who went on to become a self-taught jazz musician, a Paris nightclub impresario, a spy in the French Resistance and an American civil rights pioneer. Eugene Bullard lived one of the most fascinating lives of the twentieth century. This is the dramatic untold story of an American hero, a thought-provoking survey of the twentieth century and a portrait of...