| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Defining the Peace: World War II Veterans, Race, and the Remaking of Southern Political Tradition. By Jennifer E. Brooks. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv, 256 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2911-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5578-2.)

While the general public feasts upon celebrations of the military history of World War II, historians have discovered their own greatest generation in the veterans who returned home from the war intent on living up to wartime principles of freedom, democracy, and equal opportunity. Civil rights historians have pinpointed the war as a watershed in the creation of the modern black freedom struggle. Returning servicemen played a prominent role in mobilizing southern black communities against white supremacy. Gradually, they found an ally in the federal government. The Supreme Court's ruling against the white primary in 1944 pried open restricted access to the ballot box, and the Truman administration desegregated the armed forces and proposed civil rights legislation whose time had not yet come. Nevertheless, a combination of wartime ideology (including that of the subsequent Cold War), changing demographics, and a new generation of black leaders with innovative and bold tactics spearheaded the greatest reform movement of the twentieth century.

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