• 
• 
• 
• 

WORLD WAR II

Six African- American sailors who were given the Navy Cross for standing by their gun when their ship was damaged by enemy attack near the Philippines, 1945.

World War II pitted freedom against totalitarianism. Images and rhetoric of freedom filled wartime propaganda in America. Women achieved a certain economic freedom by filling jobs in factories left by soldiers gone overseas, while men by the millions joined the fight, a testament to Americans’ willingness to make sacrifices for freedom.

 

Roy Takeno, a Japanese-American and editor of the Manzanar Free Press, reads a copy of the newspaper in the Manaznar War Relocation Center, where he was interned during World War II, 1943.

Wartime rhetoric had the ironic effect of accentuating a glaring lack of freedom for minorities. African-Americans, segregated at home and in the Army, pressed for civil rights with a “Double V” campaign, victory against prejudice at home and against the enemies of democracy abroad. African-American trade unionist A. Philip Randolph and other civil rights leaders planned a march on Washington to protest racial discrimination in the armed forces, but canceled it when President Franklin D. Roosevelt barred discrimination in defense industries and federal agencies. Fears of subversion and racial animosity led to the mass relocation of Americans of Japanese descent. With little opposition, the government uprooted 150,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans, relocating them to internment camps. The World War II rhetoric of freedom did not always match the reality at home.