African-Americans

The Crater: Explosion of Death

It was just after 3 am on Saturday, July 30, 1864. A month of relative quiet along a two-mile stretch of Union and Confederate trench lines immediately east of Petersburg, Virginia, was about to come to an explosive end. Read more

African-Americans

Ending the Divide

Three German armies surprised the Allies by breaking across the Our River and storming into the Ardennes on December 16, 1944. Read more

African-Americans

Black Soldiers in the American Revolution

When the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington Green on the morning of April 19, 1775, Black men had already been serving in colonial militias for some time, particularly in New England. Read more

African-Americans

African-American Airmen Blasted Barriers

The African American Tuskegee Airmen took the fight to a well-trained and deadly enemy with a ferocity and tenacity that World War II aerial combat required. Read more

African-Americans

Battle of New Market Heights

Reports of a massive enemy force crossing the James River to assail the paper-thin Confederate lines defending Richmond reached Lt. Read more

African-Americans

They Also Served

When it came to the global war against tyranny, America’s blacks would not be denied a stake in the action. Read more

African-Americans

Red Ball Express to the Rescue!

By Dante Brizill

In a message to the Red Ball Express in October of 1944, Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote, “To it falls the tremendous task of getting vital supplies from ports and depots to combat troops, when and where such supplies are needed, material which without armies might fail. Read more

African-Americans

The White and Black Ship

During World War II, the U.S. Navy built more than 1,000 destroyer escorts, ships whose primary duty was to escort supply convoys across the world’s oceans to insure that their precious cargo of food, fuel, war material, and personnel got to their destinations safely. Read more

African-Americans

The 93rd Infantry Division: The African-American Soldiers in the Pacific

On August 2, 1945, two weeks prior to Japan’s surrender, the highest ranking Japanese officer captured during the war in the Pacific was taken on the island of Morotai, Dutch New Guinea. Read more

African-Americans

Fourteen Black Soldiers Earned the Medal of Honor Chaffin’s Farm

Union soldiers streamed across the pontoon bridge at Deep Bottom on the tidal portion of the James River in the early morning hours of September 29, 1864. Read more

African-Americans

Jamie Holmes’s ‘The Free and the Dead’

Following the end of the Revolutionary War, parts of Florida reverted to Spain, becoming a continuing source of conflict boundaries, the presence of formerly enslaved people and Native Americans from the region attacking the United States. Read more

African-Americans

Cheryl W. Thompson’s ‘Forgotten Souls’

An investigative journalist for NPR and the daughter of one of the Tuskegee Airmen—the Black pilots who mostly flew as fighter escorts for America during WWII—the author follows the legacy of the 27 men who never came back. Read more

African-Americans

Hamilton Fish III and the “Harlem Hell Fighters”

In July 1918, 30-year-old U.S. Army Captain Hamilton Fish, Jr., was in war-torn France with the 15th New York National Guard Regiment—also known as the (U.S.) Read more

African-Americans

Roger Sauvage & Normandie Niemen

Roger Sauvage was born in Paris in 1917 to a white Parisian woman and a black soldier from Martinique. Read more

African-Americans

Tank driver Dwight Johnson in Vietnam

The U.S. military had 409,000 soldiers and Marines in South Vietnam organized into approximately 100 infantry and mechanized battalions at the start of 1968. Read more

African-Americans

Blood on the Snow: The Battle of Nashville

For the black-skinned, blue-clad soldiers deployed on the extreme left flank of the Union Army outside Nashville, Tennessee, the order to advance announced at dawn on December 15, 1864, was a long time coming. Read more

African-Americans

Pauline Peretz’ ‘A Black Army’

Unlike other African-American military units such as the Tuske-gee Airmen, or even the 10th Cavalry Regiment “Buffalo Soldiers” who occupied Fort Huachuca before them, the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions—the only two black units of divisional size in World War II—have received much less coverage in popular media over the past 80 years. Read more

African-Americans

Known as ‘Black Death,’ Henry Johnson finally earns U.S. recognition for valor.

In the early hours of May 15, 1918, U.S. Army Corporal Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts sat in an outpost along the French lines at the western edge of the Argonne Forest. Read more

African-Americans

The Fight Near Hill 250: K Company at the Battle of Bougainville

In an article in the Pittsburgh Courier on April 15, 1944, correspondent Billy Rowe, who was covering the activities of the 93d U.S. Read more

African-Americans

Tyler Perry, Netflix present the story of the all-Black, all-female 6888th Postal Battalion in World War II.

Actor and filmmaker Tyler Perry knows a great story when he comes across one. And when he read Kevin Hymel’s dramatic narrative of the 6888th Central Postal Battalion in the pages of WWII History magazine, he knew it was something special. Read more