Listening to black people who dared publicly to challenge racism-and to optimistic white liberals-in the 1940s and early 1950s, we can see how they imagined the approach of a new, more egalitarian world of race relations in the United States: A black American corporal, 1945: I spent four years in the Army to free a bunch of Dutchmen and Frenchmen, and I'm hanged if I'm going to let the Alabama version of the Germans kick me around when I get home.