Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941-1963. Library of America. 996 pages.

Reporting Civil Rights, Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973. Library of America. 986 pages.

Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
-- Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience"

Early in 1941, the United States began to feel the rumblings of a war that had been a long time coming, and which had nothing to do with Germany or Japan. In January of that year, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, sent out a call for 10,000 black people to march on Washington to demand an end to segregation in the armed forces and in the hiring of defense workers.

By June, President Franklin Roosevelt was beginning to feel the heat. Late in the month, he met Randolph halfway, with an executive order prohibiting discrimination among defense contractors, but not in the military. Randolph was sufficiently mollified to call off the march, understandably losing some supporters. It didn't matter. Within a few months, civil rights for black Americans would be the last thing on anyone's mind, except black Americans. On segregated military bases and in major cities, decades of suppressed rage were beginning to boil over.

The tension only torqued up when Johnny came marching home. Black soldiers who had defended their country against Hitler came home to find his spirit alive and well, especially on city buses. In February of 1946, within ten hours of being discharged from Camp Gordon, Ga., a black soldier named Isaac Woodard was riding home on a bus with some white soldier pals. When the driver thought they were getting too rowdy, he ordered the whites to sit up front. Woodard complained, and when the bus stopped in Batesburg, SC, the driver had him arrested. Accounts would differ on what happened after that, except that a police officer beat Woodard so badly that he was left permanently blind. In what would become South Carolina's first Civil Rights case, the officer was brought before federal court in Columbia. After deliberating for 28 minutes, an all-white jury let him go; Woodard had "resisted arrest."

It was a story that would be repeated many times in the years to come. The Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers - who would go on to become one of the early martyrs for the cause — recalled how he too was beaten "within an inch of my life" on his return trip home, after refusing to move to the back of the bus. "Hell, I'd just been on a battlefield for my country," he said. The attack had it's effect: "After that, I was a different man."