the conditions
of Negroes generally, its most popular activity during the 1940's was
its effort to eliminate discrimination in the armed forces. The files
of the services and the White House are replete with NAACP complaints,
requests, demands, and charges that involved the military departments
in innumerable investigations and justifications. If the complaints
effected little immediate change in policy, they at least dramatized
the plight of black servicemen and mobilized demands for reform.[5-5]

[Footnote 5-5: Clark, "The Civil Rights Movement,"
pp. 240-47.]

Not all racial unrest was so constructively channeled during the war.
Riots and mutinies in the armed services were echoed around the
country. In Detroit competition between blacks and whites, many
recently arrived from the south seeking jobs, culminated in June 1943
in the most serious riot of the decade. The President was forced to
declare a state of emergency and dispatch 6,000 troops to patrol the
city. The Detroit riot was only the most noticeable of a number of
racial incidents that inevitably provoked an ugly reaction, and the
postwar period witnessed an increase in antiblack sentiment and
violence in the United States.[5-6] Testifying to the black community's
economic and political progress during the war as well as a
corresponding increase in white awareness of and protest against the
mistreatment of black citizens, this antiblack sentiment was only the
pale ghost of a similar phenomenon after World War I.

[Footnote 5-6: _Report of the National Advisory
Commission on Civil Disorders, 1 March 1968_,
Kerner Report (Washington: Government Printing
Office, 1968), pp. 104-05; see also Dalfiume,
_Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces_, pp.
132-34. For a detailed account of the major riot,
see R. Shogan and T. Craig, _The Detroit Race Riot:
A Study in Violence_ (New York: Chilton Books,
1964).]

[Illustration: PRESIDENT TRUMAN ADDRESSING THE NAACP CONVENTION,
_Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., June 1947. Seated at the
President's left are Walter White, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Senator
Wayne Morse; visible in the rear row are Admiral of the Fleet Chester
W. Nimitz, Attorney General Tom C. Clark, and Chief Justice Fred M.
Vinson_.]

Nevertheless, t