After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance. Fathers of black soldiers warned their sons not to come home in their uniforms because police had made a practice of searching and beating black military men. “If he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, they’d kill him,” one Mississippi man related.
