Many Black leaders looked to the end of the war with a sense of optimism, hopeful that the fight against fascism, with its policies of racial genocide, might make Americans think twice about their own history of segregation, violence, and white supremacy. But far from launching an era of peaceful coexistence in American race relations, the first months of 1946 produced what the NACCP’s Walter White characterized in a letter to Hoover as a “well-organized campaign of terrorism.” Some of the worst attacks were aimed at Black veterans, who returned home to a heightened atmosphere of racism,
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