[Footnote 1-14: This discussion of civil rights in the pre-World War II period draws not only on Lee's _Employment of Negro Troops_, but also on Lee Finkle, _Forum for Protest: The Black Press During World War II_ (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975); Harvard Sitkoff, "Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War," _Journal of American History_ 58 (December 1971):661-81; Reinhold Schumann, "The Role of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the Integration of the Armed Forces According to the NAACP Collection in the Library of Congress" (1971), in CMH; Richard M. Dalfiume, _Desegregation of the United States Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953_ (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969).] These politicians realized that the United States was beginning to outgrow its old racial relationships over which Jim Crow had reigned, either by law or custom, for more than fifty years. In large areas of the country where lynchings and beatings were commonplace, white supremacy had existed as a literal fact of life and death.[1-15] More insidious than the Jim Crow laws were the economic deprivation and dearth of educational opportunity associated with racial discrimination. Traditionally the last hired, first fired, Negroes suffered all the handicaps that came from unemployment and poor jobs, a condition further aggravated by the Great Depression. The "separate but equal" educational system dictated by law and the realities of black life in both urban and rural areas, north and south, had proved anything but equal and thus closed to Negroes a traditional avenue to advancement in American society. [Footnote 1-15: The Jim Crow era is especially well described in Rayford W. Logan's _The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901_ (New York: Dial, 1954) and C. Vann Woodward's _The Strange Career of Jim Crow_, 3d ed. rev. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)]