A week-by-week account from 1939 to 1945 of efforts to advance the Black rights struggle in face of patriotic appeals to postpone resistance to lynch-mob terror and racist discrimination until after U.S. "victory" in World War II. These struggles--of a piece with rising anti-imperialist battles in Africa, Asia, and the Americas--helped lay the basis for the mass civil rights movement in the postwar decades.Chronology, glossary, notes, index.