Double Victory in Black and White: What Digitized Historical Newspapers Reveal about the African American Experience of WWII

Please join NEH Division of Preservation and Access and the Serial and Government Publications Division at the Library of Congress for a very special event on Thursday, September 29, 2022, 4:00 pm to 5:15 pm EDT

In the plenary address at the annual conference of the National Digital Newspaper Program, “Double Victory in Black and White: What Digitized Historical Newspapers Reveal about the African American Experience of WWII,” historian Matthew Delmont explores how Black newspapers led the Double Victory campaign during WWII, to secure victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Black newspaper reporters told the stories of the vital roles Black troops played and brought the triumphs and tragedies of the war home to Black readers.  The Black press raised questions regarding race, democracy, and citizenship that remain relevant eight decades later.

Dr. Matthew Delmont is the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor of History at Dartmouth. An expert on African-American history and the history of civil fights, his next book, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, will be published by Viking Books in October 2022. Smithsonian magazine has just featured an excerpt from Half American, “A Deadly World War II Explosion Sparked Black Soldiers to Fight for Equal Treatment.” To support research for this book, Dr. Delmont was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award to support this research.  He is also the author four previous books: Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African American Newspapers (Stanford University Press, 2019); Making Roots: A Nation Captivated (University of California Press, 2016); Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation (UC Press, 2016); and The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock ’n’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia (UC Press, 2012).  Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Delmont earned his bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and a master’s and a doctorate. from Brown University.

To register, please visit: https://www.loc.gov/item/event-405634/

Sponsored by NEH and the Library of Congress, this talk is free and open to the public.