Military Review English Edition November-December 2015 | Page 134

MR BOOK REVIEWS
LET US FIGHT AS FREE MEN:
Black Soldiers and Civil Rights
Christine Knauer, University of Pennsylvania Press,
Philadelphia, 2014, 352 pages

I

n Let Us Fight As Free Men: Black Soldiers and
Civil Rights, Christine Knauer, a postdoctoral
research fellow at Eberhard Karls University of
Tübingen, Germany, thoroughly investigates the long,
challenging, humiliating, and ultimately triumphant
road to integration of the United States Armed Forces.
Over eight chapters, from the Korean trenches to
Capitol Hill, Knauer examines the struggle by relying
on personal accounts, archives, editorials, columns,
and letters, which poignantly reveal some of the truest
feelings and motives of our political and military luminaries. The Korean War and the segregated South serve
as the military and domestic panoramas. These lenses
provide unique insight into the intersection of Jim
Crowism and the military. The book’s only shortcoming, which Knauer concedes, is the limited narrative
and space given to women. They are peripheral players;
this is a story about masculinity.
Consider the moment: America, the purveyor
of global democracy, fighting in Korea—even as it
struggles with its own civil rights problems at home.
Hypocritically, the United States expected black men
to fight for the country while it simultaneously upheld
a caste system in the South. This