Books: Second-Class Citizens

WHAT THE NEGRO WANTS—Edited by Rayford W. Logan—Chapel Hill ($3.50).

Negro soldiers, entraining for overseas duty, paused to look at the patriotic poster spread across the wall of a railroad terminus. "What You Are Fighting For!" boomed the slogan under a sea of proud, anxious American faces. The Negroes "gave the eye-catching picture a swift glance and then snapped their heads away, almost as if by command." Every face on the poster was white.

Rayford W. Logan, professor of history at Howard University and editor of What the Negro Wants, believes that in the midst of World War II "race relations are more...