Professional Affiliation
Associate Professor of History, University of New Mexico
Expert Bio
Robert F. Jefferson is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the Ninety-third Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), Brothers in Valor: The Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor (Lyons Press, 2018), and the editor of Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America: Closing Ranks (Lexington Books, 2019). In 2019–2020, he was a Fulbright scholar in Denmark, where he was the Distinguished Chair of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark at Odense. His research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, gender, and military studies in Twentieth Century United States history. He is currently writing a book on the history of the Army’s officer candidate schools in World War II.
Expertise
- Cold War
- Democracy
- History
- Security and Defense
- Society and Culture
- U.S. Politics
Wilson Center Project
When Jim Crow Faced a New Army: World War II and the Nonsegregation of the United States Military
Project Summary
Robert Jefferson's project examines the experiences of black and white soldiers who attended the Army Officer Candidate Schools of World War II. He vividly captures the moments during which the social interactions between black and white military students at the commissioning schools deepened their understandings of race and the political transformations that were taking place in American society at the time. His study also chronicles the extent to which the Army's OCS schools influenced the military's postwar employment of African Americans and the political contours of civil rights initiatives in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Exploring the Executive Order 9981 and the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown versus Board of Education decision, his study chronicles the extent to which the Army's OCS experiment underlined the military's postwar employment policies relating to African American GIs and influenced the direction of civil rights initiatives of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Major Publications
- Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
- Brothers in Valor: Battlefield Stories of the 89 African Americans Awarded the Medal of Honor (Westport, CT: Lyons Press, 2018).
- Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth Century America: Closing Ranks (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019).
