Divided arsenal

"World War II indisputably led to the reform of federal racial policies. Daniel Kryder, in Divided Arsenal, asks why that reform turned out to be limited in scope. To do so, he examines the wartime roles of blacks in the Army, in factories, and in agriculture. Kryder finds that central governments have two main goals during war - the full mobilization of wartime production and survival in office. Limited racial reform, then, represented a means to serve the central government's larger concerns and was not an end in itself. Nevertheless, Kryder argues, these modified reforms, by both stanching…