When Politics Becomes Protest: Black Veterans and Political Activism in the Postwar South

Recent narratives of the civil rights movement document black veterans’ contributions to the movement’s success, often attributing their efforts to their military experience. While this attribution makes sense intuitively, alternative explanations for black veterans’ mobilization are not fully explored in existing work. For instance, black veterans were often among the most active members in many of the civil rights organizations from which insurgency was launched. Therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility that black civic institutions, not military service per se, drove black veterans’ activism. Furthermore, if military service did lead to political activism, we lack a microlevel mechanism to explain the means by which it did so. In this article, I show that military service did motivate black veterans’ activism independent of their membership in black civic institutions or feelings of group solidarity and theorize a mechanism by which it did so.