Matthew Delmont first came onto my radar in 2016, as the History Channel was preparing to release an updated version of Roots, a TV miniseries based on Alex Haley’s best-selling novel about the enslavement of an African man and the travails of his descendants in America. The original, released in 1977 and starring LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte, remains the most-watched miniseries ever. Delmont, then a history professor at Arizona State, and now at Dartmouth, had written a book about its making. So we watched the new Roots together and talked about each episode.
Delmont, who is Black, went on to write a fabulous book about the Black Americans serving in World War II, demonstrating how critical they were to the Allied victory even as they were denied coveted opportunities and had their accomplishments denigrated by the brass. Being Black in America, as Delmont notes in a Mother Jones excerpt from his book Half American, those men and women were unable to fully share in the benefits the GI Bill offered to other returning soldiers—advantages that helped a generation of white families prosper and build intergenerational wealth.
Some similar themes echo in Delmont’s coverage of Black service in a different war—Vietnam. His latest book, Until the Last Gun Is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America’s Soul, is out this week. And so, just in time for Black History Month, we bring you a new excerpt, wherein Delmont shares the story of the Vietnam soldier Skip Johnson to make the case that America benefits when we celebrate the sacrifices of Black service members rather than dismissing them as, in the infamous words of Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth, “DEI woke shit.”
—Michael Mechanic
