Roi Ottley's World War II: The Lost Diary of an African American Journalist

The book appeared in the middle of a summer when race riots broke out in Los Angeles, Harlem, Detroit, Mobile, and elsewhere. [...]Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma appeared the following year, it provided mainstream audiences with their best introduction to black life. The diary material, the most valuable part of the book, is presented as originally typed, thus repetitive and containing spelling or punctuation errors, but it also contains a host of enlightening comments, such as how he received praise from Ernest Hemingway or how Edward R. Murrow respected him "not as a Negro . . . but as a competent newspaper man."