“White folks would rather lose the war than give up the luxury of race prejudice,” Roy Wilkins of the NAACP argued in 1942. The navy, he said, “would rather not have a vital radio message get through than to have it sent by Black hands or over equipment set up by Black technicians.”

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/10/19/we-return-fighting-half-american-delmont/