On Jan. 31, 1942, in a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, James Thompson proposed that “colored Americans” adopt a double V sign: “The first V for victory over our enemies
<p>"Black activists in the Black press recognized what a tremendous danger Nazism and that racial ideology posed to the world because they saw the commonalities between how Jews were being treated in Europe and how Black people were being treated in the American South. And they called out those similarities explicitly."</p>