They Fought for Democracy Abroad. At Home, Racism Won

They Fought for Democracy Abroad. At Home, Racism Won

It took more than a century, and a literal act of Congress, to happen. It came decades after the last of them — Black World War I combat veterans who had survived the blood-and-guts brutality of trench warfare in Europe and suffered the dehumanization of Jim Crow  — had passed.  But the Harlem Hellfighters, an all-Black, all-volunteer regiment whose battlefield heroics are the stuff of legend, finally got their due from the United States governm…