Beth Bailey of the University of Kansas will lecture on her book, “An Army Afire: How the U.S. Army Confronted Its Racial Crisis in the Vietnam Era”

Thursday, April 4th at 4:00 pm Pyle Center Room 232 on the UW-Madison Campus

Even as US troops fought in Vietnam, Black and white soldiers battled each other in barracks and bars, with violence spilling into the streets of towns and cities in the United States and around the world. By the late 1960s, key Army leaders had begun to worry that racial conflict undermined the Army’s ability to defend the nation. In their attempts to solve “the problem of race,” Army leaders were surprisingly creative, even willing to challenge military principles of discipline, order, hierarchy, and authority. Confronting what some saw as an existential threat, the fundamentally conservative institution of the US Army took strikingly progressive actions, though in service of a conservative goal.

This lecture is presented by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum and the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.