Please be informed that I am ready to serve in any unit of the armed forces of my country which is not segregated by race,” wrote Winfred Lynn to his local draft board in 1942 after learning of his conscription into the United States Army.

The thirty-six-year-old landscape gardener from Jamaica, Queens, New York City, loathed Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan but vowed to go “to prison or to die, if necessary, rather than submit to the mockery of fighting for democracy in a Jim Crow army.”

Only when his lawyers concluded that his case against the Selective Service would be stronger were he in uniform did Lynn submit to conscription. He saw duty in the Pacific, made the rank of corporal, and watched his case reach the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it on January 2, 1945, dashing what one black newspaper, proclaiming Lynn the “Hero of World War II,” termed “the most important legal battle to challenge segregation in the armed forces.” Only the Second World War’s end in 1945 brought him an honorable discharge and the outcome he had sought for three long years: freedom.