Hello Ask Historians:
I am asking for your help in finding sources / back text to a story I once heard. I will try to be as descriptive as possible, but unfortunately, the crucial details escape me and that is where I am asking for your help.
Essentially - Post WW II Black Americans return to their homes in the South (its a specific Town). There, they find corrupt leadership(local level) and are forced to take up arms against the this falsely installed local leader. I could have been south like Texas, or Florida, or Louisiana. But I almost certain I have seen historical account of this story.
Thank you very much in advance for your time.
It's not quite what you describe, but "WWII veterans returned home" to a town in the South and taking up arms sounds a lot like the Columbia Race Riot in Tennessee, in 1946.
https://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/entries/columbia-race-riot-1946/
There was a dispute over a radio being repaired for a Black veteran. The vet wouldn't back down, was arrested, a White mob assembled, other Black vets responded and also refused to back down. The White mob was reinforced by police, and over a hundred Black residents were arrested, two dying in custody. As noted in the link,
"The Columbia incident and the reaction to it,” concluded historian Dorothy Beeler, “were major events of the late 1940's, which helped create a base from which black organizations gathered strength for the civil rights push of the 1950's and 1960's.”
Certainly it must have helped to shape the career of Thurgood Marshall.
If this is what you mean, I am sure you could post again more specifically and likely get some recommendations of other good sources. But the incident features in an excellent post-war history/memoir of corrupt law enforcement and politics in that part of Tennessee, James Squires' The Secrets of the Hopewell Box