Histories of the African-American presence in Australia during World War II have noted the scrutiny placed on the sexual relations of visiting servicemen, and the legacies these encounters left behind. The war permitted new sexual and romantic relationships that Australian historians have used to explore gender, culture, and race in the 1940s.

Shifting the locus of examination of these interactions from the Australian point of view to the American, and placing them in the context of the global movement of bodies brought about by the war, these stories take on new contexts. Australia, as well as other white ‘western’ nations, became spaces in which the struggle for civil rights in the United States played out. Drawing in particular on debates that played out in the newspapers of the ‘black press’ I examine how reports of interracial sex were received by African Americans back home in the United States, and show how such reports constituted a surprising, yet also limiting approach to civil rights activism during the wartime period.