With the onset of World War II, at a moment when American propaganda embraced brotherhood, tolerance, and equality as war aims, makers of race movies slipped from view - victims of short rations of raw film stock. Yet black activists and their government together pressed filmmakers to address wartime racial injustice. The black railway porter's union, led by A. Philip Randolph, threatened a march on Washington unless the government granted equality of opportunity in war industry; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) held its annual convention in Los Angeles, partly to lobby Hollywood directly for better roles; and the black Pittsburgh Courier campaigned on its front pages for a Double V: a simultaneous victory over foreign fascism and domestic racism.

In response, federal agencies made several movies of advocacy. First among them in quality and breadth of distribution to both army and civilian theaters was the United States War Department's The Negro Soldier (1944), written by Carlton Moss, who also starred in the film. Late in the war, the government commissioned or inspired short civilian films on the theme of equitable race relations, among them Don't Be a Sucker, It Happened in Springfield, and The House I Live In (which won an Oscar in 1947 as the best short film). The studios joined the ranks - partly at the urging of the U.S. Office of War Information - and racially integrated the military years before the armed forces themselves would do so. Among works with an integrated cast were MGM's Bataan (1943), Twentieth Century Fox's Crash Dive (1943), and Columbia's Sahara (1943). Movies set in civilian life, among them Since You Went Away (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1943), made similar gestures.

Documentaries strove for a similar liberal voice. Gjon Mili's Jammin' the Blues (1944) (a Life magazine "movie of the week") so evoked the mood of a black jazz club that seasoned newspaper reporters thought it had been done with a hidden camera. Janice Loeb and Helen Levitt's The Quiet One (1947) caught the dedication that social workers gave to the plight of black juveniles. And the United Auto Workers sponsored an animated cartoon, The Brotherhood of Man (1947), that took up the fate of racism in postwar America.

In the spring of 1949 at least three movies addressed racial issues: MGM's movie version of William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust made racism an issue of conscience rather than politics; Louis DeRochemont's Lost Boundaries came from a Reader's Digest report on passing for white in a Vermont village; and, boldly for the times, Darryl Zanuck asked Jane White, daughter of Walter White of the NAACP, to do an uncredited but sweeping job of script doctoring on Pinky, yet another story on passing.

Thereafter, in the 20 years following Sidney Poitier's debut in Zanuck's No Way Out (1950) - an era that might well be dubbed "the age of Sidney Poitier" - scores of films emerged from Hollywood, each with an obligatory scene, sequence, or subplot involving a small, often painfully obvious victory over racism. Indeed, Poitier won an Oscar for his Christ-like savior of a group of nuns in Lilies of the Field (1963) and starred in the culmination of the genre, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1968). As if warning of the ominous price to pay for not following the liberal path to racial harmony, Harry Belafonte's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) closed with a scene in which two prejudiced bank robbers, one black and one white, blow themselves to bits rather than team up to pull off a job. By the 1950s such movies played a sort of backbeat to the actual Civil Rights Movement.