Phoenix race relations tinged by Southwest’s segregated past
PHOENIX (AP) — Three American Legion posts stand within miles of each other in central Phoenix, a curious reminder of how segregation once ruled the U.S. Southwest as well as the Deep South.
Soldiers returning after World War I in 1919 chartered one of the first posts of the U.S. veterans organization near downtown. But when black and Mexican American men returned from World War II, they opened their own posts, in their own neighborhoods farther south.