A Black minister stands before his congregation and lays out the case for enlisting to fight the Nazis, and that sermon frames a War Department film built to recruit African American soldiers for World War II. Produced by Frank Capra and directed by Stuart Heisler, with a score by Dimitri Tiomkin, the film uses historical re-enactments to place Black soldiers in every American conflict back to the Revolution, then shifts to footage of Black judges, schoolteachers, orchestra conductors, and football players to argue for a fuller place in American life. One sequence shows Jesse Owens and other Black athletes competing at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, footage chosen to needle the Nazi racial ideology the recruits would be fighting. As government propaganda, it never mentions segregation within the very army it is selling, but its images of Black achievement and service, assembled to persuade a wartime audience, are themselves the historical record now.