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| The 1940s |
| 1940: You're in the Army now America has not yet been drawn into WWII, but the country gears up with a draft that brings thousands of young men to Fort Dix for infantry training. 1941: War A young military wife from the Trenton area grabs her children and runs when the Japanese launch their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. A gallery of other area vets also tell their stories. 1942: Home front Steel, auto and rubber plants kick up the production, kids start collecting scrap metal and Trentonians learn to get along with less in order to beat the Axis. 1943: Victory over discrimination Two Trenton mothers, Berline Williams and Gladys Hedgepeth, file suit to stop the segregation of Trenton's schools in a case that's a forerunner of Brown vs. Board of Education. 1944: Manhattan Project Princeton physicists go from theorizing about the atom to actually splitting it, and create the most destructive and terrifying weapon in the history of war. 1945: The prisoners who wouldn't go home Red Army soldiers who ended up in Fort Dix after they were captured fighting on Nazi Germany's side riot when told they have go back to Russia, where Stalin has declared them traitors. 1946: New paper in town Typesetters and other strikers from the Trenton Times create The Trentonian to compete against their old bosses, touching off a newspaper war that continues to this day. 1947: SAT story Educational Testing Services is founded in Princeton to help schools gauge the performance of students, and soon its test becomes an obsession and nightmare for American youth. 1948: The Trenton Six Six black men from Trenton get charged with the robbery-murder of a shopkeeper, leading to three years of worldwide civil rights protest. 1949: Turnpike America's first great tollway begins under the direction of a governor who would spare no expense -- and give no thought to just how ugly it might become. |
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