On the eve of World War II, the American Red Cross (ARC) excluded African-American blood donors. The instructions from the Army and the Navy implied that the armed forces did not want the allegedly "inferior" blood of Blacks in the veins of "superior" White soldiers. The ARC's exclusionary policy, as mandated by defense officials in the War Department, continued the tradition of relegating African-Americans to second-class citizenship.Black newspaper editors and individual protest leaders on the national and local levels pressured the armed forces to change its blood donor policy. On January 29, 1942, the ARC started to accept blood donations from Blacks but followed a national policy of segregation. The ARC labeled and stored African-American blood donations apart from those of Whites and maintained Jim Crow blood banks throughout the war even though medical experts found no factual basis to differentiate blood by race.This paper examines how Black newspapers and individuals such as Asa Philip Randolph, Walter Francis White, William Henry Hastie, Mabel Keaton Staupers, and the Black community of Indianapolis responded to the ARC's initial policy of exclusion and then segregating AfricanAmerican blood donations. The paper attempts to modify the popular interpretation that the war constituted a watershed for African-Americans. My research indicates that while many Black leaders and protest organizations on the national and local levels challenged the ARC's blood donor policies, African-Americans did not win a fundamental change in military policy. Thus, while the fight against blood donor discrimination was a manifestation of the wartime "Double V" campaign it also represented its limitations.The paper draws on secondary sources, African-American newspapers, and the manuscript collections of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses, Claude A. Barnett, William Henry Hastie, Asa Philip Randolph, and the Indianapolis Area Chapter of the ARC as well as the papers of African-American physicians in Indianapolis, Walter H. Maddux and Harvey N. Middleton of the Flanner House and the Morgan Health Center. / Department of History