In this abridged excerpt from “The Last Thing You Surrender” by columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., elements of the all-black 761st Tank Battalion make a grisly discovery and Pvt. Luther Hayes, whose parents were murdered before his eyes by a white mob when he was a boy of nine, learns a lesson about humanity’s true capacity for cruelty.
It was a camp of some sort, barracks arranged in neat rows. And hobbling, shuffling, tottering toward them from every direction, came an assemblage of stick men in filthy black and white striped prison suits. Maybe some of them were women, too.