Separate, But Heroes:
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2025

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.― George Orwell, 1984

History is being erased in my country, by executive order.

The photo over there on the right, known as “Whipped Peter,” was taken in April 1863 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The man was actually named Gordon; Peter was his friend who escaped the living hell of their plantation with Gordon and two other men. It’s an iconic photo, and in August 2025 U.S. President Donald J. Trump ordered it removed from National Park Service displays.

We’re not a government agency, so we don’t have to comply. There will be no anticipatory obedience at Avalanche Press. We’re not going to sugarcoat history and feed you comforting fairy tales. We’re going to talk about “how bad slavery was,” because slavery was bad. An evil institution that has been a stain on American history since the first slaves were imported to St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. So bad that the United States fought a Civil War, because of slavery.

Separate, But Heroes is a work of history, focused on the contributions of African-Americans to U.S. military history, focused primarily on the segregated, African-American 761st Tank Battalion. It covers much more than that, including the context in which a segregated Army existed. That means we’re talking about American racism, and that means we’re talking about slavery.

Back in 2021, we published a book called Black Panthers, a Panzer Grenadier scenario book. It was, 63 years after Charles Roberts published the first modern historical wargame, the first (and, as far as I know, still the only) wargame or wargame book to feature an African-American person on its cover (Sergeant Harvey Woodard, who died for his country in November 1944). The world’s largest game distributor promptly dropped us after a 27-year business relationship. They never said why, but I assume it was because “someone might be made uncomfortable.”

I’m very proud of that book. We made a statement. We told the truth. And we paid the price for it: getting tossed out of distribution, the angry cancellations, the quiet boycotts.

Even as I wrote it, I saw a fundamental problem with Black Panthers: it combined history and game stuff under the same cover. That limited its reach not just to a wargame audience (overwhelmingly older white guys), but to those who played a particular game series, and who already owned (or had to buy) another game to play with the Black Panthers (Black Panthers was an expansion, not a stand-alone game). It’s a popular series, but probably limited to a couple thousand hard-core players at most. I wanted more people to read my work, and I wanted to be able to show it and give it to people who did not play Panzer Grenadier and had no wish to ever do so (which is most people on this planet).

Separate, But Heroes is my effort to correct that fundamental publishing error. Black Panthers is getting a new edition, with more game scenarios and game stuff, but we’re pulling out the history part into Separate, But Heroes and roughly doubling its volume. It’s what we’re calling a Historical Study, a new line of just straight-up history books without game content. They’re all tied to a game or games by way of their topic, but they stand completely alone. Separate, But Heroes comes bundled with the new edition of Black Panthers, and is also sold separately.

So, what’s under the cover?

On the military history side, we of course talk about the Black Panthers, but also the other segregated units in which African-Americans served their country: the other two segregated tank battalions, the segregated battalions of tank destroyers and paratroopers, and even the segregated Ranger company. The segregated infantry divisions, and segregated cavalry division. Their organization, their battles, their contribution to the American victory over fascism.

None of that existed outside of American society: Black soldiers were shuffled into separate units for a reason, and it certainly wasn’t for their own comfort or by their own wishes. An army reflects its society, especially so in a democratic society. Black soldiers had served the United States from the very beginning of the American Revolution, and over 200,000 fought for the United States in the Civil War (outside of insane racist fantasies, there were no “Black Confederates” fighting for the insurrectionists, but tens of thousands performed the forced labor that kept the Confederate armies in the field).

The Second World War came nearly eight decades after Emancipation, but the integration of former slaves and their descendants into American society had not gone smoothly. Legally-enforced segregation remained in many states, with Jim Crow holding sway in others where the law allegedly did not allow it. Lynchings and mob attacks terrorized Black Americans before the war and continued even afterwards.

It's an ugly story. I suppose I could pretend that it has nothing to do with games, and follow the well-trodden path of our tiny industry. Shut our eyes, shut our mouths, and pretend it never happened. Write some fairy tale that says the Black Panthers “overcame adversity,” and glide right over who caused that “adversity” and what it was, and is. That would be the smart thing to do.

The story of Avalanche Press is one of stubbornly refusing to do the smart thing. We’ll tell you about the Tulsa Race Massacre. About the court-martial of Jackie Robinson. About the Double-V Campaign (Victory in War, Victory for Civil Rights). About Benjamin O. Davis (my father’s CO) and the Red Tails. And of course, about the Black Panther battalion, who sprung my grandfather from the Gunskirchen concentration camp.

I’m not, myself, African-American. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t write this story if I were; the rage would make it impossible to string words together. As it stands, it’s still difficult to overcome the newspaper training, when it was drilled into us to write about “racial tensions” instead of “white mobs beating and hanging people.”

Separate, But Heroes is a statement of what we stand for, here at Avalanche Press. I’ve poured everything I know into making this the best possible work of history I can craft. We’re not going to run from a difficult topic, just because it might make someone uncomfortable. And if there’s a price to pay for that, if it costs me the business and career that I’ve spent my adult life building? I’ve written worse endings.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children.

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