Shipdham Airfield in Norfolk, England, became home to the U.S. Army Air Forces’ 44th Bomb Group during World War II. Flying B-24 Liberators, the group carried out hundreds of bombing missions over occupied Europe and suffered heavy losses. Like the American military as a whole, the base operated within a segregated armed forces in which Black servicemen faced severe restrictions on their roles. After the war, much of the airfield returned to agricultural and civilian aviation use.

I photographed the remains of Shipdham Airfield in England in 1991. The abandoned wartime landscape interested me first as a physical remnant of World War II. Its history later became part of the broader pattern I kept finding in these places: even while Americans were fighting fascism abroad, the American military itself remained segregated.