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Gibson had also done his bit during World War II. He was as much of a groundbreaker for his race as was Jack Johnson, although in a more subtle way. He had an ego—for example, the use of the full, drawn-out moniker of Truman K. Gibson Jr.—but he had reason to be proud of his achievements. For all his later weaknesses, when he chose to do business with Jim Norris and his cohorts attached to the International Boxing Club, Gibson could go to his grave content with his contribution in tearing down Jim Crow prejudices in the armed forces before and during World War II, a time when bigotry was far more entrenched than now.

He was a big barrel of contradictions, noble and weak, intelligent and—conveniently, perhaps—naive. He made the best of whatever situation he was in but failed to see that he could have avoided being in some tight corners in the first place had he not let circumstances drift. Truman Gibson might have been boxing's ultimate pragmatist.

In the autumn of 1940, Gibson, one of his country's few prominent black lawyers, was summoned to Washington to act as an advocate for African-American soldiers. For five years he served as an assistant to Bill Hastie, the civilian aide to the secretary of war. He saw prejudice against black soldiers everywhere, who were “abused, assaulted and even murdered by white civilians in the south,” as he recalls in his autobiography.