Christine McClure

A family connection led Christine and Dennis McClure to the Alaska Highway in 2013, but traveling the famous road raised issues far more important than family. The racism that distorted the experience of thousands of young, black American soldiers and the fact that they received no credit for their enormous contribution infuriated them. They created a website to document the experience of the black regiments on the Highway—https://www.93regimentalcan.com. And they spent four years traveling to archives, visiting veterans and families, exhaustively researching the black experience on the Highway and in 2017 Epicenter Press released their book, We Fought the Road. Traveling the Highway again in 2017, they discovered the story of the black 97th Engineers who built the portion of the Highway in Alaska itself. The story climaxed in a trumped-up court martial that convicted 9 young black heroes of mutiny and sentenced them to prison at hard labor. Three more years in the archives, finding and interviewing families and writing led to the release of their second book A Different Race in 2021. And in 2018 they put up a second website, a blog that tells stories from the history of Northern Canada and Alaska. Look for https://www.chrisdennis111.com/