Torchbearers of Democracy

African American Soldiers in the World War I Era

Chad L. Williams

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780807899359
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios afroamericanos

For the 380, 000 African American soldiers who fought in World War I, Woodrow Wilson's charge to make the world "safe for democracy" carried life-or-death meaning. Chad L. Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in the global conflict and how they, along with race activists and ordinary citizens, committed to fighting for democracy at home and beyond. Using a diverse range of sources, Torchbearers of Democracy reclaims the legacy of African American soldiers and veterans and connects their history to issues such as the obligations of citizenship, combat and labor, diaspora and internationalism, homecoming and racial violence, "New Negro" militancy, and African American memories of the war.

PART I War

Negro Soldiers

These truly are the Brave,
These men who cast aside
Old memories, to walk the blood-stained pave
Of Sacrifice, joining the solemn tide
That moves away, to suffer and to die
For Freedom—when their own is yet denied!
O Pride! O Prejudice! When they pass by,
Hail them, the Brave, for you now crucified!

These truly are the Free,
These souls that grandly rise
Above base dreams of vengeance for their wrongs,
Who march to war with visions in their eyes
Of Peace through Brotherhood, lifting glad songs,
Aforetime, while they front the firing line.
Stand and behold! They take the field to-day,
Shedding their blood like Him now held divine,
That those who mock might find a better way!

—Roscoe C. Jamison (1917)

1 DEMOCRACY AT WAR

African Americans, Citizenship, and the Meanings of Military Service

If America truly understands the functions of democracy and justice, she must know that she must begin to promote democracy and justice at home first of all.

—Arthur G. Shaw, New York City, May 31, 1917

August 1914, in many ways, told the story of African Americans in the early twentieth century. It was a month mixed with both the glimmer of progress and the pain of disappointment. On August 14 the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) held its annual meeting at Wilberforce, Ohio, where delegates representing clubwomen from throughout the country reelected Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Tuskegee founder and principal Booker T. Washington, as their president.¹ One week later, the National Negro Business League (NNBL) convened at the Muskogee, Oklahoma, convention center, bringing together thousands of black entrepreneurs and race men.² For African American communities, in the North and South, small but meaningful local happenings continued to hold tremendous importance, such as the dedication of a new $12,000 library provided by the Carnegie Foundation for the black residents of Savannah, Georgia, or an August 27 ninth-inning, 10–8 victory of the Cuban Giants over the Bronx Athletics in New York.³ But August also brought with it reminders of the long road that lay before black people in their quest for freedom. The black press still fumed over the decision of the Wilson administration to require photo identification of all potential Civil Service Commission applicants.⁴ This paled in comparison to the threat of racial violence black southerners continued to face on a daily basis. During a bloody five-day span, between August 5 and August 9, lynch mobs in Louisiana took the lives of five black men. In the small town of Monroe, the Chicago Defender reported, four perished at the hands of “bloodthirsty ‘crackers.’”⁵

An ocean away, blood also spilled. This was no ordinary month. In August 1914 Europe descended into the abyss of war and transformed the fate of the modern world. The June 28 assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by a Serbian nationalist was only the pretext for a conflict many saw as inevitable. German war plans had been long in the making, as Europe's preeminent industrial power saw territorial expansion and the subjugation of its French and British rivals as a matter of national survival. Germany poked and prodded Austria-Hungary's emperor Franz Joseph to declare war on Serbia, and when he did on July 31, 1914, one by one the dominoes of a precarious national alliance system fell. Russia mobilized in support of Serbia. On August 1 Germany declared war on Russia and, two days later, on France. On the basis of the “Schlieffen Plan,” the kaiser and the Central Powers had a straightforward strategic aim: encircle and crush the French army with a combination of brute force and blinding speed; continue the counterclockwise sweep into Russia; and end the war within a matter of months. Doing so necessitated the invasion of neutral Belgium, an act of aggression that brought international condemnation and led to Great Britain's entrance into the war on the side of the Allies. Nevertheless, the massive German military machine, acclaimed as the finest in the world and further inspired by a belief in Teutonic racial supremacy, swelled with confidence and believed no force could stand in its way.

This self-assurance proved illusory. The French buckled but, in the end, failed to break at the crucial battle of the Marne in September 1914, ultimately pushing back with the aid of British forces a German offensive that at one point stood within a mere thirty miles of Paris. The best chance for a German victory thus came and went in these pivotal, early days of the war. The ensuing result was the entrenchment of armies along the western front and a bloodletting unparalleled in modern history. The battle of Verdun between February and December 1916, an ultimately futile German offensive, resulted in over 400,000 casualties. The Allied Somme campaign from July to November 1916 proved even more catastrophic. The British, which led the operation, lost more than 60 percent of their troops to death or injury in the initial advance. A total of 419,654 British soldiers alone died by the end of the five-month battle, and the final dead and wounded on both sides reached well over one million.⁶ As the war bogged down on the western front, Russia and the Central Powers battled in the East, where the fighting was much more fluid but nevertheless equally devastating. The number of Russian combat deaths surpassed one million. Such incomprehensible loss of life and destruction shattered Europe's image of Enlightenment civilization and rationality. By the spring of 1917, some three years after the buoyant summer of 1914, when young German, Russian, Austrian, British, and French men marched off to war filled with nationalistic pride, the European combatants found themselves exhausted and in search of any and all advantages to bring the conflict to an end.⁷

Most Americans initially observed the European war with a mixture of dismay and stunned detachment. If anything, the war offered final confirmation for descendant Europeans of the historical and evolutionary distance between the United States and “old world” Europe. For millions of recent immigrants with direct ties to the conflict, their response was understandably more emotional and immediate. While some support for the Central Powers existed in German American and Irish American enclaves, American public sentiment overwhelmingly favored the Allies, shaped in large part by Germany's invasion of Belgium and widely reported atrocities. Although the United States government clearly leaned toward the side of the Allied forces, providing material support and generous credits to Great Britain, President Woodrow Wilson firmly adhered to a policy of American neutrality.⁸ Despite the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915 and the pleas of Britain and France for the United States to intervene, the carnage occurring on the European battlefields served as a strong deterrent to American military involvement. Events occurring south of the U.S. border in Mexico, where American troops were busy chasing the insurgent forces of Francisco “Pancho” Villa, actually elicited greater immediate concern than those across the Atlantic. By the beginning of 1917, however, circumstances had dramatically changed, and the United States faced the troubling reality of fighting in a war of unprecedented magnitude and scope. Formal American entrance into the war on April 6, 1917, demanded the creation of an army capable of ensuring an Allied victory and positioning the United States as the central player in the peace process.⁹ Such an undertaking required the mobilization of all financial, material, human, and ideological resources at the government's disposal.

This mobilization included African Americans. Considering the social, political, and economic obstacles black people faced on the eve of the war—segregation, disfranchisement, job discrimination, racial violence—they had every reason to dismiss the significance of the war to their lives. Many, in fact, did. Nevertheless, most approached the war with guarded optimism, and placed faith in the ability of loyalty and patriotic duty, specifically regarding military service, to infuse life into the moribund condition of African American citizenship. The democratic framing of American participation in the war played a significant role in why many African Americans felt this way. Wilson asserted that the country entered the war not for territorial gain or national aggrandizement but for the singular purpose of making the world “safe for democracy,” of ensuring that the cherished American principles of freedom, self-determination, personal liberty, and peace became the hallmarks of a new postwar global community. African Americans were no strangers to the ideals of democracy. They had intimate, painful experience with both its inspiring possibilities and its cruel disappointments. As an ideological struggle, with the future of democracy purportedly at stake, the war suddenly bore greater relevance to the everyday realities of black people. The United States could either live up to its potential as a model of democracy and freedom by supporting the rights of its African American citizenry or demonstrate its hypocrisy to these principles on a global stage.¹⁰ The choices were clear.

African American soldiers and the contested meanings of black military service shaped the historical and ideological context within which the United States mobilized for war. As arguably the most sacred obligation of citizenship, military service for black people became a highly contentious issue. The organization and participation of African American soldiers in the war, many race spokesmen and -women perceived, represented an opportunity for the race to demonstrate its loyalty to the country in its hour of need. Black soldiers became potent, albeit unstable, symbols of African American patriotism, racial pride, manhood, and citizenship. They had the power, many African Americans hoped, to challenge white supremacy and make democracy a reality.

Questions concerning what role African American soldiers would have in the war were extremely volatile. The government had little time to waste, as thousands of black soldiers in the Regular Army readied themselves for battle, while millions of civilian black men awaited the possibility of induction. Democracy, race, manhood, citizenship, and obligation made for a combustible combination, one experienced by African American soldiers and draftees in various forms, moments, and places in the earliest stages of American participation in the war. There was Houston, Texas, where black soldiers declared war on white supremacy as an assertion of their manhood and human dignity. There was the struggle for black officers, exemplified by the contentious Des Moines training camp and the tragedy of Charles Young. And, perhaps most significant, there was the draft, an unprecedented reconfiguration of the relationship between the nation-state and its citizens, which eventually pulled close to 370,000 black men into the army. Although Wilson and the American military set their focus on Germany and the French western front, in the summer and fall of 1917 the United States became the crucial battleground in the fight for the meaning of democracy and its viability for black people. African American soldiers and civilians, literally and figuratively, prepared for war.

ON THE EVE OF AMERICAN entry into the First World War, democracy had become increasingly severed from the lives of most African Americans. Black people were citizens in name only, as one by one, the achievements of Reconstruction faded into memory. Millions of black farmers in the South remained trapped in slavery-like conditions, shackled by the debt and crushing poverty of a sharecropping system that provided little hope for economic freedom.¹¹ The challenges confronting black workers went hand in hand with the rise of Jim Crow. While segregation was not a new phenomenon, the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision legally sanctioned a system of de jure racial separation that soon pervaded southern social and cultural life.¹² For African Americans residing in northern and midwestern cities, de facto segregation, particularly in housing, education, and employment, became the norm. The steady stripping of African American voting rights left black people with little political recourse to address these problems. State governments employed a variety of tactics—“grandfather” clauses, poll taxes, literacy tests—all geared to deprive African Americans of access to the ballot. Pockets of black electoral participation still existed in some upper South communities, as well as in northern cities where white politicians courted African American patronage. Nevertheless, the ability of African Americans to exert political power through the ballot, arguably the most cherished privilege of democracy, was considerably weakened.

What white supremacists intent on driving African Americans from the political sphere could not accomplish through deceit they achieved with raw violence. The bloodshed of the 1860s and 1870s spilled into the post-Reconstruction era and, in many respects, worsened. The efforts of African Americans to assert their citizenship were often met with fierce resistance, as witnessed in the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, riot, which effectively stamped out one of the last remaining vestiges of black political participation in the state.¹³ However, racial violence and the general disregard for black life went far beyond strictly politics and infected the entire social, economic, and cultural fabric of the nation. In the South, where the stakes of white supremacy ran highest, violence served as a tried-and-true strategy for maintaining a sense of stability to a precarious racial hierarchy. Lynching became a deadly method of social control and regulation of the codes of racial etiquette. Between 1882 and 1916, at least 2,833 African Americans lost their lives by extralegal violence, perpetrated by “persons unknown” who rarely received punishment for their actions.¹⁴ As the number of lynchings increased during the 1890s, so too did their carnivalesque character. Many were advertised in advance and attended by sometimes thousands of people, who shot, stabbed, burned, and mutilated black men and women as a grisly form of public entertainment and cultural bonding.¹⁵ Racial violence was not exclusive to the South. Race riots erupted in New York City in 1900 and in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908, demonstrating that in various regions of the nation, black people lacked the fundamental civic expectations of safety and equal protection under the law.

African Americans did not quietly acquiesce to the assault on their democratic rights and humanity. Despite the erosion of black citizenship in the aftermath of Reconstruction, African Americans continued to build upon existing social, religious, and educational institutions, while also establishing new vehicles for political activism and agitation. The 1915 death of Tuskegee Institute president Booker T. Washington marked a shift in the landscape of black political ideology.¹⁶ The Tuskegee “Wizard” had effectively shaped the terms of debate on the “race question” with his controlling grip of crucial philanthropic financial resources, the black press, and access to white political elites. Washington's politics of appeasement and conciliation to the logic of racial segregation, while influential, did not go unchallenged. The “Tuskegee machine” encountered vocal and at times fierce opposition from individuals such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the vociferous antilynching activist and founder of the Negro Fellowship League; William Monroe Trot...