World War I and African Americans

By: James Sellman

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

World War I and African Americans

European conflict that involved the overseas service of around 200,000 African American soldiers.

For most African Americans, the United States' entry into World War I in the spring of 1917 held the promise that patriotic service could improve their opportunities and treatment in postwar America. W. E. B. Du Bois, the nation's principal African American leader, called on fellow blacks to “close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens.” Unstinting patriotism, he wrote, would result in “the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult.”

Before they could fight the Germans in Europe, however, blacks had to face the opposition from many white Americans. Sen. James K. Vardaman (D-Mississippi) condemned any mobilization plan that would result in “arrogant, strutting representatives of black soldiery in every community.” Black leaders had to overcome considerable resistance, especially from southern Democrats, to their insistence that African Americans be included in any wartime draft. Ultimately, their efforts were successful, and 367,710 African Americans were drafted during the war. By this time, however, blacks had come to expect little in the way of recognition for their service in any branch of the armed forces. Few African Americans served in the U.S. Navy and none in the Marine Corps. The army was strictly segregated, maintaining four black units, the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments—all under the command of white officers.

When posted in the western and southern United States, African American soldiers faced harsh treatment, intimidation, and Lynching—yet no white citizen was ever punished for engaging in such assaults. On the other hand, in the 1906 Brownsville Affair, 167 black enlisted men were discharged without honor after a Texas shooting incident in which the men quite likely had no part. President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the discharges despite the regiment's recent and courageous service in Cuba and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

As the nation mobilized for war, African American leaders faced great difficulties in furthering the opportunities for blacks within the armed services. In light of the service academies' longstanding hostility to black cadets, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed for the establishment of a training school for black officers. NAACP efforts resulted in the establishment of a Colored Officers' Training Camp (COTC) at Fort Dodge in Des Moines, Iowa. During the war, Fort Dodge trained and commissioned 639 African American officers. Although symbolically important, the existence of these black officers did little to alter the great racial imbalance: African Americans comprised 13 percent of active-duty military manpower during the war, but only seven-tenths of 1 percent of the officers.

Black aspirations were dealt a further setback when members of the 3rd Battalion of the 24th Infantry took part in the Houston Mutiny of August 23, 1917—the first race riots in American history in which more whites than blacks died. The violence left sixteen whites and four black soldiers dead. After hasty courts-martial, nineteen more African American soldiers were executed for their part in the mutiny, and numerous others received lengthy jail sentences. Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Michael Lee Lanning, author of The African-American Soldier, concluded that a key factor in the riot was, ironically, the previous transfer of twenty-five of the battalion's most senior sergeants to Des Moines to attend COTC, leaving only one experienced company first sergeant and seriously undermining battalion discipline. In the years to come, this incident effectively undermined any proposal to increase the role of black troops.

African Americans did find greater opportunities once the nation entered the war, which had been ongoing in Europe since August 1914. Many Southern blacks moved to the North to take industrial jobs created by the wartime economy. Their numbers added to what would later be known as the Great Migration, a population movement that created or greatly augmented black communities in many northern cities. In addition, 200,000 black soldiers were deployed to Europe, some serving with the American Expeditionary Force and others detailed to the French Army. But the vast majority of these troops were relegated to Services of Supplies (SOS) units and labor battalions. The War Department did not order its four black regiments to Europe, evidently in response to the Brownsville Affair and the Houston Mutiny. Rather than taking part in World War I, the army's most experienced soldiers remained at their posts along the Mexican border.

Instead the army organized two new black combat divisions, the Ninety-second and Ninety-third Divisions, through which some 40,000 soldiers saw combat in Europe. But Gen. John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, the supreme commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), evidently had misgivings about using African American combat troops. When the Ninety-third arrived in France, General Pershing turned the unit over to the French army.

Both the Ninety-third Division and the French inadvertently benefited from white Americans' unwillingness to serve alongside blacks. The 369th Regiment of the Ninety-third Division included Lieutenant James Reese Europe, the black society musician from New York City who organized the regimental band. Lieutenant Europe was the first black officer to lead troops into combat in World War I, and he and his band introduced the French to African American Music, preparing the way for a lasting French fascination with Jazz.

With the French, the Ninety-third experienced far greater acceptance and more equal treatment than that provided by the U.S. Army. The unit served heroically throughout the remainder of the war, suffering a casualty rate of 35 percent. The 369th Infantry Regiment spent more than six months on the front lines—longer than any other American unit—during which it neither surrendered an inch of Allied territory nor lost a single soldier through capture. In the 369th alone, 171 officers and men received either Croix de Guerre or Legions of Merit from the French government.

During the war, no black soldier received the Congressional Medal of Honor, America's highest award for military heroism. In 1991, however, President George Bush presented relatives of Corporal Freddie Stowers with what he termed a “long overdue” Medal of Honor in recognition of Stowers's heroism on September 28, 1918, while serving in France with the 371st Infantry Regiment, Ninety-third Infantry Division. Stowers rallied his company after it encountered withering machine-gun and mortar fire that exacted 50 percent casualties and killed or wounded all of the company's more senior officers. After capturing a German machine-gun position in the first trench, Stowers was leading his men against a second trench line when he was mortally wounded by machine-gun fire. Even after being hit, he continued to crawl forward, and when he could crawl no farther, he continued to shout encouragement to his men. Inspired by Stowers's heroism, the company overran the remaining German positions.

Yet despite their record of wartime service, black soldiers faced a hostile and often violent reception on their return from France. The Ku Klux Klan, reborn in 1915, spread for the first time into the North as well as throughout the South. Between 1914 and 1920, a total of 382 African Americans were lynched—in some cases, the victims were recently discharged soldiers still wearing their uniforms. A city official in New Orleans reportedly told a group of returning World War I veterans, “You niggers were wondering how you are going to be treated after the war. Well, I'll tell you, you are going to be treated exactly like you were before the war; this is a white man's country, and we expect to rule it.”

There were serious race riots during and after the war, especially in northern cities that had growing black populations—the 1917 riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, for example. In the Red Summer of 1919, riots broke out in more than two dozen cities. Of these, the deadliest by far was the Chicago Riot of 1919, which resulted in the deaths of twenty-three African Americans and fifteen whites, with a total of 520 whites and blacks injured. This wave of violence effectively quashed black hopes for social advance until President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and, especially, World War II. Yet the war and its aftermath had profound consequences for black culture, setting the stage for the Black Nationalism of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association and leading to the emergence of the self-assured and politically militant New Negro, the Chicago jazz and Blues scene, and the Harlem Renaissance.

See also Black Nationalism in the United States; Brownsville, Texas, Affair; East St. Louis Riot of 1917; Race Riots in the United States; Spanish-American War, African Americans in the.

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