World War I

By: Dorothy Salem

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

World War I

World War I transformed the consciousness of black women in America. The war years offered black women the opportunity for increased intergroup cooperation, the occasion to win local improvements under the guise of selfless patriotism, and the challenge to expose racial injustices in a country waging a war for international democracy. Through their wartime efforts, they proved their abilities, performed nontraditional jobs, and increased their expectations for postwar progress in pay, occupational status, and racial justice. Black women gained skills, networks, and confidence that shaped a more militant perspective—one that was a postwar amalgam of the New Negro and New Woman.

Impact at Home of Early War Years

The outbreak of the European war in 1914 did not immediately concern black women facing worsening race relations under President Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated federal restrooms and eating areas and sent the Marines to occupy Haiti. Black women had been making steady inroads into federal civil service employment until Wilson halted the progress by requiring personal interviews and application photos. Congress was considering legislation to segregate races on public carriers, to exclude black Americans from commissions in the army and navy, and to make lynching illegal under federal law. Locally, municipal codes required residential segregation of the races, lynching became more frequent, and the D. W. Griffith silent film Birth of a Nation (1915) attracted audiences to share in the public stereotyping of black men as beasts lusting after virtuous white women.

As individuals and groups, black women fought against the worsening racial conditions. Black leaders from thirty-eight states protested the Wilson segregation policies. At one meeting with President Wilson, they were assured that the trend would not continue, but after a year of disappointments they returned to Wilson to complain, only to be asked to leave. A national incident resulted. Women circulated petitions, lobbied sympathetic congressmen, issued protests in the press, held public meetings with white leaders, and used the court system to stop regressive federal, state, and local legislation. To protest Birth of a Nation, women helped organize local boycotts to educate the public about the issues. Delilah Beasley's articles in the Oakland Tribune motivated her community's successful protest against the film.

As they fought against the legal and political changes, the war influenced their communities by exacerbating conditions that black women had been attempting to improve. The war years brought nationwide inflation and a rising cost-of-living index. In the South, damaging floods, a thriving convict-lease system, and the boll weevil infestation made life unbearable. The “work or fight” rules, enforced by the federal government, meant that individuals were open to arrest if neither working nor fighting for the war effort. To black women domestics who quit their jobs, these rules led to arrest or reemployment in difficult jobs. For black women who chose to stay home to raise their children, the rules meant mandatory employment or arrest for vagrancy.

Few organized efforts prevailed during the war years. The Women's Trade Union League called for equal treatment of black women in the workforce during a time when black women earned 10 to 60 percent less than white women. In the North, black women had to accept inferior positions and do the least desirable tasks. The American Federation of Labor made a superficial attempt to address the problems of black women workers by appointing Mildred Rankin, a black social worker, to head a national Colored Women Workers Office. Without adequate funding and power to fight the racial attitudes of the labor movement, however, Rankin accomplished little.

The “work or fight” rules touched even the efforts of elite black women who tried to help their working-class sisters. Club women such as Mary Church Terrell, Jeanette Carter, and Julia F. Coleman founded the Women Wage Earners Association (WWEA) in Washington, DC, to organize and protect women workers through improved wages, working conditions, and adequate housing. The WWEA's organizational efforts led to wartime strikes of waitresses, domestics, tobacco stemmers, and nurses. The strike in Norfolk, Virginia, in the fall of 1917 led to the arrest of strikers as “slackers” under the “work or fight” rules. As a result of the strike, the Norfolk branch of WWEA was smashed, and the national organization was investigated as an attempt to interfere with the war effort. During this time, labor organization work was considered a threat to national security, especially when initiated by black women.

Pushed by worsening situations and declining opportunities in the South, young black Americans came to the cities of the North seeking employment in industries engaged in war production, in occupations previously employing European immigrants, and in jobs left open by white Americans taking better-paying factory work or serving in the armed services. As black migrants entered the cities, the problems of urban life—vice, housing, health and sanitation, family disintegration, social isolation, crime, and education—intensified. Programs and facilities grew to serve the expanding numbers and needs. For example, in 1915 the Chicago Phyllis [sic] Wheatley Home moved to larger quarters and established an employment department to find jobs for black women migrants. Similar conditions led to the establishment of a black Young Men's Christian Association branch in Louisville, new quarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Brooklyn, New York, and new services in Detroit.

Limited War Service

Once the United States officially entered the war in the spring of 1917, wartime propaganda and intergroup cooperation provided black women with both the rationale and the means to improve local conditions. As white women worked for the improvement of public health, black women focused on improving the nutrition, medical care, and recreational facilities for black children and families. Women who took Red Cross classes in home nursing and dietetics applied their new knowledge in the black community. As white women established better safeguards for women in industry, black women improved their job opportunities by arguing that the training of black women for new jobs freed white women and men to concentrate on the war effort. Black nurses at home meant white nurses in the European field. Black elevator operators could free white men to serve in the military. Improvement of city lighting and street conditions in black neighborhoods and expansion of black reformatories would lessen the potential immoral temptations for men stationed at nearby military camps. Through skillful manipulation of wartime rhetoric, black women helped their local communities gain municipal services and training.

Most of their efforts began, as with white women, with patriotic service. By 21 April 1917, the government had organized the Woman's Committee under the Council of National Defense. The committee incorporated all groups of women, including the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), into the domestic war effort to accomplish food conservation, production of knit goods, development of maternal and child protection activities, and creation of federal working standards for women in industry. According to Alice Dunbar-Nelson, field representative of the Woman's Committee, this was the best-organized mobilization of black women of all the war organizations.

The racial policies of the Woman's Committee varied state by state because of the reliance on state councils of defense. Most northern states incorporated black women, yet distinctions existed. Illinois organized a Committee on Colored Women through the Urban League. Indiana's Federation of Colored Women's Clubs directed a separate division for war work. In New Jersey, the Colored Woman's Volunteer League worked through the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense.

Southern politics of racial segregation produced a variety of structures through which black women served the Council of National Defense. Separate black women's councils existed in Florida, Mississippi, and Maryland. Ida Cummings, a kindergarten teacher and founder of the Woman's League of Baltimore, served on the Maryland State Council of Defense. Sally Green, a graduate of Hampton Institute, chaired the state council in Mississippi. Florida's Eartha M. White headed that state's black women's department. In Kentucky, the black men's organizations incorporated the women into their efforts. In Missouri, the state council saw no need to organize black women. The West Virginia council asked the West Virginia State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs to dispatch a representative to the Council of National Defense. Most of the southern states appointed a local black resident to cooperate with the local county council. This approach led to well-organized local efforts that failed to influence other communities.

When war was declared, many recruiting stations refused to accept black volunteers. The Selective Service Act of June 1917 required the enlistment of all healthy men from ages twenty-one through thirty-one. Blacks made up less than 10 percent of the population but made up more than 13 percent of those drafted. The great majority served in supply, service, and labor units, with only 11 percent seeing combat. Black men were not the only ones seeking direct engagement in World War I. Black women sought direct service, too, but War Department officials disapproved. Legislation to enlist black women in the army was introduced in December 1917, but the secretary of war returned the bill to the House Military Affairs Committee. The NAACP wrote to Secretary of the Navy Daniels in August 1918 to complain that “cultivated” black women had tried to apply and were told that women of color were not accepted. A southerner by origin, Daniels had no intention of incorporating black women in the war effort. The NAACP advised that if this discrimination was policy, then the navy should change its advertisement to save the women from needless humiliation. Secretary Daniels did not reply to the NAACP letter or to any other complaints about discrimination.

Despite such discriminatory practices, fourteen black women served as “yeowomen” in the muster roll section in the Navy Department. A few of their white supervisors reported their tidy and appropriate demeanor, which served as a model for white women to emulate both on and off duty. Officially, the Army Nurse Corps allowed only eighteen black nurses, who were restricted to serving black soldiers in hospitals in the United States. The Navy Nurse Corps had no known black women. Service entitled these women to burial in Arlington National Cemetery, but only one black woman from World War I is buried there—the grandmother of President Clinton's secretary of commerce, Ron Brown. For the majority of black women, their “service” in World War I would be more indirect.

Indirect Service for the War Effort

The American Red Cross was one of the first organizations approached by black women seeking to serve. In many northern cities, they cooperated with white women. For example, the black women of Freehold, New Jersey, formed an auxiliary to the Big County branch of the American Red Cross, working in the same headquarters under the same supervisor as did the white women. Separate black branches, such as the Booker T. Washington branch in Tampa, Florida, took part in Red Cross activities in the South. When nurses were called for duty overseas, black nurses eager to serve were excluded. Their participation in Red Cross organizations, coupled with protests from black leaders and organizations, led to the calling of black women into national service in June 1918. Registered by the American Red Cross, the women served in the six black base hospitals—Camp Funston (Kansas), Camp Grant (Rockford, Illinois), Camp Dodge (Des Moines, Iowa), Camp Taylor (Louisville, Kentucky), Camp Sherman (Chillicothe, Ohio), and Camp Dix (Wrightstown, New Jersey)—serving thirty-eight thousand black troops. Few black nurses had been called to overseas duty before the armistice, but Alice Dunbar-Nelson reported that over three hundred black nurses served overseas by passing for white. Denied the privilege to serve even in canteens in the South, other black women prepared comfort kits, maintained restaurants, and otherwise contributed within the limitations of the rigid racial etiquette of the era.

Whatever the level of training or the form of organization, black women helped their communities during the war. When Dunbar-Nelson became the field representative of the Woman's Committee, she found black women already organized in the South. As part of the domestic war effort, they took an active part in food production and conservation, nutrition, and fund-raising through food sales to benefit both rural and urban communities. Building on the home economic demonstrations of county agents or state agricultural colleges, the women learned and then taught new canning techniques, formed clubs, and provided nutritional information to local residents. Their push for playgrounds received support from the war context because playgrounds were said to ensure strong patriotic children. Under the banner of patriotic service, health campaigns could provide information and social service.

Red Cross workers at a surgical dressing unit in St. Paul, Minnesota, 1918. This photograph appeared on a postcard.

Minnesota Historical Society

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Black women developed services similar to the Red Cross through the Circle for Negro War Relief. Started during the fall of 1917 in New York City, the circle expanded to sixty units by early 1918. Each circle promoted the welfare of black soldiers by meeting individual and local emergency needs. A variety of services emerged as black women provided comfort kits, chewing gum, Victrolas and records, southern dinners for homesick boys, lectures on social hygiene and race pride, and other niceties. Examples of individual units demonstrate this diversity. The ambulance unit of New York City, for example, donated a $2,000 ambulance to the 367th Regiment at Camp Upton. The Crispus Attucks Circle in Philadelphia attempted to establish a base hospital for black soldiers with a staff of black physicians and nurses. Mary McLeod Bethune developed an emergency circle of Negro war relief in Daytona, Florida. Boston women developed a comfort unit for soldiers. The Motor Corps of Haywood unit in New York City visited hospitals; escorted the wounded to canteens, on sightseeing tours, and on shopping trips; and wrote letters for soldiers and their families.

Black women transferred their talents as fund-raisers to war work. They participated in the five Liberty loan drives, six Red Cross campaigns, the United War Work Campaign, and the thrift savings stamp program. The National Association of Colored Women, under the leadership of Elizabeth L. Davis, raised money for Liberty bonds. In the third Liberty loan campaign, they raised over $5,300,000 for the Red Cross. The National Council of Women praised the black club women for this successful fund-raising, as did Emmett J. Scott, special assistant in the War Department. Black teachers also encouraged students to show their patriotism by making contributions. Black schools, for example, participated in war savings stamp programs. Black women in Selma, Alabama, raised money by selling thrift stamps. Laura Brown of Pittsburgh, as the appointee of the National War Savings Committee under the secretary of the treasury, headed the campaign to recruit black women's support for these efforts.

The federal government indirectly stimulated black women's involvement by mobilizing seven national organizations for the United War Work Campaign. Of these seven, only three organizations, the National War Work Councils of the Young Men's and Young Women's Christian Associations, the War Camp Community Service, and the Salvation Army, utilized the energies and skills of black women. In June 1917, the national board of the YWCA established the War Work Council to protect the health and morals of American womanhood, especially in communities surrounding army and navy training camps. Under the leadership of Eva D. Bowles, National Secretary of Colored Work, black female leaders and volunteers came together to meet three needs of the black female community. First, through the establishment of hostess houses in training camps, they provided an information bureau for female relatives and friends of black soldiers; a pleasant atmosphere for soldiers and visitors; a supervised environment in which to adjust to military life; and rest, refreshments, and entertainment. Second, through an industrial department, the YWCA met the needs of black women drawn to urban areas in search of employment. Third, it provided these young women with appropriate recreation, emergency housing, and self-improvement advice in health, social morality, and skills.

In order to accomplish these goals, participation had to grow rapidly. In 1917 there were one national secretary, sixteen local centers or branches, and nine paid workers. In 1918, the allocation of $400,000 to “colored work” supported the two-year expansion of staff to twelve national workers, three field supervisors, and sixty-three paid workers managing the work in forty-two centers, many of which later became branches of the YWCA.

The Hostess House Program

Most communities set up canteens for white soldiers and their families. To meet similar needs in the black communities, the hostess house program became the most significant achievement of the YWCA's Colored Women's War Council. The first hostess houses opened in the Northeast, where interracial cooperation and black YWCA work was firmly established. In November 1917, Camp Upton Hostess House was opened on Long Island through the efforts of Boston black women, including Mary Wilson and Hannah Smith and her assistant, a Mrs. Norcomb. By early 1918, Lugenia Hope, founder of the Atlanta Neighborhood Union, became the director of the Upton house. The Upton house became a model for the succeeding fifteen facilities: Camps Custer (Michigan), Grant (Illinois), Funston (Kansas), Dodge (Iowa), Dix (New Jersey), Sherman (Ohio), Meade (Maryland), Taylor (Kentucky), Green (North Carolina), Gordon (Georgia), Alexander and Lee (Virginia), Jackson and Wadsworth (South Carolina), and Travis (Texas). Upton also served as the training center for supervisors assigned to other hostess houses. By the summer of 1918, training had been received by Mable Whiting for Funston, Amanda Gray for Dodge, Callie Edwards and Mary Cromwell for Dix, and Ruth Hucles for Gordon.

The hostess houses served minorities shut out of other social services. When a soldier was injured or killed, the hostesses consoled and advised female members of the fallen soldier's family. They also served as centers of literacy training for illiterate men from the South. During the influenza epidemic in late 1918, the houses became emergency hotels where women could stay while nursing the ill. For men drafted unjustly, the hostesses served as liaisons between the military bureaucracy and the soldier; and for those away from home, the camps provided a homelike atmosphere that made camp life more comfortable.

Although the YWCA provided funds, information, and direction in securing their buildings and training their hostesses, the atmosphere, furnishings, and volunteer activities originated with the black women from surrounding communities and other centers of reform. Adapting the often paternalistic programs of the YWCA to meet the needs of the race, the black volunteers and supervisors transformed the program into useful guidance. White journals praised the houses and the effective work done by the black women. Leaders of the YWCA called the program a spectacular wartime achievement. Instilling both patriotism and racial pride, the hostesses encouraged the soldiers to fight to make the world safe for democracy and to improve the future of their race at home.

Industrial Goals

To meet the industrial goal of the YWCA's war work, Mary E. Jackson brought her experience in the Labor Department of Rhode Island and in the National Association of Colored Women to her task as industrial secretary of the YWCA's Committee on Colored Work in December 1917. She built on the existing employment bureaus of Phyllis [sic] Wheatley branches and developed industrial recreational centers to create training programs for improving skills and work habits, to save women from exploitation, to organize women into groups for bargaining power, and to build long-range goals out of wartime opportunities. Jackson also mobilized the women in black communities to investigate working conditions, wages, racial problems, and occupational categories. These investigations established the basis for Jackson's patriotic pleas to support training programs and promotional opportunities to make black females better war workers.

Through their separate black branches, or as agents of the industrial secretary, black women created employment services, training bureaus, and social, educational, and recreational services to serve their communities. For example, a center in Houston provided a meeting place for the Patriotic Service League, the Rainbow Club, and the Tennis Club, as well as classes in food demonstration, wartime cookery, French, and stenography. From once-limited programs for girls working in war gardens to increase food supplies in Petersburg, Virginia, emerged a variety of multiservice centers in communities throughout the United States. Their cooperation with other wartime agencies, such as the Red Cross or War Camp Community Service, enabled local black women to expand services to the community.

Although the programs and philosophy of the YWCA War Work Council did not differ considerably from those of the women's clubs or state defense councils, the characteristics of the leadership in the war work of the YWCA did differ. The clubs and women's committees of the state councils of defense had married, middle-aged women as their leaders. The YWCA national staff and war workers were younger, single women, prepared by higher education similar to that of the leadership in the settlement house movement. The hostess house supervisors had a higher percentage of married, middle-aged women (seven of twelve), but of 187 war workers only 51 were married. In one form or another, the war work involved black women of all ages, marital statuses, and regions in efforts to serve the black communities and soldiers.

Other national committees were less successful. The black experience with the War Camp Community Service (WCCS), for example, demonstrated that the armistice of 11 November 1918 had ended the fighting, but not the war. The WCCS established centers to provide services and recreation for returning soldiers. Mary Church Terrell served as an organizer for the WCCS, selecting qualified black women to head the centers, working with local executive committees of the WCCS in program development, and ascertaining the needs of local black communities. In some areas of the South, white leaders approved only those programs that would train domestic workers. In other areas, white organizers refused to support any recreational services for black soldiers. Terrell reported cooperation only in Memphis, the city of Terrell's family origins. In Memphis, an interracial committee established a community center that served as the headquarters for all work concerning black people. So little was accomplished through the WCCS in the South that Terrell resigned in the spring of 1919. She sent her meticulous reports to the NAACP, which then called a conference at the offices of the national board of the YWCA. Eugene K. Jones of the National Urban League, Jesse Moorland of the YMCA, Eva Bowles of the YWCA, Mary Talbert of the NACW, and Mary White Ovington of the NAACP produced a letter from the five national organizations to the WCCS, criticizing the agency's policies and practices.

Demobilization and peace motivated black women to ensure the safe return of their troops, to make certain that racial issues were acknowledged in the peace process, and to create a process of demobilization that protected the safety and welfare of all black Americans. Several sought passports to go to Europe to participate in international meetings. The U.S. government, fearing embarrassing public statements about its racial injustices, denied passports to vocal black critics such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Madam C. J. Walker. Other black women won access through participation in accepted activities.

Immediately following the armistice, the Paris headquarters of the YWCA sought the services of black women to minister to the needs of the 200,000 black troops. Kathryn Johnson, former organizer for the NAACP; Addie Hunton, organizer for the YWCA, NAACP, and NACW; and Helen Curtis, Washington club woman and wife of the minister to Liberia, talked with the soldiers, recorded their aspirations, and made recommendations for improving conditions. Their reports of discrimination contradicted official versions issued by the government's agents. Hunton joined Talbert and Ida Gibbs Hunt in the Pan-African Congress in Paris (February 1919). Talbert and Hunt joined Terrell at the International Congress of Women in Zurich (May 1919) to inform women of the world about the racism in the United States.

They returned to the United States, a country reverting to a peacetime economy, readjusting to civilian life, and returning to a prewar status quo. Demobilization hastened the economic and social tensions that erupted in the Red Summer of 1919. The return of black men in uniform clashed with the revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, persistent denial of suffrage, residential segregation, unemployment, and postwar hysteria directed against immigrants and radicals. By the end of 1919, seventy-seven black Americans had been lynched, including eleven soldiers, and race riots had erupted in twenty-six cities. Black women had sacrificed their sons and had demonstrated their abilities during the war years only to reap increased violence and intolerance. The war had transformed black women, who could not return to the prewar patience with injustices.

Although many historians have concluded that America's involvement in World War I was too brief to have a transformative effect on America, this could not be said for black America. The war brought challenges to the women who aided black soldiers and their families; raised money through the various Liberty loans, war savings stamps, and United War Work campaigns; helped to produce and conserve foodstuffs, clothing, and industrial goods; and spread American propaganda through the press, lectures, and schools. The war required citizens to cooperate with the government to use manpower resources as efficiently as possible. Racial tensions often had to be subordinated to the overall aims of the nation, thereby placing America's elaborate systems of segregation in the background. The women organized to meet these challenges. Black women, proud of their achievements under adverse conditions and possessing a power base in urban areas, emerged from their war roles resolved to bring democracy to their own people—Americans of color.

See also Bethune, Mary McLeod; Military, Black Women in the; National Association of Colored Women; Nursing; Terrell, Mary Eliza Church; Walker, Madam C. J.; and Wells-Barnett, Ida B.

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