Charles A. O’Connor III retired after more than 40 years of private environmental law practice in Washington, DC. He taught in the Graduate Liberal Studies Program at Georgetown University (2016-17) and currently teaches a course entitled “The Impact of the Great War on Western Culture and the Western Worldview” for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at American University (2014-present). He is author of The Great War and the Death of God: Cultural Breakdown, Retreat from Reason, and Rise of Neo-Darwinian Materialism in the Aftermath of World War I (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2014), Introduction to A John Haught Reader: Essential Writings on Science and Faith (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018), review of Jonas Kurlberg’s book Christian Modernism in the Age of Totalitarianism: T.S. Eliot, Carl Mannheim and the Moot in Religion and the Arts (2022), and two articles in Confluence: “Judaism and the Rise of Scientific Materialism after the Great War” (Fall 2016) and “Western Music, Cosmic Meaning, and the Great War” (Fall 2018). He is a graduate of Harvard College, AB cum laude in English (1964), and Georgetown University, JD (1967), MALS (1985), and DLS (2012).
essay
The Great War in Black American Experience and Culture
Charles A. O’Connor III, Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at American University
World War I (1914–1918), the “Great War,” constituted a seminal and transformative event in the Black experience.[1] This essay explains how the Great War opened new employment opportunities in the North that enabled Black southerners to escape White supremacy and racist abuse; how Black men overcame opposition to their military service from White supremacists as well as Black skeptics; how they enlisted in a war to save democracy abroad that was denied them at home; how they trusted America to reward their patriotic service with recognition of full citizenship and equal rights only to confront the U.S. Army’s institutional racism; and how the Great War experience at home and abroad changed Black Americans irrevocably.
Black soldiers proved their courage, fought alongside fellow Black men, discovered egalitarian France and the African diaspora, and returned home in 1919 with a new sense of racial pride and empowerment. When racial violence erupted in postwar America, Black citizens stood their ground and rejected prewar sufferance. While America retreated into isolationism during the 1920s and 1930s, Black Americans embraced and fostered Pan-Africanism, the New Negro Movement, and the Harlem Renaissance. The crucible of war had forged a newfound Black confidence that laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the first national recognition of racial equality since Reconstruction.[2]
The Prewar Status of Black Americans
In 1914, nine million Black Americans (90%) lived in the South, where White supremacists subjected them to voter suppression, segregation, unequal treatment, recurrent violence, and lynchings.[3] This subservient condition existed despite the Reconstruction Amendments: the 13th Amendment (1865) abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment (1868) granting citizenship, and the 15th Amendment (1870) granting voting rights. It persisted despite the Civil Rights Act (1875) barring discrimination against Black citizens and providing “equal and exact justice to all, of whatever nativity, race, color, or persuasion, religious or political.” Implementing the election Compromise of 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes ended Reconstruction and removed Federal troops from the South, unleashing a southern White backlash.[4]
Once Reconstruction ended, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan (1865) and Knights of the White Camellia (1867) began terrorizing Black citizens, burning Black churches, and lynching Black males. New Black Codes authorized imprisonment on spurious grounds, followed by forced labor and convict leasing. The Supreme Court provided no legal recourse, limiting application of the 1875 Civil Rights Act to states and not individuals in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), and later upholding “separate but equal” segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). The Court effectively legitimized Jim Crow treatment of Black Americans, with disastrous consequences. In New Orleans, Louisiana (1900), White mobs launched race riots, and in Forsyth County, Georgia (1912), they evicted Black residents and confiscated their property. After Reconstruction through 1895, White southerners killed 53,000 Black Americans, and between 1882 and 1909, journalist Ida B. Wells documented 3,182 Black lynchings. This staggering toll triggered formation of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. [5]
The Great Migration
In 1914, when the European Great Powers went to war, America remained neutral—in keeping with President Wilson’s winning campaign theme for the 1916 election.[6] But America’s sympathies lay with Britain and France, and American industry began supplying them equipment and matériel, accounting for 70% of American 1916 exports. This opened enormous employment opportunities, which the northern Black press aggressively advertised to Black southerners, encouraging them to shake off their de facto slavery and move to the “promised land” of the North. Although segregation existed in northern and midwestern cities, it paled by comparison with conditions in the South, with its impoverishing sharecropping system, eviscerated franchise from poll taxes and literacy tests, and omnipresent White supremacy and Jim Crow abuse. In response, more than one half million Black Americans flooded from the South in the first wave of the Great Migration (1915–1919), reshaping northern city life and demographics in places like New York, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago.[7]
American Preparedness for War
In 1917, the U.S. Army ranked 19th in the world by size, lacked any large-scale combat experience since the Civil War, and lacked the modern military weaponry and combat doctrine required for industrialized trench warfare. In January, Germany instituted unrestricted submarine warfare and, in March, forced America’s hand upon discovery that Germany was encouraging and offering to support Mexico if it attacked the United States to reacquire the southwestern states.[8] On April 6, 1917, America declared war on Germany, supporting President Woodrow Wilson’s principle that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”[9] To defeat Germany, the United States urgently needed to raise, train, and arm a large army and then safely transport it to France. Five million soldiers were already dead in Europe, and the Western Front had not moved, despite almost three years of war. By the end of 1917, Germany appeared to have the upper hand and America faced a daunting rescue mission.[10]
On May 18, 1917, Congress enacted the Selective Service Act, requiring all men between 21 and 31 years of age to register for the draft. The War Department faced two significant and contentious organizational problems: immigrants (33% of the population) and Black Americans (10%). Immigrants spoke 49 different languages; most had less than fifth grade education and often tested within illiterate or “inferior” categories. Despite questions of their loyalty, the Army supported these first- and second-generation White immigrant troops with remedial language instruction, placed some in noncombat roles, segregated some by ethnicity, and integrated others in combat units. The Army deemed their performance “splendid.”[11]
The Army’s treatment of Black draftees was radically different. Black soldiers had fought in every American war since the American Revolution. Approximately 179,000 Black soldiers served in the Union Army during the Civil War, and the legendary “Buffalo Soldiers” served in the Regular Army in the American West, as well as the Spanish-American War (1898), the Philippine War (1899), and the Mexican Expedition to capture Pancho Villa (1916). In the Mexican Expedition, Gen. John J. Pershing commanded American forces that included two Black units, earning him the sobriquet “Black Jack.” At the outbreak of the Great War about 12,500 Black soldiers served in the Regular Army.[12] Yet the Army was reluctant to arm them, and their service became heatedly controversial among White and Black Americans alike.
Black Service Controversy
On August 16, 1917, Mississippi Sen. James K. Vardaman warned the U.S. Senate that Negro soldiers would threaten the southern racial status quo: Negro service would “inflate his untutored soul with military airs” and lead “but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” Even southern White progressives who supported Black enlistment reflected “a paternalistic and naïve belief that southerners ‘knew’ their black folks.”[13] Intensifying the opposition to Black service among both Black and White Americans, a race riot erupted in Houston, Texas, on August 23, 1917, between White Houston police and Black soldiers in the 24th Infantry.
The Army responded by court-martialing the involved soldiers for mutiny and murder among other offenses, convicted 58, and sentenced 13 to death summarily by hanging in the Army’s largest mass execution of soldiers. Southern congressmen used this riot as evidence of Black indiscipline. The NAACP investigation found that “the habitual brutality” of Houston police toward Black residents caused the riot, and the 13 soldiers became martyrs for racial justice. In November 2023, over a century later, the Army finally overturned their convictions, acknowledging the soldiers “were wrongly treated because of their race and were not given fair trials.”[14]
In early July 1917, East St. Louis, Illinois erupted in a violent four-day racial cleansing by White workers who feared losing their jobs to Black migrants from the South. In what was called “America’s first pogrom,” White men slayed between 40 and 125 Black residents, including women and children, and torched 300 buildings, leaving 6,000 homeless.[15] Responding to this massacre, the NAACP organized a Negro Silent Protest Parade in New York City on July 28, 1917. The NAACP leadership led four drummers and rows of Black men, women, and children, marching silently in step down New York’s Fifth Avenue before 20,000 supportive onlookers. Some marchers carried placards reading, “Mr. President why not make America safe for democracy?”[16]
President Wilson’s reputation with Black Americans was already in tatters after segregating long-serving Black employees of the U.S. Post Office and Treasury Department and endorsing Birth of a Nation, a racist film excoriated by the NAACP.[17] Thus, the hypocrisy of his call to safeguard democracy was not lost on A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the Black newsmagazine Messenger. In their November 1917 issue, at personal risk of criminal violation of the Espionage Act, they boldly opposed Black war service. Rather than safeguarding democracy abroad, they asserted, “We should make Georgia safe for the Negro.”[18]
On July 18, 1918, W. E. B. Du Bois, a renowned, multifaceted, and leading intellectual/activist and editor of the NAACP Journal Crisis, ignited an opposing firestorm with his editorial “Close Ranks,” urging Black Americans to join White soldiers in the war for democracy: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the Allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.”[19] In the Messenger Randolph and Owen promptly scoffed at Du Bois’ exhortation, and the D.C. branch of the NAACP and the Cleveland Advocate followed suit, calling Du Bois’ editorial a “surrender.”[20]
Other Black leaders, however, recognized Black service as a political duty. In New York Age, the accomplished author, poet, and NAACP organizer James Weldon Johnson wrote: “The bald truth is that the Negro cannot afford to be rated as a disloyal element in the nation.”[21] Thus, most Black Americans “approached the war with guarded optimism,” writes Chad Williams, “and placed faith in the ability of loyalty and patriotic duty, specifically regarding military service, to infuse life into the moribund condition of Black citizenship. The democratic framing of American participation in the war played a significant role in why many African Americans felt that way.” One conclusion was obvious, adds Williams: “As in the Civil War, racial progress would require African Americans to place their lives on the line.”[22] So, trusting that America would reward their patriotism with recognition of full citizenship and equal rights, 2.3 million Black Americans registered for the draft, 370,000 joined the Army, and more than 200,000 served overseas in the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). [23]
Black Soldiers in the Great War
Service of Supply
The Army segregated and shunted 330,000 Black soldiers into the noncombatant Service of Supply, a disproportionately high percentage (almost 55%) of these labor troops.[24] Col. E. D. Anderson, heading Operations Branch, considered Black soldiers lacking “the mental stamina and moral sturdiness” for combat and “nothing more than laborers in uniform.” Thus, the 170,000 Black Supply troops serving in the South bore the brunt of Army racism from White officers and NCOs chosen specifically for their ability to “get work out of colored men.” Outfitted in blue denim overalls rather than Army uniforms, they looked and were treated like a prison farm or chain gang and incurred discipline often applied with kicks and whips.[25]
The 160,000 Black Supply soldiers stationed with the AEF in France fared little better. As port stevedores, their backbreaking, often 16-hour-per-day workload contributed to their “stigma of inferiority” as “the cheerful antebellum slave.” They received substandard housing and terrorizing by White soldiers and military police.[26] But the most dangerous Supply assignments were the 13 all-Black Pioneering Infantry units that served immediately behind the Front, building roads, creating ammo dumps, clearing barbed wire, and removing unexploded shells. Frontline soldiers in every sense, the Pioneer Infantry faced constant danger, usually without proper combat training or instruction in gas mask use.[27]
Although MPs aggressively prohibited their fraternizing with the French, these Black Supply troops inevitably had contact with local French, who received them warmly, preferred them to arrogant White American soldiers, and considered them more civilized than French colonial troops from the African diaspora. The integrated French Army, like its population, displayed little racial prejudice, which prompted W. E. B. Du Bois to call France “the only white democracy.” French egalitarianism and patent rejection of American racial stereotypes inspired these Black Supply troops with hope for interracial democracy in America and also fostered a postwar Pan-Africanism, giving international focus to race and democracy.[28]
The Talented Tenth
White officers had commanded Black soldiers since the Civil War, with few exceptions like Col. Charles Young, one of three Black West Point graduates, the only Black officer on active duty, and a war hero. In 1903, Du Bois championed the idea of an educated Black leadership class, the “Talented Tenth,” and upon America’s entry into war, he proposed these talented Black men serve as military officers.[29] Despite the Army’s view that Black servicemen lacked the skills for quality officers, Du Bois, Col. Young, the NAACP, the Central Committee of Negro College Men, and the Black press convinced the military otherwise, and in July 1917, the Army established an officer candidate school for Black soldiers in Des Moines, Iowa. In October 1917, the school commissioned 639 junior officers—an elite group of Black men, including nine Harvard graduates—a victory soon undermined by the Army’s institutional racism.[30]
The Army quickly retired Col. Young (purportedly for health reasons) because southern White officers refused to serve under a Black officer, and the White senior officers in the Black 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions systematically decimated their Black officer corps. The 92nd Division commander, Maj. Gen. Charles C. Ballou, segregated Black from White officers, denied promotions to Black officers, and threatened them with efficiency boards. Ballou recommended reassignment of 43 Black officers on spurious grounds, reduced his Black officer corps by almost 25%, and instituted court-martials against five Black officers for allegedly leading a cowardly withdrawal of the 368th Regiment. Four received death sentences and one a life in prison—sentences all later commuted because the officers had in fact received orders to withdraw.[31]
The 93rd Division’s Black officers fared no better, despite the high regard of the division’s French commander, Gen. Mariano Goybet. The White American Col. Herschel Tupes, commanding the 372nd Regiment, enabled White officers to ignore orders from Black officers and arbitrarily brought 77 of his Black officers before efficiency boards, nearly causing a regimental mutiny. Gen. Goybet ultimately despaired of redressing Tupes’s racism and reluctantly replaced every 372nd Black officer. Similarly, White American Col. T. A. Roberts, commanding the 370th Regiment (8th Illinois), demoted and transferred Black officers. Even the famed 369th Regiment (15th New York) endured mistreatment, leaving France with only one of its original five Black officers, Lieut. James Reese Europe.[32]
The Army’s racist mistreatment of Black infantry officers fueled the postwar New Negro Movement. First Lieut. Charles Hamilton Houston,a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College and one of only 33 field artillery officers commissioned at Des Moines, served in the 92nd Division’s White field artillery brigade. In his diary, Houston recorded that White officers “humiliate us and destroy our prestige as officers in front of the French instructors, the White soldiers, and even the German prisoners.” These indignities motivated Houston to pursue a legal career challenging systemic racism: “My battleground was America, not France.” He attended Harvard Law school, eventually becoming Dean of Howard Law School and, in 1935, special counsel to NAACP. In that role, Houston devised the incremental legal strategy and led the successful litigation campaign against segregation that culminated in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), desegregating public schools.[33]
The 93rd Infantry Division
The 93rd Division consisted of four Black Infantry Regiments: three National Guard units, the 369th (15th New York), 370th (8th Illinois), and 372nd (D.C. and five states), plus the 371st (a unit of South Carolina draftees). The AEF initially deployed the 369th as laborers when they reached France in late December 1917. But in early March 1918, Gen. Pershing transferred the Regiment to the French Army, granting French Gen. Philippe Pétain’s request for desperately needed replacement troops. The French welcomed the 369th (and the other three divisional regiments upon their arrival in April), providing them French gear, gas masks, and field training—far better than the AEF provided the 92nd Division.[34]
In late March 1918, the 369th (the “Harlem Hellfighters”) held the line against a month-long German assault west of the Argonne Forest. On May 13, Privates Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, serving as forward night observers, withstood attacks by over two dozen Germans. Seriously wounded, Roberts supplied hand grenades to Johnson who, wounded himself, hurled them at their attackers and then engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Germans, preventing them from taking Roberts prisoner and forcing their retreat, leaving four dead and a dozen injured.Johnson and Roberts became the first Black persons awarded the Croix de Guerre, Johnson’s with gold palm, France’s highest military award. Their exploits became front page news in New York, exemplifying Black heroism and earning Gen. Pershing’s praise for their “notable instance of bravery and devotion.”[35]
The 93rd Division joined the French forces in the July Aisne-Marne counteroffensive and the final Meuse-Argonne Offensive. While the Hellfighters stood out for their unequaled regimental successes, France celebrated the entire 93rd Division before embarkation, awarding them the Croix de Guerre, along with 170 individual awards for valor. Yet the prominent 200-foot American Montfaucon Memorial depicts only the 92nd and not the 93rd Division, despite its even greater combat role during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, presumably because the 93rd served with the French. Significantly, while awarding 127 Medals of Honor during the war, the Army awarded none to Black soldiers until years later and posthumously.[36]
Similarly disturbing was the hostile AEF attitude about well-deserved French praise for 93rd Division performance. The AEF urged French Col. Lewis Albert Linard, heading the French Mission to the AEF, to write his infamous August 1918 memorandum to French officers, “Secret Information concerning Black Troops”—a primer on White supremacy racism, which Du Bois later published in Crisis (May 1919). “Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible,” and with “vices” that pose a “constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.” Linard warned against praising Black soldiers and “any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers” or “any public expression of intimacy between white women and black men.” The shocked French General Staff promptly withdrew the memo for endorsing American racism.[37]
92nd Infantry Division
Gen. Pershing resisted Marshall Foch’s request to transfer the 92nd Division to the French forces during the final Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Consequently, the 92nd Division, with its four Black infantry regiments of mainly draftees, participated among 600,000 AEF doughboys in largest and costliest campaign in American military history, resulting in more than 26,000 combat deaths and more than 120,000 total casualties. In his obsolete “open warfare” doctrine, Pershing considered “the lone infantryman with his rifle…the ultimate instrument of war”—a costly failure to understand the 3-year learning curve of the British and French, which probably caused 10 American lives for every German, as raw and ill-trained troops rose in waves to assault machine gun nests. The “bitter irony,” according to historian David M. Kennedy, “was the fact that attrition, not mobile strategy, proved to be Pershing’s greatest contribution to the Western cause.”[38]
Serving with the AEF, the 92nd Division remained subject to AEF racism, received insufficient military training, endured unwarranted stigmas for alleged interracial sex (the “rapist division”), and suffered decades-long criticism as unfit soldiers and officers for alleged combat failures.[39] On September 26, as the 368th came off patrol duty in another sector, the 92nd Division directed this woefully unprepared Regiment to fill a gap in the Front between French and American forces. The 368th had limited combat training or experience, no intelligence about the terrain or opposing forces, no critical supplies, and no advance artillery support. Entangled in unfamiliar terrain under heavy German machine-gun fire and shelling, the 368th became disorganized, lost communications, and retreated. The 92nd was quick to attribute this retreat to Black cowardice when in fact a confused and frightened White officer Maj. Max Elser had ordered withdrawal.[40]
The Army temporarily removed the entire 92nd Division from the line, and for decades the 368th became the Army’s whipping boy. But the 368th misfortune was no anomaly; the White 35th Division also retreated in disorder under German artillery fire with enormous resultant casualties. Furthermore, on November 10, two other Black division regiments went over the top in the face of heavy German fire and successfully attacked their sectors. Belying the 92nd Division’s ill repute, White senior officers recommended a comparable number of Distinguished Service Crosses for combat valor to soldiers in the 92nd and 93rd Divisions.[41] In short, the Army’s later disparagement of the 92nd Division was the unwarranted product of its inherent racism, which Black soldiers endured during military service but refused thereafter to suffer submissively in civilian life.
Returning Soldiers: Triumph and Tribulation
Homecoming
The Army scheduled the early U.S. return of the 92nd and 93rd Divisions over White officers’ concerns about Black soldiers interacting with the French population. This decision excluded Black troops from the Allied victory parade in Paris on Bastille Day 1919 and from the 402-foot war mural Pantheon de la Guerre. Perversely, the Army retained its Black Supply soldiers to support troop embarkations and its Black Pioneer soldiers to work on the battlefields, removing barbed wire, trenches, and unexploded ordinance, and to undertake the gruesome work of reburying the dead and building cemeteries for the Graves Registration Service. Stateside, the Army released White Supply troops but retained Black Supply troops, who worked like indentured laborers rather than citizen-soldiers. Returning Black soldiers, however, linked their service, sacrifice, and valor to their hopes for racial equality and full citizenship, and the Black press and Black Church publicized this theme. [42]
Homecoming parades of Black soldiers throughout the United States manifested growing civic consciousness, cohesiveness, and vitality and hopes for civic reform. On February 17, 1919, a million New Yorkers cheered the Harlem Hellfighters as they marched up Fifth Avenue into Harlem. Decorated war hero Sgt. Henry Johnson rode in an open car, and Lieut. James Reese Europe led the 369th regimental band, which alternated between military marches and syncopated jazz. That same day in Chicago, the 370th Regiment paraded before 400,000 along Michigan Avenue, and another 60,000 Chicagoans, including Mayor Thompson, greeted them in Coliseum Hall.[43] Throughout early 1919, Black soldiers in uniform marched proudly through American cities, large and small, before cheering admirers, Black and White, from Buffalo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh in the North to Dallas, Mobile, Richmond, and Savannah in the South. The large, enthusiastic, and racially diverse turnouts inspired hope that the war experience had transformed America’s racial attitudes and enhanced prospects for racial equality and full democracy.[44]
War at Home
Tragically, these early celebrations soon deteriorated into racial violence, as lynchings redoubled in the South and riots erupted in more than 50 cities nationwide during the “Red Summer” of 1919. Violence centered on Black veterans, especially those in uniform, because they represented manliness, dignity, authority, and citizenship and embodied a visible threat to the southern racial hierarchy. Proud returning veterans and newly self-confident Black civilians increasingly questioned their second-class status, while White supremacists aimed to preserve the racial status quo threatened by full Black citizenship. As the justice of the peace in Shingler, Georgia, warned Black veteran Daniel Mack on April 5, 1919, before ordering him shackled and sentenced to 30 days on a chain gang for fighting with the White man who shoved him off the sidewalk while in uniform: “this is white man’s country and you don’t want to forget it.”[45]
In 1919, extrajudicial killings increased to 76, almost doubling the 1917 total and including at least a dozen Black veterans in uniform—“the ultimate act of contempt for Black citizenship.”[46] Cities further north were similarly inhospitable, as major riots exploded in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Tulsa, all involving Black veterans. Black Americans fought back, embracing Du Bois’ editorial “Returning Soldiers” in Crisis (May 1919): “Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States, or know the reason why.”[47] Having agreed to close ranks with White troops in the Great War, Black soldiers returned fighting for equality—indeed for their very survival.
On July 18, 1919, reports circulated in D.C. about Black men attacking a White woman, and a White mob responded by randomly killing Black civilians. The next day, Black veterans of the 372nd (D.C.’s National Guard) responded in a four-day race war, causing several hundred casualties, including six deaths, ending only after Congress ordered federal troops into D.C. On July 27, 1919, racial violence erupted in Chicago, the “promised land” for some 55,000 Black southerners who had migrated there for work. White residents caused the drowning of Eugene Williams by pelting him with rocks for breaching an imaginary racial barrier in Lake Michigan. His murder triggered Black outrage and interracial combat the next day, leaving 17 dead. The riot raged for two weeks and caused more than 500 casualties, including 38 deaths (23 Black and 15 White persons). The 372nd Infantry Regiment (8th Illinois) defended Black Chicagoans and averted a catastrophe.[48]
Racial violence continued into 1920 and took a political turn in Ocoee Park, Florida, when Black landowners Mose Norman and Julius Perry encouraged Black voter turnout for an election. In response, the local KKK threatened any Black residents who voted. Then, polling officials barred Norman and Perry from voting and assaulted Norman when he returned armed, demanding his right to vote. The local KKK hunted down the two organizers, set homes and churches afire, and killed more than 50 Ocoee residents. The KKK took Perry to an Orlando jail, where the sheriff released him to a mob, which later deposited his mutilated body in Ocoee with a sign: “This is what we do to Negroes that vote.”[49]
The three-year racial bloodbath climaxed in Tulsa, Oklahoma, home to a prosperous community of 11,000 Black residents, called the “Magic City,” and its business district called “Negro’s Wall Street.” In 1921, Tulsa’s population of almost 100,000 included a 3,200-member KKK branch, which intimidated Black Tulsans and enforced a Black color line. On May 30, Dick Rowland inadvertently stepped on Sara Page’s foot in an elevator, but she claimed he assaulted her and triggered one of America’s worst race riots. The next day police arrested Rowland, a 2,000-person lynch mob assembled at the jail, and 50 to 75 armed Black citizens, mostly veterans, arrived to help police protect Rowland. A single shot ignited a gunfire exchange, wounding a dozen and launching a race war in Black Tulsa that continued through the night. By morning, Black Tulsa wasdestroyed, its population displaced, and its dead estimated from 27 up to 300. In summary, postwar America remained unsafe for democracy, with the KKK openly celebrating racism in 1925 and 1926, marching more 50,000 strong down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. [50]
The New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance
On November 19, 1919, the Senate rejected the Versailles Treaty, fearing its League of Nations provision compromised sovereignty; Wilson consequently vetoed the joint resolution ending American belligerence, and America entered “arguably the most isolationist phase of its history,” according to David Kennedy.[51] America put the war behind it, built no national World War I monument, turned inward, forgot about the war, and escaped into the Jazz Age and Roaring 20s.[52] Black Americans, by contrast, became energized, engaged, and internationalist. France’s warm reception and egalitarian treatment gave 200,000 Black soldiers in the AEF a new perspective on American racial prejudice. Contact with French colonial troops heightened their interest in African culture and their position in the African diaspora.[53] As Addie Hunton and Catherine M. Johnson explained in their 1920 war memoir Two Coloured Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, Black soldiers “developed in France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in a half-century of normal living in America.”[54]
In the dominant White narrative of the Great War, idealistic youth enlisted with patriotic fervor and naïve dreams of glory, faced unprecedented carnage on the Western Front, and returned disillusioned, disheartened, and alienated from a society responsible for the slaughter.[55] Great American writers like Ernest Hemingway exposed the horrific truth about modern industrialized warfare, and Ezra Pound decried the “botched civilization” responsible for the war.[56] Hemingway saw “nothing sacred” or glorious in the human “sacrifices,” and F. Scott Fitzgerald despised the pro-war Old Guard who “knew nothing,” abandoned Wilsonian internationalism, and left postwar America with “no more wise men.”[57] In Frederick J. Hoffman’s summary: “the postwar generation felt…victimized by gross and stupid deception. Nothing genuine had come out of the war. The American politicians had refused to accept their responsibility in a world league…and had chosen isolation.”[58]
For Black Americans, long familiar with such victimization, the dominant narrative was betrayal.[59] Having closed ranks with White Americans, Black Americans expected democratic equality. Instead, they confronted the Red Summer. Two poems dramatize this promise and betrayal. In “A Sonnet to Negro Soldiers” (1918), Joseph Seamon Cotters expresses optimism about the rewards for Black war service: they “Shall rise and their brows cast down the thorn / Of prejudice. E’en though through blood it be, / There breaks this day their dawn of Liberty.”[60] When postwar racial violence dashed such hopes, Claude McKay reacted with rage in “If We Must Die” (1919): “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”[61] In the 1920s, Black rage like McKay’s against racial injustice evolved into a confident new intellectual and artistic sense of empowerment expressed in the New Negro Movement and Harlem Renaissance.
The New Negro Movement
Alain Locke, the first Black Rhodes Scholar, a Harvard Ph.D., and long-serving Chair of Howard University’s Philosophy Department, championed the Harlem Renaissance and composed the Movement’s central text, The New Negro (1925). For Locke, the New Negro had shaken off unjust stereotypes, acquired a new self-respect and independence, and entered a dynamic new phase. This postwar renewal enlarged Negro experience, enriched American art and letters, and clarified the “common vision of the social task ahead.”[62] Locke sought a more inclusive American civilization, integrated, and revitalized through the arts. In Apropos of Africa (1924), he urged Black Americans, with their uniquely diverse pan-African backgrounds, to become “the leader in constructive pan-African thought and endeavor” and to “develop the race mind and race interest on an international scale.”[63] In short, Black Americans were on the move, exhibiting a new race pride and pursuing personal, national, and even international objectives.
Unlike the existentially adrift lost generation of White writers who dwelled on the carnage of an irrational war, Black writers focused on the Great War as a leveling experience, challenging racial hierarchies, displaying interracial bonding, celebrating returning Black officers as a sign of race progress, and forecasting prospects for postwar racial reconciliation. Mark Whalan identifies at least six works of Black fiction situated in no-man’s-land where White and Black soldiers become reconciled upon discovery of their common human bond and sometimes even their common ancestry.[64] In his poem “Sam Smiley” (1932), Sterling A. Brown explained the war’s “striking lessons” about racial equality and Black determination: “a surprising fact had made / Belated impress on his mind: / Shrapnel bursts and poison gas / Were inexplicably colorblind.”[65]
Whalan faults Black cultural histories for focusing primarily on the Great Migration and often overlooking the war’s impact on “the transatlantic, diasporic, and transnational network of New Negro culture.” Whalan also reports that the war inspired “the new artistic techniques of the New Negro movement—the renewed interest in folk forms and in the aesthetics of memory, the rise of the urban folk narrative, a broader discussion of the intersections of race and sexuality, a new sophistication in portrait photography.” This new Black artistry “provided novel frameworks for representing the experience of war for African Americans.”[66]
Among the movement’s artistic achievements, Locke’s The New Negro emphasizes jazz and includes an essay by Joel A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home.” Rogers identifies jazz as a thoroughly Black musical form that conveys refreshing joyousness, provides relief “from the horrors and strains of war,” and “recharge[es] the batteries of civilization with primitive new vigor.”[67] Jazz revitalized Black artistic expression, became “an emblem of modernity on both sides of the Atlantic,” and energized a more inclusive postwar American culture.[68] The popularity of postwar jazz owes much to jazz pioneer James Reese Europe who recruited, organized, and led the 369th regimental band that took France by storm, after arriving with its jazzy version of “La Marseillaise.” The band became the U.S. Army’s official representative and returned home to make Americans wild about jazz, “demonstrating the genius of black music and its ability to remake American democracy.”[69]
Jazz and blues also influenced Langston Hughes, whose poetry “helped define the spirit of the age.”[70] In “Jazzonia” (1923), Hughes describes “shining rivers of the soul” in a Harlem Cabaret where “Six long-headed jazzers play” and “A dancing girl whose eyes are bold / Lifts high a dress of silken gold.” In “The Weary Blues” (1925), Hughes reminisces about a pianist: “Droning a drowsy syncopated tune, / Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon, / I heard a Negro play.… With his ebony hands on each ivory key / He made that poor piano moan with melody. / O Blues!”[71]Long associated with the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes wrote award-winning poetry that resonated widely, like the music that inspired it. “In jazz nightclubs, literary parlors, playhouses, galleries, and street corners from the South Side of Chicago to Marseille,” writes Chad Williams, “the artists of the New Negro movement afforded America and the world new visions of blackness, freedom, and history.”[72]
The Black Church
In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Du Bois remarked, “The Negro church of to-day is the social center of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character.”[73] During Reconstruction, thousands of underground Black churches emerged throughout the South, with the key mission of education. Schools soon appeared in church basements, promoting literacy, launching magazines, and effectively becoming “a nation within a nation” and “the single most important institution in the Black community.”[74] During and after the war, the Black Church followed Black migration northward, providing storefront churches for southern Black citizens uncomfortable with northern church formality and desiring personal and musical expression.
The 1920s were the early days of phonographs, and Black preachers began recording sermons with southern gospel music. As Zora Neale Hurston remarked, the finest Negro poetry issued “out of the mouths of preachers,” and church music formed “a conscious art expression.”[75]Henry Lewis Gates Jr. considers the Great Migration “key to the origins of modern gospel, as southern sounds spread to northern cities.” Blues and jazz artists borrowed from Black Church music, creating a novel interplay of sacred and secular sounds that still resonates in Black music.[76]
Whereas White Fundamentalist Christians inveighed against Darwinian evolution and ignored racial injustice, the Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey challenged the White supremacy leanings of the Christian Church itself. In response, Garvey founded the African Orthodox Church in 1921 and inspired the founding of the Nation of Islam in 1930. The Nation of Islam resonated in the urban North, but its fight for political and social progress lagged in the South where Jim Crow laws stifled Black voting and White accountability. The freedom songs of gospel music, however, proved critical to the emerging Civil Rights movement by relieving Black fear and insecurity while facing racist danger. From the 1920s to the 1960s, the Black Church supported the Civil Rights movement by building voting and political strength in the urban North before turning to the Deep South.[77]
The Harlem Renaissance
James Weldon Johnson stood at the forefront of Black letters and social activism during the Harlem Renaissance and edited a landmark literary work, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922, rev. 1931). In his Preface, Johnson extols Black Americans as “the creator of the only things artistic that have yet sprung from American soil and been universally acknowledged as distinctive American products.” Here Johnson references the folklore of the Uncle Remus stories and folksong spirituals, cakewalk and ragtime, and dance and poetry among other artistic forms.[78]
One Harlem Renaissance exemplar was the extraordinary writer and early feminist Zora Neale Hurston. She wrote the first collection of Black folklore, Mules and Men (1935), and incorporated Black vernacular in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), among the best novels of the early 20th century.[79] Another was Langston Hughes, who describes his poems in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) as “racial in theme and treatment, derived from the life I know.” Decrying the restrictive artistic “race towards whiteness,” Hughes urged the Black artist to express “his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears.”[80]
Unsurprisingly, Black artists from Harlem and across the country faced the difficult task of balancing Black cultural exceptionalism with cultural assimilation into mainstream America. For all its great achievements, the New Negro Renaissance carried too heavy a burden alone to overcome America’s endemic racism. Achieving the Great War objective of racial equality would require Black Americans to mobilize greater political strength and activity, which became their primary project into the 1960s.[81]
Conclusion
In the post–World War I period, especially during the Great Depression, Black Americans continued to suffer disproportionate hardship, pain, and bitterness “that a great country in time of need should promise so much and afterward perform so little.”[82] In 1940, Du Bois lamented his failure to recognize war’s “impotence as a method of social reform,” while Richard Wright faulted Black leaders like Du Bois for aligning themselves “with the most reactionary forces in American life” without insisting on political preconditions for Black war participation.[83] Culture was problematic and controversial as a lone political force. James Weldon Johnson maintained confidence in its constructive influence on national society and politics, whereas Langston Hughes advocated international multiracial action by the economically oppressed.[84] Although political success would take another four decades, the Great War constituted an axial event in the modern Black experience: stimulating pursuit of racial justice and civic equality, inspiring the New Negro Renaissance, elevating the importance of Black culture and history, and laying the groundwork for integrating the U.S. Military in 1948 and public schools in 1954 and for nationally recognizing racial equality in 1964.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to Earl M. Leiken, Charles E. Yonkers, Peter F. Healey, Evelyn Haught, Prof. Maurice Jackson, Raymond Maxwell, Damon Johnston, Dr. Judith F. Chused, and especially Dr. Susan F. Plaeger for their helpful comments and advice.
Notes
[1] Lonnie G. Bunch III, Introduction in We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity, ed. Kinshasa Holman Conwill (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2019), 9. See also Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University Of North Carolina Press, 2010), 5; Mark Whalan, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008), xii.
[2] Bunch, Epilogue: “On the Horizon – Towards Civil Rights” in We Return Fighting, 137.
[3] John H. Morrow Jr., "At Home and Abroad: During and after the War" in We Return Fighting, 99.
[4] Salter, “From Civil War to World War” in We Return Fighting, 52-54.
[5] Ibid., 54, 59.
[6] Garrett Peck, The Great War in America: World War I and Its Aftermath (New York: Pegasus Books, 2018), 59. See also, David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 32-33.
[7] Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 116; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 20; Morrow Jr., "At Home and Abroad: During and after the War," 109.
[8] Whalan, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, 1 (America’s Regular Army stood at 127,588 and the National Guard at 181,620.); Peck, The Great War in America), 74, 92-93, 98, 134, 143; Jay Winter, “A Global War” in We Return Fighting, 25-26.
[9] Kennedy, Over Here, 24, 42-44.
[10] Winter, “A Global War,” 25-26, 31-32.
[11] Kennedy, Over Here, 157-60, 188; Geoffrey Wawro, "How 'Hyphenated Americans' Won World War I," New York Times, September 12, 2018,https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/12/opinion/how-hyphenated-americans-won-world-war-i.html.
[12] Salter, “From Civil War to World War, 51; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 29-30.
[13] Quoted in Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 30-32; 53-56.
[14] White Houston police officers pistol-whipped two Black soldiers for intervening in their abusive arrest of a Black woman. One soldier escaped arrest and raced to camp tailed by a White mob. This triggered an armed response by more than 100 Black soldiers in violation of orders to remain in camp. The ensuing three-hour riot left 15 dead, including four police and two Black soldiers. The Army convened three courts-martial, which found 58 soldiers guilty of mutiny, assault, and murder, and sentenced 13 soldiers to death by hanging without providing them opportunity for appeal or review. The subsequent NAACP investigation concluded: “The cause of the Houston riot was the habitual brutality of the white police officers of Houston in their treatment of colored people.” In November 2023, the Army finally acknowledged the gross injustice. Ibid., 32-37; Michael Levenson, “A Century Later, 17 Wrongly Executed Black Soldiers Are Honored” (New York Times, February 25, 2024) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/us/army-black-soldiers-fort-sam-houston-cemetery.html.
[15] Whalan, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, 3 (The “pogrom” characterization is attributed to historian David Levering Lewis); Morrow, "At Home and Abroad," 115.
[16] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 28. Also, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, African American History: from emancipation through Jim Crow, Course Guidebook, The Great Courses (Chantilly VA, 2022), 56-60.
[17] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 21-22.
[18] Ibid., 24-25. The Espionage Act of June 15, 1917, criminalized and fined any interference with the draft or recruitment.
[19] Quoted in Chad L. Williams, The Wounded World: W. E. B. Du Bois and the First World War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), 72.
[20] Quoted in Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 75-77.
[21] Quoted in Ibid., 26.
[22] Quoted in Ibid., 15, 28.
[23] Ibid., 6, 108, 111.
[24] Salter, “From Civil War to World War,” 71; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 111.
[25] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 108-10.
[26] Ibid., 110-13; Whalan, The Great War, 9.
[27] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 113-14.
[28] Ibid., 147, 162-64; Whalan, The Great War, 9-10.
[29] Williams, The Wounded World, 15-16; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 2, 40.
[30] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 6, 39-51; Whalan, The Great War, 114-15.
[31] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 46-48, 135, 143 & 376n168.
[32] Ibid., 129-32.
[33] Houston set about undoing Plessy v. Ferguson: first, University of Maryland v. Murray (1936) required Maryland Law School to admit a qualified African American because the state provided no comparable law school for Black persons, and next Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada (1938) did not overturn the state segregation law but held that the state’s effectively forcing a qualified applicant to obtain his law degree out-of-state constituted denial of equal protection under the Constitution. These cases opened the door for overturning Plessy in Brown v. Board of Education, which Thurgood Marshall (later Supreme Court Justice) successfully argued. Marshall was among a generation of Black lawyers whom Houston mentored, and Marshall credited Houston for these legal successes against racism: “We wouldn’t have been any place if Charlie [Houston] hadn’t laid the groundwork for it.” Salter, “From Civil War to World War,” 93; Morrow, "At Home and Abroad," 117; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 134; Jeffries, African American History: from emancipation through Jim Crow, 102-04.
[34] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 119-21.
[35] Ibid.,124-27; Salter, “From Civil War to World War,” 85, 121; Whalan, The Great War, 11.
[36] Morrow, "At Home and Abroad:" 121, 123-24 (Cpl. Freddie Stowers of the 371st in 1991 and Sgt. Henry Johnson of the 369th in 2015); Salter, “From Civil War to World War,” 81-82, 85, 90-92; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 350-51.
[37] Quoted in Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 159-60; also, Whalan, The Great War, 6.
[38] Kennedy, Over Here, 202-05, 195; Peck, The Great War in America, 141-43, 183-86.
[39] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 136, 140-41; Salter, “From Civil War to World War,” 87; Whalan, The Great War, 7-8, 250n7.
[40] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 138-40; Whalan, The Great War, 8-9; Arthur E. Barbeau & Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, African-American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Da Capo Press, 1996), 150-59.
[41] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 141-42; Morrow, "At Home and Abroad," 124.
[42] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 193-95, 201-05, 208-13, 300.
[43] Ibid., 214-17; Steven L. Harris, Harlem's Hellfighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2003), 261-63; Morrow Jr., “At Home and Abroad,” 124; Whalan, The Great War, 11-12.
[44] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 219-22.
[45] Ibid., 224-25, 237, 239; Morrow Jr., “At Home and Abroad,” 125-29. In “Vanishing War Dreams,” New York Age (June 7, 1919), James Weldon Johnson reported that “four other colored soldiers have been lynched; some of them wearing their uniforms; one of them because he was wearing his uniform.”
[46] Morrow Jr., "At Home and Abroad," 125; Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 237.
[47] Quoted in Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 207.
[48] Ibid., 249-57.
[49] Ibid., 257-58.
[50] Ibid., 258-60; Morrow, "At Home and Abroad " 129.
[51] Kennedy, Over Here, 362, 387.
[52] Edward G. Lengel, "Why Didn't We Listen to Their War Stories?" Washington Post, May 25, 2008, http://www.314th.org/why-didnt-we-listen-to-their-stories-ed-lengel.html. In 2014, Congress finally designated a World War I Memorial site and established a Centennial Commission, which choose the Memorial design – a battlefield relief entitled “A Soldier’s Journey,” installed September 2024.
[53] Whalan, The Great War, 50-56.
[54] Quoted in Ibid. 53.
[55] Charles A. O'Connor III, The Great War and the Death of God: Cultural Breakdown, Retreat from Reason, and Rise of Neo-Darwinian Materialism in the Aftermath of World War I (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2014), chs. 3 & 6; Kennedy, Over Here, 229. (Kennedy limits disillusionment largely to American high culture).
[56] Ezra Pound, "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley ("Life and Contacts") in The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, George Walter ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 248.
[57] Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), 177-78; F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2010), 307.
[58] Frederick J. Hoffman, The 20s: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: Free Press, 1965), 99.
[59] Whalan, The Great War, xii.
[60] Quoted in ibid., 18-19.
[61] The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 3rd ed., vol. 1, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Valerie A. Smith (New York: Norton, 2014), 1005.
[62] Ibid., 977-78.
[63] Ibid., 969, 973.
[64] Whalan, The Great War, 69-78, 116-16. (In Jesse Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924) Black and White soldiers named Bye are revealed to share the same great-great-grandfather.)
[65] Norton Anthology, 1289.
[66] Whalan, The Great War, 43-44.
[67] Quoted in ibid., 38.
[68] J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout & Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, Ninth Edition (New York: Norton, 2014), 777.
[69] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 165, 326-27.
[70] Gates and Smith, "Langston Hughes, 1902-1967" in Norton Anthology, 1302.
[71] Ibid., 1306-07.
[72] Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 325.
[73] Norton Anthology, 727.
[74] Henry Lewis Gates Jr., The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song (New York: Penguin Books, 2022), 78-95 (quoting historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham).
[75] Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West, Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston’s You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays (New York:HarperCollins, 2022), 5.
[76] Gates, The Black Church, 120, 125.
[77] Ibid., 128-30, 135-36, 143; also, O'Connor, The Great War and the Death of God, 94-98.
[78] Norton Anthology, 871-93, 872.
[79] Gates and West, Introduction to Hurston's You Don’t Know Us Negroes, 3, 7.
[80] Norton Anthology, 1321-23.
[81] Whalan, The Great War, 23.
[82] Reflections in 1933 on America's wartime assurances by Emmet J. Scott, African American Special Assistant to the Secretary of War (1917-19), quoted in Kennedy, Over Here, 284,
[83] Quoted in Whalan, The Great War, 214.
[84] Ibid., 220-22.