[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21st century veterans’ stories!]
On how an
under-remembered community of veterans helps us make national sense of a
complex foreign war.
As part of
a June 2017 centennial series on the U.S. and World War I, I shared
this post on African American WWI soldiers, including an extended
discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s May 1919 The Crisis column “Returning
Soldiers.” I’d ask you to check out both that post and that column (the
hyperlink in the original post no longer works, but the second one in this
paragraph should) if you would, and then come on back for further thoughts on
that column and community.
Welcome
back! Since I wrote that column, I’ve learned much more about the Red
Summer of 1919, a year-long, nationwide orgy of white supremacist violence
and racial terrorism that very consistently targeted African American
WWI veterans, often in uniform and/or taking part in commemorative marches
and events. As that second hyperlinked article from the National World War I
Museum and Memorial describes it succinctly and accurately, while the violence
was always—let me say again, always—initiated by white supremacist mobs, “the
Red Summer saw Black populations fight back aggressively against racial
violence and intimidation in ways that were not typical before.” Proving
prophetic indeed Du Bois’s stirring lines, “we are cowards and jackasses if now
that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to
fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in
our own land.”
Those are the
most specific and to my mind the most important takeaways from this veteran
community and Du Bois’s column alike. But I think these histories also frame a
broader point, one that has helped me analyze what this complex
foreign war—one in which the U.S. got involved very late compared to most
of the rest of the world—meant in and for the U.S.
When we take into consideration that 1919 violence targeting veterans, and add
in ongoing catastrophic crises in that same year including the
influenza pandemic and the Palmer
Raids (both of which emerged directly out of World War I), it’s fair to say
that for the United States the “wartime” period very fully extended past the November 1918
Armistice and into 1919 (if not beyond). Of course that’s always the case
for veterans, as I hope every post in this series makes clear. But in this
case, I would argue that the entire nation remained in many ways “at war” well
past the conclusion of the foreign war, and no community better reflects that
reality than African American veterans.
Last
veteran’s story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?
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