On two opposing yet crucially interconnected ways to remember a community
of veterans.
Thanks in large part to the film Glory (1989), we’ve started to develop a collective sense of the U.S. Colored Troops who fought in the Civil War; thanks to similar cultural texts such as the film Red Tails (2012), we’ve perhaps begun to do the same for the African Americans who served in World War II. But for whatever reason—perhaps it’s as simple as the
absence, to date, of a historical film centered on them?—I don’t think we have
much of a collective awareness at all of the equally significant community of African American soldiers who served in World War I. Coming half a century after abolition, in the same era
as such defining histories as the Great Migration, the lynching epidemic, and
the founding of the NAACP, this World War I service is certainly as significant
as those other, more famous ones, and deserves far more remembrance in our 21st
century culture.
If we start to engage with the histories of this community, however,
another reason for our general amnesia about them becomes clearer: compared to
the pretty inspiring Civil War and World War II stories, the history of these 370,000 World War I soldiers—and of the vets when they returned home—is a strikingly
dark and divisive one. Exemplifying those dark histories are the words of the U.S. chief military commander, General
John Pershing, who while publicly
recognizing African American soldiers privately composed a secret communiqué to
white officers instructing them that “we must not eat with them, must not shake hands with
them, seek to talk to them or to meet with them outside the requirements of
military service. We must not commend too highly these troops, especially in
front of white Americans.” And when they returned to the United States, these
veterans found themselves right back in a society where President
Wilson had recently segregated the federal government, where The Birth of a Nation (1915) was a towering
cultural achievement, where whatever protections their uniforms had afforded
them ended as abruptly as did the war.
So we can’t better remember these World War I soldiers and veterans without
remembering another in the long national series of hypocrisies and horrors
directed at African Americans—which of course doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
remember them (quite the opposite). But on the other hand, we can also work to
push beyond those negatives to remember the deeply inspiring sides to this
community’s service, and to consider how they brought those experiences back
with them to the post-war nation. In his May 1919 “Returning Soldiers,”
published as an editorial for his monthly NAACP
magazine The Crisis, W.E.B. Du Bois
makes the case for thinking of the soldiers in precisely that way; throughout
his stirring editorial Du Bois contrasts the cause for which these soldiers
have risked their lives for the “fatherland” to which they will soon come home,
concludes, “We return. We return from
fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in
France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of
America, or know the reason why.” It’s quite possible to see this era, and
this community of veterans, as a vital step toward the Civil Rights Movement—and
in any case it’s well worth remembering this inspiring side of their
experiences.
Next post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other
histories you’d share for the weekend post?
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