Lovely War(112)

* * *





Events involving the Clef Club orchestra and the Harlem Hellfighters are all drawn from historical sources, starting with the Carnegie Hall “Concert of Negro Music,” and through to the victory parade marching up Fifth Avenue. Their experiences of persecution at Camp Dix, Camp Wadsworth, Saint-Nazaire, and Aix-les-Bains are all taken from the historical record. (A light postscript on the Carnegie Hall concert: some of my sources said ten upright pianos were used in the orchestra. Others claimed fourteen. I went with the smaller number, though this may be the only book in print that asserts ten pianos on a stage to be “the smaller number.”)





BLACK SERVICEMEN IN THE GREAT WAR


The story of America’s contribution to the final year of World War I is one of sacrifice, valor, and honor. But it’s not a story of unalloyed white heroism. The shameful truth of how black servicemen who risked all for their country suffered widespread hatred, betrayal, and violence from their country is a crucial part of the story.

The US 369th infantry wasn’t the only black regiment to see combat in the Great War. Of nearly 400,000 black American soldiers who served, 200,000 were sent to Europe, and of them, approximately 42,000 fought. The rest worked as dockworkers, gravediggers, road and railroad builders, and other heavy laborers, in the military branch known as SOS (Service of Supply). Black SOS soldiers were cruelly misused, worked from morning till night seven days a week, often given minimal food, clothing, or housing. They faced brutality, humiliation, and violent reminders that they were to bow to white authority; and that restaurants, shops, train cars, and most of all, white society, particularly, white women, were off-limits. One SOS soldier described their treatment as being “in the spirit of slavery.”*





THE LONG DARK NIGHT


As the Great War broke, white supremacy in America was having its post–Civil War heyday. White America, long scarred by the bitterness and divisions of the Civil War, was tired of remaining adversarial, North versus South. The political, economic, and cultural opportunities possible in healing the breach between North and South were too tempting to pass up. Segregation, whether eagerly embraced or quietly overlooked, became the compromise that lubricated a nationwide reunification of northern and southern political and economic interests, at the expense of black Americans’ legal, civil, and human rights.

Black activists described the period between 1890 and the Great War as “the long dark night.” With the 1896 ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson that legalized “separate but equal” facilities, segregation, now legally blessed, soon infiltrated American life. Schools, trains, buses, restaurants, theaters, workplaces, churches, and civic spaces were segregated on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

White supremacy wasn’t the view of just a narrow, hateful fringe; it was ubiquitous, enshrined in the White House with the 1912 election of Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern Democrat elected since James Polk in 1844. As president of Princeton, Wilson had blocked all black applications to the university. As President of the United States, Wilson staffed his administration with Southern Democrats who dismissed and demoted black workers, segregating the postal service and the Department of the Treasury. Such policies helped residential segregation laws pass in southern state legislatures.

White supremacy rested—and still rests—on greed, specifically, the desire to enrich oneself with free or cheap labor or stolen resources, or to reduce competition for jobs and privileges by suppressing other groups’ eligibility; on fears of black political power at the polls; on fears of the strength of armed black resistance; and especially, on fears of contaminating the “purity” of the white race through interbreeding. It rested, therefore, upon sex as much as on dollars, laws, votes, and guns. “Degenerate” blacks had to be kept far from white women, and from circumstances that would display their intellect, capacity, character, strength, resolve, bravery, and ambition.

Where better to demonstrate these admirable qualities than through military service? Black Americans, eager to prove that black America could produce exemplary citizens and soldiers, flocked to the Great War, seeing it as a major opportunity. By contrast, white supremacist America—the America in full control of the reins of political power—saw armed black men trained in effective combat as their worst nightmare.





EXPORTING JIM CROW


Military white supremacists watched with alarm as the relatively egalitarian French embraced black soldiers as brothers-in-arms, fearing it would “spoil” them and further destabilize the “race problem” in America. The US Army forbade black soldiers from interacting with white women overseas, yet local women welcomed their company.

Finally, in desperation, US Army officials induced French counterparts to distribute a memorandum to French military officials titled “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” W. E. B. du Bois published it in the NAACP magazine, Crisis, in 1919. Below are a few illustrative excerpts.

    . . . the French public has become accustomed to treating the Negro with familiarity and indulgence.

Americans . . . are afraid that contact with the French will inspire in black Americans aspirations which to them [the whites] appear intolerable. . . .

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. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence . . .