A poet, lyricist, novelist, former U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, field secretary of the NAACP, and editorial page editor of The New York Age, James Weldon Johnson proved himself one of the most eloquent civil rights advocates of his time. As the United States mobilized, Johnson examined the racial implications of War Department policies. African Americans, constituting 10 percent of the nation’s population, would account for 13 percent of its army—serving in segregated units under predominantly white officers. Out of 200,000 wartime commissions, black officers received 1,200.
AN AGE reader at Jacksonville, Florida, sends us a circular which is being distributed in connection with the army recruiting stations at Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, Pensacola and Tallahassee, and which reads as follows:
NON-COMMISSIONED OFFICERS WANTED
WHITE MEN
Married or Single
EXPERIENCED IN THE HANDLING
OF COLORED MEN
For Enlistment as Non-Commissioned
Officers in the Service,
Battalions, Engineer Corps
NATIONAL ARMY
“Experienced in the handling of colored men.” That is about the most conspicuous example of grouping the Negro with the mule that has ever been brought to my attention. But aside from that, what kind of white non-commissioned officers does the War Department think it will get by allowing recruiting stations to advertise in the South for white men “experienced in handling colored men?” Does the War Department have any idea of what it means in the South to have experience in handling Negroes? It generally means to have the qualifications of a slave driver, of a chain-gang guard, of an overseer of the roughest kind of labor. It means to be devoid of sympathetic understanding and human kindness. Of course, if it is absolutely necessary to have white non-commissioned officers over colored troops, the Department can find lots of white men in the South who make intelligent and sympathetic officers; but it will not find these men by advertising there for white men who are “experienced in handling Negroes.”
The War Department has adopted a policy of training Southern troops in the North and Northern troops in the South. In line with this policy, I would suggest, since the Department seems to deem it necessary that colored troops be commanded by white officers, that all white officers for colored troops be Northern men. It is true that the sort of Southern white man the Department would get by the above advertisement would have more “experience,” but it would be experience of the wrong kind, it would be experience that would render him incapable of looking upon the men of his command as comrades in arms.
It is true that some of the finest and truest officers that the colored regiments of the regular army have are white men of Southern birth; but these men are entirely devoid of any “experience in handling Negroes” in the Southern sense. They went to West Point in their teens. Direct from West Point they went into the army and there have come to know the glorious traditions of the four crack colored regiments of the service, and to respect them and the men who made them. There is no plane of comparison between these officers and men taken out of civil life in the South and given command because of their “experience in handling Negroes.”
Getting down to common sense and plain justice, since colored men must be in strictly colored regiments, all non-commissioned officers of these regiments should be colored men: more, all line officers of those regiments should be colored men; and there is no good reason why, ultimately, all the field officers of those regiments should not be colored.
But if it is decreed that white men must officer colored regiments, then at least let them be Northern white men who have had no “experience.”
The New York Age, November 8, 1917