A More Unbending Battle

Sometimes the reason to go to war is clear. More often, a number of falsehoods must be sold to a populace before one nation can enter into combat with another. Proponents of war may claim that the conflict will be over quickly, that victory will come easily and at a meager cost, that the enemy is less than human, that he deserves everything he gets, that he has it coming to him. Among the remarkable lies that made the Great War possible was one promising that the war would be fun; it is surprising as well how long that lie was perpetuated, in song and story, long after the actual news and numbers from the front revealed the truth of the matter.

In 1916, African Americans had cause to question whether the promise of citizenship was just another lie, a false assurance from a race hardly cognizant of its own duplicity. Part of the propaganda campaign meant to prepare America for war involved demonizing the enemy. The papers and popular magazines were full of true accounts of pillaged Belgian villages, French children gutted with bayonets, girls gang-raped, churches burned to the ground. Germans were commonly referred to as “the Hun” and depicted on posters and in political cartoons as hulking, subhuman savages. The caricatured Hun resembled a massive, drooling, slope-browed ape with black skin, bearing virtually no resemblance to real Germans, who were pale in complexion. One black writer, Kelly Miller, a dean at Howard University, described the enemy as “the German, ungainly, acrimonious and obdurate, part Saxon, part Hun, part Vandal and part Visigoth, a creature of blood and iron.” The Hun was a brute, a barbarian, a savage. And in the cartoons, he was black.

Yet, many white Americans would have declined to characterize, or failed to recognize, as “Hunish” the treatment given to Jesse Washington, a seventeen-year-old boy in Waco, Texas, accused on May 8, 1916, of killing Lucy Fryer, the fifty-three-year-old wife of a white farmer for whom he’d been working. Jesse Washington had been seen nearby, prior to the time the crime was committed, working in a field. Still working in the same field when the police arrived after the murder was discovered, he made no effort to flee. Reports described him as “feeble-minded.”

Jesse Washington confessed to the crime of murder and rape, although the medical examiner offered no evidence of rape and, according to one account, members of the sheriff’s office had coerced his confession by telling him if he did so, he wouldn’t be lynched. After he was tried and, following a mere four minutes of deliberation, convicted by a white jury, in front of a white judge and a white prosecutor, a white mob was allowed to drag Jesse Washington from the courtroom. He was taken to the City Hall lawn. On the way, he was beaten by members of the mob, which was growing in size and frenzy. He was struck by shovels, bricks, and clubs. He was stabbed and cut until he was red with blood. According to the Waco Times Herald,

Life was not extinct within the Negro’s body, although nearly so, when another chain was placed around his neck and thrown over the limb of a tree on the lawn, everybody trying to get to the Negro and have some part in his death. The infuriated mob then leaned the Negro, who was half alive and half dead, against the tree, he having just enough strength within his limbs to support him. As rapidly as possible the Negro was then jerked into the air at which a shout from thousands of throats went up in the morning air and dry goods boxes, excelsior, wood and every other article that would burn was then in evidence, appearing as if by magic. A huge dry goods box was then produced and filled to the top with all the material that had been secured. The Negro’s body was swaying in the air, and all of the time a noise of thousands was heard and the Negro’s body was lowered into the box. No sooner had his body touched the box than people pressed forward, each eager to be the first to light the fire, matches were touched to the inflammable material and as smoke rapidly rose in the air, such a demonstration as of people gone mad was never heard before. Everybody pressed closer to get souvenirs of the affair. When they had finished with the Negro his body was mutilated.

People took fingers, toes, and ears as keepsakes. The crowd, estimated at ten thousand, included women and children. Jesse Washington was one of fifty-one colored men known to have been lynched in 1916, “as if by magic.” “There are crimes,” a Texas paper said of lynching, “which make sane and sober men mad; there are crimes which set aflame the minds.” A Texas congressman defended such behavior as “the call of blood,” an instinct white men had received from God himself, “a call to the preservation of the race.” Defending the white race was a noble vocation, heroic, according to the depiction of the Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie Birth of a Nation.

The atrocity in Waco gained national attention. It outraged members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in Harlem in 1909 by magazine editor W. E. B. DuBois, suffragette Ida Wells, and attorney Archibald Grimke, among others. The “Waco horror” was notorious for its extreme nature, but for most black Americans, there were other, smaller incidents as well, indignities too numerous to track or count, brutalities too small to make the local papers. There were beatings, humiliations, insults, and slights, with no end in sight. Jesse Washington, in Waco, had been taken from a government courthouse and murdered by ten thousand people in front of City Hall. The city police had done nothing to stop the lynching. And this was precisely the government, the country, the democracy that the men on the muster rolls were signing up to defend.

Yet, W. E. B. DuBois, editor of Crisis magazine, saw it as a simple syllogism. “If this is our country,” he reasoned (a substantial “if” to some), “then this is our war.” In the July 1918 issue of Crisis, he wrote, “We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy. Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks, shoulder to shoulder with our 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. We urge this despite our deep sympathy with the reasonable and deep seated feeling of revolt among Negroes at the present insult and discrimination to which they are subject even when they do their patriotic duty.”

“The future historian,” preached Rev. F. M. Hyden of St. James Presbyterian Church, “when he comes to set down the facts in connection with the world war, should have before him the fact that coloured men went to war not as an endorsement of the President, but as a measure of national defense . . . volunteered service in such a time as this constitutes . . . the strongest argument and the noblest appeal for political and economic rights which colored men could present to the nation after the war is over.”

On the same day, Rev. Adam Clayton Powell at the Abyssinian Baptist Church told his congregation, “This is the proper time for us to make a special request for our constitutional rights as American citizens. The ten million colored people in this country were never so badly needed as now. . . . As a race we ought to let our government know that if it wants us to fight foreign powers, we must be given some assurance first of better treatment at home. . . . Why should not the colored Americans make a bloodless demand at this time for the rights we have been making futile efforts to secure [from a] government that has persistently stood by with folded arms while we were oppressed and murdered.”

Others saw it as a trick, or perhaps a false hope. “Since when,” asked A. Philip Randolph in the Messenger, “has the subject race come out of a war with its rights and privileges accorded for such a participation. . . . Did not the Negro fight in the Revolutionary War, with Crispus Attucks dying first . . . and come out to be a miserable chattel slave in this country for nearly one hundred years?”

There was considerable resistance in white society as well as within the military to the idea of arming large numbers of colored American men, training them, and giving them permission to kill Huns, who, despite the cartoons in the magazines, were white people. The image of a race war had lodged in the American imagination since before Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and even before the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti. Colored men had served in the armed forces since the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War, but since the Civil War, they’d primarily fought against nonwhite enemies: Native Americans in the American West or Insurectos in the Philippines when the United States took command of Spanish colonies following the Spanish-American War. William Hayward commanded black troops in Cuba. More recently, black troops of the Tenth Cavalry had distinguished themselves fighting with Gen. John Pershing against Pancho Villa at Carrizal. The War Department felt its job was to prepare to win a war, not to solve the nation’s race problem. As such, its approach was to circumvent the problem of race by establishing separated and segregated regiments and divisions, or regiments in which white officers commanded black soldiers.

Pershing asserted repeatedly that American troops were neither ready nor prepared to fight the war in Europe. Yet, rather than send to France the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth infantries and the Ninth and Tenth cavalries, the colored units he already had, he deployed them to Mexico, the Philippines, and Hawaii. For the war in Europe, black soldiers were recommended only as stevedores, laborers, or support troops. The army chief of engineers suggested, “The class of white men who would seek service . . . in these battalions could not be very desirable and more time would be required to train them than would be necessary with the intelligent colored man.”

The army chief of engineers cited one problem: “There will be vacancies in the non-commissioned grades which must be filled from time to time and unless white men are taken from other ranks and transferred to these battalions there results a permanent vacancy or the promotion of a colored man. The promotion of the colored man is then impossible as it gives a mixed class of non-commissioned officers.”

It occurred first on August 13, 1906, when a black battalion, the First Battalion of the Twenty-fifth Infantry, upon being stationed at Fort Brown on the Mexican border in Brownsville, Texas, found Jim Crow laws enforcing racial segregation firmly in place and signs in the town park reading, “No niggers and no dogs allowed.” Uniformed men were occasionally knocked to the ground for what the local whites deemed disrespectful behavior. After a fight between a black soldier and a Brownsville storekeeper, the city tried to bar colored soldiers from entering town. On the night of August 13, sixteen to twenty unidentified colored soldiers allegedly walked into town and shot up the buildings, wounding a police officer and killing a bartender. The white commanders at Fort Brown testified that the men were in their barracks at the time in question. Only spent shell casings from army rifles could be produced as hard evidence, and the defense argued that these could easily have been planted. When the soldiers refused to cooperate with official inquiries, either by confessing or giving evidence against those responsible—which one government investigator termed a “conspiracy of silence”—the army, with President Theodore Roosevelt’s consent and by his order, dishonorably discharged all of the men in Companies B, C, and D. In total, 167 soldiers, including men with over twenty years of service and approaching retirement, were released without receiving the back pay due them. They were denied all benefits and pensions and excluded from any further government service. The chief attorney for the defendants was a thirty-year-old lawyer named Napoleon B. Marshall, who developed evidence that later (but not in his lifetime) persuaded the government to grant the men honorable discharges.

The director of the War Plans Division, Brig. Gen. Lytle Brown, wrote of the problem: “The fighting value of colored men has been much discussed and while there is considerable doubt as to their value for furnishing officer material, it seems to be pretty generally agreed that under white officers or largely officered by white men, their capacity and work as noncommissioned officers and privates, even on the firing line . . . has been considerable.”

Brown addressed the inherent problem of men serving without hope of promotion:

It is, moreover, considered a very unsafe policy to utilize colored men in a way to accentuate the race discrimination against them. This is not a time to stir up race-feeling which is, under the best condition, a very serious problem with us. If they are to be used in such a way that only subordinate positions are open to them and if they are made to feel that faithful and satisfactory service cannot bring them the reward of advancement to higher grades in the unit in which they are serving, it can hardly be supposed that they can give their best efforts or that a proper pride and morale can exist in such units. The colored drafted men will include the best of that race, and it is to be expected that some excellent noncommissioned officer material will be found which should be recognized and utilized.

Brown had a lower opinion of the black men entering the army through the draft:

A large proportion of these colored men are ignorant, illiterate, day labor classes. A great many of them are of inferior physical stamina and would not hold up under the conditions of strenuous field service and could not withstand the rigors of the damp cold winter in France. The percentage of sickness among them has been very high, particularly of venereal disease.

At the time, however, the French had seventy-three thousand colonial soldiers from West Africa already serving in that same damp, cold climate. The U.S. government already used colored troops from the First Separate Battalion (Colored) of Washington, D.C., to protect the White House, the Capitol, and other federal buildings and charged them with preventing white German spies from infiltrating and passing as guards. Nevertheless, the army’s leadership did not trust colored soldiers to serve in combat. Many of the draftees Lytle Brown cited as illiterate, ignorant, or disease-ridden came from the South, where they lived in poverty, had inadequate schools, and lacked access to health care.

Some in the military resorted to the pseudosciences of the day to justify their biases. One officer cited a “well known fact to anthropologists,” who had used head measurements of members of the black race to indicate limited cranial capacities, inferring a correlation between intelligence and hat size. Others in the military cited the poor performance of draftees on intelligence tests, which asked questions like “What is a mimeograph?” “Where are Overland Railroad cars manufactured?” “In which does the character of Scrooge appear: Vanity Fair; A Christmas Carol; Romola; or Henry IV?” or “Who is Christy Matthewson?” He was a well-known baseball player, granted, but such a question was hardly useful in measuring native intelligence. In fact, the test scores of draftees of all races taking the army intelligence test indicated that just about everyone was “subnormal,” though how the average score of an entire population could be less than “normal” remained unaddressed.

Six days after the first American troops stepped ashore in France, racial violence erupted in the United States. On Sunday, July 1, 1917, in East St. Louis, white workers went on strike at a local plant, which then recruited black strikebreakers. About one hundred thousand people lived in East St. Louis, but the white labor pool had not grown since the war put an end to European immigration, while the black population was swollen with recent migrants from the South. Conflict between white and black workers was aggravated when speakers at a rally at City Hall urged white citizens to take action against colored laborers. A car drove into a black neighborhood, firing bullets into black homes. When another car filled with white policemen followed, armed blacks retaliated by shooting at the car as it drove away, killing two of the policemen. The ensuing riot lasted for three days. Blacks were beaten, stabbed, kicked, stoned, hanged, or shot while trying to escape their burning homes. The police looked on, doing nothing. Some members of the Illinois state militia who had been sent in to assist the police joined them in their inaction. One soldier even invited a white man to “kill all the Negroes he could, that he did not like them either,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch . By the end of the riots, thirty-nine African Americans were dead, and hundreds of black homes had been reduced to ashes.

A month later, at a Carnegie Hall reception for a delegation representing the new government of Russian premier Alexander Kerensky, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), in a room full of AFL supporters, excoriated the strikebreakers in East St. Louis and said they got what they deserved. Ex-president Theodore Roosevelt was on the podium. When Gompers applauded the riots in East St. Louis, Roosevelt leapt from his seat and crossed the stage to shake his finger in Gompers’s face, saying, “Murder is murder, whether white or black. I will never stand on any platform and remain silent and listen to anyone condoning the savage and brutal treatment of Negro strike breakers.” A near-riot ensued, and Roosevelt needed a police escort from the hall. Leaving with him was one of the event’s organizers, a Capt. Hamilton Fish of the New York Fifteenth National Guard.

Sunday, July 28, 1917, saw another parade in Manhattan, prompted by what had happened in Waco and East St. Louis and by racial strife in Memphis, but no marching bands accompanied this one. The papers that day spoke only of the war and of mundane things, like the Yankees losing to the Indians and the price of bacon being up six cents a pound since the war started. From Harlem, perhaps as many as fifteen thousand black citizens—little girls in white church dresses with ribbons in their hair, little boys in jackets and ties, men and women in their Sunday finery—marched silently down Fifth Avenue, holding signs.

We march because by the grace of God and the force of truth the dangerous, hampering walls of prejudice and inhuman sacrifices must fall.

We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis, by arousing the conscience of the country, and to bring the murders of our brothers and sisters, and innocent children to justice.

We march because we deem it a crime to be silent in the face of such barbaric acts.

We march because we are thoroughly opposed to Jim Crow laws, segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, lynching and the host of evils that are forced upon us.

It is time that the spirit of Christ should be manifested in the making and execution of laws.

We march because we want our children to live in a better land and enjoy fairer conditions than have fallen to our lot.

The silent march ended peacefully and inspired no reciprocal racial hostilities, as it might have had it occurred in St. Louis, or Memphis, or Waco. The men of the Fifteenth would have only read about it in the paper, for they were already elsewhere. Having met the goal of mustering two thousand men, the regiment was sent, on July 15, to Camp Whitman near Poughkeepsie, New York, for training. The order came at 8:00 A.M. A mad scramble ensued to find everybody and get them to the railroad station in time.