Chapter Two
Unfortunately for African Americans, the country made little attempt in the fifty years following the Civil War to repay the debt owed to them for their service—whether in a soldier’s uniform or in tattered clothing on sweltering plantations. Instead, America seemed to double down on its failings by accruing new insults to Black people every time a slight step toward progress was made. While a gradual shift toward equality was to be expected, what African Americans often faced varied between “inclusion” in name only or outright rejection and degradation not much different from what plagued them before that Great War.
As much as the United States Colored Troops’ exclusion from the original Grand Review had been a serious affront to those who had valiantly served, its reenactment fifty years later by the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and the circumstances surrounding the event, added almost equal insult to the injury.
Formed the year after the end of the Civil War, the GAR was the preeminent organization of Union veterans. Black and White Union soldiers alike were allowed to participate in state and national encampment activities under its auspices. In September 1915, the GAR held its 49th National Encampment in Washington, DC, and this encampment coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Union’s Civil War victory. The reenactment of the Grand Review promised to celebrate the milestone; and this time, Black soldiers who had fought for the Union would march alongside the White soldiers.
Despite its progressive veneer, however, the GAR was a segregated organization and prevailing attitudes toward race influenced its operations. The GAR organized itself by state “departments,” and each department had several posts. Although some posts had both Black and White members, integration was not socially acceptable in most localities. As one White GAR leader put it in 1891:
[T]he inexorable law of this social condition is such that the White man who associates upon terms of social equality with the Black man is barred from all association with the people of the White race and practically excluded from the privilege of earning a livelihood. It points the finger of scorn and derision to the wife of his bosom and the children of his love.1
Whatever gains had been achieved during Reconstruction, the period between 1865 to 1877 when the country put its best-faith effort into including African Americans in its full democracy, had been reverted and further trampled with the advent of Redemption and its Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. Indeed, more aggressive and insidious declarations were overtaking the country.
The insidiousness was evident in 1915, because that was not only the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War’s end, but also the year of a watershed moment in cinematic and social history. That year, American director D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation,2 a cinematic adaptation of the novel The Clansman, The Birth of a Nation written by Thomas Dixon Jr.
The story follows two White families, one from the North and one from the South, who find themselves in South Carolina during Reconstruction. Although they fought on opposite sides during the Civil War, they now unite in their opposition to the freedmen. In the film, the formerly enslaved win a majority in the South Carolina state legislature and oppressively rule over the White Southern populace.3 Essentially, The Birth of a Nation was a condemnation of Reconstruction and the progress the country was trying to make, a manifestation of a White nightmare where Black people had the same access to citizenship and opportunity as they did.
The film offers gross and insulting caricatures of Black people, featuring uncivilized Black legislators4 and licentious, sexually violent Black men whose sole aim is to prey on innocent and unwilling White women. Enraged by the indignities the White population suffers at the hands of the newly “empowered” Black people, the film’s protagonist forms the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) “in defense of the[] Aryan birthright.”5
The Birth of a Nation concludes with a depiction of the next election. This time, the KKK is out in full force and successfully intimidates South Carolina’s African-American population into giving up its vote and staying home.6 This is a victorious and happy ending for those sympathetic to the Confederacy and White supremacy, to the point a writer for the Confederate Veteran magazine gushed that the film showed how the KKK:
[U]pheld the Southern people in their refusal to surrender to the demand of the Radical Congress that they submit to [N]egro domination. They fought until the last vestige of that domination had disappeared. They affected a revolution. They added an unwritten amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That amendment reads as follows: “The American nation shall forever have a White man’s government.”7
The Birth of a Nation assaulted the notion of a free and equal Black man having a presence in the United States, resting on the premise that Black people were at the root of all problems facing the country, that liberty and unity could not coexist if Black people had equal rights to White people.
Promotional material represented that “[t]he events of the war between the states and of reconstruction, pictured in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ are matters of authentic history.”8 The film’s purported basis in historical truth could not have been a more grievous injury to African Americans at the time, especially those who had sacrificed on behalf of the Union Army.
Griffith, the director, invited a group of newspaper editors to view the film in New York and promised to withdraw the film if they found any inaccuracies in it.9 He even declared he would pay $1,000 to anyone who could find falsehoods in his film; many were found, but he never paid up.10
As expected, the film drew universal condemnation from African Americans, led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which believed the film’s “heroic” depiction of the Ku Klux Klan glorified and encouraged the lynching of Black men—the very epidemic that helped spur the founding of the civil rights organization in 1909.11
At the time, the Supreme Court had not yet ruled that films fell within the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of expression, so the film could be banned by state and local censor boards and licensing regulations. The NAACP and other opponents of The Birth of a Nation sought, sometimes successfully, to ban it outright or have the most objectionable scenes cut as the film made its way across the country from theater to theater. Many protests of the film arose, and some turned violent. In Boston, riots erupted outside a theater after efforts to ban the film failed; in Philadelphia, rioting was so intense that it led to several deaths.12
Outside of protests, many African Americans decided to fight in less direct ways, chiefly to challenge the film’s “truths” by promoting an accurate recounting of Black experiences. Most notably, famed historian Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (today called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History or ASALH) in 1915. Its primary objective was to counter attacks against the character of African Americans, including those perpetrated by The Birth of a Nation. Woodson went on to establish The Journal of Negro History, The Encyclopedia Africana, and the Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month.
The controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation engulfed the capital shortly after its first private screening in Los Angeles, on February 8, 1915. As the NAACP and others strategized ways to use boycotts, protests, censor boards, and challenges to licenses and permits to stop the film’s showings, the purveyors of the film planned their counterattack. Most notably, Clansman author Thomas Dixon Jr. persuaded President Woodrow Wilson, with whom he had attended Johns Hopkins University, to screen the film in the White House.13 Washington newspapers informed the public of the upcoming White House screening of the then-relatively unknown film, saying the picture, “will show the progress of the colored race in this country from the days of slavery down to the present time,” and that the President was interested in the film because of “the great lesson of peace it teaches.”14
On the evening following the White House screening, the National Press Club hosted a private screening in a large ballroom of the Raleigh Hotel in Washington. Dozens of high-ranking government officials attended, including the Chief Justice, other members of the Supreme Court , Senators and Representatives.15 Dixon and Griffith believed these private screenings to national leaders gave the filmmakers and theater owners ammunition for their later fights with the licensing and censoring authorities: if the film could be shown in the White House, how could it be inappropriate for viewing by the common citizen? Indeed, the filmmakers would go on to win more censorship battles than they lost, despite the fact President Wilson, facing political pressure, later released a public statement indicating he, “was entirely unaware of the character of the play before it was presented, and has at no time expressed his approbation of it.”16
The specter of The Birth of a Nation lingered in Washington as the colored Union veterans arrived for the GAR National Encampment in the fall of 1915. Newspapers published stories about the film practically every day as protests and lawsuits gave the film free publicity and contributed to its record-breaking ticket sales.
Surely, Black veterans felt the sting of its presence, even as they sought out old brothers-in-arms and tried to celebrate their service to the nation. The Rev. Dr. James Shera Montgomery, a prominent minister who would later become Chaplain of the House of Representatives, even delivered a sermon entitled “Birth of a Nation” at a special service for the GAR members who had travelled to Washington for the Encampment.17
However, these Black veterans did not need a film to remind them of their second-class status while at the Encampment. The GAR was already doing so. In the months prior to the Encampment, the GAR had appointed a “Public Comfort Committee” to coordinate all arrangements for entertaining the Union veterans in Washington, and no Black member had been named to it. The Washington Bee, a Black newspaper, chastised the GAR for the exclusion, sarcastically noting, “It is to be regretted that this city doesn’t have one representative colored citizen of sufficient intelligence to be appointed on the public comfort committee.…”18
In the face of this exclusion, the Black community in Washington stepped up to the challenge of ensuring the heroic colored veterans would be properly hosted during the Encampment. They formed the Colored Citizens Committee for the Entertainment of the Veterans of the Encampment. The committee arranged transportation, lodging, banquets, tours, and other activities for the visiting Black veterans by raising money from churches, society groups, and other organizations.19 People donated automobiles so veterans could take sightseeing tours of the city and opened up their homes so visiting veterans would have comfortable lodging, given their exclusion from the segregated hotels.20 They also organized a concert and receptions. The committee extended a formal invitation to President Wilson to address them at a grand reception planned for the eve of the reunion march.21 Unsurprisingly, he declined, choosing instead to attend the main reception sponsored by the GAR. As the nation’s Commander in Chief, he received a warm reception from the assembled White veterans. In his address, President Wilson thanked them for their service and said he was “proud to be [their] servant.” He explained that he loved this country not just because it was his home, but also because he saw this country “as a great instrument for the spirit of mankind.” Wilson proclaimed to this group of Union veterans that:
This nation was from the beginning a spiritual enterprise, and you have seen the spirits of the two once-divided sections of this country absolutely united…[from] a war which seemed as if it had the seed of every kind of bitterness[…]it has seen a single generation put bitterness absolutely out of its heart, and you feel as I am sure the men who fought against you feel, that you were comrades even then, even though you did not know it, and that now you know that you are comrades in a common love for a country which you are equally eager to serve.
He celebrated this reconciliation as “a miracle of the spirit.” Wilson, who was born shortly prior to the Civil War in Virginia, and raised in Georgia and South Carolina, even strangely proclaimed, “This is one of the very few wars in which in one sense everybody engaged may take pride.”22
On the next day, approximately 20,000 veterans participated in the reenactment of the Grand Review. Even though there was only one-tenth of the number of original participants, the diminished size did not result in diminished spirit. The veterans gathered at Peace Monument, which had been constructed to honor sailors lost at sea during the Civil War. From this location just west of the Capitol, they made the two-mile trek down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House, where President Wilson and other national luminaries saluted them. Along the way, more than a quarter million people lined both sides of the Avenue to cheer the veterans. The former soldiers marched proudly, many struggling mightily with the aid of a cane or the shoulder of a stronger comrade. Several became exhausted and collapsed along the Avenue, as nurses and others ran to resuscitate them and tried to help them complete the trek from the Capitol to the White House so that they could salute the President. Several of the aging veterans collapsed with exhaustion as soon as they passed the presidential reviewing stand.23 Those too weak or lame to attempt the journey on foot brought up the rear in scores of automobiles.
President Wilson’s theme of reconciliation manifested itself during the parade as a handful of Confederate veterans in uniform joined the march and proceeded arm-in-arm with the Union veterans. These scenes led to uproarious applause and cheers from the crowd, who marveled at the happy reunion of blue and gray. Parade attendees observed no one seemed to enjoy those scenes more than President Wilson himself.24
The reunion was, however, surely bittersweet for Black veterans and the Black community that gathered to support them. While they were able to right the wrong of exclusion from the original Grand Review and celebrate the defeat of the Confederacy, now, they lived every day under Jim Crow.
As the Afro-American Ledger observed:
[N]otwithstanding the fact that they wore the uniform, and the badge of faithfulness, there was hardly a single place of entertainment, not kept by a member of their own race[,] that was opened to them. Not a single place of amusement in the city of Washington, the capital of the nation they gave their blood to defend, would have given them a decent seat.…25
When Black citizens protested their exclusion from the Public Comfort Committee prior to the Encampment, GAR leadership responded that most states were planning activities for their native sons and therefore responded that “[i]t would be entirely proper for the 90,000 colored people of Washington to organize similarly and independently.”26 This explanation dodged the essential concern of racial segregation. The fact some states offered entertainment alternatives for their White veterans meant nothing to the visiting Black veterans from those states, who would have had no social activities to attend at all had it not been for Black Washingtonians organizing to provide them.
Fortunately, there was a boon to be had thanks to the GAR’s exclusion and prevarication. The Committee of Colored Citizens decided to take the funds left over from their activities during the Grand Review’s Fiftieth Anniversary and use them “as a nucleus for the erection of a monument in this city to the memory of the colored soldiers and sailors who fought in the wars of our country.”27 After the Encampment, the Afro-American Ledger asked, “[W]hat has these fifty years brought of fame or honor to them that they might feel proud that they once wore the uniform and fought for a grateful country?”28 The question, echoing the concern George Washington Williams had expressed a generation earlier, finally had the start of an answer in the form of this proposed national monument.
But the complete answer would be a very long time coming.