Loren Miller, movement lawyer (he was counsel for Angelo Herndon) and long-time ‘fellow traveler’ with a summary of the history of the U.S. military’s use and misuse of Black soldiers.

‘Last in Peace, Last in War’ by Loren Miller from New Masses. Vol. 16 No. 13. September 24, 1935.

ALLIED and German armies were locked in the decisive battle of the world war when the French Military Mission attached to the American high command issued “Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops.” Dated August 4, 1918, the bulletin was distributed to French military and civil officials and outlined race relations in the United States. It went on to say that the “Negro is regarded by the white American as an inferior” and that the “vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly.” French officers were told to avoid eating or shaking hands with Negro officers and were warned to be careful about citing Negro troops for bravery. The tenor of the bulletin was that Negro men had a predilection for white women and that they were inferiors who would be spoiled by too much attention. It was evident, even before the French disavowed responsibility, that the sentiments were those of the American Genera] Staff. Nor was there any occasion for surprise; the bulletin was in the very best American military tradition.

The army has had a long experience with Negro troops; at least six thousand of them served with colonial forces in the revolutionary struggle with England. A Negro, Crispus Attucks, was the first to fall in that little band that precipitated the Boston Massacre, a group sneered at by John Adams as a “rabble of saucy boys, Negroes, mulattoes, etc.” There were a half million Negro slaves in the colonies and England made a determined effort to enlist them on her side. The war had hardly begun before Lord Dunmore issued an order promising freedom to all slaves who joined loyalist forces. Negroes flocked to the English army and the colonials were thrown into panic. George Washington called Dunmore that “arch traitor to the rights of humanity.” But the English appeal brought the colonists to their senses and they rescinded orders forbidding enlistment of Negroes.

The status of Negroes in the revolutionary armies was nebulous. Some of them were deserters from plantations always liable to be sent back to servitude—Washington himself found time to aid in slave catching in his army. Some were free men and still other black soldiers remained slaves while their masters drew interest on their value during service. By the time the war ended there were Negro soldiers in every colonial army and there are many Negro women eligible for membership in the D.A.R., although one shudders to think what would happen if they applied. Despite vague promises American Negro soldiers were returned to slavery and one of the provisions of the Treaty of Ghent provided (among other things) for the “return of slaves and other property” England took.

Admiral Perry thought highly of Negro sailors who served under him in the war of 1812 and observed that while “America has such tars she has little to fear from tyrants of the ocean.” Faced with superior forces at New Orleans, Andrew Jackson issued a frantic appeal to Louisiana Negroes telling them that “as sons of freedom you are now called upon to defend our most inestimable blessings. As Americans your country looks with confidence to her adopted children.” New Orleans Negroes helped him out but when the war ended the United States did nothing to help free Negroes whom the thrifty Britishers had captured and sold into slavery in the West Indies. Jackson enhanced his military reputation by leading slave-catching expeditions into Spanish Florida.

The Civil War was looked upon as a white man’s war in the beginning and Negroes were denied the right to enlist. Slaves who fled from their masters were sent back to the plantations and Lincoln himself revoked some of the early military proclamations of freedom in invaded areas. But as the war wore on it became apparent that the use of Negro troops was necessary to insure victory. The early policy was revoked in 1863, almost 200,000 Negroes joined union forces but until 1864 they received only seven dollars a month in comparison to thirteen dollars paid white soldiers. Some historians believe that Negroes tipped the scales in favor of the North in the conflict; certainly they played their part in winning their own freedom and preserving the union. The story of reconstruction and what happened to the Negro people requires no comment.

Negroes participated in the Spanish-American war as free citizens and several regiments saw service in Cuba where one detachment won fame by saving Theodore Roosevelt when he led his Rough Riders in a foolish and impetuous assault on San Juan hill. With the praise of the country ringing in their ears, Negro soldiers returned to the United States. On its way home one regiment was quartered in Huntsville, Alabama. Townspeople accused the victorious heroes of being too “uppity” and a riot broke out in which four soldiers lost their lives. —

By the turn of the century America’s policy in regard to Negroes in military service was fairly well settled. A limited number was permitted to enlist in separate detachments in the infantry and cavalry. With few exceptions ranking officers were white while Negroes held non-commissioned posts. The first Negro entered West Point in 1870 and since that time fourteen others have been admitted to the military academy. Only three have graduated and received commissions in the regular army, the last one in 1889. It goes without saying that Negro officers are never placed at the head of white soldiers.

NEGROES have not served in the navy since reconstruction days except as mess attendants and servants. None of three Negroes who attended the naval academy graduated. Back of the exclusion of Negroes from the navy lies the fact that American military authorities do not want Negroes in the first line of defense, the position long held by the navy. Now that mechanized branches, such as chemical warfare, tank corps and the like, have become vital they too exclude Negroes. The air service is even more exclusive than the navy; a Negro applicant was told last year that “no provisions have been made or contemplated for such training.”

There is a mixture of contempt and distrust in the refusal to train Negro officers and in the exclusion of Negroes from all but subordinate branches of the military forces; contempt because the Negro is still popularly regarded as an inferior and distrust because there is fear that armed Negroes will remember the conditions to which they are subject as civilians. Indeed, the Negro does not escape insult and discrimination by putting on the uniform, a circumstance that led to the famous Brownsville, Texas, incident. In 1906, a Negro infantry regiment was ordered to the Texas city on its return from the Philippines. City officials protested the order bitterly and when the troops got there they were subjected to every insult that a southern community can heap on Negroes.

On the night of August 13 a barkeep was killed and a particularly vicious lieutenant of police was wounded during a wild shooting spree in which a section of Brownsville was riddled with bullets. The white brigadier general in command charged that nine Negro soldiers had done the shooting. But not a word, except defiant denial, could be wrung from the soldiers. Enraged officials asserted that a few soldiers had been detailed the job of shooting while the rest were pledged to silence. President Roosevelt stormed and discharged 156 men without honor but if the soldiers knew what had happened they never told. Perhaps for reasons of: policy, Negroes have always contended that the shooting was not done by the soldiers. Certainly there was provocation enough and if there was a conspiracy of silence it was one of the most magnificent examples of solidarity ever seen.

The Brownsville incident excited Negro people for years and it was still a live issue at the time of the world war. There were other reasons why Negroes were not enthusiastic about the war. With the exception of a few favored colonials all people of African descent hate England because of her imperialism in Africa. Nor was there much sympathy for Poor Little Belgium. No ruler has ever piled up the atrocity record that Leopold did when, as king of the Belgians, he pacified the Congo. On the other hand a number of German exiles of 1848, particularly Carl Schurz, played a large part in marshaling anti-slavery sentiment during the Civil War. Then, too, Negroes were not enamored of the task of making the world safe for democracy while they were disfranchised in the South and without representation in the North.

Fifty-five Negroes were lynched in 1916, adding to Negro discontent. Another circumstance that same year added fuel to the fire. Pershing took Negro soldiers in the famous, and futile, chase after Villa into the interior of Mexico. Four were killed in an engagement in which American forces were defeated at Carrizal. Controversies sprang up. On one hand Negro soldiers were accused of lack of courage and on the other white opponents of Wilson’s policy referred sneeringly to the anomaly of black soldiers warring on a friendly nation. Of course, the Negro people were not to blame for the policy but they had to bear the opprobrium. At the height of the controversy, W.E.B. Du Bois, then editor of The Crisis magazine, referred in slighting terms to the fact that Negro soldiers were being used to pull other people’s chestnuts out of the fire and observed that “one of these days black men are going to learn to fight for themselves.”

The same thought had occurred to those who were driving the nation into war. Something had to be done. The man on whose shoulders rests the major responsibility for the fairly successful effort to enlist Negro support for the world war is, curiously enough, Du Bois. At that time he was the foremost Negro scholar in America. He was not only editor of The Crisis magazine but the real leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. More than that, he was outspoken and militant and, ostensibly, an opponent of war. As late as September, 1916, he was holding up Sir Roger Casement, Irish rebel, as an example for Negroes. In November, he supported Allan Benson, the Socialist nominee, for president.

That winter the drive toward war was intensified and Joel and Arthur Spingarn, men who gave both guidance and money to the N.A.A.C.P., began to dabble with dreams of military greatness. Du Bois vacillated, wrote stinging editorials sneering at American and Allied hypocrisy—and then capitulated. The first definite sign of his weakening came when he gave support to the Spingarn plan for separate officers’ training camps for Negroes. He argued that war was bound to come, advanced a tacit plea for Negro support and urged Negroes to be prepared to furnish trained officers.

WHEN war was finally declared, Du Bois was one of the main cogs in the military machine. He wrote the platform on which a group of public figures meeting in Washington agreed to support the war. To the vast army of Crisis readers he cried: “War! It is an awful thing! It is hell! Bad as it is, slavery is worse; the rape of Belgium is worse.” His unceasing work and his lyric appeals to the martial spirit helped mightily; soon Negro intellectuals were flag-waving with the best of them. The government did its part, too; vague and lofty promises were made to remedy (after the war, of course) the ills about which Negroes complained. Emmett Scott, a Negro educator, became an assistant to the secretary of war and George F.E. Haynes left the Urban League to take a position in the Department of Labor. Although these, and other, Negro leaders assured America that her black stepsons yearned to fight for her, Southerners weren’t so sure. They shuddered at the prospect of armed Negroes. Senator Verdaman arose to warn the Senate that “universal military service means that millions of Negroes…will be armed. I know of no greater menace to the South.” All over that section voices were raised in fear and warning. Proposals were even made to exempt Negroes from the draft and in the spirit of the times Du Bois denounced such plans as a German plot, The result was a practical compromise.

Negroes were made subject to the draft along with others. In fact, they were herded into the army wholesale without regard to exemption claims or dependents. In the first draft ten percent more of the Negroes called were certified for service than white. But these Negroes were not called for combat service; most of them were placed in the Service of Supply, that is, in labor detachments. Many of them never drilled except with wooden guns. Of the 200,000 Negro soldiers who went to France more than three-fourths were in labor battalions.

Negro opposition to the war never entirely died out, A series of incidents fanned it to flame on several occasions. The first was the East St. Louis race riot of July, 1917, a riot provoked by the importation of unskilled Negro workers from the South in an effort to keep wages down. There had been preliminary riots in May when an appeal for aid from troops stationed there to protect private property against strikers was refused. The July riot raged for three days and 200 Negro men, women and children were killed. Officials failed to punish those responsible and spent their time prosecuting Negroes who had the effrontery to defend themselves. The government contented itself with the appointment of an investigating commission.

Negro protest over the riot was still raging when Negro soldiers stationed near Houston, Texas, revolted against a reign of police brutality and met city policemen in what amounted to a military engagement. Police officers began badgering Negro civilians and soldiers as soon as the detachment arrived at Houston. On August 23, 1917, two of the most vicious of these officers beat up a Negro woman. A Negro soldier intervened; he received the same treatment. When a Negro officer arrived and inquired into the trouble policemen set upon him too.

Negro soldiers were stationed a few miles from the city and when they got word of what had happened they broke into the armory, took guns and marched in military formation on the city. Their objective was the police station. When civilians tried to interfere the soldiers shot their way through. Seventeen white persons fell in the engagement, among them the police lieutenant mainly responsible for the trouble.

War Department officials were panic stricken; here was open rebellion and the war was only a few months old. Moreover, the Houston soldiers were not raw recruits; they were seasoned veterans of the regular army. Punishment was swift and certain. Thirteen soldiers were hanged almost immediately, five others got death sentences, fifty-one were given life imprisonment and five more got shorter terms. A wave of resentment swept over the country as Negroes contrasted the action at Houston with government impotence at East St. Louis. Even white newspapers advised caution and the War Department was forced to issue an order calling for review of similar cases in the future. Nothing could shake Du Bois’ support of the war. He wrote a long editorial mourning the death of the Houston soldiers and ended by saying: “We ask no mitigation of their punishment. They broke the law. They must suffer.” Obsequiousness could go no further.

The soldiers who had been punished at Houston took their places in Negro life as the Houston Martyrs. There were flare-ups at other training camps. The War Department created more trouble by placing white southern officers over Negro soldiers under the theory that such officers knew how to control Negroes. Negro soldiers in the Service of Supply were treated as if they were still peons on southern plantations. Service Y.M.C.A, huts followed Jim-Crow practices. The Red Cross rejected Negro nurses. A Negro regiment bound for France was ordered off the battleship, Virginia, because, the captain said, Negroes had never been transported on a battleship. In some cases Negro officers arriving in France were sent to quarters in unfinished barracks while white fellow officers were quartered in hotels. White soldiers were encouraged to refuse to salute Negro officers while commanding generals in France embarked on a well-planned campaign to vilify their Negro troops. General Ballou referred to his Negro division as the “rapist division” and General Erwin issued an order commanding his Negro soldiers not to associate with French women.

Negro officers were court martialed and demoted on the slightest pretexts. Several attempts were made to dismiss Negro officers in a wholesale fashion. Meanwhile, Colonel Charles Young, the highest ranking Negro officer, was being treated in a shameless manner, The expansion of the army to war-time strength should have brought him a promotion to at least the rank of brigadier general but instead he was given the run-around for months and then retired on the excuse that he was unfit for active service. He became a pathetic figure and rode on horseback from Ohio to Washington to prove his fitness. To the bitter end he exhorted Negroes to support the war.)

FORTY-FOUR Negroes were lynched in 1917; fifty-five Negro men and women were victims of mob violence in 1918. Stories of discrimination against Negro soldiers in France began to trickle back home. The Negro people were in a ferment of discontent, President Wilson tried to check their rising opposition by restoring some of the Brownsville soldiers to their posts and followed that action by officially condemning lynching in the summer of 1918. Another conference of Negro public figures was summoned in Washington. In the July, 1918, issue of The Crisis, Du Bois wrote what is perhaps the most famous—and one of the most amazing—editorials ever published in the Negro press when he issued an appeal for Negroes to continue support of the war. “Let us, while this war lasts,” he pleaded with the Negro people, “forget our special grievances and close our ranks.”

A cry of protest over the enormity of that doctrine went up. Attacks on Du Bois for the editorial had not died out before astonished Negroes learned that he had accepted a commission with the General Staff. Protest was redoubled and he was accused of being a traitor to his people. Perhaps wisely, the General Staff changed its plans and Du Bois never served in the position that had been created for him. And in the September, 1918, issue of Crisis magazine Du Bois upbraided “any man or race that seeks to turn his country’s tragic predicament to his own personal gain.”

These efforts to still Negro discontent at home were going on concurrently with the issuance in France of the “Secret Information” bulletin and the most vicious attacks on Negro soldiers. Haunted by the specter of the Russian revolution, Americans who were conducting the war were trying to insure against any eventuality by whipping up racial feeling to an unprecedented degree. There was some sense to their actions too, for, as a Negro historian observed later, never were Negroes more discontented than in that fall of 1918 when the armistice was signed.

There were difficulties in France, too. Every Negro soldier who saw active service knows the story of some unpopular white officer who lost his life in action. Such officers had a way of getting in the path of fatal bullets that was alarming. There were other cases in which Negro officers had presented a united front when discrimination grew too onerous. In view of these danger signs the War Department hurried Major Robert Russa Moton, principal of Tuskegee Institute, to France soon after the armistice was signed. Major Moton pleaded with the soldiers not to “become arrogant” and urged them to adapt themselves to American ways on their return home. Southern whites founded the Interracial Commission to help returning soldiers “adjust themselves.” Everybody was expecting trouble.

There was plenty of it. Sixty-two Negroes were lynched in 1919. Marauding bands set upon Negro soldiers in southern states, ripped war decorations from their uniforms, beat and, in many instances, killed them. The Ku Klux Klan was revived. A series of race riots swept the country. Washington newspapers published detailed plans in advance for an offensive by a mob on the Negro section of the city in the summer of 1919. Negro soldiers organized defense squads. Another riot broke out in Chicago a month later and again Negro soldiers bore the brunt of defending the Negro section. In quick succession there were riots at Chester, Pennsylvania; Omaha, Nebraska, and Elaine, Arkansas. And Negroes fought back. Negro editors, perhaps a little ashamed of their craven conduct during the war, sneered openly at the democracy to which the soldiers had returned. Other editorials openly exhorted Negroes to take up arms in their own defense. The old concept of the Negro a a docile, ever-suffering foil disappeared. These lessons have not been wasted on the War Department. Segregation of Negroes is more scrupulous than ever, Negro gold-star mothers were sent to France on a freight boat on one occasion and on separate ships on every occasion. The color line is rigorously drawn in the mechanized branches of the service, in the navy, the marine corps and the air service. Rumor has it that War College plans call for the use of Negroes only in labor detachments in that inevitable next war. Regardless of the truth of that rumor it is a fact, denied officially of course, that Negro combat units are being disbanded. Negro regiments are far below peace-time strength and it is almost impossible for a Negro to enlist in any branch of the service. Both cavalrymen and infantrymen are being used as servants for white soldiers and officers. R.O.T.C. training is denied Negro students beyond the second year in state universities—commissions are given for third and fourth year service. Citizens Military Training Camps are closed to Negroes. There are only four Negro commissioned officers in the regular army; one of them is on R.O.T.C. duty and the other three are chaplains, Recently the government refused to assign Negro reserve officers to C.C.C, camps. White communities would object, the War Department explained.

In the face of these facts Negro public figures of the stripe that supported the last war refuse to attack these policies. Their theory, disproved in practice for 150 years, is that if Negroes serve loyally during war they will be rewarded by being given full citizenship rights. Every crumb is eagerly seized upon to support this thesis and when a Negro was accepted at West Point in 1929—the first in forty years—there was rejoicing everywhere. Nobody says much about the fact that he was dismissed. Not a person at West Point spoke to the Negro cadet out of the line of duty during his first year there.

There are more and more dissenting voices. In 1932 a former lieutenant who had seen service in France issued a statement branding as foolish any Negro who voluntarily put on the uniform. Editorial commendation was surprisingly widespread. When that next war does come there will be frantic pleas to close ranks. The war mongers will drip promises again. Doubtless, Negroes will be conscripted along with other citizens. Pressure of public sentiment will force the arming of some of them. The question is what the Negro will do with the guns he is given. Perhaps he will go to some foreign land to be spit upon by commanding officers and then return home to be discriminated against and lynched. Or perhaps he will revive the tradition of Houston, combine his strength with the poor whites to settle some scores of his own.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1935/v16n13-sep-24-1935-NM.pdf