The participation of African Americans in the American Expeditionary Forces during the World War I

This article examines the participation of African Americans in the World War I in the ranks of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the 1917 – 1918. The author studies the attitude of the African-American community towards participation in the World War I, describes the peculiarities of military service of African American soldiers in the American Expeditionary Forces, and reveals the manifestations of racial discrimination. The article also reviews the attitude of French soldiers and officers towards African American soldiers of the U. S. Army, analyzes the impact of the acquired combat experience and sociocultural interaction with foreign soldiers upon the activity of African American population in fighting for their rights and freedoms in the United States. In Russian historiography, the participation of African Americans in the American Expeditionary Forces during the World War I, peculiarities of their service, and the impact of war on self-consciousness of this category of military servicemen have not previously become the subject of special research. Based on the article. The conclusion is made that the attitude of African American community towards participation in the World War I was quite ambiguous. Their soldiers faced different forms of discrimination during their military service: they could not serve in the Marine Corps and other elite units, and most of the time were engaged in the rear. A different experience received African American soldiers from the units transferred under the leadership of the French Army, whose officers treated them with respect; the blood shed for their country, combat experience and respectful of the allies enhanced desire of the African Americans to gain equal civil rights and freedoms in their homeland.

African American Soldiers in World War I

In the midst of the long black freedom struggle, African American military participation in the First World War remains central to civil rights activism and challenges to systems of oppression in the United States. As part of a long and storied tradition of military service for a nation that marginalized and attempted to subjugate a significant portion of US citizens, African American soldiers faced challenges, racism, and segregation during the First World War simultaneously on the home front and the battlefields of France. The generations born since the end of the Civil War continually became more and more militant when resisting Jim Crow and insisting on full, not partial, citizenship in the United States, evidenced by the events in Houston in 1917. Support of the war effort within black communities in the United States was not universal, however, and some opposed participation in a war effort to “make the world safe for democracy” when that same democracy was denied to people of color. Activism by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the War Department’s official and unofficial policy, creating avenues for a larger number of black officers in the US Army through the officers’ training camp created in Des Moines, Iowa. For African American soldiers sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the potential for combat experience led to both failures and successes, leading to race pride as in the case of the 93rd Division’s successes, and skewed evidence for the War Department to reject increasing the number of black officers and enlisted in the case of the 92nd Division. All-black Regular Army regiments, meanwhile, either remained in the United States or were sent to the Philippines rather than the battlefields of Europe. However, soldiers’ return home was mixed, as they were both celebrated and rejected for their service, reflected in both parades welcoming them home and racial violence in the form of lynchings between December 1918 and January 1920. As a result, the interwar years and the start of World War II roughly two decades later renewed the desire to utilize military service as a way to influence US legal, social, cultural, and economic structures that limited African American citizenship.

Shocking Racial Attitudes: Black G.I.s in Europe

Can attitudes towards minorities, an important cultural trait, be changed? We show that the presence of African American soldiers in the UK during World War II reduced anti-minority prejudice, a result of the positive interactions which took place between soldiers and the local population. The change has been persistent: in locations in which more African American soldiers were posted there are fewer members of and voters for the UK’s leading far-right party, less implicit bias against blacks and fewer individuals professing racial prejudice, all measured around 2010. Our results point towards intergenerational transmission from parents to children as the most likely explanation.

Redeeming Reconstruction

The chapter assesses the government-sponsored periodical Carry On, which frequently used the term “spirit” not just to describe the resilience of individual disabled veterans, but also the intellectual and artistic capabilities that distinguished Anglo-Americans from other races and ethnicities. In its run from 1918 to 1919,Carry On showcased the federal government’s new rehabilitative and vocational services by implicitly and explicitly drawing on evolutionary frameworks to show that only Anglo-American men were capable of transforming a prosthetic into a soul-enriching, civilization-advancing device. To make this point clearer, the magazine features several disabled African American soldiers, whose evolutionary stagnancy renders them unable to make prosthetics spiritually transformative instruments. Their depicted deficiencies are similar to the articles’ renderings of German primitiveness and brutality. In this light, the magazine shows just how slippery and manipulative racial codification could be in the opening decades of the twentieth century.