Negro Heroines

This chapter examines the role Black women volunteers played as immune nurses in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. To enlist black women’s care labor in the Cuban conflict, army physicians relied on the myth of the plantation nurse, a figure whose biological and thus racial immunity from yellow fever recalled forms of gendered subordination and sacrifice ritualized in U.S. slavery. Black leaders like Namahyoka Curtis helped to recruit immune nurses in New Orleans in the hope that their performances of patriotic service would secure greater citizenship rights for the greater African American community. The experiences of the nurses before, during, and after the conflict offer a counter historiography of the war, and shows how Black women self-consciously presented themselves as matrons of respectability whose labor and sacrifice entitled them to fair and equal treatment under the law.

Introduction

This introduction provides a framework for considering America’s military conscription of gender, racial, and sexual difference in the early to mid-twentieth century, and the unique role Black military workers played in the extension of U.S. empire. Beginning with the definition of militarism as conceived by Alfred Vagts, the author makes an appeal for both conservative and progressive scholars to focus on the study of the military. Immunity and contagion are introduced as key terms used to analyze the movement of African American soldiers around the world, and to show how their quests for citizenship rights was burdened by antiblack racism. A chapter breakdown demonstrates how race, nation, masculinity, and sexuality are important subjects in the archive of American militarism, and argues that a new chapter of African American life was brought into being through the imperial conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference.

We Don’t Need Another Hero

This chapter considers the 2017 death of Sgt. La David Johnson in Niger as an example of Mbembe’s necropolitics, and argues that the racist media coverage it received drew its power from nineteenth century discourses of Black inferiority. These arguments were premised upon scientific racism, and held that enslaved Blacks were biologically immune to diseases like yellow fever. The belief that Blacks were immune to tropical diseases continued throughout the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1898, where African American male volunteers were inducted into Immune Regiments in order to perform grunt labor in battlefields beset by fever. Black leaders like Booker T. Washington strategically used the sacrifice of African American troops in the conflict to claim political immunity for the larger Black community, yet the gravesites of Black soldiers in Santiago belied the fact that honoring the American fallen was a deeply racialized affair.

Communicable Subjects

This chapter follows the segregated mobilization of Black military workers across the expanded playing fields of the second World War, showing how the Black body was once again rendered into a subaltern, contagious, and communicable subject of American militarism. Sex remained an important commodity traded within the economies of pleasure created through U.S. foreign military intervention, and the stigma of venereal disease once again justified the experimental use of prophylaxis drugs upon and within the bodies of African American soldiers. Representations of Black troops in military training films vacillated from heroic to lecherous, and even enlisted notable “race men” like Paul Robeson to shame soldiers into sexual abstinence. Yet Black troops encountered a world globalized through technological advances in communication, medicine, travel, and warfare, and this in turn shaped their own ideas about race, sexuality, and citizenship. Their experiences during the war and later in occupied Berlin enabled them to map the contours of a global color line through their military travels, increasing their transnational awareness of colonial policies in allied countries, and granting them a political kinship with the darker peoples of the world.

Contagious Immunity

This chapter examines how anxieties around race and sexuality during World War I produced overlapping projects of black masculine perfectibility and restraint within the U.S. military’s campaigns against venereal disease (VD) at home and in France. The belief that African American troops were members of a “venereal race” led efforts by white army doctors to enact novel and conventional modes of control in their efforts to discipline the bodies and desires of Black servicemen stationed overseas. While some of these doctors claimed the experimental regulation of Black male sexuality through the use of prophylaxis as a technocratic success, Black leaders touted the “clean” body of the African American soldier as a matter of masculine will rather than medicine. As subjects of these contradictory and competing discourses, Black troops in France developed a new consciousness of race and sexuality abroad. Through a consideration of stigmatized sexual practices, the sexual economy of French brothels, and the movement of African American military bands in France, this chapter shows how African American soldiers renegotiated meanings of race and nation in their travels outside of the United States.

Epilogue

The epilogue considers the military writings of William Gardner Smith, and the literary reception of his 1948 novel, Last of the Conquerors. Smith worked as a reporter for the Pittsburgh Courier before he received his draft notice to serve as an occupation soldier in Berlin. While deployed, he continued to write for the Courier as a special correspondent, detailing the injustices faced by Black soldiers abroad under his pen name, Bill Smith. His witness as subject and scribe of the overseas military apparatus offered a counter history to America’s official military record of occupation, and laid the foundation for what would become the familiar narrative told about black soldiering in the postwar era: that military service in the occupied nation was like a “breath of freedom” for African American troops. These contagious narratives of black military freedom and control influenced successive generations of African Americans to join the service, and produced a possibility that had not been possible until the end of World War II: that black men and women might look toward the military service as a career.

Charles Young in Five Acts

This chapter considers the life and work of Charles Young, the third African American officer to graduate from West Point, and the first to reach the rank of colonel. Through his quest for leadership in the U.S. Army and performances of martial valor, Young strove to prove by his own example that black people could—if given a chance—excel as officers in the U.S. military. Though committed to American military imperialism, Young became frustrated by the forms of racial discrimination that impeded his progress up the army chain of command. In 1906 he began to channel his critique of American militarism into a play he wrote about the Haitian Revolution and his idol, Toussaint Louverture. Never published during Young’s lifetime, the five-act drama is examined as an allegory of antiblack racism, prophetic memoir (Young chose exile in Africa rather than submit to racist rule in the United States), as well as the most pronounced articulation of the emergent Pan-African political awakening of America’s first black military imperialist of the twentieth century.