What Du Bois also found in France was the profound cultural influence of the African-American troops’ transatlantic deployment. That the strains of the ‘Marseillaise’ could evoke such deep emotions in African Americans was testimony to the significance of their war-time experiences and their encounter with French culture. Du Bois, who described France as ‘the only real white Democracy’, returned to New York and chose for the cover of the June edition of The Crisis a reworked version of a famous French wartime poster. It depicted a group of African troops – Tirailleurs from West and North Africa and a Goumier on a white horse, charging, with the French flag billowing behind them. In the previous edition of the magazine, Du Bois had penned a powerful editorial that was both a summary of the oppression to which African Americans were subject and a rallying cry to fight against it. It ended with a famous statement:
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought! But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. By the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our land. We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting. Make way for Democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.38
The 369th Infantry Regiment arrived back in the United States on 12 February 1919. As the ship slipped past the Statue of Liberty, James Reese Europe gathered the regimental band on deck and serenaded the regiment’s home city. On 17 February the men marched through Manhattan in a special parade. Lined-up, sixteen abreast – an unfamiliar French formation – they marched up Fifth Avenue, with the regimental band leading the way playing French military marches (to the disappointment of onlookers who had come out in the hope of hearing some jazz). The parade took them through central Manhattan, along streets lined with white Americans, then up into Harlem. As they reached their home neighbourhood, the ranks were opened up so that the family members and friends gathered on the sidewalks could get a clear view of their fathers, sons and brothers. There was huge excitement at the sight of Henry Johnson, the diminutive sergeant who had fought off dozens of Germans using his jammed rifle and a Bolo knife. He was carried through New York City in a convertible, with the Stars and Stripes draped over the back. The man of the hour – the black soldier whom every New Yorker had read about in the newspapers – smiled and waved to the crowds, a huge bouquet of flowers in his right hand. The leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Organization, Marcus Garvey, was said to have wept at the sight of the 369th Infantry parading through the city.
That whites, too, had lined Fifth Avenue was taken by some as a hopeful sign that in the moment of magnanimous victory the United States might be on the verge of a new era of black–white relations. But African Americans returning to their homes in the South quickly understood that far from winning them new respect, their service overseas had cast them in the minds of many whites as dangerous, radicalized black men who needed to be put back in their place. Having seen out one war in Europe, they were coming back to another conflict, in which white mobs would be willing to murder, torture and even incite a general race war in order to maintain the status quo.
On the day of the Armistice, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, the most implacable enemy of the African American, prophesied that:
Now that the war is over, we shall soon be face to face with the military negro, and if this country is to be spared much trouble we shall need men in office who can realize the truth that where the negro constitutes any appreciable percentage of the population, he must be kept separated from the white people. Unless that policy shall be pursued, the result will be disastrous for the negro and unfortunate for the white man.39
In the spring of 1919, as the numbers of returning African-American soldiers increased, Senator Vardaman called Southern whites to arms. In his own newspaper, Vardaman’s Weekly, he proclaimed:
Every community in Mississippi ought to organize and the organization should be led by the bravest and best white men in the community. And they should pick out these suspicious characters – these military, French-women-ruined negro soldiers and let them understand that they are under surveillance, and that when crimes similar to this one are committed take care of the individual who commits the crime.40
The institution around which the Southern mobs organized was the Ku Klux Klan, an organization that had been revived and reinvigorated during the war years. Even before the first black troops had arrived home, the Klan and other informal white mobs had prepared themselves to greet the veterans with a campaign of violence, intimidation and murder. Taking Vardaman’s words to heart in towns in Alabama and Georgia, Klansmen openly patrolled the night-time streets, intimidating and terrorizing black individuals and communities.
Under Section 125 of the National Defense Act, US soldiers had the right to wear their army uniforms for three months after their date of discharge. This military regulation collided with a deep contempt for the sight of a black man in uniform, which since the Civil War been capable of rousing sections of the South to murderous rage. Some Southerners had appealed to the War Department to prohibit all returning African Americans from wearing their uniforms. But when that request was refused, some set out to enforce their demands directly. Ned Cobb, the son of a slave in rural Alabama, noted in his autobiography (published under the name Nate Shaw):
What did they do to the niggers after the first world war? Meet em at these stations where they was getting off, comin back to the United States, and cut the buttons and armaments off of their clothes, make em get out of them clothes, make em pull them uniforms off and if they didn’t have another suit of clothes – quite naturally, if they was colored men they was poor and they might not a had a thread of clothes in the world but them uniforms – make em walk in their underwear. I know it was done, I heard too much of it from the ones that come back to this country even.41
In April 1919, the Chicago Defender explicitly warned returning African-American soldiers that there was a chance that they would be forced out of their uniforms on their return home.42 Across the South, discharged African Americans in uniform were attacked on the street and forced to flee town.
It was this issue of African Americans in army uniform that was used to bring down black America’s great war-time hero. After his return, Henry Johnson had been asked to give a speech at Saint Louis, Missouri. Rather than restrict his address to the dramatic details of his time in the trenches, Johnson unburdened himself of the resentment that he, like all African Americans in the US Army, had developed after years of discrimination and abuse. In a speech that was light on platitudes, Johnson condemned the racism of the US Army. He informed the audience, composed of African Americans and whites, of what every American soldier – black and white – already knew: that white Americans had refused to serve in the same trenches as their black countrymen. While black members of the audience burst into applause, the white reaction was one of injured fury.43 A warrant was issued for Johnson’s arrest for slander. He was charged under Section 125 of the National Defense Act for the crime of wearing his uniform beyond the permitted three months after his discharge. Johnson was silenced and off the lecture circuit. His wounds prevented him from finding other employment and he died destitute in July 1929, forgotten and unrecognized at the age of thirty-two.
It was white fear – of the drafting of African Americans and the fact that on their return they might feel a new sense of empowerment – that lay behind the hostility to uniforms. But the fact was that even before the first African-American veterans landed back in the United States, the country had witnessed a heightening of racial tensions and an increase in lynchings, as if to assert white power over the defenceless as a counterweight to these new perceived threats.
Lynching in 1917 and 1918 developed into a protracted theatre of open-air torture, in which large crowds assembled from over great distances to watch the slow deaths of African Americans. The ferocity shocked even those who tacitly tolerated the terrorizing of black Southerners. In May 1918 a white mob lynched the eight-months-pregnant Mary Turner: she was burnt to death, her belly was sliced open and her unborn infant was crushed under the boots of her killers.44 The newspapers blamed the incident on Mary Turner herself, who was said to have made ‘unwise remarks’ to the white mob after they had just murdered her husband. Children were not spared. In one incident, two girls and a boy were trussed up and thrown off a bridge; in another, five black children were burnt to death in Texas, and their mother was shot for trying to save them.45*2 It was into this cauldron of race hatred that the African-American veterans returned, their very presence looked on as a threat to the old order, and their uniform, war service and new knowledge and experience of European culture regarded as a provocation. Unsurprisingly, the war had been over less than a month before the first African American soldier was lynched.
Private Charles Lewis from Alabama was honourably discharged from the US Army on 14 December 1918. He was murdered by a white mob in Hickman, Kentucky, later the same day. His mutilated body was left hanging from a rope. He was still wearing his US Army uniform. Three months later, in March 1919, Bud Johnson, another soldier, was burnt to death in Alabama. His skull was broken open with a hatchet and the shards of bone handed out as souvenirs to members of the mob, comprising both men and women. The killings continued. In May 1919, Wilbur Little was beaten to death for wearing his army uniform. Another returning African-American soldier, whose identity remains unknown, was killed along with a black woman in Pickens, Mississippi, for the crime of ‘writing an insulting note’ to a white woman.*3 As in other cases, the soldier was taken from his prison cell by a white gang. As was usually the case, the jailor was strangely absent at the crucial moment and the mob was made up of unidentifiable ‘strangers’ who were never traced. When the newspapers complained about this double-lynching in May 1919, Senator Vardaman responded with an article entitled ‘The Only Remedy is the Rope’. What else, he asked, was a ‘decent white man’ expected to do when an insulting note had been written to a female member of his family? While claiming to be opposed to mob law, Vardaman stated that he was ‘more opposed to negroes writing insulting notes’.46 He reflected a prevailing atmosphere in which, all too often, contact between black men and white women was reported as rape, attempted rape or ‘intent’ to rape.
The litany continued. In July 1919, Robert Truett, another soldier, was murdered in Louise, Mississippi. Four more veterans were lynched in August 1919; among them was Clinton Briggs, a decorated soldier, who was chained to a tree and shot between forty and fifty times by a white mob, for refusing to obey a white woman who ordered him off the sidewalk.47 In September 1919 the body of discharged soldier, L.B. Reed, was found hanged from a Mississippi bridge. Senator Vardaman offered a simple solution to the spate of lynchings and a way to counter ‘the evil effects upon the negro’s mind of his experience in Europe during the war’:
…if the negro is content to occupy the position he has occupied since ’65, and the place God Almighty intended he should occupy in a white man’s country, he will be kindly treated; aye, more, he will be generously treated by his white friends. But when he begins to put on airs, demand social and political equality, right then and there the trouble will begin, and the negro is going to be hanged, shot or otherwise regulated… The advice I am giving to the white people and the negroes in this instance, is not born of hatred for the negroes… Just as long as negroes foully murder white men, just as long as they invade the sacred precincts of the white man’s home and perpetrate crime against the female members of the white man’s family, just so long will mobs hang negroes. There is no other remedy.48
In all, nineteen African Americans who served their nation in the First World War were killed by lynch mobs on their return to the United States. In addition, the nation was rocked in 1919 by a succession of race riots that spread across twenty-six American cities. The worst violence took place in Chicago and Washington, DC, and was motivated primarily by the demands placed on the labour market by demobilization and the great movements of labour – both black and white – around the country caused by the shift away from war production. Distrust of African-American veterans was deepened by suspicions that among their ranks were recent converts to Bolshevism, another contagion carried back from Europe. (President Wilson himself commented that the black soldier was the most likely means by which Bolshevism might be transmitted to the United States.) The violence began in April and was still rumbling on in November, but it reached its peak in the summer months, leading James Weldon Johnson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to dub it the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919. Despite their underlying economic causes, events followed a pattern in which white mobs, often including former servicemen, would attack African American communities or individuals on the street. Matters would escalate, with killings on both sides. When asked to justify their violence in court or in the press, white rioters often complained that the African Americans who had returned from the war were both militant and over-confident. As in the South, there was a widespread sense that black soldiers had to be ‘put back in their place’. One of the African-American journals reporting on events in the capital lamented that:
The relatives of returned Negro soldiers were beaten and killed on the streets of Washington, right in front of the White House, under the dome of the capitol of the greatest Republic on earth – a Republic that went to war to beat down injustice, and make the world safe for democracy. Has the head of this nation uttered one word of condemnation of the mob? If so, we have failed to see it.49
In 1919, the lynch mobs of the South and the rioters of the Red Summer accounted for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of African Americans. It was one of the one of the worst years for racial violence in American history.
What took place in the United States in 1919 was part of a wider process – official and unofficial, covert and at times open – by which non-white peoples who had taken part in the war, or who had offered their support, were put back in their places. African Americans in the South were pushed back into their allotted roles as sharecroppers or manual workers, now living under the terror of the Klan. But many of them rejected this settlement and headed north, where the ‘New Negro’ of the wartime generation continued the fight for civil rights and sparked a renaissance in Harlem.
The Caribbean troops, who had fought for Britain, were treated by their ‘motherland’ in comparable ways. When the fighting was over, the men of the British West Indies Regiment were relegated to menial tasks and denied the pay rises awarded to their white colleagues. Gathered in December 1918 at a base in Taranto, Italy, they mutinied – to the shock of the British. One mutineer was killed by a black NCO, and a bomb was detonated by the mutineers. Sixty men of the BWIR were put on trial as a result, and one was sentenced to twenty years in prison while another was executed by firing squad. The regiment, returning to the West Indies under guard, was completely disbanded in 1921.
In Taranto, in the American Deep South and elsewhere, it was evident that barriers between the races that were temporarily lowered were being hastily raised again. In the eyes of some, it was happening too late. There had always been those who worried that the war was expending the energies and power of the ‘white race’ in a way that would leave it weakened and permit the colonized peoples of the world to loosen and perhaps even shatter the shackles of colonial rule. Baron Colmar von der Goltz, the Prussian general whom Kaiser Wilhelm had dispatched to Istanbul to help the Ottomans reorganize their army, had predicted in 1916 that ‘the hallmark of the twentieth century must be the revolution of the coloured races against colonial imperialism of Europe’.50 That same year, the American race theorist and eugenicist Madison Grant published The Passi
ng of the Great Race, and by March 1919 – just weeks after 369th Infantry had paraded down Fifth Avenue – the bookshops of Manhattan were receiving stocks of the book’s third edition. Grant called for a clear separation of the races and for the preservation and purification of the ‘Nordic Race’ through a programme of eugenics. That year, as African-American veterans were lynched and US cities rioted, the American journalist Lothrop Stoddard was working on his own contribution to the new doctrine of race: The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy.51 Stoddard, who discussed his ideas with Grant while drafting his manuscript, intended his book as a clarion call, claiming that the population growth among the ‘coloured’ races of the world was undermining the ability of the white race to maintain their empires and their dominant position. He predicted the ultimate collapse of the European empires and believed that future historians would come to recognize the First World War as the first step towards the disastrous decline of white global dominance. ‘To me,’ Stoddard wrote,‘the Great War was from the first the White Civil War, which, whatever its outcome, must gravely complicate the course of racial relations.’52
Stoddard viewed the various alliances forged during the war between white and non-white nations as disastrous betrayals of ‘race-interests’, producing an ‘unprecedented weakening of white solidarity’. He condemned all sides for having armed and deployed legions of non-white soldiers and believed such policies had dangerously empowered non-white peoples. He harangued Britain for its alliance with Japan, claiming that ‘all white men in the Far East, including most emphatically Englishmen themselves, pronounced it a great disaster’.53 He attacked Germany for ‘plotting even deadlier strikes at white race-comity, not merely by preparing war against white neighbours in Europe, but also by ingratiating itself with the Moslem East and by toying with schemes for building up a black military empire in central Africa’. Most egregious of all was the reckless behaviour of France, which during the war ‘was actually recruiting black, brown, and yellow hordes for use on European battle-fields’.54 In near apocalyptical terms Stoddard saw the war as ‘the first shots of Armageddon’, which had witnessed:
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