HISTORY BOOK CLUB
ROCKPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY
ROCKPORT, MASSACHUSETTS
Program for Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Wednesday, October 24,
2018. (vice Oct. 31): African American Warriors and
their place in American History. From the American Revolution, during
the Civil War to Korean War. E.g.: Contraband to Massachusetts 54th, Buffalo
Soldiers and Native American Wars, Spanish American War and Truth about Battle
of San Juan Hill, World War I and use of African American soldiers with French
combat troops, World War II and Segregated all African American combat
units: Armor, Transport, Tuskegee Airmen, Desegregation and Korean
War. [Suggested by William Tobin]
Lentz-Smith, Adriane Freedom Struggles:
African Americans and World War I, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Paperback – August 15, 2011
The narrative of this story washes
over you, the harsh reality of the treatment of African-Americans in America,
in 1860, before emancipation, in 1890, in 1917, the focal area of this book,
and in 2018.
As a white male who grew up in
segregated southeast Texas, I’ve seen the suspicion, disregard, fear and
condescension toward blacks. I’ve seen the rabid hatred and mistreatment of
blacks by what we called “poor white trash”.
And I’ve seen the mistreatment or at best, looking the other way, by the
rest of us.
As a 14-year-old in 1948, I took a Greyhound
bus trip from Texas to Virginia, alone, to spend the summer with an aunt on her
mink ranch. Then I continued to
Baltimore, to spend time with another aunt. Finally, I crossed the Mason-Dixon
line into New York, to spend a little time with yet another aunt.
In the north, it was easy to
understand the huge migration of African-Americans from the south after World
Wars I and II. Blacks didn’t have to sit in the back of the bus; they could
drink from any water fountain and use any public restroom. But, still, even in
the north, I could see things were different for blacks, and Adriane
Lentz-Smith’s book shows me that I didn’t see even a small percentage of the
real picture!
The way white Americans thought
about blacks, the way they acted toward them, in the years leading up to the
War of 1917-18 was far worse than most white Americans today can imagine, and
it is tragic that there is so much of the stench of white supremacy today.
For African-American males before
and during World War I, the appeal of joining the United States Army was
strong, even though you were serving in an all-black cavalry or infantry unit
with white officers, and there was always the feeling among Army leaders that
perhaps you shouldn’t let blacks be engaged in real contact with the enemy,
because these soldiers might gain experience that they would bring back home
and cause trouble in civilian life. And then there was always the feeling that
black soldiers might be cowardly in combat.
The Army had employed four black
regiments during the latter years of the 19th century in the
Philippines, the Caribbean and in Mexico and the southwest. Most black soldiers
were assigned to non-combat activities. However, many thousands of African
Americans, through their Army service, had done and seen a world far beyond the
Jim Crow world of black civilians.
Several states had formed black
National Guard units with black officers to fight in the Spanish-American war
and the skirmishes with Pancho Villa along the Mexican border, but these had
been disbanded. Only the 11th Illinois Regiment could boast of two
decades of service with a full roster of black officers before World War I.
Houston.
August 24, 1917. There are many race riots in American history, but this
one stands out. The Army had moved the African-American 24th
Infantry from New Mexico to heavily segregated Houston to build up Camp Logan
there in preparation for American participation in World War I. Black troops
were restricted in their liberty to only one part of Houston. Houston police
were very suspicious of blacks in general and looked upon these soldiers as
troublemakers. An incident arose in the black San Felipe section of Houston involving
the arrest of a black female. Black soldiers spoke up in her defense, which
aroused the ire of a Houston policeman, who pistol-whipped the black soldiers.
Then three black female school teachers were arrested for ‘prostitution”. It
appears that these respectable women were arrested out of police anger at
“biggety women”. Black soldiers rushed
to their defense and they were beaten by police.
On the night of August 23, 1917
soldiers in the Camp got word that a mob of angry whites was headed to the Camp.
Whether there was ever such a mob is questionable, but it was a dark, rainy
night, and many of the black troops stormed the camp armory and grabbed
weapons, over the opposition of their seven white officers. They raced out of
the camp gate, and in the confusion began shooting at each other. A full-scale
mutiny was on. Soldiers marched to San Felipe, and in a two-hour melee, 17
whites were killed, 11 injured, and two of their number lay dying. Among the
whites killed was one of the policemen who attacked the black female teachers,
but many were simply bystanders.
How anyone recorded this event
depended upon what color you were. However, in the end, 13 mutineers were given
a quick court martial and hanged, quietly. Another 47 were given life
sentences, and 27 lesser sentences. Later, another 11 were sentenced to death
but President Wilson commuted ten of those sentences to life imprisonment.
Author Lentz-Smith used several
African-Americans to tell her story. Kathryn Johnson was a young black woman
from Ohio who graduated from Wilberforce College and went south where she
discovered white supremacy in full bloom. When black Americans were being sent
to Europe to fight in 1917 she and a friend got the YMCA to send them to France
as volunteers to serve as stewards of black men’s conduct, character and
culture there. Johnson came home after the war, committed to fight for the
rights of blacks. Faced with segregation aboard the steamer returning home, she
renewed her dedication to a life of striving for the rights of “dark people”. She
became a strong voice in fighting for racial equality in the NAACP.
Ely Green was a grammar-school
dropout from Waxahachie, Texas who joined the Army because it offered him an
opportunity “to become a man”. In the summer of 1917 he traveled north to
Chicago, a path many blacks were following then. What he saw was many young
blacks caught up in a life where they wished the week was “nine days long, and
every day Sunday.” A life of making money and spending it and doing as little
as possible. It was not for Ely.
I must confess that this image of
lazy black males and hard-working, conscientious, church-going black females
was the image I gathered when we lived near the District of Columbia in the
early 1960s, and again in the late 1980s. I wish that I had seen more men like
Ely Green.
However, with Ely there was another
outcome. He befriended a “Wobbly”, a member of the communist-leaning
International Workers of the World and sampled the heady wine of revolutionary
thought that flowed during and after the 1918 October Revolution that brought
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to life. Quite a few black Americans got lured into
this, but eventually many discovered that the communists were just as racist as
capitalist whites.
As the Army was preparing for World
War I they formed industrial training detachments at colleges, to prepare men
for the Army by teaching them skills that would them better soldiers. Thanks to
a former associate of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, the Army included
several black colleges in this program. In the eyes of some this advanced the
achievements and opportunities of many black Americans and was “one of the
greatest social triumphs of the war.”
Sgt.
Edgar Caldwell. A black
non-commissioned officer, on a rare day off from a brutal work detail, was
traveling on a trolley in Anniston, Alabama when a young white conductor accosted
him, beat him, kicked him off the car, and was about to strike him with a large
metal rod when Caldwell pulled a pistol out and shot him, killing him and
wounding an associate. (12-15-1918) Lentz-Smith devotes many pages to this case,
which revolved around the question of whether Caldwell should be tried by the
State of Alabama or the Army. The case went to the Supreme Court, but in the
end, he was sentenced to be hung, and died on July 30, 1920.
The African Americans who went to
France saw a new, different world. Although the white majority of the Army
sought to keep Jim Crow alive and blacks “in their place”, black soldiers experienced
a world quiet unlike back home. They encountered French women who were often
intrigued with them.
Their leaders both black and white lectured
them about sexually-transmitted diseases, and there were many occasions of infection,
but both by their experiences in combat and their exposure to French citizens, African
Americans’ eyes were opened. And as their
eyes were opened, white soldiers, both officers and enlisted, often feared that
blacks returning home would feel empowered to upset the status quo of white
supremacy.
President Wilson arranged to have
Dr. Robert Moton, the president of Tuskegee Institute after Booker T.
Washington, sail to Europe and lecture to black troops in numerous bases, to
encourage them to return home humble, polite, “like good Negroes.” Against
claims that black soldiers “failed” in combat and raped white women, Moton urged
them to shed characteristics like laziness, shiftlessness and willfulness as he
sought to “domesticate” these soldiers.
Lentz-Smith is clearly disappointed
with Woodrow Wilson as a died-in-the-wool southerner who had no intention of
speaking up for racial equality. In fact, in the long time Wilson spent at the Versailles
peace negotiations, Wilson never spoke up for the rights of Africans in Africa
and caved in to the colonial wishes of the British and French in seizing former
German colonies.
The author gives us the other side,
too. She tells about the savvy,
world-wise black soldiers of the 11th Illinois National Guard who
ride a troop train south to Camp Logan in Houston n the aftermath of the mutiny
there. As they stop at towns in the
south along the railroad, they do plenty of mischief, yelling and cursing at
white southerners, insulting them, taunting them, saying what they’re going to
do with their wives, and barging into local shops and stealing and carrying
away food and drinks and spreading trash in their wake. One can say, “Well, the white supremacists
started it!” Like the killing of innocent bystanders in the Houston mutiny, the
behavior of the African Americans did not contribute to any racial harmony.
Black soldiers who served in World
War II, whether they went overseas or not, were exposed to a world wider than
most had experienced in the Jim Crow South, and even in the subtler segregation
in the North. Even though many whites fought desperately to undo the small freedoms
black soldiers had won, the trend toward achieving true racial equality was happening.
The main problem, however, is that a century later, even after having had our
first black President govern for eight years, we have millions of white
Americans who are still not willing to acknowledge racial equality.
-end-
HISTORY
BOOK CLUB FUTURE TOPICS
2018-2019
Wednesday, November 28, 2018: Guns in American History. E.g. American
Revolution and the Minutemen; Going West with new technology: six guns,
repeating rifles, Twentieth Century automatic weapons after World War I:
pistols, rifles, Tommy guns, The St. Valentine’s Massacres of 1929 and 2018.
Control vs. freedom of gun use. and Machine Gun laws, mass shootings in
America: rifles, pistols, military style weapons, Guns laws in 21st
century America. [Suggested by
William Tobin]
2019
Wednesday, January 30, 2019: Horses in History. The clattering of hooves pierced the
dark stillness of the Austrian night. It is the fall of 1855. The gilded Ambruster
Dress Carriage, a beautiful vehicle trimmed in glimmering black paint and
shiny gold leaf showed that Emperor Franz Joseph was arriving. Read any book about horses, from Caligula to
Triple Crown, from Richard III to Pony Express, from mythology (Pegasus) to
literature (Arabian Nights) or music (Von Suppé’s Light Cavalry
Overture), from battle tactics (Genghis Kahn, Templars, conquistadors,
light cavalry of Napoleon) to transportation and military logistics, from money
making business of breeding to prestige and rivalry of kings and sheikhs, from
fundamental needs in agriculture to the vanity of Derby fashion. [Suggested
by Janos Posfai]
Wednesday, February 27, 2019: Medical Discoveries in History. Germs, Anesthesia, Inoculations
against Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Polio; Birth Control; Mental Illness, X-Ray
Insulin, Pasteurization, Penicillin.
Wednesday, March 27, 2019: Intelligence Gathering and Spying in
History: Julius Caesar’s Spy Network; Sun-Tzu, Julius and
Ethel Rosenberg, Espionage Act of 1917, the KGB, MI-5, the OSS, CIA, Pinkerton’s
Union Spies, Confederate Spies.
Wednesday, April 24, 2019: From Fur Trappers to Fishermen to
Settlers: How Montréal began; Plymouth; Salem; Gloucester; New
Amsterdam; The early colonization of America.
Wednesday, May 29, 2019: Progressive America in the first two
decades of the Twentieth Century: Teddy Roosevelt and
the Robber Barons; Woodrow Wilson and World War I.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019: Westward Ho: the westward expansion of America; Manifest Destiny; The Louisiana
Purchase and Lewis and Clark; James K. Polk; The Union Pacific.
Wednesday, July 31, 2019: The Crusades—what caused them? The Seljuk Turks; Pisa, Genoa, Venice and Amalfi; Byzantium and Jerusalem; The Children’s Crusade; Attacking the Jews in Germany; The Popes and Kings; Saladin and Richard I of the Lion Heart; how the Christians massacred Moslems and Jews and made Moslems intolerant.
