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[00:00:13] Speaker 1: o first off, a lot of people often ask me why there should be a talk on African Americans in World War I, and I guess, like many things, history is not the same for everybody. And as in many cases with U.S. History, the African American experience was dramatically different from that of white Americans.

So I think it's worth taking a look at that. Just a little background, World War I began in August of 1914. This is the map of Europe. And basically, it was Germany and Austria-Hungary in the center here against the allied countries, which comprised of France, Great Britain, and Russia. Although, of course, Greece and Italy also joined on the side of the allies eventually. But again, the war began in 1914.

And it was characterized in many cases by these enormous battles. Places like Ypres and the Somme and Verdun, where half a million soldiers might be fighting on each side and the casualties could mount to many, many, many thousands, which is in great contrast to typical sort of big American battles, when we think of something like Antietam, where about four or five thousand men were killed, which was a terrible thing, but that would be like an average day on the Western Front throughout the First World War.

This is a map of what was called then Western Front which was the line of trenches and battle lines that stretched all the way from the North Sea up here along the French coast, down all the through France, Paris is over here, and stretches all the way down to the Swiss border, so about 400 miles of trench lines.

And of course, the British were primarily up in this area, the French down through the rest of the way, and of course, the Germans were opposing them all the along the line. And later on, when we talk about the American forces, we'll see that the Americans... Fought primarily in this little area right around in here.

At the time of the breakout of the war, in 1914, Woodrow Wilson was the president, and he ran for re-election in 1916 then, and his platform was basically that he had so far at least kept the United States out of the War. Woodrow was born just prior to the Civil War, and of course, as a young child, he had seen the results of terrible wars like this, and so he wanted to keep the US out the fight as long as he could, and to use such terms as...

The Americans were too proud to fight, and he encouraged all Americans to be impartial and neutral as much as they could. And he really hoped that he could stay or keep the country out of the war. In terms of tonight's talk, we'll see in a bit that Woodrow Wilson was a Southerner. He was from Virginia. And although he was a progressive, what we might call these days sort of a liberal, he did have sort of southern ideas. He didn't believe that African-Americans were equal to whites, and he wasn't all that keen about... Them helping and serving in the United States.

Plus, he needed the support of powerful Southern political allies. And so in many cases, when it came time to make decisions about African Americans, he had to go along with his Southern supporters. But finally, in 1917, and again, this is about two and a half years after the war started, although America had been neutral all that time.

In early 1917, Germany did two things that really forced us eventually to join the war, and that was they declared unrestricted submarine warfare by which they would sink any vessel that was out on the open ocean. And of course, they had a vast submarine fleet to do that. And the other thing was this so-called Zimmerman telegram, which isn't usually as well-known, but this was a telegram sent by the German foreign minister to Mexico.

Encouraging the Mexican government to attack the United States. And if they did that, Germany would make sure that Mexico got back New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Texas in the subsequent treaty after Germany had defeated the Allies in the war.

So that was too much even for Woodrow Wilson. And so in April, then, the U.S. finally declared war on Germany. And now... Wilson was saying the world must be made safe for democracy, and so this was his call for the US to then enter the war. Almost immediately, of course, there was a response from the Black leaders.

This is W.E.B. Du Bois. He was the editor of The Crisis, which was the magazine of the, and still is, the magazine of the NAACP, which had only really been formed several years prior to this. The NAACP was formed in 1909.

But Du Bois, like many black leaders, supported... Not only the war, but supported African-American participation in it. The hope was, as it had been during the Civil War and the Spanish-American War, was that when blacks served their country in the armed forces, when the war was over, they would be rewarded with more civil rights.

That was at least their hope. And Du Bois wrote a famous editorial, which actually appeared in 1918, it was called close ranks and where he encouraged African Americans to close ranks with their fellow white citizens during the war and to support the war.

There were other African American leaders who also did the same thing, and in general African Americans did support the War, as we'll see in just a minute, by registering for the draft and purchasing the liberty bonds and so forth. But not everybody was quite so enthusiastic about it. This is a cover of The Messenger, which was a magazine that came out of Chicago.

And its subtitle here is that it's the only radical Negro magazine in America. I guess they felt that the crisis was not radical enough for them. And the editors of this magazine encouraged African Americans not to join the war. In a famous quote, they said, we'd rather fight to make Georgia safe for the Negro than to make the world safe for democracy.

And so they were saying, let's make things better here at home in the United States before we running off to. Europe and fight in the war. This is a political cartoon from, again, March of 1918 from a magazine called The Chicago Defender. And again, if you can see this, what this is is a woman here, an African-American woman. And she's going to the Red Cross desk.

And she says, my brothers at the front need my services. And the man behind the desk, who has a strange resemblance to Woodrow Wilson, he's saying, we can use your money but not your services. And so they're contrasting here. The African-American men fighting over in Europe. This is all very patriotic and honorable here. But meanwhile, back at home, law and order is in no man's land, and of course, implication of lynching and whatnot going on here.

So there certainly were people that recognized the dichotomy between fighting for democracy and the way African-Americans were treated here in the United States. Well the problem, one of the biggest problems facing the U.S. At this time now was to build up an army. Now that we had declared war, we had to come up with an army to fight in it, and again like I said before, most of the armies of the European nations were millions of men.

You know, when you have 200,000 men in a battle, you've got to have lots and lots of troops. And at this time, when the U.S. Declared war... We had about 120,000 or so regular professional soldiers in what we call the regular army. And then in the National Guard we had quite a few more than that, but really only about 300,000 men.

And this, again, it was the size of an army that might take part in a big battle. You can see that there were a number of African-American soldiers both in the regular Army and in the national guard at this time. But again, this force was minuscule compared to what the U.S. Would have to come up with. The plan was to... Eventually come up with an army of about three or four million men. And so this wasn't really a very big start.

It was like the U.S. Army often is during peacetime, poorly equipped, poorly organized. The U. S. Industry had been making lots of weapons and equipment for the European countries, even though we were supposed to be neutral. We were making quite a bit of arms and ammunition for the British and the French. And so we really didn't have that much industrial capacity now to make a lot of what our own army needed. Plus, the army was, again, poorly organized.

There weren't many officers, and the men were relatively poorly trained at that point. So it wasn't quite starting from scratch, but it was almost that bad. Well, so the first thing was then to try to build up the size of the army through enlistment. And this is a famous recruiting poster that I'm sure you've all seen. And this a, again a lesser known recruiting poster encouraging African Americans to... Enlist in the army, again, invoking the image of Abraham Lincoln here and a picture of African American soldiers forcing a bunch of Germans to surrender.

And actually the enlistment went quite well. The problem was it almost went too well and for a while the army slowed down the of African Americans. Because they weren't really sure what they were going to do with all these African-American troops. There was no real plan ahead of time as to where to put all these troops and what to do with them. So whereas white Americans joined the army fairly quickly, they sort of held off on the African-Americans until they could decide where they were going to put them and how they were going to train them, and whether they were going to have them at all in the army.

Of course, at this time, blacks were not allowed to enlist in the Marines at all. If they wanted to enlist in the Navy... They would be allowed to do so, but they'd serve as cooks or stewards. You couldn't be an officer or anything in the Navy. So the army was really about the only place that they could enlist. The other option, of course, was the draft. And ultimately, in the draft, African-Americans made up about 13% of what was called then the American Expeditionary Forces that went over to France and fought. Many men registered, of course, 10% were black.

That's probably a little bit lower than the average, you know, than the typical population of the country. But again, almost 400,000 African-Americans were eventually drafted. And the first call up for those men to report was in June. But again that was slowed down because of the army being unsure what to do with them.

They made a rule that in any one training camp, there had to be two white soldiers for every black soldier, I guess, just to make sure that things didn't ever. Get out of control or something. And in many cases, they actually had to build the camp. So frequently, whether you were white or black, when you arrived at the camp, that was one of your first jobs, is construction. And you had to actually build the buildings that were eventually going to be used.

One of the interesting things is, when it came to the draft, about 50% of the African Americans who were drafted were voted or. Registered as 1A, suitable for service, whereas about 30% of the whites were. So the standards for getting in or being inducted into the army, the standards were much lower. So many whites got out of the army because of flat foot or bad eyesight or something, whereas for African Americans, that didn't keep you out.

The leader, or the general, the commanding general of the American Expeditionary Forces was John Jack, Black Jack Pershing, and Black Jack was a nickname given to him by the recruits at West Point while he was an instructor there, and it really came from his prior service with what was called the 10th Cavalry Regiment. This is one of the black cavalry regiments in the army, and Pershing had served with in Cuba as their commander.

And so the students at West Point thought that was, Biden calling him Black Jack, that was really gonna be an insult. And he really didn't like the nickname either, but it sort of stuck with him and that's how he's still known today. Formed a little group of officers and went to France in June to organize the American Expeditionary Forces, and the first white troops at least arrived in late 1917. So, again, it took us almost six months even to get anybody over there in Europe.

The one thing that Pershing was adamantly opposed to was what was called amalgamation, and this was a policy that the French and the British both wanted to initiate, which is where they would take American soldiers and amalgamate them into the French and British armies.

And they would be officered by French and British officers. And of course, Pershing knew that if they did that, they would waste the American lives. And so Pershing adamantly refused to allow any American soldiers to be incorporated into those armies. He insisted on having a separate US army that would fight on its own, that would have its own US officers and everything else. So that was one of his big, big points. And we'll see in a minute how that sort of changed a little bit.

Over time. So what about the black soldiers that eventually were in the American Expeditionary Forces? There are really four groups of them that I would just like to talk a little bit about here tonight. The first is the black soldiers that were in the regular army. These were professional soldiers. They had been in the army in many cases for years. They had served in the Indian Wars. And there were several thousand of them at the time of the outbreak, several thousand of these African American soldiers in the regular army at the outbreak of the First World War.

Then there was what we call the National Guard Army. This was made up of, as you might imagine, National Guard units that were initially all over the country. There were some in Chicago, some in New York, some Washington, D.C. And various places. Again, they were all segregated, so these were all specifically African American National Guard units. Then we have the National Army, which... Was made up of the drafted soldiers, and these soldiers were just inducted for the duration of the war. And then finally, the black officers, which in some cases came from the regular army units. In other cases, they were trained in special training programs in 1917 and 1918.

Okay, so in the regular army, like I said before, there were several African-American units already formed in the Regular Army. There were two cavalry regiments, this was the ninth and the tenth. If you ever heard the term buffalo soldiers, that term originally applied to the tenth cavalry, which again had fought in the Indian Wars, had fought at San Juan Hill in the Spanish-American War and was really quite well known. The problem with this was cavalry wasn't so important in World War I. And so, these soldiers were primarily posted out in the west. Some went to the Philippines, some went to Hawaii, and they were sort of scattered around to serve guard duty.

Two of the infantry regiments, the African American infantry regiments, were the 24th and 25th. Likewise, they were primarily out in west, and were used subsequently to guard the Mexican border. The 24th in particular is sort of infamous, famous, whatever. They were posted to Camp Logan in Houston, Texas. And as you can imagine, the local residents were not too keen on this. And there was a bad incident in Houston where a bunch of black soldiers ended up going into town to sort of seek revenge for some of their fellow soldiers being mistreated.

And they're turned into sort of a bit of a riot. And two white Texans were killed. Than I. I'm sorry, two black soldiers were killed, and I think about 15 white Houston residents. And there was subsequently a trial. This is one of the largest group trials in US history, where about 40 or 50 of the soldiers from that infantry regiment were tried as a whole group. And they were found guilty, and 19 of them were hanged. 19 of these soldiers were hanged, like within three days.

I mean, there was no appeal or anything. It was just over and done with. And a whole bunch more were sentenced to life in prison. And the last of those was actually released in 1938. So this was a terrible incident that really, I guess, made a lot of people fearful of African-American soldiers, pointed out the race problems that could develop in the South.

And it led to problems further down the line, as we'll see in just a minute. So the regular army, somewhat surprisingly, these were highly trained soldiers, but they were never used in World War I. They were all sort of scattered around and never really, didn't really take advantage of their expertise and their abilities. Some of the officers from these black units were taken and put into some of the new units that were developed, and eventually did make it to France.

But for the most part, these professional soldiers didn't do anything during the war. Much more important are the black National Guard units. There were approximately 5,000 or so African Americans serving in various National Guard units around the country. When the war was first declared in April, they were sent on guard duty to guard critical areas at ports and bridges and things.

And the thought was that the African Americans were much more trustworthy than the German Americans or a you know, the Irish Americans even, right, because they were a little suspicious of the Irish because they weren't too keen on us helping out the British in the war. And so the African Americans from these National Guard units did a lot of guard duty early on.

Eventually, they were all grouped into four separate regiments, and they went on to be formed into what was called then the 93rd Provisional Division. And you always see the word provisional because a division not only includes four infantry regiments, but it has to have... A signals unit, an artillery unit, and, you know, the sanitation train and all that other stuff. But this division was only ever made up of these four infantry regiments. It never had all the other elements that would be required for a typical division.

And as we'll see in just a minute, these regiments never really were together. They got to France and they each sort of ended up going their own separate ways. So the 93rd was never really a true division, although it did have these four regiments that were sort of assigned to it. Well, the 93rd Provisional Division is probably the most famous of the African-American groups in World War I. And in that division, like I said, the most-famous regiment of those four was what became known as the 369th.

It was originally the 15th heavy-foot regiment of New York. It was a National Guard unit that formed up in Harlem. And it was formed, really, in June of 1916. So it formed during the war, but before the US got into the war. It was formed and organized by the guy that eventually became Colonel William Hayward, who was really a political crony of the New York governor. In those days, the National Guard was more like a club. I mean, you got in, you elected your own officers, and you got your own uniforms, and you paraded around, and it really wasn't very well organized.

But William Hayward had talked Governor Whitman actually into promoting him to the rank of colonel and allowing him to organize this group of African-American soldiers. And so they trained up in Harlem. They used the old Lafayette Theater as their sort of drilling base. They had black non-commissioned officers and all that. And while this group of African American soldiers was forming, another very famous National Guard unit made of white soldiers was forming. That became the 42nd Division. And that was called the Rainbow Division because it's included men from all over the country.

So it was like a rainbow. And the story is that Hayward went to the general of the Rainbow Division and said, hey, you know, my black soldiers would like to join that Rainbow Division. And the the story as he was told, black is not a color of the rainbow. And so that was the end of that. So the 42nd went to France on their own, and the 369th stayed on its own.

For training, once the war broke out, of all places, they sent it to Spartanburg, South Carolina, which again, is not the greatest place for African Americans to go. And in fact, the mayor of Spartanberg wrote to the New York Times and wrote a letter saying don't send these New York black guys down here because, and the quote is, I have a copy of the letter for anyone who wants to look at it, but the quote is because these Northern Negroes will be expected to be treated like whites, and we're not gonna treat them as anything but our resident Negroes.

If they come into our stores, we're going to knock them down." But the army decided to send them there anyway. And as you can imagine, tensions were pretty high. And so the 369th only stayed in Spartanburg for about two weeks. And then they decided they would move them out, and they brought them up and they sent them right over to France. So this was one of the first units, then, to get to France, largely because they just wanted to get them out of South Carolina.

Ultimately, as we'll see in a bit. Uh... They ended up serving more days at the front lines than any other u.s. Regiment so they were early getting there and they uh... Spent a lot of time uh... In action, Oh, and I should also mention that in 2004, the residents of Spartanburg put up a nice plaque commemorating the visit of the 369th there in Spartanburg. There were other regiments of the 93rd. Again, I'm not going to say a whole lot about them, but there was the 370th.

This was made up the old Illinois National Guard unit. Again, you sort of wonder what the Army's thinking, but they sent them to Camp Logan in Houston, Texas, where just months before they'd had this big race riot and hanged 19 guys. So they spent a little bit of time there. Again, they moved them out fairly quickly and sent them France, although they didn't go till a little bit later than the 369th. The other two regiments were very similar, although they had some draftees to sort of boost up the ranks a little but, and they also left for France in early 1918.

Contrary to Pershing's claim that he would never allow any U.S. Troops to serve in the French or the British armies, he decided that, oh, you know, it just so happens we have a couple of these regiments that aren't attached to any division. And the French, of course, were desperate for soldiers at this point. So many hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen had been killed in these early years of the war that the French really wanted soldiers.

And like I say, Pershing refused to give them any white soldiers, but he was sort of happy to unload these four regiments of African-American soldiers. And so he basically gave them to the French and said, use them however you want. These African-American soldiers then arrived, of course, with their Springfield rifle and their Doboy hat and all their US equipment. And as soon as they arrived, all that was taken away.

They were given the French Lebel rifle, the French helmet, the French food, and everything else, all of which was inferior to the US stuff. I mean, the France Lebel was worse than the Springfield. The French Chauchat machine gun was worse. I mean everything was worse, plus the fact that now they had to learn how to use all this new stuff all over again. But they spent time training with the French officers and learned a lot about fighting from the French soldiers.

And they would eventually end up fighting in the French Army, right, as part of the French army itself, with French artillery and everything else that goes with a typical. There was an interesting point where the African Americans were actually very, very popular among the French, and the French officers really thought they were doing very well.

And they started to be treated very well, and there was a note sent to the French from a U.S. Officer telling them, you know, don't start treating our African Americans too nicely, because when this war is over, they're going to have to come back to the U. S., and we don't want them getting any ideas. And so they actually, the French actually sent this around to their officers, and the French government. Actually proclaimed then that no they were going to treat everybody equally and African-American or not.

So again many African-Americans found France to be just a wonderful place because it was much more free and liberal than had been their experience back home in the U.S. Eventually all three of these regiments would participate in what would eventually to be the allied counter-attacks of 1918 which ultimately really ended the war. We'll take a look at that in just a second here. Yeah, so in 1918, which is really when the Americans actually start fighting, and again, we declared war in April 1917, but it wasn't at least a year later before any U.S. Troops did any fighting, and we didn't do any significant fighting until July of 1918.

But what happened in the spring of 1918, the Germans put on these major attacks, and they pushed far into France, and this is one of the areas where they really pushed, again, Paris is just right over here. So the German offensive really started an approach to Paris. And this is the area in which the African-American regiments here eventually went to fight with the French right along this line, where you can see the Germans started an offensive down there in the springtime.

And that's pretty much the area where all of these African-Americans regiments from what was the 93rd Red Division fought eventually. Here's just some pictures of of these African-American troops. This is the helmet or the shoulder patch that they adopted as their division symbol. It's a picture of the French helmet designed. It's called the Adrien helmet. And the French coat was light blue, and so they used that color. So this is a group of African-Americans soldiers.

Again, you can see they have the French helmet rather than that typical sort of doughboy shaped helmet like that. Here they are receiving hand grenade instructions from their French officers. Again, they had never seen a lot of these things in the US. When they trained here in the United States, they didn't really get to practice with hand grenades and machine guns and all this equipment that then they had to really learn about once they got to France. But again, you can see African Americans again, wearing the French uniform.

This is a French officer sort of explaining how you use a hand grenade, which again, this was a new weapon in the First World War. They had to learn how to use the French. Machine gun, which again was a very inferior weapon to many other weapons, but they had to learn how to use that. Again, French instructors over here teaching the men how to to use a machine gun. There were several notable members of the 93rd Division. These first ones I'll just say a little bit about. Henry Johnson was from Albany, New York and Needham Roberts from New Jersey.

They were some of the first real heroes of the war. They were attacked at night, they were in a little outpost, and they were attacked by a group of Germans. And Needham Roberts was badly wounded, but continued to fight. And Henry Johnson, the two of them fought off this raiding party of Germans, and so this was written up in the papers, and this was a very famous sort of incident that happened, again, fairly early on in the US's involvement in the war. They were both awarded medals by the US by the French. Government. This is Corporal Freddy Stowers.

He was also a member of the 93rd Division. He was famous for leading attacks against several German machine gun nests. And after capturing two or three of those, he was eventually killed in the process. And they show him here with the Medal of Honor. There was only one African-American awarded the Medal Of Honor in the First World War, and that was Freddy Stowers.

And he got it a little late. He got it during... George Bush's administration. They went back and they decided, well, you know, I guess he really did deserve it. But at the time, no African American got the Medal of Honor during the First World War. And this is Sergeant William Butler of Salisbury, Maryland, of whom we'll have more to say about him later. But these were certainly three of the more famous men of the 93rd Division. Well, there were not only soldiers in those regiments, there was also a band. Every regiment had a band, and when the 369th... Regiment was formed in Harlem, one of the first things they did was go out looking for the best musicians they could find.

And one of them, James Reese Europe, went all around the country, went to Puerto Rico even to enlist the best musician he could find, and he formed the band that eventually became called the Hellfighters Band. The 369th Regiment was eventually called the Harlem Hellfighter Band, and they toured all through Europe. So while the war was going on, James Europe and his band traveled all through France. And really brought jazz music to France and it just caught on amazingly and the French to this day even just love jazz music. So he was very, very famous.

He came back to the U.S. With his band and he was actually murdered by one of his band members in 1919. So unfortunately his great career was really cut short. Here's just a picture of some men from the 93rd Division. These guys have all received the Croix de Guerre, which is the French medal. It's not like the Medal of Honor, it's not that high of a level of medal, but certainly a medal for bravery in the war. Again, they didn't do a lot of fighting, but nevertheless, 600 or so soldiers from the 90th Division died, either killed or outrided, died of wounds, many more wounded. Here's a returning soldier with.

Part of his leg missing, and one of the many, one of several, I think there were six big U.S. Cemeteries in France from the First World War, where many of these men are still buried. As far as the black draftees go, again, like I mentioned before, they were admitted to the Army at a much higher rate than the white soldiers. They tried to portray them as being dumb and stupid, and they didn't know anything and all these other things. But nevertheless, they took them into the army intending really to use them just as laborers. That was really the intent from the beginning.

But fortunately, men like Du Bois realized that if they just used them as laborer, they would never get any credit for anything. And when the war was over, they wouldn't gain anything from it. So Du Boise really put pressure on the government and then on the army. To form some of these draftees and use them as soldiers in the U.S. Army, not to give them away to the French Army. So here's just, again, a couple of pictures of the citizens, the civilians, they're arriving at training camps, and again, there was a lot of jokes made at the time that these guys are coming in from the farms and they're carrying all their stuff in a little bag and they are sort of in rough clothes, but this was true of white soldiers too.

I mean, when white soldiers came in... What they found was that many of the southerners, from white southerner's, had even lower IQ scores, whatever that means, than many of the African Americans. And so, again, they made fun of these sort of disheveled looking African American folks come in, but this was just the way a lot of people arrived at the training camps. They just hopped on a bus and they came to camp and sort of raw recruits, I guess in a lot of ways like many people still arrive at the army.

Again, there were several camps set up all around the country. These units of drafted African-Americans also were never really formed together into a true division until they actually got to France. So this was the 92nd Division. It has, again, four regiments to it. They adopted as their shoulder patch the Buffalo. Again, they weren't really related to the Buffalo soldiers, but they used that symbol, at least. Again, they receive very poorly very poor training. They never worked as a cohesive group. The officers, some were black and some were white. The problem was white officers got into the 92nd Division by doing poorly everywhere else.

And so this was like the dumping ground of the worst white officers that we had. Many of the black officers that were in place were simply removed and replaced by these lousy white officers. But again, the Division was sent to France and. Trained, again, with the French, like many other units did as well, but it did eventually join the U.S. Army when the battle started. Really, the only regiment from this division that fought was the 368th, and again, without going into too much detail about the battles, they fought in what was called the Meuse-Argon Offensive, which was the big American battle near the end of the war. Again, it was late September 1918.

And the only thing we really need to say about that is where these African-American soldiers fought was right about here. The French army was all through here. The American army was through here, and they were separated by this area called the Argonne Forest. Well, first of all, wherever two armies join, especially of two different nationalities, that's the worst place to be because communications are bad, there's very poor cooperation typically, plus you're in this very, very dense forest which is filled with German defenses. But nevertheless, that's where they put this group of men and. Of course they had poor officers, they had lousy equipment, and they didn't do so well.

And they were really, these black troops, this is called the failure of the 368th. They were blamed for not being able to keep up and the Lost Battalion, if you're familiar with stories of World War I, the Lost battalion actually ends up being in the Argonne Forest. They become lost like... Three days after the African-American troops were moved out, but nevertheless, people often associate the failure of the 368th with the eventual isolation of the lost battalion. But they're really not related at all. And eventually, after they were withdrawn from here, they were sent way down here in a fairly quiet sector where they spent the rest of the war. So the 92nd Division was really not very heavily involved in the war at all, but again, soldiers die in these things.

And this is just a shot of the early graves that were dug for some of these soldiers of the 92nd Division. One of the questions that came up early, again, was who was gonna lead these black soldiers? Would they be black officers? And one of the more likely candidates was Charles Young, who was a colonel. He was only the third African American to graduate from West Point. But after we declared war, he was quickly deemed unfit. Uh... And they forced him into retirement and uh... It seems pretty clear now that they found some correspondence between woodrow wilson and a uh... A southern senator uh... That he was he is you know convinced wilson to force newton baker who was the secretary of war into forcing young into retirement so he was that the highest ranking african-american officer was then sort of pushed out of the way and there was space now to put in all the white officers.

There were some officers, African Americans, who were trained at a special camp at Fort Des Moines in Iowa. The rules were they didn't have to be college graduates, whereas white officers had to be college graduate. But the African Americans had to be 25 to 40 years old. So they didn't have to college graduates and they were quite a bit older, so very fewer college graduates anyway. And again, so this was not like picking the cream of the crop. There were better people that could have been selected. But they were too young, right?

The college graduates were younger than this, and so a lot of them didn't get in. And like I said before, some of them were officers from the regular army. From this camp at Fort Des Moines, they did graduate a couple hundred African-American officers. But they didn't really get a whole lot of training. I mean, this is one of those 90-day wonder sort of things where they got some quick training in how to run a combat unit. All of these officers were assigned to the 92nd Division and then the the training camp was shut down That was pretty much the end of it.

So really very few African Americans were trained to be commissioned officers levels of you know Lieutenant and that sort of thing they had many non-coms the sergeants and the corporals that sort thing But as far as the upper levels of officers go, they really were not many of those at all But here here are several of them from the 92d Division again a couple this must be after the war. You can see the buffalo patch on this guy here. This guy's wearing the Distinguished Service Cross.

So he must have done something significant in the war You can sort of tell the officers not only by the cap badges that they have, but also this belt. This is called the Sam Brown belt, which all officers from Lieutenant on up got to wear in the First World War. It was sort of a status symbol more than anything else. It wasn't really useful for much of anything. But all the officers liked to wear it, I guess. You know, overall, I guess we'd really have to say that the performance of these black officers was not the greatest.

But again, they were poorly trained. They were generally poorly educated. They weren't graduates of college, probably most of them didn't even finish high school. They didn't have confidence in themselves, and their men weren't that sure of them either. So as leaders in a military operation, they would just put in an unfortunate situation and just didn't have that. Great of a success. And this, of course, haunted African-Americans for years. World War II, Korea, having African-American officers was just something that was very difficult to do. Many of these soldiers, of of course never made it as soldiers. They were used instead as laborers. So even if they were drafted into the army, they never made into combat.

They were use as what was called the Services of Supply, which again had the unfortunate acronym of S.O.S. Again, this is often a role in the army that people sort of pooh-pooh, but this is extremely important. You can't have much in the way of fighting troops if you don't have someone to bring the supplies, the ammunition, the food, all that stuff to where the armies are fighting. And it turns out that 80 percent of those soldiers of the African Americans that got to France were simply used as laborers.

Although they made up only 13% of the entire American Expeditionary Force, they made 30% of all the labor troops. So again, you can see that they were not treated equally. And I would not want to be working for this guy. He doesn't look too cheery. But again, the black men were the laborers. The officers, even of these labor units, were white officers. They were divided into two real groups. There was what were called the labor battalions. These guys were simply laborers.

They received virtually no training. They did the unloading at the docks. Again, when you think of an army of millions of men, thousands of tons of equipment would arrive every day at these ports in France. And all this equipment would have to be unloaded, unpacked, repacked on trains and sent out. And so these guys worked as stevedores on the dock just hauling these enormous quantities of supplies. Then when it went up to the front lines, it had to be hauled on little light railways, often pulled like a cart on a little railway, pulled by a mule. They took care of all the horses and animals. Again, this is really before there were many motorized vehicles.

There were huge numbers of horses and mules that had to shod and fed and everything else. And they did everything, repairing roads, cutting wood, lots and lots of work everywhere to support, again, the army. But really, they received virtually no training. They weren't they weren't intended to be used as fighting troops at all. Unfortunately, many of them were used as strike breakers back in the United States, which didn't earn them any popularity either after the war was over, or even during the war, actually. This is a great quote from Colonel US Grant. But again, with this idea that even though the laborers themselves were African-American, all of the officers that kept control of them were typically whites.

And you can imagine they weren't the nicest guys to work for. There was also another group of labor forces called the pioneer units. These were more like soldiers. They did receive some military training. They didn't know how to use a rifle and this sort of thing. They were typically more skilled. Than the guys that were just in the labor battalions. But again, they spent most of their time simply working, building bridges, building roads, repairing equipment. There was a lot of salvage going on. You know, all the guns and clothing had to be repaired and things like that, so.

These guys were slightly more trained. They worked closer to the front lines. But nevertheless, you don't really earn a lot of accolades by being in a pioneer infantry unit. And again, I should point out that there were labor battalions and pioneer units made up of white soldiers as well. It wasn't just African Americans. But again, proportionally, there were many more African Americans in these than there were of white soldier. Okay, so once the war ended... It was time to return back to America. Some of the African-American soldiers stayed on in Germany and were the army of occupation. We didn't really occupy Germany in the way we did it in World War II, but they did occupy some of the bridgeheads and whatnot.

Some of these labor battalions stayed on the battlefield working. Again, there was just hundreds and hundreds of square miles with barbed wire and unexploded ordinance, dead bodies. Somebody had to go out and dig up all the... Temporarily buried bodies and reburied them in these nice American cemeteries. And so many of these African-Americans stayed there and continued to work. And whereas white soldiers were allowed to go into Paris and go to various universities and take classes in France, that was restricted from the African-American. Most of the African Americans, at least the 369th and some of those, returned fairly quickly back to America where they were really very warmly welcomed.

If they had become officers, they were pretty quickly kicked out of the army since they didn't need them anymore. And when veterans groups formed together, something like the American Legion, the blacks were excluded from all of those things, and they had to form their own veterans groups. But again, they were very warmly welcomed home. This is some slides of a 369th arriving. Here they are on board ship coming into the New York Harbor. Thank you very much. And this is a parade that they held up through Harlem, all the way up through... Through all the downtown Manhattan, all the up through through Harlem and they're marching along.

Interesting to note, now they all have American equipment again, right? So when they went to France, they took all their American stuff away and gave them French stuff, but when they came back, they all got to parade in their doughboy hat, which they never had worn before. But again, marching up through Haarlem... This was just a huge event, huge crowds came out, not just African-American crowds, but white crowds as well to see the soldiers marching up through Harlem, and of course the band was a very prominent attraction of the parade.

Here's a painting of the Hellfighters from Harlem, the 369th, again for some reason painting them with American helmets, which again they never would have had while they in France. So after the war... There's sort of this Harlem Renaissance, as it was called, the development, if you will, of the idea of the new Negro, which wasn't really a new idea. But it certainly grew after the war a certain pride and willingness to defend themselves. After fighting in France, being trained in a military frame of mind, they were more willing to come back and fight for their rights. And if you know Claude McKay's poem, if we must die, or Du Bois.

His returning soldiers essay, where he says, we return from fighting, we return fighting, saying that we're not going to take it anymore, that kind of thing. And this is part of the whole Harlem Renaissance, some of the paintings and, of course, the music, the poetry, the literature all sort of comes out largely of Harlem, not just because of the war, but certainly I think the war provided this new attitude that we fought for our country. We deserve. These rights that have been promised us for so long. Unfortunately, many white people were not so happy about the idea. And so in the summer of 1919, this becomes known as the Red Summer, where large race riots are occurring in many cities across the country, where there's sort of this backlash against this new Negro, new black attitude.

And lynching actually increases, you know, it goes up from 30 during the war to it becomes higher and higher.

And of course, African-American leaders are calling on Wilson to do something, but Congress doesn't. Again, Wilson needs those strong southern politicians to support other initiatives he's trying to get. And so they sort of say, well, lynching is sort of a state's rights thing, and we'll let each state deal with it in its own way. And of, course, nothing really gets done. So again, this is typically what happened. African-Americans join the army. They serve in these conflicts, expecting that this will help their claim for citizenship. And yet, when the war is over, their service is denigrated. And they really don't gain much. So again this had happened many times before in US history. And now it just seemed to be happening once again after World War I. Well, I see the time is running out, so I'm gonna get right to our local hero, Sergeant William Butler.

William Butler, this is his service record. He was born on the western shore of Maryland in the area called White Plains, sometimes called Indian Head or over by La Plata there. He was in the late 1880s, and at some point, he must have come over to Salisbury, and I don't know exactly when that was, but he married a girl named Jenny. And they lived downtown. And if anybody is familiar with Linda Dyer's excellent book, Round the Pond, you can see where the black community lived around the lake in downtown Salisbury at that time. And then at some point, William Butler moved, or I shouldn't say moved, but he went to New York and he lived at Harlem at the time that he enlisted in the 369th, which was in September of 19- 16, actually. He was living at least in Harlem. So he was married to Jenny, but he went to Harlem.

Exactly why is not really clear. But he enlisted then in this regiment before the U.S. Got into the war, just a couple of months after the regiment actually formed. And he enlist right about, must have been like the same day that James Reese Europe, the musician enlisted, because they were listed within just a few days of each He eventually goes to France with the 93rd Division. He fights as part of the 369th. And in August of 1918, while he's serving with the French army, he's again in a little isolated outpost. And a German raiding party comes in and captured about five American soldiers. And then they were taking these American soldiers back to the German lines. And William Butler jumps up out of his little hole there. And fires with his machine gun and kills several of the Germans liberating now the Americans and capturing several other the Germans that were still alive. And for this, this was a great event. Again, it wasn't quite as famous for some reason as Henry Johnson and Edom Roberts, I guess, because they were the first.

And, you know, William Butler came along a little bit later. So he wasn't as famous as them, but he was written up in many of the magazines and newspapers of the time. He was proclaimed then as Maryland's greatest hero of the war. And we can see that he went on. He wasn't done then. In August of 1918, he did this heroic feat. But he stayed in the war, he kept fighting until he was wounded in the big Allied offenses in September of 1918. And at that time, I assume his service was over and he came back. But he was eventually awarded several awards. This is a picture of him from a book written by Emmett Scott on African-Americans in World War I. It says here Sergeant William Butler of Salisbury, Maryland. And here he is receiving the Distinguished Service Cross, which is the second highest to the Medal of Honor in the U.S. Services, and also the French Croix de Guerre.

There's a French officer that came. And this is in City College Stadium in New York, where he's being awarded. This is Sergeant Butler, then, right here. And this the officer. He's got a little rattlesnake. Badger, the rattlesnake was the symbol of the 369th Regiment. So, I wondered, you know, whatever happened to Sergeant Butler after this. I thought I'd try to track him down, and if I could, I'll just read a little bit of his citation of his Distinguished Service Cross. It says, William Butler, for extraordinary heroism in action in France, August 1918, he broke up a German raiding party which had succeeded in entering our trenches and capturing some of our men. With an automatic rifle, he killed four of the raiding parties and captured or put flight the remainder of the invaders.

And so that's the citation that was actually given to him for the Distinguished Service Cross. So like I said, I wondered whatever became of him. And in the Wicomico News of February 10, 1919, they report on a reception that was held for Sergeant Butler at the John Wesley Church, which is now the Chipman Center up here. And it was attended by a bunch of notables. And again, I have a copy of that article if anybody wants to take a look at that. So, at least he came back to Salisbury in 1919 at least for this reception. In the 1920 census, he's right here. He's living on Water Street, again in Salisberry right here along around the pond, and he's living with Jenny Butler who he had married before the war. He's also living with a person who appears to be Jenny Butler's mother and then a young girl. And it's not really clear if this is his daughter or... Some other relative of theirs.

But he's listed as being a merchant in groceries. So he's here until at least 1920. In the 1930 census, Jenny Butler now is living at 405 Water Street, and William Butler is nowhere to be seen. So something happens between 1920 and 1930 where William Butler leaves Salisbury. And so I figured there, the trail went cold. Well then, a couple of years later, I was reading a book on the bonus army, which you might know was when a bunch of World War I veterans came to Washington in the 30s to seek the bonus payment they were supposed to get. And in this book, they mention an article from the Washington Post about a parade that was held as part of the bonus Army. And one of the so-called heroes of World World I in the parade was William Butler. And now he's living in D.C., right?

So, I knew now he was living in Washington, D.C. Well, again, how are you going to find somebody that was living in Washington, D.C. In the 1930s? Well, I went to a lecture where somebody was talking about Henry Johnson, the other guy from the 369th that was famous. They always thought that after the war, Henry Johnson moved back to Albany, that he died a very poor man and was buried in a pauper's grave, which was just simply covered over when they developed all the state buildings in Albany. But years later, I think it was in the 1990s, somebody discovered that Henry Johnston was actually buried in Arlington Cemetery. So when I heard this, I thought, wait a minute. Butler was living in DC. Maybe he's buried in Orlington. So I went to Arlington, and I said, do you have Sergeant Butler here? And they said, yeah, we do. And I said Sergeant A. Butler? Yeah, yeah. And so it turns out it was him. So I ran around Arlington cemetery. And sure enough, here is his gravestone, Sergeant William Butler.

Unfortunately, they list him as being in the 396th Regiment, not the 369th, which, again, I guess is not that significant. But it sort of seems like a silly mistake to make. And it had not only his date of birth, but also his date death, as well as the fact that he won the Distinguished Service Cross and the Purple Heart. So now I said, oh, now I know when he died. Now I can search the Washington Post database and find his obituary, find out what he's been up to all these years. So I did that. And unfortunately... It doesn't come to such a great conclusion. In 1947, he committed suicide in his apartment in DC. So this is about the only clue to anything about him at this point, this woman who was the wife of his stepson. I don't know when the son came along or anything about that. And so I really, again, there's sort of the I don't know what happened to, you know, any way to find out any more about him. But recently I was reading a novel about the First World War, and this is a quote that comes at the very end of the book.

And again, unfortunately, it happens so often. Many of the men from World War I, some of the real heroes of the First World War, ended up doing exactly this. And I'm sure when she writes this here in her book, she's referring to Charles Whittleslee, who was the commander of the Lost Battalion. Big hero after the war, and then a couple years later, took a cruise off and then just hopped off the ship at some point. Needham Roberts, the guy who fought with Henry Johnson. He committed suicide years later. So this was, again, we didn't recognize post-traumatic stress disorder at that time and a lot of these guys really suffered for many years. But I'd like to thank the Millennial Grant, this was a number of years ago, that they gave me some money to buy some books and things. And of course, everybody here at the Knapp Center is always wonderfully helpful when you're trying to find out anything about local history. This is a sort of a bibliography of African American in World War I.

You still see books coming out saying, the untold story of African, well, it's not so untold if you look around a little bit, which is a good thing. And I have some of those books up here, plus a really terrific book that just came out that's on African Americans in World War I. And it's really a picture book, just many, many photographs that are really great. And if anybody would like to come up and take a look at those, and a couple articles about William Butler as well. So, thank you for your attention, and I'll see you next time. In your way, in your way. [00:00:13][0.0]