Color line migration and black resistance in canada 1870 to 1955 and the forthcoming back the glory of their deeds a global history of black soldiers and the great war era. The professor has earned several International Awards and is a former fellow at the university of hidelbergs center and at harvards institute. And finally we have professor jeffrey t. Salmons, professor at history at New York University where he teaches a broad range of courses in United States and race and society. Hes the coauthor of excuse me, author of beyond the ring the role of boxing in american society, and the 2014 book harlems rattlers and the great war which he coauthored and has been rightfully declared the definitive history of the 169 regiment. Hes received fellow ships from the National Endowment of the humanities he has plans to write a book and im going to hold him accountable to this, writing a book on the heroic and tragic life of Henry Johnson. As far as the format for this, our panelists will speak for roughly ten minutes or so. Ill take advantage of my prerogative as chair to pose some questions to get the conversation going and then we will take questions from the outside. Were going to be going a little bit out of order on the program and beginning with professor louis. Thanks very much for that introduction, professor. I owe what im going to say to w. E. B w. E. B. Da boyce. The war that ended peace opened with a question which there is yet no agreed upon final answer. To wit, how could europe have done this to itself . Her book insists that the answer lies with a small number of men and they were all men, she reminds us, who could have said no. Indeed there were some notable men and women who did say no to the war. Theyre across the pages of the book to end all wars. But for the men whose opinions mattered, generals, politicians, had they restrained their allies, prioritized diplomacy, sent no fatal ultimatums, given no final mobilization orders, sara imagining europes yea saying elites as naysayers, however, is a counter narrative that determinists would insist flies in the place of alliances merely awaiting the triggering incident for the determinists, the war was ultimately inevitable. Whatever the proximate cause is of the war, the european elite sanctioned, Richard Evans reminds us that the european elites shared a positive attitude towards war based on notions of honor, expectations of swift victory, and ideas of social darwinism, quote. The answer, as to how europeans could do such terrible violence to themselves lies to a considerable degree with answers to another question, to wit, what of the consequences to themselves of the terrible violence they perpetrated on noneuropeans. Fair to say, few times in history has manifest destiny and asymmetrical power produced such transformational violence in so brief a time. A single generation sufficed for repeating rifling and guns to spread european disruption from cairo to the cape in the name of christianity, commerce, and civilization. Webb due boyces readers were meant to ponder the collision of racial arrogance and geopolitics that made the socalled dark continent the cause of the world war that had repeatedly come within an ace of starting above or below the issahara. He said it excused murder and rape. Africas real estate was partitioned, africas independence extinguished and africans own values ruptured and europeans own values corrupted by the prerogatives of european of imperil domination. Du bois had in mind the occupation of egypt and affront to french interests that launched the african scramble after 1882. He had in mind the Second World War 17 years later when it was attempted to steal the gold fields, 75,000 soldiers dead from Great Britains bloodiest combat since waterloo. They were dead in the concentration camps. The institutionalized bwas different from the policing of indigenous people. It meimicked the belgians when colonial authorities sanctioned the extermination of the peoples in 1904. And they reported in the german press with a full arsenal of new tools, barbed wire, maxim machine guns and poisoned aqua fers. Du bois tried to make sense of the show. The african roots of the war anticipated the 1916 tract imperialism, the highest age of capitalism, du boiss article theories to explain why a monopoly capitalism escaped the contradictions of class welfare and class conflict and overproduction. Instead, though, of channeling the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism would better have been conceived as the highest stage of ethnocentrism. The swedish scholar is convinced that the last words in that great literary masterpiece of empire, heart of darkness, engs terminate all of the brutes, was taken from the social statics, Foundation Text of social darwinism. The ideology demanded coldhearted discipline, the forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, exterminates sections of mankind as stand in their way he shared. Be he human or brute, the hinderence must be gotten rid of. He sniffed, an english man may need need inquire too closely of what these people think themselves. Even as the brutes succeeded in making themselves heard, as when in 1885, radical islamists eliminated british presence in the sudan and 11 years later, disgraced the italians, the occupiers grasped almost nothing of the large political and technological implications for themselves. They missed entirely the 19th centurys most important military legacy for the impending 20th. For major douglas hague, future British Expeditionary commander, experiencing his First Military engagement, it was that september morning in 1898, it was the empire, 50,000 rifle and spear wielding arabs charged the 5,000 troops and their guns. Churchills bestselling book described the results. Thus ended the battle, he enthused. The most signaled triumph ever gained within the space of five hours, the strongest and best armed savage army has been destroyed and dispersed with hardly any difficulty, 10,000 sudanese died, 16,000 wounded. The british suffered 48 fatalities. Quote unquote, they site the endorsement of the maxim, a weapon that is specially adapted to terrify a foe. By the time the article appeared, maxim guns had terrified civilized foes out of their sandals, entrenched them behind 25,000 miles of barbed wire and killed 25 times the number of sudanese dead. It could have ignited a european firestorm before 1914 were mostly unfamiliar to the american subscribers, france and england, italy and turkey in tripoli. England and portugal, england, germany and the butdutch in sou africa. The incident virtually guaranteed fullfledged hostilities between europes major powers in less than a generation. When it came time to play their parts in the tragedy of august 1914, the principled players arrived with diplomatic scripts, decisively revised after that. The foreign minister assuaged the pride of his lobby and sailed to st. Petersburg to close the loophole in an alliance whose partner had left france on the upper nile with little to show for her 5 million gold franc investment in russia. Language biding russia to all of frances Security Issues and vi vice versa in an alliance of their adversaries triple alliance. Meanwhile, the french ambassador and the British Foreign secretary quietly signed the edition to the article 4 of the 1894 convention which finally closed the 16year dispute over the egyptian question. The nile valley became officially british but with an understandi understanding that the rest of north africa was frances for the taking. They returned the german enemy front and center to frances security preoccupations and almost simultaneously germany moved front and center to britains preoccupations because of the aggressive naval and colonial negotiations. Fast forward from 1899 through the series agreements in spirin of 1904, the anglorussian convention, to the july 1912 anglofrench naval accord and you have Great Britain and the alliance that emerged out of africa primed to meet the triple alliance of germany, austria, and italy. The men who designed these confrontational Alliance Systems possessed an untroubled belief in capacity and an exulted sense of righteous destined to bring to their own continent the sociological and technological injuries inflicted upon their imperil possessions. I went on a bit long, but thank you. [ applause ] i have the pleasure of having listened to david louiss remarks and the daunting task of having to follow them. This is probably what the other girl in Reverend Franklins Church choir after aretha did a solo. I would like to talk for a few minutes about how one thinks about or how i have been thinking about the Long Civil Rights Movement and world war i together as someone who wrote a book about africanamerican about the black freedom struggles set in 1917 and is writing a book about the black freedom struggles set in 1985, i have a relationship to this topic that i have willfully not interrogated too hard. And so now im going to subject you to my current thoughts about them. So once long ago when i was a wee sprog, as my scottish friends would say, i wrote a dissertation called the great war for civil rights. It was about africanamerican soldiers and other africanamericans in the progressive era during the age of imperil warfare. I realized when i circulated an early draft of that book manuscript, that i had actually landed myself in the middle of a heated argument on framing a Long Civil Rights Movement versus maintaining a sense of the classical phase of the civil rights, but not only did i not have a dog in that fight, i hadnt realized until i got my readers report that there was a fight and so had never thought to bring a dog. You guys know the ins and outs of this debate. But ill give you the quick reminder. Jacqueline dowd hall synthesis of where the literature was in 2005 does a lovely job of making a case for a Long Civil Rights Movement. She writes that histories of the movement that began with brown and end with the Voting Rights act truncate the time line of what was a sort of broad and imaginative freedom struggle, turning the fight against White Supremacy as an economic political and psychological system, into a simple drive for color blindness and the vote. Or, to use her words, confining the civil rights struggle to the south, to heroes, to a single decade and to limited noneconomic objectives takes the teeth out of what that movement was. I think that the article offers the most compelling challenge to this framework. They argued in that piece that an everything is everything approach plays fast with the conceptional differences that one should talk about when one talks about histories of the black freedom struggle in the 20th century and maybe before. In so doing, this approach runs the risk of painting what they call an undifferentiated social landscape of oppression and resistance and actually teaching the Civil Rights Movement class right now where my students call everything resistance with no more specificity than that, im sympathic to this argument right now. They say that it is at the end of the day, a discussion that marshals historians favorite fighting point, change versus continuity and which context have the have the most sort of analytical purchase or heft. In countering this debate, my response for a long time was just to skirt the issue. In fact, if you remember chads introduction, i responded to the reports by being like, no problem. Well call the book freedom struggles. Nobody disputes thats a thing. And actually within that, my investment was making sure that people understood that the First World War mattered within that longer history of the black freedom struggle, that seemed like a higher order argument to me. But in watching the debate from the sidelines, i was struck by a few things. One was what i really think was just an overweaning case of baby boomer in boomer nostalgia. I think the bad rebuttals are really bad. I get the argument that not every moment of protest is a movement. And i get that Mass Mobilization is a particular iteration of a struggle whose scale and efficacy in the 60s bears special notation. Too often, the screeds that i read were all about the authors own investments where they mistook their political coming of age for a nations coming of age and they werent that convincing. But the other thing, i think even above and beyond this that struck me, was that this was not a debate that required that you take a side. Is there or is there not a Long Civil Rights Movement, is not a question that requires a yes or no. Its a way of thinking about what stories we tell, and how we tell them and why we tell them. And even more, perhaps, what stories we listen to and how we are able to explain to them their importance. Again, my class that im teaching this semester is a case in point. Its a class on the Civil Rights Movement that i begin in the 1860s and will end with by assigning them the ferguson report precisely because i realized they had no sort of content or conceptional framework to even understand what was remarkable about the 1950s and the 1960s without pulling out farther before they went in. For them, the Civil Rights Movement was like an aal that you come back in the south pacific. It must have come from nowhere, right, and youre glad to see its because you need to pause for a second. But that doesnt necessarily mean that they see its connection to the earth below. With the Long Civil Rights Movement debate got me thinking about and what i ask you to think about is, what does it do to frame world war i as a key moment in the freedom struggle . What does it do to make that the sort of central story as i did in talking about the war. It orients us forward and backward. Its hard to talk about black soldiers and activists living their lives in the war years without looking back at the veterans who built visions of citizenship and articulations of reconstruction. And at the same time to anticipate the next generation of folks who would send a movement with Forward Motion into the post world war ii years. I do this. One of the main takeaways from my book is the generation who made the postworld war ii generation possible came of age during world war i. The world war i cohort fashioned, as ive written, their politics out of the aspirations, agonies and failures of their wartime experience and they applied the lessons of the First World War to build a successful movement in the second. Thinking about this, in the sort of big Long Civil Rights Movement narrative, serves the valuable purpose of identifying the strivers of the world war ii era as the producers of the postworld war ii and postworld war ii era struggle. Theres a way, if you read my book, you could vague a more imagine a version where at the end of the movies, they give you the name, an kin skywalker grows up to be darth vader. He grows up to train the cohort to produce the strategy to undo segregation through litigation and gives us thurgo thurgood marshall. I told you about hayward hall. The simplistic version of what i do in my book is exactly this, like, i chose my characters to get you to this place. I hope that ive done something more nuanced than that. But, you know, you know how graduate students are. Im sure you have some that say that i havent. [ laughter ] what this kind of also flags for me and one of the things that i try to be mindful of in this work on world war i and on current work now is teology and the way in which placing world war i within the framework of a Long Civil Rights Movement actually sort of pushes you towards an outcome that we know but try not to write towards but have a hard time resisting. As an exercise, ive tried to ask myself, how might i have written my book if there had never been a second reconstruction . What would stand out if there had been no Mass Mobilization after world war ii that is the thing that we can unquestionably call the Civil Rights Movement . And im not sure, like, this might be a little halfbaked. But i think what sticks out to me is that without that known end point, the story of global encounter and the way that it opened up worlds of possibility takes even more of a from stage, right, that if one of the things the part of me that came to this through southern history and histories of the black freedom struggle, foregrounded the Long Civil Rights Movement, there was another part of me that was curious about the africanamerican folks who ended up in the world not because they were du bois and thinking hard about it already, but crazy circumstance placed them there, right, and in that story, you get people who find themselves in the middle of an imperial war with subjects from across the world before they necessarily have even, like, conceived of a notion of a thing called empire, right . And so the histories the stories that are embedded in that and the work thats been done by people in this room and people at this conference on kind of growing senses of diaspora, anticolonial movements, those come to the fore even more. And so one of the things that does for me or that i end up thinking about is the ways in which the Long Civil Rights Movement frame might actually proventialize africanAmerican History. Im making cold war, civil rights the peak story of midcentury, right, removing the Civil Rights Movement, thinking about where you stand from world war i, actually leaves you with a narrative in which this history of the 20th century this might be replacing one telos with another, but as a history of anticolonial struggle and then of decolonialization. I think in some ways that brings us back to du boiss 1915 article, that im far more beholden to than i think i registered until many decades after i had first read it. I would say that probably everything that ive thought as a historian, i realized that either du bois or James Baldwin said before i did far more eloquently. But i think theres a value, right, these are not the only stories to tell but i think theres Something Worthy and worthwhile in thinking through the war about how we place it in our own histories, right, and what we do when we place them in those history that is will keep us coming up with new and fresh ideas and not just fighting about the old ones. Thank you. [ applause ] good afternoon. I spend a lot of time thinking about violence. And i dont know that you would necessarily assume that, if you saw me walking down the street. I always say that, you know, one were to find my purse, they would wonder who the serial killer is for the stuff thats in there. But i find that i cant step away from this contemplation. Im struck by how much people who write about the great war talk about or evoke this theme of violence as an absolute shock especially for europeans, a shock that they themselves could be that violent, when the violence was happening in africa, asia, in the americas, in the caribbean, there was a sense to that violence. But theres something shocking and destabilizing about the violence that world war i lays bare. And that traumatic scale of the violence and the impact of that violence is something that world war i historians return to over and over as though its something that they cant yet grasp. The nature of that violence, the scars both on people and on the landscape made wrought by that violence, the shock to soldiers and governments made real by the violence, the shock that we could even do such things to each other, other civilized europeans or so it was said. I spend my time contemplating how all of this talk of violence must have sounded to africanamericans and even other people of african decent during the great war era. How did reports of unspeakable horrors against belgiums and french people and polls, serbians, ar me serbians, jews, how did that change the app pa temperature for africanamericans with respect how then to explain their lives steeped in violence, a life that extended during the war to haitians, cubans and other caribbean folk. For one thing, much of the language used to describe and grapple with the violence let loose during the great war reveals the shock and horror experienced by men and women trapped in war zones so theres much talk about the dismemberments, right, and how people felt about either seeing soldiers survivaling soldiers in bits, or how much soldiers wrote about the shock of seeing their loved ones, pals in the trenches, in parts. Theres a lot of terror of not knowing when this stillness in the war zones would be up ended because of violence. A lot of soldiers tell us that when it was quiet, it was much more frightening than when the bombs were raining down around them. And so that not knowing when the violence would start again seemingly proved very disruptive for civilians and soldiers alike. And yet africanamericans lived with that silence and then not knowing where the violence would pop out, right . Right around this time in particular. Whole town and is villages are emptied or leveled on both the western and eastern front. Confirming their opponents determination to make violence a permanent presence in france or belgium or poland or any of the various points along the eastern front. Churches set aflame, people on the run for their lives, properties abandoned or destroyed. All of these accounts resonated deeply with africanamericans who had, since the end of reconstruction, lived with all of this kind of violence often, many of the same dimensions of that violence knocking europeans back on their feet had for africanamericans been the way that you negotiate your way to church on a sunday morning. The way that you go to the store. Right . And so im trying, as i walk around, bike around, sit on planes, im trying to understand the impact of, you know, sort of hearing this sort of martyr story about what has happened to europe because of violence and being a person in a small village and we could pick any number of riots during the great war era, right, and going, wow, interesting that that was so devastating for you. And yet you dont understand when we try to explain living in a state of constant fear and assault. Of course, lynching comes to mind most obviously when we talk about violence and something that africanamericans lived with daily. Whether thats the fear, the stories, the reality. But so too did arson and banishment really define africanamerican life arguably more so than lynching. Im struck when i look at africanamerican newspapers by the number of accounts or even not like nonafricanamerican newspapers, the number of accounts of white americans just pouring oil on black people and lighting them on fire at movie theaters, public squares. This was a way of acting out that violence. And if africanamericans thought about banishment and arson as we know they did, then hearing stories like about the genocide would have resonated for them. Thats one of the things i explore, how africanamericans, as christians and as oppressed violently oppressed minorities really saw in racialized attacks in europe and elsewhere, of course, but right now im writing about europe, how they saw these moments as very powerful echoes for their own experiences. I think about the belgium congo and how much it mattered for africanamericans before the war. One of the things im arguing in my work is that, you know in a supersimplistic way, while it might have been a shock to europeans to find out that they could be incredibly violent to each other, it was no shock to anybody who had been on the receiving end of their boot. And the belgium congo had been something that africanamericans had been writing about, had been talking about, and pointing very specifically to the impact of that european contact and violence on black bodies, right, the photographs of missing hands, especially for children, the dismemberment that is so surprising to europeans during world war i is something that people of african decent all over the world had been dealing with, living with, trying to survive from, i suppose. And so for me the belgium congo and the brutal, brutal expansion of british are important ways that i think about that violence and its impact on black people. We know that during world war i, the u. S. Absolutely took advantage of the distraction in europe to spread their tentacles into the caribbean and that arrival registered as violence for haitians, dominicans, the cubans could have told them earlier, right . But it takes on a different form in the caribbean because there it is the navy, the American Army that are the not armed forces, sorry, i dont want to get the navy army people worked up in this room. But it arrives on a jim crow platter that is that is rebranded to fit with the caribbean. Rather than colored and white signs, we get silver and gold signs to demarcate jim crow and make it recognizable in the area. Silver because thats what black people were paid, the currency in which black people were paid, in the caribbean, especially, working in the zone, and gold if you were white. So thats those are the signs that would have been on the doors. I think about the violence in the philippines, right, that, again, had weighed on africanamerican minds, especially given the glee with which so Many Americans celebrated the acts of violence against the bodies of filipinos and for africanamericans that needed very little, if any, translation. And ill end with this. I think a lot about how germans framed their sense of their wound and experience of violence after the war by pointing to black soldiers who were part of the armed forces in the occupied the occupied territory, the region west of the rhine river. And even before these black soldiers arrived, most of whom were attached to the french army but not exclusively, even before they arrived, the germans marshalled all the language we knew to make it clear how black bodies were a danger of violence upon them. You may be familiar with the talk of rape and alleged rape cases. But they talked about how black people ate their bodies and how they collected their noses and their ears and precisely the things that we see with lynching. And so this inversion of violence and its use to either frame the war at the beginning or dismantle the fragile piece at the end of the war that weighs on my mind all day every day because i think its so important to pull of these themes apart, but im not yet sure how to do it in a manner that well, frankly, isnt too dark for the folks who have to read it. But that also makes it clear that these were for me the great war era is a period of not just state sponsored but carefully calibrated deployment of racialized violence and thats my departure point with my project. Thank you. [ applause ] how does it feel to you think to go last . So i consider myself to be a scholar, activist, attracted to history with policy implications and applications. With that said, please allow me to introduce my comments through the voice of contemporary observer, race activist, scholar, William Pickens who opined that world war i made clear to all but especially to blacks that character is more fundamental than reputation, episoend quote. The former being imposed and the other intrinsic. Moreover, as pickens saw it, the war allowed blacks from africa and america the opportunity to make their, quote, first great record as a modern International Factor and a positive world influence, end quote. A lesson never to be lost on blacks. World war i helped to produce a selfconfident new negro and the change that comes later owes much to them born out by Chad Williams and torch bearers of democracy also david louiss assertion that the parade of the 369th on february 17, 1919, marked the beginning of the harlem renaissance. Major harlem renaissance figure poems, dont tread on me, and rallying cry to the masses to action, make that connection clear and real. But to listen to what robert called the whispering gallery, led by general robert e. Lee bullard, colonel alan garear and the and formalized in the disgraceful Army War College report of 1925, heres what he had so say, blacks could do nothing im sorry, could do everything but fight. They were only dangerous to themselves and women. And there was much, much more maligning and disparagement from grear who signed the document from general baloo which told blacks dont go where youre not wanted. No matter if you have the legal right to do it, you cant do anything that will cause trouble, or well deal with you. The war college report, all officers agree without exception that the negro lacks initiative, displays little or no leadership, and cannot accept responsibility. Theyre also rank cowards in the dark. Nonetheless, and we would never guess this fact, that some 70 black soldiers received the distinguished Service Cross during world war i. The nations second highest military honor and that at least eight africanamerican soldiers were nominated for the medal of honor, the highest such honor. That no black received the medal of honor during the war speaks to its importance as an exclusionary instrument and marker of white gallentry. Ironically, the only two black medal of honor recipients from world war i, freddy stouers in 1991, and Henry Johnson, almost 100 years after the war in 2015, received no American Honors until well after the war. This denial of valor undoubtedly had immense psychic damage. Henry johnson dissipated and died ten years after the war. Roberts, his comrade in action, barely 17 years old at the time, committed suicide in 1948. Another hero of the 369th, william a. Butler, one of the eight known medal of honor nominees committed suicide in 1947. Henry johnson was a man of few words and i believe to be illiterate. But this expression by him probably dictated to the author and mediated also really gives us a sense of what the world war i black veteran went through in postwar life. He wrote to Theodore Roosevelt jr. September 7th, 1927, im writing to say that i sincerely appreciate the article you had published in the paper concerning me and the way i fought to help protect this country during her struggle with germany. But i am very sorry to state that i dont think my uncle sam is treating me just right. As my pension has been reduced to 60 per month from 100, i have a sick wife, a weakened body, and my health is gone. Thus making it utterly impossible for me to work. How am i to make it in this life. The odds are all against me. Nevertheless, im no slacker. This i have demonstrated to all. I have endured the hardships of battle during the war and have fought hard and im doing the same in peace. I shall be very grateful to you if you will only attend to this matter for me, for i cannot manage to get alone. Very respectfully yours, william h. Sergeant johnson. Henry johnson was dead two years later. So i mentioned that im an activist, that i like history that can be applied. So in addition to my role as a consultant to the United States world war i centennial commission, im also on a medal valor medal review task force dedicated to writing the wrongs of the africanamerican soldier in world war i in terms of proper recognition. As ron armstead is has said, why do we have to wait 100 years to do these kinds of things. Well, i guess the 100th anniversary of the great war brought the war and its injustices into clearer focus. So with that, i end my presentation. Thank you. [ applause ] thank you, everyone, for these brilliant and thoughtprovoking presentations. I can certainly monopolize the conversation but i did just want to throw out a couple questions at you. First, kind of thinking about just frameworks, and how we can begin to grapple with the the significance, but also the scale of the war for africanamericans and other peoples of one of the clear themes that has come out in your comments and presentations is this theme of empire, right. Just how the war as professor lewis so eloquently describes originated in this european thirst for imperial conquest in 1898 and continuing into the 20th century. How the imperial dementions brought contact with one another and it was a manifested in the context of the war itself. Im wondering if we could kind of take that framework and train it more explicitly on the United States, since were thinking about what the war meant for africanamericans, thinking about the United States as an imperial nation. Woodrow wilson in his war address famously said that the United States was fighting to make the world safer democracy, had no selfish aims, no territorial aspirations, were the defenders of mankind. Kind of distancing the United States from these very clear and obvious imperial dimensions of the war, but as we know, the United States was fully committed and deeply invested in the project of empire, whether its in the philippines, whether its in mexico, certainly in the caribbean, 1917, the jones act, puerto rico, so i wonder if we could maybe talk a little bit about that and just what it means to think of the United States as an imperial nation, to think of world war i in the american context as an imperial war and what that meant for africanamericans. Thats an Excellent Way of framing what weve all addressed in our different ways. Im trying to remember i was reading the papers, the list of papers for these three days and im sure that im not hallucinating, but ive been reading a number of things lately. But i believe there was one panel or presentation that dealt with collaborators, africanamerican collaborators in the diaspora. The role of africanamericans in the philippines and in mexico was proactive, we were very proud of the fact that we advanced the imperial project and i suppose the logic of that was the logic that disgraced for a moment the man youre going to deal with so revelatorily, w. E. B. Du bois when he wrote closed ranks. Offending his lifelong socialist friends because he believed that through the penance of dying on the battlefields would come a recognition of citizenship. And so there is schizophrenia in our experience in the imperial project. And i suppose it was rather logical to have this view that if we advance the nations manifest destiny, we will be compensated. The only reason why that hasnt happened is because of color, race, whatever that term signifies. Otherness. And the remarkable thing is that it is so embedded that the movement in this country, the narrative is, high peaks of togetherness, of kumbaya, of legislation, of Supreme Court decisions and the rest of it. And then suddenly there is a reaction to it, a zerosum panic, the unmeltable ethnics rearri revive so we have another experience. Were going through the worst experience in modern American History now. This is the most obscene moment in our history. And it is so awful that it may in fact cost all of us democracy. It may well be in 30odd days, what is it, november 6th, that in fact the hope that the congress, the house will be accessed by the democrats will not be fulfilled. And in that happens, we then are in totally unknown territory in which race and otherness and greed, all themes that are a part of our great experience of exceptionalism, will in fact dominate everything. And so i think we must say that we dont want to be part of anymore imperial projects. They will not serve us because in fact empire is for the dominant group, that is to say the rich, the very rich. If anything is clear now, our experiment is one in which the transfer of 90 of all the money in 30odd years is not a good thing. But those who have benefitted will do everything to keep going. And so we will see where our imperial projects goes. I wrote a book about Wendell Willkie and he wrote a book about called one world which was broadly read and the last chapter is on is on race. And he conceives that race in america is simply a version of imperialism abroad, an insight that is quite remarkable. He was quite unusual. I want to remind everyone in the room that during the great war, the u. S. Is in an imperial foot race and its clear about that. And heres what i mean. First, it uses the the u. S. Uses the distraction of the war to say, well, someone has to protect the caribbean. After all, the germans have parked one of their warships just off the coast of the dominican republic. Theyre checking it out in case no one is looking and they can pounce on panama. The u. S. Says we have to send all of our virtually all of our warships down there to check the germans who, frankly, didnt have any coal and could they couldnt un they couldnt move the ship which is why it was off the coast they were taking a break. Theres that. The u. S. Is also very aware of the fact that the british cant spread any thinner. And the only people that the british have kind of keeping an eye on the caribbean, the only white folks en masse in this area are the canadians who during world war i will say both to Great Britain and to a lesser extent to the United States, and i quote, we too need our own deep south. And so canada will make the case for its modernity, its place in that imperial foot race by saying that they need black people as well that they can control, that they can keep in political purgatory. 10 the u. So the u. S. Is aware of that, and the u. S. Is aware that there are people already talking about some version of independence for themselves throughout the caribbean. And so that imperial launch is an important time for the United States. We cant forget that we get im not even american, so i have to stop saying we. You get some fabulous places to vacation during spring break as part of that imperial footrace. Listen, denmark, you cant handle imperialism, so why dont you just buy a couple islands, take them off your hands. But the real concern is the danes would not be able to keep the germans at bay in europe. A and if the germans took denmark, then they would be within an easy front crawl to the United States from the turks and kay yoecaicos, for campleex. And the imperial race hasnt stopped in the pacific. That it is because of that violence in europe and everyones shock about it, that the u. S. Can use the pacific to hide, tuck away its imperial work. Those africanamericans that adrian tells us about in houston, who had throughout the years leading up to the war, flexed some frightening muscle in the southwest, are sent, its precisely those africanamerican soldiers who have the most and most modern military experience, the only ones who had seen the use of machine guns in theater in mexico, those guys are sent to hawaii and to the philippines to sit out the war. So the pacific becomes a place where the United States can tuck away those standing up against its imperial aims. And, of course, during the war, the americans get to say, what filipinos . We dont have any insurgents. But the war with the philippines doesnt really quiet down until 1923. So there is plenty. The imperial work of americans is very, very clear to the filipinos during the war. I actually think that bringing up black soldiers helps us train would you say, train our sort of eye more explicitly on the u. S. And thinking about the empire, in ways that are more complex than we sometimes credit. These folks than say talking about Buffalo Soldiers are people who spent their career at war with other nations and what we now call the american west, right . So if were going to talk about empire in the u. S. , what we need to understand is that the u. S. Was a Settler Colonial Society evolving to have its imperial moment. And that africanamericans are in the center of that, in ways that are not always libbatory, and theyre staking their cleem on a fully realized citizenship by extending a racialized regime and often extinguishing the people who are too much of a conundrum for the sort of like overall sort of elites of power to think about. Theyre actually helping to strengthen and build the cages that will provide the structure that keeps them from moving, too, right . So thats career soldiers. Then you have world war i, and you have the draftees, you have all of the folks who come in, who then join these interrelated dynamics in ways that they are sometimes cognizant of and sometimes not, and the violence that they sort of see, the things they run up against are all part of these larger systems and structures. I also say, i was thinking when you were talking, sage, that what you hear folks talking about in the press, the shock of this violence is actually about violence out of place. Correct. That these are racialized regimes. This is violence that is racialized. What people are saying is, oh, my god, we feel like colored people right now. Like, thats the underlying its when they shut down people who said dont you think the story is White Working Class suffering. By even phrasing it that way, by naming that exception, youre telling us what you think is normal. Its a similar dynamic in an earlier period. Remember too that the retort to wilsons were going to make the world safe for democracy was we ought to be making georgia safe for negroes. So world war i america fought world war i on many fronts, and im not just talking about the western and eastern front. But the wilson wouldnt allow american soldiers to be assigned for the most part to european armies. He did allow some National Guard units, including, you know, the 369th and the others in the 93rd provisional division. So america wanted to dictate the terms of the peace. Unfortunately didnt quite go wilsons way for him. But i want to say that there was also a war fought on the racial front, and one of the main concerns of, you know, government officials and military officials was that they were able to maintain the status quo in terms of race relations, despite what blacks had proven they could do. And that is why we have this denigration and disparagement officially after the war. Its why blacks were virtually removed from combat positions postwar between the two wars. Its why world war ii, the same thing happens again. The 92nd division is not even allowed to train as a division because of the fear that blacks would prove themselves and make claims to the freedom that theyre being denied. National guard units were disbanded after world war i. The 369th did not exist again until 1924. So there is no question that, you know, the american authorities want to make sure that blacks are clolonized afte world war i, despite whatever accomplishments they had made. I want to give an opportunity for the audience to ask questions. We can certainly keep talking here amongst ourselves. We all know each other. Theres a microphone in the middle of the aisle. Please feel free to step up and ask any questions that you may have. Yes, thank you for your presentations. I want to ask permission to ask a question of the panel, as well as the audience. How many of us here have an ancestor, particularly a great grand parent, who served in the First World War . So its many. Its many. Good. And how many have a great grandparent who was killed in the First World War . So theres only one, and thats myself. But i want to thank in particular someone said this whole issue is about who is human, and who is not. And we, i think, overuse the issue of civil rights and its really a question of human rights and who is human and who is not human. Thats why i especially thank i know professor lents is your name, and the last speaker, who treated the issue from the viewpoint of the soldier. And from the correspondence of my grandfather to my grandmother, his fear was not of the germans. His complaint was not of the germans, even though the germans killed him, his complaint was of the white officers, of the white officers over the over the black troops. And one of your alluded to the fact that some of them served under the french. But yone of the general pershing did not consider that black soldiers were human, and they went over there with black soldiers a and the french said you have soldiers you wont let fight . So one of the best books about this whole issue is the American Foreign legion that some of you know about. Because my grandfather served, not under american command, he was killed under french command, which is a disgrace in particular to the country. So i want to thank the commemoration of the of the struggles of the of the africanamerican soldier for recognition as a human being, especially no one i dont think mentioned Sergeant Edgar Caldwell and his legal lynching. So remarks . On paper we have. If i could just respond to that briefly. I think one of the really exciting developments in the study of the First World War and the black experience in the war is to really bring out the humanity of black soldiers for much of the history, even beginning, immediately after the war in 1919, black soldiers were seen as racial symbols. They were seen as heroes, representatives of the race were presented in many respects as these kind of very flat, even uncomplicated figures, because they were seen as so symbolically important for the progress of the race, right . So you have individuals like due boyce, like emmitt scott, like pickens and others who are deeply invested in this intellectual and political project of the black soldier as hero, right . And why someone like Henry Johnson is so important. But i think what our work has tried to do is complicate that, and bring out these other stories and other dimensions of the black war experience, which quite frankly are very troubling. The fact that you did have an entire division who served underneath the french. That the majority of black soldiers didnt serve on the front lines, but were noncomb noncombata noncombatants, ditch diggers, burying dead bodies. But those are the type of human stories that i think are important to tell, if we want a full and complex understanding of what the war meant. I would just like to Say Something about the officers. There was, you know, a trend or maybe even policy to assign white southern officers to command black soldiers. And so they brought with them this, you know, master slave mentality. Of course, west point was a very southern institution, as well. And had all the attitudes if you look at how Charles Young was treated at west point, for example, or flipper, and the guys that didnt make it, a terrible institution. And as late as benjamin o. Davis, jr. , 19321936, no one spoke to him for his four years at west point, except in an official capacity. But his retort was that it was too bad for them, because he was actually a great person, and they missed out all four years on the opportunity to find out, which i just thought was phenomenal. Im glad you brought up this question of the white officers, because it brings us back again to this point about imperialism. The british and the french army and to a lesser extent the spaniards, they sucked in theater so they werent there for long. They too used that model having officers who were familiar with or had been posted in the colonies and therefore, knew negroes best. The South Africans only appoint officers who had either worked in the mines with black people or who spoke indigenous languages. So the u. S. Is mimicking that, and exporting that same power model. At the same time, trying to say that their imperialism is slightly different. So just to add one more thing. One of the things that comes across in soldiers writings, memoirs, letters home, is how exhausting it is to continually be fighting with their fellow americans, who are more invested in enforcing jim crow, than they are in getting them to help with the war effort. And Rayford Logan whose memoirs, if you saw notes on his world war i experience, are worth going to the library of congress and looking at that, because hes writing knowing we are going to be reading from it at some point. So hes basically like, take note. One of the things he says that i tau always quote, he was fighting two wars at once, his and woodrow wilsons. And he couldnt tell you which left him with more scars. Professor lewis, i have two questions. Did dubois ever regret his close ranks editorial. And second, to what degree did his return fighting editorial restore his reputation . Well, there is a note that it was written in a hotel as joel spinguard is about to leave and going somewhere to his wife, amy. And he says, you know, the Board Meeting ive just left the Board Meeting, and it was pretty pretty intense. But this is just between us, dear. The board is sending dubois abroad so he can hold a panafrican congress, and maybe get a better reputation when he comes back. That may have been a bit snarky. In fact, its true. I think dubois very quickly, the backlash from that close ranks amongst people who were professional, who had sort of double and triple vision was enormous. They should couldnt believe that dubois had done it, the timing was so bad. Because it just gave the game away it seemed. So, yes, dubois was troubled by it. And thats why he writes with the same the same lapedary prose, we return fighting by a great god jehovah, if we dont get our rights, we will. And that was to compensate for close ranks. But i think dubois was generally pretty easy with himself and his conscien conscience, because he believed that mostly whatever he did advanced the race. And one or two mistakes was just part of doing the lords work. Dubois left well at night. Im not sure about that, but he probably did. Thank you for the presentation. I was curious about the role and impact of james europe in that First World War. And how you saw what he did as contributing, helping, not helping in terms of how we became how we were seen in terms of the great war. Well, if you see stormy weather, which is a movie thats supposed to be supportive and positive and respectful and a counter to the imagery of birth of a nation and the jazz singer and all that, it starts out with this homage to James Reese Europe, and also about something about the last 50 years of blacks in entertainment. So it only focuses on blacks as entertainers, who are happy in their segregated world. And of course, James Reese Europe is played by earnest whitman in the film. It doesnt say anything about why he wasnt with us any longer, but my point is that the film takes away from the combat contributions of the regiment, and i think that that has been something that has been repeated by lots of scholars to pay too much attention to James Reese Europe. Im not denying that he was a highly inknfluential and path breaking figure in the world of music. But when were talking about world war i, the focus has to be on the combat soldier. And we tried to make sure that we mentioned James Reese Europe, discuss him. But our focus is on blacks as combatants. I was just curious in terms of the impact [ inaudible ] you know, hes credited with introducing live jazz to europe. Thats been debated, at least spreading jazz. No question it was one of the best, if not the best military bands there. They were recorded by pathay records, so the music spread after that. I have a problem too, because the band embraced the moniker appalachian harlem hell fighters, when the men never called themselves that. They were the rattlers, based on the rattlesnake from the gadsten flag, dont tread on me. But the American Press and then the bands, you know, message through, you know, advertising made this moniker stick. So i dont deny his musical influence, but in terms of what the war meant to blacks in terms of proving some kind of capacity for citizenship through bravery, galla gallantry, all that, you dont look to the band for that. I may sound oh, sorry. I was just going to address another part of your question, the potential drawbacks of a focus on James Reese Europe. I think, you know, its fair to say that the 39th harlem hell fighters are the most celebrated and most recognized fighting regiment of africanamericans in the war. And i think in large part thats due to a kind of cultural fetishization of James Reese Europe and jazz and how its this kind of new exotic thing that is somehow quintessentially africanamerican. So thats why the hell fighters in europe received so much attention. I think that comes at the expense of other aspects of the black war experience, particularly on the battlefield. You know, the 92nd Division Still has not received the credit that it deserves for its contributions to the war, and its significance to how the war has been remembered. Particularly during the postwar period, as well. So while i think europe is certainly significant, its also important to think about the totality of the black military experience, especially on the battlefield. I wonder if i might just Say Something more about dubois, because i think i was a little disrespectful of my subject. But when he gets to europe, of course, the exposee of the treatment of the troops and the discovery of the infamous circular that the American Army gave to the french and the french army was to distribute it, warning french women and warning french officers never to accord any kind of respect to fellow officers or to american persons of color. All of that was of Great Service and was exposed in the crisis with great density. In fact, i think that was the one time when the post office was going to invoke its censorship rule, and the magazine was held up for two or three days or Something Like that. So although perhaps he was intemperate in saying lets go die and fight and get our citizenship, and that didnt prove to be what came to pass, he also was an investigative journalist of the first order in exposing the shameful treatment of troops, the only troops who were not allowed to march down the champselysees. All the other participants were. But we removed our negro troops, sent them home. And so we were effaced almost and dubois makes that point. I might sound jaded but i get accused of that once a week. I think europe actually has a legacy that it was harmful to this idea of africanamericans as combatants. Im not blaming him for that, but part of the reason people are so enraptured with this band is because they assuage our worry about black men with guns. Because they have trumpets and saxes instead of guns and weapons. Can you imagine just the band with machine guns . That would have been very alarming. Europeans eat it up because the americans they already dont think that much about the americans coming. Theyre green, it doesnt matter if theyre black or white, theyre still green as soldiers. But then here theyre part of the first wave that help boost morale with their music, and its not an accident that reese is sent on a 25city tour shortly after getting there, but what happens is the british are worried, too, about all this attention, so they whip up a group of black, canadian and british jazz players and send them on competing tours. These guys are going to little tiny villages in the french countryside that sometimes have bans of black people being in town when theyre on r and r, but they welcomed them for mayors childrens birthday parties and opening of hospitals, all of this stuff, again, creating critical distance away from the battlefield and makes them seem as though the americans are just here to we had seen them before as the fiske jubilee singers and now theyre just bringing a different kumbaya to us. Thats how they write about these tours, and the germans to a certain extent will, too. One of those, a rest area where no blacks were allowed, so the only blacks in town were the band. But not all of them thought they were cute. There is a white american, a critic who talks about james reese sort of preening and all this kind of stuff, being pretentious. Who does he think he is, et cetera. So there was that reaction, as well. Not totally the u. S. , but the canadians are so worried about this exposure to jazz that aer the war they create the Health Department, and one of the first things that the Health Department considers is to ban jazz in canada because it threatens womens virginity because of the way the sounds and syncopations will awaken something in these girls. This they saw from the bands playing in europe. Elvis presley. Yes, exactly
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