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Three Black Doughboys Arrangements for drafting and deploying the 357,000 African Americans who served in the United States Army during World War I were only gradually arrived at by the War Department in the summer of 1917.1 Although senior of¤cers and bureaucrats made no suggestion that the long-standing policy of assigning the races to separate regiments be revised, they debated the actual function of black troops, where best to train them, and whether black of¤cers should be entrusted with commanding them in battle. The formulation of a policy was accelerated and in®uenced by the Houston mutiny by members of the 24th Infantry. The day after the Houston riot, Acting Chief of Staff Tasker H. Bliss advocated a delayed draft for blacks, followed by minimal weapons-training as near to their homes as possible and rapid transportation to France for labor service in rear areas. He rejected other suggestions, including the concentration of black men in two southern camps, which he regarded as too dangerous, and the provision of basic training for blacks in eight northern camps and weapons-training in France, which was deemed too complicated.2 Secretary of War Newton D. Baker agreed with Bliss, but he maintained in public statements that blacks and whites would be similarly trained and deployed—that they would be sent to all sixteen army training camps and that as many as possible would be used for combat.3 In the end, 80 percent of the black soldiers who reached France wound up in supply or labor regiments—unloading ships, building roads, and reburying the dead. Only two combat divisions were formed—the 92nd, consisting of drafted men, and the 93rd, created from a mixture of National Guard units and draftees. American lack of faith in black combat troops was demonstrated further when, before reaching full strength, the 93rd Division was placed under French command in partial ful¤llment of Pershing’s obligations to the Allies.4 The Wilson administration was well aware of white southern anxiety at the prospect of large-scale black enlistment even before the Houston riot, having been warned by the chairman of the House Military Affairs 74 Committee about probable reactions to the president’s call for “universal liability to service.”5 Between 1906 and 1917, a number of bills had been introduced into Congress by southerners seeking to exclude blacks from the army, prompted initially by the brief riot in 1906 at Brownsville, Tex., involving members of the 25th Infantry, and later as part of a general campaign of denigration of the race. In the debate prior to the passage of the National Defense Act of 1916, Sen. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, a progressive in many respects but also a radical racist, declared that “a negro may become an obedient effective piece of machinery, but he is devoid of the initiative [sic] and therefore could not be relied upon in an emergency .”6 Early in August 1917, a South Carolinian delegation consisting of Gov. Richard I. Manning, Sen. Ben Tillman, and Sen. Ellison Smith visited the War Department to protest against a proposal to train black Puerto Ricans in the Palmetto State. They claimed that “the Puerto Rican Negroes did not understand the Southern method of dealing with the race, and trouble may ensue.”7 The Houston riot produced a further wave of complaints about the presence of African-American troops in the South. The Columbia (S.C.)State called for all the training of black men to be restricted to the North: “Why risk the outbreak of unpleasantness in the South when it is not necessary and when the one great object is to raise, equip, and train an army with celerity?”8 Even some liberal northerners agreed; the New Republic , a New York weekly normally sympathetic to the equal rights campaign , claimed to understand the peculiar unease of the South at the aggregation of “large numbers of lusty young blacks accustomed to no other discipline than that of the plantation.”9 Few publications objected for as long or as rabidly as K . Lamity’s Harpoon, a racist sheet published in San Antonio, Tex., which blustered for months about the “negro characteristic of running amuck when least expected,” and denounced those who favored inclusion of blacks in the army as a “gabble of saphead white negrophiles and coon-chasers.” Since black people lacked “that spirit of absolute obedience to their superiors, which is the ¤rst requisite of a ¤rst class...

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