Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (review)

As Chad Williams acknowledges in his early pages, Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri’s The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I (1974) has for thirty years been the major work on African Americans in World War I. That solitary preeminence has been recently redressed by the work of Jennifer Keene, Richard Slotkin, and particularly Adriane Lentz-Smith’s Freedom Struggles: African Americans in the First World War (2009). But Torchbearers of Democracy primarily emerges as an extended dialogue with Barbeau and Henri’s story of African American doughboys as “unknown soldiers,” whose indispensible service in the U. S. war effort went unrecognized and unrewarded by a Jim Crow nation in 1917–1920, and left black America to remember World War I as a depressing episode of national bigotry and betrayal. In contrast, Williams locates African American veterans of the war as crucial symbolic and systemic agents who made World War I a pivotal moment in the long struggle for civil rights. Far from emerging wholly embittered, resigned, and ineffectual from the conflict, these were men who found multifaceted and often successful ways to turn their new experiences of the state, combat, and international travel to pressing African American claims to participatory citizenship.

The initial coordinates of this history will be familiar to scholars of the period. Williams begins with the tumultuous summer of 1917, as America scrambled to get onto a war footing. In East St. Louis in July, labor tensions between the races exploded into a racial pogrom that left between forty and 125 African Americans dead. This was followed by the rebellion of elements of the African American 24^th Infantry in Houston in response to the racially motivated brutality of local police, leading to fifteen deaths (including four law enforcement officers) and the consequent execution of seventeen soldiers for mutiny. Partly in response, the War Department decided that of the 380,000 African American men who served—the majority draftees—only 40,000 would fight as infantry, with the remainder working as labor troops in both Europe and the U. S. In France, the two African American infantry divisions—the 93^rd and 92^nd—had very different experiences. The former, composed predominantly of African American National Guard units and brigaded with the French army, were better-trained and better-led, and despite the frictions of a predominantly white officer cadre and the racial contours of France’s colonialist mission civilisatrice, compiled an impressive frontline record. In contrast, the 92^nd remained within the American Expeditionary force (after being rejected by the British) and were poorly trained, poorly led, and more thoroughly demoralized by the grinding imperatives of Jim Crow handed down by the Division’s leadership. One regiment’s poor performance in the September Meuse-Argonne offensive—which, as Williams points out, was chaotic across all American units, with undistinguished service from many white regiments—was publically seized upon by Army high command as conclusive proof that African Americans made poor officers and “inferior soldiers,” in the words of their commanding general. In the meantime, most African American servicemen worked in labor battalions—unloading ships, building roads, and reburying the dead—in conditions often barely better than chain gangs. By 1919, veterans were highly mobile. A handful remained in France, but the thousands who had migrated to cities and often engaged in violent racial struggles (marked by urban rioting, Southern union-busting, and a spike in lynchings) fought over the issue of whether the prewar racial status quo would remain. African American veterans formed associations, joined militias, wrote radical journalism, and produced fiction and art—fighting physically, politically and culturally (in what many African American intellectuals optimistically termed the “new reconstruction”) to secure the citizenship dividend they believed was owed them for their service to both President Wilson and the nation’s professed ideal of global democracy.

Yet these broad strokes do little to suggest the brilliant...