Brothers to the Buffalo Soldiers: Perspectives on the African American Militia and Volunteers, 1865–1917 ed. by Bruce A. Glasrud (review)

Military service has always been an outlet for Americans to gain respect from their fellow citizens and provide career opportunities. In the decades after the Civil War, African Americans looked to build on the successes they achieved while serving in the Union army. Typically, historians have examined the military, social, and cultural exploits of the Buffalo Soldiers, African American men who served in the regular army and were deployed out West. Bruce A. Glasrud, however, has focused historical attention on those African American citizen-soldiers who participated in state militias or enlisted in the Spanish-American War. In doing so, Glasrud collected what he believes are the most influential articles written in the past fifty years examining these soldiers. From Otis A. Singletary’s “The African American Militia during Radical Reconstruction,” and Eleanor L. Hannah’s “A Place in the Parade: Citizenship, Manhood and African American Men in the Illinois National Guard,” to Willard B. Gatewood Jr.’s “North Carolina’s Negro Regiment and the Spanish-American War,” and Roger D. Cunningham’s “‘A Lot of Fine, Sturdy Black Warriors’: Texas’s African American ‘Immunes’ in the Spanish-American War,” Glasrud has brought together nearly a dozen historical treatments of African American military experiences in the post–Civil War years.

As with any edited collection of articles and essays that spans the decades and incorporates differing styles, the occasional disconnect and unevenness occur. This becomes obvious when one compares the various arguments located within each of the two well-defined sections of Glasrud’s collection. The first half of the book explores the extent of African American participation in the state militia movement from Reconstruction to the turn of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, the structure of the book creates a sense of redundancy, as each essay develops similar themes in setting the historical understanding of a particular state’s militia. The rise, sustainability, and eventual collapse of African American militia units in Illinois, Virginia, Alabama, and Texas present similar and parallel paths, with the men experiencing shared difficulties and only occasional successes. What is missing between these individual essays, and what Glasrud dutifully attempts to bridge in his opening narrative, is the relationship between the rise of Jim Crow at the turn of the twentieth century and its impact on the continuation of these African American militia units. The influence of Jim Crow made it impossible for white politicians, even those partial to the African American community, to maintain the militias, especially when African American political power was curtailed. Each article’s conclusion briefly touches upon this theme, but a greater, in-depth analysis is needed on the local, state, and even national levels, especially with the 1903 passage of the Dick Act, the creation of the National Guard, and the federalization of the state militias. In many ways, this nationalization of the state militias transformed Jim Crow from a regional issue into a federal policy with regard to African American citizen-soldiers. A closer examination of Jim Crow through the militia movement could provide further insight into the lack of respect and heightened racial animosity experienced by African American soldiers who served during the Spanish-American War and help bring the two sections of the book together with a common narrative. Perhaps it was Glasrud’s aim to pose these unwritten historical questions to readers in an attempt to push the historiography further and jumpstart future narratives.

The second half focuses on the role of southern African American volunteers serving during the Spanish-American War and the difficulties they experienced during training and deployment. Similar in structure to the initial examination of African American militia units, every essay concentrates on a particular military group or region of volunteer soldiers. The historical arguments each author presents contain similar narratives, as exemplified by the common theme that their...