Black Veterans, Politics, and Civil Rights in Twentieth-Century America: Closing Ranks ed. by Robert F. Jefferson Jr. (review)

The five main contributors to this slim volume take on a critical subject. How did black people’s service in America’s twentieth-century wars include the struggle for civil rights? Owing to Jim Crow and its legacy, black veterans’ patriotism makes for an enduring problem in American history. Why did so many men sacrifice potentially everything for a nation, the majority of whose white citizens vehemently rejected black claims to full citizenship? Puzzling over that question in chronological order, the authors contribute to at least two strands of historiography that are sometimes connected, civil rights and military history.

Unfortunately, with the exception of the last essay in the collection, Elizabeth F. Desnoyers-Colas’s “African American Leadership’s Tug of War with Black Military Service Members: Rhetorical Situation Strategies in the Face of Gulf War,” every contribution amounts to a tale of missed opportunities. Despite efforts by the authors of the foreword and afterword to lend conceptual coherence to these essays, upon closer reading most are often muddled or incomplete in their analyses.

Kevin D. Greene’s piece on blues musician Big Bill Broonzy’s World War I experience suffers because Broonzy’s militancy never comes into focus. Readers know the war changed him and opened his eyes. Without some appreciable account of his follow-through on those experiences, the reader never learns entirely how or why Broonzy’s story is a civil rights story. Greene admits, for example, that “no evidence exists” for why the bluesman made the Great Migration (p. 10). On such slim evidence, Greene imagines that choice and the events leading up to it as something resembling activism, stretching the concept of civil rights to a conceptual breaking point. That Greene uses other examples of activism and militancy—the experience of historian Rayford W. Logan, for example—suggests the author understands the problem (he needs ballast to straighten out the lines of his argument). Nonetheless, resistance can be an awfully supple concept. Had Greene made more extensive and intentional use of the methods of cultural and literary history, showing how Broonzy’s lyrics or songs reflected a new consciousness in the years after his military service, the essay might have fit the bill.

Robert F. Jefferson Jr.’s essay on relationships across the color line between service members blinded while serving in World War II, although on firmer ground, misses some opportunities, too. Readers learn too little about precisely how the servicemen in this government-run convalescent home experienced racial conversations, or at least we do not read those specific stories in the subjects’ own words. This could be a problem of sources. But the overall effect of the essay makes the reader suspect such things happened. The drama comes instead from the many moving stories of how the men learned to live with their disabilities. Yet Jefferson misses a critical opening. Some at the convalescent facility emphatically objected to their portrayal in the pages of Baynard Kendrick’s novel Lights Out (1945) and made their objection known in an organized setting. Jefferson’s reader ought to know more about the novel. What exactly did veterans find so objectionable and why?

Selika M. Ducksworth-Lawton’s chapter, about the storied Louisiana group Deacons for Defense and Justice, covers some potentially interesting ground but never quite brings its strands of interpretation together. Connections between black republican ideology and the strategy and tactics learned through military service never fully materialize. An extensive literature review muddles rather than sharpens things, leaving the reader more confused than illuminated. This is a shame, because the intersection between republicanism and military experience has enormous potential for illuminating the many competing and complementary strands of ideas that made up the classic phase of the civil rights movement. For his part, Jeremy P. Maxwell...