Paris, Capital of the Black Atlantic: Literature, Modernity, and Diaspora

CHAPTER 2 “The Only Real White Democracy” and the Language of Liberation: The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s

CHAPTER 2 “The Only Real White Democracy” and the Language of Liberation The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s Mark Whalan I found that many subjects were taboo from the white man’s point of view. Among the topics they did not like to discuss with Negroes were the following: American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery ; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro. —Richard Wright, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” Richard Wright’s famous—and famously lengthy—list of taboos for interracial conversation in 1920s Tennessee exhibits much of his talent for grim humor on the subject of white southern racial prejudice. It is also a revealing litany of the totems and shibboleths around which African American struggles for social, material, and cultural inclusion were enacted in the first half of the twentieth century . Each item on Wright’s list had historically been a site of contestation for the status of African American masculinity, a contest the white southerners at the Memphis optics company Wright was working for avoided by their prohibitive silence. France is the only country whose name is subject to this taboo, a prohibition due to African American participation in the Great War of 1914–18, which the United States joined in April 1917. The largest transatlantic movement of black men since the days of the Middle Passage (200,000 African Americans served in France during and after the Great War), was to a country without the social and sexual racial segregation of the United States, and it left a lasting legacy—in France, in the white South, and in African America. Wright’s inclusion of France among the unmentionable aspects of “living Jim Crow” from the distance of 1938 is perhaps only the best known of several testaments to the fact that the figure of the African American soldier returning from the Great War retained a powerful range of political connections in the imaginations of both black and white Americans long after the immediate social consequences of demobilization.1 Despite this, critics have often been silent on the importance of France and French culture to the prolific outpouring of cultural experimentation known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is surprising as the Great War in France afforded African American men opportunities many had not experienced before. As Wright noted, participating in models of masculinity grounded in martial heroism and “manly self-assertion” was crucial, but so was the engagement with a range of global cultures far removed from their peacetime experiences . Such an engagement was often written about in fiction and memoirs dealing with African American participation in the Great War through the trope of the acquisition of the French language, a language that often came to represent democracy, liberty, and a cosmopolitan sophistication. Indeed, white writers committed to the racist paradigms of eugenics or minstrelsy would attempt to mollify the type of white fears that Wright referred to above by dramatizing episodes of inept, or incompetent, African American assimilations of French language and culture. African American servicemen acquiring French culture and language became an area of racial and political conflict, both in terms of representation and in the realities of servicemen returning home.2 Such a conflict exemplified that the The Great War, France, and African American Culture (1920s) 53 54 Mark Whalan mobility in which African American members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) engaged was not exclusively spatial, as their participation in what Modris Eksteins described as the single most important event in establishing the “life in the fast lane” mentality of modern consciousness represented an inclusion in the temporal configurations of modernity (xiv). It was a chance to escape the historical-political system that proclaimed the temporal “belatedness ” of peoples of African descent, to assert that the temporal lag so often used to justify their exclusion from the privileges of modernity was a chimera. While it is true that the transatlantic and diasporic traffic in culture and language were sites of change, agency, and emancipatory politics for what came to be known as America’s...