Great Expectations: African Americans and the Great War Era

Chad Williams's Torchbearers of Democracy begins with the simple question that those of us interested in the Great War era have often wondered about: how could scholars have so long ignored the impact and importance of World War I on African Americans' lives? How could a period that wrought so much carnage, toppled long-standing monarchies, and realigned empires, including those inhabited by millions of black people, have seemingly had little effect on how African Americans (and African American scholars) imagined and reimagined the twentieth century's possibilities? Judging by the limited literature on the period, the erroneous conclusion could be drawn that African Americans had somehow managed to remain mostly unmoved by the war's great shakeups, when in truth, World War I reoriented black life in lasting, dramatic, and quite radical ways. Thrust into a global conflict, African Americans, like so many other Americans, quickly assimilated the geo-political terms in contest during the war, as well as those that came to define peace after 1919. But the real reason that the Great War has been overshadowed by the seemingly more enthralling cold war era is, in part, our contemporary fascination with the civil rights movement, with its iconic figures, rousing speeches, and made-for-television showdowns between unrepentant young African Americans and the most powerful men in America—business owners, mayors, governors, legislators, white supremacists, presidents.

Brave though they surely were, civil rights activists from the 1950s on often resuscitated a boldness first witnessed among African American history's unsung heroes: Great War veterans. Within the last few years, a cast of new scholars has brought to light these men's struggles, their dashed hopes, and their small though symbolically significant victories. These scholars have also made clear that African Americans saw the Great War as a period of epochal social change, when both men and women steered their communities into regaining the civil rights lost since Reconstruction's dissolution in 1877. Just as W. E. B. Du Bois had augured nearly a decade earlier in his essay on diaspora, "The Color Line Belts the World," fighting in France became for African Americans but a different "local phase of a world problem" that included winning freedom from fear at home. Through their published biographies, letters, and essays in the black press, and in letters to their governmental representatives, Great War-era African Americans sowed the seeds that made protest politics possible and viable later in the twentieth century. For instance, African Americans—soldiers and civilians alike—applied continuous pressure on the federal government to allow them to make a purposeful contribution to the war; in exchange, they demanded protection of their suffrage and an end to lynching. In other words, during the interwar years, black women and men tested a range of political strategies that served as crucial training for the social and political movements that enjoyed greater success after World War II.

In their own distinct ways, Chad Williams, Adriane Lentz-Smith, and Mark Whalan each grapple with how African Americans plotted a course through the Great War. At the root, they are all interested in how black soldiers' and citizens' choices gave way to a tradition of militancy apparent in the organizations created by African Americans during the interwar years, the literary forms that they inspired, and the political ideologies that they advocated, particularly when challenging worsening Jim Crow practices. Though Williams, Lentz-Smith, and Whalan have selected very...