"NO NEGROES ALLOWED": SEGREGATION AT THE FRONT IN WORLD WAR I
This account commemorated and celebrated African-American participation in the war, even as it noted segregation and discrimination within the effort to “save the world for democracy.”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5330
"THE NEGRO AND THE WAR": REPORTS IN AFRICAN-AMERICAN NEWSPAPERS
Five different reports from the Norfolk Journal and Guide, and one from the New York Call, arranged chronologically from March to September of 1917. The last piece is notable for it’s analysis of the Great War’s beneficial effects for African American labor.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5054
"TO THE COLORED SOLDIERS OF THE U.S. ARMY"
This propaganda leaflet was dropped by German airplanes behind American lines during World War I. Nearly 370,000 African Americans were drafted into the U.S. Army starting in the fall of 1917 (they were not allowed to join the Marines, and the Navy took African Americans only as cooks and kitchen help). Although more than half of the black troops were in combat units, they remained segregated from white troops. Subjected to racist harassment (including demeaning insults from white officers), black troops were continually reminded of their second-class citizenship. By stressing racist conditions in the United States, leaflets such as this attempted to destroy morale and encourage desertion among African-American troops.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6655
W.E.B. DU BOIS, "RETURNING SOLDIERS"
This impassioned article in The Crisis was written by W.E.B. DuBois, calling for African American soldiers returning from war to continue their fight for democracy at home.
http://www.yale.edu/glc/archive/1127.htm
"THE NEW NEGRO": "WHEN HE'S HIT, HE HITS BACK!"
In the years immediately following World War I, tens of thousands of southern blacks and returning black soldiers flocked to the nation’s Northern cities looking for good jobs and a measure of respect and security. Many white Americans, fearful of competition for scarce jobs and housing, responded by attacking black citizens in a spate of urban race riots. In urban African-American enclaves, the 1920s were marked by a flowering of cultural expressions and a proliferation of black self-help organizations that accompanied the era of the “New Negro.” Many black leaders, including religious figures, embraced racial pride and militancy. This 1921 article by Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, captured well what was “new” in the New Negro: an aggressive willingness to defend black communities against white racist attacks and a desire to celebrate the accomplishments of African-American communities in the North.
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5127