In the midst of the long black freedom struggle, African American military participation in the First World War remains central to civil rights activism and challenges to systems of oppression in the United States. As part of a long and storied tradition of military service for a nation that marginalized and attempted to subjugate a significant portion of US citizens, African American soldiers faced challenges, racism, and segregation during the First World War simultaneously on the home front and the battlefields of France. The generations born since the end of the Civil War continually became more and more militant when resisting Jim Crow and insisting on full, not partial, citizenship in the United States, evidenced by the events in Houston in 1917. Support of the war effort within black communities in the United States was not universal, however, and some opposed participation in a war effort to “make the world safe for democracy” when that same democracy was denied to people of color. Activism by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the War Department’s official and unofficial policy, creating avenues for a larger number of black officers in the US Army through the officers’ training camp created in Des Moines, Iowa. For African American soldiers sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the potential for combat experience led to both failures and successes, leading to race pride as in the case of the 93rd Division’s successes, and skewed evidence for the War Department to reject increasing the number of black officers and enlisted in the case of the 92nd Division. All-black Regular Army regiments, meanwhile, either remained in the United States or were sent to the Philippines rather than the battlefields of Europe. However, soldiers’ return home was mixed, as they were both celebrated and rejected for their service, reflected in both parades welcoming them home and racial violence in the form of lynchings between December 1918 and January 1920. As a result, the interwar years and the start of World War II roughly two decades later renewed the desire to utilize military service as a way to influence US legal, social, cultural, and economic structures that limited African American citizenship.
Article
African American Soldiers in World War I
Amanda M. Nagel
Article
Black Girlhood in 20th-Century America
Miya Carey
Examining American history through the lens of black girlhood underscores just how thoroughly childhood everywhere is not “natural” but depends heavily on its social construction. Furthermore, ideas about childhood innocence are deeply racialized and gendered. At the end of Reconstruction, African Americans lost many of the social and political gains achieved after the Civil War. This signaled the emergence of Jim Crow, placing many blacks in the same social, political, and economic position that they occupied before freedom. Black girls who came of age in the 20th century lived through Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, Black Power, and the rise of the New Right. Moreover, black girls in the 20th century inherited many of the same burdens that their female ancestors carried—especially labor exploitation, criminalization, and racist notions of black sexuality—which left them vulnerable to physical, emotional, and sexual violence. In short, black girls were denied the childhood protections that their white counterparts possessed. If fights for cultural representation, economic justice, equal access to education, and a more just legal system are familiar sites of black struggle, then examining black girlhood reveals much about the black freedom movement. Activists, parents, and community advocates centered black girls’ struggles within their activism. Black girls were also leaders within their own right, lending their voices, bodies, and intellect to the movement. Their self-advocacy illustrates their resistance to systemic oppression. However, resistance in the more obvious sense—letter writing, marching, and political organizing—are not the only spaces to locate black girls’ resistance. In a nation that did not consider black children as children, their pursuit of joy and pleasure can also be read as radical acts. The history of 20th-century black girlhood is simultaneously a history of exclusion, trauma, resilience, and joy.
Article
Black Song, Dance, and Theater in pre-World War I New York City
David Gilbert
Between 1896 and 1915, Black professional entertainers transformed New York City’s most established culture industries—musical theater and popular song publishing—and helped create two new ones: social dancing and music recording. While Black culture workers’ full impact on popular entertainment and Black modernism would not be felt until after World War I, the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age were decades in the making. Stage performers Williams and Walker and their musical director Will Marion Cook introduced full-scale Black musical theater to Broadway between 1902 and 1909; songwriters-turned-performers Cole and Johnson expanded the style and substance of ragtime songs along Tin Pan Alley; James Reese Europe created a labor union for Black musicians that got hundreds of players out of Black nightclubs into high-paying White elites’ homes, eventually bringing a 200-person all-Black symphony orchestra to Carnegie Hall for the first concert of its kind at the august performance space. James Europe’s Clef Club Inc. also caught the ears of Manhattan’s leading social dancers, the White Irene and Vernon Castle, in ways that helped disseminate Europe’s ragtime dance bands across America and, by 1913, became the first Black band to record phonographs, setting important precedents for the hit jazz and blues records of the postwar era. While James Europe would go on to win renown as the musical director of the Harlem Hell Fighters—the most-decorated infantry unit to fight in World War I—his prewar community of professional entertainers had already successfully entered into New York City’s burgeoning, and increasingly national, commercial culture markets. By studying some of the key figures in this story it becomes possible to get a fuller sense of the true cultural ferment that marked this era of Black musical development. Stage performers Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson, behind-the-scenes songwriters Will Marion Cook and James Weldon Johnson, and musicians such as James Reese Europe’s artistic and entrepreneurial interventions made African Americans central players in creating the Manhattan musical marketplace and helped make New York City the capital of U.S. performance and entertainment.
Article
Black Women’s Internationalism from the Age of Revolutions to World War I
Brandon R. Byrd
Black internationalism describes the political culture and intellectual practice forged in response to slavery, colonialism, and white imperialism. It is a historical and ongoing collective struggle against racial oppression rooted in global consciousness. While the expression of black internationalism has certainly changed across time and place, black liberation through collaboration has been and remains its ultimate goal.
Since the emergence of black internationalism as a result of the transatlantic slave trade and during the Age of Revolutions, black women such as the poet Phyllis Wheatley and evangelist Rebecca Protten have been at its forefront. Their writings and activism espoused an Afro-diasporic, global consciousness and promoted the cause of universal emancipation. During the 19th century, black women internationalists included abolitionists, missionaries, and clubwomen. They built on the work of their predecessors while laying the foundations for succeeding black women internationalists in the early 20th century. By World War I, a new generation of black women activists and intellectuals remained crucial parts of the International Council of Women, an organization founded by white suffragists from the United States, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, a global organization formally led by Jamaican pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. But they also formed an independent organization, the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (ICWDR).
Within and outside of the ICWDR, black women from Africa and the African Diaspora faced and challenged discrimination on the basis of their sex and race. Their activism and intellectual work set a powerful precedent for a subsequent wave of black internationalism shaped by self-avowed black feminists.
Article
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
Lee Sartain
The NAACP, established in 1909, was formed as an integrated organization to confront racism in the United States rather than seeing the issue as simply a southern problem. It is the longest running civil rights organization and continues to operate today. The original name of the organization was The National Negro League, but this was changed to the NAACP on May 30, 1910.
Organized to promote racial equality and integration, the NAACP pursued this goal via legal cases, political lobbying, and public campaigns. Early campaigns involved lobbying for national anti-lynching legislation, pursuing through the US Supreme Court desegregation in areas such as housing and higher education, and the pursuit of voting rights. The NAACP is renowned for the US Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that desegregated primary and secondary schools and is seen as a catalyst for the civil rights movement (1955–1968). It also advocated public education by promoting African American achievements in education and the arts to counteract racial stereotypes. The organization published a monthly journal, The Crisis, and promoted African American art forms and culture as another means to advance equality. NAACP branches were established all across the United States and became a network of information, campaigning, and finance that underpinned activism. Youth groups and university branches mobilized younger members of the community. Women were also invaluable to the NAACP in local, regional, and national decision-making processes and campaigning. The organization sought to integrate African Americans and other minorities into the American social, political, and economic model as codified by the US Constitution.
Article
Jazz, Blues, and Ragtime in America, 1900–1945
Court Carney
In January 1938, Benny Goodman took command of Carnegie Hall on a blustery New York City evening and for two hours his band tore through the history of jazz in a performance that came to define the entire Swing Era. Goodman played Carnegie Hall at the top of his jazz game leading his crack band—including Gene Krupa on drums and Harry James on trumpet—through new, original arrangements by Fletcher Henderson. Compounding the historic nature of the highly publicized jazz concert, Goodman welcomed onto the stage members of Duke Ellington’s band to join in on what would be the first major jazz performance by an integrated band. With its sprit of inclusion as well as its emphasis on the historical contours of the first decades of jazz, Goodman’s Carnegie Hall concert represented the apex of jazz music’s acceptance as the most popular form of American musical expression. In addition, Goodman’s concert coincided with the resurgence of the record industry, hit hard by the Great Depression. By the late 1930s, millions of Americans purchased swing records and tuned into jazz radio programs, including Goodman’s own show, which averaged two million listeners during that period.
And yet, only forty years separated this major popular triumph and the very origins of jazz music. Between 1900 and 1945, American musical culture changed dramatically; new sounds via new technologies came to define the national experience. At the same time, there were massive demographic shifts as black southerners moved to the Midwest and North, and urban culture eclipsed rural life as the norm. America in 1900 was mainly a rural and disconnected nation, defined by regional identities where cultural forms were transmitted through live performances. By the end of World War II, however, a definable national musical culture had emerged, as radio came to link Americans across time and space. Regional cultures blurred as a national culture emerged via radio transmissions, motion picture releases, and phonograph records. The turbulent decade of the 1920s sat at the center of this musical and cultural transformation as American life underwent dramatic changes in the first decades of the 20th century.
Article
Juneteenth and Emancipation Celebrations
Emily Blanck
Emancipation celebrations in the United States have been important and complicated moments of celebration and commemoration. Since the end of the slave trade in 1808 and the enactment of the British Emancipation Act in 1834 people of African descent throughout the Atlantic world have gathered, often in festival form, to remember and use that memory for more promising futures. In the United States, emancipation celebrations exploded after the Civil War, when each local community celebrated their own experience of emancipation. For many, the commemoration took the form of a somber church service, Watch Night, which recognized the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. Juneteenth, which recognized the end of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865, became one of the most vibrant and longstanding celebrations.
Although many emancipation celebrations disappeared after World War I, Juneteenth remained a celebration in most of Texas through the late 1960s when it disappeared from all cities in the state. However, because of the Second Great Migration, Texans transplanted in Western cities continued the celebration in their new communities far from Texas. In Texas, Juneteenth was resurrected in 1979 when state representative, later Congressman, Al Edwards successfully sponsored a bill to make Juneteenth a state holiday and campaigned to spread Juneteenth throughout the country. This grassroots movement brought Juneteenth resolutions to forty-six states and street festivals in hundreds of neighborhoods. Juneteenth’s remarkable post-1980 spread has given it great resonance in popular culture as well, even becoming a focus of two major television episodes in 2016 and 2017.
Article
Race Films
Alyssa Lopez
In the early 1910s, Black Americans turned to motion pictures in order to resist the incessant racism they experienced through popular culture and in their everyday lives. Entrepreneurs, educators, and uplift-minded individuals believed that this modern medium could be used as a significant means to demonstrate Black humanity and dignity while, perhaps, making money in the burgeoning industry. The resultant race films ranged in content from fictionalized comedies and dramas to local exhibitions of business meetings and Black institutions. Racial uplift was a central tenet of the race film industry and was reflected most clearly in the intra-racial debate over positive versus negative images of Black life. Inside theaters, Black spectators also developed ways to mitigate racism on screen when race films were not the evening’s entertainment. The race film industry encouraged Black institution-building in the form of a critical Black film criticism tradition, Black-owned theaters, and the hiring of Black employees. Race films and the industry that made their success possible constituted a community affair that involved filmmakers, businessmen, leaders, journalists, and the moviegoing public.
Article
Railroad Workers and Organized Labor
Paul Michel Taillon
Railroad workers occupy a singular place in United States history. Working in the nation’s first “big businesses,” they numbered in the hundreds of thousands, came from a wide range of ethnic and racial groups, included both men and women, and performed a wide range of often esoteric tasks. As workers in an industry that shaped the nation’s financial, technological, and political-economic development, railroaders drove the leading edge of industrialization in the 19th century and played a central role in the nation’s economy for much of the 20th. With the legends of “steel-driving” John Henry and “Cannonball” Casey Jones, railroad workers entered the national folklore as Americans pondered the benefits and costs of progress in an industrial age. Those tales highlighted the glamor and rewards, the risks and disparities, and the gender-exclusive and racially hierarchical nature of railroad work. They also offer insight into the character of railroad unionism, which, from its beginnings in the 1860s, oriented toward craft-based, male-only, white-supremacist forms of organization. Those unions remained fragmented, but they also became among the most powerful in the US labor movement, leveraging their members’ strategic location in a central infrastructural industry, especially those who operated the trains. That strategic location also ensured that any form of collective organization—and therefore potential disruption of the national economy—would lead to significant state intervention. Thus, the epic railroad labor conflict of the late 19th century generated the first federal labor relations laws in US history, which in turn set important precedents for 20th-century national labor relations policy. At the same time, the industry nurtured the first national all-Black, civil-rights-oriented unions, which played crucial roles in the 20th-century African American freedom struggle. By the mid-20th century, however, with technological change and the railroads entering a period of decline, the numbers of railroad workers diminished and with them, too, their once-powerful unions.
Article
Red Summer and Early 20th-Century Race Massacres
Ann V. Collins
Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake. Yet, racial violence has had a long and painful history in the United States. From the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, whites strove cruelly and systematically to maintain power and control over their bodies and labor. Indeed, many interactions between ostensible racial groups have centered on white hostility. A type of brutality that proved especially vicious took the shape of white-on-black race massacres. First appearing in the early 19th century and fading by the end of World War II, whites used these types of disturbances to deny African Americans progress and freedom. Destruction of black communities, massive bloodshed, and lynchings characterized these occurrences. The early 20th century, and particularly the Red Summer, marked a critical moment in the history of race relations of the United States—one that proved deadly to African Americans.
Article
Southern Textile Worker Struggles in the 20th Century
Joey Fink
The rise of the southern textile industry in the early 1900s shifted the center of American textile production from the northeast to the Piedmont and created a new class of southern industrial workers: the “cotton mill people.” Throughout the 20th century, larger economic and political forces changed the industry and its people. Technological innovations, wars, and the diversification of the southern economy affected how textiles were made, the consumer demand for them, and mill workers’ wages and working conditions. The labor, civil rights, and women’s movements produced federal laws and legal victories that desegregated the mills, drew attention to the particular vulnerabilities of women workers, and provided protections for all workers against exploitation and poverty. Continuity, however, was as significant as change for mill workers. Women’s labor was always crucial in the mills, and women were key leaders in strikes and organizing drives. Unionization efforts were consistently undermined by technological innovations that replaced human labor, the global movement of capital, and the united power of mill owners and political leaders. Throughout the 20th century, cotton mill people struggled to resist the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization and insist on the dignity and value of their labor. The story of their struggles reveals important dimensions of 20th-century southern labor and life. With the movement of textile manufacturing from the American South to the Global South, their 20th-century struggles offer insights into the 21st-century struggles of textile workers worldwide.
Article
The Harlem Renaissance
Rachel Farebrother
The Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement was an unprecedented flowering of Black American cultural production and activism in the 1920s and 1930s. Shaped by larger social shifts such as the Great Migration—the mass movement of Black Americans from rural southern communities to northern cities such as New York and Chicago—it was a period when, in Langston Hughes’s words, “the Negro was in vogue.” Dancers like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson became celebrities, blues records topped the charts, and there were new opportunities for performance, publication, and artistic collaboration for Black performers, artists, and writers. Harlem became the actual and symbolic capital of the movement (and a significant setting and idea in Black American expressive art), but the outpouring of Black cultural expression spanned the United States (from cities like Chicago to the US South, which was often imagined as a wellspring of Black American folk culture). Since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), conceptions of the Harlem Renaissance have been transformed by attention to the transcultural and diasporic reach of Black cultural production. Participants in the movement, who included luminaries such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nella Larsen, engaged in vigorous debate about art and its purpose; the complex relationships between culture, race, and politics; and questions of audience. The cultural experimentation for which the era is known owes much to interartistic experimentation: writers and artists drew inspiration from jazz and blues, dance, and visual art to reimagine Black American identities and experiences, and to make modernity Black.
Article
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
Susan M. Reverby
Between 1932 and 1972, the US Public Health Service (PHS) ran the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro in Macon County, Alabama, to learn more about the effects of untreated syphilis on African Americans, and to see if the standard heavy metal treatments advocated at the time were efficacious in the disease’s late latent stage. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection and can be passed by a mother to her fetus at birth. It is contagious in its first two stages, but usually not in its third late latent stage. Syphilis can be, although is not always, fatal, and usually causes serious cardiovascular or neurological damage. To study the disease, the PHS recruited 624 African American men, 439 who were diagnosed with the latent stage of the disease and 185 without the disease who were to act as the controls in the experiment. However, the men were not told they were to participate in a medical experiment nor were they asked to give their consent to be used as subjects for medical research. Instead, the PHS led the men to believe that they were being treated for their syphilis by the provision of aspirins, iron tonics, vitamins, and diagnosis spinal taps, labeled a “special treatment” for the colloquial term “bad blood.” Indeed, even when penicillin became widely available by the early 1950s as a cure for syphilis, the researchers continued the study and tried to keep the men from treatment, however not always successfully.
Although a number of health professionals raised objections to the study over the years, while—thirteen articles were published in various medical journals, it continued unobstructed until 1972, when a journalist exposed the full implications of the study and a national uproar ensued. The widespread media coverage resulted in a successful lawsuit, federal paid health care to the remaining men and their syphilis-positive wives and children, Congressional hearings, a federal report, and changes to the legislation concerning informed consent for medical research. The government officially closed the study in 1972. In 1996, a Legacy Committee requested a formal apology from the federal government, which took place at the White House on May 16, 1997.
Rumors have surrounded the study since its public exposure, especially the beliefs that the government gave healthy men syphilis, rather than recruiting men that had the disease already, in order to conduct the research, and that all men in the study were left untreated decade after decade. In its public life, the study often serves a metaphor for mistrust of medical care and government research, memorialized in popular culture through music, plays, poems, and films.
Article
The Urban League
Adam Lee Cilli
White and Black progressives established the National Urban League (NUL) in October 1911 to meet the growing social service needs of inner-city African Americans. Under the leadership of the league’s first executive secretary, George Edmund Haynes, the NUL established its core mission and tactical posture while developing league affiliates in cities across the country. Urban League staff committed themselves to building alliances across racial and class lines to promote Black economic advancement and ensure that African Americans had access to adequate housing and health care. These services became all the more imperative as hundreds of thousands of rural Black southerners made their way to cities during the Great Migration. Urban Leaguers welcomed migrant newcomers, helped them find lodging and employment, provided vocational training courses, sponsored programs to improve health and hygiene, and performed a variety of other functions that collectively provided a social safety system in Black neighborhoods.
While retaining the league’s core social service mission, Urban Leaguers broadened their civil rights goals over time as new possibilities emerged. During the mid-1930s, as the Congress of Industrial Organizations formed with the goal of unionizing all industrial workers, regardless of race or ethnicity, the league developed workers’ councils across the nation to facilitate the entry of Black workers into the labor movement. Urban Leaguers joined the March on Washington Movement during World War II to protest discriminatory hiring practices at industrial firms with defense contracts. Later, the league served as one of the “big five” civil rights organizations orchestrating the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Through these eras and up to the early 21st century, the Urban League has retained its original commitment to expanding economic opportunities for Black Americans and improving health and wellness in inner-city neighborhoods.
