Robert H. Zieger
Department of History
POB 117320
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL 32611
zieger@ufl.edu
July 29, 2002; September 2005

_______

Historians have rightly viewed the decade of the Great War as a time of repression, disappointment, and racially motivated violence directed at African Americans, but it was also a time of surprisingly positive developments. ⁽¹⁾ The logic of wartime mobilization, along with the Fourteenth Amendment's still-operative provisions for the rights of national citizenship and the presence in the government of liberal voices, resulted in key changes in the practical status and circumstances of African Americans even during the period of the most racist national administration of the 20^th century. Developments in diverse arenas, from the Supreme Court to wartime agencies, combined with the mass migration into northern industrial centers helped to make this turbulent decade a particular pregnant period in the struggle of African Americans for full citizenship. The shortness of duration of American belligerency aborted promising initiatives with respect to labor, social welfare, and industrial status. Moreover, the hopes of African American leaders that loyal support of the war effort would transform race relations were disappointed, but developments in the Great War decade did lay important groundwork for subsequent black advance. Whereas in the wake of war European colonial powers intensified subordination of their African subjects, in the United States the reaffirmation of national citizenship and the right of free transit helped pave the way for eventual civil rights breakthroughs.

The era of the Great War was a time of hope, hardship, and bitter disappointment for African Americans. Indeed, historian John Higham has singled out World War I as being alone among major US conflicts in the lack of progress associated with it, declaring that it "fails completely to fit the general pattern." World War I, he charges, "made race relations worse rather than better. . . ." ⁽²⁾ After the Revolution, a number of states ended slavery and Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, barring slavery in the western territories. The Civil War brought the end of slavery and, eventually, citizenship for black Americans and in World War II the Fair Employment Practices Committee, along with several significant Supreme Court decisions, advanced the dause of racial justice. But no liberationist legislative initiative, executive order, or Constitutional amendment is associated with the war to make the world safe for democracy. Especially in view of horrendous postwar violence that killed hundreds of blacks, Higham's negative judgment about World War I's contribution to racial justice seems right on target.

Yet from another angle of vision, the World War I decade wa a hinge on which eventual civil rights advances turned. The 1910s were in fact an important gestation period in the modern struggle for equality. In the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution, adopted in 1868 and 1870, respectively, former slaves were granted full national citizenship and were awarded the right to vote. For a period of from about 5 to 15 years thereafter, thousands of former slaves exercised these rights and, for longer or shorter periods, participated actively in the rituals and processes of citizenship. But by 1900, a generation after the end of Reconstruction, what had happened to these rights of citizenship and these rituals of participation? A snapshot of the civic rights of African Americans taken in 1900 would reveal a vast shrinkage of the black electorate, mounting social subordination, and widespread and unpunished physical assaults. ⁽³⁾ By the onset of the Great War, the Civil War dispensation seemed moribund, drowned in a sea of racial repression and racist ideology. Yet despite the spate of outrages immediately following the war itself, in the generation following the Armistice the public status and political influence of African Americans expanded decisively. ⁽⁴⁾

During and after World War II, the anti-fascist and anti-racist ideology of the Allied war effort helped to discredit racial prejudice and to promote civil rights. Tangible evidences of an emerging new public consensus abounded. During the war the establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and several landmark Supreme Court decisions; after the war Truman's Commission on Civil Rights in 1947; the civil rights platform planks of the Democratic party in 1948; state anti-discrimination laws all provide support for the theme of the Good War's positive impact. Yet it was not until 1964, 19 years after Hiroshima, that Congress passed a comprehensive Civil Rights Act. Looked at from one angle of vision at any rate, the period from the establishment in 1918 of the Division of Negro Economics-the first federal body since the Civil War-era Freedmen's Bureau to express a friendly interest in the economic circumstances of black citizens-to the adoption in 1941 FEPC is 23 years, exactly the span elapsed between promulgation of the FEPC and adoption of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ⁽⁵⁾ Like the FEPC, the DNE was abandoned after the war emergency; like the FEPC, however, the DNE played a role in placing the concerns of African American workers on the national agenda.

Clearly, the Woodrow Wilson administration was no champion of civil rights. The Great War American state's record in the area of race is at best a checkered one. True, for the first time in American military history, the War Department made provision for the training of black officers. True also that the Army grudgingly conceded the formation of two black combat divisions, units of which fought with great distinction in France. And it is also true that Secretary of War Newton Baker broke precedent by appointing a special advisor on Negro affairs, Tuskeegee principal Emmett J. Scott.

The actual record of the Army and of the administration generally, however, was dismal. The rapid and ruthless execution of thirteen soldiers of the 24^th Infantry regiment in December, 1917, for their alleged role in racial disturbances in Houston the previous summer provided a shocking preview of the kind of treatment black recruits might expect. The story of the Army's disdain for and mistreatment and misrepresentation of its black combat units is well-known. The abuse of tens of thousands of black troops who served in engineering and construction battalions, often kept in prison-like confinement, scarcely less so. During training in Kansas, the commander of the 92d Division promulgated an order stating "The Division Commander has repeatedly urged that all colored members of his command. . . should refrain from going where their presence will be resented." In France, this same general openly referred to his men as "the rapist division" and refused to permit photographing of the unit's Medal of Honor winners. White officers and soldiers spread vicious rumors about the behavior of their black compatriots to discourage contact with French civilians. U.S. black troops were not permitted to march in the Paris victory parade, unlike their French colonial counterparts. Postwar assessments of black troops' combat performance pounced on relatively minor episodes of disorganization and confusion to brand blacks as incapable of fighting under modern conditions. In short, in the words of one black sergeant, the "American Negro soldier in France was treated with the same contempt and undemocratic spirit as the American Negro citizen is treated in the United States." ⁽⁶⁾

On the civilian side, the Wilson administration's record was equally bleak. From its earliest days the southern-dominated administration had imposed rigorous segregation within the federal bureaucracy and had systematically relegated black employees to subordinate status. Moreover, although around 150 African Americans were victims of wartime lynch mobs and urban pogroms, the only public pronouncements made by members of the administration about the dangers of mob violence specifically mentioned only anti-German episodes. Bureau of Investigation and Military Intelligence agents harassed dissident blacks, gave credence to even the most bizarre reports of African American disloyalty, and ignored or covered up violations of civil rights. The Wilson administration routinely treated black dissent with a combination of empty gestures and stern repression rather than offend the sensibilities of white southerners by advancing positive programs of race improvement. Widespread in the black community was the accurate understanding that, war or no war, the ruling Democratic party was no friend of African Americans. Blacks, declared the Chicago Defender in 1917, could expect little consideration while "the south is in the saddle." ⁽⁷⁾

Even so, however, the logic of wartime mobilization, as well as the proclivities of some key members of the Woodrow Wilson administration, did at least briefly allow a glimpse of what a more racially egalitarian order might look like. There were some cracks in the wall of racial hostility, notably in the area of manpower mobilization. The mass migration of, eventually, a half-million African Americans from the South to centers of war industry in the North evoked panicky reactions and calls for repression and curtailment. And indeed this exodus was a remarkable phenomenon that the sudden ending of European immigration, the devastating effects of the boll weevil, and the hunger of blacks for participation in the political, social, and economic opportunities that an expanding America offered. ⁽⁸⁾ In 1919, the new Journal of Negro History collected and printed scores of letters sent to northern newspapers and migrant aid organizations that gave a vivid human face to this great migration and that provide testimony, at once eloquent and poignant, of the aspirations of a generation of black aspirants. They poured into the offices of the Chicago Defender and Urban League by the hundreds though 1916 and 1917 from Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas; Moss Point, Passagoula. and Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Shreveport, Plaquemine, and Alexandria in Louisiana; and from Chattanooga, Charleston, New Orleans, Jacksonville, Savannah, Atlanta, and Mobile. "We are working here at starvation wages. . . ," declared a Mississippian. "I work but dont get but small wedges I am up bilder of my colord race. . . ," insisted a Floridian. And from Macon, Georgia: "here. . . we have to be shot down here like rabbits for every little orfence. . . ." But more dominant was the note of determination and opportunity. "I learn you can assist me in bettering my condition," wrote a Texan to the Urban League. "With a little experience I would make a competent automobile" mechanic, an Atlanta native believed. ⁽⁹⁾

Wartime legislation designed to provide support for the female and juvenile dependents of conscripted soldiers provided further evidence of the unintended but difficult to circumvent egalitarian thrust of both federal initiative and the logic of manpower mobilization. In the fall of 1917, Congress provided an across-the-board allotment of $30.00 a month for all married conscripts. With allowances for children, the monthly stipend could reach $65.00. Designed to keep intact male breadwinning status during the war emergency, the measure did not-nor could it-take need or race into account. At a time when southern agricultural workers often earned less than a dollar a day, these federal allotments and allowances, distribution of which entirely bypassed the local power structure, spelled a powerful disincentive for African American women to continue to work in the fields or as domestic servants, adding to the South's perceived manpower (or in this case, womanpower) crisis. ⁽¹⁰⁾

Both the Great Migration and the perceived affects of the allotment program created consternation among important Democratic constituencies. The mass movement of blacks northward, along with fears of the effects of family allotments on local labor markets, alarmed planters and politicians, accustomed to a plentitude of cheap labor. Complained a Louisiana congressman in July, 1917, "The negroes have been leaving in bunches of twenty five to fifty every Saturday night for the last three months." ⁽¹¹⁾ Reflecting complaints by whites that allotment checks were drying up supplies of low wage domestic workers, the mayor of Savannah, complained that "the laborers find they can support themselves without working full time. . . ." Encouraged by the US Army's Provost General, southern cities and states adopted "work or fight" ordinances, ostensibly as a means of compelling unpatriotic "slackers" to contribute to the war effort but in reality, in the southern racial context, a means of forcing blacks to accept substandard wages in their accustomed agricultural or domestic work. ⁽¹²⁾

Hardly less concerned were labor unionists and political leaders in the host states and cities. Thus, in the same month Minnesota governor John Lind wired labor secretary Wilson that "The government must stop the movement of Negros into this section at once[.] I shudder to think of the consequences if this is not done." And, assessing responsibility for the savage racial assaults in East Saint Louis, in June and July of 1917, a committee of Illinois labor leaders declared that "the riots were due to the excessive and abnormal number of negroes . . . [pouring into] East St. Louis." ⁽¹³⁾

The effects of the migration and the implications of the allotment system triggered calls for federal regulation of labor mobility. Both southern economic elites and northern labor interests urged the Department of Labor to act. Surely the wartime emergency would enable the Department of Labor to stop the flow of labor northward and provide federal support for local "work or fight" measures.

To be sure, there was no constitutional basis for the restriction of citizens movements. Calls for the administration to "do something" about the black exodus rarely acknowledged the difficulty of restricting U.S. citizens' free movement across state lines. Presumably, those calling on the government to block black migration northward were implicitly urging such a policy as an emergency war measure of some sort. Here, however, they ran into difficulties, for with the virtual cessation of European immigration that the outbreak of the war had caused industrial employers were equally adamant in asserting their desperate need for black labor in northern munitions works.

Southern white employers nonetheless fought hard to retain their entitlement to geographically restricted, low wage black labor privilege. In the 1910s, southern states routinely passed legislation designed to impede or halt outside labor recruitment. State and local ordinances typically imposed prohibitive licensing charges on recruiters. Southern mailmen confiscated copies of newspapers such as the Chicago Defender that encouraged the exodus and contained practical information for would-be sojourners. Southern state and local officials also sabotaged the federal government's efforts to recruit workers for military construction. In May, 1918, for example, the director of the United States Employment Service (USES), an arm of the Department of Labor, complained that "Florida has arrested numerous of these labor agents and now has in jail at Gainesville two officers of our Service who have been recruiting common labor for the Army projects at Norfolk." State officials told USES officers that "Florida absolutely forbids recruiting labor from the state." ⁽¹⁴⁾

Federal agents sometimes endorsed white southerners' efforts to retain the benefits of cheap, captive labor. For example, in the summer of 1918, one southern saw mill operator complained that contractors building the government's great munitions complex at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, were "offering my niggers . . . $3.80 and $4.00 a day, while I am paying them $2." USES Director John Densmore sympathized with this dilemma, thus reflexively endorsing southern white employers' sense of entitlement to low-wage black labor. While duly pointing out that it would not be legal for his agency openly to dissuade the movement of black labor toward more remunerative opportunities, Densmore pledged that "if the $2 fellow in the sawmill down there is satisfied with his $2-and he is or he would not be working there-we, as part of the Government, are not going to . . . lay before him newspapers showing what they do at Muscle Shoals to get him to move away from there. We will let him alone. . . .'" Representatives of the Department of Agriculture, most notably southern county agents, always sensitive to local white constituencies in the South, were more aggressive in aiding planters and other employers to discourage blacks from migrating, demanding higher wages, or even changing jobs. Since the United States Supreme Court had in the past sanctioned certain kinds of restrictions on geographical mobility-approving, for example, state laws imposing heavy licensing fees on labor agents, the clear intent of which were to impede black agricultural workers' freedom of movement-there was no guarantee that in the perfervid atmosphere of wartime emergency that the Woodrow Wilson administration could not have found ways of acceding to the demands of these important constituencies. ⁽¹⁵⁾

Overall, however, Secretary of Labor Wilson resisted these pressures. He did acknowledge that "The migration of negroes from the South . . . in larger numbers than can be assimilated in the North has caused a great deal of anxiety to the Department of Labor, both because of the fear of friction in the North and the shortage of labor in the South." And the Department of Labor's agencies most intimately involved with manpower mobilization, notably the USES and the DNE, did at times advise potential migrants of the perils of relocation, even as they counseled southern employers that improved wages and conditions of employment would help to keep black workers on the farms. Nonetheless, Wilson repeatedly pointed out to advocates of governmental restriction that no agency of the government, even during wartime, had any authority to impede the free movement of people across state lines. Moreover, the secretary and his aides resisted the "work or fight" movement that peaked in the summer of 1918, despite pressure from potent southern political sources and the military itself. In the end, though politically disfranchised and socially reviled, African Americans simply could not, finally and generally, be treated as other than US citizens when it came to the fundamental right of free transit. ⁽¹⁶⁾

Under William B. Wilson, the main response of the government, though the Department of Labor, was a joint program of detailed study and on-site exhortation and negotiation. Alert even before the entry of the US into the war to the vast dimensions of the black migration, in 1916 Wilson borrowed two black investigators from the Department of Commerce to conduct a preliminary survey of the scope and impact of the migration and then recruited academic and social investigator James H. Dillard to oversee a more ambitious analysis. Spurred in part by concern "expressed over the probable loss . . . of southern crops through the departure. . . of Negro workers in appalling numbers," Dillard's report provided a wealth of information about conditions both North and South but made no specific recommendations for governmental action. ⁽¹⁷⁾

The declaration of war in April, 1917, further spurred blacks' search for industrial opportunity and the numbers leaving southern plantations and cities swelled. At the urging of black leaders, in May of 1918, Secretary Wilson created a new body in the Department of Labor, the Division of Negro Economics. To head it, he tapped Dr. George Edmond Haynes, a distinguished African American social scientist and a founder of the National Urban League. The DNE, which operated without a separate budget line and functioned in the field in close association with the United States Employment Service, had two primary tasks. One was to monitor and analyze the scope and effects of the migration. The other was to spur wartime production by easing the so-called "labor shortage" in the South while promoting amity and accord between white and black workers in newly biracial northern settings. ⁽¹⁸⁾

Throughout its two-year existence, the DNE and its director walked a tightrope. On the one hand, Haynes's brief was to subordinate all considerations to prosecution of the war effort. Yet southern commercial and agricultural elites were determined to cling to their sources of cheap and, so they thought, docile labor. But it was black leaders who pushed for the creation of the Bureau and militants in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) could be relied upon to criticize any concessions to southern interests. Moreover, southern blacks themselves proved deeply suspicious of any official efforts to discourage migration: reported one of Dillard's white investigators, "all the advice about staying in the South that we shower on the Negro, he reads backward." ⁽¹⁹⁾

Moreover, Haynes was convinced that the migrations constituted a magnificent opportunity for members of his race to gain a foothold in industry, improve their living standards, gain access to educational opportunities, and generally promote black betterment. Creating a structure of state committees in both the chief departure and host states, working deferentially through the existing white power structure in the former, and dissociating himself and the government generally from the currents of race radicalism that the war fostered, Haynes and his state directors and field agents worked assiduously to ease the economic transitions, North and South, involved in the migration. Able investigators in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and New Jersey conducted a series of illuminating studies of the living, working, religious, and leisure-time lives of new northern workers. At the same time, their southern counterparts worked to blunt the impact of "work or fight" orders, to recruit local blacks for needed war production, and to promote the view that the key to retention of southern labor was the improvement of wages and working and living conditions on Dixie's farms and in her lumber camps and construction sites. Although Bureau staff members were not able to devise quantitative instruments for measuring the effects of their work, their efforts, given considerable public visibility by Secretary Wilson, helped to blunt the call for repressive labor measures and for curtailment of physical mobility. ⁽²⁰⁾

It was Haynes's great hope that the work of the BNE could continue into the postwar period and that the Bureau could become a permanent agency. The migration, he believed, marked a decisive breakthrough in the struggles of African Americans. "'Mr. Opportunity,'" he advised a Detroit audience, ". . . has taken hold of the Negro worker's right hand and has led him into the place of work. . . ." Nor was potential progress confined to the North, for "One of the striking things is that 'Mr. Opportunity' is concerning himself in the South. . . as well as in the North," since southern whites were being forced to improve conditions so as to retain their labor force. After the Armistice, Bureau agents continued to file detailed reports of living and working conditions in northern states, as the end of the war failed to stem the flow of African Americans northward. Although Congress quickly cut funding for the USES, into whose budget DNE allocations were folded, Haynes soldiered on into mid-1920 attempting to keep alive what he and his allies in the black community considered the most important federal racial initiative since Reconstruction. ⁽²¹⁾

Indeed, if progress was to be steady and secure, blacks and whites needed the support of a benign federal government. In Haynes's view, the racial balance in the North was delicate, with much friction between white and black workers. Militant race-conscious elements were capitalizing on the frustration and anger of migrants who too often encountered poor housing and hostility on the part of white fellow workers. Migrants' "discontent growing out of previous conditions and present maladjustment. . ., their desire for American rights, their resentment against unjust discriminations and other un-American practices. . . make them a very ripe field for unrest, friction and disturbances. . . ," he warned. In view of the kinds of racial tensions that erupted into deadly violence in Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere in the summer of 1919, a federal presence was desperately needed, perhaps more so than during the war itself, for angry transplanted blacks "will listen to counsel and guidance from Federal agents as from no others." ⁽²²⁾

Haynes's appeals, however, were unavailing. By the fall of 1920 this promising experiment in federal manpower and race relations management was a dead letter. Neither the southern-dominated outgoing 66^th Congress nor the incoming 67^th regarded ongoing involvement of the federal government in the monitoring or amelioration of social conditions a necessary or appropriate function. Stripped of his investigating staff and his office help, Haynes returned to his teaching post at Fisk University. There he continued to write as a private citizen about the migration, seeking to encourage the efforts of civic and religious bodies to provide moral and practical support to the new black urban communities. Groups such as the Urban League attempted to fill the void left by federal departure but for the most part the great migration continued apace into the 1920s with little public oversight or direction. ⁽²³⁾

Other wartime agencies also gave initial evidence of concern for the welfare of African American workers, although none specifically targeted the problems of black wage-earners. The U.S. Railroad Administration, created in December, 1917, to take over operation of the chaotic transport system, promulgated a series of rulings that facilitated the organization of some black workers and even on occasion favored the interests of black employees in opposition to the demands of the powerful and thoroughly racist mainstream white railroad brotherhoods. USRA support for black workers, however, was at best episodic and ended abruptly with the cessation of the fighting as the white rail unions were quickly able to gain governmental backing for the exclusion of blacks from all "operating" positions. ⁽²⁴⁾

The record of another wartime agency, the National War Labor Board, was better, however. Established in the spring of 1918, the NWLB played a key role in boosting union membership and extending industrial democracy. Led by militant progressive Frank Walsh, it intervened in a number of racially pregnant labor disputes. In cases involving streetcar operators in New Orleans, laundresses in Arkansas, iron and steel workers in Alabama, and phosphate miners in Florida, NWLB investigators came down on the side of equal pay for equal work and the rights of workers to workplace representation, regardless of race. However, as soon as the war ended, employers everywhere immediately withdrew even their grudging cooperation with the Board and refused to implement its awards even before the Board's official termination in May of 1919. ⁽²⁵⁾ In the actions of both the USRA and the NWLB, African American workers and race spokesmen caught a glimpse of what might be possible from a national government in its dealings with black workers at the heart of the wartime economy. The brevity of American belligerency and the sharp postwar reaction against virtually all evidences of war-begotten federal activism, however, quickly ended these seemingly promising experiments in de facto workplace equality. ⁽²⁶⁾

The brevity of the war also truncated other, non-governmental initiatives that seemingly had the potential for decisively shifting national perspectives on race. The American labor movement, long a bastion of racial exclusivism, at last showed signs of responsiveness to the concerns of black workers, for example. In 1919, the American Federation of Labor established a committee to investigate the possibilities of launching a major organizing campaign among black workers and its officers conferred regularly with civil rights leaders who were eager for progressive allies in a tense racial climate. Indeed, a number of promising initiatives in bi-racial unionism marked the wartime and immediate post-war period. In Chicago, mass unions of packinghouse workers brought blacks and whites together in a city seething with racial tensions. In Little Rock, Birmingham, central Florida, and backwoods Louisiana laundresses, metal workers, phosphate miners, and wood products workers sought to take advantage of wartime labor shortages and a relatively benign federal disputes resolution machinery to build bi-racial unions. ⁽²⁷⁾

War era developments also triggered black political activism. As early as 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois, then editor of the NAACP magazine The Crisis, had brilliantly adumbrated the ways in which the war raging in Europe opened opportunities for recognition and leadership for African Americans. In "The African Roots of the War," an essay published in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly, the fiery editor pointed to the role of imperial rivalry in accounting for the outbreak of the conflict. Prior to the 19^th century, he held, European elites could exploit their domestic populations with relative impunity. But the rise of popular democracy, organized labor, and socialism had democratized material expectations. "It is," Du Bois held, "no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, or even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation; a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor." For elites to continue to exert political, economic, and cultural authority, they had to find ways to extend the benefits of material bounty to once-subordinated domestic populations. The result was the imperial scramble, wherein now-democratic European states sought access to the resources and cheap labor of the non-Western world, notably Africa, as a means of meeting the demands of formerly quiescent workers and peasants. In the resulting imperial rivalry, particularly involving Africa, lay the roots of the war, even as both sides recruited African workers and soldiers to wage it.

The war, Du Bois believed, must end in the awakening of colonial peoples and in addressing their legitimate demands for self-government and participation in the advantages that modern regimes of production offered. To be sure, African and other people of color, Du Bois conceded, needed tutelage. A product himself of elite western education, he shared the view that people of color needed guidance from the West in entering the modern world. And it was here, in a the same American exceptionalism that animated Wilson, that Du Bois saw a distinctive role for African Americans. Victims of racism and imperial outrage, African Americans had nonetheless adapted to and were participating in the modern world. They were in a unique position to supply the leadership, born of their special experience and their record of social advance, to bring Africa into its rightful place in the new world order. Thus, Du Bois, while remaining a sharp critic of Woodrow Wilson's blinkered view of colonialism and while continuing to advance an astringent critique of western imperialism, urged African Americans to support the U.S. war effort as a means not only of strengthening claims at home to equal rights but also of assuming leadership roles in the post-colonial aftermath of the conflict. ⁽²⁸⁾

Other African American activists drew more extreme lessons from the wartime turbulence. Thus, in New York and Chicago for example radical black organizations proliferated, often invoking anti-war sentiments and linking them to calls for militant racial struggle in the United States and in European colonial dependencies. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association recruited thousands of adherents in the eastern and southern cities, while groups such as the African Blood Brotherhood and the black socialists associated with Chandler Owen's and A. Philip Randolph's magazine The Messenger attracted the attention of federal surveillance agents. But it was the NAACP that seemed for a time to be using the ferment among African Americans most effectively in broadening its membership base and extending recruiting well beyond its traditional constituency of urban professionals and businessmen. In Texas, for example, NAACP organizers had a field day through the immediate postwar months. "JOIN NOW AND FIGHT FOR JUSTICE," urged a black weekly in Dallas, seeking to mobilize African Americans to resist racial violence. "'The people are in a "fever heat,'" wrote a local secretary. Thousands of blacks flocked into new branches, many of them springing up in small hamlets. Returning veterans and newly politicized women played key roles in this remarkable flowering of activism. "Send me a copy of the 13^th, 14^th, 15^th amendment," a local secretary pleaded, for "'the time has come that the white man and the black man to stand upon terms of social equality.'" In a number of Texas towns, petitions from engorged NAACP branches were instrumental in causing white mayors to ban the showing of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. ⁽²⁹⁾

During the decade of the Great War also, the United States Supreme Court began a cautious retreat from its robust endorsement of segregation and discrimination. Inspired in part by the promulgation in 1913 of the Natives Land Act in South Africa, some southern whites sought adoption in the United States of similar measures, designed to prohibit black residence in designated areas. A broad movement to emulate South Africa by creating large, racially exclusive black and white zones eventually fell victim to the reliance of southern economic elites on cheap black labor. But a number of southern cities did adopt ordinances that would designate geographical areas in which black (or white) residency was prohibited. In many ways, the movement toward this sort of geographical restriction was the logical culmination of the powerful segregationist impulse underway since the late 19^th century, an impulse that as late as 1908 in the Berea College case the Supreme Court had sanctioned. But in April, 1917, the Court, in an important precedent setting case, struck down a Louisville ordinance that provided legal enforcement of residential segregation. Though narrowly framed, the Court's decision in Buchanan v. Warley was crucial in that it specified sharp limits to the segregationist tide expressed in the Plessy (1896) and Berea (1908) cases and rejected, albeit on narrow, property rights grounds, the legally enforceable effort to impose strict geographical segregation on racial lines. While the Buchanan decision was in no way connected with the Woodrow Wilson administration, it did illustrate the ways in which the logic of the 14^th Amendment's specification of national citizenship, however abridged in other respects, operated to affirm African Americans' rights in the critical realm of personal mobility. ⁽³⁰⁾

All in all, considering both governmental actions and organizing impulse within the black community, the African American experience during the era of the Great War was one of promising beginnings, abrupt endings, and opportunities for future advance. The AFL never did budge from its haughty and self-defeating attitude toward African Americans and the promising grass roots efforts of meatpackers, timber workers, phosphate miners, and others soon fell victim to repression, internal conflict, and lack of sustained support. While the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters preserved a precarious existence through the 1920s and eventually linked up with the eloquent Randolph to lay the basis for a successful black union, other initiatives went underground or collapsed under the pressure of federal and state harassment. The DNE went out of business and although the Republican administrations of the 1920s often verbally invoked racial justice, they provided no tangible support for black aspirations.

In another sense, though, what was important about the era of the Great War for African Americans was what didn't happen. Looked at from the broad perspective of the 20^th century overall, no event is more important that the mass migration that began after war broke out in 1914. Over the decades, this great population shift beginning in the era of the Great War brought millions of people into the nation's industrial and urban matrix. For all of the problems that have developed in the great urban ghettoes, migration northward was central to the entry of African Americans into the mainstream of American life. Despite its discriminatory features and the failure of public authorities to support the legitimate aspirations of blacks, North and South, migration had a permanent and positive economic effect. To take just one measure, the proportion of blacks classified as skilled workers by the census rose from 7.9% in 1910 to 12.6% in 1930 (on its way toward 24% in 1950). And certainly, the political power that enfranchised blacks in key northern cities was the fulcrum that forced Congress to give substance to the 14^th and 15^th Amendments and to make real the constitutional rights adopted in the 19^th century. ⁽³¹⁾

This observation, commonplace though it may be, leads to another, namely that the refusal to restrict internal migration may have been the most important positive race relations legacy of the public men of the World War I era. The absence of measures on the part of the federal government to treat African Americans as constitutionally "other" merits registering. Clearly, when it came to matters of prejudice and discrimination, the government was often shockingly overt in its ill-treatment of blacks, as Du Bois, the Defender, and thousands of ordinary black citizens frequently and eloquently complained. This discrimination was often remarkably blunt: "You are advised that Negroes are not being accepted for enlistment in the Quartermaster Corps, National Army," the Army told one recruit. The guarantees of the 14^th and 15^th Amendments often seemed like cruel jokes to proud African Americans, who saw their service men treated like prisoners and the murderers of their loved ones escape punishment or even condemnation. Yet citizenship rights were crucial in a sense precisely because they were so rarely enforced. They remained on the books, repositories of legitimate dreams and aspirations and texts upon which moral and legal appeals could be based. And of course with the migration northward, voting and other civic rights now were exercised. ⁽³²⁾

The fates of other blacks caught in the maelstrom of the Great War contrasted sharply with those of African Americans. In French West Africa, the French recruited and conscripted over 170,000 Senegalese and other colonials, over 30,000 of whom died in service. Tens of thousands of Africans were imported into France to work in wartime transport and industry. During and after the war, when conscription was actually intensified, these men not only suffered from discrimination and ill-treatment; even more importantly, they were subjected to special rules and disciplines, both as soldiers and civilians. Postwar rule in Africa brought no rewards for loyal service but rather ever more degraded civic status. Remarks the historian of these "colonial conscripts," "For Africans, conscription was but another example of how their situation compared to France of the ancien regime rather than to France of the Revolution. No egalitarianism was ever intended or extended. . . ." ⁽³³⁾

South African blacks were even more harshly victimized. Although the African Native National Congress endorsed the Imperial war effort and blacks volunteered to fight, South African authorities refused them any military role. Indeed South African statesman Jan Christian Smuts chided his British and French allies for their use of black troops in Africa and in France: In the future, he told a London audience in the spring of 1917, "I hope that . . . the military training of natives . . . will be prevented, as we have prevented it in South Africa. It can well be foreseen that armies may yet be trained there, which under proper leading might prove a danger to civilisation itself." Labor battalions recruited for heavy work in England and on the Western Front suffered appalling rates of death owing to disease and poor conditions. Six-hundred died in the English Channel when the ship on which they were being transported, Mendi, was sunk. Worse, however, was to come, for in the wake of war, the reward for blacks' support of the Imperial war effort and for the sacrifices they made was reaffirmation and drastic intensification of pre-war measures that relegated them to increasingly inferior civic status. ⁽³⁴⁾

The point here is not that America's black citizens should have been grateful for escaping worse mistreatment or that theoretical political and constitutional rights are a substitute for substantive justice. The sometimes-promising initiatives of the Wilson government, as evidenced in the work of the Division of Negro Economics, offer a sad counterpoint to the disappointments and illusions of the whole enterprise of the Great Crusade. To look back through the official records of America's wartime agencies in their dealings with fellow citizens of color is to be newly appalled and shocked by the depth and scope of racism.

But Du Bois's mid-war judgment that "already because of this war . . . the [people of the] Negro race in the United States, have gained more than at any time since emancipation" was perhaps not entirely mistaken. ⁽³⁵⁾ The physical and moral fact of the Great Migration insured that, in contrast to the experience after the Civil War, African American progress would not descend again to what historian Rayford W. Logan called "the nadir" ⁽³⁶⁾ of race relations in the United States that prevailed in the quarter century before the Great War. The preservation of fundamental constitutional status even during a period of perceived national crisis and intense and virtually universal ideological racism was, in the end, a worthy, if inadvertent, achievement of a government otherwise notable for its disdain and disregard for its citizens of color.

1. There is as yet no comprehensive study of race and politics in the 1910s. For now-standard treatments, see Jane Lang Scheiber and Harry N. Scheiber, "The Wilson Administration and the Wartime Mobilization of Black Americans, 1917-18, Labor History 10: 3 (Summer 1969): 433-58 and Nancy J. Weiss, "The Negro and the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation," Political Science Quarterly 84: 1 (March 1969): 61-79. Important recent works that also deal with this theme include Theodore Kornweibel, Jr.,"Seeing Red": Federal Campaigns against Black Militancy, 1919-1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998); Mark Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government during World War I (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (NY: Henry Holt, 1993); Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 (NY: Viking, 2001), 86-109; and Jonathan Rosenberg, "For Democracy, Not Hypocrisy: World War and Race Relations in the United States, 1914-1919," International History Review, 21: 3 (September 1999): 592-625. Recent general studies of the U.S. in World War I include Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), and Robert H. Zieger, America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000). Still standard, however, is David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (NY: Oxford, 1980).

2. John Higham, "Three Reconstructions," New York Review of Books, November 6, 1997.

3. See, e.g., Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (NY: Knopf, 1998), 280-315, and passim; Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (NY: Oxford University Press, 1984), 180-222.

4. See Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

5. See