[For Veterans Day, I’ll be AmericanStudying five examples of texts that can help us remember and engage with veterans’ experiences from five of our defining wars. Leading up to a weekend post on 21st century veterans’ stories!]
On how an under-remembered community of veterans helps us make national sense of a complex foreign war.
As part of a June 2017 centennial series on the U.S. and World War I, I shared this post on African American WWI soldiers, including an extended discussion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s May 1919 The Crisis column “Returning Soldiers.” I’d ask you to check out both that post and that column (the hyperlink in the original post no longer works, but the second one in this paragraph should) if you would, and then come on back for further thoughts on that column and community.
Welcome back! Since I wrote that column, I’ve learned much more about the Red Summer of 1919, a year-long, nationwide orgy of white supremacist violence and racial terrorism that very consistently targeted African American WWI veterans, often in uniform and/or taking part in commemorative marches and events. As that second hyperlinked article from the National World War I Museum and Memorial describes it succinctly and accurately, while the violence was always—let me say again, always—initiated by white supremacist mobs, “the Red Summer saw Black populations fight back aggressively against racial violence and intimidation in ways that were not typical before.” Proving prophetic indeed Du Bois’s stirring lines, “we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.”
Those are the most specific and to my mind the most important takeaways from this veteran community and Du Bois’s column alike. But I think these histories also frame a broader point, one that has helped me analyze what this complex foreign war—one in which the U.S. got involved very late compared to most of the rest of the world—meant in and for the U.S. When we take into consideration that 1919 violence targeting veterans, and add in ongoing catastrophic crises in that same year including the influenza pandemic and the Palmer Raids (both of which emerged directly out of World War I), it’s fair to say that for the United States the “wartime” period very fully extended past the November 1918 Armistice and into 1919 (if not beyond). Of course that’s always the case for veterans, as I hope every post in this series makes clear. But in this case, I would argue that the entire nation remained in many ways “at war” well past the conclusion of the foreign war, and no community better reflects that reality than African American veterans.
Last veteran’s story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Veterans’ stories and/or texts you’d share?
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