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The Unsung Heroes:
A Literature Review of
Black Soldiers in World War I
By: Imani Tinter
History 297 Spring 2014
Dr. Ferrell and Mr. Bales
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Abstract
Historiographical works concerning the role of the African American soldier during the
Great War have been written throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From literature
written just after the war’s conclusion—such as Emmett J. Scott’s Scott’s Official History of the
American Negro in the World War published in 1919—to more recent scholarship such as Chad
L. Williams’ Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I
Racial Militancy published in 2007. Despite these historical works being published many years
apart, they all manage to make the same argument and reach the same conclusion. The
overlapping theses among these and many other works concerning the black soldier in World
War I all state that due to the racist and discriminatory culture of early twentieth-century
America, black soldiers were not given the proper recognition, remembrance, and praise that
their white counterparts received, and that each of the authors’ literature aim to rightfully give
those soldiers a proper place in history. The paper analyzes how—from Scott’s 1919 work to the
early 2000—all scholarship about the roles of African American soldiers in the Great War reach
the same conclusion.
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The Unsung Heroes: A Literature Review of Black Soldiers in World War I
Even though historical literature about the role black American servicemen played in the
First World War has been published all throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they
all make the same argument. That repeated thesis is that due to the discriminatory culture of
America at the time, black soldiers did not receive the same recognition nor a proper place in
American history as their white counterparts had, and that each author’s work aims to rectify this
by awarding the African American soldier a proper analysis and place in history.
[I]t is because of the immensely valuable contribution made by Negro soldiers, sailors,
and civilians toward the winning of the great World War that this volume has been
prepared, in order that there may be an authentic record, not only of the military exploits
of this particular racial group of Americans, but of the diversified and valuable
contributions made by them as patriotic civilians.1 From the prologue of Emmett Scott’s
History.
Emmett J. Scott (1873-1957) was one of the pioneers in the positive portrayal of African
American soldiers in the Great World War. As the Special Assistant to the Secretary of War,
Newton Baker, he was able to write the esteemed Scott’s Official History of the American Negro
in the World War. Published just after the war in 1919, Scott’s History later became a scholarly
work for future historians writing on similar subjects. Scott was truly ahead of his time, for the
next literature positively portraying the role that black American soldiers played in World War I
was published for another fifty years.
It was not until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that there was a boom
of literature on the study of black soldiers in First World War. All such accounts cite Scott’s
History. Important original works of the 1970s were then used by scholars of later decades.
1
Quote above from the prologue of Emmett J. Scott, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the
World War (Chicago: Homewood Press, 1919), 10. Picture on title page can be found at: The U.S. National
Archives and Records Administration. Some of the colored men of the 369th (15th N.Y.) who won the Croix de
Guerre for gallantry in action, 1919. http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/picturing-the-centuryphotos/gallery1.html (accessed April 5, 2014).
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Important sources commonly cited by later scholars include Arthur Barbeau and Florette Henri’s
The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I published in 1974.
This burst of literature then died out in the 1980s. The only works published at that time
were due to a reaction to the controversial Vietnam War and did not focus solely on the role of
black military men in the First World War, but focused on black soldiers throughout history—
from the American War of Independence to the Vietnam War. Literature concerning the black
American servicemen’s role in various wars include Bernard C. Nalty’s Strength for the Fight: A
History of Black Americans in the Military published in 1986.
In the 1990s-early 2000s, there was a strong resurgence of scholarly interest in the roles
of African American soldiers both specifically on World War I and in other wars. The reason for
this is likely due to the now well-known fact that black Americans were playing as much a role
in the American military as anyone else, as during the Gulf War. Most of the accounts from the
1990s and early 2000s cite the major original scholarship of the 1970s as well as Scott’s History.
Each of the numerous works on the role of black soldiers in the Great War spread out
over the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, each scholarship sends the same message.
That message is that, in the past, due to the Jim Crow discriminatory and racist American
society, African American soldiers in nearly every war before the Civil Rights Movement were
not given the same credit that their white brethren received. Each source stresses this point and
states that the author means to illustrate how vital a role the black soldiers actually played.
All of the literature spreads across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have two
things in common: 1) a similar thesis on how black soldiers in World War I did not receive the
recognition they deserved at the time and that the author’s work emphasizes the black soldiers’
importance to the war, and 2) all cite Scott’s History. The main argument of Emmet Scott’s
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Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War was that the African American
veterans of the Great War deserve just as much praise and honor as the whites and that patriotism
is color-blind. He was one of the first of his time to emphasize the black solider and his service:
[T]he Negro, in the great World War for Freedom and Democracy, has proved to be a
notable and inspiring figure. The record and achievements of this racial group, as brave
soldiers and loyal citizens, furnish one of the brightest chapters in American history. . .
.When war against Germany was declared April 6, 1917, Negro Americans quickly
recognized the fact that it was not to be a white man's war, nor a black man's war, but a
war of all the people living under the "Stars and Stripes" for the preservation of human
liberty throughout the world.2
Scott was in a unique position to acquire first-hand information on the war due to both his
employment as the assistant to the Secretary of War and because of his chronological proximity
to the war itself. Because the Great World War had just recently happened when Scott published
his work, he acquired his information through several channels, including letters, newspapers,
veterans, and other personnel. The result is a large and well-documented book of over sixhundred pages deeply analyzing the role of blacks in the war. As a result of Scott’s thorough
research and proximity to his subject, as a result, his scholarship would be cited by later scholars’
writing on similar subjects. It became a crucial source as a primary and a secondary source.3
However, any other scholarships focusing on the role of black soldiers in the First World
War after Scott were nonexistent until the Civil Rights Movement. This movement altogether
inspired a surge of literature reanalyzing history, and created new historical disciplines such as
women’s history, social history, and African American history. Sources on black American
soldiers in World War I were a part of this burst of new history literature.
One work produced during this movement, Arthur Barbeau and Florette Henri’s The
Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I, became just as important to future
2
Scott, History, 9. Emphasis on the original text.
3
Scott, History, 4-8, 13-14
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scholars as Scott’s History and is often cited along with it. Barbeau and Henri’s Unknown
Soldiers was the first of its kind in the 1970s, with a thesis similar to Scott’s despite the fiftyfive-year gap. Unlike Scott, however, both Barbeau and Henri were historians and better
equipped to analyze, research, and interpret their evidence and better support their conclusion.
Though the two literatures were over half a century apart and reflected different societies, the
thesis is nonetheless the same—that the black servicemen in the First World War were not given
the full recognition, rights, and appreciation for their service as their white counterparts—and
their scholarship hopes to highlight the accomplishments and the vital role those soldiers played
in the war.
The book itself begins with a quotation highlighting the same thesis. The first page of the
book begins with The Reverend Francis Grimke stating that, “That shameful record is going to
be written up, and published, so that the whole world may read it, and learn how these black
men, who went out from these shores to die at their country's call, were treated simply because of
the color of their skin. . . .4” The emphasis on how black American militiamen were the
unappreciated heroes of their time and how little their roles and accomplishments were
acknowledged and remembered is a part of the Civil Rights approach to history. The purpose
was to reinterpret and rewrite history to include everyone outside of the traditional views
focusing mainly on individual politicians and other great (white) men. Another purpose of the
Civil Rights Movement’s new approach to history was to also expose the realities of the
oppression of certain groups such as women, immigrants, and racial minorities.
The foreword of the book, written by Burghardt Turner, discusses where Barbeau and
Henri hope to succeed where they believe older works such as Scott’s History failed:
4
Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), v.
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[E]ven though several full-length accounts have been written of the remarkable exploits
of Afro-American soldiers in World War I, none of them have revealed the sordid
realities of the racist, debasing indignities committed against the black soldier, both as
enlisted man and officer. Of those accounts that were published within a few years after
the end of the war, all left much to be desired. They were without index, footnotes, or
bibliography, and none was written by an historian who applied rigid tests to his sources.5
Although Scott’s History is one of the first to discuss and acknowledge the African American
serviceman in the Great War, Barbeau and Henri, as historians, were better equipped to research
and analyze the subject. While Scott’s History may be the first work concerning the black soldier
in the First World War, the Unknown Soldiers is the first historical work, analyzing the realities
of the black American military man’s role in World War I and the difficult world they lived in:
“The unknown soldier of World War I was the American black man, and it is the purpose of the
authors to make his history known.”6 Because of the importance of both Scott’s and Barbeau and
Henri’s works, later historians all manage to cite both in their scholarship.
After the 1970s, the number of literature on the role of black soldiers in the First World
War declined. While some works on the black American serviceman were published, they were
either on African American soldiers throughout American history or specifically on the roles
they played in the Korean and Vietnam wars, rather than World War I. While the military
historian Bernard Nalty’s Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military
published in 1986 is on blacks in the military as a whole, he does provide a good analysis on
Great War black servicemen, citing both Scott7 and Barbeau and Henri8 while using an overall
thesis similar to theirs:
5
Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, xi.
6
Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, xv.
7
Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military (New York: The
Free Press, 1986), 405.
8
Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 402.
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[S]ince colonial timesblacks have made an increasingly important contribution to
American military might. . . . [w]hen given an opportunity to fight, black soldiers and
sailors did well, whether in the North American wilderness, at sea, or on foreign
battlefields. Helping defeat America's foes did not gain acceptance within the military. . .
[B]esides fighting the wartime enemy, black Americans faced a second and far more
dangerous foe—racism, which sharply restricted their opportunities within the armed
services and in civil society as well.9
Once again the overall thesis that seems consistent throughout the ages appears again in Nalty’s
historical work. This thesis also argues that the black soldier was not appreciated nor
acknowledged due to the racism of their society. Nalty aims to right this decades-old wrong and
give black military man a role in American history.
After the 1980s, there was a resurgence in the studies that first began in the Civil Rights
era, including the study of black American soldiers in the First World War. Literatures were
published in the late 1990s and early 2000s on the subject, once again citing Scott and Barbeau
and Henri. The historian Steven Diner’s 1998 A Very Different Age: Americans of the
Progressive Era is one of these historical works.
While Diner’s book focuses on how Americans reacted to the changes of the Progressive
Era (which ends with the conclusion of World War I), he divides his book into numerous
chapters that focus on specific types of Americans, from immigrant farmers, to the heads of
mega-corporations, to women factory-workers, to the urban African American. When reading his
chapter on how the Great War affected different groups of Americans, when Diner discusses the
black American soldier in the Great War, his thesis matches that of his predecessors: “AfricanAmericans could not collect on the promise of freedom after America's victory in the war for
democracy [World War I].”10 Diner continues by illustrating the horrors that black veterans came
9
Nalty, Strength for the Fight, 1-2.
10
Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang
1998), 252.
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home to, a world that had not changed and was still oppressive. In some detail, Diner illustrates
one horrific summer in 1919 (called the Red Summer) that involved black veterans in a still
racist society:
[. . . ]lynchings increased from thirty-eight in 1917 to fifty-eight in 1918 and seventy in
1919. . . [A] particularly horrific episode occurred in Houston, where black soldiers,
many from outside the South, refused to honor local Jim Crow laws. . . . [A]ccording to
the official account, black soldiers stole ammunition from a supply tent, marched to town,
where they met armed white police and civilians, and exchanged shots. Two AfricanAmericans and seventeen whites died. The army swiftly tried 156 black soldiers for
mutiny, sentencing thirteen to death and forty-one to life imprisonment.11
Though the blacks in the military had fought bravely for their country in hopes of being awarded
freedom and equal rights, they returned to a world that had only become worse in its treatment of
them. Once again the Civil Rights era emphasis on the great degree of oppression that black
Americans faced and how their story was neglected until now, persists in Diner’s book.
Retelling history to include African American servicemen continued to persist throughout
the 1990s. The consistent thesis—that, due to a world of racism, black servicemen did not earn
the same place in history as white servicemen—still continues. However, a new idea began to
emerge alongside the consistent thesis beginning in the 1990s. This new idea illustrated how the
world of racism may have actually affected Great War black veterans, which was also illustrated
by Diner in his book.12
This new approach to the racist post World War I world on black American soldiers has
been called the “New Negro Movement.” Historian James Mennell’s 1999 article, AfricanAmericans and the Selective Service Act of 1917, explains this new, 1990s-born, idea:
[T]here seems to have been intangible advances made in black pride. . . . The violence of
the Red Summer of 1919 and perhaps some of the wartime lynching may not have
resulted entirely from white desire to put blacks back in their place. Some of the violence
11
Diner, A Very Different Age, 250.
12
Diner, A Very Different Age, 250.
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may have resulted from a growth of black pride consequent to the significant number of
African Americans who served their country in such an honorable way. . .13
The “New Negro” idea still embodies the traditional thesis that has persisted in nearly all
historiographical scholarship since Scott’s History in 1919 while also suggesting an extension to
that thesis with a new one.
One of the most recent works on First World War black soldiers, published in 2007, still
embodies the traditional thesis while also using the new-age “New Negro” idea. In his article the
Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I Racial
Militancy, historian Chad Williams noted that, “[E]xamining the experiences of black veterans,
in both their symbolic and historical context, is thus essential to the development of a
multilayered conception of the New Negro of post-World War I America.”14 This new 1990s
idea both deviates from and conforms with the argument that black American servicemen in
World War I did not gain the praise and study they should have received, and that the author’s
aim is to give those soldiers a proper study and illustrate the vital roles they played in the war.
New scholarship on the Great War black soldier seems to stop after 2010. This may be
because of a loss of interest in the subject, or perhaps because scholars feel there is enough
scholarship on the subject and no one wishes to state something differently. Indeed, for over
ninety years scholarship regarding black American soldiers in World War I have all made the
same argument, that due to the racism of their time, they did not get the credit they deserved and
modern scholarship aims to change that. The literature that has been published since Scott’s
1919 History have all shown a similar thesis, rectifying the age-old atrocity that black
servicemen had to endure both during their service and after. Because of this consistent thesis
13
James Mennell, “African-Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917,” Journal of Negro History
84 (Summer 1999): 285.
Chad L. Williams, “Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World War I
Racial Militancy,” Journal of African American History 92 (Summer 2007): 350.
14
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across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it seems that scholars all agree on this thesis and
that no one desires to debate so otherwise; all seem to agree that First World War black
American soldiers were treated unfairly and they did not receive proper recognition. The
literature published on the subject since Scott’s History have all aimed to give the black
American solider a proper placement in history, and write a history that analyzes all those
important to American history.
"I hereby declare upon my word of honor that I have neither given nor received unauthorized
help on this work."
~Imani Tinter
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Bibliography
Barbeau, Arthur E. and Florette Henri. The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World
War I. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974.
Diner, Steven J. A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1998.
Mennell, James. “African-Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917.” Journal of Negro
History 84 (Summer 1999): 275-87.
Nalty, Bernard C. Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military. New
York: The Free Press, 1986.
Scott, Emmett J., Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War. Chicago:
Homewood Press, 1919.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Some of the colored men of the 369th
(15th N.Y.) who won the Croix de Guerre for gallantry in action, 1919.
http://www.archives.gov/press/press-kits/picturing-the-century-photos/gallery1.html
(accessed April 5, 2014).
Williams, Chad L. “Vanguards of the New Negro: African American Veterans and Post-World
War I Racial Militancy.” The Journal of African American History 92 (Summer 2007):
347-70.