African Americans, Military Service, and WWI Tensions

A Mobilized Diaspora: African Americans, Military Service, and the Tensions of Nation in the First World War "Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see." 1 Writing in 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois observed the World War with close personal interest. His ties to Europe and two of the principal warring nations ran deep; Du Bois had studied in Germany at the University of Berlin from 1892 to 1894, an experience that profoundly influenced his intellectual sensibilities. He could also trace to lineage back to France and held an abiding admiration for the nation of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. But as the Crisis editor made sense of the European maelstrom, he unreservedly rested his allegiances with the oppressed darker races of the world. In his seminal May 1915 Atlantic Monthly essay "The African Roots of War," Du Bois set forth his thoughts on the war, challenging the prevailing Eurocentrism of its origins and casting the conflict in the broader context of Africa and its diaspora. Anticipating similar critiques made by Vladamir Lenin and others, he detailed the destructive history of Western imperialism in Africa fueled by the dual engines of capitalism and white supremacy, the complicity of the white working classes in legitimizing the oppression of African peoples, and how, in the end, the furious dash to control the continent's resources lay at the heart of the European civil war. 2 "The ownership of materials and men in the darker world," he wrote, "is the real prize that is setting the nations of Europe at each other's throats to-day." 3 The fate of modern civilization and any hope for peace, Du Bois surmised, hinged on the future of Africa and the expansion of "a world-democracy" to the continent free from foreign domination. 4 Make no mistake, Du Bois conveyed, this was a war about black people, and as such they had an important role to play in its eventual outcome, whatever it may be. 5 Two years later, in the spring of 1917, when the United States entered the war on the side of the Allied powers, Du Bois found himself at the forefront of efforts to rally African American patriotic support and ensure the participation of black soldiers and officers in the war effort. The 1 war fundamentally transformed black America. The lure of wartime jobs and social freedom compelled an estimated 500,000 black southerners to migrate to northern and midwestern cities. Military service, both volunteer and compulsory, brought over 380,000 black men into the national army. African Americans, soldier and civilian, male and female, North and South, began to reconsider their relationship to the nation and the very meaning of democracy as a result of the exigencies of war and its rhetorical framing by Woodrow Wilson. Even more broadly, the First World War marked a watershed moment in the historical development of the modern African diaspora. 6 As war of empire, the conflict set in motion and dispersed millions of colonized peoples of African descent from throughout the world. From Port-a-Prince to Dakar, Algiers to Cape Town, military labor and combat at once tightened and challenged the bonds of imperial rule, as the armies of France, Great Britain, Germany and others dramatically exposed black people to new lands, new people, and new ideas. Across the diaspora, the war caused peoples of African descent, in the United States and beyond, to ponder the dimensions of their social, political, and racial identities, the nature of their relationships to one another, and ultimately their collective future in a modern world in the midst of epochal transformation. In this essay I explore the ways in which diaspora was both articulated, as a discursive process, and experienced, as a historical condition, by African Americans in the specific context of the First World War, France, and the military participation of peoples of African descent. 7 Despite the wealth of scholarship emphasizing the impact of World War I in shaping interwar black internationalism and various articulations of diaspora, scant historical attention has been devoted to the war itself and, more specifically, the discursive function and experiential place of black soldiers in this transformative moment. I do not purport to present a comprehensive historical rendering of the experiences of all peoples of African descent in the war and its holistic 2 impact on the diaspora; such an endeavor, while needed, is well beyond the constraints of a singular article. More narrowly, I focus on the black press and African American soldiers to explore how they presented and experienced diaspora within the particular historical context of the First World War. The war created new openings and possibilities for African Americans to both imagine and situate themselves as part of a broader democratic world and diasporic community of African peoples. It also exposed the conflicted place of the nation in the lives of African Americans, its centrality to their racial and political identities, and ultimately its function in shaping how African Americans, and soldiers in particular, engaged with questions of diaspora. A focus on the First World War and the experiences of black soldiers specifically offers an alternative conceptual and methodological framework for examining the meaning and construction of the modern African diaspora for African Americans, with all of its complexities. Joseph Harris posits the emergence of a "mobilized" modern African diaspora, coinciding with the early twentieth-century apex of European colonialism, comprised of “descendant Africans with a consciousness of the identity of their roots, occupational and communication skills, social and economic status, and access to decision-making bodies in their host country.” 8 Harris conceptualizes mobilization largely in terms of collective political organization around issues of race and ethnicity. But in thinking about a different type of mobilization—the mobilization of material, ideas, and most significantly men for employment in the First World War—we gain a deeper historical understanding of the making of the modern African diaspora and the place of African Americans in it. 9 The war set millions of descendant Africans in motion through the demands of combat and labor, bringing them into contact with one another and fundamentally transforming the demographic, ideological, and imaginative contours of the diaspora. Through 3 their experiences and encounters, soldiers of African descent grappled with the ideological vicissitudes of race, nation, empire, class, gender, community and, above all, the harsh realities and existential challenges of life and death. They likewise confronted national and imperial regimes of power in ways that were at once highly personal, yet reflective of broader struggles facing oppressed peoples of African descent throughout the diaspora. Any understanding of the modern twentieth-century African diaspora and the formation of diasporic consciousness must acknowledge the crucial role that black servicemen during the First World War played in this process. How African Americans experienced diaspora in the context of the war reflected the particular social and political dynamics surrounding military service and, most importantly, the role of France. The war and its immediate aftermath have been traditionally cast as a crucible giving rise to a diverse range of black internationalist social, political, cultural, and intellectual movements, many centered in and connected to the Parisian metropole. 10 As the central front of the war, France functioned as an epicenter of diasporic mobilization, serving as host to thousands of black soldiers, workers, and intellectuals from the United States, Canada, the West Indies, and the African continent. 11 France likewise constituted a geographic, metaphorical, and ideological space in which peoples of African descent reformulated their sense of national, racial, and diasporic belonging, and where African Americans pondered the meaning of their Americanness, their Africanness, and distinct African Americanness. Many of the 200,000 black soldiers who traveled overseas romantically gazed upon France as a model of democratic republicanism and universal equality, juxtaposing American white supremacy with French racial egalitarianism. As African American troops interacted with French men and women, and encountered North and West African soldiers, France seemed to embody everything the United States and its racist 4 military was not: a nation that recognized the fundamental humanity of black people. At home, the black press encouraged a similar view of France, praising its unconditional embrace of African American troops and widespread employment of colonial African soldiers on the western front. Scholars have thoroughly exposed and debunked the myth of a color-blind France. 12 Nevertheless, the power of this trope for African American soldiers and civilians alike during the First World War says much about African American investment in the potential of nationality within the specific historical parameters of the First World War, and, in the end, their engagement with diaspora. African Americans have historically looked beyond the confining and racially circumscribed parameters of the American nation-state, adopting transnational approaches to challenge white supremacy. 13 At the same time, the nation, and nation-specific concerns of citizenship, democracy, and political rights remain central to African American identity, and thus have figured prominently in how they have understood themselves as a diasporic people. It is therefore not surprising that the nationalistic exigencies of the American war effort, with its Wilsonian focus on the expansion of global democracy, would resonate with many African Americans, especially those engaged in military service on the behalf of the United States, and elevate the centrality of the nation as an ideal in their racial, political, and emergent diasporic consciousness. It is also not surprising that another nation-state, France, would function as a crucial mediator in how African Americans imagined, articulated and experienced diaspora. Diaspora need not necessarily be cast as diametrically opposed to nation; indeed processes of diaspora and black internationalism have historically been shaped by and emerged within the social, political, and cultural vicissitudes of the nation-state. 14 Indeed, during the First World War, African Americans experienced diaspora not in opposition to, but through 5 the nation, a process that spoke to the contextually specific and historically contingent nature of wartime African American identity. But the elevated place of the nation in the wartime consciousness of African Americans lent towards a deeply contradictory, politically narrow, and often racially hierarchical engagement with diaspora. Diaspora has been defined as much by difference and discontinuity amongst various peoples of African descent, than by a transcendent, essentialized racial consciousness or shared metaphorical experience. 15 This was particularly true during the First World War. African Americans took deep and genuine interest in other peoples of African descent, particularly those serving in the French army. Their interests, however, were informed and shaped by their historical experiences with and investment in the American nation. Their diasporic articulations and encounters often reflected the depths to which African Americans had internalized dominant representations of African peoples perpetuated by Western national and imperial regimes of power. And while the war situated African Americans firmly in the contentious history and social realities of empire, they lacked a critical awareness of its complexities to fully comprehend the multicultural and multinational nature of diaspora within this context. How African Americans responded to these encounters reflected their political parochialism, naiveté of the racialist dimensions of empire, and a lack of familiarity with the historical and cultural diversities of African peoples. For African Americans during the World War I moment, diaspora functioned as an expression of hybridity, multivocality, at once challenging and reifying the nation, and ultimately reflecting the conflicted nature of black racial and political identity during the war. 16 I explore these tensions from two perspectives: the words and images of African American newspapers, and the experiences of African American soldiers in France. Black newspapers and journals 6 expanded the discursive parameters of diaspora by highlighting the participation of African soldiers in the French army, reflecting a growing interest in the diaspora informed by the war. Their coverage, however, simultaneously privileged the domestic, nation-centric political concerns of African Americans and their self-proclaimed cultural superiority in relation to other peoples of African descent. African American soldiers fought, labored, and socialized with Algerian, Moroccan, and West African troops in France, experiences that spoke to a shared diasporic condition within highly racialized and discriminatory militaries. Nevertheless, glaring cultural, linguistic, and political discontinuities characterized these encounters that reflected the historical and ideological ties of African American soldiers to the American nation. How African Americans grappled with and made sense of this dilemma encapsulates the dynamism of diaspora during the First World War and its unique ability to shed light on the complex historical experiences and conditions of people of African descent. Diasporic Mobilization: War, Empire, and Military Service W. E. B. Du Bois presciently identified the imperial origins of the First World War and its connection to Africa. But what made the conflict truly imperial in nature was the employment of colonized peoples of color as soldiers and laborers on the part of the major warring nations. 17 Reflecting the geographically distinctive nature of European colonialism and its diverse political dynamics, black men from Canada, the Caribbean, and every region of Africa became both willing and unwilling participants in the European war which quickly assumed global dimensions. Over two million Africans served in the war, and Africa itself became a key battlefront, with France and Great Britain taking aim the German colonial possessions of 7 Togoland, Cameroon, South West Africa, and German East Africa. 18 The most extensive campaign occurred in German East Africa and drew black soldiers from throughout the continent and beyond. Although white South African and English soldiers fought in East Africa, the British army employed thousands of troops from Kenya and its other east African colonies, many of whom served in the King's African Rifles (KAR), as well as men from India and one battalion of the British West Indies Regiment. The German forces, led by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, relied almost exclusively on African servicemen. An estimated 50,000 African servicemen, the majority carriers, lost their lives to combat and disease in the protracted struggle that concluded two weeks beyond the November 11, 1918 armistice. 19 Imperial racial ideologies shaped the decisions of the major warring nations to use African soldiers on the European front. Colonial benevolence did not supersede a powerful belief in Western white supremacy and a widely held view of the conflict as a “white man’s war.” For Great Britain and Germany, this meant that soldiers of African descent had no place on the battlefield with white soldiers. Although a few men managed to sneak through the cracks, Great Britain steadfastly refused to allow soldiers they classified as “black” to fight in France. 20 Black soldiers of the BWIR were overwhelmingly consigned to labor duties in Italy, and although South African soldiers labored in France, the British military heavily policed their presence in order to minimize social interactions with white French men and women. 21 The German government, with its belief in Teutonic kultur, held firm that Africans had no place in war between the white races. Germany reacted with outrage to France's decision to extensively employ African peoples as soldiers and laborers on the western front, a strategy that opened the door to a dramatic influx of peoples of African descent to European soil and exemplified the war's impact on reshaping the 8 diaspora. Devastating casualties at the onset of the war prompted French military officials to expand the use of their colonial soldiers beyond the African continent. While a significant number of soldiers from France’s Caribbean possessions, such as Guadeloupe, fought in the war and served in metropolitan forces, the vast majority of France’s colonial soldiers came from Africa. 22 France undertook a massive recruitment campaign throughout its African colonies and, by the end of the war, some 450,000 colonial Africans had traveled to Europe to fight on the behalf of the motherland. 23 France raised over 200,000 troops from its North African colonies of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia who participated in several major battles, including Verdun and the crucial battle of the Marne. 24 Another 46,000 came from Madagascar, although these soldiers saw limited action and served in more specialized roles. 25 The use of the tiralleurs sénégalais, a generic label applied to all colonial West African soldiers, was a subject of considerable debate both within the colonies and the metropole. Colonial military officer Charles Mangin emerged as the most vociferous proponent of employing Africans, particularly those from the French West African Federation (AOF), for European combat duties. In his influential 1910 book La Force Noire, Mangin, utilizing a combination of military logic and civilizationist discourse, argued for the use of Africans in the increasingly inevitable event of a European war to counter the demographic imbalance between France and Germany. 26 Military service, he and his supporters asserted, represented another potential step in the process of elevating Africans to a higher level of humanity, as well as an opportunity to spare precious French lives. A February 1912 decree sanctioned conscription in the colonies, but it was not until late 1915 that plans to mobilize West Africans on a mass scale proceeded. Over 140,000 conscripted West Africans fought on the Western Front during the war, frequently serving as the first wave of assault or counter-attack against German positions. 27 9 French colonial and racial ideology fused to shape both the decision to use African subjects in the European theatre and the nature of their service in the French military. Colonial officials rationalized that as recipients of French civilization and freedom, subject Africans had a reciprocal obligation to provide service in defense of the nation. However, as Alice Conklin and Richard Fogerty have argued, republican universalism and racialism underpinned French colonial rule, and as such informed the employment of African troops. 28 In the context of the French civilizing mission and the exigencies of war, French military officials viewed colonial Africans as a limitless and ultimately expendable reservoir of manpower. Although French opinions of its colonial subjects varied according to region and ethnic group—some West African tribes, for example, were perceived as being more “warrior-like” than others—military officials rooted their decision to utilize African colonial subjects in a core ethnocentric belief that, intrinsically, all African peoples possessed a natural acclivity to warfare, had a higher physical tolerance for pain than Europeans, were culturally predisposed to the discipline and hierarchal nature of military life and, because of their inherent mental inferiority, would unquestionably follow orders from their white commanders. Military necessity, cultural relativism, and biological determinism thus crudely converged to construct Africans as ideal soldiers by glorifying the assumed warrior-qualities of the race. 29 This racialist conception of African soldiers translated into their use in battle. The tirailleurs sénégalais in particular were primarily used as “shock troops,” and as a result suffered disproportionately higher causality rates than white French soldiers. 30 French military employment of Africans troops exposed the paradoxes of French colonial ideology and the deeper racialist underpinnings of the European war. 10 Articulating Diaspora: The African American Press, France, and the Meanings of Black Military Service With European civilization in crisis and black people dying on the front lines, the war captivated the attention of the African American press. Editors of black newspapers and journals closely observed the conflict and its broader racial implications, but did so with one eye overseas and another eye firmly fixed on the domestic struggles of African Americans. The war and the actions of its European participants created an opportunity to recast critiques of American racial discrimination and white supremacist violence in an internationalist context. 31 James Weldon Johnson sardonically wrote in February 1915, "It is worth while to think about the hypocrisy of this country. Here we are holding up our hands in horror at German 'atrocities,' at what is being done in Belgium and at what is being done on the high seas while the wholesale murder of American citizens on American soil by bloodthirsty mobs hardly brings forth a word of comment.” 32 In a similar tone, W. E. B. Du Bois compared the April 1915 sinking of the Lusitania to "the same sort of happenings hidden in the wilderness and done against dark and helpless people by white harbingers of human culture." When "Negroes were enslaved, or the natives of Congo raped and mutilated, or the Indians of the Amazon robbed, or the natives of the South Seas murdered, or 2,732 American citizens lynched," Du Bois continued, "we civilized folks turned deaf ears." 33 The ongoing violence and suffering of black people in the United States took on new meaning as violence and suffering now engulfed the broader world. More pointedly, black journalists and editors alerted their readers that however distant and seemingly inapplicable to the immediacy of their everyday lives, the war did matter for no other reason than it had the potential to fundamentally alter the fates of millions of peoples of 11 African descent throughout the globe. An October 1914 New York Age editorial asserted, "We colored Americans might well interest ourselves in speculating upon what this war will finally mean for those engaged in it who are racially and nationally in positions similar to our own." Taking the European carnage into account, the Age deduced that "perhaps, after all, the oppressed peoples will come out of this titanic struggle as the only real victors." 34 The Baltimore Afro-American reflected in December 1915, "There is but little doubt but greater recognition of the manhood of the darker races will be conceded by all parties after this war is over.” 35 In speaking of the "oppressed peoples" of the "darker races," the African American press posited an abstract conception of diaspora, one in which the connections, real and imagined, between black Americans and their scattered descendants were predicated upon a vague but nevertheless shared racial oppression. These initial ruminations on the impact of the conflict on black people throughout the globe were significant, as acts of framing, in alerting African Americans to the realization that this was not simply a "white man's war," but a potentially significant moment in the larger history of the diaspora. 36 France functioned as a crucial mediator in the gradual evolution of a transnational view of the war concerned with expanding the boundaries of racial democracy beyond the ideological parameters of the American nation-state. African Americans' romantic affair with France originated well before the First World War. The ideals of the French Revolution captured the imaginations of African Americans, enslaved and free, during the late 18th and early 19th century. Ranging from 19th century figures such as William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass, to 20th century notables like Henry Ossawan Turner, Mary Church Terrell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a number of African Americans with the means to do so found both temporary and long-term political, social, cultural, and emotional refugee in France and its capital of Paris. They 12 propagated an image of France as the singularly color-blind and authentically democratic nation amongst her Western counterparts, including the United States. 37 Thus as the United States prepared to enter the war, France, as an embodiment of the transnational potential of democracy, functioned as a source of inspiration for African Americans. As the Baltimore Afro-American wrote in May 1917, "The blessings of 'Liberty, equality and fraternity' which the French citizenry won in the memorable revolution of 1789 have been actually enjoyed by every Frenchman whether he is European or African. Every man in France is a Frenchman first and then afterwards white or black." 38 African American newspapers and journals devoted particular attention to the participation of African soldiers in the French army in their efforts to highlight the distinctions between France and the United States on matters of race and democracy. As the glowing words of papers like the Baltimore Afro-American reflected, the black press chose not to critically interrogate France's imperialistic and deeply contradictory historical relationship with peoples of African descent. Instead, they interpreted the participation of African soldiers in the war as further evidence of France as a sanctuary of racial egalitarianism. Several stories on France's African servicemen appeared in black newspapers in the months preceding American entry into the war, presenting another western nation that, unlike the United States, saw black people as playing an important role as combatants in the defense of the nation." Whenever and wherever black soldiers are placed they fight with the same steadiness and intelligence as white soldiers," the New York Age proclaimed in September 1914, and continued, "The French is the only government in Europe that appreciates this fact and makes the most of it." 39 In September 1916 The Crisis reported on the presence of French "colored troops" "mixed with white troops from the finest regiments" engaged in fighting at Verdun. 40 These statements functioned to swell 13 African American racial pride, but more significantly challenge the democratic legitimacy of the United States in comparison to France. Black America's most influential newspaper, the Chicago Defender, chose pictures over words to convey the contribution of African peoples to the French war effort. Between the spring of 1916 and 1917, the Defender featured several photographs of African soldiers in the French army on its front pages. The power of photography as a site of imaginary reunification of peoples of African descent across temporal and geographic distance made the images appearing in the Defender, with its circulation reaching into the deep South, ripe with both effective and symbolic meaning. 41 Viewed one way, they functioned as a powerful visual education for dispersed African Americans, especially those lacking the privilege of literacy, about the participation of African peoples in the war and its diasporic reach. The various images of Algerian and West African soldiers had the potential to invoke feelings of transnational racial pride by highlighting their military achievements and concomitant manhood. One of the earliest photos appeared in April 1916, and featured a photo of a contingent of unspecified "African" soldiers traveling through Bordeaux on their way to the front. The accompanying caption read, "These Stalwart Men Are Relied upon for Their Courage and Valor." 42 A subsequent June 3 photo was more specific, and depicted two Algerian soldiers on horseback above the statement, "These Brave Troops Have Meant Much to the French in Their Success Around Verdun." 43 African American readers casting their eyes upon these photos were connected to the war through proof of African martial heroism, valor and sacrifice. 14 The photos in the Defender functioned as visual refutations of racialist and civilizationalist constructions of African peoples. Several images emphasized the essential humanity of African peoples by showing soldiers eating and engaging in moments of relaxation. 44 As they conveyed, these were not savages, but civilized men possessing a fundamental humanity that transcended racial difference. Moreover, the Defender used African soldiers within the context of the war as a watershed moment in the history of modernity to critique discourses that positioned African peoples outside the bounds of modern civilization. An extremely powerful photo appeared in the January 27, 1917 issue. Under the heading "Picking Off Germans," it showed African soldiers manning machine gun turrets and included a statement alerting readers to "Notice the latest model of machine guns these troops are using." 45 The editors of the Defender appeared cognizant of colonial propaganda asserting that African soldiers lacked the inherent mental capacity to master the use of sophisticated modern weaponry. With visible evidence to the contrary, they turned such racialist logic on its head. Photos such as this 15 and others that ran in the pages of the Defender represented powerful examples of how the black press attempted to foster an affirmative consciousness of the diaspora and its relationship to the French war effort by framing images of African soldiers, as symbols of African peoples more broadly, in a way that challenged their perceived inferiority. This fact notwithstanding, and considering the Chicago Defender's ideological orientation and domestic commitment to African American social and political progress, the paper’s photos also served a more provincial purpose. Just as significant as how these images were framed was how they were not framed. Notably, they appeared alone, with no accompanying articles. As a result, the images stood completely removed from the colonial context in which African soldiers fought, thus further reinforcing a romantically distorted view of France's relationship with its 16 subject populations. The paramount goal of the Defender was not only to glorify the heroic exploits of African soldiers, but to critique the United States government and its racially exclusive social and military policies by positioning it in dialectical opposition to an essentialized democratic and racially egalitarian France. This reflected a broader strategy by African American papers like the Defender of employing France and colonial African soldiers as a discursive mechanism to both highlight the racially marginalized condition of African Americans and discredit the moral and international political legitimacy of the United States. One photo was explicit in this regard. An image appearing on the front page of the Defender's July 22, 1916 issue, under the heading "Wounded French Troops," showed a group of Algerian soldiers, wounded in combat against Germany, "sunning themselves on the balconies of the leading hotels in Paris." One of the men in the photo was an African American expatriate named Bob Jones, who apparently left the United States when the state of Georgia refused to allow African Americans to enlist in its national guard. "He went to France," the caption bluntly stated. 46 17 The caption conveyed a clear message: in the United States, black men in most sections of the country lacked the opportunity to defend their country and, due to Jim Crow segregation, the sight of several black men casually relaxing on the balcony of a prominent hotel was unimaginable. In comparison to France, as the photo and its accompanying caption made clear, the hypocrisy of the United States is glaring. But this incredibly provocative image left many significant questions unaddressed: who were these Algerian soldiers, and what were the conditions under which they fought? How did they get to Paris, and what type of reception did they receive? Who was Bob Jones? How did he get to France, where did he fight, and how did he end up in Paris? 47 How well did Jones know these Algerian soldiers? What type of exchanges occurred between them? The Defender leaves these burning questions for the imagination, thus casting explication of a moment of potentially powerful diasporic unity to the wayside in lieu of a skewed juxtaposition of France and America's respective racial attitudes. The war and the participation of African people in it provided the Defender with a broadened range of discursive possibilities to cast critiques of American racial inequality in a transnational and, more specifically, diasporic framework. But as discourse, diaspora functioned in this context to promote a still very much nation-centered agenda of African American democratic rights, as opposed to a broader critical interrogation of the conditions of and relationships between various peoples of African descent, African Americans included. The nationalist priorities of the black press became even more pronounced when the United States formally entered the war in April 1917 and debates regarding the use of African American soldiers dominated racial discourse. Print culture has been central to the formulation of various nationalisms, a phenomenon reflected in African American press coverage of the war. 48 18 While quick to expose the hypocrisy of Woodrow Wilson’s claim to make the world “safe for democracy” through American participation in the war, black papers did not abandon the ideal of nationality, but instead stressed a longstanding historical tradition of black patriotism and nationalistic service. “In loyalty to the country,” the New York Age declared on the eve of American entry into the war, “the Negro people of the United States yield to none, and this despite the strain put upon that loyalty by an administration most unfriendly to them. But they remember that administrations come and go but the Nation endures forever. So despite the insult and wrong done to them by the advocates of a so-called service to Humanity, they remain loyal to the flag.” 49 The war became increasingly cast as a potentially transformative moment in the domestic struggles for citizenship and democratic rights, with African American soldiers functioning as catalysts of change. In the Chicago Defender and other papers, photos of African American soldiers increasingly replaced photos of African soldiers in the French army and elsewhere. And when the black press did mention African soldiers, it was now regularly in the context of discussions of African American military service and the domestic racial politics of the war. The Richmond Planet, for example, preached a gospel of unconditional African American loyalty and in a June 1917 editorial upheld the historical record of black soldiers as evidence of this purported fact. The paper invoked France's African soldiers to underscore their argument, writing, "If the French Senegalese are the terror of the enemy, the well-trained Southern Negro will make a soldier worth while. We believe it without qualification!" 50 The fact that the Richmond Planet even mentioned France’s Senegalese troops is significant and speaks to the growing war-inspired interest in Africa amongst the black press. Unpackaging this statement, however, reveals a great deal about how many black papers not only viewed African soldiers, but employed them for use within a nation-centric discourse of African 19 American political rights advocacy. The label "French Senegalese" empowered the imperial motherland with effective ownership of Senegalese peoples, effectively reinforcing a racialist hierarchy of West African subjugation to French colonial benevolence. Describing the Senegalese as "the terror of the enemy" likewise buttressed a civilizationist construction of the inherent warrior-like nature of West Africans. This led to clear juxtaposition between Senegalese soldiers and African Americans; whereas the Senegalese were naturally fierce fighters, African Americans, even from the South, had progressed beyond such an evolutionary state, were receptive to training, and would make equally, if not more effective soldiers than their African counterparts. As newspapers like the Richmond Planet invested in the service of African American soldiers, they positioned African Americans as occupying a higher rung than France's African colonial soldiers on the ladder of modern Western civilization, thus demonstrating African American fitness for full citizenship rights. Embedded within this articulation of diaspora and simultaneous wartime commitment to nationality were dominant civilizationist discourses of citizenship that African Americans both challenged and appropriated to meet their contextually specific social and political concerns. In one particularly revealing case, the black press, in its haste to promote African American national loyalty and fitness for citizenship, served as a partner with French military officials in propagandizing the imperial civilizing mission. Well before America's official entrance into the war, France had taken active steps to cultivate and maintain fruitful relations and open lines of communication with the United States by sending several key officers of the French High Command to its embassy in Washington, DC. One of these men, Edouard Réquin, was a close confidant of French Marshals Joffre and Foch with past experience commanding Senegalese soldiers in North Africa. Former NAACP Chairman Joel Spingarn, as part of his 20 "constructive programme" in Negro subversion with the Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB), and Booker T. Washington’s longtime secretary Emmett Scott, in his capacity as special assistant to the Secretary of War, saw Réquin as a potentially valuable resource for increasing black support for the war. 51 At Spingarn’s behest, Réquin attended and spoke at the June 1918 Washington, DC editors' conference, a historic gathering convened in cooperation with the Committee on Public Information (CPI) and attended by forty-one African American newspaper editors and political leaders with the goal of forging a united front on black support for the war effort. 52 Réquin’s speech lauding France's employment of African soldiers so impressed Spingarn that he asked the French officer to compose a similar statement for national distribution through the auspices of the CPI and the War Department. As propaganda, Réquin's statement titled “Emploi des Troupes de Couleur dans L’armee Francaise” read as a glowing tribute to the success of French colonialism in rescuing Africans from their previously backwards state, providing them with the civilizing benefits of military service, and granting them the ultimate privilege of defending the motherland. Réquin explicitly stated the utilitarian purpose African troops served prior to the war, writing "they have been the best instrument of our colonial expansion." He went on to single out the service of Algerian and Moroccan troops as a prime example of the civilizing mission's effectiveness at overcoming Muslim colonial resistance, stating, "If one considers that in North Africa the Mohammedan group has been essentially refractory to all foreign intervention, the voluntary participation of colored men in the defense of French soil consecrates definitely the motivating principles of our expansion." The most glaring aspect of Réquin's article was his characterization of the tirailleurs sénégalais, which placed the racialist beliefs held by French military officials of West African soldiers on stunning display. Completely devoid of self-conscious agency and autonomous 21 thought, as Réquin articulated, they exhibited a blind devotion to their white officers and disregard for their own bodily safety. Unable to master the complexities of modern warfare, such as use of the machine gun, the tirailleurs sénégalais were in his words "particularly apt for attack and counter-attack," a euphemism for their crude battlefield utilization as shock troops. This held little consequence because, as Réquin rationalized, these Africans were "equally devoted to France, whom they serve most loyally, and to the flag which represents France," and "so that just as we have delivered these black men from African barbarism so we have given them civilization and justice; it is their duty in turn to defend among us that justice and that civilization against Prussian barbarism." It would seem that Réquin had forgotten his article was intended for African Americans who might take umbrage to such flagrantly racist characterizations of Africans. But he in fact remained fully cognizant of his audience and made it clear that any negative depictions of African soldiers he propagated did not apply to African Americans. "But they are primitive men," Réquin wrote of France's West African soldiers, "without civilization— men who cannot be compared from this point of view with colored Americans." 53 In one eyecatching statement, the French officer provided African Americans with an opportunity to distance themselves from African soldiers, West Africans more broadly, and proclaim their evolutionary superiority. A classic piece of French propaganda from Réquin's perspective to promote France's colonial mission civilisatrice, the article also functioned for the black press to reify a socially constructed diasporic cultural hierarchy that elevated African Americans over other peoples of African descent, specifically those from the continent itself. Réquin forwarded the article to Joel Spingarn, who saw no problems with his observations and translated the document, without revision, into English. After receiving the translated copy from Spingarn, Emmett J. Scott 22 similarly expressed his pleasure with the article's content, its potential to "cheer and hearten the colored people generally," and promised to have it disseminated to "some of our more important colored newspapers." 54 One of these papers was the influential New York Age. The Age featured Réquin's article on the front page of its August 10, 1918 issue, under the subheading "French Officer Says Colored Soldiers of France are Received Exactly the Same as White Soldiers—Foreign Colored Troops Cannot be Compared with Colored Americans who are Products of Civilization." 55 These constituted the two central points of Réquin's article the Age wanted readers to come away with. As a framing mechanism, the subheading functioned to first position France in ideological opposition to the United States and its racially segregated military, a consistent theme throughout much of the black press in its coverage of African soldiers. Second, it reinforced a civilizationist hierarchy of African peoples by positioning African Americans as self-conscious agents of superior mental, cultural, and historical development, thus justifying their full social and political inclusion into modern Western and, more specifically, American democracy. Just as coverage of the war, France, and African soldiers could forge a broadened diasporic awareness amongst African Americans, it also functioned to illuminate significant difference in how African Americans saw themselves in relation to other peoples of African descent and ultimately the importance of the nation in African American racial and political consciousness. African American Soldiers, French African Soldiers, and the Process of Diaspora As black people in the United States struggled with the conflicted place of the nation in their lives, the real and symbolic presence of African American soldiers occupied a central place 23 in the discursive and experiential practice of diaspora and its vicissitudes during the war. Of the roughly 380,000 African Americans who served in the wartime American forces, over 200,000 engaged in overseas duty in France. The 92nd Division, composed of black draftees, and the 93rd Division, composed mostly of national guardsmen who fought under the French flag, allowed over 40,000 black men to demonstrate their manhood on the battlefields of France. The vast majority of African American troops, however, served as laborers, performing the inglorious, yet essential tasks of loading and unloading transport ships, constructing and repairing trenches, and burying the dead. The racial nationalist and white supremacist realities of American democracy remained vividly present throughout the experiences of African American soldiers in France. After all, they were in the army, an institution of the nation-state, which replicated on French soil the domestic racial hierarchies and concomitant systems of dominance, control, and violence inflicting African Americans in the United States. African American officers were slandered, black labor troops systematically abused, and segregation pervaded everything from military hospitals to YMCA huts. The AEF High Command, as evidenced by an infamous August 1918 memo titled “Au Sujet Des Troupes Noires Americaines” ("Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops"), went so far as to educate French officers in command of African American troops on the core tenants of American Jim Crow and white supremacy. 56 "I regret to say that I have come home from France with a feeling of intense bitterness towards white men," Lieutenant James H. N. Waring, a black officer in the 92nd Division, angrily told the Baltimore Afro-American following his service. 57 African American soldiers fought two enemies in France: Germany and trans-Atlantic American racism. Nevertheless, service in France constituted a remarkable social experience for African American servicemen, one that transformed how many positioned themselves as global citizens. 24