My Uncle Cardoza in France During WWI

This post relates to an interesting subject relevant to our investigation of African American culture in the 20th century, which is the participation of African Americans in particular in WWI--a topic that has largely existed under an extraordinary cloud of obfuscation manufactured largely by the dismal scent that Jim Crow lent to every activity and contribution of African Americans in the 20th century.

The story of their role in WWI is one of the most fascinating chapters, which I wanted to delve into more deeply during my sabbatical but never got to. It moves me deeply partly because of the magnificent portrayals of black soldiers of WWI, in particular in Ralph Ellison's classic INVISIBLE MAN, immediately comes to mind.

Their experience of segregation in the military, the whiff of freedom and triumph they enjoyed in Paris and then their tragic return to the Red Summer of 1919 and the lynching ropes and fires of the South is a story that will forever intrique, especially since I was raised in a time in which women rarely got to engage in military service of any kind.

The case of WWI, in which many men of African descent participated from all over the world, is really a topic of great international dimension and interest, which might provide some necessary background to matters that come much more clearly into focus in the historiography and journalism on African American participation in WWII. There wasn't too much time between the two wars, but WWII was so much more extensively and graphically documented in every detail, benefiting as it did by the extraordinary international developments in photography and war journalism. Indeed, such developments may have contributed to the ultimate desegregation of the U.S. military by President Harry Truman after World War II, a step which now seems inevitable in historical hindsight.

I don't know if you have had a chance to notice but a lot of wonderful documentaries and feature films have begun to emerge on this war, propelled along in part by the release of a great deal of color film monopolized by the military in a variety of countries (the U.S. and Japan both come to mind--I will be showing some of both collections in class) but then not widely released to the public for various reasons, some of them having to do with propaganda and all sorts of war related fears. Part of it is that only now via dvd, internet and computer technology have we got the means to really widely distribute and appreciate this material I think although I don't hear people saying much about it.

Many people seem too consumed by the wars of the present to notice this glorious scholarship and documentation of the equally crazy wars of the past but I think it would be most helpful to all of us if we could take another longer look. Certainly, much of it is deeply relevant to the subject matter of this course. African American military participation has always been central to all discussions of African American Civil Rights and Cultural Progress. There's actually a wonderful book about this, which we won't be reading in this course but which you might find interesting. It is by John A. Williams and it is called CAPTAIN BLACKMAN (1972 republished in 2000). Not my favorite title but certainly one of my favorite books. And a book that anyone who has ever been in the military, or knows anyone in the military, should certainly read.


http://michelewallace.zenfolio.com/img/s8/v10/p848698751-11.jpg


 Some more pictures of black soldiers in WWI from my family archive.

http://michelewallace.zenfolio.com/blacksoldierswwi

African Americans and WWI

World War I is an important topic in understanding the nexus of blues people aesthetics and the history of African Americans in the 20th Century.  I knew this but couldn't explain how I knew it until I begun to really dig for some way to clearly represent this to an audience of students.

I started with a series of unconnected pieces, clues really: the fact that my great Uncle Cardoza had been a soldier in WWI and been stationed in France, that I had two photographs of him in uniform at the beginning and at the close of the war, as well as many pictures of friends in his regiment.  I also knew that James Reese Europe had led the Regimental Orchestra along with Noble Sissle, and that both of them were highly productive and well documented innovators in jazz and ragtime.  When I say documented, I mean not only written documents but also photographs.  I knew that WEB Du Bois had recommended to African Americans that they fight in WWI, Close Ranks with other Americans despite the unwelcome environment of racism and Jim Crow at home, in the hopes that things would get better after the war.  

But at the same time, I came to the realization that a great deal of negativity continues to radiate around African American participation in WWI, the notion that their contribution was less than dignified, that few of them fought, that others were employed in segregated units doing labor that failed to contribute to any advancement of the race.  

I had bought second hand a series of books by Kelly Miller containing many photographs of black troops from the U.S. and from other places throughout the Diaspora, which I haven't yet  had the time to read.  Then I found Walter Dean Myers lovely little volume written with Bill Miles, the documentarian of the 369th Regiment: The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage.  Although it is a text intended perhaps for a high school or junior high school audience, like much that Myers does, himself a collector of black photographs, it is beautifully done.  I had not even realized that I had never known what a regiment or a platoon was and how important it was to gather these rudiments of military vocabulary to comprehend what had happened to the black soldiers in my great Uncle's unit. 

Via Walter Dean Myers' book, I discovered other references, including The Unknown Soldiers: African-American Troops in World War I by Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri and Harlem's Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I by Stephen L. Harris. And so now the thing to do is to put it altogether.  

But I do think the undervaluation of African American cultural contributions in the 20th century begins with the profoundly damaging misreading of how wars have and continue to eviscerate men's bodies and souls. 

CHRONOLOGY CONTINUED

This photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston taken in 1899 of a class of African American and Native American students at Hampton Institute engaged in the study of the traditional costume of a fellow classmate I have chosen to spearhead the Blues People Curriculum for this semester. It was this very photograph, which has been widely reproduced and misinterpreted by American Studies scholars, that has played a key role in the formation of my current conception of the role played by historically Black Colleges, the Blues, and the lives of such extraordinary figures as WEB Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and Ida B. Wells in creating the cultural signature of a people who had once been slaves, whose image was once reviled, but whose legacy has inspired struggles for freedom and democracy all over the world. 

Just by way of explanation of what is going on in this picture.  Hampton University had a Museum, to which were donated artifacts of African and Native American tribes, often as gifts from the students or their parents.  

In this picture I would propose that the young man in Native American costume is actually John Wizi, son of Chief Wizi of Cross Creek, South Dakota.  His presentation in the album elsewhere in Western dress and haircut suggests perhaps that he was an influential person among the students.  As is often the case, the commentary included with the pictures is unreliable and impressionistic.  In another photograph of Native American students, of which there were a great many in the original scrapbook but very few of which were used in the Album, there is a shot of the "Indian Orchestra," one of whom might also be John Wizi, in the center in the back on a large drum. 

Also, Hampton held pageants in which the native dress of Africans and Native Americans were a key aspect of the program, as described in the chapter on the Hampton Museum in ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, The Center for African Art & Prestel Verlag, 1989.  William Sheppard, a Hampton graduate visited the "Belgian" Congo as a missionary and ultimately devoted his important collection of Kuba art to the Hampton Museum, as well as also becoming one of the leading voices condemning King Leopold's persecution of the people of the Congo.  This is just part of the story of the connection between historically black colleges and the Congo as described by Professor Ira Dworkin in his dissertation in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, 1999.  

1909--NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ) is founded in order to attack segregation, lynching and race riots.  Du Bois hired as Director of publications and research.  Moves to New York to found, edit and write The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the NAACP.

1910--National Urban League founded to direct migrants from the South to jobs, housing and education.

1912--Jelly Roll Morton publishes his first song, "The Jelly Roll Blues."

1913--Du Bois writes and stages The Star of Ethiopia, a pageant celebrating black history to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emanicipation.
[Photo]

1914--Du Bois supports women's suffrage in CRISIS editorial.

1915--NAACP Campaigns actively against the public exhibition of THE BIRTH OF A NATION

1917--Marcus Garvey founded the UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association)

1918--Du Bois writes "Close Ranks" editorial in THE CRISIS urging black men to enlist to fight in WWI in exchange for their liberty at home.

"Let Us while this war last, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our whhite fellow citizens and the alllied nations that are fighting for democracy."

WEB Du Bois, 1917

COURSE READINGS--SECTION II

II. Jean Toomer, Cane (1923)
The Jean Toomer Pages, University of Buffalo 1996

Visuals: James VanDerZee, Aaron Douglas, Aspects of Negro Life (1934)
Music:St. Louis Blues, dir. Dudley Murphy with Bessie Smith (1929)Louis Armstrong Collection: Dinah, On the Waterfront, Black and Blues, A Sleepy Time Down South III.

III. Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (1926)

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poetsg_l/hughes/weary.htm

SUPPLEMENTARY READING:"

Yale University Beinecke Library: "Langston Hughes at 100 http:/highway49.library.yale.edu/langstonhughes/web.html

IV. Vernacular Culture Section--African American Literature/Norton Anthology, 2nd Edition

Mahalia Jackson, "Soon I Will Be Gone," on The Norton Anthology Audiotape

VI. Richard Wright, "The Man Who Lived Underground" (1941) in Eight Men