An American and Nothing Else: The Great War and the Battle for National Belonging
A New World Order
The Great War left Africans Americans radically transformed. Some relished in the gains of the war years, armed with new outlooks, new networks, and new militancy to fight for their civil rights and human dignity. Others embraced separatist Black Nationalist movements, rejecting the empty promises of American democracy in pursuit of an autonomous Black state in Africa. Still others celebrated diasporic ties and radical Black internationalism, devoting themselves to Pan-Africanism and a visionary global struggle against racial oppression, colonialism, class exploitation, and white supremacy.
Photographic Postcard: Three soldiers in uniform stand before a house
Two wear Engineer Corps badges. [ca. 1918].
Broadside: Call to the People of Asbury Park
“A call to the people of Asbury Park.” [Jamaica, N.Y.]: Universal Negro Improvement Association?. [1924?].
Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) advocated a separatist philosophy of social, political, and economic freedom for all Black people of the African diaspora. In 1918, on the eve of the end of war, Garvey held a mass meeting in Harlem. “The Irish, the Jews, the East Indians and all other oppressed peoples are getting together to demand from their oppressors liberty, justice, equality,” he explained to the crowd of 2,000. “And we now call upon the 400 millions of Negro people of the world to do likewise.”
Antiguan-born George Alexander McGuire served as the founder and chaplain-general of the African Orthodox Church of the UNIA, a faith rooted in traditional Catholic doctrine that rejected “white gods” in favor of “our own true God.” This catechism pamphlet contains both religious and historical doctrine on the impossibility of religious and social equality through American denominations and institutions. At its peak in 1920, the UNIA boasted four million members.
Pamphlet: Universal Negro Catechism
George Alexander McGuire (1866–1934). “Universal Negro Catechism: A Course of Instruction in Religious and Historical Knowledge Pertaining to the Race.” New York: Universal Negro Improvement Association, 1921.
Pamphlet: Word war and democracy as regards to the negro
Charles B. Johnson. “The World War and Democracy as regards the Negro (the Truth): A speech delivered on January 1, 1919, in Union, South Carolina.” M.H. Power, 1919.
Charles Johnson’s celebratory volume celebrates notes that Black soldiers had to forget the “unpleasant past” in order to serve and get to finally taste for themselves “the sweet morsel of Democracy.” He praises the soldiers’ courage in the face of “enemies in the South” and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, “whose sole object is to put the Negro back in his place.” However, Johnson warns: “The old methods of force, ignorance and low wages will not do for this new era and a new Negro. The Negro will no longer stand them.”
The United States rose to world dominance because of the war and in this epoch of revolution and regeneration, the country failed to resolve its most fundamental and ruinous issues. Rather than bid farewell to the days of conquest and aggrandizement, the U.S. moved to secure and expand its empire abroad. Rather than protect the wartime gains of unions, those in power turned to red baiting and violent antilabor crackdowns. Rather than outlaw lynching and abolish Jim Crow, the federal government allowed these systems to persist and calcify locally. Rather than pursue a genuine democratic multicultural and multiracial society, the United States cowed to a status quo of rigid assimilation, nativism, and racial inequality.
Pamphlet: U.S. Navy Training Station at Hampton Roads
U.S. Navy Recruiting Bureau. “U.S. Navy Training Station at Hampton Roads.” Recruiting brochure with pictures and descriptive text, New York, N.Y., [ca. 1918]. Note the clear color line and broader culture of Jim Crow delineated in the final section, which outlines the role of Mess Attendant. The U.S. Navy would remain particularly resistant to racial integration up through World War II, though leadership across all branches of the armed forces defended keeping the military segregated.
Papers: Copy of "White Man's Candidate" Handbill
“Paid Political Advertisement, J.D. Goss, Birmingham, Alabama.” NAACP Red Summer Archive reprint of “White Man’s Candidate” handbill in circulation in Birmingham, Ala., along with explanation of its contents. James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
This facsimile comes from the NAACP’s “Red Summer Archive,” documenting instances of racial violence in 1919. In this handbill J. D. Goss, a white man running for public office, calls for “the Jew, the Greek, and the Syrian,” to be excluded from the whites’ only primary. Although much of the racial violence in this era exploded along the lines of a white-Black racial binary, this document reflects shifting categories of whiteness.
“Stripes but no stars, Asheville, N.C., Convicts marching to work. The Good Road Makers in Dixieland.” International Postcard Company, New York, NY. [1925].
These postcards depict images of chain gangs in North Carolina and were printed in a series called “Stripes but no Stars.” The series juxtaposes the WWI-era language of “stars and stripes” with the harsh realities of convict labor. These postcards offer a cruel twist on civil service, as southern states turned to the forced labor of shackled (and disproportionately Black) prisoners for public works.
NAACP Press Release protesting exclusion of black soldiers from American Legion
NAACP Press Release protesting exclusion of black soldiers from American Legion Red Summer Archive, James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
The American Legion was a veterans’ organization formed in 1919 to lobby for the interests and benefits of veterans and servicemen and to promote “Americanism.” The “Lt. Col. Roosevelt” referenced in the press release was the son of former President and wartime Preparedness advocate Theodore Roosevelt. A veteran of the Great War, the younger Roosevelt played a central role in establishing the Legion and its policies. The NAACP was right to concern itself with the exclusion of Black soldiers and veterans, as the Legion left it up to states and individual locals to decide on the matter of whites only, segregated, or integrated posts.
