The Roughest Riders (33 page)

I
t wasn't long before the old racial prejudices resurfaced. Roosevelt had betrayed the Buffalo Soldiers after their service in Cuba, and now it was Pershing's turn to stigmatize them as virtual foreigners in their own country. The man who had earned the sobriquet Black Jack because of his high praise for the black troops he led in combat now labeled them a “constant menace” to American society in a directive he sent to the French Military Mission in Europe on August 17, 1918. “We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service,” he advised the French officers. “We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans…. Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men.”

It is difficult to believe that these words poured from Pershing's heart in light of his previous views about the Buffalo Soldiers with whom he served. Most likely his message was political, a reflection of the attitudes of the Wilson administration, which was initially opposed to admitting more blacks into the military, even as the
United States waded belatedly into the war that was supposed to end all wars. Pershing was a general who served his masters, and beyond his military acumen, he was a politician himself at the core, like most high-ranking military leaders. So, while his directive may not have emanated from what he felt in his heart, it issued forth from the soul of a man who was a politician first and foremost. Whatever the case, it was all the more disheartening coming from the pen of a man who may not have believed in his own hateful message.

The French responded to Pershing's missive with commendable Gallic disdain; they ordered copies of it burned. France itself was a battlefield on which one in twenty-eight of its citizens had lost their lives by the end of 1918, and its army boasted elite black officers, including two generals, who had served their country well during a four-year struggle against Germany. Senegalese, Algerian, and Moroccan troops had proved their loyalty and fighting spirit at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, which stopped the Germans cold just forty miles shy of the Champs-Élysées.

“It is because these soldiers are just as brave and just as devoted as white soldiers that they receive exactly the same treatment, every man being equal before the death which all soldiers face,” read the official French reply.

France had long been a refuge for African Americans. The French welcomed their range of music and culture and accepted them as equals in a society that imposed no color barriers. It became a home away from home for many jazz musicians, performers, and writers who faced unrelenting bigotry at home. Black American warriors were no exception as they poured into a country that had already been ravaged by war for years before they arrived. At first, Wilson tried to minimize the presence of black soldiers in the military, but when he finally decided to involve the United States in the war in Europe, he realized he would need to beef up the ranks
with whatever resources he had. He instituted a military draft in June 1917 that ensnared all able-bodied men between twenty-one and thirty-one years old—black men in disproportionate numbers to white men. Seven hundred thousand black citizens registered within a month, amounting to 13 percent of all draftees, even though the total number of blacks constituted less than 10 percent of the population at the time.

All in all, ten thousand African Americans manned the ranks of the US Army before the war ended, including the Buffalo Soldiers of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantries. The Ninth boasted the presence of Lieutenant Benjamin O. Davis, the future first black general of the army, who had fought in the Philippines. Ten thousand more joined the National Guard in a growing number of states, and another ten thousand joined the US Navy. Wilson's need for manpower to flesh out his insatiable war machine induced him to create two additional black combat units: the Ninety-Second and Ninety-Third Divisions. Like the Buffalo Soldiers who had served in the Spanish-American War before them, the latest black warriors quickly earned the respect of both the enemy they fought against and the allies they fought beside.

Two white American aviators testified that, “While [the black troops] were captured at different points, and imprisoned at widely separate prisons,” the first question German military intelligence asked was “How many colored troops the Americans had over here.” The Germans were concerned that the Buffalo Soldiers, like the Senegalese and Algerians who fought with the French, were mighty warriors who took no prisoners.

The French were so impressed by the black Americans' fighting ability that they awarded the coveted Croix de Guerre to Sergeant Henry Johnson, the first American of any color to receive it. More than one hundred more would be given the honor or the even more prestigious Medaille Militaire. They came to be known among black
American civilians as the “Men of Bronze” and “Harlem's Own,” while the Germans regarded them as “Hell Fighters.” The French sympathized with the men's Class-B status by referring to them as Les Enfants Purdus—lost children, isolated within their home country.

The war crushed Europe during a brutal four-year period, but US involvement lasted only nineteen months. Wilson claimed it was America's duty to make the world “safe for democracy,” but there was little in the way of democracy at stake in Europe, which had been crippled by the turmoil of falling and rising empires, internecine monarchies, and a lust for other nations' territory over the centuries leading up to the First World War. “We have no selfish end to serve,” Wilson declared in a speech. “We desire no conquest, no dominion…. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind.”

While America's belated entry into the war did not exactly expand democratic freedoms across the Continent and elsewhere—Nazism and Communism would follow in the wake of the war—it did save the day for the beleaguered Allies. Italy was on the verge of surrendering to Austria, Britain and France were close to collapse, Germany was near triumphant, and the Russian Bolsheviks had used the opportunity to impose their own special brand of totalitarian hell over a vast spread of land from Europe through the frigid reaches of Siberia.

“We're finished forever with this filthy war!” read the lyrics of a popular French protest song of the period. The country's soldiers were deserting in droves, and England and France together had lost a million men plus countless civilians during the seemingly interminable onslaught. Germany was ready to declare victory in April 1918, when the landing of a million US troops on European soil turned the tide and disabused them of that notion. The German
general Erich Ludendorff attributed his nation's “looming defeat” to “the sheer number of Americans arriving daily at the front.” The Buffalo Soldiers were among the last US troops to hit the shores and were placed under the command of the French army. Afterward, an aide to Marshal Philippe Pétain praised the fighting spirit of both the black and white American soldiers who came to his country's rescue in a memo to Pétain: “The spectacle of these magnificent youths from overseas” symbolized “life coming in floods to reanimate the dying body of France,” he wrote.

The Buffalo Soldiers suffered tremendous losses in the war to liberate Europe from German aggression, with the dead and wounded of the Ninety-Third alone totaling almost 50 percent of the division.

Within four months of their triumphal return to the United States, which included a ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City, race riots exploded across the length and breadth of the country. The summer of 1919 was called the “Red Summer,” a reference to the blood of black citizens that flowed through the streets of large cities and small towns in both the North and South. Seventy-eight black men—including several veterans in uniform—were strung up by the neck in the course of the year. The president of the United States defended the widespread racial antagonism in a book he had written in 1901, stating that “congressional leaders were determined to put the white south under the heel of the black south,” and therefore whites were motivated by “the mere instinct of self-preservation.” As president, Wilson institutionalized racism at the highest level of government.

This time around, however, African Americans were determined to give back as good as they got. “Like men we'll face the
murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back” was a call to rebellion penned by Jamaican American writer and poet Claude McKay in July 1919. African American civil rights activist and writer W. E. B. Du Bois followed that cry from the soul a month later with his own words: “They cheat us and mock us; they kill us and slay us; they deride our misery … TO YOUR TENTS, O ISRAEL! And FIGHT, FIGHT, FIGHT for freedom.”

Black citizens in Chicago armed themselves with government-issued Springfield rifles and Browning automatic machine guns on the night of July 28, 1919, when a race riot broke out, the result of black residents fearing an invasion of their neighborhood by an Irish gang. Fortunately, the conflict never came off, since it would undoubtedly have ended in bloodshed and the loss of life for many participants. “Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down,” wrote black veteran Haywood Hall. “This was even more true after the war.”

Republican congressman Hamilton Fish from New York, the son of the Rough Rider of the same name who had been killed in Cuba, spoke out in favor of a bill to make lynching a federal crime in 1922. “The colored man who went into war had in his heart the feeling that he was not only fighting to make the world safe for democracy but also to make this country safe for his own race.” The bill was defeated with the help of President Warren G. Harding, who was elected in 1920. Harding was rumored to be part black himself; one of his ancestors may have “jumped the fence,” the president admitted, with no trace of irony in his voice.

The aftermath of the war marked the beginning of the end of the Buffalo Soldiers as a group of tightly knit fighting units in the US military. Although the need for black warriors to help fight the
country's battles never ended, when the United States began to downsize the armed services during the years following World War I, there is no question that African Americans were more adversely affected than whites; turned away from the military, they were left only the most menial jobs available in the mainstream economy.

The downsizing continued through the 1920s and into the 1930s, with the Ninth, Tenth, and other Buffalo Soldier units thinned out and all but obliterated as the Great Depression took hold. The cavalry and infantry divisions that survived continued to be segregated as they had been throughout the wars in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, and during the expedition into Mexico, and they were still under the command of mostly white officers. As late as 1941, there were still only five black officers in the army: Benjamin O. Davis, who became the first black general on October 25, 1940; his son Benjamin O. Davis Jr.; and three chaplains. Those who had served earlier had either been killed in battle or become ill and forced to retire—including Charles Young, who had fought valiantly in the Philippines and in Mexico and died an outcast in Nigeria in January 1922. He was buried there with full British military honors.