My Fellow Soldiers: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War by Andrew Carroll

Author:Andrew Carroll
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Biography & Autobiography, History, Military, United States, World War I
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2017-04-04T03:00:00+00:00

Such a course of action does not mean that he should be led by any silly sentimentality in taking up the duty that faces him in the present hour. It does not mean he should forget his just cause for complaint. It means that guided by hard, common sense and remembering all that this country justly owes him, the Negro will take up and perform the duty that now falls to him; thereby strengthening his protest for his right and flinging a challenge to the white people of this country to rise to his plane of magnanimity and do their duty by him.

Secretary Baker was torn. Desegregating the Army was out of the question. Neither the public nor President Wilson, for that matter, would stand for it. The U.S. Marine Corps refused to accept blacks under any circumstances, and in the Navy, blacks could serve only as mess hands, preparing food. But Baker knew African American soldiers had already distinguished themselves in the Revolution, the Civil War, and every major conflict since. Baker was under tremendous pressure from African American leaders to deploy black soldiers into combat positions, but what happened at Houston, no matter how culpable the local whites were for goading the 3rd Battalion soldiers, cast a shadow over all black troops. Considering the sheer number of soldiers involved, white and black, it was impossible to separate them entirely or to keep black troops from training near white communities. Logistics simply wouldn’t allow it.

The next potential clash started brewing one week after the Houston killings. On August 31, 1917, the mayor of Spartanburg, South Carolina, J. F. Floyd, was dumbfounded to learn that the War Department was sending the 369th Infantry Regiment to Camp Wadsworth, right outside Spartanburg. The Rattlers, as they were known—their flag showcased a rattlesnake—were, except for a handful of white officers and Puerto Rican volunteers, all African American soldiers from New York.

“With their northern ideas about race equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men,” Spartanburg’s mayor told the New York Times. “I can say right here that they will not be treated as anything except negroes.” Floyd, alluding to Houston, stated that sending the 369th to Spartanburg in the aftermath of such mayhem was like “waving a red flag in the face of a bull, something that can’t be done without trouble.”

The head of Spartanburg’s chamber of commerce fully agreed, telling the New York Times:

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