Indispensable Histories

Abstract

Following World War I, African American camp worker Kathryn Johnson and YMCA volunteer Addie Hunton produced a memoir to document stories of Black soldiers during the war. Johnson and Hunton's efforts mirrored those of other writers, historians, and civil rights activists “to generate a Black counter-memory of the war.” Those histories, Lentz-Smith attests, “were not simply defenses of Black men and women's honor; they were also calls to action.”