Segregated Soldiers: Military Training at Historically Black Colleges in the Jim Crow South Marcus S.Cox. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Segregated Soldiers: Military Training at Historically Black Colleges the Jim Crow South Marcus S. Cox. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.In 1863, encouraged by the Emancipation Proclamation, freed slaves joined the ranks of the Union Army en masse. Abolitionist leader and former slave Frederick Douglass saw this development as inevitable the context of a war predicated on the problem of slavery America. To fight for the Government this tremendous war, Douglass wrote, to fight for nationality and for a place with all other classes of our fellow citizens (Douglass' Monthly, April 1863). Within a decade of the war's end, the promise of national fellowship had eluded millions of freed slaves, including veterans and families of those who had fought and died for the Union cause. The former Confederacy had begun the process of restoring white supremacy the South, while the North looked on. As the long era of Jim Crow dawned, Frederick Douglass found that the sacrifices of a generation of African Americans had been forsaken. Despite guarantees of citizenship, black southerners were in a condition but little above that which they were found before the rebellion (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1892). With this betrayal as a backdrop, historian Marcus S. Cox examines the enduring popularity of black military education the South after the Civil War. Segregated Soldiers reveals a surprising commitment among southern blacks to the value of military training and service during the Jim Crow era, a period which the South-with both the implicit and explicit cooperation of the federal government- was committed to black subordination.At the heart of Segregated Soldiers is the argument that African American military education inside Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) has, for over a century, played a central role the southern black freedom struggle. This is an especially valuable contribution to the existing literature on African American culture. Civil Rights scholars, as Cox accurately asserts, rarely handle the dynamic impact of black soldiers and veterans on the evolution of the movement (with some notable exceptions, including Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom (1995) and Leon F. Litwack's How Free Is Free? (2009). And, although institutional histories of HBCUs have revealed the significance of the military within black higher education, these works have failed to consider how this training might fit within the broader context of the culture of black activism. …