Abstract
During World War I, 85 African-American social service workers were sent to France as program directors for the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). They took up their work in the context of soaring race consciousness as they and the African-American soldiers they served encountered "free France" on the one hand and the American command's determination to recreate Jim Crow on French soil on the other. The African-American YMCA "secretaries," as they were called, worked with imagination, passion, and considerable skill to establish the right of the African-American soldiers to services long designated "for whites only." Their programs were suffused by habits of collective self-help and benefited enormously from the race pride, spirit of internationalism, and militancy of the times.
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