“The Crowning Insult”: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s

Abstract

“The Crowning Insult”: Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s Rebecca Jo Plant and Frances M. Clarke Rebecca Jo Plant is an associate professor of history at the University of California, San Diego. Frances M. Clarke is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. The authors would like to thank Clare Corbould, Carolyn Eastman, Ivan Hess, Andy Kaladelfos, Rachel Klein, Paul A. Kramer, Micki McElya, Alisa Plant, Elizabeth Strodeur Pryor, Stephen Robertson, Ken Vandevelde, and Judith Weisenfeld. They also benefited greatly from the comments of Hasan Jeffries, Edward T. Linenthal, Lisa Materson, G. Kurt Piehler, and the anonymous reviewers for the Jour- nal of American History. Readers may contact Plant at rplant@ucsd.edu; and Clarke at frances.clarke@sydney.edu.au. On the history of the gold star mother and widow pilgrimages, see John W. Graham, The Gold Star Mother Pil- grimages of the 1930s: Overseas Grave Visitations by Mothers and Widows of Fallen U.S. World War I Soldiers (Jefferson, 2005); Lisa M. Budreau, Bodies of War: World War I and the Politics of Commemoration in America, 1919–1933 (New York, 2009), 185–241; G. Kurt Piehler, “The War Dead and the Gold Star: American Commemoration of the First World War,” in Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity, ed. John R. Gillis (Princeton, 1994), 168–85; Lotte Larsen Meyer, “Mourning in a Distant Land: Gold Star Pilgrimages to American Military Cemeteries in Eu- rope, 1930–33,” Markers, 20 (2003), 31–75; and Rebecca Jo Plant, “The Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages: Patriotic Maternalists and Their Critics in Interwar America,” in Maternalism Reconsidered: Motherhood, Welfare, and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Marian van der Klein et al. (Oxford, 2012), 121–47. For studies that focus on the African American pilgrims but that do not detail how the controversy surrounding the pilgrimages played out in doi: 10.1093/jahist/jav351 © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. The Journal of American History September 2015 Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on August 26, 2015 James Weldon Johnson was hard at work on his book Black Manhattan in the summer of 1930, having taken leave from his position as executive secretary of the National As- sociation for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp). One morning, after reading a newspaper article that filled him with disgust, he “threw aside” his manuscript to write a satirical poem. The offending news concerned the gold star mother and widow pilgrimages, a federal government program that would send nearly 6,700 women to Europe to visit the graves of their sons and husbands who had perished in World War I. Johnson read that “Negro gold-star mothers would not be allowed to sail on the same ship with the white gold-star mothers” but would instead travel separately on “a second- class vessel.” The poem he penned in protest of that treatment, “Saint Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day,” never directly refers to the women, however; instead, it dramatizes the plight of the betrayed and effaced black male soldier. In the poem’s fantastical climax, set in the nation’s capital at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, mem- bers of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Ku Klux Klan, and veterans’ groups recoil in horror when the soldier is revealed to be black: “Through it, at last, his towering form loomed / big and bigger— / ‘Great God Almighty! Look!’ they cried / ‘he is a nigger!’” 1 Today largely forgotten, the government’s discriminatory treatment of the black gold star mothers and wives ranked high among the concerns that preoccupied black journal-