Negro Soldiers Research Articles

On the Rationality of Propaganda II: Examples of Reasonable Propaganda Films

The term ‘propaganda’ is normally taken in the pejorative sense of deceitful messaging. Propaganda is considered dubious if it is produced by a government agency, especially if by a ministry of war or propaganda. In this article I apply the theory of propaganda I sketched in a prior piece in these pages, under which propaganda is simply messaging intended to persuade others to do something or to support something. Under this theory, propaganda is reasonable if but only if it is evidence-based, truthful, broadly logical, not coercive, targeted at mentally competent adults, and transparent—meaning that the audience should be aware that the message is intended to persuade them to do or support something. I then examine three WWIIera government propaganda films, one—A Defeated People (1946)—produced by the British military, and two—The Negro Soldier (1944) and Teamwork (1947)—produced by the American military. I explain first why I chose these particular films. I then analyze these films in some detail, and show that while they were not perfectly rational, they all effectively conveyed the persuasive message that the respective militaries wanted to convey. And they did this by meeting all of criteria for propaganda to be rational.

Professor, Prize-Winning Poet, Translator

Professor Herbert Woodward Martin and his family arrived in Pécs thirty years ago, in early September 1990. He earned a Fulbright grant to teach American and African American literature courses to students of the English Department of Janus Pannonius University as the institution was called at that time. Martin was not the first Fulbright scholar in the department but the first African American who, among other subjects, familiarized the English majors with poems published in The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20thCentury, edited by Arnold Adoff and introduced by Gwendolyn Brooks. The anthology contains some poems by Martin too, including “A Negro Soldier’s Viet Nam Diary,” which has heart-wrenching lines about a black soldier facing the loss of innocent lives in a land destroyed by modern weapons, where “Death hangs on the rice” (Martin, “A Negro Soldier’s” 228)

Professor, Prize-Winning Poet, Translator

Professor Herbert Woodward Martin and his family arrived in Pécs thirty years ago, in early September 1990. He earned a Fulbright grant to teach American and African American literature courses to students of the English Department of Janus Pannonius University as the institution was called at that time. Martin was not the first Fulbright scholar in the department but the first African American who, among other subjects, familiarized the English majors with poems published in The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20thCentury, edited by Arnold Adoff and introduced by Gwendolyn Brooks. The anthology contains some poems by Martin too, including “A Negro Soldier’s Viet Nam Diary,” which has heart-wrenching lines about a black soldier facing the loss of innocent lives in a land destroyed by modern weapons, where “Death hangs on the rice” (Martin, “A Negro Soldier’s” 228)

“American Homespun Fascists”: Seán O’Casey and the Returning Veteran at the American Negro Theatre

This article explores four works produced by the American Negro Theatre (ANT) for stage and radio between September 1945 and July 1946 – Arthur Laurents’s The Face (1945), Samuel J. Kootz’s Home Is the Hunter (1945–46), Erik Barnouw’s The Story They’ll Never Print (1946), and Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1946) – arguing that they collectively constitute a coherent, if uneven, set of responses to what ANT co-founder and director Abram Hill had called in September 1945 “one of the most pressing questions facing the world today: What is the reaction of the returning Negro GI to his land of democracy?” This essay identifies the interrelatedness of these four works and draws on archival sources to pay close attention to the production of Juno (which has never previously been discussed at length or in connection with the ANT’s other returning veteran dramas). Analysing the ANT’s Juno as an oblique “returning Negro soldier drama” that critically retools what Judith Smith terms “trading places” stories of the immediate post-war years, this essay further contends that the company trod a fine line between an explicit and an implicit critique of the United States, protesting against “American homespun fascists” and asserting the ordinariness of African American soldiers. While this strategy sometimes risked opacity, it invited astute audiences to make connections that were inferred rather than asserted and thus circumvented accusations of anti-Americanism.

Foreword: A Century of Black Life, History, and Culture: An Exhibition of Dr. Carter G. Woodson's Legacy

4 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN Vol. 77, No. 2 77 No.2 FOREWORD: A CENTURY OF BLACK LIFE, HISTORY, AND CULTURE: AN EXHIBITION OF DR. CARTER G. WOODSON’S LEGACY BY ALICIA L. MOORE AND LA VONNE I. NEAL This issue of the Black History Bulletin (BHB) focuses on the impact of Dr. Carter G. Woodson’s vision when he espoused, “The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples.”1 “In 1915 when he established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, it was born of the need he perceived for African Americans to gain a greater appreciation of their history and to defend the race against its traducers by countering falsehoods with facts.”2 A century later, we are celebrating the successful impact of the organization he founded, now known as the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). Woodson’s legacy is the result of an effective infrastructure comprised of an organization—ASALH and a publishing company that has helped to reframe public curriculum to include the contributions of Black people to American life, history, and culture. For example, he was quite compelling and clear about the need for inclusion through multicultural education when he wrote: ,QRXURZQSDUWLFXODUKLVWRU\ZHZRXOGQRWGLPRQHELWWKHOXVWUHRIDQ\VWDULQRXU¿UPDPHQW:HZRXOGQRWOHDUQOHVVRI George Washington, “First in War, First in Peace and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen”; but we would learn something also of the three thousand Negro soldiers of the American Revolution who helped to make this “Father of our Country” possible. We would not neglect to appreciate the unusual contribution of Thomas Jefferson to freedom and democracy; but we would invite attention also to two of his outstanding contemporaries, Phillis Wheatley, the writer of interesting verse, and Benjamin Banneker, the mathematician, astronomer, and advocate of a world peace plan set forth in 1793 with the vital principles of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations.3 As co-editors of the Black History Bulletin (BHB) formerly known as the Negro History Bulletin, established by Dr. Carter G. Woodson in 1937, at the behest of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, we contemplated how to appropriately celebrate Woodson’s 100-year-old legacy. Our direction was clear, like museum curators, we would exhibit special moments of life, history and culture. Subsequently, we GHFLGHGWRERUURZIURPWKHDFXPHQRIDFRQWHPSRUDU\PXVHXPFXUDWRUZKREHQH¿WWHGIURPKLVLPSDFWRQ$IULFDQ$PHULFDQVJDLQLQJ a greater appreciation of their history. Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, inspired us. It was evident to us that Golden continues to carry Woodson’s torch to reframe public curriculum when during an interview in The Grio she commented: When the museum was founded it was with the very powerful idea that the exclusion of African-American artists from the canon of American art needed to be challenged and changed. The museum’s founding principle was to create the possibility to show innovative and important works of art and to create exhibitions and programs that brought art and culture by black artists to the community and the art world at large. That continues to be our mission, though the art and culture worlds have evolved, Harlem has evolved, and the nature of how people see museums has evolved.4 This issue is an exhibition of authors who represent the legacy of Woodson with their articles that highlight the texture of Black life, history, and culture through articles about art, spirituality, innovation, and media. Additionally, inspired by Golden we are featuring an African American artist---Calvin Coleman II who created all of the art featured in this issue. Notes: 1 Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro ed. Daryl Michael Scott (Washington D.C.: The ASALH Press, 1933/2005...

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

Reviewed by: The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro Stacy Reardon (bio) Whalan, Mark. The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2008. 400,000 African American soldiers participated in World War I within a segregated military that in large part consigned them to service roles: building roads, digging trenches, and unloading cargo. Nevertheless, prominent African American intellectuals in the early-twentieth century pushed for African American inclusion in the military as an opportunity for social progress and a means for African American men to acquire the trappings of masculine honor and respect so long denied them. When the 369th regiment, "The Harlem Hellfighters," paraded up 5th Avenue into Harlem, 250,000 people came to greet them. Yet the prevalence in 1919 of race riots and lynching—including of African American veterans still in uniform—cut into the optimism. Meanwhile, white America went busily about memorializing the war as one fought exclusively by whites. Almost a century later, the memory of World War I remains a contested site in American culture, particularly in the arts, where the relationship of the Great War to African American literature and culture has gone virtually undiscussed. While many of the prominent histories of the Harlem Renaissance, including When Harlem Was in Vogue by David Levering Lewis (1989), The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White by George Hutchinson (1995), and Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance by Cary D. Wintz (1998), touch on World War I, Mark Whalan's The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro is the first full-length work to examine in detail how African American participation in World War I played out in the cultural sphere. Recognizing that a critical focus on battlefield narratives as the defining texts of war literature has failed to document the way the War interwove with the New Negro movement, Whalan expands his investigation to cover writings of the "talented tenth" not normally considered to be war literature. By examining texts ranging from fictive representations of African American soldiers, such as Claude McKay's Home to Harlem (1928) and Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), to popular war poetry exhorting African American soldiers to victory, such as Roscoe Jamison's "Negro Soldiers," to the influential [End Page 1140] photography and soldier portraits of James VanDerZee, Whalan unveils the tensions generated within African American culture at the prospect of participating in an imperial war on behalf of a racist state in which racialization of the enemy was a dominant ideological strategy. Whalan persuasively theorizes that African American participation in the War, however oppressive, energized the New Negro movement and helped shape its models of manhood and resistance. Whalan opens with a thoroughly grounded history of the experiences of African Americans in the War and at home. He outlines the social debates framing race and the military, showing that a central question for African Americans was whether the possibility of social advancement through military service could offset the costs and contradictions of serving in a segregated military during a time of widespread racial violence and oppression. At the same time, white America "deplored the thought of militarily trained black men in their communities" and was conflicted as to whether the need for men was urgent enough to risk training and arming a group so long held in subjugation through violence (1). Whalan traces how these issues funneled into the practical but contentious disputes taking place on a national level about military segregation, black military roles, and officer training. The book's major project, however, is to offer a cultural thematics of African American engagement with the cultural implications and memory of the Great War, particularly adumbrating the internal debates within the New Negro movement about the role of African Americans in the military, its implications, and how that participation should be represented. In the second chapter, "'Civilization has met its Waterloo': The Great War, Race, and the Canon," Whalan brings into focus the way African American intellectuals negotiated a precarious position between demanding that African Americans be acknowledged as rightful participants in American culture on the one hand and celebrating African American culture as an attractive refuge...

Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande, 1846-1861 (review)

20ogBook Reviews265 service would boost the fortunes of their region and pave the way for a southern transcontinental railroad. Elsewhere, in his discussion of Henry Skillman's mail operations in Texas during the early 1850s, Sells says that "Negro soldiers" provided protection for Skillman's mail line (131-132). Buffalo soldiers were not detailed to the Texas frontier until after the Civil War. The above arejust a few of die many errors that diminish diis overview's odierwise commendable assets. Sells, a Colorado native now retired from the financial services industry, clearly has a strong affinity for his subject matter. Readers will find much of the book informative and many of the stories engaging. This work provides an illustrative example, however, of why copyeditors at every publishing house are wordi their weight in gold. Texas Christian UniversityGlen Sample Ely Texas Devils: Rangen and Regulars on tL· Lower Rio Grande, 1846—1861. By Michael L. Collins. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Pp. 328. Illustrations , notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9780806139395, $26.95 cloth.) Anyone wanting to know more about the history of the Texas Rangers and the United States Army and the role they played in the history of the Lower Rio Grande will thoroughly enjoy this refreshing and tantalizing book. In a grand sweeping narrative, Collins ably demonstrates that the Mexican War was only die beginning of a series of tumultuous events on the border. As many as five thousand Texas Mounted Volunteersjoined Gen. Zachary Taylor 's army on die Rio Grande in 1 846. Although Taylor viewed the Rangers as brave and gallant, he saw them as lawless and uncontrollable. Rangers such as Ben McCulloch,John Salmon "Rip" Ford, Walter P. Lane,John Coffee "Jack" Hays, and Samuel Hamilton Walker all became legendary during the war. A veteran of the Mier Expedition and the "black bean" incident, Walker came to be known as the ¦ "Thunderbolt of die Texas Rangers." Killed at the Batde of Humanda at the end of the war, he is best remembered today for the Colt Walker revolver, the largest and most powerful black powder repeating handgun ever made. As an adjutant in the Rangers, Ford came to be known as "R. I .P." after writing "Rest in Peace" at die end of letters of condolence. One of the most interesting Texas volunteers, however, is John Joel Glanton who is referred to as a half-savage Indian fighter with a penchant for scalping die enemy, and who was certain to have been courtmartialed as a war criminal had he not escaped back to Texas. After a murderous, scalp hunting career murdering Indians in northern Mexico, Glanton arrived at the Yuma Crossing on die Colorado River where he seized control of the ferry from the Yuma Indians. In response, the Yumas caught Glanton and his men in a drunken stupor, killed and scalped most of them, and then cremated their bodies in a big bonfire. Largely men of myth with a barbaric code of conduct and notorious for their excessive violence and biting racism, "Los Diablos Téjanos" left deep and lasting scars on die history of the border that remain to this day. In the 1 850s, the lower Rio Grande was also plagued by filibusters lusting for conquest, many of them Knights of the Golden Circle. Some dreamed of creat- 266Southwestern Historical QuarterlyOctober ing a Republic of the Sierra Madre as an independent buffer state in northern Mexico. Probably die best known filibuster wasJosé María de Jesús Carvajal who rallied several hundred Texas mercenaries into a mob called the "Liberating Army of Northern Mexico." In what was known as the "Merchant's War," Carvajal and his rabble captured Camargo and attacking Matamoros, only to be defeated by a superior force of the Mexican army in street-to-street, house-to-house fighting. Certainly the most serious uprising on the Rio Grande, one that would send hundreds of Texas Rangers and the United States Army scurrying for the Rio Grande, was the Cortina War of 1859-1860. Although Collins did not have available a recent biography of Cortina that corrects many of the errors of previous writings on die subject, his treatment of this...

Visions of belonging: family stories, popular culture, and postwar democracy, 1940-1960

Acknowledgments Part 1. Ordinary Families, Popular Culture, and Popular Democracy, 1935-1945 Radio's Formula Drama Popular Theater and Popular Democracy Popular Democracy on Radio Popular Democracy in Wartime: Multiethnic and Multiracial? Representing Soldier The New World of Home Front Soldiers as Veterans: Imagining Postwar World Looking Back Stories Part 2. Making Working-Class Family Tree Grows in Brooklyn From Working-Class Daughter to Working-Class Writer Revising 1930s Radical Visions Remembering a Working-Class Past Instructing Middle Class The Ethnic and Racial Boundaries of Ordinary Making Womanhood Ordinary Hollywood Revises Tree Grows in Brooklyn The Declining Appeal of Tree's Social Terrain Part 3. Home Front Harmony and Remembering Mama Bank Account and Other Ethnic Working-Class Fictions Remembering Mama on Stage The Mother Next Door on Film, 1947-1948 Mama on CBS, 1949-1956 The Appeal of TV Mama's Ordinary Family Stories Part 4. Loving Across Prewar Racial and Sexual Boundaries Lillian Smith and Strange Fruit Quality Reinstates Color Line Strange Fruit as Failed Social Drama The Returning Negro Soldier, Interracial Romance, and Deep Are Roots Interracial Male Homosociability in Home of Brave Part 5. Seeing Through Jewishness Perception and Racial Boundaries in Focus Policing Racial and Gender Boundaries in The Brick Foxhole Recasting Victim in Crossfire Deracializing Jewishness in Gentleman's Agreement Part 6. Hollywood Makes Race (In)Visible A Great Step Forward: The Film Home of Brave Lost Boundaries: Racial Indeterminacy as Whiteness Pinky: Racial Indeterminacy as Blackness Trading Places or No Way Out? Everyman Stories Part 7. Competing Postwar Representations of Universalism The Truly Universal People: Richard Durham's Destination Freedom The Evolution of Arthur Miller's Ordinary Family Miller's Search for the People, 1947-1948 The Creation of an Ordinary American Tragedy: Death of a Salesman The Rising Tide of Anticommunism Part 8. Marital Realism and Everyman Love Stories Marital Realism Before and After Blacklist The Promise of Live Television Drama Paddy Chayefsky's Everyman Ethnicity Conservative and Corporate Constraints on Representing Ordinary Filming Television's Ordinary: Marty's Everyman Romance Part 9. Reracializing Ordinary American Family: Raisin in Sun Lorraine Hansberry's South Side Childhood Leaving Home, Stepping Deliberately Against Beat The Freedom Family and Black Left I Am a Writer: Hansberry in Greenwich Village Raisin in Sun: Hansberry's Conception, Audience Reception Frozen in Frame: The Film of Raisin Visions of Belonging Notes Index

Variety for the Servicemen: The Jubilee Show and the Paradox of Racializing Radio during World War II

In 1944, Truman Gibson, civilian aide to the Secretary of War and Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis Sr., expressed great excitement toward the activities of the Armed Forces Radio Service (AFRS). Two of the most highly influential black Americans in World War II, Gibson and Davis indicated that the AFRS was making a "great contribution" regarding the operation as "easily the best from an administrative point of view."1 This high praise is not surprising, given the achievements of the AFRS in featuring black Americans on the radio. As part of its innovative program schedule to meet the entertainment needs of American soldiers, the AFRS developed Jubilee, an all-black variety show employing the most famous musicians and comedians of the time. Acknowledging the interests of black troops and the morale-boosting potential of individuals such as Duke Ellington and Lena Horne, the AFRS asserted that racialized programming was important to radio's wartime function. Thus, Jubilee became part of the larger mission of the AFRS, as stated by Commanding Officer Tom Lewis: "Radio, by holding to the ideal of its charter—by faithfully serving public interest, convenience and necessity—can be the democratic voice of free America speaking to its own people . . . and to the freedom-loving people of the world."2 The creation of Jubilee was part of a widespread federal effort to recognize black Americans through cultural programs. At this time, state administrators believed that they could acknowledge the needs of an increasingly mobilized black population while avoiding explosive racial tensions. With the failed promise of World War I in the minds of black Americans, and as American discrimination proved as pervasive as ever, many black individuals were hesitant to support a largely undemocratic nation. Yet a congressional stalemate coupled with an official stance against promoting racial reform prevented the federal government from launching a legislative attack against discrimination and segregation. Thus, in this politically precarious environment, radio shows such as Jubilee served as an alternative method of racial policy. [End Page 945] Particularly in the War Department, administrators agreed that the best way to feature black individuals on the radio was to develop variety shows based mostly around music. After experimenting with the variety format in the program "America's Negro Soldiers," officials felt that popular black comedians, actors, and musicians could neutralize the subject of racial inequality. When the AFRS staff developed Jubilee they could rest easy, believing in the benign effects of entertainment. Yet in spite of producers' goals to ensure politically sanitized programming, radio paradoxically provided many black artists with the opportunity to relay political messages. Here, politics and entertainment were not so clearly separated, as musical and comedic performances featured on Jubilee made both subtle and overt references to American racial tensions. With black participation more central to the development of federally sponsored programs than to commercial films and radio, the state offered a unique cultural arena. Although black artists understood that cultural programs such as the Jubilee radio show could not directly secure racial equality in the most important areas of their lives, they nonetheless used all cultural media to critique the status quo and to possess their own representation. The pervasiveness of minstrelesque iconography, endemic to most areas of American popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, not only shaped white perceptions of black people, but ratified white Americans' belief in their own racial superiority.3 Thus, more so than the white administrators that shepherded these projects, black participants understood that Jubilee could reduce the perpetuation of racial stereotypes in favor of a more honest discussion of the issues they faced in their daily lives. Broadcast to both white and black servicemen, the show legitimated music by black performers that in other settings had been "cleaned up" and covered by white artists. Furthermore, as music occupied a central position in black political consciousness, Jubilee...

Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II

1. A divided arsenal: the problem and its setting 2. The executive and political imperatives: presidential campaigns and race management policies on the eve of war 3. The Executive and National Security Imperatives: unrest and early struggles over racial manpower policies 4. The racial politics of industrial employment: Central State Authority and the adjustment of factory work 5. The racial politics of army service: Central State Authority and the control of black soldier resistance 6. June 9, 1943: 'Negro soldier trouble' at Camp Stewart, Georgia 7. The racial politics of urban and rural unrest: monitoring agriculture and surveilling cities 8. 'America again at the crossroads': war, the state and social conflict.

The From Slavery to Freedom Fiftieth Anniversary Symposium, September 19-20, 1997

John Dittmer [*] I am pleased and honored to participate in this celebration of a great historian and his work. In preparing these remarks, knowing that I would be the final speaker today, I feared that so much would have already been said about Professor Franklin's career, and the impact of his life and scholarship on academe and on the larger society, that my comments would only echo this eloquent testimony. It turns out that I was right, of course! So to be on the safe side, I knew I would not be repetitive if I began by talking about myself. I am celebrating an anniversary of sorts as well, for it was thirty years ago this month that I first taught From Slavery to Freedom [FSTF], at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. Back then, in the fall of 1967, Mississippi's Closed Society had begun to crack. The civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 were now in force, and while compliance was not yet widespread, it was apparent that the state no longer had the will to engage in massive resistance to federal law. White attitudes, however, remained locked in the state's history and tradition, one handed down from generation to generation, both at home and in the public schools. I'd like to read you several passages from a book called Mississippi Through Four Centuries. At the time the FSTF was first published, this text was required reading for all 5th-grade students in Mississippi -- in both black and white schools. Here is what these kids read about the slave system in Mississippi: When a group of Negroes had been built up by a plantation owner, it was usually held together. In this way a close relationship between the whites and blacks came into existence. A negro who had served for a long period of time was sure to be cared for in his old age by his master.... The plantation owner was very much interested in the welfare of his slaves. A healthy and contented slave meant a better worker and greater profits. The good health of the slave depended upon good food, clothing, and shelter. The clothing of the Negro was of good quality. The usual distribution was in the spring and the fall. On each occasion two suits or dresses were given. In the fall, shoes and blankets were distributed. This new clothing was in addition to the old. And of the Reconstruction era, here is what the authors of Mississippi Through Four Centuries had to say about the black troops stationed in the state: There were many soldiers left as garrisons. Some of these troops were Negroes. The Negroes frequently conducted themselves in a way to arouse the anger of the people. In cities, the Negro soldiers sometimes took delight in pushing white women off the sidewalks. And what about the blacks who held office during Reconstruction? Many of these Negroes were of the worst type themselves or were under the influence of dishonest white people. Finally, a word about the Ku Klux Klan: A Negro who had been giving trouble in a community might awake some night to find a ghost-clad figure standing by his bed. . . . If these attempts to frighten them did not change the Negroes, the Klansmen would resort to whippings and in extreme cases to killings. The organization helped the South at a difficult time. . . . To make sure the fifth-graders got the message, the discussion questions at the end of the chapter asked: What was the most serious shortcoming of Negro officeholders? What was the purpose of the Ku Klux Klan? And, Give reasons why a Negro militia should not have been organized. Thus at an early age white kids learned that their supremacy over black people was both necessary and proper. While black students took away a very different message. During that first year at Tougaloo I remember a freshman student coming up after our class discussion of Franklin's chapter on Reconstruction. He was so angry that there were tears in his eyes. …

Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (review)

book reviews223 "soft fighting and heavy victories," as Lee put it. This was to be achieved through the grand turning movement, threatening the enemy's communications and forcing him out of his chosen positions to fight unprepared and at a disadvantage. Harsh says that strategically Lee did this in the Peninsula and Second Manassas campaigns but that faulty tactical execution led to unaffordable Rebel losses. Harsh's provocative argument challenges recent criticism of Lee's aggressiveness . The book will inevitably raise questions. If a defense of Lee's actions rests on showing that his was the way to break Northern morale, why does the book spend almost no time on the psychological balance of the opponents? Indeed, Harsh suggests that the union answer to defeat on the Peninsula was to increase their armies by 50 percent, surely not the response Lee wanted. Works assessing the psychological aspect of the war, however, are not in the bibliography . Again, in supporting Lee and Davis in their belief that the war must be fought on the Northern border to shield Richmond, rather than making a defensive stand in the heart of the South, Harsh says that a large percentage of Rebel manufacturing was concentrated in the Rebel capital and had to be saved. But couldn't the machinery have been transported South, as the Russians shipped away their industrial plant in face of Hitler's 1941 invasion? Finally, in saying that the South came closest to winning in the summer of 1862, is Harsh forgetting the war in the West, which saw the Rebels turned back from Cincinnati and driven from Kentucky at Perryville? Wasn't this of equal import to Second Manassas as a morale factor in the war? These are the kinds of questions this stimulating book will generate. Michael C. C. Adams Northern Kentucky University Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865. By Noah Andre Trudeau. (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998. Pp. 576. $29.95.) Noel Andre Trudeau's Like Men of War is a chronicle of combat. The book treats every major engagement in which black troops took part as well as many of the smaller actions. Trudeau sets the scene for each engagement by describing its geographical location and topography, its place within larger strategic frameworks, the major actors (the field commanders and the units under their command), and the outcome. Sixty detailed maps complement the discussion. Like his earlier works, this one also relies heavily upon participants' observations .To the standard after-action reports, he adds insightful commentaries from black men in the ranks, from their company officers, and, not infrequently, from their Confederate foes. Diaries, letters, newspaper reports, and material in federal pension case files provide this first-person vantage point. Trudeau makes clear that black soldiers were willing, even eager, to engage the enemy in pursuit of freedom for the slaves and full citizenship rights for all black people in America. He also provides ample evidence ofthe men's passion 224CIVIL WAR HISTORY to demonstrate what Frederick Douglass (among countless others) termed "the Negro's manhood" (7). Yet, even as the record of heroic action grew longer, each unit carried a "cross" into its first engagement: "the need to prove themselves in combat before the eyes of the white man" (331). The question "Would they fight?" dogged black soldiers from the beginning to the end of the contest. Most eyewitnesses proved capable of changing their views after observing black men in action. Following the battle of Nashville in December 1864, Adj. Gen. Lorenzo Thomas hoped to slay the dragon once and for all by proclaiming , "The question is settled; negro soldiers will fight" (349). But William T. Sherman remained unconvinced. Although Trudeau finds it "difficult to identify a major engagement in which black soldiers played a crucial role" (467), their solid performance overall clearly contributed to the Union's victory. What is more, that record helped tip the balance in favor of extending citizenship to African Americans during the postwar period. By focusing so closely on combat, Trudeau's account highlights the deadly consequences that often awaited captured black soldiers and their officers. In the aftermath of the battle...

Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian?

Was the Emancipated Slave a Proletarian? Alex Lichtenstein (bio) Over three decades ago, James McPherson wrote in The Negro’s Civil War (1965) that “The Negro was not merely a passive recipient of the benefits conferred upon him by the war. Negro orators and writers provided leadership in the struggle for emancipation and equal rights. Blacks were active in the movements to bring education, suffrage, and land to southern freedmen. And perhaps most important of all, the contribution of Negro soldiers helped the North win the war.” Conspicuously absent from this list of African-American contributors to freedom, however, were the slaves themselves.1 Following the lead of historians of slavery, who during the 1960s and 1970s returned those in bondage to center stage in accounts of the peculiar institution, American historians over the past two decades have begun to take a fresh look at the role of slaves in the Civil War and the process of emancipation. This reevaluation of the transition from slavery to freedom has been closely allied with the ongoing effort to rewrite the social history of Reconstruction. Two scholarly projects in particular have set the tone for the new work in emancipation studies. The benchmark for nearly all recent practitioners in the field remains Eric Foner’s magisterial study of the social and political transformations wrought by black freedom, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (1988). Based on nine years of research, this work laid to rest once and for all the unquiet ghost of the Dunning school and a once deeply influential Reconstruction historiography that portrayed emancipated African Americans as manipulated dupes of vindictive Northerners, utterly unprepared for the tasks and responsibilities of freedom. Indeed, this work placed black agency—especially that of the former slaves—at the very center of the momentous social upheaval that accompanied African-American freedom at its birth. 2 Foner’s Walter Fleming lectures, published as Nothing But Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (1983), brought a comparative perspective to bear on the study of emancipation as a social process for the first time. Radical Reconstruction in the American South stood out from all other emancipations in an era that saw many, for only there did former slaves “enjoy universal manhood suffrage and a real measure of political power.” 3 [End Page 124] At the same time, however, Foner’s work has demonstrated how “Reconstruction emerges as a decisive moment in fixing the dominant understanding of freedom as self-ownership and the right to compete in the labor market, rather than propertied independence.” Few historians have done more than Foner to use the drama of slave emancipation to illuminate the narrowing conception of freedom in a society increasingly devoted to the market as its arbiter, or to portray the freedpeople themselves as full and worthy human participants in this drama. “In being forced to deal with freedom as a matter of concrete policy,” Foner proclaimed in his 1994 Presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, “Americans were compelled to recognize how thoroughly their own society had changed” during the course of the nineteenth century’s market revolution. 4 Complementing Foner’s oeuvre is the collective endeavor of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project (FSSP), begun in 1976 and published so far in four volumes as Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (1982–1993). 5 Housed at the University of Maryland and overseen by historians Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland, this genuinely collaborative project has drawn on the talents of a diverse array of scholars who have helped shape the field with a small library of their own articles and monographs. 6 Together they have produced a multi-volume work that lends enormous documentary weight to the emerging interpretation of emancipation as a process generated by the actions of slaves as much as by Abraham Lincoln, the Union Army, or black and white abolitionists. Both Foner and the FSSP, in turn, trace their legacy back to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935). In that work, ignored by the historical profession at least until the 1960s, Du Bois began his chapter on the Civil War, entitled “The General Strike,” with this provocation: “When...

A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (review)

256CIVIL WAR HISTORY and speaking with them, few believed in racial equality and many were vehemently racist. George M. Turner of the 3d Rhode Island Artillery expressed a common viewpoint: "The plan of having negro soldiers is very well in some cases; but ... I am not willing to fight shoulder to shoulder with a black dirty nigger" (87). New England soldiers also commented disparagingly about white Southerners , their crude homes, drinking habits, and alleged tendency toward sloth. Chapter4, "Politics on the Home Front," contains letters on a range of topics, from Abraham Lincoln's policies to Copperhead philosophy, to the war's blurring ofgender roles. In several letters, women demonstrated their political awareness by commenting on the Emancipation Proclamation. In another, a Connecticut doctor expressed his belief that women might influence voters to reject peace candidates. In chapter 5, "The Personal Sacrifices ofWar," soldiers and their families discussed the economic benefits that the war created for some Northern businesses and the economic dislocation families endured due to uneven and inadequate military pay. The final chapter, "The Morse Family Correspondence ," includes letters ofaVermont family with two men atthe front. While it reveals the family and financial tensions caused by the war, this brief chapter is somewhat difficult to follow because of a complicated family tree. Yankee Correspondence will assist students and scholars in their continuing efforts to interpretthe war's role in shaping the lives and views ofaverageAmericans . If, as Walt Whitman believed, "the real war will never get in the books," volumes such as this one at least make it possible to bring it closer to home. Wendy Hamand Venet Georgia State University A Voice ofThunder: The Civil WarLetters ofGeorge E. Stephens. Edited by Donald Yacovone. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xxi, 351. $26.95.) The first third of this remarkable books contains Donald Yacovone's incisive biography of George E. Stephens ( 1 832-1 888), complete with twelve pages of illustrations and four of maps. Stephens's parents were free African Americans who fled to Philadelphia from Northampton County on the eastern shore of Virginia in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion and the persecutions of black Virginians that were its immediate sequel. Supporting himselfas a cabinetmaker and then as a seaman on the USS Walker (of the Coast Survey, not the Navy), George E. Stephens was first and foremost an abolitionist, a reformer, and an intellectual. All the letters reproduced in this book were written for publication in the Weekly Anglo-African, published by Thomas and Robert Hamilton in New York City. Stephens wrote his first four letters in Philadelphia between November 1859 and January 1861. He then wrote a much larger and, for the historian of the Civil War, more original group of letters from Maryland and Virginia between October 1 861 and December 1862. Attached as cook and helper to Col. Benjamin C.Tilghman of Pennsylvania's 26th Regiment, Stephens both BOOK REVIEWS257 acted in and reported on local struggles involving Unionists, Confederates, the defenders of slavery, abolitionists, slaves, and freedmen. Once the Union had finally decided to arm blacks, Stephens traveled to Massachusetts to enroll in the most visible, and certainly most discussed, black regiment in the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th. His remaining letters detail the training of the 54th and its campaigns against Charleston and in Florida. Stephens vividly testifies to the regiment's heroism in usually ill-conceived and unnecessarily dangerous battles and its political heroism in refusing to accept inferior pay for fighting the Union's war. Unfortunately the letters end after August 1864. Yacovone's biography tells of the triumphant return of the fate 54th to Massachusetts and of Stephens's initially promising career as a schoolmaster and politician in Tappahannock, Virginia. His later years were spent in Brooklyn, where he helped organize the William Lloyd Garrison Post of the Grand Army of the Republic. Briefdescriptions can scarcelydojustice to the qualities ofGeorge E. Stephens as a writer. In choosing the phrase "A voice of thunder" from an ultra-militant speech of Henry Highland Garnet, Yacovone testifies to Stephens's mastery of the prophetic style so richly developed by the abolitionists. But there is much more to Stephens...

Reflections on A Soldier's Story: For Blacks, A War Within the War

Long I Reflections on A Soldier's Story: For Blacks, A War Within The War Clockwise from top left,Art Evans, David Allen Crier, David Harris, Dennis Lipscomb, WilliamAllen Young, Denzel Washington, RobertTownsend and Larry Riley, in Columbia Pictures'ASoldier'sStory. Directed by Norman Jewison from a screenplay byCharles Fuller,thefilm stars Howard E. Rollins,Jr. and Alolph Caesar. Jewison, Ronald L Schwary and Patrick Palmer produced. 18 I Film & History The Black Image in Film | Special In-Depth Section Jerome H. Long Wesleyan University Reflections on A Soldier's Story: For Blacks, A War Within the War F / ^^irector Norman Jewinson transformed Charles Fuller's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama A Soldier's Play (1981) into a powerful and innovative film, A Soldier's Sto/y (1984). Ostensibly this film is not about war at all—if by war we mean armed combat with a well-defined adversary. The war ofA Soldier's StoryIs a different kind of war-one that has been fought by black soldiers throughout the history of the United States. There have been other movies depicting the role of Negro soldiers in World War II. The Red Ball Express (1952), Bataan (1943), Sahara (1943), Home of the Brave (1949) and the War Department's The Negro Soldier (1943, directed by Frank Capra) come to mind. All of these films-except The Negro Soldier- depict in combat scenes the bravery and camaraderie of Negro and white soldiers fighting side by side. The fact of the racial segregation of the U. S. Army during World War II is glossed over either by a plotthat accidentally throws Negro and white soldiers together (as in Bataan and Sahara) or by outright falsification (as the depiction of seemingly integrated units in The Red Ball Express). The portrayal of Negro soldiers is shallow and romanticized; the stories never delve into their feelings or inner conflicts, much less their attitudes toward a segregated army ostensibly fighting for the principles of democracy and freedom. In fact, segregation and prejudice are seldom mentioned. Ralph Ellison, in a 1981 introduction to Invisible Man,lawyer from the Judge Advocate General's Office in Washwrites that "most of this nation's conflicts ofarms for Afro-ington D.C, has been temporarily assigned to the Military Americans have been wars-within-wars"(x). First, there wasPolice. His mission is to investigate the murder of a Negro the war between each Negro soldier and the segregated mili-sergeant, Vernon C. Waters (Adolph Caesar), near the town tary. In addition, there was the war within each Negro sol-ofTynin, Louisiana—not far from Fort Neal. A preliminary dier as a result ofhis membership in a military thatviolatedreport concerning the murder has been filed and found unthe democratic ideals it fought to defend. It is this "war-satisfactory. Because of previous murders ofNegro soldiers within-the-war" that is the subject of A Soldier's Story.stationed at Fort Neal, there is a strong suspicion of Ku Klux On the surface A Soldier'sStoryis amurder mystery. InKlan involvementand ofa cover-up and conspiracy bywhite 1944 Captain Davenport (Howard E. Rollins,Jr.), a Negroofflcers· The case is «opened as a result ofpressure by the NAACP, the black press, and other black organizations. Vol. 25, No. 1-2, 1995 | 19 Long I Reflections on A Soldier's Story: For Blacks, A War Within The War In the process ofhis investigation, Captain Davenport conducts a series of interviews with Negro enlisted men. As Davenport interviews each man, the scene cuts to a flashback presenting a picture of the personality, character, and behavior ofSgt. Waters . With relentless patience and logic, Captain Davenport accomplishes his task. As the events leading up to the murder are reconstructed, the murderers are found out, and they confess. They are, surprisingly , two Negro soldiers, Pfc. Melvin Peterson (Denzel Washington) and Pvt. Tony Smalls (David Harris), members ofWaters' own platoon. So one interpretation of the film is that it is simply a detective story. But this is only a surface reading. Davenport wants to discover not only who murdered Sgt. Waters, but why. As the story of the soldiers' relationship to Sgt. Waters unfolds in flashbacks , it gradually becomes clear that the...

The Black Image in Film

Rollins I Introduction to Special In-Depth Section Peter C. Rollins Editor-in-Chief The Black Image in Film y \^_^/ he recent awards presented by the Academy of Motion PictureArts and Sciences ("the Oscars") were reprehended by many because black filmmakers, actors, and technicians did not receive expected recognition. Anti-semitic comments by such celebrities as Marlon Brando (on the LarryKing Show) did not advance the cause of understanding or encourage positive recognition. We have much to learn about the black image in film and television-not only in relation to past images, but how the current images are woven into the attitudes of contemporary America. In the opening essay for this section, Prof. Mark Winoker explores the background and fallout of the images in a specific film, The Green Pastures (1936). His understanding of the available myths and stereotypes, together with close reading, reveals The Green Pastures paradox-it is at once a forum for black culture and a perpetuation of anachronistic stereotypes of the state of the black church in America. The black contribution to America's fighting forces has been of great interest during the recent celebrations of our great victory in World War II. Documentaries about the Tuskeegee airmen, plus an HBO docudrama, have reminded Americans of the essential contribution of blacks to the victory. For example, we now know that, during the Battle of the Bulge, the infusion of fresh troops was essential to stopping the German offensive and, under the command of General Patton, black soldiers recorded some major accomplishments. Just this spring, those contributions were recognized by President Clinton in the presentation of Medal of Honor medals-for the first time-to black heroes. One of them came from a small Oklahoma town not far from my home. In the Fall, we will have a special "massing of the colors" ceremony to commemorate the sacrifice of Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers, a man who fought and died at the very tip of Patton's mechanized arrow. 4 I Film & History The Black Image in Film | Special In-Depth Section Liberators (1992) was a documentary designed to honor the black contribution in WWII, but the film went beyond the facts. In her scholarly study, Pamela Calvert places the production in its 1990s context and shows how the forces at work in the pressure-cooker environment of New York City affected the work of the two collaborators. Calvert's article also reminds us of the need to have real historians-as opposed to media typesdirectly involved in the entire range of production. We of Film & History have been reminded of this need many times over the years-in articles by Patrick Griffin, Richard Raack, and Peter Rollins—but continuing violations of basic historical methodology demand scholarly whistle-blowing. At the present time, Liberators-bolh the film and the book versions-have been withdrawn from circulation by the publisher and the network involved. This action settles the immediate problem; yet the danger in all this controversy is that we lose perspective on the real issue: there are no standards in the vast wasteland of television when it comes to historical films. Too often, the need for funding and ratings dictates that drama wins out over information. A Soldier's Story(1984) is a fine, tense film which explores the story within the story for black soldiers in WWII-and at other times. During our history, minorities have often gambled on the possibility that their willingness to fight for the nation would win them recognition and acceptance. Anyone who has been in combat training or in war knows the tensions and stresses of the role; scholar Jerome Long (a US Army veteran of the Korean era) argues that the virtue of this film is its exploration of the "second front" for blacks, the humiliation of service in a military strictly segregated. Frank Capra's film The Negro Soldier (1944) puts the best possible face on the hopes of the nation and its blacks for equity, but A Soldier's Story is a more realistic portrait of the inner struggle for America's blacks in uniform. All three essays are models of research and committed scholarship; together, they...

Abraham Lincoln and the insanity plea.

A confederate civilian physician shot and killed a white Union officer who was drilling Negro troops in Norfolk, Virginia. With no question as to guilt, President Abraham Lincoln decided to have a medical expert conduct a professional sanity/insanity examination. Documentation indicates that legal and political factors may have influenced Lincoln's decision. As a lawyer, Lincoln prosecuted a case where the insanity plea was used as a defense. Two influential Cabinet members, William H. Seward and Edwin M. Stanton, also had legal experience involving the insanity plea. Politically, Lincoln faced serious issues such as the draft riots, the military necessity to recruit slaves into the army, the impact of Union Negro soldiers upon the border states, the morale and discipline of the army and the upcoming presidential election. Upon Seward's recommendation, Lincoln chose a physician who had a reputation for finding the accused sane and who did so in this case. As the southern physician was hanged, Lincoln's means achieved the desired legal and political ends.

"Your Old Father Abe Lincoln is Dead and Damned": Black Soldiers and the Memphis Race Riot of 1866

Between May 1 and May 3, 1866, racial conflict erupted violently in Memphis, Tennessee. Irish policemen and firemen, together with white laborers and small businessmen, rioted in southern part of city. For three days they attacked black residents living in shanty settlement surrounding Fort Pickering, a Union military installation on outskirts of city. The rioters initially focused their attacks on former soldiers of Third United-States Colored Heavy Artillery regiment, which had disbanded April 30-the last of three black regiments to be mustered out of United States service at Memphis. On May 2 and 3, however, rioters increasingly targeted civic institutions and property of black community of south Memphis, including schools, churches, and black-owned houses. By May 4, when federal military authorities declared martial law and detachments of white troops enforced order in city, two whites and at-least forty-six blacks had been killed, between seventy and eighty others had been wounded, at least five black women raped, more than one hundred people (mostly black) robbed, and four churches, twelve schools and ninety-one houses burned.2 Contemporary observers attributed violence to unruly conduct of black soldiers in Memphis and to longstanding animosity between blacks and Irish, who competed for work as manual laborers. The Memphis Daily Avalarlche, for example, argued, is only with negro soldiers that trouble has ever existed.... With their departure, will come order, confidence, and good will of old days. Had we had [white troops] instead of negro troops, neither this riot, nor many lawless acts preceding it during past six months, would have occurred. The superintendent of Memphis Freedmen's Bureau, Major General Benjamin P. Runkle, stressed that was also a conflict of labor between Irish hackSdrivers, dray-drivers, porters, laborers, c there was a good deal of bitterness felt upon part of Irish, from fact that these southern gentlemen preferred to hire negro servants. Another observer, Ewing O. Tade, a representative of American Missionary Association, stated succinctly that the late Memphis Riot was beyond a reasonable doubt instigated by Irish Police of this city.3 The rioters, however, were a diverse lot, and their ethnic and occupational background does not support such a narrow, socio-economic interpretation of

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

Book reviews : 'Smoked Yankees' and the Struggle for Empire: letters from negro soldiers 1898-1902 By WILLIAM B. GATEWOOD Jr (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1987). 328pp. £9.60

Book reviews : 'Smoked Yankees' and the Struggle for Empire: letters from negro soldiers 1898-1902 By WILLIAM B. GATEWOOD Jr (Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1987). 328pp. £9.60