Pellom McDaniels III, Curator of African American Collections, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library “A Question of Manhood: African Americans and WWI” Fresh from winning the Center for Research Libraries 2017 Source Award for Research, for curating an Emory exhibition inspired by Natasha Tretheway’s book, Native Guard, Pellom turned his attention to an exhibition inspired by the memoir of an African American soldier who fought in WWI, a memoir he just edited for Oxford University Press. In this presentation, Pellom will offer an overview of the materials and major theses of the exhibition (though we’re sure our members will want to visit the exhibition itself, available for viewing in the Rose from early in the fall). Here is some of that overview now—by way of a tease. Like most Americans, very few African Americans understood the implications of the First World War (1914-1918) for the course of everyday life in the United States. The war was “over there” somewhere. For a majority of African Americans, their concerns were focused on surviving the brutality of Jim Crow and its machinations against black progress and advancement. In fact, at the beginning of the First World War, nearly ninety percent of all African Americans lived in the southern United States in the shadow of slavery, working the same lands that their forebears once toiled in as human chattels. In their minds, France was a million miles away. In the spring of 1917, the United States entered the European conflict as an ally of France. However, its participation signaled an internal rise in tensions related to the meaning of democracy, and the support and defense of both the human and civil rights of African Americans. How could a country that based its very existence on the principles of freedom, liberty, and justice, defend its systematic and legal abuse of twelve-million of its own citizens, while claiming to defend the free world against German Imperialism? President Woodrow Wilson was himself an advocate of the Jim Crow policies that denied African Americans full access to the government that they supported through their loyalty, taxes, and blood sacrifices in times of war and peace. In this so-called “war to end all wars,” there were those African American leaders who saw participation as not in the best interest of those constantly fighting for their lives in the country of their birth. Still, there were those leaders within the African American community who felt it imperative to continue to serve as citizen-soldiers in an effort not to lose ground, while simultaneously risking accusations of disloyalty to the nation in its time of need. In the end, African American men gravitated towards the image of the black soldier as a beacon of hope and dignity for the community, as well as a symbol of American manhood realized. |