>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
[ Silence ]
>>
>> Betsy Peterson: We have a layer, or several layers,
of introducers and presenters here.
So while people, the last people are coming in I wanted
to certainly welcome you here today.
My name is Betsy Peterson, as Guha said, and I'm the director
of the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress.
And I'm glad to see old faces and new, new faces, and new friends here
for today's presentation, which is part
of a larger public program series sponsored
by the American Folklife Center, called "Many Paths to Freedom -
Looking Back, Looking Ahead at the Long Civil Rights Movement."
I'll be turning the podium over in a minute to Bob Patrick,
Director of the Veterans History Project.
Bob is the mediator today for this afternoon's event.
And the VHP is one of the co-sponsors of the program today,
as is the Library's chapter of blacks in Government,
and I want to say thank you to both of those organizations
for their support in putting on this program.
But before I turn it over, I also just wanted to say that Many Paths
to Freedom is, and this program series,
is part of a larger initiative for the American Folklife Center.
In fact, it's part of a five year, national collecting initiative
which was mandated by Congress and has been undertaken
by the Folklife Center here at the Library, and the National Museum
of African American History and Culture
at the Smithsonian Institution.
It, over five years, we have been out and about,
documenting movement vent, veterans' experiences
in the civil rights movement, and the struggle for freedom.
And that will be culminating in the launch of a website in May
that will feature many of the,
stream many of the interviews that we have been doing.
And I want to invite you all to return
to that and, and check it out.
So come to our website and you will find all of that information.
This program today is also part of a,
just a series of public programs going on throughout the year,
beginning with the march on Washington exhibit last year,
that debuted last year, and sponsored by the Prints
and Photographs Division, called A Day Like No Other.
And it is over in the Jefferson Building, and is still up.
And I invite you to go look at that as well.
And finally, also in June
of this year the Interpretive Programs Office will be launching a
major exhibition to commemorate the 50th anniversary
of the Civil Rights Act.
It will be called The Long Road to Freedom, and again,
I want to invite you to visit that.
It will be up for, oh, close to a year or so.
Please come back, come back often.
But in the meantime, let's return to today.
And with all of those provide, please let me turn everything
over to Bob Patrick gladly, who will introduce our speakers and,
and then join them on stage later for a series of discussions
and questions, et cetera.
And lastly, I also want to just acknowledge another guest
that I know is here in the audience.
With the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History
and Culture, we have also been working
with the SNCC Legacy Project, and I see that Charlene Krantz is
in the audience today, and I want to welcome here.
But I want to thank all of the many partners
that have made this possible.
So, Bob --
[ Applause ]
>> Bob Patrick: You know, everything's a big word, Betsy.
I am very pleased to be here today.
I'm Bob Patrick.
I'm the Director of the Veterans History Project
within the American Folklife Center here at the Library of Congress.
Just a quick commercial about the Veterans History Project,
because we're so excited to be able to co-sponsor this event today.
For those who don't know,
the Veterans History Project is a congressionally mandated effort
to collect and preserve the wartime memories of America's veterans.
We've been doing that since the year 2000.
These are veterans you will hear about today.
Veterans from World War I all the way up to the brave young men
and women who have been fighting the wars around the world here
in the last, last ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We do that through oral history.
We do that also through the collection of original materials,
photographs, letters, diaries, manuscripts that,
that relate to a veteran, or a veteran has written.
And we do that also through volunteers.
We have this great body of work that has been put together
with the largest oral history project in the country today.
It was, but the work primarily through volunteers.
Individuals sitting down with a veteran
and their life, and doing the interview.
Students, both at the high school and college level, doing it.
Organizations, churches, the American Red Cross, again,
and then of course members
of Congress have been greatly involved in this.
And I say this because whenever I'm before an audience like this,
everyone in this room, I can guarantee you, knows a veteran
and knows that that veteran has a story that they carry with them.
So if you'd like to learn more about the, the,
the Library of Congress Veterans History Project,
we do have brochures here today.
Pick one of those up, and you could learn how that,
that person's story can become a part of the works here
at the Library of Congress.
Enough about the Veterans History Project.
Let's talk about our speakers here today.
We're extremely pleased to have Adriane Lentz-Smith,
who is an associate professor of history at Duke University.
She did her undergraduate work at Harvard, her masters and PhD
at Yale, in history, and post-doctorate work
at the University of North Carolina.
But as I told her earlier, there's a very important part of her resume
that really resonates with me.
She is an army brat, and I use that word
in all the good extent that it is.
I'm a retired army officer, I have two Army kids at home too.
And if you don't know the culture, we all refer to them as brats.
So it's great having someone who knows the army here today.
Her book, "Freedom Struggles: African Americans in World War I,"
looks at the two hundred thousand black soldiers sent to Europe
as a part of the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I.
The book looks beyond the discrimination they faced,
and looks deeper into how they learned more about who they were,
how they relate to each other, and who they relate to in the world
in ge -- The book reclaims World War I
as a critical moment in the freedom struggle.
I'll let her talk a little bit more about what that all means.
Also with us today is David Cline.
David is an assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech.
He did his undergraduate in McAllister College,
graduate work at UMass - Amherst,
and PhD at the University of North Carolina.
If you're seeing an ACC strain through this, Duke, UNC, you know,
we're all on friendly ground here today.
Areas of special, his areas
of specialization are public history methods, oral history,
20th century history, with a focus on social movements and religion.
Included in the work he had done is serving as a led interviewer
on the Civil Right History Project that Betsy mentioned earlier,
sponsored by the American Folklife Center
and the Smithsonian's National Museum
of African American History and Culture.
David recently worked on the team of journalists
and historians affiliated with the American Radio Works, and the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University,
to conduct a conscientious re-examination
of the Korean War period titled "Korea - The Unfinished War".
In a forthcoming book, he will be looking at military service
of African American veterans in the Korean War, a less recognized
and remembered aspect of what is called the forgotten war.
Through the voices and experiences of those African Americans
who were there, he will explore the desegregation of the military,
the important stories of those who served, and the connection
of both these experiences to the civil rights movement.
Without any further ado, I would like to call Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith
to the podium to talk about her.
[ Applause ]
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: Thank you, Bob, for that lovely introduction,
and for helping me get on the stage, all of you for being here.
It is true that my dad was career mil, career military.
He stayed in after being drafted in '72.
As I said to Bob earlier, they stopped sending people to Vietnam
when he was in advanced infantry training, and then sent him
to the Panama Canal Zone.
And he was like, this army business is fun.
I think I'll stay.
He, people often ask me if I wrote about black soldiers
because my dad was a soldier, and I say no, I wrote a book about manhood
because my dad is such a dude.
Some of that will come through, maybe in the Q&A,
a little bit less in the talk.
I'm going to start with sort of a quote, a little info on someone
who doesn't appear much in the book except for a quote that he gives
that I think is incredibly evocative, and says something
about what the war did for and to the folks involved in it.
Not just the soldiers who fought, who I talk about today,
but the folks who were over there as well.
There's a woman in my book named Catherine Johnson,
who was a YMCA volunteer, for whom I really think the war was one
of the more formative experiences of her life as well,
in much the same way that I discuss here.
So when Sergeant Christopher Columbus Watts filled
out his questionnaire for the Virginia War History Commission
in 1920, he took a moment to explain what military service had done
for him.
Some of it you could glean from his basic biography.
He had gained a sense of his own heroism as a member
of the all-black, 369th Infantry.
He'd seen action on the front in Champagne, and he'd been rewarded
with medals from the French and from the city of Norfolk, Virginia.
More grimly, he carried physical reminders.
He'd been gassed in the Argon Forest, and described himself
as partly disabled as a result of his injuries.
But on the final page, in a single line,
he describes something less tangible.
Military service had carried the farmer and dock worker
from Portsmouth, Virginia on the edge of the Chesapeake Bay,
to Saint-Nazaire, France, on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean.
His unit, known and celebrated as the Harlem Hell-fighters,
had been comprised of black men hailing from New York
to Puerto Rico, and they'd been placed within the French Army,
trained and incorporated with French soldiers.
Watts had moved across France, mixed with French people,
seen colonial troops of color.
Looking out from Portsmouth, one might suspect
that the world was bigger than Virginia,
less bounded than the American South.
But on French soil, in the French Army, one knew it.
Sergeant Watts, named
for Christopher Columbus himself, summed it up like this.
In response to the question, what were the effects upon yourself
of service overseas, he wrote: "I have the world's experience."
World War I would bring African Americans a host of new experiences.
Nearly four hundred thousand black folks served
in the military during World War I,
millions more registered for the draft.
Two hundred and thousand of them traveled overseas
with the American Expeditionary Force.
Mobilization became an occasion for all sorts of African Americans;
enlisted soldiers, potential conscprits, scripts,
and engaged civilians to claim a particular stance in relation
to the nation, to Jim Crow, and to the larger world.
For these folks, and for their families, for their neighbors,
for their lovers, and for their advocates, who tied their fates
to black military service, the war offered a crucial opportunity
to challenge Woodrow Wilson and the particular brand of white supremacy
that he was ensconcing in Washington and across the nation.
And to make Wilson's call for a war for democracy abroad,
into a rallying cry for freedom rights at home.
What did the war mean to African Americans?
When I first started thinking
about these questions nearly 20 years ago now,
I was writing a college honors thesis on African Americans,
soldiers, and the First World War.
A lot of it came out of the papers, or a lot of, I was guided a lot
by the papers of W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP co-founder, activist,
and black intellectual who himself had planned to write a history
of African American soldiers and the Great War.
He was going to call it "The Wounded World"
which I think is a gorgeous title.
And Du Bois had letters, documents,
all sorts of things that he'd gathered.
It was a treasure trove for an undergraduate
in search of an honors thesis.
And he never finished it because he didn't have the,
sort of the financial support to do so.
Sort of following Du Bois and his papers,
by spring I'd written 75 pages documenting the hardships
and violence of black military service, and the pervasiveness
of white racial violence during the war, but I didn't know
where the story was going to end, how to close it out.
And I should say, when I, this, the thesis project began
with what is now the second chapter of my book,
the story of a riot involving black soldiers
in Houston during World War I.
It's a, it's a story of the, the soldiers started--
The soldiers were responding to a moment of intense police brutality
in which one soldier saw, was in a, the fourth of ward of Houston,
black area of Houston, saw a policeman beating up a black woman
on the street, intervened to stop it,
and was then himself brutally beaten up.
When another soldier then stepped in to find out was go,
what was going on, he was also beaten up.
The camp back where the soldiers were located, was in an uproar,
and this kicked off what some have called a mutiny,
others have called a riot, in which the soldiers marched
on the town to gain vengeance.
It was, it's a heartbreaking story in any number of different ways,
and it's where I began with this project.
And it signaled, in some ways that story augured the kind
of interactions that in fact, that black soldiers and white soldiers,
in some ways, would battle each other, even overseas.
Perhaps, well, in the black soldiers' case, as often
or more often than they battled any foreign [inaudible].
So I had that, right, and I was 19 and writing this thing,
and indignant, and, and upset,
but not really sure what to do with any of it.
So I decided to go talk to Professor Cornell West in his office hours,
who was teaching then a seminar on W. E. B. Du Bois that I was taking.
And I don't know if ya'all have had the occasion to see Cornell West
in person, or on television, but you know, he's got a sort of big corona
of hair and is, in some ways, as meticulous
or stylized a dresser as Du Bois himself.
And I say down across from him at the, at his desk, and I explained
to him what was going on.
And West said to me, well sister,
sounds to me like it was all about the black rage.
And as he said it, drawing out, rage, getting closer, and closer,
and closer to me, who was looking back at him
with a great deal of befuddlement.
I was young.
I was relatively sheltered,
and I was still developing my empathetic imagination,
so I just kind of nodded and wrote down in my notes,
"black rage," yeah, got it.
In the thesis, I narrated-- narrated that rage as inspiration,
quoting Du Bois' returning soldiers editorial that ran
in "The Crisis" in May, 1919.
If you ever heard of that article, or read it, you know it's angry
but it's very purposefully so.
In it, Du Bois describes the vindictive fate
that had African Americans fighting for a dominant minority that wanted
to debase black sol-- black folks as what he calls, "servants,
whores, dogs, and monkeys."
He supplies a searing litany of all of the ill-doing the US,
the sort of white supremacists in charge
of the South, especially lynched.
They disfranchised, they stole
from African Americans, they insulted them.
But in the end Du Bois shifts to a call to arms.
"Under circum, certain -- similar circumstances we would fight again.
By the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if,
now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain
and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle
against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for democracy.
We saved it in France and the great Jehovah we will save it
in the United States of America or know the reason why."
Du Bois' editorial had fury,
but it also had great pride, and it had hope.
At 20, I focused on that hope.
The rage that West spoke of, I didn't quite hear.
I began to, though, as I researched freedom struggles,
as I read Lieutenant Rayford Logan, future Howard historian,
his memoirs which are here in the Library of Congress,
detailing his Jim Crow shell shock.
And as I read the memoirs of black stevedore, Ely Green as he talked
of fighting folks in, white, white supremacists in the army
until he was either half dead or locked away.
I grasped rage.
Rage which seared black soldiers,
either tempering them or consuming them.
Either mobilizing them or eating them alive.
But West, I think, was actually a little bit off.
It wasn't all about the rage,
because rage has to burn out eventually.
It could become despair, it could become indifference,
or it could become resolve.
Black World War I vets knew this.
And the ones that I trace in the book are largely the ones
for whom it became resolve.
One member of the all-black regular army unit, the 24th Infantry,
sent an anonymous letter to the "El Paso Herald" in 1920,
in which he wrote, "All colored men in the 24th who've been to France
and are now in the United States wants to get it."
He said they don't like the U.S. any more-- longer.
And he hinted at a plot that would surprise the world.
Blood would spill, he promised, with white men, women,
and children getting shot like dogs.
If it took joining the Japanese, the ascendant power in the rising the --
the ascendant power then in the sort of, in "the rising tide of war,"
as one person called it --
or if took joining Pancho Villa across the border in Mexico,
the writer and his compatriots would do it.
"Anything," he wrote, "to pull down your damn flag."
The guy ends up showing up in the military intelligence files,
not surprisingly.
The military intelligence are actually a, a gold mine for figuring
out what people on the ground are saying to one another.
But there are other folks who worried about similar things.
A disabled white army veteran wrote in, in [inaudible] 20 years later
in 1940, the Mississippi Senator, Theodore Bilbo,
worried about African American militancy.
He recalled seeing a poster back when he was in the army
that had two, like, sort of, an army of Negro men in uniform,
he said, and two Negro officers.
"What do you see in the poster?"
one officer asked.
Gazing down at what Roberts, the observer, called the body
of Negro soldiers, the second officer in the poster replied,
"What couldn't we do if we only knew our strength?"
Roberts wrote to Bilbo in 1940 because he was worried
that African Americans had come to know their strength.
"This was 1919," he said.
"What do you suppose they think today?"
African Americans had two decades under their belt of organizing,
of doing things, of preparing for the coming war.
And Roberts was right, folks had come to know their strength.
There are two veterans of the, of the, of the Great War era
who are both DC people, so relevant to the city
and to the later movement, Charles Hamilton Houston and Rayford Logan,
who show in some ways the lessons learned of World War I
and what folks did with them.
Houston had served as a judge advocate general during World War I
without any law training at the time.
His father was a lawyer, but that's not the sort
of thing that's passed down through the genes.
But he had been frustrated at the precariousness of the law,
and his powerlessness in advocating for the folks
that he was supposed to be working with.
And he said he was going to go back to law school
and never find himself in that position again.
And he did.
And when the war-- when he saw the coming war on the horizon,
he worked with Rayford Logan to found the Committee
for the Participation of Negroes in the National Defense,
a group organized to make sure that African American soldiers
in World War II, their experiences did not look
like those during World War I.
Logan, or, yeah, Logan for his part, had stayed in Europe after the war
for five years, come back, and gotten a PhD at Harvard,
was on the staff at Howard faculty.
By '35, he'd come to view another war as imminent.
And despite the disillusion of his own experience,
he believed that African Americans could leverage their support
for the, for the war to advance the freedom struggle.
Unlike World War I, where folks had decided to show
that they were worthy citizens by doing their duty, and then asking
for recompense, the veterans of that war decided then, World War II,
they were going to strike the bargain first
and then, and then fight.
So in the, I can't even-- the CP, and in the,
the Committee for the Protection of Negroes in the National Defense,
through that he, Logan and Houston went
to the House Military Affairs Committee and argued
that African Americans should receive equal opportunity
to participate in the national defense.
And the, they needed their morale maintained in order
to maintain the country's defenses.
He argued that fifth columnists and communists pose less danger
than did lynching and abuse.
And he said, in short, that Negroes want some of the democracy
for which they fought in 1917.
And the sooner, he said, the better.
This was part of a multi-pronged effort during World War II
to secure African American freedom rights through the war.
This was at the same time, and in coalition with,
the double victory campaign that the "Pittsburgh Courier,"
the black newspaper, launched.
And it used and built on the, the 25 councils that the NND had started,
or the councils that they'd started across 25 states.
With the double V campaign, writers for "The Courier" worked
to remind African Americans that, even a, in a democracy,
freedom is not a bequest but a fruit of conquest.
There would be no self-sacrificial closing ranks this time around.
As one Houstonian put it, "Unless we ask at the proper time,
when someone needs our services,
it will be too late when it's all over."
This lobbying and propaganda fed a mass movement,
as the black press drummed up support for victory
against white supremacy at home and abroad.
And as Houston and Logan warned that anything less than parody
in the armed forces would ignite racial revolt, our activist,
A. Philip Randolph, threatened to bring
in ten thousand African Americans out onto the streets.
"Calling on the president,
and holding all those conferences aren't going to get us anywhere,"
he told a union organizer during a trip down south.
"We're going to have to do something about it."
Randolph proposed a march on Washington movement,
a direct action certain to rouse the grassroots and give teeth
to the general call for victory at home and abroad.
And he asked Rayford Logan to head the D.C. committee.
D.C. - Logan ended up crying off because of other commitments.
The march on Washington movement went ahead as,
or sort of went forward as, as for plan, in planning.
The march ended up not happening
because Roosevelt issued the executive order allowing, giving--
guaranteeing African Americans access to defense industry jobs,
but the march of Washington, on Washington, that was organized
in 1963 was inspired by, and is often organized by many folks
who had experience in the MOWM.
Why talk about all of this, besides the fact
that it's inherently quite interesting?
So says the woman who wrote a whole book on it.
It's in part to celebrate the determination
of the previous generations.
And it's in part to remind us that the mass movement that we celebrate
as coming out of World War II,
or that some people will even truncate even shorter
to the timeline, to, to coming out of Brown, stemmed from the work,
built on the work of decades of activism, often with the,
many of the same folks in spite, inspiring, strategizing, guiding,
and engaging with the folks who spurred the mass movement after '54.
Forewarned is certainly forearmed, also foundational,
and the world's experience brought home,
I would say, was powerful indeed.
Thanks ya'll.
[ Applause ]
>> David Cline: I want to thank you all so much for coming out today.
I especially want to thank the Library of Congress for having me,
especially Betsy Peterson and Guha Shankar from the Folklife Center,
and Bob Patrick from the Veterans History Project.
I've been actively, in the last couple months
but especially the last few weeks, digging through the treasures
of the Veterans History Project here at the Library,
and so I'll be sharing some of those, some clips with you from,
from that collection in this talk.
I'll start with a little story.
At the time that Charles Bussey was born in Bakersfield, California,
in 1921, to be black in America often meant to be
in a constant state of battle readiness.
Growing up, "in a bigoted town taught me some hard lessons,"
he recalled.
But it also taught him how to fight for himself.
Perhaps more importantly, it also taught him the need
to recover quickly before the next fight began.
Good training for leading troops into battle during the Korean War.
"Growing up as I did helped me for, helped prepare me
for being a company commander in combat."
From the Revolutionary War forward,
African Americans recognized military service in times of war
as unique opportunities to both participate in the national project,
and to apply pressure for greater inclusion.
These wars, moments of national crisis
and international vulnerability emerge as fissures in the hard shell
of the American racial order.
Times when African Americans could gain some experience
of greater freedom, while exposing their struggle on a global scale.
African American participation in the armed forces,
although its form differed with each war, as we heard,
and historical period, served as a means to leverage new freedoms
from a country that had long promised but failed to deliver them.
At the same time, military service exposed African Americans
to new ways of experiencing democracy, which in turn slowly led
to increased demands for individual
and collective access to that democracy.
The path-breaking work of soldiers
in America's wars did not lead directly to the court cases,
mass civil rights protests in mid-century,
nor did the civil rights legislation finally created in the 1960s,
but it did involve many of the same pressure groups,
and in some cases the same individuals.
And it did bequeath a legacy of experience and tactics
that will remain at the center of the movement
as it came into full blossom.
If the long Civil Rights Movement was a war,
and it certainly had all the trappings of one, enemies known
and unknown, mythic generals and heroic mass of enlisted,
decisive moments in grinding daily fighting,
then the United Nations police action in Korea, from 1950 to 1953,
was certainly one of its great battles.
President Truman's call for the desegregation
of the armed forces two years prior to the war,
and the actual achievement
of integration the Korean War necessitated,
abetted by constant pressure from black political organizations
and the black press, advanced the cause of civil rights.
In my current work on African American service people during the
Korean War, I argue that black participation in the armed forces,
and the integration of the military, were together a key component of,
and building block for, the civil rights movement.
I further argue that the greater integration of the military came
about as the result of a series of three combined forces.
One, a sustained campaign of pressure
from African American civil rights political organizations
and the black press.
The - two, the actions of President Truman and the executive branch
in pushing civil rights broadly, and the integration
of the military specifically, and putting pressure
on the recalcitrant branches of the armed forces.
And three, the Korean War itself, the particular needs
of which forced those branches that had lagged behind
to actually integrate their forces.
In my brief presentation here today,
I will draw on the incredibly rich holdings of the Library
of Congress' Veterans History Project collection
to illustrate some of the key findings of my work so far.
And I do get to excuse myself, I hope,
because this is very much a work in progress.
Hope that gets me off the hook on some things.
But first, I want to give you a quick summation
of the conflict itself.
The nation of Korea descended into civil war on June 25th, 1950,
setting off a global conflict that would put the, pit the ideals
of democracy and cin - communism against one another
in a proxy war between the superpowers.
Few would have predicted, though,
that when the cold war turned hot it would do so not in Eastern Europe
but in a remote part of Asia roughly the size of the state of Utah.
The human cost was staggering.
But the time an armistice was signed, on July 27th, 1953,
an estimated 36,000 Americans,
and 415,000 South Koreans had been killed.
And 105,000 Americans, and 429,000 South Koreans wounded.
And somewhere around a million and a half North Koreans
and Chinese killed, and untold numbers wounded.
The Korean War broke out just as the issue of the unoc -
unequal opportunities and treatment of Amer -
treatment America afforded its black citizens was coming to a peak.
Playing out in greatly increased civil rights activism,
racial violence, and demands from the black community
and progressive politicians, that the oppressive system
of Jim Crow be dismantled with haste.
The armed services, which had long exiled most black service men
and women to only a few menial positions, and nearly always
in segregated circumstances, would be the testing ground
for policy reform, especially
after President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military
by executive order on July 26th, 1948.
But change in the racial structure
of the armed services was initially isolated and inconsistent.
When the Korean War broke out almost two years later, in July, 1950,
one of the first units into combat was the army's all-black 24th
Infantry regiment, the Buffalo Soldiers, the "Deuce Four."
The integration of the military would have likely come I time
anyway, but as the armed forces came under greater political
and ideological pressure, the Korean War as the catalyst,
and was bolstered both by military leaders, bigoted dissatisfaction
with the performance of its segregated troops,
and the urgent need for increased manpower during a time of war.
After the war, black veterans returned
to the United States having experienced new freedoms,
however slight, and transformed those experiences
into demands for equality at home.
In a number of ways, the integration of the armed forces,
and the participation of African American soldiers during the Korean
War, brought the simmering Civil Rights Movement
to its boiling point.
Much of the pressure to integrate the military came
in the final years, and just following World War II,
as a number of incidents of racial abuse
of black service men made national headlines.
The NAACP, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, CORE,
the United Urban League, A. Philip Randolph's march
on Washington movement, and the black press formed a loose
but powerful coalition that heavily publicized these incidents
nationally, generating a strong response from across the nation,
and especially from the White House.
Truman Gibson, the civilian aide to the War Department focusing
on so-called "negro affairs," recalled a meeting
at the Oval Office with President Truman and several of his aides,
where the president vividly described the assault
on Isaac Woodard, who was beaten and permanently blinded by sheriffs
in South Carolina in 1946, while traveling by Greyhound
after being discharged from the army camp at Camp Gordon in August,
Augusta, Georgia, on his way home to North Carolina.
After the beating, Woodard was arrested and charged,
of course he was charged, with disorderly conduct.
"This shit has to stop," Gibson remembered the president saying.
(I love being able to quote cursing presidents.)
But it did.
Looking back on this period, a few years after the Korean War,
Truman would recall in slightly more polite language,
"My very stomach turned when I learned that the Negro sol,
soldiers just back from overseas were being dumped out of army trucks
in Mississippi and beaten.
Whatever my inclinations as a native Missourian might have been,
as President I know this is bad.
I shall fight to end evils like this."
African Americans participated in the Korean War, and supported it
from home, in great numbers.
When the war began on June 25th, 1950,
nearly a hundred thousand black soldiers and sailors were
on active duty, even though the US Armed Forces was still
largely segregated.
When soldiers like Bussey, who served with the Tuskegee Airmen
in World War II, and as a lieutenant colonel commanded the black 77th
engineer combat company for 205 days of near constant battle in Korea,
reported for duty, they did so to segregated units,
traveled on segregated transportation, were often housed
in segregated and inferior barracks.
They endure harassment and mistreatment,
and that was before they even got overseas,
where they often saw the worst of the fighting,
got the blame for the defeats and retreats, and were imprisoned
and court-martialed far out of relation to their numbers.
And all of this in service to a democracy
that did not often include them.
This fact was lost in very few black people, either in the service
or those supporting them from the home front.
In just opening weeks of the war, a columnist wrote in the pages
of the Chicago Defender that black soldiers were sure to,
"whip back the communist onslaught with their blood,
some with their lives, only to return home
to find it's still open warfare on the extension of American rights
to all citizens, regardless of their race."
These thoughts were very much on the minds
of black service people during the war.
Let's listen now to Master Sergeant Charles Barry,
who served in the United States Army for 22 years,
and through three wars, including with the 24th Infantry regiment.
Do this. I'm new.
I'm new here at the library.
>> Male voice: I think someone said during this time
that the Chinese said they would let us go.
>> David Cline: That was not Charles Barry.
>> [Video] Charles Barry: But Korea was a lesson in mortality.
It was a lesson in your religious belief.
It was a lesson for you as a man.
And most of all for me, it was, I am an American,
and when I go home I can't even sit in, and eat where I want to.
I can't ride the bus.
I can't get a job I'm qualified.
And what the hell am I fighting for?
>> David Cline: Even the integration
of the armed services was not the magic pill many had hoped it
would be.
Some commanders willingly integrated.
Many held out as long as they could.
Some integrated one man at a time, others flat out refused.
Many of the first into battle were African-American troops,
still in segregated units,
who in many cases were under-trained or poorly equipped.
Let's listen next to Lieutenant General Julius Becton, her,
who first served joi - who first joined the Army Air Corp in 1944,
rejoined the military in 1948, and went on to an illustrious career
that spanned commands in the Korean and Vietnam Wars,
for which he earned two Silver Stars
and a Distinguished Service Medal, among other awards.
Lieutenant General Becton discusses here how his outfit was put together
and how it was initially viewed.
>> [Video] Julius Becton: So in 15th July, of 1950,
my battalion shipped out, going to Korea.
And I think part of that, when the war started and we were alerted,
we were short about a third of our company,
and that was true throughout the entire regiment.
And by the time we got onboard ship, we had all the numbers we needed.
And who were those replacements?
They were cooks, truck drivers, people that came out of stockade.
And these are the folk they gave us to go and fight.
Not infantry trained people.
So while we're en route to Korea, we actually trained
as much as we could on a ship.
Physical fitness, yes.
Rifleman marksmanship.
We had orientation, they fired off the fantail of the ship
with their M-1s, and that's what we had.
They weren't the best people to get,
but they were people, they're bodies.
And so with that background, we arrived into Pohang,
which was in the Pusan perimeter, the southern tip of Korea,
the third week, latter part of third or fourth week of July, 1950.
Because we were arriving with part of the division,
our battalion was pulled out of the regiment and sent
on a separate detail which none of us could understand why.
I later found out what the story was.
But, and that story was the folks
in MacArthur Headquarters weren't too sure about the effectiveness
of this black battalion, and they wanted to put us out to a place
where we could be tested
by providing airfield security and a few other things.
We went on that mission, did well.
The regiment caught hell.
They took heavy fire.
We were pulled back into the regiment, put into the line,
and we were there when the efforts were to push
out of the Pusan perimeter, to take the offensive.
And that was in September, when we moved out, September, 1950,
and to actually engage in combat as part of the regiment.
>> David Cline: When integration did occur,
it did so at the discretion of, and in the manner of,
of choosing of the unit's commander.
One white commander [inaudible] with,
chose to send one black soldier to each of his 12 white companies,
and considered that integration.
In fact he told me that it was great to have these 12 black soldiers
because they're such wonderful natural storytellers
and entertainers, that he could send them each to a--
a company and, and boost morale that way, so.
Let's listen again though to Charles Barry, who we'll hear talk
about how his unit was integrated bunk by bunk,
and the problems associated with that, which I, a personal favorite
from the VHP collection, and how he, as a sergeant,
responded to the complaints of his men.
>> [Video] Charles Barry: And then like I said, we had that meeting.
They said that the military was going to be integrated.
So I, I was, there's about half the company was shipped out down
about six blocks to another company.
And the sergeant picked me to be a squad leader.
Then he had all the whites and blacks, he said, okay,
ya'all go on in and pick your bunk then, and then I'll be in there.
Now, when they went in the barracks, the whites go on this side,
and the blacks got on this side.
So this sergeant walked in, he said, I said we are integrated now.
Now fall back out.
So he said, one black, one white, one black, one white.
That's where you gotta bunk, that's where he integrated.
But then a lot of the, I gotta say to a lot of whites, they,
they don't take a bath, I think -- I'm gonna be frank with you,
but we had a problem with that.
And then a lot of the food that we eat, they didn't like, you know.
And then a lot of religious beliefs were different.
Well now, each person has to respect another's religion,
even though you may not like it.
But it's for you to decide what religion that person going to have.
>> Interviewer: Right.
>> Charles Barry: But it got better, it really did.
>> Interviewer: It got better, but how long, I mean,
how much friction is there, and how long does it take?
>> Charles Barry: It was so tight, so thick,
you could cut it with a knife.
It was just like you was out in the desert.
I mean, and some of 'em was, and you could hear 'em get together
and saying, "man, them niggers" and this you know.
And so I had the squad, and I called 'em all together.
I said, the first one to use that word going to fight me.
>> Interviewer: Right.
>> Charles Barry: I said, I'm not going to fight you with my fists.
I'm going to call you to stay in your tent
and hit you with that rifle butt.
I said, the man says we got to live together, then let's live together.
I said, we, we, we take of each other.
We, we cook for each other.
And I said, but a lot of you whites been raised by black women.
I said, yet we're not, they,
you're not good enough to socialize and sleep?
I said, well you going to learn.
>> David Cline: One of my, one of my favorites, yeah.
Thank you.
So the question must be asked, why enlist in the first place?
This is a very complicated question with a range of answers.
But simply put, the armed services, although still severely limited,
did offer a way up and out of difficult living situations,
and a chance to pressure for even greater change.
In 1917, as we heard alluded to earlier, the NAACP encouraged blacks
to enlist as means of achieving greater equality
and economic advantage.
That argument continued to hold true and hold sway,
especially after Truman's executive order, which seem to,
seemed to promise imminent change.
Once they got into Korea, and into battle,
many units did eventually integrate as the need
for replacements outweighed other concerns.
The 24th infantry regiment combat team
of the 25th division was the last all-black unit
in the United States Army, finally dissolved by the end of September,
1951, its troops disbursed into other units.
Although contemporary assessments harshly critique the performance
of the 24th infantry and other black units, and court-martials
of black soldiers were so frequent that they prompted the NAACP
and Thurgood Marshall to investigate in Korea, African- Americans again
and again distinguished themselves on the ground.
Indeed, the first major victory of the war, at Yongsan, was won,
I hope I'm pronouncing that right,
probably not, was won by black troops.
And of the more than 600,000 African Americans who served during the war,
an estimated 5,000 gave their lives.
Their experiences in the war convinced many veterans of the need
for change, both personally in their own lives and in their home country,
helping to dislodge the grip of Jim Crow.
Korean War veterans, including activists Ivory Perry
and James Meredith, Amiri Baraka and Booby Seale,
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Director James Foreman,
and black power and armed resistance proponent Robert F. Williams,
all veterans, joined different aspects of the Civil Rights Movement
in the mid-1950s and through the 1960s.
For some, the personal
and the political were indeed the same thing,
such as Congressman Charles Rangel of New York,
who served with the US Army in Korea during 1950, and won a Bronze Star.
He began and ended the war as a high school dropout, but determined
that if he survived he would change himself and his country,
eventually going on to represent his own community of Harlem in Congress.
He recounts this story in his interview
with VHP Director Bob Patrick.
>> [Video] Charles Rangel: I think someone said during this time
that the Chinese said they will let us go through.
This was, I don't remember because my mind wasn't my own,
but I do know I ended up in some damn hospital,
and some officer congratulating me, and, for my heroism.
And I don't know where I am, what I'm doing, or --
what the hell is he talking about?
And it was hard for me to believe I was alive, that,
that this rotten nightmare had ended.
And quite honestly, from that day on I became somebody.
And I had a lot of time to think.
How the hell did I live?
And how many people that became my buddies were dead?
And what the hell did I promise anyway?
>> David Cline: He go, and he goes on to say,
"And how do I keep that promise?
I don't know, but I know one thing.
It was easy to keep, and that's why I made up my mind
that I would never, never, never, never, never, five nevers,
complain about anything that happened to me,
because my life was spared."
So in conclusion, I hope that this talk has given you
at least a quick insight into the importance of the Korean War
in African American and American history.
How desegregation of the armed service was a crucial stepping stone
along the path that would lead to the dismantling of Jim Crow
and the fuller inclusion of blacks in American life.
And how the oral histories collected
by the Veteran History Project importantly contribute
to this historical project.
But I also want to conclude my conclusion by recognizing the,
the veterans in the audience today,
most especially Lieutenant General Julius Becton, who,
it scared the pants off me to hear --
to hear he was going to be here for this talk.
Hope I, I hope I did all right.
But I just wanted to thank the general and all
of you for coming out today.
So thank you.
[Applause].
>> Bob Patrick: Well right now we're going to have a little bit
of discussion here, and hopefully we'll have a few minutes at the end
if anyone has any questions out of the audience.
But I, I kind of prepped these folks ahead of time when we talked.
And what I'd to do, the first question is, and you kind of alluded
to it, Adriane, but I'd like to expand on it.
What, what drew you to this subject that you wrote your book on?
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: When I, when I was a junior in college,
there was no - So I was in college, I was a history major in part
because I realized that I loved stories and understanding people,
but didn't have the sort
of imaginative follow-through to be a novelist.
And if I had announced that I was going to be a novelist,
my parents would have had a heart attack.
But I was taking a narrative history course,
and we needed to write about something.
And so I went to the Crisis, the NAACP's monthly magazine,
figuring the Crisis always has something in it,
and found the NAACP investigation of the Houston, what they called,
I think, a "Houston mutiny,"
the riot that involved these black troops from the 24th infantry.
And it was incredibly, I mean, my sort of first reaction to it was,
there were black soldiers in World War I?
>> And then it was, and they apparently attacked the town
of Houston.
You know, and it, it was, it was dramatic, and it allowed a way
in to thinking about all of these many different themes and,
and threads that ended up cutting through first my dissertation,
first my thesis, then my dissertation, then the book.
But what I found every time that I've come back to, or every sort of,
every iteration that I've written about this story, I found more
and more layers to kind of affect me.
And in some ways I think, as I said, the, the story of the riot augurs,
it sort of foretold the kinds of difficulties
that soldiers would experience with white civilian
and military populations.
It also demonstrated the many different understandings
of what military service was to these soldiers.
So you had the folks, the career soldiers who'd been in there
since the Philippines, you know, since the sort of 1898 wars,
who were begging the younger soldiers not to march
out because their understanding of duty, of manhood, of,
of worth was tied up in fulfilling their obligation in spite
of whatever else might be happening around them.
>> Coming up against these younger, more raw folks for whom their sense
of manhood, self-defense, of defense of the community,
dictated that they march out on what the more experienced
of them knew would be a suicide mission.
Right, and so sort of coming to that, and wrapping my head
around that, allowed me a way into understanding the other stories
that existed within, within the World War I moment.
>> Bob Patrick: Thanks.
David?
>> David Cline: It was the only way I could think
to really get the story on what black folks thought
about white folks' bath, bathing habits, so.
[laughter] No, no, I had the good fortune of being involved
in a radio documentary right around the 50th anniversary
of the end of the Korean War.
And got to interview a lot of African American veterans for that.
And as student of the Civil Rights Movement, it just, it, you know,
I just got this, this hook into me.
It didn't make sense to me that what seemed
to be a very crucial time was kind of left out of a lot of the way
that the Civil Rights Movement often taught.
And veterans just kept popping up over and over.
And so I went on to work on other subjects.
I wrote about religious folks, seminarians,
in the Civil Rights Movement, and left, this project sat on the shelf,
unfortunately, for ten years.
And now it's back off, and I'm in the middle of it again,
and just convinced all over again that this is such a crucial piece.
>> Bob Patrick: I would also - it's, it's very timely in both wars.
We just, probably still commemorating the,
the 60th anniversary of the war in Korea, the forgotten war.
And there's information as we can still get out of
about that war is important.
And I'm sure you're aware
that in the next few years we commemorate the 100th anniversary
of World War I.
And we're going to have an ongoing program here at the library.
I think both of you were, were very timely in what you did.
What both of you also did, and I appreciate the kind words
of the Veterans History Project David, is,
is to talk about the individual's story, and talk about individuals,
talking about their experience and what they went through.
Can you elaborate on that as far as why you think
that was important to do?
And I'll put you on the spot.
Do you have kind of one person, two persons, three persons that kind
of impacted you most as you started hearing these stories?
David, you want to start with that?
>> David Cline: Yeah, I would say that it's, it's just so,
it's hard to even answer that question,
in some ways, as an historian.
And I run into this all the time with fellow historians
who are much more sort of paper document source based.
I, I can't imagine doing history without working
with people and, and their stories.
To me that, that's what makes history.
And that's why I chose to work on topics where people are still alive.
So it, it just, it just a, bring, you know,
brings this whole thing to life so clearly.
And there's so many characters that, that you meet,
and stories that resonate with you.
And really, I think that's why I did, and I was a journalist first,
and then followed, then sort of changed careers
and became an historian, because I just love listening to stories.
I've always sat at the foot of my elders
and listened to their stories.
I have to say, you already saw one of my favorites.
This is my newest discovery, is, and he's not the,
he's not the other Chuck Barry, but this Chuck Barry,
I just love his, his honestly.
It's, it's just amazing.
I would say the other-- there are two others.
There's a gentleman, Mark Halpern,
in Houston who had it incredibly rough.
Everywhere he went, this is, I was starting to talk a little bit about,
integration was sort of, you know, what,
happened in very different ways in different places.
Wherever he went he was the only black soldier, and he got it bad.
And I was so impressed with his ability to survive these things,
and his honesty in sharing them with me.
Then the other was a guy in Boston, Larry Hogan, who was in,
was in one of the units that got there first,
and didn't get relieved, and just got chewed up.
And he talked about one, I believe one other soldier who started
with him made it to the end.
And he, he said, he told me this story
about after every firefight they would sort of pick themselves up out
of the dirt and look for each other, and see each other,
and go on to the next day.
So those are some of the ones that really stuck with me.
>> Adriane?
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: Well, in answer to the one part
of your question, I think I wrote my book through characters
because that's how I think.
You know, there's some people approach the sort
of historical writing through the idea,
the grounding of modern feminism, or something like that.
Whereas I both process and convey information through narrative.
So in order to wrap my brain around the story, I have to have a story.
And then when you have a story, it sort of is more elegant
to have characters that carry you through.
But my favorite people, the people who sort of emerged most
in the book, are the ones who, I, I used a lot of memoirs,
and who's memoirs or reason, reasons for writing them intrigued me.
So I think I was sitting in the reading room here,
where I was reading Rayford Logan, who wrote his memoirs about,
he wrote his -- he wrote his recollections
of his World War I service, I think, on the eve of World War II,
or during World War II probably.
But he's recalling his colonel, the guy who was in charge
of his initial unit when he was a lieutenant, Glenda Young.
And he wrote in his things to, you know, to cuss while quoting people,
Glenda Young was a son of a bitch.
And then he puts I parentheses, you who are reading this,
when you talk about him you say that I said he was a son of a bitch.
[Laughter] You know, again, okay, duly noted.
You know, if you look in my book, Logan called his colonel a son.
But there was no sense like, I mean, one of the things that I love
about Rayford Logan is that he was fully aware.
Like, unlike some folks who came into their own, who,
who realized an unexpected future in World War I.
Like, Logan knew he was off to great places.
He was certain of it for himself.
The war directed which way those places went,
or what those places were.
But that kind of, like, I can't imagine writing a,
a memoir with the ex, with enough moxy to provide instructions
for the future reader, right?
But then there are the people, you know, one guy names Ely Green,
a stevedore from Waxahachie, Texas, who I follow all the way
from Waxahachie to France and back again,
who I adore because his memoir is such an assertion that he mattered.
You know, he was someone who didn't learn to write
until he was 20 years old because he was dating some woman
who basically was like, "I ain't going to be dating somebody
who can't read," you know.
And so he has the memoir of someone who came up in,
or the memory of someone who came up in oral tradition,
but he's able to write it down.
And he's just, 'cause again, no, you know, like,
he knows he's a good-looking man with charm, and that comes up again.
So when I read his memoirs, again to sort of bring it back
to how my father sort of conditioned what I was tempered to see,
I kept thinking of how my dad would walk into rooms when I was young,
and for no reason at all just go, "Baby,
your daddy is a man among men, and a god among women!"
and then just walk out, right?
[Laughter] But it's that again, that sort of, in some ways what is a sort
of self-preservational ego that allowed people to take the trauma
of both the war and of disillusion and betrayal by the folks
who should have been their sort of brothers in arms,
and turn it into something more than self-destructive bitterness.
Like, those were the folks that I found most interesting.
>> Bob Patrick: Kind of picking up on a theme you just picked up on,
you talk a lot about manhood, and in fact, both of you do.
Could you kind of relate why that came out in, in your book so much?
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: David, do you want to start?
>> David Cline: No.
[Laughter]
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: For me it came out in part
because it was just, it was all over the place.
And part of that is because, you know, the, the 19 teens
and twenties, when I was, that I was writing about were a period
in which, you know, women got the vote
at the end of World War I, right?
But where manhood was the language through which citizenship,
particularly in what had been this kind of idea based in kind
of old style Republicanism of like, a man is the master
of his household, blah, blah, blah, right.
That was the language of citizenship,
and that was the language that people used.
And so the question became what was that language imbued with?
So I have all of these African American women,
women who were involved in the club movement, women who serve
as volunteers with the YMCA overseas,
who are also using the language of manhood.
Not because they're trying to exclude themselves,
but because they see within that a way to voice the expectations
for the entire community.
And they see putting forth manhood, defending black manhood,
as a way to gain full community rights.
And then so the question becomes in some ways, how do,
how do those definitions change over time, and what does the war do
to tweak what people imagine, and migration and all
of these other things that are tied to the war,
tweak what people imagine a man to be?
>> David Cline: And I, I didn't want to go first on that question
because I feel like I'm just starting to grapple with this
for the Korean War period.
But I also am just finding it everywhere,
it's so, it's, it's right there.
And I think in -- I, you know, I tried to illustrate
that a little bit in the talk with the opening slides of the sort
of "men with guns," and the quote form Robert F. Williams.
But, you know, part, part of my project in trying to look
at a broader view of the Civil Rights Movement involves, you know,
we, we, we like to focus and celebrate the, the non-violent part
of the movement, and not include always those
who chose armed self-defense.
A number of these men who served in Korea and were, you know,
weapon trained, that becomes very much a part of their notion
of who they are as, as a man and what it means to defend oneself.
And a number of the Deacons for Defense, for example, in Bogalusa,
Louisiana came from that veteran background.
So it's something I'm really, I'm going to explore more.
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: And if you look at the, you remember, like,
the placards you've seen, like Eyes on the Prize, or in the marches,
there are people holding up, in the movement.
The language doesn't go away, right.
They're holding up signs that say, "I am a man."
And that is both an assertion of humanity, but it's all, it's,
it is also an assertion of, of manhood.
And the other way, I was thinking about this as you were talking,
so I'm writing right now about folks who get beat
up in the jail in Winona.
Not the SNCC workers, but a few years later when another one does.
And looking at the court cases, the number of white police officers
who identify themselves as Korean War vets is also striking.
So there's a way in which you can sort of the violence on the ground,
at least in Mississippi, as a spillover from the tensions
that were already in place from, from Korea.
>> Bob Patrick: I think both of you talked about this in what you said,
but what was the, the real impact on the civil rights movement,
coming out of World War I, in your eyes.
And in likewise, the Korean War.
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: David, you want to go first?
>> David Cline: Sure.
It's my turn.
So I would say, you know, there's, there's the role of individuals
that I talked about just a little bit,
about certain people who become activists.
But think about the definition of activist, I think, very broadly.
Because I'm not just thinking about the people that I named,
but any number of returning soldiers who worked for change even,
you know, within their church community,
within their neighborhood, I think were inspired and were part
of the movement as I see it.
And, and I think also, you just, you can't discount the fact
that this enormous institution, the, the military and the armed forces,
took-- did eventually integrate.
And ahead of many other parts of American life,
and did set a precedent there.
So I think that's vastly important.
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith:
I think after World War I, you have a few things.
The number of NAACP branches explodes during the war years.
It shrinks not long after, in part because of the wave, you know,
the red summer of 1919, this tide of intense white supremacist violence.
Like, riot is not the word for what happened in 1919, right?
These were like pogroms that were going on across the country.
And so those crushed the flowering of, a lot of the flowering
of African American, African--
African American activism in wake of the war.
But even so, you get NAACP branches that, even if they grow
and then shrink, the sort of structures are in place for people
to pick back up a few years later.
You've got massive numbers going into the United Negro Improvement,
or Universal-- the UNIA, I can't remember what they use.
Negro Improvement Organization, Association, the Garvey-ites.
Many of whom-- which provides both a sort
of domestic organizational forum, but again, increasing, enhancing,
intensifying this sense that African Americans are part
of a great community of black people
for whom these causes are connected, right.
So part of what shifts is these kind of institutional memberships.
But also on [inaudible] - anation,
not just of what is possible, but what is community.
And you've got the folks, the strategists like--
so I didn't mention about Houston, you all probably know
that he is the architect
of the NAACP's legal strategy to bring down Jim Crow.
He's basically the mentor to Thurgood Marshall
and a host of other people.
You have the folks who are sort of the,
for whom World War I is the crucible,
who carry that fight forward, and who are instrumental
to designing the post-World War II movement.
>> Bob Patrick: Thank you.
Thank you both.
Do we have any questions from the audience?
Someone have a question they'd like to ask?
Right here.
>> Male voice: First of all I had a comment for you,
to thank you for telling me something more
about Professor Rayford.
I only know his work about the issues and pioneering work,
and now I know a little bit more about the man.
Professor Cline, it seems to me that the, what I've read
about the Korean War -- [inaudible] I think by black scholars,
indicated that there maybe were actual problems with performance
of black troops, especially the segregated troops,
partly because of morale issues because they were still segregated.
And I wondered if you wanted to comment on that.
And also I think African-Americans were way over rep,
represented in the rather tiny number overall, still,
who defected to North Korea, and POWs who decided to stay with Korea,
North Korea rather than on the other side.
I wondered about those two comments are accurate.
>> David Cline: So I'll start with the, the second first.
Not in terms of actual percentage.
So there are two African Americans among the group
of 11 or 17, or whatever.
I can't remember what the actual number,
but it was, there were only two.
Though I think it caught the public's
and the, the media's imagination.
And it also in part because the North Koreans
and the Chinese especially, used a kind of,
a campaign all throughout the war,
and appealed to African American soldiers, saying,
what are you doing fighting this war
when you don't have democracy at home?
And so I think people caught on that, and said, oh look at these,
at these African American men who left.
But it would, there are, it was only two.
One of them did a, sort of a subsequent biography
with his daughter, which is quite good.
The first part of the question was.
[Inaudible from audience] Perform-- So there's, yeah, there,
there was a mixed record.
It's, it's a complicated story, of course.
There was a mixed record there.
A number of the troops who went in first, of course,
were coming you know, they were on leave,
or they were on occupation duty in Japan.
They were not training up to battle standards, clearly.
They were, they had old equipment.
They were, many of them were in summer uniforms
when they were rushed into harsh winter conditions in Korea.
So there was, I think, you know, it's fair to say that there,
there was some difficulty in performance.
There are also a lot of circumstances that explain that.
And I don't think there's any doubt that the contemporary, at least,
mainstream media evaluation of their performance was way over the top,
and, and quite racially toned.
And the Army, after many years, you know, the,
the sort of the first official account of the 24th that--
the Army's own account of the 24th's performance was critiqued for years
by scholars and veterans alike, and then was redone.
And that still has some critique, but it gives them much I think,
more nuanced explanation of the, of their performance.
>> Bob Patrick: Any other questions?
>> Female voice: Just this week there were many soldiers who,
posthumously or, you know, very belatedly,
were honored at the White House as a result of their service.
And so I picked up quickly when I heard the mention
about a disproportionate number of African-Americans
who were court-martialed, disciplined,
didn't get promotions and all.
And I wonder if there's anyone looking at that history
to see how those stories need to be retold.
Because families were damaged.
People were damaged as a result
of those stories being the public information
about their family members.
>> David Cline: My, my understanding is there is a lot
of work underway to, to correct that.
I don't know, General Becton, if I can call on you to, if,
if this is true, and if you know about work that's being done.
>> General Becton from the audience: I'm not too sure from a standpoint
of whether there is any, whether there's any in-depth assessment
as to the discipline that was handed out.
But as far as the awards, by the way, which is taking place today
in the White House, that's not the first time that's done.
They did that about ten years ago, and we had some nine black Americans
who were honored, or their ancestor was honored, with the medal of,
with the Congressional Medal, with the Medal of Honor.
But it's a kind of a thing that people like these folks
up here will inspire other folks to, to look more to.
And what Bob Patrick and the use of the Veterans History Project,
that's an opportunity to get on record what, at,
hidden inside so many people.
And so I applaud all of those from that standpoint.
But I must point out one, couple of things.
The 369th that was mentioned from World War I,
I was in the 369th in World War II.
It was a black unit then, and what may not be realized, they were for,
fighting for the French, in the French Army,
and not for the US Army, because the US commanders would not have black
soldiers fighting for them, because they felt they could not,
would not, fight properly.
One additional point, in 1925 the Army War College had a study
about why black soldiers fail, because they lacked leadership,
they lacked initiative, they went on a whole litany
of things that they could not do.
And it took a very simple thing, like Eleanor Roosevelt,
when she went down to Tuskegee, and insisted upon riding in the back
of an aircraft flown by a black American, a fellow named Anderson,
over the objection of her security and everyone else.
She wanted to prove the fact that black men can do things like that,
can be effective, can be leaders.
And that started the 92nd - let me back up.
That started the Tuskegee Airmen on their way,
which led to their combat so well documented.
And it's more people raising the kinds
of questions you're raising will get more of these things out.
You know, by the way, there's still a book in the library
that mentions some of these things too.
It's somebody Becton: [Laughter] Autobiography
of a Soldier and Public Servant.
[Laughter]
[ Applause ]
>> Bob Patrick: Thank you sir.
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: Can I say something?
>> Bob Patrick: Sure.
>> Adriane Lentz-Smith: I was going to say that what
that Army War College report did not say is
that the army leadership during World War I was so opposed
to the few number of black, black officers that had been created
through a segregated army camp, or sort of mid-level leadership
at least, that they, those soldiers were being sabotaged
from the moment they-- sort of took command.
So Logan is one of many.
Logan came out of, I can't remember if he came
out of the segregated office camp, or through sort of ROTC stuff.
He came in as a first lieutenant.
But he was quickly moved out of leading fighting forces,
to overseeing labor forces, stevedores and such,
not because he was incompetent but because people
around him didn't want him in that leadership position, right.
Folks seized any opportunity to demote black officers.
And then I'd say also that the over-prosecutions,
the misrepresentations of folks in the military
as criminals is happening within a con--
context, right, where black criminality is being exaggerated,
and blackness is defined as criminal,
from the progressive era onward.
So it's not happening in isolation in, in the military, nor does it end
after the successes of the Civil Rights Movement.
So it's a part of a deeper, longer, in some ways, more insidious story
than the one that we're telling right now.
>> Bob Patrick: Got time for one more question.
Anyone? Yes sir.
>> Male voice: One of the things that always impressed me
about Harry Truman was his willingness to step out
and pass the directive to integrate the armed services.
What struck me today was, did that trajectory play a role
in the Korean War, or was it beginning to take effect?
What would have been the effect had this directive not been in place
in 1948, because I'm picking up that there was still--
and from what General Becton and others have said--
a lot of integration still had not occurred by the Korean War.
So was there some turning point with the Korean War, and that directive,
so how does that trajectory show itself leading into the, I suppose,
the focus of the Civil Rights Movement in the 50s and 60s.
If that, if you picked up enough from your research.
>> David Cline: Yeah.
It really took the war to integrate.
And again, it was one of the wording of the executive order,
as in other integration orders that we're familiar with, was vague.
It was a - it was a kind of in all deliberate speeds kind of parallel,
all due haste, something along those lines.
And so there was not, there was not a, a timeline laid out, right?
And each of the branches took this charge in different ways.
And each, and down to the level of, you know, the,
the commander of the training camp, for example.
I believe your, General Becton's commander said, you know, we,
we've got this executive order
but that's not going to happen here, right?
Is that correct?
>> General Becton: Actually it was not my commander
but the Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
I was there for a short reserve training period.
And I think I can be heard over here?
>> David Cline: Yeah.
>> General Becton: And the commander [inaudible] read the order
to all the officers that he required be there.
And after he finished the order he said that as long as I'm
down here there'll be no change.
>> David Cline: So that was the kind of thing that was happening,
and the different branches pro, proceeded at different speeds,
and the army was definitely the, was holding back the most.
What, you're shaking your head.
You want to say the Marine Corps?
Oh, okay. So the army and the Marine Corps.
[Laughter] But I would agree with that.
But what it took was the, the, the necessity for bodies, right,
for warm bodies in terms of replacements.
This is what's told as the common story,
that when you needed a replacement desperately,
you weren't so concerned about sticking
with those racial lines anymore, and that's really what did it.
And the disbandment of the 24th, which as I said, was,
there was a lot of controversy around that.
>> Bob Patrick: Well, ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank each
and every one of you for being here today.
I ask you to check the calendar
of other programs that'll be held later this year as a part
of the commemoration, Civil Rights Act.
And please join me in also thanking Dr. Adriane Lentz-Smith
and Dr. David Cline for being here today.
[ Applause ]
>> Guha Shankar: And please also thank Bob Patrick,
Director of Veterans History Project.
[Applause] And Lieutenant General Julius Becton.
Thank you.
I was going to say, David, I thought your new, new,
new favorite would be Lieutenant General Becton,
in terms of [inaudible].
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.
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