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World War I’s Black Journalists Had to Fight Their Own Government

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Any Armistice Day Didn’t Last Long

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

William Monroe Trotter

Charlotta A. Bass

Ralph Waldo Tyler

Roscoe Conkling Simmons

Robert Abbott

W.E.B. Du Bois

A. Philip Randolph

Epilogue

 

 

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“This World War I recruiting poster harnesses the power of Lincoln’s language in the Gettysburg Address and the example of the black troops who fought in the Civil War. Ultimately, despite the indignity of serving in segregated units, some 350,000 African Americans enlisted and fought in World War I. ” (Credit: abrahamlincoln.org)

Any Armistice Day Didn’t Last Long

On the first Armistice Day, 100 years ago, black journalists had a lot on their plate.

It was 1919, and the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, was still reporting on the war just ended.

“[B]lack soldiers did not need any stimulus to experience disillusionment and bitterness; the treatment they received from many white officers was sufficient to accomplish that,” Theodore Kornwiebel Jr. wrote in his 1998 book, ” ‘Seeing Red’: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919-1925.”

“[Du Bois] made certain that African Americans knew the story, publishing official army documents which revealed the virulent prejudices of many of those who commanded black troops. It is not difficult to corroborate the Crisis accounts,” he wrote.

“Col. Allen J. Greer, chief of staff of the 92nd Division, systematically and unfairly attacked the courage, competence, and character of the troops, particularly their black junior officers.

“[Du Bois’s] expose was reviewed by [the Army’s Military Intelligence Division’s] two racial ‘experts’. Maj. Walter H. Loving, even though he was regarded as a dependable ‘white man’s Negro’ by his white peers in MID, was appalled at the slanderous postwar attacks on the battlefield record of black soldiers.

“He substantiated Col. Greer’s prejudices, which [Du Bois] revealed in the May 1919 Crisis, and in uncharacteristically blunt language recommended that Greer be court-martialed for destroying the effectiveness of the 92nd Division. . . . “

But Secretary of War Newton D. Baker “read all the communications, but took no meaningful action to alter the army’s racist policies.”

Untitled cartoon from January 1920 in Lustige Blaetter and Le Rire, German and French satire and humor magazines.

At home, 13 black soldiers were executed and 14 sentenced to life imprisonment after the largest court-martial ever held within the United States.

A massacre took place in Houston after an August 1917 incident in which a black soldier was beaten and incarcerated for coming to the aid of a black woman. Prior to that, an anti-black mob burned down a black section of East St. Louis, Ill., killing at least 100 people in an episode that gave the lie to 21st century declarations that contemporary acts constituted “the deadliest mass shooting in American history.”

The 100th anniversary of Armistice Day (later Veterans Day), signifying the end of World War I, the “Great War,” whizzed by this month with a documentary here and there and coverage of President Trump’s visit to Paris.

A look at what black journalists were going through during that time reminds us of how far the nation has come in the last 100 years, and how some of the same issues they encountered remain.

It was a time of confronting a racist president (Woodrow Wilson), the Great Migration, an escalating number of lynchings and the European powers deciding post-war how to carve up the rest of the world. And, of course, the war itself and the attendant Jim Crow within it.

There were outsized black journalists who were also activists whose names are now legendary, among them W.E.B. Du Bois, William Monroe Trotter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Marcus Garvey, along with Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender. They reported on and/or involved themselves in all of those concerns. And there were First and Second Amendment issues.

Notwithstanding Stanley Nelson’s 1999 documentary “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,” these activist-journalists have supplied enough dramatic material for several movies.

Black journalists, like Hispanic, Asian American and Native American journalists of the time, had a different mission from white journalists.

How so? “This ‘colored’ press of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has at times been erroneously lumped together with the hundreds of foreign-language newspapers that flourished around the same time among European immigrants,” Juan González and Joseph Torres wrote in “News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media.”

“But while the immigrant press successfully helped new arrivals assimilate to their new nation, racial segregation in the U.S. never permitted such an option for blacks, Native Americans, Asians and the largely mixed-race Mexicans and Latin [Americans].

“Non-white minorities were quickly relegated to a rigid second-class status, and as a result colored editors turned into persistent opponents of racial bigotry in general. . . . They thus constituted a separate but vibrant wing of the country’s muckraking press, though one that remained largely invisible to white society. . . .”

Roi Ottley wrote in his biography of Abbott, founder and editor of the Chicago Defender, “Fifty thousand Negroes were used in front-line combat, a fact that produced considerable good copy for the Defender and the Negro press generally. . . .”

These are some of the players:

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

(1862-1931)

Known for her crusading against lynching and the namesake of a top award from the National Association of Black Journalists and the newer Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, among other journalism programs, Wells, later Wells-Barnett, responded to racial outrages involving the military along with those elsewhere.

Ida B. Wells produced a pamphlet after reporting from East St. Louis, Ill.

In 1917, a two-day race riot broke out in East St. Louis, Ill., an already tense place where newly arrived blacks from the South competed with white immigrants for jobs in a city already straining to meet the demands of wartime production.

The riot began after two white detectives were killed. White men driving a vehicle similar to the detectives’ had been yelling, cursing and firing into dwellings and a church in a middle-class black neighborhood.

Whites retaliated. “Before the two-day riot subsided, two hundred homes had been burned down, most in the sixteen-block African American Black Valley district,” Paula J. Giddings wrote in “Ida: A Sword Among Lions.”

“Some five thousand blacks fled the city. It was impossible to accurately calculate the death toll. The official total was thirty-nine; other estimates were at least double the figure . . . Ida put the figure at one hundred and fifty. . . .”

Wells went to the scene, interviewed black female survivors and produced a pamphlet, “The East St. Louis Massacre: The Greatest Outrage of the Century.”

A month later, in August 1917, a soldier from the black 24th United States Infantry, 3rd Battalion, was beaten and incarcerated for coming to the aid of a black woman in Houston who was being abused by two policemen.

When word reached the battalion, a false rumor spread that the soldier had been killed. About 100 black soldiers went to police headquarters in San Felipe, Texas, only to be met by a mob of a thousand whites. White and black civilians and soldiers were killed.

In the predawn hours of Dec. 11, 1917, the Army hanged 13 of the 63 soldiers who had been charged with disobedience, mutiny, assault and murder. In a second court-martial, 11 more were given a death sentence.

Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois, editor of the NAACP’s the Crisis, each condemned what they considered a double standard and the inability of the soldiers to appeal.

Wells earned a visit from intelligence officers when she had buttons made up that memorialized the men of the 24th. One threatened to arrest her on a charge of treason if she continued to distribute them. Wells said it would be an “honor” to go to prison under such circumstances, Giddings wrote.

This year, admirers of Wells raised enough money to begin construction of a monument honoring Wells in Chicago.

The William Monroe Trotter Innovation School in Dorchester, Mass., honors African American civil rights leaders whose work was primarily in the Boston area. (Credit: William Monroe Trotter Innovation School)

William Monroe Trotter

(1872-1934)

Editor of the Boston Guardian, a founder of the Niagara Movement, predecessor to the NAACP, and namesake of the Trotter Group of African American newspaper columnists, among other tributes, William Monroe Trotter is perhaps best known for his 1914 confrontation with President Woodrow Wilson at the White House.

On Nov. 12 of that year, as Wilson plotted his administration’s response to the war in Europe and mourned the death of his wife, Edith, Trotter led a delegation to the White House to remind Wilson that African Americans had supported Wilson’s election in 1912 and felt betrayed. Among other reversals, Wilson reinstituted segregation in the federal and District of Columbia workforces and dismissed high-level black appointees.

“The President replied that his Cabinet officers had investigated and reported that ‘the segregation was caused by friction between colored and white clerks,’ ” Stephen R. Fox wrote in his biography, “The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter.” “He wanted the colored people to make progress, but there was a great prejudice against them among white people. And the race problem had no place in politics.

” ‘Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit,’ said Wilson. . . .”

The exchange between Trotter and Wilson went back and forth for 45 minutes, the president astonished that Trotter would violate White House protocol by arguing with him. “If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. Your manner offends me,” Wilson told Trotter.

The next morning the story was on the front page of the New York Times.

When the war ended, Trotter sought to have a section added to Wilson’s 14 Points, a statement of principles for peace that was to be used for peace negotiations to end the war.

Trotter’s additional point would read, “The elimination of civil, political, and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations for the new era of freedom everywhere.”

When the State Department would not issue passports to his group, the activist journalist got himself hired as a second cook on a “small, tired freighter” headed for France, Fox wrote. “Ragged and hungry and in need of funds, I made my way to Paris,” Trotter recounted.

Once there, Trotter began to publicize the plight of African Americans. A white man from Massachusetts wrote the New York Age that he was impressed. “Every newspaper in Paris has given him space — from one inch to one column,” the man wrote.

Nevertheless, Wilson, who had arrived in Versailles, rebuffed Trotter’s request to see him there. The editor returned “having made a greater impression on the French than on his own countrymen,” Fox wrote.

Charlotta A. Bass

(1874-1969)

Charlotta A. Bass, born Charlotta Amanda Spear, was a crusading editor who was only beginning her long career during World War I.

Charlotta Bass

But during the war years, she used her platform as editor and publisher of the California Eagle to fight “for equal rights for the millions of African Americans who moved to the West Coast during the migration of the World War I and II era, pitting them against the hegemonic white establishment,” Rodger Streitmatter wrote in “Raising Her Voice: African- American Women Journalists Who Changed History.”

Bass wrote, “When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that it is going to require to put this old world in such condition that it will be a fit and happy abode for all the people, they must first be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened.”

The Eagle spoke out against injustice in the military during and following World War I. Streitmatter called Bass a “radical precursor of the Black Power Movement,” publishing the Eagle from 1912 to 1951. “As a vehicle for Bass’s demands, the Eagle became a lightning rod for protest, and she became a target of hatred and violence.”

Based in Los Angeles, Bass tried to block the production of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” the racist 1915 film targeted by activist editor William Monroe Trotter and others. “When dozens of workers — black as well as white — argued that they should not be denied the high wages that Griffith was willing to pay, Bass lost,” Streitmatter wrote.

However, “Word that Bass had challenged the motion picture industry spread rapidly through black America, and soon her spirit of resistance was in demand by downtrodden African Americans all over the country.” She attended the 1919 Pan-African Conference, led in Paris by W.E.B. Du Bois, and during the 1920s was co-president of the Los Angeles branch of Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association.

Photo credit: Southern California Library for Social Studies Research

Ralph Waldo Tyler

(1860-1921)

“When black troops finally went to war” in the spring of 1918, “The Afro-American, the Chicago Defender and other black publications were unable to report directly from overseas,” Jinx Coleman Broussard writes in “African American Foreign Correspondents: A History.” Instead, the black press published letters from African American soldiers and relevant news from white newspapers.

Ralph Waldo Tyler

As Broussard points out, the federal government was concerned about black discontent with the war — the United States was fighting for freedom in other countries as it denied it to blacks at home — and appointed Emmett J. Scott, a black ally of moderate “race” leader Booker T. Washington, as special adviser for race relations to Secretary of War Newton D. Baker.

In October 1917, Scott invited black leaders to a Conference of Negro Editors and Leaders that included 30 black editors and publishers. They complained of escalating lynching parties, persistent discrimination, Jim Crow laws and misinformation about blacks in the mainstream media.

On the latter, “Black leaders believed the only way to counter such negative characterizations was for the government to appoint a black journalist to go overseas to tell the stories of the sons, husbands, brothers, and friends of their readers who hungered for information. . . , ” Broussard wrote.

Chosen for the job was Ralph Waldo Tyler, 58, a Columbus, Ohio, native who acted both as a correspondent and accredited representative of the government’s Committee on Publication Information. He was as much a political appointee as a journalist.

“Although the National Negro Press Association paid his expenses (he worked for free) and distributed his stories, he reported to the CPI,” John Maxwell Hamilton reports in “Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting.” “Tyler recounted ‘the splendid endurance and valiant fighting of the Colored soldiers.’ He did not report the discrimination he witnessed — not that he had much choice. The CPI spiked stories in which he reported French women’s willingness to fraternize with blacks.”

Broussard wrote, “He successfully navigated between his fellow black editors and publishers, who wanted their country to do what was right, and the government that decided what he should tell his readers.”

Roscoe Conkling Simmons

(1881–1951)

“The Chicago Defender was not pleased about the arrangement that sent Ralph Waldo Tyler overseas,” Jinx Coleman Broussard writes in “African American Foreign Correspondents: A History,” “although publisher Robert Abbott was present at the meeting. Independent and competitive, Abbott decided to send Roscoe Conkling Simmons to Europe immediately after Tyler received his assignment.

“Simmons was a nephew by marriage of Booker T. Washington, but he was also a leader in his own right. In addition to being a Chicago Defender columnist, he was a renowned orator with ties to the Republican Party.”

Roscoe Conkling Simmons

Simmons was a character. From Roi Ottley in his “The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender Newspaper,” published in 1955:

Simmons’ “assignment was to cover the Negro troops at the front and report their day-to-day activities. But Simmons somehow never got beyond the Paris fleshpots.

“When he could tear himself away, he casually interviewed a Negro soldier or two on leave in the city, and dispatched his second-hand gleanings to the Defender — and, to be sure, these were transparent enough for his publisher to recall him.

“His irresponsibility was particularly distressing, because Abbott’s well-laid plans to get the jump on his competitors by eyewitness reports had gone awry.

“Upon his employee’s return, he staged a monster mass meeting in Chicago at which War Correspondent Simmons, in a matchless performance of imagination, described his experiences abroad. The thousands who turned up at the armory — at one dollar a head — replenished Abbott’s depleted coffers and Simmons carried off his role like a hero.”

Ottley also wrote of J. Hockley Smiley, the Defender’s de facto managing editor.

“[O]ne day Roscoe Conkling Simmons, a famed Republican orator, but often a wayward character, borrowed money from Abbott to pay his railroad fare to a speaking engagement in St. Louis, Missouri. Simmons promised to return a day or two later to repay the loan. [Reporter Henry D.] Middleton recalls that ‘One week, two weeks, three weeks went by and no Simmons and no money, and Abbott casually complained to Smiley.’

“The next edition of the paper carried the following streamer across the front-page: COL. ROSCOE CONKLING SIMMONS DIED SUDDENLY IN ST. LOUIS — adding in small type below, ‘other papers please copy.’ It was a ‘scoop’ for the Defender and every Negro newspaper reprinted the story.

“When Simmons read his obituary he hurried back to Chicago somewhat chastened and promised repayment. Abbott, with a twinkle in his eye, reprimanded Smiley for his sly wit. . . .”

The March 1918 edition of the Crisis included this cartoon by Lorenzo Harris, “The Funny Page.” It was calculated that between 1890 and 1919, 1,748 black men, women and children were lynched by whites, roughly one every six days. During the same time period, 1,294 whites were lynched, mostly in the West.

W.E.B. Du Bois

(1868 – 1963)

W.E.B. Du Bois was the pre-eminent black intellectual of the first half of the 20th century. As founding editor of the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis (“A Record of the Darker Races”), he was also its pre-eminent black journalist. Du Bois was also a historian, sociologist, academic and agitator. By 1917, when the United States entered World War I, the Crisis’ readership had grown to 50,000, expanding to more than 100,000 two years later after the war came to a close.

W.E.B. Du Bois

That readership surpassed that of the New Republic and the Nation, Shawn Leigh Alexander noted in introducing “Protest and Propaganda: W.E.B. Du Bois, the Crisis, and American History.” The book was inspired by a “100 Years of Crisis” panel at the 2010 American Historical Association conference.

Theodore Kornweibel Jr. wrote in “Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy: 1919-1925,” “During World War I military officials, alleging that the interracial civil rights organization’s outspoken magazine was under enemy influence and encouraging disaffection among black troops, sought to ban it from military posts.

“The army’s fears infected other agencies in the growing political intelligence network; soon the Justice and Post Office departments were also monitoring the influential monthly, with some officials eager to ban it from the mails. . . . “

Du Bois “trimmed his editorial sails, culminating in the controversial ‘Close Ranks’ admonition to African Americans to wholeheartedly support the war effort.

“Although Du Bois was motivated in part by a desire to receive an army commission and serve in a proposed black military unit, he recognized that only editorial circumspection would abort outright government suppression. . . .”

Still, the circumspection lasted only so long. In 1919, after combat had ceased in Western Europe, the New York postmaster general decided to withhold all 100,000 copies of the Crisis from the mails after the Translation Bureau of the Post Office accused it of violating the Espionage Act, which targeted publications that encouraged “treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law.”

Ten black periodicals were so accused, including the New York Amsterdam News, which still publishes today.

“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,” Du Bois wrote in an editorial headlined “Returning Soldiers.” “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.”

The six-day Post Office delay ended after the postal solicitor ruled that the Crisis did not violate the Espionage Act.

Du Bois saw part of his mission to connect African Americans with other people of color around the world (“the darker races”), and the Crisis reflected that.

“Du Bois sailed to France on a dual mission, to shepherd a Pan-African Congress in Paris, which he was responsible for organizing, and to investigate charges of army discrimination against black soldiers in France,” Kornweibel wrote. However, the Pan-African Congress was considered “grandly symbolic,” according to Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, and as previously noted, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker “took no meaningful action to alter the army’s racist policies,” Kornweibel concluded.

Du Bois and the other activist journalists had correctly read the mood of African Americans, in and out of the military.

When the war was over, “the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919 erupted in over three dozen racial clashes, many involving servicemen of both races”  the “Seeing Red” author wrote. “Lynching of African Americans increased dramatically, with several veterans murdered simply for wearing their uniforms in public.”

A. Philip Randolph

(1889–1979)

At Washington’s Union Station.

Before he was known as the architect of the 1963 March on Washington and organizer of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph was a socialist trade union leader whose crusade for social justice included journalism.

He and colleague Chandler Owen co-founded the militant publication the Messenger in November 1917, originally covering New York trade union activities, then as “the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes.”

Theodore Kornweibel Jr. wrote in ” ‘Seeing Red’: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy 1919-1925,” “The Messenger in its ten-year life would oppose World War I; espouse socialism and, for a time, Bolshevism, challenge Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanism, shepherd the Harlem Renaissance; and define new black leadership strategies and goals. . . .

“The white press and government during the peak of the magazine’s militancy, saw it as the most serious black threat to the racial status quo, and Randolph himself was branded ‘the most dangerous Negro in America.’ . . . “

Ida B. Wells biographer Paula Giddings wrote, “Of all the black editors, Randolph was the most contemptuous of the sedition threats. The Messenger published statistical evidence that blacks were opposed to conscription, and it blatantly editorialized that it would be better to make ‘Georgia safe for the Negro’ than die for the country in France.

“The paper was eventually throttled by the postmaster general, and in August 1918, Randolph and his co-editor, Chandler Owen, had been arrested and charged under the Espionage Act, which carried a penalty of a twenty-year prison term. The charges were eventually dismissed, but the publication was suppressed until the following year.”

“Some of the Chicago girls welcoming home one of the military men of the 370th (Old 8th Illinois National Guard),” the caption reads. The pride of Chicago, the Fighting Eighth gained special recognition as the regiment that finally drove the German forces from the Aisne-Marne region of France prior to the Armistice in 1918. (Credit: blackhistoryheroes.com)

Robert Abbott

(1870–1940)

It took a number of lynchings and other abuses against African Americans in the South for the Chicago Defender to promote what became known as the Great Migration, but once it did, in 1916, the Defender prompted tens of thousands to head north. The Defender’s circulation soared.

Founder and Editor Robert Abbott came to believe “that migration was at once an effective tactic for hurting the white South and a real opportunity for African Americans to live in freedom,” Ethan Michaeli wrote in his critically acclaimed, 633-page “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America,” published in 2016.

In November, as Woodrow Wilson won a narrow reelection victory, “the editorial page published ‘Bound for the Promised Land’ by M. Ward, a heretofore unknown poet, whose portrait photo shows a young man, nattily dressed with a satin bow tie, recounting the experiences of those who had already gone North, found jobs, and sent for their wives, as well as the efforts from the South to ban the work of labor agents:

“From Florida’s stormy banks I’ll go. I’ll bid the South goodbye;
“No longer will they treat me so. And knock me in the eye,
“Hasten on my dark brother. Duck the Jim Crow law.
“No Crackers North to slap your mother, or knock you on the jaw.
“No Cracker there to seduce your sister, nor to hang you to a limb
“And you’re not obliged to call ’em “Mister,” nor skin ’em back at him.

“So popular was the poem that the issue sold out, prompting The Defender to reprint it a few months later. ‘This poem caused more men to leave the Southland than any other effort,’ the newspaper proudly noted. . . .

“The Defender estimated that 250,000 black people had left the South by the beginning of that winter, and noted that a shift was taking place in white public opinion. . . .

“The migration accelerated throughout the spring, as evinced in The Defender’s national section, which included state-by-state reports from black communities across North America and beyond . . .”

On Friday, Oct. 12, 1917, thousands came out to the 8th Infantry Armory to see the Eighth Regiment, the only all-black regiment in the United States, head off for war.

“Now that the war in Europe was officially on, black manpower would be crucial to enhancing America’s underpowered military,” Michaeli wrote. “Finally, the editorial page felt, black America had serious leverage on the federal government. The newspaper’s first demand was for full integration in a military ostensibly fighting for freedom and democracy overseas. . . .”

The U.S. armed forces were not desegregated until 1948, when Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981.

Epilogue

In 1918, before the Armistice Day surrender, the Crisis published a column by J.B. Watson titled “The Black Soldier,” dedicated to “the nearly 10,000 men of Negro descent who are today called to arms for the United States.” It was “dedicated, also, to the million dark men of Africa and India, who are fighting for France and the other allies.

“Out of this war will rise, sooner or later an independent China; a self-governing India, and Egypt with representative institutions; an Africa for the Africans, and not merely for business exploitation,” it continued.

“Out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult. These things may not and will not come at once; but they are written in the stars, and the first step toward them is victory for the armies of the Allies.”

 

 

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Ida B. Wells produced a pamphlet after reporting from East St. Louis, Ill.
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