The Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home
The triumphant return from World War I of the U.S. 369th Infantry Regiment, 93rd Division, known popularly as “The Harlem Hellfighters,” and specifically their welcome home parade up Manhattan’s 5th Avenue on Feb. 17th, 1919, has traditionally been cited as the day the Harlem Renaissance began, marking the birth of what Alain Locke called “The New Negro” and the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement.
It might, however, be argued that the Harlem Renaissance actually began six months earlier, when a man named Irvin S. Cobb, a popular “southern humorist,” wrote a serious article, published in the August 24th 1918 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, entitled “Young Black Joe” which gave African-Americans a new kind of hero, and a new source of ethnic pride.
The exploits of the men from Harlem, who’d first formed in 1916 as the 15th New York National Guard before being federalized, had been previously reported on in black newspapers including the New York Age, as well as in the New York Times and New York World. Until Cobb’s article, however, it was a story of local interest, with limited exposure.
The road to glory was long, with detours along the way. Their state-side training was cut short due to racial hostilities and tensions that arose wherever they were sent. At Camp Wadsworth, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in October, 1917, though the commander of the regiment, a white New York attorney named Colonel William Hayward, had asked his men to comply (if not agree) with the local Jim Crow laws, a near riot occurred in a hotel lobby when the hotel owner knocked the hat off a black soldier who’d been told he could buy a newspaper there. A few weeks after that, at Camp Mills, Long Island, a white officer named Hamilton Fish, later elected to congress from Duchess County, got word that soldiers from the Alabama National Guard, bivouacked nearby, were planning to attack his men. Fish issued live ammunition to his troops, just in case, then marched into the Alabama encampment, accompanied by a 6’6 260lb. black heavyweight boxer named George “Kid” Cotton, and offered to fight any officer who would have him, adding that he’d brought along an enlisted man who would fight any two southerners.
There were no takers.
Adversity produced a sense of unit cohesion, “us against them,” even if the “them” was the U.S. Army. Unlike other colored regiments where black soldiers had little respect or affection for their white officers, the men of the 369th knew their white officers had their backs, and understood their predicament. The Hellfighters had black officers too, at a time when the War Department preferred having colored troops led either by an all white or an all-black officer’s corps.
They arrived in Brest, France on New Year’s Day, 1918. The NY 15th National Guard was initially pressed into the Service of Supply, as were the majority of the 400,000+ colored troops conscripted for the war effort, laying railroad tracks, draining swamps and unloading ships. Colonel Hayward campaigned, writing letters to AEF headquarters, pleading that his men be allowed to see combat. General John Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force, had for some time refused all requests from the French and British to give them reinforcements, arguing that his troops weren’t ready and that he wasn’t about to allow American troops to fight under a foreign flag. The French Army, by 1918, was both depleted and demoralized --- 24,000 French soldiers had been tried and convicted of mutiny in 1917. To make matters more dire, the Bolsheviks, after taking power in Russia in November, 1917, had negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers, allowing the Germans to transfer a million troops from the Eastern to the Western front. Pershing understood that the Germans intended to mount a spring offensive in 1918, a final push to seize Paris and negotiate a treaty on favorable terms before the Americans arrived in sufficient numbers to stop them.
Pershing, knowing that were he to deploy colored American troops with or adjacent to white American troops, trouble was sure to follow, capitulated and gave the French eight regiments of colored soldiers.
The 15th, re-named U.S. 369th Infantry, became part of the French 4th army, led by a General Henri Gouraud, in March, 1918. They wore French helmets, used French weapons, and consumed French rations. The French trained them in the ways of trench warfare, served side by side with them for a brief introductory period, then turned a sector over to the Americans, south of the town of Sechault and east of a hill called Butte Mesnil, where over 200,000 Germans and poilus had died during the first three years of fighting. Thus the Harlem Hellfighters (a moniker bestowed upon them by the Germans) served longer in the trenches than any other American regiment. They helped repel the German spring offensive and participated in the Allied fall offensive, fighting up the west side of the Argonne forest. They are believed to have been the first American troops to reach the Rhine, the prime objective of many American military leaders, including two young officers named George Patton and Douglas MacArthur.
Irvin Cobb enters the picture in May, 1918, when Colonel Hayward invited him, in his capacity as war correspondent, to visit and write about his troops. With Cobb were two other reporters, Martin Green of the Evening World and Lincoln Eyre of the New York World, but Cobb was by far the better known, his magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, with a circulation over 2,000,000, one of the most widely read publications in America. Cobb was described, by a critic of the era, as “One of America’s chief assets. … More people read him than any other contemporary writer—to be both amused and informed. He may not be the funniest man in America, but if he isn’t, who is?” Ring Lardner? Dorothy Parker? Robert Benchley?
Fortuitously, Cobb arrived the day after an event that became known as “The Battle of Henry Johnson.” Pvt. Johnson, a diminutive redcap from Albany, was manning an observation post in No Man’s Land on the night of May 15th with a fellow private from Trenton, NJ, named Needham Roberts, when they were attacked by a German raiding party. Roberts fought with grenades but was soon wounded. Henry Johnson emptied his rifle, then used it as a club, and finally drew his bolo knife as German after German came at him. Afterwards, it was estimated, judging from the footprints in the mud, the weapons left behind and the pools of blood, that he’d killed at least four of the enemy and driven off as many as two dozen. Both Johnson and Roberts, and ultimately 169 other members of the 369th, were awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. Both men were disabled by their injuries.
The U.S. army did little, after the war, to recognize the efforts and the sacrifices made by the men from New York, even though Johnson was “one of the five bravest soldiers in the war,” according to Teddy Roosevelt. The greatest recognition came from Cobb’s story in the Saturday Evening Post, which gave African Americans everywhere a story of an ordinary man who’d exhibited extraordinary valor.
The irony is that Cobb was, himself, a bigot who told racist jokes, a Kentuckian who penned demeaning caricatures of black people, giving their speech the kind of transliteration not uncommon at the time, full of “dem’s” and “dose’s” and “I’s gwine’s” and minstrel slang. When Colonel Hayward held a reception for Cobb, many of the black officers turned their backs or refused to shake his hand. Cobb was a celebrity, the man chosen to host the first Academy Awards ceremony. Read today, the humor of his prose is lost (at least on me), Cobb coming off as a self-satisfied gas bag who engaged his readers with long winding sentences that took far too long to get to the point. Once one of America’s best-loved or most widely read writers, he is today utterly unknown, his obscurity not undeserved; his redemptive legacy may reside within the words of “Young Black Joe,” in which, impressed and changed by what he’d seen, he writes:
They were soldiers who wore their uniforms with a smartened pride; who were jaunty and alert and prompt in their movements; and who expressed as some did vocally in my hearing, and all did by their attitude, a sincere heartfelt inclination to get a whack at the foe with the shortest possible delay…. I am of the opinion personally, and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all the Southerner’s inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.
Of course, the origins of a cultural movement as broad as Civil Rights can’t truly be pegged to a single day, the desire for racial equality and social justice having arisen in the hearts of African Americans long before WWI and far in advance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet from “Young Black Joe,” and in the image of Henry Johnson, African Americans understood what Frederick Douglass had said during the Civil War in 1863: “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his buttons and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned his right to citizenship.”
The period after the troops came home from WWI was known as “Red Summer” for the blood that flowed in the race riots that ensued, in Texas, Tennessee, Nebraska, Arkansas, Virginia, in Chicago, Illinois, in Tulsa, Oklahoma and in Washington, D.C., usually white mobs entering black towns and neighborhoods, hoping to put the blacks back in their place. It’s hard now to listen to the popular song of the era, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm, After They’ve Seen Paree?” without hearing racist overtones. (Incidentally, the regiment band, led by musician James Reese Europe, can be credited for introducing jazz to France.) After the war, African Americans fought back, inspired and sometimes defended by their soldier heroes. It was not a battle that could be quickly won, but it was one from which there could be no turning away. The “New Negro” would not accommodate, nor would he abide Jim Crow. The result was change.
In the sacrifices made by the men from the 15th New York National Guard (about three-quarters of their original number were casualties), as described in Irvin Cobb’s report in “Young Black Joe,” African Americans understood that their brothers had given their lives for their country and for the patriotic cause to “make the world safe for democracy,” even though America, home to lynchings and Jim Crow laws, was not safe for black men and women. They died for an America they believed was possible, and in doing so, made it possible.