The Role Of African Americans During World War I

During World War I, African Americans went a step further. Instead of only participating in protests, black workers would write persuasive letters – using the war and patriotism as means to support their requests. “Despite the tendency of the postal system to marginalize them, African Americans participated in a broad process of communicating … ‘African Americans viewed the war as a potentially defining moment in their history of racial progress and struggle for freedom.’ African Americans … made use of the postal system and petitioned the federal government for racial justice.” African American men employed under the United States Railroad Administration were not being paid equally to their white counterparts. One black railroad worker wrote
They wanted to show that they were putting aside all thoughts and notions of social equality and only focused on economic equality while also concealing any idea that they were envious or hated their white peers. While men were writing persuasive letters, women would use World War I as a way to show their support for America and persuade white Americans that they were not heavily interested in social justice by sending food and clothes to soldiers. Instead of focusing and fighting for gender reform amongst the African American community, “black clubwomen redirected their focus … to the public sphere of public war work and military life. … [They] used their background in community work to give black soldiers their support.” By showing support for World War I, they noticed the positive reception and “generous [applauds]” from
“‘The Negroes are getting too independent,’ [white Americans] say, ‘we must teach them a lesson.’ What lesson? The lesson of subordination.” Some white Americans were so afraid of African Americans migrating all over America and integrating into society that they felt the need to assert who was in charge of whom; African Americans immediately entered into a battle against the white Americans who strived to see the African American community falter. “African Americans beyond the South would, on behalf of their Southern counterparts, ‘face the enemy and fight inch by inch for every right [white Americans denied black Americans].’” African Americans could be threatened with a lynching just for being African American as a situation on August 15, 1900 in New York clearly showed. “The New York Times reported that a crowd of a thousand people ‘started to clean the streets of Negroes’ … Some shouted ‘lynch the nigger.’ One man tied a clothes line to a lamp-post, looking for someone to lynch.” Unfortunately, black Americans were also much more likely to be lynched whether they were in the South, East, West, or the North, according to King and Tuck’s article; it was not just a North-South division. “[B]lack people were some ten times more likely to be lynched than white people across the Western and Southern states, but they were more than forty times likely to be