The talk of freedom during World War I inspired the hopes of African Americans.  Many African Americans hoped to change the racial structuring of society in the United States.  They were influenced by black individuals with differing opinions on how to achieve this.  W.E.B. DuBois felt that through service in the military during the war would gain them civil rights.  Others, such as William Monroe Trotter, felt that the U.S. should spend time fixing internal problems involving racial issues instead of fighting for democracy in other countries.(1)  Another important event for African Americans during WWI was the Great Migration North.  WWI caused a shortage of immigrant labor in the Northern factories.  With promises from the Northern factory owners of better pay and a better life, African Americans migrated North.

          Many African American men volunteered for service in the army during the war; others joined because they were drafted in 1917.  Many of those who volunteered did so because of the message W.E.B. DuBois sent out through the magazine The Crisis.  That message was that African Americans could gain progress in civil rights by proving themselves as worthy patriotic citizens in the war.(2)  William Edward Burghardt DuBois was an influential black intellectual. He was an editor, historian, and civil rights leader. His experience in the South caused him to reject the accommodating methods of Booker T. Washington.  DuBois pressed for public protest against racial violence and discrimination.  He suggested that African Americans should provide leadership for the race by becoming more educated and entering into political and economic roles. DuBois was an activist as well as an intellectual. In 1905 he helped to found the Niagara Movement and in 1910, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He was the editor for this organization’s publication, The Crisis.(3)

         Upon entering the service, many African American soldiers were given a newly developed IQ test.  The psychologists who administered the tests claimed that the results proved that African Americans lacked intelligence.  In reality, the tests were flawed and only measured knowledge of mainstream American culture and English literacy.(4) 

At the time, many white Americans considered African American men cowardly and non-masculine.  Many African Americans felt that enlistment in the military would allow them to prove their masculinity.  However, once enlisted, units of African American soldiers tended to be assigned to labor battalions instead of combat units.  Their white leaders were afraid they might be successful and this would upset the social norms of the day.

         Some African American troops did participate in combat.(5)  Some units of African American soldiers in France saw combat, fought bravely and successfully.  Many of them received the French Legion of Honor.(6)  The African American soldiers in France also experienced many new freedoms while in France.  The French did not see the African American soldiers as inferior or cowardly. They saw them as equals.

          In response to pressure from African American leaders, an officer training school was established in Des Moines in 1917.  Joel Spingarn, of the NAACP, and W.E.B. DuBois rallied support for the training school.  But upon return to the United States, African American soldiers realized that despite their efforts in the war, they had been unable to change their position in white society in America. 

As mentioned previously, another influential black intellectual, William Monroe Trotter, did not support the idea of participating in the war to gain ground in civil rights.  He felt that the U.S. government and African American rights groups should spend their time solving the race issues in America.  He especially felt that the problems of lynching, discrimination and the conditions for African Americans in the South needed to be dealt with. Trotter, the editor of the Guardian newspaper, had gained a reputation for being outspoken and fearless in his fight for the Negro race, when he challenged  President Woodrow Wilson in 1914 to keep his campaign promises to assist the African Americans to achieve better treatment.(7)

        Although DuBois and Trotter seemed to have differing approaches to achieving Black equality, they did collaborate on occasion. Trotter and DuBois drafted the Declaration of Principles for the Niagara Movement of leading African-American opinion makers, stating:

Persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty….We black men have our own duties…to respect ourselves, even as we respect others. But in doing so, we shall not cease to remind the white man of his responsibility. We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.(8)

          With the onslaught of war in Europe, the number of people immigrating to the U.S. decreased significantly.  This meant that factory owners in the northern states lacked in potential employees.  Therefore, factory owners began to call upon the African Americans of the South to fill their factory floors.  The factory owners recruited African American people from the South for work in the northern industrial states. Many people who were considering moving north were tired of being oppressed by the southern white people.  They were also seeking better employment opportunities.  Many went north for a variety of reasons, they went north in search of better wages, a chance to educate their children, and to escape from the possibility of being lynched.(9)  Therefore, the call to work from the North came at an opportune time, when African American people were looking for somewhere else to go to improve their way of life.  African Americans did not leave the South just because of discrimination; they also tended to leave for the chance at achieving economic stability.

        The exodus from the South may have caused increased oppression of African Americans.  When they arrived in the North, the southern African Americans ran into opposition from white factory workers.  White factory workers began riots to protest African American labor.  The riots were taken to an extreme in 1917 in St. Louis, Missouri.  An armed, white, mob cornered black workers in their quarters, where 125 people were massacred and burned.   In the court cases that followed, the white participants received less punishment than the African American participants.  In retaliation for the St. Louis riots, a silent parade was held in Manhattan on July 28, 1917.  It appeared that the dream of equality in the North may have been short lived. 

          Southerners attempted to scare African Americans out of migrating North by telling them that once the war was over, the job ranks of the North would be refilled with white immigrants, pushing African Americans out of work.  They told the African Americans of the South about how badly the African Americans were being treated in the North.  Despite the efforts of white Southerners, transplanted African Americans in the North continued to send hopeful news to family and friends via the mail asking them to join them up North. 

Employers in the South realized they were loosing their workforce, so they set out to stop the movement north.  Southern employers doubled their efforts by passing laws, preventing northern labor agents from entering southern states.  When the mail continued to encourage migration northward, Southerners began to remove African American people from trains, drive them from bus stops, and some were even imprisoned on false charges. 

          The African American dream for freedom was given a brief chance during WWI through the efforts of black soldiers in the war who served their country bravely and by factory workers moving out of the South to seek new opportunities and economic stability. The black political leaders continued to publish reminders of inequality and to seek resolution for injustices.  .  Discrimination would continue however unfortunately, for another 50 years.  Despite their best efforts, neither side was able to accomplish its goal of improving civil rights for African Americans.  They did however, experience many new things that shaped their lives and advanced them further down the path towards the Civil Right Movement.  The Great Migration North placed African Americans in Urban areas.  Returning African American soldiers also moved into urban areas.  These two events combined with the newly formed NAACP would form the backbone of the Civil Rights movement. 

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1. Eric Foner, Give Me Liberty! An American History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005).

2. Ibid.

3. Public Broadcasting Station, Marcus Garvey, “People and Events”, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/garvey/peopleevents/index.html

4. American Social History Project, Who Built America, (New York: Worth Publishers, 2000).

5. Bret E. Carroll, ed., American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2003), 506.

6. World War I and Postwar Society, “True Sons of Freedom”,  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aopart7.html .

7. Public Broadcasting Station, “People and Events”.

8. Ibid.

9. Foner, 2005.