Black men drafted into the U.S. Army during World War I were significantly more likely to join the NAACP and to play key leadership roles in the early Civil Rights Movement as a result of the discrimination they experienced while serving the country, according to a new study by Harvard Kennedy School economist Desmond Ang and Sahil Chinoy, a doctoral student in economics.
Looking to measure what drove the postwar boost in political activism among Black veterans, the researchers combed through millions of military records, U.S. Census data, as well as membership rolls for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the decade following the war. They found that by 1930, World War I veterans comprised 15 percent of male members of the NAACP, the leading civil rights organization of the period.
The significant discrimination Black troops faced while serving in the Great War — working in segregated units with little formal training — “seeded deep feelings of institutional betrayal and discontent” that compelled many veterans to challenge the status quo after 1918, Ang and Chinoy concluded.
Desmond Ang (left) and Sahil Chinoy.
Photo by Grace DuVal
Black men who were induced to enlist were three times more likely to join the NAACP, the study found. Since the early 1800s, Black Americans had been barred from serving in the military and attending institutions such as West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy. When World War I broke out, the U.S. needed to beef up its defensive ranks quickly, so in 1917 it instituted the first nationwide draft of Black men, conscripting nearly 400,000. The move was unpopular, particularly within the all-white armed forces, and Black and white servicemen were segregated. Nearly 90 percent of Black troops were assigned labor-intensive or menial jobs, say the researchers, and most were denied combat and officer training, firearms, and promotions.
Soldiers who were most caught off guard by the hostile treatment they received were the likeliest to become politically active, the study found. For example, researchers traced the highest NAACP enrollment to veterans of the 92nd Division, who risked their lives in combat while facing constant racial abuse. The study saw lower enrollment among noncombatants and veterans of the 93rd Division, who experienced less discriminatory treatment while brigading overseas with the French military.
Identifying the private motivations of veterans from a century ago was difficult, so to help understand how Black soldiers felt about the war, Ang and Chinoy reviewed questionnaires administered by state commissions asking veterans to describe their service and how it affected them. Those who served in camps that denied training or promotion opportunities were more than twice as likely to cite injustice in their survey responses.
Another rich source of information, said Ang, were contemporaneous reports assembled by U.S. military intelligence, which had a department monitoring what it called “Negro subversion.” White officers would go from camp to camp taking the temperature of Black troops. The two greatest causes of discontent cited by Black service members in the reports were the dearth of promotion opportunities while laboring under often cruel and unqualified white supervisors, and the lack of military training in return for their service.
“The government had a really good handle on what things were really upsetting Black people,” which “speaks to this idea that a lot of this was very deliberate, institutional decisions that were happening,” said Ang. “It really seems to corroborate this narrative [historian] Chad Williams and others have talked about, which is the sense of hypocrisy and injustice that was going on.”
Ang and Chinoy say the research may “underestimate” how influential World War I veterans were in terms of the potential spillover effects on their families, friends, and others in the Black community, a subject they intend to explore next. Also, the researchers are starting to look at how the backlash to the NAACP’s rise and the Civil Rights Movement sparked a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow in the 1920s.
Citing the white power movement following the Vietnam War and the paramilitary styling of some far-right groups today in the U.S., Ang wonders whether the dynamics at play during World War I is a piece of a much larger puzzle. “Is this something that we can see historically, and what are the aspects of military service” that may drive people to become politically active?
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