WAMC Northeast Public Radio has a great little segment called Academic Minute, which allows professors from throughout the country to discuss aspects of their work within the tidy timeframe of one minute. I am featured on the December 28, 2010 program. It was tough trying to capture the central meaning of Torchbearers of Democracy in one minute, but I gave it my best shot. If anything, this serves as a great cure for long-winded professors: keep it short and sweet!

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/wamc/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1739889

Friday, 8:30 AM conference panels are never a good idea. It’s one of those slots that, after organizing a session, you check the schedule, and just wince, shake your head, and hope for the best. Nevertheless, I was extremely excited about the roundtable panel I put together for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) annual meeting, held in Raleigh, NC from September 29 to October 3. The session consisted of myself, Adriane Lentz-Smith (History Department, Duke University), Pellom McDaniels III (History Department, University of Missouri-Kansas City) and David Davis (English Department, Mercer University). Adriane, who I jokingly refer to as my twin because our interests are so alike, is the author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I, a great book. I first met Pellom during a Memorial Day 2009 visit to Kansas City and the National World War I Museum, where we both discussed the legacy of African Americans in the war. ASALH was my first opportunity to meet David Davis, whose work on representations of the war in African American literature I have greatly admired.

With such a stellar group, I was fully prepared for an overflow audience. I had my comments ready to go, along with glowing introductions for my co-panelists. But, alas, by 8:40 it became clear that it was going to be just us.

Not content to let a great opportunity go to waste, we sat down and started chatting amongst ourselves. We began our conversation by talking about the contested memory of World War I for African Americans and the various ways in which it has been both remembered and historicized. David made the point that the United States has done a poor job of remembering World War I in general, and that the seemingly forgotten presence of African Americans is reflective of a broader national historical amnesia.

After a few minutes we were joined by John W. Franklin of the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of African American History and Culture (who I later found out is the late great John Hope Franklin’s son!). With the World War I centennial just around the corner, he was adamant that we organize a symposium on black participation in the war. Of course we all said yes! Mr. Franklin also thrilled us with some great stories about “uncle” Rayford Logan, the famed African American historian who served in World War I, and how he studied in France with Cesaire. Thinking about a possible symposium at the Smithsonian gave Pellom an opportunity to discuss the fabulous website he created, “They Came to Fight” (www.theycametofight.org), on African American participation in World War I and the school curriculum he has developed around it. We all agreed that the history of African Americans and the war cannot be confined just to the academy, but must be a public history as well.

Doing this necessitates demonstrating the breadth and complexity of African Americans’ experiences during the World War I era. While Adriane, David, Pellom and I have examined similar sources, we each use them in different ways. Adriane emphasized how we can gain a new perspective on issues of womanhood, political consciousness and internationalism by looking at the war through the experiences of a black woman like Kathryn Johnson, who served as an overseas YMCA secretary in France during the war. David mentioned the historical and literary significance of the black Services of Supply troops, and how they do not fit into the dominant narrative of black participation in the war. Pellom observed how integral African American soldiers were to the development of both jazz and Negro League baseball. To this point, he also talked about his efforts to further incorporate the black war experience into the National World War I Museum, and connect it to the National Jazz Museum and Negro League Hall of Fame, all located in Kansas City. This seemed perfectly logical to all of us. But clearly a disconnect continues to exist between the war and other key developments in African American history in the larger public consciousness. I suggested that one of the main reasons why World War I remains so ambiguous for African Americans is because the memories of the war itself are so conflicting. While you have tremendous examples of valor and courage, like Henry Johnson and the 369th Harlem “Hellfighters,” you also have tremendous disappointment, such as the demeaning treatment of black soldiers and the violence of the “Red Summer” of 1919. David made the astute observation that we can indeed appreciate how visceral the memories of postwar racial violence were by looking at the plays, poems, and novels produced by African American writers during the interwar period. Reconciling these conflicting meanings of the war—patriotic sacrifice and valor vs. dogged racial oppression and disillusionment with American democracy—was and continues to be an extremely difficult task. As both Adriane and I noted, self-proclaimed “historians” of the black war experience, like Emmett J. Scott, Kelly Miller, and Allison Sweeny produced books that in the end failed to leave a lasting impact. W. E. B. Du Bois likewise tried to write the history of World War I and peoples of African descent, but never succeeded despite a seventeen year attempt to do so.

This caused us to ponder, what makes us different? How do we account for the current burst of scholarly interest in African Americans and World War I? We did not come to a firm conclusion. But perhaps historians and literary scholars are only now beginning to ask the right questions and search in the right places for the answers. By adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, connecting the global to the local, and critically interrogating the meanings of nation, citizenship, freedom and democracy, maybe we have finally begun to marshal the necessary intellectual tools for fully appreciating the breadth and complexity of African Americans’ experiences in World War I. If our conversation at ASALH is any indication, we certainly have much to look forward to.