|
Product Description
For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation.
Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them.
This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- The highest glass ceiling: women's quest for the American presidency (Chinese Edition)
- Fighting in the Jim Crow Army: Black Men and Women Remember World War II
- Beyond Combat: Women and Gender in the Vietnam War Era
- America: A Narrative History (Brief Tenth Edition) (Vol. 2)
- America: A Narrative History (Brief Eleventh Edition) (Vol. Volume 2)
- Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture)
- Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America (War/Society/Culture)
- We Return Fighting: World War I and the Shaping of Modern Black Identity
- African Americans and the Pacific War, 1941-1945: Race, Nationality, and the Fight for Freedom
- Uncle Sam Wants You : World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen
*If this is not the "Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Nov 5, 2024 13:41 +08.