Bret Harte - "East and West"

William McPherson - "An Elementary Study of Chemistry"

Fred M. White - "The Crimson Blind "

Arsene Houssaye - "Les grandes dames"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940 1965

M >> Morris J. MacGregor Jr. >> Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940 1965




Although the Army's racial policy differed from the Navy's, the
resulting limited, separate service for Negroes proved similar. The
laws of 1866 and 1869 that guaranteed the existence of four black
Regular Army regiments also institutionalized segregation, granting
federal recognition to a system racially separate and theoretically
equal in treatment and opportunity a generation before the Supreme
Court sanctioned such a distinction in _Plessy_ v. _Ferguson_.[1-6] So
important to many in the black community was this guaranteed existence
of the four regiments that had served with distinction against the
frontier Indians that few complained about segregation. In fact, as
historian Jack Foner has pointed out, black leaders sometimes
interpreted demands for integration as attempts to eliminate black
soldiers altogether.[1-7]

[Footnote 1-6: 163 U.S. 537 (1896). In this 1896 case
concerning segregated seating on a Louisiana
railroad, the Supreme Court ruled that so long as
equality of accommodation existed, segregation
could not in itself be considered discriminatory
and therefore did not violate the equal rights
provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. This
"separate but equal" doctrine would prevail in
American law for more than half a century.]

[Footnote 1-7: Foner, _Blacks and the Military in
American History_, p. 66.]

The Spanish-American War marked a break with the post-Civil War
tradition of limited recruitment. Besides the 3,339 black regulars,
approximately 10,000 black volunteers served in the Army during (p. 007)
the conflict. World War I was another exception, for Negroes made up
nearly 11 percent of the Army's total strength, some 404,000 officers
and men.[1-8] The acceptance of Negroes during wartime stemmed from
the Army's pressing need for additional manpower. Yet it was no means
certain in the early months of World War I that this need for men
would prevail over the reluctance of many leaders to arm large groups
of Negroes. Still remembered were the 1906 Brownsville affair, in
which men of the 25th Infantry had fired on Texan civilians, and the
August 1917 riot involving members of the 24th Infantry at Houston,
Texas.[1-9] Ironically, those idealistic impulses that had operated in
earlier wars were operating again in this most Jim Crow of
administrations.[1-10] Woodrow Wilson's promise to make the world safe
for democracy was forcing his administration to admit Negroes to the
Army. Although it carefully maintained racially separate draft calls,
the National Army conscripted some 368,000 Negroes, 13.08 percent of
all those drafted in World War I.[1-11]

[Footnote 1-8: Ulysses Lee, _The Employment of Negro
Troops_, United States Army in World War II
(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1966), p.
5. See also Army War College Historical Section,
"The Colored Soldier in the U.S. Army," May 1942,
p. 22, copy in CMH.]

[Footnote 1-9: For a modern analysis of the two
incidents and the effect of Jim Crow on black units
before World War I, see John D. Weaver, _The
Brownsville Raid_ (New York: W. W. Norton Co.,
1970); Robert V. Haynes, _A Night of Violence: The
Houston Riot of 1917_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1976).]

[Footnote 1-10: On the racial attitudes of the Wilson
administration, see Nancy J. Weiss, "The Negro and
the New Freedom: Fighting Wilsonian Segregation,"
_Political Science Quarterly_ 84 (March
1969):61-79.]

[Footnote 1-11: _Special Report of the Provost
Marshal General on Operations of the Selective
Service System to December 1918_ (Washington:
Government Printing Office, 1919), p. 193.]

Black assignments reflected the opinion, expressed repeatedly in Army
staff studies throughout the war, that when properly led by whites,
blacks could perform reasonably well in segregated units. Once again
Negroes were called on to perform a number of vital though unskilled
jobs, such as construction work, most notably in sixteen specially
formed pioneer infantry regiments. But they also served as frontline
combat troops in the all-black 92d and 93d Infantry Divisions, the
latter serving with distinction among the French forces.

Established by law and tradition and reinforced by the Army staff's
conviction that black troops had not performed well in combat,
segregation survived to flourish in the postwar era.[1-12] The familiar
practice of maintaining a few black units was resumed in the Regular
Army, with the added restriction that Negroes were totally excluded
from the Air Corps. The postwar manpower retrenchments common to all
Regular Army units further reduced the size of the remaining black
units. By June 1940 the number of Negroes on active duty stood at
approximately 4,000 men, 1.5 percent of the Army's total, about the
same proportion as Negroes in the Navy.[1-13]

[Footnote 1-12: The development of post-World War I
policy is discussed in considerable detail in Lee,
_Employment of Negro Troops_, Chapters I and II.
See also U.S. Army War College Miscellaneous File
127-1 through 127-23 and 127-27, U.S. Army Military
History Research Collection, Carlisle Barracks
(hereafter AMHRC).]

[Footnote 1-13: The 1940 strength figure is
extrapolated from Misc Div, AGO, Returns Sec, 9 Oct
39-30 Nov 41. The figures do not include some 3,000
Negroes in National Guard units under state
control.]


_Civil Rights and the Law in 1940_ (p. 008)

The same constants in American society that helped decide the status
of black servicemen in the nineteenth century remained influential
between the world wars, but with a significant change.[1-14] Where once
the advancing fortunes of Negroes in the services depended almost
exclusively on the good will of white progressives, their welfare now
became the concern of a new generation of black leaders and emerging
civil rights organizations. Skilled journalists in the black press and
counselors and lobbyists presenting such groups as the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the
National Urban League, and the National Negro Congress took the lead
in the fight for racial justice in the United States. They represented
a black community that for the most part lacked the cohesion,
political awareness, and economic strength which would characterize it
in the decades to come. Nevertheless, Negroes had already become a
recognizable political force in some parts of the country. Both the
New Deal politicians and their opponents openly courted the black vote
in the 1940 presidential election.

[Footnote 1-14: This discussion of civil rights in
the pre-World War II period draws not only on Lee's
_Employment of Negro Troops_, but also on Lee
Finkle, _Forum for Protest: The Black Press During
World War II_ (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 1975); Harvard Sitkoff, "Racial
Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second
World War," _Journal of American History_ 58
(December 1971):661-81; Reinhold Schumann, "The
Role of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People in the Integration of
the Armed Forces According to the NAACP Collection
in the Library of Congress" (1971), in CMH; Richard
M. Dalfiume, _Desegregation of the United States
Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953_
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969).]

These politicians realized that the United States was beginning to
outgrow its old racial relationships over which Jim Crow had reigned,
either by law or custom, for more than fifty years. In large areas of
the country where lynchings and beatings were commonplace, white
supremacy had existed as a literal fact of life and death.[1-15] More
insidious than the Jim Crow laws were the economic deprivation and
dearth of educational opportunity associated with racial
discrimination. Traditionally the last hired, first fired, Negroes
suffered all the handicaps that came from unemployment and poor jobs,
a condition further aggravated by the Great Depression. The "separate
but equal" educational system dictated by law and the realities of
black life in both urban and rural areas, north and south, had proved
anything but equal and thus closed to Negroes a traditional avenue to
advancement in American society.

[Footnote 1-15: The Jim Crow era is especially well
described in Rayford W. Logan's _The Negro in
American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901_
(New York: Dial, 1954) and C. Vann Woodward's _The
Strange Career of Jim Crow_, 3d ed. rev. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974)]

In these circumstances, the economic and humanitarian programs of the
New Deal had a special appeal for black America. Encouraged by these
programs and heartened by Eleanor Roosevelt's public support of civil
rights, black voters defected from their traditional allegiance to the
Republican Party in overwhelming numbers. But the civil rights leaders
were already aware, if the average black citizen was not, that despite
having made some considerable improvements Franklin Roosevelt never,
in one biographer's words, "sufficiently challenged Southern (p. 009)
traditions of white supremacy to create problems for himself."[1-16]
Negroes, in short, might benefit materially from the New Deal, but
they would have to look elsewhere for advancement of their civil
rights.

[Footnote 1-16: Frank Freidel, _F.D.R. and the South_
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1965), pp. 71-102. See also Bayard Rustin,
_Strategies for Freedom: The Changing Patterns of
Black Protest_ (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1976), p. 16.]

Men like Walter F. White of the NAACP and the National Urban League's
T. Arnold Hill sought to use World War II to expand opportunities for
the black American. From the start they tried to translate the
idealistic sentiment for democracy stimulated by the war and expressed
in the Atlantic Charter into widespread support for civil rights in
the United States. At the same time, in sharp contrast to many of
their World War I predecessors, they placed a price on black support
for the war effort: no longer could the White House expect this
sizable minority to submit to injustice and yet close ranks with other
Americans to defeat a common enemy. It was readily apparent to the
Negro, if not to his white supporter or his enemy, that winning
equality at home was just as important as advancing the cause of
freedom abroad. As George S. Schuyler, a widely quoted black
columnist, put it: "If nothing more comes out of this emergency than
the widespread understanding among white leaders that the Negro's
loyalty is conditional, we shall not have suffered in vain."[1-17] The
NAACP spelled out the challenge even more clearly in its monthly
publication, _The Crisis_, which declared itself "sorry for brutality,
blood, and death among the peoples of Europe, just as we were sorry
for China and Ethiopia. But the hysterical cries of the preachers of
democracy for Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in Alabama,
Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia--in
the _Senate of the United States_."[1-18]

[Footnote 1-17: Pittsburgh _Courier_, December 21,
1940.]

[Footnote 1-18: _The Crisis_ 47 (July 1940):209.]

This sentiment crystallized in the black press's Double V campaign, a
call for simultaneous victories over Jim Crow at home and fascism
abroad. Nor was the Double V campaign limited to a small group of
civil rights spokesmen; rather, it reflected a new mood that, as
Myrdal pointed out, was permeating all classes of black society.[1-19]
The quickening of the black masses in the cause of equal treatment and
opportunity in the pre-World War II period and the willingness of
Negroes to adopt a more militant course to achieve this end might well
mark the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

[Footnote 1-19: Myrdal, _American Dilemma_, p. 744.]

[Illustration: INTEGRATION IN THE ARMY OF 1888. _The Army Band at Fort
Duchesne, Utah, composed of soldiers from the black 9th Cavalry and
the white 21st Infantry._]

Historian Lee Finkle has suggested that the militancy advocated by
most of the civil rights leaders in the World War II era was merely a
rhetorical device; that for the most part they sought to avoid
violence over segregation, concentrating as before on traditional
methods of protest.[1-20] This reliance on traditional methods was
apparent when the leaders tried to focus the new sentiment among
Negroes on two war-related goals: equality of treatment in the armed
forces and equality of job opportunity in the expanding defense
industries. In 1938 the Pittsburgh _Courier_, the largest and one (p. 010)
of the most influential of the nation's black papers, called upon the
President to open the services to Negroes and organized the Committee
for Negro Participation in the National Defense Program. These moves
led to an extensive lobbying effort that in time spread to many other
newspapers and local civil rights groups. The black press and its
satellites also attracted the support of several national
organizations that were promoting preparedness for war, and these
groups, in turn, began to demand equal treatment and opportunity in
the armed forces.[1-21]

[Footnote 1-20: Lee Finkle, "The Conservative Aims of
Militant Rhetoric: Black Protest During World War
II," _Journal of American History_ 60 (December
1973):693.]

[Footnote 1-21: Some impression of the extent of this
campaign and its effect on the War Department can
be gained from the volume of correspondence
produced by the Pittsburgh _Courier_ campaign and
filed in AG 322.99 (2-23-38)(1).]

The government began to respond to these pressures before the United
States entered World War II. At the urging of the White House the Army
announced plans for the mobilization of Negroes, and Congress amended
several mobilization measures to define and increase the military
training opportunities for Negroes.[1-22] The most important of these
legislative amendments in terms of influence on future race relations
in the United States were made to the Selective Service Act of 1940.
The matter of race played only a small part in the debate on this
highly controversial legislation, but during congressional hearings on
the bill black spokesmen testified on discrimination against Negroes
in the services.[1-23] These witnesses concluded that if the draft law
did not provide specific guarantees against it, discrimination would
prevail.

[Footnote 1-22: The Army's plans and amendments are
treated in great detail in Lee, _Employment of
Negro Troops_.]

[Footnote 1-23: Hearings Before the Committee on
Military Affairs. House of Representatives, 76th
Cong., 3d sess., on H.R. 10132, _Selective
Compulsory Military Training and Service_, pp.
585-90.]

[Illustration: GUNNER'S GANG ON THE USS MAINE.]

A majority in both houses of Congress seemed to agree. During (p. 011)
floor debate on the Selective Service Act, Senator Robert F. Wagner of
New York proposed an amendment to guarantee to Negroes and other
racial minorities the privilege of voluntary enlistment in the armed
forces. He sought in this fashion to correct evils described some ten
days earlier by Rayford W. Logan, chairman of the Committee for Negro
Participation in the National Defense, in testimony before the House
Committee on Military Affairs. The Wagner proposal triggered critical
comments and questions. Senators John H. Overton and Allen J. Ellender
of Louisiana viewed the Wagner amendment as a step toward "mixed"
units. Overton, Ellender, and Senator Lister Hill of Alabama proposed
that the matter should be "left to the Army." Hill also attacked the
amendment because it would allow the enlistment of Japanese-Americans,
some of whom he claimed were not loyal to the United States.[1-24]

[Footnote 1-24: _Congressional Record_, 76th Cong.,
3d sess., vol. 86, p. 10890.]

[Illustration: GENERAL PERSHING, AEF COMMANDER, INSPECTS TROOPS _of
the 802d (Colored) Pioneer Regiment in France, 1918_.]

No filibuster was attempted, and the Wagner amendment passed the
Senate easily, 53 to 21. It provided

that any person between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five
regardless of race or color shall be afforded an opportunity
voluntarily to enlist and be inducted into the land and naval
forces (including aviation units) of the United States for the
training and service prescribed in subsection (b), if he is
acceptable to the land or naval forces for such training and
service.[1-25]

[Footnote 1-25: 54 _U.S. Stat._ 885(1940).]

The Wagner amendment was aimed at _volunteers_ for military service.
Congressman Hamilton Fish, also of New York, later introduced a
similar measure in the House aimed at _draftees_. The Fish (p. 012)
amendment passed the House by a margin of 121 to 99 and emerged intact
from the House-Senate conference. The law finally read that in the
selection and training of men and execution of the law "there shall be
no discrimination against any person on account of race or color."[1-26]

[Footnote 1-26: Ibid. Fish commanded black troops in
World War I. Captain of Company K, Fifteenth New
York National Guard (Colored), which subsequently
became the 369th Infantry, Fish served in the much
decorated 93d Division in the French sector of the
Western Front.]

[Illustration: HEROES OF THE 369TH INFANTRY. _Winners of the Croix de
Guerre arrive in New York Harbor, February 1919._]

The Fish amendment had little immediate impact upon the services'
racial patterns. As long as official policy permitted separate draft
calls for blacks and whites and the officially held definition of
discrimination neatly excluded segregation--and both went unchallenged
in the courts--segregation would remain entrenched in the armed
forces. Indeed, the rigidly segregated services, their ranks swollen
by the draft, were a particular frustration to the civil rights forces
because they were introducing some black citizens to racial
discrimination more pervasive than any they had ever endured in
civilian life. Moreover, as the services continued to open bases
throughout the country, they actually spread federally sponsored
segregation into areas where it had never before existed with the
force of law. In the long run, however, the 1940 draft law and
subsequent draft legislation had a strong influence on the armed
forces' racial policies. They created a climate in which progress
could be made toward integration within the services. Although not
apparent in 1940, the pressure of a draft-induced flood of black (p. 013)
conscripts was to be a principal factor in the separate decisions of
the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps to integrate their units.


_To Segregate Is To Discriminate_

As with all the administration's prewar efforts to increase
opportunities for Negroes in the armed forces, the Selective Service
Act failed to excite black enthusiasm because it missed the point of
black demands. Guarantees of black participation were no longer
enough. By 1940 most responsible black leaders shared the goal of an
integrated armed forces as a step toward full participation in the
benefits and responsibilities of American citizenship.

The White House may well have thought that Walter White of the NAACP
singlehandedly organized the demand for integration in 1939, but he
was merely applying a concept of race relations that had been evolving
since World War I. In the face of ever-worsening discrimination,
White's generation of civil rights advocates had rejected the idea of
the preeminent black leader Booker T. Washington that hope for the
future lay in the development of a separate and strong black (p. 014)
community. Instead, they gradually came to accept the argument of one
of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, William E. B. DuBois, that progress was possible only
when Negroes abandoned their segregated community to work toward a
society open to both black and white. By the end of the 1930's this
concept had produced a fundamental change in civil rights tactics and
created the new mood of assertiveness that Myrdal found in the black
community. The work of White and others marked the beginning of a
systematic attack against Jim Crow. As the most obvious practitioner
of Jim Crow in the federal government, the services were the logical
target for the first battle in a conflict that would last some thirty
years.

This evolution in black attitudes was clearly demonstrated in
correspondence in the 1930's between officials of the NAACP and the
Roosevelt administration over equal treatment in the armed forces. The
discussion began in 1934 with a series of exchanges between Chief of
Staff Douglas MacArthur and NAACP Counsel Charles H. Houston and
continued through the correspondence between White and the
administration in 1937. The NAACP representatives rejected MacArthur's
defense of Army policy and held out for a quota guaranteeing that
Negroes would form at least 10 percent of the nation's military
strength. Their emphasis throughout was on numbers; during these first
exchanges, at least, they fought against disbandment of the existing
black regiments and argued for similar units throughout the
service.[1-27]

[Footnote 1-27: See especially Ltr, Houston to CofS,
1 Aug and 29 Aug 34; Ltr, CofS to Houston, 20 Aug
34; Ltr, Maj Gen Edgar T. Conley, Actg AG, USA, to
Walter White, 25 Nov 35; Ltr, Houston to Roosevelt,
8 Oct 37; Ltr, Houston to SW, 8 Oct 37. See also
Elijah Reynolds, _Colored Soldiers and the Regular
Army_ (NAACP Pamphlet, December 10, 1934). All in
C-376, NAACP Collection, Library of Congress.]

Yet the idea of integration was already strongly implied in Houston's
1934 call for "a more united nation of free citizens,"[1-28] and in
February 1937 the organization emphasized the idea in an editorial in
_The Crisis_, asking why black and white men could not fight side by
side as they had in the Continental Army.[1-29] And when the Army
informed the NAACP in September 1939 that more black units were
projected for mobilization, White found this solution unsatisfactory
because the proposed units would be segregated.[1-30] If democracy was
to be defended, he told the President, discrimination must be
eliminated from the armed forces. To this end, the NAACP urged
Roosevelt to appoint a commission of black and white citizens to
investigate discrimination in the Army and Navy and to recommend the
removal of racial barriers.[1-31]

[Footnote 1-28: Ibid. Ltr, Houston to CofS, 1 Aug
34.]

[Footnote 1-29: _The Crisis_ 46 (1939):49, 241, 337.]

[Footnote 1-30: Ltr, Presley Holliday to White, 11
Sep 39; Ltr, White to Holliday, 15 Sep 39. Both in
C-376, NAACP Collection, LC.]

[Footnote 1-31: Ltr, White to Roosevelt, 15 Sep 39,
in C-376, NAACP Collection, LC. This letter was
later released to the press.]

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