Black North Carolinians as Soldiers in the Great War: A Microcosm of the National African American Experience

The military service and sacrifices of 21,609 young black North Carolinians during the World War I, individually and collectively, have been generally ignored, simplistically rendered, represented by only a few, impossibly hidden away in disparate and scattered sources, or carried to the grave without articulation or preservation.  This presentation is derived from research that begins to undo that by exploring the collective story of all black North Carolinians made possible when I created a digital database of all the soldiers service cards and then created a random sample from that database.  This database of service card information combined with archival research of military and political records reveals that the experiences of black soldiers from the Tar Heel state in the Great War were multifaceted and wide-ranging, depending of the location, unit, and duration of their service.   A host of other variables also shaped the soldiers’ wartime experience, including whether these men, the vast majority of whom were under thirty years old, returned home and in what condition they returned.   Despite the broad spectrum of individual experiences, which were as varied as any group of soldiers in any war, all black soldiers’ experiences were shaped, if not strongly determined, by the label in the corner of their service card—“Colored.” Racial categorizing shaped their military experience, just as race prejudice has shaped the telling and remembering of their contribution. The collective story of North Carolina’s African American soldiers is best understood only when placed in the context of national political and military leaders’ decision-making process, which was deeply intertwined in the beliefs and dictates of white supremacy. This unique look at the collective experiences of all African American soldiers from one state in the context of the national story reveals that North Carolina was a microcosm of the national experience.