These crucial struggles are traditionally overlooked by scholars who focus instead on other dynamic movements of the period, namely Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association and the Harlem Renaissance. In "We Return Fighting," Mark Robert Schneider restores to history the significant contributions and pioneering efforts of the leaders and rank-and-file in the NAACP during the Jazz Age. He tells the complex and multi-layered story of courageous campaigns for voting rights and equal education, against segregation and lynching, that were fought in the streets, courts, press, meeting halls, city offices, state legislatures, and Washington lobbies. Schneider's engrossing account vividly portrays the NAACP's black leadership team of James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and W.E.B. Du Bois, the heroic leaders of over 300 local branches in rural and industrial communities scattered across the nation, and the thousands of working-class members who labored tirelessly to keep the civil rights movement alive. This is a powerful tale of extraordinary individuals who often risked their lives in an unwavering struggle to protect their constitutional rights in Jim Crow America. It is filled with dramatic, poignant, and at times chilling stories of lynchings, murders, rapes, gun battles, mobs, and courtroom confrontations.

Mark Robert Schneider received his Ph.D. in history from Boston College and is an Adjunct Instructor in American History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the author of Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890-1920. He lives in the Boston area.

Chapter One

Make Way for Democracy!

The armistice was only seven weeks old, and America was just getting used to peace in January 1919. Millions of survivors looked forward to resuming their normal lives and enjoying the familiar rhythms of work and home. There would be no more trenches, shelling, machine guns, and no-man's-land; now it was back to the factory or farm. In April baseball would start, and in the summer there would be time for picnics and the beach.

    For African Americans, the end of the war promised change, not a return to old ways. President Woodrow Wilson had called the conflict "a war to make the world safe for democracy" when he asked Congress to fight Germany in April 1917. Returning black veterans knew that there was little democracy for them in America. They had killed and died in the trenches just like white men, and now they wanted their rights at home.

    James Weldon Johnson remembered the promises. He was there when New York's black regiment, the Buffalos, marched from Madison Square Garden up Fifth Avenue to receive their colors from the governor at the Union League Club. The orators spoke stirring and patriotic words, urging the men to bring the flag home in victory, and now they had done it.

    Johnson was the field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In his capacity as traveling organizer, he had recruited thousands of new members and organized dozens of branches since joining the staff at the end of 1916. A native of Jacksonville, Florida, he had experienced his share of race prejudice, and he had left the South with his New York-born wife, Grace Nail, to get away from it. Now forty-seven, Johnson had enjoyed a remarkable career as youthful baseball pitcher, school principal, lawyer, Tin Pan Alley songwriter, U.S. consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua, poet, and columnist for New York's leading African-American weekly, the New York Age . A balding, mustachioed man with a sober mien but good sense of humor, James Weldon Johnson was a true Renaissance man.

    Johnson had carefully honed his speaking skills as well. On January 6 he left his ailing mother in his sister's care and proceeded to Carnegie Hall, where the NAACP was holding a rally for African freedom. The building was packed. Still concerned about his mother, Johnson sat, distracted and blue, on the platform. When it came. Johnson's turn to speak, he told of that day when the troops had marched off to war, bearing the American flag. His voice swelled with the memory of the day's emotions, and the audience interrupted with a storm of applause. The flag, Johnson declared, bore

the stains of Disfranchisement, of Jim Crowism, and of Lynching .... The record of black men on the fields of France gives us the greater right to point to that flag and say to the nation: Those stains are still upon it; they dim its stars and soil its stripes; wash them out! wash them out!

The crowd cheered again, and Johnson recalled the speech as the most effective of his career.

    The next morning his mother was dead. The bewildering confusion of triumph and death, of hope and sorrow, and above all of unleashed emotion made that night in January a paradigm for the rest of the year. The year 1919 would be the most tumultuous in American peacetime history, and the leaders of the NAACP would be right in the center of the action.

    Although Woodrow Wilson had promised to keep America out of war in the 1916 election, most Americans agreed that when Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare against American ships, the country had no choice but to declare war. Only a small handful of radicals claimed that the World War was a slaughterhouse in which poor men died senselessly. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, the editor of the NAACP's monthly magazine the Crisis , sympathized with that view. Yet, when war was declared, he argued that black people could best defeat American racism by loyally joining the war effort rather than opposing it. At war's end, he prepared to place the question of black rights on the American agenda.

    Du Bois reached his fifty-first birthday in February, a highly celebrated and yet isolated man. Born to an African-American mother and a mysterious, light-skinned Franco-Haitian father whom he never met, Du Bois grew up in the mostly white Berkshire village of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. A brilliant student, he graduated from the local high school and attended Fisk University, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. He was the first black man to earn a doctorate at Harvard. Du Bois taught at Wilberforce College in Ohio, did sociological research in Philadelphia, and then taught at Atlanta University. During this time he published his research in history and sociology and in 1903 a book of essays titled The Souls of Black Folk . This best-seller in African America established him as the leading black intellectual in the country. He helped to found the NAACP in 1909 and came to New York to edit the Crisis . Du Bois built it into the most outstanding civil rights organ in the nation, and by 1919 it had one hundred thousand readers.

    Controversy over the African American's role in the war centered at first on the creation of a separate training camp for colored officers in Des Moines, Iowa. When the army refused to integrate officer training, Joel E. Spingarn, chairman of the board of the NAACP and Du Bois's most trusted white friend, accepted the separate camp as a compromise. Greatly influenced by Spingarn, Du Bois did as well, in part because he saw the positive role of separate black institutions generally. At the same time, Spingarn, who became a military intelligence officer, arranged to offer Du Bois a commission, which he accepted. Du Bois then wrote an editorial for the July 1918 Crisis , urging African Americans to "Close Ranks" behind the war effort and "while this war lasts, forget our special grievances." Rival civil rights leaders, including some NAACPers, attacked Du Bois for this conciliatory stance. The army reconsidered, denied Du Bois his office, and shipped Spingarn to France as a major in a white regiment. Meanwhile, over 367,000 African Americans signed up for the military, proportionately more than the number of whites. Of these, 200,000 went overseas, serving mostly as stevedores and laborers. Those who saw combat, like their forefathers in the Civil War, covered themselves in glory. Four infantry regiments fought bravely in French trenches. The 369th from New York fought longer than any other American regiment and reached the Rhine before any white troops did. Having put their lives on the line, as well as earned the respect of the French and the fear of the Germans, the veterans and their home communities now expected the government to pay them its debt.

    Du Bois especially felt this way. He had encouraged the war effort through the Crisis , and he felt responsible for the war's effect on civil rights. Du Bois's biographer David Levering Lewis showed the similarity between the editor's situation and that of President Woodrow Wilson at war's end. Both were idealistic historian-intellectuals who cast aside grave doubts regarding the efficacy of war, yet Wilson led a nation and Du Bois a race into one. Both therefore had high hopes for the peace. The irony was that Wilson, a Virginian, held traditional southern racial views and would deny to African Americans the same rights he posited for subject European peoples in his Fourteen Points.

    On Armistice Day, the NAACP board met and agreed to send Du Bois on a dual mission to France. Each of his tasks would be Herculean for a team of scholars or activists. The first was to prepare a multivolume history of the African-American troops in the war. Even before the guns had stopped, American military officials began a campaign of slander against the colored officers, and Du Bois aimed to investigate their charges. The second assignment was to represent the NAACP and the Crisis at the peace conference by calling a Pan-African Congress (PAC). This would gather delegates from Africa and its diaspora to prepare resolutions for the conference of victors at Versailles.

    Du Bois sailed for France on December 1, on the official press boat for peace conference journalists. There he shared a room with Robert Russa Moton, the successor to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee Institute. Despite their philosophical differences, the two men got along cordially and even lectured the white journalists aboard ship. Sometime in January Du Bois began his investigations at the front, only to be met with icy hostility by white officers, trailed by military intelligence, and kept as far as possible from unsupervised contact with the black soldiers.

    Despite these obstacles, Du Bois gathered shocking evidence that indicted the high command. African-American soldiers and French authorities both criticized white American officers. In the May Crisis , Du Bois published "Documents of the War," which included interviews with these men and official military communiqués. Headquarters for the 372nd Colored Infantry secretly sought, in its own blunt language, "replacement of colored officers by white officers." The French called on their men to respect southern white racial mores, which forbade treating black soldiers as equals. In this and subsequent articles, Du Bois exposed fraudulent charges of rape against colored soldiers and proved the heroism of black men in battle. Perhaps most embarrassing for the military was Du Bois's charge that black troops had deliberately been sent "over the top" of the trenches underequipped and insufficiently armed. He concluded that "white officers fought more valiantly against Negroes than they did against the Germans." Du Bois had too many responsibilities, and he never wrote the multivolume history.

    Back in New York, the city welcomed its colored veterans home with a ticker tape parade. On a cold, sunny Monday, February 17, 1919, twenty-nine hundred men of the old New York Fifteenth National Guard, now the 369th Infantry Regiment, paraded seven miles up Fifth Avenue from 23rd Street to 145th and Lenox Avenue. The men gathered at Madison Square Park near the statue of Lincoln's secretary of state William Seward, and just across from the imposing new skyscraper, the Flatiron Building. Dubbed "Hellfighters" by their German foes, they made an impressive sight for the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, black and white, who lined the avenue and showered them with applause and candy. Led by Big Jim Reese Europe's marching band, the men received the heroes' welcome they had earned in the Champagne trenches over 191 days.

    Two days later, Du Bois opened the Pan-African Congress in Paris. Fifty-seven delegates from sixteen nations met for three days of speeches at the Grand Hotel. Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese representative in the French Parliament, collaborated with Du Bois and served as president of the meeting. The State Department denied visas to would-be American delegates, but sixteen Americans attended anyway. Addie W. Hunton, an African-American YMCA worker who would later join the NAACP staff, spoke on the neglected role of women in the freedom movement.

    Du Bois wrote the preliminary and final resolutions for the Pan-African Congress, which dramatized the central weakness of the meeting: only a handful of the delegates were in fact African or had even visited there. Most of Du Bois's proposals were directed at the fate of Africa's four German colonies, inhabited by twelve million people. The delegates insisted that these should not simply be divided among the victors as spoils of war. Instead, they wanted an international commission to supervise them, in which African and diaspora leaders would have the decisive voice. Their task would be to prepare these natives, and perhaps those of the Portuguese and Belgian colonies as well, for independence by education. Contrary to imperialist propaganda, Du Bois argued, Africa would not descend into "chaos" once freed. Furthermore, who were Europeans, who had just plunged their own continent into chaos, to judge their black brethren? The PAC delegates argued that the supervising bodies must hold land in trust for the natives, abolish forced labor, promulgate health and education, and respect local cultures.

    This program fell short of demanding immediate independence. It was transitional in nature, mixing generally democratic ideas with more radical notions that led in the direction of independence. Certainly, the vengeful European victors were more intent upon punishing Germany than propitiating a handful of colored people who had no real power. While the French press covered the Pan-African Congress respectfully, the diplomats at Versailles paid it little heed. This was not the fault of Du Bois and his colleagues, and on balance the congress represented a bold attempt to assert African rights and to recognize the common bonds among a black diaspora divided by language. These were advanced notions for African Americans in 1919, and for Africans it was a harbinger of the freedom movement to come. Du Bois was the NAACP's visionary, a dreamer who thought internationally and took big risks to assert grand principles.

    The NAACP had its share of pragmatic activists who thought the Pan-African Congress was a waste of time and money. Among such critics was Archibald H. Grimké, nineteen years Du Bois's senior and president of the most important branch, Washington, D.C. Grimké had faint hopes for peace and even less interest in Africa. Earlier he had criticized Du Bois for wishing to accept an officer's commission and still edit the Crisis . At the February board meeting he urged the Association to focus on American problems and stormed out when his resolutions were rejected. Nevertheless, under his pressure the board turned down Du Bois's requests for more money.

    The editor returned to New York in mid-April and answered his critics in the May Crisis . This cover depicted a sturdy black soldier chiseling his record onto a shield: "Loyalty, Valor, Achievement." Defending the congress, Du Bois argued that Paris had become the headquarters of all nationalities seeking self-determination, and that the congress had now established a permanent presence there on behalf of the darker races. "And yet," the editor thundered in conclusion, "some American Negroes actually asked WHY I went to help represent the Negro world in Africa and America and the Islands of the Sea."

    Turning to the other part of his mission, Du Bois made new enemies for himself among men whom the Association was courting at that very moment. He suggested that his shipboard companion, Dr. Moton, had whitewashed military racism in his reports. While not questioning Moton's integrity, Du Bois wrote that the principal's activities in France consisted of delivering bland homilies to the angry and militant soldiers. Further, he testily criticized the investigation by Emmett J. Scott, head of the War Department's Negro Bureau and former secretary to Booker T. Washington. Black newspaper editors were often more friendly to Moton and Scott, both of whom the Association was imploring to speak at its antilynching meeting in New York. Distressed chairman Mary White Ovington reported to the board in May that Du Bois had failed to submit these controversial editorials to the NAACP Crisis committee.

    Certainly, Du Bois had been more honest than politic. His weapon was the rapier, and sometimes he wielded it without regard to the consequences. However, when it came to expressing the poetry of a political moment, Du Bois had no contemporary American equal. He was African America's Tom Paine, the stirring pamphleteer whose ringing words called a people to action. The passage he wrote for the May Crisis was among the most memorable of his ninety-five-year-long life:

The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the god of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.

We return .

We return from fighting .

We return fighting .

Make way for democracy! We saved it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.

    While Du Bois was in France, his colleagues planned a broad conference that asserted the growing power of the Association on the national scene. This meeting, organized by Executive Secretary John Shillady in New York and President Moorfield Storey of Boston, addressed the problem of lynching in America. Its platform reflected the NAACP's origins as a project of white liberals who had connections both to powerful whites and to African Americans.

    White mobs lynched African Americans with impunity in 1919. Northern racist violence tended to be urban, and the perpetrators generally understood that they were committing a crime. Southern lynching was increasingly a public act of ritualistic terror carried out in the town square. Southern elected officials and newspapers generally condoned lynching as just punishment for evildoers, but racial liberals in the South opposed the practice as an affront to law, order, and civilization. Sometimes the newspapers would advertise the time and place of a lynching in advance. Often the victims were entirely innocent of any crime, often they were teenagers, and sometimes they were women. Sometimes the mobs tortured their victims and burned them at the stake. In 1917, mobs killed thirty-six African Americans, in 1918 they took sixty lives, and in 1919 seventy-six.

    The Association had focused on racial violence throughout its ten-year existence because it blatantly violated American law and was so dramatically barbaric. White northern opinion, while finding lynching deplorable, regarded it as one of those unfortunate facts of life about which nothing could be done, just as it had regarded slavery before the Civil War. The NAACP leaders thought they could mobilize progressive opinion against lynching, but they had to focus, attention on what seemed to be one of just many problems Americans faced before and during the World War.

    In the aftermath of the war, race reformers raised their expectations. Moorfield Storey believed that the time had come to act on the matter. The distinguished seventy-five-year-old Bostonian represented in his very persona the New England antislavery tradition. A Harvard graduate, then secretary to Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner during Reconstruction, conservative corporation counsel, former head of the American Bar Association (ABA), and leader of the anti-imperialist movement during the war against the Philippines, Storey combined shrewd pragmatism and strict moral probity in his character. Although occupied with his private law practice, he was much more than a figurehead president. As leading spirit of the Association's antilynching committee, Storey hosted a meeting in his Boston residence at 24 The Fenway in November 1918. The committee called for a large conference to be held in New York. In April, Shillady brought out an NAACP pamphlet titled Thirty Years of Lynching that documented America's sorry record of racial violence. Storey and Shillady sought endorsers and speakers from the moderate center.

    Although the NAACP initiated the meeting, it was not to be an official Association event. Storey was under no illusions about the new situation posed by the armistice, and he wanted forces more powerful than the NAACP to speak. He wrote to Shillady that white southerners planned "to prevent the negroes from claiming any further consideration on account of their services in the war. The negroes will come back feeling like men, and not disposed to accept the treatment to which they have been subjected.... I forsee a serious crisis." To meet it, Storey wanted declarations against lynching from the wealthy philanthropists who were bankrolling southern Negro education. Therefore, Storey and Shillady were careful to keep militant African Americans off the program, for fear of offending the moderates. Boston's outspoken editor William Monroe Trotter was kept at arm's length, and even Du Bois, who was in France during the planning, did not address the meeting.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from "We Return Fighting" by Mark Robert Schneider. Copyright © 2002 by Mark Robert Schneider. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.