Soldiers of Freedom
Introduction
Published in November 2002 by Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
By Kai Wright

The truism "war is hell" did not begin with Vietnam. It was the first war in which the gruesome details came streaming into American living rooms every evening, but it was not the first to be a nightmarish affair. At points during the Revolutionary War, many of General George Washington’s troops fought clothed only in old blankets. They went days without food and water, drinking from streams filthy with both human and animal feces. They worked day and night, seven days a week, and were rarely paid a cent of their promised salaries. Their most mortal threats came not from British troops but from starvation and disease; during the dreadful winter of 1777 at Valley Forge, some 2,500 American rebels died largely from exposure to the unforgiving elements

These horrors did not end with the Revolution. In Korea, troops shipped in from the Pacific fought through the war’s first bitter winter with nothing but warm weather supplies, sometimes marching barefoot through snow and ice. Throughout American history, warfare has proved a painful and ugly business, robbing society of vibrant young men and women in the prime of their lives—too often for purposes far less noble than our nation’s leaders have professed. War is not something to glorify, but rather to disdain.

Why, then, this book? Because in post-Vietnam America, where citizens have more willingly and openly condemned the act of war than in previous eras, our society has too often also condemned those charged, usually by force of law, with carrying it out. So this book honors the deeds of men and women, of any race, who have sacrificed their lives in battles not of their own making.

But as a volume of black history, this book has another purpose. Throughout time, the African American soldiers who have participated in this country’s wars have done so not merely in defense of the nation. America’s longevity, frankly, has often been but a tangential result of service in the minds of black soldiers. From the Revolution through the Civil War, blacks fought primarily in an effort to secure their collective freedom. Each conflict brought a renewed debate within the community about whether and how African Americans should participate, a discussion that always turned on what strategy and which combatant was most likely to hasten emancipation. Following the Civil War and throughout most of the 20th century, blacks by and large fought in a two-pronged effort to earn their birthright of full American citizenship and assert their humanity in the face of charges that African Americans were too cowardly, stupid and treacherous to be trusted on the battlefield. And in more recent years, many African Americans have chosen careers in the Armed Forces largely because they provide greater opportunities than any available in the civilian workforce. This is not to say that the African American servicemembers’ patriotism is less profound than his or her white colleague’s, but rather that it is more nuanced. So this book chronicles the paradoxical struggle of the black soldier throughout history, the simultaneous fight on behalf of and in opposition to America.

This odd balance has been made even more precarious by the fact that the military has always stood at the frontline of our nation’s race war. From the days of slavery to the Civil Rights Movement, black political leaders believed this particular American institution’s unjust racial policies to be the most vulnerable to attack, and thus targeted considerable resources at changing them. And indeed, time and again, the necessities of battle trumped those of segregation, causing the military to moderate its institutional racism. African American leaders have also repeatedly gambled that changes in military race relations would spark similar reassessments in society at large. This is why Frederick Douglass so insistently pushed Abraham Lincoln to allow blacks to fight and then, once the president conceded, tirelessly recruited young freemen to enlist. His sons were among the first to sign up for the historic Massachusetts 54th Regiment, made famous by the academy award winning movie Glory. During World War I, W.E.B. DuBois spearheaded a similarly relentless campaign for more and better assignments for black troops and led recruiting efforts to enlist them. During the build up to World War II, Asa Philip Randolph considered integrating the ranks so important of a goal that he risked all of his hard-fought political capitol in a dangerous stand off with the White House while trying to end military segregation.

In the short term, few of those leaders’ gambles paid off, as liberalized military policies made no immediate impact on the nation’s racial caste system as a whole. Moreover, it seemed that for every inch of progress they eked out of the Armed Forces, black leaders lost a foot in the subsequent backlash within the institution. But in the process they forced the services to confront some of America’s most volatile racial fault lines long before the rest of the nation.

Ironically, as today’s military again wades through America’s social quagmires—from the debate over whether gay men and women should be allowed to serve openly to questions about affirmative action’s effectiveness in creating leadership opportunities for women and minorities—those who wish to block progress offer the same argument as did those who stood against moderating racial policies as far back as the Civil War: that the military cannot outpace the society it protects. To the contrary, the Armed Forces’ legacy is that of a pioneer in American social change. When President Harry Truman kicked Jim Crow out of the Armed Forces in 1948, most of the country was still years, arguably decades, from doing the same. And today, Colin Powell’s unparalleled place in American history stands as the payoff for the Army’s unprecedented efforts to advance African Americans to leadership positions during the 1970s. The only question is whether the military will continue its tradition, not only by dealing with hot-button issues such as those surrounding gay and female servicemembers, but also by tackling the lingering racial disparities in its upper ranks.

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The photos presented here are primarily the work of military photographers, and almost all are in the public domain. They are an example of the incredible treasures tucked away in two of our country’s most important institutions: the National Archives and Records Administration and the Library of Congress. From the Civil War forward, remarkable military photographers have trudged across battlefields around the world to document the experiences of their fellow servicemembers. Their work is often overlooked in favor of that of photojournalists dispatched by news organizations, but it is no less captivating and insightful. Indeed, much of it presents dimensions of warfare that news photographers must bypass; and it thus fills in the spaces between the flashes of immeasurable agony upon which war zone photojournalism often focuses. From depictions of the mundane labors of daily life to intimate portraits of young soldiers, the images military photographers have created over the years humanize a reality that those of us who have never been in battle cannot truly comprehend.

The images in this book are also far more articulate than the text in describing the African American military saga. They first reveal the manner in which America for too long sought to blot the contributions of its black citizens from history. Despite the remarkable integration of the Continental Army, the absence of African Americans in art depicting the Revolutionary era is nearly absolute. Only those individuals who served alongside celebrated leaders such as Washington and French General Lafayette are visible, and then only as meek servants. The reality of their contribution is far different.

Not until the Civil War do we begin to see regular efforts to visually document the existence of African Americans in military settings, and then, largely, only as part of Northern society’s fascination with slaves fleeing the South through service in the Union Army. And while successful experiments with battlefield integration occurred in most conflicts, only with the Korean War do photographers begin, sporadically, to capture white and black servicemembers working, fighting and co-existing side by side. Throughout the history, we note the dearth of images depicting the contributions made by black women, or women of any race for that matter.

But finally, the copious heroic portraits of Colin Powell and other minority servicemembers found in the photo library of today’s military reflect a vastly different institution—one that, even with the problems it continues to face, is arguably far ahead of the nation it serves in embracing racial diversity and, indeed, harnessing that diversity as a valuable resource. And they represent the ultimate payoff for the campaigns led by advocates like Douglass, DuBois and Randolph. For, ultimately, not only has the U.S Armed Forces made this progress as an institution, but by producing people such as Powell and the thousands of African Americans who have used military service as a launching pad to successful civilian careers and lives of civic engagement, the American military has in fact pushed forward the painstaking process of redrafting this nation’s shameful racial legacy into a future filled with promise.