Not only war: the First World War and African American literature

Mark Whalan

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511973659.016

15 - Not only war: the First World War and African American literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2014

Mark Whalan

Edited by

Santanu Das

Show author details

Mark Whalan: Affiliation:
University of Exeter
Santanu Das: Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London

Book contents

Get access

Summary

In a column for the Chicago Defender published just following the Second World War, the African American poet Langston Hughes has his Harlemite barfly Jesse B. Semple (or ‘Simple’) say the following:

‘You know Buddy Jones’ brother, what was wounded in the 92nd in Italy, don't you? Well, he was telling me about how bad them rednecks treated him when he was in the army in Mississippi. He said he don't never want to see no parts of the South again. He were born and raised in Yonkers and not used to such stuff. Now his nerves is shattered. He can't even stand a Southern accent no more.'

‘Jim Crow shock,’ I said. ‘I guess it can be as bad as shell shock.’

‘It can be worse,’ said Simple. ‘Jim Crow happens to men every day down South, whereas a man's not in a battle every day.’

Although ostensibly written about a different conflict, Hughes's association of battlefield trauma with the traumas of racial segregation in the USA was one forged in the experiences of the First World War. Shell shock troubled distinctions between organicist and psychological notions of trauma; it was exacerbated by feelings of helplessness in conflict situations. Such a blend of psychological and physical stress and coercion was familiar to African Americans living under Jim Crow, and Hughes's bleak humour suggests that its everyday status only prolonged that trauma rather than dulled it.

Type: Chapter
Information: Race, Empire and First World War Writing , pp. 283 - 300

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511973659.016 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Langston, Hughes, ‘Income Tax’, 1947. Reprinted in The Best of Simple (New York: Hill and Wang, 1961), 65.Google Scholar

Joanna, Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996), 107–22Google Scholar

Jessie Redmon, Fauset, There Is Confusion (1924; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 269Google Scholar

Modris, Eksteins, ‘The Cultural Legacy of the Great War’, in Winter, Jay (ed.), The Great War and the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 343Google Scholar

Richard, Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, with photographs by Edwin Rosskam (1941; London: Lindsay Drummond, 1947), 88–9Google Scholar

Alain, Locke, ‘The New Negro’, in Locke, Alain (ed.), The New Negro (1925; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 6Google Scholar

Grossman, James R., Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago University Press, 1988)

Harrison, Alferdteen (ed.), Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991

The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008

Jack, Foner, Blacks and The Military in US History (New York: Praeger, 1974Google Scholar

Gerald, Astor, The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military (Novato: Presido Press, 1998), 110Google Scholar

Barbeau, Arthur E. and Henri, Florette, The Unknown Soldiers: African American Troops in World War I (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 56–69, 128–9Google Scholar

Mark, Ellis, Race, War and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States Government during World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 31–47Google Scholar

Claude, McKay, Home to Harlem (1928; London: X-Press, 2000), 3Google Scholar

Richard, Slotkin, Lost Battalions: The Great War and the Crisis of American Nationality (New York: Henry Holt, 2005Google Scholar

Colson, William N., ‘The Failure of the Ninety-Second Division’, The Messenger, September 1919, 22Google Scholar

Mark, Wienen, Partisans and Poets: The Political Work of Poetry in the Great War (Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar

Jamison, Roscoe C., Negro Soldiers (‘These Truly are the Brave’) and Other Poems, 2nd edn (William F. Neil: Kansas City, 1918)Google Scholar

Leslie, Pinckney Hill, ‘The Black Man's Bit’, in his collection The Wings of Oppression (Boston: Stratford, 1921), 23–4Google Scholar

Alice, Dunbar-Nelson, Mine Eyes Have Seen, in The Crisis, April 1918, 273–4

Theodore, Kornweibel, Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919–1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar

Andrea, Razafkeriefo, ‘Civilization’, The Crusader, October 1921, 20. Reprinted in Hill, Robert A. (ed.), The Crusader: A Facsimile of the Periodical (New York: Garland Press, 1987), 1, 254Google Scholar

David, Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 515–80Google Scholar

Bois, W. E. B. Du, ‘The Battle of Europe’, The Crisis, September 1916, 216–17. Reprinted in his selection W. E. B. Du Bois: An ABC of Colour (International Publishers: New York, 1969), 87–8Google Scholar

Castronovo, Russ, ‘Beauty Along the Colour Line: Lynching, Aesthetics, and The Crisis’, PMLA 121 (2006): 1,443–59, 1,443CrossRef Google Scholar

Levering, Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (Oxford University Press, 1981), 14–24Google Scholar

James, Weldon Johnson's in Black Manhattan (1930; New York: Da Capo Press, 1991)Google Scholar

Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London: Papermac, 1997), 88

Hazel, Carby, Race Men (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998)Google Scholar

Flavia, Brizio-Skov (ed.), Reconstructing Societies in the Aftermath of War: Memory, Identity, and Reconciliation (Boca Raton: Bordighera Press, 2004), 197

Richard, Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 23Google Scholar PubMed

Seward, Walter E., ‘Who Went Over the Top?’ in his collection Negroes' Call to the Colours and Soldiers' Camp-Life Poems (Athens, GA: Knox Institute Press, 1919), 46Google Scholar

Victor, Daly, Not Only War (1932; New York: AMS Press, 1970), 7Google Scholar

When Washington Was in Vogue (New York: HarperCollins, 2003

Williams, Charles H., Sidelights on Negro Soldiers (Boston: B. J. Brimmer, 1923), 73Google Scholar

Wolf, Robert L., ‘Les Noirs’, The Messenger, January 1923, 578Google Scholar

Irving, Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 437–55Google Scholar

Bois, W. E. B. Du, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (New York: Harcourt-Brace, 1940), 255Google Scholar

Book contents

15 - Not only war: the First World War and African American literature

Summary

Access options

References

Save book to Kindle

Save book to Dropbox

Save book to Google Drive