In Part One I wrote about Chester Edmondson and the freedom that came in 1865. This time I want to talk about two men in my family who put on a uniform: my great-great-grandfather in World War I and my grandfather in World War II.
My great-great-grandfather served in the Army in World War I, in the 302nd Battalion. I'm still pulling his service records, so I won't guess where his unit went or what it did. What I can tell you is what that war looked like for a lot of Black soldiers.
About 380,000 African Americans served in the Army. Most were put in labor and service units instead of combat units. They unloaded ships, built and repaired roads, hauled supplies and dug trenches. Stevedore regiments, for example, handled the cargo that kept American forces supplied in French ports. Nobody puts that work on a recruiting poster, but the fighting couldn't go on without it. Some Black soldiers did see combat, in the 92nd and 93rd Divisions. All of them served a country that still denied them full rights at home, and plenty came back hoping that would change. A lot of them were disappointed.
My grandfather was a cook in the Navy in World War II. To understand that job, you have to know how the Navy worked then. Until 1942, Black sailors were mostly kept in the messman branch: cooking, serving, food service. The hours were long and there wasn't much room to move up.
Those men served with courage anyway. Doris Miller, a messman on the USS West Virginia, manned an anti-aircraft gun at Pearl Harbor and later received the Navy Cross. In 1944 the Navy commissioned its first Black officers, the group known as the Golden Thirteen. Feeding hundreds of men in tight quarters, sometimes in dangerous waters, is part of keeping a ship in the fight. I'm proud of what my grandfather did.
When the war ended, a lot of Black veterans found that benefits like education and home loans were harder to use in practice than they were for white veterans. That's part of this story too.
I'm still gathering records, photos and stories, and I'll add them as I confirm them. If your family has a story from either war, or you're researching a Black veteran in your own family tree, tell me about it on the contact page. You can find more history and culture programming on Nagast TV on Roku.