Detail of WWI recruiting poster |
Referring to your memorandum of February
12th, relative to the appointment and training of colored nurses for
colored soldiers, at the present time colored nurses are not being accepted for
service in the Army Nurse Corps, as there are no separate quarters available
for them and it is not deemed advisable to assign white and colored nurses to
the same posts.
—
W.C. Gorgas, Surgeon
General, U.S. Army, Feb. 14, 1918*
As America
mobilized for war in 1917, political rallies, recruiting events, posters, and
news editorials reminded them of why they were joining the bloodiest conflict
the world had yet known: they were fighting to make the world safe for
democracy. But an editorial
appearing in the New York Tribune voiced
the concerns of many Americans and challenged that premise:
Democracy
implies equality of privilege and equal obligation of service. If we fight for this for the world in general
we ought to be prepared to practice it among ourselves. At present we mingle democracy with
discriminations. All the elements of our
citizenship do not stand on the same level.**
Crisis, March 1918 |
The editorial denounced
the inequities and harsh treatment that black soldiers were regularly experiencing,
but it failed to mention that black women who attempted to assist in the war
effort were also the victims of prejudice. Hired for factory work at salaries
considerably below those paid to white women performing the same jobs, black
women were also frequently barred from volunteering as canteen and aid workers.
Perhaps most concerning was the treatment of black nurses. Emmett J. Scott,
Special Advisor of Black Affairs to the Secretary of War, sent a memo
denouncing the War Department’s discriminatory policies:
It is difficult for me to understand why some
colored nurses have not been given an opportunity to serve. This vexing
question is being put to me almost daily by colored newspaper editors, colored
physicians, surgeons, etc., who are constantly bombarding my sector of the War
Department, inquiring what has been done, and urging that something should be
done in the direction of utilizing professional trained and efficient colored
nurses.***
Alice
Dunbar-Nelson was a poet, playwright, journalist, and political activist. During
the war, she was the only black woman to serve on the Women’s Committee of the Council
of Defense (organizing women’s groups and supporting women’s war efforts), and
she was active in the Circle of Negro War Relief, establishing a local chapter
to provide assistance to black soldiers and their families.†
In 1918, her war poem “I Sit and Sew” was
published in the A.M.E. Church Review.
I Sit and Sew
I sit and sew –
a useless task it seems,
Alice Dunbar-Nelson |
My hands grown
tired, my head weighed down with dreams –
The panoply of
war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced,
stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls,
whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to
hold their lives but as a breath –
But – I must sit
and sew.
I sit and sew
– my heart aches with desire –
That pageant
terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted
fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My
soul in pity flings
Appealing cries,
yearning only to go
There in that
holocaust of hell, those fields of woe –
But – I must sit and sew.
The little
useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here
beneath my homely thatch,
When there they
lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully
calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me,
Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons
me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles
me—God, must I sit and sew?
—Alice Dunbar-Nelson
Stifled,
despairing, yet dreaming, a woman occupies her hands with a mundane domestic
task while her heart and mind yearn to leave for the battlefields. She is not naïve in imagining a glorious war.
This woman knows of the “wasted fields” on which lie “writhing grotesque
things/ Once men.” It is in fact because of these men who are “Pitifully
calling me” that she longs to travel to “that holocaust of hell,” to assist the
wounded where they “lie in sodden mud and rain.” But—as is repeated three times
in the poem—she is condemned to wait, to sit, to sew.
Crisis, August 1918 |
In 1920,
Dunbar-Nelson’s lengthy essay “Negro Women in War Work” appeared in Scott’s Official History of the American
Negro in the World War.†† Her essay describes how “Into this maelstrom
of war activity the women of the Negro race hurled themselves joyously. They
asked no odds, remembered no grudges, solicited no favors, pleaded for no
privileges. They came by the thousands, hands opened wide to give of love and
service and patriotism” (375).
And yet as
Dunbar-Nelson acknowledges, “The problem of the woman of the Negro race was a
peculiar one….There were separate regiments for Negro soldiers; should there be
separate organizations for relief work among Negro women? If she joined relief
organizations, such as the Red Cross Society, and worked with them, would she
be assured that her handiwork would reach black hands on the other side of the
world, or should she be great-hearted and give her service, simply for the sake
of giving, not caring who was to be benefited?” (376).
Dunbar-Nelson’s
essay asserts that black women “did all that could be done—all that they were
allowed to do” (377), but they were blocked from fully supporting their troops.
Like Emmett J. Scott, she found the order
excluding black nurses from overseas service deeply troubling: “Colored women
since the inception of the war had felt keenly their exclusion from overseas
service. The need for them was acute; their willingness to go was complete; the
only thing that was wanted was authoritative sanction” (378).
The African
American community feared that without black nurses, black soldiers would receive
inadequate medical care. Social codes forbidding intimacies between the races were
likely to prevent white women from nursing black soldiers, and segregated hospital
facilities were likely to offer substandard medical care. The concerns were
real: during the war, black soldiers died at a disproportionately higher rates due
to poorly staffed, segregated hospitals.†††
The poem “I Sit
and Sew” testifies to the complex intersections of gender and race in America. In the conclusion to her essay “Negro Women
and War Work,” Dunbar-Nelson praises black women for not only their war
service, but their persistent hope in the face of discrimination:
She
shut her eyes to past wrongs and present discomforts and future uncertainties.
She stood large-hearted, strong-handed, clear-minded, splendidly capable, and
did, not her bit, but her best, and the world is better for her work and her
worth (397).
Crisis, May 1919 |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Emmett J.
Scott, Scott’s Official History of the
American Negro in the World War, Homewood Press, 1919, p. 448.
**“Race
Prejudice and the War.” New York Tribune,
Sunday, 18 Nov. 1917, p. 2.
***Scott, Official History, p. 451. The memo was sent by Emmet J. Scott to Dean
F.P. Keppel, Office of the Secretary of War, dated 28 Feb 1918.
†Sandra L. West,
“Dunbar-Nelson, Alice (Alice Ruth Moore), ” p. 93. Encyclopedia
of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Aberjhani and Sandra L. West,
Infobase, 2003.
††Alice
Dunbar-Nelson, “Negro Women in War Work,” pp. 374-397. Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War, edited
Emmett J. Scott, Homewood Press, 1919.
†††Emmett J.
Scott, “Did the Negro Soldier Get a Square Deal?” pp. 429-430. Scott’s Official History of the American
Negro in the World War, edited Emmett J. Scott, Homewood Press, 1919.
This entry is my favorite yet.
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