Returning Soldiers

Unidentified African American soldier
Library of Congress, 2021653121

When American entered the Great War, many African Americans supported the war effort and joined the US Army, believing that military service would help them to gain them full citizenship rights, including both social and political equality. Yet African-American soldiers returned home to heightened racial tensions and an increase in mob violence. Social and political unrest exploded in the “Red Summer” of 1919. A report prepared for the U.S. Congress identified 38 race riots in towns and cities across America in the nine-month period from January through October,* and “at least sixteen veterans were lynched between November 1918 and the end of 1920, some of them still in uniform.”**

W.E.B. DuBois’s editorial “Returning Soldiers,” appeared in The Crisis in May of 1919. He reminded readers of the sacrifice that black troops had made in fighting “for America and her highest ideals,” but lamented the violence and degradation of on-going racism: 

This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land. It lynches. And lynching is barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history. Yet for fifty years we have lynched two Negroes a week, and we have kept this up right through the war.***

“Sam Smiley,” published in 1932 nearly fifteen years after end of the First World War, protests the violence that African Americans continued to experience. The poem works “to make a case for civil rights…. in effect to protest lynching by portraying lynching.”†

Sam Smiley

          I
The whites had taught him how to rip
    A Nordic belly with a thrust
Of bayonet, had taught him how
    To transmute Nordic flesh to dust. 

Unidentified African American soldier with rifle
Library of Congress, 2017648680 

And a surprising face had made
    Belated impress on his mind:
That shrapnel bursts and poison gas
    Were inexplicably color blind.

He picked up, from the difficult
    But striking lessons of the war,
Some truths that he could not forget,
    Though inconceivable before.

And through the lengthy vigils, stuck
    In never-drying stinking mud,
He was held up by dreams of one
    Chockfull of laughter, hot of blood.

          II

On the return Sam Smiley cheered
    The dirty steerage with his dance,
Hot-stepping boy! Soon he would see
    The girl who beat all girls in France.

He stopped buckdancing when he reached
    The shanties at his journey’s end;
He found his sweetheart in the jail,
    And took white lightning for his friend.

One night the woman whose full voice
    Had chortled so, was put away
Into a narrow gaping hole;
    Sam sat beside till break of day.

He had been told what man it was
    Whose child the girl had had to kill,
Who best knew why her laugh was dumb,
    Who best knew why her blood was still.

And he remembered France, and how
    A human life was dunghill cheap,
And so he sent a rich white man
    His woman’s company to keep. 

Julius Bloch, "Lynching"
Woodmere Art Museum

          III

The mob was in fine fettle, yet 
   The dogs were stupid-nosed, and day
Was far spent when the men drew round
    The scrawny woods where Smiley lay.

The oaken leaves drowsed prettily,
    The moon shone down benignly there;
And big Sam Smiley, King Buckdancer,
   Buckdanced on the midnight air.
—Sterling A. Brown

The poem’s author, Sterling A. Brown, was too young to serve in the war. He entered Williams College in the fall of 1918 on a minority student scholarship and went on to complete a MA in English from Harvard in 1923.†† Southern Road (1932), his first collection of poetry, includes Brown’s first ballad, “Sam Smiley.” Biographer John Edgar Tidwell notes, “Brown's poetry received its motivation from a need to reveal the humanity that lies below the surface racial stereotypes only skim.”†††
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*“For Action on Race Riot Peril,” New York Times, 5 Oct. 1919, p. 10. 
**Mark Whalen, The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, University Press of Florida, 2008, p. 12. 
*** W.E.B. DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, May 1919, pp. 13-14.
† David A. Davis, “Not Only War Is Hell: World War I and African American Lynching Narratives,” African American Review, vol. 42, no. 3/4, 2008, pp. 477, 479. 
†† John Edgar Tidwell, “Sterling A. Brown,” Oxford Companion to African American Literature, Oxford UP, 1997, p. 105.
††† Tidwell, “Sterling A. Brown,” p. 105.