I Tell My Heart to Go Ahead: The 369th Infantry Regiment as a Model for Black First World War Archaeology

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Reckoning with Violence" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

To be an African American soldier during the First World War was to be a walking contradiction. Jim Crow laws and white supremacist terrorism tormented black families on the homefront while black men, one generation removed from legal slavery, fought and died for the American cause on the battlefields of France. The African American community prayed that the service of their soldiers would move them closer to true equality. The reality was that the gallantry of these men was just as vulnerable to the dogged erasure of white supremacists as the violence committed against black civilians nationwide. This paper will analyze the service records of the 369th Infantry Regiment, more commonly known as the Harlem Hellfighters, to demonstrate the value of archaeology as a tool for reckoning with and rectifying the legacy of the First World War era in American history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Reckoning with Violence   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 460