Download or read book Strength for the Fight written by Bernard C. Nalty and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1989 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Surveys the history of blacks in the armed forces from the 1600s to the 1980s.

Download or read book Blacks and the Military written by Martin Binkin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011-02-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For much of the nation's history, the participation of blacks in the armed forces was approximately in line with their proportion in the total population. This changed during the 1970s: by 1980 one of every three Army Gls and one of every five marines were black. The reaction has been mixed. Many Americans look with approval on the growth of black participation in military service, since it often affords young blacks educational, social, and financial opportunities that constitute a bridge to a better life not otherwise available to them. But for other Americans, the opportunities are outweighed by the disproportionate imposition of the burden of defense on a segment of the population that has not enjoyed a fair share of the benefits that society confers. From this perspective, the likelihood that blacks would suffer at least a third-and perhaps a half-of the combat fatalities in the initial stages of conflict is considered immoral, unethical, or otherwise contrary to the precepts of democratic institutions. Some also worry that military forces with such a high fraction of blacks entail risks to U.S. national security. A socially unrepresentative force, it is argued, may lack the cohesion considered vital to combat effectiveness. Others fear that such a force would be unreliable if it were deployed in situations that would test the allegiance of its minority members. And some have even expressed concern that a large proportion of blacks may raise questions about the status of U.S fighting forces, as judged by the American public, the nation's allies, and its adversaries. The authors of this book examine evidence on both sides of the issue in an effort to bring objective scrutiny to bear on questions that for many years have been loaded with emotion and subjective reaction. They also discuss the implications for the military's racial composition of demographic, economic, and technological trends and the possible effects of returning to some form of conscription.

Download or read book The Right to Fight written by Gerald Astor and published by Presidio Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First time in paperback: An all-encompassing chronicle of African Americans' in the armed forces of the United States

Download or read book The African American Soldier written by Michael L. Lanning and published by Citadel. This book was released on 2022-01-25 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Military history’s hidden figures are given their due in this revealing and moving exploration of the pivotal role of African Americans who risked their lives for their country—even as they fought courageously to become full citizens. A retired Lieutenant Colonel, Michael Lee Lanning covers Black soldiers’ involvement in conflicts from the colonial days through more recent struggles of the 21st century. From Bunker Hill to San Juan Heights, from France’s muddy trenches to the Persian Gulf’s scorched sands, African Americans have fought fiercely and bravely. They have battled to overthrow British rule, to preserve the union, to safeguard their allies, and to protect democracy. Many have fought for freedom they would never see for themselves, risking their lives for their country and for the right to become full citizens. In this enlightening account, Michael Lee Lanning explores African Americans’ crucial part in military history over two centuries, beginning in the Revolutionary War and stretching to recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Exploring both notable individual contributions and the role of Black regiments, The African American Soldier pays tribute to the hidden sacrifices and unrelenting valor of those too long overlooked by history.

Download or read book The Double V written by Rawn James, Jr. and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The century-long struggle to achieve equality for America's black soldiers and sailors, in a stirring narrative history by the author of Root and Branch

Download or read book Soldiers of Freedom written by Kai Wright and published by Black Dog & Leventhal Pub. This book was released on 2002 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the history of African Americans in the Armed Forces, from Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre to the modern military life.

Download or read book The African American Soldier written by Michael L. Lanning and published by Kensington Publishing Corp.. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than five thousand blacks joined the rebel Americans in the war as soldiers, sailors, and marines; many more supported the rebellion as laborers. Their service went largely unrecognized and unrecorded. Few letters, journals, or other narratives by blacks about the Revolution exist because whites had denied most African Americans an education. White historians of the period, and for years after the war, ignored the contributions and impact of thousands of blacks participants for several reasons. First of all, prejudices were so deeply ingrained that it did not even occur to most whites of the time that blacks had played a significant role either as individuals who fought or labored or as a segment of the population that affected decisions. Prejudices also prevented some who did witness the contributions of African Americans from honestly reporting that blacks could perform equally with whites on the battlefield if given the opportunity. Others did not mention blacks because of the difficulty of explaining why the United States kept half a million men, women, and children enslaved while fighting for independence and liberty." From Defenders of Liberty, by Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning (Ret.)

Download or read book The Black Officer Corps written by Isaac Hampton and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The U.S. Armed Forces started integrating its services in 1948, and with that push, more African Americans started rising through the ranks to become officers, although the number of black officers has always been much lower than African Americans' total percentage in the military. Astonishingly, the experiences of these unknown reformers have largely gone unexamined and unreported, until now. The Black Officer Corps traces segments of the African American officers' experience from 1946-1973. From generals who served in the Pentagon and Vietnam, to enlisted servicemen and officers' wives, Isaac Hampton has conducted over seventy-five oral history interviews with African American officers. Through their voices, this book illuminates what they dealt with on a day to day basis, including cultural differences, racist attitudes, unfair promotion standards, the civil rights movement, Black Power, and the experience of being in ROTC at Historically Black Colleges. Hampton provides a nuanced study of the people whose service reshaped race relations in the U.S. Armed Forces, ending with how the military attempted to control racism with the creation of the Defense Race Relations Institute of 1971. The Black Officer Corps gives us a much fuller picture of the experience of black officers, and a place to start asking further questions.

Download or read book Freedom Struggles written by Adriane Lentz-Smith and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many of the 200,000 black soldiers sent to Europe with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, encounters with French civilians and colonial African troops led them to imagine a world beyond Jim Crow. They returned home to join activists working to make that world real. In narrating the efforts of African American soldiers and activists to gain full citizenship rights as recompense for military service, Adriane Lentz-Smith illuminates how World War I mobilized a generation. Black and white soldiers clashed as much with one another as they did with external enemies. Race wars within the military and riots across the United States demonstrated the lengths to which white Americans would go to protect a carefully constructed caste system. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination but battered by the harsh realities of segregation, African Americans fought their own “war for democracy,” from the rebellions of black draftees in French and American ports to the mutiny of Army Regulars in Houston, and from the lonely stances of stubborn individuals to organized national campaigns. African Americans abroad and at home reworked notions of nation and belonging, empire and diaspora, manhood and citizenship. By war’s end, they ceased trying to earn equal rights and resolved to demand them. This beautifully written book reclaims World War I as a critical moment in the freedom struggle and places African Americans at the crossroads of social, military, and international history.

Download or read book Black Soldiers in Blue written by John David Smith and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2005-10-12 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired and informed by the latest research in African American, military, and social history, the fourteen original essays in this book tell the stories of the African American soldiers who fought for the Union cause. An introductory essay surveys the history of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) from emancipation to the end of the Civil War. Seven essays focus on the role of the USCT in combat, chronicling the contributions of African Americans who fought at Port Hudson, Milliken's Bend, Olustee, Fort Pillow, Petersburg, Saltville, and Nashville. Other essays explore the recruitment of black troops in the Mississippi Valley; the U.S. Colored Cavalry; the military leadership of Colonels Thomas Higginson, James Montgomery, and Robert Shaw; African American chaplain Henry McNeal Turner; the black troops who occupied postwar Charleston; and the experiences of USCT veterans in postwar North Carolina. Collectively, these essays probe the broad military, political, and social significance of black soldiers' armed service, enriching our understanding of the Civil War and African American life during and after the conflict. The contributors are Anne J. Bailey, Arthur W. Bergeron Jr., John Cimprich, Lawrence Lee Hewitt, Richard Lowe, Thomas D. Mays, Michael T. Meier, Edwin S. Redkey, Richard Reid, William Glenn Robertson, John David Smith, Noah Andre Trudeau, Keith Wilson, and Robert J. Zalimas Jr.

Download or read book Taps For A Jim Crow Army written by Phillip McGuire and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many black soldiers serving in the U.S. Army during World War II hoped that they might make permanent gains as a result of their military service and their willingness to defend their country. They were soon disabused of such illusions. Taps for a Jim Crow Army is a powerful collection of letters written by black soldiers in the 1940s to various government and nongovernment officials. The soldiers expressed their disillusionment, rage, and anguish over the discrimination and segregation they experienced in the Army. Most black troops were denied entry into army specialist schools; black officers were not allowed to command white officers; black soldiers were served poorer food and were forced to ride Jim Crow military buses into town and to sit in Jim Crow base movie theaters. In the South, German POWs could use the same latrines as white American soldiers, but blacks could not. The original foreword by Benjamin Quarles, professor emeritus of history at Morgan State University, and a new foreword by Bernard C. Nalty, the chief historian in the Office of Air Force History, offer rich insights into the world of these soldiers.

Download or read book Contagions of Empire written by Khary Oronde Polk and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2020-04-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1898 onward, the expansion of American militarism and empire abroad increasingly relied on black labor, even as policy remained inflected both by scientific racism and by fears of contagion. Black men and women were mobilized for service in the Spanish-Cuban-American War under the War Department's belief that southern blacks carried an immunity against tropical diseases. Later, in World Wars I and II, black troops were stigmatized as members of a contagious "venereal race" and were subjected to experimental medical treatments meant to curtail their sexual desires. By turns feared as contagious and at other times valued for their immunity, black men and women played an important part in the U.S. military's conscription of racial, gender, and sexual difference, even as they exercised their embattled agency at home and abroad. By following the scientific, medical, and cultural history of African American enlistment through the archive of American militarism, this book traces the black subjects and agents of empire as they came into contact with a world globalized by warfare.

Download or read book The History of African Americans in the Military written by Gary Donaldson and published by Malabar, Fla. : Krieger Publishing Company. This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Designed as a small, easily read text for undergraduates, this book deals with the black soldier, from the use of slaves in the military units of the Spanish Conquistadores and the English and Dutch colonists in the seventeenth century, to the induction of General Colin Powell as head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the fall of 1989. The work focuses on a number of themes including the irony of the black soldier fighting for the American concepts of freedom and liberty on the field of battle and not free himself from the racial abuses of the American social system. Intended as a supplemental reading, this book is ideal for military history courses, black history courses, or even United States survey courses.

Download or read book The Encyclopedia of African American Military History written by William Weir and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2010-10-05 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Weir's work (over 300 entries) is one of the most complete on the subject. Much more than a record of indviduals and units, it includes, among other topics, battles, forgotten and famous; injustices and heroes; legislation and regulation; accidents and deliberate acts; medals and mutinies....Highly recommended. --ChoiceAn outstanding accounting of African-American Military 'heroes' in history. As a retired African-American 4-Star General Officer, I was very pleased to read about the accounts of those to whom I owe much gratitude and thanks for paving the way ! I was even more pleased to read about so many that I knew nothing about previously . This 'Encyclopedia' is must reading in the reference libraries for all Americans! --General [USAF-retired] Lester L. Lyles...No military historian's library should be without this book. --C.D.B. Bryan, author of Friendly FireThis is a very important, carefully researched book, which fills the gaping hole in our understanding of the heroic role of African Americans in the military history of our country. Though they were denied their rights to freedom and equality by our nation, their courage and patriotism in protecting those rights was extraordinary. - Bruce A. Morrison, member of U.S. Congress, 1983-1991Although African American soldiers and sailors have fought in every U.S. war from the War of Independence to the War on Terrorism, their contributions are rarely and, at best, erratically recorded in encyclopedias of American military history. Most Americans would be hard-pressed to name even a few of the many heroic black servicemen, who have distinguished themselves in the annals of military history. While a public figure like Colin Powell is well known, and many people are now aware of the black regiment depicted in the movie Glory, few have heard of David Lamson. When he was close to sixty years old, this African American captain of a small local militia successfully routed British reinforcements near Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. Even fewer know about the buffalo soldiers (as African American cavalry units were once called) who rescued Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders in the famous battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish American War. This book is teeming with essential information that has been overlooked in other references.William Weir's Encyclopedia of African American Military History is designed to provide long overdue recognition to the outstanding accomplishments of hundreds of African American servicemen. More than three hundred entries will not only delineate the achievements of individuals and military units, but will also highlight important, often forgotten battles, wars, legislation and policy, organizations and movements, and historical incidents.Thoroughly researched and historically accurate, with numerous illustrations, this comprehensive and substantive reference work is written to be accessible, engaging, and informative for all readers.William Weir (Guilford, CT), an army combat correspondent during the Korean War, is the author of Written with Lead: Legendary American Gunfights and Gunfighters and A Well Regulated Militia: The Battle over Gun Control, among other books.

Download or read book Harlem s Rattlers and the Great War written by Jeffrey T. Sammons and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2015-09-26 with total page 630 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When on May 15, 1918 a French lieutenant warned Henry Johnson of the 369th to move back because of a possible enemy raid, Johnson reportedly replied: "I'm an American, and I never retreat." The story, even if apocryphal, captures the mythic status of the Harlem Rattlers, the African-American combat unit that grew out of the 15th New York National Guard, who were said to have never lost a man to capture or a foot of ground that had been taken. It also, in its insistence on American identity, points to a truth at the heart of this book--more than fighting to make the world safe for democracy, the black men of the 369th fought to convince America to live up to its democratic promise. It is this aspect of the storied regiment's history--its place within the larger movement of African Americans for full citizenship in the face of virulent racism--that Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War brings to the fore. With sweeping vision, historical precision, and unparalleled research, this book will stand as the definitive study of the 369th. Though discussed in numerous histories and featured in popular culture (most famously the film Stormy Weather and the novel Jazz), the 369th has become more a matter of mythology than grounded, factually accurate history--a situation that authors Jeffrey T. Sammons and John H. Morrow, Jr. set out to right. Their book--which eschews the regiment's famous nickname, the "Harlem Hellfighters," a name never embraced by the unit itself--tells the full story of the self-proclaimed Harlem Rattlers. Combining the "fighting focus" of military history with the insights of social commentary, Harlem's Rattlers and the Great War reveals the centrality of military service and war to the quest for equality as it details the origins, evolution, combat exploits, and postwar struggles of the 369th. The authors take up the internal dynamics of the regiment as well as external pressures, paying particular attention to the environment created by the presence of both black and white officers in the unit. They also explore the role of women--in particular, the Women's Auxiliary of the 369th--as partners in the struggle for full citizenship. From its beginnings in the 15th New York National Guard through its training in the explosive atmosphere in the South, its singular performance in the French army during World War I, and the pathos of postwar adjustment--this book reveals as never before the details of the Harlem Rattlers' experience, the poignant history of some of its heroes, its place in the story of both World War I and the African American campaign for equality--and its full i

Download or read book The History of the Black Soldier written by Tobbie H. Ingram and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American Education system lacks a lot of information concerning African-American history. This leaves Whites and Blacks with the idea that Blacks have only been slaves in this country which leads to disillusionment in African Americans and misperceptions by other races. Mr. Ingram has taken the time to collect facts, that have rarely or never been heard, about the Black soldier and in doing so he offsets any belief that Blacks have never been dedicated to this country.

Download or read book African Americans In The Revolutionary War written by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Michael Lee Lanning and published by Citadel Press. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A thorough, long-overdue study of Black Americans’ contributions during the War of Independence. . . . An important piece of American and African American history.” —Kirkus Reviews In this enlightening and informative work, military historian Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning (ret.) reveals the little-known, critical, and heroic role African Americans played in the American Revolution, serving in integrated units—a situation that would not exist again until the Korean War—more than 150 years later . . . At first, neither George Washington nor the Continental Congress approved of enlisting African Americans in the new army. Nevertheless, Black men—both slave and free—filled the ranks and served in all of the early battles. Black sailors also saw action in every major naval battle of the Revolution, including members of John Paul Jones’s crew aboard the Bonhomme Richard. At least thirteen Black Americans served in the newly formed U.S. Marine Corps during the war. Bravery among African Americans was commonplace, as recognized by their commanders and state governments, and their bravery is recorded here in the stories of citizen Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre; militiaman Price Esterbrook at Lexington Green; soldier Salem Poor at Bunker Hill; and marine John Martin aboard the brig Reprisal. As interest in colonial history enjoys renewed popularity due to works like Hamilton, and the issues of prejudice and discrimination remain at the forefront of our times, African Americans in the Revolutionary War offers an invaluable perspective on a crucial topic that touches the lives of Americans of every color and background.