Transcripts For CSPAN3 African American Soldiers Post-World War I Activism 20240712

The 2011 Liberty Legacy Foundation Award from the organization of american historians and the 2011 distinguished book award from the society for military history. He is also a part of so many projects that i continue to be talking about around the nation as we are giving these Teacher Professional Development workshops. One of those is called world war i america. You can find a video with him as well as some questions and things that he helped curate to really change how our students think about world war i. So it is a true pleasure to have dr. Williams back. He is currently completing a book on w. E. B. Dubois and world war i, just completing a radcliffe fellowship with harvard university. This morning, dr. Williams will discuss africanamerican soldiers and the rise of the new negro. Please help me in welcoming back to the museum and memorial our friend, dr. Chad williams. [applause] dr. Williams good morning, everyone. Hope everybody is doing well. I hope we are all awake, got our coffee. We are good . All right. Thank you for waking up, for being with me this morning. Thank you, lara, for your introduction. You are so good at what you do, really. A remarkable host, so gracious. I want to thank you and the entire leadership of the National World war i museum. I want to thank camille for all of your help, assistance with Logistical Support in getting me here. Getting all of us here certainly would not have been possible without you. World war i centennial fatigue i realize is a real thing. It has been kind of a long four years, maybe even longer than that, but i am glad that we are spending some extra time thinking about the history of the war, its legacy, going into the postwar period. Because it is critical as we learned yesterday to really think about what the war meant on a global scale, its legacies, but also what it meant for certain groups of people, certain groups who the very meaning of war and peace itself is very complicated, very vexed. The meaning of peace and war is sometimes blurred when thinking about their lives and their experiences. And that is certainly the case for africanamericans and other peoples of african descent more largely throughout the diaspora. So i would like to start in 1919, specifically in june of 1919. The issue of the crisis, june 1919, crisis, the news magazine of the naacp edited by w. E. B. Dubois, arguably the foremost black scholar, intellectual activist of his day