Color line migration and black resistance in canada 1870 to 1955 and the forthcoming back the glory of their deeds a global history of black soldiers and the great war era. The professor has earned several International Awards and is a former fellow at the university of hidelbergs center and at harvards institute. And finally we have professor jeffrey t. Salmons, professor at history at New York University where he teaches a broad range of courses in United States and race and society. Hes the coauthor of excuse me, author of beyond the ring the role of boxing in american society, and the 2014 book harlems rattlers and the great war which he coauthored and has been rightfully declared the definitive history of the 169 regiment. Hes received fellow ships from the National Endowment of the humanities he has plans to write a book and im going to hold him accountable to this, writing a book on the heroic and tragic life of Henry Johnson. As far as the format for this, our panelists will speak for roughly ten minutes or so. Ill take advantage of my prerogative as chair to pose some questions to get the conversation going and then we will take questions from the outside. Were going to be going a little bit out of order on the program and beginning with professor louis. Thanks very much for that introduction, professor. I owe what im going to say to w. E. B w. E. B. Da boyce. The war that ended peace opened with a question which there is yet no agreed upon final answer. To wit, how could europe have done this to itself . Her book insists that the answer lies with a small number of men and they were all men, she reminds us, who could have said no. Indeed there were some notable men and women who did say no to the war. Theyre across the pages of the book to end all wars. But for the men whose opinions mattered, generals, politicians, had they restrained their allies, prioritized diplomacy, sent no fatal ultimatums, given no final mobilization orders, sara imagining europes yea saying elites as naysayers, however, is a counter narrative that determinists would insist flies in the place of alliances merely awaiting the triggering incident for the determinists, the war was ultimately inevitable. Whatever the proximate cause is of the war, the european elite sanctioned, Richard Evans reminds us that the european elites shared a positive attitude towards war based on notions of honor, expectations of swift victory, and ideas of social darwinism, quote. The answer, as to how europeans could do such terrible violence to themselves lies to a considerable degree with answers to another question, to wit, what of the consequences to themselves of the terrible violence they perpetrated on noneuropeans. Fair to say, few times in history has manifest destiny and asymmetrical power produced such transformational violence in so brief a time. A single generation sufficed for repeating rifling and guns to spread european disruption from cairo to the cape in the name of christianity, commerce, and civilization. Webb due boyces readers were meant to ponder the collision of racial arrogance and geopolitics that made the socalled dark continent the cause of the world war that had repeatedly come within an ace of starting above or below the issahara. He said it excused murder and rape. Africas real estate was partitioned, africas independence extinguished and africans own values ruptured and europeans own values corrupted by the prerogatives of european of imperil domination. Du bois had in mind the occupation of egypt and affront to french interests that launched the african scramble after 1882. He had in mind the Second World War 17 years later when it was attempted to steal the gold fields, 75,000 soldiers dead from Great Britains bloodiest combat since waterloo. They were dead in the concentration camps. The institutionalized bwas different from the policing of indigenous people. It meimicked the belgians when colonial authorities sanctioned the extermination of the peoples in 1904. And they reported in the german press with a full arsenal of new tools, barbed wire, maxim machine guns and poisoned aqua fers. Du bois tried to make sense of the show. The african roots of the war anticipated the 1916 tract imperialism, the highest age of capitalism, du boiss article theories to explain why a monopoly capitalism escaped the contradictions of class welfare and class conflict and overproduction. Instead, though, of channeling the highest stage of capitalism, imperialism would better have been conceived as the highest stage of ethnocentrism. The swedish scholar is convinced that the last words in that great literary masterpiece of empire, heart of darkness, engs terminate all of the brutes, was taken from the social statics, Foundation Text of social darwinism. The ideology demanded coldhearted discipline, the forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, exterminates sections of mankind as stand in their way he shared. Be he human or brute, the hinderence must be gotten rid of. He sniffed, an english man may need need inquire too closely of what these people think themselves. Even as the brutes succeeded in making themselves heard, as when in 1885, radical islamists eliminated british presence in the sudan and 11 years later, disgraced the italians, the occupiers grasped almost nothing of the large political and technological implications for themselves. They missed entirely the 19th centurys most important military legacy for the impending 20th. For major douglas hague, future British Expeditionary commander, experiencing his First Military engagement, it was that september morning in 1898, it was the empire, 50,000 rifle and spear wielding arabs charged the 5,000 troops and their guns. Churchills bestselling book described the results. Thus ended the battle, he enthused. The most signaled triumph ever gained within the space of five hours, the strongest and best armed savage army has been destroyed and dispersed with hardly any difficulty, 10,000 sudanese died, 16,000 wounded. The british suffered 48 fatalities. Quote unquote, they site the endorsement of the maxim, a weapon that is specially adapted to terrify a foe. By the time the article appeared, maxim guns had terrified civilized foes out of their sandals, entrenched them behind 25,000 miles of barbed wire and killed 25 times the number of sudanese dead. It could have ignited a european firestorm before 1914 were mostly unfamiliar to the american subscribers, france and england, italy and turkey in tripoli. England and portugal, england, germany and the butdutch in sou africa. The incident virtually guaranteed fullfledged hostilities between europes major powers in less than a generation. When it came time to play their parts in the tragedy of august 1914, the principled players arrived with diplomatic scripts, decisively revised after that. The foreign minister assuaged the pride of his lobby and sailed to st. Petersburg to close the loophole in an alliance whose partner had left france on the upper nile with little to show for her 5 million gold franc investment in russia. Language biding russia to all of frances Security Issues and vi vice versa in an alliance of their adversaries triple alliance. Meanwhile, the french ambassador and the British Foreign secretary quietly signed the edition to the article 4 of the 1894 convention which finally closed the 16year dispute over the egyptian question. The nile valley became officially british but with an understandi understanding that the rest of north africa was frances for the taking. They returned the german enemy front and center to frances security preoccupations and almost simultaneously germany moved front and center to britains preoccupations because of the aggressive naval and colonial negotiations. Fast forward from 1899 through the series agreements in spirin of 1904, the anglorussian convention, to the july 1912 anglofrench naval accord and you have Great Britain and the alliance that emerged out of africa primed to meet the triple alliance of germany, austria, and italy. The men who designed these confrontational Alliance Systems possessed an untroubled belief in capacity and an exulted sense of righteous destined to bring to their own continent the sociological and technological injuries inflicted upon their imperil possessions. I went on a bit long, but thank you. [ applause ] i have the pleasure of having listened to david louiss remarks and the daunting task of having to follow them. This is probably what the other girl in Reverend Franklins Church choir after aretha did a solo. I would like to talk for a few minutes about how one thinks about or how i have been thinking about the Long Civil Rights Movement and world war i together as someone who wrote a book about africanamerican about the black freedom struggles set in 1917 and is writing a book about the black freedom struggles set in 1985, i have a relationship to this topic that i have willfully not interrogated too hard. And so now im going to subject you to my current thoughts about them. So once long ago when i was a wee sprog, as my scottish friends would say, i wrote a dissertation called the great war for civil rights. It was about africanamerican soldiers and other africanamericans in the progressive era during the age of imperil warfare. I realized when i circulated an early draft of that book manuscript, that i had actually landed myself in the middle of a heated argument on framing a Long Civil Rights Movement versus maintaining a sense of the classical phase of the civil rights, but not only did i not have a dog in that fight, i hadnt realized until i got my readers report that there was a fight and so had never thought to bring a dog. You guys know the ins and outs of this debate. But ill give you the quick reminder. Jacqueline dowd hall synthesis of where the literature was in 2005 does a lovely job of making a case for a Long Civil Rights Movement. She writes that histories of the movement that began with brown and end with the Voting Rights act truncate the time line of what was a sort of broad and imaginative freedom struggle, turning the fight against White Supremacy as an economic political and psychological system, into a simple drive for color blindness and the vote. Or, to use her words, confining the civil rights struggle to the south, to heroes, to a single decade and to limited noneconomic objectives takes the teeth out of what that movement was. I think that the article offers the most compelling challenge to this framework. They argued in that piece that an everything is everything approach plays fast with the conceptional differences that one should talk about when one talks about histories of the black freedom struggle in the 20th century and maybe before. In so doing, this approach runs the risk of painting what they call an undifferentiated social landscape of oppression and resistance and actually teaching the Civil Rights Movement class right now where my students call everything resistance with no more specificity than that, im sympathic to this argument right now. They say that it is at the end of the day, a discussion that marshals historians favorite fighting point, change versus continuity and which context have the have the most sort of analytical purchase or heft. In countering this debate, my response for a long time was just to skirt the issue. In fact, if you remember chads introduction, i responded to the reports by being like, no problem. Well call the book freedom struggles. Nobody disputes thats a thing. And actually within that, my investment was making sure that people understood that the First World War mattered within that longer history of the black freedom struggle, that seemed like a higher order argument to me. But in watching the debate from the sidelines, i was struck by a few things. One was what i really think was just an overweaning case of baby boomer in boomer nostalgia. I think the bad rebuttals are really bad. I get the argument that not every moment of protest is a movement. And i get that Mass Mobilization is a particular iteration of a struggle whose scale and efficacy in the 60s bears special notation. Too often, the screeds that i read were all about the authors own investments where they mistook their political coming of age for a nations coming of age and they werent that convincing. But the other thing, i think even above and beyond this that struck me, was that this was not a debate that required that you take a side. Is there or is there not a Long Civil Rights Movement, is not a question that requires a yes or no. Its a way of thinking about what stories we tell, and how we tell them and why we tell them. And even more, perhaps, what stories we listen to and how we are able to explain to them their importance. Again, my class that im teaching this semester is a case in point. Its a class on the Civil Rights Movement that i begin in the 1860s and will end with by assigning them the ferguson report precisely because i realized they had no sort of content or conceptional framework to even understand what was remarkable about the 1950s and the 1960s without pulling out farther before they went in. For them, the Civil Rights Movement was like an aal that you come back in the south pacific. It must have come from nowhere, right, and youre glad to see its because you need to pause for a second. But that doesnt necessarily mean that they see its connection to the earth below. With the Long Civil Rights Movement debate got me thinking about and what i ask you to think about is, what does it do to frame world war i as a key moment in the freedom struggle . What does it do to make that the sort of central story as i did in talking about the war. It orients us forward and backward. Its hard to talk about black soldiers and activists living their lives in the war years without looking back at the veterans who built visions of citizenship and articulations of reconstruction. And at the same time to anticipate the next generation of folks who would send a movement with Forward Motion into the post world war ii years. I do this. One of the main takeaways from my book is the generation who made the postworld war ii generation possible came of age during world war i. The world war i cohort fashioned, as ive written, their politics out of the aspirations, agonies and failures of their wartime experience and they applied the lessons of the First World War to build a successful movement in the second. Thinking about this, in the sort of big Long Civil Rights Movement narrative, serves the valuable purpose of identifying the strivers of the world war ii era as the producers of the postworld war ii and postworld war ii era struggle. Theres a way, if you read my book, you could vague a more imagine a version where at the end of the movies, they give you the name, an kin skywalker grows up to be darth vader. He grows up to train the cohort to produce the strategy to undo segregation through litigation and gives us thurgo thurgood marshall. I told you about hayward hall. The simplistic version of what i do in my book is exactly this, like, i chose my characters to get you to this place. I hope that ive done something more nuanced than that. But, you know, you know how graduate students are. Im sure you have some that say that i havent. [ laughter ] what this kind of also flags for me and one of the things that i try to be mindful of in this work on world war i and on current work now is teology and the way in which placing world war i within the framework of a Long Civil Rights Movement actually sort of pushes you towards an outcome that we know but try not to write towards but have a hard time resisting. As an exercise, ive tried to ask myself, how might i have written my book if there had never been a second reconstruction . What would stand out if there had been no Mass Mobilization after world war ii that is the thing that we can unquestionably call the Civil Rights Movement . And im not sure, like, this might be a little halfbaked. But i think what sticks out to me is that without that known end point, the story of global encounter and the way that it opened up worlds of possibility takes even more of a from stage, right, that if one of the things the part of me that came to this through southern history and histories of the black freedom struggle, foregrounded the Long Civil Rights Movement, there was another part of me that was curious about the africanamerican folks who ended up in the world not because they were du bois and thinking hard about it already, but crazy circumstance placed them there, right, and in that story, you get people who find themselves in the middle of an imperial war with subjects from across the world before they necessarily have even, like, conceived of a notion of a thing called empire, right . And so the histories the stories that are embedded in that and the work thats been done by people in this room and people at this conference on kind of growing senses of diaspora, anticolonial movements, those come to the fore even more. And so one of the things that does for me or that i end up thinking about is the ways in which the Long Civil Rights Movement frame might actually proventialize africanAmerican History. Im making cold war, civil rights the peak story of midcentury, right, removing the Civil Rights Movement, thinking about where you stand from world war i, actually leaves you with a narrative in which this history of