World War I Recruitment Poster Appealing to African Americans, 1918.
Above, a solemn black woman clasps hands and exchanges last looks with her intrepid African American soldier who is about to leave the U.S. for the dangerous fighting in Europe. Behind the couple, an equally resolute black regiment marches off to war. However, the caption that “Colored Man Is No Slacker,” taunts and challenges blacks with the Jim Crow presupposition that blacks were lazy and evasive.
More at issue were racially motivated, deadly riots involving several thousand civilians in East St. Louis, IL, and between a black infantry battalion and white policemen in Houston, TX, in the summer of 1917, with 19 soldiers sentenced to hang. These outrages prompted the very first Civil Rights marches and demanded that President Wilson “Bring Democracy to America before you carry it to Europe.”