#black troops

From the game ~

Black troops from World War I parade over the 145th Street Bridge from Lenox Avenue, ca. 1920.

Missouri in the war. Twenty African American men left for Camp Funston

Record Group 165: Records of the War Department General and Special StaffsSeries: American Unofficial Collection of World War I PhotographsFile Unit: Colored Troops

Black Troops Were Welcome in Britain, but Jim Crow Wasn’t: The Race Riot of One Night in June 1943

Black American GIs stationed in Britain during the war were given a warm welcome by their hosts but treated harshly by their white US Army comrades.

           Bullet holes found in the wood surrounds of the NatWest Bank in Bamber Bridge, in Lancashire in the north of England, in the late 1980s led to the rediscovery of an event that saw some of the few shots fired in anger in England during World War II, which had been largely forgotten. These were not shots fired by invading troops, but by American GIs against their own military police.    

           Intrigued by his discovery, Clinton Smith, the black British maintenance worker who discovered the holes in the woodwork, asked locals how they could have got there. He was told that they were the remnants of the Battle of Bamber Bridge, when black American troops stationed in the town faced off against white US Army military police on the night of June 24-25, 1943.    

           More a mutiny than a battle, it led to the death of Private William Crossland in nearby Mounsey Road, and four other injuries to black American soldiers in a five-hour confrontation which spread from the thatched Olde Hob Inn at one end of the town to the Adams Hall army camp, where from early 1943 the US Eighth Army Quartermaster Truck Company, a black company apart from a few white officers, had been based. The event was officially downplayed, in order not to undermine morale on the home front, but the events of that night led to the conviction of 27 black American soldiers.  

Black Troops More Likely to Face Military Punishment Than Whites, New Report Says

Mortar gunners fire mortar rounds during training alongside Lithuanian forces at Pabrade Training Area in Pabrade, Lithuania June 21, 2014.Spc. Brett Hurd, 173rd Airborne Brigade / U.S. Army

Black service members are significantly more likely to face military punishment than their white colleagues, according to a new report that alleges rampant racial bias in the military. (more…)

African American Troops in the Civil War

“There was an open door to the past, and what we could see through that door was magically haunted.  But when the last notes of the bugle hung against the sky, the door swung shut.  It cannot be reopened. “