While there are isolated instances of African Americans serving in the Confederate ranks, there is overwhelming evidence that this small number represents rare and exceptional cases: historian David Blight estimates that the number of black soldiers in the Confederate ranks was fewer than 200. That small number represents some partial companies of slaves training as soldiers discovered by Union forces after the fall of Richmond. One reason that only a handful of blacks fought for the Confederacy is that until the last weeks of the war, the Confederate Congress expressly forbade arming enslaved African Americans, who made up the vast majority of the black population in the South. Given white southerners' longstanding fears of a slave uprising (fears intensified by a few abortive attempts in the first half of the 19th century and exacerbated to the point of hysteria by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859), the acute resistance of Confederates to arming blacks is understandable. Putting muskets in the hands of enslaved African Americans presented more than simply a concrete threat—embracing the notion that blacks could serve as soldiers in the same fashion as whites threatened deeply-held Southern ideas of race-based honor and masculinity. As Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs put it, "The day the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers, they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced."

Northerners were scarcely more enthusiastic about arming African Americans than their Southern counterparts. For the first year and a half of the war, Abraham Lincoln's administration eschewed the enlistment of black troops, fearful of a public backlash. Not until Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, did the Union Army begin to enroll African Americans in its ranks; even then, the decision proved deeply controversial, particularly among Northern Democrats. The Confederacy did not seriously entertain the idea of arming enslaved African Americans until a full year later, when the war situation in the South had grown much more desperate. In January 1864, months after the defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Patrick Cleburne (one of the most successful combat commanders in the Confederate Army) circulated a proposal to arm the slaves. Northern successes on the battlefield, Cleburne argued, threatened the South with "the loss of all we now hold most sacred—slaves and all other personal property, lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety, pride, manhood." Sacrificing the first, Cleburne held, could save the rest; the Confederacy could check Union advances by recruiting an army of slaves and guaranteeing freedom "within a reasonable time to every slave in the South who shall remain true to the Confederacy." A dozen of Cleburne's subordinates backed his proposal.

To most Southerners, however, Cleburne's plan was appalling. The prospect of arming the slaves struck one division commander as "revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor." A brigade commander suggested that accepting enslaved African Americans as soldiers would "contravene the principles upon which we fight." Sensing the potential for the debate to cause dangerous dissension within the ranks, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered the generals to cease the discussion. Debate over the decision to arm enslaved African Americans resurfaced many months later, as the Confederacy's situation grew progressively more dire both on and off the battlefield. When another similar proposal reemerged it carried the imprimatur of Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and perhaps the most revered figure in the South. In February 1865, Lee wrote a letter to a Confederate congressman characterizing the plan as "not only expedient but necessary." Even with Lee's support, though, the bill proved deeply divisive. It was not until March 13, 1865, just weeks before Lee's surrender, that the Confederate Congress passed legislation allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers. The two companies discovered by Union troops after the fall of Richmond never went into battle. Opposition to African American soldiers was passionate on both sides. The notion of fighting alongside blacks violated many deeply-held beliefs of white Northerners and Southerners alike. In the Union army, African Americans served in segregated regiments under white officers; many were used for menial tasks rather than fighting, and those that went into combat suffered abuse from their white comrades and were often singled out as targets by their Confederate foes. Nevertheless, the vast majority of African American troops fought bravely and with distinction, and by the end of the war, their actions in combat had begun to change the assumptions of at least some of their comrades regarding the fitness of blacks for battle. Despite their demonstrated fighting ability, it was nearly another full century before the United States Army finally desegregated individual units.

Pershing undoubtedly had complex views on race and American citizenship, probably not so different from his political ally and fellow Republican, Theodore Roosevelt. Given his command of African American “Buffalo Soldiers” in the 1898 Spanish-American War and his participation in the Wounded Knee Massacre of Lakota Indians just eight years earlier, it would seem that he held very contradictory views. To Pershing, blacks may have seemed like worthy soldiers, while Indians deserved genocide. On the other hand, as a military officer, Pershing was carrying out orders and we cannot assume these actions reflected his personal beliefs. Roosevelt, however, was in a different position. Unlike Pershing, who followed orders, Roosevelt gave orders and thus set the tone for race relations both in the military and in society at large. For example, Roosevelt was determined to see the cultural extinction of American Indians (while holding them up as “noble savages” nonetheless), but he also hosted black educator Booker T. Washington at the White House, a very controversial move, especially to white Southern Democratic politicians.

As the first two decades of the 20th century passed, the nation saw increased immigration from both Europe and Asia, as well as increased activism by African Americans, American Indians, and others who demanded equal opportunities and the end of discriminatory laws and customs. World War I was a watershed in these movements, as both African Americans and American Indians enlisted in the army. Blacks served in segregated units, but Indians did not. Indians had a highly ambivalent attitude about their senses of belonging to the American nation; after all, they belonged to tribal nations as well, nations which had long histories of government-to-government relations with the United States. Yet by 1918, the federal government had done a good deal to not only destroy Indian lives but to destroy that government-to-government relationship as well. Many Indians were resentful of these policies, but chose to join the military anyway. Why? Veterans have offered many reasons, one of which is that they believed that when America was threatened, their homelands were threatened. Many veterans saw themselves as warriors not only for their own tribal communities but for the U.S. as well. Despite their service alongside whites, there is no doubt that Indians experienced a high degree of discrimination in the military, as sensitively shown by Joseph Boyden in the novel Three Day Road. Both Indians and blacks sacrificed for the United States and felt that the country ought to treat them more fairly. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat who had to maintain political support from southern white supremacist Democrats, vacillated on this issue (especially in his refusal to support anti-lynching legislation in Congress) and questions of African American integration in the military were essentially abandoned until after World War II. Wilson, like so many other policy makers, seemed to effectively ignore Indian concerns. Indians’ service with whites in the military might be explained by the emerging notion of “whiteness.” Whiteness is an analytical category that historians have used to explain the shifts in race relations created by immigration and industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We must remember that men like Roosevelt and Pershing talked about “race” in what today we would think of as ethnic or national terms—there was an English race, an Irish race, a German race, an Italian race, and so on. Today, we tend to think of these ethnicities as “white,” though that idea was hardly solidified in the early twentieth century. Instead, a long historical process created “whiteness” and a white population out of many different nationalities once perceived as incompatible and even threatening to Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Famously, Roosevelt believed in the “melting pot,” a phrase that we have come to associate with his belief in equality and the worth of all men, but which in actuality referred to his wish to see Americans with ancestry in Western Europe mix and marry one another. It was only those Americans who could jump into the melting pot—Asians, African Americans, American Indians, and others were explicitly excluded from Roosevelt’s vision of a strong American people. Yet, Indians were not segregated in military service, despite the fact that every American president had endorsed a policy that would essentially exterminate them. These policies had not wholly succeeded, but at the turn of the 20th century the American Indian population was at its lowest in human history. In this light, we can imagine that Indians were not perceived as a threat to whiteness in the same way that Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Asians, and African Americans were. By the 1920s, immigrants from places seen as undesirable to Anglo-Saxon policy makers had increased so much that Congress passed the 1924 Immigration Act. This act installed quotas on immigrants from certain countries; in general, the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and Asia could not exceed 2% of those populations currently living in the US, as of the 1890 census. In other words, if, say, 100,000 people from China lived in the United States in 1890, then the US would admit no more than 2,000 people in a given year. Pershing, who was close to President Calvin Coolidge and had even considered a run for the Republican Presidential nomination in 1920, was present for the signing of this bill, indicating his support for it and what it represented for policy-makers’ hopes about the future racial composition of the United States. Of course, we now know that this policy ultimately did not achieve its intended effect, however much “whiteness” is taken for granted today. Indeed, what this period shows is that the racial hierarchies we believe to have always been in place were in considerable flux even as recently as 100 years ago. Pershing, Roosevelt, Wilson, and Coolidge were at the forefront of maintaining white supremacy, but they could not ignore the consistent—and insistent—protest of non-white Americans, nor should we ignore the fact that within white and non-white communities, there are very distinct groups with different histories who possessed varied responses to their situations in the United States.

Lone Wolf v Hitchcock (187 U.S. 553, 1903) was part of a long string of treaties and legislative and judicial measures that displaced North America’s First Peoples from their ancestral lands, hemmed them into “reservations,” and eventually detribalized them. This Supreme Court decision originated on the Kiowa-Comanche reservation, which the Medicine Lodge Treaty (1867) had established in Indian Territory. The treaty guaranteed the Kiowa and Comanche “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of these reservation lands and stipulated that in order for any portion of the reservation lands to be ceded to the U.S., three-fourths of the adult males in the tribe had to give their approval. However, in 1900, without Native American consent, Congress passed an Allotment Act that divided the Kiowa-Comanche lands into 160-acre allotments to give to the Native American residents of the reservation. Those who accepted the allotments were also given American citizenship. The “surplus” lands left after the allotment were to be sold to whites, and the Kiowa and Comanche were to receive about one dollar per acre for these lands. In 1902, Kiowa headman Lone Wolf sued newly-appointed Secretary of the Interior Ethan Allen Hitchcock to stop the allotment of the Reservation. Lone Wolf argued that the allotment was a denial of due process and a violation of the consent requirement in the Medicine Lodge treaty. The federal government’s lawyers asserted that Congress had a right to alter the terms of the treaty through legislation, because it had paramount authority over Indian affairs. Justice A.C. Bradley of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia rejected the Kiowa claim that the 1900 Act deprived tribes of due process. He stated that lack of consent was not relevant because Native American matters were under the exclusive control of Congress. The Court of Appeals upheld Bradley’s decision, and the United States Supreme Court agreed.

Justice Edward Douglas White’s opinion stated that Congress had the right to alter the terms of treaties with Native American tribes, because “authority over the tribal relations of the Indians has been exercised by Congress from the beginning, and the power has always been deemed a political one.” The judiciary could not interfere in Congress’s “plenary power.” This decision was based on the idea that Indians held dependent status to the United States government. Calling Native Americans “the wards of the nation,” White stated that “from their very weakness and helplessness, so largely due to the course of dealing of the Federal government with them and the treaties in which it has been promised, there arises the duty of protection, and with it the power.” This assertion of paternal dominion over Native Americans reversed the Supreme Court’s acknowledgment of a certain measure of Indian autonomy in previous cases, such as Worcester v Georgia 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832). Shortly after the decision, the U.S. opened Kiowa lands to white settlers, and over 50,000 settled on the “surplus” lands that Kiowa and Comanche had possessed under the Medicine Lodge Treaty. The “plenary power” doctrine first affirmed in Lone Wolf v Hitchcock is still valid Indian policy today.

The name refers to a race riot that occurred in the industrial city of East St. Louis, Illinois, over July 2-3, 1917. It is also referred to as the “East St. Louis Riot.” As historians have looked at its various causes, they have labeled it in different ways, depending on what aspect of it they have focused their attention on. Some recent historians have called it a “pogrom” against African Americans in that civil authorities in the city and the state appear to have been at least complicit in—if not explicitly responsible for—the outbreak of violence. Even in 1917, some commentators already made the comparison between the East St. Louis disturbance and pogroms against Jews that were occurring at the time in Russia. Roving mobs rampaged through the city for a day and a night, burning the homes and businesses of African Americans, stopping street cars to pull their victims into the street, and assaulting and murdering men, women, and children who they happened to encounter. A memorial petition to the U.S. Congress, sent by a citizen committee from East St. Louis described it as “a very orgy of inhuman butchery during which more than fifty colored men, women and children were beaten with bludgeons, stoned, shot, drowned, hanged or burned to death—all without any effective interference on the part of the police, sheriff or military authorities.” In fact, estimates of the number of people killed ranged from 40 to more than 150. Six thousand people fled from their homes in the city, either out of fear for their lives or because mobs had burned their houses.

In the early years of the 20th century, many industrial cities in the North and the Midwest became destinations for African Americans migrating from the South, looking for employment. East St. Louis was one of these cities, where blacks found opportunities to work for meatpacking, metalworking, and railroad companies. The demand for workers in these companies increased dramatically in the run-up to World War I. Some of the workmen left for service in the military, creating a need for replacements, and the demand for war materiel increased industrial orders. The workforce had been highly unionized and a series of labor strikes had increased pressure on companies to find non-unionized workers to do the work. Some companies in East St. Louis actively recruited rural Southern blacks, offering them transportation and jobs, as well as the promise of settling in a community of neighborhoods where African Americans were building new lives strengthened by emerging political and cultural power. By the spring of 1917, about 2,000 African Americans arrived in East St. Louis every week.

Racial competition and conflict emerged from this. The established unions in East St. Louis resented the African American workers as “scabs” and strike breakers. On May 28-29, a union meeting whose 3,000 attendees marched on the mayor’s office to make demands about “unfair” competition devolved into a mob that rioted through the streets, destroyed buildings, and assaulted African Americans at random. The Illinois governor sent in the National Guard to stop the riot, but over the next few weeks, black neighborhood associations, fearful of their safety, organized for their own protection and determined that they would fight back if attacked again. On July 1, white men driving a car through a black neighborhood began shooting into houses, stores, and a church. A group of black men organized themselves to defend against the attackers. As they gathered together, they mistook an approaching car for the same one that had earlier driven through the neighborhood and they shot and killed both men in the car, who were, in fact, police detectives sent to calm the situation. The shooting of the detectives incensed a growing crowd of white spectators who came the next day to gawk at the car. The crowd grew and turned into a mob that spent the day and the following night on a spree of violence that extended into the black neighborhoods of East St. Louis. Again, the National Guard was sent in, but neither the guardsmen nor police officers were at all effective in protecting the African American residents. They were instead more disposed to construe their job as putting down a black revolt. As a result, some of the white mobs were virtually unrestrained.

A national outcry immediately arose to oust the East St. Louis police chief and other city officials, who were not just ineffective during the riots, but were suspected of aiding and abetting the rioters, partly out of a preconceived plan, suggested Marcus Garvey, to discourage African American migration to the city. The recently formed NAACP suddenly grew and mobilized—with a silent march of 10,000 people in New York City to protest the riots. They and others demanded a Congressional investigation into the riots. The report of the investigation, however, pointed to the migration of African Americans to the East St. Louis region as a “cause” of the riot, wording that sounded like blaming the victims. As Marcus Garvey had said of an earlier report of the riot, “An investigation of the affair resulted in the finding that labor agents had induced Negroes to come from the South. I can hardly see the relevance of such a report with the dragging of men from cars and shooting them.” A similar point about simple justice for the victims and where to place the blame for the riots nearly caused ex-President Theodore Roosevelt to come to blows with AFL leader Samuel Gompers during a public appearance shortly after the riot. Roosevelt demanded that those who had perpetrated the violence and murders in East St. Louis be brought to justice. Gompers then rose to address the crowd and, as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, wrote, “He read a telegram which he said he had received tonight from the president of the Federation of Labor of Illinois. This message purported to explain the origin of the East St. Louis riots. It asserted that instead of labor unions being responsible for them they resulted from employers enticing Negroes from the south to the city ‘to break the back of labor.’” This enraged Roosevelt, who jumped up, approached Gompers, brought his hand down onto his shoulder and roared that, “There should be no apology for the infamous brutalities committed on the colored people of East St. Louis.” Roosevelt, like many other Americans of all races, was particularly appalled by the irony that such an event could occur in the United States at the same time that the country, by entering World War I, was declaring its intentions to export abroad its vision of freedom and justice. This theme was picked up by many editorial cartoonists in newspapers across the U.S. East St. Louis was by no means the only northern industrial city to experience race riots during this period. A conviction grew among some African Americans that they could not depend on an enlightened white community or government, either in the South or in the North, to insure their rights and their safety, but that they would have to fight for their own rights. In an editorial entitled "Let Us Reason Together," in his magazine, The Crisis, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Today we raise the terrible weapon of self-defense. When the murderer comes, he shall no longer strike us in the back. When the armed lynchers gather, we too must gather armed. When the mob moves, we propose to meet it with bricks and clubs and guns.”