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{PDF EPUB} a More Unbending Battle the Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A More Unbending Battle The Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home by Ashton Sanders Is Embarking on A More Unbending Battle for the Adaptation of Peter Nelson’s WWI Novel. Deadline announced today that Moonlight and All Day and a Night star Ashton Sanders has secured both TV and film rights to Peter Nelson’s nonfiction novel, A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighter’s Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home . If you’re unfamiliar, the official book description reads as follows: A More Unbending Battle chronicles the little-known story of the 369tC Infantry Regiment—the first African-American regiment mustered to fight in WWI. Recruited from all walks of Harlem life, the regiment had to fight alongside the French because America’s segregation policy prohibited them from fighting with white U.S. soldiers. Despite extraordinary odds and racism, the 369th became one of the most successful—and infamous —regiments of the war. The Harlem Hellfighters, as their enemies named them, spent longer than any other American unit in combat, were the first Allied unit to reach the Rhine, and showed extraordinary valor on the battlefield, with many soldiers winning the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. Replete with vivid accounts of battlefield heroics , A More Unbending Battle is the thrilling story of the dauntless Harlem Hellfighters. Sanders is expected to portray Henry Johnson, the most revered member out of the group, who fought off a German raid while suffering 21 bodily wounds—saving fellow soldier Needham Roberts in the process. In 2015, Johnson was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor by President Barack Obama. “Since the moment I discovered this incredibly rich piece of history documenting the Harlem Hellfighters, I have wanted to bring the stories of these courageous and inspiring men to life,” Sanders told Deadline. “In addition to the war, some of the most moving chapters are about the politics involved in the recruitment of these men as well as their reassimilation into society after the war.” The 25-year old Native Son star is set to produce the adaptation under his 1237 Production company. He can be seen next in the war drama, The Things They Carried with Stephan James as well as Warner Bros’ Judas and the Black Messiah alongside Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield. He can currently be seen opposite Jeffrey Wright in All Day and a Night on Netflix as well as Wu-Tang: An American Saga on Hulu. The Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home. Mr. Nelson is the author of A More Unbending Battle: The Harlem Hellfighter's Struggle for Freedom in WWI and Equality at Home (Basic Civitas Books, 2009). It might, however, be argued that the Harlem Renaissance actually began six months earlier, when a man named Irvin S. Cobb, a popular “southern humorist,” wrote a serious article, published in the August 24th 1918 issue of the Saturday Evening Post , entitled “Young Black Joe” which gave African-Americans a new kind of hero, and a new source of ethnic pride. The exploits of the men from Harlem, who’d first formed in 1916 as the 15th New York National Guard before being federalized, had been previously reported on in black newspapers including the New York Age , as well as in the New York Times and New York World . Until Cobb’s article, however, it was a story of local interest, with limited exposure. The road to glory was long, with detours along the way. Their state-side training was cut short due to racial hostilities and tensions that arose wherever they were sent. At Camp Wadsworth, in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in October, 1917, though the commander of the regiment, a white New York attorney named Colonel William Hayward, had asked his men to comply (if not agree) with the local Jim Crow laws, a near riot occurred in a hotel lobby when the hotel owner knocked the hat off a black soldier who’d been told he could buy a newspaper there. A few weeks after that, at Camp Mills, Long Island, a white officer named Hamilton Fish, later elected to congress from Duchess County, got word that soldiers from the Alabama National Guard, bivouacked nearby, were planning to attack his men. Fish issued live ammunition to his troops, just in case, then marched into the Alabama encampment, accompanied by a 6’6 260lb. black heavyweight boxer named George “Kid” Cotton, and offered to fight any officer who would have him, adding that he’d brought along an enlisted man who would fight any two southerners. There were no takers. Adversity produced a sense of unit cohesion, “us against them,” even if the “them” was the U.S. Army. Unlike other colored regiments where black soldiers had little respect or affection for their white officers, the men of the 369th knew their white officers had their backs, and understood their predicament. The Hellfighters had black officers too, at a time when the War Department preferred having colored troops led either by an all white or an all-black officer’s corps. They arrived in Brest, France on New Year’s Day, 1918. The NY 15th National Guard was initially pressed into the Service of Supply, as were the majority of the 400,000+ colored troops conscripted for the war effort, laying railroad tracks, draining swamps and unloading ships. Colonel Hayward campaigned, writing letters to AEF headquarters, pleading that his men be allowed to see combat. General John Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force, had for some time refused all requests from the French and British to give them reinforcements, arguing that his troops weren’t ready and that he wasn’t about to allow American troops to fight under a foreign flag. The French Army, by 1918, was both depleted and demoralized --- 24,000 French soldiers had been tried and convicted of mutiny in 1917. To make matters more dire, the Bolsheviks, after taking power in Russia in November, 1917, had negotiated a separate peace with the Central Powers, allowing the Germans to transfer a million troops from the Eastern to the Western front. Pershing understood that the Germans intended to mount a spring offensive in 1918, a final push to seize Paris and negotiate a treaty on favorable terms before the Americans arrived in sufficient numbers to stop them. Pershing, knowing that were he to deploy colored American troops with or adjacent to white American troops, trouble was sure to follow, capitulated and gave the French eight regiments of colored soldiers. The 15th, re-named U.S. 369th Infantry, became part of the French 4th army, led by a General Henri Gouraud, in March, 1918. They wore French helmets, used French weapons, and consumed French rations. The French trained them in the ways of trench warfare, served side by side with them for a brief introductory period, then turned a sector over to the Americans, south of the town of Sechault and east of a hill called Butte Mesnil, where over 200,000 Germans and poilus had died during the first three years of fighting. Thus the Harlem Hellfighters (a moniker bestowed upon them by the Germans) served longer in the trenches than any other American regiment. They helped repel the German spring offensive and participated in the Allied fall offensive, fighting up the west side of the Argonne forest. They are believed to have been the first American troops to reach the Rhine, the prime objective of many American military leaders, including two young officers named George Patton and Douglas MacArthur. Irvin Cobb enters the picture in May, 1918, when Colonel Hayward invited him, in his capacity as war correspondent, to visit and write about his troops. With Cobb were two other reporters, Martin Green of the Evening World and Lincoln Eyre of the New York World , but Cobb was by far the better known, his magazine, the Saturday Evening Post , with a circulation over 2,000,000, one of the most widely read publications in America. Cobb was described, by a critic of the era, as “One of America’s chief assets. … More people read him than any other contemporary writer—to be both amused and informed. He may not be the funniest man in America, but if he isn’t, who is?” Ring Lardner? Dorothy Parker? Robert Benchley? Fortuitously, Cobb arrived the day after an event that became known as “The Battle of Henry Johnson.” Pvt. Johnson, a diminutive redcap from Albany, was manning an observation post in No Man’s Land on the night of May 15th with a fellow private from Trenton, NJ, named Needham Roberts, when they were attacked by a German raiding party. Roberts fought with grenades but was soon wounded. Henry Johnson emptied his rifle, then used it as a club, and finally drew his bolo knife as German after German came at him. Afterwards, it was estimated, judging from the footprints in the mud, the weapons left behind and the pools of blood, that he’d killed at least four of the enemy and driven off as many as two dozen. Both Johnson and Roberts, and ultimately 169 other members of the 369th, were awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery. Both men were disabled by their injuries. The U.S. army did little, after the war, to recognize the efforts and the sacrifices made by the men from New York, even though Johnson was “one of the five bravest soldiers in the war,” according to Teddy Roosevelt.
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