Please do not cite without permission of author A Mobilized Diaspora: African Americans, Military Service, and the Tensions of Nation in the First World War The Historical Society 2008 Conference SESSION IIC: African Americans in the Era of the Great War Submitted on April 1, 2008 Chad Williams History Department Hamilton College 3900 Greystone Ave., #44F Bronx, NY 10463
[email protected] "Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see."1 Writing in 1915, W. E. B. Du Bois observed the World War with close personal interest. His ties to Europe and two of the principal warring nations ran deep; Du Bois had studied in Germany at the University of Berlin from 1892 to 1894, an experience that profoundly influenced his intellectual sensibilities. He could also trace to lineage back to France and held an abiding admiration for the nation of liberté, egalité, and fraternité. But as the Crisis editor made sense of the European maelstrom, he unreservedly rested his allegiances with the oppressed darker races of the world. In his seminal May 1915 Atlantic Monthly essay "The African Roots of War," Du Bois set forth his thoughts on the war, challenging the prevailing Eurocentrism of its origins and casting the conflict in the broader context of Africa and its diaspora. Anticipating similar critiques made by Vladamir Lenin and others, he detailed the destructive history of Western imperialism in Africa fueled by the dual engines of capitalism and white supremacy, the complicity