The Roughest Riders

by Jerome Tuccille

  “They have left God out of the equation,” Young had replied to a British officer who asked him just before he died what was wrong with white people in America. Young’s remains were returned to his home country four months after his death, and he was interned with honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt had the final words on the way Young had been treated when he said, “No man ever more truly deserved the high repute in which he was held, for by sheer force of character, he overcame prejudices which would have discouraged many a lesser man.”

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  Black Americans took up arms to combat the spread of Nazism and its twin brother Fascism across Europe and part of Africa in the 1930s. While much of Europe was still healing after the horrors of the First World War, Hitler grasped the opportunity to seize the Saarland region of Germany in 1935, and not to be out-done by the senior partner in the unholy alliance, Italian dictator Mussolini rained bombs on unprotected villages in Ethiopia later the same year. Most African Americans—and conscientious whites as well—considered the totalitarian juggernaut to be an extension of the same kind of racist, economic, and political oppression that existed at home. White mercenaries poured into Ethiopia in response to a plea from Emperor Haile Selassie, and some black volunteers joined the tiny Ethiopian Air Force to help put down Mussolini’s tragic push to establish a new Roman Empire.

  Then Spain emerged as the major battleground for warring forces on the right and the left. The Spanish Civil War officially broke out on July 17, 1936, when a claque of army generals attempted a coup d’état against Spain’s democratically elected coalition government. Paramount among the generals was Francisco Franco, whose forces were an amalgam of nationalists that included monarchists (or Carlists), fascists (or falangists), and Spanish, Algerian, Irish, German, and Italian soldiers of fortune. The unwieldy government coalition comprised a diverse group of anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, syndicalists, various strains of socialists, and a ragtag contingent of international brigades fleshed out by volunteers from all over Europe and North America. Further complicating this ideological stew was a mix of separatists from Cataluna, Navarra, and Galicia, who wanted independence from Spain and self-rule for their own regions. Then there were trade and student unions that splintered into a mind-numbing array of more than forty different factions, each promoting its own political agenda.

  When France, Britain, and the United States remained neutral and refused to supply arms to Spain’s left-wing government, the republicans turned to Russia for support. Germany and Italy backed Franco and his nationalists. Trying to figure out which side to come down on was a devil’s choice for most open-minded individuals, with Stalin in one camp and Hitler and Mussolini in the other. For African Americans, the war against racism and fascism was what mattered most. To them and most of the whites who decided to get involved, an alliance with the anti-Franco forces seemed like the right side to be on. Even Ernest Hemingway, who fought against Franco, said the Spanish Civil War was “a bad war in which nobody was right.” But all that really mattered was to relieve the suffering of human beings, and Hemingway had good company in England’s Winston Churchill, who claimed he would welcome the devil himself as an ally in a righteous cause to defeat his enemy. (It should be noted that the full extent of Stalin’s crimes against his own people was not yet fully apparent.)

  Journalist Milton Wolff said, “You had to be there to know what had happened. Basically, it was a war waged by the army and monarchists led by General Franco to reverse the 1936 election in which a leftist government of several parties was elected. It was called the Popular Front. Franco brought over Moorish mercenaries, a paid army, to destroy the elected government…. In the very first weeks of the war, long before Moscow decided to help the Spanish government, the republican side as they were called, Hitler and Mussolini were pouring in stuff to help Franco and the nationalists. The final factor was England putting the arm on France to close the border between France and Spain to cut off military aid to the republicans.”

  The international brigades that trooped into Spain were an unlikely mix of whites, blacks, and dark-skinned people from various economic and social backgrounds. They were a diverse group of idealists who made no racial distinctions and represented, by and large, a welcoming society for black Americans who had been ostracized and abused at home. As such, it held much appeal for black warriors looking to fight for a cause they believed was just. Many of them left the United States to fight against the Franco coalition alongside white volunteers from different nations.

  One of the most popular among them was Eluard McDaniels, the adopted son of a white photographer from San Francisco named Consuelo Kanaga, whose ethnic background was Swiss despite her Hispanic-sounding first name. McDaniels had been a longshoreman, occasional art student, and baseball player who developed a reputation for “pitching” hand grenades with devastating accuracy at enemy forces. The Spaniards he fought beside regarded him as a comrade since his forebears had once been enslavos—slaves—which they considered themselves to be under fascism.

  Vaughn Love and James Yates were among a group of five African Americans who sailed to Europe on the ocean liner Île de France on February 20, 1937. Their fellow volunteers numbered three hundred out of eight hundred passengers aboard, which included Hemingway, with whom they dined while crossing the ocean. Hemingway was already working on his novel about the war, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Both Love and Yates wrote books of their own describing their experiences in Spain, Yates selling his on the streets of Greenwich Village a half century later, when he was in his eighties. “Although we talked with each other and played poker,” Love wrote in his book about their experiences on the French ship, “we all kept our destination a secret.” Both he and Yates crossed the Pyrenees with most of the other volunteers and saw action in several theaters of war in Spain.

  The tide of war turned against the republican forces during the winter of 1937–38, the coldest in memory at the time, when they suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Teruel outside of Valencia. It was a loss the republicans would never recover from. More than fifteen thousand republican soldiers lost their lives there, and the volunteer brigades saw many of their own killed and wounded. Paul Robeson, the African American singer and civil rights activist, lent his voice and presence to the republican cause during a visit to the front. His business agent expressed concern about Robeson’s political association with the left at a time when anti-Communist fervor was mounting in the United States, but the singer refused to be deterred. “The artist must take sides,” he said. “I have made my choice. I have no alternative.”

  America’s reluctance to get ensnared in another European war ended on December 7, 1941, when Japanese bombs dropped from the sky on a US military outpost in Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. The action caught the United States largely unprepared for another major conflict after nearly two decades of downsizing its military strength. The army alone was severely understaffed, with the white ranks thinned out and only four thousand remnants of the Buffalo Soldiers in uniform. Another three thousand black men served in the National Guard. Those numbers would soon change, however, with the inauguration of a new military draft that would pull blacks into all the military branches—the army, navy, army air corps, and marines—including positions they had never served in before. The government reestablished the old Buffalo Soldier units: the Ninety-Second and Ninety-Third Divisions, and the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry Regiments.

  The eighteen hundred volunteers who had survived the war in Spain presented themselves to the US government as a single fighting unit in the war against the Axis powers. Had the government accepted them as such, the Spanish-American War veterans would have constituted the first racially integrated military entity in US history. But the government tagged them with being politically “red,” as well as an unacceptable racial blend of white, black, and many shades in between. They were regarded as security risks because they had fought on t
he side that included known Communists and Communist sympathizers. Nevertheless, about six hundred of the volunteers managed to wangle their way into the armed services and the merchant marines. Some, including the writer Milton Wolff, were even accepted into the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, which enlisted other writers into wartime service.

  The black Spanish Civil War veterans also found a home in the military, fighting alongside the Buffalo Soldiers in several major European and North African campaigns. As soon as the United States entered the war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the NAACP sent a proposal to the army’s chief of staff, General George C. Marshall, advocating the establishment of a division “open to all Americans irrespective of race, creed, color, or national origin,” in the spirit of true democracy. Many whites endorsed the idea and volunteered to serve with black troops as enlisted men rather than as commanding officers. While FDR was open to the proposal largely on the advice of his wife, Eleanor, high-ranking members of the administration opposed it and were able to sway the president in their direction. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had fought beside Buffalo Soldiers in Cuba and said he had never seen “braver men” anywhere, but he invoked “tradition” as his reason for rejecting a racially integrated military. Eleanor Roosevelt was furious. “The nation cannot expect the colored people to feel that the US is worth defending if they continue to be treated as they are treated now,” she lamented in a speech she made in the nation’s capital shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Yet defend it they did, even in the face of ongoing discrimination across all levels of society.

  For the first time, black soldiers were fighting not just on the ground but in the air. The army accepted its first black pilots early in 1942 and sent them flying off into combat after eight months of training. Others flew with the navy and went into combat on the seas, earning the Navy Cross and other medals—albeit some of them belatedly, long after the war was over. A group of them earned the sobriquet the “Golden Thirteen,” constituting the largest group of African American officers commissioned by the navy during World War II. The army shipped Buffalo Soldiers and black volunteers to fight in North Africa, Anzio, Omaha Beach, the Battle of the Bulge, and other critical battlefields in Europe and Asia, where many earned medals and other commendations for serving with distinction.

  Then, not unexpectedly, when the war was all but won by the United States and its allies, the government started to deactivate the all-black combat divisions beginning in 1944, converting them to service units and relegating them to mop-up duty. In effect, the government relieved the black warriors of their military duties when their services were no longer needed and then transformed them into virtual orderlies, performing the only types of jobs that were available to them at home.

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  President Harry S. Truman wrote the last chapter in the long saga of the Buffalo Soldiers when he issued Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948. “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin,” the order read. “This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible.” Truman’s order was partly political, since the Republican running against him that year, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, was a moderate opposed to “the idea of racial segregation in the armed forces of the US.” Within his own party, Truman had to walk a narrow line between progressives and liberals on the left, led by Henry Wallace, and racist “Dixiecrats” on the right, personified by Strom Thurmond. Truman scaled the divide and came down on the side of evolving history in the making.

  In doing so, Truman declared that the age of segregation, in the military at least, was officially over. Thus began the slow process of integrating the black divisions that had fought for their country since the end of the Civil War into units that were formerly all white. Two of the old Buffalo Soldier divisions, the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry, were officially disbanded in the years after World War II, when the country’s need for such a large number of men in uniform had ended—for the time being—with the surrender of the Axis powers. It would not be long before a new war erupted—this one on a remote North Asian peninsula called Korea—so although the long saga of the Buffalo Soldiers sputtered to a close after Truman’s historic action, black Americans would continue to answer their country’s call to arms, as draftees and as volunteers, throughout the ensuing decades.

  In early July 1950, several black combat units that had not yet been integrated were shipped to Korea with two companies of white soldiers. They were among the first to be sent abroad for what was expected to be a short “police action” before returning to their base in Japan a few weeks later. They brought with them their dress uniforms for the planned victory parade through the streets of Seoul. Instead, they would find themselves bogged down in a grinding war in extreme weather conditions that would last for two years, until Dwight D. Eisenhower brokered an uneasy peace soon after his election as president in 1952. The still-segregated troops of the Twenty-Fourth, which was soon to be dissolved, won the first ground victory on the peninsula and earned the first Medal of Honor bestowed in the conflict. A white officer with the group, Lieutenant Colonel John T. Corley, sang the praises of the black soldiers’ performance in action, which was well received by the men he led on the battlefield.

  “The 24th Infantry Regiment performed extremely well for Colonel Corley,” wrote black combat pilot Charles Bussey. “Leadership seemed more important to him than skin color in determining success in battle.” Later, however, Bussey altered his opinion of Corley when he learned that the colonel would have recommended Bussey and his men for even more medals had they been white. “I cannot allow you to become a hero, no matter how worthy,” Corley admitted to Bussey. “I reduced the size of the battalion that you saved to a group, and I reduced the number of men you killed” out of fear, he said, that Bussey and other black warriors would “flaunt it.” Blood brothers and drinking buddies they may have been in uniform, but the old racial bigotry resurfaced when they returned to peacetime life at home.

  The Korean War gave birth to the nation’s first black four-star general, Roscoe Robinson Jr., who graduated from West Point in 1951 and saw combat in Korea and Vietnam. He earned his fourth star in 1982 as the representative to NATO’s Military Committee. The complete integration of the armed forces picked up steam during the Korean War as black volunteers poured heavily into recruiting offices. The post commander of the army training center in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, found it impossible to sort out the recruits along racial lines. He cast aside whatever personal reservations he may have had and simply assigned the incoming troops wherever they were needed most. The base quickly became a model for the only viable means of completing the process of integration—just bite the bullet and do it! The era of military segregation sputtered to a close. And as the full integration of the armed forces became a fait accompli, the curtain fell on the almost century-long drama of the Buffalo Soldiers and the role they played in the long, hard sweep of American history.

  Colin Powell joined the army in 1959 after graduating from CCNY in New York City. As a cadet in the ROTC, Powell became a member of the crack Pershing Rifles drill team—named after General Black Jack Pershing—where Powell earned his bar as a second lieutenant when he graduated. It was a time between wars, with Korea now in the past and Vietnam still off in the future. Born in Harlem to Jamaican parents, Powell was sent to Germany where he quickly rose up the ranks. By the end of 1960, he became the first lieutenant in his battalion to command a company, a job ordinarily reserved for captains. He considered himself lucky that he was not personally subjected to racial discrimination, even from his white NCO from Alabama. “My color made no difference,” Powell wrote. “I could have been black, white, or candy-striped for all he cared. I was his lieutenant, and his job was to break in new lieutenants and take care of them.”

  In 1981, Brigadier General
Colin Powell jogged around a field at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the base where the first Buffalo Soldiers unit, the Tenth Cavalry Regiment, was established in 1867, 114 years earlier. Since that historic birthdate, some troops of the Tenth had been stationed there continuously through the end of World War II, but Powell noticed that there was little at the site to celebrate their presence; two alleys and two lonely graves bore the names of the Ninth and Tenth, and that was it. Powell vowed on the spot that, if he were ever in a position to rectify the situation, he would make sure the Buffalo Soldiers received the honor they deserved.

  Powell fulfilled his promise ten years later. On July 25, 1992, more than ten thousand people arrived at Fort Leavenworth to witness the dedication of the Buffalo Soldiers Monument on the site. Senator Bob Dole addressed five hundred surviving veterans of the Ninth and Tenth, and General Powell stepped up to the microphone to deliver the keynote speech. He said the Buffalo Soldiers had made it possible for people like him to achieve their current positions. Without them, Powell would not be standing before them on that memorable July day. Powell pointed proudly at the towering statue of a Buffalo Soldier on horseback, created by sculptor Eddie Dixon, rifle in hand as he scouts the territory ahead in advance of his unit. The oldest Buffalo Soldiers in attendance were 110-year-old Jones Morgan of Richmond, Virginia, and 98-year-old William Harrington of Salina, Kansas. Another veteran, Elmer Robinson of Leavenworth, had summed up their emotions three years earlier when he heard that the statue was being built at Powell’s urging: “After all these years, I didn’t think anyone cared. Now I feel like a hero.”