So Much History

In World War I Black women played a central role in the war effort. Existing networks of Black women’s organizations mobilized on the national and communal levels to provide support for African American soldiers at training camps throughout the country. Black women also served in various social welfare organizations like the American Red Cross, YMCA and YWCA to provide much needed support Black troops in the face of institutionalized discrimination. As they supported African American soldiers, African American women also used the war effort to advance their own claims to equal citizenship.

World War I marked the first major mobilization of American women in Europe in United States history. More than 16,000 women served as part of the American Expeditionary Force in sex-segregated environments in non-combat roles. Thousands of women worked stateside in the armed services in order to free up men for war. Hundreds more traveled to France to work for other organizations related to the war, for newspapers, for relief societies, or as office staff for wartime agencies. In the United States, women formed the front line of food and resource conservation, volunteered for the Red Cross and other war relief organizations, and worked in war-related capacities. 

As a result, African Americans made striking gains in employment even while also facing continuing discrimination. Black women, for example, got jobs working on the railroads for the first time during the world war. Black women found jobs as laborers, cleaning cars, wiping engines, tending railroad beds. They women also found themselves as nurses in battle against disease as influenza devastated communities across America in 1918–1919. Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn Magnolia Johnson were two of the only three known Black women the U.S. government officially permitted to travel to France during the war. While there, they ran YMCA canteens and leave stations catering to African American soldiers, where they wrote letters home for illiterate soldiers and read incoming mail to them.

The “Golden Fourteen” African American women who served as Yeomen (F)s during World War I. They worked as clerks in the Navy’s “muster roll section,” which kept records on the assignments and locations of sailors. Black nurses had an official organization where they found leadership and direction to use their abilities. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses had been founded in 1909. In 1917, Red Cross nursing leader Jane Delano urged Black nurses to enroll in the American Red Cross, although they were not accepted until two months before the war ended in November 1918. African-American females continued to serve by making bandages, taking over jobs that men held so they could be soldiers, working in hospitals and troop centers, and serving in other relief organizations.