A High School pupil, fourteen years of age and residing in a nearby city wants to know if any colored men fought in the World War? He adds that he has completed several courses in history, required by his state and offered by his school but he cannot recall a single paragraph in his text stating that Negroes fought in the last war.
A little boy of ten summers glanced up from a Hearst paper, several Sundays ago and wanted to know whether or not he would have to go to war when he became a man? He asked this because he had been looking at Floyd Gibbons war pictures for months without seeing the face of a Negro soldier or reading of the deeds of a Negro regiment.
It is the logical query of Negro and white school children today, when the late war is being discussed the classrooms-"Did Negroes fight too? We don't see account of it in our history text." Yes! To be sure they fought 400,000 patriotic American Negroes, brave and loyal, were in active military service during the last war. To be specific, Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, members of the 369th Infantry were attacked, on May 15, 1918, by a raiding party of thirty Germans and deported themselves so heroically that they were the FIRST American soldiers in France to receive medals for bravery. The soldiers of the 370th Infantry were the first American troops to enter the French Fortress of Laon when it was wrested from the Germans. After four years of warfare, these same troops FOUGHT THE LAST BATTLE of the war and advanced as far as thirty-five kilometers in one day.
Yes! Negro soldiers fought in the World War but some historians and war photographers become forgetful after a crisis has passed and remember and honor the deeds of a chosen few.