The great tragedy for many blacks who have served the United States in the military was not what happened to them on the battlefield or in the cockpit or on a destroyer, but what happened to them when they returned from battle.
It was not that they were met with violence when they returned, or even that things were very much different for them when they returned. But that was what was terrible, for many blacks (and maybe even for the majority of them) one of the primary reasons that they had gone to war û from the 18th through the 20th centuries û was to improve their lives. They looked around at the racist society that had denied them opportunities all of their lives and they thought that just maybe, if they could fight for their country, then finally people would realize that blacks were real Americans too and deserved all the accolades and elements of the American Dream.
The fact that this was not so, that blacks returned to find the society that had treated them so badly to be essentially unchanged, is explored in this paper, which examines the role of blacks in the U.S. armed forces from Revolutionary times through the wars of the 20th century, looking especially at both their chances for advancement in the military and what they came home to when they left the services.
Nearly every schoolchild growing up in America knows the story of Crispus Attucks, the leader of a group of American colonists who was killed when the group was fired upon by British troops in the 1770 event known as the Boston Massacre. Attucks was participating in a demonstration for greater rights that ended by harassing a squad of British soldiers; the soldiers responded by firing into the crowd. Attucks was the first man killed that day and by the end of the encounter four other Americans also died in the incident. Attucks was thus one of the first men to die for the cause of American nationhood and the first black man to die in the Revolutionary W...