Two Colored women with the American Expeditionary Forces

by Addie W. Hunton; Kathryn M. Johnson

The result of this, and other difficulties, was that two or three months before the American soldiers were out of France, it became generally known that the French people were tired of them and wanted them out of their country. The spirit of dislike became so great that sometimes French people were overheard saying that if the American soldiers had on German uniforms, they could not be told from the Huns! And that if they were to judge from their actions it would seem that they had a desire to treat them in the same manner as they treated the colored Americans.

After the signing of the Armistice there were frequent riotings between the American white soldiers and the French people. On the first Sunday in April, 1919, the city of St. Nazaire was changed from a quiet port city into a tumult of discord, during which a number of people were killed and wounded. It grew out of the fact that a white French woman and a colored Frenchman entered a restaurant frequented by American officers, in order that they might enjoy their lunch together. An insinuating remark concerning the woman was overheard by her brother, who understood English, and immediately resented it. The restaurant was demolished in a free-for-all fight, which grew in proportions until the French people mounted a machine gun in the middle of the public square, to restore order.

In the city of Nantes a colored French soldier was shot by an American Military Policeman, under the guise that he thought that the Frenchman was a colored American deserter disguised in French uniform.

During the writer’s period of service at Brest there were ever-recurring conflicts, and Camp Pontanezen was frequently closed and the soldiers not permitted to enter the city. Some of these were said to have occurred because of insults offered to colored Frenchmen. Rumor had it that these riots always resulted in a number of killed and wounded.

In order to substantiate our statement concerning these conflicts, we wish to quote from Sergeant Alexander Woolcott’s article in the October, 1919, issue of the North American Review:^*

“Whatever turn is taken by international politics during the next two years, whatever the official post bellum relation between Washington and the government in France, the degree of understanding and the nature of the sentiment existing between our people and the French is going to be of incalculable importance in shaping the twentieth century. It is going to give the true validity to whatever doctrine our ministers may from time to time endorse.

“That is why it is worth while to look back over the A. E. F., and by so doing, to measure and search for the causes of mutual rancor which developed between the French people and our troops—the rancor which broke out here and there in riots, as at Brest; which made the irritated army of occupation lean over backwards in their affability towards the Rhinelanders; which moved Le Rire to some caustic cartoons at the expense of the A. E. F.; and which poured into our astonished ports a stream of returning doughboys all muttering under their breaths a disparagement of the ‘French Frogs.’[5]

“Perhaps it would be well first to consider two rather fixed delusions on the subject. For one thing, stay-at-home Americans have, quite pardonably, come to the easy conclusion that all the rancor could be explained by overcharging.... As a matter of fact, the amount of overcharging was slight, astonishingly slight, when one considers that there were more than two million spendthrift Americans in France, far from home, overpaid, irresponsible, and loose in an impoverished country. It is against the nature of the French peasant or shopkeeper to go in all at once for resourceful profiteering, just as it is against his nature to part lightly with a sou on which he has once laid his thrifty hands. Furthermore, both the French government and the American Army were vigilant in the matter, so that the doughboy was not despoiled with half the unscrupulousness that would have been practised among his own people—certainly no more than is the average lot of the expeditionary soldier, anywhere under the sun....

“Then, too, there was the delusion from which the French government suffered—the notion that the whole source of bad feeling was the friction between the French and American staffs. There was such friction, and during the first few weeks of the Armistice the staff officers of the Third Army were on edge with irritation at the neighboring French command....

“I think that if the dislike developed on one side before the other, the first appearance can be traced to a certain disdain for the French which the outspoken Americans were only too wont to display. To the resulting friction a hundred and one things contributed, of which high prices constituted the least—little things, like the French truck driver’s enraging habit of driving dreamily in the middle of the road; big things, like the French street walker’s unprejudiced habits of accepting the Negro’s attentions as affably as a white man’s.”