The Role and History of Blacks in the U.S. Armed Forces

Attucks was participating in a demonstration for greater rights that ended by harassing a squad of British sol fleetrs; the sol disclosers responded by firing into the crowd. Attucks was the first man killed that solar day and by the end of the encounter four former(a) 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 opprobrious man to die in the extremist War. The result of his devastation has been that he has been held up for generations to admire as a man non alone courageous enough to die in a betrothal for the long-dead idea of democracy and republican rule just now a man forgiving enough to die for a inelegant that considered his complexion sufficient reason to enslave him.

But was he really the man that schoolchildren learn about? Is this fib as apocryphal as George Washington's wooden teeth or that humble episode with the cherry tree?

Certainly, at some level, the story is accredited, for a man by that name was killed in the capital of Massachusetts Massacre and he has no doubt inspired some vague men to sign up to serve their surface area in ways that have exposed them to the risk of death or terrible injury. He continues to stand as a symbol both of bravery and of forgiveness. But it is also true that little is actually known of Attucks's life prior to the capital of Massachusetts Massacre. It is uncertain even whether he was black, of mixed black and discolor descent, or of both African and Native American ancestry. umpteen historians

It would be all overly easy to think of the black soldiers of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries as deluded and even foolish in their beliefs that contendtime service would translate to peacetime equity, but this would be to take a far-too-harsh view of black soldiers of generations past. wish is always a virtue, and it is never foolish to hope that tidy sum will act according to the best in their reputations alternatively than the worst (although it is probably foolish to expect them to do so.) Moreover, most(prenominal) black soldiers had few other options.

Seeing no other reasonable way to raise their own status or that of their families within civilian society, they took a chance on the strong point of the symbol and reality of military service as a way to make their way towards complete citizenship and equality.

W.E.B. Dubois, for example, argued for the importance of black participation in the war effort, writing in 1917 that "If the black man could fight to defeat the Kaiser ? he could later establish a bill for payment due to a agreeable white America (Binkin and Eitelberg, 1982, p. 17).

The answer to this question is of course not uniform from soldier to soldier, some(prenominal) more than it would be for any other subset of soldiers defined by race. Some blacks have asleep(p) to war to escape poverty at home, some to retire from families they no longer loved, some to prove themselves as full Americans, some because they believed fervently in the Constitution and felt that it was a piece of paper worth dying for. Some because they precious to be heroes, some because they were foolish, some because they were brave, some because they wanted to hold up to the dreams of their parents, some because they had something to prove to themselves. The decision to go to war is a complex one for any thoughtful person, and the nature of race relations in the United States has always make that decision even more complex for blacks than for whites.

Blacks had fought in the Revolutionary War, although not in large numbers, although th
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