The 369th Infantry began as the 15th New York National Guard, recognized with help from Emmett J. Scott, a special adviser to the Secretary of War, at a time when many Black men volunteered in hopes that service would win civil rights. After training at Camp Whitman the regiment was moved to Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1917, where a shop owner knocked a newspaper from Noble Sissle’s hands while he was with Lieutenant James Reese Europe. White soldiers of New York’s 27th Division answered by threatening to boycott shops that mistreated their comrades. In France in late 1917 the U.S. Army set the regiment to unloading ships and digging ditches.
In April 1918 the Army lent the regiment to the French 16th Division of the Fourth Army and persuaded Colonel J. L. A. Linard to issue Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops, warning French officers and civilians against treating them with respect. The French, short of men, largely ignored it and issued them French helmets, belts and rifles. The 369th spent 191 days at the front, took Séchault in the Meuse-Argonne offensive and suffered about 1,500 casualties. Europe’s band, drawn from Harlem and Puerto Rico, played camps, hospitals and town squares, introducing jazz to Europe while German leaflets urged Black troops to defect.
- The captain of the battleship USS Virginia refused to carry the regiment home because no Black man had ever traveled on a U.S. battleship.
- On February 17, 1919, the 369th became the first New York unit home and paraded up Fifth Avenue into Harlem.
- Benjamin O. Davis Sr., later the Army’s first Black general, took command in 1938.
- In 1940 the War Department tried to rename the unit Colored Infantry, and veterans fought to keep the 369th designation.
- The regiment received 170 individual Croix de Guerre and, in 2021, the Congressional Gold Medal.
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