The 92nd Infantry Division, which served with the AEF, was marked by dysfunction and failure. Brooks say.

Thus, African-American soldiers found themselves thousands of miles from home, wearing French helmets, obeying French commanders and firing French rifles at the enemy.For many black troops it was a welcome change. They become a little more determined in 1919 to make that change happen, much more so than in 1917. Max Brooks tells the story of the first African-American infantry unit to fight in World War I through a new graphic novel illustrated by Caanan White.The 369th Infantry Regiment served 191 days under enemy fire in Europe. ... the Harlem Hellfighters withstood a … Ike Sims of Atlanta, Georgia, had eleven sons serving in World War I.Soon after it arrived in Europe, the 93rd Division was handed off to the war-weary French army. An art form pioneered by African-Americans, jazz was the soundtrack of the New Negro, Slotkin wrote in his book.Lt. This was still the era of Jim Crow segregation, and many African-Americans were hesitant about answering President Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy.“I did not feel justified in going into the service to fight for so called democracy which I could not myself enjoy as an American citizen,” said Sgt. They returned home one of the most decorated American units of World War I. Pippin’s work now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, and other galleries, including this exhibit.Another example was James Reese Europe, who is widely credited with introducing jazz to France.

The Harlem Hellfighters were an all-black military regiment that fought in World War I, during which the armed forces were segregated.

"[The white establishment] did not think that African-Americans had the intelligence to think clearly," Brooks says.The French army absorbed the Hellfighters to help replenish their own ranks, finally giving them the opportunity to fight that the U.S. Army denied them. "But in the end, the Hellfighters left town without a major incident. And the band was playing," Miller told an interviewer for the Caanan White/Courtesy of Broadway Books Lawrence McVey, received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart when he was wounded while leading an assault on a machine gun nest.

Only 42,000 black troops served in combat units: the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions.

Col. Reginald Sanders, former commander of the 369th Sustainment Brigade, and Col. Reginald Sanders, former commander of the 369th Sustainment Brigade, and Their training prepared them for combat, but racial segregation in the U.S. Army kept them from marching to the front lines in France. The 369th Infantry was organized on 29 June 1916 at New York City. So a lot of them expected that the America they left should be the same when they returned, which was the opposite of what African Americans expected.”The result, Salter explained, was the powder keg that led to the Red Summer.A map of race violence in the U.S. during the Red Summer“This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return,” wrote African American intellectual leader and civil rights activist W.E.B Du Bois in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in May 1919, according to a panel in the exhibit. In 1919, he was furious over how little fruit the effort had born, Salter said. "Melville Miller was 16 when he joined the Harlem Hellfighters, which was first formed as the 15th New York National Guard regiment. Decades after World War I, he could still recall marching through formerly German-occupied territory. "[It was] a powder keg!" (Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture)Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1966 They were issued inferior uniforms and weapons, and then, in an emergency, they were transferred to the French army, whose officers were explicitly told to treat them as second-class soldiers.

They go forward or they die,” Col. William Hayward, the white commander of the 369th, is believed to have said, according to the exhibit.Salter said the respect that French troops showed towards the 93rd division played a role in the 93rd's success.“If you treat someone with respect as a person, they’re going to respond better,” he said. Henry Johnson of the 369th Infantry Regiment was awarded the French Croix de Guerre for bravery during an outnumbered battle with German soldiers, Feb. 12, 1919.On one occasion, the 93rd’s then-Pvt.

"They came home to some of the worst racial violence in American history, the Red Summer of 1919," Brooks explains. The National Archives As he turned, a German grenade exploded and peppered his body with shrapnel, collapsing him to the ground. "The French called them the 'Men of Bronze' out of respect, and the Germans called them the 'Harlem Hellfighters' out of fear," explains "We did not give ourselves our name [the 'Harlem Hellfighters']," says Col. Reginald Sanders, a former commander of the 369th Sustainment Brigade, which descended from the original World War I unit.

One of them was Horace Pippin, an iron foundry worker who became an infantryman and then an acclaimed painter.