Spring Lecture Series: African Americans and the War for Democracy

View map

Time & Place

    • The Mariners' Museum and Park

      March 7, 2019, 7 p.m.

      100 Museum Drive
      Newport News, VA 23606
    • Phone: 757-596-2222
      Highway Exit: 258A from I-64
      Website: Click here to visit us online

Description

For many of the 386,000 African Americans who served in the military during World War I, the Great War was their civil rights movement. Indeed, the generation before Martin Luther King forged their civil rights ideology by appropriating President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric in service to their own visions of self-determination and by protesting his Administration’s expansionist vision of Jim Crow. This talk will focus on the experience of African American civilians and soldiers in the war years, with a particular focus on how World War I shaped the black freedom struggle.