Central to Every Front: Black Veterans, the Double Victory and the Making of American Democracy

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the guns fell silent on the Western Front. A year later, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day, and in 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the law that renamed it Veterans Day, honoring everyone who has served. The holiday asks the nation to remember. For Black Americans, remembering has always meant holding two truths at once: Black men and women have served on every front in every American war, and for most of that history they returned to a country that withheld the very democracy they had defended.

The Pittsburgh Courier gave that tension a name in 1942: the Double V, victory over fascism abroad and over racism at home. But the idea is as old as the republic.

At the Founding: Bunker Hill and the Royal Louis

Roughly 5,000 Black men served the Patriot cause in the American Revolution. At Bunker Hill in June 1775, Peter Salem, a formerly enslaved man from Framingham, was credited with shooting British Major John Pitcairn. Salem Poor fought so well that fourteen officers petitioned the Massachusetts legislature to recognize him. In Philadelphia, a fourteen-year-old free Black boy named James Forten served as a powder boy aboard the privateer Royal Louis in 1781. Captured by the British, he refused an offer of passage to England, fearing betrayal into slavery in the West Indies. He spent months on a prison ship and later became one of the wealthiest abolitionists in the country. The pattern was set early: service first, citizenship withheld. (See also Battles of Lexington and Concord and Black Patriots.)

The War for Freedom Itself

In the Civil War, Black Americans did not wait to be liberated. About 179,000 men served in the United States Colored Troops, roughly a tenth of the Union Army, and some 19,000 more served in the Navy. On July 18, 1863, the 54th Massachusetts led the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina; Sgt. William H. Carney carried the flag back despite multiple wounds and became one of the first Black recipients of the Medal of Honor. A year earlier, Robert Smalls had steered the Confederate steamer Planter out of Charleston harbor to the Union fleet. Harriet Tubman guided the June 1863 Combahee River Raid that freed some 750 people, and Thomas Morris Chester reported from the front for the Philadelphia Press. Black soldiers were paid less than white soldiers until 1864, and the 54th refused its unequal pay for eighteen months rather than accept the insult.

Buffalo Soldiers and San Juan Hill

After the war, Congress created the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry. These Buffalo Soldiers served on the Western frontier, a history that also bound them to the dispossession of Native nations. In 1898 the 10th Cavalry fought at Kettle Hill and San Juan Hill in Cuba, and Col. James H. Young commanded the all-Black 3rd North Carolina Volunteer Infantry, officered entirely by Black men. That same year, white supremacists overthrew Wilmington's elected government. Eight years later, in Brownsville, Texas, President Theodore Roosevelt dismissed 167 Black soldiers without trial, a story we told in The Uniform and the Badge.

"Over There" and Back Again

About 380,000 Black Americans served in World War I. The Harlem Hellfighters of the 369th Infantry, assigned to the French army because the American command would not fight beside them, spent 191 days under fire. Pvt. Henry Johnson fought off a German raiding party in May 1918 and received the French Croix de Guerre; the United States awarded him the Medal of Honor only in 2015. Eugene Bullard flew for France because no American unit would let him fly. The Hellfighters marched up Fifth Avenue in February 1919, and within months the Red Summer swept the country. Veterans in uniform were among those lynched, including Powell Green in North Carolina. Across the British Empire, Black colonial troops also rose, as in the British West Indies Regiment revolt of 1918. Our companion story today, Lost in the Bristol Channel, restores the names of the Black sailors who died aboard the Coast Guard cutter Tampa six weeks before the Armistice.

The Double Victory

More than one million Black Americans served in World War II. The Tuskegee Airmen, including Howard Adolphus Wooten, escorted bombers over Europe. Maj. Charity Adams commanded the 855 women of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, who cleared a backlog of millions of pieces of mail in England and France. Congress awarded the unit its Gold Medal in 2022.

Home was no safer. In February 1946, police in Batesburg, South Carolina, beat Sgt. Isaac Woodard, still in uniform, and left him blind. The outrage helped move President Harry S. Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948, ordering equal treatment in the armed forces.

Korea and Vietnam

Integration came on the battlefield in Korea, where segregated units such as the 24th Infantry were disbanded under combat pressure. (African American Troops and the Korean War.) A young West Point graduate, Roscoe Robinson Jr., earned the Bronze Star in Korea, commanded a battalion in Vietnam and in 1982 became the Army's first Black four-star general.

In Vietnam, Black soldiers died at disproportionate rates in the war's early years. On October 22, 1965, Pfc. Milton Olive III, eighteen, threw himself on a grenade to save four comrades and became the first Black Medal of Honor recipient of the war. Dissent was also a form of conscience: Muhammad Ali refused induction, Sammy Younge Jr., a Navy veteran, was killed in 1966 for trying to use a whites-only restroom, and Black sailors protested discrimination aboard the USS *Constellation in 1972.

The Gulf and the War on Terror

After the draft ended in 1973, the all-volunteer force came to rely heavily on Black enlistment, especially among working-class families for whom the military offered steady pay, training and college benefits. In the 1991 Gulf War, Gen. Colin Powell served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Black soldiers made up nearly a quarter of the Army's deployed force.

The wars that followed the September 11 attacks, in Afghanistan from October 2001 to August 2021 and in Iraq from March 2003 to December 2011, produced a new generation of veterans. Those who served in these offensive operations are veterans by every measure the nation uses, and Black Americans carried a heavy share of the load. We traced that history in African American Soldiers and the Afghanistan War. Lloyd J. Austin III commanded U.S. forces in Iraq before becoming the first Black secretary of defense in 2021.

On October 17, 2005, near Samarra, Iraq, Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe's Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck a bomb and burst into flames. Soaked in fuel, he went back into the burning vehicle again and again to pull out his soldiers, suffering burns over most of his body. He died weeks later. It took sixteen years, and a campaign by his family and comrades, before President Joe Biden presented his Medal of Honor in December 2021. The delay echoes Henry Johnson's. The fight that follows service continued at home, too: burn-pit exposure went largely unrecognized until the PACT Act of 2022, and Black veterans still face documented gaps in VA disability approvals.

What We Owe

From Peter Salem to Alwyn Cashe, the record is not a story at the margins of American war. It is central to it. Black veterans also came home and led the freedom movement: Medgar Evers had landed at Normandy, and Hosea Williams fought in Europe. Veterans Day honors service. Honoring Black service fully means remembering what the nation withheld and finishing the democracy they defended.

Factbook: Black Americans in Uniform

- American Revolution: about 5,000 Black Patriots

- Civil War: about 179,000 in the U.S. Colored Troops; about 19,000 in the Navy

- World War I: about 380,000 served

- World War II: more than 1 million served

- Executive Order 9981: July 26, 1948

- First Black four-star general: Roscoe Robinson Jr., 1982

- Afghanistan: Oct. 2001 – Aug. 2021; Iraq: March 2003 – Dec. 2011