Son Of City Attorney Writes About African-Americans Who Went 'Over There'

(February is African American History Month. Patch will have periodic articles with a local connection to the subject. The Library of Congress web site is an excellent place to begin to broaden your gaze.)

Mothers tend to be proud of their children but San Leandro City Attorney Jayne Williams has particular reason to beam about her son, historian Chad Williams, who has written a book about African American servicemen in World War I.

Williams, an associate professor of history at Hamilton College in New York State, said he initially wanted to study African American soldiers and veterans of the Civil War.

But he realized that there was a void in the scholarship on African Americans in what then-President Woodrow Wilson dubbed "the war to end all wars" and so he shifted gears.

The result was "Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era."

In addition to writing about black soldiers during the war, Williams studied how their experiences helped create a new consciousness and pride.

For instance, Williams writes in "Torchbearers" that:

"Military service allowed black troops to reconstitute their sense of manhood in such a way that both challenged negative constructions of black masculinity and affirmed their identity as true men."

That had a ripple effect on women, as Williams writes that:

"Black women assertively entered the public sphere to profess their commitment to the race, through their aid to African American soldiers and to the nation . . . (creating) new opportunities for black female social and political engagement."

The net result was to inspire a "New Negro" militancy that sparked the hopes of black people throughout the country and ultimately helped lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

"Torchbearers" has achieved critical acclaim in its field.

It won the Organization of American Historians' Liberty Legacy Foundation Award as the best book of 2011 on civil rights history.

The Society for Military History honored "Torchbearers" with its 2011 Distinguished Book Award for U.S. military history.

Like the movie "Red Tails" about the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, "Torchbearers" illuminates the little-recognized contributions of black soldiers in the wars that preceded desegregation.

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