[Black Americana]
"Colored Man is No Slacker" - WWI Enlistment Poster
Chicago: E.G. Renesch. 1918. Original chromolithographic poster. 19 x 15 1/2 in. (483 x 394 mm). One tiny corner chip upper right, else very good. A rare World War I enlistment poster, published in an effort to recruit African Americans into the U.S. Army. In this poster, a young Black man bids farewell to his sweetheart as his regiment bravely marches past in the background off to war. Patriotism is both literally illustrated and subtly implied with notes of red and white punctuating the flowers around the woman's blue dress.Upon the United States's entry into the First World War in April 1917, many African Americans eagerly enlisted in the military to exercise their civic duty, and to show their patriotism with the hope of being recognized as equal citizens. Over 20,000 Black men enlisted immediately following the declaration of war, and in May, with the enactment of the Select Service Act, the number skyrocketed into the hundreds of thousands. Although by the war's end over 350,000 African Americans had been enlisted or drafted, due to segregation and discrimination within the military, they often found themselves serving in noncombative supportive roles, typically in the Services of Supply section of the American Expeditionary Forces, providing critical engineering and logistical support to the frontline. Notable exceptions to these noncombative roles were the 92nd and 93rd Infantry Divisions, and the 369th Infantry Regiment, better known as the "Harlem Hellfighters," who fought alongside the French Army in April 1918. The Peters Sisters astutely highlighted this oxymoronic ideology in their 1919 poem, "The Slacker": "So when the Victory is won / And the world is at peace / When the shedding of blood is done / And mankind again is free / Uncle Sam, if giving up life / For the deliverance of men / Does not give all, equal rights / Who will be, the slacker then?"
E.G. Renesch was a Chicago-based firm that specialized in chromolithographs of military and patriotic scenes. (21966)
Poster History & Historiography