Inhospitable Homelands: Practices of Inclusion and Exclusion in African American War Narratives

Abstract

War is often a pivotal part of a nation’s self-written narrative. The experiences of soldiers and their tales of valour and glory are often catechized into their homelands’ defining past, and those nations, in turn, honor those veterans’ sacrifice by welcoming those who came back and cherishing the memory of those who did not. And yet, there are instances in which certain individuals are barred from participating in that sacrifice or even receiving the corresponding welcoming honors or elevated memory. In the history of the United States, where the state of citizenship has not always been crystal clear, its Army has often mimicked the practices of inclusion and exclusion existing within its other institutions and society in general and, as a consequence, the participation of ethnic groups in the history of the US armed conflicts has varied from virtually non-existent, to hardly allowed, to openly segregated, to biased, and so has the acceptance of ethnic veterans within the society. In the case of the African American community, we find a great amount of fictional or semi-autobiographical narratives in which these practices are amply portrayed and criticized. Through the depiction of the protagonists’ war experiences, these narratives often focus on instances of racial discrimination and race-oriented violence within the military as well as upon the return home, where soldiers would face a society that would deny them the same freedoms they were called to defend. This chapter will analyze how issues of manhood, social recognition, welcoming, and belonging intermingle with the African American war experience in a variety of these narratives, including Junius Edwards’s If We Must Die (1963), John Oliver Killens’s And then We Heard the Thunder (1963), and Victor Daly’s Not Only War: A Story of Two Great Conflicts (1932).

We built this country. Bled for it. I’m not gonna let anybody tell me I can’t fight for it.

—Sam Wilson, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”