Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?

Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights

in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?

Is the kind of America I know worth defending?

Letter to the editor, Pittsburgh Courier, December 1941.

Welcome to the history of the 20th century.

Music The

The Episode 427,

Half American

I want to continue today from where I left off last time.

As a reminder, when I left off, African-American volunteers were fighting in integrated

military units in the Spanish Civil War, while at home the U.S. Army and the Marine Corps

had taken the official position that black

soldiers were inferior. The U.S. Army had exactly four black officers, and two of them were named

Benjamin Oliver Davis. The junior of the two had just graduated from the United States Military Academy, an opportunity his father was denied. The younger Davis was the fourth African American ever to graduate from West Point and the first in the 20th century.

Following his graduation, Benjamin Jr. received his commission as second lieutenant.

His first assignment was to the 24th Infantry Regiment, one of the original Buffalo Soldiers units, based in Fort Benning, Georgia.

And as you may have noticed from the previous episode, the army was inclined to assign black officers to its segregated black units.

A major reason was to avoid a situation in which a white soldier would have to take orders from a black superior officer.

This issue came up during the last war with Colonel Charles Young, the highest-ranking African-American

officer ever in the U.S. Army at the time. A white lieutenant from Mississippi objected to serving

under a black superior officer and protested to the Secretary of War, Newton Baker, requesting a

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