Dec 11

Dec 11 Black Women And Their Service In WWI

In the UK, remembrance Sunday is typically held on the Sunday closest to the 11th November. It is a day when we remember all those who perished in the First World War, fighting for the greater good. However, who we remember has become increasingly debated in recent years, with the diversity of the fallen remembered.

Remembering Black Women’s contribution to WWI

Some have attempted to redress this, by highlighting the many Black people who joined the allied fight for victory. However, these attempts have also drawn criticism for focussing on the contributions of Black men to the war effort but ignoring Black women. As Black feminist activist Angela Davis has written, race is often ‘implicitly gendered as male’ and so it is very important to recognise that many Black women also enabled the allied victory in 1918 too (Davis, 1999).

Finding sources on Black women’s contribution to WWI

Yet, locating these Black women within the archives can be challenging. Whilst historians like Anne Samson and Edward Paice have detailed how Black African women supported the war effort on the continent, it is difficult to find the names of these women. Thus, we know that some British troops in Africa used indigenous women and children as ‘carriers’ who helped them transport weapons and food supplies as they moved to fight German troops in Africa. Anne Samson estimates that ‘ 250,000 British allied (Belgian and Portuguese, Black, white, South African “coloured”, Indian and Arab) soldiers served, alongside 1 million carriers who ensured the forces were supplied with food and arms’. But these carriers remain nameless in the record.

African-Caribbean women’s contributions to WWI

Similarly, it is difficult to find the names of the many African-Caribbean women who supported the war effort as well, although the wife of the governor-general of Antigua and Barbuda recently noted that: "Women of every [Caribbean] island supported the cause in several different ways; fundraising for the Red Cross, putting together medical supplies and other provisions, serving as nurses to returning troops and even donating their wages as labourers to the war efforts.” And although we do not know many of these women’s names, we do know that at least 41 women in Trinidad and Tobago served as nurses during WW1.

Nevertheless, a name we do know is that of Afro-Trinidadian campaigner Audrey Lane Jeffers. Upon arriving in Britain in 1914 she met numerous other Black people from the Commonwealth and co-founded the London based Union of Students of African Descent. She also raised funds to support West African troops during the war effort, and worked tirelessly after returning to Trinidad in 1921 to support marginalised women and children in the Caribbean. A highway is now named after her in Trinidad and Tobago.

Black American women’s contributions to WWI

A number of Black women stepped up to help in the United States of America too. In 1918, Matilda Arabelle Evans, the first African-American woman licensed to practice medicine in South Carolina, volunteered in the Medical Service Corps of the US Army. And in the same year, Addie Hunton, Kathryn Johnson and Helen Curtis sailed to France, under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA), and worked to support the 150,000 segregated African-American troops stationed there.

Despite facing suspicion from white military intelligence, who suspected them of supporting African-American civil rights campaigner W.E.B. Du Bois’ and thus labelled them as being from the “Du Bois faction,” these women diligently worked as YMCA welfare workers and even helped improve African-American troops literacy skills (Chandler, 2005) . When they returned to the US, Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson published a book about their experiences in France called Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, and became increasingly active within the NAACP.

Importantly, Two Colored Women was dedicated by Addie Hunton and Kathryn Johnson to “the women of our race, who gave so trustingly and courageously the strongest of their young manhood to suffer and to die for the cause of freedom” (Hunton and Johnson, 1920). And so just like these women wrote, all the way back in 1920, it is important for us in 2020 to never forget the contribution that Black women made to World War I.