Stovall describes it as ‘ paradoxical and deeply tragic’ not least because treatment of African Americans in uniform by their own Command was dreadful - banned from joining the Bastille Day Victory Parades in Paris in 1919 and too often, once home, picked out and picked upon by ungrateful white supremacists - indeed lynchings reached an annual peak immediately after the war.įar from being color blind the French looked at African Americans through a ‘haze of stereotypes’ writes Tyler Stovall (p.17) but at least when the French saw the discriminatory communiques sent out to Mayors from the American Expeditionary Force Command warning and advising them how to treat Blacks they responded by destroying such papers and ignoring the advice. The answer lies in the hope they had that self-sacrifice and the clearest demonstration of their worth to their country would change hearts, behaviours and legislation ‘to win the respect of a nation that had always treated them shabbily’.
Why would African Americans come forward in their hundreds of thousands to fight for a country that treated them so badly? Though here too they could find they were still ‘victimised, oppressed and excluded from mainstream American life' Stovall points out. Long before the War tens of thousands of African Americans were migrating north for work and to escape the worst oppression on the south of the country. (p.2)Īt the time, African Americans ‘learned from an early age that failure to observe the expected deferential posture in public would be met with savage reprisals'.
As Stovall writes, ‘Black America as a whole remained trapped by virulent white racism and grinding poverty at the bottom of American society’. Tyler Stoval tackles the dilemma faced by African Americans at the time who were being encouraged to fight for ‘their nation and democracy’ while at home they suffered segregation and often brutal racist attacks. ‘Paris Noir’ is an introduction the jazz age and how Black GIs came to France, stayed and laid the foundations for the creation of a vibrant African American community in Paris after the First World War. Paris Noir spans several decades, with the First World War the kickstart to the appearance in France of many African Americans eager to enjoy freedoms and civil treatment that were rare in their own country at the time. Tyler Stovall's motivation to write 'Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light' came from his own grandfather's war experience
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