We Are Goin' on

We Are Goin’ On

Much like Frederick Douglass did during the Civil War, Du Bois saw World War I as an opportunity to gain civil rights through military service. During World War I, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote an editorial “Close Ranks” published in The Crisis encouraging black men to enlist. Du Bois explained in his editorial:

“Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.” (Journey to Freedom 43) (Emphasis added)

Du Bois believed like the service of black men during the Civil War led to President Abraham Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks serving in World War I would “lead to similar political and legal advances” (Journey to Freedom 42). However, the oppressive treatment of black servicemen during the war and the continued oppressive treatment of the returning black servicemen after the war had Du Bois regret the advice he had given to induce black men to serve.

The failure of the military service of the black men to garner them entry into the freedoms they had earned for others, caused the migrations of southern blacks heading North and West in search of social, economic, and political freedom. The migration started as a trickle, but soon their departure turned into a flood, for ever changing the landscape of America. The Great Migration was a “watershed in African American history” (inmotionaame). At first the South was proud and ambivalent, pretended that it did not care. “As the North grows blacker, the South grows whiter” (Isabel Wilkerson). “Booker T. Washington was vehemently against abandonment of the South and strongly discouraged it, Frederick Douglass, who saw it coming but died before it began, was against the very thought and called it…“a premature, disheartening surrender”(Isabel Wilkerson).

With the help of Jim Crow laws of the south, the White