In Freedom Struggles, Adriane Lentz-Smith reclaims World War I as a watershed in the African American freedom movement. Tracing the intersection of American Jim Crow and European colonialism, Lentz-Smith casts the stories and struggles of black American soldiers in a Pan-African movement designed to capture the fruits of the Great War—democracy, self determination, and citizenship—and to institute them into the daily lives of those who fought to win it.

Lentz-Smith argues that for many young black Americans, entry into World War I presented an opportunity to earn the citizenship, manhood, and dignity denied by Jim Crow. Black soldiers channeled violence and masculinity to announce their full American citizenship in work camps and on battlefields and found themselves seduced by the promise of the French “imaginary,” Lentz-Smith's term denoting limited racial inclusion and equality, announced most daringly through the black soldier's liaisons with white French women (110).

But as Jim Crow traveled with the American Expeditionary Forces and cut an easement across the French landscape, it snapped this “imaginary” and sapped hopes. Their dreams of equality, citizenship, and manhood dashed by a tenacious and violent white supremacy, many black American soldiers returned home discouraged and puzzled, only to witness their economic prospects limited. The violence that erupted during “Red” summer in cities across America testified to hopes frustrated by the war.

Lentz-Smith grounds complex narratives of manhood, citizenship, sexuality, and nation in the individual stories and struggles of African Americans touched by the war. Katherine Johnson was a reformer, teacher, and volunteer in France. Ely Green was a chauffeur and soldier. Charles Hamilton Houston and Haywood Hall are more familiar as the future NAACP litigation strategist and the American Marxist leader, respectively.

Each watched as the rhetoric of sexuality and violence were twisted to the purposes of Jim Crow. Southern authorities grew alarmed by the ways uniforms and service seemed to alter the men they touched. Consequently, the Houston Riot of 1917, the actions of the raucous 8th Illinois, which tore a strip across the South on its way to France, and Mississippi senator James Vardaman's complaints about “French-women-ruined Negroes,” each bolstered Jim Crow (83).

If the fields of France were the testing grounds of a nascent black American manhood defined by duty, labor, and violence, then the streets of postwar Paris promised to connect radical proposals of self-determination and democracy, in order to remake black Americans and the world over. Lentz-Smith defines the Pan-African struggle by the efforts of Black leaders to secure recognition and by the resistance of French authorities and a postwar leadership unwilling to confront white supremacy as a global problem. Crisis editor W. E. B. Dubois organized the first of several Pan-African conferences, involving American, African, and colonial leaders, to parallel and rival the Paris peace negotiations and spotlight the work it was not doing.

On the home front, a mix of futility and resolve shaped postwar life. Sergeant Edgar Caldwell, on leave in Anniston, Alabama, in 1918 was convicted and executed for killing Cecil Linten, a white streetcar conductor who was in the process of using a “heavy piece of iron” to remind Caldwell of his place (174). Caldwell's swift prosecution by a southern court encapsulates “the futility of heroic sacrifice” (204). But, at the same time, Lentz-Smith explains, the event galvanized Anniston's black community and steered organizations like the NAACP and leaders including Charles Hamilton Houston and Emmett Scott, special assistant to the secretary of war, to the cause of black citizenship. Like Dubois's Pan-African movement, this mobilization was a harbinger of things to come.

Lentz-Smith's terrific new book is a balanced and beautifully written account of the black soldier's experience in World War I. It raises important questions about the ways that law and status in the United States is shaped by developments abroad. And, by illustrating the failure of law to accommodate the new citizenship claims of black soldiers, it implicates law and courts in the intense, episodic violence that unfolded in the years bracketing American involvement in the war. At the same time, the book is also about things to come, about defining an order that includes African Americans, soldier and civilian. I would have liked to have seen some nuance in Lentz-Smith's discussion of the citizenship and rights that were so critical to the new identity of black soldiers and the world that would include them. I could not help wonder if some rights, like social and political rights, were prized over others, and if citizenship meant the same thing to black soldiers across regions and age spectrums. World War I was a moment marked by consciousness and opportunity. I wonder if this lack of definition and agreement was also a reason why so little changed?