Black on the battlefield: Canada’s forgotten First World War battalion

November 11, 2018 4:30 AM

Young black men determined to serve their country – men who had left jobs and uprooted families in pursuit of a military unit that might accept them – were being rejected by recruiters from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. One commanding officer in New Brunswick turned away 20 healthy black recruits at once because he believed his white soldiers should not "have to mingle with Negroes,” according to a letter he wrote to his superiors in Halifax.

After two years of lobbying – fighting to fight – a compromise was cautiously forged. Black Canadians were told they could enlist if they could muster enough men to form their own, segregated battalion, which would be based out of the way in tiny Pictou, a community on Nova Scotia’s North Shore that had no black residents.

Still, the plan was to recruit more than 1,000 men from across the country from Canada and, ultimately, the United States and the British West Indies.

But there was a catch: The battalion’s soldiers would not be given guns.

posted by clawsoon (4 comments total)

Thanks for posting this!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 7:40 AM on November 11, 2018 [1 favorite]

Saw this just after hearing the reading of a poem from the point of view of a FN vet on CBC.

Themes were strikingly similar to this from the article:

“They went to the war in the face of systemic and individual racism. They went because their country, however they came to it, was their country, too. They had families to protect," she said, adding: “They came back to those same systemic issues. And they kept to themselves as a means of survival.”

(The full poem is recited in the segment with RH Thompson here if interested, in which Thompson discusses how individual stories can tell the full story of war experience, including those stories largely ignored).

These stories always come to mind when I hear the simplistic and sometimes even jingoistic reporting and speeches that say war won "our freedom".

Whose freedom?

Thank you for this post.
posted by chapps at 11:34 AM on November 11, 2018

I just read about this in David Olusoga's Black and British and how this was apparantly policy for the British ministries of War and Colonies, worried about having Black soldiers fighting white enemies and getting used to that.

So even the people who did manage to join up mostly got to do the grunt work rather than actual fighting.

And then got deliberately left out of the victory parades.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:07 PM on November 11, 2018 [4 favorites]

I had no idea. Disgraceful, how these brave men were used. Thanks for posting,
posted by rodlymight at 6:27 PM on November 11, 2018