In July 1918, shortly after American troops won their first major battle of World War I, in northern France, W. E. B. Du Bois published a contentious editorial in The Crisis, the NAACP-affiliated magazine he founded as a 'record of the darker races.' Du Bois, who hoped that African Americans' support for militarism abroad might lead to more democratic treatment at home, urged readers to 'forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.' But rather than ushering in the era of racial harmony that Du Bois imagined, the end of World War I saw a vicious backlash to wartime integration efforts: The next year, Black servicemen and civilians alike faced extraordinary racist violence across the United States. As Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, explains in the new documentary The League, 'It convinced a lot of Black people all the more that we need to...
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