ve on an adequate scale his fitness or unfitness for command
and leadership. At Fort Des Moines, Iowa, on June 16, 1917, there
assembled the largest body of educated Negroes ever brought
together for a single purpose. The candidates who survive are men
of marked intelligence and ability. Let any man who doubts the
colored men's patriotism go to Fort Des Moines and see men who have
given up professions, business and homes in order to learn to
defend their country and merit a more considerate judgment of their
race. Let any man who doubts the colored man's fidelity and loyalty
come to Fort Des Moines and revise his opinions on what he will
there learn of the spirit that has stood unswervingly behind the
commanding officer in every decision that he has been called upon
to make, even though that decision involved sore disappointment and
shattering of hopes. These men have been started out on correct
lines and will have no false ideas to unlearn."

Hardly any one in America, black or white, believed that 700 Negroes
would be commissioned in the army of the United States to receive
positions of honor not only beside her other troops, but on the field of
battle with the flower of French and English between veteran soldiery.
Everything possible to prevent, somehow or other, seemed to arise. The
men were put through the bitterest drill in the hottest sun, under the
most scorching orders the English language might devise. They
represented every section of the United States. Not once did they
break. The acid test came, when, already pricked by the numerous
situations which arose to flout them, East St. Louis broke forth in the
most savage pogrom Anglo-Saxon culture has ever revealed.

While 1200 Negroes, training for leadership, were undergoing the
terrific process of forced attrition, their nerves turned raw by army
usage, East St. Louis burst forth. Tidings reached Des Moines that the
Illinois militia, called in to break up a race riot at East St. Louis,
had joined the rioters and slaughtered the Negro population of the
community. White women had joined in these attacks, dragging out of
their houses colored women, girls and children, stoning and clubbing
them to death. Aged Negro mammies, afraid to come out of their homes,
had been burned to death by the mob which set fire to them. Black men
had been thrown into Cahokia Creek and stormed with bricks each time