Victory Monument commemorating the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an African-American unit that served in France reorganized as the 370th U.S. Infantry Regiment of the 93rd Division. The bronze sculpture is by Leonard Crunelle and was erected in 1927.The regiment saw action at St. Mihiel, the Argonne Forest, Mont des Singes, and in the Oise-Aisne Offensive. The monument lists the names of the 137 soldiers of the regiment who lost their lives in the war. © 2013, John M. Shea
Victory
"I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great Democracy, but its betrayer, and does more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her standards of law and of right than the words of her statesmen or the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior. How shall we commend democracy to the acceptance of other peoples, if we disgrace our own by proving that it is, after all, no protection to the weak? Every mob contributes to German lies about the United States what her most gifted liars cannot improve upon by way of calumny. They can at least say that such things cannot happen in Germany except in times of revolution, when law is swept away!"
Excerpt from President Woodrow Wilson's July 26, 1918 speech against lynching, made at the urging of Robert R. Moton of the Tuskegee Institute. In 1917, the year the United States entered the war, there were 38 lynchings in the country, 36 of them of Blacks. In 1918, there were 64, 60 of them of Blacks. (Counts from www.famous-trials.com/sheriffshipp/1084-lynchingsyear. Details on some two horrific 1918 examples of this loathsome community crime available at www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings. Both sources as of July 25, 1918.)
World War I and America by A. Scott Berg, page 508, copyright © 2017 by Literary Classics of the United States, publisher: The Library of America, publication date: 2017
1918-07-26, Woodrow Wilson, Wilson, 1918, July, lynching, mob, 370th U.S. Infantry Regiment, 370th Regiment, 93rd Division, African-American
