96 ChaPter 2
became a professor of sociology. In 1903, he published The Souls of Black Folk,
a book in which he attacked Washington’s strategy of obedience and waiting.
DuBois believed that African-Americans should never accept White suprem-
acy, but should demand educational opportunities, seek higher goals and not
settle for menial and low-paid work, and they should vigorously fight for
equal rights. In 1906, he helped found the Niagara Movement, a group orga-
nized to fight for civil rights.
It did not last long, however, and in 1909 he helped start an organization
that would become the most important in civil rights history, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, the group that
would be at the forefront of the legal struggles for Black rights in the 1950s
and 1960s, and he was the editor of its magazine, The Crisis. DuBois, like
most Black figures, believed that Wilson’s words about making the world safe
for democracy should apply to African Americans as well, so he urged his
community to support the Great War and used his talks and writings as a way
to show how patriotic he and other Blacks could be. Even with the support
of Black leaders and the participation in the war by huge numbers of soldiers,
who performed courageously and admirably, Wilson did not budge, and racial
animosities continued. For Blacks, this situation was becoming intolerable.
Service in the military, one of the clearest marks of loyalty and patriotism,
seemed to mean nothing for Black troops. Fenton Johnson, a well-known
Black poet, wrote “The New Day” to describe the frustration of African
Americans: “For we have been with thee in No Man’s Land/Through lake of
fire and down to Hell itself/And now we ask of thee our liberty/ Our free-
dom in the land of Stars and Stripes.” Wilson and his successors ignored such
pleas for basic rights, however. Even worse, tensions between Blacks and
Whites often became violent in this period. In a St. Louis racial confrontation
in 1917, Whites killed 40 Blacks and had 9 of their own die; in Chicago, in a
dispute over which part of a beach was open to Blacks, 23 African Americans
and 15 Whites died; and Whites even lynched 10 Blacks who were still in
their U.S. Army uniforms. But the worst incident occurred in Houston, Texas.
In the immediate aftermath of the incident in East St. Louis, the War
Department sent an infantry battalion to Houston, Texas, to police the con-
struction of a National Guard training facility to be called Camp Logan.
Made up entirely of African-Americans in the segregated “old army,” this unit
had served in Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines and was used to reasonably