Excerpt from "Twenty-Five Years in the Black Belt," the autobiography of William J. Edwards.
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@ Alabama Department of Archives and History, 624 Washington Avenue, Montgomery, Alabama 36130
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Included here is Chapter 20, "The Negro and the World War." The chapter begins by describing African American support for the war effort, but then turns to a discussion of democracy, equality, and civil rights: "Before the war, two expressions were commonly used by the white man and the Negro. The Negro's expression was this:--'I haven't any country,' and the white man's expression was:--'This is a white man's country.' Now both of these classes are saying, 'This is our country.'...we should win this war, because democracy was right and autocracy is wrong, and if we lose, and God forbid that we should, the fault will not be in democracy, but it will be due to the fact that we are not practicing what we preach." Edwards was a student of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in the late nineteenth century.
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600 Ppi Tiff
1918 1918 00 00
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