http://dl.lib.brown.edu/repository2/repoman.php?verb=render&id=129294986193000&view=pageturner&pageno=16

The section, entitled In France, of the October 1918 issue of The Crisis (pgs. 16-17 of the images and 276-277 of the magazine) contains a report on the actions of a colored regiment in battle fighting along the Marne front. The regiment fought so bravely that "the French commander of the sector has cited the whole regiment as worthy of receiving the war cross". It's clear that the purpose of publishing this article in The Crisis is to stir up support for the soldiers as they return home from the front, but the report has an interesting way of doing so. First of all, it focuses on the men as a unit, and as a group. This is not a report about the actions of a soldier, but on the actions of a unit. Solidarity and communion is therefore a primary emphasis; for example, when any of the soldiers are given an order, they respond invariably with a "Let's go!". A colonel in one of the colored regiments says, "Tell a hundred of them to do a thing and they'll say the same thing. I hear it a thousand times a day."

The report is illustrating that the unit behaves as a group, with all the members identical to one another in bravery and eagerness. This is a commendation, in a certain way, but it also pigeonholes the soldiers into their race, and identifies them all as "colored". They can't escape this tag even though they are being praised for their actions in relation to it. To me, this seems like a manifestation of the latent racism that is the base on which the article (and the magazine) is being published. It is sort of an unavoidable way to commend the unit; the commendation comes with an inevitable reference to race. It is hard to tell whether the soldiers' race or bravery is most important here, since the writer is trying so hard to equate the two. To do so, the writer has to make a generalization about the African-American race (that their regiments are all exceedingly brave), but this type of thinking (though positive here) is exactly the form that racism takes, in the negative sense. This illustrates the difficult road that the writers of The Crisis have to walk.