In Keene's "Images of Racial Pride..." she makes a concerted effort to prove that black soldiers signed up to serve in World War I with as much an eye on the present need (soldiers on the ground) as their future needs (better status in American politics). Dr. Drouin has been saying the same thing for weeks now. It was interesting that propaganda posters sought to hard to convince African-American citizens explicitly, when they were considered of secondary status at best by the very government that was wooing them for their Saturdays and extra money, but I didn't make out much beyond that.

Then I remembered an article I found last week while looking for columns on feminism. In The Crisis' Christmas edition 1914, they have an opinion column titled "The World War." In it, Dr. Jacques Loeb "analyses with deep insight the 'racial' problem underneath the present war." He spends some time talking about German beliefs in racial superiority, but then the lense is turned inward. The author states "It is hardly necessary to state that by fostering or even tolerating this fetish of racial antipathy we are making it easy for a future militaristic government to induce Americans to go to the front to fight the Japanese" (emphasis mine). 

The fact that The Crisis saw his analysis and put it alongside what The New Bedford Standard "notes the effect of the war on Negro education" is, and The London Evening Standard's remarking "that in the event of a European struggle there was every probability that the French armies in Africa would be dragged into the conflict," shows that black America's worries about their participation in the Great War ran deeper how their soldiers would be treated when they came home. Whereas many of the writers we have read can't seem to get past the idea of if the war will ever end, The Crisis, at least, is looking to the future and seeing nothing good for it.