On November 14, 1918, the Harrisburg Telegraph ran a letter to the editor from a schoolteacher named Harry Elmer James, an Black educator in the nearby industrial community of Steelton, Pennsylvania.

The letter, published three days after World War I ended with a victory for the Allied powers, was a powerful statement in regards to the rights and liberties of African Americans in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

Infamously, the United States participated in World War I on the political argument that it was fighting for American ideals of liberty, freedom, and democracy across the world. For Black Americans across America, however, their everyday reality ran contrary to those ideals.

Jim Crow reigned across the nation, putting White and Black Americans into two different spheres of existence in the same place. Black soldiers served at the front lines in segregated units. Black Americans also faced the threat of lynching and extra-judicial violence across the South.  

In the White House, the man campaigning across the world on his “14 Points” to “make the world safe for democracy” supported white supremacist policies at home and devoutly believed in segregation. President Woodrow Wilson was a Southerner, an apologist for slavery, and a lifelong believer in “The Lost Cause.”

It was in this environment that Harry James wrote his letter in November 1918 and eloquently wrote pleading for the equality for Black Americans that would take another generation, another World War, and a Civil Rights Movement to achieve.

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COLORED MAN’S HOPE

To the Editor of the Telegraph:

It is the fondest hope of the colored race, that with this cruel war ended, that our people shall be given their full rights and privileges as American citizens, and that all forms of race discrimination will have disappeared.

We further trust that men will be measured rather by their ability to do than by their color. The black man is courageously bearing his share of the burden of this world war and is justly proud to do his duty in support of the Stars and Stripes.

Sometimes we think in the strain of our great W. E.B. DuBois, who on one occasion in speaking of our race said, “a case not altogether hopeless, but unhopeful,” and he further states our sentiments when he says, “There shall dawn a day when it shall not be asked of the artist, is he black, but can he draw?”

When it shall not be asked of the workman is he white, but does he know? And we trust that that day is not in the far distant future.

Fervently do we pray that the spirit of democracy will have so permeated the minds of the citizenry of America, that when the black veterans of this war, tattered and torn by shot and shell and exposure on the battlefields of Europe, shall return to this country, that they shall find race prejudice blotted out forever, and that they shall be greeted by a grateful nation and accorded all the glory and honor due the heroes of this war without regard to color or nationality.

In every war in which America has been engaged, the black man has gallantly played his part. We can trace his work from Old Crispus Attucks and Nick Biddle to their heroic stand in Cuba in the battles of San Juan and El Caney, and in the present war, their memorable battle at the bend of the Marne, where no German was able to cross.

And when all is o’er and when the dove of peace shall soar unmolested over the recently turbulent fields of battle, may we not be forgotten in the reckoning.

HARRY ELMER JAMES, A.B. [Bachelor of Arts]

312 Lincoln Street, Steelton

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Harry Elmer James was a native of Baltimore, Maryland who attended Lincoln University near Philadelphia and taught school in Steelton, Pennsylvania in the early 20th century. He later moved to Hopewell, Virginia where he served as the principal of Carter G. Woodson School, a segregated school for Black children. Virginia schools did not begin desegregating until February 1959.

He also became a Presbyterian minister, serving churches in the vicinity of Hopewell and Petersburg.

James died in Virginia in 1947, himself never experiencing an America where all Black Americans experienced the “full rights and privileges of American citizens.”

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