World War Z author Max Brooks is out with a new, non-fiction graphic novel, The Harlem Hellfighters, about the 369th Regiment, the first African-American infantry unit to fight in World War I. Nick Romeo praises the way the book handles the moral complexity of the story:
Brooks doesn’t simply romanticize the men of the 369th; he’s aware of the ugly motives that may have prompted them to fight. The same soldier who delivers the subversive history lesson explains his enlistment like this: “White folks payin’ me to kill other white folks?!?! Glory, hallelujah!” To present the soldiers only as noble patriots persecuted by an evil system would have made them caricatures. Instead, Brooks makes them human, and as such they are subject to the same distorting rages as members of any other race. The soldier doesn’t seek revenge against particular white folks; he wants to kill them indiscriminately. No race, Brooks suggests, is immune to racism.
This moral complexity is just one of the novel’s many achievements. Dialogue and imagery are often richly juxtaposed; in one frame, the word “hero” hovers beside the image of a soldier vomiting over the side of the ship. Heroism isn’t all crisply snapping salutes and courageous charges at the enemy; it has a messy, unglamorous side as well.
Ben Mathis-Lilley interviews the author:
Why were these men, so badly treated in their own country, willing to fight for it?
They understood what it meant to be an American more than white Americans. We live in a country of really rare ideals and rights, and I think a lot of people take those for granted. I think these guys were aware of ideals because their country hadn’t lived up to them. This was the first war for ideals we’d ever fought. It wasn’t a revolution or a land grab. It was to “make the world safe for democracy.” You can’t appreciate democracy until you don’t have it. I could be wrong, but I think that resonated with them.
And yet it still took decades for the country to even begin to fully extend democracy to black Americans.
They came back to a tremendous backlash. You should google a newsreel of the KKK march in Washington, D.C. There’s an iconic image of thousands of Klan members marching with the Capitol in the background. That’s in the ’20s; that’s after the war. They endured a tremendous backlash. But even that backlash ultimately pushed the cause of freedom further. They didn’t benefit from it. But their children did.
The Dish 