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FREEDOMWAYS                             SECOND QUARTER 1973

equality and first class citizenship. They were not revolting so much against the system as they were against their exclusion from participation in that system.

  From the time the First Amenia Conference was held in 1916 until the Second in 1933, some of the younger and some of the older Blacks wrote more and more about economic problems. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen edited the Messenger especially emphasizing cooperation with organized labor. In 1917 in response to the East St. Louis riot, New York Blacks organized a silent protest parade and ten thousand marched down Fifth Avenue on July 28. When the Parade Committee merged with the NAACP, many formerly uninvolved Blacks were brought into the Association.

  Sections of the NAACP bitterly opposed a segregated officers' training camp for Blacks but in the end put themselves on record as in favor since there was no chance of having Blacks trained as officers in regular training camps. The Central Committee of Negro College Men, established at Howard University in 1917, collected fifteen hundred volunteer college men in an effort to answer General Leonard Wood's challenge to secure two hundred Negroes of college rank for the establishment of a Negro officers' school. Southern protests over the training of northern Negroes in the South forced a conference of high government officials. It was decided logistically impossible to agree to southern demands although an attempt was made to do so. After Wilson declared war on Germany, recruiting stations generally refused to accept Blacks. The Selective Service Act of 1917 provided for enlistment of all able-bodied men from 21 to 31, and on July 5, registration day, more than seven hundred thousand Blacks registered. Emmett J. Scott, appointed by Secretary of War Newton D. Baker as special assistant to the Secretary to serve as "confidential adviser in matters affecting the interests of ten million Negroes in the United States and the part they are to play in the present war," called in 1918 a conference of thirty-one leading black newspapermen. They supported the war, denounced mob violence and called for the use of Negro Red Cross nurses, the appointment of Negro war correspondents, and the return of Colonel Charles Young to active duty. One of the few Negro journals not to support the war wholeheartedly was the Messenger, published by Randolph and Owen. For an article "Pro-Germanism Amongst the Negroes," they were sentenced to jail from one to two and a half years and the Messenger was denied second-class mailing privileges.

  Between June and December 1919, seventy-six blacks were lynched

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