What was the 369th infantry

Throughout much of April and May, the th was in the forward positions, and immediately impressed the French with their skill and courage in combat.

Beginning in May , the th entered the trenches at the Second Battle of the Marne and later fought with distinction in the Allied counteroffensives of Champagne-Marne, Aisne-Marne, and Meuse-Argonne. On November 20, , the th was the first regiment of all the Allied armies to reach the Rhine River in Germany.

After days of continual combat, the th never lost a foot of ground nor had a man taken prisoner. Click Here.

Badger, Reid. NY: Oxford UP, Green, Robert E. In May they were defending an isolated lookout post on the Western Front, when they were attacked by a German unit. Though wounded, they refused to surrender, fighting on with whatever weapons were at hand.

They were the first Americans awarded the Croix de Guerre, and they were not the only Harlem Hellfighters to win awards; of its officers and men received individual medals and the unit received a Croix de Guerre for taking Sechault. In December , when Colonel Hayward's men had departed from New York City, they had not been permitted to participate in the farewell parade of New York's National Guard, the so-called Rainbow division.

The reason Hayward was given was that "black is not a color in the Rainbow. After the parade, city officials honored the troops at a special dinner. What kind of America had they come home to? World War I initiated changes on the home front that permanently affected the lives of Americans, black and white. While defense production was up, the war had cut off the flow of immigrant labor.

Workers were needed in the North, and African Americans seized the opportunity. Eagerly they left behind a rural South of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and oppressive economic conditions.

The Great Migration -- the most massive internal migration in American history -- brought several million African Americans North before the Depression stemmed its flow. With the migrants, black culture entered the American mainstream, changing it forever.

Musical styles never heard before outside the South became "hot. The Harlem Renaissance blossomed in one of the nation's greatest artistic outpourings, bringing to the fore a great poet, Langston Hughes. On the political front, participation in World War I did little to directly advance the equal rights of African Americans. But for many Americans both black and white, it did heighten awareness of the gulf that existed between American rhetoric and reality.

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Mikkelsen Jr. The th Regiment known as the Harlem Hellfighters became famous during World War I not only for their courage on the battlefield, but for th Regimental Army Band. They were an all-Black band in the segregated army led by James Reese Europe, who many credit as helping to initiate the Harlem Renaissance.