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January 19, 2007 Adriane Lentz-Smith (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) Saving Sergeant Caldwell: Ten days before Christmas in 1918, African American army sergeant Edgar Caldwell got into a fight with a white conductor and motorman aboard a streetcar in downtown Anniston, Alabama. In the fray, the soldier pulled his gun, killed the conductor, and wounded the motorman. As the case raced through the Alabama courts and on to the U.S. Supreme Court, Caldwell’s defenders labeled his actions self-defense, but others claimed that a Yankee Negro soldier had come down south to start trouble. As Caldwell grew from a local confrontation to a national case, it raised questions of African-American political strategizing, federal citizenship, and the meaning of black military service. This paper follows the fortunes of what both black and white Alabamans viewed as a test case of what is coming to us after war. Adriane Lentz-Smith is a Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research covers the black freedom struggle, soldiers and society, and internationalism in African-American thought. She holds a PhD in history from Yale University and is currently completing a book entitled The Great War for Civil Rights: African American Politics, World War I, and the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement. Co-sponsored by the Triangle Legal History Seminar |