Fort Des Moines Provisional Army Officer Training School
Iowa
In the spring of nineteen seventeen, the United States was preparing to enter the First World War, and a fight was happening on the home front that received almost no attention. Black Americans wanted to serve as officers. The Army did not want them to.
When the United States declared war on Germany in April of nineteen seventeen, West Point had graduated exactly three Black officers in its entire history. The Army's default position was that Black soldiers would serve under white officers, if they served as combat soldiers at all. A coalition of Black college students, Howard University faculty, and NAACP activists mounted a fierce lobbying campaign. They argued to President Woodrow Wilson and Secretary of War Newton Baker that Black men had the education, the discipline, and the patriotism to command, and they demanded the chance to prove it.
The result was a compromise that amounted to a segregated experiment. The Army opened a separate officer training camp specifically and only for Black candidates at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Twelve hundred fifty men arrived in June of nineteen seventeen. Forty percent held college degrees. They trained alongside veterans drawn from the legendary Buffalo Soldier regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry.
After four months of rigorous drilling, tactics, and technical instruction, six hundred thirty-nine men graduated on October tenth, nineteen seventeen, receiving commissions as captains and lieutenants. It was the first and largest class of Black commissioned officers in United States military history. They went on to serve in France with the Ninety-Second Division, fighting under conditions that required them to overcome both the enemy and the skepticism of their own Army.
The War Department shut the Fort Des Moines program down after that single class. But the six hundred thirty-nine men who earned their commissions here had already proved the point. A memorial and historical marker near the original fort grounds honors them today.
