The Black Officers of Fort Des Moines: 1917

In the spring of nineteen seventeen, as the United States entered the First World War, a debate was playing out in the offices of the War Department and in the African American press: would Black men be trained as officers? The Army was segregated. Its officer corps was almost entirely white. But tens of thousands of Black men were going to be drafted, and some of them were insisting, loudly, in print and in letters to congressmen, that they be given the chance to lead.

The answer, arranged partly through the advocacy of civil rights organizations and students at Black universities, was Fort Des Moines, Iowa. A segregated training camp was established at the existing installation on the southwest side of the city. In the summer of nineteen seventeen, approximately twelve hundred Black men, college graduates, teachers, lawyers, businessmen, members of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, arrived to undergo officer training.

On October fifteenth, nineteen seventeen, six hundred and thirty-nine men received their commissions. They became the first African Americans to be commissioned as officers in the United States Army in significant numbers. The men were assigned as second and first lieutenants in the segregated Ninety-second and Ninety-third Infantry Divisions, which went on to serve in France.

One of the men who taught at the training camp was Charles Young, then a colonel and among the most senior Black officers in the Army. Young's own path to further promotion had been blocked by a medical board that declared him unfit for field service, a finding widely viewed, including by Young himself, as a pretext to prevent a Black man from reaching the rank of brigadier general. Young rode horseback from Ohio to Washington to prove his fitness. The Army promoted him, then assigned him to a post where he would not command white troops.

The Fort Des Moines Officer Training Camp is recognized today as a singular moment in the history of the United States military and the long fight for African American equality within it. A monument to the officers was dedicated at the site in twenty-sixteen.