Kimball: The First Memorial to Black Soldiers

In the coalfield town of Kimball, in McDowell County, West Virginia, stands a building that carries a distinction no other memorial in the United States can claim: it was the first public monument built specifically to honor African American veterans of World War One.

The southern West Virginia coalfields in the early twentieth century were one of the few places in the American South where Black men could find industrial wage work that approached parity with white workers, not equality, but closer to it than almost anywhere else in the region. Coal companies recruited Black workers from the Deep South, and entire communities grew up around the mines, with Black families constituting a majority in some McDowell County hollows. When the United States entered World War One in nineteen seventeen, McDowell County alone sent fifteen hundred Black men into military service.

They came home to a country that offered them legal segregation, the Klan, and systematic exclusion from the monuments being raised to their sacrifice. The white veterans of McDowell County got a memorial. The Black veterans got nothing, until local Black community leaders decided to build their own.

Designed by West Virginia architect Hassel T. Hicks and completed in nineteen twenty-eight, the Kimball World War Memorial is a Classical Revival building in brick and stone that once housed an auditorium, a library, a billiard room, meeting rooms, and a trophy room filled with plaques and wartime memorabilia. The dedication ceremony on February eleventh, nineteen twenty-eight, featured a speech by G. E. Ferguson, the only African American from West Virginia to hold the rank of captain in World War One.

The building became headquarters for the nation's first all-Black American Legion post and hosted some of the state's earliest NAACP meetings. A fire in nineteen ninety-one left the building a shell. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-three and partially restored by two thousand. It stands now as a ruin and a monument simultaneously, waiting for the full restoration it deserves.