As the nation again honored the fallen soldiers on Memorial Day, probably few thought of those who were killed after returning home from World War One on trumped-up charges, mostly of raping or “insulting” behavior towards European American women.

African Americans then comprised 10 percent of the nation but accounted for 13 percent of the inductees, who were assigned to segregated units. They served mostly in support roles but some fought alongside the French against the Germans. France awarded its highest commendation, the Legion of Honor, to 171 of them.

Adam Hochschild, in his 2022 book “American Midnight,” provides some details. The 369th Infantry Regiment (Colored), also known as the “Harlem Hellfighters” and the “dusky fighters,” Hochschild wrote, “suffered 40 percent casualties and repeatedly endured poison gas attacks while serving an extraordinary 191 days under enemy fire, more than any other American troops.”

The New York Tribune ran separate stories on May 20, 1918, on Private Henry Johnson, 25, in civilian life “a diminutive ‘redcap’ railway station porter,” and the even younger Needham Roberts, 17, a bellhop. They repelled two dozen Germans who had charged into their trench at night, “Roberts hurling grenades and Johnson clubbing one raider with his rifle butt and disemboweling another with a bolo knife.” The two “chocolate soldiers,” as the Tribune called them, became the first Americans awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French military.

Johnson and Roberts and the other 350,000 African American soldiers who fought in the war no doubt hoped they would be returning to a United States different from the one they left to defend democracy overseas. But nothing had changed.

On the same page detailing the exploits of Johnson and Roberts, the New York Tribune ran a story headlined “Georgia Mob Lynches Negro and His Wife.” The husband, Haynes Henry, was accused, among other things, of raping a European American woman – a lie but a lynch mob killed him anyway. They hung his eight-month pregnant wife Mary by her ankles from a tree, poured gasoline on her and set her on fire. “As she screamed in pain, a member of the mob cut open her belly with a knife and when her unborn child fell to the ground and gave a cry, one of the attackers stomped the infant to death,” Hochschild wrote. The mob included the foreman of the county’s grand jury; no one was prosecuted.

Veterans’ bravery and their uniform did not spare them such atrocities. “More than 70 Black Americans would be hanged by mobs – or, in 11 cases, burned alive – in 1919, the highest total in over a decade. Seventeen of them were veterans, at least three of whom were in uniform when they were murdered,” Hochschild wrote.

They included Private Charles Lewis of Tyler Station, Kentucky, who was falsely accused of robbery and arrested. “A mob of masked men broke into the jail with sledgehammers, seized Lewis and hanged him from a nearby tree – in his army khaki,” Hochschild wrote.

Twenty years later, more than one million African American men and women served in all branches of the military in World War Two but, the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) noted in 2019, back home they continued to face “violence for the most basic assertions of equality and freedom.” And not just for allegedly attacking or insulting European American women. Navy veteran Joe Nathan Roberts refused to call a group of European Americans in Georgia “sir” so they abducted him during the night from his parents’ home and shot and killed him. A year later, another group shot and killed veteran Isaiah Nixon, 28, outside his home in front of his wife and six children hours after he defied threats and voted.

The EJI created the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, which opened on April 26, 2018, to honor the “more than 4,400 lynchings of Black people in the United States between 1877 and 1950,” including veterans. The EJI conducted extensive research and documented its findings in two must-read reports, “Lynching in America” and “Targeting Black Veterans.”

“It just became evident when we were doing research on lynching and racial terror that veterans were particularly vulnerable," EJI founder and executive director Bryan Stevenson told North Carolina National Public Radio. "They were prime targets for the kind of violence that terrorized African Americans between Reconstruction and World War II," said Stevenson, a New York University law professor who led the memorial project.

That, of course, is history which several Southern states – where most of the atrocities were committed – are trying to suppress. Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill banning lessons that would make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.”

Instead, educators must focus on “Western Civilization,” in keeping with the teachings of the Michiganbased Christian conservative Hillsdale College which came on DeSantis’ radar as far back as 2014 when he was in Congress. The Miami Herald’s Sommer Brugal reported that, with DeSantis as governor, Hillsdale has “infiltrated Florida schools.” Its goal is to reinforce “Western Civilization.” But that “civilization” killed 56 million Indigenous peoples just in the Americas over 100 years, trafficked 12 million Africans into slavery over 400 years, burned or hanged 50,000 mostly women in Europe in witch hunts over 300 years and sent around 30,000 children to die in a crusade in 1212.

Even Republican presidential candidates “of color” are getting into the act by denying that institutional racism exists. But, The New York Times said, citing strategists, “Placing racism safely in the past and trumpeting the racial progress of their own lifetimes relieves today’s G.O.P. voters from having to confront any racial animosity in their party. That can be a soothing message to Republicans who feel defensive about the party’s racial makeup and policies.”

The Times spotlighted African Americans Larry Elder and Tim Scott, and Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are descended from Indian immigrants. They point to humble beginnings and insist that because they are able to run for the presidency there is no structural racism.

“They’re saying this to make an overwhelmingly white Republican audience feel better about themselves,” Stuart Stevens, a consultant for 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, told The New York Times. “It’s a variation, oddly enough, of victim politics. People accuse you of being racist? ‘That’s unfair. Vote for me, therefore you’ll prove you’re not racist.’” And then there are the non-European American extremists, among whom Harvard lecturer and author Christopher Rhodes included in an Al Jazeera commentary: Enrique Tarrio, leader of Proud Boys, a Cuban American; Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, leader of the Portland chapter of Proud Boys, a Samoan; Kanye West, Nazi sympathizer, African American; Nick Fuentes, Holocaust denier, Mexican father; and Tony Gibson, leader of Patriot Prayer, Japanese mother.

Rhodes argues that “certain nonwhite people who espouse white supremacist ideologies will benefit by virtue of their proximity to the privileges and power that come with whiteness in America.” Through this “multiracial whiteness,” NYU Professor Cristina Beltran told Rhodes, they “appear to seek to identify with whiteness not as a racial construct but as an ideology of power and supremacy.”

According to Rhodes, “This phenomenon creates strange bedfellows, as white nationalists and non-white altright activists end up operating side by side,” fueled by “ironic internet bigotry.” The result is that “racism, misogyny, homophobia and other forms of hate have come out of the shadows and found allies in mainstream media and politics” and given “mainstream acceptance.”

The violence of the past, including against returning veterans, the EJI’s Stevenson argues, “reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed and continues to be evident in the injustice and unfairness of the administration of criminal justice in America.”