Black History

369th Experience Band Ties HBCU Musicians to WWI Black History

VOICE AND VIEWPOINT — In 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles ended WWI, two years after the U.S. entered the fight with France and Great Britain against Germany, 44 Black colleges existed. Today, 100 years later, there are 101 public and private HBCUs, and they and their students are playing an important part in reclaiming the role African American soldiers and artists played in that conflict.

Published

5 years ago

July 20, 2019

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By Leonard E. Colvin

In 1919 when the Treaty of Versailles ended WWI, two years after the U.S. entered the fight with France and Great Britain against Germany, 44 Black colleges existed.

Today, 100 years later, there are 101 public and private HBCUs, and they and their students are playing an important part in reclaiming the role African American soldiers and artists played in that conflict.

Thanks to the United States World War I Centennial Commission, Coca Cola and the network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a band of 42 accomplished musicians from HBCUs are traveling around the country playing the sounds of the 369th Infantry Regimental Band that made its mark in history during WWI and WWII.

The old wartime regimental band was reincarnated four years ago in the form of the 369th Experience. Most of the new band’s 42 members are current students or pending graduates of the HBCUs.

Its namesake, the 369th Infantry Regimental Band of WWI and WWII, used musical instruments and its artists with a flair for Jazz, originated by African Americans, to establish its legacy, and introduce the art form to the Europeans.

The WWI band was formed to accompany the 369th Infantry Regiment, a group of Black fighting troops. Its assignment was to boost the morale of the Black troops comprising the 369th Infantry Regiment, formerly known as the 15th New York National Guard Regiment and commonly referred to as the Harlem Hellfighters.

The Black soldiers in the field fought valiantly with their grit and guns to help the allies win WWI and show that Black men could fight for freedom.

The accompanying band was led by and composed of established musical professionals. In the process of performing their assignment, they also exported Jazz music,crafted by African Americans to the allied nations.

One of the band’s leaders, James Reese Europe was a respected artist in Harlem music circles before he was assigned to the military band. He went on to direct the regimental band to great acclaim.

In February and March 1918, James Reese Europe and his military band traveled over 2,000 miles in France, performing for British, French and American military audiences as well as French civilians. Europe’s “Hellfighters” also made their first recordings in France for the Pathé brothers.

According to the key organizers of the current project involving HBCU students, The 369th Experience is designed to introduce people of all cultures, especially the band members, to the band’s legacy and the role it and the fighting soldiers of the 369th played in WWI.

Also, a goal is to use the band to display the Jazz music art form to audiences domestically and abroad.

It is taking place at a time when HIP-HOP and Neo-soul are overshadowing Jazz as an art form among Black people, despite efforts since the 1970s, to repackage Jazz as a popular and “profitable” genre of music to the masses.

“We chose HBCU band students because we knew we would get the best students in terms of music and marching formation!” said Stephany B. O’Neal, publicity director for the outfit. “We had to use HBCUs to even come close to representing the Harlem Hellfighters and James Reese Europe.

“This is a totally historic event,” she continued. “Bringing the Harlem Hellfighters full circle. They won all kinds of awards from the French and totally changed the music industry in Europe.

“Like the Black soldiers who fought on the battlefield, after the war, the band suffered many slights, despite the respect the French soldiers and later the governments bestowed upon them,” O’Neal said.

She said after the war, in Paris, France, the band was not allowed to join in the victory parade with the Americans when they marched down the Champs Elysees.

To right that wrong, plans are in the works for the 369th Experience Band to travel to Versailles, France at the upcoming International observance of the Centennial of the signing of the Treaty which ended WWI.

During the 2019 Memorial Day Weekend, in conjunction with New York’s annual Fleet Week Observance, the band performed at Rockefeller Center, Marcus Garvey Park, the Liberty Park, and in New Jersey at Harlem One Stop, a historical site.

The effort to recreate the 369th Infantry Regimental Band was launched in 2013.

After the plea was made before the House Appropriation Committee, it took several years before funding for the project was first submitted.

The U.S. Army School of Music, and their PR Personnel, Noble Sissle, Jr., son of one of the original band members, and O’Neal, even before the funding was secured, hammered together the framework andfoundation of the band’s operation.

They developed the audition criteria, auditioned the students online, hired a band leader who worked at Ohio State and once all the students were selected, began rehearsing.

“We could not get all the students in one place to rehearse and engage them,” said O’Neal, “so we did it online and in sections and we had some problems. But Coke funded a better online conferencing system, so we managed to do a lot of work even before the band members and directors met each other in person.”

Although there were 65 members of the original 365th Infantry Regimental Band, currently there are 42 members from HBCUs and 1 historically white school.

Prairie View, Florida A&M and Southern University, all southern HBCUs, have the most representatives on the band.

Eventually, the band’s membership will be expanded to 65, O’Neal said. She said that recruiting for future membership is ongoing. She said HBCU veteran band members alert and recruit band members from their respective schools to apply to be a member.

People who are interested should go to the 369th website to apply for an audition, O’Neal said.

This article originally appeared in the Voice and Viewpoint.

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U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

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: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

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Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.