Abstract

This article explores how Black race histories, Native American traditionary histories, and tribute poems published in Hampton Institute’s Southern Workman (1872–1939) used military service as an imaginative foundation for thinking about citizenship beyond legal meanings. In race and traditionary histories, writers make visible the sacrifices of Black and Native soldiers that had been overlooked in official accounts of wars throughout US history. Writers also transform these histories’ commemorative aim into tribute poems, which accomplish similar work by recognizing publicly, through imaginative verse, Black and Native military service. These writers share a hope that military service might usher in the benefits of formal citizenship. But that hope is accompanied by a sense of skepticism, in that wartime did not always yield a completely united American front. With such contingencies in mind, writers use the act of military service as inspiration for the act of writing into the historical and literary record the legacy of Black and Native commissioned and noncommissioned men and women, bestowing upon each other a sense of “unquestioned citizenship” that the nation would not.

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