And so the United States went to war, including Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry as well as other regiments of Black soldiers. While stationed in the South, the Black soldiers were disarmed and more of them were killed by sheriffs and other alleged upholders of the law than were killed fighting in the war. An estimated 123 Black men, women and children had been lynched the year before the soldiers went South: burned at the stake, hung from trees, riddled with bullets or flayed alive by white mobs. But still the soldiers went to fight for freedom for other people.
They were welcomed as liberators by the Cubans and fought bravely, including saving Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders from near annihilation at a Spanish-held fort called Las Guasimas.
The Rough Riders could not advance “and dared not retreat,” said one Black soldier, “having been caught in a sunken place in the road, with a barbed-wire fence on one side and a precipitous hill on the other....At the moment when it looked as if the whole regiment would be swept down by the steel-jacketed bullets from the Mausers, four troops of the 10th U.S. Calvary came up on ‘double time.’”
“In justice to the colored race,” wrote Rough Rider Frank Knox, who later became Secretary of the Navy, “I must say that I never saw braver men anywhere. Some of those...will live in my memory forever.”
But another man had a far different opinion, especially of the Cubans. Winston Churchill, a young military observer from England, had not realized--just as most of the American public had not realized--that a large percentage of the Cuban fighters were Black. “A great danger presents itself,” an alarmed Churchill wrote. “Two-fifths of the insurgents in the field, are negroes. These men, with Antonio Maceo (a Black general affectionately nicknamed “The Bronze Titan” by his fellow Cubans) at their head, would, in the event of success, demand a predominant share of the government of the country....the results being, after years of fighting, another black republic.”
But Churchill need not have worried about the “danger” of Black participation in democracy. Within months of the Black soldiers’ deeds of bravery in the name of Cuban freedom, the U.S. government declared Cuba a “protectorate,” stationed a permanent occupying force of White soldiers on the island and seized its economy for the benefit of U.S. corporations.
Roosevelt, who would probably have been killed if the Black soldiers hadn't saved him, launched the political career that would carry him to the White House by turning on his rescuers and saying they could not carry on a fight once they lost their white officers. This appeal to White American racism was successful, even though the soldiers had made what one Rough Rider called “their great, fearless charges” under the command of Black sergeants after their White officers were killed, a fact Roosevelt knew full well.
The United States not only grabbed Cuba to prevent the Cubans from establishing a democracy and to open new markets for American corporations, but also stole Puerto Rico, Wake Island, Guam and Hawaii.
“The U.S. declared Cuba a ‘protectorate,’ stationed a permanent occupying force of White soldiers on the island and seized its economy for the benefit of U.S. corporations.”
Much of Hawaii’s land had already been taken over by American pineapple plantation owners, and much of its culture trashed and weakened by American missionaries. Hawaii, said U.S. officials, was “a ripe pear waiting to be plucked,” and they plucked it. In 1898, while Black soldiers died and were betrayed in the failed attempt to bring freedom to Cuba, the U.S. Congress passed a joint resolution annexing Hawaii and assigning the U.S. military to insure this country’s control of the islands.
Spain, seeing the futility of trying to stop the U.S. militarily, sold all its possessions to the United States for $20 million. This also included the Philippines, with Pres. William McKinley clothing the theft in the following words: “...there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all (all of Spain’s possessions) and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.”
The Filipinos, most of whom had already converted to Christianity in the decades before the Americans arrived, didn’t feel they needed “God’s grace” as defined by White Americans. In February 1899, under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo (who had been brought back to the Philippines from China by U.S. warships, in order to fight against the Spaniards), the Filipinos launched a war for freedom and democracy against the forces of the United States.
Though the war against the Filipinos is largely forgotten or ignored in this country, it was a bloody and brutal conflict that saw American soldiers and disease kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos. While Black men, women and children were being tortured and killed in this country, White American soldiers slaughtered the brown-skinned inhabitants of the Philippines so that American businesses could expand into the Pacific.
“We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world,” said Sen. Albert Beveridge in the U.S. Senate, speaking for the economic and political interests of this country. “Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Georgraphy answers the question. China is our natural customer....The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East.”
And so Americans unleashed their indiscriminate brutality in the name of capitalism and democracy.
“Our fighting blood was up,” said one White soldier, “and we all wanted to kill ‘niggers.’....This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces."
In brutality reminiscent of that at Abu Ghraib and throughout Iraq, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger wrote: "Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later...stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one..."
The Black American soldiers were disgusted with the racism they saw their "fellow" soldiers introducing to yet another land, and many of them deserted. One, George Fagan of the all-Black 24th Infantry Regiment, accepted a commission in the rebel army and fought against the White Americans.
Another soldier, William Simms, wrote home (the letters by Simms and 113 other Black soldiers are in Smoked Yankees and the Struggle for Empire, by William Gatewood): "I was struck by a question a little Filipino boy asked me, which ran about this way: 'Why does the American Negro come...to fight us where we are much a friend to him and have not done anything to him. He is all the same as me and me all the same as you. Why don't you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you...?’"
Approximately 1,000 Black soldiers married Filipino women and U.S. officials were so alarmed at the friendships between Black soldiers and Filipinos, that they ordered the soldiers shipped home early. While the majority of White Americans supported the war against the Filipinos, there were large protests from the Black American community, including many of the soldiers.
"The first thing in the morning is the 'Nigger" and the last thing at night is the 'Nigger,'" wrote Sgt. Patrick Mason of the 24th to a Black newspaper, the Cleveland Gazette about White soldiers' routine use of the word to describe both the Filipinos and Black American soldiers. Another Black infantryman, William Fulbright, wrote the editor of the Black-owned Indianapolis Freeman: "This struggle on the islands has been naught but a gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression."
“U.S. officials were so alarmed at the friendships between Black soldiers and Filipinos, that they ordered the soldiers shipped home early.”
But while the majority of White Americans supported the war, there were many exceptions. Speaking of the actions of the United States and other Western nations in stealing land and imposing oppression in the name of democracy and spreading "civilization," author Mark Twain wrote in the New York Herald: "I bring you the stately matron of Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies."
Between the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929, the United States sent its military into Latin American countries thirty-two times. Haiti alone was occupied from 1915-1934, so that the U.S. could control both its politics and its economy – just as the democratically-elected Bertrand Aristide was deposed by U.S.-supported drug dealers and murderers in 2004 for the same reasons.