Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

by David W. Blight

In May 1898, Mitchell launched a propaganda campaign under the slogan: “No Officers, No Fight!” The idea caught on widely in the black press. At its root, Mitchell’s slogan carried the insistence on real political gains at home before any blacks should die abroad. Writing from the city where the huge Lee monument stood high above the emerging Monument Avenue of Confederate heroes, Mitchell offered the black side of a bargain. “We are not rushing forward now to die,” he announced. “We have done our part of that kind of serious business, for sixty thousand victims of the Ku Klux Klan, the white-caps, the lynchers, the miscellaneous hordes of red-handed murderers are sleeping beneath the sod, and souls . . . go marching on.”18 In this variation on the legacy of “John Brown’s Body,” Mitchell demonstrated that the subtext of virtually all black response to the Spanish-American and Philippine wars was violence toward blacks at home.