For more than 200 years, African Americans have participated in every conflict in United States history. From Crispus Attucks during the beginnings of the Revolutionary War, to the appointment of General Colin Powell as Chair, Joint Chiefs of Staff, African Americans have courageously fought the common enemies of the United States.
The patriotism of African Americans is even more amazing, considering that many black soldiers fought for the nation while also confronting the individual and institutional racism of their countrymen. Since their beginnings, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUS) have been in the forefront of this somewhat paradoxical patriotic struggle. Clark Atlanta University (CAU) has a long patriotic legacy that goes back to its founding institutions, Atlanta University (1867) and Clark College (1869):
Preparing the Nation’s Black Soldiers
Atlanta University and Clark College were among Georgia’s first to participate in the designated Student Army Training Corps (SATC) which was the precursor of what is today known as the ROTC. According to the Georgia Encyclopedia, the Peach state participated actively in military training for university men in what historian Walter Cooper called “Atlanta’s College Army.”
According to the July 1943 edition of the Atlanta University Bulletin, Army Administration School Branch No. 7, was housed on the campus of Atlanta University, and trained “enlisted men of the arms and services” with the Army Air Forces in basic administration. The University was charged with the mission of developing “able administrators capable of functioning with a minimum of supervision.”
During the six months that the school was in session, approximately fifteen hundred soldiers received certificates of graduation from the commandant, Colonel Carl E. Nesbitt. There were nine officers on the administrative staff, and thirty on the instructional staff and faculty.
This was the second time that Atlanta University had served the Army. A quarter of a century earlier in World War I, the University served as a military post at which students likely to be called for active service were given instruction in what was known as the Army School for Mechanics, which trained black soldiers in civic engineering.
Military Service to Social Work
CAU’s Whitney M. Young Jr. School of Social Work has long served as fertile ground for military veterans seeking to “beat their swords into plowshares” in service to others. Since its founding as the independent Atlanta School of Social Work in 1920, the school has attracted and produced passionate, military veterans who have served the nation from the battlefields abroad to our communities here at home. Jesse O. Thomas, one of the School’s early founders, led efforts by the U.S. Treasury to sell war bonds to the black community during World War II. The School’s first dean and civil rights pioneer, Whitney M. Young Jr., Jerome Farris, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge (AU, 1955) and Famed Artist/Sculptor Noah S. Purifoy (AU, 1948), are among the many CAU Social Work scholars who have also served in the military.
