Vanguard: Black Veterans and Civil Rights After World War I

This paper provides the first causal evidence on how military service shaped Black civil rights activism in the aftermath of World War I. The research question is whether random induction into the segregated National Army caused Black men to join the nascent NAACP and become prominent community leaders during the New Negro era. The authors leverage the WWI draft lottery — in which each registrant’s unique serial number was drawn from a bowl to determine induction order — as an instrument for military service, a source of exogenous variation not previously exploited in the literature.

To support this analysis, Ang and Chinoy construct an unusually rich dataset by digitizing nearly one million Black draft registration cards from the first registration (June 17, 1917), linking them through the 1930 full-count census to 233,517 NAACP member observations across 227 branches from 1912 to 1940, and supplementing with Veterans Administration records, Army Transport Service passenger lists, and biographical dictionaries of prominent African Americans. The instrument — serial number percentile within draft board and race (SNP%) — is validated against all observed pre-draft registrant characteristics and yields a first-stage F-statistic of 1,051 in the preferred specification.

The main finding is that Black men randomly induced to serve in the military were nearly three times more likely to join the NAACP than observably similar registrants from the same draft board (TSLS coefficient 0.0219, se = 0.0049, against a sample mean NAACP participation rate of 0.8%). The authors estimate that the draft induced more than 10,000 Black men to join the NAACP in total. Military service also raised the probability of appearing in biographical dictionaries of historically prominent African Americans by a factor of roughly 1.6 (TSLS coefficient 0.0027, se = 0.0012, sample mean 0.17%). These results are robust to alternative instruments, flexible polynomial specifications of SNP%, state-year fixed effects, and alternative veteran-status measures from VAMI and ATS records. They are also not explained by differential residential mobility: adding controls for interstate and North-South migration leaves the main coefficient essentially unchanged (0.0217-0.0218).

In contrast, TSLS estimates for all socioeconomic outcomes — literacy, home ownership, employment, census-predicted income, actual 1940 income, and educational attainment — are small and insignificant, ruling out human capital acquisition as a mechanism. Club involvement measured in the census is likewise unaffected, indicating that NAACP membership reflects specifically civil rights activism rather than generically greater social participation.

The mechanism the paper identifies is experienced discrimination. Effects on NAACP participation increase monotonically with the racial gap in induction rates across draft boards (significant at p = 0.01). Effects are large and significant for men assigned to camps that restricted Black soldiers’ access to military training (coefficient 0.0351, se = 0.0104) and to officer promotion (coefficient 0.0360, se = 0.0111), and are large for men in both restriction types simultaneously (coefficient 0.0367, se = 0.0114). In contrast, men attending less discriminatory camps show small and insignificant effects. Among the two all-Black combat divisions, NAACP participation is highest for veterans of the 92nd Division — subjected to constant racial abuse under U.S. command — and lower for the 93rd Division, which served under more hospitable French command. Previously unstudied veteran surveys from Virginia and Connecticut corroborate this narrative: respondents from camps with training and promotion restrictions were more than twice as likely to mention racial injustice, and mentions of injustice were more predictive of postwar civic engagement than any other survey theme.

The scope of the paper is Black male registrants in the first WWI draft registration (men aged 21-30 as of June 17, 1917), linked to a sample of approximately 300,000 in the 1930 census. Effects are attenuated for men from counties with greater racial hostility — proxied by Confederate state status, Confederate monument density, and county lynching rates — consistent with the interpretation that activism was more feasible in less repressive environments.

Q: What is the core identification strategy and why was it not feasible to use it before this paper? A: The paper uses each Black registrant’s serial number percentile within his draft board and racial group (SNP%) as an instrument for WWI military service. Unlike the WWII and Vietnam drafts, which used birthday-based lotteries, the WWI lottery assigned induction order by drawing unique serial numbers from a bowl, making serial number rank the source of quasi-random variation. This source had never been exploited in the literature, partly because the serial numbers had to be hand-captured from digitized draft card images.

Q: How strong is the first stage, and was the lottery truly random? A: The first-stage F-statistic is 1,051, and a ten-percentile decrease in SNP% is associated with a 34.5 percentage point increase in the probability of serving. Bivariate serial numbers show some non-random patterns — nine of 13 pre-draft characteristics correlate with raw SN% — likely because some Southern boards inflated numbers for white registrants. Conditioning on board fixed effects and using SNP% within board-race cells eliminates these correlations; Panel B of Appendix Table A1 shows the largest standardized coefficient falls to 0.006.

Q: What is the magnitude of the effect on NAACP membership and how does the causal estimate compare to a naive OLS? A: The TSLS coefficient is 0.0219 (se = 0.0049) against a sample mean of 0.8%, implying roughly a threefold increase in NAACP membership. The OLS estimate of 0.0116 understates the causal effect, consistent with the marginal man induced by the lottery being observationally weaker than infra-marginal volunteers.

Q: Does the effect reflect simply that veterans moved to Northern cities where NAACP branches were more accessible? A: No. Adding indicators for interstate migration and North-South migration leaves the TSLS coefficient essentially unchanged at 0.0218 and 0.0217, respectively. The Great Migration channel is thus not the operative mechanism.

Q: Did military service improve Black veterans’ economic outcomes? A: TSLS estimates for literacy, home ownership, employment, census-predicted income, actual 1940 income, and educational attainment are all small and statistically insignificant. This contrasts sharply with evidence on Black veterans of WWII and Korea (Greenberg et al., 2022) and is consistent with the documented absence of meaningful postwar benefits or training for Black WWI soldiers.

Q: If it was not human capital or migration, what mechanism does the paper establish? A: The primary mechanism is exposure to institutional discrimination during military service. Three distinct empirical patterns converge: (1) effects increase monotonically with draft board racial disparities in induction rates; (2) effects are large and significant for men at camps that denied training and promotion, and near zero for men at less discriminatory camps; (3) veteran survey mentions of racial injustice are more common among men from discriminatory camps and are more predictive of postwar NAACP membership than any other survey theme.

Q: How do the two all-Black combat divisions differ in their postwar NAACP participation, and what does this reveal? A: Veterans of the 92nd Division, who fought under U.S. command amid constant racial abuse, show the highest NAACP participation rates. Veterans of the 93rd Division, who fought under French command and were received with relative hospitality, show lower (though not statistically significantly lower) participation. Since both divisions received similar formal training and neither group shows socioeconomic gains, the differential reflects discrimination exposure rather than skill acquisition.

Q: What is the quantitative scale of the effect for the most discriminatory camps? A: For men assigned to camps with restrictions on both training and promotion, the TSLS coefficient on NAACP membership is 0.0367 (se = 0.0114) — more than 1.5 times the average estimate of 0.0219. Men at camps without restrictions show coefficients that are small and statistically insignificant.

Q: How does county-level racial hostility moderate the effect? A: The effects of military service on NAACP membership are larger — more positive — for men from counties with fewer Confederate monuments, lower lynching rates, and non-Confederate state status. This is interpreted as evidence that activism in response to discriminatory military experiences was more feasible in less racially hostile local environments, rather than as evidence that discrimination exposure was lower.

Q: What is the paper’s aggregate policy implication regarding the scale of the draft’s effect on the civil rights movement? A: The authors estimate that the WWI draft induced more than 10,000 Black men to join the NAACP. Veterans accounted for nearly 15% of all male NAACP members, against roughly 8% of Black male adults in the population, and were significantly more likely to appear in biographical dictionaries of prominent African Americans. The draft thus constituted a sizable and measurable contribution to the organizational vanguard of the early civil rights movement.

Q: How does the paper contribute to the economics of discrimination beyond documenting discriminatory behavior by majority actors? A: Most economics research on discrimination studies the conduct of white decision-makers (e.g., racial bias in hiring, lending, or bail). This paper examines how experiences of discrimination reshape the political behavior and aspirations of the minority group itself. The results show that institutional betrayal — systematic exclusion, degradation, and denial of training — generated deep discontent that translated into aggressive political mobilization, a dynamic the authors trace through subsequent episodes including the WWII Double V campaign and responses to police killings.

Serial number percentile within draft board and race (SNP%): The instrument constructed by the authors. Each WWI registrant received a serial number from 1 to the size of his draft board; those numbers were drawn in random order to determine induction priority. SNP% measures where a registrant fell in that draw relative to others in his board and racial group, and serves as the source of quasi-random variation in veteran status.

New Negro era: The period of invigorated Black political and cultural assertiveness following WWI, characterized by renewed racial pride, economic independence, and progressive politics. The movement spanned the Harlem Renaissance, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the American Negro Press, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and represented a rejection of the “conservatism, parochialism, and political accommodationism” of older Black leaders.

Draft board racial gap: The authors’ measure of draft board discrimination, defined as the difference in induction rates between Black and white registrants within a given draft board. The interquartile range spans roughly 0 to 20 percentage points, with a notable fraction of boards exhibiting gaps exceeding 30 percentage points.

Camp discrimination: The denial of military training and officer promotion opportunities to Black soldiers, documented in War Department reports by military intelligence officers tasked with monitoring the treatment of Black soldiers. The paper classifies each camp as restricted or unrestricted on each dimension and uses this classification to estimate heterogeneous treatment effects.

Institutional betrayal: The paper’s characterization of the U.S. government’s treatment of Black WWI soldiers — drafting them at higher rates than whites, denying them training and promotion, and assigning them to menial labor — as generating a profound sense of injustice that motivated postwar political activism rather than loyalty or accommodation.

NAACP membership as civil rights activism proxy: The paper uses dues-paying membership in local NAACP branches as its primary quantitative measure of civil rights participation. Membership involved active financial cost (annual fees of $1 to $10 at a time when median Black family income was below $500), exposure to harassment and violence in the South, and participation in local protest and legal advocacy, distinguishing it from passive civic engagement.