The Harlem Hellfighters painted by S.J. Woolf
One hundred years ago today … the New York Age reported that celebrated painter S.J. Woolf had painted “First to the Rhine,” a depiction of the all-African American World War I battalion “the Hell Fighting Fifteenth.” The squad’s nickname has in more recent years evolved to “The Harlem Hellfighters.”
“First to the Rhine” by SJ Woolf, 1920. Reprinted in The National magazine: an illustrated monthly, Volume 50, 1922.
“The painting will be exhibited in the window of Arthur H. Hahlo, art dealer on Fifth Avenue, between 46th and 47th Street, for a short time, after which it will be on exhibition at the office of THE NEW YORK AGE.”
The Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment, had won honors in the war, including the French Croix de Guerre. Indeed, racist US military policy had led to their fighting as part of the French army. The regiment’s marching band, led by James Reese Europe, is credited with introducing French audiences to live syncopation.
The Harlem Hellfighters was partly a New York story. According to the Smithsonian magazine:
They were mostly New Yorkers, the first black troops in their state’s National Guard. After years of lobbying by civic leaders from Harlem, Manhattan’s celebrated black neighborhood, Governor Charles Whitman finally formed the all-black unit, first known as the 15th New York National Guard Regiment, in 1916, as the U.S. prepared for possible entry into World War I.
The majority of the enlistees actually came from Harlem, which was home to 50,000 of Manhattan’s 60,000 African-Americans in the 1910s. Others came from Brooklyn, towns up the Hudson River, and New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania. Some were teens, some in their mid-40s. Some were porters, doormen, or elevator operators, some teachers, night watchmen or mailmen.
The Harlem Hellfighters’ story, including the heroism of figures such as Henry Roberts and Neadham Roberts, is recounted in many texts, perhaps most vividly in the graphic novel by Max Brooks and Caanan White.