“Crusaders on a Quest for Democracy”: Addie W. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson’s Black Civic Pedagogy

Abstract

This article examines Hunton and Johnson’s Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces, which recounts their WWI YMCA service in France supporting Black troops. TCW exemplifies a long tradition of Black civic pedagogy, drawing on prophetic and empirical strategies to teach audiences that Black experience and racial justice are foundational to American democracy. Deploying the Black jeremiad, it exposes racial inequities and envisions a racially just future; deploying testifying, it combines narrative, reportage, and documentary evidence to empirically support its findings of white racism, Black heroism, and French egalitarianism. These strategies suggest possibilities and limitations for future practice.

Notes

1 I would like to thank RR reviewers Shirley Wilson Logan and Lisa Mastrangelo for their generous and cogent feedback.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Gold

David Gold is Professor of English, Education, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan. His research interests include feminist rhetorics, writing pedagogy, and digital rhetorics, and he is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of four volumes and various essays. He is currently studying Black women’s rhetorical activism in the age of Jim Crow.