structural:expansion, linguistic:voice_change, structural:scholar_edition
African Americans in the military

The men who served in these units were faced with some of the worst living conditions of all US soldiers due to racial segregation enforced by white officers. In the first couple of months after their arrival to Europe, many black soldiers reported that they had to sleep in tents on the dirt floors of barracks, eat outside, rather than in canteens, use makeshift outhouses, and wash themselves in makeshift bathrooms. Conditions did not improve much as the war went on. Moreover, African American recruits faced various forms of mistreatment from white recruits. There were several cases of African American soldiers being verbally abused by white soldiers working or living in close proximity. In some cases physical abuse also occurred. Ely Green, a man who worked in a labor battalion in St. Nazaire, reported various events wherein African American men were assaulted and even murdered for breaking segregation laws that were enforced by the U.S. military. Some have come to see the work camps that black soldiers were subjected to as a means for the export of Jim Crow as the people within them essentially became a servant class for white military officers.