By: Natascha Toft Roelsgaard

With immense gratitude, I am writing this status update on my recent research trip to the Library of Congress, made possible by the AJHA and the Joseph McKerns Research Grant. During the balmy days of early October, I spent a weekend reviewing records at the NAACP archive, specifically looking for newspaper clippings and correspondence related to the “work or fight” ordinance enacted in the U.S. during World War I.

This project came about when I stumbled upon a news article written by Walter F. White, an investigator with the NAACP. White had been tasked with providing a report on the status of Black life in the South after the U.S. had entered the war in Europe. During his travels in Alabama and Georgia in early 1918, White observed that the War Department’s “work or fight” ordinance—which expanded on the 1917 Selective Service Act to compel draft-age men to war work or military service—was used by local Southern governments to control the labor of Black men and force Black women into domestic roles for white families. A practice, White noted, “which bordered virtually on peonage.” His findings were summarized in an exposé published by The New Republic on March 1, 1918. 

A further search revealed that several white Southern newspapers rationalized and encouraged the exploitation of the wartime order, as a means to control Black labor and preserve the status quo. In contrast, Black newspapers in Alabama and Georgia denounced the practice, calling on the federal government to step in, and undertook what appeared to be an extensive collaboration with the NAACP on an anti-work or fight order campaign. While this campaign was mentioned sporadically in newspaper clippings, I discovered that several folders on these efforts were located at the NAACP archive, yet to be digitized. With the support of AJHA, I spent the weekend browsing through old leaflets, news articles, and letters in the Manuscript Reading Room in the James Madison Memorial Building.

The trip proved critical to my research project, revealing the NAACP’s myriad attempts to expose and put a halt to the South’s abuse of the wartime ordinance, as well as the federal government’s lack of response. News articles and letters between NAACP investigators also stipulated ties between the Ku Klux Klan and several of the white newspapers and local governments that encouraged the exploitation of the “work or fight” ordinance.

I left the archives with a full notebook and too many scanned pages to count. This winter, I plan to organize the acquired documents and categorize my findings. The goal is to include these findings as a book chapter in my book project on the historical misuse of the law to control Black labor in the U.S., the white press’ involvement in upholding and promoting these efforts and the combined efforts of the Black press and the NAACP in exposing the unconstitutionality of such practices.

I am grateful to AJHA for its continued support of junior faculty and the growing network of inquisitive and passionate scholars it has gifted me with.

Natascha Toft Roelsgaard is an assistant professor of journalism at Muskingum University. She received a McKerns grant in 2023 to support her research.