African American women in the Great War African American women, who were officially not permitted to participate

in many areas of the World War I war effort, made themselves useful in many areas. One area, in which Black Women worked and served, was at the YWCA, or the Young Womens Christian Association. The women read mail to the soldiers, wrote letters home for the illiterate soldiers and much more. The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses also served during the war. African-American females continued to serve by making bandages, taking over jobs that men held so they could be soldiers, worked in hospitals, and served in various ways at troop centers. Women served mostly in roles of nurses, telephone operators, providing food and other supplies to the military, entertaining the troops and working as journalists. African Americans were, for the most part, not allowed to serve in combat units in the US Army. They were mostly kept in menial occupations in the military. At home, they were recruited as a new source of labor to replace white men. This started the Great Migration of blacks from rural Southern areas to Northern cities.

The Flapper In 1915, two years before the United States became involved in WWI, H.L. Mencken introduced the word "flapper" into popular media. The term traces back to British slang for a teenage girl, but Mencken reclaimed it with more specificity. He described a new sort of female identity emerging in the United States: a woman who consumed music, literature and periodicals voraciously, taking her cues for behavior and style from the media in front of her, rather than the moral codes of decorum. American women were still a decade away from the knee-length dresses and bobbed hairdos that would characterize the quintessential

flapper look. He clearly recognized the shifting attitudes in young women and their thirst for worldly knowledge that would eventually fuel the flapper fashion and sensibility. Flappers were the liberated women of the post-World War 1 years, and they could be easily identified by their clothing. They also indulged openly in many practices (smoking, cursing, etc.)

Alain Locke The New Negro In the essay The new Negro, Alain Locke described the landscape of Harlem as filled by different notions of what it meant to be a black American. There was a movement from the old Negro - that is, the plantation slave - to the new Negro, African-Americans who were considered more refined, educated, sophisticated, and involved in the political process. The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement between World War I and the Great Depression. This period marked the first time that white Americans gave serious attention to African American culture. Intellectuals such as W.E.B. DuBois and Alain Locke were espousing the achievements of Black artists, and African Americans were beginning establish a new identity and to question the discriminatory environment under which they were still forced to live. Black Americans hoped to educate the general populace and promote an atmosphere of tolerance through their writings, music, and art.