'Black Bodies in Propaganda' at the Penn Museum

In a 1918 poster for a military film commissioned by Woodrow Wilson, a black soldier goes to war and comes home triumphant. A series of illustrations show him kissing his family goodbye, smiling as he charges over a hill in his steel helmet, facing a forest of surrendering hands, receiving a medal for valor and marching in a grand victory parade.

The only white people in the whole scenario are the German soldiers he fights and the officer who pins the award on his uniform. Even in the crowd at the parade, everyone around him is black.

This effort to urge black Americans to enlist during World War I launched Penn professor Dr. Tukufu Zuberi's collection of 46 propaganda posters displaying the historical uses of African and African American people on behalf of communism, militarism and colonialism. Now, 33 of Zuberi's pieces are on display, along with his comments, at the Penn Museum.

From our modern perspective, some of them seem rather fanciful. "The American Declaration of Independence Illustrated," a lithograph printed during the Civil War, reminds me strangely of The Wizard of Oz. Above an ecstatic crowd, an eagle carries two American flags and a giant basket. Riding in the basket are one white man in an immaculate suit and vest, waving royally to the crowd, and one black man in a plaid open-necked shirt, casting a broken shackle over the side.

Hooked on Chairman Mao

Another surreal entry created a century later— "Chairman Mao is the Great Savior of the Global People's Revolution"— is aimed at Africans oppressed by Europe's colonial powers. It portrays an avid crowd of young men, white smiles gleaming in their dark faces, as they cluster around a pristine copy of Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung. They're draped with bullets and guns; behind them, a spearhead bristles alongside a bayonet.

Elsewhere, the exhibition delves into Europe's colonial history, including one French lithograph, circa 1915, that translates as "Young Men Who Are Undecided About Their Choice of Employment." It's a recruitment ad for colonial officers, prominently featuring a bare-breasted black woman balancing a bowl of fruit on her head. (A 1939 film included here claims that European colonial nations brought a "Fuller Life, Free from Fear" to African subjects.)

Uncle Sam's hug

Other posters explore America's own military history, both at home and abroad, from the Civil War era through World War II.

Abraham Lincoln features prominently in posters printed decades after the Civil War. In "True Sons of Freedom," a chromolithograph from 1918, Lincoln's giant head swims benevolently over the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment, also known as the Harlem Hellfighters. But the accompanying placard notes that, in that highly segregated time, the 369th actually served under French command, their courageous exploits unacknowledged by U.S. commanders for decades, even while the U.S. military exploited their images in propaganda aimed at enrolling more black soldiers.

Another 1918 piece shows banks of black and white troops separated with surgical precision behind a smiling Uncle Sam, whose arms encircle a white soldier on the left and a black soldier on the right, shaking hands. The title is "Honor and Justice to All," apparently shelving the injustice of racial segregation for another day.

Stoking Italian fears

Meanwhile, a nearby video excerpt reminds the viewer that just a few years before the "Honor and Justice" poster was printed, Wilson was screening Birth of a Nation, a film glorifying the Ku Klux Klan, at the White House.

World War II-era pieces include an Italian poster aimed at drumming up terror of American troops. In it, Christ, nailed to the cross, falls face-first into a ruin of altar candlesticks while, in the foreground, a hideously grinning coal-faced soldier wearing a "USA" helmet grasps a sack of pilfered gold.

Back home in the States, military propaganda films— including one titled Wings for That Man, about the Tuskegee Airmen— fail even to mention racial segregation, which remained in effect through the end of World War II. The hearty narrator of the Wings film calls the black Air Force officers "pioneers," as if they were the first of their race to choose service as pilots, instead of the first ones who were allowed to do so.

A massacre I missed

The "Black Bodies" posters are grouped by theme or era, but these groupings don't necessarily flow chronologically from one time period to the next. The 1960s posters from China and Russia give way to centuries of European colonialism, while World War I unspools on the opposite wall. Images from the Civil War face pieces from World War II. And unlike many historical exhibitions, a visitor can take in the show as easily from one end as from another. Perhaps Zuberi's message is that racism never met a tidy end anywhere in the world; it still surrounds us and defies any historical timeline.

The poster that shook me most was an 1892 recruitment piece memorializing the Fort Pillow Massacre of April 12, 1864— a horrible moment in the Civil War when Confederate soldiers, led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, stormed a fort manned by black Federal troops in Tennessee and slaughtered more than 300 people, including women and children. The poster shows white soldiers stabbing and throttling black women; children lie dead on the ground.

But just as disturbing as the poster's image was my realization that, in all my years of studying American history, I never heard about the Fort Pillow Massacre. Would that have been the case if the victims had been white?