A soldier is a person who is a member of an army. A soldier can be a conscripted or volunteer enlisted person, a non-commissioned officer, a warrant officer, or an officer.
Desegregation is the process of ending the separation of two groups, usually referring to races. Desegregation is typically measured by the index of dissimilarity, allowing researchers to determine whether desegregation efforts are having impact on the settlement patterns of various groups. This is most commonly used in reference to the United States. Desegregation was long a focus of the American civil rights movement, both before and after the US Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education, particularly desegregation of the school systems and the military. Racial integration of society was a closely related goal.
Mutiny is a revolt among a group of people to oppose, change, or remove superiors or their orders. The term is commonly used for insubordination by members of the military against an officer or superior, but it can also sometimes mean any type of rebellion against any force. Mutiny does not necessarily need to refer to a military force and can describe a political, economic, or power structure in which subordinates defy superiors.
Executive Order 9981 was issued on July 26, 1948, by President Harry S. Truman. This executive order abolished discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin" in the United States Armed Forces. The Order led to the re-integration of the services during the Korean War (1950–1953). It was a crucial event in the post-World War II civil rights movement and a major achievement of Truman's presidency. Executive Order 9981 was passed primarily due to an attack on Isaac Woodard who was an American soldier and African-American World War II veteran. On February 12, 1946, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, he was attacked while still in uniform by South Carolina police as he was taking a bus home. The attack left Woodard completely and permanently blind. President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation.
Buffalo Soldiers were United States Army regiments that primarily comprised African Americans, formed during the 19th century to serve on the American frontier. On September 21, 1866, the 10th Cavalry Regiment was formed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The nickname "Buffalo Soldiers" was purportedly given to the regiment by Native Americans who fought against them in the American Indian Wars, and the term eventually became synonymous with all of the African American U.S. Army regiments established in 1866, including the 9th Cavalry Regiment, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 24th Infantry Regiment, 25th Infantry Regiment and 38th Infantry Regiment.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., a leading African-American civil rights activist, on April 4, 1968, Washington, D.C., experienced a four-day period of violent civil unrest and rioting. Part of the broader riots that affected at least 110 U.S. cities, those in Washington, D.C.—along with those in Chicago and in Baltimore—were among those with the greatest numbers of participants. President Lyndon B. Johnson called in the National Guard to the city on April 5, 1968, to assist the police department in quelling the unrest. Ultimately, 13 people were killed, with approximately 1,000 people injured and over 6,100 arrested.
The Battle of Brisbane was a riot with United States military personnel on one side and Australian servicemen and civilians on the other, in Brisbane, Queensland's capital city, on 26 and 27 November 1942, during which time the two nations were allies. By the time the violence had been quelled, one Australian soldier was dead and hundreds of Australians and U.S. servicemen were injured. News reports of the incident were suppressed overseas, and the reasons for the riot were not mentioned in the few Australian newspaper reports of the event.
The 24th Infantry Regiment is a unit of the United States Army, active from 1869 until 1951, and since 1995. Before its original dissolution in 1951, it was primarily made up of African-American soldiers.
The military history of African Americans spans from the arrival of the first enslaved Africans during the colonial history of the United States to the present day. African Americans have participated in every war fought by or within the United States, including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican–American War, the Civil War, the Spanish–American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War.
The Houston race riot of 1917, also known as the Camp Logan Mutiny, was a mutiny and riot by 156 soldiers from the all-black 24th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army, taking place on August 23, 1917, in Houston, Texas. The incident occurred within a climate of overt hostility from members of the all-white Houston Police Department (HPD) against members of the local black community and black soldiers stationed at Camp Logan. Following an incident where police officers arrested and assaulted some black soldiers, many of their comrades mutinied and marched to Houston, where they opened fire and killed eleven civilians and five policemen. Five soldiers were also killed, some by friendly fire.
The Brownsville affair, or the Brownsville raid, was an incident of racial discrimination that occurred in 1906 in the Southwestern United States due to resentment by white residents of Brownsville, Texas, of the Buffalo Soldiers, black soldiers in a segregated unit stationed at nearby Fort Brown. When a white bartender was killed and a white police officer wounded by gunshots one night, townspeople accused the members of the African-American 25th Infantry Regiment. Although their commanders said the soldiers had been in the barracks all night, evidence was allegedly planted against the men.
The Bristol riots refer to a number of significant riots in the city of Bristol in England.
The Fort Lawton riot refers to a series of events in August 1944 starting with a violent conflict between U.S. soldiers and Italian prisoners of war at Fort Lawton in Seattle, Washington during World War II. After the riot, prisoner Guglielmo Olivotto was found dead. This led to the court-martial of 43 soldiers, all of them African Americans.
African Americans have served the U.S. military in every war the United States has fought. Formalized discrimination against black people who have served in the U.S. military lasted from its creation during the American Revolutionary War to the end of segregation by President Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948. Although desegregation within the U.S. military was legally established with President Truman's executive order, full integration of African-American servicemen was not established until 1950 in the Navy and Air Force, 1953 in the Army, and 1960 in the Marine Corps.
The 1992 Coalisland riots were a series of clashes on 12 and 17 May 1992 between local Irish nationalist civilians and British Army soldiers in the town of Coalisland, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. The Third Battalion 1992 tour's codename was "Operation Gypsy".
A series of policies were formerly issued by the U.S. military which entailed the separation of white and non-white American soldiers, prohibitions on the recruitment of people of color and restrictions of ethnic minorities to supporting roles. Since the American Revolutionary War, each branch of the United States Armed Forces implemented differing policies surrounding racial segregation. Racial discrimination in the U.S. military was officially opposed by Harry S. Truman's Executive Order 9981 in 1948. The goal was equality of treatment and opportunity. Jon Taylor says, "The wording of the Executive Order was vague because it neither mentioned segregation or integration." Racial segregation was ended in the mid-1950s.
The Townsville mutiny was a mutiny by African American servicemen of the United States Army while serving in Townsville, Australia, during World War II.
The Camp Van Dorn Slaughter is a hoax popularized in a 1998 self-published book, more than two-thirds acknowledged fiction, that alleged some 1200 members of the all-black 364th Infantry Regiment were killed in June 1943 by white soldiers at Camp Van Dorn, a U.S. Army installation near Centreville, Mississippi. As no hard evidence has been found to support these allegations, despite a more than year long investigation by the Department of Defense, most observers have dismissed this claim.
The Aldershot riot occurred on the evenings of 4 and 5 July 1945 when Canadian troops of the Canadian Army Overseas tired of waiting to be repatriated rioted in the streets of Aldershot in Hampshire, causing considerable damage to property.
The Battle of Bamber Bridge is the name given to an outbreak of racial violence involving American soldiers stationed in the village of Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, in Northern England during the Second World War. Tensions had been high following a failed attempt by US commanders to racially segregate pubs in the village, and worsened after the 1943 Detroit race riot. The battle started when white American Military Police (MPs) attempted to arrest several African American soldiers from the racially segregated 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment for being out of uniform at Ye Olde Hob Inn public house in Bamber Bridge.
