Mar 28, 2019 - Sale 2503

Sale 2503 - Lot 336

Price Realized: $ 688
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 900
(MILITARY--WORLD WAR TWO.) Photographs of an Army Engineer regiment building levees to protect cotton fields in Arkansas. 16 contemporary prints, 8 x 10 inches, one of them laid into a contemporary captioned scrapbook mount, with typed captions and inked "Restricted for official use only" stamps on verso; minimal wear. With 8 additional 8 x 10 uncaptioned copy prints. Arkansas and Tennessee, May 1943 and undated
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Additional Details

The 364th Engineer General Service Regiment consisted of African-American soldiers. They trained at Camp Claiborne Engineer Unit Training Center in Louisiana, and then were dispatched on flood control projects in neighboring Arkansas to protect the region's corn and cotton crops. It was strenuous physical labor, perhaps too reminiscent of the forced labor performed by African-American convicts across the south--although in this case the soldiers had rifles. The men are shown camping in tents in an open field, filling sandbags, purifying drinking water, and traveling in overloaded open boats. One has the names of three soldiers written on the image. Only one of the photos depicts their white officers, with three colonels standing around a map on an improvised table. The disturbing caption on the mount reads "Confab of 'The Big Three from Tennessee.' Results: Arkansas furnishes the sand, government furnishes the bags, U.S. Army furnishes the Darkies, We Build a Levee."
Most of the photographs are from Peach Orchard Bluff and Sand Hill, features on the White River in Arkansas near Georgetown, roughly halfway between Little Rock and Memphis. One is an aerial view of the regiment at work on the Mississippi River in Tennemo, TN. "Starred this time in the role of guarding overburdened levees along the Arkansas, White, and Mississippi rivers was the 364th Engineer regiment, a colored unit. The regiment was praised . . . for laying some 125 thousand sandbags during its stay in the flood districts in the latter half of May. The major part of that prodigious task was done . . . in the vicinity of Peach Orchard Bluff"--Alexandria Daily Town Talk, 15 June 1943. The regiment later went on to serve in France.
The regiment did not face the same level of racism and violence as the similarly named 364th Infantry Regiment (you can look them up for a real horror story), but they did suffer a disturbing incident on 20 May 1943, during the period depicted in these photographs. A group of off-duty soldiers went into the nearby town of Cotton Plant and were dining peacefully at a restaurant in the "colored section" of town when a white constable ordered them to leave without explanation, and then drew his gun. The soldiers quickly attempted to disarm the constable, wounding him in the process. Private John A. Foreman was sentenced to 12 years in prison for attempted murder (see the New York Age, 6 January 1945).