Few people could have missed the symbolism of Harding’s June 6 visit to Lincoln, Pa., near the small town of Oxford, about five miles north of the Maryland border. The university had been founded as the Ashmun Institute in 1854 but changed its name after the Civil War in tribute to the assassinated president. Early on, it was known as “the Black Princeton.”
Harding wanted to acknowledge the searing anguish of Tulsa — the city where President Trump held a controversial rally Saturday night — not just for African Americans there but also across the nation. He also wanted to praise and honor Lincoln alumni who had been among the more than 367,000 black servicemen to fight in the Great War. One Lincoln graduate led the 370th U.S. Infantry, the “Black Devils.” Col. F.A. Denison was the sole black commander of a regiment in France.
The return of so many black veterans from the First World War was in fact one of the catalysts for the country’s increasing racial tensions from 1919 to 1921, with many whites threatened by the black veterans’ newfound status and authority, to say nothing of the competition they posed in the job market.
In Tulsa, Army veterans were among the African Americans who sought to protect their homes and businesses from the white mobs — although newspaper accounts largely and falsely blamed the city’s black population for the upheaval. It would be decades before the true scope and causes of the massacre were analyzed and understood.
Harding and his four-car caravan set off before dawn on that Monday, heading southwest from Valley Forge, Pa., where he and the first lady had been guests at a farmhouse owned by Sen. Philander Knox. When the entourage arrived at the campus, it stopped in front of a granite arch that had recently been erected in memory of “Lincoln men” who had fought and died in the war.
According to the university newspaper, the visit represented “the high-water mark in the history of the institution.” Harding spoke extemporaneously in the sun-dappled setting, addressing the graduating class as “my fellow countrymen.” He was there not just for their commencement but also to help dedicate the arch, and his words reflected a theme he sounded repeatedly during his presidency: that African American servicemen had paid through service and sacrifice for the nation to “make the world safe for democracy.” They were due.
Then he turned to two of the day’s most controversial subjects.
He called education critical to solving the issues of racial inequality, but he challenged the students to shoulder their shared responsibility to advance freedom. The government alone, he said, could not magically “take a race from bondage to citizenship in half a century.”
He also spoke briefly about Tulsa and offered up a simple prayer: “God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness, and the justice of this country, we never see another spectacle like it.”