Mia Bay (University of Cambridge), 'The Call and the Answer: Travel and Literature in the Work of Addie B. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson.

Professor Bay will discuss the travel, work and thought of Addie B. Hunton and Kathryn M. Johnson, two YMCA workers sent to France in 1918 to investigate the treatment of 200,000 segregated black troops stationed there during World War I.

Along with their colleague Helen Curtis, Hunton and Johnson were the only three Black women to participate in the American Expeditionary Force’s (AEF) mobilisation of American women auxiliary workers prior to the War’s end. They did remarkable work all the same.

Employed as 'secretaries', by the YMCA, Hunton and Johnson's assignment included organising educational, religious and cultural activities for the 25,000 African American soldiers serving as stevedores, labourers and engineers in St. Nazaire – the war’s transportation and supply hub – and providing similar enrichment for African American men on leave in Southern France and others awaiting transport home in Brest, and offering what comfort they could to the Black troops given the unenviable task assigned to recovering and burying the bodies of the American soldiers who died in the Meuse– Argonne Offensive.

Although always overextended, Hunton and Johnson launched literacy courses, discussion series and other enrichment programmes, while also taking it upon themselves to document the segregation and discrimination experienced by the Black Americans stationed in France. On their return home, Hunton and Johnson published a written record of what they saw in Europe, producing a co-written work entitled Two Colored Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920) that describes both their experiences and those of the troops.

Professor Bay will explore the convergence between travel and activism in their text.

Description supplied by the event organiser.