The military created separate training facilities, separate units, and separate command structures. Black officer candidates trained at a separate facility in Des Moines, Iowa — not because separate training was inherently better, but because the Army would not train Black officers alongside white officers. The 93rd Division, which included the 369th, was organized as an all-Black division, though it was never assembled as a complete division in France; its regiments were distributed to French command rather than fighting together as a coherent American division.
The specific consequence for the 369th was the assignment to the French Army in March 1918. The assignment was practical: the French needed manpower, the 369th needed combat duty, and Pershing could not integrate it into the American line without confronting the racial politics that he was not prepared to confront. The assignment was also, in a specific way, an opportunity: the French Army was not applying American racial rules to its soldiers, and the 369th found in France a context where it could fight on something closer to equal terms.
## The Camp Wadsworth Incident
The specific incident at Camp Wadsworth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that is documented in the accounts of the 369th’s training is worth describing because it illustrates the specific pressures the regiment faced before it ever reached France.
Noble Sissle, the bandleader and later Broadway figure who was James Reese Europe’s assistant with the regimental band, was attacked in a hotel lobby in Spartanburg for not removing his hat — the specific Jim Crow violation of a Black man failing to perform the gesture of deference that the local white social order expected. White soldiers from other units were present and the confrontation escalated.