By Berry Craig
KyForward columnist
Rufus Ballard Atwood came home a war hero in 1919, but not to a hero’s welcome in Hickman, his hometown.
Pomp Atwood feared for his son’s safety. So he warned him to be in civilian clothes when he got to town. Some other World War I veterans like Rufus Atwood wore their uniforms home and were beaten up.
The ex-soldiers were African American.
Atwood made sergeant in the storied 369th Infantry, most of whose men were from Harlem in New York City. Their beleaguered German foes nicknamed them the “Hell Fighters,” according to Harlem’s Hell Fighters: The African-American 369th Infantry in World War I, a book by Stephen L. Harris. He wrote that the regiment was in combat for 191 days, longer than any other American outfit.
Atwood was cited for bravery in battle the day before the war ended. But he is better known as an educator. Atwood earned three college degrees and served as president of Kentucky State University in Frankfort from 1929 to 1962.
Because Atwood’s skin was black, he was treated as a second-class citizen in Hickman, an old Mississippi River port and the Fulton County seat where he was born in 1897. His parents had been slaves.
Segregation and race discrimination were the law and the social order in Hickman, which was strongly pro-Confederate during the Civil War and where blacks were lynched afterwards. Hickman wasn’t the only Kentucky community in which whites assaulted or taunted African Americans for returning from World War I in their olive green Army uniforms.
Atwood was afraid to don his uniform until he was inside his house. The 22-year-old veteran said he wanted his family to “see how I looked as a soldier…I never wore that uniform outside our door.”
Atwood earned bachelor’s degrees from Fisk University in Nashville and Iowa State University. He added a master’s degree from the University of Chicago.
Atwood was a student at Fisk when he volunteered for the Army in 1918. Racism was rampant in the military, too.
Overseas in France, most American generals, all of whom were white, disdained blacks as combat soldiers. They detailed most of them as laborers or handed them over to the French. The 369th served in the French Fourth Army, whose commanders showered the African Americans with medals.
After World War I — the Great War until World War II — most white historians all but ignored the role of African Americans in the conflict. African American historian John Hope Franklin told about Atwood’s bravery in his 1947 book, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes.
Atwood’s officers recognized him for heroism in battle on Nov. 10, 1918. A German shell hit the house in Pont-à-Mousson where Atwood and other soldiers were operating a switchboard, Franklin wrote. “…Atwood rendered valuable assistance in reconstructing the switchboard and connecting new lines under heavy shell fire.”
Franklin quoted from the official Army report of Atwood’s bravery: “When the ammunition dump began to explode in the same neighborhood, he remained on the job, tapping new connections. After repairs were made from the first explosion, there were two to follow which completely wrecked the switchboard room and tore out all the lines which were newly fixed.
“Sergeant Atwood was left alone, and he established a new switchboard and the same connections they had at first. The coolness with which he went about his work and the initiative he took in handling the situation justifies his being mentioned in orders.”
Atwood was dean of agriculture at Prairie View State College in Texas from 1923 until he became president of Kentucky State.
In 1962, the University of Kentucky awarded him the Algernon Sidney Sullivan Citizen Medallion for dedicating his life “to the education of young people and…for the advancement of interracial relations,” according to the Kentucky Human Rights Commission.
Atwood was the first African American to receive the honor which was started in 1925 and conferred by 25 Southern colleges and universities, The Kentucky Encyclopedia says.
He died in 1983 and was buried in the Frankfort Cemetery.
Berry Craig of Mayfield is a professor emeritus of history from West Kentucky Community and Technical College in Paducah and the author of five books on Kentucky history, including True Tales of Old-Time Kentucky Politics: Bombast, Bourbon and Burgoo and Kentucky Confederates: Secession, Civil War, and the Jackson Purchase. Reach him at bcraig8960@gmail.com
