“If person is of African descent cut off this corner”.
In addition to collecting World War I Draft Registration cards for family members, I've been compiling an index of cards for 'persons of African descent' in Labette County, KS. Even though I've looked at many cards before and noticed the lower left-hand corner cut off of many of them, I never thought about its significance. Then I finally looked at a blank form and saw the little triangle in the corner with the instruction to cut it off based on the registrant's heritage. There were three versions of the draft card - A, B and C. Version C did not have the triangle. All three versions did have an entry for Race but I suppose it's easier to look for cut off corners than to actually have to read cards in order to select a race-based group of soldiers, especially when that entry included Black, Colored, African and Ethiopian (I haven't found any Mulattoes in my extracts yet). What ever did they do when they got to the C-cards? What happened to the person whose corner was cut off by mistake? Or whose corner was not?
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