World War Memorial

The World War Memorial in Kimball, West Virginia commemorates African Americans who served in World War I. The building sits on a hill in Kimball, a town in McDowell County, West Virginia. Constructed in 1928, the site was the first memorial of African-American veterans in the United States. Many African Americans worked as coalminers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As of 1920, McDowell County had the largest population of African Americans in the entire Appalachian region. 1,500 men from the county were among the 400,000 African Americans who volunteered for service during World War I.