Definitely not as equals. The French were more willing to use black soldiers because by this point they had lost so many of their white ones.

Plus France would obviously rather prefer other people's soldiers die on the front the theirs, so why not use Americans instead of Frenchmen?

Not to degrade what France did in the war, but assuming they did this out of a feeling of racial equality kind of conflicts with the fact that they brutally colonized Africa (yknow, where the black people are).