Black Bolshevik is the autobiography of Harry Haywood, published January 1, 1978. The son of former slaves who became a leading member of the Communist Part USA and a pioneering theoretician on the Afro-American struggle.
The author's first-hand accounts of the Chicago race riot of 1919, the Scottsboro Boys' defense, communist work in the South, the Spanish Civil War, the battle against the revisionist betrayal of the Party, and other history-shaping events are must reading for all who are interested in Black history and the working class struggle.
It was dedicated to his family; his third wife, son and daughter.
"To My Family,
Gwen, Haywood, Jr., and Becky"
Acknowledgement
There have been many friends and comrades who have, directly or indirectly, helped me with the writing of this book. Unfortunately, they are too numerous to all be named here.
There are a number of young people who have helped with the editorial, research and typing tasks and helped the project along through political discussions. Special thanks to Ernie Allen, who gave yeoman help with the early chapters. Others whose assistance was indispensable include Jody and Susan Chandler, Paula Cohen, Stu Dowty and Janet Goldwasser, Paul Elitzik, Pat Fry, Gary Goff, Sherman Miller, John Schwartz, Lyn Wells and Carl Davidson. Others who gave me assistance are Renee Blakkan and Nathalie Garcia.
Over the past years, I have had discussions with several veteran comrades and friends who have helped immeasurably in jogging my memory and filling in the gaps where my own experience was lacking, I extend my warmest appreciation to Jesse Gray, Josh Lawrence, Arthur and Maude (White) Katz, John Killens, Ruth Hamlin, Frances Loman, Al Murphy, Joan Sandler, Delia Page and Jack and Ruth Shulman.
A political autobiography is necessarily shaped by experiences over the years and by comrades who helped and influenced me in the long battle for self-determination and against revisionism. My earliest political debts are to the first core of Black cadres in the CPUSA: Cyril Briggs, Edward Doty, Richard B. Moore and to my brother Otto Hall, all former members of the African Blood Brotherhood.
To Harrison George, outstanding son of the working class, charter member of the CPUSA, former editor of the Daily Worker and the Peoples' World, who gave his all to the Communist movement and died alone, victimized for his “premature" anti- revisionism.
A special tribute to my comrades in the battles against revisionism within the CPUSA and after: Al Lannon, veteran director of the Waterfront Section and member of the Central Committee of the CPUSA; Charles Loman, executive secretary of the Brooklyn Party Organization; Isidore Beagun, executive secretary of the Bronx Party Organization; Allen and Pearl Lawes, Al and Ruth Hamlin, Olga and Victor Agosto. And to my wife, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, my closest collaborator from 1953 through 1964 in the writing of manuscripts as well as in the Apolitical battles, who has since established her own reputation as historian and essayist.
A tribute to Ed Strong, former communist youth leader and director of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, whose premature death in the mid-fifties cut short his uncompromising stand within the Central Committee for the right of self-determination for the Black nation.
To the editors of Soulbook Magazine, who published my writings in 1965-66 and invited me to Oakland, California, in the spring of 1966 during the formative stages of the Black Panther movement.
To Vincent Harding, who provided me with funds to return to the U.S. from Mexico in 1970 and gave me technical and material assistance to begin this autobiography.
Thanks to John Henrik Clarke and Francisco and Elizabeth Cattlett de Mora for their enthusiasm and moral support.
To Robert Warner, Director of the Michigan Historical Collections, for his help and his sensitivity to the need to collect and preserve historically relevant materials from the Black movement in the United States.
Prologue
On July 28, 1919,1 literally stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of my life. Exactly three months after mustering out of the Army, I found myself in the midst of one of the bloodiest race riots in U.S. history. It was certainly a most dramatic return to the realities of American democracy.
It came to me then that I had been fighting the wrong war. The Germans weren’t the enemy -the enemy was right here at home. These ideas had been developing ever since I landed home in April, and a lot of other Black veterans were having the same thoughts.
I had a job as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad at the time. In July, I was working the Wolverine, the crack Michigan Central train between Chicago and New York. We would serve lunch and dinner on the run out of Chicago to St. Thomas, Canada, where the dining car was cut off the train. The next morning our cars would be attached to the Chicago-bound train and we would serve breakfast and lunch into Chicago.
On July 27, the Wolverine left on a regular run to St. Thomas. Passing through Detroit, we heard news that a race riot had broken out in Chicago. The situation had been tense for some time. Several members of the crew, all of them Black, had bought revolvers and ammunition the previous week when on a special to Battle Creek, Michigan. Thus, when we returned to Chicago at about 2:00 P.M. the next day (July 28). we were apprehensive about what awaited us.
The whole dining car crew, six waiters and four cooks, got off at the Twelfth Street Station in Chicago. Usually we would stay on the car while it backed out to the yards, but the station seemed a better route now. We were all tense as we passed through the station on the way to the elevated which would take us to the Southside and home. Suddenly a white trainman accosted us. “Hey, you guys going out to the Southside?”
“Yeah, so what?” I said, immediately on the alert, thinking he might start something.
“If I were you I wouldn’t go by the avenue” He meant Michigan Avenue which was right in front of the station.
“Why?”
“There’s a big race riot going on out there, and already this morning a couple of colored soldiers were killed coming in unsuspectingly. If I were you I’d keep off the street, and go right out those tracks by the lake.”
We took the trainman’s advice, thanked him, and turned toward the tracks. It would be much slower walking home, but if he were right, it would be safer. As we turned down the tracks toward the Southside of the city, towards the Black ghetto, I thought of what I had just been through in Europe and what now lay before me in America.
On one side of us lay the summer warmness of Lake Michigan. On the other was Chicago, a huge and still growing industrial center of the nation, bursting at its seams; brawling, sprawling Chicago, “hog butcher for the nation” as Carl Sandburg had called it
As we walked, I remembered the war. On returning from Europe, I had felt good to be alive. I was glad to be back with my family—Mom, Pop and my sister. At twenty-one, my life lay before me. What should I do? The only trade I had learned was waiting tables. I hadn’t even finished the eighth grade. Perhaps I should go back to France, live there and become a French citizen? After all, I hadn’t seen any Jim Crow there.
Had race prejudice in the U.S. lessened? I knew better. Conditions in the States had not changed, but we Blacks had. We were determined not to take it anymore. But what was I walking into?
Southside Chicago, the Black ghetto, was like a besieged city. Whole sections of it were in ruins. Buildings burned and the air was heavy with smoke, reminiscent of the holocaust from which I had recently returned.
Our small band, huddled like a bunch of raw recruits under machine gun fire, turned up Twenty-sixth Street and then into the heart of the ghetto. At Thirty-fifth and Indiana, we split up to go our various ways; I headed for home at Forty-second Place and Bowen. None of us returned to work until the riot was over, more than a week later.
The battle at home was just as real as the battle in France had been. As I recall, there was full-scale street fighting between Black and white. Blacks were snatched from streetcars and beaten or killed; pitched battles were fought in ghetto streets; hoodlums roamed the neighborhood, shooting at random. Blacks fought hack.
As I saw it at the time, Chicago was two cities. The one was the Chamber of Commerce’s city of the “American Miracle,” the Chicago of the 1893 World Columbian Exposition. It was the new industrial city which had grown in fifty years from a frontier town to become the second largest city in the country.
The other, the Black community, had been part of Chicago almost from the time the city was founded. Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable, a Black trapper from French Canada, was the first settler. Later came fugitive slaves, and after the Civil War- more Blacks, fleeing from post-Reconstruction terror, taking jobs as domestics and personal servants.
The large increase was in the late 1880s through World War 1, as industry in the city expanded and as Blacks streamed north following the promise of jobs, housing and an end to Jim Crow lynching. The Illinois Central tracks ran straight through the deep South from Chicago to New Orleans, and the Panama Limited made the run every day.
Those that took the train north didn’t find a promised land. They found jobs and housing, all right, but they had to compete with the thousands of recent immigrants from Europe who were also drawn to the jobs in the packing houses, stockyards and steel mills.
The promise of an end to Jim Crow was nowhere fulfilled. In those days, the beaches on Lake Michigan were segregated. Most were reserved for whites only. The Twenty-sixth Street Beach, close to the Black community, was open to Blacks—but only as long as they stayed on their own side.
The riot had started at this beach, which was then jammed with a late July crowd. Eugene Williams, a seventeen-year-old Black youth, was killed while swimming off the white side of the beach. The Black community was immediately alive with accounts of what had happened—that he had been murdered while swimming., that a group of whites had thrown rocks at him and killed him, and that the policeman on duty at the beach had refused to make any arrests.
This incident was the spark that ignited the flames of racial animosity which had been smoldering for months. Fighting between Blacks and whites broke out on the Twenty-sixth Street beach after Williams’s death. It soon spread beyond the beach and lasted over six days. Before it was over, thirty-eight people—Black and white—were dead, 537 injured and over 1,000 homeless.
The memory of this mass rebellion is still very sharp in my mind. It was the great turning point in my life, and I have dedicated myself to the struggle against capitalism ever since. In the following pages of my autobiography, I have attempted to trace the development of that struggle in the hopes that today’s youth can learn from both our successes and failures. lt is for the youth and the bright future of a socialist USA that this book has been written.
Chapter 1
A Child of Slaves
I was born in South Omaha, Nebraska, on February 4, 1898— the youngest of the three children of Harriet and Haywood Hall. Otto, my older brother, was born in May 1891; and Eppa, my sister, in December 1896.
The 1890s had been a decade of far-reaching structural change in the economic and political life of the United States. These were fateful years in which the pattern of twentieth century subjugation of Blacks was set. A young U.S. imperialism was ready in 1898 to shoulder its share of the “white man’s burden” and take its "manifest destiny” beyond the Pacific Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. In the war against Spain, it embarked on its first "civilizing” mission against the colored peoples of the Philippines and the “mixed breeds” of Cuba and Puerto Rico. In the course of the decade and a half following the Spanish-American War, the two-faced banner of racism and imperialist “benevolence” was carried to the majority of the Caribbean countries and the whole of Latin America.
“The echo of this industrial imperialism in America,” said W. E. B. DuBois, “was the expulsion of Black men from American democracy, their subjection to caste control and wage slavery.” In 1877, the Hayes-Tilden agreement had successfully aborted the ongoing democratic revolution of Reconstruction in the South. Blacks were sold down the river, as northern capitalists, with the assistance of some former slaveholders, gained full economic and political control in the South. Henceforward, it was assured that the future development of the region would be carried out in complete harmony with the interests of Wall Street. The following years saw the defeat of the Southern based agrarian populist movement, with its promise of Black and white unity against the power of monopoly capital. The counter-revolution against Reconstruction was in full swing.
Beginning in 1890, the Southern state legislatures enacted a series of disenfranchisement laws. Within the next sixteen years, these laws were destined to completely abrogate the right of Blacks to vote. This same period saw the revival of the notorious Black Codes, the resurgence of the hooded terror of the Ku Klux Klan and the defeat for reelection in 1905 of the last Black congressman surviving the Reconstruction period. Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation in public facilities were enacted by Southern states and municipal governments. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow in the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in 1896, declaring that legislation is powerless to eradicate “racial instinets” and establishing the principle of “separate but equal.” This decision was only reversed in 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court held that separate facilities were inherently unequal.
At the time when I was born, the Black experience was mainly a Southern one. The overwhelming majority of Black people still resided in the South. Most of the Black inhabitants of South Omaha were refugees from the twenty-year terror of the post-Re construction period. Omaha itself, despite its midwestern location, did not escape the terror completely, as indicated by the lynching of a Black man, Joe Coe, by a mob in 1891. Many people had relatives and families in the South. Some had trekked up to Kansas in 1879 under the leadership of Henry Adams of Louisiana and Moses “Pap” Singleton of Tennessee, and many had then continued further north to Omaha and Chicago.
My parents were born slaves in 1860. They were three years old at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. My Father was born on a plantation in Martin County, Tennessee, north of Memphis. The plantation was owned by Colonel Haywood Hall, whom my Father remembered as a kind and benevolent man. When the slaves were emancipated in 1863, my Grandfather, with the consent of Mr. Hall, took both the given name and surname of his former master.
I never knew Grandfather Hall, as he died before I was born. According to my Father and uncles, he was—as they said in those days—“much of a man” He was active in local Reconstruction polities and probably belonged to the Black militia. Although Tennessee did not have a Reconstruction government, there were many whites who supported the democratic aims that were pursued during the Reconstruction period.
But Tennessee was also the home of the Ku Klux Klan, where it was first organized after the Civil War. In the terror that followed the Hayes-Tilden agreement, these “night riders” had marked my Grandfather out as a “bad nigger” for lynching. At first they were deterred because of the paternalism of Colonel Hall. Many of Hall’s former slaves still lived on his plantation after the war ended, and the colonel had let it be known that he would kill the first “son-of-a-bitch” that trespassed on his property and tried to terrorize his “nigrahs.”
But the anger of the night riders, strengthened by corn liquor, finally overcame their fear of Colonel Hall. My Father, who was about fifteen at the time, described what happened. One night the Klansmen rode onto the plantation and headed straight for Grandfather’s cabin. They broke open the door and one poked his head into the darkened cabin. “Hey, Hall’s nigger-where are you?"
My Grandfather was standing inside and fired his shotgun point blank at the hooded head. The Klansman, half his head blown off, toppled onto the floor of the cabin, and his companions mounted their horses and fled. Grandmother, then pregnant, fell against the iron bed.
Grandfather got the family out of the cabin and they ran to the “big house” for protection. It was obvious they couldn’t stay in Tennessee, so the Colonel hitched up a wagon and personally drove them to safety, outside of Martin County. Some of Grandfather’s family were already living in Des Moines, Iowa, so the Hall family left by train for Des Moines the following morning. The shock of this experience was so great that Grandmother gave birth prematurely to their third child—my Uncle George who lived to be ninety-five. Grandmother, however, became a chronic invalid and died a few years after the flight from Tennessee.
Father was only in his teens when the family left for Des Moines, so he spent most of his youth there. In the late 1880s, he left and moved to South Omaha where there was more of a chance to get work. He got a job at Cudahy’s Packing Company, where he worked for more than twenty years—first as a beef-lugger (loading sides of beef on refrigerated freight cars), and then as a janitor in the main office building. Not long after his arrival, he met and married Mother—Harriet Thorpe—who had come up from Kansas City, Missouri, at about the same time.
Father was powerfully built—of medium height, but with tremendous breadth (he had a forty-six-inch chest and weighed over 200 pounds). He was an extremely intelligent man. With little or no formal schooling, he had taught himself to read and write and was a prodigious reader. Unfortunately, despite his great strength, he was not much of a fighter, or so it seemed to me. In later years, some of the old slave psychology and fear remained. He was an ardent admirer of Booker T. Washington who, in his Atlanta compromise speech of 1895, had called on Blacks to submit to the racist status quo,
Uncle George was the opposite. He would brook no insult and had been known to clean out a whole barroom when offended. The middle brother, Watt, was also a fighter and was especially dangerous if he had a knife or had been drinking. I remember both of them complaining of my Father’s timidity.
My Mother’s family also had great fighting spirit. Her father, Jerry Thorpe, was born on a plantation near Bowling Green, Kentucky. He was illiterate, but very smart and very strong. Even as an old man, his appearance made us believe the stories that were told of his strength as a young man. When he was feeling fine and happy, his exuberance would get the best of him and he’d grab the largest man around, hoist him on his shoulders, and run around the yard with him.
Grandfather Thorpe was half Creek Indian and had an Indian profile with a humped nose and high cheekbones. His hair was short and curly and he had a light brown complexion. He had a straggly white beard that he tried to cultivate into a Van Dyke. He said his father was a Creek Indian and his mother a Black plantation slave. No one knew his exact age, but we made a guess based on a story he often told us.
He was about six or seven years old when, he said, “The stars fell”
“When was that, Grandpa?”
“Oh, one night the stars fell, I remember it very clearly. The skies were all lit up by falling stars. People were scared almost out of I heir wits. The old master and mistress and all the slaves were running out on the road, falling down on their knees to pray and ask forgiveness. We thought the Judgement Day had surely come. Glory Hallelujah! It was the last fire! The next day, the ground was all covered with ashes!”
At first we thought all of that was just his imagination, something he had fantasized as a child and then remembered as a real event. But when my older brother Otto was in high school, he got interested in astronomy and came across a reference to a meteor shower of 1833. We figured out that was what Grandfather Thorpe had been talking about, so we concluded that he was born around 1825 or 1826.
Grandfather Thorpe was filled with stories, many about slavery.
“Chillen, I’ve got scars I’ll carry to my grave.” He would show us the welts on his back from slave beatings (my Grandmother also had them). Most of his beatings came from his first master in Kentucky. But he was later sold to a man in Missouri, whom he said treated him much better. This may have been due in part to his value as a slave—he was skilled both as a carpenter and cabinetmaker.
Grandfather had many stories to tell about the Civil War. He was in Missouri at the time, living in an area that was first taken by a group known as Quantrell's raiders (a guerrilla-like band of irregulars who fought for the South) and then by the Union forces.
When the Union soldiers first came into the plantations, they would call in slaves from the fields and make them sit down in the great drawing room of the house. They would then force the master and mistress and their family to cook and serve for the slaves. Grandfather told us that the soldiers would never eat any of the food that was served, because they were afraid of getting poisoned.
The master on the plantation was generally decent when it became clear that the Union forces were going to control the area for awhile. At that time, Grandfather and my Grandmother Ann lived on adjacent plantations somewhere near Moberly, Missouri. Grandfather was allowed to visit Ann on weekends. Often on Sundays when he went to make a visit, he was challenged by Union guards. They would roughly demand to know his mission. My Grandfather and Grandmother got married, with the agreement of their two masters, and eventually had a family of five daughters and two sons. Grandfather Thorpe was given a plot of land in return for his services as a carpenter, but the family soon moved into Moberly. As the children reached working age, the family began to break up, but the girls always remained very close. They came back to visit frequently and never broke family ties as the boys had.
My Mother, Harriet, was born when Grandmother was a slave on the plantation of Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri. After the family moved into Moberly, Mother worked for a white family in town. She later went to St. Joseph, Missouri, to work for another white family. One day, while she was at work in St. Joseph, she heard a shot and then screams from down the street. She ran out to see what had happened. There was a great commotion and a crowd of people was gathering in front of the house next door.
The family living there went by the name of Howard—a man, wife and two children. Both the man and his wife were church members; they appeared to be a most respectable couple. Mrs. Howard had been very active in church affairs and socials. Her husband was frequently absent because, she said, he was a traveling salesman and his work took him out of town for long periods of time.
What the neighbors were not aware of was that “Mr. Howard” was none other than the legendary Jesse James. He was shot in the hack while hanging a picture in his house. The man who killed him was Robert Ford—a member of Jesse's own gang who had turned 11 a it or for a bribe offered by the Burns Detective Agency.
When my Mother did the laundry, I remember she would often ring the “Ballad of Jesse James"—a song which became popular niter his death.
Jesse James was a man—he killed many a man,
The man that robbed that Denver train.
It was a dirty little coward Who shot Mr. Howard,
And they laid Jesse James in his grave.
Oh the people held their breath When they heard of Jesse's death,
And they wondered how he came to die.
He was shot on the sly By little Robert Ford,
And they laid poor Jesse in his grave.
In 1893, my Mother went to Chicago to visit her sister and see the Exposition. She said she saw Frank James, Jesse's brother, lie was out of prison then, a very dignified old man with a long white beard. He had been hired to ride around as an attraction at one of the exhibitions.
Mother kept moving up to the north by stages. After the job in St. Joseph, she found work in St. Louis. She arrived to Find the city in a tense situation- the whole town was on the verge of a race riot. The immediate cause was the murder of an Irish cop named Brady. The Black community was elated, for Brady was a “nigger-hating cop" who carved notches on his pistol to show the number of Blacks he had killed. Brady finally met his end at the hands of a "bad" Black man who ran a gambling house in Brady's district.
The gambling, of course, was illegal. But as was often the case, The cops were paid off with a “cut" from the takings of the house. As the story was told to me, Brady and the gambler met on the street one day and got into an argument. Brady accused the gambler of not giving him his proper “cut." This was denied vehemently. Brady then threatened to close the place down. The Black man told him, “Don’t you come into my place when the game’s going on!” He then turned and walked off. The scene was witnessed by several Blacks, and the news of how the gambler had defied Brady spread immediately throughout the Black district.
This was bad stuff for Brady. It might lead to “niggers gettin’ notions,” as the cops put it. A few days passed, and Brady made his move. He went to the gambling house when the game was on and was shot dead.
Some anonymous Black bard wrote a song about it all:
Brady, why didn’t you run,
You know you done wrong.
You came in the room when the game was going on!
Brady went below looking mighty curious.
Devil said, " Where you from?”
"I'm from East St. Louis .”
"East St. Louie, come this way I’ve been expecting you every day!”
The song was immediately popular in the Black community and became a symbol of rebellious feelings. Mother said that when she arrived in St. Louis, Blacks were singing this song all over town. The police realized the danger in such “notions” and began to arrest anyone they caught singing it. Forty years later. I was pleasantly surprised to hear Carl Sandburg sing the same song as part of his repertoire of folk ballads of the midwest. I had not heard it since Mother had sung it to us.
Mother later moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and then to South Omaha. Her marriage there to my Father was her second. As a very young girl in Moberly, she had married John Harvey, but he was, to use her words, “a no-good yellah nigger, who expected me to support him.” They had one child, Gertrude, before he deserted her.
Gertie came to Omaha some time after my Mother, and married my Father’s youngest brother, George. I have a feeling that Mother promoted this match; the two hard-working, sober Hall brothers must have been quite a catch!
As I remember Mother in my childhood years, she was a small, brown-skinned woman, rather on the plumpish side, with large and beautiful soft brown eyes. She had the humped, Indian nose of the Thorpe family.
My first memory of her is hearing her sing as she did housework. She had a melodious contralto voice and what seemed to me to be an endless and varied repertoire. Much of what I know about this period, I learned from her songs. These included lullabies (“Go to Sleep You Little Pickaninny, Mamma’s Gonna Swat You if You Don’t”) and many spirituals and jubilee songs. There were also innumerable folk ballads, and the popular songs of her day like "Down at the Ball” and “Where Did You Get That Hat?” Then there was the old song the slaves sang about their masters fleeing the Union Army—“The Year of Jubilo.”
Oh darkies, have you seen the Massah with the mustache on his face?
He was gwine down de road dis mornin’ like
he's gwine to leave dis place.
Oh, de Massah run, ha ha!
And the darkies sing, ho ho!
It must be now the Kingdom cornin' and de year of Jubilo!
Mother never went to school a day in her life, but she had a phenomenal memory and was a virtual repository of Black folklore. My brother Otto taught her to read and write when she when forty years old. She told stories of life on the plantations, of the “hollers” they used. When a slave wanted to talk to a friend on n neighboring plantation, she would throw back her head and half sing, half yell: “Oh, Bes-sie, I wa-ant to see you.” Often you could hear one of the “hollers” a mile away.
When Mother was a girl, camp meetings were a big part of her life. She had songs she remembered from the meetings, like “I Don’t Feel Weary, No Ways Tired,” and she would imitate the preachers with all of their promises of fire and brimstone. Later, when we lived in South Omaha, she was very active in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. As a means of raising funds, she used to organize church theatricals. Otto would help her read the plays; she would then direct them and usually play the leading role herself. She was a natural mimic. I heard her go through entire plays from beginning to end, imitating the voices (even the male ones) and the actions of the performers.
In addition to caring for Otto, Eppa and myself, Mother got jobs catering parties for rich white families in North Omaha. She would bring us back all sorts of goodies and leftovers from these parties. Sometimes she would get together with her friends among the other domestics, and they would have a great time panning their employers and exchanging news of the white folks’ scandalous doings.
Mother had the great fighting spirit of her family. She was a strong-minded woman with great ambition for her children, especially for us boys. Eppa, who was a plain Black girl, was sensitive but physically tough, courageous, and a regular tomboy.
Worried about her future, Mother insisted that she learn the piano and arranged for her to take lessons at twenty-five cents each. Though she learned to play minor classics such as “Poet and Peasant,” arias from such operas as Aida and II Trovatore, accompanied the choir and so on, Eppa never liked music very much and was not consoled by it the way Mother was.
As a wife, Mother had a way of making Father feel the part of the man in the house. She flattered his ego and always addressed him as “Mr. Half’ in front of guests and us children.
LIFE IN SOUTH OMAHA
You ask what town I love the best.
South Omaha, South Omaha!
The fairest town of all the rest,
South Omaha, South Omaha!
Where yonder's Papillion’s limp stream
To where Missouri’s waters gleam.
Oh, fairest town, oh town of mine,
South Omaha, South Omaha!
In the early part of the century, the days of my youth, South Omaha was an independent city. In 1915, it was annexed to become part of the larger city of Omaha. Like many midwestem towns, the city took its name from the original inhabitants of the area. In this case, it was the Omaha Indians of the Sioux tribal family. The area was a camping ground of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804. It grew in importance when it became a licensed trading post and an important outfitting point during the Colorado Gold Rush. But the main growth of South Omaha came in the 1880s as the meat packing industry developed.
In 1877, the first refrigerated railroad cars were perfected. This made it possible to slaughter livestock in the midwest and ship the meat to the large markets in eastern cities. As a result, the meat packing industry grew tremendously in the midwest.
The city leaders saw the opportunity and encouraged the expanding packing industry to settle there—offering them special tux concessions and so forth. The town, situated on a plateau back from the “big muddy” (the Missouri River), began to grow. Soon it was almost an industrial suburb of Omaha and was one of the three largest packing centers in the country. All of the big packers of the time—Armour, Swift, Wilson and Cudahy—had big branches there. Cudahy’s main plant was in South Omaha.
The industry brought with it growing railroad traffic. As a boy, I watched the dozens of lines of cars as they carried livestock in from the west and butchered meat to ship out to the east. The Burlington; the Chicago and Northwestern; the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific; the Illinois Central; the Rock Island; the Union Pacific—all of these lines had terminals there. By 1910, Omaha was the fourth largest railway center in the country.
When I was born in 1898, South Omaha was a bustling town of about 20,000. Most of these 20,000 people were foreign-born and first generation immigrants. The two largest groups were the Irish and the Bohemians (or Czechs). There was a sprinkling of other Slavic groups—Poles, Russians, Serbs—as well as Germans, Greeks and Italians.
The Bohemians were the largest ethnic group in town. They lived mainly in the southern part of town, towards the river, in the Brown Park and Albright sections. One thing that impressed me was their concern with education. They were a cultured group of people. I can’t remember any of them being illiterate and they had their own newspaper. They were involved in the political wheelings and dealings of the town and were successful at it. At one time, both the mayor and chief of police were Bohemians.
The Irish were the second largest group, scattered throughout the town. The newly arrived poor "shanty” Irish would first settle on Indian Hill, near the stockyards. There were two classes of Irish the "shanty” Irish on the one hand, and the "old settlers” or "lace curtain” Irish on the other. This second group, who had settled only one generation before, was mostly made up of middle class, white collar, civil service and professional workers who lived near North Omaha. There were also a few Irish who were very rich; managers and executives who lived in Omaha proper. They had become well assimilated into the community. The tendency was for the poorer Irish to live in South Omaha, and those who had "made it” to one degree or another would move up to North Omaha or Omaha proper.
There were only a few dozen Black families in South Omaha, scattered throughout the community. There was no Black ghetto and, as I saw it, no "Negro problem.” This was due undoubtedly to our small numbers, although there was a relatively large number of Blacks living in North Omaha. The Black community there had grown after Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers during the 1894 strike in the packing industry, but no real ghetto developed until after World War I.
Our family lived in the heart of the Bohemian neighborhood in South Omaha. Nearly all our neighbors were Bohemians. They came from many backgrounds; there were workers and peasants, professionals, artists, musicians and other skilled artisans, all fleeing from the oppressive rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
They were friendly people, and kept up their language and traditions. On Saturdays, families would gather at one of the beer gardens to sing and dance. I remember watching them dance scottisches and polkas, listening to the beautiful music of their bands and orchestras, or running after their great marching bands when they were in a parade. On special occasions, they would bring out their colorful costumes. Much of their community life centered around the gymnastic clubs—Sokols or Turners’ Halls— which they had established.
There were differences in how the ethnic groups related to each other and to the Blacks in town. In those days, Indian Hill was the stomping ground of teenage Irish toughs. One day, a mob of predominantly Irish youths ran the small Greek colony out of town when one of their members allegedly killed an Irish cop. I remember seeing the Greek community leaving town one Sunday afternoon. There were men, women and children (about 100 in all) walking down the railroad tracks, carrying everything they could hold. Some of their houses had been burned and a few of them had been beaten up in town.
We should have seen the danger for us in this, but one Black man even boasted to my Father about how he had helped run the Greeks out. My Father called him a fool. “What business did you have helping that bunch of whites? Next time it might be you they run out!’’ The incident was an ominous sign of tensions that were lo come many years later.
At the time, however, our family got along well with all the immigrant families in our immediate neighborhood. I loved the sweet haunting melodies of the Irish folk ballads; “Rose of Tralce,” "Mother Machree” and many of the popular songs, like “My Irish Molly-O” and “Augraghawan, I Want to Go Back to Oregon.”
There was a Bohemian couple living next door. On occasion, Mr. Rehau would get a bit too much under his belt. He’d come home and really raise hell. When this happened, Mrs. Rehau scurried to Officer Bingham, the Black cop, to get some help. I remember one afternoon when Bingham came to lend a hand in laming him. The Bohemian was a little guy compared to him. Officer Bingham threw him down out in the yard and plunked himself down on Rehau’s back.
Dust flew as he kicked and thrashed and tried to get out from under the Black man. Bingham just “rode the storm” and when Rehau raised his head, he’d smack him around until the rebellion subsided.
“Had enough?" he’d yell at his victim. “You gonna behave now and mind what Mrs. Rehau says?" All the while, she was running around them, waving her apron.
“Beat him some more, Mr, Bingham, please! Make him be good.”
Finally, either Bingham got tired or Mr. Rehau just gave out and peace returned to the neighborhood.
“Police and community relations" were less tense then. The cops knew how to control a situation without using guns. Often this meant they'd get into actual fist fights. In those days, there was a big Black guy in town named Sam, a beef lugger like my Father. Sam was a nice quiet guy, but on occasion he'd go on a drunk and fight anyone within arm’s length (which was a big area). The cops generally handled it by fighting it out with him.
But I remember one time Sam really caused a row. He was outside a bar on J Street, up in Omaha proper. During the course of his drunk, he’d beaten up five or six of the regular cops. This called for extreme measures. Briggs, the chief of police, came to the scene to restore law and order. He marched up to Sam and threw out his chest, “Now Sam, it's time for you to behave, you hear?" He even pulled out his thirty-eight to show he meant business.
But Sam wasn’t ready to behave. He came at Briggs, intending to lay him out like he’d done with the other officers, Briggs backed up, one step at a time. “Sam, you stop. You hear me Sam? Time to stop, now." Sam forced Briggs all the way back to his carriage. Once Briggs was in, he delivered his final threat: “Sam, you come down to City Hall on Monday and see me. This just can’t happen this way."
Briggs drove off. Monday morning came and Sam went down to City Hall. He was fined for being drunk and disorderly. He didn’t fight the court and willingly paid the fine. It seemed like an unwritten agreement. The cops wouldn’t shoot when Sam went on a spree. When it was over, Sam would go and pay his fine and that would end the whole business.
Our family was the only Black family in our neighborhood, and we were pretty well insulated from the racist pressures of the outside world. As children we were only very dimly aware of what DuBois called the “veil of color between the races.”
I First became aware of the veil, not from anything that happened in the town, but from what my parents and grandparents told me of how Southern whites had persecuted Blacks and of how they had suffered under slavery. I remember Grandfather and Grandmother Thorpe showing me the scars they had on their backs from the overseer’s lash. I remember Pa reading newspaper accounts of the endless reign of lynch terror in the South, and about the 1908 riots in Springfield, Illinois.
In 1908, Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight champion, defeated the “great white hope.” Jim Jeffries. Pa said that it was the occasion for a new round of lynchings in the South. There were other great Black fighters—Sam Langford, Joe Jeanett and Sam McVey for instance—but Johnson was the first Black heavyweight to be able to fight for the championship and the first to win it.
He was conscious that he was a Black man in a racist world. “I’m Black, they never let me forget it. Pm Black, Til never forget it.” Jeffries had been pushed as the hope of the white race to reclaim the heavyweight crown from Johnson. When Johnson knocked out Jeffries, it was a symbol of Black defiance and self-assertion. To Blacks, the victory meant pride and hope. It was a challenge to the authority of bigoted whites and to them it called for extra measures to “keep the niggers in their place.”
To us children, Black repression seemed restricted to the South, outside the orbit of our immediate experience. As I saw it then, there was no deliberate plot of white against Black. I thought there were two kinds of white folk: good and bad, and the latter were mainly in the South. Most of those I knew in South Omaha were good people. Disillusionment came later in my life.
The friendly interracial atmosphere of South Omaha was illustrated by the presence of Officer Bingham and Officer Ballou, two Black cops in the town’s small police force. Bingham was a big, Black and jolly fellow. His beat was our neighborhood. Ballou was a tall, slim, ramrod straight and light brown-skinned Black. He was a veteran of the Black Tenth Cavalry. He had fought in the Indian wars against Geronimo and had participated in the chase for Billy the Kid. Ballou was also a veteran of the Spanish- American War. All the kids, Black and white, regarded him with a special awe and respect. Both Black officers were treated as respectable members of the community, liked by the people because they had their confidence. While they wore guns, they never seemed to use them. These cops fought tough characters with fists and clubs, pulling a gun only rarely, and then only in self- defense. It seemed that a large part of their duty was to keep the kids out of mischief.
“Officer Bingham,” the Bohemian woman across the alley would call, “would you please keep an eye on my boy Frontal. See he don’t make trouble.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Brazda. He’s a good boy.” “
Has Haywood been a good boy?”
“Oh yes, Mrs. Hall. He’s all right.’’And he would stop for a chat. My sister Eppa, a lad called Willy Starens and I were the only Black kids in the Brown Park Elementary School. My brother Otto had already graduated and was in South Omaha High. Our schoolmates were predominantly Bohemians, with a sprinkling of Irish, German and a few Anglo-Americans. My close childhood chums included two Bohemian lads, Frank Brazda and Jimmy Rehau; an Anglo-Irish kid, Earl Power; and Willy Ziegler, who was of German parentage. We were an inseparable fivesome, in and out of each other’s homes all the time.
During my first years in school, I was plagued by asthma, and was absent from school many months at a time. The result was that I was a year behind. I finally outgrew this infirmity and became a strong, healthy boy. By the time I reached the eighth grade, I had become one of the best students in my class, sharing this honor with a Bohemian girl, Bertha Himmel. Both of us could solve any problem in arithmetic, both were good at spelling, and at interschool spelling bees our school usually won the first prize. My self-confidence was encouraged by my teachers, all of whom were white and yet uniformly kind and sympathetic.
Of course, like all kids, I had plenty of fights. But race was seldom involved. Occasionally, I would hear the word “nigger.” While it evoked anger in me, it seemed no more disparaging than the terms “bohunk,” “sheeny,” “dago,” “shanty Irish” or “poor white trash.” All were terms of common usage, interchangeable as slurring epithets on one’s ethnic background, and usually employed outside the hearing of the person in question.
In contrast to the daily life of the neighborhood, however, the virus of racism was subtly injected into the classroom at the Brown Park School I attended. The five races of mankind illustrated in our geography books portrayed the Negro with the receding forehead and prognathous jaws of a gorilla. There was a complete absence of Black heroes in the history books, supporting the inference that the Black man had contributed nothing to civilization. We were taught that Blacks were brought out of the savagery of the jungles of Africa and introduced to civilization through slavery under the benevolent auspices of the white man.
In spite of my Father’s submissive attitude, it is to him that I must give credit for scotching this big lie about the Negro’s past. His attitude grew out of his concern for our survival in a hostile environment. He felt most strongly that the Negro was not innately inferior, He perceived that his children must have some sense of self-respect and confidence to sustain them until that distant day when, through “obvious merit and just dessert,” Blacks would receive their award of equality and recognition.
Father possessed an amazing store of knowledge which he had culled from his readings. He would tell us about the Black civilizations of ancient Egypt, Ethiopia and Cush. He would quote from the Song of Solomon: “I am Black and comely, oh ye daughters of Jerusalem.” He would tell us about Black soldiers in the Civil War; about the massacre of Blacks at Fort Pillow and the battle cry they used thereafter, “Remember Fort Pillow! Remember Fort Pillow!”2 He knew about the Haitian Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon’s Army by Toussaint L’Ouverture, Dessalines and Jean Christophe. He told us about the famous Zulu chief Shaka in South Africa; about Alexandre Dumas, the great French romanticist, and Pushkin, the great Russian poet, who were both Black.
Father said that he had taught himself to read and write. He had an extensive library, which took up half of one of the walls in our subject. They included such titles as The Decisive Battles of the World The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, and many histories of England, France, Germany and Russia. He had Stanley in Africa, and a number of biographies of famous men, including Napoleon, Caesar and Hannibal (who Father said was a Negro). He had Scott’s Ivanhoe and his Waverly novels; Bulwer Lytton; Alexandre Dumas’ novels and the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington.
On another wall there was a huge picture of the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black Infantry and the Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill, rescuing Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. There were pictures of Frederick Douglass and, of course, his hero, Booker T. Washington. He would lecture to us on history, displaying his .extensive knowledge. He was a great admirer of Napoleon. He would get into one of his lecturing moods and pace up and down with his hands behind his back before the rapt audience of my sister Eppa and myself. Talking about the Battle of Waterloo, he would say:
“Wellington was in a tough spot that day. Napoleon was about to whip him; the trouble was Blucher hadn’t shown up.”
“Who was he, Pa?”
“He was the German general who was supposed to reinforce Wellington with 13,000 Prussian troops. Wellington was getting awful nervous, walking up and down behind the lines and saying, 4Oh! If Blucher fails to come! Where is Blucher?”
“Did he Finally get there, Pa?”
“Yes, son, he finally got there and turned the tide of battle. And if he hadn’t shown up and Napoleon had won, the whole course of history would have been changed.”
It was through Father that I entered the world of books. I developed an unquenchable thirst to learn about people and their history. I remember going to the town library when I was nine or ten and asking, “Do you have a history of the world for children?” My first love became the historical novel. I loved George Henty’s books; they always dealt with the exploits of a sixteen-year-old during an important historical period. Through Henty’s heroes, I too was with Bonnie Prince Charlie, with Wellington in rite Spanish Peninsula, with Gustavus Adolphus at Lutsen in the Thirty Years War, with Clive in India and Under Drake's Flag around the world. I was also fascinated by romances of the feudal period such as When Knighthood Was in Flower and Ivanhoe. I read Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the works of H. Rider Haggard.
I went through a definite Anglophile stage, in part due to the influence of a Jamaican named Mr. Williams who worked as assistant janitor with my Father. Mr. Williams was a huge Black man with scars all over his face. He was a former stoker in the British Navy. I was attracted by his strange accent and haughty demeanor. Evidently he saw in me an appreciative audience. I would listen with open mouth and wonder at the stories of the strange places he had seen, of his adventures in faraway lands. He was a real British patriot, a Black imperialist, if such was possible.
He would declare, “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” and then sing “Rule Brittania, Brittania Rule the Waves.” He quoted Napoleon as allegedly saying, “Britain is a small garden, but she grows some bitter weeds,” and “Give me French soldiers and British officers, and I will conquer the world.” I pictured myself as a British sailor, and read Two Years Before the Mast and Battle of Trafalgar.
“Do you think they would let me join the British Navy?” I asked Mr. Williams.
“No, my lad,” he answered, “You have to be a British citizen or subject to do that.” I was quite disappointed. But it was not only British romance that fascinated me. At about the age of twelve I became a Francophile. I read all of Dumas’ novels and quite a number of other novels about France. I had begun to read French history, which to me turned out to be as interesting as the novels and equally romantic. I read about Joan of Arc, the Hundred Years’ War, Francis I, about Catherine de Medici, the Huguenots and Admiral Coligny, the Due de Guise, the massacre of St. Bartholomew Eve or the night of the long knives; then the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, the guillotining of Charlotte Corday and the assassination of Marat.
Occasionally, the ugly reality of race would intrude upon the dream world of my childhood. I distinctly remember two such occasions. One was when a white family from Arkansas moved across the alley from us. Mr. Faught, the patriarch of the clan, was a typical red-necked peckerwood. He would sit around the store front, chawing tobacco, telling how they treated “niggers” down his way.
“They were made to stay in their place- -down in the cotton patch—not in factories taking white men’s jobs.”
As I remember, his racist harangues did not make much of an impression on the local white audience. Apparently at that time there was no feeling of competition in South Omaha because there were so few Blacks. I would also imagine that his slovenly appearance did not jibe with his white supremacist pretensions.
One day a substitute teacher took over our class. I was about ten years old. The substitute was a Southerner from Arkansas. During history class she started talking about the Civil War. The slaves, she said, did not really want freedom because they were happy as they were. They would have been freed by their masters in a few years anyway. Her villain was General Grant, whom she contrasted unfavorably with General Robert E. Lee.
“Lee was a gentleman,” she put forth, “But Grant was a cigar-smoking liquor-drinking roughneck.”
She didn’t like Sherman either, and talked about his “murdering rampage” through Georgia. I wasn't about to take all of this and challenged her.
“I don’t know about General Grant’s habits, but he did beat Lee. Besides, Lee couldn’t have been much of a gentleman; he owned slaves!”
Livid with rage, she shouted, “That’s enough —what I could say about you!”
“Well, what could you say?” I challenged. She apparently saw that wild racist statements wouldn’t work in this situation, and that I was trying to provoke her to do something like that. She cut short the argument, shouting, “That’s enough”
“Yes, that’s enough,” I sassed. During the heated exchange, I felt that I had the sympathy of most of my classmates. After school, some gathered around me and said, “You certainly told her off?”
When I told Mother she supported me. “You done right, son,” she said.
But Father was not so sure. “You might have gotten into trouble.”
I feel now that one of the reasons for my self-confidence during my childhood years, and why the racist notions of innate Black inferiority left me cold, was my older brother Otto. His example belied such claims. He was the most brilliant one in our family, and probably in all of South Omaha. He had skipped a grade both in grade school and in high school, and was a real prodigy. He was a natural poet, and won many prizes in composition. His poem on the charge of the Twenty-fifth Black Infantry and Tenth Cavalry at San Juan Hill was published in one of the Omaha dailies. Otto was praised by all of his teachers. “An unusual boy,” they said, “clearly destined to become a leader of his race.”
One day, one of his teachers and a Catholic priest called on Mother and Father to talk about Otto’s future. Otto was about fourteen at the time. They suggested that he might be good material for the priesthood, and that there was a possibility of his getting a scholarship for Creighton University, Omaha’s famous Jesuit school. The teacher suggested that if this were agreed to, he should take up Latin. My parents were extremely flattered, despite the fact that they were good Methodists (AME). Even Father, who did not seem ambitious for his children, was impressed.
But when the proposition was placed before Otto, he vehemently disagreed. He did not want to become a priest nor did he want to study Latin. He wanted, he said, to be an architect! Doctors, dentists, teachers and preachers -these were the professions for an ambitious Black in those days.
“An architect!” they exclaimed in amazement. “Who ever heard of a Black architect?”
“Who ever heard of a Black priest?” Otto retorted. (At that time there were only two or three Black priests in the entire U.S.)
“But Otto,” Mother argued,“you’ll have the support of a lot of prominent white folks. They’ll help you through college.”
But Otto would have none of it. Undoubtedly, my parents thought that they could finally wear down his opposition and that he would become more amenable in time. They did force him to take Latin, a subject he hated.
Otto stayed in school, but no longer seemed interested in his studies. He dropped out of school suddenly in his senior year. He was sixteen. He left home and got a job as a bellhop in a hotel in North Omaha’s Black community. This move cut completely the few remaining tics he had with his white age group in South Omaha.
Otto’s drop-out from high school evidently signified that he had given up the struggle to be somebody in the white world. He had become disillusioned with the white world and therefore sought identity with his own people. During my childhood years, our relationship had never been close. There was, of course, the age gap—he was seven years older. But even in later years, when we were closer and had more in common, we never talked about our childhood. I don’t know why. As a child I had been proud of his academic feats and boasted about them to my friends.
At the time he left high school Otto was the only Black in South Omaha High and was about to become its first Black graduate. Highly praised by his teachers and popular among his fellow students, he was a real showpiece in the school.
What caused him to drop out of school in his senior year? Thinking back on it, I don’t believe that it had anything to do with the attempt to make him a priest. I think that he had won that battle a couple of years before. At least, I never heard the matter mentioned again.
Otto undoubtedly had had high aspirations at one time, as evidenced by his desire to become an architect. Somewhere along the line they disappeared. Perhaps a contributing factor was the accumulating effect of Otto’s malady. On occasion, Mother would remind us that Otto had water on the brain, and that he was different from Eppa and myself. At the time, he seemed smarter than us, more independent and in rebellion against Pa’s lack of encouragement, moral support and his parental authority. Certainly in adult life Otto used to sleep about ten hours a day and very often fell asleep in meetings. He seemed to lack the ability of prolonged concentration, although whatever brain damage he may have suffered never affected the quickness of his mind and ability to grasp the nub of any question or the capacity for leadership which he showed on a number of occasions.
But more debilitating, probably, than any physical disease was the generation gap of that era—between parents of slave backgrounds and children born free, particularly in the north. Otto’s dropping out of school and his later radical political development were undoubtedly related to a conflict more intense than the ones of today.
Father was an ardent follower of Booker T. Washington. His ambitions for his sons were very modest, to put it mildly. He undoubtedly would have been satisfied if we could become good law-abiding citizens with stable jobs. He thought of jobs a notch or two above his own station, like a postal employee, a skilled tradesman, or a clerk in the civil service. The offer of a scholarship for the priesthood was, therefore, simply beyond his expectations, and I guess that the old man was deeply disappointed at Otto’s rejection of it.
Otto was quite independent and would not conform to Father’s idea of discipline. For example, he was completely turned off on the question of religion, and Father could not force him to go to church I don’t remember Otto ever going to church with the family. Father claimed that Otto was irresponsible and wild. As a result, there was mutual hostility between them. The results were numerous thrashings when Otto was young and violent quarrels between them as he grew older. Mother would usually defend Otto. Grandpa Thorpe, himself a strict disciplinarian, would warn Mother: “Hattie, you mark my words, that boy is going to lan’ in the pen.”
At some point, Otto came to the conclusion that there was no use in continuing his education. He must have felt that it was irrelevant. Opportunities for educated Blacks were few, even in North Omaha’s Black community where there were only a few professionals. In that community there were a few preachers, one doctor, one dentist and one or two teachers. Black businesses consisted of owners of several undertaking establishments, a couple of barber shops and a few pool rooms. The only other Blacks in any sort of middle class positions were a few postal employees, civil service workers, pullman porters and waiters.
Then too, Otto had passed through the age of puberty and was becoming more and more conscious of his race. Along with the natural detachment and withdrawal from childhood socializing with girls—in his case white girls who were former childhood sweethearts—Otto experienced a withdrawal and non-socialization because of his race. He ended up quite alone because there were not many Black kids his age in South Omaha. There wasn’t much contact with the Black kids from North Omaha either. As a very sensitive person on the verge of manhood, I imagine he began to feel these changes keenly.
After he dropped out of school in 1908, Otto was soon attracted to the “sportin’ life”...the pool halls and sporting houses of North Omaha. He wanted to be among Black people; he was anxious to get away from Father. Thus, he left home and got jobs as a bellhop, shoeshine boy, and busboy. He began to absorb a new way of life, stepping fully into the social life of the Black community in North Omaha. He’d evidently heeded the “call of the blood” and gone back to the race. It was not until a few years later, when I had similar experiences, that I understood that Otto had arrived at the first stage in his identity crisis and had gone to where he felt he belonged.
He would come home quite often, though, flaunting his new clothes, a “box-backed” suit—“fitting nowhere but the shoulders,” high-heeled Stacey Adams button shoes, and a stetson hat. He’d give a few dollars to Mother and some dimes to me and my sister. Sometimes he would bring a pretty girl friend with him. But most of the time, he would bring a young man, Henry Starens, who was a piano player. He played a style popular in those days, later to be known as boogie-woogie, in which the piano was the whole orchestra. He played Ma Rainey’s famous blues, “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor, Make It Where Your Man Will Never Know,” and the old favorite, “Alabama Bound.”
Alabama Bound
I'm Alabama Bound.
Oh, babe, don't leave me here,
Just leave a dime for beer.
A boy of ten at the time, I was tremendously impressed. There is no doubt that Otto’s experience served to weaken some of my childish notions about making it in the white world.
HALLEY’S COMET AND MY RELIGION
On May 4, 1910, Halley’s Comet appeared flaring down out of the heavens, its luminous tail switching to earth. It was an ominous sight.
A rash of religious revival swept Omaha. Prophets and messiahs appeared on street comers and in churches preaching the end of the world. Hardened sinners “got religion.” Backsliders renewed their faith. The comet, with its tail moving ever closer to the earth, seemed to lend credence to forecasts of imminent cosmic disaster.
Both my Mother and Father were deeply religious. Theirs was that “old time religion,” the fire-and-brimstone kind which leaned heavily on the Old Testament. It was the kind that accepted the Bible and all its legends as the literal gospel truth. We children had the “fear of the Lord” drilled into us from early age. My image of God was that of a vengeful old man who demanded unquestioned faith, strict obedience and repentant love as the price of salvation;
I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
Every Sunday, rain or shine, the family would attend services at the little frame church near the railroad tracks. For me, this was a tortuous ordeal. I looked forward to Sundays with dread. We would spend all of eight hours in church. We would sit through the morning service, then the Sunday school, after which followed a break for dinner. We returned at five for the Young People’s Christian Endeavor and finally the evening service. It was not just boredom. Fear was the dominant emotion, especially when our preacher, Reverend Jamieson, a big Black man with a beautiful voice, would launch into one of his fire-and-brimstone sermons. He would start out slowly and in a low voice, gradually raising it higher he would swing to a kind of sing-song rhythm, holding his congregation rapt with vivid word pictures. They would respond with “Hallelujah! ” “Ain’t it the truth! ” “Preach it, brother!”
He would go on in this manner for what seemed an interminable time, and would reach his peroration on a high note, winding up with a rafter-shaking burst of oratory. He would then pause dramatically amidst moans, shouts and even screams of some of the women, one or two of whom would fall out in a dead faint. Waiting for them to subside he would then, in a lowered, scarcely audible voice, reassure his flock that it was not yet too late to repent and achieve salvation. All that was necessary was to: “Repent sinners, and love and obey the Lord. Amen.” Someone would then rise and lead off with an appropriate spiritual such as:
Oh, my sins are forgiven and my soul set free-ah,
Oh, glory Halelua-a-a-a
Just let me in the kingdom when the world is all a'fi-ah.
Oh Glory Halelu!
I don't feel worried, no ways tiahd,
Oh, glory Halelu!
I remember the family Bible, a huge book which lay on the center table in the front room. The first several pages were blank, set aside for recording the vital family statistics: births, deaths, marriages. The book was filled with graphic illustrations of biblical happenings. Leafing through Genesis (which we used to call “the begats”), one came to Exodus and from there on a pageant of bloodshed and violence unfolded. Portrayed in striking colors were the interminable tribal wars in which the Israelites slew the Mennonites and Pharoah’s soldiers killed little children in march of Moses. There was the great God, Jehovah himself, whitebearded and eyes flashing, looking very much like our old cracker neighbor, Mr. Faught.
Just a couple of weeks before Halley’s comet appeared, Mother had taken us to see the silent film, Dante’s Inferno, through which I sat with open mouth horror. Needless to say, this experience did not lessen my apprehension.
The comet continued its descent, its tail like the flaming sword of vengeance. Collision seemed not just possible, but almost certain. What had we poor mortals done to incur such wrath of the Lord?
My deportment underwent a change. I did all my chores without complaint and helped Mama around the house. This was so unlike me that she didn’t know what to make of it. I overheard her telling Pa about my good behavior and how helpful I had become lately. But I hadn’t really changed. I was just scared. I was simply trying to carry out another one of God’s commandments, “Honor thy lather and thy mother that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.'’
Then one night, when the whole neighborhood had gathered as usual on the hill to watch the comet, it appeared to have ceased its movement towards the earth. We were not sure, but the next night we were certain. It had not only ceased its descent, but was definitely withdrawing. In a couple more nights, it had disappeared. A wave of relief swept over the town.
“It’s not true!” I thought to myself. “The fire and brimstone, the leering devils, the angry vengeful God. None of it is true.”
It was as if a great weight had been lifted from my mind. It was the end of my religion, although I still thought that there was most likely a supreme being. But if God existed, he was nothing like the God portrayed in our family Bible. I was no longer terrified of him. Later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, I read some of the lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll and became an agnostic, doubting the existence of a god. From there, I later moved to positive atheism.
Two years later, the great event was the sinking of the Titanic.This was significant in Omaha because one of the Brandeis brothers, owners of the biggest department store in North Omaha, went down with her. In keeping with the custom of Blacks to gloat over the misfortunes of whites, especially rich ones, some Black bard composed the "Titanic Blues":
When old John Jacob As tor left his home,
He never thought he was going to die.
Titanic fare thee well
I say fare thee well.
But disaster was more frequently reserved for the Black community. On Easter Sunday 1913, a tornado struck North Omaha. It ripped a two-block swath through the Black neighborhood, leaving death and destruction in its wake. Among the victims were a dozen or so Black youths trapped in a basement below a pool hall where they had evidently been shooting craps. Mother did not fail to point out the incident as another example of God's wrath. While I was sorry for the youths and their families (some of them were friends of Otto), the implied warning left me cold. My God-fearing days had ended with Halley's Comet.
Misfortune, however, was soon to strike our immediate family. It happened that summer, in 1913. My Father fled town after being attacked and beaten by a gang of whites on Q Street, right outside the gate of the packing plant. They told him to get out of town or they would kill him.
I remember vividly the scene that night when Father staggered through the door. Consternation gripped us at the sight. His face was swollen and bleeding, his clothes torn and in disarray. He had a frightened, hunted look in his eyes. My sister Eppa and I were alone. Mother had gone for the summer to work for her employers, rich white folks, at Lake Okoboji, Iowa.
"What happened?" we asked.
He gasped out the story of how he had been attacked and beaten.
"They said they were going to kill me if I didn't get out of town."
We asked him who "they" were. He said that he recognized some of them as belonging to the Irish gang on Indian Hill, but there were also some grown men.
"But why, Pa? Why should they pick on you?"
"Why don't we call the police?"
"That ain't goin' to do no good. We just have to leave town."
"But Pa," I said, "how can we? We own this house. We've got friends here. If you tell them, they wouldn't let anybody harm us."
Again the frightened look crossed his face.
"No, we got to go."
"Where, where will we go?"
"We'll move up to Minneapolis, your uncles Watt and George are there. I'll get work there. I'm going to telegraph your Mother to come home now."
He washed his face and then went into the bedroom and began packing his bags. The next morning he gave Eppa some money and said, "This will tide you over till your Mother comes. She'll be here in a day or two. I'm going to telegraph her as soon as I get to the depot. I'll send for you all soon."
He kissed us goodbye and left.
Only when he closed the door behind him did we feel the full impact of the shock. It had happened so suddenly. Our whole world had collapsed. Home and security were gone. The feeling of safety in our little haven of interracial goodwill had proved elusive. Now we were just homeless "niggers" on the run.
The crudest blow, perhaps, was the shattering of my image of lather. True enough, I had not regarded him as a hero. Still, however, I had retained a great deal of respect for him. He was undoubtedly a very complex man, very sensitive and imaginative. Probably he had never gotten over the horror of that scene in the cabin near Martin, Tennessee, where as a boy of fifteen he had seen his father kill the Klansman. He distrusted and feared poor whites, especially the native born and, in Omaha, the shanty Irish.
Mother arrived the next day. For her it was a real tragedy. Our home was gone and our family broken up. She had lived in Omaha for nearly a quarter of a century. She had raised her family there and had built up a circle of close friends. With her regular summer job at Lake Okoboji and catering parties the rest of the year, she had helped pay for our home. Now it was gone. We would be lucky if we even got a fraction of the money we had put into it, not to speak of the labor. Now she was to leave all this. Friends and neighbors would ask why Father had run away.
Why had he let some poor white trash run him out of town? He had friends there. Ours was an old respected family. He also had influential white patrons. There was Ed Cudahy of the family that owned the packing plant where he worked. The Cudahys had become one of the nation's big three in the slaughtering and meat packing industry. Father had known him from boyhood. There was Mr. Wilkins, general manager at Cudahy's, whom Father had known as an office boy, and who now gave Father all his old clothes.
A few days later, Mr. Cannon, a railroad man in charge of a buffet car on the Omaha and Minneapolis run and an old friend of the family, called with a message from Father. He said that Father was all right, that he had gotten a job for himself and Mother at the Minneapolis Women's Club. Father was to become caretaker and janitor, Mother was to cater the smaller parties at the club and to assist at the larger affairs. They were to live on the place in a basement apartment.
The salary was ridiculously small (I think about $60 per month for both of them) and the employers insisted that only one of us children would be allowed to live at the place. That, of course, would be Eppa. He said that Father had arranged for me to live with another family. This, he said, would be a temporary arrangement. He was sure he could find another job, and rent a house where we could all be together again. As for me, Father suggested that since I was fifteen, I could find a part-time job to help out while continuing school. Mr. Cannon said that he was to take me back to Minneapolis with him, and that Mother and Eppa were to follow in a few days.
With regards to our house, Mr. Cannon said that he knew a lawyer, an honest fellow, who for a small commission would handle its sale. Mother later claimed that after deducting the lawyer's commission and paying off a small mortgage, they only got the paltry sum of $300! This was for a five-room house with electricity and running water.
The next day, Mr. Cannon took me out to his buffet car in the railroad yards. He put me in the pantry and told me to stay there, and if the conductor looked in: "Don't be afraid, he's a friend of mine." Our car was then attached to a train which backed down to the station to load passengers. I looked out the window as we left Omaha. I was not to see Omaha again until after World War I, when I was a waiter on the Burlington Railroad.
My childhood and part of my adolescence was now behind me. I felt that I was practically on my own. What did the world hold for me—a Black youth?
Arriving in Minneapolis, I went to my new school. As I entered the room, the all-white class was singing old darkie plantation songs. Upon seeing me, their voices seemed to take on a mocking, derisive tone. Loudly emphasizing the Negro dialect and staring directly at me, they sang:
"Down in De Caunfiel—HEAH DEM darkies moan
All De darkies AM a weeping
MASSAHS in DE Cold Cold Ground"
They were really having a ball.
In my state of increased racial awareness, this was just too much for me. I was already in a mood of deep depression. With the breakup of our family, the separation from my childhood friends, and the interminable quarrels between my Mother and Father (in which I sided with Mother), I was in no mood to be kidded or scoffed at.
That was my last day in school. I never returned. I made up my mind to drop out and get a full-time job.
I was fifteen and in the second semester of the eighth grade.
Chapter 2
A Black Regiment in World War I
On the Negroes this double experience of deliberate and devilish persecution from their own countrymen, coupled with a taste of real democracy and world-old culture, was revolutionizing. They began to hate prejudice and discrimination as they had never hated it before. They began to realize its eternal meaning and complications., .they were filled with a bitter, dogged determination never to give up the fight for Negro equality in America....A new, radical Negro spirit has been born in France, which leaves us older radicals far behind. Thousands of young Black men have offered their lives for the Lilies of France and they return ready to offer them again for the Sunflowers of Afro-America. W.E.B. DuBois, June 1919
Despite my bitter encounter with racism in school, I liked Minneapolis. I was impressed by the beauty of this city with its many lakes and surrounding pine forests. The racial climate in 1913 was not as bad as my early experience in school would indicate, either. Blacks seemed to get along well, especially with the Scandinavian nationalities, who constituted the most numerous ethnic grouping in the city.
Upon quitting school, I became a part of the small Black community and completely identified with it. I found friends among Black boys and girls of my age group, attended parties, dances, picnics at Lake Minnetonka, and ice skated in the winter time. Here, as in Omaha, a ghetto had not yet fully formed, though I here were the beginnings of one in the Black community on the north side.
Included in the Black community and among my new friends were a relatively large number of mulattos, the progeny of mixed marriages between Scandinavian women and Black men. This phenomenon dated back to the turn of the century. At that time it was the fashion among wealthy white families to import Scandinavian maids. Many of these families had Black male servants— butlers, chauffeurs, etc.—and the small Black population was preponderantly male. The result was a rash of inter-marriages between the Scandinavian maids and the Black male house servants. The interracial couples formed a society called Manasseh which held well-known yearly balls. As a whole the children of this group were a hot-headed lot and seemed even more racially conscious than the rest of us.
It was in Minneapolis that I too reached a heightened stage of racial awareness. This was hastened, no doubt, by the tragic events in South Omaha and the fact that I was now an adolescent and there was the problem of girls. I had noticed that it was in the period of pubescence that a Black boy, raised even in communities of relative racial tolerance, was first confronted with the problem of race. It had been so with my brother Otto in Omaha, and now it was so with me.
During the first year after dropping out of school I worked as a bootblack, barber shop porter, bell hop and busboy, continuing in the last long enough to acquire the rudiments of the waiter's trade. At the age of sixteen, I got a j ob as dining car waiter on the Chicago Northwestern Railway. The first run was also my first trip to the big city, where I had four aunts (my Mother's sisters). All through my childhood my Mother had told stories about her first visit there at the time of the Chicago Exposition. Upon arrival, one of the older waiters on the car, Lon Holliday, took me to see the town. I'm sure he looked forward to showing a young "innocent" the ropes. After a visit to my aunts, he took me to a notorious dive on the Southside. It was the back room of a saloon at Thirty-second and State Street.
The piano man was playing "boogie woogie" style, popular in those days. The few couples on the floor were "walking the dog," "balling the jack," and so on. Then one of the dancers, a woman, called to the pianist, "Oh, Mr. Johnson, please play 'Those Dirty Motherfuckers.'" He enthusiastically complied and sang a number of verses of the bawdy tune. I almost sank through the floor in embarrassment and even amazement. Lon, who was watching, burst out laughing and he said, "Boy, you ain't seen nothing yet!"
He then took me to the famous "Mecca Flats" on Federal Street, where a rent party was in process. There he introduced me to a young woman, whom he evidently knew, and slipped her some money, saying, "Take care of my young friend here; be sure you get him back on the car in the morning. We leave for Minneapolis at 10:00 A.M."
The railroads were a way to see the country and in the months that followed I took advantage of that, working for different lines, on different runs as far west as Seattle. On one run in Montana called the Loop, the dining car shuttled between Great Falls and Butte by way of Helena, stopping at each town overnight. It was known as the "outlaw run" and I soon found out why. It attracted a number of characters wanted by police in other cities, searching for an escape or a temporary hideout.
While laying over in Butte one night, our chef murdered the parlor car porter—cut his throat while he was sleeping in the parlor car. They had been feuding for days. I went through the parlor car that morning and was the first to see the ghastly sight. The police came, but the chef had disappeared. My enthusiasm for the job was gone. It might have been me, I thought, for I had had a number of arguments with the chef about my orders.
I quit and headed back to Minneapolis, arriving there shortly after war broke out in Europe in 1914.1 was sixteen and had been avidly following the news, reading of the invasions of Belgium, France, the Battle of the Marne, etc.
One day, walking along Hennepin Avenue I saw a Canadian recruiting sergeant. He was wearing the uniform of the Princess Pat Regiment, bright red jacket and black kilt. A handsome fellow, I thought, looking like Bonnie Prince Charlie himself. He noticed me looking at him and asked, "You want to join up with the Princess Pat, my lad? We've got a number of Black boys like you in the regiment. You'll find you're treated like anyone else up there. We make no difference between Black and white in Canada."
Imagining myself in the red jacket and black kilt, I said, "Sure,I'll join."
Then looking at me closely, he asked, "How old are you?"
"Eighteen," I lied.
"Your parents living?"
"Yes."
"Well, you've got to get their consent."
"Oh, they'll agree," I said.
"They live in the city?"
"Yes."
"Well, you come back here tomorrow and bring one of them with you and I'll sign you up."
"Okay," I said, but I knew that my parents would never agree. And well it was, too, for I later learned that this regiment was among the first victims of the German mustard gas attack at Ypres, and what was left of them was practically wiped out at bloody Paschendale on the Sommes front.
Life in Minneapolis was beginning to bore me. I was anxious to get back to Chicago, "the big city," so I moved there and stayed with my Aunt Lucy at Forty-third and State. In 1915 my parents, at the urging of my Mother, also moved to Chicago, and I then stayed with them.
In Chicago I got a job as a busboy at the Tip Top Inn, then considered the finest restaurant in town. It was owned by old man Hieronymous, a famous chef, and was noted for its French cuisine and service. In the trade it was taken for granted that if you had been a waiter at the Tip Top Inn you could work anywhere in the country. After a few months I was promoted to waiter and felt that I had perfected my skills. During the next three years I worked at a number of places: the Twentieth Century Limited, the New York Central's crack train; the Wolverine (Michigan Central); the Sherman House; the old Palmer House; and the Auditorium.
During this time in Chicago I saw Casey Jones, a Black man and a legendary character known to at least four generations of Black Chicagoans. As I remember, he was partially paralyzed, probably from cerebral palsy. He would go through the streets with trained chickens, which he put through various capers, shouting, "Crabs, crabs, I got them!" He had a defect in his speech which he exploited. The audience would literally fall out at his rendering of the popular sentimental ballad, "The Curse of an Aching Heart":
You made me what I am today,
I hope you're satisfied.
You dragged and dragged me down until
a The heart within me died.
Although you're not true,
May God bless you,
That's the curse of an aching heart!
Then there was the beloved comedian, String Beans, who often appeared at the old Peking Theater at Thirty-first and State Street. The Dolly Sisters also appeared there; they were very famous at the time. Teenan Jones'slush night spot was at Thirty-fifth and State Street. Then at the Panama, another night club, I would listen to Mamie Smith sing "Shimmy-sha-Wobble, That's All," a very popular song and dance at the time.
Once, when I wanted to go back to Minneapolis to visit, I caught the Pioneer Limited—riding the rods—out of the station on the west side. This was my first experience in hoboing. I rode the rods as far as Beloit, Wisconsin.
At Beloit I got off, but was afraid to get back on because a yard dick was going around the cars. I stayed there overnight—a fairly cold night as I remember. I met a white man, a "professional" hobo, who took me in tow and told me about the trains leaving in the morning. He said we could catch a train that would pull us right into Minneapolis. It was a passenger train, and we could "ride the blinds in," that is, the space between the two Pullman cars.
We rode the blinds, reaching La Crosse, Wisconsin. On the way he warned, "You know, there's a bad dick up there in La Crosse. We gotta watch out for him." When the train pulled to a stop in La Crosse both of us hopped off. Other guys were flying out of the train from all sides—from the rods, the blinds, and there were some on top, too. But this notorious yard dick caught us. He was a rough character, and let us know it as he lined us up.
"Hey, up there!"
I was at the end of the line of about a dozen guys and was the only Black there. I had my hands in my pocket.
"Take yer hands outta yer pockets!"
I took my hands out of my pockets.
The engine's fireman was looking out, watching all of this. He called to the yard dick, "Say, Jim, let me have that young colored boy over there to slide down coal for me into Minneapolis."
The dick looked at me and scowled, "All right, you, get up there!"
He shouted to the fireman, "But see that he works!"
"I'll see to that; he'll work."
I scrambled on the engine tender and slid coal all the way to Minneapolis, where I got off at the station.
Among my new friends in Chicago were several members of the Eighth Illinois, Black National Guard Regiment. They would regale me with tall stories of their exploits on the Mexican border in the summer of 1916 when the regiment took part in a "show of force" against the Mexican Revolution. None of us, of course, knew the real issues involved.
I remember reading of the exploits of the famous Black Tenth Cavalry Regiment, which was a part of the force sent by General Funston across the border in pursuit of Pancho Villa. They had been ambushed by Villa and a number of them killed. The papers, on that occasion, had been full of accounts of the heroic Black cavalrymen and their valiant white officers. The Eighth, however, had been in the rear near San Antonio, Texas, and saw no action during the abortive campaign.
Intrigued by their experiences, I joined the Eighth Regiment in the winter of 1917. I was nineteen. The regiment, officered by Blacks from the colonel on down (many of them veterans of the four Black Regular Army regiments), gave me a feeling of pride. They had a high esprit de corps which emphasized racial solidarity. I didn't regard it just as a part of a U.S. Army unit, but as some sort of a big social club of fellow race-men. Still, I knew that we would eventually get into the war. That did not bother me; on the contrary, romance, adventure, travel beckoned. I saw possible escape from the inequities and oppression which was the lot of Blacks in the U.S. I was already a Francophile. I had read and heard about the fairness of the French with respect to the race issue. It seems now, as I look back upon it, that patriotism was the least of my motives. I was avidly following all the news of the war and it seemed certain that the U.S. was going to get involved, despite protestations of President Wilson to the contrary.
Already the press was whipping up war sentiment. Tin PanAlley joined in with a rash of jingoistic songs: "Don't Bite the Hand That's Feeding You," "Let's All Be American Now," ad nauseum. All this left us cold. However, the song that brought tears to my eyes was "Joan of Arc":
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Do your eyes from the skies see the foe?
Can't you see the drooping Fleur de Lys,
Can't you hear the tears of Normandy?
Joan of Arc, Joan of Arc,
Let your spirit guide us through.
Awake old France to victory!
Joan of Arc, we're calling you.
Truly, nothing was sacred to Tin Pan Alley!
The Lusitania was sunk; the U.S. declared war in April 1917. Our regiment was federalized on July 25, 1917, and in the late summer we were on our way to basic training at Camp Logan, near Houston, Texas.
A demagogic promise was widely circulated that things would be better if Blacks fought loyally. For example, there was the statement of President Wilson: "Out of this conflict you must expect nothing less than the enjoyment of full citizenship rights." This propaganda was immediately belied by the mounting wave of new lynchings in the South, which claimed thirty-eight victims in 1917 and fifty-eight in 1918. Worst of all was the East St. Louis riot in September 1917; at least forty Blacks were massacred in a bloody pogrom that lasted several days.
Then there was the mutiny-riot of the Twenty-fourth Infantry in Houston, Texas, where our regiment was to receive its basic training. Company G of our outfit was already in Houston at the time, having been sent on as an advance detachment to prepare the camp for our occupation. It was through them that I learned exactly what had happened.
Black soldiers of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, an old Regular Army regiment, had for months been subjected to insults and abuse by Houston police and civilians. The outfit had stationed its military police in Houston, who were, in theory, supposed to cooperate with local police in maintaining law and order among soldiers on leave. Instead, the Black military police found themselves the object of abuse, insults and beatings by local police. This treatment of Black MPs by racist cops was evidently encouraged by the fact that they (the Blacks) were unarmed.
A report of the special on-the-spot investigator for the NAACP published in the Crisis, its organ, reads:
In deference to the southern feeling against the arming of Negroes and because of the expected cooperation of the City Police Department, members of the provost guard were not armed, thus creating a situation without precedent in the history of this guard. A few carried clubs, but none of them had guns, and most of them were without weapons of any kind. They were supposed to call on white police officers to make arrests. The feeling is strong among the colored people of Houston that this was the real cause of the riot.
On the afternoon of August 23, two policemen, Lee Sparks and Rufe Daniels—the former known to the colored people as a brutal bully—entered the house of a respectable colored woman in an alleged search for a colored fugitive accused of crap-shooting. Failing to find him, they arrested the woman, striking and cursing her and forcing her out into the street only partly clad. While they were waiting for the patrol wagon a crowd gathered about the weeping woman who had become hysterical and was begging to know why she was being arrested.
In this crowd was a colored soldier, Private Edwards. Edwards seems to have questioned the police officers or remonstrated with them. Accounts differ on this point, but they all agree that the officers immediately set upon him and beat him to the ground with the butts of their six-shooters, continuing to beat and kick him while he was on the ground, and arrested him. In the words of Sparks himself: "I beat that nigger until his heart got right. He was a good nigger when I got through with him."
Later Corporal Baltimore, a member of the military police, approached the officers and inquired for Edwards, as it was his duty to do. Sparks immediately opened fire and Baltimore, being unarmed, fled....They followed...beat him up, and arrested him. It was this outrage which infuriated the men of the Twenty-fourth Infantry to the point of revolt.
When word of this outrage reached the camp, feeling ran high. It was by no means the first incident of the kind that had occurred.
The white officers, feeling that the men would seek revenge, ordered them disarmed. The arms were stacked in a tent guarded by a sergeant. A group of men killed the sergeant, seized their rifles, and under the leadership of Sergeant Vida Henry, an eighteen-year veteran, marched on Houston in company strength.
When the soldiers left camp their slogan was "On to the Police Station!" They entered town by way of San Felipe Street which ran through the heart of the Black community. The fact that they took this route and avoided the more direct one which lead through a white neighborhood disproved the charge by local newspapers and the police that they were out to shoot up the town and kill all whites. Their target was clearly the Houston cops. On the way to the station they shot every person who looked like a cop.
Finally meeting resistance, a battle ensued which ended with seventeen whites, thirteen of them policemen, killed. The alarm went out and a whole division of white troops, which was stationed in the camp, was sent in to round up the mutineers. Finally cornered, the men threw down their arms and surrendered, with the exception of Sergeant Vida Henry, who committed suicide rather than be taken.
The whole battalion of the Twenty-fourth Infantry, including the mutineers, was hurriedly placed aboard a guarded troop train and sent to Fort Huachuca, Arizona. Immediately upon arrival there, those involved were given a drum-head court martial. Thirteen were executed and forty-one others were sentenced to life imprisonment.
The bodies of all the executed men were sent home to their families for burial. I remember reading of the funeral of Corporal Baltimore in some little town in Illinois.
Our regiment entrained for Camp Logan with our ardor considerably dampened by these events. Indeed, we left Chicago in an angry and apprehensive mood which lasted all the way to Texas. We passed through East St. Louis in the middle of the night. Those of us who were awake were brooding about the massacre of our kinsmen which had recently taken place there. The regiment traveled in three sections, a battalion each, in old style tourist cars (sort of second-class Pullmans).
The next morning we arrived in Jonesboro, Arkansas, our first stop on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. We were in enemy territory. For many of us it was our first time in the South. Jonesboro was a division point—all three sections of the train pulled up on sidings while the engines were being changed and the cars serviced.
It was a bright, warm and sunny Sunday morning. It seemed like the whole town had turned out at the station platform to see the strange sight of armed Black soldiers. Whites were on one side of the station platform and Blacks on the other. We pulled into the station with the windows open and our 1903 Springfield rifles on the tables in plain view of the crowd.
We were at our provocative best. We threw kisses at the white girls on the station platform, calling out to them: "Come over here, baby, give me a kiss!" "Look at that pretty redhead over there, ain't she a beaut!" And so forth.
A passenger train pulled up beside us on the next track. There, peering out the open window, was a real stereotype of an Arkansas red-neck. The sight of him was provocation enough for Willie Morgan, a huge Black in our company who was originally from Mississippi. Morgan was sitting directly across from the white man. He undoubtedly retained bitter memories of insults and persecutions from the past and quickly took advantage of what was perhaps his first opportunity to bait a cracker in his own habitat.
He reached a big ham-like hand through the window, grabbed the fellow's face and shouted, "What the hell you staring at, you peckerwood motherfucker?" The man pulled back, his hat flew off. Bending down, he recovered it and then moved quickly to the other side of his car, a frightened and puzzled look on his face. Our whole car let out a big roar.
Then a yard man, walking along the side of the car, asked, "Where are you boys going?"
"Goin' to see your momma, you cracker son-of-a-bitch!" came the reply.
The startled man looked up in amazement.
All of us were hungry. We had been given only a couple of apples for breakfast and now noticed that there were a number of shops and stores in the streets behind the station. I believe our first thought was to buy some food. The vestibule guards would not allow us to take our rifles off the cars, so we left them on our seats and proceeded to the stores in groups. As the stores became crowded, and as the storekeepers were busy serving some of our group, others started to snatch up any article in sight.
Cases of Coca-Cola, ginger ale and near-beer went back to the cars. The path to the train was strewn with loot dropped by some of the fellows. In the stores, some bought as others stole—this spontaneously evolved pattern was employed in raids on all stores in Jonesboro and at other train stops along the road to Houston.
The only serious confrontation that took place that day
involved the group I was with. We crowded into a little store and a fellow named Jeffries, one of my squad buddies, approached the storekeeper who was standing behind the counter. Putting his money down, he demanded a coke. Whereupon the guy said, 'Til serve you one, but y'all can't drink it in heah."
"Why?" Jeffries asked, innocently.
"Cause we don't serve niggahs heah."
Just as we were about to jump him and wreck the place, Jeffries, a comedian, decided to play it straight. He turned to us and said, "Now wait, fellahs, let me handle this. What the man is saying is that you don't know your place."
Turning to the storekeeper he put his money down and with feigned meekness said, "All right, mister, give me a coke. I know my place, I'll drink it outside."
"Thank goodness this nigger's got some sense," the storekeeper must have thought as he placed a coke on the counter. Jeffries snatched up the bottle and immediately hit him on the head, knocking him out cold.
We then proceeded to wreck the place. We took everything in sight. Rushing back to the train, I heard a loud crash—a plate glass window someone had smashed as a parting gift to the niggerhating storekeeper.
Up to this time we had not seen any of our officers. They had been up front in the first-class Pullmans. Many of them, we suspected, were sleeping off the after effects of the parties held on the eve of our departure. Major Hunt and Captain Hill now appeared and gave orders to the non-coms and the vestibule guards to allow no one else to leave the train.
We waved goodbye to the Blacks on the station platform. They looked frightened, sad and cowed. We were leaving, but they had to stay and face the wrath of the local crackers.
The train headed to Texarkana, where the scene was repeated though on a smaller scale. In Texarkana the train stopped only a few minutes and we raided one store near the railroad station. I was the last one out, running to the train with a box of pilfered Havana cigars in my hand. Nearing the train, I passed a couple of local whites talking about the raid. One said to the other, "You see all those niggers taking that man's stuff?"
"Yeah, I see it."
"Well, what are we going to do about it?"
I reached the train just as it was pulling out, relieved not to have been left behind to find out the answer. The next stop was Tyler, deep in the heart of Texas, scene of our most serious confrontation. Here we confronted the law in the person of the county sheriff. Tyler seemed to be a larger town than the others. It was a division point and all three sections pulled up on the sidings. As in Jonesboro, a large crowd had gathered at the station; Blacks on one side, whites on the other. Again, with our guns in view, we started flirting with the white women, throwing kisses at them and so on.
We were very hungry. There had been some foul-up in logistics so there wasn't any food on the train. All we had that day was a couple of sandwiches and some coffee. We piled off the train and headed for the stores, elbowing whites out of the way. We didn't carry our guns but many of us wore sheathed bayonets.
Major Hunt finally appeared but he was only able to stop a few of us. By that time most of us were already ransacking the stores in the immediate vicinity of the station. The path back to the station was strewn with bottles of soft drinks, hams, fruits, wrappers from the candy and cigarettes, etc. The major was frantically blowing his whistle and calling the fellows to come back to the cars. Finally we all got back and were eating our pilfered food, drinking our near-beer and soda.
Suddenly a large white man stepped forward out of the crowd. He wore a khaki uniform, a Sam Brown belt and a Colt forty-five in his holster. He approached Major Hunt and identified himself as the sheriff. (Or he might have been chief of police.) He said he intended to search the train and recover the stolen goods.
The major, a short, heavy-set Black man, said: "No, you don't. This is a military train. Any searching to be done will be done by our officers."
"I know," he said, "I want to accompany you."
"No you don't. You won't set foot on this train."
The sheriff hesitated and looked around at the crowd of white and Black. It was clearly a bitter pill for him to swallow, having for the first time in his life to take low to a Black man in front of his white constituents, as well as setting a bad example for the Blacks. He pushed the unarmed major aside and walked forward.
"Come on you peckerwood son-of-a-bitch!" we hollered from the car.
He approached the vestibule of our car where Jimmy Bland, a mean, grey-eyed and light-skinned Black was on guard.
"Back! Get back or I'll blow you apart!" Jimmy pushed the sheriff in the belly with the barrel of his rifle. To further impress upon him that the gun was loaded, he threw the bolt and ejected a bullet. The sheriff, who had doubled over from the blow, straightened up. his face ghastly white. He gasped out something to the effect that he was going to report this affair to the government and walked away. We all let out a tremendous roar.
We arrived in Houston the next day, five days after the mutiny of the Twenty-fourth. We were informed that five dollars would be docked from each man's pay to cover the damage incurred on the trip down. I believe we all felt that it was a small price to pay for the lift in morale that resulted from our forays on the trip.
We were greeted by our comrades from Company G of our battalion on arriving at Camp Logan. They had been there at the time of the mutiny-riot and gave us a detailed account of what had happened. We expected to be confronted by the hostile white population, but to our surprise, the confrontation with the Twenty-fourth seemed to have bettered the racial climate of this typical Southern town. Houston in those days was a small city of perhaps 100,000 people, not the metropolis it has now become. The whites, especially the police, had learned that they couldn't treat all Black people as they had been used to treating the local Blacks.
I can't remember a single clash between soldiers and police during our six-month stay in the area. On the contrary, if there were any incidents involving our men, the local cops would immediately call in the military police. There was also a notable improvement in the morale of the local Black population, who were quick to notice the change in attitude of the Houston cops. The cops had obviously learned to fear retaliation by Black soldiers if they committed any acts of brutality and intimidation in the Black community.
Houston Blacks were no longer the cowed, intimidated people they had been before the mutiny. They were proud of us and it was clear that our presence made them feel better. A warm and friendly relationship developed between our men and the Black community. The girls were especially proud of us. Local Blacks would point out places where some notorious, nigger-hating cop had been killed.
"See those bullet holes in the telephone pole over there," they'd say. "That's where that bad cop, old Pat Grayson, got his."
"Those Twenty-fourths certainly were sharpshooters!"
I occasionally took my laundry to an elderly woman who had known Corporal Baltimore. She told me what a nice young man he was.
"I hear he was hanged," she said.
"That's right," I replied.
Tears came to her eyes and she cluck-clucked. "He left some of his laundry here; you're about his size, you want it?"
"Yes, I'll take it."
She handed me several pairs of khaki trousers and some underwear and shirts all washed and starched and insisted that I pay only the cost of the laundry.
In Camp Logan, our Black Regiment, a part of the Thirty-third Illinois National Guard Division, went into intensive training. We had high esprit de corps. Our officers lost no opportunity to lecture us on the importance of race loyalty and race pride. They went out to disprove the ideas spread by the white brass to the effect that Black soldiers could be good, but only when officered by whites.
Our solidarity was strengthened when the Army attempted to remove Colonel Charles R. Young from the regiment. Young was the first Black West Point graduate and the highest ranking Black officer in the Regular Army. He wanted to go overseas very badly, but it was quite clear that they did not want a Black officer of his rank over there. He was examined by an Army medical board and found unfit for overseas service. We all knew it was a fraud. It was in all the Black papers and was known by Blacks throughout the country.
We men didn't let our officers down. We were out to show the whites that not only were we as good in everything as they, but better. In Camp Logan, our regiment held division championships in most of the sports: track, boxing, baseball, etc. We had the highest number of marksmen, sharpshooters and expert riflemen. Of course, there was no socializing between Blacks and whites, but it was clear that we had the respect, if not the friendship, of many of the white soldiers in the division.
In fact, despite all the efforts of the command, there was a certain degree of solidarity between Black and white soldiers in our division. In Spartanburg, North Carolina, white soldiers from New York came to the defense of their Black fellows of the Fifteenth New York when the latter were attacked by Southern whites. Many of us felt that in the case of a showdown in town with the local crackerdom, we could get support from some of the white members of our division who happened to be around. At least, we felt they would not side with the crackers against us.
The high morale of the regiment, the new tolerance (at least on the part of the local white establishment), the new spirit of Houston Blacks were all displayed during the parade of our division in downtown Houston. About two months before our departure, we received notice from headquarters that the regiment was to participate in a parade. We were to pass in review before Governor Howden of Illinois, our host governor of Texas, high brass from the War Department and other notables.
We spent a couple of days getting our clothes and equipment into shape. We washed and starched our khaki uniforms, bleached our canvas leggings snow white, cleaned and polished our rifles and side arms, shined our shoes to a mirror gloss. On the day of the parade, we marched the five miles into town, halting just before we reached the center of the city. We wiped the dust from our rifles and shoes and continued the march.
Executing perfectly the change from squad formation to platoon front, we entered the main square. With our excellent band playing the Illinois March, we passed the reviewing stand with our special rhythmic swagger which only Black troops could affect. We were greeted by a thunderous ovation from the crowds, especially the Blacks.
I believe all of Black Houston turned out that day. The next morning, the Houston Post, a white daily, headlined a story about the parade and declared that "the best looking outfit in the parade was the Negro Eighth Illinois."
Given final leave, we bid good-bye to our girls and friends in Houston. After that, security was clamped down and no one was allowed to leave the camp. A few days later, we boarded the train and were on our way to a port of embarkation. We didn't know where we were headed but suspected it was New York. Instead, five days later, we wound up in Camp Stewart near Newport News, Virginia.
In Newport News, we barely escaped a serious confrontation with some local crackers and the police. The first batches of our fellows given passes to the town were subjected to the taunts and slurs of the local cops.
"Why don't you darkies stay in camp? We don't want you downtown making trouble."
Several fights ensued. Some of the men from our regiment were arrested and others literally driven out of town. They returned to the barracks, some of them badly beaten, and told us what had happened. A repetition of the riot of the Twenty-fourth Infantry at Houston was narrowly averted, as a number of us grabbed our guns and were about to head downtown. We were turned back, however, by our officers, who intervened and pleaded with us to return to our barracks. Among them was Lt. Benote Lee, whom we all loved and respected.
"Don't play into the hands of these crackers," he said. "We'll be leaving any day now. All they want is to get us in trouble on the eve of our departure."
"How about our guys who were arrested?" we asked.
"Don't worry. We'll get them out."
We returned to the barracks and, sure enough, our comrades were returned the next day, escorted by white MPs. We spent the next days on standby orders, apparently waiting for our ship to arrive. After that, all leaves were cancelled.
It was on the same day, I believe, that we first learned that we had been separated from our Thirty-third Illinois Division. Henceforth, we were to be known as the 370th Infantry.
One morning shortly after this, we looked down into the harbor and saw three big ships. We knew then that we would soon be on our way. The following morning the regiment marched down to the dockside to board ship. Yet another incident occurred at the dock. We lined up in company front facing the harbor and halted a few yards from the fence which ran the entire length of the dock.
Facing us in front of the fence were several groups of loitering white native males, probably dockworkers. They stared at us as if we were some strange species. Our captain apparently wanted to move the company closer to the fence and gave the command, "Forward march." But he "forgot" to call "halt." That was all we needed.
We were still angry about the beating of our comrades in downtown Newport News a few days before. We marched directly into the whites, closing in on them, cursing and cuffing them with fists and rifle butts, kicking and kneeing them; in short, applying the skills of close order combat we had learned during our basic training. Of course, we didn't want to kill anybody, we just wanted to rough them up a bit.
We were finally stopped by the excited cries of our officers, "Halt! Halt!" We withdrew, opening up a path through which our victims ran or limped away. Then at the command of "Attention! Right face!" we marched along the dock in columns of two's and finally boarded the ship.
ON TO FRANCE
We sailed for France in early April 1918, on the old USS Washington, a passenger liner converted into a troop ship. I have crossed the Atlantic many times since, but I can truthfully say that