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 I have never experienced rougher seas. Our three ships sailed out of Newport News without escort. Of course, we were worried; there were rumors of German submarines. Our anxiety was relieved when in mid-ocean we picked up two escort vessels, one of which was the battle cruiser Covington. When we reached the war zone, about three days out of Brest, a dozen destroyers took over, circling our ships all the way into port.
It took us sixteen days in all to reach Brest, France, where we arrived on April 22. We were so weak on landing that one-half of the regiment fell out while climbing the hill to the old Napoleon Barracks where we were quartered. Immediately upon our arrival, we were put to work cleaning up ourselves and our equipment, notwithstanding our weakened condition.
The next morning we passed in review before some U.S. and French big brass. The following day we boarded a train. We crossed the whole of France from east to west and detrained at Granvillars, a village in French Alsace, close to the Swiss frontier. There we found out that we had been brigaded with and were to be an integral part of the French Army.
The reason we were separated from the white Americans was, as the white brass put it, "to avoid friction." But the American command of General Pershing was not satisfied just to separate us; they tried to extend the long arm of Jim Crow to the French. The American Staff Headquarters, through its French mission, tried to make sure that the French understood the status of Blacks in the United States. Their Secret Information Bulletin Concerning Black American Troops is now notorious, though I did not learn of it until after I had returned from France. The Army of Democracy spoke to its French allies:
It is important for French officers who have been called upon to exercise command over black American troops, or to live in close contact with them, to have an exact idea of the position occupied by Negroes in the United States. The increasing number of Negroes in the United States (about 15,000,000) would create for the white race in the Republic a menace of degeneracy were it not that an impassable gulf has been made between them....
Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible. The black is constantly being censured for his want of intelligence and discretion, his lack of civic and professional conscience, and for his tendency toward undue familiarity.
The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly. For instance, the black American troops in France have, by themselves, given rise to as many complaints for attempted rape as the rest of the army....
Conclusion:
1. We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers. We may be courteous and amiable with these last, but we cannot deal with them on the same plane as with the white American officers without deeply wounding the latter. We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service.
2. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of [white] Americans....
3. Make a point of keeping the native cantonment population from "spoiling" the Negroes. [White] Americans become greatly incensed at any public expression of intimacy between white women with black men....Familiarity on the part of white women with black men is furthermore a source of profound regret to our experienced colonials, who see in it an overweening menace to the prestige of the white race.
Apparently this classic statement of U.S. racism was ineffectual with the French troops and people, even though it was supplemented by wild stories circulated by the white U.S. troops. These included the claim that Blacks had tails like monkeys, which was especially told to women, including those in the brothels.
Our regiment was not sorry to be incorporated into the French military. In fact, most of us thought it was the best thing that could have happened. The French treated Blacks well—that is, as human beings. There was no Jim Crow. At the time, I thought the French seemed to be free of the virulent U.S. brand of racism.
The American Command not only wanted its front line to be all white, it also wanted all regiment commanders (even those under the French) to be white. Consequently, our Black colonel, Franklin A. Dennison; our lieutenant colonel, James H. Johnson; and two of our majors (battalion commanders) were replaced by white officers. Colonel Dennison was sent back to the States, kicked upstairs, given the rank of brigadier general, and placed in command of the Officer Training Camp for Colored Men at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. Although our first reaction was anger, we became reconciled to the shift.
Our new white colonel, T. A. Roberts, seemed to be warm, paternalistic and deeply concerned about the welfare of his men. He would often make the rounds of the field kitchens, tasting the food and admonishing the cooks about ill-prepared food. He even gave instructions on how the various dishes should be cooked. Naturally, this made a great hit with the men. Our confidence in him was high because we felt that he was a professional soldier who knew his business.
I remember the day the new colonel took over. The regiment formed in the village square. Colonel Roberts introduced himself. He seemed quite modest. He said that he was honored to be our new commander and that he knew the record of our regiment dating back to 1892 and its exploits during the Spanish-American War.
"Since West Point," he said, "I have always served with colored troops—the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry." He then turned to Captain Patton, our Black regiment adjutant. "Captain Patton knows me, he was one of my staff sergeants in the old Tenth Cavalry." Patton nodded.
The colonel smiled and pointed to our top sergeant. "Over there is Mark Thompson. I remember him when he was company clerk in Troop C of the Tenth Cavalry." He went on to point out a dozen or so officers and non-coms with whom he had served in the Ninth or Tenth Cavalry. "These men will tell you where I stand with respect to the race issue and everything else. We are going into the lines soon and I am sure that the men of this regiment will pile up a record of which your people and the whole of America will be proud."
The process of integration into the French Army was thorough. The American equipment with which we had trained at home was taken away and we were issued French weapons—rifles, carbines, machine guns, automatic rifles, pistols, helmets, gas masks and knapsacks. We were even issued French rations—with the exception of the wine, which our officers apparently felt we could not handle. We got all the wine we wanted anyway from the French troops. They were issued a liter (about a quart) a day and for a few centimes could buy more at the canteen.
The regiment was completely reorganized along French lines, with a machine gun company to every battalion. My Company E of the Second Battalion was converted into Machine Gun Company No. 2. We entered a six-week period of intensive training under French instructors to master our new weapons. Our main weapon was the old air-cooled Hotchkiss. And we had to master the enemy's gun, the water-cooled Maxim.
The period of French training was not an easy one. It was a miserable spring—dark and dreary, and it rained incessantly the whole time we were there. There was a lot of illness—grippe, pneumonia and bronchitis. We lost a number of men, several from our company. The men were in a sullen mood as the time approached for the regiment to move up to the front.
Disgruntlement was often voiced in the now familiar form of "What are we doing over here? Germans ain't done nothing to us. It's those crackers we should be fighting." While we were lined up in the square one day, our captain took the occasion to comment on these sentiments.
"Well," he said, "I've been hearing all this stuff about guys saying that they weren't going to fight the Germans. Well, we certainly can't make you fight if you don't want to. But I'll tell you one thing we can and will do is take you up to the front where the Germans are, and you can use your own judgment as to whether you fight them or not."
In early June 1918, we entered the trenches at the St. Mihiel Salient near the Swiss frontier as a part of the Tenth Division of the French Army under General Mittelhauser. We were intermingled with the French troops in the Tenth Division so that our officers and men might observe and profit by close association with veteran soldiers. At that time St. Mihiel was a quiet sector. Except for occasional shelling, desultory machine gun and rifle fire, nothing much occurred. We lost no men.
It was here, however, that we made our first acquaintance with two pests—the rat and the louse—whom thereafter were our inseparable companions for our entire stay at the front. Undoubtedly there were more rats than men; there were hordes of them. Regiments and battalions of rats. They were the largest rats I had ever seen. We soon became tired of killing them; it seemed a wasted effort. Some of the rats became quite bold, even impudent. They seemed to say, "I've got as much right here as you have." They would walk along, pick up food scraps and eat them right there in front of you! The dark dug-outs were their real havens. When we slept we would keep our heads covered with blankets as protection against rat bites. This may seem flimsy protection, but we were so conditioned that we would awake at any attempt on the part of a rat to bite through the blanket. I have often wondered why there were so few rat bites. Probably the rats felt that it was not worthwhile fooling with live humans when there were so many dead ones around. We soon got used to the rats and learned to live with them.
It was the same with the lice. I woke up lousy after my first sleep in a dug-out. My reaction to the pests took the following progression: first, I was besieged by interminable itching, followed by depression. Then I began to lose appetite and weight, finally becoming quite ill. All this was within a period of a few days. Most of the fellows exhibited the same symptoms.
One might say that our illness was mainly psychological, but it was nonetheless real. Since this was a quiet front, I had no difficulty in getting permission to go back to the rear for a few hours. Foolishly, I thought if I could get cleaned up just once, I would feel a lot better. I got some delousing soap, took a bath and washed my clothes. I then returned to the front, stood machine gun watch and then went into the dug-out for a nap. Needless to say, I woke up lousy again.
I told my troubles to an old French veteran who had been assigned to my machine gun squad. "Oh, it's nothing! You must forget all about it,' he said. "You'll get used to it. I've been at the front for nearly four years and I've been lousy all the time, except when I was in the hospital or at home on leave."
I took his advice which was all to the good, because I was not to be rid of these pests until six months later during my sojourn in hospitals at Mantes-sur-Seine and Paris after the Armistice. Even then, it was only a temporary respite, for I was reinfected upon rejoining my regiment at the embarkation port of Brest. After a brief stay with the regiment, I was returned to the hospital, again deloused, only to be reinfected again on the hospital ship returning to the States. I parted company with my last louse at the debarkation hospital at Grand Central Palace in New York City.
We remained in the St. Mihiel sector about two weeks. We were then withdrawn and moved into a sector in the Argonne Forest near Verdun, site of the great battles of 1916; we arrived there in late July 1918. We were still brigaded with the Tenth French Division. The area around Verdun was a vast cemetery with a half million crosses of those who had perished in that great holocaust, each bearing the legend, Mort Pour La France.
The Argonne at that time was also a quiet sector. But it was here that we suffered our first casualty, Private Robert M. Lee of Chicago. The incident occurred during machine gun target practice. The first and second line trenches ran along parallel hills about a hundred yards apart. The French had set up a make-shift range in the valley in between the trenches. Behind the gun there was a two or three foot rise in the earth, on which a number of us French and Blacks were sitting, chewing the rag, awaiting our turn at the machine gun.
Suddenly, there was a short burst of machine gun fire. It was not from our guns. Bullets whizzed over our heads—they seemed to be coming from behind the target. All of us scrambled to get into the communication trench which opened on the valley. Second Lieutenant Binga DesMond, our platoon commander (and the University of Chicago's great sprinting star), fell from the embankment on top of me. Fortunately, he was not hit. But even with his 180 pounds on my back, I am sure I made that ten or fifteen yards to the communication trench, crawling on my hands and knees, as fast as he could have sprinted the distance!
The fire was coming from behind the target. What obviously had happened was that the Germans had cased the position of our guns and had somehow got around behind the target and waited for a pause in our target practice to open fire on us. We never found out how they did it, for none of us knew the exact topography of the place. The French of course knew it, but they had assured us that the place was safe and that they had been using the range for months.
We were crouched down, panting, in the communication trench for about five minutes after the German guns ceased fire. The French lieutenant (bless his soul) then sent a French gun crew out to get the gun. To our great surprise they also brought back Robert M. Lee. He was quite dead, with bullets right through the heart. He had evidently been hit by the first burst and had fallen forward in front of the embankment. All of us were deeply saddened by the incident.
No one spoke as we bore his body back to the rear. He was only nineteen, a very sweet fellow, and he was our first casualty. We buried him down in the valley, beside the graves of those fallen at Verdun. The funeral was quite impressive. He was given a hero's burial, with representatives both from our regiment and our French counterparts. We were especially impressed by the appearance of General Mittelhauser who came down from Division Headquarters to express condolences and appreciation to the Black troops now under his command.
THE SOISSONS SECTOR
Despite the fact that we had been in aa quiet sector, it was still the front lines with its daily tensions of anticipated attack. In the middle of August, we were pulled out of the Argonne sector and sent to rest behind the lines near Bar-le-Duc. We were deeply pleased by the hospitality and kindness extended to us by the townspeople there. They invited us into their homes and plied us with food and wine. Half-jokingly they told us to come back after the war and we could have our pick of the girls. As we did throughout our stay in France, we deported ourselves well. For pleasures of the flesh, there were a number of legal houses of prostitution, or “houses of pleasure” as they were called by the French, It was with regret that we left that area.
By this time, we had become an integral part of the French Army. Along with our French equipment, training and so forth, we had affected the style of the French poilu (doughboy). The flaps of our overcoats were buttoned back in order to give us more leg room while on the march, as was their style. Like the French infantry, we used walking sticks, which helped to ease the burden of our seventy pounds of equipment. French peasants along the road, hearing our strange language and noticing our color, would often mistake us for French colonials. Not Senegalese, who were practically all black but Algerians, Moroccans or Sudanese, We would swing along the road to the tune of our favorite marching song:
My old mistress promised me, Raise a ruckus tonight,
When she died she'd set me free, Raise a ruckus tonight.
She lived so long her head got bald, Raise a ruckus tonight.
She didn’t get to set me free at all, Raise a ruckus tonight!
Oh, come along, little children come along, While the moon is shining bright;
Get on board on down the river flow, Gonna’ raise a ruckus tonight.
But we had not escaped the long arm of American racism. We were rudely confronted with this reality upon our arrival in a small town on the Compiégne front in the department of Meuse. We entrained here for our next front. The regiment was confronted dramatically with the effects of the racist campaign launched by the American high brass,
Upon entering the town, the regiment was drawn up in battalion formation in the square, Before being assigned to billets, we were informed by the battalion commander that a Black soldier from a labor battalion had been court martialed and hanged in the very square where we were standing, It had happened just a few weeks before our arrival. His crime was the raping of a village girl. His body had been left hanging there for twenty-four hours, as a demonstration of American justice,
“As a result,” he told us, “you may find the town population hostile, In case this is so,” the major warned, “you are not to be provoked or to take umbrage at any discourtesies, but are to deport yourselves as gentlemen at all times,” In any case, we were to be there only for a few days, during which time we were to remain close to our barracks, Then, in a lowered voice, he muttered, “This is what i have been told to tell you.”
We kept close to our billets the first day or so, but then gradually ventured further into town. At first, the townsfolk seemed to be aloof, but the coolness was gradually broken down, probably as a result of our correct deportment, especially our attitude towards the children (with whom we always immediately struck up friendships). Friendly relations were finally established with the villagers. When we asked about the hanging, they shrugged the matter off,
“So what? That was only one soldier. The others were nice enough,” When asked why they had been so aloof when we first arrived, they said it was the result of the warnings of the white officers. “They didn’t want us to fraternize with the Blacks.”
Continuing the conversation, they seemed puzzled about why the sentence had been so severe and the body barbarously left exposed in the square. “Trés brutale, trés horrible!” they exclaimed. With regard to the girl, “Ah, she had been raped many times before,” one of them jeered.
After two weeks of rest, the regiment began to move by stages toward the front lines again. A few days later, we boarded a train consisting of a long line of box-cars. Each car was marked: “Quarante hommes ou huit chevaux.” (Forty men or eight horses.)
The last couple of months had been quiet and relatively pleasant, with the exception of the Lec incident and the events just related. But now, we felt, we were going into the thick of it. The premonition was confirmed the very next morning when we woke (that is, those of us who had been able to sleep in such crowded conditions),
We were passing through Chateau-Thierry. There could be no doubt about it, eventhough part of the sign had been blown away and only the word “Thierry” remained. The woods around the station and Belleau Woods, a few miles further on, looked like they had been hit by a cyclone: broken and uprooted trees, gaping shell holes, men from the Graves Registration walking around with crosses, Black Pioneers removing ammunition, All were grim reminders of the great battles that had been fought there by American troops only several weeks before.
We were on the Soissons front, where we became part of the famous Armée Mangin, General Mangin (le boucher or the butcher as he was called by the French) was commander of the Tenth Army of France, among whom were a number of shock troops; Chausseurs Alpines, Chausseurs d’Afrique (Algerians and Moroccans), Senegalese riflemen and the Foreign Legion. His army was pivotal in breaking the Hindenburg Lineabout Soissons. On this front, we were brigaded with the Fifty-ninth French Division, under the command of General Vincendon.
We bypassed Thierry and Belleau Woods and detrained at the village of Villers-Cotteréts, the birthplace of Alexandre Dumas. ‘The atmosphere was charged with expectancy, Observation balloons hung like giant sausages on the horizon. Big guns rumbled ominously in the distance, A steady stream of ambulances carrying wounded jammed the roads leading from the front. Obviously a big battle was in progress not too far away. But it turned out that we were not going into that sector. We left the village and marched west to Crépy-en-Valois. Turning north through the Compiégne Forest, we reached the Aisne River at a point near Vie-sur-Aisne and continued on to Resson-le-Long where we established our depot company. The march from the railhead to Resson took about three days. It was a forced march and covered about twenty-five kilometers (fifteen miles) a day.
This was pretty rough after the restless night we had spent on the crowded train. As one of the company wags observed, “One thing bout these kilomeeters, they sho’ will kill you if you keep on meetin’ “em.”
Our regiment spent six months in the lines in all. We took part in the fifty-nine day drive of Mangin’s Tenth Army which ended on the day of the Armistice. During that period, one or another of our units was always under fire or fighting. Our toughest battles were at the Death Valley Jump Off near the Aisne Canal, the taking of Mont Singes (Monkey Mountain which was later renamed Hill 370 in honor of our regiment), fighting at a railroad embankment northwest of Guilleminet Farm, and the advance into the Hindenburg Line at the Oise-Aisne Triangle.
It was in the battles on the Hindenburg Line that we met the strongest enemy resistance and sustained most of our losses. The enemy resistance was broken in these battles and they began a general withdrawal, at first orderly and accompanied by brief rearguard actions. Finally, there was the flight to the Belgian frontier, destroying roads and railroads on orders to impede our advance. After Laon, their flight was so precipitous that we had difficulty maintaining contact. We entered many villages which they had left the day before.
Our outfit was the first allied troops to enter the fortified city of Laon, wresting it from the Germans after four years of war. We were greeted with tremendous elation by the population, who had lived under German occupation the whole of that period.
The regiment was highly praised by the French. It won twenty-one Distinguished Service Crosses, sixty-eight Croix de Guerre and one Distinguished Service Medal. In the whole two months’ drive, casualties were 500 killed and wounded-—a total of about one-fifth of the regiment. These casualties were light when compared with those of Black regiments on other fronts. For example, the 37] st Infantry of drafted men lost 1,065 out of 2,384 men in three days’ fighting during the great September defensive on the Compiégne Front. I believe that the German resistance on these other fronts, east and west of Soissons, was more stubborn than on our front.
All of our Black regiments were fortunate to have been brigaded with the French. In this respect, the American High Command did us a big favor, unintentionally, lam sure. For as far as we were able to observe, the French made no discrimination in the treatment of Black officers and men, with whom they fraternized freely. They regarded us as brothers-in-arms.
Similarly, the French people in the villages in which we stopped or were stationed were uniformly courteous and friendly, and we made many friends, I must say that we were also on our best behavior. I don’t remember a single incident of misbehavior on the part of our men toward French villagers. The latter were quick to notice this and to contrast our gentlemanly deportment with the rudeness of the white Americans. Many of the white soldiers made no effort to hide their disdain for the French(whom they regarded as inferiors) and commonly referred to them as “frogs.”
But even as we fought, we were being stabbed in the back by the American High Command. We were not to learn, however, until our return to the States of the slanderous, racist document issued by the American General Staff Headquarters through its brainwashed French Mission (the Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops referred to earlier).
We learned also that the hanging of the Black soldier on the Compiégne Front was not an isolated incident, but part of a deliberate campaign conducted by higher and lower echelons in the American Command to influence French civilians against Blacks. The campaign focused on the effort to build up the Black rapist scare among them.
Such was a memorandum issued by headquarters of the Ninety-second Division (a Black division officered largely by whites) on August 21, 1918. Its purpose was to “prevent the presence of colored troops from being a menace to women,” The memorandum read in part:
On account of increasing frequency of the crime of rape, or attempted rape, in this Division, drastic preventive measures have become necessary... Until further notice, there will be a check of all troops of the 92nd Division every hour daily between reveille and 11 P.M,, with a written record showing how each check was made, by whom, and the result...the one mile limit regulation will be strictly enforced at all times, and no passes will be issued except to men of known reliability.
This was followed the next day by another memorandum saying that the commander-in-chief of the American Expeditionary Forces “would send the 92nd Division back to the States or break it up into labor battalions as unfit to bear arms in France, if efforts to prevent rape were not taken more seriously.”
As a result, Dr. Robert R. Moton of Tuskegee was sent by President Wilson and the secretary of war to investigate the charges. He found only one case of rape in the whole division of 15,000 men. Two other men who were from labor battalions in the Ninety-second area were convicted. One of these was hanged, and I’m sure that this was the unfortunate soldier whom we saw on the Compiégne Front. General headquarters was forced to admit that the crime of rape, as later stated by Moton, “was no more prevalent among coloured soliders than among white, or any other soldiers.”
This whole racist smear of Black troops, I was to conclude later, represented but an extension to France of the anti-Black racist campaign then current in the States, It was designed to maintain Black subjugation and prevent its erosion by liberal racial attitudes of the French. Back in the States, the campaign was marked by an upturn of lynchings during the war years, with thirty-eight Black victims in 1917 and half again that number in the following year. Even then, things were working up to the bloody riots of 1919.
In contrast to all of this, the appreciation of the French for Black soldiers from the U.S. was shown by the accolade given by the French division commander, General Vincendon, to our regiment. On December 19, 1918, we were transferred from the French Army back to the American Army. On that day, General Order 4785, directed to the Fifty-ninth Division of the Army of France, was read to the officers and men of the 370th. It commended us for our contributions to France. remember being struck by the poetry of the language, it was all beautifully French to me:
We at first, in September at Mareuil-sur-Ourcg, admitted your fine appearance under arms, the precision of your review, the suppleness of your evolutions that presented to the eye the appearance of silk unrolling its waves...
Further on in remembering our dead, the communique read:
The blood of your comrades who fell on the soil of France, mixed with the blood of our soldiers, renders indissoluble the bonds of affection that unite us.
THE ROAD HOME
The road back from Soissons lay through the old battlefields where we had fought a couple of months before. Near Anizy-le Chateau there were crosses marking the graves of some of our comrades who had died in the fighting there. We paused before the graves, seeking out those of the comrades we knew. We all had the same thoughts: “What rotten luck that they should die almost in sight of victory.”
Among the crosses, there was one marked “Sergeant Theodore Gamelin.” Gamelin hadn’t died in combat. 1 remember the incident clearly, We were all lined up in some hastily dug trenches that morning, waiting for the “over the top” signal. The cooks had just distributed reserved rations. These consisted of a half-loaf of French bread (not the crispy white kind, but a coarse grayish loaf baked especially for the troops, which we called “war bread”) and a big bar of chocolate. Somehow, Gamelin had missed out on these rations. Jump-off time was drawing near. He looked around and his eyes fixed upon a private named Brown, who was sitting on the firing step, putting his rations in a knapsack. Now, Private Brown was one of those quiet, meek little fellows. He always took low, was never known to fight. But Brown was the type of man, I have observed, who can become dangerous. This is particularly true in a combat situation where one doesn’t know whether one will live five minutes longer. Gamelin, a big bullying type, an amateur boxer and very unpopular with his men, called to Brown:
“Give me some of that bread, Brown. I didn’t get my rations.”
“Now, that’s just too bad, sergeant,” Brown responded, “I’m not going to give you any of this bread. It’s not my fault you missed your rations.”
Gamelin, with one hand on his pistol, moved as though he were going to seize the bread. Brown had his rifle lying across his lap. He simply raised it and coolly pulled the trigger. The sergeant fell dead!
The platoon commander heard the commotion and ran to the spot, inquiring about what had happened. The men told him that Gamelin was trying to take Brown’s reserve rations and had made a move toward his pistol. Brown, they said, had shot in self-defense,
Obviously nothing could be done about Brown in those circumstances. So the lieutenant said, “Consider yourself under arrest, Brown. We will take this matter up after this action.”
Unfortunately, Brown was killed a few days later, The memory of this incident was on our minds as we viewed Gamelin’s grave, His helmet hung on a cross, which ironically bore the inscription “Sergeant Theodore Gamelin—Mort Pour La France (Died for France), September 1918.”
Thad gone through six months at the front without a scratch or a day of illness. But as we neared Soissons, I began to feel faint and light-headed, By the time we reached the city, I had developed quite a high fever, It was the period of the first great flu epidemic which wreaked havoc among U.S. troops in France. I reported to the infirmary and lined up with a group of about fifty men. The medical sergeant took our temperatures and then tied tags to our coats. I looked at mine and it read “influenza.” We were evacuated to a field hospital near Soissons, where I remained for about five days. After that, we boarded a hospital train and were told that we were going to the big base hospital in Paris, Now, I liked that.
I had never seen Paris and was most anxious to visit the famed city before going home. There were two of us in the compartment, another soldier from the regiment and myself, I felt a little drowsy, sol told my compartment mate that I was going to take a little nap and to wake me up when the chow came around, I “awoke” five days later in a French hospital at Mantes-sur-Seine, near Paris.
They had put me off the train as an emergency case just before Paris. I came out of a coma to find a number of strange people around my bed—nurses who were Catholic nuns, doctors and a number of patients, They were all smiling. “Thank God, young man,” said the doctor, “we thought we were going to lose you. You've been in a coma for five days, but you’re going to be all right now.”
“Where am I? Is this Paris?” I asked.
“No, this is Mantes-sur-Seine, close to Paris. They had to put you off here as an emergency case.”
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked.
“Qh, you've had a little kidney infection and it has affected your heart.”
“That sounds bad,” I said.
“Well, you’re young and have a remarkable constitution. You'll pull through all right—you’re out of danger now,” he assured me.
I remained in the hospital for about a month, receiving the kindest and most solicitous attention from nurses, doctors and patients. All seemed to regard me as their special charge, No one spoke English, but I got along all right. It was like a crash course in French, They told me I had a beautiful accent. They brought in an old lady to talk English with me, but she bored me to death, Really, my French was better than her English. She came once and didn’t return,
I was feeling much better when the head sister came to me one evening to tell me I was to leave the next morning for Paris and the American hospital at Neuilly.
“You've never been to Paris, have you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. ,
“Well, you’ve got a treat coming’
I was filled with great expectations, The next morning, after embracing all my fellow patients and exchanging warm goodbyes with the doctor and sisters, the head nurse (or sister) took me out in front of the hospital where an American ambulance was waiting.
“Hop in, buddy,” said the driver.
“Haywood, be sure to write us when you get back to Chicago,” said the sister. “Remember we are your friends and want to know how you are getting along.”
I promised that I would. As we pulled out, she stood on the road waving a white handkerchief and continued to wave it as long as we were in sight. I never wrote them, hut often thought of them.
Paris, you wondrous city! I was feeling good that morning as we pulled into the hospital at Neuilly. The hospital was situated on the Avenue Neuilly near the Boulevard de la Grande Armée, only a few blocks from the Arc de Triomphe. It was a veritable palace. I was assigned to a ward in which there were only four guys, three Australians and one white American from Wisconsin. They greeted me and gave mea run-down on the situation. They were having a hall seeing Paris, taking in all the events, theaters, race tracks, boxing and girls, I don’t believe that I saw a real sick man in that hospital. There were some of course, but they must have been secluded in some out of sight wards. We were all convalescents in our ward. A couple were recuperating from wounds received at the front,
“What do you do for money?” I asked.
“Oh, we don’t worry about that—-just stick around a while and we'll show you the ropes,”
Under their tutelage, it didn’t take me long to catch on. At that time there were dozens of rich American women, including a number from the social register in Paris. They were under the auspices of the Red Cross and had taken over the hospital and its patients as their special “war duty.” They would organize excursions, get tickets for shows, sports events, etc. Coming to the hospital in relays, they would leave huge boxes of chocolates and other goodies.
We were showered with gifts—Gillette razors, Waterman fountain pens, and even some serviceable wrist watches if you asked for them. They would come in waves. Scarcely had one group left when another would come, leaving the same gifts. The guys had it down perfect. They always left one man on watch in the ward. He was there in case the gals would come in while the others were out and receive all the presents and gifts for them. He would point to the three un oceupied beds (there were only five of us in an eight bed ward) and pretend that their occupants were out in the streets. He would suggest that the presents be left for them, also. Old Wisconsin Slim was the real genius in all this, He even hung a couple of crosses over the unoccupied beds to give more substance to the fiction that they were occupied,
Every morning we would gather all our presents, take them to the gate, and sell them fora good price to the French who gathered there to buy them. We would then return to the ward and divide the “swag.” Razors and fountain pens seemed to be rare in France at that time. The going rate for razors was about ten francs ($2) and for Waterman fountain pens even more. All this was carried out under the benign gaze of the hospital authorities.
Discipline was lax, almost nonexistent. We could stay out for two days at a time. The attitude seemed to be: let the boys have a good time, they deserve it. Besides, it’s essential for their convalescence, When we would get a little money together (about once a week), we would run out to Montmartre and the famous Rue Pigalle, “Pig Alley,” to see the girls.
As an old Francophile, I was also interested in French history and culture. I got a guidebook and spent days walking all over Paris, visiting all the historical places about which I had read, mentally reconstructing the events.
Time was passing rapidly. I had been in the hospital about two months when an administrator called me into his office.
“Well, Corporal Hall,” he said. “I hope you've been having a good time in Paris.”
“Oh yes,” I replied.
“That’s good,” he said, “We're sending you back to your regiment tomorrow.”
“Where are they?” I asked.
“They’re in Brest, waiting to embark for the voyage home.”
The next morning I got on the train at the Gare Ouest and arrived in Brest that evening. In Brest, I strolled around a bit on the waterfront and finally sat down at a sidewalk cafe. I was in no hurry to get back into the old regimental harness, I was about to order a drink when suddenly a big white MP appeared. Glowering at me, he said, “Where’s your pass, soldier?”
“Here it is. I’ve just got back from the hospital in Paris and I'm going to my outfit up on the hill,” I explained.
He grabbed it, glanced at it and shouted, “Well, get going up that hill right now. You're not supposed to hang around here.”
I left without my drink and started climbing the hill to the old Napoleon barracks where we had been eleven months before. It seemed like that had been years ago, so much had been crowded into the brief intervening period.
T rejoined my outfit. They were living in tents in what seemed to me like a swamp. The weather was miserable, a steady cold rain. The mud was ankle deep. I was greeted warmly by my comrades. I don’t think that more than half the old boys of my company were left. The rest were dead, wounded, or ill in hospitals all over France.
A couple of bottles of cognac were produced. The guys started reminiscing about what they were going to do when they got home. The news from home was bad. Discrimination and Jim Crow were rampant, worse than before. Blacks were being lynched everywhere. “Now, they want us to go to war with Japan,” observed one of the fellows. (The Hearst newspapers at the time were again raising the specter of the “yellow peril.”)
“Well,” someone said, “they won’t get me to fight their yellow peril. If it comes to that, I'll join the Japs. They are colored.” There was unanimous agreement on that point.
I bunked down that night and awoke the next morning with a high fever. I went to the infirmary and again was evacuated to a hospital. I immediately began to worry whether I would be able to return with my outfit. As I was waiting on the side of the road to hitch a ride to the hospital, I heard footsteps behind me. I turned and there was Colonel Roberts, our white commander whom I had not seen for months.
I started to spring to my feet and salute, but he motioned me to remain seated. “Corporal, you're from our regiment, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, “I'm sick and going to the hospital.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I guess I got the flu.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re in no condition to walk that distance.” He hailed a passing truck and instructed the driver to take me to the hospital. “Take care, son; we’re going home soon. Try to come hack with us.” That’s the last time I saw Colonel Roberts.
A month later, while in the hospital, I picked up the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune. The headline read: “The 370th Infantry (the old Eighth Illinois) returns and is given hero’s welcome in victory parade down State Street.” I felt pretty bad, because I could imagine my old Mother standing there waiting for me to pass by, Since I hadn’t written in months, she would probably assume the worst.
I had been away from the States for quite a while, in free France so to speak, and I had become less used to the American nigger-hating way of life. But I was thrown abruptly back into reality as soon as I crossed the threshold of the American Army hospital in Brest.
It seemed to be manned by an all Southern staff: doctors, nurses, etc. All of them spoke with broad Southern accents. I was assigned a bed at one end of the ward. When I looked around, I could see only Blacks were in that end. Whites were at the other end. There were no screens, no Jim Crow signs. The Jim Crow was de facto, but nonetheless real. I also noticed that there was a large space between the Black and white sections.
After a cursory entrance examination, the doctor seemed to think that I didn’t have the flu, and upon hearing my recent medical history, he decided that it was a relapse of the old illness.
Thad no sooner gotten settled when J heard a nurse bawling out a Black soldier for being so dirty. The poor fellow had just come in from some mud hole like the one in which my regiment was situated, where there was no opportunity to bathe.
“You don’t see any of our white boys that dirty!” she shouted, her eyes flashing indignantly at what she, a white lady, was forced to put up with, For the first time, it occurred to me that our Black regiment had been put in a worse location than the whites. Now, that’s pretty hard stuff for a front-line veteran to take. If I had been ill when I came in, I was really sick now. I could feel my blood pressure and-fever mount.
There was a Black sergeant from my outfit in the same ward, He was a tall, dignified and proud looking man, convalescing from a previous illness. He wasn’t a bed patient and was therefore supposed to make his own bed. This he did, but he never seemed to do it to the satisfaction of the nurse, who kept berating him.
“Make it over, that’s not good enough.”
“I've already made it, and I’m not going to do it again.”
“Don’t talk back to me,” she shouted. “Make that bed!”
“I’m not going to,” he said.
“You dare disobey my order?” she yelled.
“I'm a front-line soldier and you don’t have to yell at me.”
She turned and walked to the office and returned with the ward doctor, a little pip-squeak of a man. Ina stentorian voice he said:
“Make that bed, soldier.” The sergeant didn’t move. The doctor looked at his watch and said, “I’m giving you two minutes to start making that bed. If you don’t, I’m going to prefer charges against you for disobeying your superior officers.”
You could see that the proud sergeant was thinking it over and coming to a decision. I could almost read his mind; it seemed that he was thinking that this wasn’t the time to die. He only had a couple more months to go.
He finally burst into tears, but he got up and made the bed. I’ve seen this sort of situation before, and I feel almost certain that had there been a loaded gun around, the sergeant might have started shooting. It would have been reported in the news as “Another nigger runs amuck.” All of us, including some of the whites, breathed a sigh of relief at this peaceful culmination of what could have been a dangerous incident. At least the nurse never bothered the sergeant after that. Undoubtedly, she sensed the inherent danger of any further provocation.
After my stay in Paris, I was seized periodically by moods of depression. These deepened and became chronic during my stay at the Brest hospital, especially after witnessing such humiliating incidents. I felt that I could never again adjust myself to the conditions of Blacks in the States after the spell of freedom from racism in France, I did not want to go back and my feeling was shared by many Black soldiers.
I thought of remaining in France, getting my discharge there and possibly becoming a French citizen. But I did not know how to go about this. Besides, I was ill, and there was my Mother whom! wanted to see again. Probably, some day, if I got well, I would come back—or so I thought as I lay in the hospital at Brest.
Finally, the day came. We were discharged from the hospital, given casual’s pay (one month’s pay), which in my case amounted to $33, and boarded the ship for home. There was no change in the Jim Crow pattern. We were merely transferred from a Jim Crow hospital to a Jim Crow hospital ship. We Blacks found ourselves quartered in a separate section of the ship. The segregation, however, did not extend to the mess hall or the lavatories (heads). I guess that would have been too much trouble. But the ship’s military command passed up no opportunity to let us know our place.
For example, on the first day out we were given tickets for mess—~-breakfast, lunch and supper. We were supposed to present them to a checker who stood at the foot of the stairway leading up to the mess hall. A Black soldier who had evidently misplaced his ticket tried to slip by the checker unnoticed, but he was not quick enough. A cracker officer who was standing by the checker hollered: “Hey, Nigger, come back here!”
The guy kept going and tried to merge into a group of us Blacks who had already passed through. Again the officer shouted, “Nigger, come back here. You, I mean. I mean the tall one over there. That nigger knows who I’m calling.” The soldier finally turned and walked back. Purple with rage, protected by his bars and white skin, the officer said, “Listen, you Black son of a bitch, where is your ticket?” Clearly, the officer had already gauged his man and concluded that there was no fight in him,
“I couldn’t find it,” said the soldier.
“Well, why didn’t you say that in the first place instead of tryin’ toslip through heah? Well, you go on back and try to find it. If you can’t, see the sergeant in charge. Don’t evah try that trick again,” said the officer. His anger seemed to ebb and a glow of self-satisfaction spread across his face. He had done his chore for the day. He had put a nigger in his place.
The seas were rough again. It was a small ship, leased from the Japanese. Most of us were seasick. The sailors were having a ball at our expense, When one of us would rush to the rail to vomit, one of them would holler, “A dollar he comes.”
One night, the ship tilted sharply and a number of us were thrown out of our bunks, The bunks were in tiers and I was in a top one, I got a pretty hard bump. The next morning on deck the sailors were talking loudly among themselves (for our benefit of course),
“Gee,” said one, “this is the roughest sea I’ve ever seen. This old pile is about to come apart, The Japs leased us the worst ship they had.”
“It just might be sabotage,” another one suggested,
“I hope we make it, but I’m not so sure,” said another,
Not being seamen, most of us were taking this seriously, A Black soldier turned to me and said, “You know man, after all I’ve been through, if this ship were to sink now almost in sight of home, I would get off and walk the water like the good Lord,”
Another voice, that of a white sergeant from Florida who had been rather friendly to us: “You know,” he drawled, “this reminds me of old Sam down home.”
Here it comes, we thought, one of those nigger jokes.
“He was up theah on the gallows with a rope around his neck and the sheriff said, ‘Well Sam, is there anything you want to say before you die?
“All T got to say sheriff, said Sam, ‘this sho’ would be a lesson to me,’ ”
The voyage proceeded uneventfully, with one exception, The gamblers among us were out to get the soldiers’ casual pay. The law of concentration of money into fewer and fewer hands was in process, This was taking place in one of the endless crap games which started in the Bay of Biscay and wound up at Sandy Hook,
IT never really gambled, even in the Army with room and board guaranteed, If you were broke, you could always borrow some money. The lender knew you couldn’t run out on him. His only risk was that you might become a casualty. But motivated by nothing more than sheer boredom, I got into the game this time.
After all, what good was $33 going to do me? To my surprise, I hit a streak of luck and over a period of a week in and out of the game, I ran my paltry grub stake up to the tremendous sum of $1200, That was the high point, after which time my luck began to peter out. Nevertheless, I left the ship with $500. It was my last gambling venture,
That morning, we lined up at the rail as our ship passed Sandy Hook and pulled into New York Harbor, It was my first view of the New York skyline, Overcome with emotion, tears welled up in my eyes, Embarrassed, I looked around and found that I was not alone. The guy next to me was obviously crying,
Our landing was a memorable one, Ship stacks were blasting, foghorns blowing, bells were ringing and fire boats were sending up great sprays of water, Passengers in ferryboats were waving and shouting greetings.
Upon docking, we were met by two reception committees of young women. A white one to receive the white soldiers and a Black one to greet us, This time segregation didn’t bother us at all, we were so pleased to see the pretty Black girls, They drew us aside as we came down the gang plank, ushered us into waiting ambulances, and drove us to Grand Central Palace which had been converted into a deharkation hospital, Leaving us in the lobby, they said goodbye and promised to come back soon and show us around.
A woman from the Red Cross took our home addresses to notify our families of our arrival. We were then escorted into a large room and told to strip off our clothes. Leaving them in the room, we then went through the delousing process. We were sprayed with some sort of chemical and washed off under showers. We were then given pajamas and a bathrobe and shown to our Jim Crow ward.
The next day, after a physical examination, we were paid off, receiving all of our back pay, In my case, it was for twelve months, amounting to about $450, This, plus the $500 I had won on the ship, seemed to me a small fortune, the largest amount of money I had ever had in my life. J was, so to speak, chafing at the bit, raring to get out and up to famed Harlem.
On the ship, I had met a Black sergeant named Patterson, who was from the 369th, the old Fifteenth New York. He had also won a considerable sum in the crap game. He suggested that we team up and go to Harlem together. He said he knew his way around there since that was where he lived before he joined the Army.
After the pay off, we were still without clothes. But a clothing salesman came around to take orders for new uniforms. Patterson and I ordered suits, for which we were measured. In a couple of hours the man was back with two brand new whip cord uniforms with chevrons and service stripes sewed on. We had also ordered shoes, which were promptly delivered, We then sneaked out of the hospital.
After we banked most of our money downtown, we took the subway up to 125th Street and visited several “Buffet Flats” (a current euphemism for a high-class whorehouse), drinking and looking over the girls. Patterson seemed to be an old friend of all the madams. They greeted him like a long lost brother. We finally wound up in one real classy joint where we stayed for four days, playing sultan-in-a-harem with the girls.
We returned to the hospital, expecting to be sharply reprimanded and restricted to quarters, but the doctor on his rounds merely asked, “Where have you boys been?” Before we could answer, he simply said, “I suggest that you stick around a day or two, we have some tests to make.”
From New York, we left for Camp Grant near Rockford, Illinois, where we were demobilized out of the service, I was discharged on April 29, 1919. After a cursory examination, I was pronounced physically fit. “What about my chronic endocarditis and chronic nephritis?” I protested,
“Oh, you're all right, you’ve overcome it all. You’re young and fit as a fiddle,” the doctor answered me. From Camp Grant I returned home to Chicago to see my parents.
REUNION WITH OTTO
Not too long after my discharge, I came home one evening to find Otto. He had just arrived after mustering out of the service at Camp Grant. We were all happy to see him, especially Mother. He showed us his honorable discharge.
“You know,” he said, “I’m lucky to get this.”
He then told stories about his harrowing experiences in a stevedore battalion in the South and then in France. The main mass of Black draftees had been relegated to these labor units, euphemistically called “service battalions,” “engineers,” “pioneer infantry,” ete.
Regardless of education or ability, young Blacks were herded indiscriminately into these stevedore outfits and faced the drudgery and hard’ work with no possibility of promotion beyond the rank of corporal. With few exceptions, the officers were KKK whites, as also were the sergeants. Many of them were plantation riding boss types, especially recruited for these jobs. Southern newspapers openly carried want ads calling for white men who had “experience in handling Negroes,” Black draftees were not only subjected to the drudgery of hard labor, but insults, abuse, and in many cases blows from white officers and sergeants.
Otto told us his worst experience was in Camp Stewart in Newport News, Virginia, where he was stationed during the terribly cold winter of 1917-18, For a considerable period after their arrival, they were forced to live in tents without floors or stoves. In most cases, they had only a blanket, some not even that.
New arrivals to the camp were forced to stand around fires outside all night or sleep under trees for partial protection from the weather, For months there were no bathing facilities nor clothing for the men, These conditions were subsequently changed as a result of protests by the men and reports by investigators.
His outfit landed in the port of St. Lazare, France, and during the great advance participated in the all-out effort to keep the front-lines supplied in the “race to Berlin.” They worked from dawn to nightfall unloading supplies, including all kinds of railroad equipment, engines, tractors and bulldozers. They built and repaired roads, warehouses and barracks. Discipline was strict; guys were thrown in the guardhouse on the most flimsy pretexts. A Black soldier seen on the street with a French woman was likely to be arrested by the MPs.
“The spirit of St. Lazare,” said one officer, “is the spirit of the South.”
Needless to say, Otto often found himself in the guard house as a result of fights, AWOLs, etc. How he escaped general court martial or imprisonment I don’t know.
His outfit was finally moved to the American military base at Le Mans, about a hundred miles from Paris. Things were somewhat better there. There were even a few “reliable” Black corporals who were allowed weekend passes to visit Paris, Otto was assigned to mess duty as a cook,
When he applied for leave, he was refused, however, “Well, I didn’t intend to come this close to Paris without seeing it,” he said, “so I went AWOL.”
He did not see much of it, however, before he was arrested by MPs. I was surprised to learn that he had been in Paris during the period that I was in the hospital in Neuilly. Most of his time in the great city was spent in the Hotel St. Anne, the notorious American military jail run by the sadistic Marine captain, “hard-boiled Smith.”
Here now, bitter and disillusioned, Otto continued his rebellion, It led him first to the Garvey movement where he served for a brief period as an officer in Garvey’s Black Legion, Then in succession, Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World ([WW), the African Blood Brotherhood and finally the Communist Party—joining soon after its unity convention in 1921. After returning from the service, Otto stayed at home only a short time and then moved in with some of his new friends.
Chapter 3
Searching for Answers
Back home in Chicago, I was soon working again as a waiter on the Michigan Central Railroad. As I have already mentioned, the first day of the bloody Chicago race riot (July 28, 1919) came while I was working on the Wolverine run up through Michigan, When arrived home from work that afternoon, the whole family greeted me emotionally. We were all there except for Otto. The disagreements I had had with my Father in the past were forgotten, Both my Mother and sister were weeping. Everyone was keyed up and had been worrying about my safety in getting from the station to the house.
Following our brief reunion, I tore loose from the family to find out what was happening outside. I went to the Regimental Armory at Thirty-fifth and Giles Avenue because I wanted to find some of my buddies from the regiment. The street, old Forrest Avenue, had recently been renamed in honor of Lt. Giles, a member of our outfit killed in France. I knew they would be planning an armed defense and I wanted to get in on the action. I found them and they told me of their plans. It was rumored that Irishmen from west of the Wentworth Avenue dividing line were planning to invade the ghetto that night, coming in across the tracks by way of Fifty-first Street. We planned a defensive action to meet them.
it was not surprising that defensive preparations were under way. There had been clashes before, often when white youths in “athletic clubs” invaded the Black community. These “clubs” were really racist gangs, organized by city ward heelers and precinct captains,
Once of the guys from the regiment took us to the apartment of a friend, It had a good position overlooking Fifty-first Street near State. Someone had brought a Browning submachine gun; he’d gotten it sometime before, most likely from the Regimental Armory. We didn’t ask where it had come from, or the origin of the 1903 Springfield rifles (Army issue) that appeared. We set to work mounting the submachine gun and set up watch for the invaders, Fortunately for them, they never arrived and we all returned home in the morning, The following day it rained and the National Guard moved into the Black community, so overt raids by whites did not materialize.
Ours was not the only group which used its recent Army training for self-defense of the Black community. We heard rumors about another group of veterans who set up a similar ambush, On several occasions groups of whites had driven a truck at breakneck speed up south State Street, in the heart of the Black ghetto, with six or seven men in the back firing indiscriminately at the people on the sidewalks,
The Black veterans set up their ambush at Thirty-fifth and State, waiting in a car with the engine running, When the whites on the truck came through, they pulled in behind and opened up with a machine gun, The truck crashed into a telephone pole at Thirty-ninth Street, most of the men in the truck had been shot down and the others fled, Among them were several Chicago police officers—“off duty,” of course!
I remember standing before the Angeles Flats on Thirty-fifth and Wabash where the day before four Blacks had been shot by police. It appeared that enraged Blacks had set fire to the building and were attacking some white police officers when the latter fired on them.
Along with other Blacks, I gloated over the mysterious killing of two Black cops with a history of viciousness in the Black community, They had been found dead in an alley between State and Wabash, Undoubtedly they had been killed by Blacks who had taken advantage of the confusion to settle old scores with these Black enforcers of the white man’s law.
Bewilderment and shock struck the Black community as well. I had seen Blacks standing before the burned-out buildings of their former homes, trying to salvage whatever possible, Apparent on their faces was bewilderment and anger.
The Chicago rebellion of 1919 was a pivotal point in my life, Always I had been hot-tempered and never took any insults lying down. This was even more true after the war. I had walked out of a number of jobs because of my refusal to take any crap from anyone, My experiences abroad in the Army and at home with the police left me totally disillusioned about being able to find any solution to the racial problem through the help of the government; for I had seen that official agencies of the country were among the most racist and most dangerous to me and my people.
I began to see that I had to fight; I had to commit myself to struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible. Racism, which erupted in the Chicago riot—and the bombings and terrorist attacks which preceded it---must be eliminated. My spirit was not unique--it was shared by many young Blacks at that time, The returned veterans and other young militants were all fighting back. And there was a lot to fight against, Racism reached a high tide in the summer of 1919, This was the “Red Summer” which involved twenty-six race riots across the country—“red” for the blood that ran in the streets, Chicago was the bloodiest.
The holocaust in Chicago was the worst race riot in the nation’s post-war history. But riots took place in such widely separate places as Long View, Texas, Charleston, South Carolina; Elaine, Arkansas, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Omaha, Nebraska. The flareup of racial violence in Omaha, my old home town, followed the Chicago riots by less than two months, It resulted in the lynching of Will Brown, a packing house worker, for an alleged assault on a white woman, When Omaha’s mayor, Edward P. Smith, sought to intervene, he was seized by the mob. They were close to hanging the mayor from a trolley pole when police cut the rope and rushed him to a hospital, badly injured.
The common underlying cause of riots in most of the northern cities was the racial tension caused by the migration of tens of thousands of Blacks into these centers and the competition for jobs, housing and the facilities of the city. Rather than being at a temporary peak, this outbreak of racism was more like the rising of a plateau—-it never got any higher, but it never really went down, either. Writing in the middle of a riot in Washington, D.C., that summer, the Black poet Claude McKay caught the bitter and belligerent mood of many Blacks:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
if we must die, O let us nobly die
So that our precious blood may not be shed
Jn vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
* Okinsmen! We must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
‘The war and the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 left me bitter and frustrated. I felt that I could never again adjust to the situation of Black inequality. But how had it come about? Who was responsible?
Chicago in the early twenties was an ideal place and time for the education of a Black radical. As a result of the migration of Blacks during World War I, the Chicago area came to have the largest concentration of Black proletarians in the country. It was a major point of contact for these masses with the white labor movement and its advanced, radical sector. In the thirties it was to become a main testing ground for Black and white labor unity.
The city itself was the core of a vast urban industrial complex. Sprawling along the southeast shore of Lake Michigan, the area includes five Illinois counties and two in Indiana. The latter contains such industrial towns as East Chicago, Gary and Hammond. This metropolitan area contains the greatest concentration of heavy industry in the country.
By the second half of the twentieth century, it had forged into the lead of the steel-making industry, surpassing the great Monongahela Valley of Pittsburgh in the production of primary metals; including steel mill, refining and non-ferrous metals operations. There was the gigantic U.S. Steel Corporation in Gary, the Inland Steel Company plant in East Chicago and the U.S. Steel South Works, These are now the three largest steel works in the United States. The steel mills of the Chicago area supply more than 14,000 manufacturing plants,
Chicago was at that time, and remains today, the world’s largest railway center. It ranks first in the manufacture of railroad equipment, including freight and passenger cars, Pullmans, locomotives and specialized rolling stock.
The core city itself was most famous for its wholesale slaughter and meat packing industry. Chicago was known as the meat capital of the world, or in Carl Sandburg’s more homely terms, “hog butcher for the nation.”
The city’s colossal wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few men, who comprised the industrial, commercial and financial oligarchy. Among these were such giants as Judge Gary of the mighty U.S. Steel; Cyrus McCormick of International Harvester, the meat packers Philip D, Armour, Gustavus Swift and the Wilson brothers; George Pullman. of the Pullman Works; Rosenwald of Montgomery Ward; General Wood of Sears and Roebuck; the “merchant prince” Marshall Field; and Samuel Insull of utilities. These were the real rulers, Ostensible political power rested in the notoriously corrupt, gangster ridden, county political machine headed by Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson, who carried on the tradition exposed as early as 1903 by Lincoln Steffens in his book, The Shame of the Cities.
The glitter and wealth of Chicago’s Gold Coast was based on the most inhuman exploitation of the city’s largely foreign-born working force. A scathing indictment of the horrible conditions in Chicago's meat packing industry was contained in Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, published in 1910. It was inevitable that the wage slave would rebel, that Chicago should become the scene of some of the nation’s bloodiest battles in the struggle between labor and capital, The first of these clashes was the railroad strike of 1877 which erupted in pitched battles between strikers and federal troops,
Then in 1886 came the famous Haymarket riot which grew out of a strike for the eight-hour day at the McCormick reaper plant. During a protest rally, a bomb was thrown which killed one policeman and injured six others. ‘This led to the arrest of eight anarchist leaders; four were hanged, one committed suicide or was murdered in his cell, and the others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Obviously being tried and executed simply because they were labor leaders, these innocent men became a cause célebre of international labor, Thousands of visitors made yearly pilgrimages to the city where monuments to the executed men were raised, Haymarket became a rallying word for the eight-hour day. The martyrs were memorialized by the designation of the first of May as International Labor Day.
Several years later the city was the scene of the great Pullman strike led by Eugene V. Debs and his radical but lily-white American Railway Union, which precipitated a nationwide shutdown of railroads in 1894. Again the federal troops were called in and armed clashes between workers and troops ensued. ‘These battles were merely high points in the city’s long history of labor radicalism. It was the national center of the early anarcho-socialist movements. In 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (the IWW or Wobblies) was founded there. The IWW maintained its headquarters and edited its paper, Solidarity, there. In 1921, Chicago was to become the site of the founding convention of the Workers (Communist) Party, USA, which maintained its headquarters and the editorial offices of the Daily Worker there from 1923 to 1927.
Blacks, however, played little or no role in the turbulent early history of the Chicago labor movement. This was so simply because they were not a part of the industrial labor force. Prior to World War I, Blacks were employed mainly in the domestic or personal service occupations, untouched by labor organizations. They were not needed in industry where the seemingly endless tide of cheap European immigrant labor—Irish, Scots, English, Swedes, Germans, Poles, East Europeans and Italians—sufficed to fill the city’s manpower needs.
The only opportunity Blacks had of entering basic industry was as strikebreakers. Thus, in the early part of the century, Blacks were brought in as strikebreakers on two important occasions, the stockyards strike of 1904 and the city-wide teamsters’ strike in 1905. In the first instance, Blacks were discharged as soon as the strike was broken. After the teamsters’ strike, a relatively large number of Blacks remained. As a result of the defeat of the 1904 strike, the packing houses remained virtually unorganized for thirteen more years, and the animosities which developed toward the Black strikebreakers became a part of the racial tension of the city.
At the outbreak of World War I, the situation with respect to Chicago’s Black labor underwent a basic change, Now Blacks were needed to fill the labor vacuum caused by the war boom and the quotas on foreign immigration. Chicago's employers turned to the South, to the vast and untapped reservoir of Black labor eager to escape the conditions of plantation serfdom--exacerbated by the cotton crisis, the boll weevil plague and the wave of lynchings. The “great migrations” began and continued in successive waves through the sixties.
During the war, the occupational status of Blacks thus shifted from largely personal service to basic industry. In the tens of thousands, Blacks flocked to the stockyards and steel mills. During the war, the Black population went from 50,000 to 100,000. Successive waves of Black migration were to bring the Black population to over a million within the next fifty years. Black labor, getting its first foothold in basic industry during the war, had now become an integral part of Chicago’s industrial labor force.4
With the tapping of this vast reservoir of cheap and unskilled labor, there was no longer any need for the peasantry of eastern and southern Europe. There was, however, a difference between the position of Blacks and that of the European immigrants. The latter, after a generation or two, could rise to higher skilled and better paying jobs, to administrative and even managerial positions. They were able to leave the ethnic enclaves and disperse throughout the city—to become assimilated into the national melting pot, The Blacks, to the contrary, found themselves permanently relegated to a second-class status in the labor force, with a large group outside as a permanent surplus labor pool to be replenished when necessary from the inexhaustible reservoir of Black, poverty-ridden and land-starved peasantry of the South.
‘The employers now had in hand a new source of cheap labor, the victims of racist proscription, to use as a weapon against the workers’ movement. Indeed, this went hand in hand with the Jim Crow policies of the trade union leaders, who had been largely responsible for keeping Blacks out of basic industry in the first place.
These labor bureaucrats premised their racism on the doctrine of a natural Black inferiority, The theory of an instinctive animosity between the races was a powerful instrument for an anti-union, anti-working class, divide and rule policy. The use of racial differences was found to be a much more effective dividing instrument than the use of cultural and language differences between various white ethnic groups and the native born. As we know, ethnic conflicts proved transient as the various European nationalities became assimilated into the general population. Blacks, on the other hand, remain to this day permanently unassimilable under the present system.
Such were conditions in the days when I undertook my search for answers to the question of Black oppression and the road to liberation. Living conditions were pretty rough then, and I had gone back to my old trade of waiting tables in order to make some sort of living.
But | was restless, moody, short-tempered-—-qualities ill-suited to the trade, Naturally, I had trouble holding a job. My trouble was not with the guests so much as with my immediate superiors; captains, head waiters and dining car stewards, most of whom were white. In less than a month after the Chicago riot, I lost my job on the Michigan Central as a result of a run-in with an inspector.
The dining car inspectors were a particularly vicious breed. Their job was to see that discipline was maintained and service kept up to par. These inspectors, whom we called company spies, would board the train unexpectedly anywhere along the route, hoping to catch a member of the crew violating some regulation or not giving what they considered proper service. They would then reprimand the guilty party personally, or if the offense was sufficiently serious, would turn him in to the main office to be laid off or fired. Usually the inspector’s word was law from which there was no appeal. The dining car crew had no unions in those days.
This particular inspector (his name was McCormick) had taken a dislike to me. He had made that clear on other occasions. The feeling was mutual. Perhaps he sensed my independent attitude. He probably felt I was not sufficiently impressed by him and did not care about my job. He was right on both counts.
He boarded the Chicago-bound train one morning in Detroit, We were serving breakfast. It was just one of those days when everything went wrong. People were lined up at each end of the diner, waiting to be served. Service was slow. The guests were squawking and I was in a mean mood myself. I was cutting bread in the pantry when McCormick peered in and shouted, “Say, Hall, that silver is in terrible condition.”
The silver! What the hell is this man talking about dirty silver when I’ve got all these people out there clamoring for their breakfast. 2
“I’ve been noticing you lately,” he continued. “It looks as though you don’t want to work. If you don't like your job why in hell don't you quit?”
I took that as downright provocation. “Damn you and your job!” I exploded, advancing on him.
He turned pale and ran out of the pantry. A friend of mine in the crew grabbed me by the wrist.
“What the hell’s the matter with you, Hall? Are you crazy?” It was only then that I realized that I had been waving the bread knife at the inspector.
In a few minutes, the brakeman and the conductor came into the pantry. MeCormick brought up the rear,
“That’s the one,” he said pointing at me.
Addressing me, the conductor said, “The inspector here says you threatened him with a knife. Is that true?”
I denied it, stating that I had been cutting bread when the argument started and had a knife in my hand. | wasn’t threatening him with it. My friend (who had grabbed my wrist) substantiated my story.
“Well,” said the conductor, “you’d better get your things and ride to Chicago in the coach. We don’t want any more trouble here, and the inspector has said he doesn’t want you in the dining car.”
I went up forward in the coach. | got off the train in Chicago at Sixty-third and Stony Island. I didn’t go to the downtown station, thinking that the cops might be waiting there.
So much for my job with the Michigan Central.
I went back to working sporadically in restaurants, hotels and on trains. I didn’t stay anywhere very long. The first job that I regarded as steady was the Illinois Athletic Club, where I remained for several months, 1 was beginning to settle down a little and participate in the social life of the community, attending dances, parties and visiting cabarets. The Royal Gardens, a night club on Thirty-first Street, was one of my favorite hangouts. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong were often featured there. At the Panama, on Thirty-fifth Street between State and Wabash, we went to see our favorite comedians-—Butter Beans and Susie.
It was on one of these occasions that I met my first wife, Hazel. She belonged to Chicago’s Black social elite, such as it was. Her father had died and her family was on the downgrade. Her mother was left with four children, three girls and a boy, of whom Hazel was the oldest. The other children were still teenagers, and Hazel and her mother had supported them by doing domestic work and catering for wealthy whites. I was twenty-one and she was twenty five.
Hazel was attractive, a high school graduate. She spoke good English and, as Mother said, “had good manners.” She worked for Montgomery Ward, then owned by the philanthropic Rosenwald family, the first big company to hire Blacks as office clerks. She had a nice singing voice and used to sing around at parties. Her friends were among the Black upper strata and the family belonged to the Episcopal Church on Thirty-eighth and Wabash which at that time was the church of the colored elite. We were married in 1920. I was all decked out in a rented swallowtail coat, striped pants, spats and a derby. The ceremony was impressive. Photos appeared in the Chicago Defender.
In a short time, the romance wore off. Hazel’s ambition to get ahead in the world, “to be somebody,” clashed with my love of freedom. | soon had visions of myself, a quarter century hence-making mortgage payments on a fancy house, installments on furniture, and trapped in a drab, lower middle-class existence, surrounded by a large and quarrelsome family.
The worst of it was having to put up with being kicked around on the job and taking all that crap from headwaiters and captains. I had been working at the Athletic Club for several months before I got married. Then nobody had bothered me. When I asked for time off to get married, the white headwaiter and the captain seemed delighted. “Sure Hall, that’s fine. Congratulations, Take a couple of weeks off.”
Upon my return, I immediately felt a change in their attitude, Now that I was married, they felt they had me where they wanted me. They became more and more demanding. One day at lunch I had some difficulty getting my orders out of the kitchen, and the guests were complaining—not an unusual occurrence in any restaurant. Instead of helping me out and calming down the guests, or seeing what the hang-up was in the kitchen, the captain started shouting at me in front of the guests. “What’s the matter with you, Hall? Why don’t you bring these people’s orders?”
“Can’t you see that I’m tied up in the kitchen?” | said. “Why don’t you go out and see the chef instead of hollering at me!”
All puffed up, he yelled out, “Don’t give me any of your lip or I'll snatch that badge off you!”
I jerked my badge off, threw both badge and side towel into his face, and shouted, “Take your badge and shove it!”
I was moving on him when a friend of mine, Johnson, a waiter at the next station, jumped between us, I turned away, walked down the steps, through the kitchen and into the dressing room. Johnson followed me into the dressing room a few minutes later. “Hurry up and get out of here. They’re calling the cops.” | changed and left.
My marriage went down the drain along with the job. That was a period of post-war crisis. Jobs were hard to find, and especially so for me since I had been blacklisted from several places because of my temper. 1 was no longer the same man that Hazel married, and the truth of the matter was that I wanted it that way. Her hangups were typical of Black aspirants for social status—strivers, we called them-—-who never really doubted the validity of the prejudice from which they suffered. Hazel slavishly accepted white middle class values. I, on the other hand, was looking around trying to figure out how best to maladjust
MY REBELLION
For me, the break-up of our marriage in the spring of 1920 destroyed my last ties with the old conventional way of life. I was completely disenchanted with the middle class crowd into which Hazel was trying to draw me. But more important, I not only rejected the status quo, I was determined to do something about it--to make my rebellion count.
I sought answers to a number of questions: What was the nature of the forces behind Black subjugation? Who were its main beneficiaries? Why was racism being entrenched in the north in this period? How did it differ from the South? Could the situation be altered and, if so, what were the forces for change and the program?
l renewed my search for a way to go, pressed by a driving need for a world view which would provide a rational explanation of society and a clue to securing Black freedom and dignity. My search was to continue during what must have been the most virulent and widespread racist campaign in U.S. history, The forces of racist bigotry unleashed during the riots of the “Red Summer” of 1919 were still on the march through the twenties. Indeed, they had intensified and extended their campaign.
The whole country seemed gripped in a frenzy of racist hate. Anti-Black propaganda was carried in the press, in magazine articles, literature and in theater. D.W. Griffith’s obscene movie, The Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and pictured Blacks as depraved animals, was shown to millions.5 Thomas Dickson’s two novels, The Klansman (upon which Griffith’s picture was based) and The Leopard's Spots (an earlier book on the theme of the white man’s burden) were best sellers. Racist demagogues of the stripe of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Vardeman of Mississippi, and “Cotton” Ed Smith of South Carolina, were in demand on northern lecture platforms.
Closely behind the trumpeters of race-hate rode their cavalry, A revived Ku Klux Klan now extended to the north and made its appearance in twenty-seven states.6 This organization, embracing millions, headed the list of a whole rash of super-patriotic groups who were anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-foreign-born and anti-Black. The apostles of white, Anglo-Saxon and Nordic supremacy included in their galaxy of ethnic outcasts Asians (the “yellow peril”), Latin Americans and other foreign-born from southern and eastern Europe. Their hate propaganda pitted Protestants against Catholics, Christians against Jews, native against foreign-born, and all against the Blacks, upon whom was fixed the stigma of inherent and eternal inferiority.
It seemed as though the prophets of the “lost cause” were out to reverse their military defeat at Appomattox by the cultural subversion of the north. That they were receiving encouragement by powerful northern interests was self-evident. Tin Pan Alley added its contribution to the attack with a spate of Mammy songs, and along the same vein, “That’s Why Darkies Were Born”:
Someone had to pick the cotton,
Someone had to plant the corn,
Someone had to slave and be able to sing,
That's why darkies were born.
Though the balance is wrong,
Sull your faith must be strong,
Accept your destiny brothers, listen to me.
A main objective of the racist assault was the academic establishment. The old crude forms of racist propaganda proved inadequate in an age of advancing science. The hucksters of race hate conducted raids upon the sciences, especially upon the new disciplines-—anthropology, ethnology and psychology--in an attempt to establish a scientific foundation for the race myth.
The new “science of race” evolved and flourished during the period, Spadework for this grotesque growth had been done in the middle of the last century by the Frenchman, Count Arthur D. Gobineau, in his work, The Inequality of the Human Races (1851-1853), It was carried on by his disciple, the Englishman turned German, Houston Chamberlain, who asserted that racial mixture was a natural crime. In the U.S, early efforts in this field were the works of Knott and Glidden. Also, there was Ripley's Races of Mankind.
Carrying on in this pseudo-scientific tradition during the war and postwar years were the popular theorists Lathrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color: Against White World Supremacy (1923) and Madison Grant, The Passing of a Great Race: The Racial Basis of European History (1916). The cornerstone of this pseudo-scientific structure was Social Darwinism which was an attempt to subvert Darwin’s theory of evolution and arbitrarily apply natural selection in plant and animal society to human society. According to the Social Darwinists, led by Herbert Spencer, the British sociologist, history was a continuous struggle for existence between races. In this struggle, the Nordic, Anglo-Saxon, or Aryan civilizations naturally survived as the fittest.
The racists had a field day in history, long the area in which the heroes of the “lost cause” had their greatest, most effective concentration. They had held chairs in some of the nation’s most prestigious universities—Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, etc, Among such historians was William Archibald Dunning, who during his long tenure at Columbia miseducated generations of students by his distortions of the Reconstruction, Civil War and slave periods.7
In the academic world this pseudoscience of racism held sway with only a few open challengers. The latter seemed to be isolated voices in the wilderness, as the counter-offensive was slow in getting underway. In anthropology there was Franz Boaz’s antiracist thrust, Mind of Primitive Man. This was written in 1911, and not widely known at the time. The works of his students and colleagues-—-most notably Melville Hershovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past, Jane Weltfish, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead and Otto Klineburg-—-were not to appear until the next decade.
In history, the movement for revision was then decades away. It only became a trend with the Black Revolt of the sixties, Black scholars had pioneered the reexamination: W.E.B. DuBois, his tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue, “Propaganda of History,” which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment, was not to appear until the mid-thirties. J.A. Rogers, popular Black historian, had not yet appeared on the scene, Young Carter Woodson, who had founded his Association for the Study of Negro History in 1915, only began to publish the Journal of Negro History in 1916. His own important historical works were yet to come.
‘Thus, from its tap-roots in the Southern plantation system, the anti-Black virus had spread throughout the country, shaping the pattern of Black-white relationships in the industrial urban north as well. The dogma of the inherent inferiority of Blacks had permeated the national consciousness to become an integral part of the American way of life. Racist dogma, first a rationale for chattel slavery and then plantation peonage, was now carried over to the north as justification for a new system of de facto segregation.
Black subjugation, city-style Jim Crow, became fixed by the twenties, and continues up to the present day. Its components were the residential segregation of the ghetto with its inferior education, slums and the second class status of Black workers in the labor force where they were relegated to the bottom rung of the occupational ladder and prevented by discrimination from moving into better skills and higher paid jobs.
Although its purpose was not clear to me then, I later realized that the virulent racism of the period served to justify and bulwark the structure of Black powerlessness which was developing in every northern city where we had become a sizable portion of the work force,
At the time the racist deluge simply revealed great gaps in my own education and knowledge. I knew that the propaganda was a tissue of lies, but I felt the need for disproving them on the basis of scientific fact. I rejected racism—the lie of the existence in nature of superior and inferior races--and its concomitant fiction of intuitive hostility between races. For one thing, it ran counter to my own background of experience in Omaha.
Religion as an explanation for the riddles of the universe I had rejected long before. I knew that our predicament was not the result of some divine disposition and therefore that racial oppression was neither a spiritual or natural phenomenon. It was created by man, and therefore must be changed by man, How? Well, that was the question to be explored. I had only a smattering of knowledge of natural and social sciences, much of which I had gathered through reading the lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll. It was through him that I discovered Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution through natural selection.
Armed with a dictionary and a priori knowledge gleaned from Ingersoll’s popularizations, I was able to make my way through Origin of the Species. Darwin showed the origin of the species to be a result of the process of evolution and not the mysterious act of a divine creation. Here at last was a scientific refutation of religious dogma. I had at last found a basis for my atheism which had before been based mainly upon practical knowledge.
Continuing my search, | found myself attracted to other social iconoclasts or image-destroyers, and to their attacks upon established beliefs. I remember staying up all night reading Max Nordau’s Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, being thrilled by his castigation of middle class hypocrisy, prejudices and philistinism. Moving on to the contemporary scene, I discovered H.L. Mencken, “The Sage of Baltimore,” and his “smart set” crowd.
For a short while, I was an avid reader of the Mercury which he helped to establish in 1920 as a forum for his views, I was particularly delighted by his critical potshots at some of the most sacred cultural cows of what he called “the American Babbitry,” “boobocracy,” “anthropoid majority’--Menckenian sobriquets for middle class commoners. Mencken enjoyed a brief popularity among young Black radicals of the day who saw in his searing diatribes against WASP cultural idols ammunition with which to blast the claims of white supremacists. The novelty soon wore off as it became clear that Mencken’s type of iconoclasm posed no real challenge to the prevailing social structure, In fact, it was reactionary. He sought to replace destroyed idols with even more reactionary oncs, as I soon found out.
Mencken’s philosophical mentor was none other than the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, prophet of the superman, of the aristocratic minority destined to rile over the unenlightened hoardes of Untermenschen—-the “perenially and inherently unequal majority of mankind.” Most Blacks then, including myself, who flirted with Mencken never accepted him fully. The one exception was George Schuyler of the Pittsburgh Courier, who took Mencken's snobbery and reactionary politics and made a career of them which has lasted for forty years.
What confused me most were the contentions of the Social Darwinists, who claimed to be the authentic continuators of Darwin’s theories. Darwin had not dealt with the question of race per se, But it had seemed to me that his theory of evolution precluded the myth of race. How could Darwin's theory which had helped me finally and irrevocably throw aside the veil of mysticism and put the understanding of the descent of man within my grasp—how could this be used as an endorsement of racism? Perhaps I had been wrong? Was I reading into Darwin more than, what he implied?
It was my brother Otto who finally cleared me up on this point. He and I were running in different circles, but we would meet from time to time and exchange notes. Otto pointed out that Social Darwinists had distorted Darwin by mechanically transferring the laws of existence among plants and animals to the field of social and human relations. Human society had its own laws, he asserted. Ah, what were those laws? That was the subject that I wanted to explore.
“You ought to quit reading those bourgeois authors and start reading Marx and Engels,” Otto told me, suggesting also that I read Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society and the works of Redpath. ’
About this time I got a job as a clerk at the Chicago Post Office. I heard that jobs were available and that veterans were given preference. Following the advice of friends, I approached S.L. Jackson of the Wabash Avenue YMCA, who at that time was a Black Republican stalwart with connections in the Madden political machine. Jackson gave me a note to some Post Office official in charge of employment. I passed the civil service examination, in which veterans were given a ten percent advantage, and was employed as a substitute clerk.
The Post Office job in those days carried considerable prestige. It was almost the only clerical job open to Blacks. Postal workers, along with waiters, Pullman porters and tradesmen, were traditionally considered a part of the Black middle class. A number of prominent community leaders came from this group. Many officers of the old Eighth Illinois were postal employees, a good percentage of them mail-carriers.
The Post Office became a refuge for poor Black students and unemployed university graduates, For some of the latter it was a sort of way-station on the road to their professional careers. Others remained, settling for regular Post Office careers. But even here opportunities were limited. Blacks held only a few supervisory positions, as advancement depended solely on the discretion of the white postmaster.
On the job I found the work extremely boring. It consisted of standing before a case eight hours a night, sorting mail. All substitutes were relegated to the night shift. It took years to get on the day shift which was preempted by the veteran employees: On the other hand, I found the company of my new young fellow workers very stimulating.
In those days the organization of Black postal employees was the Phalanx Forum. Before the war, the organization had played an important political and social role in the community. It was dominated by the conservative crowd of social climbers and political aspirants, who were the most active group among postal employees and had close ties with the local Republican machine.
Their leadership was completely incffective with respect to the job issues of Black rank-and-file employees, and it had little or no influence over the younger group of new employees, which included many veterans and students. The gap between the old, conservative crowd and the new, youthful element was sharp. Among the latter a radical sentiment was growing.
I was immediately attracted to this group among whom I was to find friends who seemed to be impelled by the same motivations as myself-—to find new answers to the problems afflicting our people. Most of those with whom I fraternized considered the postal job as temporary, a step to other careers. Our interest at the time, therefore, was not so much with the immediate economic or onthe-job needs of Black postal workers, but with the “race problem” generally. The drive for unionization of postal employees was to come later.
The issue to which we addressed ourselves was the current campaign of white racist propaganda: how to counter it on the basis of scientific truth. We saw the network of racist lies as clearly aimed at justifying Black subjugation and destroying our dignity as a people. On this question we had long, endless discussions on the job while sorting mail, at rest, during lunch breaks and on Sundays when some of us would meet. I soon identified with what I considered the more vocal segment. Among our group of aspirant intellectuals there was a medical student, a couple of law students, a dentist (whom we all called “Doc”), students of education and some intellectually oriented workers like myself. On one Sunday when we had gathered, it was suggested, I think by Joc Mabley, that we organize ourselves as an informal discussion group, and that our purpose would be to answer the racist lies on the basis of scientific truth. The idea was instantly agreed upon.
The discussion circle was loosely organized, not more than a dozen participants in all, and bent on finding answers. The moving spirits of the group were John Heath, Joe Mabley and “Doc.”
Heath was a tall, light-complexioned man with high cheekbones. He was a graduate student in the field of education, anda man whose sterling character and keen intellect we all respected. Then there was Joc Mabley, a brilliant, small Black man. He had large velvety eyes and was a college dropout. He was married and had a family-—two or three children—and had settled down toa regular Post Office job, He and Doe were the only regular postal workers in our group—the rest of us being suhstitutes. Doc had set up an office on the Southside and was trying hard to build upa clientele while working night shifts.
Originally we had planned to meet every Sunday at noon as the most convenient time for the fellows on our shift. The meeting places were to alternate between the homes or apartments of the members. When we got to procedure, the group would choose a topic of discussion and ask for volunteers or assign a member to make introductory reports, He would then have a week to prepare the report, Our original plans included the eventual organization of a forum in which the issues of the day could be debated, and the holding of social affairs. All of this proved to be too ambitious, We found it impractical to have weekly meetings and finally agreed that twice a month was more feasible. The forum idea never got off the ground.
Among us I think we had most of the answers on the question of race, that is, to all but the big lie, the onc that was most convincing to the white masses and is the cornerstone on which the whole structure stood or fell: the assertion that Blacks have no history.
A leading formulator of the lie at that time was John Burgess, professor of political science and history at Columbia University:
The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself’ succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.
We wanted to refute the slanders on the basis of scientific truth. For this, we needed more ammunition and better weapons, particularly in the field of history. It was ahout this time that I met George Wells Parker, a brilliant young Black graduate student from Omaha’s Creighton University. I was introduced to him by my brother Otto, who had known him in Omaha. He was in Chicago to visit relatives and to conduct research for his dissertation. His major was history, I believe. We found him a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the race question, especially Black history. His major objective in life was apparently to refute the prevalent racist lies and to huild Black dignity and pride, He possessed wide knowledge and seemed to have read everything.
Parker called our attention to the writings of the great anthropologist Franz Boas; the Egyptologist Virchow; to Max Mueller (philologist who formulated the Aryan myth and then rejected it); to the Frenchman Jean Finot; to Sir Harry Johnstone (British authority on African history); and to the Italian Giuseppe Serg and his theory of the Mediterranean races, arefutation of the Aryan mythology. Proponents of this myth claimed all civilizations—Indian, Near East, Egyptians—as Aryan, One wonders why the Chinese were left out, but then that would have been too palpable a fraud! It was Parker who called our attention to Herodotus (ancient Greek historian) who had described the Egyptians of his time (around 400 B.C.) as “Black and with woolly hair.”
Otto and I introduced Parker to friends and acquaintances, and I, of course, to our discussion circle. He spoke before numerous groups. Everywhere there was hunger for his knowledge. Weeven brought him before the Bugs Club Forum in Washington Park, where he led a discussion on the race question.
This brilliant young man returned to Omaha to resume his studies. The next winter he was dead. We heard it was the result of a mental breakdown. Thus was a brilliant career cut short and a potentially great scholar lost. Surviving, I believe, was only one brief paper and some notes.
GARVEY’S BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT
But time and tide did not stand still to wait for our answers to the social problems of the day, or for the results of our intellectual researches. While we sought arguments with which to counter the racist thrust, the masses were forging their own weapons. Their growing resistance was finally to erupt on the political scene in the grcatest mass movement of Blacks since Reconstruction,
Great masses of Blacks found the answer in the Back to Africa program of the West Indian Marcus Garvey. Under his aegis this movement was eventually diverted from the encmy at home into utopian Zionistic channels of peaceful return to Africa and the establishment of a Black state in the ancestral land.
The organizational course of the movement was Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He first launched this organization in Jamaica, British West Indies, in 1914. Coming to the USA, he founded its first section in New York City in 1917. The organization grew rapidly during the war and the immediate post-war period, At its height in the early twenties, it claimed a membership of half a million. While estimates of the organization's membership vary-—from half a million to a million—it was the largest organization in the history of U.S. Blacks. There can be no doubt that its influence extended to millions who identified wholly or partially with its programs.
What in Garvey’s program attracted these masses?
Garvey was a charismatic leader and in that tradition best articulated the sentiments and yearnings of the masses of Black people. In his UNIA he also created the vehicle for their organization, Equally important, he was a master at understanding how to use pageantry, ritual and ceremony to provide the Black peasantry with psychological relief from the daily burdens of their oppression. His apparatus included such high sounding titles as potentate, supreme deputy potentate, knights of the Nile, knights of distinguished service, the order of Ethiopia, the dukes of Nigeria and Uganda. There were Black gods and Black angels and a flag of black, red and green: “Black for the race, Red for their blood and Green for their hopes.”
The movement’s program was fully outlined in the historic Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, adopted at the first convention of the organization in New York City August 13, 1920. In the manner of the Nation of Islam and its publication Muhammad Speaks (Bilalian News), the program of Garvey combined a realistic assessment of the conditions facing Blacks with a fantasy and mystification about the solution. Along with the Back to Africa slogan, the document contained a devastating indictment of the plight of the Black peoples in the United States. Expressing the militancy of its delegates, it called for opposition to the incquality of wages betwecn Blacks and whites, it protested their cxclusion from unions, their deprivation of land, taxation without representation, unjust military service, and Jim Crow laws.
Anticipating the Black Power Revolt of the sixties, the document called for “complete control of our social institutions without the interference of any other race or races.” Reflecting the rising worldwide anti-colonial movement of the period, it called for self-determination of peoples and repudiated the loosely formed League of Nations, declaring its decisions “null and void as far as the Blacks were concerned because it seeks to deprive them of their independence.” This latter point was in reference to the assignment of mandates to European powers over African territories wrested from the Germans.
Through this atmosphere of militancy, expressing the desire of the masses to defend their rights at home, ran the incongruent theme of Back to Africa. Declared Garvey:
Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires (sic), then and only then, will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.
Wake up, Africa! Let us work toward the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.
Who were Garvey’s followers?
Garvey's Zionistic message was beamed mainly to the submerged Black peasantry, especially its uprooted vanguard, the new migrants in such industrial centers as New York City, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago and St. Louis. These masses made up the rank and file of the movement. They were embittered and disillusioned by racist terror and unemployment, and saw in Garvey’s program of Back to Africa the fulfillment of their yearnings for land and freedom to be guaranteed by a government of their own.
On the other hand, Garveyism was the trend of a section of the ghetto lower middle classes, small businessmen, shopkeepers, property holders who were pushed to the wall, ruined or threatened with ruin by the ravages of the post-war crisis, Also attracted to Garveyism were the frustrated and unemployed Black intelligentsia: professionals, doctors, lawyers with impoverished clientele, storefront preachers who had followed their flocks to the promised land of the north, and poverty stricken students.
Garveyism reflected the desperation of these strata before the ruthless encroachments of predatory white corporate interests upon their already meager markets. It reflected an attempt by them to escape from the sharpening racist oppression, the terror of race riots, the lynchings, economic and social frustrations. It was from these strata that the movement drew its leadership cadres.
The immediate pecuniary interests of this element were expressed in the form of ghetto enterprises, the organization of a whole network of cooperative enterprises, including grocery stores, laundries, restaurants, hotels and printing plants. The most ambitious was the Black Star Steamship Line. Several ships were purchased and trade relations were established with groups in the West Indies and Africa, including the Republic of Liberia.
The New York City division comprised a large segment of the intensely nationalistic West Indian immigrants. West Indians were prominent in the leadership, in Garvey's close coterie, and in the organization’s inner councils. There can be no doubt of the considerable influence of this element on the organization. But the attempt on the part of some writers to brand the movement as a foreign import with no indigenous roots is superficial and without foundation in fact. It is clear that Garveyism had both a social and economic base in Black society of the twenties. Nor was Garvey’s nationalism a new trend among Blacks—nationalist currents had repeatedly emerged, going back even before the Civil War.
A key role in the movement was also played by deeply disillusioned Black veterans who had fought an illusory battle to “make the world safe for democracy” only to return to continued and even harsher slavery. Veterans were involved in the setting up of the skeleton army for the future African state, and in such paramilitary organizations as the Universal African Legion, the Universal Black Cross Nurses, the African Motor Corps and the Black Eagle Flying Corps. Many Black radicals—even some socialistically inclined—were swept into thé Garvey movement, attracted by its militancy.
Despite his hostility toward local communists, Garvey seemed to regard the Soviet experience with some favor-at least in the early years of his movement. This probably reflected the sentiments of many of his followers. As late as 1924, in an editorial in the Negro World, he publicly mourned the passing of Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, calling him “probably the world’s greatest man between 1917 and ...1924.” On that occasion, he sent a cable to Moscow “expressing the sorrow and condolence of the 400,000,000 Negroes of the world.”
‘The Garvey movement revealed the wide rift between the policies of the traditional upper class of the NAACP and associates, and the life needs of the sorely oppressed people. It represented a mass rejection of the policies and programs of this leadership, which during the war had built up false hopes and now offered no tangible proposals for meeting the rampant anti-Black violence and joblessness of the post-war period. This mood was expressed by Garvey, who denounced the whole upper class leadership, claiming that they were motivated solely by the drive for assimilation and banked their hopes for equality on the support of whites—all classes of whom, he contended, were the Black man’s enemy. The policy of this leadership, he maintained, was a policy of compromise.
It was in these conditions that Garvey, as thespokesman for the new ghetto petty bourgeoisie, seized leadership of the incipient Black revolt and diverted it into the blind alley of utopian escapism.
My contact with the movement was limited. [ had never seen Garvey. I had missed his appearance in 1919 at the Eighth Regiment Armory. | never visited the organization’s Liberty Hall headquarters. In Chicago, the movement seemed to spring up overnight, I first took serious notice of it in 1920. I listened to its orators on street corners, watched its spectacular parades through the Southside streets, The black, red and green flag of the movement was carried at the head of the parade. The parades were lively and snappy; marching were the African Legion and the Universal Black Cross Nurses in their spotless white uniforms and white veils, All marched in step with a band. It was quite impressive, but to me it was unreal and had little or no relevance to the actual problems that confronted Blacks.
From the first, the Garvey movement met heavy opposition in Chicago, The powerful Chicago Defender, edited by Robert S. Abbott, took the lead. If not the world’s greatest weekly as its masthead proclaimed, it had great influence among Chicago and Sofithern Blacks, due to its role in promoting the migration to the north. It was widely read in the South where a daily newspaper of Athens, Georgia, called it “the greatest disturbing element that has yet entered Georgia.” The Defender was relentless in its attack, throwing scorn and contempt on the movement and Garvey himself.
In addition to The Defender’s attacks, the so-called Abyssinia Affair in the summer of 1920 served to discredit the movement. The Star Order of Ethiopia and Ethiopian Missionaries to Abyssinia was an extremist split off from Chicago’s UNIA branch. The leaders of the group held a parade and rally on Thirty-fifth and Indiana. Speakers clad in loud African costume called upon the crowd to return to their African ancestral land.
To show their scorn for the U.S., they burned an American flag, and when white policemen sought to intervene, the Abyssinians shot and killed two white men and wounded a third. This incident was blown up in the white press as an armed rebellion of Blacks. It was condemned on ali sides in the Black community and by its leaders, including the editors of The Defender, who helped authorities in capturing the Abyssinian dissidents.
Despite its repudiation by the official Garvey organization, the Abyssinian affair served to muddy the Garvey image in Chicago. I was working on the New York Central at the time and heard a graphic account of the affair from my aunts when I arrived intown the next day. They lived right around the corner on Indiana Avenue.
Despite the hostile Black press and the Abyssinian affair, the UNIA grew. At its height, it claimed a Chicago membership of 9,000 devoted followers. This is probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the sympathizers numbered in the tens of thousands.
Our Sunday discussion group underestimated the significance of the Garvey movement and the strength it was later to reveal. We regarded it as a transient phenomenon. We applauded some of the cultural aspects of the movement—Garvey’s emphasis on race pride, dignity, self-reliance, his exultation of things Black. This was all to the good, we felt. However, we rejected in its entirety the Back to Africa program as fantastic, unreal and a dangerous diversion which could only lead to desertion of the struggle for our rights in the USA. This was our country, we strongly felt, and Blacks should not waive their just claims to equality and justice in the land to whose wealth and greatness we and our forefathers had made such great contributions.
Finally, we could not go along with Garvey’s idea about inherent racial antagonisms between Black and white. This to us seemed equivalent to ceding the racist enemy one of his main points. While it is true that I personally often wavered in the direction of race against race, I was not prepared to accept the idea as a philosophy. It did not jibe with my experience with whites.
While rejecting Garvey’s program, our ideas for a viable alternative were still vague and unformed. The most important effect the Garvey movement had on us was that it put into clear focus the questions to which we sought answers.
Who were the enemies of the Black freedom struggle? While Garvey claimed the cntire white race was the enemy, it did not escape us that he was inconsistent, being soft on white capitalists. His main target was clearly white labor and the trade union movement. According to Garvey:
It seems strange and a paradox, but the only convenient friend the Negro worker or laborer has, in America, at the present time, is the white capitalist. The capitalist being selfish---seeking only the largest profit out of labor-—is willing and glad to use Negro labor wherever possible on a scale “reasonably” below the standard white union wage....but, if the Negro unionizes himself to the level of the white worker... the choice and preference of employment is given to the white worker...
If the Negro takes my advice he will organize by himself and always keep his scale of wage a little lower than the whites until he is able to become, through proper leadership, his own employer; by doing so he will keep the good will of the white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things.
There was no doubt that Garvey was voicing the sentiments of the vast mass of new migrant workers. And it was not that we had any compunction about strikebreaking in industries from which Blacks were barred. In fact, that had been one of the ways Blacks broke into industries such as stockyards and steel. We were also keenly aware of the Jim Crow policies of the existing trade union leadership and of the anti-Black prejudices rampant among white workers. But in casting Blacks permanently into the role of strikebreakers, Garvey was helping to further divide an already polarized situation and playing into the hands of businessmen, bankers, factory owners and the reactionary leadership of the trade unions,
My own experience with unions in the waiters’ trade was bad. Old waiters would tell us how in the first part of the century they had listened to the siren call of white union leaders. They had gone out on strike, ostensibly to better their conditions, only to find their jobs immediately taken by whites. This had been quite a serious blow because at that time, Black waiters had had jobs in most of the best hotels and in a number of fine restaurants. It is therefore understandable that in 1920, we Black waiters felt not the slightest pang of conscience in taking over the jobs of white waiters on strike at the Marygold Gardens (the old Bismark Gardens) on the Northside, one of the swankiest night spots in Chicago, It was also probably the best waiter’s job in town; in fact, so good that some of the German captains who remained on the job used to drive to and from work in Cadillacs. The strike was broken after several months, and Blacks were turned out.
Strikebreaking to me was not a philosophy or principle as Garvey contended, but an expedient forced upon Blacks by the Jim Crow policies of the bosses and the unions.
Even as Garvey was putting forward such views, times were beginning to change. Large numbers of Blacks had been brought into industry during the war and had joined unions, especially in steel and the packing houses. A new industrial unionism was developing and raising the slogan of Black and white labor unity.
My sister Eppa’s experiences in 1919 at Swift Packing Company were a case in point, She was one of the first Black women to join the union during the organizing drive of the Stockyards Labor Council, which was headed by two communists-—-William Z. Foster and Jack Johnstone. The drive was supported by John Fitzpatrick, chairman of the Chicago Federation of Labor and a bitter foe of the Jim Crow machine of Samuel Gompers’ AFL. Despite inevitable racial tensions fostered by the employers, Eppa had seen the basic unity of interest between all workers and felt strongly that the union was the best place to fight for the interests of Black workers.
In looking back at our study of the Garvey movement, it must be evaluated in light of the fact that it was our first confrontation with nationalism as a mass movement. Our mistake, which I was to find out later through my own experience and study of nationalist movements, resulted from the failure to understand the contradictory nature of the nationalism of oppressed peoples. This contradiction or dualism was inherent in the inter-class character of these movements once they assume a popular mass form.
‘They comprise various classes and social groupings with conflicting interests, tendencies and motives, all gathered under the unifying banner of national liberation, each with its own concept of that goal and how it should be attained. These conflicts, at first submerged, surface as the movement develops.
‘They are expressed in two main currents (tendencies) within the movement. First of all, there is the nationalism which reflects the interests of the basic masses~-workers and peasants—-determined to fight for liberation against the oppressor of the nation. Then there is the nationalism of the Black bourgeoisie who, while at time in conflict with the white oppressors, tend toward compromise and accommodation to protect their own weak position.
From the very beginning this dualism was reflected in the Garvey movement. A highly vocal and aggressively dominant current within the movement was the drive of the small business, professional and intellectual elements for a Black controlled economy. Thcy sought fulfillment of this goal through withdrawal to Africa where they cnvisioned establishment of their own State, their right to exploit their own masses free from the overwhelming competition of dominant white capital. (A historical example of this can be seen in Liberia.) They thought they could aceomplish this, presumably with the acquiescence of the American white rulers, and even the active support of some.
On the other hand, there was a grass-roots nationalism of the masses, the uprooted, dispossessed soil-tillers of the South; their poverty-ridden counterparts in the slum ghettoes of the cities. ‘These masses saw in the Black nationalist state fulfillment of their age-old yearnings for land, equality and freedom through power in their own hands to guarantee and protect these frecdoms. It was this indigcnous, potentially revolutionary nationalism that Garvey diverted with his Back to Africa slogan.
We failed to recognize the objective conflict of interests between these class components of the movement, equating the social and political aims of the ghetto nationalists, the bourgeoisic, to that of the masses~-condemning the whole as reactionary, escapist and utopian.
These were the internal contradictions upon which the movement was to flounder and finally collapse. They were brought to a head by the subsiding of the post-war economic depression, the ushering in of the “boom,” and subsequent easing of the plight of Blacks, the partial adjustment of migrants to their new environment and their partial absorption into industry.
The main contradiction inherent in the Garvey movement from its very beginning had been the conflict between the needs of the masses to defend and advance their rights in the USA and the fantastic Back to Africa schemes of the Garvey leadership. Garvcy’s emphasis on these fantastic schemes reflected his resolution of the conflict in favor of husiness interests and against the interests of the masses. The resources and energy of the organization were increasingly diverted to support racial business enterprises such as the Black Star Line and the Negro Factories Corporation. The concentration on selling stock for the Black Star Steamship Line by the UNIA leadership from 1921 on neglected the immediate needs of the masses and began to crode the base of support.
Furthermore, Garvey’s response to the crisis in the movement exposed the dangcrously reactionary logic of a program based upon complete separation of the races and its acceptance of the white racist doctrine of natural racial incompatibility. Pursuing the logic of this idea against the backdrop of the organization's decline inevitably drove Garvey into an alliance of expediency with the most rabid segregationists and race bigots of the period.
Thus, in 1922, Garvey sought the support of Edward Young Clark, the imperial giant of the Ku Klux Klan. This “meeting of the minds” between Garvey and the Klan was not fortuitous. It was an open secret that it took place on the basis of Garvey’s agreement to soft-pedal the struggle for equality in the U.S. in return for help in the settlement of Blacks in Africa. This ideological kinship arose from the mutual acceptance of the racist dogma of natural incompatibility of races, race purity and so forth.
In 1924 Garvey went so far secking support for his Back to Africa program as to invite John Powell, organizer of the AngloSaxon Clubs, and other prominent racists to speak at UNIA headquarters. Garvey also puhlicly praised the KKK. According to W.E.B. DuBois, the Kian issued circulars defending Garvey and declared that the opposition to him was from the Catholic Church. In the late thirties, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi introduced a bill to deport thirteen million Blacks to Africa and received the support of the remnants of the Garvey organization.
The final curtain was to drop on the Garvey episode with the failure of the Black Star Linc. The movement was torn by factionalism and splits, with some of the leadership and remaining rank and file demanding that the domestic fight for equal rights be emphasized over the Back to Africa scheme of Garvey. The internal struggle drove many out of the organization and others into a multitude of splinter groups, each a variation of Garveyism itself. Taking advantage of this disarray, the government moved in.
In 1925, Garvey was framed on charges of using the mail to defraud in connection with the sale of stocks for the Black Star Line and was sent to the Atlanta federal prison for two years. He was deported to the West Indies upon release from prison. This debacle marked the end of Garveyism as an important mass movement, although the offshoots continued to exist in numbers of smaller groups advocating Garvey’s theory.
At the time, I had taken Garvey’s peculiar brand as representing nationalism in general and had simply rejected the whole ideology as a foreign import with no roots in the conditions of U.S. Blacks, Secing only the negative features of nationalism in the UNIA, I was blind to the progressive and potentially revolutionary aspects which were to prove so important in my own later development.
Thus, the great movement that Garvey built passed into history. But nationalism, as a mass trend, persisted in the Black freedom struggle. Existing side by side with the assimilationist trend, it was eclipsed by the latter in so-called normal times while flaring up in times of stress and crisis.
The Garvey movement was the U.S. counterpart of the vast upsurge of national and colonial liberation struggles which swept the world during the war and post-war period. In this period, masses of Blacks had come to consider themselves as an oppressed nation. Garvey’s ability to capture leadership of this nationalist upsurge by default was the result of the immaturity of the revolutionary forces, Black and white. The collapse of the Garvey movement proved conclusively that the petty bourgeois ghetto nationalist current, left to itself, led only toa hopeless blind alley. Unfortunately the forces which could give Black nationalism revolutionary content and direction were only in the process of formation.
The Black working class and its spokesmen had not yet arrived on the scene as an independent force in the Black community and, therefore, was not capable of challenging either the assimilationist leadership of the NAACP or the ghetto nationalism of Garvey. Its counterparts among radical, class-conscious white labor were waging an uphill fight against the Jim Crow-minded AFL bureaucracy led by the Gompers machine. ‘These radical sections of white labor were not yet clear as to the significance of the Black freedom struggle as a revolutionary force in its own right and regarded it simply as a part of the general labor question. Coalescence of these two forces was then a decade away, destined not to take place until the crisis of the thirties.
The preceding analysis is hindsight. I didn't realize the significance of Garvey’s movement until a few years later, when, as a student in Moscow, I was assigned to a commission to prepare a resolution on the Negro question in the USA for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in 1928. It was in the course of these discussions that I came to the recognition of nationalism as an authentic and potentially revolutionary trend in the movement.
The assimilationist programs of the NAACP had been easy to reject. Garvey was somewhat morc difficult. But while the Garvey movement was forcing me to a consideration of nationalism (which at the time I also rejected) I could not help but notice the other political developments of the period.
Most conspicuous was the concerted and vicious attack being carried out against white radicals and the trade union movement. The same forces appeared to be behind the Palmer raids of 1919 and 1920, behind the wave of racism and behind the violent union and strike busting which took place. The foreigners who were being deported, the radicals who were imprisoned and the workers throughout the country who were attacked by Pinkerton “private armies,” were white as well as Black. In Chicago, the strikes at the stockyards and the steel mills in the area particularly attracted my attention.
For me, the Garvey movement, the racists’ assault and the attacks on labor and the radical movement sharpened my political perceptions. The racial fog lifted and the face and location of the enemy was clearly outlined. I began to see that the main beneficiaries of Black subjugation also profited from the social oppression of poor whites, native and foreign-born.
The enemy was those who controlled and manipulated the levers of power; they were the super-rich, white moneyed interests who owned the nation’s factories and banks, and thus controlled its wealth, They were known by many names: the corporate elite; the industrial, financial (and robber) barons; ete. Chicago was the home base of a significant segment of this ruling class.
Here the chain of command was clear: on the political side, it extended from city hall down to the lowliest wardheeler and precinct captain and was tied in at all levels with organized crime, On the economic side, it was represented by such employer organizations as the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, by trade associations and by top management in the giant industrial plants, railroads, big commercial establishments, banks, utilities and insurance firms, Their chain of command extended down to the foremen and department heads, and on-the-job supervisors.
These levers of power also controlled education, the media, the arts and all law enforcement agencies, both military and police, At the hottom of this pyramid and hearing its weight were the working people who toiled in the steel mills, the packing plants, the railway yards, and the thousands of other sweatshops. Lowlicst among these were the Blacks, pushed to the very bottom by the “divide and rule” policy of the corporate giants and their henchmen, and the complimentary Jim Crow policies and practices of the AFL trade union bureaucracy.
PASSAGES
Our postal discussion circle, which had held together scarcely three months, was breaking up. Heath, our chairman and recognized leader, was leaving. He had played the greatest role in keeping the group together. Now he had taken a job at some college in Virginia, his native state.
Differences had already developed in the group, and with Heath gone, the possibilities for reconciling them seemed slim. These differences, as I recall, were not of a political or ideological nature. ‘They were seldom expressed in the open, but were reflected in the opposition of some members to proposals for enlarging the group and moving it into the outside political arena. This opposition evidently reflected the desire of some members to retain the group as a narrow discussion circle with membership restricted by tacit understanding to those whom they, considered their intellectual peers. It seemed to me they sought to reduce it to a sort of elitist mutual admiration society. As a result of this sectarian attitude, the group hardly grew beyond its original membership of a dozen or so.
There was no doubt, though, that our association had been mutually beneficial. All of us had grown in political understanding and awareness. But up to the time of Heath’s departure, we had advanced no program for putting our newly acquired political understanding into practice. Our original plans for the organization of a forum to debate the issues of the day never got off the ground. We had not developed a program for involvement in the struggles of the community, nor, for that matter, in the immediate on-the-job problems of Black postal employees. We never even got around to deciding on a name for the group. One suggestion, that we call ourselves the “New Negro Forum,” was never acted upon.
Heath, Mabley, Doe and myself were beginning to feel the pull from the outside, the need for a broader political arena of activity, to play a more active role in the community. We were the ones who most often attended radical forums and lectures and kept abreast of what was going on in the Southside community. We often went to the Bugs Club in Washington Park (Chicago’s equivalent of London's Hyde Park), and the Dill Pickle Club on the Northside which was run by the anarchist Jack Jones.
Heath had gone. Mabley refused the chairmanship, pleading that he was tied down by his family and could not take on additional responsibilities. Doe refused to accept the honor; he was similarly tied down by his job and dental practice. But the real reason for their refusal, which they were to confide to me later, was that they had lost confidence in the group. Without Heath, they saw no future role for it. Like myself, they were attracted to the broader movement, I also declined, giving as my excuse that I was quitting the Post Office in a few days and was going back to my old job on the railroad. A chairman pro-tem was chosen; I don’t remember who.
I continued my reading along the lines which Otto had suggested. Among the books I read were Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (which Engels had used as the basis for Origins of the Family), Gustavus Meycr’s History of the Great American Fortunes, John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and Jack London’s The Iron Heel.
I also kept abreast of world events, reading about Lenin and Trotsky in revolutionary Russia. I followed the post-war colonial rebellions of Sun Yat-sen’s China, Gandhi in India, Ataturk in Turkey, the rebellion of the Riff tribes in Morocco led by Abdul Krim. There were rumblings in black Africa—strikes and demonstrations against colonial oppression. One heard such names as Kadelli and Gumede of the South African National Congress, and of Sandino in Nicaragua who fought the U.S. Marines for many years,
My fect were getting itchy. I was fed up with the Post Office and the excruciatingly monotonous nature of the work. At the same time, the night shift cramped my social life as well as my growing need for broader political activity. I quit the job without regret.
Soon after, I started work as a waiter on the Santa Fe’s Chief, the company’s crack train running to Los Angeles. It was an eightday run: three days to the coast, with a two-day layover in Los Angeles and three days back. Our crew would make three trips a month, and a layover one trip (eight days) in Chicago. This schedule gave me approximately twelve free days a month in Chicago---time enough for both political and social life. It was a hard job, but good money for those days and exciting after the drab routine of the Post Office.
Los Angeles, “Sweet Los,” as we used to call it. The Santa Fe boys, all “big spenders,” were very popular with the girls. A bevy would show up to meet us at the station every trip.
I was to remain on that run three years, which up to that time was the longest I had ever remained on one job. Upon my return from the first trip, I called Mabley and he informed me that he thought the discussion circle had dissolved. Only one or two guys showed up at the next scheduled meeting, and the pro-tem chairman himself was absent. It was dead.
My political development continued nevertheless, The runs on the Santa Fe gave ample time for discussion with my fellow crew members. Most of them, though somewhat older, were as aware as those at the Post Office with whom I had worked. I also continued to read, now studying The Communist Manifesto, Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit.
The first stage of my political search was near an end. In the years since I had mustered out of the Army, I had come from being a disgruntled Black ex-soldier to being a self-conscious revolutionary looking for an organization with which to make revolution.
For three years I had listened in lecture halls, at rallies and in Washington Park to a spate of orators each claiming to meet the challenge of the times. They included the great “people’s lawyer” Clarence Darrow; Judge Fisher of the reform movement; the socialist leader Victor Berger and sundry other members of his party; the anarchist Ben Reichman, Ben Fletcher, the Black IWW orator and organizer, and assorted Garveyites. Although some had their points—for example, the fighting spirit and sincerity of the IWW impressed me-—I rejected them all.
In the spring of 1922, I approached my brother Otto, whom I knew had joined the Workers (Communist) Party shortly after its inception in 1921. I told him that I wanted to join the Party.
The fact that Otto was in the Party and had advised me from time to time on my reading had undoubtedly influenced my decision, I had a generally favorable impression of the Black communists I knew; men like Otto, the Owens brothers and Edward Doty. I was also impressed by whites like Jim Early, Sam Hammersmark, Robert Minor and his wife, Lydia Gibson. What added great weight to my favorable impression of the communists, however, was their political identity with the successful Bolshevik Revolution.
At the time it happened, I had been taken totally unaware of its significance, I first heard of it during an incident that occurred in France in August 1918. My regiment, while marching into positions on the Soissons sector, had paused fora rest. On one side of the road there was a high barbed wire fence and behind it loitered groups of soldiers in strange uniforms. Upon closer observation, it became clear that they were prisoners. They spoke in a strange tongue, but we understood from their gestures that they were asking for cigarettes, A number of us immediately responded, offering them some from our packs.
When we asked who they were, one of them replied in halting English that they were Russian Cossacks. He explained that their division, which had been fighting on the western front, had been withdrawn from the lines, disarmed and placed in quarantine, They were considered unreliable, he said, because of the revolution in Russia. At the time, I was not even sure of the meaning of the word revolution—some kind of civil disorder I conjectured. Giving the matter no further thought, we resumed our march. It was not until I had returned from France that I began reading about the Russian Revolution. From then on, I followed its course, and despite the distorted view in the U.S. press, its significance slowly dawned on me.
Here, I felt, was a tangible accomplishment and real power. Along with other Black radicals, | was impressed-—just as a later generation came to look at China, Cuba and Vietnam as models of successful struggle against tyranny, colonialism and oppression.
Thus, I was particularly attracted to the communists. True, the Party was largely white in its racial composition, with only a handful of Black members. I felt, nevertheless, that it comprised the best and most sincerely revolutionary and internationally minded elements among white radicals,and therefore formed the basis for the revolutionary unity of Blacks and whites. This was so, I believed, because it was a part of a world revolutionary movement uniting Chinese, Africans and Latin Americans with Europeans and North Americans through the Third Communist International.
The Bolsheviks had destroyed the czarist rule, established the first workers’ state, and breached the world system of capitalism over a territory comprising more than one-sixth of the earth’s surface. Most impressive as far as Blacks were concerned was that the revolution had laid the basis for solving the national and racial questions on the basis of complete freedom for the numerous nations, colonial peoples and minorities formerly oppressed by the czarist empire. Moscow had now become the focus of the colonial revolution. In the turbulence of those days, there seerned every reason to think that the energy unleashed in Russia would carry the revolution throughout the world.
In the U.S., the deluge of lies and distortions by the media, the red baiting, the Palmer raids, had not been able to hide this monumental achievement of the Russian Bolsheviks. The uninformed Black man in the street could reason that a phenomenon that evoked such fear and hatred on the part of the white supremacist rulers “couldn't be all bad.” As for me, the socialist victory confirmed my belief in the Bolshevik variety of socialism as a way out for U.S. Blacks.
I found the theory behind this achievement all there in Lenin’s State and Revolution. He developed and applied the theories of Marx and Engels on the role of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This work was the single most important book I had read in the entire three years of my political search and was decisive in leading me to the Communist Party. In this work, Lenin clarified the nature of the state and the means by which to overthrow it. His approach seemed practical and realistic; it was no longer just abstract theory.
Using Origins of the Family as a departure point, Lenin demystified and desanctified the myth of the state in capitalist society as an impartial monitor of human affairs. Rather, he exposed the state in capitalist society--and its apparatus of military, police, courts and prisons—as an instrument of ruling class domination, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
It thus followed that the job of forcibly replacing the state power of the dominant class with that of the proletariat was the paramount and indispensable task of socialist revolution. As far as I could seé, the Soviet example appeared to offer a completely clear solution to the problems facing American workers, both Black and white. I saw the elimination of racism and the Bea of complete equality for Blacks as an inevitable by product of a socialist revolution in the United States, It was at this point that I became fully resolved to make my own personal commitment to the fight for a socialist United States.
The first part of my odyssey was over.