Notes
645
Index
679
BLICI
BOLSIBVII
On J uly 28, 1919, I literally stepped into a battle that was to last the rest of my Iife. 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 land ed 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 trairi. The next morning our cars would be attached to the Chicago-bound train and we woul<J 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.
2
BLACK BOLSHEVIK
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 hig race riot going on out there, and already this morning a couple of colored soldiers were killed coming in unsuspectingly. If I were you l'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 buge and still growing industrial center of the nation, bursting at its seams; brawling, sprawling Chicago, "bog 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?
