1920 (13 page)

BLACKS WERE ALMOST TEN PERCENT
of the population at the time, yet less than five percent of the military. And of the military men, only one in five saw action in the Great War, clearly the result of prejudice, a prejudice that U.S. officials not only encouraged, but taught. “The French allied forces,
for example,” writes James Oliver Horton, “were instructed to see that the French civilian population respected American racial etiquette. To treat black soldiers as equals or to show them respect would, they were told, offend white American soldiers. This was especially true when French women socialized with black men.”

Many more African-Americans were waiting their turns in uniform as the war ended. If they had been called upon earlier, perhaps the fighting would have ended before it did. The little-known, but nonetheless legendary, “Battle of Henry Johnson” suggests the possibility.

Johnson and Needham Roberts were on sentry duty in Germany on the night of May 15, 1918, when a noise caught their attention.

About 2
A.M.
[Johnson] heard the Germans cutting the wire that protected his post, so he sent Roberts, in an adjoining sentry post, to alert their troops. Johnson lobbed a grenade and the “surprised Dutchmen” began firing, so he recalled Roberts. Roberts was soon incapacitated by a German grenade. Two Germans tried to take Roberts prisoner but Johnson beat them off. Roberts could not stand but he sat upright and passed grenades to Johnson.

With grenades exhausted, Johnson grabbed his rifle. He inserted an American clip in his French rifle but it jammed. At that point, a German platoon rushed him and the fighting became hand-to-hand. He then “banged them on the dome and the side and everywhere I could land until the butt of my rifle busted.” Next he resorted to his bolo knife. “[I] slashed in a million directions,” he said. “Each slash meant something, believe me.” He admitted that the Germans “knocked me around considerable and whanged me on the head, but I always managed to get back on my feet.” One German was “bothering” him more than the others, so he eventually threw him over his head and stabbed him in his ribs. “I stuck one guy in the stomach,” Johnson continued, “and then he yelled in good New York talk: ‘That black _______ got me.'” Johnson was still “banging them” when his friends arrived and
repulsed the Germans. Johnson then fainted. The fight had lasted about an hour.

Johnson and Roberts were taken to a French hospital. Johnson had a total of 21 wounds to his left arm, back, feet, and face, most of them from knives and bayonets.

The Battle of Henry Johnson, as far as I know the Great War's only eponymous struggle, resulted in all manner of accolades for its African-American hero. At the one extreme was the awarding to Johnson of the highest of all French military honors, the Croix de Guerre with a gold palm. Roberts received a Croix de Guerre sans gold palm. They were the first two American soldiers, out of tens of thousands who fought in France, to have been so recognized.

There were no honors awaiting either of them in the United States.

At the other extreme was the story called “Young Black Joe,” written by Irvin S. Cobb, one of the most famous journalists of the time, and published in the
Saturday Evening Post
on August 24, 1918. Cobb presented his encomium to Johnson awkwardly, both in phrasing and feeling: “I am of the opinion personally, and I make the assertion with all the better grace, I think, seeing that I am a Southerner with all the Southerner's inherited and acquired prejudices touching on the race question—that as a result of what our black soldiers are going to do in this war, a word that has been uttered billions of times in our country, sometimes in derision, sometimes in hate, sometimes in all kindliness—but which I am sure never fell on black ears but it left behind a sting for the heart—is going to have a new meaning for all of us, South and North too, and that hereafter n-i-g-g-e-r will merely be another way of spelling the word American.”

More than anyone else, Cobb, in his own distinctive manner, had created a hero. As much as anyone else, Henry Johnson deserved to be one.

AND SO WHEN JOHNSON AND
other African-Americans returned to the United States, many of them joining their families who were now living in the North, they expected hearty shows of gratitude at the most, a “welcome back” or a slap on the shoulder at the least. They expected freedom from segregation, or at least a lessening of its impact. They expected
better career opportunities than had existed upon their departure, if nothing so grand as a position in the executive offices. They did not believe in the sudden appearance of gold streets in the ghetto, nor even streets in which the ruts had been filled, maybe even paved over—not in the black neighborhoods. They were, however, counting on paper, green paper, more of it than they had been able to earn in their old lives. Simple, dignified, fairly compensated employment. Nineteen twenty, they hoped, as most soldiers had finally been mustered out of service by then, would be the start of new lives for them.

It did not happen, almost none of it. For the most part, African-Americans were faced with the same demeaning jobs and insulting wages they had left behind to take up arms against the Hun. In the South, they had earned their daily crumbs by cleaning toilets in public buildings or sweeping the streets in front of them, streets which, because of horse droppings, often smelled more like the toilets than the great outdoors. They tended horses, shined shoes, toiled at the most repetitious and mindless jobs in factories, and carried bags through hotel lobbies or along train platforms to seats in the “Whites Only” cars. They kowtowed to the white man and woman in both their language and their demeanor.

But for the returning black serviceman, as for the black families who had departed from their tenant farms, things were no better in the North; there was no dignity to be found in the Chicago area workplace either. The jobs they secured were horrifyingly similar, and sometimes even identical, to those they had left behind. And, on occasion, no employment awaited them at all. As Meyer Weinberg reported,

In Chicago, “International Harvester, the packinghouses, and steel mills all carefully monitored quotas on the number of blacks that could be hired.” With respect to anti-black prejudices of European immigrants, “employers … took pleasure in fueling the flames of this discord, doing whatever they could to incite the prejudices and fears of native workers.”

Beginning in 1924, the management of U.S. Steel established quotas for black employees. The new policy was part
of a broad racial program for the Gary [Indiana] community: “In the 1920s … Gary saw the growth of ‘jim crow' housing, public accommodations, recreation, and education [begun] by United States Steel corporation executives running both City Hall and the decisive community organizations to an extent unknown prior to … [World War I].”

Nor did there seem to be any likelihood of change—not yet, at least. There was no nationwide campaign to improve living conditions for blacks; no such phrase, or even notion, as “civil rights.” The country's best-known black leader, despite being a man of unusual accomplishment, inspired derision at least as much as he raised alarms. His is an extraordinary story for its time. If only it could have ended differently.

MARCUS MOSIAH GARVEY WAS ONE
of the rare blacks who had made a wide-ranging success of himself in 1920, perhaps the widest: entrepreneur, journalist, poet, publisher, and lecturer. Born in Saint Anne's Bay, a small town on the north coast of British Jamaica, Garvey had been a playful, sometimes rambunctious boy—once jailed for being part of a gang that threw stones at the windows of a local church, breaking every one. He was, afterward, ashamed of himself; he vowed it would be his last act of vandalism, and it was.

Always intelligent, always curious, Garvey took elocution lessons and entered public-speaking competitions at a young age. He read constantly in his father's library, where, according to historian Jules Archer, he “learned about the colonization and partition of Africa by European powers. He became aware of a worldwide pattern of oppression of those with black skin by those with white skin.”

Moving with his family to the United States, to Harlem, New York's largest black neighborhood, which was actually a series of neighborhoods shoved up against each other, and a part of town that would, in 1920, change the very meaning of American culture, Garvey began to dream. “But,” as biographer Colin Grant tells us, “when Marcus Garvey closed his eyes in the middle of the year [1919], he did not imagine the saccharine luxury of a Sugar Hill [Harlem's priciest neighborhood] penthouse with
a chauffeured Cadillac parked outside and a Scandinavian maid to open the front door. No, what he saw were ships, not one or two but a whole line of Negro-owned steamships sailing across the Atlantic. It was an impossible idea. There had been no hint of anything like it in recent history.”

By 1920, Garvey had founded a group for the advancement of African-Americans in the United States; and when he lectured, he spoke frequently about both the group and the exalted position he had given himself as its head. “I am President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association,” he would say at the beginning of his presentations, by way of justifying the fees he collected from those whom he addressed. “There is always a charge for admission, in that I feel that if the public is thoughtful it will be benefited by the things I say. I do not speak carelessly or recklessly but with a definite object of helping the people, especially those of my race, to know, to understand, to realise themselves.”

In addition to collecting money for the UNIA, Garvey also edited a weekly newspaper called
Negro World
, one of the rare journals of the time that advocated women's rights as well as those of African-Americans. Every issue, which cost a nickel, included a full page titled “Our Women and What They Think.” Also included were poetry by Garvey, and reviews of theatre, music, and literature. The paper would play a major role in the Harlem Renaissance, that dramatic change in American culture that is the subject of a later chapter.

It was during the Renaissance, as another Garvey biographer relates, that the paper “eventually claimed a circulation of one hundred thousand, making it the most widely read black weekly of that day. Following Marcus's policy of glorifying blackness, it refused ads for hair straighteners, skin bleaches, or any product that promised to make the user look whiter. It was the only black publication to reject such ads.”

Black is beautiful, Garvey believed, well ahead of his time. Further, he insisted that his people could most improve themselves by departing from the hostility and indignities that beset them in the United States and establishing a nation of their own in Liberia, a nation in West Africa and one of only two countries on the continent that had no history of European colonization. Liberians, as it happened, were not in favor of Garvey's idea; he would clean up details like that later.

The first step was to bring into being the Black Star Steamship Line, the fleet he saw when he closed his eyes. So determined was Garvey to make the dream come true that he sought money from those Americans who, in his opinion, would be most likely to support the venture. Not all of them were black. And not all of them were friendly.

One day in 1920, Marcus Garvey, without any advance notice, “did what no black person in America had ever contemplated.” So we learn from biographer Grant. Garvey had made an appointment with someone who was stunned to hear from him but, once learning the reason, was willing to meet. After their time together, Garvey explained what he had done and why he had done it. Opinion was divided. A number of UNIA members and other African-Americans came to regard him as a death-defying genius, while others now thought of him as a fool, perhaps even a traitor to the causes of black America, striking secret bargains of some sort with the devil.

Have this day interviewed Edward Young Clarke, acting Imperial Wizard Knight of the Ku Klux Klan. In conference of two hours he outlined the aims and objects of the Klan. He denied any hostility towards the Negro Improvement Association. He believes America to be a white man's country and also states that the Negro should have a country of his own in Africa. He denied that his organization, since its reorganization, ever officially attacked the Negro. He has been invited to speak at forthcoming convention to further assure the race of the stand of the Klan.

And that was it. Garvey said no more, having answered some of the questions raised by his visit to the Klan, but having ignored others and raised a few more. He did, however, allow a spokeswoman to tell reporters that “Garvey intends to reorganise the Black Star Line shortly, and it is possible [Imperial Wizard] Clarke may buy stock in the new company.”

Possible, yes—but not certain. And to this day no one seems to know for certain whether or not the Ku Klux Klan became a stockholder of the Black Star Steamship Line. It remains, though, intriguing to contemplate;
the possibility of Klan money helping to ship Africans back to their homeland is as stunning as it is … well, sensible.

GARVEY'S ATTIRE WHEN HE VISITED
the Klan made him look pompous, even laughable. It was, in fact, the same outfit he wore at all the formal occasions he attended, all the speeches he gave, and it could not have been more different from Mrs. Martin's bedsheets and pillowcases. If the Klansmen looked like a child's notion of a ghost, Garvey looked like a small nation's potentate or a large parade's grand marshal.

His silliest adornment was his hat, a Napoleonic bicorn with fluttering plumage; beneath it he wore white gloves and a dark blue uniform with gold epaulets and tassels and brass buttons bright enough to make a passerby blink. A belt crossed his chest at a forty-five-degree angle. A sword hung in a sheath from his waist, a sword he had never used, in part because he had no idea how to wield it. It slapped against his leg as he walked.