Epilogue
They shall go down unto Life’s Borderland,
Walk unafraid within that Living Hell,
Nor heed the driving rain of shot and shell
That round them falls; but with uplifted hand
Be one with mighty hosts, an armed band
Against man’s wrong to man—for such full well
They know. And from their trembling lips shall swell
A song of hope the world can understand.
All this to them shall be a glorious sign
A glimmer of that resurrected morn
When age-long faith, crowned with a grace benign,
Shall rise and from their brows cast down the thorn
Of prejudice. E’en though through blood it be,
There breaks this day their dawn of liberty.
—JOSEPH SEAMON COTTER JR.,
“SONNET TO NEGRO SOLDIERS,” 1918
As a matter of historical convenience, the “Harlem Renaissance” is often generally said to have started on the day of the Great Parade, February 17, 1919. None of the accounts describing the parade, it might be noted, reported on any fliers distributed prior to that date reading, “Harlem Renaissance Starts Tomorrow—Tickets Still Available!” History seldom turns in an instant, and no one generally records the moment that the seeds of change are planted, only when they germinate or blossom. Where African American involvement in World War I is concerned, it might be argued that the “New Negro,” the figure who emerged following the war, about whom much has been written, was conceived not at the Great Parade but in the “Column of Bunches,” that first, sloppy, casual, and quite disorderly parade where a few dozen men gathered in front of the Lafayette Theater on a fine morning, one day in the spring of 1916, to put broomsticks to their shoulders and march for an idea. They took those first few steps together, setting off on a path in which the generations after them would follow.
The figure they left behind was the “Old Negro.” The Old Negro lived in a society parallel to white America, on American soil that belonged as much to him as it ever belonged to anyone else, but apart from his cohabitants. The Old Negro believed in the possibility of change and that full citizenship in his country of birth was certainly his right, as much as it was anybody else’s, but it was not a right he felt confident to demand because doing so brought so much trouble and sorrow down upon his head. The Old Negro believed in accommodation, was patient, put his faith in God, worked slowly toward a future worth living for, hated Jim Crow but stayed as far from the world of Jim Crow as possible, and pretended, when interacting with Jim Crow became unavoidable, to accommodate its awful precepts. The New Negro did not accept those precepts, didn’t feel like pretending, did not agree to live in a separate, parallel society. He did not want to work slowly, was neither patient nor accommodating, and believed that God wanted the same thing he wanted—a society where African Americans lived freely and safely as equals, with dignity and self-respect.
Such ideas existed before the war, in moderation and in the extreme, just as the old ideas persisted after the war. The difference was that the war provided black Americans with a new role model, the modern colored soldier hero. The Southern humorist Irvin S. Cobb, once among the best-known, best-loved writers in America, famous enough to have served as the master of ceremonies at the very first Academy of Motion Pictures Oscar Awards ceremony, disappeared into an obscurity as deep and complete (and perhaps as deserved) as any in American letters, but before he did, he wrote one article, which may with some irony be deemed his legacy, called “Young Black Joe,” that put into the American consciousness a kid named Henry Johnson, whose name flashed across the skies, then faded, but whose image stuck, as the modern colored soldier hero, who put his life on the line for his country and came home, and in the process earned for the New Negro the right to insist on fair treatment.
The name of James Reese Europe has faded almost as much as Irvin Cobb’s or Henry Johnson’s. It is now known only to a small population of jazz historians and musicians and late-night public radio disk jockeys, who agree that had Herbert Wright not been driven crazy by the war or whatever demons propelled him and attacked his father figure in his dressing room, “Big Jim” Europe’s fame would quite likely have risen to the same level as that of Scott Joplin, Louis Armstrong, or Duke Ellington. He would be known, if not for his technical musicianship, then for his drive, ambition, and fervent belief in the possibilities of Negro music and of jazz, a belief that could only have carried him further, and higher, into film, recordings, radio, and television. At the time of his death, the newspapers across the country wrote of the passing of a famous jazz musician, but the pictures they ran were of a military officer, a lieutenant in an army uniform, standing straight and tall. Europe was, like Henry Johnson, a modern colored soldier hero, an inspiration to the New Negro.
No one feared the New Negro more than the Old White Man, the racist who had sought for so long to keep the Old Negro in his place. Soon after the war, many white Americans, threatened by the idea of black militancy or black heroes, denigrated or denied the contributions made by black soldiers. Stories of bravery were replaced by comical anecdotes about soldiers that featured all of the prewar racist stereotypes of happy/lazy/melon-lovin’ Negroes dancing and singing their way across France. Southern politicians were subsequently quick to downplay the contributions of black soldiers. Sen. John Sharp Williams of Mississippi intoned, “I never expected them to do great service, and I rather pitied than blamed them when they did not. The whole thing after all was a white man’s fight in which the Negro was not interested. If I had my way, I would not have had a Negro soldier in the entire army.”
The Old White Man feared the New Negro because he was already fairly afraid of the Old Negro. When Alain Locke wrote in 1925’s The New Negro of a “younger generation . . . vibrant with a new psychology,” he spoke not of a new era of civil disobedience but rather of the sense of black pride that was finding its voice in art, poetry, and literature. That sense of pride struck fear in the heart of the Old White Man, who sought to suppress it, just as the MP in Brest had sought to “take it out” of any African Americans who showed signs of “feeling their oats.”
The summer following the war was known as “Red Summer.” It was called red for the blood that flowed from the racial violence that erupted, largely instigated by white bigots who felt threatened by black empowerment. That year, seventy-seven black men were killed by mobs, ten of them veterans. In Sylvester, Georgia, a veteran named Daniel Mack had the courage to tell a white man he’d fought in France and wasn’t going to take any crap from anybody anymore; Mack was arrested, then snatched from jail and hanged. In Pine Bluff, Arkansas, when a white woman told a black veteran to get off the sidewalk, he replied that it was a free country; a mob later tied him to a tree and shot him fifty times. In Birmingham, Alabama, Sgt. Maj. Joe Green was lynched when he asked for change after paying for a streetcar ride. In Blakely, Georgia, Pvt. William Little was hanged simply because he walked around town wearing his army uniform.
Riots occurred in Longview, Texas; Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; Elaine, Arkansas; Norfolk, Virginia; and elsewhere. Anti-black riots occurred in Washington, D.C., where on July 19 and 20, white servicemen went into black neighborhoods and started beating up black citizens at random. This time, however, the black men of Washington fought back, armed themselves, and protected their neighborhoods. A black woman wrote to the journal
Current Opinion,
The Washington riots gave me a thrill that comes once in a lifetime. I was alone when I read between the lines of the morning paper that at last our men had stood like men, struck back, were no longer dumb, driven cattle. When I could no longer read for my streaming tears, I stood up, alone in my room, held both hands high over my head and exclaimed, “Oh, I thank God! Thank God. . . . The pent-up humiliation, grief and horror of a lifetime—half a century—was being stripped from me.”
The rioting escalated and spread. In Chicago on July 27, white bathers at a Lake Michigan beach threw stones across an invisible color line and hit a black boy swimming on his side of the line, causing him to lose consciousness and drown. Local blacks demanded a policeman arrest the white stone throwers. He arrested a black man instead. After the six days of violence that followed, 15 whites were dead, 193 were injured, and 75 had been arrested. On the other side of the racial divide, 23 blacks were dead, 365 were wounded, and 154 had been arrested.
In 1921, race riots broke out again, this time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when black World War I veterans armed themselves and marched on the county jail to prevent a white mob from lynching a black man accused of molesting a white woman on an elevator. White rioters subsequently invaded the black neighborhood of Greenville, burning over one thousand black-owned homes. In two days of rioting, thirty-six people were killed.
Perhaps more telling is the story of what happened in Rosewood, Florida, a black community with its own school, churches, and stores, about forty miles southwest of Gainesville, in Levy County. On the morning of New Year’s Day 1923, a young white woman named Fannie Taylor reported being attacked by a black stranger. For the next week, white mobs of varying sizes from surrounding white communities entered Rosewood and attacked its citizens, killing women and men suspected of being the “black stranger,” even though later testimony suggested Ms. Taylor had been attacked by her white lover. At one point during the riots, a mob of vigilantes surrounded the house of a man named Aaron Carrier. During the attack on the Carrier house, two white men were killed. Ultimately, the town was burned to the ground, its occupants scattered, and no one was ever held accountable. A black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, published a report filed by reporter Eugene Brown, who never got any closer than Tallahassee, his news reported secondhand. The story in the paper said a World War I veteran from Chicago named Ted Cole had ridden into town, gone to the aid of the Carrier family trapped in their house, and used the skills he’d learned in the trenches in France to fight off the white mobs.
However, none of the other mainstream accounts mentioned a World War I veteran named Ted Cole. The Chicago Defender story was discounted as a fabrication. Eugene Brown was reporting what he’d heard from people who’d fled the scene, and there was no way to verify his story.
Was there really a Ted Cole? A modern colored soldier hero? There could have been—or someone needed to invent the legend of Ted Cole, the strong black man, not afraid, armed and willing to defend his people and his rights.
It was in regard to the racial violence following World War I that black poet Claude McKay wrote his famous lines:
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—oh, let us nobly die.
To nobly die. To stand your ground. To dig in, bear the worst of it, then fight back against a well-entrenched enemy and never give an inch . . .
It’s easy to overextend the metaphor of the Great War as a way to understand the struggle for racial equality in America, the entrenched positions, the intractable battle. Yet, it’s true that something ended, and something new started, when the men from Harlem and their black and white officers took up arms and sailed together to France to spend a year that changed the course of American history. The optimists were right—no one could deny them their rights, their country. The pessimists were right, too, in the sense that the powers in place were firmly in place and would not be easily defeated. What the pessimists underestimated was the fight in the men who went away and returned, as well as the pride they would inspire, without which neither battle could be won, the one in France or the one back home.