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3 PROLOGUE On July 28, 1919, I 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. OnJuly27,theWolverineleftonaregularruntoSt.Thomas.Passingthrough Detroit, we heardnewsthataraceriothadbrokenoutinChicago.Thesituation 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 that 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 4 Prologue 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, toward the Blackghetto,IthoughtofwhatIhadjustbeenthroughinEuropeandwhatnow lay before me in America. OnonesideofuslaythesummerwarmnessofLake Michigan.Ontheother 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 United States 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...

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