by Dan Goldberg
Also like the Arbors, the Coopers reserved Sunday for God.
Breakfast was not served until the family prayed together.43 Edward Cooper was a trustee at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, a modest structure that had expanded over the decades. It became a symbol for the black community and a source of pride. It had grown as they did. It had thrived along with them. It was their own, amid a culture that afforded them little to claim as their own.
Sunday after church was the week’s big meal. The Coopers picked vegetables from their garden and always had the freshest fried chicken, seeing as how it was “just a matter of going out in the yard and wringing the neck of the next meal.”
Miss Laura, despite never having encountered a cookbook, knew how to make a feast without spending a fortune. One of her specialties, the hog haslet, was made from the heart, tongue, and other internal organs of the pig. Farmers and butchers would throw the offal away, but the staff who helped butchers, usually African Americans, would bring it home. Miss Laura would take these organs and cut them into small pieces and cook them on the back of a wood-burning stove for hours.
“Man, that was good eating,” Cooper remembered decades later. “When you put that stuff in your mouth, it was as tender as a baby’s bottom—delicious food.”
After graduating from high school, Cooper worked as a bellhop. He made decent money handling bags, though not as much as he made hustling whores.
There were always a few white girls hanging around the hotel, and traveling salesmen, called drummers, would come looking for a good time. Cooper played the middleman.
The going price for the girl was a couple of bucks, and Cooper got to keep twenty-five cents. The salesmen would also want liquor. Washington was in a dry county, so Cooper would keep four or five pints of Craven County Corn whiskey—pretty good moonshine—in his private closet at the hotel.
He called himself the customer service representative.
It wasn’t all fun and games, however. Anything that angered a white customer could mean the loss of employment, no matter who was at fault, and these customers could unload on black bellhops without any fear of consequence.
One time Cooper was showing a patron to his room. He placed the bags in the elevator but did not hold the elevator door open. “I thought the man was going to hit me, really,” Cooper remembered. “He called me everything he could think of, everything derogatory that came to his mind. . . . That kind of thing was just a part of living, just a part of being there.”44
Despite all the charms of rural life—the family meals, church, playing in tobacco fields, and hiding under houses—there was always a lurking fear, a terrifying thought that life could end or be upended at any moment, just as it had been for Hair’s family in Florida. Two men had been lynched near Cooper’s home when he was a child, and there were always stories of black men who had been beaten because they had done something, seemed like it could be anything—maybe just for looking the wrong way, or saying the wrong word, or maybe they hadn’t said or done anything at all. Maybe they were just black. That could be enough.
Edward and Laura Cooper begged their son to leave Washington. Get out, they said, before you are beaten, or worse.45
“You had to feel intimidated by it,” Cooper later said. “First of all, that it was done simply on the basis of prejudice, for the most part; secondly, there wasn’t a hell of a lot you could do about it; and thirdly, because I think at that point in time, there was no groundswell from the majority community to try to do anything about it.”46
That was changing in ways Cooper would have found hard to fathom as the 1940 election approached.
Vann’s desertion of the Democrats opened a floodgate of critical editorials from the rest of the black press, which, by 1940, had a hold over its readers rivaled only by the church. The Office of War Information estimated that four million black citizens were reading black newspapers each week, providing publishers with enormous opportunity to shape public opinion.47
And Vann was arguably the most powerful voice in a powerful chorus, for the Pittsburgh Courier had, since 1938, become, according to historian Richard Miller, “the single most influential force in the drawn-out quest for racial justice preceding the climactic civil rights movement of the 1950s—the role of the NAACP notwithstanding.”48
The week after the president promised Randolph and White that he’d work to find more opportunity for black men in the Army and Navy, the Courier printed a letter from fifteen black messmen aboard the light cruiser USS Philadelphia in which they detailed their shabby and prejudicial treatment. “We sincerely hope to discourage any other colored boys who might have planned to join the Navy and make the same mistake we did,” the letter said. “All they would become is seagoing bellhops, chambermaids and dishwashers.”
Vann was by now dying from abdominal cancer; with only days left to live, he used his outlet to turn the “Philadelphia Fifteen” from a story into a symbol.49 “Nothing has been done and nothing is being done about the United States Navy,” wrote the Courier in all capital letters. “Our boys are still the scullions of the Navy.” The paper condemned Knox “and the exclusive Jim Crow Southern caste which dominates the Navy.”50
“Only those who know how the Army and Navy punishes [sic] revelations of this kind, can appreciate what a courageous thing these young men have done and how bad conditions must be to have forced them to do it,” Vann wrote. “They have cried out against this persecution and reached their people through the medium of this newspaper. They have given us the information from first hand that we need in order to understand how to fight and defeat this octopus of Navy Negrophobia.”51
Nothing like the Philadelphia Fifteen letter had ever been printed before, and its publication one month before the election could hardly have come at a worse time for the Roosevelt campaign.
The New York Age, Philadelphia Tribune, and Cleveland Gazette, all black newspapers, endorsed Willkie.52 Black readers of the Courier were told that the WPA (Works Progress, later Projects, Administration), which employed millions to build roads, bridges, parks, and other public facilities, was no substitute for fair treatment in factories and equal opportunity in industry. And they were reminded that “in the game of politics more power and respect can be gained from a group’s ability to defeat someone than to elect someone. . . . Never before has [the black vote and] its power loomed so portentous as it does today,” the Courier opined as it lambasted Roosevelt’s “monumental failures” and “his baseless appeal to some Negroes for support because he has given them some relief and WPA checks that were made possible by someone else’s money. . . . In your municipal and State elections, you may vote for Democrats because you have a pretty close check up on him, but to put one in Washington is a grievous mistake,” the editorial said.53
Roosevelt, ever mindful of his political prospects, was ready to deal, and when Vann died on October 24, he saw an opportunity to win back black support. As many mourned, the White House announced the promotion of Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Sr. to brigadier general, the nation’s first black general. The White House then announced that William H. Hastie would be the first black civilian aide to the secretary of war, and Campbell C. Johnson would be the first high-ranking black aide to the head of the Selective Service.
Vann’s “loose leaf politics” had worked.
“If nothing more comes out of this emergency than the widespread understanding among white leaders that the Negro’s loyalty is conditional, we shall not have suffered in vain,” wrote George S. Schuyler, a widely quoted black columnist.54
Roosevelt easily won his third term, but the victory and October appointments did little to quell the resentment the black community felt over the treatment its boys received in the armed forces, particularly the Navy. Davis’s and Hastie’s appointments mean “nothing,” the Courier wrote four days after the election. “The United States Navy still abuses, restricts and Jim Crows black boys.”55
The Courier had kep
t the Philadelphia Fifteen in the news, and now black sailors aboard other ships were filling its pages with shameful tales of mistreatment. On November 9, three messmen aboard the USS Sampson warned black men against joining the Navy, where they would “make beds, serve meals, clean up dirt. In other words, we men in the Navy are just flunkies disguised in a uniform,” they said. “Literally speaking, the Negro is in jail under observation but somebody thought it would sound nicer to call it the Navy. There are colored youths in the Navy who are cultured, refined, smart and independent with qualifications of a good leader, yet are never given the chance.”56
In early December, six men aboard the USS Davis told the country that their first job was to shine the officers’ shoes and shine the brass work. Then they served breakfast before being allowed to eat their own. The word “nigger” was often uttered in their presence, they wrote. During a visit to Brazil, the messmen said they were invited aboard a Brazilian ship but were denied permission to accept the invitation because their officers were having guests and they were needed to serve. In Barbados, they could not leave the ship to attend “a party given by the Negroes of Barbados,” but the white men could go. “We sincerely hope that until the Negro is given other ratings . . . the Negro youth of America will cease to enlist in the U.S. Navy.”57
It was quite a condemnation to a nation headed for war, but if any of these complaints reached Knox’s desk, they were swept aside, a nuisance to be dealt with during a less pressing time. If his admirals did not want black men serving as anything other than messmen, then that was how it would be. The political pressure that moved Roosevelt could not sway Knox—not yet.
William H. Hastie, Stimson’s new civilian aide, recounted an apocryphal tale of a White House meeting during which the president, sitting with top staff from the Army and Navy, asked what the branches were doing about the increasing black protests. The Navy man responded, “We file them in the wastebasket.”58
CHAPTER 4
“WE ARE DISCRIMINATED AGAINST IN EVERY WAY.”
John Reagan exited a movie theater on a Sunday night in Missoula, Montana, to find the streets alive with the shouts of newsies selling extra editions. The Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. The world, Reagan knew, would never be the same.
Reagan, only twenty-one years old, had not yet made it home when he decided he would not be drafted. No one need compel him to defend his country. He dropped out of college, intent on enlisting in the US Army Air Forces, the precursor to the Air Force, which had recently opened up a training program for black pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama.
He wanted to be in the Air Forces as much as he’d ever wanted anything.
But the Air Forces did not want Reagan—not yet.
He’d have to find another way to serve.
John Walter Reagan was in Montana because of his prowess on the football field. He had been a nationally acclaimed high school athlete in Chicago, where his family had moved from Texas by way of Louisiana.
His parents, John Llewellyn and Bernice Bonita Ector Reagan, had a fitful marriage. John Sr. did not want his wife to work. Bernice was not interested in being a homemaker. She had married when she was only fifteen and wanted more than “wife” and “mother” on her résumé. Their fights were persistent, and the couple frequently broke up and got back together, splitting for the final time when Reagan was nineteen.
The loving but broken home meant two things for Reagan: he often had to help raise his two siblings—Johnetta, a year younger, and William, nine years younger—and he often lacked the presence of a male role model. In lieu of his father, Reagan hung around older boys on Prairie Avenue and Indiana Avenue on Chicago’s Southeast Side. He was young to be in a gang, only about ten, but large for his age. No real harm was ever committed—mostly petty theft from idling ice cream trucks, or sweet potatoes from vegetable vendors.
But his mother worried her boy was falling in with the wrong crowd, so she moved the family to 6141 South Throop Street, a small, two-story bungalow-style home in Englewood, on the city’s southwest side, about three miles from where the Arbors had settled.
The middle-class neighborhood was booming, thanks to the construction of new apartment buildings, which gave life to a popular shopping district.1 It was a family-centered community with sports and Boy Scout troops, and Reagan thrived. He read anything he could get his hands on, including material that was well above his grade. Still at Copernicus Grammar School, he’d open books on the economy and even astrology. He’d stare at pictures and try to decipher what he could.
He was a dreamer.
His father, who came in and out of his life, was a hardened realist. He wasn’t the kind of dad who threw the ball or took his son fishing. He preferred to discuss politics and current events.
The differences between the two men—the one who saw the world as it was and his boy, who saw the world as it could be—mirrored the generational divide that was shaping black discourse.
Du Bois, who had said during World War I that black men must “forget our special grievances and close our ranks,” and other voices of his era were giving way to a new generation of civil rights leaders, men who would pressure a president and proclaim that victory for democracy would not come unless it happened both in Europe and at home.2
Reagan Sr., who washed and repaired trucks for the John F. Jelke margarine company, was a Republican who related to management, not labor, and thought unkindly of welfare programs. A man ought to work hard, earn his own way, he told his son. And he lived by those principles. He had no formal education but was always working two or three jobs, even during the Great Depression.
Reagan Jr. favored the New Deal’s social programs and thought his father was overlooking the structural problems that tended to keep people, especially African Americans, from achieving their potential. The United States was a great country, he said, but “I’d just like to be more a part of it.”
Reagan entered the Robert Lindblom Technical High School in the fall of 1935, the same month Estes Wright was lynched in Florida and two years before Arbor landed at the Chicago Beach Hotel.
The school, an enormous three-story Beaux Arts building, was integrated and catered mostly to the children of European immigrants. The culture focused on assimilation and the melting pot, so racism was not often in the foreground of Reagan’s life.
By his senior year, Reagan had grown to six feet, two inches and filled out to 195 pounds. He lettered in several sports, including football, wrestling, boxing, and track and was voted Lindblom’s all-around athlete in 1938. Known as Silent John, he was lean, muscular, athletic, and intelligent, a specimen who made one imagine that God was in a particularly generous mood the day Reagan was born. He won city and state wrestling championships and finished high school with a string of opponents shaking their heads and a string of girlfriends clutching their hearts.3
His football teammates were receiving offers from Big Ten schools and the whole backfield was thinking of attending the University of Michigan. But Reagan’s wrestling coach was friends with the football coach in Montana and convinced Reagan to head to Missoula.4
He started college in September 1939, and by his sophomore year he was known as the Montana Grizzly, whose halfback and quarterback play were talked about in black communities across the country.5 A game-winning eighty-yard touchdown pass against Gonzaga cemented him as one of the most popular students on campus, and the Chicago Defender reported that he was “a hero, a boy whose name is on the tip of every fellow student’s tongue.”6
Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor came during Reagan’s junior year. He knew from press reports that the Army was training black fighter pilots for a segregated squadron, and he imagined himself among America’s real heroes, fending off Japanese bombers over the Pacific or Germans over Europe.
What the newspapers had not told him was that the Army Air Forces command remained resistant to black fighter pilots, accepting very few into their ranks.7 Reagan had no way of kno
wing that Major General Henry “Hap” Arnold had said that “the Air Corps was a club where negras would be out of place” and that white enlisted men “would never service an aircraft flown by a negra officer.”8
When the anxious and patriotic Reagan went to enlist in the Army Air Forces he was told to go home and wait to see if he was needed.
The day after Pearl Harbor, twenty African American editors, publishers, and columnists met with Army leadership at the Munitions Building in Washington, DC, where the secretary of war had moved his offices two years prior.9 The 841,000-square-foot complex, adjacent to the Navy Building on Constitution Avenue, had been expanding since World War I and would continue to be the War Department’s primary headquarters until the Pentagon was completed the following year.
The meeting had been scheduled more than a month before by Truman K. Gibson, who had been a member of the so-called black cabinet since 1940.
Gibson, twenty-nine, worked for William H. Hastie, civilian aide to the secretary of war. Hastie was a big-picture man, and Gibson’s job was to handle the more mundane tasks of his high office.10 Among Gibson’s duties was to bring to the attention of Hastie and the War Department cases of black soldiers who were treated violently or unjustly, of which there were plenty, but in 1941 he found few sympathetic ears, despite the myriad horrors that occurred.
In April of that year, Private Felix Hall had been found hanging from a tree in the woods behind Fort Benning in Georgia. The nineteen-year-old volunteer had been strung up in a jackknife position in a shallow ravine. His feet were bound with baling wire. His body had been suspended for six weeks, and when he was finally cut down maggots had already consumed chunks of his decaying flesh.
He was still wearing his Army uniform.11
A military physician ruled it a homicide, and that’s what was recorded on Hall’s death certificate. But the military insisted to the public that Private Hall had committed suicide, which raised eyebrows in the black community because his hands were tied behind his back.