In 1915 Birth of a Nation was released, a film that Woodrow Wilson adored, but that was one long pro-KKK, antiblack diatribe played by white actors in blackface. The NAACP made sure that pickets appeared wherever the film was shown, but its suit to stop screenings was unsuccessful—although several states later agreed with the NAACP that the film fostered racial hatred and violence in a time of national crisis. Blacks seemed to have no friends in America. In the first three months of 1915, Congress introduced six Jim Crow bills affecting only Washington, D.C., including an anti-intermarriage bill. Happily, the NAACP defeated a House bill forbidding even literate Negroes from entering the country. But Wilson ordered the U.S. Marine Corps to invade and occupy Haiti.
That year, caught up in war fever with the sinking of the Lusitania, and also looking for a career, twenty-five-year-old Errol Horne, eldest son of Cora and Edwin, joined the army. Known in Brooklyn as an athlete, with the famous Horne charm (which probably came from Edwin), Errol was handsome in his uniform in the studio portrait he sent home from Texas. Taught to ride and shoot by old black Indian fighters at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, by 1916 Sergeant Horne had very quickly reached the highest rank blacks could expect to attain. He was twenty-six. In March 1916 he was part of Brigadier John J. Pershing’s punitive expedition in pursuit of Mexican bandit-revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had invaded an American border town. Pershing was known as “Black Jack” for the color of the troops he led in both the Spanish-American War and the Mexican campaign. In the pursuit of Villa, who was never captured, Major Charles Young (the last black graduate of West Point in the nineteenth century) and members of the black Tenth Cavalry rescued the white Thirteenth Cavalry from an ambush and both Major Young and the Tenth Cavalry became national heroes. Young was promoted to lieutenant colonel, but army doctors declared him physically unfit for combat and removed him from active duty. If he went to war a full colonel, he could come home a brigadier—which would not do. The U.S. Army was not going have any black brigadiers. Young fought back, proving his physical fitness by making a nonstop Pony Express ride from Ohio to Washington, D.C. Young was finally made a full colonel but was not called to active duty until the last week of the war.
Errol Horne, Cora’s oldest son, who died in World War I
Errol Horne, however, was promoted to second lieutenant after the Villa campaign. He also won a bride, marrying a young woman from Texas called Lottie. He sent home a picture of a pretty, smiling girl who might be Mexican in a white middy dress with a big ribbon on her long braid of hair. Popular opinion had made Errol the “best” Horne brother: best looking, best athlete, and nicest. Errol was the golden boy. In the picture, taken by Errol, whose shadow holding the box camera is clearly seen, Lottie poses with an older man, possibly her father, who wears a big Mexican sombrero. Errol was sent to France to officer black labor troops, but within a year was dead from the 1918 influenza pandemic. Cora wrote a black-bordered note to her cousin, Katie Webb Graves:
Everything possible was done for him, and he was buried with every military honor, but O, it is a deep, deep sorrow … Am here in the country trying to rest mind and body … I have Lottie with me and she is a wreck.
Errol may have been buried with every military honor, but on August 17, 1918, General Pershing sent an official directive to the French military:
Although a citizen of the United States, the black man is regarded by the white American as an inferior being with whom relations of business or service only are possible … The vices of the Negro are a constant menace to the American who has to repress them sternly … We must prevent the rise of any pronounced degree of intimacy between French officers and black officers … We must not eat with them, must not shake hands or seek to talk or meet with them outside the requirements of military service. We must not commend too highly the black American troops, particularly in the presence of Americans.
Negroes might be “citizens,” but they were not really “American.” And Pershing was directing the French to give U.S. black officers the West Point silent treatment. The NAACP’s Crisis magazine would report in 1920 that the French gave orders to burn copies of Pershing’s directive. The French already had black generals, colonels, captains, and lieutenants, as well as Senegalese and Moroccan troops who helped save Paris in 1914. When Americans continued to harass the French about their colonial troops, the French replied succinctly:
It is because these soldiers are just as brave and just as devoted as white soldiers that they receive exactly the same treatment, every man being equal before the death which all soldiers face.
It was a brilliant reply. Neither the Wilson administration nor the U.S. military, puffed up with the hubris of their own racism, which saw black deaths as unimportant, could have any idea of the contempt that was behind every carefully chosen word: “brave,” “devoted,” “same treatment,” and “equal.” Among America’s many crimes against black people, their treatment in the world wars by their own government was among the most sickening. Black American soldiers in World War I were treated in ways that can only be described as war crimes. On some American ships, black troops were not issued life jackets but expected to use floating debris. A young lieutenant and future general, George C. Marshall, was on such a ship and was appalled. In the terrible winter of 1918, at Camp Lee, Virginia, Wilson’s home state, white troops slept in barracks and black troops slept in tents without floors or bedding. “Men died like sheep in their tents,” read a report to the secretary of war, “it being a common occurrence to go around in the morning and drag men out frozen to death.”
News of the armistice came to a brokenhearted Horne family. But there had been a bright spot in 1916. On the home front there was a civilian wedding in Brooklyn. Ted Horne and Edna Scottron were both twenty-two years old and had known each other all their lives. They were popular, attractive members of the Brooklyn “crowd.” The Scottrons, a big family from Springfield, Massachusetts, had always been free. They were among the first fifty black families to settle in Brooklyn. There were two Native American grandmothers on Edna’s side—from Eastern tribes like those that met the Mayflower or inspired James Fenimore Cooper. Edna’s father, Springfield-born Cyrus Scottron, was the first black railway postal clerk in New York. Her mother, Louise Logan, was a Brooklyn-born teacher, whose grandmother had been a French-speaking free African immigrant to the United States in the 1850s. Edna’s uncle Samuel Scottron, Cyrus’ much older brother, was an important black Brooklyn figure. He owned a large furniture store and was the third black member of the Brooklyn Board of Education. Edna, green-eyed and freckled, with a pocket-Venus figure, was considered one of the best-looking girls in the “crowd.” Ted and Edna seemed a perfect couple. What better reason to marry? Moreover, Ted had a job—a Tammany patronage job. He was the first black member of the claims division of the industrial commission of the New York State Department of Labor. His boss was Frances Perkins, later the first female U.S. cabinet member in history, under FDR. Ted actually had a white staff under him. They posed with him for a photo outside their office, all looking very young and happy. Written on the back of the snapshot was “Horne and staff.” With Errol gone, Ted and Edna lived rent-free on the top floor at Chauncey Street (above Cora). Edna was spoiled and basically uneducated. Her only reading material was movie magazines. Her intellectual habits and coterie of chattering girlfriends must have driven her mother-in-law mad—fortunately, Cora was rarely at home in the daytime.
Edna and Ted’s only child, Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917, in a Jewish lying-in hospital, where the nurses marveled over her “coppery” color. Edna was passing as white—specifically Jewish, I suppose. Cora, but not Ted, came to the hospital. The baby was called “Lena” for Cora’s sister—and “Mary” because Cora was a Roman Catholic at the time. Edna, for whom Cora had little respect, seemed to have no say on the subject. Cora herself would soon move on spiritually to Ethical Culture—but Lena was baptized at Holy Rosary Catholic Church
on Chauncey Street.
When Lena was growing up, Cora refused to address her husband by name. “Please tell Mr. Horne …” she would say to one of her sons. Cora herself was never at home. She had decided to get busy, and a 1925 article in the black newspaper Chicago Defender reported after the fact on this era in her life as an activist New Negro Woman. With the outbreak of World War I, she became a Red Cross organizer and headed a unit of seventy-five women. At the same time she was secretary of the Brooklyn Urban League, an officer of the Sojourner Truth House for delinquents, a director of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Federation, a member of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, and the mayor’s appointee to the Brooklyn victory committee.
On the board of Big Brothers and Big Sisters, Cora became a mentor to young Paul Robeson, who was the youngest son of a minister from Princeton, New Jersey, and had lost his mother. She helped him get a scholarship to Rutgers after Woodrow Wilson refused to consider the idea of a black at Princeton—even if the young man was brilliant at everything, including football, and even if Princeton was his hometown. (In 1917 “Robey” Robeson, playing for Rutgers, became the second Negro named by celebrated sportswriter Walter Camp to his “all-American” list.) Harvard and Yale had both desegregated their undergraduate schools in the mid-1870s. But Princeton was still all-white in 1917. There was never any doubt that Paul Robeson was black. But the big black Robeson of the glorious smile and blinding charisma was always an icon and never a stereotype. (At later political events, people literally stood on chairs to see him.) Like Frederick Douglass, Robeson was a natural leader since boyhood. His biographer Martin Bauml Duberman wrote of the “astonishing range of his gifts in sports, studies, singing and debating,” saying that “Robeson’s natural talents were so exceptional that he had to make a proportionally large effort in order to forestall resentment in others.” Admired by whites for “his unfailingly courteous, Christian demeanor,” he was an “amazingly popular boy,” said one teacher, because “he had the faculty for always knowing what is so commonly referred to as his ‘place.’” Duberman quotes another: “He is the most remarkable boy I have ever taught, a perfect prince. Still, I can’t forget that he is a Negro.”
On July 2, 1917, the worst and most horror-filled race riot in U.S. history took place in East St. Louis, Illinois, a blue-collar town with a conflux of black and white Southerners fleeing the boll weevil and seeking war industry jobs. East St. Louis had a special issue with blacks: it was a Democratic town that feared elections would be stolen by newly arriving black Republicans. The weeks before the riot saw the white press stirring up trouble with bogus stories of black crimes, especially rape. There was also an underlying labor issue. The riot began over the hiring of black scabs at the striking Aluminum Ore Company. The union did not admit blacks, of course. The riot exploded on a rumor that an armed black man had killed a white man. White mobs now surged through the town to kill or maim any black man, woman, or child they came across. This riot may have been as bad as the 1863 New York Draft Riots. In New York at least there were white people willing to help Negroes evade the mobs. Both white Irish police and white Irish priests, for example, helped save most of the inhabitants of the Colored Orphan Asylum. East St. Louis seemed to have no civic-minded upper class and very few good-hearted cops or priests. It was a classic, old-fashioned, Southern-minded, American small town—violent and prejudiced. Blacks and whites, mostly Southern, did not live that far apart from each other. Mobs set fire to black homes, then shot victims as they ran out. Sometimes they nailed boards over doors and windows before setting fire to the houses. A white army reserve officer reported seeing a white man snatch a baby from a fleeing black woman’s arms and toss it back in the flames. The police and National Guard did nothing except encourage the mobs and shoot at fleeing blacks. There were reports of blacks being burned alive as well as lynched. There are few records of what actually happened in East St. Louis, because the mayor’s secretary ordered police and guardsmen to arrest anyone with a camera and to smash the cameras, but eyewitnesses told their tales—and at least one picture was smuggled out. It is a photo of a mob swarming a streetcar to drag off blacks. Six thousand blacks soon left East St. Louis. Too late, the local chamber of commerce demanded that the police chief resign. German propaganda had a field day. But Woodrow Wilson said nothing.
Du Bois compiled a report, “Massacre at East St. Louis,” published in The Crisis. And the NAACP brilliantly organized the first Silent Protest march any American had ever seen. On July 28, eight thousand to ten thousand blacks marched down New York’s Fifth Avenue behind men carrying banners reading, “Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?” Leading the parade were little children dressed in white who held hands across the avenue. Women in white marched behind the children. At the very front were NAACP officials and the drummers. Besides the tread of the marchers, the only sound coming from the parade was muffled drums. It must have been a stunning sight to New Yorkers, for whom the word “demonstration” naturally meant “noise.” Although baby Lena was less than a month old, it is impossible to imagine that Cora was not there. It was the first large-scale, organized public demonstration for civil rights in the twentieth century.
When America entered World War I in 1917, at first no one wanted black soldiers—then labor troops were clearly needed and draft boards could not sign blacks up fast enough. Labor troops did manual work and heavy lifting: loading and unloading ships, building roads, and so forth—anything, except carrying a gun or firing a weapon. Ironically, the only black troops who were treated with anything like respect were in Wilson’s Washington, D.C. Washington’s black National Guard troops were stationed at all government buildings on the theory that blacks could not be infiltrated by German spies or saboteurs. Buffalo Soldiers—trained black professional combat troops—stayed in the Philippines or on the Mexican border during the war. Black troops could fight Filipinos, Mexicans, and Indians, but Wilson would not permit them to fight a white enemy. Thus, untrained black National Guard units, mostly used as labor troops, took the place of trained black troops. Only two black units actually saw combat in the war: the Eighth from Chicago, Illinois, and Edwin Horne’s Fifteenth from New York, “Harlem’s Own.”
Although the regimental colors of the Fifteenth New York were presented by New York governor Charles Whitman outside the Union League Club in the spring of 1917, and crowds cheered Jim Europe’s syncopated rendition of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” the regiment was not allowed to join the “Farewell to Little Old New York” parade when New York’s other National Guard units, known as the “Rainbow Division,” went “over there.” The Fifteenth New York was told that “black is not a color of the rainbow.” The Fifteenth New York went to France without a farewell, but it got both a new name and a new nickname. The old Fifteenth was now the brand-new 369th Infantry Regiment, attached to the Eighth Corps of the Fourth French Army—and the sobriquet “Harlem’s Own” became the “Harlem Hellfighters.” Wilson gave the 369th to the desperate French because he did not want blacks fighting for America. Wholly under French command, but permitted to carry its state colors (New York’s), the 369th fought in French uniforms, with French weapons, under the French flag and became the longest-serving and most highly decorated American unit of the war. But at the end of the war, showing contempt for its own black troops, the U.S. government officially requested that the French not mention the 369th in any postwar testimonials or memorials and not permit the 369th to march in any French victory parades. Only white Americans could take part, although black Frenchmen and black Britons marched with their respective countries. Wilson did not want the world to learn about black heroism—even though the first American soldiers to recieve the Croix de Guerre, Sergeant Henry Johnson and Private Needham Roberts, belonged to the 369th.
Black Americans without a doubt helped France win the war, and the French were grateful, though they could not show it officially without offending the U.S. government
. France showed its gratitude in a deeper way, by discovering and embracing black soldiers and black music. During its February 1918 goodwill tour of the country, the famous, larger than regulation 369th Regimental Band, led by the great Jim Europe, now Lieutenant James Reese Europe, single-handedly raised French morale. The 369th introduced jazz to France and the world, and the tour of France was a huge story in America. The 369th did much more than lift the spirits of a country at its lowest ebb. It won that country’s deepest gratitude by the fact that the soldier-musicians went back to the front after their tour to fight with the French army. They were the first unit of Negro Americans in combat and Jim Europe was the first Negro officer in combat. The band and the entire 369th were loved in France—explaining the French passion for black American jazz and sympathy for black Americans who sought a refuge from American racism between the world wars. The enlisted men of the 369th were all black, and except for the chaplain (Paul Robeson’s brother), the legal officer, and the bandmaster (Europe), the officers were wealthy white American men with paternalistic ideas about race—not a good thing, but certainly preferable to the vicious racism of the ordinary U.S. Army officer.
The Black Calhouns Page 9