Mahri-Pahluk, the Inuit called him. Matthew. The Kind One.
That furious star kept leading us north, and north—five decades
after Lincoln dragged ink across the only edict that mattered,
a wary Jubilee spanned the year. Soon after—as if a lock had
clicked open—frenzied migrants, wide-eyed and beguiled,
surged into depots in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland
Philly and Pittsburgh, clutching our strapped cloth cases, with
tabasco leaking from the waxed paper seams of what was left
of our lunches. Dizzied by a conjured glare, we streamed into
tenements, placed mementos of our other selves on shadowbox
shelves, declared ourselves blessed, and sent hallelujahs back
down south, in carefully scripted letters that sloshed our new
city’s cracked concrete with gold. You got to come see, Pearl,
it’s better up here. Amos, there a job for every man who want one.
And Amos worked to beat the willful red dust off his hat and he
came, Pearl wrapped fried bread and peppered pork scraps
for the journey and she came, Annie cried loud in front
of her granddaddy’s slantways old house and she came, Otis beat
down the little-boy fear in his belly and he came, Earl put one last
flower on Mary’s grave and he came, Esther slow-folded all her
country clothes and she came, Willie started bragging all around
Mississippi ’bout some paycheck he didn’t have yet and he came,
Eunice, Nona’s baby girl, got her tangled hair pressed and plaited
for the first time and she came, we came, hauling even the things
we dreamed of owning, we came, loosing the noose, stepping
gingerly into the gaping mouths of cities, we came, just stunned
enough. We wrangled with wary merchants, waged war with
vermin, dragged our feet through bloodied butcher shop sawdust.
Some found jobs revolving around bland ritual—the putting in
or taking out or hammering on or the pulling apart of things.
We calmed the fussy clockwork of white babies, held them to
the wrong breast. We scarred skillets for another family’s beans
and meat. We dug with ain’t-a-thang-different-but-the-dirt, ’cause
all that black gold is buried somewhere. We were told that
all those vexing daily battles were ours, but real wars belonged to
everyone. Once again, we lunged lockstep into questions that white
American men had vowed to answer with their breath and bodies.
It was called the first war in the world, but it wasn’t, it couldn’t have
been, because we had forever been tending to wounds. When
that war shuddered to its close, the very same America held out
its skeletal arms and begged the brown soldiers back inside—
inside where their names were still a street-spat venom. Inside,
while their bodies still dripped from the thickest branches of trees,
inside, where they were whispered to be not men, but fractions
of men. They returned to their homes in South Carolina and Texas,
in DC and Chicago, in Omaha and Arkansas, and the air had not
changed there. So the summer turned red and exploded, blood
splattering storefronts, a war inside a quavering peace. Snarling
white men killed to feed their hatred of hue, killed 1000 of us
to make America great again, to siphon all that dark trouble from
between its shores. We fought back, coiling and unleashing a fury
threaded in our stolen names. Incensed by our ease upon our own
streets, our stolen names gracing storefronts, our control over
our own lives, they torched the landscape flat in Tulsa, ignored
the screams of its rightful citizens and curious children, they set us
to flame. Wherever we were, whenever we dared upright, wherever
we breathed out loud, they were—damning the boys in Scottsboro,
disregarding the vile savage rampaging through men in Tuskegee.
But, dammit, we phoenix, we. We renaissance and odes inked
in tumult. We Billie warbling a fruit gone strange. And we still be
Marian sanctifying that stage, singing her America while America
said There ain’t a damned thing here that sounds like that.
1939–1944
THE BLACK SOLDIER
Chad Williams
Isaac Woodard wanted to be a soldier. One of nine children in a family of sharecroppers, he grew up in rural South Carolina, hoping, like so many other African Americans in the Jim Crow South, for a better life.
His opportunity came. At the age of twenty-three, on October 14, 1942, he traveled to Fort Jackson and enlisted in the U.S. Army. He would become one of approximately 1.2 million Black men and women who served in World War II.
On the eve of American entry into the war, the place of Black soldiers in the nation’s military was dire. In the summer of 1940, when Congress began debating a peacetime draft, fewer than five thousand Black soldiers were in the entire U.S. Army. Black World War I veterans Rayford Logan and Charles Hamilton Houston, still scarred by their experiences, testified that Jim Crow in the military had to end. The September 1940 Selective Service Act, the first peacetime draft in American history, prohibited racial discrimination in the administration of the draft, but it did not outlaw segregation.
The NAACP and civil rights activists pressured President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the War Department to reform the military and address racism affecting Black workers. The government responded by appointing Judge William Hastie as a special adviser to Secretary of War Henry Stimson and by promoting Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., to brigadier general, making him the first Black flag officer in the history of the U.S. military. Despite these concessions, the armed forces remained segregated and the defense industries systematically excluded African Americans. In January 1941, longtime labor organizer A. Philip Randolph proposed a mass march on Washington, threatening to have some one hundred thousand African Americans descend on the nation’s capital. On June 25, just days before the march, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industries and creating the Fair Employment Practices Commission.