The Long Sleep, 57th Day of Autumn, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran): On February 24, 1919, Silas Junior, my grandfather, arrived back in the United States from his service in the First World War. Although he identified himself as “Black” on his draft registration form, his discharge papers listed him as “White.”

Fighting with courage and pride in the face of virulent racism and hostility, Black servicemen had challenged racial stereotypes during the First World War. Returning home from battle, were eager to continue the fight for equal treatment they had started abroad. Their loyalty and patriotism proved by their War effort, they wanted respect and their worthiness for equal rights recognized by their White countrymen. 

W.E.B. DuBois, who had previously advised the Black community to forget their grievances and close ranks with their White fellow citizens to fight for democracy abroad, declared, “By the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.” 

But White America, especially in the South, didn’t see things the way the Black soldiers had hoped. The returning Black veterans encountered a tenacious and violent White supremacy, and their status as veterans actually made them particular targets for White aggression. Some White Americans feared that meeting the veterans’ demands for respect would lead to demands for better working conditions and higher wages, and would encourage other African Americans to resist Jim Crow segregation and racially oppressive social customs. 

On August 16, 1917, Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman, who had been opposed to drafting Black men into the Army in the first place, warned on the Senate floor that the reintroduction of Black servicemen to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” In his racist screed, he said, “Impress the Negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air” and, he cautioned, “it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.” 

The veterans’ experience with firearms and combat renewed old concerns about a violent Black rebellion. In addition, the prevalent stereotype of Black men as chronic rapists of White woman – which frequently was used to justify lynchings – was amplified by accounts of wartime liaisons between Black troops and White French women. Acceptance by the French women, it was claimed, gave Black veterans the idea that they could have sexual access to White Southern women, too. To put it bluntly, they thought that the returning Black soldiers had gotten a taste for “White man's blood" and "White woman's pussy,” and weren’t to be greeted as heroes but as threats. Racial violence targeting African American veterans soon followed. 

In the summer of 1919, a series of “anti-Black riots” erupted throughout major American cities, including Houston, East St. Louis, Chicago, Washington D.C., Omaha, Tulsa, and Charleston. Collectively, the incidents were called the “Red Summer,” and countless African American veterans were assaulted and beaten. During the violent racial clashes of Red Summer, it was risky for a Black serviceman to wear his uniform, which many Whites interpreted as an act of defiance.

For example, on March 12, 1919, Army veteran Bud Johnson had returned home to Florida to bury his father and was waiting to board a steamboat to take him back home to Alabama when the local county sheriff arrested Johnson on the grounds that he allegedly matched the description of a Black man accused of assaulting a White woman in Pace, Florida. 

While the police were taking Johnson to Jacksonville, a mob overtook the car, seized Johnson and took him to Pace. The mob tortured him, distributed $66 they found in his pockets  amongst themselves, chained him to a stake, and burned him alive. They crushed his skull with a hatchet and his discarded his corpse in a nearby swamp.  

His loved ones had to battle alligators to recover his remains for burial, while the mob sold pieces of his shattered skull to onlookers as souvenirs. 

Spalding Gray once spoke of “an invisible cloud of evil that circles the Earth and lands at random in places like Iran, Beirut, Germany, Cambodia, America.” If you don’t believe in evil, or that it could touch down in America, I defy you to describe what happened in Jacksonville that March day of 1919 as anything else.

Silas Junior returned home to Jacksonville from the War mere weeks before Johnson's lynching. There can be little doubt that he read about the lynching and that he was aware of Red Summer and the danger of wearing his uniform in public. 

Despite the open hostility in southern states like Florida, the 1920 census still found Junior living in Jacksonville along with his wealthy parents, Silas Sr. and Emma, and his son, Silas III. Although Junior’s 1919 discharge papers from the Army had declared him “White,” the 1920 census identified the entire family as “Black.” 

Perhaps seeking greater financial opportunities, or perhaps to escape the rampant racism and open hostility toward Black veterans in the South, Junior eventually quit the family banking business. Leaving his son in the care of his parents, he moved to New York City and took an apartment at 580 Saint Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, and on November 29, 1922, married Dorothea E.S. Francis of Washington, D.C.  

But in 1929, he married again, this time to the widow Mary Reilly, his third wife and the woman who became my grandmother.  What happened to Junior and Dorothea’s marriage is a mystery. They had no children, and Dorothea never remarried. She passed away in D.C. on June 25, 1939, at the age of 42. Impermanence is swift.  

Silas Junior died twenty years later, in 1959, when I was only five years old. Impermanence is swift. I don't have any memories of him and my Dad refused to talk about his father, merely saying he had "an unhappy childhood." The only information I ever got about my grandfather was that "he married a Black woman." 

I always assumed that meant that my father's unhappiness was because Junior had abandoned his family to go and marry some other woman, a Black woman, but nether Dad nor Mom would talk further about it or embellish the story. "He married a Black woman," was the full and complete oral history I got from my parents. It wasn't until I started doing some on-line genealogical research during the covid shutdown that I discovered that the infamous marriage was before, not after, his marriage to my grandmother, and that the woman was Dorothea. 

It was also that moment when I first realized that the marriage wasn't all that unusual because Silas himself was a Black man. My White parents had lied to me all my life about my heritage and background.