If you want to understand race in Chicago in the months after the end of the First World War, the letters written by two soldiers from the south side are illuminative. Throughout the war, Lieutenant Charles L. Samson wrote his wife, Loula, at 6730 S. Perry multiple times a week. A mechanical engineer, he’d had a close scrape with death after a German submarine sunk his troop ship off the Scottish coast. In France, he was posted far from the front lines, much to his disappointment.
Writing from the front lines in the fall of 1918, Lieutenant Norvell wrote to the Defender that he could not go into great detail about his experiences due to the military censorship, but that he had “found France, notwithstanding its war-ridden condition, an infinitely more agreeable place for me to live in than my own country.” Norvell subsequently won the Croix de Guerre for commanding a machine-gun company through a ten-day action after all its officers were killed or wounded. When Norvell and his comrades returned to Chicago on February 19, 1919, they were greeted by a thunderous welcome in a massive parade in the South Loop.
By November 1919, Norvell had partially retreated in his rhetoric. “We need a leader who will teach us that there is opportunity in every atom of atmosphere, in every grain of dust, in every blade of grass,” he wrote Sears, Roebuck & Co. president Julius Rosenwald, a philanthropist who had given millions to Black educational institutions. “We need a leader who will teach us how to make money out of the things that our more fortunate neighbors overlook and discard.” Norvell admitted that when he was almost ready to surrender, his thoughts turned to “the many times when on hard toilsome ‘hikes’ in France when I was weak with hunger and suffering with cold a dogged spirit of stick-to-it sustained me then and that same spirit is sustaining me now.”
