Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [31]
The formal entry of the United States into World War II on December 9, 1941, prompted several million American boys and men to volunteer for service. Harlem had a long history of sending its sons to war. The Harlem Hellfighters, the all-black 369th U.S. Infantry, had fought with distinction alongside the French army during World War I. In June 1945, the 369th fought again at Okinawa, and by the end of hostilities about sixty thousand blacks from New York City had served their country.
The immediate impact of the war mobilization was that almost overnight hundreds of thousands of white men’s jobs became vacant. Many employers were forced to hire blacks and women. In critical industries such as the railroads—in the 1940s, the principal means of national transportation—the demand for workers became acute. It wasn’t difficult for sixteen-year-old Malcolm, despite his abysmal employment record, to secure a job on a railroad line as a fourth-class cook.
His first assignment was on the Colonial, which ran from Boston to Washington, D.C., and provided him with the chance to visit big cities he had longed to see for years. During the Colonial’s routine layover in Washington, Malcolm, dressed in a zoot suit, would tour the city’s sprawling black neighborhoods. He was not impressed. “I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury.” One source of the terrible poverty, he suspected, was the backwardness of the city’s Negro middle class, which he felt possessed the intelligence and education to have reached a better station in life than what it had settled for. Malcolm later claimed that veteran black employees on the Colonial talked disparagingly about Washington’s “‘middle-class’ Negroes with Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, guards, taxi-drivers and the like.”
For the first time in his young life, Malcolm made an effort to retain a job beyond a few months. He loved traveling, and railroad work made this possible and affordable, though it often meant playing demeaning service roles. Reassigned to the Yankee Clipper, the train traveling the New York- Boston route, he was expected to lug a box of sandwiches, candy, and ice cream along with a heavy, five-gallon aluminum coffeepot up and down the aisles of the train, soliciting sales. As they had done when he was a shoeshine boy, customers frequently gave larger tips to workers who displayed enthusiasm and a happy face, and Malcolm was soon mimicking the jovial dining car waiters to obtain tips. He became so proficient that his coworkers began to call him “Sandwich Red.”
His frequent stops in New York meant that he could finally visit that fabled black Mecca, Harlem. Louise and Earl had regaled their children with stories about the shining city’s legendary institutions, its broad boulevards, its vibrant political and cultural life. Yet nothing, not even Boston’s glamour and excitement, prepared the teenager for his first encounter with the neighborhood with which he would one day become identified. “New York was heaven to me,” he remembered. “And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!”
Like a frantic tourist on a tight schedule, he rushed from site to celebrated site. His first stop was the popular bar and nightclub Small’s Paradise. Opened in October 1925 at the height of Prohibition, Small’s was racially integrated from the outset. With seating accommodations for up to fifteen hundred, it quickly became a hot spot for the jazz era’s greatest entertainers, one of Harlem’s “big three” venues along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. “No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much,” Malcolm recalled of his first time there. “Around the big, luxuriouslooking, circular