“You’re somebody, just as good as anybody,” she would say, especially when it appeared that they were as close to being nobodies as anybody could ever be. When the white policeman knocked on the door and told Hampton’s mother that he’d been caught stealing pies from a vendor, stood clenched with his fingers around Hampton’s forearm, saw three-year-old Summer standing behind her, said, “It’s a shame for a boy to grow up without a father,” his mother had watched the policeman walk down the hallway; then she had turned to Hampton and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When Hampton had to feed Summer and wash her and put her to bed while his mother worked in a factory making gloves and his friends all called him a mama’s boy because he no longer roamed the streets, his mother came home from work and kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody.” When she began working as a housekeeper for Robert Binkerd, the assistant to the chairman for the Association of Railway Executives, and came home on the evening of her first day to find Hampton still in the sweaty overalls he wore at the loading docks, Summer still damp from her work at the laundry, she kicked off her shoes and sat down and rubbed her feet like she always did and said, “Mr. Binkerd told me it ain’t unusual to have a Pullman porter young as you. He could put in a word. He offered.” And once that offered word had been put in and a nice yet slightly too-small suit had been loaned and a meeting—which Hampton learned upon arrival was more of an audition—had been set up at the association’s office, he stood in their tiny tenement room while his mother smoothed the lapels on the suit jacket and said, “You’re somebody, just as good as anybody, and don’t you forget it.” And Hampton never once forgot.
He’d always known, felt, that he was somebody, and that’s why, three years later, he’d joined the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after listening to A. Philip Randolph at a meeting of the Porters Athletic Association in Harlem. Everything about the forty-year-old Randolph had seemed deliberate to Hampton, and when Randolph spoke of the need for unionization in the face of increased work and stagnant wages, Hampton had been interested. But it wasn’t until Randolph made clear that no other union would represent the black porters, that other unions had, in fact, treated them like a bunch of nobodies, that Hampton knew for certain that he wanted to become a union man.
And that was how it had all started.
From the night he first heard Randolph speak about worker solidarity, Hampton followed in his footsteps and joined the Socialist Party. It was on the sidewalk after a party meeting one night two years later that Hampton met a pretty white girl named Sophia Blevin. It was mid-August of 1927. Humidity smothered the city like a wet blanket.
“Hey, brother,” she said. She stood before him, her hip cocked to one side as if it alone could keep him from passing. She held a bucket in one hand, dozens of leaflets in the other. “Help your brothers and sisters on the Passaic picket line?” She rattled the bucket. Coins jingled inside. Hampton had never heard a white person address him as “brother.” He smiled at the girl, dug into his pocket for a dime, and tossed it into the bucket.
“How old are you, sister?”
The girl looked down into the bucket, turned it so that the light from the streetlamp overhead caught the glint of the copper and silver inside. She studied the coins, puckered her lower lip as if satisfied with Hampton’s contribution. She looked up at him, shook the dark curls away from her eyes, smiled, handed him a flyer.
“I’m seventeen,” she said. “How old are you?”
She was the first white friend he’d ever had, and she introduced him to her other white friends, and then he had more. She was a communist. Her friends were communists.
“If you care about workers,” Sophia said, “you’d better hook your wagon to the Communist Party. Socialism is acclimation through accommodation. It takes too long.” She spoke in slogans, snatches of passages she’d read in books, heard from speeches, taglines party leaders had taught her to remember. Hampton didn’t mind. He found her interesting, this young white girl from Pittsburgh with foreign parents and a heart for justice. “What this country needs is radical transformation,” she said. “Workers’ rights. Gender equality. Integration.” The more he listened to her, the more Hampton agreed, and the more he saw it all as completely possible.
Sophia introduced Hampton to party leaders: Secretary Alec Weisbord, one of the organizers of the Passaic strike and the only one among them who’d traveled outside the country after the party had sent him to Mexico and Moscow; Velma Burch, a fellow organizer; and eventually Fred Beal, who was from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and who, by the autumn of 1928, had organized the textile strike in New Bedford, which everyone except Beal viewed as an embarrassing failure.
“What the party needs is diversity,” Sophia said. “What it needs are more people like you, Hampton.”
So, in the fall of 1928 Hampton set out to recruit his fellow Pullman porters into the Communist Party. A few of the men he worked with, most of them much older than Hampton and with wives and children to support back home, would attend the occasional meeting with him, nod their heads, even speak if they felt led to speak, but they slowly drifted away, begged off when he invited them to more meetings or organized rallies. One night, after a meeting of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Hampton understood what was happening.
At the conclusion of the evening, Randolph called Hampton’s name and asked him to come down to the speaker’s stand at the front of the room. Then, as the hall emptied out, Hampton watched Randolph gather his papers and file them into a suitcase before reaching for his hat. He turned and looked at Hampton.
“Mr. Haywood,” he said, “would you walk with me?”
They left the hall and turned west on 139th Street, walked toward the river. It was January 1929. Mounds of dirty snow were piled beneath the streetlamps. Christmas decorations still hung in shop windows. Hampton tipped his hat toward his eyes and pulled up his coat’s collar. He put his hands into its pockets. Randolph walked beside him.
“What are you doing, Mr. Haywood?” he asked.
“I’m not sure what you mean, sir,” Hampton said.
They kept walking, their shoes stepping alternately on cement, ice, compacted snow.
“This girl,” Randolph said, “this Blevin; how long have you known her?”
“A year,” Hampton said, caught off guard at the mention of Sophia’s name. “A year and a half, maybe.”
“How long have you known of her affiliations with the Communist Party?”
“For as long as I’ve known her.”
“I see,” Randolph said.
They stopped on the corner of Broadway. The night sky had begun to release tiny ribbons of snow. A diner sat on the corner. Inside, a young black boy and a man who could have been his father, a man about Hampton’s age, were drinking something hot from the same mug. They passed it back and forth across the table. The boy said something, the man laughed. Hampton recalled his father’s face, the sound of his laugh, the feel of his father’s hand spread across his chest that morning on the train, his fingers passing over Hampton’s head before he disappeared forever.
“You could have a future in the Brotherhood, Mr. Haywood,” Randolph said. “You’re young, hungry, smart. Don’t ruin it. Don’t encourage your brothers to ruin it.”
“What are you saying?” Hampton asked.
“I’m suggesting that you stick with whom and what you know.”
“You’re telling me not to mix with white people,” Hampton said.
“Not the ones who will get you killed. And, Mr. Haywood, there are many kinds of death.”
With that, Randolph turned the corner and headed north on Broadway. Hampton watched him go; then he looked at the table inside the diner where the boy and the man had been sitting. They now stood by the cash register. The man let go of the boy’s hand, reached for his wallet. The boy turned, saw Hampton staring at him through the window. He waved. Hampton waved back.