“My unit came home through Newport News. Still in uniform. Marched off the ship and straight into a colored waiting room.” A pause. “Same uniform as your brother, Miss Santoro. Different parade.”
That’s Clarence Washington speaking — a Pullman porter and one of the most quietly important characters in Book Three of The Promise Trilogy. He says it in a basement meeting where Italian construction workers, Polish steelworkers, Russian garment workers, and Irish dockmen are trying to build the kind of cross-ethnic solidarity that has never fully succeeded in New York. Clarence is the only Black man in the room. He’s also the one who understands the machinery best, because he’s watched it operate in places where it wore no disguise at all.
Clarence is fictional. His world is not.
Historians call 1919 the Red Summer — not for Bolshevism, but for blood. More than two dozen race massacres erupted across the United States between April and November. In Chicago, a Black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan drifted past an invisible boundary into white-designated water and was stoned. He drowned. The violence that followed lasted a week: thirty-eight dead, over five hundred injured, a thousand Black families left homeless. In Elaine, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers who tried to organize a union were met with a massacre that killed as many as two hundred people — the exact number remains disputed because the dead weren’t all counted.
Black veterans who had served in France — who had fought in the same war as their white neighbors — returned home to find that their service had earned them nothing. Not safety, not respect, not even the right to walk freely through the towns they’d left. Some were attacked still in uniform. The message was explicit: the democracy you fought for overseas does not apply to you here.
This was the America Clarence Washington came home to. And it was the same America where four million workers were walking off their jobs in the largest wave of strikes the country had ever seen.
The connection between racial violence and labor organizing in 1919 was not coincidental. It was structural.
Companies facing strikes had a reliable playbook: hire Black workers as strikebreakers to undermine white picket lines, then abandon those same workers when the strikes ended. The strategy accomplished two things at once — it broke the strike and deepened the racial hostility that kept workers from organizing across the color line. As Clarence puts it in the novel: “Down South, they hire Black men as scabs to break white strikes, then turn around and hire white men to beat the Black organizers. Same company. Same invoice.”
The Great Steel Strike of 1919 — 350,000 workers walking off the job across six states — was broken in part by this tactic. Steel companies recruited Black workers from the South with promises of good wages and steady employment, then placed them in the mills the strikers had emptied. The white strikers, many of them immigrants themselves, saw Black workers crossing their picket lines and drew the conclusion the companies intended: that solidarity had a color line.
It was a lie. But it was an effective one, and it worked because the racism was already there — in the hiring halls that kept Black workers out of skilled trades, in the neighborhoods where housing covenants drew invisible borders, in the unions themselves, many of which excluded Black members by constitution or by practice. The companies didn’t create the division. They weaponized it.
Clarence Washington is a Pullman porter — one of the most distinctive and important positions in Black working-class life in the early twentieth century. Pullman porters staffed the sleeping cars on America’s railroads, serving white passengers with a level of attentiveness that was both professional and enforced. The work required education, composure, and the ability to navigate white expectations with a precision that left no room for error.
The porters occupied a paradoxical position. They were among the most well-traveled and well-connected Black workers in the country — they moved between cities, carried newspapers and ideas across state lines, and built networks that stretched from Chicago to New York to Atlanta. They were also completely dependent on white passengers’ goodwill for their livelihood, working for tips in a system designed to keep them grateful and compliant.
In 1919, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters didn’t yet exist — A. Philip Randolph wouldn’t found it until 1925. But the porters were already building the relationships and the organizational infrastructure that would make that union possible. They were doing it quietly, carefully, in the spaces between service — the same way women organized in kitchens and attics, under cover of work that was already expected of them.
I wanted Clarence in the novel because the labor story of 1919 is incomplete without the people who were told that solidarity had a color line. His presence at the rally — his men holding the south bays in their pressed uniforms — represents a fragile, imperfect alliance that was real in its aspiration even when it fell short in practice.
The cross-ethnic, cross-racial solidarity at the heart of The Promise Trilogy‘s final act was the dream of 1919 labor organizing — and its greatest failure. In city after city, the divisions between groups ran deeper than language or neighborhood. Companies exploited those divisions with professional efficiency. Federal agents, surveilling immigrant communities during the Palmer Raids, added another layer of pressure — the threat of deportation made immigrant workers afraid to organize, and afraid workers make poor allies.
But the dream wasn’t entirely a fantasy. In some cities, in some strikes, the lines did hold — briefly, imperfectly, long enough to glimpse what was possible. The 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, brought together workers from more than forty nationalities. The 1919 steel strike, for all its failures, saw immigrant workers from a dozen countries stand together on the same picket lines.
What these moments had in common was someone doing the work of translation — not just linguistic, but moral. Someone standing in a room full of people who had every reason to distrust each other and finding the words that made the common ground visible. In the novel, that’s Lucie’s job: writing rally speeches in five languages that “stir without setting fires,” framing workers’ demands in constitutional language that makes federal interference look like overreach rather than protection.
Clarence understands what Lucie is attempting, and he understands its limits. “Could lift us higher than we’ve ever stood,” he says of the planned rally. “Or it could break us clean in two.” Then, quietly: “And when trouble comes — it won’t come evenly.”
The room hears what he means. Nobody argues.
I wrote The Promise Trilogy as a story about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America — Italian immigrant women, specifically, navigating the distance between the old world and the new. But a story about immigrant workers in 1919 that doesn’t include the color line isn’t honest history. It’s a comfortable excerpt.
Clarence Washington isn’t in the novel to check a box. He’s there because the world Lucie moves through — the settlement houses, the union halls, the docks where the rally converges — was shaped as much by the people who were excluded as by the people who were welcomed. The same federal agents who surveilled Lucie’s classroom also surveilled Black organizers. The same companies that exploited her students’ labor also exploited Clarence’s. The machinery didn’t care about the distinction. It only cared about keeping the parts from connecting.