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In April, 1918, the first World War was going on, and the United States had been in it actively for a year. In the decade before the war, and even more during the war years themselves, hundreds of thousands of my people, the Negro people, had moved out of the misery of life in the southern states, where the great majority of them, almost ten million, lived. They had no resentment against the southern land itself. In fact, they were deeply attached to it, for [[strikethrough]] [[??]] practically everything useful that had come out of the soil was largely a product of their toil. And they had no illusions that the North was a place free from prejudices. But in cities like Chicago factories were growing, and workers were needed, the demand growing with the war production boom. The employers discovered that a Negro's two arms could serve a machine or an open hearth in a steel mill as well as those of anyone else. 
I was born in Chicago, Illinois, April 2, 1918. Both of my parents were from the South. My father, a railroad and steel worker, was a Creek Indian. The Creeks had been centered mostly in Georgia, where they werex hounded and discriminated against like anyone else with a darker skin than white. My mother came from Mississippi. All her folks were farmers. [[Strikethrough]] [[??]] Her own mother, my grandmother, had been a slave, the illegitimate daughter of a white  master. I am not proud of this one white man who was one of my great-grandfathers. He was of a much lower order of humanity than those whose lineage was directly African. A typical slave master, he did not regard the product of his seduction of a slave women as his offspring. She was just another slave chattel. My mother was born free, but four of her relatives, two uncles and two cousins, were lynched in Mississippi. 
Of my parents, it was my [[strikethrough]] [[??]] mother to whom I was closest. My father died when I was eight. My mother later married again, but she parted from my stepfather when I was thirteen, and from that time on we looked after one another. She loved music and art. When I was seven years old she