“The oath to protect our country—the oath we all took when we got our commissions in the army. Are you, in letting this un-American Tribe hatred spread, living up to that?”
“God, no!”
Robert rose.
“I’m going to hand in my resignation now!”
“It’s eight o’clock now. Wait until morning,” urged Levin.
“No, I won’t wait another minute.”
But the office of the Dearborn Statistical Bureau, where Freeman sometimes worked at night, was locked and Robert, after sending a telegram to Griffith, went to his room.
XXXVI
The rioting begun on Sunday fanned into a race struggle all the smoldering passions and hatreds that the Armistice had once suppressed. White men of fifty different creeds, nationalities and politics, who had begun by hating the unreasoning hatred of the Hun for the un-Teutonic, and who had grown intolerant of the arrogant intolerance of the blond beast, suddenly flared into fury against the blacks.
Blacks had disappeared from the streets except in their own belt, around which howled and stormed the white mob. This was no case of punishing the blacks who precipitated the first attack on the beach, but of punishing all blacks. The cry was not “Get the nigger!” but “Get the niggers!” Difference of color, blackness, was the sole object of the crowd’s fury.