A BUFFALO SOLDIER ON HERKIMER ST. (1930)
******************************************************************************************************************************** Brownstone Detectives investigates the history of our clients’ homes. The story you are about to read was composed from research conducted in the course of one of those investigations. Do you know the history of YOUR house? ******************************************************************************************************************************** It was 1918, and Harry Francis Cole had only three options. As an African-American in the United States, drafted into the military when the country was entering the First World War, he could: 1) work as a non-combatant – laboring as a stevedore, digging trenches, graves, and latrines, or building hospitals, roads, bridges, and railroad lines, 2) fight in a segregated unit – as an American soldier with the French Army, whose soldiers did not object to fighting alongside African-American troops, or 3) join a military band – one of the many brass bands in the European theater that were composed of African-American musicians. Cole, already a budding musician back home in Philadelphia, would naturally find himself in the last group, a horn player in one of the units of the 92nd Division – or, as the military unit was more commonly known, the venerated “Buffalo Soldiers.” BORN TO WAIL Born one of four children to William and Carrie Cole in Philadelphia in 1896, Harry Cole was never really destined to be a fighter. When he was a boy he was even then sure that his future was in music. He likely caught the bug when ragtime was all the craze, but when he heard the new sound of jazz in the […]
