My Virtual Book Tour

Hi! I'm Rick Levine, author of the historical novel Though An Army Come Against Us! Welcome to my virtual book tour!

I'll do some reading, I'll answer some questions, and - with a little luck - I can interest you in my book.

Let's get to it!

The book opens on a train in Oklahoma in May, 1921.

The spy awoke with a start as the train slowed just outside Vinita. He felt a momentary impulse to check for his badge and gun – could someone have taken them while he was napping? – but restrained himself. Somebody might see him. Who knew who his fellow passengers were? This trip would be wasted if he revealed his identity before even arriving.
In the heat and the dust of Oklahoma in late May, Special Agent James Amos had fallen asleep on the hardwood train seat: body twisted, mouth wide open. He turned his head from side to side to get the crick out of his neck and swallowed a few times to moisten his dry throat.

The front half of this Jim Crow “combination” rail car was filled with shipping crates, trunks, and suitcases. Here in the back half, every Negro on the entire train was packed into the bench seats along with him. While they were boarding in St. Louis, Amos glanced through the windows of the coach car behind them, where all the whites and Indians were sitting in padded comfort. He wondered, Why did Indians get to ride with white people out here?

Outside the train the oak trees and limestone cuts of the Ozarks had given way to the grass and flat prairie of eastern Oklahoma. He saw miles and miles of recently tilled fields, delicate green sprouts already visible, but still difficult to identify as cotton plants. The oil rigs, though, were unmistakable. There were hundreds of them, as far as he could see. There were more millionaires here than on Wall Street! Or so they said. 27¢ cotton and $2-a-barrel oil? Either way it was a bonanza and this was surely the Promised Land.

Three days earlier, Special Agent Amos, the sole full-time Negro employee at the Bureau of Investigation, had been polishing Director Hoover’s shoes at Hoover’s mother’s home on Seward Square. Other agents of the Bureau – white agents – mowed the lawn, washed the windows and painted the fence, but John Hoover often said, “You, James, are the only one I trust with my wardrobe.” Amos knew that the Director’s trust extended far beyond shoes, suits and ties. Amos, like Hoover, came from a long-time Washington, D.C. family and Amos knew that John Hoover had “a little something in him.” Hoover knew that Amos knew and was confident that he would keep it quiet. And that was not young John Hoover’s only secret.

That day Hoover, wearing a bathrobe and slippers, walked quietly into the dressing room where Special Agent Amos was applying a final buffing to a pair of wing-tip oxfords. “Excellent work, as always, James,” complimented the Director.

“Thank you, Mr. Hoover.”

“As soon as you are finished I have a job for you in Oklahoma.”

“The lynching?”

“No,” frowned Hoover. “You won’t be able to help investigate there. That ignorant class of Negroes in the country towns will only speak to white agents.”

Amos kept his mouth shut and his expression flat. John Hoover was a brilliant man; his appointment to head the Bureau of Investigation at such a young age was proof. But he had a habit of strongly expressing some very stupid ideas, and this was among the stupidest. Did he even believe it himself? It really didn’t matter, because the Director had no interest in making arrests or preparing prosecutions in lynchings anyway. The all-white teams of agents never asked, “Did you see any members of the lynch mob? Did you recognize any of them?” Their only question was always the same: “Which Negroes fired guns?” So the Director’s actual assignment for Special Agent James Amos came as no surprise to him.

“We have reports from Tulsa that militants styling themselves an African Blood Brotherhood are arming themselves to launch attacks on white people. We want you to go in and find them. And remember, no arrests until we find the actual troublemakers. It might be Jamaicans from New York City, but we suspect white radicals. Look for evidence of anarchists or IWWs. We don’t think it’s likely that these country Negroes came up with this idea on their own. And by all means, look for explosive devices.

”Anarchists. IWWs. The Justice Department, the Bureau of Investigation, Director Hoover… none of them could imagine Negroes organizing themselves. That had been the problem with Special Agent Amos’s reports from New York on Marcus Garvey. He spied on Garvey and his associates for months, pretending to be a militant himself and worming his way into the upper ranks of the organization. He filed pages and pages of reports – both stolen internal documents and records of his own surveillance – but the Bureau wasn’t satisfied because the only Reds who Amos discovered were Hubert Harrison and Cyril Briggs… and they were Negroes, too, not the white agitators that John Hoover was looking for.

And why did it have to be launching attacks on white people? Since the end of the World War, white attacks on colored people had grown in size and frequency. In the summer of 1919, thousands of white people invaded Chicago’s South Side, burning homes and businesses, beating the colored people they caught, and killing twenty-five. That fall, white mobs rampaged through the Arkansas Delta and murdered over two hundred colored people. Then they held jury trials for another hundred and sentenced many of them to hang, apparently for the crime of surviving the initial pogrom. In central Florida, a white mob burned out an entire Black community. That crowd killed over fifty people, and mutilated their bodies, too. Could it be that this “Blood Brotherhood” was arming in self-defense?

James Amos shared none of these thoughts with the Director. He showed no sign of them on his face, either. If Hoover directed him to shine shoes, he would shine shoes. If Hoover directed him to look for white radicals, he would. He was an agent. In all his years working for Theodore Roosevelt, Amos kept his opinions to himself, and did what he was asked: carrying confidential messages abroad, being a personal bodyguard, entertaining the President’s children, sitting by Roosevelt’s bedside as he took his last breath. He served because he trusted Roosevelt the man. John Hoover was not Mr. Roosevelt. He did not have Teddy’s common touch, his spontaneity, or his instinct for fun. But John Hoover was devoted to his work and Amos respected that. So when he received these new instructions he didn’t question them. He only asked, “Files at the office?”

Thank you! Thank you for that nice reception. So, are there any questions? Yes. 

I'm really puzzled that you would have a Black FBI agent in, you said 1921? I mean, 100 years ago, at the height of Jim Crow? Even in the 1970's J. Edgar Hoover was still a notorious white supremacist. Wouldn't he have been worse in the 1920's? When Woodrow Wilson was President from 1913 to 1921 he segregated Washington, DC and purged the federal government of Black employees. So, a Black agent?

Well, yes, there was. And his name was James Amos. By the way, it was the Bureau of Investigation then. It was reorganized as the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935.

And he was really sent to Oklahoma to investigate African American radicals in 1921?

No, that detail is fictional. Amos started at the Bureau in August 1921, three months after I imagine him on duty in Oklahoma. But he was assigned to investigate Black radicals.

So J. Edgar Hoover hired a Black agent?

Not exactly. In 1921 Hoover was the Deputy Director. William J. Burns headed the Bureau and one of his first hires was Amos, who had been working for him at the Burns Detective Agency. Hoover didn't take over the Bureau until 1924.

So who was James Amos?

Amos worked in the Theodore Roosevelt White House in a private capacity for the President himself. He did everything I describe in the novel, from babysitting the children to acting as a

covert international operative. Later he worked as an investigator in the US Customs House in downtown Manhattan and for the Department of the Interior. When Roosevelt passed away in 1919 at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, James Amos was sitting at his bedside. The newspapers reported that he was a family retainer, but Amos was much more.

He remained at the Bureau of Investigation even after Burns had to step down because of his involvement in the Teapot Dome Affair. During his 32-year career with the Bureau he worked mainly as a firearms and ballistics expert. But he also investigated several important cases. He was deeply involved in bringing in Louis Buchalter of Murder, Inc. in the 1930's and breaking up the Fritz Duquesne Nazi spy ring in the early 1940's.

We know about the FBI spying on Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party in the 1960's. Were they really spying on the Black movement way back in the 1920's?

Yes, absolutely. And Special Agent Amos was at the center of that. He led the Bureau's investigation of Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920's. For the purpose of my novel I moved this in time to before Amos's fictional assignment to Oklahoma.

Marcus Garvey? I thought that was a mail fraud case, about a financial scam.

Marcus Garvey

Well, that's the way most high school history books tell the story. In fact, Marcus Garvey was the leading Black political figure of the 1920's. He founded the UNIA in Jamaica in 1914 and introduced it to the United States in 1916. In 1920 the UNIA held its first convention at Madison Square Garden with 20,000 delegates in attendance.

The UNIA was popular throughout Black America. If you are interested in this undertold story I highly recommend Grassroots Garveyism by Mary Rolinson which emphasizes the spread of the movement through the rural South, where the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in 1920.

So why was the FBI investigating them?

I suppose you could ask the same question about Martin Luther King. If you view the Jim Crow system - segregation, disfranchisement, and sharecropping - as an unfortunate leftover of old customs, then it could seem strange that the federal government opposed Black organizations. But if you see the suppression of African American people as central to the US economy and to white American identity it's a different story. Then every struggle for equality starts to look subversive. The federal government was determined to find some sort of crime in Garvey's activity. They managed to charge him with mail fraud because he advertised stock in a steamship line prior to acquiring the ships. He was convicted, imprisoned in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, and then deported to Jamaica, where he had been born.

How did you find all this out?

Much of what we know today about the workings of the UNIA is from the reports filed by James Amos and James Wormley Jones, another Black agent known in the files as "800." This prequel to the FBI's attacks on the Black liberation movement is discussed in Theodore Kornweibel's Seeing Red.

You said something about them looking for white socialists? But only finding other Black radicals? Are they real, too?

I mention other Black radicals of the period. Cyril Briggs and Hubert Harrison were Harlem

Cyril Briggs

socialists who were also closely monitored by both federal and local law enforcement. The best work on Harrison is Jeffrey Perry's biography. I allude in the novel to the African Blood

Hubert Harrison

Brotherhood which was founded by Briggs. The best work I know on that is still in Ted Vincent's 1971 Black Power and the Garvey Movement.

What about that thing you say about FBI agents asking "Which Negroes fired guns?" Why would they ask that question if they were investigating lynchings of Black people?

I think that's a great question. I still think that's a great question today. Look at the cases of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. The police and the press search for a firearm or for some kind of reason for a policeman or a vigilante to have killed a young Black man. Then when that doesn't work, they repeat the same tired and irrelevant trope: "He was no angel," as if extrajudicial execution is justified for somebody who once cut class or smoked a little weed. And they always express worry that marches for justice may "turn" violent, as if no violent act took place in the original murders!


I'm stuck on something else. Why would you have an FBI agent shining J. Edgar Hoover's shoes?

Actually, Director Hoover was notorious for assigning agents to do personal chores for him, totally unrelated to their job descriptions, like cutting the grass and painting the fence at the Seward Square house he inherited from his mom. I have no idea what inappropriate tasks he gave Amos. But it fit Hoover and it fit Amos's experience with Teddy Roosevelt, too: valet/bodyguard/confidential agent.

What about these little sly statements about Hoover that you put in Agent Amos's mouth. How did you put it? "Hoover had a little something in him"?

You might call that the rumor that J. Edgar Hoover had some Black ancestry. White agents in the Bureau were fond of speculating about his appearance. They also knew that every one of them had to undergo a scrupulous background check including their parentage. But Hoover, who was born in Washington, DC in 1895, somehow had no birth certificate until the

J. Edgar Hoover in the 20's

1940's. In the African American community I would characterize the conversation differently. The stories there that Hoover had "a little something in him" came from people whose parents told them that he was a relative, but that they were never to speak of it. I have no evidence that James Amos knew anything about this. But he was fifteen years older than Hoover, his dad was a DC cop, and the city had only about a quarter of a million people when Hoover was born. Only about 75,000 of them were Black. I find it easy to imagine that Amos would know that Hoover's family "crossed." I find it easy to imagine that he would stay quiet about it.

You also say that was not young John Hoover's only secret.

Clint Eastwood dealt with all that in his film "J. Edgar" so it's not really a secret anymore, is it? The movie shows a whole unusually close friendship between Leo DiCaprio as Hoover

and Armie Hammer as Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Hoover and Tolson shared a home, traveled together on vacation and often wore matching outfits. Agency employees

Hoover and Tolson at the beach, 1939

speculated about this relationship, too. I'll just say that, by itself, it is no more of a problem than his racial background. But you put it together with the way he directed the Bureau it becomes a totally different story. You look at a person with African heritage whoconducted endless attacks on Black leaders. You look at a person who lived his whole private life with another man - his direct work subordinate! - who obsessed about other people's "unnatural" sexual proclivities, and who had his agents investigate other peoples' private lives. It paints a picture.

Can you tell us why you chose to write about all this?

I think that's too big a question for the time we have. But I will be here for a while autographing books and I'll be happy to keep talking to whoever wants to stay. Thanks so much for joining us tonight! And I hope you enjoy my book! There are copies to purchase over there on that table.

Hoover and Tolson ringside
Joe Louis-Jack Sharkey fight
Yankee Stadium, 1936