On the same evening in Boston, Louis Fraina and the Lettish Workingman’s Society applied for a parade permit to march from the Dudley Square Opera House to Franklin Park in recognition of May Day.

The application for a permit was denied.

RED SUMMER

CHAPTER twenty-six

May Day, Luther had breakfast at Solomon’s Diner before he went to work at the Coughlins’. He left at five-thirty and got as far as Columbus Square before Lieutenant McKenna’s black Hudson detached itself from a curb across the street and did a slow U-turn in front of him. He didn’t feel surprised. He didn’t feel alarmed. He didn’t feel much of anything really.

Luther had read the Standard at the Solomon’s counter, his eyes immediately drawn to the headline—“Reds Plot May Day Assassinations.” He ate his eggs and read about the thirty-four bombs discovered in the U.S. mail. The list of targets was posted in full on the second page of the paper, and Luther, no fan of white judges or white bureaucrats, still felt ice chips flow through his blood. This was followed by a jolt of patriotic fury, the likes of which he’d never suspected could live in his soul for a country that had never treated his people with any welcome or justice. And yet he pictured these Reds, most of them aliens with accents as thick as their mustaches, willing to do violence and wreckage to his country, and he wanted to join any mob that was going to smash them through the teeth, wanted to say to someone, anyone: Just give me a rifle.

According to the paper, the Reds were planning a day of national revolt, and the thirty-four bombs that had been intercepted suggested a hundred more that could be out there primed to explode. In the past week, leaflets had been pasted to lamp poles across the city, all of which bore the same words:

Go ahead. Deport us. You senile fossils ruling the United States will see red! The storm is within and very soon will leap and crash and annihilate you in blood and fire. We will dynamite you!

In yesterday’s Traveler, even before news of the thirty-four bombs leaked out, an article had listed some of the recent, inflammatory comments of American subversives, including Jack Reed’s call for “the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism through a proletarian dictatorship” and Emma Goldman’s anticonscription speech last year, in which she’d urged all workers to “Follow Russia’s lead.”

Follow Russia’s lead? Luther thought: You love Russia so much, fucking move there. And take your bombs and your onion-soup breath with you. For a few, strangely joyous hours, Luther didn’t feel like a colored man, didn’t even feel there was such a thing as color, only one thing above all others: He was an American.

That changed, of course, as soon as he saw McKenna. The large man stepped out of his Hudson and smiled. He held up a copy of the Standard and said, “You seen it?”