The Duffs of Normal, Illinois
John Walker Duff (1888-1974) was the second of seven children born to Peter C. and Fannie E. (Walker) Duff in Normal, Illinois. Both his parents had been enslaved at birth in Kentucky. According to his obituary in the Normalite, Peter, “industrious and eager to better his circumstances,” had migrated to Normal at the age of 14 and “hired himself to the family of Jesse W. Fell.” Fell sponsored Peter to attend Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) for more than three years and learn the trade of a carpenter. Fannie and her family arrived in 1881; two years later, she and Peter were married in a ceremony described by the Bloomington Pantagraph as “quite a prominent event in colored society,” attended by “a very large concourse of colored and white people from Bloomington and Normal,” including “all the professors and teachers at (Illinois State) Normal (University).” Immediately after the ceremony, the couple moved into a single-story cottage at 107 W. Poplar St. that Peter had constructed himself on lots purchased from Fell. The Duffs would continue to occupy the home until the death of Peter’s last surviving child Julia in 1984.
By the 1890s, Normal’s African American community had swelled to 293 people (9% of the total population), and the Duff family had become solidly middle class. The six surviving children (the youngest, Cordelia, died as an infant)—Alverta, Walker, Janie, Rollie, Julia, and George—all attended integrated Normal schools, with at least three going on to higher education. Around this time, Peter remodeled the family home. A 1993 assessment of the house as a piece of material heritage notes that he “incorporated the latest trends: Queen Anne architectural features; wainscotting; a pass-through between kitchen and dining areas; a rationally-designed kitchen; and a conservatory for house plants.”
In the years following the turn of the century, however, the family’s hard-won prosperity came under threat. Newly formed trade unions often excluded Black workers, pushing skilled craftsmen into lower-paid labor and service industries. Work began to dry up for Peter and he was forced to diversify his skills while looking farther afield for jobs. For years he lived and worked in Chicago, commuting home on the weekends by train. This lack of local opportunities would become a theme for several of the Duff children in later years as the Bloomington-Normal community grew steadily more segregated and well-compensated work for African Americans scarcer.
Thanks to Peter’s hard work and ingenuity, however, in 1909 the Duffs numbered among “the mostly highly respected colored people in the city, as far as the Pantagraph was concerned. Peter, “very active in church work, … worked for all of the leading contractors in Normal and several in Bloomington” while Fannie, a “fine cook,” “strict mother” and “immaculate housekeeper,” tended to her growing family and contributed to community organizations such as the Ladies’ Progressive Club and Second Christian Church of Normal. The Duffs “believed in education” and “wanted their children to become responsible citizens.” In a 1972 interview housed at the McLean County Museum of History, Walker’s younger sister Julia asserted that “she and her siblings were proud to be known as ‘the Peter Duff children.’”
It is worth noting that the Duffs’ relatively privileged position in Normal society may have stemmed partially from colorism. Both Peter and Fannie were sometimes listed as “mulatto” in census records, a term used to connote those of mixed African and European ancestry. Fannie’s mother, herself of blended heritage, likely had at least two children with Marion Green, the son of her enslavers, in the years immediately following emancipation. Due to the “one-drop rule,” the children of such unions—often born of coercion or sexual assault—were legally considered Black but could sometimes pass as white or find better opportunities than those who were darker-skinned. Walker, a slender man who stood 5-9, is described as having a “light brown” complexion on his World War II draft registration form. His sister Alverta’s race was recorded in the census as Black or negro in 1900, 1930, and 1950, mulatto in 1910 and 1920, and white in 1940.
Walker Duff as a young man
While attending Normal High School, Walker developed into a star football player and hurdle jumper. In 1907 he became the state record-holder in track for the 220-yard low hurdles, a title he held until the event was discontinued in the 1920s. The Pantagraph claimed “he was so fast he simply ran away from everyone who tried to tackle him … He could run and he could kick the ball a country block. Once he set out it was a touchdown.” Even decades later the paper was still singing his praises, calling him “one of the greatest athletes in the history of Normal High School” and a “magnificent” hurdler who “cleaned up everything in the state.”
After graduating in 1909, Walker briefly attended ISNU before working for a time as a presser at a “pantatorium,” or cleaner of men’s clothing. For higher paying work, he found that he needed to leave town. Walker moved first to Des Moines, Iowa in 1911, then to Pontiac, Illinois in 1912. While he was away, his younger brother Rollie died of typhoid fever at the age of 19. By 1917 Walker was living in Youngstown, Ohio and working as a waiter at the Ohio Hotel. It was there that he first met Rhea Portia Harris (née Moore).
A native of Cleveland, Rhea had been born to Dorsey E. and Susan J. Moore in 1895. By age 15, she was working as a piano accompanist in a silent film theater. That same year, she married James D. Haddon, a boarder at her parents’ house. A year later they had a son whom they named Petrucio. Rhea divorced James in 1914 and married Robert M. Harris, a waiter, six months later. At some point before 1920 they separated, and Rhea moved into a boarding house in nearby Youngstown where she earned a meager living as a self-employed dressmaker.
World War I
By the time Walker was drafted into the armed forces on August 2, 1918, he and Rhea had already become well-acquainted. They exchanged multiple letters during his deployment overseas. As a private in the U.S. Army, Walker was first stationed at Camp Sherman in Chillicothe, Ohio, with the 16th Depot Brigade. On August 15, he was transferred to Company F of the 802nd Pioneer Infantry. Two weeks later, on September 1, his company debarked from Camp Mills in Long Island, New York, on board the USS Nevasa. After arriving in Le Havre, France, he participated in the final 13 days of the Meuse–Argonne Offensive, the last, largest, and deadliest operation of the American Expeditionary Forces prior to the signing of armistice on November 11, 1918. Writing to his mother from France two months later, Walker recounted that his company had been “lucky, for (they) did not give the Germans a single man” but “certainly gave them a hot time.”
Even after the cessation of hostilities, it took several months to decommission the U.S. military apparatus in France and ship home the over 2 million American troops serving overseas. Several of Walker’s letters and postcards from the spring of 1919 survive in the McLean County Museum of History’s Duff Family Collection, documenting his travels through war-torn France as the 802nd was transferred from Chambery through Dijon to Tours, the hub of American Services of Supply (SOS) activity during the war. By early March, Walker reported he was “making his home at Camp General McAdoo” in Saint-Pierre-des-Corps, “just a short ways out of the city of Tours.” At the time his company had been charged with “road work,” and he thought “it would be some time before (they) finish(ed) them.”
802nd Pioneer Infantry Regiment at Camp Sherman, Chillicothe, Ohio. Courtesy of Ohio History Connection.
The winter of 1918 also coincided with the deadliest months of the Spanish Flu pandemic. In France, Walker reported that “some of the boys over here had it but our company has been very lucky so far, we haven’t lost anyone.” The Duffs in America, however, fared much worse. Julia, at the time a home economics teacher at Booker T. Washington High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, became ill in October 1918. Alverta and Janie traveled to Tulsa to nurse her back to health, but unfortunately Janie caught the flu herself and then, in her weakened state, also contracted typhoid fever. She died on December 4, though Walker did not find out until three months later. In a March 2, letter to his mother and Alverta he expressed a sense of fatalism at her passing, saying “death is something that must come to us all, it is the Lord’s work and not ours,” while also cautioning his mother against worrying too much as “it will only make you sick.” With a sense of relief, he surmised that “the flu did not stop at our home, (though) it made a visit of many homes.”
Walker couldn’t have known, however, that the flu had visited 107 W. Poplar St. a couple of weeks previously, and with it carried off 63-year-old Peter Duff. Upon hearing the news of his father’s death, Walker was reportedly struck “speechless with grief.” “I can hardly believe that father is gone,” he wrote, “yes, it is true this will be a winter that our family can’t forget. Two of our loved ones have departed from this world. Mother, I hardly know what to write. Tell Geo(rge) I’ll write to him in a few days when I get back to myself.” Walker’s next missive attempted to mediate continued tensions at home in the wake of his father’s untimely passing: “Now mother, if you can’t get along with Geo(rge) let him go back to Chicago because that would be better than to have him with you when you can’t get along. He’s young it is true, but make him take care of his self. He told me in the letter he wrote me how he was going to take dad’s place and help you and sister take care of home.” Urging her to take heart, he wrote that he “would like to be home with you just as much as you want me to be there, mother,” and predicted that “most of us will be out of France by the first of July.”
True to his word, Walker left from France on board the USS Nansemond on June 28. The New York Times reported that the trip home was a “smooth run,” and that “the steamship had scarcely cleared port when up through the hatches came syncopation and jazz” produced by members of the 802nd’s Verdun Minstrels led by vaudeville performer Robert “Rockpile” Johnson, “a cymbal clasher of reputed rare attainment.” Walker landed in New York on July 9, and was discharged from Camp Sherman as a colonel with $60 bonus pay on July 16. His discharge papers summed up his character as a soldier in one word: “EXCELLENT.” Walker returned to Normal three days later and resumed his job as a clothing presser for a short time before making his way back to Rhea in Youngstown.
Racism in the trenches and on the homefront
While the historical record can tell us much of Walker’s movements during the war, and even provide some glimpses into his frame of mind, we must rely on more general sources to give us an impression of his overall experiences during the 10 months he spent in the Army. In all likelihood, Walker’s war activities would have been heavily affected by racism both stateside and overseas, starting with his forced enlistment, as “discrimination was the rule throughout the draft processing,” resulting in all-white draft boards across the country placing almost 20% more African Americans in Class I (eligible and liable for service) than whites (Barbeau and Henri, 35). After arriving at Camp Sherman for training, he may then have encountered an atmosphere not unlike a “penal institution … where white soldiers ferociously regulated (Black soldiers’) labor and movements” (Lentz-Smith, 111). While conditions varied from camp to camp, his clothing, provisions, housing, and food would likely have been inferior to that of his white counterparts. As a member of a Pioneer Infantry brigade, he “had more technical skills (than soldiers in other labor battalions) and received some combat training,” but his primary purpose was to provide “cheap manpower” to the war effort as it was the Army’s “belief that the proper function of the black draftee was labor” (Lentz-Smith, 111; Barbeau and Henri, 100).
In France, “black labor units became responsible for digging trenches, removing unexploded shells from fields, clearing disabled equipment and barbed wire, and burying soldiers killed in action” (Barbeau and Henri, 99-100). The 802nd, composed of 1,969 Black soldiers led by 53 white officers, spent most of the war building railroads in the Argonne, though they undoubtedly also received a number of other grueling and undesirable assignments. After the conclusion of the fighting, their function became salvage and road reconstruction.
Even following his discharge, Walker could not be assured of a hero’s welcome in the U.S. as many whites feared that returning African American soldiers would use their military training to demand greater equality. One ISNU alum’s letter home which was published in the Pantagraph echoed sentiments that Black veterans would “needs be deported, or at least segregated” and parroted Southern prejudices so vitriolic that the Bloomington-Normal branch of the NAACP felt compelled to write a rebuttal stating that “such can only serve to keep extant conditions that bear no good for any race or nation and make Democracy a hollow mockery and we therefore hereby respectfully protest against the publication of such letters in the future.” In 1919, white terrorism of African Americans hit a fever pitch as 26 anti-Black race riots erupted in cities across the country. At least 10 Black veterans were lynched that year, some while wearing their uniforms.
The Post-War years
Walker’s sister Julia (also an ISNU alum) bore witness to the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of the Greenwood District, Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street.” Their sister Alverta wrote about Julia’s harrowing experience in The Chicago Defender. Explore Julia and Alverta’s biographies at the McLean County Museum of History.
Walker and Rhea married in June of 1920 and spent three weeks honeymooning in Normal and Chicago. Petrucio Hadden, then 9 years old and staying with Rhea’s parents, subsequently came to live with them, changing his name to Peter (“Pete”) Edward Duff. By 1923 the family had moved to Pittsburgh, where Walker assumed the position of superintendent of services at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club, and Rhea engaged in community organizing through groups such as the Lucy Stone Civic League, Urban League, and Non-Pareil Club. Sometime between 1927 and 1930 the family relocated again to Rhea’s hometown of Cleveland, and Walker took a position as a waiter at the historic Hotel Cleveland, eventually achieving the rank of captain and headwaiter.
As a young teen, Rhea’s son, then going by Edward, worked as a busboy alongside Walker. He graduated from Cleveland’s East High School in 1929, then enrolled in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was active in the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. Edward earned a bachelor’s degree from that institution in 1935, thereafter returning to his hometown to become a social worker with Cleveland’s Department of Welfare. In 1941, he married Doris Weaver, a teacher, with whom he would go on to have three children. The following year he joined the Cleveland Police Department, where he spent the remainder of his career. At the time of his premature death in 1970 he had served the department for 28 years, eight as a homicide detective and 20 as a sergeant in the fifth district vice squad.
Walker, meanwhile, continued working at the Hotel Cleveland until the advent of World War II, whereupon he took a job at Kirtland Country Club, a position he would hold until his retirement 25 years later. As retirees, he and Rhea lived in Springbrook Apartments, a public housing high rise, and participated in programming through the Ernest J. Bohn Center. Walker died on September 26, 1974, at the age of 86. Rhea lived another 13 years, dying in 1987.
Walker’s story is one of 681 ISNU affiliates’ profiled in Milner Library’s newly-digitized World War I Illinois State Normal Service Records.
Other articles in this series include:
