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      That is why the black men on the wharf were better men than the white. You could be lynched for saying that. Be a thief; be a pimp or a rotter; but don’t be a nigger-lover. Lower than that no man can sink: to be a nigger-lover! Yet after talking for six months to the white men on the wharf I would sicken at the sight of some of them. Their minds made you think of puddles of green mold. The old men where fossils. The young men were dance-hall sheiks. All of them cheap and small; and the older they got, the fussier they got. Fussy little souls, puttering around with bills of lading; running up a fever over two ham burnt-cork comedians called Amos and Andy (for the real Negro wit everywhere about them they had no ear); getting fleeced day after day by race-track crooks.

ex Paul Peters, “Dockwallopers,” in The American Mercury : 20:79 (July 1930) : 319-326 (321)
U California copy/scan (one of several via hathitrust) : link
 

Paul Peters was the pseudonym of Harbor Allen.

His “radical reportage and theater” is discussed in Mark Pittenger, Class Unknown : Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present (NYU Press, 2012), especially pp 94-102 and the notes thereto : link (accessed 20260625)

see also
Sender Garlin, “Paul Peters, Revolutionary Playwright — An Interview” in Daily Worker, in two parts, May 15 and 16, 1934)
Part I : Years in Industry Gave Author an Insight into Workers’ Struggles
via marxists.org : link   (pdf)
Part II : “When Negro, White United in Struggle”
Yesterday Paul Peters described his five years in industry and the experience which went into the making of Stevedore, now playing at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York. Today Peters continues the story of labor battles, in which Negro and white workers joined hands in struggle.
via marxists.org : link   (pdf)
 

other writings by —

1. “Let Me Be Honest for a Day.”
   Southwest Review 12:1 (October 1926) : 27
   U California copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link

   transcription —

   Let me be honest for a day.
   Let me say the things I may not say.
    
   Let me rail at idols I know are brass ;
   I shall call them gold when the clergy pass.
    
   Let me shake the pillars of rotting wood ;
   They will stand and rot where they’ve always stood.
    
   There is time enough to grow old and wise,
   To yawn at truth and blink at lies.
    
   Tomorrow I’ll spend in the market place,
   Selling cracked pots with a pious face.
    
   But today I am young and mad for a fray :
   Let me be honest for a day.

   “Harbor Allen, although only twenty-five years old, is a product of four universities, including Chiago and Munich, he says. He is teaching in a Wisconsin college.”

2. “I’m Hunting for a Job.”
   Harper’s Monthly Magazine 158 (March 1929) : 462-469
   U Michigan copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
   another copy/scan (via archive.org) : link
    

25 June 2026