Author Archives: fultonk
Did MLK Improvise in the ‘Dream’ Speech?
Five Score and 50 Years Ago …
This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued at the midpoint of the American Civil War, and the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, a moment that marked the spiritual summit of the civil rights movement. In place and time, they are joined at the Lincoln Memorial on the Mall in Washington, the nation’s shrine to the president who signed the proclamation declaring the slaves of the Confederate states free and the King who, 100 later, spoke to the disappointments and dreams of their descendants. Today, the words of both men — authors of arguably the two greatest speeches in American history, the Gettysburg Address and the “I Have a Dream” speech (pdf) — are etched in stone and in memory at the Lincoln and King Memorials in Washington.
Lincoln Memorial, Aug. 28, 1963 (Public Domain)
No one understood the poetry of their parallel moments better than the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself, who, speaking in front of Daniel Chester French’s iconic seated Lincoln statue, began his speech, “Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation … But 100 hundred years later the Negro still is not free.” In this way, Dr. King framed Abraham Lincoln as the Great Emancipator and made freedom — “at last” — the ideal by which we measure progress in our country.
So effective was King in tying the memory of Lincoln to the cause of civil rights that most of us now see the Lincoln Memorial as the obvious site, the holiest of holy places, where history and racial progress meet. So, it was — it had to be — the perfect backdrop for the ultimate barrier breaker, Barack Obama, to stand on the eve of his inauguration in 2009. Yet, as we shall see, there was nothing inevitable about the choice of the Lincoln Memorial as the logical place for racial protests throughout the early 20th century, or as the staging ground for Dr. King’s most memorable speech.
Last week, we honored Bayard Rustin, the architect of the march; today, we examine the moment that remains most closely associated with it. But first, it’s important that we all understand a bit of the complicated background about the setting …
1922: A Dedication or an Opening?
The NAACP was founded in Springfield, Ill., Feb. 12, 1909, the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Yet, at the opening of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington May 30, 1922, security guards tried to “Jim Crow” black guests into a separate section from whites, despite the presence of a black orator onstage, the president of Tuskegee Institute, Robert Russa Moton, who, in addition to serving on numerous national boards, published an annual list of blacks lynched in the United States. (Sources for this last fact include the Afro-American newspaper from June 2, 1922, and Moton’s New York Times obituary from June 1, 1940.)
The title of Moton’s speech, “The Negro’s Debt to Lincoln,” might have been the other way around (given the role of black soldiers in the Civil War), but Moton agreed to tone down his remarks to placate the Memorial Commission, as Adam Fairclough writes in his article “Civil Rights and the Lincoln Memorial.” Even then, Moton managed to slip in his view of Lincoln’s ambivalence about emancipation: “The claim of greatness for Abraham Lincoln lies in this, that amid doubt and distrust, against the counsel of chosen advisers, in the hour of the nation’s utter peril, he put his trust in God and spoke the word that gave freedom to a race.”
No mainstream newspaper covered the attempt to segregate black guests at the dedication or that 21 guests apparently stormed out. (I checked ProQuest for these facts after reading other valuable historical accounts by Scott Sandage and Christopher Thomas.) They did cover President Warren G. Harding’s keynote address, in which he sanitized the memorial as a symbol of a restored Union by telling the estimated 75,000 gathered, “Halting human slavery as [Lincoln] did, he doubtless believed in its ultimate abolition through the developing conscience of the American people, but he would have been the last man in the Republic to resort to arms to effect its abolition.”
For this reason, at least one black newspaper, the Chicago Defender, on June 10, 1922, refused to accept that the Lincoln Memorial had been dedicated in 1922. “With song, prayer, bold and truthful speech,” its editor prophetically declared, “later on let us dedicate that temple thus far only opened.”
The Rededication
African Americans, beginning with members of the AME Zion Church, started gathering at the Lincoln Memorial as early as 1926, as a Washington Post account on August 5, 1926, indicates. And on April 9, 1939 (Easter Sunday and the 74th anniversary of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox), the black contralto Marian Anderson fulfilled the Chicago Defender’s prophecy by giving a performance (mp3) of patriotic hymns, opera selections and Negro spirituals before a crowd of 100,000.
Martin Luther King Jr. was only 10 when Marian Anderson gave her concert. At 15, he cited her in his prize-winning speech at Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School: “When the words of ‘America’ and ‘Nobody Knows De Trouble I Seen’ rang out over that great gathering, there was a hush on the sea of uplifted faces, black and white, and a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity. That was a touching tribute, but Miss Anderson may not as yet spend the night in any good hotel in America.” Young Martin was right — the night of her concert, Marian Anderson stayed at the home of former Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot (for a terrific account of her life and impact, see Raymond Arsenault’s book, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert that Awakened America).
Sixteen years later, by then-Dr. King would lead a bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., that would set him on a path toward immortality and a destiny not dissimilar to the one occupied by the slain president who would be seated behind him (in stone) before a crowd of 200,000-plus marchers gathered in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963.
Writing the Speech (Minus ‘The Dream’)
As Taylor Branch notes in his definitive narrative, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, Dr. King began working in earnest on his speech with a small group of advisers in the lobby of the Willard Hotel the night before the march, and the resulting draft was “a mixture of truncated oratory and fresh composition” that was “politically sound but far from historic.” (To learn more, see King adviser Clarence B. Jones’ account in the Washington Post).
Martin Luther King Jr. addressing the audience at the March on Washington (Wikimedia Commons)
When King took the stage the following day, the audience had no knowledge of the behind-the-scenes wrangling we read about last week in the column about Rustin or that the march’s D.C. coordinator, Walter Fauntroy (future D.C. congressman), had to ring up the Justice Department to send in the Army Signal Corps to repair the expensive sound system sabotaged the day before. Imagine if they hadn’t come! (For more, see Charles Euchner’s recent book, Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington.)
What the audience did know was that the August heat was rapidly approaching unbearable and the cavalcade of speeches, whatever their individual merits, was beginning to weary them. Still, the crowd anxiously anticipated the march’s climax, the appearance of Dr. King, whom A. Philip Randolph introduced as “the moral leader of our nation … Dr. Martin Luther King, J-R.” King approached the podium keenly aware that he was addressing not only the massive crowd gathered before him at the Lincoln Memorial, but also the millions more watching live on TV, including President Kennedy and his brother, Robert.
Working Off the Script
Adam Fairclough has pointed out that part of the power of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech came from the fact that he “framed this vision entirely within the hallowed symbols of Americanism: the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation and the ‘American Dream.’ ” But when he started talking that day, he had not planned to discuss any dreams.
After opening with his allusion to Lincoln and “the Negro … still not free,” King turned to the novel metaphor of “the promissory note” — that the Declaration of Independence was a check of sorts written to all Americans of all races as a guarantee of their rights, but that so far, for “the Negro people,” it had been “a bad check … marked ‘insufficient funds.’ ”
In the following sections of the speech, King responded to critics across the political spectrum, including those who cautioned moderation (“gradualism,” he named it) and those who had begun calling for armed militancy and racial separation. King stressed the need for action “in the fierce urgency of now” and argued for a nonviolent, biracial approach, reminding those demanding more radical action that “The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny … We cannot walk alone.” King then encouraged Americans to continue fighting for right over might, as “we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
A Speech Becomes a Sermon
Not long after delivering that now-famous line, however, King changed course. Looking at his prepared speech, he balked when he reached this mouthful of a sentence: “And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction.” Instead, he transformed his speech into a sermon. He instructed the audience to “Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama … South Carolina … Georgia … Louisiana … to the slums and ghettos of our Northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.”
King speechwriter Clarence Jones realized what was happening when he saw King “push the text of his prepared remarks to one side,” he wrote in the Washington Post in 2011. “I leaned over and said to the person next to me, ‘These people out there today don’t know it yet, but they’re about ready to go to church.’ ” Onstage that day, as Branch’s Parting the Waters quotes, the singer Mahalia Jackson, who had performed earlier, reportedly kept saying to King, as he spoke, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.” King never said if he heard her or not, but Julian Bond recently told me it would have been impossible not to, given their proximity on the stage and the resonance of Jackson’s powerful voice.
In any case, her dream was fulfilled when King continued, “Even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed.” In classic black preacher oratorical fashion, King then turned to repetition, outlining the specifics of his dream, which emphasized interracial cooperation across the South. Poignantly, he exclaimed, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Soon the speech reached its dramatic climax. King quoted the first verse of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (the song Marian Anderson had opened with at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939; she was also there to sing the national anthem in 1963) and commanded, “Let freedom ring” in “New Hampshire … New York … Pennsylvania … Colorado,” and “California,” but also “from Stone Mountain of Georgia … from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee … from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside. Let freedom ring … ”
He saved his most dramatic exhortations for last: “When we allow freedom to ring — when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentile, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and to sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God, Almighty, we are free at last,’ ” a reference to this song. There is no better way to do justice to the delivery and effect of Dr. King’s speech upon his audience both at the memorial and in living rooms across America than to read (pdf),watch and listen.
Three months later, King explained his decision to go off-script: “I started out reading the speech … just all of a sudden — the audience response was wonderful that day — and all of a sudden this thing came to me that I have used — I’d used it many times before, that thing about ‘I have a dream’ — and I just felt that I wanted to use it here” (quoted in David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference). As inspiring as those speeches were, especially the version of the “Dream” speech he delivered in Detroit just two months before, settings matter, as Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford, was quoted as saying in the Detroit Free Press June 22 of this year. Musical as Motown was, it couldn’t compete with “the symbolic space” of the Lincoln Memorial (though Berry Gordy officially released 45s of the Detroit speech on the same day as the March on Washington!).
Immediate Reactions
Despite its well-earned current status as one of the greatest speeches in American history, it was not universally lauded the following day. While the New York Times published a story called “‘I Have a Dream …’ Peroration by Dr. King Sums Up a Day the Capital Will Remember,” the Washington Post did not even mention King’s speech in its coverage of the march, according to Branch in Parting the Waters.
At the same time, radical activists on King’s left criticized the speech as a farce. “Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and ‘I Have a Dream’ speeches?” Malcolm X wrote in his autobiography. All this, he added, while “the black masses in America were — and still are — having a nightmare.”
Nevertheless, King’s speech had its share of admirers, including the best-selling black writer at the time, James Baldwin, who later wrote, “That day, for a moment, it almost seemed that we stood on a height, and could see our inheritance; perhaps we could make the kingdom real, perhaps the beloved community would not forever remain that dream one dreamed in agony.”
Politicizing the Dream
The long-term importance of the march and the speech cannot be overstated. Look no further than the explosion of marches on Washington that have occurred in the years since. That such a wide variety of people and organizations have riffed upon the March on Washington by attempting to restage it is a testament to what King, Randolph and Rustin, John Lewis and the other leaders of the march achieved 50 years ago. It’s such a testament that the singular focus on King’s climactic speech (really, a few sound bites) has fostered an overly simple portrait of King himself. As Vincent Harding argues in “The Road to Redemption,” “Brother Martin spent a fair amount of time in jail, but his worst imprisonment may be how his own nation has frozen him in that moment in 1963.”
The freeze began taking hold after King’s assassination in 1968, Drew Hansen explains in his book The Dream: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. Anxious that inner-city neighborhoods might burn, “politicians and the media [wanted] to influence the perceived direction of black protest” away from militancy and back toward the “good” civil rights movement of peaceful protest and visions of “all of God’s children … able” (and wanting) “to join hands and sing.”
The emphasis on the “dream” part of the speech especially obscures King’s later agenda. As Julian Bond once cautioned, most commemorations “focus almost entirely on Martin Luther King the dreamer, and not on Martin King the antiwar activist, not on Martin King the challenger of the economic order, not on Martin King the opponent of apartheid, not on the complete Martin Luther King.”
The speech also is too easily leveraged by political actors who surely would not have agreed with King’s message during the 1960s. For example, many opponents of affirmative action believe that the speech supports their argument; as Ronald Reagan said in 1986, “We are committed to a society in which all men and women have equal opportunities to succeed, and so we oppose the use of quotas. We want a colorblind society that, in the words of Dr. King, judges people not on ‘the color of their skin but by the content of their character’.” The estate of Martin Luther King even threatened to sue a group of supporters of Proposition 209, a 1996 California anti-affirmative action bill, when it used King’s speech in its advertisements.
The Dream at 50
We might take the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s dream not only to focus on the progress that has been made since 1963 but also to think more about his larger goals and aspirations to fix problems even more vexing than de jure segregation, problems such as wealth discrepancies between blacks and whites. You can begin by reading the text of the speech itself (pdf), and then turn to his collected writings. You might also make time to visit the Lincoln and King memorials in Washington and marvel at how Dr. King turned Robert Russa Moton’s 1922 “dedication” speech, “The Negro’s Debt to Lincoln,” into “The Nation’s Debt to the Negro,” a promissory note that remains unpaid for so many, while inspiring other minority groups to demand payment on theirs. It is a never-ending story of prophecy and protest, the noblest of our American traditions. It is also a stirring example of how African Americans reclaimed the Lincoln Memorial from Jim Crow and made it the ultimate American symbolic space for calls to redress grievances and effect progressive change in a truly democratic society.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Who Designed the March on Washington?
If you had been a bus captain en route to the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, you would have known who its organizing genius was, and you wouldn’t have been surprised to see his picture on the cover of Life magazine a week later. Yet of all the leaders of the civil rights movement, Bayard Rustin lived and worked in the deepest shadows, not because he was a closeted gay man, but because he wasn’t trying to hide who he was. That, combined with his former ties to the Community Party, was considered to be a liability.
Still, whatever his detractors said, there would always be that perfect day of the march, that beautiful, concentrated expression of Rustin’s decades of commitment to vociferous, but always nonviolent, protest. It was, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, the “greatest demonstration for freedom” in American history. And it is why, on this 50th anniversary, I ask that if you teach your children one new name from the heroes of black history, please let it be Bayard Rustin.
No Lonelier Man
There was no lonelier man in Washington, D.C., at 5:30 a.m. August 28, 1963, than Rustin. He had predicted a crowd of 100,000 marchers, and with only four and a half hours to go before the meet-up, he had his doubts. Would everything he had been working toward pan out? Would the coalition hang together? Would the march remain peaceful, thus defying the 4,000 troops President John F. Kennedy had ready in the suburbs, as Taylor Branch reminds us in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63?
Twenty-two years earlier, A. Phillip Randolph and Rustin had come very close to delivering on their plans for a first march as a way to pressure President Franklin Roosevelt into opening defense-industry hiring to blacks. Roosevelt was so alarmed by the specter of violence and the negative publicity during the “war against fascism” that a deal was reached before the march could even begin. Now, with the 1963 march about to begin, Rustin was forced to wonder, could they really pull this off? And would its impact help to achieve the goals of the movement? In a matter of hours, he would have his answers.
His Early Struggles
Bayard Taylor Rustin was born in West Chester, Pa., March 17, 1912. He had no relationship with his father, and his 16-year-old mother, Florence, was so young he thought she was his sister. From his grandparents, Janifer and Julia Rustin, he took his Quaker “values,” which, in his words, “were based on the concept of a single human family and the belief that all members of that family are equal,” according to Jervis Anderson in Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen.
As a teenager, Rustin wrote poems, played left tackle on the high school football team and, according to lore, staged an impromptu sit-in at a restaurant that would serve his white teammates but not him. When Rustin told his grandmother he preferred the company of young men to girls, she simply said, “I suppose that’s what you need to do.”
In 1937, Rustin moved to New York City after bouncing between Wilberforce University and Cheney State Teachers College. Enrolling at City College, he devoted himself to singing, performing with the Josh White Quartet and in the musical John Henry with Paul Robeson. He also joined the Young Communist League. Though he soon quit the party after it ordered him to cease protesting racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces, he was already on the radar of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI.
Disappointed when the 1941 March on Washington was called off, Rustin joined the pacifist Rev. A.J. Muste’s Fellowship of Reconciliation, and when FOR members in Chicago launched the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942, Rustin traveled around the country speaking out. Two years later, he was arrested for failing to appear before his draft board and refusing alternative service as a conscientious objector. Sentenced to three years, he ended up serving 26 months, angering authorities with his desegregation protests and open homosexuality to the point they transferred him to a higher-security prison.
Once released, Rustin embarked on CORE’s 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an early version of the Freedom Rides, to test the Supreme Court’s ruling in Morgan v. Virginia (1946) that any state forcing segregation on buses crossing state lines would be in violation of the Commerce Clause. It was a noble attempt, but Rustin soon found himself on a chain gang in North Carolina.
As part of his deepening commitment to nonviolent protest, Rustin traveled to India in 1948 to attend a world pacifist conference. Mahatma Gandhi had been assassinated earlier that year, but his teachings touched Rustin in profound ways. “We need in every community a group of angelic troublemakers,” he wrote after returning to the States. “The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn”
Before then, however, was shame. In January 1953, Rustin, after delivering a speech in Pasadena, Calif., was arrested on “lewd conduct” and “vagrancy” charges, allegedly for a sexual act involving two white men in an automobile. With the FBI’s file on Rustin expanding, FOR demanded his resignation. That left Rustin to conclude, “I know now that for me sex must be sublimated if I am to live with myself and in this world longer,” according to Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise.
Enter (and Exit) Dr. King
In 1956, on the advice of labor leader and activist A. Philip Randolph, Rustin traveled to Alabama to lend support to Dr. King, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While remaining out of the spotlight, Rustin played a critical role in introducing King to Gandhi’s teachings while writing publicity materials and organizing carpools. After helping King organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1956-1957, Rustin demonstrated against the French government’s nuclear test program in North Africa. As he once said, so simply and clear, “I want no human being to die” (as quoted in the documentary film, Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin).
Rustin experienced one of the lowest points in his career in 1960, and the author of this crisis wasn’t J. Edgar Hoover; it was another black leader. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York, angry that Rustin and King were planning a march outside the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, warned King that if he did not drop Rustin, Powell would tell the press King and Rustin were gay lovers. Regardless of the fact that Powell had concocted the charge for his own malicious reasons, King, in one of his weaker moments, called off the march and put distance between himself and Rustin, who reluctantly resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was led by King. For that King “lost much moral credit … in the eyes of the young,” the writer James Baldwin wrote in Harper’s magazine. Fortunately for us, Rustin put the movement ahead of this vicious personal slight.
In front of 170 W 130 St., March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, Deputy Director, and Cleveland Robinson, Chairman of Administrative Committee (left to right). World Telegram & Sun photo by O. Fernandez. (Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division)
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The idea for the 1963 march again came from A. Philip Randolph, who wondered if younger activists were giving short shrift to economic issues as they pushed for desegregation in the South. In 1962, he recruited Rustin, and the two began making plans, this time to commemorate the centennial of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation.
“Birmingham changed everything,” John D’Emilio writes in his 2003 biography, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin. In May 1963, the nation gasped as Birmingham police under the notorious commissioner Bull Connor turned fire-hoses and attack dogs on children. The fallout forced the Kennedy administration to jump-start action on a civil rights bill, and suddenly, D’Emilio explains, “the outlook for a march on Washington” shifted. “King, who had not shown much interest in the earlier overtures from Rustin and Randolph, began to talk excitedly about a national mobilization, as if the idea were brand new.”
Rustin traveled to Alabama to meet with King and expanded the march’s focus to “Jobs and Freedom.” From the march’s headquarters in New York, he looked forward to leading the planning coalition of the “Big Six” civil rights organizations: SNCC, CORE, SCLC, the National Urban League, the NAACP and Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. But Rustin’s past again came into play when Roy Wilkins of the NAACP refused to allow Rustin to be the front man. “This march is of such importance that we must not put a person of his liabilities at the head,” Wilkins said of Rustin, according to D’Emilio. As a result, Randolph agreed to serve as the march’s director with Rustin as his deputy.
Their challenges were manifold: Unite feuding civil rights leaders, fend off opposition from Southern segregationists who opposed civil rights fend off opposition from Northern liberals who advocated a more cautious approach and figure out the practical logistics of the demonstration itself. On the last point, Rustin later said, “We planned out precisely the number of toilets that would be needed for a quarter of a million people … how many doctors, how many first aid stations, what people should bring with them to eat in their lunches,” according to D’Emilio.
The whole time Rustin feared interference from the Washington police and the FBI; it came from the Senate floor three weeks before kickoff when Strom Thurmond of South Carolina attacked Rustin personally. It didn’t matter that Thurmond was hiding a daughter he had fathered with an African-American woman who was a maid; Rustin was a gay ex-communist and, in 1963, reading from his FBI file made political hay.
Tensions in every direction persisted. John Lewis, one of the leaders of SNCC (now a longstanding congressman from Georgia) had prepared a militant speech for the event, reading in part, “The time will come when we will not confine our marching in Washington. We will march through the South, through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own ‘scorched earth’ policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground — nonviolently.” To appease other speakers and refrain from alienating the Kennedy administration, Rustin and Randolph had to convince Lewis to tamp it down. The quarrel continued up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Before then, the marchers had to know how to get there — which brings us back to our bus captains. Imagine being one, scrambling over last-minute details, reading the now famous Organizing Manual No. 2 (pdf) that Rustin and his team distributed from New York. In 12 pages, it ran the gamut from the practical to the philosophical to the political: “Who is sponsoring the March; Why We March; Our Demands; How Our Demands Will be Presented in Congress; Who Will March; What Are Our Immediate Tasks; How Do I Get to Washington; The Schedule in Washington; How Do We Leave Washington; Signs and Banners; Food, Health and Sanitation Facilities; Children and Overnight Accommodation; Captains; Marshals; Transportation Report Form.”
In the section “What We Demand,” Rustin and his team were concrete in laying out the march’s 10 goals. Want to teach your children what the march was all about? It’s in that list.
The march itself, of course, turned out to be a tremendous success, including those glorious moments when the official estimate of 200,000 was announced (actually, there was as many as 300,000, says Life.com); when Marian and Mahalia sang; when Mrs. Medgar Evers paid tribute to “Negro Women Freedom Fighters”; when John Lewis and Dr. King spoke; and when Bayard Rustin read the march’s demands. And perhaps the most poignant statement of the power of nonviolence was that there were only four arrests, Taylor Branch writes in The King Years, all of them of white people.
Afterward, the leaders of the Big Six met with President Kennedy at the White House. Rustin remained out of sight, though he and Randolph did make it onto the cover of Life Sept. 6. Eight days later, four young girls went to their deaths in the Birmingham church bombing; in November, President Kennedy was gunned down, leaving President Lyndon Johnson to shuttle the Civil Rights Act through Congress, signing it in 1964, the same year Dr. King received the Nobel Prize, with Rustin planning the logistics of his trip to Oslo. It was, to say the least, history at its most dramatic, shocking — and unpredictable — at every turn.
A Changing Movement
While launching the A. Philip Randolph Institute in 1964, Rustin found himself embroiled in Democratic politics at the 1964 convention in Atlantic City, where he cautioned delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to back down when President Johnson made a deal to seat the state’s conservative wing. Rustin tried articulating his views in a 1965 essay in Harper’s magazine called “From Protest to Politics,” but the damage was done. “You’re a traitor, Bayard!” Mandy Samstein of the SNCC had shouted at the convention, according to Taylor Branch in The King Years.
As memories of the march faded and the movement entered its more militant phase, Rustin’s coziness with the Democratic Party power structure (he was even spotted riding in Hubert Humphrey’s limousine) angered proponents of black power. He also alienated antiwar activists when he failed to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Vietnam and cautioned Dr. King against speaking out in his famous speech attacking the war delivered at Riverside Church. Increasingly, it seemed, Rustin took (or refrained from taking) positions that put him at odds with a movement he had once so fundamentally helped to shape.
International Activism and Gay Rights
Despite tensions with other black activists, Rustin remained engaged in the struggle for justice. When Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., Rustin participated in the memorial march and demanded economic justice for sanitation workers. At the same time, he expanded his focus on international causes, including offering support to Israel, promoting free elections in Central America and Africa and aiding refugees as vice chairman of the International Rescue Committee.
During the 1980s, Rustin also opened up publicly about the sexuality he had “sublimated” since the 1950s. (This coincided with his falling in love with Walter Naegle, now serving as executor and archivist of Rustin’s estate.) In a 1987 interview with the Village Voice, Rustin said, “I think the gay community has a moral obligation … to do whatever is possible to encourage more and more gays to come out of the closet.” For his part, he worked to bring the AIDS crisis to the attention of the NAACP, once predicting, “Twenty-five, 30 years ago, the barometer of human rights in the United States were black people. That is no longer true. The barometer for judging the character of people in regard to human rights is now those who consider themselves gay, homosexual, lesbian.”
Death and Legacy
Bayard Rustin died on August 24, 1987, just four days shy of the march’s 24th anniversary. Since then, he has been the subject of several biographies by Jervis Anderson, Daniel Levine, John D’Emilio and Jerald Podar. Thankfully, we also now have the collection of his writings edited by Devon Carbado and Donald Weise. Each, in addition to the documentary Brother Outsider from producers Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, proved valuable in my research. I myself have been thinking about Rustin for more than 40 years, including in a piece I wrote for the New Yorker exploring the controversy over a gay rights demonstration planned for what was then the 30th anniversary of the march in 1993.
It is noteworthy that it was President Kennedy who made awarding the Medal of Freedom a presidential privilege in February 1963, the same year as the march. Later this year, Barack Obama, the president whose elections the march made possible — and the first to support publicly gay marriage — will make things right by awarding it to Rustin. “A Change Is Gonna Come,” Sam Cooke sang for the first time in a recording studio in 1963. I, like many, am glad that change is now coming for Rustin in 2013, not only because it is the march’s golden anniversary but because it is also the year the Supreme Court ended discrimination against gay couples seeking federal benefits while protecting their right to marry in California, the very state where in 1953 Rustin’s fate was sealed as the black leader destined to be “closeted” behind the scenes.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
What Was the Civil Rights Movement?
A silly question, right? I thought so, too, until I learned that in the year 2010, only 2 percent of 12th graders received full credit in identifying the following quote on the National Assessment of Educational Progress U.S. History Exam: ” … Separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” The 12,000 students tested didn’t need to come up with the name Brown v. Board of Education, mind you — just know it had something to do with 1.) segregation 2.) in the nation’s schools — yet a stunning 73 percent either skipped it or received an “inappropriate” score.
“What’s going on?” I asked myself, thinking about the refrain of Marvin Gaye’s canonical song that captured so brilliantly the sense of frustration and angst that so many of us felt in those years following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the Black Panthers and the Cultural Nationalists seemed to be doing their best to annihilate each other, while the FBI was doing its best to annihilate them both!
Brown v. Board of Education was not only a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case for black people; it’s arguably the most important case in American legal history and one that, more than any other, affected all Americans by making de jure segregation illegal, and integration the goal of our ever more multicultural society.
Like I said, I had no idea (or had I wished it away?), until Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, reminded an audience on Martha’s Vineyard two weeks ago of a report that the Southern Poverty Law Center had issued in 2011. Its title: Teaching the Movement: The State of Civil Rights Education in the United States Since 2011. I can boil its 108 pages of solid facts down to one sentence: The situation is “dismal.” The American school system is inexcusably treating the civil rights movement, essentially, as if it never happened, part of a collective, general amnesia about African-American history as a whole. And we cannot allow this to continue.
This month, countless Americans will gather in front of televisions and computer screens across the land — or even go to the Mall — to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the emotional highpoint of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington. Yet as the SPLC’s report reveals, where it really matters, where it counts most, in our nation’s public schools, far too many educators (and curriculum writers) view the movement “mainly as African-American or regional history.” In other words, while we may pause — some of us even weep — in claiming the “I Have a Dream” speech (pdf) Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963 as our speech, one of the greatest in our history, what’s really going on is that those overseeing the education of the next generation of dreamers conceive of the civil rights movement as niche history. They see it as being for and about black people, who, for the most part, reside in cities and/or in the South. As some of them might say: Aren’t MLK Day and Black History Month enough?
Why are the schools so important in preserving the historical memory of crucial events in black history, such as the march? Because it is in our schools that we shape, almost unconsciously, the shared sense of identity that makes us all citizens of a common republic. It is in the schools, from kindergarten on, that students imbibe the stories that the country tells itself about itself, about its history, its purpose, its raison d’être.
Want a meaningful “conversation about race”? That conversation, to be effective and to last, to become part of the fabric of the national American narrative, must start in elementary school, and continue all the way through graduation from high school. It must do this in the same way that the story of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims, the Puritans, the “City Upon a Hill” and the key, shaping stories and myths about ourselves that each American shares at the deepest level about what America is, was and continues to mean, was formulated for us through the school curriculum — from classroom content to participation in rituals such as reciting daily the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.” Unless our story becomes part and parcel of the common content of these rituals and teaching lessons, the stories of black ancestors’ sacrifices and accomplishments will not become part of the national narrative, not part of that “more perfect union.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Report
Sensing the urgency of this crisis, the SPLC took a three-step approach in reviewing all 50 states’ standards for the school year 2011-2012. Through its Teaching Tolerance project, it established a benchmark for the “generally accepted core knowledge” any student should have about the civil rights movement, based on leading textbooks and historians. It scored each state with a letter grade, A through F. And it compared them. Let’s just say that the students who missed the Brown quote in 2010 weren’t alone.
While I hope all concerned will read the report’s thorough breakdown (especially of your state), here’s a top view: A whopping 35 states received an F grade, which, according to the report, means they cover “less than 20 percent — or, in many cases none — of the recommended content.” In fact, 16 states require nothing “at all.” Check out the report (pdf) to see which ones.
As of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. It gets better, though, right? Actually, only three states in the report earned an A grade — Alabama (70 percent), New York (65 percent) and Florida (64 percent). Three other states, Georgia, Illinois and South Carolina, received B’s. And there were six C’s handed out (Lousiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia) and three D’s (Arizona, Arkansas, Massachusetts), which was also the score Washington, D.C., the site of the March, received. Want an even bigger shock? Nine out of the 12 highest scorers were former Confederate states; the other three, Illinois, New York and Maryland, have large black populations.
Going behind the numbers, we learn that, as of 2011-2012, only 19 states specifically require teaching Brown v. Board of Education, while 18 states require coverage of MLK; 12, Rosa Parks; 11, the March on Washington; and six, Jim Crow segregation policies. Only one, Arkansas, covers one of the chief obstacles to the civil rights movement: the Ku Klux Klan. Yet open up a recent American newspaper and you’ll see that some states are actually clamoring for change in the opposite direction. In 2010, according to the New York Times, the Texas Board of Education voted in edits to its history textbooks that promoted a decidedly more Christian view of the nation’s founders (none of whom owned slaves, right?) while playing up the Black Panthers’ “violent philosophy” and emphasizing Republicans’ role in voting for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If it gets its way, the Tea Party in Tennessee will do much of the same, apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Whatever the reason for the SPLC’s findings — not enough instructional time because of No Child Left Behind, poor teacher preparation in schools of education or too low expectations — the civil rights movement and, more generally, African-American history, are being left out, and it’s not only black students who are suffering. You can’t have a “conversation about race” only among black people! This is American history, after all.
While I commend states like New Jersey, New York and Illinois for passing legislation establishing Amistad Commissions to ensure the interweaving of black history throughout their social studies curriculums, I must also note that other cities, like Philadelphia (pdf) and Chicago, feel they have no better option than to mandate stand-alone courses for their high school students. I wish more school systems would offer the same, just as we do in college.
And while these are very positive steps — most of us, after all, learned African-American history in these sort of classes — not even separate stand-alone courses can have the larger and more lasting effect of integrating and interweaving our ancestors’ stories into the common core of knowledge that every school child imbibes from the very first day of kindergarten. Teaching naturalizes history; the content that is taught in our schools makes knowledge second nature. And until the contributions of African Americans become second-nature to all American school children, desperate calls for one more “conversation about race” are destined to repeat themselves, in an endless cycle, following the next race-based hate crime.
“This will be the day,” Dr. King dreamed 50 years ago this August, “when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’ ” Dr. King was a careful student of history, keenly aware of the presence of the past in the present. (I think part of his strength as a leader of the movement was the depth of the historical knowledge he brought to the task of slaying Jim Crow.) Yet how many school students today could even name the tune to which he was referring, or sing its words, let alone place it in context or communicate the power behind Marian Anderson’s decision to change “of thee I sing” to “of thee we sing,” when she sang it so defiantly during her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused her manager’s request to have her perform at Constitution Hall?
It’s not enough to spotlight one leader’s clarion call for moral action at one moment in history — however magical — because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.
It’s a small example, I know, but shared knowledge like this is what I mean when I refer to the “common culture” that Americans should share, and which public schooling forges. And that is where “the content of the character” (to paraphrase Dr. King) of black history is being left out of the schools, and therefore of our larger society. For what place is “race” currently given in the curriculum, except for the acknowledgement of Kwanzaa (an African-American invention by Maulana Karenga) and homages to heroes such as Dr. King on his birthday and Rosa Parks during Black History Month?
Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the March
Like just about everybody else in America at the time, I watched Dr. King give his “Dream” speech on a black-and-white television set, sitting with my mother and father in our living room, back home in West Virginia. I’ll commemorate the 50th anniversary by participating in a march on August 24. And this August 28, I plan on listening to it again, which I can’t seem to do without tearing up.
But listening to Dr. King’s mellifluous tones isn’t enough. It’s not enough to spotlight one leader’s clarion call for moral action at one moment in history — however magical — because the nature of the movement today, and the nature of the problems confronting the black community (and therefore America) today, are so much more complex than they were even then.
The civil rights movement was, as the SPLC reminds us, a series of events, leaders, groups, strategies and tactics, legislative acts, court cases and obstacles overcome — through decades in numerous jurisdictions — which was why Dr. King was so insistent on beginning his “Dream” speech with a reference to history. In his case, it was the history that had begun in Washington, at the Executive Mansion, with President Abraham Lincoln’s execution of the Emancipation Proclamation 100 years before King arrived at the podium. “Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,” Dr. King reminded his listeners, only to add, “But 100 years later, the Negro still is not free.”
Basic Literacy About the Negro
In conceiving of this series, a tribute to the black journalist Joel A. Rogers, a witness to the civil rights movement who died in 1966 at age 85, I had no intention of covering the most outdated of his 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, curious “facts” such as these:
No. 1: “The white population of New York is a third more illiterate than the Negro one.”
No. 19: “The peoples of Southern Europe, including Italy, and most of those of Eastern Europe, including Russia, are more illiterate than the Negroes of the United States. In seventy years Negro illiteracy has fallen off about 80 percent. In 1870 it was 82 per cent; in 1930, 16.3.”
No. 20: Though “Aframerican illiteracy [sic] is three times higher than the white one,” New York, Minnesota, Oregon and South Dakota “Negroes are less illiterate than Mississippi Whites.” And when you throw in California, Nevada and Washington; they’re “less illiterate by 100 to 400 per cent than the foreign-born Whites of all the States, save one.” And —
No. 21: “In the United States Army Intelligence tests during World War I, the Negroes of [Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois, and Ohio] led the Whites of [Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas and Georgia] by from one to seven per cent.”
I understood Rogers’ pre-Brown v. Board of Ed. reasons, of course, to prove with facts that African Americans were worthy of equal citizenship rights, but to me they no longer seemed relevant to readers in our time, especially when we now have an African-American former Constitution law professor sitting in the White House with degrees from Columbia University and Harvard Law School. But now I know there is a different burden to shoulder, a relevancy to convey with no less urgency: basic literacy for all Americans about a trulyAmerican history, reflecting its various intellectual complexions.
I know — math and science education is critical if we are going to compete with other advancing nations. But, remember, America isn’t exceptional only because of its capacity to lead the free world, but because it was conceived as an experiment meant to prove that ordinary people could govern themselves. At least that’s what I learned in school, and a similar spirit animated the broader civil rights movement itself five decades ago, as ordinary black and white citizens of goodwill struggled together to extend the founders’ aspiration to the descendants of their slaves — and, through them, to all people, “through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” as President Obama summed it up in his second inaugural address.
Just ask anyone fighting for marriage equality today and, chances are, he or she will know something of the significance of Brown v. Board of Education. While I applaud California for becoming the first state to mandate the teaching of LGBT history in its schools, I also hope it and the 34 other states that received F’s in the SPLC study will redouble their efforts to narrow the gap between the suggestions they make and the requirements they implement for teaching the civil rights movement that has inspired so many others.
In this 50th anniversary season of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the March on Washington and the Birmingham Four, I will try to contribute to this basic literacy in my next two columns: the first on the march’s organizing genius, Bayard Rustin, a man who straddles both black and LGBT history, and the second on the “Dream” speech itself and its historical setting, the Lincoln Memorial.
The March Ahead
Want to honor the people who gave their lives and risked so much during the movement? Ask your school leaders to improve their design for teaching the history of the civil rights movement and for interweaving the sweep of African-American history into your child’s social studies curriculum. If that history teaches us anything, it is that it takes a movement to “bend” “the arc of the moral universe … toward justice.” And to appreciate everything about that quote, you’d have to have taken a history class or read a history book (or at least clicked around online) and imagined it applying to past, present and future causes. I’m certain that’s what Dr. King did in riffing off the 19th-century abolitionist Theodore Parker, and what we can do by teaching our kids about the movements both men helped lead, the movements that were bigger than them or any individuals — so big, in fact, they encompassed a nation and, in the face of violence and fear, summoned its “better angels” for a better future.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Free Blacks Lived in the North, Right?
I hope it’s clear by now I love facts, especially those that surprise — even shock — us out of our assumptions. Don’t get me wrong. All of us, including scholars in various fields, have so much information to assimilate on a daily basis that it is difficult to avoid shorthand in conversation. The problem arises when we simplify and thereby distort. This is especially true when it comes to the history of slavery.
Most of us know that before the American Civil War there were so-called slave states and free states. Knowing this, our minds fill in the map with logic. If such a line as “Mason-Dixon” existed (actually, there were a series of lines drawn by “compromising” Congresses throughout the first half of the 19th century), slaves must have resided below it and free black people above it, with every man, woman and child in chains trying to escape to the North just as soon as they could — following the proverbial North Star to a new life of unbounded opportunity — while those already up there remained vigilant against being kidnapped back into slavery down in the South.
Then a book comes along — a once-in-a-generation masterpiece of research and analysis — that shakes up our constellation of inherited “facts” to the point that we no longer feel comfortable assuming anything about what was so in the black past, and why it occurred. That’s exactly what the great historian Ira Berlin did in his book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (initially published in 1974, and reissued by the New Press in 2007), a book I read as a graduate student, then returned to recently, to help me understand a puzzling fact in my own family tree.
Genealogists for our Finding Your Roots PBS series told me that I had descended from three sets of fourth great-grandparents who had been freed well before the Civil War. (Unless, like comedian Wanda Sykes, you descend from a mulatto child born to a white mother, all of your African-American ancestors were once slaves; the only question is when they became free, which for 90 percent of us was either during the Civil War or with the ratification of the 13th Amendment following the war.) Two sets of my own ancestors (the Cliffords and the Redmans) were free people by the time of the American Revolution, and the other set, the Bruces, were freed in the will of their master in 1823.
As if this weren’t surprising enough, it was another fact that drove me to re-read Ira Berlin’s book about freed slaves. All of these people, and their descendants, continued to live in slave-holding Virginia, even during the Civil War. (Their part of Virginia would join the Union as the state of West Virginia in the middle of the war, but they had no way of knowing this when they decided to remain there, rather than flee.) Why didn’t my great-great-great-great-grandparents run away to safety in the North, rather than remain in the Potomac Valley region of slave-holding western Virginia, about 30 miles, as a matter of fact, from where I was born? Free Negroes headed north just as soon as they could, right? Didn’t my ancestors’ decision to stay put in the Confederacy run counter to what we all understood about the history of slavery?
I turned to Ira Berlin’s book for answers, and I was astonished to learn that my ancestors’ presence in the South and their decision to stay put during the war were not as uncommon as I had imagined. And perhaps most remarkable of all is the fact that professor Berlin explained the mystery of my ancestors’ (and many others’) seemingly counterintuitive decisions using numbers in plain sight, including those in the 1860 U.S. Census.
In that raging year of Lincoln’s election and Southern secession, there were a total of 488,070 free blacks living in the United States, about 10 percent of the entire black population. Of those, 226,152 lived in the North and 261,918 in the South, in 15 states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas) plus the District of Columbia. Let me break that down further: A few months before the Confederacy was born, there were 35,766 more free black people living in the slave-owning South than in the North, and removing D.C. from the equation wouldn’t have shifted the result. And they stayed there during the Civil War.
Don’t believe it? You can now fact-check the numbers yourself on the U.S. Census Bureau website. Amazing, right? Even if, as Berlin illustrates in a companion table, 100 percent of the African Americans living in the North were free in 1860 (compared to only 6.2 percent in the South), it still is a puzzle to figure out why the majority lived below the Mason-Dixon Line. And here’s the kicker: At no time before the Civil War (at least not after the first U.S. Census was taken in 1790 and future states were added) did free blacks in the North ever outnumber those in the South!
To me, learning about this aspect of African-American history was as astonishing as any of the “amazing” facts on Joel A. Rogers’ original list of 100. (Rogers didn’t include this one on his list, but he did claim that some of these Southern Free Negroes fought for the Confederacy, a claim that we shall examine in another column.) Despite countless stories I’d read and heard about the Underground Railroad, with abolitionists on one side and fire-eaters on the other, there was, I now knew, a more complex landscape underfoot. Black history is full of surprises and contradictions, and this is one of the most surprising and seemingly contradictory ones that I have encountered.
First things first: How did more free blacks end up living in the South? Weren’t their lives a living hell? In this week’s column, I plan to address those questions. Next week, I’ll tackle why so many, like several generations of my own ancestors, stayed.
Luckily, Ira Berlin has the answers, and if you seek them, too, I urge you to read his book, since there’s no way I can possibly capture its many dimensions — or its brilliance — in this column. There’s a reason Slaves Without Masters won the National History Society’s Best Book Prize, and Berlin is the Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park (fitting also because Maryland was the state with the largest population of free blacks in 1860 — 83,942 — and the highest proportion of free versus enslaved blacks, with 49.1 percent free).
Who They Were and How They Got There
To understand how the South created — and acquired — its majority of free black people, you would have to travel back further in time to the Revolutionary War, when natural rights fever and military necessity (first, among the British) stimulated the first major surge of free blacks in America. Before then, there were a scant few, Berlin writes (in 1755, Maryland, the only English colony to keep track, counted 1,817; Virginia had about the same in 1782). By 1810, there were 108,265, representing “the fastest-growing element in the Southern population,” with a dramatic 89.3 percent spike between 1790 and 1800 and another 76.8 percent jump between 1800 and 1810.
There were other sources besides manumissions (formal acts of emancipation by slaveowners), to be sure, including an increase in runaways and immigrants. Among the immigrants were free blacks fleeing the West Indies (often with their own slaves) during the 1791 slave revolt against the French in Saint-Dominque, which became the independent Republic of Haiti in 1804. In part because of that revolt, another important surge in the Southern free black population occurred when Napoleon Bonaparte, exhausted and in need of cash from France’s defeat by the slaves, sold his country’s vast Louisiana territory to the Americans under its slave-owning president, Thomas Jefferson, in 1803. With it, the U.S. acquired thousands of “free people of color,” many of whom had sprung from sexual unions between French and Spanish colonists and black slaves.
Still another group of free people of color (originally from Saint-Dominique) emigrated to New Orleans from Cuba in 1809, in the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, doubling the size of the black population there. While the rate of growth among Southern free blacks would slow across nearly every decade leading up to the Civil War (the growth rate was a mere 10 percent between 1850 and 1860), by 1810 the South had a free black population that was there to say.
So who were they?
The short answer is they lived as far as they could from what we know as the Gone With the Wind South. As Berlin shows in a demographic profile as concise as it is clear, free blacks in the South largely resided in cities — the bigger the better, because that’s where the jobs were (in 1860, 72.7 percent of urban free blacks lived in Southern cities of 10,000 or more). They were predominantly female (52.6 percent of free blacks in the South were women in 1860), because, according to Berlin, free black men had a greater tendency to move out of the region. They also were older than the average slave, because they often had to wait to earn or buy their freedom, or, in not uncommon cases, be “dumped” by their owners as weak or infirm (in 1860, 20 percent of free blacks were over the age of 40 compared to 15 percent of slaves and whites). Free blacks also were lighter in color (40.8 percent of Southern free blacks in 1860 reported mixed racial ancestry versus 10.4 percent of slaves); not surprisingly, slaves with their master’s blood were more likely to be favored by him and, as Berlin shows, favored slaves were more likely to be freed.
Two Souths
Here’s where the monolith falls apart, however. As critical as Berlin’s findings about the North and South was his revelation that the South really consisted of “two Souths”: an Upper and a Lower, distinguished, among other things, by their histories, geographies and outlooks.
The Upper South (think Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina and later Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee and D.C.) had been marked by its earlier history of manumission following the Revolution; it also had a more negative outlook about slavery’s future as a result of its increasingly inhospitable soil (for more on this, see Amazing Fact, “What Was the Second Middle Passage?”).
The Lower South (think Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South, Carolina and Texas), by contrast, had never embraced manumission fever, and because there was still so much money to be made off the cotton trade (see Amazing Fact, “Why Was Cotton King?”), it never wavered in its commitment to the slave economy.
Consequently, there were two broad groups of Southern free blacks, Berlin writes. Not only did the vast majority live in the Upper South (224,963 in 1860 versus 36,955 in the Lower South in 1860), they were on average darker-skinned and more rural than their Lower South counterparts. By contrast, free blacks in the Lower South were fewer in number, lighter-skinned and more urban, creating a much more pronounced three-caste system and within it various gradations of blackness, including mulattoes (those who would be called biracial today), quadroons (those with one black grandparent) and octoroons (those with one black great-grandparent).
According to Berlin, “throughout the South, a light skin was the freeman’s distinguishing characteristic,” and “[t]he slaveholder’s increasingly selective liberation of favored bondsmen and the difficulties slaves had running away or purchasing their liberty meant that free Negroes were generally more skilled, literate, and well connected with whites than the mass of slaves.” This was especially true in the Lower South, where some free blacks even owned slaves — among them were Andrew Durnford of Louisiana, who, says Berlin, had “some seventy-five slaves” working on his sugar plantation.
Jim Crow: The Prequel
I hope I’m not giving you the wrong impression about free black life in the antebellum South, because life for them there was “no crystal stair,” to quote Langston Hughes. Laws, especially in the Upper South, reflected whites’ suspicion (very often hatred) of free blacks, and there were repeated attempts to deport them, to register them, to jail the indolent and tax and extort the wage-earner, to disenfranchise the free black caste altogether from voting or testifying in court against whites. To leave little doubt, as Berlin quotes the saying at the time, that “even the lowest whites [could] threaten free Negroes … with ‘a good nigger beating.'”
This created perverse incentives for free blacks to try hard to distinguish themselves from slaves, sometimes even to “pass” (pdf) out of the “black” caste as “white” if they could. Throughout the region, repressive laws helped create the conditions for a vast underclass that for most free blacks meant living along a very thin line between slavery and freedom, debt and dependency, poverty and pride. In fact, many of those same laws would lay the groundwork for what would follow after the Civil War and Reconstruction during the Jim Crow era.
By the 1850s, Berlin reveals, only Delaware, Missouri and Arkansas still allowed legal manumission of free blacks, and Arkansas, on the eve of secession, threatened its small population of free blacks with an impossible choice: self-deport (where have we heard that before?) or be re-enslaved. The result: Across the South in the antebellum period, there were “quasi-free” blacks who had been illegally freed without papers or prospects. Add to them those who passed as white or were kidnapped back into bondage, and it begins to make even the clearest of census numbers seem shaky.
So under those conditions, why would any free black remain in the South? Next week’s article in our series will address what impelled my ancestors and so many others to stay put on the eve of the Civil War. Until then, remember to be careful what you say shorthand in conversation. As I told an audience in Charlotte, N.C., last month, what was true for the ancient Greeks remains true for those conducting genealogical research today: “Know thyself.”
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
‘Plessy v. Ferguson’: Who Was Plessy?
‘How many mysteries have begun with the line, “A man gets on a train … “? In our man’s case, it happens to be true, and there is nothing mysterious about his plan. His name is Homer Plessy, a 30-year-old shoemaker in New Orleans, and on the afternoon of Tuesday, June 7, 1892, he executes it perfectly by walking up to the Press Street Depot, purchasing a first-class ticket on the 4:15 East Louisiana local and taking his seat on board. Nothing about Plessy stands out in the “whites only” car. Had he answered negatively, nothing might have.
Instead, as historian Keith Weldon Medley writes, when train conductor J.J. Dowling asks Plessy what all conductors have been trained to ask under Louisiana’s 2-year-old Separate Car Act — “Are you a colored man?” — Plessy answers, “Yes,” prompting Dowling to order him to the “colored car.” Plessy’s answer started off a chain of events that led the Supreme Court to read “separate but equal” into the Constitution in 1896, thus allowing racially segregated accommodations to become the law of the land.
Here’s what happens next on the train: If a few passengers fail to notice the dispute the first or second time Plessy refuses to move, no one can avoid the confrontation when the engineer abruptly halts the train so that Dowling can dart back to the depot and return with Detective Christopher Cain. When Plessy resists moving to the Jim Crow car once more, the detective has him removed, by force, and booked at the Fifth Precinct on Elysian Fields Avenue. The charge: “Viol. Sec. 2 Act 111, 1890” of the Louisiana Separate Car Act, which, after requiring “all railway companies [to] provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races” in Sec. 1, states that “any passenger insisting on going into a coach or compartment to which by race he does not belong, shall be liable to a fine of twenty-five dollars, or in lieu thereof to imprisonment for a period of not more than twenty days in the parish prison.”
It takes only 20 minutes for Homer Plessy to get bounced from his train, but another four years for him to receive a final decision from the United States Supreme Court. He is far from alone in the struggle. The 18-member citizens group to which Plessy belongs, the Comité des Citoyens of New Orleans (made up of “civil libertarians, ex-Union soldiers, Republicans, writers, a former Louisiana lieutenant governor, a French Quarter jeweler and other professionals,” according to Medley), has left little to chance.
In fact, every detail of Plessy’s arrest has been plotted in advance with input from one of the most famous white crusaders for black rights in the Jim Crow era: Civil War veteran, lawyer, Reconstruction judge and best-selling novelist Albion Winegar Tourgée, of late a columnist for the Chicago Inter-Ocean who will oversee Plessy’s case from his Mayville, N.Y., home, which Tourgée calls “Thorheim,” or “Fool’s House,” after his popular novel, A Fool’s Errand (1879). Even the East Louisiana Railroad, conductor Dowling and Detective Cain are in on the scheme.
Critically important to the legal team is Plessy’s color — that he has “seven eighths Caucasian and one eighth African blood,” as Supreme Court Justice Henry Billings Brown will write in his majority opinion, an observation that refers to the uniquely American “one drop rule” that a person with any African blood, no matter how little, is considered to be black. That Plessy’s particular “mixture of colored blood” means it is “not discernible” to the naked eye is not the only thing misunderstood about his case.
Drawing the Racial Dividing Line
In Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?, we saw the impact that “Sambo Art“ had on stereotyping African Americans at the height of the Jim Crow era. So devastating was it in drawing, and deepening, the color line, I venture that most of us, whenever we hear of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), immediately think of the slogan “separate but equal,” and, because of it, wrongly assume that the two named parties in this famous court case had to have been, on the one hand, the darkest of black people and the most Southern of whites. At the same time, as my colleague at Harvard legal historian Ken Mack has pointed out in the Yale Law Journal, we err in seeingPlessy through the prism of the case that undid separate-but-equal a half-century later, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), so that the struggle becomes only one of securing civil rights in an integrated society instead of through multiple and sometimes contradictory paths: equality, independence, racial uplift, to name a few.
The truth is that no one involved in Plessy knew they were on a longer march to Brown, or that their case would become one of the most recognizable in history, or that the “sentence” that the Supreme Court handed down would take up less than a sentence — really, just three words — in the American mind. But, thanks to historians like Mack and especially Charles Lofgren (The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation), Brook Thomas (Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History With Documents), Keith Weldon Medley (We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson) and Mark Elliot (Color Blind Justice:Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson), whose works provided indispensable research for this article, we know that what is most amazing about Plessy’s backstory is how conscious its testers were of the false stereotypes undergirding Jim Crow and the just-as-false binary posed by its laws (“white” and “colored”) in real time, without any clear definition among the states of what “white” and “colored” actually meant, or how they were to be defined.
As Lofgren shows in his watershed account, the question was, did a man at the time of Plessy have to be one-fourth black to be considered “colored,” as was the case in Michigan, or one-sixteenth as in North Carolina, or one-eighth as in Georgia; or were such judgments better left to juries as in South Carolina or, better yet, to train conductors as in Louisiana? Whatever a jurisdiction’s rule, to men like Plessy, Tourgée and his legal associates — Louis Martinet, a Creole attorney and publisher of the New Orleans Crusader, and white attorney and former Confederate Army Pfc. James C. Walker — it was clear that a man’s race was so essential to his reputation that it approximated a property right. Take it away without due process, based on a train conductor’s casual and arbitrary scan, and you rob a man, “colored” or “white” (at the time, especially “white”), of something as valuable to him as his education, income or land.
They knew their climb was uphill; everywhere they turned, it seemed, new theories of racial distinction and separation were being constructed. While today we might call proponents of those theories “quacks,” they were regarded (for the most part) as leading scientists of their day — men with college degrees and titles who, even in those rare cases when they were sympathetic to black people and their rights, felt strongly that mixing too closely with whites would lead either to black extinction through a race war or dilution by way of absorption. Of course discerning minds like Tourgée saw through such theories, but, as Lofgren illustrates in a table summarizing a 1960 study by historian of anthropology George W. Stocking Jr., among 50 social scientists publishing journal articles in the years leading up to Plessy, 94 percent believed in the existence of “a racial hierarchy” and in “differences … between the mental traits (intelligence, temperament, etc.) of races.” (I’ll let you guess which race almost always came out on top.)
Reinforcing their views on race were legislators and judges. As highlighted last week, the legal history of Jim Crow accelerated in 1883, when the Supreme Court struck down the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875 for using the 14th Amendment to root out private (as opposed to state) discrimination. As Justice Joseph Bradley wrote for the majority,“there must be some stage in the process of his elevation when he [‘a man who has emerged from slavery’] takes the rank of a mere citizen and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.”
The Civil Rights Cases opened the floodgates for Jim Crow segregation, with transportation leading the way, and not just on ferry lines. As Lofgren writes, Tennessee, having passed the Reconstruction era’s first “equal accommodations law” in the South, had already become the first to subvert it with an “equal-but-separate” transportation law in 1881. Florida followed suit in 1887; Mississippi in 1888; Texas in 1889; Plessy’s Louisiana in 1890; Arkansas, Tennessee (again) and Georgia in 1891; and Kentucky in 1892.
Attaching a Value to One’s Race
To say Plessy was a long shot on such terrain is an understatement. Yet there Tourgée and his legal team were — determined to use their test case to dismantle the legal scaffolding propping up Jim Crow. Elated by Homer Plessy’s flawless execution of the East Louisiana line plan, the Comité des Citoyens bailed him out before he had to spend a single night in jail.
Five months later, on Nov. 18, 1892, Orleans Parish criminal court Judge John Howard Ferguson, a “carpetbagger” descending from a Martha’s Vineyard shipping family, became the “Ferguson” in the case by ruling against Plessy. While Ferguson had dismissed an earlier test case because it involved inter-state travel, the federal government’s exclusive jurisdiction, in Plessy’s all-in-state case, the judge ruled that the Separate Cars Act constituted a reasonable use of Louisiana’s “police power.” “There is no pretense that he [Plessy] was not provided with equal accommodations with the white passengers,” Ferguson declared. “He was simply deprived of the liberty of doing as he pleased.”
A month later, the Louisiana Supreme Court affirmed Ferguson’s ruling. Now Plessy’s lawyers had what they’d hoped for: an opportunity to argue on a national stage. They filed their appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 5, 1893.
Contrary to popular memory, “The gist of our case,” they wrote in their brief (as quoted in Lofgren), “is the unconstitutionality of the [Separate Cars Act’s] assortment; not the question of equal accommodation.” In other words, if train conductors could be authorized to classify men and women by race, according to visible and, in Plessy’s case, invisible cues, where would the line-drawing stop? “Why may it [the state] not require all red-headed people to ride in a separate car? Why not require all colored people to walk on one side of the street and the whites on the other? Why may it not require every white man’s house to be painted white and every colored man’s black? Why may it not require every white man’s vehicle to be of one color and compel the colored citizen to use one of different color on the highway? Why not require every white business man to use a white sign and every colored man who solicits custom a black one?” (Little did Tourgée or his fellows know just how absurd the use of signs in the South would become.)
While the constitutional arguments of Tourgée et al are best left to legal experts, I continue to be fascinated by the one they crafted about the indeterminacy of race and the reputational risks (and rewards) posed to those who couldn’t (and could) pass for white. As they expressed in Plessy‘s brief: “How much would it beworth to a young man entering upon the practice of law, to be regarded as a white man rather than a colored one? Six-sevenths of the population are white. Nineteen-twentieths of the property of the country is owned by white people. Ninety-nine hundredths of the business opportunities are in the control of white people … Indeed, is it [reputation] not the most valuable sort of property, being the master-key that unlocks the golden door of opportunity?”
I’m sure there’s little suspense around the fact that a majority of the Supreme Court’s then-serving justices chose against opening the door to the Plessy team’s arguments. In his opinion for the Court, handed down on May 18, 1896, Justice Henry Billings Brown explained that, as a technical matter, he didn’t have to address Homer Plessy’s particular “mixture of colored blood,” because the appeal his lawyers had filed challenged only the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Separate Car Act, not how it had been applied to the actual sorting of Plessy or any other man. At the same time, for the sake of argument, Brown wrote, even if one’s color was critical to his reputation (and thus constituted a property right), he and the Court were “unable to see how [the Louisiana] statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property.” (Perhaps this was because attorneys for the state had already conceded that the law, as written, could be interpreted as having a crack in its immunity shield for erring rail lines and conductors.)
Accordingly, if the wronged party “be a white man … assigned to a colored coach,” Brown wrote, “he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned, he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.” As a result, the Court held, Louisiana’s Separate Car Act passed constitutional muster as a “reasonable” use of the state’s “police power,” preempting consideration of Tourgée’s hypotheticals about paint and signs and such. As far as “separate but equal” went, Jim Crow had seven justices’ blessings.
The Evolution of “Reasonable”
Perhaps what is most amazing about Plessy v. Ferguson is how un-amazing it was at the time. As Lofgren and others have shown, contemporary newspaper editors were much more concerned about the nation’s most recent economic crisis, the Panic of 1893, its overseas forays to the South and West, and the relative power of unions, farmers, immigrants and factories. (For similar reasons, some of those tracking the two affirmative action cases pending before the current Supreme Court are concerned that those cases may get drowned by more pressing headlines.) For most, Plessy v. Ferguson only acquired its notoriety years later as a result of the Brown school desegregation cases and of future lawyers like Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall, who found inspiration for their strides against Jim Crow segregation in Plessy‘s lone dissent by Justice John Marshall Harlan — of all the justices a Southerner and a former slave holder.
“Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens,” Harlan had reminded the Plessy majority (ironically using the same inkwell the late Chief Justice Roger Taney had used in penning the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, at least according to legend). Making the Louisiana law even more absurd, in Harlan’s view, had been the sole exception the statute had carved out for “nurses attending children of the other race.” In other words, it was OK for black “Mammies” to ride white cars with white babies, but not with their own (or with white adults, for that matter), because in those instances alone, the unspoken racial hierarchy was clear: Black nurses, at least as a matter of perception, still bore the markings of slaves.
With Jim Crow still ascendant between Plessy and Brown, babies born in New Orleans like future jazz great Louis Armstrong (1901) would have to grow up in the shadows of the color line that Plessy‘s lawyers were unable to erase — or even blur. Also, in between, all the main players in the case died: Walker in 1898, Tourgée in France in 1905, Ferguson in 1915, Martinet in 1917 and Homer Plessy in 1925 (in case you’re wondering, a few months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Plessy pled “guilty” to defying the Louisiana Separate Cars Act and paid his $25 fine).
Then as now, Americans remain fascinated with the “one” — or a few — “drop(s) rule.” Tourgée himself dramatized the phenomenon of passing in his 1890 novel Pactolus Prime, Mark Twain more famously in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and, in our own time, there’s Philip Roth’s The Human Stain in print (2000) and on screen (2003).
But white authors aren’t the only ones counting. Reclaiming the one drop rule served as an important motivator for the original “Amazing Facts About the Negro” explorer, Joel A. Rogers. And as another of my colleagues at Harvard, law professor Randy Kennedy, has said more recently in an interview online: “A lot of black people have come to like the one drop rule because, functionally, it is helpful in many respects. If you think about some of the most important leaders in African-American history, W.E.B. Du Bois … in other regimes, in other nations, he might not be viewed as ‘black.’ Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass’ father was white. The great Frederick Douglass, but you know, one drop rule … ‘black.’ ”
As we’ve seen in the past two weeks, everything about Jim Crow art and law was meant to turn the spectrum of race into easily identifiable stereotypes. As valuable as collecting to remember can be, it is far more important for us to tell and retell the stories of the men and women who saw just how naked the emperor was. Along these lines, I’m happy to note that descendants of the two named parties in Plessy v. Ferguson, Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson, along with historian Keith Medley, have established the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation (notice their use of “and” instead of “v.”) to “create new and innovative ways to teach the history of Civil Rights through understanding this historic case and its effect on the American conscience.” With their help, the state of Louisiana now marks every June 7 as Plessy Day, and since 2009, a plaque commemorating the dramatic story that began with “A man gets on a train” has stood in the same spot where our man was arrested.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
What Is Juneteenth?
The First Juneteenth
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” —General Orders, Number 3; Headquarters District of Texas, Galveston, June 19, 1865
When Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger issued the above order, he had no idea that, in establishing the Union Army’s authority over the people of Texas, he was also establishing the basis for a holiday, “Juneteenth” (“June” plus “nineteenth”), today the most popular annual celebration of emancipation from slavery in the United States. After all, by the time Granger assumed command of the Department of Texas, the Confederate capital in Richmond had fallen; the “Executive” to whom he referred, President Lincoln, was dead; and the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was well on its way to ratification.
But Granger wasn’t just a few months late. The Emancipation Proclamation itself, ending slavery in the Confederacy (at least on paper), had taken effect two-and-a-half years before, and in the interim, close to 200,000 black men had enlisted in the fight. So, formalities aside, wasn’t it all over, literally, but the shouting?
It would be easy to think so in our world of immediate communication, but as Granger and the 1,800 bluecoats under him soon found out, news traveled slowly in Texas. Whatever Gen. Robert E. Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the Army of the Trans-Mississippi had held out until late May, and even with its formal surrender on June 2, a number of ex-rebels in the region took to bushwhacking and plunder.
That’s not all that plagued the extreme western edge of the former Confederate states. Since the capture of New Orleans in 1862, slave owners in Mississippi, Louisiana and other points east had been migrating to Texas to escape the Union Army’s reach. In a hurried re-enactment of the original Middle Passage, more than 150,000 slaves had made the trek west, according to historian Leon Litwack in his book Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. As one former slave he quotes recalled, ” ‘It looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas.’ ”
When Texas fell and Granger dispatched his now famous order No. 3, it wasn’t exactly instant magic for most of the Lone Star State’s 250,000 slaves. On plantations, masters had to decide when and how to announce the news — or wait for a government agent to arrive — and it was not uncommon for them to delay until after the harvest. Even in Galveston city, the ex-Confederate mayor flouted the Army by forcing the freed people back to work, as historian Elizabeth Hayes Turner details in her comprehensive essay, “Juneteenth: Emancipation and Memory,” in Lone Star Pasts: Memory and History in Texas.
Those who acted on the news did so at their peril. As quoted in Litwack’s book, former slave Susan Merritt recalled, ” ‘You could see lots of niggers hangin’ to trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom, ’cause they cotch ’em swimmin’ ‘cross Sabine River and shoot ’em.’ ” In one extreme case, according to Hayes Turner, a former slave named Katie Darling continued working for her mistress another six years (She ” ‘whip me after the war jist like she did ‘fore,’ ” Darling said).
Hardly the recipe for a celebration — which is what makes the story of Juneteenth all the more remarkable. Defying confusion and delay, terror and violence, the newly “freed” black men and women of Texas, with the aid of the Freedmen’s Bureau (itself delayed from arriving until September 1865), now had a date to rally around. In one of the most inspiring grassroots efforts of the post-Civil War period, they transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, “Juneteenth,” beginning one year later in 1866.
” ‘The way it was explained to me,’ ” one heir to the tradition is quoted in Hayes Turner’s essay, ” ‘the 19th of June wasn’t the exact day the Negro was freed. But that’s the day they told them that they was free … And my daddy told me that they whooped and hollered and bored holes in trees with augers and stopped it up with [gun] powder and light and that would be their blast for the celebration.’ ”
Other Contenders
There were other available anniversaries for celebrating emancipation, to be sure, including the following:
* Sept. 22: the day Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation Order in 1862
* Jan. 1: the day it took effect in 1863
* Jan. 31: the date the 13th Amendment passed Congress in 1865, officially abolishing the institution of slavery
* Dec. 6: the day the 13th Amendment was ratified that year
* April 3: the day Richmond, Va., fell
* April 9: the day Lee surrendered to Ulysses Grant at Appomattox, Va.
* April 16: the day slavery was abolished in the nation’s capital in 1862
* May 1: Decoration Day, which, as David Blight movingly recounts in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, the former slaves of Charleston, S.C., founded by giving the Union war dead a proper burial at the site of the fallen planter elite’s Race Course
* July 4: America’s first Independence Day, some “four score and seven years” before President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation
Each of these anniversaries has its celebrants today. Each has also had its share of conflicts and confusion. July 4 is compelling, of course, but it was also problematic for many African Americans, since the country’s founders had given in on slavery and their descendants had expanded it through a series of failed “compromises,” at the nadir of which Frederick Douglass had made his own famous declaration to the people of Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity.”
The most logical candidate for commemoration of the slave’s freedom was Jan. 1. In fact, the minute Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect at the midpoint of the war, Northern black leaders like Douglass led massive celebrations in midnight jubilees; and on its 20th anniversary in 1883, they gathered again in Washington, D.C., to honor Douglass for all that he and his compatriots had achieved.
Yet even the original Emancipation Day had its drawbacks — not only because it coincided with New Year’s Day and the initiation dates of numerous other laws, but also because the underlying proclamation, while of enormous symbolic significance, didn’t free all the slaves, only those in the Confederate states in areas liberated by Union troops, and not those in the border states in which slavery remained legal until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. (Historians estimate that about 500,000 slaves — out of a total of 3.9 million — liberated themselves by escaping to Union lines between 1863 and the end of the war; the rest remained in slavery.)
Because of its partial effects, some scholars argue that perhaps the most significant aspect of the Emancipation Proclamation was the authorization of black men to fight in the war, both because their service proved to be crucial to the North’s war effort, and because it would be cited as irrefutable proof of the right of blacks to citizenship (which would be granted by the 14th Amendment).
No one in the post-Civil War generation could deny that something fundamental had changed as a result of Lincoln’s war measure, but dwelling on it was a separate matter, David Blight explains. Among those in the ‘It’s time to move on’ camp were Episcopal priest and scholar Alexander Crummell, who, in a May 1885 address to the graduates of Storer College, said, “What I would fain have you guard against is not the memory of slavery, but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people.” On the other side was Douglass, who insisted on lighting a perpetual flame to “the causes, the incidents, and the results of the late rebellion.” After all, he liked to say, the legacy of black people in America could “be traced like that of a wounded man through a crowd by the blood.”
Hard as Douglass tried to make emancipation matter every day, Jan. 1 continued to be exalted — and increasingly weighed down by the betrayal of Reconstruction. (As detailed in Plessy v. Ferguson: Who Was Plessy?, the Supreme Court’s gift to the 20th anniversary of emancipation was striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.) W.E.B. Du Bois used this to biting effect in his Swiftian short story, “A Mild Suggestion” (1912), in which he had his black main character provide a final solution to Jim Crow America’s obsession with racial purity: On the next Jan. 1 (“for historical reasons” it would “probably be best,” he explained), all blacks should either be invited to dine with whites and poisoned or gathered in large assemblies to be stabbed and shot. “The next morning there would be ten million funerals,” Du Bois’ protagonist predicted, “and therefore no Negro problem.”
Juneteenth Endures
While national black leaders continued to debate the importance of remembering other milestone anniversaries, the freed people of Texas went about the business of celebrating their local version of Emancipation Day. For them, Juneteenth was, from its earliest incarnations, as Hayes Turner and others have recorded, a past that was “usable” as an occasion for gathering lost family members, measuring progress against freedom and inculcating rising generations with the values of self-improvement and racial uplift. This was accomplished through readings of the Emancipation Proclamation, religious sermons and spirituals, the preservation of slave food delicacies (always at the center: the almighty barbecue pit), as well as the incorporation of new games and traditions, from baseball to rodeos and, later, stock car races and overhead flights.
Like a boxer sparring with his rival, year after year Juneteenth was strengthened by the contest its committee members had to wage against the Jim Crow faithful of Texas, who, in the years following Reconstruction, rallied around their version of history in an effort to glorify (and whitewash) past cruelties and defeats. When whites forbade blacks from using their public spaces, black people gathered near rivers and lakes and eventually raised enough money to buy their own celebration sites, among them Emancipation Park in Houston and Booker T. Washington Park in Mexia.
Texas Juneteenth Day Celebration, 1900 (Austin History Center, Austin Public Library)
When white leaders like Judge Lewis Fisher of Galveston likened the black freedman (“Rastus,” he called him) to “a prairie colt turned into a feed horse [to eat] ignorantly of everything,” Juneteenth celebrants dressed in their finest clothes, however poor, trumpeting the universal concerns of citizenship and liberty, with hero-speakers from the Reconstruction era and symbols like the Goddess of Liberty on floats and in living tableaux. And when Houston refused to close its banks on Memorial Day in 1919 (only to do so four days later on Jefferson Davis Day, honoring the former Confederate president), Juneteenth celebrants still did their own remembering, in Hayes Turner’s words, to project “identification with American ideals” in “a potent life-giving event … a joyful retort to messages of overt racism … a public counter-demonstration to displays of Confederate glorification and a counter-memory to the valorization of the Lost Cause.”
Strengthening the holiday’s chances at survival was its move across state lines — one person, one family, one carload or train ticket at a time. As Isabel Wilkerson writes in her brilliant book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, “The people from Texas took Juneteenth Day to Los Angeles, Oakland, Seattle, and other places they went.” As it spread, the observance was also changing. This was especially true in the 1920s, Turner explains, with the Consumer Age infiltrating black society with advertisements for fancier Juneteenth getups and more elaborate displays of pomp and circumstance.
This did not mean that Juneteenth’s advances remained unbroken, however. Despite local committees’ best efforts, with each new slight, with each new segregation law, with each new textbook whitewashing and brutal lynching in the South, African Americans felt increasingly disconnected from their history, so that by the time World War II shook the nation, they could no longer faithfully celebrate freedom in a land that still rendered them second-class citizens worthy of dying for their country but not worthy of being honored or treated equally for it. Hence, the wartime Double V campaign.
It is possible that Juneteenth would have vanished from the calendar (at least outside of Texas) had it not been for another remarkable turn of events during the same civil rights movement that had exposed many of the country’s shortcomings about race relations. Actually, it occurred at the tail end of the movement, two months after its most prominent leader had been shot down.
As is well-known, Martin Luther King Jr. had been planning a return to the site of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, this time to lead a Poor People’s March emphasizing nagging class inequalities. Following his assassination, it was left to others to carry out the plan, among them his best friend, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and his widow, Coretta Scott King. When it became clear that the Poor People’s March was falling short of its goals, the organizers decided to cut it short on June 19, 1968, well aware that it was now just over a century since the first Juneteenth celebration in Texas.
As William H. Wiggins Jr., a scholar of black folklore and cultural traditions, explained in a 2009 interview with Smithsonian magazine: “[T]hese delegates for the summer took that idea of the [Juneteenth] celebration back to their respective communities. [F]or example, there was one in Milwaukee.” Another in Minnesota. It was, in effect, another great black migration. Since then, Wiggins added, Juneteenth “has taken on a life of its own.”
Juneteenth Today
Responding to this new energy, in 1979 Texas became the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday. (Ironically, the bill was passed on June 7, the anniversary of Homer Plessy’s arrest on the East Louisiana line, as covered in Plessy v Ferguson: Who Was Plessy.) Leading the charge was Rep. Al Edwards of Houston, often referred to as “the father of the Juneteenth holiday,” who framed it as a “source of strength” for young people, according to Hayes Turner. (As a concession to Lost Cause devotees, Texas reaffirmed its commitment to observing Jan. 19 as Confederate Heroes Day.)
Since then, 41 other states and the District of Columbia have recognized Juneteenth as a state holiday or holiday observance, including Rhode Island earlier this year. “This is similar to what God instructed Joshua to do as he led the Israelites into the Promised Land,” Al Edwards told Yahoo in 2007. “A national celebration of Juneteenth, state by state, serves a similar purpose for us. Every year we must remind successive generations that this event triggered a series of events that one by one defines the challenges and responsibilities of successive generations. That’s why we need this holiday.”
You can follow Edwards’ efforts and others’ worldwide at juneteenth.com, founded in 1997 by Clifford Robinson of New Orleans. Another organization, the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation, founded and chaired by the Rev. Ronald Meyers, is committed to making Juneteenth a federal holiday on a par with Flag and Patriot days. (Note: They are not calling for Juneteenth to be a paid government holiday, like Columbus Day.) “We may have gotten there in different ways and at different times,” Meyers told Time magazine in 2008, “but you can’t really celebrate freedom in America by just going with the Fourth of July.” You can follow his organization’s activities at nationaljuneteenth.com.
These days, Juneteenth is an opportunity not only to celebrate but also to speak out. Last year, for example,The Root reported that the U.S. Department of State leveraged the holiday for releasing its 2012 Trafficking in Persons Report, with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noting, “Today we are celebrating what’s called ‘Juneteenth’ … But the end of legal slavery in the United States, and in other countries around the world, has not, unfortunately, meant the end of slavery. Today it is estimated as many as 27 million people around the world are victims of modern slavery.”
As further proof that Juneteenth is back on the rise, this Wednesday, June 19, Washington, D.C., will be abuzz during the unveiling of a Frederick Douglass statue in the famed U.S. Capitol Visitor Center, thanks to the work of D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton. (Douglass will join three other African Americans in the hall: Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King Jr.) No doubt Douglass would be surprised to learn that such an honor had not been scheduled for Jan. 1 (the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation), but glad nevertheless that the country is still finding ways to remember “the causes, the incidents, and the results of the late rebellion.”
Postscript
I grew up in West Virginia, many miles from the site of the first Juneteenth, and I never heard of the holiday until I went off to college. But I have come to see the beauty in its unexpected past and persistence. Besides, June 19 is generally a more comfortable day for outdoor family fun — for fine jazz music and barbecue — than Jan. 1, a day short on sunlight. In my article “Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?” I quoted W.E.B. Du Bois’ summation of Black Reconstruction: “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” At the time I failed to appreciate just how apt a description it was.
Of all Emancipation Day observances, Juneteenth falls closest to the summer solstice (this Friday, June 21), the longest day of the year, when the sun, at its zenith, defies the darkness in every state, including those once shadowed by slavery. By choosing to celebrate the last place in the South that freedom touched — reflecting the mystical glow of history and lore, memory and myth, as Ralph Ellison evoked in his posthumous novel, Juneteenth — we remember the shining promise of emancipation, along with the bloody path America took by delaying it and deferring fulfillment of those simple, unanticipating words in Gen. Granger’s original order No. 3: that “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves.”
My hope this Juneteenth is that we never forget it.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Should Blacks Collect Racist Memorabilia?
I have a confession to make: I collect racist memorabilia. Perhaps it is because my mother seems to have as well. She kept a very small ashtray on a table in our living room featuring a Black Sambo figurine at its center. Since neither of our parents ever smoked, I know Mom didn’t buy this object for its function; she bought it because she was intrigued, just as I was, even as a child. Why was this boy so very black — jet black, the blackest of blacks — and why was he depicted as naked? Again and again in idle moments, I would be drawn to the plight of this little black boy, frozen for all time in a racist form of in extremis, I guess one might say, with the reddest and thickest of lips, the whitest of eyes and the unutterably blackest of skin.
When it comes to the question of whether collecting those racist images is right, I often encounter two strong and diametrically opposed reactions from African Americans. Some can’t seem to amass enough examples of these “collectibles” or “memorabilia” (as we euphemistically call these hideous images today). Others think the whole lot should be assembled into one gigantic bonfire, incinerated, and the ashes buried in an impenetrable vault, or strewn over the broadest reach of the deepest ocean never to be displayed again. It’s as if these artifacts’ complete and total obliteration could wipe the slate clean or erase the painful memory and palpably harmful effects of seeing ourselves reflected over and over through the murky mirror of the anti-black subconscious as deracinated, gluttonous, lascivious non-reflective sub-human beasts — thieves, rapists, liars — a species apart from all other human beings, dominated and ruled like other animals by our instincts and passions and not by our (sub-standard) brains.
I understand the latter reaction, so it may seem counterintuitive that I pursue a scholarly interest in what I think of as the everyday racism of the genre of American popular culture that I call “Sambo Art.” In fact, one of the components of Harvard’s extensive “Image of the Black in Western Art Archive” — composed of some 26,000 images of black people in Western art, both noble and ignoble, in both high and low art forms — is made up of these racist images, which I hope scholars will study, analyze and critique: first, to understand why and how they came into being and were used to demean and delimit our people as human beings and as citizens, and second, so that we can keep this sort of thing from being used against our people and any other subjugated people ever again, to paraphrase the defiant assertion of many Jewish people in relation to the Holocaust.
I thought about all of this a few days ago, when I walked into the Sable Images Shop near Leimert Park, bordering the Baldwin Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, while filming an episode of “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” our six-hour African-American history series to be aired on PBS starting on Oct. 22. The lovely shop, owned and operated by an African-American woman, Gail Deculus-Johnson, is chock-full of historical examples of Sambo Art, ranging from 19th-century minstrel imagery all the way to advertisements for the Amos ‘n’ Andy television program in the early 1950s. What makes this shop different from others I have visited is a very thoughtful pamphlet that Deculus-Johnson distributes to her customers, in which she discusses why she collects and sells these items.
In response to this fascinating rhetorical question — “[Since] some items are disturbing, offensive and hard to believe, [if you collect and display them] are you creating these images yourself?” — her pamphlet answers: “No, definitely not,” since the store “contains astounding mementos reflecting true lives of people of African descent,” including all that African Americans have suffered through visual media, “depictions [that] are a testimony of life in the past,” including “the ‘good, bad, and ugly.’ ” And in response to whether “these politically incorrect depictions” are, in fact, “teaching racism,” the pamphlet answers that “displaying memorabilia as part of a home, no matter how painful it may seem, is ensuring that ‘each one teach one’ and that history must not repeat itself.” Our children, it continues, “must know where we have been to know where we are going.” In other words, the most important function of displaying and collecting this stuff is a didactic one: critique. And there is a lot here to critique.
The first question that strikes any student of Sambo Art is, Why so many images? It is the sheer number of these images that strikes me as perhaps the most amazing fact about them collectively. I mean, how many ways can one call a woman or a man “nigger” or “coon”? How many watermelons does a person have to be represented as devouring, how many chickens stolen, to make the point that black people are ostensibly by nature gluttonous thieves? Why in the world did anyone think it necessary to produce tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of discrete racist images — a set of fixed types or motifs, including those luscious watermelons and irresistible plump chickens, ranging across virtually every conceivable form of American popular culture following the end of Reconstruction and more particularly at the turn of the 19th century? The explanation comes in three words: justifying Jim Crow.
The Reconstruction period between 1865 and 1877, immediately following the abolition of slavery with the ratification of the 13th Amendment at the close of the Civil War, affirmed that African Americans were inherently equal to white Americans and any other human beings, capable of voting, serving as jurors, testifying in court, buying and cultivating land, forming stable social and cultural institutions, marrying, having families, raising children, learning to read and write — in short, capable of mastering and exemplifying all of the hallmarks of citizenship that make this republic great. Despite centuries of anti-black racist discourse, it turned out that in 12 short years, the mass of the African-American people (90 percent of whom were still in bondage in 1860, a year before the Civil War broke out) demonstrated that they were human beings just like everybody else.
As W.E.B. Du Bois put it, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” How was the genie of freedom and equality forced back into the bottle of segregation and second-class citizenship? How was it that the emancipated were “moved back again toward slavery” after only a few years “in the sun”?
It turns out the assault was double-barreled: first through a series of Jim Crow laws and court rulings that effectively reversed or neutralized the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and the 14th and 15th Amendments (guaranteeing equal protection under the law and outlawing race-based voting discrimination, respectively), and second (and almost simultaneously) through the astonishingly wide distribution of a massive mountain of negative Sambo images, which were intended to naturalize the image of the black person as sub-human and in doing so justify and subliminally reinforce the perverted logic of the separate and unequal system of Jim Crow itself. The assault was devastatingly effective and brilliantly evil. While next week’s column will delve into the legal history with a focus on the era’s most notorious case, let’s touch on it first and then take a look at some of these horrific images.
We can say that the legal history of what the historian C. Vann Woodward titled his book, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, took shape in 1883, when the Supreme Court (in United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629) emboldened militant groups like the Ku Klux Klan by striking down a congressional law (the so-called Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871) that attempted to force states to prosecute individuals for conspiring to suppress black people’s 14th Amendment rights, even when, in the particular case before the justices, it involved an armed mob dragging four black prisoners out of a Tennessee jail.
From there forward, a series of laws and legal decisions continued to chip away at these rights. The naked racist underpinnings of these decisions are laid bare in comments about the “nature” of negroes declared in the Mississippi Supreme Court opinion that Justice Joseph McKenna subsequently quoted in his majority opinion for the U.S. Supreme Court in Williams v. Mississippi, 170 U.S. 213 (1898), ruling that discrimination must be found in the text of a state’s laws, not just in their administration: “By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependencies, this race has acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and of character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from the whites. A patient, docile people; but careless, landless, migratory within narrow limits, without forethought; and its criminal members given to furtive offences, rather than the robust crimes of whites.”
Sambo’s Role in the New Status Quo
The tone struck in the Williams v. Mississippi decision mirrored a trend in the American consumer market, which was inundated with the most debased images of black people. Following the Civil War, because of the technological innovation of chromolithography, it became cheap to mass-produce multicolored advertisements. By the 1890s — precisely when Jim Crow was hardening as the law of the land — one of the most popular forms of these advertisements was the widespread distribution of extremely demeaning and negative images of African Americans. So popular were they with the public, so widespread was their consumption, that virtually anywhere a white person saw an image of an African American they saw one of these stereotypes of a sub-human, deracinated beast-like being, like a visual mantra reinforcing the negativity of difference.
So, when a white person confronted an actual black human being, he or she was “an already read text,” to use Barbara Johnson’s brilliant definition of a stereotype in her book, A World of Difference. It didn’t matter what the individual black man or woman said and did, because negative images of them in the popular imagination already existed, as if they were “always ‘in place,’ ” as my colleague Homi K. Bhabha puts it (pdf), “already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated … as if the essential … bestial sexual license of the African [for example] that needs no proof, can never really, in discourse, be proved.” Hence the need to repeat these images over and over again, endlessly. The racist stereotype was subconsciously imposed on the face of an actual African American, the American mask of blackness, and these images justified the rollback of the gains black people had made during Reconstruction.
The fears and anxieties of black people from within the white collective unconscious were projected onto a plethora of quotidian, everyday, ordinary consumer objects, as we depict in the accompanying slide show, including post cards and trading cards, teapots and tea cozies, children’s banks and children’s games, napkin holders and pot holders, clocks and ash trays, sheet music and greeting cards, consumer products such as Aunt Jemima pancake mix and Gold Dust washing powder, Nigger Head tobacco and Jolly Nigger Head banks, “Pick the Pickaninny” songs, puzzles and dolls, Valentine Day cards, a seemingly endless number of watermelon-devouring and chicken-stealing “coons” and a veritable deluge of Sambo imagery spread throughout virtually every form of advertisement for a consumer product.
One motif illustrates the history of evolution by showing the transmutation of a watermelon into a “coon.” A sub-genre of lynching postcards also became popular, especially “The Dogwood Tree,” depicting five black bodies hanging from one tree in Sabine County, Texas on June 22, 1908 (see slide show below). One accompanying caption says: “In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free,/Let the WHITE SUPREME forever be./Let this a warning to all negroes be,/Or they’ll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE.” It’s no surprise that between 1889 and 1918, according to the NAACP’s “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States,” more than 3,000 lynchings took place in the U.S., a reflection of the powerful effect these racist images had to justify otherwise decent people to commit the most horrific crimes.
Meanwhile, images of the black people as childlike even extended to those living in Cuba and Puerto Rico following the Spanish-American War, as we can see in an 1899 illustration from Puck, included in the slide show below.
We should understand that this Sambo “art” is the way that anti-black racism found its daily existence, drowning out the actual nature and achievements of black people, and it explains why so many black thinkers and artists embarked upon “The New Negro” movement between 1900 and 1925, starting with Du Bois’ exhibition of photographs of middle-class Negroes at the Paris Exposition of 1900. As Du Bois put it in Darkwater, “One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning with the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word ‘Negro,’ leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern profit which lies in degrading blacks — all this has unconsciously trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk are sub-human,” “a mass of despicable men, inhuman; at best, laughable; at worst, the meat of mobs and fury.”
Chromolithography and the American marketplace made anti-black racism a commodity, widely consumed in the most unconscious ways, reinforcing and reflecting the legalization of racism and the delimitations being systematically inflicted upon the rights of black citizens by the courts and Southern legislatures. As the historian Thomas Holt concludes in “Marking: Race, Race-making, and the Writing of History” (pdf), a brilliant analysis of the role of minstrelsy in naturalizing every day anti-black racism, “it is precisely within the ordinary and everyday that racialization has been most effective, where it makes race,” a process “that fixes the meaning of one’s self before one even had had the opportunity to live and make a self,” “capable of communicating at a glance accumulated stores of racialized knowledge.”
To return to the question that Gail Deculus-Johnson poses in her brochure at Sable Images in Los Angeles — why should we collect these racist artifacts? — it would be good to turn to Du Bois for an answer. “In the fight against race prejudice,” he explained in Darkwater, “we were facing age-long complexes sunk low largely to unconscious habit and irrational urge.” And the shadow of these images still haunts every African-American’s existence within American society, like ghosts of the Jim Crow past, because “it is at this level that race is reproduced long after its original historical stimulus — the slave trade and slavery. It is at this level that seemingly rational and ordinary folk commit irrational and extraordinary acts,” as Thomas Holt writes.
In other words, these images are still very much with us, as one can see by examining the horrifically racist images of President Obama already collected at the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, founded and curated by David Pilgrim. And we need to study these images in order to deflect the harm that they continue to inflict upon African Americans, at the deepest levels of the American unconscious.
This Friday, June 7, marks the 121st anniversary of a more immediate harm inflicted on a 30-year-old Creole man whose name would become associated with one of the most notorious cases in U.S. Supreme Court history. The reason he was jailed: sitting on a “Whites Only” car on a Louisiana railroad. His intention: deliberate. Even though he could pass for white, he announced he was black. In testing his state’s Jim Crow law, he and the legal team behind him defied stereotypes. The legal opinions that followed reinforced them. Remember Homer Plessy this Friday and read about his case and other “Strange Faces of Jim Crow” here in next week’s column.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
What Was Black America’s Double War?
We read about Robert Smalls, the slave who sailed himself to freedom and then became the first black Navy captain during the American Civil War, five years before the first Memorial Day. Black leaders felt that African Americans could make the strongest case for freedom and citizenship if they demonstrated their heroism and commitment to the country on the battlefield, as they had done since 5,000 black men fought for the Patriot cause in the American Revolution. No one put this more forcefully than Frederick Douglass did in the middle of the Civil War: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”
Yet, by the time the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, memories of Smalls’ heroism and of the 200,000 black men who had served during the Civil War (and those who had served in every other American war since) had been, if you will, lost at sea.
Despite the gains of the abolition of slavery and the three Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution, Jim Crow segregation had pervaded every aspect of American society since the 1890s. And the military was no exception. When black men volunteered for duty or were drafted following the Japanese sneak attack, they were relegated to segregated divisions and combat support roles, such as cook, quartermaster and grave-digging duty. The military was as segregated as the Deep South.
So it is easy for us to see why it was difficult for African Americans not to see the hypocrisy between conditions at home and the noble war aims President Franklin Roosevelt articulated in his famous “Four Freedoms” speech on Jan. 6, 1941. And because of the gap between the promise and performance of American freedom when it came to race relations, many black people frankly felt alienated from the war effort.
While A. Philip Randolph’s threat of a massive March on Washington convinced FDR to ban discrimination against blacks in the defense industry in 1941, segregation in the armed forces persisted. Covering the conflict posed a problem for black newspapers: Either give in to the government’s propaganda about racial harmony at home for the sake of the war effort and national unity, or speak the truth and be smeared as co-conspirators with the enemy. American history was replete with cautionary tales of disappointment and betrayal, starting with experiences by Frederick Douglass in the post-Reconstruction period and continuing through one involving W.E.B. Du Bois (pdf) during World War I. What should black journalists and spokespersons do?
Two months to the day after Pearl Harbor (Feb. 7, 1942), the most widely read black newspaper in America, the Pittsburgh Courier, found a way to split the difference — actually, the newspaper cleverly intertwined them into a symbol and a national campaign that urged black people to give their all for the war effort, while at the same time calling on the government to do all it could to make the rhetoric of the Declaration of Independence and the equal rights amendments to the Constitution real for every citizen, regardless of race. And in honor of the battle against enemies from without and within, they called it “the Double V Campaign.”
Participants in the Double V campaign, 1942. (National Archives and Records Administration)
While the Double V Campaign was unable to achieve its goals during the war (segregation in the armed forces remained official policy until President Truman changed that in 1948), it galvanized black people and liberal whites around a mission whose power derived from the elegance of its simplicity. Innovative, clear and easily accessible, the Double V Campaign prefigured today’s most popular social media campaigns (“It gets better,” “Yes, we can,” “Think Different”), using an impressive range of communication platforms, even gimmicks, to spread the word during the critical first year of the war.
More than 2.5 million African Americans registered for the draft when World War II began; 1 million served. And though they faced segregation, even in combat, the Courier was there to tell their stories, to fight against racial discrimination within the armed forces and to insist that the quest for civil rights at home was just as important as the fight against fascism abroad.
The Campaign
The story of the campaign and its antecedents is quite fascinating. When the war broke out, the overwhelming number of black soldiers served in segregated units. Rather than tackle integration of the military head-on, civil rights leaders A. Philip Randolph, Walter White and others organized a March on Washington to protest discrimination in the defense industry, which, well before Pearl Harbor, was receiving lucrative contracts from Uncle Sam to build up Britain’s and the nation’s defenses.
Eleanor Roosevelt met with Randolph and White to ask them to call the march off, but they refused; FDR then met with them, but they still refused — unless he signed an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry. Facing a public relations disaster, FDR came around, and on June 25, 1941, he issued Executive Order 8802, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce a new rule — that “there shall be no discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
The march was called off, but it laid the groundwork for MLK’s March on Washington in 1963. And it established the mood within the black community to monitor race relations at home, even amid the war against fascism abroad. One man, deeply concerned about all of this, sat down and wrote a letter to the most influential black newspaper in the country.
On Jan. 31, 1942, the Pittsburgh Courier published a letter to the editor from James G. Thompson of Wichita, Kan. It was titled “Should I Sacrifice to Live ‘Half American?‘ ” In it, Thompson wrote: “Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: ‘Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?’ ‘Will things be better for the next generation in the peace to follow?’ ‘Would it be demanding too much to demand full citizenship rights in exchange for the sacrificing of my life?’ ‘Is the kind of America I know worth defending?’ ‘Will America be a true and pure democracy after this war?’ ‘Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?’ These and other questions need answering.”
Then he proposed what he called “the double V V for a double victory … The V for victory sign is being displayed prominently in all so-called democratic countries which are fighting for victory over aggression, slavery, and tyranny. If this V sign means that to those now engaged in this great conflict, then let we colored Americans adopt the double V V for a double victory. The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory for our enemies from within. For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.” [Read Thompson’s full letter to the Courier here.]
The Courier was the most widely read black newspaper during the war, with a national circulation well above 200,000. It had already run stories protesting the Navy’s use of black sailors only as “messmen,” and on Jan. 3, 1942, the paper denounced the American Red Cross’ refusal to accept black blood in donor drives, under the title “The Red Blood Myth.” But nothing could prepare the editors for the enthusiastic response of the public to Thompson’s letter.
A week later, on Feb. 7, 1942, two months to the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Courier published on its front page an insignia announcing “Democracy At Home Abroad.” The following week, the paper announced that it had published the insignia “to test the response and popularity of such a slogan with our readers. The response has been overwhelming.” Henceforth, “this slogan represents the true battle cry of colored America.” As the editors conclude, “we have adopted the Double ‘V’ war cry — victory over our enemies on the battlefields abroad. Thus in our fight for freedom we wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who would enslave us. WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT … WE ARE AMERICANS TOO!” (Read the full editorial online here. [pdf])
The Double V Campaign ran weekly into 1943. To promote patriotism, the Courier included an American flag with every subscription and encouraged its readers to buy war bonds. Double V clubs spread around the country. Among the campaign’s features, the paper published a weekly photo of a new “Double V Girl” frequently lifting two fingers in a “v” sign; celebrity and political endorsements followed, including Lana Turner (who, in a bit of cross-promotion, mentioned that her movie Slightly Dangerous featured blacks in the cast) and former presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, wearing a Double V pin, which the Courier sold for five cents, as William F. Yurasko reports. A Double V hairstyle called “the Doubler” also became popular, historian Patrick Washburn recalls, as did Double V gardens and Double V baseball games. Other black newspapers soon joined the Courier’s campaign.
To measure the campaign’s impact, the Courier ran a survey. On Oct. 24, 1942, it published the results: In response to the question, “Do You Feel that the Negro Should Soft Pedal His Demands for Complete Freedom and Citizenship and Await the Development of the Educational Process?” 88.7 percent of readers responded no, with only 9.2 percent responding yes.
Needless to say, not everyone was pleased with the Double V Campaign: As Washburn writes in A Question of Sedition, the federal government systematically monitored the black press, including this campaign, during the war. Accordingly, to avoid charges of disloyalty or aiding and abetting the enemy, the Courier’s editorial added a caveat to its poll results: “No one must interpret this … as a plot to impede the war effort. Negroes recognize that the first factor in the survival of this nation is the winning of the war. But they feel integration of Negroes into the whole scheme of things ‘revitalizes’ the U.S. war program.”
Legacy of the Campaign
In September 1945, the Double V insignia disappeared from the paper, replaced in 1946 by a Single V, indicating that more work combating antiblack racism needed to be done at home. But as Clarence Taylor concludes, “Although the Courier could not claim any concrete accomplishments, the Double V campaign helped provide a voice to Americans who wanted to protest racial discrimination and contribute to the war effort.”
While the Courier’s campaign kept the demands of African Americans for equal rights at home front and center during the war abroad, we can also argue that the Double V Campaign had at least two important legacies following the war: First, through the columns of its sportswriter, Wendell Smith, which featured prominently in the film 42, it doggedly fought against segregation in professional sports, contributing without a doubt to the Brooklyn, N.Y., Dodgers’ decision to sign Jackie Robinson in 1947, which in turn had a ripple effect. And on July 26, 1948, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed forces. With that action, the Double V Campaign had at last realized one of its principal goals.
The military service of black men and women before and after the desegregation order, and the strength of the Double V Campaign, helped to inspire the modern civil rights movement that began in earnest just after the war ended. Both efforts remain worthy of remembrance on this Memorial Day holiday.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Which Slave Sailed Himself to Freedom?
Just before dawn on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and a crew composed of fellow slaves, in the absence of the white captain and his two mates, slipped a cotton steamer off the dock, picked up family members at a rendezvous point, then slowly navigated their way through the harbor. Smalls, doubling as the captain, even donning the captain’s wide-brimmed straw hat to help to hide his face, responded with the proper coded signals at two Confederate checkpoints, including at Fort Sumter itself, and other defense positions. Cleared, Smalls sailed into the open seas. Once outside of Confederate waters, he had his crew raise a white flag and surrendered his ship to the blockading Union fleet.
In fewer than four hours, Robert Smalls had done something unimaginable: In the midst of the Civil War, this black male slave had commandeered a heavily armed Confederate ship and delivered its 17 black passengers (nine men, five women and three children) from slavery to freedom.
Sailing From Slavery to Freedom
Robert Smalls, S.C. M.C. Born in Beaufort, SC, April 1839. (Library of Congress, prints and photographs division).
After two weeks of supplying various island points, the Planter returns to the Charleston docks by nightfall. It is due to go out again the next morning and so is heavily armed, including approximately 200 rounds of ammunition, a 32-pound pivot gun, a 24-pound howitzer and four other guns, among them one that had been dented in the original attack on Sumter. In between drop-offs, the three white officers on board (Capt. C.J. Relyea, pilot Samuel H. Smith and engineer Zerich Pitcher) make the fateful decision to disembark for the night — either for a party or to visit family — leaving the crew’s eight slave members behind. If caught, Capt. Relyea could face court-martial — that’s how much he trusts them.
At the top of the list is Robert Smalls, a 22-year-old mulatto slave who’s been sailing these waters since he was a teenager: intelligent and resourceful, defiant with compassion, an expert navigator with a family yearning to be free. According to the 1883 Naval Committee report, Smalls serves as the ship’s “virtual pilot,”but because only whites can rank, he is slotted as “wheelman.” Smalls not only acts the part; he looks it, as well. He is often teased about his resemblance to Capt. Relyea: Is it his skin, his frame or both? The true joke, though, is Smalls’ to spring, for what none of the officers know is that he has been planning for this moment for weeks and is willing to use every weapon on board to see it through.
Background
Smalls was born on April 5, 1839, behind his owner’s city house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, S.C. His mother, Lydia, served in the house but grew up in the fields, where, at the age of nine, she was taken from her own family on the Sea Islands. It is not clear who Smalls’ father was. Some say it was his owner, John McKee; others, his son Henry; still others, the plantation manager, Patrick Smalls. What is clear is that the McKee family favored Robert Smalls over the other slave children, so much so that his mother worried he would reach manhood without grasping the horrors of the institution into which he was born. To educate him, she arranged for him to be sent into the fields to work and watch slaves at “the whipping post.”
“The result of this lesson led Robert to defiance,” wrote great-granddaughter Helen Boulware Moore and historian W. Marvin Dulaney, and he “frequently found himself in the Beaufort jail.” If anything, Smalls’ mother’s plan had worked too well, so that “fear[ing] for her son’s safety … she asked McKee to allow Smalls to go to Charleston to be rented out to work.” Again her wish was granted. By the time Smalls turned 19, he had tried his hand at a number of city jobs and was allowed to keep one dollar of his wages a week (his owner took the rest). Far more valuable was the education he received on the water; few knew Charleston harbor better than Robert Smalls.
It’s where he earned his job on the Planter. It’s also where he met his wife, Hannah, a slave of the Kingman family working at a Charleston hotel. With their owners’ permission, the two moved into an apartment together and had two children: Elizabeth and Robert Jr. Well aware this was no guarantee of a permanent union, Smalls asked his wife’s owner if he could purchase his family outright; they agreed but at a steep price: $800. Smalls only had $100. “How long would it take [him] to save up another $700?” Moore and Dulaney ask. Unwittingly, Smalls’ “look-enough-alike,” Captain Rylea, gave him his best backup
To white Confederates, the Union ships blocking their harbors were another example of the North’s enslavement of the South; to actual slaves like Robert Smalls, these ships signaled the tantalizing promise of freedom. Under orders from Secretary Gideon Welles in Washington, Navy commanders had been accepting runaways as contraband since the previous September. While Smalls couldn’t afford to buy his family on shore, he knew he could win their freedom by sea — and so he told his wife to be ready for whenever opportunity dawned.
The Escape on the Planter
That opportunity is at hand on the night of May 12. Once the white officers are on shore, Smalls confides his plan to the other slaves on board. According to the Naval Committee report, two choose to stay behind. “The design was hazardous in the extreme,” it states, and Smalls and his men have no intention of being taken alive; either they will escape or use whatever guns and ammunition they have to fight and, if necessary, sink their ship. “Failure and detection would have been certain death,” the Navy report makes plain. “Fearful was the venture, but it was made.”
At 2:00 a.m. on May 13, Smalls dons Capt. Rylea’s straw hat and orders the Planter’s skeleton crew to put up the boiler and hoist the South Carolina and Confederate flags as decoys. Easing out of the dock, in view of Gen. Ripley’s headquarters, they pause at the West Atlantic Wharf to pick up Smalls’ wife and children, along with four other women, three men and another child.
At 3:25 a.m., the Planter accelerates “her perilous adventure,” the Navy report continues (it reads more like a Robert Louis Stevenson novel). From the pilot house, Smalls blows the ship’s whistle while passing Confederate Forts Johnson and, at 4:15 a.m., Fort Sumter, “as cooly as if General Ripley was on board.” Smalls not only knows all the right Navy signals to flash; he even folds his arms like Capt. Rylea, so that in the shadows of dawn, he passes convincingly for white.
“She was supposed to be the guard boat and allowed to pass without interruption,” Confederate Aide-de-Campe F.G. Ravenel explains defensively in a letter to his commander hours later. It is only when the Planterpasses out of Rebel gun range that the alarm is sounded — the Planter is heading for the Union blockade. Approaching it, Smalls orders his crew to replace the Palmetto and Rebel flags with a white bed sheet his wife brought on board. Not seeing it, Acting Volunteer Lt. J. Frederick Nickels of the U.S.S. Onward orders his sailors to “open her ports.” It is “sunrise,” Nickels writes in a letter the same day, an illuminating fact that may have changed the course of history, at least on board the Planter — for now Nickels could see.
In The Negro’s Civil War, the dean of Civil War studies James McPherson quotes the following eyewitness account: “Just as No. 3 port gun was being elevated, someone cried out, ‘I see something that looks like a white flag’; and true enough there was something flying on the steamer that would have been white by application of soap and water. As she neared us, we looked in vain for the face of a white man. When they discovered that we would not fire on them, there was a rush of contrabands out on her deck, some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking towards Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it, and ‘de heart of de Souf,’ generally. As the steamer came near, and under the stern of the Onward, one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off his hat, shouted, ‘Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!’ ” That man is Robert Smalls, and he and his family and the entire slave crew of the Planter are now free.
After “board[ing] her, haul[ing] down the flag of truce, and hoist[ing] the American ensign” (his words), Lt. Nickels transfers the Planter to his commander, Capt. E.G. Parrott of the U.S.S. Augusta. Parrott then forwards it on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont (of the “du Pont” Du Ponts), at Port Royal, Hilton Heads Island, with a letter describing Smalls as “very intelligent contraband.” Du Pont is similarly impressed, and the next day writes a letter to the Navy secretary in Washington, stating, “Robert, the intelligent slave and pilot of the boat, who performed this bold feet so skillfully, informed me of [the capture of the Sumter gun], presuming it would be a matter of interest.” He “is superior to any who have come into our lines — intelligent as many of them have been.” While Du Pont sends the families to Beaufort, he takes care of the Planter’screw personally while having its captured flags mailed to Washington via the Adams Express, the same private carrier that had delivered Box Brown to freedom in 1849.
The Reception
Smalls may not have had the $700 he needed to purchase his family’s freedom before the war; now, because of his bravery and his inability to purchase his wife, the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1862, passed a private bill authorizing the Navy to appraise the Planter and award Smalls and his crew half the proceeds for “rescuing her from the enemies of the Government.” Smalls received $1,500 personally, enough to purchase his former owner’s house in Beaufort off the tax rolls following the war, though according to the later Naval Affairs Committee report, his pay should have been substantially higher.
The Confederates seemed to know this already; after Smalls’ escape, biographer Andrew Billingsley notes, they put a $4,000 bounty on his head. Still, those on the scene had a hard time explaining how slaves pulled off such a feat; in the aftermath, Aide-de-Campe Ravenel even intimated to his commander that the night before, “it would appear that … two white men and a white woman went on board of her, and as they were not seen to return it is supposed that they have also gone with her.” Suppose all they wanted — there was no record of any white passengers aboard the Planter the morning of May 13 — Smalls and his crew had acted alone. As his contemporary steamer pilot Mark Twain famously wrote: “Facts are stubborn things.”
In the North, Smalls was feted as a hero and personally lobbied the Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to begin enlisting black soldiers. After President Lincoln acted a few months later, Smalls was said to have recruited 5,000 soldiers by himself. In October 1862, he returned to the Planter as pilot as part of Admiral Du Pont’s South Atlantic Blockading Squadron. According to the 1883 Naval Affairs Committee report, Smalls was engaged in approximately 17 military actions, including the April 7, 1863, assault on Fort Sumter and the attack at Folly Island Creek, S.C., two months later, where he assumed command of the Planter when, under “very hot fire,” its white captain became so “demoralized” he hid in the “coal-bunker.” For his valiancy, Smalls was promoted to the rank of captain himself, and from December 1863 on, earned $150 a month, making him one of the highest paid black soldiers of the war. Poetically, when the war ended in April 1865, Smalls was on board the Planter in a ceremony in Charleston Harbor.
Robert Smalls’ Postwar Record
Following the war, Smalls continued to push the boundaries of freedom as a first-generation black politician, serving in the South Carolina state assembly and senate, and for five nonconsecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1874-1886) before watching his state roll back Reconstruction in a revised 1895 constitution that stripped blacks of their voting rights. He died in Beaufort on February 22, 1915, in the same house behind which he had been born a slave and is buried behind a bust at the Tabernacle Baptist Church. In the face of the rise of Jim Crow, Smalls stood firm as an unyielding advocate for the political rights of African Americans: “My race needs no special defense for the past history of them and this country. It proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
For those interested in learning more about this daring Civil War hero, Helen Boulware Moore and W. Martin Dulaney, with help from the National Endowment for the Humanities, have curated a traveling exhibit, “The Life and Times of Congressman Robert Smalls.” You can also find him on YouTube, including in a South Carolina state educational video; a fourth grader’s Black History Month presentation; even a realtor’s tour of his former home in Beaufort, most recently listed for $1.2 million.
Imagine what the Planter and its guns and ammunition would fetch in current dollars? One thing I know: Robert Smalls and the purchase of his family’s freedom? Priceless.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Did African-American Slaves Rebel?
One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally “docile” or “content and loyal,” thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.
As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to ” ‘the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro’ ” who, he felt, was an ” ‘imitator and non-moralist,’ ” learning ” ‘deceit and libertinism with facility,’ ” being ” ‘easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots’ “; in short, Negroes were ” ‘a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.’ ”
Consider how bizarre this was: It wasn’t enough that slaves had been subjugated under a harsh and brutal regime for two and a half centuries; following the collapse of Reconstruction, this school of historians — unapologetically supportive of slavery — kicked the slaves again for not rising up more frequently to kill their oppressive masters. And lest we think that this phenomenon was relegated to 19th- and early 20th-century scholars, as late as 1959, Stanley Elkins drew a picture of the slaves as infantilized “Sambos” in his book Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, reduced to the status of the passive, “perpetual child” by the severely oppressive form of American slavery, and thus unable to rebel. Rarely can I think of a colder, nastier set of claims than these about the lack of courage or “manhood” of the African-American slaves.
So, did African-American slaves rebel? Of course they did. As early as 1934, our old friend Joel A. Rogers identified 33 slave revolts, including Nat Turner’s, in his 100 Amazing Facts. And nine years later, the historian Herbert Aptheker published his pioneering study, American Negro Slave Revolts, to set the record straight. Aptheker defined a slave revolt as an action involving 10 or more slaves, with “freedom as the apparent aim [and] contemporary references labeling the event as an uprising, plot, insurrection, or the equivalent of these.” In all, Aptheker says, he “has found records of approximately two hundred and fifty revolts and conspiracies in the history of American Negro slavery.” Other scholars have found as many as 313.
Let’s consider the five greatest slave rebellions in the United States, about which Donald Yacovone and I write in the forthcoming companion book to my new PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
1. Stono Rebellion, 1739. The Stono Rebellion was the largest slave revolt ever staged in the 13 colonies. On Sunday, Sept. 9, 1739, a day free of labor, about 20 slaves under the leadership of a man named Jemmy provided whites with a painful lesson on the African desire for liberty. Many members of the group were seasoned soldiers, either from the Yamasee War or from their experience in their homes in Angola, where they were captured and sold, and had been trained in the use of weapons.
They gathered at the Stono River and raided a warehouse-like store, Hutchenson’s, executing the white owners and placing their victims’ heads on the store’s front steps for all to see. They moved on to other houses in the area, killing the occupants and burning the structures, marching through the colony toward St. Augustine, Fla., where under Spanish law, they would be free.
As the march proceeded, not all slaves joined the insurrection; in fact, some hung back and actually helped hide their masters. But many were drawn to it, and the insurrectionists soon numbered about 100. They paraded down King’s Highway, according to sources, carrying banners and shouting, “Liberty!” — lukango in their native Kikongo, a word that would have expressed the English ideals embodied in liberty and, perhaps, salvation.
The slaves fought off the English for more than a week before the colonists rallied and killed most of the rebels, although some very likely reached Fort Mose. Even after Colonial forces crushed the Stono uprising, outbreaks occurred, including the very next year, when South Carolina executed at least 50 additional rebel slaves.
2. The New York City Conspiracy of 1741. With about 1,700 blacks living in a city of some 7,000 whites appearing determined to grind every person of African descent under their heel, some form of revenge seemed inevitable. In early 1741, Fort George in New York burned to the ground. Fires erupted elsewhere in the city — four in one day — and in New Jersey and on Long Island. Several white people claimed they had heard slaves bragging about setting the fires and threatening worse. They concluded that a revolt had been planned by secret black societies and gangs, inspired by a conspiracy of priests and their Catholic minions — white, black, brown, free and slave.
Certainly there were coherent ethnic groups who might have led a resistance, among them the Papa, from the Slave Coast near Whydah (Ouidah) in Benin; the Igbo, from the area around the Niger River; and the Malagasy, from Madagascar. Another identifiable and suspect group was known among the conspirators as the “Cuba People,” “negroes and mulattoes” captured in the early spring of 1740 in Cuba. They had probably been brought to New York from Havana, the greatest port of the Spanish West Indies and home to a free black population. Having been “free men in their own country,” they rightly felt unjustly enslaved in New York.
A 16-year-old Irish indentured servant, under arrest for theft, claimed knowledge of a plot by the city’s slaves — in league with a few whites — to kill white men, seize white women and incinerate the city. In the investigation that followed, 30 black men, two white men and two white women were executed. Seventy people of African descent were exiled to far-flung places like Newfoundland, Madeira, Saint-Domingue (which at independence from the French in 1804 was renamed Haiti) and Curaçao. Before the end of the summer of 1741, 17 blacks would be hanged and 13 more sent to the stake, becoming ghastly illuminations of white fears ignited by the institution of slavery they so zealously defended.
3. Gabriel’s Conspiracy, 1800. Born prophetically in 1776 on the Prosser plantation, just six miles north of Richmond, Va., and home (to use the term loosely) to 53 slaves, a slave named Gabriel would hatch a plot, with freedom as its goal, that was emblematic of the era in which he lived.
A skilled blacksmith who stood more than six feet tall and dressed in fine clothes when he was away from the forge, Gabriel cut an imposing figure. But what distinguished him more than his physical bearing was his ability to read and write: Only 5 percent of Southern slaves were literate.
Other slaves looked up to men like Gabriel, and Gabriel himself found inspiration in the French and Saint-Domingue revolutions of 1789. He imbibed the political fervor of the era and concluded, albeit erroneously, that Jeffersonian democratic ideology encompassed the interests of black slaves and white workingmen alike, who, united, could oppose the oppressive Federalist merchant class.
Spurred on by two liberty-minded French soldiers he met in a tavern, Gabriel began to formulate a plan, enlisting his brother Solomon and another servant on the Prosser plantation in his fight for freedom. Word quickly spread to Richmond, other nearby towns and plantations and well beyond to Petersburg and Norfolk, via free and enslaved blacks who worked the waterways. Gabriel took a tremendous risk in letting so many black people learn of his plans: It was necessary as a means of attracting supporters, but it also exposed him to the possibility of betrayal.
Regardless, Gabriel persevered, aiming to rally at least 1,000 slaves to his banner of “Death or Liberty,” an inversion of the famed cry of the slaveholding revolutionary Patrick Henry. With incredible daring — and naïveté — Gabriel determined to march to Richmond, take the armory and hold Gov. James Monroe hostage until the merchant class bent to the rebels’ demands of equal rights for all. He planned his uprising for August 30 and publicized it well.
But on that day, one of the worst thunderstorms in recent memory pummeled Virginia, washing away roads and making travel all but impossible. Undeterred, Gabriel believed that only a small band was necessary to carry out the plan. But many of his followers lost faith, and he was betrayed by a slave named Pharoah, who feared retribution if the plot failed.
The rebellion was barely under way when the state captured Gabriel and several co-conspirators. Twenty-five African Americans, worth about $9,000 or so — money that cash-strapped Virginia surely thought it could ill afford — were hanged together before Gabriel went to the gallows and was executed, alone.
4. German Coast Uprising, 1811. If the Haitian Revolution between 1791 and 1804 — spearheaded by Touissant Louverture and fought and won by black slaves under the leadership of Jean-Jacques Dessalines — struck fear in the hearts of slave owners everywhere, it struck a loud and electrifying chord with African slaves in America.
In 1811, about 40 miles north of New Orleans, Charles Deslondes, a mulatto slave driver on the Andry sugar plantation in the German Coast area of Louisiana, took volatile inspiration from that victory seven years prior in Haiti. He would go on to lead what the young historian Daniel Rasmussen calls the largest and most sophisticated slave revolt in U.S. history in his book American Uprising. (The Stono Rebellion had been the largest slave revolt on these shores to this point, but that occurred in the colonies, before America won its independence from Great Britain.) After communicating his intentions to slaves on the Andry plantation and in nearby areas, on the rainy evening of Jan. 8, Deslondes and about 25 slaves rose up and attacked the plantation’s owner and family. They hacked to death one of the owner’s sons, but carelessly allowed the master to escape.
That was a tactical mistake to be sure, but Deslondes and his men had wisely chosen the well-outfitted Andry plantation — a warehouse for the local militia — as the place to begin their revolt. They ransacked the stores and seized uniforms, guns and ammunition. As they moved toward New Orleans, intending to capture the city, dozens more men and women joined the cause, singing Creole protest songs while pillaging plantations and murdering whites. Some estimated that the force ultimately swelled to 300, but it’s unlikely that Deslondes’ army exceeded 124.
The South Carolina congressman, slave master and Indian fighter Wade Hampton was assigned the task of suppressing the insurrection. With a combined force of about 30 regular U.S. Army soldiers and militia, it would take Hampton two days to stop the rebels. They fought a pitched battle that ended only when the slaves ran out of ammunition, about 20 miles from New Orleans. In the slaughter that followed, the slaves’ lack of military experience was evident: The whites suffered no casualties, but when the slaves surrendered, about 20 insurgents lay dead, another 50 became prisoners and the remainder fled into the swamps.
By the end of the month, whites had rounded up another 50 insurgents. In short order, about 100 survivors were summarily executed, their heads severed and placed along the road to New Orleans. As one planter noted, they looked “like crows sitting on long poles.”
5. Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831. Born on Oct. 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Va., the week before Gabriel was hanged, Nat Turner impressed family and friends with an unusual sense of purpose, even as a child. Driven by prophetic visions and joined by a host of followers — but with no clear goals — on August 22, 1831, Turner and about 70 armed slaves and free blacks set off to slaughter the white neighbors who enslaved them.
In the early hours of the morning, they bludgeoned Turner’s master and his master’s wife and children with axes. By the end of the next day, the rebels had attacked about 15 homes and killed between 55 and 60 whites as they moved toward the religiously named county seat of Jerusalem, Va. Other slaves who had planned to join the rebellion suddenly turned against it after white militia began to attack Turner’s men, undoubtedly concluding that he was bound to fail. Most of the rebels were captured quickly, but Turner eluded authorities for more than a month.
On Sunday, Oct. 30, a local white man stumbled upon Turner’s hideout and seized him. A special Virginia court tried him on Nov. 5 and sentenced him to hang six days later. A barbaric scene followed his execution. Enraged whites took his body, skinned it, distributed parts as souvenirs and rendered his remains into grease. His head was removed and for a time sat in the biology department of Wooster College in Ohio. (In fact, it is likely that pieces of his body — including his skull and a purse made from his skin — have been preserved and are hidden in storage somewhere.)
Of his fellow rebels, 21 went to the gallows, and another 16 were sold away from the region. As the state reacted with harsher laws controlling black people, many free blacks fled Virginia for good. Turner remains a legendary figure, remembered for the bloody path he forged in his personal war against slavery, and for the grisly and garish way he was treated in death.
The heroism and sacrifices of these slave insurrectionists would be a prelude to the noble performance of some 200,000 black men who served so very courageously in the Civil War, the war that finally put an end to the evil institution that in 1860 chained some 3.9 million human beings to perpetual bondage.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Was Jackie Robinson Court-Martialed?
On April 15, 1947, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, N.Y., Jack Roosevelt Robinson, at the age of 28, became the first African American to play for a major-league baseball team since the 1884 season, when Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker played for the Toledo Blue Stockings between May 1 and Sept. 4. (William White, a student at Brown, played one game for the Providence Grays of the National League in 1879, hence technically breaking the color barrier.) Before a crowd of 26,623 spectators (of whom approximately 14,000 are thought to have been black), though he got no hits, Robinson scored a run to contribute to the Dodgers’ 5-3 victory over the Boston Braves.
The rest, as they say, is history: During a relatively short career spanning only nine years, Robinson was Rookie of the Year in 1947, Most Valuable Player in 1949, took his team to the World Series six times (including one World Championship in 1955) and made the All-Star Team six times. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1962, and in an unprecedented gesture to his enormous historical significance and prowess as an athlete, Major League Baseball retired his number “42” in 1997, the first time this has been done for any athlete in any sport.
These are the facts of his baseball career, which kids my age knew by heart. But what virtually none of us knew back then, and many people don’t know today, is that Lt. Jack Roosevelt Robinson was actually court-martialed in 1944! Court-martials are military courts, usually consisting of a panel of commissioned officers who conduct a criminal trial. There are three types of courts-martial: Summary Court-Martial, Special Court-Martial and General Court-Martial. Robinson faced a General Court-Martial.
Had he been found guilty, the whole course of black participation in professional baseball and every other professional sport, as well as the modern civil rights movement, most probably would have been profoundly affected adversely. But the circumstances of that court-martial only add to Robinson’s credentials as one of the true pioneers of the civil rights movement.
Standing his Ground
As detailed in the masterful Jackie Robinson: A Biography by Arnold Rampersad, on July 6, 1944, Robinson “became entangled in a dispute that threatened to end his military service in disgrace.” While riding on a military bus returning to a hospital from “the colored officers club,” Robinson sat next to Virginia Jones, the wife of one of his fellow officers. Jones looked white — at least the white bus driver thought so. After a few blocks, the driver abruptly ordered Robinson “to move to the back of the bus.” Robinson, justifiably outraged, refused. Among other things, he had read that segregation was no longer allowed on military buses (pdf) and proceeded to engage in a form of protest prefiguring a similar action by Rosa Parks 11 years later.
Rampersad reprints Robinson’s statement about what happened next: “The bus driver asked me for my identification card. I refused to give it to him. He then went to the Dispatcher and told him something. What he told him I don’t know. He then comes back and tells the people that this nigger is making trouble. I told the driver to stop f—in with me, so he gets the rest of the men around there and starts blowing his top and someone calls the MP’s.” Robinson was placed under “arrest in quarters,” which meant that “he would be considered under arrest at the hospital, although without a guard. Robinson was then taken to the hospital in a police pickup truck.” A white officer would recall that Robinson “was handcuffed, and there were shackles on his legs. Robinson’s face was angry, the muscles on his face tight, his eyes half closed.”
Robinson was transferred to the 758th Tank Battalion on July 24, “where the commander signed orders to prosecute him.” On that day, he was arrested. Rampersad says that “At 1:45 in the afternoon on August 2, the case of The United States v. 2nd Lieutenant Jack R. Robinson, 0-10315861, Cavalry, Company C, 758th Tank Battalion, began.” Robinson’s fate was in the hands of nine men, eight of them white: “One was black; another had been a UCLA student [where Robinson had been an undergraduate]. Six votes were needed for conviction.”
Robinson faced two charges: “The first, a violation of Article of War No. 63, accused him of ‘behaving with disrespect toward Capt. Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior officer’ … The second charge was a violation of Article No. 64, in this case ‘willful disobedience of lawful command of Gerald M. Bear, CMP, his superior.’ ” Three other charges were dropped before the trial began. Testimony reveals how bravely Robinson had fought to defend himself on the evening of the incident, including reportedly saying quite heroically, “Look here, you son-of-a-bitch, don’t you call me no nigger!” After a four-hour trial, Robinson was exonerated: “Robinson secured at least the four votes (secret and written) needed for his acquittal. He was found ‘not guilty of all specifications and charges.'”
Setting History in Motion
As the philosopher Cornel West put it in his introduction to Jackie Robinson’s autobiography, I Never Had It Made, “More even than either Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement, Jackie Robinson graphically symbolized and personified the challenge to a vicious legacy and ideology of white supremacy in American history,” a challenge, Cornel continued, that “remains incomplete, unfinished.”
It is so easy for us to underestimate the enormous significance, both symbolically and politically, of Jackie Robinson’s integration of Major League Baseball, today when so very many black athletes play such dominant roles in sports. Baseball was America’s “national pastime,” and it was also, accordingly, the ultimate bastion of white male dominance. If professional sports as a whole were to be desegregated — and to some extent, the larger society — this effort had to commence on the baseball field. To understand the even broader social and political import of what Robinson’s actions on the field initiated, we need only consider the chain reaction of crucial episodes in the history of the civil rights movement that unfolded almost immediately after his first season with the Dodgers.
First, President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9982 on July 26, 1948, just over a year after Robinson faced his first pitcher at Ebbets Field, abolishing racial discrimination in the armed forces. It is certainly reasonable to assume that Truman’s timing was informed by Robinson’s successful integration of professional baseball. Truman’s desegregation of the military no doubt informed the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board decision desegregating public schools in 1954, which in turn informed the actions of Rosa Parks on her bus, leading to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Out of the Montgomery Bus Boycott emerged the leadership role of the young Martin Luther King Jr. Without Martin Luther King, Jr. there would have been no modern civil rights movement.
And without the civil rights movement, there would have been no affirmative action, and without affirmative action, to fast-forward a bit, there would be no Barack Obama.
I’m not claiming that what Jackie Robinson alone achieved in 1947 set off this chain reaction of events, but his courage and bravery played a major role in the history of integration, both on the field and throughout American society, and no history of the civil rights movement would be complete without noting Robinson’s major role, and according him a place of honor and immortality in African-American history because of it.
Off the field, Jackie Robinson was also one of movement’s strongest voices, in spite of the fact that he had to withstand so much abuse on the field and from the stands in stoic yet eloquent silence. He once wrote, in a letter to Averell Harriman in 1955, that “We are sure that in time, the spirit embedded in the Constitution of the United States will prevail in all sections of the country; however, it is important now that we be vigilant in guarding against flagrant miscarriages of justice that will hurt not only the innocent victims, but also the perpetrators.” He desperately — and unsuccessfully — lobbied Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon to intervene when Dr. King was jailed in Georgia in October 1960. Some scholars believe that John Kennedy’s decision to do so led to his margin of victory over Nixon.
Jackie Robinson was a “race man,” as they said in those days, dedicated to the betterment of the black people. As he wrote in another letter to William Keefe in 1956, “I speak to you only as an American who happens to be an American Negro and one who is proud of that heritage. We ask for nothing special. We ask only that we be permitted to compete on an even basis, and if we are not worthy, then the competition shall, per se, eliminate us.” Hank Aaron noted this quite eloquently in his introduction to I Never Had It Made: “Jackie Robinson gave all of us — not only black athletes but every black person in this country — a sense of our own strength.” As the conservative columnist George Will correctly noted, Robinson’s life is “One of the great achievements not only in the annals of sports, but of the human drama anywhere, anytime.”
It is for these reasons that we should all be grateful that Robinson was acquitted at his court-martial for refusing to move to the back of the bus, and that we should honor the immortal legacy of Jackie Robinson as one of the greatest heroes of the modern civil rights movement, this extraordinarily noble man who suffered so much in so many ways for the sacrifices he made, both publicly and privately, so that African Americans could continue their long march for freedom and equality in this great republic with new vigor and determination.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
Who Really Invented the ‘Talented Tenth’?
Just about everybody who knows anything about black history and/or Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois knows that one of the most important concepts of the many that he defined was “the Talented Tenth.” Many of us even committed to memory the first two sentences of perhaps his most famous essay, published in 1903 in a book called The Negro Problem, and edited by Du Bois’s nemesis, Booker T. Washington: “The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among Negroes must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth; it is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own and other races.”
These sentences were effectively a throw-down against Washington’s strident advocacy of industrial training as the ideal curriculum for the daughters and sons for the former slaves, rather than a classical liberal arts education, the sort of education that Du Bois had received at Fisk and then at Harvard. So, for Du Bois, how Negroes should be educated, and Washington’s position about it, was quite personal.
Well, if you guessed that W.E.B. Du Bois was the author of the concept of “the Talented Tenth,” you would be wrong! As my colleague Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first noted in her book, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880 – 1920, the term was actually invented by a white man, Henry Lyman Morehouse (the man for whom the great Morehouse College was named), seven years before Du Bois popularized it. In an essay by that very title first published in April 1896 in the Independent magazine, Morehouse coined the term and defined it in this way: “In the discussion concerning Negro education we should not forget the talented tenth man. An ordinary education may answer for the nine men of mediocrity; but if this is all we offer the talented tenth man, we make a prodigious mistake.” Why? Because, Morehouse continues, “The tenth man, with superior natural endowments, symmetrically trained and highly developed, may become a mightier influence, a greater inspiration to others than all the other nine, or nine times nine like them.”
Obviously concerned that his argument would appear to be elitist, which it nakedly and unapologetically was — like Du Bois’ elaboration of it seven years later — Morehouse was quick to add that he was not unmindful of the importance of the contributions of the other so-called “nine-tenths”: “Without disparagement of faithful men of moderate abilities, it may be said that in all ages the mighty impulses that have propelled a people onward in their progressive career, have proceeded from a few gifted souls … men of thoroughly disciplined minds, of sharpened perceptive faculties, trained to analyze and to generalize; men of well-balanced judgments and power of clear and forceful statement.” The talented tenth man, Morehouse concludes, “is an uncrowned king in his sphere.”
A Battle Rooted in “Compromise”
What a powerful, if quite idealistic, brief for a black liberal arts education Morehouse gave. It is no accident that he published this essay just a few months after Booker T. Washington’s famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. That address was delivered at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta the previous September, at the height of the Jim Crow era, less than a year before the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision was handed down on May 18, 1896, cementing “separate but equal” as the law of the land (until that decision was overturned by the court in Brown v. Board in 1954). In this speech, which was widely heralded throughout the country and which was called the “Atlanta Compromise” because Du Bois mockingly dubbed it as such, Washington stressed, among other things, the importance of industrial or vocational curricula over a college education for black people.
Morehouse, without naming Washington, was taking Washington’s position head on: “I repeat that not to make proper provision for the high education of the talented tenth man of the colored people is a prodigious mistake. It is to dwarf the tree that has in it the potency of a grand oak. Industrial education is good for the nine; the common English branches are good for the nine; but that tenth man [like Du Bois, whom he doesn’t name but of whom he is clearly thinking, and unlike Washington, who he hints is actually a prime example of those “self-made men, so-called, whose best powers were evoked by rare opportunities”] ought to have the best opportunities for making the most of himself for humanity and for God.”
Note that Washington — in possibly the most famous and widely distributed speech that a black person had given before Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 — had just a few months before declared in Atlanta, to the delight of Southern segregationists who hailed him as a prophet, that “we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labour, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful.” And wait for Washington’s punch line: “No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”
Clearly, Morehouse was firing the opening salvo at Washington’s concept of the proper way to educate a Negro, and in 1903 Du Bois would fire the second. And just as clearly, Du Bois took Washington’s attack on the role of the liberal arts in Negro education personally, especially his line that “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.” In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois would signify upon Washington’s comment by publishing a short story, “Of the Coming of John,” which features his black protagonist paying five dollars to attend a performance of Lohengrin, Richard Wagner’s famous opera, only to be removed from his seat because a white man objects to being seated next to him.
Did Lincoln Plant the Seed?
What strikes me as fascinating about Morehouse’s and Du Bois’ concept of a supposedly elite 10 percent of “the race” is that it accords almost exactly with the size of the Free Negro population in the 1860 census: 11 percent of the African-American community was composed of Free Negroes on the eve of the Civil War (and quite surprisingly far more of them lived in the South (258,346) than in the Northeast (155,983), but that’s the subject of another column). And it was this group of freed persons to whom President Abraham Lincoln was referring when he announced, in the last speech of his life, that he advocated giving “the elective franchise” to “the very intelligent [colored man], and on those who serve our cause as soldiers,” who numbered about 200,000.
If we add the number of free black men with the number of black soldiers, it’s easy to see that Abraham Lincoln effectively introduced the notion of a privileged “talented tenth” within the race who would be accorded more rights than the remaining nine-tenths, the 3.95 million slaves who would really only be freed by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. So perhaps we should give Lincoln the credit for inventing the concept!
Despite the narrow scope and elitism of Lincoln’s proposal, how radical an idea was this in an America that had just suffered massive losses from a civil war that undeniably was fought to end black slavery? Standing on the grounds of the White House listening to the president’s speech that day, April 11, 1865, was a man named John Wilkes Booth. When he heard Lincoln say that he wanted to give even some black men the right to vote, Booth was heard to remark, “That means nigger citizenship. That is the last speech he will ever make.” Four days later, Booth assassinated Lincoln. The 15th Amendment to the Constitution, which extended to all black men the right to vote, would be ratified on Feb. 3, 1870, five years after Lincoln’s death.
Even more curiously, a month after Lincoln’s 1865 speech, the black Republican newspaper in New Orleans foreshadowed the concept of the Talented Tenth in an editorial it published as early as May 18, when it noted that “the [black] poor … are nine-tenths of the colored population.” So it’s clear that concept of the Talented Tenth had multiple authors before Du Bois publicized it in 1903.
Fifty of the 100 Amazing Facts will be published on The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross website. Read all 100 Facts on The Root.
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