On Her Own Ground Read online

  Just as Madam Walker had set about making the acquaintance of Indianapolis’s notable citizens, she was also drawn to the families whose shotgun houses lined the alley behind her home and factory. Believing that “the Lord prospers her because of her giving,” she quietly, and often, helped the poorest of her neighbors with rent and groceries. In her factory and office, she employed nearly three dozen people from the area. Throughout the year, she slipped nickels and dimes into the hands of children who ran errands for her beauty parlor. At Christmas she distributed turkeys and food baskets.

  But she knew that her well-intentioned gestures could not solve the much larger problems that confronted her neighbors. Adequate housing and steady jobs remained their most pressing needs. In 1910, African Americans lived on blocks with the working-class Germans, Italians and Irish who remained in the increasingly black residential area that extended east and west from Indiana Avenue. All but the most well-off still had outhouses, coal and wood stoves and coal-oil lamps in their neatly kept homes, a mix of Victorian cottages, two-family doubles, two-story wood-frame flats and long rows of cheap one-story frame tenements.

  “Quite a number own their own homes, and a few [have] small sums ‘laid by,’” observed a 1900 visitor, referring to the thriftiness of some of the black residents he had met. “People had a lot of pride in those days,” remembered Frances Stout, whose grandparents owned a vegetable stand in the City Market. “They were determined to try to get ahead.” Although few had any substantial material wealth, most were strivers who took pains to beautify their surroundings. “Practically everybody had flowers,” said Stout. “Marigolds. Petunias. Sunflowers. Hollyhocks. They were all in wooden buckets on their front steps and around their yards.”

  While Indiana Avenue was a far cry from St. Louis’s notorious Chestnut Valley, its twenty-nine saloons and fifteen poolrooms—many of them “nothing but gambling places”—enticed the idle and underemployed young men who congregated along its busy corridor. For the majority who resisted the temptations of the streets, the Young Men’s Christian Association at 443 Indiana Avenue provided a much-needed haven. Despite its cramped and poorly equipped facility, the converted storefront was filled seven days a week with scores of boys and men enrolled in Bible studies, physical education classes and reading groups. The first-floor gymnasium—one-third the size of a regulation basketball floor—was so small that the number of team players had been reduced from five to three. The upstairs meeting room stayed in such demand that there often were as many as three organizations in line every night to use it. Jerry-rigged showers and battered lockers occupied an adjacent coal shed. “It is utterly impossible,” pronounced the Freeman, “to do the work that [needs to] be done in the present inadequate quarters.”

  In August 1911, as the Knights of Pythias convention was closing, Indianapolis’s black civic leaders began focusing in earnest on plans to replace the run-down YMCA. Since that January, they had monitored the progress of Jesse Moorland, one of two black international secretaries of the Y’s Colored Men’s Department, as he led fund-raising campaigns for $100,000 buildings in Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia. Now Indianapolis was eager to have its own facility.

  “We must get busy. We need the building,” Freeman publisher George Knox implored in a September editorial. “Others have done the thing, and what others can do, we can do and we must do.” As president of the colored YMCA board, Knox, along with several ministers, had already gained the tentative endorsement of Arthur H. Godard, the General Secretary of the all-white Central YMCA. Having recently helped to raise nearly $275,000 for his own newly constructed downtown Indianapolis Y building, Godard had agreed to approach members of his board of directors on behalf of their black YMCA brethren.

  Knox, whom Godard probably had known for nearly a decade, had gained influence among prominent men in the city during the 1890s as proprietor of several barbershops catering to a white clientele. His bestknown customer was Republican President Benjamin Harrison, whose policies he had trumpeted in the pages of the Freeman. In addition to his shop in the old Central Y building, where he had become familiar with the association’s work, Knox had also managed the Bates House barbershop. Located in the city’s most exclusive late-nineteenth-century hotel, it was then “likened to the elegant ‘harem of an Eastern caliph’” with its ten chairs and fifteen baths. Through his personal alliances with state elected officials, Knox had been named an alternate delegate to the 1892 and 1896 Republican National Conventions. For many years, he remained the most powerful black politician in the state.

  Madam Walker probably had become acquainted with Knox through their mutual friend Joseph Ward. Over time she had grown to admire his rise from illiterate slave to influential publisher. Coincidentally, he also had made his mark in the hair care business, even marketing for a time a “hair restorative” to rid the scalp of “dandruff and other impurities.”

  In the fall of 1911, Madam Walker supported Knox’s call for a new Y because she believed it would help solve many of the neighborhood’s problems and because she considered it her civic responsibility and Christian duty. But as a woman, she could neither join the YMCA nor serve on its executive planning committee, which included Joseph Ward, Henry L. Sanders and Sumner Furniss, a well-established physician whose brother, Dr. Henry Furniss, had been named U.S. Minister to Haiti. Nevertheless, Madam Walker was prepared to make a financial contribution to the cause.

  Chicago’s enormously successful fund-raising campaign was due largely to the zeal and organizational talents of Jesse Moorland, a Howard University Divinity School graduate, who had been charged with developing black Y’s in the nation’s cities. Spurred by two conditional $25,000 contributions from businessman J. W. Harris and Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald, Moorland had helped the Windy City’s black community raise $67,000 in just ten days, an astonishing feat for a largely workingclass donor base with no truly wealthy prospects. Gifts from white YMCA donors pushed the building fund total to $150,000.

  In December 1910, just before Chicago’s whirlwind fund drive began, Moorland had been invited to lunch with Rosenwald. During the meal, he persuaded the mail-order magnate to extend his largesse beyond Illinois “to the Negro citizens of America.” Moorland’s proposition: donate $25,000 to any city willing to raise its own $75,000 to construct a Y in its black community. Because Rosenwald was “so favorably impressed” with Moorland, he agreed “then and there” to back the proposal.

  With Moorland’s blessing, Indianapolis became a candidate for the Rosenwald funds. The conditions of the pledge required that whites and blacks work together, something Rosenwald believed “would eventually help reduce prejudice.” It was also the most pragmatic strategy for an African American community with little ability to construct its own building.

  Moorland had become acquainted with Indianapolis’s black community in February 1900, when board members of the Central Y invited him to assess the feasibility of “establishing an Association among colored men.” His six-day on-site survey revealed “four to five thousand young colored men” whose condition was “very sad and deplorable.” By the time of Moorland’s visit, the city’s black population had grown to 15,931, comprising nearly a quarter of all blacks in the state. Most had migrated since 1880 from rural Indiana and the upper Southern states, including a particularly large number from Kentucky.

  While Moorland found several thriving churches and fraternal organizations among working-class blacks, he was still alarmed by the conditions that some of the young male migrants faced. “Vice is on the increase among them and . . . there is nothing to counteract the downward tendency,” he noted, with faith that a YMCA branch would provide an effective antidote to the lure of liquor and dice. “It is apparent to all that a definite work for colored men is needed here.”

  Upon Moorland’s recommendation, two young physicians organized a “Young Men’s Prayer Band” to lay the groundwork for a colored association. After the 1905 a
rrival of YMCA Secretary Thomas E. Taylor, membership grew to 400 boys and men, making it one of the largest Y’s in the country by 1910.

  The circumstances that Moorland had found in 1900 had only grown worse with a swelling black migrant population. Taylor’s own survey of the city revealed hundreds of young men living in lodging houses where “several men sleep in the same room.” The overcrowding, he lamented, had made tuberculosis and other communicable diseases “rampant.”

  Such living conditions, and the scarcity of decent-paying jobs for African Americans, Taylor believed, caused many young men to break the law. His investigation of 1910 police records revealed that of the 8,840 men arrested that year, 1,974—or more than 20 percent—were black, although African Americans made up less than 10 percent of the city’s population. There was little consolation that most of the crimes were petty thefts, minor offenses and misdemeanors.

  Marion County Police Court Judge James A. Collins had commended Taylor’s “encouraging” rehabilitation of the young men Collins had put in his care. Taylor’s work, the judge noted, deserved to be rewarded with a new facility. “What the young negro of today wants is an opportunity,” Judge Collins wrote. “Give him the same chance the white boy has and you’ll have better negro citizens.”

  Concern for public safety also was uppermost in the minds of the Indianapolis Star editorial board, who urged community leaders to overcome “race prejudice” and to support the new Y. “The presence in any city of an idle and lawless negro element is a problem and a danger,” it concluded, then added, “It would be an almost inconceivably narrow and superficial soul who would object to such an enterprise on race grounds.”

  But the Star had reason to anticipate opposition in this ethnically circumscribed Northern town. From time to time, when Samuel Lewis “Lew” Shank, the city’s folksy and flamboyant Republican mayor, rode in parades and made friendly speeches—as he had done during the Knights of Pythias convention—African Americans could temporarily enjoy a display of racial harmony. But after such ephemeral flirtations with brotherhood—quite often and quite transparently pegged to election seasons—the city’s influential and affluent whites, who had crossed the social barriers seeking votes, returned to their own neighborhoods. For the most part, the city’s white businessmen and professionals lived in impressive homes along and near the North Meridian Street corridor, while most blacks were prevented from moving beyond the boundaries of the Indiana Avenue area both by custom and by the refusal of Realtors to rent or sell them homes. Except in their jobs as servants, chauffeurs, laundresses and deliverymen, they were unwelcome in the city’s fashionable enclaves.

  With this in mind, Thomas Taylor had been careful to soft-pedal his objectives for the colored Y when speaking with the city’s white civic leaders. In the kind of charade that many blacks felt obligated to adopt during an era of overt racism, he downplayed his community’s desires. The Indianapolis association, he insisted, was content to provide education of a “practical kind” for young black men who, he implied, had no intentions of competing with their white counterparts. His aim, he said, was to “teach him how to become a better janitor, a better waiter or teach him some trade.” Such an approach was quite acceptable to members of the larger community, who preferred to exist quite separate and apart from African Americans.

  From Madam Walker’s perspective, Indianapolis was no better and no worse on the matter of race than any other American city of the era. Despite the unmasked discrimination that periodically emerged, she still valued its location and transportation options. Nevertheless she must also have been aware that the white civic leadership liked to portray Indianapolis as a “100 percent American town.” And in 1910 the notion of “real Americans” excluded blacks as well as most first-generation Europeans.

  While nearby Chicago had become a magnet for thousands of Irish, Polish, Italian and German immigrants—who now composed 36 percent of that city’s population—fewer than 9 percent of Indianapolis’s residents were immigrants. Such numbers caused the Commercial Club of Indianapolis, the forerunner of the Chamber of Commerce, to boast of “almost a total absence” of what it derisively termed “the foreign floating element.” With such sentiments so openly voiced, Indianapolis remained a racially segregated, economically divided city.

  Still there were whites who wished to help the YMCA effort and who chipped away at the barriers. Former U.S. Senator Charles W. Fairbanks, who had served as Theodore Roosevelt’s vice president from 1905 to 1909, had earlier urged the Central Y to pass a resolution to draw up plans to replace the Indiana Avenue branch. “It is to our selfish interest that this, the city of our residence, should be made the best city possible,” he waxed, with high-flown sentiment, before his fellow board members. “And the greatest things are not those which merely build up the physical city, but those which tend to build up character and to elevate the people morally and spiritually.”

  But it had taken Chicagoan Julius Rosenwald’s singular generosity to push Fairbanks and his Indianapolis colleagues beyond rhetoric. Now with Godard and the others on board, the leadership of the Central Y “agreed to bear the greater burden, knowing the colored men’s inability to rear up such a building.” Accepting Rosenwald’s conditions, Godard’s board proposed to collect $60,000, four times more than the $15,000 the Indiana Avenue Y was expected to raise. In response, Knox’s committee vowed, on behalf of “the entire Negro population,” to “put our shoulders together” for the appeal. “It is the responsibility of every Negro citizen, and only can it be accomplished by the united effort of us all . . . The cry is ‘Unity!’ The slogan is ‘Get Together.’”

  In anticipation of the ten-day Indianapolis fund-raising blitz, Moorland employed the winning formula that had cinched the Chicago appeal. With his high-level committees already in place—and racial pride and civic responsibility for both whites and blacks at stake—he scheduled “monster rallies” and lectures illustrated with glass stereopticon slides during the week leading up to the door-to-door canvassing. “A new building for your association is the salvation of your boys and girls. It will make better sons, fathers and husbands, and indirectly better girls and mothers in this city,” he proclaimed at a mass meeting at the Pythian Temple. “You are belittled when it is said you will raise only $15,000 for such a building,” he scolded the black Hoosiers. Apparently Madam Walker took his words to heart when he said, “I shall be surprised if you good people don’t go way ahead of that.”

  On the day before the Monday, October 23, kickoff, two of the city’s most prosperous white businessmen dramatically set the tone with leadership gifts that electrified the volunteers of this highly watched crusade. Arthur Jordan, a stalwart local YMCA supporter who had pioneered refrigerated railroad cars for transporting poultry between the Midwest and the East Coast, announced a very generous $5,000 pledge. Carl Fisher, a co-founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, who had become wealthy manufacturing automobile headlamp batteries, bested Jordan with an even more striking $10,000 commitment.

  That afternoon, the Indiana Avenue Y committee launched its campaign a few blocks away at the Pythian Temple with a few surprises of its own. To the grateful applause of 300 foot-stomping African Americans, Madam Walker confidently pledged $1,000. “If the association can save our boys, our girls will be saved, and that’s what I am interested in,” she said, echoing Moorland’s earlier words. Characteristically, she also used the occasion to voice her own particular concerns. “Some day I would like to see a colored girls’ association started.” Her contribution, she told the audience, was tendered in order to spur more generosity and responsibility among the city’s African Americans. “The Young Men’s Christian Association is one of the greatest institutions there is . . . I am much interested in its work,” she told the crowd. “And I think every colored person ought to contribute to the campaign.”

  By the end of the evening an additional $1,900 had been contributed, including $500 from Mrs. L. E. McNairdee, a clair
voyant who operated a well-kept boardinghouse. By coincidence, the two largest gifts from Indianapolis’s African American community had come that day from black businesswomen.

  The Freeman, which called Madam Walker “the first colored woman in the United States to give $1000 to a colored Y.M.C.A. building,” showcased her photograph in an article that was read all over the country. At the time she claimed “an income of $1,000 per month,” making the pledge a near tithe of her annual earnings. Skeptics wondered whether she could honor what seemed to be an “unthinkable” amount “coming from a colored woman.” Of course, Madam Walker ignored their accusations, confident that she could deliver on her promise.

  On Monday, the campaign opened at full throttle with 450 canvassers—including twelve Central Y teams and seventeen Indiana Avenue teams—who fanned out across the city in more than two dozen cars. Madam Walker’s Auburn automobile was likely part of the fleet. But even in collaboration on behalf of the community’s welfare, the line of racial demarcation prevailed. “By the rules of the campaign,” blacks were required to “confine their solicitations to the people of their own race.” Likewise, no member of the Central team was allowed to solicit subscriptions from blacks.

  The Indianapolis Star and the Indianapolis News, the city’s largest dailies, covered the campaign like a horse race, tallying the funds in morning and evening headlines, then reporting on the Central Y’s lunchtime assemblies, as well as the Indiana Avenue Y’s supper-hour meetings. On the second day of the campaign—with a third of their goal already secured—the black canvassers were buoyed by a congratulatory telegram from Rosenwald. “I am greatly delighted with your message, stating that $5,430 was reported from the colored people the first day,” he had wired Moorland. “Your absolute faith in the integrity of the colored man, and his willingness to make a sacrifice, has been justified once more.”