On Her Own Ground Read online

  “The folklore,” according to Washington biographer Harlan, “is [that] she came to Tuskegee and demonstrated her method on [Washington’s] family. Once he saw the results . . . he changed his mind.” In fact Madam Walker claimed to have given “84 demonstrative treatments” of her hair care method, “among which number she has the honor of including Dr. Washington and his family.” With Portia Washington Pittman, Booker T. Washington’s daughter, married and gone from the campus, Margaret Murray Washington and her niece, Laura Murray Washington, may have been the family members whose hair Madam treated. If so, Margaret Washington, whom Madam Walker had met previously at NACW events, had proven to be more sympathetic to the concept of hair culture than her husband. As president of the Mothers’ Council, Tuskegee’s “lady principal” often encountered “barefooted” rural Alabama women with “hair uncombed,” who attended her classes on hygiene, housekeeping, proper dress and child care. The treatments that Madam Walker offered could only have helped these uneducated, ill-groomed farmworkers. By the end of her ten-day visit, Madam Walker had “no end to her praises for the hospitality and courtesies shown her at the school,” despite her testy start. Afterward she expressed her gratitude to both Washingtons for the kindness “shown both myself and my agent in Tuskegee. I shall always remember very pleasantly the inspiration I received from the sights at Tuskegee Institute.”

  A month later, while billing her for $40 worth of printing work, Booker T. Washington felt no hesitation in soliciting a donation for his school from the woman he at first had insulted. Her $5 contribution was small, but it was meant to cover a semester’s worth of books for a deserving Tuskegee student. Washington thanked her “heartily” for her gift, though he may have been disappointed in the amount.

  With her Tuskegee visit, Madam Walker had accomplished exactly what she had intended: recognition from Washington and a chance to promote her company. From a business standpoint, the trip had been so satisfactory that she had opened a “permanent agency” near the campus. For her local representative she chose Dora Larrie, an Indianapolis woman whom she personally had trained in the Walker Method. Pleased with Larrie’s ambition and energy, Madam Walker felt confident that her operation was in good hands. But soon she would have reason to regret her decision.

  After a brief return to Indianapolis to replenish their supplies, Madam Walker and C.J. headed south again, dividing the territory by branching out to different states. In late March they reunited in Jackson, Mississippi, but the time apart had not made their hearts grow fonder. Instead the relationship had become pricklier. The more they were together, especially in the company of others, the clearer it became that Madam Walker was the more impressive member of the couple and the more effective entrepreneur. While C.J. had the ability to be a charming companion and an effective salesman, he continued to squander and mismanage their money. Madam Walker was increasingly concerned with current events and political affairs, but C.J. seemed content to focus on cars, clothes and, unbeknown to his wife, other women.

  To soothe his suffering ego, C.J. began another affair, this time with Dora Larrie. While Madam Walker remained in Mississippi instructing new agents, C.J. and Larrie met at the Dunbar Hotel in Birmingham, Alabama, and, as C.J. remembered, “laid our plans.” He later admitted in a public letter that Larrie had prevailed upon him to leave his wife, having convinced him that he “was being badly treated by Madam Walker because she did not let me handle all the money.” Instead, Larrie persuaded C.J. that as her business partner—with his “knowledge of making the goods, and her ability to do the work, and talk”—they could “make thousands of dollars.” Most important, she promised a gullible C.J. that he would “be master of the situation.”

  The enterprising ambition that had persuaded Madam Walker to name Larrie as her agent had translated into a self-serving ambition that finally undermined what was left of an already unsalvageable marriage. Larrie “closed her work at Tuskegee” and joined C.J. in Atlanta, where, according to Madam Walker’s secretary—in an impossible-to-verify oral history—Madam Walker discovered them together. The third-hand scenario may be more plausible fiction than fact. But Madam Walker is said to have made her way to their hotel, heard them talking through a keyhole, reached into her handbag for her revolver, gripped the trigger, then froze. “She realized that everything she had worked for would be destroyed,” her secretary Vio let Reynolds later recalled. “And she knew C.J. was not worth it. So she walked away.”

  Immediately Madam Walker returned to Indianapolis and met with attorney Ransom. A few days later, C.J. followed her there, his trip “cut short in the South,” according to the Freeman, “as pressing business demanded his attention at home.” The urgent matters, no doubt, were his wife’s anger and humiliation and, most important, her decision to divorce him.

  During the summer, while Ransom sorted out the legal details for the divorce, Madam Walker resumed her Southern sojourn. Newspaper articles about her trip—probably self-authored with Ransom’s careful editing—reported not just on her business but on her interest in “the moral and social questions affecting her race.” By mid-July she had joined forces with Mary Lynch, president of North Carolina’s colored Women’s Christian Temperance Union, who helped her navigate the state and provided introductions to ministers and clubwomen in each town they visited.

  Fearless as Madam Walker was, the indignities and dangers of the Jim Crow South had made traveling alone an unwise and unsafe proposition. The “Negro coach,” invariably a portion of a baggage bin or smoking car, was “poorly ventilated, poorly lighted, and, above all, rarely kept clean.” More often than not the makeshift compartment was “a vantage point for all the engine smoke and cinders.” And while white women were provided with separate, well-tended parlor cars, black women were relegated to messy, uncomfortable coaches. “No matter how many colored women may be in the colored end of the car, nor how clean or how well-educated these colored women may be, [their] car is made the headquarters for the newsboy” and for cigar-smoking white men, complained Booker T. Washington in a 1912 Century magazine article. Fortunately for Madam Walker, many of the Pullman porters—especially those who read and distributed the Freeman—knew of her. She, in turn, cultivated the friendship of these often college-educated young men, who went out of their way to provide her with the best possible accommodations under the circumstances.

  From North Carolina, Madam Walker and Mary Lynch headed north to Virginia for the National Association of Colored Women’s eighth biennial convention in Hampton in late July 1912. The sight of more than 400 purposeful black women on Hampton Institute’s Chesapeake Bay campus must have been a balm to the traveling companions. Just two years earlier, when Madam Walker arrived at the NACW conference in Louisville, she had been largely unknown to most of the original members of the organization. After the 1912 meeting, that would no longer be the case as she set about to make herself an integral part of some of their most visible initiatives.

  During the opening session, after hearing Mary McLeod Bethune describe her Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls, Madam Walker volunteered to spearhead a fund-raising campaign for the eight-year-old school. In Bethune, who was making her first appearance at an NACW conference, Madam Walker could see another woman who shared her vision for educating black girls. Originally trained as a missionary, Bethune had managed to attract 250 students within two years of founding her Florida school. By 1912, when Madam Walker first met Bethune, the forceful and charismatic woman had already garnered the support of James N. Gamble, a founder of Procter and Gamble. Both of them daughters of the plantation South, Bethune and Madam Walker refused to bow in the face of rejection and insult. “No matter how deep my hurt, I always smiled,” Bethune once said. “I refused to be discouraged, for neither God nor man could use a discouraged soul.” It was exactly the kind of inner perseverance upon which Madam Walker continued to rely.

  As always, the NACW gatherings were a mix of social welfare,
culture and politics, producing resolutions denouncing the “uncomfortable and inferior accommodations” of Jim Crow cars, calling for an end to segregated housing codes and deploring lynching and mob violence. At the behest of Adella Hunt Logan, an outspoken suffragette and wife of Tuskegee treasurer Warren Logan, the group “declared in favor of full woman suffrage and advocated the formation of political study clubs to stir up” activism in their communities. But what most aroused the delegates’ interest was a plea to help seventeen-year-old Virginia Christian, a young black washerwoman who awaited a mid-August electrocution in Richmond for murdering her white employer, a Mrs. Belote. Several weeks earlier, after Belote had accused her of stealing a skirt, the two women argued violently. When Christian continued to deny the theft, Belote attacked her with a heavy cuspidor. “In a blind rage” Christian retaliated, striking Belote across her forehead with a broken broomstick and “felling her instantly.” To stop Belote’s screams, Christian “thrust a towel down her throat,” then walked off with jewelry and money from Belote’s purse.

  Christian certainly was no model of virtue. And the NACW had admitted as much, calling her an “irresponsible being.” Nevertheless, they abhorred the death penalty for a minor and hoped to have her declared mentally incompetent in order to commute her sentence to life imprisonment. Mary Church Terrell, the founding president of the NACW, was appointed as head of a special committee charged with visiting Virginia governor William Hodges Mann. At dawn that Thursday she traveled to Richmond with a petition requesting leniency. “Owing to all the circumstances of the case we feel that the electrocution of this young girl would be repugnant to the Christian womanhood and manhood not only of the United States but of the whole civilized world,” read the NACW appeal. At 10 A.M. Terrell presented the document to the governor and made her plea. But while he granted Terrell permission to visit Christian in jail, he declined to “show clemency on account of age for Virginia Christian.” Late that afternoon, as Terrell returned to Hampton, she delivered the disappointing news to her colleagues.

  In the evening, as Madam Walker was formally introduced to the group, she opened her remarks with the announcement of her donation to cover all travel costs for Terrell and the two other committee members who had ventured to Richmond. The woman the NACW delegates had scarcely known two years earlier now received a “rising vote of thanks” and was praised not only for doing “a great deal to improve the appearance of our women” but for the “interest [she has shown] in race progress by contributing one thousand dollars to the YMCA fund.” Her speech was said to have “captivated the vast audience.”

  That Saturday morning, as the group was serenaded by the Hampton Institute Brass Band, Madam Walker and the other delegates sailed aboard the steamer Hampton Roads on an excursion through the lower Chesapeake Bay. At noon they docked at the Newport News Navy Yard for a lunchtime speech by Booker T. Washington, husband of the group’s newly installed president, Margaret Murray Washington.

  Once again Madam Walker found herself in the company of her reluctant Tuskegee host. In this setting he could not help but hear of her support for the Christian case and the Bethune scholarship. Money was a language she knew he understood, master that he was of drawing it to his school and his pet causes. And because she intended to keep using hers “in the interest of the race,” she knew he would not be able to ignore her. In just a few weeks, in fact, she expected to see him again on his own turf while attending her first National Negro Business League convention.

  Emboldened by the accolades she had received all summer, Madam Walker arrived in Chicago for the thirteenth annual NNBL meeting confident that Washington would not deny her request to address the delegates. Since the organization’s first conference in 1900, the annual gathering had remained the premier showcase for black enterprise, a congratulatory three-day demonstration of personal triumph and race pride. Washington, the group’s founder, also considered it an essential “instrument” for achieving “what he envisioned as a new emancipation” of economic independence for African Americans.

  Along with Emmett Scott, Washington controlled the conference agenda, parceling out leadership roles and preferred speaking slots to friends, as well as to those newcomers he wished to spotlight and endorse. This year Madam Walker believed she had earned the privilege to be among those featured speakers. But, as usual, Washington remained non-committal when she approached him.

  The seeds for the NNBL first sprouted in May 1899 during a discussion of the topic “The Negro in Business” at Atlanta University when conference planner W.E.B. Du Bois recommended “the organization in every town and hamlet where the colored people dwell, of Negro Business Men’s Leagues, and the gradual federation from these of state and national organizations.” By 1912, of course, Du Bois and Washington had become bitter ideological enemies differing over educational and political matters in the black community. But at the turn of the century—and even in 1912—they differed little on their belief that a key strategy for black “economic salvation” lay in the development of commercial enterprise.

  Atlanta Baptist College instructor John Hope, a keynote speaker at the Atlanta University conference, similarly had advocated a brand of black economic nationalism as a defense against racial discrimination. “Business seems to be not only simply the raw material of Anglo-Saxon civilization, but almost the civilization itself,” the militant and highly accomplished future president of Morehouse College had declared in his speech, “The Meaning of Business.” Calling whites—and specifically Anglo-Saxons—“a conquering people who turn their conquests into their pockets,” he insisted that blacks could no longer occupy the sidelines in matters of commerce. “The policy of avoiding entrance in the world’s business would be suicide to the Negro,” he warned. “Yet as a matter of great account, we ought to note that as good a showing as we have made, that showing is but as pebbles on the shore of business enterprise.”

  In fact, almost no blacks held stakes in mining, railroads, banking, steel or oil, unquestionably the true wealth builders of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. “During America’s greatest industrial and business expansion, there were few black manufacturing enterprises that reflected industrial America,” according to business historian Juliet E. K. Walker. At the time of the first NNBL convention “the total wealth of black America, $700 million, amounted to less than that of the nation’s first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel,” which had been organized just a few months later.

  Du Bois’s postconference study, “The Negro in Business,” provided “the first careful documentation” of the nation’s estimated 5,000 black entrepreneurs, in fact “a blueprint of the segregated black world’s economic infrastructure.” While completing the report, Du Bois was named director of the Business Bureau of the National Afro-American Council, a shortlived but visible civil rights organization that had become a battleground for the factions of conservative and militant blacks. Charged with organizing local business league chapters, Du Bois was forced to abandon his effort even before he began when the council’s executive committee—led by a loyal Washington supporter—eliminated his meager postage budget. Not long afterward, Washington, with whom Du Bois still had a relatively cordial relationship, asked to see Du Bois’s list of potential members. Roster in hand, Washington set about contacting the businessmen Du Bois had identified, then did nothing to include Du Bois in the founding of the NNBL or the planning of its first convention. Some observers suspected intentional sabotage on the part of the executive committee in an effort to wrest the organization from Du Bois’s control. Antilynching crusader and National Afro-American Council member Ida B. Wells publicly accused Washington of stealing Du Bois’s concept. And so, although “the business league idea was born in the brain of W.E.B. Du Bois,” it was Washington who used it to most advantage.

  By 1912 the NNBL had grown to nearly 3,000 members, but as E. Franklin Frazier noted in his cynical appraisal of what he called “the myth of N
egro business,” most of those on the rolls were not really businessmen, but a combination of professionals and clergy, as well as some entrepreneurs and bankers. Nevertheless the organization served Washington’s purposes well. Through a national network of local chapters, he had created “an organized body of loyal, conservative followers in every city with a substantial black population, North or South.” With an emphasis on self-help, thrift and hard work, members were encouraged not to grouse about the very real “racial discriminations” they faced, but to turn them into assets. “These discriminations are only blessings in disguise,” one delegate said sanguinely at an early NNBL gathering. “They stimulate and encourage rather than cower and humiliate the true, ambitious, self-determined Negro.”

  The organization advocated a “buy black” policy—something Du Bois had also fostered—as a way to develop a kind of capitalism based on racial solidarity in which African American consumers would purchase most of their goods and services from other African Americans. To some degree this seemed a logical response, as the refusal of many white banks, funeral homes and insurance companies to do business with blacks had forced the growth of small but prosperous parallel, and segregated, enterprises in the increasingly urbanized black communities of the North and South.

  At the same time Washington counseled that whites would patronize black entrepreneurs in the open marketplace regardless of race, if only they offered sufficiently valuable products. As early as his 1895 Atlanta Cotton States Exposition speech he had said, “No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized.” And in some instances this was true for those whites who did do business with blacks. Of course, in an era when large banks refused to extend credit to blacks and, on a smaller scale, when whites had all but abandoned the black barbers whose shops they had previously frequented, this approach may have been overly optimistic. But these annual events were so full of applause, praise and celebration that analysis of the obstacles was usually glossed over and not particularly welcomed by Washington.