On Her Own Ground Page 21

  “Madam loved going to the movies,” remembered her longtime secretary, Violet Reynolds, who frequently accompanied her on afternoon trips to local theater houses for the silent romances, Westerns and comedies that were so popular at the time. As the movie industry was establishing itself in Hollywood and evolving from nickelodeon fare, the melodramas and crime stories provided an entertaining escape for Madam with their wealthy male and female characters, who inhabited a pampered fantasy world of mansions, chauffeurs and leisurely days. That these characters often had created their fortunes as entrepreneurs or financiers must have intrigued Madam Walker.

  Less than a week after the Spencer recital Madam Walker arrived at the Isis Theatre in downtown Indianapolis prepared for a Saturday afternoon of fun. But when she presented her dime admission fee, the ticket agent refused to accept her money, informing her that “colored people” were now required to pay “twenty-five cents.” In response to her demand for an explanation of the new policy, the young box office attendant replied that she had received “orders to charge colored persons twenty-five cents each for tickets.” An irate Madam Walker insisted that Ransom take action against the theater. In his formal complaint to the Marion County Court, he demanded $100 in damages” for his “clean, sober, neat and orderly” client, who had faced racial discrimination in a public place. No document showing the disposition of the case exists in court records, but the incident surely added to Madam Walker’s impatience with Indianapolis and increased her desire to move.

  Without question, Madam Walker was known as Indianapolis’s premier black hostess, her dinner invitations coveted, especially when she entertained prominent out-of-town African American visitors from across a spectrum of political ideologies. Fascinated as Madam Walker was by current events, the conversations always focused on the issues of the day, from the racial policies of President Woodrow Wilson and the sinking of the Lusitania to the rise in lynchings; from the escalating European war and the U.S. intervention in Haiti to the racism of D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation. But Madam’s guests were just as happy for the chance to unwind in her well-appointed home, to hear recorded music on her gold-leaf Victrola—“the only one of [its] kind in Indianapolis”—and to experience the “unspeakable richness” of her grandfather clock as it chimed every quarter hour like the bells of Westminster Abbey.

  In August 1914 after the National Association of Colored Women’s biennial convention at nearby Wilberforce College, she hosted a Sunday afternoon reception for several hundred guests to honor her St. Louis NACW friends Victoria Clay Haley—a St. Paul’s member and Royal Grand Matron of Missouri’s Order of the Eastern Star—and Arsania Williams—president of St. Louis’s Wheatley YWCA, who had taught at Dumas Elementary School while Lelia was a student there. A newer acquaintance, Mary Burnett Talbert, who was in line to become NACW president in 1916, also had accompanied her to Indianapolis for the festivities.

  Two days later at an NACW “echo meeting”—where delegates gathered to discuss the convention proceedings—Talbert, an “unusually forceful speaker,” encouraged local chapter members to become “a factor in the great affairs affecting the home, religion and politics.” During the visit Madam Walker and Talbert began to forge a friendship and a strong political alliance as they chatted with Haley and Williams beneath the hand-carved alabaster chandelier in Madam’s parlor. Despite the vast differences in their early life experiences—Talbert had graduated from Oberlin College in 1886 and married a successful Buffalo Realtor—the two women shared a dauntless dedication to improve the lives of black women.

  The following spring, during April 1915, Madam Walker hosted a seven-course dinner for Robert Russa Moton, a Hampton Institute faculty member who was in town for three public appearances. Among the guests enjoying oyster cocktail, cream of popcorn soup, stuffed squab and asparagus salad in tomato aspic was Sidney Frissell, the son of Hampton president Hollis B. Frissell, as well as Madam Walker’s closest local friends George Knox, Robert Brokenburr, Thomas E. Taylor, F. B. Ransom and their wives. During Moton’s visit, Madam Walker surprised him with the promise of a $100 scholarship for his school, where he had served as commandant of male students since 1891.

  Only one week later, William Monroe Trotter—the iconoclastic editor of the Boston Guardian and Harvard’s first black Phi Beta Kappa graduate—was Madam Walker’s houseguest during his second Midwestern speaking tour. As a founder of the Niagara Movement, an organization that had openly challenged Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory political tactics as early as 1905, Trotter was at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Moton, a Bookerite and future Tuskegee Institute president. But Madam Walker, who remained open to almost all ideas that might “advance the race,” had declined to criticize publicly either perspective, supporting what she could in both.

  At the invitation of Ransom, who was president of the Good Citizens League, Trotter had been asked to speak at Bethel AME about President Woodrow Wilson’s disappointing record concerning African Americans. A Democrat and the first Southern-born President elected since the Civil War, Wilson recently had instituted the racial segregation of black civil servants in previously integrated federal buildings, excluding them from cafeterias in the post office and the Department of the Treasury. As a further blow to Trotter and the other blacks who had supported Wilson in his 1912 campaign, the number of African American federal appointees had dwindled markedly from thirty-one to eight during his first term in office.

  Four months before Trotter’s Indianapolis visit he had led a delegation to the White House to challenge Wilson’s policies. After a heated exchange, the President expelled the smart but contentious Trotter from his office. The controversial publicity, however, had helped generate a large audience in Indianapolis, providing “the drawing card, for many,” who, “out of curiosity, were anxious to see and meet the man who [had] ‘sassed’ the President.” Having carried his message to Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and Missouri, Trotter considered his Indianapolis trip “one of the most beneficial of my . . . tour” both because he had “an intelligent and appreciative audience” and because he had organized a new chapter of his radical National Equal Rights League. “My home entertainment,” Trotter wrote Mr. Ransom of his stay at 640 North West Street, “was royal.”

  One week later, while Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute founder Mary McLeod Bethune was in Indianapolis, Madam Walker presented her with a contribution for her Florida school. But one visitor Madam Walker did not personally entertain was Annie Pope-Turnbo, who had arrived for a week’s stay in the city in late May 1915. Having married Aaron Malone, a former Bible salesman, in April 1914, she was now known as Annie Malone. To Madam Walker’s annoyance, the new Mrs. Malone was featured on the front page of the Recorder in her seven-passenger Packard in a photograph very similar to Madam Walker’s frequently used publicity shot at the wheel of her 1912 Ford Model T touring car. Details of Malone’s social outings, including dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Elwood Knox—the son and daughter-in-law of the Freeman’s George Knox—as well as Recorder publisher George Stewart and Madam Walker’s pastor, Dr. E. P. Roberts, were featured in the accompanying article.

  In a thinly veiled slap at Madam, the Recorder piece reported that Malone “is known the country over for her charity work, and is always ready to help the deserving. She is the kind that gives and says nothing of it . . . [and] unlike many, [is] never heard to boast of what she has done.” Earlier in the year, Stewart had run a front-page article calling Malone the “Race’s Leading Business Woman” and “the queen of all Negro business women.”

  Although Stewart had carried similar articles praising Madam Walker, and although Madam Walker may have assumed that Malone had written the articles herself—just as Ransom had frequently supplied much of her copy to the country’s black newspapers—she remained irked with Stewart that fall. “Now in regards to George Stewart and the Popes etc.,” she fumed in a letter to Ransom. “I don’t care a rap of my finge
r. I am no copy cat. They copy from me. I have naturally got the lead and there is nothing Stewart’s paper can do for me. I bet they haven’t 500 subscribers out of the city of Indpls.”

  Madam Walker’s strategy to strengthen her business on the East and West Coasts kept her on the road for several months throughout 1914 and 1915. During September and October 1914, she gave twenty-five lectures to “full and appreciative houses” at the “leading churches” in Brockton, Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts; Newport and Providence, Rhode Island; as well as New York City and Brooklyn.

  In preparation for an extended trip to the West Coast during the summer and fall of 1915, she wrote to Booker T. Washington requesting his assistance. “Will you kindly give me a letter of introduction to Mr. Bob Owens and any other persons of influence that it would be well to meet or reside with in the states of California, Washington and Oregon?” she queried with the familiarity she had long hoped to have with Washington. “I hope to stop in all the large cities.” His reply must have been a helpful one, because within a few weeks she sent him a $250 donation “in accordance with my promise to provide scholarships for certain worthy students, to the end, that I may, in a small way, help you in your great work.” In what would become his final letter to her, he expressed his appreciation. “We shall see that the money is used in the way you desire, and thank you most sincerely for your very generous gift.”

  After stopping in St. Louis, Denver, Pueblo and Colorado Springs with Mae—who had come along to assist her—Madam Walker embarked on her long rail journey to California. En route Madam and her adopted granddaughter enjoyed the wonders of the West: the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City, Yellowstone Park with its geysers, the “vast profound” Grand Canyon and what she described as its “gorgeous colored rocks as varied as the tints of the rainbow.”

  Within the first two weeks of leaving Indianapolis, Madam Walker had already begun to see a payoff. “My lecture Monday night was a grand success. The house was packed,” she wrote Ransom. “The people applauded so I hardly had time to talk . . . I have been entertained two and three times a day ever since I’ve been here. Haven’t had a day or evening to myself. Have had two cars put at my disposal.”

  Much of her popularity on this trip, she believed, was due to her “illustrated lectures,” which described not only her hair care system but the accomplishments of African Americans in business and education since the Civil War. Presented on glass slides on a stereopticon projector manually operated by Mae, the lectures, Madam Walker said, were “taking fine,” having proved to be a hit with audiences for whom movies were still a novelty. “Everybody gets enthused and wants to take the trade,” she happily reported.

  By the second week in September, Madam Walker and Mae had settled in Los Angeles into the bungalow Lelia had purchased at 1449 West Thirty-fifth Place. They were having such a productive trip that Madam Walker advised Ransom, “I fear I will not be able to reach home before the latter part of November, as there is a great demand for my work throughout the West.” In fact, she said, interest was so high that she had been featured not only in the local black newspaper but in the Japanese, Italian and German papers as well.

  As she traveled from one end of California to the other, Madam Walker marveled at the “indescribable beauty” of the “magnificent palms” and the “giant geraniums that entwined many of them to their very tops.” But her main delight came from knowing that she had had more requests for speaking engagements than she could possibly accept. “I am sure that this trip is going to add at least two or three thousand per month to my income,” Madam Walker wrote Ransom after a particularly productive meeting in Los Angeles. “I am succeeding in making agents everywhere I go. To my surprise, [I] had 12 [agents] present, and there are four others here whom I know did not get out to the meeting.” In El Centro, near the Mexican border, she “aroused people to the highest pitch.”

  With her booming sales had come the inevitable imitators. “Now, Mr. Ransom, I find that a number of agents out here have adulterated my preparation,” she wrote. “They are removing the [labels] and selling the goods without [them]. Will you advise me what to do?”

  In one particular instance, a woman had ordered Madam Walker’s metal product containers directly from the supplier, replacing the Walker name with her own. “Now, I think I do business enough with the American Can Company to ask them to refrain from selling her boxes or boxes to anyone else for hair goods,” she complained to Ransom. “If the American Can Company can’t refuse [to send] her boxes, then I will have to take my work from them and get an entirely new box made by a new company.” A few weeks later Ransom assured Madam Walker that American Can, one of the nation’s largest manufacturing companies, was “going to take steps concerning boxes.”

  For at least a week in October she and Mae trained agents and presented lectures in Oakland. While in the Bay Area they also visited San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition, a world’s fair commemorating the recent opening of the Panama Canal, which had still been under construction during her winter 1914 visit to Central America. In late October the pair traveled farther north to Portland, Oregon. “Mr. Ransom, is it essential that I should be home by the first of December?” Madam Walker wrote, with hopes of extending her West Coast stay well beyond her scheduled return. “If not, I have a few other cities to make before reaching home.” The months on the road, however, had made her long for friends and family. “I am truly homesick now,” she wrote in reply to Ransom’s letter telling her that his wife and two young sons missed her. “I am just as anxious to see Nettie and the babies as they are to see me.” Still, her work took precedence. “This trip is and will mean so much to my business that I want to prolong it as [much as] possible.”

  The distance from her day-to-day operations had also given her time to think about new marketing plans, including ways to capitalize on the slide presentations. “Since I find that these pictures accompanied by lecture are creating such a wide interest among the people, I was thinking it would be a good idea to appoint some energetic capable women in certain territories, especially through the South and Middle West, where our people are in such great numbers,” she proposed. Her plan, she told Ransom, was to pay them the handsome sum of $100 each month, plus “10 per cent or 25 per cent of all business they send over and above $100.”

  In early November, after stops in Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, she wired $10,000 to Ransom, who pronounced her deposit a “remarkable” accomplishment. “Yes, I say it is remarkable the way my bank account continues to increase and also remarkable how I continue to draw on it,” she replied in anticipation of Ransom’s ever-watchful eye. “While this has been the most expensive trip I have ever taken in America, I feel however that the returns will fully compensate.”

  A week later, while she was in Garrison, Montana, news of Booker T. Washington’s death stunned her. “I have never lost anyone, not even one of my own family that I regret more than I do the loss of this great and good man for he is not only a loss to his immediate relations and friends but to the Race and the world,” she lamented. “Even yet I can’t picture him dead.” Immediately she sent Margaret Murray Washington a telegram expressing her regrets at “the untimely passing away of Dr. Booker T. Washington, the greatest man America ever knew.”

  At the funeral three days later, Madam Walker was represented by Ransom, who had traveled from Indianapolis with the large, cross-shaped floral arrangement Madam had requested. Inscribed with the words “Thou who so bravely bore our cross, Thy place can ne’er be filled,” it was placed alongside thousands of others as more than 8,000 mourners filed past his casket. “It gave me much pleasure to know, even though I was so far away, [that] I was represented so beautifully,” she wrote to Ransom after the funeral. “Indeed, I am glad it was thus, because his death touched me so forcibly that I am sure, or I fear, that I would have acted unwomanly at the funeral.”

  The jockeying for Washington’s successor began even b
efore his casket had closed. But while Stewart’s Recorder and others speculated that Emmett Scott would step into the breach, it was Robert Russa Moton whom Tuskegee’s predominantly white trustee board placed at the helm five weeks later.

  Despite their differences—both personal and political—Madam Walker had sincerely admired Washington’s accomplishments. And while she would prove to be much more radical than Washington in her approach to civil rights, her own background had helped her grasp the value of industrial training for the large numbers of African Americans who still remained illiterate and tied to the plantation way of life. Because she had chosen to denigrate neither Washington nor his critics, she was well positioned to cultivate her ties with Moton, Du Bois, Trotter and the roster of leading race men and women who would emerge during the next decade to fill the vacuum created by Washington’s death.

  As soon as Madam Walker returned to Indianapolis at the beginning of December, word spread of her contemplated move to New York. The next two months were filled with farewell parties, testimonials and dinners. In mid-December, the Senate Avenue YMCA hosted a banquet in her honor, presenting her with a leather-bound set of resolutions. In an attempt to persuade her to stay, they declared that this “benefactress in human uplift . . . has enshrined herself in the hearts of all of her fellow citizens.” Praising “her marvelous business ability” and “immense wealth,” their resolutions pled, “Be it resolved that we as citizens of Indianapolis generally, and members of the YMCA particularly, realizing the great loss her removal would be to the city and state, beg her to reconsider it and live always among us.”