On Her Own Ground Page 23
“Apparently your client has been fearfully imposed upon,” Singerman continued, “and I would by all means suggest that an endeavor be made to obtain a return of the deposit.” But because Madam Walker had signed a contract, the best Singerman and Ransom could do was to negotiate a lower price.
Whether Philip Payton played any role in misrepresenting the facts to Madam Walker is unknown since his business records no longer exist. But Ransom, who had little trust in the motivations of some of Madam Walker’s New York acquaintances, could barely contain his annoyance. “As you know, Madam had gone into this before consulting me,” the perturbed attorney wrote Lelia. “And even had she consulted me she would not have taken my advice for her heart was and is set on this property and on moving to New York.” Fiercely opposed to the proposition, Ransom hoped to persuade his client to delay her move for at least eighteen months until she had settled her current debts and “piled up a snug sum for rainy days.” He also hoped to squelch entirely any plan to relocate the company headquarters to a city whose cost of living he considered astronomical. “I have advised Madam against moving her business to New York,” he told Lelia. “She says she won’t, but I take it that it will be only a question of time before she moves it to your city.
“There are those who say live while you are living,” he cautioned Lelia. “But I can imagine no greater disgrace than to be known as your mother is known, and in the end give your enemies a chance to rejoice in the fact that you died poor.”
Still, the disappointment over the Derrick house had not changed Madam Walker’s mind in the least about moving. “As regards my coming back to Indianapolis, Mr. Ransom, that is clear out of the question,” she declared. “Even if I don’t build in New York, I will never come back to Indianapolis.” And although she regretted leaving her friends, “among whom I class you, Nettie and Alice, the best, there is so much more joy living in New York where there are not so many narrow, mean people.” Incidents such as the Isis Theatre episode had spoiled the appeal of Indianapolis; in contrast, she and Lelia had been greeted warmly by Italian tenor Enrico Caruso after a performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
Indianapolis had become too small, too confining, too conservative. And while she did not dispute the wisdom of maintaining her company headquarters in the Midwestern city, her unfolding political and cultural agenda required a larger canvas. New York simply had more of everything Madam Walker wanted: sophistication, wealth, culture and intellectual stimulation. That it also had more vice, corruption and poverty did not diminish its attraction. Unquestionably a city of extremes, precedents and immeasurable expansion, Manhattan held bragging rights to the world’s tallest buildings, from the sixty-story Gothic terra-cotta Woolworth tower at Broadway and Park to the fifty-story Metropolitan Life Insurance Building. By 1880 Manhattan had already become the first American city to exceed a million people. With its more than 25,000 factories, New York was the nation’s indisputable center of manufacturing in 1890. A decade later it could claim the home offices of two-thirds of the largest 100 U.S. corporations. By 1910 Manhattan’s population topped the two-million mark, nearly ten times that of Indianapolis’s 233,650. That same year, New York City was home to almost 92,000 blacks, more than four times the number of black Indianapolis residents.
Whereas the Hoosier capital city’s leaders prided themselves on the dearth of immigrants, New York had dedicated the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of ethnic inclusion in 1886. And although the metropolis did not welcome all nationalities with equal enthusiasm, it had become home to a kaleidoscope of foreign arrivals. The large influx in the 1880s of Italians and Eastern European and Russian Jews, as well as smaller numbers of Greeks, Poles and Balkans, had begun pushing earlier groups of Germans and Irish farther north up Manhattan’s avenues. And just as Southern and Eastern Europeans had flocked to the city—by 1910 there were at least a half million Italians and more than twice as many Jews—African Americans and black West Indians flowed into Harlem to form a cultural, political and intellectual mecca.
During the summer and on Sundays, the sidewalks of Lenox and Seventh avenues, at either end of 136th Street, were crowded with black Harlemites. Those attired “in loud-checked suits and flaming ties rub elbows with Negroes in most somber dress and mien. Much-beribboned women in cool, white dresses and carrying gay parasols make the avenues ring with their laughter and chatter, furnishing a contrast to almost as many who are soberly garbed,” wrote one observer. “The visitor may see there all manner of style and dress just as he does down-town among New Yorkers of lighter hues.”
While Harlem was not without its share of substandard housing, its west side was primarily a district of wide boulevards and grand homes that wealthy whites had begun to abandon in a frenzy. A National Urban League report concluded that “Negroes as a whole are . . . better housed [in Harlem] than in any other part of the country.” The black populations in several large cities were exploding simultaneously, but it was “the character of Negro protest and thought” that rendered Harlem different from Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. By 1916 Harlem was evolving into “the biggest and most elegant black community in the Western world . . . within the most urbane of American cities,” wrote historian Nathan Irvin Huggins. As black leadership jockeyed to fill the void left by Booker T. Washington’s death in late 1915, New York had become a magnet for many of the more militant thinkers, including some who had openly challenged the Tuskegee leader’s gradualist politics and who had found his efforts at securing civil rights and suffrage for Southern African Americans inadequate. Among the most outspoken of these “New Negro” intellectuals was W.E.B. Du Bois, who, in 1910, had become the Director of Publicity and Research for the recently founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, with personal hopes of charting “a new course for racial assertiveness.” By 1916, as Madam Walker herself was developing more assertive views on race, she was becoming eager to assume her place alongside Harlem’s famous, influential and intriguing residents, including Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., of the Abyssinian Baptist Church; Bert Williams, one of the era’s most successful comedians; New York Colored Republican Club founder Charles W. Anderson; and James Weldon Johnson, former U.S. consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Madam Walker’s move to New York coincided with the huge influx of African Americans who were being pushed from the South by the floods of 1915 and the boll weevil infestations of 1915 and 1916, as well as the ongoing racial violence and untenable living circumstances. One Mississippi man told a commission investigating Southern working conditions that both men and women were forced to labor in the fields during harvest season. “After the summer crops were all in, any of the white people could send for a Negro woman to come and do the family washing at 75 cents to $1.00 a day,” he contended. “If she sent word she could not come she had to send an excuse why . . . They were never allowed to stay at home as long as they were able to go.” Consequently, women were as likely as men to leave, as many said, “to better their conditions.” When they arrived Madam Walker was poised to offer just the opportunity they desired.
African Americans also were pulled to Northern cities by the factory jobs left open when the flood of European immigrants was stymied by the start of World War I in 1914. The steady deluge that had resulted in 25 million European arrivals between 1870 and 1915 dwindled to a trickle of just over 100,000 by 1918. Ready to fill the gap were an estimated half million African Americans who arrived from the South between 1916 and 1918 just as the nation’s industries were escalating their wartime production. The chance to make as much as $8 a day in a factory in the North was a seductive incentive for farmhands who had been paid as little as 40 cents a day in the South.
Harlem attracted large numbers of black Southerners, especially new arrivals from towns and farms of the eastern seaboard states of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida. Churches, black newspapers, the YMCA, the YWCA and groups like the National League
on Urban Conditions Among Negroes counseled the recent arrivals on the ways of the city and the expectations of “white employers [who] would judge their workers on the basis of general behavior, good manners, good conduct, and attention to dress and cleanliness, as well as efficient service.” Urban League “block visitors” also advised the migrants—many of whom were barely literate and had come from areas where no black public schools existed—that “children should be scrubbed, their hair combed, and . . . kept in school as long as you are able.”
Madam Walker tapped into the changing attitudes of women who longed to adopt a more urban, more sophisticated look, while also advocating personal grooming and the employment opportunities and financial independence offered by a Lelia College diploma. Most black women who arrived in the cities of the North went to work as maids, cooks and laundresses. The few who found jobs as unskilled laborers in munitions factories, meatpacking plants, rail yards and other industrial operations were placed in the “most dangerous departments” and given “the least desirable jobs at the worst pay.” For women seeking something other than domestic work and the grime of factories, Madam Walker offered an alternative. Those who learned “Walker’s Scientific Scalp Treatment,” her ads promised, could earn “from $15.00 to $40.00 per week” in their own homes or salons. The focus of customer testimonials in Walker Company brochures continued to shift from “hair growing” to business development. “You have opened up a trade for hundreds of our colored women to make an honest and profitable living . . . where they can make as much in one week as a month’s salary would bring from any other position a colored woman can secure,” wrote Maggie Wilson, Madam Walker’s top Pittsburgh agent. In a message designed to appeal to women tired of low-paying jobs, a Mrs. William James declared that with the Walker System she had made as much as $33 in one week. “It is a Godsend to unfortunate women who are walking in the rank and file that I had walked. It has helped us financially since 1910. We have been able to purchase a home and overmeet our obligations.”
Their success had also become Madam Walker’s success, pushing her annual sales above $100,000, the equivalent of more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars. Ransom’s midyear 1916 report only increased her excitement: “You don’t know how it does my heart good to see the business come up. I am hoping for the million dollar mark in the six years you promised me.” Within a decade of selling her first tin of Madam Walker’s Wonderful Hair Grower, she confidently informed a reporter that she was “contemplating enlarging her present business into a million dollar corporation.”
Harlem’s black community welcomed Madam Walker with flattering headlines and offered a receptive and stimulating setting for her increasing involvement in national political issues. Within weeks of her February 1916 arrival, the Colored American Review—a magazine she would soon own—featured her on its cover surrounded by a collage of her homes, salon, factory and automobiles. Praising her ability to overcome “handicaps, restrictions and traditions that confront women, especially colored women,” it elevated her to “a sphere unique when we consider the businesswoman of to-day.” A New York News editorial—“Welcome to Madame Walker”—hailed her as a woman who “has risen to command the respect of tens of thousands of both races” and “an inspiring example to every colored girl and woman.” In March the New York Age trumpeted her move to the city with an effusively complimentary article, drawing attention to her six-figure income and the 10,000 sales agents who sold her products on commission. Recounting the now familiar story of her early struggles, the widely read newspaper provided a ready platform for her self-help philosophy. “I first want to say that I did not succeed by traversing a path strewn with roses. I made great sacrifices, met with rebuff after rebuff, and had to fight hard to put my ideas into effect,” Madam Walker proclaimed. “Having a good article for the market is one thing, and putting it properly before the public is another.” Equally important to her was her ability to assist other women. “In Greater New York alone, two hundred agents are engaged in promoting ‘The Walker System.’ I feel that I have done something for the race by making it possible for so many colored women and girls to make money without working hard,” she told the Age reporter, comparing the daily routines of self-employed Walker agents with the back-wrenching tasks required of field and household workers. Not long afterward, another publication—referring to her speeches on social issues and women’s business pursuits—pronounced her “as famous for her lectures as she is for the wonderful preparations which she manufactures and which sell all over the country.”
With such an introduction to the community—and with her already well-established reputation as a philanthropist—it is no wonder that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People approached her for a contribution to the organization’s first major antilynching campaign, part of its game plan to force mob violence onto the agenda of a Congress and a President reluctant to acknowledge its horrors. During February 1916, as Madam Walker was settling into her new home, Philip G. Peabody, a wealthy Boston attorney, and son of Judge Charles A. Peabody—pledged $1,000 to the seven-year-old group with the stipulation that it raise an additional $9,000 for the special fund. Peabody’s conditional gift was also dependent upon his approval of the association’s proposal for “an effective program to stamp out lynching.” To Madam Walker’s pleasure, her $100 contribution was acknowledged personally by New York Evening Post publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, the first NAACP board chairman and grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
It was Villard—spurred by a small group of white activists outraged over both the deadly August 1908 Springfield, Illinois, riot and the general deterioration in race relations—who had used his newspaper to print the February 12, 1909, “call” for the conference that led to the founding of the NAACP. Issued on the centennial of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth, the document urged “all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.” More than fifty prominent men and women of both races signed on. Among them were W.E.B. Du Bois (a founder of the all-black Niagara Movement, whose goals paralleled those advocated in the call), journalist Lincoln Steffens, AME Zion bishop Alexander Walters and the iconoclastic William Monroe Trotter. One-third of the signatories were women, including white social reformers Jane Addams, the founder of Chicago’s Hull-House, and Mary White Ovington, whose persistence had supplied the impetus for the conference’s first planning meeting. Antilynching activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett and NACW founding president Mary Church Terrell were the only black women whose names appeared. All determined to combat lynching, disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws through litigation and political lobbying, the whites—many of whom were Socialists, liberal Jews and social workers—and the blacks—many of whom had backed the initiatives of the four-year-old Niagara Movement—joined forces in an unprecedented biracial coalition.
The previous summer’s riot—in the hometown of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator—had “signaled that the race problem was no longer regional—a raw and bloody drama played out behind a magnolia curtain—but national,” as characterized by Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis. After a young black Springfield man was accused of raping a white woman, a large, unruly mob swarmed through the central Illinois town’s black neighborhood with clubs and guns, some shouting, “Lincoln freed you, we’ll show you where you belong.” By the time the National Guard took control, two thousand blacks had been forced from their homes, scores were injured and at least eight people had been killed.
In the eight years since, there had been much to impel Madam Walker’s donation to the NAACP’s antilynching campaign. In 1915 alone the United States had recorded sixty-nine racially motivated killings. The April 1916 issue of The Crisis had “depicted in full-page ghoulishness . . . the group lynching of six black men in Lee County, Georgia.” During the previous decade between 1906 and 1915, some 4
97 African Americans—almost one per week—had been drowned, dismembered, hanged, branded, shot or burned by white marauders. Whether the victims were surreptitiously strung from tree limbs in backwoods or defiantly displayed on main roads, the gruesome images of dangling, mutilated bodies haunted and angered black Americans and sympathetic whites. Having spent the first twenty years of her life in Louisiana and Mississippi—two of the South’s deadliest lynching states—Madam Walker knew intimately the fear that gripped communities in the vise of what amounted to “state-sanctioned terrorism.” Now as she revisited the region on sales trips, she knew from childhood conditioning that she could not relax her guard.
The decisive motivation for Madam Walker’s check, however, may well have been a shocking July 1916 Crisis supplement—“The Waco Horror”—that detailed the unusually barbaric torture of Jesse Washington. The savage mid-May murder had galvanized African Americans across the country, providing “the opening wedge” for the association’s antilynching fund campaign. Washington—a mentally retarded teenager and farmhand in Robinson, Texas—had confessed to brutally killing his employer’s wife with a hammer after she “scolded him for beating the mules.” He was so psychologically unbalanced that after the murder he finished his work in a nearby cotton field, then went home to the cabin he shared with his parents and siblings. After his arrest later that day, he was taken to the county jail in Waco, then transferred to Dallas for safekeeping. By Sunday he was back in Waco. The next morning, May 15, as the judge cracked his gavel, several hundred spectators crammed the courtroom while more than two thousand men, women and children congregated outside. Before noon, the jury—which included a convicted murderer—delivered the expected guilty verdict. Within seconds the crowd surged forward, pulling Washington from the courthouse to the street, where he was hitched to a car and dragged until the connecting chain snapped free. As the rabid crowd shredded his clothes, he was stabbed, castrated and clubbed until “his body was a solid color of red.” In the meantime, a fire had been set at City Hall at the base of a tree beneath the mayor’s office window. Chained to a sturdy limb, the naked Washington was “jerked into the air . . . as rapidly as possible” while “a shout from thousands of throats went up on the morning air,” according to Elizabeth Freeman, a white investigator whose account supplied the material for Du Bois’s eight-page extra edition. While Washington was lowered repeatedly into the fire, the mayor, the police chief and a horde that had swelled to an estimated 10,000 Texans craned to watch. Later Washington’s decapitated corpse was strapped to a horse and paraded through downtown while his “limbs dropped off and . . . some little boys pulled out the teeth and sold them to some men for five dollars apiece.” Nauseating photographs of Washington’s “ghastly burnt cork husk” graphically exposed the depravity of the monstrous deed.