On Her Own Ground Page 27
The shortage of workers—exacerbated by the precipitous drop in European immigration after the start of the war—had brought a rapid influx of black laborers to fill the vacuum. Like Pied Pipers, aggressive recruiters traveled through the South waving free tickets and signing up so many black men for the low-level but relatively well-paying jobs that Southern plantation owners and elected officials became as concerned about the departure of their workforce as Northern union bosses became about their arrival. For those who boarded Illinois-bound trains to take jobs “loading box cars, handling crates of meat and lard, and pushing trucks,” the future looked infinitely more desirable than the drudgery of never-profitable peonage farming. That the new arrivals were filling some of the strikers’ jobs only heightened the tension.
At the Aluminum Ore Company alone the number of black employees had risen dramatically from a dozen porters in 1914 to 470 industrial line workers—almost a quarter of the plant’s total workforce—by the spring of 1917. But while the majority of the Aluminum Ore strikebreakers were white, the locked-out union workers focused their anger on the more easily identifiable blacks who had filled about 200 vacant slots. Union leaders goaded the strikers by fabricating stories that the company managers intended to turn East St. Louis into “a Negro town” by importing more than ten thousand black men and their families. By late June, after months of minor racial skirmishes—including a May confrontation that left three whites and three blacks wounded by gunfire and several black businesses ransacked—the city was primed for violence. Already riled by rumors of a July 4 race war, the townspeople found themselves too immersed in the deadly brew of hatred and retaliation to prevent it from boiling over.
Before midnight on July 1, a group of white men in a Model T–era Ford peppered several homes in a black neighborhood with gunfire. When the marauders sped through the block a second time, the residents fired back, striking the car as it raced off into the shadows beneath a moon “almost, if not quite full.” Soon afterward, local police cruised by in a dark, unmarked Ford with dim headlights that closely resembled the attackers’ car. In a case of mistaken identity, the men inside the houses delivered a barrage of fire, killing Samuel Coppedge and Frank Wadley, the two detectives most responsible for quelling the May clash. The next morning their “bullet-riddled,” blood-soaked squad car—“like a flour sieve, all punctured full of holes”—was displayed outside police headquarters. Their murders so incensed some segments of the white community that by early afternoon dozens of blacks, “without regard to age or sex,” were dragged from trolleys at the town’s central transfer depot—where Madam Walker had often stood—and were “stoned, clubbed and kicked.” Sympathetic whites who tried to intervene were intimidated and chased away. Chanting “Burn ’em out! Burn ’em out!” a white mob firebombed several houses, shooting at families as they fled the inferno. By midnight a sixteen-block area was engulfed in flames.
On the Missouri side of the river, Madam Walker’s friends Jessie and C. K. Robinson were among those called upon to assist the refugees as they streamed across the Eads and Municipal bridges. At the Knights of Pythias Hall—where C.K. had long been an officer—the local NAACP chapter hurriedly convened, calling for militiamen to put down the violence, as well as for more aid for the 6,000 burned-out evacuees. Jessie, then in training with the city’s first class of carefully chosen black women social workers, was pressed into service alongside white Red Cross relief workers at the Wheatley YWCA—where a dormitory for black women had been set up—and at the St. Louis Municipal Lodging House, which the mayor had opened to more than a thousand homeless people.
From an outraged black community, as well as some notably concerned white editors and members of Congress, the reaction was swift and indignant. At the White House, President Wilson refrained from public comment. Lacking any official statement from his leader, presidential secretary Joseph Patrick Tumulty echoed the sentiments of East St. Louis congressman W. A. Rodenburg when he called the uprising “so sickening” that he “had not been able to read much of the account of last night’s rioting, murder and arson.” While some members of Illinois’s House delegation were said to have been “much humiliated” and concerned about their “state’s fair name,” its two senators—Democrat James Hamilton Lewis and Republican Lawrence Yates Sherman—made it clear that they opposed the intervention of federal troops, with one blaming “the great number of negroes” from the South for causing the “friction [that] has developed with white labor.” Others blamed Wilson’s refusal to denounce a rising tolerance of racism as one of the many sparks that ignited the July conflagration. “Ironically, Wilson helped create the climate for the first major wartime riot by accusing the Republicans of ‘colonizing’ black voters in East St. Louis,” charged historian Kenneth O’Reilly about comments he made during the 1916 campaign year. “At the president’s urging . . . the Justice Department and its Bureau of Investigation opened voting fraud cases, a decision that stirred up racial hatred in places that had problems enough.”
Yet two weeks later when the sheriff of Bisbee, Arizona, helped herd striking copper workers onto cattle cars, then abandoned them in the uninhabited New Mexico desert, Wilson quickly and publicly repudiated the same kind of vigilantism he had declined to censure in East St. Louis. In support of the mostly white mine workers, he sent military investigators to the scene, appropriated federal money to assist the refugees and directed his Secretary of Labor to establish a mediation board to negotiate a settlement. “Waging war abroad, the President dared not divide the nation at home,” wrote biographer August Heckscher of Wilson’s decision to slight the situation in East St. Louis. Oswald Garrison Villard’s New York Evening Post—a paper Madam Walker frequently read—considered Wilson’s “failure to condemn the riot part of a pattern indicating an unsympathetic attitude toward Negroes.”
Certainly the President had done little before the early July uprising to engender trust or confidence within the black community. In contrast, former President Theodore Roosevelt—during a Carnegie Hall rally celebrating the overthrow of the Russian czar—condemned the “appalling outbreak of savagery” in Illinois. “Before we speak of justice for others, it behooves us to do justice within our own household,” he told the applauding crowd without the equivocation that had characterized Wilson’s approach to the matter.
A now more militant black population, impatient with Wilson’s neglect, resolved to register its own protest. At an executive committee meeting of the NAACP’s Harlem branch even before the East St. Louis riot, James Weldon Johnson had suggested a “silent protest parade,” an idea that first had been proposed by Villard at the 1916 Amenia Conference. In Washington, suffragettes had marched all spring and summer along Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, successfully drawing attention to their cause, especially after members of the more militant National Women’s Party were arrested and imprisoned in May.
Several Harlem leaders, including Madam Walker, joined a large committee whose “preparations were gone about with feverish enthusiasm,” Johnson later remembered. Because the group agreed that the once effective Carnegie Hall rallies “now fail to possess any news value,” they agreed with Johnson’s notion that a march “in broad day light” would “be so striking and unusual a demonstration” that the Associated Press would be compelled to “flash” it “over this country and to the remotest parts of the civilized world.”
With Du Bois in East St. Louis investigating the riot’s aftermath, Johnson assumed responsibility for assembling the committee of prominent citizens and mobilizing the demonstrators. A “superb public speaker and organizer [and] an extremely tactful and diplomatic man,” Johnson, the consummate gentleman, was ideal for the task. Barely two months earlier, just after visiting Madam Walker in Indianapolis, he had spent ten days in Memphis probing the lynching of Eli Persons, a retarded man who had been accused of murdering and decapitating a sixteen-year-old white girl.
Johnson’s committee, which inclu
ded Reverend Hutchens Bishop as president and Realtor John Nail as treasurer, raised more than $900 from a range of Harlem citizens of all stripes—West Indian aid societies, ministers, NAACP leaders and musicians—to pay for banners, handbills and other expenses. Among the donors were Lelia Walker Robinson, actor Bert Williams and James Weldon Johnson’s brother, the composer J. Rosamond Johnson.
By noon on Saturday, July 28, hundreds of African Americans clutching signs with antilynching slogans assembled on Fifty-seventh, Fifty-eighth and Fifty-ninth streets east and west of Fifth Avenue as they waited for the parade to begin. “Treat Us So That We May Love Our Country,” pleaded one banner. “Mr. President, Why Not Make America Safe for Democracy?” challenged another. An American flag was unfurled behind a large sign that accused: “Your Hands Are Full of Blood.” No letter or newspaper accounts confirm Madam Walker’s attendance, but barring illness, little else could have kept her away from this historic event.
More than 800 children, some as young as six, assembled at the front of the procession. Behind them, women dressed in white were followed by black men in dark suits—somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 in all—who marched speechlessly and solemnly to the beat of muffled drums down the avenue toward Madison Square Park at Twenty-third Street. “Fully 20,000 negroes lined Fifth Avenue and gave silent approval of the demonstration,” reported The New York Times, still refusing to capitalize the “N” in “Negro.” As the marchers stepped deliberately past mansions and office buildings, black Boy Scouts dutifully pressed fliers into the hands of the somber sidewalk crowds. “We march because we want to make impossible a repetition of Waco, Memphis and East St. Louis, by rousing the conscience of the country and bringing the murderers of our brothers, sisters and innocent children to justice,” declared their circular.
The following Wednesday, Madam Walker joined a small group of Harlem leaders on an early morning train to Washington to decry “the atrocious attacks . . . at East St. Louis and other industrial centers recently.” Their destination: the White House. Their goal: linking African Americans’ wartime loyalty and patriotism on the battlefields of Europe to their right to civil liberties at home. They also intended to appeal to President Wilson to “speak ‘some public word’ that would give hope and courage to the Negroes of the United States.” Having been assured by Wilson political ally Robert S. Hudspath—the boss of Hudson County, New Jersey’s Democratic political machine—that the President would meet with them, and having received Tumulty’s invitation “to call at the White House at 12 o’clock,” the delegation arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue late on the morning of August 1. As the noontime bells tolled across Lafayette Square, they were escorted into secretary Tumulty’s office. Once inside, they were introduced by A. B. Cosey, the black New Jersey attorney who had engineered the pivotal 1912 meeting in which presidential candidate Wilson had pledged that blacks “may count upon me for absolute fair dealing, for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interest of their race in the United States.” But just as that promise had been broken, the group was informed by Tumulty that Wilson was so absorbed in negotiations involving a “feed supply bill” that he “regretted that he would not be able to see the committee.”
A former speaker of the New Jersey General Assembly, Tumulty served as Wilson’s “political weather vane,” buffering him from favor-seekers and protecting him from people and issues he preferred to avoid. Genial and hospitable as Tumulty proved to be, James Weldon Johnson—in his weekly New York Age column—dismissed Wilson’s claims that an agricultural bill was worthy of taking precedence over murdered American citizens. “There is no doubt the President is extremely busy,” Johnson editorialized, accusing Wilson of political expediency for avoiding a meeting with African Americans. “What we want from the President is some public utterance for fair play and justice to the American Negro.” Asserting that Wilson had refused to meet with the delegation because he would have been unable to “escape making some statement as to his attitude on the Negro,” Johnson then charged “that is something which Mr. Wilson seems bent on avoiding.”
As spokesman for the group, Johnson, “in a few well chosen words,” asserted that his delegation represented not only the Negro Silent Protest Parade Committee and “the colored people of Greater New York,” but “the sentiments and aspirations and sorrows, too, of the entire Negro population of the United States.” Noting that African Americans had answered the draft in disproportionate numbers—36 out of 100 eligible black men, compared with 25 of 100 eligible white men—the petition implored the President to “use his great powers” to assist lynching victims and to use “his great personal and moral influence in our behalf.”
Completing his introductory remarks, Johnson presented to Tumulty the one-page, cream-colored petition, a document that noted that although many thousand lynchers had committed crimes “not a single one” had been convicted of murder for the death of “2,867 colored men and women” since 1885. With absolutely no faith in the individual states to uphold the law, the delegation proposed that “lynching and mob violence be made a national crime punishable by the laws of the United States.” Tying their concerns to America’s involvement in the European war, the petition declared, “No nation that seeks to fight the battles of civilization can afford to march in blood-smeared garments.” Among the sixteen signatories were Madam Walker, James Weldon Johnson, John E. Nail, Fred Moore and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as eight ministers, including Salem Methodist’s Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, Abyssinian Baptist’s Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr., and Mother AME Zion’s Reverend James W. Brown.
After Johnson’s presentation, Tumulty promised the visitors that “the matter would not be neglected” by the President, who, he claimed unconvincingly, “was in sympathy and was doing all he could for betterment” of the condition of black Americans. To assuage the disappointed delegation, Tumulty read excerpts from letters Wilson had written to his cabinet members in which he “ordered that everything be done to put a stop to the evils complained of.” But the letters, Tumulty advised the group, “were not for publication.”
After enduring a series of “general and platitudinous phrases,” Fred Moore, who had been skeptical from the beginning about the planned visit to the White House, complained that “Negroes of influence and culture, men who stand for something, who respect themselves and demand respect in return, [can] receive no recognition whatsoever and their chances of getting a word with Mr. Wilson are very slim.” Four weeks later—with the riots and parade no longer in the daily headlines—Wilson consented to a twenty-minute meeting with Tuskegee principal Robert Russa Moton. But Moore was not persuaded that the session was of any use since Wilson failed to “speak out against lynching and other injustices to which the Negro is subjected.”
Denied an audience with the President on August 1, the committee members fanned out across Capitol Hill, calling upon several receptive members of Congress, among them Congressman George Lunn of New York and Senators Joseph L. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey and William M. Calder of New York, who volunteered to submit the appeals into the Congressional Record and “to urge an investigation” of the recent riots.
Two days after their return to New York, Reverend Cullen convened another public forum at Salem Church to describe the group’s unsuccessful attempt to meet with Wilson. Although the group had failed to meet with the President, Madam Walker would manage to use the visit to advantage a few weeks later to motivate her agents to political action at the first annual Madam Walker Beauty Culturists Union convention in Philadelphia.
Madam Walker’s whirlwind efforts to organize the Walker agents delivered just the reward she had envisioned as more than 200 delegates from “nearly every state” climbed the steps to Philadelphia’s Union Baptist Church on August 31, 1917. Attentive to every detail, she had carefully selected the venue as much for its magnificent new 2,600-capacity sanctuary as for its influential pastor, Reverend Wesley G. Parks, vice-president-at-large of the pow
erful National Baptist Convention. That it was home to fifteen-year-old music prodigy and future internationally renowned operatic diva Marian Anderson may well have been an added attraction.
As Madam Walker surveyed the crowd during Philadelphia mayor Thomas B. Smith’s welcoming remarks, she noticed that several women were wearing hats. Stylish as the head coverings were, they obscured the delegates’ hair. And Madam Walker would have none of it, admonishing them good-naturedly that “in a session composed of graduates of the Walker system, who [are] experts in all things pertaining to the hair, it should not be necessary to request that the ladies remove their hats.” With no further comment from Madam Walker, the minutes recorded that “every hat was then voluntarily removed,” no doubt with a few embarrassed grimaces. Later, when the women gathered for a group photo in front of the stone church, fewer than a dozen donned hats. “A wonderful picture told the story of the unfolding and transformation of a race,” the minutes noted. “The glory of woman lies in her hair.”
Standing before the convention, Madam Walker herself continued to impress others with her own personal transformation. That June, Freeman reporter William Lewis had described her as “splendidly poised [wearing] her wealth and honors with ease as if she had [them] for all of the years . . . Madam Walker can hold her own in any gathering of women.” Through her new organization she meant to help other women develop the same self-acquired confidence.
A Walker Company news release, probably written by Ransom, pronounced the four-day event “significant” because it had assembled “the business women of the race who [had] paid their way to tell about their success, see their great leader and get new ideas and inspiration.” Gathered to exchange information and “transact business,” the agents were also participating in one of the first national conventions strictly devoted to American women’s entrepreneurial pursuits.