On Her Own Ground Read online

  The Original Ozonized Ox Marrow Company, proclaiming its product since the 1860s as “the first preparation ever sold for straightening kinky hair,” contrasted a pen-and-ink drawing of an unkempt, wiry-haired black woman with her well-groomed mirror image to illustrate the “results” of its product. The Richmond, Virginia–based Crane and Company’s pitch for its Wonderful Face Bleach—guaranteed to create a “peach-like complexion”—was equally insulting. Their cream, they promised, would “turn the skin of a black or brown person four or five shades lighter, and a mulatto person perfectly white.” Although the St. Louis Palladium ran such ads each week—possibly because its publisher, J. W. Wheeler, happened to be the local distribution agent for Ozono—many black newspapers refused the revenue because they objected to the content.

  In 1905 Fred Moore, editor and part owner of the Colored American Magazine, informed the Continental Chemical Company, “I am determined that no such advertisement shall appear in this magazine that promises to make kinky hair straight; for it is one of the things I have little confidence in, and I do not believe that such can be brought about through artificial means.” At the bottom of a copy of the same letter, which he had forwarded to powerful Tuskegee Institute principal Booker T. Washington, he wrote, “Don’t you think I am right in refusing such? It will, I am sure, pay in the long run.” Moore, no doubt, knew that Washington, his magazine’s secret financial benefactor, also opposed the sale of hair straighteners and complexion lighteners.

  But the New York Age’s T. Thomas Fortune, another Washington associate, readily accepted these ads despite his own indisputably militant politics and editorial positions. Fortune’s compromise, most likely driven by dwindling finances and waning health, left him vulnerable to ridicule from The New York Times. Ironically the paper accused him of lacking “race pride.” Still routinely using the term “negress” to refer to black women, The Times hardly could stand in judgment of the Age, which “uncompromisingly demanded equality” for African Americans. And although the black Yonkers Standard agreed that “such advertisements are improper in Negro journals because they give the impression that Negroes are ashamed of their features,” it blasted The Times for its hypocrisy in devoting “all of its energy to stirring up sentiment against the Negro throughout the country.”

  Scalp specialists like Sarah and Pope-Turnbo considered their work separate and apart from the much criticized hair straighteners. What distinguished them and their motivations was their race. The Johnson Manufacturing Company’s Hair and Scalp Preparations were “not the so-called hair straightening goods; but Preparations scientifically and carefully prepared for the proper treatment of the Scalp and Hair,” insisted its founders, a black husband-and-wife team who had studied dermatology and beauty culture before the turn of the century. Mrs. J. W. Thomas, an attractive, thick-maned black woman who advertised her Magic Hair Grower in several cities, assured customers: “If your hair needs attention try it and be the happy owner of a beautiful head of hair. It is NOT a STRAIGHTENER.” Like Mrs. Thomas, the Johnsons distanced themselves from those white-owned companies that pushed hair straighteners. Yet their own ambivalence about Negro features was displayed in their artwork of a mulatto woman with long wavy hair. Significantly absent from their ads, however, were the wild-haired caricatures used to sell Ozono and Kink-No-More.

  Even then the controversy around whether African Americans should straighten their hair—and what the decision meant psychologically and politically—was not new. An 1859 New York Times article derisively recounted the mishaps of a Mr. Hodgson, “the Great African Hair Unkinker,” who had rented a hall in downtown Manhattan to demonstrate a new hair straightening process. After Hodgson applied his heated concoction to “one side of a woolly head,” the paper reported, “what had been tight curls was suddenly ‘straight as a coon’s leg; as glossy as a wet beaver’s back; and several inches in length.’” The assembly turned to mayhem as a woman in the audience protested that “she wouldn’t desert her race to get straight hair.”

  In 1903, as Sarah looked at the bald spots on her scalp, straight hair was not her primary goal. Regardless of the debates among news editors, power brokers and race leaders, wanting to have hair had nothing to do with mimicking whites. Her main concern was better employment and financial opportunity, and Pope-Turnbo was looking for agents.

  “When I was a washerwoman, I was considered a good washerwoman and laundress,” Sarah often recalled. “I am proud of that fact. At times I also did cooking, but, work as I would, I seldom could make more than $1.50 a day. I got my start by giving myself a start.” She knew that without a formal education, self-improvement and self-promotion were the only ways to change her life. It was clear that only the most well-educated black women—graduates of schools like Oberlin, Spelman, Fisk, Howard and Atlanta University—could aspire to be teachers or nurses. Another handful who had developed skills and social connections could become seamstresses, milliners and caterers. With few employment choices open to her, hairdressing offered Sarah an alternative to the washtub and a chance to make at least twice as much money each week as she had as a laundress.

  Whether she knew it or not, beauty culture was a long-established tradition in the African American community. Since at least the eighteenth century, black women—both slave and freeborn—had found work as hairdressers for white women. Eliza Potter, a black hairdresser who had served wealthy white customers in Cincinnati and New Orleans in the mid-nineteenth century, traveled from plantation to plantation training other slave women in the trade. Some, like New York’s Mahan Sisters, called “the crème de la crème of sable artists,” owned their own shops. Others, like Harriet Wilson, the author of Our Nig, the first published novel by an African American woman, may have visited their Manchester, New Hampshire, clients in the privacy of their boudoirs during the 1870s. Mme. L. C. Parrish established a wig-making and hair-weaving trade for black women in Boston around 1889. Others also offered manicuring and chiropody services to their clientele.

  Compared with sharecropping and domestic chores, as Katherine Tillman observed in 1907, “hair-work seems to be pleasant and profitable and those running first-class shops and those doing ‘satchel trade’ from house to house earn good salaries and wages and form valuable acquaintances among the wealthy class of white people.” As well, they had begun to discover a lucrative trade among black women. “Some colored hair dressers earn a good living by giving scalp treatments to colored women’s heads,” Tillman said. “Splendid results often come from these treatments and a nice growth of soft healthy hair replaces the short, harsh hair of former days.”

  For an emergent early-twentieth-century urban black population, whose rising social and political expectations were accompanied by a desire for a more sophisticated appearance, black beauty culturists had begun to create an amalgamated aesthetic, an African American look that borrowed, adapted and reconfigured the fashions of both cultures. Sarah would not be the first to conceive the idea, but, in time, she would catapult it to unprecedented horizons.

  CHAPTER 6

  World’s Fair

  Just as St. Louis was glossing its image for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, muckraker Lincoln Steffens was branding its outrageously corrupt elected officials with the charge that they ran “the worst governed city in the land.” But by the Fair’s April opening, civic leaders were headlong into a crusade to create a “New St. Louis” with less graft, less bribery and better municipal services. The city’s boosters hoped to transform the town into a place worthy of its new international aspirations and pretensions.

  Nudged in part by St. Louis Mirror publisher William Marion Reed, and swept up in the reform spirit of Mayor Rolla Wells, the nation’s fourth-largest city appropriated millions of dollars to install gas streetlights, construct sewers, and engineer a purification system to eliminate the notoriously cloudy drinking water. Because Sarah’s Market Street neighborhood happened to surround Union Station, the transportation hub for F
air visitors and dignitaries, its most visible streets received at least a superficial sprucing-up.

  In addition to the evidence of the Fair’s impending arrival just beyond her doorstep, Sarah could easily have read about the preparations in the Palladium, the paper owned by fellow St. Paul member J. W. Wheeler. But nothing could have prepared her for the daily procession of Fair-goers who flowed from the train depot by the thousands en route to the fairgrounds in the city’s far western suburbs. By the close of the Louisiana Purchase centennial in December, nearly twenty million people had traveled by trolley, buggy, foot, horseback and the still rare automobile to enjoy the sights. Although no official attendance records were kept by race, an estimated 100,000 African Americans entered the gates of the largest exhibition the world had ever seen.

  Electricity was still enough of a novelty in most American homes that Fair-goers were enraptured each night as the lightbulb-lined façades of the Beaux Arts exhibition halls flashed on to create an incandescent paradise. With the evening sky darkening from copper to charcoal, reflections glittered upon the terraced waterfall that tumbled from the steps of the domed Festival Hall into a lake filled with boaters.

  The Fair was a magnet for highbrow and lowbrow alike, and an opportunity Sarah would not have missed. Not far from the plazas and expansive gardens of the Ivory City, families strolled along the mile-long cobblestone Pike, a carnival midway that was geared to less lofty tastes. Engulfed in the blended aroma of hot dogs, cotton candy and sawdust, children and adults savored the latest confection: a thin, baked waffle ingeniously funneled around a single scoop of ice cream. International in its reach, the Fair attracted both foreign and domestic visitors, from President Theodore Roosevelt to German sociologist Max Weber, from American “Wild West” cowboys to South African Boer War reenactors.

  Unofficially and inadvertently the Fair also provided a parallel showcase for African Americans. During the on-site Third International Olympiad, George Coleman Poage won twin bronze medals for the 200-meter and 400-meter hurdle events, making him the first person of his race to be so honored. In the large Filipino village, Lieutenant Walter H. Loving directed the disciplined and precise Philippines Constabulary Band, a group Philippines Governor-General (and future United States President) William Howard Taft had commissioned him to organize in 1901.

  The Fair also attracted black orators, authors and entertainers, who displayed their talents in halls, theaters and churches within easy walking distance of Sarah and C.J.’s Clark Avenue flat. A few blocks away pianist Joe Jordan bested other ragtime legends to win Tom Turpin’s national competition at Douglass Hall in late February. Three weeks later poet Paul Laurence Dunbar performed a grand recital at the Central Baptist Church. The Colored Knights of Pythias, arrayed in gold-roped regalia, proudly hosted brethren from other cities at their local headquarters. Small-time hustlers sported Stetsons and sparkling paste stickpins in pool halls along Market Street, an all-day, all-night amusement zone auxiliary to the Fair.

  Scholar W.E.B. Du Bois and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington, embroiled in an increasingly contentious public debate over Washington’s more conservative, more accommodating approach to civil rights, both drew large crowds in separate St. Louis appearances. Washington, speaking on the fairgrounds in late June, was a veteran of World’s Fair orations, having reassured whites at Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition that “the wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”

  Du Bois, who recently had helped launch the politically militant Niagara Movement that was to test Washington’s preeminence, filled Douglass Hall with “the most intelligent people of the community,” reported the Palladium in early October.

  Much of St. Louis’s black community welcomed the exposition festivities with optimism. Like other visitors, they were awed by the young century’s newfangled inventions. Like other Americans, they wanted to see the 160 automobiles that were on display and to view the Missouri countryside from the magnificent Ferris wheel, whose trolley-sized cars comfortably seated more than four dozen passengers.

  In frequent updates on fairgrounds construction, the Palladium encouraged readers like Sarah to visit early and often. Faithfully predicting that “no discrimination will be made,” the weekly was enthusiastic about the prospects for exhibiting African American contributions to the development of the Louisiana Territory. “The representation of the Negro race at the Fair will, it is anticipated, be a highly commendable one,” editor Wheeler assured.

  For Wheeler and many other middle-class blacks, the Fair presented a forum in which to challenge Jim Crow segregation. Since 1896, when the Supreme Court of the United States had given its blessing to the disingenuous “separate but equal” doctrine in its Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, discrimination in public places had become entrenched. With global attention focused on St. Louis, the World’s Fair Committee on Negro Day hoped to present “the true status of the Negro Question” and believed that “the coming together of so many thoughtful men and women of the race can not fail to make a favorable impression on the assembled multitude.”

  For hundreds of African Americans the Fair also meant jobs. While a few black musicians performed on the Pike, most black Fair workers were relegated to unskilled service jobs. Those with entrepreneurial instincts cashed in on off-site services to black visitors, providing lodging, food and drink in their own establishments. With the segregated white hotels filled to capacity for the run of the Fair, hundreds of black St. Louisans and job seekers from bordering states filled positions as maids, cooks, porters, janitors and butlers. More work meant unprecedented disposable income for a community that had always found itself at the mercy of a racially circumscribed job market. Some of those extra quarters and dollars found their way to hairdressers like Sarah, whose services appealed to women with rising personal expectations and a growing acceptance of cosmetics. Increased wages were also channeled into more substantive investments. According to the American Eagle, African Americans in St. Louis bought real estate valued at more than half a million dollars during 1903 and 1904. “Ragtime Millionaire,” a tune heard often during the Fair, characterized the mood:

  I’m a ragtime millionaire,

  I’ve got nothing but money to spend;

  Automobiles floating in the breeze,

  I’m afraid I may die of money disease.

  Don’t bother a minute about what those white folks care:

  I’m a ragtime millionaire.

  At the time Sarah certainly was not prosperous enough to suffer from “money disease,” but she, like most of St. Louis, was engulfed by an overwhelming infusion of ideas, people and possibilities. From time to time, though, the African American enthusiasm for the Fair wavered, especially when rumors surfaced in April that the exposition was falling short on its promise to showcase their community. In response to an invitation from the chairman of the proposed August 1 Negro Day, Booker T. Washington suggested that his decision to speak would be influenced by the treatment blacks received on the fairgrounds in the coming weeks. “The impression is fast spreading through the country among the colored people that they are to receive nothing in the way of accommodations in restaurants, etc., on the Exposition grounds and this report is causing a rather bitter feeling among the race,” he informed William Farmer, chairman of the event.

  In fact, Washington’s fears were confirmed: few eating establishments were willing to serve African Americans. “The black man who desires refreshment on the Exposition ground,” wrote one Fair-goer, “had better carry his knapsack and canteen with him.” When the freshwater concessionaire worried that whites would not patronize his fountain if blacks used the same glasses, he designated “distinctively marked goblets” and “special tanks of water . . . for colored people.”
r />   Long gone were the early, official promises that blacks—“now an element of such great importance in the industrial, political and social life of the Union”—would be included in the exhibits just as they had been at the Atlanta and Nashville fairs in the 1890s. Instead of an opportunity to display their achievements since Emancipation, they were largely omitted from the fair’s exhibits. The Old Plantation, a Pike concession “showing Negro life before the War of the Rebellion,” lamented Emmett Scott, Booker T. Washington’s private secretary, “is all there is to let the world know we are in existence, aside from a small exhibit of a Mississippi College, and one or two other exhibits of no very particular moment.”

  If Sarah and other local black visitors were proud to see themselves reflected at all in the Missouri State exhibit, it was small consolation that an area set aside for a lone photograph of Sumner High School’s faculty and the Palladium’s 1903 press run was all their presence in the state merited.

  But a dismissal of African American contributions was only part of the Fair’s overarching racial and cultural agenda. In the quarter century between 1876 and 1901, civic leaders across America—from Charleston to New Orleans, Chicago to Nashville, Philadelphia to Atlanta—had competed for the honor to host world expositions. Designed above all to boost commerce and promote innovative technology, the financially lucrative events also reinforced Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy and provided a justification for the racial discrimination that Sarah and other African Americans frequently faced. While comprehensive exhibits at the St. Louis World’s Fair traced a century’s evolution in the fields of electricity, machinery, transportation, agriculture and education, W. J. McGee, head of the Fair’s Department of Anthropology, aimed also “to represent human progress . . . from savagery to civic organization” in living “museums” throughout the fairgrounds. “It is a matter of common observation that the white man can do more than the yellow, the yellow man more and better than the red or black,” McGee had written five years earlier.