Voices from within the Veil : African Americans and the Experience of Democracy [1 ed.] 9781443811767, 9781847186256

Citation preview

Voices from within the Veil

Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy

Edited by

William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Voices from within the Veil: African Americans and the Experience of Democracy, Edited by William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by William H. Alexander, Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander and Charles H. Ford and contributors Cover design by Stevalynn Adams Cover photograph: Female protestor carrying sign that says 'Justice,' Monroe, NC, 1961, by Declan Haun ; courtesy of Chicago History Museum All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-625-4, ISBN (13): 9781847186256

To those who have shed the veil . . . To those who dropped the masks . . . To those who have become visible. . . And to those who have transcended.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ...................................................................................... x Foreword ................................................................................................... xii Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii Chapter One............................................................................................... 1 Interpretations of the Beginnings Post and Neo-Colonial Pocahontas(es): Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage ........................................................................... 3 Page Laws Voicing Virginia’s ‘Naturals’?: Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World....................................................................... 23 Cathy Waegner Jamestown Shuffle: Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830 .............................................................................. 46 Ervin Jordan Chapter Two Early Struggles for Empowerment ........................................................ 73 “Their Hoped for Liberty”: Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion .............. 75 Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie A Concentrated Diversity: The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860.............................................................................................. 85 Brent Morris The Strange Case of Sheridan Ford and Clarissa Davis: The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia ............................... 113 Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander

viii

Table of Contents

“Thinking Men and Women who Desire to Improve our Condition”: Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887 ........................................... 140 Richard Junger 40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice............................................................................................... 170 Rodney Roberts Chapter Three........................................................................................ 185 The Theory and Practice of Race in Early Virginia and Beyond The Right to One’s Relatives: The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia ......................................................................... 187 Christina Proenza-Coles The Langston-Quarles Family: A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia ................................................................................ 207 Judith King-Calnek Advantage, Agency, and Unrest: Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952................................................................................................ 229 Shayla Nunnally “The Ku Klux Klan are still scrapping here”: African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924 ............................................... 254 Kimberley Mangun Chapter Four ......................................................................................... 287 Theorizing the Black Experience “They Just Gunned Him Down Uhgain”: Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History ................................................................................. 289 Natalia Vysotska Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell: Women Who Influenced the Washington vs. DuBois Debate................. 300 Teresa Holden

Voices from within the Veil

ix

Chapter Five .......................................................................................... 313 The Struggle for Education and the Vote in Virginia The Ecumenical Moment: Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959 ............................................................................. 315 Charles Ford “Sit Down Children, Sit Down”: The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia.................................................................................................... 330 Jeffrey Littlejohn Epilogue.................................................................................................. 345 Migration Matters, Even 400 Years Later: Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee ................................................................................... 349 Cathy Waegner List of Contributors ................................................................................. 362 Index........................................................................................................ 365

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 2.7 Fig. 2.9 Fig. 2.10 Fig. 2.11 Fig. 2.12 Fig. 2.13 Fig. 2.14 Fig. 2.15 Fig. 2.16

Fig. 2.17

The wedding of Pocahontas with John Rolfe Matoaka alias Rebecka daughter to the mighty Prince Powhatan Smith rescued by Pocahontas A dark Pocahontas rescuing Smith Malick’s The New World The Negro Building, 1907 European American merchants on the waterfront with enslaved African American workers. The Grigby Party fights back View of Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp The Dismal Swamp Norfolk Waterfront India Wharf Stave Yard, located just east of Higgins' Wharf Higgins’ and Wright’s Wharves Former home of General John Hodges Colored Methodist Church in Portsmouth Emanuel AME Church location in Portsmouth and Glasgow Street sanctuary location Jeffrey Wilson, Major George W. Grice, and the Reverend George M. Bain Mrs. Jane Pyatt and Emanuel AME Church, ca. 1940s William Still’s depiction of escape by fifteen fugitives from Portsmouth and Norfolk, Virginia in July 1856 Norfolk City Jail, where Julia Ann Gregory and her three children were kept following Sheridan Ford’s escape William Still’s depiction of the escape by Portsmouth natives John Stinger, Robert Emerson, Anthony and Isabella Pugh, and Stebney Swan aboard Captain Edward Lee’s skiff in 1857 Harper’s Ferry Insurrection

Voices from within the Veil

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

xi

Free black missionaries from Zion Baptist Church from Portsmouth, Virginia to Liberia, ca. 1830 Journey of a slave from the plantation to the battlefield Influential leaders in the early twentieth century: Washington and DuBois Booker T. Washington, ca. 1880-1890

Fig. 5.1

Protestors in front of the Norfolk Public School Building

Fig. 6.1

Negro Building, 1907

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Norfolk State University’s contribution to the America’s 400th Commemoration was a two-day national conference on February 22-23, 2007 highlighting the theme, America’s 400th Anniversary: Voices from within the Veil. As part of a larger group of conferences sponsored by the Jamestown 2007 Federal Commission and the African American Advisory Council, these activities were part of an ongoing dialogue about democracy and race that was hosted by Norfolk State University. We ssembled noted scholars from the United States and abroad, community leaders, and political figures to consider the contrasting democratic images and oligarchic realities of early Jamestown and the larger subject of evolving concepts of democracy, political participation, and civil rights. The conference addressed the recurring challenges within democratic systems posed by racial and ethnic differences and the imperative of protecting minority rights within a republican framework. The Honorable Timothy Kaine, Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, graciously accepted our invitation to serve as honorary chair of Norfolk State’s commemoration of Jamestown 2007. We are grateful to the Federal Commission and the African American Advisory Council for their sponsorship of our conference and their support in bringing it to light. Dr. Carolyn Meyers, President of Norfolk State University, and the administration and staff of Norfolk State University offered us unstinting assistance during a stressful two years. Further, we offer our appreciation to the many conference participants, faculty and student workers, and community supporters who made strong commitments to the conference’s success. The essays contained in this volume represent episodes in the odyssey of African Americans toward self-consciousness and empowerment. It has been a pleasure working with the contributors to this volume. They have been erstwhile students of those who have labored within the veil. We offer a special thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their early and consistent interest in our project.

INTRODUCTION

“And then—the Veil. It drops as drops the night on southern seas—vast, sudden, unanswering. There is Hate behind it, and Cruelty and Tears. As one peers through its intricate, unfathomable pattern of ancient, old, old design, one sees blood and guilt and misunderstanding. And yet it hangs there, this Veil, between Then and Now, between Pale and Colored and Black and White—between You and Me.”1 —W.E.B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil, 1920

As the promoters of Jamestown 2007 began to speak of the accomplishment of greater diversity in the nation, and to market the myth of the seamless confluence of Indian, European, and African traditions in the early colony, many reflected not only about how the United States’ colonial origins were based on the entrepreneurial ambitions of English settlers, the conquest and degradation of native populations, and the subsequent uprooting and enslavement of untold numbers of Africans, but also about the more recent legacy of decades of discrimination and marginalization. Of course, the last commemoration in 1957 had excluded African Americans from expressions of memory and public space. Some prominent African Americans from Virginia even had to suffer the indignity of receiving invitations to a celebratory dinner only to be disinvited once their race was known. Virginia was on the verge of closing many of its schools in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, and the nation was still experiencing the twilight of Jim Crow. The discourse about the promises and dangers of democracy had begun long before Jamestown. The people who founded Jamestown in 1607 and the others who then tried to preserve its memory after its abandonment in the 1690s were keenly aware of this long-term interplay of democratic images and oligarchic realities. Equally prominent in the settlers’ minds was how to manage the colony’s increasing cultural diversity without departing from the evolving notions of an Englishman’s rights. Tragically, these rights became defined by the new concept of “race”, which has clouded the future of true democracy in America ever since. Slavery based upon “race” allowed Virginians to establish a relatively representative government in an oligarchic, stratified, plantation society. It also enabled Virginians to speak a political language that

xiv

Introduction

glorified the rights of freemen and to allow the new United States eventually to embrace democratic ideals. American democracy today is dominated by various elites that claim to be the tribunes of the people. Looking back at Jamestown and its representations in this way will offer insights on the future of democracy and our “liberal” and “conservative” elites cloaked in populist imagery. The centerpiece of the conference was a multi-disciplinary dialogue among scholars on the issue of African American rights in this country. Obviously at the conference’s core were discussions about the historical significance and experiences of this minority group in America and how the law has defined them separately from the general public. The very idea of designating groups as minorities implies subordination and marginalization from the general populace. Moreover, the ongoing and permanent designation of African Americans as minorities, despite many of them having a mixed heritage, has rendered them an unassimilated faction whose rights and privileges must be circumscribed to protect society from harm. This historical understanding of the role that minorities in general have played in defining who is and who is not an American underlies America’s true legacy as the world’s first democracy. It is that history that continues to play a role in America’s international and domestic policies regarding immigration, humanitarian funding and intervention, and accessibility to technology, civil rights, wealth, and civic enterprise. Who are African Americans? Writer Ralph Ellison wrote in his 1947 book, The Invisible Man, about the story of a highly intelligent unnamed hero who went to a southern black college and was eventually expelled by the president, Dr. Bledsoe, who was seen as a great educator and leader of his race. The hero was punished simply because he unwittingly took a white donor through a black gin mill. After his expulsion, he traveled to New York, bearing what he believed was a letter of recommendation from Dr. Bledsoe, but it was actually a letter warning prospective employers against him. The protagonist later worked in a factory, became a leader among the Harlem communists, and had an epiphany after witnessing a riot in New York. He realized that, throughout his life, his relations with other people, black and white, had been illusory and invisible. His true self was never visible because it was locked within his black skin. As long as he allowed others to define him, he would always be invisible to others. He finally understood, “When I discover who I am, I'll be free.” Africans and their descendants have been defined, redefined, pigeonholed, stereotyped, classified, segregated, and mythologized since the establishment of African slavery in America. This process has been

Voices from within the Veil

xv

the reason for continued conflict over assimilating African Americans into the system. It is also this factor that has resulted in African Americans defining and redefining themselves based on the changing definition of the term, “American.” In fact, even today the debates over the relevancy and use of the terms black, Afro-American, African American, Colored, and Negro continue to rage with no sign of ending. It seems that many would prefer to be classified simply as “American,” with the hope that that would end the ongoing marginalization of African Americans in American society. In his seminal 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois remarked that blacks found themselves in a peculiar situation in America. A double-consciousness evolved in which blacks felt a dual identity: one as a black, the other as an American. For DuBois, these two souls were destined to be unreconciled and warring because of the primacy of race in American society and culture. The result for blacks would be the emergence of a "self-conscious manhood." This double-consciousness was certainly true of African American leaders in the past, and it continues to be true. It is this conflict that creates tension and frustration today and leads to a kind of self-hating duality in many African Americans, despite the incredible achievements, contributions, and exploits of many over the past four hundred years. But all this still begs the question, are blacks nothing but the definition that others have given to them? Are they murderers and criminals, Sambos and Mammies, Jezebels and pickaninnies? Are they thugs and hoochy mammas, pimps and drug dealers or are they simply victims of a system beyond their control? These images, which have dominated American culture and have been embedded over many generations in illustrations, trade cards, newspapers, articles, movies, television, advertisements, and record labels, still resonate throughout the world as true images of African Americans. In fact, some of the most derogative images of blacks as threats are the primary marketing tools for black music entertainers, showcasing them as antisocial, angry people whose behavior marginalizes them to the sidelines of American society. These depictions of blacks in the culture of white America have successfully commoditized a stereotyped black culture here and abroad. If these images are untrue, then who are African Americans, and why are these representations still a part of American society and culture? Since the colonial period African Americans have been popularly depicted in stereotypical form, whether it was to soothe the consciences of white America about slavery or segregation, defacto and otherwise, or to justify an inherently unequal system that, at best, meted out inconsistent justice to African Americans. The Declaration of Independence revealed

xvi

Introduction

the hypocrisy of how society viewed itself versus African Americans when it included the passage, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights . . . among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” with the understanding that these rights would only be applied to whites. The 1789 Constitution would go further, declaring that blacks were chattel and only three-fifths of a person. By the 1830s, the institution of slavery had become well-entrenched, sustaining the unprecedented prosperity of the new nation. However, this factor corresponded with the emergence of the “American Dream” that characterized the United States as a “Christian” nation whose values were steeped in Biblical principles, and whose destiny was to spread democracy throughout the world. The dichotomy of these ideals and slavery resulted in the emergence of scientific racism and white paternalism, which sought to justify this system of human exploitation with American idealism. Prior to this period, when slavery was viewed as a “necessary evil” by most whites, African Americans did not cover their hair with scarves or hats, nor did they perceive their innate physical characteristics as inferior to those of whites. With the entrenchment and expansion of slavery in America, however, such writers as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Dew, Samuel Cartwright, T. D. Rice, and George Fitzhugh began the process of dehumanization by ridiculing even the noses, eyes, lips, hair, body structure, skin complexion, and odor of African Americans. To these essayists, everything associated with Africa was inferior and inadequate, especially when compared to the European model. Thus, America witnessed the birth of black stereotypes that were comforting to whites, explaining and justifying slavery while simultaneously setting the example of behavior for African Americans. In the eyes of slaveholders in particular and white America in general, the image of slaves as "Sambos," childlike, docile, lazy, and dependent became the rule. Whites expected and demanded a subservient deference from blacks, enslaved and free. By the early twentieth century, blacks had learned to cooperate with society’s “compromise policy” of Jim Crow, although this policy was off to a shaky start as cities such as Atlanta, Georgia and Wilmington, North Carolina were cast into the public’s eye with brutal race riots. Blacks and whites were to work together, forming a bond of mutual cooperation in which blacks would take their “rightful” place behind whites who were obviously the leaders and models for achievement and progress. Some among the black leadership, fearful of losing their position and favor among whites, and of the violence that would certainly ensue, championed accommodationism and peaceful co-existence as the antidote to mob rule.

Voices from within the Veil

xvii

It was in the first half of the twentieth century that blacks learned what it meant to be a “good Negro” and a “credit to their race.” And while there were organizations in the early 1900s such as the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, and the National Colored Women’s League, which decried injustice as a national policy and demanded more than the insular world that segregation afforded for blacks, their voices were temporarily muted by the powerful thunder of those arguing for compromise, patience, and moderation. Ironically, in the midst of those pressures, there emerged a diversity of voices cascading from the 1920s through the Depression era and World War II that refused to be silenced, advocating not only that blacks should join forces and fight for a more powerful Africa (PanAfricanism), but that blacks should claim their rightful place in American society. After all, what would America be without African Americans? From America’s music to its religious practices and economy, African Americans had left their indelible imprint. In the April 1970 edition of Time magazine, Ralph Ellison wrote an article, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” in response to the conservative reactions to a more radical civil rights initiative by organizations such as SNCC and the Black Panthers. In the article, Ellison said: Since the beginning of the nation, white Americans have suffered from a deep inner uncertainty as to who they really are. One of the ways that has been used to simplify the answer has been to seize upon the presence of black Americans and use them as a marker, a symbol of limits, a metaphor for the “outsider.” Many whites could look at the social position of blacks and feel that color formed an easy and reliable gauge for determining to what extent one was or was not American. Perhaps that is why one of the epithets that European immigrants learned when they got off the boat was the term “nigger”—it made them feel instantly American. But this is tricky magic. Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man’s value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black.2

From the beginning of the arrival of Africans into this nation, blacks have grappled with the issue of self-identity. This was complicated by the process of enslavement which occurred over a period of forty-odd years, and it continued throughout the colonial and revolutionary years. And even after free blacks had begun referring to themselves as AfroAmericans because of their desire to reconnect with their African roots during the antebellum period, those years brought with them self-loathing, resulting in part from the creation of proslavery arguments that were thinly

xviii

Introduction

veiled as intellectual and rational. Blacks were characterized as beasts, inferior beings, and even canines. Added to that were the challenges associated with widespread racism in America and the internalization of a “blame the victim” syndrome as a defense against these policies that deprived African Americans of their personhood and citizenship. Throughout, blacks have persevered to reclaim the humanity that American society repeatedly attempted to strip from them, despite their services to this country in war, missionary outreach, education, political activism, and civic involvement. Perhaps nowhere is this story recorded most poignantly than in the African American work songs, spirituals, blues, gospel, jazz, rhythm ‘n blues, and rap music. Together, this music symbolically reflects the actions and attitudes of resiliency, improvisation, yearning, and confrontation which evolved and helped African Americans to endure the cruelties of slavery and segregation, while simultaneously providing a medium for communion and communication. Despite the assimilation and acculturation process that has occurred in America, African Americans have continued to refashion their culture and adaptive perceptions to fit their own social needs and aesthetic preferences. In Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison wrote, “‘Everybody wants to tell us what a Negro is. But if you would tell me who I am, at least take the trouble to discover what I have been.’” Whether the paradigm is DuBois’ burden of double-consciousness, Ellison’s invisible man seeking identity, or Fanon’s white masks donned by people of color, African Americans have been defined by alienation and marginalization.

Notes 1

W. E. B. DuBois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Brace and Company, 1920), 142. 2 “What America Would be like without Blacks,” Time Magazine, April 6, 1970.

CHAPTER ONE DRAMATIC INTERPRETATIONS OF THE BEGINNINGS

Fig. 1.1: The wedding of Pocahontas with John Rolfe by George Spohni. Published by Joseph Hoover, Philadelphia, ca. 1867. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The popular retelling of the founding of America has been more often shrouded in myth and conjecture than in fact. Page Laws examines how white Americans reinvented Pocahontas as a transitional, transformative figure to justify their claims of ownership of North America. Over the years, the iconic Pocahontas bore little resemblance to the historical one, symbolizing her importance in framing the mainstream American identity. This issue of remaking Pocahontas into a European was crucial in the creation of a racially-acceptable image of Eastern Indians. This transformation accompanied the emergence of racialism in American society. Cathy Waegner also confronts the issue of the ongoing mythologizing of America’s early years. The romanticizing of the interactions between the Jamestown colonists and the Algonquins, particularly the role of

2

Chapter One

Pocahontas, has been captured in films and plays for centuries. Waegner’s essay analyzes the latest foray into that popular myth in Terrence Malick’s film, The New World (2005). Castigated by critics worldwide as rife with stereotypes, Malick attempted to give voice to the Algonquins in Virginia, impuning a body language and vernacular that merely reinvents the noble savage motif, but this time from a European perspective. Tracing Old World antecedents, Ervin Jordan explores the emergence of racism in early American society that kept formerly bonded men, such as Angolan Anthony Johnson, who aspired to be a powerful landowner, from achieving the American dream. This essay combines the arguments of Winthrop Jordan (White Over Black) and Carl Degler (“Slavery and the Genesis of American Race Prejudice”) into a cogent overview of how racism influenced the development of white entitlement in a growing American society.

POST- AND NEO-COLONIAL POCAHONTAS (ES): TERRENCE MALICK’S UPDATED MYTH OF LA BELLE SAUVAGE PAGE R. LAWS, NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY

When last spotted on the big screen in 1995, Pocahontas was a singing Europhile eager to negotiate peace among the new English arrivals and her people. In appearance, she resembled an animated, buxom Barbie doll; in behavior, however, she had taken a stride towards political correctness, with particularly strong marks in environmental awareness. Still Disney’s film was met with a barrage of negative remarks, many from critics using a postcolonial approach, comments that prove surprisingly on target for judging the newest cinematic Pocahontas portrayed in Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). This study provides a brief overview of Pocahontas in American high and popular culture, beginning with John Smith’s highly dramatized narratives, including James Nelson Barker and John Bray’s 1808 “operatic Melo-drame” The Indian Princess: or, La Belle Sauvage, and culminating in a study of Malick’s film. Sometimes a chaste child, other times a deerskin Lolita, Pocahontas’ sexual nature has long been contested along with her tribal/racial loyalties. In that sense, she has much in common with African American “colonized” women, especially those in interracial relationships. Some have seen Pocahontas as a commodified victim of imperialism (she was, indeed, held hostage for three years in Jamestown); others have branded her as Native America’s first sell-out, or, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, “our first [Uncle] Tom.”1 The triangle formed by adding two white men—her putative lover John Smith and her future husband John Rolfe—to one lone woman of color has titillated white audiences for almost exactly four hundred years (1607– 2007). La Belle Sauvage! La Belle Sauvage! Our nonpareil is she! But Princess Pocahontas Gazed sadly toward the sea.

4

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage —Stanza from Rosemary and Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem, “Pocahontas” A Book of Americans, 1933

Theseus and Ariadne; Jason and Medea; Aeneas and Lavinia; Julius Caesar/ Marc Antony and Cleopatra; Cortez and la Malinza,2—what these famous couples (or in one case, a threesome) have in common is the status of each woman as a Belle Sauvage,3 that is, a young female who “betrays” (often under coercion) the interests of her own people to aid, abet, and procreate with one of her country’s conquering colonizers. She is “savage,” of course, from the perspective of the colonizers’ civilization, for which she is also what we now call a “woman of color,” a term in itself reflective of a white point of view. The Belle Sauvage is also most often silent —a mute figure within the veil, switching to the metaphor of “Voices from within the Veil” conference. Her story has been passed to us not in her own voice, but in the words of her conquerors and their descendants. So it is and was with John Smith/John Rolfe and Pocahontas, First Heroine (again from the colonists’ perspective) of Jamestown and of America. Her story initially comes to us via three white male contemporaries: John Smith, Ralph Hamor and her husband John Rolfe. It has been told and retold—in verse, in song,4 on stage, on screen. A database of writings on Pocahontas lists, in fact, 1400 citations.5 Its latest retelling is Terrence Malick’s 2005 The New World, hailed for its visual splendor and the felicitous casting of hybrid beauty Q’Orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. But Malick is still indubitably a white male when it comes to his perspective. And despite his best intentions to be sensitive to Native Americans, his Pocahontas is really a neocolonial Belle Sauvage. The critique of colonialism identified in the academy with Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha and others has not yet made it onto the silver screen, itself a sort of high-tech veil or scrim that both obscures and reveals.

Voices from within the Veil

5

Fig. 1.2: Matoaka, alias Rebecka, daughter to The Powhatan, Wahunsenacawh, who was leader of the Virginia Algonquians. This was an illustration of a portrait done during Pocahantas’s journey to London, England,as Mrs. John Rolfe, 1616 (published in 1624). Courtesy Library of Congress.

In the Benets’ historical poem cited above, cheering Londoners greet Pocahontas on her 1616 arrival in their city with an unlikely combination of epithets: both “Princess” (for her status as New World “Emperor” Powhatan’s daughter) and “Belle Sauvage” for her exotic red-skinned beauty. Why the British used a French phrase (a century before Rousseau promulgated the notion we now shorthand as “noble savage”) is not entirely clear. We do know that Pocahontas, the “nubile,” noble savage6 in question and her tobacco planter husband were staying at a London inn called the Belle Sauvage. Scholar Philip Barbour—famous for his contentious thesis that John Smith’s “rescue” by Pocahontas was part of an adoption ritual Smith simply did not understand—insists the Belle Sauvage Inn already bore that name before Pocahontas’ arrival.7 Though the legend that the Inn was renamed for our Virginia Princess is poetically

6

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

pleasing, Barbour is probably correct. According to Pocahontas descendant, Pocahontas Wight Edmonds, the Inn stood for at least another 250 years after the Rolfe family checked out.8 Returning to our epigraph, both Ralph Hamor9 and John Smith call Pocahontas the very best, the “nonpareil” of her race and gender.10 The word “nonpareil”—another French loan word meaning the “incomparable or unequalled one”—must have been in vogue about that time, its other famous use being in praise of another epitome of young womanhood: Miranda from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (III.ii.104, circa 1610). It is widely believed that Shakespeare wrote The Tempest in response to the news of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda, an event that also intersects with our Pocahontas mythos in that the Sea Venture (or the ships fashioned from its wreck) later brought John Rolfe to Jamestown.11 Though they only had one son before Pocahontas’ death at twentytwo in 1617, an incredible (and impossible) two million Americans12 (including the Page family for whom I am named) trace their ancestry to the Pocahontas/Rolfe union. It is no accident that Vachel Lindsay entitled his poem of tribute “Our Mother Pocahontas.” Notably, there is no corresponding poem for Pocahontas’ spouse John Rolfe, no “Our Father John Rolfe.”13 Though he comes off fairly well in Terrence Malick’s film as played by Christian Bale, Rolfe is rarely granted a place in the American Pantheon of heroes. America’s “First Tobacconist”14 has always had to share the glory with his rival John Smith. Rolfe may have passed on his actual DNA, but Smith passed on some powerfully mythic genes of his own. Indeed, the putative “romance” of Pocahontas and John Smith is what Sommer15 has called the “foundational romance” of America. It is this couple’s romance that Disney chooses to laud and commodify in the animated 1995 version. It is likewise this romance that dominates Malick’s film, much to the chagrin of historians who point out the unlikelihood of any consummated love affair between Pocahontas (between ten and thirteen when she met Smith) and the middle-aged adventurer. But before turning to Malick’s film, I want to survey our national fixation with what Rayna Green has called the “Pocahontas perplex”16 over time. Just as the visual iconography of Pocahontas changes over time, her narrative form metamorphoses as well, creating a highly revealing Rezeptionsgeschichte (history of reception) for her persona embedded in American history.

Colonial and Antebellum Pocahontases The facts of history are bad enough; the fictions are, if possible, worse. —Henry James17

Voices from within the Veil

7

The four-hundred-year-old story of Pocahontas is, not surprisingly, rife with gaps, and even the generally agreed-upon “facts” of her life have become sites for contending interpretations. We cannot even agree on which of her names to call her by: Amonute, Matoaka, her father’s pet name Pocahontas, or her Christian name Rebecca. Scholars are fond of pointing out that Rebecca in the Bible—Genesis 26:22—held “two nations” in her womb, the elder of whom (perhaps Native America?) was destined to serve the younger (perhaps the newly arrived Europeans?).18 Smith and Rolfe were both characters in and documenters of the Pocahontas story; accordingly, their objectivity and veracity are suspect from the get-go.19 There is a notorious nine-year gap between the time John Smith says his famous “rescue” by Pocahontas took place (1607) and the first of eight times he mentions it in his 1616 letter to Queen Anne. The other colonial sources, Ralph Hamor and William Strachey, are also sketchy.20 How old WAS Pocahontas when she met John Smith? Was she ten, eleven, twelve or thirteen—pubescent or pre-pubescent? Did the Rescue ever even happen? Was it perhaps John Smith’s “self-serving fabrication” or what Stephen Greenblatt calls his “Renaissance self-fashioning”?21 We have already mentioned the “adoption ritual” hypothesis. Helen Rountree, the leading scholar on Powhatan life and customs, seems skeptical such a ritual ever existed. Was Pocahontas, at the time of the Rescue, a virgin, sexually experienced, or perhaps already married to an Indian man named Kocoum, who figures in the Disney version some centuries later? The Belle Sauvage myth strongly privileges virginity, a virginity to be taken by the colonizer just as he inseminates the previously “wasted” and fallow virginal land. Was she beautiful or plain? John Rolfe, in his letter to the Governor requesting permission to marry Pocahontas, swears that he has no lust for her, that he could certainly find a woman “more pleasing to the eye.”22 If that is so, why is the epithet “belle” so firmly associated with her? Was she ever raped by the colonists who held her hostage?23 Did she know John Smith was alive before their reunion in England? Visual artist/writer Gail Tremblay imagines she did not know;24 Malick imagines that she did. Was Pocahontas angry that her father failed to ransom her during those three years in Jamestown? Did she consent to her own baptism and her wedding?25 Did she suffer from “Stockholm syndrome,” that identification with her captors and their values?26 As in the case of other “silenced” women in colonies all over the world,27 we have virtually no insight at all into Pocahontas’ own feelings and opinions.

8

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

Fig. 1.3: Smith rescued by Pocahontas. This is a print showing the reported rescue of Captain John Smith by Pocahontas as Opechancanough is prevented from striking Smith with a weapon. Powhatan is standing directly behind Smith with his left hand, holding a calumet raised to stay the execution. Published by Hr. Schile in New York, between 1870 and 1875. Courtesy Library of Congress.

The answers to the questions above seem, instead, firmly fixed in the eye of the beholder and the time of the beholding. As Frederic Gleach points out in his article “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myths: The Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith,” “Stereotypical myths change to reflect their times and Pocahontas may be the most vivid North American example of this process.”28 Gleach notes that the speculation about Pocahontas having been raped coincides with the rise of postcolonial criticism in the academy. The nineteenth-century antebellum version of Pocahontas was similarly affected by the preoccupations of that era when some southerners idealized and romanticized their Indian Princess to remind the North of the “primacy of Southern settlements”29 in early America. The nineteenth century parade of Pocahontases begins with what Rebecca Faery calls Jon Davis’ “quasi-pornographic” 1805 novel.30 It is quickly followed by Barker and Bray’s musical play The Indian Princess or La Belle Sauvage (1808),31 the oldest play on Pocahontas still extant.32 Fortunately available in reprint form, it is just as revealing of American

Voices from within the Veil

9

culture in the year 1808 as a contemporary newspaper warm from the presses. Barker and Bray’s Pocahontas is impressionable and tractable, to say the very least. She represents an ideal of womanhood so perfect that the issue of her being non-white is simply transcended.33 She immediately succumbs to the prodigious charm and gallantry of John Smith–a crusading warrior knight so dashing that the Indians grow pale with fear at his very sight. That relationship is completely Platonic, however, since she sees him as tantamount to a god. After the requisite Rescue of John Smith—“White man, thou shalt not die; or I will die with thee!”34—John Rolfe quickly appears on the scene and Pocahontas falls for him, this time romantically. The “bad” Indians who plot against the colonists—one, a would-be suitor of Pocahontas named Miami, and the other, an evil medicine man named Grimasco—plot in vain. They are vanquished, and then Pocahontas can be baptized and married to John Rolfe, her destined spouse, to whom she states her profoundest gratitude: Thou’st ta’en me from the path of savage error, Blood-stained and rude, where rove my countrymen, And taught me heavenly truthes, and fill’d my heart With sentiments sublime, and sweet, and social.35

The nationalist, nativist fervor of 1808 can be read in every line of Barker and Bray’s play. The Old Country is labeled “stagnant”36 and later labeled “old licentious Europe.”37 Happy are the white, newly minted Americans38 called on to colonize the “great, yet virtuous empire in the west!”39 Happy are those Indians manifestly destined to be conquered!

Disney’s Pocahontas – Dances With Raccoons She’s a babe. —Mel Gibson (voice of Disney’s John Smith) describing his shapely, animated paramour (“The Making of Pocahontas” DVD)

Given Mel Gibson’s recent penchant for self-inflicted public relations wounds, he is probably very lucky that animated women do not sue for harassment. He is, however, voicing the obvious: Disney’s animated Pocahontas is a buxom, sexually-mature woman who is very purposefully modeled on “‘babes” of multiple ethnicities, including her voicer Irene Bedard (an Indian), Filipino model Dyna Taylor, and white supermodel Christy Turlington.40 To this list, Leigh Edwards adds black supermodel Naomi Campbell.41 This effort to be representative would seem benign,

10

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

even noble on the part of the Disney creative team, but it has its own drawbacks. Author of an article called “The United Colors of Pocahontas: Synthetic Miscegenation and Disney’s Multiculturalism,” Edwards accuses the Disney filmmakers of trying to “fashion Jamestown into the birthplace of multiculturalism”42 at the very same time that they sidestep the actual miscegenation that a consummated screen marriage43 between John Smith and Pocahontas would represent. Disney’s John Smith is wounded while protecting chief Powhatan in a totally concocted sniping incident intended to balance the poetic scales for Pocahontas’ rescue of him. Since Smith returns to England, the only race-mixing in Disney’s Pocahontas is that “pre-mixing” to be read on Pocahontas’ multiculti, animated face. Though Edwards’ complaints are overstated, he is certainly not alone in condemning Disney for superficial political correctness. The complaints about fudging Pocahontas’ age began well before the film’s release, led by Powhatan Indian consultant on the film Shirley “Little Dove” Custalow McGowan. Indian activist Russell Means gave his blessing to the film, praising its sensitivity, but then again, Means himself had a major acting role in the movie: playing Powhatan.44 Critic Rebecca Blevins Faery objects to the speed with which Pocahontas falls for the first white man whom she sees. Pushpa Naidu Parekh gives a classic postcolonial reading of the film showing how Pocahontas is really just utilized “in the business of spiritual awakening of the European, who still dominates the American continent.”45 While Disney’s Pocahontas seems sincerely disturbed about the invaders’ intent to exploit her land (singing “how high does the sycamore grow?) if you cut it down, then you will never know”) the film as a whole commodifies Indians and their culture most egregiously. Besides spinning off its own straight-to-video sequel, the film created an avalanche of tasteless licensed merchandise. Derek T. Buescher and Kent A. Ono call the Disney version a “neocolonialist text” because “it masks present-day colonialist relations inherited from the past and appropriates contemporary social issues such as feminism, environmentalism, and human freedom in order to justify both fear of people of color and beliefs of their inferiority.”46 The cartoon creates the bad colonist Ratcliffe47 in order to have a good colonist in John Smith. Terrence Malick will create the same dichotomy (a logically false dilemma) using Captain Argall as his bad guy and Smith as his good one. In both cases, we eagerly choose Smith over the villains, barely realizing we have been co-opted into choosing in favor of colonialism.48 Buescher and many others point out that it is Pocahontas – then in Disney and now

Voices from within the Veil

11

in Malick – who masters the language of her lover Smith, and not the other way around.49 The lesson of Disney’s Pocahontas is that true cultural sensitivity is impossible to purchase from consultants and harder to pull off than it ever seems. Despite the exhortation of the song “Paint with All the Colors of the Wind,” white America is yet to walk in the footsteps of red America. And it is the very nature of hegemony to veil and obscure the “things you never knew you never knew” (lyrics to “Paint With All the Colors of the Wind”).50

‘Tis new to him: Malick’s New World Tis new to thee. —Prospero to Miranda after her “Oh brave new world” remark in The Tempest V.i.184

There are more connections between Disney and Malick’s two films than most Malick fans would ever care to admit. Firstly, there are two actors who cross over from the one to the other: Irene Bedard, the speaking voice of Disney’s Pocahontas, appears in the flesh for Malick playing the minor role of Pocahontas’ mother. Christian Bale, who voiced Thomas for the Disney outing, steps up in billing to play Malick’s John Rolfe. The other most striking similarity,already alluded to, is in the multiethnic appearances of the two Indian princesses. Q’Orianka Kilcher, whose heritage includes Peruvian Indian as well as Swiss, though only fourteen at the time of Malick’s filming, plays a fully-developed, sexually active woman more than ready to take on sexy “bad boy” actor Colin Ferrell improbably cast as John Smith. The film received mixed reviews among American critics. Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post, typifies the negative reaction: “stately almost to the point of being static.” He gets in another dig alluding to Malick’s previous film The Thin Red Line: “it [The New World]’s not quite the thin dead line, but it’s close.” But those critics who liked the film were ecstatic. Ty Burr of The Boston Globe called it “lyrical” – “a thing of wild beauty,” “a sprawling cinematic tone poem that paints the characters’ thoughts on the soundtrack.” Burr even praises the non-acting Kilcher– who grew up in Germany and LA–as being just perfect for the role, adding, “She may be more savage than the woman she’s playing.”51 Malick’s opening shots of Virginia sky, shore and waters set the rapturous, “elegiac” 52 tone that his supporters so admire in his work. Pocahontas invokes the Muse for the epic to come: “Come spirit.” John Smith – embodied by a scruffy, feral-looking Ferrell – arises from his

12

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

dungeon of captivity onboard the English ship for a chance at redemption. Music swells, and we see the remarkable ship from the point of view of the Powhatan Indians darting about on shore. In the requisite “Making of The New World” video included on the DVD, the choreographer lauds Malick’s insistence that his core ensemble of Indian actors move like Algonquins. Unfortunately, the result of this training creates a flock of actors who look as if their movements have been choreographed. Christopher Plummer announces that the Jamestown swampland will “serve” for their settlement. He has clearly been cast as Captain Newport to add some gravitas–Captain Von Trapp in Elizabethan/Jacobean garb. “We must be careful not to offend the Naturals,” he says, an allusion to the Rousseauean ethos under girding Malick’s whole film. Newport grants Smith a reprieve from hanging–part of the New Covenant/New Dispensation theme. Smith’s walks in the woods and adventures by shallop begin, often to the soundtrack of birds, frogs, insects and wind. This is Malick at his best, capturing the daily miracles that an unspoiled landscape provides the marshes truly are Technicolor green. His sound crew likewise captures a New World Symphony of chirps, clicks and trills to outdo Dvorák. One of Smith’s fellow settlers, having just spotted oysters “as thick as [his] hand,” enthuses “We’re gonna live like kings!” From the point of view and earshot of the natives, however, all is not well. The sound of trees being chopped denotes the invaders’ intent to stay. The precious honeymoon between colonizers and colonized continues for a little while. Pocahontas with her brother approaches the strangers, daring to touch and sniff the unknown. Says Smith, “The savages often visit us kindly.” “They are,” he continues, “timid like a herd of curious deer.” Meanwhile, the supplies brought from England start to dwindle. Newport orders the men to sleep on the ships in their armor, to cut down every tree within half a mile of the fort (European ecoterrorism begins!), to build a palisade, and to put in crops. Slackers will be whipped. Despite the ‘live like kings’ remark above, the English class system seems to have crossed the Atlantic intact. Ratcliffe is left in charge while Newport returns to England for supplies; John Smith is ordered to approach the local Indian King to set up trade. And the curiosity on both sides – Indian and English – continues to mount. Malick inserts voiceovers of an intensely personal – even schizophrenic—nature, for example, “Who are you…What voice is this that speaks within me?” This odd internal dialogue blends with spokenaloud statements about the Myth of the Commonwealth53 and the new Utopia now supposedly under construction.

Voices from within the Veil

13

The balance of power still rests, of course, firmly with the Natives. They know where they are and how to live. The settlers, for their part, are more often than not lost, a sensation well conveyed by the scene in which John Smith, now on his trade mission, loses his way and his fellows in the tall reeds. He stumbles and blunders into a cypress swamp where he is set upon by several of Powhatan’s warriors. His European armor saves him for a while, though it also threatens to drag him down to a muddy death by drowning. The Indians prevail, and Smith is brought to the long house of Powhatan himself, setting up the indispensable Rescue Scene by Pocahontas. Malick chooses to do it both as a threat to Smith’s life and as some vaguely salubrious ritual. Smith truly believes he will die, but then: “At the moment I was to die, she threw herself upon me.” We see him surrounded by women who rhythmically press upon his body and scatter something that looks like the salt that sumo wrestlers toss for purification. Thus begins the idyll so dear to Malick’s conception: John Smith’s “conversion” to Indian life and his lengthy stay among the Powhatans. We see him slowly relinquish his terror for delight–his alienation for the love and respect of new friends. He is Margaret Mead with a beard: observing, studying, learning, enjoying. In voiceover, we hear his admiring report of the Indians’ lifestyle: “They are gentle, loving, faithful –lacking in all guile and trickery.” His first and best teacher is, of course, Pocahontas who shares a sense of wonder at his exotic beauty exactly commensurate with his wonder at hers. A pair of eagles soars totemically above the new lovers’ heads. A cynic might point out that these scenes are laughably reminiscent of those in Disney’s Pocahontas in which the animated lovers ecstatically run, leap and even fly through the natural scenery. “What voice is this that speaks within me?” says Smith again to himself (and us). The implied answer is, of course, the voice or spirit of Pocahontas – symbolic of all that is natural, good and real. Meanwhile an actual onscreen voice whispers in Powhatan’s ear that perhaps the tribe can use Pocahontas to spy on the whites: “He can teach her about his land across the sea.” This suggestion is made by Wes Studi, an actor who specializes in stereotypical “bad” Indians, e.g. the scurrilous “Toughest Pawnee” in Dances with Wolves (1990) or the vicious Magua in Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992). Here he plays Opechancanough, Pocahontas’ uncle who will eventually lead the “Massacre” of the Jamestown settlers in 1622. Powhatan sees that his daughter is in love, or about to become, in my terms, a Belle Sauvage: “Promise me,” he tells her, “you will put your people above all else – even your heart.” The internal monologues, conveyed in the by-now-irritating device of the voiceover, continue in the

14

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

lovers’ heads: “Love – Shall we deny it when it visits us?” mentally whispers Smith. “A god he seems to me,” mentally intones Pocahontas. The lovers’ idyll ends abruptly when Smith returns to Jamestown. It has become a thoroughly degraded wasteland filled with the sick and dying. Three children accost Smith, demanding where he has been and what he has brought them to eat. It is a scene reminiscent of Lord of the Flies – “natural” man and boys run amok. Smith, shocked at the contrast, says of his recent life in the pastoral Green World of the forest, “It was a dream. Now I am awake…Damnation is like this.” Along with cannibalism, religious fanaticism has reared its nasty head in the form of a settler named Small. He babbles incoherently about demons and God, clearly representing Malick’s warning about small-minded fundamentalists in any era. Even Smith himself seems threatened by the death and bedlam all around him. It is Pocahontas, of course, who arrives to save him and his fellow colonists. On the brink of the colony’s utter destruction, she brings food – a first betrayal of her own people’s best interests– and then seed corn for planting. She later warns Smith of an imminent attack on his fort understandably earning the ire of her father Powhatan (played by courtly August Schellenberg). He banishes her to a neighboring village for her disloyalty, telling her, “This is the last time we shall speak. You are no longer my child.” This banishment sets up Pocahontas’ own betrayal at the hands of Chief Iapazeus and his wife who, for the price of a copper kettle, deliver her to the sadistic Captain Argall (Yorick van Wageningen) now in charge at Jamestown. Here beginneth Pocahontas’ three-year stint as hostage and eventual conversion from “savage” to Christian. Malick is fond of placing his camera in dark interiors and shooting through doorways into brilliant, natural light. The irony is that the interiors represent colonial life (supposedly enlightened), while the outdoors represents the world of the “dark” savages. Malick’s preference for the Green World is clear, as is his sympathy for Pocahontas. Far from being the betrayer of her people, she has been betrayed by the bad colonists whom she so recently rescued from starvation. Smith is exonerated of the guilt of taking her hostage because Argall has arrested him and set him at hard labor. Newport returns, chastises Argall, and then delivers an offer from the King to Smith to head up his own exploratory expedition. The offer is irresistible, even more so than Pocahontas, clad in her new colonial clothes and painfully fitting shoes. Smith, our heroic Englishmen, takes “French leave,” sneaking off without saying good-bye to Pocahontas. He leaves instructions that, after two months, she be told that he is dead, drowned. Devastated by his departure and then the false news of his death, she reverts to wild woman

Voices from within the Veil

15

status, indulging in mourning practices her newly bourgeois fellow colonials do not condone. Now enters John Rolfe who needs her knowledge of cultivating tobacco. He is soon enamored of his field hand, and new internal monologues are whispered onto the soundtrack: “She weaves all things together,” thinks he. “Take out the thorn,” thinks she, and later, “He is like a tree. He shelters me. I lie in his shade.” Malick intercuts occasional shots of Pocahontas’ perfidious lover Smith on rocky shores in the company of Eskimos. He is still searching for the mythic Northwest Passage to take him to the Indies. Pocahontas, thinking he is dead, is well on her way to letting him go in favor of the living Rolfe, when she overhears Jamestown gossipers talking about his ongoing adventures. She is wounded yet again and falls back in love, informing Rolfe, “I’m married to him. He lives.” Rolfe understands in a way in which even a twenty-first century woman would admire. “Love made the bond. Love can break it, too,” Rolfe muses in voiceover. Pocahontas, Rolfe and their new child travel to England to meet the king and help in the Virginia Company’s publicity campaign. Pocahontas is also accompanied by Tomocomo (Raoul Trujillo), her father’s new agent pledged to spy on the English. He is to mark their numbers on counting sticks, a doomed mission meant to symbolize the hopeless disparity in the match-up between Indian ways and the mighty resources of the British Empire. The moment the Powhatans see bustling, high-tech (to them) London, they can sense their people’s inevitable doom. On her day in court, Pocahontas—handsomely costumed in clothes that came straight from the contemporary engravings—eyed the Virginia flora and fauna that had accompanied her to King James’ and Queen Anne’s court. The caged raccoon looks out of place, but Pocahontas holds her own. Malick then switches his scene to the controlled, fully cultivated English countryside, using a classical garden to contrast with Pocahontas’ distant wilderness home. Topiary is Malick’s ultimate symbol for Nature subdued to the whims of Man. Rolfe, again displaying his remarkably modern, even metro sensitivity, invites Smith to his country estate for a nonviolent romantic showdown. Pocahontas is favorably impressed at the freedom to choose another that her husband courageously offers her: “You are the man I thought you were– and more,” she says to Rolfe. When Smith comes riding up for their licensed rendezvous, he is already at a disadvantage, having run away from her and lied about his death. Now she is “Her Ladyship.” He walks slightly behind her up and down the garden paths. “Did you find your Indies, John?” she asks aloud. “I may have sailed past them,” he replies. It’s the only really clever line of

16

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

dialogue in the film, and it marks the end of their love. Both realize he has blown the relationship, and that she was the treasure– the Indies – he had always sought. In case we haven’t gotten the point, Smith adds, “I thought it was a dream…what we knew in the forest.” He then says resignedly, “It was the only truth.” Paradise, once his for the taking, is now and forever irrevocably lost. Smith rides off in defeat. Pocahontas declares her choice of Rolfe over Smith by saying to the former, “Could we not go home?” Rolfe, perceptive and sensitive as ever, answers “As soon as possible.” There are some poignant scenes of Pocahontas playing with her young son among the topiary bushes. She has successfully made the transition to this oddly chopped and groomed form of Nature. But anyone aware of history knows she will never see her native wild forests again. She succumbs to illness before the ship can leave British waters. In the darkened interior of her death room, we sense her passing. An Indian runs out into the light, as if to bear a message to her distant father. Rolfe is left to voyage home to Virginia accompanied by his little dark-haired son. It is another poetic liberty taken with history, since the real Thomas Rolfe stayed behind with relatives in England until he was much older. Malick rounds his big film with an epic swell of European music (Mozart and Wagner have anachronistically infiltrated the soundtrack early on). Closing shots of water and forests echo the opening; branches of trees give way to rivers and their branches drawn on spreading colonial maps. It may be sad for the Indians, but the outcome – whites’ manifest destiny to penetrate and rule the ‘new’ continent – has never really been in doubt.

Conclusion: The Way We Are In time, you will be as we are. You will become one people with us. Your blood will mix with ours; and will spread with ours over this great Island...54

America’s schizophrenic relationship with race is coeval with its Jamestown founding. For some,55 Jamestown represents an Edenic, preracist (though not pre-classist) time when Rolfe could have gotten in much more trouble for marrying above his station (Pocahontas was considered a princess) without his king’s permission than for marrying a woman of color. So successful and prominent were the Rolfe descendants that they might have even set a trend of intermarriage that might have rapidly led to a more or less brown-skinned America today. This did not, of course, happen.

Voices from within the Veil

17

Governor Dale of Jamestown did immediately try to follow Rolfe’s example. He asked Powhatan for Pocahontas’ sister in marriage, but was denied. Perhaps this refusal was the fatal moment when intermarriage derailed as an acceptable practice in Virginia. In 1612 this same Gov. Dale executed a white man for trying to run off and join the Indians.56 He seems to have decided that ‘Going Native’ was just too great a threat, too great a temptation for the fragile colony. The whites could have been swallowed up a red tide – one presumed fate of Raleigh’s Lost Colony. By the time that Thomas Jefferson wrote his assimilationist statement above in the epigraph, the tide of power and color had clearly turned. He was no longer worried about mixing a few drops of Indian blood into the oceanic wave of white immigration. The Rolfe family descendants, for their part, remained a force to reckon with in Virginia. They even managed to grandfather in a special exemption for themselves in the notorious 1924 “one-drop” miscegenation laws.57 The exception, which might just have well been named the “Pocahontas Escape Clause” said that whites with less than one-sixteenth part Indian blood could safely be considered white. By this late date–the Jim Crow era–whites’ anxieties about race-mixing had been thoroughly and successfully displaced away from Indians and onto blacks. Some might say that the elevation of mixed-race ethnic beauties such as Disney’s animated babe Pocahontas, Q’Orinaka Kilcher, Halle Berry, and others represents the end of the racist epoch that began in Jamestown. Others might find it yet another rejection of simple, unadulterated, more African black beauty for standards still clearly shaped by the white aesthetic. It is difficult to judge if this is progress or not. It is likewise difficult to condemn or to exculpate fully the Belle Sauvage figures who start us down the path of hybridization. Pamela Scully has noted what many of these women already mentioned–Ariadne, Medea, Lavinia, Cleopatra, la Malinza, Pocahontas—have in common. They were young (and, therefore, vulnerable); they were noble; they all had children by their conquerors; they all died young; and, for the most part, their children took up European ways. Shall we praise or blame them? I agree with Gayle Rubin when she says that the “victim/betrayer dynamic”58 is finally just too blunt an instrument to judge them. Let us remain sufficiently skeptical of their dubious depictions in paternalistic white popular culture. And let us listen more carefully for echoes of these women’s own voices–speaking as best they can from within the veil.

18

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

Notes 1

After Rebecca Blevins Faery, Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 117. 2 For the analogy with Cortez and Malintzin (a.k.a. La Malinche), I am indebted to my Norfolk State University colleague Dr. Charles H. Ford and to Tobias Döring’s “Pocahontas/Rebecca” in Figuren der/des Dritten: Erkundungen Kulturell ed. Claudia Breger and Tobias Döring (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998) 202-204. Döring also mentions Theseus and Ariadne as a prototype of John Smith and Pocahontas. Pamela Scully discusses the myth I am labeling “Belle Sauvage” in her article “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6 (Summer 2005). Many have noted Pocahontas’ similarity with Sacagawea, a helper of Lewis and Clark but not, so far as we know, their sexual conquest. 3 “La Belle Sauvage” is also the title of what I presume to be an unrelated British 1803 novel by Mr. Lyttleton, La Belle Sauvag, Or A Progress Through The BeauMonde. I do not mean the term in the sense of a “wild woman” (cf. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ similarly titled Women Who Run with the Wolves. Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (New York: Random House, 1992, cited in Preda, 338), although that variant myth does influence Disney’s “greening” of Pocahontas. 4 Note, for instance, the hip if inaccurate lyrics concerning John Smith and Pocahontas in Peggy Lee’s song “Fever.” Pocahontas begs her father to spare John Smith’s life because she is his wife: “Cap’n Smith and Pocahontas/Had a very mad affair/When her daddy tried to kill him/She said ‘Daddy oh don't you dare!/He gives me fever/With his kisses/Fever when he holds me tight/Fever!/I'm his missus/Daddy won't you treat him right?’” (Ella Fitzgerald recording transcription). 5 This first figure comes from Edward J. Gallagher’s The Pocahontas Archive at Lehigh University: http://digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/pocahontas/. To add to that mass of writings on Pocahontas, my Ebay search for “Pocahontas” on January 21, 2007, yielded 1486 items – which included not only books but paraphernalia of all sorts. That’s a high “iconicity” rating – though not nearly so high as the Ebay items under, say, Elvis Presley (17, 133 items), himself descended from a nineteenthcentury Native American. 6 The pun comes from Christopher Hodgkins’ “The Nubile Savage: Pocahontas as Heathen Convert and Virgilian [sic] Bride” in Renaissance Papers, Southeastern Renaissance Conference. 1998, 81. 7 Philip Barbour, Pocahonta and Her World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 159. 8 Pocahontas Wight Edmunds, The Pocahontas-John Smith Story (Richmond: The Dietz Press, Inc., 1956), 6. According to the Music Hall and Theater Site— Dedicated to Arthur Lloyd

Voices from within the Veil

19

(http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/Timeline1870_1879.htm), La Belle Sauvage Inn was demolished in 1873. Historians noted its name because it also served as an Elizabethan (and thereafter) theater. 9 After Faery, 82. 10 "The True Relation," written by Captain Smith in Virginia in 1608, contains the following lines: “"Powhatan understanding we detained certain salvages, sent his daughter, a child of tenne yeares old, which not only for feature, countenance, and proportion, much exceedeth any of the rest of his people, but for wit and spirit the only nonpareil [my emphasis] of his country.” Ralph Hamor, Jr. also used the term in "A True Discourse of Virginia, and the Success of the Affairs there till the 18th of June, 1614." Hamor writes: "It chanced Powhatan's delight and darling, his daughter Pocahuntas (whose fame has even been spread in England by the title of Nonparella [my emphasis] of Firginia [sic] in her princely progresse if I may so terme it, tooke some pleasure (in the absence of Captaine Argall) to be among her friends at Pataomecke….” Both quotes appear in The Story of Pocahantas by Charles Dudley Warner, available at http://www.gutenberg. org/files/3129/3129.txt. 11 Edmunds, 36. It may be the arrival of this same Third Supply fleet under the admiralty of Christopher Newport, that inspired the place name “Newport[’s] News.” Since these ships brought desperately needed fresh supplies to the colonists, their landing was good news indeed. From my home on Powhatan Avenue in Norfolk, Virginia (named, of course, for the British seaport and the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I), I can walk a few hundred yards over to the Elizabeth River and, on a clear day, can see the present-day city of Newport News near the mouth of the James River, formerly called the Powhatan River for Pocahontas’ father until the victorious colonists renamed it for their King. Today in my neighborhood, and in Norfolk as a whole, a plethora of British place names coexist with a few remaining Algonquin ones. The block behind my house on Powhatan Avenue is Rolfe Avenue, and the block behind that is Argall Avenue, named for the Jamestown leader who colluded with Chief Iapazeus in kidnapping Pocahontas and holding her hostage for three years. Argall also captained the ship that eventually took Rolfe and his Indian wife to London and that afterwards tried to take them home to Virginia. Pocahontas sickened at the start of the voyage and was put ashore in Gravesend, England where she died in 1617. The irony woven into this synchronic web of place and proper names is inescapable. 12 Ibid., 148. 13 Vachel Lindsay used lines from Carl Sandburg’s earlier Pocahontas poem, “Cool Tombs” (published in 1918) for his poem’s epigraph. Sandburg’s oft-quoted lines are: “Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? Does she remember?….[sic] in the dust, in the cool tombs?” William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Pocahontas” (after Barbour 227), an 1807 epic poem by Joel Barlow called “The Columbiad,” and Hart Crane’s 1930 epic “The Bridge” round out a mini-canon of poems alluding to her. Pocahontas’ appearances in fiction include John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and several young adult and children’s books. My favorite of the latter is

20

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

the one I grew up with: Frances Cavanah’s Pocahontas: A Little India Girl of Jamestown (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1957). 14 Edmonds, 42. 15 Pauline Turner Strong, “Playing Indian in the Nineties: Pocahontas and The Indian in the Cupboard,” in Hollywood’s Indian: the Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. 187-205), 193. 16 After Strong, 194. 17 After Philip Barbour’s use, also as an epigraph, p. vii. 18 Faery, 84; Döring, 205. 19 In his article “Captaine Smith, Colonial Novelist,” American Literature 75 (September 2003), scholar Ed White suggests that Smit’s writing belongs within the genre of fiction. 20 Faery, 117; J.A. Leo Lemay, Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith? (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 34. Ralph Hamor is cited by Faery, 125 and William Strachey by Faery, 104. 21 After Strong, 200. 22 Faery, 118-119. 23 Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, writing in Cineaste 21 (Fall 1995), 36, assumes she was but never convincingly makes this case. 24 Gail Tremblay, “Reflecting on Pocahontas,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23 (Spring 2002), 122. 25 Karen Robertson, “The First Captive: the Kidnapping of Pocahontas,” Women, Violence, and English Renaissance literature: Essays Honoring Paul Jorgensen (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2003), 76. 26 Döring, 180. 27 cf. Abena P.A. Busia’s “Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female” cited by Faery, 2. 28 Frederic W. Gleach, “Controlled Speculation and Constructed Myths: The Saga of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith,” in Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2003), 70. 29 Ibid. 30 Faery, 161. 31 Another musical play called La Belle Sauvage once even had 28 performances on Broadway – March 4, 1872–March 30, 1872. It, too, may have been a Pocahontas play, but if so, it must have been a different one. The database of Broadway performance lists its author as John Brough (see the Internet Broadway Database at http://www.ibdb.com/show.asp?ID= 444864). 32 Three other plays plus a burlesque also date from the nineteenth century. Lemay 1-2. 33 cf. Susan Scheckel, “Domesticating the Drama of Conquest: Barker’s Pocahonta on the Popular Stage,” American Transcendental Quarterly 10 (Sept. 1996), 231243, 239. 34 James Nelson Barker and John Bray, The Indian Princess or La Belle Sauvage. An Operatic Melo-Drame in three Acts (Philadelphia: T. and G. Palmer for G.E. Blake, 1808), 29. 35 Ibid., 52.

Voices from within the Veil 36

21

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 70. 38 The theme of the ‘dying Indian’ (cf. Scheckel, 232)–the tragic last survivor of his tribe who is unwilling or unable to assimilate – interestingly shadows the story of Pocahontas. She is usually pictured as an eager assimilationist, but sometimes tinged with sadness, as in our first epigraph: “But Princess Pocahontas gazed sadly out to sea.” Here in Barker and Bray, the bad Indian Miami is sad enough about his defeat to commit suicide. James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans– the locus classicus of this topos–dates from 1757. 39 Barker, 70. 40 Gary Edgerton, and Kathy Merlock Jackson, “Redesigning Pocahontas: Disney, the ‘white man’s Indian,’ and the marketing of dreams, Journal of Popular Film and Television 24 (Summer 1996), 7, 90. 41 Leigh H Edwards, “The United Colors of Pocahontas: Synthetic Miscegenation and Disney’s Multiculturalism,” Narrative 7 (May 1999), 152. 42 Ibid., 149. 43 As fantastic (and as contrary to history) as it seems, there has been at least one depiction of a marriage between Captain John Smith and Pocahontas in the eponymous 1953 live action film directed by Lew Landers. The following unlikely plot summary is taken from www.imdb.com: Captain John Smith (Anthony Dexter), returned from the Jamestown colony, is telling his story before the Court of King James I (Anthony Eustral.) He tells of the unrest in the colony and how he set out to make peace with the Indians. He is captured and sentenced to death, but Pocahontas (Jody Lawrence) makes her celebrated intervention and, instead of a slaying, there is a wedding. Back at Jamestown, Smith makes efforts to keep the colony united and the Indians from attacking, in spite of the efforts of some in the colony who stir up trouble for their own gain. He exposes them and returns to England to give his report. He stays because Pocahontas, thinking he is dead, has remarried. 44 Edgerton and Jackson, 3. 45 Pushpa Naidu Parekh, “Pocahontas: the Disney Imaginary,” in The Emperor’s Old Groove: Decolonizing Disney’s Magic Kingdom, edited by Brenda Ayres (New York: Lang, 2003), 167-169. 46 Derek T Buescher and Kent A Ono, “Civilized Colonialism: [Disney’s] Pocahontas as Neocolonial Rhetoric,” Women’s Studies in Communication 19 (Summer 1996), 128-129. 47 Ratcliffe reprises his villain’s role in the straight-to-video “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World” (1998). The New World in this cheaply animated sequel film is a world new to Pocahontas: London. Pocahontas goes there as an emissary and meets John Smith again, more or less completing the narrative arc that Malick’s movie will follow. 48 Buescher and Ono, 139. 49 Ibid., 131. 50 The music video version of this hit song was performed by Vanessa Williams, herself a multicultural mixed race beauty of the type that the Disney and Malick films favor. 37

22 51

Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage

Ty Burr. “Rapturous ‘New World’ Casts New Light on America’s Myths,” The Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2006, D1. 52 Lisa Schwarzbaum, “Paradise Lost. Pocahontas changes the course of history in Terrence Malick’s poetic ‘The New World,’” Entertainment Weekly, Jan. 27, 2006, 62. 53 cf. Shakespeare’s Gonzalo in The Tempest II.i.152-169 54 Thomas Jefferson’s 1809 [sic] Indian address [http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/ POCA/POC_law.html]. 55 Hodgkins, 82. 56 Faery, 123. 57 Gleach, 66-67. 58 After Pamela Scully, “Malintzin, Pocahontas, and Krotoa: Indigenous Women and Myth Models of the Atlantic World.” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 6 (Fall 2005), 5.

VOICING VIRGINIA'S “NATURALS”? ALTERITY AND THE OLD WORLD RECEPTION OF MALICK’S THE NEW WORLD CATHY COVELL WAEGNER, UNIVERSITY OF SIEGEN, GERMANY

The Powhatan princess Matoaka/Pocahontas–ordered by the Old World owners of the Jamestown colony to undertake a ‘public relations’ journey to England–and an African slave stare in wonderment at each other on the streets of London, two misplaced indigenes of color conscripted to serve European masters. This shot from Terrence Malick’s movie The New World (December 2005) cinematically encodes the entire Atlantic Triangle of cruel human commerce and brutal colonization in one framed moment of pure alterity. In 1617, the year Pocahontas was summoned to the English Court, the Atlantic ‘master narrative’ of trade and imperialism which uprooted, exploited, and largely silenced the native peoples of Africa and the Americas was still developing. Is it Malick’s impulse and agenda to capture and examine this incipient moment, giving the “naturals,” as he calls the Virginia Algonquins, a historical voice? Facing their own twenty-first century escalation of ethnic unrest and troubling immigration patterns, Europeans are particularly interested in lessons which could be learned from considering early New World strategies. Reviewers of Malick’s film were largely disappointed, however. In a widely quoted review in Die Zeit, the Pocahontas guru Klaus Theweleit, author of a four-volume opus on her history and cultural significance (1999; two volumes forthcoming in 2008), was distressed, labelling the movie “colonialist soft porn.”1 Others called it “mythopoetic rubbish” or objected to the overpowering pastiche score relying heavily on the Old World music of Wagner and Mozart, which made, these critics felt, the New World innocence that Malick wanted to portray seem false.2 But Malick’s movie does more than just attempt to eroticize/ romanticize the indigenous people who were to find themselves subaltern in America. His Native American actors presage the black presence to

24

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

come in 1619 with their striking (self-designed) dark body painting. The empty rhetoric and misapplied book-learning of the inept colonists is meant to contrast with the harmony of the Algonquins’ now lost oral and body language. And Malick’s discovery of Q’Orianka Kilcher, whose Peruvian Native + Swiss background makes her an icon of “Atlanticist” hybridity, has received nearly unanimous commendation. Multi-lingual and articulately self-confident, she can be regarded as a reincarnation of Pocahontas as a woman of mixed-race heritage who is contributing to the ongoing process of breaking hegemonic patterns of alterity reigning in the Atlantic world during the past four hundred years. I will begin by considering the current discussion on alterity and introducing a concept of interactive alterity and its relevance for Malick’s The New World. After a brief summary of the German reception of Pocahontas, I will deal with the German praise of and objections to The New World. Focusing on the “Mascarado” episode of the Pocahontas tale, I see Rebecca Blevins Faery’s well-formulated approach to the material as providing a link between the German and American receptions of the Pocahontas theme.3 Malick’s presentation of oratory and reading in contrast to the Algonquins’ orality and body language reveals his preferential treatment of the historical subaltern. Comparison to three other recent voicings of Pocahontas’ story by Paula Allen Gunn, Helen C. Rountree, and–very new in February 2007–the Mattaponi Reservation People will cast further light on Malick’s interpretation.4 A glance at two contemporary novels by Native American women will show how the Pocahontas legend serves as a subtext for stages of liberation of the twentieth-century Native female: Louise Erdrich’s Four Souls (2004) and Betty Louise Bell’s Faces in the Moon (1994), in the latter of which the protagonist becomes an expressive, and fearsome, “Indian with a pen.”5 The striking duality of the split Pocahontas portrait on the cover of the recent juvenile novel by Kathleen V. Kudlinski (2006) contrasts the lacecollared Jacobean lady Rebecca Rolfe of the famous van de Passe engraving with her alternative self, the tattooed Algonquin princess.6 Reflecting the current discourse on the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the remarkable black “Matowaka” portrait (1993) by the African American artist R. L. Morgan Monceaux, in which Pocahontas has traded the traditional feather for a quill pen, complicates her hybridity as a woman of color in ways that Malick only implies. I will, in all modesty, suggest three ways in which Malick could have improved his film with regard to Native American (female) voicing and reinforcing the red/white/black triangular interaction.

Voices from within the Veil

25

Alterity: otherness and interaction Before I define alterity and point to its significance for postcolonial inquiries, I want to place the film shot I began with in its scenic context, which includes a spectrum of modes of alterity, with gender and cultural differences intertwining. The Rolfe family is boarding a ship for London: husband John Rolfe’s quietly desperate overvoicing, “There is that in her which I cannot know,” refers to the alterity of both the other sex and the other culture. On the ship, Rebecca/Pocahontas faces her father’s priest and emissary Tomocomo, elaborately painted and carrying Indian paraphernalia, who has clearly not joined the white side.7 Upon disembarking in London, Pocahontas curiously observes the cathedrals, the wheels, the coal, the busy marketplaces of what is for her the “new world .” (Dare we see the title of Malick’s film as referring to both of the new worlds? Otherwise we have to admit a Eurocentric bias in this regard.) The alterity of class plays a role as well: we see the Indian princess’ sympathy with a physically unsavoury beggar, whom Pocahontas gently touches. A white woman’s open-mouthed stare at the Native American shows that the alterity shock is a mutual one and completes the red/black/white triangle underlying the subtle climax of this scene, when Pocahontas and the male African, presumably a slave, circle each other warily, with curiosity, sensing a bond in their difference. Philosophically seen, alterity is the recognition of an unassimilable difference in the Other, an absolute Otherness which cannot be incorporated into the Self.8 For our purposes here, the notion of cultural alterity, the process by which societies and cultures exclude particular groups on account of their ‘otherness,’ is appropriate. A form of alterity is necessary for personal identity construction, as when a child learns to distinguish between self and other in his/her early development, but a large and, from our postmodern view, highly questionable step is taken when hegemonic prejudices become institutionalized in customs, religions, and laws. A consequence of this construction of alterity is that the cultural assumptions of the dominant group are viewed as right, human, potentially universal, natural, even God-given–which consequently means that the alter group’s cultural assumptions are the opposite: wrong, inhuman, unnatural, fiendish. Contemporary American thinkers like Dan Zahavi link earlier philosophical concepts, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s “gaze,” to alterity in his 1999 book Self-Awareness and Alterity:

26

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

Fig. 1.4: A dark Pocahontas rescuing Smith. This is a little known seventeenth-century German engraving of a dark-skinned, sensual Pocahontas closely cradling John Smith in an early iconographic depiction of the Rescue, titled"Barbaric Love," (Eberhard Werner Happel, 1685). Courtesy Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbuettel, Germany: Ae 72:2 My encounter with the Other typically provokes two distinct changes in my self-apprehension. I become someone different (namely, socialized) as well as something different (an empirical object)…The gaze of the Other reduces me to that which I am (I am what the Other takes me to be) and so it furnishes me with the self-identity of an object.9

Specialists in African American Studies will immediately notice that Zahavi’s approach supports the philosophical basis of Du Bois’s

Voices from within the Veil

27

influential concept of double consciousness,10 without, of course, undermining the specificity of the African American experience. Following the postmodernist/postcolonialist spirit of redressing the imbalance between the culturally dominant group and the subaltern one, Jeffrey Nealon even goes as far as to propose the concept of “alterity politics,” in which identity of the individual or groups is dependent on respect for the alter: If identity politics is an attempt to thematize the other in terms of its similarities with the self, I am interested here in constructing an ethical alterity politics that considers identity as beholden and responsive first and foremost to the other [my emphasis].11

Before we judge whether Malick seems to adhere to such an “alterity politics” in his film, we need to glance at Homi Bhabha and Fredric Jameson’s emphasis on the importance of understanding the dynamics of stereotypes in (post)colonialist discourse. Both Bhabha and Jameson underline vacillation between poles in the application of stereotypes: Bhabha stresses the back-and-forth movement between “what is always ‘in place’, already known” and the urge for anxious repetition,12 whereas Jameson focuses on the dialectic between envy and loathing.13 We see this double axis at work in the film, for example, with the repeated use of the paired terms “naturals” and “savages.” These paired terms express the subaltern status of the Natives being taken for granted by the “civilized” English colonists (Bhabha’s a) and an anxiety that the Naturals must constantly be kept in that position (Bhabha’s b), as well as the Englishmen’s attraction to the Natives’ closeness to nature (Jameson’s a) paradoxically accompanied by a loathing of the Natives’ “savage” ways in, for instance, body language and decoration (Jameson’s b). In another context, I have shown how the white “cultural adulation” with regard to African American culture is usually interwoven with stereotypical essentialist attitudes which foreground race and usually contain a certain amount of condescension.14 Or, to cite an example relating to Pocahontas, the possibly inordinate pride of the Virginia families who can trace their ancestry back to Rebecca Rolfe has covered over deeply discriminatory attitudes toward interracial or interethnic marriages and their offspring, especially in the nineteenth century. Ideally, in postmodernist/postcolonialist attitudes, alterity can be seen as an opportunity, not a hindrance or problem. Double consciousness can be viewed as a form of positive code-shifting.15 In this affirmative scenario, the hierarchy of dominant self over subaltern is horizontalized into an “interactive alterity” with mutual influences among equal

28

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

although different cultural groups. Malick points to the possibility of this in the first encounters between the Naturals and the Englishmen: Pocahontas paints John Smith Indian-style with berry juice, whereas he shows the Natives his compass. But the potential good will of early sixteenth-century interactive alterity transforms into a downward spiral of stereotype exchange which takes on a destructive momentum of its own: the colonists fear the presumed cannibalism of the Natives, yet literally become cannibals themselves during the starving time; Powhatan spares John Smith’s life so that–as he explicitly states in the film–his daughter can learn about the Europeans’ civilization, but in doing so he opens a crevice through which the unstoppable flow of white colonization and exploitation trickles and then floods in. Instead of forms of non-prejudicial hybridity à la postmodernism, there is uneasy assimilation or drastic decimation.16

German reception of Pocahontas: (African) colonialism, eroticism, and irony The earliest German illustration of the Pocahontas legend can be found in a five-volume work by Eberhard Werner Happel grandly titled Greatest Memorable Events in the World (1685).17 The focus of German interest has chiefly been on the first half of the Pocahontas story featuring alterity rather than her assimilation into the Jamestown society, as in perhaps most American treatments; furthermore, rather than stressing Pocahontas’ girlish youthfulness, the German versions are generally charged with sexual energy. In Happel’s engraving, with the words “Barbaric Love” in the lower left-hand corner, the sensual pose of the adult Pocahontas closely cradling the hapless John Smith cannot be overlooked, as well as the stark color and sartorial differences between the white and nearly naked Smith, wearing merely a loin cloth, and the darkskinned–even black–fleshy Pocahontas, wearing a toga-like garment and glittering with arm bracelets.18 It is difficult to imagine this Rubensian and preoccupied Pocahontas cheerfully turning cartwheels, naked, in the Jamestown fort, as William Strachey reports the historical Poca doing: Pochahuntas, a well featured but wanton yong girle…of the age then of eleven or twelve yeares, get the boyes forth with her into the markett place, and make them wheele, falling on their handes, turning their heeles upwardes, whome she would followe, and wheele so her self, naked as she was, all the fort over.19

Voices from within the Veil

29

Malick climaxes his film with an unlikely cartwheel by the Jacobeanclothed Rebecca Rolfe, but the German viewers have been programmed since Happel, I hypothesize, to see the potential eroticism rather than the playful side of Pocahontas. It should be mentioned, however, that the text accompanying the Happel engraving speaks a different language from the “Barbaric Love” illustration, stressing Pocahontas’ pity for the “handsome, brave youth” rather than any mutual sexual attraction.20 The post-World War II interest in all things American resulted in a surge of Pocahontasiana in the 1950s. A novel using Poca’s secret Native name Amonute, Vergleichliche Amonate (Ann Tizia Leitich, Graz/Austria, 1947), was published in German. Similar to but less historically accurate than the illustration for Kudlinski’s My Lady Pocahontas, the cover of Anna Müller-Tannewitz’s novel Die rote Lady [The Red Lady] (1958) shows the Native American Pocahontas, wearing an Indian blanket as a shawl, looking in a mirror and seeing her alter ego, the Europeanized Pocahontas in an elaborate satin dress. The increasing public sexuality encouraged by the rock ’n’ roll era resulted in the publication in 1955 of the most (in)famous application of Pocahontas material, Arno Schmidt’s Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (Lake Landscape with Pocahontas).21 Schmidt has been called the German Henry Miller, a Salinger, a German James Joyce.22 His irony is obvious in his own illustration for this early postmodernist novella in which he irreverently shows Pocahontas larger than life, as an integral part of a landscape, apparently renewing the water in the lake by urinating. This is a mischievous forerunner of Rebecca Faery’s thesis that a Native woman represents the virginal territory to be conquered. In Schmidt’s Lake Landscape with Pocahontas, the association between geographical territory and conquerable femality takes place in a young man’s imagination when he, the first-person narrator, encounters a young woman during a holiday weekend and seduces her during a swimming outing, mainly through calling her “Pocahontas.” The plain, bespectacled girl senses the intended sensuality of the name which her new acquaintance bestows upon her, but she is bewildered about the actual word, for which she has no association: “I don’t believe [we can ever get together],” she said gloomily. “I look like– an owl?!” and waited in despair for his contradiction, hopelessly, with awkwardly twisted mouth and stubborn eyes. I grasped her hands under the water and silenced her with a nod of my head: not a word more in objection –“Pocahontas” I said softly (and she listened suspiciously to the strange syllables…).23

30

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

Renewed interest in Schmidt’s short novel and in the Pocahontas material was aroused in Germany by Klaus Theweleit’s mammoth Pocahontas project, Theweleit being a maverick professor and cultural critic. His four-volume opus (two volumes forthcoming) compiles a plethora of graphics and allusions to Pocahontas in relation to Schmidt’s explicitly sexual, postmodernist approach, to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to the Medea myth, and to “Poca’s” commodification.24 Theweleit’s associative style has been brutally criticized by German academics, but even they admit that his exposure of the links between the body of the woman of color and sexual/political hegemony is impressive.25 A fine collection of recent scholarly essays on Theweleit’s project, as well as on Pocahontas reception and research in Germany and the U.S. was published in 2005 under the title Pocahontas Revisited: Kulturwissenschaftliche Ansichten eines Motivkomplexes (Cultural Studies Perspectives on a Motif Complex).26 Germany has its own past of shameful colonization (as well as other, better known forms of racial or ethnic oppression and annihilation). In addition to sixteenth-century failed attempts by Brandenburg-Prussia to settle in the Americas (including Venezuela and St. Thomas), the newly united Germany joined the rush for Asian, Pacific, and particularly African colonies late in the nineteenth-century. Present-day Togo was Germany’s “model colony” from 1874 to 1914.27 The stationing of Northern African troops in the Rhineland by the French following World War I resulted in the hundreds of so-called “Rhineland bastards” who were mercilessly maltreated during the Third Reich. Theweleit’s generation of the left-wing “1968ers” is particularly aware of this stigmatized past and sensitive to any developments which threaten to respark such hegemonic mindsets. They are alarmed by current anti-“foreigner” incidents affecting people of color, especially in former East Germany, as well as rising tensions with regard to the large Muslim minority, exacerbated by America’s Iraq War policies. They look with interest at contemporary cultural projects focusing on the nexus of European colonization in North America (English in Jamestown 1607, French in Québec 1608, and the Spanish in Santa Fe 1609) and reflecting contemporary American attitudes toward historical alter encounters such as The New World. 28

German praise of and objections to The New World: “colonialist soft porn”? As Malick’s project was long in the making (he started his filmscript in the 1970s), critics looked for reasons other than the Jubilee date for his

Voices from within the Veil

31

interest in the material. As David Sterritt formulates it, Malick was applying his “pantheistic vision” in a “cinematic Creation story” in which historical facts were subservient to “intellectual interests.29 Nonetheless, a film on the topic of the first permanent settlement in Virginia released on the eve of the Jamestown Commemoration was destined to be “read” as a contribution to cultural history. What was then Pocahontas specialist Theweleit’s criticism of Malick’s film? Perhaps quite surprisingly, given the openness of the German views on the connections between bodies and colonization, it was the love scenes which most aroused Theweleit’s ire. The first hands-on encounter scene between the Algonquins and the English colonists emphasizes alterity, but it contains the germ of Theweleit’s chief objection. In the beginning of Chapter Three (DVD), we hear the colonists’ agenda, then see the Natives sniffing and touching the colonists, the smell of the unwashed Englishmen obviously repugnant to the Algonquins, who curiously and child-like or, for some viewers, childishly reconnoiter the new arrivals. The first mutual gaze between Smith and the Indian maiden follows, his eyes subtly or shiftily–at any rate significantly–breaking the gaze repeatedly to survey the land, while moving Mozart music swells.

Fig. 1.5: Terrance Malick’s, The New World. The dark body painting of the Native American actors in Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005) presages the red/white/ black interaction in colonial Virginia [DVD screen shot]. Courtesy Terrance Malick’s The New World.

After this preliminary sighting, the successive ones between Smith and Pocahontas become increasingly sexual in their innuendo, which Theweleit provocatively pronounces “colonialist soft porn”–why? Not because the fourteen-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher is romantically approached by a man at least fifteen years her senior. Not because of the

32

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

flesh exposed by her Tinkerbell-style leather outfit. It is the application of Mozart here which disturbs Theweleit and other German film critics. The Pocahontas leitmotif is Mozart’s beautiful piano concerto, No. 23 in A minor, composed in 1786, the delicate, somewhat melancholy tones of which seem at first hearing to capture perfectly her impending loss of personal and cultural naiveté, particularly as the natural sounds of the chirping crickets slide into sophisticated instrumental music. But in the leading German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, Theweleit vehemently objects to the Old World music being anachronistically and sensually applied to New World virginity: What the film does with 14-year-old Q’Orianka Kilcher, the “Newcomer of the Year,” is in my eyes close to child abuse…This child abuse takes place when…the white man stands with her in cornfields or on river banks…, his hands on her leather-clothed hips, and Malick opens his record cabinet, puts Mozart on the turntable, and the camera flows over her body from her hand to her hips, groping and grabbing, pausing on her breasts, voyeuristically exposing her face for minutes at a time.30

Furthermore, the use in the beginning and concluding scenes of the movie of the overture to Richard Wagner’s Rhinegold, which relates to the mythic time of pre-civilization, seems to be appropriate, especially for the start of the intercultural encounters. Even the association with a Germanic conquering race which Wagner’s masterly (to risk a pun) and epic music remains tainted by also seems at first consideration to be fitting. But with their German sensitivity to easily recognized classical music, many German reviewers felt that the eclecticism of Mozart, Wagner, and Horner reflects at the least bad taste.31 (American critics objected to the music too, but mostly for reasons of monotony, as in this comment: “a single chord [was repeatedly] stretched to breaking point and beyond,” this critic not recognizing Wagner.32) Combined with Malick’s “hypernaturalism and aesthetic exaggeration,” the pastiche music leads another well-known critic, Andreas Busche, writing for taz, a Berlin newspaper with wide circulation, to label Malick’s movie “mythopoeic rubbish” which even requires a “reassessment of Malick’s cinematic canon.”33 Ekkehard Knörer agrees, concluding that the “overpowering aestheticism” does not finally move beyond the usual “Hollywood forms.”34 American critics as well describe Malick’s vision of the Naturals as “sentimentalizing and reductive,” positing the cliché of “the Indian in perpetual rhapsody with Nature.”35

Voices from within the Veil

33

Faery as link to the American Pocahontas reception: “Mascarado” For Klaus Theweleit, Malick’s Pocahontas embodies too one-sidedly the stereotype of the ‘welcoming maiden’ who invites the conquistador to possess both her and the untouched continent. I have already pointed out how Colin Farrell’s/Smith’s wandering eyes seem to encompass the countryside as well as the beautiful maiden and I have mentioned Rebecca Faery’s book-length treatment of the intrinsic connection between conquering a continent and conquering Native female bodies. Her stimulating study of the instrumentalization of the “welcoming maiden” paradigm, among others, which appeared in the same year as volumes I and IV of Theweleit’s Pocahontas study, can be seen as linking the contemporary Pocahontas approaches on both sides of the Atlantic. However, Malick omitted one relevant and fascinating historical vignette, if we are to believe the chronicler John Smith, that of the Algonquin “Mascarado,” although Malick did partially encode it in the ritualistic rescue scene, in which Indian women resuscitate John Smith, bringing him back to life as an adopted member of the tribe. The Mascarado, with its carnivalesque foregrounding of female sensuality, enlivens the “welcoming maiden” stereotype with a self-empowerment twist–and would have lent itself to a colorful cinematic adaptation. Both the German and American critics would have appreciated the inclusion of the Mascarado, I claim, although the risk of its being interpreted stereotypically is great. In the section of his Generall Historie of Virginia of 1624 with the heading “A Virginia Maske,” Smith recounts how “Pocahontas and her women entertained Captaine Smith”36 after what Smith and his men thought was going to be an Indian ambush. Indeed, it was an ambush of an unexpected kind. A year after the legendary Rescue, on his way to convince Powhatan to be crowned as King of Virginia in 1608,37 Smith and his crew are drawn into a female Algonquin ceremony, which Smith calls an “antic.” Garbed in a few green leaves, varicoloredly painted, shrieking women sporting deer antlers and carrying bows, quivers of arrows, and other weapons surround the Englishmen, then dance themselves into “infernal passions”: [S]uddenly amongst the woods was heard such a hydeous noise and shreeking, that the English betooke themselues to their armes, and seized on two or three old men by them, supposing Powhatan with all his power was come to surprise them. But presently Pocahontas came, willing him to kill her if any hurt were intended, and the beholders, which were men, women, and children, satisfied the Captaine there was no such matter.

34

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World Then presently they were presented with this anticke; thirtie young women came naked out of the woods, onely covered behind and before with a few greene leaves, their bodies all painted, some of one colour, some of another, but all differing, their leader [probably Pocahontas] had a fayre payre of Bucks hornes on her head, and an Otters skinne at her girdle, and another at her arme, a quiver of arrowes at her backe, a bow and arrowes in her hand; the next had in her hand a sword, another a club, another a potsticke; all horned alike: the rest every one with their severall devises. These fiends with most hellish shouts and cryes, rushing from among the trees, cast themselves in a ring about the fire, singing and dauncing with most excellent ill varietie, oft falling into their infernall passions, and solemnly againe to sing and daunce; having spent neare an houre in their Mascarado, as they entred in like manner they departed.38

The second part of the Mascarado becomes more explicitly sexually enticing for Smith when the Algonquin women lure him into a lodge and beg him for sexual favors (if they were indeed addressing him in English, this attests to considerable previous encounters with the Anglo culture), then feasting him, singing and dancing for him: Having reaccomodated themselves, they solemnly invited him to their lodgings, where he was no sooner within the house, but all these Nymphes more tormented him then ever, with crowding, pressing, and hanging about him, most tediously crying. Loue [Love] you not me? loue you not me? This salutation ended, the feast was set, consisting of all the Salvage dainties they could devise: some attending, others singing and dauncing about them; which mirth being ended, with fire-brands in stead of Torches they conducted him to his lodging.39

These two passages, probably the most detailed we have of Pocahontas and female Algonquin behaviour, depict a female ritual, the sensuality of which apparently bewildered Smith and which he related to fiends and infernal temptation. Perhaps the Mascarado led to his belief, articulated in response to accusations that he had hoped to marry Pocahontas to establish himself as king of Virginia that he could have had any type of sexual relationship with the princess which he desired.40 The Mascarado implies a cultural sexuality which contrasts with the one-to-one romance that Malick depicts, the seduction of prelapsarian innocence. As Faery puts it, “the erotic life Pocahontas might have had within her home culture was utterly different from the eroticization she underwent at the hands of Anglo mythmakers.”41 The melancholy harmony of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 23 in A minor could never have provided the soundtrack for the “hellish shouts and cryes,” “the hydeous noise and shreeking” of the energetic women’s masque.42

Voices from within the Veil

35

Oratory/reading versus Algonquins’ orality: body language and encoded blackness Choosing among many possibilities, Malick clearly presents Powhatan’s motive for agreeing to Pocahontas’ appeal for mercy for John Smith: the Chief wants her to learn the colonists’ language and to discover the achievements of their civilization. In her recent biomythology, Paula Gunn Allen presents Pocahontas as being a spy for the Algonquins, but Malick rather stresses Powhatan’s wish to broaden his daughter’s horizons. In creating this fissure in alterity, the opposite of a Pandora’s Box, Powhatan admits entry to the other. Powhatan thus becomes a tragic figure, who, through his hubris in favoring Pocahontas’ development, permits the downfall of his people, as seen with the 20/20 vision of historical hindsight. Malick’s unlikely shot of the pages of a book being turned in the midst of a scene showing Smith learning Indian skills such as shooting a bow and arrow implies the widening of this crack. Historically, we know that Pocahontas helped Smith learn the language of the Powhatans; a sentence recorded in Algonquin and English on an appendix to one of Smith’s maps is complex and suggests pleasant familiarity: “Bid Pokahontas bring hither two little Baskets, and I will give her white beads to make her a chaine.”43 But Malick’s film only shows Pocahontas quite seductively eliciting Smith’s aid in learning English words in one-to-one reference such as “eyes” and “lips.” The graceful (but, for some viewers, overly stylized) body language of the Algonquins in the film and their Algonquin dialog, particularly shown in their religious rituals while addressing “Mother Earth,” is gradually largely replaced by Pocahontas’ English utterances. After her capture by the Englishmen, John Rolfe teaches her to read, although we have no historical proof of her literacy, only of her ability to speak English. After seeing the atrocities committed on both sides during the early years of the Jamestown colony, the film spectator must view with a grain of salt the solemn recitation of Ben Jonson’s poem “Melt Earth to Sea” (composed in 1611) at Pocahontas’ 1616 reception in King James’s court extolling the reigning monarch’s imperial fame. Even more blatantly ironic is Captain Christopher Newport’s proclamation of a royal colony and the superiority of the English nation, his oration delivered in the driving rain as he stands in Jamestown mud amidst the starvation and even cannibalism of the 1609-10 nadir. The Algonquins’ oral and body language, which Malick has attempted to authenticate with academic and institutional consultants, is clearly favored over the vacant rhetoric and

36

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

misguided application of literacy by the insensitive Englishmen. Malick’s sympathies are doubtless with the cultural subalterns. After immersion courses in Algonquin language and customs, the actors were permitted to paint their own bodies, some choosing white but most black. In Malick’s and his actors’ interpretation, I posit, the colonists’ and later slave owners’ slide from applying a “red demon” template to using a “black demon” one is literally embodied in the dark dye of the Native skin.

Pocahontas’ story as voiced by Paula Gunn Allen, Helen C. Rountree, and the Mattaponi Reservation People: strangers, squatters, and savages The nearly constant voiceover in the film presents an internal, private voicing. Pocahontas, in fact, speaks up and aloud very little in the film, and then usually in interrogative form. Page Laws has pointed out the significance of the deflating line “Did you find your Indies, John?”44 There are few historical records of Pocahontas’ direct utterances. The most lengthy is to be found in Smith’s recounting of her reunion and farewell to him in 1616 in England, eloquent and strong words which reflect her sense of Smith’s betrayal of herself and her people.45 Perhaps because unflattering to Smith, we can lend credence to this 1624 report of his, and question whether he could indeed have done whatever he had desired with such a strong-willed Pocahontas! Malick encapsulates and tones down Pocahontas’ farewell utterance into the single “Indies” sentence–cinematically effective but reductive. In a clear attempt to reconstitute Pocahontas’ voice, Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna-Pueblo and Lebanese descent, has written her biography of Pocahontas after claiming that Pocahontas actually spoke to her.46 Calling on ethnic memory, Allen would no doubt support the use of Toni Morrison’s reiterated term from Beloved as a description of her (Allen’s) project: she is “rememorying” Pocahontas’ utterances.47 Allen capitalizes on Pocahontas’ 1616 words to Smith, underlining the Algonquin princess’s deep sense of Smith’s treachery in seeing his adoption into the Powhatans as a matter of expedience for him, but for her the fulfilment of a spiritual prophecy. Malick does not attempt to convey such a verbal and personal feat. For the Four Hundred Years Jubilee, Helen C. Rountree has published a book titled Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), presenting the events and encounters of the early colony from the Natives’ point of view. The English are called “strangers,”

Voices from within the Veil

37

“savages,” and “squatters”–a brave semantic reversal in alterity showing the Eurocentric slant of the mainstream recapitulation of those events. The most sensational re-voicing of the Virginia Natives is undoubtedly the publication in book form of the oral history passed down for four hundred years by the quiakros (the Powhatan priests and the chiefs): The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History, subtitled From the Sacred History of the Mattaponi Reservation People.48 The authors are Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow, brother of the Mattaponi Chief, and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star,” an adopted member of the tribe. In an afterword, Daniel, Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the College of William and Mary, describes the difficulties her project encountered in many anthropological circles and the support by those who did not fear “the controversy Powhatan oral tradition would induce.”49 The voicing of Pocahontas is both supposedly direct–through the Natives’ oral tradition–and fascinatingly mediated through relatives in the early seventeenth century and through four subsequent centuries of tribal recounting. The main source of Pocahontas’ personal account is her eldest sister, Mattachanna, by the same mother, who had raised Pocahontas after their mother died, as well as Mattachanna’s husband Tomococo (or Uttamattamakin), one of Powhatan’s closest priests as mentioned earlier; the couple was allowed to care for the captive Pocahontas in the Jamestown Fort in 1613. Pocahontas also spoke to two of her brothers in March 1614 when she was taken to one of her father Powhatan’s villages to negotiate her ransom. The most shocking revelation in the “printed oral” account is that Pocahontas was raped while in captivity, possibly repeatedly and by more than one Englishman. Custalow and Daniel describe the gravity of this crime in Powhatan society: “Rape was virtually unheard of because the punishment for such actions was so severe.”50 Mattachanna found her sister “distressed, emotionally disturbed, fatigued, and nauseous”51–and pregnant. Pocahontas’ son was born out of wedlock prior to her marriage to John Rolfe; the birth of little Thomas was never recorded although Rolfe was secretary of the colony. Custalow and Daniel find evidence that the autocratic governor of the colony, Sir Thomas Dale, fathered the child, including Dale’s being denied permission by Chief Powhatan in 1614 to marry an Algonquian woman, one of his daughters. Furthermore, upon his return from England, Uttamattamakin, who had accompanied Pocahontas on the promotion tour for the Virginia Company, reported to his people that Pocahontas, who had been perfectly healthy on boarding the ship to go back to her homeland, had been murdered in England, probably poisoned, a suspicion already published in Allen’s

38

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

biography, four years before the disclosure in the Mattaponi publication. According to the quiakros, Pocahontas’ murder had been planned even before she set sail to London, and, moreover, she had discovered too much about motives, plans, and betrayals during her stay in the Old World. She was now a risk rather than an instrument for the Virginia Company. Malick did not have access to most of this alternative history when scripting his film. If he had, would he have privileged it? Custalow and Daniel draw on the white Englishmen’s written records when these historical accounts suit the Mattaponi argument and on their own oral sources when the records do not fit. The case will no doubt be made that calling the 2007 book “The True Story” is little different from the undertaking of many authors with vested interests who have proffered “true” versions of Pocahontas’ tale during the past 400 years. Yet, judging from the documented incidents and the policy of colonial conqueror and slave owner rape on women of color, the Mattaponi revelations are far from unlikely. Once more Pocahontas’ voice is mediated, but this 2007 book is perhaps the closest we will ever come to the voice of the Virginia Natives.

Pocahontas legend as subtext in Four Souls and Faces in the Moon: Pocahontas’ feather becomes a pen Page Laws has convincingly demonstrated how, for four hundred years, literature has imagined Pocahontas as a protagonist, shaping her to fit the weltanschauung of the respective author’s time.52 In contemporary Native American literature, the Pocahontas myths are often embedded in the narrative in complex “intertextual” reference. In Louise Erdrich’s latest novel, Four Souls (2004), for instance, the author of Native American and German heritage shows her heroine Fleur Pillager accomplishing Pocahontas’ revenge. With Fleur unaware that the very notion of land possession and possibly of revenge are Western concepts that she has long since internalized in what is presented as a largely negative form of interactive alterity, the determined protagonist hunts down the white man Mauser who stole “her” land and felled “her” trees. Like a modern-day Pocahontas, Fleur ends up saving her exploiter’s life and bearing his–a white man’s–child, despite his clear sins against female Natives and the land, Mauser having formed liaisons with a number of these women to obtain their property rights. He marries Fleur, however, to fill the space of alterity: “Only now do I understand that I had to get near something in her that I can’t know, some pure space, something that I went up north to have and only ended up destroying…I have always been

Voices from within the Veil

39

a greedy man.”53 Although Fleur’s powers are considerable, she is narratively silent, since her story, like Pocahontas’, is told indirectly by others. In Betty Louise Bell’s moving autobiographical novel Faces in the Moon (1994), the abused and confused, mixed-blood Cherokee protagonist Lucie has no access to nostalgic Indian stereotypes to help her form her identity: “I knew no Indian princesses, no buckskin, no feathers, no tomahawks.”54 Her alterity is that of a contemporary (stereotypical) Native American existence of poverty and ghettoization, which does not satisfy her white friends indulging their cultural adulation with its nuance of condescension: “What’s it like being Indian?” friends ask. I want to respond, “What’s it like being alive?” But they demand difference, want to believe in Indian transcendence and spirituality, as if their own survival depended on the Indian. I wish I had Indian stories, crazy and wild romantic vignettes of a life lived apart from them. Anything to make myself equal to their romance. Instead I can offer only a picture of Momma’s rented house, a tiny flat two-bedroom shack in a run-down part of town.55

In the complex time frames of the novel, Lucie eventually grows to understand the bequest of her female ancestors, whose slogan of “Don’t mess with Indian women” she announces, at least in an inner fantasy, to a smug, condescending white male librarian. In this climactic scene, she informs him that she is what he fears most: “’I am your worst nightmare: I am an Indian with a pen,’”56 writing down the story which has become the novel the reader is just completing. An “Indian with a pen” is what the black artist R.L. Morgan Monceaux offers us in his 1993 painting called “Matowka.” He implies that Matoaka/Pocahontas’ fate is parallel to that undergone by many blacks. She was kidnapped aboard a European ship and held hostage, with little or no choice but to accept European civilization, religion, language. Pocahontas’ trademark feather from the famous van de Passe engraving– associated with both royalty and Indians–has been transformed into a quill pen, and her story flows from her pen around the perimeters of the portrait, albeit as with Bell’s work in the English of her language of literacy. This is interactive alterity with a vengeance and a mission, highlighting the possibility of rotating the alterity axis from a historically vertical one to a philosophically and socio-politically acceptable horizontal one.

40

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

Q’Orianka Kilcher: articulate reincarnation of Pocahontas Although Malick does basically embrace alterity politics, he could not entirely, to quote a German saying, “leap over his own shadow” of white Anglo-maleness. If only he had capitalized even more on the triangular red/black/white alterity constellation so subtly indicated in the shot on the London street and in the dark body painting; had let us hear Pocahontas with less white male, musical, and over voice mediation; and had included the Mascarado Algonquin woman power! His greatest resource, most critics agree, is his leading lady. When the The New World was showcased at the highly acclaimed Berlin film festival in 2005, despite the mixed, usually lukewarm, reviews, Malick’s discovery of Q’Orianka Kilcher was universally praised. Her untoppable interculturality of Peruvian Native and Swiss heritage–to be exact, her father is a member of a large clan of Quechua-Huachipaeri, her mother a Swiss national who grew up in Alaska; Kilcher was born in Schweigmatt, Germany, and lived in Hawaii, then Los Angeles with her family –assures her unassailable credentials of near-global hybridity. She was the unrivalled star of the festival. An engagé speaker at a United Nations panel for Indigenous Rights, Q’Orianka Kilcher is a young woman of multi-ethnicity whose cinematic presence and voice could contribute to a further reorientation of four-century-old templates of alterity.

Notes 1

Klaus Theweleit “Kolonialistische Softporno,” Die Zeit, February 9, 2006, http://zeus.zeit/text/2006/07/Pocahontas (accessed April 11, 2007). 2 The quotation is from Andreas Busche, “The New World: Die Unschuld der Gräser [The Innocence of the Grasses],” 2006. taz, [no day, month, or page indicated]. http://www.filmzentrale.com/rezis/newworldab.htm (accessed 11 April 2007). 3 Rebecca Blevins Faery. Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 4 Paula Gunn Allen, Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat (HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanoug: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005); Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star,” The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History; From the Sacred History of the Mattaponi Reservation People (Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 2007). 5 Betty Louise Bell, Faces in the Moon (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 192.

Voices from within the Veil 6

41

Kathleen V. Kudlinski, My Lady Pocahontas (New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2006). According to Custalow and Daniel, op cit., Powhatan’s daughter would not have been tattooed: “[M]embers of the paramount chief’s family did not tattoo their bodies. Tattooing was for the warriors and the lower classes,” 42. 7 Also known as Uttamatomakkin (David A. Price, Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas and the Start of a New Nation (New York: Vintage, 2003), passim); this is the name favored by the Mattaponi but with a different spelling: Uttamattamakin. Custalow/Daniel, op cit., passim. This priest remained staunchly unconverted to the Englishmen’s cause and was a main source of the Mattaponi oral history. See Custalow/Daniel, 83. 8 The term “alterity” was first developed by the Jewish Lithuanian phenomenologist Emmanuel Lévinas (1906-1995); influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, Lévinas, in turn, has influenced thinkers contributing to postmodern theory such as Foucault, Ricoeur, Lyotard, and particularly Derrida. A key work by Lévinas is his Alterity and Transcendence, (London: Athlone Press, 1999; originally published in French in 1995). 9 Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: American Phenomenological Investigations (Northwestern UP, 1999), 161, 163; a locus classicus for Sartre’s “gaze” is his 1943 essay “L’Être et le néant” [“Being and Nothingness”]. 10 “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…”; W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet, 1969; originally published 1903), 45. 11 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 2. 12 “The stereotype, which is [colonialism’s] major discursive strategy...vacillates between what is always ‘in place’, already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated…as if the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African that needs no proof can never really, in discourse, be proved” (Homi Bhabha. “The Other Question,” Screen 24.6 [1983]: 18-36; reprinted in Padmini Mongia, ed. Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold, 1996), 37-54. Bhabha draws on his own argument in his later book The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), particularly in chapter 3, “The other question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism,” 66-84. 13 “The oscillation back and forth between [envy and loathing] can at least in part be explained by prestige…as for group loathing, however, it mobilizes the classic syndromes of purity and danger, and acts out a kind of defense of the boundaries of the primary group against this threat perceived to be inherent in the Other’s very existence” (Fredric Jameson, “On ‘Cultural Studies,’” Social Text 34.1 (1993), 3435. 14 I develop this theory with regard to, for example, the international hip hop phenomenon: Cathy Covell Waegner, “Rap, Rebounds, and Rocawear: The ‘Darkening’ of German Youth Culture,” in Blackening Europe: The African American Presence, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 249-271.

42 15

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

Cathy Covell Waegner, “Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff, and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface,” in AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics, ed. Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 223-244. 16 Indeed, Malick’s project of recording the incipient moment of alterity is a simplification of historical encounters. The Powhatans had already been exposed to the Spanish, who had captured a Powhatan teenager, baptized him with the name Don Luis de Velasco, and educated him in Mexico and Spain. He came back to Virginia ten years later with priests, supposedly to help establish a Catholic mission. But Don Luis returned to his own people and led a revenge attack on the missionaries. This previous exposure to Europeans might be one possible explanation for the striking similarity of negotiating tactics between Smith and Powhatan, as shown by, for instance, Smith’s “Voyage to Pamunkey” episode in his Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles (1624). A fascinating theory, debated among the experts, is that hard-liner Opechancanough, Chief Powhatan’s half-brother and, in certain ways, the power behind the throne, was, in fact, Don Luis. 17 Eberhard Werner Happel, Gröste Denckwürdigkeiten der Welt Oder so genandte Relationes Curiosae…. (Hamburg: Wiering 1685), legend recounted 195-205. 18 This seventeenth-century graphic is reprinted in Stephen Kraft, “Pocahontas deutsch: Von Versuchen, eine Geschichte zu erzählen” [Pocahontas German: On Attempts to Recount a Story”], in Pocahontas Revisited: Kulturwissenschaftliche Ansichten eines Motivkomplexes [Cultural Studies Perspectives on a Motif Complex], ed. Sabine Kyora and Uwe Schwagmeier (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2005), 15-61; 26. Part of the 1685 Happel engraving also graces the cover of the volume. This sensual pose of Pocahontas encircling the prone Smith with her arms could also be seen as a version of the Pietà, an interpretation that Malick might approve of since he presents Smith as a ritualized Christ figure in the rescue scene. A drawing roughly contemporary to Happel’s by the Belgian Albert Eckhout (1641) of a graceful, but dangerously cannibalistic Brazilian Tapuia woman reflects a source of the Europeans’ fascinated fear of Native Americans. She carries a human foot in her basket and brandishes a lopped-off human hand. One wonders how history would have changed if Pocahontas had dispatched John Smith in this manner… 19 William Strachey, Historie of Travaile [Travel] into Virginia Britannia, ed. R.H. Major (London: Hakluyt Society, 1849; manuscript dated 1612), 65. Hart Crane uses this quotation as the epigraph of Part II of his epic poem The Bridge, 1927/1930. 20 Happel’s text reads “God suddenly aroused great pity in the Chief’s daughter, Pocahuntas [sic]; she could not bear to consider that this handsome, brave youth might have his life ended so miserably” (my translation from the German original in Kraft, op cit., 25). Happel apparently did not realize that John Smith, “the handsome youth,” was at least 15 years older than Pocahontas. 21 Arno Schmidt, Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003; orginally published in 1955 in the journal Texte und Zeichen). As far as I

Voices from within the Veil

43

could discover, this novella, extremely difficult language-wise, with various dialects and Schmidt’s own coinings, has not yet been translated into English. 22 See for instance Alex Dunker, “’Immer diese Vergangenheiten!’ Kolonialismus und Geschlecht in Arno Schmidts Erzählung Seelandschaft mit Pocahontas” [“’Always These Pasts!’: Colonialism and Sex in Arno Schmidt’s Novella Lake Landscape with Pocahontas; my translation],” in Kyora/Schwagmeier, op cit., 193-206. 23 Schmidt, op cit., 20-21. Is it a coincidence that the beginning of The New World shows a couple holding hands under water? This, however, turns out to be Pocahontas and her brother. 24 Pocahontas in Wonderland: Shakespeare on Tour (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1999); Mad Affairs: Buch der Königstöchter; Die Medea/Pocahontas-Connection (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, forthcoming in 2008 [Klaus Theweleit/Martin Langbein]); Import, Export, Kolonialismustheorie, oder: Warum “Cortés” wirklich siegte (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, forthcoming in 2008 [Klaus Theweleit/Martin Langbein]); “You give me fever”: Arno Schmidt, Seelandschaften mit Pocahontas; Die Sexualität schreiben nach WW II (Frankfurt: Stroemfeld, 1999). In his saucy text, Theweleit often refers to Powhatan’s daughter familiarly as “Poca.” 25 Jan Süselbeck’s cheeky article, “Work in Progress…?: Klaus Theweleit’s Pocahontas Project” is a case in point. In Kyora/Schwagmeier, op cit.: 243-259. 26 Kyora/Schwagmeier, eds., op cit. 27 In addition to Togo, German West Africa included Cameroon; German East Africa Tanganyika, Rwanda, and Burundi; and German South West Africa Namibia (simplified list). 28 Surely the current exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia (17 March - 3 September 2007) with the accompanying publication Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings, James C. Kelly and Barbara Clark Smith (Smithsonian, 2007) will arouse avid European interest. 29 David Sterritt, “Film, Philosophy, and Terrence Malick” (2006) http://www. fipresci.org/undercurrent/issue_0206/sterritt_malick.htm (accessed April 11, 2006). 30 Klaus Theweleit, 2006, op cit. 31 Ekkehard Knörer, “Terrence Malick: The New World” [no date or page indicated]. http://www.jump-cut.de/berlinale2006-thenewworld.html (accessed 11 April 2007) can serve as a representative example here: “Malick’s aesthetic of the overwhelming is simply conventional. That relates especially to James Horner’s music, which is continually occupied with pastiche production” [my translation, slightly adapted]. 32 Unnamed author on “Epinions,” March 8, 2006, http://www1.epinons.con/ content _222961176196 (accessed April 11, 2007). 33 Busche, op cit. 34 Knörer, op cit. 35 For example, unnamed author on “Epinions,” op cit. 36 Online version of John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England and the Summer Isles, 1624: 67.

44

Alterity and the Old-World Reception of Malick’s The New World

http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/smith.html (accessed April 11, 2007). Smith’s table of contents also indicates that Pocahontas was the leader of the women’s performance: “Pocahontas entertaines him with a Maske” (xi). Smith speaks of himself in the third-person form. 37 The result was a farcical ceremony of power-juggling in which Powhatan refused to kneel and the Englishmen had to lean hard on his shoulders (Autumn 1608). 38 Smith, op cit. 39 Ibid., 67. 40 According to The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia Taken Faithfully out of the Writings of…Discreet Observers, Smith supposedly claimed that he could have possessed Pocahontas at will: “If he would he might have married her, or have done what him listed. For there was none that could have hindred his determination” (chapter 12). Online version of The Complete Works of Captain John Smith, vol. 1; http://etext.virginia.edu/ etcbinot2wwwsmith?specfile=/web/data/collections/projects/jamestown/ public/texts/www/smith.o2w (accessed April 11, 2007). 41 Faery, op cit., 111. 42 An intriguing point of research would be to contrast the Algonquin women’s staging of the Mascarado with Pocahontas’ experience of Ben Jonson’s Twelfth Night masque, The Vision of Delight; she viewed Jonson’s spectacle at James I’s court, January 1617, as a mere spectator rather than as a leading ‘actress,’ as in the Virginia performance. Perhaps the two masques had noteworthy similarities, with the traditional Twelfth Night confusions and carnival wildness! Cf. James Horn’s account of Pocahontas’ attendance at the London masque in A Land As God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 227. Karen Robertson’s otherwise valuable account only briefly mentions the Mascarado (“Pocahontas at the Masque,” Signs (Spring 1996), 578-579); Robertson makes the perceptive point, however, that in comparing the Native women’s ritual to a courtly masque, Smith is using a metaphor which asserts the colonizing force, although as a ‘commoner’ he himself never attended a masque at King James’s court. Unfortunately, the Mascarado is not mentioned in the Mattaponi account (Custalow/Daniel), perhaps because as a common ritual it was not considered significant enough to be recited in the oral history. 43 This and a few other sentences in Algonquin and English among a total of 137 words were added by Smith to his Map of Virginia (1612); the word fields and sentences are carefully analyzed by Robertson. Robertson, 562-563. 44 Page Laws, “Post- and Neo-Colonial Pocahontas (es):Terrence Malick’s Updated Myth of La Belle Sauvage” in this same volume, the conference proceedings of America’s 400th Anniversary: Voices from within the Veil, Norfolk State University, February 22-23, 2007. 45 Smith, Generall Historie, op cit., 122-123. 46 See, for instance, her interview with Joanne M. Braxton: “Pocahontas’ Voice,” The Women’s Review of Books: A Feminist Guide to Good Reading, May 2004, www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview/archive/2004/05/highlt.html (accessed 11 April 2007).

Voices from within the Veil 47

Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987). Custalow/Daniel. 49 Custalow/Daniel, op cit., 106. 50 Ibid., 62. 51 Ibid., 63. 52 Laws, op cit. 53 Louise Erdrich, Four Souls: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 129. 54 Bell, op cit., 58. 55 Bell, op cit., 59. 56 Bell, op cit., 192. 48

45

JAMESTOWN SHUFFLE: FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN RACISM AND SLAVERY IN VIRGINIA, 1629-1830 ERVIN L. JORDAN JR., UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

Approximately 240 million years ago, Africa and Virginia were joined with the earth’s other land masses as a super continent—Pangaea. When the process of plate tectonics caused the future continents to pull apart, the expanse between Africa and Virginia became the Atlantic Ocean. Centuries later, Africans and Europeans crossed this “danger water” with momentous consequences.1 Slavery and racism are intertwined in the national identity of the United States. Racism was in Virginia before 1619 and met the traumatized Africans as they got off the boat at Jamestown. This essay attempts to answer my self-posed question: Which arrived first in British North America–black slavery or white racism? I believe the answer is racism. English colonists brought Africans to Jamestown to do the work that Englishmen would not do. They were predisposed to enslaving Africans because other European nations were doing it. Africans were neither English nor Christians nor white, and their color, hair texture, clothing and values manifested their ‘otherness.’ Those who gained freedom were not regarded as Englishmen with black skins. Racism and slavery were at America’s roots as a slaveholding republic and changed the course of its history. My discussion traces their evolution, influences and consequences in the Old Dominion, including a debate between two sixteenth-century theologians, Shakespeare’s plays, and the novel Roots.

Whose History? How much history is too much? Whose history? Who decides? This year’s Jamestown quadricentennial (1607-2007) is promoted as “America’s 400th Anniversary.” If so, it remains a work in progress.

Voices from within the Veil

47

Public events will probably prove more commercial than educational, but one hopes that they will prove an opportunity for a reassessment of the African and African-American experience. Among eight articles in a recent U. S. News & World Reports issue, one describes Jamestown as “the cradle of two African Americas . . . those who were free and those who were enslaved.” A newly published coffee table book, profusely illustrated with color photographs of reenactors dressed as seventeenth century Native Americans and Englishmen, barely mentions African Virginians, and usually in the context of indentured servitude. Two black actors depict Anthony and Mary Johnson, who progressed from slavery to indentured servitude and ultimately to freedom as the foreparents of free black families in Virginia and Maryland.2 Jamestown is hallowed ground, but African-Americans were relegated to its periphery during previous commemorations. During the 1807 bicentennial “Jamestown Jubilee,” slaves were present but silent; free blacks were officially excluded beginning in the 1820s; during an 1834 observance an orator boasted of the glories of the nation’s institutions (including slavery); and a former Virginia congressman’s speech during a 1860 New York City celebration was mainly a defense of slavery. In 1907, at blacks’ insistence, a “Negro Building” was constructed and the third day of August set aside as Negro Day to honor and display their contributions. Philadelphia black artist Meta Vaux Warrick's (1877-1968) gold medal-winning “Historic Tableaux of Negroes’ Progress,” a series of fourteen dioramas picturing African American history and one of the first works of African American art commissioned by the federal government, began with the 1619 “Landing of First Twenty Slaves at Jamestown” depicting a disheartened group of semi-nude black men and women inspected by several well-dressed Englishmen. The 1957 organizing commission reluctantly permitted Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux (1884-1968) to hold segregated welcoming ceremonies on August 20, 1957 “marking the anniversary of the arrival of the first Negroes in America”; more than thirty years after his death, Michaux’s followers were still planning a National Memorial to the Progress of Colored People near Jamestown.

48

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

Fig. 1.6: The Negro Building, 1907. This building was designed by a black architect and constructed by black workers during the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition in Norfolk, Virginia. Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

Jamestown reconstructed is among the many historic sites which African-Americans shun or where they feel like uninvited guests; and this is a worrisome issue for tourism officials “because one of the primary motivations . . . is to get repeat customers, and how do you tell the story of slavery and get people to want to come.” Relatively few blacks visit Colonial Williamsburg, site of a controversial 1994 slave reenactment auction; it and Jamestown share an image problem with other historical sites because slavery cannot be presented in a warm and fuzzy way. They compensate for this with costumed black interpreters who portray slaves as strong, proud and resourceful, not downtrodden. In some ways, this too represents whitewashed history, the same old story that is not being told because the truth is uncomfortable. Full of contradictions and problems encompassing more than just history, slavery and racism cannot be glossed over; they make black and white audiences ill at ease, particularly the latter. James Horton has identified “a pressing need for public historians and interpreters to engage in serious discussions about techniques and strategies for addressing race in general and slavery in particular.”3

Voices from within the Veil

49

Even so, African-Americans disagree about how slavery should be commemorated as evidenced by an intergenerational squabble between two black Richmond lawyers in August 1969, 350 years after the African arrival. A scathing editorial letter in the Richmond Afro-American from a thirty-eight-year-old grandson of slaves denounced “the folly of wasting time and effort to attempt to dignify any aspect of slavery . . . until the manacles of our present enslavement might be loosened” and called for the boycott of commemorations as they did little more than assuage “the conscience of those who, by purpose and design through their forebears perpetuated the physical enslavement and emasculation of the black man.” But a sixty-two-year-old lawyer, countering that “the first black men in America were free,” organized a two-hour Sunday observance at Jamestown “for the descendants of America’s original black settlers.” The younger lawyer, “Lawrence D. Wilder,” later L. Douglas Wilder (b. 1931), became America’s and Virginia’s first black elected governor and founder of the United States National Slavery Museum. The elder lawyer, Oliver W. Hill (b. 1907), was Virginia’s greatest civil rights attorney until his 1998 retirement.4

Racism Defined According to George Schedler, racism embodies three prerequisites: 1) Human beings can be divided into races; 2) some races are morally or intellectually inferior to others; 3) it is morally permissible for ‘superior’ races to treat ‘subordinate’ races as inferiors. In a previous book I defined racism as “a psychosexual inferiority complex . . . consisting of attitudes, behaviors, and doctrines involving judicial, political, social, religious, and economic aspects that [promotes] and [maintain] a belief in the inherent inferiority of blacks.” In a previous book, I noted that “African-American history is not for the squeamish.” Slavery in Anglo- America was unlike Greco-Roman slavery in that it was deeply racial. The African Diaspora entailed the loss of family, homeland, identity and liberty, not to mention those who had died in transit. English America received about six percent of an estimated fifteen million Africans shipped across the Atlantic. European notions of natural racial superiority were a catalyst, but the slave trade was not a European innovation; some form of slavery had existed among Africans for centuries, but slaves were not life-chattels. They could obtain freedom by self-purchase, inheritance or marriage into their owner’s family.5

50

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

The Spanish: Indians as “Natural Slaves” Jamestown as America’s ‘first permanent settlement’ is among our most persistent myths. Leaving aside the existence of Native Americans, the first permanent European settlement in what became the United States was at St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, forty-two years before Jamestown. Moreover, Spaniards were seizing Indians as slaves from the Virginia coast as early as 1521. Spain’s northernmost North American colony was attempted during 1570-71 near Bahi de Santa Maria (Chesapeake Bay) when a small group of Jesuits established a mission to bring Christianity to the Indians of Ajacan, in the vicinity of what became Jamestown and predating it by nearly forty years. The Jesuits were betrayed by their native guide-translator and slain by his tribe, ending this first Chesapeake colony within five months of its founding. New World colonization was more or less a Spanish monopoly well into the seventeenth century. Spaniards believed that so-called nonwhite primitive societies were in a state of arrested development requiring guidance under the paternalistic guardianship of priests, conquistadors and colonists. Mining interests had imported Christian blacks from the Iberian peninsula since 1502-1510, but Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (Charles I of Spain) “moved by doubts [about the brutality of the conquistadors and the morality of forced enslavement of Spanish America’s indigenous population under a neo-feudalist plantation system] ordered a cease in further aggressions against Indians and instructed a Junta (jury) of eminent lawyers and theologians to issue a ruling on the controversy.” During the Valladolid debate of 1550-51, in response the question as to whether the Native Americans were humans with souls and capable of selfgovernance, Jesuit theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494-1573) defended the colonists and contended Amerindians were “natural slaves” and pagan inferiors. Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) rebutted these arguments by denying the Spanish had the right to “rob, slay, and tyranny to rule over them, under pretense of preaching the faith” and insisted Amerindians “were as human as Europeans, possessed souls, were capable of attaining [Christian] salvation, and retained the right to remain free men and not be enslaved.” (In 1517 Las Casas had recommended the importation of twelve African slaves per colonist as a means to encourage immigration to New Spain, but later regretted this as a moral mistake.) Charles and the junta ruled in favor of Las Casas, and this became the official position of the Catholic Church and Spain, but her colonists continued Native American enslavement with grievous repercussions for Africans more than a half century later.6

Voices from within the Veil

51

The English: Her Majesty’s Bigotry England was an envious bystander of a slave trade dominated by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch until the potential for profit proved too tempting. Although mortal enemies, by the 1560s, Englishmen were supplying slaves to Spanish America by purchasing or seizing Africans from other nations’ shipping. In 1591, Captain Christopher Newport (ca. 1560-1617), who would voyage to Virginia several times between 1607 and 1611, and for whom the city of Newport News is named, captured a Portuguese ship with 300 slaves and sold them in Puerto Rico. Sir John Hawkins (1532-1595) undertook three slave raiding voyages during the 1560s, selling Africans to the Spanish. Upon his return with pearls and spices, Queen Elizabeth I denied authorizing his piracy when Spain protested but took her share of the profits, and in 1567 she granted Hawkins a coat of arms that included “the figure of a bound Negro.” More than four centuries later, in June 2006, Andrew Hawkins traveled to Africa and publicly apologized for his ancestor's participation in the slave trade. Forgiveness was symbolically bestowed by Isatou Njie Saidy, vicepresident of Gambia (a former British colony) and the first woman to hold this office.7 A few Africans had resided in England and Scotland since the 1500s, often in the employ of royalty. John Blanke (John White) was employed as a trumpeter in the court of King Henry VII during 1507-11; King James IV of Scotland purchased clothing for two black women, Ellen and Margaret, during 1512-13. In the summer of 1555, during the reign of Queen Mary, five Africans from what is now Ghana arrived to establish a trade mission and learn the English language and customs. Their complexions and exotic features attracted much attention but not as much as the goods they brought with them (ivory, pepper, and 400 pounds of gold). There was limited trade between Morocco and England between the 1580s and 1603; in exchange for arms and ship timber, the Moroccans supplied gold and saltpeter (necessary for the making of gunpowder). During Queen Elizabeth’s forty-five-year reign, Englishmen celebrated their white cultural identity. Clergyman William Harrison (1534-1593) boasted in 1577: “Such as are bred in this island are men . . . of a good complexion . . . white of color. . . . The Britons are white in colour . . . contrariwise such as dwell toward the course of the sun, are less of stature, weaker of body, more fearful by nature, blacker in colour, & some so black indeed as any crow or raven.” The pale-skinned “Virgin Queen” (for whom Virginia was named in 1585) issued proclamations in 1596 and 1601 ordering deportations of “blackmoores brought into this realme, of

52

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

which kindes of people there are already here to manie [too many].” As the population grew faster than the economy increased, poverty and unemployment may have been grounds for this attempted racial deportation; in any case, “those kinde of people” remained and increased as domestic servants or conspicuous displays of exotic wealth by the nobility. Englishmen, like other Europeans, adopted a mentality of superiority toward Indians and Africans. This became a factor in the clash of three cultures in the Americas.8

Shakespeare’s Prejudiced Plays In 1607 William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was at the height of his contemporary fame. But how much racism, if any, can be attributed to his plays during 1589-1613, a period concurrent with England’s efforts to establish New World colonies? Did he unpremeditatedly set the stage (no pun intended) or merely reflect his countrymen’s prevailing prejudices? Since 1499, black was synonymous in England for foul purposes, sinister and evil things; one of the earliest appearances of the word slaves was recorded in 1555, but these were white people (some scholars believe it referred to the five Ghanians mentioned earlier.) Shakespeare’s audience would have regularly encountered blacks on London streets, and plays by his predecessors and contemporaries included black stereotypes; during a performance for King James, blackfaced whites portrayed African princesses in Ben Johnson’s Masque of Blackness (1605). Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour Lost (ca. 1588-1589) includes the line “black is the badge of hell”; in Titus Andronicus (ca. 1589-1591), Aaron the Moor is a Machiavellian villain who relishes murder and rape. Shakespeare’s most notable black character, Othello (ca. 1603-1604), is a Moorish general tricked into murdering his white virginal bride by a jealous white man. (It was performed at the Globe Theater in April 1610, nine years prior to the African arrival at Jamestown.) In The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1594-1598), negro was a synonym for Moor, which had been synonymous with black since 1390. However, during his “pound of flesh” soliloquy Shylock, the play’s villain, delivers one of the Western world’s earliest anti-slavery orations: You have among you many a purchas’d slave, Which, like your assess and your dogs and mules, You use in abject and in slavish parts, Because you brought them: shall I say to you, Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?

Voices from within the Veil

53

Why sweat they under burthens? . . . You will answer ‘The slaves are ours.’9

Shakespeare’s influence on English racism was personified by Caliban, “a savage and deformed Slave,” perhaps the most sympathetic yet complex character in The Tempest (1611), first performed before King James and inspired by a 1609 Bermuda shipwreck of the Sea Venture while bound for Virginia with additional colonists and supplies. Caliban’s plot to kill his master Prospero (who dubs him “this thing of darkness”; act 5, scene 1, 275), and rape his daughter Miranda typified Jacobean England’s perception of nonwhites as savages; indeed, Caliban’s name is an anagram for “cannibal.” Miranda addresses Caliban as an “abhorred slave [of a] vile race” (act 1, scene 2, 352-358), serving as another example of stereotyping dark-skinned foreigners and justification for racial slavery. (In modern productions the role is usually interpreted as an African or an Indian.) Caliban is a metaphor for the New World and oppressed nonwhites, while Prospero symbolizes European colonialism and cultural superiority. Despite some scholars’ claims that his use of the word “race” refers to “natural disposition,” I suspect Shakespeare meant it to differentiate between the races as blackness was a widespread metaphor for sin and evil. Critics have also noted his occasional apologetic tone when describing blacks/blackness, especially the obsessive meditations of his “Dark Lady” sonnets (1609) wherein he describes his dark-featured “mistress” as tyrannical, evil, and spiteful. One Elizabethan scholar estimates ten percent of London’s population regularly attended theaters. This is not meant to suggest all Englishmen knew of Shakespeare’s plays or their anti-black stereotyping, but by that time, they had encountered Africans in Africa and the New World, Englishmen seemed psychologically and instinctively conditioned to treat them as racial inferiors.10

Slavery’s Virginia Cradle The African arrival at Jamestown was convoluted, contrived, and illegal. In April 1619, a Dutch man-of-war, White Lion, and an English ship, Treasurer, ostensibly departed for a routine trading voyage for the colony’s governor Sir George Yeardley, but, in actuality, they were privateers on their way to raid Spanish shipping. In the Gulf of Mexico, the two heavily armed vessels captured a slave ship, San Juan Bautista with a cargo of 350 “Christianized” Bantu slaves from Angola (in

54

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

accordance with the Spanish custom of mass baptisms and applying “Christian” names to slaves before shipping them to America). The two ships sailed to Virginia with sixty of the healthiest slaves, but they were separated by a storm. The Dutch ship White Lion under Captain John Colyn Jope and piloted by Marmaduke Rayner (an Englishman) arrived first at Old Point Comfort and smuggled the “twenty odd” Africans ashore. Jope, pretending a lack of provisions, sold them in a prearranged deal with Yeardley and Abraham Peirsey, the colony’s wealthiest resident. (Treasurer’s owner, Sir Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, was known for a willingness to do nearly anything for money, and his ships were often involved in pirating; it was hired out “by particular Adventurers [stockholders] for private Plantations.”) John Rolfe’s January 1620 letter to Virginia Company president Sir Edwin Sandys tersely reported Jope’s arrival “about the latter end of August . . . [and] brought not anything but 20 and odd Negroes.” As far as Rolfe and Jamestonians were concerned, the Africans were not human beings but merchandise to be bought and sold. Four days later the Treasurer, under Captain Daniel Elfrith, arrived to disembark a slave woman named Angela (“Angelo”), one of the first slaves identified by name in Virginia’s history, before hastily sailing to Bermuda with twenty-nine Africans. There was a hurried effort to hide evidence of this crime within a crime; shortly after the Treasurer’s arrival, it was declared unseaworthy (“stark rotten”), and its crew demanded bribes for their silence. The joint voyage of the White Lion and the Treasurer was an act of piracy as they had no legal authorization to attack foreign shipping. In Peirsey’s 1627 will, his Bautista slaves remained in life bondage. Captain Arthur Guy of the Fortune captured several slaves from a ship off Angola and exchanged them in Virginia for eighty-five hogsheads of tobacco in 1628. Once a slave, always a slave: it is doubtful that unassimilated Africans were taken from Africa or Spanish ships and brought to Jamestown to be given the opportunity of becoming competitive landowners with equal rights. Shakespeare recognized this hypocrisy: “Shall I say to you/Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?”11 The colony’s earliest published histories were tight-lipped about slavery or the black presence; one of the first, A declaration of the state of the colony and affaires in Virginia (1620), reported fifty “Servants for the publique” without specifying their nationality. The English Empire in America (1685), published sixty-six years after the 1619 African arrival and five years after the enactment of tougher slave codes, curiously did not mention them—probably to avoid discouraging potential settlers.

Voices from within the Veil

55

Governor Sir William Berkeley’s 1663 book did not mention the black presence and suggested the colony’s history before the 1622 (the so-called Good Friday Massacre of March 22nd) be forgotten. But another Virginia historian conceded: “If our ancestors had not wanted these slaves they would not have bought them; and if they had been unwilling to buy them, the slaves would not have been brought here for sale.”12

Constructing Racial Slavery During Hampton University’s commemoration of the 375th anniversary of the African arrival, a black scholar rhetorically pinpointed American slavery’s central issue: “Did racialism precede or follow the birth of slavery in Virginia? Were English colonists motivated by preexisting racial prejudices or did economic expediency dominate?” English racial prejudice and ethnocentrism were fundamental factors in the development of black slavery during the three decades (one generation) between Angela’s 1619 arrival and John Punch’s 1640 enslavement. By 1600, according to historian Winthrop Jordan, “the European demand for slaves had altered the character of West African slavery.” There are tantalizing hints of black slavery in English America before 1619. The term slave first appeared in May 1618 among rules governing Jamestown’s colonists: “Every person to go to Church Sundays and Holy days or lye neck and heels on the Corps du Guard the Night following and be a Slave the week following. Second Offence a Month, third, a Year and a Day.” Before his death in 1617, Puritan theologian Paul Baynes described “Blackmores with us” as captive or voluntary slaves “perpetually put under the power of the Master.” In 1627 London Minister John Weemse (Weems) categorized “servants” into five varieties, the least as ‘Moores” (Moors) and Negroes who as the posterity of “Cham [Ham] are sold as slaves.” A March 1620 census mentioned “32 negroes in the service of several planters”; four years after their arrival most African Virginians, unlike indentured servants, lacked the dignity of surnames in a colonial muster (census) of 1624-25 that enumerated twenty-three blacks, all placed at the end of the rolls—last place literally denoting inferiority. Fourteen (sixty percent) had one name (ten men, four women) while the remaining nine (thirty-nine percent) were merely described as “Negro,” “a Negor” or “a negar.”13 Potential threats to white supremacy and racial purity were punished, and black indentured servants nominally entitled to freedom were enslaved. In September 1630, Hugh Davis, a white man, was ordered “to be soundly whipped before an assembly of Negroes and others for abusing

56

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

himself to the dishonor of God and shame of Christians, by defiling his body in lying with a Negro” of unidentified gender. A decade later, in 1640, three indentured servants (two whites and a black) of planter Hugh Gwyn fled to Maryland but were apprehended and returned. A court ordered the trio thirty lashes apiece and sentenced the two whites (”a Dutchman and a Scotchman”) to four additional years of indenture but “the third being a negro named John Punch shall serve his said master or his assigns for the time of his natural Life here or elsewhere.” Punch’s race made him a slave; in no surviving colonial court record is a white criminal punished with life enslavement.14 Winthrop Jordan contends slavery’s development in Virginia (1619), Barbados (1627), New England (1638), and Maryland (1639) was an “unthinking decision,” but was it? It requires a high degree of presumptuous contempt to enslave anyone, especially those deemed “unchristian and unwhite.” Captain John Smith (1580?-1631), president of the Jamestown colony 1608-09 until his return to England a decade before the African arrival, characterized Indians as painted brown-skinned nuisances though “borne white” and Africans as “blacke brutish Negers . . . idle and as devilish people as any in the world.” Seventeenth-century colonists described Africans as “Negroes” in reference to their skin color instead of Ashanti, Igbo, Yorubas and other tribal identities. Molefi Kete Asante, a leading Afrocentrist, has pointed out that “by calling Africans Negroes, the European colonists further separated Africans from their African culture.” Efforts to snuff out African memories extended to architecture; when African-born slaves attempted to construct Africanstyle dwellings, their owners customarily ordered them torn down. Although culturally disoriented in a racialized landscape, African Virginians, in defiance of their exile, retained their African selfhood well into the eighteenth century as evidenced in runaway advertisements. They readily identified themselves as “Angolan” (the grandson of Virginia free black planter Anthony Johnson named his Maryland plantation “Angola” in 1677), “Bumbarozo” (Niger), “Fullah,” “Ibo” and “Mundingo” (West Sudan). Ritual scars and tribal and linguistic identification were evidence of rich and complex societies in West Africa before black enslavement in the Americas.15 Virginia was a private corporation managed by the Virginia Company until 1624 when its charter was revoked by King James, making it a royal colony. The Royal African Company was granted a monopoly over the English slave trade in 1660 and established trading posts in West Africa; it received a fourth royal charter in 1672 and, by 1689, it had transported 100,000 slaves. The Company retained its monopoly until 1698, but it

Voices from within the Veil

57

continued transporting slaves until 1731. The title “Royal African Company” suggested England had an inherent prerogative to make Africans slaves; King Charles II (reigned 1660-1685) claimed dominion over “all places in the parts of Africa,” granted the Company authority to buy or sell “any Gold, Silver, Negroes, Slaves, wares and merchandizes,” and forbade Englishmen and foreigners from importing “Elephant’s Teeth [ivory], Negro Slaves, Hydes, Wax, Gums or any other Commodities” without Company permission. Within a century after Jamestown’s founding, 12,000 African slaves were in the colony, their numbers having doubled in one decade (16981708). The African Diaspora was history’s largest involuntary population transference. Sub-Saharan West Africans were experienced farmers and craftsmen; their enslavement meant an endlessly reproducible and soon-tobe indigenous labor supply. European nations claimed that they were insufficiently populated to supply their colonies’ labor needs, and slavery became an important cog in the Atlantic economy. But it was invariably a contradictory experience; as some Virginians imported slaves, others worried that too many were arriving. In September 1667/8, the colony’s general court initiated proceedings against “bringing more negroes from Africa than ought to have been brought.”16 Planters and farmers were as wholly attuned to profit as any Las Vegas casino, and slavery created opportunities for wealth, power, and social status. John Rolfe’s successful planting of West Indian tobacco in 1613 sparked a frenzy of tobacco growing, even in Jamestown’s streets; the first shipment to England (1614) sold at profit as smoking became medicinal and fashionable. (Rolfe, killed during the 1622 Massacre, had vehemently opposed the sale of white indentured servants as “a thing most intolerable.”) Tobacco set in motion a fateful demographic process as blacks gradually displaced the need for white indentured servitude; Virginia needed more slaves to sustain its economic growth, and it got them.17

Bearing Witness: Olaudah Equiano One eighteenth century slave blamed European racial prejudice for Africans’ New World enslavement. Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), who published the first autobiographical slave narrative, is the first and only known eighteenth century Virginia ex-slave to publish a narrative. The son of an Ibo (Igbo) chief in the kingdom of Benin (now Nigeria), Equiano was kidnapped and sold at age eleven in 1756. Of his voyage and arrival he later wrote: “We landed up a river a good way from the sea, about

58

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

Virginia country, where we saw few or none of our native Africans, and not one soul who could talk to me.” Renamed Jacob and assigned to fan his sleeping master (a Virginian named Campbell), Equiano spent lonely weeks “weeding grass and gathering stones . . . [while] constantly grieving and pining and wishing for death.” His life changed for the better after his purchase by a British naval officer who renamed him Gustavus Vassa; Equiano purchased his freedom in 1766 and spent the remainder of his life as a leader of the Afro-British community, an antislavery crusader and commissary agent for Britain’s black colony in Sierra Leone. His memoirs, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) appeared in eight British and two American editions.

Fig. 1.7: European American merchants on the waterfront with enslaved African American workers. This scene, taken from a 1751 map, illustrates an unnamed port in Virginia. Drawn by Joshua Fry and Peter Jefferson, the depiction emphasizes the important work performed by blacks in the shipping industry. Courtesy Portsmouth Public Library.

Equiano faulted European racism “against natives of Africa on account of their colour”: “Let the haughty European recollect that his ancestors were once, like the Africans, uncivilized, and even barbarous. Did Nature make them inferior . . . and should they too have been made slaves?” He described slavery in West Africa as different from the dehumanizing type practiced by Europeans and refuted claims that slavery among Africans justified the transatlantic slave trade. Equiano claimed slavery in Africa was often the result of African tribal leaders’ desire for European goods and white traders’ refusal to accept any payment except

Voices from within the Veil

59

slaves: “When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief, and tempts him with his wares. . . . Accordingly he falls on his neighbours and a desperate battle ensues.” Those captured but not sold to Europeans experienced a better fate than those bound for the Americas: “Those prisoners which were not sold or redeemed we kept as slaves but how different was their condition from that of slaves in the West . . . with us they do no more work than other members of the community . . . Some of these slaves have even slaves under them as their own property, and for their own use.” Equiano portrayed Africans as civilized human beings as evidenced by their ability to accurately mark the passage of time, extreme cleanliness, belief in one Creator, and practice of circumcision “like the Jews.”18

Of the Loss of Toes In his novelized family history Roots, Alex Haley’s African-born slave ancestor Kunta Kinte is offered a horrific choice between having his toes cut off or castration as punishment for running away; such gruesome fates were reserved almost exclusively for blacks. Merely four years after the first African arrival, tobacco planter William Capps (?-1630) specified a vicious method of discouraging runaways in a 1623 letter to the deputy treasurer of the Virginia Company: “By hap bring you in 3 or 4 score [6080] slaves to work about a ffort or ther servile worke, but before I deliver them up I will make them sing new Toes, old Toes, no Toes at all, because they shall not outrun me, for . . . they have made us sing a song . . . to the Tune of O man where is thy heart.” This cruel remark is one indication black slavery was already in place during the 1620s, not delayed until the 1640s or 1660s as some historians have suggested. It is also evidence that dismemberment of troublesome slaves’ body parts was sanctioned by custom and law sooner than later. The 1705 General Assembly authorized cutting off ears, penises, hands, and toes “not touching his life, as may be thought fit, for reclaiming such incorrigible slaves, and terrifying others”; more dismemberment laws were enacted between 1723 and 1792. The law would not have tolerated such punishment for white indentured servants but was not so squeamish about inflicting it on African Virginians.19 A century after Jamestown’s founding, Robert “King” Carter (16631733) of Lancaster County, Virginia’s wealthiest planter and owner of four-hundred slaves, received court permission on March 10, 1707/8 to dismember recaptured runaways; Bambarra, Harry and Dinah. Carter, a massive slave importer who and owned more than any other individual in the colony, viewed his role as that of a biblical patriarch owed

60

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

unquestioned obedience and was an eager advocate of cutting off slaves’ toes. “Ballazore is an incorrigible rogue,” he wrote in 1727. “Nothing less than dismembering will reclaim him. I would outlaw him and get a court order for taking off his toes. I have cured many a negro of running away by this means.”20

Quasi-Free: Indentured Servants and Free Blacks Seven white indentured servants in the 1624 muster (census) were members of the House of Burgesses by 1629; free blacks were denied this kind of upward mobility. Some scholars maintain the first African Virginians were indentured servants who, after serving a required term of years, took their place in colonial society as free persons. This is unlikely. On average, twenty slaves were economically cheaper than one white servant; from the beginning, the black experience meant slavery. Indentured servitude historian Abbot Emerson Smith flatly declared “there was never any such thing as perpetual slavery for any white man in any English colony.” It is said Europeans did not feel free unless they were oppressing others; whites never considered any black their equal, even those who were free. The Chesapeake region (Virginia and Maryland) was settled by white men aspiring to become feudal lords in a society that they did not intend to share with Indians and blacks as alienated equals. Racial coexistence did not mean racial equality.21 Some Africans were slaves; some served indentures or purchased freedom “while retaining pride in their African past.” In Anglo-Virginia, some whites believed that they could prevail against blacks with impunity and exploited them by extending their indentures, sometimes into life bondage. Andrew Moore of James City County filed suit against his master George Light who sought to hold him indefinitely beyond a fiveyear indenture that would have made Moore a slave in all but name. But in October 1673 the county general court ordered “that the Said Moore bee free from his said master, and that the Said Mr. Light pay him Corn and Clothes According to the Custome of the Country and four hundred Pounds tobacco & Caskes for his service Done him Since he was free, and pay Costs”22 Clio, the Greek goddess of history, has a sense of irony in that Anthony Johnson, who entered history as ‘Antonio a Negro’ when sold at Jamestown in 1621 with the first slaves, subsequently morphed into a slaveholder. “John Casor Negro,” conveyed to the colony as an indentured servant, desperately sought the support of three white men, Robert and George Parker and Samuel Goldsmith; their testimony

Voices from within the Veil

61

supported his claim of having a seven or eight-year indenture, that Johnson had kept him seven years “longer than hee ought” and owed him some cows as payment for his service. But Johnson insisted Casor had been purchased as a slave for life, and because Casor could not produce a valid indenture, a Northampton County court upheld Johnson’s legal claim in June 1655. Members of the Johnson family, publicly embarrassed by their patriarch’s lack of racial solidarity, privately felt otherwise. After the clan moved to Maryland, Casor was freed and prospered there during the 1670s.23 Commemorative publicity acclaims Jamestown as the birthplace of American representative democracy because its first legislative body, the House of Burgesses, convened in August 1619. Nevertheless, it was flawed by an Europeanized racism exemplified in the treatment of free blacks in Virginia and what later became the American South. Tenacious and savvy, this purgatory racial caste contradicted slavery though as long as it existed free blacks knew they could never be absolutely free; as of 1691 slaves could not be freed unless their owner transported them out of the colony within six months. Whether born free, purchased or given their freedom, free blacks were confined to the narrowest margins of liberty. They could not vote, serve in the militia, hold public office, serve on juries and were intermittently permitted to testify against whites in court; as of 1639 they were forbidden to own firearms–a perilous situation in a dangerous frontier. In 1662, Virginia declared children slave or free according to the condition of their mother, not their father as under English law, meaning most black women’s children would be slaves (partus sequitur ventrem). The option to obtain freedom by means of Christian baptism was eliminated in 1667 when legislators decreed “the conferring of baptism doth not alter the condition of a person as to his bondage or freedom.” Free blacks were required to obey the laws, including racially discriminatory ones; the first direct legal reference to them was enacted in 1668: “Negro women though permitted to enjoy their freedom . . . are still liable to the payment of taxes.” (Beginning in 1644, blacks between the ages of sixteen and sixty were declared tithable.) Race became the legal grounds for enslavement in 1682 when Virginia declared that all persons imported into the colony from non-Christian or non-white countries would be slaves. These and other de jure and de facto constraints persisted beyond 1776 (the Declaration of Independence), 1789 (the U. S. Constitution), 1865 (the Thirteenth Amendment) and 1954 (Brown v. Board of Education). If American democracy is as laudable as some claim, why were free blacks treated as semi-slaves and pariahs? If

62

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

democracy is humanity’s best political system, why were free blacks denied the rights and privileges of American citizenship prior to (and after) 1865? Racism is one answer to this fateful question.24 “History never moves in only one direction at a time,” contends Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, a historian of the previous millennium. Between 1619 and 1640, white racism had created a patriarchal pseudoaristocratic ruling caste in a society of antagonisms and anxieties and seething discontent. Wrathful and fearful, planter elites ruthlessly maintained power through appeals to white solidarity, electoral bribery, intimidation or punishment with prudent distinctions contingent on malefactors’ race and social status. By the end of the seventeenth century, in the words of one scholar, the Old Dominion was “a volatile society of exploiting landholders and the discontented landless, of wealthy planters and resentful slaves and servants, of a few big winners and multitude of angry losers.”25

Some Are Not Created Equal During the Revolutionary War, as an example of nationalistic amnesia, Americans and the British traded charges over who was responsible for slavery. The former ridiculed the “hypocrisy which pervaded the whole” of the Declaration of Independence’s “cloud of words” and pretense that “all men are created equal.” Its charge of “inciting domestic insurrections” reflected freedom offers to slaves who had sided with the British. After the war, some Americans were uneasy about their rhetorical hypocrisy and equalitarian doublespeak while tolerating human bondage.26 Black Americans, sharing a collective memory and identity rooted in their slavery experience and encouraged by their Afro-Christianity and limited perpetuation of West African cultural values, evinced an audacious desire for freedom and citizenship despite a revivified white supremacy. The General Assembly tightened previous laws while enacting new racially discriminatory statutes against slaves (1792) and free blacks (1793); among other things, the former was deemed personal property while the latter were required to register in their residency with local authorities. As the eighteenth century drew to a close, some black Virginians took matters into their own hands. Gabriel Prosser’s goals were not only his race’s liberation but economic, political and social equality with whites, but his 1800 uprising proved more of an insurrectionthat-might-have-been because of betrayal, bad weather, and bad luck. Nat Turner’s bloody rebellion in 1831, a generation later terrorized whites for

Voices from within the Veil

63

the remainder of the century. Virginia undertook a special census that asked free blacks if they were willing to emigrate to Africa but it was too late–for both races. By then, blacks were no longer ‘Africans’; Thomas Jefferson’s former slave mistress Sally Hemings was among those who overwhelmingly rejected any ‘voluntary return’ to a land as alien to nineteenth-century African Virginians as the South Pole.27 By the 1830s, perhaps with smug self-satisfaction about the British Empire’s abolition of the slave trade (1807) and slavery (1833), British tourists criticized slavery and a prevailing racism Americans barely noticed in everyday situations. In his travelogue American Notes, British novelist Charles Dickens visited Richmond and decried slavery’s continuation and prejudice against blacks. Any free black could be arbitrarily jailed and sold into slavery “on no process, for no crime, and on no pretence of crime. This seems incredible, even of America, but it is the law.” A Mrs. Felton, struck by the ubiquitousness of racial prejudice, wrote that it was considered “shockingly coarse and vulgar to converse in accents of kindness with negroes” and white children deemed black adults as beneath their contempt and to be insulted with impunity. Animals too, were taught racist attitudes; Felton claimed dogs were trained to bark at blacks and described a parrot who unleashed “degrading curses at the head of every passing negro.”28

Coda: The Next 400 Years On the nine-and-a-half minute title track of the O’Jays’ 1973 landmark album Ship Ahoy, the Philadelphia soul trio somberly sings of the Middle Passage, their vocals accompanied by a foreboding background of the ocean’s turbulent waves, flapping sails of a creaking wooden slave ship, and cracking whips: “As far as your eyes can see/Men, women and baby slaves comin’ to the land of liberty/Can’t you feel the motion of the ocean?”29 Were racism and slavery necessary? Could they have become the road not taken? When realistically assessed, African enslavement seemed almost inevitable. Native Americans had a mixed record of armed resistance and Old World disease vulnerability. Moreover, Europeans were unwilling to enslave whites. To create slaves, someone had to be inferiorized, dehumanized, and demonized. This process, applied by the Spanish with limited success against Indians in Central and South America and later Africans, constituted racism. The next phase was a legal system that made slavery racial and hereditary; slaves became the linchpins in a

64

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

new global economy of colonialism, mercantilism and capitalism that made sugar, cotton, tobacco and other cash crops and industries profitable. Slavery, an iniquity rooted in the past, echoes to the present. Earlier this year, slave apology legislation eventually passed by the Virginia General Assembly sparked an unsurprisingly heated public debate. Some opposed any apology because they resent being symbolically or literally blamed for sins and crimes not their own. What these opponents really meant, and this especially true for American southerners, is that apologizing for slavery means their race and ancestors were wrong, evil, and racist; this means they too, are wrong, evil, and racist. But “a nation in denial can not exert mature world leadership in shaping the contours of the twenty-first century.”30 As America basks in moral self-congratulations because of slavery’s abolition one-hundred-forty years ago, and, at the same time, Jamestown’s founding is celebrated as the birth of representative democracy, the quadric-centennial also represents a four-hundred-year-old wound in need of healing. As a cornerstone and millstone, racism made slavery, and slavery made America. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, slaves never forgot their physical and psychological scars; whether their descendants will do so is the subject for another essay.

Notes * This paper is an expanded revision of an earlier analysis: “Coming to America: The Foundations of African Slavery in Virginia, 1619-1830,” The Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History conference session “Foundation and Legal Consideration of Slavery,” Atlanta, Georgia, October 15, 1994 and was presented as “Jamestown Shuffle: Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1619-1830,” Session A: The Theory and Practice of Race in Early Virginia, “America’s 400th Anniversary: Voices From Within the Veil” conference (Norfolk State University), Norfolk, Virginia, February 23, 2007; see also Ervin L. Jordan Jr., “Jamestown, Virginia, 1607-1907: An Overview,” Jamestown Virtual Colony website, University of Virginia, Curry School of Education. 1 I am indebted to Dr. James S. Beard, Curator of Earth Sciences, Virginia Museum of Natural History, Martinsville, Virginia, for information about Africa and Virginia’s origins in Pangaea. 2 Jeffrey L. Sheler, “Rethinking Jamestown,” Smithsonian vol. 35, no. 10 (January 2005), 48-55; Jamestown 2007 home page ; Tim Hashaw, “The First Black Americans: A Group of Enslaved Africans Changed Jamestown and the Future of A Nation,” U. S. News & World Report (January 29-February 5, 2007): 63 (“Special Report” section); Avery Chenoweth, Empires in the Forest: Jamestown

Voices from within the Veil

65

and the Beginning of America (Earlysville, Virginia: Rivanna Foundation; distributed by University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville and London, 2006), 170 (photo), 182, 187 (photo), 204-205 (lists of actors); the black reenactors are identified in the acknowledgments pages. See T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Own Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) for the history of the Johnson family. The best study of American cultural history remains Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991). 3 Richard T. Couture, To Preserve and Protect: A History of the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (Dallas, Texas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1984), 9-12 (1807 celebrations); Moreau Bowers Jamestown Orations, 1834-1837, Accession #1806, Special Collections Dept., University of Virginia Library (UVA), 10 & 12; Tommy L. Bogger, Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia, 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 133, 222n35; Old Dominion Society, First Celebration of the Anniversary of the Settlement at Jamestown, Va., on the 13th of May, 1607, Hon. George W. Summers, Orator (New York: Pudney & Russell, 1860), 3-6, 7-83, 84, 87-97, 94-95; Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition, The Official Blue Book of the Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition, A. D. 1907/The Only Authorized History of the Celebration/Illustrated (Norfolk: Colonial Publishing Company, Inc., 1909), chapter18 (“Negro Participation”); Giles B. Jackson and Daniel Webster Davis, The Industrial History of the Negro Race of the United States (Richmond, Va.: The Virginia Press, 1908), 18, 392, passim; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Meta Warrick's 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory,” The Journal of American History, 89 (March 2003), 1375-1376, 1380, 1384-1385, 1397-1398; Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory, 368, 549, 552-553, 683 (Michaux); “Church Leaders Silent About Land Sale: Elder Michaux, Church Founder, Bought Land to Build Black Center,” New Journal & Guide (Norfolk), June 3, 1998; “Tears and Protest at Mock Slave Sale,” New York Times, Oct. 11, 1994; “Slave Auction in Williamsburg,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, Oct. 12, 1994; Paul Evans, “Scripting History: Culture Wars Challenge Historical Museums,” The University of Virginia Magazine (Winter 2006), 42-45; James Oliver Horton, “Slavery in American History: An Uncomfortable National Dialogue,” in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: New Press, 2006), 34, 49-53. 4 Richmond Afro-American articles: “Reader Blasts Jamestown Commemoration” (Wilder editorial letter), August 23, 1969, and, “Black Settlers’ Descendants Observe 350th Anniversary,” September 27, 1969. (The Richmond Afro-American ceased publication in 1996.) In 1992, as governor of Virginia, Wilder unveiled a state historical maker “First Africans in English America” commemorating the arrival of the “twenty and odd” Africans. Calder Loth, Virginia Landmarks of Black History (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 105-107.

66 5

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

George Schedler, Racist Symbols and Reparations: Philosophical Reflections on Vestiges of the American Civil War (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 10 (racism’s prerequisites); Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), xiii, 153; David Brion Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80 (1820s figures); Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1970), 216-218. A decade ago, an academic journal of early American history devoted an entire issue to the development of race in Europe, Africa, the Near East, Africa, and the Americas: “Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World,” The William and Mary Quarterly: A Magazine of Early American History and Culture, 3rd. ser., 54 (January 1997), 3-252. 6 Clifford M. Lewis and Albert J. Loomie, The Spanis Jesuit Mission in Virginia, 1570-1572 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Virginia Historical Society by the University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 7; Thomas C. Parramore, Peter C. Stuart, and Tommy L. Bogger, Norfolk: The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 1-12 (Ajacan); Felipe FernandezArmesto, Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), 459; James A. Sweet, “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 54 (January 1997), 142-166; Bartolomâe de las Casas, The Spanish Colonie, or Brief Chronicle of the Actes and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the newe World, for the space of XL. yeeres; written in the Castilian tongue by the reuerend Bishop Bartholomew de las Casas or Casaus, A Friar of the order of S. Dominicke, And now first translated into english, by M. M. S. (London: Thomas Dawson for William Broome, 1583, Imprinted at London at the three Cranes in the Vintres by Thomas Dawson for William Broome, 1583), “The Summe of the disputation between Fryer Barttlemenwe de las Casas or Casaus, and Doctor Sepulueda,” “Doctor Sepulueda his prologue to the Lords of the assemblie,” “The Bishop of Chiapa his prologue to the Lords of the assemblie,” passim, also cited in Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward The Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 57n25; E. Brooks Holifield, Era of Persuasion: American Thought and Culture, 1521-1680 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), 65 (Las Casas information); Sharon Harley, The Timetables of African-American History: A Chronology of the Most Important People and Events in AfricanAmerican History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 7; Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia articles: “Valladolid Debate,” “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” and “Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda.” Valladolid was the capital of the Kingdom of Spain, 1400s to 1561.Charles V (reigned 1519-1556), as King Charles I of Spain, was as the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who financed the voyages of Christopher Columbus. Harley (7) incorrectly states “King Charles I of England” granted a license (asiento) to import slaves in 1518; in actuality it was Charles I of Spain. 7 Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Over-land to the Remote and Farthest

Voices from within the Veil

67

Distant Quarters of the Earth at any time within the compasse of these 1600 Yeeres (Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1903-05), 10: 184-185 (also cited in Jordan, White Over Black, 61n37); William O. Foss, It Happened First in Virginia (Norfolk and Virginia Beach: The Donning Co., 1990), 94-95, 106, 116; “An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (citation 47 Geo III Sess. 1 c. 36) cited in Peter M. Bergman, The Chronological History of the Negro In America (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 7; Alan Hamilton, “Slaver's Descendant Begs Forgiveness: Briton Apologises to African Nation for the Exploits of His Elizabethan Ancestor,” TimesOnline [The Times of London)], http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2236871,00.html>, June 22, 2006. Ironically, 2007 also marked the bicentennial of Britain’s abolition of the slave trade in 1807. 8 Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 3-7, 10-12; Gretchen Gerzina, Black London: Life Before Emancipation (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 3-5; Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 263; E. W. Bovill, The Golden Trade of the Moors, second ed. rev. and with additional material by Robin Hallett (London: Oxford University Press, 1970),157159, 169-170, 201-202, 204; William Harrison, Harrison’s Description of England in Shakespeare’s Youth, Part III: The Supplement, ser. 6, no. 9, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: Published for the New Shakespeare Society, by N. Trubner & Co., 1881), 150, 151; Leyla Keough, “Great Britain,” in Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 861. 9 Act 4, scene 1, 90-98; Thomas K. Grose, “A World of Change: Who Knew About Jamestown? In 1607, There Was Too Much Else Going On,” U. S. News & World Report (January 29-February 5, 2007): 74, 76 (“Special Report” section); George M. Frederickson, The Arrogance of Race (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 191-195; James Walvin, Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Short Illustrated History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983), 123; Hardin Craig and David Bevington, eds., The Complete Works of Shakespeare, revised edition (Glenview, Illinois: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1973), 105, 369, 381, 391, 522, 523, 976; Tim Hashaw, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007), 5-10, 22-24; Jordan, White Over Black, 5, 8, 37-39, 40; Keough, “Great Britain,” 860 (Blacks in London streets); Stephen Porter, Lord Have Mercy Upon Us: London’s Plague Years (Stroud, Gloucestershire, Great Britain: Tempus Publishing Limited, 2005), 121, 178 (Othello’s 1610 performance). 10 Craig and Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 1247-1249, 1254, 1270, 1320 & Shakespeare’s sonnets (Sonnets 127, 130, 131, 132), 468-469, 471, 492493, 1311; Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Race: An Interpretation,” in Appiah and Gates, Africana, 1576, 1577; Jordan, White Over Black, 8-9 (Shakespeare as a race apologist); Chenoweth, Empires in the Forest, 170-171; Ayanna Thompson, ed., Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4 (among the first African-Americans known to have played

68

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

Caliban was noted actor Canada Lee in 1945), 23n4, 42, 159, 168; Richard Covington, “The Rebirth of Shakespeare’s Globe,” Smithsonian 28 (Nov. 1997): 72 (London estimates). 11 George Washington Williams, History of the Negro Race In America From 1619-1880 (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1882), 1:116-20; James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery In Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1902), 7-8; Edward D. Neill, Virginia Vetusta, During the Reign of James The First; Containing Letters and Documents Never Before Printed (Albany, New York: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1885), 112-16; Edward D. Neill, Virginia Carolorum: The Colony Under the Rule of Charles the First and Second, A. D. 1625-A. D. 1685, Based Upon Manuscripts and Documents of The Period (Albany, New York: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1886), 405; Wesley Frank Craven, “The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 10 (Nov. 1930): 461, 463-65; Counseil for Virginia, A declaration of the state of the colony and affaires in Virginia, With the names of the adventurors, and summes adventured in that action, By His Maiesties Counseil for Virginia, Second edition, second issue (London, Printed by Thomas Snodham, 1620), 9-10, 20, 43 (“Adventurers” were Virginia Company stockholders); Wesley Craven, White, Red and Black: The Seventeenth Century Virginian (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1971), 77-81; Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the `20. and Odd Negroes' Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. ser., 54 (April 1997): 397-96 (San Juan Bautista); Hashaw, Birth of Black America, 71-75, 86-95, 105108, 291-293 (White Lion); Alden T. Vaughan, Roots of American Racism: Essays on the Colonial Experience (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 134 (slave ship Fortune); P. Sterling Stuckey, “Reflections on the Scholarship of African Origins and Influence in American Slavery,” The Journal of African American History, 91 (Fall 2006), 426-429; Craig and Bevington, Complete Works of Shakespeare, 523-524 (Shakespeare quote, The Merchant of Venice). I recently encountered the term “Jamestonians” in Warren M. Billings, “Jamestown,” in James C. Kelly and Barbara Clark Smith Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings (Washington and New York: Smithsonian Books, 2007), 73. 12 Counseil for Virginia, A declaration of the state of the colony and affaires in Virginia, With the names of the adventurors, and summes adventured in that action, By His Maiesties Counseil for Virginia, Second edition, second issue (London, Printed by Thomas Snodham, 1620), 10; R. B., The Englis Empire in America (London, Printed for Nathaniel Crouch at the Bell in the Poultry near Cheapside, 1685), 129-37; Sir William Berkeley, A Discourse and View of Virginia (London, 1663; reprint edition by Thomas R. Stewart, Norwalk, Connecticut: William H. Smith, Jr., 1914), 3; June Purcell Guild, Black Laws of Virginia: A Summary of The Legislative Acts of Virginia Concerning Negroes From Earliest Times To The Present (Whittet & Shepperson, 1936; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), 45-46; Conway Whittle Sams, The Conquest of Virginia: The Third Attempt 1610-1624: Virginia Founded Under the Charters of 1609 and 1612 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1939), 476-543 (“If our ancestors” quote). According to Hashaw, Birth of Black America, 159, no African

Voices from within the Veil

69

Virginians are known to have been killed during the 1622 Indian attack; of 1,200 white colonists, 347 were killed. 13 Armstead L. Robinson, “A New Birth of Freedom: Reflections on the 375th Anniversary of the African Arrival in Virginia,” 17-19, folder post 1994 August, Box 6 (temporary), Armstead L. Robinson Papers, Accession #12836, UVA, “racialism” quote; Jordan, White Over Black, 61-62n38; Alden T. Vaughan, “Blacks In Virginia: A Note on the First Decade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 29 (July 1972), 470-476; “The Randolph Manuscript: Virginia Seventeenth Century Records,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 15 (April 1908), 405 (the 1618 “slave” law suggests convicted lawbreakers’s temporary loss of liberty but a loss of liberty nonetheless); “A List of Names: of the Living in Virginia February the 16 1623” and “Musters of the Inhabitants of Virginia 1624/5,” in John C. Hotten, The Original Lists of Persons of Quality (London: Chatto and Windus, 1874), 172-73, 178-79, 182, 185, 190, 217-18, 222, 224, 241, 244, 258; Virginia General Assembly, Senate Document (Extra), Colonial Records of Virginia (Richmond: R. F. Walker, 1874), 40, 42, 45, 46, 49, 51, 55; Billings, “Jamestown,” Jamestown, Quebec, Santa Fe, 77 (“32 negroes”). According to Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Laborer in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), Virginia’s 1624-25 population of 1,227 included 487 servants (thirty-nine percent) and twenty-three blacks (1.8 percent), 328. For Vaughan’s revised and expanded version his 1972 article, see “Blacks in Virginia: Evidence from the First Decade,” Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 128-135. One biblical justification of slavery was the story of Ham, Noah’s youngest son who did not cover his father’s drunken nakedness for which he and his posterity were cursed: “Cursed be to Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be” (Genesis 9: 20-27). This was racially interpreted as Canaanites, Egyptians, Numidians, Ethiopians, and, eventually, Africans and African-Americans. Frank S. Mead, Who’s Who In The Bible (New York City: Galahad Books, 1934), 13. 14 Guild, Black Laws of Virginia, 21; “Decisions of the Virginia General Court,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 5 (January 1898), 236. 15 Jordan, White Over Black, 45, 63-64, 66, 72-82; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 329 (“unwhite” quote); Vaughan, Roots of American Racism, 7, 10, 109-112, 147, 304n45 (Smith comments); Molefi Kete Asante, African American History: A Journey of Liberation (Maywood, New Jersey: Peoples Publishing Group, 1995), 86; John Michael Vlach, By The Work of Their Hands: Studies in Afro-American Folklife (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 165; Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance In Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 40, 42, 44-45, 47, 103, 215 (tribal identities); Breen and Innes, Myne Own Ground, 17 (Angola plantation). I define Afrocentricity as the focusing of any analysis of African/black history, themes, ideas, morals, achievements, behavior, and culture on Africans/blacks and what they have said, written, or accomplished. In this view, black/Africans are the center of their own being and history.

70 16

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

“The Fourth Charter of The Royal African Company of England, September 27, 1672, with Prefatory Note, Exhibiting The Past Relation of Virginia to African Slavery,” in R. A Brock, ed., Miscellaneous Papers, 1672-1865, Now First Printed from the Manuscript in the Collections of the Virginia Historical Society; Comprising Charter of the Royal African Company, 1672 . . . (Richmond, Va.: The Society, 1887), 47, 48, 49; Mullin, Flight and Rebellion, 16 (slave population); H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council and General Court of Colonial Virginia, 1622-1632, 1670-1676, with Notes and Excerpts from Original Council and General Court Records, into 1683, Now Lost, second edition (Richmond: Virginia State Library, 1979), 519. Slave trading was a risky business. Thomas Harrison, with palpable relief in a 1752 letter to his wife, reported his safe arrival in Virginia after a “very good voyage” of six weeks from the Gambia with 130 slaves: “As for the Slaves Doing us any harm They never So much as attempted to do us any Thank God for it.” Photograph of a letter, Thomas Harrison to his wife, Elizabeth Harrison, describing a voyage from the Gambia River region in Africa with slaves for Virginia, 2 July 31, 1752, Accession #4313, UVA. 17 Morgan, American Slavery, 90, 128, 295-308. Although disagreeing with Morgan’s thesis that slavery preceded racism, I profited from his insightful chapter 15, “Toward Slavery” and chapter 16, “Toward Racism.” King James deplored tobacco as “a filthy novelty” and smoking “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.” James I, King of England, A Counterblast to Tobacco (Imprinted at London by R. B., 1604). 18 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, 2nd ed., 2 volumes (London: Printed and sold for the author by T. Wilkins; sold also by Mr. Johnson, St. Paul's Church Yard, 1789), 1:16, 19, 23-32, 40-43, 90-95, 264-265; for a discussion of the significance of slave narratives, especially those by Virginia ex-slaves, see Ervin L. Jordan Jr., “Queen Victoria’s Refugees: Afro-Virginians and Anglo-Confederate Diplomacy,” in Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, eds., Virginia’s Civil War (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 152-164. 19 Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 244-250; William Capps to John Ferrar, 31 March 1623, folder 34, Robert Warwick Papers/Papers of Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, 1607-24, Accession #9202, UVA (original Capps letter); Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1906-35), 4: 76-77 (Capps letter transcript); Guild, Black Laws of Virginia, 51 (1705), 53 (1723), 57 (1748), 152-153 (1705 & 1723), 157 (1769), 160 (1792); Schedler, Racist Symbols, 96; Philip J. Schwarz, Slave Laws in Virginia (Athens and Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 28, 64, 71-75. “William Cappe” is identified as a resident of “Elizabeth Cittie”(Elizabeth City County) in Virginia General Assembly, Colonial Records of Virginia, “Lists Of The Living & Dead In Virginia, Feb. 16, 1623,” p. 53, and “an old [tobacco] planter” (1623), Indian fighter and a frequent Virginia correspondent in Morgan, American Slavery, 109, 112-113, 123; see “William Capps” in Sara B. Bearss, et al., eds., Dictionary of Virginia Biography, vol. 3: Caperton-Daniels (Richmond Library of Virginia, 2006): 8-10. The television miniseries “Roots,” became a national phenomenon of

Voices from within the Veil

71

continuing cultural influence and was viewed by 85 percent of American households during January 1977, igniting interest, particularly among AfricanAmericans, in genealogical research. Roots is currently classified by the Library of Congress as “Afro-American—Biography”; for its place in African-American studies, see Gary B. and Elizabeth Shown Mills, “Roots and the New ‘Faction’: A Legitimate Tool for Clio?” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (Jan. 1981), 3-26. 20 Morgan, American Slavery 313, 314 (Bambarra Harry and Dinah); Robert S. Cope, Carry Me Back: Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth Century Virginia (Pikeville, Kentucky: Pikeville College Press of the Appalachian Studies Center, 1973), 37-40; Peter Charles Hoffler and William B. Scott, eds., Criminal Proceedings In Colonial Virginia (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 75-76, 133-134; “Robert Carter” in Bearss, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, 3: 84-86; Guild, Black Laws of Virginia, 51. 21 Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 171, 297 (in this 435-page study only one black Virginia indentured servant is named: Benjamin Lewis of Stafford County, 244245, 387n26); Holifield, Era of Persuasion, 7; Anthony S. Parent, Jr., Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 15-27, 60-65; Richard Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 110; Ira Berlin, “Coming to Terms with Slavery in Twenty-First-Century America,” Horton and Horton, Slavery and Public History, 9; Russell Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies 16 (Winter 1977), 354-390. Menard is silent on racism as a motivation for African enslavement and contends greed for tobacco profits and stagnation of the AngloAmerican population led to slavery, but see his “From Servants to Slaves,” 378381. 22 Breen and Innes, Myne Own Ground, 4-5; Holifield, Era of Persuasion, 87 (“African pride” quote); H. R. McIlwaine, ed., Minutes of the Council, 354. For a 1691 case with an outcome similar to Moore’s, see Smith, Colonists in Bondage, 243-244. 23 Susie M. Ames, Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1940), 103-104; Warren M. Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606-1689 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 155-156; Breen and Innes, Myne Own Ground, 8, 13-17. 24 Guild, Black Laws of Virginia, 23-26, 37, 46, 94, 126, 129; William Waller Hening, The Statues at Large: Being A Collection of All the Laws of Virginia (Richmond: Printed by and for Samuel Pleasants, junior, printer to the Commonwealth, 1810) 2:260 (1667 law). 25 Fernandez-Armesto, Millennium, 459 (“History never moves” quote); Holifield, Era of Persuasion, 38 (“losers” quote). 26 [John Lind and Jeremy Bentham], An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London: Printed for T. Cadell in the Strand; J. Walter, Charing-cross; and T. Sewell, near the Royal Exchange, 1776), 107, 119, 120, 13; David

72

Foundations of American Racism and Slavery in Virginia, 1690-1830

Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA and London, England: Harvard University Press, 2007), 173-186; Berlin, “Coming to Terms with Slavery,” 14-17. 27 Guild, Black Laws of Virginia, 64-67, 95; Eva Sheppard Wolf, Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner's Rebellion (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 14-21, 34-38, 87-88; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 51-52; Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., “A Just and True Account: Two 1833 Parish Censuses of Albemarle County Free Blacks,” The Magazine of Albemarle County History 53 (1995): 114-139. Philip Schwarz convincingly suggests some West African legal practices survived among African Virginians at least until the early nineteenth century. Schwarz, Slave Laws, 13-32. 28 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London: Chapman and Hall, 1842), 2: 22, 256-257; Mrs. Felton, Life in America: A Narrative of Two Years City & Country Residence in the United States (Hull: Printed by John Hutchinson, Scale-Lane; and sold by Simpkin and Marshall, London, and by all booksellers, 1838), 62, 64, 66. During World War II many white Britons did not always agree with American segregation practices against black American troops; in racial disputes between black and white soldiers, British civilians usually sided with black GIs. G. H. Bennett, Destination Normandy: Three American Regiments on D-Day (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger Security International, 2007), 42-48. 29 The O‘Jays, Ship Ahoy, Philadelphia International Records, ©1973 CBS, Inc., KZ-32408, stereo album; reissued 2003 Epic/Legacy, EK 61470, compact disc. The transcription of the lyrics is mine. The O’Jays were among the most popular soul music groups of the 1970s. 30 Bob Deans, “‘Profound Regret’ Is Warranted: As It Should, Virginia Apologizes for Slavery,” Washington Post, February 25, 2007, B8; “House Passes Apology: Senate Ponders Own Slavery Resolution,” February 3, 2007, and “Lawmakers Pass Roads, Slavery Bills,” February 25, 2007, both Charlottesville Daily Progress; Robinson, “A New Birth of Freedom,” 17-19, (“nation in denial” quote).

CHAPTER TWO EARLY STRUGGLES FOR EMPOWERMENT

Fig. 2.1: The Grigby Party fights back after being attacked by a party of fugitive slave hunters in 1855. Courtesy The Underground Railroad by William Still.

The fight for freedom took many forms in the years before Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment. For some, the quest for empowerment took the form of land ownership and court battles. J. R. Kerr-Ritchie argues that Bacon’s Rebellion symbolizes the last effort by both blacks and whites to push back the forces of a powerful oligarchy intent on establishing a society divided by class and race. Brent Morris and Cassandra Newby-Alexander highlight the quest for liberty by enslaved African Americans through marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp and the Underground Railroad routes from Virginia northward. By focusing on Hampton Roads, Morris and NewbyAlexander discuss the ways in which the Underground Railroad posed serious challenges to the slaveocracy in America and constituted a heretofore ignored early migration of southern blacks to the North and Canada. Richard Junger takes this narrative further by describing the role

74

Chapter Two

that H. O. Wagoner had in supporting the Underground Railroad in Chicago. Then, Rodney Roberts conceptualizes the issues involved in the theme of “forty acres and a mule,” which became a mantra for blacks’ demands for rectification and justice. He discusses how blacks struggled to achieve citizenship in post-Civil War America by means of land acquisition. Unlike the assistance given to white indentured servants a century before, blacks were only given the hope of the proverbial “forty acres and a mule.” The reality was very different, although many struggled to achieve land despite the obstacles of a resentful white ruling class.

‘THEIR HOPED FOR LIBERTY’: SLAVES AND BACON’S 1676 REBELLION JEFFREY R. KERR-RITCHIE, HOWARD UNIVERSITY I am the American heartbreakRock on which Freedom Stumps its toeThe great mistake That Jamestown Made long ago —Langston Hughes, “American Heartbreak”

On September 19, 1676, Jamestown was burned to the ground. Its arsonists consisted of a motley crew of small planters, English and Irish indentured servants, and enslaved Africans, led by Nathaniel Bacon, Jr. This planter and council member had become increasingly disenchanted with English colonial Governor Sir William Berkeley, who seemed either unable or incapable of stopping American Indian attacks on frontier settlements. Bacon offered freedom to potential followers in exchange for military support against the Governor. Although an English fleet was soon dispatched, and Bacon’s unexpected death on October 26 from the “bloody flux” (dysentery) removed the revolt’s leadership, many of the motley crew continued their rebellion. Captain Thomas Grantham was eventually sent to deal with the remaining rebels. He blockaded the major rebel garrison at West Point in Gloucester County, forced its surrender, and captured between 250 and 300 armed freemen, indentured servants, and self-emancipated slaves. A smaller garrison of twenty servants and eighty slaves, however, proved a more formidable task. The Captain informed the rebels that the King’s commissioners were en route to hear their grievances, and he promised freedom to the servants and slaves. This information proved spurious, and the rebels were eventually returned to their respective degrees of unfreedom. Colonial order had been restored.1 There have been three major scholarly interpretations of Bacon’s 1676 rebellion. An older view held that Bacon’s revolt represented a democratic

76

Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion

protest against aristocratic rule that served as a “forerunner” to the American Revolution. Thomas Wertenbaker’s Torchbearer of the Revolution published in 1940 epitomized this view.2 This interpretation was challenged by Wilcomb Washcomb’s 1957 publication The Governor and the Rebel, which argued that Bacon’s revolt represented little more than a local power struggle between two strong personalities over colonial governance.3 Both interpretations represented a traditional political history that became increasingly undermined by the advent of social history from the 1960s onwards. Rather than belonging to a tradition of American anticolonialism or representing an individual political contest, Bacon’s revolt came to be seen as a vivid expression of class warfare. The pioneering work for this third scholarly interpretation of Bacon’s revolt hailed from an unusual source: American Slavery, American Freedom published in 1975 was written by Edmund Morgan, an historian at Yale University who had been writing traditional political histories of the American Revolution for decades.4 Over the past thirty years, this view of 1676 as a populist rebellion has taken one of two forms: either a protest of indentured servants against conditions of poverty, or, a class alliance among white servants and black slaves seeking greater freedoms.5 It is not hard to explain the popularity of this third scholarly interpretation of Bacon’s revolt. It has proved to be durable because it fits both a liberal agenda of diversity as well as a more radical agenda of white and black, unite and fight. It misses, however, a great deal especially with regard to the role of enslaved Africans. There is little explanation for the historical roots of slave unrest culminating in Bacon’s revolt. It is usually assumed that Bacon’s followers shared the same agenda of anti-elite disaffection, when it is clear that their different social positions made similar goals very unlikely. Why did eighty slaves remain as the last bastion of support for the revolt? What happened to slave discontent after the defeat of the uprising? Most important, what does the role of slaves in Bacon’s revolt tell us about the broader relationship between political crises and much hoped for liberties by enslaved people throughout American history? Tim Hashaw’s recently published Birth of Black America does an excellent job demonstrating the Angolan roots of the first African Americans in seventeenth century colonial Virginia. We now know even more about what I refer to as the FFAVs: First Families of AfroVirginians. Unfortunately, Hashaw’s book adds little to explaining why enslaved Africans would feel aggrieved enough to join Bacon, help burn down Jamestown, and risk their lives for liberty. (People with something to lose make poor rebels!) Indeed, the whole notion of the Creole

Voices from within the Veil

77

generation fails to explain the participation of African-descended peoples in revolts such as that of 1676.6 The beginnings of an explanation must be sought in a tradition of unrest among unfree laborers in colonial Virginia, especially enslaved Africans. According to the Virginia Council’s minutes for early September 1644, Africans working for Mrs. Wormley who had engaged in “riotous & rebellious conduct,” had been “apprehended” after one week. In 1661 in York County, Isaac Friend planned to bring together some forty servants, “get arms,” and march through the countryside. They would recruit others interested in liberty “and free [them] from bondage,” presumably enslaved Africans. In September 1663, nine laborers from Gloucester county were accused of “Rebellious proceedings” and “sedition in this said Country to rayse up, and warr to Levy, and make and wholly submit and distroy ye State of this County of Vir’g.” They planned to break into some houses, seize “armes and amunicons of Warr,” distribute these weapons to thirty other persons, and “kill and murder all and Every Pson and Psons” who stood in their way. In the original court proceedings republished in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography in 1908, all nine major plotters had English or Welsh-sounding names with no references to ethnic origins or legal conditions. In his American Negro Slave Revolts published in 1943, Herbert Aptheker claimed the events of 1663 to be the “first serious conspiracy involving Negro slaves in English America.” On the other hand, the 1908 Virginia Magazine of History and Biography titled its republication “The Servants Plot of 1663.” Subsequent scholars have also focused only on white servant involvement.7 Despite the paucity of the evidence, however, the tradition of popular unrest in seventeenth century Virginia makes it extremely unlikely that any uprising or rebellion did not involve slaves. This is evident from even a cursory glance at colonial statutes. During the 1660-61 legislative session, the Virginia Assembly passed the following law: That in case any English servant shall run away in company with any negroes who are incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time, Bee it enacted that the English so running away in company with them shall serve for the time of the said negroes absence as they are to do for their owne by a former act.

This law suggests several things: Africans were self-emancipating themselves; indentured servants were also running away, often with Africans; some Africans were serving for life—“incapable of making satisfaction by addition of time;” and the situation was urgent enough to merit the attention of colonial legislators. The law, however, does not

78

Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion

appear to have halted the quest for freedom. In 1661-62, the Virginia Assembly passed another law concerning “diverse loytering runaways.” Penalties for absent time were increased, while the means to enforce these penalties were tightened up. The earlier stipulation—that English servants running away with “negroes” were to serve the latter’s time—was repeated verbatim. Finally, the law stated that “if the negroes be lost or dye in such time of their being run away, the christian servants in company with them shall by proportion among them, either pay fower thousand five hundred pounds of tobacco and caske or fower years service for every negro soe lost or dead.” It is reasonable to assume that such severe penalties would not have been necessary if there were few runaways.8 These rebellious plots and fugitive actions during the 1660s were important for several reasons. Most obviously, they draw attention to rebellious slaves and raise the question of the participation of enslaved Africans. Moreover, these events help to explain why slaves would rebel when a major political crisis—as happened in 1676—occurred. Finally, the consistent role of slave unrest points to a difference emerging among unfree laborers in which African slaves had much more to gain as well as to lose in struggles for liberation. This helps us to understand why they would be the most reluctant to return to their previous condition. To amend the 2007 conference’s metaphor of the veil: streams became a river in 1676. According to the contemporary record, having gained the surrender of three hundred armed servants and slaves at West Point through negotiation, Captain Grantham: was also in Jeopardy of beinge killed by the Negroe slaves who were dissatisfied with the said Treaty beinge in distrest of their hoped for liberty, and would not quietly laye downe their armes being about 100 in number, but threatened to kill Captain Grantham att the General Surrender then made by the Rest, of their armes,Colours, Ammunition, etc.9

Scholars have noted these holdout rebels. Edmund Morgan observes there were “eighty slaves and twenty English servants who refused to surrender, but these were easily captured and returned to their owners.”10 Howard Zinn, Ira Berlin, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker all note the eighty slaves and twenty English servants.11 Yet none offer any explanation for why slaves would constitute the final holdouts in a revolt in which they were clearly a numerical minority. Why did slaves reject the first treaty at West Point, refuse to lay down their arms, threaten to kill Captain Grantham, and prolong their revolt?

Voices from within the Veil

79

Before answering this question, it is important to make a couple of points about the composition of these eighty slaves. Although the record is mute, we can reasonably assume that they were mostly adult males. Most scholars agree that the gender ratio of the Atlantic slave trade during this period was two males for every female with more adults than youth. Furthermore, it is possible that these rebels were either African-born or retained memories of their recent homelands from which they were seized. According to Philip Morgan, slaves from Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra equaled three-fourths of all slaves arriving in the Chesapeake.12 This would make hopes for liberty very strong to those who had recently been deprived of such freedoms. In search of an explanation for slave holdouts from within the veil, I would argue there were two important considerations at work. First, slaves had the most to lose through a “General Surrender.” During the 1660s, the Virginia Assembly had legally recognized the principle of chattel slavery. According to Governor Berkeley’s estimate, there were some 2,000 enslaved Africans in the colony by 1671.13 If slaves surrendered, then they faced a return to chattel slavery, the most extreme form of unfree labor and denial of personal liberty developing in colonial Virginia. One of the problems with the scholarly view of a working class alliance across racial lines in 1676 is not the existence of such an alliance, but its overlooking the extent to which only Africans were subject to lifetime enslavement.14 Moreover, the motives of slave rebels were different from those of many of Bacon’s other followers. Most accounts of the causes for Bacon’s revolt refer to a series of calamities during the early 1670s: depressed tobacco prices, unnatural weather conditions, Dutch-English war, cattle plagues, etc.15 As a result, many were pushed toward rebellion, seeking American Indian destruction, the illegal seizure of lands, and a general desire for plunder and profit. In contrast, many of the enslaved Africans saw the advantage of a state crisis to seize their liberty. Bacon’s challenge to Governor Berkeley’s power represented a major crisis in political rule, presenting enslaved Africans with an opportunity to strike out for freedom. It was this pattern of state crisis and the search for liberty in 1676 that anticipated numerous slave rebellions against colonial and American slavery in the subsequent two centuries. With the ending of Bacon’s revolt, some twenty-three leaders were hanged, Governor Berkeley was recalled to the United Kingdom, and servants and slaves were returned to their respective degrees of unfreedom. Most scholars discuss the impact of Bacon’s revolt in one of two ways. It foreshadowed subsequent anti-colonial rebellions. Some of

80

Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion

Bacon’s followers, for instance, relocated to the Albemarle region of North Carolina where they helped ton overthrow the established colonial government in Culpepper’s Rebellion of 1677.16 As previously mentioned, an older view of Bacon’s revolt saw it as an important anticolonial prelude to the War of Independence a century later.17 The other view is that the failure of Bacon’s revolt ended the sort of flexible code in race relations which had supposedly marked seventeenth-century Virginia and brought racial slavery to the region.18 The latest version of this argument is that the liberal moment of society with slaves was ended with the advent of plantation generations that fastened slavery on colonial America barnacle-like.19 These arguments, however, ignore other important aspects of the aftermath of Bacon’s rebellion. As we have already seen, the unexpected death of Bacon in October 1676 did not end the rebellion by enslaved Africans and a handful of English servants. Moreover, Captain Grantham’s success in depriving the last holdouts of their much hoped for liberty did not end slave unrest. In 1680, four years later, the Virginia Assembly passed a law for the prevention of slave insurrection. Apparently, the “frequent meeting of considerable numbers of negroe slaves under pretence of feasts of feasts and burialls is judged of dangerous consequence.” To prevent this, the law banned “any negroe or other slave to carry or arme himselfe with any club, staffe, gunn, sword or any other weapon of defence or offence.” Furthermore, lashes on the back were prescribed for those slaves who “depart” from their masters and “lift up his hand in opposition against any christian.” Finally, “it shalbe lawfull” for any person to kill an absent “negroe or slave soe lying out and resisting.” In short, the law tried to prevent slaves’ mobility and the right of self-defense. This law for the prevention of revolt, however, proved equally ineffective, as two years later the Assembly passed additional legislation requiring church wardens to read out anti-black insurrection law twice every year and to further limit slave movements. Over the next decade, slaves fled to Albemarle Sound and the Great Dismal Swamp. A 1691 statute empowered county sheriffs to arrest absentees and to raise a posse from the local white community. It also called for the banishment of interracial couples as well as those slaves who had been manumitted. It is hard not to view this legislation of the 1680s as a direct governmental response to the freedom hopes of enslaved Africans during the 1660s and 1670s.20 Moreover, the role of self-emancipated slaves during Bacon’s revolt in 1676 takes on an additional importance once it is placed within broader

Voices from within the Veil

81

temporal and spatial frameworks of state crisis and slavery in U.S. history. During the American War of Independence from British colonial rule a century later, it has been estimated that between five thousand and thirty thousand former slaves in Virginia sought liberty behind British lines. Between November 1775 and August 1776, around 600 slaves from Virginia and Maryland fought for the British military against the Americans in exchange for their liberty.21 This desire for freedom had stamped slave life in eighteenth-century Virginia, especially through selfemancipation and small revolts as demonstrated in Gerald Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion.22 In the aftermath of independence, slaves in Virginia continued to conspire (Gabriel’s plot in 1800), revolt (Turner in 1831), join maroon settlements (Great Dismal Swamp), and self-emancipate from slavery. Most historians agree that some 1,000 slaves fled the prison of southern slavery annually between 1800 and 1860, most of them from the Upper South. This river of protest flowed into the American Civil War. The South’s struggle for national independence against the federal government represented a state crisis that engendered opportunities for Virginia’s enslaved people. As Robert Engs demonstrated in Freedom’s First Generation, slaves self-emancipated almost as soon as federal forces arrived at Hampton in April 1861. Once emancipation had become official Union policy in 1863, thousands freed themselves entering Union lines in southeast Virginia.23 In my own work on the post-emancipation piedmont, slaves capitalized on the crisis of the American state either through self-emancipation or carving out freer lives on the farms and plantations removed from Old Dominion’s slavery.24 Nearly six thousand black soldiers from Virginia, mostly former slaves, ended up fighting for the Union army.25 Unlike 1676, this time they fought for rather than against the government. And unlike the struggles of their enslaved ancestors in 1676 and 1776, this time they succeeded in helping to destroy slavery and gain their freedom. To turn an older argument on its head: if Bacon’s revolt anticipated future anti-colonial struggles, the hopes of liberty by slaves during the 1670s anticipated future freedom movements during the 1770s and the 1860s.26 Our focus on enslaved Africans’ quest for liberation during Bacon’s rebellion is important for three major reasons. First, it spotlights neglected Africans during a critical moment in seventeenth century colonial Virginia. This meets the conference’s immediate objective of attending to voices from within the veil on the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. Second, it highlights the work of those scholars who have always known that the history of the Old Dominion was incomplete

82

Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion

without the history of people of African descent. These scholars recognized that the American Civil War, the American Revolution, and even Bacon’s Rebellion were struggles for freedom that could not ignore slaves despite the paucity of the evidence. These were the scholarly voices within the veil. Finally, this essay suggests the importance of the idea of liberty as central to the political identity of enslaved African people in this nation. Slaves’ hopes for liberties were to extend over two centuries. They flowed into the black freedom movement in Virginia from the 1950s through the 1970s.

Notes * My thanks to: Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom for its reference to those hold-out slaves which first piqued my curiosity; Robert Engs and Vincent Harding, whose work showed me the interpretive importance of selfemancipated slaves; and, to Elizabeth Lindquist and Ashraf Rushdy for help in presentation. 1 For quick overviews of Bacon’s 1676 revolt, see www.nps.gov/ archive/colo/Jthanout/BacRebel.html, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p274.html, and www. virginiaplaces.org/military/bacon.html. For more detailed historical accounts, see C. M. Andrews, ed., Narratives of the Insurrections (New York: Charles Scribners, 1915); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 250-70; Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676:The End of American Independence (Syracuse: Syracuse U. Press, 1995); Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 137-186; Peter Linebaugh Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 135-9; Tim Hashaw, The Birth of Black America: The First African Americans and the Pursuit of Freedom at Jamestown (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2007), 233-240. 2 Thomas J. Wertenbaker, Torchbearer of the Revolution (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1940); Virginius Dabney, Virginia: The New Dominion: A History from 1607 to the Present (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983), 52-68. 3 Wilcomb F. Washburn, The Governor and the Rebel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957); R. C. Simmons, The American Colonies: From Settlement to Independence (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1976), 77-8. 4 Morgan, American Slavery, 250-70. 5 For 1676 as a protest of indentured servants, see American Social History Project, Who Built America?: Working People & the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989), 56-8; John Mack Faragher, Mari Jo Buhle, Daniel Czitrom, and Susan H. Armitage, Out of Many: A History of the American People, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), 72; Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 18; David Brion Davis & Steven Mintz, The Boisterous Sea of

Voices from within the Veil

83

Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 59. For 1676 as a racial working class alliance, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492-Present (New York: Perrenial Classics, 2001), 39-41; Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 33; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 45; Linebaugh & Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 135-9. 6 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 29-46. 7 “The Servants Plot of 1663,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 16 (July 1908), 38-43; Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 165; American Social History Project, 56; Linebaugh & Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 135. 8 Virginia Statutes quoted in Willie Lee Rose, ed. A Documentary History of Slaver in North America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 18-19. Italics in the original. 9 M. L. Oberg, ed., Samuel Wiseman’s Book of Record (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005), 276. My italics. 10 Morgan, American Slavery, 269. 11 Zinn, People’s History, 41; Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 45. 12 Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 62. 13 Dabney, Virginia, 53. Governor Berkeley also noted 6,000 indentured servants with a total populace in the colony of 40,000. For Virginia’s slave laws, see Rose, Documentary History, 16-22. 14 As the nation remembers the 400th anniversary of its oldest state, it is important that it does not forget Virginia’s pioneering role in legalizing chattel slavery. 15 Morgan, American Slavery, chaps. 11, 12; Dabney, Virginia, 55-6. 16 Faragher, Buhle, Czitrom, Armitage, Out of Many, 72. It is not inconceivable that some people of African descent who rebelled with Bacon were also involved in Culpepper’s revolt. 17 Wertenbaker, Torchbearer. 18 Morgan, American Slavery, chaps. 15, 16. 19 Berlin, Many Thousands Gone, 29-46; Morgan, Slave Counterpoint, 1-23. 20 Rose, Documentary History, 20-21; A. Leon Higginbotham, In the Matter of Color: Race & The American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 38-40. For runaways to the Great Dismal Swamp, see Brent Morris, “ ‘A Concentrated Diversity: The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860,” Voices from within the Veil, Norfolk State University, Feb. 23, 2007. 21 Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 164-176, 211. 22 Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).

84 23

Slaves and Bacon’s 1676 Rebellion

Robert F. Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 18611890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 25-43. 24 Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Freedpeople in the Tobacco South, Virginia 1860-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 25-9. 25 Ira Berlin et al, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203. 26 For hemispheric dimensions, including slave holdouts during the Venezuelan struggle for independence from Spanish colonialism in 1811-12, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776-1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 341-2.

“RUNNING SERVANTS AND ALL OTHERS”: THE DIVERSE AN ELUSIVE MAROONS 1 OF THE GREAT DISMAL SWAMP BRENT MORRIS, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

In the dark fens of Dismal Swamp, The hunted negro lay… —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Slave in Dismal Swamp”

Writing for The Liberty Bell in 1852, Edmund Jackson recounted the circumstances of the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, a “singular community of blacks, who have won their freedom and established themselves securely in the midst of the largest slaveholding State of the South...from this extensive swamp, they are very seldom, if now at all, reclaimed.”2 Many of these fugitives lived their entire lives without setting their gaze upon the people or places outside of the swamp's depths.3 David Hunter Strother went on assignment for Harper's Monthy in 1856 to the Great Dismal with the specific purpose of catching a glimpse of one of these mythical fugitives. When he did stumble upon the fierce-looking Osman, the leader of the deep-swamp maroons, Strother's desires were quickly replaced by the fear of being discovered by the wellarmed chief.4 In the 150 or so years since Strother's account of his journey rolled off the Harper's presses, the maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp have been just as elusive to historians.5 Indeed, the maroons' flight into an impenetrable morass, far beyond the gaze or reach of outsiders, has been more successful in hiding them than they ever would have imagined. With no masters to chronicle their activities, no abolitionists to write letters describing the brutalities they had witnessed, and no internal record keeping, the legacy of the maroons depends on a handful of brief travel accounts, a contemporary observation here and there, a few newspaper features, and the rare personal testimony of a former resident of the swamp. These sources have not merited the concerted attention of historians.6 By definition, maroons are runaways– fugitives from the law. Yet a recent scholarly work treating the subject of

86

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

runaway slaves mentions maroons once and characterizes marronage as “ephemeral.” Admittedly, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons merit a nod as the most populous body, yet it is only as the most populous of the sundry “runaway gangs.”7 Would a contemporary estimate of 40,000 inhabitants, however, qualify as a “gang?”8 Consider as well the treatment of the Dismal Swamp maroons in other important studies that explore Chesapeake slavery. Conditions in the Chesapeake, one work notes, “[were] not particularly conductive to maroon settlements.”9 In another staple work, the maroon wars of Jamaica merit comment, but not the Dismal Swampers.10

Fig. 2.2. View of Lake Drummond in the Dismal Swamp. This is one of the few freshwater lakes in Virginia. The swamp was crucial to the life and industry of Hampton Roads providing an economic boom to the timbering industry. Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.11

Just as troublesome, it seems that even when the term “maroon” breaks the double-digit barrier in an index of an otherwise fine study, it still only appears as an umbrella term for solitary “swollen maroon colonies.”12 Often, discussion is limited to such statements as “a large colony” of “fugitive Negroes was established.”13 Nonetheless, a survey of primary documentation suggests multiple, distinct, and independent maroon settlements within the Great Dismal. To be sure, it remains a possibility that escaped slaves settled their own niche of the swamp completely ignorant of their scores of neighbors. A slave who settled in the swamp with his family around 1800 described himself as the founder of his own small community which, after his arrival, “bimeby odder niggers runs away, an' comes heah, war de dogs ain't find dem, an' de driber doan dar follow.”14 Even Edmund Jackson, the writer who described the “singular community” in 1852, could take his place among modern historians who often see one swamp, one settlement if they acknowledge marronage at all.

Voices from within the Veil

87

This essentialism is even more deceptive when one ventures beyond the mere existence of maroons within the swamp to question their motives once they reached the relative safety of the quagmire. Dismissing a single-settlement theory for one that allows for distribution across the whole of the swamp allows for the possibility of differing degrees of settlement, permanence, and intent.15 The strong West African influence among maroons of the deepest interior would have contrasted sharply with the tendencies towards racial mixture among “canal maroons” or “fringe fugitives.”16 Likewise, a comparison of the substantial structures, families, and agriculture of the inner maroons with the makeshift shanties of the often single workers or traders near the canal of swamp's edge speaks to the wide range of motivations in Dismal Swamp life. All fugitives to the swamp, of course, undoubtedly possessed considerable courage in their quests for freedom. Having to leave behind family and friends on farms or plantations would have weighed heavily on the mind of a self-emancipating slave, and the risk of defying his or her master, indeed the authority of the whole slaveowning master class, would have no doubt discouraged many slaves from the attempt. Even a maroon population such as that of the Great Dismal Swamp that potentially numbered in the thousands most likely reflected only a small percentage of all runaways, who, in turn, made up a minuscule fraction of the millions of men and women enslaved in the United States. Once in flight, however, the obstacles facing a refugee heading to the great swamp were still legion. The Great Dismal Swamp was one of the most inhospitable tracts of land along the eastern coast of the present day United States. Situated along the North Carolina/Virginia border and covering nearly 1.3 million acres,17 early travelers remarked on the area's uninviting nature. Before William Byrd set out to survey the North Carolina/Virginia border through the swamp in 1728, he was warned by a local that Ye have little reason to be merry, My Masters...I fancy the Pocoson [swamp] you must Struggle with to-morrow will make you change your Note, and try what Metal you are made of...If, therefore, you have any Worldly Goods to dispose of, My advice is that you make your Wills this very Night, for fear you die Intestate to-Morrow.18

Once within the swamp, Byrd characterized it as a “filthy Quagmire,” and “filthy Bogg” where the ground was always moist and trembled under the surveyors' feet, “insomuch that it was an easy Matter to run a TenFoot-Pole up to the Head in it, without exerting any uncommon strength to do it.” The men were not able to find firm footing as “every Step made a deep Impression, which was instantly fill’d with water.”19 Likewise, J.F.D.

88

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

Smyth captured the “dismal” nature of the swamp in 1784. He described the terrain as a place where there is scarcely the least appearance of any kind of soil; for even where there is no water nothing can be discovered but cypress knees, closely intermixed with a matted body of strong fibrous roots vines and vegetative productions everywhere, in a dark and dreary shade altogether impervious to the rays of the sun. The trees, &c. growing so close thick and lofty, that one person will lose another therein, at ten yards distance; and afterwards if they wander a few hundred yards asunder, no noise, clamour, or hallooing, from either of them, can be heard by the other; for the woods are so close as to prevent the vibration of the air for any distance through them; even the report of firearms is smothered.20

Yet Smyth noted that the Dismal was not entirely covered with water. Above-water ridges crisscrossed the swamp where animals and possibly men alike could make a life, albeit an exceedingly uncomfortable one.21 Besides the unsteady footing and intimidating terrain, the Great Dismal also contained (as it still does) a host of other dangers. “Cauldrons” of smoldering peat dotted the landscape, as did numerous beds of hidden quicksand.22 Smyth described the swamp as the home of “bears, wolves, panthers, wild cats, opossums, raccoons, snakes, some deer, and every kind of wild beasts.”23 One colorful local legend tells the tale of George Washington, then a young shareholder in the Dismal Swamp Company, being treed by a bear in the swamp's depths in 1763.24 To this list of fearsome creatures could also be added wild cattle, wild hogs, and wild goats. The cattle were considered the “most ferocious” beasts of the forest, and they were rumored to be “as fleet as the deer.”25 So dangerous were swamp conditions that the Dismal Swamp Company took the extraordinary precaution in the 1850s of insuring its timberworking slaves against loss at the steep amount of $1,000.00 per slave per year.26 Few entered the swamp without some degree of trepidation.

The Maroon Colony The wilderness to the immediate south of the main Virginia settlements itself seemed a far cry from comfortable or even desirable in the early seventeenth century. Still, as laws of science will assert, concentrations constantly move towards dispersions, and the early colonial populations were no different. Although between the 1630s and 1650s, Virginia farmland existed in abundance,27 other conditions existed which necessitated the emigration of many people to less populous regions.

Voices from within the Veil

89

While most embarked north or westward away from the coast in search of fertile land to cultivate, a handful positioned the setting sun to their right and hurriedly ventured southward, away from Virginia’s plantations and population centers to the land which would become North Carolina.28 Scholars of early Carolina have suggested that these migrants also sought fertile bottom land to establish thriving plantations of their own.30 Nevertheless, the obstacles encountered by southwardly moving migrants between the Chesapeake and the first North Carolina settlement would have been acutely frustrating had their intentions included an expansion of the Virginia tobacco farming life. Aspiring planters would have surely found bottom land: the bottom of swamps and other perpetually wet expanses of territory. Though there were occasional dry spots, so very few existed that anything resembling a grand Virginia plantation or even a respectable farm would not have been feasible. The Carolina rice boom of the 1730s was decades in the future. In addition, dry plots, if found, would have been rendered nearly useless as centers of commercial agriculture by the shallowness of the canals into Albemarle Sound and the Outer Banks along the coast. Not until the completion of the Dismal Swamp canal between Albemarle Sound and the Chesapeake Bay in 1814 did agricultural pursuits cease to be hindered by this impenetrable morass. Indeed, this area was as impoverished as any community of Englishmen in North America.31 Reason suggests that, rather than land-hungry aspiring planters who failed because of their own negligent reconnaissance, the first settlers had never hoped for affluence. Instead, they were motivated by other, more sinister reasons such as debt or law evasion.32 Thus, before the official founding of the proprietary colony in 1665, aspiring plantation grandees from Virginia would not have turned their gaze south or wasted any time or capital attempting to develop this particular boggy expanse. Still, the area was not entirely without appeal. Cut off from the commercial world and not yet officially within the jurisdiction of the Crown, the northeast corner of what would be North Carolina would have held a particular appeal to fugitives from the law and others who may have been out of favor with the Chesapeake legal community. Each obstacle that would-be planters counted as a cause of potential failure, refugees valued as a protective advantage.33 Although fugitives could perish just as easily as any in their run through the Great Dismal to freedom, if they were fortunate enough to survive to reach the southern clearings, the monstrous threat of nature would become their most treasured and trusted protector.

90

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

Fig. 2.3. The Dismal Swamp. This drawing depicted the Swamp as it appeared in 1890. The swamp was an important refuge for fugitive slaves who formed temporary maroon communities. Because of the deciduous trees and the limited food supplies, discovery of the runaways by whites was almost inevitable. Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.29

Eighteenth-century North Carolina Moravian records support the notion that the first settlers of the colony were fugitives from Virginia, and one nineteenth-century amateur historian has suggested that these renegades cared as little about secure land titles as they did about clear political jurisdiction. “I am persuaded,” he remarked, “it was smartly peopled up by squatters.”34 Regardless, some of the earliest records of the settlement are from land purchases. Seventeen years before the official establishment as a colony, settlers “purchased” land from Indian nations south of Virginia.35 Further hints of European habitation in the area come from a Virginian’s 1650 narrative of his official expedition into the region. “[O]ur Gouvernour had ordered us to go,” he wrote “and speake with an Englishman amongst them” but Natives warned him of the dangers of

Voices from within the Veil

91

travel in the area. There were, the man said “many rotten Marrishes and Swampps there … to passe over.”36 Even modern residents on the Tuscarora Reservation in Niagara County, New York hold the belief that the first white neighbors of the seventeenth-century Tuscarora were mostly criminals from Europe.37 Despite being frustrated by the swamp in their journey, the explorers of 1650 were able to determine that there were other English amongst the Indians “at the further Tuskarood town”38 and that some Englishmen had become so involved with the Tuscarora in the area that they were considered “Cockarous,” or “cawcawaassough, advisor.”39 Englishmen in the area seem to have been tolerated by the powerful Native American groups rather than reckoned as part of their enemy, and it would not be foolish to assume that the Englishmen's acceptance was due in part to their recognition of Tuscarora sovereignty.40 This recognition of Native suzerainty, however, did not necessarily preclude the Englishmen from organizing their own government, not unlike those of other Indian groups under Tuscarora influence. George Fox affirmed as much when, in his 1671 journal, he referred to one Nathaniel Batts, “formerly governor of Roanoke, who goeth by the name of Captain Batts, who hath been a rude, desperate man.”41 Although the Roanoke government was very simple, resting on “family-oriented”42 common sense principles rather than traditional English law, the fact that there was a governor suggests some form of assembly among the citizens, at least insofar as to facilitate the continued recognition of Batts as Governor.43 With proprietary rule, English officials recognized the authority of the first European inhabitants. These original Roanoke authorities “were inhabitants in Carolina before the Grant made to the present Proprietors.”44 The grant from Charles II in 1663 was quickly followed by the Proprietors writing to one of their colleagues, Virginia governor William Berkeley, authorizing him to organize two governments for the “Albemarle” territory.45 Further, the Proprietors noted Besides we have many more advantages then is in the other to incorrage the undertakers, we are informed that there some people setled on the north east parte of the river Chowan and that others have inclynations to plant there, as also on the Larboard side entring of the same river . . . the reason of giving you power to setle two Governors that is of each side of the river one, is because some persons that are for liberty of Contience may desire a Governor of there owne proposing, which those of the other side of the river may not so well like, and our designe being to incorage those people to plant abroad and to stock well these parts with planters: inciteth us to comply alwayse and with all sorts of persons, as far as possibly we cann...46

92

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

In this way, the colony of fugitives was formally recognized within a dual government, and the area’s first technical maroon settlement—the mostly white fugitives from servitude who established a clandestine settlement—in 1665 became official citizens of the colony, still isolated, but no longer in hiding. The amnesty granted to the Roanoke pioneers, nonetheless, did not curtail the area’s influx of fugitives. Immediately thereafter, North Carolina continued to live up to its reputation as a haven for fugitives. And why should they not have been considered as such? The generation of Roanoke settlers left in power after the Proprietary ascendancy in Carolina would have likely been the children of fugitives themselves, and as such, would have likely received fellow refugees with open arms. As a 1708 Council of Virginia correspondence asserted, fugitives to North Carolina found protection “among persons of the like circumstances & principles.47 Adding to these personal ties, a 1669 law entitled “An Act Prohibiting Sueing of Any Person within 5 Yeares” was enacted which encouraged immigration into the area. The statute was meant to offer sanctuary to the debtors of other colonies, but citations to the edict were also commonly raised from neighboring colonies in regards to escaping slaves, servants, and criminals. The Act’s language stipulated: Whereas there hath not binn sufficient encouragement hithertoo granted to persons transporting themselves and Estates into this County to plant or inhabit. For remedy whereof be it enacted…that noe person transporting themselves into this County after the date hereof' shall be lyable to be sued during the terme and space of five yeares after their Arrival for any debt contracted or cause of action given without the County and that noe person liveing in this County shall on any pretence whatsoever receive any matter of Atturney Bill or account to recover any debt within the time above mentioned of a Debtor liveing here with out the said Debtor freely consent to it.48

That the verbiage of the law allowed for the ambiguous inclusion of slaves and servants is laid out in the complaint of one Thomas Miller in 1680. The colony's protections, he protested, had been carryed on to ye great damage of his Majesty ye Lords Propers and sundry of his Majestyes Leige subjects both there and in ye neighbouring Plantations by reason sundry fugitives have been entertained among the Albemarle Instructors &c…49

Virginia’s Lord Culpepper in 1682 characterized the North Carolina colony as “the sink of America” which would remain a danger to Virginia

Voices from within the Veil

93

until put in better order.50 While early for a direct assault on Proprietary colonies, Culpepper’s remarks anticipate those of Edward Randolph, whose “Articles of High Crimes and Misdemeanors Charged upon the Governors in the Severall Proprieties on the Continent of America and Islands Adjacent” of 1700 clearly applied to the mounting political battle. Alluding to North Carolina’s origins (“They have no settled Government among them…”), Randolph accused the colony of “reciev[ing] Pirates, Runaways, and Illegal Traders…”51 who, according to the Board of Trade and Plantations “tend[s] greatly to…undermining the Trade and Welfare of the other Plantations, and seduce[s] and draw[s] away the people thereof; By which Diminution of Hands the rest of the Colonies more beneficial to England do very much suff’r.”52 Obviously, not just debtors but the slaves and servants as well, the “Hands” of Randolph's complaint, were taking advantage of North Carolina’s generosity. “The Country of North Carolina,” Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood declared in 1711, “has long been a common Sanctuary to all our running Servants and all others that fly from the due execution of the laws in this and her majesty's other plantations.”53 Public funds were set aside in the seventeenth century to reward those who returned runaways, usually ranging from two hundred to one thousand pounds of tobacco per return. An estimated 466,000 pounds of tobacco were expended in 1669 alone for the return of runaways.54 As noted earlier, the first settlers, runaways themselves, peacefully settled within the domain of the Tuscarora Indians. In 1709, John Lawson noted it is remarkable, that no place on the Continent of America has seated an English Colony so free from bloodshed as Carolina, but all the others have been more Damaged and Disturbed by the Indians, than they have; which is worthy of notice, when we consider how oddly it was first planted with inhabitants . . .55

Nathaniel Batts, the Roanoke governor described by George Fox in 1671, is even remembered in local folklore as Secotan, adopted kinsman of the Chowanokes who were located slightly north of the heart of the main Tuscarora settlement. According to this account, Secotan served as war chief against the Pamunkey tribe (of the Powhatan confederacy) and married the daughter of Chowanoke King Kilkanoo.56 Other Native groups in the area also demonstrated their amity and possible respect for their new neighbors through the adoption of European names. Yeopim (Weapemeoc) elders, noted in 1723, bore such names as John Barber, John Hawkins, and Harry Gibbs.57

94

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

In 1701, the Vestry Act established the Church of England as the official church in North Carolina.58 Crises over oaths of office and eventually the legitimacy of the Roanoke settlers’ Quaker-led government led to outright war between governing factions,59 including armed assistance from Virginia in opposition to the Roanoke government (that “gang of tramps and rioters”) who were led by Thomas Cary.60 Alongside this confusion, German and Swiss immigrants established settlements along the Neuse River within the ancestral lands of the Tuscarora in 1710. The next year, enraged over continued land encroachments and unfair trading practices, the Tuscarora attacked the New Bern settlement. White reaction was swift. The Cary/Roanoke faction and Tuscaroras, thus, became involved in simultaneous battles for their respective survival, struggles that often intersected, aligning the Natives and settlers against the North Carolina authorities.61 It was also nearly concurrently that the two groups were soundly overpowered in 1714-15.62

The Peopling of the Great Dismal Swamp Defeated, the main body of the Tuscarora migrated north and became the sixth nation of the Iroquois Confederacy. Many Roanoke settlers moved away as well, while others subjected themselves to the triumphant governing authority. Considerable minorities of each determined around 1714, however, that the best hope for their independent future lay within the deep confines of the neighboring Great Dismal Swamp. They would not be the first to call the swamp home, though. Although 1711-15 was likely the period of the swamp’s greatest population boom, those entering would find the swamp already inhabited. Though few in number, the Great Dismal Swamp maroons who had arrived from Virginia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries would have been those who first determined safe routes through the treacherous swamp and learned to live amidst the dangers.63 The Roanoke and Tuscarora refugees settled upon the foundation laid by these early fugitives. The first residents of the Great Dismal Swamp were survivors of small Native American nations devastated by seventeenth-century English attacks or Native American fugitives from slavery. The most numerous of these refugees were the Susquehanna, but other Native groups from as far as Maryland and Pennsylvania were also represented as well. By 1700, the Chowan Nation, who had up until that time inhabited the land immediately adjacent the swamp to the southwest, had been for the most part, either kidnapped and sold into plantation slavery or become maroons

Voices from within the Veil

95

within the depths of the swamp.64 Thomas Pollock noted before the end of the Tuscarora War that if the remnants of the Tuscarora kept the peace, we shall have…the Mattamuskeets and Core Indians to mind, who have done us great mischief, having killed and taken our people…there being about 50 or 60 men of them got together…all in a manner lakes, quagmires, and cane swamps, and is, I believe, one of the greatest deserts in the world, where it is impossible for white men to follow them…65

Some of these Native maroons may have even journeyed from their swamp base to aid the Tuscarora in their military struggle. “Pan-tribal” cooperation, evident in the unlikely collaborations of the Yamassee War of 1715,66 may have also encouraged members of nations who were formerly enemies of the Tuscarora, who ironically may have originally been forced into the swamp following wars with the mighty Nation.67 During this early period, of course, the swamp population was augmented by more than just Roanoke refugees and Native Americans. In 1714, Virginia Governor Spotswood remarked that “loose and disorderly people daily flock” to the “No-Man's-Land” along the border. 68 Many white indentured servants were still fleeing South. The problem had gotten so out of hand by 1643 that official complaints were registered.69 That so many of the swamp’s population had European roots is evident by trail names within the swamp with Irish names such as “Shallalah Road” and “Ballabeck Road.” Indeed, 37 percent of advertised indentured servants in Virginia between 1736 and 1768 with ethnic identifiers were Irish.70 Even more interesting is the continued use into the late nineteenth-century among the black population of the swamp of Irish words such as “shanty”the Irish “shan tigh,” or “old house.” 71 The first Africans, “Twenty negars,” arrived in Jamestown in 1619 on a “Dutch man of Warre,”72 and as the African slave population in Virginia grew in numbers, the likelihood that runaway blacks were present within the swamp grew as well. The uncovering of a 1709 plot among blacks and Indians in Surrey, James City, and Isle of Wight Counties, Virginia, “a Late Dangerous Conspiracy, formed and carried out by greate numbers of ye said negroes and Indian slaves,”73 locates cooperation among the groups in counties that included parts of the Great Dismal Swamp. Based on accounts of early maroon raids, it even appears that blacks already held positions of leadership among the maroons. “Captain Peter” was the title of a black maroon leader noted as early as 1709, though black representation in the swamp was not likely higher than that in the fields of Virginia plantations—a minority until the early to mid-eighteenth century.74

96

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

Poor Carolina whites also settled within the borders of the swamp, although they seem to have been paid even less attention than the other maroons by contemporary observers. As early as 1679, the area of present-day Hall Township was settled by a group of whites called derisively the “Scratch Hall Folk.” These “forest dwellers” were reported to raid passers-by in southern Chowan County from their Dismal Swamp base.75 A fierce people, the Scratch Hall Folk were sometimes referred to as “one membered men” because their appetite for “no-holds-barred” fighting often left them minus an eye, arm, leg or ear.76 There were also definite African roots among these whites as well. Some, according to the swamp's first official visitor, Colonel William Byrd, “were almost as tawny as mulattoes.”77 He does not initially characterize this family as any distinct race; “Mulattoes” is the term that he finally settles on. More than a half century later, a German traveler unwittingly hinted at the continuing multiracial makeup of the swamp when he described a disease which had “caused a terrible devastation among the blacks and the other inhabitants as well.”78 After that observation in 1784, however, outsiders increasingly identified the swamp's inhabitants as black. In the same year, J.F.D. Smyth referred to Great Dismal's population as strictly “run-away Negroes.”79 Still, the most convincing testimony of the increasing black swamp population can be found in the slave runaway ads appearing in local newspapers. In 1789, “a negro man, named TONEY” who was “as black as most negroes,” had been “seen at the Great Swamp.”80 Aaron, “a stout, likely, black fellow” was also believed to have hidden himself “on the Virginia side of the Dismal” in 1799.81 Over the years since the Tuscarora and other Native American peoples first entered the Great Dismal Swamp, their relative representation had diminished compared to that of the swamp's blacks and whites, who continued to seek refuge in the interior. Late nineteenth-century discoveries, long after emancipation had made life in the swamp unnecessary, speak to the constant Native influence within the swamp. The remnants of an old settlement near the swamp's edge (and which would have no doubt been even more concealed before extensive swamp drainage operations) lay in an area called “Black Mingle Pocosin.”82 A “pocosin” is defined as a swamp in an upland coastal region, also called a dismal, possibly derives from Virginia Algonquin, and was often used by early settlers as a designation for low swampy ground, especially a wooded swamp.83 Further, the word “Mingle” can be traced to “mingwe,” an Algonquian word meaning “stealthy” or “treacherous.”84 The area “Black Mingle Pocosin” would then seem to have no special meaning, but

Voices from within the Veil

97

when “Mingo” is substituted, the phrase becomes one common to the eighteenth century distinguishing the “Black Mingo” people from the “Red Mingoes” (Black Mingoes being those of mixed African/Indian heritage).85 Another possibility of the name's origin is that of the maroon leader of the 1820s, “the murderous” Captain Mingo. A freedman who had joined the swamp fugitives of his own volition, Captain Mingo committed many a “heinous crime and deed of blood” before he was eventually captured and murdered before trial. His reputation was so dangerous that residents did not wish to allow the possibility of his return to the swamp.86 The settlement, owing to its unique name, would have likely been one of persons of mainly African heritage with significant Native blood and strong Native traditions, or more simply, Black Mingoes.87 Yet, the Native influence remained significant throughout the maroon communities' existence.

Maroon Communities Maroon fugitives' settlements were spread across the width and breadth of the Great Dismal Swamp. Despite the assumption of most of the limited scholarship that quickly passes over these maroons, it appears as if several distinct settlements existed throughout the period of the swamp's inhabitation, nominally unified and associated, yet in no sense one continuous core settlement. Similarly, each particular settlement did not view their reasons or purposes for their residence in the Great Dismal in the same way. There existed several distinct ways of life within the swamp; cultural, economic, and ethnic divisions were often clear-cut. That these different constituencies shared a haven did not in any way make them an indivisible whole. Maroons were divided among three, perhaps four settlement groups: the well-settled “interior” maroons, the “canal” maroons, “fringe” maroons living precariously on the swamp's edge, and the Scratch Hall Folk who constantly blurred the distinction between being “in” and “of” the swamp. For the obvious reasons discussed earlier, very few outsiders reached the innermost depths of the swamp, the area around and including Lake Drummond. Within these depths, though, lived the most well-adjusted and longtime swamp residents. This most isolated settlement would have also likely been the largest, as only in the center behind layers upon layers of natural obstacles would maroons have risked congregating or settling in large numbers. Similar settlements nearer the swamp's edge would have served as “landmarks” to those few outsiders who ventured into the

98

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

swamp as well as a target for those who would see the maroons eradicated.88 In these depths one would expect to find the strongest African influence and cultural continuities. The black fugitives who became the swamp's majority in the early to mid-eighteenth century would have been primarily saltwater slaves or native Africans.89 Indeed, the Africans' predisposition to maroon life is reflected in their inclination to escape their plantation homes in groups. Among native African fugitives, close to twothirds absconded in groups of two or more and a full third in groups of five or more (compared to just one-third and one-seventh, respectively, of all American-born runaways).90 A newly formed “pan-African” identity91 would have encouraged their unity, which owing to their numerical preponderance during slavery's early years, could only have been accommodated in the deepest regions of the swamp.92 Even the few known names of interior maroons suggest their Africanity. David Hunter Strother of Harper's Weekly, as already mentioned, encountered deep within the Dismal Swamp a gigantic Negro with a tattered blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a gun in his hand...his purely African features were cast in a mould betokening in the highest degree, strength and energy. The expression of the face was of mingled fear and ferocity, and every movement betrayed a life of habitual caution and watchfulness.93

Later, upon revealing a sketch of this man to his black guides, he discovered that the maroon's name was Osman, a feared leader of the deepest maroon community. Osman is an Islamic name. Significantly, seventy-two percent of Africans imported into North America came from regions containing Muslim populations. Numerically, that means that 230,000 of the 481,000 Africans who arrived in British North America came from areas with noted Islamic influence.94 In 1856, Osman was described in terms that suggested an advanced age, perhaps around sixty-years old. His name was possibly given in honor of Usuman dan Fodio, the leader of an Islamic jihad in Nigeria from 1804-1812.95 .Thus, as late as the 1850s, the strong African influence among interior maroons is probable. The seclusion of these maroons is suggested by the testimony of a former resident who said that there were families in the depths of the swamp who had lived their entire lives without ever seeing a white man “an' would be skeered mos to def to see one.”96 Considering that evidence suggests whites, particularly the Scratch Hall folk, lived among the Dismal Swamp maroons, the fact

Voices from within the Veil

99

that one particular settlement was so isolated as not to have ever seen a white man underscores the pronounced separation of maroon settlements. Within these depths existed the most substantial houses in the swamp and within these structures, the most stable and established families lived. Still, lack of resources and the undeniable threat of discovery limited interior maroon construction. Maroon residences were best described as “cabins” which, according to the recollection of one observer, were gathered together in a single section of the settlement. Most had open doors, which, if weather required it, could be easily closed and barred. The cabins sat several feet above the often wet ground, high enough that a fully-grown man could crawl beneath. Inside, the cabins were furnished with “a rude bed...a sedge broom... [and] a home made chair and bench.”97 Other accounts suggest that these cabins often fell into disrepair, possibly for want of materials. One maroon slept upon a “shuck mattress and [could] count the stars above the great cypress and juniper trees through the apertures in the roof.”98 The substantial houses of the interior maroons also facilitated the development of families within the deepest depths of the swamp. A few slaves originally absconded with their families in tow, like the fugitive who remembered “Dat night I runs away, an’ I takes my woman an’ my chilluns, an’ hides in de Dismal...”99 After many years, though, maroon families would have reproduced to an extent that families could be formed among the swampers. Eventually, there were many residents of the inner swamp who had never experienced life outside the Dismal, and indeed, many who would reach the end of their days having never set foot on solid ground outside the swamp.100 For all these reasons, these most interior maroons, despite the constant anxieties of fugitives, were the swamp's most settled and firmly entrenched community. Deep within the swamp, these settlers were able to clear considerable plots to produce their subsistence as farmers. Observers wrote that these “Negro fugitives live in security and plenty, building themselves cabins, planting corn, raising hogs and fowls...and hunting.”101 The maroon farmer, one observer wrote, “cultivates, to the best of his very limited means, patches of corn and sweet potatoes.”102 This was no oasis, of course, since interior maroons often complained that they “suffer in de winter, an’ bin hongry in de summer,”103 yet the stability derived from deep cover allowed these people the best opportunity for any degree of self-sufficiency. Although remarkably isolated from the exterior population surrounding the Great Dismal Swamp, the interior community retained ties with other maroons. The most significant of these connections was

100

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

economic or regular trade with “canal” maroons. Besides carrying on a regular illegal trade for foodstuffs with poor whites just outside the swamp,104 these maroons also took full advantage of the cross-swamp canal, which first accommodated a vessel large enough to be considered a “ship” in 1814.105 [see figure 3] During the few weeks, the canal was open in that first year, tolls were paid on (among other items) 6,519,419 shingles, 1,160,591 barrel staves, and 16,703 bushels of Indian corn.106 Though the numbers can never be known, portions of the above-cited toll invoices are attributable to transactions among “a rough set of traders whose entire trade is with the maroons of the swamp.” In return for the “wholly contraband” crops of the interior and products of the fringe, these canal traders obtain “the articles which the Negroes require...for the most part, salted provisions, Indian corn, coarse cloths and tools.”107 Occasionally, a draught of “Dismal Swamp whisky” might change hands as well, as local moonshiners consistently produced a “liberal supply.”108 Alongside these traders near the Dismal Swamp canal were other workers, most often employed in the business of producing shingles. Runaway notices advertised for swampers like Aaron, “a shingle weaver, on the Virginia side of the Dismal,”109 Dave, whose master believed that he had probably run away to “work in the Shingle Swamp,”110 and Diver, “a good sawyer” lurking “near the shingle-Swamp.”111 It was here that the lines between slave and free, bondsman and fugitive were most blurred. Slaves and free blacks had been employed by legitimate business operations, such as the Dismal Swamp Land Company since 1763.112 Generally these workers would be allowed a great measure of freedom in the swamp, their production being measured by the task. Similar to the labor system employed on lowcountry rice plantations, so long as that particular quantity of shingles or staves was produced, regardless of the manner, little else would be expected of the worker. Extra production beyond the assigned task would generally be rewarded at a per-item monetary rate or in the form of extra rations and supplies. 113 Free to their own devices, whether motivated by personal gain or by goodwill towards fellow victims of oppression, Dismal Swamp slaves often became the employers of Dismal Swamp maroons. In fact, ambiguous Dismal Swamp Land Company bookkeeping suggests the business’s complicity in the hiring and provisioning of maroons. There are several instances where Land Company expenses are captioned “extra lightering & other work done by hands this month.” This would have been a handy way to camouflage maroon work as “other work.”115 Whether doing the bulk of the assigned task work for the slaves or working in gangs alongside authorized workers, maroons could expect to earn food,

Voices from within the Veil

101

clothing, powder and bullets, or as much as two dollars a month for their labor.116 The result of this added labor force often resulted in mammoth production counts; the number of shingles produced sometimes exceeded many times the number of authorized workers multiplied by the maximum production capacity of any single man. 117 Land Company officials reaped the windfall, yet at the same time, slaves' workloads were lightened, and fugitives were able to earn an income without leaving the safety of the swamp. The workers who brought in these swollen loads would be paid per piece (the sum of which was often as much as three times the amount necessary for their own subsistence),118 and, then, return to their swamp “camps” to divide the earnings.119 Canal maroons would often live among these workers, or if not, nearby in similar accommodations. Their lodgings, though, would not have compared favorably with those of the inner swamp maroons. Slaves or workers given the “freedom” of the swamp and payment in provisions could expect little else from their employers in terms of housing. Barely wide enough to fit five or six “closely-packed” men lying down, their four-foot-tall canal “shanties” were arranged so that workers’ heads faced the back wall and their feet stretched towards the warmth of the fire in the completely-open front. Below the sloping roof, the workers slept on beds of thin shingle shavings.120 Another difference between the interior and canal or fringe maroons would have been reflected in their demography. As already demonstrated, interior maroons often had direct African origins, and, even as late as 1856, they were clearly classified as “African.”121 In addition, their community's stability and the presence of multiple generations and families would have produced age and sex distributions more in line with exterior, family-based communities. In short, especially over generations, the interior would have resembled the naturally-occurring demography of a normal slave community. This was not the case for the canal and fringe maroons. These would have been the most recently arrived swampers, and as such, they would have more closely resembled the demography of contemporary runaways. As the institution of slavery evolved from 1790 to 1860, the standard runaway profile remained virtually unchanged. Surveys of runaway ads reveal that eighty-one percent of all advertised runaways were male,122 and, of these, seventy-eight percent were between the ages of thirteen and twenty nine.123 The descriptions of these young men read like a list of characteristics vital to Dismal Swamp survival: “well-made”124 and “stout well set.”125 And although most runaways were described as having a dark

102

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

complexion, “mulattoes” absconded in far greater numbers than their fraction of the bound population would imply. 126 The swamp, however, would likely have received a smaller proportion of mixed-race runaways. Of those 26.4% described as “yellow,” “light,” “bright,” and “mulatto,” ads often suggested that the slaves were so “light” as to possibly pass as free and blend into the white population.127 Many of these slaves would have likely bypassed the swamp for more hospitable refuges, yet the racial character of the outer swamp, as opposed to the mainly African interior, would have no doubt had a distinctly lighter hue. It is clear that just as there was no single “settlement” of maroons in the Great Dismal Swamp, neither was there unity of purpose among the inhabitants. Maroons' intentions while in the swamp, as well as their plans for life after the swamp, are more telling indicators of the Great Dismal maroons' diversity. Interior maroons were as settled as any free population in the surrounding country. With their garden plots, livestock, houses, and “large famil[ies] of children,”128 these men and women had no immediate intentions of leaving the swamp's protection. Based on their significant degree of isolation, it is questionable whether or not they even craved any interaction with canal or fringe maroons beyond trade for necessities. Canal and fringe maroons present a strikingly different picture. On the canal, maroons often lived like slaves, which, though not a likely perk, entailed an incredible degree of freedom, with the added bonus that at the end of the day, a maroon could call himself his own man. Admittedly, maroon canal workers were often exploited for the benefit of the legitimate slave since slaves often hired maroons to complete their task at reduced wages.129 As Moses Grandy remembered, “I undertook the lightering of the shingles or boards out of the Dismal Swamp, and hired hands to assist me.”130 Beggars could not be choosers, though. As William Byrd rightly assumed, “It is certain many Slaves Shelter themselves in this Obscure Part of the World, nor will any of their righteous Neighbors discover them.” Rather, fugitives would be hired “for a mean and inconsiderable Share, well knowing their Condition makes it necessary for them to Submit to any Terms.”131 By making the choice not to necessarily settle down in the interior, canal maroons were able to open doors to personal gain. With their proceeds from shingle making, maroons may have emulated the practices of their enslaved coworkers. Those maroons who had not been hopelessly outlawed132 still lived an unfree life, and, with that realization, the enduring specter of their continued status as property. Two dollars a month would not have added up quickly, but maroons may have taken notice of

Voices from within the Veil

103

slaves like their possible “employer” Moses Grandy, who had “got into a fair way of buying [him]self133 through his canal labor. There were also those outer and fringe maroons who local observers considered “too lazy” to work. These were known to filch from local granaries or make midnight raids into nearby towns and plantations to help themselves to what they need “without leave asked or granted.”134 One group, “renegades...and runaways; who as a class, have a known propensity to steal,” raided a house “on the borders of the Big Swamp.” They were pursued to their settlement, and one maroon was taken prisoner. 135 At times, these forays out of the swamp could turn violent. Eighteenthcentury travelers in the Suffolk area bordering the Swamp were warned to exercise extreme caution. Here, as they sometimes did elsewhere, maroon marauders would raid houses or attack travelers, then return “into their strong swamps from whence they will commit many daring outrages.”136 These renegades were well-prepared for battle. One Suffolk raider, a fugitive slave with a $1,000 price on his head, was captured after several such raids just before the Civil War. Though shot several times, the captive was unhurt, thanks to his primitive coat of armor—a jacket thickly wadded with rigid turkey feathers.137 The most transient of the maroons were those on the fringe who merely used the Dismal Swamp as a temporary stop on the way to more substantial freedom in the North. Of course, those who purchased their freedom such as the ever-resourceful Moses Grandy would have been free (within the limits of the law) to settle within the outside society. Other, less secure outlets to freedom remained. The North Star meant freedom to thousands of self-emancipating slaves over the years, and the Dismal Swamp was a bright spot lit in its path. During the Revolution, hundreds of Chesapeake-area slaves voted themselves freedom with their feet when they reacted to Lord Dunmore's Proclamation. These men and women who joined the English ranks were widely dispersed, with many ending up in British Canada. Years later, although not freed by flight to Dunmore's lines, James Redpath's informant Charlie told his story of life in the Dismal Swamp as a newly-freed Canadian. Fearful of the dangers of the swamp, he “made up [his] mind to leave...‘Spect I better not tell de way I comed: for dar’s lots more boys comin’ same way I did.”138 Still, many Dismal Swamp maroons did gain their freedom in this way. Shortly after Cornwallis' withdrawal, British officers compiled a list of “Negro Immigrants,” supposedly those freed through British war policy, in New York. Among the number of former maroons who were undoubtedly included on the inspection roll, several left telling clues as to their origin, giving “Dismal” as a part of their names.139

104

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

Of course, freedom was seldom as easy as a short run from the swamp to British ships at anchor in Norfolk, though the port was and later remained a likely target for freedom-seeking maroons. Along with Edenton, North Carolina, the Virginia port would have been an obvious objective for slaves seeking to escape their bonds. Elisha Norfleet advertised that his slave Isaac “will endeavor to get to Norfolk, or on board some vessel bound for the northward,”140 much like L.O. Bryan's Jerry, who “will endeavor to get to Norfolk, and from thence to Baltimore.”141 Edenton, especially, had a reputation as a stop for runaway slaves. In an advertisement for his slave, Baker Hoskins noted that Edenton was “a place more noted, than any in the state, for the concealing and harboring of runaways.”142 Moses, the slave of Banister Midyett, “was making his way to Edenton by way of Mattamuskeet and Alligator [another name for the Great Dismal],”143 much as John was “lurking about Edenton, waiting for an opportunity to get away in some vessel.”144 As a sanctuary between the two major regional ports, the Great Dismal Swamp served as a useful planning and staging refuge before a fugitive attempted his or her final break. For this reason, slaveowners advertising for their runaways in North Carolina and Virginia newspapers rarely submitted their ads without some admonition to masters of vessels that they were, as one advertiser wrote “forbid[den from] harboring, employing, or carrying [slaves] off,” and to do so would expose the perpetrator to “the utmost riguor of the law.”145 Indeed, their worries were well-founded. As New Bedford, Massachusetts abolitionist Daniel Drayton remarked, “No sooner, indeed, does a vessel, known to be from the north, anchor in any of these waters—and the slaves are pretty adroit in ascertaining from what state a vessel comes—than she is boarded...by more or less of them, in hopes of obtaining a passage in her to a land of freedom.”146 Willing mariners who “had hearts” and “no doubt...held abolitionist sympathies” often served their own consciences and aided a self-emancipating bondsman on his way.147 And so, many maroons would leave the Great Dismal Swamp in the same way in which they had first entered, as stealthy fugitives seeking an alternative to the bonds of forced servitude. On that account, the fleeing black maroon of 1850 could have called the escaped Irish servant of 1640 brother. Yet as this essay had demonstrated, maroons and their communities were never as united or linked—geographically, ethnically, purposefully, or otherwise—as historians have assumed. In fact, maroon settlements in the Great Dismal Swamp were typically isolated enclaves of distinctive populations, identifiable by their own particular distinguishing racial makeup, permanence of settlement and location, subsistence

Voices from within the Veil

105

patterns, and objectives while in the swamp. Though nominally connected by efficient lines of communication and trade, little about the innermost maroons, for example, resembles the fringe fugitives. To be sure, they shared a yearning for freedom and liberty, yet any categorization of the swamp population under the broad term “Dismal Swamp maroons” seems grossly inaccurate.

Notes The author would like to thank Jon W. Parmenter as well as the participants in the 2006 University of Sussex “Fresh Perspectives” Postgraduate Conference and 2007 Norfolk State University “Jamestown 400th: Voices From Within the Veil” Conference for their useful comments and critiques on earlier versions of this chapter. 2 Edmund Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” The Liberty Bell (By Friends of Freedom), (January 1, 1852), 12. 3 John Hamilton Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines: A Tale of Tidewater Virginia (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1906), 76; David Hunter Strother, “The Dismal Swamp,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 13 (September 1856), 451; Marion Gleason McDougall, Fugitive Slaves 1619-1865, (New York: Bergman Publishers, 1967; original publication Boston: Ginn and Company, 1891), 57. 4 Strother, “The Dismal Swamp” 452-453. 5 There has been one substantial work published on the Great Dismal Swamp maroons. See Hugo Prosper Leaming, Hidden Americans: Maroons and Virginia and the Carolinas (New York Routledge Publishers, 1995). This 1979 Ph.D. dissertation was posthumously published, and it is a valuable source to mine for potential primary sources. Unfortunately, its merit as a legitimate work of historical scholarship is not great. Leaming regularly misreads sources and often stretches them far beyond what assertions they can possibly bear. Often several pages between footnotes, Leaming's work depends heavily on myths and folklore without acknowledging his dependence. The author makes several compelling assertions in his work, but especially after his lengthy, misplaced discussion on spiritualism and Edgar Cayce, a reader would agree with one particular critic who complained that Leaming “lost his way as a historian.” 6 Perhaps contemporary observers of maroons are responsible for this fact by keeping silent on the subject to avoid encouragement to other slaves or to ease their own conscience. As this essay will show, however, the former is unlikely and the latter was generally unnecessary. 7 John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 86. 8 Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” 149. “An intelligent merchant,” Jackson wrote, “...estimated the value of slave property lost in the swamp at one and a half million dollars. This, at the usual rate of slave valuation, would give near 40,000 as the population of the swamp.” Despite the plausible logic of this estimate, Jackson himself doubted its accuracy and suggested that the population must number in the

106

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

thousands. Herbert Aptheker posits the lower (though still substantial) estimate of 2000 inhabitants. Herbert Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” Journal of Negro History, 24 (April 1939), 168. Unlike some maroon colonies in Spanish Florida, Dismal Swamp maroons generated no census records (or any other records, for that matter), so all population estimates are necessarily no more than educated guesses based on conjecture or rumor. 9 Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 449. 10 George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 27. 11 Robert W. Lamb, ed., Our Twin Cities of the Nineteenth Century: Norfolk and Portsmouth Their Past, Present and Future (Norfolk, VA: Barcroft, 1988), 182. 12 Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 125, 369. 13 McDougall, Fugitive Slaves, 57. 14 Albert R. Ledoux, Princess Anne: A Story of the Dismal Swam and Other Sketches (New York: Looker-on Publishing Company, 1896), 65. 15 Aptheker does not suggest any degree of racial diversity in his catalog of maroon activity, and though Leaming supports a theory of a varied racial population, he argues that Dismal Swamp maroons were closely united through their shared opposition to the white authority outside of the swamp. Otherwise, historians quickly passing over the existence of marronage make no concerted attempt to characterize maroon colonies as anything other than homogenous groups of runaways. 16 The term “canal maroons” refers to those fugitives who settled and/or found employment near the canal which was dug through the swamp by the Dismal Swamp Land Company in the early 1800s. “Fringe” maroons were those fugitives who settled on the very edges of the swamp. Often, these maroons were new arrivals or temporary settlers en route to some other destination, and most raids attributed to maroons were likely the work of this group. These distinctions will be further explored below. 17 Donald R. Whitehead, “Developmental and Environmental History of the Dismal Swamp,” Ecological Monographs, 42 (Summer 1972), 301-302. The swamp’s original area had been reduced through drainage, cultivation, and development by two-thirds by the twentieth century. The swamp “appeared” even larger during times of slave unrest such as during Nat Turner’s revolt of 1831, when the edges of the swamp seemed to extend all the way to their Southampton verandas. Henry Irving Tragle, The Southampton Slave Revolt of 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 36. 18 William Byrd The History of the Dividing Line (1728), in John Spencer Bassett, ed., The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia Esq. (New York, 1970; originally published New York: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1901), 42. 19 Ibid., 45, 52.

Voices from within the Veil 20

107

J.F.D. Smyth, A Tour in the United States of America (New York, 1968; originally printed in London: G. Robinson, 1784), 234-236. 21 Ibid., 236, 239. 22 Hubert J. Davis, The Great Dismal Swamp: History, Folklore, and Science (Murfreesboro, NC: Johnson Publishing Co., 1971.), 22. 23 Smyth, A Tour in the United States, 236. 24 Davis, The Great Dismal Swamp, 50. 25 Ibid., 147. 26 Todd L. Savitt, “Slave Life Insurance in Virginia and North Carolina,” The Journal of Southern History 43 (November 1977), 583. 27 Warren M. Billings, John E. Selby, and Thad W. Tate, Colonial Virginia: A History (White Plains, NY: KTO Press, 1986), 55. Virginia's expansion during this period was predominantly northward, and to a lesser degree, it extended to the west. 28 Robert S. Cope, Carry Me Back: Slavery and Servitude in Seventeenth Century Virginia (Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press of the Appalachian Studies Center, 1973), 97-103; John Spencer Bassett, Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1896), 17. 29 Robert W. Lamb, ed., Our Twin Cities, 182. 30 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 27-28. 31 Wesley Frank Craven, The Colonies in Transition: 1660-1713 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 127. 32 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 17. 33 Francis L. Hawks, The History of North Carolin (Fayetteville, 1856), 148, 335. 34 H.B. Ansell, Summary History of Currituck County, 25, in Leaming, Hidden Americans, 22. 35 William L. Saunders, ed., The Colonial Records of North Carolina, I:676. This document refers to "Southern Indians" near "Weyanook Creek," likely either the Yeopim, Weapemoc, Pasquotank, Perquiman, or Poteskeet Indians. See John R. Swanton, The Indian Tribes of North America (Washington, 1952), 88-89 and William C. Sturevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, XV: Northeast (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1978), 271-281. 36 Edward Bland, The Discovery of New Brittaine, 1650, in Narratives of Early Carolina 1650-1708, ed. Alexander S. Salley, Jr. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), 10. 37 F. Roy Johnson, The Tuscaroras: Mythology, Medicine, Culture (Murfreesboro, N.C., Johnson Publishing Co., 1967), 155. 38 Bland, The Discovery of New Brittaine, 11. 39 Ibid., 9; “Cawcawaassough” meant “cunning” and “brave.” Robert Beverly, The History of Virginia in Four Parts (London, 1722), 32. 40 Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Settling With Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580-1640 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 7, 14. 41 George Fox, The Journal, edited by Nigel Smith (New York, 1998), 469. This does not refer to Raleigh's “Lost Colony” but rather to the Roanoke settlement of what is now northeastern North Carolina.

108 42

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

Kupperman, Settling With Indians, 3. Leaming, Hidden Americans, 37. 44 Daniel Defoe, Party-Tyranny in A.S. Salley, ed., Narratives of Early Carolina, 1650-1708 (New York, 1911), 228. 45 Colonial Records of North Carolina, Vol. I, 49. 46 Ibid., 53-54. 47 Ibid., 690-691. 48 Ibid., 183-184. 49 Ibid., 283. 50 Ibid., 155. 51 Ibid., 527. 52 Ibid., 536-537. 53 Ibid., 797. 54 Cope, Carry Me Back, 103. 55 Lawson quoted in Leaming, Hidden Americans, 47. 56 Richard Benbury Creecy, Grandfather's Tales of North Carolina History (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, Printers, 1901), 19-21; Garland Pollard, The Pamunkey Indians of Virginia (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1894), 1. 57 Colonial Records of North Carolina, Vol. II, 483. 58 Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 195. 59 Ibid., 195-197. 60 See Leaming, Hidden Americans, 179-181; Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 195-197. 61 Colonial Records of North Carolina, Vol. I, 796; Christophe Von Graffenried, Christophe Von Graffenried's Account of the Founding of New Bern, edited by Vincent H. Todd (Raleigh, NC: Edwards & Broughton Printing, 1920), 81. Virginia Governor Spotswood cited “several Affidavits” that suggested “one of Mr. Cary's pretended Council was with the Tuscaruro Indians promising great Rewards to incite them to cut off all the inhabitants of that part of Carolina that adhered to Mr. Hyde [Cary's and the Roanoke faction's opposition].” Though Spotswood claims that the young Indians accepted this proposition but were overruled by the elders, the Swiss fighter Christophe Von Graffenried suggested that the Tuscaroras did, in fact, aid Cary and the Roanoke rebels. 62 Lefler and Powell, Colonial North Carolina, 67-76. 63 Cope, Carry Me Back, 97-100; John Spencer Bassett, Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina (Baltimore, 1896), 17. 64 F. Roy Johnson, Tales From Old Carolina (Murfreesboro, NC: Johnson, 1965), 17, 22, 140-142. 65 Colonial Records of North Carolina, Vol. II, 45. 66 See Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 332341. 67 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 226. 68 Johnson, Tales of the Great Dismal Swamp, 41. 69 Cope, Carry Me Back, 97-98. 43

Voices from within the Veil 70

109

Forty out of 107 servant advertisements in Virginia gazettes between 1736 and 1768 referred to Irish. Daniel Meaders, Dead or Alive: Fugitive Slaves and White Indentured Servants Before 1830 (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1993), 39. 71 Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines, 39. 72 Smith quoted in Cope, Carry Me Back, 5. 73 Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Co., 1977; original publication NY: Columbia University Press, 1943), 169. 74 Ibid. 75 F. Roy Johnson, Legends and Myths of North Carolina’s Roanoke-Chowan Area (Murfreesboro, NC: Johnson Pub. Co., 1966), 97, 101. 76 Johnson, Tales From Old Carolina, 118. 77 Byrd quoted in Johnson, Tales of the Great Dismal Swamp, 46. 78 Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 1783-1784, edited by Alfred J. Morrison (New York: Burt Franklin, Publisher, 1911, 1968), 101. 79 Smyth, A Tour in the United States, 102, 239. 80 Edenton State Gazette of North-Carolina, January 29, 1789, in Lathan A. Windley, ed., Runaway Slave Advertisements: A Documentary History from the 1730's to 1790, Virginia and North Carolina (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 457. 81 Edenton Herald of Freedom, March 27, 1799, in Freddie L. Parker, ed., Stealing a Little Freedom: Advertisements for Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 17911840 (New York: Garland Publishing, 1994), 196. 82 Johnson, Tales of the Great Dismal Swamp, 223. 83 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (Boston, 2000). In coastal Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the Carolinas, a swamp or marsh can be called a pocosin or a dismal, the second term illustrated in the name of the Dismal Swamp on the border of North Carolina and Virginia. The word pocosin possibly comes from Virginia Algonquian. The early settlers used pocosin as a designation for low swampy ground, especially a wooded swamp. 84 Houghton Mifflin Encyclopedia of North American Indians, http://college.hmco.com/ history/readerscomp/naind/html/na_022600_mingo.htm (accessed March 1, 2005). 85 See Leaming, Hidden Americans, 293. In verbal English, the sounds -el, -ul, and -o are nearly identical when heard. The author suggests the similarities of the pronunciation of such word pairs as “leo/leel,” “cleo/cleel,” and “sprinkle/sprinko.” Though Leaming assumes Mingo was an Iroquoian term, his assertion is not documented. The definition used in this essay suggests Algonquin influence, possibly Creek. No evidence of Creek or related Native Americans in the Dismal Swamp was found, however, in the research for this essay. A possible explanation for the Algonquian or southeastern influence is the absorption into the swamp of Indians enslaved by Creek, Yamessee, or white Carolinians, sold north, and who had escaped from nearby plantations to the swamp. See Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. XV, 134, 430, and Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade, 315-344.

110 86

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

William S. Forrest, Historical and Descriptive Sketches of Norfolk and Vicinity (Philadelphia, 1853), 445-446. 87 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 286. 88 Leaming, Hidden Americans, 276. 89 Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, 1998), 182185. 90 Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 232. 91 See Gomez, Exchanging Out Country Marks, 164-169. 92 Ibid., 182-185; Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 48-51, 68-69. 93 Strother, “In the Dismal Swamp,” 453. 94 Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 66, 68. 95 Ibid. 96 James Redpath, The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York: A. B. Burdick, 1859), 245. 97 Ledoux, Princess Ann, 43, 44, 49. These statements have been taken from an 1896 work and are assumed to reflect mid-nineteenth century events. No specific dates are given. 98 Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines, 78. 99 Ledoux, Princess Anne, 65. 100 Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines, 76; Strother, “In the Dismal Swamp,” 451; Marion G. McDougall, Fugitive Slaves 1619-1856 (Freeport, N.Y., Books for Libraries Press, 1971; original publication Boston: Ginn & Co.,1891), 57. 101 Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 100. 102 Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” 145. 103 Ledoux, Princess Anne, 65. 104 Aptheker, “Maroons Within the Present Limits of the United States,” 168; McDougall, Fugitive Slaves, 57. 105 Edmund Berkeley and Dorothy Berkeley, “Man and the Great Dismal,” The Virginia Journal of Science, 27 (Fall 1976), 156. 106 James Kearney, “Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and Dismal Swamp Canal,” Report to the 14th Congress (Washington, 1817) 704-708, quoted in Berkeley and Berkeley, “Man and the Great Dismal,” 156. 107 Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” 148-149. 108 Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines, 17. 109 Edenton Herald of Freedom, March 27, 1799, in Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom, 196. 110 Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General, November 11, 1828, in Ibid., 383. 111 The Edenton Gazette and North CarolinaGeneral, June 16, 1808, in Ibid., 343. The Land Company itself had a hard time keeping tabs on its own slaves. Jack and Venus, “who worked in the Dismal Swamp for about two years,” under John Washington were advertised as runaways in 1771. Virginia Gazette Dec. 5, 1771, in Windley, Runaway Slave Advertisements, 105.

Voices from within the Veil 112

111

Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company (New York: Alfred AA, Knopf, 1999), 98, 147. 113 Ibid., 451. 114 Dismal Swamp Land Company Records, October 1860 and August 1860, quoted in Edward Maris-Wolf, “Between Slavery and Freedom: African Americans in the Great Dismal Swamp1763-1863” (MA Thesis, College of William and Mary, 2002), 104. 115 Frederick L. Olmstead, “The South, #13,” The New York Daily Times, April 23, 1853; Frederick Street, “In the Dismal Swamp,” Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, 55 (Mar. 1903), 40; Redpath, The Roving Editor, 243. 116 Letters from F. Hall to Son, Jan. 16, 1818, Jan. 22, 1819, Dismal Swamp Land Company Records, quoted in Leaming, Hidden Americans, 281. 117 Strother, “In the Dismal Swamp,” 451. 118 Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy, Late a Slave in the United States of America, in Eric Anthony Shepherd, ed., Ancestor's Call (Elkridge, 2003), 41; Dismal Swamp Land Company Agent Frederick Hall to his son, January 16, 1818, Dismal Swamp Land Company Papers quoted in Leaming, Hidden Americans, 281-282. 119 Grandy, Narrative, 44; Edmund Ruffin, “Observations Made During an Excursion to the Dismal Swamp,” The Farmers Register, January 1, 1837, 518 120 Strother, “The Great Dismal Swamp,” 451. 121 That there was a noticeable dearth of women among the canal and fringe maroons is indicated by the decision in 1764 by the Dismal Swamp Company's partners to increase their female slave workforce by twelve. Previously, male bondsmen employed at the company's Dismal Plantation would commonly “run about” in the night. It is suggested that the addition of women would curtail such excursions. David Jameson to Samuel Gist, December 23, 1783; claim of Samuel Gist, American Loyalist Claims, A0 13/30, PRO; entry of Dec. 15, 1764, Memoranda Dismal Swamp Company, Dismal Swamp Land Company Records, NcD, quoted in Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company, 58. 122 Franklin and Schweninger, Runaway Slaves, 210. 123 Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General Advertiser, January 25, 1820, in Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom, 372. 124 Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General Advertiser, June 16, 1808, in Ibid., 342. 125 Ibid., 213, 214. 126 Freddie C. Parker, Running for Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina 1775-1840 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1993), 79. 127 Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” 145. 128 Strother, “In the Dismal Swamp,” 451. 129 Grandy, Narrative, 35. 130 Byrd, The Writings of Colonel William Byrd, 47. 131 See Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in EighteenthCentury Virginia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 56-57. Particularly “troublesome” or “treacherous” runaways were often “outlawed.” A price was put on the head of an “outlaw” slave, not to be taken alive, whose owner would often

112

The Maroons of the Great Dismal Swamp, 1619 to 1860

be reimbursed for the resulting loss of his property. Outlawing a slave was an official legal action that categorized the runaway as a public liability and encouraged his destruction by any citizen. 132 Ibid.; Howard, In the Shadow of the Pines, 76. 133 Davis, The Great Dismal Swamp, 61; Jackson, “The Virginia Maroons,” 145. 134 State v. Bill (a slave), 6 Jones N.C. 34 (1858), in Helen Tunnicliff Catterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1926), 218-219. 135 Walter Clark, ed., The State Records of North Carolina, Vol. XV (Goldsboro, NC, 1909-1914), 252. 136 Robert Arnold, The Great Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond: Early Recollections and Vivid Portrayals of Amusing Scenes (Norfolk, VA: Evening Telegram Print, 1888), 4. 137 Redpath, The Roving Editor, 245. 138 Graham Hodges, ed., The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile After the American Revolution (New York: Garland Pub. in association with the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1996), 183,184,189; Royster, The Fabulous History, 273. 139 State Gazette of North Carolina, January 26, 1798, in Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom, 35. 140 Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General Advertiser, February 22, 1811, in Ibid., 354. 141 Edenton Gazette and North Carolina General Advertiser, May 8, 1827, in Ibid., 382. 142 Ibid., 380; For alternate nomenclature, see Smyth, A Tour in the United States, 102. 143 State Gazette of North Carolina, December 22, 1796, in Parker, Stealing a Little Freedom, 32. 144 Ibid., 384. 145 Daniel Drayton quoted in Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 86. 146 Nineteenth-century Philadelphian and African American merchant Robert Purvis quoted in Ibid.

THE STRANGE CASE OF SHERIDAN FORD AND CLARISSA DAVIS: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD IN PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA CASSANDRA L. NEWBY-ALEXANDER, NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY

It was finally time to leave. Both her brothers had escaped two months earlier. It was now July, and Hampton Roads was known for its hot and humid summers. To make matters worse, Clarissa had been hiding in a pen since they left her behind. For some reason she did not make the schooner that took them to the safety of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and all she had were the clothes on her back. It was possible that this light-skinned twenty-two-year-old beauty was afraid what slavery would eventually bring to her life. As a baptized member of the Colored Methodist Church in Portsmouth and participant in their 1851 Bible class, Clarissa must have been familiar with the Underground Railroad since a number of her church members had escaped, especially after the adoption of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. She had worked as a house slave for two widows, Mrs. Brown and Mrs. Margaret Berkley.1 Unlike many enslaved women, Clarissa Davis was seemingly spared the indignity of sexual exploitation that was the fate of many. She was also fortunate to have most of her family around her in the small city of Portsmouth. But something spurred Clarissa, thirty year old William, and twenty-eight-year-old Charles to make their escape in 1854. William and Charles secured transit aboard the Ellen Barnes from Wareham, Massachusetts in May, possibly with the assistance of Portsmouth’s operative, Eliza Bains. She was an enslaved woman who worked for captains of vessels and who may have been the property of George Bain, pastor of Clarissa and William’s church, or Henry Lewey, also known as Bluebeard in Underground Railroad circles. For seventy-five days Clarissa hid in “a miserable coop,” praying that Providence would allow her a chance to join her brothers. According to the account of William Still, word was conveyed to her that the steamship, City of Richmond, had

114

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

arrived from Philadelphia and that the steward, John Minkins, would hide her while William Bagnall, a white agent, would assist by storing her in a box once she got aboard.2 The trick, however, was how to get to the ship. The docks were closely monitored because of the numbers of fugitives who had left from Hampton Roads in the 1850s. Moreover, authorities were already alerted to her disappearance. A $1,000 reward had been posted by their slaveholders for the return of Clarissa and her two brothers. For that reason, Clarissa prayed that a heavy rain would reduce the numbers of people monitoring the docks. Fortunately for her, torrential rains did fall by midnight, allowing Clarissa to embark aboard the ship at the appointed time of 3 a.m. dressed in male attire. Once there, Bagnall hid her in a box, while Minkins made sure that the box was delivered to the Vigilance Committee upon arrival in Philadelphia. Once there, the Committee took her to their safe house and, afterwards, suggested that Clarissa adopt an alias. Renamed Mary D. Armstead, Clarissa was furnished with a passport and then sent to New Bedford, Massachusetts, at which point she was reunited with her brothers.3

Fig. 2.5. Norfolk Waterfront, ca. 1890. Although Clarissa Davis escaped thirty-five years prior to when this illustration was created, it was indicative of the busy Hampton Roads waterways. Facts and Figures about Norfolk (Norfolk, VA: 1890). Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

Voices from within the Veil

115

Fig. 2.6. This 1885 photograph was taken from India Wharf Stave Yard, owned by Charles Reid and Son, located just east of Higgins' Wharf at 14 Nivision Street. The line of buildings stretching across the background mark the approximate position of New Castle Street . The street running parallel to the waterfront is Water Street. Forrest's 1851-1852 City Directory placed Higgins' Wharf at the intersection of New Castle and Water Streets. Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

Meanwhile her father, Samuel Davis, who was deemed too old to work, was allowed by his slaveholder either to go free or to purchase his freedom for a nominal fee. Leaving Portsmouth after Clarissa’s departure, he was reunited with his children in New Bedford. When New Bedford conducted its census in 1855, Clarissa’s household consisted of her father, two brothers, and Violet, her sister-in-law and the wife of Charles. Sometime later, they were joined by Ann Scott, her thirty-five-year-old sister, and her husband Joseph M. Scott from Norfolk. The Davis family decided to flee to Canada, although the father, Samuel, decided to return to Philadelphia where he lived out his days as a free man.4 This dramatic rendering of the story of Clarissa’s flight illustrated the anxiety and dangers faced by fugitives fleeing from Portsmouth. And while Clarissa’s story was unusual in that her entire family escaped, it was exemplary of the pattern of Underground Railroad activity in Virginia. Local operatives—both black and white—secreted fugitives with the complicity of ship captains of schooners and seamen working aboard

116

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

steamships, and a local autonomous underground network worked in concert with northern operations to transport fugitives to freedom. After 1680, Norfolk’s and later Portsmouth’s economic development as important seaports for eastern North Carolina trade brought an increase in the primarily enslaved African American population. While some information about blacks in Norfolk exists, little in the way of statistical information is known about Portsmouth’s black community which, by 1790, made up approximately twenty-five percent of the total population in this Norfolk County town. The antebellum period witnessed the development of the town of Portsmouth, which was bounded by the Elizabeth River and extended north to North Street, south to Scott Street, and west to Chestnut Street. Beyond these parameters was rural Norfolk County, which connected lower Tidewater Virginia with eastern North Carolina via the Dismal Swamp. Census records documented over twelve thousand people living in Norfolk County in 1800. Of that number, twenty-three percent were African American (almost five thousand were slaves and over two hundred were free blacks). Over the next four decades, those numbers would increase two-fold for the general and enslaved populations, while the free black population increased by one hundred and twenty percent. In 1840, there were 6,387 residents in Portsmouth: 1,890 were enslaved and 423 were free blacks. By 1850, one-third of the 8,626 residents in Portsmouth were black. So important to the economy was the slave trade and slavery in the region that three physicians—William J. Moore, George L. Upshur, and Robert W. Rose— operated a Slave Infirmary on Talbot Street in Norfolk. According to their notice, this hospital was especially advantageous to owners who hired out slaves in the area who needed surgery, medical, or obstetrical care.5 About the same time Clarissa escaped, another fugitive left Portsmouth, making his way to New Bedford, Massachusetts: Sheridan Ford. His story typified those who were forced to leave their family behind in an effort to secure the well-being of their loved ones as free people. Unfortunately for Ford, his story would be bittersweet. While reuniting with his family eleven years after his escape, the circumstances of his and his former wife’s lives would prevent them from reassembling as a family. Oddly, the lives of Clarissa and Sheridan would be inextricably linked together in a state that accommodated more fugitives than any other: Massachusetts.

Voices from within the Veil

117

Fig. 2.7. The white circle indicates the location of Higgins’ and Wright’s Wharves in this 1873 map. Courtesy C. N. Drie, Norfolk & Portsmouth, Virginia, map, Library of Congress.

Piecing together the remarkable history of the Underground Railroad has challenged scholars for generations. Clues about America’s most effectively secret organization are scattered in abolitionist newspaper accounts, runaway slave advertisements, court records, Virginia’s ship inspection records, census records, and oral accounts of fugitives and former slaves during the 1930s. Some of these individuals were caught by their slaveholders and returned to the South, like Anthony Burns of Richmond. Norfolk native Shadrack Minkins was caught in Boston, but he eventually escaped to Montreal with the assistance of abolitionists. Portsmouth native Robert Emerson fled to Canada but returned to the states and migrated to San Francisco, California.6 Others, like George and Rachel Latimer of Portsmouth, escaped and settled in New Bedford and later Chelsea, Massachusetts. Stimulated by Canada’s 1834 ban on slavery and heightened by the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act and national coverage of high profile fugitive arrests, this nineteenth-century dispersion of enslaved African American fugitives to the northern U.S. and Canada led to the second chapter of the African Diaspora. The most noted case and the first to receive national attention, resulting in the fugitive becoming a cause celèbre, was the 1842 trial of twenty-one-year-old George Latimer, who became the father of America’s famous inventor, Lewis Latimer. George Latimer was originally the slave of Portsmouth resident Edward Latimer, while his twenty-one-year-old

118

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

wife, Rachel, was owned by Mary Sayer.7 According to his first autobiographical sketch published in the Latimer Journal and North Star, a newspaper founded to support his cause, George was the son of Margaret Olmsted Mitchell, a slave, and Samuel Mitchell Latimer, a white stone mason who worked in the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth. Apparently, Samuel Latimer was the younger brother and apprentice to Edward Latimer, George Latimer’s original owner. After several different owners, George Latimer became the property of James B. Gray, a thirty-three year old machinist from Norfolk. Gray owned a steam saw mill that was located on South Duke Street near the west end of Upper Washington Street in Norfolk. Interestingly, this area was next to an inlet on the Elizabeth River where a few warehouses were located and some schooners and other small vessels were able to navigate. His account also supported the profile of most fugitives: that they were frequently hired out and mistreated by the slave owner from whom they escaped. 8 Like many enslaved African Americans, George Latimer attempted to escape more than once. Success eluded him until October 4, 1842, when he and his wife Rachel boarded a steamship in the Hampton Roads harbor that took them on a three-day journey to Boston whereupon they found sanctuary by hiding with “colored persons living on Joy Street.”9 The day after reaching Boston, however, Latimer was spotted by William R. Carpenter, a former employee of James Gray, who immediately recognized Latimer and then contacted Gray about him. In the meantime, Gray advertised about Latimer along with Mary Sayer, the owner of Latimer’s wife, Rebecca, in the Norfolk newspaper, American Beacon on October 15, 1842. Both were described in the runaway slave advertisement as mulattos and as husband and wife. Immediately after receiving Carpenter’s correspondence, Gray went in pursuit of Latimer, arriving in Boston on October 18th. Upon his arrival, Gray notified the police that Latimer should be arrested on the charge of larceny and claimed that Latimer had stolen goods from his Norfolk store. Afterwards, he was placed in the Leverett Street jail, whereupon Gray initiated the extradition process.10 Word of his incarceration spread quickly through abolitionist circles, most notably in the black community, resulting in the assemblage at Faneuil Hall of nearly three hundred people. Composed mostly of black men, they were dedicated to preventing Gray from taking Latimer to Norfolk until authorized by the courts. This same tactic would be successfully repeated in 1851 when another Norfolk fugitive, Shadrack Minkins, would be spirited away by black abolitionists. Latimer’s warrant-less arrest and imprisonment without any written charges resulted

Voices from within the Veil

119

in demonstrations in Boston and concurrent abolitionist meetings throughout the state. Apparently, the citizens of Boston were so enraged by the temerity of a slaveholder to remove one of their citizens that they forced Gray to seek out the assistance of the local authorities. These protests bolstered civil action by Latimer’s attorneys and his eventual release until a November 21 trial date. John Quincy Adams, the Massachusetts Congressional representative, received a petition signed by sixty-five thousand citizens and addressed to the state legislature demanding Latimer’s freedom. Reportedly, Adams said that the fugitive was the son of “a very respectable gentleman of Norfolk, Virginia, a member of one of the most distinguished and respectable families in that state.”11 In the interim, his legal council began offering money and pressuring Gray to free Latimer. Fearing that he would lose his slave, because the sheriff notified him that he would no longer house fugitive slaves in his jail, Gray reluctantly accepted four hundred dollars in payment for the release and freedom of his slave and waived his claims as a slaveholder.12 As for Latimer, he was cleared of larceny charges and officially freed on November 21, 1842. Still fearing that he would be kidnapped, however, Latimer and his family continued residing in Underground retreats until 1860, where he would be listed in the census as residing in Charlestown, Massachusetts as a laborer. Sometime after the war, Latimer and his family moved further north to the town of Lynn where he resided until his death on May 28, 1896.13 Latimer’s case was one such incident highlighting the importance of Hampton Roads as Virginia’s largest port area by the end of the eighteenth century. Portsmouth and Norfolk had emerged as growing urban slave centers with the majority of blacks engaged in port-related occupations in the industrial, commercial, and trade sectors of the maritime industry. The economy thrived on the backs of its enslaved workforce, but the jobs necessitated that many live and work apart from their masters. This mobility allowed African Americans, free and enslaved, to interact with one another on a daily basis. Many established strong family ties, although they were always at risk of being sold on the auction block Nonetheless, because these cities had daily and/or weekly newspapers, most of the enslaved were informed about local and national events in addition to having access to abolitionist publications, free blacks, and a diversity of visitors.14 Such was the situation for Robert Irving, alias Sheridan Ford. Born in 1827, Robert, along with his sister, Mary Ann, was the son of Joseph and Isabella Irving. Reportedly, Joseph and Robert worked at the Naval

120

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

Hospital in Portsmouth. Robert’s mother’s master, Miss Elizabeth Brown, owned both Robert and Mary Ann, while their father was owned by Mrs. Langhorne, a widow in Portsmouth. More than likely, Brown had connections to the Naval Hospital, which lay on the outskirts of the city during the antebellum period, because Robert lived and worked at the hospital.15 From all accounts, Robert knew a number of people growing up on the streets of Portsmouth. Working at the Naval Hospital obviously gave him status, flexibility, and mobility unknown to most enslaved African Americans. Three of his friends, Joseph Hodges, Charles Bracey, and David Johnson, were men who he knew as a child and young adult in antebellum Portsmouth. Joseph, who would eventually marry Robert’s sister, Mary Ann, associated with Robert during his formative years, and continued that close relationship until his escape in 1854. It was likely that Joseph Hodges introduced Robert to his wife, Julia Ann Gregory, because they were both owned by General John Hodges, a resident in the city.16 Born in 1786, General John Hodges was one of Portsmouth’s leading white citizens. During the War of 1812, Hodges so distinguished himself as an officer that he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General of the 9th Brigade of the Virginia Militia. According to one of John‘s descendants, Mary Ainsworth Hook, the Hodges family settled in Nansemond County in the 1700s, purchasing a plantation that rested along the Western Branch of the Elizabeth River. Named the Wildwood plantation, General John Hodges owned upwards of one hundred slaves, one of whom operated a ferry that conveyed people and supplies between the Nansemond County and the city of Portsmouth. Hodges also owned a townhouse that he purchased in 1829, located at the corner of North and Middle Streets.17 Like some men of this era, John Hodges married three times, surviving his first two wives, Ann Carney and Louise Harrison. In 1828, his third wife, Jane Adelaide Gregory, not only added three children to his household that included two from his second marriage, but also brought with her at least two enslaved women: Betsy Gregory and her daughter, Julia Ann Gregory, the future wife of Robert Irving. Hailing from Gates County, North Carolina, Jane Gregory was descended from noted settlers, including clergyman John Gregorie and Captain Thomas Godwin. And like many families whose roots stretched into one or more regions, hers dominated Gates and Wayne counties. Consequently, relatives whose last names included Griswold, Gregory, and Jayner would provide suitable marriage partners for the children of the Hodges family.18

Voices from within the Veil

121

In 1845, the year in which American soldiers left to fight in the Mexican War, Robert and Julia Ann married with the consent of both of their owners. Julia Ann must have been a favored slave of John and Jane Adelaide Hodges because it was General Hodges who, reading from a book, performed the marriage ceremony in the parlor of his home and in the presence of his family and countless witnesses, free and enslaved, among whom were Charles Bracey, David Johnson, and Mary Ann and Joseph Hodges. The favored treatment given to Julia by Hodges indicated a relationship beyond master-slave. And while that exact relationship may never be known, it succeeded in catapulting Julia and Robert to an influential status among Portsmouth’s blacks. It would be in the basement of General Hodges’ home that Robert prepared a wedding dinner for his bride and that the couple made their home. It was also where Julia gave birth to their three children: Robert, George, and Frank Irving.19 Robert and Julia were highly regarded among Portsmouth’s small and closely-knit community. Seen as a loving husband and wife, according to their friend, Charles Bracey, the couple prospered socially, despite their enslaved status, until Robert’s owner threatened to sell him away from his family. While the records are scant during these years, it is possible that Robert and Julia were members of the Colored Methodist Church, which held services in the Old Glasgow Street building on the former site of Benedict Arnold’s fort. Robert’s sister and brother-in-law, Mary Ann and Joseph Hodges, were members of that church as were countless other free and enslaved blacks, including the family of Clarissa Davis.20 Early maps from the 1850s in Portsmouth illustrated how slaves, whose owners lived near the ferry docks and wharves, escaped. Officials suspected residents of assisting fugitives, especially among those in the Methodist church and free blacks. The Colored Methodist Church was very close to the waterfront. Historians have noted that typically safe houses and stations on the Underground Railroad were located near graveyards and churches, which served as both navigational aids and hiding places. Strengthening these rumors was the anti-slavery position that had characterized American Methodism, especially from the late eighteenth century onward. Homes of members and the church were located close to one of the major Elizabeth River inlets known for having small wharves in which schooners and skiffs docked. Runaway slave accounts (and later in the WPA interviews or former slaves) identified these areas as haunts for Underground Railroad activities. Although evidentiary connections between these sympathizers and direct support for the Underground Railroad cannot be established, a circumstantial case can be made.21

122

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

Fig. 2.9. 300 North Street, 2008. The former home of General John Hodges, Constructed in 1792. Courtesy Cassandra Newby-Alexander

Fannie Nicholson, the former slave of Mrs. Margaret Hodges, the daughter of General Hodges, recounted years later how when slaves gathered secretly for prayer meetings they would place large tubs of water outside the house to “catch de sounds so we wouldn’t bother our marster or missus.” She further noted that some of the slaves resorted to extreme measures in their attempts to escape, such as being placed in wooden boxes on ships bound for the North. According to Nicholson, some of the slaves met a watery doom when these boats were boarded by slaveholders. To avoid imprisonment, some of these captains simply dumped overboard boxes containing slaves.22 Like many churches and organizations populated with free blacks, the African Methodist Society Church (later renamed Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1871), like its counterpart in Norfolk, came under public scrutiny, especially since suspicions were rampant that free blacks and sympathetic whites were directly involved with assisting enslaved African Americans to escape. Newspaper editorials constantly remarked that those living among them who were abolitionist sympathizers should be routed out and punished. The presence of the African Church must have been particularly disturbing for slaveholders. When the church was burned while located on Glasgow Street, its pastor, the Reverend George M. Bain, wrote in the church’s records that it was “’the work no doubt, of some wicked hand.’” This comment implied that the church’s suspected activities may have played a

Voices from within the Veil

123

role in that act. One wonders why the church was allowed to exist except that powerful individuals may have protected it, including the President of Portsmouth’s Merchants and Mechanics Savings Bank and Mayor of Portsmouth, George Grice, who was the slaveholder of the African Methodist Church’s most prominent member, Jeffrey Wilson. A close bond existed between the Grice and Wilson that was reminiscent of blood ties. Moreover, its pastor, Bain, worked as an important agent of the overseer of the Poor of Norfolk County and as cashier and vice president of the Portsmouth Savings Fund Society. 23

Fig. 2.10. Colored Methodist Church in Portsmouth, ca. 1880s. Renamed Emanuel A.M.E. Church. Courtesy Portsmouth City Directory, Norfolk, VA.

According to local lore, some of the primary departure points for the Underground Railroad were the wharves located along North Street. Nineteenth-century maps of Portsmouth illustrate how the Elizabeth River reached deep into Portsmouth along North Street, especially between the churches attended by the city’s African Americans. The Old Glasgow Street and Emanuel A.M.E. churches were positioned close to these water access points. At the opposite end of North Street and directly across from Norfolk was the ferry dock which transported people, animals, and goods between the two cities. As the town expanded and became a city by the 1850s, these restrictions lessened, allowing enslaved blacks to congregate around their churches, especially when they were located on Glasgow Street, until that church was burned in 1856. It seems that prior to the twentieth century, Emanuel was regarded as one of Portsmouth’s primary Underground Railroad safe houses. Although rumors circulated for years

124

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

in the twentieth century that a tunnel ran to the waterfront from one of these churches, an archeological survey revealed that none had existed. Instead, the survey found anomalies that were consistent with drainage trenches. It is possible that runaways used these trenches when making their way from a “safe area” to the wharves where the ships, assisting them in their escape, were berthed.24 At the very least, this church and other institutions controlled by free blacks were under attack because of the paranoia that hung over Virginia and other southern states in the years prior to the Civil War. While oral accounts contended that the church harbored runaways, posting lookouts in case city officials invaded the church, and hiding escaped slaves behind the organ, these assertions cannot be substantiated because the runaways left no artifacts or accounts that detail these specifics. What also is not known is the extent to which members of the church were involved in the impetus and success of these escapes. Church documents, however, note that throughout the 1840s and 1850s numerous enslaved members were recorded to have escaped while the church was located on Glasgow Street, and this fugitive activity continued with its its relocation on North Street.25

Fig. 2.11. The highlighted area #1 is the location of Emanuel AME Church in Portsmouth. Its earlier sanctuary on Glasgow Street is area #2. As is clearly visible in both locations, the church is located near major inlets to the Elizabeth River. Smaller vessels often berthed in these inlets. Courtesy C. N. Drie, Norfolk & Portsmouth, VA, map 187 and Library of Congress.

Voices from within the Veil

125

Fig. 2.12. Jeffrey Wilson (far left) was author of “The Colored Notes” in the Portsmouth Star and Major George W. Grice (middle) was the mayor of Portsmouth and former slaveholder of Jeffrey Wilson. Courtesy Mae Breckenridge-Haywood. The Reverend George M. Bain (right) was the pastor of the Colored Methodist Church (renamed Emanuel A.M.E. Church) during much of the church’s Underground Railroad activities. Courtesy Portsmouth Public Library.

Examining the church records and oral accounts from Hampton Roads reveals that many of the people who escaped traveled to a similar debarkation point. William Still noted that while some fugitives traveled a hundred or more miles to reach the Hampton Roads port, the majority traveled to or across the Elizabeth River or one of its many tributaries. Anthony Blow, a resident and member of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, made his escape from Norfolk. Interestingly, because Blow’s slaveholders, William and Martha Peters, who lived on Court Street, died prior to his departure in November 1854, he was scheduled to be transferred to the Peters’ daughter and her husband, James Lewis, Esq. on January 1855. Like Atkinson, Blow escaped with the assistance of his friend Minkins, who secretly worked as a conductor while serving aboard the City of Richmond. Akin to many of the fugitives from Portsmouth, Blow was a member of Emanuel AME Church. In fact, along with Blow, Clarissa Davis and Moses Wines were on the Bible study class list of Emanuel AME Church in 1851. Curiously, all escaped in 1854.26 Oral accounts indicate that Emanuel A.M.E. Church was used as a station house from which runaway slaves departed to areas in the North. The area behind the organ was said to be where members hid escaped slaves. Visitors to the church can still see these historic hiding places and access to what may be a root cellar that has been bricked in since the 1860s. Jane Pyatt, a former slave of the Parkers in Portsmouth, revealed that Emanuel A.M.E. Church was extensively involved in the Railroad's activities. She noted that runaways would seek sanctuary inside the

126

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

church, hiding behind the organ or inside the tunnel that ran from the Church to the Elizabeth River. Pyatt also noted that there was an old brick house near the same block as Emanuel AME Church whose cellar was used to hide fugitives. She claimed that there was a cellar that had a corridor which “extended to the ferry for many slaves to escape. Men, women and children would pack their clothes during the day and escape at night through this underground railroad.”27

Fig. 2.13. Mrs. Jane Pyatt (left) was a Portsmouth resident who was interviewed by a Federal Writers’ Project worker in 1937 while residing at the Portsmouth Old Folks Home. During the interview, Mrs. Pyatt discussed the involvement of Emanuel AME Church, ca. 1940s (right) in Portsmouth’s Underground Railroad. The church is located at 637 North Street. Courtesy Portsmouth Public Library.

So it was not surprising to find Robert Irving among the group who would be secreted out of Portsmouth aboard a steamer. David Johnson, who was born in 1836 and worked in the small town of Portsmouth as a coachman, met Robert in 1847, seven years before his escape. Johnson was present at all of Robert’s important events, including his wedding to Julia Ann Gregory and the birth of their three children. He considered Robert a “warm and personal friend” with whom he kept in touch, even after his escape in 1854. In fact, it was probably Johnson, and the network of Underground Railroad operatives, who had helped Robert to escape once Robert knew that his master was about to sell him away from his family. It was the circumstances of that escape and its aftermath that made Robert Irving’s story a tragic love story. According to William Still, stationmaster of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia, Robert arrived,

Voices from within the Veil

127

About the twenty-ninth of January, 1855 . . . from the Old Dominion and a life of bondage. . . Miss Elizabeth Brown of Portsmouth, Va. claimed Sheridan as her property. He spoke rather kindly of her, and felt that he “had not been used very hard" as a general thing, although, he wisely added, “the best usage was bad enough.” Sheridan had nearly reached his twenty-eighth year, was tall and well made, and possessed of a considerable share of intelligence. Not a great while before making up his mind to escape, for some trifling offence he had been "stretched up with a rope by his hands," and "whipped unmercifully. In addition to this, he had “got wind of the fact," that he was to be auctioneered off; these things brought serious reflections to Sheridan's mind and among other questions, he began to ponder how he could get a ticket on the U. G. R. R., and get out of this "place of torment," to where he might have the benefit of his own labor. In this state of about the fourteenth day of November, he took his first and daring step. He went . . . "directly to the woods," where he felt that he be safer with the wild animals and reptiles, in solitude, than with the civilization in Portsmouth.28

The year of Robert’s escape was considered the height of Underground Railroad activities in Virginia. So threatening were the efforts of abolitionists that a local newspaper, the American Beacon, sarcastically noted the apprehension of three runaway slaves in 1855, claiming that their capture resulted from the Underground Railroad being "out of order." In Hampton Roads, those activities were made easier with the infamous Yellow Fever epidemic which had become especially severe by late summer. Fleeing from his owner in November 1854, Robert probably hid in the familiar woods located on the outskirts of the city in the area of North Street, close to the Colored Methodist Church and the Naval Hospital where he worked. Like many fugitives, Ford had assistance. He claimed that a friend, who knew his whereabouts, brought him food and psychological support until travel was arranged for him aboard one of the steamers that ran between Philadelphia and Richmond. The City of Richmond and the Philadelphia were two steamships that regularly made the journey from Norfolk to Philadelphia. Typically, the fugitive was met by the Vigilance Committee, who then passed that individual to the next station in Boston.29 Following his escape General Hodges, not wanting to risk the escape of his property, arranged to have Julia and her three children locked up in the Norfolk jail for five months. Also, during that interim, Robert adopted the name of Sheridan Ford after moving to Boston, where a supportive network of black and white abolitionists helped him to get settled. Immediately upon arriving in Boston, Sheridan discovered, through this

128

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

network, that his wife and three children had been secured in the Norfolk jail, beyond the reach of local Underground Railroad operatives.30 Desperate to retrieve them, Sheridan pleaded with William Still in a February 15, 1855 letter. Writing from No. 2 Change Avenue in Boston, Sheridan declared: in the name of the Lord and humanity [I ask you] to do something for my Poor Wife and children who lays in Norfolk Jail and have Been there for three month . . . i can but ask in the name of humanity and God for he knows the heart of all men. Please ask the friends humanity to do something for her and her two lettle ones i cant do any thing Place as i am for i have to lay low Please lay this before the churches of Philadelphains . . . she is Jail and you most no she suffer for the jail in the South are not like yours for any thing is good enough for negros the Slave boaters Says & may God interpose in behalf of the demonstrative Race of Africa Whom i claim desendent . . . Please do all you can and Please ask the Anti Slavery friends to do all they can and God will Reward them for it . . . Please answer this and Pardon me if the necessary sum call be required i will find out from my brotherinlaw i am with respectful consideration, SHERIDAN W. FORD.31

Fig. 2.14. Scene depicted of escape by fifteen fugitives from Portsmouth and Norfolk Virginia in July 1856 who had to disembark from schooner on League Island. Courtesy The Underground Railroad by William Still, 486.

In a twist of fate, John Hodges died on July 21, 1855 during the area’s famous Yellow Fever epidemic. Unbeknownst to Sheridan, his family was

Voices from within the Veil

129

sold to forty-two-year-old hotel keeper R. J. Gregory in Goldsboro, North Carolina, no doubt a cousin of his wife. An 1860 slave schedule recorded Gregory owning eight slaves, including two mulatto females, one aged thirty-four (probably Julia Anne Gregory) and a twenty-three-year-old, and six children ranging in age from one to six years old. Although Sheridan kept in constant touch with his brother-in-law and sister, Joseph and Mary Hodges, as well as his good friend David Johnson, no one knew where his family had been sold. Perhaps it was because of the chaos that resulted from the epidemic and the death of her owner that Sheridan did not discover what had become of his family until eleven years later.32 Little information survived to detail what happened in the lives of Sheridan Ford and Julia Ann Irving except that, while in Goldsboro, Julia married Killis Bunn sometime around 1857 or 1858. Records also noted that Sheridan migrated up to New Bedford where he thrived as a cook on a steamer under the protection of the city’s antislavery sympathizers.33 It seems that after 1855, many abolitionists advised fugitives in New Bedford to emigrate to Canada where the power of the fugitive slave laws could not reach. Because New Bedford had a reputation as a hotbed of activist abolitionists, bounty hunters poured into the region with the hope of capturing runaways. Nevertheless, a number of fugitives chose to remain. Among those who remained were Sheridan Ford and the family of Clarissa Davis.

Fig. 2.15. This was the Norfolk City Jail, ca. 1880, where Julia Ann Gregory and her three children were kept following Sheridan Ford’s escape. Courtesy Past and City Facts and Figures of its Trade, Commerce, and Manufactures, 32, compiled by Samuel R. Borum, Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library..

130

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

Virginia’s Underground Railroad, more than perhaps any other in the United States, succeeded in sending hundreds if not thousands of runaways to areas as far away as Hamilton, Ontario. Even before the 1850s, the most active period of the UGRR, enslaved Virginians made their way to Canada. Abolitionist Benjamin Drew, who recorded the conditions of fugitives in Canada, noted that as early as 1824 Virginia slaves escaped to Western Ontario. These early escapees were left to their own devices, usually ferrying through forests and along waterways depending upon strangers for assistance. By the 1840s, a more structured organization had formed through contacts made between regional Vigilance Committees. The largest numbers crossed into Canada by way of the “lake ports between Oswego, New York and Detroit” by train or steamship. Richard Bohm, an early Norfolk escapee to Canada, and Virginian William Johnson, distinguished themselves as important UGRR agents who assisted in establishing new arrivals, such as Portsmouth and Norfolk natives John Atkinson and James Williams, in St. Catharines. John Atkinson was unusual in that clear evidence existed of where in Canada this Portsmouth native had settled. He escaped enslavement in 1854 aboard what William Still referred to as a Richmond steamer (the City of Richmond) in 1854. Escaping during a period when fugitive departures were referred to by local newspapers as stampedes, Atkinson probably escaped aboard the City of Richmond, assisted by John Minkins, or on of the schooners from New Bedford. Other emigrants to St. Catharines included Dan Josiah Lockhart who escaped in 1847 from Frederick County, William George who left from Harpers Ferry in 1851, Henry Banks who escaped with Isaac Williams from Ayler’s slave pen in Richmond, Christopher Nicholson from Fredericksburg, and David West who arrived in 1854 from King and Queen County.34 In a remarkable twist of fate, Clarissa, who took the alias Mary D. Armstead, married someone she knew from Portsmouth, Sheridan Ford. Like many fugitives who lost touch with their families, Ford began a new life with Mary and the two were married in 1863. A few years later, they moved to a smaller town, Chelsea, where they had two children: Annie Ford and Leonard A. Ford. Following the Civil War, a number of former fugitives returned to the U.S. from Canada. Among those were Mary’s sister, Ann, and brother-in-law, Joseph Scott, who spent their remaining years in New Bedford. Census records in 1870 verified that Mary and Sheridan lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a place settled by other runaways from Hampton Roads including George and Rachel Latimer, parents of Lewis Latimer. Mary and Sheridan spent the remainder of their lives in Chelsea acquiring considerable property and money, and returning

Voices from within the Veil

131

occasionally to Portsmouth after the war to visit Sheridan’s children from his first marriage.35

Fig. 2.16. The 1857 depiction of the escape by Portsmouth natives John Stinger, Robert Emerson (brother of Jeffrey Wilson, Anthony and Isabella Pugh, and Stebney Swan aboard Captain Edward Lee’s skiff. Courtesy The Underground Railroad by William Still, 86.

David Johnson kept in touch with his dear friend, visiting him once during the Civil War, shortly after he and Mary had moved to Chelsea, and twice afterwards. He was, however, unaware that Julia and the children had been sold to Goldsboro resident R. J. Gregory, a relation of Jane Gregory Hodges, who was the widow of General John Hodges. In 1865, shortly after Julia returned to Portsmouth with her husband, Killis Bunn, and her children, Sheridan wrote to his former wife asking her to send his son Robert to him at Chelsea. She sent him, and Robert lived with Sheridan’s family in Chelsea for some time. Three years later, Sheridan returned to Portsmouth for a visit. According to Julia, Sheridan dined with her and Killis just prior to his death that same year. During Sheridan’s visit, he gave his other son, Frank, clothes. Afterwards, Frank visited his father and family in Chelsea, “where he was recognized and treated as a son and brother.” In the months following the death of Killis, Julia married Joseph Brown; and after his death in 1885, she remained single until her death. Although it was unclear whether Mary had accompanied Sheridan on any of his return visits to Portsmouth, it is doubtful because the accounts never mentioned her presence.36

132

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

What is known is that Sheridan regretted leaving his wife and children. Julia Ann and Mary Ann both recalled that, during Sheridan’s last visit to Portsmouth in 1895, he gave Frank a gold watch and said to him, “Son, I am not coming here any more; it makes me sick in my stomach when I look at the place and see how I had to go away from my wife and children. Here is a watch, take it, it is nothing common, and when I die a part of my property will be yours. You will get your share of it.” Moreover, he told Julia that had he remained in Portsmouth, they would have celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary.37 Ford died at the age of seventy-one in his home at 7 Eden Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts, three days before Christmas in 1898. Although records listed him as having Bright’s disease, his death was precipitated by a fracture to his right humerus, the result of a deadly fall.38 His wife Clarissa, alias Mary Armstead, followed him in death a year later at the age of seventy of pneumonia. Interestingly, both were buried in New Bedford, the city that had been their home for a number of years following her escape from Portsmouth.39 According to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Probate Court records, following the death of Mary, Leonard Ford and Margaret Wahlen were designated as administrators of their parents’ estate worth an estimated $4,900. This amount included a wooden house in Chelsea worth $2,600, household furniture that included a piano valued at $800, and almost $1,500 in cash.40 A year after the probate filing, Frank, Sheridan Ford’s youngest son from his first marriage, filed a petition to force his half siblings to disperse the estate evenly among the survivors. Leonard and Margaret refused, resulting in the case winding its way through Massachusetts’ judicial system to its final destination: the Massachusetts Supreme Court. The decree of the Court, filed on July 29, 1902, stated that, although Frank was recognized publicly as the son of Sheridan Ford, the marriage between Sheridan and Julia was not legal in the state of Massachusetts. Therefore, “acknowledgement was insufficient to legitimatize the petitioner under the laws of this commonwealth” and that only Annie and Leonard Ford were entitled to the inheritance.41 The legacy of Sheridan and Mary Ford continued even beyond their lives and that of their children. The dispute over the estate, and the subsequent case that went before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, set a national precedence for cases confronting the courts following the deaths of fugitives and former slaves by the early twentieth century. Their deaths reignited the significance of the second African Diaspora as former fugitives reconnected with family and friends.42

Voices from within the Veil

133

During the fight with their half-brother, Frank Irving, Annie lived in the household of her brother, his wife, Cordelia, and their son Leslie. In the years that followed, Leonard and Cordelia moved to the Melrose Ward in Middlesex, Massachusetts and had three more children: Mildred, Francis, and Marion. Working as an upholsterer and carpet layer, Leonard entered the ranks of skilled artisans in the region, moving back to Chelsea in 1920 with his family that now included another daughter: nine-year-old Edna. As for his older sister Annie, it was difficult to trace her whereabouts, and those of her three nieces, because of possible marriages. After 1910, the name Annie E. Ford disappeared from the census records. The only son of Leonard and Cordelia, however, was easier to track. The 1930 census records noted that Leslie married and had three children: Jacqueline, Marylyn, and Leslie. Working as an elevated railroad porter, Leslie and with his wife Eleanor also continued living in Chelsea, the city that had been home for his parents and grandparents.43 So it was that fugitives such as Clarissa Davis, William Davis, Charles Davis, Robert Irving, George and Rachel Latimer, John Atkinson, Moses Wines, Harrison and Harriet Ann Bell, Anthony Blow, Elizabeth Frances, and countless others escaped from Portsmouth through the Underground Railroad. Leaving the port of Hampton Roads, these individuals braved the treacherous journey to Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York as well as to areas as far away as Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario. And while the true numbers of those who successfully escaped never will be known, what is certain is that many did secure their freedom in the same spirit as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Some returned to America to build a new life in what they hoped would be a changed society while others remained in Canada West, deciding instead to remain in a society that had a longer commitment to freedom and equality than that in the land of their birth. And while those in Canada often faced the same kind of racial prejudice in both countries, those who chose Canada opted for the proverbial “bird in hand” social strata.

Notes 1

Charles Stewart, The African Society Becomes Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Norfolk, VA: Guide Quality Press, 1944), 40, 44, 147; William Still, The Underground Railroad, (Salem, New Hampshire, Ayer Company Publishers, 1968; reprint 1992; originally published in Philadelphia by Porter and Coates, 1872), 60.

134 2

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

Kathryn Grover, The Fugitives Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 242-243; William Still, 60-61. 3 William Still, 61; Margaret Berkley was listed as a Portsmouth resident. Interestingly, in the 1840 census she was listed as Burkley and in the 1850 census as Berkley. Year: 1840 Census Place: Portsmouth, Norfolk, Virginia; Roll: 570; Page: 128, Ancestry.com. 1840 U.S. Federal Census [database online]. Provo, Utah: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States. 1840 United States Federal Census. M704, 580 rolls. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.; Year: 1850; Census Place: Portsmouth, Norfolk, Virginia; Roll: M432_964; Page: 181; Image: 364, Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2005. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1850. M432, 1,009 rolls; 4 Kathryn Grover, 243. 5 In 1850 there were 6,321 Whites, 554 free blacks, and 1,751 enslaved African Americans. Marshall Butt, Portsmouth Under Four Flags (Portsmouth, VA: Portsmouth Historical Association, 1961), 18-19; Thelma Dunston, “The History of the Negro in Portsmouth, Virginia,” February 12, 1937, Virginia State Library, 1; Southern Argus, October 8, 1860, 12; Southern Argus, December 8, 1854, 1; Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, University of Virginia [accessed July 13, 2005, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/ stats/histcensus]; Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals By Race, 1790 to 1990 and By Hispanic Origin, 1970-1990, For Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States, Population Division, Working Paper No. 76, (Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). 6 Robert Wilson was recorded to be in California as early as 1880. His age was recorded as thirty-seven, married to Martha, and employed as a janitor. Year: 1880; Census Place: San Francisco, San Francisco, California; Roll: T9_76; Family History Film: 1254076; Page: 260.1000; Enumeration District: 134; Image: 0475, Ancestry.com. 1880 United States Federal Census; Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census. [database on-line] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2001-. Indexed by Ancestry.com from microfilmed schedules of the 1920 U.S. Federal Decennial Census.1920 United States Federal Census. [database online] Provo, UT: Ancestry.com, 2001. Data imaged from National Archives and Records Administration. 1920 Federal Population Census. T625, 2,076 rolls. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration; “50th Anniversary Party,” San Francisco Examiner, April 17, 1913; Circuit Court, City of Portsmouth, Will Book 9: 329, Portsmouth, VA. 7 Although there is no listing for a Mary Sayer in the census records of this period, there is a thirty-five year old William Sayre listed in the 1850 Portsmouth census records. He is also listed as owning five slaves who ranged in ages from seven to fifty-five. More than likely, William is the son of Mary Sayre, although there is no census information available to support that position except that it would seem, from George Latimer’s autobiographical sketch, that one morning after he had

Voices from within the Veil

135

spent time visiting his wife, his owner caught him on the streets on his return. Therefore, both Rachel and George were probably living in Portsmouth, although the general accounts referred to the area of departure as Norfolk. Year: 1850; Census Place: Portsmouth Norfolk, Virginia; Roll: M432_964; Page: 254; Image: 509. Ancestry.com. 1850 U.S. Federal Census Slave Schedule [database online]; Asa J. Davis, “The George Latimer Case: A Benchmark in the Struggle for Freedom,” Blueprint for Change: The Life and Times of Lewis H. Latimer [Accessed July 6, 2006, http://edison.rutgers.edu/latimer/glatcase.htmH,] 8 The Portsmouth census records did not confirm the existence of a Mitchell Latimer; however, a Samuel M. Latimer was documented to have lived in Portsmouth as early as the 1830 census and as late as the 1840 census. Moreover, records indicated a sibling connection between Edward and Samuel, the only Latimers living in Portsmouth. In 1820, Samuel M. Latimer lived in Hampton, a town on the peninsula in Hampton Roads. Year: 1820; Census Place: Hampton, Elizabeth City, Virginia; Roll: M33_133; Page: 187; Image: 134, Ancestry.com. 1820 U.S. Federal Census [database online]. Provo, Utah: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States. 1820 United States Federal Census. M33, 142 rolls. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.; Year: 1830; Census Place: Portsmouth, Norfolk, Virginia; Roll: 197; Page: 350, Ancestry.com. 1830 U.S. Federal Census [database online]. Provo, Utah: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States. 1830 United States Federal Census. M19, 201 rolls. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.; Year: 1840; Census Place: Portsmouth, Norfolk Virginia; Roll: 570; Page: 127. Ancestry.com. 1840 U.S. Federal Census [database online]. Provo, Utah: MyFamily.com, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States. 1840 United States Federal Census. M704, 580 rolls. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.; Asa Davis, “The George Latimer Case”; Gary Collinson, Shadrack Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 87. James B. Gray was listed in the 1850 census with a wife, Jane, who was born in Massachusetts, four boys, ages seven to thirteen, one thirty-year old White female, and a twenty-three year old Mulatto laborer named Thomas Sparrow in his household. Year: 1850; Census Place: Norfolk, Norfolk (Independent City), Virginia; Roll: M432_964; Page: 60; Image: 122, Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database online]; Norfolk, Va. Citizens, Proceedings of the Citizens of the Borough of Norfolk, on the Boston Outrage, in the Case of the Runaway Slave George Latimer. (Norfolk: T.G. Broughton and Son, 1843), 5; C. N. Drie, Norfolk & Portsmouth, Virginia, map, 1873, Library of Congress. 9 Wilbur Siebert, The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts (Worcester, Massachusetts: American Antiquarian Society, 1935), 17. 10 American Beacon on October 15, 1842; Negro in Virginia, 143. 11 Negro in Virginia, 143. 12 American Beacon, October 15, 1842, 3; Proceedings of the Citizens of the Borough of Norfolk, 5, 10-13. 13 Year: 1860; Census Place: Charlestown, Middlesex, Massachusetts; Roll: M653_512; Page: 6; Image: 7. Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census

136

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

[database online]; Proceedings of the Citizens of the Borough of Norfolk, 12; Siebert, The Underground Railroad in Massachusetts, 18. 14 These included local newspapers such as the Norfolk Landmark, the Virginia Gazette, the Norfolk Intelligencer, the Southern Argus, the Portsmouth Daily Advertiser, the Norfolk and Portsmouth Herald, and the national abolitionist newspapers such as the Liberator, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the North Star. 15 Deposition of Mary Ann Hodges, October 12, 1899, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 16 Deposition of Joseph Hodges October 7, 1899., Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 17 From his plantation, Hodges operated a ferry that brought goods and services from the Dismal Swamp area to the shipping lanes of Portsmouth and Norfolk. Additionally, Hodges served as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates in 1826, as supervisor of the federal elections in Norfolk in 1832, and as Portsmouth’s Postmaster. The Hodges Family Papers, Series VI – Publications, Folder 22, Outline of Scripture Geography & accompanying Atlas by J. E. Worcester, 1828, Courtesy Special Collections: Manuscripts, Old Dominion University (Norfolk, VA); Oral History Interview with Mary Ainsworth Hook, Interviewed by Kim Snyder, March 19, 1981, Norfolk, Virginia, Courtesy Special Collections, Perry Library, Old Dominion University; Census Place: Goldsboro, Wayne, North Carolina; Roll: M653_917; Page: 463; Image: 321., Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860. M653, 1,438 rolls. 18 Deposition of Julia Ann Brown, October 5, 1899., Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276; Ancestry.com. 1850 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Seventh Census of the United States, 1850. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1850. M432, 1,009 rolls. 19 Deposition of Julia Ann Brown, October 5, 1899, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 20 Charles Bracey, October 17, 1899, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 21 Stewart, 13-14, ; “Map of Old Towne Portsmouth;” C. N. Drie, Norfolk & Portsmouth, Virginia, map, 1873; Thelma Dunston, “The History of the Negro in Portsmouth, Virginia,” February 12, 1937, Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, Library of Virginia; Interview with Mrs. Fannie Nicholson by Thelma Dunston, January 8, 1937, Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, Library of Virginia, WPA Life Histories database [Accessed January 15, 2003, http://eagle.vsla.edu/cgibin/spa.gateway]; Stewart, 24; “Map of Old Towne Portsmouth;” C. N. Drie,

Voices from within the Veil

137

Norfolk & Portsmouth, Virginia, map, 1873; Minute Books 2/8.06, Portsmouth Public Library. 22 Although not mentioned by name, Nicholson’s owner was probably Margaret Hodges, the only Hodges listed as a slaveholder in the 1860 slave schedules. Hodges was also noted as married to a Thomas Hodges in the 1860 census. 1860; Census Place: Portsmouth, Norfolk, Virginia; Roll: M653_1366; Page: 614; Image: 621, Ancestry.com. 1860 U.S. Federal Census Slave Schedule [database online]; Thelma Dunston, “The History of the Negro in Portsmouth, Virginia,” February 12, 1937, Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, Library of Virginia; Interview with Mrs. Fannie Nicholson by Thelma Dunston, January 8, 1937, Writers’ Project of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Virginia, Library of Virginia, WPA Life Histories database [Accessed January 15, 2003, http://eagle.vsla.edu/cgi-bin/spa.gateway]. 23 1850 Directory for the City of Portsmouth, 127. 24 By 1857, the church was rebuilt on North Street in an area located just beyond the city’s borders. By 1860, many would begin to settle in the area along North Street, west of Washington and Green Streets, south of Emmett Street, and east of Cedar Grove Cemetery that, by 1890, would be renamed Lincolnsville in honor of President Abraham Lincoln. Maps indicated that many blacks, both free and enslaved, typically followed the location patterns of this church. Stewart, 14, 1719, 25; Cassandra Newby-Alexander and Mae Breckenridge-Haywood, Black America Series: Portsmouth, Virginia (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2003), 49, 51; Collinson, 30-31, 33-34; John Capheart was listed in the Norfolk 1850 census as a forty-nine year old constable. 1850; Census Place: Norfolk, Norfolk (Independent City), Virginia; Roll: M432_964; Page: 77; Image: 156, Ancestry.com. 1850 United States Federal Census [database online]; “Map of Old Towne Portsmouth;” Archaeo—Geophysical Investigation of the Emanuel A.M.E. Church and Former Glasgow Street Location of the Church, Portsmouth, Virginia , AMEC Project No. 03-4996-0000, Report of Cultural Resources Investigations 04-010, Prepared by Duane Simpson and Ryan Peterson, AMEC Earth & Environmental, Inc., Louisville, Kentucky, May 18, 2004. 25 Charles Stewart, 12, 17, 24-25 26 William Still, 60-62, 223, 230; Charles Stewart, 41, 44,46 27 Jane Pyatt interview; Norfolk Journal and Guide, November 1, 1967, 16. 28 William Still, The Underground Railroad, 67. 29 William Still, 67-68, 230-231. 30 William Still, The Underground Railroad, 43. 31 William Still, The Underground Railroad, 43. 32 Depositions of Julia Ann Brown, October 5, 1899, David Johnson, October 23, 1899, and Mary Ann Hodges, October 12, 1899, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276; Ancestry.com. 1860 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860. M653, 1,438 rolls; Year: 1860; Census Place: Goldsboro, Wayne, North Carolina; Roll: M653_917;

138

The Underground Railroad in Portsmouth, Virginia

Page: 463; Image: 321., Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860. M653, 1,438 rolls. 33 Deposition of Julia Ann Brown, October 5, 1899, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 34 Benjamin Drew, The Refugee: A North Side View of Slavery (Reading, Mass., 1856), 19-30, 43-91; Bordewich, 255; Still 260, 299-300. 35 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276; Year: 1870; Census Place: Chelsea, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: M593_650; Page: 125; Image: 256, Ancestry.com. 1870 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2003. Original data: 1870, United States. Ninth Census of the United States, 1870. Washington, D.C. National Archives and Records Administration. M593, RG29, 1,761 rolls, Minnesota. Minnesota Census Schedules for 1870. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. T132, RG29, 13 rolls. 36 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276; Ancestry.com. 1860 U.S. Federal Census - Slave Schedules [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860. M653, 1,438 rolls; Year: 1860; Census Place: Goldsboro, Wayne, North Carolina; Roll: M653_917; Page: 463; Image: 321., Ancestry.com. 1860 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Eighth Census of the United States, 1860. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1860. M653, 1,438 rolls. 37 Ibid. 38 Bright’s disease is typically describe as kidney failure, the result of high blood pressure. The addition of a break in one of the extremities in an elderly person, such as a leg, arm, or hip, often precipitates the retention of fluids putting undue stress on the kidneys. 39 Massachusetts Archives, Death Records, 1898, Vol. 483, 606; 1899 Death Records, Vol. 495, 573. 40 Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Probate Court, Chelsea, Massachusetts, April 17, 1899, 758/276. 41 Ibid. 42 See the article by Edward Stimson, “The Laws Governing the Creation of Rights and Duties between Persons Subject to Different Laws,” Virginia Law Review 48 (May 1962), 643-667. 43 Year: 1900; Census Place: Chelsea Ward 4, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: T623689; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 1569, Ancestry.com. 1900 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2004. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Twelfth Census of the United States, 1900. Washington, D.C.: National

Voices from within the Veil

139

Archives and Records Administration, 1900. T623, 1854 rolls; Year: 1910; Census Place: Melrose Ward 6, Middlesex, Massachusetts; Roll: T624_602; Page: 6A; Enumeration District: 946; Image: 1237, Ancestry.com. 1910 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2006. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1910. T624, 1,178 rolls; Year: 1920; Census Place: Chelsea Ward 4, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: T625_743; Page: 2B; Enumeration District: 638; Image: 711, Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2005, Enumeration Districts 819-839 on roll 323 (Chicago City. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1920. T625, 2,076 rolls; Year: 1930; Census Place: Chelsea, Suffolk, Massachusetts; Roll: 960; Page: 10A; Enumeration District: 542; Image: 277.0, Ancestry.com. 1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: The Generations Network, Inc., 2002. Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.

“THINKING MEN AND WOMEN, WHO DESIRE TO IMPROVE OUR CONDITION”: HENRY O. WAGONER, CIVIL RIGHTS, AND BLACK ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY IN FRONTIER CHICAGO AND DENVER, 1846-1887 RICHARD JUNGER, WESTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY

As the continent’s first successful European colony, the Jamestown settlement took on a new status with the arrival of a dozen Africans in 1619. Previously, famine, disease, and ongoing warfare with First Americans had been omnipresent concerns for the English colonists, but a small yet growing trade with their home country in commodities such as tobacco created an ever-increasing need for in expensive labor. A few poor whites paid for their voyage to the New World in exchange for indentured servitude in the fields, but a growing number of Africans were imported for the sole purpose of creating hereditary enslavement, men and women condemned to life servitude. It is in that sense, then, that the first American civil rights movement began in Gloucester County, Virginia, in 1663, when enslaved and indentured Africans supportive of the late English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell “form’d a villanous Plot to destroy their Masters, and afterwards to set up for themselves,” as an eighteenth-century white Virginia historian wrote. Not surprisingly, similar slave revolts, rebellions, uprisings, and other acts of civil disobedience, or the fear of them, continued to be a fact of life for slaveholders until the Civil War.1 From such inauspicious beginnings, a larger black civil rights movement began to take shape in the Eastern United States in the early nineteenth century and expanded into Western states and territories such as Illinois and Colorado in the immediate years before and after the Civil War. For too long, the activities of the African Americans involved in these activities have been ignored or minimalized by white historians. In

Voices from within the Veil

141

this essay, the contributions of Henry O. Wagoner, African American businessman and civil rights activist, to the so-called Underground Railroad (UGRR), described by Fergus M. Bordewich as “the country’s first racially integrated civil rights movement,” are explored, especially as he helped to establish and promote Chicago as a central depot on the road’s western system. As well, Wagoner’s advocacy of male enfranchisement and other civil rights after the Civil War helped Colorado blacks to experience at least some of the promises made to them in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Emancipation Proclamation. As a self-made businessman, Wagoner’s financial success also gave evidence that African Americans could not only survive but prosper in blatantly-capitalistic frontier societies such as those of Chicago and Denver. Unfortunately, Wagoner’s words and experiences, along with those of many of his contemporaries, have been lost, forgotten, or overlooked. To appreciate the contributions of the twentieth-century civil rights movement, it is important to understand African American leaders such as Wagoner and how they struggled for legal and economic equality during the nineteenth century.2

Wagoner’s Earliest Years The first mention of Chicago in an African American newspaper occurred in 1828 when Freedom’s Journal, the first American black newspaper, noted that “the Indians between Chicaga [sic] and the country occupied by the Winnebagoes, chiefly Pattawatomies, have planted no corn this year.” “This is said to indicate hostilities in that quarter,” the paper explained. When Chicago was incorporated as a city nine years later, 77 African Americans were counted among some 4,200 EuroAmerican settlers. That same year, The Colored American, the nation’s second black newspaper, printed a letter from a Connecticut black man who wanted his mailing address changed to Chicago. The city’s first abolitionist activities began in 1839 as part of prayer meetings at a white Presbyterian and the black Quinn A. M. E. church. In 1842, a free black man named Edwin Heathcock, an A. M. E. congregant who had left accidentally his free papers in Ohio, was reported to the sheriff by a disgruntled co-worker. He was arrested for being an undocumented, and therefore, potentially escaped enslaved person, a violation of Illinois’ Black Laws. To pay for his $17.50 jailing costs, Heathcock was offered for sale at auction. Broadsides along the city’s main street warned of “the selling of a Methodist brother, in good standing . . .” to whites, and the

142

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

brother of the city’s first mayor bid twenty-five cents for Heathcock, telling him, “Edwin, you are my man. I have purchased you for 25 cents. Go where you like.” A white abolitionist who had observed the transaction wrote years later, “Many persons have been sold in various ways in Chicago since that time for considerations as various as the imagination could devise, but none would be willing to admit that they were purchased for so small a price as 25 cents.”3 The Western Citizen was the voice of abolitionism in Chicago beginning in 1842. In “Stealing Niggers,” co-editor Asa B. Brown advised readers in an early issue that there was as yet “no organization whose object is to induce the slaves to escape” in Chicago, “but we make it a matter of principle B a matter of conscience, (and what Christian would not!) to aid all such as happen to come to our doors, and are in need of our assistance.” Two years later, the paper reported that an increasing number of “travelers” had passed successfully through Chicago on the Liberty Line, the Citizen’s characterization of the UGRR, with only one female captured and returned to her enslavement. In contrast to European immigrants, especially the so-called famine Irish, who were faulted by Chicago’s native-born whites for their Catholic religion and extreme poverty, Chicago’s tiny African American population was said to held in relatively high esteem. “There are probably three hundred colored inhabitants here,” the Western Citizen noted in 1847. “Many of them are persons of property . . . and the day is yet to come when any person has seen a colored person begging from door to door, which cannot be said of the people of any other origin, residing here.” “There is no city in the Western or middle states where there is less prejudice . . . .” the Voice of the Fugitive wrote of Chicago in 1851. Regardless of such statements, however, a white abolitionist recalled in 1891 that the sentiments of the community were still against blacks. “A large part of the people, while recognizing their freedom, regarded them as slaves by divine right, and believed they ought to be in slavery,” he said. “They were often treated as vagrants, who having escaped from slavery, had no rights out of bondage.” As historian Lawrence W. Levine has referenced, freed blacks in northern cities such as Chicago lost the sense of cultural self-containment that they had known as enslaved persons in the South and were forced to live as a marginalized subculture overshadowed by a mainly intolerant white society.4 It was from this bigotry that Henry O. Wagoner emerged as one of Chicago’s first civil rights leaders and businessmen. Born February 27, 1816, in Hagerstown, Maryland, in the same slave-holding county (but two years earlier) as abolitionist Frederick Douglass, Wagoner’s father

Voices from within the Veil

143

was said to be a “liberty-loving” German and his mother a freed enslaved person who installed in him a sense of the injustice of enslavement. Young Henry was taught to read and write by his paternal grandmother in defiance of Maryland law, writing in chalk on fence boards. He received two three-month terms of public school education in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, just over the Mason-Dixon line from Hagerstown, but his obituary speaks of self-education in combination with “working in the fields during the day and teaching school in winter.” As a literate man, Wagoner became acquainted with the Pennsylvania abolitionist movement around 1836. Two years later, he relocated to Baltimore as a freedman. In this city and within days of Douglass’ celebrated escape, Wagoner assisted the local UGRR until, as he later wrote, he “became under the bane of suspicion.” Seeking “freer soil,” he traveled west the following year, ending up in the frontier town of Galena, Illinois, in April 1839. Putting his education to good use, he learned typesetting and printing at a local newspaper and became a land speculator, as was the custom in the boomtown, selling property to whites, including future Illinois Congressman and presidential confidant Elihu B. Washburne. In return, Wagoner helped solicit votes for Washburne among white abolitionists, and Washburne became a life-long friend. In 1843, Wagoner liquidated his Galena assets for $600 and moved to Chatham, just north of Lake Erie in the far southern region of what was then called Canada West, already a popular UGRR terminus. Always vigilant for a military incursion, mid-nineteenth century white Canadians welcomed escaped enslaved black men and women into their border communities to act as buffers against Americans. Chatham even boasted a scarlet-uniformed militia comprised of white officers and “runaway slaves,” eager to welcome their former masters at the point of a musket. Wagoner worked at the Chatham Journal, taught at a black school, and married in the community’s Anglican Church in August 1844.5

Early Chicago Wagoner turned his attentions toward Chicago two years later, likely because his wife had family living in what was nicknamed the Garden City. As was the case in frontier Galena, the principal business activity of 1846 Chicago was land speculation, lubricated in hotels and “eating saloons” with ample quantities of whiskey, bourbon, and other hard liquors. Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians competed with New Englanders and New York State immigrants along with a growing contingent of Irish escaping from Western Europe’s most impoverished

144

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

economy. While it was true that Chicago’s first abolitionist society met in 1840, only a year after sending its the first enslaved to Canada aboard a boat, the city was known best for other attributes. Situated at the level of Lake Michigan, its streets were frequently impassable, horses, wagons, and even pedestrians sinking deep into the swampy muck. Its almost exclusively Yankee business class featured extreme advocates of free market capitalism, boasting endlessly of Chicago’s potential in newspapers, magazines, and in person. Lacking an organized police force as well, vice operated openly in frontier Chicago, especially in a lakefront area known as “The Sands.” Nearly one-hundred gaming establishments or “dens,” situated along both sides of the Chicago River, featuring card games, roulette, thimble-rig, an American variant of the three-shell game, and policy, a lottery-type game brought to the city by African Americans. Numerous black and white brothels, or “resorts,” as they were called, and an uncountable number of saloons, most unlicensed, joined them. Such entertainments attracted tourists and “sporting” men to the city, blacks and whites, who attempted to outdo each other in gambling prowess, dress, and dueling, as they tried to seduce the frontier city’s relatively small female population. “There you fall into at once the circling tide, and sweep into the very vortex of intense activity and life,” a white Massachusetts newspaper warned in 1853.6 A black man settling with a young wife and daughter in such an environment may have seemed an anomaly, but Wagoner was determined to persevere in his “little domicile on Dearborn Street.” It was a challenge, for he and his wife were one of only a few dozen upper-class black couples in the Chicago of 1846. Wagoner typeset briefly for the Chicago Advertiser and the Western Citizen, and, at the latter paper, he renewed ties with abolitionists made a decade previous in Pennsylvania. Chicago’s white abolitionists were becoming more organized and outspoken by the mid-1840s. “We are having a glorious times here, or have had for the last ten days, from the attempt to return two Fugitive Slaves,” one abolitionist wrote.” Excitement ran high, . . . everything we disliked was voted down and everything we liked was voted up.” “We have sent off from here thirteen chattels to be made into men, in the last fourteen days, and hundreds more are on their way.” The downstate Illinois Belleville Advocate was so disturbed by the prevailing attitude in Chicago that it apologized for the city, writing, “We of the south do not regard Chicago as belonging to Illinois. It is a Sink hole of abolition as Boston or Cincinnati.”7

Voices from within the Veil

145

In an era before there were sufficient numbers of African Americans in Chicago to support their own newspaper, literate civil rights activists such as Wagoner communicated through a variety of means. He called, chaired, or participated in a large number of public meetings during his Chicago years, gathering in the city hall or various churches to discuss issues ranging from the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to colonization. He was involved in membership organizations such as the Literary and Debating Society that he had founded at the Quinn A. M. E. church in 1852. He also wrote letters to the editors of local papers such as the Western Citizen and Chicago Tribune and beyond Chicago to national black newspapers such as The North Star, which first appeared in December 1847 and later became known as Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Wagoner considered the latter “the only paper which we can emphatically call ours,” and he acted as a subscription agent for Douglass in the ear1y 1850s. In his first letter to Douglass in a correspondence that would span nearly fifty years, Wagoner congratulated Douglass in early 1848 on the establishment of his paper, writing that “you are engaged in a noble work; and being a native of the same State as yourself, I most sincerely wish you every success in your new enterprise.” Referring to himself as “some little of a ‘Typo’ [typographer]” a reference to his newspaper work, Wagoner continued, “I write very little, and never for the public press; therefore, I beg you will make a reasonable allowance for my wild and unconnected manner of addressing you.” He went on to suggest the establishment of a black-owned savings bank, an institution that would help “our unfortunate and disfranchised countrymen.” “The author of [that] letter is a mulatto now residing in this city, who has at times assisted as a compositor in our office,” the Chicago Advertiser reported subsequently, “and from his unassuming manner, and regular habits, has commanded the esteem of all his co-laborers.” Wagoner’s suggestion, based on a similar Canadian institution, was a precursor to the ill-fated Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company, a banking institution for former enslaved people chartered by Congress in 1865 which later failed in 1874, taking the money of thousands of blacks, including Douglass. A gifted writer but shy public speaker, Wagoner considered Douglass a man of “figure, voice, elocution, knowledge, and, above all, the purest and most florid diction, with the justest metaphors and happiest images.” “I would to God his voice could be heard in every State in this Union,” Wagoner proclaimed decades before the advent of broadcasting. “Could he be heard calmly, quietly, and dispassionately in the South, we should have no fear for the result.”8

146

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

As did Douglass, Wagoner considered enslavement a legal and philosophical question rather than the religious issue put forward by moralistic, mainly white Protestant abolitionists. For instance, William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass’ mentor, had characterized the Constitution as an inherently evil document for its support of enslavement, employing religious rather than legalistic rhetoric in his speeches. His moral appeals fell on deaf ears among southern capitalists, who considered enslaved people a store of their personal wealth. Wagoner pursued a more secular approach than Garrison. “Nor should we be discouraged by the efforts which are being put forth from certain high sources, to stifle and to check the tide of ‘light and liberty among the people’,” Wagoner wrote in 1851, and alluding to the Declaration of Independence, he continued, “Great Britain had not the power to take [liberty] from our Revolutionary sires, and it is to be hoped that future generations may never have the power to annihilate it.” Four years later Wagoner wrote in an unpreserved issue of the Chicago Tribune, “the Constitution knows but two classes in this country, citizens and aliens. We are not aliens, and, therefore, we must be citizens. If we are citizens then, there are no valid reasons, why we should not be protected as such, or at least, as well as aliens are protected, in the “enjoyment of their rights.” As did other African Americans, Wagoner embraced the Enlightenment perspective of seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, who had argued that all humans possess natural rights beyond government or political control. Wagoner wrote, “God has given this whole earth as the habitation of the whole human race, and as a part of the human race, I claim that we have a natural right to live anywhere on God’s beautiful earth; and certainly, if a people have not the right to live where they were born, where, in God’s name, have they a right to live?” Never a devoutly religious person himself, Wagoner was not afraid to employ God’s rhetoric in his written pleadings. He published a letter in Frederick Douglass’ Paper in 1851 proposing a national day of “humiliation and prayer to Almighty God . . . A God of Justice and Mercy, will hear our cries, and awaken to our distresses, by diffusing light and love of liberty among the people.” Fellow black letter writers criticized him for imploring God to act, noting, “He is a poor God who is awaiting for sinful, selfish men, to urge Him to his duty.” “If this is not irreverence, blasphemy, and a total annihilation of the efficacy of prayer,” Wagoner replied angrily, “then I know not what is.” And quoting white abolitionist Gerrit Smith, whom Wagoner had supported as a presidential candidate in 1848 and 1852, he wrote, “Were I to hear a man preach and pray, with the

Voices from within the Veil

147

power, of an angel, and then be in favor of enforcing the fugitive slave law, I would call not Christ-like, but devil-like; for, said he, ‘that law came from hell, not from heaven’.”9 As a literate man and skilled newspaper compositor, Wagoner was considered a journeyman mechanic in early Chicago’s labor market, likely commanding a respectable if smaller wage than a white counterpart. By comparison, most of Chicago’s blacks worked as common laborers, domestics, cooks, waiters, in personal services such as barbering or tailoring, or as watermen, hauling lake water to residents in two-wheeled carts. Nevertheless, Wagoner left the newspaper industry to strike out on his own in late 1847. Within a decade, he and his wife had eight children, and they owned and operated a produce depot and grist mill at the corner of Harrison and Griswold streets, near the south branch of the Chicago River, worth an estimated $7,000. Wagoner specialized in southern-style corn meal preparations that he had learned as a child, delicious and unknown to white Yankee palettes. He delivered samples of his products to the Tribune‘s editors in 1852, and the paper reported that Wagoner’s Virginia-style hominy was a “luxury of a well cooked dish,” and that his white flat corn, samp, and grits were said to be so good that “Old Kaintuck herself could not beat him.” “They are excellent, cheap, toothsome B all of which are included in our saying that they are Wagoner’s, whereof hundreds know and are well assured already,” the paper reported in 1860. In return, Wagoner was a fervent booster of early Chicago’s economic prospects. Writing Frederick Douglass in 1851, “Before I close, permit me again to admonish our colored brethren of the East, and especially those of capital and enterprise, to come to the western states (Indiana excepted,) and with a little cash money can be laid out to good advantage. Now is the time to get a hold of the sale, and establish ourselves among this hardy race of Northern Europeans.” Indiana was excluded because of an antiabolitionist assault that Douglass had received in 1843 in which his hand was broken. “I have seen your article: Learn trade or Starve,” Wagoner wrote Douglass two years later. “It is something practical, and ought seriously to be considered, and at once acted upon. . . . It becomes us, as thinking men and women, who desire to improve our condition, to look to this matter without delay.” Writing decades later to white Chicago abolitionist Samuel H. Kerfoot, Wagoner recalled, “In many of my hours of quietude I ruminate over the earlier days of Chicago and of the active, restless, go-ahead, intelligent business men of those times.” Writing to Douglass in 1890, Wagoner put it more simply: Chicago was “the most phenomenal city on this planet.”10

148

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

Chicago Abolitionism In the 1850s, Chicago was a Mecca for escaped enslaved people and their kidnappers. When the Western Citizen failed in 1852, the Daily Missouri Republican lamented, “if one Abolitionist has disappeared, there is yet three or four papers, at the least, with all the essences of Abolitionism about them, still left in Chicago . . . . There is Negrophobism enough in Chicago to answer any purpose whatever.” While Wagoner and other blacks kept few written records of their UGRR activities to protect concerned parties (and those few records were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1871 fire, in which most blacks were burned out), they were involved intimately in rescuing escaping enslaved peoples, a fact overlooked in most white histories. “Those were perilous times to Anti-Slavery advocates, as the Oligarchy was then in the full swing of its power,” Wagoner wrote years later. For instance, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act required northerners to assist in capturing and returning escaped slaves, although few prosecutions occurred in Chicago because the common council voted nine to one in late October to “nullify” or ignore the act just as southern states had argued that they should be able to do with federal laws for years. “Where is their authority to act,” the Ohio State Journal demanded in response to the decision. “By what right do they decide?” Even after the council rescinded its decision, few other than Irish immigrants, trying to make their own mark on the world, could be found to enforce the law, requiring most slave catchers to depend upon their own resources. The North Star applauded Chicago in 1850, “no one has yet been found who will accept the appointment of Commissioner to carry into execution the Fugitive Slave Law.” Just how pivotal Chicago was in the UGRR movement is apparent from a recollection by the daughter of one of Wagoner’s Chicago African American colleagues, John Jones. “[My father] was instrumental in sending hundreds of fugitives to Canada on the day after the signing of the Fugitive Slave Act,” Lavinia Jones Lee recalled in 1905. “Ten car loads were put out from [Chicago] across the [international border] line to save them from being returned to slavery.” Her mother Mary recalled loading fugitives at the Sherman Street train station as they were watched by a group of slave owners and catchers. “I remember at that time, a man came along who looked as if he might do a great deal of fighting. He told the slave owners and friends that if they would bring one man at a time he would not leave one of them.” An ad hoc group of as many as threehundred-fifty blacks and whites, presumably including Wagoner, formed a so-called Liberty Association, a “colored police organization that

Voices from within the Veil

149

persecuted slave catchers and supporters as they assisted escaped enslaved people.” Members patrolled the streets day and night, using the same political divisions as the police, and fights between association members and southerners sympathetic to enslavement were not unknown. Events intensified the controversy. The Fugitive Slave Act took on a new dimension in September 1851 when slaveholder Edward Gorsuch was killed and three whites injured in a shoot out with black abolitionists near Christiana, Pennsylvania. Chicago blacks led by Wagoner, who had spent most of his childhood in Pennsylvania, sent financial support to four blacks who were accused of aiding in the stand-off. As well, the publication in late 1851 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin further galvanized opposition to enslavement among Chicago’s whites even though Stowe’s criticisms were aimed more at the slavery system than its perpetrators. The Tribune called the novel “celebrated and popular,” noting that “we are glad to see it, and hope it will be multiplied till it is found in every home in the land.” Beyond the book, many more Chicagoans were exposed to the cruelties of enslavement through theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which were staged about the city. The dramatic performances accentuated the emotions of the novel, bringing audiences to literally tears over scenes such as the separation of the enslaved families.11 The UGRR’s prominence was greatly increased by the passage of the “notorious Nebraska Bill” as it was called by abolitionist newspapers, the creation of Illinois Democratic Sen. Stephen A. Douglas in 1854. Crafted to defuse the politics of enslavement, it had the reverse effect in the Kansas and Nebraska territories, creating a “bleeding crisis” as settlers of both persuasions battled over whether enslavement or freedom would prevail in their forthcoming states. Wagoner and other blacks redoubled their efforts to provide sanctuary in their homes and businesses in the wake of the 1854 law. “We are glad to observe that our enterprising friends, James D. Bonner and John Jones, have opened in Chicago an intelligence office,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper noted a few months after the Act’s passage, listing Wagoner as a participant in the venture. Through this “office,” Chicago’s African Americans provided transportation, food, housing, medical aid, advice, and loans to escaping enslaved people, and they also helped find employment for freed men and women in the traditional black occupations. John Jones gave testimony to the extent of African American organization and leadership in Illinois’ UGRR in a letter published in Frederick Douglass’ Newspaper in November 1853. Alluding to insecurity with the written word, he began, “I write you this letter not

150

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

because I am a letter writer by no means, sir, as your readers will learn by reading a little further but because there is an activity among the colored men and women of Illinois which deserves passing notice.” Citing “some fifteen or twenty letters” that he had received, Jones named a number of black colleagues, including Wagoner, busily organizing and implementing the UGRR. Bragging that “the Underground Railroad is doing a fair business this season,” he documented some thirteen passengers who had recently been “snugly shipped for Queen Victoria’s land.” “Our friends among the whites cheer us on to victory,” Jones wrote, “they say the time has come when ‘HE WHO WOULD BE FREE HIMSELF MUST STRIKE THE BLOW.’”12 As the dangers increased, especially for sympathetic whites who could be arrested for helping escaped enslaved people, UGRR reports disappeared from Chicago newspapers, except when escapes became unavoidable public events. Frederick Douglass’ Paper copied a Chicago Tribune report in 1854 on the escape of several enslaved people through Iowa to Chicago, including one who had lived and worked in the city surreptitiously for several months until confronted by his former master. Branding the slave catchers with “the stamp of Legree,” the brutal slave dealer in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the paper noted that they were “of very unfavorable appearance . . . . Their faces lack the expression of intelligence and mental acquirements, but contain all that is animal and ferocious.” In turn, the Tribune reprinted an article from the St. Louis Republican detailing the tribulations of slave catching in Chicago with the observation that “the Negroes and Abolitionists abused us shamefully; the white men of Chicago were like angels [with] visits few and far between; we could name a few honest white men that we found there, but will not mention their names at present.” In December, the Tribune detailed the successful escape of seventeen fugitive enslaved people to Canada from Missouri through Chicago via the Michigan Central railroad. “By this time, we suppose they are safely under the protection of Queen Victoria.” In turn, slave catchers complained to the St. Louis Republican that “any court or commissioner in Christendom, outside of Chicago, would have awarded possession” of the enslaved people who they sought, but “Chicago has been so thoroughly abolitionized, the negroes [sic] have such entire possession of the sympathies of the people, that they combine to run off a slave, the property of another, whenever they find that pursuit is made, even under the most justifiable circumstances.” “The system of negro [sic] stealing, once a matter of so much risk, is now broadly done in our midst, and slaves taken in broad daylight and shipped to their places of destination,” the paper

Voices from within the Veil

151

maintained in an editorial that was reprinted in Chicago. “The Chicago Democrat says that on Friday last, sixteen human chattels from the Sunny South came up on the Underground Railroad on their way towards the North Star,” reported Frederick Douglass’ Paper in early 1855. “The owners, or their agents, arrived in Chicago soon after, and were taken to a house on the north side by one who professed to aid them in their efforts to recapture their freed humanity, and employed them in a fruitless search.” The work of caring for escaping enslaved people fell on the shoulders of black women. Mary Jones’ granddaughter recalled that her grandmother was “mistress of the home” when enslaved people and abolitionists visited. “She harbored and fed the fugitive slaves that these men brought to her door as a refuge until they could be transported to Canada,” her granddaughter wrote. “She it was who stood guard at the door when these pioneer abolitionists were in conference with the slaves huddled below in the basement.” Presumably, Henry Wagoner’s wife prevailed in her household in a similar manner. In 1864, Mary Jones and other prominent black Chicago women, including Mrs. Wagoner, organized an aid society for “needy freedmen of the South,” providing clothing, cook utensils and fresh vegetables for contraband blacks. “Many of the older time, staid women of Chicago would counsel with Mrs. Wagoner on particular occasions,” her husband wrote to Frederick Douglass.13 At no time was antebellum Chicago a haven of safety for escaping enslaved people, especially after 1853. “That [whites] will aid you so far as they can, without incurring the penalties of the criminal laws of Congress, we can positively promise,” the Tribune wrote to escaping enslaved people in 1854 in a since lost issue that was reprinted in the Daily Missouri Republican, “but that they will go beyond this we cannot.” “They have recently had a fearful advent of slaveholders among them in pursuit,” the Upper Canadian Provincial Freeman warned of Chicago in 1856, “and in the free States of America, such intelligence usually creates a panic similar to that produced by the advent of a hawk among a drove of dung-hills.” “Underground railroad operations in Chicago are no longer in the hands of the great merchants of that city, if they ever were,” the newspaper maintained a month later. “When fugitives arrive, a society of colored men meet, put their hands into pockets and provide for their passage of their brethren to Canada . . . . [They] are scandalized by such pretenders to the duty.” In particular, Wagoner and other Chicago African Americans took exception to Illinois’ notorious Black Laws. Among its various provisions, freed black men and women were required to provide documentation attesting to their status or were assumed to be runaway enslaved people

152

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

who could be held and sold at auction. In 1847, voters statewide approved a ban on the immigration of free blacks into Illinois and denied those already present the rights of suffrage and militia service. Reacting to growing abolitionist activities, the southern Illinois-dominated legislature strengthened the Laws again in 1853 to make it a crime to bring a free black person into the state for more than ten days without appropriate documentation. Wagoner and his son were instrumental in several antiblack Law protest meetings in 1864 before moving to Denver. The detested Laws were voided by a new legislature made up of Union veterans in early 1865.14 Wagoner escorted his friend Frederick Douglass, the most eloquent speaker of his generation on the abomination of enslavement, to Chicago and northern Illinois at least twice during the 1850s. One 1854 appearance ended in near disaster when “Know-Nothing and Abolition gentry,” as the Chicago Times called them, “wreaked their revenge on the furniture in the hall, seizing and breaking the chairs and throwing the fragments out the windows, and about the room, striking in their erratic course both friend and foe” when Douglass was first asked and then not allowed to speak. Douglass gave his speech in another venue to an audience of 1,500, where he indirectly defended Sen. Stephen A. Douglas, the man who had been hanged in effigy in Chicago and other Northern cities throughout the summer of 1854 for championing the detested Kansas-Nebraska Act. “There is perhaps something in a name, the black Douglass joked. “No man likes to read in a newspaper of the hanging of a man bearing his own name.” “It is a noble, grand speech,” Ohio Senator and future Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase said of Douglass’ words. “How such eloquence and reasoning shame the miserable prejudice, which measures a man by the color of his skin!” During the same visit, Douglass spoke to an audience in Wagoner’s old home town of Galena, the two men talking of Sen. Chase and prairie flowers while waiting for a stage coach. When the two shared a hotel room, Wagoner recalled how Douglass rebutted a speech by Sen. Douglas in his sleep one night. Six years later, Wagoner introduced Douglass to another gathering at the Quinn A. M. E. church. “We believe that circumstances warrant us in saying that you have done more for the elevation of the negro and colored man in this country, than any other colored man in it,” Wagoner said in introducing his friend.15 Through his friendship with Douglass, Wagoner became a supporter of John Brown, the white Kansas abolitionist who tried to create an antebellum black liberation movement before he was executed in 1859. Brown sent Wagoner fugitive enslaved people from Missouri and Kansas and visited Wagoner in Chicago several times during the 1850s. “John

Voices from within the Veil

153

Brown – God Bless him,” Wagoner wrote of Brown, the “Noblest of God’s heroes,” to Boston abolitionist Wendall Phillips in November 1859, a month before Brown’s death and at a time when the mere public admission of knowing Brown could have put a black man in prison. “He deserves to live a long – I had almost said – aye, I will say, an immortal – life.” In his letter, Wagoner recalled receiving a group of twelve escaped people the previous March at four in the morning, “God’s poor” as he called them, including a child born on the road and named John Brown in honor of the abolitionist. The group had been liberated at gunpoint by Brown from three Missouri farms, with one slaveholder killed in the process. Wagoner, his wife, and their family sheltered and fed the escapees in his mill for three days, while his friend John Jones entertained Brown and four of his white associates at his house.

Fig. 2:17: Harpers Ferry Insurrection. This rendering of the famous insurrection, led by John Brown appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newpapers in November 1859. This scence is in the interior of the Engine-House, just before the gate is broken down by the storming party, where hostages are held. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Their discussions revolved around Brown’s forthcoming raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, proving that Wagoner and other Chicago blacks had had advance knowledge of the attack. Jones’ wife Mary recalled that Brown’s associates, who arrived in the midst of a rain storm, were “the roughest looking men I ever saw. They had boots up to their knees, and their pants down in their boots, and they looked like they

154

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

were ready to fight. They behaved very nicely . . . ” A real railroad conductor was so disturbed at their appearance that he mistook them for slave catchers and sent word to Wagoner, Jones and other UGRR operators. In turn, Mary sent a call for help to white abolitionist and private detective Allan Pinkerton, who showed up at the Jones’ home to check on Brown. Pinkerton, Wagoner, and the Joneses helped to buy new clothing for Brown and his party from a downtown store, including a suit that Mary Jones guessed were the clothes that Brown would be hanged in, and paid for the group’s transportation to Detroit. “Lay in your cotton, tobacco, and sugar, for I intend to raise the prices,” Brown advised Wagoner and others, referring to goods thoughtlessly used by northerners and harvested by enslaved people in the South. “Six months from that day he struck the blow that raised the prices of everything on the American continent,” Mary Jones recalled, “liberty and martyrdom not excepted.” Written toward the end of her life, Mary Jones’ included in her memoirs the opinion that she thought Brown “was a little ‘off’ on the slavery question,” especially in his belief that freed blacks could create their own nation with only a few armed supporters. Wagoner was involved in other organizational efforts in Chicago before the Civil War, but he was always hesitant to claim credit for himself. His dislike of public speaking also kept him out of the immediate spotlight. “Friend [John] Jones is one of our strong men,” Wagoner wrote of his colleague, Chicago’s first well-known civil rights leader, in an 1852 Frederick Douglass’ Paper letter. “In a masterly and happy manner did [Jones] discant [sic] upon, and expose, to the common-sense view of all present, the immoral, wicked, and evil tendency of such enactments” as the Black Laws. The two men represented Chicago at the 1853 Rochester, New York National African American Convention and supported efforts to create a national civil rights council, promote black business and employment opportunities, create a black newspaper and book repository, and encourage the establishment of a national black industrial school. Wagoner and others organized an Illinois conference that same year, held in Chicago, calling for a “North American Convention of colored men” to “be like a band of brothers fully united, and with a will, not despotic, but pliable, with a mind in its purposes, and unwavering in its determination.” Wagoner attended the 1856 National Convention of Radical Abolitionists, which had endorsed another presidential bid by Gerritt Smith, and he chaired an ad hoc meeting held in the basement of the Quinn A. M. E. church in 1857 to protest the news that Senator Stephen Douglas had employed a black body servant, named James Hibburn (Abraham Lincoln employed a similar black body servant), at the same time Douglas was

Voices from within the Veil

155

castigating other African Americans verbally “in such low and vulgar epithets and tirades against an unoffending and inoffensive people who have never done him any injury.”16 Wagoner was actively involved in efforts to oppose colonization, the organized emigration of free African Americans to Africa, as were most other blacks of his generation. Beginning as early as 1851, he maintained that “the sentiments of the most intelligent of our people . . . are opposed to leaving the country, while three millions of our fellow-countrymen remain in slavery.” Repeating his opposition in an 1855 Chicago Tribune letter, he organized an 1857 Chicago meeting which voted nearly unanimously to oppose any such effort, even though there was support among white abolitionists and some blacks. “We have been with this people since the beginning,” Wagoner wrote in the group’s resolution in reference to the race’s long-time presence on the North American continent, and “we intend to remain with them to the end; for we have already planted our trees in the American soil, and by the help of God, we mean to repose under the shade thereof.” When the Tribune reported falsely in 1859 that Wagoner and thirteen other prominent Chicago blacks were preparing to emigrate to Haiti, Wagoner retorted, “we have so much to do, right here at home, and no good men, qualified men, to spare, let us continue here to labor and wait.” In taking such positions, Wagoner put himself in opposition to prominent Illinois whites such as Abraham Lincoln, who held that colonization was the only credible alternative to enslavement. As one of the managers of the Illinois State Colonization Society, Lincoln’s group sponsored the emigration of several state residents to Liberia.17

Denver City Wagoner never preserved his reasons for moving to Galena in 1839 or Chicago in 1846, but he must have had a predilection for pioneer settlements. Unfortunately for him, the frontier had moved far beyond Chicago by the late 1850s, and the lure of the West began acting on Wagoner once again. As well, two fires damaged his milling operations during the late 1850s, not unusual in a prairie city constructed entirely of wood, which impeded but did not destroy his business. It was the discovery of gold near what would become Denver during the summer of 1858 that seduced him instead, touching off another incarnation of the 1848 California Gold Rush. “The existence of gold in Western Kansas has been known for several years,” the Tribune reported in June 1858, “but the precise locality of the mines has not been known to whites.” A trickle of

156

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

miners became a flood the following year, streaming westward from Chicago. “It can be found be found everywhere,” a Tribune correspondent confided to readers in early 1859, “on the plains, in the mountains, and by streams.” Wagoner could hardly be ignorant of the rush when he gifted another batch of corn meal to the Tribune in April 1860, the paper noting that “grits or fine hominy, [are] just the thing for Pike’s Peakers, in crossing the plains. . . . These and more are being prepared by H. O. Wagoner, from the whole flint corn.” A number of Chicago blacks had chased after gold in California and Oregon. It was no surprise then that Mary Jones wrote Frederick Douglass a month later, “Friend H. O. Wagoner is trying to sell out his hominy machine to go to Pike’s Peak.” Wagoner journeyed to the raw-edged Denver City settlement in August 1860 with Barney L. Ford, an escaped enslaved person whom he had helped as part of his UGRR activities. In turn, Ford had married Wagoner’s sister-in-law, Julia A. Lyoni, in Chicago in 1850, with the new couple joining the California gold rush. With Wagoner, Ford tried to stake a claim outside of modern-day Breckinridge, Colorado, but he was advised by a shyster white lawyer to use the lawyer’s name on his deed because Ford could not make his own claim. The Colorado territorial law (it was actually part of the slave-supporting Kansas territory at the time) was similar to Illinois’ Black Laws in that blacks could not marry whites, testify against whites in court, serve on juries, or stake claims on public lands. Ford did what the lawyer suggested, and the man subsequently had Ford, Wagoner, and their black companions thrown off the claim. No gold was ever found, but the land southeast of the city was known as “Nigger Hill” until map makers changed it to “Ford Hill” in 1964. Upon his return in late 1860, Wagoner sold his Chicago milling operations, keeping his wife and children in the city for the duration of the Civil War so that their only son Henry, Jr. could complete his Chicago public school education. That Wagoner would leave was not usual, for one-third of Chicago’s black population left the city during the Civil War. The young Henry created a stir during a Chicago Liberty Club excursion to Chatham, West Canada, in 1862. “The next evening at the festival at the town hall the audience were treated with a Union and patriotic speech by Henry O. Wagoner, jr., of Chicago, aged eleven years, which brought down tremendous applause,” the Tribune reported in an article about the trip that may have been written by Wagoner. 18 The Civil War ended the need for an Underground Railroad as escaping enslaved people were allowed to travel freely, but the war’s end created a new challenge: black male enfranchisement. During the war, Wagoner applied his business acumen to the job of sutler, a merchant who

Voices from within the Veil

157

traveled with and sold provisions to Union troops, but in 1862 Congress authorized the enlistment of black troops. At the age of forty-six, Wagoner was too old to fight himself, so he recruited blacks to fight in Illinois’ 29th Colored Infantry and Massachusetts’ Fifth Cavalry, and was commissioned to recruit refugees and contrabands, freed enslaved people, in captured Mississippi, earning a letter of recommendation from General U. S. Grant, a fellow pre-war resident of Galena, Illinois. With the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in late 1865, it was young Henry Wagoner, Jr. who became involved in Chicago efforts to agitate for a male black vote. Trivialized by many historians in the wake of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1868, black suffrage was far from a certainty in the immediate years after the war, and many white abolitionists were lukewarm, if not opposed, to a black vote. In the wake of calls for African American voting rights in the occupied South, the Chicago Tribune defended the lack of a similar right among northern blacks in a June 1865 editorial, noting that “there is little or no interest, deposition, or power in the northern whites to oppress the blacks, and therefore the latter do not so palpably need to be armed with the ballot in self defense.” Meeting the following August at the Quinn A. M. E. church, Chicago blacks elected Wagoner, Jr. in place of his father as a delegate to a state conference in Springfield on “the Franchise.” “We, in fighting the battles of this country, perpetuation as a nationality, consider that we have earned the privilege of demanding our rights,” the group resolved. “The time is passed when the claims of the colored man, if pressed upon the government, would . . . embarrass it in securing the sustenance of political parties in the North.” The Fifteenth Amendment, granting the ballot, was approved by Congress with the support of newly-elected President Ulysses S. Grant in February 1869. Illinois was the third state to ratify it, becoming law just days before Chicago’s April 1870 municipal elections.19 Meanwhile, Henry, Jr. graduated from the integrated Chicago High School at the age of sixteen in 1866, a member of the first class in five years to embark upon life without the Civil War hanging over its head. Beginning in the late 1840s, black children had been allowed to attend the same Chicago public schools as whites, most attending P.S. 1 near the intersection of Washington and Dearborn streets. The elder Wagoner transported his family via train and wagon to Colorado over the summer of 1866 so that they could join him in frontier Denver City, where he had built a residence and saloon on Blake Street the previous year. Frontier Denver was not unlike early Chicago. Founded in the 1850s by gold miners, the early city was daunted by fire, floods, and vice, but achieved a

158

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

population of 4,759 by 1870, including some four hundred blacks. The first mention of Denver in the black press was in early 1859, the National Era waxing on what it called the “perfect harmony and order [that] pervades among the miners.” The real life situation was far different. Even more than in antebellum Chicago, the legal and social status of African Americans was in doubt in early Colorado. Spawned from the pro-slavery Kansas territory, blacks could be killed summarily and without retribution in very early and lawless Denver, and one early white saloonkeeper advertised openly that even his saloon’s pet monkey would not “shake hands with a darkey.” “The People’s Government that irregular, revolutionary thing which has so often provoked the wrath of august rulers is inaugurated here,” a hopeful correspondent told the black National Era, but Colorado did not become its own territory until 1861 without any clear mandate on the legal status of resident blacks. Ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment resolved the enslavement issue in 1865, but enfranchisement remained a leading concern. The territorial legislature had granted suffrage to all “male persons” in 1861, but that law was amended to exclude African Americans in 1864 when a few of the estimated 150 living in the territory tried to vote. In September 1865, territorial whites narrowly approved a bid for statehood but refused black enfranchisement in a companion referendum by a margin of eightto-one. Wagoner and brother-in-law Barney Ford joined an effort led by black Denver businessman William Jefferson Hardin to petition Congress to oppose statehood until equal suffrage was legalized. Hardin, who was more French than black, argued that freedom was important in an area where “the soil has never been pressed by the foot of one unhappy slave, or desecrated by the tread of the proud and cruel oppressors of our race.” Citing African American sacrifices in the late war in December 1865, Wagoner wrote a petition with 137 signatures to territorial Governor Alexander Cummings asking for male enfranchisement, and he made a similar plea the following month seeking to end the exclusion of black children from Denver’s public schools. Congress, especially Radical Republican Sen. Charles Sumner, determined to oppose statehood until blacks were enfranchised. In response, Colorado’s leading booster, Rocky Mountain News publisher William N. Byers, attacked Hardin, Wagoner, and others for linking statehood to the suffrage and education issues. In one paper, Byers cited “W. J. Hardin and one hundred other niggers” for delaying the statehood process. “Much as we may be in favor of granting the negro his rights,” he wrote in another issue, “we do not propose to eat, drink, or sleep with one, and neither do we believe it right that our children should receive their education in negro classes.” “There is the usual

Voices from within the Veil

159

prejudice against us,” a black Colorado miner told the Christian Recorder in 1867, “but not in any hurtful quantity, and it is dying out more rapidly than in the East.”20 At about this time, Wagoner befriended Frederick Douglass’ two adult sons, Lewis H. and Frederick, Jr. While ostensibly joining Wagoner in Colorado to learn typography with the aim of starting a black newspaper, the two added the elder Douglass’ prestige to the enfranchisement issue. In particular, Colorado blacks pointed to a popular quotation from the senior Douglass that “if a negro [sic] knows as much when sober, as an Irishman when drunk, he knows enough to vote.” “What I have done for your boys, is but a feeble expression of my constitional [sic] disposition to help my race in particular, and mankind in general,” Wagoner wrote to Douglass, and he characterized Lewis as “a young man of strong, clear good sense” while Frederick, Jr., “seems to be more cautious.” Wagoner and the others continued their enfranchisement efforts in the face of a statehood veto by President Andrew Johnson in May 1866 because there were too few residents in the territory. Although Johnson’s action returned Colorado to its whites-only territorial status, the Colorado turmoil was embraced by Radical Republicans, and Congress passed the Territorial Suffrage Act the following January, without Johnson’s signature, forbidding the restriction of voting rights based on color in all territories including Colorado. Acquiescing to a superior power, the Rocky Mountain News declared that “there is not the slightest doubt as to this fact [of black suffrage], for Congress is determined to push this question to the wall, and forever nail it there . . . .” In spite of rioting threats during Denver’s 1867 municipal elections, ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment ended the voting rights debate. “To the colored Americans, among the proudest recollections of the past will be the part they took in their own deliverance,” twenty-year-old Henry Wagoner, Jr., told a white and black Denver audience in honor of the event in May 1870. “The despised chattel of 1860 is the respected voter of today.” Education remained another pivotal issue to Denver blacks, especially when public schools continued to be closed to their children. The debate was complicated by a disagreement between William J. Hardin, who argued for immediate integration, and Frederick Douglass, Jr., who probably favored a more gradual integration. Fearing that the dispute would spill over into the broader white Denver community, Hardin warned that blacks would face ostracism for what could be perceived as a “disgraceful nigger frolic,” while Douglass countered that Hardin’s contention was “impolitic and damaging” to blacks. While education was the concern, black property owners paid more than $200,000 in school

160

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

taxes in 1867 alone only to have their children excluded from schools. To underscore the importance of integration, Lewis taught reading, writing, arithmetic, government, and politics to adult blacks in Wagoner’s home with the assistance of Barney L. Ford, Hardin, and others. The Denver school board approved a segregated school building in 1867, and, in the wake of several public confrontations, fully integrated Denver’s public schools in 1873 in spite of white protests. “I do not ask social equality for the Colored Man, for that will regulate itself,” Wagoner quoted former President Ulysses S. Grant in 1882, “but let him have access to the schools that he may become educated . . . .” Hardin’s role in Denver’s black community came to an abrupt end in 1873 when he was accused of bigamy and fled to territorial Wyoming. The Douglasses never started their newspaper and returned East.21 Early Denver was an attractive destination to enterprising African Americans, and its economic opportunities were comparable to those of early Chicago. The 1870 census revealed 105 adult males living and working in the city, nearly all involved in “black occupations” from domestics, porters, and cooks to waiters and barbers. Hardin, who had been a schoolteacher in his native Kentucky, worked as a barber, worth an estimated $1,500 in 1870. Wagoner operated a saloon and restaurant in addition to working as an Arapaho County sheriff’s deputy and court bailiff, a clerk in the first Colorado state legislature in 1876, and a register and election judge in Denver’s Ninth Ward. He was the wealthiest black in a city where the average per capita wealth for blacks was around $100 in 1870. That same year, Wagoner’s assets were estimated at $6,300, and he was said to be worth some $20,000 by 1887 through land speculation and other entrepreneurial businesses including a hotel with brother-in-law Barney Ford. Wagoner also advertised, promoting his saloon and restaurant business in the predominantly white city directory in 1866: Get wholesome food at cheap rates — Oysters, pies, and butter cakes, Nuts of dough, Chicago kind, Even cider too, B d’ye mind? Right down Blake Street you’ll find — H. O. Wagoner is the host, And to please all is his boast.

Wagoner's wife of twenty-six years, Susan, died in 1870, as did five of the couple’s eight children before adulthood. Susan joined him in his civil rights and entrepreneurial activities, especially during his Chicago years. She died of an unknown disease in frontier Denver in 1870, and

Voices from within the Veil

161

five of the couple’s eight children died before adulthood. Only his oldest and youngest daughters outlived Wagoner. His only son and namesake moved from the Chicago public school system to the newly-founded Howard University Law School in 1870, graduating in one of its first classes in 1873. Wagoner considered his son a gifted “linguist, accountant, lawyer and diplomatist.” With the political assistance of Frederick Douglass and Wagoner’s old Galena friend and former Congressman Elihu Washburne, both confidants of President Ulysses S. Grant, Henry, Jr., was appointed attaché to the United States Legation in Lyons, France, in 1873, likely the first African American to achieve such a rank in the U. S. Foreign Service outside of the Caribbean or Liberia. In a letter fragment written in 1874, Frederick Douglass, who never aspired to college for his own sons, wrote, “I share as a friend, your father’s pride and satisfaction.” “It is indeed a long time since I wrote you,” Henry, Jr., confided to his father in 1878, and evoking the elder’s newspaper career, he continued, “Your favorite saying that ‘no news is good news’ and so forth, is like all other old sayings B more often false than true.” Before that letter arrived in Denver however, the gravely-ill twenty-six-year old Henry, Jr. had died of what probably was tuberculosis, and was buried in Lyons. On a European tour in 1887, Douglass visited the grave for his friend, in what Douglass called in his reminiscences “a work of love.” Wagoner never recovered totally from the death, characterizing his son as “my last great hope of earth.”22

Final Years In 1882, Wagoner returned to the civil rights fray at the age of sixtysix to edit briefly the Denver Star, perhaps the first black newspaper west of the Missouri River. The Star had been founded in the early 1880s by Lewis Price, a Missouri-born enslaved person who escaped to fight with the Missouri Colored Infantry during the war before settling in Denver in 1870. Price invested $6,000 in the newspaper, money earned in Denver real estate speculation. Some accounts indicate that he was illiterate, hiring other blacks to write for him. A number of letters describing Denver’s early black community appeared with Price’s byline in The Christian Recorder during the 1870s and 1880s. “The change in the management of the Denver, (Col.) Star, will doubtless insure its permanency; with an increased editorial strength,” the Recorder noted in July 1882. “With H. O. Wagoner at its head HOW could it fail to influence the regions round about?”

162

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

Only one partial issue of the early Star survives, before Wagoner accepted the editorship, but excerpts of the paper were republished in The Christian Recorder. “We have always held, and do now believe, that the fathers of our families as an incentive to encourage the young men of this city [should] aspire to other pursuits than mere menial labor.” Wagoner wrote in an editorial. “It is thought among a certain class that the colored vote can be carried for the candidates who give the most money.” he wrote in September 1882, two months before Congressional elections. “Let us refute the charge this year and show them that our vote cannot be bought.” At about the same time, Wagoner took issue with the use of the word Negro in a black St. Louis newspaper, writing, “We are not desirous of dictating to our esteemed contemporary, who possesses great ability; but would simply ask him to consider well the matter, and cease to use that un-English and abominable word. In the dark ages it was introduced by the brutal slaveholders, and from then it has been used by whites in derision of the colored race. Why then won’t our colored brethren drop the word.”2 As did the rest of their Gilded Age contemporaries, Wagoner and Douglass had the misfortune of witnessing the unraveling of the civil rights’ reforms that they had championed as younger men. Wagoner’s concern began to grow in 1882 when several federal courts began to dismantle legislation of the previous fifteen years based on the specious legal argument that the Fourteenth Amendment, approved in 1868, applied only to states and not private individuals. “Is it possible, Douglass, that battles are still to be fought for the civil rights and equality of the black man before the law in this Country? Is this eternal strife never to cease?” Wagoner asked, and in reference to the terrorist Ku Klux Klan wing of the Democratic party, he continued, “After all these things have been done by the deliberate powers of the Nation, still our people, at the South, especially, are actually at the mercy of the lawless.” “It now behooves us to begin vigorously, to prepare for coming events,” Wagoner wrote in 1883, just days after the Supreme Court struck down the keystone 1875 Civil Rights Law, “to use wisely and unitedly, the means lawfully placed in our hands for securing and maintaining [our] rights.” In its decision, the court argued that Congress lacked the authority to enforce racial discrimination rules among individuals and private organizations, an argument repeated in the segregationist Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896, a year after Douglass had died. In reply to the 1883 court decision, Wagoner proposed “a national council to give, shape, force and effect” to civil rights legislation on a state level, where he believed that at least Northern states such as Colorado and Illinois would stand by its black residents. He advocated national

Voices from within the Veil

163

educational and election bills which would “have a powerful influence in solving the Negro question.” “It does seem to me that an Educational Bill ought to be the forerunner to a Federal Election Bill,” he wrote to Douglass in 1890 as black voting rights were diminishing. “In my humble judgment, these two agencies would have a powerful influence in solving the Negro question.” Wagoner complained of the advantages that the Democratic Party came to enjoy because of its “solid South” coalition during the 1880s and 1890s, lamenting, “now-a-days, the Democrats vie with the Republicans in showering praises upon Abraham Lincoln, who great and good man that he was, never got a single electoral vote from the Democratic party.” Wagoner criticized the Washington, D. C. police force in 1894 for an incident in which black women were clubbed for being bystanders. “Old as I am, I still get fired up at such outrages,” he wrote Douglass, “and in my righteous indignation I think all kinds of things, and then calm down to the consolation that there is a corresponding penalty, of some kind, to all violations of law: natural and Sacred.” “I am still hopeful and confident of the ultimate future,” Wagoner wrote to Douglass in 1888. “What we want, as you say, is protection in the just rights of humanity; not a mere theoretical protection, but an actual protection.”24 Wagoner and Douglass shared at least one significant defining characteristic that aided them in their civil rights efforts; they were both biracial or, what Douglass called, the “intermediate race.” Historian Leon F. Litwack has argued that nineteenth-century whites had an affinity for light-complexioned African Americans, seeing them as “normal” men in contrast to their darker-skinned counterparts. In Chicago, fellow civil rights activist John Jones was also biracial and he, Wagoner, and Douglass were all treated differently from other blacks. In Colorado, William J. Hardin was considered the de facto head of the voting rights campaign because of “his seven-eighth [sic] Saxon origin” as described in the Rocky Mountain News in 1866. “We have never seen anything ‘nigger’ about him.” The color issue came to a head of sorts in 1884 when Douglass married a white woman following the death of his first, black wife in 1882. “The very big event of your life, consummated by the natural selection . . . has marked . . . an Epoch from which the unification of the races will become accelerated,” Wagoner wrote in congratulations: “If a black man burns his feet by marrying a white woman.” Douglass told reporters, “he must expect to stand on the blisters.” “It has been clearly demonstrated by centuries of experience that the black race makes the most progress where it is brought into the closest contact with the white race,” the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1890. “It is rare, now-a-days, to find compatible marriages.” Wagoner wrote Douglass the same year in

164

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

reference to a disagreeable black grandson who had “no qualities nor intelligence.” “While it is true that this thing is common with the whites, I think it is, to a greater degree, common with the colored people.” 25 Attributing his long life to temperance, the elderly Wagoner also credited taking “very little medicine through life,” perhaps a reference to patent medicines of his day, never dancing, and smoking only in the immediate years after his wife’s death. No early images of him survive, but he was similar to Douglass in stature and appearance in his later years, with a lighter skin color that helped him in his interactions with whites, thick white hair and beard, and gold-rimmed glasses. He was a keen student of politics and public events as well as the economy with the Denver Daily News calling him a “walking encyclopedia of historical and political events of the century.” Ever the entrepreneur, Wagoner was an optimistic man primarily, looking for an opportunity in a seeming defeat. “What a glorious century is this in which you and I have lived,” he wrote Douglass in 1873. “Of course we will continue to the End to all the good we can, so let us, in the mean time, be as jovial and as happy as we may.” The eighty-four-year-old Henry O. Wagoner died of what was termed “old age” in Denver in 1901, hailed as the “Douglass of Colorado” by the same Rocky Mountain News that had once disparaged him as one of a “hundred other niggers.” Of his many memories, his nearly fifty-year friendship with Frederick Douglass was the most important to him. “Yes, it is and ought to be a consolation to you and to me to recall the pleasant fact that during an intimacy of about forty years,” Wagoner wrote in 1885, “stretching over a period of great antagonism of opinions, still our friendship has never been broken. This is a rare fact, and especially as we both happened to be men of strong convictions.” Their relationship was unique, a long overlooked chapter in the nineteenth-century American civil rights movement. As well, Wagoner’s contributions to the Underground Railroad and the male suffrage movement helped blacks to enjoy at least some of the legacy promised to them in the Declaration of Independence. As a self-made businessman, Wagoner’s financial success also proves that nineteenth-century African Americans not only survived, but that they prospered in blatantly capitalistic frontier economies such as Chicago’s and Denver’s. Wagoner’s words, along with those of his other African American contemporaries need to be better understood as part of the long campaign for civil rights in America.26

Voices from within the Veil

165

Notes 1

Robert Beverley, The History and Present State of Virginia (Charlottesville: Dominion Books, 1968, 1705), 59-60; Junius P. Rodriguez, ed. Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006); Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Publishers, 1982). 2 Fergus M. Bordewich, Bound for Canaan: The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America’s First Civil Rights Movement (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 4; William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872); Ann Hagedorn, Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); Ella Forbes, But We Have No Country: The 1851 Christiana Pennsylvania Resistance (Cherry Hill, N. J.: Africana Homestead Legacy, 1998); George and Wilene Hendrick, Fleeing for Freedom: Stories of the Underground Railroad as Told by Levi Cofin and William Still (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003); Chicago Defender, December 3, 1962, 11; Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1878, 7; Glennette Tilley Turner The Underground Railroad in Illinois (Glen Ellyn, Ill.: Newman Educational Publishing, 2001), 24; H. H. Bell, “Chicago Negroes in the Reform Movement, 1847-1853,” Negro History Bulletin, 21 (April 1958), 153-155; H. F. Gosnell, The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935); Larry Gara, “The Myth of the Underground Railroad,” American History Illustrated, 12 (September 1978), 34-41. 3 Western Citizen, November 16, 1847, 2; Chicago Tribune, April 4, 1859, 2, January 18, 1874, 4; February 15, 1874, 8; February 14, 1880, 6; May 1, 1932, H1; June 9, 1935, A4, 13 April 1958, NW13; January 22, 1978, H36; Chicago Defender, February 12, 2000, 1; Freedom’s Journal, 4 July 1828, African American Newspapers: The 19th Century (hereafter AAN), item #1828; The Colored American, May 27,1837, AAN, item #2494, September 29, 1838, AAN, item #4069; Rufus Blanchard, Discovery and Conquest of the Northwest with the History of Chicago, vol. II (Chicago: R. Blanchard and Co., 1900), 282. 4 Western Citizen, February 13, 1843, 2; December 28, 1843, 91; October 27, 1846, 2; November 16, 1847, 2; Chicago Inter Ocean, June 28, 1891, 17; [Chicago] Daily Democratic Press, June 21, 1853,.2; Finis Farr, Chicago: A Personal History of America’s Most American City (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1973), 50-51; Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 138. 5 Rocky Mountain News, January 28, 1901, 5; Bordewich, Canaan, 113-114, 247248; H. O. Wagoner to S. H. Kefoot, 27 September 1884, miscellaneous manuscripts, box 364, Chicago Historical Society (hereafter CHS); Wagoner to Frederick Douglass, 1 September 1890, in General Correspondence, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress (hereafter Douglass Papers); William J. Simmons, Men of Mark; Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Cleveland: George M. Rewell and Co., 1887), 679-684.

166 6

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

Pittsfield [Massachusetts] Sun, November 10, 1853, 1; [Amherst, New Hampshire] Farmer’s Cabinet, December 20, 1855, 2; Chicago Tribune, February 7, 1909, Q2. 7 Gem of the Prairie, January 27, 1849, 2; Wagoner to S. H. Kefoot, September 27, 1884, miscellaneous manuscripts, CHS; Arvarh E. Strickland, “The Illinois Background of Lincoln’s Attitude Toward Slavery and the Negro,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 56 (Fall 1963), 479-40; Western Citizen, July 11, 1844, 2; Otto L. Schmidt, “The Underground Railroad of Illinois,” unpublished manuscript, Schmidt papers, CHS; James H. Collins to George W. Clark, November 7, 1846, Zebina Eastman Papers, CHS; Larry Gara, “The Underground Railroad in Illinois,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 56 (Fall 1963), 508-528; Belleville Advocate, July 17, 1851, 2; Miscellaneous items, Atkinson Family Collection, CHS. 8 Lionel C. Barrow, Jr., “’Our Own Cause’: Freedom’s Journal and the Beginnings of the Black Press,” Journalism History, 4 (Winter 1977-78), 118-122; The North Star, February 18, 1848, item #9322, September 29, 1848, AAN, item #12270; Chicago Advertiser as quoted in The North Star, April 28, 1848, item #10304; Chicago Defender, August 30, 1919, 12; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, April 14, 1854, AAN, item #48868, November 10, 1854, AAN, item #63369 and #63362; Douglass’ Monthly, March 1859 as copied in Black Abolitionist Archives, Doc. No. 20323; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, December 23, 1853. 9 The North Star, March 20, 1851, AAN, item #23573; Chicago Tribune, circa February 1855, as excerpted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 2, 1855, AAN, item #64167; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, December 11, 1851, AAN, item #24792, January 8, 1852, AAN, item #25016, February 12, 1852, AAN, item #25279, February 19, 1852, AAN, item #25322; December 14, 1855, AAN, item #77747. 10 Wagoner to Douglas, October 13, 1885, September 1, 1890, Douglass Papers; Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1852, 2; August 8, 1857, 1, 13 February 1860, 1; Blanchard, Discovery and Conquest, 303-304; Turner, Underground Railroad, 26; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 11, 1851, AAN item #23839, March 8, 1853, AAN, item #46116; Wagoner to S. H. Kefoot, September 27, 1884, miscellaneous manuscripts, CHS; Simmons, Men of Mark, 679-684; Rocky Mountain News, January 28, 1901, 5. 11 Blanchard, Northwest, 297; Trenton State Gazette, October 28, 1850, 2; Ohio State Journal, November 5, 1850, 2; Chicago Inter Ocean, June 28, 1891, 17; The North Star, October 6, 1848, AAN, item #12406, October 24, 1850, AAN, item #23036, 31 October 1850, AAN, item #23112.; Chicago Evening Journal, March 11, 1875, 4; Lavinia Jones Lee to Caroline McIlvaine, April 21, 1905, Jones papers, CHS; Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1851, 2; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, January 8, 1852, AAN, item #24997; Chicago Evening Journal, October 8, 1850, 3. 12 Chicago Tribune, April13, 1853, 2; March 12, 1875, 3; July 24, 1955, S2; Chicago Inter Ocean, June 28, 1891, 17. 13 Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1854, 3, as quoted in National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 17, 1854; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, November 11, 1853, AAN, item #47426, April 14, 1854, AAN, item #48871, September 8, 1854, AAN, item

Voices from within the Veil

167

#62899; Wagoner to Douglas, August 17, 1893, Douglass Papers; Chicago Tribune, September 12, 1854, 2; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, September 22, 1854, AAN item #62966, September 29, 1854, AAN item #63072, 26 January 1855, AAN, item #63863; Tribune as quoted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, November 3, 1854, item #63281; Tribune as quoted in Provincial Freeman, 23 December 1854, AAN item #27825; St. Louis Republican as quoted in Tribune, September 28, 1854, 2; L. Jones Lee to Caroline McIlvaine, April 21, 1905, CHS, quoting Chicago Evening Journal, March 11, 1875, 4, Theodora Lee Purnell to Illinois Historical Society, September 2, 1955, John Jones Collection, CHS; The Christian Recorder, 12 March 1864, AAN, item #60369. 14 Provincial Freeman, April 12, 1856, AAN, item #38851, May 17, 1856, AAN, item #38978; Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1853, 2; Frederick Douglass’s Paper, April 29, 1853, AAN, item #46468; Carol Pirtle, Escape Between Two Suns: A True Tale of the Underground Railroad in Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 8-10; Merton L. Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 2324; Turner, Underground Railroad, 108; Chicago Tribune as quoted in Daily Missouri Republican, October 9, 1854, 1. 15 Chicago Daily Journal and Chicago Times as quoted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, November 3, 1854, AAN, item #63280, November 17, 1854, December 10, 1854; Wagoner to Douglass, October 13, 1886, Douglass Papers; Ohio Columbian as quoted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 24 November 1854; New York Times, November 2, 1854, 4; Douglass, Frederick Douglass Papers, Vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 541; Douglass’ Monthly, March 1859, clipping at University of Detroit Mercy, Black Abolitionist Archive. 16 Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1852, 2; February 26, 1856, 2; August 8, 1857, 1; November 20, 1857, 2; August 16, 1858, 1; November 23, 1858, 2; April 28, 1859, 1, 28; April 1859, 1; July 25, 1859, 1; November 12, 1859; February 13, 1860, 1; July 13, 1860, 1; November 19, 2, 22 and November 23, 1864, 4; The North Star, 20 March 1851, AAN, item #23573; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, July 11, 1851, AAN item #23839, January 14, 1853, AAN, item #45649, March 8, 1853, AAN, item #46116, June 10, 1853, AAN, item #46733, July 28, 1853, AAN, item #37297, December 2, 1853, AAN, item #47536, May 5, 1854, AAN, item #49128, September 15, 1854, AAN item #62938; March 16, 1855, AAN, item #64316, May 18, 1855, AAN, item #64799; Chicago Tribune as quoted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, March 2, 1855, AAN, item #64167; The National Era, July 24, 1856, AAN, item #66945, December 18, 1856, AAN, item #68054; Wagoner to Douglass, October 13, 1885, Douglass Papers; Chicago Times, December 29, 1852, 4; Chicago Evening Journal, November 19, 1864, 4; Blanchard, Northwest, 303-304; Turner, Underground Railroad, 26; H. O. Wagoner to Wendell Phillips, November 6, 1859, John Brown Collection, #299, Box 2, Folder 5, Kansas State Historical Society; Chicago Times, September 1, 1882, 8; Blanchard, Northwest, 297-302; Chicago Defender, March 28, 1959, 11; L. Jones Lee to Caroline McIlvaine, April 21, 1905, John Jones papers, CHS; Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1859, 1.

168 17

Henry O. Wagoner, Civil Rights, and Black Economic Opportunity in Frontier Chicago and Denver, 1846-1887

Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1858, 1; May 5, 1859, 1, June 10, 1858, 2, January 13, 1859, 2, April 19, 1860, 1; January 5, 1861, 1; August 7, 1862, 4; August 23, 1865, 4; Mary Jones to Frederick Douglass, May 29, 1860, Douglass Papers; William L. Katz, The Black West (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 188-191; Chicago Defender, May 3, 1930, 6. 18 The Christian Recorder, May 9, 1863, AAN, item #58381, September 23, 1865, AAN, item #72591, October 3, 1868, AAN, item #85953; Chicago Tribune, June 30, 1865, 2; August, 23, 4; August 29, 1865, 3; April 13, 1866, 3; April 8, 1870, 4; undated excerpts from the Chicago Evening Journal and Post as quoted in Christian Recorder, January 12, 1867, AAN, item #75964; Roger D. Bridges, A Equality Deferred: Civil Rights for Illinois Blacks, 1865-1885,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 74 (Summer 1981), 83-108; V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 123. 19 Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1866, 4; The National Era, February 17, 1859, AAN, item #80729, December 8, 1859, AAN, item #82719; Christian Recorder, September 3, 1864, AAN, item #61636, December 10, 1864, AAN, item #62347, December 21, 1867; Thomas J. Noel, The City and the Saloon: Denver 1858-1916 (Niwot, Col.: University Press of Colorado, 1996), 26; Eugene H. Berwanger, “Reconstruction on the Frontier: The Equal Rights Struggle in Colorado, 18651867,” in African Americans on the Western Frontier (Niwot, Col.: University Press of Colorado, 1998), 37-53; Berwanger, “Reconstruction on the Frontier: The Equal Rights Struggle in Colorado, 1865-1867,” Pacific Historical Review, 44 (August 1875), 313-329; Rocky Mountain News, January, 24 and February 23,1866; Berwanger, “Hardin and Langston: Western Black Spokesman of the Reconstruction Era,” The Journal of Negro History, 64 (Spring 1979), 101-115; Berwanger, Eugene H. "William J. Hardin: Colorado Spokesman for Racial Justice, 1863-1873." Colorado Magazine of History 52 (Winter 1975), 52-66; Clark Secrest, Hell’s Belles: Prostitution, Vice, and Crime in Early Denver With a Biography of Sam Howe, Frontier Lawman (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002); John H. Monnett and Michael McCarthy, Colorado Profiles: Men and Women Who Shaped the Centennial State (Niwot, Col.: University Press of Colorado, 1996), 171; Daniel G. Hill, “The Negro in the Early History of the West,” The Iliff Review, 3 (1946), 132-142; James R. Harvey, “Negroes in Colorado,” Colorado Magazine, 26 (July 1949), 165-176; George H. Wayne, “Negro Migration and Colonization in Colorado, 1870-1930,” Journal of the West, 15 (January 1976), 102-120; Harmon Mothershead, “Negro Rights in the Colorado Territory,” Colorado Magazine, 40 (July 1963), 212-223; Robert M. Tank, “Mobility and Occupational Structure on the Late Nineteenth-Century Urban Frontier: The Case of Denver, Colorado,” Pacific Historical Review, 47 (May 1978), 189-216. 20 Wagoner to Douglass, August 27, 1866, Wagoner to Douglass, April 14, 1882, Douglass Papers; Rocky Mountain News, January, 6, June 6, August 2, August 6, 1867, May 4, 1870; Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1869, 1; Christian Recorder, November 18, 1865; Jerome C. Smiley, History of Denver (Denver: The Denver Times, 1971, 1901), 738-741; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New

Voices from within the Veil

169

York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 248-252; Frank Hall, History of the State of Colorado (Chicago: Blakely Print Co., 1889- 1895); Berwanger, “William J. Hardin: Colorado Spokesman for Racial Justice, 1863-1873, “Colorado Magazine, 52 (Spring 1975), 52-65; Rocky Mountain News, April 1 and April 3, 1867. 21 Wagoner to Douglass, April 29, 1873, December 10, 1873, March 23, 1878, April 19, 1886, Henry O. Wagoner, Jr., to Wagoner, February 18, 1878, Nelson B. Gregory to Wagoner, March 5, 1878, Douglass to Henry O. Wagoner, Jr., fragment dated 21 February 1874, all in Douglass Papers; Wagoner to S. H. Kerfoot, September 27, 1884, CHS; Cheyenne [Wyoming] Daily Sun, November 9, 1879; Douglass, “My Foreign Travels,” unpublished MSS., The Frederick Douglass Papers: Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, Vol. 5 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976), 310-311; Christian Recorder, 26 October 1872, AAN, item #92174, December 14, 1872, AAN, item #93019, November 27, 1873, AAN, item #98734, 11 April 1878, AAN, item #113516; Noel, Saloon, 27. 22 The Christian Recorder, September 11, 1873, item #97579, December 11, 1873, item #99027, June 25, 1874, item #102992, November 10, 1881, item #122373, 22 June 1882, item #124685, July 13, 1882, item #124806, July 20, 1882, item #124936, August 24, 1882, item #125506 September 14, 1882, item #125808, October 12, 1882, item #126016, all in the AAN collection; Monnett and McCarthy, Colorado Profiles, 169-177. 23 Wagoner to Douglass, December 10, 1873, March 23, 1878, April 14, 1882, October 29, 1883, April 27, 1885, November 9, 1885, August 8, 1888, September 12, 1888, May 2, 1894, Douglass Papers; Denver Daily News, 28 January 1901 as cited in Noel, Saloon, 47. 24 Wagoner to Douglass, October 29, 1883, August 8, 1888, September 12, 1888, September 1, 1890, May 2, 1894, Douglass Papers. 25 Rocky Mountain News, January 30 and March 15, 1866; Wagoner to Douglass, February 21, 1884, April 27, 1885; November 9, 1885; November 5,1890; Douglass Papers; New York Times, January 27, 1884, 6; Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1890, 10. 26 Rocky Mountain News, 28.

40 ACRES AND A MULE: BLACK FOLK AND THE RIGHT TO THE RECTIFICATION OF INJUSTICE RODNEY ROBERTS, EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

Congressman John Conyers of Michigan has been trying to get House Resolution #40 out of committee and onto the House floor for debate since he first introduced the bill in 1989. The Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act would "acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the U.S. and the thirteen American colonies between 1619 and 1865" and establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against AfricanAmericans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.1

The language of the bill is consistent with the idea that, because of the injustices perpetrated against them by slavery and its progeny of racial injustice, black folk have a right to rectification. But do blacks really have such a right? My aim in this essay is to show how forty acres and a mule, the classic symbol of reparations for the enslavement of Africans in North America, would have failed as a just response to the injustice of American slavery. Focusing on the descendants of American slaves, I offer support for a right to rectification by showing how some of the arguments against such a right fail, and by connecting the harms of slavery to the present-day descendants.

Voices from within the Veil

171

Rectification The moral right to the rectification of injustice is grounded in rectificatory justice. Rectificatory justice is that form of justice employed as a means of addressing those situations that arise when the requirements of a just system of distributive justice have broken down. Although the aim of rectificatory justice is clearly remedial, since it purports to remedy these situations, its specific aim is to take an unjust situation and set it right. Righting an injustice requires several things. First, restoration is required whenever possible. Restoration calls for the return of precisely that which has been lost as a result of injustice, as in the case of stolen property. Second, compensation may also be required. To provide compensation is to counterbalance an unjust loss with something else that is equivalent in value to that loss. Since providing compensation means providing something other than the exact thing that was lost, compensation is, in this way, distinguishable from restoration. Typically, when the term “reparations” is used, it refers to some sort of rectificatory compensation. Finally, rectification calls for an apology. Since restoration and compensation can only address unjust losses, an apology is necessary in order to effect rectification because it is the apology that addresses the matter of righting the wrong of an injustice. What makes an injustice a wrong is the lack of respect shown when one's rights are violated. Hence the righting of the wrong is accomplished by way of an apology, i.e., an acknowledgment of wrongdoing that includes the reaffirmation that those who suffered the injustice have moral standing.2 The right to rectification, then, can only be legitimately ascribed when rights have been violated. Hence, the right to rectification is a "remedial right," since there is a sense in which it is "derived from the violation of other independently characterizable rights."3 Since the right to rectification is grounded in rectificatory justice, it calls for addressing both the wrong of the injustice, and any unjust losses resulting therefrom. Take a right that can be legitimately ascribed to all persons, like the right not to be discriminated against unjustly. If this right is violated, if one is in fact discriminated against unjustly, this violation gives rise to a right to rectification and hence to all that rectificatory justice requires. In the case of social groups, it is at least plausible to think that, in cases where it is impossible to spell out the content of the discrimination from which each individual in the group has a right to be free without referring to the group, the right not to be discriminated against unjustly can be legitimately thought of as a group right. If the group is in fact discriminated against unjustly, this violation gives rise to a right to rectification.

172

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

Forty Acres and a Mule4 Forty acres and a mule has come to be “[s]ymbolic of reparations for [the] enslavement” of blacks in America, and it has been “a recurring phrase in Black Culture and throughout the African American Experience since the Civil War.”5 It is this idea that prompted Rep. Conyers to designate his Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for AfricanAmericans Act as H.R. 40. Six score and five years before Conyers first proposed his bill, several of the bills proposed by Congress were concerned with land for the former slaves who had been freed before the end of the war. All of these bills, including the one proposed by Senator Charles Sumner, however, merely call for leasing land to blacks, and none of them mention forty acres. 6 Indeed, even the 1865 “Act to establish a Bureau for the Relief of Freedmen and Refugees” only calls for temporary leasing, and makes no mention of 40 acres.7 Hence, it seems likely that the idea arose earlier that year when Major General William Tecumseh Sherman issued his Special Field Orders, No. 15. Sherman ordered that [t]he islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns River, Florida, are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the Negroes now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.8

Section 3 of the order provided that “each family shall have a plot of not more that (40) forty acres of tillable ground.”9 The idea of providing a mule along with the forty acres is not mentioned in the order. This provision may have come to be added to complete the phrase “40 acres and a mule” because of the view that “Sherman also encouraged the army to lend the families army mules for plowing.”10 The belief that forty acres and a mule is a rectificatory idea rests on the mistaken assumption that its aim was to aid blacks in their transition from slavery and to compensate them for the injustices that resulted from that “peculiar institution.”11 But even if newly freed black families had been granted forty acres and a mule, it clearly would not have constituted rectification for the injustices perpetrated against blacks in America through 1865—it fails by virtue of the lack of an apology alone. Moreover, in no way was the idea to make up for the injustice of slavery; rather, it was the strictly forward-looking notion of helping newly freed blacks in their transition from slavery to freedom.12 This is underscored by the legislative proposals in 1866 by the Thirty-Ninth Congress. First, like the Freedmen’s Bureau Act itself, these proposals did not only

Voices from within the Veil

173

concern newly freed slaves, but whites as well. They concerned both freedmen and “loyal refugees.” Second, the “parcels not exceeding forty acres each” were to be rented, with the possibility of purchasing them in the future.13 Even Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who, along with Charles Sumner, was at the vanguard of the Congressional struggle to aid the newly freed slaves, offered a bill devoid of the idea that the forty acre parcels were meant to be compensation for the injustice of slavery. Stevens’ proposal was clearly the most “radical.” It called for the forfeiture of “all the public lands belonging to the ten States of the Confederacy,” and the distribution of forty acre parcels to the freedmen. These parcels were to be held in fee simple and “inalienable” for ten years, after which “absolute title” to the property was to be granted.14 Stevens’ rationale for the proposal, however, did not include providing rectificatory compensation to the freedmen for the injustices perpetrated against them by the institution of slavery. His “Bill Relative to damages done to loyal men, and for other purposes,” while “due to justice,” was meant “as an example,” and to inflict “proper punishment” on those who constituted the Confederacy for their declaration of an “unjust war against the United States for the purpose of destroying republican liberty and permanently establishing slavery… and also to compel them to make some compensation for the damages and expenditures caused by said war.”15 Hence, forty acres and a mule does not even amount to rectificatory compensation—it was never intended to, nor would it, counterbalance the unjust losses sustained by blacks as a result of their enslavement. Moreover, since there is no sense of acknowledgment or remembrance of the injustice, nor any show of respect for the newly-emancipated Americans of African decent, forty acres and a mule fails even as rectificatory symbolism. It is by way of an apology, coupled necessarily with at least some manner and substantive degree of compensation, that the wrongdoing of the injustice is acknowledged, and the moral standing of those upon whom the injustice was perpetrated is reaffirmed. Of course, even if forty acres and a mule had counted as rectificatory compensation, the proposal was never fulfilled. [Andrew] Johnson’s proclamation and orders of 1865 provided for the early restoration of all property except property in slaves and such of the Port Royal lands as had been sold for taxes…. [B]y Federal force, Negroes were compelled to leave most of the lands and to make contracts as common laborers.16

The prevailing rectificatory sentiment during Reconstruction toward the four million newly freed black folk was overwhelmingly negative.

174

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice Against any plan [like that of 40 acres and a mule] was the settled determination of the planter South to keep the bulk of Negroes as landless laborers and the deep repugnance on the part of Northerners to confiscating individual property.17

Moreover, the United States was disinclined to add to its huge debt by undertaking any large and costly social adjustments after the war. To give land to free citizens smacked of ‘paternalism;’ it came directly in opposition to the American assumption that any American could be rich if he wanted to, or at least well-to-do; and it stubbornly ignored the exceptional position of a freed slave.18

Unfortunately, the rectificatory sentiment toward blacks in the U.S. is not much better today. While most blacks seem to be in favor of rectificatory measures, most whites seem to be opposed to them.19 This anti-rectificatory sentiment on the part of whites helps to explain why H.R. 40 has languished in committee for nearly two decades.

Compensation, Slavery, and the Slave Descendants20 Belief in a popular conception of compensation provides a basis for giving credence to the idea that slave descendants are not legitimate holders of a right to rectification. According to the counterfactual conception of compensation (CCC), we ought to think of compensation counterfactually and thus approach it in a way that is based upon events that did not in fact occur. Rather than thinking of compensation as counterbalancing a loss, the counterfactual view tells us that the aim of rectificatory compensation is to make people no worse off than they would have been without receiving the compensation had the injustice not occurred.21 The popularity of this approach may be due in large part to its initial appeal. There is a sense in which it paints a utopian picture of rectificatory compensation. On this view, we seek to alter history in response to injustice by erasing the unjust event(s). This fantastic aim might explain why many find it ideal. There are, however, often practical reasons why it is unwise or impossible to follow this conception.22 Indeed, even theorists like Robert Goodin, who ultimately employ the notion, acknowledge concerns about the impossibility of achieving its aim.23 This is the first problem with the CCC.

Voices from within the Veil

175

Fig. 3.2: Journey of a slave from the plantation to the battlefield. This is an uncut sheet of twelve illustrated cards presenting the journey of a slave from plantation life to the struggle for liberty in the aftermath of the Civil War, ca. 1863. Attributed to James Queen after Henry Louis Stephens. Courtesy Library of Congress.

176

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

A more serious problem is that the CCC can result in absurd notions of compensation, the employment of which may themselves constitute injustices. Suppose the following scenario: I am scheduled to take a plane from New Haven to Washington. Five blocks from the airport, the taxi hits another car. My leg is broken; I'm taken to the hospital; I miss my flight. The plane I would have taken crashes. There are no survivors. Had I caught the plane, I would have died. Only the taxi driver's recklessness keeps me alive.24

Now suppose the taxi driver provides me with some compensation for my broken leg, say one dollar. According to the CCC, the dollar compensates me for the taxi driver's recklessness. Since I am clearly no worse off (in fact much better off) than I would have been without the dollar if the cabby had not driven recklessly (I am alive instead of dead), the dollar fully compensates me for my loss! Moreover, on this view, making me no worse off than I otherwise would have been had the taxi driver not driven recklessly and caused me a broken leg, is both a sufficient condition and a necessary condition for having been fully compensated. Since I am clearly better off with the broken leg than I would have been had I died in the plane crash, we wind up with the absurd idea that the taxi driver has already fully compensated me for my broken leg by making me miss my flight! The CCC may also raise a more general moral concern in such cases. One consequence is that we might end up giving the taxi driver a moral status similar to that of someone who, for instance, has rescued me from a burning building. While I am clearly better off with the broken leg than I would have been had I died in the plane crash, there is also a sense in which the taxi driver saved my life. Granted, this was purely accidental, and is far from how we think of supererogatory acts such as rescuing someone from a burning building. Except for the driver’s actions, I would be dead. So in addition to the absurd idea that the taxi driver has already fully compensated me for my broken leg by making me miss my flight, on this account I could end up with a moral debt of something like gratitude to the driver. As the absurdities arising from the reckless cabbie example show, the CCC leads us afoul of how we ought to think about compensation. Since we can end up grossly under-compensating those who have suffered unjust losses, or providing them with no compensation at all, employing the CCC can itself result in an injustice. The aim of rectificatory compensation is not that I be made no worse off than I would have been without receiving the compensation had the injustice not occurred. In the reckless cabbie example, the taxi driver is obliged to give all passengers some reasonable

Voices from within the Veil

177

standard of safety as a means to maintaining their bodily integrity. Hence, the broken leg that I suffered is a wrongful loss that resulted from the violation of my right to that standard (the reckless driving). When we take rectificatory justice seriously, we see that the cabby has wronged me and that I have suffered an unjust loss. The aim of compensation is to counterbalance that loss. This difficulty with the CCC is exacerbated in cases where far greater losses than a broken leg are at stake. Were we to err by employing the idea in large compensatory programs, we may, just as in the reckless cabbie example, end up grossly under-compensating those deserving of rectificatory compensation, or providing them with no compensation at all. Thus, we would end up with a public policy, the employment of which may itself constitute an injustice. An example of just such an error would be to employ the CCC in the case of the descendants of American slaves. First, notice what happens when the CCC is embraced by the descendants themselves. At first blush, some may find this idea troublesome because it “doesn’t seem to make sense for a person to claim that she has been wronged by a historical injustice if she would not have existed at all if the injustice had not been done.”26 But this view just assumes that it is impossible for one to be wronged by a historical injustice, and have that injustice be a necessary condition for one’s own existence. The real trouble here is that subscribing to the counterfactual conception of compensation entails the absurd idea that if the descendants of slaves desire compensation for slavery, then they also desire never to have existed! This difficulty arises in a recent argument against rectificatory compensation for the descendants of American slaves. The argument holds that, since the descendants of slaves were not harmed by slavery, they are not due rectificatory compensation for the injustice of slavery. The premise is supported by arguing that “the descendants of slaves were not harmed by slavery since they owe their existence to slavery.”27 Let us call this “the Existence Argument.” It includes the claim that the descendants of slaves owe their existence to slavery and the inference that, because of this, these descendants have not been harmed by slavery. Put in another way, according to the Existence Argument, owing one’s existence to the circumstances created by an injustice, in this case a particularly egregious and long-standing one, is sufficient to support the idea that the descendants of those who were the particular victims of that injustice are not harmed by it. Of course, we need not venture into the metaphysics of personal identity to see that the claim regarding the existence of descendants vis-à-vis American slavery is probably true. I probably would

178

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

not be “me”, i.e., I probably would not be the particular person that I am, had there been no Transatlantic Slave Trade and had my ancestors not been enslaved at the Somerset Place plantation in Creswell, North Carolina. No doubt this is also probably true of all the other descendants of the African peoples who were enslaved in the Americas. So the question becomes whether or not the premise upon which the Existence Argument is based is sufficient to sustain a reasonable inference to the conclusion that the descendants of slaves are not harmed by slavery. I do not think that it is. It is not unreasonable to think that many of those who have embraced the CCC have (perhaps unwittingly) assumed a dominant perspective in their view of compensation. Consider an injustice that was clearly a part of the slave experience—the injustice of rape. While few, if any, would deny that rape itself constitutes an injustice from which the victim sustains an unjust loss, and is therefore due rectificatory compensation, advocates of the CCC might object to compensating any offspring which may have come to be as a result of the injustice. The reason for this is the same as in the case of the slave descendants: the child of the rape victim owes her existence to the injustice of rape. But for the rape, this child would not exist. So, just as in the case of the slave descendants, we are left with the intuition that this person has indeed been harmed. However, the likelihood that this intuition is the appropriate one is strengthened when we consider the existence premise from the dominant perspective. From the perpetrator’s perspective, it is difficult to see that any offspring resulting from his rape of the victim has suffered any unjust harm. The perspective here is this: “Were it not for my ‘sexual encounter’ with your mother, you wouldn’t even be here!” Hence, as we saw in the reckless-cabbie example, there seems to be a sense that something approaching a debt of gratitude is owed. In this case, we would end up thinking that children conceived as a result of rape owe a debt of gratitude to the rapists who violated their mothers. Surely this must be mistaken. Likewise, in the case of the descendants of American Slavery, the perspective is this: “If your ancestors had not been brought here from Africa and enslaved, you wouldn’t even be here!” So again, there seems to be a sense that something like a debt of gratitude is owed to those who brought about and helped to perpetuate slavery in North America by the slave descendants. Surely, however, this too must be mistaken. Since one is only grateful when one has been done some good, and since these examples suggest that it is a mistake to be grateful for the injustice that facilitated one’s own existence, it appears that the injustice in

Voices from within the Veil

179

these cases is not a good. This makes sense because injustices are, by definition, not goods. Secondly, the notion entailed in the existence premise that “being brought into existence (with decent life prospects) is a benefit,” is, like the CCC itself, “assumed without argument.”27 Consequently, it makes sense to think that the existence premise is not sufficient to sustain the conclusion that the descendants of slaves were not harmed by slavery, and that “the Existence Argument” fails. Of course, even those who are persuaded by my argument will rightly remain concerned because, even after jettisoning the counterfactual conception of compensation and “the Existence Argument,” we still need to make sense of the idea that the descendants of American slaves were wrongfully harmed by slavery. One way to make sense of this wrongful harm is by way of an argument from analogy. Even though the unjust conditions of what would come to be known as the Jewish Holocaust led to the conception of the descendants of those who suffered that horrible event, many of us still think that these descendants were due rectificatory compensation. Both American Slavery and the Jewish Holocaust were clearly atrocities.28 Indeed, many hold that, since the former lasted for 246 years, during which time “hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties,” including “deaths in the millions during [the] terror-filled sea voyages” of the Middle Passage,29 it was an even greater injustice than the latter. This being the case, since it made sense to render compensation for “the interests of the Jewish people as a whole who were entitled to indemnification for property that had been left by those who had died without known heirs,”30 and since “[n] ot only have the actual victims of the Nazi regime received compensation, but their children have as well,”31 it makes sense to think that the descendants of the actual victims of the Jewish Holocaust were harmed by that injustice. This being the case, it likewise makes sense to think that the descendants of American slaves were harmed by slavery. Another approach begins with our conception of the status quo vis-àvis the descendants of American slaves. A dominant perspective suggests the deviation from the status quo that is typically found in conceptions of rectificatory compensation. Nevertheless, this notion is absent in the case of the slave descendants. It is only from the dominant perspective that we begin with the assumption of a status quo, a norm possessed by all. Hence, from the dominant perspective, we conclude that any unjust loss must have dropped those who have suffered the loss below the norm. The problem with this assumption was brought out in some of the criticism raised against the decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The decision was criticized for not being ‘neutral’ because the existing distribution of

180

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

power and resources between blacks and whites was taken by the courts as simply ‘there’—the base line from which all actions should be measured. All subsequent departures from the status quo were the ‘preferences,’ or violations of neutrality.32 So instead of supposing that the descendants of American slaves begin life at the status quo, we ought to suppose that they begin life at some position below that which is the norm for the dominant group. As Robert Goodin points out with respect to compensation for the congenitally handicapped, we are not restoring them to some status quo ante in which they were able to walk: if their handicaps are congenital, their impaired mobility has been lifelong. That makes this case very unlike the ordinary practice of compensation. What we are doing here is not restoring the congenitally handicapped to some status quo ante. Rather we are bringing them up to a standard that, while normal for the species, is one that those particular individuals never actually enjoyed.33

Likewise, the slave descendants are not due compensation so that they can be restored to some status quo ante. Rather, they are due compensation because of the diminished status they are born into. They are also due compensation for the plethora of racial injustices perpetrated against blacks in America which perpetuate that status. Theirs is not the harm of slavery itself. It is not a status that entails a life of bondage. As children, they are not likely to be systematically disciplined even before they have learned to walk. They probably will not be “whipped for crying” in order “to make them subdue.”34 Nor does their status entail the possibility that, while pregnant and having failed to do that which was demanded of them at work, they would be flogged while being held down at their hands and feet by four others.35 And if they should one day decide to leave their current places of residence, they are unlikely to be followed by an overseer “and a pack of bloodhounds” into a swamp, torn up by the dogs, shot “in the hip with 14 buck-shot,” burned on their “back[s] with a red hot iron, and [their] legs with strong turpentine,” then forced to wear “an iron collar” around their necks and “irons, one on each leg” for a period of eighth months.36 Rather, their status and their perpetual harm are the result of racial injustice. What is often overlooked, however, is that “[r]acism and racial caste…issue from racial slavery.” 37 This is so because “racial slavery required a sophisticated racist rationale to justify and sustain it. That rationale was not created by slavery, but a slave society drew upon already existing assumptions and attitudes to produce it.”38 “[T]he establishment of racial slavery gave a meaning and authority to racial and color prejudice that would dominate race relations in the new

Voices from within the Veil

181

society.” 39 As former slave Frederick Douglass observed in the second decade following emancipation: Slavery had the power at one time to make and unmake Presidents, to construe the law, dictate the policy, set the fashion in national manners and customs, interpret the Bible, and control the church; and, naturally enough, the old masters set themselves up as much too high as they set the manhood of the Negro too low. Out of the depths of slavery has come this prejudice and this color line. It is broad enough and black enough to explain all the malign influences which assail the newly emancipated millions to-day. In reply to this argument it will perhaps be said that the negro has no slavery now to contend with, and that having been free during the last sixteen years, he ought by this time to have contradicted the degrading qualities which slavery formerly ascribed to him. All very true as to the letter, but utterly false as to the spirit. Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country and poisons more or less the moral atmosphere of all sections of the republic. The money motive for assailing the negro which slavery represented is indeed absent, but love of power and dominion, strengthened by two centuries of irresponsible power, still remains.40

Hence, slavery itself is often cited as the source of harm to the slave descendants, not because we were victims of this invidious institution, but because there is a clear sense in which slavery is the genesis of racial injustice.41 It is in this sense that the descendants of American slaves are harmed by slavery. While the view from the top ignores the adverse impact of slavery on the slave descendants, those who look to the bottom “have no trouble linking the wrongs against ancestors to the condition of living descendants.”42 The dominant historical narrative “has continued to amplify the myths of automatic progress, universal freedom, and the American Dream without the ugly reality of racism seriously challenging the faith.”43As Justice Thurgood Marshall reminds us, “[t]he dream of America as the great melting pot has not been realized for the Negro; because of his skin color he never even made it into the pot.” 44

Notes 1

U.S. Congress, H.R. 40 IH, 105th Cong., 1st sess., January 7, 1997. For a more thorough account of rectificatory justice, see Rodney C. Roberts, “Justice and Rectification: A Taxonomy of Justice,” in Injustice and Rectification, ed. Rodney C. Roberts (New York: Peter Lang, 2002). 3 Allen Buchanan, “Theories of Secession,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 26 (1997), 39. 2

182 4

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

This section is adapted from Rodney C. Roberts, “Rectificatory Justice and the Philosophy of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Re-Cognizing W. E. B. Du Bois in the TwentyFirst Century: Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Mary Keller and Chester J. Fontenot, Jr. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2007). 5 Geneva Smitherman, Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 113. 6 U.S. Congress, S. 63, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 18 January 1864; U.S. Congress, S. 128, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 19 February 1864; U.S. Congress, S. 227, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 12 April 1864; U.S. Congress, H.R. 51, 38th Cong., 1st sess., 30 June 1864. 7 U.S. Congress, H.R. 698, 38th Cong., 2nd sess., 20 February 1865. Charles Sumner’s proposal that year mentions forty acres, but only insofar as it quotes Sherman’s order in an effort to “warrant and confirm the land titles of grantees” under that order. U.S. Congress, S. 19, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 11 December 1865. W. E. B. Du Bois seems to have thought that the idea of forty acres preceded Sherman’s order. According to Du Bois, the seized lands under the control of the Freedmen’s Bureau “w[ere] the nucleus of the proposal to furnish forty acres to each emancipated slave family. The scheme was further advanced when Sherman, embarrassed by the number of Negroes who followed him from Atlanta to the sea and gathered around him in Savannah and South Carolina, as a war measure settled them upon the abandoned Sea Islands and the adjacent coast.” W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 601. 8 Major General William T. Sherman, “Special Field Orders, No. 15, January 16, 1865,” sec. 1, in Should America Pay?: Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, ed. Raymond A. Winbush (New York: Amistad, 2003), 331. 9 Sherman, 332. 10 Noralee Frankel, “Breaking the Chains: 1860-1880,” in To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans, eds. Robin D.G. Kelley and Earl Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 239. 11 Geneva Smitherman, for instane, thinks that the legislation that would have provided the forty acres “was designed to make [the former slaves] self-sufficient and to compensate for 246 years of free labor.” Smitherman, 114. 12 As historian John David Smith observes, “proponents of land distribution never defined their plans as reparations to former slaves for their centuries of servitude and unrequited labor.” John David Smith, “The Enduring Myth of ‘Forty Acres and a Mule,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 (February 2003), B11. 13 U.S. Congress, H.R. 87, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 18 January 1866; U.S. Congress, S. 60, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 7 February 1866; U.S. Congress, H.R. 330, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 26 February 1866; U.S. Congress, H.R. 359, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 7 March 1866. 14 U.S. Congress, H.R. 29, 40th Cong., 1st sess., 11 March 1867, sec. 1, sec. 4. 15 Ibid., sec. 1. 16 DuBois, 386. 17 Ibid., 601. 18 Ibid., 601-02.

Voices from within the Veil 19

183

In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, “[n]ine out of 10 white respondents said the government should not make cash payments to slave descendants,” 62% of white respondents said corporations that profited from slavery should not apologize for having done so, and 61% of white respondents were opposed to having companies that profited from slavery set up scholarship funds for slave descendants. Peter Viles, “Suit seeks billions in slave reparations,” CNN.com/LAWCENTER, 27 March 2002, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/26/slavery.reparations/index.html (accessed 27 November 2006). 20 This section is adapted from Rodney C. Roberts, “The Counterfactual Conception of Compensation,” Metaphilosophy 37 (2006), 414-428. 21 The popularity of the counterfactual conception of compensation seems to have begun with the work of Robert Nozick. According to George Sher, Nozick’s idea is both the official view, and the standard interpretation, of compensation. George Sher, Approximate Justice: Studies in Non-Ideal Theory (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 29, 18. According to Nozick, “[s]omething fully compensates a person for a loss if and only if it makes him no worse off than he otherwise would have been; it compensates person X for person Y's action A if X is no worse off receiving it, Y having done A, than X would have been without receiving it if Y had not done A.” Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 57. So according to the CCC, it is both a sufficient condition and a necessary condition that individuals who have been wrongfully harmed be placed in the position they would have been in had the injustice never occurred. 22 James W. Nickel, “Justice in Compensation,” William and Mary Law Review 18 (1976), 380. 23 Robert E. Goodin, “Theories of Compensation,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 9 (1989), 74. Recognizing this difficulty, Jeremy Waldron suggests that the CCC aim at bringing the present “as close as possible” to a history without the injustice. Jeremy Waldron, “Superseding Historic Injustice,” Ethics 103 (1992), 13. 24 Jules Coleman, Risks and Wrongs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 323. 25 Janna Thompson, Taking Responsibility for the Past: Reparation and Historical Injustice (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), 104. 26 Stephen Kershnar, “The Inheritance-Based Claim to Reparations,” Legal Theory 8 (2002), 243. 27 David Benatar, “Why It Is Better Never To Come Into Existence,” American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997), 345. 28 See Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 29 Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Plume, 2000), 208. 30 Robinson, 223. 31 Irma Jacqueline Ozer, “Reparations for African Americans,” Howard Law Journal 41 (1998), 481. 32 Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106 (1993), 1768 n. 264.

184 33

40 Acres and a Mule: Black Folk and the Right to the Rectification of Injustice

Robert E. Goodin, “Compensation and Redistribution,” in NOMOS XXXIII: Compensatory Justice, ed. John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 163. 34 Madison Jefferson, Interview (Jefferson was an enslaved Virginia house servant, field hand, and herder. He was interviewed in England in 1841), in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies, ed. John W. Blassingame, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 217. 35 Jefferson, 220. 36 Tom Wilson, Interview (Wilson was an enslaved Mississippi and Louisiana cotton presser and fireman. He was interviewed in England in 1858), in Slave Testimony, 339. 37 Nathan Irvin Huggins, Revelations: American History, American Myths, eds. Brenda Smith Huggins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 255. 38 Huggins, 271 n. 47. 39 Huggins, 272. 40 Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line,” in Frederick Douglass: Select Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 663. Cf. Randall Robinson’s claim that slavery seems to “produc[e] its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended” (Robinson, 216). Also, there may be a new “money motive for assailing the negro.” See Rodney C. Roberts, “Criminalization and Compensation,” Legal Theory 11 (2005), 159. 41 Much of the global community, except the United States of America, recognized this when it acknowledged “that slavery and the slave trade are a crime against humanity and should always have been so, especially the transatlantic slave trade, and are among the major sources and manifestations of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance, and that Africans and people of African descent [among others] were victims of these acts and continue to be victims of their consequences” United Nations, Report of the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Durban, South Africa, August 31-September 8, 2001, U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 189/12 (2002), 11-12. 42 Vincene Verdun, “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It: An Analysis of Reparations to African Americans,” Tulane Law Review 67 (1993), 632. 43 Huggins, 255. 44 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke 438 U.S. 265, 400-401 (1978).

CHAPTER THREE THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RACE IN EARLY VIRGINIA AND BEYOND

Fig. 3.1. A group of free black missionaries from Zion Baptist Church days before their departure from Portsmouth, Virginia to Liberia. Courtesy Portsmouth Public Library.

The evolution of American racial theory had its origins in Virginia. First contact with the East Coast Indians sowed the seeds of a uniquely Americanized racism. It was also in Virginia that the lines of ethnic purity would become blurred. The resulting legal fallout was laws that sought to control power by using race—and gender—as the foundation for full citizenship. Christina Proenza-Coles looks at the issue of paternity and race as a platform for maintaining power and privilege in the hands of a few. By focusing on the rights of mixed-race children in Virginia, Proenza-Coles demonstrates that the mutual exclusivity of the terms black and white facilitated racial polarization in America. In so doing, white Virginians went so far as to deny rights to their own kin. Judith King-Calnek continues the exploration of the dissolution of these rights by examining the Langston-Quarles family of Louisa County,

186

Chapter Three

Virginia. Lucy Langston was an enslaved woman of Pamunkey Indian and black ancestry whose relationship with a white man, Ralph Quarles, defied society’s mores by their living together as husband and wife and producing six children. They did so with the tacit approval of other landed whites and the consternation of many more. Challenges to participation and citizenship rights continued in the postemancipation years. Shayla Nunnally describes the unique example of Petersburg, Virginia and the role of blacks in the Cockade City’s in their self-empowerment. She also explores the fight for enfranchisement by black Virginians in the pre-1965 Voting Rights era. Led by historian and political activist, Luther P. Jackson, the Virginia Voters League launched a full-scale attack on Virginia’s discriminatory voting system, creating the grassroots infrastructure that served the community well during the civil rights era. Then, Kimberley Mangun’s examination of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon in the 1920s provides a fascinating discussion on the fierce battle waged by the state’s roughly two thousand black citizens. Determined to fight the Klan and committed to exposing the atrocities perpetrated on Oregon’s blacks, Mangun reveals the fight waged by Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Oregon NAACP during a time of government apathy.

THE RIGHT TO ONE’S RELATIVES: THE CONVENTIONS AND CONSEQUENCES OF DENYING PATERNITY FOR MIXED-RACE CHILDREN IN COLONIAL AND ANTEBELLUM VIRGINIA CHRISTINA PROENZA-COLES, VIRGINIA STATE UNIVERSITY

In the New World, as a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery, social distinctions traditionally understood in terms of kinship, religion, station, language, and region were gradually mediated and, to some extent, eclipsed by notions of black and white. The conditions of colonial settlement in the Americas - the junction of once geographically distinct communities, the politics and practices of colonization, the growth of modern slavery and capitalism, developing ideologies of democracy and republicanism—necessitated new forms of social organization that generated New World identities in novel terms of race. As individuals from different parts of the world came to occupy the same space, they began to share language, religion, a sense of place, and kinship ties. Nevertheless, once efforts to secure labor and amass wealth with Indigenous, European, and African bondspeople gave way to a system of slavery based on African ancestry, conventions of race cleaved new status distinctions in colonial American communities as well as in colonial American families. The Atlantic system thus yielded not only modern constructions of race, but it also generated new understandings of kinship. Kinship ties between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans, or as the North Americans termed it, miscegenation, began with first contact. Africans and Afro-Spaniards, enslaved and free, accompanied Spanish conquistadors and explorers. People of African descent populated the earliest European settlements in the Caribbean and Central, South, and North America. Until 1800, more Africans than Europeans crossed the

188

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Atlantic Ocean. As people of European, African, and Indian ancestry lived among one another on colonial frontiers, under varying degrees of coercion, exigency, and intimacy, sexual unions were common. How authorities and elites regulated such unions and regarded their offspring had tremendous consequences for the development of colonial states with slave-based economies. Since the publication of Frank Tannenbaum’s classic comparative study Slave and Citizen in 1947, many scholars have suggested that miscegenation was characteristic of Latin American societies, whereas “race mixing” was much less significant in North America. I contend that miscegenation was prevalent in all New World societies; the difference lies in the ways in which the various colonial powers and communities dealt with such unions and, in particular, their issue. Laws and customs continually attempted to regulate inter-ethnic unions and the classification of their progeny in order to delineate racial distinctions amid the unprecedented social conditions of American colonialism and modern slavery. How the societies of the colonial Americas regulated and regarded inter-ethnic unions and how they defined their offspring in terms of race and legitimacy varied. The Virginians’ unique convention of hypodescent, whereby mixedrace children automatically inherited the status of the lower caste parent, endeavored to render miscegenation invisible as it permitted, if not required Anglo parents to deny the paternity of their own children. This convention left Virginians with numerous anomalies and contradictions as they tried to negotiate a single color line in a complex society. Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonials approached race mixing very differently. Racial categorization was more fluid and malleable. In Anglo-America, children with known African ancestry could never be regarded as white, whereas in Latin America they might be.1 Inter-ethnic unions were not publicly framed as anathema in Latin America, but they were recognized as a social practice; in some instances, elites promoted interracial marriage as a means to “whiten” the population. Unlike mixed-race Virginians, the mixed-race children of Spanish, French, and Portuguese men had the possibility of inheriting the status of their fathers. Virginia laws attempted to prohibit, but they did not prevent racial mixing. In 1662 Virginia passed one of the first laws to exhibit statutory racial discrimination in North American history when it doubled the standard fine for “’any christian [who] shall committ Fornication with a negro man or woman.’”2 The regulation of sexual intimacy was a crucial means of mediating property and labor relations and fundamental to the legal and social construction of race. In an era where fornication and

Voices from within the Veil

189

adultery were punished by law, however, early statutes referring to interracial unions outside of marriage may have emphasized legislating moral restraint in general rather than racial boundaries per se. Records indicate several instances of legal marriages between Afro-Virginians and Europeans in the seventeenth century.3 In 1664, Maryland enacted a statute which, preceding the emergence of the term white by almost two decades, prescribed that “any freeborn English woman” who married a slave would become the lifetime servant of his master as would her issue. While such a law was likely meant to reduce the existence of such unions, some planters seeking the economic advantage coerced servants into marriages with slaves. When Lord Baltimore learned that an unscrupulous new master had forced his former servant, Irish Nell, into such a marriage, he sought the law’s repeal. The new act of 1681 referred specifically to “free-born English women, or white women”4 and stated that if the marriage of a woman-servant with a slave should involve the master’s permission, then their offspring would be free. Maryland’s 1681 statute regulating unions between English women and African slaves and the status of their children was the first use of the term white in colonial American law. In 1691, in the first Virginia statute to use the term white, legislators passed the first law to prohibit marriage between an Englishman or woman and a “negro, mulatto, or Indian…bond or free” in the New World. For the prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which may…increase…by negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarrying with English, or other white women…whatsoever English or white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman bond or free shall within three months after such a marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever.5

Like the Maryland statute, the Virginia legislators were concerned about English women having children with non-English men; but, unlike Maryland’s 1681 act, Virginia’s legislation also restricted the marital options of Englishmen. Virginia’s 1691 Act XVI, having endeavored to eradicate inter-ethnic marriages, went on to prescribe punishment for “any English woman being free [who] shall have a bastard child by any negro or mulatto”6 and mandated a thirty-three year term of service for her issue. This Virginia law attempting to prevent mixed marriages and prescribing bond service for the illegitimate mixed issue of “any English woman” strove to curb the growing mixed-race population. This legislation was reenacted in 1696, 1705, 1753, and 1765.7

190

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

The 1691 Virginia statute went still further to prevent the legitimacy of mixed-race children when it stated: “That no negro or mulatto be after the end of this present session of assembly set free by any person or persons whatsoever.”8 The act declared that if a person were to manumit a slave, he must “cause the said negro or mulatto to be transported out of the country” within six months. While this portion of the act was specifically concerned with “great inconveniences [that] may happen to this country by the setting of negroes and mulattoes free, by their either entertaining negro slaves from their masters service, or receiving stolen goods, or being grown old bringing a charge upon the country,” 9 I suggest that an implicit and important consequence and, perhaps, cause of the legislation was to prevent slave owners from manumitting their mixed race children. From 1723 to 1782, Virginia law explicitly prohibited manumission, except in very particular cases that required legislative approval. Notwithstanding this legislation, a few elite Virginians employed petitions and other means to manumit slaves and, in a few instances, they granted freed slaves property. Between 1792 and 1806, in the wake of the American Revolution, manumission laws eased and manumission rates surged. After 1806, however, freed persons were required to leave the state within twelve months or return to slavery. In spite of the threat of legal and social sanctions, unions between persons of European and African descent were common in colonial and early republican Virginia.10 In the face of legislation specifically targeting female white servants who had children with black men, Paul Heinegg’s rigorous genealogical studies of Virginia and surrounding regions have shown that [W]hite servant women continued to bear children by African American fathers through the late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century. . . it appears that they were the primary source of the increase in the free African American population for this period.11

Or, as an antebellum article in The Richmond Enquirer spitefully put it in 1859, “’As long as there are Negro slaves in Virginia, and bad white women, we shall have a mulatto population free.’”12 The notion that white women were the primary source of the increase of the free black community during the colonial and early republican period would be inherently illogical in any other New World society; the Virginians’ unique convention of hypodescent, however, rendered it a social fact. In his foreword to Heneigg’s study of free African American families in Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, Ira Berlin comments on the prevalence of inter-ethnic unions in colonial North America.

Voices from within the Veil

191

Everywhere whites, blacks, and Indians united in both long-term and casual sexual relations, some coerced and some freely entered. That mixing took place at the top of the social order, where white men of property and standing forced themselves on unwilling servant and slave women, often producing children of mixed racial origins. But Heinegg maintains such relationships produced a scant one percent of the free children of color. Inter-racial sex was far more prevalent at the base of colonial society, where poor and often unfree peoples - mostly slaves and servants of various derivations - lived and worked under common conditions.13

The notion that interracial unions at the top of the social order did not produce free children of color should not be surprising, since by law a child’s status followed the condition of the mother. If we consider the marriage and manumission laws described above, it seems less surprising. There is nothing in Heinegg’s study, nevertheless, that suggests interracial sex, while frequent at the base of society, was any more frequent than at the top. Masses of evidence attest to a very large presence of mulattoes among slaves; the fact that the restrictive legislation cited above invariably referred to mulatto slaves specifically is but one small example. This large population of mixed race slaves was most likely the descendants of white fathers. Sexual unions between masters and slaves specifically and between whites and blacks generally were common in Virginia and as well as in every other slave holding society in North America.14 “It was probably the exception, rather than the rule, to find a large plantation which did not have, among the slaves, some who owed paternity to the master or to some of his relatives or close friends.”15 Some sources suggest that sexual unions between the sons of slave masters and their slaves were customary prior to the marriage of the former. Others indicate that these types of unions were common among married men as well. The prevalence of white paternity among slaves over generations is indicated in documentary records that attest not only to the presence of mulatto slaves but also to socalled “white” slaves.16 In his autobiography, Harry Smith reported that among his neighbor’s 700 slaves, “there were seventy single young women, and forty of them were so white you could not tell them from the whites.”17 James Hugo Johnson cites several cases where, because of their appearance (and their ancestry), slaves were “mistaken” for white people. Referring to a particular instance of this type of mistake, the editor of Baltimore’s Niles Register lamented in 1834 “’fathers have made a traffic in their own slaves.’”18 Several sources suggest that it was not unusual for the southern elite to have enslaved kin.19 How these enslaved family members were treated varied drastically. Several, we may infer, were liberated by white parents.

192

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

In his study of manumission in the Virginia cities of Petersburg and Richmond, Luther Jackson noted that many emancipated slaves were listed as “bright mulatto,” “very light,” “very bright in complexion,” and, sometimes, “almost white.”20 In addition to descriptions of complexion and records of manumission, another indicator of white paternity might be a slave’s name. On some plantations it was not uncommon for slave owners to give enslaved persons ancient Greek, Roman, or other unusual names; on these plantations slaves who were given traditional English first names may have been the progeny of the slave master.21 In rare cases, relatives and observers left documentation. In Virginia’s King William County in 1825, for example, an Indian petitioner named John Dungee invoked the paternal relationship between his “negro” wife and her former owner. Dungee wrote that his wife had been manumitted by the will of her owner because she was his offspring and was bequeathed $1,000 upon his death. Dungee’s petition entreated that his wife not be removed from Virginia or returned to slavery as per the laws of the state.22 While Jackson cites numerous records of Virginia slaves described as “very bright mulatto complexion” who were granted manumission, perhaps by their fathers, it does not appear that the children were legally recognized as relatives. The will of one white Petersburg resident, John Stewart, however, did specify that he wanted his estate, amounting to about $20,000, to go to Mary Vizzaneau, “’my natural colored daughter.’”23 By and large, though, when white Virginians left bequests to people of color, they did not directly acknowledge a familial relation.24 According to Jackson, property was not often transferred from whites to free blacks in cases of miscegenation; in the regions surrounding Petersburg and Richmond, four free black families were bequeathed land from whites.25 Scholars have documented rare instances in South Carolina where mixed-race children were treated as the legitimate heirs of slaveholders despite the fact that, after 1740, South Carolinians were explicitly prohibited from manumitting slaves.26 In Alabama, a region influenced by French and Spanish colonialism, there were cases where fathers attempted to bequeath property to mixed race children, several of whom were thwarted by white family members and state courts.27 Yet, these examples are extremely rare compared to the vast majority of mixedrace children who were categorically denied their patrimony. Controversy surrounds several longstanding claims made by the descendants of a slave named West Ford, owned by George Washington’s brother, that George Washington was Ford’s father, but there is little controversy over the claim that one of Washington’s male relatives was Ford’s ancestor. A portrait of West Ford clearly depicts his mixed-race

Voices from within the Veil

193

heritage.28 Ford’s descendants have maintained independent and strikingly similar oral histories that recognize George Washington as Ford’s father, although some family histories regard Washington as Ford’s uncle. Henry Wiencek has recently brought to light documentation indicating George Washington and Ford’s enslaved mother, Venus, may have both been at Mount Vernon around the time of the child’s conception. Wiencek and scholars such as Henry Robinson also make a persuasive case that West Ford was the child of George’s nephew, Bushrod Washington. The wills of several Washington relatives illustrate a unique concern for West Ford and his family. In 1801 Bushrod’s mother Hannah stated in her will, I offered to buy [West] of my dear sons Bushrod and Corbin Washington, but they generously refused to sell him but presented the boy to me as a gift. It is my most earnest wish and desire this lad West may be as soon as possible inoculated for the smallpox, after which to be bound to a good tradesman until the age of 21 years, after which he is to be free for the rest of his life.29

West Ford was the only one of Hannah’s slaves who was ever manumitted. Prior to West’s manumission, John Augustine, Hannah’s husband and George Washington’s brother, had altered his own will, possibly prompted by Hannah, to protect West’s mother and grandparents from potential sale upon his death by specifically deeding them to his wife. After his manumission, West Ford continued in the employ of and in close association with the Washington family. Bushrod’s will granted West 160 acres of land adjoining that of George Mason. Ford was never explicitly recognized as a relative, but he received exceptional treatment in comparison to his fellow slaves. He was educated (despite legal prohibitions), bequeathed property, and given duties of responsibility throughout his lifetime at Mount Vernon. Nonetheless, A blood tie to the master was no guarantee of benevolent treatment. West Ford gained freedom not because he was the son of a Washington but because he had a staunch patron in Hannah Washington. Had matters been left to John Augustine, he might have been sold off. And Hannah had to ensure his emancipation by including it in her will, giving it the force of law. She did not risk leaving his fate up to her sons.30

West Ford was not the only enslaved kin of the Washington family; Martha Washington owned her mulatto half-sister, Ann Dandridge, throughout her lifetime. “An arrangement like this was common, the colored child [of a slave owner] playing the part of the white child’s

194

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

personal servant and companion.”31 Martha’s enslaved half-sister had a child with Martha’s son from her first marriage, Jackie Custis. Jackie Custis died a few years later, but Washington’s family acknowledged the child as part of the family. He was free, but married a slave, and their children were emancipated by the husband of one of Martha’s granddaughters.32

One can only conjecture whether the union between the enslaved halfsister and her half-nephew was consensual. While this source reports that their issue, William, was acknowledged as part of the family, his choice of spouse suggests that he may have identified or been identified with the enslaved community. However William was acknowledged by the Washingtons, evidence suggests “George and Martha Washington had a grandchild among the servants at Mount Vernon.”33 After William, Ann Dandridge went on to have four daughters with an enslaved man named Costin, “all of them nieces of Martha Washington, and all of them becoming slaves at birth slaves-for-life for the Custis estate.”34 Several contemporary travelers commented on the large presence of fair-complexioned slaves at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello;35 these mulatto slaves were likely kin. Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his late wife’s enslaved half sister, Sally Hemings, produced his own enslaved offspring. Hemings’ mother and grandmother produced enslaved children with their white masters, none of whom were ever freed. Of Jefferson’s enslaved children, two boys may have escaped to freedom with support from the family. His daughter Harriet, like her mother, was a domestic servant for the Jefferson family. Jefferson’s slave sons Madison and Eston were apprenticed to Sally Heming’s brother, an enslaved carpenter. Upon Jefferson’s death in 1826, his will granted freedom to his sons Madison and Eston as well as to Sally’s brother whom he appointed as their legal guardian. He asked that the Virginia legislators grant them permission to remain in the state on the grounds that they had permanent employment on the campus of the University of Virginia. Hemings and Jefferson’s daughter Harriet became the possession of Jefferson’s daughter Martha. While it appears that the Washingtons and Jeffersons treated their enslaved relatives with favor, several primary and secondary sources indicate that some slave owners treated their children as chattel. In a slave autobiography from the Atlantic trade, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, published in 1789, the author described slave owners physically beating their own slave children.36 In 1851, Alexis de Tocqueville recounted:

Voices from within the Veil

195

I happened to meet with an old man in the south of the Union who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his own negroes and had had several children by her who were born the slaves of their father. He had indeed frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their freedom, but years had elapsed without his being able to surmount the legal obstacles to their emancipation and the meanwhile his old age had come and he was about to die. He pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of a stranger until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring imagination into a phrenzy.37

In 1901, Isaac Johnson published an autobiography titled, Slavery Days in Old Kentucky: A True Story of a Father Who Sold His Wife and Four Children By One of the Children wherein the title says it all.38 The authors of several nineteenth-century North American slave autobiographies were the children of enslaved women and white men. Frederick Douglass and Lewis Clark’s autobiographies report that they were the sons of enslaved women and anonymous white men, though some believed Douglass’ father was his master. Moses Roper, the son of his master and an enslaved woman, looked so much like his master that his master’s wife attempted to murder Moses as an infant, but his paternal grandmother intervened; he and his mother were promptly sold away. 39 According to William Brown’s narrative, the author was sired by a relative of his master.40 Henry Bibb wrote that his enslaved mother had ‘slaveholding blood flowing in her veins…enough to prevent her children though fathered by slaveholders, from being bought and sold in the slave markets in the South.’41 Before Booker T. Washington rose to national prominence, he lived as a slave in Virginia, the son of an anonymous white man. Some authors of slave autobiographies, like Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley, bore enslaved children with white men. Keckley, the dressmaker to Abraham Lincoln’s wife, was born a Virginia slave. She reported that her only child was conceived with a white man who had raped her. Harriet Jacobs and her children were purchased, but they were not freed by the children’s white father. Jacobs observed: My master was, to my knowledge, the father of eleven slaves. But did the mothers dare to tell who was the father of their children? Did the other slaves dare to allude to it, except in whispers among themselves? No, indeed! They knew too well the terrible consequences….Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do

196

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia not make them aware of this by passing them into the slave-trader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.42

In the autobiography of William and Ellen Craft, the former reported “my wife’s first master was her father, and her mother his slave, and the latter is still the slave of his widow.”43 In the 1930s, under the auspices of the Federal Work Progress Administration, interviews were conducted with thousands of former US slaves; “the collected narratives contain many claims by ex-slaves that they had been sired by their master or overseer.”44 One respondent recalled, “the master regularly sold away slave concubines when his wife discovered the relationship and ‘would sell his own children by slave women just as he would any others…’” Another said of enslaved concubines (via the WPA transcriber) “’But dey was all slaves just de same, and de niggers dat had chilien with de white man didn’t get treated no better. She got no more away from work dan de rest of ‘em.’”45 A man named W. L. Bost recalled of his experience as a slave in North Carolina, “Plenty of the colored women have children by the white men.… Then they take them very same children what have they own blood and make slaves out of them.”46 A former Virginia slave reported Did de dirty suckers associate wid slave wimmen?….dat wuz common. Marsters an’ overseers use to make slaves dat wid deir husbands git up, do as dey say….When babies came dey aint exknowledge ‘em. Treat dat baby like ‘tuthers - nothing to him. Mother feared to tell ‘cause she know’d what she’d git. Dat was de concealed part.47

Mixed-race children of white mothers were legally free, but Virginia’s legislation denied many of the same rights to free black and mixed race persons as were denied to slaves. From 1691 to 1967, people with partial or no European ancestry were forbidden to choose white spouses. In 1705, Virginia law further eroded the rights of people with European and African ancestry, stipulating that “the child, grand child, or great grand child, of a negro shall be deemed, accounted, held and taken to be a mulatto”48 and that no “negro, mulatto or Indian, shall… bear any office, ecclesiastical, civil, or military, or be in any place of public trust or power.”49 In 1785, Virginia law made mixed race persons legally black, legislating that “’every person, who has one-fourth more Negro blood shall be deemed a mulatto, and the word negro in any section of this or any other statute, shall be construed to mean mulatto as well as negro.’”50 Antebellum Virginia laws severely limited the educational and occupational opportunities of people of color as well as their physical

Voices from within the Veil

197

mobility, right to assembly, political participation, and legal recourse. Virginia laws reinforced social practices that rigorously endeavored to block avenues of socio-economic mobility for persons of color, many of whom had European parents, siblings, grandparents, or other relatives. How white Virginians dealt with their mixed-race offspring is highly relevant not only to understand how they superimposed a bifurcated color line on a very heterogeneous population, but also, in my view, a key component to understand Virginia’s exceptional demographic history. Among the New World colonies, Virginia was the first slave society to possess a black population growing primarily from self-reproduction, not forced migration. This watershed was achieved as early as 1720 – on some estates even earlier. Moreover, not only did natural increase occur earlier [in Virginia] than elsewhere, the black population grew at an unusually rapid rate.51

While Virginia received less than one percent of the roughly ten million Africans who came to the Americas, Virginia’s black population grew much more rapidly than any other New World colony. By 1720, persons classified as black comprised one-quarter of Virginia’s population; by 1770, Afro-Virginians comprised forty percent of the colony.52 While several scholars have attributed this growth to Virginia’s more hospitable climate, better nutrition, and less taxing tobacco plantation regime relative to the sugar colonies that regularly, and profitably, worked laborers to death, we might also consider the differences in how mixed-race persons were classified. In the Caribbean and Latin America, free persons with mixed ancestry might be regarded as members of the white community. The mixed-race children of European fathers tended to inherit the status of their father. After 1795, eligible mixed-race petitioners could purchase certificates attesting to their whiteness from the Spanish Crown. The Virginian convention of hypodescent meant that persons who would have been regarded as white in other New World societies were held to be black; this distinctive way of conceptualizing race is evidenced in the fact that “[Virginia’s] documentary record is strewn with references to people described as ‘white negroes.’”53 Manumission figures, marriage records, and baptismal records that racially classified children illustrate that colonial French, Spanish, and Portuguese societies dealt with miscegenation and mixed race children very differently than did the Virginians. The roots of some of these differences lie in demography. With few female European settlers, French and Iberian colonists looked to African and Indian women for mates, and state powers looked to their children to help build the colonies. While

198

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

inter-ethnic unions often involved free people of color, unions between enslaved women and their masters were not uncommon. In colonial Latin America, “Racially mixed slaves were not infrequently the children of their owners, or members of the owners’ families. We cannot say for certain what proportion of such slaves were freed, but clearly many were.”54 Manumission rates in the French and Iberian colonies were much higher than in the mainland English colonies. The majority of freedpersons tended to be women and children, and “slaves of mixed origin were decidedly advantaged in the manumission process.”55 Afro-Creole historian Charles Rousséve has observed that French and Spanish slaveholders treated their mixed-race children unlike AngloAmericans in that they “‘accepted them as members of the families, freed them, and educated them.’”56 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s work on eighteenth-century Louisiana shows that during French and Spanish colonization, “Mulatto children sired by white fathers of means tended to be freed as children…. race mixture and the emancipation of nonwhite concubines and mixed-blood children of white men was extensive….”57 Highlighting the contrast between Latin and Anglo colonial policies and practices regarding enslaved kin, Hall contends that the “[e]mancipation of slave children… by their white fathers, was common enough to be a major reason why, in 1807, the First Legislature of the Territory of Orleans passed a law that banned the emancipation of slaves under the age of thirty.”58 Hall’s observation that “French colonists tended to absorb free people of African descent, especially concubines and descendants of French men, into the white population”59 is supported by other scholars. According to Ira Berlin, In Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Domingue…the lines between free and slave, black and white were porous prior to the arrival of sugar. Intermarriage between well-placed free people of color and ambitious French nationals was common. Indeed, census takers, notaries, and other officials regularly elevated free people of color to white, paving the way for their entry into the colonies’ respectable society.60

Until the eighteenth century, the Code Noir, the earliest set of slave laws for the Atlantic system, declared that intermarriage between slave and master automatically rendered the former, along with any children, free. Almost from the days of the first arrivals of Africans and the earliest appearances of slavery in the French islands, persons of color managed to

Voices from within the Veil

199

obtain their freedom, and, in certain instances, free men of color were integrated into the white group, not only economically and socially, but also racially.61

With the development of the plantation system came restrictions on interracial unions and on free people of color. The Code Noir was modified in 1723 and 1724 to forbid interracial marriage, and, in 1733, a royal decree restricted the military and judiciary to whites.62 Interracial unions, however, continued to occur; on the eve of the Haitian Revolution, “miscegenated persons” comprised one-half of the free population.63 Whereas Virginia’s manumission laws and social mores made it difficult for slave owners to free their slaves, including kin, Cuban practices and policies encouraged manumission, and the initiative of many whites in this process suggests cross-racial networks of support if not kinship. Because a number of Spanish soldiers fathered children with state-owned slaves, a 1583 decree ordered that fathers be given preference at the auction where their enslaved children were sold.64 Another sixteenth century Spanish law prohibiting types of dress for upwardly mobile women of color directly acknowledged intermarriage. The 1571 Royal Code stated, “No Negress, whether free, or slave, nor Mulattas, may wear gold, pearls, or silk; however, if a Negress or Mulatta is married to a Spaniard, she may wear gold earrings with pearls, and a small necklace, and on her skirt a fringe of velvet.”65 While this law can be seen as an attempt to maintain visible distinctions for “pure-blooded” Spaniards and enforce a racial hierarchy, unlike any North American legislation, it contradicted the endogamous nature of caste systems and implied that intermarriage advanced the status of women of color. Spanish law did not forbid interracial marriages, although, after 1805, they required licensing by the state. Alejandro de la Fuente has examined the manumission records in seventeenth-century Havana and determined that at least half involved children under fifteen years of age, three-quarters of whom were listed as mulatto. De la Fuente suggests that white parents and relatives often lent support for these manumissions and found that whites helped to finance self-purchase in at least twenty-five percent of the cases he examined.66 Numerous petitions reveal the desire of Cuban slave owners to liberate pregnant slaves or request that offspring of “unknown” parentage be officially designated as their legitimate heirs.67 The daughters of Cuban slave owners inherited from their fathers as well. In 1700, Juana Carvajal, for example, a “mulata” and ex-slave, was deeded ownership of one of Havana’s most magnificent homes by her former owner. Spanish officials’ concern for “purity” was subordinated to the state’s desire for

200

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

increased population and growth of the empire, thus the Crown’s policies and legal decisions tended to offer mixed-race children opportunities to obtain legitimacy. In Cuba, colored children of aristocratic fathers born out of wedlock could emulate the education and careers of their fathers; they might find restrictions waved, and, in late eighteenth century, might purchase legal certificates of legitimate birth and whiteness. In Virginia the recognition of illegitimate progeny was virtually unknown.68

Brazilian law followed the ancient Roman slave doctrine that the children of masters and slaves were to be free at birth.69 While some Brazilian masters kept their children enslaved despite the law, others not only liberated their kin but also acknowledged them as such. Studies suggest that, in addition to the mulatto slaves freed by charter, numerous infant slaves were liberated upon their baptism. “[A] notable percentage of the slave children freed were the illegitimate offspring of their fathers.”70 While manumissions in Brazil and Latin America, in general, were often the result of self-purchase—typically skilled slaves who were able to earn enough money to purchase their own freedom—a sense of kinship seems to have motivated a significant number of manumissions. The bonds of affection, love, or fictive and consanguineal kinship played a vital role in the manumission process. The importance of such ties were obvious in a slaveowner’s freeing of his mistress or his illegitimate children….As one man put it when in 1741 he freed his child, ‘he is my son, not my slave.’ At least some [Brazilian] slaveowners recognized the contradiction that existed between these two statuses.71

I am not arguing, in the tradition of the Tannenbaum thesis, that slavery was more humane or benign in Latin America; nor am I suggesting that Latin Americans were less racist or more humanitarian than their North American counterparts. Both Latin and Anglo-American societies practiced brutal forms of slavery, and both embraced pernicious white supremacist ideologies. Nevertheless, the ways in which these societies understood race, race mixing, and the nature of whiteness differed drastically. That Latin colonials tended to have a broader and more fluid definition of whiteness is not inherently laudable. As David Brion Davis observed, “It is an open question whether a society that sees every addition of white blood as a step toward purification is more, or less, prejudiced than a society that sees any appreciable trace of Negro blood as a mark of degradation.”72 I am suggesting that, in most of the New World, slave owners tended to liberate their enslaved kin as children and some went on

Voices from within the Veil

201

to recognize their mixed offspring as legitimate heirs, whereas in Virginia and other mainland Anglo colonies, this practice was exceedingly rare. What kind of psychological toll did family structures with enslaved relatives take on North Americans? Former Virginia slave Francis Fredric described the plight of a woman sold away by her father and the torment of a man who had been flogged by his master/father. Fredric invited readers to consider the mental anguish of being enslaved by one’s parent when he wrote of slave owners: Even his own child, by a black woman or a mulatto, when the child is called a quadroon, and is very often as white as any English child, is frequently sold to degradation….There are thousands upon thousands of mulattoes and quadroons, all children of slaveholders, in a state of slavery. Slavery is bad enough for the black, but it is worse, if worse can be, for the mulatto or the quadroon to be subjected to the utmost degradation and hardship, and to know that it is their own fathers who are treating them as brutes, especially when they contrast their usage with the pampered luxury in which they see his lawful children revel.73

What was the emotional impact of slavery on the children of slave masters and on their relatives? How were siblings, cousins, and grandparents—slave and free, black, white, mulatto—affected? What was the effect of owning or being owned by one’s sibling? What was the psychological impact on the man whose wife was raped by their owner or on the mother whose babies were sold away? As a concubine, was it a worse fate to be sold away or remain the property of the mistress? What was the psychological impact on the slave master/father? Thomas Jefferson repeatedly decried the abomination of “mixture” in public. In his Notes on Virginia, he asserted, This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people [American slaves]....Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture.74

Did Jefferson include his relatives among those who needed to be removed? Did his assertions of black inferiority throughout this section of the essay refer to his own mixed race children? Edmund Morgan has argued that freedom in colonial Virginia was born of slavery, institutionally and normatively.75 The profound emotional contradictions hinted at above might also be viewed as another aspect of what Morgan

202

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

deemed “The American Paradox”: a paradox of collective consciousness in a nation grounded in slavery and freedom and a paradox of individual consciousness in families grounded in slavery and freedom. The foundation of my argument is not new. As the eminent historian Carter G. Woodson noted almost a century ago, “the English, unlike the Latins, disowned their offspring by slave women, leaving children to follow the condition of their mother. There was, therefore, not so much less miscegenation among the English…the offspring of whom in the case of slave mothers became commodity in the commercial world.”76 Nor are these issues confined to the colonial past. Strom Thurmond’s public denial of the paternity of his black daughter illustrates a contemporary manifestation of the North American convention. The public denial of illegitimate children has long been practiced outside of the context of slavery and race relations, especially where issues of station, fidelity, and marital status rendered a union taboo. Nonetheless, the practice of keeping one’s relatives as slaves may be unique to the Atlantic system and may have predominated in Virginia and other Anglo-American slave societies. As Isaac Johnson, who was sold away by his own father, put it, “a man who could sell his own children or who would uphold a system that enabled him to do so - the thought is a horror.”77 I am urging that we consider the implications and impact of this historical practice for white, black, and mixed race persons as well as for American culture and society as a whole. In the colonial New World, the institutions of slavery and freedom and the lives of black people and white people were more intimately and fundamentally interconnected than many of our historical memories allow. It is well-documented but poorly remembered that founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned their own bloodrelatives, including possibly their own children, and that their wives owned their siblings throughout their lifetimes. The ubiquity of white families with enslaved kin throughout the American South is wellestablished, but it remains underanalyzed. The denial and repression of these interconnections in particular families had social and cultural as well as economic, demographic, and psychological implications that impacted the larger society and culture. When we examine how differently various American societies dealt legally and socially with the innumerable unions between the descendants of colonists and slaves, we problematize the historical construction of white identities in the Americas and further expose the artifice of race and the pathology of racism. Recognizing how colonials handled the processes and issues surrounding inter-ethnic unions in the context of American slavery and freedom can help us to understand

Voices from within the Veil

203

how, historically, we have endeavored to imagine families as well as entire societies in racial categories of black and white.

Notes Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 26. 2 Winthrop Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 79. 3 T. H. Breen, and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of North Carolina, Virginia and South Carolina, 4th Edition (Baltimore, MD: Clearfield Genealogical Publishing, 2001); Jordan, White Over Black. 4 Lerone Bennett, Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America, 1619-1962 (New York: Penguin, 1984), 302. 5 W. W. Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619 (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1832), 86-87. 6 Ibid., 87. 7 James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenatio in the South (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 173. 8 Hening, The Statutes at Large, 87. 9 Ibid. 10 Heinegg, Free African Americans; Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia. 11 Heinegg, Free African Americans, 4. 12 Quoted in Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 120. 13 Ira Berlin, “Forward” in Heinegg, Free African Americans, i. 14 Joshua Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861, Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2003, 14. 15 Pearl M. Graham, “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings,” The Journal of Negro History 46 (April 1961), 100. 16 Leon Higgenbotham, Jr. and Barbara Kopytoff, “Racial Purity and Interracial Sex in Virginia,” Mixed Race in America and the Law, Kevin Johnson, ed. (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 14. 17 Harry Smith, Fifty Years of Slavery in the United State of America (Grand Rapids, MI: West Michigan Printing Co., 1891), 66. 18 Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 212. 19 Henry Wiencek, The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998). 20 Luther P. Jackson, “Manumission in Certain Virginia Cities,” The Journal of Negro History, 15 (July 1930), 310.

204 21

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Ball, Slaves in the Family, 107. Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 31. 23 Ibid., 222. 24 Ibid., 223. 25 Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 18301860. (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co. 1942), 126. 26 Heinegg, Free African Americans; Peter H. Wood, Black Majority (New York: Norton, 1975). 27 Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 226; Gary B. Mills, “Miscegenation and the Free Negro in Antebellum ‘Anglo’ Alabama: A Reexamination of Southern Race Relations,” The Journal of American History 68 (June 1981), 16-34. 28 Henry S. Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?” The Journal of Negro History 66 (Summer 1981), 170. 29 Quoted in Robinson, “Who Was West Ford?” The Journal of Negro History 66 (Summer 1981), 167. 30 Henry Wiencek, An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), 309. 31 Ball, Slaves in the Family, 188. 32 Nancy Hurrelbrink, “Freeing His Slaves Is One of Washington’s Greatest Legacies,” Inside UVa 31:2 Charlottesville, VA, January19, 2001, reprinted electronically in The Papers of George Washington, (Feb. 13, 2008). 33 Wiencek, An Imperfect God, 285. 34 Ibid., 289. 35 Rothman, Notorious, 47-48. 36 Paul Edwards, ed., Equiano’s Travels (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Educational Books, Inc. 1969). 37 Tocqueville, American Institutions and Their Influence, 384. Quoted in Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia, 220. 38 Johnson, Slavery Days in Old Kentucky. 39 Moses Roper, A Narrative on the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery (Philadephia: Merrihew and Gunn, Printers, 1838), 9-10. Reprinted in Afro-American History Series, Vol. 2 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, n.d.). 40 William Brown, “Narrative of William W. Brown, An American Slave,” reprinted in The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, William Andrews and Henry Gates, eds. (Washington, DC: Civitas Counterpoint, 1999), 204. 41 Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave (Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing Co, 1969; original publication 1859), 14. 42 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Maria Child ed. (New York: AMS Press 1973), 55-57. 43 W. Craft, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, or The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery” reprinted in The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, 406. 22

Voices from within the Veil 44

205

Fay A. Yarbrough, “Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves Recall a Multiracial South,” The Journal of Southern History 71 (August 2005), 560. 45 Ibid., 563. 46 W. L. Bost, Federal Writers Project interview, [1937] http://www.spartacus.schoolnet. co.uk/USASpunishments.htm (accessed February 13, 2008). 47 Charles L. Perdue, Jr., et. al., eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia’s Ex-Slaves (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 207. 48 Henings, Statutes, 252. 49 Ibid., 250. 50 Johnston, Race Relations, 192. 51 Christina Draper, ed., Don’t Grieve After Me: The Black Experience in Virginia, 1619-2005 (Charlottesville: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 2006), 9. 52 Ibid. 53 Rothman, Notorious, 10. 54 George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 43. 55 Stuart B. Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684-1745,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 54 (November 1974), 612. 56 Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 239. 57 Ibid., 273. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 240. 60 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 27. 61 Leo Elisabeth,“The French Antilles,” Neither Slave Nor Free, Davis W. Cohen and Jack P. Green, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 134. 62 Emeka P. Abanime, “The Anti-Negro French Law of 1777,” The Journal of Negro History 64 (Winter 1979), 21. 63 Franklin Knight, The Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 366-7. 64 Magnus Morner, Race Mixture in the History of Latin America (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1967), 42. 65 Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 205. 66 Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review Summer (2004), 43-44; http://www. historycooperative.org/journals/lhr/22.2/forum_fuente.html (accessed February14, 2008). 67 Archives of the Office of the Archbishop, Havana, Cuba; National Archives, Havana, Cuba. 68 Klein, Slavery in the Americas, 242-243.

206 69

The Conventions and Consequences of Denying Paternity for Mixed-Race Children in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia

Robert Cottrol, “The Long Lingering Shadow: Law Liberalism, and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas,” Tulane Law Review 76:1 (2001), 576. 70 James Patrick Kiernan, “Baptism and Manumission in Brazil: Paraty, 17891822,” Social Science History 3:1(1978) 69. 71 Schwartz, “The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil,” 621. 72 Quoted in Peter Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Columbia (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 297. 73 Francis Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia and Kentucky; or Fifty Years of Slavery in the Southern State of America, Electronic Edition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 1999; originally published in 1863), 44-46. 74 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Query XIV; http://www. yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/jevifram.htm (accessed February 13, 2008). 75 Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History, 59:1 June (1972), 5-29. 76 Carter G. Woodson, “The Beginnings of the Miscegenation of the Whites and Blacks,” Journal of Negro History, 3 (October 1918), 338-339. 77 Johnson, Slavery Days, 40.

THE LANGSTON-QUARLES FAMILY: A STUDY OF FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR IN ANTEBELLUM VIRGINIA 1 JUDITH KING-CALNEK, UNITED NATIONS INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL

[H]usbands purchased wives and parents purchased children, and so their neighbors may have come to know the people purchased not as slaves–as property–but as family members. 2

As the United States embarks on its commemoration of the Four Hundredth Anniversary of Jamestown, Americans are revisiting early chapters of the nation’s history with a more critical, self-aware approach, and there is lively debate about what portions of our history are to be highlighted and/or celebrated. Tales that were once exalted, contrived or mistold in American history texts have been reexamined and assessed more honestly, and stories that have been untold are coming to fore. Stories of the cruelty of enslavement of people of African descent and genocide of Native Americans are no longer hushed or silenced, as they were a generation ago. Rather, scholars are actively involved in understanding American history from various, sometimes divergent perspectives in an effort to reconcile disparities and capture the full richness of this country’s history. In short, we are engaged in democratic discourse about our history and its meaning. In line with this discussion, the above quotation from Edward P. Jones’s award winning novel, The Known World, depicts how bonds of kinship and commerce were at times acknowledged, while at other times ignored, and captures a key, yet often ignored, element of an important period in American history. This paper explores these dynamics through the lives of free people of color3 in antebellum Virginia. Specifically, it examines how members of the Langston-Quarles family of Louisa County navigated their way in a society which was, at times, hostile toward and at times tolerant of them.

208

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

From the end of the eighteenth through the first half of the nineteenth century, the newly formed United States was in the process of defining itself and shaping its identity, both at home and abroad. Internationally, the new government cut its teeth by asserting itself on issues of territory and trade with European nations as well as border disputes and ongoing land struggles with Native Americans. Domestically, the country faced the challenge of putting into practice a new set of ideals, policies, and laws that were outlined in the Constitution. It quickly became clear that the reality was different from the theory, and the question of who was included and excluded in the nascent republic continually dogged the nation. Although the newly independent nation was based on the principles of democracy and equality, it has struggled to live up to those ideals, often falling short, especially when it came to its population of color. As explicated by political historian Anthony Marx, “The dilemma of whether and how to incorporate an African descendant population had long divided whites, undermining whites’ potential loyalty to the state.”4 Furthermore, as the American people wrestled with the challenge of living the ideals of democratic citizenship, the challenge was even more daunting for people of African descent, many of who were not enslaved. After the War of Independence, many Americans believed that it was natural to extend the struggle for the country’s freedom from a colonial master to the freedom for individuals from a slave master. Thus, the antislavery movement intensified, especially in Virginia, as explained by historian John H. Russell.5 The [antislavery] movement in Virginia …[and] the American Revolution… both were applications of the principles of natural equality and individual liberty, they must indeed be viewed as two parts of the same current of progress.6

Many of the legal restrictions on freeing slaves were lifted in 1782 and, subsequently, there was a marked increase in the number of manumissions. In fact, the Virginia antislavery sentiment was so strong that, in 1785, citizens petitioned the government, at both the state and federal levels, and called for an end to slavery because it ran counter to the fundamental principles of both the government and Christian religion. In 1790, only about four percent of Virginia’s black population was free; by 1820, the total population of Virginia was barely one million, and just under half were people of African descent, almost ten percent of whom were free. By the onset of the Civil War, however, Virginia had one of the largest populations of free blacks, numbering close to 60,000, which

Voices from within the Veil

209

represented approximately twelve percent of the total black population in a state of about one and a half million inhabitants.7 Although antislavery opinion was widespread and strong, it was not held by a definitive majority of Virginia’s whites, and a backlash against the increasing numbers of the state’s free colored denizens soon emerged. We are cautioned that “the process of defining the nation with rules of citizenship is of obvious relevance for how racial categories are established and reinforced.” This notion is crystallized by the government’s reaction to the growing black population in Virginia as a series of highly prohibitive legislative acts complicated the lives of many. In 1793, the Commonwealth’s General Assembly passed laws which sharply curtailed the rights of free blacks, such as making it illegal for them to enter Virginia from other states. For those who were already residing in Virginia, it required they be “registered and numbered,” the records to be held with the county or city clerk in order to “restrain the practice of Negroes going at large.” Depending on the size of the population in the county or city, “free Negroes or Mulattoes” had to reregister every one to three years.8 Ironically, because of these restrictive laws, there is a cache of data about free blacks in addition to census, deeds, wills, and other records. One must question, however, the ways in which this material reflects the ways in which people actually lived their lives. For example, free women of African descent were usually registered under their maiden name, and their married name was sometimes given as an “alias,” which could be interpreted as the Commonwealth’s devaluing or failing to recognize the validity of black marriages. Nonetheless, it leaves room for inquiry about the lived experiences of women and men. It was indeed a time “when custom and the law were fixing the status of the Virginia Negro” and veritably for all Americans; however, things were not set in stone. By examining data from the lives of three generations of free women of African descent, this essay explores many of these issues.9

First Generation: Lucy Jane Langston (1780?-1834) Little is known about Lucy Jane Langston, the matriarch of the Langston-Quarles family, who was born in about 1780 to a Pamunkey Native American mother and an African American father. As far as records show, Lucy’s first owner was Warner Broaddus, a member of a local Baptist church who had briefly served as Louisa County’s deputy sheriff shortly after the War of Independence. Broaddus fell upon financial difficulties and, in an attempt to settle a debt with Revolutionary

210

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

War Captain Ralph Quarles, he “gave” Lucy to Quarles as a pledge of repayment, probably in the late 1790s. How long Lucy Jane Langston remained with Quarles at that time is not known. She was described as “a woman of small stature, substantial build, fair looks, easy and natural bearing, even and quiet temper, intelligent and thoughtful.” Broaddus, though, was still in an economic pinch and, in August of 1803, deeded a number of slaves, including one named Lucy, whom we can assume is Lucy Langston, to another local slaveholder, William G. Poindexter. Broaddus died, however, before he had managed to settle all of his debts, and his will was probated in July of 1804. One of his outstanding payments was to Ralph Quarles and, on April 4, 1806, Quarles’ attorney filed a suit against the executor of Broaddus’ estate, William G. Poindexter, and it was settled in Quarles’s favor, payable in the form of goods or property, including slaves. It appears that Lucy Jane Langston was one of the slaves transferred to Quarles on that day.10 There is considerably more information about Ralph Quarles as he was a landed white male. Born about 1764 in Spotsylvania County, Ralph Quarles was sixteen years Langston’s senior and was from a large family, of distinguished British origins,11 and went on to serve as Captain in the first battalion, fortieth Regiment in the local militia.12 He became a man of “large wealth,”13 owning many slaves and large tracts of land, including one plantation on the branch of Goldmine Creek near White Creek about four miles from the Louisa Court House, and another on the headwaters of the north branch of Hickory Creek, about three miles from his other plantation on White Creek. He is described below: His social relations were of excellent character... He was a person of broad and varied education, with a love of learning and culture remarkable for the day... His views with regard to slavery … were peculiar and unusual. He believed that slavery ought to be abolished. But he maintained that the mode of its abolition should be by the voluntary individual action of the owner. He held that slaves should be dealt with in such manner… as to prevent cruelty … and to inspire in them, so far as practicable, feelings of confidence in their master.14

Quarles put this philosophy of slavery into practice on his plantations in a way that raised eyebrows of many whites and attracted attention “with comment not always approving; often, in fact, severe and condemnatory.”15 Rather than enlist a hired overseer, he divided his enslaved laborers into quasi-self-directed work groups with one of the slaves serving as “chief director of the force.” Despite disapproval from

Voices from within the Veil

211

his white peers, Quarles continued to run his plantations in this manner and eventually found himself socially isolated, as his son explained, Beside, such course, finally, as was natural and inevitable, under the circumstances, wrought social ostracism, compelling [him] to pursue exclusive life among his own slaves, with such limited society otherwise, as might be brought by business interests.16

Quarles was not alone in his views on slavery. In fact, after the Virginia 1782 Act for the Emancipation of Slaves, which “removed restrictions upon the right to manumit slaves by will,” there was a notable increase of the number of free blacks in Virginia, and between 1790 and 1820, the total population of “free coloreds” in Virginia tripled, increasing from 12,866 to 36,875.17 It is important to note that there was a wide range of responses to the “peculiar institution”, and various approaches to abolition, ranging from absolute, immediate abolition to gradual, and forced to voluntary. In nearby Kentucky, where many white Louisa County families migrated, Reverend James Pendleton, a Baptist minister’s apprehension was complex; American slavery was not the same as biblical slavery and, therefore, not acceptable. He also believed that biblical slavery was not economically viable in America. While Pendleton opposed slavery (with qualifications), like many other whites, he was vehemently opposed to racial integration and extremely fearful of what he thought would be “social chaos” if slavery were absolutely abolished.18 A comparison of the language of manumission deeds between 1787 and Emancipation reveals the philosophical issues that framed the discourse of the time with regards to the institution of slavery. For example, some former Louisa County slave owners such as David Crenshaw in 1794 and Betty Duke in 1800 and 1805 specified the “impropriety of slavery” in their manumission deeds.19 The Reverend John Poindexter, a Baptist minister of Louisa, was among those who called for gradual and voluntary abolition20 and, on more than one occasion, issued deeds of manumission for a number of his slaves. In October 1794, he postdated deeds for fourteen slaves.21 In August 1800, John Poindexter, Jr. purchased and then manumitted a Negro girl named Frankey because he was “principled against hereditary slavery.”22 The following year, Poindexter, Jr. purchased a “yellow Negro boy” named James whose manumission he postdated for 1821, when James would be thirty-one, stating that he “prize[d] the rights of man.”23 The following year, in 1802, John Poindexter24 registered another manumission postdated

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

212

for 1820 for a negro boy named Daniel, based on the incompatibility of Christian doctrine with slavery: I John Poindexter of Louisa County being convinced of the injustice and impropriety of slavery and being convinced that the practice of slave holding is in direct opposition to and violation of that hold precept delivered from the lips of the Lord Jesus Christ himself who I trust my all, Therefore, as ye would that men should do unto you so do ye also unto them for this is the law and the prophets have determined do emancipate Daniel a Negro boy…to be free from and after the 1st day January 1820.25

Although some of these emancipation documents may appear to reflect a broad minded, social-justice conscious gentry, in many cases the newly “freed” people of African descent remained enslaved for years before their manumission was enacted, as in the case of Daniel. Furthermore, rarely did a slaveholder manumit all of his or her slaves immediately, except upon the death of the owner; even then, enslaved people were frequently bequeathed to the owner’s heirs. For the time, however, these acts of emancipation were considered subversive by more conservative whites who wished to maintain a firmer grip on African Americans and the institution of slavery. In this light, these deeds of manumission stand in contrast to other documents, usually wills, which barely mention enslaved blacks in passing, with little or no regard to their names and often in the same phrase as they hand down a piece of furniture, as seen in the wills of George Bell in 1787 and his son Samuel Bell in 1791: I Geo. Bell of Louisa County… give and bequeath unto my son, Saml., one horse with one bed and furniture with four Negroes… and bequeath unto my daughter, Mary, and furniture with five Negroes all to which she hath heretofore received to her and her heirs.26

And, I [Samuel Bell] lend unto my loving wife, Molley Bell, my whole estate consisting of Negroes stock of all kinds household furniture and outstanding debts whatsoever during the time of her widowhood.27

Although Quarles did not manumit all of his slaves, in keeping with his relatively progressive views of slavery, in 1806 he did emancipate Lucy Langston and daughter Maria, born in 1797,28 whom he had fathered and “at the time of her emancipation…was esteemed a young girl of fine looks, intelligent and well behaved.”29 While Quarles did not explicitly

Voices from within the Veil

213

cite the “impropriety of slavery” or invoke Christian doctrine to condemn the institution itself, the manumission of Lucy Langston and daughter Maria speak strongly to their newfound rights: I, Ralph Quarles, … do hereby liberate manumit and set free my Negro slaves, Lucy, a woman, and Maria, a girl daughter of said Lucy, and I do hereby renounce forever all right jurisdiction authority and power which I have or may lawfully exercise over the said slaves and I do hereby declare the said slaves to be henceforward free persons at liberty to go when and where they please to exercise and enjoy the rights of free persons and so far as I can authorize or the laws of Virginia will permit and I hereby bind myself and my heirs … to warrant and forever defend to the said Lucy and Maria their right to freedom, clear of the claims of all persons whatsoever.30

This wording alludes to the dispute about the extent to which democratic principles and notions of citizenship were to be applied to various members of the new nation. In fact, years later in 1859, Quarles’s son Charles Henry Langston revisits his father’s revolutionary spirit in an address to a court in Cleveland, Ohio: my father was a Revolutionary soldier; that he served under Lafayette, and fought through the whole war; and that he always told me that he fought for my freedom as much as for his own and he would sneer at me, and clutch me with his bloody fingers and say he had a right to make me a slave!31

Thus, we see a glimpse into Ralph Quarles’ mind and heart through the words he chooses to put forth in Lucy Jane Langston’s and daughter Maria’s manumission deed, and later in his son’s recollection of him. What is perhaps even more curious, however, is the fact that Quarles filed their manumission papers on the same day he filed suit against the executor of Broaddus’ estate. In short, it appears that he “acquired” Lucy and Maria and manumitted them in the same day. Although the suit against William Poindexter as executor of Broaddus’ estate specifies the debt owed Quarles, this does not seem to be his main concern; rather, giving Lucy and daughter Maria Langston their freedom is the overriding objective. It also seems as if there were other concerns about ensuring Lucy and Maria Langston’s immediate freedom from enslavement. This was a time of heated debate about slavery in the Commonwealth. After a protracted and forceful argument, the Virginia Assembly voted to deny the right for slaveholders to manumit their slaves and any blacks freed after the law

214

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

was enacted would have to leave the state within twelve months or risk being sold back into slavery.32 This law went into effect on May 1, 1806, a matter of weeks after Ralph Quarles manumitted Lucy and their daughter Maria Langston. Despite the number of increasingly restrictive laws aimed at curtailing the lives of free blacks (culminating in the 1857 Dred Scott decision that stripped the rights of people of African descent) in the earliest part of the nineteenth century, as seen in Louisa County, Virginia, there was a bit of give and take in this ongoing discourse and the degree to which these laws were enforced varied. Records suggest that after gaining her “freedom,” Lucy Jane Langston chose to test the limits of her new rights and left Quarles. She then had three other children (Mary, William and Harriet) between 1809 and 1813.33 For reasons unknown, she returned to him and they had three sons, Gideon Quarles Langston (born 1809 or 1814),34 Charles Henry Langston (1817-1892) and John Mercer Langston (1829-1897), who were born free,35 reflecting their mother’s status at the time. That a woman of color would have a child by a white plantation owner was not unusual for the period as there were countless incidents in which women of color were violated by their masters. What makes the Langston-Quarles’ story unique is that Quarles did not take a white wife and, despite anti-miscegenation laws, Lucy Langston and Ralph Quarles came to live together as husband and wife, to the consternation of many, but with the tacit approval of other landed whites. In January 1822, Quarles even deeded Langston 290 acres of his land.36 Local historian Quintus Massie recalls the Langston-Quarles home as twin houses, each two and a half stories high, about sixteen feet apart, yet joined by a common porch, situated near a stream on the side of a hill.37 It is difficult to fully know what “freedom” actually meant for Lucy Langston, and to what extent she was able to enjoy her status or completely exercise her rights for, although she was landed, she was neither white nor male. According to one source, she “accepted her lot with becoming resignation, while she always exhibited the deepest affection and earnest solicitude for her children.”38 As they were not married, all of the children bore the Langston surname; however, it was reported that Quarles was given to Gideon as a middle name, because of his striking resemblance to his father in “physical conformation, mental endowment, temper, taste and disposition.”39 It is not clear if or how Lucy Langston’s other children were integrated into the Langston-Quarles family; nevertheless, her son William played a pivotal role in the life of his younger half-brother John after the death of his parents.40 Quarles saw that his children were educated, especially his sons, and he personally tutored Gideon and Charles every morning with

Voices from within the Veil

215

the help of his extensive library.41 In his will, he bequeathed the vast majority of his immense property and wealth to his three sons: I give and devise to Gideon Langston, Charles Langston and John Langston youngest children of Lucy, … and … to them and their heirs forever, all my lands lying on Hooker Creek and its waters… together with all my stock horses cattle, sheep hogs and bees and household and kitchen furniture and plantation and all other utensils of every kind whatsoever including wagons, carts and still and all the grain of every kind, and all the hay and fodder and … also all the crops and every kind that may be growing… to be equally divided among them… I also give… to them… and their heirs all the money that I may have at the time of my death and also all the debts… that may be owning to me… and all my United States Bank Stock and also all my Virginia Bank stock.42

Quarles also willed a number of his slaves and a tract of land to his nephews, and manumitted and left hundreds of dollars to four other slaves, including Arthur, for whom his youngest son, John Mercer Langston, later named his first son.43 In the last part of his will, Ralph Quarles made a symbolic gesture to his brother Roger Quarles by granting him “all the residue” of his estate that was left after the above mentioned received their share.44 Langston family narrative has it that Captain Ralph Quarles left instructions that he and Lucy Langston be buried side by side on his property. According to local oral history, Quarles was buried as he wanted, seated in a rocking chair under his favorite walnut tree, from where he liked to watch “his people work.” Other than a pile of stones there is no marker for either Quarles’ or Langston’s grave. Knowing that her Quarles children were provided for by their father, Lucy Jane Langston saw to it that her other three adult children, Mary, William and Harriet, also received something. Her estate, valued at $702, included an assortment of spinning and weaving materials and other household utensils. Her belongings were divided equally between the three, and she appointed friends William Gooch and Nathaniel Mills as executors to her will. Lucy Jane Langston and Ralph Quarles both died in 1834, a few months apart, of unrelated illnesses.45

Second Generation: Maria Langston Powell (1797-1844) Remaining in Virginia carried risks as the climate was becoming increasingly more hostile toward free blacks.46 In 1831, it was ruled illegal to teach reading and writing to free Virginians of African descent. Soon thereafter, laws constricting free blacks’ rights to buy slaves thwarted their efforts at keeping their families together.47 Hence, shortly

216

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

after their parents’ death, sons Gideon, Charles and John were taken to Ohio, as it was a free state, and educated at Oberlin. The achievements of sons Charles and John are remarkable and worthy of mention as both were active abolitionists and renowned orators. Charles later settled in Kansas and is perhaps now best known as the grandfather of the celebrated American poet Langston Hughes. John Mercer Langston’s distinguished career included establishing the law department and serving as acting president of Howard University and president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University), U.S. Consul-General to Haiti, and Congressman from his home state of Virginia, to name a few of his achievements.48 Unfortunately, there is a paucity of information about Lucy Langston’s other children, Maria, Gideon, Mary, William and Harriet, the latter three who were not children of Quarles.49 Of greatest interest is the life of Maria, Lucy’s only child who did not move to a free state. At the time of her parents’ death in 1834, Maria was already a woman of thirty-seven years with a large family of her own. John Mercer Langston wrote the following, describing his eldest sibling’s upbringing: [Maria] experienced … the deep interest which her father took in her; but in every attention given to her support, education and improvement, she had enjoyed the most abundant evidence of his fatherly disposition toward her, and his constant solicitude for her welfare . . . [T]hough she was not taught with the same thoroughness as her brothers… her education was not neglected, and her knowledge of books was unusual, certainly for a girl of her class–even for any young girl of her times. She spelled, read and wrote well, being reasonably advanced in all the ordinary elementary English branches.50

Louisa County historians maintain that Maria was “undoubtedly a woman of means” and a “capable business woman.”51 Although not mentioned in his will, daughter Maria acquired a sizeable portion of her father’s property during his lifetime, where she continued to live with her husband and children after her brothers left Virginia. It was in 1812, the same year in which the new nation declared war on Great Britain, that Maria Langston married Joseph Powell, a man who was enslaved on another plantation. Records indicate Maria’s father Ralph Quarles purchased Powell from his owner, Henry Lawrence, and “sold” him to Maria for one dollar in 181352 and “although she held him throughout life as her slave husband, Powell in practice was her free husband.”53 Because of the 1806 law, she did not manumit him as he

Voices from within the Veil

217

would have had to leave Virginia within a year, lest he would be sold back into slavery. According to Louisa County records, in 1822 Quarles sold “372 acres less one fourth of an acre including the graveyard” to Maria for $700,54 as her youngest brother John Mercer Langston recounts, upon the approval of her father, who thereupon located her, in handsome manner, upon a plantation in his own neighborhood, which he bought and gave her. He purchased the person, who was her husband, as he did several other slaves… and gave them to his daughter.55

It is not clear if the other slaves mentioned were members of Powell’s family, as purchasing family members was one way of keeping enslaved kin groups together, especially after the 1806 law.56 Maria and Joseph went on to have a large family of their own with more than twenty children born between 1812 and 1840. Several of the children bore Quarles as a middle name, one was even named Ralph Quarles Powell,57 after Maria’s father. Again, brother John relates, Through her influence and her own efforts, every son of hers and every daughter was given a reasonably fair English education, with instruction in every sort of domestic and plantation industry, with sound moral and religious training… [and] improve[d] themselves as to be able to exert wholesome educational and moral influence upon their own offspring… some married, others … [remained] single.58

In the 1840 census, Maria Langston Powell was listed as the head of household and her husband Joseph Powell as a farmer and miller. While her status is “enumerated as free”, her husband’s status is not mentioned, although their many children were “enumerated as free negroes; 3 males under 10; 5 males 10-24; one male 24-36; 1 male 36-55; 4 females under 10; 5 females 10-24; 2 female 24-36; 2 females 36-55.” The same census reported that the Powells had no slaves. Consistent with the law, Maria should have registered in the Louisa County “List of free Negroes and Mulattoes”; however, the only mention of her appears as mother to some of her children who are sporadically registered. Why she did not register herself is not known. That officials did not force her implies a certain flexibility in interpretation of the state’s code at the local level, that there was a level of understanding between Louisa County’s white and colored residents that some of the laws would not be strictly enforced. Little more is known about her life. Maria Langston Powell died in 1844 and left a detailed will, specifying:

218

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia 1. All Perishables be sold to pay her funeral costs, and remaining monies be divide between her children; 2. Her husband, Joseph Powell, was to be given to their son Albert Powell who was free, but if Joseph Powell wished to leave Virginia, then he was “hereby manumit[ted], emancipate[d] and set free…”; 3. Her husband received livestock and farm equipment, which included “horses, one of [her] best yoke of oxen, and an ox cart, two mulch cows such as he may choose, eight choice sheep, ten choice hogs, one double and one single plow, gear for two horses … a choice coal [?] and two harrows” and $600. 4. Remaining slaves and property were to be divided equally between children; If Joseph Powell wished to leave Virginia, the land was to be sold and monies divided between her children; the land was not to be sold while Joseph Powell was alive and living on it, as it was meant for him and any unwed daughters to live on. At his death the land was to be sold and money divided among children; 5. John Todd Quarles (her first cousin and executor of her will) was named guardian of underage children and the executor of the will.59

Maria Powell’s estate was valued at $7,061, which would make her a relatively wealthy African American woman for her time. It should be noted that, in the 1850 census, her forty-five-year-old cousin John Todd Quarles is listed as a merchant with an estate valued at $14,000, making him one of the most affluent men in the area. As for Maria’s level of education, although her brother John reported she was well schooled, she signed her will with an “x.” It is possible that this was done because she was illiterate. Another possible explanation is that since it was now illegal to teach even free blacks, this may have been done so as not to draw attention to any education that she or her children had received.60 The same 1850 census records show a sixty-year-old “mulatto” Joseph Powell, whose occupation is farmer, residing with five children, four grandchildren, and three others. It is not indicated whether he has slave or free status, and his real estate was estimated at $3,450. Ten years later, the 1860 census has Powell registered as sixty-five-years-old, “with children; family, enumerated as mulatto” and his real estate is now valued at $9,750. At the time of Joseph Powell’s death, Powell was reported by John Todd Quarles in 1862, Powell was listed as eighty-years-old and with slave status. After Joseph Powell’s death, John T. Quarles followed Maria Powell’s wishes and sold the land at auction to Robert M. Kent, the highest bidder. There are some obvious discrepancies in the chronology of census data which raise a number of questions. Joseph Powell’s age progression is clearly inaccurate in some of the entries. What is more curious, however, is the way his social status is at times explicit, at other

Voices from within the Veil

219

times ignored, and the manner in which his ownership is transferred from his wife to his son Albert, both of whom were born free. The Powells are not the only case of free-slave marriage in which the social status of the enslaved partner is not explicitly stated. In his detailed study of free blacks in Virginia, historian John H. Russell uncovered a number of marriage certificates of a similar nature. What makes this finding even more surprising is that a number of these marriage ceremonies were conducted by whites and even in the homes of whites.61 Maria Langston Powell and Joseph Powell’s lives provide an intriguing example of how people of color navigated their way through a restrictive world, abiding by official laws while at times disregarding social implications, in an effort to fashion a life of their own choice. That she, a free woman of color with access to land and wealth, would choose to wed a man without social standing or material resources, implies that social relations among people of color were perhaps equally, if not more important, than the legal code of white society. In marrying an enslaved man, Maria Langston Powell did not lose her freedom or her wealth as she “always lived in comfort.” While Powell did not legally gain his freedom during their marriage, the way in which Ralph Quarles “sold” Joseph Powell to Maria (after they were already married) shows that there was an acute awareness of, and even disdain for, the laws of slavery, that those laws were in many ways external to and did not define the nature of their personal relationship. Furthermore, the fact that the Powells had named several of their children Quarles and had entrusted John Todd Quarles as executor and guardian indicates they had maintained relations with at least some of the white members of their family as well. This data challenges our notions of intra-and inter-racial relations in antebellum Virginia by pointing out the ambiguous nature of social markers in a racially and color stratified society, and they illustrate the interplay of class and caste-like dynamics. That is, at this time when laws were being formed to define the status of Virginia’s black population, social relations, especially among kin whose ties spanned these lines, were still negotiable.62

Third Generation: Lucinda Powell Daniel (1812-1848) Of the Powells’ oldest daughter Lucinda, historian Luther P. Jackson writes, “she too became the owner of considerable personal estate which she no doubt inherited directly or indirectly from her grandfather.”63 Further, as Louisa County records indicate, Maria Langston Powell and Joseph Powell’s case was far from the only one of a husband or wife purchasing or owning the other. Virginia historians point out that it was in

220

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

fact quite common and that “the distinction between free and slave Negroes was not sharply drawn and where the two classes frequently intermarried.”64 Lucinda, born in 1812, also elected to marry a man who was enslaved, and in 1840 Lucinda Powell married William Daniel (sometimes referred to as William Poindexter) who was a “shoemaker of skill and… stood above the rank and file of his fellowmen.”65 Similar to her mother a generation before her, a year after they were married Lucinda purchased her husband from his owner, Peter Daniel, as registered in Louisa County Court: I Peter M. Daniel of Louisa County have this day bargained and sold and delivered unto Lucindy Powell one slave named William, a shoe maker, for the sum of $600 cash in hand paid.66

Their marital status was again documented when Lucinda registered in Louisa County Court, as was required of all free people of color: Lucinda Daniel a daughter of Joseph and Maria Powell who said Lucinda was free born and intermarried with William Daniel, a bright mulatto woman about 32 years of age, 5’1” high, mole on left side of her face nearly opposite the lower part of the ear and nearly midway from the ear to the eye.67

Jackson contends that although William Daniel was enslaved, he was most likely the son of a free father, probably one of the many free Poindexters who had been manumitted by the Reverend John Poindexter.68 Nonetheless, as children assumed the status of their mother,70 Daniel was born a slave. Like his father-in-law, William Daniel “was held by his wife as a slave but in reality he lived as a free man.”70 Again, the precise meaning of this is debatable as a free black man’s life was eclipsed by the fact that he did not enjoy all of the same rights and privileges as a free white man. More precisely, free “black families continued to live in a nebulous world of freedom, but lacking basic political rights.”71 In their eight years together, the Daniels had two children, Sarah A.72 and Charles James Daniel, who was nicknamed “Polk” as he was born in 1845, in the beginning of James Polk’s presidency. Lucinda Powell Daniel died in 1847, leaving her husband and two very young children. As her mother Maria Langston Powell did, she left a detailed will and named her white kinsman, John Todd Quarles her executor.73 Unlike her mother, however, Lucinda chose to “manumit and set free and at liberty”

Voices from within the Veil

221

her husband William Daniel who was to receive “all of [her] estate of every kind and description” after debts and funeral expenses were paid. The will further stipulated that, if Daniel wished to leave the state of Virginia, he could “carry all [his wife’s] estate that can be lawfully carried to a free state,” but “should there be land or slaves they shall be sold by [John Todd Quarles]… executor and the money arising from such sales given to … said husband.”74 Included in her estate were livestock, furniture, a writing desk, spinning wheel, loom, and shoemaker’s tools. Interestingly, Lucinda Powell Daniel also signed her will with an “x,” yet she owned a writing desk, and her son went on an illustrious career in education. This again raises questions about the perceived versus real relationship between free blacks and education.75 After gaining his freedom, William Daniel elected to stay in Virginia and, as was legally required of all free people of African descent, he registered at the Louisa County Court: William Daniel alias William Poindexter, bright mulatto man in his thirty [blank] year, 5’7” high, black eyes, strait black hair, good countenance, was emancipated by last will of Lucinda Daniel, dec’d. dated 17 Nov. 1847 recorded 13 June 1848 Louisa County. Reg. 13 Oct. 1851.76

Why William Daniel was not forced to leave the state when he gained his freedom upon his wife’s death is not known, in light of the fact that the 1806 law was still on the books. Additionally, there was now active talk in the Virginia Assembly about expelling free blacks and relocating them to Liberia. Further exacerbating the plight of free blacks, a special tax in 1850 was levied on free black men that was to be used to fund removal campaigns. That Lucinda Daniel’s widower remained in Virginia speaks to Louisa County officials’ apparent reluctance to enforce all of the Commonwealth’s anti-free black laws.77 The 1860 census includes William Daniel as a fifty-year-old “mulatto shoemaker” residing with his two children as well as an eighteen-year-old white male, James Hurt Ellis. Daniel’s personal property is only valued at $500, significantly less than his wife’s family held in the preceding generation. It is unclear who the eighteen-year-old white male is in relation to the Daniel family. A first impression is that Ellis might be a boarder or hired hand as the Daniels farmed their land. Ellis was in fact the son of Robert Sale Ellis of nearby Orange County. Genealogist Ann Avery Hunter suggests that Ellis most likely was at the Daniel home purchasing shoes when the census taker came.78 Were Ellis’ and Daniel’s rapport such as to give the impression that Ellis resided there, or was the census taker so cursory in his questioning that he did not properly register

222

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

the information? Whatever the explanation, it stands that this datum, like others already discussed, seems to contradict many of the commonly-held perceptions of social interactions between blacks and whites, free and enslaved. Lucinda and William Daniel’s children, Sarah and Charles, remained in Virginia through the Civil War and after Emancipation. Sarah married Andrew Broaddus Poindexter, another free black from Louisa, and the two had a large family. After Sarah died, her brother Charles saw to it that her daughters received an excellent education as did his children. Charles himself had managed to gain an education and eventually became the secretary of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, the same institution of higher learning where his great-uncle, John Mercer Langston, had served as president. Virginia State University’s Daniel Gymnasium is named in honor of Charles Daniel.79

Closing Remarks The twenty-first century debate about how and which Americans should “commemorate” and/or “celebrate” the 400th Anniversary of Jamestown mirrors the fact that the expansion of citizenship to all Americans has been gained through contestation and conflict. At a time when we are reflecting on the beginnings of this nation, it is important to take a moment to consider the intricacies and sometimes paradoxical nature of our story as a nation. The Langston-Quarles family represents the dynamics of race and color, kinship and commerce that were an integral part of the social fabric of life in antebellum Virginia. This brief look at the Langston-Quarles family strives to reveal a portion of American history that is often overlooked or misrepresented. There are, however, many questions left unanswered. Many of the facts, when viewed in isolation, run counterintuitive to our notions of the roles and lives of men and women, blacks, browns and whites in antebellum Virginia.80 When Lucy Langston was emancipated and left Ralph Quarles, where did she go? What were her relations like with her Pamunkey relatives? In short, what was it like for a free woman of color in Virginia in the early 1800s? Did she return to Quarles because she needed the protection of a man? All signs indicate that theirs was eventually a relationship of mutual respect and affection, but how did that come about? Did Maria Langston Powell’s brothers remain in contact with her when they departed Virginia after their parents died? If so, as active abolitionists, how did John Mercer Langston and Charles Langston reconcile Maria

Voices from within the Veil

223

and Lucinda owning slaves (including their husbands) with their own anti-slavery and abolitionist activities? How representative is the Langston-Quarles family of other free black families of the time? In some respects, they were not unusual in that there was a sizeable population of free Americans of African descent. The fact that they were landed was also not unusual; as one Virginia historian notes, “In 1830 free Negroes in Virginia held 31,721 acres of land valued at $184,184; in 1860 they owned 60,045 acres valued at $369,647.”81 What is remarkable is that the Langston-Quarles family, like many other free blacks, was able to achieve and maintain such prosperous lives despite the hostility of proslavery forces and legislatures purposefully designed to confound them. Their story as free people of African descent who negotiated issues of kinship, identity and social status, in an effort to shape their lives in a racially-hostile world, gives us insight into the malleability of those social markers. This study seeks to reconcile the disparities between their lived lives and their “official” statuses and social designations. That is, it forces us to contemplate the interplay between kinship, identity, social status (de facto and de jure) and mobility, and it gives us keener insight to help us to rethink concepts which shape rights, privileges and citizenship as they pertain to African Americans both historically and contemporarily.82 That free people of African descent were not afforded all of the rights and privileges of free whites is not a new idea. What is often overlooked, however, is that “the political production of race and the political production of nationhood were linked,”83 and that citizenship was the essential link between the two. In his comparative study on race and nation, Anthony Marx argues that it was a “key institutional mechanism,”84 which this paper does not dispute. Nevertheless, it is important to realize that it was not just on a grander national level, but on a local, even familial level as well. Citizenship, or in the case of African Americans, partial or lack thereof, influenced how individuals made choices and lived their lives. This paper looks into the lives of three generations of Langston-Quarles women and explores the ways in which the choices they made contested social pressures that sought to restrict them, and how they used their limited rights to protect their loved ones who did not all have free status. This speaks to issues of class and race and kinship and calls into question the ways that these markers affected, but did not ultimately define, social relations in antebellum Louisa County, Virginia.

224

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

Notes The author would like to thank Ann Avery Hunter and Davida L. Zike for generously sharing genealogical and historical data, feedback and encouragement. Newfound kin, Zike, like the author, is a descendant of Maria Langston and Joseph Powell, and Hunter is a Quarles cousin. 2 Edward P. Jones, The Known World (New York: Amistad, 2003), PS6. 3 Just as the nation struggled to define its relations on a global level, individuals and groups/members of society were also in the process of forming new identities. There were many ways the population of African descent was categorized, including “Negro”, “mulatto”, “colored”, and later “black”. A single person’s designation may have changed during his or her lifetime. For the purpose of this paper, the terms “black”, “Negro”, “African American”, “people of African descent”, or “people of color” are used interchangeably. It should be noted, however, that many of this population also claimed Native American heritage; however, that identity was often subsumed by the “colored” designation, which later transformed into “African American”, an issue of contention among many Native Americans as many of their descendants have experienced a disconnect to that side of their past. 4 Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 10. 5 John H. Russell, The Free Negro in Virginia, 1619-1865 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969; originally published 1913), 42-85. 6 Ibid, 55. 7 Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785, Richmond, 27; Russell, 10-13, 55-61. 8 Marx, 5; Russell, 64; Luther Porter Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia, 1830-1860 (New York: Atheneum, 1969; originally published 1942), 5-6; Janice L. Abercrombie, transcriber, Free Blacks of Louisa County Virginia: Bonds, Wills & Other Records (Athens: Iberian Publishing Company, 1994), v. 9 Abercrombie, v; Russell, 10. 10 John M. Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (North Stratford: Ayer Company Publishers, Inc., 2002; originally published 1894), 13; Malcolm H. Harris, History of Louisa Count (Richmond: Dietz Press, c. 1936); Goshen Baptist Association, Minutes. (Louisa, VA: Goshen Baptist Association, 1801-09); Louisa County Deed Book (cited as LC DB) LC DB J, 705; Louisa County Will Book (cited as LC WB) LC WB 5, 154; Louisa County Obituary Book (cited as LC OB) LC OB 1806-1808, 55; Quintus Massie, “The Story of Lucy Langston.” Louisa County Historical Magazine, 24 (Spring 1993), 23-24. 11 In his autobiography, The Big Sea, Ralph Quarles’ great-grandson, the renowned American poet Langston Hughes, asserts that the Quarles family is descended from the English Jacobean poet Francis Quarles. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001; originally published 1940). However, Virginia genealogist Ann Avery Hunter (personal communication, 2007) and descendant of one of Ralph Quarles’ sisters, reminds us that “a lot of early genealogy was based

Voices from within the Veil

225

on wishful thinking” and cites the earliest documented Quarles as actually Ralph’s great-grandfather John Quarles. Hunter has located Ralph Quarles’ family, through Jane Mallory (the same John Quarles’ wife) back to Richard Vaughan, who was born in Wales in 1550 and served as Bishop of Bangor, Chester and London. 12 Ann Avery Hunter, The Clopton Chronicles, http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~clopton/ anncmill.htm#_ftnl, entry 163 (accessed March-July, 2000). 13 Langston, 11. 14 Ibid., 11-12. 15 Ibid. 16 The descriptions of Lucy Langston and Ralph Quarles are from their youngest son, John Mercer Langston, who was a young child of four or five years when both parents died. Hence, the descriptions of his parents were most likely derived from a combination of his memory, as well as what he learned from his older siblings and others who remembered them. Ibid. 17 Russell, 10-13; Abercrombie, v-vi. 18 Luke E. Harlow, “Neither Slavery nor Abolitionism: James M. Pendleton and the Problem of Christian Conservative Antislavery in 1840s Kentucky,” Slavery and Abolition 27 (December 2006), 367-369. 19 LC DB G, 487; LC DB J, 88, LC DB K, 191; Abercrombie, 133, 141. 20 Hunter, personal communication, 2007. 21 Louisa County Court Clerk (cited as LC CC), 1837-020 22 LC DB J, 46; Abercrombie, 142 (emphasis added). 23 LC DB J, 389; Abercrombie, 144-45. 24 These views were held by members of the American Colonization Society who advocated the removal of free blacks from the country altogether and aimed at (sometimes forcibly) relocating them to Liberia. 25 LC DB J, 390; Abercrombie, 145. 26 LC WB 3, 188; Abercrombie, 126-27. 27 LC WB 3, 477; Abercrombie, 134. 28 LC DB K, 226; Abercrombie, 164. 29 Langston, 18. 30 This document is dated April 1, 1806, and was recorded on the 14th in LC DB K, 226; Abercrombie, 164 (emphasis added). 31 Charles Langston, Address to Court in Cleveland, Ohio, May 12, 1859, online at www.oberlinundergroundrailroad.org, (accessed July 2007). 32 Jackson, 6; Richmond Enquirer, January 15, 1805; Russell, 66-67; 70. 33 Census and genealogy data indicate the Poindexter family had at least two generations of men named John. That this entry does not specify junior or senior, and the language is slightly different than other entries which designate the generation, it can be assumed, but is not certain that this is John Poindexter, Senior. 34 Entries #90-92 of the Louisa County Court Office on March 31, 1831, register three sons of Lucy Langston: Gideon (sixteen years), William (twenty-one years), and Charles (fourteen years). Gideon and Charles, both described as “very bright mulatto [es]”, later inherited significant wealth from Ralph Quarles, their father. William

226

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

Langston, whom John Mercer Langston (who was probably too young to have to register) later refers to as his half-brother is described as a “dark mulatto” born in about 1810. Langston, 37-53; Louisa County Court Office (cited as LC CO), entries 90-92; Abercrombie, 36. Lucy Langston’s daughters Harriet and Mary were registered in the Louisa County Court Office on August 7, 1833, both described as “tolerably bright mulatto[es]”, and both were the same height of 4’11”. Harriet’s age is not recorded, but Mary is listed at about twenty-four years, which is not consistent with the other records. In his autobiography, John Mercer Langston speaks of his sister Maria, but he makes no mention of Harriet or Mary, both of whom eventually moved to Ohio. Mary Langston Wilson, born 1809, died 1860-1870 in Jackson County, Ohio. William Langston, born 1811, died in 1886, buried in Chillicothe, Ohio. Harriet Langston, born in 1813, died in 1845, buried in Chillicothe, Ohio, in same plot as her brother William. LC CO, entries 91, 147, 146; United States Census, 18601890; Hunter, personal communication, 2008. 35 Hunter, 2006; LC DB U, 306. 36 Quintus Massie, “The Story of Lucy Langston,” Louisa County Historical Magazine, 24 (Spring 1993), 25. 37 Langston, 13. 38 Langston, 20. 39 His younger brother John dates Gideon’s born June 15, 1809, but Hunter cites Gideon as being born about 1814, which is probably more accurate since it seems that William, Harriet, and Mary were born between Maria and Gideon. Langston, 19, 3337, 49-53. 40 William Cheek and Aimee Lee Cheek. John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedmen, 1829-65 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 17. 41 LC WB 9, 110; Abercrombie, 154-55. 42 William Langston was instrumental in keeping his younger half-brother John in Ohio when Colonel William D. Gooch, John’s guardian and Ralph Quarles’ friend and executor, wished to take him to Missouri, a slave-holding state. Langston, 37-53. 43 In his autobiography, John Mercer Langston discusses a conversation that he had with his brother Charles about naming his first son: “All agreed that the babe should be named Arthur in honor of the indifferent Virginia Negro, once his grandfather’s slave, and Dessalines, in honor of the great Haytian hero.” Langston, 156-57. 44 As there was not much left of his estate after leaving it to his other heirs, that Ralph Quarles gave “all that is left” to his brother, even after giving money and land to slaves, should be read as a slight. The reason for such a pronounced insult can only be speculated, but it probably was the result of some sort of dispute. LC WB 9, 110; Abercrombie, 155-56. 45 Langston, 1-22; Massie, 27, 38; LC WB 9, 133. 46 Journal of the House Delegates, 1816-1817, 90; Russell, 73; Jackson, 7, 12-13. 47 Jackson, 19, 22-23; Russell, 94. 48 There are many writings on the life and speeches of John Mercer Langston. Much of what is written about Charles Henry Langston, however, seems to be overshadowed by the achievements of his younger brother John, and his grandson Langston Hughes. See John Mercer Langston and the Fight for Black Freedmen by William and Aimee Cheek, Allies for Freedmen and Blacks on John Brown .by

Voices from within the Veil

227

Benjamin Quarles (2001), and “Charles Henry Langston and the African American Struggle in Kansas.” (http://222.kshs.org/publicat/ history/1999winter_sheridan. htm) by Richard Sheridan, 2006, to name a few. 49 Gideon settled in Oberlin where, among other things, he owned a livery stable. According to his nephew, he died in Chillicothe, Ohio in 1848 (Oberlin College Archives). The other three also moved to Ohio. Mary Langston married John Wilson; they had two children. She died some time between 1860 and 1870. An 1860 census registers William Langston as a carpenter in Ross County Ohio, doing rather well with property valued at $3000 he died in 1886. Harriet never married; she died in 1845 and is buried in the same lot as her brother William and his family in Chillicothe, Ohio. United States Census, Free Inhabitants, Ohio, 1860; Jackson, 1969 (1942), 113n; Hunter, personal communication, 2008. 50 Langston, 18. 51 Eugenia T. Bumpass and Quintus Massie, “Maria, A Woman of Mystery,” Louisa County Historical Magazine 17 (Spring 1986), 72. 52 LC DB U, 306. 53 Jackson, 51. 54 LC DB U, 306. 55 Langston, 18. 56 Russell, 92-93; Russell, 92-93. 57 Langston, 19, reports twenty-one children; but in the 1840 Census, twenty-two Powell children were counted. Their children included Lucinda, Henry, William, Ann Elizabeth, Ralph Quarles, Ann Marie, Frances Jane Quarles, James, Joseph Jr., Nicholas H., George Albert Q., Susan M. Q., Martha A. Q., Eliza J. Q., and Sarah Ann Maria. 58 Langston, 19. 59 LC WB 11, 124-26. 60 LC DB K1, 11, 148; Massie, 73; Virginia Census, 1850. 61 Virginia Census, 1860 census, entries 423, 497; LC DB U, 306; Russell, 135136. 62 Jackson, 51; Russell, 10. 63 Jackson, 51, 203. 64 Russell, 131. 65 Jackson, 52. 66 LC DB X, entry 438; Abercrombie, 167. 67 LC CO, entry 289; Abercrombie, 65. 68 Jackson, 52. 69 Ibid. 70 William Daniel’s mother is listed as “Nancy” in Louisa County records, but no last name is indicated. Louisa County historian Quintus Massie reports that William Daniel’s father was manumitted by Reverend John Poindexter in 1794. Quintus Massie, “The Education of Charles J. Daniel,” Louisa County Historical Magazine 25 (Winter 1994), 59. 71 Abercrombie, 1994, v. 72 Luther P. Jackson cites Sarah A. Poindexter’s birth as 1842; however, the 1880 United States Federal Census records her “estimated birth” as 1843.

228 73

A Study of Free People of Color in Antebellum Virginia

Both Louisa County records and Luther P. Jackson cite her death in 1847, but census records Lucinda Powell Daniel’s death as 1848, ostensibly when it was officially registered. Jackson, 52. 74 LC WB 12, 160, in Abercrombie, 153-54. 75 LC WB 12, 160, 270. 76 LC CO, entry 422; Abercrombie, 86. 77 Journal of the House of Delegates, 1853-1854, 345; Jackson, 29-30. 78 Jackson, 51-52; Hunter, personal communication, 2007. 79 Jackson, 121. 80 Rothstein, Edward. 2007. An Upgrade for Ye Olde History Park. New York Times, April 6, Arts section, online; Marx, 5. 81 Jackson, 109-110. 82 Jackson, 1969 (1942), 10; Virginia Acts of Assembly, 1847-1848, 119; Russell, 1969 (1913), 107-180). 83 Marx, 25. 84 Ibid., 5.

ADVANTAGE, AGENCY, AND UNREST: JIM CROW, DISENFRANCHISEMENT, AND THE RE-POLITICIZATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA, 1929-1952 SHAYLA C. NUNNALLY, UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT

Introduction This essay situates African Americans of early twentieth-century Petersburg, Virginia within the broader social networks and institutions of the Jim Crow South. Despite social and political exclusion, African Americans in Petersburg, as in many other African American communities across Virginia and the South, were able to coordinate their actions in a way that provided quasi-governmental resources for Petersburg’s black community and that propelled that community toward electoral politics. Through an analysis of the political development of African Americans in Petersburg, this work offers a glimpse of how politically excluded groups organize for change and political inclusion amid statesanctioned inequality and political exclusion. Several organizations—the Petersburg Civic Association, the Petersburg League of Negro Voters, and the Virginia Voters League—have their origins in black communal networks in the city. The Virginia Voters League, in particular, inspired political engagement among Petersburg’s black citizens and citizens across the state in order to challenge Jim Crowism and the racially discriminatory intentions of Virginia’s poll tax legislation and to promote, eventually, racial-conscious voting on behalf of black group interests. This advantageous agency and its effects on African Americans in Petersburg and state-wide are the foci of this study, which shows why Petersburg becomes an especially interesting context for which to assess the conditions and contributions of African Americans to Virginia’s history.

230

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

A Short History of Early Black Social Capital in Petersburg, Virginia Petersburg’s long history began around 1645, when it became a major trade center. Being located within south-central Virginia and off the waters of the Appomattox River, Petersburg’s economy evolved around its strategic location of inter-colonial and eventually interstate trade. A little over a hundred years later, in 1748, the trade center was incorporated as a city, already having become known as a major southern tobacco locale. Business in the late eighteenth century comprised various trade outlets, including mills, bakeries, tanneries, coach makers, and various other artisans.1 In the nineteenth century, its economy diversified to include an increasingly well-known tobacco industry, a cotton/textile industry, and a major transportation center that provided easy access to water and railways. Petersburg’s economy was no stranger to the “peculiar institution,” however. Black slaves were the major source of tobacco labor in the city during the early eighteenth century.2 The city, nonetheless, also had a large and equal number of free blacks during slavery.3 Furthermore, for most of slavery (excluding the year 1860), this black population was larger than the white population.4 Equally interesting is the degree to which a sufficient number of free blacks in the city were able to establish themselves economically. Many free blacks were property holders, owning their own homes and possessing various businesses within the city.5 Both free and enslaved blacks in Petersburg also established their own churches as far back as the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century.6 In the middle to late nineteenth century, Petersburg was the site for several black institutions, including one of the headquarters for the eight statewide sub-districts established to implement Freedmen’s Bureau programs (1865),7 the first public high school for blacks in the state of Virginia—Peabody High School (1874), and a historically black college— Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute (started in 1882; present-day Virginia State University).8 Several Reconstruction-era black representatives at various levels of government also were elected in Petersburg.9 The city also served as the site of various social and fraternal organizations and several nineteenthcentury black newspapers.10 Overall, these establishments show the extent to which the black population in this city had established a certain respectable presence, and, most importantly, had developed resources,

Voices from within the Veil

231

networks, and institutions in spite of the dismal conditions caused by slavery and white supremacy. Race relations in the Upper South, state of Virginia also were less embattled than those states in the Deep South, and racial tension within Petersburg during Reconstruction Era was moderately low.11 Following the Civil War, however, shootouts between blacks and whites were reportedly common,12 but the Ku Klux Klan never developed a major presence in the city.13 Yet, Virginia blacks (the Petersburg community included) experienced racial discrimination well into the twentieth century, and the start of this discrimination dates back to 1870 and even more so to just after the Compromise of 1877, a time when blacks across the South lost their voice in politics.

The “Procrustean Bed” Breaks: The Making of Virginia Blacks into Partial Citizens: Post-Reconstruction Era Virginia, Party Politics, and Anti-Black Sentiment In 1876, Virginia passed a law to implement the poll tax as a voting prerequisite and to make it a disqualification for voting should one have faced a conviction for petty larceny, an offense, at the time, commonly associated with blacks. Even the Republicans, who formerly welcomed the support of the newly entrant black electorate upon the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, were beginning to turn on black political support. Through the political bargaining of presidential candidate and eventual president, Rutherford B. Hayes, southern governments regained control over their localities, as federal troops left the region in 1877. Therefore, the federal government abandoned the protection of blacks, leaving them at the mercy of southern whites who held steadfast to the principles of enslaving blacks and treating them as less than human. As a consequence, 1877 marked the end of Reconstruction and also the beginning of the end to a political structure that was more favorable to blacks and their political interests.14 By the end of Virginian Readjuster rule in 1883, black voices within social life and politics would become virtually obliterated by the implementation of Jim Crow. According to M. Clifford Harrison, who was writing in 1942 and reflecting on the era, the white citizens of Reconstruction Petersburg, “natives of the Cockade City regained control of their civic government. From that time they have never relinquished it.”15 Readjusters were effectively voted out of influential positions in government, where they previously had the power to appoint blacks. Blacks, subsequently, experienced their political downfall in Virginia

232

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

politics. By 1891, there were only three Republicans in the Virginia General Assembly, and, for the first time since 1867, there were no blacks.16 Once Democrats were able to regain political power within Virginia, “whiteness” became even more synonymous with political ideology and power because race and partisan ties between blacks and the Republican Party promoted a means whereby Democrats could more easily solidify their party around white supremacy.17 Increased Democratic power in Virginia followed the southern trend: political power would be used to relegate blacks to a new form of subjugation—Jim Crow. In 1894, the Virginia legislature passed the Walton Act, which instituted literacy tests for voting when, in effect, it required voters to make voting decisions without assistance or use of party labels. Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895, which encouraged blacks to think about their economic lot more so than their social and political equality, also set the stage for further alienation of blacks from electoral politics.18 By 1896, South Carolina had implemented the Democratic primary as a white primary, and other southern states followed suit.19 Moreover, the Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) effectively codified many of the social mores that had already placed black Americans at the bottom rung of society. Virginia blacks, like other blacks throughout the South, were successfully excluded from electoral participation, and the recently acquired political rights, power, and coalitions that blacks held through Reconstruction were legally stripped from them.20

Virginia Blacks and Disenfranchisement: The Context of the Nadir Across the South, legislation legitimized de facto and de jure discrimination against blacks.21 The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902 marked the ultimate exclusion of black voters in Virginia, having lasting effects probably well until the enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.22 After having conducted the 1902 convention, a new state constitution was adopted: it included a measure that provided for suffrage among only those male persons who, prior to January 1904, met the twenty-one-year-old age requirement and could read and explain any portion of the state constitution. This “understanding clause” and virtual literacy test, especially, limited voting among blacks who had had a meager education or no schooling at all as a consequence of slavery.23 After 1904, the “understanding clause” was replaced by a $1.50 capitation

Voices from within the Veil

233

(poll tax) 24 voting prerequisite, and, if this tax were not paid yearly for three consecutive years, then the voter was barred from voting.25 Due to the impoverished conditions of many blacks at this time, blacks’ inability to pay their poll taxes, as stipulated by the Virginia legislature, led to further obstructions to their right to vote as citizens. The Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1902 effectively disenfranchised the Virginia “Negro” from involvement in electoral politics, relegating many blacks’ political influence to mere acceptance of a “new” white power structure—white representation without much consideration of black political interests. Most black men were disfranchised by southern states by 1910.26 As a result, blacks’ Reconstruction-era gains through the passage of the Fourteenth and the Fifteenth Amendments were lost; their second-class citizenship now limited greatly any voice that they had in government. Moreover, as historian Leon Litwack asserts, Between 1890 and 1915, in the face of racial tensions heightened by disturbing evidence of black independence and assertiveness, whites acted to ensure the permanent political, economic, and social subordination and powerlessness of the black population.27

Without voting rights and political influence, African Americans in Virginia and across the South had no other means to hold their government accountable to them. The effect of disenfranchisement was that it depoliticized blacks by excluding them from the electoral system and by contributing to a widespread disinterest in using the ballot to yield sociopolitical resources. Regardless of the fact that there remained a small number of black voters, southern governments at state and local levels tended to ignore the concerns of the black community and legitimized blacks’ subordination to a white power structure. Yet, as C. Vann Woodward notes, The hopes and expectations aroused by these experiences had been dimmed but not extinguished by the Compromise of 1877. The laws were still on the books, and the whites had learned some measure of accommodation. Negroes still voted in large numbers, held numerous elective and appointive offices, and appealed to the courts with the hope for redress of grievances. Under these circumstances a great deal of variety and inconsistency prevailed in race relations from state to state and within a state.28

Virginia was one of those states where the ramifications of Jim Crow were less egregious than those in the Lower South. Jim Crow and black

234

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

disenfranchisement in Virginia, however, still contributed to a devaluation of black citizens’ voice in government, and this had a significant effect on the extent to which blacks as citizens incurred an inequitable share of governmental resources. Community organizing and the formation of specifically black institutions were even more necessary as a means of “quasi-government.” Historian Rayford W. Logan suggests that, during “the nadir,” blacks were able to develop some relations with their government.28 Many of these relations, however, were limited to mostly advisory roles to either white representatives or executed as representation through organizations that acted as a “quasi” extension of government. These organizations also were able to develop their relations with government as a fulfillment of the government’s interest in maintaining conditions satisfactory enough to deter disgruntled blacks from committing racial violence against whites. Although blacks had already developed many of their own social, economic, and religious institutions, there was an increased need for such institutions to provide socioeconomic resources, which increased the context of what is commonly referred to as the black community, or the home sphere.29 Civic engagement in the black community at this time, therefore, must be viewed from the perspective that this activity was not just social but also political because of the extent to which these black social networks and black institutions served as a “quasi-government” during Jim Crow. The result of widespread disenfranchisement based on race increased the need for racial uplift as a basis for socio-political mobilization. Blacks concentrated on how blackness was represented in the broader white society because they felt that it influenced their access to full citizenship.30 Disenfranchisement, nonetheless, contributed to increased political apathy and decreased political efficacy31 among blacks of the early twentieth century.32 Underlying this political apathy was the fear of repercussions sought against blacks who violated racial etiquette that was supported by law. Elsewhere across the South, blacks were lynched for acting in ways that went against the norm that blacks were second-class citizens, and voting was one of these indicators.33 While some blacks may have desired to vote, they were limited in doing so, and while they wanted to have certain representation to regain or build the black community, they had limited electoral influence even to garner support among candidates because their status was so deeply controversial that candidates would support black causes to their own detriment.34 As the famed political scientist, V.O. Key, noted, the geographic places with a large black population in relation to whites were most

Voices from within the Veil

235

resistant to black empowerment because of whites’ fear of black domination.35 Despite the demography of Petersburg’s white and black populations, race relations in the city during the early twentieth century were described as intense at times, yet mostly calm.36 Subsequently, the fact that there was such little racial violence probably contributed to the Petersburg black community’s successful organizing during “the nadir” and further into the early twentieth century because there was less racial intimidation present to counter it. Clearly, this was a sociopolitical advantage that increased this black community’s agency. The work of both black men and women in community organizations fostered the eventual re-politicization of the black Petersburg community toward electoral participation, although, as will be discussed later, this re-politicization occurred in marginal amounts. Civic engagement took a more political focus during “the nadir” and early twentieth century, as organizations were increasingly formed with the explicit intention of “racial uplift.” Such community organizing had both a social and political element. The civic organizations in Petersburg, Virginia, the Petersburg Civic Association and the Petersburg League of Negro Voters and the larger, Virginia Voters League organ that developed as an outgrowth of these two organizational predecessors, also acquired both a racial uplift and political character. Their mobilization efforts contributed to the black political development in the city and the state. Notably, it took four decades after the Virginia constitutional convention in 1902 for a state-wide movement to be orchestrated by blacks toward the restoration of black voting rights. African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia were at the center of this movement, and the humble beginnings of this movement originated with civic organizations that, initially, meant only to serve the black community and not necessarily focus on repoliticizing blacks toward electoral politics.

Black Civic Engagement, Black Politics, and the Making of a “New” Black Electorate: The Petersburg Civic Association On October 2, 1929, several Petersburg leaders, H.O. Harrison, D.C. Valentine, Russell Holmes, Robert Thomas, H.H. Williams, and Captain Thomas Brown, met to discuss the aims and objectives of what would become the “Petersburg Civic Association.” The organization was “designed to promote the Moral and Economic interest of Petersburg’s Colored Citizens and to cooperate with all other agencies in the promotion of a Bigger and Better Petersburg.”37 Initially, the Association was formed

236

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

after Captain Thomas Brown suggested that Mr. Paul Morton, the newly elected (white) city manager, address black citizens at a meeting held at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Petersburg. In honor of Brown’s dedication to racial uplift within the community and a continued interest in promoting such civic engagement among black citizens, people of the black community proposed that a civic organization be formed to perpetuate civic dialogue and involvement between black citizens and their government.38 In the wake of many of the black citizens of Petersburg incurring economic hardship as the result of the Great Depression, the Association “wanted ‘no bread-line’ here.” Instead, it proposed to provide a community solution to community problems, claiming that there “will be no let-up in the fight until Petersburg is safe insofar as a living for its citizens regardless of color, is concerned.”39 Equality, citizenship, and community-based agency became the three major virtues of the Association. These tenets also suggest that social welfare benefits via the government were less favorable. The organization foresaw the need to protect all citizens, regardless of race, implicitly citing the inequality functioning in the city. The Association also attempted to distinguish itself from all other black organizations or mutual aid societies that had an explicit purpose for caring for the sick and providing burial services for its members; it claimed that “it is concerned with vital problems of the living. Its job is to make men and women healthy, happy, and to awaken within their civic pride consciousness of public duty.”40 In order to expand the Association’s membership from an executive committee of only a few members, the organization discussed how to publicize the organization through the distribution of literature about the organization’s purpose and possibly expand the work of the Association through forming a women’s auxiliary organization.41 A resolution also was passed that requested the ministers of the city to mention the duties of citizenship in their sermons.42 By April 1930, the organization had appointed committees to address such issues as streets and sewage, the feasibility of a public school cafeteria, and the discriminatory practices of the McKinney Library.43 Various public officials from state and local government were invited to speak to the organization on issues within the black community, including unemployment among blacks in the city, recognition and burial of black Union soldiers, the removal of blacks from various public offices in the city, implementation of a Red Cross for blacks, black businesses, unfair criminal sentencing, the construction of another public school and

Voices from within the Veil

237

community center for “colored citizens,” and the workings of local, state, and national government.44 The Petersburg Civic Association was often requested to organize programs and entertainment for other groups in the city. Most importantly, it acted as an umbrella organization for fundraising for various projects across the city, many times starting the fundraising campaigns within its own executive committees. Several of the Association’s core members and leadership were socioeconomicallyprominent citizens of Petersburg, many having been professors at Virginia State College and self-employed businesspersons within the city. Therefore, there were probably class distinctions between the leadership of the Association and the people who it attempted to organize, for generally many of Petersburg’s black citizens were working class, consistent with opportunities available to most blacks at that time and with the major labor-oriented economy of the city. Regardless of class, the Association sought to promote uplift and progress among all black Petersburg citizens.45 The Association also became the major source of renewed electoral mobilization within the Petersburg black community. After meeting monthly for ten months, the organization formed a committee to “increase the electorate,” which was in keeping with the campaign for increasing the ideals of citizenship within the black community. Starting in 1931, with a campaign to advocate voter participation among its own members, the Association’s effort to reintegrate blacks into electoral politics would expand to include the greater Petersburg black community. Meetings were often called on “the matter of stimulating interest and instructing the group in the use of the ballot”46 and “in the matter of securing greater interest in exercising political privileges….”47 This reference to blacks’ apathy characterizes the broader political cynicism described among blacks, who most likely perceived that using the ballot would make less of a difference in their ability to garner governmental responsiveness from a white power structure. Members of the Association took an interest in several things regarding the status of blacks in Petersburg: the number of blacks who were eligible to vote, the use of the franchise to blacks’ advantage, and how to aassistance to blacks in overcoming legal barriers to voting, including the poll tax. For example, Dr. Luther P. Jackson, a professor of history at Virginia State College and an affiliate with the Petersburg Civic Association, conducted various surveys on “the conditions surrounding the negotiation of the Civic Association in politics.”48 He also researched the structure of the Petersburg political system and its primary system49 and conducted

238

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

surveys of blacks in the city to determine who paid their poll taxes in accordance with state laws.50 Jackson sent various correspondences to people, particularly leaders, in the community requesting that they solicit the support of the black community in becoming active in electoral politics. He also encouraged black leaders to encourage the payment of the poll tax as much as they encouraged payment of church or lodge dues.51 Ultimately, Jackson stressed a more participatory black electorate as an embodiment of blacks’ citizenship. Jackson advocated blacks’ electoral participation through the auspices of the Petersburg Civic Association and through his involvement in other organizations in Petersburg. He is credited with “popularizing the ballot among Negroes in Virginia,”52 and his voter registration and poll tax campaigns established with the Petersburg Civic Association eventually extended to the formation of an organization for the explicit purpose of increasing the number of black voters, the Petersburg League of Negro Voters.53

The Petersburg League of Negro Voters Various citizens within the black community met in 1935 to establish a constitution for the Petersburg League of Negro Voters. The draft’s preamble stated “We, Negro Citizens of Petersburg, Virginia in order to promote better citizenship, secure Race Unity, and take active part in the Government of our City, State, and Nation, do hereby create an organization to manage, direct, and protect these principles.”54 Its purpose was “…to train Negro people to be 100 percent citizens…” with a quest toward voter education, teaching black citizens the issues of “local, state, and national governmental issues,” while promoting political efficacy. For, in addition to “victories in the courts,” the League felt that “a large voting strength sometimes even makes court battles unnecessary.”55 The League offered to hold public forums on civic concerns, and it also invited political participation by making the payment of poll tax by black citizens a black solidarity issue with extrinsic value. It also proposed to publish an annual list of all black citizens who paid their poll tax. In some instances, the League also advanced payments of the $1.50 poll tax to Petersburg’s black citizens, whereupon, later, the tax was to be repaid to the organization.56 The League’s membership consisted of those Petersburg residents who were qualified voters and interested in voting within one year after becoming qualified to vote. Furthermore, membership in the League

Voices from within the Veil

239

required that its members pay their poll tax annually. Its organizational structure was based on allocating representatives from each of the several voting wards in the city, especially where large numbers of blacks resided. Each ward had its executive committee comprised of a chairman, vicechairman, secretary, assistant secretary, and treasurers and included street captains and block lieutenants who helped with recruitment of voters within their respective streets and blocks. A central committee for the city was rendered as the overarching power of the various ward units. The Committee served as the official representative in matters related to all voters within Petersburg, when issues were not specifically concerned with a certain ward unit’s activities. On March 3, 1935, the League officially adopted a constitution that extended membership “to all civic, fraternal, and other organizations in the City of Petersburg” through the limitation of two representatives per organization as chosen by each organization. Representatives of the organizations had to become qualified voters within one month of adopting the League’s constitution. Various local groups such as the Progressive Vigilantes, The Masonic Lodge, I.B.P. Order of Elks, Odd Fellows Lodge, The Tents, Women’s Council, Eastern Star Federation of Women’s Clubs, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, and Zeta Phi Beta sororities, and Alpha Phi Alpha, Omega Psi Phi, and Phi Beta Sigma fraternities were noted as possible members.57 As for the League’s programs, it was decided that in 1935, “under no conditions shall the League, as such, lend its support to any given political candidate or issue, or seek to influence the voting affiliations of Negro citizens.”58 Obviously, the League recognized the extent to which the organization should remain non-partisan and impartial in reference to support of certain candidates and even issues, possibly because it did not want to hurt the pre-established relationships that it had with some local government leaders or because it did not want to be perceived as a black political organization that might try to pose a threat to the white power structure. Moreover, they did not trust loyalties to specific political parties because of the historical relationships that blacks had had with political parties that had yielded uncertain outcomes. The League’s initial constitution reflected the interests of the members in playing “safe politics”59 by avoiding the promotion of black interests. White political leaders generally supported parallel black institutions so long as they did not conflict with white interests and racial mores. The League leadership also appeared to be concerned about limiting the politicization of the organization into a “black politics” interest group because they feared that the power of a black-politics-

240

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

interested voting bloc would lead to greater discrimination against blacks as it did in the initial circumstances surrounding blacks’ disenfranchisement in Virginia. By organizing black voters in the Petersburg community in the face of the southern attitudes toward black voter participation, the mere conception of the organization along the lines of developing a renewed black electorate already was controversial and race-specific. Coordinating black voters in the early twentieth-century symbolized black racial progress that was opposed by most southerners. Over a few short years, however, the League changed its ideology from restricting political endorsements for blacks to later pushing for the development of a black voting bloc. The League’s 1938 platform suggested that blacks should consider candidates in reference to their promotion and consideration of blacks’ interests. It also emphasized that blacks ought to develop collective political interests and should become consciously politicized.60 The League also could not escape instructing black voters to consider certain candidates with respect to the candidates’ support of black interests. The prevalence of racist ideology created a persistent threat to the power of the black voice in government. At the least, blacks needed to support candidates strategically according to whether they were sympathetic to black group interests. Therefore, the development of a black-politics-interested voting bloc was inevitable. By 1938, it had become strategically necessary for the League to build a “black electorate” that was more black interest group-oriented. Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley encouraged the activism of both black men and women as a “standing obligation to attack some of the fundamental problems of the race and to lift the masses.”61 Thus, ironically, the League had fallen victim to its initial strategic plan to avoid race politics. The League became instrumental in the political development of a black voting bloc because of its promotion of political activism among blacks who, heretofore, had been disfranchised based on their race by state-initiated disenfranchisement laws and who remained politically inactive because of their subsequent political cynicism about the accountability of their government to their interests. As a means of agency, the franchise would be used strategically as a means for racial uplift. Prior to 1938, the organization seemed to be more interested in seeing blacks as a group become more politically active. Thereafter, there appeared to be an ideological shift to support blacks acting politically in order to advance the collective interests of blacks. The League supported this agenda by sponsoring voter education programs within a political network of citizens who could access a “public

Voices from within the Veil

241

hearing [on] the merits and demerits of candidates whose beliefs [were] to promote the civic welfare of Negro people.”62 The work of the League emphasized the evaluation of a candidate’s sincere interest in promoting the progress of blacks and their interests over race-based, partisan attachments. This precaution about partisan attachments was warranted given that, in the past, political parties in Virginia were active in formally excluding blacks from electoral power. This consciousness about making candidate evaluations instead of partisan assessments also suggests how race affected blacks’ trust in political parties that supported white supremacist government. Race and racism also constrained blacks’ trust in Petersburg (and southern) government. Social exclusion imposed by Jim Crow also limited blacks’ ability to run black candidates who were thought to be more responsive to the platform that black community supporters would advocate.

Luther P. Jackson and the Black Franchise Struggle: Establishing the Virginia Voters League Petersburg was at the helm of the black franchise movement. Throughout the 1940s and World War II, the Petersburg League of Negro Voters remained active in what had become “the voter movement” in Virginia.63 The “voter movement” and other efforts of the Petersburg League of Negro Voters were recognized in the black press with the intention of making the movement known to other blacks across the state and possibly black press readers across the country. These stories implicitly encouraged blacks to become involved in electoral politics.64 Luther P. Jackson made more explicit appeals to black electoral politics in his column written for the Journal and Guide, a national black weekly published in Norfolk, Virginia. Under the general heading of “Rights and Duties in a Democracy,” from 1942 through 1948 Jackson encouraged blacks to consider the importance of voting for displaying civic mindedness. Jackson’s involvement in the movement continued as he conducted surveys of black voters across the state who paid their poll taxes and registered to vote.65 He later compiled an annual handbook, The Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia, to which several black organizations contributed funds.66 This publication not only informed its readers about the status of black poll tax payments in all the localities across the state but also informed them about the laws governing the poll tax, how to pay the poll tax, the duties of local registrars, the means for recourse if voting rights were violated by registrars, the status of racial discrimination claims in certain localities, and the southern states that continued to implement

242

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

poll taxes to disfranchise black voters.67 As a spearhead of the movement and the author of the publication, Jackson became instrumental as one of the founders of the statewide voter mobilization movement. On May 3, 1941, at a regional meeting of the Conference of School Teachers and Laymen sponsored by the State Department of Education, on the campus of Virginia Normal and Industrial College, Luther P. Jackson, D. C. Valentine, and Robert Cooley (all of the Petersburg Civic Association) established the “Virginia Voters League.” The League was supposed to be “a federation of voters’ leagues in eighty counties and 24 cities [across Virginia] with a chairman in each.”68 The Virginia Voters League formally requested organizations like the Petersburg League of Negro Voters and other political and civic organizations, such as the NAACP, the Negro Organization Society, and the State Teachers Association, in localities statewide to participate in a united front to reorient Virginia blacks toward the use of the ballot.69 The Virginia Voters League served as a “clearing house on the voting status of Negroes in every county and city [in Virginia],” and its headquarters was in Petersburg, Virginia.70 The group’s responsibilities included serving as a publicity agency for the state by informing blacks about various topics through writing articles in newspapers and magazines, promoting “two drives a year for the payment of the poll tax and registration,” and corresponding with the organizations’ chairmen in order to offer suggestions and hold conferences with them in their localities.71 The Virginia Voters League also sponsored voter literacy campaigns that taught voters how to write their names, read, complete voter registration applications, and complete ballots. It prepared black citizens for any literacy tests given at the registrar’s discretion. In Petersburg, organizations were encouraged to keep records of members who voted. For example, one of the reporting entities was the collective of black teachers in the segregated Petersburg public school system, who reported the registration and voting of their teachers.72 The Virginia Voters League also contributed to a certain statewide black consciousness, as it encouraged correspondence concerning black community issues among the various groups within the differing localities. Jackson, for instance, appealed to Virginia’s clergy to appeal urged their congregations to vote, offering the clergy and their congregations a “voter’s creed”: I believe that only through the exercise of the ballot can our people get rights vouchsafed to them under the Constitution. I believe that, with God’s help, we must enlighten our congregation[s] to the importance of

Voices from within the Veil

243

voting at every election and thereby place in office men who will look after the best interest of all people.73

Because the Virginia Voters League developed during World War II, the organization grew slowly.74 Blacks were seemingly more concerned about wartime service than they were about voting. The Virginia Voters League produced a political awareness that explored the nexus between citizenship and attention to political interests, as it related to black people in a local and state context. Moreover, concurrent and post-war concern among blacks for a “Double V” campaign that emphasized democracy at home and abroad made the quest for full citizenship status more attractive.75 From the electoral politicization of the Petersburg Civic Association and the organization of the Petersburg League of Negro Voters, there arose the Virginia Voters League, a statewide voter organization with Petersburg roots and a statewide quest for black electoral empowerment. Elsewhere in Norfolk, Virginia, Luther P. Jackson, as a co-founder of the Virginia Voters League, became the major liaison for political concerns across the state. For instance, he was informed of how black voters wrote a resolution detesting the exclusion of black delegates from the 1944 Democratic Party Convention, where black delegates had previously been “regularly and legally elected.”76 Delegates suggested that this exclusion indicated the Democratic Party’s diminished support of blacks since 1928,77 a time when black voter support was sought in opposition to Republican Herbert Hoover’s presidential candidacy and the insurgence of defecting Democrats, or Hoovercrats, as “alienators of the party.”78 It symbolized how the “Democratic Party of Virginia was a white man’s party.”79 The Virginia Voters League attempted to organize the black electorate around key issues. In a February 28, 1945 letter to the Elks, the Virginia Voters League requested that they advise all qualified voters to vote in the statewide referendum on Tuesday, March 6, 1945. This referendum questioned whether Virginia should hold a constitutional convention to give the right to vote (without payment of the poll tax) in the next election to men and women who were in the military.80 This request commenced an electoral protest against an initiative that was a modified version of the stance proposed by the Virginia Voters League. The Virginia Voters League proposed to the legislature that a convention be called to abolish the poll tax for everyone forever. Nevertheless, a special session of the Virginia General Assembly changed the poll tax law to state that the poll tax would only apply to men and women in service during wartime.81

244

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

Despite the fact that they had developed their resources to address their community needs, many blacks in Virginia nevertheless relied on the responsiveness of a “white power structure” government to address their general public services. When electoral politics did not yield sufficient returns for the black community, the Virginia Voters League offered statewide support in their local battles and attempts to build statewide political networks to address local political issues. The organization, for example, called for a statewide effort of black voters to evaluate the racial attitudes of Senator Harry F. Byrd82 and his fitness for reelection.83 The growth of this organization perpetuated the need to divide localities further into distinct districts where political issues related to these districts could be more successfully mobilized. To illustrate, black voters in Franklin, Virginia complained about a local registrar, Clyde Eley, committing nonfeasance. Upon appeal to Marvin L. Gary, the Secretary of the State Board of Elections, the black citizens, represented by their local Virginia Voters League affiliate, petitioned the Secretary to remove Eley from office. Gary sent correspondence about the ordeal to R. H. Cooley, an affiliate of the Virginia Voters League, which Cooley sent to Jackson.84 This attests to the umbrella power and commitment of the Virginia Voters League to address localized issues related to voting. In fact, instances such as this one were published in the annual Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia report. By 1950, the members of the Virginia Voters League considered uniting all black members within each city and county contained in the Fourth Congressional District of Virginia in order to form the Fourth Congressional Council of the Virginia Voters League. One of its specifically delineated purposes was to “elect to the 1952 General Assembly of Virginia, Senators and Delegates committed to repeal the segregation statutes, commonly called Jim Crow Laws.”85 Despite the mobilizing efforts of the Virginia Voters League and the increasing number of blacks who became electorally active as a result of its efforts, only few blacks paid their poll taxes and met the requirements for voting. Black voter registration increased between 1941 and 1951. Oftentimes, however, blacks paid their poll taxes in one or two years but not in three consecutive years, as the Virginia poll tax law required. Rural voters were most likely to have paid their poll taxes and to have become eligible to vote, although sometimes unknowingly, because their poll taxes were paid as a part of their real estate taxes. Many people were unaware of this fact, but even those who were aware appeared to be disinterested in voting. Many other Virginia blacks, rural or otherwise, who paid their poll taxes also remained unregistered to vote.86

Voices from within the Veil

245

By the same token, those blacks who were registered to vote did not vote. According to the 1950-1951 Eleventh Annual Report of the Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia, In the year 1950, 76,448 Negroes met the three-year poll tax requirements for voting. In the year 1951, 78,646 Negroes met this requirement, or an increase in round numbers of 2,198. Expressed in terms of the total number of Negroes of voting age, this figure represents 18.6% who have met the first requirements for voting. Thus, one can see that 81.4% are left disqualified for failure to meet this first and main suffrage requirement in Virginia for exercising the right of suffrage.87

Gender-based data collected in the 1950-1951 report indicates that men paid their poll taxes more regularly than women.88 In 1941, the number of blacks who met the three-year poll tax requirement was only 25,441 out of 365,717 blacks of voting age (age 21), or 6.95 percent of blacks, were qualified for voting in the State of Virginia. By 1950, 45,242 blacks out of 244,689 who were voting age paid their poll taxes. This number increased to 49,855 in 1951. Thus, over a decade, the black poll tax payers increased by approximately 168 percent, relative to the number of blacks who were of voting age. The participation of black candidates and the eventual victories of some black candidates also influenced how blacks perceived the power of their vote, as they also participated more in electoral politics in order to support black candidates.89 Despite the increase in black voter registration, however, the highest percentage of black voter registration during this period was twenty-one percent of the eligible black voter population, and that was in 1950, the same year that Luther P. Jackson, the organizer of the voting movement, died. Unfortunately, many blacks were not registered voters by 1951. Re-politicizing blacks toward the use of the ballot was not an easy endeavor. Political cynicism was rampant and state-sponsored disenfranchisement and social and political disrespect for blacks’ interests were the source of this cynicism. Yet, the lower level of voter participation among blacks in Virginia should not overshadow the unifying efforts of the Virginia Voters League to reorient blacks toward electoral politics and the eventual participation of a much larger number of black voters than before.

246

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

Conclusion: The Effects of Petersburg’s Black Socio-Political Capital This analysis of political development in the black community of Petersburg, Virginia shows how African Americans mobilized to increase blacks’ interest and participation in electoral politics. Over time and in response to race relations, the black community became less satisfied with their organizations performing an informal, auxiliary function (on behalf of the black community) in relation to their local government, and the franchise provided a venue for blacks to hold officials accountable to them as a racial group. Despite the early twentieth-century efforts of the black community to hold their government accountable to them through establishing black socio-political capital, however, Jim Crow remained a stumbling block for the black community’s effectiveness in building intergroup social capital with white public officials well through the 1960s. More change and progress in black-white relations became increasingly evident with the eventual development of massive protests during the Civil Rights Movement. These relationships were already strained because of the nature of racial segregation and racial politics that were de facto in the southern city and region. Petersburg is a locality in which we see how the nexus of black institutions, leadership, and civic engagement transformed into political resources. In order for blacks to participate in democracy as full citizens, they had to struggle for the government to recognize them as citizens with rights to the franchise. They also had to depend on intraracial networks and institutions to represent black social and political interests to a white political structure, in order that democracy would work in their favor. Strategically, blacks worked to transform social networks into quasigovernmental institutions in Petersburg and beyond. These resources had to be ideologically and strategically transformed into mobilization efforts to counter state-induced, political cynicism among black Americans and to reorient blacks’ toward electoral politics through racial, political consciousness. Moreover, politics on behalf of full-citizenship rights had to be addressed based on race-based political consciousness. It seems plausible to conclude that when black electoral politics did not render the desired accountability between the local government and the black community, protests became a central strategy for massive change within Petersburg. By 1958, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Petersburg ministers, Reverend W.T. Walker, Reverend R. T. Williams, and Reverend Nelson Reid, all affiliated with another community organization, the Petersburg Improvement Association, started

Voices from within the Veil

247

organizing protest movements within the city to address racial segregation and inequality practiced in the public accommodations of the city, again having a major effect on movements across the state.90 Moreover, by 1964, the black community relied on its resources to initiate change through political incorporation. Petersburg elected Joseph Owens to the City Council, making him the first black member of the Council since Reconstruction. In the same year, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was ratified, making the poll tax unconstitutional. By 1966, Hermanze E. Fauntleroy, Jr. was elected to the Petersburg City Council, joining Owens as the second black person elected to sit on the Council at that time. Later in 1973, Fauntleroy became the city’s first black mayor and the first elected black mayor in Virginia. Through mobilizing the black community and using the resources of black social capital and black socio-political capital, Petersburg’s black organizations assisted the political development of Petersburg’s black citizens from being excluded and segregated black citizens to those who voted, participated with a consciousness toward building a black voting bloc, and eventually sought to be represented by blacks. Petersburg became a major “local movement center”91 within the state of Virginia prior to the onset of the modern freedom struggle during the mid-1950s through the 1960s. Historically, the black community of Petersburg had the advantage of having the social capital in place to organize the community to address its needs. Through agency and unrest, the Petersburg black community challenged Jim Crow and its oppression of black citizenship by laying the foundation for the re-integration of blacks into the conventional political process using black socio-political capital to encourage the black individual and the black community toward the use of the ballot.

Notes Edward A. Wyatt, IV, “Rise of Industry in Ante-Bellum Petersburg,” in William and Mary Quarterly Historical Magazine, Second Series, 17 (January 1937), 2. 2 Ibid., 11. 3 Luther P. Jackson, “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,” in Journal of Negro History 12 (July 1927), 366. 4 Ibid., 366. 5 Luther P. Jackson, Free Negro Labor and Property Holding in Virginia (New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1942), 138. 6 Luther P. Jackson, “Free Negroes of Petersburg, Virginia,” 384. First Baptist Church (Harrison Street) was founded as early as 1756, and it is believed to be one of the oldest black Baptist churches in America.

248 7

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

Various services were rendered, such as medical care, including a black hospital, family care, and employment. 8 The historically black college was initiated as a result of Readjuster interest and funding in black public education. 9 George L. Fayermore served in the House of Delegates of the Virginia General Assembly (1869-1871) and served on the Petersburg City Council; Peter G. Morgan served in the House of Delegates from (1869-1870), and served on both the Petersburg City Council and School Board; Joseph Evans served in the House of Delegates (1871-1873) and in the State Senate (1874-1875). 10 Some organizations included the Independent Order of Good Samaritans, Odd Fellows, Rising Daughters of the Golden Rule, Sisters of David, Sisters of Usefulness, Order of St. Luke, and 13 Masonic Orders. The first black newspaper in Petersburg was the Star of Zion, which was published weekly from 1877 through 1885. A more detailed discussion on the social organizations of Petersburg and various black newspapers may be found in William D. Henderson, Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg, Virginia, 1874-1889 (Washington, D.C.: University Press America, Inc., 1980), 321-26. 11 Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics: 1902-1965 (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 1967), Chapter 1; Charles E. Wynes, Race Relations in Virginia, 1870-1902 (Charlottesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 1961), 86. 12 William D. Henderson, Gilded Age City: Politics, Life and Labor in Petersburg, Virginia, 1874-1889), 67. 13 William D. Henderson, The Unredeemed City: Reconstruction in Petersburg, Virginia 1865-1874 (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1972), 262. 14 William D. Henderson, The Unredeemed City, 65. 15 M. Clifford Harrison, Home to the Cockade City: The Partial Biography of a Southern Town (Richmond, Virginia: The House of Dietz, 1942), 43. 16 Richard Lee Morton, The Negro in Virginia Politics: 1865-1902 (Spartanburg, SC: The Reprint Company, 1973), 131. 17 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc. 1955, 1971), 103. 18 Ibid., Chapter XIII. 19 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 85. 20 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Inc. 1974), Chapter 9. 21 Ibid., 97-110. 22 On August 22, 1900, 100 black men across Virginia met for the Virginia Conference of Colored Men at the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Charlottesville, Virginia. The men proposed to challenge the efforts of the Virginia referendum on black disenfranchisement. See Race and Place: An African American Community in the Jim Crow South: Charlottesville, Virginia, http://vcdh. virginia.edu/afam/politics/ party.html. The organization later developed into the Virginia Educational and Industrial Association, also known as the Negro Educational and Industrial Association.

Voices from within the Veil 23

249

James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 17. 24 A comparison of the relative value of $1.50 U.S. Dollars to 2005 U.S. Dollars indicates that today this poll tax would be the equivalent of paying $152.13 based on the money earned for unskilled wages. Unskilled wages are earned among those who fill positions such as janitorial services, porters, housekeepers, and plant workers, which require no formal training. See Williamson, Samuel H. 2006. “Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a U.S. Dollar Amount, 1790-2005,”See www.measuringworth.com. Many blacks occupied positions like this in the segregated labor markets of the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 218 25 Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics. 26 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 225. 27 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 218. 28 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 33. 29 Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (London: Collier Books, 1965), Chapters 1-6. 30 Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 5. 31 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 32 Here, I am defining political efficacy to mean a feeling that one’s vote can make a difference in an election (for those who could pay their poll taxes and vote) and/or a feeling that one’s vote has influence in the political process. Additionally, because of disenfranchisement among many non-voting blacks, I feel that political efficacy should include the feeling that one’s presence within a government is included or overlooked by the extent to which one has no voting privileges and one associates the value of voting privileges with having a voice in government. 33 V.O. Key’s discussion of disenfranchisement discloses various methods that white southerners used to keep blacks from voting, including white primaries, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and poll taxes. For further discussion, please refer to Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949), Chapters 25-29. 34 Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Chapter 2. 35 Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics. 36 V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (New York: Knopf, 1949). 37 A Virginia State University Oral History interview with Mr. George W. McKeever revealed racial tension between black soldiers and whites after World War II. He described Petersburg as being a “beehive.” An interview with Ms. Mabel Mann revealed that blacks were limited in their ability to travel through certain neighborhoods, particularly those neighborhoods near East Ward St. where there was a white Catholic school. An interview with Ms. Marie Lee revealed that while various public places were segregated, she remembered some blacks sitting in the front seat of the city’s street cars, an obvious infraction of southern racial etiquette, which required

250

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

blacks to sit in the back or special seating areas for blacks. Interestingly, she did not mention there having been much or any trouble related to such incidents. 38 Petersburg Civic Association Yearbook 1930-31, Norris Family Papers, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University. Hereafter cited as Norris Family Papers. 39 Ibid. 40 Petersburg Civic Association Yearbook 1930-31, Norris Family Papers. 41 Ibid. Many of the social organizations at this time offered benefits such as special burial privileges to its members. 42 Upon meeting with women who were interested in the Association, the women expressed that they preferred to be a part of the organization rather than being an auxiliary. The association approved women as members and decided that women could elect their own chairperson for “women’s work.” Thus, women also actively participated within the Association. However, again, gender became an issue over how to organize in order to address the black community’s needs. The schism continued to be evident as far as male and female political spheres. Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, April 11, 1933, Norris Family Papers. 43 In the McKinney Public Library, blacks’ usage was restricted to a room in the basement. Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, September 10, 1930, Norris Family Papers. 44 Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, February-April 1930, Norris Family Papers. 45 Ibid. 46 Interestingly, several of the interviews with African American Petersburg citizens revealed the extent to which they did not think blacks were too involved in politics in this time period. Notably, these citizens appeared to be in the working class, having worked in the various factories in the city. This may reflect the extent to which the “voter movement” was limited to those black persons who could afford to pay the poll tax: those people who may have been other than working class. Yet, the activities promoted within the community had their broad-reaching effects. While this movement may have been class distinctive, there was a black union movement after the Great Depression among black tobacco workers in the American Suppliers Factory. Supposedly, the organizing led to better wages and benefits throughout the city. For more information on the unionization of tobacco factory workers, refer to the interview with Ms. Mabel Mann in the Oral History Collection (1984), Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University. 47 The minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, September 9, 1931, reveal that Dr. Luther Porter Jackson, a major organizer of black voting efforts on behalf of the Association and in the city felt that there was a widespread “apathy” among blacks in Petersburg that needed to be addressed in order to build a strong black electorate. Norris Family Papers. 48 Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, October 14, 1931, Norris Family Papers. 49 Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, December 9, 1931, Norris Family Papers, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University.

Voices from within the Veil 50

251

Minutes of the Petersburg Civic Association, April 12, 1932, Norris Family Papers, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University. 51 In The Negro and the Virginia Poll Tax, Luther P. Jackson discusses the regulations related to the poll tax in Virginia, while also assessing the number of blacks who had paid their poll tax in Petersburg. Jackson had conducted various surveys in the black community of Petersburg in order to retrieve this information. In the Petersburg Civic Association Yearbook 1931-1932, Norris Family Papers. 52 Ibid. 53 R.H. Cooley to Luther P. Jackson, January 31, 1942, Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University. Hereafter cited as Luther P. Jackson Papers. 54 Marva D. Curtis, “Luther P. Jackson and the Virginia Voters League,” (M.A. Thesis, Virginia State University, 1979). 55 The League of Negro Voters Constitutional Draft, Box 18, Folder 508, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 56 Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley proposal to expand the League, December 7, 1938, Box 18, Folder 509 and Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 57 Note dated May 5, 1939, Box 26, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 58 The Version of the Constitution adopted March 3, 1935, Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 59 Ibid. 60 Safe politics is used in reference to “safe issues” in Bachrach and Baratz (1969), where the power of decision-making is limited to those issues that are not adverse to the general interests of those who have the power of decision-making. 61 Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley proposal to expand the League, December 7, 1938, Box 18 Folder 509, Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 62 Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley proposal to expand the League, December 7, 1938, , Box 18, Folder 509, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 63 Ibid. 64 Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley refer to the “voter movement” having begun in 1932, possibly showing the link of the voter registration efforts made by Jackson with the Petersburg Civic Association. Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley proposal to expand the League, December 7, 1938, Box 18, Folder 509, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 65 March 18, 1935 Journal and Guide and March 19, 1935 in the “Colored Dots” column for blacks in the Petersburg Progress-Index. Luther P. Jackson and Robert Cooley proposal to expand the League, December 7, 1938, Box 18 Folder 512, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 66 Michael Dennis, Luther P. Jackson and a Life for Civil Rights, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), 76-84. 67 Organizations such as the Virginia Negro Organization Society, the Virginia branches of the NAACP, Alpha Phi Alpha, Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Omega Psi Phi, the lodges of the Virginia Elks, the Eureka Lodge of Norfolk, the Virginia State Teachers Association, and the Order of Saint Luke contributed funds annually to support the publication.

252

Jim Crow, Disenfranchisement, and the Re-Politicization of African Americans in Petersburg, Virginia, 1929-1952

68

The “white primary” limited primary participation to whites, leaving blacks unable to influence the slate of candidates who ran in the general election. This also affected the outcomes of the general elections because the Democratic Party, as the one-party of the South, faced virtually no competition from the other major political party. Therefore, the winner of the primary also would go on to win the general election. Later in 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Allright that legal barriers to black voting rights, such as the white primary, were unconstitutional. Fifth Annual Report. The Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia, 1944. Virginia Voters League. April, 1945. 69 Luther P. Jackson to Russell Holmes, president of the Petersburg League of Negro Voters, November 24, 1941, Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 70 Luther P. Jackson to Helen C. Reede, President of the Beta Epsilon Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, December 18, 1941, Box 26, Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 71 Ibid. 72 Luther P. Jackson to Helen C. Reede, President of the Beta Epsilon Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, December 18, 1941, Luther P. Jackson Papers Box 26 Folder 677, Special Collections, Johnston Memorial Library, Virginia State University. 73 Postcard to the Virginia Voters League. December 17, 1948, Box 26 , Folder 677, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 74 Marva Curtis, “Luther P. Jackson and the Virginia Voters League,” (M.A. Thesis, Virginia State University, 1979), 44. 75 Ibid. 76 Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 77 Norfolk Delegates to the State Democratic Convention, Richmond, Virginia, September 5, 1946, Box 18, Folder 515, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 78 V.O. Key in Southern Politics in State and Nation refers to “The Bolt of 1928” when Republicans were represented by presidential candidate Herbert Hoover and Alfred E. Smith was the Democratic presidential candidate and the election was highly racially and sectionally divided. In those areas where black populations were highest, whites tended to vote Democrat (consistent with the Solid South, anti-black tradition) and vice versa. Blacks voted mostly Republican, and for the blacks of Norfolk to have declared Democratic loyalty was evidence of the possible racial tension over blacks’ voting patterns. 79 Norfolk Delegates to the State Democratic Convention, Richmond, Virginia, September 5, 1946, Box 18, Folder 515, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 80 Ibid. 81 Letter to the Elks, February 28, 1945, Box 18, Folder 514, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 82 Ibid. 83 Byrd was the leader of the “Byrd Machine” that is often referred to as a long-time, oppressive guarantor of the status quo in Virginia politics. “The Machine” often supported legislation that was inconsistent with the interests of the poor and blacks. Yet, its willingness to protect a degree of black suffrage led to allies among some blacks within Virginia. For a detailed discussion on the “Byrd Machine,” see V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, (Knoxville, TN: The University of .

Voices from within the Veil

253

Tennessee Press, 1993; originally published by New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1949), Chapter 2. 84 Luther P. Jackson to Regional Supervisors, Presidents, and Secretaries of the Virginia branches of the NAACP, April 11, 1946, Box 18, Folder 515, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 85 Letter to R.H. Cooley, Jr. from Marvin Gary, Secretary of State Board of Elections of Virginia, November 27, 1946. Letter to Luther P. Jackson from R.H. Cooley, Jr., August 28, 1946, Box 26, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 86 March 18, 1950, Box 18, Folder 508, Luther P. Jackson Papers 87 Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia, 1941-1951, Virginia Voters League, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 88 Eleventh Annual Report, Voting Status of Negroes in Virginia, 1950-1951,” Virginia Voters League, August, 1953, 4, Luther P. Jackson Papers. 89 Interestingly, Jackson attributes this gender gap in poll tax paying to husband-wife relationships, “It appears then to the compiler of this handbook that if the husbands of wives do not pay their poll tax, the woman must pay it themselves, if they hope to meet this first requirement to vote in Virginia on par with men.” Ibid., 5. Thus, depending on women’s wherewithal, they were more or less likely to pay their poll taxes and vote, an outcome that also related to the role of women (black or white) as second-class citizens based on gender. 90 Andrew Buni, The Negro in Virginia Politics, 155, 170. 91 Aldon D. Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press, 1984). 92 Aldon D. Morris in the Origins of the Civil Rights Movement discusses the extent to which the community organizations of various localities contributed to the widespread development of the modern civil rights movement. For a further discussion on “local movement centers,” refer to Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change, (New York: Free Press, 1984), Chapter 3.

“THE KU KLUX KLAN ARE STILL SCRAPPING HERE”: AFRICAN AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE OREGON KLAN, 1922-1924 KIMBERLEY MANGUN, THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH

Early in 1932, journalist and civil rights activist Beatrice Morrow Cannady wrote a poignant editorial about “Race Prejudice in Oregon”: It seems that away out here in Oregon—God’s country—there should not be any such thing as race antipathy. But there is, and lots of it. Nearly every colored person who has sought to buy a home has had to fight in the courts and out of them in order to occupy them; there are many public places of accommodation, resort and amusement which draw color lines in different ways. Why all this meanness? The colored people in Oregon for the most part are good law abiding citizens and there is little or no illiteracy among them. They go to school, to church and contribute freely of their time, talents and money toward civic betterment and still they must suffer the injustice and unreasonableness of race prejudice. What is the matter with the white ministers in their pulpits? Why don’t they speak out and influence their own race to do right? What is all this talk about religion and going to heaven? To some of us who live behind the veil, it appears more and more to be nothing but the ‘bunk,’ if you please.1

The charge that white clerics should be doing more to promote brotherhood was nothing new; Cannady had addressed that issue in other editorials in The Advocate, a newspaper for African Americans founded in Portland by her husband and nine other men in 1903.2 But this was one of the few times that she alluded to the bleakness and invisibility of a life spent “behind the veil,” the stark metaphor used by W.E.B. Du Bois in his book, The Souls of Black Folks. Although Cannady, a Wiley College alumna, was more privileged than many African Americans during the

Voices from within the Veil

255

1910s and 1920s, she still felt the sting of Jim Crow on numerous occasions. 3 In 1928, the editor used The Advocate to express the humiliation that she and sons George, fifteen, and Ivan, thirteen, experienced when an usher at the Oriental Theatre in downtown Portland tried to seat them in the balcony rather than on the main floor, which was reserved for white patrons. She described the painful experience as a play in three acts with the following cast: “One usher and three guests. Usher of white race, guests of colored race; usher’s profession, ushering; guest’s profession, editor and lawyer.”4 In the first act, the usher tries to seat the guests in the balcony. When the guests ask whether seats are available on the floor, the usher tells them, “Yes, but I’m sorry I can’t seat your people downstairs.”5 The second act involves confrontation and compromise. She tells the usher: “I see there are plenty of seats downstairs, and as I’m not in the mood to climb stairs; as I am a law-abiding citizen, presentable and have paid admission for three people, myself and two sons, I prefer to sit downstairs and shall do so.”6 When the guests proceed to look for seats the usher says, “I’ll seat you over on the side aisle—but it’s against the rules to seat you downstairs in the center aisles.”7 The denouement occurs in the third and final act: “Three lovely seats are vacated on center aisle. Guests move over and occupy them and nobody moves because of their presence. Guests see show but can’t enjoy it because of the humiliation in obtaining seats.”8 In the end, Cannady observed wryly that this sort of treatment was a “regular occurrence” in Portland, “‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.’”9 Another incident that deeply wounded her occurred in 1922, when thirty-three-year-old Cannady became the first African American woman to graduate from Northwestern College of Law in Portland.10 On a Wednesday evening late in May, candidates and their families gathered in Multnomah Hotel’s “ballroom of palatial grandeur” for the muchanticipated awarding of degrees.11 Among the proud class of twenty-two were Beatrice Cannady and her brother, Almus. Cannady had another reason to be happy that night: Music was her passion, and she was on the program to sing two solos, including By the Waters of Minnetonka, a composition “inspired by a Sioux Love Song” and published in about 1913.12 But when she was finished, the dean “publicly insulted and humiliated” Cannady and her brother—“the only two colored members” of the graduating class—“by asking them and their invited guests” to leave.”13 She later recalled in an interview, “Of course, I do not forget such experiences, and no one can fully appreciate the distress, unless he has suffered in the same way.”14

256

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Discrimination because of color was the constant that tied together years of Advocate articles and editorials and illustrated an important reality of race relations in Oregon during the early 1900s. Even when Cannady was not discussing overt racism, skin tone dictated all aspects of an individual’s life: from the church that one attended to the jobs one held; from the restaurants that one could enjoy to the neighborhood where one lived. In this respect, Oregon was not much different from southern states. But African Americans living in Oregon also faced unique challenges due to factors beyond their control: population and isolation. Fewer than a dozen African American residents lived in some towns. Even in cities such as Portland, where the majority of the state’s twenty-one hundred black citizens lived, individuals were scattered widely due to housing restrictions.15 The small and isolated population made it difficult for Cannady, a transplanted Texan who was known as the unofficial “ambassador of good will between the racial groups,” to effect reform.16 This was particularly true in the spring of 1921, when organizers for the Ku Klux Klan pushed north from California and settled in Oregon. Although an alarmed Cannady urged Oregon Governor Ben W. Olcott to prohibit the organization from gaining a foothold in the state, he ignored her pleas. In fact, he seemed puzzled by the Klan’s arrival in his state, since its demographics did not include the Klan’s usual targets: Catholics and African Americans. “The population … comes from the pioneer stock that wended the long trail, the Oregon Trail,” he told his colleagues at a conference in West Virginia at the end of 1922.17 “We have no so-called catholic menace in Oregon; the catholic population is comparatively small; we have no so-called jewish menace in Oregon, because the jewish population is also comparatively small.”18 And, he told those assembled, “We have no negro population there, only a total of about 1,800 negro votes in the whole state of Oregon.”19 In 1923, a reporter discussing the “Ku-Kluxing of Oregon” for Outlook wasted no words when he observed the state did not have “enough Negroes to man a Pullman car,” a reference to the fact that many black men worked for the railroad.20 Contemporary descriptions such as these not only made life challenging for Cannady and other black Oregonians, but they also caused repercussions that are still being experienced today. Among other things, those comments have led scholars to ignore the African American experience in Oregon during the early 1900s. This marginalization is particularly evident in discussions of the Klan’s impact on Oregon in the 1920s. Several scholars have examined the formation of the Klan in Oregon, as well as the activities of klaverns, or

Voices from within the Veil

257

chapters, in several cities.21 The studies stress the organization’s concerted efforts to dominate politics at the local and state levels, attempts to regulate individual morality, and the heated debate over a Klan-inspired compulsory school bill aimed at abolishing private and parochial schools in Oregon.22 What is most remarkable about these studies, however, is the lack of attention that has been paid to entrenched racism. Scholars have downplayed the organization’s violent acts and their effect on African Americans simply because the small population “scarcely constituted a threat” to the Oregon Klan.23 Further, they do not consider how “necktie parties” and other “isolated” incidents combined to create a hostile atmosphere for African Americans trying to eke out a living in the state.24 Ignoring the symbolism of cross burnings, the terrifying sight of hooded men on parade, and attempted lynchings in several Oregon towns minimizes the Klan’s subtle—and not so subtle—tactics to control African Americans already in the state, limit future migration, and regulate citizenship. Indeed, prejudice, extralegal discrimination, limited employment opportunities, and the Ku Klux Klan combined to make Oregon a very unwelcoming place for African Americans for many decades. This study critically examines, for the first time, articles and editorials in The Advocate alongside NAACP records, reports and editorials in the state’s white press, Klan documents, and comments expressed by Governor Ben W. Olcott and his successor, Governor Walter M. Pierce.25 A close reading of these primary documents brings new evidence to bear on the hate crimes committed against African Americans living in Marshfield, Oregon City, Roseburg, and Medford between 1922 and 1924. Overall, this focus on the African American response to the Ku Klux Klan offers readers an intimate—if disturbing—glimpse into Oregon’s racist past, and suggests a revisionist look at a state that typically celebrates the pioneers who made the trek on its namesake trail, but that ignores the white-robed men who marched by the thousands in cities and towns across the state.

“Fiery crosses … burned continuously” In the summer of 1921, the Ku Klux Klan “invaded” the small agricultural community of Hood River in the northern part of the state looking for “native born Americans” to join the secret organization.26 An editorial in the Glacier suggested fighting back with “ridicule,” the “most effective weapon that can be employed against such an organization as the Ku Klux Klan.”27 Some residents, though, voiced the need for greater

258

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

protection against what they called a “relic of the dark ages.”28 A local man, who noted that he had “never even had a popgun” in his home, told the Hood River Glacier that “announcements of such an instrument of violence as this Klan causes us to feel as though we ought to go and buy the highest powered rifles.”29 Six weeks later, the Klan organizer who “dropped without previous announcement into the midst of Hood River” apparently left just as “mysteriously.”30 One report speculated that the $10 initiation fee—about $103 today—was too much for prospective members, even if they were “at first tempted by the thrill of possible adventure”: “It is well known that money is usually tight in the Apple City until after harvest returns have begun to materialize,” observed the town’s paper.31 No matter the reason for the organizer’s sudden departure, Hood River’s brush with the Klan ended well. Many other communities in Oregon were not so fortunate, however. Throughout the state, huge flaming crosses dominated the night sky. In Roseburg, two hundred and forty miles south of Hood River, a “great cross” nearly four hundred feet tall “cast a red glare high into the heavens” as “a class of more than 100 candidates [was] received into the invisible empire” in July 1922.32 A reporter for the Roseburg News-Review appeared to be deeply affected by the “awe-inspiring” event and described the ceremony at length: Silhouetted in the bright glare the marching figures passed in an endless array like silent wraiths, bent upon some solemn mission: ever-silent, evermoving, a dauntless power, an irresistible force, moving on and on, ever beneath the cross, ever yielding to its glory and magnified by its power. On they moved like incarnate spirits endowed with cleansing fire to purge the world of corruption and evil….33

In Portland, two “fiery crosses … burned continuously” on Mount Scott, where a “picturesque ceremonial” was held in June 1923 “for the purpose of initiating 2000 new members.”34 And to the south in Eugene, more than one hundred men were welcomed into the Klan as “the radiant light shed by a huge cross of fire” illuminated the open-air ceremony.35 One of the more memorable displays, however, may have occurred in the state’s capital. While some fifteen hundred robed Klansmen participated in the “longest parade ever held in Salem,” an airplane circled the city towing an illuminated cross and a banner urging people to “Join the KKK.”36 The parade ended at the fairgrounds, where an “immense illuminated red cross burned vividly … near the grandstand.”37 Thousands of spectators huddled in the bleachers to watch the proceedings. Finally, Grand Titan V.K. Allison, a pastor from Lebanon, Oregon, addressed the crowd at 11 p.m.

Voices from within the Veil

259

Known for his powerful oratory skills, wit and humor, and ability to hold his audience’s attention for up to three hours, Allison told the crowd that the Ku Klux Klan “strives to teach the doctrine of pure Americanism.”38 The “white race is supreme,” he proclaimed, “and the Anglo-Saxons are ordained by God to be the leaders of the world and to assist inferior races.”39 In communities across Oregon, “100 percent pure Americanism” became the watchword. It is no wonder, then, that Beatrice Cannady grew alarmed when the Klan “broke out” in Portland.40

The Ku-Kluxing of Oregon Toward the end of June 1921, Cannady wrote the NAACP’s Robert Bagnall that the local branch had called a mass meeting “to appoint a committee to wait upon [Mayor George L. Baker] to prevent the holding of a street parade.”41 Two months later, she and the other members of the committee on legislation and legal redress drafted a petition to Governor Ben W. Olcott: The Portland Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, representing more than three thousand colored people in the State of Oregon, … respectfully call[s] your attention to the formation and rapidly spreading organization known as the Ku Klux Klan, under the pretense of promoters of law and order but aimed unquestionably at the persecution of individuals who may incur their disfavor. And to the end that all citizens may have a sense of security in their homes at night, and peaceable protection in their places of business and employment during the day, we humbly pray you honor to prevent in our state, any organization or public demonstration of the said notorious Ku Klux Klan under any pretext whatsoever.42

Cannady, a founder of the Portland Branch in 1914, was careful to publicize issues and events related to Portland’s African American residents. So it is likely that she furnished the Morning Oregonian with a copy of the petition in an effort to generate white support for the Branch’s request.43 The same day in which the short news item appeared in that newspaper, Governor Olcott addressed Cannady’s concerns. His reassuring words, though, would come back to haunt him. “[You] need not be apprehensive about the Ku Klux Klan becoming any very serious menace to our government,” he wrote Cannady.44 “I have a great faith in the sound sense of the people of our commonwealth, and I think our laws and our form of government require no secret associations to assist them in properly functioning for the liberty and happiness of our people.”45

260

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

The following month, Olcott received a telegram from the executive editor of the New York World asking for his “own position” regarding the Ku Klux Klan.46 In his reply, the governor acknowledged that the organization had tried to “invade the state,” but that it had “made little or no progress” thanks to “wholesome conditions in Oregon, with little discontent and a satisfied people.”47 Because the Klan had “made practically no impression on our people,” Olcott felt that “action or any particular comment [was] unnecessary.”48 Unfortunately, he was not the only one who had underestimated the scope of the KKK in Oregon. An editorial in the Morning Register suggested that most “100 per cent Americans are likely to find a better use for their leisure hours than getting out at night in ghostly party clothes and scaring the daylights out of somebody.”49 Those who did insist on “parading the streets” of Eugene and other cities “attired like a cheap ghost in a home talent melodrama” could be ignored, since the costumes were “chiefly useful for concealing the lack of furnishings in the wearer’s attic.”50 Similarly, readers in Albany, Oregon, were told: “‘White Trash’ and the like may derive some thrill of pleasure from fancied prestige gained through the wearing of the cloak, but it is a safe wager that should the ‘Klan’ enjoy a brief period of existence here its roll will lack the names of those who think and reason.”51 The state’s leading daily, the Morning Oregonian, also dismissed the growing threat that the Klan posed to civil liberties. Articles during the summer of 1921 lampooned King Kleagle Luther Powell, one of several men charged with organizing klaverns in the Pacific Northwest. Among other things, the Klan was dubbed the “Order of Sheet and Pillowcase,” the hood was referred to as a “duncecap,” and Powell himself was called the “king dodo of the comic opera Klan, Knights of the Nightshirt.”52 Nevertheless, by the spring of 1922, activities of the Invisible Empire had deeply divided Oregonians and focused unwanted national attention on the state. In particular, the abduction and near-lynching of three individuals—one African American, two white—in southern Oregon led to a grand jury investigation and an attempt to recall the Jackson County sheriff, events that dominated local and state news for months.53 Ironically, though, it was not the violence that incensed people, but the subsequent indictment of six “upstanding” white citizens for the crimes. The first nightriding incident involved Arthur Burr, a “negro bootblack” who had just completed a three-week sentence in the county jail for bootlegging. On March 14th, the evening of his release, Burr was offered a ride to Medford by two men in an automobile.54 Instead, they drove into the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains, near the California border, where a

Voices from within the Veil

261

“hooded band of inquisitors” was waiting for them.55 Burr reportedly was lifted off the ground and “hanged three times by the neck” as “revolver bullets … kept his feet doing the double shuffle while they were on the ground.”56 He finally was released and “ordered to leave the community.”57 Burr wasted no time getting out of Oregon; he fled to Modesto, in central California, and he did not look back. Three days later, Joseph F. Hale, a forty-year-old white Medford piano salesman, was kidnapped from his home by “several masked Ku Klux men” and driven to an isolated spot known as Table Rock.58 There, according to the Medford Mail Tribune, “he was threatened with death by hanging unless he dropped a suit … he had pending against a Medford citizen and promised to leave town immediately.”59 Hale finally was brought back to town unharmed, but his abductors “warned [him] that if he ever uttered a word about the doings of the night and his experience he would be killed.”60 The first incident attracted little attention, but the second caused the community to sit up and take notice. The Medford Klan denied its involvement in Hale’s near-lynching and issued a signed statement opposing “such mob action”: The Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is a regular fraternal, patriotic benevolent order standing unqualifiedly for the following principles: Pure Americanism, protection of pure womanhood, free speech and press, free public schools, restricted immigration, white supremacy and law and order and believes in and is constantly assisting all officers of the law in the performance of their duties.61

Yet it was this emphasis on “law and order” that linked the Medford Klan to another incident in the spring of 1922. In mid-April, the Medford Mail Tribune reported that for the “third time during the past few weeks self-appointed masked and armed bands were abroad creating terror … and adding much to the apprehension of the people of the valley.”62 Twenty-two-year-old Henry Johnson, initially described as black in one newspaper article, was driving home with three friends when their car broke down near Jacksonville, a former mining town near Medford.62 Seven men, all wearing “flimsy veils with eyeholes cut out,” drove up in two vehicles.63 Johnson was taken “a short distance and accused … of the chicken stealing that had been going on in Jacksonville.”64 When he denied the charges, “his captors shouted for a rope which they put around his neck and pulled taut.”65 The nightriders also accused Johnson of bootlegging and associating with white women, charges he “denied …

262

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

vehemently.”66 Like Hale, he finally was let go and advised “to speed away.”67 Thereafter, the violence was not confined to southern Oregon—but it apparently was directed solely at African Americans. A “negro bootblack” living in Roseburg barely escaped a similar “necktie party” one Saturday night in April 1922. According to a report in the Roseburg NewsReview, Klansmen were informed that Sam Jackson had “made several insulting remarks” to a young woman working at a confectionery.68 The newspaper estimated that between twenty-five and thirty Klansmen organized and “a careful search of the city was started” immediately.69 The chase for the negro occasioned a great deal of excitement. It was in progress at the same time the Klan picture and lecture were shown and heard at the Antlers theatre. Many people watched the Klansmen as they formed in regular military formation and as they went about the task of searching out the negro’s hiding place. They were on the street for several hours in full regalia.70

Jackson managed to stay hidden until the following morning. When he finally dared to reappear, he “was informed that unless he left town before night … he would be taken in hand by local Klansmen and escorted out of the city in no gentle manner.”71 He must have “heeded the advice” because the News-Review reported that he had not been seen since then.72 Jackson was lucky. Klansmen and their guests had attended a talk earlier that night by one of the state’s most popular lecturers, former Portland minister Reuben H. Sawyer.73 He “delivered a very forceful address,” reported the paper, “and the showing of the film ‘The Face at Your Window’ only made more vivid some of the startling statements which he presented.”74 In fact, both Sawyer and the film, which was used as a recruiting tool, proved to be so popular that they were held over for a second night.75 Adding to the excitement was the report that two Klansmen “in regalia paraded the streets for about two hours … on horseback advertising the Ku Klux Klan picture.”76 Considering the number of atrocities being committed by Klan members in the South—at least sixty-three lynchings in 1921 alone—the incidents in Roseburg and Medford “were quite tame.”77 As historian Jeff LaLande has observed, “Despite their undeniably violent nature, no one died or suffered permanent physical injury.”78 The goal was not to maim or kill their victims; instead, he argues that the nightriders had a very different agenda: “The incidents were meant by their perpetrators to be seen as acts of moral regulation taken to benefit the community.”79 Certainly, a preoccupation with divorce, adultery, bootlegging, and other

Voices from within the Veil

263

perceived moral lapses guided Klan rhetoric and action in the 1920s. But this interpretation overlooks a crucial aspect of the Klan’s presence in Oregon: intimidation. Arthur Burr may not have been physically harmed, but the bootblack bore the psychological scars of the terrifying event. Even the Oregon Daily Journal observed that his experiences were “indelibly … imprinted on his memory.”80 Although the Invisible Empire officially denied a program of race antipathy, a former Oregon Klansman wrote in the Portland Telegram that he became “disillusioned by the endless repetition of mob excitement, fanning of race hatred and religious prejudice, [and] mouthings of obscenity and vulgarity” during the meetings.81 Another ex-Klansman wrote that the organization was “engaged in an evil propaganda in promoting unwarranted religious and racial hatred against Jews, Roman Catholics, negroes, and foreign-born American citizens.”82 Cannady contested the organization’s ability to exclude certain individuals. “Where does the Ku Klux Klan get its super-power to prescribe the place of Negro Americans in their own country?” she asked in one editorial.83 “What is its standard of citizenship?”84 According to the application for membership in Luther Powell Klan No. 1, the Portland chapter of the KKK, citizenship was defined as white and male.85 Prospective Klansman were required to sign a statement affirming their eligibility in the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan: I, the undersigned, a native born, true and loyal citizen of the United States of America, being a white male Gentile person of temperate habits, sound in mind and a believer in the tenets of the Christian religion, the maintenance of White Supremacy and the principles of a ‘pure Americanism,’ do most respectfully apply for membership in the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.86

Despite Governor Ben Olcott’s earlier assurance to Cannady and other members of the Portland NAACP, the Klan had become a force to be reckoned with in Oregon.

Oregon Needs No Masked Night Riders With the grand jury investigation into the near-lynchings in southern Oregon dominating the news, Governor Olcott issued an official proclamation on 13 May 1922. “Dangerous forces are insidiously gaining a foothold in Oregon,” he wrote.87 “In the guise of a secret society, parading under the name of the Ku Klux Klan, these forces are endeavoring to usurp the reins of government, are stirring up fanaticism,

264

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

race hatred, religious prejudice and all of those evil influences which tend toward factional strife and civil terror.”88 But, he counseled, “The true spirit of Americanism resents bigotry, abhors secret machinations and terrorism and demands that those who speak for and in her cause speak openly, with their faces to the sun.”89 To that end, the governor called on the state’s officials to “prevent further outrages and maraudings such as have occurred in some of our own communities.”90 The official proclamation may have temporarily reassured the state’s two thousand black citizens, but race hatred divided Oregon communities again the following year. The Morning Enterprise reported that Perry Ellis, owner of an auto washing business in Oregon City, was the victim of a “midnight lynching party” in June 1923.91 Ellis said he had received a late-night phone call from an individual who stated his wagon had broken down on the outskirts of town. When Ellis arrived on horseback, he was surrounded by an armed “group of … men, dressed in white robes and hoods,” who ordered him to dismount.92 According to the newspaper, he was “blindfolded, threatened with being shot full of holes if he tried to get away, and driven … 30 miles further out into the country.”93 There, Ellis was told “that if he did not tell the truth about certain escapades with white girls” he would be hung.94 His captors tried to persuade him to talk by placing “a noose about his neck” and slinging “the free end of the rope … over a convenient limb of a tree,” but the efforts “failed to bring other than reiterations of innocence from the black man, and even when they tightened up the manila, he says that he could make them no confessions of intimacy with young girls.”95 At that point, Ellis said the “hooded gang” removed his blindfold, pointed at a nearby lake, and told him that was where they threw “the bodies of their victims.”96 His captors then debated whether to free him, or carry out “a sterilization operation.”97 The “latter plan, while commenced, was not carried out, and Ellis was told that if he would leave Oregon City … they would not harm him physically.”98 Finally, at dawn, Ellis was returned to the outskirts of the city. The Morning Enterprise article was reprinted without comment on the front page of The Advocate.99 But two weeks later, Cannady made the following observations: “Regardless of the fact that many colored people have been run away from their homes and worldly possessions, beaten, lynched and murdered by the Ku Klux Klan,” and despite the fact that “a colored man in Oregon City was recently beaten, strung up and when released run out of town,” she wrote that “some colored ‘nuts’ are still heard to say that the ‘k.k.k. ain’t after us.’”100

Voices from within the Veil

265

While The Advocate urged its three thousand readers—both black and white—to pay attention to the growing threat posed by the Klan, an interesting conversation was taking place in Oregon City.101 The Morning Enterprise reported that Perry Ellis had “made good his promise” to leave for Tacoma, Washington, despite Sheriff William J. Wilson’s assurances that his departure was unnecessary.102 One week later, the city council held a special Friday afternoon session to discuss the incident. By a threeto-two vote, a resolution was passed condemning the actions of the “perpetrators” who deprived Ellis of his Constitutional rights by threatening him “with death” and forcing him “to flee from, and to live outside our city and community.”103 The resolution stated that the “outrage” had “disgraced” Oregon City as well as the entire state, and noted that the community would remain disgraced “until the perpetrators” were “brought to Justice to answer for their crime.”104 A copy of the resolution was sent to the new governor, Walter M. Pierce, and county law enforcement officials, who were asked to help “run down, discover and prosecute all the un-American cowards who took part before, at, or after the fact in the outrage, to the end that such acts shall cease forever in our midst.”105 Pierce said his office was ready to “aid in enforcement of all Oregon laws,” but noted that “it is not our purpose nor our policy to tamper with local affairs unless complaint is made that local officers have failed in their duty or until they ask for aid from the state.”106 One year later, however, Pierce was forced to intervene when the mutilated body of an African American man was discovered near the small coastal town of Marshfield.107 “Those who committed this dastardly crime must be apprehended and properly tried,” he wrote the sheriff and district attorney.108 “Do everything in your power to secure evidence against the guilty ones.”109 Even though it was never proven, members of the Portland NAACP Branch were convinced that the Klan was involved in the attack on Timothy Pettis in the summer of 1924. In fact, they wrote James Weldon Johnson that “Marshfield is infested with the Ku Klux Klan and we are of the opinion, [as are] the colored people who live in Marshfield, that all efforts are being made to cover up the crime.”110 Some of the area’s white residents may have had their suspicions, too. Eight months earlier, a public forum was held in the neighboring community of North Bend to discuss whether the Ku Klux Klan was a “menace or a blessing.”111 The Coos Bay Times reported that “it was the consensus of opinion that the organization is a menace to society, more than a blessing, although the Klan had several exponents.”112 A minister was among those who spoke that night. He addressed the “three points against which [the Klan] directs its attack”: Roman Catholics, Jews, and the “negro

266

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

problem.”113 Regarding the latter, he said it “is something that America has to face, realizing that the negro is not in America of his own will, but was brought here forcibly by the white man.”114 Although the Marshfield investigation started well, rumors soon replaced leads and the search for clues all but ended two weeks later. A coroner’s jury was impaneled to consider evidence within hours of the discovery of the body. The Coos Bay Times reported that “eight or ten colored people attended the inquest and one, [Gaston] Campbell, took an active part toward the end of the hearing, bringing out several important points not before touched upon.”115 Campbell asked the undertaker “point blank” whether Pettis “had been the victim of physical mutilation at the hands of someone,” either “before or after death.”116 According to the undertaker, the “fastened condition of the dead man’s underclothing and outer garments was such as to indicate … beyond any doubt” that Pettis had been “the victim of a heinous crime.”117 Beatrice Cannady, along with other members of the Portland Branch, closely monitored developments in the case. She reprinted the initial Coos Bay Times article about the murder to keep readers apprised of the realities of racism elsewhere in Oregon.118 Furthermore, she used The Advocate to applaud Campbell’s bravery and to encourage his efforts to uncover the truth about the crime: G.L. Campbell is standing upon his rights as an American citizen and is not fleeing from Marshfield, Oregon, where a cowardly mob of whites [has] brutally murdered a colored man. But he is manly, unafraid, pleading for the rights of his race. Campbell is one man in a thousand who would do what he is doing, and is deserving of great praise for his brave stand in the case, almost single-handed and alone, against the mob spirit which seems to dominate Marshfield.119

Conversely, Cannady criticized—and shamed—the government for failing to protect its citizens: “Isn’t it about time for the Federal government to speak or step out against the many brutal murders, whippings, intimidations and the branding of peaceful, law-abiding citizens by mobs, which are being done in many parts of the country?”120 In many ways, these editorial comments are reminiscent of those issued by editors of the black press following Reconstruction. Like her predecessors, Cannady continually called attention to the absence of civil rights and liberties and urged the government to take action to stop atrocities committed against its African American citizens in order to preserve peace in the country. In this single sentence, Cannady also pointed to the variety of tactics used by the Klan to oppress African

Voices from within the Veil

267

Americans, and underscored the longevity of its campaign. Also interesting is her comment about branding, which may have been an oblique reminder of the attack on Elise Reynolds in the fall of 1921. According to the Portland Telegram, police were “trying to determine whether the attack” on the twenty-six-year-old Portland woman “was due to robbery, an effort by residents of the district to drive out the negro family, or to the Ku Klux Klan.”121 A large “K” reportedly was etched on her cheek with acid while she was unconscious, and a “threatening note signed ‘KKK’” was left on the door by the two assailants.122 As was the case in Medford and other sites of violence directed at African Americans, the Klan disavowed any knowledge of the attack. Bragg Calloway, Oregon’s first kleagle, told the Telegram, “We do not countenance outrages. We will gladly co-operate with the authorities to run down the perpetrator of this crime and bring him to justice.”123 But in Oregon, as across the nation, justice was illusory in crimes committed against African Americans. Governor Pierce demanded that Marshfield’s law enforcement officers do everything “in their power to bring to justice the murderers of Timothy Pettis.”124 However, the district attorney, sheriff, and deputy sheriff all were out of town during much of the brief investigation, prompting the newspaper to observe that the “sheriff’s office has not been able to investigate much.”125 Area residents formulated their own ideas about the crime. Following the coroner’s inquest, the Coos Bay Times reported that the “general theory, especially among the colored folk, is that Pettis was the victim of a gang.”126 The Portland NAACP Branch, frustrated with the pace of the investigation, sent a telegram to New York: “Colored war veteran mysteriously disappeared July sixth, recovered week later from Coos Bay; testicles missing; crime apparently being covered; no clue found; outside assistance needed: send investigator.”127 The next day, NAACP Secretary James Weldon Johnson wired his reply: “Case cited one which state legal machinery should handle. If state does not take prompt action communicate with us giving full details.”128 The investigation continued, but eyewitness accounts of Pettis’ disappearance varied widely. During the inquiry, the owner of the café where Pettis was last seen testified that Pettis and a black friend “were getting noisy” and bothering other customers, including sailors on liberty from the destroyer U.S.S. Shirk.129 The men left, but the sailors said Pettis returned with a knife. They “rushed the man out of the place” and two police officers gave chase, only to lose Pettis in the dark.130 The sailors testified that they returned to their ship at midnight and “disclaimed all knowledge of what happened to T.F. Pettis after he left” the café.131

268

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

But Pettis’ friend, Joseph Hartello, described a different scenario. He testified that they had talked with the sailors earlier in the evening at a pool hall, where Hartello recognized a man with whom he had served during World War I. The men were invited to join the sailors at the local café and “were having a good time” until the proprietor ordered Pettis to leave.132 When the owner began pushing Pettis, a local janitor, Hartello said that he feared there would be trouble. He went in search of help and returned with a mutual friend, only to discover that Pettis already had been chased off. Hartello testified that they could not find Pettis and so returned to the café. Soon after, the policemen arrived and Hartello reported hearing one of them say, “I guess the black fellow will leave town now—him and a few others like him.”133 The Portland NAACP Branch sent copies of the Coos Bay Times along with a progress report to the national office. “Our Branch has called on the Governor of the State, Walter M. Pierce, asking that he offer a reward for the apprehension of the guilty parties,” wrote the Branch’s secretary to James Weldon Johnson.134 Also have asked him for a special investigator on that case. He would not consent to offer a reward but states he has an investigator working on the case. We are of the opinion since nothing has been reported from this source that he has not done anything of the kind.135

In early August, the local newspaper stated that the county court had offered a five-hundred-dollar reward—the equivalent of $6,000 today—to anyone with “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons allegedly to have mutilated and murdered Timothy Pettis.”136 In addition, the small black community in Marshfield managed to raise one-hundred dollars—about $1,200 today—which was added to the court’s offer.137 But the Portland Branch remained dissatisfied with local efforts to solve the crime. Its status report noted that “nothing will be done in the case unless from outside sources” and hinted that if a “white investigator” were to come “on the scene,” he might be able to “solve the mystery.”138 Unfortunately, the national office was unable to offer assistance. “I wish that I could give you more encouraging information relative to the employment of detectives,” replied Walter F. White, assistant secretary of the NAACP. “At various times in the history of the Association we have employed detective agencies including the Burns, the Pinkerton, and others. On every occasion we were forced to pay a considerable sum and on no one of the occasions did we receive anything like adequate or satisfactory returns.”139 Lacking the funds to hire its own detective, the Portland Branch apparently took a “wait and see” attitude

Voices from within the Veil

269

with the Marshfield investigation. But by September, two months after the murder, the Coos Bay Times had stopped printing updates. In its annual report to the national office, the Branch noted that it had investigated the “brutal murder … as far as physical power could act.”140 Evidently, the murder of Timothy Pettis never was solved.141

A Decade of Prejudice, Segregation, and Violence It is tempting to view the Roaring Twenties through rose-colored glasses. Larger-than-life images of Babe Ruth swatting a home run or “Lucky Lindy” piloting his plane across the Atlantic crowd out ugly photographs of hooded men marching in cities across the United States. But, as Beatrice Cannady observed in January 1924, “The Ku Klux Klan are still scrapping here as well as elsewhere.”142 One couple who moved to Portland in 1929 recalled, “Everybody knew [that] in every town you lived in … there were groups” of the KKK.143 Another man said without hesitation: “Oregon was a Klan state.”144 Between fifteen thousand and forty-five thousand white men took the oath of allegiance during the turbulent decade.145 By the end of 1923, Oregon Voter reported that there were fifty-eight chartered klaverns in the state; seven more had provisional charters.146 A few courageous individuals spoke out against the Klan during the 1920s. In Springfield, Oregon, for example, more than one hundred businessmen signed a petition urging Governor Olcott to use his “utmost powers … to promptly suppress the activities of this anarchistic gang” acting outside the law.147 Similarly, in Roseburg, where the reported four hundred-foot-tall cross burned on a hillside in the summer of 1922, a resolution was drafted by the congregation of Methodist Episcopal Church.148 “The congregation views with alarm the revival of the Klan in the light of its criminal history, which consists of whippings, outrage and murder,” noted the document.149 A copy of the resolution was sent to Congressman Willis C. Hawley, who was asked “to thoroughly investigate the recent activities and alleged crimes of the Ku Klux Klan, and to … support … any and all legislation looking to the suppression of this infamous order.”150 Newspapers, however, were less critical of the Klan and its activities, leading some editors to castigate their peers.151 In particular, the Capital Journal in Salem took its Portland counterparts to task for their silence during the bitter 1922 political campaign, which included a controversial compulsory school initiative designed to eliminate Catholic schools and a Klan-backed candidate for governor.152

270

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924 Every newspaper in Portland will admit that the idea of invisible empire in a republic and the control of government by secret societies is a menace to democracy, yet not a word of protest appears in any of them. As a result of this shameful conspiracy of silence by the press, the public schools and city and county governments of the metropolis have been turned over to invisible exploiters whose identity is a matter of conjecture.153

For some editors, the fear of lost ad revenue may have been a factor in the “conspiracy of silence.” Fred L. Gifford, exalted cyclops of the Portland klavern, reportedly “launched advertising boycotts against newspapers that offended him and attacked their editors as ‘Catholic hirelings.’”154 Twenty years later, Oregon Voter recalled: “Wholesale cancellation of advertising, midnight intimidation by telephone with threats to personal safety of family, and gross slanders of character, were employed against us and against the few publications which denounced the Klan.”155 Beatrice Cannady and her family appear to have fared surprisingly well, given her campaign for better race relations during the 1920s. She gave dozens of talks to civic and religious groups as well as white high school and college students during that decade, yet documentary evidence suggests the Klan tried to interfere on only one occasion.156 In 1923, Cannady was invited to speak to students at a summer Bible school in Newberg, Oregon, on the subject of race relations. The matter of asking Mrs. Cannady to come had been discussed in teachers’ meeting and unanimously approved but one Judas in the group saw fit to report the invitation to the Ku Klux Klan, which at that time was very strong in the city. As a result many of the pupils heard conversations in their homes criticising the action of the teachers of the school in extending the invitation to Mrs. Cannady, advocating rudeness and unresponsiveness to her message, and attempting to arouse in her hearers a spirit of hatred, prejudice and antagonism. … On the morning Mrs. Cannady was to speak, the building … was surrounded by the Ku Klux Klan cohorts and handbills … were passed out to the pupils on the playgrounds: ‘ATTENTION! WE ARE WATCHING YOU! … The Speaker is a well known editor of a Colored Newspaper. Fellow citizens: If you believe that your children should associate and marry Hindus, Chinese and Negroes attend this lecture. If you attend your name will be read from the housetops.’157

School staff worried about the editor’s safety, but the event apparently went as planned. Some years later, Alice Handsaker, the school’s principal, recalled, “I am sure that many Ku Klux Klan parents of that

Voices from within the Veil

271

community had much ‘explaining’ to do that night for under Mrs. Cannady’s persuasive eloquence their children had seen the light.”158 Despite this positive outcome, the acts of violence committed against black Oregonians during the early 1920s are indicative of a few of the challenges that they faced as a minority population in the state. In addition, Klan rhetoric emphasizing white supremacy would be considered hate speech by current standards and thus another form of violence directed at African Americans. Scholars describe the “mental or emotional distress” that such language causes, as well as the fact that it denies individuals “a sense of dignity, resulting in loss of self-esteem, personal security, and sense of community membership.”159 Further, racial insults communicate “the message that distinctions of race are distinctions of merit, dignity, status, and personhood.”160 That was clearly the case in Oregon, where klavern efforts to keep Oregon “pure” added to African Americans’ sense of isolation and alienation. The Ku Klux Klan mostly disappeared from Oregon by the late 1920s. Nevertheless, its legacy still weighed on people’s minds. In 1929, Cannady told a white friend: At first I thought it a frightful menace but I am coming to believe that its influence is waning. I am saddened when I think of its unintelligent, unAmerican attitude. Its presence and its activities must be taken into account, but I feel no special bitterness towards its members as I have found the same spirit of intolerance amongst the white people who are outside of the Klan; the only difference is that the Klan is organized.161

That Cannady was able to “turn the other cheek” speaks volumes about the editor’s outlook on life and devotion to the Bahá’í Faith. But scholars have done a disservice to her and her contemporaries by writing incomplete—and even erroneous—accounts of Oregon’s racist past. These omissions have erased the work that people like Beatrice Morrow Cannady did to promote goodwill and interracial understanding in Portland, and Oregon generally, in the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition, this general disregard for a significant piece of the state’s history perpetuates the myth that African Americans were inconsequential until World War II, when thousands of individuals moved to the state in search of better job opportunities. But black Oregonians worked hard during the early 1900s to put down roots and claim their right to coexist equally with white Oregonians. “As citizens,” wrote Cannady, “colored people deserve all the rights and privileges and the protection as any other citizen has.”162 And during the 1920s, especially, that entailed

272

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

the right to live and work absent fear—despite the Ku Klux Klan’s best efforts to keep black Oregonians behind the veil.

Notes 1

“Race Prejudice in Oregon,” The (Portland, Ore.) Advocate, January 16, 1932, 2. Minor typographical errors and a misspelling were corrected to improve readability and eliminate the use of “sic,” which can become distracting. The content was not changed in the process. 2 The Advocate was founded by Edward Cannady, whom Beatrice Morrow married in June 1912, and nine of his colleagues in September 1903. It was published until about 1936. After the couple married, she assumed most of the responsibility for the newspaper and wrote feature articles and editorials, sold advertising, collected overdue accounts, and occasionally set the type. She became publisher in 1930 after the couple divorced. Little is known about Edward Cannady. According to a short obituary, he was born in Texas on November 27, 1867 and “gained a wide reputation for his memory when he served in the hat-check room of the Portland hotel and could handle as many as 300 hats, returning each to its rightful owner, without resorting to the use of hat checks.” He died July 26, 1941, at the age of 73. “Edward Cannady,” (Portland) Oregonian, July 30, 1941, sec. 1, 8. Another brief biographical sketch contains different, and conflicting, information. It states that Edward was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, on 27 November 1877—ten years later—and attended public schools in Jefferson City and high school in St. Louis. Also, the write-up notes that he was in the “money broker business” in Portland between 1904 and 1912. See Frank Lincoln Mather, ed., Who’s Who of the Colored Race: A General Biographical Dictionary of Men and Women of African Descent (Chicago, n.p.: 1915), 59. Another article notes that Cannady worked at the Ryan Hotel in St. Paul, Minnesota, and also assisted with the Appeal: A National Afro-American Newspaper in that city. See “Editor Impressed with Portland,” The Advocate, June 16, 1928, 2. For more about the Portland Hotel, see G. Douglas Nicoll, “The Rise and Fall of the Portland Hotel,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 99 (Fall 1998), 298-335. 3 Beatrice Morrow was born on January 9, 1889 in Littig, Texas. She attended school near Austin and reportedly graduated from Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, in 1908. She taught school briefly in Louisiana and Oklahoma, but her passion was voice and piano, which she studied at the University of Chicago. Apparently, her decision to leave Illinois in the spring of 1912 and move to Portland was inspired by a long-distance relationship with Edward Cannady. According to one account, the couple had never seen each other but “through friends had been intrigued to exchange letters purely platonic.” See Clifford L. Miller, “‘I Dress to Vamp the Judge’ So Says Mrs. E.D. Cannady, an Attorney of Portland, Oregon, Who Came Here As a Delegate to the Pan-African Congress,” New York Amsterdam News, August 27, 1927, 3, reprinted in The Advocate, September 10, 1927, 1. For biographical details, see Millie R. Trumbull, “A

Voices from within the Veil

273

Modern Joan of Arc,” The Advocate, Illustrated Feature Section, September 28, 1929, 2, and Mather, 59. 4 “Some of the Joys of Being Colored in Portland,” The Advocate, December 8, 1928, 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. For information about theater discrimination in other states, see, for example, The Advocate, May 28, 1927, 2. 10 Several historical and scholarly sources list Cannady as the first African American woman lawyer in Oregon. See, for example, “First Colored Woman Lawyer in Northwest,” (Portland) Oregon Daily Journal, June 5, 1922, 6, and “Social Progress,” The Crisis, November 1921, 37. But the Oregon State Bar has no record of Cannady ever passing the Bar exam, despite taking it on five occasions. Nevertheless, she represented herself as an attorney in criminal and probate proceedings until the OSB informed her that she must desist or face criminal proceedings. Meeting of the Board of Governors of the Oregon State Bar, December 21, 1935, Oregon State Bar, Salem, Oregon. For some discussion of her court cases in The Advocate, see, for example, December 10, 1927, 4; “Trimble Freed,” December 17, 1927, 1; “Officer Beats Prisoner,” September 7, 1929, 1; July 30, 1932, 1. Also see Beatrice Cannady to Robert Bagnall, April 13, 1926, NAACP Portland Branch files for 1914-1955, Mss 2004-2, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society [hereafter NAACP Portland Branch files]. 11 This text appears on a postcard of the ballroom. For the scanned image, see PdxHistory.com, http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/multnomahhotel.html. 12 By the Waters of Minnetonka was composed by Thurlow Lieurance, former dean of the Wichita State University School of Music in Kansas. See Thurlow Lieurance Memorial Music Library, Wichita State University Online, http://library.wichita.edu/music/thurlow_lieurance.htm. 13 “Defeat John Hunt Hendrickson,” The Advocate, October 30, 1926, 1. 14 Trumbull, “A Modern Joan of Arc.” 15 Just fifteen hundred African Americans, or approximately 0.6 percent of the total population of 258,288, lived in the state’s largest city by 1920; only 2,144 African Americans lived in the entire state (out of a total population of 783, 389). Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920, vol. II, General Report & Analytical Table (Washington, D.C., United States Government Printing Office, 1922), Table 13, 47. Regarding housing, see, for example, “The NAACP,” The Advocate, October 5, 1929, 2; “Vandals Hit Dwelling of Negro M.D.,” Oregon Daily Journal, April 24, 1931, 1; “Sue to Oust Negro Owner; White Do Not Want Colored in District; Go to Court to Dispossess Mrs. Tindall,” The Advocate, January 16, 1932, 2. 16 Daniel G. Hill to the Harmon Foundation, Inc., August 30, 1929, Beatrice Cannady Scrapbook, 1929-1936, Mf 160, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society, 27. Hereafter cited as Cannady Scrapbook.

274 17

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Ben W. Olcott, “America Adrift,” in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference of Governors of the States of the Union, held at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, December 14-16, 1922 (n.p.), 138. For a draft of his remarks, see the Ben W. Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8/General Correspondence, AX 81, Special Collections and University Archives, University of Oregon [hereafter Olcott Scrapbook with appropriate volume information]. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Waldo Roberts, “The Ku-Kluxing of Oregon,” Outlook, March 14, 1923, 491. 21 See, for example, Dorothy O. Johansen, Empire of the Columbia: A History of the Pacific Northwest, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1967); Eckard Vance Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon: Its Character and Program” (M.A. thesis, University of Oregon, 1959); David A. Horowitz, “Order, Solidarity, and Vigilance: The Ku Klux Klan in La Grande, Oregon,” in The Invisible Empire in the West: Toward a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s, ed. Shawn Lay (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 185-215; Horowitz, “The ‘Cross of Culture’: La Grande, Oregon, in the 1920s,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 93 (Summer 1992), 147-67. 22 For information about the controversial school bill debate, which was ultimately decided by the United States Supreme Court in 1925, see, for example, Lawrence J. Saalfeld, Forces of Prejudice in Oregon, 1920-1925 (Portland, Ore.: University of Portland Press, 1984); Jane W. Bryant, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Oregon Compulsory School Bill of 1922” (M.A. thesis, Reed College, n.d.); Donald L. Zelman, “Oregon’s Compulsory Education Bill of 1922” (M.A. thesis, University of Oregon, 1964); and M. Paul Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy, 1922-1925,” Pacific Historical Review, 37 (August 1968), 327-41. Donations to churches and destitute women and children were part of the Klan’s efforts to regulate morality and protect pure womanhood. For examples of activities in Oregon, see, for example, “‘K.K.K.’ in Full Regalia Again Visit Pastor,” Medford (Ore.) Mail Tribune, March 21, 1922, 5; “Ku Klux Klan on Visit to the Church; White Robed Visitors Appeared at M.E. Edifice and Left Sum of Money,” (Astoria, Ore.) Morning Astorian, March 14, 1922, 3; “Klansmen Carry Money to Y.M.C.A.,” Corvallis (Ore.) Gazette-Times, October 14, 1922, 1; “Clansmen Present Purse; Hooded Men Present Purse to Salvation Army,” (Eugene, Ore.) Morning Register, March 22, 1922, 3; “Klansmen Feed Needy; Food from Banquet Is Given to Poor,” Morning Register, July 1, 1924, 8. 23 Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915-1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 200. Also see Eckard V. Toy, “Robe and Gown: The Ku Klux Klan in Eugene, Oregon, during the 1920s,” in The Invisible Empire in the West, 155, and 158, 164, and 171. 24 McLagan comes closest to documenting the black experience during the 1920s. She provides brief descriptions of the KKK’s actions in Marshfield and Medford, but does not fully explore reactions in the white press, the lackluster investigation, interplay between Cannady and the local and national NAACP, or the connection between the Klan, power, and race. Further, factual and interpretive errors mar the

Voices from within the Veil

275

discussion. See Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise: History of Blacks in Oregon, 1778-1940 (Portland, Ore.: The Georgian Press Company, 1980), 135-40. 25 Copies of The Advocate prior to May 1923 appear to be lost to historians. I have no doubt that there were many more articles and editorials about the Oregon Klan in the newspaper during 1921 and 1922. 26 “Ku Klux Klan Makes Appearance,” Hood River (Ore.) Glacier, August 4, 1921, 7. 27 “The Broadside of Ridicule,” Hood River Glacier, August 11, 1921, 2. 28 “Ku Klux Klan Not Wanted Here,” Hood River Glacier, August 11, 1921, 4. 29 Ibid. 30 “Klan Returns to Whang Doodle Land,” Hood River Glacier, August 29, 1921, 4. 31 Ibid. The Inflation Calculator, http://www.westegg.com/inflation. 32 “Ku Klux Klan Stages Monster Spectacle in Receiving Their Charter; More than a Thousand Klansmen Gather Beneath a Gigantic Firey Cross While Charter Is Presented to Umpqua Klan—More than One Hundred Initiated,” Roseburg (Ore.) News-Review, July 17, 1922, 1. Apparently, combustible materials were used to fabricate the shape of a huge cross on the steep hillside. When ignited, the flames could be seen for miles. 33 Ibid. A typographical error was corrected. 34 “15,000 Klansmen Participate in Night Ceremony,” Oregon Daily Journal, June 12, 1923, 2. 35 “Klansmen Hold Their Ceremonial in Open Air; Class Initiated on Top of Emerald Heights,” Morning Register, July 18, 1922, 8. The Klan was still active in Eugene two years later. For more about the klavern’s activities, see, for example, the following in the Morning Register: “Klansmen to Parade; Council Grants Permission for Affair Saturday,” June 24, 1924, 3; “Klan to Hold Initiation; Several Hundred Will Be Taken in Saturday,” June 25, 1924, 8; “Klan Initiation Here Will Bring Thousands; Eugene to Be Mecca for Ku Klux Tomorrow,” June 27, 1924, 6; parade advertisements, June 27, 1924, 7; “Caravans Here Today; At Least Eight Coming for Klan Celebration,” June 28, 1924, 5; “Klan Initiates Men before Large Crowd; Parade through Streets Precedes Ceremony,” June 29, 1924, 4; “Chief of Police Thanks Citizens of Eugene,” July 1, 1924, 5. Also see the parade advertisements in the Eugene (Ore.) Daily Guard, June 27, 1924, 8. For more about the Eugene Klan, see Toy, “Robe and Gown,” 155, and 158, 164, and 171. 36 “Ku Klux Klan Parades City and Initiates; Thousands of Spectators Line Streets As White-Robed Marchers Pass in Vari-Colored Uniforms,” (Salem) Oregon Statesman, November 11, 1923, 1. 37 Ibid, 3. 38 “Ku Klux Klan Parades City and Initiates,” 1. For one discussion of Allison’s “fame as an orator,” see “Allison Upholds KKK,” Tillamook (Ore.) Headlight, January 4, 1924, 5. Allison delivered a three-hour speech in Klamath Falls the day before he addressed the Salem crowd. See “Ku Klux Klan Parades City and Initiates,” 3. 39 Ibid, 1, 3.

276 40

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Beatrice Cannady to Robert W. Bagnall, June 21, 1921, NAACP Portland Branch files. 41 Ibid. 42 Petition from the Portland Branch Committee on Legislation and Legal Redress to Oregon Governor Ben W. Olcott, August 18, 1921, copy in the NAACP Portland Branch files. The committee consisted of Cannady, E.W. Agee, and Oliver S. Thomas. 43 See “Negroes Protest Klan; Governor Olcott Asked to Prevent Organization in Oregon,” Morning Oregonian, August 20, 1921, 9. 44 Ben W. Olcott to Beatrice Cannady, 20 August 1921, copy in the NAACP Portland Branch files. 45 Ibid. She sent a copy of the petition, Olcott’s reply, and possibly the Morning Oregonian article, to The Crisis with the following note: “It may be of interest to the readers of The Crisis to know something of what the colored people of the State of Oregon are doing to handicap the efforts of the Ku Klux Klan in getting a foot hold in the state.” See Beatrice Cannady to W.E.B. Du Bois, August 24 , 1921, NAACP Portland Branch files. Nothing was located in The Crisis during September-December 1921. 46 For a typewritten copy of the telegram [September 22, 1921], see the Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8. Also see “Many Governors Denounce Klan; Georgia Official Lone Defender,” New York World, September 14, 1921, 1. The World, concerned about “the racial prejudices and passions excited by” the Klan, as well as its “secret, oath-bound operations,” conducted a nationwide investigation of the Klan over the course of three months. The Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé, which began running September 7, 1921, was initiated by Henry P. Fry, a former Klan kleagle who withdrew from the organization after five months and turned over all of his information to the newspaper. Fry assisted with the investigation and reportedly wrote a number of articles for the paper. The following year, his book, The Modern Ku Klux Klan, was published by Small, Maynard & Co. of Boston. The Capital Journal in Salem, Oregon—“the ONLY NEWSPAPER IN OREGON having the rights of publication”—reprinted a chapter a day beginning July 15, 1922. See the advertisement for the series in the Capital Journal, July 15, 1922, 6. In 1925, Cannady observed that Fry had “stepped into the limelight with some interesting scenes from inside the … Ku Klux Klan.” See The Advocate, June 13, 1925, 4. 47 For a typewritten copy of Olcott’s reply [n.d.], see the Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8. Olcott’s reply was not included in the New York World’s article. However, the paper did print remarks from the governors of Alabama, North Dakota, Kansas, Minnesota, Maine, Utah, Louisiana, Nebraska, West Virginia, and Nevada. See “Many Governors Denounce Klan,” 1, 2. 48 Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8. 49 “The Ku Klux Klan,” Morning Register, August 7, 1921, 10. 50 Ibid. 51 “Ten Dollars, Please,” (Albany, Ore.) Semi-Weekly Democrat, August 16, 1921 [misprinted as August 13], 2. A spelling error was corrected. 52 See “Nightshirt Knight Faces Grand Jury; King Kleagle on Carpet for Rynerson Letter,” Morning Oregonian, August 5, 1921, 14. Also see “Klan Claims 1000

Voices from within the Veil

277

Members in State; King Kleagle Says Perhaps 2000 in Oregon Belong,” Morning Oregonian, August 17, 1921, 11; “Old King Kleagle Abandons Oregon,” Sunday Oregonian, August 28, 1921, 16; “Klan Chief Leaves; Business Bad Here; Few $10 Donations Discourage Nightshirt Knights,” Morning Oregonian, September 23, 1921, 10. 53 Olcott wrote Sheriff C.E. Terrill, asking for details about the activities of the “KKK in our section.” Terrill replied that he regarded the organization as a “menace to public welfare. Everybody is on their toes looking for something to happen. There have been three outrages committed without justification, yet the Ku Klux Klan claim they had nothing to do with it, yet they do nothing to help the officials catch the guilty parties.” See the typed copy of the letter from Terrill to Ben W. Olcott, May 14, 1922, Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8. For more about the investigation, see, for example, “Prosecute Night Mobs, Says Olcott; Attorney General Van Winkle Ordered to Act in Jackson County,” OregonDaily Journal, July 6, 1922, 1; “Move against Klan in Jackson County Made by Governor,” Oregon Statesman, July 7, 1922, 6. For coverage of the recall, see, for example, “Recall of Sheriff Charles E. Terrill Demanded,” (Medford, Ore.) Clarion, June 23, 1922, 1; “Why a Recall?” Medford (Ore.) Mail Tribune, June 26, 1922, 4; and “Recall Vote Ordered by County Cl’k,” Medford Mail Tribune, July 11, 1922, 1. 54 Newspaper accounts list several different dates: March 1, March 13, and March 14. I have chosen to use March 14, which was the date initially reported by the local newspaper, the Medford Mail Tribune. 55 “Bootblack to Tell How He Was Hanged; Negro Who Was Run out of Medford, after Being Strung up, Is Called by Jurors,” Oregon Daily Journal, July 26, 1922, 1. 56 Ibid. 57 “Move against Klan in Jackson County Made by Governor,” Oregon Statesman, July 7, 1922, 6. 58 “Local Citizen Victim of Ku Klux Klan; J.F. Hale Is Given Neck Tie Party,” Medford Mail Tribune, March 18, 1922, 1. According to the 1920 Census, Hale, thirty-eight, and his father were born in Tennessee. His mother’s birthplace was listed as unknown. He had two sons: J [initial only], twelve, and William, one [?]. Hale is described as a widower; his wife may have died due to complications from childbirth. HeritageQuest Online, Fourteenth Census of the United States: 1920Population, Jackson County, Oregon [hereafter referred to by Census year and county/state]. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid, 6. 61 “Ku Klux K. Denies Hand in Outrage; Imperial Kleagles Make Official Statement Declaring Organization against All Violence—Money Presented to Pastor of Methodist Church Sunday Morning,” Medford Mail Tribune, March 20, 1922, 1. Donations to churches and destitute women and children were part of the Klan’s efforts to regulate morality and protect pure womanhood. For examples of activities in Oregon, see, for example, “‘K.K.K.’ in Full Regalia Again Visit Pastor,” Medford Mail Tribune, March 21, 1922, 5; “Ku Klux Klan on Visit to the Church; White Robed Visitors Appeared at M.E. Edifice and Left Sum of Money,”

278

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Morning Astorian, March 14, 1922, 3; “Klansmen Carry Money to Y.M.C.A.,” Corvallis Gazette-Times, October 14, 1922, 1; “Clansmen Present Purse; Hooded Men Present Purse to Salvation Army,” Morning Register, March 22, 1922, 3; “Klansmen Feed Needy; Food from Banquet Is Given to Poor,” Morning Register, July 1, 1924, 8. 62 “Third Necktie Party Staged in J’Ville District,” Medford Mail Tribune, April 12, 1922, 8. 63 It is interesting to note that several accounts erroneously list Johnson as black [for example, McLagan, 139; Saalfeld, 4; “Ku Klux in Jackson,” Oregon Voter 3 (August 12, 1922), 12; Toy, “The Ku Klux Klan in Oregon,” 72]. Indeed, race can be inferred from one account of the crime, which referred to his association with white women and included the use of a racial epithet (see “Third Necktie Party Staged in J’Ville District”). Race, however, is never mentioned in subsequent reports (see, for example, “Prosecute Night Mobs, Says Olcott” and “State to Prosecute Local Outrages; Night Rider Prosecution Is Ordered,” Medford Mail Tribune, July 6, 1922, 1). Omission of this detail suggests that Johnson was white, or perhaps Hispanic. Had he been black, all articles would have identified him by race, as was the case for Arthur Burr. Also, newspaper accounts variously list the date of the “outrage” as April 6 (see “Move against Klan in Jackson County Made by Governor,” Oregon Statesman, July 7, 1922, 6 and April 9 (see “Grand Jury Invitation Is Issued,” Medford Mail Tribune, July 27, 1922, 1). 64 “Third Necktie Party Staged.” 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 69 “Klan Ejects Negro from Roseburg; Bootblack Accused of Making Insulting Remarks to Young Woman Forced to Leave,” Roseburg News-Review, April 3, 1922, 1. Also see “Ku Klux Eject Negro; Klansmen Drive Suspected Offender of Women from Roseburg,” Morning Oregonian, April 3, 1922, 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Ibid. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 For more about Sawyer see, for example, Reuben H. Sawyer, The Truth about the Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Portland, Ore.: n.p., 1922). Also see the advertisement for Sawyer’s lecture and the films The Face at Your Window and The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Ride Again in the Morning Register, January 10, 1922, 3, and “Ku Klux Klan Is Defended; Speaker Representing Organization Tells of Ideals,” Morning Register, January 12, 1922, 6. 75 “Klan Ejects Negro from Roseburg.” According to former Klansman Henry Fry, the “propagation department of the Ku Klux Klan … uses motion pictures and paid lecturers to spread the germs of Ku Kluxism. There is a picture entitled ‘The Face at Your Window’ that is being used extensively as an aid to the canvassing Kleagles. The film company arranges with the local Kleagle to have this picture exhibited on a certain day, and each Klansman is requested to bring a friend with

Voices from within the Veil

279

him to see it. At the close of the performance the Klansman hands his friend an application blank and through the psychological effect of the picture usually gets the other to join.” Henry P. Fry, “Lawlessness, Mob Outrage Follow Klan Organization; Newspapers Silenced by Threat of Boycott When Opposed to Order,” Capital Journal, July 18, 1922, 4. 76 See “Capacity Audience at Klan Lecture; Many People Unable to Gain Admittance at Last Night’s Meeting at Antler’s,” Roseburg News-Review, April 1, 1922, 1. Also see “Klan Has Come to Stay Says Sawyers [sic],” Roseburg NewsReview, March 31, 1922, 6. 77 “Klansmen Advertise Coming Lecture,” Roseburg News-Review, March 30, 1922, 8. Also see the advertisements for the film and lecture in the paper, March 30, 1922, 6; March 31, 1922, 6; and April 1, 1922, 6. 78 “Lynching and Migration,” Morning Oregonian, January 5, 1922, 8; Jeff LaLande, “Beneath the Hooded Robe: Newspapermen, Local Politics, and the Ku Klux Klan in Jackson County, Oregon, 1921-1923,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 83 (April 1992), 47. 79 LaLande. 80 Ibid, 47-8. Although LaLande is addressing specifically the Medford outrages, this statement applies also to the Roseburg incident. 81 “Bootblack to Tell How He Was Hanged.” 82 Ben Titus, “I Was a Klansman,” Portland (Ore.) Telegram, November 4, 1922, sec. 1, 2. His exposé of the Oregon Klan began on 2 November 1922 and ran through November 6, 1922. The original typed manuscript can be found in Ku Klux Klan Records/Folder 1 of 2, Mss 22, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society. 83 Henry P. Fry, “Klan Money-Making Scheme for Benefit of Few Insiders; Religious and Racial Hatreds Commercialized for Profit of Grafters,” Capital Journal, July 19, 1922, 1. 84 “Colored People’s Place,” The Advocate, November 6, 1926, 4. The Advocate often ran advertisements for books that Cannady thought readers should have in their personal library. One notice, in particular, may have caught their attention: “Have you read a copy of ‘Ku Klux Klan Exposed’? Discloses attitude toward Catholics, Jews, Negroes and foreign born. Other revelations. Order your copy now. Sent postpaid in plain wrapper, price fifty cents (coin, check or money order). Bates & Co., 103 East 125th Street, New York City.” “Ku Klux Klan Exposedm,” The Advocate, September 20, 1924, 1. 85 Ibid. 86 Major Luther I. Powell had been working as a kleagle (organizer) in California before arriving in Oregon. He organized the Medford klavern—the first KKK chapter in Oregon—in January 1921. Then, at the request of the Imperial Wizard, he traveled to Portland to take over from the original kleagle, Bragg Calloway. Powell soon was replaced by Fred L. Gifford. 87 Ku Klux Klan Records. 88 Benjamin Wilson Olcott Papers, Mss 308, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society [hereafter Olcott Papers]. Olcott’s stand against the KKK may have cost him a second term as governor. Luther Powell, king kleagle of the Portland Klan,

280

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

wrote Olcott, “Your condemnation of a truly 100% American Organization … is the direct result of your sad defeat politically.” Powell to Olcott, November 8, 1922, Olcott papers. And J.E. Wheeler, president of the Portland Telegram, wrote Olcott, “Whether we, any of us, got away with just what we wanted or not last year we can take satisfaction in feeling that we stood just where good solid Americans should stand, and feel that in the end we will be entirely vindicated.” Wheeler to Olcott, January 11, 1923, Olcott Papers. Olcott noted in a press release: “I say, with all sincerity, I would rather meet defeat in the primaries on Friday and be a free American than to serve another term in the governor’s chair with the mill stone of such an endorsement hanging about my neck.” See the typed press release, May 16, 1922, Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 8. Olcott served from 1919-1923. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 “Midnight Party Held for Negro by Robed Sextet; Perry Ellis Is Quizzed about Affairs with White Girls; Noose about His Neck Fails to Bring Forth Confession,” (Oregon City, Ore.) Morning Enterprise, June 3, 1923, 1. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid, 8. Manila refers to the rope; Manila hemp is made from the inner fiber of an abaca, or banana plant, which grows in the Philippines and is used for cordage. The Readers’ Digest Great Encyclopedic Dictionary (1966), s.v. “manila” and “Manila rope.” 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid. 109 “Midnight Party Held,” reprinted in The Advocate as “Oregon Stages Near Lynching Party; Perry Ellis, Only Colored Citizen of Oregon City, Victim of Near Lynching by Masked Men in Nearby Country Thought to Be Members of KKK,” The Advocate, June 9, 1923, 1. 101 “Ku Klux Klan Ain’t after Us,” The Advocate, June 23, 1923, 4. 102 Cannady never published circulation figures, but some years later, she told a contemporary that circulation was “approximately three thousand.” See Daniel G. Hill, Jr., “The Negro in Oregon: A Survey” (MA thesis, University of Oregon, 1932), 55. 103 “Promise Made to Robed Band Kept by Local Negro; Perry Ellis Moves from Town Despite Sheriff Wilson’s Assurance He Can Remain; Departs Sunday for Tacoma,” Morning Enterprise, June 5, 1923, 1. 104 “Council Votes City Disgraced by Acts of Gang; Aldermen Pass Resolution at Special Meeting Deeming it Officials’ Duty to Find and Punish Perpetrators,” Morning Enterprise, June 9, 1923, 1. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. Klan-backed Democrat Walter Pierce succeeded Olcott and served from 1923-1927.

Voices from within the Veil 107

281

“Governor Ready to Aid Officers, Recorder Is Told; C.W. Kelly Receives Letter from Executive Responding to Resolution Passed by Council about Ellis Affair,” Morning Enterprise, June 17, 1923, 1. The newspaper was reviewed through 28 July; no additional stories about the resolution or request for assistance were located. 108 In 1944, the town changed its name to Coos Bay. It is located 217 miles south of Portland. See “History of Coos Bay,” City of Coos Bay, www.coosbay.org/cb/aboutcb/ CBHistory.htm. 109 “Gov. Pierce to Aid Solve Pettis Murder Mystery,” (Marshfield, Ore.) Coos Bay Times, July 15, 1924, 1. 1101 Ibid. 111 Lee C. Anderson to James Weldon Johnson, August 6, 1924, NAACP Portland Branch files. 112 “Think Ku Kluxers Menace Country,” Coos Bay Times, November 5, 1923, 6. 113 Ibid. A spelling error was corrected. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid. 116 “Heinous Murder of Negro Shown by Developments; Timothy F. Pettis, Who Was Found in Bay, Victim of Heinous Attack,” Coos Bay Times, July 14, 1924, 2. 117 Ibid, 1. It was not uncommon for mobs to mutilate bodies following a lynching, both to make a statement about the victim’s manhood and to obtain a macabre souvenir. 118 Ibid. 119 See “Timothy F. Pettis, Whose Body Was Found in Bay, Victim of Heinous Attack,” The Advocate, July 19, 1924, 1. 120 “A Brave Man,” The Advocate, July 19, 1924, 4. 121 Ibid. Cannady wrote numerous editorials about the government’s failure to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and she criticized President Hoover and other lawmakers for spending “millions of dollars for the suppression of the liquor traffic, but hardly a cent to enforce the law granting civil and political rights to 15,000,000 of her people.” The Advocate, April 6, 1929, 2. Also see the following in The Advocate: October 20, 1923, 4; February 2, 1924, 4; August 25, 1928, 2; “Law Enforcement,” March 30, 1929, 2. 122 “Negro Woman Branded; Klan Message Left; Note Signed ‘KKK’ Warns Family to Move; Robbery of $28 in Cash Also Reported in Case,” Portland Telegram, October 21, 1921, 1. Elise Reynolds and her husband, Phil, appear in the 1920 Census. Elise, twenty-five, was born in Missouri; her father was born in Missouri and her mother in Kentucky. Phil was born in Florida; his parents were born in Georgia. He was thirty then [or perhaps thirty-eight] and working as a porter. The couple had a two-year-old son named Jack. Fourteenth Census, Multnomah County, Oregon, Online. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid, 1, 2. 125 “Gov. Pierce to Aid.” 126 “No Clue Yet in Murder Case,” Coos Bay Times, July 19, 1924, 1.

282 127

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

“Run Down Poison Liquor Clew [sic] in Pettis Murder,” Coos Bay Times, July 17, 1924, 1. 128 Telegram from Lee C. Anderson to the NAACP, July 18, 1924, NAACP Portland Branch files. Punctuation was added to improve readability. 129 Telegram from James Weldon Johnson to Lee C. Anderson, July 19, 1924, NAACP Portland Branch files. Punctuation was added to improve readability. 130 “Heinous Murder of Negro,” 2. Also see “Sailors Disavow Crime Knowledge,” Coos Bay Times, July 25, 1924, 1. 131 Ibid. 132 “Sailors Disavow Crime Knowledge.” 133 “Heinous Murder of Negro.” 134 Ibid. The accuracy of hearsay is debatable, but Marshfield residents apparently continued to try to exclude African Americans from the town. According to The Advocate, whites objected to having “colored porters” on railroad parlor cars pass through town. “For that reason, the company has put white men on the cars instead and the colored porters who were discharged have been returned to their homes in California.” See “White Men on the Job,” The Advocate, October 3, 1925, 4. 135 Anderson to the NAACP. 136 Ibid. 137 “Negroes Raise Reward of $100,” Coos Bay Times, August 8, 1924, 1; The Inflation Calculator. 138 Ibid. 139 Anderson to the NAACP. 140 Walter F. White to Lee C. Anderson, August 19, 1924, NAACP Portland Branch files. 141 Branch report to the Officers and Members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, June 21, 1925, NAACP Portland Branch files. 142 That was not the first time a black man had been murdered in Marshfield. Ten years before Beatrice Cannady moved to Oregon, Alonzo Tucker was lynched for allegedly raping a white woman. In September 1902, Mrs. Dennis, the wife of a miner, reported that she “had been brutally assaulted by a negro” near her home. According to newspaper accounts, an armed mob of one hundred men “marched to the jail for the purpose of lynching the negro,” only to find that the marshal had taken Tucker away for his own protection. Tucker managed to escape, but he could not hide: The following morning, the “frenzied men” discovered the “black fiend” hiding under a store. He ran but pursuers chased him through the store and up a flight of stairs. Shot twice, Tucker “fell headlong” through a door, landing on a loft above a stockroom. He was lowered by a rope to the wharf below, then loaded on the store’s truck where a rope was placed around his neck. Tucker died on the way to the bridge at the outskirts of town, but that did not deter the assembled mob. The “rope, which was already around his neck, was tied to a timber of the bridge and the body was pushed over the side and left hanging about six feet below the roadway,” reported the Morning Oregonian. The correspondent marveled that the crowd, estimated at three hundred, was so “quiet and orderly.” In fact, he wrote, “it is safe to say that no such lawless proceedings were ever conducted with less unnecessary disturbance of the peace.” A few hours later, the body was cut down

Voices from within the Veil

283

and taken back to town for the inquest. After determining that the rifle shot had killed Tucker, the coroner’s jury quickly issued its verdict: The “deceased came to his death at the hands of parties unknown, while resisting arrest for a felony, and … no crime was committed thereby.” The correspondent noted that the “sentiment of the community is in sympathy with the lynchers, and it is extremely improbable that any arrests will be made.” The following day, an editorial in the Morning Oregonian observed that Alonzo Tucker “was of a low, debased order—a human being without instincts of decency or morality.” But, while stopping short of condemning the actions of the Marshfield mob, the oblique editorial did hint that the extralegal violence was wrong: “There are those … who think that such criminals should be lynched, especially if they are black men. The Oregonian is of the opinion that since the law does not make this abhorrent crime a capital one, those who commit it should not be hanged; that since it does make it a heinous crime with a heavy maximum penalty, this penalty should be rigidly enforced … without regard to any condition of race, color or personal influence.” Adolphus Griffin, editor of Portland’s sole black paper then, the New Age, was more direct: “The people who lynched the Negro at Marshfield yesterday committed a crime that ought to be punished. An example should be made of these lynchers, or some of the leaders of them, so that such a disgraceful crime will not be repeated in this State. … Oregon is thereby disgraced and humiliated, and the governor ought to exercise all the authority and power he has to see that the lynchers are punished, as a warning to others who are tempted to like acts of lawlessness.” See “Fiend Is Lynched; Marshfield Negro Brute Pays Penalty of His Crime,” Oregon Daily Journal, September 18, 1902, 1; “Mob Pursues Negro; An Assault on Coos County Woman Arouses Miners; Brute Escapes from Officers,” Morning Oregonian, September 18, 1902, 4; “Dies at Mob’s Hands; Marshfield Negro Shot down in Streets of Town; Dead Body Hanged to Bridge,” Morning Oregonian, September 19, 1902, 4; “In Simple Justice,” Morning Oregonian, September 20, 1902, 6; “The Southern Oregon Lynching,” (Portland, Ore.) New Age, September 20, 1902, 4. Copies of the local papers, the Coos Bay News and the Coast Mail, have not been located. 143 The Advocate, January 12, 1924, 4. 144 Oregon Black History Project, Research Notes, Mss 2854, Research Library, Oregon Historical Society, Box 1 of 2/Folder/Oral History Notes/1 of 41/Mr. and Mrs. Julian G. Henson [hereafter Oregon Black History Project with appropriate folder information]. 145 Oregon Black History Project, Folder/Oral History Notes/1 of 41/Otto Rutherford. Rutherford was president of the Portland Branch of the NAACP in the early 1950s. 146 Because the Klan was supposed to be a “secret” organization, it is rare to find minutes of klavern meetings and membership rosters. Thus, estimates of “naturalized” members vary depending on the source. Jackson calculates that there were fifty thousand men and women (as members of the Ladies of the Invisible Empire) initiated in the Oregon Klan between 1915 and 1944. See Jackson, 237. Chalmers estimates that fourteen thousand were naturalized during the Oregon

284

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Klan’s first year. See David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, 3d ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1987), 88. 147 “‘Purifying’ the Klan,” Oregon Voter 35 (December 8, 1923), 16. 148 “Ku Klux Suppression Asked for by People of Neighboring Town,” Eugene Daily Guard, August 8, 1921, 1; also see “Klan’s Suppression Urged,” Morning Register, August 9, 1921, 6. For a typewritten copy of the petition as well as Olcott’s reply to the men, see the Olcott Scrapbook, vol. 4/Press Releases 1921. See also, “Olcott Refuses to Get Excited about Ku Klux Klan Bogey,” SemiWeekly Democrat, August 16, 1921, 3. 149 “Methodist Episcopal Church Adopts Resolution Favoring Suppression KuKlux-Klan,” Roseburg News-Review, August 8, 1921, 1. 150 Ibid. 151 Ibid. 152 The issue of newspaper responsibility in bringing the Klan’s Oregon activities to light deserves further study. For a brief discussion of the press, see Chapter 6 in Saalfeld. The Capital Journal may have been the most outspoken critic of the Klan; as noted earlier, it was the only newspaper to serialize Henry P. Fry’s book about the modern Ku Klux Klan. For Journal editorials critical of the daily press, see, for example, “Easy Marks,” Capital Journal, July 25, 1922, 4; “Benefits of Silence,” Capital Journal, August 3, 1922, 4; “A Revelation,” Capital Journal, 5 August 1922, 6; “The Oregonian’s Discovery,” Capital Journal, August 12, 1922, 4; and “Silence in the Sanctums,” Capital Journal, August 21, 1922, 4. In southern Oregon, Robert W. Ruhl, editor of the Medford Mail Tribune, may have been the lone voice critical of the KKK. See, for example, “The ‘Truth’ about the Ku Klux Klan,” Medford Mail Tribune, June 9, 1922, 4; “The Truth Does Prevail,” Medford Mail Tribune, August 4, 1922, 4; and Robert W. Ruhl, “Reference to Klan Dodged by 80 Per Cent of Papers, Says Editor,” Portland Telegram, May 1, 1923, 6. 153 Many scholars have written about these issues and their effect on Oregon. See, for example, LaLande, and Horowitz, “Order, Solidarity, and Vigilance.” For Cannady’s view on the Klan and Catholics, see, for example, “The KKK and the Katholics,” The Advocate, September 11, 1926, 4. For information about the controversial school bill debate, which was ultimately decided by the United State Supreme Court, see, for example, Saalfeld; Jane W. Bryant, “The Ku Klux Klan and the Oregon Compulsory School Bill of 1922” (M.A. thesis, Reed College, n.d.); Donald L. Zelman, “Oregon’s Compulsory Education Bill of 1922” (M.A. thesis, University of Oregon, 1964); and M. Paul Holsinger, “The Oregon School Bill Controversy, 1922-1925,” Pacific Historical Review, 37 (August 1968), 32741. 154 “Pusillanimity of the Press,” Capital Journal, July 17, 1922, 4. A typographical error was corrected, and punctuation changed slightly, to improve readability of this passage. Also see “Benefits of Silence”; “The Oregonian’s Discovery”; and “Silence in the Sanctums.” 155 Titus. Exalted cyclops was the Klan’s term for president. 156 “One of Only Three,” Oregon Voter 33 (April 19, 1947), 21. 157 Other editors, such as Charlotta Spear Bass of the California Eagle, were not as fortunate. See, for example, the following in the (Los Angeles) California Eagle:

Voices from within the Veil

285

“KKK Attempts to Burn Edward Grubbs Home,” January 28, 1922, 1; “Klan Operations,” July 4, 1924, 1; “Chief Mogul of Ku Klux Klan Procures Warrant for Editor and Managing Editor of ‘Soaring Eagle,’” May 15, 1925, 1; “Ku Klux Case Set for 18th of June,” May 22, 1925, 1; “Ku Klux Complaint Against Eagle Editors,” June 5, 1925, 1; “Judge Chambers in Notable Decision Finds Defendants in KKK Case Not Guilty,” June 26, 1925, 1. Also see Bass’ autobiography, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: by the author, 1960), and Rodger Streitmatter, “The Media and Racial Equality,” in The Significance of the Media in American History, eds. James D. Startt and Wm. David Sloan (Northport, Ala.: Vision Press, 1994), 247-65. 158 Alice M. Handsaker to the Harmon Foundation, Inc., [1929], Cannady Scrapbook, 20-5. Punctuation was added to improve readability. This incident was not reported in the Newberg (Ore.) Graphic. 159 Ibid. Cannady, for whatever reason, did not write about this incident in The Advocate. 160 Alison G. Myhra, “The Hate Speech Conundrum and the Public Schools,” North Dakota Law Review 68 (January 1992), 80. 161 Richard Delgado, “Words that Wound: A Tort Action for Racial Insults, Epithets, and Name-Calling,” in Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge, 2d ed., eds. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 131. 162 Cannady, quoted in the draft of Trumbull’s article, “A Modern Joan of Arc.” Cannady’s comments about the KKK were omitted from the final version that was published in the Illustrated Feature Section inside The Advocate. For the draft, with handwritten notes and edits, see the Cannady Scrapbook, N.pag. Cannady left Portland for southern California at the end of 1936, probably to be nearer family who had relocated there. She died in Los Angeles in 1974 at the age of eighty-five. 163 “Race Prejudice in Oregon.”

CHAPTER FOUR THEORIZING THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

Fig. 4.1 Influential leaders in the early twentieth century: Washington and DuBois. Booker T. Washington, ca. 1890-1900 (left) and W.E.B. DuBois, ca. 1920s (right). Courtesy Booker T. Washington Collection and George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Perhaps no two people more clearly embody the dichotomy of black self-definition than Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Both men sought to redefine the “place” the African Americans would occupy after 250 years of servitude and slavery. At the same time that they attempted to grasp the status vagaries of African Americans, a virulent racism in the form of Jim Crow circumvented their newly achieved rights. By using Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play, Natalia Vysotska turns on its head the ways in which mainstream America has used American history to validate its place in the world. Vysotska finds that Parks’ play, satirizing the white-washed version of history, puts onto center stage the ironies of African Americans’ encounters with democracy. What is less known is the role that Mary Church Terrell and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin had in introducing and framing the parameters of the debate that later occurred between Washington and DuBois. Teresa

288

African American Response to the Oregon Klan, 1922-1924

Holden traces Terrell and Ruffin’s roles as pioneer thinkers of race and feminism in the early twentieth entury. As with Washington and DuBois, the similarities between Terrell and Ruffin were greater than their differences: they both sought empowerment for blacks within American democracy.

“THEY JUST GUNNED HIM DOWN UHGAIN”: SUZAN-LORI PARKS’ THE AMERICA PLAY AS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMENT ON U.S. DEMOCRATIC HISTORY NATALIA VYSOTSKA, KIEV NATIONAL LINGUISTICS UNIVERSITY

In a statement characteristic of his ambiguous racial rhetoric, Abraham Lincoln, protesting against the “counterfeit logic,” according to which his not wanting a black woman for a slave necessarily implied his wanting her for a wife, declares, “I need not have her for either. I can just leave her alone.” In spite of his belief that “in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others,” he is emphatic that “in some respects she certainly is not my equal.”1 It is a big question whether any black woman would actually want Abraham Lincoln for a husband, but one thing is clear: a particular black woman, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, who earns her bread with her own hands crafting intricate theatre scripts, definitely refuses to leave him alone. The (transmogrified) Lincoln figure as a major political and cultural icon in American democracy (though not the sixteenth US president himself) is at the core of her The America Play, published in the early 1990s. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few “Lincolns” on the stage. In accordance with the Theatre of Absurd multiplication technique aimed at devaluing and ridiculing its object, the Great Man’s bust and his pasteboard cutout form the background for the grotesque story of a Black grave digger called “Lesser Known” who “bore strong resemblance to Abraham Lincoln”2 and made his living by an act offering the public an opportunity to shoot the President once more. Recurrent winks to the cutout and nods to the bust that punctuate the performative narrative help establish its predominantly ironic mode.

290

Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History

Realizing that the dramatic stories which she chooses to tell transcend the boundaries of mimetic theatrical tradition, Parks deploys a variety of alternative play-writing strategies–stage collage, juxtaposition of multiple discourses, materialization of linguistic metaphors, up to remodeling Standard English on the basis of African American idiom and sound into a “language” of her own, with glossaries attached to the texts. The syncretism of her writing is hinted at by the critical definition “jive Beckett.” Joseph Roach, in particular, finds The America Play “indebted to Beckett in the spareness of its language, in the density and fatality of its images, and in the cruelty of its repetitions.” 3 Parks herself identifies the central element in her work as repetition and revision (“Rep & Rev”) borrowed from Jazz aesthetic. Through its use, the playwright is striving “to create a dramatic text that departs from the traditional linear narrative style to look and sound more like a musical score.” 4 At the same time, she claims as her own a rich multicultural legacy, with European dramatic techniques (Brechtian alienation, the Theatre of the Absurd poetics etc.) intertwining with attempts at revitalizing Black archaic verbal magic (“Words are spells in our mouths...”) and with neo-mythological cyclical concept of temporality (“Time has a circular shape”). Consequently, the concepts that she relies upon in her work are often double-voiced, reflecting a variety of cultural traditions. The America Play, as everything that Parks does, draws upon the above-stated aesthetic principles. The resulting product, again as everything that Parks does, is a highly polyvalent and multidimensional entity. This article aims at pulling only a few threads out of its tightly knit fabric (or, if you will, at deciphering only a few of its codes) pertaining to the perspective it provides on American democracy that is scrutinized against the backdrop of demythologized history turned timelessness. My discussion will center around two codes – historical and “archeological.”

Code of History History figures prominently among Parks’ major preoccupations as an artist, and, in its treatment, she, in my opinion, makes use of two conflicting paradigmatic approaches, whose tension imparts internal drive to her oeuvre. The first is shaped by postmodern deconstructionist perception of history as a declining grand récit, while the second is determined by Black America’s urge to reclaim its stolen past. As many scholars have convincingly demonstrated, postmodernity marked by fading relevance of the past relentlessly ruptures traditional ties between the individual and the society, discrediting the latter’s

Voices from within the Veil

291

foundational metanarratives and, thus, depriving the individual life of its meaning largely generated by shared stories. The result is what Jameson refers to as “present-oriented culture” or “a society bereft of all historicity”5 desperately trying to reestablish links with the lost past through its nostalgic re-enactments. In this climate national shrines turn into tourist attractions (Z. Bauman), while the milieux de mémoire (memory environments) where the past was spontaneously and unselfconsciously relived are replaced by lieux de mémoire (memory sites), lifeless sites for practicing nostalgia. 6 As Zygmunt Bauman puts it, the guiding principles in the life-game of postmodern consumers make it necessary “to cut the present off at both ends, to sever the present from history, to abolish time in any other form but a flat collection or an arbitrary sequence of present moments; a continuous present.”7 It is in this context that Barry Schwartz in his well-documented studies of Lincoln’s “changing face” in American memory analyzes the Great Man’s plummeting prestige over the past four decades–the fact attested, among other things, by increasingly irreverent visual and verbal representations. The scholar argues that these developments have everything to do with postmodern denial of grand narratives making the past irrelevant for the subject. “The erosion of these [popular presidents’] reputations and the metanarratives of which they are a part resulted not from political and social crises of the period”, he claims, “but from a “postmodern turn” within which these crises assumed their traumatic character.” 8 On one level, Parks’ play seems to fit neatly into this typical late twentieth-century framework. It presents national/world history as a “theme park” impressing the viewer (Bauman’s “tourist”) with its “historicity”–“the order and beauty of the pageants which marched by them the Greats on parade in front of them.”9 The individual’s engagement with history is reduced to the latter’s ability “to excite, please and amuse.” “Him and Her would sit by thuh lip uhlong with thuh others all in uh row cameras clickin and theyud look down into that Hole and see – oooo – you name it...Amerigo Vespucci hisself made regular appearances. Marcus Garvey. Ferdinand and Isabella. Mary Queen of thuh Scots! Tarzan King of thuh Apes! Washington Jefferson Harding and Millard Fillmore. Mistufer Columbus even. Oh they saw all thuh greats. Parading daily in thuh Great Hole of History.”10

Arbitrary listing of historical and fictional figures, chronologically and geographically dispersed and farcically incompatible in their commonly recognized “value”, makes one recall Michel Foucault’s observation that “the mere act of enumeration that heaps them all together

292

Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History

has a power of enchantment all its own,” and emphasizes deliberate fragmentariness and lack of cohesion or sequence in post-modern historical narratives.11 My belief is, however, that excising “political and social crises of the period”, such as racial tensions, from the general equation leaves the picture incomplete. Their factoring in would bring about at least one substantial corrective: specific attitude to history and collective memory in ethnic communities where discontinuity and alienation from the past were forced from without. Viewed in this light, Parks’ enigmatic stage pieces with their demonstrative repudiation of verisimilitude and logic (“absurdity”), inexhaustible imagination, a population of unexpected characters in queer combinations and brilliant word play would reveal African American culture’s perennial concern with the regeneration of the past as their motive force. The author’s idiosyncratic visions and revelations acquire the parameters of a collective myth instrumental in turning theater into “an incubator for the creation of historical events.” For the simple reason that “so much of African American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out,”12 theater for Parks serves not only as the site for dismantling official history, but also as “the perfect place” to make [alternative] history. The dichotomy of “the real” and “the fictional” is resolved by the logic of the ritual – the fact of stage re-enactment accords an event the same ontological status as what “actually happened.” The dramatist, therefore, is “re-membering and staging historical events which, through their happening on stage, are ripe for inclusion in the canon of history.”13 As a result, the postmodernist thesis about history’s relative, constructed and textual nature (leading to the loss by historical narrative of its former high societal status) is qualified by the writer’s positioning herself as a spokesperson for a minority group that due to continuous marginalization feels an urgent need to bring back to life its usable past – the only solid foundation for group and individual self-identification. Consequently, every Parks’ play becomes an exercise in revising, reversing and reconfiguring history so that it would accommodate its formerly neglected segments. Getting back to The America Play, group marginalization is symbolized in it by the liminal position the blacks occupy during the history parade–they observe it “from the sidelines” or “from the lip.” In this context remarks such as “the hole and its Historicity and the part he played in it all (italics mine– N.V.) gave a shape to the life and posterity of the Lesser Known that he could never shake”14 or “we’re all citizens of one country afterall”15 sound bitterly ironical. Indeed, today it is known all too well that “one country’s” official records stubbornly

Voices from within the Veil

293

denied or misrepresented the part played by the blacks in shaping its history, leaving gaps (“holes”) in the texture of national narrative. Parks sets out to redress the evil through writing African Americans back into the U.S. history by means of theatrical magic. In her version, it is the Lesser Known who performs the function of the land’s cultural hero as a pioneer and frontiersman: “Come out here al uhlone. Cleared thuh path tamed thuh wilderness dug this whole Hole with his own 2 hands and et cetera.”16 Through his reasserted participation in nation-building the black grave-digger is associated with previous generations of Americans–“All them who comed before us–my Daddy. He’s one of them”17–thus becoming an inalienable part of his country’s history. Concurrently, the foundational myth itself is subject to revision. The epigraph—the words ascribed to John Locke “In the beginning, all the world was America”– accentuates the images of “void” and “wilderness” echoed in the topos of the Great Hole of History. “I’d say thuh creation of thuh world must uh been just thuh clearing off of this plot,”18 explains the Lesser-Known’s son. But this canonical vision of nation foundation (the notorious “errand into wilderness”) is discredited by references to “peace pacts, writs, bills of sale, treaties, notices, handbills and circulars, freein papers, summonses, declarations of war, addresses, title deeds, obits, long lists of dids”19 belying the assumption that “the plot” was entirely vacant for taking and substituting instead a chain of violence and subjugations as a more probable version of the national past than the official story. On the other hand, current globalization processes that, in many cases, boil down to Americanization make one wonder whether in Parks’ mythicized view history is coming full circle, so that the epigraph might be ringing (ironically) true again–“At the end, all the world will become America”? Another strategy aimed at demythologizing the national past consists in undermining the Founding Fathers’ authority through puns (much of Parks’ struggle against stereotypes is waged on the linguistic level). To begin with, in the standard phrase itself “founding” is replaced by “foundling;” as a result, the myth of origin gives way to the notion of American rootlessness, lack of connection to the land seen by early settlers as a void, and of white Americans’ not originally belonging there. In other puns, “forefather” is changed into “foe-father” and then to “faux-father”, with Freudian overtones underscoring the nation’s far-from-parental injustice towards its black stepchildren. Nonetheless, Parks’ irony with regard to American democratic history is most apparent in the play’s focus—the Lincoln murder enactment as a popular hit. People who admired the Lesser Known’s uncanny similarity to the Great Man, would not pay money just to watch him or hear him

294

Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History

enunciate familiar quotations from Lincoln’s speeches; the offer to come and throw old food at him was only a moderate success; but the invitation “to pay a penny, choose from the selection of provided pistols, enter the darkened box and ‘Shoot Mr. Lincoln’”20 made him famous overnight. The murder, repeatedly re-enacted with slight variations (“Rep and Rev”), forms the play’s structural axis—a man or a woman eagerly enters the theater box, takes a gun and shoots; “Lincoln” slumps in his chair; “Booth” recites some apocryphal phrase attributed to his historical prototype (“Thus to the tyrants!”, “The South is avenged!” etc.). Providing a counterpoint to the action, echoes of gunshots offer an incisive comment upon the nation’s insatiable desire to destroy again and again its most famous democratic leader: the “liberator” of black slaves. The irony is further enhanced by the refrain, “And how thuh nation mourned.” Parks’ black humor, therefore, is spearheaded at the most tabooed components of the national democratic myth. What are we supposed to make of this comment? Is it meant to argue that the ideals Lincoln stood for have lost their value for the people? That the majority of Americans today would side with the South over the issue of slavery? This reading might be borne out by the description of Lincoln’s death scene–“The watching of the play, the laughter, the smiles of Lincoln and Mary Todd, the slipping of Booth into the presidential box unseen, the freeing of the slaves [italics mine – N.V.], the pulling of the trigger [...].”21 The mention of Lincoln’s role as Emancipator in the context of his assassination establishes a direct (cause-and-effect?) link between these two occurrences. In my opinion, though, her irony is primarily targeted at the deep inconsistency lying at the core of American democracy. Lesser Known refers to Lincoln’s early war years as “years of uncertainty”, “when he didnt know if the war was right when it could be said that he didnt always know which side he was on [...].”22 And this is precisely the point. As historian George M. Frederickson observes (in hidden polemics with F. J. Turner), slavery and its consequences were not incidental or secondary aspects of American history, but constitute its central theme. “Rather than being an exception to the grander themes of liberty and democracy, slavery and the racism it engendered have exposed the shallowness and narrowness of the national commitment to these ideals.”23 And this brings us to the issue of equality, which is both unavoidable and painful in U.S. democratic discourse. Democracy is, above all, about equality. It is in this respect that the fathers of the nation fell remarkably short of their professed beliefs. Let me quote Lincoln on the subject: “Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are

Voices from within the Veil

295

created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal except Negroes.” When Know-Nothings get control, it would read “all men are created equal except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics”. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty – to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”24 In spite of his acute grasp of the matter, as these words seem to indicate, Lincoln, as well as his predecessors in building democratic America, proved unable and/or unwilling to conceive even of a theoretical possibility of African Americans’ full equality with whites, to say nothing of actually extending it to them. In their attempts to apply the Enlightenment triple creed of liberty, equality and fraternity to racial “Other” represented by American black slaves, the Founding Fathers had the greatest problems with equality. The case of Jefferson, who was dubbed “a metaphor for race relations in America” for devoting so much attention to them, is telling. All his life, Jefferson struggled to eliminate the slave trade and to solve the problem of slavery since liberty was for him the primary and inalienable “natural right” of any human being. He called African Americans “our black brethren,” but when it came to recognizing their equality, he could never bring himself to place blacks on the same intellectual and moral plane as whites. For him, as for other Founding Fathers, as for Lincoln a hundred years later, they have forever remained “in reason much inferior.”25 The arguments underpinning this conviction are traceable to early modern and Enlightenment assumptions about the natural relationship between the presence of written tradition as a visible sign of reason and the very humanity of peoples or cultures. H. L. Gates summarizes his discussion of the issue by concluding that this “led to the relegation of black people to a lower rung on the Great Chain of Being.”26 According to William Gienapp, Lincoln’s opposition to slavery “derived from certain fundamental beliefs rooted in the uniqueness of the American experience: the promise of equality, the nature of opportunity in a free country, the republic’s special destiny, and the importance of the Union.”27 In case of African Americans, even this ephemeral “promise of equality” which he could see no way of fulfilling in foreseeable future, was limited to social and political spheres, without trespassing upon the sacred territory of individual subjectivity where “I” can be measured against “you.” It is precisely this historically/psychologically insurmountable barrier that Parks is intent on demolishing. Giving Lincoln a black person for a doppelgänger unequivocally asserts their equality on the crucial level of basic humanity. But her theatrical magic depends for its effectiveness on a

296

Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History

particular chronotopos created on the stage by means of “archeological turn.”

Code of Archeology The setting of The America Play is described as “A great hole. In the middle of nowhere. The hole is an exact replica of the Great Hole of History.”28 The tropes of “holes” and “digging” not only run through The America Play, but constitute much of Parks’ general subtext, as evidenced by her statement that one of her tasks as playwright is “to... locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down.”29 Thus, (re)construction of history is largely conceived by the playwright as an archeological excavation in a re-mythologized temporal and spatial continuum. Again, as is the case with history, Parks’ use of the “archeology” concept is double-voiced, informed by contemporary (Western) theory and modified to meet the needs of African American community. Black Americans’ interest in “digging” as a means to retrieve their stolen past is superimposed upon Michel Foucault’s “archeological” cognitive project. The indispensability of archeology is declared in the chiasmic pun opening the play: “He digged the hole, and the whole held him”: only “digging the hole” into the past and reappropriating your own belongings found there can make you “whole” again or make you part of the “whole”. Or, if you wish, reinserting back the displaced voices of history Parks fills in the “hole.”30 The play’s second act (“Hall of Wonders”) entirely focuses on this symbolic digging (for one’s father’s bones) that is simultaneously an act of creation, with the sections bearing the titles like “Big Bang”, “Archeology” and “Spadework”. Following Parks’ predilection for things multiplied and replicated, the play offers several “great holes”: one of them might symbolize black Americans’ exclusion from history, while the capitalized “Great Hole” stands for the postmodern view of the past as an abyss filled with fragmented “bits and pieces” that used to belong to the great and to the “lesser known” alike. The play’s opening lines are examples of hiatus (or chiasmus) taken from Webster’s Dictionary and cunningly linked to the Lincoln/Lesser Known double story: “He digged the hole, and the whole held him;” “I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed;” “He went to the theatre but home went she.” They recur throughout the play. In his The Signifying Monkey, Henry L. Gates emphasizes the centrality of this trope implying plot reversal in African American tradition: “The overarching rhetorical

Voices from within the Veil

297

strategy of the slave narratives written after 1845 can be represented as a chiasmus, as repetition and reversal.”31 It is no wonder that Parks with her commitment both to Rep & Rev structure and to official history subversion would resort to this verbal tool. As we can see, the setting that is normally identified in spatial terms is temporalized in Parks’ play, while time itself acquires spatial characteristics. This “confusion” may be interpreted in terms of Foucault’s description of modernity in The Order of Things, especially if one considers the importance of the resemblance/identity theme resonating through both his and Parks’ texts. While in classical times the objects’ being was primarily related to space where identities and differences were put in order, Foucault argues, in contemporary episteme, that history becomes the main mode for cognizing the objects’ being. It is there that we are supposed to look for a “common locus of encounters” allowing for things to be probed for their similitude or distinction. As discussed above, no part of historical America could either physically or spiritually become a zone where the sign of equivalence was possible between a black gravedigger and Abraham Lincoln. But Parks’ purely textual and performative “great hole of history”, the locus where, to use Foucault’s words again, “language intersects space”, is perfectly suited for the task. It serves as “homogeneous and neutral space in which things could be placed so as to display [...] the continuous order of their identities or differences [...].”32 In the Great Hole of History the margins and the center converge (who could be more marginal in America’s grand narrative than a black gravedigger, and who could be more central than Lincoln!). “Where else could they be juxtaposed except in a non-space of language?”33 Lesser Known’s identity to Lincoln, though meaningful only in Parks’ oneiric “non-space”, still graphically refutes the premise of their basic inequality. Parks does not mock or denigrate Lincoln—she merely shows that the kind of democracy that he epitomized is flawed and untenable. As Corey Walker observes (paraphrasing Melville) in his rereading of the seminal text on American democracy—Alexis de Tocqueville’s early study, “(a)lways lurking beneath the text is the specter that is the Negro. The pre(ab)sence of the Negro calls into question the commitments of democracy in America—its equality, its representation, its inclusion, its rights, its laws, its very foundation.”34 A peep into the Great Hole enables a reader/viewer to see America’s basic ideas about black people’s inferiority for what they are – social constructs rooted in a certain historical period. It is not by mere chance either that Lincoln’s double is given the trade of a gravedigger. In the virtual life-world of theatre and drama,

298

Suzan-Lori Parks’ The America Play as an African American Comment on U.S. Democratic History

gravedigging inevitably brings to mind the churchyard scene in Hamlet. It is my belief that Parks intentionally riffs on it to develop the theme of equality in her play. After all, Shakespeare’s scene, from beginning to end, is about people achieving ultimate social equality after death, that is, in history. First, there is reference to Adam’s digging—“there is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners, ditchers and gravemakers”; then Hamlet’s reflections upon the transience of gloria mundi, the “fine revolution” undergone by corpses and bones of those who used to be high and mighty and have now turned to dust; the Clown’s witty repartees making Hamlet observe that “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe”; his musings over Yorick’s skull resulting in his question whether Alexander looked and smelled the same in the earth; the logical sequence tracing Alexander’s path to becoming a beer-barrel stopper; and, finally—the verse summing up the scene: “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay,/ Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:/ O! that that earth, which kept the world in awe,/Should patch a wall to expel the winter’s flaw.”35 Shakespearean intertext, therefore, made here to question not only status/class, but also racial hierarchical distinctions, is enlisted by Parks to corroborate the tenet of ultimate human equality proved by mortality. Another digging allusion is, of course, Marx’s famous designation of the proletariat as capitalism’s gravedigger. Does Parks transpose it to racial relationships? Does her play prefigure ominous and threatening realities of imminent racial warfare? I do not think so. Rather, it can be read as a warning about the possible repercussions of long-buried history, once it is dug out, for the established order of things. What is called for, Corey Walker argues, is “the development of an agonistic narrative of democracy, along with a deep analysis of the specter that lies buried and repressed in the textual and material reality that is democracy in America.”36 Parks’ insistence as an artist on digging out ancestral bones and writing down their singing definitely contributes to this project.

Notes 1

Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer, editors and introduction, Lincoln on Democracy (New York: Fordham University Press , 1990), 90. 2 Suzsan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1995), 159. 3 Joseph Roach, “The Great Hole of History: Liturgical Silence in Beckett, Osofisan and Parks”, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100 (Winter 2001), 308. 4 Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works, 9.

Voices from within the Veil 5

299

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham : Duke University Press, 1991), 18. 6 Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, vol.1 (N.Y., 1996), 78. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, “From Pilgrim to Tourist,” Questions of Cultural Identity, edited by S. Hall and Paul Du Gay (London; Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996.), 24. 8 Barry Schwartz, “Postmodernity and Historical Reputation: Abraham Lincoln in Late Twentieth-Century American Memory,” Social Forces 77 (September 1998), 63. 9 Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works, 162. 10 Ibid., 180. 11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xvi. 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Ibid., 5. 14 Ibid., 162. 15 Ibid., 180. 16 Ibid,, 179. 17 Ibid., 184. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 186. 20 Ibid., 164. 21 Ibid., 189. 22 Ibid., 166. 23 George M.Frederickson, “America’s Original Sin”, The New York Review of Books 25 (March 2004), 34. 24 Mario Cuomo and Harold Holzer, Lincoln on Democracy, 83. 25 Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia”, The Portable Thomas Jefferson, edited and with an introduction by Merrill D. Peterson (New York : Penguin Books, 1977; original publication, 1975), 188. 26 Henry Gates, The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 130. 27 William Gienapp, “‘All We Have Ever Held Sacred;’ Lincoln and Slavery. 1854-1857: Introduction,” Lincoln on Democracy., 57. 28 Suzan-Lori Parks, The America Play and Other Works, 158. 29 Ibid., 4. 30 Louise Bernard, “The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World,’” http://www.findarticles com/p/articles/mi_m2838/is_n4_v31/ai_ 20425714/print, 21. 31 Henry L.Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 172. 32 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, xviii. 33 Ibid., xvii. 34 Corey D. B.Walker, “‘The Specter of Democracy,’” 201. 35 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act V, Scene I. 36 Corey D. B.Walker, “‘The Specter of Democracy,’” 206.

JOSEPHINE ST. PIERRE RUFFIN AND MARY CHURCH TERRELL: WOMEN WHO INFLUENCED THE WASHINGTON VS. DU BOIS DEBATE TERESA BLUE HOLDEN, GREENVILLE COLLEGE

In the last five years of the nineteenth century, two women, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, organized to draw African American women into the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). While they worked toward this common goal, a careful examination of their efforts reveals ways in which their strategies and objectives differed greatly. These women’s disparate views caused a rift early on in the NACW, one that has most often been attributed to regional and personality differences within the organization.1 Reducing their conflicts to personality differences ignores the intellectual flavor of the disputes among these women, who not only were well-educated but who also exhibited exhaustive abilities to organize and cooperate. Closer analysis brings to light the ideological differences that existed between these two leaders (and the women they led) that resulted in their disagreements in the early years of the NACW. Further, their arguments disclose the degree to which these women intellectuals articulated positions that influenced or reconstructed those of male leaders, including Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. Each woman had close personal associations with Washington, DuBois, and most of America’s foremost black leaders. Furthermore, Josephine Ruffin and her husband, Judge George Lewis Ruffin, had worked side-by-side with Boston’s most radical reformers (both white and black) during the antebellum and post-Civil War periods to abolish slavery and to encourage Radical Reconstruction. When the last decade of the nineteenth century opened, the nearly fifty year old widow directed, from her Boston home, an intellectual assemblage that was to shape the

Voices from within the Veil

301

contours of activist African American thought over the coming forty years and beyond. Ruffin’s home became a familiar gathering site for young, black university students who probably were friends with the Ruffins’ adult children. Their visitors included Harvard students W. E. B. DuBois, Clement Morgan, and Butler Wilson, who was a law partner with Josephine’s son, Hubert. These young men sought the tasteful atmosphere of the Ruffin home not only to charm beautiful, young African American women who also visited there, but also, according to DuBois, there they “met and ate, danced and argued and planned a new world.”2 Perhaps in this place, anything seemed possible. The Lewis Hayden home that in years past had stood as a symbolic citadel of freedom for fugitive slaves and white anti-slavery activists was just blocks away. Similarly, in 1890, Ruffin’s Charles Street home was a haven to a young, black intelligentsia, and it also welcomed white women’s rights and former abolitionist activists.3 Through her interest in women’s rights, Josephine had formed friendships with a group of white Transcendentalist women (Ednah Dowe Cheney, Julia Ward Howe, Abby Morton Diaz, and Lucy Stone) who were all twenty years her senior and who had welcomed her into their clubs and organizations. This intermingling of liberalminded visitors presaged a future that would bring African Americans and whites, men and women together to work for civil rights in the NAACP, an organization that Ruffin and each of the young men who frequented her home helped to start. Thus, Ruffin’s home was, in 1890, a cauldron for black and women’s rights activist thought where she and all of her guests contributed to the dream of building a world that was free from racial, gender, and other types of discrimination. During this decade, Ruffin attempted to contribute to the construction of “a new world” by pursuing the broad purpose of drawing women into a global community to fight oppression. This effort, like Ruffin’s entire public career, was firmly rooted in the black community. Early in the decade, Ruffin, along with other black women from the Northeast, raised money to support anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells. In the process, they set off a groundswell of black women’s activism that inspired the creation of northeastern black women’s clubs and a national black women’s club movement. In 1894, Ruffin helped to start the Boston Woman’s Era Club, an organization composed mostly of African American women. At the same time and with the club’s help, she launched a monthly newspaper, The Woman’s Era, a publication that broadcast the perspectives of black women nationally and linked their interests with those of white American women who were also contributors to the paper.

302

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell

Ruffin’s eagerness to begin a national black women’s club movement and a nationally circulating journal reflected the company that she kept and suggested the intellectual synergy that brewed at her home on Charles Street. DuBois described his beliefs during this period of his life in this way: The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.4

The young black intellectuals who gathered in Ruffin’s Charles Street apartment dreamed of ways to remake the world through correcting misconceptions about African Americans in the minds of white Americans. Ruffin was aware that white society seldom considered black and other minority women to be intellectual. Nevertheless, she believed that, as women of all races and backgrounds formed coalitions, black women would excel; their abilities would become apparent, and they would provide ample evidence to counter hegemonic beliefs about them. Under Ruffin’s leadership, the women who belonged to the Woman’s Era Club envisioned themselves as playing a role in American society that was uniquely available to them as women of color. Their ideological approach illustrated a concept that DuBois would later call “second-sight” or “double-consciousness.” As though they were behind a veil, these women recognized that many white Americans disdained them and that their subjugation was a result of this scorn. At the same time, from within the veil, people of color knew the richness of black culture.5 Members of the Woman’s Era Club realized they possessed rare insight into the subjugation that women and other minority groups in America experienced. For this reason, in the inaugural issue of The Woman’s Era, they stated a broad mission for their club: We the women of the Woman’s Era Club enter the field to work hand in hand with women, generally for humanity and humanity’s interests, not the Negro alone but the Chinese, the Hawaiian, the Russian Jew, the oppressed everywhere as subjects for our consideration, not the needs of the colored women, but women everywhere are our interest.6

Emphasizing a sense of mission to those who experienced subjugation globally, Ruffin and her club next brought all of their forces to bear upon organizing black women nationally for action. They did this through The Woman’s Era, a monthly publication that was circulated among black

Voices from within the Veil

303

women’s clubs nationally. By publicizing news and events and publishing women’s views, The Woman’s Era facilitated the formation of the National Association of Colored Women. Ruffin’s efforts to organize black women nationally were not without controversy, however. She held and publicized outspokenly activist views that rankled many of the (mostly conservative) African American women who had the resources to participate in the deliberations necessary for organizing a national club movement. In 1895, based on humiliating treatment that African Americans had received at the 1892 Columbian Exposition, Ruffin publicly opposed black participation in the Cotton States Exposition, and she, herself, boycotted the event. Explaining her position in a Woman’s Era editorial, she said: It is [as] impossible to separate the work of the whites and the blacks as it is to separate the work of those who have Irish or German blood. The result is inevitably meager, inadequate and mortifying. The result [will be] that we shall not have grown over rich in dignity or worth in the eyes of the other race, and we shall be probably financial losers.7

Ultimately, in her absence this very event would solidify most black intellectuals (at least temporarily) around a single and opposite strategy that Booker T. Washington espoused in his famous address there. Washington’s words, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress,” outlined a strategy of tacit acceptance of social segregation tinged with hopefulness about a future, more mutually inclusive society.8 While most black intellectuals (at least publicly) accepted Washington’s challenge for African Americans to focus inwardly on self-help and economic development, Ruffin continued to reflect the radical, activist views that were the foundation of her own political thought. Standing almost alone, she challenged Washington’s perspective by continuing to publish a radically activist point of view in The Woman’s Era and through eventually challenging the leadership aims of the NACW.9 An illustration of her fervency for civil rights was her response to the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (that legalized public segregation). Supporting civil disobedience rather than accepting injustice, she editorialized in The Woman’s Era: If laws are unjust, they must be continually broken until they are killed or altered. The world is turning a callous ear to appeals for justice; it is evident that the only way now to get what we want is to take it even if we have to break laws in getting it.10

304

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell

Positions such as this would eventually lead to Ruffin’s separation from the NACW, the organization that she had helped to found. Women who were attracted to the idea of organizing into a nationalized black women’s club movement (initially through the pages of The Woman’s Era) found over the next half decade that their own beliefs were more adequately represented in the person of Mary Church Terrell, who was elected as the NACW’s first president in 1896. In 1897, illustrating their differing opinions, Terrell and the NACW chose to part ways with Ruffin’s publication, The Woman’s Era, despite Ruffin’s dedicated service to the organization. Beginning with its 1894 inaugural edition, Ruffin and the Woman’s Era Club had sought in the pages of The Woman’s Era to draw a national audience of women into the black women’s club movement. They had succeeded first by facilitating the formation of the National Federation of Afro-American Women (NFAAW) in 1895, and then by publicizing events that led to a merger in 1896 of the Federation and the Colored Women’s League (CWL) that resulted in the formation of the National Association of Colored Women. Both organizations had chosen The Woman’s Era as their official publication, yet even before the formation of the NACW, some black club women had begun to express concern over the content within The Woman’s Era. In Ruffin’s absence, a meeting of black club women from around the country who had gathered at the Cotton States Exposition in 1895 passed resolutions, one of which seemed to target The Woman’s Era and specifically Josephine Ruffin: Resolved, That the tone of the Negro press should be elevated and placed upon such high standard so that none but those having special training for that calling may be encouraged to continue in such work. In the publication of race journals the personality of the editor should either be wholly eliminated or subordinated to questions of public importance. The advocacy of the selfish ends of any person or persons as against the public interests should be condemned, and no article that is not elevating in its character and pure in its purpose should ever appear in the columns of our newspapers.11

Later, in opening merger talks between the NFAAW and the CWL, representatives from the CWL confirmed that some club women believed The Woman’s Era too clearly reflected the views and personality of Ruffin. NFAAW representative Victoria Earle Matthews reported the point of view held by CWL representative Lucy Moton:

Voices from within the Veil

305

Miss Moton stated many things, which from her point of view detracted from the Era’s reputation for unbiased dealing with public questions, her language being decidedly strong.12

Thus, the issue of editorial bias that was addressed in the resolution of the Atlanta Congress was carried over into discussions about The Woman’s Era , as black women considered uniting into a national organization. At their 1897 convention, the NACW and President Mary Church Terrell turned south to Tuskegee and enlisted the help of Booker T. Washington’s wife, Margaret Murray Washington to develop a new publication for the organization. Washington began the National Association Notes, an innocuous paper that (notably) was free of editorials, a hallmark of The Woman’s Era. Extant records provide little detail about the transition from The Woman’s Era to the National Association Notes. Historian Deborah Gray White says Ruffin willingly gave up her position as publisher of the national journal that served the NACW because of the financial burden that she bore for publishing The Woman’s Era.13 A letter that Ruffin issued in November, 1897, contradicts this view and hints at her dissatisfaction with remaining on the sidelines in her work for women and African Americans. Journalism had provided her with an outlet for shaping public opinion, and she was not willing to abandon this avenue of expression. In the typeset letter that was dated November 17, 1897, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin offered an explanation about the disappearance and the fate of The Woman's Era, linking the journal to the mission of reform that extended beyond the black community. She explained that she and the Woman’s Era Club had originally created the journal “with a mission” that was to “[organize] the colored women of the country to do systematic work for the uplifting of their race.” Since this goal of bringing together a national organization of women was now accomplished, she stated that the paper “would have retired from the expensive field of journalism with a gratified 'well done' to itself” if its existence was not “a necessity for carrying the movement on to its legitimate results.” She believed that the new objective of the nationalized black women’s club movement lay in “reducing ignorance and vice by bringing the strong and good women, into sympathetic touch with those others who, in unlimited numbers, stand needy and anxious to be helped to better living.” But Ruffin was not merely interested in seeing black women do good works within their own communities. Challenging the accepted wisdom among club women, she insisted:

306

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell reformation must continue to be the rallying cry of the one hundred or more clubs in the 'National Association of colored women' until the vital importance of right formation is more generally appreciated.14

Ruffin intended to rally support for reform among women’s clubs through revising The Woman’s Era into a journal that would attack specifically the southern practice of using black prisoners as a source of labor through the convict lease system. She announced: ‘The Woman’s Era’ can have no higher mission than to spread information, and make public sentiment against this infamous abuse of justice, which is now doing more to keep the Negro in a degraded condition than slavery did. So while the Era will continue to do the general work of keeping the women’s clubs of the country in vital touch with each other, by regularly reporting the good work being done by them, it will devote itself especially to advocating the cause of Prison Reform in the South.15

She told facts about how in the South whites targeted black children and labeled them as convicts for minor offenses. For this reason, she believed the danger posed by the convict lease system to be even greater than slavery. Thus, she elevated social reform as the first and primary objective of black women’s clubs, above their attempts to rightly form the black community. Reform was a broad task that would change the entire scope of American society, while internal attempts of uplift in the black community would not alter white, hegemonic attitudes that kept African Americans subordinate. Still, she lacked the financial resources to develop The Woman’s Era in this new direction, and so she appealed in her letter for financial support. Perhaps Josephine Ruffin took this step to reestablish The Woman’s Era in response to encouragement from other clubwomen. At the 1897 Nashville NACW convention, a club from Pittsburgh included comments about The Woman’s Era in their annual report. They hoped that Ruffin would “resurrect” the journal.16 Presumably, Ruffin had received feedback from others who had written for and had supported the journal in times past. She did not seem to view this interruption of service as the termination of the publication. Since Ruffin issued her letter two months after the Nashville conference at which the National Association Notes had been adopted as the NACW’s publication, she apparently believed that there was an audience for two publications that would serve black club women. Her journalistic mission differed so clearly from Margaret Murray Washington’s, as National Association Notes lacked any hint of controversy. In her letter, Ruffin

Voices from within the Veil

307

positioned The Woman’s Era to be a protest journal that would agitate for social reform. Presumably, she sent the letter to past subscribers and potential patrons, but she did not receive the financial assistance that would allow her to publish her paper again. While she enjoyed support from small pockets of black women, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin was mostly out of step with a younger generation of club leaders who hid their protest impulses behind a veil of respectability. Actions to replace The Woman’s Era seemed to satisfy the majority of NACW members. Further, by 1899, NACW members were so pleased with Terrell and her representation of black womanhood that, despite protests of Ruffin and the Boston Woman’s Era Club, they broke with their own by-laws and elected her for a third consecutive term as their president.17 For them, Terrell represented what Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham has so aptly named the “politics of respectablity.”18 At this point in her life, Terrell reasserted Washington’s self-help strategy, but with a feminist edge that empowered black women as the prime race leaders, yet within their own sphere, the home.19 In a speech before the National American Women's Suffrage Association in 1898, she flawlessly demonstrated the benefits that an inward focus produced for women of the NACW. In her address entitled, “The Progress of Colored Women,” she outlined and highlighted the worth and efforts of black women. The proofs that she offered were the valuable works of reform that African American women were performing within their communities. She explained: Through the National Association of Colored Women much good has been done in the past, and more will be accomplished in the future, we hope. Believing that it is only through the home that a people can become really good and truly great, the National Association of Colored Women has entered that sacred domain. Homes, more homes, better homes, purer homes is the text upon which our sermons have been and will be preached.20

By placing black women in their homes, Terrell minimized the threat of race mixing and assured her mostly white audience that they were busy in their appropriate sphere. Outlining the work of individual clubs, Terrell galvanized her alliance with Tuskegee by telling first of the Mother’s Meetings that Margaret Murray Washington held with women in the area surrounding the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In each of her examples, she stressed the NACW’s mission of spreading cleanliness, morality, industriousness, and achievement. She closed with words that would become the NACW’s motto, “lifting as we climb”:

308

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long. With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.21

In the end, then, Terrell requested equality, not because of the shared humanity that all women enjoy, but because black women had proven their worth through their Herculean efforts within their communities. The strategic and ideological differences between Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell posed a threat to the NACW at its 1899 convention in Chicago. Ruffin and her Woman’s Era Club protested the continued leadership of Terrell and her strategy of arguing for black rights based upon their good works in their own communities. Delivering her club report to the assembled women from across the country, Ruffin appropriated the same passionate political language that her friend, William Lloyd Garrison, had used in 1831 in his first edition of his abolitionist journal, Liberator. She said: Today the [Woman’s Era] club utters its protest against self constituted leaders of the race who are prompted by selfishness and love of gain irrespective of the validity of the methods and to the shame of all selfrespecting members of the race. We beg that this convention now assembled will see to it that a crusade is begun against any who are willing to sacrifice the self respect and dignity of the colored citizens of America. This is what the Era Club is trying to do they are standing for right and on questions affecting the good of the race. We are in earnest that we will not equivocate, that we will not retreat a single inch, and that we will be heard.22

Appropriating Garrison’s words (“we are in earnest that we will not equivocate, that we will not retreat a single inch, and that we will be heard”), Ruffin broadened the scope of the conflict. Not just about what the by-laws of the organization allowed, Ruffin indicated the conflict was also about Terrell’s leadership style that attempted to prevent radical, activist protest about issues that were vital to all African Americans. Like Garrison, who had faced persecution and imprisonment, yet continued to voice his abolitionist views, Ruffin would not be silenced even as she faced an organization that had taken her publishing voice away. Few of the conservative women delegates at this conference wanted to adopt Ruffin’s radically activist stance. They, like Mary Church Terrell

Voices from within the Veil

309

and the majority of prominent black women and men, either publicly supported or remained silent about Booker T. Washington’s strategy of self-improvement in order to gain civil rights. Terrell was elected for the third time as the NACW’s president. She immediately created a pamphlet, quoting Chicago newspapers that had given glowing reviews of the convention and its participants. At the same time, Ruffin and the women of the Woman’s Era Club withdrew their membership from the organization in protest of the NACW’s actions. In time, others would take up the strident protests over American injustice that Ruffin maintained so consistently during the last decade of the nineteenth century. By the beginning of the twentieth century Ruffin’s friend, W. E. B. DuBois, would follow her lead and mount an ideological challenge to Washington’s point of view. Yet, for a brief time in the last five years of the nineteenth century, Ruffin stood mostly alone. Terrell temporarily settled in Washington’s camp, but as president of the NACW, she sought to carve a larger role for African American women in American society, one that placed black women at the center of selfimprovement efforts. Her loyalty to Washington soon waned. Over time, she became increasingly involved in black activism. By the end of 1906, she had begun to criticize Washington, and in 1910 she helped to found the NAACP. As a ninety-year-old woman in 1953, she picketed Washington, DC department stores and restaurants as chairman of the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the District of Columbia Anti-Discrimination Laws. Although their contributions have seldom been recognized, both Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell participated in sculpting the political thought and public discourse that would eventually become the DuBois versus Washington debate. They negotiated the societal boundary that kept them behind a “veil,” yet blessed them with “second sight.” Ruffin accessed singular knowledge (about the profound effects of oppression) that the veil had allowed her as a black woman. She attempted to educate others through publicizing insights that were available to her through this knowledge. For her, being silent about America’s unjust racial practices was not an option, just as it had not been an option for William Lloyd Garrison. Ruffin’s strident, radical voice served as a link between the uncompromising perspectives of nineteenthcentury protesters (like Garrison and Frederick Douglass) and the twentieth-century articulations of dissent offered eloquently by W. E. B. DuBois. Terrell constructed a “veil of respectability” through which she attempted to build bonds of unity with white women for whom morality and cleanliness were among their highest aspirations. By emphasizing the

310

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell

monumental efforts African American women were making to uplift their own communities, she hoped to elicit increased respect for them. Furthermore, the actions of uplift carried out by the NACW under the leadership of Mary Church Terrell, while insular, served temporarily as a way for African American women to gain greater power and control in a national environment that had grown increasingly hostile toward them. The actions and words of both Ruffin and Terrell influenced black male leaders from who they received little recognition, so that their contributions have remained mostly hidden.

Fig. 4. 2: Booker T. Washington, ca. 1880-1890. Washington was only thirty-nine when he made the white-acclaimed speech during the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition in September 1895. Courtesy Booker T. Washington Collection, Library of Congress.

Voices from within the Veil

311

Notes 1

Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves 1894-1994 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), 64-6, 93. Two doctoral dissertations also acknowledge disagreements within the organization. Maude Jenkins, “The History of the Black Woman’s Club Movement in America” (EdD diss., Columbia University Teachers College, 1984), 79. Jenkins, who is the niece of Ruffin’s granddaughter, Constance Ridley Heslip, provides quotes that confirm dissension in the NACW, but she offers no explanation for them. She did the same in an interview with the author, November, 2002; Tullia Brown Hamilton, “The National Association of Colored Women, 1896-1920” (PhD diss., Emory University, 1978), 56-8. Hamilton blames the departure of the Woman’s Era Club and Ruffin on procedural disagreements between Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell, the organization’s president for its first five years. 2 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (International Publishers, 1968), 136-7; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993), 104-7. 3 Lewis, 104-5. 4 Du Bois quoted in Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 141. 5 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, eds. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver, Norton Critical Edition (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 10-11. 6 “Boston,” The Woman’s Era, March 24, 1894. 7 “Editorial,” The Woman’s Era, June 1895. 8 Booker Taliaferro Washington, "Atlanta Exposition Address, September 18, 1895," The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan et al., vol. 3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), 584-87. 9 Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 116. Schecter chronicles that Wells-Barnett’s exclusion from the NACW was similar to Ruffin’s and attributes Wells-Barnett’s situation to the NACW’s divided loyalty to Washington. 10 Unnamed editorial, The Woman’s Era, June, 1896. 11 Ibid., 4-5. 12 “Memoranda of ‘The Conference Committee’ of the National Federation, The National League, and The Atlanta Congress,” The Woman’s Era, February, 1896. 13 White, 84. 14 Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin to subscribers, 17 November 1897, Woman’s Era Club file, Boston Public Library. 15 Ibid. 16 “Report of the Frances E. W. Harper League of Pittsburg and Alleghany,” 1897 Tennessee Convention, Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895-1992, Part 1, Reel 1, find in handwritten club reports that accompany the official records of the convention.

312 17

Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell

The NACW’s constitution that they had adopted at their 1897 convention called for a new president to be elected every two years, and no president was to serve longer than two terms. Supporters of Terrell interpreted that, although she had been president for two terms, her tenure under the present constitution had been for only one term. 18 Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham, “African American Women’s History and The Metalanguage of Race,” in We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible, ed. Darlene Clark Hine, Wilma King, Linda Reed, (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1995), 16. 19 Monica J. Evans, “Black Women and Outlaw Culture,” in Critical Race Theory the Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 509. 20 Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women,” Gifts of Speech: Woman’s Speeches from around the World, Sweet Briar College, http://gos.sbc.edu/t/terrellmary.html. 21 Ibid. 22 Josephine Ruffin, “Woman’s Era Club Report.” 1899 Chicago Convention, Records of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, 1895-1992, Part 1, Reel 1, find in handwritten club reports that accompany the official records of the convention.

CHAPTER FIVE THE STRUGGLE FOR EDUCATION AND THE VOTE IN TIDEWATER VIRGINIA

Fig. 5.1. Protestors in front of the Norfolk Public School Building, ca. 1958. Courtesy Edna Hendrix Collection.

Beginning on December 9, 1952, three cases were argued for three days before a packed courtroom in the Supreme Court. Deliberations took months and included recalling both sides to answer further questions. In the interim, Earl Warren was appointed Chief Justice following the death of Fred Vinson, a staunch segregationist. Three cases were amalgamated into one that included public schools in Clarendon County, South Carolina, Topeka, Kansas, and Prince Edward County, Virginia. By May 1954, the Court rendered its unanimous ruling which declared separate schools inherently unequal and segregated schools unconstitutional. Although the Court was unanimous in its decision, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was slow to implement the decision because of fears that integrated education would bring about social turmoil.

314

Chapter Five

Education was the main civil rights battleground of the 1950s, with the ripple effect of the Brown decision gradually spilling over into other areas of social contact. In a case study of Norfolk, Virginia, Charles Ford examines the importance of local clergy during the tumultuous years following the Brown decision. Fearful of risking the ire and conservative backlash among their church membership, some white clergymen chanted the mantra of “wait,” while municipal leaders used public funds to fight integration. Ford finds, however, that the moral weight of many Protestant clergy, both black and white, tipped the scales in Norfolk in favor of those wanting at least some kind of compliance with Brown. For Norfolk, of course, the turning point occurred five years after the Brown decision when six schools were closed during a protracted court battle. And while supporters of integration eventually won this battle, the outcome was very minimal and cloudy at best. In the 1960-61 period, the focus of black protest shifted from school integration to challenging a broad range of racial and economic inequities. Influenced by the Congress of Racial Equality’s sit-in strategy, groups of college-aged students, beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1960, re-initiated sit-ins as part of a massive application of nonviolent protests. Jeffrey Littlejohn surveys Norfolk’s student-led protests to desegregate white-only lunch counters at Woolworth’s, S. S. Kresge's, and W. T. Grant's. Their success at Woolworth’s would inspire students in neighboring Portsmouth to follow suit in what seemed to outsiders to be a coordinated attack on the status quo.

THE ECUMENICAL MOMENT: RELIGIOUS SUPPORT FOR INTEGRATED SCHOOLS IN NORFOLK, 1954-1959 CHARLES H. FORD, NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY

The failure of "Massive Resistance" to integrate schools in Norfolk, Virginia stemmed in part from the local clergy's unwillingness to defend the Jim Crow status quo in reference to public education. Many historians have credited district judges, business leaders, Navy officers, outraged parents, and local editors for the sudden defeat of segregationists in Norfolk. Yet the significance of local religious leaders, both white and black, in achieving this political and civil rights victory has been overlooked. Alarmed by prospects of social disorder and inspired by Scriptural passages, a diverse array of white and black ministers of various denominations there went beyond simply opposing the overreaction of closing quite a few public schools to advocating change and ultimately gradual integration. Accordingly, this essay documents an ecumenical moment during the civil rights era in Norfolk that other historians have missed, assessing the crucial roles of religious leaders of various denominations in ending segregation de jure in “the Shining City by the Sea.”1 To appreciate these contributions by clergy and committed laypeople locally requires a brief review of the context that precipitated their courage. In 1954, the Supreme Court handed down its Brown decision, which quickly raised the possibility of desegregation in border-state cities such as Louisville, Baltimore, and Norfolk. In 1955, school board officials from Norfolk listened to the assistant superintendent of Baltimore’s schools to compare notes and strategies about what they considered inevitable change. That same year, the School Superintendent, Dr. J. J. Brewbaker, was praised for operating a fully integrated summer workshop for faculty at Lakewood School. Yet the intervention of Virginia’s Senator Harry Byrd the next year with his call for “Massive

316

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

Resistance” by all means necessary to the Court frightened Dr. Brewbaker and emboldened those officials such as Mayor W. Fred Duckworth who wanted to continue separate and unequal schools. As the summary overview offered by the Women’s Interracial Cooperation Council lamented later, “the great body of moderate citizens of Norfolk … simply did not offer their leadership in those years.” Faced with the inaction of the white center that failed to hold initially, African American leaders in Norfolk waited for the courts to get things done. Given the direct legal mandate that Norfolk schools had to be desegregated in the fall of 1958, the actual prospect of African Americans going to school with whites led the Governor of Virginia to shut down the six Norfolk schools that were to allow seventeen screened African American applicants to attend. A referendum on November 18, 1958 was held to support this draconian action, but a broad coalition of elite pressure groups, including clergy, forced the schools to reopen with the seventeen screened African American students attending previously all-white schools on February 2, 1959.2

Support for Brown Some clergy in Norfolk welcomed the Brown decision with obviously more African Americans doing so than whites. For example, in the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, May 24, 1954, “it was the unanimous view of those [white ministers] who commented that the ruling was ‘in harmony with Christian principles,’ so far as could be ascertained.” The newspaper extensively quoted the sermon, “The Christian Faith in a Changing World,” given by the Reverend Floyd Leggett, pastor of the First Christian Church, Disciples, a fashionable, well-to-do congregation on Colonial Avenue in the Ghent neighborhood of Norfolk. Preaching to at least some of the business leaders and civic notables, including School Superintendent J. J. Brewbaker, who would ultimately make the hard choices necessary for compliance, Leggett admitted that “it is not up to me to tell you how to think … You have a right to make up your own mind. But I will say you are obliged to face the change like Christian people. Sub-Christian thought and comment always bring sub-Christian results.” Implicitly criticizing the die-hards as “sub-Christian,” volatile, and savage, he worried that, if they acted upon their emotions, then “innocent people would suffer and the situation would be aggravated.” That same Sunday, the Reverend Peyton Randolph Williams of the even more exclusive Christ and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Ghent cast his approval of Brown in a general discussion of Christian stances on social issues:

Voices from within the Veil

317

“Without some recognition of our own sinfulness, the democratic process is unworkable. We see that exemplified in the McCarthy hearings, where there is a persistent unwillingness to face one’s own shortcomings while at the same time condemning others. We see it, too, in the boiling up of the controversy over segregation.” Without ever explicitly endorsing desegregation, the Reverend Williams detected the worldliness and violence untempered by Christianity that underlay the segregationist side. Yet, farther north of downtown, ensconced in new middle-class and suburban developments, the all-white parishioners of Talbot Park Southern Baptist Church on the main thoroughfare of Granby Street did not receive their ministerial editorial in the sermon, but instead they were given it explicitly as part of a prayer: “O Lord, forgive us Christian people for finding it necessary for the Supreme Court to pass on a decision that we as Christian people have known to be true for 2,000 years.” Here the Reverend Fred T. Laughon, Jr. implicitly characterized opposition to Brown as not only un-American but also as anti-Christian.3 African American ministers were understandably much blunter than Laughon in their approval of Brown as an overdue application of Christianity. For instance, in reference to the Commonwealth’s effort to frustrate even the gradual implementation of Brown, the Reverend John B. Henderson, pastor of Bank Street Baptist Church and the chairman of the NAACP Educational Committee, saw these delays as pure evil and not a good-faith attempt at moderate compromise. Indeed, in his analysis of the school board’s denial to enroll African American children in all-white schools, Henderson found the board caught “between the Devil of rank Virginia racism and the deep Blue Sea of justice and equality as interpreted by the Supreme Court of this land of ours.” Clearly, the board and the governor had chosen a path that was “diabolically shameful” and showed “an indecent and unChristian lack of ethics.” To Henderson and most black clergy, the righteousness of their cause was self-evident, and they were determined not to let the Devil win this time.4 Among African Americans, community mobilization required a clerical vanguard. For example, integration was the focus of a church panel at Christ Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church “for the benefit of the building fund drive of St. Paul CME Church” on Sunday afternoon, June 19, 1955. Along with Dr. G.W.C. Brown, the supervisor of the Evening College at the Norfolk division of Virginia State College (in 1969 became Norfolk State College), Mrs. Leola Clark, president of the Crest Social Club, Willie Mae Watson, principal of Diggs Park School, the Reverend E.C. Walton, pastor of First Baptist Church in the small town of South Hill, came to Norfolk to discuss the church’s role in integration,

318

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

which was placed first on the program. This vanguard relied on eternal truths that transcended the ideologies of the recent past. In two editorial cartoons in August 1956 in the Journal and Guide, the oldest and largest African American weekly newspaper in eastern Virginia, Jack Mimms captured this confidence. In the first one, Mimms has a self-satisfied white segregationist with his eyes closed condescendingly saying to a black man: “Sure, you’re a full-fledged American citizen, but I decide what you can or cannot do.” On the side of the segregationist are the smiling heads of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Joseph Stalin, the symbols of godless ideologies that had been or were to be defeated. The black man, with eyes open if hat in hand, is clearly on the side of the Biblical quotation from Leviticus 25:17: “Ye shall not oppress one another.” The next week, in another cartoon, Jack Mimms drew a balanced scale of justice with one black man on one side and one white man on the other based upon Acts 10:34, “God shows no partiality,” and Genesis 1:27, “God created man in his own image.” This scale is depicted as Truth with a capital “T” and emboldened. Myth is portrayed lower in the cartoon as an imbalanced scale of one large white man and one much smaller black man without Biblical references yet with the banner of “White Superiority.” Fact is portrayed in a box below Myth, showing the latest scientific conclusions that showed race to be more a cultural than a biological construct. Thus, the cartoon’s title is “God and Science Explode a Myth,” reflecting the optimism that the Bible and cutting-edge research were on the same track, at least with regard to desegregation.5 Confident of the Scriptural bases for their cause, African American ministers came to the defense of their white counterparts who had criticized (and who had been criticized by) their own more conservative flocks. For instance, in the Journal and Guide, February 4, 1956, journalist Thomas Dabney reported that the Reverend Leonard E. Terrell, the acting director of religious activities at Virginia State College, the main historically African American public university in the Old Dominion headquartered in Petersburg, “spoke in defense of white ministers who have expressed publicly their opposition to Virginia’s scheme to circumvent the desegregation order of the U.S. Supreme Court.” Before an audience at the Norfolk division of Virginia State, the Reverend Terrell dismissed the tired Biblical references of one hundred years ago to slaves obeying their masters by upholding the other Scriptural passage in which the apostle Paul saw “all as children of God.” To Terrell, because both slavery and segregration were and are moral issues, then ministers of all backgrounds had and have a special obligation to combat those evils, despite “what opponents have said in letters to the editor.” Even if the

Voices from within the Veil

319

churches themselves lagged behind professional sports, labor unions and the armed services in their own actual integration, their leaders should “speak out against wrong no matter where it is found.”6 As the final showdown loomed, both white and black clergy were at the forefront to shout down any howling mobs. The Journal and Guide reported that “a committee has been formed for parents to support legal efforts to block school closures in Norfolk. The Norfolk Committee for Public Schools is headed by the Rev. James C. Brewer, pastor of the Norfolk Unitarian Church,” another mainstay of fashionable Ghent. Thirty-five years later, Forrest R. White believed that the Committee wanted a pastoral chair for legitimacy and prestige, “even if the Unitarian Church was held in less esteem than the Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Lutheran congregations that dominated the City.” Yet other ministers besides the Unitarian one were anxious to step up to the plate and lead. Indeed, on September 27, 1958, on Wednesday, some 1,200 residents made plain their intent to abide by the law of the land and committed themselves to peaceable means to bring about integration of schools in a full-page announcement in a daily newspaper. Colored and white names were signed into the announcement. The move was initiated by a white minister, the Reverend William B. Abbott, pastor of Oakdale Presbyterian church,7

a more mainstream and, thus, more influential vehicle. This leader, the Reverend William B. Abbot of Oakdale Presbyterian (on East Little Creek Road, north of downtown), was particularly active. He had been driven to Norfolk from rural Berryville, Virginia (the place where Senator Byrd had his iconic apple orchard) because of his progressive views on racial relations, and, in 1957, he spoke to the state conference of the NAACP on “The Church Meets the Challenge of Compromise.” He wanted to implement the stated goal of the National Council of Churches that went way beyond school desegregation “without insincerity or evasion.”8 Abbot also wrote a letter of support to Delegate Kathryn Stone of Arlington, admiring her courage in the immediate wake of the Moncure affair in February 1958 (in which other delegates ganged up on Stone after she questioned the secrecy of the committees harassing the NAACP and its lawyers), and, later in the year, he would go on to lead the local ministerial reaction to the schools closure.9 This unequivocal resistance on the part of leading clergy in Norfolk such as Abbot to Massive Resistance initially rebuffed the segregationist Tidewater Educational Foundation, Inc. (TEF), which wanted to use church facilities for all-white private academies to replace the public schools.

320

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

The Other Side Of course, there were pulpits in Norfolk and its immediate environs that saw Brown as apostasy and even more that greeted desegregation with icy indifference. The Reverend Dr. Richard B. Martin, a regular contributor to the Journal and Guide’s editorial page and the rector of Grace Episcopal Church (a congregation which featured some of the most prominent African Americans), observed that many of his white counterparts catered to the wishes of their congregations in part because they did not want to lose their jobs. He lamented that “the average white congregation has deteriorated into a private club, with dues paying members, with the minister as the ‘hired boy’” who was not about to rock the boat.10 He also discerned that, even when the pastor might draw the line on using his church for segregated classrooms, prominent laymen may elect to disregard his advice. This lay preference, to Martin, made the church in many cases: “a pressure group … a lobbying group bargaining against change … used by man to serve his social, economic, and political convenience.”11 So it was no wonder that the TEF eventually did find a religious refuge in the form of Bayview Baptist Church in Norfolk’s soonto-be annexed northeastern corridor; by 1958, this working-class congregation and its pastor, the Reverend Burks, would allow segregated classes for white students seeking a completely segregated alternative to proceed on their premises. In addition, the TEF’s most energetic cheerleader would emerge in the form of a twenty-five-year-old Norview High School history teacher, Hal Bonney, whose father had published a layman’s guide for Tidewater Methodists in 1950. Bonney had become an active layman himself at stately Epworth Methodist downtown on Freemason Street, whose pastor, the Reverend Dr. Potts happened to be for desegregation. The national Methodist Board of Education had explicitly opposed the use of its denomination’s churches in setting up segregated academies, and Dr. Potts emerged as the ministerial leader to reopen the schools desegregated.12 Accordingly, Bonney and his fellow travelers turned to the Baptist Burks for logistical support. For those Protestants turned off by their own preacher’s activism, there were ready local options. Most annoying for the supporters of segregation at any price, the Norfolk Presbytery’s resolution implicitly threatened that closing public schools might also close doors of salvation to those who went along with the school board’s unlawful and un-Christian defiance.13 This stance was too much for dissenting members of Royster Memorial Presbyterian (well north of downtown near the Naval Base), who were well on their way to

Voices from within the Veil

321

forming their own segregationist Suburban Christian Church in neighboring Princess Anne County, now the City of Virginia Beach. In March 1956, within the context of the schools crisis, thirty members of Royster “decided that their spiritual and social needs could best be met elsewhere.”14 Their leaders revealingly included W. H. McKendree, the local printer who helped to found Tidewater Academy, the segregated private school for those whites fleeing the public schools because of the African American transfers, and William Story, the arch-segregationist superintendent of adjacent South Norfolk County Schools, who actually negotiated with Brewbaker to try to accommodate some select (white, of course) members of “the lost class of 1959” in his lily-white homerooms. The dissenters from Royster at first gathered for worship at the McKendrees’ residence in March 1956; for the next month, they met at the Thole Street Fire Station and then, between April 1956 and April 1957, at Suburban Park Elementary, an all-white public school. After a year, for whatever reason, school officials told the suburban Christians that they could not continue to rent the school’s auditorium, prompting a difficult search for a place to gather that landed the embryonic congregation in an old abandoned dairy barn in then-rural Kempsville, previously owned by one of the area’s leading real estate developers, T. Marshall Bellamy. Most interestingly, their minister in the 1950s, William H. Gatling, was not ordained but had been a lay Methodist minister (similar to Bonney) and worked for an insurance company full-time. He may have not been a Defender of State Sovereignty and Individual Liberties, but McKendree, a founding father of Suburban Christian, certainly was.15

“Not … A Smooth Sailing, But A Safe Landing” While there were lay Methodists at least and a few Baptists who were certainly on the segregationist side, the tense confrontation with Mayor Duckworth at the City Council meeting on September 30, 1958 showed the depth and diversity of pastoral support for desegregration even if socially confident Methodist and Episcopalian leaders took the center stage. Before a packed and largely friendly house of up to one-hundredfifty people, the Reverend Dr. Potts from Epworth Methodist presented his petition to reopen the schools in compliance with Brown before the Council with seventy-six names and signatures from the Norfolk Ministers’ Association, of which he was President. He maintained that public schools were the creators of American democracy, which, in turn, came from Christianity. Thus the ministers could only embrace a Christian solution to the school closure crisis, which, to Potts, meant

322

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

reopening formerly all-white schools with the seventeen carefullyscreened African American applicants quietly admitted. James Brewer, the Unitarian leader of the Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, went on to use a much more secular argument about local control of education being historically preferred over that of the state, which the Mayor quickly dismissed as fiscally irresponsible. The religious, not the secular, argument was apparently what really made the Mayor and his fellow supporters of Massive Resistance angry. Reiterating Potts’ argument, the Episcopal Reverend Moultrie Guerry of Old St. Paul’s, the downtown white church that still had a cannonball in its walls from the British bombardment of 1776, vehemently urged the Council to proceed with desegregated schools. This robust speech apparently brought an equally robust reply from the Mayor, who blurted: “The best thing you preachers can do is to tell those 17 niggers to go back where they belong and we’ll open the schools tomorrow.” Reverend Guerry was stunned to silence by the crudity and brutality of this broadside, but he quickly and quietly chided Duckworth by saying: “You can’t halt progress. Even if those seventeen withdrew, there would be seventeen others to take their place.” The Mayor then whined about the NAACP picking on Norfolk, which had, in his words, “done more for Negroes than any city in the South.” He went on to observe about Norfolk’s African Americans: “They pay only 5% of the taxes and occupy 75% of the jail space.” They were ingrates to the Mayor, who felt that $50 million worth of slum clearance and all-black school upgrades were not sufficiently effective nor appreciated. When another Episcopal minister, the African American Richard B. Martin, rebutted his racist comments, Duckworth differentiated Martin from the NAACP and its alien agitation. The preachers as a group were irritating to the Mayor, however. In one account, he bristled that “I can’t understand why it is that only since the Supreme Court decision have you ministers jumped on the bandwagon of integration.” That apparently brought an equally spirited response from the Reverend Peyton Randolph Williams, allegedly “from the same bloodlines that produced Thomas Jefferson,” who exclaimed: “Your honor, I was born with the idea!”16 Just as the schools crisis deepened with the fractious Council exchange, on 1 and 2 October, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference held a midweek conference and meeting at the Norfolk Municipal Arena and at the Queens Street Baptist Church, “soliciting the support of all churches in the Tidewater area and all civic, fraternal, educational, labor union and business groups … [and] the cooperation of the ministers of all denominations.” A local prominent African American dentist, Dr. Samuel F. Coppage, and, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist

Voices from within the Veil

323

Church in nearby Portsmouth, Reverend Dr. Harvey N. Johnson, cochaired the planning committee for the gathering. Dr. W. L. Hamilton, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church, just across the street from the new campus for the Norfolk division of Virginia State College, also was prominent in planning the local arrangements, which apparently included an optional trip to pray outside a closed Norfolk high school, Norview, for God’s love to change the hearts and minds of white officials. Indeed, it was anticipated that one of the best attended sessions would be “Suggesting How Non-Violent Resistance Might Be Used in Pushing for School Integration.”17 While most white ministers in Tidewater did not attend the above workshop, they did have their own non-violent resistance planned carefully within legal limits and traditional proprieties. In an early October article from Thomas L. Dabney, the Journal and Guide proudly announced that Dr. Potts had garnered ten more signatures from local ministers for his petition to reopen the schools. That added up to the seventy-six names that he had presented to the raucous Council session on September 30, and there was hope that “others may sign who did not attend the meeting” of the Ministerial Association. While the actual statement focused far more on the benefits of public schools to maintaining American democracy than on the moral imperatives for integrated instruction, several white ministers surveyed by the African American weekly a few days later discerned that “they knew of no Bible statement, particularly in the New Testament, which supports the claim of some clergymen and laymen that God favors the segregation of the races or intended that they should remain segregated.” Indeed, one of these ministers claimed that most pastors in Norfolk believed that God did not want segregation, but he went on to say that “ministers generally don’t like to make statements for the press on integration because they prefer not to be involved in any political controversy.” Yet, by signing the petition and having the political cover of seventy-five other members of the clergy, even this relatively timid if probably typical minister could not help but be caught up in the opposition to Massive Resistance. Dabney approvingly noted that the Association’s statement stemmed from a longstanding and sincere commitment to integration. Seven years before, “in 1951 the ministers voted not to sponsor another preaching mission in Norfolk until it could be held as an interracial project and [be] unsegregated.” After Brown, the Association had revived the Norfolk Preaching Mission “unsegregated and on an interracial basis.” Dabney ended his article by noting that the ministers wanted the same “smooth” transition that ushered

324

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

in “high moral and spiritual aspects” for “the field of democratic education.”18 African American clergy and laypeople knew, however, that this epochal shift would not be smooth, and they were ready for a long fight. Furthermore, there was an element of the local saying among African American Protestants: “The harder the cross, the brighter the crown.” The Journal and Guide, October 11, 1958, highlighted the sermon, “When in Life’s Storms,” given by the Reverend W. H. Crews, pastor of Mt. Pleasant Baptist church in Titustown, a working-class African American section of the City. In his homily, Rev. Crews referred to Mark 6: 48-51. Comparing the Biblical storm described in Mark with the one in City Council over the school crisis, he declared: “perhaps this is the starting point of the storm for them, but as a race we have been in the storm for a long time. Our forefathers stood in the storm of slavery and the clouds have not cleared yet.” The storms engulfing the African American students trying to integrate were inevitable, but he reminded everyone that God tended to appear at the height of them. To Crews, “the Lord has not promised us a smooth sailing, but a safe landing.”19 To guarantee a safe landing amidst the storms of hate swirling for the seventeen screened African American students meant a firm spiritual grounding for them especially. As Vivian Carter Mason of the Women’s Council for Interracial Cooperation later reported, “each morning there was an opening exercise of which one of the children had charge. They selected the hymns, the scripture and the responsive readings.” One of the favorite hymns was “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” but the one that they sang with the most vigor was “We’re Marching, We’re Marching, We’re Marching Upward to Zion, Beautiful Zion, the city of God.” According to Mason, singing that number in particular “built in them something that was irrevocable and was not to be destroyed. It gave them some strength where by they could not be moved.” The Norfolk 17 knew that there was not going to be smooth sailing, yet they knew that they would prevail in the end because God was on their side.20 That safe landing described by the Reverend Crews was seen as coming sooner rather than later, however, largely because of sectarian solidarity. In the Journal and Guide, October 18, 1958, the Reverend Dr. Richard B. Martin praised Governor LeRoy Collins of Florida and his keynote address to the 59th General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA, finding it “refreshing to listen to a man in high public office speak with Christian courage to an interracial audience.” Unlike Virginia’s J. Lindsay Almond who had followed through with the godless and irrational Massive Resistance, Collins urged his denomination to

Voices from within the Veil

325

pursue “a plan which can be supported with honor by people of every race, creed, and color, a plan which will be supported, with respect for Christian conscience, and with respect for law; a plan which can be idealistic and at the same time embraces reason and common sense.” To Collins and Martin, the moral high ground associated with complying with the courts guaranteed national security and implicitly staved off divine retribution.21 In the next week’s edition of the Journal and Guide, October 25, 1958, the Reverend Dr. Martin applauded the mainly white Episcopal bishops’ unequivocal resolution to condemn Massive Resistance and segregation. He wrote that “these are times when a good case can be made for a position of compromise and moderation, but Christianity is not a religion of compromise, but rather of absolutes. Had Christ consented to be moderate, he could have escaped the cross. Today’s church wants Christianity without the cross and the two are inseparable.” The bishops who had an unusually large popular and elite following in Tidewater Virginia, because of their colonial past, were to be congratulated, according to Martin, for refusing to backpedal from their confrontation of customary prejudice. In reference to the bishops, Martin wrote that “we thank God for those church bodies [such as the Protestant Episcopal Church’s hierarchy] which have not been afraid to condemn the use of church facilities by those who seek to circumvent the courts. We thank God that there are church bodies which have condemned segregation as being unChristian.” 22 The confidence that God was so obviously backing the Norfolk 17 propelled the elderly African American George L. Williams of Washington, D.C. to lambaste back-sliders such as the Reverend Eugene Brown, as previously aired in the Washington Evening-Star, “a Negro Baptist supply preacher,” who had “urged families of the seventeen black students to search their hearts and withdraw their applications in the interest of community harmony.” In a letter to the editor published by the Journal and Guide, 3 January 1959, Williams, a native of Norfolk, judged that these deferential pleas to white supremacy were “more often made by those who would endeavor to sell the freedom of their race to some political opponent.” He did not want someone such as the Reverend Brown ruining the promise of legal justice so long denied in part because “all such gestures from the members of the race do encourage the opponent to resist much harder.” Certain that the Norfolk 17 would rise above the Reverend Brown’s self-interested ploy with the law and destiny on their side, Williams clearly saw the segregationists on the run. 23 The crescendo of clerical opposition that foreshadowed ultimate victory over Massive Resistance in Norfolk resounded with the resolution

326

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

of the mainly black Baptist Ministers’ Conference of Norfolk, Portsmouth, and Vicinity on 31 January followed by a similar manifesto by the white Norfolk Ministerial Association on February 1. In response to the City Council’s compounding the closure of even more schools by shutting off their funds, the ministers called that move “retaliatory, revengeful, and unChristian.” Agreeing with Rabbi Schecter that the Council was way out of line with its “exhibition of intemperance and pride,” they went on to warn the Councilmen personally: “Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”24 The next week, after the schools had reopened and Massive Resistance had indeed fallen, on 7 February 1959, Vivian Carter Mason noted the victory over “the shallow-hearted and decadent leadership,” but she believed that “there can be no feeling of rejoicing. This hard trek has been painful, full of anxiety, and self-sacrifice.” Yet it was all worth it in the end for the Norfolk 17 to become “pioneers in human rights,” thanks to, among others, “the sanctuary of First Baptist Church, Bute Street, … [and, in general] the undergirding by the clergy and the churches.”25 These events in Norfolk largely confirmed historian David L. Chappell’s appreciation of the added and necessary boost that Bible-based activism gave liberal reform in the 1950s and 1960s. Many ministers and laypeople, both black and white, knew God was on their side, but they did not wait for God to bring down Massive Resistance. They confidently faced the opposition, some of it from avowed and fellow Christians, themselves, knowing that they would eventually win. It is true that what desegregation meant and would bring would divide congregations and their leaders by race and class in Norfolk into the next century. Nevertheless, at that ecumenical moment, to many committed clergy and their flocks, the “backlash” that would contribute twenty years later to the making of the Christian Right was yet neither Christian nor right.26

Notes 1 For a standard account that leaves out the roles of religious leaders, see Thomas Parrimore with Peter C. Stewart and Tommy L. Bogger, Norfolk: The First Four Centuries (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 373-376. For an assessment that downplays the significance of religious support, see Alexander S. Leidholdt, Standing Before the Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Public-School Integration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 95-98. 2 “How Norfolk Opened Her Schools,” February 2, 1959, 2. Women’s Council for Interracial Cooperation Papers, Folder 20, MG-54, Special Collections. Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, Virginia. For the Lakewood School

Voices from within the Veil

327

workshop, see “Frontiers Commend Officials: Stand By Brewbaker And Chittum Wins Plaudits,” Journal and Guide, June 18, 1955, 1. For a detailed account that still largely overlooks the spiritual dimension, see Forrest R. White, Pride and Prejudice: School Desegregation and Urban Renewal in Norfolk, 1950-1959 (Westport, CT, Praeger, 1992). 3 “Ministers Here Back Decision on Segregation,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, May 24, 1954, 8A. 4 “Henderson Speaks: School Board Between Devil and Deep Blue Sea,” Journal and Guide, August 30, 1958, 8; “Henderson Speaks: Virginia’s Deadly Virus: Little Men in Big Places,” Journal and Guide, September 20, 1958, 8. 5 For the panel, see “Integration Subject for St. Paul Church Panel,” Journal and Guide, June 18, 1955, 3. For the cartoons, see Journal and Guide, “Ridiculous?Ask the Oppressed Millions,” August 5, 1956, 10; “God and Science Explode A Myth,” August 11, 1956, 8. See also “Panel on School Crisis: Desegregation Called Phase of Social Change,” Journal and Guide, September 20, 1958, 15. On this panel, among others, was Ms. Jocelyn Goss, member of the English Department of the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College. Their audience was a Sunday School class taught by Dr. Lyman Beecher Brooks, the first President of the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College (now Norfolk State University.) 6 Thomas L. Dabney, “Ministers Defended on Opposing Segregation,” Journal and Guide, February 4, 1956, 2. For southern Presbyterians in general, see Joel Alvis, Religion and Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946-1983 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994). 7 For Brewer, “Group Formed Keep Schools Open,” Journal and Guide, September 27, 1958, 2. For White’s assessment, see White, Pride and Prejudice, 172. For Abbot, see “’Open Our School’ Pleas Sounded By Students Fall On the Deaf Ears of Governors,” Journal and Guide, September 27, 1958, 19. 8 Virginia State Conference of the NAACP, The Candle, Vol.1, No. V, December 1957, 3 as found in Papers of the NAACP, Part 27: Selected Branch Files: 19561965, Series A, The South, Reel 18, microfilm. 9 William B. Abbot to Kathryn Stone, Papers of Kathryn H. Stone, No. 10555-A, Box 9, Albert Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. 10 Richard B. Martin, “’Hired Boys’ In Pulpit,” Journal and Guide, October 26, 1957, 8. See also his “My Brother’s Keeper?,” Journal and Guide, May 10, 1958, 8. 11 Richard B. Martin, “Stubborn Man, Almighty,” Journal and Guide, August 16, 1958, 10. See also John B. Henderson, “Clergymen and Laymen Split Over Race Issue,” Journal and Guide, May 10, 1958, 8. 12 “Methodists Bar Use of Churches to Keep Segregation,” Journal and Guide, January 25, 1958, 13. 13 “Churchmen Will Not Allow Buildings To Be Used As Schools,” Journal and Guide, August 9, 1958, 1-2; August 16, 1958, 10. 14 Robert J. Grymes, Jr., “Fifty Years of God’s Faithfulness”: A History of Suburban Church, Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, October 2006, 1. Grymes, a current officer at the church, carefully gathered the details for his official history yet discreetly left out the context of his church’s origins. The strong support of

328

Religious Support for Integrated Schools in Norfolk, 1954-1959

Massive Resistance by church founders McKendree and Story is obviously much less politically correct today (even on the Christian right) than it was then. That may account for Grymes’ discretion about not drawing attention to an open secret from the increasingly distant past. 15 Ibid., 1-4. 16 Malcolm Stern, “Living the Norfolk Story,” 7, unpublished typed manuscript of speech given at Olef Sholom Synagogue in 1971 and 1976. Special Collections, Lyman Beecher Brooks Library, University Archives, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, Virginia. Stern, a local rabbi and member of the Interracial Ministers Fellowship, was an eyewitness to the meeting. His recollection differs in that, in his account, Guerry and Randolph make statements and Duckworth crudely responds. The Norfolk City Council Minutes, September 30, 1958, only feature Dr. Potts and Dr. James Brewer as the two clerical advocates of desegregation at the meeting, and Duckworth’s language, if not his tone, is cleaned up. Guerry and Williams do not appear in the official Minutes. See also Gene Roberts, “Council Indicates: Negroes’ Withdrawal Would Reopen the Schools,” Virginian-Pilot, October 1, 1958, 1, 11. Yet another newspaper account, however, summarizes the Reverend Williams’ statements at the meeting, but it does not match either the Minutes, which omit them, or Stern’s account. For that account, see Paul Williams, “To Get Schools Reopened: Mayor Suggests Ministers Use Persuasion on Negroes,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, Late Home Edition, October 1, 1958, 19. See also Robert Smith, “Defensive Game,” Virginian-Pilot, October 5, 1958, 3D. 17 “Mass Meeting at City Arena: Southern Christian Group Meets in Norfolk, Oct. 1-2,” Journal and Guide, September 27, 1958, 1. The Reverend Martin Luther King. Jr. did not attend this conference in Norfolk in part because he was recovering from a wounding by a mentally ill woman in New York. See also “Delegates Pray At Closed School,” Journal and Guide, October 4, 1958, 1. 18 Thomas L. Dabney, “Does God Favor Segregation? : Norfolk Pastors Who Want Schools Open Say ‘No’,” Journal and Guide, October 4, 1958, 11. As Malcolm Stern pointed out in his speech, the most influential Methodist elder was the conventionally devout Judge Walter Hoffman himself, the author of the legal decisions paving the way for the Norfolk 17 and, thus, becoming the scourge of the Mayor and Council. On June 8, 1958, Stern and Hoffman attended an annual joint service between Ghent Methodist and Olef Sholom dedicated to advocating for desegregation and for ending discrimination of all kinds. (“Living the Norfolk Story,” 2.) 19 “Minister Speaks On: Storm In Norfolk City Council On Integration,” Journal and Guide, October 11, 1958, 27. See the cartoon featured in “Riding Out the Storm,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 26, 1958, 14, for a segregationist spin on this storm trope. 20 “How Norfolk Opened Her Schools, February 2, 1959,” 14-15. Women’s Council for Interracial Cooperation Papers, Folder 20, MG-54, Special Collections. Old Dominion University Libraries, Norfolk, Virginia. For the spiritual mentoring and preparation of the 17, see also Margaret L. Gordon and the History and Archives Committee, eds., A Documented History of the First Baptist Church Bute

Voices from within the Veil

329

Street, Norfolk, Virginia (Virginia Beach, VA: n.p., 1988), 137-39. See also Leidholdt, Standing before the Shouting Mob, 95-6. 21 Richard B. Martin, “Speech in Christian Spirit,” Journal and Guide, October 18, 1958, 8. 22 Richard B. Martin, “House of Bishops Praised,” Journal and Guide, October 25, 1958. 8. 23 George Williams to the editor of the Journal and Guide, “The ‘17’ and Rev. Brown,” January 3, 1959, 11. 24 “Closings Are Deplored By Ministers: Norfolk-Portsmouth Pastors Urge City To Reopen Schools,” Journal and Guide, January 31, 1959, 1. 25 Vivian Carter Mason, “’The 17’ Pioneers and the Dawn of a New Day,” Journal and Guide, February 7, 1959, 8. 26 David L Chappell, “A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Faith, Liberalism, and the Death of Jim Crow,” The Journal of the Historical Society, III: 2 (Spring 2003), 129-162.

“SIT DOWN CHILDREN, SIT DOWN”: THE SIT-IN MOVEMENT IN NORFOLK, VIRGINIA JEFFREY L. LITTLEJOHN, SAM HOUSTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Sit Down Children, Sit Down Walk right in and take your seat In every Southern Jim Crow state and town You’ll pay the same for what you eat Wear your beams and wear your crown All the world applauds your feat Sit Down Children, Sit Down Sit Down Children, Sit Down Ol’ Jim Crow has got to go There’s a better day a coming The moving finger tells us so Keep those bells of freedom ringing Here and there, to and fro All of God’s children keep on singing Sit Down Children, Sit Down Sit Down Children, Sit Down.1

When school let out on Friday, February 12, 1960, Milton Gay Jr., prayed for guidance. Gay was a nineteen-year-old freshman at the Norfolk Division of Virginia State College, and he was preparing to lead his first sit-in demonstration. “I was anxious and frightened,” he later recalled. “It was just the uncertainty” of the situation. “We didn’t know whether police were going to take out their billy clubs . . . hit us over the head, and drag us off to jail.”2 The sit-in movement had begun eleven days earlier—on February 1— when African American college students sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina to protest against segregation. The Woolworth’s staff refused to serve the students, insisting that lunch

Voices from within the Veil

331

counters in Greensboro, like those around the South, were reserved for whites only. When the Greensboro students were asked to move from the counter, however, they refused. In a dramatic act of non-violent resistance, the students—Ezell Blair, Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond—kept their seats. During the coming days, hundreds of students joined the Greensboro protest against segregated seating. Their efforts inspired a wave of sit-in demonstrations that spread across the South in the winter of 1960, forever transforming the Civil Rights Movement.3 Inspired by the Greensboro demonstrations, Milton Gay and a host of Norfolk students coordinated a similar protest for their city’s downtown district. This essay chronicles their effort. It is a tale of growing impatience and dissatisfaction, in which young people, furious with the tortured pace of desegregation, bypassed their elders and became the leaders in a campaign to challenge Jim Crow. In the process, Norfolk’s African American young people sat-in at restaurants and spoke at churches; they marched on sidewalks and protested at schools. But, most of all, they led their parents and their pastors into a new stage of the civil rights struggle. When news of the Greensboro sit-ins reached Norfolk, Virginia, in February 1960, racial tension in the city was running at an all-time high. The most obvious source of conflict centered on school desegregation, which had begun one year earlier as seventeen African American students entered six of the city’s previously all-white schools. Norfolk’s white leadership opposed the move. Mayor W. F. Duckworth and members of the City Council lamented the fact that desegregation had begun at all. On the other hand, many African Americans in the city were disappointed with Norfolk’s meager desegregation effort. At the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), President Robert D. Robertson and activist Vivian Carter Mason complained that school integration was proceeding far too slowly. In the six years since Brown v. Board of Education, fewer than twenty-five of Norfolk’s 15,000 African American students had been admitted to integrated schools. And, that was just the beginning of the city’s racial problems. At the Journal and Guide, Norfolk’s African American newspaper, Publisher P. B. Young and his staff focused attention on other burning issues in city politics. They noted that African Americans accounted for one-third of Norfolk’s population, but did not hold one seat on the City Council or the School Board. This meant that segregation remained in place; that black parks, schools, and libraries received

332

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

secondary attention (if any at all); and that black efforts to change the situation often fell on deaf ears.4 As Norfolk’s African American young people watched their parents negotiate with the city’s white elite, they learned an important lesson imparted by Fredrick Douglass, the great abolitionist leader, more than a century before. Speaking in Canandaigua, New York in August 1857, Douglass told his audience: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”5 For Norfolk’s African American youth, this was a painful, but liberating lesson. It meant that white racism and oppression would not simply disappear with a court order or political proclamation; it must be confronted and fought. The struggle would require leadership, organization, and perseverance. Norfolk’s young people had all three. In the late 1950s, Milton Gay Jr., emerged as the leader of Norfolk’s burgeoning youth movement. A Norfolk native, Gay was born in 1941 and grew up with his younger brother, James, on Chapel Street in the heart of the city’s African American community. He was a tall, trim, good looking young man. An eloquent speaker and an ambitious activist, Gay wrote poetry, played the piano, and, as one of his friends later recalled, he longed to make himself “indispensable” to everyone.6 In 1958, Gay won election as President of the local NAACP Youth Council. Over the course of the next two years, he accumulated a long list of achievements in this position. He petitioned Superintendent J. J. Brewbaker to desegregate Norfolk’s public schools; he initiated a statewide voter registration contest known as “Operation Citizenship”; he won a scholarship to attend the “Encampment for Citizenship” sponsored by the New York Society for Ethical Culture; and he spoke at the Second Annual Pilgrimage of Prayer for Public Schools held at the Virginia capitol in Richmond.7 As Gay pursued his own civil rights activities, he worked with Roberta Robertson, the local NAACP Youth advisor, to increase the size and role of Norfolk's youth movement. While Norfolk’s African American leaders confronted the local school desegregation crisis, Gay and Robertson coordinated a huge NAACP membership drive. Under their guidance, the local Youth chapter grew from 172 members in 1958 to 601 members in 1959. This tremendous surge made Norfolk the leading Youth office in the state, with almost twice as many members as the second largest branch in Richmond.8 The growth of the Norfolk branch was only part of the story, however. At the Annual NAACP State

Voices from within the Veil

333

Convention in October 1959, Norfolk’s leaders took charge of the entire Virginia Youth organization. The delegates elected Milton Gay as President of the state conference and his brother James as Treasurer. In addition, delegates selected other Norfolk leaders for key positions, including Patricia Godbolt as Assistant Secretary, Wyoma Gaston as Financial Secretary, Melvin Fallis as Editor-in-Chief of “The Freedom Press,” and Roberta Robertson as state Youth Advisor.9 Four months after his election as state NAACP Youth President, Milton Gay read about the Greensboro sit-ins in the local newspaper. He found the story invigorating. Here, at last, was a method to harness the pent-up anxiety and frustration that plagued the young black community in Norfolk. Here, at last, was the opportunity for direct action against Jim Crow.10 Within days of the first sit-in demonstration in Greensboro, Gay was coordinating a similar protest for local students in Norfolk. He called for support from his younger brother, James, a senior at Booker T. Washington High School and the newly elected President of the local NAACP Youth Council. In addition, Gay met with Eric Jones, Winston Williams, Oscar Waller, Grant Coleman, and more than a dozen other students at the Norfolk division of Virginia State College to plan the details of the upcoming protest. When would the students demonstrate? Where would the strike? And, what would they do if someone was arrested?11 After little more than a week of discussion, the students decided to launch their first sit-in demonstration on Friday, February 12—Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. At 5:30 p.m., Gay and his team of thirty-seven activists marched into Woolworth’s department store in downtown Norfolk and sat down at the white lunch counter. It was a “chance to confront the system [of segregation] head-on in a collective manner,” Eric Jones, one of the participants, remembered.12 Although Woolworth’s store manager, L. L. Day, refused to serve the students, they remained calm and orderly. No property was destroyed, and no arrests were made. The students behaved in a focused, well-mannered fashion, sitting peacefully at the lunch counter until it closed around 6:00 p.m. As planned in advance, none of the students identified themselves or their leaders. “I’m just a citizen,” one student told a newspaper reporter, while another jotted a simple note on a menu: “We want our rights.”13 On the following day—Saturday, February 13—Woolworth's lunch counter remained closed. That afternoon, young people targeted two other stores in the downtown area: S. S. Kresge's and W. T. Grant's. Twelve students from the Norfolk division of Virginia State College moved on Kresge's, where the manager quickly closed the lunch counter to prevent

334

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

demonstrations. Only one young man braved the counter at Grant's, but he was ignored by waitresses and left shortly thereafter.14 Then, as quickly as they began, the sit-ins in Norfolk seemed to end. During the course of the following work week, not one African American student demonstrated at the city's downtown lunch counters. Norfolk's white leaders were ecstatic at the development. They hoped to avoid the nightmare that was taking place in Portsmouth, their sister city across the Elizabeth River. There, on Tuesday, February 16, dozens of white toughs — some carrying hammers and wrenches — attacked sit-in demonstrators and African American bystanders in the parking lot at the Mid-city shopping center. The following day, twenty-seven people were arrested when a crowd of 3,000 gathered for another showdown. “One highschooler was found to have a loaded .22 caliber pistol” the newspaper reported. “Two had chains. Another carried a switchblade knife. All four were white.” While Portsmouth's segregationist Mayor, B. W. Baker, called for order and calm, the city's orgy of violence appeared in the pages of Life Magazine.15 At the Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk’s largest newspaper, editors found the developments in Portsmouth startling. “The possibilities of serious public disorder among high school whites and high school Negroes, particularly as disclosed in Portsmouth . . . are important enough to bring into play all possible retraining influences,” the editors wrote. The paper called on Norfolk’s civic leaders and school officials to prevent the local situation from “degenerat[ing] into open clashes and public violence.” Should young African Americans continue to oppose segregation at the city’s lunch counters, the editors said, they should pursue traditional lines of protest. They should write editorials, join the NAACP, or litigate their cases in the court room. They should not, however, continue the sit-ins. The Pilot came out in direct opposition to these demonstrations, arguing that they “may lead . . . to public difficulties and dangers” of the first degree. Now was not the time for heroics and radicalism, the editors suggested, it was “a time for intelligence”—“for restraint and good sense.”16 Milton Gay and the students at the Norfolk division of Virginia State College could not have agreed more. They believed that this was a time for intelligence and good sense. That is why they postponed their sit-in activities, formed the Student Relations Association (SRA), and worked to coordinate a disciplined movement that would conduct itself according to the highest standards of non-violent behavior. When the Norfolk students resumed their sit-ins on Saturday, February 20, they did so in a deliberate and exacting manner. Shortly after noon, Milton, as head of the SRA, led

Voices from within the Veil

335

seventy five African American youths into Kresge’s downtown department store. As the students occupied the seats at the white lunch counter, manager A.P. Hunt announced that the store was closing for the day. He rushed the students, customers, and employees out the front entrance, and then locked the building to prevent any further protest.17 The SRA had won its first tactical victory; Kresge’s lunch counter was closed. The story of the Kresge’s sit-in was complicated by the appearance of “25 to 30 white youths” who, the Virginian-Pilot reported, “followed the Negroes into the store and ranged themselves along nearby shopping aisles.” Were these students assisting the African American demonstrators by participating in another form of civil disobedience, or were they at Kresge’s to cause trouble, like the white youngsters in Portsmouth? Unfortunately, there is no way to know for sure — the documentary evidence is too vague, and oral interviews have proven inconclusive.18 What we do know is that it was not unusual for white students from the local branch of William and Mary (now Old Dominion University) to support the sit-ins in Norfolk. Lulu Thornton, an African American demonstrator from Norfolk State, remembered that business managers in the downtown district would often take the stool tops off the seats to keep blacks from sitting down at the lunch counters. When white students asked for the seats, however, the managers would provide the stool tops. Then, some sympathetic whites would immediately give their seats to the protesters. In this way, a number of Norfolk’s white college students assisted the demonstrators without being directly associated with them.19 On the other hand, it was far more common for Norfolk’s white citizens to antagonize and harass the protesters, especially when they came in direct contact with one another at the lunch counters. Jan Filhiol, another African American demonstrator from Virginia State, recorded her experiences during a sit-in at Grant’s. “It is amazing . . . to note the tension aroused because of our being here,” she said. “The Police come around with haunting faces that will probably be lasting memories. One ‘rabble-rouser’ just passed, saying ‘niggers won’t get no whar’ — typical of their ignorance and fright. They stand around peering at us as though we were monsters from outer space.”20 Although tensions never rose to the point they reached in Portsmouth, Norfolk’s demonstrators faced constant harassment and bullying from white onlookers. For instance, Milton Gay remembered an episode that occurred when he was picketing outside a downtown store later in the protest. There, a white woman in a gray tweed suit was watching him for a distance. “I thought she was going

336

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

to be sympathetic to the cause,” Gay remembered. But, “[s]he came over and spat at me.”21 Although the Norfolk students employed non-violent tactics and refused to respond to acts like those described above, white critics of the protests wrote to the Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Dispatch on a weekly basis. They suggested that the sit-ins were planned and executed by outside agitators, including the NAACP and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality).22 These organizations represented what one author called modern day “carpetbaggers” who came to the South, “stirring up the trouble and causing the hatred they complain about.”23 As students followed these outside organizations, many whites complained, they unleashed a force that they barely comprehended and certainly could not contain. “The hard central fact of the present situation,” the LedgerDispatch declared, “is that these youths have provoked a situation quite beyond their control. The results, if they persist, could be far beyond their immature imaginings.”24 Margaret Scarborough, a white resident of the area, was terribly concerned about the results of the protests. She wrote to the paper in a contemplative mood, “If people would just stop and think what would happen if Negro and white [people] went to the same movies, beaches, and restaurants. I don’t think if things come to that, that Norfolk would be a safe place to live.”25 Other critics of the sit-ins agreed. One man, writing under the penname I.M. FEDUP, wrote to the paper declaring that he gave “Negro[es] and all other minorities their God give rights. . . . But I know, as a lot of other people do, that they will never accept anything except total surrender from white people.”26 This was to become a mantra of the racist white community. Sit-in demonstrators were not simply seeking equal rights, they were forcing themselves on white businesses owners and asking the police to defend them. Another editorial writer summarized the feelings of many whites when he wrote, “I am for giving the Negroes rights. But when anyone tries to force himself on me, that is when I draw the line.”27 During March, the sit-in protests continued as African American students occupied the lunch counters at Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, and Grant’s. The demonstrators were neither served, nor arrested, but their presence caused a sharp decline in white patronage.28 When interviewed about the demonstrations, sit-in leader Milton Gay called for talks between the protesters and the variety store managers.29 Although he refused to elaborate on the nature or objectives of these proposed talks—seeking to maintain a diplomatic, conciliatory air—Milton’s brother, James, was not so reticent. “During the past few weeks,” James wrote in a March

Voices from within the Veil

337

editorial in the Virginian-Pilot, “students have been conducting sitdown demonstrations at various restaurants, and the management refused to serve these students simply because they were Negroes.” This was not only discriminatory, James argued, it was un-American. “Negroes have helped to defend America in every war since the American Revolution. Yet the Negro has not been allowed to enjoy the American ideal of equality for all.” The sit-down demonstrators meant to right this wrong, to exact justice through their own direct action protests. “Remember,” James said, “the young educated Negro will not be satisfied with second class citizenship. He has proven that he is willing to go to jail if necessary, in order to secure the blessings of equality for himself and others in his race.”30 White political leaders responded to this new-found black militancy in a variety of ways. On the national scene, President Dwight Eisenhower pursued a policy of calm detachment. In a March press conference, the President said that he was “deeply sympathetic” with the protesters, and “deplore[d] any violence” used against them. But, he insisted, the sit-ins were local issues to be handled by local governments. “I certainly am not lawyer enough or wise enough in this area,” Eisenhower said, “to know when a matter . . . violate[s] the constitutional rights of the Negroes.” Eisenhower’s apparent confusion was not shared by his predecessor, the former President, Harry Truman. On April 18, at a press conference in Ithaca, New York, Truman derided the sit-in protesters, declaring that their entire movement was orchestrated by the Communist Party. “You never can tell,” Truman said (as only he could), “where you’ll find their fine Italian hand, and its not Italian—it’s Russian.”31 At the state level, Virginia Governor J. Lindsay Almond, Jr. called for an immediate end to sit-in demonstrations that were sweeping through the state. He believed that the protests were illegal: they violated the personal property rights of business owners, and they endangered standards of racial decorum throughout the state. On February 24, the Almond administration proposed three new anti-trespass bills, which were meant to halt the sit-in demonstrators in their tracks. In less than twenty-four hours, the General Assembly passed the measures by unanimous vote, with a good deal of “moderate” support. Norfolk’s Edward Breeden Jr., Portsmouth’s William Spong Jr., and Lynchburg’s Mosby Perrow Jr.—all well-known liberals—signed on as sponsors of the legislation.32 On February 25, Governor Almond signed the new bills into law, providing for a maximum penalty of one year in jail, a $1,000 fine, or both, for trespassing, encouraging others to trespass, or conspiring with others to trespass on private property.33 Although Robert Robertson tried to make

338

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

light of the situation, saying that the new laws would not “stop Negroes from seeking their constitutional rights,”34 the legislation clearly put protesters at increased risk for arrest. In fact, local police departments around the state used the new legislation to lock up dozens of sit-in activists who trespassed on private property when they refused to leave restaurants or other places of business.35 The new anti-trespass laws were extremely controversial, however, even among whites. In Norfolk, the editors of the Virginian-Pilot noted that the state would “be lucky if bills enacted so fast and with so little attention do not show constitutional or other flaws.”36 A more serious criticism came from Ellis James, a white pro-school advocate and the named litigant in the school desegregation suit James v. Almond, who called the new laws “harsh and punitive.” Had the State of Virginia learned nothing from the failed policy of Massive Resistance, he asked? It strained belief to imagine that the General Assembly and the Governor now proposed to arrest and imprison young people who dared to ask for equal treatment at lunch counters and libraries. To those white citizens in Norfolk who supported the anti-trespass legislation, James had one thing to say: “The Virginia Negro today is a citizen coming of age. Obviously, he doesn’t want or seek paternalism in government or economic life. He simply wants fair and equitable treatment and the elimination of discriminatory practices based solely on color.” 37 Despite moderate white support in the Virginian-Pilot, and occasional assistance from whites at lunch counters, African American students bore the brunt of the sit-in struggle. In April, Norfolk’s black community tightened ranks behind the young protesters. At the Journal and Guide, Publisher P. B. Young characterized the demonstrators as “dignified and non-violent” students, whose “exemplary conduct is matched only by the reasonableness and Americanism of their objectives.”38 Robert Robertson shared Young’s assessment. When the protests began, he issued a statement on behalf of the local and state chapters of the NAACP, promising to “furnish whatever support is necessary, legally and otherwise, to help these courageous youths in their efforts to make American democracy a living reality.” 39 In early April, Norfolk’s NAACP Executive Council acted on Robertson’s promise, issuing a resolution urging African American customers to boycott downtown stores that practiced racial discrimination.40 The boycott was publicized at churches and community functions, and the NAACP printed hundreds of leaflets to support the protest. As African American pressure mounted in the downtown district, however, white leaders in the city struck back. Police chief Harold Anderson remembered

Voices from within the Veil

339

that the sit-in demonstrations and downtown boycott created “an ugly era.” “It wasn’t a pleasant thing at all,” he said, “and it wasn’t good for the picture of the city.”41 As students marched through the streets carrying protest signs and singing songs, police officers used K-9 dogs to monitor the demonstrations and maintain order. Although arrests in Norfolk remained infrequent, in mid-April, eight high school students and two college men were taken into police custody for distributing NAACP leaflets as part of the boycott campaign. The young men were charged with violating Section 3-1 of the Norfolk City Code, which made it unlawful to distribute materials “liable to litter the streets.”42 James Gay was among those detained. At the time of his arrest, he and his friends, Alfred Edmunds, Eric Jones, and James Reeves were standing in front of W.T. Grant’s on Granby Street. As the students went about their task distributing handbills, a policeman approached and arrested the young activists. The students were then taken to the police station, booked, fingerprinted, and their parents were called to pick them up.43 Word of the arrests soon filtered out to the community. Joseph Jordan and Evelyn Butts, two local African American activists, alerted Robert Robertson at the NAACP. Robertson was furious that the young men were charged with such a ridiculous crime. Indeed, their first amendment right to freedom of speech protected their activities, he declared. NAACP attorneys Victor Ashe and J. Hugo Madison agreed. They argued that the students had a fundamental constitutional right to distribute materials that advised patrons to avoid stores that practiced racial discrimination.44 Shortly after the arrests, Robertson issued a statement on behalf of the NAACP, declaring that the city’s police crackdown would not halt the African American boycott.45 In fact, the arrest and subsequent conviction of the student protesters had energized the black community. Ministers implored their congregations to avoid shopping at downtown stores, while civic leaders demanded an end to segregation at restaurants on Granby street. Meanwhile, high school and college students continued their downtown demonstrations as pressure against segregation mounted throughout the South. Although sit-in demonstrators throughout the nation remained unaware of the federal government’s activities on their behalf, on June 1, 1960, U.S. Attorney General William Rogers met with national representatives of Woolworth’s, Kresge's, Grant’s, and other major retail stores. Rogers encouraged the representatives to begin the desegregation of lunch counters at national chain stores. He said that desegregation was important “because the standing of the United States as a leader of the free

340

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

world suffers as the result of acts of racial discrimination.” After the meeting, national chain store executives instructed their local managers to speak with public officials in their towns to determine the most efficient and peaceful way to eliminate segregation.46 In late July, Norfolk’s variety store managers made the decision to desegregate lunch counters at Woolworth’s, Kresge’s, and Grant’s. Seeking to introduce the change with as little excitement as possible, the managers requested a conference with three of the region’s leading African American ministers, Henry W. B. Walker, James A. Askew, and S. L. Scott, Jr., the president of the Metro Baptist Ministers Conference. The store managers informed the ministers that they had decided to offer service to all customers at their lunch counters, regardless of race. The implementation of the decision would take place on July 23, 1960, and the ministers were to be the first people served.47 Although Norfolk’s student protesters discovered that desegregated seating would be introduced at the downtown variety stores, they were not included in the negotiations. At the time, Milton Gay was diplomatic about the situation. He praised the ministers and their congregations for supporting the sit-ins. “The church has played its role in facilitating this change,” Gay declared, “by allowing students to speak to congregations . . . [and] planning the implementation of the decision to desegregate.” 48 Later, however, Milton and his brother James expressed their anger at the way in which Norfolk’s students were treated. Milton remembered that the students were “totally ignored.” “We felt it was out of retaliation,” he said. The store managers “were just saying, ‘You students will not make us integrate. We will be the ones to decide who will sit down at the counter. We felt that we had fought the battle, and someone else was getting the credit.”49 Today, James Gay continues to feel this way. “The students were left out,” he remembers. “The store managers and ministers sought the credit — they ignored the students and their leaders.”50 Despite the controversy, Norfolk’s downtown lunch counters desegregated on July 23. Students who were privy to the development rushed to Woolworth’s to participate in “Operation 4 o’clock,” when the counters opened to African American patrons. Milton Gay, James Reeves, Oscar Waller, and James Stanton were among those students who sat down to inaugurate a new day of race relations in Norfolk. Reflecting on developments that day, Francis M. Mantz, another student protester, summarized the sit-in movement and its achievement. “The students d[id] not fight for self-seeking purposes or for personal advancement,” Mantz said. “They spen[t] their time and energies in the cause for desegregation because they believe[d] it to be right and proper.”51

Voices from within the Veil

341

Notes 1

Milton F. Gay, Jr., “Sit Down Children, Sit Down,” as remembered by Milton’s brother, James Gay. James Gay, interview by author, Norfolk, Virginia, March 16, 2007. This poem was adapted by Milton Gay from J. Farley Ragland’s poem, “Sit Down Chillun,” which appeared in the Norfolk Journal and Guide on February 27, 1960. Gay’s version of the poem was first publicly read at the fourth annual Freedom Fund and Life Membership Dinner of the Norfolk branch of the NAACP in October, 1960. Coverage of the dinner may be found in “Bishop Calls for ‘Speed Ahead’ In Quest for Liberty,” Journal and Guide, October 8, 1960. 2 Milton F. Gay, Jr., quoted in Cindy Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago,” The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger Star, March 24, 1985. 3 William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Random House, 1998). Aldon Morris, "Black Southern Student Sit-in Movement: An Analysis of Internal Organization," American Sociological Review 46 (December 1981): 744-767. For sit-ins before Greensboro see, Carl L. Graves, “The Right to Be Served: Oklahoma City’s Lunch Counter Sit-Ins, 1958-1964,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 59 (1981): 152-166; Gretchen Cassell Eick, Dissent in Wichita: The Civil Rights Movement in the Midwest, 1954-72 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, Illinois, 2001); Ronald Walters, "Standing Up in America's Heartland: Sitting in Before Greensboro" American Visions 8 (February/March 1993): 20-23. 4 For a discussion of the school desegregation crisis in Norfolk see: Jeff Littlejohn, “The Brown Decision in Local Context: Race and Public Education in Norfolk, Virginia" in Brown v. Board of Education: Its Impact on Public Education, 19542004 (Brooklyn, New York: Word For Word, 2005). See also: Alexander Leidholdt, Standing Before The Shouting Mob: Lenoir Chambers and Virginia’s Massive Resistance to Public School Integration (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997). 5 Frederick Douglass, "The Significance of Emancipation in the West Indies," Speech, Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857 in The Frederick Douglas Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews. Volume 3: 1855-63. Edited by John W. Blassingame. New Haven: Yale University Press, 204. 6 James Gay, interview by author, Norfolk, Virginia, February 21, 2007 and March 16, 2007. Edward Rodman, telephone interview by author, April 11, 2007. 7 On the talk with Superintendent Brewbaker, see “In Talk With Superintendent: ‘Let All Students Go To School’, BTW Pupils Ask,” Journal and Guide, September 30, 1958. On “Operation Citizenship: see: Memo, “To Members of Executive Boards, Virginia State Conference — NAACP” From the Executive Secretary, Lester Banks, December 1958. See also Lester Banks to Milton Gay, Jr., December 4, 1958. NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. Memo, “Operation Citizenship,” March 1959, NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. On the scholarship to attend the Encampment for Citizenship see: Herbert L. Wright to Milton Gay, February 24, 1959. NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. The

342

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

scholarship was to the 1959 Encampment for Citizenship Program, which was to held at the Fieldstone School in New York City from June 28 to August 8, 1959. 8 “Statement of Virginia Youth Memberships,” NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. Richmond had 309 members. None of the other 58 branches in the state, had 150 members. 9 “Meet Your State Leaders,” The Freedom Press, Vol. 1, No. 3, November 1959. NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. See also, “Program, 24th Annual NAACP State Convention,” October 9-11, 1959, NAACP Papers, Part 27, Series A, Reel 19. For information on Laura Greene see “NAACP: The Virginia Defender,” July-August, 1960, Vol. 1, No. 3, NAACP Papers, Part 19, Series D, Reel 6. 10 Oscar Waller, telephone interview by author, June 10, 2007. 11 Ibid. Grant Coleman, telephone interview by author, July 1, 2007. 12 Eric Jones quoted in Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago.” 13 “Sitters Move On Norfolk – Portsmouth Also Hit; Elizabeth City Tense,” Virginian-Pilot, February 13, 1960. For Gay quotes see Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago.” 14 “Sitters Hint At Cool-Off,” Virginian-Pilot, February 16, 1960. 15 For information, see: William Connelly, “White and Negro Students Fight Briefly at MidCity,” Virginian-Pilot, February 17, 1960. William Connelly, “Crowd Mills; 27 Arrested – No Violence Recurs At Shopping Center,” VirginianPilot, February 18, 1960. 16 See: “Responsibility at the Lunch Counter,” Virginian-Pilot, February 18, 1960. "Who Stands Up for Law and Order?” Virginian-Pilot, February 19, 1960. See also: “Trespass Acts in a Hurry, Virginian-Pilot, February 26, 1960,” which states that “The mass demonstrations . . . have outlived any usefulness they possessed . . . and can degenerate into new and serious difficulties.” 17 “Sitdown Protests Spread,” Virginian-Pilot, February 21, 1960. 18 Ibid. 19 Lulu Thornton, telephone interview by author, July 1, 2007. 20 Jane Filhiol, “’Sit-Down’ — As I Lived It,” Journal and Guide, March 4, 1960, 1. 21 Milton Gay quoted in Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago.” 22 For instance, a man signing his name as I.M. FEDUP wrote the following to the Ledger-Dispatch: “It seems to me that the Negroes have lost every bit of race pride they have ever had. The Negroes will never be satisfied with the practice of race separation any more because of organizations such as the NAACP and CORE.” I.M. FEDUP, “Does a Court Order Bring Brotherhood,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch and The Portsmouth Star, March 23, 1960. In another piece, presenting a direct indictment of the state college system for supporting the sit-ins, a white citizen wrote: “From what I can learn through newspaper reading, this rash of black ‘counter hopping’ which causes our business places to close up this department is engineered by Negro students from state supported colleges. This of course is only half the story. While the Negroes themselves refuse to give out any information as to what caused their action, the white man is in no doubt as to where the

Voices from within the Veil

343

inspiration came from, and that is the NAACP.” “The Law and the Sit-Downs,” Virginian-Pilot, February 20, 1960. 23 OFF COLOR, “We Need More Men like Carver, Louis,” Norfolk LedgerDispatch and The Portsmouth Star, March 23, 1960. 24 “Stop the ‘Sitdown’ While There’s Time,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch and The Portsmouth Star, February 18, 1960. 25 Margaret Scarborough, “Whites, Not Negroes, Low on Totem Pole,” Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch and The Portsmouth Star, March 23, 1960. 26 I.M. FEDUP, “Does a Court Order Bring Brotherhood,” Norfolk LedgerDispatch and The Portsmouth Star, March 23, 1960. 27 T. Gates, “Food and Segregation,” Virginian-Pilot, March 2, 1960. 28 “Sitdowns Giving Way to Boycotts,” Virginian-Pilot, March 4, 1960. 29 Ibid. 30 James Gay, “A Negro Student Speaks,” Virginian-Pilot, March 4, 1960. 31 Harry Truman quoted in Clayton Knowless, “Truman Believes Reds Lead SitIns,” New York Times, April 19, 1960, 21. 32 “Senate Rushes Trespass Bills: Governor Asks Moves To Discourage Sitdowns,” Virginian-Pilo, February 25, 1960. “Senate Rushes Trespass Bills: Governor Asks Moves To Discourage Sitdowns,” Virginian-Pilot, February 25, 1960. Senator Fred Bateman of Newport News, who ushered the bills through the General Assembly, said that the new restrictions did not mean that the state would enforce segregation in stores and eating establishments. Rather, he argued that the state would “protect the rights of the private property owner to conduct his business as he might legally choose (“Stiff Trespass Laws Signed by Governor,” Virginian-Pilot, February 26, 1960). 33 “Stiff Trespass Laws Signed by Governor,” Virginian-Pilot, February 26, 1960. 34 “Protesters March, Library Closes,” Virginian-Pilot, February 28, 1960. 35 See for example, Peter Wallenstein, Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 114-141. 36 “Trespass Acts in a Hurry,” Virginian-Pilot, February 26, 1960. 37 Ellis James, “The Negro in Public Life,” Virginian-Pilot, March 7, 1960. 38 “Commendation,” Journal and Guide, April 2, 1960. 39 “Cooling Off Hinted In Sitdown Activity,” Virginian-Pilot, February 16, 1960. 40 “Convicted of Passing Out Handbills, Pupils Appeal,” Journal and Guide, April 23, 1960. 41 Harold Anderson quoted in Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago.” 42 On Thursday, April 14, Donald M. Giddens and William E. Thorton, Jr., both students at the VSCN, were arrested for distributing NAACP leaflets in downtown Norfolk. Judge Llewelly S. Richardson of Municipal court, assessed the two college students $15 each on April 15 (“Distribution Will Go On, Robertson Says,” Journal and Guide, April 16, 1960). Meanwhile, Juvenile Court Judge Alfred W. Whitehurst fined three boys $10 each on April 18. They were arrested Friday night (April 15), while passing out handbills in front of W.T. Grant’s on Granby street. The boys were released into custody of their parents. (“Students Appeal Litter Penalties,” Virginian-Pilot, April 20, 1960).

344 43

The Sit-In Movement in Norfolk, Virginia

James Gay, interview by author, Norfolk, Virginia, March 16, 2007. “Lunch Counter Protest Appeals On Way for 10,” Journal and Guide, April 30, 1960. 45 “Distribution Will Go On, Robertson Says,” Journal and Guide, April 16, 1960. “Lunch Counter Protest Appeals On Way for 10,” Journal and Guide, April 30, 1960. 46 William P. Rogers quoted in “Executives Meet With Attorney General – He Stresses Voluntary Nature of Moves – Towns Not Listed,” The New York Times, August 11, 1960, 14. 47 “In Norfolk Lunch Counter Desegregation Effort: Ministers, NAACP, Students Worked Together,” Journal and Guide, August 6, 1960. 48 Milton Gay quoted in “In Norfolk Lunch Counter Desegregation Effort: Ministers, NAACP, Students Worked Together,” Journal and Guide, August 6, 1960. 49 Milton Gay quoted in Schreuder, “Color Barrier Fell 25 Years Ago.” 50 James Gay, interview by author, Norfolk, Virginia, March 16, 2007. 51 “In Norfolk Lunch Counter Desegregation Effort: Ministers, NAACP, Students Worked Together,” Journal and Guide, August 6, 1960. 44

EPILOGUE

Fig. 6.1: The Negro Building, 1907. Standing outside the building are the African American leaders responsible for the building’s construction for the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Celebration in Norfolk, Virginia. Courtesy Sargeant Memorial Room, Norfolk Public Library.

When Jamestown was established in 1607, there was not a plan for establishing a heterogeneous society or an economy based on slavery. Nevertheless, with European workers at a premium, though in short supply, African slavery would develop in the colonies before the middle of the seventeenth century and grow rapidly after 1680. Soon, over one-half of all the laborers of African origin in Virginia and Maryland were enslaved. The colonies were part of the growing Atlantic colonial economic system that relied on cheap labor to produce staples for the European market. African slavery was the recognized and preferred labor supply and spread throughout the New World. And because the English could work the Africans harder and control them more thoroughly than white servants, they seemed a logical choice for exploitation. Additionally, African slaves increasingly in demand in America were inexpensive in comparison with other laborers. As historians Edmund

346

Epilogue

Morgan and David Hackett Fischer have shown, liberty for themselves was far more important than democracy to most of Virginia’s early leaders. It was in this House of Burgesses that Virginians developed their ideas of freedom, the prerequisites for a later democracy: the right to be free from arbitrary taxation; the right to be represented in government; and the rights and liberties of independent, property-holding yeoman farmers. By the eighteenth century, Virginians could allow these ideas—which would have been dangerous in the century before—because reckless freedmen no longer threatened them. So, as historian Morgan has argued, slavery permitted Virginians to expound these new ideas of freedom. Slavery based upon “race” allowed Virginians to establish a relatively representative government in an oligarchic, stratified, plantation society. It also enabled Virginians to speak a political language that glorified the rights of free men and to allow the new United States eventually to embrace democratic ideals. Moreover, as the United States developed, it adopted a national identity and culture that united all Europeans under the banner of “American” with a distinctly Anglo-Saxon heritage. This resulted in a disregard for the multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious realities that existed within the United States. Negative feelings toward African Americans grew across all classes of white colonial society. The very existence of black slavery provided a sense of separateness and unity to whites of gentry, middling, or commoner classes. It gave whites a common identity and then intensified their attitudes toward other major identifiable groups on the mainland. Furthermore, the intellectual community played a major role in affirming the inferiority of blacks and creating negative black images in the white mind. A rationalized racist ideology developed in the late- eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries based on the belief that genetically there were varieties among humans. These theories would be used by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century theorists who designed intelligence tests to create “evidence” that these individuals should not gain entrance into America because of their genetic inferiority. The non-Western Europeans were specifically targeted because non-Europeans were already designated as undesirables by Congress. This racialist thinking crystallized in latenineteenth-century America mainly because the presence of non-whites and non-Anglo Saxons was at odds with how the nation defined itself culturally, politically, and socially. Since the early half of the twentieth century, tremendous headway has been made to redress centuries of inequity and wrong-doing. For many white Americans, the 1940s and 1950s were quiet decades in which

Voices from within the Veil

347

families, suburbs, and the new institution of television provided an idyllic and tranquil setting, hiding the disparities and inequities that were so glaringly obvious throughout the nation. Because a majority of Americans supported slavery before 1860, and wanted to continue aspects of that repression after the Civil War, the resulting Jim Crow system was the official way in which the nation maintained that control. And no where was this more evident than in education, which assuredly limited opportunities and access in a way that slavery had done in the first 250 years of the nation’s history. Not surprisingly, education became the focus for civil rights activism in the 1950s, and that focus expanded to include economic rights by the 1960s. To many, the contradictions of American life were undeniable. The U.S. was a nation of affluence. By 1960, it was the richest nation on earth, yet it was unable to properly feed, educate, or keep healthy a significant portion of its population. As late as the mid1960s, despite its worldwide protestations of democracy, Americans maintained a system of virtual apartheid and institutionalized racism. The moment of its greatest triumph was also a time of its greatest challenge for the American system. On a number of fronts, accepted norms were questioned and, in some instances, tossed aside. For example, for members of the African American middle and upper classes, equal opportunity and affirmative action allowed for unprecedented economic and political power. On the other hand, greater freedoms for the black bourgeoisie did not translate into similar political and economic gains by those African Americans still mired in poverty and despair in part by persistent, if subtle, patterns of racial discrimination. The jury is also still out as to whether the American experiment toward a truly multiracial democracy can be fully realized or adapted by other countries such as Iraq or Russia or Rwanda. Policymakers have assumed that the export of this still-evolving legal framework will be relatively easy, but recent events have belied their expectations. Nevertheless, perfecting democracy abroad may yet yield improve-ments at home, as American shortcomings are exposed internationally. Legal segregation was no longer politically correct when the Cold War dictated a clear-cut fight between democracy and dictatorship. Segregation's lingering economic inequalities may become no longer acceptable, as the war on terror demands a united front at home. America remains a paradox of freedom and slavery. During the twentieth century, expressive freedoms and equality before the law became much more attainable; yet inequalities remained in this leading industrialized country. Recent situations with the Katrina hurricane that hit the Gulf Coast are examples of how race and class even now

348

Epilogue

differentiate government reactions to crises. In the Constitution, the Founders placed protections for political and economic minorities such as themselves against "the many-headed hydra" of the common people. These protections ironically provided the constitutional and legal basis for extending freedoms and protections to African Americans after the Second World War. Cathy Waegner’s essay is a fascinating retrospective on Norfolk State University’s conference. Expounding on the future of the nation based on current policies, Waegner posits thought-provoking questions that speak to the issue of whether blacks are still only voices within the veil.

MIGRATION MATTERS, EVEN 400 YEARS LATER: ETHNICITY IN THE 1607-2007 JAMESTOWN JUBILEE CATHY WAEGNER

In our supposedly postcolonial context of 2007, the commemoration of the Jamestown/Virginia settlement in “America’s 400th Anniversary” can serve as a telling case study of how far the Atlantic world has moved beyond hegemonic attitudes since the European powers’ outright colonialism beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Native and African Americans were sidelined1 during the three-hundredth anniversary in 1907 in the depths of the Jim Crow era; in 1957, the emerging embroilments of the Civil Rights era made exclusion of the ethnicities during the 350th celebration both more important for the white mainstream organizers and simultaneously more difficult than in previous commemorations. By 2007, the extensive program for the four-hundredth anniversary features countless events stressing the Native and African American components of the Jamestown settlement.2 One of eight conferences at Virginia universities about “perspectives on democracy,”3 all of them under the auspices of the Commemoration Commission, it took place at Norfolk State University, an historically Black College/University (HBCU)4 and was entitled “Voices from within the Veil.” At this conference (February 21-23, 2007), it became abundantly clear that for the Native and African Americans the wounds of colonialism and human bondage are still festering, with certain patterns of subalternity stubbornly remaining in place. In this retrospective, I will present the issues which emerged during the course of this conference, briefly outline the historical background of the Jamestown Jubilee, and then point to four new ways of viewing ethnicity in America’s beginnings which are now influencing the mainstream understanding of the European “migration”5 to the New World four centuries ago. I will relate this migration, which was part of what can be considered the largest and most diverse migration in human history–the movement of the European citizens of (sub-)nations within a four-

350

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

hundred-year span to nearly all the continents–to a few of Saskia Sassen’s thoughts in her new book called Territories, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages6 dealing with the differences between the global expansion of the seventeenth century, which included Jamestown, and our current globalization.

Norfolk State University’s Candid Conference In an official letter to the conference attendees, Timothy J. Sullivan, the Chair of the organizing committee of the eight conferences (“Democracy Conference Planning Council”), announced that “our respect for the members of three cultures that converged at this point in history [early seventeenth century]—European, Virginia Indian and African— grows as we rediscover the courage and sacrifice exhibited by all during the forging of this nation.”7 Despite the Council’s public embracing of ethnic involvement in the construction of the Jamestown colony and later the United States, the Voices from within the Veil conference was opposed by influential white members of the Conference Council who feared a problematizing rather than celebratory aura for the four-hundred year anniversary. The new (white) Governor of Virginia, Timothy M. Kaine (Democrat), strongly supported the goals of the conference, however, stating clearly in his personal appearance and conference address that there was much “unfinished business” with regard to the inequalities arising from the flow of free and enslaved migrants into the already occupied space of seventeenth-century Virginia and the ensuing diasporas. The “Voices from within the Veil” conference emphasized continuing issues of concern for the African American community. In a keynote address, Brandeis University’s Thomas Shapiro presented shocking statistics on black economic disadvantage in his speech titled “The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality.” Mary Frances Berry, who has a distinguished portfolio of professorships and public service, including chairing the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 1993-2004, emphasized the present legal backlash on affirmative action; other speakers touched on the intra-black crime, teen pregnancy, and absent fathers featured controversially in the ongoing “Bill Cosby debate.”8 Further black social issues mentioned by the conference speakers and discussed in plenary were under-achievement in education, the effects of hip hop role models, the ethnic glass-ceiling in professional hiring and advancement, questions of black leadership, and fading engagement in the post-Civil Right era. The candidacy of Barack Obama in the presidential election sparked awkward conversations at the

Voices from within the Veil

351

conference concerning ethnic loyalty versus practical politics. In early 2008, the choice facing blacks was: should African Americans cast their votes in the primaries for Hillary Clinton, an early Democratic frontrunner, or for the young black rising star Barack Obama, who might have difficulty asserting himself against the Republican powerhouse?

Ethnic Lines in 1907 and 1957 The candid discussions gave the conference the air of an insider one in which the “we” form dominated and managed to include comfortably the numerous white and Native American participants as well as the popular guest Timothy Kaine, while at the same time excluding the white mainstream U.S. society at large, which had elected the leadership in the Oval Office. Political lines did not correlate completely with ethnic ones. Glancing at the history of the Jamestown Jubilee, however, we see that ethnic lines were clearly drawn in the Tercentennial of 1907. Inclusion of a controversial contribution by Richmond attorney Giles B. Jackson, born a slave, who led the effort to include a “Negro Building” in the 1907 exposition, was the only nod to African Americans. Jackson’s plan was opposed by W. E. B. DuBois, who felt that the separate project showed acceptance of Jim Crowism. The main attraction of this Tercentennial Jubilee was a naval extravaganza called “The Great White Fleet,” an appellation which suited the Jim Crow era perfectly. The current exhibition at the Library of Virginia in Richmond, called “Myth and Memory: Understanding Four-Hundred Years of Virginia History,” points out that this 400 Years Jubilee was the first to be organized by a federal commission, which supported the “Negro Building” concept. Jackson’s “Building” presented more than 3,000 exhibitions, including dioramas sculpted by Meta Vaux Warwick Fuller of scenes from black history. Indeed, the “Negro Building,” Jim Crowish or not, was the only profitable facility of the financially disastrous exposition. In an effort to compete with the increasingly popular story of the New English Pilgrims, the Native Americans were romanticized, as in the sheet music cover of “Glory to Jamestown, an Exposition March” (1907), into pale-skinned, amiable exotics, dressed in eclectic Indian garb; Pocahontas and presumably her father gaze at and beyond the Jamestown fort with obvious interest, even holding a “Virginia” welcoming sign!9 The 350 Years’ Celebration in 1957 had been preceded by extensive archeological excavations, which gave a more accurate image of the role of the Native Americans (and women) with regard to the Jamestown settlement. But the Cold War tensions shaped the Jubilee into a patriotic

352

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

encomium to American values arising from Anglo-Saxon traditions. Queen Elizabeth II visited the newly established permanent Jamestown Festival Park, operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and lent it a copy of the Magna Carta. Furthermore, the racial struggles unleashed by the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing school segregation made the issues of race and early Virginia slavery far too controversial for the Jubilee organizers to allude to during the celebratory events in this southern state. The folkways of the Indians, who were presented as having helped the settlers, provided a conveniently safe topic, allowing the prestigious society of the descendants of Pocahontas–all decisively white–to feel honored. The Jamestown celebrations, particularly with regard to the ethnicities, have thus proved to be a complex hybrid of paradigmatic national policy and Virginia agenda. The 2007 Jubilee, the grandest of all, continues this tradition, having welcomed Queen Elizabeth II to Jamestown once more to affirm the Anglo-American alliance. But political correctness has clearly left its mark, and the ethnicities have become major players, supported by the new media which advertises and promotes colorful celebratory events like the Intertribal Cultural Festival (July 2007), the latest archeological finds, and corollary exhibitions and meetings such as the “State of the Black Union” symposium in Williamsburg in February 2007. For my purposes, the new academic and literary/historical approaches to Jamestown ethnicities are of the most interest. I have already dealt with the first–candid facing of the ethnic problems then and now, as in the Norfolk State University “Voices from within the Veil” conference–and will deal with three more: cultural reappropriation, particularly through ethnic voicing; micro studies; and drawing of macro parameters.

Cultural (Re-) Appropriation: Voicing Pocahontas Looking at the Virginia Natives, we can consider the current process of “de-colonizing” their best-known historical figure, Matoaka/Pocahontas, as a prime example of cultural (re)appropriation. The daughter of Powhatan Wahunsenaca, paramount Native chief at the time of the founding of Jamestown, Pocahontas has been depicted in Western literature and art as everything from a seductive Belle Sauvage to a Christianized Jacobean lady or a supporter of ecological and ethnic harmony. Three books published on the eve of the 2007 Commemoration have attempted to present Pocahontas and her transcultural dilemma from the largely missing point of view of the Native Americans: Paula Gunn Allen’s bio-

Voices from within the Veil

353

mythography Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003; anthropologist Helen Rountree’s expert study, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005; and, most controversially, the Powhatan/Mattaponi Indians’ brand-new revelation of their oral history: The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History; From the Sacred History of the Mattaponi Reservation People.10 The thrust of all of these books is to liberate Pocahontas’ experiences from the century-long American agenda of reading the establishment of the nation state rooted in the precarious Jamestown settlement of 1607 as inevitable and as exclusively positive. In a clear attempt to reconstitute Pocahontas’ voice, Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna-Pueblo and Lebanese descent, has written her biography of Matoaka/Pocahontas after claiming that Pocahontas actually spoke to her.11 Calling on ethnic memory, Allen is, to borrow Toni Morrison’s term from Beloved, “rememorying” Pocahontas’ experiences and perceptions.12 In Allen’s account, there is certainly no romantic relationship between the twelve-year-old Pocahontas and the fifteen-yearolder John Smith; the famous rescue is an initiation ritual. Allen capitalizes on Pocahontas’ 1616 parting words to Smith in England,13 underlining the Algonquin princess’s deep sense of Smith’s treachery in seeing his adoption into the Powhatans as a matter of expedience; for her, this adoption was the fulfillment of a spiritual prophecy.14 Rountree’s book, explicitly published for the 400 Years’ Jubilee, attempts to present the events and encounters of the early colony from the Natives’ perspective. The English are called “strangers,” “savages,” and “squatters” – a brave semantic reversal in alterity, revealing the Eurocentric slant of the mainstream recapitulation of those events. As a “white Virginian…who has now been studying—and restudying—those early Virginia records [of eyewitnesses, all non-native] for thirty-five years,”15 she adopts the strategy of investigating the motivations, immediate agenda, and biases of those witnesses. In doing this, and assessing what the Natives “could have been able to observe or deduce about the newcomers for themselves,” she astutely and mirror-like re-inscribes the motives and reactions of the Indigenes. Even recreating the likely Algonquin pronunciation of “John Smith” by referring to him as “Chawnzmit” throughout the book gives the reader the impression that this authoritative anthopologist is performing effective and justified ventriloquism. The most sensational re-voicing of the Virginia Natives is undoubtedly the publication in book form of the oral history passed down for four

354

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

hundred years by the quiakros (the Powhatan priests) and the chiefs. The authors are Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow, brother of the present Mattaponi Chief, and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star,” an adopted member of the tribe. In an afterword, Daniel, a doctoral candidate in anthropology at the College of William and Mary, describes the difficulties that her project encountered in many anthropological circles and the support by those who did not fear “the controversy Powhatan oral tradition would induce.”16 The voicing of Pocahontas is both direct–through the Natives’ oral tradition—and fascinatingly mediated through relatives in the early seventeenth-century and through four subsequent centuries of tribal recounting. Like Allen, the Mattaponis stress the close relationship between Pocahontas and her father, her loyalty to the Powhatans, rather than a romantic relationship to the fickle Smith. The main source of Pocahontas’ personal account is Mattachanna, her eldest sister by the same mother, who had raised Pocahontas after their mother died, as well as Mattachanna’s husband Tomococo (or Uttamattamakin), one of Powhatan’s closest priests. They were allowed to care for the captive Pocahontas in the Jamestown Fort in 1613. Pocahontas was also allowed to speak to two of her brothers in March 1614 when she was taken to one of her father’s villages to negotiate her ransom, albeit in vain. The most shocking revelation in the printed “oral” account is that Pocahontas was raped while in captivity, possibly repeatedly and by more than one Englishman.17 Custalow and Daniel describe the gravity of this crime in Powhatan society: “Rape was virtually unheard of because the punishment for such actions was so severe.”18 Mattachanna found her sister distressed, emotionally disturbed, fatigued, and nauseous”19–and pregnant. Pocahontas’ son was born out of wedlock prior to her marriage to John Rolfe; the birth of infant Thomas was never recorded, even though Rolfe was secretary of the colony. Custalow and Daniel find evidence that the autocratic governor of the colony, Sir Thomas Dale, had fathered the child; in 1614, Dale was denied permission by Chief Powhatan to marry one of his other daughters.20 Uttamattamakin had accompanied Pocahontas on the promotion tour to London for the Virginia Company, and upon his return from England reported to his people that Pocahontas, who had been perfectly healthy on boarding the ship to go back to her homeland, had been murdered, probably poisoned, a suspicion already uttered in Allen’s biography four years before the disclosure in the Mattaponi publication. According to the quiakros, Pocahontas’ murder had been planned even prior to her setting sail for London, and, moreover, she had discovered too much about

Voices from within the Veil

355

motives, plans, and betrayals during her stay in the Old World. She was now a risk rather than an instrument for the Virginia Company. The latest in a long line of “true story of Pocahontas” projects, the Custalow/Daniel book has its hermeneutical shortcomings. It draws on the standard seventeenth-century accounts by male English contemporaries (e.g. Smith, Strachey, Argall) when these support the Mattaponi narrative, and contradicts them randomly. For example, Custalow/Daniel vehemently deny the received story that Powhatan’s brother Japasaw and his wife betrayed Pocahontas, delivering her to the English for a mere copper kettle, but they assert instead that Japasaw wanted to prevent difficulties for his brother and acted with diplomatic and loyal cleverness. The book is open to the criticism that an adopted member of the tribe, Angela Daniel, becomes the spokesperson, a white in ‘redface.’ Passions are running high on the issue of who can speak for the Natives during the Jamestown Jubilee year. Predictably, a conservative critic prefers the Natives “grateful” for the “arrival of Christianity [and] the establishment of Jamestown” rather than “those individuals who are seeking to hijack our national celebration and turn it into a year of mourning, guilt manipulation and self-loathing.”21 A more balanced critique can be found on the College of William and Mary website; while admitting that some will denounce the Custalow/Daniel book, an assistant professor of anthropology at the College suggests that “the oral history, inasmuch as it reflects the mindset of the Mattaponi, should be welcomed into the record.”22

Micro Studies: Fishhook Lashes and Remarkable Privileges In addition to the emphasis on (a) candidly facing the ethnic problems then and now, (b) reconstituting and giving authority to the Native Americans’ own points of view, newest scholarship is stressing both (c) micro and (d) macro parameters. The micro approach involves exhuming the stories of individual lives, which present tiny cross-sections of the interrelationship of nationality, class, gender, and ethnicity. Martha McCartney’s amazing compilation of individual colonists’ origins and fates was published this summer as Virginia Immigrants and Adventurers 1607-1635: A Biographical Dictionary, based on her scrutiny of courtroom records and legal documents in a vast database for over twentytwo years.23 She shows the narrowness of the century-long focusing on a few key figures such as John Smith and Christopher Newport. The international experiences of John Clark, for example, reflect the

356

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

interweaving of the Atlantic nations and territories. An English pilot who landed in Virginia in May 1611, he made the mistake one month later of boarding a Spanish ship near Jamestown. He became a victim of ongoing English/Spanish competition and intensive mutual spying when he was seized, taken to Cuba and interrogated (presumably harshly) to reveal details about the Jamestown settlement. In 1612 he was shipped to Spain, where he was imprisoned until renewed interrogation in 1616 (one wonders how much valuable information he could reveal from his onemonth stay in Virginia five years previously…) He made a startling comeback, however, returning to England after his release and serving as the pilot for the Mayflower, sailing to Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1620. That same year, Jane Dickenson emigrated to Virginia with her husband Ralph as an indentured servant. Her biography lends insights into the types of bondage and captivity that both women and men could be subjected to in the early Virginia years. During Opechancanough’s uprising in 1622, when one-fourth of the colonists were killed, Dickenson was captured by the Native Americans, and remained in their custody for nearly one year. She was finally ransomed by Dr. John Pott for a mere two pounds of beads and became his bonded servant in Jamestown. She solicited the Governor to set her free in 1624, insisting that her time of servitude with the Pott family was “far worse than the time she had spent as a captive of the Indians”24–surely her written narrative would have been even more revealing of early Seventeenth-century interculturality and gender conflicts than Mary Rowlandson’s well-known 1682 best seller. Elizabeth Abbott, an English vagrant, also suffered immensely at the hands of her indenturer. A habitual runaway, she was beaten many times, on one occasion receiving 500 lashes. In fact, she died after a final brutal beating in 1624, which was inflicted with “a stout cord containing fishhooks.”25 There were apparently no convictions made after the inquest. Even free women were well warned not to incur the wrath of male colonists: Margaret Jones fought with her neighbor at an outpost near Jamestown in 1626, beating him with a tobacco stalk while he was gathering peas in his garden. She was sentenced to be towed behind the stern of a boat both to and from a ship anchored in the James, but survived her draconian punishment. The same day as her sentencing, she and a Jamestown man were accused of committing adultery. Not to be squelched, she marked the hogsheads of tobacco produced by her (and presumably her husband’s) farm with her own initials.26 Before racial slavery was firmly in place in Virginia statutes, the Africans were not treated noticeably differently from the indentured servants. Indeed, Anthony, an African who lived in Elizabeth City County

Voices from within the Veil

357

by 1624, served in a Captain’s household and was permitted remarkable privileges. Despite (probably) being a non-Christian, he was allowed to marry Isabella, another African servant in that home, and by 1625 they had a child. All three were then baptized.27

Macro Parameters: Migration and Globalization The macro approach reveals the complexity of the multi-ethnic encounters in Jamestown within the context of the Atlantic powers and continents. The Virginia Natives had already had drastic clashes with the Spanish,28 decisively influencing the Algonquins’ interaction with the English Europeans, which is commonly presented as based on pristine alterity–even in such a recent cultural product as Terrence Malick’s 2005 film The New World. A current exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society called “Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings” shows the English (1607), French (1608), and Spanish (1609) colonizations and their involvement with the indigenous populations in a new mutual light. In the glossy book publication accompanying the exhibition, the curators underline the broad geographical scope, calling these three settlements “small outposts in a vast and interconnected Atlantic world.”29 They also point out that the well-worn phrase “settling the New World” could only be used after the colonization in those outposts solidified and spread–a better term for the events of the early seventeenth-century, which resulted in shocking losses of life of all parties involved and destruction of established ways of living, would be “unsettling the New World” (11) as the Europeans encroached from all directions. It is a commonplace that the affairs in the New World reflected the balance of power struggles in Europe, but the ways in which the geopolitics resulted in the establishment of colonies with divergent but intertwining attitudes toward the Natives, with different economic strategies and religious agendas, is now being investigated through a comparison of artifacts and documents. The link between the establishing of “plantations” in Ulster beginning in 1603 and the subjugation of the Powhatans in the subsequent decades is another Atlantic network of unsettling as a result of policy in the European nation states–in this example England–with their aggressive empirebuilding. Investigation of the “intertextuality” of American concerns with European, mainly British, policies, laws, and Virginia Company documents has burgeoned in this Jubilee year, particularly because it conflates exactly with the Bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade. The Museum of Docklands in London is offering “Journey to the

358

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

New World: London 1606-Virginia 1607,” followed by a permanent exhibition (as of October 2007) to be called the “London, Sugar and Slavery” Gallery. The astonishingly interactive exhibition at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol/UK called “Breaking the Chains” memorably illustrates, focusing on the Bristol/Bath region as a case study, how the growth of upper-middle-class wealth in seventeenth/eighteenth-century England lay in the international infrastructure of the slave trade with Africa and the New World. Young museum visitors, in particular, are encouraged to perceive the economic reasons for the development of the lucrative slave trade and simultaneously to voice their indignation at the horror of such commerce which served to enable luxury articles such as sugar, tobacco, and rum to grace the salons of now controversial merchants, such as the Bristol-born Edward Colston (1636-1721), whose philanthropy from his slave-trading fortune is still celebrated in that city.30 Saskia Sassen points out in her new book that it is tempting but problematic to view the world political economy in the late sixteenthcentury as the first era of globalization.31 The changing of the paradigm in the sixteenth-century from strict enclosure of the home territory to migration had the aim of projecting the national systems on the colonized areas. Ironically for the colonizers, the nation state which benefited most from the intense rivalry among the European powers was the new hybrid one, later to be called the United States of America, which emerged and claimed its “manifest destiny,” forgetting the constructed nature of its international beginnings. According to Sassen, the current era of globalization, in contrast to the seventeenth-century expansion, reduces the growth of international rivalry, serving to “subject national differences to global economic logics insofar as the main actors are economic.”32 Despite claims of the ascendance of a new world order, the old patterns of ethnic superiority seem to be functioning, perhaps covertly, but with undeniable effects. Sassen has warned us that cultural revisions are rarely total: “foundational change need not entail the elimination of everything that constituted the preceding order.”33 The Norfolk State University conference participants drew a banal but powerful conclusion that needs saying in 2007: Virginia is still raced. Yes indeed, migration continues to matter, even 400 years later.

Notes 1

Giles B. Jackson’s successful campaign for a “Negro Building” in the 1907 exposition will be discussed later in this article.

Voices from within the Veil 2

359

The key website touting the events: America’s 400th Anniversary, http://www.jamestown2007.org; alternative URL: http://www.americas400thanniversary.org. 3 America’s 400th Anniversary: Forum on the Future of Democracy, http://www.jamestown2007.org/se-democracyforum.cfm (list of conferences). 4 The acronym HBCU denotes the ca. 115 “historically black colleges or universities” established prior to 1964. NSU, one of the largest HBCUs, was established in the depths of the Depression years in 1935 as the Norfolk division of Virginia Unioin. Later, it was a division of Virginia State College until gaining its independence as a separate college in 1969. By 1975, it became Norfolk State University. According to a 2005 website document, approximately ten per cent of NSU’s students classify themselves as white (African American 5,320; white 419; Hispanic 106; Asian 59; other, including foreign 416; http://www.nsu.edu/athletics/athleticsmanual/athleticsmanual.pdf). The conference did not ask itself whether the possibly controversial mission of a (nearly) all-black college should be re-thought: does it encourage racial categorizing? In fact, Norfolk State, one of the largest HBCUs, conducted a a major promotion campaign in 2006 which included the creation of an impressive image CD. 5 The term “migration” is not unproblematic. Until recently “immigration” has been preferred in the U.S. to distinguish the voluntary expatriate, the “immigrant,” from temporary workers (“migrant laborers”) or non-humans (e.g. “seasonal migration of birds”) or mass movements within one country (“black migration to the North”). In Europe the terms “migration”/”migrant” are used more readily, I maintain, to describe voluntary movement of people from one nation to another. In Saskia Sassen’s 1998 book Globalization and its Discontents (New York: The New Press), the index has no entries for “migration,” but well over a dozen for “immigration”; in her recent writings, as far as I have been able to ascertain, she speaks more readily of “migration” and “migrant,” probably signaling a terminological trend. 6 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 7 Conference program, introductory pages. 8 The popular actor has been outspoken in calling on the African Americans in the lower economic brackets to take personal responsibility for underachieving youths. He has reaped scorn from many black voices which have accused him of supporting conservative white forces seeking explanations for black-on-black crime and poverty in African American attitudes rather than in inherited social structures of disadvantage. 9 See http://www.lva.lib.va.us/whoweare/exhibits/mandm/intro.asp for graphics of items shown in the exhibition, including the colorful sheet music cover, as well as for further information about the 1907 and 1957 Jamestown commemorations. 10 The authors Dr. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow and Angela L. Daniel “Silver Star” had difficulty finding a publisher who would support their project. Daniel even encountered strong denial of her “identity as anthropologist” (105) because of this work, finally accepted by Fulcrum Publishing, Golden/Colorado, 2007. 11 See, for instance, her interview with Joanne M. Braxton: “Pocahontas’ Voice.” The Women’s Review of Books: A Feminist Guide to Good Reading, May 2004:

360

Ethnicity in the 1607-2007 Jamestown Jubilee

“Pocahontas…had spoken to me across the years…I heard her most directly near her burial place at Gravesend, England…She didn’t use words”; www.wellesley.edu/WomensReview/archive/2004/05/highlt.html. 12 Morrison repeatedly uses the term “rememory” (both as verb and noun) to describe the internal re-experiencing of a past event, the most extreme example being Beloved’s vivid, impressionistic ‘rememorying’ of the horrors of the Middle Passage. Beloved (New York: Signet, 1991; original publication, 1987), 259-63. 13 These words were reported by Smith eight years later: “You did promise Powhatan what was yours should be his, and he the like to you; you called him father being in his land a stranger, and by the same reason so must I do you…You were not afraid to come into my father’s country, and caused fear in him and all his people (but me) and you fear here I should call you father; I tell you then I will, and you shall call me childe, and so I will be for ever and ever your countryman. They did tell us always you were dead, and I knew no other till I came to Plymouth; Powhatan did command Uttamatomakkin to seek you, and know the truth, because your countrymen will lie much.” Online version of John Smith, The General History of Virginia, New England and the Summer Isles, 1624, 67 (spelling and syntax largely modernized); http://docsouth.unc. edu/southlit/smith/smith.html. 14 A saucy multi-voicing of Pocahontas which anticipates a number of Allen’s insights lies at the heart of a postmodernist play by “Kuna-Rappahannock halfbreed” Monique Mojica (“About the Playwright,” 86): Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991), first performed in 1990. The character of Matoaka expressses a mythological relationship with nature and her Native “deer clan,” 32. Lady Rebecca tells John Smith about his betrayal, 29. Princess Buttered-On-Both-Sides embodies the stereotypical ‘welcoming Indian maiden,’ (ironically) proclaiming “For the talent segment of the Miss North American Indian Beauty Pageant, I shall dance for you, in savage splendour, the ‘Dance of the Sacrificial Corn Maiden’, and proceed to hurl myself over the precipice, all for the loss of my one true love, CAPTAIN JOHN WHITEMAN,” 19. 15 Helen Rountree, Pocahonta, Powhata, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005, preface. 16 Custalow/Daniel: 106. 17 Ibid., 62. 18 Ibid., 62. 19 Ibid., 63. 20 The Powhatan/Mattaponi allegation that Pocahontas was raped would offer concrete evidence to support Rebecca Blevins Faery’s well-developed and convincing theory that the discourse of colonialism conflates the conquerable continent with the body of the woman of color; the invading European male saw the ‘rape’ of both as sanctioned because of his self-proclaimed cultural superiority (Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999). 21 Doug Phillips, “Who Speaks for the American Indian?”

Voices from within the Veil

361

http://www.worldnetdaily. com/ news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55527, posted 4 May 2007. 22 http://www.wm.edu/news/index.php?id=7646. 23 Baltimore, Maryland: Geneological Publishing Company, 2007. (Note the use of “immigrants” rather than “migrants” in the title.) 24 Ibid., 250. A newspaper review article (Mark St. John Erickson, “Rebuilding Jamestown Story by Story,” Daily Press [Willliamsburg], Thursday, May 10, 2007, D1-2 presents an excellent selection of cameos from McCartney’s newly released Biographical Dictionary. 25 Ibid., 77. 26 Other tales reveal gender subjugation: Joane Wright, who emigrated to the colony as early as 1609, was the first to be publicly accused of witchcraft, probably because she was a left-handed midwife. Margaret Beard of Pasbehay became pregnant as a result of adultery and, furthermore, failed to report runaway servants; she was whipped at Jamestown for these offenses. 27 At least the records show that all three had been baptized by 1625, McCartney, 87. Although Pocahontas’ baptism has been featured in all European versions of her biography, the colonists met with relatively little success in converting the Native Americans in Virginia (see for example James C. Kelly and Barbara Clark Smith, eds. Jamestown, Québec, Santa Fe: Three North American Beginnings (Washington and New York Smithsonian Books, 2007), 23. 28 The Spanish had entered the Chespeake Bay in approximately 1560, capturing a Powhatan boy. He was educated in Mexico and Spain, baptized as as Don Luis de Velasco (not to be confused with the Luis de Velasco who was the viceroy of New Spain at the turn of the next century). As a star pupil, he was returned to Virginia in 1570 to help establish a Catholic mission, but instead rallied the Powhatans for a revenge attack. The Spanish retaliated bloodily in 1572. David A. Price recounts the Native/Spanish encounters in detail in Love and Hate in Jamestown: John Smith, Pocahontas, and the Start of a New Nation, New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 11. 29 Kelly/Smith, Ibid., 11. 30 A detailed website documents the exhibition: http://www.empiremuseum.co.uk/ exhibitions/st2007.htm. A pedagogically state-of-the-art “learning pack” + CDROM can be purchased at the exhibition. 31 Territories, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), chapter 1. 32 Ibid., 16. 33 Ibid., 11.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

William H. Alexander is professor of history at Norfolk State University in Virginia. A specialist in European cultural and world history, he has written on blacks in eighteenth-century France and is completing a cultural study of blacks in France from the Enlightenment to the present. Charles H. Ford is professor in and chair of the Norfolk State University history department. He teaches British, Commonwealth, and world history and is the author of Hannah More: A Critical Biography (1996). Currently he is co-autthoring a study on public education in twentieth century Norfolk with Jeffrey Littlejohn. Teresa Holden is assistant professor in the history and political science department at Greenville College in Illinois. Her primary research focuses on the career of twentieth-century African American activist Josephine St.Pierre Ruffin. Ervin Jordan is research archivist at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library and associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He specializes in Civil War and AfricanAmerican history and is the author of many articles and three books: 19th Virginia Infantry (1987), Charlottesville and the University of Virginia in the Civil War (1988), and Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia (1995), a History Book Club selection. Richard Junger is associate professor of journalism at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. In addition to his courses in news writing, he is preparing a major study of H. O. Wagoner’s life and career. Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie currently teaches in the history department at Howard University. He has written Freedpeople in the Tobacco South: Virginia, 1860 to 1900 (1999) and Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (2007). Dr. Kerr-Ritchie’s teaching and research interests concern slavery, abolition, and post-emancipation societies.

Voices from within the Veil

363

Judith King-Calnek presently teaches anthropology, history and theory of knowledge at the United Nations International School in New York. Her publications have focused on education and citizenship in Brazil and the United States. In addition to her teaching and research, Judith KingCalnek pursues her long time love of Brazilian music and jazz as a radio programmer and producer in the New York area, for which she has received numerous awards. Page Laws is professor of English and director of the Honors Program at Norfolk State University. Among her publications in film and literary criticism is “White Orpheus? Expiation and the Post-Apartheid Imagination” in Dark Webs: Perspectives on Colonialism in Africa, edited by Toyin Falola and published in 2005. Jeffrey Littlejohn is assistant professor of history at Sam Houston State University in Texas with a specialization in colonial American history. Currently he is co-authoring a study on public education in twentieth century Norfolk with Charles Ford. Kimberley Mangun is an assistant professor of communications at The University of Utah. Her publications on the activist Beatrice Cannady and race relations in Oregon include “The (Oregon) Advocate: Boosting the Race and Portland, Too.” American Journalism 23 (Winter 2006): 7-34. Brent Morris is a graduate student in the Department of History at Cornell University. His research focuses on slavery and abolition as well as discourses of gender and masculinity pertaining to antebellum AfricanAmerican communities. Cassandra L. Newby-Alexander is associate professor of history at Norfolk State University and author of Black America Series: Portsmouth, VA (2003). Currently she is co-authoring a history of African Americans in Norfolk and is also preparing a study of the Underground Railroad in Virginia. Shayla Nunnally is assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on African American political behavior, with an emphasis on black, racial and political socialization, black public opinion, and black political development

364

Contributors

Christina Proenza-Coles is assistant professor in the Department of History and Philosophy, Virginia State University, Petersburg. She has a forthcoming work on African Americans in the Military during the Civil War. Rodney Roberts is associate professor of philosophy at East Carolina University, Greenville, and the editor of Injustice and Rectification. (2002). He is a descendant of the African peoples who were brought to North Carolina in 1786 and enslaved at the Somerset Place plantation in Creswell, North Carolina. Natalia Vysotska is professor of European and American literature, Kiev National Linguistics University, Ukraine, and the author of At the Crossroads of Civilizations: African American Drama as a Multicultural Phenomenon, Kiev (1997). Her scholarly interests encompass African American Literature with special emphasis on theater and drama. Cathy Waegner is professor of English at Siegen University in Germany. A specialist in European perspectives on American ethnicity, she has written extensively about black culture and is the author of Recollection and Discovery: The Rhetoric of Character in William Faulkner's Novels (1983). She also is co-editor of Literature on the. Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002).

INDEX

Abolitionists, 85, 117-119,122, 127, 129-130, 136, 141-144, 146-155, 157, 216, 222-223, 301, 308, 332 Adams, John Quincy, 119 African Diaspora, 49, 57, 117, 133 Africans, 46, 49, 50-54, 56-58, 60, 63, 75-81, 95, 98, 141, 170, 184, 187, 197-199, 345, 356 Algonquin, 1-2, 12, 19, 23-24, 31, 33-36, 40, 44, 96, 109, 353, 357 Alterity, 23-25, 27-28, 31, 35, 3742, 353, 357 Almond, J. Lindsay Jr., 325, 337338 America’s 400th Anniversary, xiixiii, 46, 349, 359 American Revolution, 76, 79-80-82, 190, 208, 211, 337 American slavery, 55, 79, 170, 178179, 187, 202, 211 Angola, 2, 53-54, 56, 69, 76 Aptheker, Herbert, 77, 106 Ashe, Victor, 339 Atlantic slave trade, [See Transatlantic Slave Trade] Bacon’s Rebellion, 73, 80-82 Bacon, Nathaniel, Jr., 75-76, 79-81, 83 Bain, Reverend George M., 113, 122-123 Bale, Christian, 6, 11 Ballabeck Road, 95 Baltimore, Maryland, 104, 143, 189, 191, 315 Barker, James Nelson, 3, 8-9, 21 Batts, Nathaniel, 91, 93 Bauman, Zygmunt, 291 Bedard, Irene, 9, 11

Belle Sauvage, [See La Belle Sauvage] Benet, Stephen Vincent, 4-5 Berkeley, William (Governor of Virginia) 55, 75, 79, 83, 91 Berlin, Ira, 78, 190, 198 Berry, Mary Frances, 350 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 27, 41 Bibb, Henry, 195 Black Mingle Pocosin, [See Pocosin] Blackmores, [See Moors] Blevins, Rebecca, 10, 24, 360 Bonney, Hal, 320-321 Bordewich, Fergus M., 141 Boston, Massachusetts, 117-119, 144, 153, 300, 301, 307 Brazil, 42, 200 Brazilian law, 200 Bray, John, 3, 8-9, 21 Brewbaker, J. J., 315-316, 321, 332 Brewer, James C., 319, 322, 328 Brooks-Higginbotham, Evelyn, 307 Brown, Elizabeth, 120, 127 Brown, Eugene (Reverend), 325 Brown, G.W.C., 317 Brown, John, 152-154 Brown, Joseph, 132 Brown, Thomas, 235-236 Brown, William (Captain), 195 Brown v. Board of Education, 61, 179, 314-317, 320-321, 323, 331, 352 Butts, Evelyn, 339 Byrd, William (Colonel), 87, 96, 102 Byrd, Harry F. (Senator), 244, 252, 315, 319

366 California, 117, 135, 155-156, 156, 260-261, 279, 285 California Eagle, 284 Campbell, G. L., 266 Campbell, Naomi, 9 Canada, 73, 103, 115, 117, 129-131, 134, 143-144, 148, 150-151, 156 Cannady, Beatrice Morrow, 186, 254-256, 259, 263-264, 269-274, 274, 276, 279-282, 284,-285 Carter, Robert “King”, 59 Counterfactual Conception of Compensation (CCC), 174, 176179, 183 Charles II, 57, 91 Charles V, 50, 66 Chase, Salmon P. (U.S. Senator), 152 Chatham, Massahusetts, 143, 156 Chatham Journal, 143 Chelsea, Massachusetts, 117, 131133 Cherokee, 39 Chesapeake, 50, 60, 79, 86, 89, 103 Chicago, 74, 141-158, 160-161, 163-164, 308-309 Chicago Advertiser, 145 Chicago Democrat, 151 Chicago Times, 152 Chicago Tribune, 145-146, 150, 155, 157, 163 Chowan, 91, 93-94, 96 Christ Christian Methodist Episcopal, 317 City of Richmond, 113, 125, 127, 130 Civil Rights, 49, 140-142, 145, 160164, 168, 186, 246, 254, 266, 301, 303, 314-315, 331-312, 347, 349-350 Civil War, 74, 81-82, 103, 124, 131132, 140-141, 154, 156-157, 172, 208, 222, 231, 300, 347 Cockade City, 186, 231 Colonial Williamsburg, 48, 352

Index Colored Methodist Church, [See Emanuel A.M.E. Church] Columbian Exposition, 303 Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, 170, 172 Confederacy, 93-94, 173 Congress of Racial Equality, 314, 336 Constitution, U.S. (1789), xvi, 61, 141, 146, 208, 242, 348 Conyers, John, 170, 172 Coppage, Samuel F., 323 Cornwallis, Lord Charles, 103 Cotton States Exposition, 303-304 Craft, William and Ellen, 196 Cuba, 199-200, 356 Culpepper, Lord Thomas, 92-93 Culpepper’s Rebellion, 79 Custis, Jackie, 194 Dabney, Thomas L., 318, 323-324 Daily Missouri Republican, 148, 151 Dances with Wolves, 13 Dandridge, Ann, 195-196 Daniel, Angela, 37-38, 354-355, 359 Daniel, Lucinda Powell, 219-220, 222 Daniel, William, 220-222, 227 Davis, Charles, 113, 133 Davis, Clarissa 113, 121, 125, 129, 133 Davis, David Brion, 200 Davis, Hugh , 55 Davis, William, 113, 133 Declaration of Independence, xv, 61, 62, 141, 146, 164 Democracy Conference Planning Council, 350 Denver, Colorado, 141, 152, 155161, 164 Dismal Swamp, 73, 85-90, 94-106, 116, 136 Dismal Swamp Company, 88, 111 Disney, 3, 6-7, 9-11, 13, 17-18

Voices from within the Veil Double consciousness, 27 Douglass, Frederick, 134, 142-143, 145-147, 149-152, 156, 159, 160-164, 181, 195, 309, 332 Drayton, Daniel, 104 DuBois, W. E. B., xv, 287-288, 300, 302, 309, 351 Duckworth, W. Fred, 316, 321-322, 328, 331 Dutch, 51, 53-54, 79, 95 Eisenhower, Dwight, 313, 337 Elizabeth I, Queen of England, 19, 51, 352 Elizabeth River, 116, 118, 120-121, 123, 125-126, 334 Emanuel A.M.E. Church (Portsmouth, VA), 113, 121-127 English, 3, 12, 14-15, 23, 27-28, 3031, 33-39, 41, 43-44, 46-47, 49, 51-57, 60-61, 65, 75, 77-80, 8991, 93-94, 103, 109, 140, 146, 162, 189, 192, 198, 201-202, 216-217, 224, 290, 327, 345, 351, 353-357 Engs, Robert, 81-82 Enlightenment, 145, 295 Existence Argument, 178-179 Faery, Rebecca, 8, 10, 24, 29, 3334, 360 Federal Work Progress Administration, 196 Fifteenth Amendment, 157, 159, 231, 233, 281 Ford, Annie, 133 Ford, Barney L., 156, 158, 160, 165 Ford, Leonard, 131-133 Ford, Sheridan, 116, 119, 127-130, 133 Ford, West, 192-193, 206 Forty acres and a mule, 74, 170, 172-173, 182 Foucault, Michel, 41, 291, 296, 297 Founding Fathers, 202, 293, 295 Freedmen’s Bureau, 172, 182, 230 French, 5-6, 14, 30, 41, 158, 188, 192, 197-198, 357

367

Fringe fugitives, 87, 97, 100-103, 105-106, 111 Fuente, Alejandro de la, 199 Fugitive slaves, 78, 85-87, 89-90, 92, 94, 97-106, 114-117, 120, 124-131, 133, 144, 147-148, 150-152, 301 Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 113, 145-149 Garrison, William Lloyd, 146, 308309 Gates, Henry L., 295-296 Gay, James, 339, 340 Gay, Milton Jr., 330-338, 340-341 General Assembly (Virginia), 59, 62, 64, 209, 232, 243-244, 248, 337-308, 343 Germany, 11, 24, 26, 28-33, 38, 40, 94, 96, 143 Gibson, Mel, 9 Gloucester County, Virginia, 75, 77, 140 Grace Episcopal Church, 320 Grandy, Moses, 102-103 Grantham, Captain Thomas, 75, 78, 80 Gray, James, 118-119, 136 Great Dismal Swamp [See Dismal Swamp] Greensboro, 314, 330, 331, 333 Haitian Revolution, 199 Hall, Gwendolyn Midlo, 198 Hamilton, Ontario (Canada), 130, 134 Hampton Roads, 73, 76, 86, 113114, 118-119, 125-125,, 134 Harpers Ferry, 131, 153 Harper's Monthy, 85 Harper's Weekly, 98 Hayes, Rutherford B., 231 Hawkins, Sir John, 51, 93 Hemings, Sally, 63, 194 Henderson, John B., 317 Henry VII, 51 Historic Tableaux of Negroes’ Progress, 47

368 Hodges, General John, 120-122, 128-129, 132, 137 Holocaust, 179 House of Burgesses (Virginia), 6061, 346 Howard University, 161, 216, 362 Hypodescent, 188, 190, 197 Illinois, 140-141, 143-144, 149-154, 157, 162 Indian Princess, 3, 8, 11, 25, 39 Irving, Frank, 121, 133 Irving, Robert, 119, 120, 126, 133 Iroquois, 94 Isle of Wight, 95 Jackson, Edmund, 85-86 Jackson, Luther P., 188, 192, 219220, 237-238, 240-245, 253 Jacobs, Harriet, 195 James City County, Virginia, 60 James IV, 51 Jameson, Fredric, 27, 291 Jamestown, xiii, 1, 3-4, 6-7, 10, 1217, 19, 21, 23-24, 28, 30-31, 3537, 46-50, 52-57, 59-61, 64, 7576, 81, 95, 140, 207, 222, 345, 349-357, 359, 361 Jefferson, Thomas, xvi, 17, 58, 63, 194, 201-202, 295 Jim Crow, xiii, xvi, 17, 229, 231234, 241, 244, 246-247, 287, 315, 330-331, 333, 347, 349, 351 Johnson, Andrew (U.S. President), 159, 173 Johnson, Anthony, 2, 47, 56, 60-61 Johnson, David, 120-121, 126-127, 129, 132 Johnson, Isaac, 195, 202 Johnson, James Hugo, 191 Johnson, James Weldon, 265, 267268 Jones, Edward P., 207 Jones, Eric, 333, 339 Jones, John, 148-149, 150, 153-154, 163 Jones, Mary, 151, 153-154, 156 Jordan, Joseph, 339

Index Jordan, Winthrop, 2, 55-56 Journal and Guide, 241, 318-320, 323-325, 331, 338, 341 Joyce, James, 29 Kaine, Timothy M. (Governor of Virginia), xii, 350-351 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 152 Keckley, Elizabeth, 195 Kilcher, Q’Orianka, 4, 11, 17, 24, 31-32, 40 King and Queen County, 131 King William County, 192 Know-Nothings, 295 Ku Klux Klan, 162, 186, 231, 256257, 259-265, 267, 269-272, 276-279, 284 La Belle Sauvage, 3-5, 7-8, 13, 1720, 352 Lake Drummond, 86, 97 Langston, Charles Henry, 212, 215, 222 Langston, John Mercer, 216-217, 222, 226 Langston, Lucy Jane, 186, 209-210, 213-216, 222, 226 Langston-Quarles family, 185, 207, 212-215, 223 Latin America, 188, 197-198, 200 Latimer, George, 117, 118-119, 133, 135 Latimer, Lewis, 117, 131 Latimer, Rachel, 117, 131 Latimer Journal and North Star, 118 Lewey, Henry "Bluebeard", 113 Logan, Rayford W., 234 Ledger-Dispatch, [See Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch] Lieux de mémoire (Memory Sites), 291 Lincoln, Abraham 137, 154-155, 163, 195, 289, 291, 293-297, 333 Litwack, Leon, 163, 233 Lost Colony, 17, 107

Voices from within the Veil Louisa County, Virginia, 185, 207, 209, 211-212, 214, 216-217, 219-221 Madison, J. Hugo, 339 Malick, Terrence, 2-4, 6-7, 10-16, 21, 23-25, 27-36, 38, 40, 42-43, 357 Manumission, 80, 190-193, 197200, 208, 211-215, 220 Marx, Anthony, 208, 223, 298 Maroons, 81, 85-87, 90, 92, 94-106 Marshall, Thurgood, 181 Martin, Richard B., 320, 322, 324325 Maryland, 47, 56, 60-61, 81, 94, 109, 142, 189, 345 Mascarado, 24, 33-34, 40, 44 Mason, Vivian Carter, 324, 326, 331 Massachusetts, 119, 132-134, 136, 144, 157, 356 Massive Resistance, 315, 319, 322, 325-326, 328, 338 Matoaka [See also Pocahontas] Mattaponi, 24, 41, 37-38, 353-355, 360 McKendree, W. H., 321, 328 Michaux, Elder Lightfoot Solomon, 47 Minkins, John, 114, 125, 130 Minkins, Shadrack, 118 Michigan, 144, 150, 170 Milieux de mémoire (Memory Environments), 291 Ministerial Association, 323, 326 Miscegenation, 10, 17, 187-188, 192, 197, 202, 214 Mixed-Race, 17, 21, 24, 102, 185, 188-192, 196-198, 200-202 Moors, 51, 55 Morgan, Edmund, 76, 78, 201, 346 Mount Vernon, 193-194 Mozart, Amadeus, 16, 23, 31-32, 34 Mt. Pleasant Baptist, 326 Mulatto, 96, 102, 118, 129, 145, 189-194, 196, 198-201, 209, 217-218, 224-226

369

Mullin, Gerald, 81 Muslim, 30, 98 NAACP, xvii, 186, 242, 257, 263, 265, 267, 268, 274, 301, 309, 317, 319, 322, 331-334, 336, 338-339, 342 National Association of Colored Women, 300, 303-304, 306-307 National Colored Women's League, xvii Native American, 4, 18, 23-25, 29, 31, 38-39, 42, 47, 50, 63, 91, 9496, 109, 187, 207-209, 224, 351352, 355-356, 361 Naval Hospital, 120, 127 Negro Building, 47, 351, 358 New Bedford, Massachusetts, 104, 113-117, 129, 131-132 New World, 5, 12, 21, 23, 25, 32, 40, 50, 52-53, 57, 140, 187-190, 197, 200, 202, 301, 345, 349, 357-358 New York City, 47, 131, 154-155, 267, 342 New York State, 91, 103, 130, 134, 143, 332, 337 New York World, 260 Newport, Christopher (Captain), 12, 14, 19, 35, 51, 355 Nigeria, 57, 98 Norfolk, Virginia, 19, 104, 115-119, 122-123, 127-130, 135-137, 241, 243, 314-326, 328, 251-252, 331-341, 348, 354, 360-361 Norfolk 17, 325-326, 328 Norfolk Committee for Public Schools, 319, 322 Norfolk division of Virginia State College [See Norfolk State University] Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, 316, 336, 342 Norfolk State College [See Norfolk State University]

370 Norfolk State University, 105, 317, 323, 327, 330, 333-336, 348350, 352, 358-359 North Carolina, 80, 87, 89-90, 9293, 104, 107, 109, 116, 120, 129, 178, 190, 196, 314, 330 North Star, 103, 145, 148, 151 Norview High School, 320 Obama, Barack, 350-351 Olaudah Equiano, 57-58, 194 Old Dominion [Virginia], 46, 62, 81, 127, 318 Old Dominion University, 335 Opechancanough, 13, 36, 42, 353, 356 Oregon, 156, 186, 254, 256-261, 263-267, 269-273, 273, 275-276, 283-284 Oregon Trail, 256 Osman, 85, 98 Othello, 52, 67 Outer Banks, North Carolina, 89 Pamunkey, 42, 93, 186, 209, 222 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 287, 289-298 Peabody High School, 232 Pennsylvania, 94, 133, 143, 144, 149 Petersburg, Virginia, 186, 192, 229231, 235-238, 241-243, 246-251, 318 Petersburg League of Negro Voters, 229, 238-243, 251-252 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 47, 63, 114-115, 127, 134 Pinkerton, Allan, 155, 268 Plessy v. Ferguson, 162, 232, 303 Pocahontas, 1-40, 42-44, 351-355, 360-361 Pocosin, 96, 109 Poindexter, John, 211-212, 220, 225, 227 Poindexter, William, 210, 213, 220221 Poll Tax, 229, 231, 233, 237-239, 241-245, 247, 249-251, 253

Index Portland, Oregon, 254-256, 258259, 262-263, 265-272, 276, 279-280, 283, 285 Portsmouth, Virginia, 113, 115-121, 123-127, 314, 323, 326, 334335, 337, 342 Portuguese, 51, 188, 197 Postmodern, 25, 27-30, 41, 290-292, 296, 360 Powell, Maria Langston, 215-220 Powhatan, 5, 7, 10, 12-15, 17, 19, 23, 28, 33, 35-37, 41-44, 93, 352-355, 357, 360-361 Prince Edward County, Virginia, 313 Princess Anne County, Virginia, 321 Prosser, Gabriel, 62 Punch, John, 55-56 Pyatt, Jane, 126 Quarles, Ralph, 186, 210-217, 219, 224-226 Queen Mary, 51 Queens Street Baptist Church, 322 Quinn A. M. E. Church, 141, 145, 152, 154, 157 Racial theory, 3, 185 Racial, 30, 49, 52-53, 55-57, 60-63, 69, 72, 79-80-, 83, 87, 102, 104, 106, 134, 141, 162, 170, 180181, 184-185, 188-189, 191, 197, 199, 203, 209, 211, 219, 223, 229, 231, 233-236, 239241, 244, 246-247, 249, 252, 256, 263, 271, 276, 278, 289, 292, 295, 298, 301, 309, 314, 319, 331, 337-340, 344, 347, 352, 356, 359 Racism, 2, 46, 48-49, 52-53, 58, 6164, 70-71, 181, 184, 187, 202, 241, 256-257, 266, 287, 294, 317, 332, 347 Reconstruction, 173, 230-233, 247, 266, 300 Rectification, 74, 171-173, 175

Voices from within the Veil Richmond, Virginia, 49, 63, 117, 127, 130-131, 192, 332, 342, 351 Richmond Enquirer, 190 Roanoke, Virginia, 91-95, 107-108 Rocky Mountain News, 158-159, 163-164 Rolfe, John, 3-4, 6-7, 9, 11, 15-17, 19, 24-25, 27, 29, 35, 37, 54, 57, 354 Rountree, Helen C., 7, 24, 36, 353 Roussève, Charles, 198 Royal African Company, 56-57, 70 Ruffin, Josephine St. Pierre 287288, 300-311 Runaways, 59, 78, 83, 85, 87, 90, 93, 98, 101-104, 106, 111, 124, 126, 129-131 Russell, John H., 208, 219 San Juan Bautista, 53 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25 Schedler, George, 49 Schmidt, Arno, 29-30, 43 Scratch Hall Folk, 96-98 Scully, Pamela, 17-18 Shakespeare, William, 6, 30, 46, 5254, 67, 298 Shallalah Road, 95 Shapiro, Thomas, 350 Sherman, William Tecumseh (General), 172, 182 Shingles (wood), 100-102 Slavery, 2, 46-49, 52-64, 69-70, 7981, 83, 86, 94, 98, 101, 113, 116117, 121, 128, 142, 149, 154155, 158, 170, 172-173, 177, 178-181, 183-184, 190, 192, 208, 210-214, 219, 230-232, 287, 294,-295, 300-301, 306, 318, 324, 245-347, 352, 356, 358 Smith, John, 3-16, 18-19, 21, 26, 28, 31, 33-36, 42,44, 56, 60, 147, 155, 193, 353-355, 360 South Carolina, 182, 190, 192, 232, 313 South Norfolk County, Virginia, 321

371

Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 246, 322 Spanish, 30, 42, 50-54, 63, 84, 106, 188-189, 192, 197-199, 356-357, 360 Spotsylvania County, Virginia, 212 Spotswood, Alexander (Governor of Virginia), 93, 95, 108 St. Catharines, Ontario, 130-131 State of the Black Union, 352 Still, William, 113, 125, 130, 138 Stockholm Syndrome, 7 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 149 Strother, David Hunter, 85, 98 Student Relations Association, 334 Suffolk, Virginia, 103 Sumner, Charles (U.S. Senator), 158, 172, 182 Surrey, Virginia, 95 Swamp Land Company, 100, 106 Tannenbaum, Frank, 188, 200 Taylor, Dyna, 9 Terrell, Leonard E.(Rev.), 318 Terrell, Mary Church, 287-288, 300, 304-305, 307-310, 312 The New World, 2-4, 11-12, 21, 2324, 30, 40, 43, 357 The America Play, 287, 289-290, 292, 296 The Boston Globe, 11 The Christian Recorder, 159, 161162 The Colored American, 141 The Liberator, 308 The Signifying Monkey, 296 The Woman’s Era, 301-307 Theweleit, Klaus, 23, 30-33 Thirteenth Amendment, 61, 73, 157158 Thurmond, Strom, 202 Tidewater Educational Foundation, 319 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 194, 297 Transatlantic Slave Trade, 58, 178, 184 Turlington, Christy, 9

372 Turner, Nat, 62, 81, 106 Tuscarora, 91, 93-96, 108 Twenty Negars, 95 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 149-150 Underground Railroad, 73-74, 113, 115, 117, 121, 123-124, 126128, 130, 133, 141, 150-151, 156, 164 Vassa, Gustavus, 58 Virginia Beach, Virginia, 321 Virginia Constitutional Convention, 232-233, 235 Virginia Company, 15, 37-38, 54, 56, 59, 354-355, 357 Virginia Council, 77 Virginia State College [See Virginia State University] Virginia State University, 216, 222, 230, 237, 249, 251, 335, 359 Virginia Voters League, 186, 229, 235, 241-245 Virginian-Pilot, 334-338 Voice of the Fugitive, 142 Voices from within the Veil, 4, 81, 105, 349-350, 352 Voting rights, 157, 159, 163, 233, 235, 241, 252 Voting Rights Act of 1965, 186, 232 Wagner, Richard, 16, 23, 32 Wagoner, H. O., 74, 141-164 Walton Act, 232 Wareham, Massachusetts, 113

Index Warrick, Meta Vaux, 47 Washcomb, Wilcomb (Governor of Virginia), 76 Washington, Booker T., 195, 232, 287, 300, 303, 305, 309 Washington, Bushrod, 193 Washington, D.C., 163, 176, 309, 325 Washington, George, 88, 192-194, 202 Washington, Margaret Murray, 306307 Washington, Martha, 193, 194 Washington Evening-Star, 325 Washington Post, 11 Wertenbaker, Thomas, 76 West African, 55, 57, 62, 72, 87 West Point, 75, 78 Western Citizen, 142, 144-145, 148 Western Ontario, Canada, 130 Wilder, L. Douglas (Governor of Virginia), 49, 65 Wilson, Jeffrey, 123 Woman’s Era Club, 301-302, 304305, 307-309, 311 Women’s Council for Interracial Cooperation, 324 Woodson, Carter G., 202 Woolworth’s, 314, 330, 333, 336, 339-340 York County, Virginia, 77 Young, P. B., Sr., 331, 338