by Dan Goldberg
His death in September 1935 remains shrouded in mystery, and, more than eighty years later, relatives dispute a few of the details. There was no obituary and there is no gravestone.
Lynchings aren’t recorded like that.
“A black man would get ‘uppity’ and he would just disappear,” said Jean Ellen Wilson.
Wright’s final moments appear to have begun when he tried to help a black man named Frank Ricks, who had gotten into a car accident with a white driver at the corner of Avenue D and Seventh Street while making a delivery run for Sid’s Dry Cleaners. A group of white men gathered threateningly around Ricks.
Wright intervened.
Ricks ran.
Wright could not get away.
The mob had him.
Hair’s sister Carrie was the first to hear and ran screaming for her brother.
“James! James! They’re killing Estes. They’re killing him.”
Hair grabbed his bicycle and together the two pedaled downtown toward the jailhouse. They arrived in time to see Wright’s bloodied body, gasping for a few last agonizing breaths.
Wright lay on a bench—surrounded by about six hundred white men.
“All he could do was give these death sounds, the death rattle in his throat—what a hurting sound,” Hair remembered.
Hair and Carrie took a handkerchief and started wiping the blood from their brother-in-law’s battered and bruised face. Wright’s skull was as soft as the cotton Hair had grown up picking—”Nothing hard about it.”
Sheriff Robert Brown spotted the pair tending to Wright.
“What in the hell you doing here?” he shouted.
“We’re here to take care of our brother.”
“Get the hell out of here right now!” Brown screamed at the two. “Get out!”
The two started to leave when Carrie, almost under her breath, said, “Look like they would let us do something for him.”
Brown grabbed her arm and spun her around.
“What in the hell did you say?”
Hair lowered his shoulder and charged into the sheriff, knocking him back.
There was a moment of absolute stillness as the crowd, thirsty for blood, stared at their sheriff on his heels, waiting to see what would happen next.
Brown walked over to Hair and patted him on the head. “son, go on about your business.”28
That night the mob brought Wright’s near-lifeless body back to his home at 713 North Thirteenth Street. His whole family, even his pregnant wife, was forced out of the house while the body was placed in bed. A line of cars drove up in front of the narrow, rectangular, shotgun-style home. A man dressed in a white shirt and white pants and carrying a shotgun got out of the lead car. Another man, similarly dressed, got out of the second car and stood at attention. Then a third and a fourth. Maybe a dozen men in all got out of their cars and stood silently. No one moved until the last man exited his car. The white men formed a line and marched through the Wright front door to the bed on which Wright lay dying, out the back door and around the house. They stood again by their cars. They stared at the African Americans who had gathered to watch this curious procession.
The message was clear: this is what happens to a black man who doesn’t follow the rules.
Then they got back in their cars and drove away.
The next afternoon, Estes Wright died in his bed, never having regained consciousness.
The only contemporary mention of his death can be found in the Fort Pierce News Tribune, which reported that Wright had died after falling and hitting his head on the sidewalk.
On his death certificate, Dr. C. C. Benton attested that Wright’s death had been caused by a “blow on head” resulting in a “fractured skull and compression.” The coroner’s jury found Wright “came to his death by interfering with [a] legal arrest and through his own negligence when he fell and struck his head against a street curb.”
As far as anyone could remember, that particular street had no curb.
CHAPTER 3
“I JUST DON’T BELIEVE YOU CAN DO THE JOB.”
Jesse Arbor dropped out of Arkansas AM&N College, a black land-grant college, in March 1937, a few months shy and $38 short of a diploma. He returned home to Chicago and found work at the Chicago Beach Hotel, one of the premier establishments in the city. The gig paid well, $70 per month—more than most other jobs in an economy still reeling from the Great Depression. Arbor may not have been rubbing elbows with the city’s elite, but he was opening doors for them, and for an African American kid with no college diploma that seemed pretty good.
Arbor wasn’t originally from Chicago. He had been born the day after Christmas, 1914, in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, in the Mississippi Delta, on land deeded to his family after the Civil War. He was the grandchild of slaves—his maternal grandmother, who lived until the age of 105, often told stories that began with, “My master said . . .”
He was one of twelve children born to Alexander and Tecora Arbor in the farm-dominated town, about sixty-five miles west of Memphis. At the time of his birth, Cotton Plant was in the midst of a population boom, growing from 458 people in 1900 to nearly 1,700 by 1920.
By then, Cotton Plant had a post office, two banks, three cotton gins, a sawmill, and a factory that made shirts for the Army. The town boasted a Masonic lodge and an opera house. There were two “white” churches and three “colored” churches.
Arbor attended Cotton Plant Academy, a Presbyterian school three miles away, and the religious principles taught there were reinforced at home. There was a rule against playing ball or shooting marbles on Sunday. That was the Lord’s Day. If a commandment was violated, Jesse’s father, a soft-spoken, devout Christian, wouldn’t whip his sons on Sunday because, well, that was the Lord’s Day, but first thing Monday morning, before breakfast, the commandment breaker would receive his righteous punishment.
Mr. Arbor was a carpenter, able to provide both a reasonable living and plenty of wooden toys for his children. He was slight, dwarfed by his nearly-two-hundred-pound wife, Tecora. The couple believed in God and education with equal fervor.
At night, Mr. Arbor insisted that his ten boys and two girls sit near the fireplace with a book and read aloud. Alexander Arbor, a first-generation freeman, had never made it beyond the fourth grade. It wasn’t long before his children had a better vocabulary than he did—and that was the point. They needed to know more to become more. If his children stumbled on a word—it didn’t matter whether Mr. Arbor understood what the word was—he made them repeat it until they could read the word smooth and proper.
The Arbors moved to Chicago when Jesse was fifteen years old, part of the Great Migration that brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the fields and farms in the South to cities and factories in the North. Few places were as affected as Chicago, where the black population grew from 2 percent of the city in 1910 to 33 percent by 1970.
Boll-weevil infestations and emerging technology were sending cotton farmers the way of horse-and-buggy drivers. And the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the borders to southern and eastern Europeans, a factor that, when combined with the many white men lost in World War I, meant job openings in factories and mills in the nation’s urban centers.1 Arbor’s maternal uncles had already moved to Chicago and insisted that better opportunities for prosperity existed there.
The Windy City was far more tolerant of black families than Arkansas, but it was no Shangri La. White Chicagoans passed zoning laws and used violence to keep black families from moving into white neighborhoods.2 That kept African Americans on the South Side of Chicago, which is where the Arbors found themselves in the early 1930s.
Arbor’s skill as a right tackle earned him a football scholarship back in Arkansas, but he struggled academically and lost his financial support. That forced him home and then to a Chicago resort on the shore of Lake Michigan, where he worked first as a waiter and later as a doorman. At the age of twenty-two, Arbor, an unremarkable thread in the t
apestry of a fast-growing city, found himself at the entranceway to a life far beyond his means, ushering people into luxuries he could only imagine.
He worked at that hotel for nearly four years, until one day a familiar face opened a door for him.
“What are you doing standing up on this door?” asked Mr. McMannen. He was the father of a high school classmate of Arbor’s and a vice president at the famed Pullman Car Company.
“Why aren’t you doing something commensurate with your education?”
“Mr. McMannen,” Arbor replied, “I need not tell you why I’m on this door. The jobs that I can get commensurate with my education do not pay as much as this.”
McMannen suggested that Arbor look into the railroad, which would give him a chance to see the country and earn a living.
“They are not hiring anybody,” Arbor said.
McMannen smiled and handed Arbor his card. He said, “Go down to 18th and L,” and ask George Bulow about being a Pullman porter.
Arbor politely took the card but made no follow-up. He was a smartass who liked to run his mouth and hated taking orders. Besides, he liked his job and was concerned about taking another without any seniority. Seemed risky.
McMannen returned a few weeks later, incredulous that Arbor hadn’t taken his advice. A job as a Pullman porter was a ticket to the middle class, and porters had one of the strongest unions in the country.
“Didn’t I tell you to get off this door?” he asked. “Where’s that card?”
Arbor lied and said he had lost it. McMannen handed him another and again instructed him to go down to 18th and L. This time McMannen called the office and told them to expect the young man, making it plain he would not take no for an answer.3
Arbor took the hint and the help. He spent much of the next two years riding the rails, cleaning the cars and taking care of passengers, but he never warmed to the life. He came home to Chicago and found a job at Kuppenheimer (B.) & Co., a leading manufacturer of men’s clothing. Still preferring to give orders, not take them, he opened up his own tailor shop and soon hired three employees, not bad for a C-student who had flunked Introduction to Economics.4
Arbor was earning good money, and life in Chicago was grand, but the prosperity was short-lived. In the spring of 1940, the Germans invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France, and were on their way to take Paris. The war in Europe, which Arbor had heretofore given little thought to, would soon demand another career change.
In Washington, President Franklin Roosevelt was building his “arsenal of democracy,” and his call to defend democratic ideals gave civil rights leaders a new argument for an old fight.
By the summer of 1940, discrimination in the Army and Navy “cut deeper into Negro feelings than employment discrimination,” and had replaced lynching as the chief political priority for the black community.5
The NAACP released a statement saying that it was “sorry for brutality, blood, and death among the peoples of Europe, just as we were sorry for China and Ethiopia. But the hysterical cries of the preachers of democracy for Europe leave us cold. We want democracy in Alabama, Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia, in the Senate of the United States.”6
Robert Lee Vann, editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, surveyed the political landscape and surmised that black Americans may never have a better opportunity than 1940 to pressure the White House for equality in the military.
Roosevelt was running for an unprecedented third term, and the black vote, he knew, could swing the election. It seemed to Vann that the nation could ill afford to rely on Major General Ely’s report from fifteen years prior and ask African Americans to contribute to a military that insisted they were inferior. Vann told his readers to flood Congress with letters protesting “military taxation without representation.”7
The response was overwhelming. Congressmen from northern and border states—commanding plenty of electoral votes—were suddenly championing the Courier’s call on Capitol Hill.
Vann organized the Committee on Participation of Negroes in the National Defense Program and chose as its head Rayford Logan, a history professor at Howard University, an elite black university in Washington, DC. Logan lobbied Congress to add antidiscrimination language to the Selective Training and Service Act. He was successful, but only to a point.
When the bill reached the president’s desk on September 16, 1940, it contained an antidiscrimination clause but also said that “no man shall be inducted . . . until he is acceptable to the land or naval forces.” This gave both the Army and Navy plenty of ways to limit African American opportunity without technically discriminating under the law.8
Navy Secretary Frank Knox immediately announced he would take advantage of the loophole. The Navy would not accept black men from the draft. Instead, the branch would rely on volunteer enlistments, which would allow the Navy to limit the number of black inductees.
Black men who were accepted would be messmen, as they had been since 1933—nothing more. Their work would be limited to serving white men: preparing their meals, making their beds, and shining their shoes. Aboard ship, they’d sleep separately in messmen’s quarters. They’d eat separately—after serving meals to white sailors and officers. The general-service ratings—gunner’s mates, electrician’s mates, quartermasters, shipfitters—would be reserved for whites only, and vessels would be strictly segregated so that whites would not have to share a room or a table with blacks.
The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP, impressed upon its readers the insidiousness of Knox’s stance. “There is more to all this than standing on the deck of a warship in a white uniform,” the editorial said. “To be stigmatized by being denied the opportunity of serving one’s country in full combat service in the Navy is humiliating enough. But the real danger and greater injustice is to deny a tenth of the citizens of this country any benefit whatsoever from the billions of dollars spent on our Navy.”
Picking up on Vann’s taxation-without-representation argument, the editorial pointed out that taxes from black households maintained the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, which black boys could not attend. They paid for naval bases, navy yards, and naval air bases from which black men were excluded. They paid for the training of thousands of white boys, who would learn skills valuable long after their service ended, but black men were offered no such training or career paths.
“The health care, the character building, the training in efficiency, the travel and education—all at the expense of the taxpayers—are for whites only! This is the price we pay for being classified as a race, as mess attendants only! At the same time we are supposed to be able to appreciate what our white fellow citizens declare to be the ‘vast difference’ between American Democracy and Hitlerism.”9
The same evening that President Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act into law, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was in New York City speaking before two thousand delegates and their families at a biennial dinner for the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The dinner was held at the Shriners’ resplendent Mecca Temple, an ornate structure in the Moorish style on West Fifty-Fifth Street in Manhattan, two blocks south of Carnegie Hall.10
Looking out at a sea of black faces, the First Lady told the crowd that there was a growing understanding that they had plenty to contribute to the defense effort.
“People are beginning to realize that we can’t let any one group suffer because it then becomes a menace to the whole group,” she said. “You know that we have many difficulties still to overcome. I happen to be tremendously interested in the young people of your race and I know their difficulties.”11
The audience roared with appreciation, and the New York Age, a black newspaper, said it was one of the most “inspiring boosts of support” for Roosevelt’s third term.12
But the jubilation for Eleanor, a champion of civil rights, masked the growing frustration with her husband’s intransigence on integration of the military.
Vann, fed up, endorsed Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee, making good on his threat to desert the Democratic Party if it stalled on civil rights. He told his readers to abandon the president because of Roosevelt’s refusal to prohibit segregation in the Army and Navy.13
Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, and A. Philip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, were equally distressed. They had been asking the White House for a meeting to discuss how black men would be used in the armed forces and the fact that the Army and Navy were hell-bent on segregation, even in the face of a coming war.
Their repeated requests were ignored, so they petitioned Eleanor Roosevelt, who, just before she took the podium, had promised to help.
With the long evening over, the First Lady retired to her Greenwich Village apartment and wrote her husband to complain that no meeting had been scheduled.
“There is a growing feeling amongst the colored people, [that] they should be allowed to participate in any training that is going on, in the aviation, Army, Navy. . . . This is going to be very bad politically besides being intrinsically wrong and I think you should ask a meeting be held.”
Eleanor returned to Washington two days later, determined to make her case in person. She bypassed the staff—to their great annoyance—and went straight to her husband to demand that he meet with the civil rights leaders.14
She arrived during a particularly low point for the president’s reelection campaign. The New York Times was about to endorse Wendell Willkie.15
Roosevelt decided his wife was right. He needed to take that meeting—and fast.
The following Friday morning, Randolph, White, and T. Arnold Hill, an assistant director with the National Youth Administration, were ushered into the Oval Office. The president, a former assistant secretary of the Navy, had given the august room a nautical theme. Prints of Navy ships and Hudson River landscapes, reminding Roosevelt of his Hyde Park home, dotted the walls. What drew the eye, however, was the president’s desk, always cluttered with knickknacks: lighters, paperweights, cigarettes, assorted toys and dispatches and reports spilling out of wire in-baskets.