Intended to raise both money and consciousness, the Crisis supplement was mailed to 42,000 subscribers, as well as to all members of Congress, several hundred white newspapers, fifty Negro weeklies and 500 wealthy New Yorkers. From his Evening Post office, Villard made a personal appeal to thirty influential editors. Du Bois—influenced by a long tradition of protest journalism from Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm’s Freedom’s Journal to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and Frederick Douglass’s North Star—knew an opportune moment when he saw one. But this was by no means his initial attempt to goad the public on the issue. Few editions of The Crisis had been without articles or items on the country’s sorry response to vigilante law, from the magazine’s inaugural issue—where Du Bois had written ironically of two murdered Italian-Americans having “the inalienable right of every free American citizen to be lynched”—to a routinely featured tabulation entitled “Colored Men Lynched without Trial.” Accompanied by the verse “If blood be the price of liberty, Lord God, we have paid in full,” the column tallied 2,732 lynchings—“the standard American industry”—from 1885 through 1914. Because Madam Walker received the magazine, she could well have seen items about eighteen-year-old Iver Peterson of Eufaula, Alabama, who was killed after having been charged with grabbing a white woman, or Will Porter of McLean County, Kentucky, who was seized on the stage of a local opera house, or the Honea Path, South Carolina, man whose lynching posse included a member of the state legislature.
In July—either just before or just after she had sent her donation to the NAACP—Madam Walker received an invitation to an extraordinary conference at Troutbeck, the Amenia, New York, estate of Joel Spingarn, the NAACP board chairman who had replaced Villard in late 1914. “I need not tell you how much we desire your cooperation in the work of the conference, which can hardly attain its real purpose without your presence,” read Spingarn’s letter of invitation. But previously scheduled travel plans forced Madam Walker to miss the gathering. “Much to my regret, I shall be in Kansas City on that date,” she replied on August 13. “However, please accept my assurance that you have and shall have my most hearty cooperation in the spirit and purpose of the conference.”
That Madam Walker was among the 200 invited guests signaled her inclusion in a select inner circle chosen to discuss nothing less than the “fundamental rights of the Negro” at the very moment that America’s black leadership was realigning itself for a post–Booker T. Washington future. While the setting for the three-day conference was at Spingarn’s Dutchess County, New York, estate, it was Du Bois who had engineered the concept and the agenda. He had also vetted the guest list, judiciously choosing men and women, black and white, from across the spectrum of “business, law, medicine, education, politics, scholarship, art” and other fields. “At last the time has come for a frank and free discussion on the part of the leaders of every school of thought, in an endeavor to ascertain the most advanced position that all can agree upon and hold as vantage ground from which to work for new conquests by colored Americans,” Du Bois declared in the conference program.
With Washington dead less than a year, the Crisis editor wisely and strategically seized the moment to deescalate the suicidal sniping between the two camps, and very possibly to position his organization as first among equals. In a conciliatory gesture earlier that summer, he had prevailed in postponing the NAACP’s annual meeting after learning that the date conflicted with a memorial service honoring Washington. As Du Bois assembled the participants for Troutbeck, he reached out to Washington disciples Robert Russa Moton, Emmett Scott and Fred Moore. On the final list was a mix of other conservative Bookerites, activist NAACP supporters and some who were, more or less, neutral, including St. Philip’s Church’s Hutchens Bishop, Morehouse College president John Hope, former diplomat James Weldon Johnson, Howard University scientist Ernest Just and former Assistant U.S. Attorney William H. Lewis. Among the eleven women who shared two tents on the shore of Spingarn’s three-acre pond were Mary Church Terrell, Mary Burnett Talbert, YMCA organizer Addie Hunton and educators Lucy Laney and Nannie Helen Burroughs—women all known to Madam Walker from NACW conventions. Day visitors included Oswald Garrison Villard, New York congressman William S. Bennett, New York governor Charles A. Whitman, Realtor John E. Nail and architect Vertner Tandy. Helen Keller, Lincoln Steffens and Julius Rosenwald were among those invited guests who could not attend. Had Madam Walker been able to adjust her travel plans, she would have benefited as much from the formal addresses as from the camaraderie. In between serious discussions of “the thing which all of us call ‘The Problem,’” Du Bois later wrote of the focus on overcoming Jim Crow laws and attitudes, the conferees “swam and rowed and hiked and lingered in the forests and sat upon the hillsides and picked flowers and sang.”
“One can hardly realize today how difficult and intricate a matter it was to arrange such a conference, to say who should come and who should not, to gloss over hurts and enmities,” Du Bois remembered. “The wall between the Washington camp and those who had opposed his policies was still there.” James Weldon Johnson—at the time editor of the Booker T. Washington–allied New York Age and later secretary of the NAACP—viewed the gathering as pivotal. “The Amenia Conference came at an hour of exigency and opportunity . . . The great war in Europe, its recoil on America, the ferment in the United States, all conspired to break up the stereotyped conception of the Negro’s place that had been increasing in fixity for forty years.”
After the conference, Madam Walker was able to read about the group’s seven resolutions, including one specifically addressing the partisanship that had long divided many of the conferees: “Antiquated subjects of controversy, ancient suspicions and factional alignments must be eliminated and forgotten if this organization of the race and this practical working understanding of its leaders are to be achieved.” An optimistic Du Bois, buoyed by the confirmation that their differences were more “a matter of emphasis” than of objective, pronounced “the Negro race . . . more united and more ready to meet the problems of the world” as a result of the rustic assembly. “We all believed in thrift, we all wanted the Negro to vote, we all wanted the laws enforced, we all wanted assertion of our essential manhood; but how to get those things,—there of course was infinite divergence of opinion.”
That the two factions had come together at all was considered a milestone, but “the legacy from Troutbeck was far less one of genuine understanding and real unity than of cosmetic harmony and pragmatic tolerance among the various factions,” wrote David Levering Lewis. “It marked a definite shift in the balance of power within black America, a reflection of the increasingly industrial, northern, and national character of the American Dilemma. It affirmed the NAACP’s primacy,” and did little “in the way of converting veteran Bookerites to the activist goals of the NAACP.” The fault lines were too fractured, the fissures too personal to expect more, and Du Bois’s allies correctly calculated that the future belonged to them. At any rate, with Democrat Wilson’s ascendancy to the White House, Booker T. Washington’s political clout had begun to wane even before his death. And changing circumstances, as blacks began a decade-long Northern migration, had rendered many of his strategies out-of-date. Increasingly his approach to education began to seem “anachronistic,” wrote historian Nathan Irvin Huggins, because “he encouraged training in obsolete crafts, based the Negro’s economic future on a sick and dying southern agriculture [and] ignored the future urban role of Afro-Americans.” While Washington’s philosophy was rooted in a nineteenth-century agrarian reality, the NAACP, with its Northern roots, had begun to secure its position at the forefront of protest politics and was eager to challenge rather than accommodate and acquiesce.
Du Bois had become familiar with Madam Walker at least as early as the fall of 1911, when the national coverage of the Indianapolis YMCA fund drive had prompted him to include a small item in that December’s Crisis. The next month Madam Walker’s first Crisis advertisement
—a half-page spread—appeared in the fifteenth issue of the ten-cent publication, which, in just one year, could boast a national circulation of 16,000. (In fact, its rapid growth so concerned Booker T. Washington that he urged Fred Moore to try to increase the Age’s circulation to 25,000 readers to keep rival Du Bois from gaining any political edge.) In the June 1914 Crisis, Madam Walker’s proposal to “found an industrial school in West Pondoland, South Africa” drew a mention, though the project apparently never materialized. Later that year, she was featured in a quarter-page photograph in an article highlighting “large colored donors” to YMCA building funds.
There appears to be no existing correspondence between Du Bois, the Harvard intellectual, and Madam Walker, the self-educated businesswoman, until after 1916. Even then the trove is sparse. Without such letters, it is impossible to pinpoint the time, location or circumstances of their first meeting. But the occasion may have been during the summer of 1914 when both were featured speakers at the NACW’s biennial gathering at Wilberforce College. Absent any documents, there also is no way to decipher how Du Bois initially viewed Madam Walker on the Bookerite/NAACP loyalty continuum. In 1916, of course, Madam Walker’s contribution to the organization’s antilynching drive surely gained his favor. But that same year Madam Walker also had committed her army of sales agents to a major fundraising role for the Washington memorial planned for Tuskegee’s campus. “[I] don’t want my agents to fall behind any body of women in this rally,” she had advised Ransom that April, directing him to prepare a letter of appeal. “It will show to the world that the Walker agents are doing something else other than making money for themselves.”
Madam Walker maintained cordial relations with both the conservative and militant circles, declining to pledge exclusive allegiance to either. By refusing to do so, she adopted a stance quite similar to that of many other politically informed black women of the time whose personal alliances through marriage and friendship frequently crisscrossed the ideological spectrum. As early as 1907 the NACW—itself already more than a decade old—had voiced support for the Niagara Movement, the black forerunner of the NAACP. But the fact that Margaret Murray Washington, the NACW president from 1912 to 1916, also happened to be Booker T. Washington’s wife complicated the organization’s internal politics. By 1910, four NACW members—including one past and two future presidents—had become part of the NAACP’s leadership: Mary Church Terrell and Ida B. Wells-Barnett on its executive committee, and Mary Burnett Talbert and Elizabeth Carter on its general committee. In fact, Wells-Barnett and Frances Blascoer, the NAACP’s first executive secretary, made a presentation at the NACW’s Louisville convention in 1910, though the brilliant Wells-Barnett had been excluded from some early NACW activities because of her uncompromising, often argumentative personality. Members of both groups cooperated at the Hampton biennial in 1912 in their efforts to commute the sentence of Virginia Christian, the teenaged laundress who had killed her employer. By 1914 the NACW’s Department for the Suppression of Lynchings had joined forces with the NAACP and others to make lynching “an American embarrassment,” then allocated $100 for the NAACP’s antilynching fund during the 1916 biennial in Baltimore. During the same session the women also voted to raise $1,000 for the Booker T. Washington memorial. While the men may have been inclined to draw staunch lines of demarcation, the women’s barriers seemed more permeable and flexible, though no less principled.
Madam Walker greatly admired Mary Burnett Talbert, the NACW’s sixth president and an early NAACP member in whose Buffalo, New York, home some of the radical Niagara Movement members had met during the time of their 1905 organizational meeting in Canada. As a leader of both groups, Talbert simultaneously organized activities and recruited members for the NACW and the NAACP as she traveled around the country on their behalf.
Madam Walker also deepened a personal friendship with Elizabeth Carter, another NACW president, when she visited Carter’s New Bedford, Massachusetts, home during the fall of 1914. Both a teacher and the founding president of the racially integrated New Bedford Home for Aged People, Carter had displayed a militant streak during the summer of 1914. Responding to the widespread belief that President Wilson’s wife, Ellen, had been a catalyst for racial segregation in federal facilities, Carter had objected to sending a letter of condolence from the NACW to the President when Mrs. Wilson coincidentally died during the organization’s 1914 convention.
After Booker T. Washington’s death, even the National Negro Business League showed signs of change. At the August 1916 convention, Madam Walker was just as comfortable paying tribute to Washington as she was hearing NAACP investigator Elizabeth Freeman’s address on lynchings. As Madam Walker presented her stereopticon slides—now at the enthusiastic invitation of Emmett Scott—she fervently announced, “I never shall forget or cease to be grateful for the inspiration I received from the life and teaching of that grand hero of our Race, whose every thought and word and deed was for the uplift of the Negro—our own DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON!” Freeman’s presence at the meeting showed that at least some of the barriers—by necessity and pragmatic expediency—were gradually coming down. “I am here in the interest of the NAACP to start a crusade against the modern barbarism of lynching human beings,” said Freeman. “Your honored and lamented leader, Dr. Booker T. Washington, did much to awaken public sentiment against this new form of anarchy, termed ‘lynching,’” she said, though some had argued that he had not protested forcefully enough. “But there yet remains much for us to do if we would curb this heinous disrespect of law and order and put an end to the dangerous practice of lynching human beings.”
Like many other African Americans who straddled nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Madam Walker was evolving with the times, adopting a more militant and politically assertive posture. During the Wilson administration, as domestic civil rights battles intensified and the international drama of war inched closer to the United States, Madam Walker would soon find herself among those in the forefront of the protest, lashing out against injustice and denouncing the mind-set that tolerated lynching. Her money and celebrity, as well as her ability to use both as tools for political activism, provided Madam Walker with an advantage that few other African American women—regardless of educational background or social status—could claim.
CHAPTER 16
Southern Tour
Within weeks of arriving in New York, Madam Walker conceived a brilliant plan: convene a national gathering of all Walker agents and beauty culturists to exchange business ideas, learn new hair care methods and compete for prizes and awards. By April 1916 she was busily organizing Lelia’s 200 New York area agents into the first chapter of the Madam C. J. Walker Benevolent Association. Her mission was twofold: to show them how to increase their sales and to persuade them that contributing to charitable causes like the $2 million Booker T. Washington Memorial Fund was good for business. Through her memberships in the Court of Calanthe, the Mite Missionary Society and the National Association of Colored Women, Madam Walker had observed the power of women’s collective action. Her agents—with few exceptions—were not the educated elite of the NACW or the wives of prominent men, but women who, nonetheless, had begun to savor economic success and independence. She believed they could be just as effective, if not more so, than other women’s groups. Because they had been drawn together by the promise of financial rewards, she knew they were already highly motivated. Now she wanted to encourage them to harness their prosperity for improving their communities. What Madam Walker had gained in public recognition and admiration as an individual donor to Tuskegee and the YMCA, she wanted for her agents. With a national body of Walker representatives she could channel their combined muscle, buttressing the moral suasion and political rhetoric of groups like the NACW with the financial clout of businesswomen. Madam Walker envisioned what few had ever imagined: an enterprise on a grand scale controlled by black women with political and civic objectives.
On Her Own Ground Page 24