On Her Own Ground

  On April 6, 1917, as President Woodrow Wilson placed his signature on the resolution declaring war on Germany, Madam Walker was in Louisiana busy with her own recruitment efforts to enlist more women into her growing army of Walker agents. But she was hardly oblivious to the conflict in Europe. Away from Harlem during most of the year, she stayed well informed through letters, telegrams and newspaper articles as her fellow African American leaders examined and debated their positions on black military involvement. Within weeks of America’s entry into the war, Tin Pan Alley’s biggest hit of 1916—“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier”—was quickly replaced by “Over There,” an upbeat tune that assured the European Allies that “the Yanks are coming . . . And we won’t be back till it’s over over there.”

  Many African Americans caught the contagious flag-waving spirit, readying themselves to help “save the world for democracy.” But in the months preceding America’s intervention, a few Negro weeklies—incensed at proposed congressional legislation barring blacks from military service—had editorialized against black participation. “If war comes, the colored man is not wanted and it would be a white man’s war between Germany and the U.S.,” asserted the Washington Bee that March. Particularly indignant that President Wilson was “doing or saying nothing to stop lynching at home,” the Iowa Bystander was even more direct: “Why need we go 3,000 miles to uphold the dignity and honor of our country and protect her citizens over in England and fail to uphold dignity at home?” In barbershops and on street corners, plainspoken sentiments conveyed similar meaning: “The Germans ain’t done nothing to me, and if they have, I forgive ’em.” Ultimately, however, the community’s more patriotic voices prevailed. James Weldon Johnson—a former U.S. diplomat and now NAACP field secretary—had long advocated African American support of the war. As America mobilized, he proclaimed the black soldier willing to “take up the duty that comes to him and, as always, do his part.” In turn, Johnson expected the nation to “do its duty to him.” Later that summer W.E.B. Du Bois—the staunch antilynching crusader—set aside some of his own misgivings in what appeared to some to be an opportunistic statement of support just as he was being considered for an appointment to a captaincy in the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department. “Let us not hesitate,” he urged in his July Crisis column. “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”

  Drawing upon a legacy of military participation in every conflict since the American Revolution, most African Americans swallowed their ambivalence and rallied. As always, they mustered their optimism, hoping loyalty, allegiance and blood would expedite long-overdue equal rights and equal opportunity, a kind of “civil rights through carnage,” as David Levering Lewis has written. But this time the nation’s black leadership also sought a precedent-setting quid pro quo. In exchange for contributing their “full quota to the federal army,” they pressed for the establishment of a training camp for black officers. While many objected to a segregated facility, a sufficient number joined Du Bois in making the tortuous choice between “the insult of a separate camp and the irreparable injury of . . . putting no black men in positions of authority.” A leading proponent of the effort was Joel Spingarn, then on leave from the NAACP board and serving in a reserve officers’ training camp. At his urging the Howard University–based Central Committee of Negro College Men submitted more than 1,500 names of students—primarily from Howard, Lincoln, Fisk, Morehouse, Tuskegee, Hampton and Atlanta University—for officers’ training. “Our country faces the greatest crisis in its history,” opened their letter of petition seeking support from 300 congressmen. “The Negro, as ever loyal and patriotic, is anxious to do his full share in the defense and support of his country in its fight for democracy.” In late May, when Secretary of War Newton Baker announced plans for a black officers’ center at Fort Des Moines, the CCNCM claimed “victory,” but spent little time basking. “The race is on trial,” their circular warned. “If we fail, our enemies will dub us cowards for all time . . . But if we succeed, then eternal success.”

  With Madam Walker’s architect, Vertner Tandy, now a major in the 15th Regiment—and the highest-ranking black officer in the New York Guard—she was all the more inclined to take a personal interest in the regiment’s activities. When the American Red Cross initially excluded black women as volunteers and nurses, Madam Walker agreed without hesitation to join the advisory board of the Circle for Negro War Relief, a group of prominent black women who established a clearinghouse for money and supplies “to improve conditions among colored soldiers.” Comprising more than fifty chapters around the country—with a dozen in New York alone—the Circle purchased an ambulance, provided several hundred hand-knitted pairs of socks and gloves and assisted the soldiers’ families.

  In early December 1917 as the men of the 15th—soon to be known as the 369th Hellfighters of the Provisional 93rd Division—prepared to leave for France, Madam Walker was still recovering at Battle Creek. But Lelia—whose party invitations were always in high demand—cohosted a farewell concert with James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson to aid the Circle’s programs. On December 13, as the troops boarded European-bound transport ships in Hoboken, New Jersey, the Lelia College holiday greeting in The Messenger wished for the “speedy culmination of the war” and the “bravery and success of our boys in uniform.”

  In mid-January, with a fresh retinue of black trainees in the barracks at Long Island’s Camp Upton—and with Madam Walker home from Michigan—the Walker women entertained the black officers of the 92nd Division at a military cotillion. Amid red, white and blue decorations in the music room upstairs at 108, the uniformed men and the “daintily dressed” women “made a pleasing sight.” In addition to Major Vertner Tandy, other honored guests included two popular physicians—Captain Charles Garvin, who would soon become commanding officer of an ambulance company in France, and Lieutenant Colonel Louis Wright, a 1915 graduate of Harvard’s Medical School. The Friday Evening Knitting Class—a group of Lelia’s friends, including Edna Lewis, Madam Walker’s social secretary, and Czarina Jackson, the manager of the Seventh Avenue Walker Salon—served as hostesses, dancing with the officers well beyond midnight to the tunes of the Harmony Quartet.

  Relishing her role as society fund-raiser, Lelia next invited famed tenor Enrico Caruso to be her guest of honor at a Circle for Negro War Relief dance in early February. Like her mother, she embraced eclectic musical interests. Having spent her childhood enveloped in St. Louis ragtime, she also genuinely enjoyed opera. With Caruso at the peak of his career—“his voice is now at its richest, his acting is more polished with every performance,” wrote one critic—Lelia knew his name would attract a large and diverse audience. And although he canceled “at the last minute . . . owing to a very important engagement for the next day,” Lelia’s disappointment was tempered by the tremendous turnout at the Manhattan Casino. “At any rate,” she wrote Ransom, the invitation to Caruso had “served its purpose for the hall was crowded and it was a huge success.”

  Caruso, with whom Lelia enjoyed a cordial friendship, had “few intimate friends” and often was “bored” and “ill at ease at parties.” So it is entirely possible that he bowed out of the commitment to avoid the crowd and the small talk. But he also was legitimately swamped that month and in the midst of a Metropolitan Opera season in which he sang a dozen different roles between February and April. After attending one of those performances (perhaps the February 12 special matinee of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida—the story of the star-crossed but courageous Ethiopian princess), Lelia sent a basket of flowers to Caruso’s “luxurious” fourteen-room apartment at the Hotel Knickerbocker. Several months later when he visited her mother’s Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, property, he found the setting and design so reminiscent of the estates of his native Italy that he christened the home “Villa Lewaro,” crea
ting an acronym from the first two letters of Lelia Walker Robinson. The name became permanent, gracing the Walker women’s stationery during their lifetime and enduring into the twenty-first century.

  Throughout early 1918, Lelia continued volunteering for a range of wartime committees. Whether serving lunch to the men of the 367th Infantry after a Fifth Avenue parade or helping form a black women’s auxiliary to the American Red Cross, she was enjoying the sense of purpose the activities provided.

  Having returned to Battle Creek in late January, Madam Walker missed much of Harlem’s winter social season. Arriving at the sanitarium bundled against Michigan’s frosty winter in her Hudson Seal cape, she complained of a pesky, persistent virus. “I am getting along fairly well, only my cold seems to be sticking by me,” she wrote Ransom. But two weeks later—still surely in need of rest—she embarked upon a three-month Midwestern tour to Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Now, in addition to publicizing her business, she was visiting military camps and promoting the work of the Circle for Negro War Relief. At Fort Des Moines—where the 100 officers and 3,600 enlisted men of the 92nd Division’s 366th Infantry awaited orders for European duty—Madam Walker was escorted by attorney George Woodson. Later the founding president of the National Bar Association, Woodson considered it his “good fortune and high honor to introduce her.”

  At the YMCA tent reserved for the “social, cultural and political” activities of black soldiers, Madam Walker praised the “boys,” who were going “over there,” for their bravery. “Now and then, but seldom, you hear one say, ‘This is not my country. I have no right to fight for a flag that does not protect me,’” she told the men, as many strained to hear from outside the jam-packed canvas shelter. “But let me say to you that this [is] our home . . . All we have is here, and the time will come, and it is not far distant, until we must and will receive every protection guaranteed to every American citizen under the American Constitution.”

  Watching from the stage, Woodson was startled by Madam Walker’s weakened condition. “The eloquent force which she put into that speech in spite of her nervous state, greatly alarmed me,” he later wrote. During the reception following her remarks, Woodson’s concern compelled him to request permission to measure her pulse. “I tried to get her away from the great mass of common people who crowded about her to admire and compliment her. But it was no use. She loved those common people and just would not leave them.”

  Later when Madam Walker arrived at the home of Sue Wilson Brown—her Des Moines hostess and the immediate past president of the Iowa Federation of Colored Women—she was greeted by a small group of admirers. Although Woodson “insisted that she go to bed and rest,” Madam Walker lingered to talk with the visitors, as well as with her host, attorney S. Joe Brown. Valedictorian of his 1901 University of Iowa Law School class and a founder of Des Moines’s NAACP chapter, Brown was considered “one of the seven or eight most important Negro lawyers in America” of the era. The next day, Woodson “begged the privilege of speaking plainly” to Madam Walker. “I told her that she was entirely too valuable to her Country and Race to be taking such desperate chances with her health and life,” he later wrote.

  But Madam Walker—only too aware of her progressing kidney disease—was all the more determined to resume her frenetic schedule. From Iowa, she traveled to Kansas City, St. Louis and Columbia, then on to Chicago. “The madam has developed into a magnetic platform speaker and is exceedingly witty and humorous,” a Chicago Defender article later described her appearance at the city’s Olivet Baptist Church. “The story of her success,” declared the flattering account (in all probability penned by Ransom), was something that “every young woman in America should hear.” Apparently Dora Larrie, C. J. Walker’s second wife, had decided that she too needed to hear the message. “I understand that Mme. Walker No. 2 was out to my lecture last night. I know that she went away with a sick heart,” Madam Walker “No. 1” gloated. “I had a crowded house and applause all through the lecture. I would have to wait nearly three minutes for them to get quiet before I could begin again.”

  That enthusiastic response, and Olivet’s reputation as a haven for recently arrived Southern migrants, persuaded Madam Walker to select the church as the site for her second annual Walker agents convention. With nearly 1,000 newcomers streaming each month into Chicago’s South Side from Mississippi Valley towns along the Illinois Central train line, Madam Walker easily envisioned ways to cultivate the untapped pool of thousands of potential Lelia College students, sales agents and customers. That young black women were being hired as tobacco strippers and hotel waitresses, chambermaids and kitchen helpers at $15 to $20 per week meant that a $1.75 Walker treatment was within their reach, even with the North’s higher rents siphoning off much of their increased income. Julius Rosenwald’s Sears, Roebuck and Company and Montgomery Ward had hired more than 1,500 black mail-order clerks, vastly increasing white-collar employment among African American women in the city. And although most remained in domestic service jobs, hundreds “deserted this grade of work for the factories” in order to guarantee evenings and Sundays off. Now part of a faster, more urbanized culture of consumerism, these working women were eager to spend a part of their incomes and free time on themselves. Having just rented a storefront for a Walker salon at 4656 South State Street—on the main commercial thoroughfare of Chicago’s black community—Madam Walker was primed both to accommodate their desires and to provide an avenue to economic independence.

  With the location of her August meeting settled, Madam Walker dashed ahead to more cities, adding nearby Gary and Fort Wayne, Indiana, to her itinerary. But en route to Indianapolis—where she intended to stay through late March—she wired Ransom, “Do not accept any social engagements. I want to rest.” Not surprisingly, her break was brief. In Columbus, Ohio, during early April, she trained and organized enough women to create a new chapter of Walker agents. And her feisty spirit was in full force as she confronted a local woman known to have issued Walker diplomas under the false pretense that she was authorized to teach the Walker course. “She is as crooked as a black snake and I have cut her out entirely,” Madam Walker informed Ransom. “And I announced it from the platform last night [while] she was present.”

  Forty miles south of Columbus in Chillicothe, Madam Walker was welcomed to the First Baptist Church—the town’s largest and oldest black congregation—by Zella Ward, Dr. Joseph Ward’s wife and Madam Walker’s first Indianapolis hostess. Awaiting his assignment to a medical unit in France, Ward was now stationed at nearby Camp Sherman. With her dear friends as guides, Madam Walker learned of the discrimination the troops faced on the base and in the town. Although there were eleven Y buildings on the grounds, only one was not off-limits to the 2,000 black soldiers. In downtown Chillicothe the Ross County Courthouse posted a sign that advised: “Army Club No. 1 for White Soldiers’ Friends and Relatives: Reading, Writing and Recreation Rooms.” And throughout the country the backlash against black men in uniform had become more frequent and more demeaning. Scattered across seven training camps, the 92nd Division—in which almost all black troops were clustered—had been splintered intentionally to prevent any one encampment from being more than one-third black. General Charles Ballou, the division’s white commanding officer, had even issued a directive ordering black troops to avoid situations and public places where their presence would be “resented,” unfairly putting the burden on them to anticipate the racism of others. Only a few months earlier First Lieutenant Charles A. Tribbett, an electrical engineer and Yale graduate, had been arrested and forced from a train while en route with fellow servicemen from New York’s Camp Upton to Fort Sill. Left behind in Chickasha, Oklahoma, he was jailed for “violating the separate coach laws of the state” because he had dared to occupy a Pullman car.

  Despite these troubling incidents, Madam Walker encouraged the troops to persevere. “This is your country, your home,” she reminded them. “What
you have suffered in the past should not deter you from going forth to protect the homes and lives of your women and children.” But she did not gloss over the very real discrimination and indignities they faced, vowing to use her influence on their behalf. Several months later, a member of Company D of the 317th Engineers wrote, “We all remember you, and . . . have often spoken of you, and of the words of consolation which you gave us at Camp Sherman, Ohio, on the eve of our departure. Those words have stayed with the boys longer than any spoken by any one that I have known or heard of.” Her comments, he said, had even shored them up “one night while under shell-fire” on a French battlefield.

  From Chillicothe Madam Walker made her way to Pittsburgh for a mid-April Madam C. J. Walker Benevolent Association event. “Her tribute to ‘our boys’ aroused her audience to unusual patriotic enthusiasm,” the Pittsburgh Courier reported. “When the war began it was thought that ‘our boys’ would not be needed,” she told the “packed house” of 600 people. “But we see that they are needed, and victory shall not have been won until the black boys of America shed their blood on the battlefield.” And while Madam Walker’s outreach on behalf of the Circle for Negro War Relief had become important, helping women better their economic circumstances remained her passionate priority. “What I have done you can do,” she persuaded the Pittsburgh audience. “I am here to interest and inspire you, if possible. If I am not successful in helping you, remember I did the best I could.”

  When Madam Walker announced that she hoped to “meet every agent personally before I leave the city,” she may well have been responding to a situation that required damage control. Much to her consternation, she had learned of a Mrs. Saunders, who not only had used her name on an unauthorized beauty salon sign but was saying that Lelia had “got drunk” and revealed the Wonderful Hair Grower formula. Saunders was “claiming,” Madam Walker told Ransom, that “since I have gone to New York the goods are not made properly any more and . . . that I had gotten rich and gone to New York to sport.” Incensed by the accusation, she sought retaliation. Aware that Courier publisher Robert Vann—who had been Lelia’s attorney in her divorce from John Robinson—also represented Saunders, Madam Walker authorized Ransom to apply strategic pressure. “I think it will not be any trouble to get him to advise her to take down the sign since I am one of his heaviest advertisers,” she said with confidence.