On Her Own Ground

  Afraid that Scott “might do one of two things, say that he is not coming, or let it go on as though he intends to be present and at the last minute, send a telegram regretting his inability to be present,” Lelia continued to fret, perhaps reflecting upon Enrico Caruso’s last-minute cancellation for her Circle for Negro War Relief concert. “In either case it would be a slam on mother.” But because Madam Walker rarely allowed obstacles to impede her, she assumed that her good intentions, as well as the setting—in the spirit of Joel Spingarn’s 1916 Amenia retreat—would provide a sufficient catalyst to loosen stalled dialogue and soothe old and irritated rivalries.

  Certainly she knew that Scott had endured recent fire for adhering too closely to the accommodationist style of his mentor, Booker T. Washington. Among his critics were longtime adversaries Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, both of whom could well have been included on Madam Walker’s original guest list. Because Scott’s letters to Madam Walker and Lelia are lost, and because his personal correspondence at Morgan State University is currently unavailable for review, there is no way to be certain of the complaints he may have lodged against specific guests. But if either Trotter or Wells-Barnett were invited, neither appears to have attended.

  To them, as well as to some others, Scott had been too willing to rationalize and defend Secretary of War Baker’s plan to assign more than half of the drafted African Americans to jobs as laborers and stevedores rather than to combat units and to staff their squadrons with mostly white officers. Soon after being appointed to his post in the fall of 1917, Scott had “proposed to popularize the war among ‘the Colored people,’” as he wrote in a letter to Baker. But the secretary showed little reciprocal sentiment, informing Scott soon after that there “was no intention on the part of the War Dept. to undertake at this time a settlement of the so-called race problem.” Despite Baker’s rebuff—and perhaps because many of those who knew Scott understood his precarious and relatively powerless position—he continued to enjoy “widespread support,” if only as a symbolic and token representative who could exercise occasional influence on behalf of the race to those in power.

  Apparently Scott’s initial reservations about the roster of invitees were sufficiently overcome by the time he prepared to leave the NNBL convention in Atlantic City. Traveling directly from New Jersey to Irvington, Scott and his wife, Eleanora Baker Scott, arrived the evening before the event, perhaps, like others, feeling that they had been “transported into a fairyland.” Early the next afternoon “nearly 100 white and colored men and women, leaders in their respective races,” entered the grounds, some chauffeured by Madam Walker’s driver, others in automobiles from Manhattan, a few on foot from the Irvington train depot. Among the guests were Charlotte Hawkins Brown of Palmer Memorial Institute, NAACP Secretary John Shillady, Vertner Tandy and his wife, Sadie Dorsette Tandy, Massachusetts Realtor Watt Terry (whom Madam had first met during the 1912 NNBL convention), her longtime St. Louis friend Jessie Robinson, as well as several NACW members. Mae was home from her second year at Spelman and Lelia had added a handful of her closest friends to the guest list.

  After an “appetizing” lunch on the rear terraces, with the river visible beyond the lush, leafy treetops, all adjourned to the music salon. Beneath two massive crystal chandeliers and gold-leaf-trimmed pilasters, the assembled party was treated to a concert arranged and hosted by J. Rosamond Johnson and featuring violinist Joseph Douglass and organist Melville Charlton. As much as anything her wealth afforded, Madam Walker enjoyed introducing emerging musicians and showcasing seasoned performers. Douglass, a grandson of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, had performed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and was the first black violinist to be featured on transcontinental tours. Charlton—the first African American admitted to the American Guild of Organists and chief organist at the Religious School of Temple Emanu-El (the wealthiest synagogue in America)—was masterful on the Estey.

  Following the uplifting musical interlude, Ransom ceremoniously introduced Madam Walker, who, in outlining the purpose of the meeting, encouraged her guests to “confer” with Scott and “with each other regarding the part American Negroes were playing in the war.” In the process, she hoped they would “forget all their differences [and] stand together for the higher principles involved in this war . . . to continue [to be] loyal to country [and] to the soldiers fighting for democracy.”

  Having visited several military camps earlier that year, Madam Walker had observed firsthand the treatment and living conditions of the troops. Like two of her guests—Mary White Ovington and James Weldon Johnson—she had spoken out in the most forceful terms about the bravery, the rights and the expectations of black soldiers. As the summer sun streamed through the fanlight windows and wide-open French doors, Madam Walker’s remarks drew much agreement. Harlemites remained proud of Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, the two men whose May heroics to thwart a nighttime German ambush had helped the 369th gain the nickname “Hellfighters” and caused the German soldiers to describe them as “blutlustige schwarze Männer” or “bloodthirsty black men.”

  Whether Madam Walker referred to it or not, her guests had not forgotten the December 1917 execution of more than a dozen black Camp Logan soldiers. Months of insults and assaults had pushed the base’s troops—already at the flash point—to ignition. Angered after having been beaten and shot at by Houston police for insisting upon information about a fellow battalion member, Corporal Charles Baltimore—an experienced and popular noncommissioned officer—led close to 100 revenge-seeking black recruits from the camp into town. Before the resulting August 23, 1917, riot was halted, two black civilians and seventeen whites—including five policemen—lay dead. In response to the mortal confrontation, the Army court-martialed sixty-three members of the 24th Infantry, hanging thirteen of them at dawn on December 11.

  Even fresher in their minds was the murder of a soldier at nearby Camp Merritt, New Jersey, exactly one week earlier. With tensions simmering on the evening of August 17, 1918—after two black soldiers had been ordered from a YMCA building because two white Mississippians “resented” their presence—a black soldier stabbed a white soldier. Soon after, black and white troops gathered in the streets and exchanged threats. While a commander attempted to disperse the crowd, armed guards—without orders—shot at the retreating black soldiers, wounding five and killing another with a bullet to the back. In his quick and defiant reaction, Reverend Francis Grimké, the attorney who had negotiated the NACW’s purchase of the Douglass home, railed, “Every colored soldier who meets his death here before sailing for France because he resents the insults of southern white bullies . . . belongs on the honor roll of the noble dead.”

  Madam Walker could not have agreed more, yet she delivered a message of unity as she introduced Scott, signaling to her guests that any disagreements they may have harbored were best temporarily sacrificed for the greater good. Arising “amidst much applause,” Scott paid his hostess “high tribute.” Conscious of the criticism he faced, Scott used the occasion to trumpet small victories, suggesting that through his efforts some neighborhood Selective Service boards had been closed “because they treated Negro draftees unfairly.” Then he proudly announced that “colored women would be sent overseas as Red Cross” volunteers after having been denied the privilege earlier in the war. As the afternoon progressed, Ransom presented several more speakers, each reflecting Madam Walker’s interest in a range of political and educational issues: Mary Talbert and Fred Moore; former Assistant U.S. Attorney General William H. Lewis and Wilberforce president William S. Scarborough; the NAACP’s John Shillady and Mary White Ovington, as well as William Jay Schieffelin, a longtime Tuskegee Institute board member. The speakers—whether white or black, Bookerites or NAACPers—all adopted Madam Walker’s unity theme (at least for the afternoon) and “emphasized the necessity of the various elements in the race getting together,” wrote the New York Age.

  “It will be a ver
y great pleasure during all the years to come that we were the first official guests entertained in Villa Lewaro,” Scott wrote a few days later. “The wonderful gathering of friends who came to pay tribute to your great business ability and to congratulate you . . . was beyond compare.” And although he had witnessed Booker T. Washington’s many gatherings of esteemed philanthropists and prosperous industrialists at The Oaks on Tuskegee’s campus, he deemed this event a most unusual one: “No such assemblage has ever gathered at the private home of any representative of our race, I am sure.” Appreciative of the “manifestations of friendship” shown him and his wife, Scott assured Madam Walker of “my earnest willingness to serve you and any of your interests in any way possible, at any time.”

  With similar sentiments, George Lattimore, the field secretary of the Welfare League of the 367th Infantry, wrote that he was “transmitting . . . to our boys ‘Somewhere in France’ the message of assurance they are not forgotten.” Noting that he had reminded them that Madam Walker stood “preeminently in the front ranks of the host of friends ready ‘to do or die’ over here,” he then mused, “I imagine I can hear the boys now firing a salute in your honor.”

  Not all the guests, however, were pleased with Madam Walker’s message. William Jay Schieffelin—a wealthy white New Yorker long involved in local political reform—soon was publicly criticizing Madam Walker and suggesting that her words about the rights and expectations of returning black soldiers were entirely too militant, even racially divisive. As president of Schieffelin Drugs—the family concern that had introduced Bayer aspirin to America in the 1890s—he moved in powerful circles. Nevertheless, Madam Walker did not hesitate to challenge him, disturbed that he was damaging her reputation by misrepresenting her position. Neither a verbatim account of Madam Walker’s August 25 remarks nor a text of Schieffelin’s comments exists, but her reply could not have been stronger. “It has given me no little annoyance that you have misinterpreted my meaning again and again in your talks,” she wrote with great pique. “I feel it necessary to explain my position to you more fully that you will not again be in error in this particular respect.”

  Admonishing Schieffelin for his insensitivity, Madam Walker reminded him of the “hundreds of revolting, loathsome experiences which [my people] suffer from day to day.” As the specially appointed colonel of New York’s 15th National Guard, he doubtless knew the details of the racially motivated insults endured by her friend Noble Sissle and other members of the regiment during their training in South Carolina just prior to their departure for France. “The Negro in the south,” she reminded him, “has been denied the use of firearms . . . and has been no match for the fiends and brutes who have taken advantage of his helplessness.” Having “bravely, fearlessly bled and died” to help defend America’s honor, she believed, the troops had every right to expect a patriot’s reward. “Now they will soon be returning. To what? Does any reasonable person imagine to the old order of things? To submit to being strung up, riddled with bullets, burned at the stake? No! A thousand times No! And what good friend, even of humanity, would wish it so?” she exclaimed, with a not so subtle dig at his “claim to be a real friend to the Negro.”

  “They will come back to face like men, whatever is in store for them and like men defend themselves, their families, their homes,” Madam Walker continued, refusing to soften her stance. “Please understand that this does not mean that I wish to encourage in any way a conflict between the two races. Such a thing is farthest from my mind,” she insisted. “My message to my people is this: Go live and conduct yourself so that you will be above the reproach of any one. But should but one prejudiced, irrational boast infringe upon [your] rights as men—resent the insults like men . . . and if death be the result—so be it. An honorable death is far better than the miserable existence imposed upon most of our people in the south,” she wrote, sadly noting her “resignation” to the situation. “I have tried so very hard to make you see the thing thru the eyes of a Negro, which I realize is next to impossible.” Demanding that he refrain from further distorting her message, she scolded, “Your talks would do a far greater good if you would point out to the white people just what their duties to the Negro are and be assured if the advice is heeded, there will be no reason to find fault with the execution of the Negro’s duty to the white man.”

  As the war dragged on—and African American leaders saw little official willingness to address domestic issues—such sentiments gathered momentum. Wholly disenchanted with the Wilson administration and the War Department, their diminishing patience left them less and less compelled to defer their complaints and displeasure. The following spring, in fact, when Du Bois returned from a postwar trip to France, he refused to contain his bitterness at the continued lynchings and the Army’s Jim Crow policies. “By the God of heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land,” he wrote in so stinging an editorial that the New York Postmaster attempted to ban the May 1919 issue of The Crisis in which it appeared. With a defiance that nearly obliterated the collaborative tone of his earlier “Close Ranks” column, he wrote:

  We return.

  We return from fighting.

  We return fighting.

  Make way for Democracy! We saved it for France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it for the United States of America, or know the reason why.

  Whereas Schieffelin may have expected the “old order of things,” Moorfield Storey, the former president of both the American Bar Association and the NAACP, predicted, “Negroes will come back feeling like men and not disposed to accept the treatment to which they have been subjected.”

  While Madam Walker’s personal spirit and public politics waxed ever more potent, her physical health waned, forcing her to stay close to home during the late summer and early fall. “Am still getting up to work in the garden every morning,” she wrote Ransom from Villa Lewaro in mid-September, “but it’s getting pretty cool here so am afraid I won’t be able to do it much longer.” In a note to her friend Jessie Robinson, Madam Walker joked that she and the Bells “are following the sun beams all over the house in an effort to keep warm.” But the nippy weather failed to stifle her glee. “I wish my friends throughout the country would give me a chicken shower,” she told Ransom, slipping comfortably into one of the more enjoyable memories of her rural Louisiana childhood. When an early October spell of Indian summer brought a welcomed respite from the morning frost, she was able to savor the autumn leaves as they engulfed the forest along the Palisades in flames of crimson, saffron and tangerine. “Am grateful for the warm weather as I don’t want to start the fires any sooner than I can help,” she wrote.

  But her joy soon was jostled by an alarming notification from Ransom: her income taxes—dramatically inflated to more than $50,000 by a wartime surtax—were due “at once.” Now the expense of firing her furnace had become the least of her worries. “After you take care of taxes, state, federal and income, you will hardly have any money for anything else than to look after general expenses,” Ransom informed her. To add to the problems, the American Can Company remained under a strict mandate to fill government contracts first, leaving the Walker Company and other consumer manufacturers low in priority for their orders. And as the price of scarce metals increased, so too did the price of steel hot combs.

  Still Madam Walker felt an obligation to contribute to the war bonds drive. “If I do not buy in Harlem, the colored people will not get the credit and there is a feeling in Washington that they have not measured up, so a letter from Mrs. Talbert tells me,” she notified Ransom. When a small delegation of the Irvington Liberty Loan committee—apparently recovered from the village’s initial shock at her presence—called upon Madam Walker to support its latest effort, she politely declined, informing them that she had made a commitment to Harlem’s drive. “When I explained my inte
ntion of taking out bonds in N.Y. they readily understood and thought me justified in doing so,” she wrote.

  Try as she might to adhere to her doctor’s advice, Madam Walker could not entirely confine herself to Irvington. On November 11, 1918, when the armistice ending the gunfire in Europe was signed, she was in Boston, where she spent a “delightful five days” as the city exploded into euphoric, round-the-clock bedlam. “Never has the old Puritan city seen such an outburst of spontaneous celebration,” proclaimed the Boston Globe, as impromptu “parades, big and small, blocked every street” and thousands of revelers flocked to the expansive Boston Common to celebrate the surrender of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II. From dawn to dawn, the racket of factory whistles, car horns, jangling tin cans, booming drums, clanging frying pans, cheers and whoops filled the “bright, crisp” autumn air. The city’s narrow downtown streets were deluged in a blizzard of confetti as streamers dangled from lampposts and telephone wires. Businessmen in pinstripes snake-danced past peddlers hawking American flags while automobiles and horse-drawn carts alike were trimmed in red, white and blue bunting. “It seems that the whole country went mad over the peace imminence,” Madam Walker wrote to Ransom after returning to Irvington. “You were right to give the folks at the factory a half day.”

  Two weeks after Germany’s surrender, Madam Walker and Lelia traveled to Washington for the Thanksgiving holiday. “Lelia and I had a very pleasant trip to Washington, altho it rained all day Thursday,” she wrote, recalling an “especially good” recital that evening where they had “met lots of interesting folks.” She also was delighted to have seen Emmett Scott, who, she wrote, “was especially courteous to us, sending us candy and flowers.”

  For her part, Lelia had a “splendid time,” delighted with Scott’s “lovely box of bon bons.” But Lelia’s primary focus was her new beau, Wiley Wilson, a pharmacist who was completing his medical studies at Howard University. A tall, “olive-brown,” “commanding son of a gun,” Wiley impressed Lelia, at least in part, because he was not in the least intimidated by her status or her money. Two years her senior, he was the youngest of three dashing, well-educated sons of a successful Arkansas farmer and cattle rancher. His elder brothers, John and Ed, had attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in the 1890s. Then, while Ed was enrolled at Union Theological Seminary, John returned to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and became a sheriff. But after arresting a prominent white man, he was prohibited from apprehending whites. Incensed, he quit the force, purchased a saloon and openly operated two whorehouses. With some of his considerable earnings, he sent Wiley to Howard University’s School of Pharmacy, then bankrolled a drugstore for his brother when he graduated. In 1911, when John was shot to death during a Mardi Gras quarrel with a former girlfriend, Ed and Wiley inherited his property and his cash.