Quite aside from his skepticism about a partnership with the Japanese, Ransom told Madam Walker that he had “no faith in the management” of the ILDP and predicted “for it an inglorious failure.” Madam Walker’s appointment as treasurer was less an honor, he believed, than a transparent gesture to secure a sure source of funding. “You will have to watch your League for I very much suspect they will want you to finance most all of their little projects.” He was, he said, “beginning to grow seriously apprehensive lest you will impair your usefulness by becoming identified with too many organizations fostered by highly questionable characters.” Ransom specifically cautioned Madam Walker about Reverend R. D. Jonas, a Welshman and one of the League founders, whom he harshly blasted as a “nihilist, a fanatic [and] a petty grafter who seeks to gain his livelihood by appealing to the Negro on some phase of the Negro problem that will cause them to back him . . . in some impractical propaganda.” Having been “run out of every City of size in the United States,” including Indianapolis, Ransom counseled her that Jonas was “liable to mislead some well-meaning people,” including—though he did not say so—Madam Walker herself.
Little did either of them know that, just as Major Loving had infiltrated the December National Race Congress, R. D. Jonas had become the ILDP’s own homegrown informant, ferreting out information about his black “friends” for the United States government. For at least a year this undercover operative, who was sometimes known as Jonas the Prophet, had been gathering material, not only for the War Department’s MID but for British military intelligence officials who had developed a particular interest in contacts between blacks and Japanese. After the January 2 session at Villa Lewaro and the January 7 meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, Jonas also approached the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation with hopes of being paid for information about the League. In a convoluted and illogical scheme, he told bureau officials that he was “recruiting black, Japanese, Hindu and Chinese socialists and Bolshevists to learn their plans and then secretly mobilize conservative black churchmen against them.” Now, presumably, Madam Walker’s name had been added to yet another surveillance file.
While Ransom was quite familiar with Jonas, he wrote Madam Walker that he knew “nothing about the man Randolph.” But had he spent more time strolling the streets on his visits to Harlem, he surely would have heard the provocative, eloquent speeches that A. Philip Randolph regularly delivered from the corner of 135th and Lenox. The dignified and eloquent son of an AME minister, Randolph had arrived in New York in 1911 just a few years after graduating from Jacksonville, Florida’s Cookman Institute, the first black high school in Florida. While taking night classes at New York’s City College, he was exposed to the rhetoric of radical politics in the speeches of black Socialist Hubert Harrison, as well as Socialist Party founder Eugene Debs. Now one of Lenox Avenue’s most able soapbox orators—in an era before most Americans had radios—Randolph with his rich baritone captivated passersby as he discussed topics as wide-ranging as the French Revolution and the history of slavery. “His delivery was . . . impeccable,” a young admirer later remembered. “Instead of rabble rousing, he just talked.”
Madam Walker and Randolph probably first met through his wife, Lucille Green Randolph, a Howard University graduate and former New York City schoolteacher, who had been one of the first graduates of Lelia College’s Harlem branch. With her own salon on 135th Street, Lucille was one of the most successful Walker hair culturists in the city. She was a light-skinned woman of “medium height and build,” whose “short-cropped, prematurely silver hair” rendered her striking rather than merely attractive. “Her customers ranged from the black elite in Harlem to well-to-do crinkly-haired whites from ‘downtown,’” wrote her husband’s biographer Jervis Anderson. Once a week she carried her satchel full of Walker products and curling irons to Atlantic City’s “fashionable” Marlborough Blenheim Hotel, where she also counted a number of wealthy whites among her clients. Devoted to the same political causes as her husband, Lucille had run unsuccessfully for the New York state legislature on the Socialist slate in 1917. Her “considerable income,” as well as her unhesitant willingness to share it with her husband, made it possible for him to pursue his “public ambitions.” One acquaintance later said that he had never known Randolph to “work for a salary,” yet he “never saw him without a starched collar, a carefully knotted tie, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a blue serge suit that looked like he had just bought it from Brooks Brothers. It was his wife, of course.” Randolph himself later said, “We were on an uncharted sea. Chandler and I had no job and no plan for the next meal. But I had a good wife. She carried us.” While Madam Walker had been one of the first advertisers in The Messenger—a reprint of her November 1917 New York Times article appeared as a full-page ad in the magazine’s second issue—it was Lucille Green Randolph who sustained the publication. “Without her money,” Randolph often said, “we couldn’t have started The Messenger.”
That Lucille was a gregarious extrovert who thoroughly enjoyed Madam Walker’s social gatherings seemed to create no conflict for Randolph, whom friends “never saw . . . at a dance or a party” because “he had bigger things in view.” Lucille, they said, “sometimes invited him to Madam Walker’s parties, but he always begged off, saying he had no time to waste with ‘fly-by-night people.’” Apparently Randolph exempted Madam Walker herself from that unflattering category. “She was a woman of common sense and good business sense,” he later remembered. But he also suggested that Madam Walker, who was almost entirely self-taught, still welcomed and needed assistance in preparing major speeches. “She was not a literate woman but she had money,” he told an interviewer. “My wife would make trips” with her and would help “get her talks together.”
Just as Madam Walker had not agreed with all of the political positions of Booker T. Washington, Monroe Trotter or Emmett Scott, she must surely have differed with Randolph in July 1918 when he countered Du Bois’s controversial “Close Ranks” editorial with the position that “no intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists.” Yet, as with others she liked personally, she did not sever contact with him over political disagreements. Had she known all the details of Randolph’s August 1918 arrest for violating the Espionage Act, however, she would have had sufficient reason to be anxious about her relationship with him. While Randolph addressed a rally in Cleveland, a Justice Department intelligence agent confiscated copies of the July Messenger, citing Randolph and Chandler Owen for spreading subversive information. Undoubtedly, one section of the magazine that caught the agent’s attention was an editorial that welcomed the “growth of socialism, which is the death of capitalism.” After a two-day investigation and a brief trial, Randolph and Owen were released, but the newspaper, now in the possession of the Justice Department, included several references to Madam Walker. A concise biographical sketch praising her as “a factor in the economic, political [and] social life of the country” would have been of little consequence to the agent. More likely it was Madam Walker’s prominent role as an advertiser that would have intrigued the bureau investigators, since her payments had helped fund the “seditious” contents. In addition to a full-page Walker Company ad on the magazine’s back cover, Madam Walker was mentioned in two other full-page spreads, one purchased by Frank Smith, her interior decorator, the other by the Miller-Reed Company, the general contractors for Villa Lewaro, St. Philip’s AME and Mother AME Zion. The link to Madam Walker, Smith and Miller-Reed was The Messenger’s advertising manager, Louis George. As an assistant to Madam Walker, he had accompanied her on her second trip to Battle Creek and often helped with marketing promotions in the 136th Street salon.
An earnest and enthusiastic young man, George and his wife, Czarina, were, along with Lloyd and Edna Thomas, Lelia’s closest friends. But George, who had been named chairman of the ILDP’s executive committee, was someone Ransom viewed with disdain, primarily becaus
e he had mismanaged both money and business transactions in the Walker Company’s New York office. “I know you are fond of Louis George and I do not wish to hurt him in your estimation, but because you are fond of him does not make him fit to manage large affairs or lead the Race,” Ransom huffed. “You certainly have seen enough to know he [is] utterly incompetent along business lines.”
When Madam Walker suggested placing George in charge of her trust fund, Ransom was livid. “It evidently did not occur to you that Louis has not the capacity for such a position,” he lectured. “People [who] know him know his limitations and will laugh at you thinking that you did not know any better.”
As if Jonas’s and George’s affiliation with the League were not enough, Ransom could not have been pleased with the prominent coverage the two ILDP meetings received in the Age. “I, for one, am sorry that [Villa Lewaro] was the birthplace for such an organization,” especially, he told her, because people would believe that she was “sponsor for the acts of fanatic and irrational beings.” Concerned that the group might be “identified with the socialist element of our citizenship or radicals and agitators that are to be found among all Races,” Ransom sounded another alarm. “Diplomatic, persistent agitation along conservative lines is alright, but anything that borders on Bolshevikism is to be avoided.”
Unable to control Madam Walker’s interactions with those he considered “irresponsible” zealots, or to curb what he implied might be his client’s naiveté, Ransom once again urged her to consider her business and her reputation. “The only thing I am concerned with is the danger of your becoming identified with some person or persons whose acts will hurt your future in this country.” To lessen Ransom’s anxiety—and apparently because she too was having second thoughts—Madam Walker assured him that she would heed his advice and withdraw her support. “I am glad to note that you are not going to mix up into organizations and propositions in the future,” Ransom wrote, reinforcing her responsibility to other African Americans. “You cannot be too careful in this respect. People who have developed great businesses, attained great wealth and influence, no longer belong to themselves but to the people and to posterity and they cannot be too careful as to entangling alliances, such as may bring them in ill-repute or in a way affect their business standing and integrity.” Four days later, on February 5, Madam Walker resigned from the ILDP. “Owing to the fact that I do not expect to be in the city this winter and to the further fact that my physician has advised against my participation in public affairs, I herewith tender my resignation,” she informed the group and the editors of the Age. Reverend Powell followed suit later that month, claiming that he had been selected as president without proper consent and asking that his name not be used in connection with the League. “While I believe in the objects and principles of the league and hope to remain a member, my limited time and ability will not allow me to serve as president.” Without their backing, the International League of Darker Peoples collapsed. While most who knew Madam Walker found no fault with her short-lived flirtation with an organization that included a handful of Socialists, the damage to her reputation—at least among high government officials who could control her ability to travel to Europe—had been done.
As Madam Walker prepared her passport application in February 1919, she had no idea that her political and social activities had been monitored on at least four occasions by Walter Loving, Hallie Queen, R. D. Jonas and other government spies. Still, Ransom’s warnings seem to have made her sufficiently sensitive to the government’s preoccupation with political dissent that she applied for a commercial business passport, apparently to keep from attracting undue attention. She intended, she wrote on her affidavit, to travel to England, France and Italy to “buy and sell toilet preparations.” Certainly her most recent advertisements—which touted her international sales with the words “We Belt the Globe”—indicated a legitimate aim to expand her overseas market. Nevertheless, Ransom cautioned her not to misrepresent the reasons for her trip, lest the State Department view her application as “merely subterfuge to get to the peace conference.” The Wilson administration, he reminded her, was “quite determined” that no American be allowed to travel to “challenge” the government’s position at the peace talks. “If you are not going to make a bonafide effort to represent your business over there, my advice would be not to go, because your actions will be observed,” he wrote, alerting her that “secret service men are everywhere and the government does not intend to be deceived in granting passports.” Less than two weeks later, Ransom told Madam Walker that Emmett Scott had informed him that she was included in a Military Intelligence Division file. “I was afraid that your name had been sent in,” he wrote, advising her that she might now expect to have “trouble in getting passports” for herself, Lelia and the salesman she had hoped would accompany her.
Just as Ransom had predicted, Madam Walker’s entanglements with Trotter and the International League of Darker Peoples had jeopardized her trip to France. On the recommendation of Loving, she and the other National Race Congress delegates, as well as the ILDP committee, had become targets of a Military Intelligence Division inquiry into the political activities of those whom the government considered “Negro subversives.” Specifically naming Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Madam Walker and six men in his report, Loving wrote: “If passports are to be requested for the above named individuals I suggest that the record of each person be locked up before a passport is granted. I recommend this in the case of Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett especially. This subject is a known race agitator.” Three weeks after Loving’s MID report, William E. Allen, the acting chief of the Bureau of Investigation, advised the State Department to refuse passports for all National Race Congress delegates in order to prevent them from mentioning “the negro question at the Peace Conference.” Quoting Loving, Allen included Madam Walker among the group of people now considered “more or less agitators.” In denying the passports, the State Department engaged in its “first major interference in African American politics,” according to historian Theodore Kornweibel. Later the agency would contend that it had no “formal policy barring black travelers,” yet clearly all but a few blacks who attempted to visit Paris in 1919 met with “deliberate bureaucratic delays.” Although Madam Walker submitted her passport application in February 1919, State Department records at the National Archives today lead to a cold trail, perhaps because, as Loving had directed, they had been “locked up” beforehand as classified files.
In February, with Madam Walker’s own prospects for going to Europe having vanished, she lent her support to Du Bois’s efforts to convene a PanAfrican Congress in Paris. As a member of the executive committee of the NAACP’s New York chapter, Madam Walker sent a personal check for $25 to the parent organization after receiving James Weldon Johnson’s February 11 letter asking that the committee approve a $100 expenditure from its treasury for the work of the congress. “We are hoping for some very tangible results from the efforts which Dr. Du Bois is making,” Johnson wrote in his letter acknowledging her contribution. Having just received a cable from Paris, he was pleased to inform her that Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese member of the French Chamber of Deputies, had persuaded French Premier Clemenceau—against the wishes of President Wilson—to grant permission for Du Bois’s conference to proceed. “In private advices from Dr. Du Bois,” Johnson continued, “we learn that he has the support of all of the colored members of the French Chamber of Deputies,” as well as the Liberian and Haitian delegates and members of the Aborigines Society of London, an organization Johnson described as similar to the NAACP. Du Bois’s three-day Pan-African Congress opened on February 19 at Paris’s Grand Hotel with a welcome address from Diagne to the fifty-eight delegates. Although “sixteen nations, protectorates and colonial entities” were represented, the number of participants would have been much higher had not the U.S. State Department, as well as other Allied governments, placed obstacles in the paths of most who wished to attend. Claim
ing falsely that the French government disapproved of the conference, the Wilson administration issued an announcement that it would be “unable to grant passports to persons desiring to proceed to Paris for the purpose of attending such a congress.”
Before Du Bois left Paris, he had managed to personally present the assembly’s resolutions to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close friend and political adviser. He also had “indirectly” dispatched the document to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George through an intermediary. Nevertheless, he returned to the United States “convinced that Allied officials had effectively sabotaged his attempts to appear before the Peace Conference.”
Monroe Trotter, whose NERL had chosen Madam Walker as a delegate, had fared even worse. Denied a passport, he eventually posed as a cook and stowed away on a freighter, still hoping to arrive in time to lobby for a racial equality clause. But on the very day that he reached Paris, the Allies were sitting around a table at the Petit Trianon at Versailles presenting the German delegation with a draft of the treaty.
The final version of the Treaty of Versailles included no special provisions for the world’s people of color. Germany’s four colonies, not surprisingly, were parceled out between France and Great Britain with no mention of Du Bois’s “international Africa” or Randolph’s “supernational commission.” And although the Japanese delegation had met with Colonel House to discuss a treaty amendment “terminating racial discrimination,” the issue was entirely absent from the document. Throughout the process, Madam Walker and other black Americans had been relegated to the sidelines. Now the only battlefront left was the one at home.
On Her Own Ground Page 35