CHAPTER 21
“I Want to Live to Help My Race”
A jubilant roar rippled through Manhattan from lower Fifth Avenue to the rooftops of Lenox Avenue as nearly a million New Yorkers greeted drum major Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and the men of the triumphant 369th. Now, on February 17, 1919, after having been in France for more than a year, Harlem’s Hellfighters were home, stepping smartly to the military marches of Lieutenant James Reese Europe’s battle-tested band. At Sixtieth Street, where Madam Walker had been invited to join other members of Mayor Hylan’s welcoming committee, Sergeant Henry Johnson—the first American to receive the French Croix de Guerre—stood in a convertible waving red lilies while New York governor Alfred Smith, Emmett Scott and other assembled dignitaries applauded him. Extending for several blocks south of the reviewing stand, ambulances driven by members of the Colored Women’s Motor Corps transported Johnson and the other wounded soldiers. As chair of the Corps’s executive committee, Madam Walker had helped organize the convoy. With the Walker Hair Parlor closed for the celebration, few matters could have prevented Lelia—a Motor Corps captain and volunteer ambulance operator—from being at the wheel of her luxury Pathfinder.
Along the seven-mile route, exuberant parade watchers showered the 1,300 survivors with candy, cigarettes and coins. At Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, Mrs. Vincent Astor and her friends waved American flags above rows of shiny bayonets and steel helmets, while eight blocks later, industrialist Henry C. Frick cheered from a window of his mansion. Then at the northern edge of Central Park, the troops turned west toward Harlem, quickening their steps as they swung north up Lenox Avenue. Enticed by a cloudless sky and springlike weather, families, friends and sweethearts jammed sidewalks, clung to fire escapes and leaned from windows to cheer their heroes. When Big Jim Europe’s precise and patriotic tunes gave way to the syncopated rhythm of “Here Comes My Daddy Now,” the crowd exploded with hysterical joy. Strutting and singing, with wives and girlfriends latched on to their arms, the soldiers abandoned any pretense of an ordered formation.
Harlemites had every reason to be proud. Claiming never to have “lost a prisoner, a trench or a foot of ground,” the entire regiment had been awarded the Croix de Guerre by a grateful French government. Shunted away from combat by the American Expeditionary Forces, the unit had been attached to the French Army’s 161st Division, with whom they had endured uninterrupted enemy fire for 191 days—longer, it was said, than any other American soldiers. “It was hell, but those boys faced the music,” Colonel William Hayward had declared five days earlier as the division steamed past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor. “Every mother’s son of them stood up and fought like a tiger.” When the Armistice was signed, indebted French officers selected the unit to lead all Allied fighters across France to Germany’s river Rhine. “We were received with enthusiasm in every town we entered,” Hayward noted with pride.
That same spirit of acceptance and gratitude embraced the men all along the New York parade route. “That’s one day that there wasn’t the slightest bit of prejudice in New York,” one soldier remembered. In the midst of nonstop concerts, parties and dinners in their honor, Madam Walker invited them to consider Villa Lewaro “as their own” during a two-week-long open house. Dozens of men and their families gladly made the trip to Irvington. Among Madam Walker’s overnight houseguests that month was her physician Joseph Ward, who, as a colonel during his tour of duty in France, had become the U.S. Army’s highest-ranking black medical officer as well as the first African American to command a base hospital. His wife, Zella, still grieving the loss of their son from the 1918 flu pandemic, had also joined him. With an interval of several months since their last visit in Chillicothe, Ward immediately noticed Madam Walker’s deteriorating health. Her kidney disease—with its telltale bloating and lethargy—had advanced significantly, causing the doctor to insist that she curtail her speaking engagements. But, of course, Madam Walker found full compliance impossible, substituting home entertaining for public appearances. Barely a month later, while still suffering from “a severe cold,” she happily welcomed her friend Mary Burnett Talbert to Villa Lewaro. Simultaneously serving as president of the NACW and a vice president of the NAACP, Talbert surely was brimming with tales of her recent efforts to organize NAACP chapters in Texas and Louisiana, areas already primed for her message because of the high incidence of lynchings. Familiar with the territory from her own campaigns to recruit sales agents, Madam Walker easily compared travel experiences. And with Lelia en route to Cuba, she craved the companionship that Talbert’s visit provided.
Whether Madam Walker or Lelia could have admitted it at the time, Lelia’s overseas trip was designed, in part, to mend the growing rift between them. Forced to reduce her own travels, Madam Walker had intensified her involvement in the New York operation, leading to inevitable conflict with her daughter. In her desperation to escape the daily scrutiny, Lelia had persuaded her mother to allow her to develop her own niche with the Caribbean, Central American and South American trade. Accompanied by Mae—on temporary leave from Spelman—and Antonio Davila, the Walker Company’s Spanish-market sales representative, Lelia intended to remain abroad until August. Within days of Lelia’s departure, the company announced that Madam Walker had “assumed entire control” of Lelia College and the Walker Hair Parlor in New York to allow her daughter “to travel in the interest of the company.” The news release gave no hint of the tug-of-war between mother and daughter. Besides their philosophical disagreements over business matters, Wiley Wilson remained a major source of contention. Complicating the situation was Madam Walker’s obvious preference for another of Lelia’s suitors, Captain James Arthur Kennedy, an army surgeon and protégé of Joseph Ward. A native of tiny Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Kennedy had studied at Branch Normal Institute in Wiley Wilson’s hometown of Pine Bluff, Arkansas, before enrolling at Meharry Medical School. Like Wilson, he was both a pharmacist and a physician. But “Gentleman Jack,” as the lean and handsome Kennedy was affectionately known, had a decidedly more congenial and agreeable manner.
As much as Lelia resented Madam Walker’s meddling in her personal life, she remained devoted to her mother. And just as Madam Walker fretted over Lelia’s choice in men, Lelia worried with equal intensity about her mother’s health. “Please see to it that Mother rests,” she had begged Ransom on more than one occasion. Now, despite Dr. Ward’s warnings and Lelia’s concerns, Madam Walker began preparing in late March for a monthlong trip to the Midwest. Still recovering from her cold, she spent the first two weeks of April in Indianapolis, reviewing business matters with Ransom, seeing old friends and retracing the paths of some of her earliest successes.
While there she discussed the misconceptions that many people had developed about her products. “Right here let me correct the erroneous impression held by some that I claim to straighten hair,” she told the Indianapolis Recorder. “I deplore such impression because I have always held myself out as a hair culturist. I grow hair.” Sensitive to the critics who misunderstood the need for improved hygiene and grooming, especially in the rural areas she had visited, she continued, “I have absolute faith in my mission. I want the great masses of my people to take a greater pride in their appearance and to give their hair proper attention.” She also added a new message that signaled her vision of an evolving beauty aesthetic for black women. “I dare say that in the next ten years it will be a rare thing to see a kinky head of hair and it will not be straight either.”
Determined to introduce her new line of skin care products in St. Louis, the city where she had first learned beauty culture—and with hopes of spending Easter at St. Paul AME—Madam Walker pushed herself to travel to Missouri. But by Good Friday on April 25, she was in such “critical” condition that her hosts, Jessie and C. K. Robinson, insisted that she be examined by a specialist. From her bed, she confided to Jessie that she knew she had only a short time to live. Resigned to “God’s will,” she r
emained thankful for her blessings. “It was through His divine providence that I am what I am, for all good and perfect gifts come from above,” she told her friend. Nevertheless, she wished for a longer life. “My desire now is to do more than ever for my race. I would love to live for them,” she said. “I’ve caught the vision. I can see what they need.”
Throughout the Easter weekend, the Robinsons and other old friends sang and prayed with her, as she had requested, hoping to boost her spirits before her Monday-morning departure for Villa Lewaro. In a flower-filled private Pullman car, William P. Curtis, her St. Louis physician, and his nurse, Antoinette Howard, monitored her condition as the train sped through the springtime farmlands of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When the conductor announced an unscheduled stop at Tarrytown, New York, curious passengers finally glimpsed the wealthy colored passenger. A uniformed Louis Tyler hovered with housekeeper Frances Bell and Lawyer Ransom as Madam Walker was placed in an ambulance for the short ride to Irvington. Dr. Ward, on temporary leave from Camp Upton, was soon at her bedside. Shortly afterward, he assured a Chicago Defender reporter that he was “optimistic over the prospects for her recovery.” But his sunny public prognosis was at odds with the reality he knew so well. Convinced, in fact, that her remaining days were few, Madam Walker and Ransom drafted and signed a codicil to her will before the end of that day. Her plans to bequeath to Lelia all real estate and a third of the net profits of the Madam C. J. Walker Manufacturing Company remained unchanged. But the codicil stipulated that the remaining two-thirds of the company’s net proceeds be divided equally between maintenance of her Irvington home and “the benefit of worthy charities.” In addition to $10,000 bequests to granddaughter Mae, godsons Frank Breedlove Ransom and Hubert Barnes Ross, and longtime friend and factory forelady Alice Kelly, Madam Walker set aside smaller yet still generous gifts for more than a dozen employees, relatives and friends. She also named as beneficiaries her favorite charities and schools: Tuskegee Institute, Mary McLeod Bethune’s Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute, Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s Palmer Memorial Institute, Lucy Laney’s Haines Industrial and Normal Institute, Jennie Dean’s Manassas Industrial School, St. Paul’s Mite Missionary Society, St. Louis’s Colored Orphans’ Home, Indianapolis’s Alpha Home for the Aged and YMCAs and YWCAs in Louisville, St. Louis and New York. As well, she earmarked $10,000 for an endowment for an African mission school and instructed future trustees to designate part of her proposed trust fund to “help members of my Race to acquire modern homes.” Under the revised will, Villa Lewaro, upon Lelia’s death, was to be turned over to the NAACP or “such organization” judged by the trustees to be “doing the most for Racial uplift.”
That same week Madam Walker purchased $4,000 worth of Victory Bonds and urged her agents and customers to display their “loyalty and patriotism” by helping to retire the nation’s war debt. “Let us in this last campaign subscribe so promptly and liberally . . . that there will be no uncertainty as to where the Negro stands,” she implored. “To my mind it cannot be too strongly emphasized that our boys have done their bit [and] brought home victory to our great cause . . . leaving it clearly up to the great army back home to make the victory complete.”
Having tempered their outspokenness during the war, Madam Walker and other members of the NAACP were eager to resume plans for the anti-lynching conference they had first discussed in 1916. In late March, just a few days before Madam Walker’s departure for Indianapolis, she had gladly responded to the organization’s request to support an early May assembly. Already deeply committed to the NAACP’s programs, she joined 118 other prominent Americans in signing the call to action against mob violence. Deliberately “nonpartisan and nonsectional,” the roster of signatories included former Secretary of State Elihu Root, Missouri congressman Leonidas Dyer, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, one current and one former Ivy League college president, and seven governors and ex- governors. Among the nine women were Mary Talbert, Mary White Ovington and National American Woman Suffrage Association president emerita Anna Howard Shaw. “It is time that we should wake to the need of action,” the petition declared. “Public opinion, irresistible when aroused, should be enlisted against this barbarism in our midst.” Shortly after Madam Walker agreed to endorse the document, NAACP president Moorfield Storey approached her with a request for financial backing, having been notified by Association Secretary John Shillady that she was a “prospect for [a] considerably sized contribution to [the] antilynching fund.” To make the appeal more personal, Shillady advised Storey to use his own monogrammed stationery rather than the NAACP letterhead. Madam Walker responded affirmatively and immediately to Storey’s solicitation with a commitment to contribute $1,000 at the time of the conference. “There are no words by which I could express my appreciation for the splendid work being done by the Association and some day I hope to be able to prove this in a material way,” she promised Storey.
But on May 5, when the mass meeting finally opened at Carnegie Hall, Madam Walker was confined to Villa Lewaro, too weak even to consider making the personal presentation she had planned. With more than 2,500 delegates—including NACW colleagues Nannie Helen Burroughs, Maggie Walker and Mrs. S. Joe Brown—the leadership vowed to organize state committees, rally public opinion and raise funds for an unprecedented advertising campaign “to awaken the national conscience” about lynching.
The first public relations strike—a carefully researched report entitled “Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States”—revealed the sobering statistic that more than 3,200 people had been lynched in America between 1889 and 1918. To no one’s surprise, most were black men and almost all were in the South. Texas and Louisiana—where Talbert had focused her organizing—along with Georgia and Mississippi were the nation’s deadliest states, each logging more than 300 victims during the three decades covered by the survey. In 1918 alone, sixty-three African Americans, including five women, as well as four white men, had been lynched. Now, in 1919, with the return of newly confident black war veterans, the vigilantes had found a fresh target for their rage and resentment. Among the most recent victims—just as Madam Walker had foreseen in her letter to William Jay Schieffelin—was a returning black soldier. Hounded and harassed for weeks in his southwestern Georgia hometown, Private William Little received anonymous letters “advising him to leave town if he wished to ‘sport around in khaki.’” On April 3, he was discovered on the outskirts of Blakely, Georgia, beaten to death while still in uniform.
“You cannot dethrone justice in the South and let lynching go unpunished there and expect to be secure in this great metropolis of New York,” said former Republican New York governor Charles Evans Hughes, one of the conference keynoters. “Duty begins at home. Little can be done in the cause of international justice unless nations establish strongly and securely the foundation of justice within their own borders,” declared the future Chief Justice of the United States to a standing ovation. That same day James Weldon Johnson, always reluctant to inflame, chose his words carefully when he proffered that “the race problem in the United States has resolved itself into a question of saving black men’s bodies and white men’s souls.”
Forbidden by Dr. Ward to leave her home, Madam Walker entrusted Mary Talbert—who was soon to become the NAACP’s antilynching campaign director—with her $1,000 check and a special message for the conference. Madam Walker, Talbert announced to electrified applause, was offering a pledge of $5,000 to the Association’s fight against mob violence. Noting that her “most generous gift” was “the largest the Association has ever received,” John Shillady informed Madam Walker that her donation had served as a catalyst for another $1,000 contribution from prosperous Arkansas farmer Scott Bond. Other conference delegates were similarly motivated, pledging an additional $3,400 at New York’s Ethical Culture Hall the next night. Gratified that “the greater part of it [had come] from colored people,” Shillady, an Irish-born former social
worker, flattered Walker: “I know our branches and individuals subscribing and pledging were inspired to do so as much by your contribution as by the inspiration of the gathering itself.” Mary White Ovington added her “deep appreciation” as well. “A gift like yours means a very real sacrifice,” wrote the NAACP board chair, “but a sacrifice that you and I believe to [be] the most important cause today before the people of the United States.” All regretted her absence and her illness, “knowing,” Shillady wrote, “how much pleasure you would take in what proved to be a splendid Conference.”
By the second week in May, Villa Lewaro was overflowing with floral arrangements and get-well wishes from all over the nation. “Our prayers have gone up for you,” assured a “grateful” Mary McLeod Bethune, who had announced Madam Walker’s “marvelously wonderful” $5,000 gift to Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute at her school’s commencement the previous night. “Words fail me to express our appreciation for your generous contribution to our work . . . The Negroes and white people went wild with joy and appreciation.” Bethune’s letter closed with a plea that was echoed in much of the correspondence Madam Walker received that month: “God spare you to the race and humanity is the wish of your friends.” On days when she was feeling relatively well, Madam Walker was heard to say, “I am not going to die, because I have so much work to do yet.” But on May 15 she was too ill to answer Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s acknowledgment of her $1,000 pledge to Palmer Memorial Institute. “Madam Walker is still very sick but we are happy to say that she is slowly improving,” Ransom replied on her behalf.
On Her Own Ground Page 36