On Her Own Ground

SCRBC—Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York)

  TPL—Tallulah Public Library (Tallulah, LA)

  UMSL—University of Missouri at St. Louis

  UPHL—University of Pittsburgh Hillman Library

  ORGANIZATIONS

  NAACP—National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

  NACW—National Association of Colored Women

  NNBL—National Negro Business League

  NAMES

  MMB—Mary McLeod Bethune

  RLB—Robert Lee Brokenburr

  JWJ—James Weldon Johnson

  JAK—James Arthur Kennedy

  FBR—Freeman B. Ransom

  LWR—Lelia Walker Robinson (A’Lelia Walker)

  EJS—Emmett Jay Scott

  CJW—Charles Joseph Walker

  MW—Madam C. J. Walker

  BTW—Booker T. Washington

  CHAPTER 1 FREEDOM BABY

  born around 1828—Madison Parish Deed Book, COB: B pp. 289–90, “Caruther & Co. to Burney”; Heirs of Burney v. John T. Ludeling, Vol. 3, p. 490 (1895), Louisiana Supreme Court, 47 La. Ann. 1434, 17 SO. 877.

  banner year—Stephen R. James, Jr., Cultural Resources Investigations, Delta Mat Casting Field Additional Lands, Madison Parish, Louisiana (Vicksburg: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Apr. 1993), submitted by Panamerican Consultants, Inc. (Tuscaloosa, AL), p. 13.

  valued at $125,000—James Arthur Thomas, Jr., document with June 28, 1969, letter.

  “growing up with weeds”—Heirs of Burney, p. 545.

  in Morton, Mississippi—Matilda Thomas, Speech to the United Daughters of the Confederacy reprinted in Kentucky New Era, June 22, 1963.

  refugee camp—Freedmen’s Bureau Record Group 105, Entry 1400, Morning Reports of the Assistant Surgeon at Birney Plantation, Jan. 1864–Feb. 1865, Louisiana Chief Medical Officer, Box No. 40; Southern Claims Commission Case No. 20441, Estate of R. W. Burney v. the United States; John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freedmen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work for the Contrabands and Freedmen of the Mississippi Valley (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907), p. 105.

  “The refugees were crowded”—Eaton, Grant, p. 105.

  burial ground—Inventory of remains, unpublished document, accompanying letters from Brig. Gen. H. M. Whittlesey, OCHM.

  “shanties near the river”—Heirs of Burney, p. 545.

  twenty-two years old—1860 U.S. Census lists his age as forty, which would make him twenty-two years old in 1842; Charles B. McKernan Affidavit, Receiver’s Office, Ouachita, LA, Nov. 18, 1842, Receipt No. 7699, lists Burney’s age as “about 24” in 1842.

  $1.25 an acre—U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, Eastern States Land Grant certificate #7699, General Land Office, Feb. 4, 1843.

  160 acres—Madison Parish Deed Book, COB: B pp. 289–90.

  October 1846—James Arthur Thomas, Jr., unpublished family history: R. W. Burney and Mary Fredonia Williamson, Oct. 21, 1846, marriage, Christ Church, Vicksburg, MS (from Burney Long).

  wealthy Mississippi landowner—Dunbar Rowland, History of Mississippi: The Heart of the South, Vol. I (Chicago and Jackson, MS: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1925), p. 565; Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 7.

  fought as a teenager—John E. Hale, Jan. 21, 1995, “First Generation,” unpublished memo, from MCML.

  appointed Williamson surveyor general—C. Albert White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington, DC: GPO, U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, 1991), pp. 95 and 211; Senate Executive Journal, Jan. 30, 1998, phone conversation with Matt Fulgham (National Archives).

  “Ownership was as American”—Robert V. Remini, The Legacy of Andrew Jackson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), p. 89; Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 31.

  at least a dozen slaves—R. W. Burney to Judge A. Snyder, Richmond, Louisiana, Apr. 1, 1850; Mary F. Williamson et al. v. Eliza A. Dawson et al., No. 1205.

  Vicksburg investor—Gordon Cotton to A’Lelia Bundles, undated correspondence.

  “negroes, Oxen, Corn”—Heirs of Burney, p. 489.

  slaves Burney brought—Ibid., p. 490.

  “to clear up”—Ibid., p. 489.

  “be invested in negroes”—Ibid., p. 491.

  “any negro women”—Ibid., p. 495.

  $10,000—1850 U.S. Census.

  350,000 slaveholding families—Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), p. 144.

  “teaching them to read”—Howard A. White, The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 166, cites The Consolidation and Revision of the Statutes of a General Nature (New Orleans, 1852), p. 552.

  “too much information”—Editorial, Richmond Compiler, Aug. 9, 1842, quoted in “Plantation Life,” Madison Journal, Aug. 14, 1975.

  unincorporated village—Thurston H. G. Hahn III, Allen R. Saltus, Jr., and Stephen R. James, Jr., Delta Landing: Historical and Archaeological Investigations of Three Sunken Watercraft at Delta, Madison Parish, Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Coastal Environments, and Vicksburg: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, June 1994), pp. 15–16.

  “blackened like fire”—John Q. Anderson, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), p. 369.

  700,000 black men—Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 81; John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 79.

  127,639 registered voters—Charles Vincent, “Negro Leadership and Programs in the Louisiana Constitutional Convention of 1868,” Louisiana History, Vol. 10, No. 4, (Fall 1969), p. 341, cites John Rose Ficklin, History of Reconstruction in Louisiana (Through 1868) (Baltimore, 1910), pp. 169–97; A. E. Perkins, “Some Negro Officers and Legislators in Louisiana,” Journal of Negro History, Vol. 14 (Oct. 1929), pp. 523–28.

  half the delegates—Vincent, Louisiana History, p. 341.

  two were not Republicans—Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed 1863–1870 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 146.

  “Congo Convention”—Vincent, Louisiana History, p. 344.

  “Africanize”—Franklin, Reconstruction, p. 74.

  “utterly so ignorant”—Ibid.

  as much or more education—Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. 58.

  Johnson, a tailor—Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996) p. 147.

  educated in France—Vincent, Black Legislators, pp. 52–53.

  outlawing segregation on trains—Ibid., p. 62.

  “government of white people”—W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), p. 454.

  White Camellia—James G. Dauphine, “The Knights of the White Camellia and the Election of 1868: Louisiana’s White Terrorists; a Benighting Legacy,” Louisiana History, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Spring 1989), p. 173.

  CHAPTER 2 MOTHERLESS CHILD

  one thousand murders—Dauphine, Louisiana History, pp. 175–76; Records of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, Records of the Assistant Commissioner for the State of Louisiana, 1865–1869, Washington, DC, National Archives, Record Group 105, Microfilm 1027, roll 27, frames 16, 63, 262; roll 34, frames 206–308; Report of the Joint Committee of the General Assembly of Louisiana on the Conduct of the Late Elections and the Condition of Peace and Order in the State, Session of 1869 (New Orleans, 1869), p. 84; and U.S. Miscellaneous Documents, 41st Congress, 2nd Session, Serial 1435, No. 154, Part 1 (Washington, DC, 1879), pp. 298
and 555.

  proximity to—Dauphine, Louisiana History, pp. 189–90.

  widest margin—Ibid.

  “White Man’s Government”—Eric Foner and Olivia Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), pp. 87–88.

  “a black man, uncompromisingly”—Howard J. Jones, “Biographical Sketches of Members of the 1868 Louisiana State Senate,” Louisiana History, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 1978), p. 78, cites New Orleans Louisianan, Dec. 22, 1870, and New Orleans Daily Picayune, July 10, 1868.

  championed Louisiana legislation—Charles Vincent, Black Legislators in Louisiana During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), pp. 98–99.

  blacksmith—“Human Interest Story: Madam Walker,” unpublished essay from Tallulah Library, Madison Parish, Louisiana, p. 3; Cholera Epidemic of 1873, House Executive Document 95, 43rd Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: GPO, 1875), p. 115.

  “unmanageably large”—Louis C. Hunter, Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), p. 176.

  penny a pound—Ibid.

  “improvements in dress”—Howard A. White, The Freedmen’s Bureau in Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), p. 130.

  $100 marriage bond—Marriage bond (Nov. 20, 1869) and license (Dec. 6, 1869), Madison Parish, Louisiana, 13th District Court, Book B, p. 29, Madison Parish Court House.

  “ordinary person”—“Human Interest Story,” p. 3, TPL.

  “a-choppin’ cotton”—Ibid.

  “twisted and wropped with strings”—Ibid.

  state legislature declined—Joe Gray Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 462.

  “hostility to schools”—John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865-1866 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 353.

  her father remarried—Marriage bond (Aug. 26, 1874) and license (Aug. 27, 1874), Madison Parish, Louisiana, 13th District Court, Book B, p. 378, Madison Parish Court House (Dick and Will Sevier).

  “little or no opportunity”—1914 NNBL Report.

  1873 cholera epidemic—Cholera Epidemic of 1873, pp. 46 and 115.

  “armed camp”—Vincent, Black Legislators, p. 183.

  White League—The first White League was organized in Opelousas (St. Landry Parish) in late April 1874. Vincent, Black Legislators, p. 183.

  “no security, no peace”—Alexandria Caucasian, Apr. 4, 1874, cited in Alice Bayne Windham, “Methods and Mechanisms Used to Restore White Supremacy in Louisiana, 1872–1876,” unpublished M.A. thesis, Louisiana State University, 1948; Taylor, Louisiana Reconstructed, p. 282.

  removal of federal troops—C. Vann Woodward, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951, and Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 239.

  hollow log—“Through Tensas,” Chicago Tribune, May 10, 1879, p. 16; Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), pp. 167–68 and 170; Frederick W. Williamson and George T. Goodman, Eastern Louisiana: A History of the Watershed of the River and the Florida Parishes (Shreveport: Historical Record Association, 1939), p. 171.

  “hanging in the swamp”—Testimony of William Murrell in Report and Testimony of the Select Committee of the United States Senate to Investigate the Causes of the Removal of the Negroes from the Southern States to the Northern States, 46th Congress, 2nd Session, Report 693, Part II (Washington, DC: GPO, 1880), p. 520.

  “excited the colored people”—Ibid.

  “homeless, breadless”—Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi 1865-1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), p. 112.

  a porter at C. L. Chambers—Gordon Cotton/OCHM to A’Lelia Bundles, June 5, 1988; A’Lelia Bundles to Gordon Cotton, Jan. 2, 1989, confirming 1988 letter re: 1877 Vicksburg City Directory listing for “Alex Breedlow”; Gordon Cotton to author, July 9, 1998; Khaled J. Bloom, The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), p. 107.

  “craved for the beautiful”—“The Life Work of Mme. C. J. Walker,” Indpls. Freeman, Dec. 26, 1914, p. 1.

  re-created part of the floor plan—Author’s conversations with Robert Burney Long and Anne Long Case.

  “the province of black women”—Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 125.

  “onerous”—Tera W. Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 52 and 56.

  “16 shooters”—Edward Leonard affidavit, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, p. 61.

  abridge their rights—Painter, Exodusters, p. 186.

  “Now is the time to go”—Benjamin “Pap” Singleton flier, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka.

  railroad company circulars—R. C. Overton, The First Ninety Years: An Historical Sketch of the Burlington Railroad 1850–1940 (Chicago: Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, 1940), pp. 22–23.

  “plenty of coal”—Singleton flier.

  “poor, battered”—Painter, Exodusters, p. 197.

  clotted together at Vicksburg—Testimony of Charlton H. Tandy, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, pp. 36–37.

  “African hegira”—Vicksburg Herald, Feb. 28, 1879, cited in St. Joseph North Louisiana Journal, Mar. 8, 1879, and in Painter, Exodusters, p. 185.

  “cut very bad”—Curtis Pollard Affidavit, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, pp. 47–48.

  nearly 700 refugees—Murrell Testimony, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, pp. 512–13.

  “every road”—Hinds County Gazette, Mar. 5, 1879, cited in Painter, Exodusters, p. 186.

  “I was accused”—Pollard Affidavit, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, p. 9.

  black Republican Club president—Murrell Testimony, Select Committee of the United States Senate, 1880, pp. 514–15.

  1,600 Exodusters—Ibid., p. 513.

  first job as a porter—St. Louis City Directory, 1881 and 1882.

  CHAPTER 3 WIFE, MOTHER, WIDOW

  “I married at the age of fourteen”—National Negro Business League Report of the Seventeenth Annual Session, Kansas City, Missouri, Aug. 16–18, 1916 (Washington, DC: William H. Davis, 1916), p. 135.

  $200 Mississippi marriage bond—Gordon Cotton to author, Aug. 13, 1998.

  “exceptionally good”—Harry P. Owens, Steamboats and the Cotton Economy: River Trade in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990), p. 108.

  churches and benevolent societies—W. E. Mollison, The Leading Afro-Americans of Vicksburg, Mississippi (Vicksburg: Biographia Publishing Co., 1908), pp. 73–78; Jonathan Beasley, “Blacks—Slave and Free—Vicksburg, 1850–1860,” Journal of Mississippi History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Feb. 1976), p. 12.

  “Her father having been killed”—Konrad Bercovici, “The Black Blocks of Manhattan,” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, Vol. 40/41 (after 1923), GSC/CU.

  “I don’t think”—David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981), p. 168, cites LWR to Walter White, Nov. 10, 1924 (Walter White Papers, LOC).

  “reported killed in a race riot”—Marjorie Stewart Joyner, “The Saga of the First Woman Millionaire Manufacturer” (appears to be a convention booklet, possibly from Joyner’s organization, circa 1946–48); on the basis of Marjorie Joyner’s assertion that he had been lynched in this article and in personal conversations with Joyner during the 1980s, this author in Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (New York: Chelsea House, 1991), a young adult biography of Madam Walker, stated that he was killed in an accident. But even the “accident” cannot be substantiated upon further investigation.

  “Is Daddy coming back?”—Harry B. Webber, “Grim Awakening to Her Future Was I
ncentive to Mme. Walker,” Pittsburgh Courier, Mar. 15, 1952, p. 12.

  “bodies thrown into the river”—Ibid.

  95 people whose lynchings—NNBL Report 1916, p. 176.

  massacred in Carrollton—Christian, Black Saga, p. 267.

  “impossible to make any estimate”—Raymond Gazette, July 18, 1885, cited in Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, p. 224.

  “several lynchings”—“Lynchings,” Centennial Edition of the Madison Journal, Aug. 14, 1975, 8-VI, cites the Times-Democrat, July 24, 1889.

  “no single instance”—Wharton, Negro in Mississippi, p. 224.

  Mississippi lynching victims—E. M. Beck, “Listing of Lynching Victims: Mississippi, 1882–1930,” unpublished, Feb. 26, 1996, pp. 1–6; Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 41.

  “5,000 Negroes Lynched”—Ralph Ginzburg, “A Partial Listing of Approximately 5,000 Negroes Lynched in the United States since 1859,” in 100 Years of Lynching (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), pp. 262–65.

  aside from murder—A’Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur (New York: Chelsea House, 1991), p. 27 (on the basis of interviews with Dr. Marjorie Stewart Joyner in the 1980s, the author was told that Moses McWilliams had died tragically, leading to the speculation in early editions of this young adult biography that he had “died in an accident”).

  Hundreds of young, single and widowed—Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 155–56.

  200,000 unmarried women—U.S. Bureau of the Census, Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1893), pp. 36–45; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negro Population 1790–1915, pp. 509 and 526, cited in Beverly Washington Jones, Quest for Equality: The Life and Writings of Mary Eliza Church Terrell, 1863–1954 (Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1990), pp. 24 and 99 (fn. 29).

  Anchor Line—Andrew Morrison and John H. C. Irwin, The Industries of Saint Louis: Her Advantages, Resources, Facilities and Commercial Relations as a Center of Trade and Manufacture (St. Louis: J. M. Elstner & Co., 1885), p. 29.