On Her Own Ground

  “Of course, they have your name”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, #1 (MWC/IHS).

  in the “spirit of race internationalism”—The World Forum, Jan. 1919.

  “assured the delegation of his unqualified and genuine approval”—Ibid.

  Harboring their own expansionist objectives—Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 520 and 566.

  “the next war would pit white nations”—Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 101.

  “If Japan and China raised”—“The Race Issue at the Peace Table,” New York Age, Nov. 30, 1918.

  “There is no sympathy between Japan”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, #3.

  who was said to have arranged the Kuriowa meeting—Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. 1: 1826–August 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 345.

  “We admonish Negroes not to be appealed to”—A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, “Japan and the Far East” The Messenger, July 1918, p. 23.

  had “no faith in the management”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, #1 (MWC/IHS)

  “You will have to watch your League”—FBR to MW, Jan. 17, 1919.

  “beginning to grow seriously apprehensive”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, #1.

  For at least a year this undercover operative—Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 80.

  Jonas also approached the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation—Ibid. (The Bureau of Investigation became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1936.)

  “recruiting black, Japanese, Hindu and Chinese”—Ibid.

  Now, presumably, Madam Walker’s name had been added—A Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files on Madam Walker yielded no information. (J. Kevin O’Brien, Chief, Freedom of Information Privacy Acts Section, Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice, letter to author, Dec. 3, 1993, regarding Request No. 376915 and 376916/C. J. Walker and A’Lelia Walker.)

  “nothing about the man Randolph”—FBR to MW, Jan 25, 1919, #1. As founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and as an organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, Randolph would become one of the most important black political leaders of the twentieth century.

  The dignified and eloquent son—Anderson, A. Philip Randolph, p. 44.

  While taking night classes—Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, p. 8.

  Randolph with his rich baritone—Anderson, Randolph, p. 77.

  “His delivery was . . . impeccable”—Ibid., p. 78.

  Madam Walker and Randolph probably first met—Ibid., p. 70.

  With her own salon on 135th Street—Ibid.

  a light-skinned woman—Ibid.

  Lucille had run . . . for the New York state legislature—Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 77.

  Her “considerable income”—Anderson, Randolph, pp. 71 and 75.

  “work for a salary”—Ibid., p.78.

  “We were on an uncharted sea”—Ibid.

  the magazine’s second issue—Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 77.

  “Without her money”—Anderson, Randolph, p. 82.

  “never saw . . . at a dance or a party”—Ibid., p. 72.

  “sometimes invited him to Madam Walker’s parties”—Ibid.

  “She was a woman of common sense”—“The Reminiscences of A. Philip Randolph,” transcript of interview by Wendell Wray, 1972, pp. 124, 128–29 and 137, Oral History Research, Columbia University.

  “She was not a literate woman”—Ibid.

  “no intelligent Negro is willing”—Anderson, Randolph, p. 104, cites The Messenger, July 1918.

  “growth of socialism, which is the death of capitalism”—Randolph and Owen, “Japan and the Far East,” p. 22; “Who’s Who: Mme. C. J. Walker,” The Messenger, July 1918, p. 30.

  “a factor in the economic, political”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, Letter #1.

  “I know you are fond of Louis George”—Ibid.

  “It evidently did not occur”—FBR to MW, Jan. 27, 1919 (MWC/IHS).

  “I, for one, am sorry”—FBR to MW, Jan. 25, 1919, #3.

  “identified with the socialist element” and “Diplomatic, persistent”—FBR to MW, Jan 6, 1919 (incorrectly dated as Jan. 6, 1918).

  “The only thing I am concerned”—FBR to MW, Jan. 11, 1919.

  “I am glad to note that you are not”—FBR to MW, Feb. 1, 1919, #2 (MWC/IHS).

  “Owing to the fact”—FBR to MW, Feb. 3, 1919, #1 (MWC/IHS); “Mme. C. J. Walker Quits Newly Formed League,” New York Age, Feb. 8, 1919.

  “While I believe in the objects”—“Dr. Powell Resigns As Head of League,” New York Age, Mar. 15, 1919.

  Without their backing, the International League of Darker People collapsed—Hill, Marcus Garvey Papers, Vol. 1, p. 345.

  “buy and sell toilet preparations”—“Affidavit in support of application for a passport to go abroad on commercial business,” Feb. 5, 1919.

  Certainly her most recent advertisements—“A Million Eyes Turned Upon It Daily,” Walker ad, New York Age, Feb. 18, 1919.

  “merely subterfuge to get to the peace conference”—FBR to MW, Feb. 5, 1919 (MWC/IHS).

  The Wilson administration . . . was “quite determined”—Ibid.

  “If you are not going to make a bonafide effort”—Ibid.

  “I was afraid that your name had been sent in”—FBR to MW, Feb. 17, 1919 (MWC/IHS).

  “If passports are to be requested for the above”—W. H. Loving report on National Race Congress, Dec. 20, 1918.

  refuse passports for all National Race Congress delegates—Acting Chief, FBI, to R. W. Flournoy, State Dept., from RG 65, Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, File OG 336880 (Microfilm M1085). The Acting Chief, not formally appointed until Feb. 10, 1919, was William E. Allen (per Maureen Grenke, FBI Research Office, phone conversation with author, Apr. 5, 2000).

  “more or less agitators”—Ibid.

  “first major interference in African American politics”—Kornweibel, “Seeing Red,” p. 15.

  no “formal policy barring black travelers”—Ibid.

  Madam Walker sent a personal check for $25—MW to James Weldon Johnson, Feb. 15, 1919, NAACP Papers, Part I (1909–1959), Administrative File, Subject File, Pan African Congress, LOC; Johnson to Executive Committee of NAACP New York Branch, Feb. 11, 1919, NAACP Papers, LOC.

  Having just received a cable from Paris—Johnson to MW, Feb. 19, 1919, NAACP Papers, LOC.

  “In private advices from Dr. Du Bois”—Ibid.

  “sixteen nations, protectorates and colonial entities”—Lewis, Du Bois, p. 574.

  “unable to grant passports”—“Cannot Attend Conference to Be Held in Paris in Feb’y,” New York Age, Feb. 8, 1919.

  “convinced that Allied officials had effectively sabotaged”—Skinner, African Americans, pp. 407–8.

  But on the very day he reached Paris—Fox, The Guardian of Boston, p. 226.

  still hoping to . . . lobby for a racial equality clause—Stephen R. Fox, “William Monroe Trotter,” in Logan and Winston, DANB, p. 605; Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson, p. 567.

  And although the Japanese delegation had met with Colonel House—“Japanese Again Bring Up the Race Question,” New York Age, undated clipping (1919).

  A’LELIA WALKER: AN AFTERWORD

  she hoped to “find” herself—JAK to LWR, Feb. 2, 1922 (MWFC/APB).

  “excellent write-up in the French papers”—JAK to LWR, Dec. 30, 1921 (MWFC/APB).

  “négresse”—LWR to the editor of L’Intransigeant, MSRC, OG Folder, #276, 1921.

  “I am utterly surprised”—Ibid.

  “Her appearance . . . was so spectacular”—Bruce Kellner, ed., “Keep a-Inchin’ Along”: Selected Writings of Carl Van Vechten about Black Art and Letters (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 154.

  In Addis Ababa, she became the first American—“Mrs. Lelia Wilson Guest of Abyssinian Empress,” Chicago Defender, Mar. 25, 1922.

  “I think of the whole of Europe”
—JAK to LWR, Dec. 8, 1921 (MWFC/APB).

  $486,762 in 1919—Sale of Products, undated document, circa 1936 (MWFC/APB).

  “I do not know of anything that can be done”—LWR to FBR, Dec. 8, 1923 (MWC/IHS).

  “I feel we have exploited this field” and “Everything has its day”—LWR to FBR, Nov. 13, 1923 (MWC/IHS).

  “the Negro was in vogue”—Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981; originally published 1930), pp. 223–28.

  all hoped their cultural revolution—Arnold Rampersad, “Introduction” in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Macmillan, 1992; originally published by Albert & Charles Boni, 1925), p. xvi.

  “now surpasses that of Broadway”—Variety, Oct. 16, 1929.

  Selected Bibliography

  Books

  Adele Logan Alexander, Homelands and Waterways: The American Journey of the Bond Family, 1846–1926 ( New York: Pantheon Books, 1999 ).

  James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 ( Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988 ).

  Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait ( New York: Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973 ).

  ———, This Was Harlem 1900–1950 ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981 ).

  John Q. Anderson, Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861–1868 ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972 ).

  Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience ( New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999 ).

  Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vol. 2: From Reconstruction to the Founding of the N.A.A.C.P. ( New York: Citadel Press, 1990 ).

  ———, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, 1910–1932, Vol. 3 ( New York: Citadel Press, 1973, reprint 1993 ).

  Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 ).

  Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line ( New York: Doubleday, 1908 ).

  Edward A. Berlin, King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and His Era ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 ).

  Caroline Bird, Enterprising Women ( New York: W. W. Norton, 1976 ).

  Khaled J. Bloom, The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993 ).

  David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, eds., Encyclopedia of Indianapolis ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994 ).

  John Bodnar, Roger Simon and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians and Poles of Pittsburgh 1900–1960 ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982 ).

  Paul F. Boller, Jr., Presidential Anecdotes ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1996 ).

  Joseph J. Boris, ed., Who’s Who in Colored America, Vol. 1 ( New York: Who’s Who in Colored America Corp., 1927 ).

  Eric Breitbart, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair 1904 ( Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997 ).

  A’Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam C. J. Walker: Entrepreneur ( New York: Chelsea House, 1991 ).

  Mary Butler, Frances Thornton and Garth “Duff” Stoltz, The Battle Creek Idea: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium ( Battle Creek, MI: Heritage Publications, 1998 ).

  Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis ( London: Jonathan Cape, 1946 ).

  The Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922 ).

  Charles M. Christian, Black Saga: The African American Experience ( Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985 ).

  Cyprian Clamorgan, The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis ( 1858 ).

  Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller, Saint Louis in the Gilded Age ( St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1993 ).

  Jeffrey J. Crow, Paul D. Escott and Flora J. Hatley, A History of African Americans in North Carolina ( Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Division of Archives and History, 1994 ).

  Susan Curtis, Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin ( Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994 ).

  John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865–1866 ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965 ).

  Scott Derks, ed., The Value of a Dollar: Prices and Incomes in the United States ( Detroit: Gale Research, 1994 ).

  Howard Dodson, Christopher Moore and Roberta Yancy, The Black New Yorkers: The Schomburg Illustrated Chronology ( New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2000 ).

  Lyle W. Dorsett, The Queen City: A History of Denver ( Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Company, 1977 ).

  Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s ( New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995 ).

  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 ).

  ———, The Souls of Black Folk ( New York: Everyman’s Library/Alfred A. Knopf, 1993; originally published 1903 ).

  Alfreda M. Duster, ed., Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970 ).

  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 ).

  Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History ( New York: Kodansha International, 1997; originally published 1966 ).

  Abraham Epstein, The Negro Migrant in Pittsburgh ( Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh School of Economics, 1918 ).

  Sir John Eric Erichsen, Practical Treatise on the Diseases of the Scalp ( London: John Churchill, 1842 ).

  Henri Florette, Black Migration: Movement North 1900–1920 ( Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1975 ).

  Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996 ).

  ———, and Olivia Mahoney, America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics after the Civil War ( New York: HarperCollins, 1995 ).

  Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter ( New York: Atheneum, 1970 ).

  John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom ( 5th ed. ; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980 ).

  ———, Reconstruction After the Civil War ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994 ).

  ———, The Free Negro in North Carolina 1790–1860 ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995 ; originally published 1943 ).

  E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie ( New York: Collier Books, 1962 ).

  Alfred C. Fuller, A Foot in the Door ( New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960 ).

  Willard Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880–1920 ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 ).

  ———, Slave and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox ( Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1979 ).

  Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America ( New York: William Morrow, 1984 ).

  Ralph Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynching ( Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988 ).

  Polly Anne Graff and Stewart Graff, Wolfert’s Roost: Portrait of a Village (Irvingtonon-Hudson, NY: Washington Irving Press, 1971 ).

  Lorenzo J. Greene, Gary R. Kremer and Antonio F. Holland, Missouri’s Black Heritage (rev. ed.; Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993 ).

  Howard S. Greenfield, Caruso: An Illustrated Life ( North Pomfret, VT: Trafalgar Square Publishing, 1991 ).

  Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Daughters of Sorrow: Attitudes Toward Black Women, 1880–1920 ( Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1990 ).

  ———, and Jo Moore Stewart, Spelman: A Centennial Celebration ( Atlanta: Spelman College, 1981 ).

  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 ).

  Charles E. Hall and Z. R. Pettet, Negroes in the United States: 1920–32 ( Washington, DC: GPO, 1935 ).

  Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1972 ).

  ———, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915 ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1983 ).

  Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business Among American Negroes ( Chicago: Urban Research, 1992 reprint ).

  Middleton Harris, The Black Book ( New York: Random House, 1974 ).

  Alferdteen Harrison, ed., Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South ( Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1991 ).

  August Heckscher, Woodrow Wilson ( New York: Collier Books, 1991 ).

  Paul Heinegg, Free African Americans of North Carolina and Virginia ( 3rd ed.; Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1997 ).

  ———, Free African Americans of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, MD and Delaware (“www.freeafricanamericans.com/Roberts Skip.htm”>www.freeafricanamericans.com/Roberts_Skip.htm, March 1999 ).

  Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream ( New York: Oxford University Press, 1981 ).

  Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993 ).

  Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, Vol. I : 1826–August 1919 ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 ).

  Darlene Clark Hine, When the Truth Is Told ( Indianapolis: National Council of Negro Women, Indianapolis Section, 1981 ).

  ———, Wilma King and Linda Reed, eds., We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible ( Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Publishing, 1995 ).

  ———, Elsa Barkley Brown and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, eds., Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia ( Brooklyn: Carlson Publishing, 1993 ).