The Last Hero
Page 3
“Our name changed often,”4 Henry would explain. “My mother and father, they could not read or write, and so it was spelled differently many times over the years.”
Herbert Aaron had come to Mobile as a slender nineteen-year-old without prospects beyond labor, and although he was unable to read or write, he was determined nevertheless that life would be better for him than it had been for his father. He considered himself religious—he attended Episcopal Sunday services in Mobile—but, unlike his predecessors, did not envision a life rooted in the church.
In Mobile, work was plentiful but unpredictable in its reliability. Mobile was Alabama’s main port city, and in the years following World War I, it boasted a growing economy and a diversity of jobs. This optimism stood in strong contrast to the city’s sagging economic fortunes in the decades following the Civil War. In later years, when his son grew famous, Herbert would tell interviewers that, in terms of manual labor, he had done it all. In Camden, he had picked cotton, as well as operated heavy machinery and motorized farm equipment. According to city records, Herbert and Stella moved to 1170 Elmira Street in Down the Bay, one of the two major residential areas for blacks inside of Mobile’s city limits. Rent was six dollars per month. In the Mobile city directory, Herbert listed his first job as a laborer, and later he drove a truck for the Southall Coal Company.
Down the Bay was situated in the southern part of the city, blocks away from the idyllic magnolia-lined beauty of Government Street, bordered by the Magnolia Cemetery to the south, Government Street to the north, and Cedar and Ann streets to the east and west, respectively. Demographically, Down the Bay was poor, unemployment high. The neighborhood was primarily black, but, unlike Davis Avenue—the main thoroughfare, which served as the center of the other predominately black section of Mobile—not without diversity. The 1930 census listed fifteen dwellings on Elmira Street, seven white households, eight black. Whites lived on each end of Elmira, the blacks in the middle. To the north, by contrast, was Davis Avenue, once known as Stone Street and then renamed before the Civil War for Jefferson Davis. It was called “Darkey Town” by blacks and whites alike before adopting the more modern and proud nickname “the Avenue.”
To northerners, Mobile seemed both formidable and chilling. The city was situated in the deepest part of the Deep South, just miles from the Mississippi border, a frightening pocket of intolerance, where good people who said or did the wrong things might just disappear. To white and black southerners alike, however, Mobile was one of the more livable cities for blacks. Bienville Square, with its rushing alabaster water fountain and softly blossomed magnolias and oaks, represented the best of Mobile for its whites, the middle- and upper-class gentry, and on special days—birthdays, holidays—the white poor. The park represented southern beauty, especially on those perfect spring days before the heat soared, and for a time in the late nineteenth century, both blacks and whites had come to see Bienville Square as a place representative of all of the city’s residents.
Both races, naturally, came to resent the northern view of Mobile as another intractable southern monolith. It was not uncommon for blacks to rise to the defense of Mobile as an example of southern tolerance. One of the reasons Mobilians tended to take a more benign view of race relations was due to its population. Unlike Wilcox County, where a small number of whites controlled four times as many blacks, the white population in Mobile hovered around 50 percent.
By the time Herbert and Stella arrived, legal and social segregation had been firmly entrenched for nearly two decades, and in that regard Mobile was no different from the rest of the South. Locals believed that despite the law, daily accommodations had allowed both blacks and whites to live in relative dignity. It was an idea, of course, that rested on the notion that moderation resided in the eye of the beholder. If you were the ones on top, daily life might have been fine, acceptable, without the coarse and brutal edge of, say, Birmingham.
If you were black and did not upset the social order, it was not necessary to live in fear. Moderation also depended on one’s standard of measurement, and in the South, the measure had always been Birmingham, two hundred miles to the north, centered in the heart of the Black Belt, both in the agricultural and racial sense. The locals would always use the backbreaking rigidity of Birmingham as the standard, and the contrast always worked in Mobile’s favor. Compared to Birmingham, Mobile appeared almost sleepy.
Part of the reason for this was its quirky history. Where most regions in the South were demarcated by the oppressive and linear weight of slavery, Mobile’s racial lines were somewhat less obvious. The city had been inhabited by the French and the Spanish. Where in much of the South there were just blacks and whites, Mobile was populated with another racial group, Creoles of Color. Though the event would first be co-opted and later defined by New Orleans, Mobile was the first city in the United States to celebrate Mardi Gras. The historical demographics of the city—with its high number of French and Spanish and a high number of citizens of mixed racial origin—made it difficult to strictly enforce the emerging racial codes that had effectively destroyed the promises of Reconstruction.
The truth was, however, that during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, whites across the South organized a massive resistance to whatever gains blacks had made during Reconstruction. If fond memories existed of Bienville Square as a gathering place for all Mobilians, it was also true that long after the nation had abolished the slave trade, illegal slave ships docked on the Mobile River, next to the L&N Railroad and the Mobile and Ohio docks, and chained-together captured Africans were sold at auction in Bienville Square during the week. Another old slave market stood blocks away, on Royal Street, between St. Anthony and Congress.
During the first two and a half decades of the twentieth century, southern whites methodically restored the old social order through a punishing combination of legal and extralegal means. Mobile, despite an exterior gentility and a favorable comparison to some of the harsher southern cities, did not escape this organized assault on black freedoms.
In 1900, Montgomery adopted a series of segregation ordinances. Mobile was under similar pressure to enact stricter segregation laws, though the city had been relatively free of major incident. The following year, numerous states, including Alabama, rewrote their state constitutions, legally imposing segregation orders, disenfranchising blacks from voting and other social freedoms they had enjoyed during Reconstruction. Between 1895 and 1909, the first year of Herbert’s life, a massive campaign of disenfranchisement had begun.
South Carolina enacted laws severely limiting people of color from voting and prohibiting contact between the races in terms of education, marriage, adoption, public facilities, transportation, and prisons. During the same period, similar laws were enacted in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia (“White persons who marry a colored person shall be jailed up to one year, and fined up to $100. Those who perform such a marriage ceremony will be guilty of a misdemeanor and fined up to $200”), Maryland, Washington, Idaho, California (“Persons of Japanese descent in 1909 were added to the list of undesirable marriage partners of white Californians as noted in the earlier 1880 statute”), Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, North Dakota (literacy tests) and South Dakota (intermarriage or illicit cohabitation forbidden between blacks and whites, punishable by a fine up to one thousand dollars, or by imprisonment up to ten years, or both), Kansas, and Nebraska.
In justifying separation of the races, the press served as an effective tool to incite fear among whites. It purported that blacks did not possess the social capacity to be treated with the same courtesies as whites, and that blacks were dangerous, uncivilized, a grave threat to the safety of the white women of Mobile. (In 1915, Alabama passed a statewide law prohibiting “White female nurses from caring for black male patients.”)
The social order had
been upset by the large influx of blacks who inhabited the city during the final decade of the 1800s. The Mobile Daily Item was the most actively hostile newspaper in the city toward blacks—its coverage only spurred growing insistence among whites for the return of segregation. During a ten-day period in October 1902, its coverage proved even more relentless:
FURY OF A TEXAS MOB5
Finds satisfaction in lynching of negroes
HEMPSTEAD, TEX., OCTOBER 21—After being tried with legal form and procedure for criminal assault and murder and given the death penalty in each case, Jim Wesley and Reddick Barton, negroes, were, late this afternoon taken from the authorities and lynched in the public square by an infuriated mob
NEGRO PEEPER6
Is discovered on the gallery of a
citizen residing on Espejo Street
Mr. Charles Helmer, while on his way home Tuesday night last with his wife and a party of ladies saw a negro on the gallery of Mr. George McCary, on Espejo Street, near Government. The Negro was on the gallery peeping through the blinds and when one of the ladies discovered him, he jumped to the ground. Mr. Helmer chased the man across a pasture but was unable to capture him.
The black response derived from the old paternalistic relationships with whites. The famous educator Booker T. Washington appealed to the white city elders across the South to confront the “criminal colored elements” but not to “punish the entire Negro race” with segregation ordinances. Washington’s disciples began echoing a similar theme in Mobile. Washington was already a national figure, and his presence in Mobile increased the influence of two black businessmen, Charles Allen and A. N. Johnson. Washington would vacation with Allen, often fishing at his home. Johnson owned a funeral home prominent in the black community and published his own newspaper, where he often broke with Washington’s doctrines of appeasement with whites. Washington appealed to whites to recall the positive relationships between the two races, a relationship that in large part favored whites. Johnson seemed to have a clearer notion of white intentions. Through his writing, he sought to challenge the existing structure. He understood that a single increase in restrictions would only lead to more.
Johnson was right in his belief that a movement to undo current relationships between the races was afoot. Erwin Craighhead, the editor of the ostensibly moderate Register, endorsed in an editorial the necessity of segregation on streetcars. These sensational headlines and editorials only heightened racial tensions in the city, and any idea that Mobile would be different from the rest of the South crumbled. The newspapers increased their character assault on Mobile’s blacks, including a decision by the newspaper editors to publish on the front page reports of crimes committed by blacks hundreds of miles away.
BOUND FACE TO FACE7
They had murdered a young farmer
while on his way home
One of the negroes escaped into Arkansas
NEWBORN, TENN., OCTOBER 8—Garfield Burley, and Curtis Brown, negroes, were lynched here at 9 o’clock tonight by a mob of 500 persons…. The mob would not listen to the judge and forcibly took possession of the two men…. Ropes were presented and the two men were taken to a telephone pole where they were securely tied face to face. At a given word, they were strung up and in a few minutes both were pronounced dead. The lynching programme was carried out in an orderly manner, not a shot being fired.
BAD NEGRO
Sam Harris Riddled with Bullets at Salem Ala.
USED AXE ON WOMEN8
The negro was placed in custody and held until Miss Meadows had sufficiently recovered to identify him. This she did at 4 o’clock this afternoon, and the negro was taken in charge by about 125 armed men and his body riddled with bullets on the spot. He denied his guilt until the first shot was fired, when he acknowledged the crime.
By October 16, 1902, Mobile reacted with a sweeping ordinance that had been adopted in New Orleans, as well as in Montgomery and Memphis.
TEN MORE POLICEMEN PROVIDED9
FOR CITY: SEPARATION OF THE
RACES ON STREET CARS
Petitions, circulated by the Item and
Signed by More Than 500 People,
Read and Favorably Acted Upon—
full text for the Ordinance Requiring
the Separation of the Races on
All of the Street Cars.
Be it ordained by the mayor and general counsel of the city of Mobile as follows: That all street railcars operated in the city of Mobile and its police jurisdiction shall provide seats for the white people and negroes, when there are white people and negroes on the same car, by requiring the conductor or any other employee in charge of said car or cars to assign passengers to seats on the cars, or when the car is divided in two compartments in such manner as to separate the white people from the negroes by seating the white people in the front seats and the negroes in the rear seats as they enter said cars; but in the event such order of seating might cause inconvenience to those who are already properly seated, the conductor … may use his discretion in seating passengers, but in such manner that no white person and negro must be placed or seated in the same section or compartment arranged for two persons; provided that negro nurses having in charge white children or sick or infirm white persons may be assigned seats among the white people.
Be it further ordained, that all conductors and other employees while in charge of cars are hereby invoked with the police power of a police officer of the city of Mobile, to carry out rail provisions, and any person failing or refusing to take a seat among those assigned to the race to which he or she belongs, if there is any such seat vacant, at the behest of a conductor … shall, upon conviction, be fined a sum not less than five dollars and not more than fifty dollars.
And so it was done. Jim Crow laws were now established in Mobile, if not as violently enforced as in other southern cities, although equally rigid. Two weeks later, on November 1, the black leaders A. F. Owens, A. N. Johnson, and A. N. McEwen staged a boycott, which lasted barely two months. During the time of the boycott, some white business owners, unconvinced the city would benefit from the segregation ordinance, openly defied it. James Wilson, the owner of the Mobile Light and Railroad Company, told his conductors not to enforce the law. Whites sat anywhere they chose on Wilson’s cars, and blacks were, for a time, seen seated in the front. The courts intervened and the segregation laws were not only upheld but strengthened. On streetcars, conductors could use their own discretion in upholding the ordinances. After December 1902, whites faced jail time and a fifty-dollar fine for not upholding segregation statutes.
Streetcars were the first step. Total segregation came next, followed by the vigilante violence Mobile thought it had avoided. The outspoken black leaders, who once believed they had a voice, fled the city. A. N. Johnson escaped to Nashville in 1907.
“With the disintegration of the boycott10 and the court’s decision, segregated public conveyances legally became an established element of life in Mobile—a condition that persisted unchanged until the 1950s,” historian and Mobile native David Alsobrook wrote in his comprehensive 1983 dissertation. “By 1904, Mobile’s blacks, as in other southern cities, were separated from whites by municipal and state laws and by customs. Mobile had segregated public conveyances, schools, parks, restaurants, hotels, theaters, hospitals, cemeteries, saloons and brothels. With the single exception of public transportation, segregation was maintained without the passage of municipal ordinances.”
By the time Herbert and Stella arrived, whites and blacks alike now lived under a new, terrifying system, naturally worse for blacks but also not easy for whites who didn’t believe in segregation. David Alsobrook recalled walking down the street in Mobile one day as a boy and seeing the charred remains of a cross. In addition to the legal segregation codes was the daily etiquette whites demanded, unwritten codes that, if not followed, could be deadly. Herbert knew them all by heart:
No offering handshakes with whites, for it assumed equality.
No offering to light a white woman’s cigarette.
All whites were to be addressed as “sir,” “mister” or “ma’am,” but whites were free to address blacks by their first names or “boy.”
This was Herbert Aaron’s America. He knew where he stood.
CHILDREN WERE BORN frequently to the Aarons. The combination of children and Herbert’s constant (and not always successful) search for work forced the family to look for housing as often as Stella bore children. A son, Herbert junior, was born in 1930, and the family moved again, this time to 10 O’Guinn. Then the family moved to 1112 Elmira, before renting another apartment in Down the Bay, at 666 Wilkinson, for nine dollars per month.
Four years later, on February 5, 1934, at 8:25 p.m., Stella gave birth again, this time to a twelve-and-a-quarter-pound boy named Henry Louis. The baby was so large that Stella nicknamed him “the Man.”
A year before Henry was born, Herbert took a job as a part-time riveter at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, on Pinto Island, on the Mobile River. The company had been in business since World War I. Herbert worked as a boilermaker assistant and riveter on coal barges, minesweepers for the U.S. Navy, and tank barges for oil companies. The work was hard and often irregular, but a few years later, as the war in Europe escalated and tensions with Japan increased, a job at ADDSCO became one of the plum ones to have in Mobile, especially for blacks. At the company’s peak, a third of ADDSCO’s workers were black, though that did not mean the workforce was treated with complete equity. The riveting and manufacturing and labor crews were largely segregated. Blacks and whites entered together through the large main gate, but both proceeded through designated separate entrances. When he first accepted the job, Herbert was paid sixteen cents an hour.