House and the association officers explained to the membership that repeatedly introducing legislation, submitting petitions from old ex-slaves, and engaging lobbyists would someday gain a committee hearing and then perhaps a vote. Standing before the poor and working blacks who had elected her to office, Callie House expressed both the optimism of the moment and the practical view learned from years of black struggle. She told members that grassroots petitions and lobbying would someday gain victory in Congress for their efforts, but the bill would not pass soon. The struggle would be necessarily long and problematic, but the principle of debt owed should never be abandoned.
Unlike Vaughan’s operation and other mutual assistance fraternities, the association opened its membership to all, emphasizing that their organization had no “secret grips or passwords.” The association’s simple goal was to put the name of every ex-slave on a petition asking Congress to pass a bill providing pensions. Surely the plight of these old African-American men and women, aging, ill, and impoverished from hard work and ill treatment during slavery—many of whom were the relatives of the white middle class—deserved recognition. These people’s unpaid labor and service had continued during the Civil War as they had served as washerwomen, nurses, and laborers repairing levees, widening drainage ditches, and building fortifications. Their cause should compel sympathy and money when their status was compared to that of Union veterans, who, even if they had served for only ninety days far from the battlefield, could claim an inability to perform manual labor, whatever their occupation or income, and receive a government pension of $12 a month.18
The Association placed great emphasis on self-help. Local chapters were required to use part of the dues to pay for the burial of members and to provide mutual assistance in time of sickness and need. At the time such private aid organizations were the only help available for poor African Americans. These functions did not depend on the success of the pension legislation but would build solidarity in the group. In the meantime, the association would keep the reparations claim before the public, declaring it a matter of justice for African Americans.
The Ex-Slave Association was unusual in its origins and purposes. Sociologist Rebecca Ash and other scholars argue that movements have either radical change or service goals. The ex-slave movement had a dual mission from the beginning: the attainment of federal pension legislation and mutual aid to poor members. Although the controversial nature of the pension demand brought the association legal troubles, its mutual assistance activities accorded with the national self-help emphasis of the late nineteenth century.
African Americans had long been in the habit of forming mutual assistance associations, providing help when government refused to help. For African Americans, such mediating institutions historically provided the only available social assistance. Government provision of social services to the African-American community is a relatively recent development.19
Thousands of ex-slaves signed petitions like this one to Congress asking for pensions for their forced labor during slavery. Those who could read and write made sure that those who could not were included.
In 1787, in Philadelphia, blacks led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones withdrew as a body from the prejudiced whites of St. George’s Church and formed the Free African Society, the first African-American mutual-aid society. The members pledged to help one another in sickness and death and to provide for widows and children of the deceased. They also purchased a plot to use as a burial ground. Mutual-aid societies, often connected with a church, spread rapidly in northern urban communities and among free Negroes in New Orleans, Charleston, and other southern cities. In this period, long before the Social Security Act of 1935, the societies aided the elderly or disabled and provided a decent burial for the impecunious.20
With Emancipation, the concept of the benevolent association grew rapidly until it was employed by Mrs. House and the association. It was one component of the broad effort at community care among African Americans, which included secret societies, homes for children, old-age homes, and a flexible family system for individuals throughout the life cycle. At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Ex-Slave Association began, a freedman or-woman emancipated at age thirty would have been sixty-seven. Among the first generation of African Americans to enjoy freedom, large numbers were in their sixties, seventies, and eighties and unable to work at manual labor because they were suffering from a variety of ills, some stemming from the hardships endured during slavery. The rapidly aging members overwhelmed local benevolent societies. The crisis underscored the need for both parts of the Ex-Slave Association’s agenda of mutual aid and pensions.21
In 1898, when the Ex-Slave Association sought its charter, Nashville already had a number of benevolent institutions. The 1895 smallpox epidemic and the continuing admonitions of the public health officer caused the white Ladies’ Relief Society to increase help to poor whites and to challenge black leaders to do the same for African Americans. Thirty leading African-American women formed the Colored Relief Society for this purpose. Other relief organizations, including the Nashville Provident Association, founded in 1865 to give firewood and soup to needy freedmen, still operated. Nashville’s African-American churches, like those elsewhere, offered benevolent auxiliaries. The association’s mutual aid filled a crucial gap in these disparate and generally underfinanced services for an aging and ill population. Suffering from poverty, bad diet, injuries from abuse during slavery, and hard work since, many ex-slaves over the age of seventy had a difficult time making their battered bodies continue to work at the hard-labor jobs available to them. Moreover, the poverty of the “first freedom” generation of African Americans meant they could not sustain both their older relatives and their own families.22
Nashville’s better-off African Americans put some resources into helping the poor, but they showed more concern for civil rights and opportunities than for addressing poverty. As Jim Crow and disenfranchisement became law and the lynching of African Americans became common across the South, they also took their toll in Nashville. Indelibly etched in the minds of local ex-slaves was the 1892 lynching of Eph Gizzard, who had been accused of raping a white woman. On April 30, while the city was still in the grips of the seventeen-foot March snowstorm, the largest in history, Gizzard was hanged by a mob right downtown at 2:40 P.M. on the Woodland Street bridge.23
Most of Nashville’s frustrated African-American leadership ignored pension seeking to spend their energy and political capital on other concerns where they believed they could make a difference. For example, the year before House and others met in the city to promote reparations, the elites worked hard to gain participation in the Centennial Exposition of 1897, held to mark Tennessee’s one hundredth birthday. Preoccupied with their own image as an educated group, the elites thought it valuable to join the exposition even though they would have to accept segregation. Northern middle-class African Americans, far from the Jim Crow environment, objected to the strategy, earning the resentment of their Nashville counterparts. On February 27, 1897, the Nashville American criticized the only African American in the Massachusetts legislature for complaining that public funds should not be used to pay the expenses of Massachusetts officials visiting the Tennessee fair because of its segregation. In a period when House and most other African Americans lived in rental housing without light or heat except for a fireplace, and worked at low-wage, laborintensive jobs with which they could barely make ends meet, the business and professional leadership fought for inclusion in the exposition and boasted that they’d achieved a Negro day at the fair. In the end, the emphasis on culture, sketches, oil paintings and drawings, musical compositions played daily by a pianist, and carvings by Negro sculptor G. R. Devans of horns and walking canes engraved with pictures of Civil War generals contrasted sharply with the real-life social and economic problems of poor African Americans. When the exposition was over their problems remained.24
But it was in 1895 in Atlanta,
on precisely such an occasion of proud cultural displays, that Booker T. Washington gave his racial accommodationist speech:
“In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the five fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” He continued, “To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man…I would say ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’” His widely reported Atlanta Exposition speech essentially amounted to telling African Americans to stay in the South, work hard, and accept segregation to show they “deserved” citizenship rights someday. Washington’s speech made him white America’s favorite race leader and gave him control of African-Americans’ access to money and power.25
In Nashville, the Tennessee Exposition officials followed the example set in Atlanta to establish a segregated “Negro Department” at the beginning. They appointed a committee chaired by the city’s most prominent African-American Republican leader, James Napier, a former member of the city council who held various patronage posts and saw to it that his friends did so as well. As chief of the Negro Department, Napier’s committee included fifteen of the most prominent African Americans.26
With this nod to Napier by the state’s leading white businessmen, Nashville’s African-American leadership determined to show its agreement with the philosophy of Booker T. Washington. It publicly accepted segregation as a road to equality and applauded the selection of Washington as a speaker. It also seized the opportunity to display the “progress” African Americans had made since emancipation. When Napier was later forced to resign because of ill health, he publicly underscored the value of this opportunity to the community. His resignation letter pointed out that since Emancipation “intelligent” blacks had “rapidly increased in numbers” and the “Negro Exhibition Hall” would prove their progress. Under the leadership of Richard Hill, a “Negro” schoolteacher and the son of “Uncle John Hill”—a favorite fiddler for wealthy white parties, black Nashvillians designed and constructed the “Negro Building,” which included a segregated first-aid station and other facilities for their use. Hill told African Americans that they were “on trial.” He said, “The American people have spent no small amount and energy for our intellectual and moral training. Many are now asking ‘What have they amounted to?’” If they failed to exhibit their accomplishments, “It will be our everlasting shame.”27
Each college, university, and other acceptable African-American organization in the city enjoyed a special day for its segregated exhibits. The managers also set aside June 5,1897, as “Negro Day” to enjoy the entire fair. From all over the state blacks came to Nashville to visit the site, and schools, churches, and civic organizations marched in the parade. Both races, kept segregated, attended affairs involving Republican president, William McKinley, the governors of some twenty states, and the Booker T. Washington speech on Emancipation Day, September 22, 1897. The white Nashville press usually restricted coverage of African Americans to reports of lynchings, vignettes and cartoons on the laziness and ignorance of blacks, or articles on the “misguided” efforts of African Americans who challenged the color line. For the exposition, the papers enthusiastically reported on the “Negro Building” and African-American activities. Leaders believed they had put their best foot forward at the fair and avoided “everlasting shame.”28
Nashville’s class of well-off African Americans concentrated on making gains in business and the professions within the segregated black community. Privately, like Booker T. Washington, they worked to remedy black exclusion from politics and were finally somewhat successful in 1911, when a black lawyer, Samuel P. Harris, was elected to the city council. He was the first African American elected since Napier’s defeat in 1885. Poor and working-class African Americans such as Callie House and association members interacted with this group of blacks only in the course of business, such as in the incorporation of the organization.
The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association charter stated that the Association would work to unite African Americans and “friends” together in the cause. It made clear the dual mission of the organization. The association would collect petitions and lobby to pass the pension bill. However, mutual assistance was of equal importance. Local chapters would do “whatever is necessary in the way of charity and benevolence by aiding of its members in distress in sickness and in death and in looking after the interests of all.”29 Members contributed ten cents monthly to finance their ambitious goals.
Although chartered by Primitive Baptists, the church of working-class blacks, the first official association convention, at which Mrs. House was elected assistant secretary, took place at Gay Street Christian Church, a prominent Disciples of Christ congregation. The church, founded in 1824 as the “Negro congregation” of the white Vine Street Christian Church, trained and nurtured some of the most outstanding African-American church brotherhood leaders, including Preston Taylor, who became a nationally admired Disciples of Christ leader. Taylor was closely associated with James Napier and other well-off African-American Nashvillians. Taylor involved himself in every civic endeavor and enterprise in Nashville and the surrounding area and he introduced Booker T. Washington at the 1897 Centennial Exposition. He also served as parade marshal on “Negro Day.” The Gay Street Church provided a quite respectable venue, giving the association credibility. The pastor serving the successor church today could find no records from this period but suggests that Gay Street became the venue for the association convention because of Preston Taylor’s interest in every type of community involvement.30
Following the association’s first postcharter convention, from November 28 through December 1, 1898, the newly elected assistant secretary, Callie House, reported to the membership that they had proudly thanked local Republican leader James C. Napier and Reverend Richard Henry Boyd for their attendance. Boyd’s presence was important because he was the most successful Baptist minister, the founder of the National Baptist Publishing Board, and financier of the local black newspaper, The Globe. The association officers knew that the presence of Napier and Boyd at their first official convention could signal important political support for the pension cause. Napier’s future father-in-law, for example, was John Mercer Langston, who had vocally opposed the pension idea while in Congress.31
In the materials she sent to the state and local chapters and after the convention, House reported that the convention had acknowledged, both at the meeting and in its literature, the role Vaughan had played by first suggesting pension legislation. She also candidly described a rift in the movement blamed on Vaughan’s attempt to anoint Hill, who the association did not deem any more likely than Vaughan to garner grassroots support. Although “slanderous circulars” and competing efforts had ensued, the association now asked that any existing organization affiliate with it to “consolidate under one head.”32
The delegates who went to Nashville for the meeting made clear their support of pension legislation and what they called the “Bodkin Bill,” a measure introduced by Democratic congressman Jeremiah Botkin of Kansas in March 1898. The bill gave ex-slaves homesteads of forty acres for individuals and 160 acres for a family. The families would also receive initial capital from a legacy or commissary fund that included uncollected deceased soldiers’ pay and pensions. This bill, which did not pass, reiterated the original promise of land to the freedmen that had remained unfulfilled.33
Notice of the Ex-Slave Association 1898 convention at which Callie House was elected assistant secretary.
The association announced opposition to a Senate bill designed to appropriate $100,000 for a National Home for Aged and Infirm Old Ex-Slaves in Washington as out of line with its objectives. The appropriation would come from funds in the Treasury, owed to deceased black soldiers but unpaid because wives and children were not aware they existed and did not apply or could not provide
legal documentation of their relationship to the deceased. The bill’s sponsor, Senator George Perkins, Republican of California and chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor, stated that as of July 27, 1895, the funds amounted to $230,018.84 even though the bill expressed a willingness to spend less than half that amount. A group of “the very best and most influential colored people in this country” had been asking senators and congressmen to introduce the bill since 1893. Their petition included leaders such as African Methodist Episcopal Church bishop Alexander Walters, chairman of the Afro-American Council, a civil rights protest and advocacy group; the four most prominent Washington, D.C., ministers, Francis Grimke of Fifteenth Street Baptist Church, Walter Brooks of Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, J. Albert Johnson of Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, and J. A. Taylor of Shiloh Baptist Church; and Calvin Chase, editor of The Washington Bee, one of the most important black newspapers. Those leaders had created a corporation and arranged to buy land to build the home. These men thought this appeal was more likely to receive support from Congress than any other proposals to help poor blacks.34
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