Even after Callie House’s jailing and death, old ex-slaves like these kept writing the government to demand pensions for their bondage and forced labor. Sarah Graves, Edgar and Minerva Bendy, Tiney Shaw, and Molly Ammond.
Some of the local chapters continued to work after Callie House’s jailing. This Atlanta chapter lasted at least until 1932. Brunsey R. Holmes, their president, is shown giving funds to the needy.
A freedwoman in Holmes County, Mississippi, wrote to President Herbert Hoover, wanting to know if the pension bill had ever been passed. She “were a girl the age of 16 when freeman [freedom] were taken place and now am an old lady blind can’t see and if there ever were a person kneads assistance I know its me. My owners in slavery were Mr. Jeff Poole who lived in Moreland, Miss.”16
In 1934, a number of old ex-slaves wrote President Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Is there any way to consider the old slaves?” One asked specifically, whatever happened to the idea of “giving us pensions in payment for our long days of servitude?” The government officials replied that no legislation existed. Their letters attest to the interest in pensions. They also affirm Callie House’s insistence during federal investigations and prosecution that she had told ex-slaves only that the association wanted to gain the enactment of a federal pension law. Members had not been told that Congress had passed a law.17
As late as 1937, the attorney Richard Broxton of New York City asked the Treasury Department and the attorney general whether the law prohibited “forming an Organization designed for the purpose of having the Government appropriate funds for the payment of the services of those held in involuntary servitude—such funds, if available, to be paid to the descendants of such ex-slaves, if located.” His inquiry and others concerning the legal issues received a standard response: “The Attorney General is authorized by law to give opinions only to the President and heads of the Executive Departments.”18
The interest of the ex-slaves and their descendants in pensions persisted. Callie House gave voice to their pleas and her “whole soul and body to the movement.” African Americans, who carried the message of the movement with them as they migrated out of the South, carried the struggle with them to live for another day.19
In the years since the demise of the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, scholarly analysis of social movements has shed additional light on the fate of the organization and Mrs. House. The “changes in the political environment” that a social movement confronts, rather than “the internal characteristics of the movement [’s] organization and the social base upon which it drew,” determine its success or failure, according to sociologist Charles Perrow and others. Perhaps reparations for African Americans will never become a reality, but the 1890s proved a decidedly negative time for the ex-slave pension movement. Mrs. House believed that the aging condition and social deprivation of the ex-slave population called for a remedy. Also, pensions had been given quite freely to white Union veterans, and even Confederate states paid pensions. However, most public attention to the unfinished business of the Civil War focused on achieving national reconciliation and reunion consensus, bringing closure to the divisions of whites North and South.20
By the time Mrs. House and her associates were working for ex-slave pensions, the Reconstruction-era interest in blacks and freedmen and-women had become a distant memory. So had the national refusal, in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, to give land or other property to the freedpeople to start them on their way. Except for praising loyal retainers, the “Mammies and Uncles,” of plantation lore, talking about slavery symbolized a refusal to forget and an offensive insistence on still waving the “Bloody Shirt” of civil war. The bloodiest war in American history, in which more than 400,000 soldiers laid down their lives, no longer was viewed as a war to save the Union that had become a war to free the slaves.21
Reconciliation and reunion between North and South focused on the broken bonds of brotherhood, not the travail of combat, much less the fate of the ex-slaves. Though poorly armed, clothed, and fed, and often denied their pay, black Union soldiers fought and died to save the Union and to earn freedom for themselves and other African Americans, yet the claims of more than 186,000 African Americans who served in the Union ranks went unacknowledged, banned from the national debate.22
President Abraham Lincoln’s words in the Gettysburg Address, delivered on November 19,1863, gave hope of reparations when he described the task before the nation as finishing the work so that those who died had not died in vain. He saw the goal as ensuring “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” By war’s end, his meaning, described by Confederate officials as slavery and the South’s determination to preserve it, had been accepted by millions of northern whites and almost all African Americans. The Lincolnian idea that Emancipation would result in a new birth of freedom, in a reunited nation, and a new charter of equal rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, receded in the face of a new national disposition. Those who wanted to cite Lincoln’s sentiments and reject any measures beyond emancipation for African Americans could cite the president’s second inaugural address, in which he seemed to equate the sacrifice of battle with reparations for enslavement. Lincoln said he hoped the war would end quickly but God might will that “it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bondsman’s two hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago.”23
As historians Nina Silber and David Blight explain, the custodians of Confederate memory won a postwar battle to celebrate the South’s lost cause as a valiant crusade for constitutional liberties and states’ rights that lost only to brute force. In this version of history, slavery had little to do with causing the war, and reconciliation of the two sections that had fought a “brother’s war” deserved concentrated attention instead of discussing the consequences of abolition.24
In 1888, only four years after he had pleaded for a memory of abolition among causes and consequences of the Civil War, Albion Tourgee, the white Massachusetts lawyer who had gone south to serve as a judge after the war, conceded defeat. In the “field of American fiction today,” he wrote, “the Confederate soldier is the popular hero. Our literature has become not only Southern in type, but distinctly Confederate in sympathy.”25
With sad inevitability, forces that emphasized reconciliation and those with white supremacist visions merged to overwhelm any “New Birth of Freedom” in the future of African Americans. By 1913, “a combination of white supremacist and reconciliationist memories had conquered all others,” according to Blight. In that year, the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of Gettysburg attracted five thousand aging veterans and many more spectators, and took place, Blight notes, “as a national ritual in which the ghost of slavery, the very questions of cause and consequence, might be exorcized once and for all, and an epic conflict among whites elevated into national mythology.” In such a climate, redress for the defeated white southerners, not reparations for African Americans, became a more acceptable objective. Whites in the North and South sought to heal the harm they had done to each other.26
Essentially, the view of the Civil War and Reconstruction portrayed in D. W Griffith’s 1915 movie Birth of a Nation, which demonized African Americans and depicted white southerners as victims, prevailed throughout the country. Based on Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, a novel about Reconstruction that appeared in 1905, Birth of a Nation told a story of how heroic whites had redeemed the South from efforts to Africanize it by black brutes unleashed by the abolition of slavery. The movie faithfully followed the book. The movie was the first motion picture to be shown at the White House. The southern segregationist president Woodrow Wilson called the film “like writing history with lightning.” Meanwhile, as the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People protested unsuccessfully against the film’s showin
g, millions of people saw it and forever viewed themselves and the country in the context of the film’s contrived political appeals.27
Reflecting the growth of a general southern nostalgic movement, there was some sentiment for establishing monuments and memorials to the “old black mammies, “and some Confederate veterans endorsed the idea of pensions to reward those slaves who “peaceably cultivated the plantations of their masters” during their absence and showed absolute “fidelity.” But even their efforts were of no avail.28
In such a climate, the adoption of legal and practical racial segregation was not surprising. After the Civil War and Emancipation, and through the years of reconciliation and reunion, African Americans attempted to gain political and economic opportunity through various strategies, and a few people became relatively prosperous. However, African Americans’ freedom did not bring economic, political, or social equality. In an effort to gain fair treatment and opportunity, some joined political protest groups such as the African American League, the Niagara Movement, and later the NAACP. Others boycotted segregated streetcars and struck against unequal wages. Some African-American factions placed more emphasis on self-help through mutual assistance, racial solidarity, emigration, and separatism. Still, the situation was so bad that the usually optimistic Frederick Douglass, who lived through this period of transformation in thought with its reshaping of memory and the forgotten aims of the Civil War, doubted aloud in the 1890s whether American justice and equality of rights would ever apply fully to African Americans.29
Despite the prevailing national mood and the powerful forces that fought her efforts, Callie House insisted that the nation acknowledge its debt to every old ex-slave. In the end, she paid dearly for her stubborn devotion to the cause.
Epilogue: The Reparations
Movement Still Lives
Do you hear those voices calling
From their lone and musty graves
Urging us to note the toilings
Of the poor neglected slaves?
CORNELIUS JONES
(1916)
SINCE THE FOUNDING of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association in 1896, the poorest African Americans have been the most consistent supporters of reparations for slavery. The black middle class has been mostly critical of the effort. However, there have been times, such as during the late 1960s and more recently, when some among the middle class have supported reparations and taken leadership in the cause. The political scientists Cathy Cohen and Michael Dawson argue that the black poor are detached from the American political system because it seems irrelevant to solving their problems. They point out that black nationalism is popular among poor African Americans, although they note that in particularly stressful times, others join in the nationalist cause. So long as African Americans endure discrimination and ill-treatment because of race, and so long as economic resources are distributed unequally and correlated with race, many African Americans will believe the government should pay compensation for 300 years of slavery.1
The right to vote, ensuring access to a quality education, fair employment, and contracting opportunities are issues supported by most African Americans now and in the past. Yet the visceral wrong that African Americans built the nation without compensation—assets to pass on—while others reaped the benefits both during and since slavery is maddening to some. That the nation has never apologized or fully acknowledged that debt is a thought too painful for many African Americans to bear.2
While former slaves still lived, Callie House and the ExSlave Association embodied the cause. But during the year Mrs. House spent in prison, another black leader arrived in the United States to stir up the masses of African Americans. His movement advanced the reparations cause. This new leader was Marcus Moziah Garvey, and his organization was the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). When Garvey arrived in 1916 from Jamaica, many African Americans, versed in the Ex-Slave Association, found that the UNIA was another organization through which they might press their aims. Garvey’s movement drew from these ideas. Garvey saw the redemption of Africa as recompense for the exploitation of African peoples. The UNIA emphasized self-help, self-improvement, and the importance of racial pride and organization to success.3
Like the Ex-Slave Association, which had a chapter in New York City, his movement attracted the working poor. As future labor leader Asa Philip Randolph wrote sneeringly to Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty in 1923, Garvey’s members came chiefly from “the most primitive and ignorant element of West Indian and American Negroes.” In fact, these men and women were mostly not “primitive” or “ignorant.” Many of the American members were ex-slaves or the children of ex-slaves who had also joined the ex-slave pension movement.4
Marcus Garvey. Some of the agents of the association became chapter heads in Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which supported reparations.
Garvey, born in Jamaica in 1887, the grandson of an African slave, emigrated as a young man to London, where he lived for several years working as a printer. In London’s colonial émigré community, Garvey became acquainted with native Africans, from whom he learned about the calculated exploitation of the continent and its immense potential. After returning to Jamaica and unsuccessfully attempting to organize a printers’ strike, Garvey abandoned the trade union movement to promote industrial education modeled after Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery.5 The famed Tuskegeean, replying to his inquiries, encouraged Garvey to visit the United States, but Garvey did not arrive until after Washington’s death. Garvey’s initial basis for the UNIA came from West Indian immigrants in Harlem. A commanding, charismatic figure, Garvey insisted on “Africa for the Africans” and promoted racial solidarity. His programs encouraged blacks to support black businesses, and the UNIA itself organized a chain of groceries, restaurants, laundries, a hotel, a factory to make black dolls, and a printing plant. Thousands of blacks bought stock in the UNIA’s Black Star Steamship Line, organized to establish a commercial link among the United States, the West Indies, and Africa. UNIA membership swelled to the tens of thousands as blacks paraded in the mass units of the African Legion and the Black Cross Nurses through Harlem, proudly waving the black, green, and red flag.6
Naming himself the provisional president of Africa in 1922, Garvey petitioned the League of Nations to turn over the former German colonies in Africa to the UNIA. A strong element of his appeal came from the militant black nationalist stance he inspired. For example, one of his chief lieutenants, Hubert Harrison, for a time associate editor of the Negro World, urged blacks to demand an eye for an eye in their struggles against discrimination and mob violence: “If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property.” This was a stance echoed by A. Philip Randolph, a critic of Garvey in his condemnation of the 1919 race riots.7
Garvey’s influence was global. European and colonial administrations in Africa sought to suppress the UNIA. Even though he was a native of the British colony of Jamaica, in 1923 the British refused to give Garvey a visa to travel in British-controlled areas in Africa. The British Colonial Office explained that it believed he wanted “to stir up trouble and to incite sedition in Africa.”8
Garvey attracted enemies not only among the European colonial powers, but also among African-American leaders, including Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois. Garvey criticized light-skinned integrationists and middle-and upper-class blacks active in the NAACP for their shame about their ancestry. The criticism and the rapid growth of the UNIA raised fear and jealousy. Cyril Briggs, a Communist who had failed to draw UNIA members to his party, urged government officials to prosecute Garvey. Other African-American leaders called on the U.S. government to investigate irregularities in the management of the Black Star Steamship Line and demanded Garvey’s arrest.9
The Black Star Line, founded to take African Americans to Africa, was a viable business idea executed by people with no expertise in the
business. Unscrupulous ship owners had sold him worn-out vessels, unseaworthy crafts that could not make the promised voyages. The federal government indicted Garvey for using the mail to defraud, the same charge they used to jail Callie House. His subsequent imprisonment and deportation led to the collapse of his movement.10
Former members of the UNIA, inspired by the themes of racial pride, redemption, and organization, joined other nationalist organizations, including the Black Muslims. Many became vocal advocates of reparations. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, writing in 1926, said there was justice in the “halo that shines about” Garvey, a victim of selective federal prosecution. “[I]f the government were to punish all those who use the mails to defraud, it would round up those energetic business men who flood the mails with promises to give eternal youth and beauty to aging fat matrons… and to make masterminds of morons.”11
The UNIA had great presence in urban centers. However, it established chapters including pension supporters in the same hamlets and towns where Mrs. House had organized her movement. The UNIA organized in the same way as the Ex-Slave Association. A dynamic speaker from UNIA headquarters or a popular minister would motivate a community to form a division. In some cases an inspired local layman or-woman would start a branch. High commissioners and designated organizers were assigned by the UNIA to organize and supervise the work of the divisions. In the wake of the Ex-Slave Association, the UNIA organized not just in New Orleans, Kansas City, and Atlanta but in Wetumka, Oklahoma; Suffolk, Virginia; Bullock County, Alabama; and Cairo, Illinois. Ex-Slave Association agents, including John Scott in Ohio and P. Powell in Ohio, were prominent in their state UNIA divisions.12
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