My Face Is Black Is True

by Mary Frances Berry

  Other experts argue that the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 may be used to overcome the government’s immunity to suits. The APA provides that a person who is wronged by a government agency action may have the government action reviewed in the courts. The act clearly states that the court cannot dismiss the action solely on the grounds that the government is being sued. The United States may be named as a defendant, and the court can issue a judgment against the United States. People suing have the opportunity, unlike the ex-slaves in the cotton tax case, to prove they have been harmed under a law permitting money damages in order to win payment. In such a case today, one of the Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction, which include money damages, might be used to make a claim under the Administrative Procedure Act.35

  Some advocates have proposed arguing that international law has been violated by the U.S. government because a universal consensus exists against genocide, enslavement, and systematic racial discrimination. Furthermore, the Nuremberg trials established that under international law, a state could be held criminally liable for the treatment of its own citizens. At Nuremberg, the four victorious powers of World War II tried German officials for “crimes against humanity.” However, Germany’s crimes against its own citizens took place during a war. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress presented a petition to the United Nations charging genocide by the federal government against African Americans, but to no avail. Under international law, arguably to continue segregation under the charter meant a waiver of sovereign immunity. However, the United States signed the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, with reservations, only in 1992.36

  The interest in reparations has led some people to attempt collection prematurely, without benefit of law or court decision. In March 2002, the Internal Revenue Service admitted that it had mistakenly paid out some $30 million on more than 100,000 tax returns for a reparations tax credit. The agency paid for erroneous refunds in 2000 and 2001. The funds amounted to a “black tax credit” of about $43,209 for each individual return, an amount that Essence magazine suggested in 1993 would be the updated value of the promised forty acres and a mule that African Americans never received after Emancipation. The agency is taking steps to recoup the funds. Apparently some Internal Revenue Service employees received some of the refunds. The government successfully prosecuted professional tax preparer Gregory Bridges for aiding and assisting the preparation of tax returns for individuals who claimed the “black tax credit” in violation of the tax code.37

  The continuity in the reparations cause, from Callie House to Queen Mother Moore to Christopher Alston and “Reparations” Ray, offers graphic historical testimony of the indelible memory of the unrequited labor of the slaves among African Americans. In August 2002, thousands arrived on the Mall in Washington for the “Millions for Reparations Rally.” Chicago activist Conrad Worrill, chairman of the National Black United Front and one of the chief organizers, pointed out, “This is the first time there has been a mass rally demanding reparations” in the nation’s capital. As John Conyers and “Reparations Ray” exulted, the crowd, “raising red, green, and black flags and clenched fists,” demanded recompense for centuries of slavery and racism. They symbolically carried on the tradition started by the UNIA followers who first proudly waved the black, green, and red association flag: black for skin, green for hope, and red for blood.38

  Detroit follower of Christopher Alston, “Reparations” Ray, and others spoke at this first reparations march in the nation’s capital organized by N’COBRA, the National Black United Front, The December 12th Movement, and other organizations.

  Callie House wanted ex-slaves to have economic capital based on their work during slavery. Financial resources made available would strengthen mutual assistance organizations and provide a basis for economic development. She fought to address the poverty and subordination faced by ex-slaves. African Americans in later generations have made progress, but the underlying issue of appropriate payment is still unresolved. Mrs. House tried and failed to gain reparations for those African Americans still alive, who were the first generation to survive slavery.

  Whatever the outcome of the modern case for reparations, there was a time when freedpeople believed in the possibility. Those who act in the cause today pay homage to their struggle and to the spirit of Callie House.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1. The defiant quote is from the postmaster of Nashville to the assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department on March 30, 1901. “Wild” and “anarchists” come from an assessment of the movement made by the Pension Bureau in connection with the investigation of an alleged imposter, W. L. Reid. Inspector to George Rice, Agent-in-Charge, Little Rock, May 21, 1899, case no. 273,115c, Record Group 15, Pension Bureau, Department of the Interior, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).

  1 We Need a Movement

  1. This was the Third Annual Convention. “Notice to All Associations Chartered under the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, 1898”; Constitution By-Laws and Membership Certificate, Bureau of Pensions, Department of the Interior, Record Group 15, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives. Flyer from 1898 Nashville Convention, “Greetings and History,” Callie House’s introduction to Constitution and By-Laws of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association of the United States of America (Nashville: National Baptist Publishing House, 1899), Record Group 15, Pension Bureau, Department of the Interior, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).

  2. Rayford Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877—1901 (New York: Dial Press, 1954); Senate Committee on Pensions, January 16, 1900. 58th Congress, 1st session, report 75, estimated about 69,000 members by 1900. Federal prosecutors in their indictment of House in 1916 estimated almost 300,000 members. (See chapter eight.) The Association estimated a high of 600,000 members in the early 1900s.

  3. Callie House to Harrison J. Barrett, acting assistant attorney general for the Post Office Department, September 29,1899, Record Group 28, Records of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, Fraud Order Case Files 1894-1951.

  4. In 1880, the U.S. Census recorded Callie Guy as a “school girl” and her birth date as 1861; National Archives film no. T9-1276, p. 223B. The 1910 United States Manuscript Census, Ed. 60, Sheet 12, L.30 reported her age as forty-eight, which would accord with the 1880 Census, but her death certificate recorded her age as sixty-three, which would place her birth date as 1865; State of Tennessee Board of Vital Statistics registration no. 21901, file no. 1391, death certificate no. 13311, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville. Jim Leonhirth, The Black Presence in Rutherford County: Fragments of a Past, Rutherford County History of Families, Rutherford County Historical Society (Paducah, Ky.: Turner Publishing Company, 1976). See also Reverend Melvin E. Hughes, Sr., compiler and writer, A History of Rutherford County’s African American Community (Murfreesboro, Tenn.: Allen Chapel A.M.E. Church, 1996).

  5. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 394-403, 579-581; “Tennessee Slave Narratives,” Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-38, American Memory, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage.

  6. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, pp. 394-403, 579-581; The Roster of Union Soldiers, 1861—1865, United States Colored Troops, edited by Janet B. Hewett, 98 reels, National Archives, 2 vols. (Wilmington, N.C.: Broadfoot Publishing, 1997).

  7. Ira Berlin and Leslie Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 140-147.

  8. Liberator, February 24, 1865; quoted in McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 841. See also Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 145.


  9. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 842; United States, Statues at Large (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1867), XIII, 507-509.

  10. Freedmen’s response quoted in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, October 7, 1865; James McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 408-409; “Tennessee Slave Narratives.”

  11. Article by Reverend John Savary in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, November 3, 1866, quoted in McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, p. 410. Abolitionists finally achieved a provision in a new Homestead Act that opened up government lands for the freedmen, but the return of land to the slaveholders meant the government had few acres under its control and what was avilable consisted of the worst, most unproductive soil. Further, the freedmen had no capital to buy tools or to support themselves as they tried to grow a crop.

  12. Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 94—96; Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 454.

  13. Leonhirth, The Black Presence in Rutherford County. See also Hughes, Rutherford County’s African American Community; Bertram Wyatt Brown, “Black Schooling During Reconstruction,” in Walter J. Fraser, Jr., R. Frank Saunders, Jr., and Jon Wakelyn, eds., The Web of Southern Social Relations: Women, Family and Education (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 146—166: Heather Andrea Williams, “Clothing Themselves in Intelligence: The Freedpeople, Schooling, and Northern Teachers, 1861—1871,” The Journal of African American History 87 (Fall 2002): 372—389; Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, pp. 262—264.

  14. “Tennessee Slave Narratives”; Paul David Phillips, “Education of Blacks in Tennessee During Reconstruction, 1865—1870,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 46 (1987): 98—109; Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 277—280.

  15. Phillips, “Education of Blacks in Tennessee During Reconstruction, 1865-1870.”

  16. Laura Jarmon, Arbors to Bricks: A Hundred Years of African American Education in Rutherford County, Tennessee, 1865—1965 (Murfreesboro: Middle Tennessee State University Division of Continuing Studies and Public Service, 1994), pp. 27, 54-55. Uniform textbooks were mandated by the state in 1888; however, in Rutherford County well into the twentieth century, African-American students had to buy their own books. The schools provided education through the eighth grade. In 1891, the state directed exactly what eight-grade schools had to teach. Every secondary eight-grade school was to teach orthography, reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, history of Tennessee and history of the United States, including the U.S. Constitution, vocal music, elocution (the art of public speaking), and nothing else.

  17. Jarmon, Arbors to Bricks; Bertram Wyatt Brown, “Black Schooling During Reconstruction,” pp. 146-166.

  18. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. DuBois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), pp. 116-118; quote is on p. 118.

  19. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 106-108; Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 150.

  20. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 48 and note 25.

  21. Ibid., pp. 64, 331-332.

  22. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, p. 107.

  23. Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 150. See also Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, p. 120, which quotes Reverend James D. Lynch as saying, “We have met here to impress upon the white men of Tennessee, of the United States and the world that we are part and parcel of the American Republic.”

  24. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 178, 233.

  25. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 125-145.

  26. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, p. 213, also cites Thomas Bayne in Virginia, but see Foner, Reconstruction, pp. 87-88.

  27. Jarmon, Arbors to Bricks; Bobby Lovett, The African American History of Nashville: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), pp. 85—89, 214—224; C. C. Henderson, The Story of Murfreesboro (Murfreesboro, Tenn.: News-Banner Publishing Company, 1929).

  28. Jarmon, Arbors to Bricks; Carlton C. Sims, ed., A History of Rutherford County (Murfreesboro, Tenn., 1947), p. 43.

  29. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 418—451.

  30. Ibid., pp. 441—450; Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, pp. 160—161.

  31. 1880 United States Census T9-1276, p. 223B, Rutherford County Roll 223B, National Archives Film Number T9-1276, p. 223B.

  32. 1880 United States Census T9-1276, p. 223B, Rutherford County Roll 223B, 1883 marriage record Rutherford County Marriages and Births, 1883, roll 44, box no. 218, p. 9, and 1910 Census extrapolating ages and dates of birth. In addition to Thomas, the children also included William, born in 1888, and three daughters, Delphia, born in 1886; Mattie, born in 1892; and Annie, born in 1894. Acts of Tennessee 1881 (chap. 155), p. 212, was preceded by an 1875 Tennessee statute that permitted public officials to discriminate if they wished. Acts of Tennessee, 1875 (chap. 130), p. 216.

  33. Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 399.

  34. Ibid., p. 400.

  35. Ibid., p. 405.

  36. V. P. Franklin, Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of the Faith of the Fathers (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1984), pp. 133—144; Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 320—322, 332.

  37. Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 403.

  38. Ibid., pp. 403 —404. See in general Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). On Singleton and Henry Adams, see Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 403.

  39. Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, pp. 404—405.

  40. Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet, pp. 318—363.

  41. Ibid., p. 355.

  42. Ibid., p. 452.

  43. Berry and Blassingame, Long Memory, p. 405.

  44. Walter R. Vaughan, Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedmen (Chicago, 1891), p. 32, copy in Moorland Springarn Collection, Howard University Library.

  45. See H.R. 11119, Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 1st Session (1889-90); S. 1389, Congressional Record, 53rd Congress, 2nd Session (1894—5); S. 1978, Congressional Record, 54th Congress, 1st Session (1895—6); S. 1176, Congressional Record, 56th Congress, ist Session (1899—1900); H.R. 11404, 57th Congress, ist Session (1901—2). All the bills contained the same provisions.

  46. Vaughn, Freedmen’s Pension Bill. See in general Nina Silber, The Romance of Reconstruction: Northerners and the South, 1865—1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), and David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 1—5.

  47. Letter from Douglass to Vaughan in Vaughan, Freedmen’s Pension Bill, p. 150.

  48. R.G. 15, Veterans Administration, Correspondence and Reports Pertaining to Ex-Slave Pension Movement, 1892—1916, National Archives.

  49. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 102—103.

  50. Ibid., pp. 439—440.

  51. Ibid., pp. 382—384; R.G. 15.

  52. Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), pp. 89—91.

  53. Ibid.

  54. Albion Tourgee, “Is Liberty Worth Preserving?,” published by the Inter Ocean, Chicago, Ill., 1892, in African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818—1907. The pamphlet was written to benefit the National Citizens Rights Association Mayville, Chautauqua, N.Y.

  55. Walter Fleming, “Ex-Slave Pension Frauds,” South Atlantic Quarterly, April 11, 1910, p. 126; Reverend Isaiah Dickerson claimed Murfreesboro as
his birthplace.

  56. Ibid.; R.G. 15.

  57. R.G. 15; “Ex-Slaves Pension Bill,” The Washington Post, April 24, 1897, W. R.

  58. “To Pension Ex-Slaves,” Nashville American, August 31, 1897, Deposition of Isaiah Dickerson, May 12, 1902, Record Group 15, Veterans Administration, box no. 2, Correspondence and Reports Pertaining to the Ex-slave Pension Movement.

  59. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. no-m, 128.

  60. Stephen Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: André Cailloux and Claude Paschal Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000); Donald R-Shaffer, “I Do Not Suppose Uncle Sam Looks at the Skin: African Americans and the Civil War Pension System, 1865-1934,” Civil War History 46, no. 2 (June 1, 2000): 132-147; Elizabeth Ann Regosin, “Slave Custom and White Law: Ex-Slave Families and the Civil War Pension System, 1865-1900,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Irvine, 1995, pp. 26, 50, 56-70, describes the operations of the pension agents and racial considerations. On Harriet Tubman, see Logan and Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography, pp. 606-607; “Harriet Tubman’s Family Seeks Civil War Pension,” The New York Times, November 1, 2003, p. B17.

  2 Organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association