My Face Is Black Is True

by Mary Frances Berry

  1. Aldon Morris, Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), pp. 4-7.

  2. Bobby L. Lovett, The African American History of Nashville: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999), pp. 85-89.

  3. In 1899, the Post Office Department placed Callie House at 1003 Vernon, but she is not in the Census in 1900. In 1902, she was listed in the Nashville City Directory as a widow, at 1003 Vernon, with Charles Guy as a boarder. By the 1910 Census, they were both residing on Tenth Avenue South, where they remained in subsequent censuses and directories. The 1920 Census lists House as a seamstress; 1920 Census roll no. 1735. There are two African Americans named William House in the 1880 Census in Murfreesboro, Rutherford County; both were laborers; Tennessee Census, National Archives, film no. 1255276, pp. 224C, 120C.

  4. Nashville City Directory, 1902; 1920 Tennessee Census, National Archives, Roll no. 1735.

  5. Sarah Hill, ed., “Bea: the Washerwoman,” Federal Writer’s Project Papers 1936-40 (1998 Southern Historical Society Collections); University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, “Sixty-five Years a Washer and Ironer,” Clifton H. Johnston, ed., God Struck Me Dead: Religious Conversion Experiences and Autobiographies of Ex-Slaves (Philadelphia and Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1969), pp. 116-120; Tera A. W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom’: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 56-57; Crisis, I (Nov. 1910), 8 (April 1911), p. 6. The description of how the laundry was done is taken from my own observations and my mother’s recollections. See also Carter G. Woodson, “The Negro Washerwoman, A Vanishing Figure” Journal of Negro History 15 (1930): 269-277

  6. Ibid. The quote is reported in Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p. 234.

  7. Thirteenth United States Census, 1910, Part of Sixteenth Ward Enumeration District 60, and Fourteenth United States Census, 1920, Nashville, Tennessee, Part of Sixteenth Ward Enumeration District 64.

  8. Bobby L. Lovett, ed., From Winter to Winter: The Afro-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1870—1930 (Nashville: Department of History and Geography, Tennessee State University, 1981), p. 107.

  9. Lovett, African American History of Nashville, pp. 72-74. Edgefield Camp sat across the Cumberland River in East Nashville near the present site of the Tennessee Titans football stadium. “Black Bottom” referred not to African Americans but to the foul water from frequent flooding and the ever-present black mud. These stagnant pools lay just south of Broad Street between Front and Cherry, south of the capitol. Black Bottom predated the Civil War and had moved from being white to black and then from working-class and middle-class black to poor and black. An area of rental houses, brothels, gambling joints, saloons, and small retail businesses, it became the sort of slum that existed in every large southern town. Nearby lay Trimble Bottom, to the east off Lafayette Street, and northwest, the largest camp, in which a thousand contraband lived in plank buildings between Church and Cedar (today Charlotte) Streets from Tenth to Eighteenth Avenues North. James Somerville, “The City and the Slum: ‘Black Bottom’ in the Development of South Nashville,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 40, no. 182 (1981).

  10. Ibid.

  11. Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880—1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985).

  12. Ibid.

  13. Lovett, From Winter to Winter, pp. 108-109.

  14. Lovett, African American History of Nashville, chapter 10.

  15. The incorporation papers were filed in Nashville for the Ex-Slave Bounty and Pension Association of Tennessee, registered on February 8, 1898, vol. 197, page 400, charters of incorporation, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, Tennessee.

  16. Luke Mason had also been a county magistrate. His wife kept house, and he had five grown children. Squire Mason, a sixty-two-year-old shoemaker, had operated a downtown shop for almost twenty years. His wife kept house, and they also had five grown children. Reverend McNairy appeared in the Nashville City Directory, but not with a congregation of his own; Twelfth Manuscript Census of the United States, 1900, Tennessee, Sumner County, 11th District, lines 128-129, Nashville National Archives Film, T9-1250, pp. 267D, 190A; Nashville City Directory, 1890,1899,1900. Gosling, the last incorporator, has not been found in the Census or the city directories.

  17. Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 64; “Greetings and History,” flyer from 1898 Nashville Convention; Callie House, 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, ExSlave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).

  18. Light McGhee to Commissioner on Pensions, April 1, 1898, R.G. 15, Ex-Slave Pensions; William Glasson, Federal Military Pensions in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1918), p. 234.

  19. Drew Smith, New Day Begun: The Public Influences of African American Churches (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 3, explains that the concept of secondary reliance on mediating institutions probably does not apply easily to African Americans, for whom churches and mutual-aid associations have always been a first resort. Government help instead of suppression is only a mid-twentieth-century development.

  20. Leslie J. Pollard, “Black Beneficial Societies and the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons: A Research Note,” Phylon 4 (1980): 230-334.

  21. Although the Ex-Slave Association was one among many African-American mutual-assistance organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, studies have focused primarily on women’s associations. For example, Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Memphis, which my youngest brother pastored in the 1990s, hired a physician for $200 a year to treat ill members. Nannie Helen Burroughs developed an association of black female wage earners in Washington, D.C., and led the women’s convention of the National Baptist Convention. The members of these associations included the wives of skilled workers and professional men as well as laundresses, domestics, and similar low-paid working women. Males dominated some organizations, while others worked independently of male leadership. Elsa Barkley Brown describes the Independent Order of St. Luke, led by the banker Maggie Lena Walker, that began as a women’s association but admitted men. As women’s work, Callie House’s leadership in the mutual-aid mission of the Ex-Slave Association was unremarkable. In the African-American community, her leadership in the political campaign for pensions—“men’s work”—was a different matter. See Kathleen Berkeley, “Colored Ladies Also Contributed: Black Women’s Activities from Benevolence to Social Welfare, 1866-1896,” 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, 1985), pp. 184-185; Armistead Robinson, “Plans Dat Comed from God: Institution Building and the Emergence of Black Leadership in Reconstruction Memphis, in Orville Vernon Burton and Robert McMath, Jr., eds., Toward a New South, pp. 71-102. See also Anne Firor Scott, “Most Invisible of All: Black Women’s Voluntary Associations,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. I (1990) 3-22; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880—1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs 14, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 610—615, 630—633. The Pullman Porters Benevolent Association, established to provide for old retired porters, was the first independent porters’ organization. The concept of burial assistance was so traditional that the men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study participated in part because they were offered burial assistance. The heads of major civil rights org
anizations today are men. Elaine Jones, who headed the NAACP-LDF, a small nonmembership public interest law firm, was exceptional; see the discussion in Linda Faye Williams, “Power and Gender: A Glass Ceiling Limits the Role of Black Women in the Civil Rights Community,” Emerge, December—January 1995, pp. 63—65; Carter G. Woodson, “Insurance Business Among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 14 (April 1919): 202—206; Pollard, “Black Beneficial Societies,” pp. 230—234.

  22. Lovett, From Winter to Winter, p. 109.

  23. Lovett, The African American History of Nashville, pp. 93—96.

  24. Ibid., pp. 127—34; see, e.g., “A Brief Survey of the Negro Building,” Nashville American, April 5, 1897; “In and Around the Negro Building,” Nashville American, April 6, 1897; “One Massachusetts Negro Trying to Get in Front of the Engine,” Nashville American, February 27, 1897

  25. John Hope Franklin and Alfred Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 246.

  26. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 470—471.

  27. Lovett, ed. From Winter to Winter, p. 129.

  28. Ibid., pp. 127—134; see, e.g., “A Brief Survey of the Negro Building, Nashville American, April 6, 1897, and “In and Around the Negro Building, Nashville American, April 5, 1897.

  29. “Notice to All Associations Chartered Under the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association,” 1898; Constitution By-Laws and Membership Certificate, R.G. 15; Charter of Ex-Slave Bounty and Pension Association of Tennessee, Registered February 8, 1898, Charters of Incorporation, vol. 197, page 400, Nashville Metro Archives.

  30. “Leaders of Afro-American Nashville, Preston Taylor, 1849—1931,” The Nashville Colored Directory Biographical, Statistical, p. 22; Black Yellow Pages, Nashville Metro Archives; author’s interviews with Pastor William Crowder, New Covenant Church, Nashville, Tenn., September-October 2002, and March 19, 2003.

  31. This was the Third Annual Convention. “Notice to All Associations Chartered under the Ex-Slave Mutual Relief Bounty and Pension Association, 1898”; Constitution By-Laws and Membership Certificate, R.G. 15; Lovett, From Winter to Winter.

  32. Constitution and By-Laws, p. 23. P. F. Hill was either a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church or associated with the denomination. He was a member of the committee on address to the country and on resolutions when a Race Council meeting affirmed support for Washington’s policies, while denouncing lynching and disenfranchisement at St. John A.M.E. church, where Bishop Henry Turner spoke; “The American Negro Union,” Nashville American, September 3,1897.

  33. 55th Congress, 2nd Session, p. 2516, March 1, 1898; flyer, 1898 Association Convention, R.G. 15.

  34. “National Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People,” S. 2140, Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 3503—3504, 7775—7776.

  35. Ibid.

  36. “McNairy’s Master Stroke for the Ex-Slaves, Reverend D. D. McNairy President of the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, February 20, 1899, flyer concerning the Home for Ex-Slaves bill, R.G. 15.

  37. Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 2nd Session, pp. 7775—7777.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Minutes, Third Annual Convention, Constitution and By-Laws, 1899, R.G. 15. See also H.R. 11119, Congressional Record, 51st Congress, ist Session (1889—90); S. 1389, Congressional Record, 53rd Congress, 2nd Session (1894—5); S. 1978, Congressional Record, 54th Congress, ist Session (1895—6); S. 4718, 55th Congress, 2nd Session (1897—8); S. 1176, Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session (1899—1900). All the bills contained the same provisions. There were a number of organizations in various states that operated only locally. In May 1899, Pension Bureau inspectors reported on their investigation of an organization that they described as an obvious scam, using it to defame any pension lobbying effort as fraudulent. In 1897, Isaac Walton, an African American in Madison, Arkansas, organized The “Ex-Slave Assembly” and obtained a certificate of incorporation from the Arkansas secretary of state. He had 12,381 members signed up at twenty-five cents each. He had a newspaper called The Ex-Slave that he sold for $1 a copy. The Post Office Department planned to prosecute Walton at the October term of court in Helena, Arkansas, although Jacob Trieber, the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, thought Walton’s publication and distribution of a newspaper to promote the pension cause to be a valid use of the funds he collected. However, the Post Office Department could, of course, use its unreviewable authority to issue a fraud order.

  40. Membership certificates, Constitution and By-Laws, R.G. 15, Ex-Slave Pensions.

  41. Minutes, 1899 Convention, R.G. 15, Ex-Slave Pensions; House to Acting Assistant Attorney General Harrison Barrett, September 29, 1899.

  42. Callie House to Acting Assistant Attorney General Harrison Barrett, September 29,1899, Record Group 28, Records of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, Fraud Order Case Files 1894—1951.

  3 The Association Under Attack

  1. Harrison J. Barrett, Acting Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, Washington, D.C., Record Group 28, Records of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, Fraud Order Case Files 1894—1951, hereafter referred to as R.G. 28. Barrett was actually assistant to the assistant attorney general, James Tyner, who was his uncle by marriage, Harrison J. Barrett, Post Office Department File, National Personnel Records Center, Civilian Records, St. Louis, Missouri.

  2. Dorothy Garfield Fowler, Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 55—56; Record Group 15, Pension Bureau, Department of the Interior, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).

  3. J. L. Davenport to Mr. Alfred Lathan, Hammond, Louisiana, November 20, 1897, R.G. 15.

  4. Reid, Inspector, to George Rice, Agent in Charge, Little Rock, May 21, 1899, case no. 273, 115C, R.G. 15.

  5. Harrison J. Barrett, circular no. 260, Office of the Assistant Attorney General for the Post Office Department, Washington, D.C., October 16, 1899, R.G. 15.

  6. Wills served as postmaster from 1890 to 1914; see http://politicalgraveyard.com/parties/R/1900/index.html; Who’s Who in Tennessee, 1911 (Memphis: Paul & Douglass Co., 1911); United States Census, 1880, National Archives film T9-1249, p. 129D; 1885 Nashville City Directory, Wills, Andrew W., Atty & Claims Agent; 1888 Nashville City Directory, Wills, Andrew W., President, National Manufacturing Co. (cotton yarn manufacturers) Attorney and Claims Agent. Marshall Cushing, in The Story of Our Post Office: The Greatest Government in All Its Phases (Boston: A. M. Thayer, 1893), pp. 725-726, praises Wills and everything else about the Post Office Department.

  7. Fowler, Unmailable, pp. 55-56.

  8. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 358-385 has a useful description and interpretation of Comstock’s work.

  9. Section 149, 1872 Post Office Department Law; Fowler, Unmailable, pp. 55-56.

  10. Fowler, Unmailable, pp. 55—56. The law also forbade the transfer of lottery tickets in interstate commerce. See Champion v. Ames, 188 US 321 (1903).

  11. Ibid.; Public Clearing House v. Coyne, 194 U.S. 497 (1904).

  12. Inquiries received by the Post Office Department concerning ex-slave pensions, Record Group 32.

  13. 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.

  14. Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 321-322; Mary Frances Berry, The Pig Farmer’s Daughter and Other Tales of Law and Justice (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), pp. 208, 213.

  15. Barrett, circular no. 260.

  16. Ibid.

  17. In her history of Washingt
on’s race relations, Constance Green describes Chase as “not from one of the old mulatto “first families” but occupying a place in the upper stratum of the rank just below’s Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 139. See also Rayford W. Logan and Michael Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 98-101.

  18. Ward Churchill, Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement (Boston: South End Press, 1988). John Johnson’s Jet magazine similarly cooperated with the FBI over a long period of years. “Deluding the Freedmen,” The Evening Star, September 21, 1899; “Gigantic Fraud Being Pushed by Base White Men,” The Nashville Banner, January 28,1899; Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976).

  19. Deposition G, Criminal Conduct of Charles H. Dixon, November 13, 1899, taken by P. W. Rawles special examiner. This was presented by the bureau to the Senate Committee on Pensions for its report Congressional Serial Set Volume 3886, Senate Adverse Report “Pensions for Freedmen, Etc.,” 56th Congress, 1st Session, report no. 75, January 1900, R.G. 15.

  20. Barrett, circular no. 260. After years of tolerating Vaughan’s activities, the staff noted that they were issuing no order against Vaughan’s association because he was no longer operating. Historian Walter Fleming, who saw the reparations idea as irrational and crackpot, opined in a 1916 article that Vaughan was “probably ill-balanced mentally” for promoting the idea; Fleming, “Ex-Slave Pension Frauds,” South Atlantic Quarterly, April 11, 1910, p. 126.

  21. Barrett, circular no. 260. The city directories and the Census confirm that House’s immediate family members were always employed in low-wage jobs while she worked in the movement. Also, local property records show no evidence of wealth possessed by her or her children.