14. Dickerson deposition. Asked if he knew of other organizations that were working on the passage of the “so-called” ex-slave pension bills, he identified Stanley P. Mitchell, president of the National Industrial Council, a small pension lobby group. Mitchell had been formerly in Indianapolis and Lexington, Kentucky, where he had been chairman of the executive committee of Vaughan’s Justice Party. Dickerson thought that Isaac Walton of Madison, Arkansas—already identified by the bureau as another “swindler”—might be associated with him. He knew little if anything about their operations and “had no connection with them.” In fact, Mitchell and Walton tried unsuccessfully to persuade the association to consolidate with their organizations; “New Colored Party,” The Washington Post, January 7, 1903; “Hitch Among Ex-Slaves,” The Washington Post, January 9, 1903.
15. Wills to Greenaway, February 9, 1903, Record Group 28, Records of the Postmaster General, Office of the Solicitor, Fraud Order Case Files 1894-1951, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 28).
16. Freedmen’s Headlight, R.G. 28.
17. “Ex-Slaves Defrauded,” The Nashville Tenn Daily News, February 6, 1903, R.G. 28.
18. “Ex-Slave Pension Matters,” The New York Times, February 10, 1903; “Ex-Slaves Approve,” The Washington Post, February 13,1903. They also passed a resolution introduced by Stanley Mitchell of the National Council. A minor eruption occurred when he made a speech describing his organization and asked the body to endorse a resolution he had prepared instead of the one before the meeting. Dickerson and R. E. Gilchrist handled the situation by seeking approval for both motions, which the attendees passed enthusiastically. Vaughan, still interested in having legislation passed, continued to work on southern support for the cause as a way to help the white South.
19. Wilson, Inspector, to Captain W. B. Smith, inspector in charge, Washington, D.C., R.G. 15.
20. H. G. Payne, Postmaster, order no. 1064, Post Office Department, October 28, 1903, R.G. 15.
21. Dorothy Garfield Fowler, Unmailable: Congress and the Post Office (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), pp. 88—89; American School of Magnetic Healing v. J. M. McAnnulty, 187 U.S. 94 (1902).
22. Fowler, Unmailable, pp. 55—56; Public Clearing House v. Coyne, 194 US 497 (1904).
23. Lovett, From Winter to Winter, pp. 158—160.
24. Report of Inspector Keene on the application for revocation denied; a letter from C. B. Keene, Inspector, to Captain William B. Smith, January 13,1906, stated that the assistant attorney general had requested the investigation. R.G. 15.
25. See discussion of Tyner’s corrupt behavior in chapter five.
26. Fowler, Unmailable, pp. 94—96.
27. Ibid.
28. Thomas Jones to R. P. Goodwin, assistant attorney general, April 26, 1907, R.G. 15.
29. “Would Pension Ex-Slaves,” The Washington Post, December 9, 1905; 1880 United States Census, Washington, D.C.
30. Assistant Attorney General Goodwin to Thomas Jones, R.G. 15.
31. H. V. Cuddy to Chief of the Southeastern Division, December 5, 1904, Chief of Law Division, Bureau of Pensions, Department of the Interior, R.G. 15.
32. A. W. Wills to first assistant postmaster general, December 28, 1906; J. M. Thompson, superintendent of carriers, to Major A. W. Wills, Postmaster, December 26, 1906, R.G. 15.
33. “Ex-Slaves Want Pensions,” The Washington Post, June 5, 1906.
34. Wills to Greenaway, November 26, 1907, R.G. 15.
35. 1910 Manuscript Census of the United States, ED 60, sheet 12, L 30, National Archives.
36. Senate Journal, 61st Congress, 2nd Session, December 7, 1909, p. 14; Senator Mason of Illinois’s bill no. 4718, first introduced on June 6, 1898, in the 55th Congress, Record Group 46, box 150, Records of the U.S. Senate Committee on Pensions.
37. M. A. Warren, Tuskegee, Alabama, to Congressman Thomas J. Heflin, January 2, 1911; Assistant Attorney General to Warren S. Reese, United States Attorney, February 16, 1911, R.G. 15.
38. Hitchcock to secretary of interior, April 24, 1911; Sherley to Wicker-sham, attorney general, April 20, 1912; Assistant Attorney General Harris to Sherley, April 23, 1912; W. R. Harris to postmaster general, April 23, 1912, R.G. 15.
39. Lovett, ed., From Winter to Winter, pp. 165—170.
40. Report of the Nineteenth Annual Convention, Record Group 21, U.S. District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, Criminal Action no. 521, box 17, R.G. 15.
41. See H.R. 11119, Congressional Record, 1st Congress, ist Session (1889—90); S. 1389, Congressional Record, 3rd Congress, 2nd Session (1894—5); S. 1978, Congressional Record, 54th Congress, 1st Session (1895—6); S. 4718, 55th Congress; S. 1176, Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session (1899—1900), H.R. 11404, 57th Congress, 1st Session, February 17, 1902.
7 The Association Goes to Federal Court
1. United States v. Augustus Clark, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, docket no. 239, p. 177, filed November 1916, April 10, 1917, History of the Case, pp. 3—4.
2. Ibid.
3. Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 108—109.
4. 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; Rayford W. Logan and Michael Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 98-101; “Cornelius J. Jones,” America Must Redeem Her National Pledge of ‘Sacred Honor’—Called to the Bar of Her Own Courts for an Accounting,” Washington Bee, October 23,1915.
5. J. Clay Smith, Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844—1944 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), pp. 131-132, 305, n. 26; Gibson v. Mississippi, 162 U.S. 565 (1896); “He Should Be Seated, the Congressional Campaign of Hon. C. J. Jones— A Superb Constitutional Lawyer,” The Colored American, July 16,1898.
6. Smith, Emancipation, pp. 131-132, 305, n.26.
7. “Look Up Old Cotton Claim,” The People’s Recorder, published by S. H. Nix and L. E. Holmes in Columbia, South Carolina, January 27, 1900; Johnson v. McAdoo, 45 App. D.C. 440 (1916); 244 U.S. 643 (1917); “Cornelius J. Jones America Must Redeem Her National Pledge of ‘Sacred Honor’—Called to the Bar of Her Own Courts for an Accounting,” Washington Bee, October 23, 1915.
8. Jones, “America Must Redeem.”
9. Johnson v. McAdoo, 45 App. D.C. 440 (1916); Mary F. Berry, “Reparations for Freedmen, 1890-1916: Fraudulent Practices or Justice Deferred,” Journal of Negro History 57 (July 1972): 219-230; Smith, Emancipation, pp. 296-297; Jones, “America Must Redeem,”
10. Jones, “America Must Redeem”; letter from Douglass to Vaughan in Vaughan, Freedmen’s Pension Bill, p. 150; also published in newspapers and in Frederick Douglass papers online, Library of Congress, American Memory Web site discussed in chapter one.
11. As Boris Bittker did in The Case for Black Reparations (New York: Random House, 1973), he ignored approaches such as the Brandeis brief strategy, used by Louis Brandeis in seeking a limitation on hours of work for females in Mueller v. Oregon, which would have supported the inclusion of “social facts” concerning the plight of the old ex-slaves. Neither did Jones focus on the detrimental effects of segregation since slavery.
12. Jones characterized his claim as an equitable lien and avoided making a generalized claim for government money that would confront governmental immunity frontally, citing the government as the custodian of funds belonging to the plaintiffs. He cited standard debt cases, including those where the creditor could not pursue a claim until much later, to support the ex-slaves’ request for payment. For example, in Wright v. Ellison, 17 L. Ed. 555, I Wall 16 (1863), a maritime case, the court held that to constitute an equitable lien on a fund there must be some distinct appropriation of the fund by the debtor. Once that is identified, the holder of the fund is obligated to pay it. In Christmas v. Russell, 20 L. Ed. 76, 14
Wall 69 (1873), a mortgage debt case, the court held that to make an equitable assignment there must be an actual or constructive appropriation of the subject matter so as to confer a complete and present right on the party meant to be provided for, even if the circumstances do not permit immediate exercise of the right. McAdoo said the constitutionality of the tax had come before the courts in Farrington v. Saunders, Collector, tried in the U.S. Circuit Court, Western District of Tennessee, and appealed to the Supreme Court but not reported.
13. “No Fund for Ex-Slaves,” New York Evening Post, October 15, 1915.
14. Wright v. Ellison, 17 L. Ed. 555, I Wall 16 (1863); Christmas v. Russell, 20 L. Ed. 76, 14 Wall 69 (1873); “The Cotton Tax,” Washington Bee, November 13, 1915; “Look Up Old Cotton Claim,” The People’s Recorder, January 27, 1900.
15. Johnson v. McAdoo, 45 App. D.C. 440 (1916); 244 U.S. 643 (1917). In the Blue Fox case in 1999, the Supreme Court rejected a suit based on Jones’s equitable lien theory, finding that what appeared to be a damage action was essentially a claim for money owed by the United States; Department of the Army v. Blue Fox, 525 U.S. 255; 119 S. Ct. 687 (1999). But it would be difficult to argue that the old ex-slaves’ claim was contractual considering that slaves could not make contracts.
16. Jones agreed that a suit saying an officer should do a certain thing was a suit against the government and dismissible on the grounds of governmental immunity. Therefore he instead argued the equitable lien theory to show that the government had no direct interest in the suit. The fund in possession of the treasury secretary was there only for custodial purposes. He drew an analogy to Indian trust funds that were held in the Treasury until distributed to their rightful owners—location does not vest ownership. The arguments are taken from the brief filed in the Supreme Court, no. 897, October term (1916), Johnson v. McAdoo, per curiam judgment, affirmed 244 U.S. 643 (1917); Postal Supply Co. v. Bruce, 194 U.S. 601, was a contract case in which the facts showed that the government was the defendant and would have been substantially interfered with, unlike the situation in the cotton tax case. In Belknap v. Schild et al., 161 U.S. 10, the property in question was shown to belong to the United States, based on evidence at trial and not just a statement in the record. Getting to trial was precisely what Jones was asking to do. State of Louisiana v. W. G. McAdoo, Secretary of Treasury, 234 U.S. 627, was a case in which the state wanted to control the discretion exercised by the secretary under a statute. Jones cited cases to show that if the tax was illegal and the funds had been illegally collected by the government, they belonged to the ex-slaves. According to the decision by the Supreme Court in Pollock v. Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co., 157 601 (1895), in which an income tax was delcared unconstitutional, the cotton tax should have been apportioned. The Sixteenth Amendment, permitting a tax on income from whatever source derived, was not added to the Constitution in 1913. However, according to the Pollock decision, at the time the unapportioned cotton tax was collected it was illegal. This illegally collected tax, Jones argued, should be given back to the slaves who had produced it because slavery was illegal and the slave owners were rebels. However, the slaves were legally disabled from establishing a claim at the time.
17. For example, Washington Bee, July 24, 1915. In “Cotton Tax Suit Has No Merit,” The Chicago Defender, November 6, 1915, reported Attorney General McAdoo’s denunciation of the suit but let Jones reply on the front page in the next issue, “Cotton Tax Suit Has Merit.” The Defender also ignored the Association; Record Group 15, Pension Bureau, Department of the Interior, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).
18. Quote is from complaint in the unsuccessful prosecution of Ex-Slave Association agent Augustus Clark, discussed in the next chapter; United States v. Clark, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Texas, docket no. 239, p. 177, filed November 1916, April 10, 1917, p. 4.
19. Congress added the italicized language to Section 215, U.S. Criminal Code, the postal fraud statute: “Whoever, having devised or intending to devise any scheme or artifice to defraud or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations or promises… shall, for the purpose of executing such scheme or artifice, or attempting to do so place or cause to be placed, any letter…in any post office shall be fined not more than one thousand dollars or imprisoned not more than five years or both.”
20. Letters from U.S. attorney, Southern District of Alabama, Alexander R. Pitts, February 28, 1916, March 2, 1916, to attorney general; letter from William Wallace, assistant attorney general, to Pitts, R.G. 15.
21. U.S. District Court, United States v. Cornelius Jones accounting ledger; Fisher died in 1941. See http://Bioguide. Congress.gov/scripts/biodis-play.pl?index=F000149.
22. Memphis Commercial Appeal, p. 1, August 9, 1920; www.fjc.gov/servlet/tGetInfo?jid=1520.
23. Harris Dickson, “Please Y’Onner,” The Saturday Evening Post, July 1906—June 1907, vol. 179, nos. I—52, microfilm reel no. 7: “The negro is emotional.” “He does not mind being hanged, if only the execution is in public and people come from miles around to make a picnic day of it.”; “The Mississippi Monarch,” January—June 1913, vol. 185, nos. 27—52, reel no. 16: “Carpet-bag adventurers led these big black credulous children to believe that every ex-slave would be provided with forty acres and a mule.” “Only the hungry ones could be induced to work, having got the fixed idea that as wards of Uncle Sam the nation must take care of them.”
24. Smith, Emancipation, pp. 294—295, 318; Washington Bee, July 10, 1920. The Philadelphia Public Ledger criticized him for allegedly trying to organize petitioners to ask the government to legislate the cotton tax monies that he had not been able to obtain in court. Someone apparently was given or found a circular Jones had used to collect support for the case in 1915 that asked for a contribution of $1.75, “Asks Only $1.75 to Share Millions,” Philadelphia Public Ledger, April 15, 1922, in Tuskegee Institute news clippings file [microfilm], Division of Behavioral Science Research, Carver Research Foundation, Tuskegee Institute (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1976).
8 Jailed for Justice
1. Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 108—110.
2. I. H. Dickerson was deceased; Pension Bureau memorandum on the case March 21, 1917. An early handbill of the association denounced as “fakes and frauds” any black person or leader who opposed “a pension for past wrongs”; Record Group 15, Pension Bureau, Department of the Interior, Ex-Slave Pensions, National Archives (hereafter referred to as R.G. 15).
3. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: Morrow, 1984); Anne Firor Scott, “Most Invisible of All”; “Black Women’s Voluntary Associations,” Journal of Southern History 56 (February, 1990): 3—22; Tera Hunter, To’Joy My Freedom; Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
4. Melinda Chateauvert, “Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925—1957,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1992, pp. 36—40, 377—379; Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), chapter 7. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850—1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), explains that black women in the movement wanted suffrage but also wanted to make sure they behaved only in a respectable manner while pursuing activism. On the background of women leaders, see, e.g., Beverly Jones, “Mary Church Terrell and the National Association of Colored Women, 1896—1901,” Journal of Negro History 67 (Spring 1982): 20—33; Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 282.
5. See language added to code in note 19, chapter seven.
6. U.S. Attorney, Souther
n District of Alabama, Alexander R. Pitts, February 28,1916, to Attorney General Thomas Gregory.
7. Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson to Attorney General Gregory, March 30, 1916, Department of Justice, Record Group 60, file no. 1555690-8; Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren to postmaster general, April 6, 1916; Assistant Attorney General Charles Warren to Lee Douglas, April 6, 1916; Lee Douglas to attorney general, April 11, 1916, saying case will be tried at the September 1916 term and that the office has taken a “sworn statement from Callie House, which will prove very helpful.”
8. U.S. District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, March term, 1916, Criminal Action nos. 520 and 521, Record Group 2, National Archives, Atlanta Region, box 17. The government materials cited below are in this collection unless otherwise noted. U.S. District Court, Middle District of Tennessee, March term 1916, Criminal Action Nos. 520 and 521. Thirteen other black alleged coconspirators, who held office in the organization, were charged in what would have been a conspiracy. The government hoped they would produce evidence against House. The others indicted included officers and board members William Atkins of Lynchburg, Virginia; Reverend Robert Page of Nashville, Tennessee; Matilda Hill of Johnston Station, Mississippi; and Millie Thompson of Vicksburg. They produced no evidence and were not prosecuted. Witnesses before the grand jury were George W. Stewart, W. R. King, Thomas W. Hardwick, J. L. Pemberton, Rick S. White, Doc Parchman, York Calloway, G. A. David, and A. J. Cole.
9. Douglas, requesting authority to pay from the attorney general, April 6, 1916; approved on April 10, 1916; Law Division to Robbins Company, Attleboro, Massachusetts, June 27, 1916.
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