Around West Point, slave owners and freedpeople alike struggled to come to terms with the new order. The newspapers in Columbus and in La Grange, about sixteen miles from West Point, reported rumors of incipient insurrection among the freedpeople of Harris County. The evidence came from a cache of hidden firearms and from a general disinclination among the freedpeople to sign long-term work contracts.30 Such independence on the part of former slaves stirred anxiety among the former planter class. As much as local white farmers feared life with the former slaves, they feared life without them. The La Grange Reporter noted with anxiety the reports that disgruntled freedpeople might leave their former owners to seek work elsewhere. “It would be a burning disgrace for any Southern man to take the advantage of a negro in a pecuniary transaction...the truest and finest friends of the freedmen are their former masters.”31 The former slaveholders’ avowed affection for their former workers, however, would be sorely tested as black men and women claimed the right to negotiate contracts on their own terms.
West Point is “a village of cheap frame houses,” wrote the New York journalist Whitelaw Reid, who passed through town shortly after the war. Reid, later to become a close friend of King’s, observed the “gangs of negroes” outside of town, clearing land for cotton with primitive tools, and acknowledged that their crude cultivation methods seemed to produce fair crops.32 But another northern reporter, who passed through the area in 1867, saw only poor, overworked land and a people stuck in a deep rural poverty. In a dispatch filed with the New York Times he wrote that “when you look at the ragged and slovenly agriculture, the washed hillsides seamed by gullies in every direction, the plains covered with pools of stagnant water, the un-drained bogs, the tumble-down stables and barns, the rude and unpainted houses, the endless snake fences in every stage of decay and hideousness, and learn that the lands are becoming less and less productive . . . the wonder is, not that they do not produce more, but that they produce so much; not that the people are not more comfortable, but that they are not less so.”33
For the ex-slaves of west Georgia, the early years of freedom brought not just crushing poverty but brutal and unpredictable violence. In May 1867, in Troup County, John Copeland, a member of the extended clan of white Copelands, assaulted a freedman named Andrew Boozier with a gun.34 In September 1867, according to the official records of the Georgia Freedmen’s Bureau, whites killed two black men in Harris County in unprovoked attacks and shot and severely whipped another. The civil authorities took no action. Nor did they act in Troup County, where that same month a white assailant killed a black man for being a “radical” and an unknown attacker stabbed another black man.35 C. S. Cherry, a white schoolteacher and a Republican who lived in Chambers County, Alabama, just across the state line from West Point, Georgia, testified in June 1871 before the congressional committee set up to investigate Klan violence in the South that violence escalated yet further just before the election of 1870. Passions ran high, he explained, as Klan members sought to intimidate Republican voters, reinforce white supremacy, and disrupt the Reconstruction programs designed to move blacks into the public sphere. “I know quite a number of prominent colored men who did not sleep in their houses there for more than a month after the election; I do not know that they all sleep in their houses yet,” Cherry testified. Some, he thought, still lived in the woods. Angry threats slipped easily into violent acts. A week or two before the election, about twelve miles from West Point, eight white men broke into the home of a well-respected, elderly black preacher named America Trammell, who provided room and board to a Mrs. Randall, the white schoolteacher from West Point who ran a local school for the freedmen, after no white family would house her. The youthful terrorists murdered Trammell in his bed and shot and wounded his son; the teacher escaped into the woods in her nightclothes. The attackers operated without masks or disguise; they escaped without ever being brought to justice.36
Even as vigilante violence exploded, however, the freedmen’s schools managed to survive. And somehow, in the harsh and violent world of post-emancipation Georgia, Ada Copeland learned to read and write. The first evidence of her literacy comes from the period after her marriage, and it remains possible that she learned to read and write from a sympathetic friend or employer in New York. But it seems more likely she learned as a girl in the Reconstruction or post-Reconstruction South.
During the antebellum period, black literacy posed an incipient threat to slavery and the South’s repressive social order. Georgia’s original slave code of 1755 prohibited teaching slaves to read and write, and a law of 1829 extended the restriction to free people of color. “If a man had a slave and taught him to read,” a former slave from Columbus, Georgia, recalled, “he was sent to the penitentiary, and consequently the door of literature was barred against us.”37
When Ada was born circa 1860, fewer than 5 percent of black adults in the state could read and write.38 An African American minister writing a history of “Negro education in Georgia” in the late nineteenth century reported that outside of Savannah, Augusta, and Columbus during the antebellum days there were “not a dozen colored people able to read and write, and in the country places, perhaps not one.”39 Ada’s parents, then, were unlikely to be her teachers. Like so many other freedpeople, they were probably illiterate and vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous employers in their new post-emancipation world. “Well the older ones are ignorant,” admitted a black clergyman in 1883, “and you can impose on them.... But you can’t do that with one of these live men that have had the advantages of education.”40 A black schoolteacher in Opelika, Alabama, about fifteen miles from West Point, told a government agent in 1883 that he had “three married ladies” in his school, the eldest of whom was around forty-eight. “What is their object in learning to read at their age?” asked the agent. The teacher replied, “Well, their object is just to learn to read and write, so that they can act for themselves.”41 Blacks of all ages understood that literacy could provide a path to the economic as well as political independence that could give real meaning to their new legal freedom. Still, as late as 1890, almost two-thirds of the black men and just over 70 percent of the black women in Georgia remained illiterate; the older you were, the slimmer the chance you could read and write.42
If Ada learned to read and write in Georgia, she might have acquired her skills at one of the freedmen’s schools set up by private missionary societies and later supported, in part, by the Freedmen’s Bureau, the federal agency established in 1865 to help oversee Reconstruction programs in the Deep South. Only 5 percent of Georgia’s school-aged black population attended elementary school in any one year during Reconstruction, 1865-70 (a figure that would grow to more than a third by 1877 and 43 percent in 1880), and few of them could attend on a regular basis.43
School attendance in the rural districts around places like West Point mirrored the seasonal rhythms of cotton farming. Few families could spare their children’s labor when harvesttime came around. And indeed, as a new system of public schools emerged to replace the Freedmen’s Bureau schools as Reconstruction waned after 1870, many of the country schools for African American children operated only during the summer months, using teachers on vacation from their regular jobs in the town schools. One African American trained in the Freedmen’s Bureau or so-called Yankee schools, became a teacher himself in 1872, and worked in the Harris County schools. “I find that the people in the country care but little for public school,” he observed, and send their children only about thirty days out of three months. “Along about July, when they lay by the crops, then they have a little spare time and they send their children to school, but when it is fodder pulling time they take them out of school again. Then, before school closes, the cotton time opens and then the children are off for good.”44
And yet, in one of the schools scattered around West Point, in Troup or Harris County—in a simple frame structure, probably borrowed from a church—Ada seemingly learned to read and writ
e.
Learning could be difficult in these ill-equipped schools, especially in the climate of violence that gripped postbellum Georgia. In 1866 there were seventy-nine schools with 7,792 pupils, 3,000 of whom had learned to read in just the past six months.45 But in 1865-66 “white incendiaries” torched seven black school buildings. In 1866 in La Grange, the Reverend J. H. Caldwell and his wife opened day, night, and Sunday schools affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church that enrolled more than six hundred black children. “The whites manifest great indignation,” Caldwell wrote, “and make severe threats. A large mob surrounded my church one night recently for the purpose of intimidating me and my pupils, and gave us much annoyance by firing pistols and guns in the air.” Other teachers had their lives threatened, their homes burned.46 And no one had enough money. At the smaller Baptist school in La Grange, fewer than half of the sixty-five students could pay the dollar-a-month tuition.47 Daniel McGee, a teacher at McGee’s Chapel School in Troup County, wrote letter after letter pleading for money and in September 1868 filed his final report: “McGee’s Chapel and school house was burned to the ground Saturday night, 19th Sept.”48 In West Point itself, a teacher at a school connected to the Methodist Episcopal Church reported in December 1869 that public sentiment toward the “colored schools” was “bitter.”49 But there were at least two freedmen’s schools in West Point that winter that Ada turned eight, and together they enrolled some 120 students. 50 By 1871, 3,563 black children attended classes in the small schools spread out across rural Troup County.51 The conditions were basic, surely no better than those James Weldon Johnson encountered when he taught in a rural Georgia school for African American children in the early 1890s—no desk, no blackboard, nothing but hard, backless benches for the children.52 One minister recalled he had attended school in an abandoned boxcar near Atlanta. Others, he said, attended school in old fodder houses or simply sat outdoors under the trees.53
Such was the world Ada Copeland would leave behind. Even during the postwar years, the West Point area offered little to a young black woman of ambition and imagination, particularly one who understood, as one unschooled freedman put it, “that a man that is educated is going to get ahead of a man that aint.”54 The new textile mills that opened up along the Chattahoochee during Ada’s girlhood offered employment to poor whites displaced from the land but confined blacks to menial jobs. “All mill operatives having to do with the process of cotton manufacturing involving quick perception and manipulation are white,” testified a Columbus cotton mill owner in 1883. But “where it is only a question of muscle, and where intelligence is not a necessity” a “coloured laborer” would do.55 The African American principal of a “public colored school” in west Georgia explained to a Senate committee investigating local labor conditions in 1883 that his ambitious students might aspire to careers as teachers or preachers. But he added, “It is no use to educate ourselves for anything else; there is no other work for us to do. We cannot get employment in the higher branches of art or mechanics; we cannot be civil engineers or anything of that sort, we cannot even be operatives in factories.” A senator interjected, “You are as badly off as the women.” The principal replied, “Well, very nearly.”56
As Klan violence supplanted the terrors of the slave codes and share-cropping replaced slavery, many ex-slaves in the rural cotton country of west Georgia found their lives as economically uncertain as ever. By 1880 more than two-thirds of the farmers in Troup County were tenant farmers.57 For most blacks, land ownership remained an unrealizable dream. The southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips, born in the Troup County seat of La Grange in 1877, when Ada was a teenager, recalled his boyhood there in rosy terms. “In happy childhood,” he recalled, “I played hide-and-seek among the cotton bales with sable companions.”58 But such romantic memories of racial harmony most often took root among those southerners, like Phillips, whose white skin left them immune to the everyday indignities imposed upon black people in the post-Reconstruction South. A young African American girl like Ada most likely understood her own rural childhood in a very different way: perhaps recalling the tense relations between landowners and tenant farmers, the capricious violence directed at poor blacks, or the natural disasters like droughts or tornadoes—or even illness—that could turn months of hard, backbreaking work to naught.59 Whether pushed from west Georgia by violence or poverty, or lured by ambition and opportunity, Ada buried deep the memories of her early life, never passing down to her family stories of her childhood.60 When she left the familiar landscape of her girlhood, trading the piney hills and cotton fields of west Georgia for the bustling urban streets of Manhattan, she demonstrated a desire for the new more powerful than any sentimental attachment to the old.
ADA LIKELY LEFT GEORGIA in the mid-1880s. But she left behind no stories about her flight north, by foot or horse, train or boat, in the company of friends or relatives or on her own. Like many rural southern migrants in the late nineteenth century she perhaps moved first to a southern city, testing the possibilities of urban life, before moving north. Her age made her a typical migrant. The southern blacks who migrated to New York in the 1880s were overwhelmingly single and young, most moving between the ages of fifteen and twenty-eight.61 Born free or raised in freedom, they felt less rooted than their parents, less willing to endure the daily humiliations that blacks faced in the harsh racial climate of the post-Reconstruction South. The older generation’s deep memories of slavery might inure them to the social and economic discrimination that flourished in a later era of greater political and personal freedoms. But younger people, without their own memories of chattel slavery as a reference point, would see the South of the 1880s differently, less as a place of expanded opportunities than one of harshly limited possibilities, especially when measured against the failed promise of Reconstruction. For all that had changed in local race relations, much remained the same. “Well, it is just like as it was in time of slavery,” a black carpenter from Columbus said in 1883. His fellow freedmen were afraid to speak up; “they want to say things, but are afraid of the white people.”62 Ada, no doubt, had grown up with similar fears. Her move north powerfully suggested, however, that she wanted more in her young life.
If Ada’s age made her a typical migrant, she remained in other ways unusual. Relatively few blacks emigrated north before 1900 from Georgia and Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, despite the harsh Jim Crow laws that governed life across the Deep South. Most African Americans moving north during the late nineteenth century came from the upper South and border states, and those heading to New York City came largely from areas near the Atlantic seaboard, where they could catch a steamboat headed up the coast.63 In the 1880 census, for example, 5,350 black and mulatto residents of Manhattan and Brooklyn listed their birthplace as Virginia; only 460 claimed to be from Georgia .64
In the years following the war, the local Democratic newspapers of west Georgia did their best to persuade African Americans (or at least those who could read) to sign labor contracts and stay put as a labor force by pointing out that work conditions elsewhere might be worse. In 1869 Troup County’s largest paper, the La Grange Reporter, claimed that “the poor, over-worked needle-women of the North, who are struggling in the cold sweat of life and death, not knowing whether they will have bread to eat to-morrow, would consider the condition of the negro woman of the South far better than their own.”65 But the winds of discontent inevitably swept across the cotton fields, where even the poorest black sharecroppers now understood their lives differently than they had before. And these winds of change swept young Ada north.
From the lower Mississippi Valley in the late 1870s and early 1880s, many thousands of rural blacks moved north and west into Kansas in search of farmland and the political and economic freedoms that, with the collapse of Reconstruction, seemed so hard to secure in the Deep South. Fewer migrants from the southeastern states joined the great movement of the “Exodusters,” but in the summer of 1879 crowds of freedpeopl
e gathered in eastern Alabama and western Georgia to listen to speakers extol the economic virtues of Kansas, and recruitment agents spread out across the farms of western Troup County. “The emigration idea prevails more largely in this section of Georgia than many suppose,” the La Grange Reporter noted in August. “There are many negroes who would quickly leave for Kansas if they could see their way clear. They have an idea that they would have more privileges, social, political and commercial, in the West and North than they have here.”66 Possibly, Ada and her family heard talk of the opportunity to be found far from the rolling red clay hills that marked the boundaries of their known world. Eventually, however, Ada’s interests focused not on the farmlands of Kansas but on New York City, where her life would be governed by something other than the cyclical rhythms of the growing seasons. No records document when she left home. Her son believed she arrived in New York around 1884. It seems at best an approximate date, confirming that Ada came north not as a small child but as a young woman—not as the result of someone else’s decision but as a consequence of her own.67
Traveling north, Ada would have been reminded of the harsh racial logic of the South at every step of her journey. Writing about travel conditions in Georgia in the late 1880s, a local reporter remarked upon the strict segregation that governed train travel: “Dirty and half-clad white men and women may ride in these first-class coaches, but never mind how neatly dressed colored persons may be, they are not permitted to enter if it is known that they have a drop of colored blood in their veins.”68 Required to pay first-class prices, African Americans could not ride in the first-class cars.69 Throughout the South, segregation prevailed on all forms of public conveyance.70 However Ada traveled, she could not help but observe that her color, as well as her gender, determined where she could ride, or eat, or sleep, where she would be safe and where she would not.
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