Also by Gail Lumet Buckley
The Hornes: An American Family
American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm
THE BLACK
CALHOUNS
FROM CIVIL WAR TO CIVIL RIGHTS WITH ONE AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY
Gail Lumet Buckley
Copyright © 2016 by Gail Lumet Buckley
Cover design by Charles Rue Woods
Cover photographs courtesy of the author
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-8021-2454-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9069-7
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
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For Kevin
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
South/Reconstruction, 1865–1876: Morning/1860s
CHAPTER TWO
South/Reconstruction: Noon/1870s
CHAPTER THREE
South/Reconstruction: Night/1880s
CHAPTER FOUR
North/1900–1919: The New Negro
CHAPTER FIVE
South/1900–1919: The New South
CHAPTER SIX
North/1920s: Harlem Renaissance
CHAPTER SEVEN
South/1920s: Terror
CHAPTER EIGHT
North and South/1930s: Lena and Frank
CHAPTER NINE
North/1940s: Movie Star Year
CHAPTER TEN
South/1940s: War Brides
CHAPTER ELEVEN
North/1950s: Blacks and Blacklisting
CHAPTER TWELVE
South/1950s: Postwar
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
North/1960s: “Now”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
South/1960s: Overcoming
Coda/1980s Honors/North: Lena
Coda/1980s Honors/South: Dr. Homer E. Nash
Acknowledgments
Sources Cited
Index
INTRODUCTION
IT WAS 1865. The Civil War was over. Everything my great-great-grandfather Moses Calhoun—the thirty-five-year-old patriarch of the black Calhouns of Atlanta, Georgia—wanted for his future was at hand. It was a brand-new world, at least for a lucky few. The nation that had taken so much away from black Americans would soon give them the three great Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution: the Thirteenth, which gave them true freedom (the Emancipation Proclamation was only a proclamation and could be rescinded); the Fourteenth, which gave them equality under the law; and the Fifteenth, which gave black men the vote. Moses had all the attributes for success in freedom: he was literate; he had been the favored slave of one of Georgia’s most powerful men; he had lived in a town, not on a plantation; and his family was intact, which meant that he was not wandering the postwar countryside looking for sold-away loved ones. In this brand-new world, life and liberty were secure; now he was free to pursue happiness.
In 1865 he found a beautiful bride who had always been free. Her name was Atlanta Mary Fernando. Atlanta, whose mother came from New Orleans, was fifteen years younger than Moses and looked white. They produced two beautiful daughters, Cora and Lena Calhoun, and educated them for the free new world. Moses firmly believed in commerce and capitalism—and thanks to Reconstruction, he was agile enough to make the leap from slavery into something like the middle class. Twenty-two years after General Sherman’s troops raised the flag of the United States of America over Atlanta’s city hall, a newspaper, the Constitution of March 12, 1886, called Moses Calhoun “the wealthiest colored man in Atlanta.”
Moses Calhoun, patriarch of the Black Calhouns, in his prime as the “wealthiest colored man in Atlanta,” c.1885
One branch of Moses’ family would stay in Atlanta and another branch would move north. Moses came from strong women, including his mother, Nellie, and his grandmother Sinai, who bought her own freedom and that of her husband and four youngest children and moved to Chicago three years before the Civil War. Sinai made selling homemade cakes and persimmon beer on a street corner in Newnan, Georgia, a wealthy community outside Atlanta. Sinai’s daughter Nellie, a talented cook like her mother, had two children, Moses and his younger sister, Catherine Sinai, called “Siny.” Nellie and her children stayed in Georgia when Sinai went north. Moses and his mother and sister were all owned by a relative of John C. Calhoun, Dr. Andrew Bonaparte Calhoun, one of the richest and most important men in the state. His had been the first signature on Georgia’s Ordinance of Secession. Because A. B. Calhoun wanted a butler who was literate and relatively sophisticated, Moses had received the rare gift of an education. It was illegal for slaves to learn to read or write, but Moses taught his mother and sister in secret. The year that Sinai left the South, 1857, was the year that Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of the Supreme Court said that Negroes in the United States had “no rights which white men were bound to respect.”
After the war the black Calhouns of Atlanta, led by Moses, a flourishing entrepreneur on good terms with his former owner, were fortunate enough to escape the harsh realities of poverty and racism that the vast majority of American blacks faced. They could afford to live in the “best” black neighborhoods, which had less crime—although to travel outside the city limits was incredibly dangerous: beyond Atlanta was, in Mark Twain’s words, “the United States of Lyncherdom.” Middle-class black women might work outside the home—as teachers, for example—but they did not work as domestics in white households. Middle-class black Southern women seemed to have perfected the survival technique of constructing their own South—one in which white people did not exist except perhaps as vague social role models. All black Southerners were exposed to and infected by racism, but normally, middle-class Negroes did not have the usual “black” experiences of racial insults and threats. On the whole, their lives seemed generally quite sunny. They went to college, they went to war, they married their childhood sweethearts, and they raised families. This book is about an extended family with “stars” in every generation, North and South, but Moses’ great-granddaughter, my mother, Lena Mary Calhoun Horne, born in 1917, became one of the brightest stars in the family during the second half of the twentieth century.
In the grotesquely lopsided African American story, oversimplification is the truth. Blacks in the North were protected by the U.S. Constitution, but blacks in the South had no constitutional protection at all. The black Calhouns who went north certainly “made it,” however “it” is defined. But some urban, educated Southerners like the black Calhouns also had wonderfully successful, happy lives—much happier, in fact, than the lives of cousins who fled t
o the North. The Southerners who “made it” won respect and honors from both races in every generation, despite living in an oppressive society. Because society at large was closed to them, Southern black families and communities turned inward. There was only family, friends, school, clubs, community, and, highly important, church. Northerners, less frequent churchgoers, seemed to find less happiness and cohesion, and were more prone to divorce, alcoholism, and adultery. Yes, there were Southern alcoholics, but in the church-oriented South families were whole. Southerners had more children and longer and happier marriages. But black Northerners, despite prejudice and restrictions, still had a whole world of outside choices. Northerners had libraries, parks, museums, and schools open to everyone; none of these things was available to Negroes in the South. Yet the black Calhouns prevailed; they were physicians, educators, entrepreneurs, politicians, social workers, journalists, and musicians. Which was more important, political freedom or a happy family life? Living without freedom could be bearable only if one was surrounded by love. Love and personal achievement were the only possible antidotes to the poisons of racism and Jim Crow.
Cora and Lena Calhoun, their cousin, Katie Webb (the daughter of Moses’ sister), and the men they married all belonged to the first generation of purposefully educated Southern blacks. As children of free Negroes or favored slaves, they were specifically educated in what were known as “Missionary” schools, founded by Northern philanthropists, to become the first black teachers in the South. The purpose of these schools springing up across the old Confederacy was to train future black teachers to help undo three centuries of enforced illiteracy. Despite the enmity of Southern whites, the Missionary schools were unqualified successes. The Missionary colleges, in particular, represented the dawning of a new day for Southern blacks. Above all, the American Missionary Association recruited dedicated teachers, mostly young Northern whites, who accepted a pittance for the dangerous job of going south to instruct the children of former slaves. They were hated by Southern whites because they treated blacks as social equals, using titles like “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss” and eating meals with them. One of those Missionary teachers was a tough-minded idealist named Edmund Asa Ware, Yale class of 1863, who was head of Atlanta’s two Missionary schools—the Storrs School for younger children and Atlanta University. In 1871 he admitted Cora Calhoun to the Storrs School, and in 1881 he signed her Atlanta University diploma. Lena Calhoun chose to go to college at Fisk, in Nashville, another Missionary institution. In 1885 seventeen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, fell in love at first sight with the beautiful “rosy apricot” vision of his sixteen-year-old classmate, Lena Calhoun of Atlanta.
He not only fell in love but found an iconic label for his fellow black Missionary teachers-to-be. He called them the “Talented Tenth.” Theoretically, they were to “uplift” the other 90 percent and take on roles of leadership. The Talented Tenth were very proud people because they were Negroes who mattered. Having been programmed for centuries by Southern whites to believe that they were inferior beings, the members of the post–Civil War generation were now being told almost exactly the opposite by their Northern white teachers. Missionary colleges were known to produce extremely confident black men and women. Missionary college elitism sometimes annoyed other blacks almost as much as it annoyed whites, but it would drive the twentieth-century battle for civil rights.
By the time the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (which upheld racial segregation) basically rescinded the Fourteenth Amendment, Cora and Lena Calhoun had both left the South with their husbands. In October 1887 Cora married teacher-editor-publisher Edwin F. Horn, a.k.a. “the Adonis of the Negro Press,” who would add an “e” to the end of his last name when he arrived in New York. On Christmas Day 1888, Lena Calhoun, presumably breaking the heart of “Willie” Du Bois, married Frank G. Smith, a slightly older Fisk graduate who would become a Chicago ophthalmologist. Meanwhile, their cousin, Katie Webb, married Antoine Graves, an early civil rights hero who was the first black licensed real estate broker in Atlanta, and stayed in the South.
Antoine Graves, the husband of Katie Webb, was an 1880s civil rights hero and successful businessman—the first black real estate broker in Atlanta.
Edwin Horne, Cora’s husband, the “Adonis of the Negro press”—an Indiana Republican who became a New York Tammany man
It is said that American history is cyclical—but for African Americans it seems more like a vicious circle. The pattern repeats itself over and over: one step forward, three steps back. Is it a coincidence that the three presidents assassinated between 1865 and 1963 were considered “friends of the Negro”? It was amazing, in the first decade of the millennium, that America elected a black president named Barack Hussein Obama. Although some people would never forgive Obama for being black, my ninety-one-year-old mother was thrilled. At first, it appeared that none of Obama’s ancestors had been slaves. However, researchers discovered that Obama may have descended from America’s first documented African slave, as the eleventh great-grandson of John Punch, an indentured servant who was enslaved in 1640 after an escape attempt. The descent was not, as one might think, from Obama’s black father, but through his white mother—a fact that epitomizes the complexities of race in America.
All forms of slavery are cruel, but slavery in the American South was especially cruel in its need to deny blacks their humanity. Blacks, literally, had “no souls,” insisted eighteenth-century Southern white Protestants—which may be why the concept of “soulfulness” became so important. Catholics, of course, had a mandate to nurture souls, not deny their existence. The Vatican profited heavily from slavery and the slave trade, but had a civilizing effect on slavery itself. In Catholic areas—Louisiana, for example, as well as Latin America—slave marriages were sanctified, and children could not be sold away from their parents. For the rest of the black South, however, family became as important a concept as soul. After the Civil War, the South had nothing—so poor whites held on to their guns, their dogs, and their battle flag. And poor blacks held on to the concepts of soul and family. Soul was about more than color—country music is poor white soul. For blacks, soul meant faith, fortitude, humor, tenacity, wisdom, and the ability to overcome, despite a lifetime of “white supremacy.”
I have no memory of childhood talks with my mother about race, but I do remember being told that if anyone asked “what” I was, I was to say, in no uncertain terms and with no embellishments, “I am an American.” Many years later, at the 1959 Harvard commencement, I chatted briefly with Senator John F. Kennedy, whose 1958 Senate campaign I had worked on. He asked me what I planned to do, now that I had graduated. I said I planned to go to Paris and never come back. “Oh, yes you will,” he said. “You’re an American.”
Part history and part memoir, The Black Calhouns is about six generations of an atypical African American family that is also typically American. Broadly, the nineteenth century is history, and the twentieth century, beginning with 1937, the year of my birth, is memoir. North and South, the black Calhouns lived through the civil rights century, 1865 to 1965—surely the most volatile American century of all. The black Calhouns, strengthened by their strong faith as well as their belief in the glowing evolvements of the creed, were lucky—but they were never selfish achievers.
As a child during World War II, it seemed important to stress national unity—however specious the idea. As a hero of that war, John F. Kennedy, a member of a formerly oppressed minority himself, never believed in hyphenated Americanism. Today, however, it is important to let people know “what” I am. I identify myself as African American to let others know that I am one of America’s historical stepchildren. The quality of African American life, like that of all stepchildren, depends on the spiritual, philosophical, and political character of the stepparent and stepsiblings. As far as the spiritual is concerned, America boasts of its belief in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Well, we know how the God
of the Old Testament felt about racism: when Moses’ sister Miriam rebelled against Moses for marrying a Cushite (Ethiopian) woman, God turned Miriam into a “snow-white leper”—so much for “white supremacy.” America’s philosophical character, as stated in our national documents, our creed, is both impeccable and immutable. The trouble, of course, is politics. The political character of American life is both cynical and changeable—and our political actions have rarely reflected either our avowed faith or our stated creed. African Americans might very well be charged with the task of keeping the country true to its best self.
CHAPTER ONE
South/Reconstruction, 1865–1876
MORNING/1860s
THE STORY of Reconstruction is really the story of what almost was, wrote W. E. B. Du Bois—who first lived Reconstruction, then studied it. His book Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880, published in 1935, makes statistics breathe and reads like a novel. Du Bois called Reconstruction the mythic time for blacks. It was a window of American opportunity that opened in 1865, the year of the Thirteenth Amendment, and closed in 1876, the election year that saw the final betrayal of blacks by the Republican Party. That single decade, 1865–1876, between the end of slavery and the arrival of Jim Crow, represents the arc in time called “Reconstruction,” when for the first time in the South, under the protection of the federal government, blacks were American citizens and all public discrimination was illegal. There were laws to protect black civil rights—and anyone could learn to read and write. This “different world,” as Du Bois called it, arrived with the passage of the three great Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth, also known as the Civil War Amendments, which really freed the slaves and made them citizens and voters. This was the issue: Alabama, Florida, and Louisiana had almost as many black Republicans as white Democrats, and Mississippi and South Carolina had more black Republicans. This was the reality of Reconstruction—the political tables were turned. And this is what the white Democrats of the South were determined to destroy.
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