The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  In the state report on Atlanta University in 1877, the year that Cora Calhoun was a freshman at the school, the committee noticed a “remarkable docility” on the part of the students, who were like “clay in the hands of the potter.” Atlanta University was in a position to “shape the public opinions of the colored race, and make them true and loyal citizens of Georgia … or it can turn all their prejudices and feelings against their native state.” The board urged Asa Ware to remove certain books that presented a “sectional bias” and suggested that he instruct his teachers to promote friendly relations between students and native whites. Ware, who was courageous but not rash, removed the objectionable books and urged his teachers to make serious efforts to avoid alienating the students from Atlanta’s white citizens.

  Perhaps Ware was conscious of the growing relations between the students at Fisk and the friendly citizens of Nashville, due in particular to the Fisk Jubilee Singers. In the 1870s America discovered and fell in love with Negro spirituals: Bible stories, both light and serious, retold in Negro dialect and set to vocal harmonies of an almost transcendent beauty and power. Audiences, black and white, flocked to hear the Fisk Jubilee Singers, fresh on the concert scene and currently touring America, Europe, and the British Isles to raise money for their university. One of their earliest and most eloquent fans was Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), a longtime friend of the Negro. (Huck Finn, of course, is the perfect “closet” abolitionist.) Twain first heard the Jubilee Singers in a German beer hall on their first tour of Europe in the summer of 1871:

  To my mind—their music made all other vocal music cheap … It is utterly beautiful, to me; and it moves me infinitely more than any other music can. I think that in the Jubilees and their songs America has produced the perfectest flower of the ages; and I wish it were a foreign product, so that she would worship it and lavish money on it and go properly crazy over it.

  Suddenly, black American spirituals were being sung around the world in every language, and the Jubilee Singers became internationally known. These very polite and well-groomed young people, ranging in all the shades of black, from ebony to ivory, raised enough money from the 1876 tour to construct the first important building at Fisk.

  Beyond the schools and churches of both races, vox populi was not exactly clamoring for spirituals—but it was clamoring for black music and dance. And it was clamoring for an ersatz version of black life in minstrel shows. Before the war, minstrelsy was about whites performing in blackface (burnt cork makeup). After the war, the most successful minstrel troupe was Charles Callender’s Original Georgia Minstrels, formerly the Georgia Minstrels, who were blacks in blackface. Black minstrels accepted and copied the image created by racist white minstrels. Callender’s Original Georgia Minstrels entered every new town with a parade, a brass band, and, if possible, an elephant.

  Also popular were “Tom” shows—performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—a theatrical perennial for at least eighty years. At one point, four companies performed the play simultaneously in New York City. And touring companies continued to play to packed houses all over America—generally with all white actors. The more successful companies, however, had Negro extras, often advertised as “a passel of darkies and a brace of hounds.” Or—if really high end—“200 genuine colored people.” In February 1881, ninety-two-year-old Reverend Josiah Henson, “the real Uncle Tom,” who lived in Dresden, Canada, near Detroit, gave one of his last lectures on slavery in an American church. White-haired Henson was indeed the “original.” His lecture was free. This is what Reverend Josiah Henson said about slavery: “It turned the slave into the cringing, treacherous, false, and thieving victim of tyranny.”

  By the 1880s, twenty years past slavery, Moses and Atlanta Calhoun were leaders in Atlanta’s black middle-class community, and Cora and Lena Calhoun and their cousin, Katie Webb, were definitely top girls. The Calhoun girls, with their youthful good looks, were photographed—Cora, small and pretty, and Lena, tall and beautiful. In the 1880 census, Moses Calhoun, aged fifty-one, of Fulton County, Georgia, was listed as “Merchant & Restaurant,” “married,” and “mu” for mulatto—the census could never make up its mind about Moses; sometimes he was “bla” and sometimes he was “mu.” His household now consisted of Atlanta, Cora, Lena, and Atlanta’s mother, Charlotte Fernando. The family names are followed by six unknown men, presumably the cook and waiters from Moses’ restaurant, living in his boardinghouse next door. Moses had become a pillar of the First Congregational Church, which remained unapologetically integrated—with a white pastor and a substantial group of whites in the congregation, mostly teachers and staff at Storrs and Atlanta University—sitting among rather than separate from the black members, contrary to Georgia law. The black Calhouns were now leaders of their community. As the hopes of Reconstruction began to fade, they continued to embody its promise.

  CHAPTER THREE

  South/Reconstruction

  NIGHT/1880s

  BY 1880 the country was clearly speeding backward on the subject of race—and the extent of the racist oppression would go far beyond anything seen in antebellum days. Jim Crow, the KKK, and the “separate but equal” lie all held sway over black Americans from the late nineteenth century through most of the twentieth century. The 1880s could be called the Dark Ages—everything won in the war and Reconstruction was basically lost. Southern blacks had absolutely no constitutional safeguards. Jim Crow would soon spread its shadow over the region and the country. Outside the larger Southern cities, black life was less than cheap. It was a tyranny that was worse than slavery. The only thing that made it marginally better than slavery was the ability to escape, which was available to only very few.

  Above the Mason-Dixon Line, it was the Gilded Age—with tycoons, trusts, and the iron tentacles of the railroads relentlessly pushing westward. It was a new age of steam, steel, speed, and communication. There were new inventions, some by black Americans, to make life easier and faster. For example, Canadian-born Elijah McCoy, the son of runaway slaves, was trained and certified as a mechanical engineer in Scotland, but in America he could get only a job as a railroad fireman. In the 1870s he invented a steam engine lubrication device that was so superior that purchasers began asking for the “real McCoy.” And Massachusetts-born Lewis Latimer, also the son of runaway slaves, drafted the patent drawings for his friend Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone; he also invented the railway water closet and, most important, the carbon filament for electric lightbulbs. Working for Hiram Maxim (inventor of the machine gun) in 1881, Latimer supervised the installation of electric lights in New York City, Philadelphia, Montreal, and London. In 1884 he became Thomas Edison’s chief draftsman and the only black “Edison pioneer”—and in 1890 he cowrote the book on the Edison electricity system. (In the 1890s he would become a good friend of the New York–based black Calhouns.) Special black achievement might be recognized—but the explosion of southern European and Chinese immigration was making an impact on black employment. There was racial and labor violence. There was also a robber baron mentality among the powerful. “The public be damned!” said the richest man in the world, William H. Vanderbilt of the New York Central Railroad. It summed up the attitude of almost every politician in Washington in the last quarter of the ninteenth century. The Negro electorate and the Negro leadership continued to follow the Republicans without protest. How could they support the Democrats?

  In the summer of 1880 Edwin Horn, the young man who would marry Cora Calhoun, was an alternate delegate from the First District in Indiana to the Republican National Convention in Chicago, pledged to Senator James G. Blaine of Maine. Edwin was now a spectacularly handsome twenty-one-year-old middle school principal and editor-publisher of a black weekly newspaper. Senator Blaine was leader of the “half-breeds,” the liberal Republican faction that wanted continued federal protection for black Southern voters. But conservative Republicans, known as “stalwarts,” believed in sacrificing the black vote for an alliance with disaffecte
d Southern Democrats. The 1880 Republican convention was deadlocked between “half-breed” Blaine and “stalwart” Ulysses S. Grant, seeking an unpopular third term. The convention desperately needed a dark horse. Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce was presiding when Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio asked for recognition. Bruce recognized Garfield, who made such an impression on the exhausted delegates that, on the thirty-sixth ballot, he became the “dark horse” nominee. Garfield’s victory was slim and achieved without a single Southern state. He campaigned on the “bloody shirt” platform—of helping Southern Negroes. The Senate itself was evenly divided between the two parties.

  Despite being a Blaine man, Edwin Horn was happy to support Garfield, a former abolitionist and the youngest brigadier in the Union army, and to see Blaine chosen as secretary of state. They were both “half-breeds.” They would save the beleaguered black Republican South from the depredations of the Democrats. Garfield, who was the last president to be born in a log cabin, and whose campaign biography, From Canal Boy to President, was written by Horatio Alger, attended Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College), then transferred to Williams College, where he graduated in 1856. After college, he taught classical languages at Western Reserve Eclectic during the week and preached for the Disciples of Christ on Sundays. He became principal of the Eclectic Institute in 1857. The ambidextrous Garfield’s classicist parlor trick possibly explains the meaning of “Eclectic”: he could simultaneously write an answer to a question in Latin with one hand and ancient Greek with the other—surely uniquely in American politics.

  There was a notable black presence at the Garfield inauguration. Black troops, heroes of the Indian Wars, marched in the inaugural parade. (After the Civil War, the army established four all-black units—two infantry and two cavalry—to fight hostile Indians.) It was said that more Negroes than whites bought tickets for the inaugural ball. And in a historical first, on March 4, 1881, as marshal of the District of Columbia, sixty-three-year-old Frederick Douglass had the duty of escorting both president-elect Garfield and outgoing president Hayes to the inauguration ceremonies. Appointed by Hayes in 1877 to be the first black marshal, and still handsome and imposing with his lion’s mane of white hair, Douglass led the parade of officials from the Senate chamber to the Capitol rotunda, where Garfield took the oath of office.

  In his inaugural address, President Garfield stated that all the powers of the government, the states, and volunteer services should be directed at solving the problem of educating the Southern Negro. “There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States,” he said, essentially speaking of all the people the Missionary schools were unable to reach. The South disagreed, of course.

  On March 5, the day after the inauguration, President Garfield named Frederick Douglass the first black recorder of deeds of the District of Columbia. Douglass had not been entirely for Garfield. He preferred men of sterner stuff, like General Grant. Most blacks loved Grant—graft, “stalwarts,” and all. But recorder of deeds was a more lucrative patronage job ($1.50 per deed) than marshal. It would also mean less time on the lecture circuit and more time to write. His third book, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, would be published that year. As recorder of deeds, he had a new secretary: a forty-two-year-old Mount Holyoke graduate, Helen Pitts, a white feminist from a Rochester, New York, abolitionist family.

  By now, Senator Bruce of Mississippi, the first black senator to serve a full term in Congress, was one of the wealthiest Negroes in America and the most famous black elected official. His senatorial term ended on Garfield’s inauguration day. His political future now depended entirely on Republican Party patronage. He requested the position of register of the Treasury and it was granted. It was the highest appointed position ever held by a Negro—his signature would be on U.S. currency. As long as there was a Republican in the White House, black Republicans like Bruce and Douglass would have good federal jobs. Black Republicans no longer won elections in Mississippi, of course, but they still controlled delegates to the Republican National Convention and could make a difference in tight races.

  Bruce’s 1878 marriage to the beautiful Josephine Wilson, daughter of an important Cleveland Negro, had been highly publicized, and the honeymoon abroad was a success—with all courtesies from the Department of State. The newlyweds were a political and social success in London. The London Times called Bruce as “accomplished as any man in the Senate.” Back in Washington, the Bruces attended a white church, had many white friends, and entertained lavishly in their imposing Washington house. The senator now owned three thousand acres of Mississippi Delta land, plus several successful Washington businesses, and commanded high fees for speeches. “His complexion is café-au-lait, and his slightly curly hair is well-brushed,” wrote a contemporary. “He dresses well and is as intelligent and polite a gentleman as you will find in Washington.” Mrs. Bruce, it was noted, had “Caucasian features, large, beautiful eyes, a somewhat brunette complexion, and long, slightly waved hair. She is well-educated and said to be an intellectual.” A photograph of the young Mrs. Bruce reveals a delicate-featured, seemingly white beauty who is really a Negro—at least according to the “one-drop” rule of Southern law. Bruce and his wife had one son, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, born in 1879 and named for Bruce’s senatorial mentor, the Republican boss of New York.

  By the late winter of 1880, up-and-coming young Indiana Republican Edwin Horn was about to marry his second wife and move to Indianapolis, where he would become principal of a colored school and found a weekly newspaper, the Colored World, later the successful Indianapolis World. Extremely high-minded, and steeped in Romantic poetry and literature, he had joined a colored literary society in neighboring Nashville, where he had met his first love, Callie Hatcher. Two 1878 Nashville newspaper clips tell the story:

  Married … Saturday, November 30th … Mr. Edwin F. Horn of

  Evansville, Indiana to Miss Callie Hatcher of this city …

  Died … On Saturday, December 14, Mrs. Callie L. Hatcher, the wife of Edwin Horn …

  They had been married only two weeks. The cause of Callie Hatcher Horn’s death is unknown. Maybe she was ill when they married. Maybe she had a sudden accident. Edwin married again two years later. His second wife’s father, H. Ford Douglass, had been a noted Illinois abolitionist and “agent” on the extraordinary Ohio Underground Railroad. The great Frederick permitted Ford to add an extra “s” to his name and spoke well of him in print. In the bloody 1850s Ford Douglass had advocated black emigration to Central America or Haiti. Despite his faith in emigration, however, he was the first black man in Illinois to try to enlist in the Union army. Eventually, he became captain of the army’s only black regiment of light artillery and died of typhus at the Battle of Vicksburg. Edwin understood his father-in-law’s sense of exile, as it became less and less possible for black Republicans to survive or have freedom in the South. Edwin’s second wife, Ford Douglass’ daughter, Nellie, died in childbirth.

  After presenting herself for examination concerning her Christian faith, on February 9, 1881, sixteen-year-old Cora Calhoun was chosen for admission into the Congregational Church. And on March 13 she was baptized by immersion, as was the practice, with a group of thirteen others. Cora was now a member of the senior class of the higher normal course at Storrs. (A senior in high school, more or less.) She was studying algebra, art history, Milton, and Shakespeare; her classes included “Mental Philosophy and Moral Philosophy” and “Evidences of Christianity.” High school may be where Cora discovered that she was a religious seeker.

  On April 7, 1881, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan, created the first Jim Crow law, mandating separate railway carriages for Negroes and whites. It was the first law of its kind in the South—but its title came from an old song. According to historian C. Vann Woodward, by 1838 the term “Jim Crow” had become an adjective that applied to all aspects of Southern Negro life. Over time, “Jim Crow” became synonymous with the
South’s entire legal system. The name came from a minstrel song, “Jump Jim Crow.” The original Jim Crow(e) may have been a crippled black man who entertained workers at Thomas Crowe’s livery stable in Louisville, Kentucky, circa 1830:

  He was very much deformed, the right shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the knee, which gave him a painful, but at the same time ludicrous limp … He was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied words of his own … and these were the words of his refrain: “Wheel about, turnabout, do js so, an ebery time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.”

  This deformed man apparently so convulsed white minstrel star Thomas “Daddy” Rice when he was a young man that he put it into the blackface act that made him famous.

  It is important to understand that Jim Crow laws were the model for Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws and South African apartheid. Nazis sent Jews to death camps. Apartheid kept black people penned into “homelands.” And Jim Crow kept blacks isolated, oppressed, impoverished, uneducated, liable to lynching, and still working without fair recompense. Tennessee’s Jim Crow law became the Southern model in the long twilight of Reconstruction. Tennessee laws were copied by Florida in 1887; Mississippi in 1888; Texas in 1889; Louisiana in 1890; Arkansas, Georgia, Alabama, and Kentucky in 1891; South Carolina in 1898; North Carolina in 1899; Virginia in 1900; Maryland in 1904; and Oklahoma in 1907. These ironclad laws were the bane of black Southern life for most of the twentieth century.