In June 1881 Cora Calhoun completed Atlanta University’s higher normal course of study and become a member of its fourth graduating class. Her diploma was signed by Asa Ware. Besides her religion and philosophy courses, she had studied geometry, geology, geography, botany, chemistry, physics, astronomy, literature, composition, history, government, and Latin. She also learned household science: plain sewing, cookery, and nursing. The pretty sixteen-year-old Southern girl from a reasonably well-off family, bluestocking and feminist though she might claim to be, was always ready to go to a party. Cora kept party invitations as souvenirs: There was the New Year’s Eve 1880 “Entertainment” at Odd Fellows Hall given by “a committee of 12 bachelors.” The bachelors were slightly older young men whom she had known all her life. The “Gate City Girls” (“G.C.G.”) and “The Married Ladies Social Club” had a masquerade party “At Mr. Calhoun’s” (Moses’ restaurant) at No. 34 Decatur Street, on March 24, 1882; the committee included “the Misses Webb and Calhoun.” In 1883 Cora was cordially invited to attend “a Reception given by the Young Men, at Golden Rod Hall, Whitehall St. Dec. 28, 8 o’clock.” Christmas and the New Year, a social time for Cora and other middle-class blacks of Atlanta, had traditionally been festive times on plantations—the holidays were even more festive in freedom.
But education was the eternal issue—and “Head or hand?” was the question. On May 31, 1881, Booker T. Washington, a twenty-five-year-old Negro graduate of Hampton Institute, received $2,000 from the Alabama state legislature to open a new school for Negroes in Tuskegee, Alabama. At the age of sixteen, Washington, a former child coal miner, had walked barefoot to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and asked to be admitted. Students received a postsecondary education, learned job skills, and paid for their education through manual labor. They were advised to ignore politics and concentrate on character development and economic self-help. When the Alabama legislature asked Samuel Armstrong, Hampton’s founder, to recommend a white teacher as principal, he instead recommended Washington. Tuskegee Institute officially opened on July 4, 1881, with one teacher, Washington, using space rented from a local church. Tuskegee stressed the “hand” above all—thus it received more Northern industrial largesse than any other Missionary college.
Two days earlier, on the morning of July 2, 1881, a failed civil servant crackpot named Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield in the busy waiting room of Washington’s railroad station. As Garfield entered the station, Guiteau stepped directly behind him and shot him twice in the back, then was seized by angry witnesses who held him until a policeman arrived. It was at the police station that Guiteau made the statement that caused so much trouble to Garfield’s successor: “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! I did it and I want to be arrested! Arthur is President now!” Vice President Chester A. Arthur, a stalwart (essentially a Republican willing to accommodate the anti-Negro South), would enter the presidency under a large cloud of suspicion.
Frederick Douglass, for one, had always been suspicious of the “self-indulgent” vice president. Douglass distinctly remembered when he first heard the name “Chester A. Arthur” at the 1880 Chicago Convention. He had felt a shudder “such as one might feel in coming upon an armed murderer or a poisonous reptile”:
For some occult and mysterious cause, I know not what, I felt the hand of death upon me. I do not say or intimate that Mr. Arthur had anything to do with the taking off of the President … I state the simple fact precisely as it was.
Party reformers had no love for Arthur, either. There was no place in which Arthur’s “powers of mischief will be so small as in the Vice-Presidency,” said the Nation magazine. The New York Times said that Arthur’s previous career had been a “mess of filth.” He was a well-dressed fat man, collector of the Port of New York, and chief lieutenant to Senator Roscoe Conkling. During the 1880 campaign, political rivals insisted that he was ineligible to be president because he was not born in America. Some insisted that he was Canadian because his parents had briefly lived there. Another group said he had been born in Ireland and came to the United States at the age of fourteen. Even his so-called friends were aghast. “Chet Arthur, president of the United States? Good God!” said one unnamed acquaintance.
Once again, America was plunged into mourning over the assassination of a president. This was different, however. Although gravely wounded, Garfield still lived. Public prayer vigils were held throughout the country. At first Garfield’s condition fluctuated; then it was mostly bad. In the Washington summer, navy engineers lowered the temperature of the president’s sickroom by blowing fans over a large block of ice. Sam Ward, who personally carried some hundred-year-old rum to the White House, wrote to his sister Julia, saying he was “backing divine Providence to win the race.” The problem was the bullet—doctors couldn’t find it. One bullet had grazed the president’s arm; the second was possibly in his spine. Looking for the bullet, a team of doctors stuck unwashed fingers into the wound and infected his liver in the process. Alexander Graham Bell announced the invention of a special metal detector to find the bullet—a “telephone probe,” he called it, for the detection of bullets in the human body. But the metal frame on Garfield’s bed threw the instrument off. Bell had asked the doctors to move Garfield from the bed, but they rejected his request. What did Bell know about medical science? When Garfield finally succumbed, his medical treatment had been such that his assassin could fairly say that the doctors, not he, had killed the president.
Douglass had some final thoughts on Garfield and Arthur:
The death of Mr. Garfield placed in the presidential chair Chester A. Arthur, who did nothing to correct the errors of President Hayes, or to arrest the decline and fall of the Republican party, but, on the contrary, by his self-indulgence, indifference, and neglect of opportunity, allowed the country to drift (like an oarless boat in the rapids) towards the howling chasm of the slaveholding Democracy.
In December, Atlanta University established the Garfield Scholarship Fund, as a memorial to the late president who had been considered a friend of the Negro.
If there was anyone who understood political disappointment, it was Edwin Horn. Senator Charles Sumner’s great Civil Rights Act of 1875, which he reported on for two Indiana papers, was declared unconstitutional in October 1883. Black despair followed. It was the end of all Reconstruction benefits. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court ruled that the bill’s guarantees of equal rights went beyond the powers granted to Congress in the Reconstruction Amendments.
Republicans and Democrats were now united in seeking to make life hell for blacks in America—52 blacks were lynched in 1883. Between 1883 and 1896, 1,280 Negroes, including women and children, were lynched. And Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, and Georgia enacted Jim Crow laws on everything from railroad cars to burial plots to checkers games. Ida Wells-Barnett, the militant antilynching crusader, would begin keeping statistics in 1892.
On July 4, 1885, an item appeared in the Washington Bee, one of the most popular black newspapers, that “Miss Cora C. Calhoun, of Atlanta, Ga., and Miss Carrie Walton of Augusta, Ga.,” were “expected in this city daily.” They had been in Raleigh, North Carolina, for the wedding of a friend. “Both are accomplished young ladies, besides embracing all other charms demanded by the critical eye.” Belles of the Eastern circuit black bourgeoisie of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, and Atlanta, they were great travelers, despite Jim Crow. Cora was now twenty. She hoped to see new (male) faces—Atlanta’s faces were far too familiar.
“He Fell Going Uphill” was the Atlanta Constitution headline. In the late summer of 1885 Asa Ware returned to Atlanta ahead of his family to prepare for the opening of school in the fall. After dinner on the evening of September 5, he felt ill and went for some air. As he was walking uphill from his home to the university, he had a seizure, or stroke, and died. His burial posed a problem for the local cemetery. Ware had stated his wish to be buried where he had done his lifework and “not with
those … who had not been friends to the colored people.” Because Ware was held in such esteem by whites as well as blacks, the cemetery made a concession. President Ware was buried in the middle of the road that divided the Negro and white sections of the cemetery. Thus, one-half of his body lay in the burial ground of each. Nine years later, on December 22, 1894, Ware’s remains were moved to Atlanta University and placed beneath a granite boulder from Ware’s Massachusetts birthplace.
In the fall of 1885, sixteen-year-old Lena Calhoun went away to college at Fisk, where among the new faces in her class was a seventeen-year-old youth from Massachusetts with a decidedly Yankee accent named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois—known as “Willie.” Du Bois, who was at Fisk to prepare for Harvard, entered Fisk already a sophomore and was suddenly running the paper and the student government. He had only one academic rival, the daughter of Fisk’s white German teacher. Du Bois, the star student-athlete of Great Barrington High School, had been one of three blacks in his high school—the others were his cousins. Of African, French Huguenot, and Dutch ancestry, they were all descendants of the colonial “Black Burghardts,” who had lived free in the Berkshires for generations. An admirer of beautiful Lena Calhoun, Du Bois wrote of her in retrospect:
Never before had I seen young men so self-assured and who gave themselves such airs and colored men at that; and above all for the first time I saw beautiful girls … Of one of these girls I have often said, no human being could possibly have been as beautiful as she seemed to my young eyes in that far-off September night of 1885. She was the great-aunt of Lena Horne and fair as Lena Horne is, Lena Calhoun was far more beautiful.
Du Bois did not learn about being black until he attended Fisk. And he was happy that he went to the school before he went to Harvard:
Had I gone from Great Barrington High School directly to Harvard, I would have sought companionship with my white fellows and been disappointed and embittered by a discovery of social limitations to which I had not been used.
At age eighteen, Du Bois began teaching summer school, leaving Nashville for the Tennessee countryside—where, living and teaching in log cabins built before the Civil War, he learned about slavery after the fact:
No one but a Negro going into the South without previous experience of color caste can have any conception of its barbarism … Murder, killing and maiming Negroes, raping Negro women—in the 80’s and in the southern South, this was not even news; it got no publicity; it caused no arrests; and punishment for such transgression was so unusual that the fact was telegraphed North.
The process of “learning” to be black was a kind of rite of passage for certain black men—usually middle-class Northerners. In the process of learning, Du Bois found hope instead of futility. At Fisk he discovered a “civilization in potentiality,” into which he leaped with enthusiasm. “A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism,” wrote the Massachusetts Yankee: “henceforward I was a Negro.”
After college, it was time for Katie Webb and the Calhoun girls to marry. Katie was actually the first. She found a hero—a romantically handsome fellow with ambition. In October 1885 Katie married Antoine Graves, of Rome, Georgia, who graduated from Atlanta University two years after Cora. In June 1883, twenty-one-year-old Antoine was appointed principal pro tem of the Gate City Colored Public School (also known as the Houston Street School), and he was reelected as principal by the Atlanta Board of Education for the school years 1884–1885 and 1885–1886. He was the second principal of the school. In 1886 the body of Jefferson Davis passed through Atlanta on the way to reburial in Richmond, and the white citizens planned a celebration. All schoolchildren, teachers, and principals were ordered to march in the parade. Antoine Graves told his teachers and students that he did not believe they should honor a man who fought to keep them in slavery; therefore he would not march—but the teachers and students were free to do as they wanted. He was fired. After job-hunting as far afield as Texas and California, he eventually returned to Atlanta and opened a real estate business, which he would operate for fifty-five years. He was the first black broker in Atlanta and would handle some of the largest transactions in the city: selling the governor’s mansion to the state, and appraising and selling land to and for the city. During the late 1880s and early 1900s, he was active in the Republican Party South, now virtually an all-black party. He was also a past grandmaster of the Odd Fellows Lodge, an organization established after the Civil War to aid former slaves in adapting to a new way of life. Katie and Antoine had four children, all born in Atlanta: Nellie, July 1886; Antoine Jr., called “Judge,” June 1888; Catherine, April 1890; and Marie Antoinette, March 1892.
On March 12, 1886, the pleasant world of Moses Calhoun fell apart on the front page of the Atlanta Constitution. The white population may have read the article with amusement:
An Irate Mother
She Gives a Young Darky a Good Thrashing
Ras Badger, the son of the colored dentist, makes slanderous remarks about Cora Calhoun, the daughter of Mose Calhoun—the mother gives Badger a thrashing.
The upper crust of the colored society is now enjoying a smothered sensation in which the Badgers and the Calhouns are the star characters.
Cowhides and injured characters are the features of the sensation …
The article went on to describe Moses and Dr. Badger, the dentist, as two of the most prominent Negroes in Atlanta—both being “sober” and “industrious,” with “considerable property” and “the confidence of a long list of white friends.” Both were described as having families and as occupying the “highest social position in colored society.” It seemed, however, that Dr. Badger’s son, Ras, had been overheard making “unkind and slanderous remarks” about Cora Calhoun, whom the paper described as “quite pretty and a decided belle with her race.” The paper does not reveal the content of the slander, but Atlanta Calhoun, Cora’s mother, took it seriously enough to confront young Badger, who strongly denied having made any remarks about Cora. When he refused Atlanta’s demand that he put a denial in the papers, the Constitution reported that “the mother knocked him down and gave him a good genteel thrashing.” She then purchased “an old-time cowhide which she says she will use upon Badger the first time she meets him.” The affair was hushed up immediately after it happened, the paper said, “but leaked out yesterday and is now the talk of the town among the colored people.” Moses is singled out in the story as having “amassed enough money to make him the wealthiest colored man in Atlanta,” with “a handsome home on Wheat Street.” Like his wife, the paper said, Moses Calhoun “is devoted to his children and out of what he makes sets aside a liberal amount for their wardrobes and education.”
Records are scarce, but it appears that sometime shortly after this article appeared Moses Calhoun suddenly sold his businesses and moved his family lock, stock, and barrel to Birmingham, where, once again, he opened a restaurant-catering establishment. Why did he move to Birmingham? It seems he was so humiliated that he felt he literally could no longer show his face in Atlanta. Dignity and pride were huge elements of his personality. In any case, the dream was shattered just when Moses could actually hold it in his hand. He moved to Birmingham for two reasons: it was in another state, and it was a city without a past. He was starting over where no one knew his name. No sleepy Old South town, Birmingham was born in the 1870s from rich iron and coal works, and borne on the backs of black convict labor slaves who were bought and sold to work in the mines, living in unspeakable horror and filth, beaten four or five times a day, and often working naked on very little of what passed for food. “Convicts,” by the way, were usually convicted of “crimes” like vagrancy and were sold by sheriffs to work off the bonds they were forever unable to post for their bail. Convict labor was the post-slavery way for individuals as well as communities to make revenue from free human labor.
How did the Calhoun family feel about being “the talk of the town”? Cora and Lena were doubtless mortified, Atlanta was
chagrined, and Moses was both furious and afraid. What was he without his good name? He was a laughingstock and felt utterly humiliated. I think Moses had what is called a narcissistic mortification—a death of the ego. He could not hold his head up in Atlanta. How interesting that he would seek to re-create himself in Birmingham, a new city that had no identity beyond its mineral resources. And no one in Birmingham appeared to have read the Atlanta papers.
Moses found the prosperous center of Negro Birmingham and opened a grocery-catering service. This was very lucky since his two daughters would marry, one a year after the other. Cora was first. This item appeared on October 29, 1887, in the Cleveland Gazette:
An invitation to attend the marriage of Miss Cora C. Calhoun, of Birmingham, Ala., and Edwin F. Horn, editor of the Chattanooga, Tenn., Justice, and formerly a resident of Indianapolis, Ind., and Chicago, Ill., has been received. The wedding occurred the 26th at the residence of the bride’s parents, in Birmingham, Ala. That theirs may be a long and pleasant marriage life is the earnest desire of the Gazette.
In 1887 Edwin might have still been optimistic about the black future in the South—Chattanooga, like Birmingham, was still a Republican town. Edwin had been successful in Chattanooga, publishing the paper and teaching. The Chattanooga Justice, the paper Edwin started, became the leading colored paper in the state. He was also a budding capitalist—perhaps inspired by his new father-in-law—as part owner of a “modern” drugstore, the People’s Drug Store, where “electric cars pass the door.”
After the death of his second wife, Edwin had moved to Chattanooga, which was one of the rare Republican-dominated Southern cities. It was known to be a place where blacks could get ahead. But Cora and Edwin probably met in 1886, when he was briefly coeditor of the weekly Atlanta Defiance, and still visibly grieving after the deaths of two wives. They were both in a state of upheaval. Cora, with her sister and parents, was about to start life over in Birmingham. Not only was Edwin a new face, but he was the handsomest man she had ever seen. That could be worrisome. But he seemed so melancholy. At some point she learned the story of his two tragically brief marriages. What woman could resist? In 1887, twenty-two-year-old Cora was slender and petite, with large nearsighted hazel eyes, a generous mouth, curly brown hair, and a tiny waist. The colored press delighted in the marriage of one of its own to a belle of Atlanta and Birmingham:
The Black Calhouns Page 6