The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  Cora Calhoun at eighteen, a belle of Atlanta

  Lena Calhoun at sixteen, the great love of W. E. B. Du Bois

  The marriage of Mr. E. F. Horn of this city [Chattanooga] and Miss Cora Calhoun of Birmingham, Ala. was a brilliant event in the history of the magic city … The groom came to this city about one year ago, since then he has made a great success in editing and publishing a weekly paper called JUSTICE … Mr. Horn is also a teacher in the Gilmer Street school …

  Everyone agreed that while Cora was a pretty little thing, darkeyed Lena—at sixteen already tall, majestically poised, and gravely smoldering—was a beauty. Lena broke Willie Du Bois’ heart when she married an “older man,” as Du Bois described Frank Gatewood Smith, Lena’s husband, who had been a senior during her and Du Bois’ first year at Fisk:

  Frank Smith of the class ahead of me was a yellow dandy, faultlessly dressed and a squire of dames. He later married Lena Calhoun with whom I was hopelessly in love; but Smith was over 25 years of age and ready for a wife.

  Lena married Frank on Christmas Day 1888 in her father’s Birmingham house. They followed Cora and Edwin to Chattanooga, but later returned to Nashville, where they had both gone to college. At some point before they married, Frank had passed as “Cuban” to attend an Illinois ophthalmology school. So he was Dr. Frank G. Smith, optometrist—but he was also, in typical black middle-class fashion, the first principal of Pearl High School, attached to Fisk, the only black high school in Nashville. Frank and Lena had two children, both born in Nashville: Edwina, 1891; and Frank Jr., 1893.

  Frank G. Smith, Lena Calhoun’s handsome husband, was a Fisk graduate, physician, and high school principal—W. E. B. Du Bois was heartbroken when she married him.

  Moses was known to have owned a grocery store in Birmingham in 1887. And he was listed in the Birmingham directory for 1890. The house address given is the same as the one on Cora Calhoun’s wedding invitation. First Congregational Church records list Moses and Atlanta Calhoun as having left the church by death in 1890. More likely, they both died between 1888 and 1890.

  After Cora and Edwin Horn married, they followed the dying Republican Party across the South—from Atlanta to Birmingham to Chattanooga. Edwin finally met his idol, Frederick Douglass, in Washington in 1888, at the National Negro Editorial Association convention. Douglass had returned to Washington to work for the Republican Party in the 1888 election. The new president, Benjamin Harrison, made Douglass minister and consul general to the Republic of Haiti and chargé d’affaires for the Dominican Republic. There was even a small flurry that year for Indiana native Edwin Horn to be recorder of deeds when Harrison, a friendly acquaintance of Edwin’s from Indiana, became president. This was great excitement for Edwin, but in the end the job went to veteran former senator B. K. Bruce. The Republicans had two important black tokens in Douglass and Bruce, who interchanged a round of jobs. Edwin and Cora had their first son, Errol, in 1889, in Chattanooga.

  Poor health and arguments over the U.S. occupation of Haiti caused Frederick Douglass to resign his consular posts. Douglass died on February 20, 1895, after speaking to a meeting of the National Council of Women. Douglass’ controversial second marriage to his white secretary in 1884 seemed to have no effect on his party standing. In theory, he spoke for and to the black people of America. And he was, after all, the most recognized and important token of all.

  On the other hand, Booker T. Washington would soon become far and away the most important black man in America—so important that he stood alone between all that money from Carnegie and Frick and the entirety of Southern black education. In modern terms as well as in the context of their own times, Washington was pretty far right and Du Bois was pretty far left. Douglass was the most centrist. Washington basically distrusted middle-class blacks, especially the NAACP. He did not believe that voting rights or civil rights were essential to black success. As far as whites were concerned, Washington believed in strict accommodation—and educating the “hand” instead of the “head.” Washington never shared his good fortune, which he reaped because he mostly said only what whites wanted to hear—as in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech of 1895: “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”

  There were few friends of the Negro in the years between 1890 and 1900, when the Supreme Court entrenched segregation and disenfranchisement. The final assault on blacks came thirteen years after the Supreme Court declared Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Act to be unconstitutional. In 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson upheld both Jim Crow and white supremacy, ruling that it was “powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based on physical differences.” Against this blatant support for white supremacy, the great Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent was a powerful rebuke to the racist court: “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” Although some Northern states enacted state civil rights acts, Plessy v. Ferguson remained the national law of the land for more than fifty years. White supremacy was the American way of life.

  It would be a very long and dark night for black Americans in the South. Between January 1896 and December 1897, two hundred Negroes were lynched. In Atlanta the black Calhouns survived by creating their own insular world, by staying out of controversial politics, and by always supporting the church, the community, education at all levels, and, most important, the concept of family life. They loved Atlanta. There were rednecks everywhere, and race riots were not unknown, but there were no night riders in the streets of Atlanta. Atlanta was the New South ideal.

  Reconstruction became part of Southern folklore: once upon a time, a decade or so after the Civil War, there were laws in the South by which Negroes were not reduced to third-class citizenship and were permitted to vote freely, and state universities, supported by black taxes, were open to black students. This was the Reconstruction message to blacks: You are free American citizens, equal under the law with every other free American citizen. You have the duty as well as the right to vote—your life may depend on it. Reconstruction died because the white South did not want the ex-slave to be either a citizen or a voter or even, necessarily, an American. The white South wanted blacks to be returned to some form of slavery. And the form of slavery that the mass of ex-slaves and their descendants had returned to by the end of the nineteenth century was in many ways far worse and far more terror-filled than the antebellum variety. But the spirit of Reconstruction went north, where it found a home in Harlem and created the Harlem Renaissance, whose talent pool came from Missionary colleges. It would also find a home in Washington, D.C., at Howard University Law School, a perfect place to plot the legal downfall of Jim Crow.

  Reconstruction produced an entirely different sort of black leadership. Instead of revolutionaries, or token “great men,” by the late 1880s there would be a growing army of highly educated young Negro men and women, dedicated to teaching and uplifting the race—and also to standing up for the race. They had been educated for leadership by their Missionary teachers; and their duty, in turn, was to educate future leaders. This was leadership en masse. The message of a Missionary education was clarity of purpose, strength of dedication, and a crucial sense of amour propre: “If you know who you are, and what you are doing, then nothing and no one can put you down.” These new educator-ambassadors, or envoys between the races and generations, had all come of age during Reconstruction. They all grew up with white teachers. They would always strive for respect and friendship between the races because they knew it was possible. They were building the bridge to real freedom.

  Reconstruction taught blacks that they had human and civil rights, and if they had little else, they had a friend in the Constitution. The new century began with everything won by blacks in the Civil War and Reconstruction lost. Freedom, equality under the law, citizenship, and constitutional protection no longer existed. For more or less the next h
undred years, Negroes in the South were reduced to de facto slavery, and Negroes in the North to second-class citizenship. The North won the Civil War—but as far as blacks were concerned the South won the peace. A 1912 editorial in the Raleigh News and Observer described the true meaning of Jim Crow and the Southern mind-set: “The subjection of the negro politically, and the separation of the negro socially, are paramount to all other considerations in the South short of the preservation of the Republic itself”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  North/1900–1919

  THE NEW NEGRO

  THE NORTHERN migration of the Talented Tenth, Du Bois’ name for the 10 percent of highly educated American blacks, began about fifteen years before the Great Migration of World War I. The Great Migration was about jobs—about leaving the South to find work. The Talented Tenth migration was about personal fulfillment—leaving the South to do work. Members of the Talented Tenth were also known as “New Negroes.” There was a common denominator between those who left the South and those who remained. The daughters of Moses could afford to leave—just as the daughter of Siny could afford to stay. Negroes with money had some choices.

  Plessy v. Ferguson, which made white supremacy the law of the land, gave Cora and her Republican activist husband, now known as the “Adonis of the Negro Press,” the impetus to leave the South. And Moses Calhoun’s death gave them the wherewithal. Pregnant with her third son, and wearing the heavy black-veiled mourning clothes of the period, Cora set out for New York City with her handsome editor husband. Facing an ever more powerless Republican Party, Edwin and Cora decided that they did not want their two sons, Errol and Teddy, to grow up as prisoners of their race. The North might not be free of racism, but at least the boys (whose two younger brothers would be born in New York) could go to public schools, museums, libraries, theaters, parks, and zoos without facing “whites only” signs.

  Cora and Edwin were successful Northerners because they were meant to be Northerners. It was not about money. It was about a certain kind of self-fulfillment for each that would not have been possible had they remained in the South. The self-fulfillment involved a change of political party for him—and a slight change in name. He added an “e” to the end of Horn—possibly because he had formerly been well known as a black Republican and hoped to forestall confusion. The Northern move also meant a change in lifestyle for her. Cora and Edwin arrived in Manhattan’s West Fifties sometime in 1896, just at the birth of a new center of black life, which had moved uptown from Greenwich Village. Known as “Black Bohemia,” the West Fifties were the best section of black New York. Cora and Edwin’s new neighborhood (around what is now Columbus Circle) would soon be known as San Juan Hill, for the turning point in the 1898 Spanish-American War in Cuba, where black U.S. cavalry troops fought side by side with Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders in the first (and last until Vietnam) integrated U.S. fighting force since the War of 1812. There were two black-owned hotels on West Fifty-Third Street: the Maceo, which was very sedate; and the Marshall, which was glamorous and fun and had the best jazz orchestra in New York. San Juan Hill became the center of black culture and nightlife. The West Fifties were a precursor of Harlem—vibrant, creative, musical, and home to black New York’s most talented citizens: Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Edwin’s new theatrical friend, Bert Williams of the Ziegfeld Follies.

  Cora and Edwin fled the South in 1896; four years later they received a belated New York greeting in the form of a race riot that could easily have come from Dixie. The riot occurred in the neighborhood known as the “Tenderloin”—home to Manhattan’s poorest blacks, living almost cheek to jowl with some of its poorest whites, the Irish of Hell’s Kitchen. From the New York Times, August 16, 1900:

  RACE RIOT … SET UPON AND BEAT NEGROES … For four hours last night Eighth Avenue, from Thirtieth to Forty-second Street, was a scene of the wildest disorder that this city has witnessed in years. The hard feelings between the white people and the Negroes in that district, which had been smoldering for many years … burst forth last night into a race riot …

  The black-Irish issue was discussed in Harper’s Weekly of December 22, 1900:

  In 1890 the city’s population was 1,515,301 and that of the negroes 25,674 … It will be seen from the figures given above that the negroes in New York do not constitute a very considerable proportion of the population … Why there should be any race feeling against such an insignificant element of the population seems superficially strange. It is quite true that the Irish seem to have a natural antipathy to the negroes …

  “Natural antipathy” is putting it mildly. The Irish hated American Negroes. The New York City Draft Riots—when in 1863, Irish mobs lynched blacks from lampposts and set fire to the Colored Orphan Asylum with the orphans still in it—seemed like yesterday. George Templeton Strong, the patrician Republican diarist, called blacks “the most peaceable, sober and inoffensive of our poor.” He was sorry to say that “England is right about the lower class of Irish. They are brutal, base, cruel, cowards, and as insolent as base.” Irish-black hatred was based on the deep psychology that in America, the Irish were thrilled to finally find people who were lower on the social scale than themselves. They bitterly resented the fact that in some American locations—Boston, for example—the Irish were treated worse than Negroes. But in New York, the Irish ruled absolutely—not in the corridors of real money and power, but in Little Old New York, which was all that mattered. The Harper’s article stated that black employment had been much higher earlier in the century. It mentioned all the “good” waiter, bootblack, and barbering jobs that first belonged to Negroes, and then to the Irish, but were now taken over by newer immigrants like Greeks and Italians. Tammany captured immigrants as soon as they stepped off the boat. Negroes, Republican for so long, were the newest “immigrants” to be ensnared by promises, some of which were actually kept. Tammany was extremely eager to capture the black vote—which is why Edwin Horne (now with an “e”) spent his days surrounded by Irishmen. And it is probably why Cora became a Roman Catholic.

  Edwin began his New York life in 1896 as a teacher, but after unsuccessfully suing the city for promoting a white teacher with less seniority over him, in 1898 he gave up teaching and became secretary of the newly organized United Colored Democracy, a.k.a. the Afro-American Tammany Hall Organization, otherwise known as “Black Tammany,” a lobbying group that sought to lure black voters away from the Republicans. The United Colored Democracy was the brainchild of T. (Timothy) Thomas Fortune, publisher in 1896 of the New York Age, a hugely successful black newspaper. Three years older than Edwin, and born a slave in Jackson County, Florida, Fortune learned the printer’s trade in Jacksonville. After attending Howard University, he moved to New York and began his newspaper career in 1881 with two papers, the New York Globe and the New York Freeman—both of which soon failed because of Fortune’s radicalism. Because Negro papers were barred from membership in the Associated Press, Fortune was among the group that founded the Colored Press Association. Fortune attacked the Republican Party and urged blacks to resort to self-defense if the government refused to help them. His disgust with the Republicans extended to encouraging blacks to support Democratic hopeful Grover Cleveland. By 1889 he was disgusted with the Democrats, too, and called for a National Afro-American League, but it failed for lack of political and financial support. He advocated using the term “Afro-American” instead of the Spanish word Negro, because blacks were “African in origin and American in birth.”

  Meanwhile, Fortune encouraged Edwin’s political switch. Nothing if not ambitious, Edwin saw which way the political wind was blowing. Influenced by his mentor, Edwin changed his party affiliation and the spelling of his name. Edwin Horne was definitely a new man, a political New Negro—a Democrat. Enlisting in the Democratic Party was a revolutionary concept for black Americans. Edwin did so well for Black Tammany that in 1899 he was given the patronage job of assistant inspector in the combusti
ble division (bomb squad) of the New York fire department in Brooklyn. It was an extraordinary job for a black man (indeed for anyone who was not Irish), so he may have passed for white—not with Tammany, but with the fire department. In 1898 New York City consolidated all five boroughs, joining Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island with Manhattan and the Bronx. Cora and Edwin now decided to leave the West Fifties and move to tranquil, bucolic Brooklyn, buying a new brownstone row house at 189 Chauncey Street, an integrated street around the corner from Bushwick Avenue in a section of Brooklyn then called Stuyvesant Heights. While mostly white, it was also known as a black middle-class enclave. The four new brownstones on Chauncey Street clearly represented gentrification or urbanization or both. The new row houses symbolized bustling modern Brooklyn, part of a great city, but they were bordered on one side by a Swedish livery stable and on the other by an Irish farmhouse. Across the street were wooden tenements inhabited almost entirely by Irish families. The new Horne home was a microcosm of New York’s history and of its ethnic mosaic. Anyway, it was a better place to raise sons than West Fifty-Third Street. There was no nightlife.