The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  Black Tammany, meanwhile, was thriving. From the New York Times, January 16, 1904:

  The United Colored Democracy of Greater New York, which is better known as the Afro-American Tammany Hall Organization, had a ball last night at Tammany Hall, and every colored Democrat of prominence in the city attended the affair. Not only were the colored Democratic leaders at the ball, but also many leaders in Afro-American social circles. The costumes of the women folks were not only beautiful but expensive …

  The reporter noted that “half a dozen women who are well-known in colored social circles in Brooklyn” were seated in “one of the handsomely decorated boxes.”

  T. Thomas Fortune was also a feminist, speaking of the “New Afro-American Woman” and supporting the new organization to which Cora belonged, the National Association of Colored Women, organized in 1896 by firebrand Brooklyn suffragist Victoria Matthews, who assured black men that women wanted the vote only so they could elect more black men. Cora considered herself a feminist and a suffragist. She was also a New Afro-American Woman with three small sons and spiritual and political yearnings.

  On May 1, 1904, Cora, ever a religious seeker, was confirmed as a Roman Catholic and took the name “Elizabeth,” for the mother of John the Baptist, who was miraculously pregnant in old age. She received the sacrament of confirmation from Archbishop John Murphy Farley, but the priest who instructed her was the charismatic Monsignor John Burke, the white pastor of St. Benedict the Moor, New York’s first black Catholic church. Named in honor of a sixteenth-century black Sicilian saint, the Church of St. Benedict the Moor moved up from Bleecker and Downing streets in Greenwich Village to the Tenderloin in 1898, soon after Cora and Edwin arrived in New York. Cora was surely influenced by Tammany when she gave up Congregationalism to become a Roman Catholic, but she remained a Republican without a vote. Privately, she scorned Black Tammany. Why would she leave the party of Lincoln for the party of the Draft Riots? In 1905 Cora, age forty, had her fourth son and named him John Burke Horne for the priest who instructed her in her new faith, but called him “Burke.” Cora and Edwin’s three older boys—Errol (b. 1889); Edwin Jr., called “Teddy” (b. 1893); and Frank, named for Aunt Lena’s husband (b. 1899)—all left Public School 54 and entered St. Vincent Ferrer School. It was about this time that Teddy Horne got an after-school job as a page boy at the old Plaza hotel and, unbeknownst to his parents, having learned to gamble, vowed to spend the rest of his life in very bad company. He would be rescued, briefly, by sports.

  In 1904 the Brooklyn bourgeoisie was caught up in the St. Louis Olympics because George C. Poage of Milwaukee, the first American Negro to enter the games, won two bronze medals in track and field. With the Olympic ideal in mind, in 1905 several families, including the Hornes, founded the Smart Set Athletic Club of Brooklyn, a middle-class family organization that stressed sports. It was ideal for the Horne boys. Teddy Horne had a growth spurt and outgrew his hotel job. His morals were probably already beyond repair, but he became a member of America’s first independent, all-black basketball team. The Black Fives Organization, which researches and preserves the history of pioneering all-black basketball teams from 1904 to 1950, described the Smart Set:

  Teddy Horne is top row, far left, of the Smart Set Athletic Club’s champion basketball team, c. 1910.

  The Smart Set Athletic Club of Brooklyn was founded in 1904 and is created with assembling the first formally organized fully independent African American basketball team, which debuted in 1907 … [Its] members came from a tight knit clique of well-educated, affluent “old money” African Americans who resided in what was then predominantly white Stuyvesant Heights of Brooklyn … [T]heir complete dominance of other black basketball teams earned them the nickname the “Grave Diggers.” [The team] won the first two Colored Basketball World Championships, for 1907–08 and 1908–09.

  In 1908 the “Grave Diggers” defeated the Washington, D.C., Crescent Athletic Club at home and away. Both Teddy Horne and Charlie Scottron, cousin of Teddy’s future wife, Edna Scottron, were on the team. (The “Grave Diggers,” including Teddy and Charlie, would be prominently featured in publicity surrounding the opening of the new Barclays Center sports complex in Brooklyn in 2012.)

  The Smart Set and George Poage were one side of the 1910 black sporting picture—the other side was Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion so hated by white America that the mere mention of his name could start a race riot. In 1908 Johnson knocked out Tommy Burns to become the first black heavyweight champion, and millions of young black boys thought about boxing gloves. Johnson, with two white wives, charged the racial climate simply by existing. Riots at screenings of the film of the Jack Johnson–Jim Jeffries heavyweight bout caused an interstate edict against fight films and may have helped convince producers to keep blacks out of movies. Jack Johnson, heavyweight champion of the world and racial provocateur, defeated Jim Jeffries, known as the “Great White Hope,” in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910.

  Despite factional disputes, no money to speak of, and Booker T. Washington’s refusal to support it, the formal organization of the NAACP had been completed in May 1910. The officers of the organization, at 20 Vesey Street in downtown New York, included Oswald Garrison Villard (a descendant of William Lloyd Garrison) and W. E. B. Du Bois; Moorfield Storey of Boston served as the first president. The only “colored” officer, Du Bois was the director of research and publicity and editor of The Crisis. A very professional, sophisticated, and intelligent magazine, Crisis did not talk down to its readers—nor pander to them. There was literature, art, criticism, human interest, and, certainly, politics. In November 1910 Crisis sold one thousand copies; by 1918 circulation would be one hundred thousand. In some people’s minds, the presence of Du Bois on the staff branded the organization as radical from the beginning. Many feared it would fall apart, like his Niagara Movement. Instead it grew. The New York branch of the NAACP was organized in January 1911. Cora and Edwin Horne were early members. There would be nine branches by 1912. That number would double between 1913 and 1914. Meanwhile, starting in 1910, the NAACP publicized lynching stories—sixty-seven blacks were known to have been lynched that year. In 1911 a story about a Negro being lynched appeared in the papers on an average of every six days. That year, in another political move sure to confound his rival Booker T. Washington, Du Bois left both the Republicans and the Democrats to join the Socialist Party.

  Black Tammany had actually been doing well since 1906 and the Brownsville, Texas, riot, where white townspeople attacked black soldiers, and President Theodore Roosevelt indicted the soldiers. Blacks took this as an unforgivable betrayal on the part of a man who in 1898 said he owed his life, and the lives of his Rough Riders, to the black Ninth and Tenth cavalries. It was becoming less difficult to convince Negroes, if not to support Democrats, at least to reject Republicans.

  Edwin Horne also took a big political step in 1910, running for city council on the Tammany ticket. His nickname back in Indiana was “Windy,” which might be the reason for his loss. Edwin lost his run for city council, but won the thanks of Tammany for the gift of the black vote. Thanks to Edwin’s attacks on Theodore Roosevelt in his What Do We Want? pamphlets, sponsored by the United Colored Democracy, nearly fifty thousand black men voted Democratic for the first time in New York history and a Democrat, John A. Dix, was elected governor of New York. “Some Negros would vote for the Republican party even if the party put them back in slavery,” Edwin’s pamphlet asserted. Tammany had a nice way of thanking new voters. Nearly everything Edwin asked for in What Do We Want? was given to the Harlem community by Tammany:

  [We want] colored policemen, colored firemen, garbage removed from our streets before noon, crooks driven out of the tenements, work for our boys, protection for our girls … civil rights as citizens in theatres and restaurants … a colored regiment in the National Guard.

  Edwin’s pride and joy, the new Fifteenth New York National Guard Regiment, organized in 1912, the first black Nati
onal Guard unit in the state, was known as “Harlem’s Own.” In war, the Fifteenth New York became the 369th Regiment, the “Harlem Hellfighters,” one of the most storied military units of World War I. Thanks to broken Republican promises, Roosevelt’s blunder at Brownsville, and the new Republican policy of dismissing black officeholders, the congressional election of 1910 had seen a revolutionary shift in black voting away from the Republican Party. New York Negroes, thanks to Edwin, became permanent Democrats—but even Tammany could not save New York Negroes from the “Black Peril” hysteria.

  The year 1910 saw the so-called Black Peril edict against blacks in Manhattan—as if less than 2 percent of the population could actually invade and overwhelm the city. The Black Peril hysteria kept black talent out of the theater and black audiences out of the theater district. Blacks could perform only in Harlem—and black theatergoers could not attend Broadway houses. The Lafayette, at 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, was the leading Harlem theater, producing all-black musicals, Broadway hits, and classic European theater. But the Black Peril was actually something of a “green” invention. In 1903 the black musical comedy team of Walker and Williams (the great Bert Williams) had a smash hit Broadway show called In Dahomey. It was the same year that George M. Cohan, the king of Broadway, put forth a so-so effort called Running for Office. Cohan, a well-known racist and union-buster who refused to join Actors’ Equity, did not want any black competition. From Cohan to Eddie Foy to Chauncey Olcott, the Irish owned Broadway for at least the first quarter of the new century. They not only wanted no black performers; they wanted to prevent perfectly respectable Negroes from going to the theater or dining in the theater district. But Edwin’s friend, the great black Ziegfeld Follies star Bert Williams, was immune. In 1910 Williams was listed above the title, along with Fanny Brice, Eddie Foy, and Lillian Lorraine. He was such an enormous star, and his blackness was so extremely comic, that he was forgiven. No one who saw Williams’ pantomime poker game ever forgot it. Onstage, Williams was a black caricature. Offstage, he was a tall, light-skinned Negro from the Danish West Indies who “blacked up” to become an audience favorite. His Follies act, as a Pullman porter dealing with small, inebriated white passenger Leon Errol, was so hilarious that diehard fans came two or three times a week just to see what Williams and Errol were up to in the ad-libbed act. (Errol’s solo drunken act later became a staple of early movies.) Meanwhile, Edwin constantly listened to Williams’ deep, lugubrious voice singing “Ace in the Hole” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” on his big wind-up Victrola.

  Blacks may have been barred from Broadway, but they still had the Marshall Hotel. On any Sunday night, circa 1910, great black talent met white talent as stars from Broadway came up to the Marshall to dance to Jim Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra—booking a table in advance was recommended.

  James Weldon Johnson wrote in Black Manhattan:

  In the brightest days of the Marshall the temporary blight had not yet fallen on the Negro in the theatre. Williams and Walker and Cole and Johnson were at their height; there were several good Negro road companies touring the country, and a considerable number of colored performers were on the big time in vaudeville … the first modern jazz band ever heard on a New York stage … It was a playing-singing-dancing orchestra, making dominant use of banjos, mandolins, guitars, saxophones, and drums in combination, and was called the Memphis Students—a very good name, overlooking the fact that the performers were not students and were not from Memphis.

  The Memphis Students were such a hit that they played in Paris, London, and Berlin later that year and stayed abroad a further year. The Marshall, which advertised in the first issue of The Crisis, was apparently under secret police surveillance because of “race mixing.” It was the meeting place of black and white celebrities and politicians. James Reese Europe, a.k.a. Jim Europe, was a “Memphis Student.” Born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1881, he grew up in Washington, D.C., where he studied violin with the assistant director of the U.S. Marine Corps Band. He came to New York in 1904 and became a musical director for the team of Bob Cole and Billy Johnson and for Bert Williams. In 1910 Jim Europe organized the Clef Club. James Weldon Johnson describes it:

  He gathered all the colored professional instrumental musicians into a chartered organization and systematized the whole business of “entertaining.” The organization purchased a house in West Fifty-third Street and fitted it up as a club, and also as booking-offices. Bands of from three to thirty men could be furnished at any time, day or night. The Clef Club for quite a while held a monopoly of the business of “entertaining” private parties and furnishing music for the dance craze, which was then beginning to sweep the country. One year the amount of business done amounted to $120,000.

  The crowning artistic achievement of Jim Europe and the Clef Club was the famous Carnegie Hall concert in May 1912. It was the first jazz concert ever in Carnegie Hall—with a 125-member orchestra and ten upright pianos. James Weldon Johnson described the audience reaction:

  New York had not yet become accustomed to jazz; so when the Clef Club opened its concert with a syncopated march, playing it with a biting attack and an infectious rhythm, and on the finale bursting into singing, the effect can be imagined. The applause became a tumult.

  In 1913 Europe and his Society Orchestra, including young violinist-vocalist Noble Sissle, played at Delmonico’s and the Hotel Astor—proof positive that the Black Peril had been successfully put to rest by an NAACP suit the year before. Europe was approached by white dancing stars Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Castle (as they were billed, lest anyone think they were brother and sister) to become their musical director. Irene and Vernon Castle were America’s greatest dancing stars, and rich tourists flocked to the Marshall to fox-trot and turkey-trot to the Castles’ favorite orchestra. Besides composing, arranging, conducting, and recording Castle dance steps, in 1913 Europe made the first jazz recordings by a black band for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Some modern critics say that the Clef Club orchestra did not really play “jazz.” What it played was “pre-jazz hot ragtime”—a popular style in the Northeast in the 1910s. “Hot ragtime” is perfect. The band was hard-edged, driving, and red-hot, like Bessie Smith singing “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”

  While the racial atmosphere for black musicians was good, it was very bad for black politicians. In 1912 a surprising number of Negroes voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who actually appeared to be leading a campaign against black Americans. Blacks could only blame themselves when the first Southern Democrat elected president since the Civil War resegregated every aspect of federal Washington, including the lunchrooms and cafeterias—all desegregated since the Civil War. They could have chosen the flawed but bighearted Teddy Roosevelt; even better, Eugene Debs. But Wilson was a racist who told Thomas Dixon, author of The Clansman, that as president he would put blacks back “in their place.” Practicing what historian James Chace called “draconian segregation,” Wilson made the District of Columbia as racist as Dixie. He dismissed black diplomatic appointees to traditionally “black” countries like Haiti and the Dominican Republic and replaced them with white men. Even his famous aide, “Colonel” Edward House, wrote in his diary that Wilson’s “prejudices are many and often unjust.” How could blacks vote for Wilson? Edwin may well have voted for Wilson since he could not vote for Roosevelt. Poor Roosevelt. His instincts on race were those of a decent man—but every time he said a kind word to a Negro, the South went berserk. Teddy Roosevelt’s last public speech, which he was invited to give by Du Bois, would be in November 1918 at Carnegie Hall for the Circle for Negro War Relief. It is possible, of course, that Edwin voted neither Democratic nor Republican, but for the Socialist Debs.

  Eugene Debs, of course, was some sort of saint. “What is socialism?” he was asked. Debs replied, “Merely Christianity in action. It recognizes the equality in men.” He was more of a charismatic preacher than a politician, attracting large crowds but not so many votes. In William Howard Taft’s hometow
n, both had speeches the same night. According to James Chace, Taft spoke free and Debs charged 10 cents for admission, but Taft’s meeting hall was barely filled, and Debs’ audience was overflowing, with people turned away. Debs actually did better than expected in 1912, winning the largest share of the popular vote ever won by a Socialist candidate (6 percent). A man remarked to Debs that the audiences all seemed to love him. “They love me because they know I love them,” he said. In September 1918 Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for violating the Espionage and Sedition Acts by making speeches against the war. After attesting to his “kinship with all living beings,” Debs uttered his famous credo: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

  World figures appealed for clemency for Debs, who was sixty-two years old and in very poor health—but Woodrow Wilson refused. In 1921 President Warren Harding, a Republican, pardoned Debs and he was released from prison. James Chace described the scene:

  When Debs was released from prison, the warden suspended all rules so that 2,300 convicts could crowd along the front wall of the prison to shout their farewells. Debs turned to them, with tears streaming down his face, and held his hat in tribute to them high above his head. Finally, a drawn and terribly thin Debs offered a last good-bye and drove away.

  A photo of Cora and Edwin, taken in 1912, shows Cora looking lovely in an age-appropriate black evening dress and Edwin, as usual, looking impossibly handsome and melancholy. Despite four sons, and good looks, Cora and Edwin’s marriage was not happy. By 1913 they were leading separate lives under the same roof. There were New Women as well as New Negroes—and Cora had become a New Woman. The mother of four was a teacher, social worker, do-gooder, “uplifter,” and suffragist. After twenty-six years of “the business of raising a family,” as she would say in a 1920s newspaper interview, she came into her own in 1913 by becoming active in the YWCA. This was only the beginning—she was shedding the role of dutiful wife. Cora must have had many a lonely day and night at home in Brooklyn with the boys while Edwin was doing Tammany business. His fire department job took up very little time, but Edwin spent most evenings across the bridge. He loved the theater, the opera, and the city’s nightlife. He liked going to the Marshall. This was the political and social free participation he had left the South to find. Meanwhile, life at home was toxic. Edwin was rumored to have a white lady friend. She was Edna Woolman Chase—a suffragist and, of all things, an editor at Vogue (whose first issue had appeared in 1892). In photographs, Chase resembled the young Cora—small and pretty with a direct gaze. No one knows if the rumors were true, but it seemed that Cora believed them. She also may have believed that Edwin spent a great deal of his time away from the family living as a white man.