In February 1919, ironically enough, the 369th led New York City’s victory parade up Fifth Avenue. Two years earlier the regiment had not been allowed to march, but now the Harlem Hellfighters were the stars of the parade, famously photographed by newsreel cameras. The sidewalks were thronged with cheering New Yorkers of all races who screamed in deafening collective delight when they saw that the first regiment to come through the lower Fifth Avenue Victory Arch was the 369th. Delirium became near pandemonium when the crowd saw that the regiment marched in phalanx order, with massed blocks of men, across the avenue. The French army used the phalanx (the Nazis and the Soviets picked it up later) and, as the Romans knew very well, the phalanx could be intimidating.
The U.S. Army had discovered that the 369th Regimental Band, now considered one of the great bands of the world, could be useful and sent it on a triumphant cross-country tour. Lieutenant Noble Sissle, whom army public relations billed as “The Greatest Singer of His Race … America’s Own ‘Young Black Joe,’” was the featured star. But real tragedy struck on the last night of the tour. Jim Europe was stabbed to death in Boston by one of his musicians. His was the first public funeral for a Negro in New York City. The funeral procession, with his flag-draped coffin carried on the backs of uniformed band members, retraced the victory parade route of four months earlier. Europe was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Cora Horne had a new role in life. Sadly, both of baby Lena’s parents deserted her before she was two. It cannot be blamed on the war. One day in 1919, Ted Horne was no longer there. Letters arrived at his workplace stating that he had to take a long trip west for his lungs. It was a surprise to his wife, too. He fled all the way to Seattle, where he took up with a widow or divorcee named Irene. There is an amazingly racy “hot cha!” picture of Ted and Irene. Apparently, he made a killing gambling in the Black Sox baseball scandal—but no one was ever certain. Lucky Ted was always on the furthest fringes of organized crime, ever since he had learned to gamble at the old Plaza, but he was never in trouble with the law. Consequently, although he deserted his wife, child, and job, he was able to send money to Cora for herself and Lena and to help his younger brothers with college. Ted now spent his time at prizefights, Negro League baseball games, college football games, and horse races. He liked to own large automobiles. He also liked to spend his time with gamblers and demimondaines. Both of Lena’s wayward young parents were a disaster. After Ted went west, Edna ran away to Harlem and the Lafayette Theatre—where, to Cora’s outrage and horror, she took Lena onstage as the baby in Madame X. Cora put her foot down, and Teddy agreed that Lena should be in Cora’s custody. Since Edna essentially feared as well as disliked her mother-in-law, and probably regarded Lena as a hindrance to her career aspirations, she allowed Cora to have her way. Until the age of seven, Lena lived with her grandparents exclusively. How Cora found time for Lena is a mystery, but she did manage to take care of the important things. In April 1919 the NAACP published Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, listing the names, by state, of Negroes lynched from 1889 to 1918. That year Cora enrolled her two-year-old granddaughter as a lifetime member of the NAACP. She also took her to the new office at 70 Fifth Avenue, where Lena sat on the lap of the great James Weldon Johnson and played with his telephone.
Cora Horne at the height of her do-good-uplift career—member of the board of directors of the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Federation and Republican Party activist
Cora Horne’s granddaughter Lena at sixteen, just beginning in the Cotton Club, c. 1933
CHAPTER FIVE
South/1900–1919
THE NEW SOUTH
THE ATLANTA census of the Fourth Ward of 1900 does not list Antoine Graves as “an American success story”—it should have. It simply lists Antoine Graves and family as living at 116 Howell Street: Antoine, age thirty-nine; wife Catherine (Katie Webb), age thirty-nine; daughter Nellie, age fourteen; son Antoine Jr., age twelve; Catherine (called Kate), age ten; and Marie Antoinette, age eight. The census reported that the whole family could read, write, and speak English and they owned their own home free of mortgage. The census color listed for everyone was “B” for black. Antoine’s occupation was listed as real estate agent. The South was well into the long, dark post-Reconstruction night of what Mark Twain called “The United States of Lyncherdom”—but the black Calhouns were more or less protected, because as professionals and businesspeople, they needed little from the white community except its vague goodwill—which they kept by staying out of trouble and out of politics (until their grandchildren later brought them to civil rights).
“The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line,” Lena Calhoun Smith’s old friend Willie, now Doctor Du Bois, famously said in 1900. By then the South was solidly segregated, and the North was about to be flooded with Southern revisionism. The Old South and slavery itself were now sentimentalized and romanticized in many ways—from movies hailing the KKK to songs about Dixie. Again, the black Calhouns were more or less protected. They lived in Atlanta neighborhoods, not isolated rural homesteads, and they were known to important Atlanta whites. Like their Northern cousins, they were able to communicate with both worlds.
On the other hand, between 1890 and 1910, more than two hundred thousand blacks left the American South, in flight from political and racial oppression. Blacks in the South were at the mercy of their region, and their region could do anything it liked to them without fear of reprisal. Parts of the North were as virulently racist and hateful toward blacks as the South, but in the North blacks could vote and had legal redress against attacks. Despite living in a fearfully hostile environment, the black Calhouns who stayed in the South stayed safe and certainly seemed happy within their close-knit community and family enclaves. Although there were working mothers in every generation—teachers or social workers mostly, married to busy professional men—they raised confident and successful children who understood the unfair and unjust nature of their society, and were smart enough not to provoke it.
By 1900 Atlanta seemed the perfect New South city. But there were definite underlying racial tensions. Negroes in Atlanta and other Southern cities began boycotting streetcars to protest Jim Crow seating. White journalist Ray Stannard Baker, in his book Following the Color Line, described Atlanta in the early years of the new century:
Atlanta is a singularly attractive place, as bright and new as any Western city. Sherman left it in ashes … and a new city was built, which is now growing in a manner not short of astonishing … But this is not the whole story. Everywhere I went in Atlanta I heard of the fear of the white people … And yet every Negro I met voiced in some way that fear.
Baker told the story of one white woman who had been accidentally brushed on the shoulder by a hurrying “rather good-looking young Negro” and his reaction when he discovered that she was white:
He had not seen me before. When he turned and found it was a white woman he had touched, such a look of abject terror and fear came into his face as I hope never again to see on a human countenance. He knew what it meant if I was frightened … It shows, doesn’t it, how little it might take to bring punishment upon an innocent man!
Atlanta, like Brooklyn, metropolitan but leafy, was a black middle-class haven. Brooklyn may have had no “whites only” signs—but Atlanta was the Athens of the black South. Atlanta University was home to wunderkind “Willie” Du Bois, with degrees from Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin. Du Bois first discussed the Talented Tenth in his 1903 collection of essays The Negro Problem. Calling his fellow former Missionary students the “Talented Tenth,” Du Bois defined their job:
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work and Negro colleges must train men for it. The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.
The same year the prodigiously talented Du Bois established his reputation as
a great American essayist with the publication of The Souls of Black Folk:
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others … One feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
That July, Booker T. Washington made a speech in Atlanta to celebrate the thirty-sixth anniversary of the First Congregational Church and the ninth anniversary of its pastor, Reverend H. H. Proctor. Some of the leading white men of the city attended, including the governor, the mayor, and the pastor of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Unlike Du Bois, Washington had no interest in the psychological problems of black people in America. His main concern was not giving any problems to white people. He complained that “idle men,” North and South, who hung around street corners and barrooms were the next race problem. It would be much worse in the North, he said, because in the North “the doors of industry are too often closed against the Negro.” This, of course, was true. White immigrants were hired in the North before native blacks, and except for the “Wobblies,” the short-lived Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), American labor unions rejected any black members.
In 1904 Atlanta’s Union Mutual Insurance Company put out a pamphlet about selling insurance that was actually a picture of black life in Atlanta—and a very polite guide to the intricacies of the Jim Crow system:
Atlanta has a population of 132,000 people, and of this number 45,000 are Negroes. They are scattered among all the wards of the city … A map of Atlanta has been drawn with the particular aim of helping Negroes find their way to the wards most thickly populated by Negro residents, business houses and pleasure centers …
Under “Places of Amusement,” for example, it was noted of the opera house and the theater, “Accommodations for Negroes Limited.” In other words, do not try to attend the opera or the theater. Middle-class blacks entertained each other at home. Every house had a piano, any type from upright to grand, and somebody played it. They made their own amusement in Atlanta.
“The Negroes do not own or manage any banks,” said the pamphlet, sounding vaguely apologetic. And hospitals, of course, were “Under white management.” As for churches, there were seventeen Baptist, eight African Methodist Episcopal, two Colored Methodist Episcopal, one Protestant Episcopal, one Presbyterian, and one Congregational. First Congregational was the black Calhoun church. Its dynamic young pastor, the celebrated Reverend H. H. Proctor, was born in Tennessee in 1868, the son of former slaves, and attended Fisk and the Yale Divinity School. He became the first black pastor of First Congregational in 1894, at age twenty-six. The American Missionary Association stopped supporting First Congregational when Proctor arrived. From the beginning, he made the pastorate self-supporting and began missionary activities among the poor and in Atlanta jails. In 1903 Proctor was a cofounder and the first president of the National Convention of Congregational Workers, an effort to promote Negro Congregationalism.
The 1904–1905 Union Mutual pamphlet, whose aim was “to lift the moral tone of Negro business life and thereby increase the people’s respect and appreciation for it,” included a directory of black Atlanta businesses.
Opportunity for employment is the most serious question … we are vastly more in need of Leaders of Industry and Business than anything else just now … we must all agree that “the man who has done something” is of much more value to the community than the one who is constantly theorizing …
This appears to be a dig at Du Bois and a push for Washington. The list includes a bakery on Auburn Avenue, two grocers (one on Piedmont Avenue, the other on Fraser Street where Moses Calhoun began his life in freedom), and several contractors and builders, boarding- and lodging houses, restaurants, caterers, dressmakers, tailors, shoemakers, and barbers, along with “T.E. Askew, The Only Colored Photographer.” There was Mrs. W. A. Hinton, “Business Stenographer, Typist and Accountant, telephone 8673.” And there was one ice-cream parlor on Piedmont Avenue—“The public’s presence is respectfully asked.” There was a dentist on Peachtree Street, and a drugstore where prescriptions were “carefully Compounded Day or Night.” There was a trained nurse, two orphanages, one old folks’ home, and two white hospitals, Grady and MacVicar (where a basement corner was set aside for blacks). There was also Dr. T. Howard and Son, on Piedmont Avenue, undertakers and embalmers, “Oldest, Most Reliable, Best Equipped and Most Polite Service.” Finally, at the end of the long list, Antoine Graves Sr. had a double-page ad:
I sell lots of property for investment and firms
List Your Properties With Me for Results A. GRAVES
121-2 Wall Street Atlanta, Ga. A. Graves Real Estate and Loans.
Under “Athletics,” the pamphlet had remarked:
The college sports among Negroes in Atlanta have always been free. This applies to baseball. Atlanta University has constructed an athletic park on the campus where baseball and football are played. The admission fee is 15c. The custom has been to play in the city parks, but this privilege has been denied the Negro colleges.
Healthy bodies as well as minds were encouraged at Atlanta University, as they were in all black middle-class venues. From the April 1904 Atlanta Independent Sporting News: “Atlanta University is playing great ball this season … has a great infield in Jones, Graves, Hawkins and Huggins … Big Antoine Graves is a great infielder.”
Antoine Graves Jr., scholar, athlete, and musician, the calm center of a whirlwind of sisters, was a solemnly handsome young man whose nickname was “Judge.” The gifted violinist posed for photos with his good-looking male friends, most of them smiling, but Judge always looked sober and solemn.
Black Atlanta was busy improving itself. In 1906 Reverend H. H. Proctor helped put First Congregational Church in the black by creating “Circles of Ten.” He called it “an original plan of church work”:
The object of the Circles is to promote the helpfulness of the members to one another, and to unite them for Christian service. The Circles are to serve in the three following directions:
1. SERVE ONE ANOTHER by regular visitation, caring for one another in affliction, relieving in need, encouraging one another in Christian service and life, and whatever else one Christian can do for another. Read John 13:35
2. SERVE THE CHURCH by inviting others to it, leading persons to Christ, securing those without a Church home to join us, coming to the rescue of the Church in time of financial need … Read Ephesians 5:25
3. SERVE THE COMMUNITY of which the Church is a part by ministering to those shut in by affliction, for whom no one cares, by reclaiming the outcast, visiting hospitals and prisons, and doing whatever you think Christ would have you do. Read Matthew 25:31–46 …
Ten persons made a Circle, each with a specific role to play, meeting once a month:
The meetings should rotate from house to house so that by the end of the year each member will have had the privilege of entertaining the Circle in his own home. Light refreshments add greatly to the pleasure of the meeting …
First Congregational was an active faith community. Antoine “Judge” Graves Jr. had his own Circle of young male friends. And his mother, Catherine (Katie Webb Graves), had her own Circle of “matron” friends. Judge’s young sisters, Kate Graves and Marie Graves, made professions of faith for membership in First Congregational in March 1904.
In June 1906 young Marie (Antoinette) Graves graduated from the same Houston Street public school that had fired her father ten years earlier. Atlanta was now considered the example of how Negroes and whites could live side by side in harmony. But that same June found Georgia’s new governor-elect, M. Hoke Smith, making a disturbing pronouncement: “Legislation can be passed which will … not interfere with the right of any white man to vote, and get rid of 95 per cent of the Negro voters.”
This was the onset of a violently antiblack press crusade. Arch-r
acist Smith was the former publisher of the Atlanta Journal. Smith’s rival in the campaign was Clark Howell, editor of the anti-Smith Atlanta Constitution. The Atlanta Journal was loudly pro-Smith. On August 1, 1906, it printed an incendiary racist appeal as a front-page editorial:
Political equality being thus preached to the negro … what wonder that he makes no distinction between political and social equality. He grows more bumptious on the street, more impudent in his dealings with white men; and then, when he cannot achieve social equality as he wishes, with the instinct of the barbarian to destroy what he cannot attain to, he lies in wait, as that dastardly brute did yesterday near this city, and assaults the fair young girlhood of the South …
Now there was talk everywhere of disenfranchising Negroes. In trying to “out-nigger” each other for a political campaign, the Atlanta papers started a race war. The press offered rewards for lynching bees and urged a revival of the Klan. On Saturday, September 24, Atlanta newspapers reported four assaults on white women by Negroes. The Atlanta News had screaming headlines about black rapes of white women—all of which proved false. But by early evening, some ten thousand white men and boys came surging down Decatur Street attacking black men, women, and boys—and killing some—and torching and smashing black-owned businesses. The Amos Drug Store, on Auburn Avenue, was nearly destroyed. Moses Amos, who had been an apprentice to a white druggist in 1876, was owner of the first and largest of several Negro drugstores. The wealthiest Negro in Atlanta in 1906 was A. F. Herndon, president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company and owner of the biggest barbershop in the city—all black barbers, all-white clientele. The mob went into Herndon’s and dragged out all the barbers to be beaten to death, or near enough. The mob also attacked streetcars and trolleys, assaulting black women as well as black men. At least three men were beaten to death. The governor finally called out the militia at midnight, but the mob did not begin to disperse until there was a heavy rainfall around 2 A.M. Even then, vigilante mobs continued to attack black neighborhoods on Sunday and Monday. Four black men were killed in the black Atlanta suburb of Brownsville, home to black Clark College and Gammon Theological Seminary, whose president was severely beaten by the police. Instead of a mob riot, Brownsville actually saw a police riot against black citizens, who had called the police for protection. Typically, the police spent more time confiscating black weapons, leaving blacks helpless, than arresting white rioters. And the fire department had trouble getting to burning black businesses. But the mayor, as ever thinking about image, only wished the riot to end. He got the governor to call out the militia, as Ray Stannard Baker said, “to apply that pound of cure which should have been an ounce of prevention.” Saloons were closed for two weeks. The police managed to arrest twenty-four white rioters, who were sentenced instantly to the maximum possible time on the chain gang. Yes, twenty-four. Atlanta wanted the whole thing to go away.
The Black Calhouns Page 10