The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  By Monday and Tuesday, city officials, businessmen, the clergy, and even the white press, which had instigated the riot, were calling for an end to violence. Not only was Atlanta’s image being damaged throughout the United States, but the riot was big news internationally. Estimates ranged from twenty-five to forty black deaths—although the coroner officially listed only ten. All accounts agree that there were only two white deaths, one caused by a heart attack.

  On September 24, 1906, a thirteen-year-old Negro boy in Atlanta named Walter White discovered the meaning of being black. It had not quite sunk in for young Walter because he and his family looked white. “I am a Negro,” Walter wrote in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White:

  My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me … There is no mistake. I am a Negro. There can be no doubt. I know the night when, in terror and bitterness of soul, I discovered that I was set apart by the pigmentation of my skin (invisible though it was in my case) and the moment at which I decided that I would infinitely rather be what I was than, through taking advantage of the way of escape that was open to me, be one of the race which had forced the decision upon me.

  The White family of seven children and their parents lived on Houston Street, and all the children attended Antoine Graves’ old school. They lived in an eight-room two-story frame house that Walter’s father, a graduate of Atlanta University and a mail collector, kept spick-and-span and whitewashed, with neatly trimmed grass and flower beds—in the midst of a mixed neighborhood of run-down black and white homes. (Neighborhoods in the South were often integrated.) He collected mail in a little cart that he drove from three to eleven P.M. On Saturdays, Walter drove the cart for him regularly from two until seven. Around seven o’clock in the evening on Saturday, September 24, as Walter and his father were driving toward the mailbox at the corner of Peachtree and Houston, “there came from near-by Pryor Street a roar the like of which I had never heard before, but which sent a sensation of mingled fear and excitement coursing through my body.” Walter wanted to see what the trouble was, but his father ordered him to stay in the cart. On Peachtree Street they witnessed a lame Negro bootblack from Herndon’s barbershop being beaten to death by the howling mob of whites. Walter and his father were safe from the mob because of their white skin. On Marietta Street they saw an undertaker’s carriage:

  Crouched in the rear of the vehicle were three Negroes clinging to the sides of the carriage as it lunged and swerved. On the driver’s seat crouched a white man, the reins held taut in his left hand. A huge whip was gripped in his right. Alternately he lashed the horses and, without looking backward, swung the whip in savage swoops in the faces of members of the mob as they lunged at the carriage determined to seize the three Negroes.

  Back on Pryor Street Walter and his father rescued an elderly black woman, who cooked at a downtown white hotel, as she ran as best she could from the mob of whites. Walter’s father lifted her onto the cart while Walter took the reins and lashed the horse to speed.

  The next day was Sunday. Normally, the White family walked half a block to the corner of Houston and Courtland streets to First Congregational—this morning, they did not. On the Sunday morning after the first night of the riot, most black worshippers stayed home. Late that afternoon some friends of Walter’s family came to tell them that a mob was gathering to march down Houston Street to “clean out the niggers.” Walter had no idea where his father got the two weapons that they now each held at the living room windows. Lights in every Negro house on the street that Sunday night were turned out early. Walter’s father sent his wife and daughters to the back of the house. Walter and his father were the only males at home. They took their places at the front windows … Walter’s father turned to him and said in a quiet voice, “Son, don’t shoot until the first man puts his foot on the lawn and then—don’t you miss!” Walter was wondering what it would feel like to kill a man when suddenly shots were fired from a nearby house. And the mob, armed only with torches and clubs, paused, grumbled, then suddenly evaporated and retreated up Houston Street as more shots were fired. The white mob retreated in the face of black self-defense. It was then, White wrote, that he knew who he was:

  In that instant there opened up within me a great awareness; I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance, in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority …

  In 1906 Du Bois had the title of professor of economics and history at Atlanta University. The former professor of Latin and Greek at Wilberforce sat all night on the library steps at Atlanta University with a shotgun, waiting for attackers who never came. He wrote a (long) “Litany for Atlanta”—one of the last lines of which was: “Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely Thou too art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing?”

  Northern white journalist Ray Stannard Baker, who went to Atlanta right after the riot, made an acute observation about the South:

  When I first went South I expected to find people talking about the Negro, but I was not at all prepared to find the subject occupying such an overshadowing place in Southern affairs … the South is overwhelmingly concerned in this one thing.

  White Southerners in general were so obsessed with keeping blacks from rising that they were keeping the whole region down. They would rather have themselves and their families suffer than see Negroes have an advantage.

  Respectable white Atlanta was outraged, but the mob was not made up of “respectable” white Atlantans. “The poor white hates the Negro,” wrote Baker, “and the Negro dislikes the poor white. It is in these lower strata of society, where the races rub together in unclean streets, that the fire is generated.” Poor whites hated blacks because during slavery, poor whites often perceived blacks as being better treated than themselves. But the white power structure was angry because Atlanta looked bad in the eyes of Yankee investors and the international press.

  Thanks to Charles T. Hopkins, a prominent attorney, for the first time in Atlanta’s history the city’s “respectable” whites and blacks came together. It was agreed that when whites said that they “know the Negro,” they meant the servant Negro, the field hand, and the laborer. They knew nothing about the “better class of Negroes,” wrote Baker, “those who were in business, or in independent occupations, those who owned their own homes.” Baker believed that many whites wanted the “New South” and the “old Negro”—“faithful, simple, ignorant, obedient, cheerful.”

  A committee of ten was proposed to raise funds for black assistance: Charles T. Hopkins headed the list, followed by the president of the chamber of commerce, the president of the board of education, the president of the Fourth National Bank, and several important businessmen. Prominent Negroes were invited to join the committee, including Reverend H. H. Proctor of First Congregational Church and four other black ministers and Benjamin J. Davis Sr., editor of the black newspaper the Atlanta Independent. Antoine Graves Sr., business manager of the Independent from 1903 to 1928, would surely have been among the black notables on the committee. Negroes discussed grievances: specifically unnecessary roughness by streetcar conductors and police. White members agreed to speak to the streetcar company and the police. Hopkins discovered that Atlanta Negroes were clearly not the “child race” he had thought them to be:

  I believe those Negroes understood the situation better than we did. I was astonished at their intelligence and diplomacy. They never referred to the riot: they were looking to the future. I didn’t know there were such Negroes in Atlanta.

  Hopkins now invited 1,500 prominent white men to join the committee. At the same time, Reverend H. H. Proctor and his committee of Negroes organized the Colored Co-operative Civic League, which comprised 1,500 of the “best” colored men in city. Whe
n rumors came of another possible outbreak of violence over Christmas, new policemen were added to the force, newspapers agreed not to publish sensational stories, and the city was warned against lawlessness. Saloons were closed at 4 P.M. on Christmas Eve. And there seemed to be new harmony between the races. An integrated prayer meeting of black and white ministers was held at the Negro YMCA.

  One can only imagine the excitement in the black Calhoun household of the Graves family in the early summer of 1908. Judge Graves, the twenty-year-old musician-athlete son of real estate broker Antoine Graves and Katie Webb Graves, had given up baseball. He was scheduled to give a violin recital in the first week of August. It would be a very white recital—at Phillips and Crew’s piano emporium in downtown Atlanta, before a white audience and white critics. News of Judge’s gifts had probably spread from his teacher. There should have been no worries for Judge, the boy who showed no emotion. As usual, he surpassed himself. From the Saturday, August 8, 1908, black weekly the Independent:

  Tuesday of this week A. Graves, Jr. gave an exhibition of his musical talent at Phillips and Crew’s music hall before the best white critics of the art in the city … When the critics at Phillips and Crew’s parlors heard young Graves, supported by his sister, Miss Nellie, racial prejudice gave way to talent and character. The critics forgot that the young violinist was a negro and they were as liberal in their criticisms as if Mr. Graves were white … Mr. Graves feels much encouraged at the favorable comment of his home press and has decided upon a tour of the principal cities of his state … accompanied by Miss Nellie, his sister, a pianist of rare development and culture from Oberlin Conservatory of Music …

  Nellie attended Oberlin College and the Conservatory of Music from 1906 to 1909. Nellie and Judge’s Georgia itinerary that August included recitals in Columbus and Americus.

  Judge’s rave reviews were not limited to the black press. The arch-racist Atlanta Journal used the words “masterful,” “virtuoso,” and “genius.” His success was not that surprising; Southern Negroes had always been allowed to make music (or prepare food), but there had clearly been a huge change of attitude since 1906. There was still a post-riot honeymoon for the New South in which some good things could be said about some Negroes. The black paper referred to the pianist as “Miss Nellie”; to the white paper she was plain “Nellie Graves.” There were certain ironclad social rules in the South. A black person could be called “Doctor,” “Reverend,” “Professor,” “Aunt,” or “Uncle”—but never “Sir,” “Madam,” “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” or “Miss.”

  Nellie Graves, who became Mrs. Noel Brown and the first Black Calhoun divorcee

  For the black Calhouns of all ages, education was paramount. In November 1908 Antoine Graves Sr. enrolled in the American Correspondence School of Law in Chicago, a three-year course. The following year his daughter Marie completed the college preparatory course at Atlanta University, where a young Edward Twichell Ware was the third president and the second President Ware. Except for industrial institutions like Hampton and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee, by 1910 the Missionary colleges were in dire financial straits. By then the state of Georgia had withdrawn its annual appropriation to Atlanta University. It had also unsuccessfully attempted to forbid white instructors to teach there. The university depended more than ever on individual and foundation endowments from Northern liberals. Among the out-of-state contributors: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Cornelius Bliss, Edward S. Harkness, Henry Villard, Charles Francis Adams Jr., William Lloyd Garrison (the son of the great abolitionist), the Reverend Phillips Brooks, Julia Ward Howe, Richard P. Hallowell, Melissa P. Dodge, Olivia Stokes, and many educators and college presidents.

  When Edward Ware was inaugurated on December 31, 1907, there was great celebration, with official greetings from Yale, since all three of Atlanta University’s presidents—the Reverend Asa Ware, the Reverend Horace Bumstead, and the Reverend Edward Twichell Ware—were Yale graduates. The chancellor of the University of Georgia had excellent advice for Edward Ware:

  Don’t let any theory about the race question come into your dealings with your pupils. What they need is to realize that they are individuals. Whatever you do, recognize the individual. Don’t undertake to educate a race, a class, a section of a class. Educate the individual in your school. That is what I want you to do.

  There is a photograph, circa 1910, of the Graves house, 116 Howell Street. It is a sturdy-looking, two-story wooden frame house. There is an ornate front porch with carved wooden posts like a colonnade and a picket fence with a gate. The two upstairs front windows are open, and fluttery curtains are glimpsed. Seated on the comfortably wide porch are Katie Webb Graves in a rocker; a friend of the family; and Katie’s three daughters: Nellie, Kate, and Marie. They have been told to pose but not to smile. The composition is quite lovely. Three of the young women sit on the carved porch fence, and Nellie stands near a post. Nellie seems to be the odd girl out. She was her brother’s accompanist, best friend, and possible confidante. She was also the plainest of the three sisters—though all were fetching in their white dresses and carrying flowers at various graduations. Katie Webb Graves had another portrait taken—possibly by the only Negro photographer in Atlanta. She is an attractive, well-dressed matron in a silk ankle-length dress, wearing an ostrich feather hat (a toque).

  On June 12, 1912, musical Nellie became the first Graves bride when she married Noel Brown, a 1911 Oberlin graduate and son of a Mississippi doctor. They had met at Oberlin when Nellie was there studying music, and were married by Dr. Proctor at First Congregational. Nellie, who had a lovely slim figure, wore a simple and becoming white wedding dress and veil. Noel Brown seemed to suffer from the typical Southern black middle-class male problem of “finding himself.” He was “in banking” in Greenville, Mississippi, from 1911 to 1913. By 1913 he was a photographer and cotton broker. From 1914 to 1915 (possibly assisted by his father-in-law) he was in real estate and insurance in Atlanta. From 1915 to 1918 he was a teacher at Jackson College in Mississippi. By 1918 he was a teacher and principal in Indianapolis public schools. Nellie and Noel would have four children and be the first Southern black Calhouns to divorce.

  Later in June 1912, Nellie’s brother, Judge, who four years earlier had earned accolades for his music, now earned a doctor of dental surgery degree at Howard University. Judge gave up his first love for the practicality of dentistry and opened his first dental office in Atlanta. Judge went abroad on a holiday by himself in August 1913 and sent a letter from the Grand Continental Hotel in Rome to his sister Kate. “I am leaving Rome today for Naples,” he wrote. He talked about sightseeing and shopping and “not being bothered about color.” He said that he had seen “6 or 7 negroes since I’ve been here. From Naples I go to Paris then I will sail on 30th.” But he came back to a place where he would be bothered about color all the time.

  Color actually took a backseat in Atlanta in 1915 when the Leo Frank case erupted. Two years earlier a white thirteen-year-old named Mary Phagan was found dead in the Atlanta pencil factory where she worked. Suspicion fell on both a black factory watchman, Jim Conley, and the Jewish superintendent of the factory, Leo Frank. Frank had been born in Texas and raised in Brooklyn, but had recently been elected head of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith (the oldest Jewish service organization). The trial took place the summer before Walter White’s senior year at Atlanta University and White, like all of Atlanta, was fixated on the case:

  Under “normal” circumstances no one would have thought of accusing a white man had he been gentile and Southern. The guilt of the Negro would have been the inevitable assumption and he would have been lynched or tried, convicted, and executed. Because of Frank’s religion and place of birth the case developed into a clash of prejudice in which anti-Northern and anti-Semitic hatreds had been whipped to such a frenzy that the usual anti-Negro prejudice was almost forgotten.

  Frank’s trial was swift and unjust—in a packed courtroom with openly armed spectators howling for a fa
st conviction. Most historians of the case now agree, as Atlanta police privately thought at the time, that the black janitor, Conley, who told many contradictory stories, was the real murderer. His own lawyer finally announced it, but neither the state nor the police seemed to care. Both the public and rival newspapers refused to consider Conley’s possible guilt—“black brute–white maiden” was so old hat. But Leo Frank was so new and so much more the “other” than blacks, whom whites had known all their lives. Among the polite epithets, “Yankee,” “capitalist,” and “industrialist” all were anathema in the South. The trial was divided by class, with Atlanta’s upper class and its paper, the Constitution, generally believing Frank innocent. The more downscale papers and the man in the street were vociferously anti-Frank. Atlanta’s always latent mob mentality (the town was built by and for railroad workers) called for the head of Frank. Atlanta, probably for the first time, was drunk on anti-Semitism rather than simply hating blacks. Why? Atlantans were in love with the novelty of Frank. Frank himself was amazed, as he said in his court statement, that the “perjured vaporizings of a black brute” could be used against him. The Jewish community of Atlanta was the biggest in the South. Though Frank was raised in Brooklyn, he had adopted Southern attitudes about race.