The Black Calhouns

by Gail Lumet Buckley

  On May 31, 1915, Frank pleaded to the Georgia State Prison Commission that his death sentence be commuted to life in prison. The conscientious and popular departing governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, decided to study all the facts of the case. Five days before Slaton’s term as governor was over and one day before Frank was scheduled to hang, Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison and presented a sort of apologia:

  I can endure misconstruction, abuse, and condemnation, but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience, which would remind me in every thought that I, as governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right … Feeling as I do about this case I would be a murderer if I allowed this man to hang.

  The public reaction was outrage. A lynch-mad mob surrounded the governor’s mansion, while state police and the Georgia National Guard led Governor Slaton and his wife to safety. The Slatons left Georgia the next day and did not return for ten years. Meanwhile, Frank was sent to a minimum-security work farm where he was slashed in the jugular by another inmate but not killed—and so was left to the hands of a group called the “Knights of Mary Phagan.” On August 16 Frank was kidnapped from prison and taken to Marietta, Georgia, where the murdered girl was born, and lynched. Several photographs were made of the body hanging from a tree, surrounded by the lynching party. In typical Southern fashion, the lynching photos were sold as souvenirs in Atlanta shops for twenty-five cents, along with pieces of the rope and the nightshirt that Frank was wearing when he was taken. But local newspapers did not publish the pictures, because the lynchers could be easily identified. They included a former mayor and the current mayor of Marietta; several sheriffs, deputy sheriffs, and police officers; a superior court judge; the organizer of Marietta’s first Boy Scout troop; and Joseph M. Brown, former governor of Georgia—whose mind was changed about black intelligence by Atlanta University. After Frank’s lynching, about half of Georgia’s three thousand Jews left the state. The lynchers were not publicly identified until 2000.

  In November 1915 Booker T. Washington died. In a world with so many enemies, it was important for Southern Negroes to know that they were not completely alone—that they had white friends. The pre–Civil War friends of the Negro had been abolitionists. The postwar friends tended to be idealists and progressives with and without money. But former slave Booker T. Washington, of Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, made powerful white friends from a different category altogether. Tuskegee Institute could always depend on its white friends because Washington’s message to blacks was to be apolitical, anti-intellectual, noncompetitive with whites, and skilled at manual labor. His Northern money came from the top tier of the titans of industry and conservatism. But his power would mostly die with him. On the other hand, W. E. B. Du Bois, as a young professor of economics and history at Atlanta University, would dare to question the Tuskegee policy of educating the black “hand,” not the “head.” With liberal white seed money, Du Bois built grassroots support for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), an organization that would single-handedly, inch by inch dismantle Jim Crow through the courts and the Constitution.

  The Great Migration began in 1915. Farm wages were seventy-five cents a day or less; boll weevils destroyed the cotton crop; and Jim Crow had reached the point of parody: South Carolina insisted on separate entrances, stairs, pay windows, lavatories, and water buckets for textile workers; and Oklahoma required separate phone booths. Jess Willard, finally the “Great White Hope,” defeated Jack Johnson. Rumor had it that Johnson threw the fight to relieve racial tensions and escape punishment under the Mann Act. By 1915, between Woodrow Wilson, a racist president; the movie Birth of a Nation; and black and white Southerners migrating to the industrial North at the same time, race relations were at an all-time low. According to statistics collected by antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the NAACP, 1,100 Negroes were lynched between 1900 and 1915—and those were only the ones reported or known about.

  In 1916, when twenty-three-year-old Atlanta University graduate Walter White, now working for Standard Life Insurance Company, heard that the Atlanta Board of Education planned to eliminate seventh grade for black children, he knew he had to protest. He had already turned down an offer to become principal of a Missionary school in Albany, Georgia—but he had to do something about Atlanta. He further learned that besides abolishing seventh grade for blacks, the board was planning to build a new high school for white students. Eighth grade for blacks had already been abolished two years earlier. Now education for black children would end at sixth grade. There were no high schools for blacks—although blacks paid taxes for white high schools. Blacks had fourteen grammar schools serving seventy-five thousand black children in double and triple sessions. All except one of the fourteen schools was a dilapidated wooden fire hazard. Parents who wished their children to receive a high school education had to pay tuition to Atlanta University, which was forced to keep its high school department open because the city refused to pay for a black high school. Some of the older generation recommended caution and submission, but White was part of the group that decided to write to the fledgling NAACP in New York for advice. It also decided to form an Atlanta NAACP chapter. White drafted the letter. Meanwhile, it was discovered that an informer had reported to the board of education that Negroes were planning to protest. But informing worked two ways. The protest group discovered that the board had moved up the date of the meeting to eliminate seventh grade, so that it would be a fait accompli before the protest could gather steam. So the protesters were ready for the new date. Considered “too young and hot-headed,” White was not allowed to appear before the board. But he was a member of the committee that drafted the petition. The petition was not just a demand to retain seventh grade, but also a demand for academic and technical high schools, more modern grammar schools, and “educational facilities in every way the equal of those enjoyed by their white contemporaries.” One of the 1906 black leaders, Dr. William F. Penn (stepfather of Dr. Louis T. Wright, future chairman of the board of directors of the NAACP), acted as chairman of the committee to present the petition. Benjamin J. Davis Sr., a newspaper editor, head of the Georgia Odd Fellows, and chairman of the Georgia State Republican Committee, was another committee member. The board of education made little effort to conceal its astonishment and resentment at the petition. But one white member, James L. Key, a future mayor of Atlanta, was on the petitioners’ side:

  Gentlemen, I want to plead guilty to every word these men have spoken. We have the government in our hands, we control the finances, and we would be derelict to our duty if we did not grant their demands.

  But Mayor Asa G. Candler, head of the Coca-Cola Company, jumped up and shouted angrily: “I do not agree with the gentleman who has just spoken. I do not wish to plead guilty. Let us not give way to hysteria but look at this matter in a sane manner.” But Key would not be moved:

  The seat of all hysteria in this city is in the Mayor’s office and the chief professor of that science is the Mayor himself. I do plead guilty, and as long as I am a member of this board I pledge my word here today that I shall fight for the rights of these men.

  The black delegation never found out what was said in the executive session of the board, but a few days later, it was announced that the board had abandoned its plan to cut seventh grade for blacks and had decided to float a bond issue to improve Atlanta schools. Elation and victory were short-lived. When Dr. Penn and the committee next appeared before the board, they were told with “brutal frankness and considerable profanity” that none of the bond money would be spent on Negro schools and there was nothing colored citizens could do about it. Members of the board had been attacked by their friends as well as newspaper editorials for being “whipped into line by niggers.”

  Meanwhile organization of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, with Walter White as secretary, had been sped up. All hope for school improvement seemed lost until someone thought of exami
ning the city charter of Atlanta in order to learn the requirements for the floating of bond issues. The charter required affirmative approval of two-thirds of registered voters, not two-thirds of those who actually voted. “We counted on white voters’ neglecting—in the great American tradition—to vote on an issue in which no personalities were involved,” wrote White. His group now started a house-to-house campaign in the black Third and Fourth wards to get Negroes to pay poll taxes and register to vote. They had to space out their appearances at city hall, in case whites figured out that blacks were planning to vote. By the time city hall realized what was happening, it was too late to register large enough numbers of whites to override the Negro vote. James Weldon Johnson, the new NAACP field secretary, came to address the new Atlanta branch of the NAACP. He spoke to a packed house in the Negro movie theater in the Odd Fellows building of the need to wipe out race prejudice before hate destroyed both victims and perpetrators. Later he would say that “the race problem in the United States has resolved itself into a question of saving black men’s bodies and white men’s souls.”

  Walter White was called on to say a few words. Unprepared, he launched into a rousing, impassioned speech about the NAACP: “We have got to show these white people that we aren’t going to stand being pushed around any longer. As Patrick Henry said, so must we say, ‘Give me liberty, or give me death!’”

  The audience loved these words, but White saw a look of absolute consternation and abject terror on the face of a well-known black school principal, who was doubtless realizing what would happen when word got back to the board of education. White’s parents invited James Weldon Johnson to dinner after the meeting, and he paid particular attention to Walter. Walter soon got a letter from Johnson in New York inviting him to join the staff of the NAACP as assistant secretary. To accept the job meant considerable financial sacrifice. He would be paid $1,200 a year, far less than his pay at Standard Life Insurance. At the time, the NAACP had 8,490 members in seventy-six branches—ranging from 1 member in St. Joseph, Missouri, to 692 in Boston.

  Florida-born James Weldon Johnson, an 1894 graduate of Atlanta University, came from Jacksonville’s longtime colony of free Negroes. An educator, lawyer, diplomat, poet, and author, the first black national director of the NAACP was a Renaissance man and, in many minds, the first great black leader of the twentieth century. In the summer of 1891, as a college freshman, he taught children of former slaves in a rural Georgia district. Like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, Johnson called it the most meaningful experience of his life. He returned to Jacksonville and became principal of the city’s largest black public school, where he was paid less than half of what a white would receive. In 1897 he became the first black admitted to the Florida bar exam since Reconstruction—one of the examiners walked out because he did not want a Negro admitted. Johnson worked on Teddy Roosevelt’s 1904 presidential campaign, and Roosevelt appointed him U.S. consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela (1906–1908), and Nicaragua (1909–1913). In 1912 he was the composer, with his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” known as the “Negro National Anthem.” He was also, that year, the anonymous author of the groundbreaking The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. He became a field secretary for the NAACP in 1916.

  While Walter White was thinking about Johnson’s offer, a “flying squadron” of patriotic young Negroes came to Atlanta to encourage Negro college men to volunteer for the new Negro officers’ training camp, which the War Department, under pressure from the NAACP, was planning to open at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. For the first time in its history, the city of Atlanta permitted Negroes to use the city auditorium for a meeting to whip up patriotism. White, on the platform, was one of the first to volunteer. But he, along with two or three others with skin light enough to pass as whites, was rejected—ostensibly because German agents could be infiltrated among them and because “confusion” could occur in enforced segregation. (The same thing happened in World War II.) On January 31, 1918, White reported to the NAACP in New York City. Atlanta was still in the middle of the bond issue, but Negroes voted in sufficient numbers to defeat it. The result was the new David T. Howard High School, named after a philanthropic and greatly loved prosperous Negro, whose farm each summer was the scene of a magnificent barbecue. And the black grammar schools were patched up.

  When 1917 tests of new black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean showed that they were more literate than American blacks, this became an issue for black officers. The army assumed there were few educated young black Americans. And if they were found, the army definitely preferred that they be Southern—the army did not want Northern Negro officers giving any radical ideas to black troops. Joel Spingarn, the white chairman of the NAACP, responding to black protests against the lack of officers’ training for blacks, convinced the War Department to establish the first training camp for black army officers at Fort Des Moines, an old cavalry camp, in May 1917. There were one thousand black officer candidates and instructors from Howard, Tuskegee, Harvard, and Yale. Two hundred fifty sergeants from the Buffalo Soldier regiments attended the camp, which also became a training center for black medical personnel. It was the first black officer candidate class in the history of the U.S. military. The commander of Fort Des Moines, Lieutenant Colonel Charles C. Ballou, was white. Many people thought the commander should be the highest-ranking black officer, West Point graduate Colonel Charles Young, but Young had been forced to retire so he could not become the first black general. In October the army commissioned 639 black officers. But new black officers who traveled in the South were in for a rude awakening. White Southerners hated black soldiers, but they really hated black officers. Whites in Vicksburg, Mississippi (according to the New York Age), announced “they would allow ‘no nigger’ to wear a uniform that a white man was bound to honor.”

  Both branches of the black Calhouns, North and South, had war brides and officer bridegrooms. In Texas, there were Errol and Lottie Horne. In Atlanta, Marie Graves married a young captain, Homer Nash of the Army Medical Corps. Dr. Homer Nash, who had graduated second in his class at black Meharry Medical College, opened his medical office on Auburn Avenue (“Sweet Auburn”) in 1910. His certificate from the Georgia Board of Medical Examiners is dated July 25. He became a member of First Congregational Church in 1915. (He would eventually become chairman of the board of deacons.) He was at Fort Des Moines for ninety days of training as part of the medical group. He had been determined to marry Marie. It was a difficult courtship.

  Marie Graves, who became the wife of the great Dr. Homer Nash

  Here are two letters from Antoine Graves Sr. to Homer Nash at “Camp Freedom,” Kansas, in November and December 1917:

  11/17/17

  Dear Sir,

  I have not changed from my original proposition. I shall insist that before you marry Marie that you be settled down to business with a decent income … Respectfully, A. Graves

  12/17/17

  My Dear Sir,

  I have given you all the best advice in my judgment, however if you can make it all right with Marie that will suit me. Personally I have no objection to you …

  A marriage license at last: Homer Erwin Nash (COL) and Marie Antoinette Graves (COL) were married on February 6, 1918, at First Congregational Church by Dr. Proctor. (“COL” meant colored.) It was a big traditional wedding, like her sister Nellie’s, awash in roses and bridesmaids, but Marie looked as if she had stepped out of the pages of Vogue with a daring, absolutely of the moment dress. Hinting at shorter hem lengths to come, the dress was longer in back and cut to the ankles in front, revealing beautiful satin shoes. The veil was a complicated but flattering arrangement of lace and tulle partly covering her pretty face. Captain Homer Nash, U.S. Army Medical Corps, looked very handsome in his uniform.

  In 1918 Judge Graves, who had opened his first dental practice in Atlanta the year before, married a legendarily beautiful young woman called Pinkie Chaires, whose mother was a longtime clubwo
man friend of his mother’s. Judge’s heart may not have been in it—they soon separated. By everyone’s estimation, Pinkie was the most beautiful girl in Atlanta. There is a picture of her, taken some fifteen years or so later at a graduation, where her beauty just leaps out.

  On January 15, 1919, Homer Nash wrote to his mother from the 366th Field Hospital in France:

  My Dear Mother, I am wishing you all a happy new year and the very best of health. I am quite well and quite happy. I had a cablegram from my wife telling me of little Marie’s arrival … I know that she is the most wonderful baby in the world. I just love her to death already. For I am sure she is just as cute as she can be. God has been so good to us in so many ways. And I am always more than thankful to him for all his many blessings … Love to all, Your Son, Homer