Many people believed that the repeal of Prohibition, more than the Depression, killed Harlem. Without illicit alcohol, and happy, well-dressed “natives,” there was no reason for white tourists to visit Harlem—which seemed to change almost overnight from a lively tourist mecca into a derelict slum. Harlem jobs utterly depended on the downtown economy. When the stock market crashed, downtown jobs disappeared almost overnight—and Harlem had no financial cushion. Harlem by day, once a place of colorful street life and cheerful banter, was now a place of breadlines and political harangues. Night was better. The Cotton Club, still big and noisy, still lured celebrities and tourists. In 1933 the star was Cab Calloway, who sang about “Cocaine Lil” and was a merry proponent of “reefers.” Arguably the first hipster, he was certainly the first zoot-suiter. Rich white tourists had departed, but younger and poorer white tourists had returned for the music: Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb, and so forth. Lena did enjoy one Cotton Club outing, even though Edna went along. The club did a free show at Sing Sing prison, where Owney Madden was under temporary protective arrest on tax charges, as all the other mobsters were killing each other for control of New York rackets. The band, the stars, and the chorus girls went up the Hudson in two buses and had a sumptuous free meal, provided by the Cotton Club, in prison.
Harlem itself was no longer a happy place. In 1934, presaging the White Citizens’ Councils of the 1960s South, Blumstein’s department store on 125th Street formed the all-white Harlem Merchants’ Association in order to keep its staff lily-white. Blumstein’s was adamant in its refusal to consider hiring Negro employees on the main street of a Negro community. Yet the 1935 Harlem riot against police brutality and the refusal of Harlem stores to hire black employees shocked and surprised the city.
Black Communists and black fascists were both busy in 1930s Harlem. Frank Horne’s good friend Langston Hughes was openly a Communist. James Ford, a former Missionary college football hero, was the perennial Communist Party vice presidential candidate. Paul Robeson, harassed by Nazis in Germany and white American tourists in England, went to Soviet Russia and was treated like a king. An admirer of the “colored” empire of Japan ever since the Japanese defeated the czar’s navy in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, Dr. Du Bois had very different political sympathies in the 1930s. Du Bois was widely criticized in 1936 for suggesting that the Chinese look on the Japanese as liberators. That same year, however, he went to Berlin and stated that Nazi persecution of the Jews was “an attack on civilization, comparable only to the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.” The Nazis admitted that most of their racial laws were borrowed from the United States. Although Du Bois reported that German academics had shown him more respect than his American colleagues, he soon gave up fascism.
James Weldon Johnson continued to encourage Frank Horne to write more poetry. Frank had appeared in Johnson’s 1930 Anthology of Negro Poetry and was included in a 1929 German anthology, but he was still dean and acting president at Fort Valley—which meant he did everything. He was also a newlywed. Frank and Frankye were married in New York in August 1930 at the Actors’ Chapel, St. Malachy’s Church, the “Little Church Around the Corner.” Everyone, North and South, was very happy. Frankye was warm, outgoing, and full of charm. Slender and chic, she actually looked like a young Coco Chanel. Frankye brought a sense of Paris wherever she went—even Fort Valley, where she was now the official “acting” first lady. She was the first Negro first lady, but it seemed to be OK because she looked almost as white as Frank did. She moved out of the girls’ dorm and into Frank’s “acting” president’s house and continued teaching. The students loved her because she had a sense of fun. The teachers liked her because of the weekend parties that she and Frank gave—with plenty of moonshine and Louis Armstrong records. The other teachers were a mixture of Southern and Northern middle-class blacks stuck in rural Georgia Klan country. In 1932 Frank and Frankye finally had a decent honeymoon, when Frank took a leave of absence to get his master’s degree at the University of Southern California. They met up with Ted Horne for the Los Angeles Olympics. In pictures they look so happy—partly from love and partly from being away from the South.
In Atlanta in 1933, a nineteen-year-old black Communist named Angelo Herndon was sentenced to twenty years on the chain gang for leading a hunger march to petition county commissioners for relief for Negroes. He was defended by a young black Harvard Law graduate, Benjamin J. Davis Jr., whose father was the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and the former editor of Atlanta’s black newspaper, the Independent, whose business manager had been Antoine Graves. During the Herndon trial, the judge turned his back and read a newspaper whenever Davis spoke—and refused to address him as anything but “nigger.” Davis’ response was to join the Communist Party himself as soon as the trial was over.
In 1933, of the 24,536 people said to be members of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), no more than 2,500 were black. Two years later many of those black Communists left the party when it was revealed that Russia was selling oil and wheat to Mussolini, whose airplanes were killing barefoot Ethiopians. It was hardly likely that there would be many black Communists in America anyway, since black Americans thoroughly despised the American labor movement. Except for the Wobblies, the fabled, integrated, short-lived Industrial Workers of the World, blacks were barred from all labor unions, as well as all productive work opportunities. They could be janitors—but they were never allowed on the factory or shop floor. In 1934 the American Federation of Labor (AFL) once again rejected A. Philip Randolph’s plea to integrate. The AFL wanted separate black and white unions. The integrated Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) was born the following year. The CIO was no second-tier group—it represented big steel, automobiles, factories, and mines. This was a time of bloody labor battles featuring outnumbered workers against brutal, armed police. Young Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers and older, charismatic John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers of America were important CIO leaders.
In 1935 Du Bois published his book on Reconstruction:
If the Reconstruction of the Southern States, from slavery to free labor, and from aristocracy to industrial democracy, had been conceived as a major national program of America, whose accomplishment at any price was well worth the effort, we should be living today in a different world.
That year Negroes were lynched at the rate of one every three weeks—and the NAACP withdrew support from FDR because, needing Southern Democrats to pass his New Deal legislation, he refused to support the Costigan-Wagner antilynching bill (although Eleanor encouraged him to support it). Meanwhile, fifteen blacks were lynched in 1934. The South remained the South. In 1935 in Atlanta the median income for blacks was $632 and for whites was $1,876. The Southern states as a whole spent an average of $17.04 that year on each black pupil and $49.30 on each white pupil. Frank Horne knew very well how ill-funded black schools were. He was beginning, in fact, to see the true extent of the perils of applying Jim Crow to formulate an industrial “education.” In 1935 he wrote a much-talked-about piece in the Urban League magazine, Opportunity:
As factors in training Negro youth to earn a livelihood in industrial America of today, the industrial schools of the South, except in a few rare instances, could practically all be scrapped without appreciable loss to any one … In the midst of this teeming, complex, kaleidoscopic economic world, the Negro industrial schools of the South sit as though sublimely oblivious … We are fiddling with “man-and-plow” agriculture in the face of the gang-plow and the tractor; our home economics girls are in bodily danger in a modern kitchen; the language of collective bargaining, company unions and cooperatives is so much Greek to the ears of our industrial students.
The following year Frank got a call from Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, inviting him to join the New Deal. Thank God, he and Frankye could leave the South.
After two years at the Cotton Club, Edna had decided that Lena could do better. She concei
ved a plan to spirit Lena away to Boston to join Noble Sissle and his Society Orchestra. Edna and Lena actually left between shows, bundled into a taxi by a cohort of chorus girls, while stepfather Mike, after being roughed up by some of the “boys,” stayed in New York.
Recognized as a war hero in Boston, where Jim Europe died, Noble Sissle led the first black band to play the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. To honor the occasion, Sissle decided to redo Lena. Fortunately all of her “Cotton Club–isms” were put on, not innate. This was the era of the debutante “torch singer”; Sissle seemed to have that in mind when he renamed Lena “Helena Horne” and assigned her to sing slightly plaintive ballads. She sang “Blue Moon” at the Ritz-Carlton and acquired a Harvard fan club that returned night after night. Lena and Sissle were a big success in Boston. In fact, the Ritz-Carlton’s manager was so impressed that he called young New York jazz impresario John Hammond, Benny Goodman’s brother-in-law, to say, “There’s a terrible band on the roof called Noble Sissle, but the girl singer is so beautiful, she belongs in New York.” Later that year, en route to a well-publicized engagement at the huge whites-only Moonlight Gardens dance hall outside Cincinnati, Sissle was in a bad car crash. It was headline news. When Lena saw him in the hospital, Sissle told her that she must lead the band. “It’s the only way to keep the band alive,” he said. He told her not to worry about the music. The band would play what it always played—all she had to do was wave the baton around and pretend to conduct. A terrified Lena, wearing her band “uniform” of red sequin tailcoat and white crepe bell-bottom trousers, went on for Sissle at the Moonlight Gardens to cheers from the audience and raves from the Cincinnati papers—such was the novelty of a young, pretty female leader of a band. All the places that had canceled when they heard about Sissle’s accident now wanted the band with Lena. Reporters came backstage looking for interviews. They invariably mentioned Lena’s “modesty,” which was actually distress. She had no idea what she was supposed to say or do in an interview—though Sissle had always been a stickler for details and gestures onstage. After a long Southern tour—equal parts fear, exhaustion, and harassment (“Look at the New York niggers!”)—Lena realized that she hated what she was doing. She was tired of “show business” and tired of her mother pushing her around as if she were a commodity—while fiercely guarding the virginity that Lena was less and less interested in protecting. In fact, she was tired of her mother altogether—which is why she married my father.
In early 1936 Lena decided to go to Pittsburgh to visit Ted, who owned a small hotel with a quiet gambling den upstairs. Ted’s best Pittsburgh friend, Gus Greenlee, another World War I officer, had political control of the city’s Democratic black Third Ward and also ran the local numbers racket—another enterprise in which whites allowed blacks to succeed. When Lena came to visit, Ted introduced her to his younger friend, Louis Jones, whom he referred to as a “college man.” One of four children of a Louisville, Kentucky, minister, Louis Jordan Jones, a graduate of West Virginia State, had a Democratic patronage job as registrar of the coroner’s office. The Jones siblings all lived in Pittsburgh, where Louis’ older brothers were Third Ward lawyer-politicians. Pittsburgh was a blue-collar city, with white and black workers up from the South competing for the same jobs. But it produced the most important black newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and a great black baseball team, the Crawfords, owned by Ted’s pal Greenlee. Pittsburgh’s black middle class was almost as insular as its white superrich. The Loendi Club, where Louis took Lena on her first date ever with a man, was known as the “favorite gathering-place of Negro Pittsburgh’s most exclusive set.”
Cora Horne’s granddaughter Lena and her first husband, Louis Jones, as young Pittsburgh marrieds in quasi costumes, c. 1936
Lena, who had never had a date or a boyfriend, wanted to run away from show business and her mother. Why not marriage? Louis was twenty-eight and Lena was nineteen. Lena’s virginity when she married Louis had been a subject of great amusement among Louis’ married friends, all older than Lena and, in her mind, extremely condescending. Besides playing high-stakes bridge and treating her as if she were stupid, Louis was extremely controlling and jealous of Lena’s career. He also would not let her spend money—although he spent plenty. On top of everything, in a moment of folie de grandeur, he quit his job and borrowed a huge sum because he intended to run for a seat on the city council. He lost.
In the 1936 election, the Democratic platform did not mention Negroes, but two South Carolina delegates—Senator Ellison DuRant “Cotton Ed” Smith and the mayor of Charleston—walked out of the Democratic convention when a black minister began to give the opening prayer. Smith refused to support “any political organization that looks upon the Negro and caters to him as a political and social equal.” Typically, the Republicans had a decent, if modest, civil rights plank:
We favor equal opportunity for our colored citizens. We pledge our protection of their economic status and personal safety. We will do our best to further their employment in the gainful occupied life of America, particularly in private industry, agriculture, emergency agencies and the civil service. We condemn the present New Deal policies which would regiment and ultimately eliminate the colored citizen from the country’s productive life and make him solely a ward of the Federal Government.
The Communist platform was even more decent and much showier:
The Negro people suffer doubly. Most exploited of working people, they are also victims of Jim Crowism and lynching. They are denied the right to live as human beings … We demand that the Negro people be guaranteed complete equality, equal rights to jobs, equal pay for equal work, the full right to organize, vote, serve on juries, and hold public office. Segregation and discrimination against Negroes must be declared a crime. Heavy penalties must be established against mob rule, floggers, and kidnappers, with the death penalty for lynchers. We demand the enforcement of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
In 1937 Burke Horne, a practicing pharmacist, collected medicines for the Spanish Republic. In March Salaria Kee, a twenty-year-old nurse from Harlem Hospital, arrived in Spain to become the only black nurse in the Fifteenth International Brigade of the Spanish Civil War. The heroine of two critically praised documentaries, she was an excellent propaganda tool for the Communist-backed Spanish Republicans. She and Captain Oliver Law, the black commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the first black American to lead whites in battle, were reason enough for black Americans in general to support the Spanish Republic—as was Paul Robeson’s magnificent album of Spanish Civil War songs. Even though they lost the war and were destroyed as a military unit, veterans of the integrated Lincoln Brigade were proud to have been among the first Americans to fight fascism—for which their own government would severely punish them.
There was actually some good news for American blacks in 1937. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of picketing firms that refused to hire Negroes. The NAACP successfully challenged the attempt to exclude black Boy Scouts from the great Scout Jamboree to be held in Washington that summer. And, in the best sporting news since Jesse Owens’ four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, Joe Louis, a young Alabama Negro, became heavyweight champion of the world when he defeated the white boxer James J. Braddock.
In Atlanta in June 1937, Kate Graves had a new job at the Fulton County Department of Family and Children Services. She was a social worker and, technically, a maiden aunt—but she was also a fashion plate with a model-sized figure. She dressed like a “career woman”—and inspired her nieces, especially namesake Catherine Nash, who had graduated from Atlanta University’s Laboratory High School that same June.
I have one page of a letter or report that Kate wrote about her work that is a perfect example of the Reconstruction spirit:
My field of work is dealing with social problems and social case work. The greatest difficulty that confronts me is the lack of cooperation among people who are able to give their aid and assistance but will not;
seemingly they have not the interest of the race at heart enough to help uplift struggling humanity …
In August, Kate’s brother, Judge, died in New York City of acute alcoholism. Poor Judge: he should have stayed with music, in Europe or New York, and been true to himself. He could, at least, have been a professor of music somewhere; but dentistry was chosen for security—in everything but spirit. There was one saved letter of condolence addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. A. Graves, and family, 115 Howell Street, Atlanta Georgia” from Joseph D. Bibb, attorney at law, 3507 South Parkway, Chicago: “Dear Friends: Permit me [to] express my deepest sympathy in the passing of your dear son and my old pal, Judge. Sincerely yours. Joseph D. Bibb.”
Bibb was an old black Georgia name—the original Bibb must have had many slaves. Joseph might have been one of the good-looking young men who posed with Judge in the 1904 photograph. Among Judge’s papers was Frank Horne’s Los Angeles address.
For Lena, the first real shock of color in Pittsburgh came in December 1937 when she was in labor with me. Her very social Negro doctor drove her to the hospital, then told her for the first time that he could not practice in the white hospital—that a strange white doctor would deliver her baby. Meanwhile she would be put in the basement where the colored babies were born. To say that Lena sustained a culture shock is putting it mildly. She became hysterical and had to be sedated. Who would have thought that Pittsburgh was part of the Deep South?
The Black Calhouns Page 17