Although this incident of collective armed action seems to have been more the exception than the rule during the nadir, it may be that similar black responses have been ignored or have gone entirely unrecorded. This may have been especially true in the coastal region of Georgia, where the Darien Insurrection occurred; although at this time Georgia’s lynch-mob terrorism was perhaps worse than in any other part of the South, the Georgia coast had the fewest lynchings of anyplace in the state.
Black struggle was slowed but not stopped by the southern white Redemption. Although a willingness to use armed self-defense was certainly alive in many black communities, much of the resistance during the nadir also took the form of political action. Between 1900 and 1906, blacks mounted a boycott movement against Jim Crow streetcars in many southern cities. A surge of intellectual activity around this time also challenged what some considered Booker T. Washington’s overly accommodating approach to white power. Most notable in this regard was the Niagara Movement, an organization that grew from a 1905 meeting at Niagara Falls (on the Canadian side) of twenty-nine black intellectuals led by W. E. B. Du Bois and his former Harvard University classmate Monroe Trotter. This movement led to the formation of the NAACP, undoubtedly the most significant development in civil rights struggle during these early years of the century.
Yet although groups like the NAACP would prove crucial in aiding and inciting black resistance, its impact during the nadir itself was limited, as was the impact of most other groups, with the possible exception of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) for a time. The NAACP grew slowly, never quite taking root in the South until a new black leadership supplanted the sometimes condescending white do-gooders who dominated the organization in its early days. Three men were significant to this transformation: poet, educator, and diplomat James Weldon Johnson, who in 1920 became the NAACP’s first black executive director; a grown-up Walter White, who in 1930 succeeded Johnson as executive director and who, as an African American with very fair skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes, went undercover at scenes of southern lynchings to covertly investigate them for the NAACP; and W. E. B. Du Bois, the prolific intellectual who would launch and edit Crisis magazine. The thinking of these three reshaped the organization around a black consciousness and self-reliance. In a 1914 letter to his good friend and prominent NAACP supporter Joel Spingarn, Du Bois expressed the thinking of “new Negroes”—men such as himself, White, and Johnson—who were now taking center stage in the NAACP: “No organization like ours ever succeeded in America; either it became a group of white philanthropists ‘helping’ the Negro like the Anti-Slavery societies; or it became a group of colored folks freezing out their white coworkers by insolence and distrust.” The color line was ever-present, Du Bois noted. “Everything tends to break along [it]. How can this be changed? By changing it. By trusting black men with power.”
The idea that black people should take control of their own destinies was not limited to the NAACP or confined to the thinking of black intellectuals like Du Bois; rather, it reflected the attitude of many in black America at the dawn of the twentieth century. A new generation of men and women was consciously distancing itself from the thoughts and habits of their parents and grandparents who had suffered under slavery and the terror of the Redemption. These “new Negroes” asserted themselves, exchanged ideas, and planned action. In addition to Crisis magazine, a host of other black publications—newspapers with national reach such as the Chicago Defender, the Baltimore Afro American, the Pittsburg Courier, and Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, as well as the Messenger, the Emancipator, and the Crusader magazines—were read by black people around the country, expanding black aspirations and promoting a more public black militancy. Black soldiers going off to fight in World War I carried with them the thoughts and attitudes promulgated in these publications and discussed at their kitchen tables. They, too, were new Negroes.
Black leadership was divided over the question of whether or not black men should join the war effort. But even in their disagreement, the political effect of the war can be seen in the intensifying debate—which would continue for the rest of the century—about the relationship of black people to the American government and about their obligation to sacrifice themselves for its priorities. Although Du Bois favored enlistment, Monroe Trotter argued that fighting for democracy within the United States—“making the South safe for Negroes”—was the greater need. Similarly, A. Philip Randolph (who in 1919 would become president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country’s largest black labor union) argued that black leaders so eager to make the world safe for democracy should go to France themselves and fight. He himself, he said, “would rather fight to make Georgia safe for democracy.”
While these disagreements over whether to support the war effort were straining the unity of black leaders, within the ranks of blacks in the armed forces something new appeared: open defiance of, and sometimes even physical resistance to, the racial discrimination and oppression that was the norm in military life.
A 1917 confrontation in Houston, Texas, provides a particularly graphic example of black troops standing up to white power—and of the risks they ran in doing so. At about noon on August 23, a little over four months after the United States entered World War I, Mrs. Sara Travers, a housewife and mother of five, was ironing clothes when she heard gunfire. She stepped out of the house to investigate and encountered two white policemen, Lee Sparks and his partner Rufe Daniels. The officers were searching for two men who had been shooting dice, and Sparks demanded to know if Mrs. Travers had seen “a nigger jumping over the yard.”
Mrs. Travers lived in the predominately black San Felipe district of Houston’s Fourth Ward. Sparks was well-known for his racist brutality, and his reputation may have played a part in her decision to respond with a simple “No, Sir.” Nevertheless, without asking permission, Sparks barged into Travers’s house and began searching it—routine behavior by Houston police in black neighborhoods.
As Sparks was coming out of the house, he heard Mrs. Travers telling one of her neighbors that she thought Sparks had been firing at some gamblers. Sparks called her a liar, claiming he had fired into the ground. Then, suddenly, he flew into a rage. “You all God damn nigger bitches!” he shouted, “since these God damn sons of bitches nigger soldiers come here, you are trying to take the town.” His outburst over, Sparks went back inside the house to continue searching it.
This time Mrs. Travers followed Sparks and asked him what he was looking for. He replied, “Don’t you ask an officer what he want in your house.” Where he was from, Sparks told her, white men “don’t allow niggers to talk back to us; we generally whip them.” Then he slapped Travers. Her scream brought Daniels into the house, and he and Sparks decided to place the housewife under arrest because she was acting like “one of these biggity nigger women.” Pinning Mrs. Travers’s arms tightly behind her back, Daniels marched her outside to wait at a nearby call box for a police patrol wagon to carry her to jail.
By now, Mrs. Travers’s neighbors were gathering, and a soldier, Private Alonzo Edwards, who was also a military policeman, approached the two white policemen and asked that Mrs. Travers be allowed to dress; she was barefoot, wearing an “ol’ raggedy” slip and her underwear. He also asked that she be placed in his custody. Sparks responded by striking Edwards across the head several times with his sidearm and arresting him.
A short while later, another black soldier, Corporal Charles W. Baltimore, stepped off a streetcar in the neighborhood and learned of the arrests of Travers and Edwards. Baltimore approached Sparks and Daniels, who were still patrolling the area, and asked what had happened. In particular, he wanted to know why the policemen had beaten and arrested Edwards. Baltimore was with the military police (MPs), and there was a standing agreement that the city police and military police would share the duty of policing soldiers, although black MPs would patrol unarmed. Houston’s police chief had also said he wou
ld order his policemen to call black MPs “colored” instead of “nigger”—an order that either had not reached Sparks or made no difference to him.
Sparks told Baltimore, “I don’t report to no niggers.” He and his partner then began pistol-whipping Baltimore, who fled. The two policemen gave chase, firing several shots at the soldier. Baltimore ran into a house and hid under a bed but was caught and arrested. He was bleeding badly from the beating, but Sparks claimed Baltimore had sustained his injuries from running through a door. Sparks later told a city board of inquiry that he did not mind black military police “as long as they would stay in their place.”
That evening, almost two hundred black soldiers met at Camp Logan, a military base still under construction, which they had been sent to Houston to guard. Their anger over the virulent racial hostility of Houston’s white residents had been simmering since their arrival, and they had little trouble believing two rumors spreading through their ranks: that Baltimore had been shot and killed and that a white mob was on its way to attack them.
The soldiers stole guns from the camp and, ignoring the orders of officers, marched into the city and toward the police station. As they passed through Houston’s all-white Brunner neighborhood, whites attacked the column, and the troops defended themselves. As they marched, they shouted out protests; one soldier yelled, “We ain’t gonna be mistreated!” Another was heard to exclaim, “God damn white people!” Baltimore, now released from jail, joined them—but although the troops could see for themselves that he had not been killed, they could not turn back now. A white mob formed and joined the police in the street. A shootout ensued.
Of the twenty people who died in the exchange of fire, only two were black troopers; the others were five white policemen (one of them Rufe Daniels), and thirteen white civilians. A police car was riddled with fifty bullets. This was not, however, a mindless black rampage, nor did it display the savagery of white rioting. Writing in the November 1917 Crisis magazine after her investigation into the incident, Martha Gruening, an attorney associated with the NAACP, offered a nuanced and commonsensical conclusion about the event: “It was not a cold-blooded slaughter of innocents but the work of angry men whose endurance had been strained to the breaking point, and who in turn committed injustices.”
Martial law was declared, and the Illinois National Guard, which was also in Houston, arrested and confined 163 of the rebellious soldiers to a prison stockade. After a three-week court-martial in November, 54 were found guilty of murder and mutiny, and 13—Corporal Baltimore among them—were sentenced to be hanged; 41 received life sentences. Neither President Wilson nor the secretary of war reviewed the death sentences, as was required when a court-martial handed down a death penalty sentence. Just before dawn on December 11, 1917, accompanied by army trucks carrying lumber for scaffolding and trap doors, the thirteen men were taken to an isolated mesquite thicket near Salado Creek outside San Antonio and hanged. A New York Times reporter wrote, “The negroes, dressed in their regular uniforms, displayed neither bravado nor fear. They rode to the execution singing a hymn, but the singing was as that of soldiers on the march.” The men refused blindfolds. It was only after the hangings had occurred secretly that the convictions, sentencing, and executions were announced publicly. “Thirteen young strong men … have gone to their death,” wrote a dismayed Du Bois with a restrained mixture of grief and anger; “soldiers who have fought for a country that was never wholly theirs; men born to suffer ridicule, injustice and at last death itself.”
Houston was a tragedy, but it was also a lesson. The clash and its aftermath demonstrated to blacks again a lesson learned during Reconstruction and Redemption in the previous century: that the use of firepower was not likely to defeat the coordinated power of wrathful federal and local authorities reacting to black anger and aspiration. It is a lesson that has endured, in some form, in black consciousness to this day. Individually and collectively, black people have always been fairly hardheaded and cautious in appraising what is doable and desirable in the pursuit of equal rights. Experience taught then and teaches now that blacks should never underestimate the level of violence that could be brought to bear against them by white authority, and that they should never overestimate the prospects for receiving understanding and support from white people.
Houston was rare, in that black troops took action in a white neighborhood. Despite the deep anger that existed among black troops, incidents of such retaliatory or offensive violence were not typical. Even during the so-called Red Summer of 1919, when black communities in city after city across the country were besieged by white mobs, ex-soldiers sometimes provided defense but generally refrained from assaults on white people and white communities. This restraint was in part due to some very practical as well as political considerations. Retaliation would surely have been viewed as an assault on government, and though local governments—and many parts of the federal government as well—were undeniably racist, such action would have been akin to launching a civil war.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that blacks’ anger and ambitions were abandoned at the war’s end. Strong underground currents of thought and activism flowed with greater force in and from black communities in the aftermath of the war, eroding the white-supremacist order. Propelling these currents was blacks’ shared desire to promote and safeguard genuine democracy in the United States and also, on occasion, overseas. Black soldiers in the war, declared veteran William N. Colson in the July 1919 issue of the Messenger, “were fighting for France and for their race rather than for a flag which had no meaning.” The war had exposed more of the terrain of struggle, wrote Du Bois. “There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went—glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy, glad to have a new, clear vision of the real inner spirit of American prejudice. The day of camouflage is past.”
There was clearly a new Negro in the new century, in a milieu typically portrayed in terms of art, literature, and music or encapsulated in the Harlem Renaissance. But this new Negro had a corresponding political existence much larger than New York City’s Harlem and the arts, and with the threat to free expression and civil liberties somewhat eased after the war—at least above the Mason–Dixon Line—the demands of this new generation became less muted.
One of the most prominent and influential voices of what is sometimes called “the new Negro movement” belonged to the writer and political activist Hubert Harrison. Harrison felt that an organization more radical than the NAACP was needed, and he founded the Liberty League. Self-defense was high on his list of necessary action. “If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property,” Harrison wrote in 1917. “This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre.” He was referring to a riot that had taken place just a few weeks before the Houston confrontation in East St. Louis, Illinois. Black laborers had replaced striking white workers, and false reports warned that blacks were planning to attack white communities. In response, whites went on a rampage; huge white mobs indiscriminately stabbed, clubbed, and lynched blacks, driving 6,000 people from their homes. They also demanded that guns be taken away from black people. Before the carnage was over, forty-two blacks and eight whites were killed.
Harrison died in 1927 at the young age of forty-four. But many blacks thought as Harrison did, that guns were needed to stop mob atrocities. Lynching continued to be a powerful tool of white supremacy and was ignored at every level of government. Rioting whites were an ever-present threat. An editorial in the Messenger magazine noted these dangers and spoke for many when it declared, “Negroes can stop lynching in the South with shot and shell and fire… . A mob of a thousand men knows it can beat down fifty Negroes, but when those fifty Negroes rain fire and shot and shell over the thousand, the whole group of cowards will be put to flight.”
Another outspoken member of the new Negroes was William N. Colson, who had served as a second lieutenant during the war and was
afterward closely associated with the Messenger magazine. In one of a series of articles written decades before the sit-ins of the 1960s, he urged direct action against train and bus segregation. “Each black soldier, as he travels on jim crow cars, if he has the desire, can act his disapproval,” Colson wrote. “When he is insulted, he can perform a counter-action.” Colson did not elaborate on what he meant by “counter-action,” although nonviolence is not likely to have been in his mind. But he did envision a vanguard role for black veterans that in some respects came true, especially after World War II: “The function of the Negro soldier, who is mentally free, is to act as an imperishable leaven on the mass of those who are still in mental bondage.” Sentiments like these are the seeds from which subsequent civil rights organizations like SNCC, CORE, and even SCLC sprouted. They were fertilized not by nonviolence but by the idea of resistance, and they were planted well before those organizations rose to prominence in the 1950s and ’60s.
South Carolina native Osceola McKaine was another of the “new crowd Negroes”—a term coined by the Messenger, perhaps to distinguish them from the more favored and slightly older “new Negroes” like Du Bois, Johnson, and White. McKaine too had been radicalized by the war and would become a major figure in the League for Democracy, a short-lived organization of black veterans that described itself as “an organization of soldiers, for soldiers, by soldiers.” Its intent was to “keep alive the military spirit of the race.” Although the group fell far short of its goal of becoming the “predominant race organization in the Republic” and of having a presence in every town containing more than a thousand black people, it did get the attention of military intelligence. For a time, military intelligence considered the League for Democracy to be a greater threat than Marcus Garvey’s nascent UNIA. In 1944 McKaine helped organize the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) in South Carolina, an alternative to the state’s all-white Democratic Party that foreshadowed by two decades the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which challenged the legitimacy of the all-white state party to represent the Democratic Party.
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