by Paul Ortiz
By the spring of 1873, leaders of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee had demonstrated the existence of so much popular support for their campaign that they earned a personal audience with President Ulysses S. Grant. The Cuban solidarity movement had accomplished the tremendous feat of gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures—some estimated the count at five hundred thousand—to present to Grant.48 The delegation included the most prominent African American leaders of the time including Rev. Garnet, J. M. Langston, and George T. Downing. The previous winter, President Grant had given the movement hope when, in his message to Congress, he urged Spain to declare emancipation of the slaves in Cuba.49
Nevertheless, even though Grant politely received Henry Garnet and the delegation of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, the odds were not in their favor that he would officially recognize the Cuban liberation struggle. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish viewed Cubans as racially inferior.50 The historian Richard H. Bradford notes, “As a businessman Fish favored the interests of Americans who had invested in sugar and slaves and perhaps stood to lose if the revolution succeeded. . . . The ‘hard-money elite’ of upper-class Northeasterners in both parties” opposed formal recognition of the Cuban patriots.51 Congressman Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, writing in 1873, explained why the United States ultimately betrayed the Cuban insurgents. Banks believed that the pursuit of overseas profits enshrined as imperial policy placed the United States on the side of Spanish plantation agriculture in Cuba. Congressman Banks was unsparing in his criticism of his government’s rejection of the petition and demands of the Cuban solidarity movement:
But the obstacle in the way was the position of the United States Government. It was the American Government which obstructed the way of progress and reform in the waters and islands of Cuba. . . . The trouble was that the people of the United States were wild, if not insane, in the pursuit of wealth, and sacrificed every consideration of right and public duty to that purpose and end alone.52
The imperatives of racial capitalism had once again trumped humanity and human rights.
African American organizers regrouped after being rebuffed by their nation and continued to build support for international solidarity with the Cuban patriots. As the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes loomed, the Savannah Tribune wrote, “CUBA. The revolution in this island, has continued eight years, and has probably cost Spain nearly a billion dollars, and over a hundred thousand lives, many of them the flower of Castilian chivalry and the gem of the Antilles is still unconquered. We hope one of the first acts of President Hayes’s administration [will] be to acknowledge the belligerency of Cuba.”53 At a mass meeting held in Philadelphia the following year, Henry Highland Garnet continued to expound on the theme that the work of abolishing slavery was incomplete, stating,
If the veteran abolitionists of the United States had not mustered themselves out of service, I believe that there would not now have been a single slave in the Island of Cuba. . . . We sympathize with the patriots of Cuba, not simply because they are Republicans, but because their triumph will be the destruction of slavery in that land. All Europe now frowns upon Spain, because of her attitude toward human bondage. We must take our place on the broad platform of universal human rights, and plead for the brotherhood of the entire human race.54
After hearing addresses in Spanish and in English, participants formed the American Foreign Anti-Slavery Society to address the crisis in Cuba. The respect that Cuban revolutionaries held for Garnet was reflected when the Cuban patriot General José Antonio Maceó visited New York the following year and requested a private audience with the senior leader of the Cuban solidarity movement.
African American efforts to promote support for the anticolonial struggle continued. However, the momentum of the Cuban solidarity movement slowed as white supremacy, anti-Black violence, and voter suppression began to erode African American political power. The massacre of the Black electorate came in waves of violence and fraud—first in the form of the so-called First Mississippi Plan (Ku Klux Klan terrorism, lynching, and election corruption), and then in the Second Mississippi Plan (poll taxes, literacy tests, residential requirements).55 Voter turnout in the South began a general decline, and the entire region began sinking into the venality of one-party rule.
The Cuban solidarity campaign launched by Black antislavery abolitionists in the heart of Reconstruction was one of the most remarkable social movements in American history. In placing the liberation of Cuba on the same platform with their desperate struggle for equal citizenship in the United States, African Americans from Key West to California created a new kind of freedom movement. The national petition campaign was built on the traditions of anti-imperial antebellum slavery abolitionism. Furthermore, the movement prefigured the Third World liberation and anti-apartheid struggles of the twentieth century. While Black organizers focused much of their energy on the question of race and slavery in Cuba, they also made it clear that they viewed the Ten Years’ War as a multiracial anticolonial movement aimed at ending Spanish tyranny. In the eyes of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee, “white” Cuban rebels deserved support because they had abolished slavery for the same pragmatic reasons that Abraham Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War.
Henry Highland Garnet died on February 13, 1882. Having been appointed US minister to Liberia, the man who had once declared that he had no home other than the United States decided to spend the final weeks of his life in Africa. No one in the United States had fought more creatively for freedom in the Americas than Reverend Garnet. His call for a rising of the slaves in 1843 was a people’s manifesto that maintained that it was up to the most oppressed to save the nation from complete destruction. Garnet grasped this most precious truth even before Frederick Douglass, who in turn glimpsed it long before Abraham Lincoln did. Garnet and his comrades proposed to heal the malignancies of the age with the balm of mass action. Garnet was the prophet of the Black general strike that won the American Civil War, as surely as he and his comrades in the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee provided a new model of building international solidarity that echoed into the following century. The Cuban patriot José Martí provided a stirring eulogy to Garnet in La Opinión Nacional:
He was Henry Garnet, who showed lazy, proud, and impatient men how, from a little Negro cabin boy—son of fugitive slaves who went naked through the snow and suffered hunger and cold in the woods—one could go on to become a pastor of a church, a teacher, a member of a Frankfurt congress, a mediator for free labor in England, a leader of his race, a representative upon foreign soil of a nation of fifty million subjects, an orator upon whose pure, proud brow the serene and grandiose light of the Capitol played as if fond caresses. . . . He despised hatred. He deeply loved white men and Negroes alike. He died beloved.56
THE FREEST TOWN IN THE SOUTH
Even as powerful currents of white supremacy were sweeping the mainland, African Americans, exiled Cubans, Bahamians, and dissident Southern whites were building an enclave of freedom in Key West, Florida. Establishing this sanctuary was no easy task. When the island’s Black community attempted to celebrate emancipation during the Civil War they were violently attacked by Confederate sympathizers. In 1865, there was a breakthrough: the National Anti-Slavery Standard reported, “Yesterday was the first time that the colored people of the Island have been allowed without violence and molestation to celebrate the anniversary of their emancipation.”57 There was a good reason that saboteurs were unable to disrupt the 1865 celebration. The participants were “escorted through the principal streets of the city by the Second Regiment U.S. Colored Infantry, with banners flying and to the sound of martial music, these happy and peaceful people met and rejoiced over the good fortune which had befallen them.” Armed self-help in the defense of democracy would become a foundation of Key West politics.
Key West became an important site of the resurgence of the Cuban solidarity movement in the 1880s. The island’s vibrant political cul
ture attracted individuals such as J. Willis Menard, a prominent Black New Orleans politician who subsequently founded the Key West News.58
When former President Grant visited Key West in 1880, he was greeted by “the almighty public, where whites, negroes, Cubans and Chinese mingled in one enthusiastic and curious mass.” Grant received delegations of African Americans and Cubans who still viewed him in a positive light as supportive of Cuban independence, against the Eastern establishment.59 Cuban patriots and military leaders, including General José Antonio Maceó and Máximo Gómez, visited Key West in 1884 and were received with great enthusiasm by tobacco workers and the general population. “The city of Key West emerged triumphant from its early trials,” José Martí observed. “In Yankee hands it was no more than sand and shacks, but now it can point proudly to factories that in their continual thought and study are like academies of learning; schools where the hand that rolls the tobacco leaf by day lifts a book and teaches by night.”60
Black power built via interracial coalitions with Cuban émigré socialists and Knights of Labor union assemblies pointed the way toward a new kind of democratic politics in South Florida and the Gulf. Key West also became a critical movement center for the Independent Party of Florida, a statewide interracial political party.61 Working-class self-activity was the foundation in the building of Key West’s political culture. The nation’s still-liberal voting laws for new immigrants were another important factor. The enfranchisement of African American men in Reconstruction led to the adoption of measures making it easier for immigrants to vote in the South. Cuban refugees to Key West found a relatively easy pathway to the ballot box via “declarant alien voting,” which was passed by Florida’s Reconstruction legislature in 1868 (“declarant aliens” were resident aliens who declared their intent to naturalize).62 According to Article 14 of the 1868 Florida constitution, a man who swore to defend the laws of the land and to eventually become a citizen could vote.63 The insurgent Knights of Labor gave the island’s workers linkages to a potent national labor organization, and unionists in Key West organized at least two local assemblies and one district assembly of the Knights of Labor.64 Local trade union publications included the Equator and the Spanish-language El Jornalero, both of which were listed in British government reports as “chief working class papers in America.”65
L. W. Livingston, writing from Key West as a special correspondent for T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age, reported that Republican Party strength on the key was tied to its unique location in the international economy.66 After the Civil War, Key West stood at the intersection of a brisk shipping trade in a variety of commodities, none more important over time than tobacco and cigars.67 “We are on a little island here,” Livingston reported, “cut off from the rest of the world, both civilized and uncivilized, and absolutely dependent upon Havana, New Orleans, Tampa and New York, especially the last named place.”68 Migration from these ports brought together a diverse working class: “There is such a conglomeration of American colored and white folks, Cubans, colored immigrants from Nassau and Conchs [white Bahamians], and such an admixture of them all that it is impossible to determine where the line begins and where it ends.”69
The Republican Party forged a multinational, multiracial, and cross-class coalition in Key West that weathered the crisis of disenfranchisement then sweeping through the South and kept the Democratic Party at bay in that community. Republican meetings in Key West were boisterous and bilingual. As J. Willis Menard, the founder of the Key West News, told Joseph E. Lee, an African American leader of Black Republicanism, “Clubs of Laboring men” consisting of whites and Afro-Cubans, as well as African Americans, made up the rank and file of the Republican Party on the island.70 “The Cubans are with us to a man,” exulted William Artrell, an African American leader and former Key West alderman.71 “There is generally at least one speech in Spanish and at a Republican meeting I attended recently a Cuban delivered two speeches,” noted Livingston, “one in English and one in Spanish.”72 He marveled, “The idea I wish to convey is, that colored men here speak and act their sentiments, with none to molest or make them afraid, and there is nothing cowardly and servile about them.” White Key West residents found themselves having to participate as equals in the public sphere, and did not always appreciate the novelty of the island’s political climate.
In 1888, Key West voters elected James Dean to a judgeship—the first African American judge elected in the South since the end of Reconstruction a decade earlier—as well as an African American sheriff, Charles F. Dupont. Both candidates enjoyed strong support in the Cuban émigré community,73 and Dean advocated slavery reparations in order to fund Florida’s abysmal public education system.74 Livingston captured the pageantry and joy of the celebrations that swept the island in the wake of this great victory: “Talking about enthusiasm, why the way the colored and white Republican Cubans, the colored Americans and Baham[ians] and the American white Republicans celebrated the election of the National Republican ticket here as well as their own county ticket, was enough to make old Zach Chandler turn in his grave.” A great procession of “torchlights, brass bands, Cuban queens, Chinese lanterns, barbecues, cards marked ‘free trade’ and attached to the caudal appendages of horses, endless exclamations in Spanish and English—these are some of the manifestations of Key West enthusiasm.”75
Livingston called Key West the “freest town in the South.”76 The political tensions that endangered this enclave of Black political power did not escape the reporter’s attention.77 But Livingston also wanted his readers in the North to understand what lay at the bottom of the Republican coalition’s success in Key West: the ability of Black Floridians on the island to defend themselves from white incursions. Livingston observed that African Americans in Key West were “well equipped with the means of offensive and defensive warfare, as conducted in times of peace, with a good sprinkling of old soldiers among them, and the beauty . . . is that they are not the only ones that knows their power and invincibleness.” Livingston was referring to Black veterans of the American Civil War as well as immigrant veterans of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba.78
On the Florida mainland, African American workers were also making progress. In 1887, African American guano-fertilizer factory operatives in Pensacola formed an alliance with white railroad workers through the Knights of Labor and carried out a successful strike for higher wages. During the business downturn caused by the 1888 yellow fever epidemic, Black labor in Jacksonville organized an unemployed movement that successfully pressed municipal authorities to create a public works program that would provide jobs.79 In addition, African Americans throughout Florida were taking part in the creation of a public education system that for the first time in Southern history served the children of poor and rich alike. These actions were animated by the knowledge that “Southern industry is but another name for colored industry, or the industry of colored people of the South, notably as this relates to cotton, rice and sugar. Subtract what the colored people produce and the remainder would scarcely be worth the mentioning. . . . And yet the laboring people of this section of the country are among the poorest of the nation.”80
Albion W. Tourgeé, a former Union Army soldier who was the chief counsel in Plessy v. Ferguson, described a few of the major achievements of African Americans in the first years after the end of the Civil War:
They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot-box and jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule in the South. They abolished the whipping post, and branding iron, the stocks and other barbarous forms of punishment which up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance, they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time no man’s rights of person were invaded under the forms of laws.81
WHITE BUSINESS SUPR
EMACY STRIKES BACK
Moneyed interests in the South had no plans to share their power with workers, nor were they interested in building a public infrastructure to develop an educated working class. In 1889, Florida state legislators revoked the city charter of Jacksonville, an act that empowered the governor to replace pro-labor elected officials with a white regime controlled by the state. The Florida Times-Union described the new cabal taking charge of Jacksonville: “Everybody favors the bill: lawyers, merchants, and businessmen.”82 According to the pro-business Times-Union, the overthrow of elected government in Jacksonville would guarantee race and class domination: “If the present bill to amend the Jacksonville charter should fail, this city will get no relief whatever. Capitalists will not lend money to a municipality that can be bought for fifty dollars. At our next city election Jacksonville will be completely Africanized.”83
Deep South leaders in politics and business skillfully replicated their system of voter suppression, low wages, and inequality across most of the Sunbelt states. The Florida state legislature provides a case study in the making of Jim Crow/Juan Crow segregation.84 In 1889, Tallahassee legislators revoked the municipality of Key West’s charter, and Governor Francis Fleming deposed Judge James Dean for allegedly presiding over an interracial marriage involving a light-skinned African American man and an Afro-Cuban woman. Fleming used the state’s miscegenation statute to remove a leader who had played an integral role in building multiracial alliances.85 The state also revoked the charter of the city of Pensacola. Next, it imposed puppet regimes friendly to elite interests in all three of Florida’s largest cities where active labor movements, interracial and internationalist, posed a threat to white business supremacy.86 State seizure of local government was carried out in the interests of individuals whom the Pensacola Commercial celebrated as the “intelligent, enterprising, business men.”87