Four Hundred Souls
Page 23
Black clusters were subject not only to floods but also to sewage literally draining down from the hills. City laws allowed garbage to be dumped in Black and poor neighborhoods, in addition to the natural flow of malodorous human waste of the better-offs. Potable water for drinking and bathing could only be siphoned from wells. Ingersoll seemed not to notice these health hazards of uneven development, claiming that “drainage is therefore excellent” and “epidemics are unheard of and the locality is an island of health in the treacherous yellow-fever climate of its region.”
There is much beneath the surface that Ingersoll, in pigeonholing Blackness, could not see. Shermantown was a vibrant settlement. It was the home of Big Bethel A.M.E. Church, the first Black church in the city, dating back to the antebellum era. The church in turn housed the first school for freed people in 1865, organized by James Tate, a grocer and former slave, then taken over by the American Missionary Association a year later and named the Storrs School. Wheat Street Baptist Church and the First Congregational Church were also located there. Wheat Street itself was a major street that housed an inchoate Black business district that would later become famous as Auburn Avenue, still thriving today. And it was home to the growing popularity of commercial leisure, especially outlets for music and dance.
Shermantown, like the other Black neighborhoods, was a haven for newly freed people in search of life in the city that would enhance their autonomy and allow them to escape the strictures of bondage. At the center of this effort to create community were women, the majority of the city’s Black population. And essential to their existence was work. They were half of the Black workforce.
These women did impress Ingersoll, if nothing else, because of their ubiquity: “There are certain features that strike the stranger’s eye. On Mondays you may see tall, straight negro girls marching through the streets carrying enormous bundles of soiled clothes upon their heads,” he wrote. Domestic work was the primary occupation of Black women, and within that, laundry work dominated. By the time Ingersoll was visiting the city, laundry work was growing by leaps and bounds. There were more washerwomen than there were casual laborers among men (the largest single category of men’s work). Over the course of the 1870s, the number of Black washerwomen increased by 150 percent.
A number of factors fed this expansion. Black women were forced into domestic service, but they gravitated to the jobs that gave them the most autonomy. Whereas under slavery, domestics lived and worked under the close supervision of slaveholders, under freedom, Black women were determined to live on their own. They refused to live in the homes of employers even when they chose to be general housekeepers and cooks. But taking in wash gave them the most flexibility. It changed the dynamic of the conventional employer-employee relationship by giving the washerwomen more control over their labor. Women picked up loads of dirty clothes and brought them back to their homes, just as the lithograph depicted. Married women and those with children especially found the flexibility of the work attractive, as it allowed them to take care of their children and perform other chores intermittently.
The popularity of washerwomen was also driven by demand. As more whites moved into the city, they desired a variety of housekeeping services. Laundry work was among the most arduous household chores for women, and any who could afford to do so preferred to send out their wash for others to literally do their dirty work. Even some poor whites, only slightly better off, took advantage of Black women’s labor.
The community life that was invisible to Ingersoll’s sightseeing enabled more than women’s work. Just two years before, the washerwomen had started to mobilize, deciding to adopt a uniform rate of pay for their labor. And in 1879 they gathered to form the first organization, a protective association, modeled on the prolific mutual aid societies founded by African Americans in the postwar South. Two years later this would all build up to the launch of the largest strike in the city’s history.
The broader context of these working-class mobilizations was a thriving grassroots political culture that persisted beyond the formal end of Reconstruction. Neighborhoods like Shermantown were bases for community organizing. Mass meetings were held in churches and halls where men, women, and children gathered to deliberate on the important issues of the day: to demand the hiring of Black teachers and police officers, jobs on the state railroads, more public schools, and the provision of potable water and sewer lines.
These political mobilizations were intensifying when Ingersoll visited. African American men came close to winning city council elections, defeated only by the last-minute scramble by white voters who shrank the field of candidates and closed ranks. Only men could legally vote, but women eagerly engaged in local Republican politics, much to the chagrin of employers who complained about their absenteeism as a result of their partisan work.
Shermantown of 1879 was by no means unique. The limitations of racial and economic oppression and the collective efforts to push against them were common in Black communities throughout the South and the nation. Truth be told, similar disparities persist today. Despite progress since the civil rights era, African Americans are disproportionately confined to inferior, overpriced housing, live near hazardous waste sites, and even lack clean drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan, Ingersoll’s home state. And yet, out of the shabbiest of conditions, miracles have been made.
Dreams have been deferred but not always defeated.
1879–1884
JOHN WAYNE NILES
William A. Darity, Jr.
In the early 1880s, John Wayne Niles proposed a territorial reparations program under the aegis of his all-Black Indemnity Party. It arrived during the period between the unmet promise of the Black demand for slavery restitution in the form of forty-acre land grants and Callie House’s 1890s movement claiming pensions for the formerly enslaved. While Callie House’s National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association reached a membership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, Niles’s Indemnity Party probably never exceeded two thousand members. But the notoriety of his efforts extended much further than the scale of his political party. His personal notoriety as a swindler stretched nationwide. His numerous exploits were covered in newspapers from New York to San Francisco.
In 1883 he brought a petition to the U.S. Congress seeking an allocation of separate public lands for settlement of the “colored folk” living in the South. In 1884 he mysteriously vanished from the national eye and historical record. It is unclear what happened to him after 1883, and precisely when or how he died.
John Wayne Niles was born in 1842, the son of a white man and a Black woman in Mississippi. In adulthood, white reporters described him variously as “a burly and muscular negro, weighing over two hundred pounds, light in color, with features rather Caucasian than Senegambian, and with a winning and self-confident rather than an intelligent expression,” as “[a] heavily built colored man,” and as “the most remarkable negro in the Southwest.”
Niles may have been semiliterate, but evidently he was a remarkable orator with uncanny powers of persuasion. Not only did he have a convincing impact on “the more illiterate of his own race,” but he included well-heeled white bankers among the victims of his artistry as a con man.
In 1869, in Tennessee, he had been incarcerated for killing a man, but somehow obtained a pardon from the governor long before his sentence was complete. Upon release from prison, Niles moved to Kentucky and became engaged with the Exodusters movement, the effort to form settlements in Kansas on the part of Black immigrants to the state. He joined the Nicodemus, Kansas, colony project in a leadership capacity and arrived at the settlement site in 1877. Apparently he left a wife and children behind in Kentucky, and there is no evidence that he was with them again after his migration to Kansas.
His presence in Nicodemus leaves a contradictory trail. While most of the Black settlers applauded Niles for the community’s survi
val in mid-1878 in the midst of food shortages and viewed him with admiration, he also developed a reputation as a nineteenth-century hustler, a scoundrel always on the make.
In 1881, during his time in Nicodemus, he managed to obtain a substantial loan from banker Jay J. Smith, by offering as collateral fifteen hundred bushels of corn he said he had bought from local Blacks at twenty cents a bushel. Niles convinced Smith not only that he had this large amount of corn in his possession but also that he anticipated he could resell it at thirty cents a bushel—and required a loan to tide him over until the price of corn reached a suitable level.
When Smith learned that local Black farmers had not raised an amount of corn that even approached the quantity that Niles claimed to have, he brought Niles to trial on charges of fraud. Drawing upon his oratorical prowess, Niles successfully defended himself against a team of professional lawyers hired by the banker without calling a single witness. In a stem-winding, three-hour statement, described by one observer as both “eloquent and soulful,” Niles drew the attention of the all-white jury not only to the plight of the Black man in the near aftermath of slavery but to their own experience of oppressive encounters with local banks. Niles won his case. “The judge who criticized the ‘jurymen for ignoring the evidence and their instructions,’ the county attorney, the assisting lawyers, and the bankers were all astonished at the verdict,” according to a report.
Even W. H. Smith, president of the Nicodemus colony, saw Niles’s efforts to obtain support and resources for the settlement as unauthorized, dishonest, and self-serving. Always seeming to try to outrun any deterioration in his reputation, Niles left Nicodemus shortly after his exoneration in the “corn trial” and moved to Phillips County, Arkansas.
Niles’s idea of a land reparations program for all Blacks seems to have taken seed in Nicodemus. However, it came to fruition in Arkansas, where Niles formed the Indemnity Party, an all-Black political party seeking reparations and providing an alternative to the Republican Party for Black voters in the state. The charge immediately was made that any diversion of the Black vote from the Republican Party would give the more explicitly white supremacist Democratic Party a greater opportunity for electoral success. This parallels the contemporary claim—given the post-Dixiecrat reversal of the postures of the two major parties—that any withdrawal of Black votes from the Democratic Party in search of a specific “Black agenda” only will give the now overtly racist Republican Party an additional critical leg up in national politics.
Not only were local whites discontented about Niles’s political activity, they also were disturbed by his alleged involvement in additional scams. But it was the formation and promotion of the Indemnity Party that seemed to draw the greatest ire.
Many people schemed to bring Niles down because of his political activities. In 1882 Niles owned a store in Lee County, Arkansas, where he sold whiskey without a license. Initially he was arrested and convicted on multiple charges of violating state law and ordered to pay $1,200 in fines. But the Black community rose in his support, and after he spent a few days in jail, it raised the full amount and paid off his fine. However, he was rearrested immediately for violating federal laws by selling liquor without a license. This time, despite a renewed outcry from the Black community, he was convicted again and ordered to pay $400 and spend four months in state prison.
At the end of his sentence, Niles left Arkansas for Washington, D.C., and proceeded to actively promote the Indemnity Party’s project. Niles sought to obtain public land where Blacks could live separately and independently of whites. It would constitute a space for Black settlement of six thousand square miles or almost 4 million acres.
Niles advanced this proposal in the latter half of 1883, and by early October he was making the case in writing to the president and the Department of Justice. He also indicated that an all-Black political party could come together and possibly nominate Frederick Douglass as its presidential candidate. Niles argued that it was necessary to “declare war against the Republican Party” for its failure to fulfill its promises for two decades.
The climate for the Indemnity Party’s plan was not propitious. Respectable voices in the Black community were hostile. On October 15, 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, an act that had prohibited discrimination in access to hotels, trains, and other public sites. On November 3, 1883, the Danville (Virginia) Massacre resulted in massive loss of Black lives and destruction of Black property. The massacre was followed by the November 6, 1883, election, when Virginia senator William Mahone and the Readjuster Party lost control of the state to the Democratic Party.
Ultimately, it was America’s officialdom who shut down Niles’s project. Attorney General Benjamin Harris Brewster deflected the Indemnity Party’s petition in two steps. First, he invoked a states’ rights argument that the territory sought was under the jurisdiction of the state of Arkansas and beyond the approval of the federal government for Black settlement. Second, Brewster said if satisfaction was not forthcoming from the state of Arkansas, Niles ultimately could appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court—the same Court that just had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
With Kansas senator John James Ingalls’s successful motion to table the Indemnity Party’s petition for homesteads for Black Americans on the floor of Congress, this chapter of the Black reparations movement came to an end. Subsequent claims for reparations consistently have been met by resistance from elite Blacks and by concerted efforts to discredit advocates. Unfortunately, Niles’s personal history had given his opponents plenty of ammunition, but implementation of his core idea—provision of land grants for the formerly enslaved—would have forever altered the trajectory of America’s racial and economic history.
1884–1889
PHILADELPHIA
Kali Nicole Gross
When Christopher J. Perry launched the Philadelphia Tribune on November 28, 1884, he had no way of knowing that it would become the longest-running independent Black newspaper in the nation. Yet he was confident in the future success of the Tribune because it was unabashedly written by Black people for Black people. Or as Perry described it, the Tribune’s purpose was to “lead the masses to appreciate their best interests and to suggest the best means for attaining deserved ends.” The clear imperative and sense of urgency are evident in his words. With good reason, too.
Between 1870 and 1890, Philadelphia’s African American community nearly doubled in size. This steady stream of Black migrants sparked white fears of rising urban crime. Police officers profiled African Americans using surveillance methods that a decade later would be codified into official policing practices. Patrolmen were directed to report on and detain all those who appeared to be poor or loiterers from outside the state. Such tactics found Black people especially vulnerable in a city that already had a long history of disproportionately incarcerating them. Philadelphia was home to the country’s first penitentiary, the Walnut Street Jail, founded in 1790, in anticipation of Black freedom after Pennsylvania passed one of the earliest acts of gradual abolition in 1780.
Building on a legacy of biased justice, police officers in Perry’s time employed a muscular surveillance of suspected members of the “crime class.” Between 1884 and 1887, the force had a clarified administrative hierarchy and a detective squad overseen by a former Secret Service operative. Coercion in custody was routine, as police beating prisoners was, for the most part, tolerated as a part of the job. Most African Americans arrested by Philadelphia police and sentenced by its justice system were charged with crimes against property. But in 1885, one recent Black migrant to the city would be arrested for murder.
The majority of the migrants hailed from Virginia and Maryland, but smaller numbers of African Americans came from New England. Such was the case with Annie E. Cutler, a twenty-one-year-old Black woman who lived and worked in the heart of the City of Brotherly Love. Laboring as a cook, A
nnie had a solid job at a saloon at 835 Race Street. Perhaps because of her schooling and pedigree (she had had eight years of private education in her hometown of Newport, Rhode Island), Annie enjoyed an amicable relationship with her white employers, the Mettlers. She also maintained a close, intimate relationship with the man she expected to wed, William H. Knight. The two had been dating for years. She had followed him from Newport to Philadelphia, after falling in love with him in the summer of 1882.
Despite the perils of anti-Blackness, the city held exciting activities for young couples. There were “jook joints” and pubs, theaters, concerts, dances, and parks for leisurely strolls. It also offered a measure of anonymity that permitted brazen, even reckless kinds of social and sexual attachments. Lovers’ quarrels were fairly common, and shouting matches could easily devolve into more violent melees, particularly in underground haunts where liquor and carousing mixed in combustible ways.
Yet the violence that erupted between Annie and William did not occur while they were in the throes of a heated argument in a hot, packed dance hall; nor did it burst forth in a private space where the two might have cuddled up from time to time. It happened a few steps away from 1025 Arch Street, where William worked as a waiter, on a crisp spring evening in late April, in front of several witnesses.