Four Hundred Souls
Page 24
William had been heading home when he passed and ignored Annie on the sidewalk. He had recently broken her heart by ending their engagement with the news he had married another woman. His new wife was expecting their first child. William’s failure to acknowledge Annie served as the final straw. In a statement read before the court, Annie said: “He did not look at me, and passed without appearing to see me….This enraged me more than ever. Without knowing what I was doing I took a pistol and shot him.” Not just once, either. William was struck twice and died from his injuries. Shocked witnesses disarmed Annie and detained her for the authorities. According to their accounts, she wanted to know if William was dead and begged them to let her “give him the balance of it.” An officer came and arrested her. She was charged with murder.
Attorney Elijah J. Fox initially handled her case. Though it seemed open and shut, details about her motives emerged. Annie had shared her wages with William for years in anticipation of their marriage. She had also shared her body. She charged that William had “ruined” her and then married another. Prior to the night of the shooting, Annie had written two letters—both were entered into evidence. One was to the Mettlers, apologizing and thanking them for their kindness. The second was to her mother, apologizing for what she was about to do. Reading like a suicide note, the letter contained her request to be buried in a plain white box.
Under the circumstances, Fox advised Annie to plead guilty, likely to elicit mercy from the court. Whatever Fox’s logic, it was the wrong move. The judge found Annie guilty of murder in the first degree. She burst into tears upon hearing the verdict. Fox asked that the sentence be postponed. It was. In the weeks that followed, Annie’s family, employers, and a growing number of concerned citizens worked to secure a pardon.
On October 16, 1885, Thomas E. White, Esq., presented Annie’s statement to the court. She said that shortly before their fatal encounter, William had beaten her during an argument, and that she had been driven to alcohol and despair. She said she purchased the gun as protection because she feared that he might strike her again when she confronted him. Judge Mitchell was unconvinced, particularly because the two letters indicated premeditation and because Annie had tested the gun ahead of the meeting to make certain it worked. “The sentence of the law is that you, Annie E. Cutler,” the judge said, “be taken hence to whence you came, and there hanged by the neck until you are dead. And may God have mercy upon your soul.”
Undoubtedly, they were terrifying words for any prisoner to hear, but considering many Philadelphians’ long-standing aversion to capital punishment, Annie had a strong chance of having her sentence commuted. After the hearing, her attorney, her family, her supporters—a bevy of elite Blacks and whites among them—and the Pennsylvania Prison Society swung into action to press the board of pardons.
The specter of a double standard in the case was troubling. White women received the benefit of the doubt from the justice system and in similar cases were afforded mercy as fallen women. Wealthy Black men like Robert Purvis, who had famously financed abolitionist causes and William Garrison Lloyd’s paper The Liberator, and elite Black and white men such as William Still, John Wanamaker, and J. C. Strawbridge, all advocated for mercy and signed petitions asking that Annie’s sentence be commuted. Even the Citizens’ Suffrage Association took up Annie’s cause. Not everyone agreed. Edward M. Davis tendered his resignation from the group, citing its engagement in matters that were not “directly connected with the cause of attaining woman’s equality at the ballot.” His resignation was accepted.
Annie’s support grew, and her counsel submitted a request for commutation, asking not for life imprisonment but for a fair sentence given the aggravating circumstances, including that Annie had been poorly advised by her first attorney. Their efforts were rewarded. Annie’s sentence was commuted to eight years at Eastern State Penitentiary. Incarcerated Blacks had disproportionately higher rates of death at Eastern, but compared to a hangman’s scaffold, the new sentence seemed like a win.
Annie’s crime, sentence, and commutation played out in detail in local presses, with the Tribune likely among them. Unfortunately, the earliest archived issues of the Tribune begin in 1912. The case stirred people and mobilized collective, interracial action against the state-sanctioned killing of a Black woman. Even against the era’s rising racist tides, women and men in Philadelphia organized against the judicial double standards because they knew not just that tolerating them would amount to an unfair outcome for Annie Cutler but that such an imbalance ultimately held dangers for all.
1889–1894
LYNCHING
Crystal N. Feimster
I found that in order to justify these horrible atrocities [lynchings] to the world, the Negro was being branded as a race of rapists, who were especially mad after white women. I found that white men who had created a race of mulattos by raping and consorting with Negro women were still doing so wherever they could, these same white men lynched, burned, and tortured Negro men for doing the same thing with white women, even when the white women were willing victims.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett
In his widely accepted 1889 study, The Plantation Negro as Freeman, Southern historian Philip Alexander Bruce alleged a dangerous moral regression among post-emancipation African Americans. Black people, Bruce maintained, had undergone a salutary civilizing process through enslavement that was tragically ended by emancipation.
For Bruce, the most striking example was the alleged “increase” of “that most frightful crime,” the rape of white women by Black men. Adding insult to injury, Bruce blamed the supposedly hypersexual Black women. Black men are “so accustomed to the wantonness of the women of his own race” that they are “unable to gauge the terrible character of this offense against the integrity of virtuous womanhood.”
Bruce’s construction of the Black male rapist functioned to reinforce a variety of racist ideas in the South: that only white women were chaste and respectable; that Black womanhood was immoral and unredeemable; and that white men were honorable and civilized. The spread of such ideas in the early 1890s justified an unprecedented period of lynching.
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, the mother of the nineteenth-century antilynching movement, was among the first to publicly challenge the racist ideas about Black men and women that Southern whites deployed to excuse their mob violence. Wells-Barnett, born into slavery during the Civil War, lost her parents to yellow fever at sixteen. She was a teacher-turned-journalist who co-owned the Memphis Free Speech. She launched her antilynching crusade in 1892, after a white mob of economic competitors murdered three prospering Black Memphis store owners, one of whom was a close friend.
She urged African Americans to fight back, with guns if necessary and through economic pressure. Spurred by her scathing editorials, thousands migrated to Oklahoma, while those who stayed in Memphis boycotted the newly opened streetcar line. Wells-Barnett began investigating other lynchings and soon discovered that many were designed to suppress the economic and political rights of Black people. When she published an editorial arguing that “nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,” a white mob destroyed her press. Wells-Barnett, in New York at the time, received warnings not to return to Memphis at the cost of her life.
Far from being silenced by this attack, Wells-Barnett transformed herself into the architect of an international crusade. In exile from Memphis, she wrote for the New York Age and in 1892 published her first antilynching pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, which offered an incisive analysis of the economic roots of lynching and linked violence against Black men with the sexual exploitation of Black women by white men. Wells-Barnett revealed that less than 30 percent of all lynchings involved the charge of rape, let alone the conviction. She also documented consensual sexual contact between Black men and white women and insisted that lynching
functioned to keep Black folks terrorized, politically disenfranchised, and economically dependent.
From the inception of her crusade, Wells-Barnett claimed that white hysteria about the rape of white women by Black men effectively masked violence against women—both Black and white. “To justify their own barbarism,” she argued, Southern white men “assume a chivalry which they do not possess.” Lynching, she explained, was not about protecting Southern womanhood but had everything to do with shoring up white men’s social, economic, and political power—in other words, white male supremacy. Desperate to control white women’s sexual behavior and maintain sexual control over Black women, Southern white men had created a scapegoat in the animalized figure of the Black rapist. Wells-Barnett argued that the focus and attention on the image of the Black rapist concealed lynching’s motives and masked violence against Black women who were victims of sexual assault and lynching.
While Wells-Barnett advocated Black self-defense and self-help, she also hoped to turn white public opinion against the South, where most lynchings took place. In 1893 and again in 1894, she traveled to England, where she inspired the formation of the British Anti-Lynching Society and published The Red Record in 1895. By the end of her second British tour, Wells-Barnett had made lynching a cause célèbre among British reformers. White American men found that in the eyes of the “civilized” world, their tolerance of racial violence had cast them in the unsightly position of unmanly savages. Her skillful manipulation of dominant cultural themes did not stop lynching, but it did put mob violence on the American reform agenda and made visible sexual assault against Black women.
Highlighting Black women’s victimization and white men’s disregard for law and order, Wells-Barnett challenged the racial double standard embedded in the rape-lynch discourse. In The Red Record, under the heading “Suspected, Innocent and Lynched,” Wells-Barnett reported the 1893 lynching of Benjamin Jackson; his wife, Mahala Jackson; his mother-in-law, Lou Carter; and Rufus Bigley in Quincy, Mississippi. She explained that the two women, accused of well poisoning, were hung by a white mob even after they were found innocent of the charges against them. Wells-Barnett argued that neither their innocence nor their sex served to “protect the women from the demands of the Christian white people of that section of the country. In any other land and with any other people, the fact that [these two accused persons] were women would have pleaded in their favor for protection and fair play.” Wells-Barnett argued that mob violence against Black women was not only barbaric but ran counter to the rape-lynch discourse. The accusation of rape, she argued, could not explain why Black women were “put to death with unspeakable savagery.”
Wells-Barnett constructed an antilynching argument that addressed the inconsistencies produced not only by female victims of lynching but also by Black female victims of white men’s sexual assault. In The Red Record, under the heading “Color Line Justice,” Wells-Barnett provided numerous examples of Black women and girls raped by white men. She opened the section with this report: “In Baltimore, Maryland, a gang of white ruffians assaulted a respectable colored girl who was out walking with a young man of her own race. They held her escort and outraged the girl. It was a deed dastardly enough to arouse Southern blood, which gives its horror of rape as excuse for lawlessness, but she was a colored woman. The case went to the courts, and they were acquitted.” Black women, she argued, were protected neither by mob violence nor by the courts.
1894–1899
PLESSY V. FERGUSON
Blair L. M. Kelley
At the beginning of our conversation, Keith Plessy lets me know that if I google Homer Plessy, historic images of mixed-race men pop up, but none of the images are actually of him. He tells me that the man with the full beard is P.B.S. Pinchback, a Union Army officer and the former lieutenant governor of Louisiana. The clean-shaven gentleman, who is also not Plessy, is Daniel Desdunes, the son of organizer Rodolphe Desdunes and the first man selected by the Citizens’ Committee to test the legality of interstate segregation. This isn’t the first time Keith Plessy, whose fourth-great-grandfather was also Homer Plessy’s grandfather, has told me a search of the Internet will not turn up a real picture of Homer Plessy.
He mentioned this when we first met eight years ago, not realizing he kept repeating the same complaint. His repetition underscores his abiding frustration with the error of misidentification and the other omissions that shape our landscapes. Keith Plessy wants to correct those mistakes and reshape how we understand the legacy of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).
Those familiar with the outlines of the legal battle for civil rights know that the U.S. Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson served as the legal foundation for de jure racial segregation. This failed test case was put forward by the small group of Creole of Color New Orleans activists called the Citizens’ Committee. The case set the precedent of “separate but equal” that stood for more than half a century. Indeed, when viewed strictly as a story about legal history, Plessy is the top of a slippery slope down to an American South where Jim Crow segregation marked every landscape. However, my conversations with Keith Plessy remind me that this historic case must be considered in the context of the particularities of place and time—then and now. Plessy v. Ferguson was the manifestation of the African American opposition to segregationist attempts to shame and degrade Black train passengers. While elite Creole of Color leaders organized the Citizens’ Committee, African Americans from all walks of life supported the effort—more than 110 organizations and thirty individuals donated to the cause. Likewise, in this moment, when our collective memories about the past are hotly contested, it will be the work of like-minded people who will harness accurate histories of the past to better address our present.
I suspect that there is no extant picture of Homer Plessy because he was working-class and probably did not have his picture taken often if at all. In the 1890s, a portrait was a luxury. Black scholars and race leaders, not shoemakers, had portraits. Even if there was once a picture, in a city that suffers from floods, winds, and weather, so much family history has been lost. In addition to the visual silence, there is an archival one; none of the extant correspondence between the members of the Citizens’ Committee and their attorney, Albion Tourgée, includes any personal, political, or professional reference to Plessy. In the elder Desdunes’s 1911 book Nos Hommes et Notre Histoire (Our People and Our History), a history of the Creole of Color community in New Orleans, the only mention of Plessy reports that “the Committee engaged Mr. Homere [sic] Plessy as its representative.”
Like his well-known forebear, Keith Plessy is a working-class activist and a New Orleans native. He has worked as a bellman at the New Orleans Marriot on Canal Street for nearly as long as the centrally located modern hotel has existed. Along with filmmaker Phoebe Ferguson, a descendant of Judge John Howard Ferguson, the local judge whose decision against Homer Plessy connected his name to the case forever, Keith established the Plessy and Ferguson Foundation in 2004. They are working to increase public understanding of this historic case. To date, their organization has erected five historical markers in the city and state, worked to have June 7 declared Homer A. Plessy Day, and led the charge for New Orleans to have the street where Homer Plessy boarded the East Louisiana railcar designated Homer Plessy Way.
Well before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, New Orleans was home to one of the largest communities of gens de couleur libre, or free people of color, in the South, where people of mixed European, Native American, and African descent battled to establish themselves as free in a slave society. Some were manumitted, educated, and propertied by their European fathers, while others had migrated to the port city from Haiti and Cuba. Plessy’s paternal grandfather, Germain Plessy, was a white Frenchman who fled to New Orleans in the wake of the Haitian Revolution and had a family with a free woman of color. But when Keith Plessy told me his family history, he began with his great-grandmother, Agnes Mathie
u, who successfully sued for her freedom in the courts after a slaveholder refused to honor his promise to allow her to purchase her freedom. He connected her determined advocacy with Homer Plessy’s and, implicitly, with his own.
Working-class Creoles of Color like Plessy were set apart from both the elite Creoles of Color—the New Orleans equivalents of the “talented tenth”—and the masses of Black workers whose ancestors had been in bondage. Plessy was a shoemaker. Keith Plessy said he was “raised to the trade” that his stepfather, Victor Dupart, passed down. But Dupart passed down a legacy of activism as well; he had been active in the 1873 Unification movement, a short-lived but valiant effort to halt political, social, and economic discrimination. Dupart was one of the published signatories of the movement’s Appeal for the Unification of the People of Louisiana.
At the time of the arrest in 1892, Plessy lived with his wife in a rented house on North Claiborne Avenue, a beautiful tree-lined thoroughfare in the Faubourg Tremé, an integrated working-class neighborhood on the French side of Canal Street. He served as the vice president of a local education reform organization, the Justice, Protective, Educational and Social Club, that resisted racism in New Orleans schools. Perhaps Plessy saw the work of the Citizens’ Committee as an extension of his own interest in fighting segregation. The committee held mass meetings in Congregation Hall, just steps from Plessy’s home. We can’t know exactly what connected him to the effort. Maybe he was drawn by a flyer to attend a meeting of the Citizens’ Committee. Perhaps because of his racial ambiguity, relative youth, and interest in activism, he was asked to volunteer on the Citizens’ Committee. These ambiguities remind us why Keith Plessy is digging. So much of this past is long gone.