Four Hundred Souls
Page 25
When I googled Homer Plessy’s 1892 home address, 1108 North Claiborne Avenue, I saw nothing but concrete. The shotgun house where Plessy lived with his young wife is long gone, razed in 1968 to construct Highway 10. There is no remnant of his life on a tree-lined street so wide that children played ball on the grassy neutral ground in the middle. You’ll see no hint as to why that avenue was the site of Black Mardi Gras, where the Zulus and Mardi Gras Indians would parade annually. As in so much of the country, the historic landscape of the lives of Tremé’s everyday Black working men and women is gone, wiped away by politicians seeking urban renewal and labeling Black property as blighted. Homer Plessy put his life on the line to fight to preserve his citizenship, yet policy makers and planners saw the landscape of his New Orleans as disposable. The work of preservation that Keith Plessy is doing is urgent. The landscapes of African American history are as vulnerable to gentrification today as they were decades ago to eminent domain and urban renewal. But this work has a hold on him, perhaps because Homer Plessy is still with us. As Keith Plessy said, when “you start looking for your ancestors, you find out they have been looking for you all along.”
JOHN WAYNE NILES
ERMIAS JOSEPH ASGHEDOM
Mahogany L. Browne
Gunshot wound
is a violent way to say gone missing
Your body will be laid to rest
by your family’s devoted palms
Black people will always find each other
in the passage between death and America
A country designed in an image of rot
But we’ve always been able to ferment the good
knuckle deep in prayer despite the steel
Eat well
Sleep sound
Faith in the hands that raise children and wheat
This is what happens when you blind divine and brilliant
A smoke signal is sent to snuff you clean off this good land
Your land
The way your blood is righteous in the toiled soil
Until a home
a community
a church
is centered
start boom then born
Migration for freedom is a drinking gourd anthem
Is a liberation of black & black & brown dot link & link our dna
Listen
The time is ours
Blow the doubt to bits
Missing gone say
Hush
The secret to Nicodemus
beats beneath the sternum in Compton
beneath the solid stretch of acre in Mississippi and Detroit
and the crown of our labor chant
a river returning to the source
A reddening dusk that will never settle on the
backs of our people
1899–1904
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Derrick Alridge
Throughout my years of teaching courses in African American educational history and studies, I have always been excited to discuss Booker T. Washington. My excitement stems from engaging the complexity of the man and scrutinizing the ways he is presented in scholarly works and contemporary textbooks. Washington is often referred to as the “Wizard of Tuskegee.” His politics, which are described as “accommodationist,” are typically referred to as the “Tuskegee Machine.”
Typically, in my classes, some students support Washington’s pragmatic approach and his advocacy for Black people. They admire his focus on education as a means of making a living, while forgoing civil rights for the time being. Other students view Washington’s approach as representing acquiescence to white supremacy. I often agree with aspects of both viewpoints, and I try to help my students understand this complex man in the context of his time.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States perceived that it had a problem, in the form of 9 million Black Americans who sought the rights of full citizenship. The so-called “Negro problem,” sometimes referred to as the “Negro question,” was of such great concern that politicians and scholars alike examined the “problem” and proposed measures to address it. Some believed that with proper training and the passage of time, Black people could evolve intellectually to become productive members of American society. Others viewed Black people as inherently inferior and incapable of full integration into society. Among African Americans, Booker Taliaferro Washington emerged as a representative of his race who offered a pragmatic approach to addressing the “Negro problem.” He was so revered as a great “Negro” leader of his time that historian August Meier has called the period between 1880 and 1915 the “age of Booker T. Washington.”
Washington emerged on the national scene on September 18, 1895, at the Cotton States International Exposition in Atlanta. His speech, commonly known as the “Atlanta Compromise,” offered pragmatic suggestions for resolving the “Negro problem.” Washington observed that after Emancipation, Black Americans had started “at the top instead of at the bottom,” emphasizing political participation and holding seats in Congress during Reconstruction. Washington argued that instead of engaging in politics and pursuing civil rights, Black people should have pursued training in the trades and agriculture to obtain the skills to make a living.
In making his point, Washington offered the analogy of a ship lost at sea for many days hailing another ship for help, indicating that its crew was dying of thirst. Washington related how each time the crew of the lost ship called for water, the crew of the other ship replied, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The crew of the lost ship finally cast down their buckets and retrieved fresh water from the Amazon River, enabling the crew to survive.
For Washington’s audience, the lost ship represented Black America. Washington encouraged African Americans to heed the advice given to the crew of the ship: “ ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded.” He encouraged them to cast down their bucket in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” Addressing whites’ fears about the commingling of Black and white people, he noted, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
When I teach Washington, I always begin with his Atlanta Compromise speech. I have read and taught the speech and heard it recited countless times over the past few decades. I consistently struggle with certain passages, particularly Washington’s statement, “The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly.” While much of his message sounds like appeasement of the white South, a closer reading reveals that these are the words of an extremely pragmatic and politically astute man dedicated to the future of his race. I therefore challenge my students and myself to “step into Washington’s time.” This means remembering that in 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson had established the “separate but equal” doctrine, upholding Jim Crow laws throughout the South. Moreover, 541 African Americans were lynched between 1899 and 1904. These realities offer crucial context for understanding Washington’s views.
Though Washington published several books, I always assign his autobiography Up from Slavery as the central text in studying his life and thought. Up from Slavery reads like an inspiring Horatio Alger story, yet as Ishmael Reed notes, the story is even more impressive because Washington was born into slavery and founded a university. Published in 1901, the book recounts how Washington received no education as a slave but had vivid memories of seeing children sitting at desks in a schoolhouse. Going to school, he believed, “would be about the same as getting into paradise.”
Washington’s book recounts the valuable lessons he learned from his mother and stepfather, as well
as from his own work in coal mines. He describes the lessons of tidiness and cleanliness he gleaned from Mrs. Ruffner, a woman for whom he once worked. He also tells of his odyssey traveling by foot, wagon, and car five hundred miles to the Hampton Institute; the mentorship he received from Union general Samuel Chapman Armstrong; and his founding of the Tuskegee Institute.
Each time I teach Up from Slavery, my students and I ponder how much of the book reflects Washington’s true thoughts and feelings. We consider to what extent the work might reflect a mythology of himself and of Blacks as a people that he wanted to convey to the country at that particular moment in time. In the end, we typically conclude that, like most other biographies, the book reflects both the real Washington and a mythological Washington.
In addition to Up from Slavery, I have my students read Washington’s collection of published papers, his correspondence, and passages from books about Washington. We discuss how he sometimes made jokes about Black Americans that appealed to white audiences; these jokes often chastised Black people for having an obsession with learning the classics before learning to make a living.
At the same time, it is clear that behind the scenes Washington advocated for Black civil rights. For example, he stated the following in the Birmingham Age-Herald in 1904:
Within the last fortnight three members of my race have been burned at the stake; of these one was a woman. Not one of the three was charged with any crime even remotely connected with the abuse of a white woman. In every case murder was the sole accusation. All of these burnings took place in broad daylight, and two of them occurred on Sunday afternoon in sight of a Christian church.
The years 1899 to 1904 were pivotal in African American history broadly and in the life of Booker T. Washington in particular. During this period, Up from Slavery was published and became the best-selling autobiography of an African American, a distinction it retained until the 1965 publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Students of history who engage the life and thought of Booker T. Washington by reading Up from Slavery and other primary sources that provide insight into his life, thought, and vision for Black people will gain deeper insight into the complexity and multidimensional leadership of African Americans in the twentieth century.
1904–1909
JACK JOHNSON
Howard Bryant
Starting in 1898, two years after Plessy, public accommodations in the South—streetcars, bathrooms, buses, restaurants, down to something as simple as a drinking fountain—were segregated in a coordinated legislative assault. These laws were passed in every Southern state, from Louisiana and Mississippi to Georgia and Tennessee. By 1902, no segment of Southern society contained social ambiguity. In the North, Midwest, and West, there was equal unambiguity in regard to hierarchy. The American empire was a white one—and this was also evident in the realm of sports.
During this period, baseball and several of its nascent organized leagues had been integrated. White players, aware of the empire and their place in it, systematically removed the Black players from the field. They did this first not by edict but by violence. A late-nineteenth-century second baseman named Frank Grant had his calves and shins pierced so often by white players sliding deliberately into his legs—instead of the base—that he began wearing thin slabs of wood to protect them.
By the turn of the century, no organized white league fielded Black players. By the time of the first World Series in 1903, Black players were excluded from professional baseball.
But that very same year, a mirror was placed in the face of white supremacy. The mirror existed in reality, in the flesh and blood, fist and muscle, of a Black boxer, Jack Johnson. Born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Jack Johnson, whose full name was John Arthur Johnson, became the World Colored Heavyweight champion in 1903.
Away from the speeches and the laws and the treaties that could be broken when backed by a gun, the true arena of white supremacy was inside the ring, one-on-one.
The white champions were protected by racism, by their refusal to fight Black champions. While John L. Sullivan and Jim Jeffries, the iconic names of early white boxing, built their legend without fear of losing to a Black man, those who encountered Jack Johnson were not as fortunate. It would take more than two thousand fights before a white champion accepted Johnson’s challenge to fight—and finally put white supremacy to the test.
In 1908 in Australia, Johnson destroyed Tommy Burns to become the first Black man to win the heavyweight title. The writer Jack London, ringside for the fight, looked at Johnson in the ring, holding the mirror up to white America—the entire white race, actually—and saw the mediocre reflection of Burns, who could not beat Johnson or save them. It was London who birthed the term the “great white hope.”
That ignited the search for a fighter, as The New York Times would write often, who could restore the dignity of the white race. The search reintroduced Jeffries, spawned the “fight of the century,” and articulated the white desire—through the defeat of this singular symbolic Black man—to prove that its quest for white empire was not constructed on a faulty blueprint. London, in his account of the Johnson-Burns fight, had offered these final words: “But one thing remains. Jeffries must emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that smile from Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you.”
But in 1910 Johnson pummeled and humiliated the unretired, now-mediocre Jeffries. White rioting resulted in the deaths of twenty-six Black people in incidents across the country.
The spectacle Johnson created in the ring showed America what it truly was: a nation that espoused the aspiration to freedom and equality but demanded white supremacy. His challenge shifted from inside the ring to outside it. Johnson, once he became a national figure, took on the characteristics of myth quickly and completely. Symbolically, he represented the Black male in the white nightmare: strong and indomitable—and oversexed in his preference and appetite for white women. He became so symbolic that his existence appears almost to be a caricature or a deliberate construction of the prototypical embodiment of all white fears of Black masculinity.
By extension, Johnson also became symbolic of Black freedom—the freedom to wear gold teeth, to kiss white women in public, to marry them in private (and thus to be desired and not repulsed), to drive expensive cars, to take America’s material ostentatiousness—the fruits of empire intended only for whiteness—and keep it all for himself. Johnson did all this and more at a time when most Black Americans were laboring to survive in homes and fields.
In 1910 Congress passed the White Slave Traffic Act, prohibiting the transporting of white women across state lines. That brought Johnson down, eventually sending him to prison due to his marriage to a white woman. He then became the rallying point for a quest for reputational rehabilitation for the ensuing century.
What happens to the person when they become a symbol? Can they be recovered? Can they exist beyond what they embody? In this wrestling over symbols, the individual is sacrificed. They become the unknown. Johnson’s eternal value to the American story has never received the balance of most historical figures who are viewed as part person, part of the times in which they lived. Johnson is almost completely defined by his time period—what his presence meant to the white order, his threat to empire. While rogue to some Blacks, offensive to others, inspiration to others still, he was just a man—except to whites who viewed him as a threat. America is unwilling, except in the strictest academic terms, to label Johnson’s years the most calculatedly racist period of the twentieth century, and because of that unwillingness, it talks about itself through Johnson.
So this fascinating man of morbid defiance—neither heroic nor villainous—lives on as an almost mythological barometer. There is, in all this, a certain exploitation at work, for the price Johnson paid was not the 117 years he and his reputation lived unpardoned for the crime of marrying a white woman. Rather, America’s inability to reconcile even t
he clearest truths about its foundations meant his personal humanity has never received the proper priority. It was never about him.
1909–1914
THE BLACK PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
The acceptance of African American women as intellectuals—thinking women—has been elusive, but we have a long history as producers of knowledge, even when that production has not been fully recognized.
An example is the American Negro Academy (ANA), the first learned society of persons of African descent in the United States, which was founded in Washington, D.C., in March 1897 by seventy-eight-year-old Reverend Alexander Crummell. Born in New York City and educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge, Reverend Crummell was an Episcopalian minister, educator, and missionary, as well as one of the most prominent and visionary nineteenth-century Black intellectuals. The ANA did not bar women from membership (limiting them to fifty), but during its thirty-one-year existence it remained an all-male organization from 1897 to 1924. Its constitution announces itself as “an organization of authors, scholars, artists, and those distinguished in other walks of life, men of African descent, for the promotion of Letters, Science, and Art.” Its overall goal was to “lead and protect their people” and be a mighty “weapon to secure equality and destroy racism.”
The ANA’s specific objectives were to defend Black people against racist attacks; publish scholarship about the Black experience by Black authors; foster higher education and intellectual projects; promote literature, science, and art in the Black community; and create a Black intellectual elite, whom W.E.B. Du Bois would later conceptualize as the “talented tenth.” During this era, many Black women intellectuals made outstanding contributions, among them Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and Ida Wells-Barnett. Yet not one of them was ever invited to join the ANA. Though they believed a natural alliance existed between them and Black men, they were rejected on the basis of their sex.