Four Hundred Souls

by Four Hundred Souls (retail) (epub)

  1904–1909: Jack Johnson

  “But one thing remains”: Jack London, New York Herald, December 27, 1908.

  1909-1914: THE BLACK PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

  This chapter draws on Guy-Sheftall’s work in her “Foreword” to Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy, Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, Donna-Dale L. Marcano, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010).

  1914–1919: The Great Migration

  “They left as though”: Emmett Jay Scott, Negro Migration During the War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1920), 44.

  “their fate was”: David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper & Bros., 1936).

  “I went to the station”: Quoted in Scott, Negro Migration, 41.

  “folk movement of”: Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 263.

  1919–1924: Red Summer

  1919 Race Riot: Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago: A Study of Race Relations and a Race Riot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 595–651.

  increased by 148 percent: National Register Nomination for Chicago’s Black Metropolis, National Park Service, 1986.

  Black Belt: “Black Belt,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, Chicago Historical Society, 2005, encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/​pages/​140.html.

  Black veterans were not: Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold, African Americans: A Concise History (New York: Pearson, 2012), 383–87.

  diverse population: “Chicago, IL,” DataUSA, datausa.io/​profile/​geo/​chicago-il/.

  buried in snow: Whet Moser, “Snowpocalypse Then: How the Blizzard of 1979 Cost the Election for Michael Bilandic,” Chicago Magazine, February 2, 2011.

  “Vrdolyak 29”: “Council Wars,” Encyclopedia of Chicago.

  closed more than fifty schools: Valerie Strauss, “Chicago Promised That Closing Nearly 50 Schools Would Help Kids in 2013: A New Report Says It Didn’t,” Washington Post, May 24, 2018; Miles Kampf-Lassin, “Rahm Emanuel Will Be Remembered as Chicago’s ‘Murder Mayor,’ ” Nation, September 5, 2018.

  highly segregated neighborhoods: Noreen Nasir, “Segregation Among Issues Chicago Faces 100 Years After Riots,” Associated Press, July 24, 2019; Curtis Black, “In Final Act, Emanuel Cements Legacy of Tolerating Corruption, Promoting Segregation,” Chicago Reporter, March 7, 2019.

  discrepancy in life expectancy: Lisa Schencker, “Chicago’s Lifespan Gap: Streeterville Residents Live to 90. Englewood Residents Die at 60. Study Finds It’s the Largest Divide in the U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 2019.

  disparities are evident: Alana Semuels, “Chicago’s Awful Divide,” Atlantic, March 28, 2018; “New Report Details Chicago’s Racial, Ethnic Disparities,” UIC Today, May 15, 2017.

  1924–1929: The Harlem Renaissance

  “the first act”: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 153.

  “certify the existence”: Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes, vol. 1, 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America (1986; New York: Oxford, 2002), 105.

  “mystery woman”: Mary Helen Washington, “Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance,” Ms., December 1980, 44–50.

  “all tired and worn”: Hurston to Lawrence Jordan, May 31, 1930, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters, ed. Carla Kaplan (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 190.

  1929–1934: The Great Depression

  “The Fascist racketeers”: Angelo Herndon, Let Me Live (1937; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 166.

  anticipated fascism: Cedric Robinson, “Fascism and the Intersections of Capitalism, Racialism, and Historical Consciousness,” Humanities in Society 3, no. 1 (1983): 325.

  “a symbol of the clash”: Herndon, Let Me Live, 317. Other scholars have elaborated on the links between Herndon’s case, the Communist Party’s antilynching and racial justice campaigns, and Black antifascism, most notably Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), chap. 4; Mark Solomon, Their Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917–1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); and Clayton Vaughn-Roberson, “Fascism with a Jim Crow Face: The National Negro Congress and the Global Popular Front” (PhD diss., Carnegie Mellon University, 2019).

  mainly in Alabama: Herndon’s memoir tells a different story, but I am relying on the census data, which not only registers Alabama as the birthplace of all of Harriet’s children but situates her in Union Church by 1920 with her seven children. Angelo is listed as five, which would push his birth year up to 1914, which is very likely since the 1930 Census lists him (as Eugene Braxton) as age fifteen. U.S. Census 1900, Population Schedule: Union Church, E.D. no. 40; U.S. Census 1920, Population Schedule: Union Church, E.D. nos. 43 and 44.

  Sallie Herndon: Sallie married Harriet’s brother Alex (or Aleck) and lived in Union Church with their six children for several years. She moved to Birmingham in the mid- to late 1920s. Alex is not listed as a member of the household, although she is listed as “married.” See U.S. Census 1910, Population Schedule: Union Church, E.D. no 44; U.S. Census 1930, Population Schedule: Birmingham, E.D. no. 37-2.

  “some kind of a secret”: Herndon, Let Me Live, 72.

  Impressed with the Communists: See Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 38.

  Atlanta Six: The best account of the Atlanta Six case is Maryan Soliman, “Inciting Free Speech and Racial Equality: The Communist Party and Georgia’s Insurrection Statute in the 1930s” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2014).

  “back to the cotton fields”: Ibid., 135.

  denying Black Shirts: Ibid., 132–37; see also Charles Martin, “White Supremacy and Black Workers: Georgia’s ‘Black Shirts’ Combat the Great Depression,” Labor History 18 (1977): 366–81.

  The ILD retained: On Angelo Herndon’s case and the campaign surrounding it, see Charles H. Martin, Angelo Herndon and Southern Justice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gilmore, Defying Dixie, chap. 4; Rebecca Hill, Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); James J. Lorence, A Hard Journey: The Life of Don West (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007); and Dennis Childs, “ ‘An Insinuating Voice’: Angelo Herndon and the Invisible Genesis of the Radical Prison Slave’s Neo-Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 40, no. 4 (2017): 30–56.

  “lynching is insurrection”: See Gilmore, Defying Dixie; Benjamin Davis, Jr., Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a Federal Penitentiary (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 54–60.

  “Today, when the world”: Herndon, Let Me Live, 406.

  “Yesterday, Ethiopia”: Langston Hughes, “Milt Herndon Died Trying to Rescue Wounded Pal,” Baltimore Afro-American, January 1, 1938; quoted in Vaughn-Roberson, “Fascism with a Jim Crow Face,” 90.

  1934–1939: Zora Neale Hurston

  “Jonah’s Gourd Vine can be called”: Margaret Wallace, “Real Negro People,” New York Times, May 6, 1934.

  “had been dammed up”: Zora Heale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), 175.

  “Her dialogue manages”: Richard Wright, “Between Laughter and Tears,” New Masses, October 5, 1937.

  “It is a pity”: Reece Stuart, Jr., “Author Calls Voodoo Harmless in a Study of Haiti and Jamaica,” Des Moines Register, November 13, 1938.

  “Hur
ston’s poorest book”: Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 248.

  “so grim that”: Zora Neale Hurston, “Stories of Conflict,” Saturday Review of Literature, April 2, 1938.

  1939–1944: The Black Soldier

  Isaac Woodard wanted: Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019).

  Black World War I veterans: On the experience of Black soldiers in World War I, see Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

  victory against racism: Kimberley L. Phillips, War! What Is It Good For? Black Freedom Struggles and the U.S. Military from World War II to Iraq (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

  clashed with local whites: Gail L. Buckley, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2001); and Bernard C. Nalty, Strength for the Fight: A History of Blacks in the Military (New York: Free Press, 1986).

  court-martialed fifty men: Robert L. Allen, The Port Chicago Mutiny (New York: Warner Books, 1989).

  on the European front: On the presence of Black servicemen in D-Day, see Linda Hervieux, Forgotten: The Untold Story of D-Day’s Black Heroes, at Home and at War (New York: Harper, 2015).

  New Guinea campaign: Robert F. Jefferson, Fighting for Hope: African American Troops of the 93rd Infantry Division in World War II and Postwar America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  served as a longshoreman: For firsthand accounts of the experiences of Black soldiers in the army, see Phillip McGuire, Taps for a Jim Crow Army: Letters from Black Soldiers in World War II (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1983).

  761st Tank Battalion: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton, Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII’s Forgotten Heroes (New York: Broadway Books, 2004).

  first Black officers: Richard E. Miller, The Messman Chronicles: African Americans in the U.S. Navy, 1932–1943 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2004).

  Montford Point: Melton A. McLaurin, The Marines of Montford Point: America’s First Black Marines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

  fighters of the 332nd: J. Todd Moye, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  Charity Adams Earley: Charity Adams Earley, One Woman’s Army: A Black Officer Remembers the WAC (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1989).

  permanently blind: Gergel, Unexampled Courage.

  abolished segregation: Jon E. Taylor, Freedom to Serve: Truman, Civil Rights, and Executive Order 9981 (New York: Routledge, 2012).

  Black veterans: Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle Against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

  1944–1949: The Black Left

  manifestos of the day: Gerald Horne, Black & Red: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 128–50; and Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 37–40.

  “subversives”: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 400–44.

  everything the far right despised: Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography (New York: New Press, 1989), 296–380; Gerald Horne, Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 59–124.

  full democracy at home: Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  African American exodus: Manning Marable, Race, Reform & Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 12–37.

  other “colored” populations: Penny M. Von Eschen, Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  aspirations might be realized: Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 13–18; Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 203–15; and Raymond Arsenault, Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20–33.

  enraged ultranationalists and bigots: John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf, 1995); and Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: NYU Press, 2011), 74–99.

  upcoming recital: Westchester Committee for a Fair Inquiry into the Peekskill Violence, Eyewitness: Peekskill, USA—Aug. 27; Sept. 4, 1949 (White Plains, NY: Author, 1949), 2; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 341–54, 364.

  day of the concert: Howard Fast, Peekskill, USA: A Personal Experience (New York: Civil Rights Congress, 1951), 20–45; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 364–65.

  “Wake up, America!”: Fast, Peekskill, USA, 61–65, 69–91; Duberman, Paul Robeson, 367–75; Horne, Paul Robeson, 124–25.

  1949–1954: the road to Brown v. Board of Education

  “separate educational facilities”: 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

  “these buildings were sawed”: “NAACP Sets Stage to Enter Hearne Suit,” Informer, September 27, 1947.

  Sweatt is widely regarded: Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).

  Prince Edward County: Robinson and Hill correctly gauged the level of resistance they would find in Prince Edward County. From 1959 to 1964, the county closed the public schools rather than comply with orders to desegregate. Schools opened only after the LDF successfully challenged the school closure in the U.S. Supreme Court. Griffin v. County School Board of Prince Edward County, Va., 377 U.S. 218 (1964), supreme.justia.com/​cases/​federal/​us/​377/​218/.

  the four Brown cases: The Hearne case received new attention thanks to Rachel Devlin’s excellent book A Girl Stands at the Door, which explores the courage and sacrifice of Black girls like Doris Raye and Doris Faye Jennings in Hearne, who were often the very deliberately selected “integrators” of Southern schools. Jennings did not directly challenge segregation. Black parents wanted a safe and properly constructed and resourced school for their children. Describing the remedy sought in the case, LDF reported, in its docket report to its board in 1948, that the discrimination “must be remedied either by admitting Negro students to the white high school or by providing Negro students with a new, modern and safe high school”: that is, separate and truly equal education, or admission to the white school.

  1959–1964: The Civil Rights Movement

  “You have begun something”: Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger,” Southern Patriot 18 (June 1960).

  “In government service”: Ella Baker, “Developing Community Leadership,” in Black Women in White America: A Documentary History, ed. Gerda Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1973), 351.

  1964–1969: Black Power

  “This is the twenty-seventh”: Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 142.

  “the biggest purveyor”: Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” (speech), April 4, 1967, kinginstitute.stanford.edu/​king-papers/​documents/​beyond-vietnam.

  1974–1979: Combahee River Collective />
  Since 1969, the Nixon administration: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 55–72.

  underground to elude capture: Barbara Ruth, “When Susan Got Busted, Philadelphia 1975,” barkingsycamores.wordpress.com/​2016/​09/​15/​when-susan-got-busted-philadelphia-1975-barbara-ruth/.

  Joan Little and Ella Ellison: “This Day in History, Aug. 15: 1975: Joan Little Acquitted,” Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org/​news/​tdih/​joan-little-acquitted.

  Dr. Kenneth Edelin: Robert D. McFadden, “Kenneth C. Edelin, Doctor at Center of Landmark Abortion Case, Dies at 74,” New York Times, December 30, 2013.

  I wrote the statement: Zillah R. Eisenstein, Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

  groundwork for intersectionality: Terrion L. Williamson, “Why Did They Die? On Combahee and the Serialization of Black Death,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 19, no. 3 (2017): 328–41.

  Black Lives Matter movement: Barbara Ransby, Making All Black Lives Matter: Reimagining Freedom in the 21st Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 2–3.

  Colectiva Feminista: Ed Morales, “Feminists and LGBTQ Activists Are Leading the Insurrection in Puerto Rico,” Nation, August 2, 2019.

  1979–1984: The War on Drugs