Black In Time

Under segregation, a person (of color) could be accused of “reckless eyeballing,” meaning an improper look at a white person, presumed to have sexual intent. Matt Ingram (a black tenant farmer) was convicted of this offense in North Carolina in 1951. [John Zimmerman, photographer (1953)] Matt Ingram was among the last convicted under this framework, in a 1951 case made notorious by civil rights activists in North Carolina. A seventeen-year-old white woman named Willa Jean Boswell testified that she was scared when her neighbor Ingram looked at her from a distance of about 65 feet. Prosecutors demanded a conviction of assault with intent to rape that was reduced to assault on a female by the judge, leading to a two-year sentence. He was defended by a white lawyer, Ernest Frederick Upchurch, Sr. At the appeal in Superior Court, the judge instructed the jury that Ingram was guilty if he used “intentional threats or menace of violence such as looking at a person in a leering manner, that is, in some sort of sly or threatening or suggestive manner…he causes another to reasonably apprehend imminent danger” The all-white jury again returned a conviction, leading to a six-month sentence of labor on the roads, suspended for five years. However, after pressure from the NAACP and African-American media like Ebony, the state supreme court vacated the conviction because: “it cannot be said that a pedestrian may be assaulted by a look, however frightening, from a person riding in an automobile some distance away. …He may have looked with lustful eyes but there was the absence of any overt act.” The look alone no longer represented grounds for conviction. People continued to be convicted of assault if there was “reasonable apprehension” of danger, such as a body movement, movement in the direction of the person under observation and so on. Ingram spent over two years in prison while his 3 trials took two-and-a-half years to resolve. [State v. Ingram, 74 S.E.2d 532 (N.C. 1953] Ingram was married to Linwood Jeffress Ingram (1910-2003). The couple had nine children. He died in 1973. Source: coolcleveland.com

From March 4th to May 26, 1928, a unique event grabbed the attention of the American public—an 84 day, 3,400-mile footrace from Los Angeles to New York City, nicknamed the Bunion Derby. The 199 starters included five African Americans, a Jamaican-born Canadian, and perhaps as many as fifteen Latinos, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders, representing about ten percent of the competitors. The rest were white. The derby consisted of daily town-to-town stage races that took the men across the length of Route 66 to Chicago, then on other roads to the finish in Madison Square Garden. All were chasing a $25,000 first prize, a small fortune in 1928 dollars. Given the racial climate of 1928, black participation in the bunion derby seemed a risky venture, better suited for more tolerate racial times, either the 1870’s when professional distance racing was the rage and men of all races were accepted in to its fold, or our modern age, when the sight of African runners leading endurance events is an everyday occurrence. The 1928 race would take the men into the Jim Crow segregated South, where most whites believed blacks lacked the ability to concentrate for anything longer than the sprint distances, and had no business competing against whites. Bunion derby organizer Charles C. Pyle looked back, longingly, to the 1870’s when the craze for professional distance running gripped the land, and sports promoters could make a fortune sponsoring these events. In those days, most towns and cities had their own indoor tracks, where “pedestrians” raced in six day “go as you please” contests of endurance. Participants were free to run, walk, or crawl around these tracks for six days. They often set up cots inside the track oval and survived on three hours sleep a night. This was a sport of the working classes. Fans bet money on their favorite pedestrians and followed them with all the fervor of today’s NFL fans. Stamina not ethnicity was the single qualifier to become a pedestrian star. Black America had its hero, Haitian born, Frank Hart who made a fortune in the sport and averaged ninety miles a day in one six day endurance race. C. C. Pyle’s “Bunioneers” found far harsher conditions than the pedestrians faced in the calm environment of an indoor track. His men tackled the mostly unpaved and pot-holed Route 66 across the American West, running daily ultra-marathons across one thousand miles of the most challenging terrain on the planet--the ninety-five degree heat of the Mojave Desert, and the freezing mountain passes and thin air of Arizona and New Mexico. By the time derby reached eastern New Mexico, only ninety-six of the original 199 starters remained, including three of the five African American starters--Eddie Gardner of Seattle, Sammy Robinson of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Toby Joseph Cotton, Jr., of Los Angeles--and Afro-Canadian Phillip Granville, of Hamilton, Ontario. After overcoming all that, the black runners faced a man made hell when Route 66 took them to Texas where the KKK dominated the state legislature and the city governments of Dallas, Forth Worth and El Paso. Gardner, Joseph, Cotton, and Granville were forced out of the communal sleeping tent into a “colored only” tent, then bombarded with death threats and racial slurs as they slogged their way across the muddy, tendon ripping roads of the Texas Panhandle. In McLean, Texas, an angry mob surrounded Gardner’s trainer’s car, and threatened to burn it, claiming that blacks had no business racing against whites. In Western Oklahoma, a farmer trained a shotgun on Eddie Gardner’s back, and rode behind him for an entire day, daring him to pass a white man. After Phillip Granville’s experience with Jim Crow segregation, he began referring to himself as Jamaican Indian, and “anything but negro,” and disassociated himself from the black runners. This abuse continued across Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri, a total of a thousand miles and twenty-four days of running hell before the derby crossed into Illinois. The men were helped along the way by tightly knit black communities in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, and Chandler, Oklahoma, that raised money for them, gave them a clean bed for the night, and a solid meal to keep them going in the face of so much hate. They also were supported and protected by the white runners who had bonded with them like brothers over the brutal miles on Route 66. The heroism of the black bunioneers was a symbol of hope and pride to black communities they passed along the way, and to black America as a whole, who followed the men’s struggle across Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri in the Amsterdam News, California Eagle, Black Dispatch Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier. The competitors also put to rest the long held belief that blacks were unsuited to long distance running, given that three-fifths of the blacks finished compared to about twenty-five percent of the whites. The derby also showed the nation that blacks and whites could compete against one another even if they were not yet ready to live together in harmony. On May 26, 1928, fifty-five weary men made their final laps around the track in Madison Square Garden that marked the end of their eighty-four day ordeal. Three of the top ten finishers were runners of color, including the $25,000 first prize winner, Andy Payne, a part Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma, the $5,000 third place winner, Phillip Granville of Canada, and the $1,000 eighth place winner, Eddie Gardner of Seattle. These three bunioneers were cut from the same social cloth as their white competitors—they were blue-collar men who were looking for a piece of the American dream. They did not run for loving cups or medals, but for prize money that could lift a mortgage off a farm, buy a house, or give their children some decent clothes to wear, and in the case of the black runners, they risked their lives to do so. This was a far different mentality from the university athletes and members of athletic clubs who looked down their noses at these working class distance stars, but it was also strikingly modern, a herald of the rise of professional sports in the years to come, where merit, not race determined fame and glory. Source: Bunion Derby: The First Footrace Across America by Charles Kastner

Photograph of Josephine Kelly's son submitted as evidence to prove that the baby's father must be an African American, Prince George County Chancery Cause 1893-001, Thomas P. Kelly vs. Josephine Kelly. The case of Thomas P. Kelly vs. Josephine Kelly, 1893-001, there is also a bit of baby daddy drama. The divorce suit involves Norfolk, Virginia native Thomas Kelly, who had been for many years enlisted as a machinist in the United States Navy. During the year 1888, Thomas Kelly was stationed on board the monitor fleet lying at anchor at City Point in Prince George County. There he met Josephine Hodges, who was sixteen years of age. As Kelly would later testify in the chancery cause, their relationship began as a friendship and culminated in intimacy. Kelly confessed that he had sexual intercourse with her on or about the 17th day of June 1888 and also with more or less frequency from that date until he was transferred with the fleet to Richmond in October of the same year. About the first of January 1889, Thomas was informed that Josephine was pregnant and that her condition was attributed to him. Her friends and her mother’s friends, including the pastor of her church, made repeated and urgent endeavors to have Thomas agree to marry her, but as there had been no promise of marriage and no undue advantage taken by him, he refused to comply with their wishes. Finally it was urged that the suggested marriage would not only save the girl from ruin but would relieve his child from the stain of illegitimacy. Thomas finally gave in and they were married on the night of 5 January 1889. A few hours after the marriage, Josephine was in labor, and about 9 or 10 o’clock the next night she delivered a son, who was named after his father, Thomas P. Kelly. Thomas was at first greatly surprised the child would be born so soon, but supposing that its birth was prematurely brought on by the excitement of the marriage, he dismissed from his mind all thoughts suggesting improper conduct on the part of his wife and cared for her and his child “with all the tenderness of which he was capable, giving freely of his time, attention, and money to provide for their welfare and comfort.” Although its mother and father were both fair, the baby’s coloring was dark, but Thomas Kelly did not have his attention drawn specially to the baby’s appearance until sometime after its birth because his duties with the navy kept him away from home most of the time. Thomas visited his wife and son on 5 November 1889 and was struck with the fact that the child had grown very dark in color, which caused him great uneasiness and aroused his suspicion. In discussing the matter with his wife, “she bullied him into quietude by her positive assurance that the child’s peculiar complexion was due to the fact she had taken large quantities of medicine before its birth.” Thomas, not doubting her statement, went back to his port of duty and did not return again to City Point, where his wife and his child had always resided, until 18 January 1890. Upon his return, Thomas found the “child was blacker than ever, its lips were grown thick, its nose flat, and its hair having the unmistakable wooly kink – altogether showing plainly that Negro blood flowed in its veins.” Thomas, though shocked at the evidence which was presented to his own eyes, hesitated at first to communicate to his wife the connections he was making. But the more he tried to down the thought, the firmer hold it had upon him, and in his desperation, he stated to his wife that he was satisfied the child was not his. “A scream followed and amid tears of anguish” his wife confessed to him that he was not the father and that the real father was an African American named James Laundy. (However, a deposed witness identified the father as “General Sherman,” whose real name was thought to be William.) Josephine admitted she had sexual intercourse with another man on 11 April 1888 – the same confession being afterwards made to her mother and to other members of her family. In an instance the “whole scheme of deception” became apparent to Thomas Kelly and “in righteous indignation” he immediately left his wife and refused to recognize the marital relation existing between them. After separating from his wife, Thomas was informed by many people living at and near City Point that they had for some time believed that the “child was begotten by a Negro, but in consequence of the delicate nature of the case did not feel justified in expressing their opinions to him.” In his bill for divorce filed in 1890, Thomas Kelly charged that at the time of his marriage on 5 January 1889 his wife was with child by some person other than him and that he believed that such other person was a Negro. As evidence to support his claims, Thomas submitted a photograph of his wife’s son. Thomas also claimed that after he left his wife, she had disposed of her child to certain African Americans in the city of Petersburg with the understanding that they would rear him as their own “thus emphasizing the grievous wrong which she perpetrated on her unsuspecting husband” in an attempt to hide her own disgrace. Thomas turned to the courts seeking the relief afforded by divorce stating that “the road of affliction had been laid heavily upon him and that his cup was full of bitterness,” but in 1893, for reasons not stated in the case, he requested that the divorce suit be dismissed. Source: Sherri Bagley, Local Records Archivist, Prince George's County, Maryland

The following paragraph comes from The Freeman Newspaper (Dec. 22, 1900): "Last Picture of the Benjamin Family" --- R.C.O. Benjamin was assassinated October 2, 1900. This picture represents his family group taken during the visit of Mrs. Benjamin's father, W.S. Robinson, of Alabama. September 19, 1900 twelve days before the tragedy. The ages in years of the Benjamins are: Robert Charles O'Hara, 45; Lulu Maria 27; Robinson Charles O'Hara (called Robin, bearing his father's full initials), 4; Lillian Allen, 8 months. The children's grandfather, aged 53 years, is on the left; their father at the right. Mr. Benjamin was one of the most remarkable Negroes that ever lived --- Editor, Lawyer, Preacher, Teacher, Author, Poet, Orator, Humorist, Lecturer, Politician, Traveler, Thirty-Third Degree Mason and member of all the leading Secret and Benevolent Societies. Duplicate photographs will be sold at 25 cents each for the benefit of the Orphan Fund. Address The Standard, Lexington, Kentucky, a newspaper edited by R.C.O. Benjamin until the night of his martyrdom, and now published by his widow. The following biography comes from American National Biography Online, "Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin" by George C Wright : Robert Charles O'Hara Benjamin, (1855 - 1900), journalist and lawyer, was born on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies. Details about his early life, including the names of his parents and his education, are not known. In the fall of 1869 he arrived in New York, where he worked as soliciting agent for the New York Star and then as city editor for the Progressive American. Benjamin apparently became a U.S. citizen in the early 1870s, and in 1876 he gave speeches in support of Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican candidate for president. He was rewarded with a position as a letter carrier in New York City but quit after nine months and moved to Kentucky, where he taught school. While there, Benjamin also took up the study of law. He continued his studies after being named principal of a school in Decatur, Alabama, and was admitted to the bar at Nashville, Tennessee, in January 1880. Before and after his admission to the bar, Benjamin continued his career in journalism. In total, he edited and/or owned at least eleven black newspapers, including the Colored Citizen of Pittsburgh; The Chronicle of Evansville, Illinois; the Nashville Free Lance (where, as contributing editor, he wrote under the name "Cicero"); the Negro American of Birmingham, Alabama; the Los Angeles Observer; and the San Francisco Sentinel. When Benjamin worked at each of these papers is unclear. He was apparently in Birmingham in 1887, Los Angeles in 1888, and San Francisco in 1891. He also worked for the Daily Sun, a white-owned newspaper in Los Angeles. In addition to his journalism, Benjamin also published a number of books and pamphlets that reflected the wide range of his interests. In 1883 he published Poetic Gems, a small collection of poetry, and in 1888 he published Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. He was perhaps best known for Southern Outrages: A Statistical Record of Lawless Doings (1894). In 1886 Benjamin traveled to Canada on a speaking tour. For twenty years Benjamin maintained a legal practice in the cities where he edited newspapers. One of his cases received widespread publicity: in Richmond, Virginia, in 1884 he won an acquittal of a black woman charged with murder. At a time when most white newspapers spoke of blacks in derogatory and racist terms, Benjamin's skills as a lawyer drew favorable comment from white newspapers in Richmond, Los Angeles, and Lexington. Benjamin, however, did not court white opinion, although he well understood the risk that African Americans ran in challenging whites in civil rights, politics, and race relations. Benjamin was a vocal critic of racial discrimination and went much further than most black leaders; instead of simply denouncing Jim Crow legislation, he urged blacks to defend themselves when attacked by whites. Such an outspoken attitude led to Benjamin being forced to leave Brinkley, Arkansas, in 1879 and Birmingham in 1887. Irvine Garland Penn, author of The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (1891), said of Benjamin: "He is fearless in his editorial expression; and the fact that he is a negro does not lead him to withhold his opinions upon the live issues of the day, but to give them in a courageous manner." In December 1892 Benjamin married Lula M. Robinson; they had a son and a daughter. The family settled in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1897. To the dismay of some whites, Benjamin quickly became involved in local politics. On October 2, 1900 he argued with Michael Moynahan, a Democratic precinct worker, over the white man's harassment of blacks wishing to register to vote. Late that evening Moynahan killed Benjamin. At the trial several days later, he pleaded not guilty by reasons of self-defense. The judge accepted Moynahan's claim and dismissed the case, even though Benjamin had been shot in the back. Because of his militant stance, his journalism and other writings, and his legal career, R. C. O. Benjamin deserves serious attention from scholars. His tragic death is also a reminder that throughout American history even highly respected black leaders have been vulnerable to white violence. He is buried in African Cemetery No. 2 in Lexington, Kentucky. Source: Joshua Soule Smith papers, 1863-1905

The photograph depicts a white mob leaving Chicago's 29th Street Beach. The site of the stoning and subsequent drowning of 17 yr old Eugene Williams. The incident touched off the Chicago Race Riot. 1919 Chicago Race Riot , On the afternoon of July 27, 1919, Eugene Williams, a black youth, drowned off the 29th Street Beach. A stone throwing melee between blacks and whites on the beach prevented the boy from coming ashore safely. After clinging to a railroad tie for a lengthy period, he drowned when he no longer had the strength to hold on. This was the finding of the Cook County Coroner's Office after an inquest was held into the cause of his death. William Tuttle, Jr.'s book, Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919, includes a 1969 interview with an eyewitness. This witness was one of the boys swimming and playing with Eugene Williams in Lake Michigan between 26th Street and the 29th Street Beach. He recalled having rocks thrown at them by a single white male standing on a breakwater 75 feet from their raft. Eugene was struck in the forehead and as his friend attempted to aid him, Eugene panicked and drowned. The man on the breakwater left, running toward the 29th Street Beach. By this time rioting had already erupted there precipitated by vocal and physical demonstrations against a group of blacks who wanted to use the beach in defiance of its tacit designation as a "white" beach. The rioting escalated when a white police officer refused to arrest the white man, by now identified as the perpetrator of the separate incident near 26th Street. Instead he arrested a black individual. Anger over this, coupled with rumors and innuendos that spread in both camps regarding Eugene Williams' death led to 5 days of rioting in Chicago that ultimately claimed the lives of 23 blacks and 15 whites, with 291 wounded. The Coroner's Office spent 70 day sessions and 20 night sessions on inquest work and in examining 450 witnesses. Those findings, reported in the Coroner's Report of 1919 are followed by his recommendations to deal with the festering social and economic conditions that were the underlying factors of the riots. Anita Gonzalez & Ian Granick Growing Racial Tensions , The "Red Summer" of 1919 marked the culmination of steadily growing tensions surrounding the great migration of African Americans from the rural South to the cities of the North that took place during World War I. When the war ended in late 1918, thousands of servicemen returned home from fighting in Europe to find that their jobs in factories, warehouses and mills had been filled by newly arrived Southern blacks or immigrants. Amid financial insecurity, racial and ethnic prejudices ran rampant. Meanwhile, African-American veterans who had risked their lives fighting for the causes of freedom and democracy found themselves denied basic rights such as adequate housing and equality under the law, leading them to become increasingly militant. In this fraught atmosphere, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization revived its violent activities in the South, including 64 lynchings in 1918 and 83 in 1919. In the summer of 1919, race riots would break out in Washington, D.C.; Knoxville, Tennessee; Longview, Texas; Phillips County, Arkansas; Omaha, Nebraska and--most dramatically--Chicago. The city's African-American population had increased from 44,000 in 1909 to more than 100,000 as of 1919. Competition for jobs in the city's stockyards was particularly intense, pitting African Americans against whites (both native-born and immigrants). Tensions ran highest on the city's South Side, where the great majority of black residents lived, many of them in old, dilapidated housing and without adequate services. A Drowning in Lake Michigan , On July 27, 1919, a 17-year-old African American boy named Eugene Williams was swimming with friends in Lake Michigan when he crossed the unofficial barrier (located at 29th Street) between the city's "white" and "black" beaches. A group of white men threw stones at Williams, hitting him, and he drowned. When police officers arrived on the scene, they refused to arrest the white man whom black eyewitnesses pointed to as the responsible party. Angry crowds began to gather on the beach, and reports of the incident--many distorted or exaggerated spread quickly. Violence soon broke out between gangs and mobs of black and white, concentrated in the South Side neighborhood surrounding the stockyards. After police were unable to quell the riots, the state militia was called in on the fourth day, but the fighting continued until August 3. Shootings, beatings and arson attacks eventually left 15 whites and 23 blacks dead, and more than 500 more people (around 60 percent black) injured. An additional 1,000 black families were left homeless after rioters torched their residences. Lasting Impact , In the aftermath of the rioting, some suggested implementing zoning laws to formally segregate housing in Chicago, or restrictions preventing blacks from working alongside whites in the stockyards and other industries. Such measures were rejected by African-American and liberal white voters, however. City officials instead organized the Chicago Commission on Race Relations to look into the root causes of the riots and find ways to combat them. The commission, which included six white men and six black, suggested several key issues —including competition for jobs, inadequate housing options for blacks, inconsistent law enforcement and pervasive racial discrimination—but improvement in these areas would be slow in the years to come. President Woodrow Wilson publicly blamed whites for being the instigators of race-related riots in both Chicago and Washington, D.C., and introduced efforts to foster racial harmony, including voluntary organizations and congressional legislation. In addition to drawing attention to the growing tensions in America's urban centers, the riots in Chicago and other cities in the summer of 1919 marked the beginning of a growing willingness among African Americans to fight for their rights in the face of oppression and injustice. Sources: "Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919" by William Tuttle, Jr., Atheneum Press, NY, 1970], [ history.com ]

The Headline read: NEGRO SHOT BY WOMAN Allen Britt, colored, was shot and badly wounded shortly after 2 o'clock yesterday morning by Frankie Baker, also colored. The shooting occurred in Britt's room at 212 Targee Street, and was the culmination of a quarrel. The woman claimed that Britt had been paying attentions to another woman. The bullet entered Britt's abdomen, penetrating the intestines. The woman escaped after the shooting." Frankie Baker [1876 - 1952] “Frankie and Johnny were lovers,” true enough, but his name was Allen, not Johnny. “He was her man, but he done her wrong.” More accurately, Frankie Baker was Allen Britt’s woman, but yes, he done her wrong. He was her pimp and he abused her. Frankie caught Allen cheating with Alice Pryar and on October 16, 1899 she shot him – not in a public saloon, but in the bedroom of her St. Louis apartment. They quarreled about Alice Pryar and when he attacked her with a knife, she pulled a pistol from under her pillow. By that evening a local songwriter had composed a ballad that would immortalize the story of Frankie and Al Britt, and provide the framework for a century of misinformation. In the early 20th Century the origin of “Frankie and Johnny” was the subject of heated debate among folklorists. Carl Sandberg claimed the song was widespread before 1888, Leonard Feather said it was sung at the Siege of Vicksburg in 1863, others linked it to Frankie Silver, who was convicted in 1832 of killing her husband. But “Frankie and Johnny” never appeared in print before 1925. Today there is almost universal agreement that the song is based on the 1899 murder of Allen Britt by Frankie Baker in St. Louis, Missouri. Frankie, in her mid-twenties, was a prostitute, famous in the black “sporting area” of St. Louis, for her beauty and flamboyant elegance. She wore diamond earrings “as big as hen’s eggs." Allen Britt was Frankie’s 17-year-old pimp. Britt was well known in St. Louis as a ragtime pianist. The night of October 15, he was playing piano at the Phoenix Hotel. Frankie went to the hotel to hear him play and caught him in the hallway making love to an 18-year-old prostitute named Alice Pryar. They began arguing in the street outside the hotel and Frankie begged Allen to come home with her. He refused and she went home alone. Around 3 a.m. Albert entered Frankie’s apartment and the fight continued. When he pulled out his knife and started to attack her, Frankie grabbed a pistol she kept under her pillow. She shot him once in the chest. Allen was taken to the hospital and Frankie was arrested. The police took her to the hospital where Allen identified her as the shooter. Though Allen Britt didn’t die until three days later, the evening of the murder, “barroom bard” Bill Dooley was performing a ballad he wrote called “Frankie Killed Allen.” Trial: November 13, 1899 Though in many of the songs Frankie is executed, sometimes in the electric chair, in reality, the coroner's jury called the killing justifiable homicide in self-defense. She was still required to stand trial and on November 13, 1899 she was acquitted by Judge Willis B. Clark. Verdict: Not guilty - justifiable homicide in self-defense. Aftermath: As the song grew in popularity, in St. Louis and beyond, it went through a number of changes. First the name Allen Britt became Albert and the title of the song became “Frankie and Albert.” Then Albert was changed to Johnny, possibly at the request of Allen’s parents who were unhappy about their only son being remembered this way, but more likely because singers found the phrase “Frankie and Johnny” more pleasing than “Frankie and Albert.” The name “Alice Pryar” became “Nellie Bly” – more familiar and easier to sing. As the popularity of the song grew, a number of different versions developed and there have been at least 256 recordings. Popular singers sang the published, somewhat sanitized, version of “Frankie and Johnny.” African American songsters like Leadbelly and Mississippi John Hurt sang grittier versions and continued to use the title “Frankie and Albert.” White country performers, like Charlie Poole sang another version, the raucous “Leaving Home.” In St. Louis, people began singing the song when they saw Frankie on the street. A year after the murder she fled to Omaha, Nebraska to escape the humiliation. The song had already arrived in Omaha so she moved again to Portland, Oregon. There she worked as a prostitute and was arrested several times. Around 1925 she gave up prostitution and opened a shoeshine parlor. In 1935 the movie She Done Him Wrong, starring Mae West and Cary Grant was released and Frankie was hounded again by reporters, autograph seekers, and folks who would stand outside her house and gawk. In 1938 Frankie sued Republic Pictures for damages but lost, she couldn’t convince the all-white jury that Mae West’s character was based on her. In 1942 she sued Republic Pictures again when they released Frankie and Johnnie starring Helen Morgan. She lost again. Frankie Baker was later admitted to a mental hospital in Portland where she died in 1952. But her story, though somewhat less than accurate, will live forever. Sources: St. Louis Globe-Democrat; Discovering African American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites by John A. Wright; photographer unknown

The photograph shows African American men and a boy posed with a horse-drawn wagon loaded with bales of cotton in front of the Leflore County, Mississippi, courthouse, circa, 1920. (Library of Congress). A century ago, Mississippi’s Senate voted to send all the state’s Black people to Africa Washington Post By Joshua Benton Feb. 2022 One hundred years ago, the Mississippi state Senate voted to evict the state’s Black residents — the majority of its total population — not just out of Mississippi, but out of the country. The Senate voted 25 to 9 on Feb. 20, 1922, to ask the federal government to trade some of the World War I debts owed by European countries for a piece of colonial Africa — any part would do — where the government would then ship Mississippi’s Black residents, creating “a final home for the American negro.” The act is a reminder of just how long after the end of slavery some White Southerners were pushing not just to strip African Americans of their political rights but also to remove them from the land of their birth. What opposition there was to the proposal in the all-White Mississippi legislature came not from people who believed in racial equality but from plantation owners who feared losing their cheap, brutalized labor force. And remarkably, the proposal had a few Black supporters: Black separatists who preferred a move to Africa over the violence and abuse that African Americans faced in Jim Crow Mississippi. Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 21 was written by Sen. Torrey George McCallum, a former mayor of Laurel in Jones County. The county has achieved some measure of Hollywood fame as the “Free State of Jones,” a pocket of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War, but the McCallums were deeply engaged in the institution of slavery. Torrey’s grandfather Archibald enslaved 51 people on his plantation in 1860 and had a net worth of $80,000, about $2.5 million today. More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation. McCallum’s proposal came in the aftermath of World War I. The relatively late entry of the United States into the war and the devastation of the conflict left many of its European allies deep in debt to Washington. In all, European countries owed $10.35 billion, the equivalent of $174 billion today. Although short on cash, those countries had plenty of colonial territory — particularly in Africa, where the major European powers had scrambled to divvy up the continent’s land and resources. McCallum saw the makings of a deal. His resolution argued in flowery language that “the spirit of race consciousness” had grown with a postwar increase in nationalistic feelings worldwide and that it was “our most earnest desire to reach a just, fair, amicable, and final settlement” to what some White people then called “the Negro question.” It concluded with a request that President Warren G. Harding “acquire by treaty, negotiation or otherwise from our late war allies sufficient territory on the continent of Africa to make a suitable, proper and final home for the American Negro, where under the tutelage of the American government he can develop for himself a great republic, to become in time a free and sovereign state and take its place at the council board of the nations of the world.” McCallum made clear that “the spirit of race consciousness” he cared about belonged to White people. The goal, he wrote, was “that our country may become one in blood as it is in spirit, and that the dream of our forefathers may be realized in the final colonization of the American Negro on his native soil.” The resolution does not specifically state whether the proposed mass migration would be voluntary. But its use of language like a “final settlement,” “the final colonization,” and the United States becoming “one in blood” makes clear the aim was total removal. Not consulted in this process: Mississippi’s Black residents, who in the 1920 Census made up 52 percent of the state’s population. During Reconstruction, Mississippi’s Black majority had sent three African Americans to Congress and more than 60 to the state legislature. That had all ended, though, first with rampant White violence in the 1870s and 1880s, then with the passage of a new state constitution in 1890 that effectively disenfranchised Black people. In some ways, it felt like the post-Reconstruction era was returning: Another spike in anti-Black violence had followed World War I, especially during the Red Summer of 1919, and the Ku Klux Klan was suddenly reborn. Black newspapers nationwide mocked McCallum’s proposal, just as African Americans had generally resisted the previous century’s attempts at colonization. “Only one thing seems to have been overlooked by the Hon. Senator, and that is, how even the Mississippi colored people will be induced or enabled by the Mississippi Legislature to go to Africa,” wrote the Broad Ax, a Black Chicago newspaper. After generations of rape of enslaved women by White men, it wrote, “the intervening shades are so numerous and various, it may be a question to determine who is a colored person. Of course, such things don’t bother McCallum.” “We see that representatives in Mississippi would colonize the American Negro in Africa,” wrote the Southern Indicator of Columbia, S.C. “Poor fools.” The one exception was Negro World, the national newspaper published by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which embraced McCallum’s proposal. Garvey believed that members of the African diaspora would never be treated fairly in a White-controlled country and that the solution was a new African homeland. “Hurrah for Senator McCallum,” its headline blared. “Work of Universal Negro Improvement Assn. Bearing Fruit.” Garvey gave a speech at Liberty Hall in New York endorsing McCallum’s plan: “The Negro should not delude himself … by the belief that the future will mean happiness and contentment for him in this country, since it is the undoubted spirit and intention of the white man that this shall in truth be white man’s country." Garvey was becoming known for seeking strange bedfellows in his quest for Black autonomy abroad. A few months later, he went to the offices of the resurgent Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta for a cordial meeting with Imperial Wizard Edward Young Clarke, sparking outrage from Black leaders and newspapers. (Garvey was under indictment on charges of mail fraud at the time, so he also may have been motivated to curry favor with White officials.) Mississippi’s largest newspaper, the Clarion Ledger — once called “the most racist newspaper in the nation” — happily ran the full text of a telegram Garvey sent McCallum offering his “congratulations” for “the splendid move” he had made. But Garvey seemed aware of who he was teaming up with. McCallum, he said in a speech, “is the same Southern senator who would object and stand behind the objection, with his whole life and with the last drop of his blood, for a Negro in the United States of America to dine with the President of the United States at the White House.” McCallum was far from the only racist White leader interested in sending Black people “back” to an Africa they had never seen. The impulse dates to well before the Civil War, to the early days of state colonization societies, which built colonies in what is today Liberia. The Mississippi Colonization Society created Mississippi-in-Africa on the Pepper Coast, sending several hundred freed slaves there to face what became the highest mortality rates of any society in recorded human history. Some advocates of colonization considered it a more humane option than slavery, but more viewed it as a way to rid their states of free Blacks who might encourage rebellions among enslaved people. As the Civil War approached, debates over slavery were not limited to the two extremes — continuing and expanding slavery on one hand, and making African Americans free and full political citizens on the other. Some White people argued for freeing the enslaved but still denying them the vote, just as it was then denied to most free Blacks in North and South alike. Others wanted to create a limited class of Black voters, restricted only to the educated or to those who had fought for the Union. And many thought the only solution to the “Negro question” was to send them away — either voluntarily or by force — to a new colony in the Caribbean or “back” to Africa. Hinton Rowan Helper, the most prominent anti-slavery activist in the South, was nonetheless a virulent racist and advocate of expulsion. As he wrote in the early weeks of the war: “Death to Slavery! Down with the Slaveholders! Away with the Negroes!” Among those interested in colonization was Abraham Lincoln, who was drawn repeatedly to the idea. In 1862, Congress passed a bill allocating $600,000 for the colonization of formerly enslaved people living in the District of Columbia. Lincoln sent a young free Black man named John Willis Menard to British Honduras (now Belize) to scout it as a potential location; the Danish Virgin Islands, British Guiana, and Dutch Surinam also were considered. Lincoln struck a deal to set up a colony in the Chiriquí Province of what is now Panama, but strenuous objections from Central American countries led him to scuttle the plan. He eventually signed off on a disastrous experiment that sent 453 free Virginia Blacks to the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache. High rates of disease and a mutiny led to its collapse and 350 survivors sailing back to Virginia less than a year later. During Reconstruction and afterward, a trickle of Black people continued to leave the South for various promised lands: Liberia, Haiti, Kansas, California. But it took until World War I for the Great Migration of African Americans to Northern and Western cities to start in earnest, driven by job opportunities and the desire to escape Jim Crow. Still, that was not the end of the idea of colonization, in the minds of either White racists of Black separatists. U.S. Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, a proud member of the Ku Klux Klan, carried colonization forward to a new generation, proposing in 1939 what he called the Greater Liberia Act. It was modeled on McCallum’s 1922 resolution, offering France and the U.K. relief for their war debt in exchange for 400,000 square miles adjoining Liberia’s borders. Greater Liberia was to be run by a U.S. military governor. The bill went nowhere — but it again drew the support of an aging Marcus Garvey, as well as the vocal support of Black separatists including Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, the founder of the Peace Movement of Ethiopia. The Mississippi Senate vote 100 years ago was as far as the state’s attempt to exile its African Americans would go. After passing the Senate, the resolution went to the state House of Representatives. Its Committee on Federal Relations reported the resolution out favorably on March 1, 1922. On March 10, McCallum went to the House floor to advocate for passage. “He wanted it understood that it was not written, nor was it intended as a reflection in the least on the negro,” a Biloxi newspaper reported, “but was intended to settle him in a country of his own and where he could make himself a home under laws of own making. He said he simply wanted to settle for all time to come a great problem confronting this country and in the interest of the negro.” But the speech wasn’t enough, and the House voted the resolution down, 40 to 32. Most of the chamber’s debate over the bill has been lost to history, but a newspaper reporter did record a representative named John Holmes Sherard explaining his opposition: “He did not like any such propaganda as this meant the loss of labor of his part of the state, the Delta, where the negro was needed. … He asserted that he had 500 negroes on his plantation in Coahoma County, and had never had a quarrel with them.” One of the regulars at Sherard’s plantation commissary in Coahoma County was a young man named McKinley Morganfield, who picked cotton at a neighboring plantation. At Sherard’s and elsewhere around Coahoma, men like Robert Johnson and Son House were playing what would become known as the Delta blues. In 1941, Morganfield found his own escape from Mississippi — not to Africa, but to Chicago, where he became known as Muddy Waters. Waters’s songs sometimes romanticized the simpler life back in the Delta, but when asked directly if he ever planned on moving back, his response was clear: “I wanted to get out of Mississippi in the worst way, man. Go back? What I want to go back for?” Mississippi Goddamn by Nina Simone: www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ25-U3jNWM

African American children enter Fairgrounds Park Pool in St. Louis, Missouri in 1949. They were the first African American swimmers to enter the pool, and they were assaulted by angry white residents soon after the photo was taken. The Fairgrounds Park Riot - African Americans were permitted to swim for the first time at St. Louis, Missouri's Fairgounds Park Pool on June 21, 1949. While approximately forty African American children swam at the pool that afternoon, nearly 200 whites surrounded the pool fence. Violence broke out later that day as the swimmers left the pool. Several men, women and children of both races were hospitalized; however, no one was killed. Following the riot, segregation was re-instituted and remained in effect for the next twelve months. A federal court ruling in July 1950 by Judge Rubey M. Hulen mandated racial integration. Source: St. Louis Globe

Ask Mary Alexander who she is, and she’ll proudly share her many titles: wife, mother, grandmother, former teacher and high school principal. “We were married three years before I realized I was married to a Coca-Cola model,” says her husband of three decades, Henry Alexander. Affectionately called “Miss Mary” by some, she’s as humble as they come. So humble, in fact, that Coca-Cola didn’t know the identity of the young woman pictured in those groundbreaking ads until more than a half-century after they were produced. Mary grew up on a farm in Ballplay, a small community in the northeast corner of Alabama. One of 10 children, she spent most of her days hoeing fields in the Southern heat. “I had my first Coke at around 7 or 8 years old,” Mary remembers. “After a long, hard day of working on the farm, that was our treat at the end. We’d get an ice-cold Coca-Cola.” She became only the second person in her family to attend college, enrolling at Clark College in Atlanta. During her junior year, the housemother of her dorm approached her and explained that Coca-Cola was trying to recruit African-Americans for a new advertising campaign. She suggested Mary try out. Having no modeling experience, Mary hesitated, but agreed after the Dean insisted once more. She interviewed and was selected. “I was surprised that they chose me,” she says. “Girls there were from Atlanta and New York. I was just a simple country girl!” As word spread around campus, Mary’s excitement quickly turned into uneasiness. She describes her first photo shoot as “nerve-wracking.” “I went back to my room and cried a little bit,” she recalls. “I was afraid this wasn’t what I should be doing. My parents were very strict, and I wanted to make sure they were okay with it.” When the final ads came out, however, the mood changed. “We told the whole family and spread it around campus,” Mary says. “It was surreal… I was just so happy.” She earned $600 total for approximately 15 ads, enough to pay for a full year of her college tuition. While Mary’s face graced newspapers, magazines, billboards and New York subway stations, she fell out of touch with The Coca-Cola Company. The ads marked both the beginning and end of her modeling career, though she would go on to achieve plenty of other firsts. After college, she moved to Detroit to pursue a master’s degree for a career in education. The job market was tough for an African-American woman in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, but after nearly three years of applying to positions and working as a real estate secretary, Mary landed a position at Mount Clemons High School. The principal warned her that the school’s population was mostly white, and that she’d be their first African-American teacher. Yet Mary remained unfazed. “I asked, ‘Well, do they all have red blood running through their veins?’ He replied, ‘They do,’ and I said, ‘Then I don’t have a problem!” Mary recalls. She left Mount Clemons after three years to teach at Highland Park High School and eventually became the school’s first female African-American principal. Years later, she was named the first female African-American director of vocational education for the state of Michigan. Meanwhile, Mary continued to have no contact with Coca-Cola. She was rediscovered by chance, 52 years after her ads were first published. Mary’s niece and a high school classmate were looking through old photos when they came across a familiar face. The two took a picture of one ad and contacted Coca-Cola, letting a consumer hotline operator know what had been found. When the request finally reached the company archives, the team assumed the claim was false. “We get these kinds of requests all the time,” explains Jamal Booker, manager of heritage communications. “We have a whole file on people who claim to be models.” Fortunately, Mary had kept a personal letter from the company from her modeling days. She faxed it in, and the team quickly called back to verify what Mary had known all along. “In more than 30 years of people claiming to be models, Miss Mary was the only one who had proof,” Booker says. “We were shocked.” Just months earlier, one of Mary’s ads had been selected to be featured at the World of Coca-Cola. The company brought Mary and her husband to Atlanta to see the exhibit and learn more about the story that almost went untold. “Miss Mary reflects the humble confidence of the brand Coca-Cola itself,” Booker says. “She rarely, if ever, mentions the fact that she was an advertising trailblazer. If it had not been for a fan of hers, we wouldn’t have even known she was out there.” A lesson learned, Coca-Cola now keeps in close contact with Mary, now 78. Retired and living in Ocala, Florida she periodically visits Atlanta for speaking opportunities and events. Though she is flattered by the attention, she says it’s not about her. “I hope I opened some doors. I hope I laid some groundwork for people in the future to see what can be done despite the odds,” Mary concludes. “That’s why I’m just so happy about it.” American Trailblazer: Coca Cola Heritage Edition w/ Mary Alexander and Archivist for Coca Cola Jamal Booker: www.youtube.com/watch?v=73fAI20bN_Y Sources: A Humble Trailblazer: Meet Mary Alexander, the First African-American Woman to Appear in Coca-Cola Advertising (cocacolacompany.com) by Amy Cross

Facial reconstruction of Ms. Peterson created by forensic imaging specialist, Joe Mullins. In October 2011, while building an apartment complex, construction workers were shocked to uncover human remains in an abandoned lot at 90-15 Corona Avenue in the Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens, New York. So great was the level of preservation, witnesses first assumed they had stumbled upon a recent homicide. Forensic analysis revealed a remarkably different story. Buried in an elaborate and expensive iron coffin, the body belonged to a young African American woman who died in the first half of the 19th century, before the Civil War and the federal abolishment of slavery. She was dressed in a long white nightgown with thick, knee-high socks and a hand-crafted comb that held a delicate knit cap on her head. Who was she, and why was she buried there? Forensic archaeologist Scott Warnasch and a team of historians and scientists as they investigate this woman’s story and the time in which she lived, revealing a vivid picture of what life was like for free African Americans in the North. Warnasch joins forces with Jerry Conlogue, Professor of Diagnostic Imaging at Quinnipiac University, to conduct a “virtual” autopsy. Using sophisticated computer software and hardware, they determined the woman was between 25 and 30 years old, and died from smallpox in the 1850s, more than 150 years ago. The ornate iron coffin also provides clues about the woman’s identity. Created in 1848 by New York stove merchant Almond Dunbar Fisk, the coffin was designed to preserve bodies for sanitary storage and transportation prior to modern embalming. These airtight coffins were very expensive for the era and used by the wealthy and elite, including former first lady Dolley Madison, former President Zachary Taylor, and former Vice President John C. Calhoun. Why was this woman — possibly escaped from slavery from the South, or someone born enlaved in New York as it was slowly abolished in the North — buried in a coffin normally reserved for the rich? Historians Clarence Taylor and Jeffrey Kroesser, of Baruch College and John Jay College respectively, and Carla Peterson, author of Black Gotham, offer additional clues, sharing insights on the lives of newly freed African Americans living in the North. When New York, one of the largest slaveholding states, officially abolished slavery on July 4, 1827, newly freed African Americans began to establish communities in New York City, including Seneca Village in Manhattan (which gave way to Central Park’s development), Weeksville in Brooklyn – home to the Weeksville Heritage Center, and Newtown (now Elmhurst) in Queens, where The Woman in the Iron Coffin was found at what was once the location of an African Methodist Episcopal church and burial ground. These emancipated settlements became beacons to those still enslaved in the South and the target destination for many of those brave and lucky enough to escape. But African Americans in New York, while legally free, still faced racism, low-wage jobs, and poor-quality housing. Precious little remains of these early communities formed in the first decades of freedom. The Woman in the Iron Coffin sheds light on this lost part of New York history. After examining the body and studying the 1850 Census of New York City, Warnasch determines that the remains likely belonged to Martha Peterson, a 26-year-old African American woman living in New York City in 1850. Peterson was the daughter of John and Jane Peterson, prominent figures in Newtown’s African American community. Public records also noted that Martha Peterson lived with William Raymond, the brother-in-law, neighbor and business partner of Almond Dunbar Fisk, the iron coffin creator. In 2016, five years after a construction crew dug up her coffin, Martha Peterson was given a proper burial by the Saint Mark African Methodist Episcopal Church of Jackson Heights. “Because of her and because of the finding of her, our church has had a renewed fervor in learning more about who we are and who we were ,” Pastor Kimberly Detherage said. “We lost some of the history throughout the years .” Video of the The Woman in the Iron Coffin can be found here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjkQbq_ONfw Sources: PBS Thirteen Media with Impact: A Queens Tale: Woman in An Iron Coffin (Aug. 16, 2019); youtube

In 1959, sixty-nine African American teenage boys were padlocked into their dormitory for the night at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville, Arkansas. Twenty-one died in a mysterious fire that night. Pictured above are the survivors. Fourteen bodies lie side by side and unmarked in a mass grave at Haven of Rest Cemetery on Twelfth Street. The only proof of their burial is a page from the graveyard's 1959 records. The fourteen were teenagers when they burned to death in a fire March 5, 1959, at the Negro Boys Industrial School in Wrightsville. In all, twenty-one boys between the ages of 13 and 16 perished, incinerated in a dorm room whose doors were padlocked on the outside. The teens had been incarcerated (“Industrial School” was euphemistic) for homelessness, petty theft and pranks — one boy had been caught soaping windows during Halloween. Many were raised in single family homes and turned over by their parents. Forty-eight of the boys who were in the “Big Boys Dorm” managed to escape what press reports called the “holocaust.” Seven boys had private funerals. The remaining 14 — burned so badly their bodies could not be identified individually — were buried five days after the fire, their interment paid for by the state of Arkansas. During the funeral, the Arkansas Gazette reported, a mother cried out, “Oh Lord! You done burned up my baby!” In her anguish, she may have blamed the Lord. But a Pulaski County grand jury finding issued the following September said the state employees in charge of the training school, the legislature, the governor and even “the people of Arkansas, who did nothing about” conditions at the decrepit facility, were responsible for the deaths. The General Assembly should have been “ashamed,” the grand jury report said. Responsible — but not liable. The grand jury returned no indictment. No criminal charges were ever filed, despite the fact that Gov. Orval Faubus, standing by the smoldering ruins at dawn the day of the fire, declared the tragedy “inexcusable.” Forty-nine years later, the event is little remembered. But Luvenia Lawrence, 81, whose son, Lindsey Cross, died in the fire, and Lindsey's brother Frank Lawrence, who was 4 years old when his brother perished, remember. They found the record of the graves at Haven of Rest. At their request, the graves, hard by a ditch, are now marked with yellow flagging tape. Frank Lawrence, who plans to make a documentary film about the event, has taken the story to print and television media in Little Rock. Two TV stations have aired interviews with Lawrence in recent weeks, and he's working with the Mosaic Templars Cultural Center to record the story there. At one time, Luvenia Lawrence says, a stone at Rest Haven marked the graves. A stone would be a start in reminding the people of Arkansas of the terrible event, she and her son say. Lindsey Cross was 15 when he was trapped by the fire. He'd been sent to Wrightsville after a neighbor of the Lawrences — in the Tie Plant area of North Little Rock — told authorities he'd stolen money from a store's cash register while two other boys distracted the white owner. Luvenia Lawrence said she could only remember going to “an office” before her son was sent to Wrightsville. It seemed strange to her that there had been no trial. But there wouldn't have been. It took a lawsuit, filed by Grif Stockley for Legal Aid in the late 1980s, to create legal redress for juveniles in Arkansas. Until then, county judges had jurisdiction, appointing referees (usually not lawyers) to decide the fate of juveniles. Pulaski County's referee — Judith Rogers, who later became a juvenile judge — testified for Stockley. In 1987, the state Supreme Court ruled the system unconstitutional and ordered juvenile cases heard in chancery courts (now circuit courts). Also buried at Haven of Rest: Charles L. Thomas, 15, of Little Rock; Frank Barnes, 15, Lake Village; R.D. Brown, 16, Emerson; Jessie Carpenter Jr., 16, Forrest City; Joe Crittenden, 16, Blytheville; John Daniel, 16, El Dorado; Willie G. Horner, 16, North Little Rock; Roy Chester Powell, 16, Forrest City; Cecil Preston, 17, Blytheville; Carl E. Thornton, 15, North Little Rock; Johnnie Tillison, 16, LaGrange (Lee County); Edward Tolston Jr., 15, Wilmot, and Charles White, 15, Malvern. Two of the dead boys were only 13 years old. One of those children, William Loyd Piggee of DeWitt, had been sent to Wrightsville after he'd been seen riding a bike that belonged to a white boy. But William Piggee often rode that bike, which had belonged to a white friend whose family his mother worked for. The friend had a new bike, and the two boys used to ride their bikes together. The mother of the white boy had reported the bike stolen. But when she discovered William had taken it, she told authorities that it was all right for him to ride it. But, according to William's brother, Larry Piggee of Houston, Texas, the police insisted that the bike was stolen and William had to pay. He paid big. After the fire, “police came to our house at 5 a.m. and knocked on our door. They talked with my mother and father, told them they needed someone to come down and take a look.” “They had a number of bodies stretched out,” Piggee said. His mother and father “picked out the body of a person that had a Bible in the breast pocket because my brother always carried one.” Larry Piggee left Arkansas when he was 16. “I didn't look at it as an accident myself,” he said of the fire. The other 13-year-old who died was O.T. Meadows of El Dorado. The remaining dead were 15-year-olds Henry Daniels of Little Rock, John Alfred George of North Little Rock, Roy Hegwood of El Dorado, Willie Lee Williams of Helena and 16-year-old Amos Guice. Most of the bodies were found piled in the corner farthest from the doors to the room. Frank Lawrence doesn't get sentimental standing over his brother's grave. He doesn't believe any of the coffins actually contain bodies. “Their ashes blew over Wrightsville,” he said. “They're part of Wrightsville.” The building burned entirely to the ground. The fire broke out in what was known as the “Big Boys Dorm” between 3:15 a.m. and 4 a.m., news reports said. A vocational teacher who normally slept in a room next to the dorm had been in the hospital for two weeks before the fire broke out. There were only two exits from the dorm, and both were padlocked, so that exit from the inside was impossible. The boys who escaped did so by prying loose mesh metal screens from two of the dorm windows. The Arkansas Democrat, then an afternoon paper, ran a picture of the fire as it raged on its front page. A photograph of Faubus, standing amid the rubble by the window screens, accompanied the front page story in the Arkansas Gazette the following morning. Stories told by employees of the Industrial School — all of whom were black — conflicted. School Superintendent L.R. Gaines first told the press the doors to the dorm had been locked, but later in the day said one door had been open. School farm manager Wilson Hall first said he'd been sleeping in the classroom adjacent to the dorm when the smoke woke him up, but later told the school board that he'd discovered the fire when he went to the building to make sure the substitute caretaker was there. Hall said he found the dorm doors locked when he arrived, so he ran to the windows and “started pulling screens.” “They were screaming and hollering in there,” the Gazette quoted Hall as saying. “You couldn't make out any words or anything.” Lee Andrew Austin, the livestock supervisor, told the board that he'd left the building — which included the dorm, a chapel, the caretaker's office and workshop — in the middle of the night because the lights went out and he needed to fetch a flashlight from his home, which was near the dorm. So though Hall, Austin and Gaines all had keys to the door, according to Gaines, none, apparently, was in the dorm when the blaze began. A transcript of the school board's interviews with school employees shows that the board believed Austin was negligent. “Isn't it a fact that had you functioned properly, this tragedy would not have occurred?” chairman Alfred Smith asked Austin. “Well, Mr. Smith,” Austin replied, “I would like to know how I could have prevented it.” The Little Rock Fire Department — which initially declined to answer the call to the fire since it was outside the city limits — said the blaze probably started in the attic above the empty caretaker's room off the classroom and close to the entrance to the dorm. One teen-ager died at the door to the dorm; when the door collapsed in the fire, the body fell partially into the classroom. A survivor told the Gazette that the boys fought each other to get out the windows. “There was a whole lot of screaming,” he said. He saw four boys hitting at the mesh-covered windows trying to escape. The boys who did escape stood barefoot in the cold and stunned, watching as the building burned to the ground. The Sunday after the Thursday fire, a headline in the Gazette proclaimed “Constant Fire Vigil Is Kept at White Industrial School.” The article quoted the superintendent of the school, located in Pine Bluff, as saying the building was fireproof, doors were never locked, and that the house parents never left the dorm at night. Superintendent Gaines and his wife, Mary, a school teacher who was also on the payroll at Wrightsville, resigned in April. Gaines did not testify before the grand jury; he was reported in ill health and living in Chicago. News of the fire made front pages across the nation. Faubus was already known to the country as the governor who'd sent troops to Central High to keep nine black students from attending school. News of the fire fueled national sentiment that Arkansas put little value on the life of its black residents. A letter to Faubus from Los Angeles: “Your support of a policy of segregation and of second-class citizenship for the Negro people helped to create this holocaust.” From “not a Negro”: “It sure must have made you happy to have those boys roasted alive.” From London, England: “We feel that this unfortunate mishandling of human lives cannot be wholly divorced from the prevailing race attitudes and conflict under your administration. The psychological impact of this case will be terrific here in Europe. It is the sort of thing these people do not forget easily.” From Virginia: “I hope your measly heart is capable of feeling the sting of the race hate you as a leader of your gang started last fall.” From Detroit: “You are just as responsible as if you had struck the match.” From California: “Each time I see in the newspaper a by-line [sic] ‘Little Rock, Arkansas' I shudder, because I know it means another atrocity against the Negroes.” Faubus also got a letter from a woman who had not heard whether her son had survived the fire. Later, she sent another letter, saying her son had helped boys escape and pleading for his release on that account. What value did the state officially put on the life of black teen-agers? Most of the survivors filed claims with the state Claims Commission seeking $25,000; one asked for $50,000 and there were claims for sums in between. The commission, ruling in September 1959, awarded $2,500 to the estates of each of the 21 boys. It reached that amount, it said, by reasoning that “negro boys, all minors, incarcerated … [were] contributing little and often nothing to the support of their parents. The Supreme Court of Arkansas has often affirmed the verdict of juries awarding $2,000 to $3,000 damages for the death of a child.” It's hard to say if the sum was out of line. In February 1960, the commission awarded a boy who was disfigured in a car accident caused by Highway Department negligence $5,000, in anticipation of future medical costs. But it gave only $6,138.71 to the widow of a man who'd plunged in his car from a bridge into Village Creek because the state Highway Department failed to erect a sign warning the bridge was out. The commission found that the “direct and proximate cause of the death of the 20 [sic] decedents was the carelessness and negligence of the officers, agents and employees of the State of Arkansas, employed at the Arkansas Negro Boys' Industrial School,” and cited the facts that the boys were locked in with no means of escape, that there were no buckets, water or fire extinguishers, fire drills or other safety precautions. “The State in its composite wisdom has seen fit to create schools for both races and for both sexes commonly referred to as Industrial Schools, where youths may be sent for correctional training. It is the custom of Arkansas to place negro supervisors over the negro children under the supposition that members of that race would be best able to cope with the problem and give to their wards the best training available in order to prepare the inmates for worthy citizenship. … So far as the record in this case indicates the persons in authority had every right to believe that L.R. Gaines and his assistants would operate the school in a proper, safe and efficient manner. … However, on the night of said holocaust, L.R. Gaines and his staff ignored their duty to their wards … .” Though commission records show that the family of Lindsey Cross was awarded $3,400 — the estate award plus $600 to Luvenia Lawrence for mental anguish and $300 to his estranged father, Charlie Cross — Lawrence says she only got $1,000, from a white man who showed up at her door one day and gave her a check. She claims she took the check to the Square Deal Pawn Shop to cash it, where the owner, Robert Itzkowitz, asked, “Is this all Faubus gave you for killing your son?” Total claims paid by the state ranged from $3,300 to $5,900. In 2002, the Justice Department sued the state of Arkansas for deficiencies at the Alexander Youth Services Center (now the Arkansas Juvenile Treatment and Assessment Center). The Alexander facility had racked up a number of incidents of neglect and abuse, including a couple of suicides, and had failed to provide adequate education. Also cited by the Justice Department: fire hazards. Under the terms of the 2003 settlement with the state, the Division of Youth Services agreed to install sprinklers in dormitories and educational facilities, smoke detection devices and fire alarms. It also agreed to train personnel in what to do in case of fire, and to remove flammable materials on which gas generators had been stored. Frank Lawrence thinks the more people know about what happened in 1959, the more they'll take an interest in what's going on today. Sources: KATV Little Rock, Arkansas; Arkansas Times Staff (March 2008)

The Cleveland Call and Post was an African American newspaper started by Garrett A. Morgan. It ran from 1919 until 1927. Allen E Cole, Photographer. Sources: Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present; by Deborah Willis

Late 19th century blackmail trials revealed unexpected class and gender entanglements, but said nothing about the crossing of racial boundaries. That was to be expected, given that in England there was only a tiny non-white population that in America Jim Crow segregation made interracial relations unlikely. In the 20th century, however, with the mixing of races and sexes in cities came heightened concern over possible confusion of identities. Blackmail stories by the earlier 20th century did more than warn middle-class men that if they sought sexual adventures outside their class they ran the risk of being compromised. In a radical departure from the older script, sensational cases in both the United States and England demonstrated that those who dared to cross racial lines could also find themselves victimized. In 1904 eighty-four year old John R. Platt charged in a New York court that Hannah Elias, "a negress and courtesan," had extorted from him the enormous sum of $685,385. Platt, the last president of the New York volunteer fire department. He first met his "octoroon girl" in the Tenderloin in 1884 when she was only sixteen. Their paths crossed again in 1896 when he went to a massage parlor (because of rheumatism, he said), and at this point he became "interested in her welfare." He claimed that he believed she was single and set her up in a boardinghouse. She said that she loved him; but, he told the court, she later threatened to tell his married daughters and her Pullman Porter husband of their adulterous affair. As a result Platt felt obliged to give her money, including the lawyer's fee for her divorce. The press informed the public that what began as a private romance ended in sensational public scandal. Platt had sometimes called himself "Mr. Green" when secretly visiting Elias at her fashionable home on 230 Central Park West. In the fall of 1903 Cornelius Williams, a discarded and insanely jealous "Negro" admirer of Elias, mistakenly murdered an Andrew H. Green, believing him to be Platt. Elias threatened to use the sensational circumstances of the murder, Platt asserted, as yet another weapon with which to extort money from him. He had finally had enough. Hannah Elias defied Platt's June 3, 1904, civil order for her arrest and barricaded her home. Finally on June 8th the police prevailed upon Platt to swear out a criminal warrant. Thousands watched as four policemen broke into Elias's home and arrested her. The press gave a detailed account of the appearance of the short, self possessed, elegant woman whose race, it declared, was "obvious" and of her three month old baby, the baby's white nurse, and Kato, the Japanese houseboy. The publicity of the case meant Elias’s life became more complicated as her wealthy Central Park West white neighbors of three years discovered that she was black rather than their assumption that she was “Cuban” or “East Indian” or that she was an ”Oriental princess exiled temporarily from her own country.” Elias's position plummeted dramatically, as the New York Times maliciously noted, from Central Park West to the female tier of "Coon Row" in the Tombs Prison, where she was held on $50,000 bail. Kato, "the Jap," insisted to reporters that Platt showered Elias with money but that she never resorted to extortion. Indeed, according to Kato, she had been the victim of white men (including the lawyer who handled her divorce) who threatened to make public her irregular relationship with Platt. Elias took the moral high ground and said that despite Platt's vindictiveness she felt sorry for the octogenarian and saddened by the press's fixation on the color of her skin: "I have all my life made white people my friends and have never had much to do with my own race." At the arraignment Platt clearly under the hectoring pressure of his children to pursue the case appeared confused and embarrassed at having to testify, and in the end stubbornly refused to admit to being "bled." The case against Elias collapsed. When Platt left the courtroom a large crowd jeered and catcalled. Platt's family were not through with Hannah Elias. They proceeded to file a civil suit against her, which came to court in 1905. Once again huge crowds turned out to hear how Elias had made her way from being a cook earning $3 a week to being the mistress of a man who paid $20,000 to the lawyer who secured her divorce, Elias, represented by former New York state governor Frank S. Black, insisted that she had been Platt's devoted mistress and friend, pointing out that he had even given her his deceased wife's watch and pocketbook. The court again found in Elias's favor, concluding that there was no proof of threats. Moreover, it stated that judges did have the duty of enforcing immoral contracts. John R. Platt admitted to being a fool, getting the very publicity he had paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid. After the two trials Elias moved to Harlem, where she helped John Nail, a black real estate developer, turn the neighborhood into an enclave for New York's black residents. Sources: Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History By Professor of History Angus McLaren (Harvard University Press 1st edition 2002); Black Enchantress: an upcoming book, Hannah Elias, Interracial Sex, Murder, and Civil Rights in Jim Crow New York, By Dr. Cheryl Hicks; Black Fortunes: The Story of the Six African Americans who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires; Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN) 1903

The above image and following story was published in The Crisis Magazine , November 1913 issue. The News Leader a "white" afternoon paper of Richmond, Virginia, is "opposed" to woman suffrage and also to Negroes. Recently it offered $10 for the best argument against woman suffrage. The contest was very successful. The Leader says: "The contest editor, a man of some experience in this line of well, we will call it work, for short is frank to confess that no more interesting reading ever came under his observation, no keener competition for first honors was ever waged in a similar event in his knowledge, and no more difficult contest problem ever confronted him than of selecting what he thought the best answer in the six hundred and twenty-five received." Then the managing editor wrote a right gallant epistle: "Dear Mrs. Goode, "Herewith the News Leader wishes to hand you a check for Ten Dollars ($10), for your very excellent answer submitted in the contest, it having been declared the best received. We congratulate you on your winning the first prize, and hope that when other contests are arranged we will see one or more answers from you. "The Contest Editor would like to publish a photograph of you. Will you be kind enough to oblige us by sending the picture, which will be returned to you after an etching is made of it? "Yours very truly, (Signed) "Louis A. Macmahon, "Managing Editor" November 1, 1913. Mrs. Goode responded with her photograph. It was not published in the Leader for lack of space and so The Crisis is kindly releasing the Leader of its natural embarrassment. "My Dear Mrs. Goode" has also received a most cordial appeal from the Virginia ladies "Opposed," etc. Mrs. Goode was formerly an assistant in the Congressional Library but went to Virginia to mother nine children whose own mother was dead. "The latter work is not productive of as many luxuries as I enjoyed at Washington, but the privilege of shaping so many young lives after my ideas of the beautiful, gives me a sense of happiness which words cannot express." We are sorry that Mrs. Goode is opposed to votes for women and we are also sorry for the News Leader , but we think it quite permissible to chuckle quietly over the whole affair.

Charles Collins was shot and killed by Herbert Gallehugh on March 7, 1902. The shooting took place in the kitchen of the San Angelo Hotel which was located at 1221 Nicollet Avenue. Collins was employed at the hotel as a chef where one of his co-workers was Ida Gallehugh, the wife of the man who shot him. Based on the testimony of those who witnessed the shooting, it should have been an open-and-shut case. Gallehugh had shot Collins in front of several witnesses who were prepared to refute Gallehugh’s claim that he had killed Collins in self defense. But it was 1902--the victim was African-American and the man on trial was white, and the local African-American community was rightly concerned about whether justice would be served. In an unusual move, members of the African-American community raised funds to hire an attorney to assist the government lawyers who were prosecuting the case. The trial was, according to the papers, “one of the most interesting ones of the criminal history of Hennepin county.” Charles Collins had lived in Minneapolis for sixteen years but had only worked at the hotel for a few months. Before that he had worked as a chef on the Northern Pacific Railroad. He had recently become engaged to Annie Chambers, and he was by all accounts an upstanding member of the community. The defendant, Herbert Gallehugh, was a railroad worker who had fallen on hard times. His wife had gone to work at the hotel because he was out of work and they were deeply in debt. Other than the fact that his wife worked with Collins for about a week, Gallehugh had no known connection to Collins. Gallehugh’s lawyers argued that he had killed Collins in self defense after he had confronted Collins about “insults” that Collins had directed toward Ida Gallehugh. According to Herbert Gallehugh, Collins walked toward him carrying a knife, so he shot him in self-defense. The trial began five weeks after the shooting occurred. Jury selection took five days. It was a long process because prospective jurors had to demonstrate that they were not racially prejudiced and that they were not opposed to the death penalty. Although African-Americans had had the legal right to sit on juries in Minneapolis for several decades, they were rarely selected as jurors in murder cases because many of them were opposed to the death penalty. When the process was completed, the jury consisted of twelve white men. The trial took less time than jury selection. Testimony began on April 22nd, and the jury announced its verdict on April 25th. One juror reported that they had actually reached the verdict on the evening of the 24th, shortly after the trial closed, but that they did not announce their it then because “they thought it best that they should not have it appear that they had decided the case without deliberation.” They had taken three votes. The first was whether Herbert Gallehugh had shot and killed Charles Collins, a fact that was obvious. The second vote was about whether or not the shooting was premeditated, and only one juror agreed that it was. The third vote, for second degree murder, was unanimous. On April 25th, Herbert Gallehugh was convicted of second degree murder, and sentenced to life at hard labor—a grim prospect for Gallehugh, who was only 25 years old at the time. The murder of Charles Collins, as is true of all murders, was a senseless crime. If it can be said that any good came out of it, it was that the African-American community received, in some small measure, the justice that they had sought for a valued member of their community. Charles Collins is buried in the second grave from the northeast corner of Lot 16, Block i-1 in Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery. Minneapolis Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery History Page; Alley Newspaper (Oct. 2007)

Who was Eugene Williams? This black teenager’s death sparked Chicago’s 1919 race riot, but few facts are known about Williams himself. He died in the waters of Lake Michigan on the afternoon of July 27, 1919, after a white man threw rocks at him — a tragedy that spiraled into a spate of violence lasting several days, with 38 people dead. At the time, when newspapers reported on the riot, they mentioned Eugene Williams’s name, but nothing about his story, his parents, how his death changed their lives. As far as I can tell, after searching through microfilmed and digitized newspapers, the press didn’t bother to answer those questions. This was typical of journalism in the early 20th century. Few newspapers reported in depth about the lives of black Chicagoans. But even the Chicago Defender, a nationally prominent black newspaper, said very little about Williams. Furthermore, newspapers rarely told detailed stories about anyone’s lives. The Defender did publish a picture of Eugene Williams on August 30, 1919, a little more than a month after his death. A smiling young man in formal clothing is dimly visible on the microfilm and digital scans. The short text below the picture noted that Williams had lived at 3921 South Prairie Avenue, the same address that the Defender mentioned in its first report about his death. That’s one of the only scraps of information published about Williams at the time. “Little is known of his parents or his early life,” according to the African American National Biography. Nevertheless, Williams was considered important enough to merit a short biographical entry in that 2006 reference collection. In 1919, Eve L. Ewing’s new book of poems about the riot, she imagines a black man named James Crawford witnessing Eugene Williams’s drowning. Crawford sees Williams clinging to a railroad tie in the water. He muses that no one would be saying Eugene’s name if he hadn’t drowned. “… but he was somebody, / because I saw the whites of his eyes / before he let go of the railroad tie. / So I spoke it, his name came out of me, / and I fired.” It isn’t known whether the real-life James Crawford witnessed Williams’s death. But he reportedly did fire a gun at police later that day. A cop killed Crawford — the second death of the riot. As the poem’s narrator says, Eugene Williams was somebody. And as I was researching my recent Chicago magazine article chronicling the race riot, I found a few more details about him. During my reporting, I contacted William M. Tuttle Jr., the author of the 1970 book Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919. Now 81, he’s a University of Kansas professor emeritus. Tuttle agreed to mail me the transcripts of some interviews he’d conducted in the late 1960s for his book. Among them was a conversation with John Turner Harris, a friend of Eugene’s who’d been there on the day he died. In them, Tuttle asked Harris, “Can you tell me much about Eugene Williams, what kind of guy he was?” Harris responded: “He was just a regular kid like us — just a regular kid. He had just graduated from school. He was a pretty smart boy. That’s all I know. As I say, we met him and we liked him.” Author Claire Hartfield’s 2018 book A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 includes a reproduction of Eugene Williams’s death certificate from the Cook County clerk’s office. Here’s what we know about Williams from that document: He worked as a porter at a grocery store. He was born on March 10, 1902, in Georgia. His father, John W. Williams, was born in South Carolina. “Unknown” is written in the space for “Maiden Name of Mother,” but the document does say Eugene’s mother was born in Georgia. Other records show that her first name was Luella. The death certificate also says that Eugene was buried at Lincoln Cemetery on August 5, 1919, nine days after his death. The undertaker was Charles S. Jackson of 3317 South State Street, a black Pittsburgh native who was well regarded in the African American community. (After 145 years in business, becoming America’s longest-running black-owned funeral home, the Charles S. Jackson Funeral Home’s final South Side location closed in 2012.) During his interview, Harris recalled his friend’s funeral, explaining why he never told investigators about the drowning he’d witnessed. He was afraid, he said, that his mother would get angry if she found out he’d disobeyed her by going swimming. “I’ve never told it to the police or anything,” Harris told Tuttle. “We were forbidden to go swimming on Sunday, and I was more afraid of my mother than anyone. They would look for us and ask who the boys were with him. We went to the funeral, and the mother knew me. And when I talked to her at the funeral, I told her how it happened.” Harris believed that Luella Williams later conveyed his story to the authorities. But it’s unknown exactly who testified when Cook County coroner Peter Hoffman held an inquest to determine the cause of Eugene’s death. Many documents about the race riot are missing — including 5,584 pages of testimony that witnesses gave at coroner’s inquests for the 38 homicides. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request in November 2018 with Cook County, asking for any surviving documents connected with those deaths. Five days later, they’d found coroner’s jury verdict forms for 35 of the 38 homicides. In its verdict concluding that Eugene Williams had drowned, the coroner’s jury described him as “a peaceable citizen in bathing suit.” But what about those thousands of pages of testimony? Rachel Dailey, the administrative assistant in Toni Preckwinkle’s office who handled my FOIA request, told me via email: “After an extensive search we have not located any additional records responsive to your request. We will continue to search for records and contact you if and when they are located.” Five months later, I asked if any additional documents had turned up. “No luck finding anything else,” she replied. The coroner’s jury described Williams as “an athlete and expert swimmer.” Did someone testify to the jury about Eugene’s athletic prowess? In his interview, Harris said: “None of us were accomplished swimmers, but we could dive underwater and come up. We would push the raft and swim, kick, dive, and play around. As long as the raft was there, we were safe.” The story Harris told about that raft offers another glimpse of what Eugene Williams was like. “We made a little raft, we worked on that a long time,” Harris said. “About four different groups of about 20 boys worked on this raft for about two months. It was a nice size — it was about 14 by 9 feet. Oh, it was a tremendous thing.” It’s likely that Eugene and his friends were just looking for ways to spend their free time. They knew that white people used the 29th Street beach, while black people used a section of beach farther north, near 25th Street. Luella’s name appears in Chicago City Council minutes from 1923, when the aldermen voted to settle lawsuits filed by Luella and other relatives of race riot victims, paying them $4,500 each. The lawsuit notes that Luella’s son was earning $18 a week at the time of his death — about $460 in 2019 dollars. The document includes a space where the lawyers should have written the name of Eugene’s employer, but they left it blank. The lawsuit also describes Luella as Eugene’s “only heir and next of kin, who was solely dependent upon him for her support, aid, and maintenance, and who has by reason of his death been deprived of the said support, aid, and maintenance.” This suggests her husband had also died. Using information from Ancestry.com and an Illinois State Archives deaths database, I pinpointed a date for John Williams’s death and requested a Cook County death certificate. It showed that he died of aortic regurgitation on March 31, 1921 — only a year and a half after his son’s death. “About” 36 when he died, he’d been born in 1884 or 1885 in South Carolina, just two decades after slaves were emancipated. John’s parents, Wesley and Lilla Williams, were also from South Carolina, probably born around the time of the Civil War. John had a job that was common for black men of his era, working as a dining car waiter on the Rock Island Line. The death certificate says that John had lived in Chicago for 12 years, meaning that he’d arrived sometime in 1908 or 1909, when his son, Eugene, was six or seven years old. That’s several years before what historians regard as the beginning of the Great Migration of African Americans. Looking through Chicago city directories, I found a possible match for the Williams family in the 1912 directory. A porter named John W. Williams was living with a Luella Williams at 3512 South Calumet Avenue, where a North Carolina native named J.T.N. Patterson rented out rooms. It appears that Eugene had no siblings, or at least none that were living with his parents at the time of his death. Census records show that Luella was born in 1888 in Georgia, but her maiden name and ancestry are a mystery. It’s also unknown when or where she died, or how she spent the remainder of her life. (She might be one of the six people named Luella Williams who died in Chicago between 1923 and 1943. There were also seven people listed as “Lula Williams” who died in Chicago during that period.) Conjuring Eugene Williams’s childhood experience takes some guesswork. Most black Southerners moved north to escape racist Jim Crow laws and the threat of lynching, while hoping to find better jobs, schools, and homes. On one hand, Defender articles from Eugene’s childhood describe a vibrant community of black Chicagoans living on the South Side at the time. On the other, complaints were common about shoddy and unsanitary housing. How much racism did Eugene experience during his life — as a child in the South, and later as a youth on the South Side? Black Chicagoans faced insults, threats of violence, and even bombings when they moved into neighborhoods previously dominated by white people. Harris recalled white gangs such as Ragen’s Colts attacking black youths whenever they ventured into white neighborhoods. It’s possible that more documents on Eugene Williams are out there. Digitization has made has it far easier to search historic newspapers and genealogical records, but many aren’t available online. Some aren’t even on microfilm. And it’s conceivable that somewhere, someone has old letters or diaries sitting in an attic or closet that would shed light on Williams’s story. In May, I called the offices of Lincoln Cemetery, asking for the location of Eugene Williams’s grave. A cemetery employee looked him up and gave me these coordinates: Section 5, Lot 30, Row 6, Grave 36. “Is that the boy who died in the riot?” she asked. I drove out to Alsip the following morning to visit Lincoln Cemetery. Among the famous black Chicagoans who are buried there: poet Gwendolyn Brooks, Defender founding editor Robert Sengstacke Abbott, aviator Bessie Coleman, congressman George Washington Murray, actor Richard Berry Harrison, Negro Leagues baseball star Rube Foster, and musicians Albert Ammons, Gene “Jug” Ammons, Lil Hardin Armstrong, “Big Bill” Broonzy, Johnny Dodds, Baby Dodds, Al Hibbler, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Jimmy Reed, Jimmy Yancey, and Marvin Yancy. The cemetery opened in 1911, eight years before Eugene’s death. An “Announcement Extraordinary!” in the Defender declared, “This cemetery will be dedicated by the colored citizens of Chicago and vicinity for the burial of their relatives and friends.” I spent an hour walking around Section 5, looking for Eugene Williams’s headstone, without any success. Then an employee in the cemetery office dispatched a groundskeeper to help me. The burial plot is in a corner of the cemetery without any trees or shrubs. There are no monuments visible above the grass in — only a few headstones here and there, sitting flush with the lawn and sometimes hidden beneath it. As I walked down the rows, I noticed that all of the visible markers were from 1918 and 1919. When I was close to the spot where Williams’s grave should be judging from what I’d seen on the groundskeeper’s map, I noticed a marker for someone named Ira Henry, who died in 1919. I recognized the name as that of another race riot victim. A black laborer who’d moved to Chicago from Mississippi, Henry was shot and killed by two police officers near 49th and State Street after he’d shot one of the cops, according to the coroner’s jury. Like Luella Williams, Henry’s family received a $4,500 settlement after suing the city of Chicago. There were no markers in the grass next to Henry’s, so I went to the cemetery office and asked the employees to look up Henry’s name. A woman looked through the rows of little yellow cards and pulled out the one with his name on it: Section 5, Lot 30, Row 6, Grave 35 — right next to Eugene Williams’s unmarked resting place, 36. A woman in the cemetery office said that somebody else who’d recently inquired about Williams had talked about getting a headstone for him. Currently, there is a marker bearing Williams’s name elsewhere, not far from where he died in Chicago. It’s on a boulder near the spot where 29th Street would hit the lakefront if it continued east of Lake Shore Drive. The plaque, created in 2009 and sponsored by students from York High School in Elmhurst with the Chicago Park District, is “Dedicated to all the victims of the race riot that began near this place.” Along with a description of Williams’s death and the riot, the plaque features quotations from the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The boulder is easy to miss if you aren’t looking for it. It sits in the grass near a walking trail a short distance west of the water — south of McCormick Place and north of the Margaret Burroughs Beach at 31st Street. The landscape has changed since 1919, as landfill was added along the shore. The shoreline where Williams, Harris, and their friends waded into the water was approximately where Lake Shore Drive is today, and the place where Williams drowned was probably farther north. When I stopped by the boulder in late July, butterflies were flitting nearby amid milkweed, prairie grass, and flowers. A handful of Chicagoans of various races were enjoying the mild, sunny weather that Monday. Some sat on the concrete embankments near Lake Michigan’s waves, others strolled or jogged on the nearby paths. In front of the rock with Eugene Williams’s name, someone had left a circle of flowers. Sources: Searching for Eugene Williams, His killing catalyzed Chicago’s 1919 race riot, but little else is known about the teenager’s life on the South Side, article written by Robert Loerzel (08/01/2019) chicagomag.com

The Nacirema Club was a social club located at 6118 30th Street in Detroit, Michigan; it was the first African-American social club in Michigan. In 2011 the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A black middle class population grew rapidly in Detroit during and just after World War I. The relatively high wages of the factory workers meant that they could support professionals, skilled craftsmen and a variety of musicians and entertainers. At this time, men’s clubs were popular. Black men wished to enjoy their amenities such clubs offered but knew that prestigious downtown clubs such as the Detroit Club and the Detroit Athletic Club would not admit African Americans. Twenty-one black men in the Tireman neighborhood decided, in 1922, to form a club that would serve their needs. They selected the name Nacirema (American spelled backwards), perhaps to imply that the city’s white leaders had inverted or contorted the American system of values. Sources: Detroit: The History and Future of the Motor City; Michigan Public Library

Surviving members of the Baker family, (L to R) Sarah, Lincoln, the widow Lavinia, Willie, Cora, and Rosa Baker. With the financial assistance of William Lloyd Garrison II, the son of the late abolitionist, and at the urging of many concerned African Americans in Boston and the North, the surviving members of the Baker family moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts late in 1899. Over the next twenty years, four of the five children fell victim to tuberculosis. When her last remaining child passed away in 1942, Lavinia Baker returned to South Carolina. She died in 1947 in Florence County, less than twenty-five miles away from Lake City. The Lynching of Postmaster Frazier Baker and His Infant Daughter Julia in Lake City, South Carolina, in 1898 and its Aftermath -- Shortly before one o’clock on the morning of February 22, 1898, Frazier Baker, an African-American postmaster in the predominantly white hamlet of Lake City, South Carolina, awoke to discover a raging fire deliberately set in back of the small wooden structure that housed both his family and the town’s post office. Caught between the rising flames and a group of hostile and well-armed white men outside the building, Baker, his wife, and their six children sought unsuccessfully to douse the blaze. As they prepared to flee the post office, the mob opened fire. The postmaster was shot several times and collapsed, fatally wounded. The barrage of gunfire continued unabated, and the three eldest Baker children were all seriously injured before they could escape through the open door into the night. Baker’s wife Lavinia attempted to follow with her infant daughter Julia, but a bullet passed through her hand, killing the baby and tearing her from her mother’s arms. Struck in the leg by a second bullet, Lavinia Baker collapsed beside the burning building. The mob then dispersed as quietly as it had appeared. As flames consumed the wooden structure, local African Americans drawn by the gunfire offered sanctuary in their homes to the new widow and her five surviving children. For many, the word lynching conjures up images of victims killed by hanging, but the term encompasses the taking of individual life by a mob under a wide variety of extralegal circumstances. In addition to the traditional noose, mobs riddled their victims with bullets, burned them to death, and mutilated their bodies. The victims of were not always black; whites and Hispanics were often lynched when accused of cattle rustling on the nation’s Southwestern frontier in the nineteenth century. But the overwhelming majority of lynching victims were African-American males in the southern United States and the vast majority of lynch mob participants were whites. In the peak years of racial violence, between 1889 and 1899, one person was lynched every other day. An increasing number of the victims were black males in the Deep South states, many of them accused by white mobs of having made sexual advances against white women. Pioneering African-American anti-lynching activists like Ida Wells-Barnett argued as early as 1892 that the widespread charges of rape were unfounded. Historians and other investigators of lynching have since confirmed her assertions, conclusively demonstrating that the alleged “epidemic of rape” did not in fact exist. The timing of Frazier and Julia Baker’s deaths in 1898 places the Lake City lynching on the cusp between the peak in lynchings in the late-1880s and 1890s and the cementing of de jure segregation in the South. Four years of Civil War and a decade of Reconstruction had failed to remold the South along lines of racial equality. In the two decades following the “redemption” of the South by native white leadership, the door to equality wedged partially open by blacks and Union troops during Reconstruction was shut closed forcibly by a unified white South. Suffering under the stigma of regional cultural and political marginalization and entering a period of increasing economic difficulty, many frustrated whites found an outlet in reaction. They targeted their rage against blacks, believing they sought to abandon their traditionally subservient place in their quest for equality. In this climate of reaction, whites lynched thousands of African Americans. The widely-held assumption in the white South and the nation at large at the turn of the century was that the national government would do nothing to stop the lynching of blacks or to punish mob participants. Despite anti-lynching sentiment among the Republican party’s rank and file, successive presidential administrations were unwilling to challenge the South on the issue, and Congress and the federal courts typically followed the executive lead. Many in the national government excused their inactivity by arguing variations on the theme of “federalism” -- that it was the role of the states to control the lawlessness of white lynch mobs -- but in so doing they conveniently overlooked the constitutional precedents set by Reconstruction. White northerners were convinced that any attempt by federal authorities to interfere in the sadistic customs of their white southern neighbors would subvert the ongoing process of sectional rapprochement (an altar on which the rights of African Americans were being sacrificed as the nineteenth century drew to a close). The initial response to the lynching in Lake City was a telling exception to this pattern of unchecked violence. The brutality of the attack on the postmaster and his family elicited outraged protests from across the nation. Baker’s status as a federally appointed postmaster heightened the stakes in the eyes of a national government ordinarily unmoved by the lynching of blacks. The timing of the Baker lynching on the eve of war with Spain also catalyzed African-American protest that had remained diffuse in earlier lynchings of lesser-known victims. Although systematic disfranchisement would ultimately rob many African Americans of the ballot, even as late as the 1890s blacks still remained an important constituency for the national Republican Party (their clout within the “Party of Lincoln” was in fact responsible for Frazier Baker having originally secured a patronage appointment as postmaster of Lake City in 1897). President McKinley and his political advisers wanted to preserve a politically united homefront as tensions over Cuba ultimately led to a U.S. declaration of war against Spain later in the spring of 1898, and both white and black Americans rallied to the flag. One of the most interesting aspects of the Baker case was the uncharacteristic way in which many southern whites outside of the immediate community of Lake City reacted to the lynching. Many white southerners at the turn of the century vigorously defended mob “justice.” They claimed that it was necessary to punish black men who they alleged raped white women, that the legal system was cumbersome and might not mete out a sentence severe enough, and that a trial would only compound the “outrage” already suffered by the female victims of these alleged assaults. In fact, the vast majority of lynchings had nothing to do with the crime of rape. Lynching was first and foremost about a racial majority violently policing the color line against blacks who whites deemed had stepped out of their “place” of enforced subservience and inferiority in political, economic, and social relations. But in spite of the facts, white defenders of lynching almost always returned to the explosive charge of rape. That this generalized accusation was groundless did little to diminish southern whites’ obsession with what they referred to as the “nameless crime.” In their lurid imaginations, whites saw black men as sexual predators and would-be “despoilers” of white homes. In the case of Lake City, however, a black home had been despoiled by whites guilty of the murder of an infant girl and her father. And Baker, like so many other black lynching victims, had not been guilty of rape, not even accused of it. Local whites targeted him solely on the basis of his insistence on serving out his commission as a black postmaster in a largely white community. In the weeks preceding the fatal attack, Lake City whites had accused Frazier Baker of administrative incompetence and “ignorance,” had boycotted the post office, then burned it down at an earlier location. On two separate occasions federal post office investigators found no evidence to substantiate the townspeople’s claims; clearly what infuriated whites was Baker’s race, and his elevation to a position of authority in the town. The men who joined the mob in Lake City no doubt saw Frazier Baker as the embodiment of the stereotypical “uppity nigger” who failed to respect the etiquette of “knowing one’s place” in the post-Reconstruction South, an etiquette carefully-constructed and ruthlessly-enforced by whites. In having the temerity to accept the appointment as postmaster, they reasoned, Baker forfeited his right to live in a “white man’s country.” But in the aftermath of the lynching many white southerners were troubled by their inability to saddle the postmaster with a “crime” that would “excuse” lynching according to the popular notions of the day. In a sense, whites were forced by circumstances to criticize the specific lynching in Lake City because it threatened to undermine the legitimacy they conferred on the entire practice of lynching. By arguing that Lake City was a “bad” lynching, white southerners tacitly endorsed mob activity under different circumstances. When many newspapers in the South accused the lynchers of “cowardice” for targeting an entire family in what some likened to a “turkey shoot,” they were ostensibly making an argument against lynching -- albeit one rooted in a gendered code of chivalry that allowed other lynchings to be seen by whites as a manly defense of female virtue. But the implicit corollary was that attacks carried out by the light of day directed against individual black men rather than entire families were perfectly acceptable. The reluctance of most southern whites to condone the murders of Frazier and Julia Baker presented a chink in the armor of white supremacy through which early anti-lynching activists -- and ultimately the federal government -- might attack lynching. For once Washington replaced rhetorical equivocation with a forceful response. The reaction of the federal government grew less out of moral outrage, however, than in response to the political pressure skillfully applied by African Americans. Anti-lynching crusader Ida Wells-Barnett and U.S. Representative George White of North Carolina’s “Black Second” Congressional District, the last black remaining in Congress two decades after the end of Reconstruction, helped to mobilize grassroots protest aimed at forcing the government’s hand. Blacks in South Carolina, throughout the South, and in northern cities attended mass meetings protesting the lynching of the Bakers and signed memorials demanding a federal effort to bring the guilty parties to justice. Fourteen months later, after an extensive investigation, federal prosecutors arraigned thirteen white men in federal court in Charleston, South Carolina on charges of conspiracy to deprive Frazier Baker of his civil rights. Since South Carolina’s legal system had failed to take any effective action to apprehend the Bakers’ lynchers, the federal government relied on a series of Congressional statutes collectively known as the Enforcement Acts to prosecute mob members for felonies committed pursuant to a conspiracy against Baker. The Enforcement Acts, passed during Reconstruction in 1870 and 1871, were intended to protect African Americans’ civil rights as guaranteed by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments from infringement by southern whites. After a federal grand jury ruled there was sufficient evidence to try the accused lynchers, however, the government’s attorneys found their best efforts stymied by the resolve of the white Lake City community to protect its own. In the subsequent trial, friends and relatives of the accused perjured themselves repeatedly to provide alibis for the men. As closing arguments began, the U.S. District Court proceedings in Charleston degenerated into a grand political circus. Lawyers for the thirteen white defendants largely ignored the government’s well-constructed case and even glossed over the evidence they had presented in rebuttal; riddled with internal contradictions, it had been equally damning. Instead, they resorted to a naked appeal to the racist sensibilities of an all-white jury. (Three years after South Carolina’s Constitutional Convention of 1895 stripped the state’s African Americans of the ballot, blacks were already being systematically excluded from juries.) White supremacy, the lawyers argued, demanded acquittal of the defendants. The government lawyers responded to the legal farce with lily-white protestations of their own. In effect, they agreed with the defendants that the Republicans’ appointment of Baker to the postmastership of Lake City had been a grievous error, but they insisted mob rule was an affront to the civilization whites professed to be defending. On that basis, and with the overwhelming weight of the evidence, the jurors should convict those accused of lynching Frazier and Julia Baker. In his final appeal to the twelve impaneled white men, the chief prosecutor spoke eloquently of “outraged justice.” Without true justice -- as opposed to the grisly sentences meted out by bloodthirsty lynch mobs -- southerners might just as well “shut the school houses, burn the books, tear down the churches and admit to the world that Anglo-Saxon civilization is a failure” (Charleston News and Courier, 21 April 1899). After twenty-two hours of deliberation, an irreconcilably divided jury produced a mistrial; evidence suggested approximately half of the jurors had voted to convict the white men for the lynching of the Bakers. The federal government never resumed prosecution of the case. The proceedings in Charleston had been relatively unusual in that whites were so rarely brought to trial at all for the crime of lynching. It was not uncommon for coroner’s juries in the South to conduct cursory investigations into lynchings, but the inquests, often composed of participants in the mob itself, were apt to be open mockeries of justice. One jury investigating a lynching reputedly rendered the solemn verdict: “the deceased came to his death by swinging in the air”; another, “the deceased came to his death by taking too great a bite of hemp rope.” Within this context, the willingness of a federal grand jury made up of white southerners to indict the lynchers and the refusal of a second jury to grant outright acquittals in the trial might be considered evidence of progress. But any optimism in this respect should be tempered by the knowledge that the federal government rarely took such an aggressive stance against lynching following the Baker case, and the turn of the century saw ongoing lynchings joined by an even more deadly phenomenon: “race riots” in Phoenix, South Carolina, Wilmington, North Carolina, New Orleans, Atlanta, and other cities. These explosions of violence left scores of African Americans dead and were less “riots” than massacres, clearly illuminating the extent to which some southern whites were willing to go to perpetuate white supremacy. From the time of the attack on the Bakers in 1898, African-American anti-lynching advocates in Boston considered asking the surviving family members to leave Charleston -- where they had lived while awaiting the outcome of the trial -- to settle in the North. In late July of 1899, a young white woman named Lillian Clayton Jewett electrified a Boston meeting of African Americans when she offered to lead personally a campaign to "rescue" the Bakers, who were reportedly in dire financial straits. Jewett's appearance touched off an acrimonious debate between those black Bostonians who supported her efforts and others who resented the sudden intrusion of an unfamiliar white woman into what had been an exclusively African-American effort. Against the wishes of many of the city's black elite, Jewett secretly boarded a train heading south. In Charleston she convinced the Bakers of her good intentions, and the family agreed to accompany her. On the trip north Jewett rested in a sleeping car, while in the day coach the Bakers struggled to make out the charred ruins of the Lake City post office when the train passed within yards of the site of the lynching. Jewett's African-American supporters in the North likened her to Harriet Beecher Stowe, an earlier white heroine of the anti-slavery movement. By bringing the Bakers out of the benighted South, they eulogized, she had performed veritable "underground railroad work." Jewett appeared with the Bakers before large gatherings in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine. Holding up the family's suffering as an object lesson against lynching, she strongly denounced President McKinley for his failure to take a public stand against mob rule in the South. Audiences responded enthusiastically to Jewett's political message, but they were less eager to meet her request for donations to provide for the Bakers' future. When contributions continued to drop off in subsequent meetings, Jewett's crusade quickly faltered. In the South, white critics following media coverage of Jewett charged her with exploiting the Bakers' misery for profit. A black nurse who had accompanied the family from Charleston voiced similar concerns: "The Bakers had not come North for exhibition purposes . . . they are not to be treated like monkeys in a cage and trotted around from place to place" (Boston Post, 8 August 1899). Whatever Jewett's true intentions, the Bakers soon realized that the controversy surrounding the young white woman was harming their chances of obtaining economic support. In September Lavinia Baker made a direct appeal to the public for support. Interpreting the plea as a rebuff, Jewett declared herself finished with the family. William Lloyd Garrison II, the son of the late abolitionist, raised twelve hundred dollars to provide a home for the Bakers near Boston. Glad to escape the notoriety that had followed them for nearly two years, the survivors of the Lake City lynching finally retired from the nation's newspaper headlines. During the next twenty years, four of the Baker children fell victim to tuberculosis, a disease endemic among Boston's poorer African Americans. When her last child passed away in 1942, Lavinia Baker returned to South Carolina. She died in 1947 in Florence County, less than twenty-five miles away from Lake City. Where discussed at all, the Lake City case has typically appeared as little more than a historical footnote in most accounts of South Carolina history. As scholar Joel Williamson noted recently, such historical amnesia is not unusual where lynching is concerned. “Arguably, southern whites lynching blacks in the turn-of-the-century South while northern whites looked on is as close as America has ever come to experiencing our own holocaust.” And just as there are some who continue to deny the irrefutable evidence of Nazi genocide, the extent of lynching in America’s past is a subject on which few care to dwell. Ours is a culture, Williamson writes, that is “amazingly effective in erasing some parts of its history and creating others.” For a brief moment in 1898, the assurance that white men could lynch with total impunity, provided their victims were black, had been threatened by organized African-American protest and a federal government prodded into action by the intensity of that protest. The flame flickered and died, however, as southern whites closed ranks to protect their own. Ultimately, the inability of the federal government to bring the Bakers’ lynchers to justice reaffirmed its lack of political willpower where enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution was concerned. After the miscarriage of justice in the Charleston trial, the national government slipped back into its former complacency. African Americans and a courageous minority of whites continued to wage a spirited public campaign against lynching, but in the ensuing decades they were all too often voices in the wilderness. In the aftermath of the lynching of Postmaster Frazier Baker and his daughter Julia, the pattern of color-conscious justice -- or injustice -- remained unchanged. Sources: David C. Carter, Assistant Professor of History, Auburn University, Alabama; J.E. Purdy, Photographer (Boston, MA);