W. E. B. Du Bois, F. B. Ransom, the Madam Walker Company, and Black Business Leadership in the 1930s

Mark David Higbee"

From the 1870s to the 1930s, the development of business en- terprise was widely seen as the one essential ingredient for Afri- can-American progress. Yet neither African-American business enterprise nor the political roles of black entrepreneurs have been adequately studied by historians. Accounts of African-American ec- onomic hardships during the Great Depression have slighted the important political debates that these hardships produced. Simi- larly, writings on W. E. B. Du Bois, the black scholar and founder of the twentieth-century civil rights protest tradition, have ne- glected his distinctive vision of African-American business enter- prise. Consequently, a little known 1937-1938 dispute between Du Bois and Freeman B. Ransom, an African-American businessman and Indianapolis community leader, demands attention. Ransom and Du Bois viewed the proper aims of business enterprise in rad- ically opposing ways. The Ransom-Du Bois dispute provides an op- portunity to examine the differing ways these two leaders approached the problems of the Depression as well as how African Americans reconsidered older ideas of black business enterprise and political leadership. Studying the 1930s is acutely important because during that decade faith in business as the basis for Afri- can-American leadership was supplanted by political and labor strategies.

* Mark Higbee is completing a dissertation on W.E.B. Du Bois at Columbia University, New York. He thanks the following people for their comments on vari- ous drafts of this essay: Barbara Bair, Eric Bates, Martha Biondi, Jonathan Bir- enbaum, Elizabeth Blackmar, Eric Foner, Wilma Gibbs, Sarah Henry, Kate Levin, Judith Stein, the members of Col'umbia University's U.S. History Dissertation Group, and the anonymous readers for the Indiana Magazine of History. An early version was presented at the Indiana Historical Society's annual meeting in Novem- ber, 1991.

INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, LXXXIX (June, 1993). 8) 1993, Trustees of Indiana University. 102 Indiana Magazine of History

The issues that undergirded the Du Bois-Ransom dispute of 1937-1938 were a reprise of the famous Booker T. Washington-Du Bois debate of the early 1900s.’ Washington and Du Bois had de- bated whether blacks should accommodate to America’s segrega- tionist racial order. Thirty years later Ransom and Du Bois disagreed on the equally basic question of how much of America’s existing social and economic system should be embraced and how much rejected by African Americans. On December 18, 1937, Du Bois used his column in the Pitts- burgh Courier to criticize the Indianapolis-based Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company, the famous African-American hair and beauty products enterprise. The attack was part of Du Bois’s long-running critique of what he perceived as the failure of black businesses to address the basic needs of black Americans. Although Du Bois praised the accomplishments of the late “Ma- dame Walker and her hair culture business” as “epoch-making,” he attacked the firm: “Since Madame Walker’s death the business has fallen, I have been told, mainly into the hands of white capi- talists.” Further, the company had based itself “on the usual ex- ploitation of labor.” Du Bois suggested an alternative vision of how the business might have developed: a little broader knowledge and far-seeing advice might easily have turned the Walker hair culture business during her [Walker’s] life into a co-operative enter- prise and this co-operation, instead of being simply a group capitalistic movement, could have been given the form of a socialistic mass movement, not only in hair culture but in other lines. What is true of the Walker business can be true of the whole inner economic organization of American Negroes2 Ransom was the Walker Company’s manager and attorney. In an open letter to Du Bois published in the Pittsburgh Courier, he angrily protested the attack. “There is not now, or has there ever been,” Ransom insisted, “one share of stock of the Mme. C.J. Walker Mfg. Company owned by any white man” or “ ‘by white capitalists.’ ” Only “members of the Walker family” had ever held shares in the firm. While Ransom ignored Du Bois’s comments about cooperative business enterprise and Du Bois’s broader cri-

See chapter 3 in William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago, 1903), and Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tus- kegee, 1901-1915 (New York, 1983). Du Bois’s column, “Madame Walker,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 18, 1937 (hereafter cited as Du Bois, “Madame Walker”). Du Bois’s newspaper columns have been reprinted in Herbert Apthek’er, ed., Newspaper Columns by W.E. B Du Bois (2 vols., White Plains, N.Y., 1986); “Madame Walker” is in Volume I, 258-59. Du Bois’s allegation that the Walker Company exploited its workers was not directly challenged by Freeman B. Ransom, and Du Bois never reiterated it. The actual relations between the firm and its employees call out for study. FREEMANB. RANSOM

Courtesy Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis. 104 Indiana Magazine of History

tique of black business enterprise, he demanded an apology and a published c~rrection.~ Emanating from the nation’s most prominent black intellec- tual and appearing in what was the nation’s leading African-Amer- ican newspaper (the Courier’s 1938 circulation was a quarter million copies a week), Du Bois’s allegation that whites controlled the firm contradicted the image that the Walker Company was a company run and owned by African Americans and an employer that created opportunity and self-respect for its black employees and agent^.^ And Du Bois was wrong: “white capitalists” did not control the firm. Du Bois replied privately to Ransom on December 22, 1937: I am sorry that my reference to your company in the ‘Pittsburgh Courier’ did not altogether please you. You will remember that I did not say that the business had fallen into the hands of white capitalists. I said that I had been told it had. Nor was there anything in my statement or intention to decry or injure your business in any way. Most of us, are engaged in work which is directed wholly or in part by white capital. That fact in itself is not at all derogatory. I merely mentioned the rumor in this case because the matter was of importance in the possible development of co- operative business among 118.5 The letter hardly satisfied Ransom. He again wrote Du Bois, de- manding a published correction and hinting at a lawsuit. He also scoffed at Du Bois’s claim that he meant nothing “derogatory.” The purpose of Du Bois’s comments on the Walker Company’s pur- ported fall to “white capitalists,” Ransom believed, was to blame its management for failing to advance African-American economic development. But Du Bois was unmoved by Ransom’s protest. In early January, 1938, Du Bois told the Courier that he had no plans to apologize or make any admission of error.6 Two days later, Ransom wrote Du Bois a third letter “to in- quire as to just what you plan to do before I take further action in the matter.”7 Ransom’s threat finally moved Du Bois to seek advice from Arthur Spingarn, a lawyer, a top official of the National As-

Freeman B. Ransom to Du Bois, December 20, 1937, reel 48, frame 327, mi- crofilm edition, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts). Reel and frame references to the Du Bois Papers are hereafter cited together, as in this case for example, “48:327.”F. B. Ransom, “Whites Have Never Owned One Share of Stock in Mme. C.J. Walker Co., F.B. Ransom Writes in reply to Article Penned by Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 1, 1938, sec. 2, p. 2. ‘Du Bois, “Madame Walker”; and Ransom to Du Bois, December 20, 1937, 48:327, Du Bois Papers. For the Courier’s circulation figures, see Rayford Logan’s biographical sketch of Robert Vann, the paper’s publisher, in Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, eds., Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York, 19821, 615. Du Bois to Ransom, December 22, 1937, 48:328, Du Bois Papers. Ransom to Du Bois, December 28, 1937,48:329, ibid.; Du Bois to Ira F. Lewis, January 5, 1938, 49:425, ibid. Ransom to Du Bois, January 7, 1938, 49:794, ibid. W.E.B. DLJ BOIS(1868-1963) IN HIS SEVENTIES

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Courtesy of the Archives, University Library, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. 106 Indiana Magazine of History

sociation for the Advancement of Colored People, and a long-time Du Bois friend. Spingarn warned Du Bois that a court could find his statement libelous and injurious to the Walker Company. At the very least, such a suit would be expensive to defend. Spingarn also told Du Bois that “the moral side of it requires some form of correction.”8 With this stern warning from an old friend, Du Bois retreated. In the Courier of January 23, 1938, Du Bois retracted his claim that white capital controlled the Walker Company: “I am glad to withdraw the statement and I am sorry if what I said did any harm.” Du Bois added that he was pleased with the firm’s suc- cess and with its having remained “under Negro control.” This apology ended the exchanges between Ransom and Du Bois. Ran- som wrote Du Bois that he considered the matter closed. Privately, Du Bois explained his own reversal by telling the Courier‘s man- ager that Ransom had been “obstreperous and I am trying to pla- cate him.”9 Du Bois had failed to investigate what he had heard about the Walker Company before publishing it and had tried to avoid ad- mitting error. Ransom, understandably, wanted the record set straight. In truth, however, the Du Bois-Ransom dispute went far deeper than the narrow question of fact. The controversy reflected antagonisms born of these leaders’ fundamentally different ideas of the proper function of black business enterprise and their conflict- ing views of the proper aims of African-American leadership. In order to understand the roots of the dispute, the history of the Walker Company and the careers and political views of Ransom and Du Bois must be examined. Ransom adhered to a conservative, Booker T. Washington-in- spired vision of black business enterprise, which held that “the race” would advance by following in the footsteps of successful Af- rican-American businessmen. (Washington conceived of such lead- ers and business entrepreneurs as men, not women: in 1912 he tried to prevent Madam C.J. Walker, already successful in busi- ness, from addressing the National Negro Business League Con- vention.) In the years between the defeat of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the Great Depression, a consensus existed among edu-

Du Bois to Arthur Spingarn, January 10, 1938, Spingarn to Du Bois, January 12, 1938, 49:696-97, ibid. 9 Du Bois’s January 23, 1938, Courier column, “Mme. C.J. Walker Manufactur- ing Company,” (in Aptheker, Newspaper Columns of W.E. B. Du Bois, I, 262-63); Ransom to Du Bois, January 19, 1938, 49:796, Du Bois Papers; Du Bois to Ira F. Lewis, January 11, 1938, 49:425, ib’id. Du Bois wrote F.E. DeFranz, head of Indi- anapolis’s black Senate Avenue YMCA shortly after speaking there in February, 1938, to thank him for a good audience and “for your diplomacy in the case of Mr. Ransom.” Just what this “diplomacy” involved cannot be ascertained from the re- cords available. Du Bois to F. E. DeFranz, February 21, 1938, 492386, ibid. The Madam Walker Company 107

cated African Americans that the advancement of “the race” de- pended on the development of black business enterprises. As the New York Age, a black newspaper, stated: “There is commercial opportunity everywhere. Let us hammer away. The almighty dol- lar is the magic wand that knocks the bottom out of race preju- dice.” Ransom aptly expressed this view in 1924: “Business opportunities are opening up everywhere, the gates are swinging open, a race has seen the light, indeed no power on earth is strong enough to halt the resistless waves of the ever advancing Negro.”lo Ransom was born in Grenada, Mississippi, in 1882. Educated in the public schools of Grenada and at Walden University Law School in Nashville, Ransom settled in Indianapolis in 1910 and was admitted to the state bar. That same year, Madam C.J. Walker (1867-1919) moved her hair and skin care products com- pany to Indianapolis. There she bought a house and opened a fac- tory to produce her company’s products. She also took the young Ransom as a boarder. He soon started doing legal work for her, beginning a professional relationship between Ransom and the Walker Company that lasted until his death in 1947.” Madam C.J. Walker was born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 near Delta, Louisiana. She was orphaned at seven, married at fourteen, had a daugther, A’Lelia, and was widowed at twenty. After her husband’s death, Breedlove moved with her young daughter to St. Louis, where she worked as a laundress. This exhausting and poorly paid work, with its constant exposure to soap, dirt, and hot steam, dried her skin and hair and caused premature hair loss.12 Similar occupational hazards affected countless other African-

lo For the National Negro Business League incident, see A’Lelia Perry Bundles, Madam C.J. Walker (New York, 1991), 13-14.The New York Age quotation is from Walter Weare, “Charles Clinton Spaulding: Middle-class Leadership in the Age of Segregation,” in John Hope Franklin and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders of the Turentieth Century (Urbana, 1982), 169. For the Ransom quote, see the Garvey movement newspaper, Negro World, August 2, 1924. See also August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor, 1963). For biographical sketches of Ransom, see his entries in Who’s Who in Colored America (6th ed., Brooklyn, N.Y., 1941-1944); Who’s Who of the Colored Race (Chi- cago, 19151,I; and, the useful reference work edited by Florence Murray, The Negro Handbook (New York, 1949). Bundles, Madam C.J. Walker, contains information on Ransom, as does Two Dollars and A Dream: The Story of Mme. C.J.and A’Lelia Walker, a film by Stanley Nelson, Ransom’s grandson (produced by Stanley Nelson & Associates, 1987). I2No full-length study of Walker or her company yet exists. But her great- great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Perry Bundles, has written Madurn C.J. Walker, a fine contribution to the Chelsea House Publishers’ young adult series, “Black Amer- icans of Achievement,” for which historian Nathan Irwin Huggins was senior con- sulting editor. Bundles’s slim volume is based on letters not generally available to scholars and includes numerous pIiotographs. For two short sketches written by historians, see the Walker entries by Rayford Logan in Dictionary of American Ne- gro Biography, and by Catherine Clinton in The Reader’s Companion to American History, eds. Eric Foner and John A. Garraty (Boston, 1991). These works are here- after cited as Logan, “Walker” and Clinton, “Walker.” ON THE STEPS OF THE SENATE AVENUEYMCA LEFT TO RIGHT, GEORGEKNOX, c. J. WALKER,F. B. RANSOM,BOOKER T. WASHINGTON, ALEXANDERMANNING, DR. JOSEPHWARD, R. w.BULLOCK, AND THOMASA. TAYLOR

Courtesy Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis. The Madam Walker Company 109

American women laundry workers, who earned no more than “a couple of dollars a week.”13 Breedlove’s experience as a laundress helped inspire her to start a business making and selling hair and skin care products and techniques for African-American women. By 1905 she was per- fecting and selling her hair-cleaning, hair grower, and pomade for- mulas as well as a hot comb for the hair and creams for the skin. Her marriage to a Denver newspaper sales agent, C. J. Walker, produced her business name, Madam C.J. Walker. The marriage soon ended, but the business prospered. Walker attracted custom- ers and recruited a sales force of African-American women-the “Walker agents”-through extensive promotional travels. In 1910, seeking a central location with good access to railroads, she consol- idated her business in Indianapolis, “where she built a plant to manufacture her products.” By 1915, Walker had become one of the early twentieth century’s most successful businesswomen and one of the most famous African Americans.14 Walker pioneered new ways of marketing consumer products. As the mass consumer age was beginning, Walker grasped what “image” would sell her products, and she projected it forcefully: a company owned and started by a hard working but glamorous Af- rican-American woman who had pulled herself up from the cotton fields and wash tubs to become a “mi1lionaire.”l5Much of the ap- peal of Walker’s products was that Madam Walker was a woman who seemed to embody her customer’s own dreams. Her story of success accorded well with both the reigning national ideology of business enterprise and individual endeavor, as well as with the personal aspirations of her African-American women customers to appear stylish and beautiful.16 Walker also portrayed herself as a progressive employer. “I am endeavoring,” she said in 1914, “to provide employment for hun- dreds of women of my race.” Although some ran store-front beauty shops, most Walker agents ran their shops from their homes or sold Walker products door-to-door.Their average earnings substan-

l3 Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York, 19851, 125-26. l4 Logan, “Walker.”Bundles, Madam C.J.Walker, 35-38, offers a slightly differ- ent chronology. Is The Walker legend holds that Madam Walker was the first woman to earn a million dollars, but she probably never came close to that much wealth. The value of her company was dependent on continued growth in sales, which relied on contin- uous promotion and increased expenses. While Walker once complained to Booker Washington that “I have been mistaken for a rich woman,” that was the image she had created. Walker to Washington, May 5, 1914, in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond Smock, eds., The Papers of Booker T. Washington (14 vols., Urbana, 1972-1989), XIII, 14-15. IfiLogan, “Walker”;Bundles, Madam C.J. Walker, 14. 110 Indiana Magazine of History

tially exceeded those of most African-American women wage work- er~.~~ Walker’s interests extended beyond business to politics, espe- cially during the last years of her life. In 1917, after the bloody East St. Louis, Illinois, race riot (in which white mobs murdered scores of African Americans and burned hundreds of homes), Walker joined a delegation of African Americans that traveled to the White House and presented a petition protesting the lynchings. President Woodrow Wilson refused to see them. Not for another year would Wilson publicly condemn lynchings. And in 1918 Walker was one of eleven African Americans selected by the Na- tional Equal Rights League, a militant civil rights group led by Boston’s William Monroe Trotter, to attend the Paris peace confer- ence. The delegation aimed to call attention to the rights of black people in America and in Europe’s African colonies. As World War I came to an end, Trotter demanded that Wilson add a fifteenth item to his Fourteen Points peace plan: “the elimination of civil, political, and judicial distinctions based on race or color in all nations.” Because the State Department denied visas to the Trotter group, Walker never left for Europe. In the spring of 1919, she died at age fifty-one.18 With Walker’s death, Ransom’s responsibilities with the com- pany grew. Already in charge of the Indianapolis factory, he now supervised the national network of Walker agents and directed marketing. A Walker Company film, featuring F. B. Ransom, played in “colored” movie houses and was one of the first films ever used to promote commercial pr0d~cts.l~In the 1920s, however, the company began a long decline. In part this resulted from the rise of competitors and imitators in the growing and volatile beauty products industry. Most importantly, after Walker’s death, the firm lacked its powerfully symbolic founder, whose extensive pro- motional travels had consistently spurred sales. Moreover, in the 1920s the company constructed what quickly became a major item of expensive overhead: the famous Walker Building, which still stands on Indiana Avenue just west of down- town Indianapolis. Completed in 1927, the Walker Building was both a remarkable achievement and a tremendous capital invest- ment. A four-story, 48,000 square foot, triangle-shaped structure with polychrome terra cotta trim, the Walker Building is a notable historic and architectural landmark. When it opened, the building housed the Walker Manufacturing Company’s plant and offices,

17 Logan, “Walker”;Clinton, “Walker.” IRBundles, Madam C.J. Walker, 63-64, 82-84, 98-100; Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1971), 221-23. 19Stanley Nelson’s film Two Dollars and A Dream contains a clip from the 1920s Walker Company film. The Madam Walker Company 111

the beautiful Walker Theatre (which featured films and live per- formances), professional offices, and a number of other African- American businesses. The Walker Building quickly became the so- cial and civic center of the Indianapolis black community.20 At a time when African Americans could not get a bite to eat is segregated downtown Indianapolis, the Walker Building offered a restaurant, the “Coffee Pot,” open to all customers, as well as perhaps the only non-segregated movie theater in the entire state. The Walker Building provided the black community of Indianapo- lis with a cluster of shops and stores, a social center, a grand ball- room, a theater, doctors’ offices, and, naturally, a Madam C.J. Walker Beauty salon. Indeed, the Walker Building was a precursor to the modern shopping mall: with many retail, food, and enter- tainment establishments under one roof, it was a place for shop- ping, seeing friends, and having fun. But like a shopping mall, the Walker Building relied on people spending money, and blacks had very little to spend, especially after the Depression hit. Conse- quently, Walker Building businesses lost money, and this grand civic monument became a financial drain for the company. The fortunes of the Walker Building also appear to explain how Du Bois formed the impression that the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company was no longer owned by African Ameri- cans. The Walker Theatre Company, an entity legally separate from the Walker Manufacturing Company, leased the theater for an annual rent of $15,000, payable to the Walker Manufacturing Company, the building’s owner. As early as January, 1930, the Walker Theatre Company owed a large back rent, forcing the Walker Manufacturing Company to find another tenant. The com- pany leased the theater to a white businessman, who “continued to book films and shows of interest to the black Indianapolis commu- nity.” Since Du Bois visited Indianapolis often on his lecture trips, he undoubtedly heard or observed personally that the Walker The- atre was being run by a white businessman and later conflated the Walker Theatre with the Madam C.J. Walker Manufacturing Com- pany.21This is the only evident explanation for Du Bois’s mistaken impression that the Walker Company was controlled by “white

Gloria J. Gibson-Hudson, “ ‘To all classes; to all races; this house is dedi- cated’: The Walker Theatre Revisited,” Indiana Historical Society Black History News and Notes, XXXV (February, 1989), 4-6. 21 Zbid. Du Bois had undoubtedly visited the Walker Building and the Walker Theatre, probably several times, on his lecture trips. And Mrs. Frances Stout, who grew up in Ransom’s neighborhood, knew the Ransom family, and attended events at the Senate Avenue YMCA, remembers Du Bois visiting Ransom’s home, proba- bly earlier than 1937. Mrs. Stout recalls that many African-American speakers from out-of-town were entertained by the Ransom family. Mrs. Stout kindly shared this information with the author at the November, 1991, meeting of the Indiana Historical Society. INDIANA AVENUEIN INDIANAPOLIS, ANCHOREDBY THE WALKER BUILDING

Courtesy Indiana State Library, Indianapolis. The Madam Walker Company 113

capitalists.” Du Bois was probably not alone in overlooking the dis- tinction between the Walker Manufacturing Company and other businesses associated with the Walker name. By the late 1930s, almost twenty years after Madam Walker’s death, the Walker Building was probably a more visible manifestation of her legacy than was the company itself. Ransom’s “open letter” to Du Bois complained that Du Bois had not mentioned “our new million dol- lar plant here in Indianapolis,” although by then it was ten years old.22 Ransom’s own leadership and civic activities extended well be- yond the Walker Company. He was an important political, church, and business leader in the Indianapolis African-American commu- nity, as well as a practicing attorney. While a Republican in the World War I era, during the 1930s Ransom became a Democrat and encouraged African-American voters to leave the Republican party for the Democratic party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. As historian John Hope Franklin noted, Ransom was one of many black leaders “who was widely known” to be “high in the Democratic [party] councils’’ under Roose~elt.~~ In the 1930s and 1940s, Ransom held patronage appointments to the board of trustees for the Indiana School for the Blind under three Democratic governors and served as its treasurer as well. And in 1938, some months after his dispute with Du Bois, Ransom was elected to the Indianapolis City Council, serving one term. He served on several mayoral committees, on the Interracial Commit- tee of the Church Federation of Indianapolis, and as a trustee of Bethel A.M.E. Church. At the time of the Du Bois dispute, Ransom was vice-president of the National Negro Business League and a member of the Senate Avenue YMCA board. In the last few years of his life, Ransom served on the Indianapolis Redevelopment Com- mission, which involved him in postwar slum clearance. In 1946, Flanner House, the city’s African-American settlement house, named him the city’s “outstanding Negro citizen.”24 While Ransom and Du Bois agreed on some questions, their ideological differences were more striking. Ransom, like Washing- ton and Marcus Garvey (the black nationalist leader of the Univer- sal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s) deplored the Du

p2Ransomto Du Bois, December 20, 1937, 48:327, Du Bois Papers. See also Pittsburgh Courier, January 1, 1938. Emphasis added. 23 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Ameri- cans (5th ed., New York, 1980), 387; Ransom’s entry in Who’s Who of the Colored Race, I. 24 Indianapolis Recorder, March 26, May 7, 1938; Indianapolis Star, December 1, 1946, December 4, 1946, August 7, 1947 (Ransom’s obituary). The city of Indi- anapolis honored his memory in 1991 by giving the name “Ransom Place” to the near downtown neighborhood where he had lived for decades. Indianapolis Star, July 21, 1991. Also see the Ransom entry in Murray, The Negro Handbook. 114 Indiana Magazine of History

Boisian insistence on the primacy of political protest. And Ransom accepted the basic structure of American capitalism, which Du Bois in the 1930s saw as fundamental to blacks’ oppression. Afri- can Americans, Ransom said in his 1924 commencement address at the Tuskegee Institute, “make the mistake of over-emphasizing our real and fancied wrongs and under-emphasizing our opportu- nity in this country.” America, Ransom held, was “the land of op- portunity and her beckoning hand is extended to black and white alike.” He professed an “abiding faith in the Constitution” and “the fair-mindedness of the American white man.” The idea that Afri- can Americans protested mere “fancied wrongs” would have en- raged Du Bois, who was acutely aware of the mob violence, denial of voting rights, and housing and employment discrimination that black people in America suffered. But Ransom felt his views best advanced “the race.” As Ransom told the Tuskegee graduates, ech- oing Washington, the school’s founder, “My message to the white man is, discriminate if you will, but let the test be moral fitness, and not the color of the skin.”25 Ransom had likewise opposed Madam Walker’s participation in Monroe Trotter’s plans to bring African-American protest to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Ransom warned Walker that “You must always bear in mind that you have a large business,” unlike Trotter’s other associates, who “have nothing.” Indeed, “There are many ways in which your business can be circumscribed and ham- pered, so as to practically put you out of business.”26Ransom voiced the same caution that induced Washington to shun public political activity as inherently dangerous and unproductive. But Ransom lived into the 1930s and 1940s, when African- Americans’ political options became far broader than in Washing- ton’s time. As the New Deal expanded the role of government, black Americans had greater opportunities to demand equality and assert a political role than they had had since the end of Recon- struction. Together the New Deal and the Depression enabled po- litical effectiveness in the public realm to displace private business ownership as the primary basis for African-American leadership on the local level. The new political landscape of the 1930s, historian Walter Weare has noted, allowed local African-American business- men and erstwhile Bookerites like Ransom “to move from business leadership to civic leadership,” a watershed “transition in twenti- eth century black political leader~hip.”~~Ransom responded to the expanded political and reduced business opportunities of the De-

1s Ransom’s Tuskegee speech was printed in the Gamey movement’s newspaper, Negro World, August 2, 1924, on the “magazine page.” 26 Bundles, Madam C.J. Walker, 98. 27 Walter Weare, “Charles Clinton Spaulding: Middle-class Leadership in the Age of Segregation,” 166-90, quotation 168. The Madam Walker Company 115 pression by becoming quite active in Indiana politics. And during the 1930s, African Americans comprised a growing portion of the Indianapolis electorate, which gave black Democrats some lever- age within the party. During that decade, historian Emma Lou Thornbrough has noted, “the Negro vote was important in supply- ing the margin of victory to the Democrats in successive elec- tion~.”~~Hence Ransom, by joining the Democrats and shifting priorities from business toward political action, typified a major change in black life during the 1930s. In 1935 Ransom pressed the Democratic administration of Governor Paul McNutt to support a bill requiring the Indianapolis school board to provide free transportation for black students forced by the board to attend segregated schools. Ransom com- plained that some black students had to walk as far as eight miles a day to attend high school. He urged his party to support the bill, though its sponsor was a Republican. Ransom, at once playing the role of a Democratic loyalist and black community leader, added that he did not “think much of the author of this bill” and won- dered if it could “be taken away from him” and introduced by a Democrat. But he insisted that it must be passed regardless of whether a Republican or Democrat sponsored it. Indeed, “I will feel it very keenly if it does not” pass, Ransom warned, hoping to seize an advantage from the Democrats’ reliance on black voters. The bill passed.29 In 1938 Ransom spoke at a ground-breaking ceremony for a new addition to Crispus Attucks, the segregated Indianapolis pub- lic high school for black students. He declared that “Education is the life blood of our democracy, and if democracy is to survive, our program of education must ever grow. Colored students, then, must be accorded a full participation in this program.”30Ransom knew that segregated schools greatly limited the vocational and aca- demic preparation black students in Indianapolis could obtain and thus restricted their lifetime economic opportunities. But while he opposed school segregation, Ransom also knew that segregated schools provided the only public education available to African- American children in Indianapolis. Consequently, he celebrated

By 1930 blacks made up over 12 percent of the population of Indianapolis. James H. Madison, Indiana through Tradition and Change: A History of the Hoo- sier State and Its People, 1920-1945 (Indianapolis, 1982), 8;and Emma Lou Thorn- brough, Since Emancipation: A Short History of Zndiana Negroes, 1863-1963, [Indianapolis, 19631, 36. 29 Ransom to Pleas Greenlee, March 1, 2, 1935, Box A, Drawer 86, Governor Paul V. McNutt Papers (Archives Division, Indiana Commission on Public Records, Indiana State Library and Historical Building, Indianapolis); and Thornbrough, Since Emancipation, 37, 56. 30 Indianapolis Recorder, March 26, 1938. 116 Indiana Magazine of History

the addition to Crispus Attucks, a segregated Here was a rare instance of political agreement between Du Bois and Ransom in the 1930s: they concurred on the need for a less onerous school segregation. As a Democrat, Ransom urged state and local officials to min- imize racial exclusion and to employ more African Americans in government jobs and in a greater variety of positions. Ransom claimed that the party’s continuation of segregation of state em- ployees by race and its denial of a fair share of patronage appoint- ments to blacks would carry a high electoral cost. Ransom told Governor McNutt and his patronage director, Pleas Greenlee, that Indiana was as bad as the southern states in failing to appoint blacks to high salary state jobs. “The Democrats are making a grave mistake,” Ransom said, “in not finding a few places paying reasonable salaries that the negro [sic] can point to with pride.’’ Indiana Republicans boasted that they had appointed more African Americans to well paying jobs than had McNutt. Pleading that “My concern is in the interest of the Democratic Party,” Ransom warned that McNutt’s administration did “not realize to what ex- tent Republicans are attempting to win back the Negro Ransom quietly complained that the State Unemployed Bu- reau had no positions whatsoever open to black applicants, a form of discrimination not likely, he implied, to be forgotten on election day. Ransom also intervened on behalf of African-American state employees who suffered discrimination on the job and on behalf of those laid off by the In short, during the 1930s Ransom lobbied to improve blacks’ occupational and educational opportu- nities in Indiana, using his position in the Democratic party to plead against the Hoosier system of segregation. But aside from small gestures and a few low-paying jobs, Ransom’s efforts in the party achieved little: “the Democratic organization in Indiana during the New Deal era did little that was conspicuous in behalf of its Negro supporters,” historian Emma Lou Thornbrough has concluded.34Yet Ransom appears to have given little thought to other political strategies or economic reforms. Consequently, Ran- som stood in sharp contrast to the Du Bois of the 1930s.

31 In 1949 the Indiana legislature banned public school segregation, but the state never enforced this law, so Indianapolis school officials were able to maintain school segregation until the 1970s. Indianapolis public schools were segregated in the 1920s. After World War 11, as Thornbrough has noted, Indianapolis was “the largest city in the North with a [de jurel segregated school system.” Thornbrough, Since Emancipation, 48-69. For post-1949 events, see Emma Lou Thornbrough, “The Indianapolis School Busing Case,” in We the People: Indiana and the United States Constitution (Indianapolis, 1987),,69-92. 52 Ransom to Paul McNutt, March 14, August 6, 1935, McNutt Papers; Ransom to Pleas Greenlee, April 20, March 2, 29, 1935, ibid. Ransom to Wayne Coy, September 4, 1935, ibid.; Ransom to Greenlee, Octo- ber 22, November 8, April 20, March 2, 1935, ibid. 34 Thornbrough, Since Emancipation, 34, 37. F.B. RANSOM AT HIS WALKER COMPANY OFFICE

Courtesy Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis. 118 Indiana Magazine of History

During the century’s first decade, Du Bois became the one es- sential figure in the forging of an interracial progressive move- ment for racial equality in the United States.35Du Bois called for full civil and legal equality of the races at the very time that the South was enacting segregationist statutes. A federal judiciary dominated by conservative-activists sanctioned southern states’ de- nial of voting rights to African Americans, and white mobs were lynching nearly two hundred African Americans per year. Du Bois’s proud insistence on blacks’ full civil and legal equality, first voiced when most white Americans believed in their innate “ra- cial” superiority, became the fundamental demand on which the enduring twentieth-century tradition of African-American civil rights protest arose. Du Bois’s protests and writings from the first years of the century inspired a small group of white socialists and progressives who founded the National Association for the Ad- vancement of Colored People in 1910. Du Bois worked for the NAACP for twenty-four years, founding and editing its influential magazine, the Crisis. At the turn of the century Du Bois had accepted the consensus of the small African-American “middle class” that racial salvation must be achieved primarily through business enterprise. This be- lief was fully consistent with his original notion of a “Talented Tenth black leadership As Du Bois challenged Booker T. Washington on questions of political rights and black education, he still believed in the central importance of black business enter- prise. Indeed, Du Bois, not Washington, first conceived of the Na- tional Negro Business League, established in 1900.37But in the early 1930s Du Bois, in one of the major watersheds of his long career, radically altered his belief in collective advancement through the success of “talented” African Americans: without en- tirely abandoning the idea of an elite black leadership class, he encased it in an idiosyncratic socialist program. For in the 1930s, Du Bois concluded that the now much larger black middle class had failed to rise to the demands of group leadership. In the 1930s Du Bois addressed the problems of failed black leadership and the crisis of the Depression by arguing for coopera- tive African-American businesses and community-controlled schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Each would involve the participation of elite as well as less privileged African Americans.

35 Manning Marable, W.EB.Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston, 1986), chapters 3 and 4. 3fi Du Bois’s fullest statement of his “Talented Tenth” theory was his essay of that title, published in The Negro Problem (New York, 1903), a book of essays by leading African Americans. But Du Bois’s book The Philadelphia Negro (Philadel- phia, 1899) had laid out its main argument. 37 Louis R. Harlan, Booker 2’. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901 (New York, 1972), 266-67. The Madam Walker Company 119

These institutions would be staffed and managed by black people and structured to induce elite African Americans to serve “the race” as a whole. Similarly, Du Bois questioned the viability of the NAACP’s continued reliance on a middle class leadership and called for a shift of power from the national office to the local branches. While these ideas of black leadership and social class differences were influenced by Marxism, Du Bois’s views in the 1930s differed greatly from those of socialists and Marxists, and he forcefully rejected their political ~trategies.~~ In 1934 Du Bois left the NAACP and the Crisis, primarily be- cause he and the NAACP’s top leadership no longer agreed on the primacy of civil rights protest in the struggle for racial equality. As the Depression unfolded, Du Bois increasingly argued that eco- nomic subordination lay at the root of African-American oppres- sion. He urged the NAACP to adopt his economic program, which envisioned a race-based autonomous socialism for African Ameri- cans. This community socialism or “cooperative commonwealth,” would, he hoped, unite the talents and labor of all African Ameri- cans-businessmen and laborers, teachers and domestics, scholars and sharecroppers-in a common struggle. Such a “Negro Nation within the Nation” would be guided, Du Bois insisted, by the self- less pursuit of the collective good of “the race.”39But the NAACP’s leadership refused to alter its civil rights program and rejected Du Bois’s economic ideas. It also moved to restrict Du Bois’s right to criticize the NAACP in the Crisis. These disputes culminated in Du Bois’s resignation from the NAACP in June, 1934. Spending the next decade at Atlanta University, he continued to promote his economic program throughout the 1930s, through lectures, news- paper columns, and other writings. Du Bois had long recognized the achievements of the Walker Company. Even his December, 1937, Courier column had praised it for creating “perhaps 13,000 [Negro] jobs: beauty shops and hair pressing parlors, where women unemployed or forced into me- nial service are able to make a livelihood and approach the status of almost independent entrepreneurs.” After Madam Walker’s death in 1919, Du Bois wrote a Crisis obituary that praised her as

aR Although he rejected the socialist left and communism in the 1930s, years later, during the Cold War, Du Bois adopted an orthodox Communist politics and became quite close to the party, which he joined in 1961. Thus the 1930s stand as a watershed in Du Bois’s intellectual-political route from an elitist to a proletarian theory of African-American leadership. 39 Du Bois articulated his 1930s economic-political program in many writings, including: “A Negro Nation within the Nation,” Current History, XLII (June, 1935), 265-70; his Crisis editorials in each issue from January, 1934 to June, 1934; his three speeches from the 1930s published in Du Bois, The Education of Black People (New York, 1973); and “The Negro and Social Reconstruction,” written in 1936 and published in Du Bois, Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Ad- dresses, 1887-1961 (Amherst, 19851, 103-58. 120 Indiana Magazine of History

“A Great Woman” who had “transform[ed] a people in a genera- ti~n.”~O In the 1930s, however, Du Bois complained that virtually all African-American businesses, including the Walker firm, had failed to promote the kind of autonomous economic development that he thought essential for African-Americans’ health and sur- vival. The Walker Company had not turned itself into “a coopera- tive enterprise” promoting “a socialistic mass movement.” Business owners, Du Bois charged, had failed to use their “tremen- dous power” to serve society.41 Du Bois’s perspective on the purposes of business enterprise differed radically from that of any successful entrepreneur. He wanted African-American businessmen and women to act as com- munity leaders by converting their privately owned businesses into philanthropic community institutions. Profits from all black-owned businesses should be invested for community purposes, not con- sumed by individual owners. He believed that most African-Amer- ican business owners wanted to serve the community while bettering themselves, but typically their pursuit of individual gain undercut their contributions to the community. Consequently, the radical scholar-activist wanted to democratize something that had rarely been subject to democratic governance and hardly existed to serve communal or democratic ends: business enterpri~e.~~ Du Bois had no detailed plan for how his idea of cooperative business enterprise among African Americans could be realized in practice. His vision of socialism-in-one-community was based more on an appreciation of the depths of the crisis facing black America in the Depression than on a realistic assessment of what was polit- ically and economically obtainable. Even the most community- minded black business owners objected to Du Bois’s program. To have supported it would have been to abandon their class identity. More crucially, even if black business leaders had embraced Du Bois’s economic program, tremendous difficulties stood in the way of implementation. Neither black businessmen nor African Ameri- cans as a whole had the capital to finance the type of economic development Du Bois envisioned. This was especially true during the 1930s, when the greatest economic crisis in world history pre- vented countless African Americans from even feeding their fami-

40 Du Bois, “Madame Walker”; Du Bois, “A Great Woman,” Crisis (July, 1919), 131. 41 Du Bois, “Madame Walker”; and, Du Bois, “Business as a Public Service,” Crisis (November, 1929), 374-75, 392. 62 Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” in Micheline R. Malson et al., eds., Black Women in America: Social Science Perspectives (Chicago, 19901, 173-96, for an ex- amination of an important black enterprise that pursued collective goals rather than profits for individual entrepreneurs. The Madam Walker Company 121

lies adequately. Du Bois never demonstrated how an impoverished people could finance the kinds of cooperative businesses he envi- sioned. Yet Du Bois was convinced that his plan was essential for com- bating black poverty and joblessness, two problems the Depression exacerbated. The Depression not only devastated employment and living standards for African Americans, it also wiped out a gener- ation of black business development overnight.43Only the advent of widespread, if still inadequate, public relief prevented extensive starvation in the black community. In An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal estimated that in 1935 “around half of all Negro families in the North were on relief.”44By putting most black busi- nessmen out of business, the Depression destroyed the credibility of African-American businessmen as a leadership class. Economic collapse also convinced Du Bois that a drastic re- structuring of the economic life of black America was inevitable. Du Bois’s economic program was an attempt to shape this restruc- turing. Satisfied that capitalism could not provide even the bare necessities of life for all, Du Bois in the early 1930s concluded that economic depression was, together with racial prejudice, forcing Af- rican Americans to intolerable levels of poverty and joblessness. Du Bois feared that many black people would be forever left out- side the labor market and below the level of subsistence unless African Americans united in an extraordinary effort to save them- selves. Du Bois forcefully argued that a cooperative economy in the black community was the only way for African Americans to re- solve their economic crisis and to survive as a people. In the very Courier column in which he apologized to the Walker Company, Du Bois pressed his economic program: “There is no greater service that can be rendered to a group than the serv- ice of business men.” “Nevertheless,” he added, “perhaps the great- est mistakes of our industrial society have arisen among these servants of the public.” Therefore, society must “save and encour- age” business owners by regulating “their activities.’’ Du Bois judged that this would “be accomplished in the future by the grad- ual socialization” of business and wealth. Moreover, “the move- ment toward socialized business is starting throughout the world” and “American Negro businessmen ought to lead in this and not

4l Of over a hundred African American-owned banks founded between 1890 and 1929, only twelve survived in 1936 and over half of all “black retail merchants and savings and loan associations failed in the 1930s.” Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks (New York, 19781, 253. 44 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York, 1944), 197, 206. In the Depression, many employers fired blacks and replaced them with whites. In Indi- anapolis, such racial job competition resulted in white school teachers being given preference, over a large number of unemployed African-American teachers, for jobs in-all-black public schools. Ransom to Greenlee, November 8, 1935, McNutt Papers. 122 Indiana Magazine of History

follow.” Thus, even as he granted Ransom an apology, Du Bois still pushed for African-American cooperative business enterprise-the very point on which his economic program most directly challenged Ransom.45 For Du Bois, “socialization” of the economy meant democratic and popular control over society’s wealth and investments. African Americans, lacking a highly stratified class structure, were, Du Bois argued, uniquely well-suited to pioneer a communal socialistic economy. Such a radical change in African-American economic life required, Du Bois said, the active support of African-American business leaders. This, to Du Bois, was the real tragedy of firms like the Walker Company: despite remaining in black hands, they had not built an independent or prosperous economy for the black community. Nor had they promoted what Du Bois considered a meaningful economic education for African Americans. Almost alone among radical black intellectuals in the 1930s, Du Bois saw the prospect of a socialist America as highly problem- atic for African Americans. A successful socialist movement, com- prised of America’s white working class majority, Du Bois feared, could be just as racially exclusionary as American capitalism. Nor did Du Bois, unlike most radical intellectuals during the Depres- sion, see an interracial labor movement as a viable strategy for African Americans. For decades he applauded efforts to unite black and white workers, but in the 1930s Du Bois concluded that such efforts were quite unlikely to overcome whites’ racial bias. African- Americans’ sole choice, he wrote privately in 1933, was “annihila- tion by American capitalism piecemeal or racial organization in self-defense.” Since “[anti-]Negro prejudice still lives,” Du Bois ar- gued, there was no chance that “Cornrnuni~rn’~or trade unionism could resolve the economic crisis in ways favorable to African Ameri~ans.~~But despite his pessimistic view of a hypothetical so- cialist future in the United States, Du Bois in the 1930s believed that constructing socialism-in-one-community was African-Ameri- cans’ best hope of salvation. Rejecting the labor strategy of the left and placing no hope in restored capitalist prosperity, Du Bois sought an autonomous and socialistic “Negro Nation within the Nation.” This approach pur- ported to require nothing from whites or institutions controlled by

4s Du Bois, “me. C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company,” Pittsburgh Courier, January 23, 1938. This was Du Bois’s last column in the Courier. Du Bois’s “fare- well” column was written simply to settle his dispute with Ransom. However, it also touched upon several other topics, in order that, as Du Bois told the newspa- per’s manager, Ira Lewis, his corrected statement would “not look too much like free advertising” for the Walker Company. Robert L. Vann to Du Bois, December 1, 1937, 48:039-040, Du Bois Papers; Du Bois to Vann, December 3, 1937, ibid.; Du Bois to Lewis, January 11, 1938, 49:425, ibid. W, Du Bois to George Streator, June 23, 1933, ibid. The Madam Walker Company 123

whites. A cooperative black economy must be as independent of the larger society as possible, Du Bois felt, because white Americans excluded blacks from all economic opportunities. Du Bois imagined an autonomous black economy based on consumers’ cooperation, able to accumulate enough capital to fund adequate housing, em- ployment, and health care for the black community. As a practical response to the economic crisis African Americans faced in the De- pression, Du Bois’s scheme was sorely lacking. But if viewed as part of a debate on the possibilities of African-American freedom and security in America, then Du Bois’s 1930s ideas stand as a telling critique of what he thought were the equally feeble efforts of conservative businessmen, liberal reformers, and Marxists to ad- dress racial oppression and poverty in the United States. Although Ransom never formally commented on Du Bois’s ec- onomic program, he surely shared the disdain for it expressed by other black entrepreneurs. African-American businessmen saw Du Bois’s scheme as a far-fetched and utopian attack on their own en- terprise and way of life. As Ransom wrote in his open letter, “I ask you why, Dr. Du Bois, writers such as you seek always to decry and misrepresent Negro business?”47 Ransom and Du Bois each believed in racial solidarity and in group leadership, but they sharply disagreed on what goals should be pursued through that solidarity and leadership. Their political animosities shaped the vehemence of Ransom’s protest of Du Bois’s factual mistake and contributed to Du Bois’s reluctance to admit error. Yet ihe Du Bois-Ransom dispute of 1937-1938, while arising from profound disagreements on the most basic questions confront- ing African Americans in the 1930s, never matured into a real de- bate over political ideas or strategies. Neither Ransom nor Du Bois addressed one another on fundamental questions of African-Amer- ican economic strategy, political leadership, or business enterprise. Apparently neither Du Bois nor Ransom saw their dispute as an opportunity to attract political support. Du Bois, however, did campaign for his economic program dur- ing the 1930s. Ironically, his dispute with Ransom stemmed from Du Bois’s rebuttal of an independent Marxist writer, Benjamin Stolberg, who, writing in The Nation, had blasted Madam Walker’s “hair unkinking process” as an “anthropological insult.” Du Bois replied in the Courier that “it is no more an ‘anthropological insult’ for one person to have hair straightened than for another to have his hair curled.” But Du Bois’s real dispute with Stolberg involved far deeper issues of economics and politics. Stolberg held the view, common among American Marxists of the 1930s, that “labor con- sciousness” alone could save “the colored world” but that African-

47 Ransom to Du Bois, December 20, 1937, 48:327, ibid. 124 Indiana Magazine of History

Americans’ “bourgeois” ideology retarded the black working class from seeing this Marxian tr~th.*~ In Du Bois’s view, Stolberg underestimated the depth and power of racial bias among white Americans and slighted the con- structive value of African-American solidarity. But Du Bois re- spected Stolberg as a fellow participant in the on-going and multi- sided 1930s debate on the economic future of the African-American people. Replying to Stolberg in several of his December, 1937, Courier columns, Du Bois argued that his own program of a race- based economic strategy was superior to both the Marxist panacea of Stolberg and the capitalism-as-usual approaches of African- American business. Rejecting Stolberg’s attack on Walker, Du Bois made his own very different criticisms, thereby using the Walker Company to polemicize for his economic program. Ransom re- sponded with his “open letter” to Du Bois. However, Ransom addressed none of the broad issues debated by Du Bois and Stolberg. Nor, evidently, did Ransom ever partici- pate in this far-reaching intellectual debate on the political and economic future of black Americans. The contentious ideas of rad- icals, intellectuals, trade unionists, communists, and socialists of all types did not engage the Indiana businessman. In the 1930s these groups constituted an important and sizable milieu, but Ran- som had little contact with them. Ransom was preoccupied with his own responses to the black economic and leadership crisis of the Depression and with his pursuit of political opportunities opened up by the New Deal. Consequently, once Du Bois publicly admitted that the Walker Company had not “fallen into the hands of white capitalists,’’ Ransom saw further exchanges with the rad- ical scholar as pointless. Likewise, Du Bois deemed a potential de- bate with the Indianapolis businessman as mattering infinitely less than the debates over strategy already raging on the left and among African-American intellectuals.

4n Benjamin Stolberg, “Minority Jingo,” The Nation, CXLV (October 23, 1937), 437-39; Du Bois, “Madam Walker.”