Introduction
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Notes Introduction Notes to Pages 1–7 1. When William Donald Schaefer left his final term unfinished in order to become state governor, Clarence “Du” Burns, an African American and chairman of the City Council, succeeded Schaefer, finished his term, and thus technically became the first black mayor. 2. Sandy Banisky and Ann LoLordo, “Kurt Schmoke Sworn in as 46th Mayor of Baltimore,” Baltimore Sun, December 11, 1987. Schmoke is quoted in Marion E. Orr, “Black Mayors and Human-Capital Enhancement Policies: A Study of Baltimore,” unpublished paper presented at National Conference of Black Political Scientists, March 1991. 3. Michael Ollove, “Schmoke Takes a Sizeable Political Risk by Assuming Responsibility for Schools,” Baltimore Sun, July 3, 1988. 4. The statistics of poor performance by students in the Baltimore public school system were rehearsed in numerous reports, including the Abell Foundation, “A Growing Inequality, a Report on the Financial Condition of the Baltimore City Public Schools,” Baltimore, 1989; Governor’s Commission on School Funding, “Report,” Baltimore, January 1994; Governor’s Commission on School Performance, “The Report of,” Annapolis, 1989; Commission for Students at Risk, “Maryland’s Challenge,” Annapolis, January 1990; Peter L. Szanton, “Baltimore 2000, a Choice of Futures,” Baltimore: Morris Goldseker Foundation, 1986. To compare the local education studies with national studies of public education, see U.S. Excellence in Education Commission, “A Nation At Risk,” Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Education, 1983; Task Force on Education for Economic Growth, “Action for Excellence,” Washington, DC, 1983; Editors of Education Week, Charting a Course for Reform (Washington, DC: Editorial Projects in Education, 1993). 5. Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) 8. 6. Mike Bowler, “Barclay’s Principal Retiring,” Baltimore Sun, July 22, 1998. The two superintendents to whom he refers were both Schmoke appointees, Richard Hunter, who tried to block the Calvert partnership and his successor, Walter Amprey, who unsuccessfully tried to move Gertrude out of Barclay. 7. I made partial summaries and indexes of the 2001 tapes and other later tapings but have not transcribed them. 8. Valerie Yow, “ ‘Do I Like Them Too Much?’: Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-Versa,” Oral History Review 24: 1 (Summer 1997) 57–79. Quotation, 76. Karen Fields, “What One Cannot Remember Mistakenly,” in History 228 / Notes to Pages 8–12 and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)150–163. Quotation, 151. In this essay, Fields reflects on the process by which she and her grandmother, Mamie Garvin Fields, composed her grandmother’s memoir, Lemon Swamp and Other Places (New York: Free Press, 1983). 9. Fields, Lemon Swamp, 152. 10. Yow, “Do I Like Them Too Much,” 57. 11. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” in History and Memory, 294. Chapter One Beginnings 1. Frederick Miller, “The Black Migration to Philadelphia: A 1924 Profile,” in African Americans in Pennsylvania, ed. Joe William Trotter Jr. and Eric Ledell Smith (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission and State University Press, 1997) 289. 2. W.W. Scott, A History of Orange County Virginia (Richmond: Everett Waddy Co., 1907) 114. Sarah Bennett Carter, Orange County in War Time, a Community History, volume six of Arthur Kyle Davis, ed., Virginia Communities in War Time (Richmond: Virginia War History Commission, 1925) 404. 3. W.W. Scott, History of Orange County, 134–137. 4. Ibid., 166. 5. The 1880 census recorded Julia as age 24; Caesar as 60; and Grace as 60. The wide age difference between Caesar and Julia is intriguing, all the more so when viewed in light of data from later censuses. See note 44. 6. Scott, History of Orange County, 50. The WPA Writers’ Program, Virginia, The Negro in Virginia (reprint; New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969) 269–270. Emily J. Salmon and Edward D.C. Campbell, The Hornbook of Virginia History (Richmond: Library of Virginia, 1994) 53, 98. 7. Scott, History of Orange County, 164. 8. Writer’s Program, Negro in Virginia, 268. Salmon and Campbell, Hornbook, 98. 9. Ibid., 164. 10. In 1910, the population had risen slightly with the number of whites recorded as 7,959 and blacks as 5,526. University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center, United States Historical Data Browser (On Line: University of Virginia, 1998). Ͻhttp//fisher.lib.virginia.edu/census/Ͼ. Accessed January 13, 2004. 11. William A. Link, “Privies, Progressivism, and Public Schools: Health Reform and Education in the Rural South, 1909–1920,” Journal of Southern History LIV. 4 (November 1988) 628. 12. Writer’s Program, Negro in Virginia, 326–327. 13. Ibid., 255, 271. 14. Sarah Bennett Carter, “Orange County in War Time,” in Virginia Communities in War Time, ed. Arthur Kyle Davis (Richmond, Virginia: Virginia War History Commission Ser. 1 v.6, 1926–1927) 414. 15. Writers Program, Negro in Virginia, 327, 328. Notes to Pages 13–15 / 229 16. Gertrude knew her grandmother’s name as Charlotta. In the census records, it appears as Charlotte. 17. The Mount Holy Baptist Church Clerk and Officers, “Mt. Holy Baptist Church,” photocopied excerpt from “Our Father’s House, A Look at African-American Churches in Orange County,” James Madison Museum, February 1993. Courtesy of the Orange County Historical Society. 18. The Orange County Deed Book recorded the purchase of land in 1890 by Douglas Williams, in collaboration with his brother-in-law, Gilbert Taliaferro. They purchased it from John W. and Susan M. Clark, who, according to the 1889 census were white. In 1900, Douglas bought land from another white couple, James and Emma Clark. In 1877, before Douglas married Margaret Clark, Margaret’s mother, Mary S. Clark (identified in the deed as “colored” and a widow) collaborated with her three sons, Robert, William, and Gilbert Taliaferro and her two sons-in-law (Lewis Spotswood and William Hopkins) to purchase land from a white woman identified as Lucy Walker. The Deed Book records a “deed of trust” placed on Douglas’s land (September 5, 1908) and indicates a default on the loan (March 26, 1919). It seems possible that Horace could have inherited his father’s land but been unable to pay off the lien against it. 19. We were unable to verify the Manassas certificate. 20. The wedding certificate identified Horace as living in La Grangeville, New York and Mamie in East Fishkill. The marriage ceremony occurred in Hopewell Junction, New York, witnessed by Mamie’s aunt and uncle, Moses and Mary Wallace. U.S. Census, 1920. 21. City Directory of the United States, 1902–1935, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Woodbridge, Connecticut: Research Publications Inc.,) Microfilm, Reel 29. 22. Joe Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 23. According to V.P. Franklin, in 1930, 33% of Philadelphia’s black population (who comprised 12% of the total population) were dependent on public assistance. The Education of Black Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979) 109. 24. Frederic Miller, “Black Migration,” 292, 294. Quotation, 294. 25. Though most migrants crowded into densely populated black areas, Miller does observe that migrants from smaller communities, such as the Williamses tended to settle in areas with mostly white populations. Miller, “Black Migration,” 300. 26. Russell Weigley, Philadelphia a 300-Year History (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1982) 492; Frederick M. Miller et al., Still Philadelphia, a Photographic History, 1890–1940 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1983) 3; Richard R. Wright Jr., The Negro in Pennsylvania, a Study in Economic History (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969 [reprint from 1912]) 65; source of “better class” quotation. Judith Callard, Germantown, Mount Airy, and Chestnut Hill (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2003; first edition, 2000). 27. Judith Callard, Germantown, Mount Airy and Chestnut Hill, “Slavery Protest,” 14; “Johnson House,” 37. 28. Such oral history recollections of segregation inform Stephanie Felix, “Committed to Their Own: African American Women Leaders in the YWCA: The YWCA of Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1870–1970,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Temple University, 1999. See also untitled oral history transcript of Jack Jones interviewed by 230 / Notes to Pages 15–16 Lisabeth Holloway and Louise Strawbridge, March 1, 1984, Germantown Historical Society. 29. Felix, “Committed to their Own,” 97–98, 100. 30. Population densities in Philadelphia neighborhoods with black residents were calculated by T.J. Woofter Jr. in 1928 in terms of “people per acre”: South side, 139; Lower North side, 121; Upper North side, 109; West Philadelphia, 89; Germantown, 79. T.J. Woofter, “Neighborhoods,” in Negro Problems in Cities, ed. T.J. Woofter, (Greenwood Publishing Group reprint edition, February 1970; originally published 1928) 80. V.P. Franklin documented instances of black families being driven from white neighborhoods in The Education of Black Philadelphia, 159. 31. This impression of Germantown as an area that harbored prejudice in many forms but was yet a less harsh environment than one might expect, is conveyed by the grand daughter of William Byrd in whose yard the KKK cross was burned. Louetta Ray Hadley-Riley told German Town Historical Society interviewers that despite evident discrimination, “without romanticizing, most of my memories of growing up in Germantown are happy ones.” “I Remember Germantown,” Germantown Crier, 52.1 (Spring 2002). Gertrude expressed the same sentiment about her Germantown childhood. 32. Clarence Taylor, Knocking at Our Own Door (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997) 17–19. Kathryn Morgan, Children of Strangers: Stories of a Black Family (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980) 83. Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984) 211–213. 33. John Palmer Spencer, “Courage in Cross Fire: Marcus Foster and America’s Urban Education Crisis, 1941–1973,” Ph.D.