The “Bad” Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s - 1930s
by Sandra Rena Heard
B/ARC, 1992, Mississippi State University Th.M., 1998, Xavier University
A Dissertation submitted to
The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
August 31, 2010
Dissertation directed by
Chad Heap Associate Professor of American Studies
The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Sandra Rena Heard has passed the Final Examination for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy as of June 30, 2010. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.
The “Bad” Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s - 1930s
Sandra Rena Heard
Dissertation Research Committee:
Chad Heap, Associate Professor of American Studies Dissertation Director
Melani McAlister, Associate Professor of American Studies and International Affairs Committee Member
James Miller, Professor of English and American Studies Committee Member
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Dedication
For Jennie Ruth Heard, Catherine Heard, Brian Hughes
and
Reia Don Stock-Heard
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Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my partner Ginger Rumph and other family members for their unwavering support as I labored to complete this project over the past five years. Ginger’s creative insight, close reads and edits were most useful in keeping the content engaging and current. I am also appreciative of the guidance that my dissertation advisor Chad Heap gave during the many rewrites of chapters. The strength of this work is due, in part, to his insistence on pulling more from the sources even when
I was convinced that there was nothing left to find in seemingly innocuous documents.
Of course, a word of gratitude must be extended to the additional members of my doctoral committee, Melani McAlister and James Miller. Because of their targeted criticisms, I have been able to produce what I believe is a significant piece of scholarship.
And, I cannot say enough about the archivists at the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, the Library of Congress and the Historical Society of Washington, DC. These professionals were always patient and knowledgeable as I sometimes fumbled through collections, asking a multitude of questions. Lastly, I would like to send a shout out to the many readers, especially Ramzi Fawaz, Kim Yates and Jeremy Hill, who helped me think through the tough spots and encouraged intellectual curiosity.
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Abstract of Dissertation
The “Bad” Black Consumer: A Study of African-American Consumer Culture in Washington, D.C., 1910s - 1930s
My dissertation is a social and cultural history of African-American consumption in the nation’s capital during the interwar period. It argues that commodity culture fashioned a black consumer class that willingly and unintentionally stigmatized the Race during the rise of Jim Crow. This project specifically explores how members of the capital city’s black elite worked to delimit the mobility of their constituency when they reproduced the idea that African Americans who conspicuously consumed were villainous or disreputable. It also looks at the role that mass culture played in distracting poor and middle-class black Washingtonians from addressing the structural forces that systematically disenfranchised peoples of African descent. Instead of collaborating to remedy the inequities that were responsible for creating a large black servant class, a number of African Americans within D.C. turned to the market to style themselves in ways that were in line with popular images of success. In so doing, they helped to preserve the reigning racial and class ideology of the era, which prefigured the white consumer as the ideal citizen and the black consumer as a potential criminal and threat to the existing social order.
I focus on Washington, D.C. because it did not have a large black industrial working class in the early twentieth century. The absence of an organized black proletariat partially contributed to the emergence and dominance of a black consumer
! #! class, which reinforced the supremacy of the bourgeoisie instead of cultivating a blue- collar racial identity that countered middle-class “white” cultural norms. As this project maintains, black Washingtonians participated in marginalizing their community when they bought into mainstream ideas of what constituted status or propriety and publicly linked African-American consumption patterns with deviance. That is, commodity culture united various classes of the District’s African-American residents to the dominant white society while undermining their ability to fully participate in collective action to resist the vagaries of racism or gain equality between WWI and WWII.
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Table of Contents
Dedication………………………………………………………….....iii
Acknowledgements…………………………………………………...iv
Abstract of Dissertation………………………………………...... v
Table of Contents…………………………………………………….vii
List of Figures……………………………………………………….viii
Introduction………………………………………………………...... 1
Chapter 1: The “Bad” Black Consumer……………………………...24
Chapter 2: Colored Chauffeurs: Negotiating Stereotypes While Working and Cruising……………………………..65
Chapter 3: Consuming Melodrama in Black and White……...... 115
Chapter 4: Black Homes: Places of Refuge and Threats to Civil Society……….………………………………...162
Conclusion……………………………………………………...... 221
Bibliography………………………………………………………...227
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List of Figures
Figure 1: 1930 Map of Washington, DC………………………….. 220
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Introduction
Black newspaperman Calvin Chase was one of the most prolific purveyors and resolute arbiters of consumer culture in Washington, D.C.’s African-American community throughout the early twentieth century. During the summer of 1917, he declared in his weekly paper that blacks gravitated toward “flimsy schemes” and “sharp practice” (deception or shoddy and low-quality work) because they wanted to avoid real labor and were unduly enticed by a life of “ease,” fascinated with “finery” and lured by
“luxury.” While admitting that white America had its share of scam artists who cheated the public out of its hard earned property, Chase claimed that the rate of fraud or double- dealing was higher among the nation’s African-American populace.1 Why would Calvin
Chase couple criminality with leisure and flowery apparel when discussing blacks and their labor practices? More importantly perhaps, what purpose could it have served for
Chase to conjure up the stereotype of the conning, lazy, conspicuous Negro consumer when he charged that African Americans lacked a proper work ethic and regularly engaged in deceitful behavior so that they could consume like the upwardly mobile?
It is possible that Chase was addressing white Washingtonians’ anxiety about well-dressed African Americans or black dandies who have, at least since the early
1800s, symbolized socioeconomic mobility for free persons of color and served as a form
1 Chase stated that 1 of 25 people in Black America and 1 of 100 persons in white America were con artists. See “The Commercial Exchange No 6. – Graft,” Washington Bee, June 2, 1917. Also check out: “The Commercial Exchange No 5,” Washington Bee, May 26, 1917; and “The Commercial Exchange No 7. – Opportunism,” Washington Bee, June 9, 1917.
1 of resistance to the “prescribed…class and racial order” in the U.S.2 Chase could have also blindly parroted white urban dwellers who linked the fashionably-attired black man with pimping, pick pocketing and other illicit enterprises at the dawn of the twentieth century. In 1908, for example, Progressive Era reformer Ray S. Baker noted that the
African-American man who paraded city streets in aristocratic garments “stir[red] the deepest animosity” in some whites, who were convinced that the immaculately dressed
“Negro” male was usually an unemployed freeloader who “live[d] on the wages of a hard-working colored woman and spen[t] all he [could] get on” fine clothing.3 On the other hand, Chase may have simply frowned upon extravagant displays because he wanted to show his constituency that a respectable consumer or a proper citizen was one who was committed to industry and thrift, or he was eager to dispel a well-established white American perception that blacks were naturally indolent and overly preoccupied with flaunting the symbols of success.4
2 For a detailed analysis of the “black dandy” and its associated meanings, see Barbara L. Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker: A Case Study in Genealogical Method,” TDR: The Drama Review 45.5 (Winter 2001), 12.
3 Ray Stannard Baker, Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy (New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1908), 125-126. Also note that the Washington Post ran numerous stories of well-dressed black men who reportedly robbed others of their money, clothes and jewels. See “Choked And Robbed Her: Negro’s Bold Crime Near Marine Barracks – Third Case in a Week,” Washington Post, January 28, 1900; “He Dressed Too Well: Negro Arrested on Charge of Collecting Money on False Pretenses,” Washington Post, April 18, 1900; “Has New Suit For The Fourth: Negro Received C.O.D. Package at Vacant House and Clothier Loses,” Washington Post, July 4, 1900; “Drank Drugged Beer: Atlanta Business Man Robbed in Washington,” Washington Post, September 7, 1903; “Negro Thief Arrested: John West Believed to Have Practiced Robbing Boarding-houses,” Washington Post, April 20, 1905; “Victim Of Flim-Flam Game: Negro Euchred Out of $9 Through Story of Crafty Stranger,” Washington Post, July 14, 1905; “Victim Of Envelop Game: Negro Seals Up $4 and Later Draws Out Scrap of Paper,” Washington Post, August 5, 1905; and “Pressman Robbed Of Watch: Negro Asks the Time, Snatches the Timepiece, and Escapes,” Washington Post, April 8, 1912.
4 Historian Ted Ownby argues that shortly after Emancipation, many white landowners, employers, store owners and politicians in Mississippi openly claimed that newly freed blacks lacked a proper work ethic and foolishly spent their money on fancy clothing and nonessential foods instead of purchasing utilitarian 2
In either case, Chase represented African Americans as shiftless and threatening to their own economic development strategies and the nation’s social structure in his pronouncement against ease, finery and luxury. Further, he helped to bolster a longstanding view that blacks who vigorously participated in mass culture did so illegitimately so that they could vicariously achieve status by donning expensive consumable goods.5 Calvin Chase was a willing champion of the larger society’s racial ideology, which naturalized the idea that conspicuous consumption was a measure of white citizenship and penalized African Americans for simply entering the mainstream market. In so doing, he reinstated the construct of the flashy criminal black consumer or
“the vain and overdressed ‘Negro’, [and]…the lazy thief,” which, according to anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, “find their roots in the engineered oppression and deprivations of slavery.”6
items and saving to prepare for future needs. See Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, & Culture, 1830-1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 61- 66.
5 According to Ownby, wealthy Mississippi planters were “extremely suspicious” about enslaved blacks who made request for new clothes and other consumable goods. Because slaveowners viewed African Americans as inherently “self-indulgent and wasteful,” they readily believed that their slaves would lie about not having sufficient rations in order to receive extras or unnecessary luxuries, which supposedly satisfied their seemingly unquenchable thirst to display individuality and status. Ownby also asserts that soon after Emancipation, white landowners “continued to see blacks as wasteful consumers,” and some claimed that “idle and trifling Negroe[s]” would inevitably steal, not work, to gain a living and prevent starvation (Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 47, 62). Performance studies scholar Barbara Webb states that the black man “who dressed well and wore jewelry” in early twentieth-century America occasionally “‘provoked’ arrest and imprisonment until he could prove ownership of his clothing and possessions.” In other words, some whites were convinced that the finely garbed African-American male or black dandy stole aristocratic-looking attire (presumably from well-to-do whites) to trick the public into believing that he was an elite citizen of the nation (Barbara L. Webb, “The Black Dandyism of George Walker,” 16).
6 Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 35.
3
This dissertation looks at the role that Washington, D.C.’s culture of consumption, which was largely marketed by white and black elites, played in reproducing the idea that African Americans who conspicuously consumed between the
1910s and the 1930s were villainous or disreputable. It also explores how commodity culture distracted segments of the capital city’s black populace from addressing the structural forces that systematically disenfranchised peoples of African descent during the interwar period. Instead of collaborating to remedy the inequities that were responsible for creating a large black servant class, a number of poor African Americans relied on illegitimate economies to acquire trendy clothes and cars, or they turned to popular magazines and films to style themselves in ways that would prove that they were equal citizens of the nation.7 Likewise, several prominent blacks vilified those within the community who did not present middle-class sensibilities when consuming inside and outside city neighborhoods. Others invoked the “suspicious Negro” in their admonitions against mass and conspicuous consumption, although they, too, sported luxuries to demonstrate that they were elites and to distinguish themselves from the working classes.
7 Throughout the early decades of the last century, D.C.’s large black servant class consisted of poorly paid workers who toiled for the federal government and in the domestic and personal service spheres. Of the 64,453 black Washingtonians, aged 10 and over, who were employed in the 1920s, 10% held white-collar jobs; 21% were listed as skilled or semi-skilled workers in the manufacturing, mechanical and transportation industries; and 69% worked as unskilled laborers, domestic servants and personal service providers. See E. Franklin Frazier, “Occupational Classes Among Negroes in Cities,” American Journal of Sociology 35.5 (1930): 723; and Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 22-25, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008). According to the 1930 Census, 37,612 (or 51%) of Washington’s 73,130 black workers labored in the domestic and personal service spheres and “industries not specified” (Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1 [Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932], 388, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm [accessed December 18, 2008]). By 1940, approximately 60% (or 60,315) of D.C.’s 97,664 “nonwhite” (read predominantly black) laborers worked for the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and in the domestic and personal service spheres (Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 1, [Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943], 968, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm, [accessed December 18, 2008]). 4
These individual practices were used to exhibit class mobility, political power and respectability during a time when the Race as a whole faced intense discrimination in housing, the employment sector and recreational spaces.
However, since African Americans in the nation’s capital appropriated dominant cultural norms to counter bigotry, they helped to sustain the reigning racial and class ideology of the era, which prefigured the white consumer as the ideal citizen and the black consumer as a potential criminal and threat to the existing social order. As this study argues, black Washingtonians participated in marginalizing their community when they bought into mainstream ideas of what constituted status or propriety and publicly linked African-American consumption patterns with deviance. D.C.’s black population ultimately preserved the primacy of the bourgeoisie who, as Marxist Antonio Gramsci has astutely noted, successfully maintains sovereignty by inculcating its values, which are embraced by subordinate groups who consciously, and at times unintentionally, submit to the status quo, wear the chains of oppression, or derail their own acts of agency against tyranny.8 That is, commodity culture united various classes of the District’s African-
American residents to the dominant white society while undermining their ability to fully participate in collective action to resist the vagaries of racism or gain equality between
WWI and WWII.
8 According to Antonio Gramsci, the state or civil society is “the entire complex of political and theoretical activity by which the ruling classes not only justify and maintain their domination but also succeed in obtaining the active consent of the governed” (Gramsci, quoted in Joseph V. Femia, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process [Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1981], 28). Also note that Frankfurt School theorists Horkheimer and Adorno have posited that the cultural industry has been successful in persuading “workers, employees, …and the lower middle class” to uncritically embrace the bourgeois “myth of success” and the “very ideology which enslaves” the oppressed or the “deceived masses” (Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming [New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1998], 133-134).
5
A range of elite black Washingtonians propagated the notion that African-
American consumers were potential threats to civil society. Like Calvin Chase, black newspapermen affiliated with the Washington Tribune and the Afro-American generated multiple interpretations of the criminal Negro consumer in the 1920s and 1930s.
Particularly, these middle-class journalists provided depictions of African Americans stealing, exchanging goods on the “black market,” and swindling unsuspecting others inside and outside their communities in order to own fashionable items and accumulate wealth.9 A few university-trained professionals associated with the city’s black upper class or aristocracy also helped to cast the image of the degenerate Negro consumer throughout the early twentieth century. They specifically charged that African
Americans used expensive products, like deluxe automobiles, to gain sexual favors and adorned themselves in furs, jewels and other costly wares to conceal (or perhaps indicate) their underworld personas as murderers, hustlers, gamblers and crooks.10
9 See John P. Moore, “Beauty and the Diamond Ring,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 12, 1929; J. Fortune Reade, “Trapping the Gang: The Thrilling Adventure of a Negro Policeman,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 26, 1929; “Numbers Mogul Asks New Deal,” Washington Tribune, May 17, 1934; Anonymous, “Chiselers on Relief Own a Fine Car,” Washington Tribune, September 29, 1934; “Police Arrest 17 in Alleged Burglary Ring,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 4, 1933; and William Max Johnson, “Gambling Fever: A Gambler Bets Against Cupid,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 25, 1936.
10 In the early 1920s, a number of “educated” African Americans who resided in Washington’s upscale Ledroit Park community spread an unfounded rumor that one of their female neighbors accepted a sports car from a lover (also a Ledroiter) as compensation, so to speak, for her services. See Margaret Dumas of 1817 13th Street, N.W., to Josephine Bruce, 16 November 1922; Family Correspondence, Folder 59, Box 10-3, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Sr. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. In 1929, black sociologist William Jones perpetuated a prevailing view that D.C.’s poor black alley dwellers regularly engaged in bootlegging, gambling, and selling stolen merchandise, and sometimes maimed or killed so that they could dress in “very beautiful and expensive clothes” (William Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC: A Study in Human Ecology [Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1929], 46-49).
6
Because Washington’s African-American leaders surveilled and denigrated the black consumer in the early twentieth century, they secured social hierarchies or second- class citizenship for minority populations in the nation’s capital. In other words, privileged blacks shored-up Washington’s racial and class order during the rise of Jim
Crow when they positioned African-American recreational activities as suspicious behavior that warranted regulation. The city’s black elite, in some sense, behaved like the plantation system’s patrolling white working class, described by theorist Steve
Martinot as an incipient middle class (or control stratum) that solidified white supremacy during slavery by “denying humanity to [racialized black and brown] others.”11 But instead of using brute force to curb African-American acts of resistance, race leaders monitored and publicly humiliated black consumers in an attempt to ensure that members of their community would make “proper” choices in the market.
D.C.’s black elite also worked to protect its tenuous class standing by joining ranks with America’s ruling social group or adopting its racial and class proscriptions related to mass consumption. To put it another way, prominent black Washingtonians - who believed that conspicuous consumption was reserved for the middle and upper classes and that “sensible” consumption was most appropriate for a black servant class - demonized those within their community who used their monies to satisfy individual desires instead of communal needs. As whites had historically done before them,
11 Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 79.
7
Washington’s African-American leaders represented the conspicuous black consumer as a menace to society and a well-functioning yet subservient laboring class.12
But a significant number of black Washingtonians still believed that they could use or consume mass-produced items to transcend imposed class status and create subjectivities that were in line with popular cultural ideas, such as the well-dressed motorist, the self-sufficient workingwoman and the upstanding single-family homeowner.13 Many of the city’s African-American doctors, lawyers, teachers and ministers worked two or more jobs to maintain their social standing, obtain commodities and show that they were proper citizens who deserved equal treatment under the law.14
Some underemployed black residents relied on bootlegging, racketeering and other underground economies to earn a living wage and acquire the badges of success because of their limited income, racial and class segregation, or they were simply denied full entry into the dominant culture of buying and owning. And, there were poor blacks who were willing to engage in a host of legal and illegal dealings because they understood that low- wage employment in the “legitimate” economy would barely allow them to earn a decent
12 Elizabeth Chin states that elite whites have long defined “the consumption of blacks as illegal, or not, depending on convenience. Images of slaves sneaking into henhouses and melon patches have evolved into present day portrayals of African Americans who, like the infamous welfare queen, are too lazy to work but not too lazy to steal, ready to play dumb but amazingly ingenious at executing a scam” (Chin, Purchasing Power, 37-38).
13 In the 1910s and 1920s, many covers of American sheet music portrayed opulently dressed white couples sitting inside or standing near their cars, which symbolized wealth and class privilege. See “Cars! Cars! Cars!” from the exhibit titled, America on the Move, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Washington, D.C., http://americanhistory.si.edu/ONTHEMOVE/themes/story_41_2.html (accessed January 10, 2010).
14 Jacqueline Moore asserts that many black Washingtonians who were trained as doctors, lawyers, ministers and teachers had to supplement their incomes by taking jobs in the federal government. See Jacqueline Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 26-27. 8 living let alone buy expensive consumable goods. In the late 1930s, for instance, a disadvantaged youth told Howard University professor E. Franklin Frazier that he did not think he would follow in the footsteps of his father, a laborer who apparently “worked hard all his life” but was unable to purchase a home and enough clothes for his children.
Instead, according to this Washingtonian, he would “like to have money no matter what
[he] had to do to get it” so that he could “be like” his idol, prizefighter Joe Louis. For this socially and financially marginalized teen, “money [wasn’t] everything, but it [could] certainly get most anything,” namely the status symbols associated with upward mobility, fame and manliness.15
Contrary to Calvin Chase and other race leaders who touted the idea that African
Americans would gain political and economic power by taking on honest work and practicing thrift, it appears that this representative youth was willing to do just about anything to have the expendable cash that would allow him to consume like the elite and demonstrate that he was an important citizen of the nation. This anything could have included training to become a champion boxer, or it could have meant pimping, stealing and participating in other questionable deeds. Sure enough, pimping and robbing required a great amount of work to pull off successfully, yet these labor practices were part of the pantheon of activities that many whites had long associated with “Negroes.”
15 This unidentified youth stated the following: “Of all the men we mentioned whom I thought were important, I think I’d like to be like Joe Louis. Why? Well, chiefly because of his money….Oh, Boy! What I couldn’t do with some of the money he has made. Money isn’t everything, but it can certainly get most anything….I’d like to have money no matter what I had to do to get it. It looks as though I’m not going to get much by working for it. My father worked hard all his life and we don’t even own our house. My clothes are pretty ragged as you can see and there’s little I can do to earn money to buy more, and my father says if I want them, I’ll have to get out and get the money to buy them” (Anonymous interview, circa 1938 or 1939, Notecards, Folder 4, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University). 9
The desire to “have money no matter what [it took] to get it” was enough to drive numerous underprivileged blacks to create identities that countered middle-class understandings of respectability. However, the longing to use money or the accoutrements of the monied to prove worth also trapped several low-income African
Americans in “criminal” or “disreputable” lifestyles that worked to further subjugate the
Race.
In one sense, then, consumer culture was liberating for the individual black consumer because it allowed him or her to defy authority and exhibit class mobility in the face of white racism and Jim Crow policies. By flaunting the symbols of success, varied black Washingtonians were also able to display a measure of citizenship (or autonomy, status, equality and political power). Actually, using commodities to show that one was a citizen of the nation was among the few, if not only, options for a minority group that lived in a city where African Americans were grossly underrepresented in labor organizations, in a district of disenfranchised residents who lacked congressional representation, and in a society that was bent upon proving that dark skin was an indicator of destitution and subjugation.16 But by emulating mainstream representations of citizenship (i.e., the white American who donned luxuries to prove that s/he deserved the privileges associated with the propertied), blacks in the nation’s capital confirmed a
16 According to Constance Green, Washington’s white-run labor unions excluded African Americans throughout the 1800s and the early 1900s. It was not until the late 1930s that the CIO opened membership to black workers. See Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 27, 96, 120, 133-134, 196, 223-230, 242. Also note that in 1974 Washingtonians elected their first African-American mayor, who was the city’s first elected mayor since 1871, and the U.S. Congress is currently working to pass a DC Voting Rights Act that would grant Washingtonians their first voting member in the House of Representatives. See Ronald M. Johnson, “LeDroit Park: Premier Black Community,” in Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital, ed. Kathryn Schneider Smith (Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, Inc., 1988), 147; and DC Vote: Working to End Taxation Without Representation http://www.dcvote.org/ (accessed January 10, 2009). 10 common perception that “Negroes” were disorderly criminals who illegally obtained consumable goods to contest the idea that class mobility was a sign of whiteness.17 They also incurred the wrath of their leaders, who labeled mass entertainment and conspicuous consumption injurious to character development and economic stability. Black
Washingtonians who co-opted mainline images and lifestyles ultimately preserved the dominant racial and class ideology, which encouraged affluent whites to use mass- produced goods to fix their status yet racialized and disciplined African Americans for openly challenging the notion that consumer culture was closed to them.18
By focusing on commodity culture’s impact on African-American identity formation and group efforts, this project complicates Southern and Northern black community studies, such as Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom, Glenda Gilmore’s
Gender and Jim Crow, Robin Kelley’s Race Rebels, Earl Lewis’s In Their Own Interests,
James Grossman’s Land of Hope and Joe Trotter’s Black Milwaukee. These monographs demonstrate that working- and middle-class African Americans expressed their class interests in racial terms as they engaged in everyday, unorganized and institutionally led
17 Cultural historian Grace Hale shows that the mainstream media represented the upwardly mobile white consumer as the consummate citizen in the United States in the early twentieth century. See Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Vintage Books, 1998).
18 Roland Marchand has argued that wealthy white businessmen proliferated ads in the early twentieth century that “portray[ed] the world they knew,…satisfied their own tastes,” or reflected the aspirations of upper-class and upper middle-class white Americans who, more than any other social group in the US, had the expendable income to conspicuously consume (Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985], xvii). Susan Porter Benson confirms that the department store was chiefly designed to attract bourgeois white matrons who were mainly responsible for ensuring that their families wore the latest fashions of the era and lived in well furnished yet tastefully decorated homes. See Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).
11 forms of resistance to discrimination and white hostility.19 Trotter, Grossman and Lewis also detail how unjust policies and intra-racial conflicts disrupted civil rights campaigns in Black America during and immediately after WWI. However, none of the previously mentioned scholars show how African Americans from various backgrounds displayed and upheld middle-class “white” cultural norms and, consequently, subjugated the Race in their market exchanges, nor do they fully examine consumption’s role in impeding collective organizing and uplift in black communities during the rise of Jim Crow.
This work also challenges consumer culture studies that chart how varied whites solidified their class interests and white privilege through consumerism, but do not address the ways that the market criminalized blacks and prevented many from developing race consciousness that opposed mainline notions of success.20 Of course, it
19 Tera W. Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994); Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915-45 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).
20 Stuart Ewen and Roland Marchand examine advertising produced in the early twentieth century to demonstrate how white businessmen sold the ideology of consumption or the consumer ethic to the American public. William Leach looks at the role that national corporations, investment banks, mail order houses, chain stores, hotels, restaurants and department stores played in America’s transformation from a producer- to consumer-oriented culture. Kathy Piess focuses on the leisure activities of young white working women in New York City at the turn-of-the twentieth century to show how immigrant women introduced a heterosocial spatial and gender arrangement to the public arena that challenged the middle- class concept of separate spheres and the Victorian notion of female respectability. Susan Porter Benson examines the consumer activities of male managers, working-class saleswomen, and middle-class female customers to illustrate how the department store was a new public space for white Americans of various backgrounds to jockey for social status and display their cultural norms and economic interests during the rise of commodity culture. See Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1976); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working 12 must be noted that Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal, Marya McQuirter’s “Claiming the City” and Davarian Baldwin’s Chicago’s New Negroes argue that African Americans used their purchasing power to exhibit status, challenge racial bigotry and contest middle- class representations of style and decorum throughout the twentieth century.21 Cohen further demonstrates in A Consumers’ Republic how mass consumption has simultaneously helped and undercut African-American efforts to achieve equality since the Great Depression.22 Yet these histories, like those that solely focus on the business and recreational activities of whites, do not adequately discuss how commodity culture produced the ominous black consumer and weakened the development of an aggressive race-based movement to fight inequitable laws and practices.
Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); and Benson, Counter Cultures.
21 Lizabeth Cohen argues that African Americans in urban centers like Chicago consumed during the 1910s and 1920s to become more “independent and influential as a race, not more integrated into white middle- class culture” (Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 148). Marya McQuirter examines the leisure activities of black Washingtonians from 1902 to 1957 to illustrate that African Americans turned to consumer culture to cement multiple urban black identities in the public sphere; contest the boundaries of racial segregation; and challenge ideas of middle-class respectability in the first half of the twentieth century. Davarian Baldwin demonstrates that black beauty culturists sold their hair and skin products by using the rhetoric of uplift in the early twentieth century. Baldwin also examines various cultural products to substantiate his claim that Southern blacks, who flocked to industrial cities during the Great Migration, turned to the mass marketplace to develop “New Negro” ideas of respectability that competed with “old settler” or elite Northern blacks’ notions of refinement. See Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City: African Americans, Urbanization, and Leisure in Washington, D.C., 1902-1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000); and Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
22 Cohen states that during the 1930s urban blacks became “citizen consumers” who organized boycotts against commercial establishments that refused to hire African Americans. She additionally points out that after WWI, “politicized black consumers” participated in “many local civil rights struggles” that were “aimed at gaining equal access to mass consumer markets” in public places. However, according to Cohen, African Americans were barred from living in government-funded suburbs that whites developed on the outskirts of U.S. cities in the postwar era. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 41-61; 166-256.
13
Lastly, this dissertation builds upon urban histories, such as Jacqueline Stewart’s
Migrating to the Movies and Chad Heap’s Slumming, in its exploration of the role that commercialized leisure played in forging racial identities, fueling conflicts in urban black districts, shoring-up white hegemony and stigmatizing African Americans between WWI and WWII.23 But unlike these scholars, I argue that consumer culture – which was a dominant “way of seeing” in the United States during the interwar period – fashioned a black consumer class that was invested in (or consciously and subconsciously consented to) marginalizing the Race.24 This African-American consumer class was quite noticeable and vocal in Washington, D.C., a white-collar city that engendered a middle- class way of life and aesthetic, which, in turn, influenced the consumption ethic and habits of all of the city’s inhabitants.25 Moreover, while the District’s black consumer
23 Jacqueline Stewart illustrates that American cinema mirrored U.S. racial stereotypes and Jim Crow practices and exacerbated tensions between old and new settlers in Chicago’s Black Belt during the Great Migration. She also claims that American cinema expanded and limited working-class black identity because poor African Americans who viewed popular films were able to temporarily transcend their imposed class status; yet, they were always reminded of their subjugated position when they encountered segregated theaters, derogatory images of blacks on the big screen or could not fully emulate Hollywood stars because of their limited income, physical features and white racism. And, Chad Heap demonstrates that slumming allowed middle-class whites to physically cross the color line in Chicago and New York City during the early twentieth century. He also posits that slumming solidified the strict black/white axis in urban centers because these expeditions were ways for upwardly mobile white men and women to consummate their relationships and simultaneously degrade and distinguish themselves from so-called primitive blacks. See Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); and Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885 – 1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 189- 230.
24 In Fox and Lears’s The Culture of Consumption, they argue that consumption “became a cultural ideal, a hegemonic ‘way of seeing’ in the twentieth century America” because of the actions, visual representations and writings of urban elites (Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1983]).
25 I borrow the term “white-collar city” from Constance Green’s Secret City (p. 196). By referring to D.C. as a white-collar city, Green seems to have meant that in the 1910s and the 1920s the District was home to a significant number of salaried professionals who were affiliated with the federal government, universities and private enterprises. In “Occupational Classes of Negroes in Cities,” E. Franklin Frazier reported that in 1920 approximately 10% of the 64,453 gainfully employed black Washingtonians held white-collar jobs 14 class was primarily an underpaid servant class, it did not necessarily coalesce into a racially conscious proletariat as African-American communities did in industrial
Chicago, Milwaukee, and Norfolk, Virginia.26 The rise of Jim Crow certainly forced many black Washingtonians, like their counterparts across the U.S., to agitate for equality and build institutions that helped members of the Race survive and prosper in spite of discrimination. However, D.C.’s African-American populace did not readily embrace a working-class racial identity that countered assimilation into mainstream “white” culture, largely because it was vastly different from the black communities that formed in manufacturing hubs immediately after WWI.27 Although field hands from the Deep
South made up the bulk of “Black Belts” in the country’s major industrial centers in the
1920s, over 80 percent of D.C.’s African-American residents were native
(professional, public services and trade), 21% were skilled and semi-skilled workers, and 69% were domestics or laborers. See Frazier, “Occupational Classes of Negroes in Cities,” American Journal of Sociology 35.5 (1930): 723. Also see Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 22-25, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008).
26 Historians Joe Trotter, James Grossman and Earl Lewis agree that the Great Migration and industrialization forged a racially conscious black proletariat that was wed to contesting Jim Crow practices and building communities that would protect its members from hostile urban environments. Joe Trotter specifically asserts in Black Milwaukee that industrialization created a black proletariat, comprised of working and middle-class African Americans, which “expressed [its] class interests in explicitly racial terms” (Trotter, Black Milwaukee, xi-xii); see also James R. Grossman, Land of Hope; and Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests. Note that E. Franklin Frazier reported that in 1920, 69% of the 64,453 gainfully employed black Washingtonians worked as domestics or unskilled laborers. See Frazier, “Occupational Classes of Negroes in Cities,” American Journal of Sociology 35:5 (1930): 723. Also see Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 22-25, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008).
27 Lizabeth Cohen argues that African Americans in urban centers like Chicago consumed during the 1910s and 1920s to become more “independent and influential as a race, not more integrated into white middle- class culture” (Cohen, Making a New Deal, 148). Davarian Baldwin claims that Southern blacks brought a Southern “New Negro” identity or racial consciousness to Chicago’s Black Belt that countered the city’s black elite’ understanding of respectability. This “New Negro” outlook and sensibility, according to Baldwin, could be found in hairstyles, movies and other cultural formations. See Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes.
15
Washingtonians and transplants from Maryland and Virginia who had lived in the city for at least a decade or more.28 The lack of a sizeable migrant population made it fairly easy for a number of the District’s black residents to adopt the consumer ideology of
America’s urban elite, not that of a racialized working-class minority. Further, many within Washington’s African-American populace did not collectively forge a proletarian or producer consciousness because they never toiled under segregated, dehumanizing factory conditions. And, unlike the large black laboring classes that spent much of their time in attire that was suitable for unsanitary manufacturing jobs, the majority of the capital city’s African-American residents worked in the upscale environs of the federal government.29 As a result, they dressed and presented themselves in ways that were acceptable to office managers, Congressmen and other wealthy whites.
In sum, the absence of an organized black laboring class partially contributed to the emergence and dominance of an African-American consumer class, which reinforced the supremacy of the bourgeoisie by reenergizing its ideology instead of cultivating a blue-collar identity that rejected America’s reigning consumption ethos. As this project
28 Thirteenth Census of the United States, Volume II, Population 1910 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1913), 291, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1910.htm (accessed March 7, 2010), and Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 19, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed March 7, 2010). For more on the makeup of black communities in industrial Milwaukee, Chicago and Norfolk, VA, see Joe William Trotter, Jr., Black Milwaukee; James R. Grossman, Land of Hope; and Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests.
29 Historian Constance Green asserts that the nation’s government employed approximately 70% of the District’s 64,453 black workers in 1928. Green specifically states that in 1928 there were over 51,880 black Washingtonians employed by the federal government; messengers, charwomen (janitors) and other manual workers, earning an average of $1234 a year, comprised most of the list. See Green, The Secret City, 203. Also note that the Census reported that the average wage in the District of Columbia in 1925 was $1571. See Paul F. Brissenden, Earnings of Factory Workers, 1899-1927: An Analysis of Pay-Roll Statistics (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1929), 388.
16 maintains, race leaders – who set the terms of “good” and “bad” recreational choices in
Black Washington – worked to delimit the mobility of their community when they constructed the recalcitrant Negro consumer that threatened civic order and defied group expectations of what it meant to be a proper citizen of Black America. This study also illustrates how mass culture was instrumental in encouraging poor and middle-class black
Washingtonians to counter the images of respectability and the rhetoric of communal uplift sanctioned by some of the city’s African-American elite. It specifically claims that the white-owned film and publishing industries helped disadvantaged black females to present selves that were different from the portraits of civility propagated by their leaders. In addition, it demonstrates how influential whites in Washington D.C. persuaded upwardly mobile blacks (such as teachers and government workers) to buy commodities so that they could escape racially designated areas of the city and set themselves apart from the working classes that resided in or near the urban core.
I rely on a variety of sources – including the black and white press, sociological studies, government records, city directories, Negro literature, Depression-era romance magazines and melodramatic movies, and the personal papers of African-American leaders – to examine consumer culture’s impact on black identity formation and organizing efforts. These primary documents were selected because they are the only available sources, to my knowledge, that let contemporary observers see the mass products and images that black Washingtonians consumed; these materials also allow readers to understand the meanings that D.C.’s African-American residents ascribed to commodity culture. While these sources mostly reveal how elites represented and demonized the District’s black consumers in the early twentieth century, some also give 17 insight into the ways that working-class black Washingtonians resisted notions of
“proper” consumption. For instance, E. Franklin Frazier’s and William H. Jones’s sociological studies confirm that underprivileged African Americans turned to the market to temporarily escape their low-class status even though leading Washingtonians incriminated them for challenging the nation’s racial and class norms that insisted that conspicuous or mass consumption was a white or middle-class right.
By far, D.C.’s black-owned newspapers were most influential in shaping the contours of this dissertation because of their bounty of editorials, advertisements and readers’ letters that highlight consumer activity. These weeklies provide the bulk of interpretive material for Chapters 1 and 2, which discuss the defamation and criminalization of black consumers between the 1910s and the 1930s. Both chapters chart how the District’s black elites denounced certain consumer activity under the guise of protecting the well-being of “legitimate” citizens. More pointedly, Chapters 1 and 2 investigate how some of Washington’s most prominent African Americans positioned black consumers as threats to maintaining the socioeconomic order and as the primary reason that the Race could not access citizenship or was not fully included in the national polity.
Chapter 1 recovers how the city’s black business class utilized the Negro press to sell the idea that African Americans who refused to stop patronizing white establishments and practicing thrift were impediments to generating wealth in Black America. This chapter also demonstrates that African-American leaders participated in subjugating their community by linking displays of extravagance with degeneracy. The class conflicts between Washington’s old black aristocracy and the emerging black business class serve 18 as the main context, which foregrounds the disparaging image of the African-American consumer. The city’s rising black capitalist class criticized the purchasing habits of university-trained, upper-class blacks to supplant the “aristocracy” as the new leaders of
D.C.’s African-American community.30 Enterprise supporters also berated elite (and ordinary) black consumers because they believed that the only way that African
Americans could justifiably participate in commodity culture was by becoming small business owners, patronizing black entrepreneurs, and saving capital that could be used to sustain the Race over the long haul. Those who refused to or could not follow these ideas of proper citizenship were labeled deficient and disreputable or poor examples of black manhood and womanhood. According to the defenders of Negro enterprise or cooperative economics, participating in mass consumption and turning away from black- owned ventures was proof that African Americans lacked the pride necessary to combat racism. Donning expensive goods was also sufficient evidence to nourish the perception that blacks would forfeit principles and obligations to partake in conspicuous consumption. In the final analysis, Washington’s black capitalist class represented the
African-American consumer as a self-serving villain who enriched white America and robbed the Black Race of the opportunity to achieve equality in the United States.
Chapter 2 is also concerned with the conflation of African-American consumption with illegitimacy or illegality. It argues that black auto-mobility, and/or representations
30 Historians August Meier, Willard Gatewood and Michael Fitzpatrick have discussed the conflicts that occurred between old and new middle-class blacks who lived in urban centers during and immediately after WWI. See August Meier, “Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” Phylon 23.3 (1962): 258-266; Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 332-348; and Michael Andrew Fitzpatrick, “A Great Agitation for Business: Black Economic Development in Shaw,” Washington History (Fall/Winter 1990- 91): 51-56. 19 of African Americans in cars, produced the stereotype of the Negro driver who used the auto to expedite and camouflage despicable behavior. While the well-dressed motorist was an exalted symbol of status in Washington’s black community in the early twentieth century, the very act of driving also brought new restrictions to the city’s African-
American populace. Particularly, working-class blacks who used vehicles to supplement their income or to purely earn a living were often criminalized for attempting to subvert discriminatory work conditions and policies that curbed their economic mobility.
Because some blacks drove automobiles to cover-up illicit activity, all African-American motorists were, in effect, rendered suspect and potentially dangerous. A number of elite whites in the capital city lampooned the “colored chauffeur” and vilified black bootleggers to erase traces of African-American ingenuity and achievement and to reinforce the idea that wily “Negroes” needed strict monitoring. Moreover, well-to-do blacks revived the image of the contemptible Negro driver to distance themselves from bootleggers and jitney drivers (unauthorized cabbies) and to malign those who took to the wheel to display style that countered middle-class perceptions of propriety, such as the fashionably-attired autoist who drove to serve and uplift the community.
Despite being denigrated for participating in mass culture, blacks in D.C. endeavored to attain citizenship by appropriating mainline images of success. Chapters 3 and 4 mostly examine African-American newspapers and sociological reports as well as products sold by whites to demonstrate that segments of black Washingtonians counted on the mainstream market to show that they were modern Americans, and thus, citizens of the nation during the Great Depression. These chapters also reveal that when blacks embraced popular understandings of upward mobility, they often did so to disconnect 20 from their communal obligations or to separate themselves from racially marked city dwellers by censuring working-class consumer patterns in aging urban neighborhoods or fleeing the inner core for newly built suburban communities. In effect, African-American residents in Washington, D.C. helped to seal their community’s degraded status when they bought into mainstream notions of what constituted standing in the U.S. They particularly sustained a consumer logic (tinged by America’s racial and class ideology) that granted license for public displays of respectability yet assailed working-class acts of agency via consumption.
As Chapter 3 of this study shows, poor teenaged black girls in the nation’s capital mimicked popular expressions of modern femininity during the 1930s in an attempt to shed their prescribed roles as loyal daughters and mothers who selflessly cared for families and communities. But by doing so, teen girls also risked punishment or further subjugation because they challenged the racial and class norms that consigned them to the domestic sphere and validated a widespread perception that black females regularly engaged in questionable activities. Some African-American educators and social workers explicitly portrayed romance readers and viewers as depraved women, not upstanding ladies, who lacked the moral compass to maintain their homes and rear healthy children.
Chapter 3 pays particular attention to the way that broadly circulated love stories - developed by the white-run movie and publishing industries - forged black female identity in Washington, D.C. during the Great Depression. It argues that mainstream romances presented a racialized or “marked” white female identity, which helped poor black girls to fashion subjectivities that countered the dutiful mother or housewife celebrated by many of those affiliated with the white and black middle class. This 21 chapter also illustrates that melodramas offered the possibility of citizenship to rebellious young women if they were willing to accept restricted class mobility, temporary ostracism or injury for stretching the limits of proper femininity.
While poor African-American girls who consumed popular magazines and films inadvertently worked to secure their containment or demise, a number of elite black
Washingtonians turned away (or were distracted) from cultivating identities that challenged America’s dominant consumption ethic during the 1930s. Put differently, many middle-class blacks promoted a bourgeois sense of taste and decorum when they labeled working-class African Americans as “bad” (dirty, lazy, and immoral) neighbors and poor consumers of their environment, rehabilitated urban homes to increase the value of their assets and purchased newly built dwellings located in suburban settings to maintain their standing in the District. Elite blacks who endorsed middle-class displays of refinement also celebrated an ideology that rewarded propertied Americans and chastised dispossessed minorities for not being able to consume like the upwardly mobile. As chapter 4 argues, black Washingtonians worked in tandem with their white
“neighbors” during the Depression to diminish the value of aging real estate that was located in the capital city’s urban core. Influential African Americans especially characterized the working- and under-class populations, who resided in D.C.’s central or inner-city wards, as menaces to public health, safety and prosperity. Subsequently, they helped to justify the government and market-driven policies designed to bypass disadvantaged urban dwellers and funnel monies into modern communities located at the city’s edge.
22
Mass consumption provided a modicum (or the prospect) of self-sufficiency for select blacks who embraced popular depictions of American citizenship during the interwar period. The purchasing habits and recreational activities of black
Washingtonians also helped to dismantle a widely held assumption that African
Americans could not participate in the emerging consumer culture. However, many of these same practices sustained a prevailing view that “Negroes” were overly concerned with brandishing costly items to mask their imposed inferior status. Various blacks in
D.C. bought luxuries or simply consumed mass-made goods, patronized white-owned establishments and put on extravagant displays. Concurrently, a number of the city’s race leaders constructed the reckless, conspicuous Negro consumer to stress that a proper black citizen practiced thrift and used his or her purchasing power to build a robust black economy and uplift the entire community. In so doing, elite African Americans in the nation’s capital bolstered a deeply entrenched white American perception that blacks could not attain (or did not deserve) social, economic and political power because they supposedly exercised a lack of restraint while interfacing with the market.
23
Chapter One
The “Bad” Black Consumer
In a 1933 editorial titled, “What Do Negroes Really Want,” the black-owned
Washington Tribune asked its readers: would they rather be “amalgamated and absorbed in the American melting pot” or “remain Negroid” by “cultivat[ing] more solidarity with a national purpose?”1 The basis for the question was the National Theatre’s showing of the play Green Pastures, which interpreted African-American life in the rural South. Jim
Crow policies barred blacks from viewing the play at the National Theatre. But Tribune editors reported that some black Washingtonians were “itching” to turn a profit by organizing a separate performance of Green Pastures to accommodate African
Americans who believed that they were entitled to see the play because it starred black actors. Paying to view Green Pastures in any segregated venue, claimed Tribune editors, was proof that black Washingtonians lacked race pride and group solidarity. According to the Tribune, the only surefire way for African Americans in the District to “maintain their racial distinction” was to refuse to support blacks and whites who upheld racial discrimination. Tribune editors further suggested that African Americans could indeed
“remain Negroid” or authentically black if they cooperated by establishing and patronizing race businesses that would provide the latest plays and other products to the entire community.
1 “What Do Negroes Really Want?” Washington Tribune, February 10, 1933. For more commentary on the Jim Crow policies of the National Theatre during the Depression, see “Washington’s ‘Green Pastures,’” Washington Tribune, February 10, 1933 and “Wilson Bans ‘Green Pastures,’” Washington Tribune, February 10, 1933. 24 The Tribune’s editorial was emblematic of the many consumer-related articles that Washington, D.C.’s Negro press printed between the 1910s and the 1930s. Much of the commentary published by African-American journalists equated buying black with displaying racial unity or “authentic blackness” while linking patronage of white establishments with dependency on whites or the desire to be white. Some of the consumption articles published by the District’s black newspaper owners and editors also questioned the pride and propriety, or racial authenticity, of African Americans who spent lavishly as well as those who purportedly engaged in illicit activities to gain access to leisure or luxury.2 And, journalists were not alone in spreading the idea that black
Americans lacked regard for themselves in the pursuit of recreation and commodities. A number of Washington’s African-American government workers, businessmen, laborers and students publicly invoked the image of the “bad” black consumer in the early twentieth century.3
The purpose of this focus on the consumer was to stress that a proper leader, or an
“authentic Negro,” was one who practiced thrift and helped to build a black economy that would offer employment, quality wares and services for members of the Race. However, the critiques of African-American leisure habits also depicted consumers who were more
2 “Expensive Vanity,” Washington Bee, November 10, 1917; “Baptist Extravagance,” Washington Bee, July 3, 1920; “Luxuries and Extravagances,” Washington Bee, October 23, 1920; John P. Moore, “Beauty and the Diamond Ring,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 12, 1929; J. Fortune Reade, “Trapping the Gang: The Thrilling Adventure of a Negro Policeman,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 26, 1929; and “Stole Employer’s Overcoat to Adorn Sweetheart,” Washington Tribune, January 25, 1929.
3 The Washington Sun, Washington Bee and Washington Tribune published letters from various black Washingtonians who believed that black consumers did not support race enterprises or practice thrift. A review of the Archibald Grimke Papers, the Carter G. Woodson Collection, and the E. Franklin Frazier Papers also shows that NAACP members, black businessmen, pastors and educators were less public about their assertions that African-Americans did not practice thrift or patronize black businesses and would commit despicable acts to possess luxuries and participate in leisure.
25 interested in satisfying individual desires than with uplifting Black America. The construct of the disreputable, selfish Negro consumer proliferated by black
Washingtonians is markedly different from historical representations of black consumers.
Scholars who study consumer culture overwhelmingly discuss how African Americans have traditionally turned to the market to show respectability, protest bigotry and attain equality.4 Moreover, they have illustrated how cultural institutions, like the Negro press, helped black leaders sell the idea that African Americans could cultivate race pride, exhibit group solidarity and gain political power by participating in consumerism.5 But historians have not fully explicated the role that black newspapers, as consumable products designed to make profits, played in reviving the image of the degenerate Negro consumer and derailing African-American civil rights campaigns during the rise of Jim
Crow.6
4 In Style and Status, Susannah Walker argues that the African-American beauty industry of the early 1900s encouraged black females to purchase its products and become hair stylists to prove that black women were glamorous, upwardly mobile models of femininity. Davarian Baldwin shows in Chicago’s New Negroes that Southern blacks, who flocked to industrial cities during the Great Migration, created and sold varied cultural products to develop “New Negro” ideas of respectability that competed with “old settler” or elite Northern blacks’ notions of refinement. In A Consumers’ Republic, Lizabeth Cohen posits that during the Great Depression, blacks became “citizen consumers” who organized boycotts against commercial establishments that refused to hire African Americans. See Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Davarian L. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
5 Susannah Walker asserts that “African-American beauty advertising” that appeared in the Negro press during the 1920s and the 1930s “promote[d] race pride…by celebrating black female beauty, by lauding the successes and charitable activities of black beauty entrepreneurs, and by advocating beauty culture as a desirable occupation for African-American women” (Walker, Style and Status, 29). Lizabeth Cohen argues that the New York Age and the “militant Chicago Whip” newspapers played pivotal roles in helping urban blacks to successfully organize “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts during the Great Depression (Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 44-46).
6 There have been critics of the black press who point out that race papers of the 1940s and ‘50s were established by the black capitalist class to flaunt and preserve their socioeconomic status. In 1943, white journalist Thomas Sancton of the New Republic claimed that black newspapermen printed derisive stories of whites while taking an apologetic stance toward Negro vice and crime to increase newspaper sales. 26 An examination of D.C.’s Negro press reveals that there were stark differences in
Black Washington over what it meant to be an authentic Negro or an upstanding black consumer in the early twentieth century. Owners and editors of African-American newspapers generally advanced the notion that a “real” race man or woman was one who patronized black enterprises and practiced thrift. In order to successfully sell their version of the authentic Negro, these business leaders wrote articles and printed letters from their supporters.7 But journalists also regularly depicted the negligent Negro consumer because they wanted readers to understand the import of supporting race establishments, saving and investing, and/or they simply set out to increase newspaper subscriptions by dabbling in controversial subject matter. On occasion, editors published views from African Americans who put forth different versions of the black consumer.
Some suggested that a respectable consumer only supported venues that catered to a
Sancton maintained that publishers of the black press were primarily “businessmen whose interest in race welfare was secondary to their interest in selling papers.” He also argued that the Negro press’s racially slanted stories prevented black and whites from collaborating to find solutions to America’s race problems (Thomas Sancton, “The Negro Press,” New Republic 108.17 [April 26, 1943], 557-560). In 1957, African- American sociologist E Franklin Frazier echoed Sancton when he asserted that the black bourgeoisie used race papers to overplay the achievements of the Race in an attempt to counter derogatory images of “Negroes” proliferated by whites. Frazier further posited that post WWII black-owned magazines, such as Ebony and Jet, were established by the black middle class to showcase their achievements and wealth not to improve conditions within the larger black community. See E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 177-194.
7 See, for example, “U Street Needs You,” Washington Sun, March 5, 1915; “The Negro in Business,” Washington Sun, July 2, 1915; H.C. Smith, “Letters from the People,” Washington Sun, July 9, 1915; “The Negro in Business,” Washington Bee, July 17, 1915, “Ware’s Department Store,” Washington Bee, July 17, 1915; “Howard Dental Parlors,” Washington Bee, July 17, 1915; “Patronize Race Enterprises,” Washington Bee, August 24, 1918; “Theatres Open,” Washington Bee, November 9, 1918; J.C. Cunningham, “Business Emancipation,” Washington Bee, January 18, 1919; “Theatres and Drug Stores,” Washington Tribune, June 4, 1921; “Business Opportunities of U Street,” Washington Tribune, June 25, 1921; “Of Commercial Interest,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921; “Business and Commerce,” Washington Tribune, August 6, 1921. Also note that over twenty Tribune readers discussed the merits of supporting black enterprises when they participated in the “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” essay contest that took place in the Summer of 1921. See “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” Washington Tribune, July 23, 1921; July 31, 1921; August 6, 1921; August 13, 1921; August 20, 1921; and August 27, 1921.
27 “high class” clientele and offered choice products.8 Others indicated that trading in both the black- and white-run markets was the best way to demonstrate class mobility and status.9 But even with these interpretations, D.C.’s black newspaper owners and editors helped to construct the idea that the “bad” consumer, not discriminatory policy, was the primary reason that the Race could not access full citizenship in the United States. As this chapter argues, this publicly staged image of the wayward Negro consumer, in turn, confirmed a deeply entrenched white American perception that blacks did not deserve equality because of their dealings in the market.10
Washington. D.C.’s Negro Press, 1910s to 1930s
The Washington Bee and the Washington Tribune were the most popular black weeklies in the nation’s capital between WWI and WWII. Yet, subscription numbers do not give an accurate account of who read these papers. Family, friends and neighbors often shared black weeklies; African Americans who went to the District’s newspaper buildings to get the late breaking news may have also read the Bee and the Tribune.11
8 James C. Waters, Jr., “Letters from the People,” Washington Sun, February 12, 1915, and Sylvester R. Woodfork, “Letters to Editor,” Washington Tribune, October 8, 1921.
9 V.B.H., “Lily White,” Washington Bee, February 12, 1916, and M.M., “Why We Don’t Patronize Our Own Stores,” Washington Tribune, April 12, 1934.
10 Historian Ted Ownby asserts that shortly after Emancipation, many white landowners, employers, store owners and politicians in Mississippi openly claimed that newly freed blacks lacked a proper work ethic and foolishly spent their money on fancy clothing and nonessential foods instead of purchasing utilitarian items and saving to prepare for future needs. See Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 61-66. Also see Dissertation Introduction for more in the ways that black Washingtonians emulated whites when they revived the image of the degenerate or threatening black consumer through private and public correspondence.
11 Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City: African Americans, Urbanization, and Leisure in Washington, D.C., 1902-1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000), 73.
28 The Bee was established in 1882 and ceased publication in 1922, approximately a year after the death of the paper’s owner and editor, Calvin Chase.12 The paper had about
1000 subscribers annually; it was read locally, nationally and internationally and was the oldest black weekly in continuous publication in the 1920s.13 The Tribune began publication in May 1921 and folded during the late 1940s.14 Between May 1921 and
May 1922, the Tribune competed with the Bee for readers. As early as August 1921,
Tribune editors insisted that their paper was the “most widely read weekly paper in the
District of Columbia” to primarily capture the Bee’s audience.15 Freeman H. M. Murray was the owner of the Tribune and William O. Walker served as managing editor.
According to African-American sociologist William H. Jones, 175 of the 3,319 black households he surveyed in Washington, D.C. stated that they subscribed to the Tribune in the 1920s.16 In the winter of 1922, Tribune newspapermen announced that they disseminated 6,400 copies of the paper to residents of the District and its surrounding
12 Hal Scripps Chase, “Honey for Friends, Stings for Enemies: William Calvin Chase and the Washington Bee, 1881-1921” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1973), 34, 337. Note that Hal S. Chase also challenges Roland E. Wolseley who asserts in the Black Press, U.S.A. that the Bee ceased publication in 1926. According to historian Chase, there is no data or primary source material, which documents that the Bee was published after May 11, 1922.
13 Hal S. Chase, “Honey for Friends, Stings for Enemies,” 93, and Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 64. Note that circulation numbers for the Bee were not listed in the N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory from 1915 to 1922.
14 The first issue of the Tribune was published on May 12, 1921: See Display Ad: “A Triumph of Clean Policy and Principle,” Washington Tribune, August 27, 1921. According to the American Newspaper Annual and Directory, the Tribune was established in 1921. See American Newspaper Annual and Directory: A Catalogue of American Newspapers (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer & Son, 1926), 168. Also note that the Tribune was not listed in the American Newspaper Annual and Directory in 1947 and 1948.
15 See Display Ad: “A Triumph of Clean Policy and Principle,” Washington Tribune, August 27, 1921.
16 William H. Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC: A Study in Human Ecology (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1929), 123-124; Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 73.
29 suburbs; journalists also claimed that the Tribune “carried approximately 30,000 readers” in 1929 to increase distribution and show that the paper carried mass appeal.17
The appeal of the Bee and the Tribune may be partly attributed to their regular championing of Negro enterprise ideology. Proponents of black enterprise believed that establishing and supporting race businesses were prerequisites to obtaining socioeconomic and political power. Advocates of black capitalism were also convinced that African Americans could combat Jim Crow policies and attain full citizenship if they adhered to the philosophy of self-sufficiency and cooperative economics. Black enterprise followers were indebted to Booker T. Washington and the National Negro
Business League for spearheading a nationwide commerce movement within Black
America in the 1890s. It is also plausible that D.C.’s race journalists and their supporters, in particular, were heavily influenced by the writings and speeches of Martin Delany and other black nationalists who rose to prominence in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.18
The concept of building a separate black economy had circulated in the city’s Negro press at least a decade before Booker T. Washington introduced his program to a national
17 “This Week’s Issue of the Tribune is 6,400,” Washington Tribune, February 25, 1922. “The Washington Tribune Does The Job Well,” Washington Tribune, January 11, 1929. Also note that the N.W. Ayer & Son’s American Newspaper Annual and Directory listed the Tribune’s circulation at 5,300 in 1926, 5,549 in 1927, and over 30,000 in the mid to late 1930s.
18 Historian Steven Hahn has argued that renowned black nationalists, such as Martin Delany and Alexander Crummell, and black ministers who espoused blacks nationalist ideology at the grassroots level had a profound impact on working-class African Americans who lived in the rural and small-town South during the 1870s and 1880s. As these migrants journeyed to upper Southern and Northern cities to find better opportunities, Hahn continues, they brought their understanding of self-help and cooperative economics, major tenets of black nationalism, with them and turned inward so that they could work to build self-sustaining communities. See Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 465- 476.
30 audience.19 And, as theorist Tommie Shelby points out, Martin Delany published tracts, such as “The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent,” as early as the 1850s to put forth a program of black solidarity and separatism with the hope that
African Americans would “achieve equality, citizenship, [and] self-government.”
Another aim of Delany’s nationalist project was to cultivate “manhood” by stressing that a real race man (and a race woman to a lesser extent) was one who displayed ambition, courage, self-respect and autonomous thought that was different from or countered that of whites.20
The fact that the Bee and the Tribune provided sensationalist features that excoriated upper-class African Americans who supposedly did not purchase from race establishments might also explain why these papers attracted a portion of D.C.’s black community.21 Many affiliated with the city’s “black aristocracy” embraced business
19 Historian Hal S. Chase suggests that it is possible, but not conclusive, that Calvin Chase, owner and editor of the Bee, adopted or was influenced by Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of self-help and cooperative economics, since excerpts of Washington’s “Alabama Notes” appeared in the Bee before 1895. See Chase, “Honey for Friends, Stings for Enemies,” 114; But historian August Meier maintained that economic solidarity and cooperation were advocated by black newspapermen before Booker T. Washington called for a national Negro enterprise movement in 1895. See August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 45, and Michael Andrew Fitzpatrick, “A Great Agitation for Business: Black Economic Development in Shaw,” Washington History (Fall/Winter 1990-91): 50-53.
20 Tommie Shelby, “Two Conceptions of Black Nationalism: Martin Delany on the Meanings of Black Political Solidarity,” Political Theory 31.5 (October 2003), 664-692.
21 In 1915, Chase consistently ran editorials in the Bee that accused “colored” elites of lacking race pride and not properly supporting black enterprises. Tirades against “lily whites” and “Jim Crow” blacks could be found in the Washington Bee under the following headlines: “Only Two,” February 20, 1915; “Negro Phobia,” February 27, 1915; “Ledroit Park,” May 8, 1915; “Gullible Negroes,” May 22, 1915; “Shams,” May 22, 1915; “Oratory of the Gullibles,” May 29, 1915; “He Apologizes,” June 26, 1915; “False Leadership,” July 3, 1915; “How to Succeed,” July 10, 1915; “Is This Race Pride?” August 14, 1915; and “Why We Fail,” October 2, 1915. Also, see “White Lawyers and Colored Clients,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921; “Colored Business Men and White Undertakers,” Washington Tribune, December 24, 1921; “Mary Church Terrell Injured in Automobile: Denies Private Room, Mrs. Terrell Prefers Open Ward in White Hospital,” Washington Tribune, August 4, 1923; “Race Lawyers Ignored by Mrs. Mary C. Terrell,” Washington Tribune, December 15, 1923; and “Mrs. Mary Church Terrell Repudiates Her Husband,” Washington Tribune, December 29, 1923. 31 development as a workable strategy to gain a measure of equality in the U.S.22 But much of this segment of the population also identified more with the NAACP’s program of cultivating the arts, educating the public about racial discrimination as well as lobbying
Congress to pass anti-lynching and desegregation laws.23 Aristocratic blacks gravitated toward the NAACP because they rejected the idea that Negro enterprise was the most valid way to advance politically. Specifically, they preferred to integrate fully within, not separate from, American society, and they did not believe that accumulation of property and wealth was an indicator of elite status.24
Julia P. Coleman, the owner and editor of the Washington Sun in the 1910s, was an advocate of Negro enterprise but she refused to cater to those who wanted to publicly
22 Historian Michael Fitzpatrick asserts that many of D.C.’s upper-class African Americans embraced a two-pronged strategy of protest and business development by the 1910s. See Fitzpatrick, “A Great Agitation for Business,” 71-72.
23 In 1912, the Terrells, Grimkes and other leading black Washingtonians helped to establish a DC chapter of the NAACP. Membership remained in the hundreds in the early years of the DC branch’s existence; by 1918, the District chapter carried the largest membership in the country. See John R. Shillady, “Finances of the N.A.A.C.P.,” Crisis 17.1 (November 1918): 18. Secretary of the New York Office also sent a letter to Archibald Grimke, president of the DC NAACP chapter, noting that they received the “telegram from Washington telling about the 6,042 new members received…[and that] Washington will have within sixty percent of the total membership of the Association (John R. Shillady to Archibald Grimke, 6 May 1918, NAACP Correspondence, 1918-1919, Folder 547, Box 39-27, Archibald Grimke Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University). For more on the NAACP, see Timothy J. Green, “Teaching the Limits of Liberalism in the Interwar Years: The NAACP’s Antilynching Campaign,” OAH Magazine of History 18.2, Jim Crow (January 2004), 28-30; Sarah A. Anderson, “The Place to Go”: The 135th Street Branch Library and the Harlem Renaissance,” The Library Quarterly 73:4 (October 2003), 383- 421; and Mark Schneider, “The Boston NAACP and the Decline of the Abolitionist Impulse,” The Massachusetts Historical Review 1 (1999): 95-113.
24 For more on the tensions within the black middle class during and immediately after WWI, see Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 332-348; Wilson Record, “The Negro Intellectual and Negro Nationalism,” Social Forces 33.1 (October 1, 1954), 10-18; and “The Negro Business League,” Crisis 10.6 (October 1915): 280-281; “Mr. B. T. Washington in Louisiana, “ Crisis 10.3 (July 1915): 144-146; “Booker T. Washington,” Crisis 11.2 (December 1915): 82; “Moton,” Crisis 12.4 (August 1916): 185; and “Unity,” Crisis 28.3 (July 1924): 103-104.
32 humiliate prominent leaders.25 This refusal to denigrate elites also likely accounted for the Sun’s low distribution numbers and sporadic bouts of publishing throughout the early twentieth century. From its inception, the paper had at least three editors: T. Thomas
Fortune served as editor and Julia P. Coleman acted as assistant editor from March 1914 to March 1915; Coleman was listed as owner, editor and publisher of the Sun in April
1915; and Dr. Alonzo Dow Turner, a former Howard University professor, was editor of the weekly in the late 1920s.26 According to Coleman, the paper began publication in
March 1914 and was still thriving a year later and receiving favorable reviews from newspapermen affiliated with the white-owned Washington Herald.27 However, the Bee reported in the summer of 1915 that the Sun folded; Calvin Chase also mocked the paper’s journalists for failing to get the subscriptions and advertising needed to maintain publication.28
Editors of the Sun and the Bee were at odds over how to conduct a black newspaper. While celebrating the Sun’s one-year anniversary, Coleman avowed that she
25 For example, Coleman promoted black enterprise in the following articles: “U Street Needs You,” Washington Sun, March 5, 1915; “Howard Dental Parlors Popular,” Washington Sun, June 25, 1915; and “The Negro in Business,” Washington Sun, July 2, 1915.
26 On March 5, 1915, Sun editor Julia P. Coleman announced that T. Thomas Fortune left his post as editor. See “Mr. Fortune Retires From the Sun,” Washington Sun, March 5, 1915. The Sun also printed a Statement of Ownership in April 1915, which listed J.P.H. Coleman as editor, publisher and owner of the Sun. See Washington Sun, April 9, 1915. The Tribune reported that Dr. Alonzo Dow Turner was editor of the Sun in 1929. See “Local Newspaper Suspends Publication,” Washington Tribune, January 11, 1929.
27 “The Sun Has a Birthday,” Washington Sun, March 19, 1915, and “What the Washington Herald Had to Say About the Sun,” Washington Sun, March 5, 1915.
28 “Died – The Sun,” Washington Bee, August 7, 1915; “A Sudden Death,” Washington Bee, August 14, 1915. Note that the Library of Congress’s microfilmed copies of the Washington Sun date from December 25, 1914 to July 23, 1915. As a result, it is not possible to know if the Sun was in continuous publication beyond July 1915. Microfilmed copies of the Sun are located in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, Library of Congress and the Washingtoniana Division, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, D.C. Also note that the Sun was not listed in the American Newspaper Annual and Directory from 1914 to 1929.
33 aimed to publish a “clean” race journal; to give “publicity to the very best sentiment of the best people”; and to avoid “making malicious attacks on anyone because [she did] not agree with them.”29 By this, Coleman implied that the Sun was a better and drastically different product than the Bee, which Coleman suggested, was a prime example of yellow journalism or a cheap rag that doled out scandal and gossip to hook readers.30 Chase publicly responded to Coleman’s indirect dig at the Bee when he headlined in August
1915 that the Sun had died “A Sudden Death.” According to Chase, the paper was apparently “too clean to live” and compete with the Bee, which he insisted had been
“supported by the substantial people of the city” for thirty-five years.31 While it does not appear that the Sun was in continuous publication in 1915, the paper did not exactly “die” either. In 1929, Tribune journalists indicated that the Sun was still in print, but they also reported that the weekly had again ceased publication, revealing that owners and editors likely had problems attracting readers and keeping the paper afloat financially on an ongoing basis.32
Based on a review of the small amount of Sun articles left in the archives and the exchange between Chase and Coleman, one could conclude that the decision not to market sensationalist material about aristocratic blacks resulted in operational instability
29 “The Sun Has a Birthday,” Washington Sun, March 19, 1915.
30 “The Acquittal of Professor Glenn,” Washington Sun, March 19, 1915.
31 “Died – The Sun,” Washington Bee, August 7, 1915, and “A Sudden Death,” Washington Bee, August 14, 1915.
32 “Local Newspaper Suspends Publication,” Washington Tribune, January 11, 1929.
34 for the Sun.33 Furthermore, normative gender constructions of the era would have required Coleman to hold a public image of respectability. Coleman’s attempt to always present the “best” of the Race (or uplifting and educational news that featured the upper classes) likely did not resonate with working-class blacks who also enjoyed lowbrow activities that violated a middle-class sense of decorum. On the other hand, newspapermen of the Bee and the Tribune understood that in order to build profitable ventures, they could satisfy the appetites of “common” black folk without compromising their status as leaders.34 To demonstrate that they were real race men who were in solidarity with the people, journalists also realized that they needed to distance themselves from the old vanguard by representing the aristocracy as a self-serving caste that refused to use its resources to uplift the Race.
Defaming the “Black Aristocracy”
The familiar struggles between old and new settlers did not play out in the Bee and the Tribune because, unlike industrial cities, Washington, D.C. did not receive a
33 Note that the Library of Congress’s microfilmed copies of the Washington Sun date from December 25, 1914 to July 23, 1915. Microfilmed copies of the Sun are located in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, Library of Congress and the Washingtoniana Division, Martin Luther King Library, Washington, D.C.
34 Historian Marya McQuirter argues that newspapermen affiliated with the Washington Tribune “adopted modern conventions, finding a way to be both politically engag[ing] and entertaining.” The decision to print “sensationalist pieces that showed African Americans in a negative light,” McQuirter continues, also partly accounts for the Tribune’s wide appeal in the early twentieth century. McQuirter further suggests that unlike the Washington Tribune, the Washington Bee was primarily a forum for “select readers who believed that the paper represented a sense of propriety and respectability.” While this may have certainly been the case, it also appears that the Bee catered to a mass readership through its preponderance of black enterprise editorials and articles that slandered D.C.’s black aristocracy (McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 64-73).
35 massive influx of Southern black migrants during and immediately after WWI.35
However, conflicts between the emerging black business class and the established black aristocracy were quite evident in the capital city’s Negro press during the early twentieth century. Much of the rancor between the old and new middle classes sprang from enterprise supporters’ unyielding belief that establishing a solid footing in commerce was the most sensible way for African Americans to harness power in a capitalist society. For the champions of cooperative economics, whites respected the properly (not necessarily formally) schooled businessman more than the artist, orator or so-called educated professional.36 Because the rising black business class was also deeply wed to earning profits and dethroning the aristocracy, it waged a sustained attack against the upper classes by exposing their supposedly toxic consumption practices.37 Particularly,
35 The Census reported that 94,208 African Americans resided in the nation’s capital in 1910; by 1920, the black population was listed at 109,966, a fourth of the District’s total population. Washington’s black populace grew by 16 percent between 1910 and 1920, compared to Chicago’s African-American community, which went from 44,103 in 1910 to 109,458 in 1920, a 148 percent increase in population. By 1930, there were over 132,000 black residents in the District, which paled in comparison to the 233,000 African Americans who lived in Chicago during the Depression. See Thirteenth Census of the United States, Volume II, Population 1910 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1913), 291, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1910.htm (accessed July 21, 2008); Fourteenth Census of the United States, Volume III, Population 1920 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1922), 178, 261, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008); and Fifteenth Census of the United States, Volume II, Population 1930 (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1933), 35, 67, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm (accessed July 21, 2008). Also note that the Census reported that 91,709 blacks lived in New York City in 1910; 152,467 blacks lived in NYC in 1920; and 327,706 blacks lived in NYC during the Depression.
36 “College Men and Business,” Washington Bee, January 6, 1917; “Graduates,” Washington Bee, July 21, 1917; “Graduates,” Washington Bee, August 11, 1917; “Education vs. Ignorance.” Washington Bee, December 6, 1919; “What Educated Colored People of Washington Have Done,” Washington Bee, December 13, 1919; R.C.E., “Educated vs. Uneducated,” Washington Bee, December 20, 1919; “Question Confronting Graduates,” Washington Tribune, June 18, 1921; “Of Commercial Interest,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921; “Idle Hands,” Washington Tribune, June 17, 1922; “What is the Purpose of Education,” Washington Tribune, September 16, 1922; “After Graduation – What?” Washington Tribune, June 23, 1923; “What of Our Graduates?” Washington Tribune, June 21, 1924.
37 Historians August Meier and Michael Andrew Fitzpatrick briefly discuss the conflicts between the emerging black capitalist class and the old black aristocracy that took place in U.S. urban centers in the 36 journalists of the Bee and the Tribune, key figures in the Negro enterprise movement, constructed the reckless, morally-bankrupt elite black consumer when they regularly asserted that members of Washington’s “colored society” devotedly yet shamefully subsidized white businesses.
The Bee’s owner and editor, Calvin Chase, routinely lashed out at Washington’s black gentry whom he claimed preferred to be treated like second-class citizens by white and “Jew” shopkeepers. In 1915, Chase maintained that African Americans who lived in the prestigious Ledroit Park community “liberally supported” the nine white stores located there, but did not regularly purchase from the black-owned Swann’s grocery store, which was also located in the neighborhood at the corner of 4th and V streets,
N.W.38 As well, he reported that well-to-do blacks did not buy goods from the black- owned Ware’s Department store, located at 1832 14th St., N.W., or the Harlan’s clothing store, which moved from U Street to Seventh and T in March 1915 because it did not receive sufficient patronage.39 Chase wrote, “The Bee ventures the assertion that not five
Colored professional men in [the] city…and not five Colored teachers” support Ware or
Harlan because so-called educated blacks would “rather go to places where they are ‘Jim
Crowed.’”40
early twentieth century. See August Meier, “Negro Class Structure and Ideology in the Age of Booker T. Washington,” Phylon 23.3 (1962): 258-266; and Fitzpatrick, “A Great Agitation for Business,” 51-56.
38 “Ledroit Park,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915; and Ronald Johnson, “From Romantic Suburb to Racial Enclave: Ledroit Park, Washington, D.C., 1880-1920,” Phylon 45.4 (1984): 267-270.
39 “Only Two,” Washington Bee, February 20, 1915. Also see “Negro Phobia,” Washington Bee, February 27, 1915; Display Ad: “Ware’s Dept Store,” Washington Bee, January 1, 1916; and “U Street Needs You,” Washington Sun, March 5, 1915.
40 “Only Two,” Washington Bee, February 20, 1915. 37 In the same year, Chase stated that “lily white” (integrationist-minded or uppity, light-skinned) African-American government workers, teachers and ministers would “not be seen in a drug store, a shoe store or any other place of business conducted and controlled by Colored people” because they were “ashamed to associate with [their] own.”41 Chase further argued, in subsequent editorials, that the District’s black populace had not advanced politically and economically because the “so-called intelligent and educated colored man,” who did not support Negro enterprises, was “more prejudiced towards the race’s advancement than the ignorant classes.”42
In 1916, the Bee posted a reader’s response to its many tirades against “lily white” elites. Chase featured the letter to prove that uppity, light-skinned blacks were “Jim
Crow” traitors who often “visit[ed] white theatres” and “sail[ed] under false colors.” The letter also represented aristocratic blacks as characteristically anti-Negro or uninterested in participating in cooperative economics. According to Chase, the “young lady” who submitted the letter had “been recently appointed in the [District’s] public schools” and her father, who was a black man, was “employed in the Capitol, and [came] from one of the leading families” in the city. The alleged writer, who left her initials V.B.H., admitted that she regularly “passed” as white and was pleased to do so. Specifically, she
41 “Don’t Blame All,” Washington Bee, January 30, 1915. Tirades against “lily whites” and “Jim Crow” blacks could also be found in the Washington Bee under the following headlines: “Gullible Negroes,” May 22, 1915; “Shams,” May 22, 1915; “Oratory of the Gullibles,” May 29, 1915; “He Apologizes,” June 26, 1915; “False Leadership,” July 3, 1915; “How to Succeed,” July 10, 1915; “Is This Race Pride?” August 14, 1915; and “Why We Fail,” October 2, 1915.
42 “Why Negroes Fail,” Washington Bee, June 3, 1916: 4; Chase continued to criticize “Jim Crow,” black elites who, according to him, desired to hide their identity, mingle with whites and patronize white-own establishments in: “Race Pride,” Washington Bee, March 17, 1917; “Don’t Have to Ask,” Washington Bee, January 11, 1919; “Wake Up,” Washington Bee, January 18, 1919; and “Why Colored People Fail,” Washington Bee, January 31, 1920.
38 quipped, “I am a colored woman who can and do attend all of the white theatres, or any other place intended for white people, and am proud of it.”
To show her disgust with Chase, V.B.H opined that Chase was ashamed of his dark skin and secretly wanted “fair” skin like her so that he could experience the privileges she enjoyed. As V.B.H. put it, Chase displayed such venom about her purported lack of allegiance to the Race because “people of [his] complexion [were] jealous because they [couldn’t] pass.” V.B.H. also insisted that her father was “a pure white man [who] was legally married to [her] mother, who was a creole” and that she had
“white fever, and truly hope[d]” that her letter would “help [Chase] get over the colored fever.” 43 By this cheeky assertion, V.B.H. seems to have meant that she hoped Chase would stop chastising upper-class blacks for not putting all of their money into race enterprises. V.B.H. could have also meant that Chase should not be so preoccupied with skin color and the doings of light-skinned elites who patronized businesses owned by blacks and whites. Then again, V.B.H. may have intended to communicate that she was indeed ecstatic (or feverish) about being able to trick whites into believing that she had the right to recreate in Jim Crow spaces.
But this shameless admission of successfully crossing the color line surely helped to sustain the perception that blacks commonly engaged in deceit to consume like upwardly mobile whites. Moreover, the caustic response from the unknown “lily white” shows that some light-skinned blacks may have thought it unproblematic to associate with the “enemy,” even at the expense of jeopardizing racial uplift. The letter from
V.B.H. reveals that African Americans who temporarily or permanently “passed” might
43 V.B.H., “Lily White,” Washington Bee, February 12, 1916. 39 have believed that black skin was inferior and black businesses and venues were less valuable and unworthy of support. As Chase portrayed it, “lily white” blacks who did not properly support their “own” had internalized the racial prejudices propagated by the larger society. The shadowy or shady V.B.H, according to Chase, was a detriment to the survival of the community; she and other elite blacks who “passed” were not authentically Negro because they refused to stop patronizing white establishments. They lacked race-consciousness and the group spirit necessary to help improve conditions for the masses of black people. The consumer practices of “lily white” professionals, in
Chase’s depiction, ultimately impeded the community’s collective resistance to racial discrimination.
Not only did Chase attack elites who frequented white establishments, he also condemned race leaders who did not subsidize his publishing business by donating funds or purchasing advertising space in the Bee. As early as 1914, Chase declared that “high brow” black Washingtonians “gather[ed] money and sen[t] it to boost” the NAACP’s
Crisis magazine while overlooking the financial needs of the Bee. Upper-class black
Washingtonians subscribed to the Crisis because they adhered to the NAACP’s focus on interracial coalition building, protest, education, arts and uplift.44 Yet and still, Chase believed that the Bee deserved more respect and support from the District’s black leaders
44 In 1918, the Crisis reported that the District’s membership stood at 6800, 60% of the organization’s total membership in the United States. See John R. Shillady, “Finances of the N.A.A.C.P.,” Crisis 17.1 (1918): 18; In May 1918, John Shillady, Secretary of the New York NAACP office, sent a letter to Archibald Grimke, president of D.C.’s NAACP, noting that they received the “telegram from Washington telling about the 6,042 new members received…[and that] Washington will have within sixty percent of the total membership of the Association (John R. Shillady to Archibald Grimke, 6 May 1918, NAACP Correspondence, 1918-1919, Folder 547, Box 39-27, Archibald Grimke Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
40 because it had been “fighting the battles of the race” since the 1880s, long before the
Crisis was officially launched in 1910.45
To continue his campaign against black leaders who did not help finance the Bee,
Chase branded Reverend Dean, the pastor of Ebenezer M.E Church, a race traitor because he customarily posted his church services in the white-owned Evening Star and purportedly hired a “white contractor at a higher price…than a colored contractor.”46
Chase also argued that the “colored man in business” believed he could get support from blacks because of his name or the color of his skin and that it was, therefore, “not necessary to advertise in his own race journals.”47 Here, Chase appeared to refer to ads such as the one titled, “Representative Colored Businesses of the National Capital,” which ran in the Washington Post in May 1915.”48 The advertisement featured black- owned insurance companies, banks, dentists, painters, realtors, undertakers, tailors and druggists. The Industrial Savings Bank, located at 2006 11th St., N.W. and Madden
Bros., Inc. Tinning and Heating, located at 1735 7th St. N.W., posted ads. The “colored” painter Allen F. Jackson and the black-owned Harris’ Drug Store showcased their
45 “Why Not Help the Bee?” Washington Bee, January 24, 1914. Also see Frederick G. Detweiler, The Negro Press in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1922), 61; and Postcard: F.H. Murray to John Hope, President of Atlanta Baptist College, September 1910, The Horizon Correspondence, Folder 10, Box 74-1, Correspondence and Financial Papers, Freeman H. Morris Murray Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
46 “Is This Race Pride,” Washington Bee, August 14, 1915. Note that services for the Ebenezer M.E Church were routinely advertized under “Church Announcements” in the Saturday editions of the Washington Evening Star from 1915 to 1920.
47 “Why We Fail,” Washington Bee, April 24, 1915.
48 Display Ad: “Representative Colored Enterprises of the National Capital.” Washington Post, May 9, 1915.
41 services and wares.49 Businessmen who placed the “Representative Colored Enterprises” piece were, according to Chase, “gullible Negroes” and impediments to creating a viable black press that defended the rights of the Race. Further, Chase stressed, elites who purchased space in the white press were “sham” leaders who earned a living by “extolling the virtues of the down-trodden masses” while supporting “prejudiced white
[publications]” that charged “blacks with imaginary offenses.”50
Chase, of course, conveniently forgot to mention that some of the black professionals who advertised in white dailies mainly did so because they wanted to show that African Americans prospered in spite of the inequalities they faced. In 1915, Samuel
W. Rutherford, manager and founder of the National Benefit Association, and Judge
Robert H. Terrell placed opinions in the Washington Post to demonstrate that blacks were an industrious people who established successful enterprises.51 But the white press was an obvious choice for professionals like Rutherford and Terrell because the Negro press was in the business of slighting the upper classes on a weekly basis. Since Calvin Chase often provided negative images of the aristocracy, African-American elites who
49 Harris’ Drug Store placed additional ads in the Post in May and June of 1915; Allen Jackson purchased space in February 1916 to secure clients. See Display Ad: “Harris’ Drug Store,” Washington Post, May 1, 1915, May 4, 1915, May 6, 1915, May 27, 1915, June 13, 1915; “Painting Decorating and Paperhangers,” Washington Post, February 29, 1916. Samuel W. Rutherford and other members of the National Benefit Association continued to purchase advertising space in the Post in 1916. See Display Ad: “National Benefit Association, Inc.,” Washington Post, August 24, 1916, August 26, 1916.
50 “Gullible Negroes,” Washington Bee, May 22, 1915; Also see: “Oratory of the Gullibles,” Washington Bee, May 29, 1915: 4; New York News, “Editor Chase Right Here,” Washington Bee, June 12, 1915; “He Apologizes,” Washington Bee, June 26, 1915.
51 S.W. Rutherford, “The Need of a Chamber of Commerce,” Washington Post, May 9, 1915; Robert H. Terrell, “The Negro in Business Life at the Nation’s Capital,” Washington Post, May 9, 1915. Note that Samuel W. Rutherford was listed as secretary and manager of the Nation Benefit Association in the 1916 and 1921 editions of the Boyd’s Directory. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1916), 1054; Boyd’s Directory (1921), 1174. Also note that the Journal of Negro History reported that Samuel Wilson Rutherford moved “to Washington, D.C. in 1898 and started the National Benefit Life Insurance Company” (Journal of Negro History 37.2 (1952): 216-217).
42 purchased space in white newspapers may have seen this move as an opportunity to set the record straight or to present a more dignified front for themselves and the overall community. Historian Marya McQuirter states that the white-run Evening Star “was popular” among D.C.’s “wealthy and professional” blacks in the early 1900s because it:
“chronicle[d] the issues and events that were important to them”; “included photographs of prominent Negroes” and “accepted contributing articles from [leading] African
Americans.”52 The Star was also attractive to the city’s black elites because they could use it to differentiate themselves from the working classes who were “principally represented in the [paper’s] crimes sections.”53
Lastly, African-American professionals solicited in the white press because they believed that they could reach a substantial black clientele. Simon P.W. Drew of the
Cosmopolitan Baptist Church wrote a letter to the Washington Post in 1917, thanking owners and editors for providing space to advertise his uplift activities and assisting him with fundraising for his work. Drew further stated that he chose to make his appeals through the Post because “over 90 per cent of [D.C.’s] colored population read [this] paper.”54 For Drew, it was sound business strategy to publicize in white newspapers because, as he understood it, the majority of black Washingtonians regularly consumed these products. Sociologist William H. Jones practically confirmed Drew’s assessment of the community’s reading habits when he suggested that D.C.’s black residents preferred white dailies to race weeklies in the early twentieth century. According to
52 McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 75-76.
53 Ibid., 75.
54 Asks Fund for New Church: Colored Minister Praises The Post for Assistance in His Work,” Washington Post, April 15, 1917.
43 Jones, out of the 3,319 Negro households he surveyed in the 1920s, over 50 percent
(1,786) subscribed to the Evening Star and Washington Post, while only 5 percent (175) received the Washington Tribune.55 From this evidence, it is obvious that African-
American elites turned to the white press to represent themselves in a positive light and to sell their wares, services and ideologies to the larger public. In doing so, however, these race leaders (and their black patrons) helped to maintain a highly profitable white press that supported and defamed members of the Race instead of backing a Negro press that worked to fulfill these same contradictory roles.
Like the Bee, the Tribune exposed elites for using their earnings to help build prosperous white communities. Journalists particularly focused on the purchasing practices of the upper classes to question their “blackness” or to prove that they were disreputable leaders who did not care for others in their social group. In 1921, newspapermen reprimanded Walter Pinchback, manager of the Republic Theatre and son of former Louisiana Lieutenant Governor, Pinckney Pinchback, for not showing “loyalty toward colored businessmen and racial enterprises” because he hired a “white undertaker to bury his father.”56 As the Tribune stated, “Governor” Pinchback was an
“illustrious…race man” who should have been properly laid to rest by “colored undertakers whose equipment, service and direction [were] equal to any.” Journalists
55 Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 123-124; and McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 73.
56 “Colored Business Men and White Undertakers,” Washington Tribune, December 24, 1921. Note that Pinckney Pinchback was elected Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana in 1871; he was also the grandfather of Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer and the descendant of William Pinchback, a wealthy white planter, and Eliza Stewart, his mulatto slave mistress. For more info on Pinchback and his family history, see Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 19; 42-43; 170-172. In the same year, Tribune editors also attacked the Pollyanna Social Club, an exclusive organization for “educated” black women, for betraying their Race because they secured white attorneys to defend its members against a suit filed by Miss Carrie Johnson. See “Pollyannas Sued for Charity Fund: Proceeds of Charity Ball at Coliseum is Demanded,” Washington Tribune, June 25, 1921; and “White Lawyers and Colored Clients,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921.
44 further implied that Walter Pinchback was not an upstanding black leader like his father who dutifully served “his people” even though he was an accomplished African
American and a descendant of a wealthy white planter.
Two years later, the Tribune slammed Mary C. Terrell - graduate of Oberlin
College and noted clubwoman - because she hired white lawyers to represent her in a suit she filed against the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, for injuries incurred after the company’s utility truck struck her automobile.57 According to the Tribune,
Terrell’s actions were inconsistent with her status as a race leader and the many lectures she had delivered on pride and patronage. To further drive home their point, editors asserted that Mary Terrell “repudiated” or rejected her husband, attorney Robert H.
Terrell, by not securing his expertise or that of other black lawyers he trained at Howard
University. “Mrs. Terrell…fail[ed] to live up to her own instructions,” editors continued, or she did not adequately fulfill her duty as an exemplar for the larger black community when she hired white lawyers. Journalists finally warned that if Terrell “hope[d] to continue the prestige she once enjoyed, she must stay within the race in her public dealings.”58
Tribune editors also posted a letter from a black entrepreneur who charged that
“educated” elites were poor role models because they often delivered writings and lectures on cooperation but snubbed race enterprises in their everyday dealings. Thomas
57 Mary C. Terrell was also the daughter of Robert R. Church, a wealthy businessman and banker from Memphis. For more on Terrell family history, see Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 19; 43-44. Also see “Mary Church Terrell Injured in Automobile: Denies Private Room, Mrs. Terrell Prefers Open Ward in White Hospital,” Washington Tribune, August 4, 1923; “Race Lawyers Ignored by Mrs. Mary C. Terrell,” Washington Tribune, December 15, 1923; and “Mrs. Mary Church Terrell Repudiates Her Husband,” Washington Tribune, December 29, 1923.
58 “Mrs. Mary Church Terrell Repudiates Her Husband,” Washington Tribune, December 29, 1923.
45 C. R. Bragg, a broker who lived in a rooming house located at 1313 K St., N.W., submitted an extensive diatribe to the Tribune in 1923 rebuking “race leaders.”59 As
Bragg told it, an unnamed prominent black man submitted an article to a Washington paper to share his views on cooperative economics. But instead of providing useful information in his editorial, Bragg maintained, this representative race man mostly
“quoted poetry,” wallowed in “self aggrandizement,” and provided “unwelcomed and illogical advice.” To further disparage this upper-class person, Bragg claimed that the leader gave “flimsy examples” to justify the reasons that African Americans like him did not purchase from their own people. Specifically, Bragg reported that “the better classes of [black] people” or so-called race leaders would often buy an article “from a U Street
Colored merchant” and inevitably say, “You see, I always want to patronize my own color, but you can never get anything that is any good from them.”60
In Bragg’s account, leading African Americans bypassed Negro enterprises because they were convinced that race merchants marketed and sold inferior products.
However, it must be noted that a number of upper-class black Washingtonians did not consistently purchase from “their own” because of their limited income or they believed
59 Thomas C. Bragg was listed in the 1921 edition of Boyd’s Directory as a broker who lived in a rooming/boarding house, located at 1313 K St., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1921), 359. The 1922 edition of Boyd’s Directory also listed Thomas Bragg, a printer who lived in a rooming/boarding house at 221 Florida Ave., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1922), 357.
60 Thomas C. R. Bragg, “Letters to the Editor,” Washington Tribune, August 18, 1923. Note that DC resident William T. Watson stated that he was mocked by an educated African American for aspiring to be a “race man” who would one day do great things for his community. According to Watson, this university- trained person “laughed at [him], and said that [he] would be wasting time, adding that Race men were nuisances;” they were not effective at solving black folks’ problems. By race man, it appears that Watson meant one who worked tirelessly to improve conditions for blacks. The proper race man or woman exhibited pride and served as an inspirational role model for the “less determined.” They were “good citizens who possessed “good spirit” and aided in the progress of the Race (WM. T. Watson, “Letters from the People,” Washington Tribune, December 1, 1923).
46 that they could not always get reasonably priced quality wares and services from black establishments. Sometime between WWI and WWII, renowned art critic and Howard
University professor Alain Locke wrote John Davis, the president of the West Virginia
Collegiate Institute, to stress that he thought it was ridiculous, or at least unfair, for Negro enterprise supporters to expect black consumers to totally finance race businesses.
According to Locke, the “bourgeois or the purely mythical aristocratic class” was not affluent enough to “shoulder a subsidy” for Negro businesses, and the “average Negro consumer” lived too “close to the starvation scale.” As a result, Locke insisted, neither social group could afford to pay premiums or exorbitant prices charged by some black merchants when they could “secure identical service” and products from whites at cheaper rates. 61
Locke also disclosed that he thought that he would lose money if he regularly invested in African-American ventures. In so doing, he obliquely summoned the much- maligned black con artist who posed as a legitimate entrepreneur in order to amass wealth at the public’s expense. As Locke professed, elite blacks should not be asked to jeopardize their economic standing to pay for “inefficiency,” “inability to render service,” and the “desire to get rich quick.” 62 By this, Locke suggested that consumers like him did not always patronize race enterprises because they believed that some African
Americans who operated businesses were actually schemers whose main goal was steal
61 Alain Locke to John Davis, W. Virginia Collegiate Institute, No date, Organizations Ma-Ph, National Negro Business League, Folder 14, Box 164-181, Alain Locke Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. According to archivist notes, John Davis was the President of West Virginia State College from 1919 to 1953. See John W. Davis Papers, Collection 168-1 to 168-61, Prepared by Robin Van Fleet, August 1994, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
62 Ibid.
47 from clients instead of providing high quality or timely work. In 1934, a Tribune reader expressed concerns similar to those cited by Locke in his or her response to, “Why
[Blacks] Don’t Patronize [Their] Own Stores.” As this unnamed critic declared, African
Americans did not always purchase from race merchants because they could not be assured that they would receive “good, honest, [and] polite service.” The reader continued by stating that many black-owned businesses were “operated by people who make it” or turn a profit by “beating the public” or cheating the customer.63
Second, some of Washington’s elite blacks did not fully support race establishments because they were dissatisfied with the activities that occurred in these venues. Journalist James C. Waters, Jr. wrote the Washington Sun in 1915 to critique
Howard Theatre managers for allowing indecent behavior to take place at a Monday night showing; Waters also warned owners to clean-up their place of business if they wanted to continue attracting the “better classes” of blacks. For Waters, working-class
African Americans, or as he derisively referred to them, the “rot-gut brigade” and the
“usual gang of guttersnipes and skull-busters” often ruined the Howard Theatre’s vaudeville shows with their “disgusting” behavior and sexual innuendos. Furthermore,
Waters argued, these low-class folks or degenerate Negro consumers made the Howard an unsuitable entertainment space for “decent, respectable” people who supposedly
“enabled [black-owned movie and stage] houses” to turn a profit and remain open to the general public.64
63 See M.M., “Why We Don’t Patronize Our Own Stores,” Washington Tribune, April 12, 1934.
64 James C. Waters, Jr., “Letters from the People,” Washington Sun, February 12, 1915. Waters was listed as a contributing editor of the Sun in 1915. See James C. Waters Jr., “Contributing Editor’s Column,” Washington Sun, April 9, 1915. Also note that Tribune reader Sylvester R. Woodfork lodged a complaint 48 And contrary to the myriad claims that elites preferred to purchase from those who “Jim Crowed” the Race, certain aristocratic blacks were not eager to support any establishment that did not treat them as equal citizens. In 1916, Judge Robert H. Terrell seems to have complained to the white owner of the People’s Drug Store, located at 7th and K streets N.W., that his wife, Mary C. Terrell, had been “refused accommodations” by a clerk who worked at the store. M.G. Gibbs, the proprietor, responded to Terrell by offering a “personal apology” for the “crass ignorance” of his employee. He added, “We do not care to serve people of any race at our fountain who are not genteel, but such objections could certainly not [be] obtaine[ed] against your wife, yourself or any high class colored person.”65
A few upper-class blacks in the District offered their reasons for not frequenting race merchants, and through their private and public correspondence, we get insight on why an elite African American would frequent a white business. Judge Robert Terrell and his wife were two of the most well-known and accomplished residents in the nation’s capital. As a result, they probably felt that they had the right to browse and shop at any store located in Washington and were outraged when they were denied this privilege that at least some whites granted them and other prominent African Americans. But Alain
Locke, for example, did not account for the stereotypes that he held about race merchants. That is, Locke readily or inadvertently conjured up the conning, lazy, conspicuous Negro consumer when he intimated that some black business owners
against the Howard Theatre in 1921 for presenting “indecent” material at a “midnight show” (Sylvester R. Woodfork, “Letters to Editor,” Washington Tribune, October 8, 1921).
65 M.G. Gibbs, Proprietor of People’s Drug Store, Main Store, 7th and K streets, N.W., to Hon. Robert H. Terrell, 12 July 1916; Correspondence, 1886-1954 and undated, Conts. 4-5, Reel No. 4 of 34, Shelf No. 16,976, Papers of Mary C. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. 49 devised “get rich quick” schemes instead of working diligently to please customers by demonstrating proficiency and providing superior service.66 Nor did James Waters seem aware (or he was not troubled) that it was likely offensive to the larger black community that he used pejorative language to refer to the working classes and refused to share the same theater with them because of their “coarse” public displays. Because some aristocratic elites revealed that they were caste conscious and harbored some of the same racially biased views about those outside their social circles as whites held about the entire Race, the black capitalist class justified its campaign to humiliate them using enterprise ideology.
In fact, D.C.’s Negro press occasionally suggested that “educated” professionals were overly invested in preserving their status and distinguishing themselves from the poor instead of helping the masses of black people gain equality.67 The Bee additionally lampooned elites for expending funds on unnecessary commodities and recreational outlets instead of saving to build stable households. In 1915, for instance, Calvin Chase published a poem titled, “One of the Teachers,” which teased the educated classes for their lavish spending. The poem’s author, printer’s assistant Annie L. Lucas, specifically
66 Note that Bee editor Calvin Chase also invoked the stereotype of the conning, lazy, conspicuous Negro consumer when he stated in 1917 that blacks gravitated toward “flimsy schemes” and “sharp practice” (deception or shoddy and low-quality work) because they wanted to avoid real labor and were unduly enticed by a life of “ease,” fascinated with “finery” and lured by “luxury” (“The Commercial Exchange No 6. – Graft,” Washington Bee, June 2, 1917). Like Calvin Chase, Alain Locke also validated or tapped into a deeply entrenched white American perception that African Americans were naturally indolent and participated in illegitimate enterprises so that they consume like the upwardly mobile. See Dissertation Introduction for a fuller discussion of the stereotype of the criminal Negro consumer.
67 In 1915, Bee editor Calvin Chase mocked members of Washington’s black society, many of whom were affiliated with the NAACP. According to Chase, the NAACP had never really accomplished much for the Race. He insisted that the organization was a “sham” non-entity that existed for “lily whites” who were more concerned with displaying their accomplishments in lieu of assisting the community gain the wealth it needed to prosper. See “Negro Phobia,” Washington Bee, February 27, 1915; and “Sham Aristocracy,” Washington Bee, April 10, 1915.
50 insinuated that black teachers wasted their summer breaks in pursuit of pleasures instead of finding work to pay bills in a timely manner when she wrote:
“We teachers, have had a lengthy leave/Tho’ ‘tis not this which makes us/ You say, ‘We’re resting, and why grieve; holler’/Why, man, we’re broke; we need a dollar/We need it not for bread; oh, nay/The butcher gets our first month’s pay;/But there are pleasures all around,../Some teachers to the seashore went. For ‘change’ (the kind you use for rent)…”68
The Bee also ridiculed elites for purportedly squandering their income to partake in extravagant displays. Actually, the Sage of the Potomac, the anonymous writer of the
Bee’s weekly column, “Public Men and Things,” mocked varied classes of blacks when he suggested that ordinary African Americans thought that their leaders would rather purchase gaudy jewelry than finance uplift activities. As the Sage spun it, he overheard a
“droll old fellow” in the “dark part” of a local barbershop “get off” the following witty remark in response to the allegation that dark-skinned blacks did not donate to charity:
“Don’t tell me nothing ‘bout these darks contributing to nuthin’…these here coffee-colored (brown or light-skinned) babies of ourn will fasten two big brass earrings in [their] ears, hang about two pounds of copper chain and a string of glass pearls around their necks, slip four or five bracelets on their arms, and about six oreidi rings on their fingers, then they will go to church and give a plugged nickel for missionary work.”69
From this rather colorful excerpt, one could argue that the Sage was offering a racist rendering of blacks as a tribal people who were predisposed to piercing and draping various body parts with decorative items. But it is also conceivable that the Sage used parody to highlight the tensions between working- and upper-class blacks around consumption. The “coffee colored babies” is a comic stand in for African Americans
68 Annie Laurence Lucas, “One of the Teachers,” Washington Bee, September 4, 1915. Mrs. Annie Laurence Lucas was listed in the 1916 edition of Boyd’s Directory as a Printer’s Asst. with the Bureau of Engraving and Printing; she lived in a rooming house at 1845 14th St., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1916), 783.
69 Sage of the Potomac, “Public Men and Things,” Washington Bee, April 10, 1915. 51 who were of visible mixed ancestry and often possessed a privileged position within the
Race because of their ties to whites. The “droll old fellow” who sometimes speaks in dialect and sits in the “dark part” of the barbershop represents the disadvantaged classes that were not as educated as elites and were normally of a darker hue than the aristocracy.
And as the Sage recalled it, the dark-skinned, working-class man wanted to impress upon his friends that it was uppity African-American leaders, not ordinary black folk, who opted to spend their monies on flashy accessories instead of using it to improve conditions in their communities.
This view that D.C.’s prominent African Americans were rash spenders and often forfeited their obligations because of their preoccupations with luxuries persisted into the
Great Depression. Tribune reader and black enterprise supporter Al Slaughter even went as far as to imply that those affiliated with the NAACP were criminal (or vile and despicable) because they did not possess enough “love” and “race pride” to properly use their political and financial capital to “look after” or alleviate black suffering in the
1930s. He explicitly charged that the NAACP insisted on asking whites for handouts during the crisis instead of encouraging its members and other leading blacks to practice thrift and give funds to aid the less fortunate of the Race. According to Al Slaughter, there were enough privileged “Negroes employed [in the nation’s capital], and buying the white man’s goods to employ four-fifths of the Negroes walking around without jobs and homes.” Slaughter also implicated Jewish merchants as participants in the downfall of the community when he argued that the economic devastation in Black Washington was a result of African-American professionals who “[threw] away enough money foolishly…buying cheap Jew clothes, big cars, and showing off, generally” instead of
52 helping poor “Negroes” of the city.70 But a small numbers banker, interviewed by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers in 1938, seemed to think that the District’s black elite were not necessarily criminal or disreputable because of how they chose to spend their money. After all, stated this illegitimate business owner, unlike the “average man on the street,” the professional people did not generally support gambling and other underground enterprises. Instead, they were simply conspicuous consumers who lived “above their means” and in effect compromised their families’ economic stability, not necessarily that of the entire Race.71
Maligning the Entire Race
Newspapermen from the Bee and the Tribune claimed that they established their weeklies to represent the interests of ordinary African Americans. Chase stressed that the mission of the Bee was to “publish the news for the benefit of the masses and defend the weak against the vicious strong”; Tribune editors stated that their paper was an
“institution for the masses…[that was] devoted to reform and progress.72 To appeal to a range of black Washingtonians, journalists printed “everyday happenings” and constructive or uplifting news about Washington, D.C.’s black populace. African
70 Al Slaughter, “Race Pride Needed,” Washington Tribune, October 7, 1932.
71 The small numbers banker specifically stated, “The professional people do not support any of these businesses much. On the first and fifteenth they will come around. They call it slumming. After that, we do not see them. You see, they live above their means. They live well, too. They have their fine apartments and their cars, and give big parties. All of this takes up all of what they make…It is the average man on the street who is the backbone of our business. We can depend on him but we can’t depend on the professional man” (Small Numbers Banker, interview by T.E. Davis, 23 October 1938, Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
72 “The Bee – Its Mission,” Washington Bee, October 13, 1917; and “Our Policy,” Washington Tribune, March 7, 1925.
53 Americans could find announcements of church and club meetings as well as information on uplift organizations, weddings, parties, sports events and charity balls. Readers were also periodically reminded that some black leaders served as race advocates who worked to elevate the status of their communities.73 Like other race papers in the U.S., the Bee and the Tribune provided forums for black Americans to challenge bigotry and discuss the importance of exhibiting unity to advance socially, economically and politically.
But the Bee, in particular, was not necessarily an arena for average black citizens to voice a variety of perspectives and political platforms in the early 1900s. The Bee mostly embodied the views of Calvin Chase and primarily race merchants located within and outside the District, since fifty percent of the paper’s operating budget came from ads posted by business owners from 1895 to 1921.74 Some of the editorials featured by
Chase may have also been written by patrons who paid to air their political agendas and personal grievances against others within Black America. Historian Hal S. Chase indicates that Calvin Chase had a history of accepting funds from Booker T. Washington who intermittently used the Bee from 1900 to 1915 to proliferate his views on industrial education and enterprise.75 In 1915, Sun editor Julia P. Coleman maintained that many of the “so-called best [black] people” of the District secretly penned some of the Bee’s
73 In 1916, the Bee praised Rev. I. N. Ross, a black minister of the District’s Metropolitan A.M.E. Church, for the being a “fearless and outspoken in defense of his people and church regardless of public opinion” (“Bishop I.N. Ross, D.D.,” Washington Bee, January 15, 1916). In 1929, the Tribune reported that Kelly Miller, Howard University professor, was to serve as one of the vice chairmen for the District’s Community Chest Fund, which provided charity to underserved populations in Washington, D.C. See “Kelly Miller to Head Chest Fund,” Washington Tribune, January 11, 1929.
74 Chase, “Honey for Friends, Stings For Enemies,” 98-99.
75 Ibid., 108-183.
54 editorials.76 By “best black people,” Coleman could have meant race merchants who may have anonymously written opinions that chastised black Washingtonians for not frequenting their business houses on a regular basis. It is also possible that Coleman was referring to the Bee’s weekly column, “Public Men And Things,” which was written by the Sage of the Potomac, an unknown critic who used stinging satire to criticize the spending habits and social activities of African Americans.77
Moreover, Chase often used his editorial pages to belittle the consumption habits of the very audience he purportedly aimed to protect on a weekly basis. The upper stratum of Black Washington still received the brunt of criticism from Chase, but the Bee also sold the idea that African Americans, in general, possessed inborn or cultural traits that hindered them from saving, investing and building viable businesses. Throughout the early twentieth century, Chase left the impression that blacks were frivolous consumers who lacked wisdom because they wasted dollars on useless “trash in the form of personal ornaments, gewgaws (trinkets), [and] unnecessary railroad travel.”78 In a feature titled, “How to Imitate the White Man,” Chase claimed that blacks mimicked whites in their pursuit of “frills” and “follies.” But he ridiculed African Americans for their inability to emulate white Americans in their efficiency, management and business
76 “The Acquittal of Professor Glenn,” Washington Sun, March 19, 1915.
77 Historian Hal S. Chase asserts that “Public Men And Things” could have been penned by George H. Richardson, a former co-editor of the black-owned People’s Advocate, or Ralph W. Tyler, an influential black political who held a position as Sixth Auditor in the Navy Department in the early 1900s. But Chase also states that there is no conclusive evidence that either of the above-mentioned men was the Sage of the Potomac. See Chase, “Honey For Friends, Stings For Enemies,” 77-78.
78 “Luxuries and Extravagances,” Washington Bee, October 23, 1920; Also see “Automobiles,” Washington Bee, August 18, 1917; “How To Imitate The White Man,” Washington Bee, November 3, 1917; “Expensive Vanity,” Washington Bee, November 10, 1917; “Folly,” Washington Bee, January 19, 1918; and “Economic Interest,” Washington Bee, October 16, 1920.
55 development. Chase additionally admonished blacks for wasting money on “aimless travel” and “showy ornament” while characterizing those who conspicuously consumed as unintelligent and disorganized.79 In “Expensive Vanity,” Chase asserted that many black Washingtonians were infatuated with a recent trend of purchasing “expensive residences and home decorations,” which was potentially ruinous for many who had
“saved up small competency.” 80 Chase also warned his supporters to practice thrift when he told them in a short perspective titled, “Automobiles,” not to purchase cars, as suggested by the white dailies. He stated: “Most of our readers are comparatively poor.
They should avoid all forms of expensive luxuries. Our advice to every one of our readers is to buy a [modest-priced] home.”81
In a series of “Commercial Exchange” articles designed to promote economic development, Chase characterized blacks as naturally inclined to use “surplus” time and earnings to attend meetings and develop organizations. For Chase, organizing clubs for black Americans was akin to creating unnecessary recreational activities for an oppressed group who needed to first learn to build and control capital. “During the last fifty years,”
Chase wrote in 1917, “the Negro has been spending his surplus time mainly in the pursuit of pleasure and culture…The average Colored person of Washington” has wasted too much valuable time “attending secret society meetings, church meetings, mass meetings,
79 “How to Imitate the White Man,” Washington Bee, November 3, 1917. Tribune editors made a similar claim in “The Negro’s Business Outlook,” Washington Tribune, May 24, 1924.
80 “Expensive Vanity,” Washington Bee, November 10, 1917.
81 “Automobiles,” Washington Bee, August 18, 1917.
56 lectures, the spend-it-all dance halls, musical concerts, [and] theatres.”82 Chase further implied that blacks of the District had successfully established cultural and social institutions primarily because these ventures did not require much discipline, hard work or sacrifice. As Chase argued, American “progress depend[ed] primarily on labor” and black Washingtonians (and the entire Race) would not prosper until they “purged” the
“vaporous societies…clubs, councils [and] leagues” from their community and really labored or established a firm economic program.83
Finally, Chase maintained that securing and developing arts was a luxury and therefore not intended for a proletarian group; arts development was meant for those who demonstrated that they could establish thriving businesses. In an article called, “Music and Art,” Chase particularly targeted those affiliated with Washington’s black society because he believed that elites were overly consumed with developing “arts for arts sake.” But Chase also attacked what he called the “recent movement of colored people…to stimulate an interest…in music and drama” because he wanted to discourage his readers and any black American who, he believed, would be undeniably seduced by the call from elites to needlessly cultivate something that they had already mastered.
According to Chase, blacks were natural artists, musicians and orators who took much pleasure in visiting, singing, dancing and discussing seemingly important matters.
Participation in these pleasures, Chase insisted, caused many to throw away vital time
82 “The Commercial Exchange No 8 - Waste of Time,” Washington Bee, June 16, 1917; Also see “The Commercial Exchange No 9 - Waste of Time (Continued),” Washington Bee, June 23, 1917; Tribune editors claimed that blacks spent too much time and money attending national and state meetings in “National Meetings a Menace,” Washington Tribune, September 3, 1921 & “National Gatherings – Again,” Washington Tribune, September 10, 1921.
83 “The Commercial Exchange No 6. - Graft,” Washington Bee, June 2, 1917.
57 and monies needed to enrich their everyday lives. As Chase put it, “the colored people need no stimulus to love and study music…The dark races do not need to prove their capacity for the other fine arts, for they gave the world its architecture, sculpture, drama and painting, many centuries ago….We would rather see a bath tub in every colored home in Washington than a piano. We would rather see every colored home equipped with fly screens than a multiplicity of paintings.”84
The Tribune had a better record than the Bee of publishing commentary from readers whose views did not mirror or sanction those of newspapermen. But like Calvin
Chase, the Tribune’s editors more often than not featured letters from Washingtonians with opinions that were comparable to theirs. For instance, journalists rarely published views from African Americans who did not wholeheartedly embrace Negro enterprise.
They did, however, print articles from those who discussed the merits of supporting and establishing race businesses. In the summer of 1921, the Tribune organized an essay contest that asked readers to answer, “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People
Should be Supported?” Editors promoted the contest to increase readership and to encourage patronage of race theaters, since the prizes awarded to winners included: “$20 in Gold” and a “One Month’s Pass to all Theatres Owned by [Black] People in
Washington.”85 Over twenty letters were published between July and August of 1921.86
84 “Music and Art,” Washington Bee, July 7, 1917.
85 See Display Ad: “The Tribune’s First Big Essay Contest,” Washington Tribune, June 4, 1921. In November 1921, the Tribune sponsored a “Title Contest” that promised winners “a round trip to Philadelphia and a ticket to the Howard Lincoln football game.” See Display Ad: “Big Title Contest Is On In Full Swing,” Washington Tribune, November 5, 1921. And in October 1922, the paper staged the “What Title Would You Suggest for This Cartoon?” contest that promised winners box seats at the Howard-Lincoln football game. See Display Ad: “What Title Would You Suggest For This Cartoon?” Washington Tribune, October 7, 1922; “Tribune’s Title Contest Proving Very Popular,” Washington 58 Essays contained much of the rhetoric used by journalists when promoting black capitalism. A number of contest participants particularly argued that supporting race theaters exclusively would help black merchants provide employment, high quality products and a variety of entertainment options for the community.87
Further, the Tribune was quite similar to the Bee in that its journalists demeaned their base of support although this action ran counter to the paper’s stated policy of being
“an institution for the masses…[that was] devoted to reform and progress.”88 That is to say, newspapermen generated the image of the corrupt, conspicuous Negro consumer,
Tribune, October 21, 1922; “Prizes in Big Title Contest Won By Joseph Rideout and C. Isabelle Garner,” Washington Tribune, November 25, 1922.
86 “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” Washington Tribune, July 23, 1921; July 31, 1921; August 6, 1921; August 13, 1921; August 20, 1921; August 27, 1921. Essays from the following readers were printed: Florence M. Hunt, M.J. Miles, Myrtle A. Childs, Joseph A. Smith, Winfield McAbee, Walter E. Tibbs, Jas. Robinson, Solon S. Chavis, Salter J. Cochran, Henry C. Nelson, H.E. Wilson, William Bethel, Mrs. Earnestine Washington, Agnes Murdock, James O. Williams, W. Thomas Soders, Mrs. Naomi Jean Cochran, William S. Burruss, Miss. Ada Woods, Mrs. Anna Buford, John S. Agenor, Theodore S. Botts, Jr., and Miss Veda L. Porter.
87 Treasury Department clerk Veda Porter pressed that supporting race theatres would eventually help owners raise the “standard of performance” or offer “high class colored performances” that were of better quality than vaudeville acts. She also maintained that building profitable race theatres would “inculcate race pride” because African-American theater owners would be able to employ classically trained black actors, and patrons would then realize that “white people [were] not the only [folk] who [could] do real acting (Miss Veda L. Porter, “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” Washington Tribune, August 27, 1921). Vida (not Veda) L. Porter was listed in the 1922 edition of Boyd’s Directory as a clerk with the Treasury Dept. Porter lived at 1334 V St., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1922), 1266. Winfield McAbee, a janitor who lived in Northwest DC, argued that patronizing race theatres would result in “more first class theaters [and] more first class plays that means first class pay and that would be a stepping stone to all [within] the race who are talented to strive to attain the highest peak in the [acting] profession (Winfield McAbee, “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921). Winfield McAbee was listed as a janitor in the 1921 edition of the Boyd’s Directory. He resided in a house at 150 Rhode Island Ave., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1921), 1039. M.J. Miles stated that black-owned theaters “employ our young men and women. They not only earn a livelihood in an intelligent business enterprise but they acquire business knowledge…and many are inspired to write plays and become actors, which all means the advancement and development of the race (M.J. Miles, “Why Theatres Owned and Operated by Our People Should be Supported,” Washington Tribune, July 31, 1921). Michael J. Miles was listed as a clerk for the Dept. of Interior in the 1922 edition of the Boyd’s Directory. Miles resided in a rooming or boarding house at 921 12th St., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1922), 1121.
88 “Our Policy,” Washington Tribune, March 7, 1925.
59 which worked to subjugate the Race instead of enhancing its overall status within the nation’s capital. In an editorial titled, “Faults of Negro Business Men,” the Tribune portrayed black merchants as more inclined than business owners of other racial or ethnic groups to use earnings to display wealth because they were unaccustomed to success or turning a profit. “One fault Race business men have,” proclaimed editors, “is one which comes as a result of being ‘Negro rich.’ Speaking generally, let the Negro start a business, and as soon as he gets where he can pay his expenses and still have a surplus, a high price automobile and a diamond…he is too important to attend to the little things which are, in the main, responsible for his success.”89 As Tribune editors conveyed it,
African-American entrepreneurs were overly concerned with displaying the facade of success instead of gaining the skills needed to prosper. As a result, according to journalists, the Race could not obtain socioeconomic and political power.
Along with propagating the idea that race merchants were spendthrifts, the
Tribune bolstered the notion that African-American business owners and their prospective clients would engage in illicit activities or deceive those around them to possess money and other valuable commodities. In a series of short stories the Tribune published in the late 1920s, editors further warned that dealings in conspicuous consumption or extravagant displays eventually led to incarceration, economic loss and decline. In the feature titled, “Beauty and the Diamond Ring,” a young black salesman named Walker, and his associate Stewart, sell counterfeit watches, rings and pearls to
89 “Faults of Negro Business Men,” Washington Tribune, January 17, 1925. Also see Chicago Whip, “Shut Up; Get Busy,” Washington Tribune, December 31, 1921. Note that in the 1930s, an unnamed critic repeated the sentiment expressed by Tribune editors, when s/he was interviewed by Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers. See Anonymous, interview by Anonymous, circa 1938; Notecards, Folder 5, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 60 Harlem residents out of their jewelry store. One day, Walker encounters a “beautiful cocoa-brown” faced woman who has cooked up a scheme to steal one of the fake jeweled rings that Walker and Stewart advertise as “genuine imported diamonds-price three hundred dollars.” Walker is smitten with the well-dressed woman who inspects his collection. As a result, he agrees to drive her to see her husband, a supposed asylum patient who mysteriously has money to purchase expensive wares. After they arrive at the asylum, Walker realizes that the crafty woman has lifted a diamond ring from his coat pocket and vanished into the night. Walker also discovers that the woman has convinced the hospital staff that he is her mentally deranged husband who needs to be detained because of his hysterics about being conned out of nonexistent, valuable merchandise.90
The image of the flashy criminal black consumer resurfaces in “Trapping the
Gang,” a story of a black policeman who trails a band of well-dressed underworld characters that use the La Salle apartment complex to gamble and stash stolen jewelry.
During his stake out at the La Salle, the policeman meets a poorly-attired, young black woman named Miss Goff who he believes is being primed by the mob to join their criminal enterprise. He warns Miss Goff to stay away from the thugs in her building, primarily because he thinks she is “magnificent,” “bewitching,” and clueless about the illegal doings of her neighbors. But she refuses to do so because she is seduced by the dazzle of smart clothing and “ice” worn by Belle Lenarde, described by the policeman as the “bejeweled lady” and the “Queen of the Forty Thieves.”91 Eventually, the policeman
90 John P. Moore, “Beauty and the Diamond Ring,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 12, 1929.
91 The protagonist of “Trapping the Gang” uses the term “ice” to describe the jewelry worn by Belle Lenarde: “Better take these prisoners off my hands…so as I can go hunting for my shoes. Unless I’m off, my guess this man is the leader of the outfit below and this woman with all the chunks of ice dotting her is 61 arrests Belle Lenarde and her bandits; he also saves Miss Goff (by not arresting her) from spending time in prison for gambling, stealing luxury goods or engaging in other get rich quick schemes to sport flashy apparel.
Some black Washingtonians seemed to agree with newspapermen that African
Americans participated in disreputable activities, tarnished their reputations, or sabotaged their own success and that of their communities to obtain luxuries. While detailing the living conditions of the District’s black neighborhoods in 1929, sociologist William Jones appeared to share the opinion expressed by a D.C. Health Officer who claimed that alley- dwellers unabashedly committed crimes (such as bootlegging, gambling and exchanging
“hot goods”) to adorn themselves in “very beautiful and expensive clothes.”92 During the midst of the Depression, an unnamed relief worker relayed a somewhat similar story to the Tribune’s editors because s/he wanted to help them expose yet another case of
“chiselers” or con artists who blatantly defrauded unsuspecting others and degraded themselves so that they could conspicuously consume. As this worker reported, there was a “John and Mary Doe” who lived in the Northwest section of the city and cheated the federal government out of “food, clothing, shoes and [day] work” despite the fact that they owned a “fine car” and a refurbished or “overhaul[ed]…home.” John and Mary
the queen…” See J. Fortune Reade, “Trapping the Gang: The Thrilling Adventure of a Negro Policeman,” Washington Tribune: Illustrated Feature Section, January 26, 1929.
92 See Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 46-47. Robert M. Williams - pastor of Washington’s Asbury Methodist Episcopal Church - told black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers that many disadvantaged black youth gravitated toward “disreputable” activities because they were unemployed and did not have supervised recreational outlets in their communities. Williams particularly stated that young boys would “resort to stealing and gambling” to “go to a movie or to buy something,” while some girls would “sell themselves to get money for buying things they want[ed]” (Reverend Robert Moton Williams, interview by T.E. Davis, 6 July 1938, Field Reports, Folder 1, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
62 Doe were also heavy drinkers, according to the worker, and they had “many sources” of income that came from “roomers” and a bootlegging business.93
Varied black Washingtonians, like the anonymous relief worker, discussed consumption to define what it meant to be an upstanding citizen in the early twentieth century. While doing so, they brought to mind the “bad” black consumer who purchased from whites and sacrificed propriety or standing to own luxury goods. From the 1910s through the 1930s, many African Americans in the nation’s capital seemed to share the view of one of their leaders, historian Carter G. Woodson, who argued in the Mis-
Education of the Negro that consumers were the “weak link in the chain” in establishing a solid black economy.94 Because African Americans failed to support Negro merchants and practice thrift, according to Woodson and other members of the Race, blacks were unable to attain equality or full citizenship during the rise of Jim Crow.
The image of the bad black consumer that emerged from D.C.’s Negro press ultimately substantiated the long-held perception that African Americans refused to use their earnings to alter their lowly status, participated in questionable activities and committed crimes to consume like upwardly mobile whites. Instead of adequately addressing the racial inequities that stripped the Race of its ability to build wealth and equally participate in commodity culture, the capital city’s black newspaper owners and editors worked to disenfranchise their constituency by vilifying their acts of agency via
93 Anonymous Report Worker, “Chiselers on Relief Own a Fine Car,” Washington Tribune, September 29, 1934.
94 Woodson also argued that the university-trained “Negro” could not build thriving commercial ventures because he had learned to indulge in “extravagances before he could afford them.” Moreover, Woodson claimed that the “failures of the Negro business” was “often due to the “Negro business man” who often squandered his profits by “build[ing] a finer home than anybody else in the community, …[and buying] the finest car, the most expensive dress, [and] the best summer home” (Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mis- Education of the Negro [1933; reprinted by Africa World Press, Inc., 1990], 42, 48-51). 63 the market. But as the last three chapters of this study show, black Washingtonians still bought luxuries, purchased from whites or consumed products marketed by white
America because they equated expensive goods with status and identified with mainstream ideas about what it meant to be modern in the early twentieth century.
African-American spending and leisure habits were forms of resistance to an ideology that equated whiteness with mass and conspicuous consumption while linking blackness with destitution and criminality. However, these acts of agency also helped to sustain a consumer logic that limited black mobility as well as delegitimized and stalled African-
American community building and organizing efforts between the two world wars.
64
Chapter Two
Colored Chauffeurs: Negotiating Stereotypes While Working and Cruising
African-American drivers were a common sight in Washington, D.C. in the early twentieth century. Of those black Washingtonians with cars, most were likely elites and skilled laborers who purchased new or second-hand models that saturated the market after the mass-production of Ford’s Model T and other makes of autos in the mid-to-late
1910s. Sociologist William Jones reported that 26 percent of the District’s African-
American households owned automobiles in 1929; he added that he surveyed 278 of the city’s 2,716 black male chauffeurs and mechanics who drove and maintained cars for the upper classes and/or owned taxi and auto repair businesses.1 Jones also stated that 60 percent of the 1000 “highly-cultured” black families that he interviewed in the mid 1920s owned motor vehicles and most were used.2 By highly-cultured, Jones meant African
Americans who were affiliated with black society, lived in settled or fashionable city neighborhoods, and held positions as doctors, lawyers, ministers, educators, public officials, business owners and clerks. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Sociologist William Jones reported that of the 6,841 Negro homes that he studied in 1929, 25.7% owned automobiles. Also note that Jones claimed that chauffeurs and mechanics headed 278 of the 5,062 Negro homes that he examined in 1929. See William Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC: A Study in Human Ecology (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1929), 123, 115-116. In 1924, the Census reported that 7.5% or 2,716 of the 35,865 gainfully black males in the District were professional mechanics (310) and chauffeurs (2406). See Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 22, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed July 21, 2008).
2 According to Jones, 627 of the 1000 “highly cultured” black homes he examined owned cars and most were used. Jones also claimed that “two or more automobiles” were found in the “highly cultured Negro home” (William H. Jones, Recreation and Amusement Among Negroes in Washington, DC: A Sociological Analysis of the Negro in an Urban Environment (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1927), 102-103). 65 Professional black Washingtonians, like their counterparts across the U.S., equated the automobile with upward mobility, success and rank in the early 1900s. Judge
Robert Terrell wrote his wife, Mary C. Terrell, in 1916 to describe his activities while delivering speeches in Indianapolis, Indiana. He stated that he spent one of his days
“being carried about in a touring car visiting the big folks of the town.”3 Terrell also suggested that the car ride symbolized his celebrity status; he was likely treated as a renowned personality because of his reappointment as a Republican Municipal Judge in a majority Democratic Senate.4 Terrell further conveyed that he was a little baffled or maybe humbled by the conduct of the Indiana Association of Colored Men who showered him with praises about his “powerful” speeches. But Terrell was also sure to communicate to his wife that he was “greatly pleased with [his] reception” and the royal treatment he received when motoring.5
The District’s upper-class African Americans also purchased cars for the same reasons as elite whites who drove in the first decades of the twentieth century: to temporarily escape city neighborhoods, to avoid riding public transit, to visit family and friends as well as to tour the countryside.6 In the 1910s and 1920s, Robert and Mary
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Robert Terrell to Mary C. Terrell, 21 February 1916, Conts. 1-2, Reel No. 1 of 4, Shelf No 17, 902, Papers of Robert H. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
4 See George C. Osborn, “Woodrow Wilson Appoints a Negro Judge,” The Journal of Southern History 24.4 (1958): 481-493. Also, in Robert Terrell’s personal papers, there are numerous letters addressed to Terrell, congratulating him on his appointment/reappointment as Municipal Judge of Washington, D.C in the 1910s. See Conts. 1-2, Reel No. 1 of 4, Shelf No 17, 902, Papers of Robert H. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
5 Robert Terrell to Mary C. Terrell, 21 February 1916, Conts. 1-2, Reel No. 1 of 4, Shelf No 17, 902, Papers of Robert H. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
6 For more on the history of white auto-mobility and a discussion of how upper-class white Americans saw cars as an alternative to public transit and equated cars with status, independence and escape from congested city spaces, see Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City 66 Terrell used their automobile to travel from their home in D.C.’s Ledroit Park neighborhood to their bungalow on Highland Beach, a popular Maryland resort for well- to-do blacks between the 1890s and the 1930s.7 The Terrells associated their vehicle with private family gatherings and vacationing; their motorcar transported them away from the duties of work and communal obligations during summer months. Moreover, owning an automobile made it possible for the Terrells to move freely inside and outside city and town limits without the aid of busses or trains. In 1917, Mrs. Terrell wrote her brother, Thomas A. Church, that he should come to visit the family at Highland Beach.
To ensure that Church understood that his stay would be “comfortable” or suitable for a man of his stature, Terrell told her brother that she or her husband would “fetch” or pick him up from the railroad station so that they could liberally tour Anne Arundel County,
Maryland.8
While it is not clear if Thomas Church accepted his sister’s offer to vacation at the family’s beachfront cottage in 1917, he shared her excitement for motoring. Mr. Church seemed particularly enchanted by the prospect of using the car to exhibit self-sufficiency
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Peter J. Ling, America and the Automobile: Technology, Reform and Social Change (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); and James J. Flink, “Three Stages of Automobile Consciousness.” American Quarterly 24.4 (1972): 454-455. Further, note that Paul Gilroy and Mark Foster discuss how blacks have historically purchased and driven cars as part of an uplift strategy and to avoid discriminatory practices experienced on streetcars and trains. See Paul Gilroy, “Driving While Black,” in Car Cultures ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001), 81-104; and Mark Foster, “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945,” Journal of Negro History 48.2 (1999): 130-149.
7 Note that Highland Beach was established by a descendent of Frederick Douglass in 1893. See Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 214-215. Also note that the Terrells lived on T St., N.W. in the 1910s and on S St., N.W. in 1925. See Correspondence, 1886-1954 and undated, Conts. 4-5, Papers of Mary C. Terrell and Conts. 1-5, Papers of Robert H. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
8 Mary C. Terrell, Highland Beach, Anne Arundel Co., MD, to Thomas A. Church, 10 August 1917, Family Correspondence, 1890-1955 and undated, Conts. 3-4, Reel No. 3 of 42, Shelf No. 16, 976, Papers of Mary C. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. 67 and mitigate his dependence on outdated or unsavory forms of public transit. Church also saw the automobile as an investment and a way to propel his standing among peers in D.C. and New York City, as evidenced by the letter he wrote in 1922, informing Mrs.
Terrell of his opportunity to buy “hacking cars” and make a “barrel of money.” “Yellow taxicabs” were all the rage in New York, according to Church, because they were
“beautiful” cars made of the “strongest material.” He added that purchasing or leasing a taxi was a far better gamble than playing the numbers, or rather, it was a new or innovative type of transportation that “beat the horses in a hundred different ways.” As
Church conveyed, investors would not lose money if they provided an $800 down payment for a single cab and met a monthly note of $100.00 for eighteen months, until the total cost of $2700.00 for the taxi was paid in full. He further communicated that owners of taxis could clear $20.00 a day per car and possibly bring in as much as
$7,000.00 in 18 months, after paying their chauffeurs and cab rental fees. For Church, owning a legitimate “hack” service was a low-risk way to earn a “steady and lucrative income.”9 And apparently it was a respectable means for an elite black man, like him, to maintain his middle-class lifestyle and perhaps experience the thrill of traveling in his very own car.
Although the car appeared to provide autonomy and unencumbered transport for the Terrells, their friends and family members, the advent of the motor vehicle actually brought new forms of policing to Black Washington during the rise of Jim Crow.
Examining the District’s black and white press, Negro literature, sociological studies, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 Thomas A. Church, New York, to Mary C. Terrell, 6 March 1922, Family Correspondence, 1890-1955 and undated, Conts. 3-4, Reel No. 3 of 42, Shelf No. 16, 976, Papers of Mary C. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
68 the personal papers of race leaders, this chapter demonstrates how auto-mobility shaped
African-American identity and increased the surveillance of D.C.’s black community in the early twentieth century. This study of African-American motoring is similar to
Kathleen Franz’s “Narrating Automobility” in that it shows how professional blacks purchased automobiles in the interwar era to exhibit status, to escape Jim Crow practices on public transit, to tour the open road, and to contest the idea proliferated by the larger white American society that blacks were not technically savvy drivers.10 This chapter also illustrates - as Blaine Brownell does in “A Symbol of Modernity” and Ted Ownby mostly corroborates in American Dreams in Mississippi - that the auto exacerbated intra- racial conflicts in African-American communities or widened the gulf between working- and middle-class blacks in the early 1900s.11 But unlike Franz, Brownell and Ownby, I argue that black auto-mobility helped to regulate and disenfranchise Washington, D.C.’s
African-American populace between the 1910s and the 1930s, primarily because it cast the stereotype of the suspicious Negro driver who used the car to mask “real” identity or conduct illicit activity.
Whites in the District criminalized the “colored chauffeur” throughout the early twentieth century to wipe out signs of black achievement and to reinforce the idea that
African Americans were disorderly subjects who needed to be contained. At the close of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 Franz also argues that the arrival of the car or auto-mobility reinforced white authority, black inferiority and racial segregation in the “new leisure space of the open road” between the 1910s and 1930s (Kathleen Franz, “Narrating Automobility: Travelers, Tinkerers and Technological Authority in the Twentieth Century,” [Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1999]).
11 Blaine A. Brownell, “A Symbol of Modernity: Attitudes Toward the Automobile in Southern Cities in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 24.1 (1972): 36; and Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty and Culture, 1830-1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1999), 110- 113.
69 1910, for instance, the Washington Post published an article that described how three lavishly-attired people hired a “colored chauffeur” to drive a “handsome yellow touring car” to disguise the purported fact that they burglarized homes in an upscale New York suburb.12 While it is plausible that the Post gave an actual account of criminals who used fashion and luxury items to conceal their unlawful deeds, it seems that the main intent of the story was to remind or inform readers that black drivers in flashy cars were suspect and potentially dangerous. After all, the Post feature referenced the skin color of the chauffeur in its title and body, while conveniently omitting the racial identity of the well- dressed men (and woman) who possibly masterminded the scheme to rob upper-class white Americans by blending into their communities. In so doing, journalists reconstructed the image of the manipulative Negro who stole expensive merchandise to consume like the wealthy, or the suspicious African American who participated in fraudulent schemes, such as masquerading as a domestic servant for affluent whites, to hide his (or her) “true” identity as conning thief and illegally obtain valuable property.13
Well into the 1930s, white Washingtonians represented black chauffeurs as careless drivers as well as criminals who stole cars, robbed others while off duty, or maimed and killed pedestrians while joyriding.14 In 1917, the Post ran a piece called,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 “Swell Burglars Use Auto: Wear Fashionable Attire and Have a Colored Chauffeur,” Washington Post, December 8, 1910.
13 Both historian Ted Ownby and anthropologist Elizabeth Chin argue that whites have long circulated the idea that African Americans would lie, cheat and steal to obtain consumable goods that did not rightfully belong to them. See Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 47, 62; and Elizabeth Chin, Purchasing Power: Black Kids and American Consumer Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 34-39.
14 See, for example, “Accused of Hold Ups: Police Say Merchants Identify Negro as Masked Bandit; Prisoner Is A Chauffeur,” Washington Post, December 9, 1913; “Injured Chauffeur Dies: Colored Woman, Who Was With Him in Wrecked Car, Cannot Live,” Washington Post, April 17, 1915; “Auto Kills Lone Poole: Judson Welliver’s Colored Chauffeur Arrested After Accident,” Washington Post, May 9, 1919; 70 “Brings Own Traffic Rules,” which depicted Mike O’Leary – a “colored chauffeur” who drove for Senator Sheppard of Texas - as an unruly lawbreaker because he allegedly powered his car, or that of his employer, at high speed throughout the city’s streets.
According to Post journalists, O’Leary was a poorly trained motorist who needed to learn
“certain little details about driving” because he brought his “own traffic rules” from
North Carolina to the District; outran “several bicycle policemen”; and abandoned his vehicle after a “motorcycle [officer] got on his trail.”15 Yet reporters failed to disclose that there were no set or unified traffic rules and regulations in Washington, D.C. in the
1910s. The city’s Traffic Court - which encouraged road safety and issued citations for reckless driving - was established in 1922; the District’s official traffic code was not adopted into law until May 3, 1925.16 Moreover, the Post did not consider or selected not to point out that is was possible that the cops attempted to detain O’Leary because he drove an automobile (maybe a fancy one) for his personal enjoyment instead of chauffeuring a white person. Lastly, journalists did not acknowledge that O’Leary may have “abandoned his vehicle,” if he actually did so, because he was concerned that he would be wrongly held for a crime or assaulted by law enforcement. As a newly transplanted migrant from the Carolinas, O’Leary could have been a victim of false arrest
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Two Poke Cops With Guns: Colored Men Sentenced to One Year Each by Judge McMahon,” Washington Post, March 14, 1922; “Chauffeur Held in Deaths: Coroner’s Jury Fixes No Blame, So Charge Is Driving Without Permit,” Washington Post, June 1, 1922; “Auto Charge Goes to Grand Jury,” Washington Post, October 30, 1928; “Dyer’s Chauffeur Put on Probation for Year,” Washington Post, November 28, 1928; and “Widow Seeks $150,000 In Auto Accident Death,” Washington Post, December 14, 1932.
15 “Brings Own Traffic Rules: Senator Sheppard’s Driver Follows North Carolina Regulations.” Washington Post, August 23, 1917.
16 See “New Traffic Court Ready,” Washington Post, June 20, 1922; and “New Traffic Code Formally Adopted; To Be Law May 3,” Washington Post, April 23, 1925.
71 or familiar with cases of officers who accosted black men for not showing sufficient deference to the “proper authorities” and challenging the South’s racial codes. These discriminatory policies criminalized a black man for behaving like an “uppity Negro” who refused to play the part of the obedient servant; they also allowed the white-run legal system to harass, punish and incarcerate African-American men for simply driving unaccompanied or “driving while black.”17
The District’s white press also portrayed the African-American chauffeur as a backward domestic who was unfit to operate an automobile or was too mentally incapacitated to engage in skilled labor like steering and maintaining a car.18 And this depiction of the black automobilist as bungling driver (and mechanic) was not unique to
Washington, D.C. According to historian Kathleen Franz, reproducing the image of the incompetent black motorist - or the “technologically primitive,” nonwhite “other” - was a way for whites across the nation to reify black inferiority and justify racial segregation in roadside eateries, hotels, gas stations and other businesses that catered to white drivers !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 17 Ted Ownby analyzes a Mildred D. Taylor short story titled, “The Gold Cadillac,” to argue that African Americans believed it was dangerous for them to own or drive solo in an expensive automobile throughout the South during the early twentieth century. See Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi 127-129. Also note that in 1902 the Post suggested that some of Washington’s officers arbitrarily accused black males of speeding or driving recklessly although they lacked sufficient evidence to support their allegations. Journalists specifically reported in an article titled, “Negro Chauffeur in Court,” that “Bicycle Policeman Bray” arrested a “colored chauffeur” named Edward Sims for “driving an automobile faster than the law permit[ted]” or “making eighteen to twenty-two miles an hour.” Sims disputed the charge when he appeared before Judge Bundy in the city’s Police Court by asserting that his “automobile could not run faster than twelve miles an hour,” and adding that he believed his arrest occurred because he charged Bray with “riding on the wrong side of the street.” While the Post did not question how the policeman could have accurately estimated the speed of the chauffeur’s automobile, the daily did state that the judge chose to fine the black chauffeur, implying that it was possible that the African-American man in the story was penalized for challenging a policeman and driving a car without white supervision (“Negro Chauffeur In Court: Bicycle Policeman Testified that He Was Exceeding Speed Limit,” Washington Post, July 20, 1902).
18 See “Will Have Diamond Smile: Chauffeur Has a ‘Sparkler’ Set in One of His Gold Teeth,” Washington Post, January 5, 1916 and “He Thought Cat Was A Coon: Colored Chauffeur Shakes Angora From Tree to Jaws of Waiting Bulldog,” Washington Post, December 1, 1914.
72 between the 1910s and 1930s.19 However, the District’s white press also incriminated or at least raised the specter of suspicion toward the seemingly inept colored chauffeur by sometimes portraying him as an unpredictable clown figure that was prone to violence or mischief if left to his own devises. A case in point can be found in the 1914 Post vignette titled, “He Thought Cat Was A Coon,” which showcased a countrified black man who worked as a driver for an “aristocratic” family in a California suburb. The African-
American chauffeur in this ridiculous fairy tale supposedly “caused wild excitement” when he chased the family’s beloved Angora cat “in true Kentucky style” and “shook it…from a tree,” allowing his pet bulldog to kill it.20 The article clearly communicated that the black chauffeur, like all African-American domestics, lacked class and experience in the finer things of life; therefore, he mistakenly thought the exotic cat was a raccoon and a potential danger to his employer. But the story also appeared to warn the wealthy of the perils of allowing an uncouth, inexperienced chauffeur, or any black worker, to freely roam around their homes and yards without strict supervision.
The derision and over criminalization of the colored chauffeur in the early twentieth century was, to some extent, the basis for harassing and detaining any black male in the nation’s capital or wrongly accusing him of committing felonies and misdemeanors with autos. In February 1923, the black-owned Washington Tribune reported that George McGee - a Veterans Bureau employee who resided at 323 South
Capitol street - was “awarded five hundred dollars damages against the [white-owned]
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 19 Kathleen Franz, “Narrating Automobility,” 93, 133-145.
20 “He Thought Cat Was A Coon: Colored Chauffeur Shakes Angora From Tree to Jaws of Waiting Bulldog,” Washington Post, December 1, 1914.
73 Washington Times company.” It appears that the Times falsely charged that McGee used
“a dangerous weapon…[a Ford automobile] which had run down a white woman,” although McGee reputedly had no “knowledge of the crime” and never “own[ed] a Ford.”
After Mr. McGee further investigated the case, according to the Tribune, he “learned that the [real offender] was a white man.” The Tribune also claimed that all the District’s white “dailies carried the article [accusing a McGee], but the Times alone gave an address.”21 From the Tribune’s report, one can easily conclude that some black
Washingtonians believed that whites were so accustomed to associating African
Americans with crime and mayhem that the Times thought it justifiable to haphazardly accuse a black citizen of misconduct or to present yet another portrait of a disorderly
Negro driver, even if it was erroneous. But the McGee incident also suggests that Times’ journalists may have thought it unproblematic to subject an innocent black man to possible attacks from angry whites who could have easily traveled to McGee’s home after his address was made public.
Years before the McGee suit, black newspaperman Calvin Chase asserted that the
District’s white policemen unreasonably targeted and fined upstanding black motorists during Washington’s 1919 Race Riots.22 Chase specifically reported that, at the time of the uprising, a seemingly unsuspecting African-American man parked his automobile “in front of an eating saloon…on Seventh street, …and when he came out [of the saloon] he
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 See “Wins Suit Against Washington Times,” Washington Tribune, February 17, 1923. Note that I was unable to find any reference to the McGee lawsuit in the Washington Times, the Washington Post or the Evening Star.
22 “Not to Blame,” Washington Bee, July 26, 1919. For more on the city’s 1919 riots, see Michael Andrew Fitzpatrick, “A Great Agitation for Business,” 73; and Constance M. Green, Secret City, 190-197.
74 was placed under arrest…and charged with disorderly conduct.”23 For Chase, black men
(like the motorist) were disproportionately apprehended during the city’s insurrection, while white men who initiated the riots with attacks “against the [District’s] colored citizens” were allowed to terrorize, injure and murder black Washingtonians with pistols and other weapons.24 But it also appears that during the city’s race war, some within the nation’s capital believed that “Negroes in an automobile” traveled about the District shooting whites and destroying property with wild gunfire.25 The Washington Times was a major player in solidifying this image of the dangerous black driver in the midst of the unrest, although the paper’s account of Negro desperadoes in a motorcar looked concocted, inconclusive or at least contradictory. When detailing the activities of the roving band of African Americans, Times’ journalists claimed that: “four Negroes in an automobile fired several shots at a group of sailors,” and “on Bladensburg road northeast…shots were fired…at three white men” who were “unable to say whether the occupants of the [car] were white or colored.”26
Calvin Chase further maintained that some of the District’s prominent whites routinely described blacks who participated in the 1919 riots as “crapshooters” and
“bootleggers,” meaning a gang of underworld elements who gambled and peddled liquor
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 23 “Not to Blame,” Washington Bee, July 26, 1919.
24 “They Started It,” Washington Bee, July 26, 1919. Also see “The Rights Of The Black Man,” Washington Bee, August 2, 1919.
25 Negroes in Automobile Fire at Group of Sailors; Escape: Desperadoes Shoot as Car Speeds Past U.S. Hospital.” Washington Times, July 21, 1919.
26 Ibid.
75 by car, bicycle or foot.27 While it is uncertain if white Washingtonians publicly linked
African-American rioters with bootlegging, some did believe that blacks who resided in
Southwest D.C. were involved in the city’s underground alcohol trade that emerged after the passage of the District’s Sheppard (Prohibition) Act in 1917.28 About a year before
Washington’s Race War, the Post publicized that Harvey Johnson, a “colored” bootlegger who lived at 219 G St. S.W., was arrested for allegedly hauling 50 flasks of whiskey from Baltimore “in an automobile” owned by Sarah Clark, a “colored” woman who also lived at 219 G street.29 Months before the riots, the Post additionally communicated that black bootleggers who trafficked in Southwest should be vigorously monitored and jailed because they were dangerous criminals. According to reporters, a
“colored” bootlegger named William E. Lewis stabbed police officer Frank M. Allegood, after Allegood bought alcohol from Lewis “at Third street and Maryland avenue…in
Southwest Washington” and informed him “that he was under arrest.”30 It also looks as if the white servicemen who ignited the city’s riots in July 1919 specifically targeted
Southwest because they believed that the area’s black bootleggers and other African
Americans were responsible for most of the District’s assaults in the 1910s. As historian
Constance Green has noted, “the first overt acts of race warfare occurred” in Washington when “a band of more than a hundred [white] soldiers, sailors and marines…invaded !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 27 “The Rights of the Black Man,” Washington Bee, August 2, 1919; “Not to Blame,” Washington Bee, August 23, 1919.
28 See “Sustains ‘Dry’ Law: Justice Gould Holds Sheppard Act Is Constitutional,” Washington Post, October 25, 1917.
29 “Haul Of Whiskey Made by Police: 1,000 Half Pints Seized in Automobile – Colored Man Arrested,” Washington Post, June 16, 1918.
30 “Police Driver Gashed: F.M. Allegood Badly Wounded by an Alleged Bootlegger,” Washington Post, January 12, 1919.
76 southwest and beat several colored persons” to quell the “wave of public hysteria over…a series of sex crimes, …street robberies and attacks upon [white] women.”31
Some whites outside Washington, D.C. openly held that black bootleggers caused much of the civil unrest and racial strife that took place in U.S. cities in the 1910s and
1920s. Two years after the District’s riots, Charles Davis of Petersburg, Virginia wrote an opinion for the Virginia Law Register titled, “The Race Menace in Bootlegging,” to argue that “Negro” bootleggers were injurious to building an ordered society because of their criminal pursuits, especially their close ties with the powerful whiskey trafficking industry.32 According to Davis, he had been informed that a “large proportion of the bootlegging business” in cities like “Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia” was
“conducted by Negroes.” But the central purpose of Davis’s article was to impress upon readers that “Negro bootleggers” were a serious threat to national security because they purchased “expensive cars” to elude policemen while trading and retained “expensive lawyers” to help them avoid spending time in jail for breaking laws. At the close of his essay, Davis warned that if the black bootlegger was not “quickly eliminated, his wealth, power and influence [would] grow.” He further predicted that the bootlegger’s elimination “may involve a race struggle with all its attendant horrors.”33
As a counter to the stereotype of the disorderly Negro motorist, numerous black men in the District engineered the respectable black chauffeur who used his automobile
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 31 Green, Secret City, 190-191. Also see “Denouncing Wave of Crime Here, Officials, Ministers and Others Declare Police Are Too Few,” Washington Post, July 21, 1919; and “Riots Taken Up in Congress; Kahn Blames New ‘Dry’ Law; Inquiry Is to Be Asked Today,” Washington Post, July 22, 1919.
32 Charles Hall Davis, “The Race Menace in Bootlegging.” Virginia Law Register 7.5 (1921): 337-344.
33 Ibid.
77 to provide upscale taxi, touring and funeral services to the community. African-
American males purchased cars to create businesses and to display style that would prove that they were just as refined and enterprising as other Americans. As early as 1914, the
James Brothers - a “successful firm of colored undertakers [located] at 19th and L streets,
N.W.” - showcased their “progressive” methods and “up-to-the-minute” services in the black-owned Bee.34 They were also sure to let the public know that their “magnificent electric funeral cars” were “duplicates of those used by the most modern and fashionable undertakers in all of the large cities.” The James Brothers considered themselves
“ambitious…business men” who should be emulated by other blacks. They were leading role models who gratified the “desires of persons wishing to conduct funeral services in keeping with modern methods, insuring a quiet, noiseless and dignified entourage en route to the last resting place of the honored dead.”35
The black-owned taxi and touring services available in Washington, D.C. in the early twentieth century were primarily geared toward African-American elites who could afford to spend leisure time with family and friends. To be driven around in an expensive vehicle by a distinguished looking chauffeur was seen as a symbol of status. But hiring an accomplished black driver was also a way to support a reputable African-American entrepreneur and participate in an uplift strategy that used luxury items to challenge racial bigotry. In 1919, J.M. Miller advertised his taxi service in the Bee. The promotional
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 34 Display Ad: “James Brothers, 19th and L Sts., N.W.,” Washington Bee, June 27, 1914. Note that the James Brothers also billed themselves in the Washington Sun as “progressive undertakers” whose “quality, workmanship and elegance, guided by practical experience,” made “them leaders in [their] line [of work]” (Display Ad: “E.R. James and Brother Washington’s Progressive Undertakers,” Washington Sun, January 29, 1915).
35 Display Ad: “James Brothers, 19th and L Sts., N.W.,” Washington Bee, June 27, 1914.
78 stated that Miller’s business was located at 2113 Fourteenth St., N.W. It also included a line drawing of what appeared to be a luxury motorcar and a photo of a well-heeled
Miller who offered: “First-class auto and taxi service for all occasions…Featuring seven- passenger Cadillac Eights, touring and limousine style, and other exclusive cars, all with uniformed chauffeurs.”36 To further sell automobile travel as an upscale recreational activity, the owner of the “Royal Sight-Seeing Car” marketed his service in the summer of 1919 as the perfect solution for “those who [did not] care to maintain a car for themselves and friends.” Also known as the “Royal Joy Line,” the touring car transported “colored citizens” to the District’s Zoo so that they could witness many beautiful sights, including “picturesque scenes” like “Rock Creek Park and the running stream, as well as the fine residences of modern architecture.”37
Some of the District’s African-American businessmen touted that they were knowledgeable drivers with distinctive automobiles to perhaps challenge the representation of the unskilled colored chauffeur/mechanic who drove a junker because he was unable to maintain his vehicle.38 Black proprietors, M. T. Malvin and Mr. Alden
D. Schey, established the Red Cab Service Company in May 1921, which was billed as a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 Note that in the ad, the car is represented by a line drawing, not a photographic reproduction. See Display Ad: “Taxi,” Washington Bee, August 2, 1919; August 9, 1919; August 16, 1919; August 23, 1919; August 30, 1919. Also see “New Taxi Company Operates 21 Fine Cars,” Washington Tribune, May 20 1922.
37 “Need-Result-Appeal: The Royal Joy Drive,” Washington Bee, June 14, 1919.
38 As early as 1906, the U.S. Lithograph Company created an image titled, The New Smart Set; the print depicted a black man - with large red lips, goggles, hat, red coat and green pants - chauffeuring three well- dressed white or light-skinned black women in a rickety looking automobile with milk jugs for engine casings, and a dog and cane or umbrella holder tied to the side of the vehicle. See The New Smart Set, lithograph, created by U.S. Lithograph Co. (c 1906; Cincinnati, New York: digital file from color film copy transparency, LC-USZC4-7932, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.). Also see Kathleen Franz, “Narrating Automobility,” 133-145.
79 “first class taxicab service patterned on the order of the famous [white-owned] Yellow
Cab Company of Chicago.”39 According to Malvin and Schey, customers would be able to distinguish Red Cab from competitors because their cars had “red bodies and cream colored wheels” and were “driven by thoroughly experienced and reliable chauffeurs.”40
In 1922 African-American real estate agent, Clarence M. DeVeile, purchased a rather substantial article in the black-run Tribune to inform the public of the “reasons…[they] should deal” with or purchase and rent homes from him. Along with announcing that he offered sound real estate investments, DeVeile also assured prospective customers that he was an “experienced chauffeur” who provided free touring services in his luxury “seven passenger Hudson Super Six Automobile” to “see the houses he [had] for sale.”41
Well-dressed African-American garage owners featured their expertise in the
District’s Negro press to further reinforce the idea that black mechanics/chauffeurs were competent professionals who provided high quality car-related services.42 From February to March 1916, for example, automobile connoisseur Charles Skinner was pictured in the
Bee dressed in suit, tie (and sometimes a brimmed hat) while promoting his auto repair
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 39 “Taxicab Company Formed,” Washington Tribune, May 14, 1921. John Hertz, an Austrian born immigrant, founded Yellow Cab of Chicago in 1915. See Gorman Gilbert and Robert E. Samuels, The Taxicab: An Urban Transportation Survivor (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 39- 51.
40 “Taxicab Company Formed,” Washington Tribune, May 14, 1921. Also see Display Ad: “Red Cab Service,” Washington Tribune, October 10, 1925.
41 “Clarence M. DeVeile: Our Distinguished Real Estate Agent of 1837 Seventh St., N.W.,” Washington Tribune, May 13, 1922.
42 “Making A Record,” Washington Bee, February 5, 1916; Display Ad: “Chas. L. Skinner: Automobile Repairing of Quality,” Washington Bee, March 4, 1916; and “Palmer’s Garage Is Expanding,” Washington Tribune, March 18, 1922.
80 business and relaying his knowledge of motorcar history and technology.43 Skinner was an ambitious twenty-three year old who had managed the Mt. Pleasant Garage Company at 2116 Eighteenth street and maintained autos for the U.S. State and Treasury
Departments before he established a mechanic’s shop with Benjamin Nesbit at the rear of
1420 K St., N.W.44 Additionally, Skinner organized Washington’s first Negro Auto
Floral Parade, which took place on May 27, 1916. The purpose of the event, according to
Skinner, was to “show the advancement of [the] race in the auto industry and to advertise the different trades[men] and profession[als]” within the District’s black community who used cars and trucks to conduct business.45
Yet Skinner also used the Floral Parade to demonstrate that prominent black men who owned and maintained automobiles were equal to or at least respected by some of the District’s white males. In the biography he submitted to the Bee, Skinner pointed out that he and his business partner were able to secure contracts to service government cars, though their bids were sometimes higher than their white competitors.46 To further show that he was highly regarded by white men of the city and to perhaps add legitimacy to his
Auto event, Skinner announced that Police Superintendent Major R.W. Pullman and businessman Joseph Berberich would serve as judges for the procession.47
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 43 “Making A Record,” Washington Bee, February 5, 1916; Charles Skinner, “News Of The Day About Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” February 12, 1916; “The Auto Parade,” Washington Bee, March 4, 1916.
44 “Making A Record,” Washington Bee, February 5, 1916.
45 Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, March 4, 1916.
46 “Making A Record,” Washington Bee, February 5, 1916.
47 Display Ad: “The Auto Parade,” Washington Bee, March 4, 1916; Display Ad: “Judges In The Bee’s Auto Parade,” Washington Bee, May 13, 1916; and Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To 81 To encourage participation in the parade, Skinner told black drivers to adorn their automobiles with flowers, flags and bunting (decorative cloth) so that they could win prizes, such as gold and silver cups for the best-decorated car. The pageant of ornamented cars and trucks was intended to symbolize the patriotism, finery and respectability of Washington, D.C.’s African-American populace. To further increase interest in the auto show, Skinner listed the names of black leaders who agreed to showcase their cars, like department store owner Richard Ware and undertakers E.R.
James Brothers.48 He seemed particularly proud to disclose that African-American doctors, lawyers, merchants and political officials used their vehicles to travel to resorts as well as to conduct business inside and outside city limits. That is, Skinner announced that black elites owned or leased vehicles for many of the reasons that upper-class whites did because he wanted the larger Washington public to understand that African-American drivers in the nation’s capital were upwardly mobile citizens. Even though the Model T touring car was affordably mass-produced for the “common man” beginning in 1913,
Skinner enthusiastically reported that professional blacks purchased mid-priced and luxury sedans or sports models in the 1910s. In February 1916, Skinner stated that Judge
Robert Terrell had recently purchased a Chandler Six; Dr. Creed Childs, a Paige Detroit; and Mr. E.R. James & Brothers, a Hudson Six.49 Compared to the cost of a new Model
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, May 13, 1916.
48 Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, March 4, 1916.
49 Charles L. Skinner, “News Of The Day About Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, February 12, 1916. Also note that Skinner reported that black photographer, Daniel Freeman, owned a Studebaker and a black physician named Dr. Curtis and his son respectively owned a Paige Detroit and Reo Roadster. See “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, 82 T, which could be purchased for about $360.00 in 1916, a Chandler Six, Paige Detroit and Hudson Six were specifically manufactured for the rising middle classes of the early twentieth century and new models could be had for $1,050.00 to $1,375.00 in 1916.50
Moreover, Skinner appeared to remind black chauffeurs of the importance of being civic-minded car owners and drivers to presumably minimize the indiscriminate policing of African-American motorists. To avoid break downs on city and country roads and possible confrontations with law enforcement, Skinner offered basic maintenance advice to black car owners in 1916 to help them properly care for their vehicles, such as
“don’t use cheap gas” and “don’t forget to change the oil in the crank case (the engine’s oil storage unit),”51 He also set up a “Professional Chauffers [sic] Protective
Association” to help black drivers “secure employment” and pay for attorneys to represent them when they were “arrested for a minor charge” like “speeding,” which,
Skinner asserted, was “liable to happen to any responsible [car] owner.”52
After the event, Charles Skinner informed the Bee’s readers that the Floral Parade was a successful demonstration that was well received by “white and colored citizens” of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! March 11, 1916.
50 Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 135; Display Ad: “Hudson Super Six.” New York Times, January 2, 1916; Display Ad: “The New and Greater Chandler: The Six with the Marvelous Motor,” New York Times, February 13, 1916; and Display Ad: “Paige: The Standard of Value and Quality,” New York Times, April 23, 1916.
51 See Charles L. Skinner, “News Of The Day About Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, February 12, 1916; Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, March 11, 1916; March 18, 1916; March 25, 1916; April 22, 1916; April 29, 1916.
52 “Professional Chauffers Protective Association,” Washington Bee, May 13, 1916.
83 the nation’s capital.53 However, some black Washingtonians portrayed those who participated in the street festival as ineffective or effete leaders who relied on fashion and insignia to display manhood and status. The Bee’s columnist, known as the Sage of the
Potomac, ridiculed Howard Theatre manager Andrew Thomas because he won first prize for the “prettiest pleasure car” and was dressed in a feminine manner or “in immacculate
[sic] style” with “kid [leather] gloves,” while floating in a decorative carriage or “bed of flowers.”54 Strangely enough, the Sage also claimed that his boss Calvin Chase compromised his social standing and the economic vitality of his publishing business so that he could purchase an expensive automobile to show off at the parade. Specifically, the Sage communicated that it was disgraceful or paradoxical that a so-called upright entrepreneur like Chase opted to “blow…five or ten thousand dollar[s]” on a fancy
“French car” instead of paying his employees in a timely matter.55 Not only was Chase’s extravagant display in direct opposition to the many admonitions he made against “sham” and “showy ornament,” the Sage implied, it was evidence that black leaders in the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53 Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, June 3, 1916.
54 Sage of the Potomac, “Public Men And Things,” Washington Bee, June 3, 1916. For a list of best- decorated auto contest winners see Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored motoring Public,” Washington Bee, June 3, 1916.
55 The Sage of Potomac wrote: “I heard the other day that ‘mah fren’ William Calvin was figurin’ on buyin’ an automobile. I just cant see how that man can have the heart to go and blow hisself for a five or ten thousand dollar French car when he aint done nothin’ but promise me each week that he will pay me for the week’s before work a turnin’ out the Sage dope…Chase’s bank deposit, just his profits, from running this great palladium, are so heavy that the Riggs National bank told him the other day they were afraid to carry his account” (Sage of the Potomac, “Public Men And Things,” Washington Bee, April 1, 1916). Skinner also seemed surprised that some salesman was able to convince Chase to buy an automobile. See Charles Skinner, “Motoring News And Hints: To Washington’s Colored Motoring Public,” Washington Bee, March 18, 1916.
84 District would incur large amounts of debt to prove to themselves and whites that they were respectable looking citizens who deserved equal treatment under the law.56
Black Washingtonians, other than the Sage of the Potomac, cast aspersions on
African-American motorists, which helped to bolster the racially pejorative claim that
Negro drivers were suspicious and dangerous. There was a bevy of scandalous gossip from various elite black Washingtonians after Roscoe C. Bruce, Assistant Superintendent of the District’s Colored Schools, and four of his friends, were injured in an automobile accident near Relay, Maryland on April 21, 1915.57 To be exact, some black professionals within the nation’s capital publicly and privately accused Bruce of using his
Cadillac to facilitate and conceal a romantic affair.58 Much of the rumor-mongering surrounding Bruce’s auto “mishap” came from African-American parents, teachers and school board members who felt slighted by Bruce’s educational policies and hiring decisions. Because Bruce was closely aligned with the Tuskegee machine, some well-
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 As early as the 1880s, Chase used his paper to lambaste upper-class blacks for using “sham…money, color and good looks” to show status (Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, 57-63). For more on Chase’s views on conspicuous consumption see: “The 18th B.M.C.,” Washington Bee, September 23, 1916; “The Commercial Exchange No. 8: Waste of Time,” Washington Bee, June 16, 1917; “Automobiles,” Washington Bee, August 18. 1917; “How To Imitate The White Man,” Washington Bee, November 3, 1917; “Expensive Vanity,” Washington Bee, November 10, 1917; “Folly,” Washington Bee, January 19, 1918; “Baptist Extravagance,” Washington Bee, July 3, 1920; “Economic Interest,” Washington Bee, October 16, 1920; and “Luxuries And Extravagances,” Washington Bee, Oct 23, 1920.
57 See “The Bruce Automobile Accident,” Washington Sun, April 30, 1915; “The Fatal Auto Ride,” Washington Bee, May 1, 1915; May 8, 1915; “Will They Demand It,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915; Sage of the Potomac, “Public Men And Things,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915; “No Title,” Washington Sun, May 14, 1915; and “Resignation Pending,” Washington Sun, May 14, 1915.
58 In 1915, Roscoe Bruce owned a Cadillac Touring car, which he still had in 1921 when he served as principal of “colored schools” in Kimball, West Virginia. Copies of Roscoe Bruce’s Motor Vehicle Operator’s License and Registration Certificate are located in: Financial Papers-Printed Materials- Manuscripts-Clippings- Photographs, Folder 85, Box 10-4, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Sr. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Bruce mentioned his plans to sell the Cadillac in 1921 in a letter to his mother. See Roscoe C. Bruce Sr. to Mrs. Josephine Bruce, 24 September 1921, Family Correspondence, Folder 52, Box 10-3, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Sr. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
85 educated blacks thought he was committed to Booker T. Washington’s ideal of vocational education, not the classical liberal arts curriculum that they believed was most appropriate to prepare black youth to succeed in American society.59 From the beginning of his tenure as superintendent in 1907, Bruce faced criticism from black leaders who claimed that he catered too much to whites of the District while ignoring their concerns.
He was also regularly accused of favoring teachers who were light-skinned and from the wealthier black families while unlawfully firing others.60 The auto accident presented yet another opportunity for those who bitterly opposed Bruce to malign him with the hope of reappointing a superintendent of their choosing.
In the weeks following the incident, race journalists seemed to speak on behalf of parents, teachers and other African-American professionals when they questioned if the automobile accident was due to an act of negligence or impropriety. Reporters specifically alleged that there was more to the accident than what was being reported by
Bruce and his companions, namely that Bruce went “joy-riding” in Maryland to cover-up an affair that he was having with one of the women who motored with him. According to the Bee, the Sun and the Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, Bruce and his companions were traveling toward Washington, D.C. from “what was rumored to have been a dinner party” in Baltimore or Annapolis when the collision occurred. Bruce was reportedly driving a five-passenger Ford at a “high rate of speed” and with him “was his secretary,
Mr. Morton, Miss Jessie Wormley, a teacher with the Colored Normal School [of D.C.,]
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 Jacqueline M. Moore, Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital, 1880-1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 103-107.
60 Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 288-290.
86 and her two sisters, Mrs. Helen Wormley Anderson and Mrs. Miriam Wormley Lewis.”61
In his characteristically mocking tone, the Sage of the Potomac quipped: “It’s funny what little things will start people to talking in this berg. If a fellow that is single takes a married woman out for a joy ride…some people take the day off to talk about it. If a boss takes one or two of his subordinates out for a forty-mile spin….They wonder why he didn’t take his wife, and…they wonder why he took along a secretary when there wasn’t going to [be] no letter writing.”62 By this somewhat puzzling jab, the Sage intimated that
Roscoe Bruce, a married man, used his wealth and influence (or an expensive vehicle and members of his staff) to successfully pull off a romantic or sexual encounter he had with one of Washington, D.C.’s female teachers.
Some of Bruce’s critics implied that his reckless driving was a sign of poor leadership or his inability to properly manage a school system. Bruce’s car was also implicated as a site or container of immorality that had the potential to endanger one’s family or the Black Race. Sun editor Julia P. Coleman asked her readers to ponder whether the auto episode was another example of Bruce’s bad judgment or indicative of his propensity to make decisions that held dire consequences for the entire community when she posted the following query: “Does an automobile accident unfit a man for high official station, or is such an accident frequently caused by the unfitness of the man at the helm?”63
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 61 “The Bruce Automobile Accident,” Washington Sun, April 30, 1915; “The Fatal Auto Ride,” Washington Bee, May 1, 1915; May 8, 1915; and “Prof. Bruce Improving,” Afro-American Ledger, Baltimore, May 1, 1915.
62 Sage of the Potomac, “Public Men And Things,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915.
63 “No Title,” Washington Sun, May 14, 1915.
87 Journalists of the Bee and the Sun demanded an investigation from the Board of
Education, indicating that there were too many conflicting accounts regarding what actually caused the accident; how many people were in the car; and whether or not
Bruce’s party was “going or coming from Maryland” when the “mix-up” occurred.64 In
“Will They Demand It,” Bee owner and editor Calvin Chase asserted that it was not “for
[him] to try Bruce’s case through his columns” and that if Bruce had nothing to hide, he would request a public investigation or resign from his post as assistant superintendent.65
Chase did, however, use his paper to harass Bruce, while using words like “affair” and declaring that “everyone is innocent of an offense until he is found guilty” when referring to an unfortunate accident that could have happened to any one who motored. While
Roscoe Bruce and several of his friends were hospitalized for injuries they sustained from the collision, Chase characterized the crash as the “Fatal Auto Ride,” which made it appear more lethal and sinister, far beyond the run-of-the mill auto wreck that may have occurred because of faulty equipment or poorly maintained roads.66 Ultimately, Chase and other black elites in the nation’s capital linked an auto accident with Bruce’s inability
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 64 “Resignation Pending,” Washington Sun, May 14, 1915; “Will They Demand It,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915.
65 “Will They Demand It,” Washington Bee, May 8, 1915. Note that in 1919, D.C.’s Board of Education conducted an investigation to determine the “educational and administrative efficiency of Roscoe Conkling Bruce.” The officials associated with the study weighed in on the infamous car wreck and other charges levied against Bruce. They found “no sound reason” or evidence, “which would implicate the Assistant Superintendent as guilty of serious breach of morality.” Officials further stated that “the testimony concerning the so-called Relay [automobile] accident, which occurred on the night of April 21-22, 1915, is such that no careful scrutiny of the main facts of that unlucky ride need leave the circumstances any longer in the nature of suspicion” (Results of an Investigation, authorized by the Board of Education, into the Educational and Administrative Efficiency of Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Asst. Superintendent (1907-1919) of the Colored Schools of the District of Columbia, 22 October 1919, Financial Papers-Printed Materials- Manuscripts-Clippings-Photographs, Folder 90, Box 10-4, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Sr. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University).
66 “The Fatal Auto Ride,” Washington Bee, May 1, 1915; May 8, 1915. 88 to lead, adultery and secrecy. Some African-American professionals believed that Bruce used his car to initiate and contain activity not befitting school officials and other seemingly respectable black folk who held considerable influence over children.
Years after the Bruce automobile scandal, the District’s black upper class continued to defame and ostracize those within their social circles who supposedly purchased and drove cars to conduct questionable activities. Mrs. Josephine Bruce must have surely reflected on her son’s auto-related problems when she read a letter sent from one of her associates in 1922. Margaret Dumas, wife of prominent African-American physician Michel Dumas, expressed remorse to Mrs. Bruce over the “most unfortunate” situation of one of their married female acquaintances who lost the company of upstanding black Washingtonians because she possibly accepted an auto from a lover and motored with him to commit adultery. She wrote, “There’s a bit of gossip going the rounds that a certain friend of ours on ‘O’ street has been made the recipient of a car by another friend who lives in the block above us….I don’t know how much there is in the rumor, but the car is a fact – a red sports model – and she has been seen driving it.
Saturday [a] week ago they motored to [some unknown destination]. I have not yet heard whether [boy]friend [or] husband was along.”67
While Mrs. Dumas never explicitly stated that her neighbors used a swanky car to expedite an extramarital affair, she blithely accused them both of wrongdoing without providing hard evidence to substantiate the claim. Moreover, Mrs. Dumas did not consider or convey that her female “friend” might have purchased the car in question for
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 67 Margaret Dumas of 1817 13th street, N.W., to Josephine Bruce, 16 November 1922; Family Correspondence, Folder 59, Box 10-3, Roscoe Conklin Bruce, Sr. Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 89 her own pleasure or that said husband may have bought a big ticket item as a gift for his wife, the accused adulterer. For Mrs. Dumas and others in her social group, the mere sight of an African-American female and male in a flashy car was enough to start and feed a rumor, and more importantly, perpetuate the stereotype that Negroes used autos to conduct or cover up disreputable behavior. Like many white Americans, a number of prominent black Washingtonians also believed that an African-American driver of an expensive vehicle was suspect. In the case of the “red sports model,” some affiliated with black society thought that one of their very own had jeopardized her marriage and reputation to engage in a seedy liaison in a car or had merely exchanged propriety for the thrill and status associated with a luxury automobile.
At the height of the 1920s, black Washingtonians with summer homes on
Highland Beach in Maryland scrutinized African Americans who motored to their resort but did not hold property at the beach. Yet in their attempts to police those unaffiliated with the upper class, Highland Beachers represented black autoists as rowdy delinquents who used cars to change the neighborhood character of a well-ordered bay front community. The first reports of Highland Beach’s automobile conflicts appeared in
Washington’s black press in August 1927. In its usual sensationalist manner, the Tribune headlined stories of racial “exclusion” that was being practiced by “mulatto” and “high yaller” African Americans who employed “southern tactics” when they prevented cars driven by ordinary blacks from entering their summer colony.68 Editors did, however,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 68 See Louis R. Lautier, “Highland Beach Citizens Making Valiant Fight to Keep Sea Shore Exclusive For ‘Socially Prominent,’” Washington Tribune, August 12, 1927 and Louis R. Lautier, “Highland Beach Citizens Are Divided Over Exclusion: Colony Seethes Over Exposure By Newspapers,” Washington Tribune, August 19, 1927. Editors also posted several letters from indignant black Washingtonians who charged light-skinned Highland Beachers with displaying prejudice towards dark-skinned blacks, while asserting that much of Race’s progress had been hindered by the internalized race hatred held by most 90 post opinions from Highland Beach citizens, which gave the public some insight into their reasons for placing restrictions on who could vacation in their community.
Journalist Louis Lautier interviewed E. B. Henderson - Highland Beach mayor and the
Director of Health and Physical Education for the District’s Black Schools - to clear up rumors about property owners discriminating against dark-skinned African Americans.
Henderson was quoted as saying that: “Restrictions exist in all municipalities….The commissioners at Highland Beach at the request of citizens voted several years ago that there should be no bathing from automobiles and no picnicking” from those who did not own property on the beach or were not guests of property owners.69 Instead of practicing color prejudice, according to Henderson’s comments, Highland Beachers differentiated on the basis of ancestry and class. Their town was off limits not to those who were dark- skinned but to those who lacked ties to the area’s black aristocracy or could not afford to rent rooms at the beach’s hotels.
It also appears that Highland Beachers excluded working-class automobilists because they feared that they would bring their “trashy” cultural practices to a well-kept, reputable district. According to Lautier, Henderson disclosed that property owners barred auto bathers from the resort because they had become “public charges and…nuisances” that dumped “bottles and other debris” throughout the town’s streets
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! African Americans. See W.R. Tillman, “Let Him without Sin,” Washington Tribune, August 26, 1927; John E. Harris, “A Study in Black and White,” Washington Tribune, September 2, 1927; and Thomas C.R. Bragg, “More Discussions on Black and White,” Washington Tribune, September 9, 1927.
69 Louis R. Lautier, “Commissioners Responsible For Highland Beach Discrimination,” Washington Tribune, August 26, 1927. Note that E. B. Henderson was Director of Health, Physical Education and Safety for the District’s Black Schools from 1925 to 1954. See Finding Aid, Edwin Bancroft Henderson Papers, Collection 44-1 to 44-19, Prepared and Revised by Karen L. Jefferson, June 1980, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
91 and shoreline. Henderson continued by stating that he turned away “six cars of bathers, in bathing suits,” who were “guests of a hotel [not located on] Highland Beach,” apparently because he believed that choosing to drive while scantily clad or refusing to adhere to middle-class dress codes while motoring was an indicator of low-class status.70
While unseemly auto bathers were the major source of contention for property owners in 1927, a motley crew of working-class blacks who drove to the beach to spend time at the Ware Hotel became a new focus of anguish for Highland Beach citizens two years later. In July 1929, the Baltimore Afro-American announced that the Ware Hotel, owned by Richard F. Ware of the District, was raided because of neighbors’ complaints of illegal gambling.71 Some Highland Beachers, it seems, were concerned that large numbers of unfamiliar and “undesirable” African Americans regularly motored from
Washington, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia to engage in unlawful activity at the
Ware despite the many “restrictive ordinances” passed by property owners.72 During the weekend the hotel was searched by Annapolis police, there were over fifty
Washingtonians registered at the inn, several of whom were skilled and unskilled laborers. A few of the hotel’s guests included: Jessie Pringle, a janitor, and his wife,
Dorothy Pringle, who both lived in Northwest D.C.; Samuel Bruce, a chauffeur who
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 70 Louis R. Lautier, “Commissioners Responsible For Highland Beach Discrimination,” Washington Tribune, August 26, 1927.
71 “Highland Beach Hotel Ware Is Raided: Annapolis Officers Arrive in Autos to Take Out Slot Machines,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 27, 1929.
72 “Highland Beach Homes and Hotels Crowded With Week-end Guests,” Washington Tribune, August 2, 1929.
92 resided in Washington’s Southeast quadrant; and Joseph Sewall, an elevator operator who rented at one of the city’s boarding houses.73
Although many of Ware’s patrons were probably considerate neighbors when visiting Highland Beach, a number of the town’s residents believed that lodgers at the community’s hotels were thoughtless drivers who raucously traveled about the streets and parked their cars in front of homes and on vacant lots without permission. According to
Afro-American journalists, Highland Beach commissioners stated that they were opposed to the hotels in their community because they “attracted hundreds of visitors [who] crowd[ed] the streets with automobiles, …disturbing the quiet and privacy of the town residents.”74 On July 29, 1929, Haley Douglass - the new mayor elect of Highland
Beach, a Washington business owner, and grandson of Frederick Douglass - wrote
Nannie Burroughs, requesting that she send a letter from her lawyer forbidding Mr. Ware from using her property as parking for his guests. Burroughs, founder of the District’s
National Training School for Women and Girls, owned a vacant lot on the beach that was adjacent to the Ware inn. In the letter to Burroughs, Douglass wrote: “Just a line to let you know that Mr. Ware is still permitting his guests to churn up the surface of your lot with their autos….He is now under $300.00 bond for openly running his gambling machines….[H]is utter disregard for the property rights of Highland Beach citizens will !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Ibid. For a list of addresses and occupations for Jessie and Dorothy Pringle, Samuel Bruce, and Joseph Sewall, see Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1929), 320, 1271, 1397. Some of the other Washingtonians registered at the Ware on the weekend it was raided include: Mr. and Mrs. George Ransome; Ransome was listed in the 1929 edition of the Boyd’s Directory as a clerk who worked for the Capital Gas Station and lived at 228 ! C street, S.W.; Frank Sellers was listed as a waiter who lived in an apartment located at 2922 Sherman avenue, N.W.; William Tyree was listed as a messenger who lived at 1318 V street, N.W.; and Lemuel Butler was listed as a chauffeur who lived at 3003 Stanton road, S.E. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1929), 345, 1288, 1394, 1573.
74 “Highland Beach Hotel Ware is Raided: Annapolis Officers Arrive in Autos to Take Out Slot Machines,” Baltimore Afro-American, July 27, 1929.
93 soon cause us to take action against him for maintaining a public nuisance.”75 Douglass’s letter confirms that certain property owners were, indeed, dissatisfied with the conduct of
Ware’s clientele because they reputedly engaged in gambling and defaced private property while motoring. Douglass and like-minded Highland Beachers were ultimately concerned that cars driven by hordes of “disreputable” black folk would transform their bucolic summer hideaway into a chaotic, bustling city zone.
The increased presence of working-class drivers in urban areas was also a concern for elite black Washingtonians in the early twentieth century. The unregulated cabbie or jitney driver was especially onerous for professional African-American residents in the capital city because he ostensibly discriminated against black customers by making
“insulting remarks” and refusing to “stop and take on colored passengers.”76 The jitney car first appeared around 1914 in West Coast cities like Los Angeles and Seattle, but the jitney craze quickly spread throughout the South, Midwest and East Coast. Most jitneys were second-hand or unsightly cabs driven by white, immigrant and African-American men (and occasionally women) who charged customers five cents or a below market fee to take short trips throughout the city; the typical jitney driver was an out-of-work mechanic, locomotive engineer, printer or clerk who had been adversely affected by the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 75 Haley G. Douglass of Lantern Gift Shop, 1349 You Street, N.W. to Nannie Burroughs, 29 July 1929, General Correspondence, Folder DOB-DRM, Cont. 7, Papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. For more on Haley Douglass and his family’s relationship to Highland Beach, see Eula G. Brown, “Highland Beach: A Paradoxical Community,” Washington Tribune, August 23, 1929.
76 “The Jitney Bus Company,” Washington Bee, October 16, 1915. Also see “The Classification of the Jitneys,” Washington Bee, June 19, 1915; “Jitney Busses,” Washington Bee, June 19, 1915.
94 nation’s 1914 economic recession.77 Some chauffeurs used their employers’ luxury cars as jitneys in their “off” times to earn extra cash. According to historian Carlos
Schwantes, a number of professional drivers in Oakland, California “slipped around the corner” and “put a jitney sign” in their car windshields after “delivering their wealthy patrons to the theatre.”78 As well, blacks drove jitneys in Southern towns and cities across the U.S. to cater to other African Americans who wanted to escape Jim Crow streetcars.79 The street railway industry viewed jitneys as threats or viable competitors mainly because drivers offered cheaper rates and reduced travel time. In order to reign in jitney operators in Washington, D.C., a congressionally appointed Public Utilities
Commission “issued an order” in 1917 to establish a 5-cent fare for private cabs and ban them from running “in certain congested streets in the downtown section of the city.”80
By the 1920s, the jitney car was almost nonexistent because city governments strictly regulated all cab services.81
Before the official prohibition of the private taxi, streetcar workers or financiers may have tried to impair jitney operations by vandalizing their automobiles. In the spring of 1915, the Washington Post reported that an unknown person or group of people declared a “tack war on jitneys” by scattering nails “along the streets of Chester, PA” in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 77 Carlos A. Schwantes, “The West Adapts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914-1917,” The Western Historical Quarterly 16.3 (1985): 313-314.
78 Ibid., 309.
79 “Colored Men Run Jitney Automobiles,” Washington Sun, March 26, 1915; and Blaine A. Brownell, “A Symbol of Modernity: Attitudes Toward the Automobile in Southern Cities in the 1920s,” American Quarterly 24.1 (1972): 20-44. Also see “Negro Automobile Line,” Washington Post, October 19, 1905.
80 “Jitney Fare Fixed at Nickel A Ride,” Washington Post, September 8, 1917.
81 Schwantes, “The West Adapts the Automobile,” 322-323.
95 an attempt to disable and hopefully “drive…[unauthorized hacking] cars out of business.”82 Other Americans presented jitney drivers as threats to the general public to possibly encourage officials to police the private cab and those who used autos to earn a living illegitimately. For example, the white press regularly equated jitneys with sexual promiscuity and violence throughout the 1910s with titles such as, “Milwaukee Girls
Ogle Jitney Drivers for Free Rides on the Buses” and “Held As Slayer Of Girl In Jitney
Car.”83 Some whites boldly linked jitneys to Mexicans and African-American cultural practices; the jitney was also tied to lowbrow or questionable money making schemes.
About a month before the “tack war” story, the Post reprinted an article written by an unidentified Wall Street Journal reporter who aimed to unravel the mystery and origin of the word “jitney.” According to this writer, residents of Kansas described jitneys as con artists who relied on trickery or deception to “[separate] the public from its small change.” However, this unknown journalist added, many California professors agreed that jitney was a “Mexican [word] for a five-cent piece,” while citizens of Kentucky argued that jitney “belonged to the ‘nigger’ language, being used by the darkies in their game of craps, the phrase being ‘shoot a jit,’ meaning five cents.”84
Because unregulated hacks were frequently coupled with vice, associating with them could damage one’s reputation within Washington’s middle-class black community
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 82 “Tack War On Jitneys,” Washington Post, May 9, 1915.
83 “Says Milwaukee Girls Ogle Jitney Drivers for Free Rides on the Buses,” Washington Post, May 9, 1915; ”Jitney Blind Tiger Latest; Beer Is Part Of A 25-Cent Ride,” Washington Post, August 1, 1915; “Peach Buried Under Peaches: Jitney Upsets, Throwing Girl Under Huckster’s Fruit Cart,” Washington Post, September 6, 1915; and “Held As Slayer Of Girl In Jitney Car,” Washington Post, September 18, 1918.
84 “Jitney,” Washington Post, April 4, 1915.
96 and the city’s larger white society. If an upwardly mobile African American chose a jitney operation as a viable business, this action could also add currency or weight to the allegation that Negroes often used cars to carry out fraudulent transactions. Moreover, riding in a jitney could endanger one’s life and subject prominent black citizens to despicable behavior without recourse. Some leading blacks in the District critiqued and distanced themselves from jitneys to guard against racial discrimination and hostility.
Bee owner Calvin Chase was particularly annoyed that a number of D.C.’s black jitney drivers “refused to accommodate their own people.”85 Other African-American elites rejected the unauthorized taxi because they believed that this mode of transport was unreliable and dangerous. Annie L. Lucas, printer’s assistant for the Bureau of
Engraving and Printing, submitted a poem to the black-owned Washington Sun in 1915 to express her wariness and discontent with jitneys. She wrote, “The jitney starts out on a wild goose chase/Your nickel expires, you are far from base. It’s a swell idea, but not yet matured/ E’re you get in a jitney, get your life insured. The Capital Traction cars, will do for me/It at least transfers you, where you want to be.”86 For Lucas, the District’s electric cable cars were a better option than the jitneys because, as she believed, public transportation was a safer form of travel. Lucas also chose government-regulated streetcars over private cabs because she felt that with public transit, she could reach her desired destination in a timely manner.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 85 “Helping the Strike,” Washington Bee, March 31, 1917.
86 Annie Lawrence Lucas, “The Jitney Car,” Washington Sun, June 11, 1915; Mrs. Annie Laurence Lucas was listed in the 1916 edition of Boyd’s Directory as a Printer’s Asst. with the Bureau of Engraving and Printing; she lived in a rooming house at 1845 14th St., N.W. See Boyd’s Directory, District of Columbia (R.L. Polk & Company, 1916), 783.
97 To further distinguish themselves from working-class forms of auto-mobility, a few prominent African Americans affiliated with D.C. subtly chastised the underemployed autoist for his negligent behavior and shored-up the construct of the dangerous black bootlegger. Yet in doing so, they also presented a measure of sympathy for those who drove cars to carry out illegal transactions while simultaneously indicting the larger society for forcing or encouraging the poor to use automobiles to escape subjugation. In his poem, “Seventh Street,” Washington native Jean Toomer provided an understated critique of the consumption practices that he witnessed in a working-class section of the District’s black community when he pronounced: “Money burns the pocket, pocket hurts/Bootleggers in silken shirts/ballooned, zooming Cadillac/Whizzing,
Whizzing down the streetcar tracks.”87 But for Toomer, underprivileged blacks wildly motored throughout city streets because they were seduced by the promise of liberation associated with fashionable clothing and expensive cars advertised on the “legitimate”
U.S. market along with the easy money gained from an underground economy. Toomer’s contemporary, Rudolph Fischer, portrayed African-American drivers in the nation’s capital as transgressive and potentially menacing in the short story titled, “City of
Refuge.” Fischer particularly recalled a prevalent idea that blacks who lived in
Southwest Washington were commonly associated with bootlegging, violence and other lawless acts. However, Fischer complicated his image of African-American auto- mobility by presenting Southern blacks, who were able to escape white tyranny with a car, as heroic. Fischer equated the motorcar with freedom from repressive regimes and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 Jean Toomer, “Seventh Street,” in Cane ed. Darwin T. Turner (1923: reprinted by W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 1988), 41.
98 settings when he wrote, “Back in North Carolina Gillis had shot a white man and, with the aid of prayer and an automobile, probably escaped a lynching. Carefully avoiding the railroads, he had reached Washington in safety. For his car a Southwest bootlegger had given him a hundred dollars and directions to Harlem.”88
Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, a range of elite blacks, like numerous upper- class whites, produced the image of the suspicious Negro driver, which, in turn, helped to intensify the surveillance of all the District’s black automobilists. The policing of
African-American motorists did not, of course, prevent black Washingtonians from touring in cars. Professional African Americans took to the wheel to contest the view that they were unable to handle auto technology and to avoid ill treatment that many blacks faced on streetcars and trains.89 Alfred Edgar Smith, a District teacher, spoke of the lure and thrill of traveling by motorcar in 1933 even though he and his family often experienced discrimination from roadside business owners who refused to accommodate them. Motoring was well worth it for Smith because it was “good to be the skipper for a change” and “good for the spirit to just give the old railroad Jim Crow a laugh.”90
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 88 Rudolph Fisher, “City of Refuge,” in The New Negro ed. Alain Locke (New York: Albert & Charles Boni Inc., 1925), 58. Also note that sociologist William Jones suggested that black alley dwellers in Southwest Washington were bootleggers and prostitutes who maintained rowdy houses. See Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 51-52.
89 For accounts of blacks who purchased or leased cars to avoid discrimination on streetcars and trains, see Kathleen Franz, “Narrating Automobility,” 123-125.
90 Alfred Edgar Smith, “Through the Windshield,” Opportunity May 1933: 142-144. For more on Smith’s biography, see Finding Aid, Works Progress Administration, Collection 119-1 to 119-18, Prepared and Revised by Great S. Wilson, June 1980, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. For more references to Smith’s occupation, auto travels and conflicts, see Mark Foster, “In the Face of ‘Jim Crow’: Prosperous Blacks and Vacations, Travel and Outdoor Leisure, 1890-1945,” Journal of Negro History 48.2 (1999): 141-143 and Kathleen Franz, “Narrating Automobility,” 124-125.
99 Others drove as part of an uplift strategy or because they associated automobiles with status. Ida B. Wells Barnett, noted activist and anti-lynching crusader, was the esteemed guest in a “large automobile party” that was assembled by some of D.C.’s
African-American residents in 1917. The caravan was largely organized to escort Barnett to the District’s Asbury M. E. Church, where she delivered a speech that encouraged black Washingtonians to organize and “agitate” so that they could establish themselves
“as full-fledged citizens.”91 But the motorcade was also designed to show that Barnett was a valued race woman and celebrity who deserved the best that blacks could bestow.
Instead of being the featured attraction of an auto procession, Nannie H. Burroughs received a “brand new handsome touring car” in 1915 as a token of appreciation from male “friends [who lived] throughout the country.” The automobile was a “practical gift” to ensure that Miss Burroughs made it to speaking engagements without incident and compensation for Burroughs’s unflagging service to the community, especially the work she accomplished through Washington’s National Training School for Women and
Girls.92 However, the car also marked Burroughs's position as a respected member of the
Race.
Leaders like Nannie Burroughs were encouraged by peers to drive or admired for their ability to do so primarily because they used automobiles to serve the larger black public or to successfully fulfill community obligations. But African-American professionals who purchased autos to purely satisfy individual desires faced harsh
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 91 “Self-Help The Negro’s First Duty,” Washington Bee, October 13, 1917.
92 “Miss Burroughs: Presented a Handsome Touring Car at the Chicago Convention – Gift of Friends Throughout the Country,” Washington Bee, September 25, 1915.
100 judgment from those outside their social group. During the Depression, for instance, some believed that downwardly mobile African Americans engaged in disgraceful acts to ensure that they could motor and to maintain the appearance of success. An anonymous
Washingtonian interviewed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers conveyed contempt for the District’s black gentry when he stated that: “elite folks…[were] nothing but proper whores and whoremongers” who would “do all kinds of things to make a living.” This unknown critic further claimed there was a woman who hustled and sold herself to anybody “she could get something out of.” And though she had limited income, she owned an automobile and regularly offered sex or companionship to a gas station man in exchange for fuel for her car.93 Another resident interviewed by researchers expressed disgust with race merchants who owned autos and other luxuries. This unidentified person also echoed a sentiment that had long been articulated by a variety of black Washingtonians when he argued that professionals could not succeed in the commercial world because they squandered their earnings on nonessentials instead of using profits to build businesses.94 For this surly black enterprise supporter, the Race could not attain equality because “as soon as a colored man [got] a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 93 “Drug Store Talk,” interview by T.E. Davis, 12 April 1938; Field Reports, Folder 1, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
94 Anonymous interview, circa 1938; Notecards, Folder 5, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also see “Faults of Negro Business Men,” Washington Tribune, January 17, 1925; and Al Slaughter, “Race Pride Needed,” Washington Tribune, October 7, 1932. In addition, refer to Chapter 1 of this Dissertation.
101 little bit of money he [bought] a large car, fine clothes, [and] a big house,” or he essentially “live[d] above his means.”95
Even some prominent black Washingtonians, who likely drove vehicles or enjoyed the privilege of motoring with family and friends, deemed wholesale car ownership unconscionable during the Depression because African Americans were disproportionately affected by the crisis.96 To remedy the community’s economic woes, elites advised (as they had done previously) that blacks should not spend their dollars on expensive interior decorations, automobiles and other unnecessary consumable goods.97
Instead, according to leaders, they should develop and support small businesses as well as establish cultural institutions to become productive and responsible citizens. Cooperative economics and self-help were upheld as the only means by which blacks would survive and potentially prosper in the 1930s.98
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 95 Anonymous, interview by Anonymous, circa 1938; Notecards, Folder 5, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
96 In 1932, unemployment among African Americans ran between 40 and 55 percent in major U.S cities. See Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks – The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 37. According to William Sundstrom, in Northern cities unemployment rates were 80 percent higher for blacks than for whites during the 1930s. William A. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers during the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 52.2 (1992): 417. In the 1930s, blacks made up about 25 percent of Washington, D.C.’s population, but approximately 50 percent of the city’s unemployed populace. See Charles Gorman, “Findings of Conference on Juvenile Delinquency,” Report of Youth Assembly, Auspices Twelfth Street Branch, Y.M.C.A., D.C., Folder 18, Box 131-111, Institutions- Recreational, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
97 “Get Out Of Out Economic Plight,” Washington Tribune, January 22, 1932. Also see Chapter 1 of this Dissertation.
98 Carter G. Woodson, “Blessings of the Depression,” Washington Tribune, February 26, 1932; and Nannie H. Burroughs, “Nannie Burroughs Answers Critics On Depression,” Washington Tribune, March 4, 1932.
102 In the face of appeals to practice thrift, many black Washingtonians (like other
Americans of the era) continued to conspicuously consume. In fact, the well-dressed motorist was still a dominant way to exhibit respectability and success in the District’s
African-American community during the Great Depression. Newspapermen from the
Tribune and the Capital edition of the Afro-American were partly responsible for encouraging blacks to use commodities to display upward mobility. Journalists regularly promoted car ownership by equating automobiles with popularity, beauty, fame and wealth. In January 1932, Duke Ellington (dressed in suit, tie and long overcoat) was captured posing beside his Pierce-Arrow under a headline titled, “Class Versus Class.”
The pictorial proudly announced that Ellington and his luxury automobile were “in a class all their own.”99 In the same year, a “popular” Howard University student, Miss
Helen Eagles, was shown with a mink or sable fur standing in front of her 1932 Chevrolet
Special Sedan under the caption, “Charm Plus Charm.”100 To celebrate the refinement of
Black Washington, the Tribune dedicated two pages in May 1935 to showcase Dr. W.A.
Goodloe, his family and their luxurious lifestyle. Goodloe’s tastefully decorated home and Custom De-Luxe Limousine were photographed and described in detail. An impeccably dressed Dr. Goodloe was pictured standing regally alongside his car, which was “furnished in black and…upholstered in…[an exotic-type] broad cloth.”101 In the fall of 1935, the Afro-American boldly announced that Perry Howard of Washington, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 99 Display Ad: “Class Versus Class,” Washington Tribune, January 29, 1932. Also see Display Ad: “Duke Ellington and His New Pierce-Arrow!” Washington Tribune, January 29, 1932.
100 Display Ad: “Charm Plus Charm,” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932. Also see Display Ad: “Beauty Versus Beauty,” Washington Tribune, January 29, 1932; and Display Ad: “A Christmas Gift That’s Worth While,” Washington Tribune, January 5, 1930.
101 Display Ad or Photo, Washington Tribune, May 18, 1935.
103 D.C. had “purchased three new Fords in the past two years” and that George Clark, manager of the District’s Lincoln Theatre, had “bought three Chevrolets.”102
Because motorcars were so closely identified with social rank, a number of
African-American elites incurred sizeable debt and risked bankruptcy to own automobiles, which they often saw as sound investments that would eventually help them assuage their economic difficulties. Leading blacks within the District also purchased cars to disguise their tenuous middle-class status and to show that they were indeed upwardly mobile Americans. In 1934 Mary C. Terrell’s daughter, Mary T. Tancil, wrote that her husband, a financially strapped physician, bought a new Pontiac that could have cost between $500.00 and $600.00. “Here’s something that will surprise you,” Mary told her mother, “Leon got a new car the other day….It is quite nice and runs smoothly and
Leon is very well pleased with it.” Mary further communicated that she thought that the
Pontiac was an unnecessary expense for her family although it appeared that Leon acquired the car to maintain his medical practice by serving clients in their homes. “As poor as we are,” Mary wrote her mother, “and as little as [Leon] is able to make in collections I don’t see how he will keep his payments up but I suppose he’ll just do the best he can.”103 Nannie Burroughs owned at least two automobiles in the 1930s while the operating budget for the National Training School for Women and Girls ran a deficit year
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 102 “Watch the Fords Go By,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 2, 1935; and “Nothing But Chevrolets For Him,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 2, 1935.
103 Mary Terrell [Tancil] Beaudreau to Mary C. Terrell, 21 April 1934, Family Correspondence, 1890 – 1955 and undated, Conts. 3-4, Reel No. 3 of 34; Shelf No 16,976, Papers of Mary C. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. According to a LOC archivist’s notes, Leon C. Tancil was married to Mary C. Terrell’s daughter between 1923 and 1938.
104 after year during the Depression.104 Burroughs purchased the cars to preserve her elite status and to easily travel to speaking and fundraising engagements that were held across the U.S. In 1936 Janie Bradford, a Columbia University student and a District teacher, wrote Burroughs to let her know that she was “glad to hear” that she had finally gotten another automobile. Bradford also stated that Burroughs definitely “need[ed] a car and certainly deserv[ed] one” presumably so that she could represent herself and her people in a proper manner when touring the country to request donations for her social service activities.105 Three years later, Burroughs acquired a 1939 model Ford from the Steuart
Motor Company, located at 7th and I streets N.W.106 She was also willing to pay an exorbitant amount for a car to perhaps illustrate that she was an important race woman who had a right to motor. Burroughs purchased the Ford for $1,065.00, shelling out
$375.00 extra dollars in interest for a vehicle that was originally listed at $690.00.107
Celebrities and professionals were not the only members of the community who equated cars with upward or unrestricted mobility during the 1930s. Black “numbers men” donned stylish clothes and drove modestly priced or expensive automobiles to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 104 For info on the Burroughs school finances, see Finding Aid, Papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. Also see “Nannie Burroughs Answers Critics On Depression,” Washington Tribune, March 4, 1932.
105 Janie Bradford to Nannie, 26 July 1936, General Correspondence, Folder Bradford, Janie 1932-55, Cont 4, Papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress. Janie Bradford was a District teacher who traveled to New York to study at Columbia; she lived at 1203 Kenyon street, N.W., Washington, D.C.
106 Burrough’s Certificate of Title of a Motor Vehicle was issued from the Director of Vehicles and Traffic on September 11, 1941. Burroughs purchased a new Ford 91A 1939 DLX FDR from the Steuart Motor Company, Seventh Street Branch at 7th and Eye streets on June 10, 1939. See Miscellaneous Personal Expense, Administrative and Financial File, Cont. 48, Papers of Nannie Helen Burroughs, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress.
107 Ibid.
105 dissociate from visible signs of poverty that were linked to weakness. African-American racketeers who resided in the capital city also cruised while simultaneously appropriating, resisting and validating the representation of the criminal Negro driver. Black men in the numbers scene were elites who had fallen on hard times and working-class males who were underemployed or jobless and needed funds to make a living. Some
Washingtonians described racketeers as owners of “magnificent cars” who patrolled and parked along U street.108 Researcher T.E. Davis interviewed a “small numbers banker” who maintained that it was “easy to get started in the business” in the nation’s capital.
This illegitimate banker also implied that Washington’s gamblers held high regard for racketeers from large urban centers like New York City because they appeared or were known to be wealthier, and as a result, garnered more sway in the underground banking scene. Specifically, he told T.E. Davis the following: “if a strange man [came to
D.C.]…and flashe[d] some bills, and [let] it be known that…he want[ed] to bank the numbers, he [would] be accepted with open arms. [And] if he ha[d] a car with New York license plates, they [would] run over themselves to welcome him.”109
Numbers men could also be college graduates and less educated males who blended in with elites by living in a similar manner as professionals. Richard Green, a former Howard Law student, petitioned the House District Committee in 1934 to protest the passage of a bill designed to outlaw all forms of gambling in the capital city. In his plea, Green distinguished between honest backers like himself and “dishonest operators
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 108 “$25.00 A Week Top Salary For Rum-Runners,” Washington Tribune, October 14, 1932.
109 Small Numbers Banker, interview by T.E. Davis, 23 October 1938, Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
106 who ‘welch[ed]’ on…winnings.” Tribune writers comically portrayed Green as a
“fashionably dressed…numbers mogul” who “ooz[ed] confidence” because he
“voluntarily appeared before” the very entity that planned to incarcerate suspects like him.110 In interviews with Frazier researchers, several elite black youth attested that they went to school with a girl whose father was a “racketeer.” Said girl, according to the teens, did not seem to be adversely affected by the fact that her father was an underworld character. Furthermore, her dad drove a nice car and owned a fine home; she dressed well, got “along swell” with others, was a very good scholar or made good marks and had
“lots of friends.”111 Maribelle Just, an African-American teenager who lived at 421 T St.,
N.W., stated that she did not know that her girlfriend’s father, “Pinkney,” was an underground banker until she heard about his arrest in the papers.112 After all, numbers men fit so well into black society with their posh homes, cars and clothes that they went undetected by many until their illegal dealings were made public.
The numbers racket engulfed D.C. as it did other major U.S. cities during the
Depression because many Americans could not find jobs that paid living wages. Some blacks of the District believed that most Washingtonians were involved in the “racket,” no matter their education, age, class or religious affiliation. The Tribune regularly
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 110 “Numbers Mogul Asks New Deal,” Washington Tribune, May 17, 1934.
111 Anna Mae Miller, granddaughter of noted black writer and professor Kelly Miller, interview by Lauretta Wallace, 11 August 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center; Virgie Spottswood of 1324 Q street, N.W., interview by Lauretta Wallace, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 13, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
112 Maribelle Just of 421 T street, N.W., interview by Lauretta Wallace, 19 August 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
107 claimed that pharmacists, school children, teachers, and government workers played the numbers.113 There were writers and backers who ran the numbers game: backers would put up large sums of cash to ensure smooth operations and writers would aggressively hustle so that bets were made daily on horse races. Writers and backers could be dangerous men who killed and maimed when attempting to collect or distribute money.
As early as 1929, there were reports of stabbings and other violent clashes that resulted from disagreements over winnings and territorial battles amongst numbers barons.114
Police also regularly raided small businesses that served as covers for gambling. Many of the raids occurred in black-designated enclaves of the District. Barbershops, beauty salons, drug stores and other establishments located on U and Seventh streets were thought to be staging areas and pick-up stations for writers and runners.115 Reports of police breaking up alleged gambling rings in the Lewis Building, located at 11th and U streets, and a drug store, located at 12th and U, were reported in the Tribune during the height of the Depression. “Seventh Street,” according to journalists, was “known to be
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 113 “Hot Lottery ‘Tips’ Coining Money For Fake Experts,” Washington Tribune, February 28, 1930; “Extra: Gambling Raid By Police Nets 41 Men. 4 Women,” Washington Tribune, June 17, 1932; “Prominent Pharmacist Arrested in Numbers Raid on Drug Store,” Washington Tribune, January 13, 1933; “Investigates Students’ Gaming,” Washington Tribune, January 18, 1934; “New D.A. to Break Up Numbers,” Washington Tribune, February 1, 1934; and “Numbers in District Doomed,” Washington Tribune, March 22, 1934.
114 “Numbers War Breaks Out Anew in D.C.: Blame Numbers Feud for D.C. Stabbing.” The Afro- American, Baltimore, June 29, 1929.
115 Anonymous, interview by Anonymous, 6 May 1938, Interviews, Folder 7, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; and “New D.A. to Break Up Numbers,” Washington Tribune, February 1, 1934. Also see Local Newspaperman, interview by T.E. Davis, 19 October 1938, Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
108 honey-combed with numbers joints which use[d] women and children runners.”116
Washington resident Ralph McAllister desperately wanted to know where he could “find a barber shop without having every barber try to force him to play the numbers.” He was certain that most shops in the city were infested with “numbers or gambling of some form.”117
The capital edition of the Afro-American ran short stories, which described how white Americans controlled the numbers scene that thrived in U.S. cities and portrayed gaming as a dangerous lifestyle that ultimately disrupted African-American families and neighborhoods. In O. Anderson Stewart’s “Easy Money,” black detective Perry Morton and his white assistant, Sam Waters, plan to catch a notorious numbers broker called
“Compton” in order to “clean up the policy racket” in some unnamed African-American district.118 However, Morton and Waters have a difficult time accomplishing their goal because of the “graft and crooked politics” of the city’s mostly white police department.
Soon enough, Morton decides to play the numbers so that he and Waters can get close to one of the “big money boys behind the racket.” After the officers finally get a winning ticket, they attempt to collect but are told by one of Compton’s runners that he would not
“pay off [the] bet.” To discuss the matter further, the runner drives Morton to a blown- out factory district to see the boss but warns him to stay out of “white folks’ business.”
As they reach their destination, the runner parks his automobile “behind a line of cars” owned by other men affiliated with Compton’s notorious gambling ring to symbolize the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 “New D.A. to Break Up Numbers,” Washington Tribune, February 1, 1934.
117 Ralph McAllister, “Says Most Barber Shops Here Are ‘Blinds’ for Numbers Writers,” Washington Tribune, February 15, 1934.
118 O. Anderson Stewart, “Easy Money,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 25, 1936. 109 organization, wealth and excess of the nation’s illegal banking system. Shortly after
Morton visits Compton’s office, violence ensues and Morton emerges the victor, having shot one of Compton’s black henchmen, and with the aid of his assistant Waters, eventually captures the entire Compton gang. “Easy Money” highlighted the difficulties of earning a living from underground economies. The narrative also stressed that law- abiding blacks were often helpless in ridding their communities of criminality, particularly white exploitation of poor blacks who sacrificed their lives to make a dirty dollar so that they could purchase cars and other consumable goods equated with social and economic mobility.
Like “Easy Money,” William Max Johnson’s “Gambling Fever” depicted racketeering as a dishonorable profession that had the potential to negatively impact the
Race. But the story also seemed to concede that the illegitimate market provided some black men with enough income to purchase the luxuries they associated with success.
“Gambling Fever” discusses how “small time gambler” Pete Stansbury decides to leave his criminal pursuits so that he could spend an upright life with Ann Harris, the owner of a successful and reputable beauty parlor. Ann’s brother, Joe Harris, who is heavily steeped in the numbers game and drives a roadster to mark his position, tries to dissuade his sister from marrying because he thinks Pete will never accomplish anything of value.
But Ann refuses to listen to her brother’s advice and attempts to convince him that Pete will definitely “give up gambling altogether” and take a legitimate job with the Carolina
Insurance Company. In the end, Pete does choose romance over his passion for the game. Joe Harris, however, does not leave the underworld. Yet he is satisfied that Pete is a good man because he opts to cherish and love Ann instead of leading a life of
110 disgrace and shame. The theme of this tale was fairly obvious: gambling was not a respectable line of work or something to be admired, but it was a seductive alternative for some men because a broker, writer or player could own a luxury car and other status symbols if he stayed in the sport long enough.119
If many black Washingtonians did not approve of racketeering, some displayed a level of compassion for those who participated in underground economies because most
African Americans could not make a decent living during the Depression. In an interview with Frazier researchers, an anonymous District resident was outraged that blacks were being unduly arrested for gambling. According to this Washingtonian,
“Colored people just had to be first to get caught writing numbers. They are always first…They will have to build another jail to hold everybody they catch….All of these folks writing numbers are going to start stealing now to make a living. They wouldn’t write them if they could find a job.”120 Periodically, Tribune editors even went as far as sanctioning the racket because they believed that wealthy backers were not prosecuted at the same rate as writers who they insisted were the unfairly targeted poor (and presumably black Americans) at the bottom of the game.121 Newspapermen also posted the “numbers tips” and “numbers sures” in the Tribune’s weekly “Sport World” section,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 119 William Max Johnson, “Gambling Fever: A Gambler Bets Against Cupid,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 25, 1936.
120 “Drug Store Talk,” interview by T.E. Davis, 12 April 1938; Field Reports, Folder 1, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
121 “Police Diligence,” Washington Tribune, January 13, 1933; Editors also took issue with wealthy “stock gamblers” who were not prosecuted and policed by law officials (“Numbers Hysteria,” Washington Tribune, January 18, 1934).
111 which encouraged readers to gamble or acknowledged that they did so.122 Because some influential blacks viewed gambling as a viable way to earn a living, men who were backers, runners or writers were able to flaunt their activities. The illegitimate banker who wore fashionable clothing and drove a nice car also achieved status or a semblance of respectability although he skirted the law and sometimes engaged in violent activities.
Between the 1910s and the 1930s, the well-dressed motorist was a, if not the, preferred way to show respectability, economic mobility and manliness in Black
Washington. A variety of African-American professionals projected the image of the affluent automobilist as part of an uplift strategy or to mask their imposed subjugated class identity. Black women drove cars to emphasize that they were part of the city’s elite and to stress that they were reputable leaders who relied on consumable goods to fulfill their social service duties. Black men who participated in below board transactions used big or expensive cars and trendy attire to prove that they were prosperous, persuasive and confident. In the early twentieth century, many saw the motorcar as a vehicle that granted standing and autonomy. But black auto-mobility actually brought new restrictions to Washington’s African-American community because it produced the stereotype of the suspicious Negro driver who used the car to cover up low status and carry out questionable or criminal deeds. That said, there were black youth in the nation’s capital who spoke of owning automobiles and other comforts because they wanted to replicate the image of success perpetuated by their leaders and the larger society. St. Elmo Brady, a sixteen-year-old Dunbar High School student, stated that he thought of “being successful in [his] work and having enough money to do as [he]
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 122 For example, see “News of the Sport World,” Washington Tribune, December 2, 1932; April 7, 1933. 112 please[d]” when asked by Frazier researchers: “What do you think about when you imagine things for yourself?” and “What would you do if you had $100?” Brady also revealed that he dreamt about “traveling and having a car and lots of clothes” and that if he had $100 he would use it to “travel just as far as it would take [him].”123
Alice Williams, a working-class teen, told interviewer Laura Lee that there were four things that she had “always wanted to do: dress, to travel, to have a lovely home and a car.” Alice also unapologetically declared that she did not care much for black youth
“whose parents [were] teachers or lawyers or something [and those who] go to Dunbar.”
But Alice displayed envy for elites who were able to participate in the leisure activities and purchase the consumable goods that she equated with freedom and happiness.
According to Alice, Dunbar students were mostly from families of means. As a result, they had “lots of money to spend”; they could “jump in a car, ride to Baltimore anytime”; and they could “go to all the night clubs around Washington every evening if they want[ed] to.”124 In other words, upper-class blacks did all the things that Alice wanted to do, but was unable because she had no ties to society. Like professionals, Alice wanted to display status and escape impoverished settings. But since Alice did not have the resources to obtain luxuries, she turned to inexpensive or “cheap” recreational outlets, which allowed her to imagine that it was possible to transcend working-class identity and access the commodities or lifestyles associated with the middle and upper class. As
Chapter 3 demonstrates, Alice Williams (and other African-American girls like her) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 123 St. Elmo Brady of 2603 11th street, N.W., interviews by I.W.M, 27 July 1938, 4 August 1938, Interviews, Folder 4, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
124 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 113 consumed popular melodramas of the 1930s because these stories provided images and narratives that helped them shape identities that were in line with mainstream ideas of what it meant to be an upwardly mobile American woman.
114
Chapter Three
Consuming Melodrama in Black and White
This chapter looks at the role that melodramatic love stories, produced by the white-run publishing and movie industries, played in developing black female identity in
Washington, D.C. during the Great Depression. It argues that mainstream melodramas circulated in the 1930s forged a racialized or “marked” white female identity, which helped poor young African-American women to imagine selves that were different from the dutiful mother and housewife sanctioned by middle-class blacks and whites. By racialized or “marked” woman, I refer to the white female who exhibited traits that many considered inferior to the qualities of the construct of the genteel or proper white lady.
The marked white women featured in popular romances of the 1930s were racialized (or characterized as not quite white) because they abandoned homes and families to satisfy individual desires, refused to settle down and accept marriage proposals offered by upstanding men, were sometimes strident and used foul language, wore garish clothing, and/or participated in activities deemed inappropriate for respectable ladies of status.1 In other words, these female protagonists were declassed and “othered” as deviant because they stretched the limits of proper middle-class femininity. They were also represented as nonwhite workingwomen because race was inextricably linked to class in the early
1 For more on the construction of racialized or subjugated female identity, see Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 78-114; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 87-107.
115 twentieth century, and racialization (the way in which institutions and individuals rely on behavior to codify and naturalize racial categories) has historically defined the class structure in the United States.2
To uncover the ways that melodrama forged African-American female identity, I examine love stories published in two popular magazines of the early twentieth century:
True Story magazine and True Confessions; widely circulated films featuring Depression- era starlets; romantic shorts, movie advertisements and reviews printed in the Afro-
American, a black-owned weekly distributed in the District of Columbia; and interviews that African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers conducted with teenaged black girls in Washington, D.C. in the late 1930s.3 The narratives found in True Story magazine, True Confessions and the Afro-American are women’s melodramas because females are central characters, tamed by marriage and domesticity and marginalized by society or punished with social and economic decline for challenging the patriarchal notion that they should patently accept and fulfill their prescribed roles as responsible mothers, daughters and wives.4 Many of the popular
2 Theorist Steve Martinot defines racialization as the “way race is produced and bestowed on people by institutional social actions, and not simply as a condition found in their racial category.” Racialization, according to Martinot, means that race is “something people do, rather than what they are.” Martinot further asserts that “[American] colonial history reveals that racism is more than an ideological tactic in a class struggle; it is a fundamental cultural structure in the United States, to the extent that racialization grounds the construction of class relations” (Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003], 13, 77).
3 Note that the interviews with young black women document their family histories, social settings, reading and movie-going habits as well as their perspectives on work, love, sex and marriage. See Box 131-112 and Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
4 Film theorist and historian Pam Cook argues that the “heroine’s trangression [in women’s melodramas] resides in her desire to act against socially accepted definitions of femininity, bringing her face to face with society. Work or a career is set against maternity and the family, and the heroine often gives up both for the sake of love…The heroine suffers for her transgression, sometimes with death, but her humiliations are 116 women’s films or melodramatic love stories and “weepies” that emerged during the
Depression cast Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Kay Francis and Jean Harlow in leading roles. These actresses starred in crime, romantic and maternal melodramas produced before and after the Hayes Production Code, which went into full effect between 1933 and 1934 and prohibited explicit references to or detailed representations of sex, violence, miscegenation and homosexuality.5 Moreover, Crawford, Davis, Francis and Harlow arguably brought some of the most defiant and tragic female characters to the big screen during the Great Depression. They left memorable interpretations of working girls and harlots who used sex appeal to manipulate men and earn a living as well as mothers and wives who endured humiliation and misery yet gave selflessly to ensure the happiness and mobility of their loved ones.6
I explore melodrama’s part in shaping black female identity because writers and producers of sentimental novels, plays and movies have historically marketed sensationalist, romantic narrative as a specifically female-centered genre. According to scholars Ben Singer and Nan Enstad, melodrama has been promoted in the U.S. at least small-scale and domestic compared with the tragic hero’s epic downfall” (Pam Cook, “Melodrama and the Women’s Picture,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama ed. Marcia Landy [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991], 254, 248-262).
5 See Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), 90-188; Christian Viviani, “Who Is Without Sin: The Maternal Melodrama in American Film, 1930-1939,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 168-182; Charles Eckert, “The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warner’s Marked Woman,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 205-226; and Jean-Loup Bourget, “Faces of the American Melodrama: Joan Crawford,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 429-439.
6 See, for example, Bette Davis’s portrayal of the tawdry, gold-digging waitress in Of Human Bondage (1934), the gutsy prostitute in Marked Woman (1937) and the self-sacrificing, battered and unwed mother in Old Maid (1939); and Jean Harlow’s depiction of the adulterer and home wrecker in Red-Headed Woman (1932), the sexy vamp in Bombshell (1933) and the uncouth, brassy blonde showgirl in China Seas (1935).
117 since the nineteenth century as the preferred genre for girls and women and the prime venue for displaying female identity that is virtuous, heroic, overly sentimental and fashion-oriented.7 I also focus on melodrama because during the early twentieth century, black women (like other American women) watched melodramatic films starring white actresses even though they were not the courted audience for these products. An African-
American known as Dorothy enthusiastically told E. Franklin Frazier and his researchers that she went to the movies to see her favorite stars because they were talented and fine models of female form and beauty. As Dorothy stated:
“I like to go to the movies, that is when I have money. I like comedies very much. I like good pictures. I don’t go to the movies unless there is a good picture. My favorite stars are Kay Francis and Robert Taylor. I like Kay Francis because she is beautiful and plays well. I like Bette Davis, too. I used to like Jean Harlow before she died because she was beautiful and had a nice shape.”8
Young black women in the District also read love stories or “True Stories” from
Macfadden’s True Story magazine and Fawcett Publications’ True Confessions although some middle-class Americans believed that inexpensive romance magazines peddled vulgar content and images that had the potential to corrupt youth.9 A fourteen-year-old
7 Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 221-26; and Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Woman, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 31-83.
8 Dorothy ?, interview by Anonymous, 1 June 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 15, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
9 In 1938, Catholic University graduate student Leonise Ruth Aubry conducted a survey to determine if and how economic status, social setting and living conditions influenced the future ambitions of Washington, D.C.’s black children. While Aubry reminded her readers that poverty was “not the major cause of crime,” she exposed her biases around what she considered “good” and “bad” for healthy youth development. Specifically, Aubry linked unsupervised play and lowbrow forms of entertainment, such as reading “cheap” magazines like “True Confessions,” with unruly behavior and lack of mental acuity when assessing the 118 working-class girl named Esther Wright appeared rather indifferent and unashamed when she announced to researcher Laura Lee in 1938 that she read “screen magazines [and] true stories” as well as engaged in “sexual intercourses” with her boyfriend in her spare time.10 Esther’s reading choices were similar to those of other African-American females who resided in major cities throughout the economic downturn. Alva Hudson surveyed
116 of Chicago’s black women in the 1930s to provide recommendations to officials associated with the American Association of Adult Education on how to “improve the reading interests and tastes” of “Negro women [with] limited education.” She discovered that each of the three groups she studied – those of fair or poor, average and above average economic status - had a “decided preference for love stories [and]…True Story magazine was read rather extensively but mostly by the domestic service group.”11
During the Great Depression, reading and viewing melodramas that featured white females in leading roles was a favorite pastime for black women. But little has been written about African-American females who consumed romances that sometimes mirrored their own lives of conflict, suffering and scandal, yet provided narratives and images of upward mobility, luxury and emotional support for women of low status.
Moreover, the studies that examine African-American consumption in the early twentieth
leisure activities of “youth in poor economic status” (Leonise Ruth Aubry, “Ambitions of Youth in a Poor Economic Status,” [MA Thesis, Catholic University, 1938], 41-42).
10 Esther Wright, interview by Laura Lee, 3 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
11 Hudson also stated that “Love Stories and Negro literature constituted sixty-two percent of the total number of books read” by the 116 black women she surveyed (Alva Hudson, “Reading Achievements, Interests and Habits of Negro Women,” Journal of Negro Education 1.3/4 [October 1934]: 367-373).
119 century do not entertain the possibility that popular cultural products designed largely for white audiences helped black Americans create identities that were resistant to or different from the discourse of respectability and racial uplift. Histories such as Style and
Status, Chicago’s New Negroes, and A Consumers’ Republic do, however, overwhelmingly discuss how blacks have developed consumer identities by using their purchasing power to exhibit status, obtain jobs and protest racial inequality.12
One of the goals of this chapter is to recover forgotten histories of young African-
American women who read and screened mainstream melodramatic love stories to recreate selves that were in line with popular constructs of white femininity. It also discusses how mass-produced romances possibly encouraged teen girls to risk or accept penalty for challenging parental authority and group expectations in exchange for the off chance that they would be rewarded with autonomy and a life of ease. “Consuming
Melodrama in Black and White” builds upon Jacqueline Stewart’s Migrating to the
Movies, which explores the varied ways the Great Migration and the American film industry shaped each other, fashioned black identities, and widened racial cleavages in cities like Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s.13 Like Stewart, I demonstrate that American cinema heightened intra-racial conflicts in black communities in the early twentieth century. I pay particular attention to how mainline melodramatic films (and romance magazines) exacerbated gender and class divisions within Washington’s African-
12 Susannah Walker, Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007); Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, The Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
13 Jacqueline Najuma Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).
120 American population during the Depression, when a significant percentage of the country’s black populace was under- or unemployed and an increasing number of women became the prime or sole breadwinners for their families.14
However, this study diverges from Migrating to the Movies in its discussion of female spectatorship. Stewart suggests that poor black female moviegoers identified with white starlets in the 1910s and 1920s because the American movie industry portrayed the
Race in a derogatory light or simply did not cast African Americans in popular films of the era. This identification with the white Hollywood star system, according to Stewart, opened up possibilities for “problematizing and expanding” black female subjectivity while simultaneously restricting the ways that African-American women could represent themselves to the larger public.15 But Stewart does not adequately explain how a subjugated black woman was able to re-imagine identity when gazing at a white celebrity because she does not examine women’s films that circulated in the early twentieth century, which would have helped to convey why it was possible for a black female to see glimpses of herself in the gestures, speech and manners of white women projected on the big screen. She also assumes that disadvantaged African-American females preferred to mimic famous starlets instead of the marked or racialized white women they often
14 According to William Sundstrom, in Northern cities unemployment rates were 80 percent higher for blacks than for whites during the 1930s. William A Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired? Unemployment and Urban Black Workers during the Great Depression,” The Journal of Economic History 52.2 (1992): 417. Also note that Lois Rita Helmbold argues that the economic instability of the Depression facilitated tensions between working-class women and their families as well as disrupted familial ties and communal networks. See Lois Rita Helmbold, “Beyond the Family Economy: Black and White Working-Class Women during the Great Depression,” Feminist Studies 13.3 (1987): 629-655.
15 Stewart, Migrating to the Movies, 95-113.
121 portrayed in the dramas and comedies that were produced throughout the 1920s and
1930s.
As this chapter shows, underprivileged teenaged black girls consumed melodramatic films and romance magazines that circulated during the Great Depression because these cultural products provided narratives and images that reassured them that it was tenable for females of low status to access the freedoms and luxuries associated with the upwardly mobile. It further maintains that it was because the white-run movie and publishing industries often depicted racialized nonwhite female protagonists during the
1930s, rather than unequivocally privileged white leading ladies, that poor African-
American women were able to fashion selves that challenged middle-class notions of proper femininity. This work is similar to Linda Williams’s “‘Something Else Besides a
Mother,’” which argues that melodramatic films portray multiple and conflicting representations of womanhood that allow female spectators to question patriarchy and imagine selves outside the confines of marriage and domesticity.16 It is also comparable to Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance because it maintains that formulaic love stories concurrently provide women readers temporary escape from their household duties and shore-up the idea that heterosexual unions are the most desirable and natural vehicles for constructing and maintaining “a fully coherent, fully satisfied, female subjectivity.”17
Yet this chapter illustrates, unlike Williams’s and Radway’s projects, how melodramas offer the possibility of citizenship to racialized and transgressive women while
16 See Linda Williams, “‘Something Else Besides a Mother’: Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama,” in Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film & Television Melodrama, ed. Marcia Landy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 307-330.
17 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 10-18. 122 simultaneously stigmatizing and subjugating them. More pointedly, it contends that romance stories and melodramatic films produced during the 1930s encouraged rebellious women and females of low status to believe that it was possible for them to obtain self-sufficiency and access to commodities if they were also willing to accept the likelihood that they would experience great suffering and restricted mobility because they contested bourgeois ideas of what it meant to be a respectable lady.
The Great Depression had a devastating impact on the lives of Americans of varied ethnic, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. Workers lost their jobs, insurance policies and homes, and as male heads of households were laid off, women and children increasingly sought employment to assuage the debilitating effects of economic hardship.
Moreover, many families could no longer count on neighborhood charities and community networks that had historically provided needed social, economic and emotional support.18 While most working-class Americans struggled, black families and communities were disproportionately disrupted during the Depression. In 1932, unemployment among African Americans ran between 40 and 55 percent in New York
City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit.19 In Washington, D.C., the employment rate for
African Americans was considerably higher than they were in northern urban centers, but blacks continued to swell the capital city’s relief roles during the economic downturn.
From 1930 to 1940, 65 percent of Washington’s black labor force was employed in some
18 For more on the effects of the Depression on neighborhood networks, see Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 213-249.
19 Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks - The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue: The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 37. According to William Sundstrom, in Northern cities unemployment rates were 80 percent higher for blacks than for whites during the 1930s. Sundstrom, “Last Hired, First Fired?,” The Journal of Economic History 52:2 (1992): 417.
123 capacity; by 1940, African Americans made up 28 percent of D.C.’s total populace, but
59 percent of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) recipients.20 Also, a significant number of black Washingtonians toiled for low wages, which made it difficult to meet basic needs.21 Although the District experienced an economic boom due to the expansion of New Deal programs and a government subsidized real estate market, many of the newly created jobs went to whites who flocked to the city. Blacks were increasingly fired from government posts and other trades that had been traditionally set aside for
“Negroes.” Exacerbating problems within Black Washington, African Americans from the South migrated to the nation’s capital year after year looking for work, housing and relief from the federal government.22
The onset of the Depression especially curbed the social and economic mobility of black women, many of whom had already been relegated to the worst jobs in the domestic and service sphere. By the late 1930s, black women’s unemployment rates were higher than those for white men and women, and in a few industrial centers, greater
20 See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 388, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm (accessed 12/18/2008); Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 965, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
21 According to the Census, about 48 percent of the District’s black labor force held jobs in domestic and personal service in 1930. See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 388 (accessed 12/18/2008), http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm.
22 Constance McLaughlin Green, The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 228. Also note that from 1930 to 1940, D.C.’s black populace went from 132,068 to 187,266. See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 385 (accessed 12/18/2008), http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm; Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 956, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
124 than the unemployment rates for black men.23 The shortage of work outside the domestic sphere led some black women to devise creative ways to earn a living. To avoid serving as domestics for white elites, African-American women turned their dwellings into boarding houses or became self-employed hair stylists, dressmakers, seamstresses and laundresses. Others preferred or were forced into prostitution to stave off the impact of the economic crisis. In Washington, D.C., African-American prostitutes could be found boldly soliciting customers on Fourteenth street, between R and S streets and south of
Pennsylvania near the Capitol.24
Working-class black youth, like their poor white counterparts, also faced joblessness and grim prospects for higher education during the 1930s. As a response to the “youth problem,” government officials, educators, ministers and social workers organized vocational programs and recreational activities in girls and boys clubs, summer camps, churches, community centers, schools, and settlement houses with the goal of deterring juvenile delinquency and preparing youth to become responsible adults. The
New Deal’s National Youth Administration was expressly created in 1935 to provide work, education as well as organized sports, arts and crafts for unemployed American youth to help them develop and preserve mind, body, spirit and character.25 Some black teens found domestic service jobs in the homes of wealthy whites to assist their underemployed or out-of-work single mothers or to help their families replace income
23 Robert L. Boyd, “Race, Labor Market Disadvantage, and Survivalist Entrepreneurship: Black Women in the Urban North during the Great Depression,” Sociological Forum 15.4 (2000): 647-670.
24 Marya McQuirter, “Claiming the City: African Americans, Urbanization, and Leisure in Washington, D.C., 1902-1957” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2000), 186-187.
25 Richard A. Reiman, The New Deal and American Youth: Ideas and Ideals in a Depression Decade (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 97-122.
125 lost by fathers who were jobless because of lay-offs, serious illnesses or injuries. Martha
Harris, a fourteen-year-old girl who sometimes frequented her neighborhood’s settlement house and worked part-time as a maid in Washington, D.C., reported that she and her sibling gave their mother part of their earnings to pay rent, care for their invalid father and purchase much needed household essentials. As Martha told it:
I make $5 a week at my job. I only work half a day….It isn’t hard work, I don’t do no scrubbing, no washing, nothing like that to do. All I do is to dust, make the bed, I do wipe up the kitchen floor and I get my lunch and breakfast there….I give Mamma $3 a week and keep $2 for myself…[and my brother Tiny] makes $9 a week on the Star Wagon. He pays rent and gives Mama five dollars besides. We pay $3.50 a week for [our] two rooms.26
From Martha’s account, it is clear that some working-class parents in D.C. expected their children to secure jobs that would help their families brave the challenges of the
Depression. But it also appears that Mrs. Harris may have taken advantage of Martha and her brother Tiny by treating them like adult boarders who were disproportionately responsible for rent and other costs associated with tenancy.
The situation for elite African-American youth was starkly different in the 1930s.
Unlike Martha, middle-class black female teens were less concerned with finding employment because their parents, and the other adult kin who sometimes lived with them, were gainfully employed professionals who provided comfortable living quarters, stylish clothes, summer vacations and access to automobiles and other consumable goods. Upwardly mobile black girls could also take advantage of recreational activities organized in their homes and those offered at black-owned camps and beaches. Further,
26 Martha Harris, interview by Laura Lee, 18 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 11, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 126 these young women understood that their parents and peers expected them to seek higher education and to conduct themselves in other ways suitable to their status. In 1938, high schooler Barbara Scott talked with researcher Lauretta Wallace about her summer activities and future educational plans. Barbara revealed that much of her free time was spent vacationing at “Camp Atwater” and organizing parties with members of her social club called the “Et Ceteras.” Barbara also reported that she and her girlfriends would
“black ball,” not associate with or “think much of” girls who engaged in disreputable activities like premarital sex. She added that she planned “to go to a northern college and then do graduate work at Northwestern” primarily because of its “very fine Dramatic
Department.”27
Lauretta Wallace interviewed another elite teen named Anna Mae who spoke briefly about what she did for fun, her educational goals and her views on dating, sex and marriage while being mindful to conduct and represent herself in a manner acceptable for someone associated with the District’s black upper class. Sixteen-year-old Anne Mae
Miller was the granddaughter of Kelly Miller, noted African-American writer and
Howard University professor. According to Wallace, the Miller household consisted of
Kelly Miller and his wife, Anna Mae’s mother (Miller’s daughter-in-law), sister and two aunts. Wallace also recorded that the Miller home was beautifully decorated, “modern with spacious rooms” and lush front, back and side yards that formed “a picturesque view” to show that the Millers were indeed a part of the city’s black establishment. In the
27 Barbara Scott, interview by Lauretta Wallace, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131- 113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 127 session with Wallace, Anna Mae stated that her mother allowed her boyfriend Thomas to visit her twice a week during summer vacation so that “she wouldn’t have to meet boys on the corner” and presumably be enticed to engage in activities deemed inappropriate for youth. Anna Mae continued by revealing that she, Thomas and family members went to the “show” every Saturday, implying that it was proper or standard for adults in her social group to escort teenagers to public events. She also shared that she “hoped to be a librarian, perhaps at Howard” and that she “would like to be married, [and] later on,
[have] two girls.” When Wallace asked if Thomas had ever kissed her, Anna Mae gladly admitted that he had, but she was sure to convey that she and Thomas had not “discussed sex or the like,” and that she would wait to deal with the subject after marriage.28
Contrary to Barbara and Anna Mae, the working-class black youth interviewed by
E. Franklin Frazier and his researchers rarely spoke of organizing recreation in their homes, receiving strict supervision and substantial financial support from parents, or going to prestigious universities. Many were also unable to secure jobs offered by the private sector and New Deal programs. Poor African-American teens sometimes selected not to or did not have the opportunity to engage in sports, art classes and other types of leisure provided by social, religious and government institutions. To entertain themselves, they participated in unsupervised forms of play that were inexpensive or cost nothing but were easily accessible from their immediate social settings. Moralistic black leaders considered these pursuits and pleasures, such as watching “cheap” movies, drinking alcohol, having sex, and frequenting dance halls and poolrooms, inappropriate
28 Anna Mae Miller, interview by Lauretta Wallace, 11 August 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 128 for children and potentially damaging to “normal” mental development. According to
E.B. Henderson - Director of the Department of Health, Physical Education and Safety for the District’s Black Schools from 1925 to 1954 - “undirected” leisure “result[ed] in increased instability, lowered morale, and… tend[ed] to destroy personality and responsibility.”29
Disadvantaged black youth also turned to lowbrow forms of entertainment that helped them imagine better futures for themselves despite disapproval from some adults.
Particularly, young working-class black women who resided in Washington, D.C. in the
1930s consumed popular melodramas because they offered the possibility of adventure, independence, luxury and emotional comfort. While the District’s edition of the Afro-
American and other black-owned newspapers featured romantic shorts in the 1930s, black girls who were interviewed by E. Franklin Frazier’s researchers did not mention that they read love stories produced by the black press. It is likely that female romance readers selected not to view the Afro-American’s love tales or did not communicate that these melodramas were relevant to their lives because they did not identify with narratives of loyal daughters, mothers and housewives who worked tirelessly to maintain homes, families, communities or relations with the men they loved.
The black women featured in the Afro-American’s romances were attractive, well- dressed and gainfully employed waitresses, seamstresses, secretaries and salesclerks who sometimes rescued black men from self-imposed ruin or taught them to become better
29 E. B. Henderson, “The Participation of Negro Youth in Community and Educational Programs,” Journal of Negro Education, 1940, Writings by E.B. Henderson, Folder 25, Box 44-1, Family Papers- Correspondence, E.B. Henderson Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 129 men so that they could provide for themselves and their families.30 In Edward Worthy’s
“Something Deeper,” small town girl Jane Wesley travels to the “big city” to find her childhood sweetheart, George Ward, to convince him to return to their hometown to care for his aging mother who has difficulty supporting herself after the passing of her husband. One day, Jane (sporting a fitted dress, hills, fur smock and smart hat) finally runs into George after she realizes that he has been trailing her, and when she confronts him, he readily confesses his plan to rob her because he is unemployed and desperately in need of cash so that he can remain an urban dweller. Jane, who is unnerved and undeterred, manages to convince George that he should join her in the sales business so that he could boost his confidence and earn a decent living; since George does not recognize Jane, she also decides to assume the name “Dorothy” so as to spare her former boyfriend further embarrassment and help him find his way. After days of failing to secure contracts, George decides to quit and tells Jane that he thinks that he does not have what it takes to make a successful businessman. But the gutsy and determined heroine does not relent; Jane reveals her true identity and informs George that his near destitute mother sent her to the city to find him so that he would understand the import of displaying perseverance and proving to himself and his loved ones that he is an admirable, hardworking man. In the end, Jane and George resolve to marry and return to
30 Harry Winston, “Masquerade,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 5, 1935; Harry Winston, “Masquerade: Alice Madison Saves a ‘Drunk’ and Finds the Father of Her Child,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 12, 1935; Joseph Stafford, “The Man She Made: A Story of a Modern Girl Who Made the Type of Man She Wanted for Her Mate,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 2, 1935; Edward Worthy, “Something Deeper,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 13, 1937. 130 their rural community, which helps George take on his rightful place as faithful husband and reliable son.31
The Afro-American’s love stories also regularly presented glamorous Howard
University students, teachers and housewives who were pillars of responsibility and respectability. Middle-class and elite female protagonists could also rescue black men and children from destruction, but they were mostly depicted as beautiful women who used fashion, poise and sex-appeal to attract dashing and financially-secure single black men or philandering husbands.32 Bettye Elliott’s short story entitled, “Ann’s Husband,” illustrates this theme quite well with the narrative of a “tall and willowy” society women named Ann Baling who hatches a scheme to win affection from her cheating spouse Jerry
Baling. In order to compete with her husband’s mistress, Ann abandons her role as the doting wife, purchases an assortment of “lovely gowns,” and spends her evenings riding in an expensive car and attending social events with a handsome man. Sure enough,
Jerry realizes how much he loves his wife after he becomes suspicious that she is having an affair. Jerry eventually questions Ann about her nightly exploits, and she gently tells him that she bought new clothes and convinced her cousin Ben to escort her around town so that she could save her marriage.33
31 Edward Worthy, “Something Deeper,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 13, 1937.
32 Bertye Helm, “Lonesome Elva: The True Story of How the Afro Helped a Lonely School Teacher to Find Her Soul’s Mate,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 19, 1935; Harry Winston, “Engaged Girl: Just How Long Should an Engagement Ring Tie a Girl Down?” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 16, 1935; Bettye Elliott, “Ann’s Husband: A Young Wife Regains Her Husband’s Love by Stepping Out Discreetly,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 23, 1935; Harry Winston, “Old Maid’s Romance: She Was a Contented Schoolmarm Until Love Swooped Down on Her,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 16, 1935, March 23, 1935; and Harry Winston, “A G-Man Meets Love Down a Maryland Road,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 10, 1935.
33 Bettye Elliott, “Ann’s Husband: A Young Wife Regains Her Husband’s Love by Stepping Out Discreetly,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 23, 1935. 131 The leading ladies of the Afro-American’s melodramas did not abandon their obligations nor did they express the desire to escape tradition, limited mobility or poverty in search of independence, adventure, fame or wealth. If black female characters left families or hometowns, they did so temporarily for work and leisure or to “save” black men who had lost confidence in their ability to earn a living, and while traveling, they encountered unexpected adventure, danger or romance.34 African-American female characters that challenged parental authority or engaged in illicit activities did so to primarily attract or marry men they loved.35 When a black protagonist did abandon her family to find stardom or fortune, like the leading character in Harry Winston’s 1935 short titled, “Gold Digger,” she was depicted as an unhappy, unscrupulous girl who is eventually redeemed by giving up her selfish pursuits and embracing a life of struggle and “real” love with the “right” black man. Winston introduces the protagonist of “Gold
Digger,” Frances Adair, as an actress who begrudgingly dates wealthy nightclub owner and underground character Baron Knight. He also refers to Frances as a one of the many
“parasitic and lovely orchids” that uses beauty and charm to swindle money and other luxuries from powerful men in Chicago’s Black Belt during the Depression. But we soon discover that Frances has fallen hard for a young handsome bank cashier named Hal
Grayson, who is eventually jailed for embezzling money from his employer so that he can impress Frances and win her heart. When Francis hears about Hal’s arrest, she
34 Harry Winston, “Masquerade,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 5, 1935; Harry Winston, “Masquerade: Alice Madison Saves a ‘Drunk’ and Finds the Father of Her Child,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 12, 1935; Harry Winston, “A G-Man Meets Love Down a Maryland Road,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, August 10, 1935; and Edward Worthy, “Something Deeper,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 13, 1937.
35 Harry Winston, “Cora Charity’s ‘Dream Man’: Another of Harry Winston’s Gripping Stories about a Girl Who Wanted to be a Live One,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 18, 1936, January 25, 1936; and Edward Worthy, “One Girl’s Story,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 30, 1937. 132 rushes to his side and gives up everything – her luxurious yet unfulfilled life with Baron
Knight, her career, jewels and other valuable property – so that she can have the one thing she had never been able to possess: genuine love.36
Black leading ladies who frequented disreputable places were able to maintain or regain virtue through marriage or by being represented as hard-working women who gave selflessly to others. In the feature titled, “Masquerade,” for example, a nice, decent girl named Alice Madison decides to work in a roadhouse (speakeasy) instead of taking a job as a domestic so that she could adequately provide for herself and her seven-year-old son.
One night she encounters an unconscious, “drunk” black man at the roadhouse and decides to help him to safety because she notices that thugs have planned to rob and kill him. After a high-speed automobile chase and finding shelter in an abandoned house,
Alice rescues the man from the clutches of the gang of criminals. When the man finally awakens, Alice also discovers that she has been reunited with her former lover Ducky, who she met at a masquerade ball seven years earlier. Ducky eventually realizes that he is the father of Alice’s child; and as a result, he proposes marriage as a reward or form of gratitude for the fortitude displayed by Alice, who has single-handedly raised their son, saved his life, and shown him how to be a responsible, caring adult.37
Young poor black women surveyed by Frazier’s researchers did, however, read
True Story magazine and True Confessions even though African Americans were not featured or directly targeted by the producers and marketers of mass-produced romance
36 Harry Winston, “Gold Digger: Her Pulse Quickened to Gold and Jewels ‘till the Right Man Came Along,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 27, 1935, May 4, 1935.
37 Harry Winston, “Masquerade,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 5, 1935; and Harry Winston, “Masquerade: Alice Madison Saves a ‘Drunk’ and Finds the Father of Her Child,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 12, 1935. 133 magazines. They did so because they identified with stories of the working-class, small town or lowly woman’s quest to be free from restraint, tradition and limited socioeconomic mobility. The leading character of True Story magazine’s melodramas was usually depicted as an unusually pretty and charming white girl who desperately wanted to leave her family or community to find adventure, luxury, romance and wealth.
In the 1930s, True Story headlined the following titles which illustrate the magazine’s oft-repeated theme of the unhappy white woman’s relentless desire to escape boredom, poverty and convention: “Her Road to Happiness: She Wanted to be Free”; “I Wanted to be a Somebody: She Refused to be a Small Town Wife”; “Restless Blood: The Girl
Who Craved Adventure”; and “Heartless and Shameless: I Was the Slave of My
Desires.”38 Teenaged black girls who read popular romances stated that they fantasized about being like the white women in the stories. When asked by researcher Jean
Westmoreland what kind of books she read, sixteen-year-old Eloise West confirmed that she read “mostly romantic stories…adventurous or love stories.” Eloise further admitted rather coyly (while supposedly smiling) that she sometimes saw herself in the stories with
“lots of money, and…a big pretty house.”39 Another teen repeated the sentiment expressed in many of True Story’s headlines when she was asked if she ever likened
38 “Her Road to Happiness: She Wanted to be Free,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 22.5 (June 1930); “I Wanted to be a Somebody: She Refused to be a Small Town Wife,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 27.1 (August 1932); “Restless Blood: The Girl Who Craved Adventure,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 28.6 (July 1933); and “Heartless and Shameless: I Was the Slave of My Desires,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 29.5 (December 1933).
39 Eloise West, interview by Jean. P Westmoreland, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131- 113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 134 herself as the girl in one of the “true stories” or fairy tales she read. Similar to Eloise and the many white female characters portrayed in romances, this unnamed young black woman revealed that she fantasized about leaving (perhaps temporarily) her home and community in search of travel, wealth and possibly love. Specifically, she imagined being like “the girl in the story…with money and things who went a lot of places.”40
True Story magazine began publication in 1919 and was originally billed by its publisher Bernarr MacFadden as a forum for ordinary and mostly working-class women to confess their misdeeds and hardships while providing advice and comfort to other female readers like themselves.41 But many of the magazine’s features appear to be fictional accounts and morality tales written by elites who wanted to impress upon their audience that unrepentant desire, laziness and impudence were sinful and deserving of possible incarceration, death or a life of poverty and marginalization.42 In “Heartless and
Shameless,” a young white girl named Olive refuses to cook, clean and care for others, yet she desires adventure, luxury, and freedom from her family who expect that she will one day become the dutiful woman that she and all women were meant to be. At nineteen, Olive seduces thirty-year-old Bruce Elmore, a successful civil engineer who visits her village to survey a railroad line that has been planned for her community. Olive
40 Anonymous, interview by Anonymous, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 15, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
41 Wendy Simonds, “Confessions of Loss: Maternal Grief in True Story, 1920-1985,” Gender and Society 2.2 (1988): 149-171.
42 Wendy Simonds asserts that during the early days of True Story’s circulation, Macfadden “hired a board of clergymen to serve as ‘moral sensors’ of the magazine” (Simonds, “Confessions of Loss,” 151). Also note that Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III state that Harlem Renaissance writer Wallace Thurman held an editorial post at MacFadden in 1928 and may have edited some of True Story’s articles. See Amritjit Singh and Daniel M. Scott III, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: Harlem Renaissance Reader (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 4.
135 also convinces Bruce to marry and take her away from her uneventful small town. Olive and Bruce produce three children in the first three years of their marriage, but Bruce eventually tires of Olive because she has not been sufficiently prepared for motherhood.
Olive also commits the ultimate act of betrayal against her upstanding white husband by engaging in a love affair with a sweet-talking gigolo of Turkish or Austrian descent named Franz Ottoman. Olive is further cast as a wanton, marked woman when her oldest son reveals to his father that he witnessed his mother kissing and hugging a “black man” named Franz. Franz Ottoman marries Olive after Bruce divorces her and gains custody of their children. However, Franz regularly cheats with other women and neglects his fatherly duties by not providing sufficient income to care for Olive and their son Oliver.
At the close of this seemingly tragic tale, the leading female character learns a great lesson from her mistakes and flawed personality. She eventually repents for her wrongdoing, builds a moderately successful laundry business, leaves her “irresponsible” husband, and teaches her son Oliver that the only way for him to become an honorable and successful adult is through hard work, thrift and saving. More importantly perhaps, romance readers discover that a disorderly woman could gain a level of self-sufficiency
(albeit in the domestic sphere) if she were also willing to endure temporary strife and dishonor for using sex appeal, wit and charm to manipulate others into fulfilling her whims and desires.43
True Story magazine did not always punish white females who transgressed the bounds of proper femininity. Instead, these supposedly self-serving women were
43 “Heartless and Shameless: I Was the Slave of My Desires,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 29.5 (December 1933): 28-30; 122-127.
136 contained or restrained by marriage with powerful men who helped them realize dreams of attaining “real” love, happiness, financial security or wealth. “Restless Blood” features Su Joe who is raised by her strict spinster Aunt after her parents die when she is a young girl. Early in the story, the woman narrator informs the audience that she had always been the rebellious type who hated the “rules and regulations” set down by her uninspiring female authority figure, and that she always felt that she “should have been a boy.” The protagonist finally saves her money from her job as a teacher in a Texas school so that she could leave her “humdrum life” and travel throughout the U.S. During this time, she also meets an upright young man named Don who falls desperately in love with her and proposes marriage. Su Joe rejects Don’s offer because, according to her, she knew she “couldn’t be contented.” Instead, she takes the train to Los Angeles to enjoy its lovely beaches and experience other wondrous sights on the West Coast. While in
California, she meets Ross Daley, a mysterious and strikingly handsome reporter from
San Francisco who happens to be on a two week vacation, which he has mostly spent visiting various beaches, auto camps and other “must-see” leisure spots. Su Joe agrees to join Ross after he convinces her that it would be more adventurous yet safer for her to travel as his companion. After a while, Su Joe and Ross fall in love as they journey together and meet people of varied backgrounds. They also witness a robbery at one of the auto camps and set out to solve the crime. Su Joe experiences more excitement and un-welcomed danger when she decides to trail the suspected crooks in San Francisco without Ross’s knowledge. In the end, Ross and his male companions rescue Su Joe after her brush with sordid criminals and death. Ross also proposes marriage to curtail Su
Joe’s quest for exploits and she accepts because she knows that she has finally found
137 what she was looking for all along: love and security with the man of her dreams. By being independent and rebellious, Su Joe acquired what she always desired: exploration, romance and commitment from a handsome, intelligent and sophisticated man of means.44
Fawcett Publications’ True Confessions was established in the early 1920s. Many of the white female protagonists featured in its pages were portrayed as racialized or marked women primarily because they, too, tested the limits of perceived respectability.
These working girls were also depicted as likable female characters because they were independent, sassy and emotionally detached when bored and unfulfilled, yet passionate when they finally found their “true love.” The white women of True Confessions were often rewarded with romance and/or saddled with marriage because they opted to leave families and small towns in search of thrills, fame or wealth. The girls in True
Confessions found eternal bliss although or because they engaged in premarital sex, had babies out of wedlock, cheated with married men or frequented disreputable spaces. True
Confessions’ headlines readily conjured up images of promiscuous women and extramarital affairs. Some of the titles that ran from 1937 to 1938 include: “Secrets of a
Strip Teaser”; “Love Fling of a ‘Gigolette”; “Traitor to My Marriage Ring”; and “The
Husband We Shared.”45
In “Secrets of a Strip Teaser,” a small town Southern girl from Mississippi moves to New York City to find money and stardom. But she ends up becoming a stripper for a
44 “Restless Blood: The Girl Who Craved Adventure,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 28.6 (July 1933): 28-30; 83-91.
45 “Secrets of a Strip Teaser,” True Confessions 31.183 (October 1937); “Love Fling of a ‘Gigolette,” True Confessions 31.183 (October 1937); “Traitor to My Marriage Ring,” True Confessions 31.185 (December 1937); and “The Husband We Shared,” True Confessions 32.187 (February 1938). 138 burlesque company because she needs to survive and refuses to admit to her family that she has “failed” or could not succeed in the big city. In due course, the leading character falls in love with one of the men associated with her troupe and regularly worries that she has sullied her reputation by having sex with a married man. She also fears that she has soiled her family’s name when she is caught in a nightclub raid that is reported in the city’s daily papers. Her childhood sweetheart gets word of her troubles and travels to
New York to insist that she marry him so that he can provide her with some semblance of respectability. She refuses his proposal and finds refuge (but not necessarily marriage) with an alcoholic press agent who declares his undying devotion for her and defends her against the attacks levied by her childhood sweetheart. The moral of this fairy tale was quite clear to its prime audience: women with checkered backgrounds could still find financial and emotional security despite their refusal to fulfill their prescribed roles as obedient daughters, mothers and wives.46
Since “True Stories” showcased scandals and references to premarital sex, and sometimes compensated insubordinate girls, some believed that young black women were peculiar and reckless because they regularly read love stories. In an interview with researcher Laura Lee, an African-American teen named Martha Harris described her seventeen-year-old sister-in-law, Gussie, as a “wang” (a lazy, ungrateful floozy) who was very much interested in facilitating discord in her marriage and willingly took advantage of her husband Ernest to achieve her goal. She also insisted that Gussie could not get
“work in a Butcher’s shop” presumably because she possessed so little skill and ambition.
Martha seemed to think that part of Gussie’s disposition was created or exacerbated by
46 “Secrets of a Strip Teaser,” True Confessions 31.183 (October 1937): 20-23; 91-97.
139 her excessive drinking and avid reading of romance. And based on Martha’s account of her sister-in-law’s behavior, it looks as if Gussie was greatly influenced by the love stories she purportedly consumed on a regular basis. As Martha told Laura Lee, Gussie often went “out to beer gardens” instead of cleaning house, and she used her husband’s money to purchase “bottle[s] of white port” so that she could “lie up in bed, read a love story and drink.” Martha added that Gussie intentionally provoked Ernest when she allegedly told him that she “was too young to be married” and planned to “get [an annulment].”47 In other words, Gussie appeared to mock the institution of marriage because she did not behave like the good wife who took care of her home, husband and family. Gussie also seemed to be convinced that she was not in love with her husband, and that she wanted to experience adventure so that could possibly find a life of ease with the man of her dreams.
When gathering information on Lucy Savage - an unemployed nineteen-year-old who lived with her baby, siblings and pregnant, single mother - researcher Jean
Westmoreland often suggested that Lucy’s choice of recreational outlets may have had something to do with the fact that she had a baby out-of-wedlock, quit school, engaged in stormy relationships with various men, and refused to play the part of the devoted
47 Martha specifically stated the following: “I don’t think Ernest and his wife [Gussie] are going to be together long. She is young and silly. She ain’t but 17. She likes to go out to beer gardens. She will say: ‘I’m going around the corner to my girlfriend’s’ and when she comes back it is the next morning. Mamma had to go and clean the house today and she went the other day…Gussie can really drink...Ernest will give her money to get lunch and right to the bar to get a bottle of white port and maybe a little cheese sandwich. And then she will lie up in bed, read a love story and drink. She says to me ‘Why don’t you drink, you don’t know what you are missing. You will in time!’…Mamma says that ‘Gussie is a nice girl, but she has certainly turned out to be a wang.’ She told Ernest ‘I am too young to be married. I’m going to get it annulled’….Then sometimes Ernest will try to make up with her and she will curse. She can call him everything but a son of God. He sleeps on one side of the bed and she on the other…No, she don’t work, she couldn’t work in a Butcher’s shop!” See Martha Harris, interview by Laura Lee, 18 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 11, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
140 caregiver. When Lucy’s best friend, Grace Jackson, divulged that she advised Lucy to stop mistreating one of her boyfriends, Westmoreland asked if Lucy “reads a bit,” which prompted Grace to disclose that Lucy stayed up nights devouring “True Stories and things like that.”48 Westmoreland further vocalized concern for Lucy’s indifference to marriage after Lucy admitted that she “sometimes” went to “Beer Gardens” and “read love stories” at “one or two o’clock in the morning.”49 As she described Lucy’s living conditions, Westmoreland seemed to imply that disreputable forms of leisure engendered chaos and neglect; she also likened the “Savage” children to animals who had been horribly disfigured and demoralized because of the recklessness of Lucy and her mother, and their squalid living conditions in general. Westmoreland specifically wrote:
“[I] entered the room [where Lucy resided]. It was in general disorder, furnished with odd pieces of furniture….The walls were bare, greasy, and unpapered….[There were] two small babies…on the bed....One baby had been burned quite severely on its chest, it appeared. The scar covered completely its nipples. Its naval hung about 2 inches over the stomach. The other baby crawled off the bed and toddled towards Lucy. Its stomach protruded, its back curved decidedly inward, causing the child to walk with a gait very much like a monkey.”50
Some black Washingtonians were concerned that love stories caused young readers to defy authority and sabotage their prospects of becoming successful adults who
48 Grace Jackson, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 11, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
49 Lucy Savage, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
50 Lucy Savage, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, 13 July 1938?, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
141 cared for their families, homes and communities. However, there were educators in the
District who gave or sold issues of True Story to their female students so that they could apparently learn to become responsible women who did the proper things to ensure that they experienced all the greatness and wonderment that life had to offer. In 1932,
Washington, D.C. teacher Ruth M. Hillyard submitted a letter to True Story magazine’s editors and publishers to inform them that she thought: “True Story…should be ranked as the leader in the field of literary art.” Hillyard added that she believed that the magazine taught its readers “to appreciate the enthralling beauties that life brings…[and] to understand more readily, and forgive the weaknesses and transgressions of our friends and neighbors.” For Hillyard, True Story was not trashy or “in any way…detrimental to the ideals of the youthful reader.” Instead, the magazine provided the necessary lessons and advice that young people needed to become empathetic adults who were able to recognize and enjoy beauty and romance.51
A number of black teens also communicated that melodramatic stories provided lessons to help them make choices that could potentially improve their lives. An African-
American who went by “Dorothy” was quite appreciative that her teachers encouraged her to read popular magazines like True Story so that she could get advice on love relations and the many struggles that young women faced. When asked about her reading preferences, Dorothy told researchers the following: “I read novels, sometimes magazines. I like to read things I can get some benefit. In English class, the teacher sells
51 Ruth M. Hillyard, “What True Story Readers Think of Their Magazine,” True Story Magazine: Truth is Stranger than Fiction 27.1 (August 1932): 128.
142 us the Reader’s Digest for 15 cents. Sometimes, True Stories.”52 But Beulah Hines, a seventeen-year-old who lived at Washington, D.C.’s Phyllis Wheatley Y.W.C.A and attended Dunbar High School, disclosed that she stopped reading love stories perhaps because they were too lurid or the stories of suffering and scandal made her think of the horrors that she could endure if she were not careful selecting the right male companion.
According to Beulah, “she used to [read True Stories], but didn’t read them much now.
She used to worry about them, and the stories would stay on her mind so she stopped.”
When asked if she had “ever been in love,” Beulah remarked, “no, and never intended to” primarily because “people get so worried when they were in love and committed suicide.”53 Beulah also stated that she did not think she would marry, but planned to become a teacher so that she could support herself and possibly her family who lived in
Atlantic City, New Jersey. After researcher Laura Lee told Beulah that “it was unusual- most girls wanted to marry” and pressed her to describe the kind of man she would consider marrying, Beulah reported that her future husband “would have to have a good job and be able to take care of her.”
There were other black female romance readers within the nation’s capital who, like Beulah, stated that they had no plans or desire to marry. Fourteen-year-old Esther
Wright admitted to reading romance and having sex with her boyfriend. When asked if she would like to marry her sexual partner, Esther snapped, “Don’t care if I marry him,
52 Dorothy ?, interview by Anonymous, 1 June 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 15, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
53 Beulah Hines, interview by Laura Lee, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 14, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C, Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 143 don’t care if I don’t.”54 Lucy Savage, the unwed mother who was interviewed by researcher Jean Westmoreland, also stated that she did “not want to get married” because people were “always fussing and carrying on.” When Westmoreland asked Lucy if she considered marrying the father of her son Yodell, she emphatically retorted, “I don’t want to marry him. He was all right. He was good to us until he got sick and had to be sent to a sanitarius [sic]. I never hear from him anymore. I don’t want to be bothered. I didn’t love him; he was all right, though, I guess.”55
Teenaged black females who rejected marriage were not necessarily closed to finding “real” love with the men of their dreams. They seemed to be more interested in being single or becoming self-sufficient workingwomen because they did not desire to marry black men who could not provide for them financially. Young African-American women may have also feared entering into loveless marriages that would produce unwanted children and absentee fathers. When told that her teen daughter Lucy was not interested in marriage, Mrs. Savage - a divorced or jilted women with four children and one on the way - unabashedly told researcher Jean Westmoreland the following: “Can you blame her? When you see how the men are acting these days, you don’t blame anybody for not wanting to get married. There’s only a few men who are any good.
There are three unhappy marriages to every one happy one. What’s the use of marrying?
54 Esther Wright, interview by Laura Lee, 3 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
55 Lucy Savage, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, 13 July 1938 ?, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 144 Who wants a house full of babies? That’s all these men can give you now. I’d rather
Lucy didn’t have that to contend with.”56
Mrs. Savage’s commentary reveals that some adult women in Washington, D.C.’s working-class black communities may have helped the teenaged girls in their social circles to at least question the patriarchal notion that they should uncritically embrace roles as submissive mothers and homemakers. Poor young black women could have also fashioned subversive identities by listening to female blues singers who, as cultural historian Hazel Carby has duly noted, wrote songs in the 1920s and 1930s that “asserted a woman’s independence” from men and, in some cases, encouraged same-sex female romantic and sexual encounters.57 But it is also likely that underprivileged African-
American girls wanted to avoid unhappy marriages and sex with men they did not love because they were repeatedly told by the melodramas they read that it was possible for racialized females and women of low status to find happiness and security with or without marriage. Teen girls who had babies out of wedlock seemed to be open to romance but were not interested in marrying the fathers of their children because they did not love these men or these men could not or simply did not provide for them emotionally and financially. These girls also desired travel and wealth, and they sometimes risked serious injury when they duped or planned to trick black men into “treating” them so that they could gain access to commodities. In 1938, one of Lucy Savage’s male suitors brutally cut her face because she accepted money and other gifts from him but was unwilling to abide by his rules. Grace Jackson claimed that Lucy was violently attacked
56 Ibid.
57 Hazel V. Carby, “It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues,” Radical America 20.4 (1986): 9-22. 145 because she was a “funny person” who refused to stop cheating on her boyfriend even though he regularly did “nice things for her and her baby.”58 While Lucy was visibly marred in the altercation, this did not stop her from presenting a bold exterior and displaying courage when dealing with an abusive man. Lucy confirmed that her
“boyfriend” did indeed take “out his knife and cut [her]” when researcher Jean
Westmoreland inquired about the incident; however, she also declared (purportedly while smiling and laughing) that she was single (and apparently happily so) because she “had
[her so-called lover] put in jail” for assault.59
“True Stories” offered many accounts of adversity and unrequited love. These romances may have also given African-American females the tools they needed to navigate relations with violent men and avoid those who refused to properly support their so-called loved ones. But some teenaged girls preferred to watch melodramatic films instead of reading love stories because they believed that the narratives in pulp magazines presented predictable outcomes of romantic bliss and confirmed the prevalent idea that women would inevitably find happiness and security through marriage and domesticity.
As working-class high schooler Alice Williams revealed to interviewer Laura Lee, “I used to read fairy stories – I would get them from the library…Sometimes I may read
[love stories]…but I don’t like them much. They are just alike all leading the same way, the right man gets the right girl and so on.” Alice further claimed that she had caught all
58 Grace’s account of Lucy, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
59 Lucy Savage, interview by Jean P. Westmoreland, circa 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 10, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
146 of Bette Davis’s films that played during the Depression mainly because Davis was one of her favorite movie stars and was indeed a “good actress.”60 There were other young black women like Alice who also viewed melodramas because they wanted to see popular white actresses and the characters they perfected on the screen. When asked about her leisure activities, Evangeline Edwards replied, “Yes, I like to go to the movies….Joan Crawford is my favorite star. I don’t go to the movies unless there is an interesting picture. I like the type of roles Joan Crawford plays.”61
One of the roles that Crawford repeatedly took on in the 1930s was the wealthy socialite who encounters difficulty in her love relations.62 But she also played a down- and-out showgirl in The Bride Wore Red (1937) who assumes the identity of a countess so that she can bask in the luxuries associated with the rich and famous and land a handsome scion from a wealthy family. The picture showed at the Lincoln Theatre in the fall of 1937 for a “seven-day engagement” and was described by the Afro-American as the “story of a women’s struggle to find happiness in the lowly surroundings of her birth.”63 Because Crawford portrayed a poor workingwoman who, by chance, escapes
60 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
61 Evangeline Edwards, interview by Laura Lee, 6 June 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 15, Box 131- 113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
62 “Crawford, Gable, Montgomery in ‘Forsaking All Others’ at the Lincoln, Starting Friday,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, January 26, 1935; “Joan Crawford and Robert Montgomery in ‘No More Ladies’ at the Lincoln Starting Fri.,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 3, 1935; and Display Ad: “She Dared to Live Her own Life: Joan Crawford, I Live My Life,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, December 7, 1935.
63 “Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone Showing at Lincoln,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, November 6, 1937. Also see The Bride Wore Red, VHS, directed by Dorothy Arzner (1937: MGM/UA Home Video, 1990). 147 her imposed subjugated status, she likely appealed to disadvantaged black girls who desired to live like the upwardly mobile. Young African-American women, who rejected the idea that love and marriage could forever ensure a woman’s happiness and emotional comfort, may have also identified with Crawford’s depiction of the socially prominent female protagonist that continues to thrive after suffering a botched romance.
Sometimes black girls in the District saw themselves as future dancers and actresses. Sixteen-year-old Mildred Washington stated that Ginger Rogers and James
Stewart were her favorite actors primarily because “they dance[d] well”; she also revealed that “one of her secret desires…[was] to be a dancer.”64 Others subconsciously desired to be white starlets or they simply wanted to access the privilege associated with white skin so that they could enjoy trysts with powerful men. Susie Morgan, a teen who lived in one of the District’s poverty-stricken alley communities, told researcher Laura
Lee that she fantasized about being a wealthy white starlet who played opposite or was romantically involved with a famous white actor. Susie also intimated that she wanted a comfortable, unencumbered life similar to that of the elite or the socially and economically mobile nonwhite females sometimes presented in the movies. As Susie reported, “I dreamt I was Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor was in the dream…Well I guess Robert Taylor is my favorite actor.” What do I think about when I am by myself?
Oh, I think maybe I am rich, maybe I were a teacher’s daughter---do I think about getting
64 Mildred Washington, interview by Anonymous, 2 July 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131- 113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
148 married, no indeed. I have seen enough you don’t know until you get into that trouble…I want to be a working woman.”65
In the 1930s, black Washingtonians could screen popular melodramas at the
Howard, Broadway, Republic, Lincoln, Booker T., and Raphael theaters, all of which were located in a predominately African-American neighborhood currently known as the
Shaw district. According to Alice Williams, she preferred the Republic because it was “a beautiful place.”66 By this, Alice likely meant that she frequented the Republic because she wanted to experience its eclectic architecture and highly ornate interiors. Historian
Robert Headly notes that “the front of the Republic was of stucco work in imitation of buff Indiana limestone,” and “a Spanish tile roof topped the [theater’s] façade.” The
Republic’s “auditorium,” Headly adds, “was equipped with opera chairs finished” in elaborate wood patterns and colorful upholstery.67 It is also plausible that Alice chose to watch movies at the Republic because it allowed her to recreate like elites or associate with upper-class black Washingtonians who patronized the theater in the early twentieth
65 Life History of Susie Morgan, interview by Laura Lee, 14 April 1938, Incomplete Interviews, Folder 13, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Research Projects, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
66 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
67 Robert K. Headly, Motion Picture Exhibition in Washington, D.C.: An Illustrated History of Parlors, Places and Multiplexes in the Metropolitan Area, 1894-1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1999), 309.
149 century. In the late 1920s, sociologist William Jones ranked the Republic as an upscale or “Class A” theater because of its appearance, location, and “select” clientele.68
Most of the romantic comedies and dramas that played at the District’s movie houses during the 1930s were produced by white filmmakers and featured famous white actors and actresses. Occasionally theaters in black neighborhoods offered films that cast
African Americans in leading roles. Two racial passing dramas, John Stahl’s Imitation of
Life (1934) and Oscar Micheaux’s God’s Step Children (1938), ran at the Lincoln and
Republic theaters during the height of the Depression.69 The Afro-American billed
Imitation of Life as a “Dramatic Thunderbolt” and a “Startling Revelation of Truth,” while describing God’s Stepchildren as a “stark drama and eventual tragedy that comes to those who live a life of pretense” to appeal to the black movie-going public who, like many Americans, paid to see controversy. But African-American girls who were interviewed by Frazier’s researchers did not mention that they viewed films created by black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux or that they identified with black women who starred in white-produced movies. If these young women did watch Imitation of Life and God’s
Stepchildren, they did not communicate that they desired to emulate or even sympathized with the films’ “tragic mulattos,” who consistently denied their African ancestry and attempted to assume the identities of middle- and upper-class white ladies.
Underprivileged black females may have overlooked the leading ladies in passing dramas
68 See William H. Jones, Recreation and Amusement Among Negroes in Washington, D.C.: A Sociological Analysis of the Negro in an Urban Environment (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1927), 113-114.
69 “Colored Stars Steal the Glory in ‘Imitation of Life’ Coming to Lincoln,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 12, 1935; “Imitation of Life: A Dramatic Thunderbolt! A Starling Revelation of Truth,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 19, 1935; “Oscar Micheaux’s God’s Step-Children,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, May 28, 1938. 150 because the narrative of the woman who suffers or dies because she crosses the color line was not of much concern to those who were either too dark to pass or more enticed by the possibility of escaping subjugation by becoming economically independent. Like popular romance magazines that were produced in the 1930s, widely circulated films provided images of nonwhite females who traveled extensively and found satisfying work outside the domestic sphere. Narratives of social mobility and self-sufficiency resonated with poor black women who desired to transcend their class status and challenge those who believed that it was proper for them to embrace their set roles as respectful daughters, mothers, wives and servants.
Melodramatic films of the 1930s depicted white women as gold-diggers, hussies, home-wreckers and cold-hearted vixens or femme fatales. With titles like - Forsaking All
Others, Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, Reckless, Stranded, Women are Like That, and Wife vs. Secretary - these films readily invoked images of scandals, love triangles and tragedy.
Between 1935 and 1939, at least eight of Bette Davis’s films played at theaters located in
Washington’s black communities, which undoubtedly helped Alice Williams to follow the career of her favorite actress.70 Davis starred in the broadly circulated film Of Human
Bondage (1934) as a ruthless waitress with a cockney English accent who is punished with poverty, disease and death because she shamelessly endangers the life of the film’s
70 See Display Ad: “Front Page Woman,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 24, 1935; “On the Screen at the Howard, Starting Friday, September 6th: Bette Davis in ‘Girl From 10th Ave.,’” Afro- American, Capital Edition, September 7, 1935; “’Special Agent,’ T-Man Picture, at the Lincoln, Starting on Friday,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 19, 1935; “’Dangerous’ at the Republic Theatre Beginning Friday, February 28,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 29, 1936; Display Ad: “Bette Davis: Jezebel,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 2, 1938; “Paul Muni, Bette Davis at Booker T. in ‘Bordertown,’” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 23, 1938; Display Ad: “Of Human Bondage,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, October 14, 1939; and Display Ad: “The Old Maid,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 28, 1939.
151 likable male protagonist. The movie ran at the Booker T. Theatre on several occasions during the height of the Depression; in October 1939, it was advertised in the District’s edition of the Afro-American under the caption: “one week only gala return engagement.”71 The paper described Davis’s character as a “cheap, unscrupulous woman who takes [the] love, enslaves [the] soul and spends [the] money” of the film’s hero, while “repaying him with scorn and unfaithfulness.”72 Davis was also the main attraction in Dangerous (1936), which appeared at the Republic Theatre in the same year that it was released to the general public; she portrayed an alcoholic, ill-tempered stage actress who tricks the leading male character, a renowned architect who is star-struck, into falling for her even though she is married.73
Although Bette Davis was a leading lady in melodramas of the 1930s, she hardly ever assumed the role of the virtuous heroine who eventually overcame obstacles and
“lived happily ever after.” Instead, she was cast as wives who were trapped in dreadful marriages and troubled single women who engaged in dishonorable activities to gain access to luxuries or manipulated men to win their affection. These character and narrative sketches likely appealed to Alice Williams because they did not advance fantasies of eternal love or put forth the idea that the “right girl” always got the “right man.”74 As Alice told researcher Laura Lee in 1939, she made it her business to “see all
71 Display Ad: “Of Human Bondage,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 14, 1939.
72 “Of Human Bondage at the Booker T.,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 14, 1939; Also see Of Human Bondage, DVD, directed by John Cromwell (1934: Alpha Video Distributors, Inc., 2001).
73 Dangerous, VHS, directed by Alfred E. Green (1936: MGM/VA Home Video, Inc., 1990).
74 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research 152 of [Davis’s] pictures” because she was stellar actress who was apparently able to captivate audiences with her interpretations of recalcitrant female protagonists who sought romance with handsome, upwardly mobile men yet sabotaged their dreams of love and success by being dishonest and conniving. In Bordertown (1938), for example,
Davis gave a rather striking (and bizarre) performance as a bawdy, maniacal working- class woman who is committed to an insane asylum after she murders her wealthy husband and is unable to persuade a handsome Mexican-American casino owner to take her as his lover and accept responsibility for her crime.75 Davis also starred in Jezebel
(1938) as the scheming Julie Marsdon, the daughter of a wealthy planter who inadvertently convinces her fiancé Preston Dillard to marry another woman because she regularly flouts the codes and mores of her antebellum community to test the love and commitment of the “honorable” Southern-bred gentlemen in her social circle. To appeal to Davis’s fan base who were accustomed to seeing her skillfully portray the likable yet intractable “bad” girl, the Afro-American wrote that Davis played a “willful, spoiled, tempestuous young Dixie belle who breaks hearts with dashing unconcern…and a
“modern miss in an old-fashioned setting” who “smokes [and] prefers juleps to sherry.”76
Center, Howard University.
75 See “Paul Muni, Bette Davis at Booker T. in ‘Bordertown,’” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 23, 1938; and Bordertown, 16 mm sd., b/w, Reference Print, directed by Archie L. Mayo (1934, Warner Bros.: United Artist Collection), Motion Picture Collection FCA, 6744, 6743, 6742, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
75 Dangerous, VHS, directed by Alfred E. Green (1936: MGM/VA Home Video, Inc., 1990).
76 “Bette Davis in ‘Jezebel’ Returns to Booker T.,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 4, 1938; See the following ad also: “Bette Davis: Jezebel,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 2, 1938.
153 Like Bette Davis, Jean Harlow played working girls from questionable beginnings and these characters were almost always contrasted with the other stock female character- the refined lady with impeccable taste, speech, manners and dress. Yet the marked or sometimes uncouth female characters played by Harlow were able to earn money as dancers, singers and actresses. In 1935, Jean Harlow starred in China Seas, which appeared at the Lincoln and Broadway theaters, and was advertised by the Afro-American as a “stirring story of adventure and romance, a story that teems with lusty action and abounds with strange emotional qualities that brings them together.”77 Harlow skillfully and comically depicts the archetypal brassy, platinum blonde showgirl who dresses in embroidered nightgowns while mostly shouting and using crass language when addressing Clark Gable, the film’s leading man who plays Captain Gaskell. In the movie’s opening scene, we find that Harlow (affectionately known as China Doll) has stowed away on Gaskell’s ship that is set to sail for Hong Kong and Singapore. China
Doll does indeed surprise Gaskell when he discovers her in his cabin, but he informs her right away that there is nothing between them anymore; he also tells her that he has plans to pursue another love named Sybil Barclay.
Sybil is quite different from China Doll in that she is always elegantly dressed, well mannered and soft-spoken with a decidedly British accent. This sophisticated white lady is also deeply in love with Gaskell and wedding plans are in the works. The love affair between Sybil and Gaskell infuriates China Doll who does not refrain from
77 “Gable, Harlow and Beery in ‘China Seas’ at the Lincoln Theatre, Starring Friday,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, September 28, 1935; and Ad: “Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery in ‘China Seas,’” Afro-American, Capital Edition, September 2, 1935. Also see China Seas, VHS, directed by Tay Garnett (1935: MGM/VA Home Video, Inc., 1986).
154 insulting them both with lewd language and suggestions. Eventually, Gaskell warns
China to stay way from him and his new love; he also confirms her biggest fear: that he could never really love her because she is low-class and trashy. After being rejected by
Gaskell, China Doll becomes depressed, vengeful and engages in drinking games with varied men aboard the ship to further cement or symbolize her class status. And in due course, China Doll betrays Gaskell by colluding with working-class white men and
Chinese pirates who have long planned to rob the ship of its gold and other treasures.
When Gaskell discovers his former lover’s misdeed, he confronts her and she confesses while shouting that she did it because she “loved and hated him at the same time.” At the close of China Seas, Gaskell decides to forgive China Doll for her outrageous behavior. Gaskell also declares his devotion for China stating that he always loved her more or differently than the way he loved Sybil, primarily because he and
China shared similar backgrounds as common folk who just happened to get the chance to earn a living by sailing the seas and performing on stage. And before the authorities take China into custody for the part she played in pirating an American ship, Gaskell proposes to her while insisting that the “married life will settle [her], make [her] an honest woman.” In the end, it seems that China Doll does get the thing she always wanted despite the obvious fact that she has not behaved in a “ladylike” manner. She was able to convince the man she loved to accept and marry her by taunting him and degrading herself and others in public spaces. It was because of her passionate and wild displays that China Doll was attractive, lovable and able to catch the handsome Gaskell.
Women of low status could compete, at least in the movies, with genteel ladies and win the hearts of the men they desired. They could also travel to foreign lands, don
155 fashionable nightgowns, earn a living as singers or dancers, and socialize with people of varied backgrounds and nationalities even though they came from suspect or humble beginnings.
Some of the films of Jean Harlow and Bette Davis featured buffoonish black female domestic types who used “Negro” dialect and eagerly displayed deference to the whites they served. Black domestics also appeared at key moments in melodramas to further demonstrate that white women characters were marked or viewed by others within their social settings as females of dubious character. In China Seas, the appearance of the black domestic - who is represented as the characteristically jolly mammy figure with bulging eyes, bandana and apron - occurs immediately after Captain Gaskell rejects
China. This positioning of China with a poorly attired black domestic worker clearly communicates to the viewing public that the white female protagonist is considered coarse or similar to the uncouth African-American woman who serves her. When China asks her maid “what is it that Sybil Barclay has that I don’t have,” the African-American domestic happily informs her in “black speak” that Sybil is a refined lady who would never wear the type of glitzy gowns owned by China. The maid continues by saying that the dresses worn by her employer “weh mo’ fo’ folks like me,” meaning that flashy clothing was designed for working-class women who served cultured ladies of status.
The theme of the vulgar dress as a symbol of servitude or low-class status reappears in Jezebel (1938) when the audience is introduced to Julie Marsdon’s black maid, who gladly works to satisfy her mistress’s every whim and peccadillo. One of
Julie’s many transgressions in the film includes donning a “vulgar” red dress for a formal public event instead of the standard white gown that would properly symbolize the
156 humility, purity and respectability of an unmarried young white maiden descended from a wealthy plantation owner. To ensure that film viewers would fully understand that gaudy apparel represented disgrace or was a mere tool used by the leading white lady to manipulate others who served and loved her, Julie promises to give the “blood” red garment to her overjoyed and happy-go-lucky black maid if she agrees to help her humiliate her fiancé Preston at one of the community’s most respected public balls. In formulaic fashion, the enslaved African-American domestic willingly helps her young mistress while admiring the dress in a wide-eyed hypnotic gaze and conveying to the audience that a tasteless colored night gown was more appropriate for a woman of her standing.78
Like the black domestic servants in the films of Harlow and Davis, African-
American girls who viewed melodramas were infatuated with the prospect of owning and sporting fashionable clothing and other consumable goods. But young black women desired luxuries to mask poverty or to show that they were upwardly mobile, independent or financially secure, not to further cement their lowly or working-class status.
Moreover, teen girls did not necessarily identify with derogatory images of black femininity represented in melodramatic films of the 1930s. In fact, some young African-
American women were most likely disgusted when they saw black females cast in stereotypical roles as loyal servants. Alice Williams, the working-class teen who revealed that Bette Davis was her favorite actress, graduated Cardoza High School in
June 1939 and was desperately looking for employment as a typist or some other kind of
78 Jezebel, VHS Screening Cassette, directed by William Wyler (1938, Turner Entertainment: DUBS Incorporated, 1990), Motion Picture Collection VAB2297, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division, Library of Congress.
157 clerical work so that she could save her money to go to a dancing school in New York.
Alice stated that she simply refused to work as a domestic and equated cooking and cleaning with modern day slavery. According to Alice, “if she had to clean house, why she just would not work.” She continued with “you know working for white people is kind of funny like they want you to change your name…to some old name they used to call colored people in slavery,” and they want you to “go around ‘Missing’ [or displaying submission to] people.”79 Alice did, however, express the desire to be free from poverty, restraint, tradition and boredom like some of the marked white female characters did in melodramatic films. As she told researcher Laura Lee, “there are four things I have always wanted to do: dress, to travel, to have a lovely home and a car…I’d like to travel all over the world. I’m sick of Washington. I’d like to start and just keep going. I’d like to travel all around with a female. Now, I see you’re smiling. You don’t believe. Sure
I’ll be an old maid, that’s what I want to be. No one believes me when I say that. Sure
I’d like to have a little dog along, a little Pekinese dog.”80
A closer examination of popular melodramas show that young black women read romance magazines and viewed mainstream films because they were able to identify with racialized nonwhite female characters that suffered as they did but were able to gain access to commodities by duping men of means and by exhibiting wit, charm, independence and sex-appeal. Black women consumed widely circulated melodramas
79 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939 & 12 July 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131- 113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
80 Alice Williams, interview by Laura Lee, 25 June 1939, Interviews, Folder 8, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
158 because they readily understood stories of triumph, conflict, and the lowly woman’s quest to be prosperous and free from limited socioeconomic opportunities. And like nonwhite female characters, they also desired romance, luxurious lifestyles and happiness with or without entering into marriage. Moreover, teenaged black girls who consumed melodrama were interested in upward mobility not necessarily middle-class respectability. By reading love stories and watching sensationalist films, young black women were able to imagine and represent selves that were different from the picture of domesticity and respectability often celebrated by many in the black and white middle class.
But by embracing the aspirations and mimicking the behaviors of marked white female protagonists, teenaged black girls also risked being marginalized by family and community members as well as experiencing injury, death or further subjugation because they contested the bounds of proper femininity. High-school graduate Alice Williams was quite enthusiastic about the possibility of saving money from a future job as a typist so that she could leave Washington, D.C. She seemed to believe that if she could flee her hometown and become a self-sufficient woman, she could live in a manner similar to or would be rewarded like some of the nonwhite women she saw in popular films of the
1930s. Alice never expressed any reservations about the real likelihood of not being able to travel freely without experiencing racial prejudices because of Jim Crow practices and attitudes. She also did not mention or seem to concern herself with using part of her earnings to help her six siblings and mother who worked as a domestic.81 Alice appeared
81 According to Laura Lee, Alice had six siblings, a mother who was a domestic worker and a father who was deceased. Alice Williams and Frances Meachem, interview by Laura Lee, 30 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier 159 to be more interested in attaining individual liberation, not necessarily providing financial support for her immediate family. In addition, Alice expressed no desire to collaborate with other African Americans to challenge structural racism. Alice, in essence, did not represent herself as a respectable young black woman who worked tirelessly to uplift families and communities. When she was asked by researcher Laura Lee in the summer of 1938 if she would assist black Washingtonians associated with the “Don’t Buy Where
You Can’t Work” campaign to boycott white merchants who refused to hire blacks, Alice stated that the only way that she would get involved if she were compensated for her efforts.82 Like racialized white women in Depression-era melodramas, Alice desired individual liberation and financial reward but was not so keen on selflessly fulfilling her preset obligations. This refusal to support others caused some fictionalized women to experience great suffering and marginalization. And young black women, like Alice
Williams, who rejected the role of the dutiful daughter, mother or wife no doubt endured disappointment, harsh judgment and restricted mobility in their search for commodities, pleasure and independence.
Poor teen girls may have ultimately turned to popular melodramas as a form of escape because their ideas of “home” were starkly different from the living circumstances that many black Washingtonians found themselves in during the Great Depression. As I demonstrate in the last chapter of this dissertation, African-American homes that were
Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; “Girls Interviewed, Washington, D.C.,” Names and Girls Interviewed, Folder 5, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
82 Alice Williams and Frances Meachem, interview by Laura Lee, 30 July 1938, Interviews, Folder 12, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
160 located in aging urban centers were often poorly built, cramped, and sites of rampant policing. As a result, various black and white Washingtonians viewed racially marked areas of the city as containers for vice, disease, and second-class citizenship while equating modern suburban spaces with health, autonomy, and financial security.
161
Chapter Four
Black Homes: Places of Refuge and Threats to Civil Society
In April 1937, black Washingtonian Selma Thomas wrote Eleanor Roosevelt to say that she thought that the “Greenbelt resettlement community” planned for Maryland would be an “ideal place…to live.” Mrs. Thomas longed for an affordable, “modest little home” to help find security during the Depression because her husband, an underemployed parcel porter for Union Station, was unable to land “a job with a livable salary to care for” his family. While Greenbelt was designed for whites, Mrs. Thomas was sure that a racially restricted, inexpensive suburban home set in green pastures would be akin to “paradise” because it would allow her and Mr. Thomas to make their way toward economic stability and properly raise their “three lovely little ones.”1 Selma
Thomas did not reference Langston Terrace, a similar government-subsidized development for African Americans that was underway in Washington, D.C.’s Northeast quadrant.2 She may have opted not to do so because she wanted to escape black communities, which were often located in densely settled urban districts and associated with instability, disease and crime.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Selma Thomas, 933 N street, N.W., Apt. 4, Washington, D.C., to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C., 27 April 1937, Unemployable, Folder 4, Box 119-1, Works Progress Administration, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
2 In 1938, African Americans who “formerly lived under slum conditions” moved into Langston Terrace, which is located off Bennings road in Northeast, D.C. (“274 Families Moved into U.S. Housing Project,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 7, 1938); see also “Langston, A Planned Neighborhood,” Washington Housing Association Annual Report, 1938, General Records, Folder: In the Shadow of the Capital, Box No. 11, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
! 162 In Selma Thomas’s quest to find a “modest little home” and an “ideal” place to reside, she looked toward domestic architecture located in suburban or semirural landscapes that countless Americans had long associated with respectability and citizenship.3 Mrs. Thomas also likely discounted the possibility that she could find
“paradise” in a black community because her own home was either inadequate for her needs, was too costly for her family’s income, or she simply perceived her neighborhood as a veritable slum. When Selma Thomas contacted the First Lady, she rented on the fourth floor of the Henrietta Apartments, a Beaux Arts inspired, five-story brick building that is located at 933 N street N.W. in what is currently known as the Shaw district.4
From the 1870s through the 1910s, Shaw was the preferred destination for middle-class whites because of its Victorian architecture and proximity to the city’s business core and government offices; by the 1930s, Shaw was an overcrowded, predominately African-
American region with limited quality housing stock.5 While the Henrietta was one of the few solidly built buildings that accommodated blacks in the nation’s capital during the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Kenneth T. Jackson asserts that as early as the 1840s, privileged whites constructed the notion that the detached single-family home located in a lush, pastoral landscape was the most appropriate setting to cultivate morally upright children and shield the middle class from the corruption associated with cities. See Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 45-72. Also note that architectural historian Barbara Mooney argues that shortly after the Civil War, many African Americans embraced the idea that the “comfortable tasty framed cottage” or the modest single-family dwelling surrounded by a fine garden was a symbol of order, cleanliness and industry and a measure of black assimilation into white society. See Barbara Burlison Mooney, “The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage: An African American Architectural Iconography,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61.1 (March 2002), 48-67.
4 Information on the architectural style of the Henrietta Apartments was gathered by street survey. Also see: Sanborn, District of Columbia, Washington, 1927-1928, Vol. 1, 1928, Sheet 70, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress; and Selma Thomas, 933 N street, N.W., Apt. 4, Washington, D.C., to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Executive Mansion, Washington, D.C., 27 April 1937, Unemployable, Folder 4, Box 119-1, Works Progress Administration, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
5 Marcia M. Greenlee, “Shaw: Heart of Black Washington,” in Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital, ed. Kathryn Schneider Smith (Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, Inc., 1988), 119-129.
! 163 early twentieth century, many of the residential units in Shaw and other racially designated parts of the District were substandard during the Depression. Further, a number of Washingtonians thought that working-class African-American enclaves located in or close to the city’s aging center were threats to maintaining upstanding families and building community. In 1936, for example, the Afro-American’s journalists described alley dwellings that were concentrated in the Shaw neighborhood and situated approximately eight blocks southwest of the Henrietta as “wretch[ed],…dangerous” urban spaces that would have an adverse effect on residents who attended schools and churches that were in the vicinity.6
The concept of the secure, well-appointed home took on an increased importance during the Great Depression because at least a third of the nation’s populace, who did not make a living wage, was forced to live in impoverished conditions.7 Also, many government officials, social workers and ordinary citizens, like Progressives had done before them, believed that poor housing was a major contributing factor in the purported crime surge in U.S. cities.8 The sanitary modern house and orderly neighborhood were hallmarks of proper citizenship during the 1930s. Because scores of African-American !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 The Afro-American reported that Washington, D.C.’s “other half lived” in alleys “hidden” behind M and K streets, N.W. or the most dangerous slum, which was located in Precinct 2 bounded by North Capitol, M street, New Jersey avenue, and K street N.W. (“Where the Other Half Lives,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 11, 1936).
7 See Rosalyn Baxandall and Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How The Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 51-77. Also refer to FDR’s 1937 Inaugural Address, whereby he stated that “one-third of” the nation’s population was “ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.” Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937, Bartleby.com: Great Books Online, http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres50.html (accessed 10/27/2009).
8 See, for example, “Crime Fostered By Bad Housing,” Washington Post, June 3, 1934; “Desperadoes Breed in Slums: New York City Survey Shows,” Washington Post, July 31, 1934; “Bad Housing Breeds Disease And Crime, Expert Declares,” Washington Post, January 21, 1935; and Isabel Vickers, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, “Crime and Slums,” Washington Post, June 5, 1936.
! 164 homes were ramshackle and congested, blacks did not meet the measure of society.
Those black Washingtonians who were fortunate enough to rent or own relatively updated, spacious quarters boasted of their elite status and the latest conveniences in their houses.9 Yet they, too, had to contend with the stigma of the slum because blacks of various socioeconomic backgrounds were forced to live in close proximity due to restrictive covenants passed by whites. Strained living arrangements exacerbated intra- racial conflicts and caused some African Americans within the nation’s capital to use the rhetoric and strategies of the larger society to tame and distance themselves from those who did not abide by bourgeois standards. Instead of adequately addressing inequitable policies that inhibited poor peoples from accessing quality shelter, various African
Americans in D.C. deemed certain black homes as threats to community and nation building, while guarding their own dwellings and neighborhoods from outsiders and using them as spaces of refuge to ward off “disreputable” elements.
One of the goals of this chapter is to show that the homes (alleys, apartment buildings, multi-unit row houses, single-family dwellings and neighborhoods) that were occupied by black Washingtonians in the 1930s exposed the racial and economic disparity prevalent in the District of Columbia. This study is similar to John F. Bauman’s
Public Housing, Race, and Renewal and Howard Gillette’s Between Justice and Beauty because it discusses how whites affiliated with neighborhood groups, the federal
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 9 In the 1930s and 1940s, several of E. Franklin Frazier’s Howard University students proudly maintained that they lived in well furnished two-or three-story brick homes that contained seven to ten rooms, indoor plumbing and electric lighting, and the latest modern appliances. See the following essays in Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University: Pauline L. Ellis, “The Family,” circa 1930s or 1940s, Folder 22, Box 131-86; Essie J. Lark, “Family History,” circa 1930s or 1940s, Folder 9, Box 131-88; and Emma L. Wilkins, “My Family History,” 5 June 1946, Folder 6, Box 131-91.
! 165 government and the private sector codified segregation in U.S. housing policy under the guise of quelling racial conflict, protecting property values, and obliterating “slums” during the early decades of the last century.10 This chapter, like Andrew Wiese’s “Black
Housing, White Finance” and Places of Their Own, also illustrates that African
Americans resided on the outskirts of U.S. cities before WWII to partake in the American dream of owning real estate in the pastoral countryside.11 I argue, however, that black and white Washingtonians collaborated during the Depression to devalue African-
American homes that were located in older sections of the capital city. They did so by construing these inner-city communities as undesirable places that created and accommodated “unruly” black populations, whose consumption habits supposedly damaged the individual’s chance of becoming a full-fledged citizen. At the same time,
Washingtonians upheld newly built, modern residences in suburban settings as prime models and expressions of independence and middle-class status.
During the economic downturn, African Americans lived in all of Washington’s four quadrants. But they were concentrated in what is presently called the Shaw-U street area located in the Northwest section of the city, and the Southwest neighborhood, which was bordered by the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the Mall, and South Capitol street
(see map on page 220). Between 1930 and 1940, blacks made up 55 to 62 percent of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 10 John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920-1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
11 Andrew Wiese, “Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, before 1940,” Journal of Social History, 33.2 (1999), 429-460, and Andrew Wiese, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1-93.
! 166 Shaw’s total population, while comprising 48 to 57 percent of the Southwest populace, respectively; by 1940, approximately 50 percent of the District’s African-American community lived in both localities.12 Blacks were corralled together in older, rundown parts of the city, and in many cases, the housing stock they inhabited was comparatively inferior and more expensive than the dwellings that were sold or rented to the city’s white residents. As early as 1929, sociologist William Jones completed a housing study to partly urge real estate owners to recognize “fully the difficulty which Negroes [had] in securing houses with modern equipment at reasonable prices.” Jones also recommended that builders should “provide a superior grade of material and workmanship” in the new apartments and single-family homes they intended to market to upwardly mobile African
Americans to replace the usual expensive, yet cheaply constructed dwellings that many were forced to occupy.13 Mrs. Mary E. Plummer echoed Jones in 1938 when she asserted in the Courier, the official organ for the black-run Pleasant Plains Civic Association, that
African Americans spent much of their income on deteriorated real estate in urban centers because they could not find or were barred from acquiring modern homes in new
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 In 1930, blacks made up 55% or 55, 254 of the 100,051 people who lived in Precincts 2 and 8, the area currently known as the Shaw/U street/Logan Circle districts. In 1930, S street, N. Capitol, Michigan/Euclid, Rock Creek Park, 15th and K streets, N.W. bounded Precincts 2 and 8. In 1940, blacks made up 62% or 76,779 of the 122,772 people who lived in Precincts 2 and 13, the area currently known as the Shaw/U street/Logan Circle districts. In 1940, S street, N. Capitol, Michigan/Euclid, Rock Creek Park, 15th and K streets, N.W. bounded Precincts 2 and 13. In 1930, blacks made up 48% or 11,728 of the 23,965 people who lived in Precinct 4, the area known as Southwest, and bordered by the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the Mall and S. Capitol street. In 1940, blacks made up 57% or 11,567 of the 29,343 people who lived in Southwest. In 1940, 93,603 of 187,266 black Washingtonians (or 49.9% or the D.C.’s total black populace) lived in Shaw and Southwest. See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 384, 389, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm (accessed 12/18/2008); Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 954-956, 969, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
13 William Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 153.
! 167 residential developments. As Plummer plainly put it, real estate agents were “able to capitalize on the fact” that “Negro demand” for housing was “greater than the supply.”
As a result, blacks settled for or “inherit[ed] the [outdated] houses which white people
[abandoned]”, and they often paid “more rent, because competition for decent houses for
Negroes was so keen.”14
Some black Washingtonians continued to live fairly close to whites of various cultural and economic backgrounds even though African Americans as a whole were increasingly confined to certain areas of the city. When surveying tracts in and adjacent to Shaw, a researcher who worked under the auspices of sociologist E. Franklin Frazier noticed that “apartments for Negroes appear[ed] next door to those of the same type for whites” in the area south of U street between New Hampshire and Florida avenues. This investigator also recorded that “wealthy” and “fashionable” whites occupied dwellings inside and immediately surrounding a “predominately Negro residential area,” bounded by 16th street, Florida, Connecticut and New Hampshire avenues.15 In Southwest,
African Americans, Eastern European immigrants and native whites historically resided in low-rent alley tenements and framed shanties that were organized around and segregated by Four and A Half street, the neighborhood’s main commercial strip. During the height of the Depression, Franklin Frazier researcher T.E. Davis reported that while
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 14 Mrs. Mary E. Plummer, “Symposium: The Economic Emancipation of Negroes in the District of Columbia,’” The Courier 2.3 (March 1938), Church Publications, Folder 8: Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also note that the Washington Tribune stated that black “people [were] the poorest paid workers and the highest paying renters.” See “Rents Are Too High,” Washington Tribune, July 8, 1932.
15 Tract 42, survey by D.D.N., 30 November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 168 4-! (which had been converted to 4th street) still served as the major dividing line for the community’s racial groups, there were blacks and whites who lived on the same blocks throughout the neighborhood.16
In “restricted Negro” urban zones, professional African Americans took up residence in stately townhouses that were generally located near the dilapidated homes of the poor. According to one onlooker, Shaw’s U street corridor was teeming with “low and middle class Negroes” in the 1930s; it was overcrowded or “congested and a great number of” its inhabitants “lived in the section…in slum dwellings, and comfortable but old stone houses.”17 Upwardly mobile blacks also set up shop and resided in “densely populated” working-class business districts so that they could maintain their economic status by providing services, wares and recreational outlets to a sizeable portion of the
Race. The “section around 7th and Florida” in Shaw, noted one observer, was a “busy one” and a “major portion of Washington’s Negro Harlem” because it was home to numerous African-American “lawyers, realtors, dentists, and physicians” who “live[d] and operate[d]” in the area. The 7th street area also attracted a motley array of other black-owned establishments, “ranging from [h]aberdasheries and shoe stores to night
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 16 See Fourth Street Southwest, survey by T.E. Davis, 9 May 1938, Interviews, Folder 7, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also note that historian Carole Kolker states that from the 1900s to the 1920s, Southwest’s African-American community was forced to remain east of the business core, while Eastern European immigrants primarily resided above their stores that were located on 4 !, and native whites isolated themselves in the district’s western edge near the Potomac River. See Carole Abrams Kolker, “Migrants and Memories: Family, Work, and Community Among Blacks, Eastern European Jews, and Native-Born Whites in an Early Twentieth Century Washington, D.C. Neighborhood” (Ph.D. diss., The George Washington University, 1997), 22-24, 44-82.
17 Tract 44, survey by D.D.N., 30 November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 169 clubs and pool rooms” as well as “a few” white-owned “laundries, hash-houses, pawn shops, grocery and liquor stores.”18
Some of D.C.’s African-American neighborhoods were highly prized commodities because they offered quality real estate and the rare opportunity for blacks to locate in upscale districts that were in the vicinity of schools, hospitals, transportation lines, and thriving commercial strips. Ledroit Park - roughly situated east of 7th, north of
S, west of North Capitol and south of Howard University - was originally designed for well-to-do whites in the 1870s. After decades of conflicts over what many perceived as
“Negro invasion” of their quaint suburb, it had become an exclusive urban community for
Washington’s African-American elite by 1920.19 A number of the city’s most renowned black citizens resided in Ledroit Park in the early twentieth century. Judge Robert H.
Terrell and his family purchased a 2-1/2 or three-story Victorian on T street, and noted educator Anna J. Cooper lived in spacious quarters located at 2nd and T streets. 20 In a portrait taken by black photographer Addison Scurlock during the Depression, Dr.
Cooper was captured in her beautifully appointed patio that led to an inside sitting area,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 18 Tract 45, survey by D.D.N., 30 November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
19 Ronald M. Johnson, “From Romantic Suburb to Racial Enclave: Ledroit Park, Washington, D.C., 1880- 1920,” Phylon 45.4 (1984), 264-70.
20 See Correspondence, 1886-1954 and undated, Conts. 4-5, Papers of Mary C. Terrell and Conts. 1-5, Papers of Robert H. Terrell, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress; Ledroit Park Historic District (The Ledroit Park Historical Society), planning.dc.gov/planning/frames.asp?doc=/planning/lib/planning/ preservation/brochures/ledroit.pdf (accessed 2/19/2009); and Ronald M. Johnson, “From Romantic Suburb to Racial Enclave: Ledroit Park, Washington, D.C., 1880-1920,” Phylon 45.4 (1984), 264-70.
! 170 which was framed by French doors, decorated with a sofa, table and chair set, and lighted by a hanging stained glass fixture.21
A Howard university student eagerly divulged that she was a Ledrioter, or lived near them, to perhaps illustrate that she was part of the city’s black aristocracy. In a
“family history” recorded for sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, Grace E. Payne revealed that throughout the 1930s she spent her entire childhood at 2206 Flagler Place, about four blocks north of Dr. Cooper’s address. Grace added that her father would soon acquire the deed to their house, which had “four bedrooms, [a] living room, dining room, kitchen,…recreation room and one bath,” to communicate that her family’s income was
“within keepings” or comparable to that of the American middle class. She further reported that her residence was sufficiently equipped with “modern luxuries,” such as
“two refrigerators, [a] double gas stove… [and] a Bryant gas heat system.”22
Although professional African Americans in the District had the distinct pleasure of owning their homes, black Washingtonians were more likely than their white neighbors to rent during the Depression. According to the Census, 24 percent of D.C.’s
African-American citizens were fortunate enough to call themselves homeowners in
1930, while 42 percent of the city’s white residents were able to maintain their mortgages.23 Black Washingtonians also paid exorbitant prices to lease cramped quarters
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 21 Ronald M. Johnson, “Ledroit Park: Premier Black Community,” in Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital, ed. Kathryn Schneider Smith (Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, Inc., 1988), 140.
22 Grace E. Payne, “My Family History,” 20 May 1946, Folder 1, Box 131-89, Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
23 Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Housing, Volume II, Part 2, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 455, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm ! 171 or poorly maintained apartment buildings, alley dwellings and row houses even though many were low-wage earners who toiled in the domestic sphere and personal service trades.24 Leroy A. Halbert, Research Director for D.C.’s Emergency Relief Division, conducted a survey in the early 1930s to understand the living conditions of poor blacks and whites in the nation’s capital. Halbert determined that rents in the District’s “slum sections” were “45 percent higher than [they were] in other [U.S.] cities.” He added that many of Washington’s working-class families were forced to live in overcrowded, unsanitary buildings that had been “condemned by the health authorities” for lacking
“adequate toilets” and updated “facilities for light and heat.”25
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (accessed 12/18/2008). In 1940, the picture was a little bleaker for all Washingtonians: while 19% of the area’s “nonwhite” homes were owner-occupied, 33% of the city’s white populace owned or were still purchasing their dwellings. Also note that the rates of homeownership were higher for Washingtonians than they were for Chicago’s populace. In 1930, 32% of Chicago’s “white” dwellings were owner- occupied, and 10% of city’s “nonwhite” citizens were homeowners. By 1940, 25% of Chicago’s white populace lived in owner-occupied dwellings, while 7% of city’s nonwhites owned their residences. Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Housing, Volume II, Part 2, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), 455, 763, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
24 Of the 64,453 black Washingtonians, aged 10 and over, who were gainfully employed in the 1920s, 10% held white-collar jobs; 21% were listed as skilled or semi-skilled workers in the manufacturing, mechanical and transportation industries; and 69% worked as laborers or domestics. See Fourteenth Census of the United States, Compendium, District of Columbia (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1924), 22-25, www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1920.htm (accessed 7/21/2008); and E. Franklin Frazier, “Occupational Classes Among Negroes in Cities,” American Journal of Sociology 35:5 (1930): 723. Also note that the 1930 Census reported that about 48 percent of the District’s black labor force held jobs in domestic and personal service. See Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930, Population, Volume III, Part 1, (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 388, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1930.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
25 “Rents Held High in Washington Slum Sections,” Washington Post, August 21, 1934. In 1933, journalists affiliated with the Washington Tribune reported that poor Washingtonians paid “more than 50 percent of their income” to live in low-quality, unsanitary housing (“Survey of Housing Here Shows Deplorable Conditions,” Washington Tribune, January 6, 1933). According to historian Kelly Quinn, “In the mid-1930s, Washington offered African-American working-class families limited options with respect to affordable, decent shelter in rental units. Many paid dear prices for rooms in overcrowded, dilapidated housing stock; they also paid excessive rates for the cost of heat, light, and refrigeration” (Kelly Anne Quinn, “Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, A New Deal Housing Program in Washington, D.C.,” [Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2007], 27).
! 172 Moreover, D.C. residents of varied backgrounds often defined the living spaces that were available to African-American renters as intolerable places that produced bad health and delinquency. Washingtonians were, of course, not alone in thinking that impoverished settings caused degeneracy and sickness. Researchers, journalists, social service organizations and ordinary citizens across the U.S. regularly claimed that environment played a key role in determining behavior and well-being.26 Like
Progressive reformers had done decades earlier, government administrators and other professionals focused much of their attention on the city’s “slums” during the economic crisis because they believed these communities were impediments to raising upstanding families and building civil society. Months before the stock market crash, sociologist
William Jones proclaimed that there was a “surprisingly close relationship between the morbidity, mortality, and criminal conduct of Negroes in cities and their bad housing.”
For Jones, “the poorest and least resourceful sections” of Washington’s African-
American populace lived in back alleys, which cultivated and attracted a “certain kind of retrograde (backwards or rebellious) Negro…[who] did not wish to measure up to the white cultural standard” or refused to assimilate into mainstream society.27 The only way to effectively deal with the alley resident, claimed Jones, was to clear the slums and replace them with new buildings. An updated, clean environment would purportedly
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 26 “Squalor And Grandeur,” Washington Post, January 8, 1934; “Crime Fostered By Bad Housing,” Washington Post, June 3, 1934; “Desperadoes Breed in Slums: New York City Survey Shows,” Washington Post, July 31, 1934; “Bad Housing Breeds Disease And Crime, Expert Declares,” Washington Post, January 21, 1935; Isabel Vickers, Blue Ridge Summit, PA, “Crime and Slums,” Washington Post, June 5, 1936; “Children Gone Wrong,” New York Times, October 3, 1936; “NAACP Supports Wagner Housing Bill in Senate,” The Chicago Defender, May 2, 1936; “Afro-Readers Say: Better Housing Needed,” Baltimore Afro-American, August 21, 1937; “Find Low Wages, Slums Are Breeders of Crime,” The Chicago Defender, January 14, 1939.
27 Jones, Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 25-26, 40-41.
! 173 “benefit…the entire [capital] city” because it would transform a shiftless underclass into productive citizens or encourage underprivileged blacks to behave more like the middle class by displacing and forcing them to move to more “stable” sections inside and outside city limits.28
Years after the Jones study was circulated, black architect and Howard University professor Hilyard Robinson publicly declared that alleys in the U.S. were havens for wards of the state who threatened neighborhood stability and countered community- building activities. Robinson also claimed that America’s slum dwellers were noticeably different from those he observed in Europe. The European alley residents possessed a sense of “tradition” and civic pride and lived in a “rather charming quality of picturesque squalor,” asserted Robinson, which helped to attract tourist traffic and dollars. On the contrary, he continued, alleys in the United States were occupied by a “very large number of very poor colored people, and a few white people” who had become a “burden on the public” because they were diseased transients who needed constant assistance and monitoring from social, religious and government agencies.29 By this, Robinson suggested that middle-class residents of the District wasted their money, time and effort to reform the city’s underclass populations who supposedly refused to amend their unruly behavior or could not do so because they were morally, mentally and physically incapacitated by their unsavory environment. Robinson further intimated that the only way that Washington could remove its onerous slum dwelling population was by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Ibid., 52-55.
29 “Europe’s Alleys Unlike Ours,” The Afro-American, Capital Edition, October 8, 1932.
! 174 transforming the city’s alley hovels into visually cohesive, European villages that housed industrious working-class people.30
Like Jones and Robinson, John Ihlder - the Director of D.C.’s Alley Dwelling
Authority (ADA) or the nation’s first Housing Authority - thought that slums were taxing to the people who resided there and the larger city. And throughout the Depression,
Ihlder worked to accomplish the goals of the ADA, which were “to rid Washington of its inhabited alleys” and “provide housing for” low-income residents who were unable to pay market rate prices for decent shelter.31 He also agreed that a modernized alley environment could create functional alley families that would help cultivate morally upright children who worked to preserve American society. In a press release or a speech he prepared for city officials titled, “The Family’s Part in Better Housing,” Ihlder attempted to persuade his audience that ramshackle alley homes should be abolished because there was a strong link between the “character of…people” and “the character of the house.” While Ihlder admitted that it was not definitive if a poorly maintained home had a deleterious effect on the individual, he was rather certain that an improved, well- ordered and sanitary “type of dwelling” could positively influence or “raise the standards” of its inhabitants.32
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 30 According to historian Kelly Quinn, Hilyard Robinson was greatly influenced by Europe’s modernist housing movement, which championed the idea that a state-sponsored, low-rise, garden-styled apartment community was the most affordable, humane, and architecturally appropriate way to house poor people in the early twentieth century. See Kelly Anne Quinn, “Making Modern Homes,” 91-122.
31 John Ihlder, “Accomplishment of The Alley Dwelling Authority,” Speeches, Statements, and Related Records, 1935 – 1945, Records of John Ihlder, Box No. 1, A-C, Folder: Accomplishments of the ADA as of 6-24-36, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
32 John Ihlder, “The Family’s Part in Better Housing,” Speeches, Statements, and Related Records, 1935 – 1945, Records of John Ihlder, Box No. 2, C-G, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, National Archives, Washington, D.C. ! 175 Throughout the 1930s, the District’s newspapers reported that racially designated areas of the city with a high concentration of alley dwellings spread tuberculosis that supposedly compromised the health and prosperity of the entire D.C. populace. Although the Afro-American attempted to debunk health officials claim that the T.B. death rate was highest in the city’s Northwest black communities, newspapermen concurred with the
District Tuberculosis Association’s classification of Shaw’s precincts 2 and 13 (where blacks made up more than half of the population) as the centers of “concentrated misery and disease – the capital’s tuberculosis sore spot[s].”33 Relying on Jacob Riis’s characterization of New York’s slums at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, black journalists described the alleys in Precinct 2 as the wards “where the other half live[d].”34
Alley dwellers who subsisted next to prominent African-American citizens were deemed hazardous to their more fortunate neighbors and the larger city. The “stench” from the alley was used as a rhetorical device to play into the prevalent view that homes of the underprivileged were filthy places that produced nauseous fumes and other affronts that interfered with the comfort and everyday functioning of the black professional class.35
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 33 According to the Afro-American, the District Tuberculosis Association reported that the “greatest prevalence of tuberculosis” was found in Precincts 2 and 13, in the area bounded by Rhode Island avenue, 7th street, New York avenue, and North Capitol street N.W. or what is currently known as the U street corridor/Logan Circle/Shaw district (“T.B. Death Rate Is Highest in Precincts 4 and 5, Chart Shows,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, February 22, 1936. Also note that the Census reported that blacks made up 68% or 42,484 of the 62,824 people who lived in Precinct 2, the area bordered by S, 15th, K and North Capital streets N.W. In Precinct 13, the area bounded by S, North Capital, Euclid/Michigan and Rock Creek Park, blacks made up 57% or 34,095 of the 60,316 people who resided there. See Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940, Population, Volume II, 969, http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm (accessed 12/18/2008).
34 The Afro-American reported that Washington, D.C.’s “other half lived” in the most dangerous slum, which was located in Precinct 2 and bounded by North Capitol, M street, New Jersey avenue, and K street N.W. See “Where the Other Half Lives,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 11, 1936.
35 “Stench Time,” Washington Tribune, June 1, 1935.
! 176 Washington Post newspapermen went even farther by claiming that the “Negro” alley population caused a spike in the city’s overall tuberculosis cases, which may have damaged the image or standing of the nation’s capital. Citing findings from Dr. T. F.
Murphy, chief of the Census Bureau’s vital statistics division, reporters relayed that infected African-American slum dwellers exposed white Washingtonians to T.B., placing
D.C. as the leader in tuberculosis cases of twelve cities surveyed by health officials.36
Alleys were not the only targets of those who desired to reform the city’s large black working class. Street front buildings that accommodated African Americans also received their fair amount of negative coverage. The District’s press frequently provided accounts of domestic disputes that occurred inside and around boarding homes, apartment buildings, single-family dwellings, and commercial buildings located in Shaw and other
“Negro” sections of the city. Black homes were depicted as perpetual war zones; they were characterized as sites of chaos and unrest. According to newspapers, African-
American men and women who lived in two- and three-story row houses on 6th, 6 ! and I streets northwest stabbed, shot and beat significant others and perceived rivals with iron pipes and other weapons because of irreconcilable differences or suspected love affairs.37
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 36 “Tuberculosis Toll Blamed On D.C. Alleys,” Washington Post, February 7, 1934.
37 The Tribune reported that Wilbur Briscoe shot and killed Jesse Wood at his home on 1234 Sixth street, N.W.; The 1928 Sanborn Insurance Map shows Wood’s home as a three-story, semi-attached framed dwelling that sat between a similar three-story attached framed unit and the Mt. Zion Baptist Church. See “Married Lover Seeking Revenge Kills Wrong Man,” Washington Tribune, January 20, 1933 and Digital Sanborn Maps 1867 -1970, Washington, DC 1927-1960, Vol. 1, 1928 - Nov. 1959, Sheet 72, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. The Afro-American told of Wallace Lewis who attacked his former lover Mary Bias with an iron pipe. At the time of the incident, Bias resided at 1229 Six and One Half street, N.W. The Sanborn Map records 6 ! Place, N.W. as a two-story attached dwelling that was located a block west of 6th street, N.W. See “Taximan Tells Of Killing His Jilted Rival,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 14, 1933 and Digital Sanborn Maps 1867 -1970, Washington, DC 1927-1960, Vol. 1, 1928 - Nov. 1959, Sheet 72, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress. The Afro-American also announced that Miss Mary Rankin was fatally stabbed in front of 816 G street, N.W. and that William Archer fatally shot William Bean in front of Archer’s home located at 2418 I street, N.W. See “Girl Killed ! 177 Headlines of street fights, muggings, seemingly random acts of violence or “black on black” crimes that took place in the Shaw district on 23rd, 14th, V, and North Capitol streets, N.W. further conveyed that racially marked areas in the city were dark places, brimming with terror.38 African Americans were additionally charged with robbing unsuspecting citizens inside and outside their communities and organizing “burglary rings” or hoarding stolen merchandise in their homes. In the late 1930s, the Afro-
American told of a police raid that took place in Precinct 2 at 255 K street, N.W., which netted 17 black men and women, and confiscated “5,000 worth of loot” that was allegedly stolen from “homes in various parts of the northwest quadrant of the city.”39
The Post gave a similar report, which stated that 125 seemingly vagrant or unemployed colored men were “snared in a series of poolroom raids” on 14th, U and 7 streets, the main arteries of Washington’s African-American commercial district, because of the rash of alleged “pocketbook snatchings” that took place in the city’s northwest section.40
With reports of “Doubling Up” or five to six people living in one and two room apartments, black journalists asserted that congested living conditions facilitated bloody
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In Street Fight,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, January 28, 1933 and “Alleged Killer Held For Action Of Grand Jury,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 4, 1933. Note that the Sanborn Map does not list 816 G street but does show that the 800 block of G street northwest was heavily populated with offices and commercial buildings. The Sanborn Map described 2418 I street, N.W. as a three-story attached framed dwelling that was located approximately one block south of the inhabited alley known as Snows Court. See Digital Sanborn Maps 1867 -1970, Washington, DC 1927-1960, Vol. 1, 1928 - Nov. 1959, Sheets 15 & 42, Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.
38 “Man Is Slain in Street Fight; Another Sought,” Washington Post, January 11, 1932; “Pistol Report Ends Chase of Suspects,” Washington Tribune, January 20, 1933; “Week End Fights Send Several To Hospital,” Washington Tribune, February 3, 1933; and “Man Is Slain in Street Fight; Killer Escapes,” Washington Post, July 10, 1933.
39 “Police Arrest 17 In Alleged Burglary Ring,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 4, 1933.
40 “Raiders Seize 125 Vagrants In Crime Drive,” Washington Post, February 26, 1938. Also see “Four Taxi Drivers Held Up In Night by Pair With Rifle,” Washington Post, February 12, 1930.
! 178 conflicts and other crimes.41 However, it is likely that joblessness and underemployment fueled overcrowding, theft, tensions and brutal encounters in the District’s black communities. Because many African Americans were in dire straits during the
Depression, reformers spent much of their time focusing on improving the economic status and home life of black teens and young adults with the hope of preventing them from engaging in illicit behavior. In 1937, D.C.’s Public Child-Welfare Program stressed the need to modify or improve the “economic conditions,…ensuing bad housing and demoralizing environment” in Black Washington in order to reduce the unusually high percentage of “delinquency, dependency, and neglect among colored children.”42
Charles Gorman, chairman of a Y.M.C.A. sponsored conference titled, “Strategy of
Youth in a Changing Society,” delivered a presentation in the same year to discuss the importance of organizing youth groups to help “alleviate the acute problem of juvenile delinquency [among the colored population] in the District of Columbia.” Participants and speakers affiliated with the event agreed that the “lack of employment opportunities resulting in demoralizing environment and bad housing” was a prime reason that there were “twice as many colored delinquents as there were white.”43
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 41 “Doubling Up’ On Increase in Capital Houses,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 18, 1933.
42 Emma O. Lundberg, The Public Child-Welfare Program in the District of Columbia (Bureau Publication No. 240, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1937), 8-9, Social and Civic Associations, Folder 2, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
43 Miss Alyce Hill, “Findings of Conference on Juvenile Delinquency, Presentation of Problem: Charles Gorman,” Report of Youth Assembly (Twelfth Street Branch, Y.M.C.A., D.C., December 4 and 4, 1937), Institutions-Recreational, Folder 18, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 179 Associating African Americans with vice or depravity was a common occurrence in Depression-era Washington because many in the nation’s capital believed that black homes were tantamount with disrepute or were harbors for despicable dealings because of their disorderly appearance. Sociologist Franklin Frazier and his researchers examined various neighborhood tracts in the District of Columbia to presumably identify where
African Americans resided, the types of houses, businesses and recreational amenities they had in their communities, and the views that whites held about their black neighbors.
However, researchers also regularly based or judged the character of the people they observed on the housing stock they inhabited. When describing parcels in a black neighborhood located in Southwest, an unnamed surveyor maintained that the community’s worn real estate was illustrative of the compromised or debased character of the area’s residents. Specifically, this observer noted that in a “lower residential section of Southwest Washington,…the houses near F street…became more shabby and delapidated [sic] and the residents, also.”44 In 1939, white Washingtonian Paul Merton submitted a letter to the Washington Post, which urged blacks to cleanup the “colored sections” of the city because he believed that the “physical appearance” and seediness of
African-American districts were indicative of the low status and degeneracy of the Black
Race. If African Americans curbed the “petty crime,…filthy expectorating on the sidewalks,…[and] the vile and vulgar language” that flourished in their communities,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 44 Neighborhood, survey by anonymous, circa 1930s, Notecards, Folder 4, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also see surveys conducted for Tracts 1, 2, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, and 86 in: Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 180 Merton insisted, they could shed stereotypes about innate black inferiority and criminality as well as attain full equality and acceptance from whites.45
Harry S. Wender, president of the Southwest Citizens Association (SWCA), discussed the recklessness that he noticed or associated with the African-American section of his district. Wender was a resident of Sternberg Courts, a privately-owned housing project that accommodated upwardly mobile whites in Southwest. He was also appointed president of the SWCA in 1937, shortly after his two-year stint as secretary of the organization and delegate for Washington’s racially segregated Federation of Citizens
Associations (FCA), which was made up of white community groups that appealed to government officials to help them rehabilitate D.C.’s neighborhoods.46 To inform members of the SWCA or the FCA of the threats that whites faced in Southwest during the Depression, Wender prepared a brief titled, “Southwest Washington: Social Facts as of 1937.” In this document, Wender claimed that, outside of traffic violation, “Negroes” made up 65 percent of the arrests in Southwest, and 62 percent (or 124) of the 200 T.B. and other health-related cases treated by the area’s hospital.47 Wender further maintained, in a letter he wrote to Frank B. Marks, head of the District’s Animal Pound, that unruly and inconsiderate “Negro residents in the neighborhood” allowed their
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 45 “Race and Poverty: A Reader’s Reflection On The Anderson Recital,” Washington Post, April 16, 1939.
46 Christine Sadler, “Head of Southwest Association Presses for Alley Clearance, New Area School, S…,” Washington Post, December 29, 1937. Historian Marya McQuirter asserts that sometime after 1921, African-Americans in DC founded the Federation of Civic Association to distinguish their federation from the white-only Federation of Citizens Association. McQuirter also states that “as a result, many, but not all, of the black neighborhood associations established after the Federation of Civic Association was formed used the term ‘civic’ in their names” (McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 139-140).
47 “Southwest Washington: Social Facts as of 1937,” Correspondence, etc, 1937, Folder SWCA-A, Container 1, MS 379, Harry S. Wender Papers, 1921-1965, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
! 181 “unlicensed” dogs to freely roam throughout the community during the night. The main problem with these wild beasts, according to Wender, was that they disturbed the peace and comfort of law-abiding Southwesterners who lived in Sternberg Courts and Jefferson
Terrace, the Alley Dwelling Authority’s low-income housing project that was constructed for working-class white families in 1938. In order to solve the neighborhood’s insidious dog problem, Wender requested that Mr. Marks “stage a few hunting expeditions” to cleanse the area of its dangerous elements and to apparently warn African-American residents that whites affiliated with the SWCA were willing to maim or kill to maintain their community’s standards.48
A number of African Americans who resided in predominately black neighborhoods complained that disreputable people in their communities could have a negative impact on their families, particularly their children. To ward off potential injury, parents used their homes as places of refuge; they turned inward or isolated themselves from “undesirable” neighbors so that they could protect themselves from verbal or physical harassment and cultivate proper citizenship. When E. Franklin Frazier and his team of researchers asked Mrs. Coleman, a Washingtonian who lived in a “slum section” of Southwest, if she were satisfied with her home, Mrs. Coleman stated that she
“preferred to live in Southeast” because the environment in her neighborhood “was so bad.” She continued by disclosing that her “biggest trouble…was fighting against outside influence,” like juvenile delinquents who would attempt to persuade her children
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 48 Harry S. Wender, President of Southwest Citizens Association, to Mr. Frank B. Marks, District Pound Master, S. Capitol and Eye streets, S.W., 22 September 1938, Correspondence, etc, July – Dec 1938, Folder SWCA-A, Container 1, MS 379, Harry S. Wender Papers, 1921-1965, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
! 182 to question authority, disobey rules or “sprout wrong ideas.”49 By Southeast, Mrs.
Coleman evidently meant that relocating to Anacostia would help protect her children against pernicious threats. Anacostia was technically a part of D.C. proper during the
1930s, but it contained a man-made park and reservoir as well as a sizeable working-class population who lived in modest homes set in country or rural surroundings.50 It is unlikely that Mrs. Coleman was referring to “Southeast” located near the city’s Navy
Yard because various black Washingtonians saw this area as a dangerous, noisy slum district that had the potential to adversely affect its inhabitants. Mrs. Douglas - an
African American who lived with her family at 326 L street, S.E., about two blocks north of the Navy Yard - thought that the young men in her community would no doubt damage her son William if she allowed him to freely associate with them. According to
Mrs. Douglas, she kept William “home most of the time” because she wanted to shield him from the boys “around her neighborhood,” whom she claimed would steal and “act so bad” or use “more cuss words in three seconds than she could think of all day when she was their age.”51
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 49 Mrs. Coleman, interview by Anonymous, circa 1930s, Notecards, Folder 4, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
50 Howard Gillette states that before World War II, “Uniontown (now Old Anacostia) and Barry’s Farm/Hillsdale (now Barry Farms) carried on in the manner of small towns, surrounded by open space. Many [black and white] residents kept gardens on their large lots and sold produce in central Washington. Although a few prominent Washingtonians lived in the area, such as D.C. Budget Director Walter L. Fowler as well as Frederick Douglass, most residents worked at blue-collar or laboring jobs” (Howard Gillette, Jr., “Old Anacostia: Washington’s First Suburb,” in Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital, ed. Kathryn Schneider Smith [Northridge, CA: Windsor Publications, Inc., 1988], 100).
51 Mrs. Douglas and her son lived at 326 L street, S.E. See William Douglas, interview by Anonymous, circa 1930s, Interviews, Folder 9, Box 131-112, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also note that the anonymous interviewer described Mrs. Douglas’s neighborhood as “a slum area in the Southeast” that was ! 183 Blacks who could afford to own or rent in relatively staid, middle-class sections of the District thought that their communities were being invaded by transient working- class folk who needed to be educated on the merits of displaying civic responsibility and maintaining neighborhood assets. Mrs. Velma Williams, president of the Pleasant Plains
Civic Association – one of the largest black citizens groups in D.C. during the 1930s – was adamant that “laborers and other types of [sordid] people” brought unsanitary living habits to her community, which was located near Howard University and more or less bounded by 6th street, Euclid avenue, 13th and Harvard streets, N.W. As she suggested, poor blacks (and their network of associates) were dirty, lazy and immoral neighbors who let “their property rundown, [threw] paper and trash in the streets and [did] many other things below the standard of their community.” She further communicated that whites were somewhat justified in their use of restrictive covenants that barred African
Americans when she daringly admitted that she understood why “[white] people hat[ed] to see a Negro move into their neighborhood.”52
Like Mrs. Williams, other elite black Washingtonians denounced and distanced themselves from working-class African Americans who migrated to their communities because they believed that association with those who did not share their values would inevitably ruin their reputations or jeopardize their social status. For instance, Howard
University students recorded “family histories” for E. Franklin Frazier’s sociology course to document and analyze their family dynamics and community relations. In so doing, a !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “near the Navy Yard and an [unusual amount] of noise.” S/he added that “without exception, all of the houses in the block [were] in need of major repairs.”
52 Mrs. Velma Williams, interview by T.E. Davis, 13 September 1938, Interviews, Folder 7, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 184 few revealed that they thought their neighborhoods were negatively altered or deteriorating because of the influx of people of questionable character. Grayer Williams reported that his “family was the first Negro family” to integrate the formerly “white” block located on 13th street N.W. in the 1910s. He added that over the 18 years (from
1916 to 1934) that he lived in his home, he saw his “neighborhood change from one of the best Negro sections in the northwest to a…mediocre neighborhood with all types of people residing within.”53 Anacostia resident James G. Banks flatly admitted that his father, a Howard Law graduate and a supervisor in the Treasury Department’s
Procurement Division, did not allow him to “mingle with certain kids” in his immediate surroundings because in the 1920s and 1930s his “neighborhood was gradually becoming occupied by Southern [black] migrants who were not at all desirable associates.” African-
American migrants were objectionable, according to James, because they did not hold his father’s middle-class status and values or were too poor to “dress comfortably” and too crude to “maintain a well-balanced home” that would supposedly offer the best setting to properly rear well-behaved children.54 Another student named Mary Alice Ward wrote that she lived with her mother and father in Southwest from 1930 to 1946. To convey that she thought her family was part of the black middle class, Alice disclosed that both her parents were “employed by the government” and maintained a “seven room red brick house.” She further attempted to establish elite status by claiming that the “majority of
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 53 Grayer Williams, “The Family Tree,” circa 1930s, Folder 9, Box 131-91, Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
54 James G. Banks, “Family History,” circa 1940s, Folder 9, Box 131-85, Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 185 the persons” in her community were of “a lower economic standard,” and as a result, their “values differed from those” of her family. To ensure that her family would
“maintain a certain social level,” according to Alice, she and her parents isolated themselves from their working-class neighbors, and occupied a “sort of preferred position” by participating in reputable activities sponsored by schools, churches and civic agencies.55
Not all upwardly mobile African Americans necessarily took a disparaging attitude toward their less fortunate neighbors. For some, uppity elites were the problem or obstructions to building community because of their discriminating attitudes and inability to accept those of different socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds. Howard
University student Phyllis Simons stated that before she and her siblings “were recognized for [their] scholastic ability,” the “professional people, teachers and government employees” in her Ledroit Park community excluded or looked down on her family even though they lived in a “four story structure similar to many others around it.”
Phyllis also implied that part of the difficulty that “snooty” blacks may have had with her family was that her striving, working-class dad took on “two jobs” to ensure that his wife and children lived in a “fashionable” city neighborhood; yet, he could barely maintain his home, which was decorated in a relaxed, outdated or unacceptable style or “had the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 55 Mary Alice Ward, “The Family History,” 5 June 1946, Folder 29, Box 131-90, Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 186 appearance of being lived in,” not like the interiors that “came out of fashion magazines.”56
Renovating entire homes and converting interiors into show places were two of the many strategies that middle-class black Washingtonians used to create modern living quarters and neighborhoods with market appeal. D.C.’s black and white press ran ads and special features that encouraged homeowners to apply for Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) loans, ranging from $100.00 to $2000.00, so that they could help stimulate the economy or shore-up the nation’s building industries by “modernizing” kitchens and baths, painting woodwork, and insulating floors and walls.57 African-
American journalists and designers sold the notion that “renovizing” could be affordable and valuable because it would increase one’s standing in the community and the overall city.58
In 1933, architect Hilyard Robinson won honorable mention for an interior elevation he submitted to the “Renovize Washington” campaign. Robinson’s scheme featured an informal parlor that was visually buttressed by two large windows and a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 56 Phyllis Simons, “Study of A Family,” circa 1930s or 1940s, Folder 5, Box 131-90, Family Histories, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
57 See for example: “Billions Aid For Homes Is Requested By President: Message Outlines Plan to Revive Building Industry,” Washington Post, May 15, 1934; “Home Owners Get New Credit to Aid Repairs,” Washington Post, July 15, 1934; “Housing Plan Seen as Aiding U.S. Recovery,” Washington Post, September 30, 1934; “Modern Bathroom Has Plenty of Towel Racks,” Washington Post, January 6, 1935; Display Ad: “Home Improvements Loans from $100 to $2,000,” Washington Post, January 7, 1935; Ad: “Help Unemployment at Home by Repairing, Remodeling,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, February 16, 1935; and “Home Renovizing News: Heavy Volume of Home Improvements Anticipated in District as Spring Nears,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 2, 1935.
58 Jefferson Johnson, “Home Renovizing News: To Make Your Home Look Better Is To Increase Its Worth,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 9, 1935; and Jefferson Johnson, “Home Renovizing News: Have You A Dark, Damp Cellar?” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 16, 1935.
! 187 central fireplace, flanked by two identical wing back chairs, and a floor and table lamp.
To add a dash of “color and pattern” to this rather familiar domestic arrangement,
Robinson collaborated with Howard University Arts instructor Lois M. Jones to provide a floral panel above the hearth’s mantelpiece and to install matching ceiling-to-floor length drapes at the windows, further stabilizing the space at its core and edges. Robinson’s
“Interior Treatment” elucidated for African-American homeowners, his primary audience, how they could spruce up their living rooms by purchasing new furnishings and decorative fabrics for $350.00 or less and arranging them in ways that would illustrate that they possessed the panache associated with the middle and upper classes. To underscore this particular point, Robinson told the Afro-American’s readers that his elevation illustrated how living rooms in aging houses could be renovated
“economically” and in “simple good taste.” Robinson was also sure to let potential clients know that they could transform their homes into fashionable, upscale showrooms if they hired his design team. Specifically, he highlighted the fact that his interior decorator,
Lois M. Jones, was a graduate of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and had regularly sold her “fabric designs” to “nationally known” textile manufacturers in New York City and
Washington, D.C.59
Along with demonstrating how refurbished real estate could enhance status, the black press occasionally presented actual examples of well-appointed homes to celebrate successful African Americans and to reinforce bourgeois ideas of good taste. In the year
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 59 “Keep in Repair: Announcing Washington’s ‘Renovizing’ Campaign!” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 3, 1933. Also see “Experts Register With House Plans,” Washington Post, May 2, 1933; “Keep in Repair: Announcing Washington’s ‘Renovizing’ Campaign!” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 6, 1933; “Justement Wins Renovizing Design,” Washington Post, May 12, 1933; and “Keep in Repair: Announcing Washington’s ‘Renovizing’ Campaign!” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 27, 1933.
! 188 of the “Renovize Washington” contest, the Tribune offered interior views of the
“Suburban Home of Mr. and Mrs. John H. Wilson,” located in the Anacostia community.
Although the Wilsons’ home was within D.C.’s city limits, it was an apt representation of the American suburban ideal primarily because of its colonial styled, semicircular fanlight windows that adorned the main façade and provided ample light for the interior spaces.60 The couple’s home was also suburban or domestic in orientation because a brick fireplace framed its living room, which was fashionably decorated with drapery, a sofa, floral rugs, and a floor lamp crowned with a dainty shade. A shimmering chandelier gracefully centered the dining area, which held a buffet stand and a dining table that was topped with a doily and a flower-filled vase.61 Another example of the American suburban ideal was found in the “charming, colonial dwelling of Mr. and Mrs. J. Wesley
Austin” from Southwest. The Austins’ house was photographed in Flash, a black-owned magazine produced sporadically throughout the Depression. Valerie Parks - author of the
Flash column titled, “The Femininescope” - began her tour of the Southwest Colonial by calling out the “grand, old knocker” at an “immaculately white entrance” door. These details were intended to show readers that the Austins had the wherewithal to enshrine the face of their home in traditional design motifs that were also supposed markers of their “distinctive” taste and ability to make their house attractive and inviting. Parker
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60 Based on the interior view of the Wilson home, the dwelling appears to be a Colonial that was built in the 1920s or earlier. See Photo Display, Washington Tribune, January 6, 1933. Also note that historian Janet Hutchinson argues that by the 1920s, the suburban ideal in the United States “was a single-family detached dwelling, often a two-story bungalow or cottage with Colonial Revival elements.” Janet Hutchinson, “Shaping Housing and Enhancing Consumption: Hoover’s Interwar Housing Policy,” in From Tenements to The Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America, ed. John F. Bauman, etal (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 83.
61 Photo Display, Washington Tribune, January 6, 1933.
! 189 also gave the particulars of a “delightfully green and white” kitchen that was “compactly arranged” and equipped with uniquely crafted pieces, such as a “drop leaf” table that folded up and fronted as a door when it was not in service. She did so to mainly prove to her audience that the Austins were “practical” and “clever” middle-class homeowners, who appropriately followed Better Homes and Gardens’ design advice to install “built- ins” that would economically and “neatly” retrofit cramped living spaces for multiple uses.62
Leading blacks also promoted slum clearance and high-quality shelter for the city’s entire African-American populace because they believed that “good” housing would make “good” citizens. In 1936, the Washington Committee on Housing staged a
“Conference on Better Housing Among Negroes” that was principally geared toward black and white professionals who were affiliated with government agencies, social service organizations, neighborhood civic and citizens associations, schools, and real estate and design industries. Robert C. Weaver - the Department of the Interior’s Advisor on Negro Affairs - gave an address titled, “The Significance of Housing,” to impress upon his audience that the “individual [was] affected greatly by his environment.”
Weaver also communicated that there was a great need for concerned citizens in the nation’s capital to design and support a “successful housing program” that would provide low-cost, modern living quarters for D.C.’s poor residents. He further told his audience that overcrowding and blight in African-American neighborhoods were caused by racial prejudice and speculative real estate practices to cast doubt on a prevailing view that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 62 Valerie Parks, “The Femininescope,” Flash: Weekly Newspicture Magazine October 18, 1937, 16, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
! 190 blacks lived in squalid living conditions because they were naturally inferior or biologically inclined to do so.63 In his talk on the “Minimum Standards of Housing,” architect Hilyard Robinson gave practical information to help mostly middle-class
Washingtonians evaluate the condition of the real estate in their communities. According to Robinson, a suitable house was one that was situated in a neighborhood with adequate schools, transportation lines and “social centers, such as theatres, community centers and the like.” He added that a safe, healthy and respectable home had sanitary plumbing facilities, and was properly lighted, ventilated and spacious, with separate sleeping quarters for adults and children.64
From 1936 to 1938, journalists affiliated with the Afro-American sponsored
“Clean Block” drives to remind mostly ordinary blacks in D.C. to whitewash and paint steps, sidewalks and houses; pick up trash that had accumulated in the fall and winter; and to plant gardens and install flower boxes at windows to enhance the overall appearance of facades and yards.65 Reporters encouraged African-American adults and youth across the city to organize their neighbors to participate in the campaign by
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 63 Robert C. Weaver, “The Significance of Housing,” Report of the Conference on Better Housing Among Negroes, Held under the auspices of the Washington Committee on Housing at the Miner Teacher’s College, Washington, D.C., April 18, 1936, Folder 4, Container 1, MS 579, Washington Housing Association Records, 1935-1947, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
64 Hilyard R. Robinson, “Minimum Standards of Housing,” Report of the Conference on Better Housing Among Negroes, Held under the auspices of the Washington Committee on Housing at the Miner Teacher’s College, Washington, D.C., April 18, 1936, Folder 4, Container 1, MS 579, Washington Housing Association Records, 1935-1947, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
65 “Clean Block: Every Block A Clean Block, Flowers in Every Block,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 23, 1936; “Washington Joins Other Juniors in Clean Block Campaign,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 25, 1936; “33 Youngsters Start Cleaning Ahead of Time,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 1, 1936; Photo Display: “Clean Blockers in Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia Tidy Up Their Homes,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 21, 1937; and “Fourth Annual Clean Block Campaign Is on Its Way: Afro Gives $300 for Clean Blocks,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 30, 1938; Also see “The Garden Beautiful,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 11, 1938.
! 191 offering cash prizes and certificates of merits to those who were able to present the “best block” or the cleanest and most beautiful street to judges of the event. In order to persuade potential participants of “Clean Block” that it was virtuous to keep their neighborhoods orderly and sanitary, the Afro-American also equated the run-down home and trash-laden neighborhood with improvidence and low socioeconomic class, while linking the clean, redecorated dwelling and community with renewal, worth, thrift and respectability. In a piece called, “The Backyard Test,” black newspapermen warned readers that junky yards revealed to lenders that a person was not credit worthy and validated a prevailing view that Negroes were bad neighbors who decreased property values. According to reporters, “credit men” or loan officers in banks often looked for
“evidences of character,” such as tidy and well-maintained living quarters and workplaces, to determine if a businessman, homeowner or renter was a good investment and a dependable customer who repaid debts in a timely manner.66
The Clean Block project was ultimately meant to prove that ordinary African
Americans were community-minded and interested in increasing the values of their apartments, houses and neighborhoods. The initiative was also an easy way for many to simply participate in a community-building activity as evidenced by the numerous newspaper images of seemingly eager and happy youth and adults who worked in groups to paint railings, clean windows, sweep sidewalks and streets, and plant flowers around their homes.67 But media coverage of “Clean Block” also revealed that some blacks were
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 66 Graphic: “The Backyard Test,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 18, 1938.
67 Photo Display: “This Is The Way We Clean Our Blocks So Early in the Morning,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 25, 1936; Photo Display: “Bucket, Broom, Soap and Water to Clean Up a Block,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 25, 1936; Photo Display: “Washington Children Sign Up for Clean ! 192 not deeply invested in the program because those areas that were exemplary clean blocks during the spring and summer were filled with refuse much of the remaining part of the year. In a photo display titled, “Shabbiness Fades As Clean-Up Drives Opens,” before and after shots were presented of a Northwest alley to demonstrate that industrious youth associated with the Junior Board of Commerce worked diligently to remove massive amounts of trash that had piled up over months.68 While reporters communicated that there was insufficient garbage collection in Washington’s economically distressed wards, they also suggested that alley dwellers neglected to do their fair share to keep their environs sanitary and healthy.
To further remedy the problem of the disorganized neighborhood, elite African
Americans formed and joined civic organizations to prove that they were responsible neighbors who were willing to collaborate with one another to develop well-functioning urban spaces. Some of the black-run community groups that were active in Washington,
D.C. in the 1930s included the Ivy City, Southwest, and Brookland civic associations.69
These groups were among the ten or more neighborhood clubs that made up the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Block Campaign,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 1, 1936; and Photo Display: Clean Blockers in Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia Tidy Up Their Homes,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 21, 1937.
68 Photo Display: “Shabbiness Fades As Clean-Up Drives Opens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 23, 1938.
69 “With Civic Associations: No. 5 - Eastland Gardens Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 19, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 6 – Marshall Heights,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 26, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 7 - Brookland Civic Association,” Afro- American, Capital Edition, April 2, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 8 – Kingman Park Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 9, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 9 – Ivy City Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 16, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 10 – Capital View Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 23, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 11 – Rock Creek Citizens Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 7, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 12 – Bennings-Glendale-Oakland Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 14, 1938; and “With Civic Associations: No. 12 – Southwest Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 21, 1938.,
! 193 Federation of Civic Associations, an umbrella organization that was established in 1921 by upwardly mobile black Washingtonians who were denied membership in the District’s white-run Federation of Citizens Associations.70 Members of the Southwest Civic
Association (SWC) were chiefly black property owners who were very much interested in protecting their investments and class status by making “Southwest Washington a better place in which to live.” The organization convened its first meeting in 1913, and under the auspices of the Federation of Civic Associations, it was successful in securing recreational facilities; sponsoring a health survey for the community’s public school; and replacing the fire station and equipment for the No. 4 Engine Company, the only “all colored unit” in Washington.71 There were approximately seventy African-American homeowners affiliated with the Brookland Civic Association (BCA) during the 1930s.
The organization was established in 1935 and after the group joined the Federation of
Civic Associations a year later, it was able to convince city officials to repair streets throughout Brookland so as to maintain the area’s “urban beauty.” Members of the BCA also focused their attention on issues that impacted the entire city when they attempted to establish a Washington-based Urban League and protested in support of “local suffrage” or voting rights for all of D.C.’s residents during the Depression.72
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 70 “With Civic Associations: No. 9 – Ivy City Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 16, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 12 – Southwest Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 21, 1938; “With Civic Associations: No. 7 - Brookland Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 2, 1938; and McQuirter, “Claiming the City,” 140-141.
71 “With Civic Associations: No. 12 – Southwest Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 21, 1938.
72 “With Civic Associations: No. 7 - Brookland Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 2, 1938.
! 194 The insistence on keeping neighborhoods residential or warding off potentially dangerous commercial development was also paramount to elite black Washingtonians because many believed that unscrupulous businesses would contaminate a reputable district. African Americans associated with the Pleasant Plains Civic Group opposed establishments that they thought would attract unwanted foot or car traffic to their neighborhood. The organization’s president, Velma Williams, told Frazier researcher
T.E. Davis that her group’s “most successful fight” in the late 1930s was preventing one of its community drug stores from obtaining a liquor license.73 For a significant number of D.C.’s propertied residents, black or white, the ideal location for commerce was at the edge or within walking distance of residential sections. A respectable, organized and secure neighborhood, according to some leading Washingtonians, was one that was largely comprised of well-maintained yards and owner-occupied residential buildings; and, a disorderly district or “slum” contained businesses like poolrooms, gambling houses, beer parlors, and bordellos that housed and attracted unsavory people, activity or trade that would undoubtedly decrease real estate values and negatively impact impressionable youth.74 In 1929, sociologist William Jones maintained that “a large
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 73 Mrs. Velma Williams, interview by T.E. Davis, 13 September 1938, Interviews, Folder 7, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also see “Civic Association Opposes Issuing of Liquor Licenses,” Washington Tribune, January 19, 1935.
74 Many leading whites and blacks in the District believed that the city’s unruly and unsightly slum areas produced delinquency and sickness because they were the designated sites for disreputable business transactions and activity. In 1929, African-American sociologist William Jones suggested that whites adopted restrictive covenants that barred Africans Americans from their residential enclaves because whites associated blacks with behaviors and conditions that existed in vice or slum districts, such as crime, noise, drunkenness, and unsanitary living habits; Jones also argued that whites had problems with accepting African Americans as neighbors because blacks were, in reality, culturally different from whites. See Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 70-77. In 1933, members of the Kenilworth Citizens Association, a community group that represented white citizens in the Northeast section of the District, adopted a resolution to oppose the “granting of license[s]” to those who desired to “sell beer within” their ! 195 number of Negro communities” in the nation’s capital were associated with social unrest, crime, sickness and economic decline during the early twentieth century because they were situated in or dangerously close to red-light districts.75 The solution, for Jones, was to clean up vice districts in Washington’s racially marked wards and/or relocate African
Americans to more stable residential tracts in and outside the city.
Moving to new suburban-styled or single-family housing subdivisions designed for “colored” was an option for a select number of blacks who could not withstand living near questionable commercial houses, rowdy neighbors or littered yards and streets that were located in or near the city’s urban core. Washington’s white builders and developers ran ads throughout the 1930s to persuade African Americans to invest in new residential tracts named Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens, and DePriest Village-Capital
View, all located off Bennings Road in the Northeast section of the city (see map on page
220).76 Businessmen like Charles D. Sager, the builder for Kingman Park; Howard S.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! jurisdiction. The main culprit for some residents was the beer parlor, which they claimed would undoubtedly wield “certain harmful influences” on the young people in their area (“Street And Alley Projects Offered: Kenilworth Citizens List 16 Improvements for Place in Works Program,” Newspaper Clipping, circa 1933, Folder 3, MS 24, Kenilworth Citizens Association Records, 1908-1933, 1937, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C). In the late 1930s, WPA writer Sterling Brown wrote the following: Washington’s alley slums “are a ‘no man’s land’ for any stranger, Negro or white. Knives flash and pistols bark to terminate crap games and domestic brawls. Rasped nerves and short ugly tempers are not soothed by heaving drinking of liquor which is as likely to be ‘canned heat’ as corn whiskey…The ‘numbers’ game, an American form of gambling, is popular in the alleys as it is on the avenues. The money that dribbles away to the number ‘baron’ and ‘runner’ could well be used for bread, milk, and shoes.” Sterling Brown, “The Negro in Washington,” in The American Negro: His History and Literature, ed. William Loren Katz (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1969), 84.
75 Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 85.
76 Ad: “Kingman Park Homes,” Washington Tribune, June 30, 1933; Ad: “Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1935; Ad: “Ideal Home Site: Kingman Park Home,” Washington Tribune, June 15, 1935; Ad: Now Open, Model Home: Kingman Park,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 19, 1939; Ad: “Buy a Home and Lot in Beautiful, Sightly Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 13, 1936 & June 20, 1936; Ad: “Buy in Beautiful Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 18, 1936; Ad: “Health, Wealth: DePriest Village and Capital View Homes,” Washington Tribune, July 8, 1932; Ad: “Happy Homes are built in DePriest Village, Capital View,” ! 196 Gott, Eastland Gardens’ developer; and Clarence A. O’Brien, one of the owners of
DePriest Village-Capital View, were among the small number of whites across the nation who offered attractive financing options to help African Americans relocate to “colored” enclaves that were constructed at the fringe of U.S. cities between WWI and WWII.77
Historian Andrew Wiese has argued that it was sound business strategy for elite whites to lend to working- and middle-class blacks, enabling them to make affordable down payments and monthly installments to purchase homes in suburban settings. However, according to Wiese, it was also a way for the American building and banking industries to maintain racial segregation in housing while simultaneously appeasing blacks who wanted to escape urban ghettos and avoid interfacing with prejudiced whites, who used a dizzying array of discriminatory tactics to stop the supposed tide of “Negro” invasion into their neighborhoods.78
In 1929, Charles Sager established Kingman Park - bordered by H street-
Bennings road, the Anacostia River, East Capitol and 15th streets, N.E., - because he !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Washington Tribune, June 24, 1932; Ad: “Live In DePriest Village, Capital View: Washington’s Most Exclusive Colored Home Community,” Washington Tribune, June 17, 1932; Ad: “DePriest Village: ‘The City of Mansions,’” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932. Ad: “Individuality Is Shown In The Modern Home: DePriest Village, Capital View,” Washington Tribune, July 1, 1932; and Ad: “For Sale: Capital View-DePriest Village,” Washington Tribune, November 25, 1932.
77 Ad: “Kingman Park: Fifth Anniversary,” Washington Tribune, July 27 1933; Mr. Charles Sager, Developer of Kingman Park and his Superintendent of Building Construction, interview by R.J.B., November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Ad: “Buy a Home and Lot In Beautiful, Sightly Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 13, 1936; Courtland Milloy, “Eastland Gardens, A Lily of The Valley: Where Life is about homes and gardens and pride,” Washington Post, November 21, 1982; Victoria Churchville, “Eastland Gardens Blooms Amid Blight,” Washington Post, November 28, 1987; Ad: “De Priest Village, Capital View: Washington’s Most Exclusive Colored Home Community,” Washington Tribune, January 22, 1932; “Realty Firm Will Build 50 Homes in City,” Washington Post, October 14, 1934; and Ad: “You Enjoy Both A ‘Townhouse’ and a Countryhome When You Live In Capital View,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 14, 1938.
78 Andrew Wiese, “Black Housing, White Finance: African American Housing and Home Ownership in Evanston, Illinois, before 1940,” Journal of Social History 33.2 (Winter 1999), 429-460.
! 197 reportedly “realized [that] there was a definite need for a place for the colored to live.”
Sager was certain that blacks “would much rather live together” in segregated modern communities, “than meet all the opposition of…whites” who vehemently objected to living in integrated settings.79 And based on one African American’s account, it seems that Sager was correct in thinking that there was an appreciable market for
Washingtonians who preferred to dwell in newly built, black-only residential zones located near the District line. Howard University student Geraldine B. Alves resided in an aging city home in “the middle of a [predominantly mixed-income] white community,” which was vexing to her family from the 1920s through the 1930s primarily because she and her siblings “felt the sting of race hatred much earlier than [black] children” who were insulated “in Negro neighborhoods.” According to Geraldine, her parents would not allow her to socialize with either the disreputable “poor whites” who lived on her block or the rowdy “Negro children who lived around the corner” in “one of those terrible short streets,” an alley or a derisive connotation for a lesser-known street that was hidden behind more prominent thoroughfares that usually ran in front of the residences of the elite.80 She added that her mother advised her to “buy a house in a
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 79 Mr. Charles Sager, Developer of Kingman Park and his Superintendent of Building Construction, interview by R.J.B., November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
80 Geraldine B. Alves, “Family History,” 7 July 1944, Family Histories, Folder 2, Box 131-85, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. Also note that William Jones stated that black Washingtonians who were “particularly concerned about their social position in the city tend[ed] to avoid short streets…because they [were] not sufficiently well known to give the desired dignity and status.” Jones added that “the short street [did] not give as great an incentive to display as [did] the well-known long street, the homes of which [were] more before the eyes of the public.” He further claimed that “a number of” black Washingtonians disclosed “that they would not live on short streets, either because they have to be apologized for, or are likely to be confused – in the minds of persons who are not acquainted with the city - with the alleys” (Jones, The Housing of Negroes in Washington, DC, 87-88). ! 198 Negro community in the suburbs” when she could do so because old homes in urban centers were too costly to maintain, and a middle-class colored neighborhood located at the urban fringe was a better option for African Americans who could not stand to live among working-class blacks and bigoted whites of any economic background.81
To appeal to those who thought that congested, mixed-income spaces in older city districts were anathema to their sensibilities and potentially threatening to their children,
Sager posted ads in Washington’s black press that portrayed Kingman Park as a
“convenient in-town community with extensive park and school surroundings that furnish[ed] suburban advantages.”82 He also catered to renters who equated homeownership with economic stability and respectability when he placed announcements that touted that owning in Kingman Park would solve the “family man’s problem of furnishing [the] best housing for [the] least cost” and urged his audience not to “waste money for rent that [could] be used” to purchase in a community of
“discriminating people.”83 Sager ultimately sold the idea that blacks could become citizens through homeownership, instead of remaining dependents who looked to landlords, government agencies and others to continuously provide shelter for them when he included the following Theodore Roosevelt excerpt in one of his ads: “every person who invests in a well-selected home in a growing section of a prosperous community
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 81 Geraldine B. Alves, “Family History,” 7 July 1944, Family Histories, Folder 2, Box 131-85, The Negro Family in the U.S., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
82 Ad: Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1933.
83 Ad: Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1933 and Ad: “Kingman Park Homes,” Washington Tribune, June 30, 1933.
! 199 adopts the way to independence.”84 By linking homeownership with self-sufficiency and status, Sager tapped into an entrenched American belief that the property owner was socially, economically and morally superior to the renter or apartment dweller. He further implied that blacks could purchase citizenship or demonstrate that they were upstanding residents of the nation who deserved equal access and treatment under the law because they, like many middle-class whites, opted to raise their families in single-family housing set in “extensive park” surroundings.85
By 1938, Kingman Park was home to “300 satisfied” African-American customers who were described by a Frazier researcher as well-dressed “middle-class
Negroes” with “spic and span” dwellings and yards, and “inexpensive…Fords and
Chevrolets.”86 The Kingman homes could be had for about $6,000.00, with a $200.00 to
$600.00 down payment, and monthly installments of $39.50 or more; and, all were
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 84 Sager was quoting Theodore Roosevelt who at some point in his career as New York Governor or President of the U.S. stated the following: “Every person who invests in well-selected real state in a growing section of a prosperous community adopts the surest and safest method of becoming independent, for real estate is the basis of wealth” (“Kingman Park Homes,” Washington Tribune, June 30, 1933). Also see William H. Ten Haken, “Real Estate as a Marketable Commodity,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 148.1 (1930), 19-25.
85 Kenneth Jackson argues that since the mid 1800s, middle-class whites have equated homeownership with decency, success, permanency, and stability so as to differentiate themselves from the transitory urban renter. Jackson also states that upwardly mobile whites have historically expressed their citizenship or supposed exalted moral, social and economic status in the U.S. through homeownership of single-family dwellings enclosed in ornamental yards. See Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 45-72. Barbara Mooney asserts that shortly after the Civil War, many African Americans embraced the idea that the modest single-family dwelling surrounded by a fine garden was a symbol of order, cleanliness and industry and a measure of black assimilation into white society. See Mooney, “The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage,” 48-67.
86 Mr. Charles Sager, Developer of Kingman Park and his Superintendent of Building Construction, interview by R.J.B., November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Kingman Park, survey by R.J.B, November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131- 111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; and Ad: “Ideal Home Sites: Kingman Park Home,” Washington Tribune, June 15, 1935.
! 200 equipped with tiled bath rooms, tubs and showers, large closets, automatic refrigerators, heat systems, paneled club rooms, built-in cabinets and sinks, garages and concrete porches.87 Some came with recreation rooms so that families could opt to entertain in a relaxed setting instead of formal living rooms, and children could have an adequate play space while indoors.88 Most of the “Sager-Built-Homes” were attached two-story brick rowhouses with front and back yards, all of which made the community appear rather urban in form. But Sager was sure to remind blacks, who looked to escape dilapidated city districts, that they would be investing in “Quality-Lifetime Construction” in one of
D.C.’s “finest residential sections.”89
In the late 1930s, Kingman Park also had an active civic organization that was founded by a D.C. teacher named Gertrude Cope in 1929. Sometime shortly after its formation, the Kingman Park Civic Association (KPCA) joined the Federation of Civic
Associations, and its first successes as a group were securing “better light facilities, greatly improved streets, and an improvement of the [neighborhood’s] sanitary conditions.” Members of the KPCA also convinced the D.C. Board of Education to build three new schools in their area during the midst of the economic downturn by showing that the majority of Kingman Park’s residents were gainfully-employed, tax-paying homeowners, who apparently believed that modern educational facilities provided the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 87 Kingman Park, survey by R.J.B, November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Ad: “Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1933; Ad: “Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, July 27, 1933; and Ad: “Now Open,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 19, 1939.
88 Ad: “Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1933.
89 Ad: “Now Open,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 19, 1939; and Ad: “”In Beautiful Kingman Park,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, September 16, 1939.
! 201 proper teaching environment to mold children into respectable adults. And in 1933, city officials gave KPCA “a silver cup” to commemorate the neighborhood’s win for “the best kept lawns in the George Washington Bicentennial Garden Contest.”90 In as little a nine years, the KPCA had effectively garnered enough sway to organize government lobbying and beautification efforts within the Kingman Park subdivision. The civic association had also wielded sufficient influence in the nation’s capital to make its neighborhood the thriving “in-town” community that Charles Sager spoke of in the many ads he posted in the city’s black newspapers during the 1930s. The KPCA was able to do so, in part, because it was comprised of propertied African Americans who embraced, and put into practice, the idea that investing in or simply making a “prosperous” community with “suburban advantages” was one of the most effective ways to illustrate citizenship in the U.S.91
Kingman Park was essentially advertised as a black community throughout the
Great Depression. Yet its residents lived fairly close to whites who also flocked to the
District’s Northeast quadrant to escape densely settled urban centers and to show that they were middle-class homeowners. According to one of Frazier’s neighborhood surveyors, an unidentified “white building concern” constructed a section of housing in the Kingman Park subdivision that was “fully protected by a [racial] covenant.”
Furthermore, noted this surveyor, these newly built “white” dwellings cost about the same as the Sager homes, and they were located on “E Street, N.E.” or the block that
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 90 “With Civic Associations: No. 8 – Kingman Park Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 9, 1938.
91 Ad: “Homes: Kingman Park,” Washington Tribune, April 7, 1933; and Ad: “Kingman Park Homes,” Washington Tribune, June 30, 1933.
! 202 abutted the “Negro” section of the development.92 From these observations, it appears that some upwardly mobile whites were willing to live near African Americans as long as they could maintain strict lines delineating “colored” housing from their own. The presence of segregated divisions within Kingman Park, however, suggest that Sager or some other builder may have helped to fuel racial tensions in D.C.’s Northeast quadrant.
And, these conditions would have made this area less idyllic or suburban for elite black
Washingtonians who desired to flee the urban core’s mixed-raced spaces and avoid harassment from hostile whites.
Like Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens was founded in 1929, and it included much of the land bordered by the Anacostia River, Douglas street and Eastern avenue, N.E. (see map on page 220). The subdivision’s developer, Howard Gott, sold lots to African
Americans for $400.00 or more with a $25.00 down payment and a monthly note of
$10.00; Gott also built “handsome new brick” homes for his clients who were encouraged to select from ready-made plans and mortgage their houses as if they were paying
“monthly rent.”93 To give his development a mark of distinction, Gott told prospective homeowners that a typical Eastland house came with “unusual” features such as: six large rooms, hardwood floors, a tiled bath with shower, a cement porch, hot water heat,
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 92 Kingman Park, survey by R.J.B, November 1938, Community, Folder 20, Box 131-111, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
93 Ad: “Buy a Home and Lot In Beautiful, Sightly Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 13, 1936 & June 20, 1936; Ad: “Buy in Beautiful Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 18, 1936; Courtland Milloy, “Eastland Gardens, A Lily of The Valley: Where Life is about homes and gardens and pride,” Washington Post, November 21, 1982; and Victoria Churchville, “Eastland Gardens Blooms Amid Blight,” Washington Post, November 28, 1987.
! 203 an electric kitchen, an attic and a cellar with stationary tubs and a lavatory.94 To attract those who equated good taste and status with single-family dwellings set in expansive yards, Gott described Eastland Gardens as “a subdivision henceforth of brick bungalows,” and a “beautiful, sightly” community that offered ample space for a “nice home…, surrounded with roses and a rock garden.”95 In so doing, Gott essentially presented the Eastland bungalow as a “tasty cottage” encircled in a beautifully landscaped lawn, which architectural historian Barbara Mooney argues, has been a symbol of sobriety, thrift, good breeding and refinement for many blacks or a way for them to assimilate into the larger white American society since at least the mid 1800s.96
But from its inception, Eastland Gardens was not the suburban oasis that was commonly promoted by Howard Gott. African Americans who moved to the neighborhood during the Depression had to collaborate to transform a “rural, dismal place with no obvious signs of improvement” into a desirable community that they believed would maintain and attract “good citizens.”97 In 1930, Veterans Bureau employee Walter L. Robinson established the Eastland Gardens Civic Association
(EGCA) to make the subdivision convenient, comfortable and safe for the residents who lived there. In the same year, the EGCA joined the Federation of Civic Associations.
This move gave the organization the political clout it needed to persuade city officials to
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 94 Ad: “Buy in Beautiful Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, July 18, 1936.
95 Ad: “Buy a Home and Lot In Beautiful, Sightly Eastland Gardens,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, June 13, 1936 & June 20, 1936.
96 Mooney, “The Comfortable Tasty Framed Cottage,” 48-67.
97 “With Civic Associations: No. 5 – Eastland Gardens Civic Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 19, 1938.
! 204 institute regular trash pick up, provide better mail delivery, install more street lights and transportation stops, and build an underpass so that neighborhood youth could walk beneath elevated railroad tracks on their way to school.98 Throughout the 1930s, homeowners in Eastland Gardens worked diligently to create a respectable neighborhood through protests and lobbying efforts; they also attempted to show the larger public that
Eastland was the perfect container for cultivating the domestic ideal, particularly dutiful women who looked after children and maintained tidy, sanitary homes for the entire family. In photos taken by Addison Scurlock, a cheery woman is captured in front of an unfinished Eastland bungalow holding an infant while greeting a prospective neighbor or admiring her future community, and a mother and/or wife is pictured standing over a gas range in a well-planned kitchen decked with built-in cabinets and sink, decorative china, containers for storage, stainless steel pots, a wall clock and an electric wall fan.99 These scenes of a female tending to a child and another cooking in an orderly interior illustrate that suburbia was the chosen site for some black Washingtonians who desired to exhibit economic mobility. The Scurlock-generated photographs also show that there were
African Americans who, like whites, looked to create environments that they believed would preserve their families.
Located south of Eastland Gardens and bounded roughly by Bennings Road, East
Capitol, 53rd and Blaine streets, N.E., DePriest Village-Capital View was planned in the
1920s and 1930s for African-American professionals who desired to live in a fashionable !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 98 Ibid.
99 Eastland Gardens, cellulose acetate photonegative, no date, but seems like circa 1930s, 1940s or 1950s, contained in Black and White film negatives (series 4), Box 688.04.89, Scurlock Studio Records, Manuscripts and Photographs, Archives Center, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.
! 205 locale on the outskirts of the city (see map on page 220). The owners of the Capital View
Realty Company, the builder for the subdivision, were whites who hired black real estate brokers to make the pitch to would be homeowners.100 Salesmen publicly referred to
DePriest Village as the “The City of Mansions” to hook those who cared about living in a prestigious neighborhood that carried the namesake of Oscar DePriest, a property owner in the famed Ledroit Park and the first African American, outside the South, to serve in the U.S. Congress in the early twentieth century.101 They also described DePriest as a neighborhood with “executive qualities” and “rigid restrictions” to reinforce the fact that only a select few would be allowed the opportunity to purchase in the development.102
Frequently, realtors marketed DePriest Village-Capital View as “Washington’s Most
Exclusive Colored Home Community” that offered wide paved streets, shade trees, and access to water, sewer, gas, electricity, schools, churches and stores to ensure elite blacks that they were investing in a viable middle-class suburb that would provide comfort, health, safety and future wealth to its inhabitants.103
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 100 “Real Estate Firm Fights Paving Levy,” Washington Post, Feb 22, 1927; Ad: “DePriest Village: ‘The City of Mansions,’” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932; “Thomas C.R. Bragg of the Capital View Realty Company’s Sale Force,” Washington Tribune, June 17, 1932; Ad: “Holiday Greetings,” Washington Tribune, December 23, 1932; and “Realty Firm Will Build 50 Homes in City,” Washington Post, October 14, 1934.
101 Ad: “DePriest Village: The City of Mansions,” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932; and Ledroit Park Historic District (The Ledroit Park Historical Society), planning.dc.gov/planning/frames.asp?doc=/planning/lib/planning/ preservation/brochures/ledroit.pdf (accessed 2/19/2009).
102 Ad: “DePriest Village: The City of Mansions,” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932.
103 Ad: “De Priest Village, Capital View,” Washington Tribune, January 22, 1932; February 12, 1932, April 22, 1932; Ad: “Your Home in DePriest Village, Capital View,” Washington Tribune, June 10, 1932; Ad: “Live in DePriest Village-Capital View,” Washington Tribune, June 17, 1932; Ad: “Happy Homes,” Washington Tribune, June 24, 1932; and Ad: “Health is Wealth,” Washington Tribune, July 8, 1932.
! 206 In 1933, Capital View Realty promised $100.00 to thirty black women who participated in Washington’s Annual Cooking School, which would be “credited toward the purchase of a home or as down payment for a home site (or lot)” in DePriest Village-
Capital View.104 The black-run Tribune and the Washington Gas Light Company staged the Cooking School and Home Economics Demonstration Classes to remind African-
American homemakers of the value of installing modern conveniences in their kitchens so that they could easily and safely prepare healthy foods for their families. The Cooking
School was held at the illustrious Murray Casino, located on U street in the Shaw district, and it was supervised by Miss Ruth Sheldon, Director of the Washington Gas Light
Company’s Home Service Department. To attract participation in the annual event, free baskets of food, washing machines, electric cookers, gas ranges, and chinaware sets were given to housewives who apparently eagerly flocked to the sessions by the droves so that they could learn all there was to know about modern house keeping.105 The cooking demonstrations designed for black women were similar to those that Washington Gas
Light Company organized for white homemakers who lived in the nation’s capital during the Depression. In fact, Ruth Sheldon held food preparation exhibitions around the city in 1933 to display her culinary skills and to give prizes to white females so that they would attend her events and purchase the latest gas appliances.106 The marketing of real
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 104 Ad: “Own A Home In Capital View or DePriest Village,” Washington Tribune, January 13, 1933.
105 Ad: “The Second Annual Cooking School,” Washington Tribune, January 6, 1933, January 20, 1933; Ad: “The First All-Electric Cool Cooking School,” Washington Tribune, June 15, 1935; “Tribune Cooking School,” Washington Tribune, July 6, 1935; and Anonymous, “Visited school by accident, but glad she attended,” Washington Tribune, July 6, 1935.
106 Display Ad 8: “Important News for the Ladies! A Style Show…A Sale…and a Modern Gas Range Free!” Washington Post, June 2, 1933; and “Gas Devices For Home Seen in All Forms,” Washington Post, ! 207 estate to African-American women was, however, the one key difference between the cooking shows that were geared toward white and black audiences. Not only did black realtors and journalists collaborate with a white home economic specialist to ensure that caregivers were astute in modern house keeping standards, they also worked in concert with white professionals to help upwardly mobile black Washingtonians partake in the
American dream of owning a home in a suburban setting.
Capital View Realty also recruited African Americans to their subdivision by giving them the option to either build their own homes or buy pre-planned, semi-attached townhouses and two- to three-story detached country villas that cost between $4950.00 and $6950.00, with a $250.00 to $500.00 down payment and a monthly note of $47.50 to
$55.00.107 The real estate company also used the District’s black press to showcase one of its model homes: the three-story Tudor Revival of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Kelson, located at 4912 Blaine street, N.E. Brokers included a photo and a list of the Kelson property’s interior features - such as oil heat, electric refrigeration, large closets, a breakfast alcove and sun parlor, and tiled baths - to demonstrate that DePriest Village-
Capital View was a “distinctly modern community” and the “most progressive development for colored people” in Washington, D.C.108
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! October 22, 1933.
107 Ad: “De Priest Village-Capital View,” Washington Tribune, January 22, 1932; Ad: “For Sale: Capital View-DePriest Village,” Washington Tribune, November 25, 1932; Ad: “Now is the Time of all times To Buy Your Home!” Washington Tribune, March 24, 1933; Ad: “Invest,” Washington Tribune, June 2, 1933; Ad: “Capital View-DePriest Village,” Washington Tribune, July 27, 1935; Ad: “See the Pearless Furnished Model Home,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 9, 1936; and Ad: “New Homes in Capital View,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, August 21, 1937.
108 “DePriest Village Home: Local Suburb Beautiful Place,” Washington Tribune, June 10, 1932; and Ad: “A Home Like This,” Washington Tribune, February 17, 1933.
! 208 Further, realtors offered Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loans to clients, which allowed them to purchase “new [semi-attached] stone, steel [framed], [and] brick homes” that were equipped with oak floors, kitchens with built-in cabinets and electric clocks, tiled baths with tubs and showers, hot water heaters and large basements that were suitable for recreation rooms.109 Capital View Realty most likely accessed FHA financing because it convinced New Deal policy makers and the banking industry that federal housing dollars would be used to expand an elite black subdivision that was off limits to the working classes or racial and ethnic minorities who refused to or simply could not display middle-class sensibilities when interacting in public or through home maintenance. That is to say, developers built FHA approved homes because they successfully illustrated that DePriest Village-Capital View was an “exclusive” suburb, not an aging inner-city district that housed “inharmonious racial and nationality groups” who purportedly decreased property values because of their so-called objectionable behavior and unsanitary or unsightly living habits.110
Moreover, some of the African Americans who financed their Capital View homes with FHA loans may have embraced the idea that they lived in a restrictive neighborhood that barred those who they believed did not share their class status or
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 109 Ad: “New Stone, Steel Brick Homes in Capital View,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 26, 1938; Ad: “Now Showing New Stone, Steel, Brick Homes: Capital View,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 30, 1938; and Ad: “You Enjoy Both A ‘Townhouse’ and a Countryhome,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 14, 1938.
110 Ad: “De Priest Village, Capital View,” Washington Tribune, January 22, 1932; February 12, 1932, April 22, 1932; Ad: “DePriest Village: The City of Mansions,” Washington Tribune, April 8, 1932; Also note that Kevin Gotham points out that the 1934 Housing Act did not allow the FHA to lend to homeowners who lived in mixed-raced communities in the inner city because New Deal policy makers believed that providing mortgages to certain “racial and nationality groups” was a bad credit risk (Kevin Fox Gotham, “Racialization and the State: The Housing Act of 1934 and the Creation of the Federal Housing Administration,” Sociological Perspectives 43.2 [Summer 2000], 291-317).
! 209 cultural values. According to O.W. McDonald, the president of the Capital View
Citizens Association (CVCA), the principal goal of his organization in the 1930s was to protect the community from “undesirables.” The group also sponsored “Better Gardens” contests to remind residents to clean and beautify their surroundings, and during the winter holiday season, the club organized neighbors to “decorate the exterior of their properties in the Christmas motif” to affect the appearance of a “Yuletide fairyland.”111
The activities of the citizens’ organization were largely planned to maintain a sense of order and propriety in an upscale black settlement. Homeowners were very much vested in protecting their real estate and making sure that their neighborhood was closed, or at least hostile, to those who did not abide by community standards. However, the seemingly random violence that many middle-class Americans associated with urban zones and the laboring classes occasionally found its way to Washington’s exclusive black suburb. For instance, the District’s black press headlined that the Mills Brothers, famous African-American radio singers, had been “mobbed in [a] fight” that took place at the dwelling of Mrs. Williams, a DePriest resident and a Howard University employee.
Journalists specifically reported that Carroll Swann of Deanwood, a working-class community located in Northeast D.C., attacked the Mills Brothers because he believed that they “paid too much attention” to one of Mrs. Williams’s sisters.” This action caused the Mills Brothers to retaliate by tackling Swann and giving him “a good beating.” After the brawl, Mrs. Williams’s home was “completely wrecked,” the Mills
Brothers had “bruised heads and bodies,” and Carroll Swann suffered a “black eye, and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 111 “With Civic Association: No. 10 - Capital View Association,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, April 23, 1938.
! 210 [a] possible fracture of the right arm.” Conscientious community members no doubt perceived this altercation as a stain on their development. And as a result, they attempted to distance themselves from the debacle and reinstate their suburb’s exalted image when they reputedly told the Tribune, “none of the participants” in the fight “were members of the DePriest Village colony.” 112
As residents of DePriest Village-Capital View struggled to insulate themselves from “undesirables” or rowdy working-class populations, D.C. government officials attempted to address the housing needs of low-income blacks by relocating them to modern quarters in predominately African-American neighborhoods, like those situated in the District’s Northeast quadrant. Washington’s way to deal with the “slum” was clearing it and rebuilding improved homes and public facilities in its stead or moving former inhabitants to better lodging in other parts of the city. Langston Terrace, located at Bennings road and 21st street in Northeast, D.C., was one of the largest public housing projects that the New Deal’s Public Works Administration constructed for African
Americans during the Depression (see map on page 220). Howard University professor
Hilyard Robinson was the chief architect of the complex, which contained 32 two-story row houses, 84 flats and 158 apartments that surrounded an exterior courtyard.
Construction for the project began in 1936, and approximately two years later, the first occupants moved into the garden styled apartments nestled in the “distant green hills
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 112 “Mills Bros. Mobbed in Fight: Famous Radio Artists Beaten in Fight at DePriest Village Party,” Washington Tribune, January 20, 1933.
! 211 across [from] the Anacostia river.”113 The year it opened, the development housed 274 families, including single mothers with children (about 6 percent of Langston’s total populace) and married couples with dependents.114 Before moving to Langston Terrace, almost half of the families paid $20.00 to $50.00 per month to occupy one room apartments in dilapidated buildings located in the inner city. At Langston, tenants paid considerably less, $19.50 to $31.20, to reside in units that contained a bathroom, a living room, at least one bedroom and a kitchen that was equipped with major appliances and built-in cabinets and sink.115 Residents were also able to enjoy many of the development’s unique exterior features, such as small porches with circular railings at apartment entrances and an ornamental frieze that adorns the northern face of the central courtyard. This frieze - designed by white sculptor Daniel Olney and titled, The Progress of the Negro Race - was installed to represent the mostly rural, working-class African
Americans who moved to Langston to access socioeconomic mobility by living in affordable, high-quality housing. According to urban historian Kelly Quinn, the frieze adequately “commemorate[d] the past and celebrate[d] the future” when it was
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 113 “Langston a Planned Neighborhood,” Washington Housing Association Annual Report, 1938, Folder: In the Shadow of the Capital, Box No. 11, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, 1935-1949, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
114 “274 Families Move into U.S. Housing Project,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, May 7, 1938; Kelly Anne Quinn, “Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, A New Deal Housing Program in Washington, D.C.,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2007), 169.
115 “Langston a Planned Neighborhood,” Washington Housing Association Annual Report, 1938, Folder: In the Shadow of the Capital, Box No. 11, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, 1935-1949, National Archives, Washington, D.C; Urban historian Kelly Quinn states that of the 274 rental units in Langston, there were 19 “kitchenless” apartments during the 1930s (Quinn, “Making Modern Homes,” 159, 157-164).
! 212 commissioned in the 1930s because it presents African-American life from slavery to freedom, through Reconstruction and the Great Migration.116
Because Langston Terrace was located so close to Kingman Park, its residents worked to establish strong ties with the area’s African-American homeowners by showing that they shared similar ideas around home and civic responsibility. Within the first year of occupancy, residents formed a viable tenant’s organization that distributed a newsletter titled, Langston News, and they organized social and recreational events, such as reading clubs, and handicraft and dance classes, to create a sense of neighborhood cohesion. In the late 1930s, resident J.R. McIver hyperbolically proclaimed that twenty- one organizations had been established in the community, and they all aimed to “better” or improve conditions in “Langston, the [larger Washington area] and the world.”117
Another tenant named Norwood C. Williams poetically waxed that he and other
Langstonians had “experienced a fuller life in complete homes” because of their new community. Williams added that the move to quality affordable housing had “inspired a spirit of neighborliness” that would eventually unite Langston’s residents “into an entity
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 116 Some of the frieze’s images include six stooped figures that labor on a Southern plantation or a farm and three figures that work with factory tools in Northern industrial settings. See Quinn, “Making Modern Homes,” 147-149. Also see the following for a photo and brief description of the “sculptured frieze”: “Langston a Planned Neighborhood,” Washington Housing Association Annual Report, 1938, Folder: In the Shadow of the Capital, Box No. 11, Record Group 302, Records of the National Capital Housing Authority, 1935-1949, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
117 Langston News, Anniversary Issue, May 4, 1939, Folder 7, MS 597, Washington Housing Association Records, 1935-1947, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.; Also note that I have been unable to determine the exact number of clubs and organizations that Langston’s tenants formed during the Depression. According to Kelly Quinn, residents did devote a considerable amount of time and effort engaging in community-building activities such as reading clubs, handicraft and dance classes and a Mother’s Club, many of which were sponsored and held at Langston’s public library. See Quinn, “Making Modern Homes,” 183-186.
! 213 with bonds so strong that through strength…all things [would] be possible.”118 Judging from opinions expressed by McIver and Williams, Langston Terrace residents appeared to take stock in the notion that improved housing gave them a new lease on life and a real opportunity to show that they were good citizens, committed to improving their own lives and overall conditions in the nation’s capital. And from all known accounts, Kingman
Park’s homeowners embraced their less fortunate neighbors who lived in public housing.
The Kingman Park Civic Association purchased advertising space in the Langston News to show economic and moral support. Kingman residents also encouraged Langstonians to attend their neighborhood meetings to presumably better understand and confront the issues that faced black residents in the Northeast and citywide.119
Working-class black suburbanites of Marshall Heights, however, did not receive the same treatment from their neighbors who resided in DePriest Village-Capital View.
When citizens of Marshall Heights asked to join the middle-class community in their bid for inclusion in the District’s Federation of Civic Organizations, the Capital View
Citizens Association (CVCA) denied the request because they apparently believed that
Marshall Heighters were not wealthy enough or did not share the same ideas around home maintenance and neighborhood beautification. According to Rev. James White, the president of the Marshall Heights Citizens Association (MHCA) in 1935, he was informed that the CVCA’s charter prohibited its members from forming political alliances or simply affiliating with those who owned or built homes “costing less than
$4,000.” And since most of the houses in Marshall Heights were priced “anywhere from !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 118 Langston News, Anniversary Issue, May 4, 1939, Folder 7, MS 597, Washington Housing Association Records, 1935-1947, Kiplinger Library, Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
119 ibid. ! 214 $50 up,” his working-class community was forced to create “its own citizens association” that was “separate…from any other group” so that its residents could solve their own
“distinctive problems.”120
The main issues that confronted Marshall Heighters during the Depression included lack of indoor plumbing, a dearth of streetlights and paved roads, and inadequate public transportation. While the community was established around the same time as Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens and Depriest Village-Capital View, most of the area’s inhabitants were skilled laborers and domestic servants who purchased plots at affordable rates and gradually built modest sized houses when they had expendable income (for location of Marshall Heights, see map on page 220). A Frazier surveyor claimed that “most of the homes” in Marshall Heights were “so tiny” that he could not understand “how a single person could live in one, let alone a large family.” This researcher also noticed that “land around the small box-like structures was highly cultivated,” suggesting that many of the community’s residents used their yards for small-scaled farming or subsistence gardening so that they could provide food for their families in times of need.121 For Marshall Heighters, erecting single-family houses on inexpensive land on the outskirts of Washington, D.C was more attractive and preferable than paying exorbitant rents to live in what they perceived as cramped, squalid or low quality apartments in urban centers. According to one resident, “it [paid] to live” in the suburbs because “for $30.00 a month,” a working-class black family “couldn’t get half !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 120 Florence M. Collins, “Marshall Heights Folk Wary of Any Commercial Invasion,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 2, 1935.
121 Marshall Heights, survey and interview by R.J.B., 22 August 1938, Interviews, Folder 2, Box 131-113, Negro Youth Study, Washington, D.C., Research Projects, E. Franklin Frazier Papers, Moorland Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
! 215 [as] much” space if they rented in a rooming house located in the city.122 Marshall
Heighters were similar to other poor blacks who lived in American suburbs during the early twentieth century. As historian Andrew Weise asserts, African Americans with little income created “rustic landscapes” at the edge of U.S. cities because they desired to fulfill their own “vision of suburb[ia],” which “emphasized domestic production, thrift, and family security, while exposing a lingering ambivalence about urban industrial life.”123
Although citizens of Marshall Heights understood their move to a semirural tract as a way for them to construct and own low cost shelter in a country-like setting and gain a semblance of economic stability, some affiliated with Washington’s elite saw their homes as a “shantytown” or a miserable slum district that had the potential to spread disease. In February 1935, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt toured Marshall Heights because she and other government officials were curious to know where “evicted” alley dwellers of Northwest and Southwest D.C. had “gone to live.” For Mrs. Roosevelt, the sheds and two-story houses that Marshall Heighters inhabited were “more undesirable” than the alley hovels that had been razed by the federal government, primarily because they were poorly constructed and had inadequate sewage lines.124 But Mrs. Little, a mother who lived in the community from 1932 to 1935, took issue with the First Lady’s characterization when interviewed by a reporter affiliated with the Afro-American. As
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 122 Ibid.
123 Andrew Weise, Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 78, 67-93.
124 “Mrs. Roosevelt Tells of Trip To Inspect Slum Clearance,” The Evening Star, February 4, 1935; and “Alley Homes Were Better, She Avers,” Washington Times, February 4, 1935.
! 216 Little told it, she and most of her neighbors “never lived in an alley,” and they freely choose to locate in Marshall Heights because “rents were too high in the city.” Little further stated that she and her husband “felt that [they] could acquire land cheap…[in suburbia], construct a temporary house and add to [their] comfort” as their “income permitted.” To show that Marshall Heights was a thriving community comprised of decent, hardworking folks, Little was also sure to let the public know that her family was
“not on relief,” and she maintained that many of her neighbors were active participants in the neighborhood’s “self-help cooperative groups.”125 The Afro-American spoke with other Marshall Heighters who, like Mrs. Little, objected to outsiders’ derisive depiction of their working-class suburb. These unnamed “citizens,” according to journalists, explicitly asserted that the “police and truant officers [did] not have much work in their community,” implying that they thought that behavior, not physical appearance, determined if an area was indeed a “shantytown.”126 Contrary to those who deemed
Marshall Heights a slum that housed disreputable people and activities, residents thought that their community provided industrious working-class black families the exceptional opportunity to own homes in country settings. Marshall Heighters also seemed to believe that they were generally better off or more independent than poor renters who looked to the private and public sectors to provide commodious shelter for them.
Throughout the Depression, black and white Washingtonians worked in tandem to marginalize and subsequently devalue African-American homes that were located in
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 125 “Marshall Heights Men’s Self-Help Project Dies, But Women’s Flourishes,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 9, 1935.
126 “Marshall Heights Folk Wary of Any Commercial Invasion,” Afro-American, Capital Edition, March 2, 1935. ! 217 aging urban districts because they were convinced that the disorderly, worn house and neighborhood symbolized illness, dependency and criminality. The move to newly built suburban-styled or single-family housing subdivisions that were constructed near the
District line also reveals that blacks of various backgrounds desired to leave racially marked areas of the center city so that they could attempt to shed the stigma associated with the slum and participate in the dream of owning a modern home set in green pastures. Residents of Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens and DePriest Village-Capital
View, for example, established civic groups to help them create elite black suburbs within D.C.’s city limits. They did so, to a large extent, because they embraced the middle-class “white” notion that owning a well-maintained dwelling surrounded by a manicured lawn was a distinctive marker of purity, respectability and status. Although homeowners in Marshall Heights could not afford to build or buy homes that resembled those in Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens or DePriest Village-Capital View, these working-class African Americans also looked toward suburban environs to help them achieve and display the socioeconomic mobility and moral rectitude that they felt were untenable if they remained in low-income urban areas.
Instead of building coalitions with fellow citizens in Washington’s inner-city wards, a number of D.C.’s African-American residents selected to distance themselves from those who they believed did not share their commitments to family, civic responsibility, home maintenance and beautification. Others opted to flee Washington’s core for new “colored” residential enclaves in suburban or semirural spaces so that they could buy into one of the most powerful symbols of American citizenship. But black
Washingtonians’ attempts to escape racially marked slums were never fully realized
! 218 because new “colored” subdivisions that were located close to the city’s edge often had to endure many of the same problems that residents confronted in inner-city districts. Some of the issues that plagued homeowners in Kingman Park, Eastland Gardens, DePriest
Village-Capital View and Marshall Heights included: poor sanitation or sewage drainage systems; dealing with bigoted whites who drew up restrictive covenants to segregate themselves from their black neighbors; facing prejudiced black professionals who refused to interact with the laboring classes in their district; and enduring the persistent view that
African-American communities, whether working- or middle-class, were somehow less valuable because they were structurally unsound and purportedly the main harbors for unsavory people and criminal activity.
! 219 ** Note that large numbers on map indicate tracts ! 220
Conclusion
The major thrust of this thesis has been to explain how commodity culture created a black consumer class that intentionally and inadvertently disenfranchised African
Americans through representation and practice. This project has also charted how the wayward black consumer reemerged as consumerism became the dominant lens by which
Americans evaluated their social, economic and political status. As early as the 1870s, moralistic white elites denounced the buying habits and leisure activities of immigrants and other working-class populations. By the 1910s and 1920s, however, middle-class whites increasingly turned their attention toward those within their social circles who had come to accept consumer culture as a “natural” way of life and a means to access and exhibit power.1 During the same time, there was a growing sentiment among prominent blacks that consumption (especially conspicuous consumption) would dismantle African-
American economic development and racial uplift strategies. While detailing what it meant to be a proper citizen, some of Washington, D.C.’s race leaders, in particular, helped to sustain a deep-rooted American perception that the Negro consumer was characteristically negligent and extravagant. But the concerns expressed by upwardly mobile blacks did not impede the tide of mass and conspicuous consumption in the capital city’s African-American districts. In fact, many black Washingtonians frequented white businesses, consumed products marketed by whites and/or sported luxuries to show
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875- 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
221 worth and challenge the nation’s racial and class norms. Yet by doing so, they also secured the stereotype of the degenerate Negro consumer.
The image of the errant black consumer did not fade after WWII, as Americans of various races, ethnicities and classes tended to agree that mass consumption was the most tenable path to citizenship or the most valid way to fulfill civic duty and show socioeconomic equality.2 For example, black nationalists like Carlos A. Cooks resuscitated the morally- bankrupt Negro consumer through speeches he gave in Harlem during the 1950s. Cooks was an ardent supporter of Marcus Garvey and promoted one of the basic tenets of his self-determination ideology – the “buy black” initiative. Shortly after Garvey’s death in 1940, Cooks established the African Nationalist Pioneer
Movement (ANPM), which was dedicated to “bringing about a progressive, dignified, cultural, fraternal and racial confraternity amongst African peoples of the world.” In a talk titled, “Hair Conking; Buy Black,” Cooks charged that so-called Negroes were so obsessed with integration that they often burned themselves with harsh chemicals so as to
“ape” white standards of beauty and readily purchased from “alien” or nonblack establishments. Not only was the Negro consumer the “biggest enemy to the ‘Buy Black’ campaign,” Cooks continued, they committed an “unforgivable crime and sin” by refusing to “patronize only black businesses [that were located] in black communities.”
Cooks further proposed organizing a “2000 man African Legion,” a mafia styled organization that would be responsible for inflicting bodily harm on any
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
222 “traitorous…Uncle Tom…[and]…Aunt Jemima” Negro consumer until he or she learned to stop doing business with whites.3
Another version of the bad black consumer reappeared after violence erupted in
U.S. cities in the 1960s and many poor African Americans were isolated in urban ghettos.
The criminal, conspicuous Negro consumer was often the central character in some of the blaxploitation films that were produced in the 1970s. Gordon Parks, Jr.’s Superfly introduced the well-dressed, Cadillac-wielding Youngblood Priest to the general public in
1972. Priest is an ambitious black man who has been able to acquire many of the status symbols associated with American success by selling cocaine to his people in Harlem.
But he is also conflicted about his everyday dealings and comes up with a scheme to leave the drug scene prosperous yet unscathed. When Priest tells his partner in crime,
Eddie, of his plans, Eddie is reluctant because he knows that participation in an underground economy is the only way that he has been able to obtain economic mobility.
To make it perfectly clear that drug dealers, unlike the majority of disadvantaged blacks in his community, were able to partake in the good life, Eddie asks Priest the following:
“You gone give all this up, eight track stereo, color TV in every room, and can snort a half a piece of coke everyday. That’s the American Dream, nigger….ain’t it, well ain’t it?” But Eddie also provides a piercing critique of American racism when he finally agrees to help Priest and tells him, “I know [selling drugs] is a rotten game, but [it’s] the only one the man left [inner-city blacks] to play.” In time, though, Eddie betrays his friend because he does not believe that he can make a decent life for himself outside “the
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 Carlos Cooks, “Hair Conking; Buy Black,” in Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan, ed. William L. Van Deburg (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 84-92.
223 business.” Eddie specifically attempts to maintain his precarious position by teaming up with the New York City’s white police commissioner, the ringleader of Harlem’s cocaine trade, to have Priest jailed or killed. In the end, Priest manages to escape after hiring assassins to protect his interests and convincing the chief of police that he would have his family murdered if he were not allowed to walk away from the corrupt system.4 Superfly gave audiences a somewhat nuanced look at the lives of working-class African
Americans who were forced to reside in poverty-stricken wards and take on criminal lifestyles because of American greed and racism. The movie also showed that some blacks were unable to imagine a rewarding existence outside the confines of mainstream understandings of success and would deceive those around them to enjoy the material privileges normally associated with the wealthy.
Beginning with the excesses of the eighties and continuing well into the nineties, whereby the gap between the “haves” and “have nots” was more and more visible in the
United States, Americans were once again preoccupied with the dangerous black consumer. This time, however, the national spotlight was on urban black youth who beat, shot, robbed and murdered peers and adults for expensive sports jackets, designer tennis shoes or costly jewelry.5 The press offered its reasons for the “senseless” acts of violence: inner-city teens were not reared in stable households headed by fathers and
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 4 Superfly, DVD, streaming, directed by Gordon Parks, Jr. (1972: www.netflix.com, 2010).
5 See, for example, Susan Schmidt, “Growing Number of Senseless Slayings by Teens Instills Concern,” Washington Post, October 14, 1985; William E. Schmidt, “A Growing Urban Fear: Thieves Who Kill for ‘Cool’ Clothing,” New York Times, February 6, 1990; “Sneaker Killing Sentence,” Washington Post, November 1, 1990; Felicia Lee, “For Gold Earrings and Protection, More Girls Take to Violence,” New York Times, November 25, 1991; Celia W. Dugger, “A Boy in Search of Respect Discovers How to Kill,” New York Times, May 15, 1994; “A 6-Foot Rebel, A Search for Help,” New York Times, May 15, 1994; and “A Girl Who Likes Expensive Things,” New York Times, May 15, 1994.
224 mothers; they bought guns to protect themselves from hostile neighbors but often used these weapons to assault others; and many simply desired instant gratification, were too lazy to work for the things they wanted and would rather engage in illicit activities to own valuable goods. But these explanations mostly reinforced the notion that African-
American ghetto dwellers were culturally inferior and solely responsible for the cycle of crime and disinvestment in their communities. Moreover, newspaper coverage usually overlooked the role that racist and classist policies played in creating a black underclass that did not have the resources (particularly well-paying jobs) to meet basic needs or legitimately participate in consumer culture. The public frenzy over youth who maimed and killed for commodities ultimately worked to further stigmatize the racialized poor who were already trapped in impoverished city centers in the 1980s and 1990s.6
Throughout the last century, the bad black consumer was a pervasive figure that criminalized and disenfranchised peoples of African descent. And as we move into the
21st century, this trope is starting to materialize in news stories of blacks who embezzle money to finance lavish lifestyles and viciously attack others to attain mass goods.7 If
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 6 According to anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, news stories that portrayed “minority youth as destructive and out-of-control consumers” in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into an “insidious American myth: that the poor are highly susceptible to commodity fetishism, that they are addicted to brands, and that they are willing to acquire expensive things even at the cost of their own (or someone else’s) health and/or well- being” (Chin, Purchasing Power, 56, 43-59).
7 Carol D. Leoning, “Raids on D.C. Tax Probe Reveal Lives of Luxury,” Washington Post, November 28, 2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112701130.html (accessed May 24, 2010); Del Quentin Wilber, “Lawyer Says Walters Lacked Self-Esteem,” Washington Post, June 2, 2009, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/06/01/AR2009060101763.html (accessed May 24, 2010); Eric Lipton and Eric Lichtblau, “In Black Caucus, a Fund-Raising Powerhouse,” New York Times, February 13, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/us/politics/14cbc.html (accessed May 24, 2010); and Maria Glod and Dan Morse, “Two Teens Charged in Death of D.C. Principal,” Washington Post, May 4, 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/03/AR2010050304594.html (accessed May 24, 2010).
225 these portrayals are representative of what’s to come, it is likely that a disproportionate share of the nation’s African-American populace will continue to experience chronic unemployment, live in dilapidated neighborhoods, attend poor-quality schools, and lack the political capital needed to gain full citizenship.
226
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