Album Men of Distinction from Kicha

A. Means

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:28:22 +0000

Kicha has posted:

He was the only African American Hatter (Hatmaker) in Memphis, Tennessee in the late 19th century.

Mr. Means for years has run the only first class hat store owned exclusively by colored people. He and his son have had long experience in the hat business and their workmanship has been of such a character as to give this firm an enviable reputation in business circles. Mr. Means is one of our oldest and best known citizens and no man stands higher in the estimation of all classes. He is a man of considerable wealth and has a commodious home on South Cynthia street. He has always been a good citizen and has done his part to promote the same. An estimable wife and three children form his family circle.

Advert:
A. Means & Son, The Hatters,
Keep constantly on hand a select assortment of the Latest Styles of Soft Hats neatly cleaned, dyed and repaired. Mail and telephone orders promptly attended. Satisfaction Guaranteed, New Phone 2905, 125 Gayoso Ave., Memphis, Tenn.

Sources: The Bright Side of Memphis: A Compendium of Information Concerning the Colored People of Memphis, Tennessee, Showing Their Achievements in Business, Industrial and Professional Life and Including Articles of General Interest on the Race, by Green Polonius Hamilton (1908)] *GP Hamilton was Principal, of Kortrecht High School in Memphis, TN

William Donnegan

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 20:11:00 +0000

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William Donnegan, believed to be one of Springfield, Illinois' conductors on the Underground Railroad, was lynched during the 1908 Race Riot. This photo was originally published in the Chicago Record Herald ------ Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library.

William Donnegan, had been a prominent member of Springfield, Illinois' African American community since before the Civil War and was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. He was lynched in the 1908 Springfield Race Riot.

According to an August 21, 1908, story in the weekly version of the Illinois State Register, Donnegan (spelled “Donnigan” by the newspaper) “was beaten almost to insensibility; his throat was slashed from ear with a razor and a small clothes line rope was tied about his neck, then he was hanged to the limb of a small tree” across from Donnegan’s home at Spring and Edwards streets.

The attack was broken up by police and state militia, but Donnegan died the next day at St. John’s Hospital.

The paper said the gang that attacked Donnegan’s home amounted to about a dozen men, apparently led by Abraham Raymer, a 20-year-old restaurant worker and peddler who had immigrated from Russia. Raymer was later found guilty only of stealing a sword.

Donnegan owned an estimated $15,000 worth of property at his death, a substantial amount for the time. Although he had been a cobbler and real estate investor, Donnegan also had made a pre-Civil War trade of importing slaves from the South and hiring them out as laborers in free-state Illinois. Whites resented his wealth and the fact that his third wife, Sarah Rudolph Donnegan, was white, the Register suggested.

Donnegan’s age at his death is open to question. Most accounts say he was either 76 or 84, but the Register’s reporter, who interviewed Donnegan’s family, gave an exact date for Donnegan’s birthday: March 16, 1828, making him 80 years old when he was killed. He is buried at Oak Ridge Cemetery.

Mr. Donnegan is credited with writing a memoir of his role in helping an enslaved woman travel through Springfield to Canada in 1858.

The memoir, first published in 1898, was reprinted in the summer 2006 edition of “For the People,” the newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association. The original is available at the Sangamon Valley Collection at Lincoln Library.

“I lived, in those days, on the north side of Jefferson, between Eighth and Ninth streets, in a story and a half house. It is still standing, and I could show you the garret yet in which many a runaway has been hidden while the town was being searched. I have secreted scores of them, …” Donnegan wrote.

Image: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library
Info: Sagamon County History

Thomas Morris Chester: The Lone Black Reporter of the Civil War

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:51:17 +0000

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Born 1834, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The son of an escaped slave and oyster salesman, Chester’s childhood was relatively secure and very progressive. Attending college in Pittsburgh, he first became interested in the concept of African colonization and traveled back and forth between Liberia and the U.S. after graduation in 1853. Liberia was actually where Chester got his first taste of journalism, writing and editing for the “Star of Liberia” in Monrovia, the nation’s capitol.

The escalation of the Civil War prompted Chester to move back and join the Union efforts; he helped recruit and raise the 54th and 55th Massachusetts Colored troops regiments. Later, he would lead two Black regiments into battle for the famous Gettysburg Campaign in 1863. This was the first time Pennsylvania issued weapons to African-Americans.

From August 1864 to the end of the Civil War, Chester worked as a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press, becoming the first Black war correspondent working for a major daily paper.

After the end of the war, Chester moved to England to study law and went on to become England’s first Black barrister (lawyer). During the 1870s, Chester moved back to the U.S. and settled in Louisiana, working as the brigadier general of the militia and also the superintendent of schools in 1875.

In 1892 embittered by Jim Crow laws and in ill health, he returned to his hometown, where he died of a heart attack a year later. He was buried in a segregated cemetery in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Newseum, Sharon Shahid
Image: Cheyney University of Pennsylvania

Soldier

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 19:25:07 +0000

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Portrait of a very young handsome man photographed during WWI. Name unknown. "A Saga of the Black Man" by Rosetta Lucas Quisenberry

Editor of the Freeman

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 18:58:06 +0000

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An 1870 portrait of George Parker the Editor of the newspaper The Freeman later called the New York Age, photographed at Hossack Palais Royal Gallery in NYC.

Romeo Dougherty

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 18:28:39 +0000

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New York, NY, Saturday December 16, 1944,
Romeo Dougherty is Dead

Romeo Dougherty, Vet
Negro Sports And
Drama Critic Dead

Romeo L Dougherty, who was prominent in the newspaper profession for almost 40 years during which he became known as the "Dean" of sports and dramatic editors, died Saturday afternoon at his home in Jamaica, Long Island, at the age of 59.

In failing health for years, Mr. Dougherty was bedridden for the past three months, a victim of dropsy and resulting complications. His death followed a heart attack early Friday morning.

Mr. Dougherty was known to intimates as "The Sage of Union Hall Street," partly because of a penchant for poetic and philosophic comment, and partly because of his avid reading habits. His private library consisted of close to 2,500 volumes, including many rare works on the Negro. It was his boast that he had read every book in this collection from cover to cover.

A native of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, he migrated to this country when he was eight years old. He entered the newspaper field at an early age, starting on the now defunct Brooklyn Eye. He was next employed by the New York News, a Harlem publication founded by George W. Harris, and joined the editorial staff of the Amsterdam News around 1910, remaining with that publication until 1935. Since that time he has done freelance work for a number of national publications.

Dougherty is survived by his widow Frances and a cousin, Edwin McKetney of Harlem.

An impressive tribute by the sports world was paid Sunday night at the Renaissance Casino when Bob Douglass interrupted the feature game between the Renaissance and the New York Nationals and the audience stood in silence for one minute while "Taps" was played on cornet by a member of Don Wilson's band.

Source: The Competitor, vol. 1, 1920

Sam Marlowe Private Eye

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 06:23:23 +0000

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Was Samuel Marlowe, the inspiration for author Raymond Chandler's famed fictional character Philip Marlowe, who's been played in film adaptations, by several actors over the decades, from Humphrey Bogart to Robert Mitchum?

Marlowe, is alleged to be LA's first licensed black private detective. He shadowed lives, took care of secrets, and knew his way around Tinseltown. He helped Hollywood figures out of jams in the off-limits African-American clubs and bars in LA that many white actors and execs enjoyed frequenting on the sly.

Marlowe was supposedly called on to help stars like Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin track down runaway lovers, and was tapped to keep an eye on a $8,000 blackmail payment Marlene Deitrich's studio made to the son of her female makeup artist she was in a relationship with.

It's said he also knew hard-boiled writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

Marlowe first connected with Dashiell Hammett in 1929, the same year Hammett published his first novel 'Red Harvest'.

Marlowe wrote a letter to Hammett to complain about details of his portrayals of private investigators and the two supposedly became friends; with Marlowe eventually sharing real-life details that would show up in Hammett's later books.

According to research and an LA Times article, in 1930 when Hammett published 'The Maltese Falcon', the "Sam Spade" character was a private nod to Marlowe's help. And the character’s surname was Hammett’s “winking inside joke,” because “spade” was a derogatory term for a black person.

Marlowe also helped out Raymond Chandler too by not only sharing his real-life expertise and tracking down police files, but also escorting the writer around the seedier parts of LA where it was difficult for whites to navigate because of the strict segregation at the time.

So his name was Samuel Marlowe … and the writers most famous characters were Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe.

Samuel Benjamin Marlowe, Sr., was born on August 3, 1890, in Montego Bay, Jamaica. According to The Times obituary, he served in Britain’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, a World War I fighting brigade that guarded the Suez Canal. After the war, Marlowe immigrated to the United States settling in Los Angeles, where he soon became a private detective.

According to a 1980s story in the Sentinel it asserted: When Marlowe became a PI in 1921, he was the “first black man to have a licensed detective agency (Samuel B. Marlowe Detective Agency) in the state of California.”

The California Department of Consumer Affairs, which issues private detective licenses, has no record of Marlowe, but an agency spokesman said that older files are often incomplete or missing. The University of Southern California's History Department researcher Angelica Stoddard, whose work centers on L.A.’s first licensed black private eyes, says Marlowe is the earliest one she’s heard of.

The private eye died two weeks before his 101st birthday in 1991. He’s buried at the Inglewood Park Cemetery.

Sources: LA Times: Finding Marlowe article written by Daniel Miller (Nov. 2014); Shadow and Act (April 2017); theculturegeistblogspot (Dec. 2014)

Napolean P Drue

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 05:17:28 +0000

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Cabinet card of Napolean P. Drue, taken at the Richmond Photo Company in Richmond, Virginia, circa 1880s. There was a note attached that indicated he purchased land in 1867 and was "the first colored person in Powhatan County, Virginia to record a deed for property bought after emancipation by one of his race." Drue was born enslaved in Belmead, Virginia in 1843 and served as a house servant for the Cocke family until 1863 when he was emancipated. Following the Civil War, he purchased 33 acres near Belmead and worked at St. Emma's. He died in 1925 and is buried in Belmead Historic Cemetery. [Library of Virginia]

Julius Irwin Washington, Sr.

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:58:54 +0000

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Among what are known as the learned professions, the law has attracted, perhaps fewer colored men than any other. The position of the negro lawyer is widely different from that of the preacher or the teacher. They have an assured following, as there is no competition between the white churches and schools and the negro churches and schools. The negro lawyer, however, must not only build up a clientage in sharp competition with the white lawyer but must also overcome the custom of the colored man to go to a white lawyer when in need of legal advice or services. So when one finds a colored lawyer who has succeeded in building up a good practice, especially in the smaller places, one may be sure of exceptional ability.

As a lawyer, Julius Irwin Washington, of Beaufort, has won a measure of success which is at once a credit to him and to his race. What is more, he has not found it necessary to leave his home town in order to succeed but among the people who know his character and ability best has worked through the years.

He was born in Beaufort, December 12, 1860. His parents were Richard and Catherine Washington. Coming of school age, just after the war, young Washington attended the public schools and when ready for college entered South Carolina College, which was open to both races. Later he read law under General W.J. Whipper, and was admitted to the bar in December, 1887. It was necessary for Mr. Washington to make his own way in school. He taught school for a few terms.

He is Secretary of the Trustee Board of the Beaufort School. He believes that progress of his people depends on better school facilities, better wages and the ballot. He has property interests in Beaufort, Atlanta and in Aiken county.

In October, 1880, Mr. Washington was married to Miss Carrie Kinlaugh, of Beaufort. She bore him two children: Adell S. (Mrs. Fleming) and Thomas W. Washington. His wife passed away in 1885.

On June 4, 1890, Mr. Washington was married to Miss Eliza Middleton. Their children are Serg. J. I., Jr., Sadie (Mrs. Rice), Etta M. and Charles E. Washington.

Source: History of the American Negro and his Institutions (South Carolina)

George P Stewart

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:56:50 +0000

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George Pheldon Stewart (1874-1924), along with Will H. Porter co-founded the Indianapolis Recorder newspaper in the 1890s. It began in an office on New York Street in Indianapolis. Stewart eventually became sole owner. He was active in several business, political, and fraternal organizations always promoting the business and political progress of blacks. Race pride and the importance of education were promoted in the stories the newspaper covered. The Recorder began as a community newspaper and grew to cover state and national news stories. By 1916 it included vital statistics, political stories, and many ads. The newspaper continues to be published today. [Photo and Info: Indiana Historical Society]

William Eli Warfield

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:55:02 +0000

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William Warfield was known in Fort Wayne in the early 1900s as an entrepreneur who was well respected in the community. He died in 1936.

By 1910, William Warfield had built a solid life for his family. Through odd jobs, such as cleaning doctors' offices and drugstores, Warfield purchased a 21-room, three-story home on East Douglas Street. He also had written several songs, which are registered with the Library of Congress.

Warfield was one of 572 African Americans who lived in Fort Wayne at that time, trying to build a better life for themselves. But it wasn't always easy, said Hana Stith, a retired teacher who is compiling the history of African Americans in the city. Stith said Warfield was the exception in an era when blacks were facing difficult times. "Things were tough," Stith said. "There was no decent housing, minimal jobs and small wages."

"I don't think blacks were content back then, by any means," said Miles Edwards, a member of the Fort Wayne African American Historical Society. "But they were able to deal with the hand that life had dealt them. They had to be strong to survive the things they were going through."

Before 1910, the African-American population was small. Fort Wayne residents had voted in favor of excluding African Americans from the state in the 1851 Indiana Constitution. The black population began to grow after the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution were passed, which abolished slavery and declared African Americans citizens of this country.

By 1900, there were 276 African Americans in Fort Wayne. The overall population was 45,115. Part of the reason for the increase was the migration of African Americans moving from the South. Although little is known about African-American life during this period, documents show they mostly worked in hotels and domestic service, and a few had jobs with the old Bass Foundry. he average salary was about 20 cents an hour.

African Americans basically kept to themselves and only mingled with whites in the city when they were working for them. "Blacks were looked down upon as second-class citizens, and most recreation was in the church," Stith said. There were only two churches for African Americans at the time — Turner Chapel A.M.E. and Mount Olive Baptist Church.

African Americans also attended the Garity, a local movie theater that had seats in the back reserved for them. On weekends, Stith said, they often had picnics in old Robison Park. By the end of the decade, Warfield and a few others had created a strong presence in the city, Stith said.

Warfield was a writer and editor of The Vindicator, an African-American publication that began in 1913. He later went on to write "We Love Old Fort Wayne." The song was written in honor of the city's 150th birthday.

By the 1920s, the African-American population had grown to 1,450, and job opportunities began to expand with the help of the Phyllis Wheatley Community Center. The facility, also located on Douglas Street, was a place where African Americans could gather for recreation and job training. The center also was a place where children learned about history and was home to a 20-piece orchestra that played at African-American churches in Fort Wayne, Edwards said.

Sources: Early African Americans Find Local Life a Constant Struggle, by Shannon King of The News-Sentinel; photograph courtesy of Hana Stith

Robert J Wilkinson

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:53:43 +0000

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Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, ca. 1860 Missouri History Museum Archives

Daguerreotype of Robert J Wilkinson, a barber who worked at the Southern Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. Wilkinson owned a popular barbershop in the Planters' House Hotel and was named in Cyprian Clamorgan's 1858 pamphlet, 'The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis' to be one of the forty-three free Blacks in St. Louis who, as he described, "move in a certain circle; who by means of wealth, education, or natural ability, form a peculiar class- the elite of the colored people." In the early 1840s Wilkinson moved from Cincinnati to St. Louis and was one of the 1400 free blacks that lived in St. Louis out of the estimated 2100 free blacks at this time in 1850.

Source: Dolores A. Kilgo's. Likeness and Landscape: Thomas M. Easterly and the Art of the Daguerreotype

Frank Coffin

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:52:21 +0000

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Frank Barbour Coffin of Little Rock (Pulaski County), owned one of the first drugstores serving the city’s black community.

Frank Barbour Coffin (1870 - 1951), was an African-American pharmacist who owned and operated one of the earliest drug stores serving the black community of Little Rock (Pulaski County). He was also one of the country’s unnoted African-American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth century, barely remembered today for his two volumes of poetry and other works printed in various publications.

F. B. Coffin was born on January 12, 1870, in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the son of Samuel and Josephine Barton Coffin. Holly Springs was a small town in northern Mississippi, about forty miles from Memphis, Tennessee. His mother died before he was twelve years old, leaving Coffin and at least four other siblings to be raised by their father, a farmer. Little else is known about his childhood years.

Coffin attended Rust College in his hometown of Holly Springs from 1886 to 1887. He earned a Ph.D. degree from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1890 and a pharmaceutical degree from Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1893.

Coffin borrowed train fare to Little Rock and moved to Arkansas. His name first appears in the Little Rock City Directory in 1895. He obtained a license to practice pharmacy in Arkansas after passing the necessary exam and worked in the pharmacy business at George E. Jones Drug Company at 700 West 9th Street. On January 1, 1898, Coffin purchased the business and became the sole proprietor. Jones, whose wife had been a classmate of Coffin, sold him the building and loaned him $150 worth of drugs to get started. His business became known as Children’s Drug Store around 1928.

Coffin tutored children in the community with their homework assignments after school, at his store. His business was very popular with neighborhood children because of the soda fountain and candy, thus his motto, “Follow the Children to Children’s Drug Store.”

When Coffin bought the drug store, African Americans mostly populated West 9th Street with homes and businesses. Although not the first African American to open a drug store in Little Rock, Coffin was still considered a curiosity among his white neighbors from the surrounding area who occasionally drifted into the store to ask if he was the Negro who mixed medicine. They eventually began to trade with him. Coffin stated in an Arkansas State Press newspaper interview that “at that time practically all of 10th Street and back out that way was populated by whites.” He offered the conveniences of a well-supplied and well-operated store with a delivery service.

Almost a decade passed before Coffin had competition from other black-owned drug stores. The Foster Drug Store was established around 1908, followed by the Gem Pharmacy at 800 West 9th and Floyd Pharmacy located at 501 West 9th Street. Coffin advertised his business in the Arkansas State Press and in the conference programs of the Arkansas Medical, Dental and Pharmaceutical Association.

In 1902, Coffin married Josie Pettie, a teacher in Little Rock. There are no records of a divorce or her death. In 1913, he married Lottie E. Woodford of Lexington, Kentucky. The couple’s home was at 1118 Izard Street.

Coffin published his first book of poetry, Coffin’s Poems and AJAX Ordeals in 1897. His poetry reflected a fondness for children and his mother, as well as romantic love. He offered insight into the troubles of racism and wrote admiring verses about Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and Abraham Lincoln.

Other pieces of his poetry were published in the Arkansas World, Arkansas Monitor, Pittsburg Courier and other publications. Coffin also wrote a two-page ode titled “Re-emancipation of Human Driftwood,” which was published in The Douglass Monitor (circa 1927). The Douglass Monitor was a publication of the Frederick Douglass Club established in Little Rock on September 7, 1905. The club was formed as a separate Negro Republican club after segregation took root in the Republican Party. Haven Press of New York published another Coffin book, Factum Factorum, in 1947. In 1994, some of his poetry was published in a collection called The Spirit of the Free.

In 1949, two years before his death, he had moved into the Graysonia Hotel at 809 Gaines Street. He was a trustee of the Wesley Chapel Methodist Church and served as secretary for Philander Smith College.

Coffin died on March 4, 1951, at the United Friends Hospital, and his funeral arrangements were taken care of by the United Friends Undertakers. The United Friends was established in Little Rock in 1918 as a self-help organization to take care of the needs of their black members. The United Friends, whose motto was “We Serve In Life, We Serve In Death,” provided insurance, hospitalization, and funeral arrangements for its members. Coffin is buried at Haven of Rest Cemetery in Little Rock.

Source: Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, Central Arkansas Library System authored by Linda McDowell

Arthur P Bedou

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:50:50 +0000

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Arthur P. Bedou (1880 - 1966), maintained a studio in New Orleans for over 50 years. He photographed everything from landscapes to rallies, but his refined portraiture earned him acclaim and business. For many years, Bedou served as the formal portrait photographer for Xavier University and many religious institutions in Louisiana. He is best known, however, for his series of photographs documenting the life of Booker T. Washington during his tenure as President of Tuskegee Institute. Bedou was also an active journalist and a co-founder of the People’s Life Insurance Company of Louisiana.

Source: New Orleans Historical Society

Another Unknown Soldier

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:48:02 +0000

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From the first and deadliest WWI. [D.H. Ramsey Library, Special Collections, University of North Carolina at Asheville]

Freedom Fighter: Hubbard Pryor

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:44:33 +0000

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Hubbard Pryor fled slavery in Tennessee at age twenty-two and reached Union lines, enlisting in a black infantry regiment on April 7, 1864. This photograph was included in a report on black recruitment sent to the war department in Washington, DC, later in the year. “For raiders in the enemies country, these Colored Troops will prove superior,” wrote the white regimental captain; “they are good riders - have quick eyes at night . . . and know all the by-ways.” [Davis, p. 269]

The 44th U.S. Colored Infantry soon moved south to Georgia. Surrounded during a battle in Dalton, the regiment surrendered. The white officers were released by agreement but the African American soldiers were placed “under guard and lash,” forced to work rebuilding southern railroads and other facilities.

After the war Pryor stayed in Georgia his home state and married in 1870. In May 1890 he wrote the war department to learn if he had been listed as a prisoner or a deserter at war’s end. Listed as a prisoner, he was thus eligible for a pension. Before he could apply, however, he died in August 1890, in his mid forties.

Sources: National Archives & Lawrence E Walker Foundation Collection; Robert Scott Davis, Jr., “A Soldier’s Story: The Records of Hubbard Pryor, 44th U.S. Colored Troops, (National Humanities Center)

T. Montgomery Gregory

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:42:10 +0000

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While a professor at Howard University, T. Montgomery Gregory was active in establishing a training camp for black Army officers during World War I. He became a lieutenant. (Family photo).

On May 3, 1917, a letter appeared in a Washington newspaper posing a stark question: “What of the Negro?”

The letter’s author was T. Montgomery Gregory, an English professor at Howard University who had been moved to write by events that were rapidly unspooling in the capital. A month earlier, the United States had declared war on Germany, joining a conflict that had already been raging in Europe for nearly three years.

Our military was relatively small then. It was estimated that some 2 million American men would need to be conscripted into the Army in the coming year. Black men had fought in American wars since before the country was a country, a fact Gregory pointed out, writing, “The unbroken loyalty of the negro to the country of his adoption, yes even to the owners of his body, is one of the remarkable facts of history.”

With the United States girding for war, Gregory wondered how men such as himself would be involved. “What part is he to play in this fighting phalanx?” Gregory asked.

Thomas Montgomery Gregory was born in 1887 on the campus of Howard University, where his father, James Monroe Gregory, was a dean and Latin professor. The elder Gregory had been in Howard’s first graduating class. T. Montgomery Gregory earned his undergraduate degree not from Howard but from Harvard — Class of 1910 — but the historically black college was to play an important role in what came next.

As the United States prepared to enter the Great War, the Army announced that 14 officer training camps would be established. Supporters of integration — including such figures as Joel E. Spingarn, a white New Yorker active in the NAACP, and W.E.B. Du Bois , editor of its magazine, the Crisis — believed these camps should include African Americans. The Army disagreed: No black volunteers would be allowed at the camps.

Activists started mobilizing to secure what they saw as the next best thing: a camp to train black officers. A group called the Central Committee of Negro College Men was formed to push for this.

“The headquarters of this group was the basement of the chapel at Howard University,” said Sheila Gregory Thomas, T. Montgomery Gregory’s daughter.

Gregory chaired the group, which sprang into action. Members of the committee lobbied Congress, going from office to office on Capitol Hill to make their case to representatives. If a congressman refused to see them, they left behind a card outlining the situation and pledging the support of the African American community.

Letters and articles appeared in the black press and in the white-owned press. (Gregory’s letter was in the old Washington Times.)

The committee employed stirring language in its plea for a black officer corps: “Let us not mince matters; the race is on trial. It needs every one of its red-blooded, sober minded men. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, business men, and all men who have graduated from high school. Let the college student and graduate come and demonstrate by their presence the principles of virtue and courage learned in the academic halls. Up, brother, our race is calling.”

The effort extended to many fronts in the African American community.

“The colored churches in the District of Columbia were interested,” wrote Emmett J. Scott, an assistant to Secretary of War Newton Baker and the highest-ranking African American member of President Woodrow Wilson’s administration. “Frequent mass meetings were held by the Howard students; and when additional funds were needed a concert was given in the chapel.”

Figures at the Tuskegee-Normal and Industrial Institute were active, too.

Barely a week after Gregory’s letter appeared, 1,500 black American men had put their names forward. Most were college students or college graduates.

On May 19, the War Department announced that the 17th Provisional Training Regiment would be established for black officer candidates at Fort Des Moines. It was a remote location, chosen, some thought, because it was far from East Coast journalists who would be watching the experiment closely.

T. Montgomery Gregory was among those who attended the camp. He was commissioned as a lieutenant and served stateside in intelligence, his daughter said.

What was the outcome of the campaign launched in a Howard University basement? Or, as Scott put it in a chapter at the end of his 1919 history on black participation in the Great War: “Did the Negro soldier get a square deal?”

Any student of American history probably knows the answer. Two units of black troops — the 92nd and 93rd divisions — served in France. The officers graduated from Fort Des Moines faced discrimination throughout World War I: hazed, denied promotion, denied command, bivouacked in lesser quarters, prohibited from interacting with French civilians.

It wasn’t until 1948 that President Harry S. Truman integrated the armed forces.

Source: Washington Post, article by John Kelly (Feb. 5, 2019), "When WWI raged, a D.C. professor fought for Black officers' participation"

James Monroe Trotter

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:39:37 +0000

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James Monroe Trotter was born in 1842, in Grand Gulf, Mississippi, to a slave named Letitia and her owner Richard S. Trotter. Around 1854, Richard Trotter sent Letitia and her children to the free city of Cincinnati, Ohio, where after attending several schools in the area, the young James Trotter worked as a hotel and a river-boat cabin bell-boy as well as a teacher. In 1863, after being recruited by John Mercer Langston (great-uncle of poet, Langston Hughes), Trotter moved to Massachusetts where he enlisted on June 11, 1863, and within less than two weeks was mustered into Company K of the 55th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry as a 1st Sergeant.

On November 19, 1863, he was promoted to Sergeant Major and, on April 10, 1864, he was promoted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant, which was quite unusual for African Americans serving in the Union army. In the above carte-de-visite, Trotter wears the uni-form and officer’s shoulder straps of a 2nd Lieutenant, which makes the rarity of this image even greater.

With the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, African American men could actively as well as legally be recruited into the Union army. Nonetheless, there remained a reluctance by the army to commission any of its enlisted black soldiers and a great deal of trepidation amongst its white officers when qualified black enlisted soldiers were considered for promotion to officer. Trotter experienced this fear first hand. Even though he had been promoted to the rank of 2nd Lieutenant on April 10, 1864, because of on-going contract disagreements between commissioned black soldiers and the U.S. government, which had largely been brought about by white back-lash over the appointment of black officers, he was not mustered to this rank until a little over a year later, on July 1, 1865, less than two months before the 55th regiment was itself mustered out on August 29, 1865. For black Union soldiers this bureaucratic delay only further attested to on-going racial discrimination that existed within the Union army, which while advancing claims to inclusion and equality, nonetheless continued to provide inequality in pay and an unfair share of noncombat labor duty to its enlisted black soldiers.

James Trotter, the first man to protest African American soldiers receiving less pay than promised. The federal government reneged on its promise to pay soldiers $13 a month, and instead paid only $10. Sgt. Maj. James Trotter, of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry, stepped up and said, "We are soldiers, we will accept nothing less than the soldier's pay..."We will not degrade the name of an American soldier."

After ten months without compensation, the soldiers won. Trotter said later, "in their struggle for equal pay and recognition the Massachusetts colored troops finally won for themselves, for all other colored troops, and relatively for their race and its friends, a complete, a glorious victory."

After the war, Trotter returned to Ohio, married Virginia Isaacs, and moved to Boston where he obtained a good position in the U.S. Postal Service. After eighteen years of service with the USPS, James Trotter found that he was not being promoted as were white co-workers of equal seniority. In an act of protest, he resigned rather than continue in an inferior position.

In 1878 Trotter published a groundbreaking survey of African American music. His distinguished war record and support of the Democratic Party led to appointment as District of Columbia Recorder of Deeds in 1887, the highest government office open to blacks. Trotter’s passionate commitment to equality inspired his famous son, William Monroe Trotter.

Marsha Dubrow, Examiner; Mirror of Race Collection, By Erina Duganne; African American Families of Monticello; Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, William J. Simmons, and Henry McNeal Turner; Civil War Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library

American Tragedy: The Isaac Woodard, Jr. Story

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:30:24 +0000

Kicha has posted:

The above is a photograph of Woodard and his mother. On February 13, 1946, U.S. Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. (1919-1992), was on a Greyhound Lines bus traveling from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, headed home to his family in North Carolina. En route to Winnsboro, South Carolina, Woodward asked the bus driver to make a rest stop, which the driver grudgingly did so after an argument with Woodard. The bus stopped in Batesburg (now Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina).

Once the stop was completed, Woodard got into a second altercation with the driver after the driver chastized him for taking too long. Though Woodard did not protest, the driver contacted the local police (including Chief of Police Linwood Shull), who forcibly removed Woodard from the bus. After demanding to see his discharge papers, a group of officers, including Shull, took him to a nearby alleyway, where they proceeded to beat him repeatedly with nightsticks. Woodard was then taken to the town jail and arrested for disorderly conduct, accused of drinking beer in the back of the bus with other soldiers.

In an analysis of the case, attorney and author Michael R. Gardner wrote, "In none of the papers is there any suggestion there was verbal or physical violence on the part of Sergeant Woodard. It’s quite unclear what really happened. What did happen with certainty is the next morning when the sun came up, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was blind for life." What was revealed is that during the course of the night in jail, Shull blinded Woodard, smashing in one of his eyes with a nightstick and gouging the other out. Woodard also suffered partial amnesia as a result of the injuries.

The following morning, the police sent him before the local judge, who promptly found him guilty and fined him fifty dollars. Upon requesting medical assistance, it took two days for a doctor to be sent to him. Not knowing where he was and still suffering from amnesia, Woodard ended up in a hospital in Aiken, South Carolina, receiving substandard medical care.

Three weeks after he was reported missing by his relatives, he was discovered in the hospital. Woodard was immediately rushed to an Army hospital in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Though his memory had begun to recover by that time, doctors found both his corneas damaged beyond repair.

Though the case wasn't reported much in the early days following the attack, it was soon covered in major newspapers around the nation. The NAACP publicized Woodard's plight, campaigning heavily for the state government of South Carolina to address the issue, which it frequently dismissed.

However, the news soon also emerged in popular culture. Via his radio show, broadcaster and movie celebrity Orson Welles soon began to crusade for the punishment of Shull and his accomplices. Welles, a follower of the civil rights movement, found the reaction of the South Carolina government to be intolerable and shameful.

Later that year, folk artist Woody Guthrie would record a song for his album The Great Dust Storm entitled "The Blinding of Isaac Woodard", saying he wrote the song "...so's you wouldn't be forgetting what happened to this famous Negro soldier less than three hours after he got his Honorable Discharge down in Atlanta...." Guthrie later said of the song, "I sung this Isaac Woodard song in the Lewisohn Stadium one night for more than 36,000 people, and I got the loudest applause I've ever got in my whole life. This song is a long song, but most of the action is told in Isaac's own words. I made this ballad up because we'll need lots of songs like this one before we win our fight for racial equality in our big free United States."

On September 19th, of that year, NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White, a friend of President Harry S. Truman, met him in the Oval Office to discuss the Woodward case. Gardner writes that when Truman "heard this story in the context of the state authorities of South Carolina doing nothing for seven months, he exploded." The following day, Truman wrote a letter to Attorney General Tom C. Clark demanding that action be taken to resolve this. Six days later, on September 26, Truman directed the United States Department of Justice to open an investigation on the case.

A short investigation ensued, and on October 2nd, Shull and several of his officers were indicted in the U.S. District Court in Columbia, South Carolina. The case was brought into the Federal level on the grounds that the beating had occurred at a bus stop on Federal property, and that at the time of the assault, Woodward was in uniform. The case was presided over by Judge Julius Waties Waring.

By all accounts, the trial was a travesty. The local U.S. Attorney charged with handling the case failed to interview anyone except the bus driver, a decision that Waring, a civil rights proponent, believed was a gross dereliction of duty. Waring would later write of his disgust of the way the case was handled at the local level, commenting, "I was shocked by the hypocrisy of my government...in submitting that disgraceful case...."

On the Defense side, the behavior was no better. When the defense attorney began to shout racial epithets at Woodard, Waring had it stopped immediately. During the trial, the defense attorney also stated to the jury that "if you rule against Shull, then let this South Carolina secede again." Furthermore, after Woodard had given his account of what happened, Shull firmly denied this, claiming that Woodard had threatened him with a gun, and that Shull had used his nightclub to defend himself. During this testimony, Shull admitted that he repeatedly struck Woodard in the eyes.

On November 5th, after thirty minutes of deliberation, Shull was found innocent on all charges despite his admission that he had blinded Woodard. The courtroom broke into applause immediately thereafter.

In July 1948, over the objection of senior military officers, Truman promulgated Executive Order 9981, banning racial discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces. This was done as a response to a number of incidents against black veterans, most notably the Woodard case.

The failure to convict Shull was seen as a failure on the part of the Truman Administration.

Sources: Michael R Gardner, 'Harry Truman and Civil Rights: Moral Courage and Political Risks', The Stan Iverson Memorial Library, Infoshop & Anarchist Archives; NAACP Papers

Sgt. Maj. Zechariah Alexander

nobody@ipernity.com (Kicha) — Wed, 18 Oct 2023 04:25:32 +0000

Kicha has posted:

Sergeant Major Zechariah Alexander served in the 3rd North Carolina Infantry in the Spanish-American War, c. 1898. Photograph courtesy of Mrs. Kelly M. Alexander, Sr., Posed in his Spanish American War uniform ---- he was the patriarch of the Alexander family, whose generations would continue to positively make their mark on Charlotte and beyond. Charlotte, North Carolina, By Vermelle Diamond Ely, Grace Hoey Drain, Amy T. Rogers