Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

  Circa 1910–1920: Addison N. Scurlock.

  For Saving Savannah, I also had to dig into the New Negro Movement, a militant call for social justice combined with reaches into black folkways and back to Africa for artistic inspiration—a movement that began before 1919 and one that was hardly confined to Harlem. Although drawing on deep roots, this movement, with its future-looking gaze, was more of a birth than a rebirth or renaissance. Here I thought about a tendency to see the movement as African American–made and to overlook the contributions of people from the black diaspora, especially West Indians. That is, other than perhaps the Jamaican poet Claude McKay and Marcus Garvey, also Jamaican and founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

  Digging deeper, I stumbled upon the firebrand born on the tiny Leeward Island Nevis, Cyril Briggs. And thanks to the NYPL Digital Collection, I was able to view copies of Briggs’s magazine, the Crusader, with those covers featuring young women that so entranced Savannah.

  Circa 1919: Hubert Henry Harrison.

  And then I became fascinated with Hubert Henry Harrison of St. Croix—such a beacon light for Savannah, a man whose life was cut short in 1927 due to complications around an appendectomy. At the outset I knew Harrison’s name but not what an amazing mind he had, not that he was called the “black Socrates,” not why independent scholar Jeffrey B. Perry hails him as “The Voice of Harlem Radicalism.”

  This is just some of what went into—what I got caught up with—when building Savannah’s world and her entrance into the Jazz Age.

  Flappers.

  Rising hemlines.

  Drop-waist dresses.

  The shedding of corsets.

  Frenzied dancing until dawn.

  Sheet music from 1919: Arranger, composer, and bandleader James Reese Europe, who attended DC’s M Street School (forerunner of Dunbar High), was a major figure on the ragtime/jazz scene. Before the Great War, Europe’s Clef Club Orchestra was the first to play jazz at New York City’s Carnegie Hall (1912). His Society Orchestra is believed to be the first black band to cut a record (1913). His band often accompanied the famous white dancing duo Irene and Vernon Castle of fox-trot fame. The legendary songwriter team Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake were among the members of Europe’s bands.

  More women behind the wheels of cars.

  And in this new era, with women (and some men) celebrating the ratification then adoption to the Constitution of the Anthony amendment turned the Nineteenth Amendment (August 18, 1920), and with the NAACP, the NACW, and other organizations soldiering on in the civil rights crusade, I do wonder how Savannah Riddle will make her mark.

  For sure, I can see her making her way to Georgia Douglas Johnson’s townhouse at 1461 South Street NW to get her copy of The Heart of a Woman autographed. And who knows, perhaps Savannah will become a denizen of the Saturday literary salon this poet and pioneering playwright hosted in her home.

  Crisis Cover March 1920: According to Yale University, the photograph is of Georgia Douglas Johnson. Inside that March issue of the Crisis are two of her poems: “Attar” and “Afterglow.” There’s also this news: A new song, “I Want to Die While You Love Me,” is issued by the Ricordi music house of New York. The lyric is by Georgia Douglas Johnson and the music is by H. T. Burleigh.

  Crisis Cover November 1919: This is the issue Mother is perusing while sitting in the beauty parlor waiting for her daughter to get that Dutch bob.

  Crisis Cover February 1919: This is the issue Savannah flips through one Saturday night.

  NOTES

  For full citations of sources heavily consulted please see Selected Sources.

  “Camel trappings jingle …”: “Hindustan,” music by Harold Weeks, lyrics by Oliver Wallace, first recorded in 1918, https://www.sheetmusicbackinprint.com/popular/hindustan.html. Last accessed January 28, 2019.

  “U.S. AT WAR WITH GERMANY …”: Evening Star, April 6, 1917, p.1.

  “Children the Pitiful Victims of Modern War’s Ruthlessness”: Evening Star, June 19, 1917, p. 1.

  “INSANITY INCREASE ATTRIBUTED TO WAR”: Washington Bee, May 12, 1917, p. 2.

  “13 MILLION MEN IS COST OF WAR”: Washington Bee, January 26, 1918, p. 3.

  4-Minute Men were volunteer propagandists for the Committee on Public Information created by President Woodrow Wilson to gin up support for the war.

  “SCANDINAVIA IS SWEPT BY ‘SPANISH INFLUENZA’ ”: Evening Star, September 19, 1918, p. 9.

  “SPANISH INFLUENZA SPREADING IN D.C.”: Evening Star, September 26, 1918, p. 2.

  On the frankfurter: For example, in an article on an upcoming 1918 Christmas program in Kensington, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that “Liberty sausages before the days of the Hun were known as ‘Frankfurters,’ more familiarly to children as ‘hot doggies.’ ” (December 21, 1918, p. 16.)

  On the hamburger: For one, by unanimous vote the Seattle Meat Dealers’ Association abolished the term “hamburger” in favor of liberty steak in May 1918. “Order ‘Liberty Steak’ If You Want Hamburger,” Jackson Citizen Patriot, May 4, 1918, p.1.

  “As a matter of fact …”: “Puts O.K. on Sauerkraut,” Washington Bee, July 27, 1918, p. 7.

  Items in comfort kit: The Valve World, June 1918, p. 188.

  Bombings in Philadelphia: They occurred on December 30, 1918. “Bombs Exploded in Judges’ Homes,” Evening Star, December 31, 1918, p. 4.

  New Year’s Day suffragist protest: “President’s Speeches Burned by Women in Rain,” Evening Star, January 2, 1919, p. 18.

  On Ida Wells-Barnett in suffragist parade: This Woman Suffrage Procession was held on March 3, 1913. Ida Wells-Barnett was not the only black woman to march. Mary Church Terrell and twenty-two founders of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority also marched.

  “MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?” and “MR. PRESIDENT, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE?”: “Picketing for Suffrage,” Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/august-28/. Last accessed January 28, 2019.

  “MAKE AMERICA SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY” and “RACE PREJUDICE IS THE OFFSPRING OF IGNORANCE AND THE MOTHER OF LYNCHING”: “The Negro Silent Parade,” Crisis, September 1917, pp. 241, 244.

  The Silent Parade: It was held on Saturday, July 28, 1917. An estimated eight to ten thousand black people participated in this protest. It began at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street and ended at 23rd Street and Madison Square. W. E. B. Du Bois was the architect of this parade.

  Soldier on cover of Crisis, ads for colleges, Men of the Month column, “LYNCHING RECORD FOR THE YEAR 1918,” “Private Harry Thomas …”: Crisis, February 1919, cover, pp. 160, 161, 177–178, 180–181, 193, 202, 204, 205, http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?id=1292952614561750&view=mjp_object. Last accessed January 28, 2019.

  Charlie’s letter about the Hell Fighters: Almost verbatim “All New York Joins to Pay Honor to ‘Hell Fighters’ in Parade on Fifth Avenue,” Evening World, February 17, 1919, p. 1.

  ads for records, books, Lula Robinson, Idlewild, and busts: Crisis, February 1919, pp. 202, 204, 205, http://www.modjourn.org/render.php?id=1292952614561750&view=mjp_object.

  “All Warsaw in darkness.… gun fight!”: Washington Herald, March 1, 1919, p. 1.

  Bombing in Southside Chicago: “Negro Dies, Many Hurt, in Bomb Explosion,” Washington Times, February 28, 1919, p. 16.

  Bombing in Massachusetts: “I.W.W. Dynamiters Die in Explosion,” New York Times, March 2, 1919, p. 9.

  Flyer for Burroughs’s school: Almost verbatim from an ad in the Washington Bee, August 15, 1914, p. 6.

  Covers of the Crusader: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-a135-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-a13a-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-a159-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99. Last accessed January 28, 2019.

  “Greatest Negro High School in the World”: J. C. Wright, “The New Dunbar High School,” Washington, DC, March 1917, p. 221.

  Nannie Burro
ughs’s speech: Some of it is almost verbatim from Burroughs’s article “Black Women and Reform” in the Crisis, August 1915, p. 187.

  “ ‘by which all others are secured.’ ”: Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass, p. 147.

  Du Bois’s “Close Ranks”: Crisis, July 1918, p. 111.

  “First, as workers, black and white.… Any race or class”: A. Philip Randolph, “Our Reason for Being,” Messenger, August 1919, History Matters: The US Survey Course on the Web, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5125/. Last accessed January 8, 2019. This editorial appeared a few months after it appears in this novel, but I can imagine Randolph uttering such sentiments in spring 1919.

  “The world, as it ought to be”: Hubert H. Harrison’s “The New Politics for the New Negro,” (September 1917), collected in When Africa Awakes (New York: The Porro Press, 1920), p. 40.

  “In the home of an Italian rag-picker.… Bottle Alley”: Jacob A. Riis, from How the Other Half Lives (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890), pp. 51, 69, 1, 34, 63, 66.

  “U.S. HUNTS ANARCHISTS”: Evening Star, May 1, 1919, p. 1.

  “THE LARGEST BLOUSE DEPARTMENT IN THE CITY”: Evening Star, May 1, 1919, p. 2.

  Lynchings outside Pickens, Mississippi: “Mob Lynches Negro Couple,” Washington Times, May 9, 1919, p. 10.

  Man lynched near Dublin, Georgia: farmhand Jim Waters, on May 15, 1919, “Negro Assaulter of White Girl is Lynched by Mob,” Augusta Chronicle, May 16, 1919, p. 1.

  Man burned alive near El Dorado, Arkansas: twenty-five-year-old Frank Livingston, a former soldier, on May 21, after he was forced to confess to the murder of his employer and his wife. “Frank Livingston (Lynching of),” Encyclopedia of Arkansas, http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=8283. Last accessed January 9, 2019.

  Arson near Eatonton, Georgia: May 28, 1919, “Negro Buildings Near Eatonton Burned by Mob,” Augusta Chronicle, May 29, 1919, p. 1.

  On the eclipse: “Eclipse of Sun Invisible in D.C.,” Washington Herald, May 29, 1919, p. 5.

  “Blown to butcher’s meat”: Eyewitness to the aftermath of the bomb quoted in Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer, p. 55. The bomber’s name was Carlo Valdinoci.

  On other bombings June 2–3, 1919: “Judges and Other Officials Marked for Bomb Attack,” Evening Star, June 3, 1919, pp. 1–2.

  “BOMB AT ATTORNEY GENERAL’S HOME STARTS A NATION-WIDE ROUND-UP OF ANARCHISTS”: Evening Star June 3, 1919, p. 1.

  “Fair, continued warm tonight”: Evening Star, June 3, 1919, p. 1.

  “WOMAN SUFFRAGE WINS IN SENATE”: Evening Star, June 5, 1919, p. 3.

  “THREE RADICALS TAKEN IN RAID BY DISTRICT POLICE”: Washington Herald, June 15, 1919, p. 1.

  account of slave pen: E. S. Abdy, Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America, from April, 1833, to October, 1834, vol. 2 (London: J. Murray, 1835), pp. 96–97.

  On Harrison’s intellect: Orator, journalist, educator, and NAACP field secretary William Pickens once described Harrison as “a plain black man who can speak more easily, effectively, and interestingly on a greater variety of subjects than any other man I have ever met in the great universities.” Harrison was, said Pickens, a “ ‘walking cyclopedia’ of current facts” and it made “no difference” whether he was speaking about “Alice in Wonderland or … the heaviest depths of Kant; about music, or art, or science, or political history.” Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, p. 1.

  Harrison’s address: Almost verbatim from “Our Larger Duty,” When Africa Awakes, pp. 100–104. (The essay originally appeared in the August 1919 issue of The New Negro.)

  US Coins: Standing Liberty quarter minted 1916–1930; Walking Liberty quarter, 1916–1947; Winged Liberty dime also known as the Mercury dime, 1916–1945; and the Buffalo or Indian Head nickel 1913–1938.

  “POLICEMAN BATTLES WITH CRAZED NEGRO”: Washington Herald, June 9, 1919, p. 1.

  “POSSES SEEK NEGRO WHO ATTACKED GIRL”: Washington Times, July 6, 1919, p. 2.

  “NEGRO ROUND-UP WILL CONTINUE”: Washington Herald, July 11, 1919, p. 1.

  Ace bandage: Oscar O. R. Schwidetzky, who at one point was director of a company that manufactured medical instruments and supplies, is credited with the invention of the All Cotton Elastic bandage in 1918.

  “as one would a beef for slaughter”: These are Carter G. Woodson’s words, from his affidavit on the DC riots, quoted in Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer, p. 100.

  “CHICAGO RIOTS.… DEATHS NOW TOTAL 24”: Evening Star, July 29, 1919, p. 2.

  “Red summer had merged”: Lincoln Rothblum, “The Reform of Roxana,” Topeka State Journal, July 26, 1919, p. 12. Poetic license was taken here. I did not find this story in any DC papers. The spring-fall 1919 race riots in some two dozen cities were called “The Red Summer” by James Weldon Johnson in his book Along This Way (1933). Johnson, the “father” of the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” was field secretary for the NAACP when Savannah was a teen.

  “MORE CAPITAL ARRESTS”: Washington Times, November 8, 1919, p. 1.

  “Pendulum”: Georgia Douglas Johnson, The Heart of a Woman and Other Poems (Boston: Cornhill Company, 1918), p. 56.

  On the Whitelaw’s opening week: “The Whitelaw Hotel,” Washington Bee, November 29, 1919, pp. 1, 4.

  “the House of Quality and Service”: ad, Washington Bee, January 4, 1919, p. 7.

  “was a radical colored man …”: Herbert Parsons, Memorandum, September 29, 1917, p. 2, in Correspondence of the Military Intelligence Division Relating to “Negro Subversion,” 1917–1941.

  “undeniably true but also common knowledge”: Mark Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance: African Americans and the United States During World War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), p. 57.

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS

  Here: Hell Fighters parade, Getty; Here: Nannie Helen Burroughs, Library of Congress; Here: Students at Nannie Burroughs’s school, Getty; Here: Annie Brooks Evans and Lillian Evans, Anacostia Community Museum, Smithsonian Institution; Here: Dunbar High, the Modernist Journals Project (searchable database), Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing; Here: Halle E. Queen, Cornell University Library; Here: Addison N. Scurlock, Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; Here: Hubert Henry Harrison, Photographs and Prints Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library; Here: Sheet music, Library of Congress; Here: Covers of the Crisis, the Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing. http://www.modjourn.org.

  SELECTED SOURCES

  Bundles, A’Lelia. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker. New York: Washington Square Press, 2002.

  Dagbovie, Pero Gaglo, PhD. Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.: The Father of Black History. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2014.

  Easter, Opal V. Nannie Helen Burroughs. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

  Hagedorn, Ann. Savage Peace: Hope and Fear in America, 1919. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

  Harrison, Hubert H. When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World. New York: The Porro Press, 1920.

  Jackson, Shantina Shannell. “To Struggle and Battle and Overcome”: The Educational Thought of Nannie Helen Burroughs, 1875–1961, dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, Summer 2015.

  Klingaman, William K. 1919: The Year Our World Began. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

  McWhirter, Cameron. Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America. New York: Henry Holt, 2011.

  Moore, Jacqueline M. Leading the Race: The Transformation of the Black Elite in the Nation’s Capital, 1880–1920. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999.

  Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
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br />   Sandler, Martin W. 1919: The Year That Changed America. New York: Bloomsbury, 2019.

  Stewart, Alison. First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America’s First Black Public High School. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2013.

  Stewart, R.R.S. Designing a Campus for African-American Females: The National Training School for Women and Girls 1907–1964, thesis, University of Virginia, May 2008.

  Taylor, Traki. L. “Woman Glorified: Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909–1961, Journal of African American History, vol. 87, (Autumn 2002), pp. 390–402.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my editor, Mary Kate Castellani, you were, as always, a dream to work with—always exuberant, always challenging, always thinking, always inspiring me, always keeping me from going down rabbit holes, getting too much sucked into history. Associate editor Claire Stetzer, thank you once again for your efficiency and for your grace. I’m also grateful to others in editorial: Cindy Loh and Annette Pollert-Morgan.

  And once again what joy it was to work with the marvelous production editor Diane Aronson and the equally marvelous and intense copyeditor Patricia McHugh. I’m also grateful to production pros Melissa Kavonic and Nicholas Church as well as proofreader Regina Castillo.

  In design: Donna Mark and Jeanette Levy. And then there’s cover artist Connie Gabbert. Thank you!

  And in marketing: Valentina Rice, Erica Barmash, Phoebe Dyer, Lily Yengle, and Alona Fryman.