coerced or falsified votes cast in those years by thousands of blacks.
Yet Washington and Jones had been secret al ies for years—even
as Jones was manipulating black votes in the 1890s.12 It is also
possible that as a result of Washington's secret in uence, some of
the thousands of Jones votes cast by blacks and long assumed by
historians to be fraudulent, were in fact legitimate.
But Washington knew that as an o cer in the state militia in
1883, Jones also had cal ed out troops to prevent a lynching. He
had spoken publicly on many occasions of the importance of
respecting other new rights granted to freed slaves by the
amendments to the U.S. Constitution passed in the 1870s. As
governor, he blocked e orts to divert funds for black schools to
white ones. At the same time, Jones maintained his base of support
with the state's business elite by cal ing out troops to suppress a
major strike by newly unionized miners in the 1890s.
Over the years, Jones appeared to have moderated even further
on race. More recently, he had been a delegate to the just
completed 1901 Alabama constitutional convention. The document
agreed to at the meeting and later rati ed, which would govern
Alabama for the duration of the twentieth century and into the
twenty- rst, nal y eliminated virtual y al vestiges of the electoral
and civil rights given to blacks after emancipation. But Jones de ed
the political winds of the day, vigorously pushing for one of the few
measures approved that bene ted blacks, a law al owing for
impeachment of any sheri who al owed a prisoner to be seized by
a lynch mob. Jones also opposed e orts to eliminate al black
voting and to require that public schools for African American
children be funded only with those taxes col ected from blacks.
Jones quietly strategized with Washington throughout the
convention, consistently engaged in a tone of equals, addressing the
black leader with the honorific "Dear Sir."13
On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after
On the day after Judge Bruce's death, and only two weeks after
Roosevelt had been sworn in as president, Washington sent a let er
through an aide imploring the new chief executive to name Jones
as the new federal judge in Alabama. "He stood up in the
constitutional convention and elsewhere for a fair election law,
opposed lynching, and has been outspoken for the education of
both races," Washington wrote. "He is head and shoulders above any
of the other persons who I think wil apply to you," Washington
wrote to Roosevelt on October 2, 1901.14
Roosevelt took the advice and appointed Judge Jones less than a
week later. The decision elicited the e ect Roosevelt hoped for.
Many southern whites were impressed by the president's
wil ingness to turn to one of their "best men" for a critical federal
position, despite Jones being a prominent Democrat. Newspapers
in the region hailed the move.
Ten days after the appointment, the president was informed that
Washington was in the capital city. He insisted that the black
educator come to a private dinner at the White House with the
Roosevelt family. It was a dizzying sequence of events for
Washington and other African Americans who shared his belief that
accommodating discrimination while incremental y working to
reverse it was the best route to black freedom. Here was proof, it
seemed. Regardless of the struggles stil faced by the majority of
slave descendants, black men of accomplishment could rise to
unprecedented levels of influence.
Blacks had visited the White House before, and prior presidents
had sought the advice of black men. But never had a black man
appeared to be among the very most in uential gures in a
president's execution of so critical a task as selecting federal of icials
in an entire region. Yet more astonishing was that the white
president who had taken his advice won accolades for the resulting
decision. Black men could not be the leaders of whites in this
regime, but they could quietly wield great in uence as to who the
rulers would be. Now, the president wished his African American
counselor to openly sup with himself, his wife, and his children—
making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.
making no ef ort to conceal the event or minimize its significance.
Roosevelt had no hint of the reaction that would ensue.
Notwithstanding Washington's national fame and his widely known
view that blacks should in most regards accept their legal y inferior
position in the South, word that "a Negro" had dined at the same
table as the president, his wife, and his children—violating one of
the most sacrosanct protocols of southern racial custom—provoked
a sensational backlash.
U.S. senator Ben "Pitchfork" Til man of South Carolina sput ered:
"Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we
shal have to kil a thousand niggers to get them back to their
places." The Memphis Press Scimitar cal ed the evening meal "the
most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any
citizen of the United States." The Rich-mond News declared that
Roosevelt "at one stroke and by one act has destroyed regard for
him. He has put himself further from us than any man who has ever
been in the White House." The governor of Georgia, Al en Candler,
said, "No southerner can respect any white man who would eat
with a negro."15
Laced throughout the vili cations was the implicit or explicit
message that Roosevelt's decision to al ow Washington to share his
personal dining room amounted to an endorsement of sexual
relations—and predations— between black men and white women.
"It is simply a question of whether those who are invited to dine are
t to marry the sisters and daughters of their hosts," said Governor
Miles Benjamin McSweeney of South Carolina.16
The opprobrium continued for months, growing more virulent
with each announcement of another in the slow trickle of black
appointees made by the White House. After several black
o ceholders and their wives at ended a White House reception in
early 1903, the race-baiting Mississippi politician James K.
Vardaman cal ed Roosevelt a "lit le, mean, coon- avored
miscegenationist." The White House, Vardaman said, was "so
saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge
in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the
in the stable." Vardaman was elected governor of Mississippi the
fol owing year.17
A century later it is di cult to comprehend the degree to which
most southern whites had so thoroughly adopted the rationale
embodied by the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling less than ten years earlier
—which e ectively held that African Americans had no basis of
legitimate complaint regarding the racial climate at the turn of the
century, regardless of how overtly apparent was the disparate
treatment of and opportunities for whites and b
lacks.
Roosevelt's overtures to blacks were not just violations of an
accepted social custom, but gal ing because they suggested that in
fact African Americans did have reason to object to their current
status in the United States. White southerners by and large shared a
consensus that this view was simply nonsensical. They were certain
that the vast majority of blacks were entirely content and that their
contentment would only increase as freed-men were pushed nearer
to a legal status barely distinguishable from those of their parents in
antebel um society.
The Birmingham Ledger newspaper—describing a state in which
African Americans could no longer vote, could not hold o ce,
could not serve on local juries, were proscribed from most higher-
wage work, could arrange only the slimmest legal representation in
the courts, and were subject to ut erly arbitrary enforcement of the
law—summed up the fantasy shared by mil ions of southerners:
"The court of Alabama and schools of Alabama are open to negroes
and every door of opportunity can be entered and above al it is
easier for a negro to get rich here than anywhere else in the
world."18That delusion would not waver in the South for at least
another fty years, until the very climax of the civil rights
movement.
The Dadevil e Spot Cash, the voice of John Pace's Tal apoosa
County, enunciated this white delusion—and its o ense at the
inherent impudence of Roosevelt's at itudes—in a detailed
fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and
fulmination in early March 1903. "Alabama has many negroes and
many kinds of negroes, as lit le boys have many kinds of marbles.
We have good negroes and bad negroes, industrious negroes and
idle negroes, negroes determined to bet er their own condition and
negroes who care no more about the future than the birds care.
Alabama has negroes who have earned the respect and regard of
the people who know them, and Alabama has negroes who wear
the stripes of the convict."19
The Dadevil e editor also re ected the broadly shared paranoia
that any e ort to change or improve the conditions of blacks
amounted to an e ort to seize control of society: "Alabama has
negroes who own land and cat le and who are rearing their families
respectably and who can go to the bank and borrow money without
security. There are negroes who are teaching and many who are
fol owing honorable lines of work, and it has some who think with
the president that the door of hope for them means governing
white people as of icials. Al these we have and others."20
The message was clear, and shared almost universal y among
whites: whatever happens to black men is strictly the result of their
own choices. Those choices ultimately were to submit quietly to the
emerging new order or be crushed by it.
The reaction of southern leaders to Roosevelt's gesture to
Washington further underscored how far southern whites could
extend their ability to reconcile the obvious and extraordinary
abuses of blacks occurring around them with their rhetorical
insistence that African Americans were entirely free, content, and
unmolested. Never before in American history had so large a
portion of the populace adopted such explicitly false and calculated
propaganda. Many southern whites actual y came to believe claims
that black schools were equal y funded, black train cars were
equal y appointed, and that black citizens were equal y defended
by the courts—as preposterous as those claims obviously were.
Those who truly knew bet er nonetheless relished the clever
fabrication of this mythology, and how it so e ectively stymied the
busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most
busybody friends of African Americans in the North. The most
cynical thread in the mosaic of racial myth was the outrage of
southern white men at Roosevelt's supposed encouragement of
sexual interrelations between blacks and whites. White men openly
forced black slaves into their beds for two centuries before the Civil
War, and sexual access to local black women remained a running
point of confrontation between white landowners and their black
laborers deep into the twentieth century—a phenomenon that
continued to demonstrate itself a century later with the public
revelation that South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond fathered a
black child with an African American family servant in 1925.
"The whole country wel knows that white men of the South have
come into closer relations with negroes and commit ed far grosser
sins than that of sit ing down to meat with a reputable and
representative colored person," wrote Wil iam A. Sinclair, a black
physician, in 1905. "And in the eyes of their fel ows they su ered
no disgrace."21
President Roosevelt was shocked by the calumnies and vitriol
spewing from the South regarding his friendliness toward blacks.
He moderated slightly— never inviting another black man to his
dinner table again—but continued to insist that good Americans
could not legitimately object to the view that law-abiding and
industrious blacks should be treated with equity and ful protection
of the law.
Roosevelt concluded a long circuit of speeches across much of the
country in the spring of 1903 with an address in Spring eld,
Il inois, on June 4, at the monument there to Abraham Lincoln.
Arriving on a 10:15 A.M. train, Roosevelt was greeted euphorical y
rst by aging Union soldiers in the Lincoln-McKinley Veteran
Voters’ Association, then by more than ve thousand schoolchildren
massed along the street leading past the state capitol and furiously
waving American ags. Businesses and homes were decorated in
elaborate patriotic bunting and ags. A gathering of ten thousand
impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he
impatiently awaited the president at a nearby new armory he
would dedicate later in the day. Also in the crowd at the Lincoln
memorial were several detachments of the Il inois National Guard,
including the al -black Company H of the Eighth Regiment. "It
seems to me eminently t ing that the guard around the tomb of
Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers," Roosevelt said,
citing his own service in Cuba beside black soldiers. "A man who is
good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be
given a square deal afterward."22
The words were a modest anodyne for black Americans, given
the scale of the campaign over the previous two decades to
circumscribe their constitutional protections and limit their free
participation in American society. Yet the sentence—condensed by
newspaper reporters and repeated ubiquitously as a promise by
Roosevelt of "a square deal for the negro"—in amed white
southerners yet again. What most gal ed whites was the implication
by Roosevelt that African Americans were not already receiving as
square and fair a deal as they could possibly deser
ve.
In Alabama, as Secret Service agents scoured the countryside for
slavery, whites recognized that Roosevelt's remarks might be more
than the pitiable window dressing of equal civil rights they had
heard from McKinley and the other Republican leaders of the
previous decade.
By early June 1903, Alabama was a ame. Judge Jones—only
nineteen months into his service as the new member of the federal
bench—had proven to be precisely the gure Roosevelt hoped. The
slavery investigation announced in late May was spreading across
the state. Prominent white landowners in a half dozen counties had
learned they were under examination or at least al egation. Black
laborers—while stil acutely aware that the investigation subjected
them to a new degree of jeopardy with angry whites—quietly
expressed a level of anticipation unlike anything since rst word of
the coming emancipation had arrived forty years earlier.
The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons
The inquiry began when an at orney named Erastus J. Parsons
was hired to represent a black prisoner being held in Shelby
County. Local authorities obstructed Parsons's e orts to nd the
prisoner and refused to say why he was being held. Parsons
contacted the U.S. at orney in Montgomery, who in turn told Judge
Jones. The rst handful of frightened witnesses were brought before
a grand jury sit ing in Birmingham and presided over by Jones.
They told the first shocking account of Pace's slaving network.23
In March, Judge Jones red o a bewildered let er to At orney
General Philander C. Knox in Washington, D.C. "Some witnesses
before the Grand Jury here developed the fact that in Shelby
County in this District, and in Coosa County in the Middle district, a
systematic scheme of depriving Negroes of their liberty, and hiring
them out, has been practiced for some time," Jones wrote. "The
plan is to accuse the negro of some pet y o ense, and then require
him, in order to escape conviction, to enter into an agreement to
pay his accuser so much money, and sign a contract, under the
terms of which his bondsmen can hire him out until he pays a
certain sum. The negro is made to believe he is a convict, and
treated as such. It is said that thirty negroes were in the stockade at
one time." Already, at least one witness had been seized from a
Slavery by Another Name Page 25
