by Beth Macy
The Ringling brass hadn’t bothered figuring it out. But what a wild celebration it was.
Billboard recounted the event in a brief that was spoon-fed to it by Fellows, who liked to twirl his graying mustache as he typed. He was proud of the nickname his reporter friends bestowed on him: the Minister Plenipotentiary of the Greatest Show on Earth.
It was getting to be so effortless; they reprinted his every word.
What the Minister Plenipotentiary never saw coming was the literal media circus into which he was about to be jammed.
If Harriett Muse had her way, the reporters could print all the racist poems and jokes they wanted. But George and Willie would have the last laugh.
8
Comma, Colored
If Dexter Fellows couldn’t tell one brother from the other, he sure didn’t know where their mother lived. In his autobiography, he says authoritatively that the Muse brothers hailed from “the Carolinas.”
He certainly had no idea they had an entire family living in Roanoke. But he did understand just how harsh the racial climate in Virginia’s booming rail town was.
Fellows’s most recent trip to Roanoke had been three decades earlier, as an advance man for Pawnee Bill, a cowboy-oriented Wild West show whose acts included Annie Oakley and Buffalo Bill.
By his own vivid accounting, Fellows’s brief time in Roanoke had been a haunting one. The drama unfolded the moment he happened into town in September 1893, when a hotel proprietor urged him to attend a public event taking place that night.
“Better come uptown with me,” S. A. Vicks said. “They’re going to lynch a nigger… Why, the whole town is turning out.”
Indeed, Fellows had just stumbled into the most violent and chaotic scene ever witnessed in Roanoke, before or since: the Thomas Smith lynching of 1893. Thousands gathered around the city jail, threatening to storm it. Evidence was flimsy, historians would later agree, that Smith had actually attacked a woman earlier that day, as the media and police claimed at the time.
But the crowd “snarled and snapped like wolves encircling their prey and their ululating cry, as it could be heard blocks away, throbbed like the thundering bass of an organ,” Fellows wrote in a four-page description that dovetails, paragraph by paragraph, with the confirmed historical account. (While his press releases were full of hyberbole and outright myth, Fellows hewed to the facts where the lynching was concerned.)
“Come on, let’s get the bastard!” someone shouted.
Shots rang out, and though Vicks initially insisted otherwise, it became clear—there was blood everywhere—that the bullets were not blanks. Separated from Vicks in the chaos, Fellows took refuge under a porch while soldiers ushered Smith out of jail during a brief lull, transporting him outside the city limits.
When the shooting quieted down, Fellows wrote, he found the hotel proprietor lying dead in the street, one of nine people killed.
By nightfall, Smith’s corpse dangled from a hickory limb, bullets riddling his body and signs hanging from him that read MAYOR TROUT’S FRIEND on his back and DO NOT CUT DOWN BY ORDER OF JUDGE LYNCH.
After scores of people carried away fragments of Smith’s clothing, after they burned Smith’s body on the banks of the Roanoke River, after hysterical women tore ribbons from their dresses to throw into the funeral pyre, Fellows walked back to the proprietorless hotel, as he described it. He closed the scene by reciting the lamentations of a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the best-known black writer at the time:
I bent me down to hear his sigh;
I shook with his gurgling moan.
And I trembled sore when they rode away,
And left him here alone.
By the mid-1920s, Roanoke’s racial climate hadn’t changed much, though Smith’s lynching was the city’s last. What had evolved, though, was the cultural cachet of the Gainsboro neighborhood, along the northern edge of downtown. The black-owned Dumas Hotel on Henry Street, popularly known as the Yard, was beginning to attract the likes of Duke Ellington, Marian Anderson, and Louis Armstrong. It was home to scores of black-owned businesses, too—barbershops, law offices, smoke shops, nightclubs, and cafes. It had its own tiny branch library, initially housed in the flood-prone basement of the black YMCA in 1921.
The Yard also had people like the feisty young Virginia Y. Lee, a librarian who covertly put up black-history displays against the wishes of her white downtown-library bosses, who told her to “slow the pace.” Because the city was pitching in only $20,000 toward a proper black library—just one-twelfth of what it was planning for its new main branch downtown for white residents—Lee found herself walking toward the grand, imposing Catholic church at the top of a steep hill near the Yard. She wanted the priest to donate land for the stand-alone building she had literally sketched out herself, a beautiful, sun-drenched brick Tudor building that would become the beacon for the neighborhood as it exists today—and, where, incidentally, I began my research for this book.
“On the way up that hill, I was saying a little prayer that God would be with me; that I would not have to tolerate non-interest in what I was going to ask,” she recalled in a 1982 ceremony in her honor. The priest signed on to donate the land, after garnering written permission from Pope Pius XII.
A few blocks away, a young Illinois-born novelist-turned-filmmaker named Oscar Micheaux had set up an office on the Yard called the Micheaux Film Corporation, and he had grand plans for Roanoke’s mini–Harlem Renaissance. From the gritty railroad city, Micheaux was on his way to becoming the most prolific filmmaker of the silent period, black or white. He used local actors—including a young Oliver Hill—in his House Behind the Cedars, a film that shocked viewers for its depiction of an interracial couple, one of Micheaux’s favorite themes.
The oldest surviving feature film by a black director is his 1920 Within Our Gates. The sprawling story of racial injustice was created in partial response to D. W. Griffith’s 1915 The Birth of a Nation, which had featured a cast of inflammatory caricatures: noble white people who liked nothing more than to lynch lazy, lecherous blacks.
Virginia-born President Wilson, a staunch supporter of segregation, made The Birth of a Nation the first film shown inside the White House, helping spark a resurgence of the KKK. Calling Griffith’s racist saga “the finest motion picture of all time,” the Roanoke Times noted that its local premiere featured a special orchestra and select seats that sold as high as $2, the equivalent of $46 today.
Micheaux’s return salvo was released the same week the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced that nine African-American World War I veterans had been lynched. Within Our Gates featured especially bold and graphic scenes of two blacks being lynched and the near rape of a black woman by a white man—who stops only when he realizes that the victim is, in fact, his own mulatto daughter. The man had been stealing from the parents who raised her, his tenant farmers, for many years, and long before, he had also raped her mother, never realizing that he had sired a child.
Criticized for its graphic nature and banned in some cities, Micheaux’s film was positively audacious at a time when whites were still cheering Griffith’s work. Across the country, lynching had almost turned into a spectator sport, with special railroad excursions planned around established lynching sites—a practice W. E. B. Du Bois called the new “white amusement.”
Unlike most of the black leaders Du Bois hailed as the Talented Tenth, Micheaux didn’t just portray blacks as heroes. He was rare among black artists because he also explored the negative traits of his characters, airing such dirty laundry as gambling, drug use, conspiring with white men for selfish advancement, and crime. He even stepped on the toes of the black clergy, openly mocking what he perceived as their greedy and sanctimonious behavior.
“The black intelligentsia attacked him,” said Bayer Mack, a documentary filmmaker who explored Micheaux’s life in a 2014 film. “He was saying the church was dead asleep and for sale to the highest bidder.”
With his liberal use of black dialect, “he was saying we are not properly educated. He was pointing out that urbanization gave blacks a different problem than they had in the South: competition for jobs,” Mack added.
“If you’re looking at civil rights and [the 2015] riots in Baltimore, Oscar was just light-years ahead of his time.”
In Roanoke and elsewhere in the South, Jim Crow laws had reached their zenith in the late 1910s and ’20s. Some progress had been made in Virginia since emancipation. Blacks now owned $53 million in property, a pittance compared with the $920 million of white-owned land. Still, it was “a big step forward from the days of slavery,” a newspaper writer noted in 1924. And yet, more than fifty years after the abolition of slavery, three-quarters of African Americans living in the South were still working as day laborers or sharecroppers.
“Separate but equal” segregation, legitimized by the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court Plessy v. Ferguson, was now fully entrenched, with stringent Jim Crow laws in places like hospitals, jails, and businesses in southern states, not to mention the voting booth. Under the oligarchy of segregationist Virginia governor Harry F. Byrd and his so-called Byrd Machine, ordinances forbidding blacks and whites from living on the same block were enacted in many cities.
As a visiting Swedish writer observed: “Segregation is now becoming so complete that the white Southerner practically never sees a Negro except as his servant and in other standardized and formalized caste situations.”
Black-white interactions could now be as bizarrely intimate as they were brutally snobbish. In Jordan’s Alley, black maids were so close to their white employers that they washed their undergarments outside their own shanties but could not ride in the same railcars. In the executive car of the Norfolk and Western Railway, the black chef served elaborate meals for his white bosses garnished with the parsley he’d grown and snipped in the backyard of his home—located, of course, on a blacks-only block.
The Roanoke Times heralded the establishment of the region’s KKK klavern, or chapter, named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and attributed its creation to a “surge of patriotism.” World War I had just ended, and in the next year more than seventy African Americans had been lynched, many of them still wearing their military uniforms.
Membership was no doubt helped along by having the right kind of haters in the right kind of places: local Klansmen were led by a prominent lawyer and Spanish War and World War I veteran, Colonel R. Kent Spiller, who would go on to serve as the city’s commonwealth attorney, or chief prosecutor, in 1925. Shortly after Spiller’s election to that post, the KKK held a parade through the streets of downtown Roanoke, headed by a huge fiery cross and an oversized U.S. flag held up by fifty people.
Under a hazy October sky, some fifteen hundred men, women, and boys joined the parade, and thousands more came along to watch, filling streetcars and causing one of the city’s earliest traffic jams. The parade started at a downtown park and wended its way down the Jefferson Street main corridor and on to the city fairgrounds, near the edge of downtown.
Led by a robed horseman, the marchers encircled the grounds, and cheers rang out from the grandstand. More than two hundred converts took oaths of allegiance to the Invisible Empire. Hooded figures then gathered in the shadow of a burning cross. The newspaper recorded “the color and mystery of the organization with the fiery cross,” and a local radio station broadcast the event so people who couldn’t be there could listen from home on their brand-new Atwater Kent radio sets.
Spiller and company declared they “hated neither negroes, Catholics or the foreign born; that their organization was simply to keep the states under control of white native-born Protestants.”
Spiller was a member of the prestigious St. John’s Episcopal Church in downtown Roanoke and of the upper-crust Shenandoah Club—which wouldn’t admit Jews, blacks, or women until the late 1980s. He was descended from an old Virginia family, prominent slave owners and land-grant recipients from the British sovereign during the colonial era. His father had served as a captain in the Confederate army and fought in the Battle of New Market, and Spiller saw himself as a law-and-order defender of racial integrity and white Protestant supremacy.
Roanoke’s Robert E. Lee Klan No. 4 was a prestigious group to be a part of, something local business owners joined to help boost their reputations, akin to Rotary and Kiwanis clubs today. “They were just plain, everyday citizens,” recalled one black Roanoker, in an oral-history interview he gave to the Harrison Museum of African American Culture in 1992. For years the man couldn’t understand why his boss at the insurance agency where he did low-level work was so mean to him—until he saw him marching in a Klan parade.
At ninety-eight years old, retired but still a legend among Virginia newspapermen, Melville “Buster” Carico told me he remembered a weeklong singing and dancing extravaganza sponsored by the local Klan in 1926. A musical that toured across the South, The Awakening relied on local Klans to provide backup for its professional troupe. The city’s best-known department stores sponsored the play, tracing the Klan version of Reconstruction: outrages perpetrated by “negro officers” and “low class” whites, followed by the “awakening” of the South, all thanks to the gallant and patriotic Klan.
Buster was ten years old at the time and didn’t go to the show. But he read about the opening-night crowd of twelve hundred in the afternoon newspapers he delivered. He recalled an open-air Ford passing down the hilly blue-collar street where he lived with his divorced mother and spinster schoolteacher aunt. It was chock-full of Klansmen, wearing white robes and hoods.
“My mother admired the KKK, not for its racial stance but for how they protected women. If a man was known to be cheating on his wife, the Klan would go to him and persuade him to stop,” recalled Buster, who said he knew not a single black person growing up. “A lot of the best people in Roanoke were in the Klan.”
It did not surprise him to discover, after being promoted to Roanoke Times reporter at the age of nineteen, following stints as a paperboy, mailroom hand, and switchboard operator, that the print establishment treated blacks as subhumans, covering only their crimes or, on rare occasion, their church- or library-related events.
The paper ran a syndicated comic strip called Hambone’s Meditations, featuring a character in blackface who said things like “I ain’ stud’in’ ’bout borryin’ trouble—dey’s ’nough uv it come to me FREE!”
“When I started on the paper, if a black was in the news, you had to put ‘comma, colored’ after his name,” Buster said.
During Prohibition, Spiller was as adamantly opposed to bootleggers as he was to blacks, though he was careful not to look too hard for them, knowing full well that everyone from judges to church deacons made their own beer and wine. Advertisements for hip flasks were a routine sight in the Roanoke Times.
The nip joints in Jordan’s Alley were in full swing, and in a spectacular moonshine-conspiracy trial that took place in the 1930s, a clearer picture of illegal ’20s drinking would soon emerge: Franklin County alone had turned 17,000 tons of sugar into moonshine in one three-year period, and everyone seemed to be in on the action, from sheriff’s deputies to a state Prohibition officer to a twelve-year-old boy who ran whiskey regularly from Franklin County to Roanoke.
“Few had scruples about violating the unpopular law,” wrote the Roanoke historian Clare White. “A whole generation came to adulthood in an atmosphere of permissive law-breaking never before seen.”
Spiller tended to focus his laser beam of justice elsewhere, waging a campaign to eliminate gambling devices of all kinds and in particular slot machines. Roanokers were “gambling away money needed for pork chops, bacon, and beans,” he argued.
While the Roanoke Times ignored the things Spiller turned a blind eye to, it paid special attention to the crimes being committed by blacks, such as in these typical “Police Court Notes” items: “Eight colored men, charged with gambling, were dismissed. They said you cou
ldn’t get fifteen cents out of the crowd. Their defense, in addition to that: ‘Jest in dah talkin’ about de good games we used to have ’en how close times is now ’en how hard money is to git.’”
It was OK for judges and clergymen to have a little home brew going in their basement or moonshine in their hip flasks. But when Novelle Smith attempted to cross the county line from Franklin to Roanoke, a patrolman, shocked that a black woman could have the resources to own her own vehicle, pulled her over, searched her car, and found whiskey stashed in the trunk.
“She offered him $100 to let her go… but he refused, bringing her to headquarters,” the court reporter wrote.
“I think I would have let her go,” the judge quipped, and the courtroom erupted in laughter.
But it was only a joke, as he then abruptly pronounced “Fifty and thirty” for Novelle Smith, meaning a $50 fine and thirty days in jail.
The Muse family had been on the radar of city police since Cabell’s arrest in 1920 for reckless driving, a charge he appealed but ultimately lost, incurring a $5 fine. In 1923, the same year a wire-service reporter described Willie and George as shedding all their hair on their heads every six months, their younger, albino brother, Harrison, was arrested for felonious malicious assault. His victim was a laborer named A. W. Wade, whom police said Harrison had “feloniously and maliciously cut, stabbed, stricken, beaten, held, wounded, bruised, and ill-treated” with the intent of disfiguring and killing him.
An all-white jury sentenced the twenty-one-year-old Harrison, who had recently married but was still living in his parents’ two-room shanty, to five years in prison. Harrison appealed the ruling. He claimed he was at home—nowhere near the scene of the attack—and that, besides, it was too dark that night for Wade to have reliably identified him as the attacker. But the judge overruled his motion to appeal. (One wonders whether Harrison, legally blind from albinism, would have been able to see his purported victim.)
