by Carla Kaplan
Lillian did not intend to be a radical. In fact, she could hardly have had a more usual background. Lillian, whose legal name was Elizabeth, was born to Courtney and Rebecca Wood in 1868 and raised in Pleasant, Ohio, with two older sisters, Florence and Alma; and an older brother, William. The Woods were hardworking, conservative Methodists who did not do well financially. Courtney Wood was a miller, an important job in a grain-producing state such as Ohio but not one likely to generate wealth. He and William took a chance and opened a shoe store in the nearby town of London in the late 1870s or early 1880s. The family lost all its money. Lillian wanted to be a writer, an artist, or a missionary, perhaps in China, but her mother forbade it, and she began teaching in her teens. She did manage a year at Ohio Wesleyan, then was called back to elementary and Sunday school teaching to supplement the family income.
Life was rough for the Wood sisters, as it was for many single women of lower-middle-class homes. None of the sisters married, though Lillian loved a local farmer who chose a woman with more money. Things were especially difficult after William married and left home. The sisters’ parents died. They could not afford the mortgage on the family property and were forced to sell it. Florence’s health turned delicate. Alma proved unreliable. Though she was the youngest, Lillian assumed the role of caretaker and took Florence to Chicago to recuperate and study millinery, one of the most acceptable professions for women in the late 1800s (also one of the few in which earning a decent wage was possible). Chicago was an immensely exciting city in the late 1800s, with thirty-three different train lines bringing workers into the stockyards, steel mills, shops, and neighborhoods to help the city rebuild after the Great Fire of 1871. Lillian wanted to stay and study art. But she was called back to Ohio almost immediately to care for an ailing aunt. Before long she found herself back in London, an unwelcome guest in the home of her brother and his “not agreeable” wife.
Florence took up her millinery work in Toledo, so Lillian packed up the family furniture and went to join her. She found work teaching and advanced to principal of a small school. Then “disaster again overtook us.” Florence lost her health, her money, and her ability to work. Alma, “always a problem because, especially, she could stick to nothing,” descended upon them, to be looked after as well. In short order, trying to juggle too many different responsibilities, Lillian lost her job and was penniless. It was 1907, and the country’s finances, depleted by a long recession, teetered on collapse.
At that point, Lillian received what she later described as her great “calling” and arranged to move to Morristown, Tennessee, a part of the country she had never seen. “I’ll go to the colored people,” she declared. In 1907, she set up Florence and Alma in nearby Knoxville and took up residence in one of the college dormitories, beginning a stint as dormitory matron. At that time it was highly unusual, anywhere in the South, for black and white teachers to live together. Lillian believed that she’d been foreordained from childhood to live among blacks. Even as an infant, she declared, she had shown a marked preference for “colored” babies over white ones, proving that “God then designed me to go to the Colored People.” But Lillian was also canny. By giving herself in “service” to “the coloured people” of Morristown, she made herself unavailable to most of her family’s demands. Her sisters were nearby but no longer able to lean so heavily on her. The wishes and needs of her Ohio relatives necessarily faded. She had a steady income, a welcoming community, a challenging occupation, and the possibility—if only she could squeeze out enough time—of pursuing her artistic and literary ambitions.
She could hardly have picked a more difficult time to go south, at the tail end of a “steep decline in the commitment of the North to blacks in the South.” Not only had northern support turned away from higher education for blacks in favor of either vocational training or elementary schools, but decades of backlash to Reconstruction gains had deepened racial divides. Southerners’ tendencies to see blackness as a contagion threatening whiteness had intensified. Segregation hardened. As historian Joel Williamson explains, “By about 1900 it was possible in the South for one who was biologically pure white to become black by behavior. . . . White people could easily descend into blackness.” That may have been fine with Lillian.
Arriving at Morristown College in 1907, Lillian was not altogether pleased. Morristown College was founded at the same time as Hampton Institute, a vocational and industrial school for blacks with an emphasis on the so-called dignity of labor, which meant menial work. Hampton’s founder, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, called on blacks to “refrain from participating in southern political life because they were culturally and morally deficient and therefore unfit to vote and hold office in a ‘civilized’ society.” Morristown College was struggling. “Southern white opposition [to blacks] was very largely aimed at black education of any kind” but was especially fierce about schools, such as Morristown, that emphasized the liberal arts. Since donors favored Hampton’s model, Morristown attempted to straddle it and a classical liberal arts education both. In addition to theology and religious instruction, the early curriculum offered courses in Latin, algebra, Greek history, English, Roman history, medieval history, geometry, geology, physics, psychology, modern history, and composition, as well as carpentry, woodworking, blacksmithing, machining, steam fitting, printing, upholstery, broom and brush making, foundry, domestic science, and sewing. It was a demanding program, with an insufficient faculty, and everyone at Morristown worked extraordinarily long hours.
Morristown was without any public hospital for blacks in 1907 when Lillian Wood arrived. President Hill thought the school should attempt to serve as a hospital, in addition to schooling blacks of all ages in every possible discipline. The pay was low, even by the standards of such schools (Lillian earned $20 a week, only a few dollars more than the weekly pay of work-study students). Classes were crowded, standing room only at times. Church attendance was mandatory. Most students worked at least five to six hours a day, in addition to their classes. Not surprisingly, they were often too exhausted to study. Lillian had been hired “to care for the boys and girls in her care much as a mother would in a home.” When she was found to be an able teacher, she was quickly assigned to teach history, grammar, zoology, and English classics—no doubt daunting for a woman trained in none of those subjects.
Relations with local whites were not much better than they’d been in Stearns’s day. The white president, Judson Hill, who came in 1881, found that he and his wife, Laura Yard Hill, were “shunned.” “Taunts and threats were part of their daily lives.” Called “Nigger Hill” by local whites, Judson was pushed and shoved on the streets. Eggs were thrown at him, and he was nearly tarred and feathered. “Our friends among the white people could be counted on the fingers of both hands. . . . Myself and family were completely ostracized. We scarcely dared to walk on the streets of town,” he noted.
Lillian had left Ohio for Tennessee expecting white opposition but also imagining interracial harmony in her new job. She did not know that the majority of white teachers “did not necessarily think their living students were yet their equals. Some thought they never would be.” The attitudes of her white colleagues disappointed Lillian most. Most of her fellow teachers looked down on blacks and refused to socialize with them or give them important responsibilities. In spite of working with blacks, they did not want to be charged with “nigger-loving.” “I found to my surprise . . . that there was a difference between a ‘missionary’ and a ‘friend.’ Some teachers were one thing and some were the other.” Lillian, determined to be a “friend,” attached herself to the one teacher there, Eugenie Hepler, who refused to kowtow to whites or condescend to blacks. Hepler “lived in [the] New Jersey Home [a girls’ dormitory] with the girls and showed at no time that she wasn’t a woman of color. She entered into the social life of the students and went to church at the colored Methodist church.” “Miss Eugenie Hepler,” Lillian wrote admiringly, “was a ‘friend’ of
the colored people. She took me under her care, God bless her memory.” Through Hepler, Lillian learned to ignore being charged with “nigger loving,” a challenge most of her white colleagues failed.
At Morristown, Lillian attempted to teach black history courses. Even Alain Locke, the leading black philosopher of his generation, could not succeed in getting a single such course approved at Washington, D.C.’s Howard University, the nation’s premier black educational institution. She also initiated a student exchange program called “Friends of Africa” that brought African students (mostly from the Congo) to study in Morristown. The program succeeded. But it raised eyebrows. She was rumored, according to former Morristown students, to have fallen in love with one of her older African students. What Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, attempted in 1961 was nearly unthinkable in 1907.
Lillian crossed other lines as well. Most white and black faculty members did not socialize. She did. She grew especially close to her elegant black colleague Andrew F. Fulton, who taught English (basic academic skills) from 1889 to 1927. Fulton was a former slave, sold for $1,666 from the same building where Almira Stearns had first taught. In her later years, especially, Lillian also took black students, both female and male, to live with her in a cottage behind the president’s house: an A-frame wooden house with a porch and three bedrooms but heat only in the living and dining rooms. The students spent winter evenings huddled together in the living room, reading or talking, sitting on Lillian’s overstuffed red and black horsehair furniture, “the ugliest furniture I’d ever seen,” one of them remembered. To Lillian, those students were always her “good friends” and her “best friends.”
Her novel was intended as a gift to them, and she wrote her friendships into the book. Let My People Go is in many ways a classic sentimental/didactic novel, of the type generally considered heavy-handed. But as a writer, Wood incorporated a number of surprises into the novel’s more predictable plotlines, testaments to how far she was willing to go and how unlike other white women she had come to consider herself.
On the face of it, Let My People Go seems remarkable only in the breadth of its historical reach and its attempt to condense all of black history into the life story of one Bob McComb, a black boy of origins so humble they are almost Dickensian. The novel weaves its way, via a classic sentimental love story between Bob and his beloved, Helen, through Reconstruction, lynching, disenfranchisement, early black education, the “Red Summer” race riots of 1919, officers’ training camps, World War I, the New Negro, the Great Migration, and the development of the NAACP: “nearly all the race’s ordeals,” as Shockley noted. Lillian was obviously reading the northern newspapers in which her small black college, Morristown Normal and Industrial, was placing weekly ads. She knew that the students and faculty at the college—a two-year industrial and teacher-training school founded in 1881—worried about their place in the “New Negro” world. Wood’s fictional protagonist, Bob McComb, was modeled on her own hardworking students. Let My People Go proposes that such a young man, acting with reason and intelligence, could solve the problems that leaders such as Du Bois, Locke, and others found insurmountable. By implication, his teachers—women such as Lillian E. Wood—had a place in the future as well.
Just as Lillian Wood hoped to draw positive attention to Yankee schoolmarms like herself and her predecessors, so too did she aim to strike a blow against lynching. She wanted to enter the growing national conversation through her novel. With the explosive growth of the black press that occurred during the 1920s, readers in Harlem could track the persistence of lynching and the heartbreaking failure of attempts to pass federal antilynching laws.
From Alabama to New York State, blacks were murdered for being more successful than neighboring whites, “sassing” a white person who took umbrage, looking like someone else in a lineup, passing a white driver on the road, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They would be accused of theft or dishonesty because they spoke their minds, stood up for themselves, talked to or merely smiled at a white woman, or even let a white woman smile at them. And the “Big Lie”—that black men threatened white women—held sway in many places, although, as activist Ida B. Wells put it in her controversial pamphlet A Red Record, 1892–1894, no one in Harlem or other black communities “believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women.” The fact that white women sometimes seduced black men was the far more dangerous truth. As Wells bravely noted, some southern communities would go to almost any length to hide that. “If Southern white men are not careful,” she warned, with guarded circumspection, “they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.” Wells’s carefully worded warning nearly cost her her life. “‘Tie the wretch who utters such calumnies to a stake,’” a white newspaper responded, “‘at the intersection of Main and Madison Streets, brand him in the forehead with a hot iron and perform upon him a surgical operation with a pair of tailor’s shears.’”
The threat of lynching was a factor in the Great Migration of blacks moving north to cities such as Chicago and New York, and it helped create the population boom in Harlem. But northern cities were not altogether free of racial terror. In nearby Port Jervis, New York, in 1892, a black man named Robert Lewis was seized by more than a thousand whites who dragged him across almost half a mile of ground before hanging him from a maple tree. “Hundreds” of white locals “hurried to the lynching to see his body. Afterward, men women and children hacked apart the lynching tree and cut up the rope for distribution among the crowd. Port Jervisites proudly displayed their morbid relics in the following days.” Wood used the lynching in Let My People Go.
The heart of the “New Negro” ideal was refusal to tolerate such violence: “If we must die; oh let us nobly die / dying but fighting back,” as McKay put it. Too narrow a focus on Harlem’s nightclubs and novels overlooked the pall that lynching cast over black communities and how central the antilynching fight was to the Harlem Renaissance, even—sometimes especially—when it was not mentioned. Frustration over lynching and the tepid national responses to it was as formative of the Harlem Renaissance—and as determining of the possibilities and limits of interracial friendship—as was enthusiasm for the arts. White women were so often the excuse for racial violence that Miss Anne had an important role to play in this struggle—if she was brave enough to take it.
Far too often, the nation proved indifferent to people of color. By the early 1920s, hundreds of antilynching bills had been launched, but none had managed to pass. National organizations such as the NAACP and, later, the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching threw their weight—and much of their operating budgets—into lengthy, committed campaigns to pass meaningful laws. The most hopeful moment in the long antilynching struggle seemed to occur in 1921, when Representative Leonidas Dyer’s antilynching bill was approved by the House of Representatives. But Dyer’s bill was defeated, that same year, by a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. In response, there were stepped-up efforts by activists and a range of cultural appeals in poems, novels, and plays—giving rise to an entire genre of antilynching theater—but no federal legislation passed, then or ever. To some blacks, it seemed that white women cared more about the vote than they did about lynching.
National apathy was a devastating blow to blacks’ hopes for white support. As scholar Jacqueline Goldsby writes, “The nation’s callous disregard for the mortal danger under which African Americans lived was indeed widespread.” Northern Methodist churches did not condemn the practice until 1900, only seven years before Lillian Wood went south, and southern Methodist churches stayed silent. Photographs of lynchings remained so popular—appearing commonly on postcards—that as late as 1908, one year after Lillian went south, the U.S. Post Office was forced to ban their circulation through the mails. “White Americans’ apathy allowed lynching to thrive as much as did wh
ite southerners’ much-studied antipathy.” In August 1927, W. E. B. Du Bois expressed his outrage and bewilderment that “the recent horrible lynchings in the United States, even the almost incredible burning of human beings alive, have raised not a ripple of interest, not a single word from the pulpit, and not a syllable of horror or suggestion from the Defenders of the Republic, the 100% Americans, or the propagandists of the army and navy.”
National indifference made the need for white allies more urgent. Southern black women writers reached out to white women: “The Negro women of the South lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. . . . We all feel that you control your men . . . that so far as lynching is concerned . . . if the white women would take hold of the situation that lynching would be stopped. [As for the excuse that lynching is necessary to protect] the chastity of our white women . . . I want to say to you, when you read in the paper where a colored man has insulted a white woman, just multiply that by one thousand and you have some idea of the number of colored women insulted by white men.” “There must be good people of the white South,” one despairing black leader wrote. “If only they would give some sign, protest in some form, it would have telling effect.” It was not enough to tsk-tsk and lament. Being a “true friend of the Negro” as Lillian Wood put it, now meant more than letting go of the long-standing white image of blacks as “childlike, affectionate, docile, and patient.” It meant castigating other whites and, if necessary, renouncing them. It meant rethinking staid ideas about race and desire.
