Miss Anne in Harlem

by Carla Kaplan

  For the most part, white women came weakly and late to the cause. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching did not form until 1930. And it did not generally support full enfranchisement for blacks or endorse a black militant response to racial violence, advocating instead “a slow process of cultural change” through the influence of white women. Black activists such as Mary B. Talbert pleaded with white activists such as Mary White Ovington: “The hour has come. . . . I am firmly convinced that your help and co-operation is needed at this time.” But little changed. It is no wonder, then, that a woman like Lillian Wood, looking around her and lacking political skills, decided to act on her own and no accident that she turned to literature.

  Let My People Go is a wish-fulfillment novel. It imagines resolving this intractable issue of lynching, the most pressing one facing black communities in the 1920s. And it imagined white women playing an important role, refusing to be the excuse for the violence perpetrated against black men. Historian Glenda Gilmore noted that “most white women simply could not overcome the racial contexts in which they lived, even if they had thought to try.” As much as her move to a black community, Wood’s novel was an attempt to both confront and overcome her race. Bob McComb advances from a college modeled on Morristown to the U.S. Congress, where his demand that “Lynch law and Mob rule be abolished” is met with unanimous enthusiasm. He is able to speak back to the highest levels of national power, insisting “that the President be instructed to enforce this measure” (at a time when enforcement of existing laws was virtually nonexistent in some parts of the nation). And his congressional acts inaugurate a new day for black America, a “morning light” for “our people.”

  Bob’s national triumph comes at the end of many tribulations. He is orphaned at fourteen, escapes three lynchings, avoids jail after being wrongly accused of a theft, acquires a white patron, goes to school, meets and courts his wife, joins the service, fights valiantly, is wounded and recovers, chooses to live in Tennessee over New York or Chicago, and prospers as a “race man.” One dramatic incident sets everything he does in motion. He is “called” into service to his race when he witnesses a young black woman’s anguish after being raped by her white employer. Feeling for “his sisters suffering wrongs such as that,” Bob determines that he will do “somethin’ to help the girls.”

  Lillian knew firsthand of such incidents in the lives of her female students. At Morristown, she vigorously defended a black female student who had been living off campus with a local minister and his wife. When the student became pregnant by the minister and the school moved to expel her for indecency, Lillian took her into her home and made sure she was able to pass her examinations and graduate with her classmates. “I remember Beulah with pleasure,” she later reflected. “I was and am sorry that I displeased some of the faculty, but it seems I had to try to save my girl.” A few women, former students at Morristown, remember how risky the defense of Beulah Tucker was. “She took a chance,” one said. “She was brave to do that,” said another. The centrality of black female honor in Wood’s novel indicated to many that its author must be a black woman. Shockley praised how well the novel “summed up the new black woman.” Other bibliographers have similarly assumed that this portrait of the “emerging black woman” displays the inside understanding of a black woman writing about her own people.

  Lillian’s white colleagues did not like her book. “It was not well received by some white members of the faculty,” she wrote in her unpublished memoirs, “and was refused by some book sellers. They thought it was too radical and pushed the Negro forward too much.” Financially and critically, the novel fared poorly. It had a modest print run of five hundred copies, was not reviewed, and appears not to have been advertised. She gave away as many copies as she sold.

  But among her former students at Morristown, the novel did well. Her “best friends” (her students) all spoke “well of it,” she reported happily. I was able to meet a few of those former students, including some who had lived with Lillian Wood toward the end of her life. They confirm Wood’s remembrance. Let My People Go, they told me, was important because it demonstrated that an older white woman from a very different northern background could “get it”—could empathize with the issues dearest to young black men and women and, especially, with ideas about black female sexuality. She had a “tremendous impact” on them, they told me. “She was very sincere.” She proved that in spite of race, people are “just people.” The forthrightness of the book belied schoolmarm stereotypes. “What she believed in, she would let you know,” her students noted admiringly.

  The Franklin sisters, Odessa, Violet, and Lady Bee Coleman, former students of Lillian Wood who lived with her at Morristown College; their copy of Let My People Go is carefully preserved.

  Her portrayal of the teacher-student relationship between Bob McComb and the white Miss Ranier, “a small white woman with beautiful graying-brown hair,” stands out. Wood used it to model interracial intimacy. Why is it, Bob asks, that some white teachers just don’t “like Negroes,” for all of their “talk? . . . Miss Ranier . . . looked at Bob, and his eyes met hers with a look Bob always remembered. It seemed that they looked into each other’s souls and found out that they were the dearest of kin. From that time forward their friendship was firm and true. She held him to her soul, and he was her own.” Miss Ranier was Bob’s “best friend.”

  Wood contrasted Miss Ranier with false “friend[s] of the Negro” who oppose “social equality.” But Wood went considerably farther. Doing what even black radical antilynching activist Ida B. Wells would not have dared, Wood depicted white women as absolute fiends. She painted a scene of an Illinois lynching in which the most brutal participants are the white women:

  A crowd of white women, with wildly flying hair and garments, rushed by just as a shot struck the [black] preacher’s wife. Two women took the body and threw it back into the burning house; then they rushed on. One of them stumbled and fell over [the little child] Teddy who had fallen near the burning cottage. She arose with a curse, grasped Teddy by the arm, and dragged him to an open space in the throng. Then these savage women stripped the clothing from his little body and in [a] frenzy of hatred they stoned him until they had finished the earthly life of their victim. They then threw the body into the flames.

  This is the most condemnatory portrait of white women I have encountered, and one of the very few portraits of lynching to also include white women. It all but declares war on white womanhood. In it the author advocates “fighting back” against her “own” people and represents white women, not blacks, as beyond the social “pale.”

  Her support of black militancy was probably especially discomforting to her white colleagues. The Morristown College teachers were instructed never to strike back at their harassers. Indeed, they were instructed never to look at them. Students and faculty were counseled in forbearance. Let My People Go gave lip service to that ideal, but it emphasized, instead, the New Negro manhood and the right of blacks to fight for “the rights of men, the respect due to men, and the chance of men.”

  Wood published her novel through the African Methodist Church’s Book Concern, a highly unusual move for a white Methodist. Its foreword, moreover, was written by Robert E. Jones, the first black bishop of the Methodist Church. In African-American literature there is a long tradition of white prefaces preceding black autobiographies, part of the “authenticating machinery” designed to reassure white readers that the story is true and its author trustworthy. There is no corresponding tradition of white literature depending on black “authenticating machinery” to establish its legitimacy. Even Mary White Ovington did not turn to W. E. B. Du Bois to introduce her memoir of founding the NAACP. In giving Bishop Jones the first word, Wood pointedly reversed hundreds of years of custom.

  Of course, since she had been taken for black for so long, much of this went unnoticed, except locally. In Morristown, Lillian remained visible, living at the colle
ge during the school year and with her sisters in Knoxville in the summer, and taking creative writing courses at the University of Tennessee. Morristown College kept faith with Lillian Wood. When it was accredited and the state required all teachers to have college degrees, Lillian E. Wood, who never earned an advanced degree, was made college librarian. When her sister Alma died, the school permitted her other sister, Florence (also uncredentialed), to move in with Lillian on campus and give the students piano lessons. When Florence died, the black college president accompanied Lillian to Ohio for the funeral (one can only imagine what her Ohio relatives thought of that). As Morristown transitioned from a mostly white faculty to an all-black faculty, Lillian Wood remained, living in campus housing and receiving a small salary.

  Nonetheless, vestiges of old racial attitudes are visible in her novel. Occasionally, in Let My People Go, blacks roll their eyes. Sometimes they exhibit the “usual optimism” of their race and “laugh, sing, and feast,” thinking “as little as possible of the morrow,” as do Harriet Beecher Stowe’s characters, Mark Twain’s, and Joel Chandler Harris’s. Lillian Wood was not perfect. She was one of a band of what Almira Stearns called “remarkable women,” women who, while ordinary in many ways, nevertheless did extraordinary things.

  When Wood wrote Let My People Go, black colleges such as Morristown were well into a historic shift away from all-white faculties. Morristown, in 1925, was roughly fifty-fifty. By the time Lillian Wood died of a heart attack at Morristown in 1955, she was the only white faculty member left standing in the yearly faculty photograph, a striking presence with her large bun of white hair and her heavy suits and dresses. She was ninety years old and had spent forty-eight of those years at Morristown, more than half of her life. She failed in her effort to attract the notice of white women of the Harlem Renaissance, but she clearly watched them from afar and was influenced by their writings. I suspect she would have been very glad to know some of the women in this book, such as Mary White Ovington, Annie Nathan Meyer, Fannie Hurst, and even Josephine Cogdell Schuyler. Charlotte Mason, no doubt, would have put her off and alienated her. And she probably would have been shocked by Nancy Cunard. No doubt she would have been especially glad to know Amy Spingarn, who mounted an extraordinary antilynching exhibit in 1935. Spingarn’s show, “An Art Commentary on Lynching,” like Wood’s novel, was unusually graphic. Some called it “grisly” and “heartbreaking.”

  Integration was not kind to Morristown College. Like many historically black colleges, it struggled to attract students. Finally, in 1989, it was acquired by Knoxville College, also a struggling historically black college. Knoxville hoped to use the fifty-two-acre campus, with its beautiful historic buildings, many of them on the National Register, as a satellite campus. But Knoxville lost its own accreditation and had to give up its Morristown plans. The school stood abandoned from 1994 to 1996, vandalized and decaying. A few of its records and archives were transferred to Knoxville, but most were left behind in the empty buildings. The Morristown campus was purchased in 2006 by a local developer for $776,000. He wanted to convert it into condominiums. But he soon declared bankruptcy and then died, leaving the school grounds abandoned again. A series of arson fires then picked off the campus’s most striking historic buildings: the cafeteria, the gymnasium, dorms, and science buildings. In 2010, another arson fire reduced the college’s crown jewel, its Laura Yard Hill Administration Building, to a pile of smoking bricks, each of which had once been made, on campus, by Morristown College students.

  During the years of neglect, local alumnae did what they could to salvage the college’s records and movable artifacts. Often in their sixties, seventies, and even eighties, they braved unsafe flooring, dug through Dumpsters, challenged homeless squatters and drug addicts, looked around crumbling corners, and carted what they could into their cars. Some records were taken to a Head Start Center, where the Progressive Business Association then met around long folding tables to discuss its hopes for black Morristown. There they stored college records and photographs, catalogs and artifacts, archives and newsletters as best they could in a wall of dented tan file cabinets.

  Among the many artifacts stored at the Progressive Business Association was a life-size bronze bust of a white woman, which sat on the edge of a black folding table.

  Bust, depicting either Almira Stearns or Lillian Wood, maintained by Morristown’s Progressive Business Association (now defunct).

  She has a roundish face, a large bun, and a determined, kindly face. She was identified to me as Almira Stearns, but she looks more like Lillian E. Wood. When I asked for clarification, no one was quite sure which of those two teachers the bust represented. They were certain, however, that she needed to be preserved somewhere people could see her, along with the rest of the college history, which, they knew all too well, was vanishing.

  The once eminent black school Morristown College, for sale.

  Chapter 4

  Josephine Cogdell Schuyler: “The Fall of a Fair Confederate”

  Most of America is crazy on the race question.

  —Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  My purpose? To break down race prejudice that my children may not suffer as my husband and my friends in Harlem . . . and that families like the one in which I was born may cease to exist.

  —Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  Sad Are Beautiful Revenges.

  —Josephine Cogdell Schuyler

  The Schuylers at home.

  It almost did not happen. But late on a cloudy, unseasonably warm Friday in early January 1928, a petite, graceful white Texas beauty named Josephine Cogdell slipped into the New York City marriage license bureau with her black lover, George Schuyler, Harlem’s most biting satirist and a widely published journalist: a short, dark, elegant man with excellent manners, an arch wit, and a sardonic smile. They were exceptionally well dressed, dignified, and mature—both in their early thirties—but they were being treated like children, conducted from one corner of the municipal building to another by scowling officials, then rushed through the steps of their civil ceremony without explanation or congratulation. A graying justice of the peace, anxious to clear his desk and get home, read from a perfunctory script without looking up. George barely had time to peck Josephine’s cheek before they were hustled outside again, where they found themselves standing on the stone steps, left alone to adjust to their new status under the muted colors of a winter sunset slanting through lower Manhattan’s administrative buildings. Josephine looked up from under her new green hat, swayed, and steadied herself with a gloved hand on George’s arm.

  She had succumbed in a daze to the disappointing ceremony. Now she imagined that she “was being abducted by a dark prince who would take me to his castle in an exotic new land.” The weight of racial intolerance was bearing down on her, demanding that she sacrifice “everything I knew” and bid an “emotional farewell” to the white world. She feared that she would never again return to what she knew or be known for who she was. It felt like dying. “I have dropped completely out of sight. No one in the white world . . . knows my whereabouts or will ever know.”

  Josephine was admittedly “dramatic.” And she would have acknowledged being theatrical about having to “cast my lot henceforth with the Negro.” But for all of her hyperbole, she was not understating the vertigo-inducing stakes of marrying George that day. The taboo against interracial intimacy, or miscegenation as it was still then called, was fundamental to maintaining myths of racial difference and purity. In 1928, blacks and whites lived in such different worlds that white women who married black men did undergo a kind of social death, often expelled from family, home, and community. As they attempted to enter a black world in which their presence was an unwelcome reminder of inequality and oppression, they often found themselves without kin, church, or familiar social networks. Many crossed over without knowing much about black cultural expectations or black history. Some knew only a few black people. Most were ill equipped to face the h
ostile reaction they engendered or to fit into the new world they had chosen.

  The newspapers, meanwhile, were thick with warnings to race-crossers. An assistant professor at a medical college in Virginia had recently been fired for remarking, hypothetically, that she’d prefer to “marry an intellectual and highly cultured ‘Negro’ than an inferior type of ‘white man.’” In Poughkeepsie, New York, a black man was charged with “second degree criminal assault” for the “crime” of living with his white wife—in a state that had no laws prohibiting intermarriage. Only one state over, in Connecticut, Beatrice Taylor, a Mayflower descendant, could not find a single minister willing to marry her to her fiancé, Clarence, “who looks white, but isn’t.” In Washington Heights in New York City, white Helen Croute was beaten by white neighbors who resented her marriage to a black man. Marriages that were routine in every way but race, such as that between Edith Sproul and Jerome Peterson, two young medical students at Columbia University, were described in full-page spreads. The Jack Johnson case lived on in an angry white imagination of the “growing evil” of intermarriage. And the Rhinelander case, with its painful reminders that even where interracial marriage was legal, it was still considered immoral, and that those who crossed race lines might be subject to untold and unimaginable humiliation, was still headline matter in 1928.

  Intolerance of interracial intimacy was not confined only to southerners. Nor only to whites: the black press, albeit less hysterical, was hardly more supportive. With “social sensibilities [against intermarriage] . . . intensifying on both sides of the [color] line” throughout the twenties, many black editors were quick to pronounce interracial unions “unwise” and insist that their papers had “never argued for racial intermarriage.” Some claimed that most blacks were not “overeager to marry into the white race” and felt, as a race, “neither eagerness nor expectation of intermarriage or amalgamation.” An “uncharitable attitude” toward blacks who married whites was sometimes justified in the black press with reference to the long history of the trouble that white women had visited upon black people. Almost as many blacks as whites had objected to the “miscegenation theme” of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings in 1924. And more than ten years after Johnson walked away from prison, black readers were still writing letters to editors lamenting that the fighter had not married “some worthy black woman” rather than the two white wives who had brought the black community such bad press.