The Invisible Line

by Daniel J. Sharfstein

  10 “Dig Deep at Printery,” Washington Post, February 9, 1908, p. 3. “Very Slow to Strike,” Washington Post, October 5, 1903, p. 5, describes complaints about black workers dating back to the 1860s. According to Terrell, in Colored Woman, “Colored women know all too well if they make themselves conspicuous or objectionable, either to their fellow clerks or to their superior officers, they are courting disaster and ruin. The few colored women who are assigned to rooms in which white women work are constantly in a state of suspense and apprehension, not knowing the day or the hour when the awful summons of removal or dismissal will come. They know they are there either by mistake or sufferance, and they would as soon think of ‘creating a disturbance’ as they would plot to dynamite the White House. All they ask is to be let alone and be allowed to do their work in peace” (p. 253). See also Stephen R. Wall to Charles A. Stillings, June 27, 1906, Wall Personnel File. “Having married a little late in life, six years ago,” he wrote, “I feel keenly the responsibility of the future welfare of my family, and as my years for active service are limited, I am making every effort to finish paying for my home and then to the education of my children that they may be self supporting in early life, and not be unfortunate as I have been.”

  11 Wall to Stillings, June 27, 1906; Stillings to Wall, June 28, 1906, Wall Personnel File.

  12 “Remains of Mrs. Wall Laid to Rest,” Washington Post, November 17, 1902, p. 14; “Weather,” Washington Post, November 13, 1902, p. 1.

  13 “Capt. O.S.B. Wall,” Washington Post, April 28, 1891, p. 7; “Funeral of Captain Wall,” Washington Post, April 30, 1891, p. 4; Everett O. Alldredge, The Centennial History of the First Congregational United Church of Christ, Washington, D.C., 1865-1965 (Pikesville, Md.: Port City Press, 1965), pp. 23-24.

  14 “Remains of Mrs. Wall Laid to Rest,” Washington Post, November 17, 1902, p. 14; Wall v. Oyster, No. 2203 (1910), record transcript, p. 23, Record Group 21, Records of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, National Archives, Washington, D.C. Writes Jenny Carson, “In 1955, after a protracted legal struggle, two porters were promoted to conducting jobs, becoming the first Black men in North America to be hired as sleeping car conductors.” See Carson, “Riding the Rails: Black Railroad Workers in Canada and the United States,” Labour/Le Travail 50 (Fall 2002), online at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/50/carson.html. I thank Donald Fyson for suggesting this source, as well as the Lovell’s Montreal directories, online at http://bibnum2.bnquebec.ca/bna/lovell/. See also 1900 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., New York, N.Y., Queens County, N.Y.; 1910 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C., New York, N.Y., Queens County, N.Y.

  15 Kelly Miller, As to the Leopard’s Spots: An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr. (Washington, D.C.: Howard University, 1905), p. 16; “Young Langston Wanted,” Washington Post, June 26, 1891, p. 1. Langston never ventured over the color line again, although people continued to cluck over another transgression: he became a Democrat. See “Negro Democrats,” Washington Bee, September 10, 1904, p. 4. See also Heidi Ardizzone, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Lawrence Otis Graham, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 182.

  16 See, e.g., “Avers Taint in Blood: White Woman Says She Unknowingly Married Negro,” Washington Post, August 29, 1908, p. 14; “Court Declares Her White,” Washington Post, August 6, 1907, p. 5; “White, Said Courts,” Washington Post, July 25, 1907, p. 1; “Old Dominion Stirred,” Washington Post, February 25, 1907, p. 5; “Miscreants Wreck House: Race Issue Supposed Cause of Outrage in Frederick County: Victim’s Son Reinstated in School After Allegation of Negro Blood Had Been Disproved by Physicians,” Washington Post, May 24, 1906, p. 12; “Woman Ejected from Hotel,” Washington Post, July 28, 1904, p. 9; “Taint of Negro Blood: Charge Against a Wife Leads to Suit for Damages,” Washington Post, March 10, 1900, p. 9; “Wife of Negro Blood,” Washington Post, July 7, 1899, p. 2; “Her Children Expelled: A Washington Woman Protests Against Charge of Having Negro Blood,” Washington Post, April 15, 1899, p. 1; and “Charged with Miscegenation: An Apparently White Woman Who Insists She Is of Negro Descent,” Washington Post, December 15, 1898, p. 3. Chase and Wall were both involved in Republican Party politics, albeit in opposing factions, in the 1880s. See, e.g., “Perry Carson’s Victory,” Washington Post, January 11, 1888, p. 1. See also “The White Fever,” Washington Bee, June 6, 1908, p. 4; and advertisement, Washington Bee, July 17, 1909, p. 5. The phenomenon of passively passing for white is depicted simply and powerfully in Caroline Bond Day’s short story “The Pink Hat,” which appeared in the December 1926 issue of Opportunity. See also Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” Transition 58 (2002), p. 4.

  17 Caroline Langston’s annual reception “signaled the opening of the social season among aristocrats of color in the nation’s capital.” Willard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 336. See also John Mercer Langston, From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol (Hartford, Conn.: American Publishing Co., 1894), pp. 522-23; Kelly Miller, unpublished autobiography, chap. 21, p. 2, box 71-1, folder 59, Miller Papers.

  18 Wall to F. W. Palmer, August 18, 1899, Wall Personnel File; Personal Question Sheet, signed August 22, 1906, Wall Personnel File.

  19 For an example of a contemporaneous passing narrative, see James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York: Sherman French, 1912). See also 1880 U.S. Census, Essex County, Mass.; Wall v. Oyster, trial transcript, p. 21. White marriages met with a certain amount of disapproval in colored Washington, but they were hardly unheard of. In addition to Frederick Douglass, Charles Purvis, the physician who cared for Stephen’s father in his final illness and a friend from their Oberlin days, had a white wife but remained a leader of the race. See Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, p. 178.

  20 Wall v. Oyster, trial transcript, p. 22; 1910 U.S. Census.

  21 Inventory of Money of Deceased and List of Debts Due Her, In the Matter of Amanda A. Wall, No. 11,202 (1903), Washingtoniana Collection; “Remains of Mrs. Wall Laid to Rest,” Washington Post, November 17, 1902, p. 14. Amanda Wall’s contemporaries took pains to distinguish upbringing and ancestry from material wealth. Gatewood, in Aristocrats of Color, pp. 336-37, cites Caroline Wall Langston and others quoted by an English journalist in the Washington Bee, December 26, 1914.

  22 Wall v. Easton, Case No. 23,642 (1902), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; Douglass v. Wall, Case No. 17,607 (1896), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938. Amanda Wall eventually settled this case in 1900. See also Complaint, Wall v. Easton, No. 23,642, Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938: “The consideration named in this deed is $3000; but the complainant avers that there was no consideration actually passed between the grantor and the grantee to said deed; ... Amanda A. Wall was at that time ... indebted to certain persons in the District of Columbia, who threatened to bring suit, and ... she made the conveyance for her own convenience, and in order to obtain time to pay her creditors, which she subsequently did.”

  23 Wall v. Easton; In the Matter of the Estate of Amanda Wall, answer of Stephen R. Wall; Wall v. Elterich, Case No. 23,789 (1903), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  24 Wall v. Elterich, Case No. 27,256 (1907), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938, National Archives, Washington, D.C.; “Mott School Dedicated,” Washington Post, May 18, 1909, p. 16.

  25 “Legal Record: Real Estate Transfers
,” Washington Post, July 3, 1908, p. 13; Wall Personnel File; Stephen R. Wall to Whitefield McKinlay, January 27, 1909, McKinlay Papers. McKinlay was Booker T. Washington’s “most trusted ally” in the District. A successful real estate agent, he was appointed customs collector of the Port of Georgetown by Theodore Roosevelt. He lived in Frederick Douglass’s old home in Anacostia. See Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color, p. 304; “Collector Is Named,” Washington Post, July 20, 1910, p. 4.

  26 The house was large enough that the next owner advertised for four to six male boarders in The Washington Post. Advertisement, Washington Post, June 12, 1913, p. 12; “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, pp. 1, 11.

  27 “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 1.

  28 1910 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C.; “D. H. Oertly Dies; Retired Engineer,” Washington Post, December 24, 1956, p. B2; “Brookland Brotherhood Title to ‘Reds,’” Washington Post, July 5, 1911, p. 5; “Growers Get Prizes,” Washington Post, October 6, 1909, p. 2.

  29 “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 11; Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, p. 23.

  30 “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 1. Terrell, in Colored Woman, describes one girl’s “bitter disappointment and keen humiliation” after being rejected by a series of elite boarding schools on racial grounds (p. 288). See “Brookland Colored School,” Washington Post, April 6, 1901, p. 12. “Discuss Road Extension,” Washington Post, May 5, 1906, notes objections to the proposal on the ground that streetcar service was already poor and that very few blacks rode streetcars through Brookland (p. 9). See also Index to the Applications to the Manassas Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Virginia, July 21, 1896-June 1928, Ruth E. Lloyd Information Center (RELIC), Prince William Public Library System, Manassas; “Virginia Obituary,” Washington Post, June 15, 1902, p. 11.

  31 “Court Must Draw School Color Line,” New York Times, June 3, 1910, p. 3. See also Terrell, “Colored Woman,” p. 131; “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 1; Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, p. 23.

  32 “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 1.

  33 “Court Must Draw School Color Line,” New York Times, June 3, 1910, p. 3.

  34 The first openly black families moved into Brookland some twenty-five years later and never forgot the hateful reaction of local whites. Poet and Howard University professor Sterling Brown recalled the experience of moving in 1935 to a house one block from where Stephen Wall had lived: “A less friendly white—I believe he was Irish from his pronunciation—for several weeks drove past in his rickety car, yelling ‘Naygur, Naygur’ at us, louder than the rattling of his jalopy. The word was frequently painted on our steps near the street. Once it was spelled ‘NIGER,’ though my only connection with that country that I know of is my friendship with our former ambassador there, W. Mercer Cook. But what is a single G among friends?” Sterling A. Brown, “Blacks in Brookland,” Washington Star, April 18, 1979, online at http://www.bawadc.com/brown.html.

  35 “May Bar Young Girl from School,” Washington Herald, October 10, 1909, p. 1.

  36 Ibid.

  37 Ibid.

  38 Ibid.

  39 Board of Education Meeting Minutes, January 28, 1910, D.C. Public School Records.

  40 C. B. Purvis to Whitefield McKinlay, October 13, 1909, McKinlay Papers.

  41 Ibid.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Wall Personnel File.

  44 Lillie A. Wall to Board of Education of District of Columbia, October 29, 1909, in Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, pp. 19-20; John Ridout to Board of Education, December 15, 1909, in Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, p. 20; and Board of Education Meeting Minutes, January 28, 1910. Mary Terrell socialized with Amanda and Gertrude Wall, and Robert Terrell participated with O.S.B. Wall in the District’s Colored Cadets; see Scrapbooks, Terrell Papers. “Votes Blaine Cannot Poll,” New York Age, December 12, 1891. When Robert T. Douglass sued Amanda Wall in 1896 over outstanding debts, he was represented by Robert H. Terrell. Douglass v. Wall, Case No. 17,607 (1896), Record Group 21, Records of the District Courts of the United States, District of Columbia, Equity Case Files, 1863-1938, National Archives. See also Terrell, Colored Woman, pp. 131-32.

  45 Wall v. Oyster, mandamus petition para. 9; Wall v. Oyster, answer of James F. Oyster para. X; Stanton C. Peelle to Government Printing Office, May 18, 1910, Wall Personnel File. Wall’s petition misrepresented his mother’s ancestry. Amanda Thomas Wall regarded herself, and was widely known, as a person of color.

  46 Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, pp. 23-24.

  47 Ibid., pp. 21-22. Daniel R. Ernst has memorably described the impeachment proceedings against Judge Wright: “It was said [Wright] never paid his bills, safe in the knowledge that no merchant would risk his enmity. (One banker who tried to collect on Wright’s $500 note found himself on jury duty in the judge’s court for weeks at a time.) He was known to frequent some of the city’s most notorious establishments ... Wright, it was said, participated in a late-night interrogation of a young woman who apparently stole $1,500 from a bedroom bureau when [Justice] Gould brought her to his home while his wife was away.” See Daniel R. Ernst, Lawyers Against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois, 1995), p. 138.

  48 “Affirms His Action,” Washington Herald, May 27, 1910, p. 2; Wall v. Oyster, transcript, p. 7; District of Columbia Board of Education, May 26, 1910, D.C. Public School Records.

  49 Wall v. Oyster, transcript, p. 3; “Affirms His Action,” Washington Herald, May 27, 1910, p. 2; “Court Must Draw School Color Line,” New York Times, June 3, 1910, p. 3.

  50 Wall v. Oyster, transcript, pp. 9-11.

  51 “Old Dominion Stirred,” Washington Post, February 25, 1907, p. 5; “Ovation from Crowds for B. T. Washington,” New York Times, March 6, 1905, p. 7; and “The Nigger Acted at the New Theatre,” New York Times, December 5, 1909, p. C12. See also Frederick Douglass, “The Color Line,” North American Review 132 (June 1881), pp. 567, 569: “One drop of negro blood, though in the veins of a man of Teutonic whiteness, is enough of which to predicate all offensive and ignoble qualities.” The use of the one-drop rule by post-Reconstruction civil rights leaders echoed abolitionist rhetoric that invoked the rule to illustrate the cruelty and arbitrariness of slavery. See Daniel J. Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600-1860,” Minnesota Law Review 91 (2007), pp. 592, 649-54.

  52 See Gilbert Thomas Stephenson, Race Distinctions in American Law (New York: D. Appleton, 1910), p. 15. In addition to Maryland, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas had one-eighth rules. Tennessee’s black codes of 1865-66 defined “persons of color” as anyone “having any African blood in their veins,” but an 1870 miscegenation statute prohibited intermarriage with “negroes, mulattoes or persons of mixed blood descended from a negro to the third generation inclusive.” Act of 1870, c. 39. See also Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line.”

  53 Wall v. Oyster, transcript, pp. 13-14. William Calvin Chase, whose weekly newspaper The Washington Bee promised “honey for its friends and stings for its enemies,” had only stings for Wall. Comparing him unfavorably with his father and uncle, who “always defended the race to which they were identified,” Chase “suggest[ed] to all colored Americans to be satisfied with our own schools, and never attempt to go where they are not wanted. It is no disgrace to associate with colored children or to attend colored schools.” “She Is Colored,” Washington Bee, June 10, 1910, p. 4.

  54 Wall v. Oyster, record transcript, pp. 16-17.

  55 Wall v. Oyster, brief for appellant, p. 9. On legal arguments about race, see generally Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, Mass.
: Harvard University Press, 2008); Sharfstein, “Crossing the Color Line”; Sharfstein, “Secret History of Race.”

  56 See, e.g., “Negroes Are Barred from White Schools,” Atlanta Constitution, December 6, 1910, p. 5; “Must Bear the Brand,” Boston Globe, December 6, 1910, p. 11; “Can’t Go to White School,” Chicago Defender, December 10, 1910, p. 1; “Sixteenth Negro Blood Is Colored,” Grand Forks (N.D.) Daily Herald, December 6, 1910, p. 1; “Girl With a Sixteenth Negro Blood Barred,” Hartford Courant, December 6, 1910, p. 1; “Classification of Negro,” Idaho Daily Statesman, December 6, 1910, p. 1; “Half-Octoroon Is a Negro, Says Court,” Lexington (Ky.) Herald, December 6, 1910, p. 1; “Little Negro Blood Counts,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1910, p. I-4; “Justice Shepard Finds Wall Girl Ranks as Negro,” Washington Bee, December 10, 1910, p. 1; and “Pupil Is Declared a Negro,” Washington Post, December 6, 1910, p. 12.

  57 Washington City Directories 1917-21, 1923-25, Washingtoniana Collection; 1920 U.S. Census, Washington, D.C. Ethel Ada Gates is listed at Western High School in “1,822 High School Pupils Registered for Summer Study,” Washington Post, August 24, 1923, p. 15. The Western High School yearbook lists Ethel Ada Gates as a freshman girl: The Westerner 1924, pp. 88-89, Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives, Washington, D.C. See also Wall Personnel File. After much difficulty finding a house, Mary Church Terrell lived for many years at 326 T Street in the LaDroit Park subdivision, a property that her father had purchased for her. In her autobiography, Terrell claimed not to know what became of the Walls, except to suggest, falsely, that Isabel had become an actress and died young. Terrell, Colored Woman, p. 132.