by H. W. Brands
Questioned why she had charged Offett with rape, Mrs. Underwood said she had various reasons. “I was afraid I had contracted a loathsome disease.… I feared I might give birth to a Negro baby.… I hoped to save my reputation.” Upon her confession, Offett was released and her husband secured a divorce.18
Wells multiplied these stories. A Natchez woman of the white upper class gave birth to a child “whose color was remarked but traced to some brunette ancestor.” The woman carried on as before, continuing, among other habits, long rides with her black coachman. Another child was born. “It was unmistakably dark. All were alarmed, and ‘rush of blood, strangulation’ were the conjectures. But the doctor, when asked the cause, grimly told them it was a Negro child.” The coachman fled west before the vengeance of the family could reach him. The woman was sent away in disgrace. The husband died—of mortification, apparently, as much as anything else—within the year.
“Hundreds of such cases might be cited,” Wells wrote. “But enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love the Afro-American’s company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.”
Wells could hardly have written anything more provocative—but she came close. In the process of cataloging 241 persons lynched in 1892 (and hundreds more during the following two years), she included stomach-turning details of gratuitous torture, victims being burned alive, and mobs acting like insatiable beasts. Line drawings and photographs illustrated the text. Her purpose was to shame the whites who read her pamphlets—and to stiffen the spines of blacks. Under the heading “Self Help,” she urged African Americans to take matters into their own hands. “Of the many inhuman outrages of this present year, the only cases where the proposed lynching did not occur was where the men armed themselves in Jacksonville, Fla., and Paducah, Ky., and prevented it,” she wrote.
The only times an Afro-American who was assaulted got away have been when he had a gun and used it in self-defense. The lesson this teaches, and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged, and lynched.
Beyond self-defense, Wells preached economic direct action. “The white man’s dollar is his god.… The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.” Black consumers should boycott white businesses, and black workers strike against white employers. The latter technique would have particular effect. “To Northern capital and Afro-American labor the South owes its rehabilitation. If labor is withdrawn, capital will not remain.” Temporary strikes and boycotts should be attempted first; if these failed, the effect could be made permanent by wholesale black emigration from the South. The emigration from Memphis in the wake of the lynchings there had caused “great stagnation in every branch of business.” Repeated across the South, the strategy could make capitalism shudder. Then the white leadership would take action to stamp out lynch law, “that last relic of barbarism and slavery.”19
ATLANTA FANCIED ITSELF a world apart from Memphis. In many ways it was. Where Memphis was a child of the Mississippi, a belle of the old South, Atlanta emerged with the railroad, the midwife of the New South. Starting during Reconstruction but continuing afterward, railroad companies expanded feverishly across the South, laying track faster in that region than in any other part of the country. As elsewhere, the construction of railroads reflected collaboration between the private and public sectors, with states, counties, and cities vying for the railroads’ favor and putting money and other resources at the corporations’ disposal. Land grants were a common device, as in the West. Texas by itself granted thirty-two million acres to railroads, a transfer from the democratic realm to the capitalist of an empire the size of Indiana.20
Those districts that won the contest for the railroads congratulated themselves on their brilliant futures. “Harrison is a Railroad Town at Last,” the local paper of that Ozark community in Arkansas boasted. “The Construction Train Laid Yesterday the Steel Which Puts Us in Touch with the World.” The railroads introduced thousands, eventually millions, of Southerners to the more frenetic pace of urban life. “All that they said was true, and much more,” a young son of the soil reported after his first encounter with the “Big Terminal” in Atlanta. “People were crowded and seemed to be excited. Hundreds of people, many of them hurrying, were pushing against each other, pages were yelling names, a big Negro was calling stations for departing trains; train bells ringing, steam escaping with strange and frightening sounds.”21
As they had in the North, the railroads refashioned the economy of the South. Railroads knitted the South together as it had never been before and wove the Southern economy into the national—and world—economy. Cotton culture penetrated new districts with the railroads, as cotton producers sought cheaper land with which to combat low-cost production in foreign countries. Lumber production increased exponentially as railroads gave the loggers economic access to markets they hadn’t been able to reach previously. The mining of coal and iron and phosphate expanded greatly. The railroads spawned the Southern steel industry, particularly in the city of Birmingham, which became the Pittsburgh of the South (prompting no less an authority than Andrew Carnegie to declare, after a visit: “The South is Pennsylvania’s most formidable industrial enemy”). The railroads allowed the Southern textile industry to spread along the Piedmont, and the Southern furniture and tobacco industries to reach their customers more efficiently than before. The railroads enabled merchants in cities like Atlanta to extend their operations far into the hinterland.22
As elsewhere, the railroad-induced integration yielded winners and losers. The expansion of the cotton culture provided jobs and other opportunities where they hadn’t existed, but it undercut existing producers; and though the rise in land values that accompanied cotton’s expansion benefited landowners, it raised rents for tenants. That the landowners were often Northern or foreign speculators limited the local gains even from the rise in land prices. Moreover, although the railroads afforded Southern cotton producers readier access to the world market, it rendered those producers, and all who depended on them, more susceptible to the vagaries of that market. The lumber industry likewise brought jobs to previously stagnant districts, but it stripped huge swaths of the South of their trees, leaving little but stumps and naked red clay behind. Here again, external ownership, as by the London-based North American Land and Timber Company, meant that profits were often expatriated. The mining and steel industries provided work to many thousands of Southerners, but because Southern mine and mill operators were even more successful than their Northern counterparts at resisting unionization, the work was especially difficult, dangerous, and poorly paid. And, as with commercial agriculture, Southern industry was vulnerable to events far away and utterly beyond Southern control. Financial panics hit the South harder than ever; industrial depressions laid Southern mines and mill towns low. Southern consumers benefited from the reduced rates on shipping from department stores and mail-order houses in the cities, but small-town merchants watched their businesses wither. Eventually even Southern cities felt the pressure of direct Northern competition.23
In other words, what was new about the New South, in economic terms, was that it looked increasingly like the rest of the country. The South had joined capitalist America. Southern living standards rose, though they remained far below those outside the region; as late as 1900 the average per capita income in the South was scarcely more than half that of the rest of the country. Success in the South, as elsewhere, went to the ambitious, clever, and strong, who
tended to get stronger, if not necessarily more clever and ambitious, leaving the weaker, duller, and less driven at a deepening disadvantage.24
BOOKER WASHINGTON UNDERSTOOD the dynamics of modern capitalism and shaped his message accordingly. Washington’s travels in the North had brought him to the attention of Thomas Bicknell, the president of the National Educational Association, who took an interest in Tuskegee and invited Washington to address the association’s 1884 meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. Washington accepted the invitation as an opportunity to speak not simply of Tuskegee but of relations between the races.
The audience of four thousand was the largest he had ever encountered. He chose his words carefully. Speaking to teachers, he stressed the primacy of education—for whites as much as for blacks. “Any movement for the elevation of the Southern Negro, in order to be successful, must have to a certain extent the cooperation of the Southern whites,” Washington said. “They control government and own the property.” Blacks and whites must rise together, if either were to rise at all. “Whatever benefits the black man benefits the white man. The proper education of all the whites will benefit the Negro as much as the education of the Negro will benefit the whites.” For blacks, the right to advancement by education mattered more at present than the right to vote. “Brains, property, and character for the Negro will settle the question of civil rights.… Good school teachers and plenty of money to pay them will be more potent in settling the race question than many civil rights bills and investigating committees.” Blacks who could contribute to the betterment of their communities would be sought out, not shunned, by whites. “Let there be in a community a Negro who by virtue of his superior knowledge of the chemistry of the soil, his acquaintance with the most improved tools and best breeds of stock, can raise fifty bushels of corn to the acre while his white neighbor only raises thirty, and the white man will come to the black man to learn.” Washington had seen such things happen at Tuskegee. “In Tuskegee a Negro mechanic manufactures the best tinware, the best harness, the best boots and shoes, and it is common to see his store crowded with white customers from all over the county. His word or note goes as far as that of the whitest man.”25
Washington’s message of salvation through individual enterprise rather than politics pleased the emerging capitalist class in the South, which during the late 1880s and early 1890s promoted him as a spokesman for the black race. Washington spared no effort to exploit his opportunity. He received an invitation to address a large group of whites in Atlanta in 1893. He had already committed to be in Boston just before and after the proposed engagement. “Still, after looking over my list of dates and places carefully,” he recalled, “I found that I could take a train from Boston that would get me into Atlanta about thirty minutes before my address was to be delivered, and that I could remain in that city about sixty minutes before taking another train for Boston.” As he had been asked to speak for only five minutes, he decided to make the trip and pray the trains would run on time.26
They did, and the audience responded well. The Atlanta papers lauded his moderation and good sense, and newspapers around the country picked up the story. The following year a delegation of Atlanta capitalists asked him to join them in Washington to lobby Congress to fund the upcoming Cotton States and International Exposition, to be held in Atlanta in 1895. House Speaker Charles F. Crisp of Georgia ensured that the group received a respectful hearing from the commerce committee, despite the long-windedness of several of the Atlantans. The committee members didn’t know Booker Washington, and they may have been surprised at his articulateness. But they listened intently as he described his philosophy of race relations. “I tried to impress upon the committee, with all the earnestness and plainness of language that I could command, that if Congress wanted to do something which would assist in ridding the South of the race question and making friends between the two races, it should, in every proper way, encourage the material and intellectual growth of both races,” he remembered. “I tried to emphasize the fact that while the Negro should not be deprived by unfair means of the franchise, political agitation alone would not save him, and that back of the ballot he must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence, and character, and that no race without these elements could permanently succeed.”
Washington had been allotted seven minutes, but the entranced committee let him run twice that long. Here was a man white Southerners could do business with—precisely because business, not politics, was what he wanted to do. When he concluded, the Georgia delegation leaped up as one to shake his hand, and the other committee members joined in. The committee unanimously endorsed the appropriation for the Atlanta exposition, which the full Congress approved a few days later. The organizers of the exposition decided Booker Washington must speak on opening day.27
Washington didn’t daunt easily, but as he reflected on what was expected of him, he was taken aback. “I remembered that I had been a slave; that my early years had been spent in the depths of poverty and ignorance; and that I had had little opportunity to prepare me for such a responsibility as this. It was only a few years before that time that any white man in the audience might have claimed me as his slave; and it was easily possible that some of my former owners might be present to hear me speak.” Never before had a black man been given such a stage in the South. “I was asked now to speak to an audience composed of the wealth and culture of the white South, the representatives of my former masters.” Northerners would be there, also, as well as many African Americans. Some who could not be present conveyed congratulations and encouragement, which only intensified the pressure Washington felt. “Surely, what hath God wrought?” exclaimed T. McCants Stewart, a black lawyer in New York. The Colored American of Washington, D.C., declared, “Every colored woman, man, and child who can possibly get there ought to go, if for no other reason than to hold up the hands of Prof. Washington, as the children of Israel held up the arms of Moses while he fought the battles of the Lord.”28
“I felt a good deal as I suppose a man feels when he is on his way to the gallows,” Washington wrote of his departure from Tuskegee for Atlanta the day before the exposition opened. “In passing through the town of Tuskegee I met a white farmer who lived some distance out in the country. In a jesting manner this man said: ‘Washington, you have spoken before the Northern white people, the Negroes in the South, and to us country white people in the South; but in Atlanta tomorrow you will have before you the Northern whites, the Southern whites, and the Negroes all together. I am afraid that you have got yourself into a tight place.’ ” Washington couldn’t disagree. “But his frank words did not add anything to my comfort,” he remembered.
On the train to Atlanta, everyone seemed to know who he was, where he was going, and why. Some wished him well; others simply stared. Washington quoted an elderly black man who saw him at the Atlanta station: “Dat’s de man of my race what’s gwine to make a speech at de Exposition tomorrow. I’se sho’ gwine to hear him.”
Washington slept poorly that night and woke before dawn. He reviewed what he intended to say, and whispered a prayer for guidance and strength. After breakfast a delegation from the exposition committee arrived to take him to his place in the parade that would march about Atlanta en route to the fair grounds. The day was hot and the procession long. “When we reached the grounds,” Washington recalled, “the heat, together with my nervous anxiety, made me feel as if I were about ready to collapse.”
The auditorium was packed from floor to rafter. Whites had the best seats; blacks crowded the galleries. Thousands more, mostly blacks, milled outside. Washington heard and felt the encouragement of the blacks; he sensed the skepticism, indeed hostility, of many of the whites. A visitor described the entrance of the speakers: “A door behind the platform opened and the guests as they came in were welcomed with enthusiasm. But when amongst them a colored man appeared, there was an instant cessation of the applause, and a sudden chill fell upon the whole assemblage. O
ne after another asked angrily, ‘What’s that nigger doing on the stage?’ ” Washington himself remarked, “I had been told, while I had been in Atlanta, that while many white people were going to be present to hear me speak, simply out of curiosity, and that others who would be present would be in full sympathy with me, there was a still larger element of the audience which would consist of those who were going to be present for the purpose of hearing me make a fool of myself.”
Rufus Bullock, a former Georgia governor who had left politics for business, hosted the afternoon’s festivities. He introduced one speaker after another; all extolled the virtues of private enterprise and the future of Atlanta and the South. A band played the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which elicited polite applause, and “Dixie,” which evoked a more heartfelt reaction. Governor Bullock thanked the musicians and then introduced the next speaker. “We shall now be favored with an address by a great Southern educator,” he said. Clapping ensued—until Washington rose and everyone in the audience realized who the Southern educator was. The hall fell silent. Bullock proceeded unfazed. “We have with us today a representative of Negro enterprise and Negro civilization.” Some of the whites applauded perfunctorily; the blacks cheered loudly.
The afternoon sun streamed in a window, falling full on Washington’s face as he reached the lectern. He always tried, when speaking, to talk directly to his audience, looking his listeners in the eye to narrow the gap between himself and them. Now he discovered he couldn’t see any of them, from the blinding sun. But the light cast him into unexpected relief. A New York reporter described him as “a remarkable figure, tall, bony, straight as a Sioux chief, high forehead, straight nose, heavy jaws and strong, determined mouth, with big white teeth, piercing eyes and a commanding manner.” The light, apparently, was playing tricks; Washington was neither tall nor bony. But the tricks favored him. “The sinews stood out on his bronzed neck, and his muscular right arm swung high in the air with a lead pencil grasped in his clenched brown fist. His big feet were planted squarely, with the heels together and the toes turned out.”29
