The African Americans

by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

  Clearly, Montgomery owed much to his patrons, especially Joseph Davis. Yet his ability to outmaneuver his white competition speaks to his talent, foresight, and discipline. Few people of any background could have accomplished as much as he did. His wife, Mary, and other relatives joined in his various ventures, and all showed remarkable business talent. For several years, Benjamin and Mary lived the life of wealthy planters, actually residing in Jefferson Davis’s former home, with its 16-foot ceilings and 10-foot windows. He even received the dubious praise of local whites, who declared him “a sensible darky” who paid $2,447 in taxes and “does not dabble in politics, and does not corrupt himself hunting offices that he is incompetent to fill.”17 His ability to tolerate such praise and ingratiate himself into white racist society proved the key to his success, a strategic talent he passed on to his son Isaiah. Both men followed accommodationist political policies that intended to deflect white opposition away from their efforts. It would be a tactic that Booker T. Washington would turn into an art form and Isaiah Montgomery would later use to protect his own black community at Mound Bayou.

  Beginning with the financial depression of 1873 and the expansion of their business into Vicksburg, the fortunes of Montgomery & Sons began to decline. Cotton prices fell and continued to fall over the course of the late 1870s, which caused a corresponding decline in property values. By 1876, Benjamin Montgomery was facing bankruptcy, and his plantations—the basis for the experiment at Davis Bend—ended up on the auction block, where Jefferson Davis reclaimed them two years later. Nearly broke, Benjamin Montgomery died in 1877, and within two years his firm had gone bankrupt.

  And what of the freedmen whom both Joseph Davis and Benjamin Montgomery had hoped to serve and protect? Like so many other blacks across the South, they became entrapped in the cycle of debt inherent in the peonage system. Those who could escaped with the other “Exodusters,” the name given to African Americans looking for a new start in Kansas and elsewhere in the West. One son, Thornton, even relocated to Fargo, North Dakota. By 1886, no one from the Montgomery family lived at Davis Bend.

  Isaiah Montgomery (1847–1924) also became enamored with the movement west and bought land near Topeka, Kansas, to establish a colony just as his father had done in Mississippi. But he could never bring himself to move there. Instead, he invested his assets in some uncleared land about halfway between Vicksburg and Memphis, Tennessee, where he founded the town of Mound Bayou in 1888. In three extraordinarily difficult years, he managed to clear enough land for the town, establish a lumber business with the trees he cleared, and grow almost 400 bales of cotton, earning almost $9,000. In 20 years, 800 black families—about 4,000 people—had settled in the new colony. The community owned about 30,000 acres, with cotton planted on about 6,000. They built banks, two schools, and six churches, and the AMA even supported an industrial training school there.

  Montgomery employed a town-meeting style of government, which gave equal voice to men and women. Learning from his father’s experience, Isaiah determined that the key to success lay not only in shrewd business deals but in land ownership, political accommodation, and, ironically, self-imposed racial segregation. Keeping out the controlling interests of whites would, he held, protect black ability to own land, and thus guarantee security and stability.

  The price of accommodation, however, proved dear. When Jim Crow society was at its height, Montgomery walked softly and supported the near total disfranchisement of the state’s African American population in exchange for peace, an “era of progress.” While whites North and South applauded Montgomery’s views, black leaders in the North competed to make the most searing indictments of him. Although Frederick Douglass honored the accomplishments of Montgomery and his family, he could not tolerate the abandonment of a central core of his lifelong campaign for black rights. Montgomery’s willingness to give up on black suffrage represented “a positive disaster to the race.”18

  In 1909, the centennial year of Lincoln’s birth, Montgomery was asked to join President Theodore Roosevelt in ceremonies at Lincoln’s birthplace near Hodgenville, Kentucky. There, he placed a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in the cornerstone of the monument, an act that meant to cast light as much upon his success at Mound Bayou as on the “Great Emancipator.” But within five years, his treasured community had crumbled. Northern white investors to whom Montgomery had turned—in violation of his own principles—for the construction of a cottonseed oil–processing plant now demanded payment of their loans. The local bank failed, cotton prices tumbled, and with the onset of the First World War, the Great Migration was in full force, drawing off many black workers with the hope of a better life in the North. “Financial blight” ruined the town, from which it never recovered. For about 25 years, however, the colony at Mound Bayou prospered and fulfilled the expectations of a white slaveholder who had dreamed of this sort of community about 100 years earlier. But at the outset of the new century, the black residents of the daring experiments at Davis Bend and Mound Bayou shared the same fate of other African Americans across the South: without prospects, without land, and without the political rights that Isaiah Montgomery thought would threaten the economic life of his community.

  Isaiah Montgomery House, Mound Bayou, Mississippi. Undated photograph. Library of Congress.

  Other African Americans in the South chose a different path, even as the chasm between the races grew deeper and wider under the harsh regime of Jim Crow. During the 1890s, de jure segregation would become entrenched, sanctified as the law of the land by the Supreme Court in 1896. By 1900, anti-black violence and lynching had reached epidemic proportions, and hard-won political and legal rights had been erased. For example, the last black man in Congress from the 19th century, North Carolina’s George Henry White (1852–1918), would serve from 1897 until 1900. For the next 28 years, no African American would set foot in the U.S. Congress, except as a worker. In 1898, in Wilmington, North Carolina, whites, disgusted by the idea of black men and their white Republican allies holding political office, rampaged through the black community and staged a coup d’état, removing a constitutionally elected administration from office.

  Nevertheless, as doors were closing, many African Americans and their allies in the North and South continued to test the limits of repression. Tennessee’s Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) is the most famous of the many opponents of lynching and racial oppression, women and men who risked their lives to challenge injustice. Her 1892 anti-lynching tract, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases, was a landmark work that helped create a national resistance movement to lynching. Her work dismissed southern charges that black men represented an inherent threat to the chastity of white womanhood and explained that this fanciful allegation simply masked white desire to reinstitute racial subjugation for economic reasons. For African Americans, she remarked, the “lesson this teaches … 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.”19

  In New Orleans on a warm and cloudy June 7, 1892, Homer Adolph Plessy (1863–1925), a little-known activist who had worked as a carpenter, shoemaker, clerk, and insurance collector, took his seat on an East Louisiana Railway train headed to Covington, Louisiana. Plessy, who easily could have passed for white, sat in the car designated for whites only. When the conductor passed to collect tickets, Plessy calmly informed him that he was African American. When advised that he would have to remove to the “colored” car, he refused. Hauled off the train, Plessy landed in jail for violating Louisiana’s 1890 law requiring “that all railway companies carrying passengers in their coaches in this state, shall provide equal but separate accommodations for the white, and colored races.”

  Homer Plessy was freeborn, as was his father; he spoke French, and before the Civil War his relatives had labored as blacksmiths, carpenters, and shoemakers—free men, not slaves. His mother, Rosa Debergue, worked as a seamstress, and his father, Adolphe
Plessy, labored as a carpenter who, during the 1870s, had sought to expand black rights in the state. His son would now do the same in the 1890s. Homer Plessy boarded the train on that June day to make a difference, volunteering to assist the New Orleans–based “Citizens’ Committee to Test the Constitutionality of the Separate Car Law” (Comité des Citoyens), an African American civil rights group that set out to destroy Jim Crow and overturn all the destructive civil rights–related decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court of the previous 20 years.20 Central to the case, however, was the fearless Ohio-born judge, author, and Radical Republican named Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905).

  French Quarter, New Orleans, Louisiana, by William Henry Jackson, circa 1880–1897. Photograph. Library of Congress.

  Unjustly overlooked today, Tourgée reached near-celebrity status in his own day. He volunteered for military duty in the Civil War, had been severely wounded at the first Battle of Bull Run, and spent time in a Confederate prison. After the war, he moved to North Carolina, seeking a warmer climate for his health. He remained there from 1865 until 1879, most of the time serving as a justice on the state’s Supreme Court. His experience, especially with the many cases involving Klan crimes against African Americans, made him a champion of Radical Reconstruction and an uncompromising defender of African American civil rights.

  Tourgée is usually remembered for his stunning novel based on his time in the South, A Fool’s Errand by One of the Fools, which was first published in 1879 and greatly expanded the following year.21 Tourgée published sequels to his popular first novel and also his own influential newspaper column, “A Bystander’s Notes,” in the Chicago Inter Ocean, a Republican organ that gave voice to African Americans and civil rights issues. In a familiar condemnation, Tourgée’s column censured the Republican Party for abandoning its principles and African Americans. “They no longer say ‘this is the party of liberty and justice,’” he wrote, “but ‘this is the party of self and profit.’”

  His unvarnished opinions on racial injustice outraged critics on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. The Chicago Times called upon “decent” white folks to lynch the opinionated reformer, while Joel Chandler Harris, famed for his Uncle Remus stories, denounced Tourgée as “a monomaniac” and a “refugee from his own race.”22

  Tourgée became the lead attorney for the Plessy case, working with James C. Walker of New Orleans and Samuel F. Phillips, who had been a Tourgée ally in North Carolina and the attorney in the disappointing Supreme Court decision in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that invalidated Congress’s Civil Rights Law of 1875. Tourgée had been a consistent critic of the Louisiana law from the moment it passed in 1890 and used his newspaper column to denounce it. He and the New Orleans Creole community that led the attack on the law wanted to use a light-skinned subject like Plessy to show how arbitrary and indeterminate the definition of “race” really was as part of their multi-pronged attack on the law and the Supreme Court’s evisceration of Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution. In the case of a man who to all appearances looked white, they questioned, how could a law mandating “separate and equal” facilities for blacks be reliably and consistently implemented? In his brief, Tourgée coined a phrase—made famous by the dissenting justice John Marshall Harlan—which he contended must serve as the court’s guiding principle in all matters regarding race: if “Justice is pictured blind,” then “the Law … ought at least to be color-blind.”23

  While familiar to us today, this use of the term color-blind originated with Tourgée. He meant that it should undermine the constitutionality of the Louisiana law and, thus, the series of court cases that had severely restricted the rights presumably won by black people as a result of the constitutional amendments following the Civil War. Additionally, Tourgée’s brief attacked the court’s return to a pre–Civil War interpretation of state and federal relations that gave priority to state sovereignty. Reformers and black activists like W. E. B. Du Bois offered the highest praise for Tourgée, placing him in the same category as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. Others, however, like the editors of the Washington Post, asserted that Plessy’s lead attorney was simply on “another fool’s errand.”24

  His arguments, however, remain breathtakingly modern, which perhaps accounts for the court’s repudiation of them. Looking back to the 1850 case of Roberts v. Boston, Justice Henry Billings Brown, speaking for the court majority, infamously upheld the Louisiana law, proclaiming that “it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races unsatisfactory to either.” Thus, Brown reasoned, segregation laws “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.” In short, the court had authorized states to impose institutionalized segregation of the races on the premise that separate could be equal.25 While the strategy of Tourgée’s committee backfired, we are hard-pressed to imagine an approach to the court that would have preserved the hard-won rights African Americans obtained during Reconstruction. The court—and the nation—had set its face against any new birth of freedom. Its 1896 judgment gave full legal authority to segregation and stood as the supreme law of the land until the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. This was the lowest point in the history of American race relations since the abolition of slavery.

  _____________________________

  1 Garnet’s 1843 remarks can be read in Sources of the African-American Past: Primary Sources in American History, ed. Roy E. Finkenbine (New York: Longman, 1997), 63–66.

  2 Henry Highland Garnet, Memorial Discourse (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865) can be read at http://archive.org/stream/memorialdiscourse00garn#page/n7/mode/2up.

  3 Frederick Douglass, “What Shall Be Done with the Slaves If Emancipated?” Douglass’s Monthly (January 1862), http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=4386.

  4 Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5:353–56.

  5 Wallace Turnage’s memoir and biography are in David W. Blight, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, Inc., 2007).

  6 Journal of Wallace Turnage in Blight, A Slave No More, 216–17.

  7 Journal of Wallace Turnage in Blight, A Slave No More, 257.

  8 Leon F. Litwack, How Free Is Free?: The Long Death of Jim Crow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 2 quoted.

  9 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1962), 30 quoted.

  10 Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 207–08.

  11 Edward A. Miller, Jr., Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1839–1915 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1995), 97.

  12 Miller, Gullah Statesman, 93–102, 113–15, 125–31.

  13 Robert Smalls, “Election Methods in the South,” North American Review 151 (November 1890): 593–600.

  14 Biographical Directory of the United States Congress, 1774–Present, http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch/biosearch.asp; “Black-American Representatives and Senators by Congress, 1870–Present,” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives, http://history.house.gov/Exhibitions-and-Publications/BAIC/Historical-Data/Black-American-Representatives-and-Senators-by-Congress/; Gates and Higginbotham, African American National Biography, 7:247–49.

  15 The following account is based on Janet Sharp Hermann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

  16 Hermann, Pursuit of a Dream, quoted 46.

  17 Hermann, Pursuit of a Dream, 195.

  18 Hermann, Pursuit of a Dream, 230.

  19 Gates, Life Upon These Shores, 195 quoted.

  20 For the most detailed account of Plessy’s life, see Keith Weldon Medley, We as Freemen: Plessy v. Ferguson (Gretna, LA: Pelican Publishing, 2003). The text of the 1890
act is at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Louisiana Railway Accommodations Act, Railroads and the Making of America, http://railroads.unl.edu/documents/view_document.php?id=rail.gen.0060.

  21 For work on Tourgée see Mark E. Elliott, Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), and Richard N. Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

  22 Mark Elliott, “Race, Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public: Albion W. Tourgée’s Radical Principles in Plessy v. Ferguson,” Journal of Southern History 67 (May 2001), quoted 301–03.

  23 Elliott, “Race, Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public,” quoted 318.

  24 Elliott, “Race, Color Blindness, and the Democratic Public,” 313 quoted, 327.

  25 Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=52&page=transcript.

  7

  THE NADIR AND THE RENAISSANCE 1890–1940

  ON MARCH 9, 1892, THREE BLACK MEN WOULD DIE AT THE HANDS OF AN ANGRY WHITE MOB IN MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE—SADLY, ONLY ONE OF MANY SUCH INCIDENTS THAT YEAR, PART OF AN EPIDEMIC OF ANTI-BLACK RACIST VIOLENCE THAT SWEPT THE SOUTH AFTER THE END OF RECONSTRUCTION. While lynching had occurred elsewhere in Tennessee, recently Memphis had been spared. But the opening of a black-owned grocery store that drew customers away from the white-owned store, which until then had been the only game in town, fanned the flames of the racism that burned barely beneath the surface, a set of anti-black attitudes and beliefs that had their basis in economic fears and competition.

  Founded so close to the end of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction, the People’s Grocery was celebrated by the black community as a grand achievement, especially since it was co-owned by ten black men in the Memphis community. It was located just beyond the city limits in a mostly black area known as the “Curve,” which had been largely abandoned by whites, who had begun to set up white-only neighborhoods within Memphis proper. The Curve and other areas like it across the South were part of the larger phenomenon of “the strange career of Jim Crow,” as the historian C. Vann Woodward described it in his book of the same name about the implementation of de jure segregation during the decade of the 1890s.1 Thomas Moss, a postal worker and homeowner, was considered the head of the enterprise by his fellow blacks; his leadership would earn him the distinction of “ringleader” from whites.