by Paul Ortiz
In subsequent decades, more than a dozen states skillfully used Jim Crow segregation laws, as well as voter restrictions, to crush interracial alliances and curtail the rights of new immigrants to vote. Florida abolished declarant alien voting in the constitutional revision of 1895 as part of the state’s move to disenfranchise both African Americans and immigrants.
Whites also engaged in political terror to intimidate African Americans from even attempting to vote. Lynchings were frequent throughout the South, and between the 1880s and World War II, Black Floridians generally suffered the highest per capita lynching rates in the United States.88 “Too late to talk about the ‘suppressed vote’ now,” a Black Floridian cried out in 1887. “We are in the hands of the devil.”89
If corporations, planters, and banks needed a reminder of how dangerous a fully enfranchised working class was to their power, they only needed to look to the Colored Farmers Alliance, which, by May 1889, had “an estimated membership of 125,000 and 3,100 lodges.” Working in tandem with the white-majority Southern Farmers’ Alliance, “African American alliances advocated the order’s overall economic program of building cooperatives, fighting the banks and ‘trusts’ as well as democratizing the nation’s money supply.”90 In efforts to build an interracial political party that could confront the power of what William H. Skaggs called “the southern oligarchy,” T. Thomas Fortune held lectures where he explained to white farmers that they were “systematically victimized by legislators, corporations and syndicates” and that “poverty and misfortune make no invidious distinctions of ‘race, color or previous condition,’ but that wealth unduly centralized oppresses all alike.”91
Voter suppression in the United States was designed to ensure that the insights of Thomas Fortune and the Southern Farmers’ Alliance were never translated into public policies. Voting restrictions against African Americans in the South, Mexicans in the Southwest, and Chinese and Indians in California were justified by business leaders who argued “that the voting poor constituted a threat to property.”92 Charles Francis Adams Jr., the grandson of John Quincy Adams, raised the alarm against the possibility of a multiracial democracy taking root in the United States: “Universal suffrage can only mean in plain English, the government of ignorance and vice:—it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast; an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.”93
Voter suppression was the linchpin of a system in which the working class was bereft of real political and economic power. In 1884, a leading Democratic official in Florida explained that restricting the right to vote was the key to enforcing the republic of cheap labor:
We are going to have a Constitutional Convention in less than eight months; that convention will be controlled by white men; no one but white men will be allowed a vote there; the angel Gabriel himself will not be allowed a vote; and don’t you forget that the status of the nigger as a factor in the politics of this State will then be fixed. Then we want them to come. There are thousands of niggers in Georgia and Alabama who are working from 25 to 50 cents per day, while, in South Florida especially, we are being compelled to pay from one dollar and a quarter to two dollars a day.94
While the violence and fraud associated with the initiative to restrict suffrage was most intense in the South—and aimed most virulently against African Americans—voter suppression was a national phenomenon promoted by the most powerful interests in industrial America.95 No other domestic policy in the coming decades would be pursued with more ingenuity by America’s elites at all levels than the effort to restrict the voting franchise.
THE MAKING OF JIM CROW SEGREGATION
Southern spokesmen mounted a pro-segregation offensive using a discourse that their Northern peers could support. They pointed out that the South was economically undeveloped. White business supremacists contended that Southern economic development depended on the complete removal of black workers from politics. Daniel G. Fowle, the Princeton-educated governor of North Carolina, explained to the New York Herald that segregation enhanced America’s competitiveness in the global economy:
In social and political life the negro is subordinate in North Carolina as well as in New York. . . . In the stern realities of life as we find them, the white man is superior, and it is impossible for him to live under the domination of an inferior race. All sections of the country must agree with us in that. . . . Labor is so cheap with us that we can hire negroes for fifty cents a day, and our cotton fields can compete successfully with the world in the common grades of cloths.96
White leaders actually marketed segregation, voter suppression, and economic development on their terms as a package deal. To rationalize the separate and unequal world of Jim Crow capitalism, businessmen and academics vilified public education and depicted African Americans as lazy and unfit for politics. Robert Winston, president of the Durham, North Carolina, Chamber of Commerce argued that whites were tired of paying for public education. He commented,
It is now becoming popular to teach that when you educate a negro you spoil a good farm hand. In fact, the average Southern negro has lost to a certain extent his Southern white friend. Why this change of feeling towards the negro? It is found in the fact that the modern negro by his idleness and worthlessness, as a laborer, has rendered the average Southern farm unfit to live upon, and has endangered the industrial basis of the average Southern home.97
Dr. George T. Winston, president of the College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in North Carolina, told the American Academy of Political and Social Science in Philadelphia that black people’s progress “depends absolutely upon restoration of friendly relations with the whites. . . . Two things are requisite: 1. The Withdrawal of the negro from politics. 2. His increased efficiency as a laborer.”98
“A TRAGEDY THAT BEGGARED THE GREEK”
W. E. B. Du Bois characterized Reconstruction as “the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen.”99 The subsequent defeat of Reconstruction “was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution.” The decimation of Black ballots held cataclysmic consequences for all workers, and, as Du Bois pointed out, working-class people all over the world felt the shockwaves. In 1935, Du Bois concluded, “Imperialism, the exploitation of colored labor throughout the world, thrives upon the approval of the United States, and the United States gives that approval because of the South. World war waits on and supports imperial aggression and international jealousy. This was too great a price to pay for anything which the South gained.”100
Voter suppression was designed to undermine the kind of democratic politics that the Cuban solidarity movement brought into being. Disenfranchisement removed the largest potential block of anti-imperial voters from the nation’s voting rolls. African Americans recognized only too well that their country had descended into what William Appleman Williams called “the tragedy of American diplomacy,” a system of expansion undertaken in the name of “freedom” that denied freedom to others. Black citizens were expelled from the body politic at the very moment when their voices were most desperately needed to challenge an imperial system that embroiled the hemisphere.101
Disenfranchisement, however, did not extinguish Black internationalism. African Americans drew inspiration from new anticolonial struggles in Latin America and used Latin American opposition to US hegemony to build a new movement to regain their own political rights.
CHAPTER 5
WAGING WAR ON THE GOVERNMENT OF AMERICAN BANKS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH, 1890s TO 1920s
The paths of José Martí and Ida B. Wells-Barnett crossed at least twice in the course of their respective struggles for justice. Exiled from his native Cuba by the Spanish government, Martí traveled in the United States to build support for the Cuban liberation movement, as well as to write about its social conditions for Latin American readers. Wells-Barnett was an Afri
can American journalist who publicized the lynching of African Americans in a quest to build a campaign against lynching, voter suppression, and Jim Crow.1 Martí and Wells-Barnett separately reported on the 1892 lynching of Ed Coy in Texarkana, Texas. According to the New York Times, Coy was burned at the stake for raping a white woman, Julia Jewell.2 The Times silenced Coy’s voice at the moment of his execution, choosing not to print his last utterance. In contrast, José Martí made sure that his El Partido Liberal readers in Mexico City knew that the doomed man cried out, “I offered Mrs. Jewell no offense! You’re going to kill me, but I offered her no offense!”3 Subsequently, Wells-Barnett proved that Coy had been falsely accused of rape.4
Martí reported stories of anti-Black violence, the repression of labor unions, and the power of banks in his campaign to warn his readers in the Americas that Yankee imperialism imperiled them all. Martí admired figures such as the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet and Walt Whitman, as well as members of the nation’s embattled labor movement. However, he was alarmed at the tendency of US leaders to advocate the domination of Latin American affairs. In 1894, in “The Truth About the United States,” Martí critiqued “this greedy, authoritarian republic, and the growing lustfulness of the United States.” He wrote about US schemes to annex northern Mexico, as well as the efforts of US bankers to control the currency of the Americas. Now, Martí warned,
an honorable man cannot help but observe that not only have the elements of diverse origin and tendency from which the United States was created failed, in three centuries of shared life and one century of political control, to merge, but their forced coexistence is exacerbating and accentuating their primary differences and transforming the unnatural federation into a harsh state of violent conquest. . . . The truth about the United States must be made known to our America.5
Wells-Barnett and Martí taught the absurdity of trusting the US government with defending their people’s safety. After citing cases where African Americans had stopped lynch mobs dead in their tracks, Wells-Barnett observed:
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.6
The second traumatic event that brought Wells-Barnett and Martí together was the death of General José Antonio Maceó in 1896. A brilliant tactician who enlarged the latest Cuban liberation war against Spain, Maceó’s passing deeply impacted Martí, who said of the Afro-Cuban general, “His support will be himself, never his dagger. He shall serve his troops with his ideas even more than with his courage. Strength and greatness are natural to him.”7 Wells-Barnett and many African Americans mourned alongside Martí in spirit, and she was the keynote speaker at a Cuba Libre rally in Chicago’s Bethel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church shortly after Maceó fell. The Indianapolis Freeman reported, “The meeting was held under the auspices of the members of the church, and 500 colored persons [who] attended demanded freedom of Cuba and bemoan[ed] the death of Maceo.”8 Wells-Barnett was on the speaker’s platform when participants unanimously adopted the following resolutions: “Resolved, That the Afro-American citizens in Chicago in mass meeting assemble and express their deep sympathy with Cubans and deplore the untimely death of that matchless military leader, Antonio Maceo, and if killed by a disregard of the time honored and sacred law of a flag of truce, Spain is thereby placed beyond the pale of civilization.”9
The Chicago ceremony was one of scores of events organized by African Americans across the country to commemorate the life of the man whom they had adopted as their beloved general. “The decease of Maceo comes to us as a personal affliction,” the Indianapolis Freeman mourned. “We colored Americans need the inspiration of Maceo’s memory. In these degenerate days when the gods of our land are silver and gold instead of liberty and freedom, we need the remembrance of some former deeds of such a hero.”10 A mass meeting held in Little Rock was reported in the Cleveland Gazette: “Prominent Afro-Americans from all sections of Arkansas met in mass meeting in this city Monday night and adopted a memorial to congress, urging action favorable to Cubans in their struggle for liberty. Stirring resolutions were also adopted condemning the brutal warfare of the Spaniards and calling for liberty-loving people to render all possible aid.”11 At the Emancipation Day commemoration in Kinston, North Carolina, the Reverend C. Dillard celebrated “the plumed knight of the Island, General Antonio Maceo, who baffled the skill of all Spain by his remarkable and almost phenomenal ability in chasing 20,000 well-armed and well-fed Spaniards with only 6,000 men.”12 Edward A. Johnson, a former slave who became a noted educator, wrote, “At a public gathering in New York, where [Maceó’s] picture was exhibited, the audience went wild with applause—the waving of handkerchiefs and the wild hurrahs were long and continued.”13
African Americans’ tributes to Maceó transcended the Black-white racial binary frame that has long plagued efforts to think expansively about race in the United States.14 Black writers celebrated what they perceived to be Maceó’s racial hybridity and his ability to outsmart his Spanish adversaries. While Theodore Roosevelt and his eugenicist acolytes were preaching the doctrine of white racial purity, African Americans referred warmly to “Maceo, the mulatto,” noting that the general’s strength came from his combined African, Indigenous, and European ancestry.15 The newspaper Fair Play, published in Fort Scott, Kansas, wrote that Maceó hailed from the north coast of eastern Cuba, “where all the people have Indian blood in their veins.”16 The Indianapolis Freeman celebrated Maceó’s mixed racial lineage as a forte of his character: “Indian blood courses in the veins of its inhabitants—the Indians of whom Jesus Rabi, a prominent Cuban general, is so striking a representative.”17 African Americans imagined a new kind of identity that combined African, Indigenous, and European heritages with the struggle for national liberation as the central unifier of an individual’s character.
Representations of Maceó demonstrate that African Americans did not believe that Cubans had to be saved by the United States; Cubans possessed the ability to achieve their own independence.18 This contrasted with the white media’s depiction of a helpless Cuban populace terrorized by the Spanish.19 The historian Louis A. Pérez Jr. has explained how US political leaders and scholars erased the decades-long struggle of the Cuban people to expel the Spanish in favor of a self-serving Spanish-American War narrative crediting the United States with bringing about the island’s independence. White nationalist leaders adopted the central idea put forth in Rudyard Kipling’s essay “The White Man’s Burden,” published in McClure’s Magazine in 1899, as poetic complement to the Roosevelt Corollary, an addition to the Monroe Doctrine that claimed “international police power” for the United States and reaffirmed the right of the United States to interfere in the affairs of Caribbean and Latin America nations.20 Continuing in the anti-egalitarian tradition established by John Adams and his cohort, the nation’s elites argued that people of African or Latin American descent were mentally deficient and were doomed to being permanent second-class citizens—even in their own countries.
The Reverend Lena Mason would have none of this racial paternalism. She admired Maceó and other Cuban resistance leaders for their creativity, intelligence, and common sense in recruiting women to their revolutionary columns. Mason, a renowned AME traveling minister, observed, “It is the history of all countries that the females are the bitterest partisans, the first to urge force of arms when prudence would dictate longer forbearance and the last to give up the grudge long after the hatchet is buried.”21 Mason noted that women played leading roles in the Cuban War of Independence: “Antonio Maceo also had more
than a hundred females in his regiment—not coarse and shameless amazons, who chose the wild life for love of adventure, but mostly wives and mothers of standing and dignity. They dress[ed] in masculine attire, carried Mauser rifles, machetes, marched with men, endured all the hardships of camp and field and made as intrepid and uncomplaining soldiers as any.”22 Women partisan fighters played a major role in General Maceó’s invasion of the Pinar del Río province, a turning point of the war. Mason related, “The women of San Juan Martinez took no small part in the rebellion. When Spanish troops under Cornell were on their way to that city the citizenry, men and women, met and took a vote as to what course they should pursue. They decided to burn their town to ashes, rather than have it destroyed by Spanish soldiers.” Mason wanted her readers to understand the sacrifices that Cuban women were making to further the war of independence:
So while the men took all the horses and hurried to the field, the women set their own homes on fire and then with their children in their arms walked to Guane, twelve miles distant. The Spaniards[,] enraged at finding themselves baffled, started in hot pursuit. Hearing of their approach the women fired Guane and walked to the next town, Moutezuma[,] and so they kept up the merry chase, burning village after village, until they reached the insurgent army.23
