CHAPTER 1
The information about Frederick Douglass’s time in Nantucket and his quotations come from his 1855 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. The account of his speech comes from correspondence in The Anti-Slavery Standard on August 26, 1841. Sheldon Foner’s Frederick Douglass: A Biography was the source of the information about Douglass’s time on Nantucket and his interactions with black Nantucketers.
The biographical information and quotations from Mary Ellen Pleasant come from her two short biographies that she dictated to the journalist Sam P. Davis and which appeared in a periodical called Pandex of the Press in 1902 and 1904, titled “Memoirs and Autobiography” and “How a Colored Woman Aided John Brown,” respectively. I also used archival material from the San Francisco Library and Pleasant’s recipe books, which contain a few personal notes. I leaned heavily on the work of the investigative journalist and Mary Ellen Pleasant researcher Lerone Bennett.
I’d like to address for a moment the belief that Pleasant was an escaped slave from Virginia, a madame, a seductress, or a Voodoo priestess, as popularized by the racist yellow journalism of her day and the specious claims of her ex-employee Charlotte Dennis Downs in Helen Holdredge’s 1953 biography Mammy Pleasant. Downs claimed that she was Pleasant’s secret memoirist, but, when asked to produce evidence, said she had lost the manuscript that Pleasant had dictated to her. I consider the stories stemming from such accounts to be apocryphal. As interesting as they may be, they contradict historical records and Pleasant’s multiple documented tellings of her own life story.
I also referenced Lynn Hudson’s excellent Mary Ellen Pleasant biography, The Making of “Mammy Pleasant.” Hudson gives an expansive survey of the known material on Pleasant, including the Holdredge biography, while wading through the innuendo and historical rumor to give a balanced portrait of Pleasant.
CHAPTER 2
My primary source materials for Robert Reed Church were the two biographies published by his relatives, A Colored Woman in a White World, by his second daughter, Mary Church Terrell, and The Robert R. Churches of Memphis: A Father and Son Who Achieved in Spite of Race, by his daughter and granddaughter Annette and Sara Roberta Church. I also used archival material including his family letters and a family oral history given by Annette and Sara Roberta Church to Memphis State University titled “Robert Church Family of Memphis.” Archival letters from the Burton family to the Churches provided a great deal of information on Emmeline’s background and history as a slave.
James T. Lloyd’s Steamboat Directory and Disasters on the Western Waters and Emerson Gould’s Fifty Years on the Mississippi; or, Gould’s History of River Navigation provided additional details on the fire on Bulletin No. 2. The quotations in this chapter come from The Robert R. Churches of Memphis, A Colored Woman in a White World, the Church family oral history, and the Church family correspondence with the Burton family, who once owned Robert, his brother, and his mother.
CHAPTER 3
The information about Pleasant’s arrival and first years in San Francisco comes from her second dictated biography to Sam P. Davis, “How a Colored Woman Aided John Brown,” as well as a passenger log from the SS Oregon, the ship Pleasant arrived on, published in the Alta California in August 1852. I used The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream by H. W. Brands and The Barbary Coast by Herbert Asbury as my main references and sources of material on gold rush–era San Francisco.
Details and quotations about Pleasant’s business dealings come from the research of Lerone Bennett, and Davis’s “How a Colored Woman Aided Jim Brown.”
I excerpted James McCune Smith’s essay series on wealth from The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, edited by John Staffer, and I obtained biographical information from Shane White’s Jeremiah Hamilton biography, Prince of Darkness.
The information and quotation on Pleasant’s decision to go to Canada, her journey there, and her residence in Chatham come from Sam P. Davis’s “How a Colored Woman Aided John Brown.” The Chatham-Kent Black Historical Society and Jane Rhodes’s Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century were invaluable in providing background on blacks and Chatham. I obtained information about the Chatham Vigilance Committee’s train robbery from the reporting and court records on the incident, for which I referenced Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts, 1858–1958 by Barrington Walker and The Black Abolitionist Papers, Volume II: Canada, 1830–1865, edited by C. Peter Ripley. The information about the Chatham constitutional convention comes from John Brown’s letters and essays in John Brown, Liberator of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia, Life and Letters, edited by Franklin Benjamin Sanborn.
CHAPTER 4
The information and dialogue contained in this chapter on Robert R. Church’s time on the river before and after the Civil War comes from The Robert R. Churches of Memphis. My source for material on his first wife and daughter, Margaret and Laura Pico, comes from court records and reporting when Laura Pico sued the Church family in the case of Napier v. Church, which I found in Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Tennessee, Volume 132. My reporting on the battle of Memphis is based on the battle summary from the Civil War Sites Advisory Commission.
CHAPTER 5
Shane White’s account of Jeremiah Hamilton’s near lynching in his excellent biography Prince of Darkness is impeccably reported and invaluable. I directly referenced the newspaper accounts of the event compiled by Iver Bernstein in The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of Civil War.
CHAPTER 6
My retelling of Oklahoma’s history with slavery and the Confederacy was informed by Oklahoma, a History of Five Centuries by Arrell Morgan Gibson, General Stand Watie’s Confederate Indians by Frank Cunningham, and Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer.
CHAPTER 7
The information and quoted material on Church’s reemergence in Memphis, including his marriage to Louisa Ayers, his relationship with his father, the birth of his daughter, and the starting of his first business, comes from A Colored Woman in a White World. The saga with Margaret and Laura Pico again draws on the case files and reporting of Napier v. Church.
Beale Street Dynasty: Sex, Song, and the Struggle for the Soul of Memphis by Preston Lauterbach was incredibly informative on Church’s billiard-hall-related arrest, Church’s experience in the riots, his rebuilding afterward, and his experiences during the yellow fever outbreak. The reporting on the riot and its aftermath draws from the report generated by the United States Congress House Select Committee on the Memphis Riots.
CHAPTER 8
Pleasant’s time with the Woodworths was established by the census record that shows her and JJ living at their house. The biographical details on Selim Woodworth come from The Beginnings of San Francisco by Zoeth Skinner Eldredge and his obituary printed in Daily Alta California on February 2, 1871. Details about the Pleasant Omnibus case comes from a front-page story on the incident in the Daily Alta California printed on October 17, 1866.
Details on the second case, against NBMRR, come from the court documents in the case of John J. Pleasants and Mary E. Pleasants v. NBMRR.
The information on Pleasant’s boardinghouse comes from “How a Colored Woman Aided John Brown.” The material on Pleasant’s laundry business comes from an account by James Allen Francis Jr., an employee at one of the laundries she owned, listed among the Pleasant archive in the San Francisco Public Library.
The information on Pleasant’s mansion and her relationship with and investments in Nevada mining stock comes from the underappreciated investigative journalism of Lerone Bennett published in Ebony as “An Historical Detective Story: The Mystery of Mary Ellen Pleasant, Part I” in 1979. It constitutes some of the best research on Mary Ellen Pleasant.
CHAPTER 9
Newspaper reporting on the fire in Memphis from the Daily Memphis Avalanche and the Memphis Daily Appeal was invaluable in writing about the fire at Church’s saloon, as was the account in Beale Street Dynasty.
Information about Bob’s brother James Wilson comes from The Robert R. Churches of Memphis and A Colored Woman in a White World. The family oral history “Robert Church Family of Memphis” was the source of the details about Bob and Anna’s marriage and home life.
The quotation from and background information on Ida B. Wells in Memphis comes from her letters and diaries, collected nicely in The Light of the Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader, edited by Mia Bay.
CHAPTER 10
My background information on the 1893 Oklahoma land run comes from the Oklahoma Historical Society and Oklahoma, a History of Five Centuries.
Biographical information on O. W. Gurley’s family and early life comes from census records and a 1914 profile of Gurley in the Tulsa Star. Information on the town of Perry comes from the Oklahoma Historical Society.
The information on Edward P. McCabe comes from his entry in the Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present, edited by Paul Finkelman; an article called “Black in Oklahoma” from a New York Times correspondent printed in 1891; and The Story of Oklahoma by W. David Baird.
CHAPTER 11
The information about Annie Malone’s early life comes from her typed biography, contained in her file in the Claude A. Barnett papers at the Chicago History Museum Research Center, as well as census records that confirm her date of birth, the names of her parents, and the places of her residence. The quotations are taken from a retelling of her life story in a promotional pamphlet printed by Poro in 1925, which is also contained in the Barnett papers. For information on Madam C. J. Walker, I relied on A’Lelia Bundles’s comprehensive biography, On Her Own Ground.
CHAPTER 12
The information about Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward comes from W. E. B. Du Bois’s study of the area in The Philadelphia Negro. I sourced Elias’s story by compiling the many newspaper articles written about her in the New York World and the New York Times, both of which covered her scandal and trial and wrote dozens of articles about her after she became a public figure.
The stories of her early life, family, relationship with Frank P. Satterfield, and first and second jailing come from an article called “Rich Elias Once in the Poorhouse” from the New York Evening World on November 21, 1903. The story of Platt’s meeting Elias in the Tenderloin and the development of their affair comes from an interview he gave after he filed suit against her in the Evening World on June 1, 1904. An article in the Evening World on November 17, 1903, provides details of Elias’s initial questioning as well as information on the birth and death of her daughter, Gwendolyn.
Details about her mansion and home life come from an exposé by one her employees, published by the Evening World on June 2, 1904.
CHAPTER 13
Information on Pleasant’s ranch comes from the Beltane ranch, which is still in operation. The story of Newton Booth’s funeral comes from The Making of “Mammy Pleasant.”
The accounts of Thomas Bell’s death come from the San Francisco Examiner on October 16, 1892, and the San Francisco Chronicle on October 17, 1892. I also relied on Lerone Bennett’s “An Historical Detective Story.”
Records on Bell’s wealth were destroyed, according to the Mary Ellen Pleasant collection at the San Francisco Public Library. Newspaper sources were used, including a report on Bell’s income in the San Francisco Examiner on September 9, 1897. Pleasant’s wish to be left out of the will comes from J. Lloyd Conrich, “Mammy Pleasant Legend.”
Details and quotes from Fred Bell’s legal battle with Pleasant come from the San Francisco Call’s reports on September 9, 10, 16, and 23, 1897, and the San Francisco Chronicle on September 10, 15, and 23, 1897. Details about Pleasant’s last days and death come from her “Biography and Memoirs” and the reporting of her death in the San Francisco Examiner on January 12, 1904, and the San Francisco Chronicle on the same date.
CHAPTER 14
Accounts of Church’s construction of Church Park come from the archive at Memphis State University and The Robert R. Churches of Memphis. The information on Church’s relationship with Booker T. Washington comes from the oral history “Robert Church Family of Memphis,” as does the information about Church’s political activity and his relationship with Roosevelt. The story of Church firing at white harassers during a snowstorm comes from A Colored Woman in a White World. The stories about Solvent Savings Bank come from The Robert R. Churches of Memphis and the Church family oral history. The stories about Church’s death also come from the Church family oral history.
CHAPTER 15
The stories about J. B. Stradford’s and O. W. Gurley’s development of Greenwood come from a profile written about them in the Tulsa Star in 1914 and two excellent Greenwood books, Riot and Remembrance by James S. Hirsch and The Burning by Tim Madigan.
Reporting on Gurley’s early wealth comes from a July 24, 1917, report by the Muskogee Scimitar. The story of Stradford’s beating of a white man comes from Hidden History of Tulsa by Steve Gerkin. The story of O. W. Gurley’s fight with three white men comes from a November 11, 1916, report by the Tulsa Star on the incident.
CHAPTER 16
The stories and quotes in this chapter come from Annie’s biography in the Claude A. Barnett papers and On Her Own Ground. Information on Booker T. Washington’s death comes from his obituary published in the New York Times on November 15, 1915.
CHAPTER 17
An article by the New York Times published on November 13, 1903, contains details of Andrew Green’s funeral arrangements, the jailing and arraignment of his killer, Cornelius Williams, Williams’s confessions, eyewitness accounts of the murder scene, and a few details about Elias and Williams’s meeting and Elias’s early response to the murder.
A New York Times article from June 2, 1904, provides details of Green’s suit against Elias for the $685,000 he gave her, the first attempt at arresting Elias being thwarted by her lawyer, and a full statement by Platt giving the entire story of his relationship with Elias. Another article, on June 4 by the New York Times, describes the angry crowd gathering outside her house.
An article in the Bisbee Daily Review on June 14, 1904, details her time in prison after she was arrested during the Platt scandal. The story of Elias’s day in court, her acquittal, and her return home comes from an article in the New York Times on June 11, 1904. The same article includes the transcripts of the court testimony and an interview with Elias after the acquittal which are used in the chapter.
CHAPTER 18
Information on the nineteenth annual National Negro Business League comes from The Negro Year Book: An Annual Encyclopedia of the Negro, 1937–1938. Information on Annie and C. J. Walker comes from the Annie Malone papers in the Claude A. Barnett collection and On Her Own Ground.
CHAPTER 19
The stories of the Tulsa riots come from Riot and Remembrance and The Burning. Information on Gurley’s life after the riots and his financial losses comes from the Greenwood Historical Center.
CHAPTER 20
The story of the evictions of whites in Harlem comes from an article entitled “Hannah Elias Evicts White Tenants” in the New York Evening World on July 9, 1906. Harlem: The Four-Hundred-Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America by Jonathan Gill was an essential reference in writing about the development of Harlem. The story of another eviction of whites by Elias comes from the New York Tribune on November 11, 1905. The report of her expatriation comes from the New York Evening World in 1921.