14

DISILLUSIONED

DANIEL EVANS MURRAY, HAVING MOVED FROM BROOKLYN to midtown Manhattan, was on the program of a musicale presented at Odd Fellows Temple on West 29th Street on May 22, 1907. He performed a violin solo with piano accompaniment, Christian Sinding’s Opus 30, “Romance in E Minor for Violin and Piano.” Three years later, now thirty, his career took off. In June 1910, he organized the Port-Au Peck Quartette, named for its initial ten-week run at the Port-Au-Peck Hotel in Long Branch, New Jersey, “a summer colony where the wealthy are wont to spend the summer months.” The walk from the hotel to the Shrewsbury River was just a hundred feet or so, and there local clams and ears of corn were steamed in a bed of seaweed. One guest recalled, “At 2:30 the dinner horn blew and all were ready to do their part. The vaudeville quartette from the Port-Au-Peck Hotel gave song, sound and broad darkey smiles to stimulate the excellent cheer furnished.” The group also performed in private homes, as when some Trenton society trendsetters threw an entertainment with their dining space transformed into a French café, and “at one corner of the room was arranged, by the use of screens and palms, a stage, where the famous colored quartet from Port au Peck entertained the guests with clever songs and musical selections.” The foursome was composed of James Reese Europe on piano, Arthur “Strut” Payne on cello, Tom Bethel on bass, and group manager Daniel Murray on violin. All were part of the community of African American musicians and other entertainers and artists whose lifestyle revolved around the dance halls, clubs, and cabarets that catered to them in that part of midtown Manhattan known then as “Black Bohemia.” Marshall Hotel served as their unofficial headquarters. Home to Jim Europe, it was located a couple of blocks from Dannie’s apartment, which was on West 52nd Street off Sixth Avenue.

Dannie Murray and Jim Europe had been born ten days apart, had grown up in Washington, DC, and had taken up the violin at an early age. Both had moved to the northern metropolis with the turn of the new century (the African American population of New York nearly tripled between 1890 and 1910). With gigs sporadic, most musicians could not afford to live on performing alone. Europe, a large man in more ways than one (he was six feet and 200 pounds), took the matter in hand. He was a founder and the first president of the Clef Club, a professional and fraternal organization, initiated in April 1910 to provide promotion as a booking agent and protection as a union for African American musicians and singers.

Europe organized the Clef Club Symphony Orchestra, including among its number Dannie Murray, “Strut” Payne, and Tom Bethel. On May 27, 1910, the orchestra debuted at the new Manhattan Casino, a huge dance space and beer garden located uptown at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue. Their next performance there in October filled the hall. The New York Age reporter observed “a sprinkling of white citizens, and they were quite a study, appearing very much surprised, with eyes, mouths and ears wide open, so absorbed were they in the work of the musicians.” No wonder; the ensemble, well over one hundred men strong, assembled and conducted by Europe, was unique. There were extensive sections of mandolins and upright pianos plus banjos, violins, cellos, and harp guitars; drums, timpani, and traps provided the percussion. The mix of instruments produced unusual, imposing modulations and expressive, evocative sounds and rhythms. The repertoire included rags, marches, vaudeville numbers, musical theater songs, and classical pieces. Over time, the orchestra added woodwinds and brass and developed a distinctive African American musical idiom featuring works by black composers such as Will Marion Cook (a Washington violinist, who had preceded Dannie Murray at Oberlin’s Conservatory of Music), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, and Europe himself.

The crowning coup for the Clef Club Orchestra came on May 2, 1912: a performance before an integrated audience at the famed Carnegie Hall. Billed as a “Unique Concert of Negro Music Composed and Rendered Exclusively by Colored Musicians,” it marked a milestone, the first African American concert held at the iconic hall, which was “taxed to its utmost capacity, and a thousand people turned away.” The diverse program included concert arias, popular ballads, dance hits, and slave spirituals. In the final piece, a march, all 125 performers on stage, dressed in black tuxedoes, sang out the “refrain on the last strain, surprising the audience with the sheer power of voice. . . . The audience sprang to its feet and cheered.” Dannie Murray’s hometown Washington Bee raved, “There was no one in that audience that did not feel that for once he had heard the ‘real thing,’ worked out with clever musicianship and general verve into a truly artistic manifestation.” Europe and company had “stormed the bastion of the white musical establishment and made many members of New York’s cultural elite aware of Negro music for the first time.” The Carnegie Hall concert lent unprecedented validity to African American music, while the Clef Club’s collective voice paved the way for artistic collaboration among talented entertainers of color in the next decade’s Harlem Renaissance.

In 1908, Henry Murray earned a diploma at Wood’s Business School in New York City. Two years later he was given charge of Armstrong High School’s business department. The business courses were conducted in “the old Mott School,” and, with the support of Armstrong’s principal, his uncle Bruce Evans, he pressed for a first-class location for “commercial training for colored youth.” Starting in early 1911, there was a push for the Phelps School building on Vermont Avenue near U Street (across from Henry’s elementary school, Garnet) to be “made a colored institution and used for the business department of the Armstrong Manual Training School,” given that a new edifice was being constructed for the current occupants of the Phelps School. The school board approved the new use in late October 1911. Among the course offerings were business English, shorthand, typewriting, and bookkeeping. Though referred to as “the Colored Business High School,” it remained under the auspices of Armstrong—at least it did until September 1912, when the school superintendent and the assistant superintendent for colored schools, Roscoe Bruce (the son of Blanche and Josephine Bruce), recommended that the Phelps School be transferred to the jurisdiction of the M Street High School and a member of its faculty placed at its head. That must have been a blow to Henry, since, as his father noted, the school “under his administration attained to high success.” Henry was relegated to teaching in Armstrong’s department of business practice. There he initiated a school savings bank to serve as an object lesson in practical banking and encourage thrift.

Meanwhile, Henry had become a married man, taking Emma Green, originally from North Carolina, as his wife on November 4, 1908. At the time of the 1910 census, Henry and Emma were part of her mother’s household. Three years later they purchased a house on S Street just three doors down from his parents’ home.

For reasons unknown and not particularly likely to be monetary, given his father’s financial status, Nathaniel Murray broke up his years at Cornell. During the academic sessions of 1907–8 and 1908–9, he taught agriculture at Princess Anne Academy (now the University of Maryland Eastern Shore) in Somerset County, Maryland. He returned to Cornell as a junior and continued his studies and his involvement with Alpha Phi Alpha. The fraternity evolved through struggle and success. Its certificate of incorporation was recorded with New York’s secretary of state in 1908 and four years later at the national level. Nat received his BS degree in agriculture in 1911. In April of the same year, he married Georgia-born Mary Louise Jordan, known as Mayme, in Washington.

Having worked in the school gardens for the District colored schools during summer vacation 1910, he applied for the same job the summer after he graduated. Assistant Superintendent Roscoe Bruce informed him that due to monetary considerations, no summer gardens work was available, nor were there “prospects as far as I know for permanent work with school gardens for the colored schools in this city.” Suspecting that was not so, Daniel Murray and his wife zoomed into action on their son’s behalf, and what followed, recalled Murray, was “a series of mendacious evasions on the part of the Asst. Supt. which ended in a direct falsehood.” It turned out that a school garden would be open and Bruce was ready to offer the summer job to another candidate, one with no agricultural training but a large family to feed. Despite evidence, Bruce denied it to his supervisors. It was Nat Murray who, after the fuss made by his parents, received the appointment in late June. Telling the story eight years after it happened, Daniel Murray’s anger still rankled. One wonders how riled up he would have been if the incident had not been decided in his son’s favor.

According to the Indianapolis Freeman, at the end of the summer Nat was offered the directorship of the DC school gardens and a professorship at Tuskegee. Instead he took a position teaching horticulture at the Agriculture and Technology College of North Carolina in Greensboro. By 1913, he was assistant state agriculturist and a science teacher at West Virginia Collegiate Institute. Now West Virginia State University, this institution, like Princess Anne Academy and the A&T college in North Carolina, was one of the land-grant colleges established for African Americans in states where the education facilities were segregated. Cornell was a land-grant college as well, but in New York two separate schools were not necessary.

Nat left Ithaca a few months before his brother Harold made his way there. Harold had graduated from Armstrong High School in June 1911, the class valedictorian, and entered Cornell University in September. Harold felt “he was ‘a cut above average’ throughout his schooling.” A mechanical engineering major at Cornell’s Sibley School, Harold participated in extracurricular activities, including the university vesper club and the cosmopolitan club, composed of 250 Cornell men from twenty different nations, but never joined the Alpha Phi Alpha.

“Master Paul Murray,” about to turn fourteen and preparing to start high school in September, spent a vacation with his parents at Cape May on the Jersey shore for a week in mid-August 1912. That December, he fell and broke his arm during a drill at Armstrong. His father raised a stink, demanding an investigation, and had to be satisfied with the official finding that the fall had been “entirely accidental.” Three years later Paul did not make up for a missed assignment at the teacher’s convenience, and Murray raised a stink again, maintaining it was the teacher’s fault since the time he had elected was during regular classes. When Paul was found negligent and asked to drop the matter, Murray fired off a letter directly to the superintendent of schools, claiming it was “an unwarranted interference with my son’s natural rights” and concluding, “Paul’s feelings were greatly wounded by the incident and the humiliation gravely affected him and still affects him.”¹

THE NATIONAL AFRO-AMERICAN COUNCIL, ACCORDING TO one critic, had been “Booker Washingtonized” by 1905, when Alexander Walters attempted to renew the interest of the organization’s “Old Guard,” naming Daniel Murray among many others in an open letter published on July 25 of that year in the New York Age. The prospects for African Americans were growing worse, and Walters “called loudly to the derelict members” of the council “to arouse themselves and do something to check this onslaught upon their civil and political rights.” He wrote his letter just ten days after a new civil rights organization was formed at a Niagara Falls meeting. Although Booker T. Washington never held official office, he had become a powerful influence in the NAAC, rebuffing challenges to his accomodationist posture. W. E. B. DuBois, for one, was ready to counter the Tuskegeean’s “nerveless acquiescence in wrong” with an activist agenda. Besides DuBois, the forces behind the initial impetus for what became known as the Niagara Movement were Frederick McGhee, who had succeeded Murray as director of the NAAC’s legal and legislative bureau; Charles E. Bentley, Murray’s dentist friend from Chicago, whom DuBois credited with “planning the method of organization”; and Boston militant William Monroe Trotter, the son of the recorder of deeds in the Cleveland administration and Washington’s most open and bitter foe. Unlike Murray, McGhee had stayed active in the NAAC; he warned Walters that Washington’s control had impelled the NAAC to lose faith with its preliminary goals and nonpartisan stance, thus forfeiting its effectiveness, and that the consequence would be an effort “to start anew with men who have not failed the people.” He noted that even T. Thomas Fortune “sees no future for the council.”

These four allies hand-selected a like-minded, articulate group of men who met with them on the Canada side of Niagara Falls. Twenty-nine in all, they named their association for the “mighty current” of protest they wished to see flow. The Niagara Movement’s Declaration of Principles was eloquent and clear. It proclaimed that “persistent manly agitation is the way to liberty,” that black citizens “should protest emphatically and continually against the curtailment of their political rights.” Its leaders diplomatically insisted that their movement was not formed to strike at Booker T. Washington per se; rather, they “had gathered to consider principles and not men,” but that smacked of semantics considering the declaration’s statement: “We refuse to allow the impression to remain that the Negro-American assents to inferiority, is submissive under oppression and apologetic before insults.”

The goals of the Niagara Movement—freedom of speech and criticism, manhood suffrage, the abolition of distinctions based on race, an unfettered and unsubsidized press, the recognition that advanced academic education was the monopoly of no race, support for the dignity of labor—were not different from those of the NAAC’s original platform, nor were the strategies of pursuit, most notably through the courts system.

Washington had become paranoid over protecting his status and employed subversive methods to curb the efforts of those who threatened it. He expended what amounted to “hush money” to subsidize elements of the black press, pressuring certain journalists “hidebound” to his patronage into ignoring or criticizing the Niagara Movement. The Bookerites plotted against and harassed the new organization, planting rumors and disinformation, sending spies to their gatherings, and dissuading blacks from supporting them. The external opposition took a toll. The editor of The Voice of the Negro and one of the movement founders, J. Max Barber, was referring to Washington and those in his orbit when he decried “underhanded methods of strangling honest criticism, manipulating public opinion and centralizing political power by means of improper and corrupt use of money and influence.” The Tuskegee Machine put a lot of effort into interfering with the Niagara Movement and its program, forcing the movement in turn to direct energy into fending off such intrusions.

The second annual Niagara Movement meeting took place August 15–18, 1906, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a site chosen for its historic symbolism as well as the welcoming accommodations at Storer College. The meeting made history of its own. Speech after speech was riveting and ringing in content and tone. Many attendees to the public conference thought August 17, designated John Brown Day, the most interesting and inspiring of the whole four days. It started at 6 a.m. with a one-mile pilgrimage to John Brown’s Fort. The participants formed a single-file procession, led by Reverend Owen M. Waller, “barefoot in true pilgrim style,” and sang the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as they circled the brick building.

The afternoon proceedings back at Storer College were equally moving. It is very likely that the Murrays, certainly Anna, were present. She and the younger children continued to spend their summers at the Ferry, with her husband joining them on weekends and for his two-week leave. Moreover, Anna’s mother, seventy-nine-year-old Henrietta Leary Evans, whose brother, Sheridan Leary, and nephew-in-law, John A. Copeland, had been among the Harpers Ferry martyrs, was on the agenda. “The audience crowded forward as the venerable Mrs. Evans” spoke in a low voice. The “small, bent . . . very wrinkled” woman remained seated in her armchair on the platform as she shared her reminiscences.

Renewed interest in the history of the raid and in Henrietta Evans’s recollections followed the conference. In late December 1907, Daniel Murray responded to a letter W. E. B. DuBois sent to Anna asking that her mother “detail again somewhat her recollections of the John Brown invasion.” Murray wanted DuBois to understand, having debriefed his mother-in-law himself, that though her recollections were “in the main correct, they are slightly at variance with the facts.” DuBois was planning a biography of John Brown, as was his close associate, civil rights activist Oswald Garrison Villard, the publisher of the New York Evening Post and a grandson of the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. On March 5, 1908, Villard’s research assistant interviewed Henrietta Leary in her daughter’s presence. The “aged woman” threaded out her memories, not only of her brother Sheridan but of a good deal of early family history.

Four months after that interview, the Washington Bee reported that “Bruce Evans and family and Mrs. Daniel Murray are rusticating at Harpers Ferry.” Their mother was with them, and there, fittingly enough, Henrietta Leary Evans died on August 13. Both the Evening Star and the Washington Post ran extended obituaries, headlined “Venerable Colored Resident of This City Passes Away” and “Brother Aided John Brown,” respectively. She was survived by five of her eleven children; her son Bruce traveled with her remains to Oberlin, where they were buried next to her husband’s.

The possibility of the Niagara Movement and the NAAC merging was floated in the press now and again. The Indianapolis Freeman wondered, “Will the Afro-American Council absorb the Niagara Movement—or be absorbed by it?” At least two of the movement founders, Lafayette Hershaw and William H. H. Hart, remained NAAC members and were elected directors as late as 1907. But a marriage of the two organizations was not to be.

The NAAC did rally following Alexander Walter’s plea, though Daniel Murray did not renew his involvement. The organization reasserted its direction and energy and reiterated its original action goals, in particular the legal fight against disenfranchisement and separate-car laws. Booker T. Washington lost influence generally, beginning in 1906 with his muted and nonconfrontational responses to the Brownsville injustice and to the Atlanta race riot that followed a month later, when a massive mob of white men surged through African American neighborhoods destroying businesses and assaulting black men, leaving scores dead or wounded. The resurgence of the NAAC was not enough to sustain the organization beyond 1908, however. The Niagara Movement faded as well, after only four years of existence, never reaching close to the peak membership of the NAAC nor achieving any milestone victories. If the original goals of the two organizations had been much the same, so were many of the reasons for their demise. Among them were chronic financial difficulties, the absence of regular paid staff, the inability to generate mass grassroots support due to organizational weaknesses and lack of sustained publicity, and failure to keep even the membership updated. Added to this were internal struggles, the clashing of personalities and ideologies, with Washington playing a foremost role. In the case of the Niagara Movement, there was a falling-out between DuBois and Trotter. (When Trotter made his exit, most of the other Boston radicals, including Butler R. Wilson, who served on the legal committee, remained.)

A new, interracial civil rights organization emerged in 1909. Offended by the injustice and violence aimed at African Americans, a group of white liberals, including Oswald Garrison Villard, proposed a conference on racial justice. Among those who signed the call, issued on February 12, the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, were W. E. B. DuBois, Alexander Walters, Ida Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, and Francis Grimké. Echoing the focus of the NAAC and the Niagara Movement, the stated goal of the new organization, named the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was to secure for all Americans the rights guaranteed in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments of the Constitution. If the NAACP grew out of the failures of the NAAC and the Niagara Movement, it also profited by their examples—in platform, practice, and game plan.²

DANIEL MURRAY DID NOT RALLY TO THE CALL FROM ALEXANDER Walters, nor did he join the Niagara Movement or the nascent NAACP. He did offer his own “Race Solution Plan” in 1910, published in the Evening Star of March 27. It was provoked by a speech that Secretary of War Jacob M. Dickinson, a Mississippian, gave, appealing for “justice to the Negro compatible with white political control.” Murray recognized that statement as slightly veiled support for political elimination, “an unjust proposition to make 10,000,000 loyal Americans pariahs in the land of their birth.” He insisted, “All the people must join in the solution of the race problem,” and queried, “Why should I and my children be thus denied the right and protection by the ballot?” He suggested the creation of an interracial commission drawn from different sections of the country, concluding that “the solving of the problem consists in bringing those diverse elements together.” He wanted the commission to visit places outside the United States where “a measure of peace has been secured” between races. The article also ran in several other newspapers, and Murray sent copies to many associates. He garnered congratulations on his good idea, but it engendered nothing more. What did Murray realistically think might come of his proposal? After all, when the National Sociological Society, an interracial organization three thousand members strong, had called for the same approach and named such a committee, no action had followed. The Macon Telegraph had belittled that more concerted effort in a headline: “Solvers of Race Problem Make Usual Appeal.”

The following month Murray demonstrated his overall frustration with the second-class status allotted to African Americans. He led the Washington Civic Association, which he described as “an organization of colored people that undertakes to look after the affairs of the colored race in the District of Columbia.” In December 1908, fourteen local civic associations met to combine forces in agitating for the restoration of home rule in Washington. Daniel Murray appeared at the meeting and, after a review of his credentials, was seated. He was the only African American representative at the convention that followed, during which the coalition adopted resolutions calling for substantial control of city governance. The resolutions were presented to Congress in the form of a memorial, but the timing for such changes, as passing decades would prove, was far from ripe.

Later in 1910, city civic organizations decided to formally coalesce to form the Federation of Citizens’ Associations of the District of Columbia. A constitution was drafted that defined the federation as consisting of “all eligible civic associations and societies of white citizens of the National Capital.” When a secretary sent out invitations to an April 30 meeting to ratify the constitution, he worked from an inclusive list of local civic groups. Thus, that evening representatives from five associations of black citizens, Daniel Murray among them, arrived to the surprise of the organizers, one of whom declared the federation “a white man’s movement” that ought to proceed “without race entanglement.” The delegates from the black civic groups “failed to see how one-third of the population could be left out” and wanted to know why they had been invited, only to be insulted. “It is not an insult,” they were told. “It is a mistake.” When the constitution was read, Murray stood up to object to the word “white,” requesting it be stricken. “The colored associations of Washington can be of great benefit to the federation, and I see no reason why they should not be admitted,” he stated. “We are all striving for the betterment of conditions, so why shouldn’t the Negro assist.” A heated debate followed. The chairman of the constitution committee insisted, “The taking in of Negro associations would kill this movement. . . . The races have been segregated in Washington, and I see no need for an alliance in citizens’ associations.” With that, Murray turned on his heels and walked out, and one by one the other black representatives followed. The last one waited on the vote, 11–10, to adopt the constitution with the word “white” intact.

Daniel Murray was disillusioned. He remained a lifelong community activist but only rarely ventured onto the national political stage again. His deflating experiences in 1910 were followed by total absorption in his writing project. Still determined to contribute something of “lasting benefit to my race,” he narrowed his scope to black history while enlarging his vision to monumental proportions. It could not be contained in “a book.” Daniel Murray set his sights on a multivolume encyclopedia.³