17
NEW NEGRO/OLD CIT
RACIAL TENSION AND ANTAGONISM IN WASHINGTON peaked in the sweltering summer of 1919. The Great War had ended, and the city was crowded with returning soldiers. Many were competing for work, and their prospects were not auspicious given that the government was dismantling wartime agencies. Young men of both races were jobless, restless, and ready to act out. African American military men returning to Washington found that prejudicial practices had only proliferated under the Wilson administration in their absence. Already disadvantaged in the job market, they were treated with disdain and disrespect, notwithstanding the fact that five thousand of them had served in the military during the war and had hoped that their duty fulfilled would earn them a fair shake. Manifestations varied from the experience of one Washington veteran who approached a theater in uniform only to have the ticket seller shake his head “no” before he even reached the booth, to lynchings of black men in uniform elsewhere.
The racial tinderbox that was the nation’s capital was fueled by lurid headlines of “Negro crime,” as likely to be groundless as not, and certainly exaggerated and biased, running almost daily in the mainstream newspapers. The series of sensational stories included unsubstantiated accounts of alleged sex crimes against white women by “Negro fiends” at loose in the city. They left the impression that a “Negro crime wave” was overspreading the area. Archibald Grimké, the president of the NAACP Washington branch, wrote to city newspaper editors on July 9, pleading that they tone down such reports because they were “sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines.” No preventive measures followed.
The explosive situation did indeed blow up, ignited by an incident on the evening of Friday, July 18. A white woman, returning to her Southwest home about 10 p.m., was confronted by two black men, who jostled her as they tried to take her umbrella but ran off when she screamed and whites nearby intervened. News of that latest “outrage” immediately circulated with the Washington Post’s morning headline “Negroes Attack Girl.” All Saturday, rumors proliferated without constraint, more hysterical with each retelling. Word spread on the streets and in bars and pool halls where young men were drinking near beer and airing grievances that two black men had attempted to sexually assault a sailor’s wife. In a mood for revenge, a throng of military men, some still in uniform, and civilians headed out for the Southwest quadrant that evening. Drawing strength in numbers as they went along, several hundred men wielding clubs, lead pipes, and pieces of lumber attacked blacks at random, fracturing the skull of one with a brick.
With Sunday, the weather hot and humid, came the unleashing of a wave of white on black violence as mobs, emboldened by the limited police response, roamed the city. African Americans were chased, dragged, and pummeled, two of them directly in front of the White House. Roving bands of white men in the hundreds pulled blacks, women as well as men, off streetcars and beat them. That night Carter Woodson, newly appointed a Howard University professor, witnessed a “most horrifying spectacle.” He was walking home when a white mob materialized and he was forced to hide in the recess of a storefront. “They had caught a Negro and deliberately held him up as one would a beef for slaughter, and when they had conveniently adjusted him for lynching they shot him,” he recalled. “I heard him groaning in his struggle as I hurried away as fast as I could without running, expecting every moment to be lynched myself.”
July 20, a steamy Monday, proved to be the peak day of an outright race war. The morning edition of the Washington Post blared “Mobilization for Tonight,” giving instructions on where white combatants should meet at 9 p.m. for “a ‘clean up’ that will cause the events of the last two evenings to pale into insignificance.” As on Sunday, white mobs attacked blacks in several locations throughout the city. An African American boy was knocked off his bicycle in front of the Carnegie Public Library, and cries of “Lynch him!” and “Who’s got the rope?” followed. Before the threats could be carried out, the boy was rescued by police.
But that night, African Americans were ready to retaliate. Hundreds had bought guns from pawnshops or gun dealers during the day (secondhand pistols went for as much as fifty dollars apiece) or pulled out the military rifles they had brought home from the war. The city was a battleground. Both sides—each two thousand or more in number—fought with fists, bricks, bats, razor blades, knives, and firearms. In addition to street brawling, blacks turned the tables on their adversaries by employing their methods of revenge. They beat up whites pulled off streetcars and shot at them from drive-by vehicles known as “terror cars.”
One of the areas white mobs targeted was the Murrays’ Northwest neighborhood. Residents there stood armed and ready to guard their families and property. Anna Murray’s Parents’ League distributed 50,000 copies of a handbill that advised “our people, in the interest of law and order and to avoid the loss of life and injury, to go home before dark and to remain quietly and to protect ourselves.” Neighbors mobilized in self-defense, erecting crude barricades around the perimeter of their community. More than a thousand armed residents manned U and 7th streets. Sharpshooters waited tensely on the roof of Howard Theater, the tallest building in the area. White mobs did advance and were met by armed resistance. There were several clashes at 7th and T streets, just a few blocks from the Murrays’ house. The city did not quiet down until 3 a.m. Overall, whites fared as badly as or worse than blacks.
Reaction by the authorities was slow. The police were ineffectual, given the scope of the violence, and not until Tuesday were a thousand or more federal troops employed to restore law and order. A summer rainstorm helped them dissipate the excitement and clear the streets. Unlike in earlier race riots, African Americans had vigorously fought back at their persecutors, heeding the advice W. E. B. DuBois had given in May 1919:
We are cowards and jackasses if now that that war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for democracy!
Four days and nights of armed conflict in the nation’s capital resulted in the deaths of approximately 30 Washingtonians, with 150 or more injured. The precise numbers are unknown because a thorough investigation was blocked by southern congressmen. There were race riots incited by white against black violence in at least twenty cities during the summer of 1919. The season of bloodshed came to be known as Red Summer.1
Notwithstanding the prominence and success of the NAACP, other civil rights organizations came and went. One was the Colored American Council, incorporated in Washington in 1919, its purpose to serve as a watchdog over the merits and demerits of proposed national legislation affecting African Americans. Lafayette Hershaw was the organization’s vice chairman, Daniel Murray the treasurer, and Henry Murray the general counsel. The Colored American Council managed to arrange hearings in early September 1919 before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce. Under discussion was an amendment introduced by Martin B. Madden, a Republican representative from Illinois, calling for the abolition of Jim Crow cars in interstate commerce. It was a proposal black Washingtonians were pleased to advocate. More often they were required to combat strenuous efforts by southern lawmakers to introduce separate streetcar accommodations in the national capital. So persistent were such efforts that African Americans had to bird-dog the matter and regularly refight the same battle. The Washington Bee found the city’s elites self-centered in their fixation on issues “where the shoe pinches them,” separate-car laws in particular: “The high brow is fond of travel, hence he is interested primarily in doing away with jim-crow discrimination on passenger coaches and sleeping cars.”
Henry Murray, representing the Colored American Council, gave testimony at the House hearings in support of the Madden amendment. He provided a plethora of arguments both ethical and practical and referenced many points and precedents of law, including the Hart v. Maryland case. “For forty-five minutes the committee listened with the closest attention to his vigorous attack upon the jim-crow car system, and at the close joined in the spontaneous applause,” lauded the black press. Daniel Murray had to be very proud of his son’s thorough and erudite presentation. During Representative Madden’s own remarks at the hearing, he was interrupted by congressmen from Texas and Louisiana who “seemed to take a delight” in injecting references to “our niggers” and the “good treatment” shown them. After the hearings white supremacist lobbyists immediately set to work to counteract the proposal’s momentum. The following November 16, the Madden amendment was defeated by a House vote of 142–12.
The Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution, decreeing that the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors was prohibited, became effective in January 1920. So did the Volstead Act, passed by Congress to enforce it. But prohibition had an earlier history in the District of Columbia, thanks to Congress’s control of the city. Yet again, the District had served as an experimental arena for the politicians. During the period in 1916 when Congress, backed by the Anti-Saloon League, was considering local prohibition, Washingtonians had pressed for a residents’ referendum. Daniel and Henry Murray had both spoken in favor of the referendum at a meeting of black citizens’ associations in March. It was not to be. Washington went dry at midnight on Halloween 1917. The Murrays were among the “wets” who enjoyed alcoholic beverages, and the private imbibing of them was not proscribed by law. Daniel Murray informed George Myers in August 1920, “The Volstead has played havoc with sociability in this old town, for sure, but your humble servant is still on deck and has a little hay, made while the sun was shining. They will need to get up long before day to catch an old Marylander like myself napping.”
Nathaniel Murray spent the last years of the 1910s teaching in West Virginia, New Jersey, and North Carolina. In the fall of 1919 he and Mayme’s first daughter, the senior Murrays’ third grandchild, Pauline Leary Murray, was born in Washington. By that date, Daniel Murray owned a substantial working farm with multiple cottages in Dorsey, Maryland, a community in eastern Howard County. Nat moved there with his small family and worked the farm “that he might have a more intimate contact” with the subjects he taught. He penned a long letter to “My dear Father” on August 28, 1920, reporting on the status of the farm and its bills since “you were last here.” He wrote about horse shoeing and poultry supplies and apple, corn, and potato crops. Mayme and the baby, who “is 11 mos. old today and is beginning to learn to walk,” were well. Nat claimed that he was working hard while Henry, visiting at the farm, was “continuing his policy of sitting around.” In 1921, Nat returned to Washington and began a twenty-eight-year tenure teaching biology, botany, and agriculture at Dunbar and Armstrong High Schools. He purchased a house at 150 U Street.
The Dorsey property as well as the Cherry Heights lots would remain in the Murray family for many decades to come. Daniel Murray wrote his friend Myers about the latter in the summer of 1920: “I have not been to Baltimore for a long time and yet I have considerable interests there. I own one-half of a subdivision there, Cherry Heights. The recent extension of the city of Baltimore placed our property right on the line. Bishop John Hurst is my partner. My son George looks after it. My idea is to hold it and allow it to grow for the benefit of my grandchildren. I have three.”
Henry and Emma Murray had no children but did care for a number of cats in their S Street home. Paul Murray, too, though briefly married, never had children. He had dropped out of Cornell University’s school of arts and sciences after a year. Back in Washington he worked as a messenger in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He then tried another go at Cornell, attending the summer session of 1919. But when the census taker came around to the Murrays’ house in January 1920, Paul was included, described as having no occupation and married, though no wife was listed. But that May, according to his father, Paul was certified to the census office with a high mark from the Civil Service Commission, and in July he was named chief of his section.2
Aaron Bradshaw, a lawyer and politico, and Daniel Murray were elected District delegates to the 1920 Republican National Convention at a March 30 meeting of twenty-two Republican clubs. The pair pledged to support suffrage for women, as well as a series of resolutions promoting “the Americanization of the National Capital,” including a delegate in the House of Representatives, no increase in taxes, direct popular election of Board of Education members, and a substantial raise for public school employees. However, other city Republicans declared the balloting unauthorized, and over the following weeks two other white/black delegate pairs emerged via voting by other of the District’s Republican factions. The national convention was slated to start on June 8 at the Chicago Coliseum. A week before, all three sets of Washington’s would-be delegates, along with their alternates, traveled to Chicago to stake their claims before the national committee. The committee (which had fifteen other cases of contesting delegates to decide on), despite the “stiff fight” put up by Bradshaw and Murray, chose one of the other pairs to represent the District of Columbia. On June 19, inside the overheated coliseum, Ohio senator Warren G. Harding was declared the Republican nominee on the tenth ballot. His Democratic challenger took the solid South (except for Tennessee) in November, but Harding was the victor in every other state and won the election in a landslide.
Woodrow Wilson had forgone an inaugural ball for both his terms and Harding followed suit, setting an example of austerity. That did not stop Washington’s black elite from pulling out all the stops for an inaugural ball of their own. The Oldest Inhabitants Association sponsored the March 7, 1921, event at Convention Hall. It was a family affair for the Murrays. Daniel served on the reception committee, Henry on the press committee, and Anna was chosen to lead the grand march on the arm of the association’s president, Eugene Brooks. According to the Washington Bee, “One of the most striking figures on this occasion was that of the tall and graceful form of Mrs. Anna Murray, attired in black beaded net, trimmed with green ostrich plumes, with diamond jewelry.” The Baltimore Afro-American noticed that her silver hair was the perfect complement to her black spangled gown. The revelers danced from nine in the evening to three in the morning to the strains of an eighteen-piece band. “The reception of the Oldest Inhabitants was indeed an occasion long to be remembered,” raved one. “I thought when I entered the hall last Monday night that every person whom I knew was in attendance.”3
To be sure, by this time many in Washington’s “colored aristocracy” had seen their fortunes and careers diminished and their entitlement to respect belittled. But the black elite was still the black elite, living the high life folded in on themselves. As a group, they were disillusioned but not decimated. When Langston Hughes lived in the District in the 1920s, he found “it had all the prejudices and Jim Crow customs of any Southern town. . . . I asked some of the leading Washington Negroes about this, and they loftily said that they had their own society and their own culture.” According to family members, Anna carried herself with a superior—even “haughty”—air; others took notice when she entered a room.
One ladies’ luncheon Anna attended was described as “informal,” although it was served by Jules Demonet, one of Washington’s best caterers, and included a receiving line and a color scheme. At another “beautifully appointed luncheon,” presided over by Bettie Francis and her daughter-in-law, Alice Wormley Francis, the table was decorated with sweet peas, and Anna and the other guests each received a nosegay of the same flower. When Anna visited friends in Chicago, she was characterized as “the society leader from the Capital of the nation” and elaborately entertained by Florence and Charles E. Bentley, Colonel John R. Marshall’s wife, and others of that city’s elite with dinners, receptions, and theater parties. The Bentleys, in whose home she stayed, hosted a musicale in her honor, and a columnist who covered the event said she “looked very regal in her exquisite gown of white satin and rare lace, with jewels flashing in her beautiful white hair.”
On January 3, 1913, the “flower of Washington’s social life,” including Daniel and Anna Murray, attended a reception hosted by Register of the Treasury James C. Napier and his wife that “opened the social season of the New Year most auspiciously.” The journalist Richard W. Thompson gushed:
The elaborate function took place at the historic “Hillside Cottage,” 2225 Fourth Street, near Howard University, for many years the home of famous Congress-man John Mercer Langston, of Virginia. In this picturesque mansion Mr. Langston’s widow has continued to reside, and with her for the past three years have lived Register and Mrs. Napier, the latter being her daughter. The reception was attended by upwards of a hundred of the flower of Washington’s social and intellectual life, and at no similar entertainment within memory has there been brought together a more representative assembly of the race. . . . The flawless appointments, the personnel of the party, the elegance of the ladies’ toilettes and the courtliness of the gentlemen suggested the stately functions of the White House.
The Murrays never missed a season rusticating at the “the Ferry,” playing cards and croquet, and fishing and boating with other elites summering there. From Harpers Ferry on July 1, 1914, the Washington Bee reported, “Mrs. Daniel Murray arrived last Saturday and opened her cottage for the summer. Mrs. Murray has done the same thing thirty-five times and her cottage is as nice and comfortable as her beautiful mansion on S Street is grand and massive.”4
DANIEL MURRAY, FAR FROM HIS GOAL OF SIGNING UP FIVE thousand initial subscribers to his encyclopedia, asked Donnelly and Sons to help underwrite its publication in 1914. Given that “publishers are our customers,” they were shocked at the request: “We could not assume any financial responsibility in connection with it; nor could we undertake the selling of the finished product.” They were on the mark in suggesting that what Murray was really seeking was “a publisher who would take the entire burden on his shoulders.” Indeed, at this same time he was fashioning a multipronged approach to the Carnegie Institution of Washington, established by Andrew Carnegie in 1902 “to encourage in the broadest and most liberal manner investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.” Murray requested funding for his project and lined up a series of friends and associates, including William Carl Bolivar and John Hurst, to lend their support. For their convenience, he even composed a letter to which they needed only to add a signature. All to no avail. The institution president turned Murray down in a flash. Referring to the copy of the prospectus Murray had sent, he pointed out that World’s Cyclopedia Company had “already undertaken the publication of your works” and the institution “never subsidizes commercial agencies.” Murray’s posing as World’s Cyclopedia Company worked against him in this instance.
The last correspondence in Murray’s papers from Donnelly and Sons (still willing to negotiate “the manufacturing feature of this job”) was dated September 22, 1914: “It has been a long time since we have had any word from you in regard to the Encyclopedia. Are you expecting to do anything with it in the near future?” Instead, in 1915, Murray opened negotiations with another printing and bookbinding company, Trow Press in New York City. But with the war under way the cost of publication had risen sharply. Trow wanted $5,000 with the order, $10,000 more within sixty days, and another $10,000 once the electrotyping was complete, and that did not include the cost of binding! Between that and other attendant vicissitudes of war, Murray suspended the publication venture for a time.
His publication prospects may have been held in abeyance, but he pushed on as always. He added to his bibliographical compilation and his biographical sketches, which ran anywhere from fifty to five thousand words in length. He drafted essays on a broad range of topics; examples are Egyptians’ Alphabet, African Civilization, AME Church, Revolution in Haiti and San Domingo, Missouri Compromise, Nat Turner Insurrection, Anti-Slavery Struggle in Congress, Jim Crow Laws, and Brownsville Affair.
Murray remarked on his “years of unremitting labor.” For all his references to bringing the project to a close, at no point did he cease his research to concentrate on birthing the baby. In 1910, he identified an experienced managing editor he had hired, but there was never a second mention of a professional like that who might have whipped his manuscripts into shape. Plus it seems that the assistant editors he recruited did little or nothing. He may have appreciated their names as window dressing for the cover page, but there is no evidence that he delegated assignments to them. Murray, with his own unceasing additions to the work, had allowed himself to be overwhelmed by the burden of the message. No encyclopedia can ever be absolutely complete and up to date if it is to see the light of day in print. Rather sadly, he would periodically go through manuscript drafts wherein he had referred to the number of years he had been at his project or connected with the Library of Congress, cross out the number, and insert a larger one.
Searching for a way to publish his tome for more than a dozen years, Murray had amassed piles of ultimately fruitless correspondence, but the number of actual subscribers was negligible. He had informed George Myers in 1912 that he needed five thousand advance subscribers to proceed and that “Failing in getting them I will return to each person the amount subscribed in full.” In 1916, he did just that, while at the same time writing to Myers that he was diligently working on his encyclopedia “night and day.” Four years later, still keeping the faith, he wrote his friend, “I have strong hopes that Congress will publish for the race my encyclopedia. I stand to give the material. At times when I view what I have gathered I am myself amazed at the results of my researches.” It is not known what transactions transpired to give Murray such hope, but government publication was never a serious possibility.
In that same letter, Murray expressed some bitterness toward Carter G. Woodson: “In regard to the MSS. I hardly care to offer it to the ‘Negro Journal.’ They never invited me to contribute an article and I scarcely care to ask the privilege.” One of the items in the Daniel Murray Papers is a short letter from Woodson dated May 22, 1922, notifying Murray that his active membership in the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History was expired. According to one of Murray’s associates, the journalist Walter J. Singleton, “At first Mr. Murray was quite generous with the use of his material but later was forced to assume a different attitude when he found his work was being pirated by persons who sold the information as original.”
In November 1922, Murray and W. E. B. DuBois exchanged a series of letters on the forever forthcoming encyclopedia. DuBois advised, “I think that you would find that the only feasible way of getting a large work printed would be to print parts of it so that people could see its interest.” He would, he said, be happy for Murray to furnish an article to The Crisis. It would “let our large circle of readers know that such a body of knowledge exists and that you are master of it.” When Murray demurred, DuBois immediately wrote again with a tone of increased urgency: “You have got to face the facts. You have reached the allotted span of human life in the ordinary course of events. You cannot hope for much further time to work. If you should die before the publication of any part of your work, what would become of it? Is it in such shape that it could be published? Have you funds to insure its publication?” DuBois concluded that if the work were not disseminated, it “would mean the practical loss to the world of your long and arduous labors” and “this would be a calamity to the Negro race.” Although Murray himself had conceived of a scheme similar to DuBois’s in 1912, in cooperation with a select group of newspaper editors, he now stubbornly refused to break up his opus.5
IN 1920, HAROLD AND MADRENNE MURRAY MOVED TO NEW York City’s Harlem, just as the cultural flowering famously known as the Harlem Renaissance was beginning to unfold. Their apartment building was on 137th Street, but Harold made his way each day to the financial district on Manhattan’s southern tip, where he worked for the Island Oil Company of New York as a purchasing agent. Anna Murray traveled to Harlem in October 1921 to visit her son’s family and, in particular, to see the new baby, eight-month-old Valerie. Madrenne had given birth to Ritzi, as she was called, in her hometown of Ithaca, and it was there, a year later, that Madrenne’s twin sister, Gladys, married Walter F. White. The two had met at the NAACP national headquarters in New York, where he was the organization’s assistant field secretary and she was a stenographer. White was blue-eyed and golden-haired, only 1/64th black, but every inch a race man. Before moving to New York City in 1918, he was one of the founders of the NAACP branch in his hometown of Atlanta.
Harold and Madrenne’s fourth child, Jacques, Jack for short, was born in Harlem in July 1922. The next year, Harold accepted a temporary position in Mexico City. His wife traveled there with the children for a prolonged visit but returned to New York and established a new household at 76 Edgecombe Avenue, where Harold rejoined his family in 1925. Their apartment building, located at the southern edge of Harlem’s fashionable Sugar Hill neighborhood, was just a block or so from Walter and Gladys White’s at 90 Edgecombe Avenue. The Harold Murray family would soon emigrate permanently to Mexico City. In 1929, the same year Duke Ellington moved into 379 Edgecombe (“Take the A train to go to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem”), the Whites relocated to a top-floor apartment at 409 Edgecombe. That architecturally splendid building, sited on a bluff high above the Harlem River and served by uniformed doormen and elevator operators, was Sugar Hill’s most prestigious address and home to many African American elites. White, a political and cultural leader, was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. A novelist himself, he enthusiastically promoted the work of talented writers, artists, and performers. He and Gladys turned their spacious apartment into a salon for Harlem literati and other notables. Though short and slender, White was a dapper dresser and a congenial personality. Gladys was a glamorous hostess and, as adjudged by Langston Hughes, “the most beautiful brown woman in New York.” As the Whites’ daughter, Jane, recalled, “The parties in Daddy’s and Mother’s apartment were formidable.”6
The cultural flowering in Northwest Washington in the 1920s rivaled that in Harlem. Black Washingtonians made up more than a quarter of the overall number of city residents. Only New York and Chicago had larger African American populations. The U Street neighborhood was the locus of African American intellectual, literary, and artistic life, bringing forth an outpouring of talented and inventive writers, artists, and performers. Poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, the wife of Henry “Link” Johnson, the former recorder of deeds (he had been replaced by a white appointee under Woodrow Wilson’s administration), held a stimulating weekly literary salon at her 1461 S Street home, where a rose-lined walk welcomed visitors. Many who would go on to participate in the full bloom of the Harlem Renaissance had earlier lived in Washington and taken advantage of Johnson’s gifts as creative nurturer and gracious hostess. Examples are Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Jean Toomer. It was the last who inspired Georgia Douglas Johnson to commence her literary gatherings.
Jean Toomer was born Nathan Eugene Pinchback Toomer. He grew up in the Washington home of his grandfather Pinckney Pinchback, and returned to the capital in 1920 to live in his grandparents’ U Street apartment. He was writing his innovative novel combining prose and poetry, Cane, and looking for intellectual companionship when he approached Johnson about housing “weekly conversations among the writers here in Washington.” Johnson opened her home to writers, artists, scholars, and politicos to come together as a community to discuss and read from their works, to exchange criticism and views on literature, art, and politics, to encourage one another and hone their craft, and to celebrate black culture. The gatherings took place every Saturday night and became one of the most influential forums of the Harlem Renaissance period. Many of the participants were young and ambitious, and they appreciated the support they found for lonely artists striving in the milieu of a segregated society to express their truest selves.
Langston Hughes was one such “Saturday Nighter,” as those in Johnson’s circle were called. Hughes had moved to Washington in 1924 to join his mother, who was living with their Langston relatives in tony LeDroit Park. Like Jean Toomer, Hughes was critical of the black elite that included his own family members. He found them boorish and mocked their pompous performance, as he saw it. He met some of the “best people” in the city, who, he wrote, “themselves assured me they were the best people. . . . Negro society in Washington, they assured me, was the finest in the country, the richest, the most cultured, the most worthy. In no other city were there so many splendid homes, so many cars, so many A.B. degrees, or so many persons with ‘family background.’” Again like Toomer, Langston preferred the “sweet relief” of 7th Street, with its bars, street life, and storefront churches, “where the ordinary Negroes hang out, folks with practically no family tree at all, folks who draw no color line between mulattoes and deep dark-browns, folks who work hard for a living with their hands. On Seventh Street in 1924 they played the blues, ate watermelon, barbeque, and fish sandwiches, shot pool, told tall tales, looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud.” Hughes relocated to an unheated, two-room apartment on S Street not far from Johnson’s home. There, in some of his happiest times in Washington, he would “eat Mrs. J’s cake and drink her wine and talk poetry and books and plays.” He wrote his first volume of poems, Weary Blues, in Washington. It was published in 1926, the same year he exited the capital.
Writers and activists from the New York contingent of the Harlem Renaissance such as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and W. E. B. DuBois took in Johnson’s Saturday-night soirees when in town. Washington residents associated with Howard University who attended the salon, in addition to Zora Neale Hurston, included Kelly Miller, Carter G. Woodson, and Alain Locke. Locke, a philosophy professor (and the first African American Rhodes Scholar), was advancing the concept of the “New Negro.” The epithet referred to African Americans interested in crafting new images to subvert and challenge old stereotypes, recognizing that art and literature were forms of protest in the fight for full citizenship rights. Locke published a major Black Renaissance work, The New Negro: An Interpretation, an anthology of essays, poems, plays, and short stories. Johnson’s home, one salon goer noted, “was a house of ideas.” Johnson took responsibility for the stimulating mood, ample refreshments, and medley of attendees. “If dull ones come, she weeds them out, gently, effectively,” recalled one of the regulars.
Lillian Evans Tibbs was among those who mingled with other up-and-coming creative talents on Saturday nights at 1461 S Street. She was good friends with Georgia Douglas Johnson as well as the novelist Jessie Fauset, a Phi Beta Kappa Cornell University graduate. All three had taught in the District colored school system. Lillian was perfecting her own art form, leading the way for black opera divas to follow. She traveled to Paris in 1924 to study voice, acting, and French and to seek professional opportunities, less limited as they were by color prejudice in Europe than in her home country. There, at the suggestion of Jessie Fauset, who was in Paris at the same time, she changed her name to Lillian Evanti and began using the stage name Madame Evanti.
Daniel Murray, on the other hand, was not a “New Negro” but rather an “Old Cit” or, as Locke would have it, “Old Negro,” in contrast to the newer, younger version self-confidently asserting themselves in the years following World War I. Though he lived five blocks from Johnson’s home, Murray was not included in the select group of salon attendees. “The conditions that are molding a New Negro are molding a new American attitude,” wrote Locke. Of course, the ultimate goals were the same as they were for Murray and his peers, and race pride had been a major theme in literary and political self-expression in Murray’s heyday among Washington’s black intelligentsia. So in many ways this represented a generational shift whereby those associated with the New Negro Renaissance found a renewed purpose and definition in fiction, poetry, journalism, music, and painting. The younger writers and artists sought to break free of restrictions imposed on their expressive forms, not just to liberate the individual but to demonstrate that art could create community and serve black protest ideology.7
It was time for “Old Citz” such as Murray to think about retirement. “I am now looking forward to retiring in 1921 and then I will be free and can take up some of my leisure in visiting my friends,” he informed George Myers in August 1920. He had worked hard throughout his adult life to ensure financial stability. He advised his friend to be conservative in his prosperity, “since my observation has been that nine of every ten Colored men who attain to a certain height come down again before they die to the point of beginning.” He continued, “I have kept very clear of speculation now I am old, believing that I have received what fate has in store for me in that respect. I have paid up everything and am free from encumbrances besides having about $12,000 in mortgages. It is indeed remarkable that we two Baltimore boys should each have started out in life about the same time and accumulated over $10,000 each.”
In the event, Murray waited until the last day of 1922 to retire. There was confusion about his birth date in the Library of Congress records, and no wonder; he was as likely as not to erroneously state his birth year as 1852. He had begun working at the library when there was a staff of twelve and left with that number over five hundred. Acquisitions had grown from a quarter of a million volumes to five million and the institution from cramped quarters in the Capitol with masses of unwieldy materials to a highly efficient operation in one of the grandest library buildings in the world. Murray received a special citation from Librarian Herbert Putnam on his retirement for faithful and efficient service. His pension, $720 annually, commenced on January 1, 1923.8
Daniel and Anna Murray had six grandchildren before 1922 was over, Nat and Mayme having had a second daughter, Constance Vivian, in April of that year, two months before baby Jack was born. Although four of their grandchildren lived in New York, the eldest, Helene, now five, they were able to see Pauline and Constance on a regular basis. The Murrays’ son Paul rallied in 1924, when, in June of that year, he graduated from Howard University’s School of Law with an LLB degree. It is not clear if he ever had a stable marriage, but he and his wife divorced. He took a messenger job in the Department of Justice, but it did not last long. That his parents recognized that their son would only become further debilitated is clear from the will Daniel Murray prepared in March 1924, three months before Paul’s Howard graduation. It provided a special annual outlay from his estate for Paul’s “maintenance.” Paul would eventually be diagnosed as a psychotic epileptic. Unable to work at all by 1931, two years later he began what would turn out to be a lifelong stay as a “mental health case” at St. Elizabeths Hospital.9
Notwithstanding the glory of the Harlem Renaissance and the confidence embedded in the “New Negro” concept, the offspring of the “colored aristocracy” faced diminished vistas relative to their parents’ prospects. The rise the earlier generation had enjoyed in the Reconstruction period was just a memory. If a major element of the American Dream is seeing one’s children do better than their progenitors, both the older and younger generations had ample reason to be disillusioned. Black elites could organize social clubs and throw elaborate parties for their children, they could summer with them at exclusive vacation enclaves, and they could bring them up to be cultured and well schooled. But they could not promise them an easier or more auspicious time of it than they had experienced, given an environment increasingly hostile and humiliating for African Americans. “It now looks as though our children must go through in a large measure at least, the same fire of proscription that our fathers had to endure,” opined the Colored American. Daniel Murray memorialized hard-won African American success stories in his mammoth literary endeavor, believing that “such biographical illustrations should be kept before our youth, who are often disheartened by the mountain of opposition that obstructs every path.”
African Americans were not accepted at any white colleges in the District except for Catholic University. Daniel Murray described “a terrible row” at Howard University itself in 1905, when its white president, Reverend John Gordon, had been “seen as lacking in sympathy and respect for the students and colored members of the faculty and being averse to colored and white being together on social terms of equality.” Many of the universities in the North, including Cornell and Harvard, became increasingly inhospitable to blacks. Segregation in dormitories and dining halls and on sports teams was introduced. The reason often given was that more young southerners were attending the institutions and school officials could not afford to offend their sensibilities. When Butler and Mary Wilson’s son Edward was admitted to Harvard in 1921, its president, A. Lawrence Lowell, barred black students from the freshman dorm. Response to the new policy included a petition of protest from the NAACP. The next year, Lowell came to loggerheads with Roscoe Bruce, whose son was planning to enter Harvard. Bruce made public his outrage that, unlike his own Harvard experience, his son was to be excluded from the dormitories. Following his letter to Walter F. White, the NAACP amplified its effort and gathered protest letters from prominent African American alumni, including Robert Terrell, Archibald Grimké, William Henry Lewis, and W. E. B. DuBois. The day had arrived, wrote DuBois in The Crisis, “when the grandson of a slave has to teach democracy to a president of Harvard.” A national debate ensued. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been in the same Harvard class as Henry Murray, weighed in, remembering that when he attended the university, “no question ever arose” relating to segregation of black students. The Harvard Board of Overseers bowed to pressure and tactfully reversed Lowell’s call. African Americans would be allowed in the dormitories, but to avoid pairing racists with their black fellows, students would be permitted to select their own roommates. Oberlin College, no less, also transitioned from welcoming to intolerant. One student there, who wrote her master’s thesis on “The Negro in Oberlin” in 1925, commented, “The constant northward-drifting race-prejudice has brought about a change that it is no longer possible to ignore even in Oberlin.”
When the children of elites toughed it out at these educational institutions in spite of the drawbacks, they faced severely limited job prospects. Educator and activist Nannie H. Burroughs declared that young African Americans were “suffering for the need of vocational freedom,” forced “to follow the trades or professions that are ‘open to Negroes.’” Instead of choosing a career by following one’s natural bent, “color prejudice chooses for them.” One major reason that the colored schools in the District were superior was the excellence of the faculties. Many instructors held degrees, even PhDs, from the best universities in the country but had not been allowed to compete for the variety of positions that their white counterparts could. Indeed, so restricted were their career choices that there was ongoing competition for places in the public schools. That was the experience of Henry and Nathaniel Murray. Harold Murray achieved terrific business success, but he had to move to another country to do so. The same with Lillian Evanti, who performed with opera companies all over Europe but because of her color was unable to fulfill her dream of being the first African American to sing with the Metropolitan Opera of New York. Some in the next generation, including scions of the Wall, Greener, Bruce, and Syphax families, decided to melt into the white world rather than accept society’s dregs as African Americans.10
Murray’s dear old friend Spencer Murray died on November 23, 1925. Murray made a note of it in his papers, having no idea he would join him in the beyond a month later. Daniel Murray died on December 31—New Year’s Eve—three years to the day after he retired. He drew his last breath on a Thursday night at Freedmen’s Hospital, succumbing to Bright’s disease, an operation on his inflamed kidneys having failed to save him. Funeral services were conducted at St. Luke’s, where Bishop John Hurst offered an estimate of the value of Murray’s services “to the negro race and to the world.” He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery on the third day of January, the anniversary of his only daughter’s death. He was laid to rest near her remains and those of his two sons who had preceded him to the grave. His death certificate listed his true birthday, March 3, 1851. He would have turned seventy-five in 1926. Last born, he was the final one of the Murray and Proctor siblings to die.
At Murray’s funeral “a special tribute” sent by Herbert Putnam was read. When Murray had retired, Putnam had mentioned his lengthy years of service in the Annual Report of the Librarian of Congress and had gone on at rather great length to applaud the “extraordinary regularity of his attendance.” Certainly Putnam might have credited Murray with more than an extended tenure and admirable attendance record or for that matter, made it to his funeral in person. Murray remembered the great institution where he had worked for fifty-two years (without a raise for the last twenty-five) in his will: “All the books forming my collection of Colored authors I direct to be given to the Library of Congress to be part of the ‘Loan Collection,’ gathered therein by me for exhibition purposes.”
By the terms of Murray’s will, Anna was made executrix of his substantial estate. She was designated sole beneficiary until her death, at which time the trusteeship would pass to son Henry, then to Harold, and ultimately to the grandchildren. Murray instructed that Nathaniel’s and Harold’s children were to be the final beneficiaries and that distribution to them was to take place twenty-one years after the deaths of all his sons. Murray identified six close friends in the will he had drawn in 1924—Spencer Murray, George Myers, John Hurst, Charles Bentley, Richard Horner, and Fred R. Moore—and to each he left a personal remembrance. They encompassed “my brace of dueling pistols” and “my elaborately carved Filipino cane,” as well as books and paintings. He noted that these were the men whom he trusted to advise his sons in case of dispute.
Daniel Murray’s bibliography peaked at 7,500 titles. “His Encyclopedia of the Colored Race, the crowning achievement of his life, presents to the world for the first time the only authoritative and complete history of the achievement of colored people and their contributions to culture and civilization.” Thus wrote Anna Murray to W. E. B. DuBois, at his request for obituary details for The Crisis, three months after her husband’s death. She continued, “Mr. Murray continued his research into the literary fecundity of the colored race until his death and now his manuscripts contain over 250,000 indexed cards giving titles and condensed biographical sketches of all notable persons who were in blood related to the African race. In addition Mr. Murray had over 250 manuscripts giving complete and authentic biographies of the outstanding men of color. All this has been compiled in a great encyclopedia going back to the earliest period of Ismael . . . up to the present day.”
Daniel Murray lived just long enough to be aware of the shameful spectacle of the Ku Klux Klan marching down Pennsylvania Avenue and circling the Washington Monument, waving American flags, in August 1925. The Klan had experienced a revival ten years earlier, following the popularity of The Birth of a Nation, and peaked at a membership of around four million. With government sanction, both men and women, fifty thousand strong, led by “Uncle Sam,” paraded in full regalia in the nation’s capital. Murray, ever the hopeful integrationist, remained on the Board of Trade until his demise, the last African American participant, though its overall membership had grown exponentially. A final effort at passing anti-lynching legislation through Congress had failed in 1922. There was not one African American in the US Congress, nor had Howard University yet been administered by a black president, when Daniel Murray died in a segregated hospital and was buried in a segregated graveyard. Woodlawn Cemetery, the African American burial ground that served as the final resting place for many in the black elite, is defunct and forlorn today. The finely crafted tombstones, obscured by overgrown weeds, are lonely reminders of the rise and disillusionment of Washington’s “colored aristocrats.”11