The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.
—W. E. B. DUBOIS
BEFORE MARCH 1926 WAS OVER, DANIEL MURRAY’S PERSONAL collection of books and pamphlets was, as directed in his will, presented to the Library of Congress by his widow. Librarian Herbert Putnam accepted the fund of 1,448 books and pamphlets, fourteen broadsides, and one map “with the idea that it should form part of the material especially selected by him for exhibit purposes.” Putnam added the Murray bequest to the books and pamphlets gathered by him while assistant librarian and kept this special collection as a unit, according to Murray’s wish. However, at some point after Putnam’s tenure ended in 1939, its contents were interspersed onto the shelves of the library’s general holdings. Only a subset of 351 pamphlets was held back, and today they are in the Rare Books Division (designated the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection, they have been digitized and are accessible on the Library of Congress website).
As for the materials Murray amassed for his encyclopedia, “the famous Murray manuscripts,” as the Pittsburgh Courier called them, “No policy has been decided upon by the heirs of the late literateur. They were gathered in anticipation of a six volume encyclopedia. . . . It is now probable a syndicate will be formed by the heirs and the work published posthumously. Mr. Murray’s will provides that the copyright income shall accrue to his estate.”
Assessing the quality and quantity of the Daniel Murray Papers is a complicated undertaking. To start with the latter, descriptions both contemporary and recent deviate rather wildly. Chroniclers variously enlisted the descriptors “manuscript,” “essay,” and “sketch,” and the numbers given range from 250 to 700. All evaluations referred to the enormous reservoir of catalogue cards that Murray wrote or typed on (often in series, often on both sides), and those totals range from 35,000 to 250,000. Accounts of just what the cards cover differ as well. The only chronicler who mentioned the bibliography per se does so apart from the volume of cards (which he estimated at the maximum number). The difficulty lies in the unorganized state of the papers. Whether one designates a given item a sketch, essay, manuscript, or card series is an individual call.
As to quality, one certainly cannot conclude that Murray’s papers represented an encyclopedia waiting to be published. Murray desperately needed the strong hand of an editor both to organize and improve the material he drafted. Truth be told, he was an ace collector but neither a gifted writer nor a trained historian.
As a writer, Murray was verbose, ponderous, and overly academic, his work full of classical and other allusions. His essays went off on tangents at the drop of a hat. For example, in one he wrote entitled “Civil Rights in London,” he started off by describing a race-related incident at the International Methodist Ecumenical Conference in 1901 (see chapter 11). Less than halfway through the six-page composition, at a mere reference to “the President,” he changed course, and the rest of the piece is entirely about the assassination of William McKinley. In his biographical sketch of Ida Wells-Barnett he compared her as an agitator to Anne Hutchinson and then veered off for six pages with a sketch of the New Englander before returning to the subject at hand. Murray never had the gift of the pen or tongue when it came to inspirational expression that Jesse Lawson and W. E. B. DuBois, for example, had. In the midst of ringing speeches at one National Afro-American Council mass gathering, Murray, in pedagogical mode, described the nuanced Rochdale system of cooperation to advance the movement’s goals.
As a historian, William W. Bishop, Library of Congress superintendent of the reading room and Murray’s boss from 1907 to 1915, made a fair assessment. Murray, he wrote, “enjoyed a high reputation among his associates as a person of erudition. He was, unfortunately, only half-trained and had very little discrimination. On the other hand, he collected assiduously the writings of the people of his own race. . . . The Library of Congress has never attempted to exploit this material, largely, I suppose, because it was gathered without that type of scholarly discrimination.” W. E. B. DuBois was no less forthcoming in his evaluation. He informed the librarian at Tuskegee Institute, “The so-called Murray Encyclopedia is not an encyclopedia. It is a very interesting and voluminous series of notes made by the late Daniel Murray. . . . It is quite unorganized and not scientifically done. It could be used to great advantage in the making of a real encyclopedia, and we shall make every effort so to use it.” Howard University historian Rayford Logan, upon inspecting the papers at 934 S Street, noted, “In many instances the source of the information is given neither at the upper right hand corner nor at the end of the material.”
Be that as it may, the data Murray gathered was of encyclopedic proportions, and scholars from far and wide sought access to his papers. W. E. B. DuBois was one of them. He was planning an Encyclopedia Africana of his own. In reply to a letter from him on the topic, Georgia Douglas Johnson advised DuBois in November 1935, “Dr. Daniel Murray’s collection would be a wonderful source of data. Most of this material is in his late home in a room set aside for it. . . . It may be that Mrs. Murray may have to be approached very diplomatically to obtain this, but there are various ways of managing this that you might consider.” She added that a portion of the material had been stolen. Anna kept the bulk of the collection in a small spare room located under the first-floor stairs; there was also material on shelves and in pigeonholes elsewhere. Anna confessed that she was torn between sharing and protecting the collection.
An Evening Star reporter who interviewed Anna in October 1935 wrote that with her husband’s death, she had been “left the burden of trying all over again to interest a publisher and, at the same time, keep up with the increasing activities of her people. This she has done, devoting a number of hours each day to it.” She was at present, the reporter noted, working up an entry on “ring idol Joe Louis Barrow.” Ironically, historians’ use of the Daniel Murray Papers today is hampered by Anna Murray’s “help,” given her unattributed inclusions. She even wrote historical essays of her own, including the tale of Phoebe Fraunces and her lifesaving aid to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War, which is now considered an unsubstantiated legend. On the other hand, at the request of historian Pearl Graham, researching, for the first time in 150 years, the “old chestnut” that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, she supplied notes on Jefferson’s mulatto children from her husband’s papers, and eventually what had been dismissed as a legend for more than two centuries was confirmed by circumstantial evidence, oral testimony, and DNA analysis.
Anna applied herself throughout the decade of the 1930s to the goal of seeing her husband’s opus published, but the hurdles were only ratcheted up due to the Depression. Rayford Logan, who visited Anna at DuBois’s request in 1937, reported that she wanted $60,000 for the papers, a sum regarded as unreasonable. No buyer for the whole collection materialized, and, like her husband before her, she resisted offers to break up the work.1
Though a pioneer in the black history movement, Daniel Murray would not be celebrated as the Father of Black History. That honor went to Carter G. Woodson. He established Associated Publishers in 1920 to bring black history books to print. His own The Negro in Our History, published in 1922, was the top text in black studies until John Hope Franklin’s From Slavery to Freedom was released in 1947. He founded Negro History Week in 1926. The New York Amsterdam News presented a chronological review of 1926, and interestingly enough, the first item listed was the death and burial of Daniel Murray, while under February was this item: “Negro History Week observed. Carter G. Woodson was instrumental in making this celebration successful.” The annual commemoration of Negro History Week proved to be an influential vehicle for sharing African American heritage; it was later expanded and renamed Black History Month. Although he laid the groundwork, Daniel Murray would not publish the first Encyclopedia Africana; neither would DuBois. Woodson, too, failed at the attempt. All ran up against the insurmountable odds involved in funding an encyclopedic history of black people. The distinction finally fell to Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and not until the last year of the twentieth century.2
“Anna Murray Nears Her 80th Birthday Still Aiding Her Race,” ran the Evening Star headline for a three-column story on August 15, 1937. “Alert brown eyes that seemingly have lost none of the eagerness of youth look out from under snowy white hair as she reminisces,” observed the interviewer. Anna remained a dedicated child welfare activist well into her eighties. The day her husband died, she was scheduled to speak on behalf of the Parents’ League at a Board of Education meeting but dispatched a substitute once his condition turned critical. That July, she traveled to Oakland, California, as a District delegate for the annual convention of the Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs. Her range of activities over the ensuing period encompassed participating, along with her brother’s widow, in the dedication of the new home of the W. Bruce Evans Elks Lodge, discussing Carl Van Vechten’s new book, Nigger Heaven, at the Literature Lovers Club, speaking at a Mu-So-Lit Club program on John Brown and his band, entertaining houseguests, and enjoying the company of family in the neighborhood, including her granddaughters Pauline and Constance.
Anna gave testimony before Congress promoting “colored improvements” on a number of occasions. For instance, she was a spokesperson at Senate Appropriations Committee hearings in February 1929, part of a delegation of African American District residents. They succeeded in securing increased funding for colored schools but were stymied in their effort to acquire a health center for black children. They protested that the owners of several potential sites refused to sell or rent to African Americans, only to have the committee sanction race-restrictive covenants. In 1935, and again four years later, Anna was elected second vice president of the District Public School Association, an integrated organization with which she had been active since 1923. She pushed for hot lunches and for playgrounds and other recreational facilities, concerned that “thousands of colored children were forced to depend entirely on the streets for recreation.” By 1937, she was the head of the Parent-Teacher Association or PTA (evolved from the National Congress of Mothers) at Morse School, a grade school near her home. She worked for improved housing and schools in Southeast Washington and was a speaker at the dedication of a housing development for low-income families there in 1940.
Several other events over this period stand out. In July 1930, Anna traveled to New York City for a reception at the 135th Street Branch of the Public Library, where she and W. E. B. DuBois were two of four speakers, while Arthur Schomburg, Jessie Fauset, Wallace Thurman, and the Walter Whites were among the attendees. That November, President Herbert Hoover sponsored a White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, a medical doctor and Stanford University president, was in charge. His planning committee involved leading African American educators from the start. “The work of the conference,” he asserted, “has been strengthened by the membership of many Negro experts in child care.” Anna Murray served on the Family and Parent Education Committee. At the White House on November 20, President Hoover shook the hands of 2,500 conferees as they filed by him, there “to battle for the inherent rights of 43,000,000 American children for health, proper upbringing, education and opportunity in life.” Black newspapers were well pleased with the results. “Devoid of all racial discrimination throughout the three days of the conference, both at the White House and at the receptions at the Willard and Washington Hotels, President Hoover’s child welfare confab proved to be a huge success here last week,” applauded one. “The Negro child came into its own at President Hoover’s White House Conference on Child Health and Protection,” opined another. “The 1930 conference marks the first time that Negroes have served both as members of the committee personnel and as delegates. As a general result of this participation due recognition was given to the problems of Negro children heretofore overlooked.”
The tide turned back when the opera singer Marian Anderson was refused the opportunity to perform at Constitution Hall. The venue was controlled by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), and their use contracts banned black artists. Objections came fast and furious. In February 1939, Anna Murray submitted an editorial to the Evening Star. Referring to Crispus Attucks, she began, “Have the Daughters of the American Revolution forgotten that it was a man of Marian Anderson’s race who in a few minutes accomplished for American liberty what years of correspondence with England had failed to do?” The piece closed, “This is no time for either expression or act of racial discrimination against a woman who has been recently characterized as the ‘proudest ornament of the American concert stage.’ The eyes of the world are trained upon American democracy.” First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt pointedly dropped her membership in the DAR, but no plea or protest budged the staid organization. It was NAACP executive secretary Walter White who came up with the suggestion that Marian Anderson sing in the open air in front of the Lincoln Memorial. What would have been a travesty turned into a triumph come Easter Sunday, April 9, 1939. The renowned contralto took to the makeshift stage before an integrated audience of 75,000 and, with the iconic seated statue of Abraham Lincoln looming behind her, began a magnificent performance with “My Country ’Tis of Thee.”3
Paul Murray lived on and off with his mother until, on January 12, 1933, he was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, “overtaken by poor health,” as Anna put it. Paul was a patient at St. Elizabeths, with occasional visits home, for sixteen years. Psychotic manifestations accompanying adult epilepsy are not uncommon, but Paul’s situation was sadder yet. African American patients at St. Elizabeths were segregated into lodges, treated as alien and inferior, and expected to display deferential dependence on their white doctors, who often assumed that common labor was the most appropriate form of therapy for them. Paul Murray died at St. Elizabeths at age fifty. His mother updated the alumni office at Cornell, reporting that her son had “passed to his eternal reward on April 30th, 1949.” Anna’s will was drafted well before Paul’s death, and in it she bequeathed to him one of her most prized possessions, her piano.
In her will, Anna requested that her sons sell a particular English pastoral painting and “apply the proceeds to the purchase of etchings of myself to be placed in the kindergarten rooms of the D. C. public schools.” Praise for her lengthy and fruitful tenure of voluntary service was not lacking. The seventy-fifth anniversary of public education for black youth in the District of Columbia was observed over a six-month period in 1939 with a wide variety of programs, among them a conference on “Enriched Learning Experiences in the Home,” during which Anna was celebrated at an evening event. She was honored by a new generation of female race activists, including Mary McLeod Bethune, Nannie H. Burroughs, and Dorothy Height when the National Council of Negro Women (founded by Bethune in 1935) held its annual conference in Washington in October 1941. Six years later, she was recognized by both the National Association of Colored Women and the Association for Childhood Education for her many years of outstanding service.
After Anna took a fall in 1950 at age ninety-two, she depended on a wheelchair for the rest of her days. Basically an invalid, even forced to dictate letters, she hired a full-time nurse. Henry (and his cats) moved in with his mother after his wife died in September 1950, renting out his house three doors down. By 1952, he was permanent conservator of his mother’s estate and she his adult ward. Henry set up living quarters for Anna in the warm basement. The kitchen was on that level, and he had a bathroom installed there. Anna spent much of her time scanning resources to supplement her husband’s research, sitting in her favorite chair near the front window of the English basement, where she could see passersby on S Street. She valued her tooled, leather-bound copy of the Jefferson Bible, Thomas Jefferson’s compilation of the Gospel teachings of Jesus with religious dogma and supernatural elements excised.
Anna Evans Murray died at home on May 5, 1955. A year earlier she had been described by a grandson as “in good mental condition . . . very sharp in her mind.” In retrospect, Daniel Murray made an awful lot of comments on his wife’s ill health for a woman whose activities never slowed and who lived to ninety-seven. That was long enough for Anna to see color bars lowered in Washington’s public places, hail Mary Church Terrell, who led the fight to force the courts’ acknowledgment that the city antidiscrimination laws of the 1870s, the so-called lost laws, were enforceable. The black press was jubilant. One 1953 headline blared, “In Nation’s Capital You Can Now Eat Anywhere,” and another, “Color Bar Ends as D.C. Theatres See the Light.” Survived by two sons, ten grandchildren (of twelve total), four great-grandchildren, and her niece, Lillian Evans Tibbs (the last of her many siblings, Mary Evans Wilson, had died in 1928), Anna Murray was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery.4
Like many highly educated African Americans, her sons Henry and Nathaniel served long tenures in District colored high schools, fifty and twenty-eight years respectively. A case of exclusion in the high schools came to the fore in 1928. The Evening Star sponsored an annual local oratory competition, the winner of which would compete in the National Oratorical Contest, but that year the individual in charge declared that it was not his “intent to enter Race youths in competition with whites.” School leaders at Dunbar and Armstrong expressed their disapproval by pulling out of the “Jim Crow contest.” Henry Murray came to the rescue by taking up the matter directly with his father’s old friend, Star editor Theodore Noyes. He reported back to the Dunbar-Armstrong joint committee that Noyes knew nothing about an effort to separate black students from white, and in the end all of the District high schools were handled identically.
That same year, school authorities established a black high school specializing in business practice. In 1936, Henry was transferred to Cardozo Business High School, where he taught mathematics, English, and business courses until his retirement. He remained active with the Mu-So-Lit Club. In 1928, he was elected president, and for many years after his term expired, he was chairman of the executive committee. A very special event came along in 1934. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Lady hosted a late-afternoon reception on the White House lawn for all the men who had been in Roosevelt’s 1904 Harvard class, along with their families. Henry and Emma Murray were among the approximately three hundred people who were served lunch and enjoyed music provided by the Marine Band on Saturday, April 21, 1934. Afterward, the Murrays threw a party of their own for a few of Henry’s old classmates at their S Street home.
When Henry turned seventy in 1952, he was retired from the school system as required. He had worked his way up from an annual salary of $550 to one of $5,313. In January 1955, he applied for a military veteran’s pension and described himself as totally disabled, although elsewhere he admitted that any physical problems amounted to general old age. According to Harold’s son Marco, who spent summers living with Henry when he was in middle school in the United States, his uncle Henry was fond of betting on horse races and frequented the track during his retirement. Henry rented out the three houses on 12th Street that his father had built back in the 1880s and managed the Dorsey and Cherry Heights properties in Maryland.
Henry was a litigious individual. Those he brought suit against included the heirs of his father’s close friend John Hurst and some of his own family members. In 1931, he filed a suit against Hurst’s widow and son, the executors of the late prelate’s estate, in connection with the Cherry Heights development. The case was litigated, and the verdict was returned against him. In August 1936, Anna Murray (one readily imagines at Henry’s instigation) sued her niece, Lillian Evans Tibbs, because payment of a $50 loan was seven weeks overdue. In December of that year, Henry filed a petition in District Court for construction of Bruce Evans’s will, of which he was executor. The defendants named were Evans’s widow, Annie, and her children, Lillian and Joseph. Henry objected to the sale of a property owned by the estate. The Evans heirs countered his interpretation of the will, asserting that they were legally qualified to put the sale through. Moreover, they motioned that the suit be dismissed because Henry Murray’s executorship had terminated in 1919 and the will had granted him no role as ongoing trustee. Indeed, they charged that the sole reason for the suit was “to have the proceeds from the sale pass through his hands so as to claim a commission for services.” For all that, the evidence is that any bad feeling between Anna’s family and that of her brother was overcome, though perhaps not before 1936 ended. That was the year Anna’s will was drawn and the clause bequeathing her wearing apparel to her niece, Lillian, was crossed out; her granddaughter Helene’s name was inserted in ink script in its place. In 1952, three years after Paul Murray’s death, Henry hired counsel to conduct a protracted battle in probate court with St. Elizabeths Hospital over his brother’s estate. And the year he died, he initiated suit against his nieces and nephews, seeking an interpretation of Daniel Murray’s will in regard to the estate’s lands in the District and the Cherry Heights development in Baltimore.5
Nathaniel Murray spent most of his teaching career at Armstrong High School, where he successfully combined his academic training and practical know-how. His daughter Pauline earned a degree in Spanish from the University of Mexico and in 1942 married Cayetano García in Mexico City. While her husband was serving in the Mexican Army, Pauline gave birth to their first son in Washington, a happy event that great-grandmother Anna Murray lived to witness. The Garcías later moved to Los Angeles. Constance, who remained single, relocated to Los Angeles as well, and in 1949, Nat and Mayme followed their daughters to California’s City of Angels when Nat retired from the school system at age sixty-five.
Nat clung to his status as one of Alpha Phi Alpha’s “Jewels,” as the seven founders came to be known beginning in 1929. Looking back, he realized that initiating the country’s first black college fraternity had been a highlight of his life. The fraternity honored its charter members—looking to them “for inspiration and guidance”—and that provided Nat with needed ego gratification. One of the fraternity’s founders was uncomfortable with the title, but Nat relished signing “Jewel” after his name. He faithfully attended the annual conventions and was always pleased to present a founder’s address.
Nat experienced severe financial difficulties during his retirement. Like their father, both Henry and Nat knew how to rub two pennies together. Once Nat sent Henry two pairs of his shoes to be resoled in his old neighborhood because “the cost even with the parcel post is less in DC . . . than it is here in Los Angeles.” Unlike his father and brother, Nat was not a good manager of his money, although as a teacher his salary was more than double what Daniel Murray’s was at the Library of Congress and he was receiving a pension. In a series of letters to Henry and his mother (on Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity letterhead) in 1952–53, he seemed desperate for their assistance in keeping up with expenses as basic as taxes. He even asked the fraternity for financial help. Nat had bulked up and walked with a cane due to arthritis when he died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in December 1959 at the age of seventy-five. He was survived by his wife, two daughters, and two grandsons, and by two of the seven Jewels and 24,700 Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity members.6
Harold Murray pursued a prosperous engineering career in Mexico City as the cofounder and vice president of Maricopa Trading Company, importers of exclusive papers from the United States and Europe. At one point the firm employed three hundred people and represented twenty-five of the world’s leading paper mills. In his adopted country he was perceived as an “American,” not an “Afro-American.” He and Madrenne had two more daughters but later divorced. Some years later, Harold married a Mexican woman, Olympia Lasso, and they had four children. Harold became an ardent follower of the Baha’i faith, which preaches that all human beings are of a single race and all religions have true and valid origins. He played the piano daily. His daughter Ritzi manifested autistic behaviors; though normally uncommunicative, she always responded when her father played piano in his emotive fashion. Like Dannie before him, Harold was a composer of popular songs. Among the tunes he copyrighted were “No One After You” and “Embers of Romance.” His daughter Carmen remembers her father as having a “tranquil, smooth” character generally but as being a “fighter” when necessary. He was a confident man; in his words, “I’ve never been a ‘rubber stamp’ or a ‘yes-man.’” Perhaps one can discern a metaphorical demonstration in his shoes. A granddaughter recalled, “From an early age I remember listening to my grandfather’s footsteps. He screwed ‘estoperoles’ or metal studs to his shoes, always Bostonian type of shoes. The studs were placed on the bottom of the front part of the soles and made a click click sound against the floor every time he walked around the house.”
Harold, Olympia, and their children—Daniel, Marco, Carmen, and Bessy—visited their Washington family from time to time. While at boarding school in New York, the two boys spent their summers living on S Street. Marco took after his cousin Lillian and called his grandmother “Aunt Sis.” To his younger sister Carmen she was her “Abuelita,” although all spoke English while in Washington. Since Anna could move around only in a wheelchair by that time, the family visited with her in her lower-floor quarters. Her grandchildren recalled books, magazines, and family photographs filling the house; in the backyard, a little patio garden; at the street corner, a place to buy ten-cent ice cream sandwiches. One visit of note occurred during the winter holiday of 1953–54. It coincided with Carmen’s fifteenth birthday, and her parents hosted a coming-out reception “to meet Señorita Maria del Carmen” at 934 S Street on her January 18 birthday. Carmen was a vision of young beauty in her strapless gown and gossamer wrap. It was the custom in Mexico to celebrate a girl’s quinceañera with a party to introduce her into society and toast her passage into womanhood.
Madrenne remained in Mexico with her children after her divorce from Harold. Her sister, Gladys White, visited for two months in 1936, and four years later Madrenne, accompanied by her young daughter Anita, returned the favor in New York. On the same trip she stopped in with her former in-laws in Washington. It was in Mexico in 1949 that Gladys formally ended her twenty-seven-year marriage to Walter F. White, who scandalized both his family and the NAACP by taking up with, and immediately after his divorce marrying, a white South African. “From coast-to-coast they’re talking these days about two things,” gossiped the New York Age of July 16, 1949. “The Mexican divorce Mrs. Gladys Powell White now admits she was granted on June 30 . . . [and] the linking of Walter White’s name in an interracial romance with Mrs. Poppy Cannon, divorcee and well-known freelance writer.” Gladys had dedicated herself to her husband and children’s well-being and was devastated when her husband told her he wanted a divorce. “As long as I live I shall remember the stricken ashen look on her face,” revealed White. Gladys spent many weeks commiserating with her twin sister in Mexico City after going to Juárez to obtain divorce papers on the grounds of incompatibility.
A Brooklyn friend of Madrenne named Estelle Leslie traveled to Mexico and was her houseguest in 1944. She was gratified to find “a great deal of freedom from the color line,” in Mexico, marveling that “the most unusual experience I had was the feeling of freedom which was with me during the whole time I was there.” There was no question of race in going into a hotel, in choosing a place to eat, or in preparing to travel about the country. It was a revelation to participate in a way of life “where at no time was she made conscious of the fact that she was a Negro, but rather was treated simply as an individual.” She longed to return: “I felt like a new person there and I want that feeling again.”
When Harold Murray traveled to Washington in October 1957, the local black press dubbed him a “top-notcher,” hosting a gathering at Longchamps, a downtown restaurant: “Setting the stage in the style to which he’s accustomed, Harold Baldwin Murray, big business man of Mexico, entertained a group at dinner the other eve.” Cousin Lillian, who at the time was teaching a six-week course on “The Art and Charm of Gracious Living,” was one of his guests. Harold’s family always spent time with Lillian when they visited from Mexico. She would take his children to museums in the capital. Her career thrived at the expense of a happy marriage. She spent a lot of time traveling, but the house on Vermont Avenue, her home base, was “my anchor through all my life.” There, the piano took center stage, just as it did in most of the Murray and Evans households. She displayed original African American art, including a work by Henry O. Tanner that she had acquired directly from the painter. She hosted salons for artists, scholars, politicos, and other elites that were just as stimulating as earlier ones at Georgia Douglas Johnson’s house.7
George Henry Murray, eighty-three, died at Freedman’s Hospital on December 7, 1965, following a brief illness. His was the last burial in the Murray family lot at Woodlawn (Nathaniel was interred in Los Angeles, and Harold would be in Mexico City). Henry had followed through on the instructions in his father’s will: “Erect in our family burial lot . . . a monument not to exceed in cost the sum of five hundred dollars.” The author visited Woodlawn Cemetery in September 2013 and found the burial ground in sad disarray. The Murray family monument, ample but simpler than many, inscribed only MURRAY, was in place. The remains of Daniel and Anna Murray and five of their seven children rested underground in close vicinity to the marker, but the individual headstones were missing. Helene’s was discovered in a pile of broken stones off to the edge of the cemetery.
Anna Murray lived long enough to see the beginning of the deterioration of Shaw, as the U Street neighborhood came to be officially designated, but it was Henry who witnessed its escalation during the decade between his mother’s and his own death. The area had been named after Shaw Junior High School, itself named for Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the famous all-black 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War. Although desegregation of the public schools had transpired in the mid-1950s in accordance with Supreme Court rulings declaring segregated schools unconstitutional, the neighborhood schools were still predominantly African American because of residential patterns. Shaw Junior High School became overcrowded, and as the building itself degenerated, it was referred to as “Shameful Shaw,” a sobriquet that spread to describe the entire sector. In a story full of ironies, one of the strangest is that desegregation led to a downward spiral in school quality and an overall decline in community spirit and functioning. Restrictive real estate covenants were no longer legal, and scores of well-to-do black families moved to outlying regions. Many single-family homes were divided into rental units. The neighborhood’s economic well-being disintegrated when local businesses no longer had a cornered market or when shoppers gained access to downtown stores. By 1965, poverty, crime, and drug use had multiplied. The area was transformed from a safe, stable community to a seedy, scary neighborhood where a child walking home from school might crush a used hypodermic needle underfoot on the sidewalk.
After his brother Henry’s death, Harold emptied the family house at 934 S Street. Out from the room under the stairs came Daniel Murray’s life work, forty years after his death, dusty and brittle. Harold made a stab at trying to get the papers published but met with the same obstacles that his father, then his mother, had experienced. He next offered to donate the collection to the Library of Congress but was turned down. Through a friend Harold was put in touch with Leslie H. Fishel, Jr., the director of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Fishel was overseeing a collection of civil rights materials at the time and convinced Harold that the society would be a well-suited home. Harold donated the material in 1966, sending four locked file cabinets containing papers, broadsides, clippings, cards, photographs, maps, and a few larger visual items relating to Lincoln, McKinley, and Harpers Ferry. The papers were catalogued but unfortunately, due to their frail condition, were destroyed after being microfilmed. (Copies of the twenty-seven microfilm reels are available at several universities and the Library of Congress.)
As for the house itself, just as Harold was cleaning it out, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) declared Shaw an urban renewal area. Before the massive plan for redevelopment could be implemented, the community was rocked by days of rioting, burning, and looting that erupted following the news on April 4, 1968, that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated. With federal funding, the city’s urban renewers, the Redevelopment Land Agency (RLA), began the slow rehabilitation process in 1969. As time went by, the unoccupied structures were vandalized, ransacked, and squatted in. Six hundred rehabilitation projects were targeted in Shaw, including the former Murray house at 934 S Street, now boarded up due to a fire. In many cases, including that one, the process was one of “gut rehabilitation.” Only the shell of outside walls and sound structural beams remained. Everything else was newly built. The gut rehabilitation approach was more cost efficient than a painstaking restoration that would have preserved the fine interior features—marble fireplaces, classical moldings, and decorative elements such as stained glass, frescoing, and artistic tiling. Instead, those artifacts were piled high in the street and neighbors who recognized their value picked them over.
The house at 934 S Street was one of about seventy-five that the RLA renovated using hired contractors. The process of final inspection of this group of houses was stalled by bickering between bureaucrats and contractors. When the DC government finally put the Murray house up for sale in 1978, it was purchased for $37,000 by Godfrey and Jacqueline Kilkenny, the same family that still occupies it. Improvements were made in the neighborhood: sidewalks were paved in brick, trees were planted, and new lampposts and curb gutters were installed. Today the house is worth well over a million dollars.
On March 30, 1977, Harold Murray died in Mexico City, leaving many offspring centered there to this day. Those in the recent generations of Murray, Evans, Tibbs, Wilson, and Leary descendants have expressed fierce pride in their ancestors’ race activism. Lillian Evanti’s grandson Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr., remembered his grandmother impressing on him, “We were in the John Brown Raid.” Anna and Daniel Murray’s granddaughter Carmen identified just as strongly. She traveled from Mexico to West Virginia with her family to see Harpers Ferry, remarking, “It’s in our blood.”8
THIS IS A STORY ABOUT CHANGE OVER TIME, PERSONALIZED BY couching the narrative in the lived experiences of one man and his family. It is the story of the rise and disillusionment of a subset of the American population, the black elite centered in Washington, DC. Shaking the dirt loose from historical roots laid down from 1851 to 1925, Murray’s life span, brings light to the account of the emergence of a black elite, the rise of prospects with Reconstruction, and the reversal leading to the nadir in the early twentieth century. It is an era that has not gotten the attention that American slavery before it and the modern civil rights movement after it have. The former has been well depicted in hundreds of books in the last forty years, and the tendency has been to fast-forward from there to the civil rights struggles of the 1950s to 1970s, also a favorite subject for authors.
One commonly hears or reads reference made to “the black community” today as if 42 million Americans form an indistinguishable block. There is no one black community that speaks for or represents all African Americans. Today’s African Americans are decidedly not a homogeneous population. Nor were they in the nineteenth century. In our national dialogue the phrase “the black community” is often used as code to reference a supposedly monolithic population of poor, marginalized inner-city residents. To say that black stereotyping is unreasonable is not to deny that there is a sizable populace of black Americans who are struggling in inner cities, stuck in cycles of poverty, lacking access to middle-class education and opportunity. But that is far from the experience of all African Americans. Many Americans are unaware that a class of black elites stretches back to the time before the Civil War. The keener our understanding of the historical roots of America’s race-related issues, the more considered the solutions can be.
Disillusionment came to all African Americans, but the black elite had farther to fall when the rug was pulled out from under them. As W. E. B. DuBois noted, “The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land. Whatever of good may have come in these years of change, the shadow of a deep disappointment rests upon the Negro people.” Many African Americans who fostered high hopes during Reconstruction faced bitter disappointment because of rising exclusion. Careers were lost or stalled. Incomes were decimated or irregular.
The original black elite formed, according to Jean Toomer, “an aristocracy—such as never existed before and perhaps never will exist again in America—midway between the white and black world.” Without minimizing the profound decline experienced by many individuals in the original generation, as a group the black elite endured. Disillusioned they may have been, but they did not “fall” as in disappear. Many continued to lead the high life and, having lost faith in assimilation, nurtured their exclusiveness among themselves. As late as 1917, the Washington Bee accused the elite of promoting “caste based on complexion . . . [and] caste based on book learning and professional career.”
The black elite flourishes to this day. They favor certain insular clubs, sororities and fraternities, and vacation spots such as Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, and they talk about Boule, Jack and Jill, and other points of reference unique to them. Many of the movers and shakers in our common culture are members of today’s black elite group, the heirs of DuBois’s “talented tenth” concept. DuBois called on the talented tenth not to belittle the other 90 percent but to motivate those who were educated and able to step up to leadership positions. As Gerri Major, a principal chronicler of black society, put it in describing the generations that followed the original black elite, “What has remained is what there has always been: A class of people, who are as large, perhaps, as ten percent of the total black population, and who are and have been in the vanguard of their people. They provide the leadership, the role models.”
The focus in this narrative is on the black elite not only to highlight the heterogeneity of the black experience but to put into highest relief the absurdity of the notion of white supremacy. Too often whites in power pretended that equality was all well and good but only once black people were “civilized” enough, educated enough—in short, “ready.” Ready compared to whom? And who decides when that time has arrived? This was a smokescreen, a ruse. The true roadblock was not lack of ability but lack of autonomy and opportunity.
The story of Daniel Murray and his associates counters the false narrative that progress for African Americans was incumbent on white largesse, however slow in coming, as if blacks sat back and bit their nails waiting. The National Afro-American Council, the country’s first truly national civil rights organization, zoomed into action before the 1890s were over. According to historian Rayford Logan, “Walters and the Afro-American Council, which had a wider following than did the Niagara Movement, have not received the credit which they deserve as precursors of the NAACP.” Alexander Walters, the NAAC’s most persistent single force, stated in 1906, “If I were asked today, What is the most important thing for the Negro to do to secure his civil and political rights, I would answer without hesitation, ‘Go into the courts and fight it out.’” He noted that the NAAC had been “first in the field to test in the courts, the discriminatory laws of the Southern States.” The NAACP was modeled on the structure and strategies of the earlier organization, including test case litigation, national legislative reform, and direct-action protest.
Most Americans take pride in the ideals embedded in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution: respect for individual rights, opportunity to rise, equal protection under the law. These are values we honor, and if they were not equally applied to all creeds, colors, and genders at the start, we take comfort in believing that the American master narrative is one of increasing freedoms over time. On the very day the author composed this section of the epilogue (July 1, 2016), she perused a local newspaper article that included the following sentence: “In our struggle, we have always moved toward this idea of greater liberty.” The “our” and “we” referred to Americans collectively. That statement is false. The master narrative is not unidirectional. The single greatest reversal in our history was the disregard of black citizens’ newly won rights when Reconstruction was peremptorily abandoned. Worse yet, here was a case where the Constitution spoke loud and clear but was discounted. Worst of all, though we tout our being—first and foremost—a nation of laws, violent crimes such as arson and lynching were ignored or even tacitly condoned. It is a part of our history many Americans do not want to hear about, much less own. Yet only by remembering, and determining to respect the rights of all henceforth, can we redeem ourselves as a nation for shameful chapters in our past. Americans recognize, even as James Madison did, that slavery was “a blot on our Republican character,” but too many think that prospects for African Americans grew continually from the day the Emancipation Proclamation was released, and if progress was slow, well, maybe blacks tended not to be go-getters, rather preferring to languish in the victim role. The historical reality reveals a temporary rise in status followed by a disastrous suppression, forced by white supremacists and reinforced by government. Blame-the-victim characterizations of black struggles do not take into account the full historical evolution. Unrealized black advancement is America’s problem, and our government and society are rightly tasked with fixing it.
We can find gratification in recognizing that there was not a black hole between Reconstruction and the modern civil rights era. There were literally countless men and women such as Daniel and Anna Murray who refused to knuckle under in the face of setbacks to the newly secured rights of African Americans. Gaining equal rights for all proved an excruciatingly slow and torturous climb. The early twentieth century may have been the nadir for the African American plight and for violence, but American apartheid—de jure in the South and de facto in the North—persisted decade after decade. The failure of governance at the federal level in refusing to enforce those articles of faith—the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution—only began to be remedied in the 1950s.
The American master narrative of increasing freedoms can reverse direction at any time again. The lessons from the past are obvious. Will we, even in times of overhyped fear, dare to risk upholding our ideals? We grapple with the debate between national security and individual rights and must be exceedingly careful how much of the latter we are willing to give up to fortify the former. Recent terrorist incidents as well as systemic racial bias in law enforcement have brought this debate to the fore and highlighted inequities such as facial, ethnic, and religious profiling. We can never take our freedoms for granted. The founders never expected us to. They understood that for representative self-government to be successful, not only is a free press necessary but an informed and vigilant citizenry as well. Rights won must be rights guarded and, if necessary, rewon.9
“THE GIFT OF EXPRESSION, WHEN FIXED IN INK, IS THE ONLY lasting thing,” William Carl Bolivar stated. For all of Daniel Murray’s unremitting labor, the only “book” of his ever published was the eight-page Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors. No one understood the primacy of “printer’s ink” better than Daniel Murray:
It has ever been so, those who would rob the darker peoples of their rights or property begin by systematically writing them down. The Negro has suffered more in this respect than any other people. But because he has neglected to use the white man’s weapon—printer’s ink—in the past, need he forever be negligent in this respect? No. Let the whole race rise up as if it were one man, resolved to put forth to the world the achievements of its kind by magazines, books and encyclopedias, to the end that the world shall no longer be in ignorance of the black man’s past history.
Murray noted that one would not expect a Roman to produce an accurate history of Greece or rely upon an Englishman for a full history of France. Likewise, American blacks and whites tended to present conflicting versions of historical memory. For example, to hear early-twentieth-century white historians tell it, “Reconstruction was widely viewed as little more than a regrettable detour on the road to reunion,” as a leading historian of the period, Eric Foner, noted.
Murray never lost faith in the primacy of reason and education. He had an abiding belief in the power of truth to dispel prejudice. He believed that this along with recourse to the spirit of justice and Christian character would eventually usher in a new and enduring day in the sun. “It is coming,” former US congressman Robert Smalls wrote to Murray, “whether you and I live to see it or not.”
Daniel Murray’s support for the integration of blacks into American society did not entail the idea that they lose their identity as a people. Though always embracing racial consciousness, he sought assimilation as the signal that advancement was not race-based, that there was room for cultural pluralism. Murray and others in the “colored aristocracy” believed their function was to serve as a bridge or broker between the black and white worlds of their day, that that was a natural way to break down barriers of ignorance. Their determination to prove their right to be acknowledged as full citizens contributed to the stress the black elite placed upon exemplary behavior. But whites became increasingly prone to make no distinction between genteel high achievers and the mass of less fortunate black Americans.
Daniel Murray was a man of parts. He tended to overextend credit to himself and his family members. He indulged from time to time in jealous, petty, petulant factionalism. In many ways he had a thin skin and a big ego. That was just one of many conflicting pressures he wrestled with on a daily basis, forced to live in a world where blacks were belittled on a daily basis, forced to live in two worlds. He and others in the black elite were initially ready to think of themselves as “American first” (or “class first”), but mainstream society forced them to think “black first.” W. E. B. DuBois described the sensation of “double consciousness” in The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body.” It was tiresome to have to “measure one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt.” One hungered “To be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture . . . to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius.” Daniel Murray, too, longed to “merge his double self into a better and truer self.”
Murray responded to the call for leadership. He deserves to be lauded for his contributions to the black history movement and other race issues. He is also entitled to admiration as an exemplar of the ideal American citizen, active in civic and political life at every level decade after decade. How many give civic or political activism a try and conclude it is like banging one’s head against the wall, not to mention that the endless meetings and minutia get so boring? Not Daniel Murray. He did not just dip a toe into the water. He waded in. He stayed in through numerous betrayals, through the hollow rhetoric of one President after another, when the prize seemed increasingly illusory. Of the NAAC issues that Murray worked so hard on—anti-lynching, representative reduction, Freedmen’s Commission, court challenge to Louisiana’s grandfather clause, insufficient representation in District governance, anti–Jim Crow legislation—virtually none was successful. Still he kept on.
Black Americans generally displayed unwavering loyalty to the high ideals of the nation, despite their profoundly shameful treatment in return. The South basically committed treason but took the upper hand again, while blacks who had bravely fought for union were relegated to second-class citizenship and worse. Southern whites may have lost the Civil War, but with the end of Reconstruction, it was clear that they had been the political victors of that historical phase.
As for his own lasting legacy, Daniel Murray professed not to care. “A niche in the temple of fame has not been the secret of my determination to give to the world what I have gleaned,” he wrote. He claimed he would be satisfied if he succeeded at “removing the moss and lichen of neglect from the monument of one excellent name.” The obliterating hand of time has only lessened the recognition that Murray himself deserves for his roles in the black history movement and the first national civil rights organization. A race man to the core, he did not live to see the fruits of his labors. Not until the 1970s would African Americans approach the legal status, merit-based recognition, and cultural assimilation that Daniel Murray had anticipated to be just around the corner almost a full century earlier.10