ON SEPTEMBER 18, 1895, JUST AS SOUTH CAROLINA’S constitutional convention was entering its second week and the South’s disfranchisement campaign was gaining momentum, the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia, celebrated its opening day. The South’s answer to the great Columbian Exposition in Chicago two years before, this gala trade fair was billed as the largest and most important event in the Georgia capital since the end of the Civil War, an ostentatious display of progress and prosperity in the Redeemed South. The exposition featured 6,000 exhibits and had cost $2 million to produce. John Philip Sousa had composed a special march, “King Cotton,” to greet the crowds. The fair was expected to attract as many as one million visitors from across the nation and around the world.
Peace and reconciliation were two of the themes. “It is a great day for Atlanta and a great day for the South,” extolled the New-York Tribune. “Atlanta has again been captured, not this time by fire and sword, but by a peaceful army, of fellow-citizens and friends. Old feuds are forgotten, the old lines of suspicion and hate are obliterated, the old soldiers who once faced each other in hostile camps are clasping hands together, while the Stars and Stripes grandly float over the union of hearts and hands.”1
Among the featured string of luminaries, albeit from a distance, was President Grover Cleveland himself. Via wiring that had been installed specifically for this event, the president threw an electric switch, a “golden button,” at his home in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts, and “the wheels of the machinery . . . leaped into life,” officially inaugurating the proceedings.2 In his welcoming speech, Judge Emory Speer proclaimed, “This is indeed a happy day for the country. Cold and dull must be the nature of that man who is insensible to these convincing proofs gathered that the world may see the advancement of our people on all the paths trending toward a more perfect civilization.”3
Selling the rehabilitation of the South and portraying it as a bastion of racial harmony were unmistakably the organizers’ major goals. If they were not, Judge Speer would have been the last man chosen to open the event. Although a Confederate war veteran, he had switched to the Republican Party during Reconstruction and been elected to Congress as a proponent of integration and equal rights. He had moved on to be a United States attorney, known for his vigorous prosecution of violent white supremacists, and had aroused the fury of many Georgians by obtaining a conviction of eight white men accused of brutalizing African Americans to deny them the right to vote. He had even been able to get the conviction upheld in the Supreme Court.4 Speer had been appointed to the federal bench in 1888, and had further made himself a pariah to white supremacists with a series of decisions that upheld the civil rights of blacks.
But commerce overwhelmed personal animosity. To convince investors from both the North and across the Atlantic that the new, redeemed, racially tolerant South was a land of opportunity, Emory Speer seemed to be the perfect choice as a host. To further demonstrate to skeptics that the South harbored no ill to black people, and that racial policies were based in practicality, and even charity, the fair had sponsored a “Negro Building” and designated December 26, five days before the fair closed, as “Negro Day.” It is fitting, then, albeit not without irony, that with all the hoopla, the Cotton States Exposition is primarily remembered for a speech by a Negro.
As a final validation of their good will, the organizers had invited a black man to the opening ceremonies to address the assembled throng—tens of thousands, virtually all of them white. For this honor, they had chosen a forty-year-old educator named Booker T. Washington, described as the “principal of the Tuskegee Alabama Normal and Industrial School,” which was devoted to training young black men and women in teaching and the mechanical arts. Little was known about Washington outside Alabama, but Americans soon learned that he had been born a slave and, through education and hard work, had risen to lead a respected institution and become what white people liked to term “a credit to his race.”
The reaction in the Northern press to this unique invitation was everything Southern Democrats could have hoped for.
The selection of Booker T. Washington . . . to make an address at the opening of the Atlanta Exposition, is an almost unparalleled tribute to Mr. Washington personally, and to the negro race of which he is such a distinguished representative. Had any one predicted twenty-five years ago that the South would so honor a negro he would have been looked upon as a madman.5
Washington was the third to speak, following Judge Speer and Mrs. Joseph Thompson, president of the Women’s Board. He would need a deft hand, for Speer, who had fully embraced the spirit in which he had been invited, had stated unequivocally,
There was never the slightest danger of continued negro control in the local affairs of a Southern State. Those who apprehended it had done well to consider that of all the American Union, the Southern people present the largest percentage of old Anglo-Saxon stock. I here declare the so-called ‘race question’ does not exist. There are millions of colored people who live and who will live among many more millions of white people. Why shall anyone forge a race issue?6
It is unclear whether or not the organizers had cleared the text of Washington’s remarks in advance, but he hit precisely the right balance between conciliatory and proud, deferential and challenging. He was willing, he conceded, to accept whites’ assertions that black Americans, only thirty years removed from slavery, were not ready for full equality, or even in most cases the right to vote. He also accepted segregation as a path to prosperity for both races. “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”7
He counseled black Americans to stop thinking in grandiose terms but rather to focus on building themselves up from the bottom to share in “a new era of industrial progress.”
The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing . . . It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house . . . Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the productions of our hands, and fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor, and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life.
Washington’s main goal, however, and one that is rarely mentioned, was to convince Southern whites to choose African Americans rather than white immigrants for these agrarian and industrial jobs, and thus provide a pathway to economic self-sufficiency. Speer, in his speech, had emphasized that with slavery over, the South was seeking that very sort of competitive labor. “Slavery was here and the toiling masses from other lands could not or would not compete with slaves,” but now, “the world should awaken to the fact that no other land lighted by the sun in its diurnal progress around the world affords such attractions as a home for men with lives before them as do these Southern States of the Union.”
For black citizens in a society in which they could not vote, could not affect discriminatory legislation, cheap foreign labor could doom any small chance they had of improving their position in society, so Washington countered with the only tools he had, a plea that is often incorrectly seen as supplication.
To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted, I would repeat what I say to my own race. ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South . . . As we have proved our loyalty to you in the past, in nursing your children, watching by the sick-bed of your mothers and fathers, and often following them with tear-dimmed eyes to their graves, so in the future, in our humble way, we shall stand by you with a devotion that no foreigner can approach.
The reaction was resoundingly positive. The New-York Tribune wrote, “When [men] think of American freedom, they can do no better than to think of Booker T. Washington’s oration at Atlanta.”8 Even African Americans were almost universal in their praise, although that would soon change. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Let me heartily congratulate you upon your phenomenal success at Atlanta—it was a word fitly spoken.”9
Within months, Washington’s apparent retreat from militancy and embrace of the American ideal of hard work had made him a national celebrity, at least in white society. He would become a favorite of wealthy white industrialists—such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Sears, Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald, and George Eastman of Eastman Kodak—and would be the beneficiary of their philanthropy, including $150,000 as a personal gift from Carnegie; in 1901, he would publish an autobiography, Up from Slavery, to almost universal acclaim and booming sales; he would lecture to white audiences across the nation; he would help found the National Negro Business League, to promote entrepreneurship and financial independence; he would have tea with Queen Victoria; and he would even eventually, to the rage of James K. Vardaman and Ben Tillman, be invited to the White House for dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt.
As his acceptance by whites increased, however, he began to arouse the enmity of some blacks. They resented not only Washington being singled out as essentially the only acceptable black man in America, but also his unwillingness to challenge a rising tide of white oppression. “His militant black critics deeply believed that his efforts at appeasement had led the whites to the very aggressions he was trying to check.”10
Du Bois was among the disenchanted. He called Washington’s approach “the Atlanta Compromise,” and accused him of “practically accepting the alleged inferiority of the Negro races.” He added, “There is among educated and thoughtful colored men in all parts of the land a feeling of deep regret, sorrow, and apprehension at the wide currency and ascendancy which some of Mr. Washington’s theories have gained.”11
Although “his public utterances were limited to what whites approve,” Washington was a good deal more subversive than either white admirers or black detractors gave him credit for, nowhere more so than when it came to voting rights.12 Publicly, Washington made a point of accepting limited suffrage for African Americans, although he was less forthcoming about insisting that the same limitations that were in place for blacks be applied to whites as well. As such, he did not oppose literacy, property, or poll tax requirements, per se, even though they would hit blacks harder, but he found grandfather clauses anathema. In 1899, with his national fame assured and money available, he privately cast about for the best way to test the Louisiana Constitution in court.
After Williams and Mills, however, it was clear that in order to win a voting rights case, three things would be required: a plaintiff with impeccable credentials, a ream of supporting material to leave no doubt of the discriminatory nature of the state constitution, and, most of all, a superb lawyer to present arguments that even nine white men would be forced to accept. Washington made a secret visit to New Orleans, but after some abortive attempts at fund-raising and putting a plan of action together, he was forced to conclude that a Louisiana challenge lacked all three. Washington, who had made certain that his name had never been associated with the Louisiana partisans, returned home discouraged.
But then his private secretary, Emmett J. Scott, reminded him of Scott’s fellow Texan, Wilford H. Smith, who was making quite a name for himself in Galveston. Smith had been born in a backwater town in the Mississippi Delta in 1860, almost certainly the son of slaves, but somehow had worked his way to Boston University Law School, where he had graduated in 1883. He first returned to Mississippi to begin a practice, but eventually moved to Galveston, where he achieved success in both law and business. Scott had first introduced Smith to Washington in 1897, during a conference at Tuskegee, and Smith may well have analyzed the Louisiana case and advised Washington of its flaws.13
The following year, Wilford Smith would achieve a milestone in African American law in the case of Seth Carter, a twenty-three-year-old black man and convicted murderer.
On November 24, 1897, according to news accounts, Carter, from Galveston, pumped four bullets into his girlfriend, Alberta Brantley, then tried to shoot himself, but somehow missed. Carter then threw away his gun and cut his throat with a razor. “After this, he walked from the scene of the tragedy to the police station, almost a mile, and surrendered. His appearance at the station caused a sensation. He was one mass of blood, with a racing gash in the right side of his neck, extending around under the chin, partially severing the windpipe. He made signs for paper and ink and scrawled out a confession that he had murdered his sweetheart because she was untrue to him.”14 In spite of his wound, Carter did not die, but Alberta Brantley did. Carter, who “healed up nicely,” was indicted by a grand jury two days after the murder, and a court date was set for the following March.
In the months leading up to the trial, Carter seemed to have had a change of heart about wanting to die. He hired Emmanuel Hewlett, Cornelius Jones’s co-counsel in Gibson and Smith and, like Wilford Smith, a Boston University Law School alumnus. Hewlett lost and Carter was convicted. Hewlett asked Smith to handle the appeal, and Smith succeeded in winning a new trial on technical grounds.
At the retrial, when court convened, “before he had been arraigned or had pleaded to the indictment, [Smith] presented and read to the court a motion to quash the indictment.”15 Smith’s motion stated that no black men had served on the grand jury, although they represented one-fourth of the registered voters of Galveston County, and that they had been specifically excluded because of their race, as they had been for many years. Smith offered to submit exhibits and call witnesses to testify to the systematic exclusion of blacks on Galveston’s grand juries. The trial judge overruled the motion and refused to hear testimony or view exhibits on the matter. Carter was tried again for first-degree murder before an all-white jury, convicted, and sentenced to hang.
Smith’s appeals in state court were rejected, and so he brought the case before the United States Supreme Court. He had an advantage over Cornelius Jones in Williams because the trial judge had refused to allow him to present evidence of racial bias. And that was what Horace Gray, speaking for a unanimous Court, homed in on. After noting that the Texas appeals court ruled against Carter because he had presented no evidence of his claim of bias, Gray wrote:
It thus clearly appears by the record that the defendant, having duly and distinctly alleged in his motion to quash that all persons of the African race were excluded because of their race and color from the grand jury which found the indictment, asked leave of the court to introduce witnesses, and offered to introduce witnesses, to prove and sustain that allegation, and that the court refused to hear any evidence upon the subject, and overruled the motion without investigating whether the allegation was true or false . . . the assumption in the final opinion of the state court that no evidence was tendered by the defendant in support of the allegations in the motion to quash is plainly disproved by the statements in the bill of exceptions of what took place in the trial court.16
His conviction overturned, Seth Carter got a new trial—unclear to what end—the right of black Americans to serve on juries was reaffirmed, and Wilford Smith gained the distinction of being the first African American to win a case in the United States Supreme Court. Any lingering doubts that Washington or anyone else might have harbored about Smith’s competence were brushed away by Horace Gray’s opinion.
For all the accolades, however, the victory was largely symbolic. The Court had not ruled on systematic exclusion of African Americans from juries for non-statutory reasons, only that in this specific case, a trial judge had pushed discrimination just a bit too far. In a real sense, Carter v. Texas was simply a rehash of Strauder, which did not help the overall problem of jury exclusion. But whatever its shortcomings, a decision had been rendered by the United States Supreme Court in favor of a case made by an African American attorney.
It might be time, Booker T. Washington decided, to try another.