CHAPTER 20

Global Visions

Africa—with its stunningly rich natural resources, its unrealized political potential and its overwhelming educational needs—had long fascinated Madam Walker. At least as early as 1912, she had dreamed, with a missionary’s zeal, of establishing a girls’ industrial training school on the continent. “By the help of God and the cooperation of my people in this country, I am going to build a Tuskegee Institute in Africa!” she had proclaimed during her first National Negro Business League conference. Soon afterward she arranged to pay the tuition for Edmund Kaninga, one of Tuskegee’s small number of African students, whom she hoped to educate “for the purpose of founding and establishing a Negro Industrial School on the West Coast of Africa.” Then in 1914 she contributed funds to a mission school in Pondoland, South Africa, and extended support to another African student at Hannon Industrial Institute in Greenville, Alabama. When it became clear that business demands would prevent her from personally developing her ambitious school project, she offered $1,000 to any one of the three major black denominations—the Baptists, the AMEs or the AMEZs—willing to “start a little Tuskegee Institute in Africa.” And it was not only education that interested Madam Walker. Touched by a report that “seven African . . . girls were being held for ransom,” she sent $100 to Liberia for their release in care of Baptist missionary Emma Bertha Delaney, a Spelman College graduate who would later found the Suehn Industrial Mission near Monrovia.

The roots of Madam Walker’s curiosity about Africa may well have sprung from her childhood in Madison Parish, where an organized group of black Civil War veterans—swept up in the seductive Back to Africa movement of the 1870s—frequently met to discuss emigration to Liberia. But it probably was in the sanctuary of St. Paul AME Church in St. Louis where she first heard detailed descriptions of life on the faraway continent from visiting bishops and missionaries. As a member of the Mite Missionary Society, she deposited pennies and nickels in the weekly offering basket to help pay the salaries of women missionaries in Africa. With churches in Liberia and Sierra Leone since the early nineteenth century, and in South Africa by the late 1800s, AME representatives—much to the consternation of colonial government officials—often mingled their religious messages with education and politics, militantly claiming “Africa for the Africans.” Madam Walker’s attraction to New York’s Mother AME Zion Church was motivated, at least in part, by her admiration for Alexander Walters, the church’s presiding bishop and a leading Africanist, who had been elected president of the Pan-African Association in London in 1900 and later traveled to West Africa on behalf of the church.

In late 1918 as plans for the Paris Peace Conference solidified, Madam Walker was among a group of politically conscious African Americans already discussing the status of Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa and German Southwest Africa—the four African colonies ruled by Germany since the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, when the European powers partitioned the continent among themselves. The colonies’ future ownership loomed as a point of contention in any peace settlement. By 1900, Germany—along with Great Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Belgium—had wrested control of nearly 90 percent of Africa’s land in pursuit of the continent’s mineral and agricultural abundance, including its gold, diamonds, cobalt, palm oil, rubber and cocoa.

In the November 1914 Crisis, which was mailed during the early months of the European conflict, W.E.B. Du Bois trained a racial prism on the war, denouncing it as a “wild quest for Imperial expansion,” especially by Germany, England and France, into the resource-rich territories in Africa and Asia. “Today civilized nations are fighting like mad dogs over the right to own and exploit these darker peoples,” he assailed. And although Madam Walker’s thoughts about Du Bois’s claims are not recorded, she doubtless saw, and probably read, his article, for her photograph accompanied a story about black YMCA donors in the same issue. Four years later, with Germany’s defeat imminent, Du Bois’s “Memorandum on the Future of Africa”—a document as ambitious as Woodrow Wilson’s proposal for the League of Nations—laid out a plan for an “international Africa.” Intended to encompass the almost one million square miles of land that made up the Belgian Congo, as well as the Portuguese and former German colonies, this proposed new territory was to be administered by a global commission comprised of white Europeans and Americans, as well as by representatives of what Du Bois called “the civilized Negro world”: “black Americans and other people of African descent” from all hemispheres. U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing, upon receiving Du Bois’s proposal, appears to have summarily dismissed it. In fact, any plan advocating sovereign “self-determination”—the right of a people to establish their own future political status—even when advanced by his own President, horrified him. “The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination,’ the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races,” he wrote soon afterward regarding one of Wilson’s League of Nations principles. Certain that the phrase would “breed discontent, disorder and rebellion” among a range of disaffected peoples and become “the basis [for] impossible demands on the Peace Congress,” he asked in his confidential memorandum, “What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it?” Lansing did not even bother to mention black Americans, so unlikely were they to be able to wage any effective claims on the world stage.

As much as Du Bois attempted to redefine the issues of the European war to include African Americans, their concerns—whether domestic or foreign—were of little consequence to Woodrow Wilson, who considered the “disposition” of Germany’s former African colonies as “not vital to the life of the world in any respect.” Nevertheless, Du Bois, Madam Walker and others had begun to press the issue of black representation in the American peace delegation. In a late-November 1918 letter to Lansing, who still had not acknowledged his African memorandum, Du Bois requested approval of passports for six “carefully selected . . . representative American Negroes”—including himself—for travel to Paris to observe the conference proceedings. Claiming that “large numbers” of “the colored people of America, and indeed of the world,” had written to him “concerning the Peace Conference,” he declared, “It would be a calamity at the time of the transformation of the world to have two hundred million . . . human beings absolutely without voice.” Already skittish about the notion that “certain races” might wish to have any voice at all in France, Lansing referred the matter to State Department Counselor Frank Polk, who recommended denying travel documents for the group. “I think your inclination not to grant passports is a wise one as racial questions of this nature ought not to be a subject to come before the Conference,” Lansing cabled from Paris in late December, as he and President Wilson awaited the opening of the talks. Determined to minimize public dissent among the ranks of the American peace commission—and acutely aware that his own League of Nations plan had little support in Congress—Wilson already had excluded Republicans from the delegation. Needing all of his energy to negotiate with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau, the Democratic President had no desire to be distracted by black Americans who were intent upon raising embarrassing questions about domestic race relations and American foreign policy in Africa.

In early December, just four days after President Wilson sailed for Europe aboard the U.S.S. George Washington, however, Du Bois boarded the Orizaba, the authorized U.S. press boat. With his passport request languishing in the hands of Lansing and Polk, “only quick and adroit work on the part of myself and friends” allowed him to travel to France on official Crisis business. Also on board the otherwise all-white voyage to France were New York Age reporter Lester Walton, Tuskegee president Robert Russa Moton, and Moton’s assistant, Nathan Hunt, with whom Du Bois shared a cabin. During the crossing Du Bois told a New York Herald reporter: “The leading Negroes of the U.S. will ask the peace conference to turn back to native control the German colonies in Africa for national organization by those there now and by other Negroes who may wish to live under a government of their own race in the old African land.”

Like Du Bois, Madam Walker hoped to travel to Paris once the negotiations among the Allied nations—the United States, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan and more than twenty other countries—commenced. During November and December, as several political groups approached her about representing them in France, she and Ransom debated the feasibility of black American efforts to influence the outcome of the peace talks. Always more conservative than she, Ransom scoffed at Monroe Trotter’s plan to form his own overseas delegation. “I talked with Emmett Scott and he is in perfect accord with my opinion that there is no way that this can really be done,” he wrote. “About all the American Negro could do is to send someone . . . to influence the Japanese and Liberian delegates to insist on the settling of the Race question at the Peace Conference.” Because he was convinced that “domestic questions cannot and will not be thrashed out . . . in France,” Ransom suggested that a more effective approach would be “a great Race Conference . . . to sit at Washington contemporaneously with Congress and the Peace Conference [so that] the Negro’s position could be, by petition, properly placed before Congress and the United States President.”

Despite Ransom’s caveat, Madam Walker traveled to Washington in mid-December to attend Trotter’s National Race Congress for World Democracy. Having been selected “by unanimous vote” to represent the National Equal Rights League’s New York branch, she joined at least 250 delegates from all over the country at the venerable Metropolitan AME Church not far from the White House. If Madam Walker arrived expecting decorum and civility during the two-day conference, she was immensely disappointed by the tenor of the proceedings. “I wish you might have been at that conference,” she wrote Ransom with annoyance. “A lot of old ignoramus preachers—and every one wanted to be sent, or at least to have their particular friend sent.”

On the one hand, she was flattered to learn that, in the selection of Paris representatives, she had polled more votes than all “the names submitted, even to the Bishops.” On the other hand, she and Ida B. Wells-Barnett were offended when, despite their high tallies, the all-male nominating committee “decided that no women be sent except as alternates.” As the council named its five-man delegation—while relegating the women to alternates required to pay their own expenses—Wells-Barnett remembered that such “a clamor arose” that “the committee’s report was halted.” Taking the floor, she announced that she “regretted that the years spent in fighting the race’s battles had made me financially unable to accept the honor which they had offered me.” Madam Walker watched with pride as “Mrs. B. registered a strong protest and declined the empty honors which resulted in our being elected from the floor, as full and legal delegates.”

Now with nine official National Race Congress delegates, Madam Walker told Ransom she doubted the organization “would be able to send two.” With or without them, however, she was already planning her trip to Europe. “Since they have elected me, I shall go even if they cannot do everything for me in the way of expenses, tho I have not said as much to them,” she wrote. “Of course Lelia will accompany me.”

Ransom reluctantly congratulated Madam Walker on her election, but could not mask his misgivings about the organization. “Monroe Trotter may be all right, but he stands for practically nothing in America,” warned Ransom, especially conscious of Trotter’s past confrontations with President Wilson, the head of the American delegation in Paris. “I hope you will be very careful in not identifying yourself too closely with the Trotter bunch, who may do something that will bring the whole delegation into ill-repute or offend the country. You must always bear in mind that you have a large business, whereas the others, who are going, have nothing. There are many ways in which your business can be circumscribed and hampered so as to practically put you out of business.”

Whether Ransom was aware of it or not, the political pressure he feared for Madam Walker had already been applied to Chicago Defender publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott, a man they both knew well. Earlier that year, Major Walter H. Loving, a black Military Intelligence Division agent, had personally visited Abbott to notify him that some of his articles and editorials—especially those about lynching and the rights of black soldiers—had given government officials the impression that he might be “unpatriotic.” By the end of the visit the “chastened editor,” sufficiently intimidated by the threat that his newspaper could be banned by government censors, was said to have “promised to print nothing offensive.” During the summer of 1918—not long before Abbott attended Madam Walker’s Chicago convention—representatives of the U.S. Post Office began scrutinizing each edition of the Defender, “convinced the paper promoted racial hatred and put misguided racial goals ahead of winning the war.” By the fall of 1918, Abbott’s trademark fiery criticisms, though not entirely absent, were accompanied by “professions of patriotism.”

In addition to the War Department’s MID operations and the Post Office censors, the State Department had stepped up its surveillance of private American citizens. Empowered by the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, federal agents now had the authority to punish even the “appearance of disloyalty,” not only in the press but in any “writing or speech that might harm the country’s war efforts, promote the cause of Germany, or discredit the American government, Constitution or flag.” Near the end of the war anyone with ties to the Socialist Party or with sympathies for Russia’s anticapitalist Bolshevik Revolution was especially vulnerable to accusations of disseminating “subversive” ideas. After the war, MID operatives continued to spy on such prominent Americans as Hull-House founder Jane Addams and former Stanford University president David Starr Jordan.

Even if Abbott failed to share the details of his visit from Major Loving with Ransom and Madam Walker, Ransom’s apparently frequent contact with Emmett Scott, as well as his own wide-ranging reading habits, kept him well versed on Washington’s political climate. “I am seriously of the opinion that you will not be able to get a passport,” he predicted in a lateDecember letter to Madam Walker. At the time, of course, Ransom did not know just how close to the truth he might be, for Major Loving—not content to confine his surveillance activities to newspaper editors and publishers—had infiltrated the National Race Congress meetings just a week earlier. As a result, Madam Walker’s name had been added to the Military Intelligence Division’s files of “Negro Subversives.” Along with Hallie Queen, the Christmas season visitor to Villa Lewaro whose spy work he supervised, Loving was “one of a half dozen” black MID operatives. His surveillance efforts within the black community, wrote David Levering Lewis, were “indefatigable.” What particular strain of patriotism compelled this former music director of the Philippines Constabulary Band to engage in intra-race espionage remains unknown.

With Kaiser Wilhelm II and Germany no longer a threat, Communism and Bolshevism presented the MID and the White House with a postwar umbrella under which to place troublesome dissent of all stripes. Any aggressive protest in response to racial discrimination, lynching or the poor treatment of black soldiers—all issues that Madam Walker championed—had become tantamount to radical and seditious behavior. In 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer told Congress of “a well-concerted movement among a certain class of Negro leaders” to create “a radical opposition to the Government, and to the established rule of law and order.” Many black publications, he charged, especially when reporting on lynchings, were filled with “defiance and insolently race-centered condemnation of the white race.”

Apparently unable to fathom that African Americans might have legitimate concerns without ever looking beyond U.S. borders, Woodrow Wilson “confided the fear that black soldiers returning from Europe would be ‘our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.’” Wilson and Lansing, of course, wished to keep Madam Walker and other African Americans on the western shore of the Atlantic throughout the negotiations. As well, the three major European Allies were described as “puzzled by and cynical about the desire of a large number of black individuals and newly organized groups to attend the Paris conference.” For entirely different reasons, some black Americans expressed doubts that the delegations could have any meaningful impact upon the proceedings. In late December 1918, after several groups had chosen delegates and held rallies, the New York Age editorialized: “This business of electing delegates to the peace conference at Versailles is being run into the ground . . . It might as well be understood that there is no sense or reason in this multiplying of so-called peace delegations that will never get as far down the harbor as the Statue of Liberty.” Besides Trotter’s National Race Congress, there were other eager contingents. In November, National Medical Association president George Cannon appealed to Wilson, “We feel that our unselfish devotion at home and our heroism and supreme sacrifice on the battle fields of Europe merit representation in the make-up of the Peace Conference.” Within hours of the armistice announcement, Harlem’s Palace Casino was packed with five thousand followers of Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who himself boldly demanded that “the Allied Powers . . . hand over the ex-German colonies in Africa to black rule.” By the end of Garvey’s highly charged Universal Negro Improvement Association rally, Socialist labor leader A. Philip Randolph and Ida B. Wells-Barnett—herself now a delegate for at least two organizations—were selected to speak on behalf of the group’s interests in France. A much smaller association, the Hamitic League, nominated as two of its representatives Puerto Rican bibliophile Arthur Schomburg and militant newspaper editor John Bruce, whose “Bruce Grit” column had been carried by several black publications since the 1880s. With no authorization from the United States government, the quixotic quest of all these groups still seemed likely to end, as the Age had predicted, in New York Harbor.

Nevertheless, in an effort to unite the various factions, Madam Walker joined forces with an eclectic group of activists—including Reverend A. Clayton Powell, Sr., Reverend Frederick Cullen (who had been part of the Silent Protest Parade delegation to the White House in 1917), A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey—to form the International League of Darker Peoples. On January 2, 1919, as Madam Walker welcomed the coalition to Villa Lewaro, she announced her hopes for a permanent organization that would position itself to “engage world opinion even after the peace conference shall have ended.” Randolph, the tall, chestnutcomplexioned editor of The Messenger—a publication with decidedly leftist leanings—presented a set of “peace proposals” in the precise, Oxford-style English he had learned from a Shakespearean tutor. High on the list of demands was a call for “a more enlightened world politics” aimed at providing independence and autonomy for African nations. “Rapacious and unscrupulous ‘world power’ politics has raped Africa of over 100,000,000 souls and billions of wealth,” Randolph, the League’s secretary, asserted in his written statement. “No ‘League of Nations’ can long endure which ignores the just claims of Africa. The world cannot be ‘made safe for democracy’ while Africa is unsafe for the Africans,” the sharply worded manifesto mocked President Wilson. Further, the ILDP document insisted upon an international agreement to abolish “all economic, political and social discriminations in all countries, based upon color.” Under its plan, a “supernational” commission, composed of the world’s “educated classes of Negroes,” would develop and govern Germany’s former colonies. Such a body, the group proposed with missionary-like presumption, would establish educational systems to teach “chemistry, physics, biology, horticulture, geology, mining, engineering and political science” and supervise the construction of transportation systems and communications networks. “If peace can be secured through a league of free nations,” the ILDP declared, “so can the hydra-headed monster—race prejudice—be destroyed, by the darker peoples of the worlds . . . making common cause with each other, in one great world body.”

As a document it was wildly idealistic and utopian. Nevertheless, it embodied a vision with which Madam Walker found little to disagree. And if some of the more excessive rhetoric seemed overblown, the proposed education programs meshed easily with her longtime dream for an African Tuskegee. Ransom, however, was not nearly so open-minded, labeling many of the ILDP goals “utterly impossible as well as impractical.” As well, he found little to commend the League’s membership roster. “It seems strange to me that so few prominent New Yorkers are connected with it, in fact, there seems to be practically none,” he tartly observed. “Of course, they have your name and Mr. Powell’s,” he added a few days later. “People always seek to get the names of someone with standing to use as one would use vinegar to catch flies. You and Mr. Powell, however, owe it to yourselves to be very careful how you lend your names to every propagandist that comes along,” he admonished.

Despite Ransom’s reservations, Madam Walker continued to explore additional avenues to influence the peace talks. Aware that members of the Japanese peace delegation were in New York, the League—in the “spirit of race internationalism” and probably at Madam Walker’s expense—sent them a floral arrangement “as a token of friendship and brotherhood.” Five days after the ILDP’s inaugural meeting—with hopes of persuading Japan’s representatives to present the “race issue” before the Paris conference—Madam Walker hosted a gathering at the grand Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for a small League delegation and S. Kuriowa, a Japanese envoy and publisher of Yorudo Choho, a Tokyo newspaper. During the session, Kuriowa—whose Japanese American brethren had been prohibited from purchasing land in California because of their race—was said to have “assured the delegation of his unqualified and genuine approval of the darker peoples making common cause against the common enemy—race prejudice based upon color.” In the only edition of The World Forum, the ILDP’s newspaper, Kuriowa promised that “the race question will be raised at the peace table.”

Having declared war on Germany in 1914 and deployed its navy in defense of British convoys in Far East waters throughout the conflict, Japan now was entitled to a seat in Paris with the other Allies. Harboring their own expansionist objectives, the country’s leaders were intent upon continuing to occupy the Chinese territory they had invaded and assuming control over Germany’s former Pacific islands north of the equator.

With Madam Walker already a target of the MID, her meeting with Kuriowa surely heightened Loving’s suspicions. Just two months earlier, in fact, at a November 1918 rally, Marcus Garvey had attracted MID attention when he predicted—with a heavy dose of hyperbole—that “the next war would pit white nations against a black-Japanese alliance.” More cautiously, the Age cited Japanese newspaper articles that urged Asian delegations to champion a peace agreement clause prohibiting worldwide racial discrimination. “If Japan and China raised this question at the peace table there would really be some chance at making it an issue,” said the Age. But Ransom, ever the contrarian, saw little possibility for a genuine coalition with the Japanese. “There is no sympathy between Japan and the Negro, absolutely none between China and the Negro, or the Turk or any other of the Darker Peoples, and it cannot be brought about by a few theorists combined together,” he advised Madam Walker in a rather testy foreign affairs lesson. Even Randolph—who was said to have arranged the Kuriowa meeting at Madam Walker’s request—had discouraged any black-Japanese alliance seven months earlier in The Messenger, the publication he proudly called “the only radical Negro magazine in America.” Branding Japan “imperialistic,” “autocratic” and “reactionary” because of its threats to invade Siberia, Randolph and his coeditor, Chandler Owen, had written: “We admonish Negroes not to be appealed to on the ground of color . . . Japan oppresses shamefully her own Japanese people and she would oppress you likewise.”

Quite aside from his skepticism about a partnership with the Japanese, Ransom told Madam Walker that he had “no faith in the management” of the ILDP and predicted “for it an inglorious failure.” Madam Walker’s appointment as treasurer was less an honor, he believed, than a transparent gesture to secure a sure source of funding. “You will have to watch your League for I very much suspect they will want you to finance most all of their little projects.” He was, he said, “beginning to grow seriously apprehensive lest you will impair your usefulness by becoming identified with too many organizations fostered by highly questionable characters.” Ransom specifically cautioned Madam Walker about Reverend R. D. Jonas, a Welshman and one of the League founders, whom he harshly blasted as a “nihilist, a fanatic [and] a petty grafter who seeks to gain his livelihood by appealing to the Negro on some phase of the Negro problem that will cause them to back him . . . in some impractical propaganda.” Having been “run out of every City of size in the United States,” including Indianapolis, Ransom counseled her that Jonas was “liable to mislead some well-meaning people,” including—though he did not say so—Madam Walker herself.

Little did either of them know that, just as Major Loving had infiltrated the December National Race Congress, R. D. Jonas had become the ILDP’s own homegrown informant, ferreting out information about his black “friends” for the United States government. For at least a year this undercover operative, who was sometimes known as Jonas the Prophet, had been gathering material, not only for the War Department’s MID but for British military intelligence officials who had developed a particular interest in contacts between blacks and Japanese. After the January 2 session at Villa Lewaro and the January 7 meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, Jonas also approached the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation with hopes of being paid for information about the League. In a convoluted and illogical scheme, he told bureau officials that he was “recruiting black, Japanese, Hindu and Chinese socialists and Bolshevists to learn their plans and then secretly mobilize conservative black churchmen against them.” Now, presumably, Madam Walker’s name had been added to yet another surveillance file.

While Ransom was quite familiar with Jonas, he wrote Madam Walker that he knew “nothing about the man Randolph.” But had he spent more time strolling the streets on his visits to Harlem, he surely would have heard the provocative, eloquent speeches that A. Philip Randolph regularly delivered from the corner of 135th and Lenox. The dignified and eloquent son of an AME minister, Randolph had arrived in New York in 1911 just a few years after graduating from Jacksonville, Florida’s Cookman Institute, the first black high school in Florida. While taking night classes at New York’s City College, he was exposed to the rhetoric of radical politics in the speeches of black Socialist Hubert Harrison, as well as Socialist Party founder Eugene Debs. Now one of Lenox Avenue’s most able soapbox orators—in an era before most Americans had radios—Randolph with his rich baritone captivated passersby as he discussed topics as wide-ranging as the French Revolution and the history of slavery. “His delivery was . . . impeccable,” a young admirer later remembered. “Instead of rabble rousing, he just talked.”

Madam Walker and Randolph probably first met through his wife, Lucille Green Randolph, a Howard University graduate and former New York City schoolteacher, who had been one of the first graduates of Lelia College’s Harlem branch. With her own salon on 135th Street, Lucille was one of the most successful Walker hair culturists in the city. She was a light-skinned woman of “medium height and build,” whose “short-cropped, prematurely silver hair” rendered her striking rather than merely attractive. “Her customers ranged from the black elite in Harlem to well-to-do crinkly-haired whites from ‘downtown,’” wrote her husband’s biographer Jervis Anderson. Once a week she carried her satchel full of Walker products and curling irons to Atlantic City’s “fashionable” Marlborough Blenheim Hotel, where she also counted a number of wealthy whites among her clients. Devoted to the same political causes as her husband, Lucille had run unsuccessfully for the New York state legislature on the Socialist slate in 1917. Her “considerable income,” as well as her unhesitant willingness to share it with her husband, made it possible for him to pursue his “public ambitions.” One acquaintance later said that he had never known Randolph to “work for a salary,” yet he “never saw him without a starched collar, a carefully knotted tie, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, and a blue serge suit that looked like he had just bought it from Brooks Brothers. It was his wife, of course.” Randolph himself later said, “We were on an uncharted sea. Chandler and I had no job and no plan for the next meal. But I had a good wife. She carried us.” While Madam Walker had been one of the first advertisers in The Messenger—a reprint of her November 1917 New York Times article appeared as a full-page ad in the magazine’s second issue—it was Lucille Green Randolph who sustained the publication. “Without her money,” Randolph often said, “we couldn’t have started The Messenger.”

That Lucille was a gregarious extrovert who thoroughly enjoyed Madam Walker’s social gatherings seemed to create no conflict for Randolph, whom friends “never saw . . . at a dance or a party” because “he had bigger things in view.” Lucille, they said, “sometimes invited him to Madam Walker’s parties, but he always begged off, saying he had no time to waste with ‘fly-by-night people.’” Apparently Randolph exempted Madam Walker herself from that unflattering category. “She was a woman of common sense and good business sense,” he later remembered. But he also suggested that Madam Walker, who was almost entirely self-taught, still welcomed and needed assistance in preparing major speeches. “She was not a literate woman but she had money,” he told an interviewer. “My wife would make trips” with her and would help “get her talks together.”

Just as Madam Walker had not agreed with all of the political positions of Booker T. Washington, Monroe Trotter or Emmett Scott, she must surely have differed with Randolph in July 1918 when he countered Du Bois’s controversial “Close Ranks” editorial with the position that “no intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists.” Yet, as with others she liked personally, she did not sever contact with him over political disagreements. Had she known all the details of Randolph’s August 1918 arrest for violating the Espionage Act, however, she would have had sufficient reason to be anxious about her relationship with him. While Randolph addressed a rally in Cleveland, a Justice Department intelligence agent confiscated copies of the July Messenger, citing Randolph and Chandler Owen for spreading subversive information. Undoubtedly, one section of the magazine that caught the agent’s attention was an editorial that welcomed the “growth of socialism, which is the death of capitalism.” After a two-day investigation and a brief trial, Randolph and Owen were released, but the newspaper, now in the possession of the Justice Department, included several references to Madam Walker. A concise biographical sketch praising her as “a factor in the economic, political [and] social life of the country” would have been of little consequence to the agent. More likely it was Madam Walker’s prominent role as an advertiser that would have intrigued the bureau investigators, since her payments had helped fund the “seditious” contents. In addition to a full-page Walker Company ad on the magazine’s back cover, Madam Walker was mentioned in two other full-page spreads, one purchased by Frank Smith, her interior decorator, the other by the Miller-Reed Company, the general contractors for Villa Lewaro, St. Philip’s AME and Mother AME Zion. The link to Madam Walker, Smith and Miller-Reed was The Messenger’s advertising manager, Louis George. As an assistant to Madam Walker, he had accompanied her on her second trip to Battle Creek and often helped with marketing promotions in the 136th Street salon.

An earnest and enthusiastic young man, George and his wife, Czarina, were, along with Lloyd and Edna Thomas, Lelia’s closest friends. But George, who had been named chairman of the ILDP’s executive committee, was someone Ransom viewed with disdain, primarily because he had mismanaged both money and business transactions in the Walker Company’s New York office. “I know you are fond of Louis George and I do not wish to hurt him in your estimation, but because you are fond of him does not make him fit to manage large affairs or lead the Race,” Ransom huffed. “You certainly have seen enough to know he [is] utterly incompetent along business lines.”

When Madam Walker suggested placing George in charge of her trust fund, Ransom was livid. “It evidently did not occur to you that Louis has not the capacity for such a position,” he lectured. “People [who] know him know his limitations and will laugh at you thinking that you did not know any better.”

As if Jonas’s and George’s affiliation with the League were not enough, Ransom could not have been pleased with the prominent coverage the two ILDP meetings received in the Age. “I, for one, am sorry that [Villa Lewaro] was the birthplace for such an organization,” especially, he told her, because people would believe that she was “sponsor for the acts of fanatic and irrational beings.” Concerned that the group might be “identified with the socialist element of our citizenship or radicals and agitators that are to be found among all Races,” Ransom sounded another alarm. “Diplomatic, persistent agitation along conservative lines is alright, but anything that borders on Bolshevikism is to be avoided.”

Unable to control Madam Walker’s interactions with those he considered “irresponsible” zealots, or to curb what he implied might be his client’s naiveté, Ransom once again urged her to consider her business and her reputation. “The only thing I am concerned with is the danger of your becoming identified with some person or persons whose acts will hurt your future in this country.” To lessen Ransom’s anxiety—and apparently because she too was having second thoughts—Madam Walker assured him that she would heed his advice and withdraw her support. “I am glad to note that you are not going to mix up into organizations and propositions in the future,” Ransom wrote, reinforcing her responsibility to other African Americans. “You cannot be too careful in this respect. People who have developed great businesses, attained great wealth and influence, no longer belong to themselves but to the people and to posterity and they cannot be too careful as to entangling alliances, such as may bring them in ill-repute or in a way affect their business standing and integrity.” Four days later, on February 5, Madam Walker resigned from the ILDP. “Owing to the fact that I do not expect to be in the city this winter and to the further fact that my physician has advised against my participation in public affairs, I herewith tender my resignation,” she informed the group and the editors of the Age. Reverend Powell followed suit later that month, claiming that he had been selected as president without proper consent and asking that his name not be used in connection with the League. “While I believe in the objects and principles of the league and hope to remain a member, my limited time and ability will not allow me to serve as president.” Without their backing, the International League of Darker Peoples collapsed. While most who knew Madam Walker found no fault with her short-lived flirtation with an organization that included a handful of Socialists, the damage to her reputation—at least among high government officials who could control her ability to travel to Europe—had been done.

As Madam Walker prepared her passport application in February 1919, she had no idea that her political and social activities had been monitored on at least four occasions by Walter Loving, Hallie Queen, R. D. Jonas and other government spies. Still, Ransom’s warnings seem to have made her sufficiently sensitive to the government’s preoccupation with political dissent that she applied for a commercial business passport, apparently to keep from attracting undue attention. She intended, she wrote on her affidavit, to travel to England, France and Italy to “buy and sell toilet preparations.” Certainly her most recent advertisements—which touted her international sales with the words “We Belt the Globe”—indicated a legitimate aim to expand her overseas market. Nevertheless, Ransom cautioned her not to misrepresent the reasons for her trip, lest the State Department view her application as “merely subterfuge to get to the peace conference.” The Wilson administration, he reminded her, was “quite determined” that no American be allowed to travel to “challenge” the government’s position at the peace talks. “If you are not going to make a bonafide effort to represent your business over there, my advice would be not to go, because your actions will be observed,” he wrote, alerting her that “secret service men are everywhere and the government does not intend to be deceived in granting passports.” Less than two weeks later, Ransom told Madam Walker that Emmett Scott had informed him that she was included in a Military Intelligence Division file. “I was afraid that your name had been sent in,” he wrote, advising her that she might now expect to have “trouble in getting passports” for herself, Lelia and the salesman she had hoped would accompany her.

Just as Ransom had predicted, Madam Walker’s entanglements with Trotter and the International League of Darker Peoples had jeopardized her trip to France. On the recommendation of Loving, she and the other National Race Congress delegates, as well as the ILDP committee, had become targets of a Military Intelligence Division inquiry into the political activities of those whom the government considered “Negro subversives.” Specifically naming Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Madam Walker and six men in his report, Loving wrote: “If passports are to be requested for the above named individuals I suggest that the record of each person be locked up before a passport is granted. I recommend this in the case of Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett especially. This subject is a known race agitator.” Three weeks after Loving’s MID report, William E. Allen, the acting chief of the Bureau of Investigation, advised the State Department to refuse passports for all National Race Congress delegates in order to prevent them from mentioning “the negro question at the Peace Conference.” Quoting Loving, Allen included Madam Walker among the group of people now considered “more or less agitators.” In denying the passports, the State Department engaged in its “first major interference in African American politics,” according to historian Theodore Kornweibel. Later the agency would contend that it had no “formal policy barring black travelers,” yet clearly all but a few blacks who attempted to visit Paris in 1919 met with “deliberate bureaucratic delays.” Although Madam Walker submitted her passport application in February 1919, State Department records at the National Archives today lead to a cold trail, perhaps because, as Loving had directed, they had been “locked up” beforehand as classified files.

In February, with Madam Walker’s own prospects for going to Europe having vanished, she lent her support to Du Bois’s efforts to convene a PanAfrican Congress in Paris. As a member of the executive committee of the NAACP’s New York chapter, Madam Walker sent a personal check for $25 to the parent organization after receiving James Weldon Johnson’s February 11 letter asking that the committee approve a $100 expenditure from its treasury for the work of the congress. “We are hoping for some very tangible results from the efforts which Dr. Du Bois is making,” Johnson wrote in his letter acknowledging her contribution. Having just received a cable from Paris, he was pleased to inform her that Blaise Diagne, a Senegalese member of the French Chamber of Deputies, had persuaded French Premier Clemenceau—against the wishes of President Wilson—to grant permission for Du Bois’s conference to proceed. “In private advices from Dr. Du Bois,” Johnson continued, “we learn that he has the support of all of the colored members of the French Chamber of Deputies,” as well as the Liberian and Haitian delegates and members of the Aborigines Society of London, an organization Johnson described as similar to the NAACP. Du Bois’s three-day Pan-African Congress opened on February 19 at Paris’s Grand Hotel with a welcome address from Diagne to the fifty-eight delegates. Although “sixteen nations, protectorates and colonial entities” were represented, the number of participants would have been much higher had not the U.S. State Department, as well as other Allied governments, placed obstacles in the paths of most who wished to attend. Claiming falsely that the French government disapproved of the conference, the Wilson administration issued an announcement that it would be “unable to grant passports to persons desiring to proceed to Paris for the purpose of attending such a congress.”

Before Du Bois left Paris, he had managed to personally present the assembly’s resolutions to Colonel Edward M. House, President Wilson’s close friend and political adviser. He also had “indirectly” dispatched the document to British Prime Minister David Lloyd George through an intermediary. Nevertheless, he returned to the United States “convinced that Allied officials had effectively sabotaged his attempts to appear before the Peace Conference.”

Monroe Trotter, whose NERL had chosen Madam Walker as a delegate, had fared even worse. Denied a passport, he eventually posed as a cook and stowed away on a freighter, still hoping to arrive in time to lobby for a racial equality clause. But on the very day that he reached Paris, the Allies were sitting around a table at the Petit Trianon at Versailles presenting the German delegation with a draft of the treaty.

The final version of the Treaty of Versailles included no special provisions for the world’s people of color. Germany’s four colonies, not surprisingly, were parceled out between France and Great Britain with no mention of Du Bois’s “international Africa” or Randolph’s “supernational commission.” And although the Japanese delegation had met with Colonel House to discuss a treaty amendment “terminating racial discrimination,” the issue was entirely absent from the document. Throughout the process, Madam Walker and other black Americans had been relegated to the sidelines. Now the only battlefront left was the one at home.