CHAPTER 8

Jailed for Justice

[I]f the government were to punish all those who use the mails to defraud, it would round up those energetic business men who flood the mails with promises to give eternal youth and beauty to aging fat matrons, to make Carusos and Galli Curcis of members of church choirs, and to make masterminds of morons.

E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER
(1926)

WHILE CALLIE HOUSE REJOICED over the positive effect the cotton tax court fight had on the grassroots ex-slave pension movement, federal government officials saw the matter differently. In their view, the cotton tax suit was further evidence of Mrs. House’s arrogance and refusal to submit. At this point, the broad public was concentrating on “the War to End all Wars,” in which Jim Crowed African Americans served. Blacks at home remained economically deprived and subject to lynching and disfranchisement, and in the midst of all this Mrs. House struggled to keep the ex-slave pension movement alive. But government officials by now had decided to stop the movement once and for all. They would break her spirit and end her defiance and the pension cause. They would jail Callie House.¹

Even in the face of this climactic attack, African-American newspapers and civil rights leaders still did not speak out to aid or defend Mrs. House or the pension movement. African-American leaders’ praise was limited to Cornelius Jones; it did not extend to his clients, the ex-slaves. And the endorsement of the reparations effort by a credible star did not translate into increased acceptability for the movement.²

Perhaps the unusual nature of Mrs. House’s role as a leader of the association undermined the group’s acceptance. There had been militant organizations of black women before. As early as 1866, laundresses in Jackson, Mississippi, announced a collective agreement to maintain prices of $1.50 a week and $15 a month for a family’s washing. Eleven years later, women in Galveston, Texas, organized when threatened by Chinese laundries and steam laundries. In 1881, in Atlanta, washerwomen struck, joined by cooks, nurses, and servants. Like these women Callie House was also a laundress and seamstress, and she, too, was poorly educated and working class. Unlike them, however, Mrs. House became the leader of a membership organization of black men and women, one not defined by occupation but an explicit political cause.³

In addition, she was a single head of household, a widow with children. Mrs. House went when and where she pleased to advocate the pension cause, and seemed oblivious to criticism. Perhaps her lack of what Melinda Chateauvert and Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham describe as “respectability” in the education and gendered manners displayed by middle-class contemporaries did not help. However, so-called respectability did not always suffice, as Ida Wells-Barnett, a leader of antilynching campaigns, learned when the founders of the NAACP in 1908 studiously failed to include her. Mary White Ovington, the only woman among the five charter members (which included only one African American, W.E. B. Du Bois), wrote later that Wells-Barnett was a “powerful” personality, “Perhaps not suited to the restraints of organization.” Perhaps, the acknowledged power and influence of Booker T. Washington over everything concerning African Americans played a role in Mrs. House’s isolation. Washington opposed the pension movement as undermining his accommodationist, up-by-the-bootstraps philosophy. Perhaps, independently, African-American leaders and newspapers simply believed the federal government’s claims that the entire pension movement was misguided and probably crooked besides.⁴

For whatever reasons, African-American leaders uttered no objections when in February 1916, federal prosecutors used the strategy they had practiced against Jones. Instead of relying on fraud orders to strangle the movement, they decided to prosecute Callie House. Essentially the government punished her for exercising her constitutional right to petition the government and teach the other ex-slaves to do so. Mrs. House, like Cornelius Jones, was charged with obtaining money or property by false or fraudulent pretenses or promises, by “placing or causing to be placed, any letter…in any post office.” She had, in the government prosecutors’ view, used the mails to promise that which the postmaster considered impossible to perform and which she had no intention of performing. Using the mails to defraud exacted a penalty of $1,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years or both. Callie House and the association saw the freedpeople as victims of slavery whose exploitation needed reparation. Federal officials also characterized ex-slaves as victimized—but by the ex-slave pension movement.⁵

However, federal officials still had no evidence that House actually intended to obtain funds by claiming Congress had passed a pension bill or that she had assured payment to the exslaves. Then, in February 1916, Alexander Pitts, the U.S. attorney in Mobile, Alabama, suggested to the Justice Department that the newer modified fraud law language could possibly be used to prosecute Mrs. House. This, federal officials reasoned, would kill the association once and for all.⁶

Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson, a former Texas congressman appointed by President Wilson, agreed. Burleson wrote Attorney General Thomas Gregory that the association had been “investigated for years and now was the time to get an indictment in order to close the case.” He ordered the U.S. attorney in Nashville, Lee Douglas, to investigate and to prepare indictments in the case. He also ordered Mrs. House and other association officers arrested. Burleson calculated that the arrests would lead to some confessions and this would place the government in the advantageous position of not having to prove a violation. Douglas had no qualms about violating House’s citizenship rights. He believed she was automatically guilty because the movement’s cause was impossible. In the charges he included the unfounded, unsupported assertion of his belief that “most, if not all, of the profits of this scheme have been collected and converted by Callie House.”⁷

Douglas presented the case against House to a federal grand jury in Nashville in March 1916. As before, he claimed she had collected dues and fees knowing that pensions would never be awarded. He introduced no evidence of her wealth or income and nothing on the association’s expenditures for lobbying efforts, its lawsuit, officers’ salaries, or locally funded burials and medical care. Essentially, he simply speculated that Mrs. House had used organizational funds for herself. Three months later, the all-white, male grand jury returned an indictment charging House with violating the postal laws of the United States. The indictment charged her with obtaining money from a number of ex-slaves “by means of false and fraudulent pretenses” sent through the mails of the United States. Callie House, individually and in conspiracy with others in the organization, according to the indictment, had acted to obtain money from “ignorant, illiterate, aged, and credulous” freed-men, by means of false and fraudulent pretenses. House had sent through the mails the Association’s printed matter that used a “descriptive insignia” that could appear to “ignorant, illiterate” African Americans to represent a connection to the U.S. government, according to the charges.

The indictment alleged that Mrs. House had guaranteed the payment of pensions and promised that holders of certificates issued by the Association would be paid before non-certificate holders. The indictment identified no one who had actually been victimized by the association’s alleged fraudulent scheme. Instead, the government charged that Mrs. House had mailed a misleading circular to Mrs. Alice Williams, a black woman, at the Hotel Imperial in Knoxville, Tennessee. The supposedly misleading circular contained an eagle in the upper-left-hand corner but included nothing regarding a forthcoming federal pension payment. Apparently, by federal standards the condemning words from Mrs. House were that “the national convention was represented from every section of the government by delegates and many proxies.”⁸

In preparation for the trial, U.S. attorney Douglas used photographic copies of House’s handwriting to compare it with other Association materials. The Association’s membership badge also became evidence. This badge consisted “of a scroll from which is suspended a crescent upon which is the legend National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Assn.” A star within the crescent read “of the U.S.A.” Projecting the worst possible interpretation of Mrs. House’s actions, Douglas described the use of patriotic symbols to represent the organization as a means of fooling a largely illiterate membership.

The official badge of the association. It was cited by the prosecution against House as misleading members into thinking the group was an official government body because of its design containing the words “of the U.S.A.”

The complaint seemed to suggest that the government was unaware that national political parties and other organizations routinely used the American eagle on promotional literature.⁹

On Thursday afternoon, August 3,1916, Deputy U.S. Marshal James M. Southall arrested Callie House at her home in South Nashville. The Tennessee American, in reporting the arrest, described her as “a dusky woman of ample avoirdupois.” In addition to noting Mrs. House’s weight, the paper invoked from the grave the judgment of the Wizard of Tuskegee against her, surmising, “It is said the organization was denounced by Booker T. Washington a short time before his death.”¹⁰

If House had enriched herself by collecting thousands of hard-earned dollars from the old ex-slaves, her lifestyle showed no signs of it. Her family still lived in the same house in the same poor working-class neighborhood she had lived in since coming to Nashville. The Association had to scrape together resources to pay her travel expenses, and her grown children worked as laborers, pressers, servants, or taking in laundry. After Mrs. House had spent two weeks in jail, her son, Thomas House, persuaded a local pawnbroker and bondsman to post her $3,000 bond. U.S. District Judge Edward T. Sanford set a trial date in September 1916.¹¹

In the days leading up to the trial, House hired H. P. Stephens, a local white attorney, to defend her. Prosecutor Douglas exulted to his superiors that this was good news. He thought Stephens had persuaded her to enter a guilty plea in exchange for a light sentence. Stephens, who had represented Callie House for some years with federal investigators, knew that long ago they had determined to punish her and that no amount of information concerning the legality of association activities would dissuade the government from its attack. Apparently this was enough for those who had dealt with Stephens to assume he would advise her to plea bargain. Prosecutor Douglas, certain of her acceptance, told various postal and pension officials that they would not have to appear in court.¹²

However, the government’s plans went awry. If Stephens did urge Mrs. House to plead guilty in exchange for a light sentence, it was to no avail. When House stood before Judge San-ford, she denied the charges against her. Douglas angrily reported to his superiors in Washington that she “denied any moral turpitude.” Judge Sanford seemed to believe that she was puzzled about the actual stages of congressional action. Callie House asserted that “she was merely rendering a service to the negroes in making it possible with little effort to secure the money the Congress had appropriated for them.” Since she denied any guilt, Judge Sanford rejected the attorneys’ statements that she wished to plead guilty and ordered her placed on trial.¹³

In his eagerness to put Mrs. House away, Douglas did not reckon on her independence or Judge Sanford’s predilections. Edward T. Sanford, later an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1923 to 1930, is remembered, if at all, for his majority opinion in the 1925 case Gitlow v. United States. This First Amendment case was the first to apply one of the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to the states. Sanford saw himself as a benevolent judge who overtly tried to act with scrupulous fairness no matter the status of the client. He gloried in being called the most impartial judge in the South.¹⁴

Like other federal judges, Sanford came from an upper-middle-class background. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on July 23, 1865, he had the best education available. He went to private schools, the University of Tennessee, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School, where he served as editor of the Harvard Law Review. After some years of corporate practice, in 1905 he agreed to serve as an assistant attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department, litigating major cases.¹⁵

Sanford was certainly not a civil rights activist, but he opposed lynching and demonstrated as a prosecutor a conscious interest in avoiding racial bias. During Theodore Roosevelt’s administration Sanford tried a Chattanooga sheriff, his deputies, and members of a lynch mob for the lynching of a black defendant, despite a stay issued by the U.S. Supreme Court. Douglas reported to his superiors that when Mrs. House appeared before Judge Sanford, she would plead guilty for the light sentence of “one year and one day in a penitentiary—where I do not know but probably Atlanta.” Instead Mrs. House denied any wrongdoing; her lawyer stated that she knew bills had been in Congress and committees and told everyone the “business has not been completed.” Sanford decided Mrs. House’s letters might mean nothing more than the Association needed to keep working until passage of the legislation. Considering the factual dispute, he decided he had no alternative but to set the matter for trial.¹⁶ Sanford had prior experience with fraud cases and had shown a concern for keeping the defendant’s circumstances in mind. In one case, after a jury found a defendant guilty of mail fraud, Sanford imposed a sentence of eighteen months. Upon being informed that the defendant’s wife, who had repeatedly fainted in court, had heart trouble, Sanford reduced the sentence to a fine.¹⁷

Federal prosecutors saw no need to devote more resources to jailing Mrs. House. They viewed her refusal to plead guilty as more evidence of her arrogance. Severely disappointed at Sanford’s refusal to agree with their strategy, the U.S. attorney’s office tried to persuade Stephens to make her return to court again and, without comment, simply to plead guilty. House continued to refuse, and Sanford set a new trial date for March 22 or 29, 1917.¹⁸

In order to pressure a guilty plea from Mrs. House, the government indicted Reverend Augustus Clark, an agent for the association, hoping he would implicate her. Clark had gathered petitions and organized chapters in Texas and Louisiana. For this organizing work, he was charged with impersonating an officer of the U.S. government. A letter introduced in his case was later used as a major piece of evidence against House. Special Pension Examiner U. A. Biller, operating from New Orleans, reported that he had attempted to question Clark at his Texas home but found he had left to organize chapters in Louisiana. Bon Wier, Texas, chapter members of the association said that Clark had recruited them and collected their dues but said nothing about being a government official. Biller described Clark as “shrewd and unscrupulous” and believed that if he had been “imposed upon” by Callie House “he was willing to be imposed on provided he got his money.” The official reported that he had obtained “one letter from Clark’s niece that Callie D. House had written him” that could be used to prosecute Clark and House.¹⁹

Even without the evidence of the Bon Wier chapter members, the federal government charged Clark with obtaining money by impersonating an officer of the government. Prosecuting Clark’s case was Clarence Merritt, the well-connected son of a Texas county sheriff and state legislator. Merritt, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1916, had supported the nomination of Woodrow Wilson through forty-six ballots. The president had rewarded him with his job as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas. Merritt eagerly joined in the Post Office Department, Justice Department, and Pension Bureau effort to stop the ex-slave movement once and for all.²⁰

Merritt convened a grand jury and gathered witnesses from Bon Wier, along with government officials, to testify against Clark. Merritt charged that Clark had told nine ex-slaves that he had the authority to enroll their names so that they might receive a government pension. Like other agents, Clark always carried the association’s circulars bearing the insignia of an eagle. The members signed their names and each paid him a membership fee of one dollar.

In the trial before Judge Gordon James Russell, Merritt tried to prove that Clark had collected some $200 to $400 from ex-slaves in the area, implying that they would receive pensions from already appropriated funds. Even though the postal inspector found no one to testify that Clark had said he was a government agent, Merritt alleged that what he termed “bent and enfeebled ‘uncles’ and old black ‘mammies’” began to complain when they received no pension payments. He offered as evidence the letter the inspector had taken from Clark’s niece: “mailed on the Nashville & Memphis R.P.O. on June 6, 1916, addressed to the accused at Bon Wier, Texas, which is in the handwriting of Callie D. House, of Nashville, Tenn., and bears her genuine signature.” According to Merritt, Mrs. House had advised Clark on how he should handle the cases of persons “who did not reside in places where there was a sufficient number of victims to constitute a club.” Although the association itself was victimized by government harassment, Merritt, like government officials before him, characterized the ex-slaves as victims of those who attempted to organize them to demand that the government remedy its continued mass victimization. Using the term “ex-slaves” made sense to House, for it focused on their enslavement. However, the critical public and government officials used the term to reinforce the idea that the recruited members were ignorant, childlike consumers who needed protection from the association.

Callie House’s handwritten letter to Clark introduced by Merritt actually stated something quite different from what he charged. She said, “I tell the people that there has been something done in Congress for the ex-slaves, regardless of what anyone says, white or colored, but the business has not been completed. If it had, we would not have appointed you [Reverend A. Clark] as agent to give the ex-slaves a chance to get in the movement before the work is finished, which we are expecting at any time.” She expressed her hopes and her optimism that legislation would eventually pass.

Merritt focused on House’s statement that “there has been something done in Congress” rather than “the business has not been completed.” He argued that the letter promised the impossible; that the bill had passed and if ex-slaves became members, they would receive payment. He rejected the alternative interpretation, acknowledged by Judge Sanford during Callie House’s failed plea-bargain proceedings. Sanford’s interpretation had been otherwise. In his view her language meant that Mrs. House knew bills had been introduced repeatedly, hoped eventually one would pass, and organized ex-slaves to support the effort in their own interest. Callie House’s letter to Clark “authorized him to canvass all of Texas and four parishes of Louisiana for the purpose of organizing ex-slaves.”²¹

To encourage a belief that Clark’s guilt could be presumed, Merritt falsely claimed that Mrs. House had pled guilty before Judge Sanford. However, Merritt’s flimsy case against Clark collapsed before House’s trial was held. Merritt had presented no evidence that Clark had ever claimed to be a government agent and the letter, which had been seen by the allegedly defrauded members, made no such statements. Clark, described in the press as the “aged negro” defendant did not try to rebut Merritt’s case. He assumed Merritt was telling the truth when he said Mrs. House had, for some strategic reason, pleaded guilty. Consequently, using no lawyer and pleading his own case, Clark portrayed himself as a “victim” of House. He claimed to be the “innocent hireling” of Mrs. House, a black Amazon. “Uncle Tomming,” Clark invoked the racial paternalism of the white jury; he said he was “nothing but an unsophisticated old darky, unversed in the ways of the world and was the innocent dupe of Callie House, the notorious Negro from Nashville.” Paternalistic powers should protect a “silly negro” from this already convicted felon, pleaded Clark, not punish him.²²

Five months after Clark’s April trial, Mrs. House appeared in court as her three-day trial began on the fourth Monday of September 1917. The Tennessean, unsurprisingly, sensationalized the trial, calling her, as the prosecutors did throughout, “Aunt Callie,” in keeping with the time when black adults were “Aunt” or “Uncle” to whites. Under the headline “Aunt Callie, Head of Ex-Slave Relief Body Ready for Trial,” the subheading read “Two hundred and Twenty Pound Negro Woman Gloriously Garbed, Center of Attraction in Federal Court—Members of Association Charge Fraud.” She might have been “gloriously garbed” but it was the federal government, not members of the association, that was charging fraud. The paper went on to describe Mrs. House as discomfited briefly by the narrow doorway because of her weight. In her new black silk dress, “her velvet Merry Widow with the little touch of lavender, had become tilted to a decidedly undignified angle, Aunt Callie had begun to sweat.” The audience, “distracted by other cases being disposed of gave her time to compose herself sit at the counsel’s table and to take out a fan whereupon she assumed an air of bored tolerance.”²³

In the hope that they would call themselves victims of Mrs. House, as Augustus Clark had in the Texas case, the prosecutors presented Reverend William Atkins of Lynchburg, Virginia, the president of the association, and Reverend Doc Parchment of Okolona, Mississippi, as witnesses. These men, unlike Clark, knew that Mrs. House had not pleaded guilty. Reverend Parchment attested to the authenticity of the certificate of membership beautifully embossed with the words “Love One Another” and stamped with a golden seal. The certificate indicated that the membership fees would be used to “aid the movement in securing the passage of the Ex-Slave Bounty and Pension bill” and to “aid the sick and bury the dead.”

The Tennessean reported that “The Rev. Doc was not quite certain just when it was Aunt Callie had led him to believe he was to receive the pension funds from the government.” But letters exchanged indicated he should not be “discouraged.” He testified that he could think of no evidence of fraud.²⁴

Reverend Atkins’s testimony was also a “sore disappointment” to the prosecution. He had attended the movement’s conventions, heard the financial accounting, and observed the allocation of funds and swore in court to “Everything having been open and above board.” Affirming the association’s commitment to an open process and defending the organization’s operating procedures, Reverend Atkins testified that he saw nothing wrong with Callie House’s presence on the committees that made recommendations to the association’s convention so long as the convention approved the work. Government officials countered, telling the court that the fraud order was issued after “many certificates had been sent to the Pension Bureau by ex-slaves who insisted on having their bounties and benefits paid.” However, the government prosecutors presented no evidence of any ex-slaves who had been told by House that they could collect a pension.²⁵

Reverend J. W. Clift of Alabama testified about the Petersburg, Virginia, convention that pretended it had “expelled” House and “I. S. Dixon [Dickerson] Callie’s right-hand man in an effort to satisfy the government after the issuance of the fraud order.” He and the other Association officers told of how they had reorganized as recommended by attorney Robert Abraham Lincoln Dick in the hope of having the fraud order lifted.

Callie House, on the witness stand, “maintained an air of self assurance throughout several hours of examination and grilling cross examination,” according to the Tennessean.²⁶ She answered the prosecution’s questions about the association, trying to interject explanations about their local chapters’ work. Mrs. House testified how, despite the federal harassment, the chapters had continued to bury the dead and aid the sick, while agents and members also had continued to collect petitions. The prosecutor, Lee Douglas, pressed her to tell how money had been collected and sent to the national treasurer. She explained that since the imposition of the fraud order had been imposed, they had used most of the national office funds for travel expenses. The association paid House $50 per month— when they could afford to. She insisted that “she had not received yearly more than about $150.00 over and above the expenses connected with the national office expenses.”²⁷

The prosecution focused on damning the Association’s political activities as fraudulent with no attention to the local charitable work of the chapters. Prosecutor Douglas denounced the movement’s “so-called” national conventions and “so-called” reports from local clubs, saying they deceived the “ignorant and illiterate negroes.” However, even with the two typed letters, the only letters not in Mrs. House’s handwriting in the government’s files, the evidence was inconclusive. In the absence of any evidence of income or expenditures, any funds collected by the national organization could easily have been used to pay for the agents; expenses for House and other national officers; for the conventions held in every state where they were active; and for mailings and circulars.²⁸

In his charge to the jury after the three-day trial, Judge San-ford explained the government’s theory that she had used the mails to defraud and collected large sums. Defense attorney Stephens argued that she engaged in bona fide work to gain a worthwhile legal, legislative objective, whether she succeeded or not. The prosecution insisted Mrs. House was guilty and that she had conceived of the organization for the purpose of defrauding persons, “by making it appear ostensibly that persons would receive a benefit, when she alone would profit thereby.” The all-white, male jury found her guilty. The offense was punishable by a fine of $1,000 or imprisonment for up to five years or both. Mrs. House lacked the resources to pay a fine. When she stood before Judge Sanford, he sentenced her to only one year in prison, apparently no more persuaded of her criminality than at the failed plea-bargain proceeding.²⁹

Callie House’s conviction, like the story of the hundreds of thousands of African Americans who sought pensions, was mostly ignored. The Nashville papers reported her sentencing, but the papers around the nation focused on the war and preparedness and overlooked the story. Those stories about African Americans included the Chicago Tribune’s: “Negro Women Car Washers Take Men’s Places in Chicago Plant.” The only discussion of “civil rights” was actually about efforts to pass a bill guaranteeing insurance for soldiers who paid no premiums during the war or up to one year thereafter. African-American newspapers totally ignored the pension cause and the case.³⁰

Outside the courtroom on the day of Mrs. House’s sentencing Reverend Atkins commented that without her, “the guiding spirit,” he had no idea what would become of the association. His expressed sentiment affirmed what everyone involved knew, Callie House was “the secret” on which the organization depended. Poor African Americans gathered outside the courtroom murmuring aloud as Reverend Atkins cried, “She kept it alive.” The collection of petitions, the finances, the local chapters, the lobbying and litigation—Callie House had kept it alive.³¹

In November 1917, upon the instructions of Attorney General Thomas Gregory, “the colored woman” Callie D. House, age fifty-two, entered the Missouri State Prison at Jefferson City, Missouri, to serve a one-year sentence. Prison records described her as “Negro,” “Baptist, Lecturer,” “educated,” and with black hair, brown eyes, and a “nut brown complexion.”

She was sent to the Jefferson City prison because the federal government had no facility available for female prisoners. Mrs. House was lucky that she was not incarcerated in a southern state prison. Female state prisoners were whipped, sexually abused, made the personal servants of contractors, and put to hard work in mines and farms.³²

About six months after House’s incarceration, the federal government sentenced another female political prisoner to the Jefferson City facility. This woman, born to Jewish parents in Rochester, New York, also a seamstress by trade, was sentenced for protesting the military draft. One of the most famous radicals of her age, Emma Goldman had become an anarchist, war resister, sympathizer with the Soviet Union, and feminist. In the women’s wing, where these two activists lived, two thirds of their fellow prisoners were African Americans.³³

Callie House was placed in the Jefferson City, Missouri, Penitentiary Women’s Wing because there was no federal prison for women.

Mrs. House left no written record of her time in prison, but Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life, prison records, and other materials describe the conditions in detail. Located in Jefferson City, the state capital, about one hundred miles from St. Louis on bluffs overlooking the Missouri River, the state prison was the largest in the United States. The facility housed 2,300 inmates, mostly male. In a period when prison reform was a major political and social welfare concern, Goldman saw the prison as “a model in many respects.” Compared to the “pest holes of 1893” on Blackwells Island in New York City, where she served a previous sentence, the Missouri prison cells had double the space.³⁴

However, the Jefferson City cells lacked light and ventilation. The prisoners were made more miserable by the warden’s refusal to open the corridor windows except in very hot weather. But Goldman liked it that the prisoners had single cells and did not have to share. Still, the facility was overcrowded, with low sanitary standards, bad working conditions in the shops, poor medical services, and harsh disciplinary methods. The facility had no educational programs beyond two months of training to sew clothes for state profit.³⁵

The women’s department housing Goldman, House, and ninety other female prisoners consisted of a long building with a cage of cells, four high and two deep facing in opposite directions in the center. Each cell measured seven feet wide, eight feet deep, and seven feet high, with solid steel ceilings, cement floors, and steel-barred fronts. Each had a toilet, a sink with running cold water, and a steel bunk fastened to the wall, with two bags of straw, one to use for a mattress, the other for a pillow. The remainder of the furnishings consisted of a crude table, chair, broom, and dustpan. Each woman received raspy brown muslin prison garb to replace her own clothes, which the matrons confiscated. The dresses, long and wide in 1890s style, fit like a tent. Cheap, uncomfortable shoes completed the outer garments.³⁶

Emma Goldman was imprisoned for her antiwar efforts and served at the same time as House. Goldman wrote a memoir in which she described the prison.

Discipline and routine, the hallmarks of prevailing penal theory, governed the women’s movements day and night. Awakened every morning at 5:00 A.M. except Sunday, the prisoners ate breakfast at 6:15.

Prison food, never wholesome or sufficient to sustain the laboring prisoners, was often rancid, cold, and infested with insects. The inmates especially hated Tuesdays and Fridays, when they had “fish that was neither fresh nor plentiful.” The prisoners ate in a large, gloomy, cockroach-infested dining room with rows of long wooden tables and benches each seating eight women. They used rusty tin dishes and cast-iron knives and forks. Breakfast consisted of corn syrup, bread, “hash,” and weak coffee. For lunch they had “meat, vegetable, bread and water, and supper a light meal of bread, and perhaps stewed fruit.” Almost all the food contained vermin.³⁷

Work started in the sewing shop by 6:30 A.M., continuing until lunch. The inmates then had a rest period from 11:30 to 12:30 and then went back to work again until 4:30, the end of their nine-hour workday. After work, supper lasted until 6:00 P.M. and then the guards allowed the prisoners to walk outside in the yard. Friday after work, they cleaned their cells and bathed. On Sunday they ate breakfast later, then had church services and an outdoor exercise period. The inmates had to remain silent and could talk only during limited recreation periods. The men’s wing had a library, but women could not use it for the matron feared they could not be trusted to go there alone.³⁸

The nine-hour shift six days a week in the sewing shop was consistent with the period when workingmen were required to put in a nine-hour day. House and Goldman were both seamstresses. However, the inmates trained two months to sew wearing apparel the state contracted for revenue. The prisoners received assigned tasks, or quotas, of work to complete each day. They sewed jackets, overalls, jumpers, and suspenders for delivery by the state to retailers. Operating in a double row of old “out of date” sewing machines in a narrow, badly lighted room, each inmate would be assigned to sew 45 to 100 jackets or 9 to 18 dozen suspenders in a day. In the clothing, the jailed women sewed the labels of private firms across the country. Goldman found the work onerous and tedious.³⁹

G. R. Gilvin, the acting warden, pressed the women hard to produce their daily quotas. To compound the harsh labor conditions, the state prisoners received time off their sentences for good behavior if they made or exceeded their tasks. But this promise did not automatically extend to federal prisoners such as Callie House and Emma Goldman. The shop foreman, an unnamed twenty-one-year-old who had been in the job since age sixteen, would insult and intimidate the women verbally to keep them hard at work. The shop matron displayed a considerate attitude toward the inmates, but the head matron, Lilah Smith, in her forties and an employee of penal institutions since her teens, exuded hostility, except toward those who became her favorites.⁴⁰

The earlier practice of flogging the prisoners had been dropped for the more “enlightened” practice of isolation in a cell for forty-eight hours from Saturday to Monday on a bread-and-water diet. The worst punishment consisted of the blind cell, an entirely dark hole four by eight feet in size. With one blanket, two slices of bread, and two cups of water a day, a prisoner might be kept there from three to twenty-two days.⁴¹

Emma Goldman appears not to have noticed Callie House among the sixty other inmates of color. Goldman described her fellow prisoners as “poor wretches of the world of poverty and drabness.” She wrote, “Colored or white, most of them had been driven to crime by conditions that had greeted them at birth.” She saw them as victims of economics and/or society and not as possible political actors like her. An unnamed “Chinese girl,” imprisoned for having killed her husband, warned Goldman against being so friendly with the “colored” inmates, whom she thought “inferior and dishonest.” Challenging the woman’s racial stereotyping, Goldman reminded her that Chinese men and women had been attacked in California by mobs, just as “colored” people were in the South. The “Chinese girl” said she knew this but whites had been mistaken because Chinese people “no smell. No ignorant, different people.”⁴²

Goldman relied on the African-American prisoners, who helped her in “making the full task” quota. “The kindness of several coloured girls in the shop,” plus her five cents per jacket paid to these “girls” who usually finished their quotas an hour earlier than others, permitted Goldman to finish her shift. She thought perhaps they had greater physical strength or had done the work longer, but she did note that African-American women did the work much better than the white women. Most white prisoners could not afford a nickel to pay for help, but Goldman lent them money since they would not accept payment because she shared food and books with them.⁴³

Goldman declared that she “never had any prejudice against coloured people,” but the race question had not been part of her politics. And she apparently missed the opportunity for sharing with her fellow federal political prisoner Callie House and learning about her fight for reparations.⁴⁴

The foreman graded the prisoners’ work. The highest score, “A,” resulted in as much as half time off one’s sentence. Although sentence reduction applied only to state prisoners, Mrs. House somehow gained early release for her good work and was discharged from prison on August 1, 1918.⁴⁵

The indictment of Callie House claimed that she had “fraudulently converted money to her own use” but noted that the government could not determine the “amount of money collected or converted.” The prosecution introduced no evidence of wealth. Nashville property deeds record that Mrs. House and her son Thomas House jointly purchased a lot in 1909 for $200. They paid $35 down and agreed to pay $4 a month for forty months, and then $5 for the last month plus 6 percent interest for the property on Currey Street in South Nashville. Seven months after her release from prison, Thomas sold his mother the lot for one dollar and “in consideration of the love and affection” he held for her. Whatever Mrs. House did in the ex-slave pension movement, she and her family did not profit financially from it.⁴⁶

The federal government expected to destroy the reparations idea embodied in the ex-slave movement by jailing Callie House. But hundreds of thousands of African Americans had the same idea. Too many people had seen and heard Callie House and believed in the principle. “She kept it alive for years,” but other African Americans were willing to defend it in her stead.