CHAPTER 1

“To Hustle While You’re Waiting”

“All things come to him who waits.”

But that is merely stating

One feature of the case—you’ve got

To hustle while you’re waiting.

—DR. WILLIAM HENRY JOHNSON (1833–1918)¹

In the late morning of August 29, 1939, James H. Williams stood at the center of the upper concourse at Grand Central Terminal, waiting for a writer he’d agreed to talk to. Williams was a tawny-hued man of average height and medium build. The grayed temples below his cap betrayed his sixty-one years—thirty of which he’d spent surveying this station with keen-eyed assurance. As he waited, he occasionally blew into the pea whistle in his gloved right hand to signal his uniformed men to move to various parts of the terminal. The men were Negro baggage porters—a sizable army, several hundred strong, of rail station attendants—called Red Caps. The words CHIEF ATTENDANT in gold-embroidered letters above the visor of Williams’s own red cap announced his rank, as did the rose or carnation that he daily wore in the lapel of his double-breasted coat. What was not part of his uniform, but common among men of his age, was a black mourning band hiked up over the right sleeve of his dark coat—it’s not known who he was mourning.

He glanced at the clock atop the circular information booth. The great captivating orb, inset with four milk-glass faces, gave the kiosk the look of an ornate jewel box made of stone, glass, and gold. Its beauty was perhaps what made this clock the most popular meeting spot in the station, though Williams’s appreciation of it was less romantic than practical. He prided himself on being punctual, and could easily read the clock from most anywhere in the great hall—always ticking toward the arrival of someone he was due to meet.

This morning it was the writer. Since his appointment as chief attendant in 1909, Williams had become used to interviews. America’s number-one Red Cap, as a prominent railroad labor columnist acknowledged him to be, rarely had a day when he wasn’t “besieged by some newspaper reporter, magazine writer, or other journalistic wag.”² Although they often spoke to him about his daily duties as Grand Central’s Chief Red Cap, he just as often suspected they were trying to coax him to tell how he came to be the first Negro Red Cap porter in the country. A seductive urban legend held that on Labor Day 1890, a colored teenage porter named James Williams attached a strip of red flannel to his hat to stand out in the crowded old Grand Central Depot. This conspicuous headwear eventually became uniform for the men hustling bags from railway waiting rooms to the trains and vice versa.³ But that story was muddled in myth: the Red Cap system was started in 1895. Though Williams had been the first colored man whom Grand Central ever employed as a Red Cap, his hiring occurred in April 1903, and he wasn’t made chief attendant until 1909. Still, he was more apt to shrug off credit for being the country’s original Red Cap than either to own it or disclaim it. Williams knew this origin story was a considerable source of pride for many, even if it was only an amusing novelty to some. “That’s what they say, and they’ve been saying it for some time,” he told one reporter, kindling the mystery.⁴

Williams now eyed a tall dark young man pressing toward him through the heavily trafficked concourse, and removed his glove to extend a handshake. The two had never met, but Williams likely knew something of Abram Hill by reputation. At twenty-nine years old, Hill was a rising playwright in community theater. He had caught the attention of Rose McClendon, one of Broadway’s most esteemed black actresses, whose troupe was poised to begin rehearsing Hill’s latest play, On Strivers Row. Hailed as “the first high comedy of Negro manners,” the play was set in an exclusive Harlem enclave in the West 130s.⁵ It depicted, in Hill’s own words, a black bourgeoisie self-absorbed with its own upward mobility and ostentatious status: “Neighbor competed with the neighbor to outdo one another. Musicals, teas, and soirees set the social vogue in their homes, whereas yacht parties, theater, concerts, opera-attending, weekend retreats at resorts and summer homes—added luster to the doings of the tribe.”⁶

The comedy’s setting was sure to provoke Williams’s curiosity—and maybe a little discomfort, too. The Chief was one of the first Negroes to move into Strivers’ Row in 1919—when restrictions against black tenants had lifted—and had called the neighborhood home for a dozen years, having sold his house there only four years earlier. Newspaper reports that Hill was the subject of rumors and threatened lawsuits—despite his insistence that his play was based only on his vivid imagination—may have fueled Williams’s wariness. Of course, he understood that such controversies were often cooked up to enhance ticket sales. Still, the prospect of discussing old friends on Strivers’ Row might have made him feel disloyal.

Despite his satirical aim, Hill himself lived at 795 St. Nicholas Avenue, at the southwest corner of West 150th Street, in Sugar Hill, Harlem’s other prestigious enclave that had opened to blacks (as white residents fled) a few years after Strivers’ Row. The two affluent areas perhaps represented a generational divide between Harlem’s old and new guards—the former a bit more staid, the latter more freewheeling. During the early 1930s, the worst years of the Great Depression, Hill, his mother, and his sister entertained as many as seventy-five people at their annual summer bridge parties. Hill was relatively prosperous during those lean years, having worked as an administrative assistant to the national director of the Federal Theater, a product of the Federal Writers’ Project (a program of the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration, or WPA).

In 1938 much of Harlem had eagerly anticipated the Federal Writers’ Project’s “Portrait of Harlem,” a chapter of New York Panorama, a book of the WPA’s state-by-state American Guide Series. It discussed the city’s African-American history from earliest colonial days under Dutch and British rule to its transformation into the world’s largest urban Negro population. The WPA hired some of the country’s best-known black writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Richard Wright, to produce its guidebooks.⁷ But some found the “Portrait of Harlem” irksome. Historian Dr. Willis N. Huggins, an early proponent of African and African-American studies in American schools, criticized its troubling oversights: “Neither Chief [Wesley] Williams of the Fire Department nor Lieutenant Battle of the Police Department [is] mentioned.” Chief Williams’s perplexity was predictable: fire battalion chief Wesley Williams was his son, and police lieutenant Samuel J. Battle—“Jesse,” to all who knew him—as dear to him as a son, had been one of his Red Caps. Both of those men had broken the color barrier on the city’s civil service forces.

Williams might have murmured a few conspiratorial amens to Huggins’s litany of questionable omissions in “Portrait of Harlem.” Where were the scenes of Harlem? Where were the educators? Where the “meritorious women” like the first self-made millionaire entrepreneur Madame C. J. Walker—“whereas [Josephine] Baker, who never was a part of Harlem life is lauded.” Huggins bemoaned the absence of praise for the black press—such as the New York Age, Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, New Journal and Guide, and the old Messenger—that reported on life in Harlem. He took a dim view of holding up “cultists and fanatics” to represent Harlem while the chapter made “no mention of sounder religious leaders” such as Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., Charles T. Walker, William H. Brooks, Lorenzo H. King, William Lloyd Imes, or Rev. David Elliott “D. E.” Tobias—several of whom Williams and his family had personally interacted with through the years. Like Huggins, Williams could easily regard such curious omissions and questionable inclusions as profoundly disappointing for a government-sponsored publication focusing on Negro life in Harlem.⁸

Hill’s mandate, in coming to the station, was to write profiles of Harlem’s many notable Negro achievers, colorful characters, and vibrant institutions. His assigned subjects included the nightclub owner Ed Smalls; the fashion plate Blanche Dunn; the outré Hamilton Lodge transvestite ball; and Williams. According to Hill, Williams agreed to give an interview only “after I promised him that the write up would not be on the personal side.” Williams politely but firmly shifted any question remotely about his private life “into something concerning his work and his many workers.” He protested self-effacingly that there were “far greater men of his race to write about” than himself, but Hill sensed a certain pride during their meeting: “Of one thing he is sure. He has proved that the old superstition that Negroes would not work under a Negro is false.”

Before long Chief Williams checked the big clock. In his characteristically gracious yet decisive manner, he excused himself from Hill, as an important traveler was soon due. He directed the young man to the New York Central Publicity Department over on Lexington Avenue. Hill conveyed the awkwardness of their meeting in a note he attached to his typed interview file: “Chief Williams was not in a very talkative mood.”

“Well, everybody has to make a living,” Williams said to Hill, then turned and disappeared through the crowd into the station.⁹

Around noon on Thursday, May 15, 1873, a throng of the city’s black citizens assembled at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. They had come to celebrate the passage of a New York Assembly bill that strengthened their rights more than did a recent federal civil rights bill. The citizens included some two hundred men of the Grant and Colfax Cavalry; about one hundred fifty from the Skidmore Guard; a Pioneer Corps from Jersey City; and several colored lodges of Odd Fellows, Freemasons, and Sons of Malta. There were also representatives from a coachmen’s association, the Sabbath School of the AME Bethel Church, and benevolent societies of various monikers. As they settled into place, a long line of carriages pulled up behind them conveying leading black citizens and prominent friends of the civil rights movement. Most notable was Dr. William Henry Johnson, an Albany figure who, as chairman of the State Central Committee of Colored Citizens, a grassroots organization, had spearheaded the New York bill. The state bill was a swatch of legislation stitched to various acts passed in congressional sessions between 1870 and 1871, intended to enforce the rights and protections that had been promised to blacks in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth federal amendments.

Harried black food countermen kept up with the exigent demands of hungry railroad passengers, 1868. Library of Congress.

On February 1, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln had approved the joint resolution of Congress submitting the proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the states. The document declared, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Though the new law formally abolished slavery, the potent phrase “except as a punishment for crime” was an explicit deal-breaker. The provision allowed states to mete out servitude as punishment, and it also disabused emancipated Negroes of their notions of out-and-out freedom.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed. In addition, it forbade states to deny any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Abolitionists were constantly at odds with the fact that the amendment lacked explicit wording to prevent states from denying the right to vote based on race.

The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870, granted African-American men the right to vote by declaring that the “right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” But this promise would not be fully realized for almost a century. Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent intimidation, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise eligible black voters. Only with the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 would the majority of African Americans in the South be able to register to vote. Regardless of what the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments guaranteed, their cumulative weight did not nullify common practices of racial exclusion, exploitation, and selective criminalization.

So on this celebratory day when all had assembled at the intersection, Chief Marshal George F. Mack, a prominent black leader strongly allied with President Ulysses S. Grant, led the parade of about three thousand people.¹⁰ The picturesque line “was gay with uniforms, badges, and regalia, trim and orderly in arrangement,” as it commenced southward to the musical accompaniment of a twenty-piece band (and the Skidmore Guards’ own eight-piece drum corps). The procession moved down Fifth Avenue to Spring Street, where it turned east to Broadway and returned northward to Fourteenth Street—the demarcation in those days between “downtown” and “uptown”—snaking their way through the streets until they reached 24th Street, where they marched the two long blocks to Fifth Avenue.

The marchers commanded the grand Fifth Avenue for almost a mile until their parade came astride the great stone walls of the Croton Aqueduct’s Receiving Basin at 42nd Street. From there, the former site of the Colored Orphan Asylum was a void, but was animated by an indelible memory: the asylum had been burned to the ground on the first day of the infamous Draft Riots. On July 13, 1863, some fifty thousand whites—mostly mobs of working-class Irish enraged by new federal laws to draft men into the Union Army—enacted a campaign of antiblack terror and lynchings. Though all the asylum’s children and staff escaped the blaze, the building was the most famous collateral destruction of the riot. Even a full decade later, the marchers could not foresee that the site would still endure for generations to come as the country’s greatest example of urban unrest.

From Fifth Avenue, the pilgrimage turned east again, to Madison Avenue, where once more it descended for almost a mile to 26th Street, where it suddenly paused. From a stand in front of the Union League Club, Maj.-Gen. James W. Husted (a chief champion of New York’s new civil rights bill) reviewed the column of marchers. It was a small but poignant formality, for the Union League—established during the Civil War to promote loyalty to President Lincoln’s policies—sponsored the corps of the Twentieth U.S. Colored Infantry soldiers among them, whom it had sent into battle with a ceremonious presentation of colors in March 1864. From the club, the march resumed southward along Fourth Avenue to Astor Place, where it disbanded at about three o’clock.

On that same May 15 evening, the celebration of the state’s rigorous new civil rights bill carried over to the Cooper Union at Astor Place. The great hall was “uncomfortably full” with hundreds of black New Yorkers, some of whom were suing theater and tavern owners for thousands of dollars in damages in the Supreme Court. William H. Johnson recounted a grievance to the crowd about a stage driver who recently denied him and a woman companion from boarding because they were black. The new bill was meant to prevent such egregious behavior. “All we desire and all we demand is to be permitted to sail in the same boat, and no more,” Johnson proclaimed from the stage. “You must not insult a colored lady or gentleman any sooner than you would those of a lighter complexion.” The law stated at length that no citizen could be excluded by dint of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It mandated that all innkeepers, public transit operators, theater and entertainment house owners, public school administrators, and cemetery associations were bound to comply.

James H. Williams would later receive passed-down memories of this controversial climate, having been only a generation removed from slavery. His parents, John Wesley Williams and Lucy Ellen Spady—both born in Northampton County, Virginia—had experienced the wretchedness of America’s “peculiar institution” firsthand. According to family lore, John Wesley Williams, believed to be born in 1851, escaped via the Underground Railroad when he was only a teenager. Having grown into a wiry, olive-brown man of medium height, John Wesley could read and write, which would have given him an untold advantage when he rejoined family members in Virginia after the Civil War. By 1872, twenty-one-year-old John Wesley found work as a waiter at the Atlantic Hotel in Norfolk. His father, George W., was deceased, but his mother, Sarah Powell, lived in town as well as his four siblings: brothers Leonard F. and Henry B., and sisters Ada and Alice. Another sister, Malinda, lived in Brooklyn, New York.¹¹ The order of the siblings’ births is unclear.

By 1873, John Wesley had moved to New York City, presumably for better work prospects. He lived in Greenwich Village at 218 Thompson Street, which was connected to the parallel Sullivan Street via a network of dark, ill-boding alleyways. The enclave was known as “Little Africa”—not an uncommon nickname for whites to bestow on just about any conspicuously Negro sector—but John Wesley did not find comfort in being among his own here. Steeped in abject poverty, the area was rife with sordid dives and rakish types who preyed upon the unwitting. Not surprisingly, it was the subject of numerous case studies by such social reformers as Jacob Riis. But perhaps a redeeming aspect to the street’s widespread infamy was that it induced John Wesley to move as soon as possible—which meant he must find work.

Though both former slaves from the same Virginia county, Williams’s parents, John Wesley Williams and Lucy Ella Spady, met and married in New York about 1873. Charles Ford Williams Family Collection.

Despite the abolition of slavery in the South, even Northern states like New York would limit his employment options. Whether enforced by laws or by social customs, the strict color line effectively barred blacks from all but the most menial occupations. Just before the Civil War, New York’s colored population amounted to some ten thousand men and women, the majority of whom worked in service-related positions.¹² As he had done in Norfolk, John Wesley found work in New York as a hotel waiter. Likewise, it was at one of the city’s finest hotels, the Sturtevant House.¹³

During the Gilded Age, Brooklyn was known as the city of churches, and New York (just Manhattan then) as the city of hotels. In 1871 the noted hotel managing team Leland Brothers opened Sturtevant House on the southeast corner of Broadway at West 29th Street. It was one of several first-class public houses that were springing up on the city’s main thoroughfare. Its prime location was an indicator of a hotel’s stature, and another was its brigade of Negro waitstaff. And so in the spring of 1873, the Lelands hired the experienced colored hotel waiter John Wesley Williams to join the staff of Sturtevant House. That same spring a celebrity parricide at the hotel—a young man paid a murderous visit to the rooms of his father, the novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth—might have shown John Wesley that in a fashionable district, in contrast to Little Africa, a gunshot exchange could oddly add cachet to a hotel.

John Wesley Williams was a hotel waiter at Broadway’s immense and sophisticated Sturtevant House. Freedmen’s Bank Records, 1873.

John Wesley was fortunate, inasmuch as blacks could not be overly selective about their work opportunities. Needless to say, Negro workers were often viewed as easily replaceable—a hotel manager could build up, and as quickly replenish, his service staffs of waiters, porters, maids, barbers, coachmen, elevator operators, and the like. Though these working conditions were tenuous, a number of black employees could muster some benefits from working under the roof of the same hotel. That is, black service employees frequently formed remarkable social organizations and networks. Sturtevant House, conveniently located near the theaters and the Grand Central Depot, was a case in point. In 1875 the Clipper, a theater trade magazine, praised “the waiters at the Sturtevant House” who had formed the Pastime Literary Club, “the first amateur dramatic society of colored men that was ever organized in this city.” Their club’s venue was a Negro social hall called the Lincoln Literary Musical Association, a three-story brick townhouse at 132 West 27th Street—a “black belt” address adjacent to the more exclusive white district of imposing Gothic churches and exclusive hotels. “The house was crowded,” the journal claimed, with “a large number of the Sturtevant guests.” The players enacted scenes from Hamlet, Richard III, and Macbeth, apparently eliciting generous praise from the audience. Their performances recalled the talents of Ira Aldrich and Morgan Smith, two “colored [American] delineators of Shakespearian characters who created quite an interest in Europe”—Aldridge from the 1820s until his death in 1867, and Smith since 1867. But for the Sturtevant House actor-waiters, surely a “laughable sketch” in the program was a knowing sendup of their proverbial “day jobs.” Its title alone, “Wanted—500 Hands for the Centennial”—referring to the celebration fever spreading coast to coast over the nation’s upcoming one-hundredth birthday—betrayed a wry, introspective humor about their livelihoods.¹⁴

One society writer in the early 1870s observed that male Negro servants, waiters, coachmen, and the like were quite the fashion, rendering many hotel establishments favorably exclusive and recherché. The fashion for black servants spread fast and far—and often unwholesomely. By the end of the decade, chic matrons at Paris receptions and in London lace shops employed “imitationniggers”—white men in blackface—to cater to the discriminating tastes of their guests, in the form of “gigantic ebony figures with enamel eyes, red lips, and glittering teeth, holding silver trays with refreshments.”¹⁵ And the Spanish painter Ignacio de León y Escosura had been so taken by a picture auction for the American centennial in 1876 that he attempted to emulate its “spectacle” at the Paris World’s Fair of 1878 by having his own painting carried out by “negro waiters and white gloves complete.”¹⁶

John Wesley Williams’s new waiting job at Sturtevant House coincided with the sensational parricide of novelist Mansfield Tracy Walworth, a hotel resident. David Rumsey Map Collection.

Not unlike other colored waiters, preparing for unforeseeable misfortunes as best they could, John Wesley Williams recognized the hospitality trade both as an occupational plight and as a lifeline. When he started at the Sturtevant in 1873, he and countless other black workers had accounts at the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company, best known as the Freedmen’s Bank. The institution had been federally chartered at the end of the Civil War to encourage the economic development of newly freed slaves. But the bank was ill fated: lasting only nine years, from 1865 to 1874, it succumbed to mismanagement and fraud. Its failure left tens of thousands of its black depositors in financial ruin—how John Wesley fared is not known—but it introduced many inexperienced blacks to the potential benefits of savings.

Many black men and women also belonged to mutual aid societies in the form of fraternal and masonic orders, like the Terry Lodge no. 900, which celebrated its twenty-fifth year when John Wesley arrived in New York.¹⁷ This local chapter of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows (GUOOF)—unsanctioned by American whites, it was chartered in 1843 by the original eighteenth-century body in England—was one of several burgeoning black fraternal and Masonic orders in the nineteenth century. Others included GUOOF’s Hamilton Lodge no. 710, whose masquerade parties were already setting the stage for the cross-dressing spectacles of 1920s Harlem, and the Prince Hall Lodge, a member of the oldest black order of Freemasonry in America, founded in 1784.

These and numerous other black fraternal organizations offered their members rare and invaluable opportunities for cultural fellowship, a means to unite an otherwise dispersed community: John Wesley Williams was for decades a drillmaster with the Odd Fellows. But such fraternal organizations also offered access to benefits germane to sickness, death, and certain economic reversals—the closest thing their members had to insurance. The model of the Terry Lodge was fairly typical: a member paid three dollars to join, and thirty-seven cents monthly dues. Each man paid a twenty-five-dollar burial fee; and a sick aid fee of three dollars and one-fifty for the first and next twelve weeks, respectively. Also typical was that fraternal societies counted numerous doctors, lawyers, teachers, and other professionals who—availing their expertise to the general membership—were the linchpins of the societies’ social welfare mission. Their influence permeated enclaves where black residential life was evident.

Many social centers of black life were only a few blocks west of the Sturtevant House and the hotel district. Chief among these was a brownstone, at 252 West 26th Street, that veteran waiters would have pointed out reverentially as Porter’s Mansion. Its owner was Peter S. Porter, freeborn in 1812 in Milton, Delaware, who since 1833 had made New York his home. Scattered citations of his various enterprises as whitewasher, butler, and caterer surely underplayed his business acumen, for Porter was decidedly one of the city’s most illustrious colored magnates and bankers, said to be worth $10,000 (over a quarter-million today). The fact that Porter was the first vice-president of Brooklyn’s branch of the Freedmen’s Bank probably impressed John Wesley Williams, who was a depositor.¹⁸ But aside from Porter’s business success, it was especially his antislavery activism in the 1850s—“whether it was defying the fugitive slave law, by harboring, feeding, and otherwise succoring those who had escaped from bondage”¹⁹—that launched his celebrity among fellow high-profile abolitionists Frederick Douglass, educator and orator Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, physician Dr. James McCune Smith, and Dr. William H. Johnson. With Smith and others, Porter co-organized a State Suffrage Association in 1855, part of whose immediate mission was “to record the names and registers of the colored voters of the City and County of New York.”²⁰

By 1855 the arbitrary practice of refusing black passengers on the city’s public conveyances was a matter of tremendous contention. Fed up, a young black schoolteacher named Elizabeth Jennings sued the Third Avenue Railway Company, after being forcibly removed from one of its horsecars. Judge William Rockwell of the New York Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jennings, effectively upholding the same rights for blacks to ride the city’s public transportation as whites. A century later this benchmark case understandably cast New York’s Elizabeth Jennings and Alabama’s Rosa Parks as fellow travelers, two determined women who played similarly defiant roles in galvanizing the civil rights movements of their respective eras and places.

And much as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., would do a century later, another activist had taken up and led the crusade. Catalyzed by Jennings’s legal victory—which did not desegregate public transit either tidily or swiftly—black citizens of Manhattan and Brooklyn banded together to form the Legal Rights Association (LRA), which ardently bade blacks to resist the “Jim Crow cars.” The organization’s members included formidable church and business leaders: the oyster seller Thomas Downing, whom the city paid $2,200 in 1842 to cater its official reception for Charles Dickens,²¹ and the Brooklyn abolitionist orator J.W.C. Pennington, who wrote the first book-length history of African Americans in 1841.²²

But it was Peter S. Porter who became the most conspicuous advocate for black citizens’ civil rights, often taking similar legal recourse as Jennings had. On December 16, 1856, Porter, his wife, and four other black passengers were ejected from an Eighth Avenue car, to make room for three city railroad functionaries. The incident took a violent turn, with the white passengers pummeling Porter as they kicked him out of the car, leaving his clothing torn and watch broken.²³ “Before we had access to the public conveyances, it cost us a dollar and a half to ride down or up town in a [hired] carriage,” Porter reminded a crowd soon after the incident. “And at the same time all white persons could ride for the small sum of five cents—no matter whether rich or poor, clean or dirty, sober, or otherwise, they generally could get in.”²⁴

Porter’s lawsuit against the railway company never reached a hearing. The rail company, whether it felt less confident due to the standing court precedent or was discouraged by Porter’s reputation as a well-known citizen, settled the matter out of court and made an arrangement with Porter “permitting persons of color to ride in the cars on the same terms as white passengers.”²⁵ But knowing rail companies to be recalcitrant, Porter schooled countless black passengers to carry LRA identification and know by heart their “rights that conductors and policemen were bound to respect.”

In 1863 the Draft Riots furnished a new pretext to exclude black passengers, but a year later, when Ellen Anderson, a recent Union Army officer’s widow was manhandled off a streetcar, her self-assurance made known she had been “for many years under the training . . . of Mr. Porter.”²⁶ In 1867, Porter would accept a public tribute for his dogged commitment to black citizens’ civil rights during the 1850s “horsecar wars,” when a contingent of colored citizens of New York presented him with an ebony, gold-headed walking stick, on which the inscription expressed “a token of their appreciation of his services in obtaining Equal Rights in Public Conveyances.”²⁷

The benchmark case of Elizabeth Jennings in 1855 positioned abolitionist Peter S. Porter to emerge as the foremost opponent of racial segregation on New York’s public streetcars. New York Globe, August 2, 1884.

In the fall of 1871, a few months after Sturtevant House opened, Porter paid $15,000 for a brownstone townhouse and lot only a short distance away, at 252 West 26th Street near Eighth Avenue.²⁸ The Evening Post noted that the newly fitted residence would open on Thanksgiving Day as Porter’s Mansion, a “club-house for respectable and intelligent colored men,”²⁹ although it welcomed a fair share of women of the same caliber.³⁰ Little wonder that Porter’s Mansion resonated far and wide as a social magnet for the black community: Peter Porter exemplified Gotham’s Negro citizens of intellect, respectability, and wealth. Guests moved freely through the house’s elegantly furnished and well-ventilated rooms, where the walls featured a portrait gallery of honored men—“Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, Charles Sumner, Gerritt Smith and others”—who had been prominent agents in the abolitionist movement and the fight to enfranchise black voters.

Within months of its opening, Porter’s Mansion became a nexus of black American social and political activity. On April 1, 1872, it became the seat of New York City’s newly formed Thaddeus Stevens Club, named for the radical antislavery senator from Pennsylvania who was a key architect of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. Porter hosted the club’s first annual dinner, called to coincide with its namesake’s birthday on April 4. But the dinner was really held to celebrate the third anniversary of the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave black men the right to vote and which was still constantly being tested. About forty men sat down to table in Porter’s dining room. The Rev. E.V.C. Eato, who five years before had been the first black American delegate to attend the YMCA convention in Montreal, arose to say grace over a sumptuous bill of fare.

Porter’s legendary hospitality was indispensable to many visiting black travelers to New York City as well. On August 25, 1873, the house hosted a reception for former Louisiana governor P.B.S. Pinchback, the first colored governor of any U.S. state (albeit briefly).³¹ But it was a particularly essential waypoint for students, like the young men and women who comprised the Hampton Singers, who toured the Northeast performing “Negro music” to improve and enlarge the campus of their school, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. During a three-month itinerary that brought them to New York in the spring of 1873, one of the teacher chaperones noted the musical troupe “boarded—as they have always done in that city—at the comfortable and well-kept house of Mr. Peter S. Porter.”

Their five-week stay at Porter’s was particularly auspicious; they gave a private concert to a number of New York’s white clergymen of various denominations who immediately afterward, and in a body, issued a unanimous endorsement for the singers and their musical mission. Apart from various churches and private invitational receptions, the Hampton Singers performed at several of the city’s most notable public venues such as Steinway Hall, Union League Hall and Brooklyn’s Academy of Music. The Hampton Singers sang a benefit for the Colored Orphan Asylum—which relocated to Washington Heights after the Draft Riots and was ever dependent upon charitable gifts—and were treated to a tour around Central Park. Reverend Garnet, himself a product of colored schools, invited the singers to his home, as did the white Evening Post music critic W. F. Williams; and they left the city for Boston with excellent reviews from the Times, World, Tribune, Herald, and other papers, plus a handsome collection of $485.³²

The success of the Hampton Singers, whose strategy followed the Fisk Jubilee Singers, inspired other black colleges to bolster their respective schools by deploying student choirs for years to come. “When one of the companies of jubilee singers arrived at a building where we professionals were entertaining,” a popular black vaudevillian later recalled, “the manager of the place would ask us to come in late in order to give the singers a chance to put on their concert.” Whether black or white, the spellbound audiences were not stingy.³³

The following year, in the spring of 1874, a call went out to anyone interested in meeting William Craft while he was lodging at Porter’s Mansion. The Ku Klux Klan had destroyed Craft’s cooperative farm school buildings and harvest in Woodville, Georgia, which he hoped to restore, but most everyone recalled his name from a storied incident a quarter-century before: the flight of William and Ellen Craft from Southern slavery had garnered them international fame. In December 1848, the husband and wife boarded a northbound train from Macon, Georgia: the fair-skinned Ellen, dressed as a man, passed for a white invalid “master” named Mr. Johnson; the browner William posed as his vital manservant.³⁴ Their breathless subterfuge got them to Boston, where they evaded arrest under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 with the aid of such abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison and William Wells Brown, who were white and black, respectively. The Crafts then successfully expatriated to London, where they lived until their return to Boston in the summer of 1869. Since their return to the States, Porter’s Mansion had invariably emerged in the often-tenuous network of reliable safe havens, even after emancipation. As a guest, Craft no doubt felt assured of Porter’s partisanship and discretion that spring, and he likely roomed there again that December when he returned to New York to speak at the Union League Club.³⁵

In the summer of 1875 artist Edmonia Lewis—the first black woman recognized internationally as a sculptor—returned to the United States after a long sojourn in Italy. Lewis had been part of a renowned group of expat American bohemians living in Rome, which included the stage tragedian Charlotte Cushman; the actress’s partner, the sculptor Emma Stebbins (whose androgynous Angel of the Waters statue still stands at Bethesda Fountain, in the heart of Central Park); and the novelist Henry James. Lewis’s monumental Death of Cleopatra sculpture would be acclaimed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia the next summer, but now, on July 29, she was in her room at Porter’s Mansion, penning a letter to a venerable old abolitionist in Albany, William H. Johnson, whose interest she hoped to direct toward accepting a two-hundred-dollar work of art:

Dear Sir.—I have just returned from Rome, Italy, with a large number of works of sculpture and among them is a life-size bust of our noble [Charles] Sumner.

Johnson replied enthusiastically, and at length, on August 3:

My Very Dear and Much Esteemed Miss Edmonia Lewis:

—I am profoundly sensible of the great honor done me by your distinguished recollections of my unworthy services. . . .

To simply say that I would be delighted to be the possessor of a life-size bust of the dead Senator, and to assure you that I would be proud to know that that work of art was the creation of your talent and labor, would but faintly express my true feeling; still, language at my command is inadequate to express more. With distinguished consideration, I have the honor to remain

Yours truly,

W. H. Johnson, 27 Maiden Lane.

Albany, August 3, 1875.

The bust in question was of the late Republican senator from Massachusetts Charles Sumner, who had died the previous year. A hero to most American blacks, Sumner was caned unmercifully in 1856 on the Senate floor by Democratic congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who objected to Sumner’s antislavery speech. Edmonia Lewis’s transaction was successful. She raised the necessary subscriptions and ceremoniously presented her Sumner bust to Johnson in Albany on August 25.³⁶

As they pertained to John Wesley Williams, such were some of the notable black figures who populated the overlapping districts where he worked and started a family—amid events that foreshadowed James’s view of New York City, such as the passing of local heroes like Porter.

James Williams was just shy of six years old when Peter S. Porter died on July 24, 1884. It mattered little whether his father, John Wesley Williams, had ever set foot in Porter’s Mansion. However incidentally John Wesley and Lucy Ellen Williams might ever have spoken of it, little James would surely have detected the esteem with which black New Yorkers by and large regarded the place: a touchstone for race enterprise, altruism, and high repute. Porter’s funeral took place at the Union African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, where he had been a longtime member and Sunday school superintendent; it had been located since at least the 1830s on West Fifteenth Street, a block east from where James was born. Little James’s parents had moved the family up to 151 West 33rd Street about a year before, but it’s easy to imagine them shepherding all five of their children back down to the church, all gaining an incremental appreciation of their rapidly shifting neighborhood.