Chapter Three
The 1916 proposal to build a memorial honoring Black soldiers and sailors was hardly without similar precedent. Just a few years prior, Congress had passed bills to appropriate funds for a monument commemorating the services and sacrifices of White women to the Union’s cause during the Civil War, resulting in the construction of the American National Red Cross headquarters,1 as well as a monument to commemorate the services and sacrifices of White women during the American Revolution, resulting in the construction of the headquarters for the Daughters of the American Revolution.2 Viewed in this context, a memorial honoring African Americans who had fought in all past wars of the United States was a modest proposal. Nonetheless, it did not garner the same support as those memorials to White women.
The National Memorial Association (NMA) memorial proposal was, in essence, a counterattack to force Congress to acknowledge the contributions of Black soldiers past and present. The organization filed its official articles of incorporation with the city on March 9, 1916, and immediately started advocating its cause. At least six of the organization’s twelve charter members had been officers on the Colored Citizens Committee, including Ferdinand Lee, who had served as the Committee’s president and became the NMA’s founding president.
As citizens were writing to the District of Columbia Board of Commissioners about the proposed ban on The Birth of a Nation, Lee wrote to the commissioners seeking their assistance in finding a site for the proposed monument. And just as they had done with respect to the film complaints, the commissioners pushed away Lee, saying they had no authority in the matter and directing him to consult with city planning officials instead.3
The NMA vigorously rallied support for its cause. Within two months of its launch, it organized a “patriotic platform meeting” at the 19th Street Baptist Church in Washington, even recruiting United States legislators to speak in support of the proposed monument. Flyers were passed out all over the city, urging people to attend the gathering, which would be held eleven days after Griffith’s ignominious film ended its run. Emblazoned across the top of the flyer in all capital letters was the phrase “THE BIRTH OF A RACE,” a reminder that the NMA intended not only to honor the service of colored soldiers and sailors, but also to counter the slander on the Black community in popular culture.4
One cannot overstate the ambition and audacity of the NMA’s undertaking. Not only did members propose a monument to celebrate the accomplishments of Black soldiers amid the cultural war surrounding The Birth of a Nation, but they did so in the face of concerted congressional efforts to ban further African American enlistment in the military. On July 27, 1916, Congressman Thaddeus Caraway, Democrat of Arkansas, introduced bill H.R. 17183, explaining, “[W]hen you arm a Negro and especially when you vest him with federal authority, you bring out the evil that is in him. He becomes a dangerous, swaggering, terrorizing bully.”5
In remarks delivered on the House floor, Caraway argued his bill should be passed in order to “confine enlistments to the best blood that ever flowed in human veins—the blood of the White race.” Caraway proclaimed, “[T]he Negro is temperamentally unfit to wield authority,” and, unlike the Union, the Confederacy had not armed Black soldiers even at its most desperate stage “because they knew the temperament and character of the Negro race, and they would not inject barbarism into civil strife.”6 Caraway ended his speech by asserting White men of good character were refusing to join the military because they did not want to serve on equal footing with Black soldiers—especially the Navy, where “both White and Negro sailors serve aboard the same ship, eat in the same mess hall, and sleep in the same ward.”7 Caraway received sustained applause at the conclusion of his remarks, but ultimately his bill did not pass. Nevertheless, it was reflective of the attitudes that prevailed among many in the country—and in Congress—when it came to the Black soldier.
While the NAACP had criticized Caraway’s bill as another example of “the oppression and humiliation of colored American citizens,”8 the organization and Black Americans as a whole did have prominent government allies, including Secretary of War Newton Baker and Congressman Murray Hulbert, Democrat of New York. Hulbert noted the bravery and patriotism exhibited by Black soldiers and sailors throughout history and denounced “this intemperate and unpatriotic action upon the part of the representative who had the temerity to introduce such a measure.”9 Acknowledging the movement started by the NMA, Hulbert instead suggested Congress should support the effort to erect a memorial to the African American heroes who had served their country and sacrificed their lives in the armed forces.
Another strong congressional advocate for the NMA was Missouri Republican Leonidas Dyer, a military veteran who served in the Spanish American War. Dyer was an outspoken and steadfast supporter of causes that predominantly affected Black people and later became the author and biggest proponent of a federal bill to prohibit lynching.
On December 12, 1916, Dyer introduced HR 18721, the first of many bills inspired by the NMA to create a monument or memorial dedicated to Black soldiers and sailors. The bill proposed a $10,000 up-front appropriation to defray the cost of planning, designing, and constructing a memorial that would cost no more than $100,000. The bill also proposed forming an entity called the National Memorial Commission to supervise the effort. This latter proposal was quite extraordinary because the commission would be racially integrated.
Although based in Washington, the NMA sought to create a nationwide movement in support of the memorial. It worked with African American leaders around the country to have every governor appoint an official representative to the National Memorial Commission to be affiliated with the effort.
By May 1917, the organization had persuaded thirty-nine governors of the then forty-eight states to appoint such representatives to support the project. As national support grew, Congressman Dyer introduced more bills in 1917 to create the proposed memorial.
None of the bills introduced in 1917 received a committee hearing or a vote; a far more pressing event demanded the country’s attention: World War I.
The United States entered World War I in 1917; and, as in every prior war, African Americans valiantly served their country. When peace returned, interest in a national memorial to Black soldiers and sailors remained high. Three more bills to create the memorial were introduced in 1919. In December 1919, thousands of people attended a NMA rally at the Liberty Hut in Washington in support of the memorial. Ferdinand Lee presided over the gathering. The event raised several hundred dollars that evening, and more was pledged toward the effort.10
Speakers at the rally lauded Black military personnel in the nation’s recent victory, extolling their bravery and sacrifices. Among the invited speakers was Colonel Charles Young, the third African American to graduate from West Point and the highest ranking African American officer in the United States Army at the time. Young had served bravely in World War I, and while he appreciated the enthusiasm and thanks expressed by the throngs, it was a bittersweet occasion. Rather than being greeted as equal citizens by a grateful nation, Young and other Black soldiers had returned home to face discrimination, segregation, and even lynching. Colonel Young undoubtedly represented many of them when he declined to speak at the Liberty Hut rally:
He was opposed to a monument of bronze or stone in honor of the Negro soldier dead. But he did request of Congress a memorial to the Negro dead and that that memorial be the thing for which these Negros gave their lives—liberty, justice, equal opportunities in educational facilities, the suppression of lynching by making it a federal crime[, and] the abolition of Jim Crow Cars.11
Lynching, which entailed murder and terrorism, frequently involved merciless torturing of victims in a perverse carnival-like atmosphere. Surrounded by bloodthirsty spectators, victims were often beaten severely or disfigured by having their ears or fingers cut off, or their eyes gouged out of their sockets. Dismembered body parts were handed out to the crowd as souvenirs. Sometimes, victims were burned alive rather than hung from a tree or a post.12
Lynching deprived African Americans of their humanity and reinforced the belief they were less than human. Therefore, the monument to Black soldiers would be more than just about honoring them, but also about reminding the country of Black people’s humanity as a whole. If the country could see and recognize all the contributions African Americans had made for the national common good, then surely the country could not be so callous in its inhumane and unjust treatment of them. Anti-lynching advocates, many of whom were members of the NMA, realized humanizing African Americans in the country’s eyes was a key element in the fight. The National Equal Rights League sent an official petition to Congress, asking it to publish a document memorializing the contributions, loyalty, and service of Black people as a means to fight the existential threat caused by endemic racism in America:
The colored race has not available the necessary means to systemically and comprehensively gather and publish the facts concerning their achievements in the United States as a world group and place them before the American people. That each member of the race feels keenly the handicap suffered thereby, and believes were a full, just, and widespread showing of these facts, narrating the part the race has borne toward building up America on land and sea, placed before the world, it would serve effectually to greatly modify feeling against the colored race and be of inestimable help to it in its battle for a man’s chance in the struggle for existence.13
Colonel Young did not stand alone in demanding Congress pass federal anti-lynching legislation. Fighting lynching became a top priority for African Americans, including those who supported the NMA’s proposed memorial.14
African American leaders understood that efforts to pressure Congress into passing anti-lynching legislation required flawless strategy to succeed given that there were members who openly defended lynching on the House floor. For instance, Congressman James Thomas Heflin, Democrat of Alabama, advised Republicans against proposals to integrate the races and explicitly condoned the extrajudicial killings of Black men accused of raping White women. He warned that Republicans were “sowing dragon’s teeth in the path of White women wherever the Negro problem is present” and declared, “[W]hen a Negro commits the crime of rape on a White woman he must die.” Heflin’s comment received applause in the House chamber.15
Conversely, Congressman Dyer—the author of the first anti-lynching bill introduced in Congress and the idea’s strongest proponent—believed highlighting the loyal service of Negro soldiers to the nation would strengthen the case for the federal anti-lynching law. In 1919, Dyer gave several lengthy speeches on the House floor, painstakingly describing the heroic acts of Black soldiers during World War I. In doing so, Dyer hoped:
[O]ut of this war and the sacrifice made by the colored people that there will come a wave throughout the land of patriotic fervor on the part of all of the people that will demand of those charged with the responsibility of government that the colored people shall receive and that they will have their rights as citizens protected. There ought not to be any need for these people and their White friends petitioning the Congress of the United States that laws be enacted to give them justice.16
Dyer’s bill to prosecute lynching on the federal level would not pass through Congress for years, but he continued introducing anti-lynching legislation during every session in which he served and vowed to do so until such a law was enacted. As he later put it, lynching was an abomination to the fundamental principles of Christianity and democracy, declaring, “We must recognize the Negro as a man, a human being.”17
The push for a memorial became inextricably linked to the advocacy supporting anti-lynching legislation and other anti-discrimination bills. The growing scale of the NMA’s proposal over the years reflected this greater mission to humanize a race that had heretofore been marginalized and subjected to public hatred and ridicule.
By the early 1920s, NMA expanded the scope of the project beyond the proposed construction of a towering shaft or statue to that of a “memorial building,” a place to recognize the Negro as a fellow human being who has contributed greatly to the nation. The building would not only commemorate Negro soldiers and sailors, but also Negro achievement in business, education, politics, the arts, and every other aspect of American life. It would be equipped with:
[A]n auditorium ample to house some 3,000 or 4,000 people…a hall of fame, art and music rooms, library and reading rooms, museum, statues and tablets, which are proposed to commemorate the deeds American Negros wrought for the perpetuation and advancement of the nation, which would embody the utilitarian, aesthetic, and reverential, thus meeting the monument building ideas of the age as well as serving the race in a useful way.18
Anticipated expenses grew along with the memorial’s scope. The initial bills introduced in 1916 and 1917 had assured the National Memorial Commission would raise an amount not to exceed $100,000. By 1919 and 1924, the legislation provided a budget to not exceed $500,000; by 1927, the bill stated the budget would be not less than $500,000. These later bills also requested an up-front appropriation of $50,000 as seed capital for the National Memorial Commission to hire staff, support administrative efforts, and procure a building site.
But securing the necessary funding for the expanded project was not the only hurdle facing the NMA and its supporters. The proponents of the memorial building continued to confront racist attitudes in Congress, including the belief that Black people best served the nation when they remained loyal servants to their “White masters.”
The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and its supporters employed the same tactic as the NMA, to humanize African Americans, but with far a different narrative. The UDC, an organization that grew out of various women’s groups providing support to the Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, urged Capitol Hill lawmakers from 1922 to 1924 to introduce bills authorizing a “monument in memory of the faithful colored mammies of the South” in the nation’s capital.19 Greatly offended by a memorial solely focused on the nostalgia of the faithful of Black housekeeper who nursed the slave master’s children, the African American community offered considerable opposition.20
Despite the opposition, a “Mammy Memorial” bill sponsored by Senator John Sharp Williams, Democrat of Mississippi, passed the Senate in 1923;21 however, the bill died in the House and thus never became law. Even though the UDC’s vision for the colored mammy memorial was never realized, the impassioned fight for and against it was emblematic of the battle over the American narrative and memory, much like the controversy over The Birth of a Nation. It was another reminder of what was at stake for the National Memorial Association.22
Unlike the Mammy Memorial, the NMA was not able to convince either chamber of Congress to pass any of its bills, despite hearings in the House Committee on the Library in 1919 and 1924. But the tide began to turn in 1928, when the Committee on Public Buildings and Grounds, chaired by Richard Elliott of Indiana, held a hearing on House Joint Resolution 60, a bill that had been introduced that year by Congressman Will Taylor of Tennessee. The NMA’s hard work to garner national support for the legislation was on full display at the hearing. Congressman Taylor and Ferdinand Lee read letters of support from individuals and organizations around the country. Lee also showed a photograph of the proposed building’s model, which had been designed by African American architect Edward R. Williams, demonstrating the gravity and professionalism of the endeavor.
The most persuasive evidence in support of the legislation came from heartfelt testimony. Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of Bethune–Cookman College and president of the National Association of Colored Women, submitted that the memorial building “is merited by my race, for great has been their contributions to the worthwhile accomplishments of our splendid country.” She stressed that the memorial’s construction would mean a great deal “to the youth of the race who[se] hearts are filled with a desire for service, [for] it will mean an inspiration and a beacon light, erected in commemoration of what their people have meant to America’s civilization in the past.”23 Robert Lee Brokenburr, a prominent African American attorney in Indianapolis who represented entrepreneur and activist Madam C. J. Walker,24 wrote to remind Congress that achievements of the Negro community never had been specifically highlighted:
This idea of the insignificance of the Negro, which is contrary to fact, is so deeply rooted in the minds of most people that the large majority of students attending our public institutions of learning get no impression from the books used therein that Negros have made any worth-while contributions to American advancement and graduate with the false impression that this group of loyal patriots in peace and in war are more of a burden to America than an asset to it.25
Witnesses read editorials from the Black press into the record, including one from the Louisville News reminding Congress that fair-minded White people, as well as those indifferent to Black Americans, can be influenced by “derogatory news” about Black people and never realize “our true worth as individuals or as a group,” arguing that the proposed memorial building could change some of those attitudes.26 Another editorial from the Amsterdam News, the veritable Harlem newspaper, advised Congress “this is the greatest cultural project ever undertaken in behalf of the Negro,” and urged Congress to support the project because of African American contributions in the military, unpaid slave labor, and “his music[, which] is being hailed as American’s only original contribution to the culture of the world.”27
Ferdinand Lee reminded Congress that “no other race has advanced as astonishingly with the period of fifty years as the Negro has done [since the Civil War],” and the memorial building should be constructed as “evidence of actual and authentic recognition of a people who have complied both theoretically and literally with American standards as fixed and practiced by White Americans.”28 Congressman Will Wood of Indiana noted the positive impact of seeing exhibitions of African American art, inventions, and other achievements at the Atlanta Exposition a few years prior, proclaiming, “[T]hese things are instructive. They are illustrative. They are elevating. They demonstrate the fact that these people are doing for themselves in spite of the handicap in which they were so long placed.”29
Opponents to the bill were also present at the hearing. Most conspicuously, Congressman Charles Edwards of Georgia asked whether any other race or group had sought such a memorial, suggesting this was undue special treatment for Black people. In response, Congressman Maurice Thatcher of Kentucky stated, “if it should be said that no other race has had any consideration of this character, I would say in response to that suggestion that no other race has given 250 years of unrequited toil to America.”30
Mary Church Terrell,31 the first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, reminded the committee that even though Crispus Attucks, a Native Black man, was the first patriot to die in the Revolutionary War, “there is not a public building in the capital of the nation for which Crispus Attucks fought, in which his statue or that of any other hero of African descent may be placed.”32
Some Congressmen raised questions about the cost of procuring a site and asked whether Congress should approve anything at all, given that so many costs were unknown. Congressman Edwards warned that the $50,000 appropriation would not be the last and there inevitably would be requests for more funds in the future. In response, Ferdinand Lee countered that the American Red Cross had sought and received additional funding to complete its memorial building.
In contrast to the contentious committee hearings in the House, the process in the Senate moved more smoothly, thanks to Senator Charles Curtis, Republican of Kansas, who supported the NMA. From his powerful position as majority leader, Senator Curtis shepherded the bill’s passage with one important amendment: it allowed for the $50,000 in public funds to be provided only after at least $500,000 had been raised by private contributions to the National Memorial Commission. Senator Curtis’ bill passed the Senate without debate or controversy.33
Following the committee hearing, the memorial building legislation was granted consideration before the full House of Representatives with just two days left in the session. Congressman Taylor expressed his disappointment at the prevalence of racial prejudice, chastising his colleagues:
[P]roud representatives of the great, stalwart, independent, and arrogant Caucasian race gainsaying and denying the small, paltry, insignificant modicum of consideration and encouragement to a people just a little more than half a century removed from penal servitude and a people who have contributed so much in a material and patriotic way to build up this great country and make it as it is today the envy and admiration of the nations of the earth.”34
Rather than pushing his bill, which would have provided the $50,000 appropriation up front, Congressman Taylor asked the House to concur with the Senate version, which would send the bill to the president to be signed into law. Congressman Taylor reminded the House that the bill “will only cost the Federal Treasury the puny sum of $50,000.00,” and those funds would not be made available until at least a half-million dollars had been raised.35
Congressman John E. Rankin, Democrat of Mississippi, was unimpressed, deriding the bill as merely “a political measure […] intended to catch Negro votes.” Rankin argued the bill was “an outrage” because no such bill should pass to favor the Negro race while there had yet to be a law providing for the creation of a memorial to Thomas Jefferson.36
Congressman Taylor challenged Rankin to introduce a bill to construct a Jefferson memorial and said he would cheerily support it. Rankin evaded the challenge, no doubt because his reason for opposing the legislation was not that it somehow slighted Jefferson, but rather that it gave credit and respect to African Americans.
Nevertheless, the bill’s proponents fended off its opponents’ delaying tactics and it passed by an overwhelming majority. President Coolidge signed the bill into law on the morning of March 4, 1929. It was his final day in office and one of his last official presidential acts.37
The bill to create a National Memorial Building to Negro Achievement and Contributions to America became law with literally not a moment to spare.