CHAPTER TWO
The Bottom Rail
When you marry, don’t marry no farming man …
Everyday Monday, hoe handle in your hand …
When you marry, marry a railroad man …
Everyday Sunday, dollar in your hand!
—Lyrics from “Berta, Berta”
Turner and Mamie Smith arrived in Hattiesburg in the spring of 1900. Deeply religious and politically conscious, the black couple named their children to reflect their values. The oldest son, Charles Wesley, was named after the famous pioneer of Methodism. The second, Edwin Hammond, was named in honor of a preacher who had once inspired Turner. The third, Martin Luther, was named for the celebrated German theologian. And the fourth, Wendell Phillips, was named in honor of the famous Massachusetts abolitionist. Modest and discerning, Turner and Mamie worked hard, abstained from alcohol and tobacco, and spent hours each week in church. They never used physical punishment to discipline their children, choosing instead to lead by example. Turner also emphasized the importance of contributing to one’s community. “Don’t be a reprobate,” he often told his children.1
Turner and Mamie had been teachers, and they fervently believed in the power of education. Edwin Hammond remembered the value that his father placed on books. “He would buy a book when you need clothes,” the second son recalled. “He just [loved] books.” Few Mississippians valued education more than Turner Smith. Learning had dramatically altered his own life, having enabled him years earlier to make his exodus from the cotton fields that haunted his lineage.2
Before cotton, the Magnolia State had disappointed generations of French, British, Spanish, and American settlers who learned that contrary to colonial myths, Mississippi contained neither secret stashes of gold and silver nor a climate amenable for growing tobacco and rice. But the state was ideal for growing cotton. Its short winters, abundant rainfall, and high average temperatures facilitated cotton growth like nothing ever seen in the Americas. With Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, invented in the early decades of the First Industrial Revolution, the world’s demand for cotton skyrocketed.3
It was cotton that brought most black people to Mississippi in the first place. In 1820, Mississippi produced approximately ten million pounds of cotton; by 1860, the annual crop exceeded 535 million pounds. With the rise of cotton came the arrival of hundreds of thousands of black slaves to harvest it. During those same forty years of cotton growth, Mississippi’s black population increased from 33,272 to 437,404. Unlike other Southern slave states such as Maryland or Virginia, Mississippi’s black population was not spread across a diverse array of occupations, racial categories, and social standings. Almost all black residents were slaves (99.8 percent in 1860), and almost all the slaves worked in the cotton fields or as plantation servants.4
Their days were filled with grueling labor. Enslaved cotton pickers spent much of their lives bent at the waist, towing burlap sacks through the fields, stopping at each plant to pluck the fluffy, white fibers from their stubborn encasings. Days in the fields left them with scraped wrists, cracked skin, cramping muscles, and backaches. Years in the fields left them with arthritis, gout, and warped spines. Some slaves spent their later years unable to stand straight, “their bodies bent in forced tribute to the cotton plant,” writes historian Walter Johnson. Bondsmen were often underfed and poorly clothed. One former enslaved woman remembered competing with dogs for “mush and milk” and entering the fields on “many a frosty mornin’ with rags tied ’round my feet.” And of course, there were the masters and slave drivers who filled their lives with beatings, torture, rape, and death. The horrors of enslavement notwithstanding, picking cotton was—and still is—a tremendously difficult way to spend a life. But most black Mississippians knew little else. Even after Emancipation, sharecropping bonded them to the land.5
Sharecroppers were tenant farmers whose rent was paid to the landowner in the form of a share of the crop. In theory, the agreement seemed reasonable. After paying landowners a share, tenants were free to sell the remaining crop as they pleased. Theoretically, a poor tenant who could not otherwise acquire property might eventually save enough money from the profits of their leftover crop to buy their own land. But very few tenants ever achieved that goal. In reality, most sharecropping arrangements were designed to provide white landowners with cheap, controllable labor. White planters, many of whom brazenly referred to black sharecroppers as “their niggers,” designed and controlled the system.6
In need of supplies to begin farming, many sharecroppers borrowed against future earnings to purchase seed, fertilizer, food, tools, and livestock, thus starting their tenancies already deeply in debt. As the seasons passed, high interest rates and subsequent borrowing needs set sharecroppers back even further. Some fell victim to unpredictable calamities such floods, droughts, insects, injuries, or sheer bad luck. Others were simply cheated. Landowners regularly altered scales, overpriced supplies, and modified existing contracts. Disputes were settled with intimidation and violence or in white-controlled courts. If a white landowner was able to convince a jury that a black tenant had entered into a sharecropping contract with the intent to commit fraud, the sharecropper faced imprisonment and a fine of up to $100. The landowner could then pay the fine, thus springing the tenant from jail while sinking the sharecropper even deeper into the landowner’s indenture. Some landowners even arranged to have tenants arrested on fraudulent charges just to reestablish their debts. Even with a good crop, sharecroppers could end the year further indebted than when they started. A bad harvest could cripple a family for generations.7
Emancipated as a toddler, Turner Smith grew up the son of sharecroppers in Clarke County near Quitman. Like hundreds of thousands of other black Mississippians, Turner probably first went out into the fields as a young child. Starting with small peripheral jobs such as pulling weeds or carrying water, Turner would have experienced the tragic rites of passage of his lineage, task-by-task and year-by-year, until he was fully integrated into life as a cotton picker. Even as a boy, Turner would have understood the limitations of a lifetime in the fields; he had only to look at his parents and neighbors to understand the forlorn future that lay before him. Black sharecroppers found elements of happiness in their families and communities, but much of their lives were filled with punishing labor, hungry nights, and crushing poverty.8
Like most young black Mississippians, Turner had few educational opportunities. But he managed to attend school sporadically between the harvest seasons, and he slowly pieced together the ability to read and write. When not in the fields, Turner found a measure of solace in books and literature. He loved reading, and at some point in his youth he found the gumption—and the gall—to envision education as a plausible escape from the cotton fields.9
One day, while driving a mule plow through a field, the seventeen-year-old Turner made a decision that would change his life. Although farm work was all he had ever known, Turner recognized the limitations of a lifetime of agricultural labor. On that day, filled with hope for a better future, Turner dropped the mule plow in the soil and walked away from the field, leaving behind the beast and his burden.10
For Turner Smith’s parents, attending school was simply not an option. Fearing truancy, escape, or organized rebellion, antebellum Mississippi law forbade the teaching of slaves to read and write. Although some did find ways to learn subversively, most slaves remained illiterate. Upon Emancipation, thousands of black Mississippians clamored to learn to read and write. Literacy offered many advantages to freedpeople, especially the ability to inspect contracts, maintain financial records, write letters, cast ballots, and read the Bible and newspapers. Some saw literacy as a symbol of freedom simply because it was previously denied to them. As W. E. B. Du Bois suggested, “The very feeling of inferiority which slavery forced upon them fathered an intense desire to rise out of their condition by means of education.”11
During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau organized a series of schools across the South. Recently emancipated black Mississippians demonstrated an eagerness to learn. In Natchez, where enrollment in Freedmen’s Bureau schools grew by 600 percent in just nine months, an African American teacher reported that “there is manifested quite an eager desire to gain knowledge by the pupils. The rapidity in their studies is astonishing.” In Jackson, a Freedmen’s Bureau school teacher observed that their class was “composed exclusively of work hands” who came to classes after work on four days out of the week. Reports from Davis Bend described a population of African Americans “advancing rapidly in letters.”12
Just days out of enslavement, freedpeople organized to build, maintain, fund, and protect their own schools. In his seminal study of Reconstruction, Du Bois estimated that the Freedmen’s Bureau covered only half of school expenses; black communities made up the rest. In Vicksburg, black students began paying tuition after State Superintendent Joseph Warren accused them of having not “done enough” to support the school. In Macon, a teacher reported receiving “no other pay than that I obtained from the Freedmen.” In Columbus, local African Americans raised $658 during a meeting and later volunteered to help guard the schoolhouse and homes of its teachers. When threatened with closures, black communities often organized to keep schools open. Superintendent Warren described one community that “had become obsessed at the prospect of losing their teachers and had raised some 25 dollars to give them.” In Aberdeen, where Freedmen’s Bureau school teacher Sarah H. threatened to end classes, African Americans responded by renovating the school. “They have made the room much more comfortable,” Sarah reported. The following month, Sarah received additional support when one of the older girls in her class began to assist her with teaching duties. In some places, black Mississippians simply started their own schools.13
The African American legislators elected by black Mississippians during Reconstruction responded to their constituents’ interest in education. In 1870, Mississippi’s black elected officials helped establish the South’s first public school system for African Americans. The schools were designed to be racially segregated but equally funded. Mississippi’s first public school law required “separate free public schools for whites and colored pupils” with “the same and equal advantages and immunities under the provision of this act.” It also mandated a minimum punishment of three months in prison and a $200 fine “whenever any county, municipal, corporation, or school district shall fail to provide separate schools for white and colored pupils, with the same and equal advantages” and stated, “Such persons so offending shall also be liable to an action for damages by the parent or guardian of the pupil so refused.” According to the initial public school law, a black parent could sue a school district for racial discrimination.14
Teachers for Mississippi’s black public schools were trained at a handful of local colleges for African Americans. Four such colleges existed by 1871: Tougaloo, Shaw, Alcorn, and the Haven Institute. Tougaloo College was founded just outside Jackson in 1869 with a $13,000 Freedmen’s Bureau grant. Shaw University, later renamed Rust College, was established in Holly Springs by missionary groups. Alcorn State, named for a postwar Mississippi governor named James Alcorn (who fought for the Confederacy but advocated black education), was founded in Lorman. The Haven Institute was organized by Methodists in Meridian. About a decade after it opened, Turner Smith became one of its pupils.15
After dropping his plow, Turner Smith walked some twenty miles to Meridian, where he enrolled in classes at the Haven Institute. Also known as Meridian Academy, the school was supported financially by the Methodist Church and managed by a group of former slaves, many of whom had been educated in Freedmen’s Bureau schools. Although underfunded, the Haven Institute played an important role by helping train a cadre of desperately needed black public school teachers. By the late 1870s, Mississippi’s black public school enrollment swelled to over one hundred thousand students. With only about two thousand teachers, classrooms were overcrowded and teachers overworked. Teaching in black public schools was difficult and low paying, but for Turner Smith, a lifetime in the classroom seemed infinitely more attractive than one in the cotton fields.16
Turner studied hard at the Meridian Academy and graduated with the qualifications to teach. He moved often in the following years, spending much of his twenties teaching in small Mississippi communities before taking a position across the border in Bladon Springs, Alabama. While there, Turner met another young teacher named Mamie Grove. The details of their courtship are lost to history, but the couple fell in love, and sometime in 1888, they were married. Turner was just shy of thirty; Mamie was twenty-two. Turner and Mamie spent their first few years of marriage in Alabama before moving back to Mississippi sometime between the summer of 1891 and the fall of 1894. In the years that followed, Turner took teaching jobs near Meridian and Ellisville, a small town located along the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad.17
Mamie quit teaching when the children started coming. “The old man kept the family growing so fast that she had to give up teaching,” one of the sons later joked. Charles Wesley was born first, in 1891. The next three boys followed in successive three-year increments. Born free to educated parents, Turner and Mamie’s children would enjoy opportunities that would have been unimaginable to previous generations. But any sense of optimism must have been strewn with caution. Emancipation and Reconstruction had freed black Mississippians and provided new opportunities, but by the time Charles Wesley was born, Mississippi’s white Redeemers had retaken control of state politics. The white Democrats made decisions that had devastating consequences for black public school teachers like Turner Smith.18
In 1876, Mississippi’s Redeemers had inherited a state budget deficit of approximately $3,750,000. Part of the problem, they argued, was that the Reconstruction-era Republican government had allocated too many resources to African Americans. The Democrats quickly decreased spending, cutting annual state expenditures from approximately $1.4 million to $520,000. Black institutions, especially schools, experienced severe cuts. Resources were diverted, and the teacher pay was drastically reduced. In 1876, the average monthly salary of black teachers decreased from $53.45 to $38.54. Their salaries would steadily decline for the next thirty years.19
By the time Turner and Mamie had their first child in July of 1891, the average salaries of black teachers had dropped below $23 per month. As the family grew, Turner and Mamie realized that they could not support their growing family on Turner’s declining wages. “I asked him once why he quit teaching,” explained one of the sons. “And he said, ‘I couldn’t when the salary was getting smaller.’ ” Forced to give up teaching to find another way to support his family, Turner explored his options. He and Mamie saw an opportunity in Hattiesburg, then a young town sprouting in the Piney Woods. In search of a new foundation for their family, Turner, Mamie, and their four young sons arrived in the Hub City in the spring of 1900. Turner found work as a carpenter, and Mamie earned money by working as a laundress.20
The Smith family settled among a cluster of recent Hattiesburg arrivals. Their neighbors came from diverse backgrounds. Most in the community had come from somewhere in Mississippi, but a good number came from neighboring states such as Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana. Some arrived from even farther away—South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, and Florida. An eighty-one-year-old woman who lived with her son was originally from North Carolina; another neighbor was from Texas. It is unknown when or how each of these people came to Mississippi. Some had probably arrived decades before as slaves. Others were new to the Magnolia State and had arrived recently by their own free will. Some could read, others could not. Some owned homes, others rented. They worked as cooks, preachers, laundresses, draymen, maids, and general laborers. The majority of men held positions that were in some way connected to the modernization of the New South—thirty-two-year-old Huston Thornton was a widowed railroad worker from Alabama; twenty-seven-year-old J. H. Mintoe was a railroad fireman from Virginia; twenty-six-year-old Walter Williams was a railroad laborer from Georgia. Dozens more, including twenty-nine-year-old Louis Ward from Alabama, twenty-four-year-old Charles Bailey of Louisiana, thirty-year-old Mondes Ruffin from Georgia, and seventeen-year-old Wayne Bailey from Tennessee, worked in the local lumber industry.21
Hattiesburg’s visionaries may have been white, but many of its workers were black. Mississippi itself was predominantly black. Between 1870 and 1900, Mississippi’s black population grew from 444,201 to 907,630. With a white population of 641,200, Mississippi in 1900 had the highest percentage of black residents of any state in America. Most black adults still worked on farms (about 79 percent in 1900), but as the century closed, increasing numbers of black men and women left the fields. African American workers were essential to the railroads and lumber industry. The state simply could not modernize while leaving behind the bulk of its population.22
In the railroad industry, the worst jobs went to black men. In 1910, African Americans comprised only 1, 2, and 4 percent, respectively, of conductors, engineers, and foremen on Mississippi railroads. But African Americans were well represented in almost every other position in the railroad industry. Black firemen spent their days shoveling coal into fires. Black brakemen hopped between moving cars to turn heavy wheels that slowed trains. And black passenger car porters carried bags, changed linens, served meals, bussed tables, and shined shoes. Some even offered haircuts.23
In 1910 Mississippi, African Americans amounted to 97 percent of porters, 60 percent of both brakemen and firemen, and 87 percent of general railroad laborers. Performing the most unpleasant tasks, African American workers were essential to the spread and function of Mississippi’s railroads. Hattiesburg, a convenient intersection of Deep South travel, was filled with these men.24
Even more found work in the local lumber industry. By 1910, Mississippi sawmills employed more than twelve thousand African Americans. Across the state, seven out of every ten sawmill employees were black; besides agriculture, no Mississippi industry employed more black men before World War II. Many sawmill owners and managers preferred black workers over white ones. “I would rather have one black man in a sawmill than two white men,” one Southern lumberman noted. “All he wants is three square meals a day and his wage paid to him every Saturday night.” As with the railroad industry, the most unpleasant jobs in the sawmills were reserved for African Americans. Derogatorily referred to as “nigger work,” these jobs included sweeping sawmill dust, cleaning machines, and inspecting trees for defects.25
Some positions were more dangerous than others. Many black men worked as carriage operators, typically the most dangerous job in the sawmill. Carriage operators guided raw timbers into massive circular saws that sliced the logs into boards, often sending large, sharp shreds of wood hurtling through the industrial workspace. Flying chunks of wood left mill workers with splinters, bruises, cuts, and broken limbs—and this occurred even when the machinery was working properly. Carriage malfunctions could be even more hazardous. If a carriage gear or saw blade became damaged or bent, pieces of the machine could separate or break, pulling human appendages into the saw or sending parts of a steel blade buzzing across the shop floor.26
Black workers were also heavily involved in the operation of temporary logging railroads known as spur or dummy lines. Spur lines were short tracks laid by sawmills to deliver timbers from the forest to the mill. When an area was cleared of trees, sawmill workers simply moved the makeshift lines to another section of the forest. Hundreds of black workers served as graders or “road monkeys” for spur lines, moving and maintaining the temporary tracks. Hastily assembled spur lines presented the same dangers as railroad construction without many of the same minimum safety standards. Locomotives ran off tracks, steel rails separated or fell, and trees came down in the wrong places. Early Hattiesburg-area newspapers regularly contained reports of the deaths of black men operating spur lines in the forest. In 1898, a man named Bill Lloyd was decapitated by a runaway train on a dummy line near Hattiesburg. In 1903, a logging train ran over a black worker, “crushing his head, breaking one arm and doing internal injury.” In 1912, a thirty-seven-year-old lumber employee named John Boyd was working just south of Hattiesburg when he fell between two timber trains and was crushed to death. Less than a week later, Ten-Mile Lumber employees Ernest Reed, Robert Walker, and Andrew Giller were killed in an explosion that reportedly “tore the bodies of all the victims to shreds.”27
Jobs in Mississippi’s growing naval stores industry were even less desirable. The products of naval stores include turpentine, tar, pitch, and rosin oil, all of which are rendered from the sap of pine trees. Turpentine is great for waterproofing cloth, manufacturing rubber, lighting oil lamps, polishing shoes, and disinfecting supplies; raw tar prevents rust and helps preserve underwater wood posts; pitch stops leaks; and rosin is used to produce soaps and floor wax.28
Naval stores workers, almost all of whom were black men, labored in camps deep inside the forest. Each camp included between fifteen and thirty crops, with one harvester working each crop. Crops consisted of approximately ten thousand boxes cut into the side of pine trees. Workers known as chippers would “tap” the trees by carving two or three six-inch-wide boxes into each tree. Tree sap, or “dip,” flowed from the tree’s marrow into these boxes and was collected by naval stores workers. Chippers kept a close eye on trees, which could stop bleeding their sap in less than a week. To maintain the flow of dip, chippers spent their days walking through the forest carrying long metal blades with hooked ends used to reopen healed trees. When the boxes filled, the accumulated dip was taken to a large still where it sat over a furnace. The heated dip produced a nose-burning vapor that collected in a chamber above the still. Turpentine was the resulting product of that cooled vapor. Rosin, pitch, and tar were produced from the byproducts of the excess dip.29
The naval stores industry imposed numerous hazards on workers. Turpentine harvesters spent days in the forest, hiking across dozens of acres and chopping and chipping into pine trees for hours on end. This exhausting labor left them with severe scrapes, blisters, and sores. The Mississippi forest offered additional challenges—heat, thick brush, and several species of well-camouflaged snakes whose venom could kill an adult human within a few hours. Moreover, men who worked turpentine stills were prone to illness. Short-term exposure to turpentine vapors can cause dizziness, nausea, and irritation to the skin, eyes, throat, nose, and lungs; prolonged exposure can lead to serious respiratory, kidney, and liver diseases. Furthermore, naval stores workers were highly susceptible to unfair working arrangements. Some chippers were cheated out of pay. Others were drawn into cycles of debt by shopping at isolated makeshift commissaries out in the forest. The work fostered the creation of a rough and dangerous lifestyle with a culture of its own. Frequently isolated from black communities, naval stores workers lived lives that were often nomadic, unpredictable, and violent. Fights, vagrancy, poverty, and instability were etched into their existence.30
Naval stores workers. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
The early black jobs of Southern modernization—railroads, sawmills, and naval stores—were difficult and dangerous. There was little glory in these positions, and victims of accidents paid a steep price. Perilous days working on the railroads, in the sawmills, or out in the forest cost hardworking men fingers, limbs, and years of their lives. Each industry stole hundreds of husbands, brothers, and sons from their families. Many of the first generation of black workers to work these types of industrial jobs were not fully aware of the dangers that faced them when they accepted these positions. Although those who followed—and indeed, many of those who had pioneered these jobs—surely knew what lay ahead, thousands of black men took these jobs despite the severe hazards. Autonomy was key: all of these jobs offered an alternative to work on the farm.31
While railroad and sawmill work were dominated by men, black women found new jobs in the developing urban spaces of the New South. By 1910, nearly forty thousand black women in Mississippi (about 15 percent of all employed black women) were working in some type of domestic service job. These positions included cooks, nannies, maids, washerwomen, and general domestics, who did a bit of everything—caring for children, cleaning homes, washing clothes, and preparing meals. Black female domestics played an important role in the lives of white Mississippians by freeing privileged white women from household duties to participate in a culture of Southern white womanhood that was full of garden club events and society meetings. For some whites, the employment of black female domestic workers served as a cultural reminder of the fabled Old South plantations, where mythically happy enslaved black mammies ran Southern households. For others, the employment of a black female laborer symbolized an aspirational societal status. Even lower-class white families often employed black domestics in an effort to claim social or economic status.32
Domestic work offered numerous challenges for black women. The work was dirty and demeaning, the hours long, the pay low, and the expectations unrealistic. Their tasks included cleaning, cooking, changing diapers, doing yard work, and scores of other duties. There was also an important emotional component to in-home black female domestic labor. In addition to their daily tasks, black women were often expected to perform what one sociologist has dubbed “emotional labor,” meaning they were supposed to care deeply about the daily lives and general well-being of white families. Although many black women formed sincere and rewarding bonds with white families, this emotional labor often added an exhausting and stressful component to an already difficult workload, which itself had to be borne along with black women’s enormous responsibilities within their own families. Moreover, spending hours in the homes of white employers exposed black domestics to the possibility of mental, physical, and sexual abuse. Their experiences ranged widely. Some domestics were treated fairly; others were regularly underpaid, humiliated, beaten, or raped. Black domestics employed various methods of resistance and empowerment. They switched jobs, blacklisted dangerous or cruel employers, organized for better working conditions, and took extra food from white people’s kitchens. Some simply quit.33
Many black women avoided the potential pitfalls of housework by taking jobs as laundresses. Washerwoman is, of course, a very old profession. But in turn-of-the-century Mississippi, the opportunities available to black laundresses were linked directly to urban development. Before the growth of Southern towns and cities, many black women did not have access to a large enough customer base to work only in laundry. A woman living in rural Mississippi might have had to walk dozens of miles each day to wash clothes (although some women did just that). Urbanization conglomerated customers and expanded the marketplace for laundresses, who could work for hundreds of families within a few square miles. The rise in the number of full-time black laundresses directly reflected the expansion of Mississippi railroads and the subsequent growth of its towns. In 1880, when Mississippi had approximately 1,120 miles of railroad track and five towns with populations over twenty-five hundred, there were fewer than three thousand full-time laundresses. Thirty years later, when the state had over 4,200 miles of track and twenty-nine towns over twenty-five hundred people, there were more than eighteen thousand full-time laundresses, 98 percent of whom were black. Mamie Smith was among their ranks.34
Laundresses usually had either one of two common arrangements. The first was to travel to clients’ homes and work in the back or side yard. Using homeowners’ wash pots, the women would boil clothes, rinse them, hang them on the line, starch them, and leave them on the line to dry. Some were paid extra to return later in the day to iron and fold the clothes. The other common arrangement was to take in laundry. Some black women had their own wash pot or even a small washing shack where they would boil, scrub, and hang clothes. In some cases, groups of women gathered at the home of a neighbor or friend to work together. Regardless of the arrangement, life as a laundress often allowed black women to limit potentially dangerous contact with white employers. This is not to say that the work was easy; black laundresses carried heavy loads across town, worked with scalding hot water and irons, and spent much of their day bent over. But the jobs did also offer a bit more control over their workspace and labor. And like the black male jobs of modernization, work as a laundress or domestic provided thousands of women with a way off the farm. Even in small towns, urban jobs offered an element of flexibility and mobility not available to most sharecroppers.35
When Turner and Mamie Smith arrived in Hattiesburg in 1900, the town itself was less than twenty years old, meaning that all of their adult neighbors had come from somewhere else. The details of their backgrounds are unknown, but it is safe to say that many of these black men and women—especially those from Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana—came from long lineages of fieldwork. The children and grandchildren of field slaves, these people took jobs that had not existed even two decades before. Racial discrimination limited them to hazardous and low-paying jobs, but the decisions of these black men and women to move to Hattiesburg and take these positions should not be reduced to mere victimization narratives. These people made choices based on lifelong experiences and new opportunities they believed existed within structural changes to Southern life. Regardless of the injustices of employment discrimination, these new positions often presented these black workers with the best opportunities they or anyone else in their family had ever encountered. Like Turner Smith, the black people who came to Hattiesburg in those early years were in some way dropping their own mule plows and walking away from the fields of their ancestors.36
Black Mississippians had complex relationships with the railroads. As much as the tracks created opportunities away from the farm, they also served to demarcate racial separation and inequality. In 1888, Mississippi’s Democratic legislature passed a new law requiring railroads to “provide equal but separate accommodation for the white and colored races by providing two or more passenger cars for each passenger train or by dividing the passenger cars by a partition so as to secure separate accommodations.” Racial segregation was not new to Mississippi—even the original 1870 public school law, proposed and supported by black legislators, called for “separate free public schools for whites and colored pupils.” But that public-school statute was also designed to allow for “the same and equal advantages” for the separated races. The new laws of segregation, largely initiated on railroads, would create institutional racial disparities that characterized the emergent system of Jim Crow.37
In 1888, the State of Mississippi indicted the Louisville, New Orleans, & Texas Railroad for failure to comply with the new racial segregation ordinance. The railroad company protested, citing the economic inefficiency of state-mandated racial segregation. To fully comply with Mississippi’s new law, the railroad would have to provide separate first-class cars for both white and black passengers. If one or both of the first-class cabins was only partially filled—a high probability in post-Reconstruction Mississippi—then the company would not be able to maximize profits on its first-class service. It would not make sense to maintain and pull two half-empty first-class cars when all first-class passengers could simply ride together in the same car. Furthermore, the law raised an important question about state-mandated segregation: What if Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and other Southern states all enacted different segregation laws? It would be nearly impossible for railroads to comply with different seating regulations at every state border. Facing a perpetual fine of $500 for each violation, the Louisville, New Orleans, & Texas Railroad challenged Mississippi’s right to enforce segregation on a privately owned railroad.38
But the Mississippi Supreme Court upheld the law, arguing that previously established steamboat laws requiring equal accommodations for passengers on interstate carriers were not relevant to railroads. This new law, the supreme court contended, was a “matter respecting wholly commerce within a State, and not interfering with commerce between the States.” The Louisville, New Orleans, & Texas Railroad appealed the ruling and in 1890 argued their case in front of the United States Supreme Court (which by then included Mississippi’s own Lucius Q. C. Lamar) in the case Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi. America’s highest court agreed with the state. The statute “may cause an extra expense to the railroad company,” the Supreme Court reasoned, “but not more so than state statutes requiring certain accommodations at depots, compelling trains to stop at crossings of other railroads, and a multitude of other matters confessedly within the power of the state.” Justice Louis Harlan, one of the Supreme Court’s two dissenters, sympathized with the railroad company and pointed to the potential difficulties of different seating regulations in each state. “If each State was at liberty to regulate the conduct of carriers while within its jurisdiction,” he argued, “the confusion likely to follow could not but be productive of great inconvenience and unnecessary hardship.”39
The 1890 Supreme Court decision upheld Mississippi’s first formal Jim Crow segregation law. Because white Southern legislators had no desire to enact a difficult series of racial regulations, the new law did not create the “hardship” that concerned Justice Harlan. They merely wanted to elevate white passengers above all others. Although the law simply “strengthen[ed] an existing practice,” as historian Neil McMillen has noted, it also established a broad precedent for racial segregation statutes. Black and white citizens could be separated in every aspect of life. In almost every Southern state, railroads came first. Within eighteen months of Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi, nine other states passed railroad segregation laws, including Louisiana, which on July 10, 1890, passed the statute that was later famously challenged by Homer Plessy.40
About a week after the Supreme Court handed down Louisville, New Orleans & Texas Ry. Co. v. Mississippi, newly inaugurated Mississippi governor John M. Stone issued a proclamation calling for a state constitutional convention. Mississippians had for years debated about reforming the state constitution. The old constitution was written and passed during Reconstruction by Republican legislators who included “carpet-baggers, scalawags and negroes,” as the Atlanta Constitution observed. Redeemers had firmly retaken power, but many white Democrats were offended by having to live under the laws established by the overthrown Republican government. Moreover, although African Americans had been effectively disfranchised since the Revolution of 1875, Mississippi’s widespread voter suppression, rooted in intimidation and violence, directly violated the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and was thus illegal. As Judge J. B. Chrisman of Lincoln County argued in 1890, “no man can be in favor of perpetuating the election methods, which have prevailed in Mississippi since 1875, who is not a moral idiot, and no statesman believes that a government can be perpetuated by violence and fraud.”41
In August of 1890, white Mississippi legislators gathered at a constitutional convention to legally—and permanently—eliminate the black vote. Mississippians made little secret of their goal. “We came here to exclude the negro,” convention president S. S. Calhoon flatly explained. Outsiders also understood the reason behind the gathering. “The most important work of the convention,” observed the Baltimore Sun, “is to find some means of either reducing or neutralizing the negro vote without coming into conflict with the federal constitution.” The Washington Post noted, “That purpose is to devise a way whereby, without fraud or violence, the minority may be enabled to govern the majority.”42
Formally adopted in November of 1890, Mississippi’s new constitution included measures designed to circumvent the Fifteenth Amendment. The new state constitution included a $2 poll tax, literacy tests, and an “understanding clause” for voter registration. The understanding clause was particularly important. Even if black citizens paid the poll tax, white registrars could prevent them from registering to vote through impromptu understanding-clause examinations requiring them to interpret sections of the Mississippi Constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar. The actual questions and answers mattered very little. All understanding-clause test takers were passed or failed at the discretion of the registrar—and the registrars were almost always white. So beginning in 1890, thousands of black Mississippians—even doctors, teachers, and former legislators—were rendered unqualified to vote, thus further securing white Democratic political control. Commonly known as “The Second Mississippi Plan” (the first being the Revolution of 1875), the new state constitution provided a model for other Southern states to similarly disfranchise African Americans between 1890 and 1908.43
The year 1890, a banner year for the institutionalization of Jim Crow in Mississippi, was also the year of Hattiesburg’s first lynching. Newspaper reports indicate that on the evening of June 2, a black man named George Stevenson was being taken to prison for allegedly attempting to rape a white woman when a mob of “thirty or forty men” intercepted the prisoner and hanged him from a tree.44
On July 25, 1895, another white mob gathered in Hattiesburg. A black man named Tom Johnson had reportedly admitted (while already in custody) to killing a fifteen-year-old white girl and shooting at her sister and mother, who apparently recognized and identified the black assailant, thus leading to Johnson’s arrest. As Johnson sat in his cell, a white mob marched to the local jail and demanded that the prisoner be turned over to them. The local sheriff refused but was quickly overpowered by the crowd. The horde stormed Johnson’s cell and found the black prisoner waiting with a crowbar. Johnson was outnumbered; the crowd shot him, took his crowbar, and carried him to the scene of the alleged crime. One of the leaders of the mob, which by then numbered over a thousand people, told Johnson he was going to die and reportedly offered him the option of being hanged, shot, or burned alive. Johnson chose to be shot. He also indicated the men he wanted to do the shooting, but this was denied to him. Hundreds in the well-armed mob were anxious to blast atonement through their gun barrels into the black man’s body. Someone tied Johnson’s wrists between two close trees, leaving just enough slack for him to kneel down facing away from the crowd. Then Captain George Smith yelled “Fire!” and the volleys began. Tom Johnson was most likely killed by the first few shots, but bullet after bullet continued slicing through the air and into Johnson’s flesh, reportedly lifting his “lifeless body from the ground.” Estimates were that between five and seven hundred rounds had been fired. Johnson’s mangled body, “riddled with buckshot,” was left for his father-in-law to bury on the spot.45
Lynchings like that of Tom Johnson were increasing in the Magnolia State. White Mississippians had always used violence to harass, intimidate, and punish African Americans, but near the turn of the twentieth century, the attacks became increasingly vicious and ritualized. Lynchings were not merely concerned with retribution; some of the killings began to resemble hunting ceremonies, complete with hounds and photographs showing the killers alongside the dead. Women and children also frequently appear in lynching photographs, pointing and smiling at hanging, disfigured, or charred black bodies. As with Tom Johnson, it was common for mobs to continue mutilating bodies long after the point of death, enjoying the desecration of flesh, bone, muscle, and fat like a sport. The rituals sent chilling messages to African Americans: even in death, their bodies were not their own. In this New South, African Americans were denied the full range of citizenship rights that white people enjoyed, and they could be publicly disciplined at any time, without question or remorse.46
The next Hattiesburg lynching occurred on July 25, 1899, four years to the day since Tom Johnson had been killed. A black man named Henry Novels was accused of attacking a white woman named Rosaline Davis on a hot Saturday night, and he paid for his alleged crime by being tied to a tree and shot dead by an angry crowd.47
Turner and Mamie Smith arrived in Hattiesburg the following spring. The family spent their first years in Hattiesburg in a home on Jackson Street, a short road near the recently laid tracks of the Gulf & Ship Island Railroad. Turner was hired by white landlords to help build and maintain the small homes being constructed for the city’s new black workers. Although Turner did not work for one of the railroads or in one of the sawmills, he made his living building the homes of those who did. Mamie worked as a laundress.48
Turner and Mamie had four more children after their move to Hattiesburg. The couple strove to protect their children from the brutal realities of Jim Crow, but as African Americans, their lives were shrouded by dangerous limitations. Race dictated where they could live, eat, work, sleep, and worship and determined the health of their children. Of the four babies born to Turner and Mamie after their move to Hattiesburg, only two lived past early childhood. The circumstances of those deaths are unknown. Many white families in that era also lost children, but black babies clearly faced distinct disadvantages. A daughter and son survived. The girl, born in 1903, was named Mamie for her mother. The son, born two years later, was named William Lloyd Garrison Smith after one of the most famous abolitionists in American history.49
Frugal and disciplined, Turner and Mamie worked hard and saved. Eventually, they were able to purchase a plot of land on Dewey Street. The couple built a four-bedroom house with a large living room. Mamie spent her time taking in laundry, while Turner continued working as a carpenter. Turner also managed to find a way to start teaching again, volunteering as a Sunday school instructor at the local black Methodist church.50
Turner and Mamie would spend the rest of their lives in that home on Dewey Street. Their home was filled with books, and they constantly encouraged their children to read, learn, and excel in school. Most of Hattiesburg’s black children quit school when they were old enough to take jobs in town, but not the Smith kids. Turner and Mamie’s children stayed in school and graduated. They learned to read and to reason. Most importantly, they learned how to survive in their environment, and they came to understand how faith, education, and hard work could help them cope with the restrictions of black life in Jim Crow Mississippi. Educational achievement took each of those children far. Four of Turner and Mamie’s sons graduated from high school and college and eventually became doctors. Their daughter Mamie also graduated from college. She later became a teacher, just like her parents had once been.51
Turner and Mamie kept a piano in the living room of their home on Dewey Street. Sometimes in the evenings, the children would gather around the instrument to sing and dance. Turner rarely joined in. “He’d stand there and look at us,” remembered Hammond, “and then go on to bed.” No one will ever know what thoughts passed through Turner’s mind as he headed to bed with the sounds of music filling his home. Born into slavery, his life was dramatically different from that of his parents. Turner and his family still lived under a system of severe racial oppression, but he and Mamie had managed to craft a more promising future in Hattiesburg and to provide their children with opportunities unimaginable to their ancestors. On these nights when the kids gathered around the piano, Turner would drift off to sleep with the sound of their singing voices echoing off the walls of the house that he and Mamie had built. Always hardworking and pragmatic, Turner could well have been thinking about the next day’s work or worrying about his children’s future. One can only hope that buried somewhere deep in his thoughts was a calming realization that none of his children would spend their lives picking cotton.52
Facilitated and defined by the spread of railroads, the rise of the New South created both restrictions and opportunities for African Americans. The processes of Southern modernization led to bleak outcomes, including racial segregation, lynching, and the disfranchisement of black voters—in short, the onset of Jim Crow. But along with those developments came structural changes that provided new jobs and unprecedented mobility. Uncertain of their futures but sure that a better life existed off the farm, thousands of African Americans came to Hattiesburg from farms and rural communities across Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. For those black men and women, the view from the bottom rail looked far better than the one from the cotton field.