CHAPTER FOUR
A Little Colony of Mississippians
Others may be found to do his work, in a way and at a price, but the negro’s “place” cannot be filled.… And the South will miss them when they are gone, and don’t you forget it.
—Hattiesburg News, December 7, 1916
In the spring of 1910, the Smith family was living in a little rented home about a mile from downtown Hattiesburg. Turner, who turned fifty-one that year, was still working as a carpenter. His job did not pay particularly well, but he managed to supplement his earnings with a variety of entrepreneurial projects. At times, he rented a small plot of land to grow vegetables and potatoes that he peddled to neighbors. For a few years, he operated a little shop called Smith’s Store that sold dry goods such as flour, salt, and sugar. Resourceful and proud, Turner worked hard to provide his family with a level of financial security. The Smith family remained relatively poor, but the additional income did enable Mamie to quit working as a laundress, freeing her to spend the bulk of her time tending to the couple’s home and six children.1
That May, the Smith family children ranged in age from five to seventeen. The four middle children were enrolled in classes at a little wooden schoolhouse located about a quarter mile from their home. The oldest son was working with his father while saving for college. The youngest boy was not yet old enough to attend school. All the Smith children were expected to excel in the classroom. Turner and Mamie filled their house with books and strove to create an environment in which learning was cherished. The former teachers supplemented their children’s school lessons with home instruction on history, civics, and politics, and the Smith children entered school “way ahead of the other folks,” explained the second son, Hammond.2
Sometime between 1910 and 1914, Turner and Mamie bought a house on Dewey Street, about two blocks away from their first home in Hattiesburg. With eight occupants, the four-bedroom house was fairly cramped, but the family made do with the space they had. The daughter, Mamie, had a room to herself, and the five boys shared bedrooms or slept on the porch when it was warm. To provide inexpensive meals for their family, Turner and Mamie grew their own vegetables, kept a milk cow, and bought sacks of rice in bulk. “We always had a garden and things like that,” remembered Hammond. “So we did all right.”3
The Smith family lived in a rapidly growing black neighborhood known as the Mobile Street District. Named for the road that traverses its center, the Mobile Street District lies in a roughly 500-acre floodplain near the confluence of the Bouie and Leaf Rivers. Because periodic flooding rendered the area undesirable to whites, black migrants were free to settle the area. The neighborhood’s early boundaries were framed by rivers and rails—the Bouie and Leaf Rivers to the north and east and the tracks of the Mississippi Central and Gulf & Ship Island Railroads to the south and west. In 1910, the vast majority of Hattiesburg’s 4,357 black residents lived in or near the Mobile Street District.4
Most residents of the Mobile Street District lived in single-story rental homes traditionally known as “folk” or “shotgun” houses. These one- or two-room wooden structures were characterized by a front-gable roof, slim panel doors, vertical windows, and narrow wooden siding. Some homes stood on stacks of bricks or large rocks to help protect against flooding. Each home, even the frailest shotgun house, also had a porch. Perhaps considered luxuries in some contexts, porches were vital to poor black people living in southern Mississippi. Covered by flat-shed roofs, porches offered escape from the heat, platforms to perform chores, and additional areas for families and neighbors to congregate. A handful of black residents owned larger homes—two-story bungalows with front and back porches or shotgun houses with added rooms.5
Most black men in the neighborhood worked as wage laborers in one of the city’s sawmills, railroads, or light manufacturing shops—firms such as J. J. Newman Lumber, the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad, or Komp Machinery. Like their working-class white counterparts, many black families were drawn to Hattiesburg by the promise of wage labor. Black men were almost always paid less than white men, and their work was often irregular and susceptible to layoffs. But Hattiesburg in the early twentieth century was one of the best places in the region for black men to find wage-labor jobs.
Years later, the sons and daughters of early migrants recalled the appeal that Hattiesburg held to their fathers. Ariel Barnes remembered that her father “just kind of followed the work,” and “found more work here [in Hattiesburg] than where he came from.” Richard Boyd told an interviewer that his family came from Enterprise, Mississippi, so his father could work at J. J. Newman Lumber. Sarah Ruffin’s dad moved his family from Selma, Alabama, to take a job at the same mill. Marie Washington Kent, whose family arrived in 1911, remembered, “My father was employed at J. J. Newman Lumber Company, many years.” Nathaniel Burger, whose family came from Brookhaven, remembered the prominence of black sawmill workers in Hattiesburg. “As a boy coming here around five or six years old,” Burger recalled, “all I realized was that the mills were manned by blacks.” At times, as many as half of the city’s black males worked in sawmills. They typically earned between $1.10 and $1.35 per day, with some of the more senior black employees earning up to $4.6
Employees of J. J. Newman Lumber Company. (McCain Library and Archives, University of Southern Mississippi)
Nearly all black women were limited to employment in some form of domestic service. They worked as maids, nannies, cooks, laundresses, or some combination thereof. In some of the more fortunate families like the Smiths, wives, mothers, and sisters did not need to work outside the home. But even these women filled essential roles as caregivers in their own families. Many also engaged in informal commercial exchanges, such as peddling produce or styling hair, to earn extra money. Some women worked multiple jobs to provide for their families.7
Other black men and women were employed in a variety of service or general-labor jobs typically reserved for African Americans, positions such as waiter, drayman, servant, street sweeper, bricklayer, or gardener. These difficult jobs usually paid less than $2 per day. Many black workers moved between positions, changing jobs whenever a conflict or new opportunity arose. Regardless of the field, most black labor was connected by the common themes of low pay and dirty work. Every day across Hattiesburg, black men and women cleaned, lifted, stocked, shoveled, swept, cooked, loaded, changed, ironed, and served. Their cheap labor undergirded much of the city’s economic foundation and enabled many of its daily operations.8
Many black families benefitted from wages earned in these jobs, but in the broader scope of society, most black labor was designed to enhance the social and economic superiority of whites. White-owned firms profited from hiring inexpensive black workers to perform the most dangerous and dirty jobs. Individual white families benefitted through their ability to hire cheap cooks, landscapers, maids, and childcare providers. Even the city itself capitalized from black labor by hiring poorly paid African Americans to dig trenches, construct sewers, and sweep streets. African Americans were pushed into these types of jobs by stringent racial job discrimination. With few exceptions, black men were ineligible for managerial positions in sawmill or railroad firms. Black women were usually limited to teaching as the only viable employment alternative, but that job paid even less than domestic work and required more education than most of them had.
Although over 70 percent of black Hattiesburg adults could read and write, less than 2 percent had completed high school. The city did not even have a black high school. There was a public school for African Americans, but it offered only eight grades and was severely underfunded and overcrowded. Whereas the best white school met in a brick building with electricity and running water, the black school was housed in a windowless wooden structure with neither. The gap in pay between black and white teachers was significant. In 1910, white teachers in Mississippi earned an average monthly pay of $42.38; their black counterparts earned only $20.52 per month—despite the fact that black teachers were often responsible for far more students. In Hattiesburg at the time, black classrooms averaged seventy-five students compared to about forty in white ones. “I don’t see how you could keep that many people quiet, let alone teach them,” recalled Hammond Smith of his time as a student in the little wooden schoolhouse.9
Black parents who wanted to send their children to high school needed to make special arrangements for their kids to be educated in another county. Turner and Mamie Smith did precisely that, sending their oldest children to a residential high school located over one hundred miles away. But the Smith kids were exceptions. Most black families did not send their children to high school, either because they could not or because they saw little point in sending their kids away for a high school degree that would most probably not alter their prospects for employment. Many poor black families sent their kids to school only until they were old enough to start earning money. “Most children, they didn’t go when they got big enough to work,” Hammond explained.10
A girl named Osceola McCarty attended the little wooden schoolhouse alongside some of the youngest Smith children. The offspring of a rape, Osceola lived with her grandmother and aunt, both of whom worked as laundresses. The McCarty family struggled financially, particularly because Osceola’s grandfather had been killed years before in a sawmill accident. Tragedy struck again when Osceola’s aunt was diagnosed with a fibrous tumor. The subsequent surgery left the aunt bedridden and unable to work. With her aunt ailing, it fell upon young Osceola to help her grandmother provide for the family. The twelve-year-old girl dropped out of school in the sixth grade, trading the pencils and paper of a student for the iron and washboard of a laundress, the first job in a domestic service career that would span more than seventy years. Such was the reality for many of Hattiesburg’s working black poor. Their poverty and lack of education benefitted local white residents, who paid very little for domestic-service work.11
The various structural limitations of black life were reinforced by hundreds of laws and regulations that further outlined Jim Crow. The most obvious of these was public segregation. African Americans were barred from shopping in stores, eating in restaurants, and accessing many public amenities and services. Some stores did allow black customers, but African American shoppers did not enjoy the same basic consumer rights as whites. Policies varied by store. In many cases, black customers could not return goods, try on merchandise, use restrooms, enter the front door, or ask clerks to wrap their purchases. All interactions with white shopkeepers presented the risk of mistreatment. Some shop owners refused to accept payment directly from the hands of black customers, insisting that bills or coins be placed on the counter and slid over. Other merchants were simply rude and disrespectful.12
Segregation extended to virtually every realm of public life, blocking African Americans from partaking in many of the basic pleasures of modern life in Hattiesburg. For local black citizens, there would be no extended downtown Christmas shopping hours, baptisms in Gordon’s Creek, lumber company baseball games, or entries into the Hub City’s annual Fourth of July Parade. The city’s tax revenues did not pave their streets, install electric lights in their neighborhoods, maintain their cemeteries, or provide their homes with water.
African Americans were also expected to abide by countless customs of racial submission. By law or by tradition, black people were required to perform a repertoire of deferential social gestures—stepping off sidewalks to let white people pass, avoiding eye contact with white people, refraining from arguing with white people, and silently enduring an endless barrage of casual but degrading insults. Whites hardly shied away from such customs. Some reveled in them, relentlessly calling black men and women “boy,” “girl,” or “nigger” and constantly seeking to publicly humiliate African Americans. “If you were on the sidewalk and there were three or four white boys coming,” remembered Constance Baker, who moved to Hattiesburg in 1914, “they would scatter themselves out so you would have to get off the pavement to pass them. Or maybe they might push you off the pavement, if you didn’t get off.” African Americans learned these expected public behaviors at a young age and lived with them all their lives. “I just came up sort of knowing what it was,” remembered Ariel Barnes of black life in Hattiesburg. “We would meet white girls on the street, and we just knew to move over,” Barnes told an interviewer.13
Black people also lived with the constant possibility of criminal accusations, which could lead to fines, arrests, or even death. Crime was a major component of life in the black neighborhood. Dozens of rogue African American men and women were engaged in various sorts of criminal activity, especially bootlegging, assault, and burglary that victimized other African Americans. In 1907, the murder of a black Hattiesburg banker named Ed Howell drew widespread media attention.14
Of course, Hattiesburg’s white neighborhoods also experienced their fair share of crime, including bootlegging, assault, rape, burglary, and murder. But racial stereotypes and judicial discrimination subjected even the most law-abiding African Americans to criminal scrutiny. Very few black residents enjoyed due process of the law. They could not testify against whites, serve on juries, or hire a black defense attorney, meaning that mere accusations could result in swift convictions and punishments. Consequences varied. For some, the accusation of an offense such as swearing in public might result in a fine of a few dollars. For others, charges of assault or robbery could lead to prison. Those convicted of the rape or murder of a white person were usually executed if not lynched beforehand.15
Every component of Jim Crow was reinforced by the threat of violence. All black Southerners understood from an early age that violations of racial norms could result in physical punishments ranging from impromptu public whippings to death. Many had experienced or witnessed violence firsthand. All of them had heard the stories about lynching. Some no doubt heard the lynchings themselves. Early residents of the Mobile Street District lived within earshot of the downtown bridge over Gordon’s Creek, the spot where Amos Jones had been killed by five hundred white people in 1903 and where Kid George and Ed Lewis had been “swung into eternity” by a thousand-person mob in 1905. In each of these murders, the white mobs shot hundreds of rounds of bullets into the dead black men’s hanging corpses. Many residents of the Mobile Street neighborhood would have been able to hear the shooting from their homes. There is no telling what other sounds of the lynchings they heard—the screams, the cheers, the march of the mob, or the loud banging noises created by the makeshift battering ram that the white crowd used in 1905 to extract the black prisoners from jail. The terror is hard to imagine.16
Even if they managed to avoid the worst interactions with whites, all black men, women, and children felt the weight of the oppression. Physicians now know that prolonged exposure to intense fear and stress can weaken immune systems, cause cardiovascular damage, and lead to ulcers. Contemporary research has shown that as late as the 1960s, African Americans living in the Jim Crow South experienced higher rates of hypertension, premature death, and infant mortality than their white counterparts, even those with a similar economic status (this is, of course, in addition to having far less access to professional healthcare). Formalized segregation conspired with the daily customs of Jim Crow to create an omnipresent culture of white supremacy that ground relentlessly into the bodies and souls of black people.17
Every Sunday, the Smith family walked about two blocks to attend services at St. Paul Methodist Church. Organized in 1882, St. Paul was one of Hattiesburg’s oldest churches, black or white. For most of its first forty years, the congregation met in a small, twenty-three-foot-tall wooden structure located near the tracks of Fenwick Peck’s Mississippi Central Railroad, which for many years demarcated the southern boundary of the black community. Commonly known as the “church on the hill,” St. Paul rested on some of the highest elevated land African Americans could purchase at the time, giving it an important role for a population that lived in a floodplain. For decades, the church served as a refuge for people escaping rising waters during the rainy seasons of early spring and late summer.18
Not all black Methodist churches were part of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, an African American denomination that broke away from the Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) in 1816 because of racial discrimination and conflicts over slavery. Other African American Methodist–based denominations formed, most notably the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church, but in the early twentieth century, most of Mississippi’s black Methodist churches, including St. Paul, remained part of the MEC. Much of this allegiance was a legacy of the Reconstruction era, when Northern Methodist missionaries came to the South and helped build schools for African Americans, including institutions such as Rust College and the Haven Institute, where Turner Smith matriculated. Former bondsmen like Turner Smith remained forever loyal to the Methodist Church and the Republican Party for their role in Reconstruction. As one of his sons later explained to an interviewer, Turner Smith “had three loves: his family, the Methodist Church, and the Republican Party.”19
Regardless of denomination, black churches were the most important component of the Mobile Street District. By 1910, the neighborhood was home to five major congregations—St. Paul Methodist, Mt. Carmel Baptist, Zion Chapel African Methodist Episcopal, St. James African Methodist Episcopal, and True Light Baptist, all located within a mile of each other. With little access to other public spaces, African Americans poured their resources into the churches. They did not yet have the means to build stone or brick structures, but in an era when few black homes had electricity or heat, each of the city’s major wooden black churches had both.20
Black Hattiesburgers were deeply religious. Their Christianity was a legacy of their enslaved ancestors whose faith in God and heaven helped them navigate difficult lives. Fifty years after Emancipation, the offspring of those bondsmen invoked God and the Bible at virtually every gathering and meal. Prayers, church services, and multi-day revivals offered not only courage and hope but also brief respites from the realities of life under Jim Crow. Many never looked or felt better than they did when they were praying and singing together in the churches. Every Sunday in Hattiesburg, black women and men who normally dressed in tattered work clothes donned clean white dresses and freshly pressed suits. People who spent their days cleaning outhouses or making fertilizer led Sunday school classes and directed choirs. And folks who were called “boy” or “girl” or “nigger” in the street became “sir” or “ma’am” or “Reverend” within the sanctuaries of their community.21
The church buildings were also important sites of community organizing. People used the pulpits to announce local initiatives, explain the need for collections, or offer community updates. Each church was home to dozens of clubs and societies—missionary organizations, pastors’ wives groups, and community choirs that organized a variety of social activities and charitable initiatives. Because African Americans had such restricted access to other large venues, churches were usually the only places where even secular groups could meet. Hattiesburg’s black churches were busy almost every day. Beyond the standard religious services, funerals, and weddings, Hattiesburg’s black churches hosted scores of concerts, lectures, debates, club meetings, suppers, and schools.22
In addition to Turner Smith’s role as a Sunday school teacher at St. Paul Methodist, he also belonged to an organization known as the Howell Literary Club. Named for Ed Howell, the black banker who was murdered in 1907, the Howell Literary Club was an interdenominational organization that met in local black churches after regular Sunday services. “This club has brought the different denominations together more than any other organization in the history of this city,” said a 1908 newspaper report. Like every other component of black life, the meetings of the Howell Literary Club were packed with religious observances, including invocations, prayers, scripture readings, and church choir performances. But their gatherings also featured a variety of secular activities, including lectures and debates covering such issues as the value of industrial education or the morality of child labor. Several reports from the era list Turner Smith as a participant in the debates.23
Excluded from so many aspects of broader public life, the black men and women of Hattiesburg had little choice but to construct a parallel society of their own. Barred from the local white Commercial Club, black business owners started the Negro Progressive Business League. Ridiculed and ignored in white newspapers, local African Americans published The Weekly Times and the Beacon Light. Unable to trust white-owned banks, black entrepreneurs established the People’s Bank and the Magic City Bank. Ineligible to play on lumber company baseball teams, black Hattiesburgers formed their own squad, which competed against teams from nearby black communities. New schools and large department stores were beyond their capacity, but African Americans managed to craft a mirroring black society in the Mobile Street District, complete with businesses, hotels, offices, social clubs, and restaurants. “Mobile Street was our city,” remembered one resident of the neighborhood. “Mobile Street supplied the needs of our community.”24
An emerging group of black businessmen led the construction of this parallel society. Hattiesburg’s black laborers may not have earned much, but they still needed basic goods and services. And because black people faced such severe discrimination in white-owned stores, many had no choice but to shop in black-owned businesses. In fact, some preferred to shop among their own race. In black-owned stores, they were more likely to enjoy basic consumer rights and a modicum of dignity. Black business owners did not operate in an open market. Jim Crow may have limited their earning potential, but it also helped ensure a large, concentrated customer base. A growing number of black consumers led to a growing number of black businesses.
As Hattiesburg grew, dozens of ambitious black entrepreneurs and professionals opened new shops and offices in buildings that ranged in size from one-room wooden shacks to a three-story brick building completed in 1906. Most of these entrepreneurs came from small Mississippi communities near Hattiesburg. Notable early black business leaders Gaither Hardaway, Samuel Carmichael, and Timothy S. Thigpen each came from small towns located within seventy-five miles. Others came from bordering states. Furniture salesman Stephen Kinnard and restaurateur Noah Shackelford were from western Alabama. The city’s first black doctor, Dr. James Randall, arrived from Louisiana. Frank Sutton, often regarded as the neighborhood’s best tailor, moved to Hattiesburg from South Carolina.25
Like their working-class customers, most of the entrepreneurs originally came to Hattiesburg for wage-labor jobs before saving enough to open their own businesses. Gaither Hardaway started off as a sawmill worker before opening his own barbershop and later a successful grocery store. Noah Shackelford began his life in Hattiesburg as a cook in a white-owned hotel before opening his own barbeque joint and later a skating rink and a dance hall. Richard McBride first worked as a day laborer before becoming manager of a black guesthouse named the Glenmore Hotel. John Bradley (J. B.) Woods arrived in the late nineteenth century to work for the New Orleans & Northeastern Railroad before starting a successful black grocery store. Most formal storefronts in the Mobile Street District were owned by men, but black women also operated a small number of hairdressers, restaurants, and boarding houses. White investors owned a handful of the early shops.26
Turner and Mamie Smith lived near the heart of the Mobile Street District. If the couple stepped out of their home in 1910 and walked about two blocks east, they would have passed three grocery stores, two tailor shops, two restaurants, a barbershop, a laundry, a butcher, the Magic City Bank, and a two-story drugstore on the corner of Seventh and Mobile Streets, the epicenter of the black downtown. If the couple then turned south onto Mobile and proceeded three additional blocks, they would have passed another five grocery stores, five restaurants, three barbershops, two butchers, two tailors, two pool halls, a cobbler, a hotel, a printing company, a general store, Noah Shackelford’s skating rink, a dance hall, Stephen Kinnard’s furniture store, a drugstore, a bicycle shop, and a clothing store—all within five blocks of their home. Dozens more groceries, butchers, pressing clubs, tailors, and barbershops were scattered throughout the neighborhood.27
In 1908, Hattiesburg’s black businessmen formed an organization called the Negro Progressive Business League. Founded to “unite, foster and promote the Negro business interests of this the city and suburbs,” the organization met monthly to discuss neighborhood events and to socialize (though it left few records). It was common for groups to form based on employment, socioeconomic status, or church membership. The black sawmill employees at J. J. Newman Lumber tended to work, live, and socialize among one another. So too did the black waiters at the Hotel Hattiesburg, who formed their own social club that met on days off work. Railroad porters in Hattiesburg and elsewhere were known to form tight social bonds. And most of the city’s black female teachers lived together in black-owned boarding houses. Other groups of women formed through cooperative working arrangements—especially laundry—and church membership.28
Hattiesburg’s early black organizations left little trace of the overt activism that occurred in larger Southern cities such as Atlanta or New Orleans—with one notable exception. In 1914, a committee of black entrepreneurs drafted a “Bill of Complaints” addressing conditions on segregated railroad cars and sent copies to the superintendents of each of the three major railroads that passed through Hattiesburg—the Gulf & Ship Island, the New Orleans & Northeastern, and the Mississippi Central. There is no record of the companies’ responses, but for the era, the protest itself was certainly a bold maneuver.29
This Bill of Complaints was part of a one-day national protest named Railroad Day, organized by Booker T. Washington, who by that time was the most influential African American in the United States. Born into slavery in 1856, Booker T. Washington argued that an industrial- and agricultural-based education was crucial to the advancement of African American character and work ethic. He won the support of many white Southern leaders in the 1890s by advocating a vision of racial advancement focused on African American self-improvement, morality, and institution building, as opposed to the immediate civil rights promoted by Northern intellectuals such as William Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. Du Bois. Although Washington tactfully used his influence to quietly advocate for increased civil rights and a cessation of lynching, many of his contemporaries strongly criticized him as an “accomodationist” whose approach to racial uplift, wrote Du Bois, “practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro.”30
This debate has been largely overblown in terms of its applicability to most African Americans at the time, but it is important to note here because all available evidence indicates that members of Hattiesburg’s black entrepreneurial class strongly supported Booker T. Washington and his approach to racial uplift. Bear in mind that many were the sons and daughters of former bondsmen (if not former slaves themselves), living in a state where the governor publicly advocated lynching black people. Having come of age during an era of horrific violence, they had very little reason to believe that overt demands for racial equality would result in increased civil, social, or political rights. In fact, their experiences would have suggested that violence—perhaps even death—was a more likely result of public activism. Du Bois and his allies were absolutely correct in noting that African Americans were fundamentally limited by racially discriminatory social, economic, and political constructs, but many black Southern leaders at the time were more immediately concerned with survival.
Hattiesburg’s most visible Washington supporter was the barber Timothy S. Thigpen. Thigpen and his brothers, one of whom named a son Booker T. Thigpen, played instrumental roles in helping establish the alternative black society in the Mobile Street District through their involvement with several local businesses and organizations and their roles at St. Paul Methodist Church. It was Timothy Thigpen who in 1903 began self-publishing the Mobile Street District’s first black newspaper, The Weekly Times, which closely subscribed to and routinely defended Washington’s principles. When Chicago Broad Ax editor Julius Taylor criticized Washington in 1907, Thigpen responded with a heated editorial. “Brother Taylor is wrong,” wrote the Hattiesburg publisher. “He lets his prejudice against Dr. Washington lead him to accuse wrongfully, men who have been the moulders [sic] of race sentiment in this country. Editor Taylor, with his talent and his paper should lay aside his prejudice against Dr. Washington and help him when he is in the right and cease his useless yawping.” In a later editorial, Thigpen noted, “We of the South are tired of theorizing from the Northern Negro who knows nothing about the conditions in the South.” For Thigpen and his colleagues, racial progress was best accomplished by sidestepping the already lost battles for civil rights and developing one’s own community.31
Alongside churches and businesses, mutual aid and Freemasonry societies also served as important avenues of self-help and economic uplift. The Mobile Street District was home to five such groups in the 1910s—the locally-based Sons and Daughters of Gideon and the Industrial Toilers of America, and branches of the national Odd Fellows society, the Knights of Pythias, and the Stringer Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons, the largest black Masonic order in Mississippi. Dubbed by one black Southern newspaper as “one of the largest, wealthiest and most aggressive organizations in the country,” the Stringer Grand Lodge by 1907 included more than eleven thousand members and controlled over $166,000 in assets. That year, the organization held its annual meeting in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District, attracting approximately one thousand African Americans “from all parts of the state.”32
Black mutual aid societies, also commonly referred to as beneficial or benevolent societies, operated essentially as insurance cooperatives. Weekly or monthly dues entitled members to health, unemployment, and death benefits. Some societies even offered retirement pensions. Masonic orders, which were often closely affiliated with mutual aid societies, were generally designed to enhance the professional, moral, and spiritual development of black men. Some branches also had auxiliary groups for women. In Hattiesburg and elsewhere, these organizations often met and conducted their activities in secret. Several local black leaders belonged to numerous orders at once. For example, Timothy S. Thigpen was not only the founder of the Industrial Toilers of America, but also a member of the Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias. Membership was often stratified by socioeconomic status and / or religious affiliation, but the core of their mission also included a variety of community-based service projects and self-help initiatives.33
The dues collected by these organizations were used to fund social activities and to provide various forms of insurance, medical care, scholarships, loans, and financial aid to black families and institutions. The ability of these groups to accumulate and distribute resources effectively helped subsidize the low wages paid to African Americans and provide some access to welfare and insurance services for black men and women. Pioneered by Hattiesburg’s first wave of black business leaders, Masonic societies would play a major role in local black life throughout the Jim Crow era. The local Stringer Grand Lodge remains active to this day.
Throughout the early twentieth century, churches, work-based social groups, and a variety of mutual aid and Freemasonry societies formed the pillars of black communal life in Hattiesburg, offering not only a sense of belonging but also important economic benefits and avenues of civic participation. The “collectivist ethos” of these organizations, to use the phrase of historian Robin Kelley, was necessitated by the racial segregation and oppression that characterized black life in the Jim Crow South. The very same forces that restricted African Americans in the South also pushed them together and led to the creation and expansion of black communal institutions and traditions that helped them navigate life in a very dangerous society. For some, these community groups facilitated an escape from that society altogether.34
At about noon on December 7, 1916, one hundred black employees at Hattiesburg’s J. J. Newman Lumber sawmill received their biweekly paychecks and walked out of the mill. When the whistle blew signaling the end of lunch, the rough sheds, box factory, and docks remained unmanned and were forced to cease operations for the rest of the day. White employees at the mill, who “announced that it would be impossible for them to continue their work without assistance from the negroes,” managed to keep the planers and kilns operating for a few hours, but the entire mill shut down the following day and remained closed for two weeks. The black workers never returned. By the time J. J. Newman finally reopened, they had already left for Chicago.35
An exodus had begun that autumn. In October, between one hundred fifty and two hundred black Hattiesburgers boarded a special midnight train to Chicago. On December 11, another group of thirty-seven left. During the next month, additional groups of thirty-one and forty also went north. The following spring, other large groups of thirty, twenty-eight, eighty, one hundred twenty, and one hundred forty-seven left Hattiesburg for the Windy City. “It was considered ‘fashionable’ to go,” reported one migrant. “Anybody that had any grit in his craw, went.” Over the span of about sixteen months, an estimated 2,500 African Americans—roughly half the city’s black population at the time—packed up and left Hattiesburg for good.36
It was cheaper to go in groups. Railroad companies offered discounted rates for ten or more passengers. Migrants could save as much as $8 apiece for traveling in such groups. Travel groups formed from existing social structures in the Mobile Street District. Like the men who walked out of J. J. Newman Lumber, many of the migrants organized moves with coworkers. Others migrated with members of their churches. In less than two years, Mt. Carmel Baptist Church lost 550 of its 700-member congregation. One pastor discouraged members of his church from leaving, only to join them later in Chicago when they offered to pay for his move. At least two other congregations made similar arrangements for their preachers to join them up North.37
With the Great War grinding European migration to a halt and Northern factories still in need of labor, black Southerners were recruited to work in manufacturing jobs in Northern cities. Intrigued by the promise of jobs and a life outside the Jim Crow South, hundreds of thousands of African Americans left Dixie forever. For black Mississippians, Chicago was the most common destination. Migrants from the Magnolia State comprised a large share of the fifty-thousand-plus African Americans who flocked to Chicago between 1916 and 1918.38
For many black Mississippians, the move to Chicago was highly influenced by an African American newspaper named the Chicago Defender. Founded in 1905 by Georgia native Robert Sengstacke Abbott, the Defender commanded attention with brazen headlines such as “100 Negroes Murdered Weekly in United States by White Americans” and scathing critiques of Jim Crow. Black Southerners, living in places where newspapers typically ignored local or national black news, were attracted to the Defender’s broad scope and militant attitude. By 1918, the Defender had more than eighty thousand subscribers outside of Chicago. Pullman porters and other railroad employees delivered large stacks of the Defender’s weekly national edition to black neighborhoods across the New South.39
The Defender was immensely popular with black folks in southern Mississippi. A Hattiesburg barber named Robert Horton often bought between forty and fifty copies of the Defender and sold them to his customers at cost “just for the sake of distributing the news of a ‘fearless paper,’ ” he explained. One report noted that black Hattiesburgers “grab the Defender like a hungry mule grabs fodder.” “Men in business sell them without profit,” wrote a National Urban League official of black Hattiesburgers. “It is passed around until it is worn out.” In nearby towns, there were stories of even illiterate African Americans carrying copies of the Defender “simply because it was regarded as precious.”40
The Defender played an important role in helping spark migration. It published dozens of articles advocating black migration and even set a date—May 17, 1917—for what it called “The Great Northern Drive.” Black people in Hattiesburg sat in the shops of their community and discussed articles from the Defender, having “semi-public discussions” about life in the South, one migrant described, and “[bringing] up the reasons for wanting to leave.” Some actually wrote to the Defender itself to ask questions about jobs, train tickets, or housing. “I am a yellow Pine Lumber inspector,” one Hattiesburg man wrote to the newspaper. “My job pay me well but as my wife and Children are anxious to come north I would try and get a job.” The Defender, noted the Urban League, “which unquestionably stimulated the movement, is in large measure responsible for the popularity of Chicago.” Some local whites accused the paper of “ruining Hattiesburg.”41
The communal culture of the Mobile Street District was also crucial to people’s decisions to move. During return visits to Hattiesburg, recent migrants regularly stopped into local barbershops and grocery stores to see old friends and tell them about jobs, schools, and housing in Chicago. According to one observer, these barbershop discussions “were as effective as labor agents in seducing labor.” Locals were also influenced by letters from friends who had already moved to Chicago. “Letters were passed around and read before large groups,” reported a 1919 study on the black migration. “A woman from Hattiesburg is accredited with having sent back a letter which enticed away over 200 persons.” Another Hattiesburg migrant named Mr. Holloway reported that he and his wife had received two letters per week from friends who had moved to Chicago. “All made them anxious to come,” he explained upon his arrival in the Windy City.42
Many business owners in the Mobile Street District also left. Stephen Kinnard, the Mobile Street furniture salesman and head of the Howell Literary Club, moved to Chicago, where he took a position with a life insurance company. Former hotel manager Richard McBride also moved to the Windy City, where he worked as a hotel cook. Restaurateur Noah Shackelford sold his barbeque business on Mobile Street to open a new restaurant on Chicago’s South Side. Even Timothy S. Thigpen, the avid supporter of Booker T. Washington, ignored Washington’s advice to “cast down your bucket where you are” and went to Chicago, where he took a job in printing.43
The Hattiesburg News, which did not typically run stories about the black community, paid close attention to the departures. Many local whites were deeply concerned about the loss of the city’s black labor force. “No body of men can be found,” the paper cautioned readers, “who will work as long and at as small wages and do it as uncomplainingly, in forrests and lumber camps and the mills of the South as the negro does.” “[White] Housekeepers are not taking at all kindly to the activities of the labor agents,” another article noted, “and are trembling lest they will soon have to build their own fire in the kitchen stoves on wintry days and cook breakfast.”44
Placing the blame on “oily-tongued labor agents,” white Hattiesburg officials took measures to stop the departures. They searched the city for traveling labor agents and issued fines to anyone they suspected of recruiting workers for Northern firms without a proper license. Hattiesburg’s mayor instructed the police to monitor the local railroad depots and break up any large crowds of African Americans and “make inquiries of the negroes found there as to their businesses.” In Chicago, some of the black migrants reported that white officials actively tried to keep African Americans away from the railroad ticket offices and that private employers of domestic laborers often withheld pay if they suspected a worker might leave.45
The Hattiesburg News reassured white readers that the departures would soon end and promised the return of black migrants. The black migrants, they argued, were victims of corrupt labor agents who made false promises of jobs and housing in Chicago. “Negroes who have been carried away from Hattiesburg in hundreds by labor agents to work in northern states are not finding the labor conditions as represented,” a reporter claimed. Some African Americans, the paper asserted, were “ ‘caught in the trap’ and anxious to return to their homes here, but are unable to get away.” “Chicago is not as fond of the members of the black race as oily tongued New Orleans labor agents have led the negroes to believe,” another local report noted. Weather was the subject of another common argument. “They are helpless before the elements,” the paper insisted. One story told of a “strong, healthy negro” who had been warned by a doctor to “Go back South.… You’ll die if you stay here.” “Cold climate,” the story explained, “tends to have that kind of an effect on negroes.” Other writers concluded that the black migrants would return simply because of how much they would miss the South. One unsubstantiated report claimed that when “the lights of Hattiesburg began fading in the distance,” some of the departing migrants began “jumping through windows, or off onto the platform, so anxious were they to get off that train.” The Hattiesburg News ultimately predicted that “the exodus … will teach the negroes who leave to appreciate the South more.”46
Of course, the papers were wrong. Hattiesburg’s black men and women kept leaving, and local whites could do very little to slow their departure. At one point, one of the local sawmill owners reportedly became so desperate to keep his black workers that he “ran down to the station and begged the men not to leave his place, offering more money.” “The negroes refused,” reported a witness. Those black men would never again abide by the white sawmill owner’s demands or the rules of the Jim Crow society from which they fled.47
The greatest irony in these exoduses was that white Hattiesburgers had done so much to lay the groundwork for the migrations. The sawmills and the railroads that they had so welcomed—and that first brought black workers into the city—were the very firms that ultimately provided those black workers with the resources (wages) and the transportation (railroads) to leave. None of the black men who left the J. J. Newman Lumber Sawmill in December of 1916 had very deep roots in Hattiesburg. Those over the age of twenty-one were older than their employer; those over the age of thirty-two were older than Hattiesburg itself. This meant that they had come from elsewhere. The opportunity of lumber work had drawn them from other labors and enabled them to envision a very different life. As the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier once noted, “Some of the men had their first glance of the world beyond the plantation or farm when they worked in sawmills, turpentine camps, or on the roads.” The development of the New South offered a great many things. For hundreds of thousands of African Americans, its greatest gift was to provide a mode of exodus from the lands where their ancestors had been enslaved.48
Chicago was rife with all sorts of its own racial problems—including a major race riot in 1919—but many Hattiesburg migrants were enthralled by the opportunity to escape Jim Crow Mississippi. In explaining the reasons for leaving, most cited low pay, poor schools, and the threat of violence. “They say that we are fools to leave the warm country and how our people are dying in the east,” one Hattiesburg migrant explained. “Well I, for one, am glad that they had the privilege of dying a natural death. That is much better than the rope and torch. I will take my chances with the northern winter.” Another Mississippi migrant simply explained, “I just want to be somewhere where I won’t be scared all the time.” One Hattiesburg man, grateful to escape the daily indignities of Jim Crow, told an Urban League official that in Chicago, “for the first time in his life he had felt like a man.”49
Anxious to flee Jim Crow, thousands of black Hattiesburgers quit their jobs, abandoned their belongings, and sold their homes. “Men who had spent their lives buying homes gave them away for a trifle,” a report noted. “Negroes have almost given away what few holdings they may have gotten together after hard years of work and are leaving on every train,” reported the Hattiesburg American. Chicago became such a common word in the Mobile Street District that black people began simply referring to it as “Chi.” “The people got the Northern fever,” testified one migrant, “just like they got religion.”50
For some, the act of migration was indeed spiritual. When a group of 147 Hattiesburg migrants crossed the Ohio River at Cincinnati, they bowed their heads in silent prayer, thanking God for delivering them out of the South. After a brief moment of silence, the group broke out in song, their voices jubilantly echoing throughout the train car: “I done come out of the land of Egypt, ain’t that good news” and “I’m looking now across the river, where my faith will end in sight.” Men on the train took out their watches and stopped them at 10:30, the exact moment when they crossed the Ohio River. One woman even went so far as to claim that she could tell the difference in the air on the Ohio side of the river. They were the children and grandchildren of slaves—some were former slaves themselves—and many still viewed the North as a mythical land of freedom. The migration itself was a spiritual journey away from the horrors of their ancestral lives in the South.51
In Chicago, Hattiesburg migrants helped one another find jobs and housing. One couple from Hattiesburg bought a large, seven-room house and offered short-term lodging for new migrants. Their boardinghouse was constantly filled with recent arrivals from the Hub City who stayed with them while searching for permanent housing and jobs. Capable of hosting up to twenty-one guests at a time, the woman estimated that during the winter of 1917–18, she hosted nearly seven hundred boarders from Hattiesburg and other nearby towns in southern Mississippi.52
For many, the culture of communal self-help that had developed in the Mobile Street District transferred easily to Chicago. Hundreds of Hub City migrants chose to live together in the Windy City, developing a distinct community of Hattiesburg migrants in Chicago near the corner of Rhodes Avenue and 35th Street. The Urban League reported, “There is in Chicago a little colony of Mississippians from Hattiesburg principally, which has been transplanted so completely as to retain practically all of its customs and mores.” The people from Hattiesburg, the report noted, settle among one another because “they are desirous of helping each other.” “We stick by one another,” one of the migrants told an interviewer.53
Robert Horton, the Hub City barber who had sold the Defender from his shop in Mississippi, opened a new barbershop in Chicago named the Hattiesburg Barbershop. Sitting in the middle of over 150 families from Hattiesburg, the shop retained many of its old customers and social functions. It was a site of gathering, reunion, and gossip. “At the barbershop,” an Urban League representative observed, “it is possible to meet all old friends from home or learn of their whereabouts.” Fellow Hattiesburg migrants Noah Shackelford and Timothy S. Thigpen lived and worked less than six blocks away. Various other Hattiesburg migrants started a coal and wood company, a deli, and a pool room. There were also at least three church congregations comprised primarily of Hattiesburg migrants and an organization called the Hattiesburg Social Service Club.54
The crux of that cohesiveness was birthed in Hattiesburg’s Mobile Street District, where the black population forged a variety of institutional, social, economic, and religious structures to help navigate Jim Crow. Transferred across more than eight hundred miles, people who had lived, worked, and worshipped together continued to operate within existing communal structures and traditions in Chicago. When asked why they remained together in the Windy City, one of the Hattiesburg migrants simply explained, “I guess it’s because they made us stick together down there.”55
Back in Hattiesburg, the departures sparked several significant developments. First, local white leaders began paying more attention to the condition of African Americans. As a correspondent for the Defender reported, “White people are paying more attention to the race in order to keep them in the South.” The fundamental characteristics of Jim Crow remained unchanged, but the 1920s would see numerous examples of local white leaders supporting black community initiatives. This increased interest led them to work with local black community leaders. Businessmen and clergy who remained in the Mobile Street District increasingly began to serve as intermediaries between working-class African Americans and white city leaders who were interested in making token gestures to help curb the exodus. In 1919, the Hattiesburg American (previously the Hattiesburg Daily News, which had changed its name early in World War I) even started a new series on local black life titled the “Colored Column,” marking the first time in Hattiesburg history that the city’s largest newspaper included regular discussions of life in the Mobile Street District. This fairly short-lived column was by no means revolutionary, but along with the increased support of black community initiatives, it represented a growing recognition of the concerns of an oppressed but much-needed black population that had proven it could at any time simply pack up and leave.56
The second development was that many local firms raised wages to try to keep black workers. According to a national study conducted by the scholar Emmet J. Scott, a former aide to Booker T. Washington, the average wages in Hattiesburg sawmills increased from $1.10 per day to “$1.75 and $2” during World War I. Another historian recently estimated that statewide industrial wages for African Americans increased between 10 and 30 percent. African Americans still worked in the city’s worst jobs and earned far less than their white counterparts, but they also earned more than they had before the departures.57
The third and most important result of the departures was that the city decided to build a black high school in the Mobile Street District. In 1919 or 1920, William H. Jones, principal of the local black school, was invited to address a contingent of the city’s leading white businessmen at a banquet concerning the status of Hattiesburg’s black school district. From this meeting, local white leaders urged Hattiesburg citizens to pass a $75,000 bond to build a new high school for African Americans. Subsidized by the Rosenwald Fund, a national foundation that supported the improvement of black schools, Hattiesburg’s first high school for black students opened in September of 1921. William Jones decided to name the new school Eureka, meaning “I have found it.” Shortly after Eureka opened, a story in the Los Angeles Times featured Hattiesburg’s new black high school in an article titled “Schools Stop Negro Exodus,” which concluded, “[White] Citizens here say the school has undoubtedly served to stabilize colored labor.”58
These new developments helped generate a resurgence in the local black population. In the wake of the departures, thousands of new black migrants came to Hattiesburg to take wage-labor jobs, start new businesses, and send their children to the new school. “The town has been almost depopulated of Negroes and repopulated again,” reported the Urban League of Hattiesburg. “The towns were first drained of the available laborers,” observed the black historian Carter G. Woodson in 1930. “Then the farm Negroes were brought in to take the places vacated by those who had left for Northern points.” Woodson concluded, “Especially was this the case in cities like Birmingham and Hattiesburg.” Despite losing more than half its members, Hattiesburg’s black population over the long run continued to grow steadily.59
Turner and Mamie Smith left behind no record of their thoughts about leaving Hattiesburg, but amid such a massive exodus, they must have considered the possibility. That was another effect of the departures: from that point forward, all local black men and women were presented with the possibility of leaving the Hub City. Of course, a variety of factors influenced individual and family decisions. Turner and Mamie had plenty of reasons to stay. One was that they were a bit older; Turner was fifty-seven years old when the exodus began in 1916 and probably believed that he had a lesser chance than a younger man of finding work in Chicago. Additionally, he and Mamie had a built a life in Hattiesburg. After moving for years between teaching jobs and careers, they had bought their own home, had established themselves among the congregation at St. Paul, and were still helping support their children. Some members of the Smith family did eventually leave the South, but Turner and Mamie stayed in Hattiesburg for the rest of their lives.
In the mid-1920s, after years away in school, the two eldest Smith sons, Charles and Hammond, completed their education and returned to Hattiesburg. Upon their return, they encountered an even larger and more vibrant Mobile Street District than the one they had left nearly a decade before. They re-joined the congregation at St. Paul Methodist Church and soon thereafter started businesses of their own on Mobile Street, integrating themselves into the city’s black business community and leadership class.