FEDERAL WRITERS’ PROJECT The Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) programs designed to provide useful work for thousands of writers displaced by the Depression. A primary goal of the FWP was to write and to publish a series of local, state, and federal guidebooks, combining the features of a tour book with historical facts and data. These books took their impetus from the famous Baedeker Travel Guides, which made tourist information and attractions into absolute necessities for travelers. Sterling A. Brown held the position of editor on Negro affairs for the national FWP office. His duties included guarding against misrepresentations of African Americans in the various guidebooks.
BENJAMIN BOTKIN’S LAY MY BURDEN DOWN (1945) A collection of oral testimonies on the experiences of African American folk in the South. Brown was interested in what the narratives revealed about black life, character, and language, and about the social character that shaped them. Benjamin Botkin worked closely with Brown on folklore projects, including this book.
VIRGINIA PROJECT A state project under the auspices of the Federal Writers’ Project. Under the direction of Eudora Richardson, this project produced what many feel was the first state history of the Negro ever published, The Negro in Virginia (1940). Unique in approach, its use of anecdote, interview, and documents serves as a good example of social history. The actual research was conducted by a group of project workers led by Roscoe E. Lewis. The cogent advice Brown offered to the project has led some people to the mistaken conclusion that he was the study’s sole author. To commemorate their friendship and working relationship, Brown dedicated his poem “Remembering Nat Turner” to Lewis.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871–1938) A leading figure of the New Negro Renaissance, Johnson was a distinguished poet, novelist, teacher, critic, diplomat, and NAACP official. He is perhaps most often remembered as the lyricist for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often referred to as the Black National Anthem. Johnson wrote a compelling introduction to Brown’s Southern Road (1932) in which he modified his criticism of poetry written in black dialect.
THE NEGRO CARAVAN (1941) An anthology of African American literary and cultural expression. With Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee as coeditors, Brown set out to present a more accurate and revealing story of the Negro writer than had ever been told. The anthology presented a body of writing by African American authors and a number of folk sources that revealed a “truthful mosaic” of black character, thought, and experience and that, through perceptive literary interpretations and critical evaluations, attested to the rich diversity of black writing and cultural expression. It remains one of the most useful and comprehensive anthologies of African American writing ever published and continues to be important for establishing the basis for modern criticism of black literature.
NATIONAL COUNCIL OF TEACHERS OF ENGLISH The NCTE is an organization devoted to improving the teaching and learning of English and language arts at all levels of education. Since 1911, NCTE has provided a forum for the profession, an array of opportunities for teachers to continue their professional growth throughout their careers, and a framework for cooperation to address issues that affect the teaching of English.
JULIUS ROSENWALD (1862–1932) An American businessman and philanthropist, he served as president and chairman of the board of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. Rosenwald was committed to social reform and the improvement of race relations. In 1917, he established the Julius Rosenwald Fund; it was largely used to establish rural schools for blacks. It later offered fellowships to scholars, writers, and artists; Brown was a recipient of a Rosenwald fellowship in 1942.
VIRGINIA SEMINARY AND COLLEGE Originally known as the Virginia Baptist Seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary and College was the first post–Civil War college in Lynchburg. It was incorporated in 1888. Along with theological instruction, the seminary offered college preparatory work, teacher training, vocational education, and liberal arts courses. It was to this school that Rev. Sterling Nelson Brown and Dr. Carter G. Woodson sent Sterling A. Brown after his graduation from Harvard in 1923. No doubt the senior Brown hoped his son would “hear the call,” become a seminarian, and succeed him as a theologian and pastor. But from 1923 to 1926, Brown would heed a different calling, one that embraced the lives, lore, and language of black folk. These became important sources of his evolving poetic sensibility.
MRS. BIBBY AND CALVIN “BIG BOY” DAVIS Among those people Brown met while teaching at Virginia Seminary, two were crucial to his development of a folk-based aesthetic: Mrs. Bibby and Calvin “Big Boy” Davis, both of whom figure significantly in Southern Road (1932), his first published collection of poems. Mrs. Bibby, the mother of the one of his students, typified in many ways the tough-mindedness and strength that Brown admired in the folk. She is represented in “Virginia Portrait” and “Sister Lou.” Calvin “Big Boy” Davis, an itinerant worker and guitar player, provided him excellent instruction in the spirituals and “gut bucket” blues for a few coins to keep him going. Poems such as “Odyssey of Big Boy” and “When de Saints Go Ma’chin’ Home” preserve the memory of those wonderful experiences.
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY More than $6,000 raised by the black fighting men of the 62nd and 65th U.S. Colored Infantry constituted the initial endowment for a 22-foot-square room in which classes first began in 1866 at what is now Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. Known then as Lincoln Institute, the school began receiving state aid in 1870 in order to expand its teacher training program. It became a state institution nine years later and implemented college-level courses in 1887. It has been known as Lincoln University since 1921. As a faculty member in the English Department and part-time language instructor at Lincoln Academy from 1926 to 1928, Brown used to outrage his more staid colleagues by hanging out in “The Foot,” one of the more colorful parts of the black community. There he learned from such artful storytellers as Slim Greer and Revelations.
FISK UNIVERSITY A private liberal arts college, Fisk was founded in 1866 in Nashville, Tennessee, by the American Missionary Association. Faltering from economic woes, the school turned to a strategy that had gained popularity since the mid-1800s. Many black institutions of higher education fielded a group of jubilee singers or a vocal quartet to sing spirituals in concerts for fund-raising. The Jubilee Singers of Fisk was one of the most successful. In 1871, this small group set out to raise money for the financially strapped school. Over the next decade, the singers toured most of the Northern states and much of Europe, performing for such dignitaries as England’s Queen Victoria. Georgia Gordon, a cousin of Sterling A. Brown’s mother, Adelaide Allen, was an original member of the Fisk Singers. Both of Brown’s parents were graduates of Fisk.
IDA B. WELLS (1862–1931) A fearless antilynching crusader, suffragette, women’s rights advocate, journalist, and speaker. Wells-Barnett courageously sued the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southwestern Railroad Company for forcefully removing her from a train when she refused to give up her seat to a white man. As editor of the Memphis Free Speech, she wrote a scathing denunciation of the lynching of three black store owners whom white store owners saw as competitors for business. A mob looted and destroyed the newspaper in response; Wells-Barnett’s life was spared because she was in Chicago at the time.
ANNE SPENCER (1882–1975) A well-known poet during the New Negro Renaissance. Spencer’s verse was noted for its enigmatic, allusive quality and privacy of vision. She lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, with her husband, Edward, both of whom graduated from Virginia Seminary. Her reputation was further enhanced by her intricate flower gardens. Brown was a frequent visitor to their home, where they discussed their different poetic styles.
SOUTHERN ROAD (1932) Sterling Brown’s first book of poems. It was published during his doctoral studies at Harvard University. In introducing this collection, James Weldon Johnson recanted his valedictory that black vernacular speech had but two stops: pathos and humor. Instead, he found that Brown had infused his poetry “with genuine characteristic flavor by adopting as his medium the common, racy, living speech of the Negro in certain phases of real life.” Even the eminent critic Alain Locke was moved to proclaim that these poems “hail[ed] a new era in Negro poetry, for such is the deeper significance of this volume.”
OPPORTUNITY MAGAZINE The periodical of the National Urban League. In its 1925 literary contest, Brown won second prize for his essay “Roland Hayes.” His poem “When de Saints Go Ma’chin’ Home” won him the first-place prize in its 1927 contest. Beginning in 1931, until the end of the decade, Brown wrote a regular column for Opportunity with variations on the title “The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment.”
BOLL WEEVILS An insect that feeds on cotton plants. The years 1914 and 1917 marked a sharp decline in Southern agricultural production, in part because of the spread of the boll weevil. One result of this devastation was the series of migrations of blacks to the North.
GERTRUDE “MA” RAINEY (1886–1939) Born in Columbus, Georgia, as Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett, Ma Rainey emerged as one of the most important “blues queens” in the 1920s. This success took place after a career of owning her own musical group, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. Poet-journalist Frank Marshall Davis once described her as “commanding a big, deep, fat-meat-and-greens voice, rich as pure chocolate, and her words told of common group experiences. It was like everybody was shaking out his heart. Way, way low down it was and hurting good.” Brown shares much of this feeling in a poetic homage titled “Ma Rainey.”
DAVID WALKER (1785–1830) An abolitionist, an orator, and a writer. Walker’s fame rests primarily on a small but explosive pamphlet titled David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829–30). It was circulated clandestinely but widely throughout the antebellum South, proposing to incite slave uprisings as the only possible solution to ending slavery. After his Appeal was published, his life was threatened. He refused to flee to Canada and, instead, vowed to fight on. He died shortly thereafter in circumstances that led many abolitionists to believe he had been murdered.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS (1818–95) One of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement. A brilliant speaker, Douglass was asked by the American AntiSlavery Society to engage in a tour of lectures and so became recognized as one of America’s great speakers. His fame increased when his first autobiography was published in 1845. After the Civil War, he engaged in a vigorous struggle for black civil rights and an equally impassioned fight for women’s suffrage.
HARRIET JACOBS (1813–97) The author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861), the most well-known slave narrative by an African American woman.
WILLIAM WELLS BROWN (1814–84) Novelist, playwright, and historian. He was the son of a slave woman and a white relative of her owner. Brown escaped from slavery in January 1834. During his flight, he received aid from an Ohio Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he subsequently adopted in the course of defining his new identity as a free man. An active abolitionist, he also became a prolific author, producing a body of work that includes Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847); Three Years in Europe, or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852); a novel, Clotel; or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853); and the melodramatic play The Escape; or a Leap for Freedom (1858).
W. E. B. DU BOIS (1868–1963) Scholar, critic, poet, novelist, editor, political activist. Du Bois emerged at the turn of the century as the leading opponent within the black community of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist approach to securing civil rights for African Americans, advocating instead organized political and legal resistance to segregation. To this end, he helped to launch the Niagara Movement in 1905 and in 1909 cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His The Souls of Black Folk (1903) remains important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the profound statement it prophesied: “The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
JOHN L. LEWIS (1880–1969) The leader of the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960. A very influential union organizer, he helped to organize the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1930s, which, for the first time, allowed African American membership.
ROARK BRADFORD (1896–1948) A white author who wrote pseudo–African American folklore, often versions of stories from the Bible. He is best known for Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928) from which the play Green Pastures was adapted. Brown was especially critical of his characterizations of blacks, which appeared to Brown as so many clowns and buffoons.
DONALD DAVIDSON (1893–1968) A diehard member of the Fugitive Movement, which took its name from a short-lived publication The Fugitive, originating at Vanderbilt University during the 1920s. This group, which included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren among its members, held fast to agrarian ideals, even when industrialization had become important to redefining the Southern way of life. Thus when Davidson describes himself as a “throwback,” he acknowledges his poetry that romanticizes “Old South” traditions.
SAM FRANKLIN Franklin participated in a farm experiment near Hillhouse in Bolivar County, Mississippi. Ultimately named the Delta Farm Cooperative, this farm consisted of little more than twenty-one hundred acres. The impetus for this collective came from the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, whose attempts at unionization were thwarted in Northeast Arkansas and whose members were run off the land, beaten, or killed. A comparatively safer place was located in Mississippi, although the interracial makeup of the members caused the collective to be circumspect and to follow somewhat the racial rules governing African American and white relations. Franklin served as “the social administrator,” in other words, its resident director. All members belonged to a producers’ and a consumers’ cooperative. Politically, the collective vacillated between socialist and Christian principles, no doubt much more of the latter than the former. Franklin was the subject of a chapter in Jonathan Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South.
ERSKINE CALDWELL (1903–87) Playwright, novelist, essayist. With Margaret Bourke-White, a New York photographer, Caldwell collaborated on You Have Seen Their Faces (1937), a photographic record of the Depression-era South that specifically addresses the ways the South’s racial apartheid made the Depression even more intolerable for blacks. A prolific writer, Caldwell published a number of works, including Tobacco Road (1932), God’s Little Acre (1933), and Kneel to the Rising Sun and Other Stories (1935).
JOHN P. DAVIS (1905–73) A graduate of Harvard Law School, Davis helped lobby for the fair inclusion of blacks in New Deal Programs. Along with Ralph Bunche, he founded the National Negro Congress in the 1930s to advance the social, political, and economic status of both black and white workers. He was known to be a member of Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet.”
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE (1875–1955) Cofounder of Bethune-Cookman College, Bethune served as its president in 1945. From 1936 to 1944, she served as the director of the Negro Division of the National Youth Administration and, between 1935 and 1944, as President Roosevelt’s Special Adviser on Minority Affairs. She was one of the founders in 1935 and the first president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW). In 1939, she organized what became the Federal Council on Negro Affairs. This network of twenty-seven men and three women, many of whom worked with the Works Progress Administration (WPA), became known as the “Black Cabinet.”
HUEY LONG (1893–1935) A Democrat who served as governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932 and U.S. senator from 1932 to 1935. As governor, Long (nicknamed “the Kingfish”) consolidated a powerful political machine. Considered a radical populist by some, Long enacted many reforms that made him popular with the rural poor. He championed the little man against the rich and privileged and was an outspoken enemy of Wall Street bankers and big business. As senator, he opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, proposing instead his Share Our Wealth program. He wanted the federal government to guarantee every family in the nation an annual income of $5,000 and to provide an old-age pension for everyone over sixty. He also proposed limiting private fortunes to $50 million, legacies to $5 million, and annual incomes to $1 million. Long announced plans to run for the presidency shortly before his assassination in Baton Rouge in September 1935.
HERMAN EUGENE TALMADGE (1913–2002) Talmadge served six years as governor of Georgia and twenty-four years as U.S. senator. During that time, he skillfully rode the tide of Southern racial politics, evolving from a staunch segregationist to a powerful committee chairman who championed economic development in appealing to black and white voters.
BOB CONSIDINE (1907–75) A well-known political correspondent and syndicated columnist, Considine was one of the nationally syndicated white sportswriters who, through the 1940s, pushed for the desegregation of baseball.
WESTBROOK PEGLER (1894–1969) As a sports journalist in the early 1930s, he was initially sympathetic to Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. However, later in the 1930s, he became a controversial right-wing newspaper columnist for the Chicago Daily News and the Washington Post; in 1936, he wrote an article praising a lynching that took place in California. His targets were the Roosevelts, labor leaders, intellectuals, poets, and others. In the 1950s, he became an avid supporter of McCarthyism, providing McCarthy with information on “left-wing” writers and artists.
SLIM GREER One of many outstanding “liars” or storytellers from whom Brown learned, Slim Greer was a sometimes waiter, train car porter, and barber. Brown met him in “the Foot,” an area of Jefferson City, Missouri, held in disrepute by Brown’s colleagues at Lincoln University. Under Brown’s artful transformations, Slim Greer is the protagonist in a series of poems noted for their use of tall tales to satirize the absurdities of racism.
NATIONAL YOUTH ADMINISTRATION The NYA provided relief for the youth of America during the Second World War. Under Aubrey Williams, a white Mississippian, the NYA set up a program to benefit African American youth. In the outof-school programs, 13 percent of those enrolled were blacks, and they learned a variety of trades that were to be beneficial in the war emergency. African Americans all the way from grade school to graduate school found it possible to continue their education by means of the benefits obtained by the NYA.
PATTERROLLERS A militia established to enforce slavery. The members of the militia were in charge of patrolling areas to guard against slaves escaping or otherwise committing infractions of the laws. Hence the name “patrollers,” which, in the vernacular of many slaves, was pronounced “patterrollers.”
CANE BIÉRE A beer made from sugar cane.
EVANGELINE In Longfellow’s “Evangeline,” a more idyllic version of the poem, Evangeline wanders through much of the United States before finding her lover in a Philadelphia almshouse just before his death.
BARBUS PATASA A kind of fish that seems to be a combination of brim or perch with catfish. The “barbus” refers to the “whisker-like” protrusions, as are found on catfish.
COURBILLION Brown’s spelling of “court bouillon,” a fish broth made with water, white wine, spices, and butter.
“QUE TOUTES MES HONNÊTES DETTES SOIENT PAYÉES” French for “so that all my honest debts be paid.”
CHARLES SPURGEON JOHNSON (1893–1956) Scholar, editor, and social activist. Johnson studied sociology at the University of Chicago where he was greatly influenced by Robert Park. One of the first black academics to secure major funding for his research, he worked tirelessly to demonstrate the connection between socioeconomic and historical factors and the plight of Southern race relations. In 1923, as director of the National Urban League’s Department of Research and Investigations, Johnson also assumed the position of editor of its Opportunity Magazine.
COFFEE-POT MILLS Slang for a small lunchroom or diner, also known as “greasy spoons.”
FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (FSA) A program that in 1937 took over the work of the Resettlement Administration. African Americans received benefits, though infrequently in proportion to their numbers or their needs. Those who managed to secure loans through the FSA did so largely because of the capable leadership of Will W. Alexander. Alexander insisted that there be no discrimination between white and black farmers. His policy came under such fire that, in 1942, the enemies of the FSA managed to cut appropriations so drastically that the greater part of its program was ended.
JAMES MONTGOMERY FLAGG (1877–1960) An artist and illustrator particularly involved with wartime recruitment posters. His most famous poster is the 1917 picture of Uncle Sam with the caption “I Want You for the U.S. Army.” Flagg and his second wife, Dorothy, honeymooned by driving across the country and back. From this trip, he published and illustrated a light, humorous report, Boulevards All the Way—Maybe, in 1925. Perhaps it was this text or illustrations from this cross-country romp that Brown alluded to here. When World War II began, Flagg resumed poster painting, and his 1917 classic was re-released.
DEADHEADING A railroad term for riding the train on a free pass given to workers.
DICTY An African American vernacular pejorative that describes behavior believed to be stuck-up, over refined, or too upper class.
ROSCOE E. LEWIS (1904–61) An editor of The Negro in Virginia (1940), the best-known and most outstanding publication to come out of the Virginia project. This book represented the collective efforts of fifteen black writers and researchers and included the narratives of ex-slaves.
MAX BOND Educator and diplomat who earned his doctorate by successfully defending, in 1936, “The Negro in Los Angeles,” his doctoral dissertation. Bond served as a sociology professor at Dillard University and Tuskegee University during the 1930s. He was the founder and president of the University of Liberia. Bond was the uncle of Julian Bond and the father of well-known architect J. Max Bond Jr.
BARBARA FRIETCHIE (1766–1862) Civil War heroine. Her valor was commemorated by poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier in a poem bearing her name.
SUNKEN ROAD (OR THE “BLOODY LANE”) Part of the location for the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle of the Civil War, which took place on September 17, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. The road acquired its name because it was worn down by years of wagon travel, which formed a natural trench and gave an advantage to the soldiers positioned on top of its ridges. Historians estimate that the “Bloody Lane” experienced more than five thousand casualties alone in four hours. Even though neither side gained a decisive advantage, President Lincoln seized what bit of significance the battle held for the North to announce his Emancipation Proclamation.
THE BLOODY ANGLE Also known as the “Mule Shoe” salient, this battle was one of the bloodiest of the Civil War, and it was part of the ongoing battle for the Spotsylvania Court House in Spotsylvania, Virginia. The Confederate salient, or line of defense, was a prime target. Soldiers fought in hand-to-hand combat for twenty hours on May 12, 1864, across a large pile of logs. Casualties on both sides reached more than 7,000. A particular angle in the Confederate army east of the salient apex, called Bloody Angle, was an area of intensive fighting. Confederate soldiers gained confidence after intense battle, but both sides were heavily battered. Despite the bloodshed of the Bloody Angle, the fighting continued for Spotsylvania. After eleven days, Grant withdrew toward Fredericksburg.
SEVEN PINES BATTLE (OR BATTLE OF FAIR OAKS) The Seven Pines Battle, fought at a road junction by that name six miles east of the Confederate capital of Richmond, was the culmination of an offensive up the Virginia Peninsula by Union forces. The counter-offensive launched by the Confederates fell apart almost immediately because the orders were issued verbally. Poor organization thus led to the Confederates’ withdrawal. The battle, fought May 31 and June 1, 1862, is also known as the Battle of Fair Oaks because it occurred near the Fair Oaks railroad station.
MALVERN HILL The Battle of Malvern Hill occurred on July 1, 1862. It was the culmination of the Seven Days battles. As a result of confusion among Confederate army troops, the battle began before Robert E. Lee intended. The Confederates were defeated by massive Union firepower. The Union army suffered a loss of 3,007 men, and the Confederates 5,650. Though Lee was defeated at this particular battle, the Union army was forced to retreat from the Confederate capital.
COLD HARBOR A battle fought on June 3, 1864, near a small tavern by that name less than ten miles from Richmond. The battle, part of the 1864 campaign that included the Battle of the Wilderness and a second battle at Spotsylvania Court House, was disastrous for the Union side and forced a change in Union military tactics. Grant ordered a frontal attack against Confederates who, having had time to prepare, were well entrenched. The Union lost 7,000 men in the battle, and the Confederates lost 1,500. From then on, the Army of Potomac was wary of attacking fortified positions.
CARTER’S GROVE Located near Williamsburg, this plantation was begun in 1750 by Carter Burwell and restored in 1928 when it was purchased by Archibald McCrea and his wife. The plantation was a significant center for social life in eighteenth-century Virginia, and in one of its rooms, the “Refusal Room,” both George Washington’s and Thomas Jefferson’s proposals of marriage were refused by different women. The land is the site of an English settlement that was destroyed in the spring of 1622 by Native Americans. A century after the raid, it was bought by Carter Burwell’s grandfather, Robert “King” Carter.
WESTOVER Built in 1730 by Richard Byrd II, founder of Richmond. Named for Henry West, fourth Lord Delaware, who was the son of Thomas West, the governor of Virginia.
BERKELEY On December 4, 1619, English settlers came ashore here and observed the first official Thanksgiving. The mansion was built in 1726. It is the birthplace and property of the Harrison family, whose sons were instrumental in early American government. Benjamin Harrison signed the Declaration of Independence and governed Virginia for several terms. His brother, William Henry Harrison, became the ninth president of the United States in 1840. The latter’s grandson Benjamin Harrison would become the twenty-third American president.
SHIRLEY Shirley was founded in 1613, only six years after the Jamestown settlement. It was well known for its hospitality in colonial Virginia. It was also associated with the Carter family who owned Carter’s Grove. During the American Revolution, it was a British army supply center. Later, it became part of Civil War history: Anne Hill Carter, Robert E. Lee’s mother, was born there, and Lee received some of his early schooling there. Nevertheless, after the Battle of Malvern Hill, Union troops were fed by the homeowners.
MILES BREWTON (1731–75) The Miles Brewton House was designed by builder/ architect Ezra Waite. Because of the house’s immense size, it was occupied twice during both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars.
WILLIAM RHETT (1666–1723) Rhett came to South Carolina in 1698 and soon successfully gained high social status as a colonial leader. Colonel Rhett was dispatched in 1706 to command a flotilla to fight off a Franco-Spanish attack on Charleston. His reputation was further enhanced when he captured the infamous “gentleman pirate” Major Stede Bonnet. After acquiring a sugar plantation, he completed work on a new house in 1716. Following his death, this marvel of architecture passed through numerous hands and was renovated many times over.
JOHN RUTLEDGE (1739–1800) Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Rutledge was a member of the First Continental Congress and one of the main authors of the South Carolina constitution in 1776.
MANIGAULT The Manigault mansion was built in approximately 1790 for Joseph Manigault by his brother Gabriel, an architect. Both were successful merchants during the American Revolution.
STONE MOUNTAIN SCANDAL Situated some sixteen miles east of Atlanta, Stone Mountain has been hailed as the largest body of granite in the world. In 1915, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) leased the land and commissioned Gutzon Borghum to create the “Lost Cause” memorial. Actual carving began on June 23, 1923. His work came to an abrupt halt in early 1925 when the prospect of raising $2.5 million precipitated a distasteful episode of double-dealing, dishonor, and hatred. Borghum’s refusal to compromise on a temporary solution to a long-term stone-cutting problem got caught up in an attempt by new members of the UDC to take control of the incoming funds. At loggerheads with them, Borghum destroyed his own models of the memorial, fearing they would be used in an attempt to complete his artistic vision. The price of his models was fixed at fifty dollars, which made his “crime” a felony and therefore extraditable should he flee the state. He managed to escape to North Carolina, where he posted bond; however, the state of Georgia never pursued extradition, although it left the warrant for his arrest in place. In between periods of dormancy, work was eventually completed on the memorial around 1972. Along the way, though, the primary goal of an homage to the Lost Cause gave way, to a diversity of programs that appealed to a broader segment of the population.
NATCHEZ DANCEHALL FIRE On April 23, 1940, the Rhythm Night Club in Natchez, Mississippi, held a one-night-only dance, featuring Walter Barnes and his Orchestra. Spanish moss was used throughout the corrugated iron building for decoration. The boarded-up windows were intended to prevent patrons from entering and avoiding the fifty-cent admission. Estimates vary, but as many as 300 people were inside or trying to gain entry to the dance when a careless smoker set fire to the dry moss by the front door. Because the front entrance was the only way in and out, musicgoers had little chance to escape. Between 150 and 200 people died in the tragedy.
HARMAN BLENNERHASSETT (1764–1831) An Irish immigrant. He is known best for his tangled and unsuccessful schemes with Aaron Burr. Harman and his wife, Margaret, left Ireland in 1796 for the United States. They bought 170 acres on an island near what is now Parkersburg, West Virginia. In the spring of 1805, Burr convinced the Blennerhassetts to support and invest in his scheme for a campaign against the Spanish empire in Mexico. His neighbors suspected treason and stormed his island home. Blennerhassett and Burr were arrested later in Kentucky. Neither one was convicted. The Blennerhassett mansion and island were destroyed by fire in 1812 but later renovated.
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER (1880–1954) In Quiet Cities, published in 1928, Hergesheimer writes several romantic short stories praising antebellum American virtues. Brown’s “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors” specifically attacks Hergesheimer for his romanticizing of antebellum Southern life.
GOAT CASTLE In August 1932, Jane “Jennie” Merrill, an aging recluse from a prominent family, was murdered mysteriously at her home, Glenburnie, in Natchez, Mississippi. The prime suspects accused of the killing were her equally eccentric next-door neighbors, Dick Dana and Octavia Dockery, who shared a home called Glenwood. As children and young adults, these three and Duncan Minor had been the closest of friends and the shining jewels of Southern aristocracy. Beginning sometime in the mid-1890s, their friendships deteriorated. Dick and Octavia never again got along with Jennie and Duncan. In the ensuing years, each became either reclusive, depressed, or “strange.” While Glenburnie maintained a degree of respectability, Glenwood suffered from want of care and became squalid. Animals, including goats, wandered freely in and out of the house, which caused it to be nicknamed “Goat Castle.” Jennie’s death not only shed light on Dick and Octavia’s destitution, but it also made Glenwood a perverse attraction for tourists who paid fifty cents each for an almost carnivalesque sideshow tour in which Octavia spun antebellum tales and Dick accompanied her with off-kilter music he played on the piano. According to local legend, Jennie’s ghost haunted the woods separating the properties, looking for vengeance for her murder.
BARATARIANS The Baratarians were an elaborate smuggling ring that operated from a base near the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. These men, who represented various nationalities, met as an association of privateers in 1805. In total, they numbered between three thousand and five thousand men, led by the Lafitte brothers, Pierre and Jean. Before the War of 1812, the Baratarians disregarded naval laws and attacked American, English, Spanish, and neutral ships. With tensions over naval control rising on all sides, the U.S. Navy and Baratarians fought minor conflicts from 1812 to 1814. The Baratarians were a power to be reckoned with, and both the British and U.S. forces recognized a formidable enemy and possible ally. The British offered Jean Lafitte land in British North America, protection of his property and person, thirty thousand dollars in cash, and the rank of captain in their navy. Lafitte requested and was granted time to consider the offer. In the meantime, he approached the governor of Louisiana with proof of the British proposal and offered to help the Americans in return for a pardon for himself and his men. Even though the governor knew of Jean Lafitte’s value, the United States destroyed Barataria. For not resisting the American onslaught, the governor recommended clemency for Lafitte and his men. When the British began their invasion of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson sought and received the services of Jean Lafitte and his men, who fought valiantly in turning back the invading British.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN BUTLER (1818–93) A provocative political force before, during, and following the Civil War. From the state of Massachusetts, Butler was promoted to brigadier general of the state’s militia in 1855, a rank closely associated with his political position and certainly not military prowess. In 1861, while commanding Fort Monroe in Virginia, he refused to return to their owners slaves who had crossed Union lines on the grounds that their labor for the North made them “contraband,” thus originating the term as applied to African Americans. In 1862, he earned such nicknames as “Beast,” “Brute,” and “Spoons” (for his habit of stealing silverware) when, as commander of the forces occupying New Orleans, he seized $800,000 from the Dutch consulate, hanged a man for ripping the Union flag down from the United States Mint, and declared women who insulted Union soldiers to be treated as prostitutes. Following the war, as a Democratic member of Congress who supported the Radical Republican policies during Reconstruction, he wrote the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which outlawed the Klan.
BIENVILLE Known formally as Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville (1680– 1767). Born in Montreal, he and his brother were part of the expedition that founded the colony of Louisiana. In 1701, Bienville became its acting commandant. He served as governor of the Louisiana colony in 1701–12, 1718–26, and 1733–40. He is credited with founding New Orleans, in 1718.
GEORGE WASHINGTON CABLE (1844–1925) Cable is most noted for his work on Creole society in Louisiana. He had an extensive literary career totaling fourteen novels and short-story collections. Cable had a complex if not contradictory relationship with the South. Though he was a Confederate soldier, he later wrote essays calling for a reformed South. He was horrified by slavery, yet he was quite enamored with romantic notions of the antebellum South.
CHARLES ETIENNE GAYARRE (1805–95) New Orleans lawyer, novelist, essayist, and historian who wrote in both French and English. His best-known work was the four-volume History of Louisiana published between 1854 and 1866.
GRACE KING (1852–1932) Novelist and short story writer who portrayed the pre– Civil War South at least sympathetically (some critics say romantically). Offended by George Washington Cable’s more realistic portrayals of old Southern life, King began writing in response to him. She also became one of the first women to write histories of the South; New Orleans: The Place and the People (1895) is her first history.
PERRY YOUNG A Yale graduate and editor of World Ports Magazine, Young connected with S. P. Walmsley to devise themes for the Mystic Club, which sponsored the Mistick Krewe of Comus for Mardi Gras. In 1925 Young and Walmsley began a collaboration that was to lead to a history of the club. It was published in 1931 as The Mistick Krewe by Young. Walmsley died before the project was completed.
LYLE SAXON (1891–1946) Writer of fiction, biography, and history who also championed the romance and tradition of Old New Orleans. Saxon became the director of the Louisiana Federal Writers’ Project. He also compiled and contributed to Gumbo Ya-Ya, a collection of Louisiana folktales and valuable guides to New Orleans and other parts of Louisiana.
ANTOINE DE LA MOTHE CADILLAC (1658–1730) In 1701, this French explorer, trader, and all-around colorful figure founded the settlement of Fort Ponchartrain du Detroit, which later became the city of Detroit. Historians agree that his background as a member of royalty is dubious; however, they disagree on the year of his appointment as governor of Louisiana, then an almost unknown wilderness. Reports vary from 1710 to 1711 to 1713. In all likelihood, his tenure can be dated from 1712, when French merchant Antoine Crozat was granted a monopoly over Louisiana. He appointed Cadillac governor of Louisiana and Jean Baptiste de Bienville “commander of the Mississippi and its tributaries” or lieutenant governor, second in line to Cadillac. In 1717, Cadillac returned to France, thus making it possible for Bienville to reclaim the governorship he previously held from 1701 to 1712.
ESTEBAN MIRO (1744–1802) Third Spanish governor of Louisiana, from 1785 to 1791.
ANTOINE DE ULLOA (1716–95) First Spanish governor of Louisiana (or “La Florida Occidental”), from 1766 to 1768, after France willingly ceded Louisiana to Spain in 1762 through the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Ulloa was expelled by French settlers who revolted against Spanish rule.
GENERAL ALEXANDER O’REILLY (1722–94) A descendant of an old Irish family that migrated to Spain, O’Reilly was sent to Louisiana to serve the colony as its second Spanish governor and to reestablish Spanish control over the dissidents who had resisted the domination of the Spaniards. His tenure lasted from 1767 to 1769, in part because his rule was virtually despotic.
JOHN LAW (1671–1729) Scottish financier who founded the first French bank (Banque Générale, 1716), issued paper money, and organized the Company of the Indies, which in 1717 was granted a twenty-five-year monopoly over colonization in Louisiana. His “Mississippi Scheme” ruined many of his investors, but it also brought thousands of French and German settlers to Louisiana.
BAMBOULA AND CALINDA Although both dances probably had roots in West African cultural expression, their origins are generally ascribed to West Indian blacks during the eighteenth century. The Calinda (Fr.) or Calenda (Span.) has been described as a dance of multitude or a sort of vehement cotillion. Both men and women danced making sexual gestures by rhythmically striking their own thighs together and thrusting the pelvis and gyrating the hips. The Bamboula also probably had African roots, but it became a form of entertainment in Congo Square, in antebellum New Orleans. Musicians sat in a circle while women formed a chorus. A male dancer would enter the ring and begin a solo performance before seeking the hand of a woman to join him. The woman apparently played the role of coquette, rotating her hips while keeping the upper body immobile, while the man pursued and enticed. Slowly, other couples entered the ring to participate in a music that was frantic and sensual.
OSCAR DUNN (1826–71) An African American who served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, from 1868 until his death.
C. C. ANTOINE (1836–1921) An African American who served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction, from 1872 until 1876.
P. B. S. PINCHBACK (1837–1921) An African American who served as lieutenant governor of Louisiana from 1871 to 1872 and as acting governor from December 9, 1872, until January 17, 1873, after the state legislature impeached Governor Henry Warmoth. In 1876, Pinchback was elected U.S. senator by the Louisiana State Legislature, but the U.S. Senate denied him a seat.
PIERRE GUSTAVE TOUSANT BEAUREGARD (1818–93) Louisiana-born, West Point–trained Confederate general, Beauregard led the attack on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War. Put in charge of defending the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, he repelled a Union assault on Charleston in September 1863 and took part in the defense of Richmond in the spring of 1864.
BAGASSE MILLS Bagasse is the matted cellulose fiber residue left over after juice is extracted from sugar cane. It is traditionally burned as fuel by sugar mills.
T. M. CAMPBELL (1883–1956) Thomas Monroe Campbell of Tuskegee Institute’s School of Agriculture worked with George Washington Carver to develop agricultural extension programs at Tuskegee Institute. Their purpose was direct teaching of scientific agriculture to area farmers. The Tuskegee Institute program influenced Federal Extension Programs, and Campbell became the first U.S. extension agent.
JOHN HAMMOND (1910–87) A jazz record producer and critic whose contribution to the development of American jazz has yet to be fully determined. As a record producer, he brought out recordings by Fletcher Henderson, Benny Carter, Benny Goodman, and Teddy Wilson, among many other jazz notables. In 1938 and 1939, he organized the two historic “Spirituals to Swing” concerts in Carnegie Hall.
DR. WILL W. ALEXANDER (1884–1956) Executive director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC), which was founded in Atlanta in 1919 to address the racial tension growing out of World War I. Through the 1920s, the CIC worked to combat the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings. During the 1930s, Alexander headed a CIC committee that worked to ensure the inclusion of blacks in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and to persuade government agencies to hire black advisors on minority affairs. It is significant that the CIC never attacked segregation itself; rather, the agency’s strategy was to work to improve conditions for blacks under segregation. The CIC merged with the Southern Regional Council in 1944. See Farm Security Administration (FSA) under “On the Government.”
CLARK HOWELL (1863–1936) Succeeded Henry Grady as editor-in-chief of the Atlanta Constitution in 1897. He considered himself an enlightened conservative and generally opposed racial demagoguery; however, like Grady, he maintained the paper’s “separate but equal” political stance. He wrote an editorial praising Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech, but he criticized Washington when he sought to go beyond the compromise position expounded in that speech.
RALPH MCGILL (1898–1969) Columnist for the Atlanta Constitution. He became its editor-in-chief in 1938. McGill opposed the Klan, racial terrorism, and, eventually, segregation, thus placing the Constitution in the vanguard of New South journalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for courageous editorial leadership.
DEAN WILLIAM PICKENS (1881–1954) Educator, writer, editor, and social activist. A graduate of Yale in 1904, William Pickens was the second black to receive a Phi Beta Kappa key from the institution. For the next sixteen years, he taught classics and sociology at Negro colleges. In 1915, Pickens accepted the position of dean of Morgan College in Baltimore, and he was the first African American in the school’s history to hold this job. He remained at Morgan for five years, the last two of which he spent as vice president. Although his tenure as dean was brief, his administrative title essentially was used as his given name. In 1920, he moved to New York and became field secretary of the NAACP. A dynamic speaker, Pickens also served as contributing editor to the Associated Negro Press (1919– 40). Taking leave from the NAACP in 1941, he assumed the directorship of the Interracial Section of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Savings (later War) Bonds division. His autobiography, Bursting Bonds (1923), was reissued in 1991.
ANGELO HERNDON (1913–?) A political activist born in Wyoming, Ohio, Eugene Angelo Braxton Herndon was arrested in 1932 in Atlanta for trying to organize poor and unemployed black and white workers. Under an 1866 Georgia statute, Herndon was charged with attempting to incite a riot. The usual penalty was death, but, mercifully, he was given only eighteen to twenty years. He was released on bond in 1934, largely because of the national and international attention his case drew. The U.S. Supreme Court, in a split decision, overturned the decision, on the grounds it violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Careful historians have deduced that his real “crime” was that he belonged to the Communist Party.
HENRY GRADY (1850–89) Became managing editor and part-owner of the Atlanta Constitution in 1880. Known for progressive proposals, Grady coined the term “New South” in an 1886 speech. Specifically, he argued that plantation agriculture should be replaced by industrialization; that the South was sick of sectionalism and in need of Northern capital to support industrialization; and that race relations in the South had changed so that blacks could become partners in the New South. He championed his New South proposals in the pages of the Constitution and on speaking tours in Boston and New York.
FRANK STANTON (1857–1927) A writer for the Atlanta Constitution. He wrote one of the first daily columns, “Just from Georgia.” Stanton also published several volumes of poetry and was sometimes called the Poet Laureate of Georgia.
MRS. MALONE (1869–1957) Founder of Poro College. Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone was one of the most successful black entrepreneurs of the early twentieth century; some cite her as the first black millionaire. She made her fortune through the development of such products as nondamaging hair straighteners, hair growers, and hair conditioners, and her company had international operations in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Philippines. Mrs. Malone established Poro College in St. Louis in 1917 to train black beauticians in the correct application of Poro cosmetics and hair products and to instruct salespersons on how to market the products; the college also trained barbers, secretaries, and bookkeepers. The blocklong campus housed a manufacturing plant, sales operations, and the school itself. Madam C. J. Walker was a salesperson for Mrs. Malone before she started her own line of products.
HEMAN PERRY (1873–1929) An Atlanta businessman. He completed only the seventh grade, but he rose from cotton sampling to establish the Standard Life Insurance Company in 1913. By 1918, it had $8.2 million insurance in force and premium income of $339,327. With Standard as his base, Perry opened an array of businesses, including a bank, a discount corporation, an engineering and construction company, a laundry, and a real estate firm.
E. FRANKLIN FRAZIER (1894–1962) African American sociologist and educator. Edward Franklin Frazier is best known for his extensive, groundbreaking studies of the African American family, including The Negro Family in the United States (1939), a classic in sociology, and Black Bourgeoisie (1957), considered his most controversial book. Frazier was no stranger to controversy. His 1927 essay published in Forum, “The Pathology of Race Prejudice,” evoked quite a stir, even though it dissected racial bigotry from within the authoritative, scholarly perspective of a new social science approach. He went on to earn a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1931; he became chairman of the sociology department at Howard University in 1934 and taught there for the next twenty-five years.
HOWARD THURMAN (1900–1981) African American theologian and educator. Howard Thurman served as director of religious life and professor of religion at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges in Atlanta from 1929 to 1932; dean of Rankin Chapel and professor of theology at Howard University from 1932 to 1944. In 1944 he cofounded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples in San Francisco and served as the church’s pastor until 1953. Thurman authored more than twenty books. He studied nonviolent resistance to oppression and led the first African American delegation to meet Mohandas Gandhi in India. Thurman was a professor from 1953 to 1964 at Boston University, where he was a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr. and often discussed Gandhi’s teachings with him.
RAYFORD W. LOGAN (1897–1982) African American historian and author. Receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1936, Logan taught history at Atlanta University from 1933 to 1938 and at Howard University from 1938 until he retired in 1965. He was the editor of the Journal of Negro History and the author or editor of several books, including Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti (1941), What the Negro Wants (1944), and The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1965).
WALTER WHITE (1893–1955) African American writer and activist, White produced a well-documented history of lynching, Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch, in 1929. He became executive secretary of the NAACP in 1931; during the twenty-four years in which he held that position, he lobbied for antilynching legislation and against job discrimination, poll taxes, white primaries, and unequal education. He tried without success to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to support an antilynching bill. His investigations into the treatment of black soldiers during World War II were documented in his book A Rising Wind and provided one of the bases for President Truman’s executive order desegregating the U.S. armed services.
GENERAL NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST (1821–77) Confederate general and co-founder of the Ku Klux Klan. He ordered the slaughter of African American troops at Fort Pillow on April 12, 1864, in one of the worst atrocities of the Civil War. Fort Pillow was held by six hundred Union troops, half of whom were African American. The fort was attacked by fifteen hundred Confederate cavalrymen under General Forrest. The Confederate troops essentially murdered surrendering African American soldiers. Reportedly, black sergeants were singled out; several were nailed to logs before they were set on fire. Of the Union soldiers at the fort, 226 survived: 168 white soldiers and 58 black soldiers. The Confederates denied any wrongdoing, saying they officially viewed captured black soldiers as slaves. In later testimony, Confederate soldiers reported that General Forrest had ordered the carnage. A slave dealer in Memphis before the war, Forrest became one of the organizers of the Klan after the war.
DOXEY ALPHONSO WILKERSON (1905–93) Educator and Communist Party official. Wilkerson, born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, grew up in Kansas City, Missouri. He earned an A.B. at the University of Kansas in 1926 and an A.M. from the same school in 1927. He joined the Communist Party, USA, in 1943 as education director for Maryland and the District of Columbia. In the mid-1940s, he moved to New York, where he was executive director of the Communist-led Harlem newspaper, The People’s Voice, and a columnist for the Daily Worker, the official newspaper of the party.
HORACE MANN BOND (1904–72) Teacher and administrator. Bond wrote a major scholarly work, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), that argued that the poor quality of education among African Americans was directly linked to their lack of political and economic power. Bond did not recommend the abolition of segregated schools; instead, he called for the equalization of resources given to black and white children. In 1939, he published his dissertation, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study of Cotton and Steel, which is considered to be an important challenge to established scholarship on Reconstruction. Bond argued that Reconstruction was a significant step forward for black Americans, particularly because of the educational institutions established during that period. Bond published a number of discussions which demanded that American society recognize the intellectual abilities and accomplishments of African Americans, and he was particularly forceful in criticizing racially biased interpretations of intelligence tests, which conveyed the notion that African Americans were inherently inferior. Brown and Bond worked together on many occasions when Brown taught at Fisk University, from 1928 to 1929, and when he worked for the Federal Writers’ Project, from 1936 to 1940.
DAVID COHN (1894–1960) White Southern writer from Mississippi and a firm believer in racial segregation. Cohn believed that though it would be possible for Southern blacks to gain voting rights, justice in the courts, and equitable shares of tax money for health, education, and public services, on segregation there could be no compromise. Cohn insisted that if the federal government interceded to end segregation, “every Southern white man would spring to arms and the country would be swept by civil war.”
NATHANIEL “TIC” TILLMAN (1898–1965) An old friend of Brown’s, Tillman served Atlanta University as chairman of the English department and dean of the graduate school. He was a founding member of the College Language Association.
WILLIAM ELLERY LEONARD (1876–1944) American poet, essayist, teacher, and scholar. He was born in Plainfield, N.J., and was educated at Boston University, Harvard, Gottingen, and Columbia, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1904. From 1906 to 1944, he was a teacher at the University of Wisconsin. Of his numerous volumes of poetry, the most famous is Two Lives (1922), a sonnet sequence relating the tragic story of his first marriage, which ended in his young wife’s suicide. His psychological autobiography, The Locomotive God (1927), describes his distance phobia; like his life, his writing was marked by psychic defeat.
SIDNEY REEDY Educator and scholar. Reedy taught at Lincoln University (Missouri) and was a member of the National Council of Teachers of English and its Intercultural Relations Committee. Among his publications was “Higher Education and Desegregation in Missouri,” which appeared in the Journal of Negro Education (Summer 1958).
E. A. CROSS Educator and scholar. Cross was the head of the Division of Literature and Languages at Colorado State College. His Fundamentals in English: A Textbook for Teachers Colleges Treating the Subject-Matter of Formal English from the Professional Point of View appeared in 1926. His Teaching English in High Schools, written with Elizabeth Carney, was published in 1939. Especially in the latter book, he pays homage to the National Council of Teachers of English as “the most efficiently active organization of teachers in the country today.”
HERBERT AGAR (1897–1980) The English-born editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal and a white liberal. During World War II, he noted that the war had “ordained” the United States with the responsibility of “taking the lead in bringing a spiritual sense of equality to the world.” He added apprehensively that Southern Negroes lived so far from “equality” with white Americans that to them the very word was a joke. He was one of the writers whom Virginius Dabney accused, along with Pearl S. Buck and John Temple Graves, of “stirring up the Negroes” during World War II.
SLATER FUND A foundation to support black industrial education. John Fox Slater, a Connecticut industrialist, created the Slater Fund in 1882, when he donated $1 million for the schooling of former slaves and their children in the South. He was motivated by the belief that education was vital if African Americans were to become responsible participants in the American economy and political process. Board members of the fund believed that manual training would best provide blacks with useful skills and would instruct them in moral discipline and social conformity. Between 1891 and 1911, the New York–based fund supported a few model industrial schools, such as Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute, eventually giving these schools one half of its annual appropriations. After 1911, the fund pursued its interest in manual training by preparing black teachers in county training schools; it helped build 384 such schools in the South over the next two decades. The Slater Fund joined with the Jeanes Fund, the Peabody Education Fund, and the Virginia Randolph Fund in 1937 to form the Atlanta-based Southern Education Fund, which still exists.
PHELPS-STOKES FUND Nonprofit foundation established in 1911 by New York philanthropist Caroline Phelps-Stokes to support the education of African Americans, Native Americans, Africans, and poor whites. Between 1911 and 1944, it made numerous small grants and produced landmark reports: Negro Education in the United States (1916), Education in Africa (1922), Education in East Africa (1924), and The Problem of Indian Administration (1928). The organization’s proficiency in administering grants and delivering services was greatly enhanced during the 1950s and 1960s under the leadership of Frederick Douglas Patterson. Deeply committed to historically black colleges, Patterson organized the cooperative college development program, which dispensed more than $6 million in federal aid to improve facilities and to upgrade funding capabilities. His initiative ultimately resulted in the formation of the United Negro College Fund.
JEANES FOUNDATION The Negro Rural School Fund, which later became known as the Anna T. Jeanes Fund, was the first fund established for the sole purpose of improving rural public education for African American children in the South. Anna Thomas Jeanes donated $1 million to create the fund in 1907. The Philadelphia-based organization accomplished its goal by employing dedicated, experienced, and talented teachers from black schools, then providing them with money and training to become “master teachers.” The “Jeanes teachers,” later called “Jeanes supervisors,” operated on a countywide basis over fifteen Southern states. Assistance included developing curricula, introducing new subjects, acting as principals and superintendents, and training teachers. The Jeanes teachers also served as community advocates, raising money to build new schools and playing an essential role in the overall educational, economic, cultural, and social development for countless rural communities in the South. The Jeanes Fund was distinctive because it was one of the first white philanthropic organizations in which African Americans had real power and authority. Anna T. Jeanes entrusted Booker T. Washington of Tuskegee Institute and Hollis Frissell, president of Hampton Institute, to oversee the initial $1 million donation. In 1937, the Jeanes Foundation, along with the George Peabody Foundation, the John F. Slater Fund, and the Virginia Randolph Fund, merged into the Southern Education Fund.
GENERAL EDUCATION BOARD Philanthropic organization founded in 1902 with a $1 million donation from industrialist John D. Rockefeller Sr. Its goal was the promotion of education in the United States without regard to race, sex, or creed. From 1902 until it ceased operations in 1960, the General Education Board awarded $325 million in grants to various educational efforts across the nation, particularly in the South. Of this amount, approximately $63 million went toward improving the education of African Americans.
VIRGINIUS DABNEY (1901–95) White Southern liberal reporter who campaigned against racial intolerance in the South. He started his career as a frequent contributor to many national magazines, and, from 1939 to 1969, was editor of the influential Richmond Times-Dispatch. Dabney’s racial liberalism never quite moved beyond a highly articulate—and undoubtedly sincere—“separate but equal” position. In fact, his position on blacks serving in the Second World War was described as an effort “to reaffirm their commitment to a concept of inter-racial cooperation that did not challenge segregation itself.”
EMMETT J. SCOTT (1873–1957) Author and administrator. Because his views were generally close to those of Booker T. Washington, Scott was asked by Washington to become his personal secretary. He was elected secretary of Tuskegee Institute in 1912. After Washington’s death in 1915, Scott became special assistant to the U.S. Secretary of War in charge of Negro affairs at the start of World War I. From 1919 until 1939, Scott held positions as secretary, treasurer, or business manager at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In the business community, Scott became the principal organizer of the National Negro Business League. Like Washington, Scott believed that African Americans who achieved business success and property ownership would be given political and civil rights. His views are set forth in works such as Tuskegee and Its People (1910); The American Negro in the World War (1919); and a biography of his mentor, Booker T. Washington, Builder of a Civilization (1916).
T. THOMAS FORTUNE (1856–1928) Editor, reporter, and social activist. Before Booker T. Washington’s ascent as a national figure began in 1895, Fortune was acknowledged as a major spokesperson for black America. His leadership role in the late-nineteenth-century civil rights movement was instrumental in shaping the debate over how African Americans would respond to their legal and social oppression in the decades to come. He started the New York Freeman, which later became known as the New York Age. The New York Age became a leading black newspaper primarily because of Fortune’s editorials, which denounced racial discrimination and demanded full equality for African Americans.
PEACHTREE STREET A major artery in Atlanta running more than nine miles from the center of downtown northward to the elite enclave of Buckhead. Atlanta boasts a veritable orchard of peach trees. There are more than a hundred thoroughfares with peach trees in their names, in addition to a bounty of buildings. In the post– Civil War period, Peachtree Street developed its mystique as an elite residential address. Beginning in the 1920s, its residential status was supplanted by retail, office, and entertainment uses. The building boom of the 1960s to 1990s turned the downtown section of Peachtree Street into the only one in Atlanta that is the concrete canyon usually associated with twentieth-century cities.
DRUID HILLS Affluent white community in the eastern part of Atlanta. While trying to regulate black movement in the city, white officials also worked to keep Atlanta a majority white city by annexing the burgeoning predominantly white suburbs. The major absorption came in 1952 with annexations that increased Atlanta’s size from 37 to 118 square miles.
FRANK GRAHAM (1886–1972) Educator, scholar, and university president. A native of Fayetteville, Graham grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, where his father, as superintendent of public instruction, tried to see that black schools received a just share of funds. Aside from his father’s efforts on behalf of Negro education, the major influences on Graham’s racial liberalism were America’s professed democratic heritage and Christianity. In 1915, he joined the faculty of the University of North Carolina, where he drew more attention for his liberal views than for his scholarship. In 1930, he became president of the university, which he presided over until 1948, when he was appointed to the U.S. Senate. But Graham, for all his liberal passions, was not yet ready to violate the Jim Crow laws openly.
CLINTON CLARK Brown probably became acquainted with Clark on one of his trips to New Orleans to do research for A Negro Looks at the South. The relationship between Brown and Clark is captured in Brown’s unfinished manuscript titled Saga of an Organizer. Clark, in an unpublished memoir titled “The Autobiography of Clinton Clark,” recounts their relationship, which Elizabeth Davey has marvelously analyzed in her introduction to the text.
LILLIAN SMITH (1897–1966) American writer and champion of racial equality, who is best known for Strange Fruit (1944), a controversial novel dealing with the tragic outcome of an interracial love affair in the Deep South. Born in Jasper, Florida, she taught music at a mission school in China during the early 1920s, directed a girls’ camp in Clayton, Georgia, from 1925 to 1949, and, with Paula Snelling, edited Pseudopodia (1936), which became the North Georgia Review (1937–41) and, later, The South Today (1942–45). Her active support of the civil rights movement evoked racist anger. Her papers were destroyed by arson in 1955, and two novella manuscripts were lost; One Hour (1959) was her only published novel other than Strange Fruit. Her nonfiction books include Killers of the Dream (1949), The Journey (1954), Now Is the Time (1955), and Our Faces, Our Words (1964).
PAULA SNELLING (1899–?) Employed by Lillian Smith to oversee the Laurel Falls Camp for Girls, a summer camp, Snelling became Smith’s lifelong companion and friend. Their approach to the South’s problems was different from that of most Southern liberals. They saw most Southern liberals’ efforts to come to grips with the region’s injustices as amounting only to “scratching the topsoil.”
FOUR FREEDOMS A formulation of American post–World War II hopes made by President Roosevelt in his State of the Union address of January 6, 1941. Speaking eleven months before the United States officially entered the war, Roosevelt set forth the freedoms in these words:
The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world. The third is freedom from want—which translated into world terms means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world. The fourth is freedom from fear—which translated into world terms means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
ARTHUR FRANKLIN RAPER (1899–1979) In 1926, Arthur F. Raper, a native of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was recruited as research director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. The commission was a Southern organization in which blacks could be members and were allowed to voice complaints. Prevention of violence between the two races remained a prime objective of the body. Supporters of the commission argued that promotion of “better understanding” between the two races was also vital. Raper, unlike his predecessor, M. Ashby Jones, never thought that segregation was good or that it would last indefinitely. While with the commission, Raper produced such works as the Tragedy of Lynching in 1933 and, three years later, Preface to Peasantry, an account of the severe problems of white and black sharecroppers in two rural Georgia counties.
CONGRESSMAN JOHN RANKIN (1882–1960) Rankin, from the state of Mississippi, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1921 to 1953. A committed segregationist and states’ rights advocate, he was consistently vituperative in denouncing efforts to accord blacks the constitutional guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. During the mid-1940s, he often found conspiracy theory to be an effective means for attacking racial integration. For instance, he vilified the Fair Employment Practices Commission for subverting democracy and threatened to lynch “communistic Jews and Negroes” who attempted to integrate the House of Representatives cafeteria. He posed a similar xenophobic argument in a diatribe against the American Red Cross, whose efforts to collect blood from blacks he characterized as a communist plot to mongrelize America.
FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT PRACTICES COMMISSION (FEPC) On June 25, 1941, President Roosevelt issued executive order 8802, establishing this committee to prevent discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin in defense-related work. It was issued in response to a threatened mass march by blacks on Washington, organized by civil and labor rights leader A. Phillip Randolph.
THOMAS SANCTON (1915–?) Louisiana native and Southern liberal who wrote for the New Republic. In October 1942, a group of Southern blacks met in Durham, North Carolina, and drafted a statement in which they called for equal pay, opportunities for blacks in industry, a federal antilynching law, equality in public services, the hiring of Negroes by Southern police departments, and the abolition of poll taxes and white primaries. They also suggested that it was a “wicked notion” to suggest that the struggle for Negro rights contradicted the best interests of a nation at war. Sancton was one of the white liberals who enthusiastically supported the Durham Statement.
SCOTTSBORO BOYS On April 9, 1931, Haywood Patterson, Olen Montgomery, Clarence Norris, Willie Roberson, Andrew Wright, Ozie Powell, Eugene Williams, and Charlie Weems were sentenced to death for the alleged rape of two known white prostitutes. After perfunctory trials in the mountain town of Scottsboro, Alabama, all-white juries convicted eight of the youths. The case of the ninth defendant, thirteen-year-old Leroy Wright, ended in a mistrial after a majority of the jury refused to accept the prosecution’s recommendation for life imprisonment because of his extreme youth. The repercussions of the Scottsboro case were felt throughout the 1930s; by the end of the decade, it had become one of the great civil rights cases of the twentieth century. The nine young men were sentenced to die on July 10, 1931, but worldwide protests as well as demonstrations around the country delayed any action. The NAACP and the International Labor Defense of the Communist Party intervened. The U.S. Supreme Court, on November 7, 1932, reversed decisions reached by the Alabama courts, on the grounds that the defendants had been denied the right of counsel, which was a violation of due process as guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. The cases were remanded to the lower courts. Over the years, ending finally in 1976, the men were either paroled, freed, or pardoned.