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Highlights From Trotter Review 2009
Introduction by Barbara Lewis
Abraham Obama
The NAACP Is Born
Springfield Oral Histories
The Racial History of Juvenile Justice
Commentary by Kennth J. Cooper
Introduction by Barbara Lewis
T H E T R O T T E R R E V I E W
Introduction
Barbara Lewis
A day or two after Barack Obama was elected president, a colleague with an international reputation for political savvy commented that George W. Bush had made it possible for Obama to be president.
“No,” I responded. “You can’t give that to Bush singlehandedly. There is a whole history, a backlog of effort, not to mention Obama’s strategic genius, to explain the outcome of the election. Bush may have weakened the gate, but Obama pushed it open, and he had a whole group of folks, much bigger and more diverse than the Verizon network, behind him.”
The idea that white folks are the ones who make things happen, that they are the motive force fueling any black accomplishment, persists as a misconception. White folks have agency, black folks do not; white folks are doers, black folks are takers. Of course, not everyone thinks or feels that way, but some still do, and not necessarily through individual fault alone. The media often subscribe to the notion that accomplishment is an exception for blacks, not a given. Rather, criminality is their constant, and so too disadvantage.
The Niagara Movement, the historical focus that begins this issue, was conceived in the idea that blacks can work together in concerted fashion to better their circumstances on a broad slate, including education, law, suffrage, transportation, justice, economics, health, arts, and media. The year of its founding was 1905. At the time, blacks, who were then referred to as Negroes, were suffering hard times, having been relegated to legally-inequitable living and educational conditions and being routinely tortured and killed in public as a form of social sport. In a practice known as lynching, southerners and some northerners strung trees thick with black bodies, eyeing them as little more than expendable baubles, like Christmas trinkets garishly displayed.
The Niagara leadership, initially male but eventually male and female, came together to fight back, to attempt to set some limits to behavior that was wanton, egregious, and fatal. The idea that blacks were taking their fate into their own hands, removing it from white custodianship, did not meet with many supporters. In addition to a campaign of subterfuge, the Niagara Movement also succumbed to a lack of resources and internal feuding.
Severely crippled by 1909, the Niagara Movement was overtaken by a successor group that functioned as an inter-racial council, with scholar W.E.B. DuBois as the most prominent black member. The philanthropic backing came from deep-pocket whites, some of whom had connections back to the abolitionist movement. In the nineteenth century, abolitionism was headquartered in Boston, where William Monroe Trotter, a Niagara Movement co-founder and its most confrontational son, was also based. Almost invariably, DuBois is credited with being the brains behind the Niagara Movement. It is my contention that he shares that distinction with Trotter. DuBois has acknowledged that it was Trotter’s 1903 protest in Boston against Booker T. Washington, the Tuskegee wizard who mastered a turn-the-other-cheek brand of politics, which galvanized him into taking a stand on racial matters. Further, together Trotter and DuBois drafted the Niagara Movement principles, which called for equal treatment between the races.
The name of the successor group is, of course, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which celebrates its centennial in 2009. The year before it was founded, a catalytic race riot erupted in Springfield, Illinois, where Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, lived and was buried. The white men who rioted ran through the streets denouncing Lincoln, insisting that the Emancipation that he had promised was not available to blacks in the capital of Illinois, in the vaunted North. The unbridled mob of roughly a hundred white men descended on any black person they saw, and they murdered more than a few, including an older black gentleman of property named William Donnegan who had been on friendly terms with the former president. The mob set fire to his house, slit his throat, and hoisted him up to the limb of a tree, ignoring his pleas that he had done nothing but lived peacefully with his neighbors and so deserved mercy. There was none to be had from this crowd. It made no difference to them that they knew him, that in his role as a local cobbler, he had patched and soled their shoes. No doubt he had tipped his hat to them as they passed each other on the street. They had watched him age, turn gray and gnarled. Maybe, a week or so previously, one or two had put an arm under his elbow to help him across a puddle. But none of that mattered now. He was an enemy. His complexion made him so, and so did his white immigrant wife, to whom he had been married for over three decades. Donnegan was not the only one to die at the hands of the enraged group. Finally, the National Guard was called in, and the crisis was quelled, at least the outward signs of it.
Cooler heads were outraged. Something had to be done, they said. The home of our great leader had been desecrated. The NAACP, in the aftermath of the Springfield Riot, became the nation’s major voice against racial discrimination and took up the cause of fighting public violence. In line with that agenda, Walter White, who was born in the South as the blue-eyed, blond-haired product of generations and generations of biracial mixing, became a spy in the house the Klan built. White, who is excerpted in this issue, was a novelist as well as an administrator and politician. Like his mentor, James Weldon Johnson, who was NAACP field secretary as well as an educator, lawyer, diplomat, lyricist, and novelist, White was a man of the Harlem Renaissance. So was DuBois, scholar and artist.
The domestic war was being waged on a number of fronts, including the arts. Pauline Hopkins, novelist and editor, is featured in the first article in this issue, and in Contending Forces (published in 1900) she demonstrates how some black women exerted themselves in the project of maintaining community against assaults that were internal as well as external. Mary Church Terrell, also represented in this issue, was an educator, journalist, linguist, and activist contemporary of Hopkins who dedicated her pen to racial betterment, and lived long enough to participate in desegregation efforts, particularly in eating establishments, in the fifties. Terrell, who used the privilege into which she was born to go toe to toe with anyone, including presidents (a tendency and tactic that William Monroe Trotter also shared) passed in 1954 at the age of ninety, fighting for fairness and right to the end. In the Niagara years, she championed the black soldiers of Brownsville who were accused, perhaps wrongly, of rioting. Their punishment was severe. The white rioters in Springfield, on the other hand, were not convicted of their injurious acts of racial violence.
“What do you think of this election?” Ken Cooper asked me on November 5. “I think the image we chose that makes a composite of the faces of Lincoln and Obama was very right,” I said. “Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, but we were never fully emancipated. The nation as a whole didn’t see us that way. We were always inferior, unequal, less than. Now,” I added, “our emancipation can perhaps be more than provisional, here one day and snatched back the next.”
Maybe we’ll get the recipe for longevity right this time, I thought to myself. We’re finally standing tall enough to maybe make a difference, and we’re perched on so many shoulders: on Pauline Hopkins, on Mary Church Terrell, on William Monroe Trotter, on W.E.B. DuBois, on Booker T. Washington, on Abraham Lincoln, on Martin Luther King, on Malcolm X, on Mamie Till the mother of Emmett, on Rosa Parks, on Crispus Attucks, on David Walker, on William Donnegan, on Walter White, on Thurgood Marshall, on Jesse Jackson, on too many to name. It is our responsibility now to prove that accomplishment is our middle name, and has been for a very long time.
Barbara Lewis, PhD
Director, Trotter Institute
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Abraham Obama
This portrait, created by Ron English, a self-styled painter of popaganda, combines the features of Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama. It was part of a mural installed on a wall in the South End section of Boston during the summer of 2008. The artist said his intention was to inspire dialogue about Obama´s candidacy; however, area residents and business owners complained that English´s supporters plastered posters of the image on private and public property without authorization. Much has been written about Obama having read the Doris Kearns Goodwin book, A Team of Rivals: the Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and about his taking cues from the Emancipator.
Reprinted by permission of Ron English.
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The NAACP Is Born
The Broadax
The black press appears not to have anticipated the NAACP would emerge as the nation’s largest and most enduring civil rights organization. The initial meeting on May 30, 1909 of the National Conference on the Status of the American Negro, renamed a year later the NAACP, received indifferent or skeptical treatment in half of the Black newspapers whose copies survive. The historic gathering in New York was overshadowed by two other meetings in the same city, of the Tuskegee Negro Conference and the National American Negro Political League, and by President William Howard Taft’s commencement address at Howard University in Washington.
Of six African-American newspapers in circulation in 1909 that have been preserved, three published nothing at all about the National Negro Conference in the first month after its founding. The other three weeklies did put the news on the front-page, but only one, the Broadax of Chicago, took the meeting seriously. The Washington Bee in its June 5 issue ran three paragraphs on the lower half of its front page about a scientific presentation made at the conference. The New York Age, owned by Booker T. Washington, philosophical rival of NAACP co-founder W.E.B. DuBois, dismissed the meeting in two cynical, opinionated articles published on June 10. The lead article on the front-page carried a headline that condemned the meeting on procedural grounds: “Conference Confusion…Points of Order without Points and Arguments without Argument.” The other on page 5 predicted nothing much could come of such an organization. “It is a safe hazard to state that three-fourths of the colored people attending this meeting have never succeeded in any line of occupation. It is impossible for such to become leaders and guides for ten millions of people.”
Straightforward, comprehensive coverage was found only in the Broadax, which presented the news as its top story on June 12. The paper’s unusual name served as a metaphor for its professed journalistic independence, as stated directly in its motto: “Hew to the line; Let the chips fall where they may.” Editor and publisher Julius F. Taylor had launched the weekly in 1895 in Salt Lake City before moving his family and enterprise to Chicago four years later. In an era when most African Americans were Republicans, Taylor was four decades ahead of his time as a proud Democrat who believed the Republican Party had abandoned black people after Emancipation.
The headline on the Broadax article about the founding meeting accurately foreshadowed the NAACP’s future as a national organization “contending for the civil and political rights of th[e] Afro-American.” The basic facts of the meeting were covered in three summary paragraphs, followed by texts of what the paper deemed the three “most notable” speeches. The first explained the mission and purpose of the organization, while the second placed the country’s racial situation in an historical context. The last was a well-argued address by Du Bois, who rebutted Washington's controversial position that African Americans could advance economically without political rights. The 2,700-word article without a byline is republished with its original typographical errors, which were common in newspapers in that era of lead type set by hand.
Article On The Founding Of The NAACP
The National
Conference on the
Status of the
American Negro
FINISHED ITS SESSIONS IN NEW YORK CITY.
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JUDGE WENDELL PHILLIPS STAFFORD OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA.
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PROF. WILLIAM E.B. DU BOIS OF ATLANTA, GA., DELIVERED THE MOST NOTABLE ADDRESSES OF THE OCCASION.
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PROF. JOHN SPENCER BASSET DECLARES THAT THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS THE FIRST PRESIDENT, TO APPOINT A NEGRO TO AN OFFICE.
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THAT ANDREW JACKSON WAS THE FRIST PRESIDENT TO ENTERTAIN COLORED PEOPLE AT THE WHITE HOUSE.
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PERMANENT ORGANIZATION TO BE MAINTAINED THROUGHTOUT THE UNION FOR THE PURPOSE OF CONTENDING FOR THE CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS OF TH AFRO-AMERICAN.
The first session of the National Conference on the Status of the American Negro, was held in New York City last week. Its session were [sic] held in the Charities Building 105 E. 22d street in Cooper Union.
Each meeting was addressed by some of the most prominent men and women of both races. Among them being Bishop Alexander Walters, John E. Milholland, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Charles Edward Russell, Mrs. Ida Wells Barnett, Chicago, Joseph C. Manning, editor The Southern American, Alexander City, Ala. Albert E. Pillsubury [sic], ex-Attorney-General of Massachusetts; Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, Chicago, Prof. John Spencer Bassett of Smith College Northampton, Mass., Rev. J 0Milton Waldron, Washington, D.C.; Mrs. Celia Parker Wooley, Chicago; Dr. Livingston Farrand, New York City; Prof. W.E.B. Du Bois, Atlanta, Ga, and Judge Wendell Vhillips [sic] Stafford of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, and O.G. Vilard, [sic] editor the Post, New York City.
The Addresses of Prof. Du Bois, Judge Stafford, and Prof. Bassett, were the most notable of all the addresses delivered and which are re-produced in full.
Judge Stafford declared:
“I believe in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. Not the brotherhood of white men, but the brotherhood of all men. I believe in the golden rule and the Declaration of Independence, and I stand by the Constitution of the United States, including the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. That is my creed and my platform.
“The broad subject of our conference is the Negro and the nation, not the Negro and the North, not the Negro and the South, not the Negro and the white man, but the Negro and the nation. The questions it brings up are national. They cannot be settled by one race and still less by any one… They concern the whole country and the must be answered by the country as a whole. If the Constitution is not binding in South Carolina, it is not binding in New York. If it cannot protect the black man it cannot long protect the white.
“If fifteen States can set aside the Constitution at their pleasure there is no Constitution worth the name. If a State can nullify one clause it can nullify the whole. If a State can, in a single Congressional district, deliberately exclude three-fourths of is eligible voters, and yet insist upon having them all counted for the purpose of holding a seat in the national assembly, it can perperate [sic] a fraud on every legally constituted Congressional district in the United States, and there is no security for representative government in any corner of the land.
“If any class or race can be permanently set apart from and pushed down below the rest in political and civil rights, so may any other class or race when it shall incur the displeasure of its more powerful associates, and we may say farewell at once to the principles which we have counted for protection.
“We are confronted, not by a theory, but by a fact. That fact is the deliberate and avowed exclusion of a whole race of our fellow-citizens from their constitutional rights, accompanied by the announcement that that exclusion must and shall be permanent. It is not that the Negro is ignorant, nor that he is poor, nor that he is vicious, but that he is a Negro. Even when he is good and learned and rich, he must still be excluded because he is still a Negro. That is the proposition, and that it is which makes it the duty of all who dissent from such a doctrine to make their dissent known and make it uncompromising and clear.
Problems Faced Squarely
“It will not do to shut our eyes to the real causes and result of the war—especially now when Northern indifference and Southern injustice strike hands to keep the black race in a new bondage as helpless and hopeless as the old. As a member of the white race and turning for the moment to white men. I say that our race will deserve any calamity the presence of the black race may bring. We brought it here by theft and force. We owed it liberty and we gave it a chain. We owe it light and we gave it darkness. We owe it opportunity and we hedge it around certain restraints. We owe it the court-house and we give it the lynching tree.
“Shame on the race that holds in its hands the wealth of the continent and carries in its brain the accumulated culture of the centuries, and yet refusing to lift ignorance and vice to the level of enlightenment and virtue, makes that ignorance and vice an excuse for the denial of rights. Never until the white man has spent his last surplus dollar and exhausted the last faculty of his brain in the effort to lift up his weaker brother—never until then can he stand in the presence of infinite justice and complain of the ignorance or the criminality of the black.
“America did not choose the great doctrine of equal rights—that immortal truth chose America. It has moulded [sic] her form [sic] the beginning; it will mould [sic] her until the end; but, if it cannot it will cast her off with the wreckage of the past and take up some other nation that shall be found worthy.”
Treatment by Whites
Professor Basset, speaking of the history of the Negro in America and his treatment by the Whites, said:
“There is such a thing as the Anglo-Saxon attitude toward inferiors. By observing the feeling on the subject in the places in which the English stock has ruled inferiors, we may have general features of this Anglo-Saxon attitude.
“Mr. Bryce gives us some good illustrations of the feeling in Cape Colony [part of modern South Africa]. For example, a gentleman there may invite an educated Negro to dinner, but before doing so he will ask his white guests if they object to such company. Nor does it happen that he loses position in society because he has been host to a native. He is eligible thereafter as a guest himself at the home of those who would not accept his invitation under the conditions specified. The same is true as to intermarriage. It occurs rarely and there is no law against it. Sometimes a poor white mane[sic] will work for a Negro who has employment for him.
“Social relations with Negroes are not desired by the majority of the whites, but those who oppose such relations do not think the safety of society demands that the advocates of other views be held as enemies of the public good. On this subject people seem to think that the best safety of the public lies in allowing a man to believe as he chooses without making him pay any penalty.
“When the nineteenth century began, for three decades thereafter, the whites had the Anglo-Saxon attitude toward the Negro. They ought to develop him, they recognized his inferiority in the mass while they encouraged all efforts in the individual which seemed to work for his uplift.
“The position of the Southern churches at this time has its parallel in that some of the leading public men, Washington and many prominent Virginians are well known for their mild views of the Negro. In 1791, Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state, appointed Negro mathecatician [sic] to office in his department because he wanted to see if a Negro [Benjamin Banneker] would succeed in that capacity. His letter to a gentleman in France telling of the matter shows that he did not disapprove of Negro officeholders.
Received by Andrew Jackson
“And it was under Andrew Jackson, the second founder of the Democratic Party, that Negroes, so far as I can learn, were first received at a social function in the White House.
“Now these incidents do no prove everything, but they show that public opinion in 1791 and in 1829 was not like public opinion in the South at present. All that I claim is that in the first three decades of the nineteenth century the Southern whites had the typical English attitude toward the Negro. They recognized his inferiority, they sought to secure his development, and that painfully solid opinion which demands that white hands shall never touch black ones had not come into existence.
“Then came the war, with its failures and reconstruction, with its fury. Whether we condemn or approve Negro suffrage which the North forced on the South while it could, we shall see that it did not improved [sic] the South’s opinion of the Negro. From 1830 to 1909 is a long period. There is not a man living in the South today who remembers the time when the Negro question was not associated with passion. The people there not only have forgotten that they ever planned and strove to develop the race in the old English way, but they have difficulty to believe the historian when he proves it from their own history. They have not thought it possible to return to the former attitude, and yet what has been done can be done again.
“If we could return to the attitude which existed in the days of saner conditions, the days of Jefferson and Washington, we should not have social intermingling of the races. The difference between that condition and the present would be in the absence of friction. A white man would not hate a Negro because he was a Negro and a black man would not hate a white man because he was white. We should then lose that apprehension as old as slavery that some day there will come a great struggle between the two hostile races, a struggle whose great probability lies in the habitual anticipation of it.”
Two Mischievous Propositions
“Prof. Du Bois said in part:
“The phrase take the Negro out of politics has come to be regarded as synonymous with industrial training and property getting by black men. I want to show that in my opinion these propositions are wrong and mischievous.
“We believe in vocational training but we also believe that the vocation of a man in a modern civilzed [sic] land includes not only the technique of his actual work, but intelligent comprehension of his elementary duties as a father, citizen, and maker of public opinion, as possible voter, a conserver of the public health, an intelligent follower of moral customs, and one who can at least appreciate if not partake, something of the higher spiritual life of the world.
“It is possible—easily possible to train a working class who shall have no right to participate in the government. Most of the manual workers in the history of the world have been so trained. But the one thing that is impossible and proven so again and again is to train two sets of workers side by side in economic competition and one set of set voters and deprive the set of all participation in government. It invites a conflict and oppression. A nation cannot exist half slave and half free. Either the slave will rise through blood or the freeman will sink. So far tremendous effort in the South has been put forth to keep down economic competition between the races, by confining the Negroes by law and custom to certain vocations. But this effort is bound to break down.
“Moreover, the school [sic] that increase the competition are the industrial schools, and this is both natural and proper. This competition accentuates race prejudice; when a whole community, a whole nation, pours contempt on a fellow man, it seems a personal insult for that man to work beside me or at the same kind of work.
“Not only is there this feeling, but there is also power to act. After the Atlanta riot the police and militia searched the houses of Colored people and took away guns and ammunition while the sheriff almost gave away guns to some of the very men who had composed the mob. We think this monstrous, but this is but a parallel of the action of the whole nation; they have put the ballot in the hands of the white workingmen of the South and taken it away from the black fellow workingmen.
“Other things being equal, the employer is forced to discharge the black man and hire the white man—white opinion demands it, the administrators of government, including police magistrates, etc., render it, easier, since by preferring the white, many intricate questions of social contact are avoided and political influence is vastly increased.
Must Work for Less Wages
“Under such circumstances there is nothing for the Negro to do but to bribe the employer by underbidding his white fellow; to work not only for less money wages, but for longer hours and under worse conditions.
“Does he want to do this. Does he like long hours and under worse conditions.
“Does he want to do this. Does he like longer hours. Ignorant as he is as a mass, has he not intelligence enough to perceive the value of labor unions and the meaning of the labor movement? No, it is not because the black man is a fool, but because he is a victim that he drags labor down.
“Judges and juries in the South are at the absolute mercy of the white voters. Few ordinary judges would dare to oppose the momentary whim of the white mob, and practically only now and then will a jury convict a white man for aggression a Negro. Not only is this true in criminal but also in civil suits, so much so that it is a widespread custom among negroes of property never to take a civil suite [sic] to court but to let the white complainant settle it. In all public benefits like schools and parks and gathering and institutions, Negroes are regularly taxed for what they cannot enjoy. I am taxed for the Carnegie Public Library of Atlanta where I cannot enter to draw my own books. Negroes of Memphis are taxed for public parks where they cannot sit down.
Barred From Engines and Autos
“Witness the strike of the white locomotive firemen in Georgia today; Negro firemen get from fifty cents to one dollar a day less than the white firemen, have to do menial work and cannot become engineers. They can, however, by good service and behavior, be promoted to the best runs by the rule of seniority. Even this the white firemen now object to, and say in a manifesto; the “white people of this State refuse to accept Negro…This is worse than that. The other day the white automobile drivers of Atlanta made a frantic appeal in the papers for persons to stop hiring black drivers. The black drivers replied. “We have had fewer accidents than you and get less wages.” But he [sic] whites simply said, “this ought to be a white man’s job.”
“The voteless Negro is a provocation, an invitation, to oppression, a plaything for mobs, and a bonanza for demagogues. They serve always to distract attention from real issues and to ride fools and rascal [sic] into political power. The political campaign in Georgia before the last was avowedly and openly a campaign, not against Negro crime and ignorance, but against Negro intelligence and property owning and industrial competition, as shown by an 83 per cent increase in their property in ten years. It swept the State and if it had not culminated in riot and bloodshed and thus scared capital, it would still be triumphant. As it is, the end is not yet.
“Fourteen years ago Mississippi began disfranchising Negroes. You were promised that the result would be to settle the Negro problem. Is it settled? No, and it never will be until you give black men power to be men, until you give them power to defend that manhood. When the Negro cast a free and intelligent vote in the South then, and not until then will the Negro problem be settled.”
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Springfield Oral Histories
Oral Histories of the
Springfield, Illinois,
Riot of 1908
Edith Carpenter, Albert Harris,
Nathan L. Cohn, Mattie Hale, and
Sharlottie Carr
Most daily newspapers published at the turn of the twentieth century carried little news of the lives of African Americans, let alone their perspectives. That was indeed the case with the coverage of dailies in Springfield, Illinois about the riot of August 1908 in which Whites intentionally tracked, harmed, and killed Blacks. Thanks to the foresight of oral historians working in the 1970s and the diligence of college librarians in preserving their interviews, a record exists of the varied responses of African-American residents to the violence of the roaming White mob. Some fled. Some hid. Others took up arms to defend their lives, homes, and businesses. The threat to fight back was sometimes enough to ward off attackers, though some Black men did fire their guns into hostile White crowds, wounding or killing an unrecorded number of White rioters.
What follows is a compilation of five excerpts from more expansive oral histories taken from four Black residents and one Jewish resident of Springfield who lived through the riot. Their accounts reflect a remarkable degree of social organization in a community but two generations out of slavery. African Americans who fled to the surrounding countryside were housed, fed, and protected by Black farming families for the weekend until the National Guard arrived and restored order in the state capital. Other families who remained in the city collaborated to identify homes or, in one case, a park where they could gather and conceal themselves. One neighborhood quickly formed a self-defense committee, with women serving as lookouts and men as armed guards.
Locations of Major Episodes in Springfield, Illinois,
Race Riot of 1908
Adapted by Harini Palugulla. Source material reprinted by
permission of Springfield Convention and Visitors Bureau.
The copyrighted excerpts are reprinted with the permission of the University of Illinois at Springfield.
Edith Carpenter was about 14 years old at the time of the riot. Her father owned a grocery store and commercial real estate, and also rented a dairy farm. She told Reverend Negil L. McPherson in a 1975 interview about her father’s proactive measures to defend his children and property. He obtained a stockpile of guns and ammunition, sent his children to the countryside and boldly declared his ability and readiness to confront aggressors. Carpenter’s account of the riot illustrated the fortitude and resourcefulness of the African-American community in the face of racial violence. Edith Carpenter, who married a funeral home director, died in 1985.
Read text p. 32-34: http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/CARPENTERE.pdf
In a 1974 interview with Reverend Negil L. McPherson, Albert Harris related the destructive path of the bloodthirsty mob, which murdered an elderly man well-known in the White and Black communities. Harris, at the time about 13 years old and living away from the city’s center, recalled the courageous acts of saloon proprietors who stood their ground. He also cited evidence of unreported deaths of white rioters. Harris owned several businesses in Springfield and died three years after the interview.
Read text p. 56-62: http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/HARRISA.pdf
Nathan L. Cohn, a 15- or 16-year-old Jewish immigrant who lived in northern part of town, recounted the different aspects of Jewish involvement during the riot. He shared an eyewitness account of Scott Burton’s lynching, White residents’ measures to avoid harm and his Black neighbor’s stealthy escape. The interview was conducted in 1973 by Syma Mendelsoh. Cohn died in 1977 after working as a salesman for 35 years.
Read text p. 3-6:http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/COHNN.pdf
Mattie Hale, the daughter of a coal miner, lived with her parents on a vegetable farm on the outskirts of Springfield. Interviewed in 1974 by Reverend Negil L. McPherson, she noted some respectable and not-so-respectable men stayed in the city. Meanwhile, her parents and neighbors protected city dwellers who had fled. Hale remained in Springfield for her entire life and died in 1982.
Read text p. 11-14:http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/HALE.pdf
Sharlottie Carr, then a teenager of 15 or 16, lived with her family in the southeastern part of the city. Interviewed in 1974 by the Reverend Negil L. McPherson, she recalled the measures Black adults took to protect their neighborhood, which was not attacked, and related an anecdote about a black man elsewhere in the city who fired guns in self-defense, with skillful help from a young daughter. Carr, a cook most of her working life, died in 1983.
Read text p. 10-11:http://www.uis.edu/archives/memoirs/COHNN.pdf
Black Neighborhoods of Springfield, Illinois in 1908
Reprinted from In Lincoln´s Shadow: The 1908 Race Riot in Springfield,Illinois, by permission of author, Roberta Senechal
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The Racial History of Juvenile Justice
T H E T R O T T E R R E V I E W
The Racial History of Juvenile Justice
In October 2007, the Boston chapter of the NAACP hosted a roundtable on the Niagara Movement. In honor of the Niagara Movement meeting in Boston in 1907, the NAACP and the Trotter Institute collaborated on a series of events marking the centennial gathering of the Niagara men and women in Boston, the largest of five annual meetings of the Niagara Movement and the first to include women as voting delegates. The roundtable, like the 1907 Niagara Movement meeting, was held in Faneuil Hall. The inclusion of women as full participants in the Niagara Movement speaks to the force and significance of the Black Women’s Club Movement, in which Josephine St.-Pierre Ruffin of Boston and Mary Church Terrell of Washington, D.C., among many, many others, were prominent.
Five panelists participated in a discussion, moderated by Sarah Ann Shaw, community activist and former television journalist, about the Niagara Movement’s origins, the reasons it fell apart, the need for a similar organization today and, if so, what shape it might take.
The panelists were L’Merchie Frazier, director of education at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston; Kerri Greenidge, historian for the Boston African-American Historic Site, a branch of the National Park Service; Robert Hall, associate professor of African American Studies at Northeastern University; William Strickland, associate professor in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Geoff K. Ward, then an assistant professor in the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University.
What follows is an edited transcript of remarks made by Ward, who is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine:
I would like to talk more specifically about the racial history of American juvenile justice and how it relates to the Niagara Movement. As a way of prefacing these remarks, I can refer to the recent events in Jena, Louisiana, where we have seen not only an indication of the need for some kind of collective action around issues of racial justice, but also the sad state, frankly, of our current ability to effect meaningful social change. My mother, who is a retired attorney, the other day said, “Geoff, how is it that thousands of people showed up in Jena, Louisiana to protest the railroading of these black boys, and when everyone left, the black boy was still in jail? No one managed to bail him out.” That was once understood as a necessary aspect of the struggle – working to actually free people. My response to her was that my sense the demise of organized resistance is reflected in so much of the symbolic protest we see today and the lack of actual substantive change.
But I want to come back to that point by beginning with some background on the history of American juvenile justice, its relation to the Niagara Movement and how we got to this situation we are in today. As Bob Hall started off by saying, we can generally think of this movement as an effort to breathe life into a moribund liberal democracy, an effort to give meaning, give reality, to so many of our lofty democratic creeds at the turn of the twentieth century. Juvenile justice is a fascinating context to think about this effort, because it was established very explicitly as a liberal democratic institution. The founders of American juvenile justice described it as a “citizen-building institution,” an effort to transform “wayward and vicious youth,” to use the language of the day, into normal, productive social actors. So this was an idea of enlightened social control, where the state acting as parent of the country, as the legal doctrine defined it, in the context of juvenile justice would take an active role in preparing the citizenry of the liberal democracy.
Of course, when the juvenile court was established in 1900, there was no sense that black Americans had any standing within this liberal democracy and, therefore, no sense that black youth had any future as normal, productive citizens. However, black Americans at that time were very invested in these same notions that through concerted effort you can prepare a young person to take a position of influence and leadership within a liberal democracy. So you see, by the 1890s, black women’s clubs organizing in opposition to what is developing as a Jim Crow juvenile justice system, a system that is effectively a racial project in selective citizen- and state-building. That is a racial project. Juvenile justice becomes a racial project in the maintenance of white democracy, by selectively investing in the development of white citizens, and potentially white citizens, these being particularly Irish and Italian immigrant youth who come to these shores in large numbers at this time, and were subject to great discrimination, but viewed as having the potential to assimilate into the white democracy.
The white parental state not only systematically denied black youths access to its rehabilitative creed, but denied black communities influence in the administration of justice. And you see by the 1890s black women’s clubs taking the first steps in opposition to this developing institution of racial domination and oppression. By 1908, many black women’s clubs around the South but also in the North organized in opposition to what one Alabama club woman describes as “the slavery of an iniquitous justice system”— to refer back to someone’s earlier point about the ‘new abolitionists.’
I think that the importance of the Niagara Movement in the early twentieth century is that it offered a strategy for organizing resources more effectively, more intelligently, in terms of sustained civic activism, civic engagement. So whereas black club women’s associations, for example, were generally led by well-to-do women of color, and their rank and file were largely working-class women, with some education, but very limited political influence. The Niagara Movement attempted to bring together figures with a greater variety of political and intellectual abilities, with financial means and so forth, that would make the push for civil rights more effective. And certainly, Booker T. Washington was an impetus for that organizing effort, but there was constant consideration of how we can make this change more effectively.
For example, in 1915, the NAACP commissioned a study of the relation of the Negro child to the juvenile courts of the United States after hearing of the situation of apartheid in Memphis, Tennessee’s juvenile justice system, where there was a white juvenile court fully-fitted with all the cutting-edge devices of juvenile rehabilitation, or so they claimed, and across the town was a five-room house called the Colored Juvenile Court that featured an open sewer in the back yard, no sitting judge, and virtually no investment in services. This information comes to the NAACP. [W.E.B.] DuBois is charged by the board to conduct a national study of this issue to use that as a way to press the state to reconcile its contradictions in this alleged, enlightened project of citizen building.
Interestingly, I should point out that The Crisis, the journal of the NAACP, which also grows out of this effort, is probably one of the most important vehicles at this time in raising oppositional consciousness and organizing resources to oppose Jim Crow juvenile justice. The first black woman judge in the United States was a woman named Jane Bolin, who was appointed to the Manhattan Juvenile Court in [1939]. Jane Bolin attributed her interest in law and interest in fighting for racial justice to the copies of The Crisis she found on her father’s coffee table. Her father founded the branch of the NAACP in Poughkeepsie, New York. She decided that her future would be to realize racial justice and she set out to do that from the juvenile court bench in Manhattan.
The greatest victory of the NAACP, as far as the racial history of juvenile justice is concerned, Brown v. Board of Education, forced the integration of reformatories which had for decades—and if you go back to the Houses of Refuge of the nineteenth century, for over a century—excluded black youth from their democratic project of citizen building. The NAACP, through the lens of the liberal politics of integration, thought that if you opened these institutions to black youth and opened the courts to black decision-makers we would all have access to these enlightened ideals. Ironically, Brown v. Board of Education is really an important part of what we see today in the overrepresentation of young people of color in institutions of social control. What the liberal politics of integration did not predict is that the civic ambitions of juvenile social control would change as nonwhites joined whites in juvenile and other justice systems.
So do we need a Niagara Movement today? We certainly need to revisit the impetus of the Niagara Movement, that is, the question of how we can effectively leverage our collective influence to make meaningful social change, and what form does that leverage take. I agree we are presented with complex global issues of inequality, oppression and domination. I do not believe very much in a narrow, nationally- and race-based framework for organizing against oppression and domination. I can see the value of that in the short term; in the long term, it seems to me very limited.
What we clearly need, however, is to revisit this question of the resources we have at our disposal to put pressure on the state, perhaps to reinvent the parental state. We have to acknowledge the limitations of the liberal politics of integration, which assumed that the integration of the state would effectively institutionalize racial justice. We have enough evidence now that that has not happened. So how do we move beyond the politics of integration and, in the twenty-first century, reconsider both the problem of racial justice before us, but as importantly, how we can constructively engage in a “new abolitionist” agenda?
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Commentary by Kenneth J. Cooper
T H E T R O T T E R R E V I E W
Commentary
By Kenneth J. Cooper
Barack Obama has made history by dispatching to the dustbin another usage for the tiresome phrase, “first black.” As president, he is also going to make the future, both during his term and long after. The country’s racial-ethnic landscape, with its dangerous crevices and sheer mountains, is about to change in monumental ways.
His presence in the White House will promote more interracial dialogue, for one, and for the good of the country. This will not be a small change. The novelist Richard Wright once explained he chose exile in Paris in the 1940s because he could not have an honest conversation about race in America. Though interracial contact and discussion has increased since then, not enough has come with candor. To enter a truly “post-racial” era, a period when race is recognized but does not shape attitudes, people will need to talk more and more honestly. President Obama and his black nuclear family, and his white, Kenyan, and Filipino extended families, are quite a conversation piece for stimulating that kind of conversation. Not all will be pleasant, if it is honest, but better that resentments are spoken aloud than squelched to smolder inside.
The conversation about racial identity among African Americans will change too. A black man who grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia and was raised by a white mother and white grandparents has expanded the definitions of blackness and the black experience. One recent poll found most African Americans interviewed agreed there is no single black experience. For too long, a pinched view of blackness has prevailed, rooted in the Black Power and Pan-Africanist ideologies of the 1960s but running against the grain of much of African-American history. W.E.B DuBois, who acknowledged his full lineage as being African, Dutch, and French, helped found the Niagara Movement and NAACP. William Monroe Trotter, co-founder of the Niagara Movement with DuBois, claimed he was descended, through his mother, from Thomas Jefferson. Blond-haired, blue-eyed Walter White rose to executive secretary of the NAACP. White faced criticism about his appearance, but no one showed him, Trotter or DuBois the door for supposedly not being “black enough.”
Obama has opened the social space for African Americans who have other blood streams to embrace and talk about their full identities, with less fear of being branded self-hating or in denial. The one-drop rule should be finally laid to rest. It always ignored the law of proportions and is not a black idea anyway, conceived as it was in colonial Virginia to deny inheritance rights to the slave children of white masters. The geography of the black experience, located in most of the creative output of African Americans in the urban North or rural South, has also just been stretched. Obama proves you can be born in the state farthest from either region and still be positively black.
More than the changes in the texture of racial conversation, African Americans expect to share the economic benefits of an Obama presidency. Will more opportunities open? Some African Americans have worried that having a black president means that business leaders will conclude race is no longer an issue and, therefore, affirmative action is no longer needed. The opposite is likely to be true. People emulate the powerful. Big business has incentives to curry favor with any president, particularly in bad economic times, given the regulatory reach of the government and the huge value of federal contracts. Without being told, a company sending representatives to lobby the Obama administration for anything will figure its prospects for success will be better if the delegation is not all-white. Of course, one response could be wanton tokenism. In an Internet age, it will be much easier to sniff out.
Obama becomes not only the chief executive, but he, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha become the American royal family. For as long as he governs, their lifestyle will shape American tastes in food, fashion, recreation, and speech. For the first time, the First Family will have a black style. Obama has been photographed wearing sunglasses, not a stock presidential image. To relax, he plays basketball, rather than jog, clear brush, or chop wood like his immediate predecessors. He was unflappable in the presidential debates, a posture some commentators mistook for detachment. He is cool, not detached. His style and his family’s will balance out the black style that has come to dominate the media, the ghetto-centric, trash-talking, streetwise, violent, and often profane or misogynist vision of rap music. The rest of America will get a real-life view of black middle-class family, loving, educated, urbane, and secure. Other African Americans will have a prominent, wholesome model to affirm them or strive to emulate.
Two changes in the racial landscape will last far beyond Obama’s presidency. He is a Baby Boomer, and as such does not represent a new generation in politics, but his appointments will seed a new generation of leaders who are now in their 30s or even 20s. As they age, they can be expected to take on more responsible positions, in government or civic life. Having more African Americans serving as political appointees will make government more representative. But the impact will be broader. Like the past two administrations, Obama’s can be expected to be more diverse than the previous one. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans will work side by side in a black-led administration. It will be a formative experience. In later years, this cadre of Obamaites is likely to lead, in whatever capacities they assume, in a way that is inclusive, tolerant, and cooperative across racial-ethnic lines. That is a change that will reverberate for decades.
Another beneficial byproduct of Obama’s victory is the inevitable lifting of black aspirations. In recent years, African-American candidates have been winning more often in white-majority districts. More are likely to see political opportunity in contests for statewide offices, for example, and to find in Obama’s national campaign guideposts for how to win. Perhaps most importantly in the long term, young African-Americans will be inspired to raise their sights. Compared with black boomers, who came of age as the civil rights movement opened doors to opportunities, members of subsequent generations have assumed they have fewer possibilities and less societal support for high ambitions. From now on, any older adult who hears a young African-American uttering the self-limiting words, “I can’t,” can point to the improbable ascent of Barack Hussein Obama and paraphrase the first black president: “Yes, you can!”
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