Black Detroit Read online

  Emma Azalia Smith graduated from Washington Normal School four years after Preston completed her studies. Her grandfather, Wilson Beard, arrived in Detroit in the 1840s, making her family among the first black residents in the city. A child prodigy, Smith learned to play the piano at three and later took private voice, violin, and French lessons. From 1887 to 1894, she taught at Clinton Elementary School. She became a member of the Detroit Musical Society, played in a black orchestra, and performed voice recitals throughout the city.21

  By 1900, Smith was living and teaching in Denver, and there she met and married Edwin Henry Hackley, an attorney and editor of the city’s black newspaper, the Denver Statesman. In 1905, Emma Hackley separated from her husband and moved to Philadelphia, where she became director of music at the Episcopal Church of the Crucifixion. Always seeking to spread her love for music, she helped organize the People’s Chorus, which later became the Hackley Choral Society. The group proved popular in the Philadelphia area and gave her the opportunity to study voice in Paris in 1905–6. Among the notables who studied at the Choral Society were vocalists Roland Hayes, R. Nathaniel Dett, and Marian Anderson.22 Hackley was especially concerned with Anderson’s development, personally tutoring and guiding the young singer’s early development. After Anderson’s triumphs at Union Baptist Church, Hackley accepted her among the younger members of the People’s Chorus.

  “Before long, she gave her a solo to sing—‘to inspire the other members to higher things,’ [Hackley] liked to say. . . . Hackley had her stand on a chair as she sang. ‘I want her to feel elevated, and, too, I want no one in the back of the hall to have the slightest difficulty in seeing her.’”23

  Although a gifted singer, Hackley chose not to pursue a professional career. Instead, she devoted her life to instructing others. There were, however, occasional recitals, mainly to raise funds for various students and her choral society. Along with her teaching, Hackley was a journalist and an author. She published her own collection of music entitled Colored Girl Beautiful. In 1916, when her Vocal Normal Institute failed, she devoted more time to her research on African American folk music. Like her concerts and musicales, her folk festivals were very popular and were staged in cities throughout the country.

  Despite failing health, she accepted an invitation to travel to Japan to participate in the World Sunday School Convention. A year later, in 1921, while performing in San Diego, Hackley collapsed onstage. Assisted by her blind sister, Marietta, Hackley was rushed back to Detroit and in 1922 died from a cerebral hemorrhage.24

  Hackley’s legacy lives on in Detroit, where her collection of memorabilia and artifacts is archived at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library. While she is remembered as a maven of classical music, she was also a committed activist and a highly respected literary critic. When her biographer asked her to name the twenty-five greatest people she had ever known, her list included Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, the painter Henry O. Tanner, author Charles Chesnutt, activist Mary Church Terrell, feminist journalist Ida B. Wells, poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and writer M. E. Lambert.

  Mrs. Molly E. Lambert was the daughter of William Lambert, the legendary abolitionist. What her father represented in politics and religion, she did as an editor and author. Her articles appeared regularly in the Plaindealer, where she covered social, cultural, and political events. As an active correspondent for the paper, she often gave special attention to church affairs. In an article in 1891, she wrote very warmly about a divinity student, John A. Williams, who was feted with a sendoff party by the ladies of Saint Matthew’s church. “A small but excellent company with repartee, and mirth laughter was most intensely enjoyed,” she wrote. “The Rev. John Henderson and Miss M. Henderson, the Messrs. Anderson, Stowers, T. Lambert, and the ‘Pelham brothers’ with the Misses Meta Pelham, Julia Owen, Mrs. Ollie Wells, and Mrs. Will Ferguson assisted ‘our Fred’ [Pelham] in the honors [at] his beautiful home.” This name-dropping of the town’s black elite was part of Lambert’s appeal to readers.25 Her fans eagerly awaited each week for her roundup of the activities of the crème de la crème, which always included more than a dollop of juicy gossip.

  Lambert was more than a name-dropping gossip columnist; she was a serious writer with more than a passing interest in high literature. She had a particular interest in the lives and work of black women writers. She published occasional poetry and articles in the New National Era (apparently while still a teenager, since Frederick Douglass discontinued the paper in 1874) and in the AME Church Review, as well as news about Saint Matthew’s in its Lyceum Journal. Lambert also had a growing reputation as an essayist in several national publications.26 She gained national attention while editing the Literary Department for Julia Ringwood Coston’s Afro-American Journal of Fashion, which Coston launched in 1891. Mary Church Terrell, a women’s-rights and civil-rights activist based in Washington, DC, added prestige to the publication as editor of the biographical section.27

  In one of her final articles in the Plaindealer, Lambert was among a number of Detroiters who raved about a reading by Paul Laurence Dunbar.28 In April 1893, three years after her father took his own life, she was even more eloquent and emotional when writing about her mother, Julia, and the illness that afflicted her as she approached death. “How happy the dearly loved one seemed,” Lambert wrote after her mother had called her loved ones together, “as she smilingly passed from one to another in her gentle, motherly way. At the close of the day, she said to one of them: ‘I’m glad we had such a happy time. I felt that I wanted to have you all here with me once more, if we never get together again.’ Loving and beloved—there seems that someone has gone out of our lives whose place can nevermore be filled.” Lambert concluded the obituary with the poignant poem “Mother,” which had the ring of Wordsworth or Longfellow about it.29

  During the Gilded Age, there was a close alliance among theater, dance, and the musical arts. “Two uncles of the late Fred Hart Williams, back in the 1880s, regularly held amateur and professional shows at the old Merrill Hall,” Alma Forrest Parks wrote. “Fred Hart Ball, one of these enterprising gentlemen, was also the grandfather of Herb Jeffries, the Detroit-born balladeer.”30 Jeffries was a popular crooner who would go on to star as the Bronze Buckaroo in several Hollywood black Westerns.

  When Merrill Hall was not available, Ball and his brother, Henry, would convert their barbershop, located on Gratiot and Beaubien, into a performance center. This was also a forum for lectures and presentations by Fred Hart Williams, Detroit’s most productive author and historian. Williams was a tireless researcher and promoter of Detroit’s black culture. He compiled a treasure trove of books, manuscripts, and articles, which is now in the Burton Collection at the Detroit Public Library.

  Williams was interested not only in preserving Detroit’s black history and culture, but also he played an active role in providing forums and theatrical events for a coterie of vaudeville artists and entertainers. Vocalist Sisseretta Jones, famously known as Black Patti, and Williams’s aunt, Zoe Ball, often enlivened the theatrical scene with their performances in the Creole Belles. Azalia Smith Hackley was another performer and associate whom Williams occasionally sponsored.

  Two of Fred Hart Williams’s associates—Dr. Broadus N. Butler, later an assistant dean at the College of Liberal Arts at Wayne State University and chairman of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and Nellie Watts, whose name adorned an annual concert series—continued his work after his retirement.

  Alongside these developments in theater, the visual arts were also expanding. From the time that painter Robert S. Duncanson rose to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century, black artists in Detroit were inspired by his achievement and recognition. Though Duncanson is best known for his pastoral landscapes, his Uncle Tom and Little Eva, depicting a scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, hangs in the Detroit Institute of Arts. After traveling abroad and living in Ohio, he spent his last
days in Detroit, where he died in 1872, just as the Gilded Age was getting under way.

  Among the city’s artists touched by Duncanson was Rose Poole Wise. A graduate of the Detroit School of Art, Wise expressed her artistic vision through watercolor. Her work was lauded by the Michigan Commission for the Chicago Exposition in 1915. A fellow Detroit painter at the exposition, John Spencer Jackson, also received considerable attention for his portraits. His painting of Sojourner Truth interviewing President Lincoln was highly praised. Jackson was equally skilled as a carver, using jackknives to sculpt images in wood.31

  As the curtain descended on the city’s Gilded Age, another, far more prosperous era was on the horizon—the heyday of the automobile industry. In a rented workshop on Mack Avenue, Henry Ford began tinkering with a vehicle to replace the thriving trade in carriages. In 1904, the Ford Motor Company was founded, and the auto age began. Whether R. E. Olds had a car on the road before Ford is academic. Ford set the pace, and behind came other automotive pioneers—William C. Durant, the Dodge brothers, and Walter Chrysler. When Ford began mass-producing his Model T from an assembly line in Highland Park, his company’s production was unrivaled. Ford symbolized the automobile industry.

  The Gilded Age had provided black workers with countless employment opportunities, but Ford and car manufacturing were an incomparable boon for black Detroiters. A ceaseless wave of European immigrants pushed black workers out of the service jobs as cooks and maids in hotels, restaurants, and homes, but the automobile factories needed janitors and laborers in the foundry. By 1915 black workers began to fill this void. This was the beginning of Ford’s enduring relationship with black workers, a story that is vital to the city’s history.

  For the most part, that relationship between the man who said “History is bunk!” and black Detroiters was a troubled one, a classic black-and-white battle and clearly an unequal one. James Baldwin, during an appearance in Detroit in 1980 as a participant on a panel on black English at Wayne State University, put that relationship in stark terms, so typical of his ability to speak truth to power. “I’m talking about the auction block,” he said at the beginning of his speech. “We are also talking about the automobile assembly line. I want to make this clear, sitting in your town, talking in your town.

  “One of the architects of this peculiar town is a man named Henry Ford, who is probably responsible for building it,” Baldwin continued, “paying workers black and white, clubbing down workers black and white—who was a friend of Hitler’s; who was no friend of the Jews. (He hadn’t yet heard about us.) I challenge anyone alive to challenge me on that.”32

  Some black artists with the right connections in the union, particularly those skilled in the mechanical arts and in illustrating, lettering, and design, were occasionally employed by the automobile manufacturers. Each of them, in Baldwin’s terms, was beholden to Henry Ford and the other architects of Detroit.

  7

  THE PELHAMS AND THE BLACK ELITE

  Robert Pelham Jr. was a Detroit delegate to the National Afro-American League meeting on May 18, 1890. On the agenda was Michigan’s affiliation to the national organization, whose express purpose was to achieve full citizenship and equality for black Americans.1 He was thirty-one and in the prime of his extraordinarily productive life. There was still much work to be done in preparation for the meeting. On the political front, there were election issues to handle; there were cultural and social events to oversee. Pelham was a perpetual networker, an inveterate traveler, and he needed more than a day to deal with sundry other activities, particularly his work on the inventions that would later give him a special status in Detroit and elsewhere.

  Some of the energy and creativity he possessed was inherited from his father, Robert Sr., a robust mason and plasterer, who with his wife, Frances, arrived in Detroit from Petersburg, Virginia, in 1861, two years after Robert was born. He was born free, and at a very early age his mathematical skills and intuition were evident. The education system his parents sought out was perfectly suited for young Pelham, and he sped through what was generally a twelve-year process in nine years.2 Obviously, he was double-promoted, a practice that would exist for years in Detroit’s public school system as a reward for smart students.

  Pelham was a high-school student when he began working at the Daily Post, which advocated Republican principles and was where he would remain in various capacities for twenty years, working under the Post’s editor and owner, Zachariah Chandler, who would later hold several political offices, including mayor, senator, and secretary of the interior under President Grant. These positions gave Pelham an opportunity to be mentored in his work as a journalist. Empowered by this mentoring and tutelage, he approached his brother, Benjamin, who also worked at the Post, with the idea of starting their own paper, and in 1883 the Detroit Plaindealer rolled off the presses. It seemed a good idea in a city with a black population of nearly three thousand—practically a paper per person given its average circulation—a burgeoning middle class, and a sizable contingent of potential subscribers in the region. When it appeared, Frederick Douglass forwarded a letter to the Pelhams declaring that the paper “meets my warm approbation.”

  Joining the Pelham brothers in the creation of the city’s first successful black newspaper were Byron G. Redmond and two community stalwarts, William H. Anderson and Walter A. Stowers. In its earliest iteration, the paper consisted of six columns and eight pages. It carried many ads, both business and classified. The Detroit Plaindealer got off to a good start and created quite a buzz in the industry, eventually pulling in subscribers from throughout the nation. In fact, it was a model for other black-owned publications, such as the Chicago Defender, especially after it grew from a small folio to more than twenty pages. Not only was the paper distinguished by its hard-hitting editorials, especially its persistent rebuke of the Free Press, but also it was one of the first newspapers in the West to utilize typesetting machines, and by 1890 it was alone among the papers to have in its office a Rogers typographical composing machine. To appeal to its national readership, the paper relied on stories sent from throughout the country, as it did not have reporters in other cities. Its downtown offices were a beehive of activity, all of it overseen by managing editor Robert Pelham. All the fancy graphics and a wide range of coverage were not enough to keep the paper afloat, however. More subscriptions and broader advertising were needed in order to sustain it.

  After it folded in 1893, the Pelhams shifted their focus to the Afro-American League. While Robert and Benjamin assumed leadership roles in the burgeoning organization, their brother, Fred Pelham, was busy earning his degree in engineering at the University of Michigan. At thirty, he was younger than Robert, Benjamin, and Joseph (who lived in Missouri and was a delegate to the league’s convention in Chicago in 1890) but no less accomplished and perhaps even better educated. Among the highlights on his impressive résumé was his stint at the Michigan Central Railroad Company, where he worked as an assistant civil engineer. His ingenuity was lavishly praised, and he earned a plethora of accolades for the uniquely designed and constructed skew arch bridge, a masonry vault over the Dexter River a few miles northwest of Ann Arbor.3

  His work was also praised in Detroit and, according to the manager of Citizens Street Railway Company, Fred was a resourceful and creative engineer in redesigning the curves in the city’s rail system. Among his many affiliations were his memberships in various engineering societies; he was also a Sunday school teacher at Bethel AME Church.4

  Meanwhile, Benjamin was busy on the political front and was instrumental in electing the Wayne County treasurer. For this endeavor, he was rewarded with an appointment as the treasurer’s junior clerk. His bookkeeping and clerical skills modernized the record-keeping system for the county. He married Laura Montgomery of Sandwich, Ontario. They had two children, a daughter, Frances, and a son, Alfred, who was born in 1900, the same year Benjamin transferred to the office of the register of deeds. In this capacity, he conti
nued his modernization and organizing wizardry, thereby speeding up the processing of information.5

  Notwithstanding the commitment of the Pelhams, the Afro-American League or the National Afro-American League, as it was renamed two years after its founding, never really gained traction. The league was the brainchild of T. Thomas Fortune, the editor of the esteemed New York Age newspaper, and Bishop Alexander Walters of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Washington, DC. They envisioned and the Pelhams endorsed equal opportunities for black Americans, especially voting rights and desegregation of public accommodations, along with a cessation of lynching.6 At the dawn of the twentieth century, the organization anticipated in many ways the mission of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, with their commitment to challenge Jim Crow laws from a legal standpoint. The league had a promising start, winning two lawsuits in which Fortune was personally involved. He also was instrumental in challenging the Supreme Court decision upholding the Civil Rights Act of 1883, which ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, thereby allowing unequal treatment in all public spaces and accommodations. But without support and donations from members and advocates, there was no way the league could continue in its fight against racism and discrimination. It disbanded in 1893 but resurfaced five years later under the rubric of the Afro-American Council.7

  With the demise of the League, Robert Pelham, like his brother, shifted gears, dedicated himself to being a clerk and a good public servant. This was accomplished with his eye for detail as a special agent of the General Land Office and as an inspector for the Detroit Water Department.8 He and his wife, Gabrielle Lewis of Adrian, Michigan, whom he had married in 1893, left Detroit in 1900 for Washington, DC, where she was a prominent figure in musical circles. She had earned a bachelor’s degree in music from Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, the first woman to do so, and she would be the first person of color to have an official position with the Michigan State Music Teachers’ Association.