Black Detroit Page 8
Before the couple departed for the nation’s capital, they were honored by the governor and showered with praise and affection by the noted journalist and activist Ida Wells Barnett, who once wrote for the Plaindealer. She effused: “Mr. Pelham is the busiest man I know of anywhere.”
At the city’s bicentennial celebration in 1901, there were few black Detroiters among the spectators. Confined to the lower east side and paying exorbitant rent, most had very little to celebrate.9 If there was one benefit for the poorer denizens in the community—the majority of them, when they were lucky enough to be employed, sweeping the streets, shining shoes, or doing laundry—it was living cheek by jowl with the striving black middle class, or the black elite. The economic depression that hobbled the nation in 1893 was still a lingering problem in black America, and black Detroiters were not exempt. Possible employment in the emerging automobile industry had yet to reach the black community. Black-owned businesses provided some jobs, and their successes gave the less fortunate something to which they could aspire. Even black entrepreneurs of means had their own challenges to overcome. Many of them were what W.E.B. Du Bois defined as the “talented tenth”; they were well-educated and prepared to fight for a larger piece of the American dream. Others in the black community adhered to the ideas of Booker T. Washington as members of his National Negro Business League. It was a momentous occasion when, in October 1900, Washington was invited to dine with President Theodore Roosevelt.10
In August 1900, when the National Negro Business League held its first meeting in Boston, Mrs. Susie Smith, a chiropodist and manicurist, was the only delegate from Detroit.11 Nor was any person from Detroit or Michigan mentioned in the records of any future proceedings of the League, which is perhaps why in 1903 Washington found it necessary to travel to Detroit to speak at the Light Guard Armory, not about the absence of black Detroiters from his annual meetings but about racial harmony. Washington may have had another reason to be there. He was under furious attack, particularly by the radical Democrat Du Bois, and more aggressively by the militant Boston publisher, William Monroe Trotter. Detroit’s growing black community and its seeming neutrality on the heated differences between the major leaders may have been the comfort zone in which he sought to make his appeal. The attempt to broaden his base in the Midwest was certainly important to him toward the end of his life, and Detroit—and particularly Henry Ford—was high on his agenda. He had secured a letter of introduction to Ford in 1915.12 The Wizard of Tuskegee may have used that moment to generate sympathy in the North and tamp down the furor caused by Du Bois’s attacks on his accommodationist and assimilationist beliefs. It was not until 1926, eleven years after Washington’s death, that the League established a branch in Detroit.13
Gradually a new black middle class emerged in the city, replacing the previous one that was inclined to push for integration, as opposed to desegregation. “Integration had never worked as a viable survival strategy for the majority of black Detroiters in the late nineteenth century,” historian Richard Thomas concluded. “Having one’s sons and daughters attend white universities, white churches, and fashionable parties could not build and sustain the community to which they belonged by race and history. In hard truth, however, such achievements were mere tokens masquerading as universal race progress. In the end, the harsh hand of time demanded a reckoning. New leadership was needed if blacks were to survive and progress.”14
A relentless wave of white immigrants had a devastating impact on black-owned businesses, especially those related to the service industry, in which black butlers and maids once cornered the market. An increasing scarcity of businesses may have diminished the prospect of Detroit’s black citizens taking advantage of Washington’s network of black entrepreneurs. The network served as an umbrella for black owners to support each other beyond their often isolated precincts. By the 1900s, the extent to which the small black elite was involved in such enterprises was marginal; many of them opted to earn their living as civil servants, or as Thomas observed, to find a way to get on the “government payroll.”15 The downward spiral into unemployment or underemployment of many Detroiters, their purchasing power diminished, meant that the small black businesses no longer could depend on consumers of any color to patronize their stores. Many of these businesses—printing companies, accounting firms, funeral parlors, barbershops and beauty salons, doctors, dentists, and lawyers—belonged to the black elite, and the most prosperous of them traced their lineage back at least two generations in the city, state, or Canada.
Many of Detroit’s black elite were close associates of the Pelhams. There was William W. Ferguson, a native Detroiter whose father, Joseph, was among the city’s first black physicians and who was married to Evalina Richards, Fannie Richards’s sister. After attending the city’s public schools, William completed courses at the Detroit College of Law. It was his press, one of the largest in the city that printed the Plaindealer. He was married to Emma Pelham, Robert and Benjamin’s sister. In 1890 he sold the company and, like so many of his colleagues and associates, went into the real estate and investment business, neither of which were labor intensive or provided a significant number of jobs. Three years later, in 1893, he served a term in the lower house of the Michigan legislature, successfully demonstrating that blacks could aspire to political office in the state.16
Ferguson had ties with another member of the black elite: attorney D. Augustus Straker. For years they had been friends, and in November 1892, they shared a news story in the Cleveland Gazette when Ferguson was elected to the state legislature and Straker to the circuit court as a commissioner. They came even closer together when Straker represented Ferguson in a discrimination lawsuit. Although most of Straker’s clients were white, he still had room on his docket for a black client with enough money, particularly one of Ferguson’s prominence. Straker’s civil rights activism and his intense opposition to discrimination gave him an additional incentive to represent Ferguson in his lawsuit. When Ferguson retained him, Straker had been awaiting trial for a case that involved a doctor who had been refused service at a restaurant. Ferguson and Moses “Fleet” (short for Fleetwood, but also indicative of his speed) Walker, a baseball star in Syracuse in the International League, had been told by the restaurant’s owner, Edward Gies, that he could serve them in the saloon but not in the dining room. At the trial, this was his testimony. The judge ruled in favor of the defendant on the grounds that the requirement of “separate but equal” had been satisfied in accordance with the Michigan Civil Rights Act of 1885.17
Straker took his appeal to the Michigan Supreme Court. In Ferguson v. Gies, the justices ruled that the judge in the lower court was in error, thereby vindicating Ferguson, Straker, and another client who had a similar complaint. “The supreme court reversed the jury’s decision and ordered that only the question regarding the amount of damages to be awarded should be resubmitted to a jury,” wrote David Katzman, citing the court records. “Straker returned to Detroit and reargued the case before a jury, but the panel disregarded the spirit of the Supreme Court’s mandate and awarded Ferguson damages of only six cents.”18 In another encounter with a bigot nine years later, in 1900, Ferguson, rather than taking his case to court, took the law into own hands. A white racist objected to Ferguson’s eating with white patrons and confronted him, calling him a “nigger.” That was the last thing he said before Ferguson decked him with two punches.19
Ferguson’s friend, Moses Walker, was also involved in a fracas, in 1891, when he was attacked by a white gang while visiting friends in a tough section of Syracuse. He pulled out his pocketknife to defend himself and in the melee killed one of his assailants. Walker received no sympathy from the press, which reported that he was drunk at the time, but given his popularity and the unfairness of the charge, the public sided with him. At his trial, the jury acquitted him in less than an hour. The verdict was greeted with a resounding ovation from the spectators.20
The cheers were like the ones
he heard while performing on the baseball diamond in the Negro Leagues, where he was considered one of the immortals. Tall, slender, and handsome, Walker was the first black to play in the major leagues; in 1884 he joined the Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association. After playing at the University of Michigan, his brother, Welday, joined him on the team. Walker was the son of a doctor and was born at a way station on the Underground Railroad. He grew up in Steubenville, Ohio, where he attended integrated schools and played on integrated baseball teams. At the age of twenty, he enrolled in Oberlin College. He was as gifted in the classroom as he was on the ball field. In his final year at Oberlin, he was the star catcher. He left the school before graduating but later attended the University of Michigan for two years, again excelling as a player. “Later in life, after leaving baseball, he became a businessman, inventor, newspaper reporter, and author,” wrote baseball authority and historian James A. Riley. “Embittered, he became an advocate of racial separation, supporting a ‘back to Africa’ policy for American blacks.”21 Walker’s forty-seven-page pamphlet Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro, published in 1908, is a searing attack on colonialism and racism. The only solution to America’s race problem, he wrote, “is the entire separation by emigration of the Negro from America.”
There must have been occasions when D. Augustus Straker thought he was back in South Carolina, so rabid was the racism and discrimination in Detroit. Straker was born poor in Barbados, and after his father died, things got worse. Determined and steadfast, he was able to acquire some formal education. For a while he worked in a tailoring establishment. A plea to his mother rescued him from the realm of needle and thread and placed him back on the academic path.22 At Codrington College, on the island, he was embraced by the principal and placed under the guidance and instruction of the Rev. Joseph Durant, a well-known educator, astronomer, and linguist. By the time the brilliant Straker was seventeen, he was sought out to teach at public schools in Bridgetown, the capital. His reputation as a teacher and scholar soon attracted the attention of a Protestant Episcopal bishop in Kentucky, who invited him to America.23
In 1868, Straker was asked to deliver a speech in Kentucky on international law and the necessity to create a tribunal to help arbitrate and settle disputes. From this auspicious debut in America, he was offered an opportunity to study for the ministry, which he later rejected when he learned that it would not be a refuge from racism. After a brief stint teaching at a freedmen’s school, he left Kentucky and enrolled at Howard University, where he obtained his law degree. He was subsequently employed as a secretary for O. O. Howard, the president of the university and chief of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
It wasn’t all nose-to-the-grindstone for the bachelor. He found time to marry the niece of Fannie Richards, Detroit’s doyenne of education.
In 1875, after being appointed a customs inspector in Charleston, South Carolina, he stepped down from his position at Howard. Thereafter he practiced law and took a similar customs position with the government until the death of President James Garfield. He served three terms as a representative to the South Carolina legislature and then became dean of Allen College. His wife convinced him that Detroit would welcome his vast experience, and ever restless, he followed her advice. After the monumental victory in the Gies case, Straker was elected the first African American judge in Michigan.24 In 1892, when he and Ferguson were saluted in the press for their electoral victories, he learned that the white members of the Detroit Longshoremen’s Union No. 1 had drawn the color line, forming their own union under the International Longshoremen’s Union of the United States. This separatist move infuriated the black community, and it left some seventy African American members in No. 1 without a cent in the treasury. They rallied, elected new officers, and paid back expenses. “The fight will be carried to the docks,” the members promised.
Meanwhile, the black elite chose to deal with issues that most immediately jeopardized their upper-class status. Those were matters of property, civil rights, and integration—not desegregation—and opportunities to acquire wealth without the traditional encumbrances. Other than those in flight from servitude, most of the free blacks who arrived in Detroit in the 1840s and 1850s came from Virginia, Kentucky, or the Northeast, plus a few from Canada. Given what they had been told of the opportunities there, migrants often came from the Southern border states. The Pelhams, Richardses, DeBaptistes, Lamberts, and Fergusons, and Straker from Barbados via South Carolina, formed the foundation of what later would somewhat derisively be called the “cultured 40,” referring to the black elite.25 To some extent, they were representative of Du Bois’s “talented tenth,” endowed with a gift of leadership and the troubling “double consciousness”—a feeling as though one’s identity is split into warring factions.
A story in one of the local newspapers summarized this situation when it reported that “There is a colored elite more exclusive than any other society in Detroit, which has its old families, its professional classes, its nouveau riches clamoring for recognition, its afternoon teas, its dances, its club studies, and most of the other duties and diversions which make up the life of white society in its most exalted strata.”26
It is inaccurate and irresponsible to suggest that the black elite bore anything but a passing resemblance to white Detroiters; though they were similar in some ways, racism enforced vast differences. The black elite certainly found ways to take advantage of the adverse effects of discrimination by establishing businesses to service the black community. Even those advantages seldom amounted to more than a momentary benefit, however. Only in the businesses with steady perennial demand, such as burying the dead, was there enough money for owners to present any resemblance to the white upper class. Many in the black working class were only one paycheck from poverty. Even so, they were better off than their brothers and sisters who had no work but the scavenging of utter destitution. In such a society, how can the black elite be blamed for expropriating a bit of well-being and solace from their bourgeois pretensions and from fruitful associations with those white Detroiters who would accept them.
In no way can Mrs. Molly E. Lambert be considered an uppity black elitist with little concern for the less fortunate. Any community would be blessed to have her in its precincts or have her literature on its bookshelves. The fruit, they say, never falls far from the tree, and Lambert amply embodied the spirit and moxie of her antecedents. She was truly exemplary of her father, William, in her “race woman” attitude. As a journalist, she covered the appearance in town of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the esteemed poet, who was there mainly to bolster the campaign drive for Mayor Hazen Pingree, the choice of the black elite. Apparently Pingree’s team and a Dunbar poem, “Vote for Pingree and Vote for Bread,” made a difference.27
To honor the poet, black civic leaders established the Dunbar Memorial Hospital. Founded by Dr. James Ames and a dozen or so other black doctors in 1918, the hospital was housed in a building erected in 1892. A photo of the founding doctors graces the cover of Ken Coleman’s book Million Dollars Worth of Nerve, mainly a history of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. There, in 1922, Dr. Ames poses in front of the hospital at 580 Frederick Street. With him are several venerable members of Detroit’s elite, including Drs. Henry Cleage, Robert Greenidge, and Lloyd Bailer.
A year before Dunbar Hospital was opened, Dr. David Northcross and his wife, Daisy, founded Mercy Hospital in Black Bottom. The structure wasn’t as impressive as Dunbar’s Queen Anne style with a dash of Romanesque highlighted by a bay-windowed gabled dormer cascading across the front façade, but the service it provided was on par. Dunbar was once surrounded by similar structures, but now it stands alone, a landmarked solitary structure and the home of the Detroit Medical Society (DMS), which had a number of distinguished black doctors as members, including Dr. Ames, Dr. Joseph Dancy, Dr. A. L. Turner, and Drs. David and Daisy Northcross, who were among the creators of the DMS’s predecessor, the Allied Med
ical Society.
Among the most civic-minded of the black elite was educator Fannie Richards, who devoted time and attention to both elderly black women and deprived youth. In 1898, she and Mrs. Mary McCoy, the wife of the great inventor Elijah McCoy, established the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Ladies. Naming it after a black female poet balanced it nicely with the name of the city’s first black hospital. According to a story in the Detroit News, there were only seven women in the home in 1900.28
The decade from 1900 to 1910 was not good for black Detroiters, no matter their class. When immigrants from Europe began arriving in the city at the turn of the century, they gradually began to replace black workers in the good-paying positions as domestic servants and in the hotels. This decline in occupational status had a deleterious effect on the black elite and the “Negro continued to retrogress down to the year 1915.”29 If the black elite was experiencing an economic downturn, the city’s black working poor were reeling from an even more devastating blow.
As historian David Katzman noted, the majority of Detroit’s factory workers from 1890 to 1910 were foreign born, and for some companies, like the Dodge brothers, they were the preferred choice. “In 1890 there were no blacks in the brass and ship industries, and only twenty-one blacks were found among the 5,839 male employees in tobacco, stove, iron, machine and shoe industries.” The overall picture for African Americans interested in the manufacturing and mechanical pursuits was no better. According to the 1900 census, only 139 blacks were listed, and 47 were in the building industry.30 Nor were blacks visibly employed in brewing, furniture making, woodworking, and printing. If their employment percentage approached their population ratio, it was in dressmaking for women and house painting for men.31 Most black women worked as domestics or laundresses, while the majority of black men were unskilled laborers, except for those able to hold on to their jobs as barbers. They mainly serviced black patrons, since the European immigrants, who were given freedom to leave their departure and destination points, had replaced them behind the barber chairs.