Common Ground (12 page)

In 1923, Fanny Walker—Frederick and Cornelia’s third-oldest daughter—grew weary of wresting cotton from the wasted fields. Arriving in Boston, she sent word back that jobs were plentiful, wages nearly triple what they had been in Burke. That sounded good to her younger brother Thomas Quinnie Walker.

Quinnie had already done some roving. At the age of seventeen, he had gone to work for the Southern Bell Telephone Company, laying long lines through the Georgia swamps. Three years later, just as the boll weevil hit Burke County, he returned to try his hand at tenant farming. One day, he went to the store seeking some corn and a hoe, but the shopkeepers refused to advance him the supplies, claiming that he owed them forty dollars. That did it. Quinnie gave his mule to his sister Sarah, packed his belongings in a worn cardboard suitcase, and boarded the Dixie Flyer. Years later he would tell his daughter—the future Rachel Twymon—that when the train pulled into Boston’s South Station that morning in 1925, he felt “as if my life were starting all over again.”

After a year in which they saw each other every Sunday, Quinnie and Helen Jenkins were married. And so a circle was completed. The wedding united two Virginia families who had begun barely seventy miles apart. Once they had been remarkably similar: slaves for hire in the urbane seaport, free blacks in the sophisticated capital. But the tortuous route each family had traveled to Boston opened a chasm between them. One, transported to Nova Scotia, had found themselves the only blacks in a white village, proud of association with their neighbors yet never quite accepted by them. The other, sold into slavery, had lived for ninety years in rural Georgia surrounded by others of their race, fearing and resenting their white overlords. The marriage of an old Bostonian and an illiterate sharecropper proved an uneasy one, reflecting deep fissures in Boston’s black community.

“Slavery was repugnant to the Puritans and was regarded by them with abhorrence,” wrote William Sumner, a Massachusetts soldier-historian, in 1858. On the eve of the Civil War that was a convenient version of history, lending
the North a moral superiority in the coming struggle. But it was bad history, at odds with the ample record of Massachusetts’ dominant role in the slave trade. Boston was never quite so distinctive as it liked to pretend. Through the eighteenth century, Boston’s sailing men provided Negroes to the West Indies and the Southern colonies. Slaves, bought in Africa for five pounds sterling, brought from thirty to ninety pounds in the West Indies, a differential which laid the foundation for many New England fortunes.

In comparison with the Southern colonies, there were never many slaves in Massachusetts, partly because the harsh climate and stony soil did not permit a plantation agriculture requiring numerous field hands. Yet, by the eve of the Revolution, 5,249 Negroes, most of them slaves, were counted in the colony.

Still, Massachusetts’ brand of slavery
was
distinctive, probably more benign than in any other colony. Following the Hebraic tradition passed down through the Old Testament, the Puritans regarded slaves as persons divinely committed to their stewardship. Usually referred to as “servants” rather than slaves, they were often treated as members of the family in which they lived. A visitor in 1704 complained that New England masters were “too indulgent … to their slaves; suffering too great familiarity from them, permitting you to sit at table and eat with them (as they say to save time), and into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand.” Since salvation required a knowledge of the Bible, many masters even taught their slaves to read and write. The legal status of slaves in New England was somewhere between that of Southern plantation slaves and that of indentured servants. They could acquire, hold, and transfer property; they were entitled to a trial by jury. Most important, they could sue whites and could carry their suits on appeal to the highest courts in the colony.

By the mid-eighteenth century, slaves were taking advantage of that right, bringing civil suits for their freedom, arguing that slavery was “contrary to ye laws of Nature.” Such entreaties eventually reached the Puritan conscience. Like Virginians, many Massachusetts citizens perceived the contradictions between their own struggle against Britain and their enslavement of others. Abigail Adams, in a letter to her husband, John, wrote: “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”

Once the colonies won their independence, the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention adopted a Declaration of Rights, holding that “all men are born free and equal.” But slavery persisted. Not until 1783 did the state’s chief justice declare it unconstitutional.

Although conscience played a role in all this, more practical considerations were also involved. As John Adams noted: “The common people would not suffer the labour, by which alone they could obtain a subsistence, to be done by slaves. If the gentlemen had been permitted to hold slaves the common people would have put the Negroes to death, and their masters too, perhaps.”

Unlike Southern slaves, who were overwhelmingly cultivators of cotton,
rice, and tobacco, those in Massachusetts had been employed in a wide variety of crafts: as printers, blacksmiths, tailors, ship’s carpenters, coopers, masons, rope makers, or sailors. But with the end of slavery in the state, white artisans largely reclaimed those jobs, and by the early nineteenth century Negroes were heavily concentrated in service positions.

At first, most blacks lived along the wharves of the North End, a quarter known as “New Guinea”; later they edged into the West End and onto adjacent Beacon Hill. Since many Negroes were servants to the wealthy whites who lived on the hill’s south side, they settled in the crowded alleys on the reverse slope, which came to be known as “Nigger Hill.”

It was there—in the African Meeting House, Boston’s first black church—that William Lloyd Garrison and eleven other white men founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society and proclaimed two goals: the eradication of Southern bondage and of Northern discrimination. Although the former struggle took precedence, Garrison and other Boston abolitionists worked to ameliorate the lot of Boston’s blacks side by side with such Negro leaders as Frederick Douglass and Lewis Hayden.

One of their principal objectives was the integration of Boston’s public schools. The city’s school system had been segregated since 1798. In 1849, a black parent, Benjamin Roberts, brought suit against the city in the name of his daughter Sarah, seeking reintegration of the schools. Arguing Roberts’ case before the Supreme Judicial Court, Charles Sumner said: “[A] school, exclusively devoted to one class, must differ essentially, in its spirit and character, from the public school known to the law, where all classes meet together in equality. It is a mockery to call it an equivalent.” But Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw disagreed, ruling that the segregated schools did not deny Negroes equal protection of the law.

Justice Shaw’s ruling—the “separate-but-equal doctrine”—was to have a profound effect on the nation’s history. The Roberts case was the chief precedent cited by the Supreme Court when it enshrined that doctrine in
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
(1896) and, thus, the genesis of the legal principle which was to govern the country’s race relations until 1954.

Not in Boston, however. Spurned by the courts, black parents, supported by abolitionists of both races, carried their fight into the political arena. In 1855, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill prohibiting segregated schools. It was the first of several notable victories achieved by the same coalition in the decades before the Civil War—among them, lifting the ban on interracial marriages, adding Negroes to the jury rolls, and abandoning segregated seating on the state’s railroad cars.

By the eve of the Civil War, Massachusetts Negroes had achieved a fair measure of political and civil rights. Although their economic position was precarious and they were excluded from most social circles, they were probably more secure than their counterparts elsewhere in the nation. This progress prompted the New York
Herald
to lament: “Now the blood of the Winthrops, the Otises, the Lymans, the Endicotts, and the Eliots, is in a fair way to be
amalgamated with the Sambos, the Catos, and the Pompeys. The North is to be Africanized. Amalgamation has commenced. New England heads the column. God save the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”

The war itself quickened the sympathies of Boston’s whites for their black fellow citizens. On May 28, 1863, thousands of Bostonians gathered to watch Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a young Yankee aristocrat, lead his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry—the first Northern black regiment in the Civil War—through the city’s streets to Battery Wharf, where they embarked for South Carolina. Scarcely two months later, Shaw and several hundred of his Negro soldiers died together in an assault on Fort Wagner. Their common martyrdom helped cast a glow of brotherhood over the city’s race relations. When a monument to them was dedicated at the crest of Beacon Hill, the philosopher William James declaimed: “There on foot go the dark outcasts…. There on horseback among them, in his very habit as he lived, sits the blue-eyed child of fortune, upon whose happy youth every divinity has smiled. Onward they moved together, a single resolution kindled in their eyes, and animating their otherwise so different frames….”

Indeed, for a time, it appeared that Boston’s whites and blacks might march together toward the common goals of a just and equal society. Within months of the surrender at Appomattox, Massachusetts broadened the legal immunities of its black citizens. After Negroes complained about racial discrimination at Boston’s Globe Theater and the Brigham Restaurant, the legislators banned such discrimination in licensed inns, public meetings, and “places of amusement,” a prohibition which was eventually extended to all public accommodations.

Gradually, blacks played a more prominent role in public life. In 1867, two were elected to the Massachusetts legislature, where they maintained at least one representative until the end of the century. With their concentration in the West End, Boston’s Negroes elected at least one City Councilman in every election between 1876 and 1895.

But as Boston’s blacks tasted the fruits of this “golden era,” their community was already being transformed by successive waves of freed slaves from the South. The first to arrive were some of General Butler’s “contraband” from Hampton. Massachusetts officers had supervised these Negroes in the refugee camps which sprang up around Fort Monroe. When the Freedmen’s Bureau sought to relocate them after the war, it looked first to New England because there was “no region … more desirable as a home for the Negro.” Back came stacks of applications for “colored girl servants” and, over the next few years, nearly two thousand ex-slaves were sent North as domestics for white families in the Boston area. For the next three decades, Tidewater Virginia remained the principal source of black migrants to Boston. Most of the ex-slaves who settled in Boston in the first years after the war were urban, literate, semi-skilled, light-skinned Negroes or mulattoes—products of the relatively benevolent slave system of the Upper South.

But even such comparative sophistication didn’t assure these migrants a
warm welcome in the black community. For Boston’s Negroes—sheltered by extensive legal protection, succored by a few principled abolitionists, favored by a certain latitude in the city’s public life—were intensely proud of their “special relationship” with whites. They did not take kindly to the influx of recently freed slaves who reminded them of the indelible stamp of servitude which lay on the brow of all black men in America.

This pride in their heritage of freedom was, for some Boston blacks, a goad to action. Accustomed to dealing with whites on a plane of rough equality, such Northern Negroes were determined to extend Boston’s racial climate to the nation at large. The chief spokesman for this group of “Boston Radicals” was William Monroe Trotter. Born with an unusually light complexion, raised in white Hyde Park, Trotter had graduated
magna cum laude
from Harvard and inherited a modest fortune of $20,000. He inherited as well the racial militancy his father had developed while fighting for equal pay in one of the two black regiments Massachusetts sent into the Civil War.

Trotter’s principal target was Booker T. Washington, the Sire of Tuskegee. In almost every respect, Washington was Trotter’s antithesis: born a dark-skinned Southern slave, he derided “high-flown” intellectualism and emphasized practical “industrial education” for blacks. To Trotter, Washington was the quintessence of the Southern Negro whose spirit had been crushed by slavery. For Bookerites, Trotter was a dangerous overreacher, “a brave, roaring, make-believe lion.”

This conflict came to a head on July 30, 1902, at the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church on Boston’s Columbus Avenue. Some two thousand spectators had gathered that night to hear Washington lecture on “the dignity and beauty of labor,” but before he could begin, one of Trotter’s supporters scattered cayenne pepper on the stage. Fistfights broke out in the audience and Trotter himself clambered onto a chair to read a list of nine challenges. After Trotter was arrested, a Bookerite journal cried, “What is the matter with these Boston Negroes?” But “the Boston riot” became a landmark in American race relations less because it deepened the rift between Trotter and Washington than because it persuaded W. E. B. Du Bois, another highly educated Massachusetts Negro, to break with Washington and found the more militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, with its first branch in Boston.

The newly aggressive mood did not persist among Boston’s black elite. Trotter had never represented the privileged community into which he was born. The further the abolitionist past receded into history, the less militant Boston’s blacks grew. By the second decade of the twentieth century, their leadership had fallen into the hands of some thirty black families known as the “Black Brahmins.” There was J. H. Lewis, a merchant-tailor who kept a stable of racehorses; Gilbert Harris, New England’s largest wigmaker; and the poet William Stanley Braithwaite. “Like the white Brahmins,” writes one historian, “they spent Friday afternoons at the Symphony, vacationed at Newport or on the Cape, and lived in Beacon Hill apartments or in large, brick homes in the
South End, ‘filled with books, potted palms, dull colored plants near the window and antique furniture.’ Children learned their social graces at Mr. Papanti’s dancing school.” They generally belonged to white churches, rather than the Baptist and AME churches founded by blacks. Many summered at Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard. So proud were they of their roots in the city which Oliver Wendell Holmes had called “the hub of the solar system” that they organized a Society of the Descendants of Early New England Negroes, which had twenty-four members in 1903. Though the true “Black Brahmins” were a tiny fraternity, their influence greatly exceeded their numbers. Aspiring to their status, thousands of Boston-born Negroes took on the Brahmins’ complacency, their aloofness from social problems, their reluctance to participate in any movement that might set them apart from the white mainstream.