My Face Is Black Is True Read online

  Acclaim for Mary Frances Berry’s

  My Face Is Black Is True

  “My Face Is Black Is True reclaims Callie House as an authentic American hero who more than a century ago argued that America’s debt to its more than four million enslaved founders was long overdue. … Berry brilliantly brings the issue of slave reparations to the forefront of American history.”

  —Christopher Moore, author of Fighting for America:

  Black Soldiers—The Unsung Heroes of World War II

  “An essential chapter in American history from a distinguished historian. Mary Frances Berry captures the logic of reparations for slavery, especially when the people who had actually been enslaved advanced it.”

  —Nell Painter,

  author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol

  “A revelation—a discovery. I knew nothing about Callie House’s extraordinary work on behalf of poor former slaves until I read My Face Is Black Is True, and now she is one of my heroes. Everyone should read this story.”

  —Dorothy I. Height, Chair/President Emerita,

  National Council of Negro Women, Inc.

  “A remarkable book about a truly remarkable woman. We have long needed this perspective on the history of ex-slave reparations. A splendid, insightful, and wise work of historical reclamation. A history that all Americans should read.”

  —Darlene Hine, Board of Trustees Professor of African

  American Studies and History, Northwestern University

  MARY FRANCES BERRY

  My Face Is Black Is True

  MARY FRANCES BERRY was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She received bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Howard University, a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan, and a juris doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School.

  Dr. Berry has received many awards for her public service and scholarly activities, among them the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award.

  In addition to having been the chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for eleven years, Dr. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history of American law. She lives in Washington, D.C.

  www.maryfrancesberry.com

  ALSO BY MARY FRANCES BERRY

  The Pig Farmer’s Daughter

  and Other Tales of American Justice

  The Politics of Parenthood: Child Care, Women’s Rights,

  and the Myth of the Good Mother

  Black Resistance/White Law:

  A History of Constitutional Racism in America

  Long Memory: The Black Experience in America

  (with John W. Blassingame)

  Stability, Security and Continuity:

  Mr. Justice Burton and Decision-Making

  in the Supreme Court

  Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy:

  Black Citizenship and the Constitution

  Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights,

  and the Amending Process of the Constitution

  For Mindy

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1 We Need a Movement

  2 Organizing the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association

  3 The Association Under Attack

  4 Voices of the Ex-Slaves

  5 The Movement Fights Back

  6 Avoiding Destruction

  7 The Association Goes to Federal Court

  8 Jailed for Justice

  9 Passing the Torch

  Epilogue: The Reparations Movement Still Lives

  Notes

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  Union soldiers with “contraband” (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Sunday morning in the Virginia pines (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Preparing for school (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  A New England ma’am holds primary classes in Mississippi (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Canvassing for votes (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  A political discussion (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  The Negro exodus (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Walter R. Vaughan (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Cover of the book Freedmen’s Pension Bill: A Plea for American Freedman (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Frederick Douglass (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  John Mercer Langston, Thomas E. Miller, and H. P. Cheatham (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Isaiah Dickerson (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Woman washing clothes (Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries)

  African-American children and William Harding Jackson, Jr. (The Collection of Carl and Otto Giers/Tennessee State Library and Archives)

  Two signed ex-slave petitions (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Notice of the Ex-Slave Association 1898 convention (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Reverend Dudley McNairy (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Early certificate of the Ex-Slave Association (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Legal documents from the Ex-Slave Association (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Slaves driven South by the rebel officers (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Freedpeople eating corn cake and soured milk (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Old master and old man (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Squire Smith, Boone County ex-slave and an unidentified Boone County ex-slave (Harris Family photographs, 1880s-1960s, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, Columbia, Missouri)

  Richard and Drucilla Martin (WPA Slave Narratives, American Memory, Library of Congress)

  Ex-slaves (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Senator Jacob Gallinger (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  Henry Clay Evans (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Ell Torrance (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  James Tyner (The Story of Our Post Office by Marshall Henry Cushing [Boston: A.M. Thayer, 1893] page 626)

  Certificate of mutual assistance work of the Association chapters (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Pensions, National Archives)

  Cornelius Jones (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  Calvin Chase (Men of Mark, Eminent, Progressive, Rising by William Simmons [Cleveland: George M. Rewell & Co., 1887] page 120)

  Rolling cotton (Prints and Photographs Department, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University)

  The official badge of the Ex-Slave Association (C
owan’s Historic American Auctions)

  The Jefferson City, Missouri, Penitentiary Women’s Wing (Mark Schreiber, Associate Superintendent, Missouri State Penitentiary)

  Emma Goldman (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  Sarah Graves, Edgar and Minerva Bendy, Tiney Shaw, and Molly Ammond (WPA Slave Narratives, American Memory, Library of Congress)

  The Atlanta chapter that continued to work after House’s jailing (The Constitution, Atlanta, Georgia)

  Marcus Garvey (Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

  Queen Mother Moore (Brian Lanker, 1988)

  Christopher Alston and the organizers of a sit-down strike (Walter Reuther Archives, Wayne State University)

  Flyer for Millions for Reparations march (Dr. Conrad Worrill, cochairman of the march)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book has existed in my mind since I first found some of the materials with the help of the late Detroit activist Christopher Alston and the late Sara Dunlap Jackson of the National Archives, who first taught me how to negotiate the collections. Walter Hill at the Archives began where Sara left off. Rodney Ross of the Archives Legislative Center and the entire staff in the Manuscript Division have tolerated more of my ever more detailed inquiries about the records of the Pension Bureau and the Post Office Department than anyone should have to bear. Also in Washington, at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Collection, Joellen Bashir and Donna Wells never tired of helping me track down a person or a photograph. Staff at the Postal Library and Archives in Washington, the National Archives Photographs and Films Division, and the Library of Congress Photographs and Film Division patiently helped me find what was available.

  At the Historical Research Room at the Linebaugh Public Library in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Donna Jordan, the overworked one-person staff member, let me wander freely through the records. Carol Kaplan at the Nashville Public Library, and Karina McDaniel and Marilyn Hughes at the Tennessee State Library and Archives aided in documenting the social context. Deborah O. Cox at the Nashville Metropolitan Government Archives assisted in tracking down materials in her collection and anywhere else she thought they might be found. Joe Daugherty McClure, law librarian for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Nashville Library helped to confirm the composition of the jury in the absence of a trial transcript.

  Tom Miller, Manuscript Specialist at the Western Historical Collection, Ellis Library, University of Missouri-Columbia, and Arvah Strickland Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Missouri-Columbia aided in deciphering the Boone county records. The staff at the New Orleans Public library, Louisiana Division, who have sustained me for years as I work on other projects, and at the New Orleans Notarial Archives helped track down several members of the New Orleans chapter.

  Historians John Egerton, Genna Rae McNeil, Barbara Savage, Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Steven Hahn, and Rebecca Scott gave valuable advice. Melinda Chateauvert helped me think more critically about social movement theory. Deadria Farmer-Paellmann of the Restitution Study Group, and Attorney Willie Gary shared useful information concerning the present-day reparations movement. Jacqueline Ridly Jennings, Robert Natalini, and Luther Adams assisted with the research, and Maida Odom contributed a number of good ideas. John Hope Franklin assured me that the Ex-Slave Pension Movement was virtually unknown, even among historians, which led me to actually sit down and write the book.

  My editor Victoria Wilson and my agent Charlotte Sheedy recognized the importance of this book to the history of the late-nineteenth-century United States. Thanks to Krishna Toolsie, who, as always, helped me find time to write, and Zachary Wagman, who kept us on track. Mindy graciously shared her ideas, companionship, and encouragement.

  Mary Frances Berry

  Washington, DC.

  Prologue

  WHEN I WAS TWELVE, I became an outlaw, a transgressor of racial boundaries. That summer I did the ironing while taking care of the Abbotts’ infant boy. They lived in an all-white well-off Nashville neighborhood founded as a streetcar suburb in the late nineteenth century. On a July afternoon when Mrs. Abbott came home, I showed her a phonograph record I had taken from the shelf and played while I worked. Excitedly, I told her how I just loved the music, but the more I talked, the more agitated she became. Suddenly she snatched the record from my hands and practically exploded. “You had no business touching those records, and you shouldn’t be listening to such music in the first place.” I told her I was sorry, but she still seemed angry. I knew I had misbehaved terribly, but I did not understand how or why listening to that music was wrong.

  I did not tell my mother, but when I finally told my Aunt Serriner, she worried aloud that I might become labeled a troublemaker. “Gal,” she said, “don’t be getting out of your place, stay out of those white folks’ things.” I stayed out of “white folks’ things” thereafter, or at least kept silent when I did not. However, the episode forever clouded my pleasure upon discovering Beethoven and his Symphony Number Nine.

  Callie House did not stay out of “white folks’ things” either. She was also a racial outlaw. An African-American laundress from Tennessee, she became the leader of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century poor people’s movement that sought pensions from the federal government as compensation for slavery. Her movement, federal officials concluded, “is setting the negroes wild.” They thought that if they did not stop her, when African Americans understood that the government would never grant pensions, the nation would “have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.” Consequently, the government harassed Callie House for exercising her constitutional right to petition the government and to mobilize others in the cause. When she would not relent, calling her “defiant,” the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau redoubled their efforts to smear and confine her. Her organization was the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans.1

  Callie House and the ex-slave movement did not accept the preachments or adopt the meek attitudes that Booker T. Washington counseled at the time. Today, some people argue against reparations because those who experienced slavery are no longer among the living. It is worth remembering that thousands of ex-slaves devoted years to pressing the reparations cause. They organized support networks and helped one another through very difficult times. That they bore the marks of bondage, as living ex-slaves, did not help them. Whites and elite African Americans ridiculed their pleas for redress, and the government disrespected their claims.

  The first homes I knew, the orphanage on Laurel Street and the house of my mother’s eldest sister, Aunt Everleaner, where I lived in the 1940s, lay a few streets away from where Callie House resided until her death in 1928. There in South Nashville, down in the valley, looking up to the state capitol on the hill, we both became troublemakers. Commercial development has, for the most part, overtaken the neighborhood, erasing every vestige, every physical structure of that time and place. The address at which Callie House lived has long been occupied by a public housing unit. This book tells her story.

  CHAPTER 1

  We Need a Movement

  We are organizing ourselves together as a race of people who feels that they have been wronged.

  CALLIE HOUSE

  (1899)

  CALLIE HOUSE knew hard work. Born a slave, now a washerwoman and a widow with five children, she was at the bottom of America’s social and economic ladder as she stood proudly before a cheering crowd of African Americans. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association had just elected her its first and only female officer. Addressing the convention delegates who had honored her with their votes, she talked about the thousands of people she had met on the road in the cause of compensation for slave service. House spoke of organizing local branches and collecting petitions to submit to Congress. She told them of her long hours spent “among strangers laboring to the best of my ability for the rights which my race is justly entitled to.” This
woman of modest means but great courage would soon become the association’s leader. For her work, she would be praised by poor African Americans, ridiculed by the race’s elites, and targeted by high government officials, who feared her influence with the masses, and eventually land in jail. But on this November day in 1898, as she stood before supporters, newly elected assistant secretary of the nation’s largest reparations movement, all things seemed possible.1

  Callie House came to prominence in the period historian Rayford Logan labeled the nadir, the lowest point along the long, rough road African Americans had traveled since Emancipation. Women were legally barred from voting, and black men suffered disenfranchisement through subterfuge and violence. Booker T. Washington advised against political activism. But many like Mrs. House chose another course. By the early twentieth century, her organization, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, according to federal officials, would swell to about 300,000, determined black people petitioning a government that barely recognized their existence and demanding a law ordering reparations for slavery.2

  Through cajoling and explaining, House inspired the old ex-slaves to exercise their rights as citizens to demand repayment for their long suffering. She urged them not to give up despite continued oppression and listened as they shared stories about their lives under slavery. Often in tears, aging and ailing men and women recalled being treated as less than human during their years of unpaid labor for masters who sexually abused slave women, broke families apart, and who had “the power to whip them to death.”3

  Although steeled for the effort to gain reparations, House and her cohorts were living in desperate times and still reeling from a bleak, awful past. House’s life experiences made her intimately familiar with the plight of those she referred to as the “ignorant, bare footed and naked” among her fellow ex-slaves. From family accounts, she was born into slavery in Rutherford County near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1861. (Her birth, like that of other slaves, was not officially recorded.) There, in a landscape of rolling hills, cereal and tobacco production, and horse farming, slave owners depended upon the labor of the approximately 13,000 blacks who constituted about 50 percent of the total population of the county.4