The messenger, p.5
The Messenger, page 5
CHAPTER TWO
ROOTS
I look inside myself and see my heart is black.
—Rolling Stones,
“Paint It Black”1
He spreads his knees, awkwardly, until he can feel the leather of her boots. He leans forward to surround the hot turd with his lips, sucking on it tenderly, licking along its lower side … he is thinking, he’s sorry, he can’t help it, thinking of a Negro’s penis, yes he knows it abrogates part of the conditions set, but it will not be denied, the image of a brute African who will make him behave.…
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow2
On the morning of my arrival in the town I casually dropped into the store of the general merchant who, I had been informed, had been one of the leaders of the mob.… When he told of the manner in which the pregnant woman had been killed he chuckled and slapped his thigh and declared it to be “the best show, Mister, I ever did see. You ought to have heard the wench howl when we strung her up.”
—Walter H. White, I Investigate Lynchings3
The inaugural address of President William Howard Taft resounded with promise for African Americans. It reflected a keen awareness of the plight of all minorities, and was particularly poignant regarding African contributions to America’s rapid economic development. “I look forward with hope to increasing the already good feeling between the South and other sections of the country,” Taft told the nation on March 4, 1909.4
The consideration of this question cannot, however, be complete and full without reference to the negro race, its progress and its present condition.… The progress which the negro has made in the last fifty years, from slavery, when its statistics are reviewed, is marvelous.… The negroes are now Americans. Their ancestors came here years ago against their will, and this is their only country and their only flag. They have shown themselves anxious to live for it and to die for it.5
Like Lincoln, Taft recognized that the primary cause of the nation’s great racial divide was the xenophobia of white Americans. As commander-in-chief, he tried to show by his words and deeds the necessity for whites to bridge the gap. In May 1909, when he delivered the commencement address at the all-black Howard University (built with federal funds in 1867), Taft reiterated his belief that the nation owed reparations to blacks:
This institution is the partial repayment of a debt—only partial—to a race which the government and the people of the United States are eternally indebted.… Everything I can do as an executive in the way of helping along this university I expect to do.6
Despite his lofty aims, the president lacked sufficient support to move the nation forward on the issues of racial tolerance and equal rights.
Taft’s first speech at Howard University made front-page headlines. But when he returned to speak at the school on April 18, 1912, few people outside the campus paid much notice. The nation and the world were mourning the worst maritime disaster in history: the sinking of the Titanic, which took the lives of over 1,500 people, some of them from among the American elite. But there had been signs even earlier that America’s heart was hardening on the “Negro question.”
Many in academia embraced and even championed the new racism. The president of the nation’s most prestigious postsecondary school delivered several speeches in the months after President Taft’s inauguration expressing racial views antithetical to those of the president, who was also a well-respected legal scholar. Although he was a progressive educator (having instituted the idea of a liberal arts education), Harvard University president Charles William Eliot was no pioneer in racial matters; on the contrary, his philosophy was strictly simian in nature. Eliot, from whom one would have logically expected enlightenment, denounced any “racial mixing,” or amalgamation, and was a leading supporter of Southern demands for a complete separation of the races.7
Although whites were the main carriers of the race virus, most of its casualties were black. Not even Washington, one of the few African Americans invited to the White House in the early 1900s, was immune to the venomous rage it aroused in its host. On a trip in 1911 to the heartland of American liberalism, New York City, he was viciously beaten by a gang of white men for allegedly “approaching” a white woman—the kind of hate crime normally associated with places below the Mason-Dixon line.8
Intellectual racism typically bore the imprimatur of scholarship and science. One author wrote in rebuttal to a statement by black scholar William E. B. Du Bois:
Let us repeat that the “color problem” is not a problem of color but of mentality. The difference between the white man, who has produced all civilizations, and the negro, who has no cultural possessions save those which he has received from the white man, is not a color difference merely.
If the negro had proved himself the master of things and the Caucasian had proved himself dependent upon the negro’s progress, we should readily concede superiority to the negro. But as the history of civilization shows the white man to be the master of things and the colored race merely the beneficiaries of the white man’s progress, we cannot deny superiority to the white man.9
Professor Edmund Davison Soper expressed similar views, though with more subtlety, in his book, The Religions of Mankind:
The people of ancient Egypt were in all probability a mixture of African tribes, called by many Hamitic, and Semites, who at a very early age, long before the opening of its recorded history came over from Arabia, fused with the natives, and formed the Egyptian type as we know it even in our own time.10
Soper completely ignored evidence that the coal-black Nubian civilization existed long before Egypt’s, and proffered the idea that “fair-skinned” Egyptians had civilized “cave-dwelling” Africans.
Eight months after Taft’s first speech at Howard, a Chicago cattle breeder held white scientists enthralled at a meeting in Boston with his solution to the “Negro problem.” On January 2, 1910, Q. T. Simpson proudly announced to members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the black race could be bred out of existence through genetic manipulation:
I think we are on the verge of gaining complete control over these chromosomes [governing race], and that means the control of color.… By a set process of treatment with baths or injections this new tide in the affairs of the black man will be brought about and these new color units in the cells of the creature will be attenuated or destroyed. Today we can do it by breeding. Tomorrow we can change the color of the blacks’ offspring by treating these color-controlling cells with a stimulant to war against the chromosomes.… I am at work on a process which I think will ultimately give us the results I desire.11
Similar views took hold in Europe, particularly in Germany after World War I. In the forefront of this assault on reason were The Secret Doctrine by Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and the writings of Arthur de Gobineau, who argued that a racially superior Aryan race had been polluted with the inferior genes of Semites and other Africans. Years later, members of Anton Drexler’s newly formed Nazi Party used these writings and the pseudoscience of phrenology to justify racist views about blacks and other groups, particularly Jews. A scholar reflecting on this period wrote:
Slowly, a new religion evolved … a cult of race, based on the supremacy of the Aryans and the vilification of the Jews. It was called the Volkisch—or Pan-German—movement, and it enjoyed great popular appeal. A racial theory of history was developed, and it heralded the coming of a new Messiah.12
In relegating African Americans to play the black kettle in the metaphor of America’s “melting pot,” scientific racism cast them out, forcing them to devise their own definitions of themselves. They weren’t here, black intellectuals retorted, just to slave over the stove and to burn like Ham’s skin, as was written in the Holy Bible and the Babylonian Talmud. In 1911, author James Morris Webb wrote The Black Man: The Father of Civilization, a controversial tome that contended that there was proof in the Bible that the first people on the planet were Africans. The Garden of Eden was in Africa, he argued, and place names in the Bible were nearly all in Africa and Asia. Morris, who later played a prominent role in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, helped lay the foundation for what was labeled “Pan-Africanism.” Webb wrote a second book in 1919 in which he argued that a black man would be the Messiah that Christians expect to return to Earth in the final days.13
Elija Pool came of age in the midst of this maelstrom. Although he was no longer in school, he read as much as he could about race and religion, and he was fascinated by new archaeological findings suggesting African origins of mankind. He occasionally ran across newspaper articles, some of which credited early nonwhite civilizations with being more than a presumed missing link to apes. “Where man originated is not known—very likely in southern Asia, possibly in Africa, certainly not in Europe, anthropologists say,” one such article stated. The focus of the story in the Savannah Tribune in 1912 was the finding of a British anthropologist who had developed a new theory on the original color of man. “Some turned black, others brown and others yellow, all according to the climate in which they found themselves.”14 Generally, though, the American popular culture and the U.S. judiciary and legislature refused to acknowledge that black people had a history or culture before slavery.
It had taken whites a century to accept the idea that slaves were not chattel or three-fifths of a white man, and at the then current rate of racial enlightenment, it would take at least another century for black assimilation. Influential black philosophers and theologians such as Turner and Webb were not willing to wait that long. America had rejected blacks, they argued, so perhaps it was time for blacks to reject America. The rejection took many forms, and generally led to what is inaccurately thought of as the Harlem Renaissance.
The cultural revolution in Harlem was but a rosebush in a botanical garden; the whole African-American culture was undergoing a radical change. In 1909, for instance, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded (as an outgrowth of the Niagara Movement), followed two years later by the National Urban League (NUL). In 1913, a new type of black organizations surfaced in major metropolitan areas. While the NAACP and NUL were primarily nonwhite, their aim was assimilation. These new organizations, among them the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Ancient Order of Ethiopian Princes, the African Blood Brotherhood, the Black Hebrews, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had at the core of their philosophy tenets that rejected the idea of blacks being integrated into America’s melting pot. They argued that blacks were the “pot” in the metaphor, a mere utensil as opposed to a vital ingredient. By the third year of Taft’s presidency, most blacks felt alienated from the American government and the American Dream. The experience of fourteen-year-old Elija and the black citizens of Cordele in 1912 may offer some insight as to the causes.15
Front-page headlines in Georgia on January 30, 1912, illustrated clearly the racial dichotomy of American justice. Some papers led with news about Clarence Darrow, a prominent white labor lawyer who was indicted by a grand jury in Los Angeles for allegedly attempting to bribe jurors on behalf of clients charged with dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building. Public reaction to the indictment was minimal, and Darrow posted the $20,000 bond and went home. In stark contrast, other Georgia newspapers led with a story about a young horse-and-carriage driver, or hack. No one will ever know the complete truth of how eighteen-year-old Albert Hamilton spent the evening of January 29 because he never had a chance to tell anyone. Hamilton, a close friend of Elija’s and a neighbor of the Pool family, was a popular hack around Cordele. As far as anyone remembers, he had never been in trouble with the law and was in all respects a model citizen. Like many hacks, he worked twelve hours a day, which is why his carriage was seen parked on Eleventh Avenue around seven o’clock that evening.16
In 1912, Eleventh Avenue in Cordele was akin to Park Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles—home to the locally rich and famous. Mr. A. F. Churchwell was standing on his front porch at approximately seven o’clock on January 29 when he saw a teenage girl lying in the street near his home. Hurrying to her aid, he realized that she was the daughter of one of Cordele’s most distinguished families. Her clothes were disheveled, he said later, and she appeared to have been molested. Churchwell helped her to her feet, and then took her to his home. He left her resting on a sofa while he went to get a physician and the sheriff, both of whom returned with him shortly.
Upon being questioned, the teenager told Sheriff John H. Ward that she had been walking down Eleventh Avenue around six-thirty that evening when a “big, burly negro”17 jumped out from behind a fence, grabbed her, and then dragged her behind the fence and assaulted her. Upon hearing her account, the sheriff related the story to his deputies. Bloodhounds were quickly put onto the alleged assailant’s trail, but a pouring rain had started, washing away any scent the dogs might have picked up. Meanwhile, Churchwell helped the girl’s father take her home. A short while later, Ward and his deputies went to the girl’s home to question her in detail about the suspect’s appearance. After she gave them a description, the officers went to Cordele’s “negro town” and arrested Albert Hamilton and three other young black men who were known to have been around Eleventh Avenue that day. They were confined in Crisp County Jail overnight.
“Every effort is being made to catch the negro,” one newspaper reported in the center column of its front page early Tuesday morning, “and if he is captured he will probably be lynched.”18
At roughly the same time that the morning newspapers were hitting the streets, the girl positively identified Hamilton as her assailant. By nine o’clock, almost every white citizen of Cordele had heard that Hamilton was in custody. Sheriff Ward grew worried as a mob formed outside the jail. Forty minutes later, he sent a telegram to Governor Joseph M. Brown urging him to send assistance to Cordele at once. “Send troops to Cordele from Albany or Fitzgerald,” Ward’s first of four telegrams stated. “Immediate need. Crowd furious. Girl identifies her assailant.” By ten minutes after ten, the size of the lynch mob had doubled, and there was no word from the governor. The mob broke down the door and rushed into the jail as Ward sent another telegram. “Crisp [County] jail being broken. Rush troops. Answer.”19 Regrettably, the nearest troops were forty miles away, so even if the governor had answered the first telegram, it would have taken half a day for assistance to arrive. Within seconds of his sending the fourth telegram, the mob stormed the jail, took the keys from Ward, and kidnapped the terrified young man. They dragged him across the street as he screamed and begged for his life. Like everyone else in “negro town,” he surely knew about the lynching of three young black men and a woman in a nearby town the week before.20
“We’re going to string you up, nigger!”21 someone yelled as the crowd kicked and beat Hamilton and dragged him to “negro town.” His punishment was meant to serve as another grim and wholly unnecessary warning about what happens when a black man is accused of touching a white woman. The mob continued to beat the boy while two men lassoed a large tree branch. While terrified black residents peeped out of their windows at the goings-on, the badly bruised and now nearly unconscious suspect fell to his knees. The terrorists fixed the noose around Hamilton’s neck and tightened it. An anxious group of volunteers pulled the opposite end of the rope upward, and pushed Hamilton’s body into the cold wind. After the rope was secured around the trunk of a tree, hundreds in the mob aimed their rifles and shotguns at the dangling, dying youth. By the time the smoke cleared, Hamilton had been shot more than 300 times. As the mob proudly dispersed, an amateur photographer snapped pictures of the mutilated victim, and then ran excitedly to the local camera shop and had the most gruesome photograph made into a postcard.22
That evening, the white photographer took hundreds of copies of the postcard to Douglas and other nearby towns to sell them. “I knew that nigger all my life,”23 the forty-year-old ghoul from Cordele claimed as he hawked his macabre merchandise. Back in Cordele, the Pools and their neighbors were afraid to go near Hamilton’s body, even after the lynch mob had been gone for several hours. Coroner J. A. Stephens arrived at the scene late in the afternoon and cut him down. Elija and other residents of the black enclave huddled around the Hamilton family, crying as they tried to console them, for they all knew that it could have been any one of them instead of Albert lying on the muddy ground in a pool of blood.
“I cried all the way home,” Elija sadly recalled. “If I ever got to be a man, I told myself, I would find a way to avenge him and my people.”24 Although they wanted to take Albert away for burial, the white coroner told them not to touch the body, saying that he couldn’t release it until after he completed his inquest. The inquest took less than half an hour, as there was really nothing left to investigate. A young man had been lynched, the white mob who did it had disappeared, and the citizens of “negro town” who witnessed it were too afraid of retaliation to say anything. As no one came forward with information, the coroner quickly ruled that Albert Hamilton had died of hanging and gunshot wounds.
