“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

Abstract

Previous articleNext article Free“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930Marvin ChilesMarvin Chiles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Negro could not, in the nature of the case, secure the benefit and the elevating influences of what the white man calls “society.” That door is closed to the black man, and will always be closed.1Will the Times editor never see? Will he never understand? The doors to white society may remain barred forever, so far as we are concerned. We do not seek admission there. It is our civil and political rights for which we are contending.2More than twenty years ago, historian Robert A. Pratt argued that Virginia—largely because of the endeavors of the state’s African American activists—“played a significant part” in what historian Jacqueline Dowd hall dubbed the “Long Civil Rights Movement.”3 Virginia’s role as a significant site of civil rights activism, Pratt maintained, “has long been ignored” because the “state of race relations in the Old Dominion,” simply put, has “never been the subject of scholarly inquiry.” Pratt charged historians with being overly preoccupied with lynching and other expressions of antiblack violence in Virginia instead of exploring everyday struggles against racial discrimination. In more recent years, historians have supported Pratt’s assessment that “Jim Crow was as much a reality for blacks in Virginia as it was for blacks in Mississippi.”4 In discussing civil rights activism in Virginia, historians have also highlighted the commonwealth’s reputation as a NAACP stronghold during the mid–twentieth century. However, a closer examination of the city of Richmond—Virginia’s capital and home to one of the largest NAACP chapters in the Jim Crow South—reveals that a gap exists in the historiography on the African American experience in the Old Dominion, particularly with regard to African American civil rights struggles sustained by a diverse group of dissenters. Although black Virginians were instrumental in the Long Civil Rights Movement and involved in various NAACP activities, their historic alliance with this leading organization was not as monolithic and preordained as the historical scholarship suggests.5A prominent black minister often remarked that Richmond was “Down Where the South Begins.”6 This underappreciated characterization embodies Richmond’s dichotomous struggle between Jim Crow segregation and black activism. Drawing from newspapers such as the Richmond Planet, the Richmond Times, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and the Richmond News-Leader as well as census reports, pivotal court cases, legislative documents, and the NAACP Papers, in this article I historicize the notion of “Down Where the South Begins” to identify a shift toward activist black leadership in Richmond during the first three decades of the twentieth century and explore the nuances of and challenges inherent in the black Virginia/Richmond–NAACP alliance, a union of some sort that did not stand on firm ground at the time of its inception. Among other examples, I explore the early civil rights efforts in Richmond sparked by spokespersons and activists such as John Mitchell Jr., the Richmond streetcar boycott and the resistance to residential segregation in the city, and the complex relationship between a variety of civil rights activists, the NAACP in Virginia, the Richmond branch of the NAACP, and the NAACP national headquarters.This article contributes to our understanding of how early local civil rights struggles contributed to and fit within national efforts. Richmond is all too often perceived as not being central to the black freedom struggle, and this article demonstrates that more historical scholarship on black life during the first several decades of the era of Jim Crow segregation is warranted. As I argue, civil rights activists in Richmond shaped some of the most important trends in the Long Civil Rights Movement. The shift from conservative to activist black leadership and the need for better black cooperation defined political discourse more in Richmond than perhaps in many other southern states. Most importantly, the former Confederate capital shows that the formative years of segregation represent the crucible for southern black resistance and a period during which NAACP officials often documented that undoing segregation “Down Where the South Begins” provided the legal and cultural framework for what later become the modern Civil Rights Movement.7“This Complete Segregation,” 1899–1900The December 30, 1899, edition of the black-owned Richmond Planet newspaper was filled with holiday cheer. The front page showed “jolly old” St. Nicholas carrying an open sack of toys to deserving children on Christmas day. The featured stories, “John Olmstead’s Nephew” and “One New Year’s Eve,” used seasonal chapters to celebrate the fruitfulness of family and community.8 The owner and editor of the Planet, John Mitchell Jr., carefully crafted this New Year’s Eve edition to express his understanding of black history and culture in the former Confederate capital. As a child, he watched black Union soldiers march through Richmond’s charred downtown streets on April 3, 1865, to liberate its black citizens. This memory may have inspired the image of Santa Claus that he offered to his readers. With this notion of freedom, black Richmond took to the residential district of Jackson Ward, where they embraced family and community, creating one of the most celebrated black enclaves in the nation.9 “Little Africa,” as it was known to locals, recorded over half of the black Richmond population (32,230 people), along with two banks, one grocery store, six professional schools, ten churches with at least 2,000 members, two colleges, two first-class hotels, ten barbershops, twelve attorneys, seven dentists, fifteen nurses, and twenty-four doctors.10Richmond entered the new century with a renewed image. It was the fifth largest southern city, boasting a population of 85,000, a manufacturing sector worth $43,366,000, a retail sector grossing $35 million annually, banks clearing $165,901,000 in revenue, real estate valued at $70 million, seventy-five sewer lines, and an electric streetcar system that transported over 7,000,000 passengers annually.11 This prosperity worried the witty Planet editor. He sensed that black Richmonders would end up bearing the social brunt of economic progress. In the same New Year’s Eve edition of the Planet, Mitchell reproduced an image of two black men hanging from a tree. Beneath the image of the mangled bodies was a chart noting the statistical rise in the lynching of black males, some as young as eight years old, throughout the nation. Mitchell referenced states such as Wyoming and Washington in the same breath as Alabama and Texas to demonstrate that blacks were never totally safe from white injustice. He used this shock value to draw readers toward a developing story that would define the city, state, and region in the coming years. Next to this discussion of lynching was a copy of the white-owned Richmond Times’s editorial titled “Uplift the Negro and Help Him to Be a Good Citizen,” which declared that “we will never consent … that the Negro shall be … a disturbing element in politics. We are unwilling that the children of the black man shall be educated in the schools which the white man has provided for his own children.” The Times advocated a new form of social engineering that would require white lawmakers and businessmen to codify the city’s visible color line in the new century.12Like many southern cities, Richmond was heavily segregated by race at the turn of the century. Blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods, attended separate schools, worshiped at separate churches, worked in separate spaces, frequented separate saloons, and voted in separate voting booths. The black and white poor even sought refuge in separate almshouses.13 Writers for the Times wanted a newer and more powerful form of segregation, one that would legally inscribe black inferiority/white supremacy into the city landscape. “The peace of the nation and safety of the Negro depends upon this complete segregation,” the Times editor wrote. Richmond was becoming an important economic player in the industrializing New South and Jim Crow laws ensured that blacks remained the low-waged labor by which white wealth was created and second-class citizens in the white political power structure. After all, Richmond was a so-called white man’s city, Virginia was a so-called white man’s state, and America was “a white man’s country,” the Times boasted.14Black leaders resisted the earliest calls for de jure segregation. John Mitchell Jr. was a special case altogether.15 He urged black Richmonders to “join hands with the Times’ editor to bring about a real complete separation.” As his city approached its nadir of race relations, Mitchell championed black economic development through banking, fraternalism, publishing, and real estate ventures. “Although we suffer from the wanton insults, midnight assassins, cowardly lynchers, and the administration of injustice in the name of law and order … let us acquire property, accumulate money, [and] educate our children,” Mitchell once told his black readership.16 He also protested codified segregation because white lawmakers did not want to “bring about real separation.” Mitchell once jokingly said, “Jim Crow beds are more necessary in the Southland” than Jim Crow laws.17 This assertion stemmed from his personal disdain for white men calling for the “purity of the white race.” These unanswered calls for “Jim Crow beds ” assured Mitchell that codified segregation would reinforce white supremacy just as slavery did a few decades before.18“We Shall Never Willingly Submit,” 1900–1907Segregated travel was one of the first major expressions of Jim Crow in the South. However, blacks boycotted segregated carriers in every former Confederate state. In the 1960s, several leading scholars of the black experience portrayed these boycotts as “conservative in the sense that [they were] seeking to preserve the status quo” of integrated travel.19 More plainly, they argued that the black middle class boycotted segregation because it offended their class sensibilities. This tension was heightened in Richmond, where they found that “even before the boycott began, an open split developed in the Negro leadership.”20 Newer scholarship suggests that the boycotts represented “a valiant part of a longer struggle for civil rights” because the “working poor and its rising elite [together] found a place in the protest against Jim Crow Street Cars.”21 This section bridges together past historians’ foci on black class conflict and newer attention to the emergence of street-level activism. Black Richmond’s streetcar boycott exacerbated existing class tensions. At the same time, it also synergized black resistance, affording activists more legitimacy to lead the black community during the Jim Crow era.Richmond’s streetcar boycott was partly sparked by white newspaper editors’ racism. Beginning in the 1890s, they advocated for segregated travel by fabricating stories about black men openly harassing white women. “It takes vast stock of patience to offset the red-hot indignation which arises and spreads over the whole land whenever an assault is made upon one of our women,” wrote a writer for the Richmond Dispatch in 1900.22 John Mitchell Jr., like most of his black readership, knew that these stories were “anything but credible.”23 On the other hand, they reflected the white South’s growing desire to maintain their racial supremacy through forced separation. Between 1887 and 1900, the state legislatures in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, Arkansas, Florida, and Tennessee unequally segregated their railroad cars.24 These legislative changes inspired Virginia newspaper editors to interpret Jim Crow as being an organic progression of southern race relations and politics. “Down South the separate car law is the rule and not the exception,” recorded the Dispatch.25 But, Jim Crow travel was not brought about by a united movement. The prevalence of de facto segregation compelled some railway executives and white Democrats to perceive segregated travel as being unnecessary. This was the case in Virginia.26By 1900, the “Jim Crow Car Bill” was in danger of failing in the Virginia state senate.27 This worried the bill’s sponsor John Ellis Epps, a man who exemplified segregationist thought and politics in the New South. Epps entered adulthood like his father, John Sr., as a self-employed carpenter. After his father died, Epps put away the cast-iron bench to become a labor organizer. This decision placed him in the upper echelon of Richmond’s Democratic Party, a party that between 1887 and 1940 maintained the white working-class vote by eliminating blacks from voting and city employment. Democratic officials ensured that black voting numbers remained in the single digits throughout most districts, and they controlled the types of jobs available to black residents (e.g., teachers in black schools, cooks, janitors, and other conventional service-oriented vocations).28 Epps’s status among white working men earned him posts in the city police force, and he later secured elected posts in the city council and the state legislature. The Jim Crow Car Bill was his first act as a state delegate and was a political response to the failed segregation ordinance that he previously sponsored in City Hall.29 “God Almighty drew the color-line,” the Times proclaimed.30 And by the hands of the General Assembly, Epps, a representative for the white working class–backed Democratic machine, planned to enforce it.31“Epps seems to think that he was sent to the legislature from Richmond to represent white people only,” the Planet editor once griped.32 Mitchell often used his newspaper to criticize Epps (and those like him). Rarely did the two men ever speak to each other. Mitchell’s closest friend and black attorney Giles Beecher Jackson, however, spoke with Epps about withdrawing the Jim Crow Car Bill. Although whites rarely acknowledged it at the time, Mitchell and Jackson were on different sides of the same coin. Both men advocated for black social, economic, and political advancement. However, Jackson’s “outwardly conciliatory” attitude made him more favorable to whites. Mitchell was much more “militant … [in his] denunciation of the many discriminatory laws and rulings against blacks,” a local historian once asserted.33 Jackson’s personality provided him with socioeconomic advancement, such as passing the state bar and becoming one of seven black attorneys in Virginia in the early twentieth century, and his status offered him certain privileges, like being recorded by a census taker as a “mulatto” (despite the fact that he was unmistakably dark-skinned and not biracial).34 Jackson was the perfect black advocate to speak with Epps about withdrawing the Jim Crow Car Bill, but Epps rebuffed him and on January 25, 1900, the General Assembly passed the bill and segregated railcars throughout the Old Dominion.35Segregating railroad travel did not completely satisfy many southern whites. As their cities expanded, they clamored for more state-sponsored segregation. In 1904, the Virginia legislature, in line with both Louisiana and Tennessee, passed a law that empowered privately owned transit providers to segregate their own streetcars. The Virginia Passenger and Power Company (VPPC)—Richmond’s only streetcar provider—then obligated its conductors to enforce racially segregated seating. Black southern communities often united in protesting such policies.36 This was not the case in Richmond, however. Giles Jackson spoke privately with VPPC officials to keep the streetcars integrated. His biggest complaint was that the conductors, all of them being lower-income white men, would designate less desirable seating for black passengers. When Jackson’s appeal failed, he and a “conservative set” of black ministers met with VPPC officials to settle upon the “most liberal construction of the new law,” the Times-Dispatch reported. Both sides agreed that as long as blacks obeyed the new segregated seating policy, “there [would] be no discrimination on account of color on [VPPC] cars.”37Jackson and the ministers promised black people fair treatment on segregated streetcars. Mitchell urged blacks to “stay off the streetcars,” and he told whites to get “on with your Jim Crow Cars. … We shall protest and protest. We shall agitate and agitate. We shall never willingly submit.”38 The purpose and meaning of Mitchell’s words of protest were twofold. On the one hand, he was doing what he had always done, which was to fight discrimination in any way that he could. Simultaneously, Mitchell was also striking back at the conservative black ministers for embarrassing him in the not-so-distant past. For instance, a few years earlier, black ministers had expelled Mitchell from his home church for condemning priestly politics in the Planet. After being without a church home for two years and losing a lawsuit for libel, Mitchell remained on the bad side of many local ministers.39 The white Richmond newspapers covered this story, including Mitchell’s boycott rhetoric, and also published ads for another black man, a young Howard-educated attorney named Joseph Roland Pollard, who vowed to challenge the seating policy. The son of a shoemaker and housewife who had never been enslaved, Pollard brought a youthful zeal to Mitchell’s fight, helping him launch an official boycott.40Less than a week after the VPPC announcement, Mitchell and Pollard organized a boycott meeting. Predating the boycotts described in Aldon D. Morris’s classic The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change and the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott, Mitchell and Pollard told about 2,000 blacks to walk rather than be humiliated with segregation. However, “there was no turbulence, no fierce denunciation, and no fire-eating as many feared,” the Times-Dispatch newspaper reported.41 Only one black pastor attended the protest meeting. He told the attendees that the other ministers believed that Mitchell and Pollard were not “representative [of the] colored citizens of the city.”42 In other words, the ministers would not legitimize the protest with their presence. The Times-Dispatch stoked the fires of black political division by reporting that “it is useless to conceal that [Mitchell’s and Pollard’s] gathering was a representative one.”43 The report, along with the ministers’ refusal to openly rebuke the VPPC policy, embarrassed the ministers. They then drafted a response and send it not to Mitchell’s Planet but to the white newspapers. “While we strongly advocate peace and conservatism, this is not be construed to mean that we are in any way in accord with this change by our streetcar service,” they asserted. The ministers withdrew from the streetcar protest, allowing Mitchell and Pollard to comfortably define black Richmond’s stance on segregation.44After the policy took effect, Mitchell claimed and the News-Leader validated that as much as 90 percent of African Americans stayed off of the streetcars.45 The rest appeared to have simply obeyed the policy. Mitchell reported this news to highlight that activists like himself represented black Richmond during the Jim Crow era. This fact came with little promise. Ultimately, none of the southern streetcar boycotts succeeded. However, the black community activists did lay the foundation for future civil rights strategies. Black ministers and businessmen often came together, formed alternative transportation services, and used arrests, media coverage, and the courts to create a culture of protest. Richmond’s nonconfrontational boycott cultivated a newer brand of black resistance as well. It allowed Jim Crow to establish itself “quietly, and there is no reason to hope that it will not continue without creating undue excitement,” as the Times-Dispatch boasted. There is no clear end date for the black Richmond boycott. Mitchell claimed that it lasted until the state legislature required segregated streetcars in 1906.46“What We Must Do to Be Saved,” 1907–1930Ending restrictive covenants was a pressing concern during the modern Civil Rights Movement. These contractual clauses prohibited blacks from leaving divested and poorly valued neighborhoods. The US Supreme Court invalidated these covenants in 1948. Yet, they were merely the second phase of Jim Crow housing. The first phase involved citywide segregation ordinances. Using activities in Richmond from the dawn of the twentieth century until the beginning of the Great Depression, this section reveals how the fight against Jim Crow housing ordinances belongs to the “long” tradition of the modern Civil Rights Movement. These ordinances brought experienced southern black activists into contact with the upstart NAACP.47Throughout the early twentieth century, almost half of black Richmonders lived in Jackson Ward. Those living in the other four residential districts stayed in enclaves. The existence of racially segregated neighborhoods was a custom that most blacks could not effectively challenge. Even the well-to-do John Mitchell Jr., his elderly mother, and his young nephew and niece occupied Mitchell’s home and business office on Jackson Ward’s North Third Street until 1907.48 Mitchell purchased a home in the all-white West Clay Street neighborhood adjacent to Jackson Ward. West Clay Street residents later learned that Mitchell already owned two other homes in the neighborhood. “Out of consideration of white property owners,” Mitchell employed a white attorney to rent the homes to white people. However, there would be no consideration for white property owners with this third purchase.49Mitchell planned to relocate his Mechanics’ Savings Bank to his newly purchased West Clay Street building. The bank would be, as he later boasted, “the first structure of its kind built by Negroes on Clay Street,” symbolizing that black progress could not be Jim Crowed.50 In July 1908, the West Clay Street’s Citizens Protective League (CPL) petitioned the city streets committee to prevent the bank relocation. This was the last resort for an organization dedicated to maintaining their all-white neighborhood. Just one year prior, CPL had successfully prevented a black church congregation from moving into the neighborhood. Not long after, they protested the sale of the property to Mitchell. When this failed, CPLers tried to continue practicing residential segregation. Mitchell reported in the Planet that a white woman offered to sell her home to him for $7,000 when the city had valued it at $3,485. Mitchell’s refusal forced the CPL to use the local government against him.51After a week of negotiating in City Hall, the streets committee issued Mitchell a relocation permit. They told CPLers, “He will put the Bank there. If you do not permit him to put it at Third and Clay Streets … you will have a house there with Negro tenants.”52 Mitchell further agitated the CPL by flaunting that “the Mechanics’ Savings Bank … is now in better financial condition than it has been at any time.” He also published the bank’s expansion blueprints in the summer 1909 editions of the Planet.53 A year later, Mitchell purchased two more homes in the neighborhood, increasing his West Clay Street property holdings to five. Once CPLers learned of Mitchell’s newest purchases, they threatened his potential black tenants with violence. On the doors of Mitchell’s newly acquired properties were signs—signed the “white citizens of Clay Street”—that read: “If any Negroes move in this house, they do so at their risk. The white residents of West Clay Street are determined that no Negroes shall live in their neighborhood.”54 The threats did frighten Sallie Scott, Mitchell’s newest black renter. Just as Mitchell had two years prior, she moved into the property without recorded incident.55Challenges like Mitchell’s to de facto segregation compelled white Richmonders to expand their Jim Crow laws. More than five decades ago, C. Vann Woodward, historian and author of the seminal book The Strange Career of Jim Crow, credited Baltimore with being the birthplace of segregated housing ordinances. However, the all-white Richmond city council unanimously crafted the South’s first discrimination ordinance on February 9, 1911, ensuring that “no colored person shall be permitted to reside on a block where the majority of the residents are white and vice-versa.”56 Two weeks later, Baltimore’s Eutaw neighborhood residents filed a petition that mimicked the Richmond ordinance. The Baltimore city council went further than Richmond by banning the establishment of black churches, schools, and businesses within traditionally white neighborhoods. Soon after, other southern cities, some as far west as Kansas City, Missouri, implemented similar legislation. “Even the Dominion of Canada had taken notice of the agitation and had barred a body of colored men from the soil of that country,” Mitchell told Planet readers.57 At this point, Richmond was more than just a city governed by racist whites. It was becoming an important nexus between cultural and legal apartheid in the new century; interweaving Jim Crow segregation into national, and maybe even international, race relations. Mitchell lamented his city’s role in shaping what historian Rayford W. Logan called “the nadir” of black life, telling readers that Jim Crow housing “advertises our people as a disorderly class and it also places us in the category of undesirable citizens.”58Two years later in 1913, the NAACP national office helped a black Baltimorean overturn what a federal judge opined to be the city’s “invalid and unenforceable” ordinance.59 After the court victory, the national office focused its attention on Richmond, the city where this legislation was born. Founded in 1909, the NAACP wanted to end Jim Crow laws by using test cases to challenge their constitutionality. The national office established connections with southern civic organizations to, as one historian notes, “bring African Americans into the orbit of the NAACP.”60 However, the staff of elite black attorneys and liberal white philanthropists found trouble gaining traction in Richmond. Many black southerners saw the NAACP leaders as being elitists who thought they knew what was best for average black people. Black Richmonders labeled them a “Radical New York Group” upon initially encountering them.61 The NAACP attempted to change this perception by selecting Memphis’s Robert Church Sr., Atlanta’s Austin Thomas Walden, and Jacksonville’s James Weldon Johnson to its board of directors. With these selections, the NAACP national office sought to endear themselves to southern blacks. Richmonders, however, were not eager to accept them. The national office was long “interested in the segregation situation in Richmond,” so they stayed in constant contact with black Richmond leaders about creating and sustaining a strong Richmond branch.62But the indifference of black Richmonders to the national office made it difficult to establish a local branch. Three years after the Baltimore case, the black Richmond business community organized a makeshift chapter. The Richmond branch folded within a year. In 1917, attorneys J. Thomas Hewin and Giles Jackson, insurance executive J. Milton Sampson, real estate agent B. Addison Cephas Sr., and bank president Maggie Walker, all of whom were African American, drafted a second and more permanent charter.63 The new Richmond branch, headquartered in the heart of Little Africa’s 535 North Second Street, suffered from the same issues that plagued the first. With only seventeen members, “lack of funds” was the common excuse branch leaders reported to the national office whenever dues were requested.64 Even nationally renowned race leader John Mitchell Jr. never joined the ranks. The national office wanted to “make [the Richmond branch] one of the best branches south of Washington.” However, the lack of local interest compelled them to focus their energies elsewhere.65Ironically, Mitchell formed his own legal committee separate from the Richmond branch. He employed his protégé, Joseph Pollard, and a forty-one-year-old white Jewish lawyer, Alfred E. Cohen, who came to Richmond from New York in 1906. Cohen and his wife and daughter became heavily involved in Richmond’s prosperous Jewish community. Cohen contributed to The Jewish South, a Richmond-based newspaper dedicated to the religious education and uplift of Jewish southerners. Pollard often litigated with Cohen and not other black attorneys. Therefore, the choice to include Cohen was more than likely Pollard’s and not Mitchell’s. For a long time, the Cohens were also the only white family living in the black working-class Grove Avenue neighborhood. As he witnessed Jim Crow laws being passed in city hall, Cohen undoubtedly thought about how these laws would impact race relations given that some of Jim Crow’s victims lived around him.66A year after the courts invalidated Baltimore’s segregation ordinance, both Pollard and Cohen represented a black woman who was convicted of violating Richmond’s ordinance by sharing a residence with her white male lover. Pollard and Cohen thought they had a strong case. Yet, city attorneys easily defeated them in Hopkins v. Richmond.67 Eager to help Pollard and Cohen, Mitchell wasted no time organizing a citizens’ committee to fund an appeal. Many blacks, however, did not support the second effort.