An Army of Lions

The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP

Shawn Leigh Alexander

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205725
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In January 1890, journalist T. Thomas Fortune stood before a delegation of African American activists in Chicago and declared, "We know our rights and have the courage to defend them, " as together they formed the Afro-American League, the nation's first national civil rights organization. Over the next two decades, Fortune and his fellow activists organized, agitated, and, in the process, created the foundation for the modern civil rights movement. An Army of Lions: The Civil Rights Struggle Before the NAACP traces the history of this first generation of activists and the organizations they formed to give the most comprehensive account of black America's struggle for civil rights from the end of Reconstruction to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. Here a host of leaders neglected by posterity—Bishop Alexander Walters, Mary Church Terrell, Jesse Lawson, Lewis G. Jordan, Kelly Miller, George H. White, Frederick McGhee, Archibald Grimké—worked alongside the more familiar figures of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington, who are viewed through a fresh lens.As Jim Crow curtailed modes of political protest and legal redress, members of the Afro-American League and the organizations that formed in its wake—including the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the Constitution League, and the Committee of Twelve—used propaganda, moral suasion, boycotts, lobbying, electoral office, and the courts, as well as the call for self-defense, to end disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence. In the process, the League and the organizations it spawned provided the ideological and strategic blueprint of the NAACP and the struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century, demonstrating that there was significant and effective agitation during "the age of accommodation."

Chapter 1

Aceldama and the Black Response

The Freedman is dying ’mid carnage and gore

God of our fathers!—hast thou given us o’er

In this bloody embrace, to these tigers a prey?

Let vengeance be thine!—thou wilt repay.

Away with the thought!—for this is no dream;

They war against civil rights!—that is their theme.

But soon will they cringe, as we know full well

The crisis has come and the tolling bells tell

We will not yield, not in fear of the grave,

The rights that belong to the free and the brave.

—Henry McNeal Turner, 1881

Racial tensions in Danville, Virginia, a town of eight thousand with a slight black majority, were on the rise during the state election of 1883. Early in the campaign, several newspapers ran an editorial cartoon depicting white school children being paddled by an African American schoolmaster.¹ The cartoon played on the fears of the white community, which had lost some political control to the African American community in the previous election. In 1882, blacks had gained both a majority in the city council and a healthy share of the law enforcement positions, and had begun to dominate the public market under an African American superintendent. Despite continued white control of key political positions—mayor, police chief, city sergeant, commissioner of revenue, etc.—the dominant rhetoric surrounding the election was that Danville’s “black government” must be defeated.²

Amid this rising racial tension, a group of prominent white businessmen issued the “Danville Circular.” The notice sought to “lay before [the public] a few facts from which [they could] form some idea of the injustice and humiliation to which our white people have been subjected and are daily undergoing by the domination and misrule of the radical or Negro party in absolute power.”³ Seeking to rally support for the white Conservative-Democratic party in the coming election, business leaders claimed in the circular that the black population paid only a fraction of the tax dollars paid by white citizens, yet disproportionately benefited from the expenditure of tax revenues. The business leaders also grumbled that white men were being arrested by African American policemen for the most frivolous acts and were typically brought “to the Mayor’s office followed by swarms of jeering and hooting and mocking Negroes, and tried, fined and lectured and imprisoned by a Negro justice and then followed to the jail by the same insulting rabble.”⁴ Finally, the circular complained that African Americans perpetually lied to whites, and that they “infest the streets and sidewalks in squads, hover about public houses, and sleep on the doorsteps of the storehouses and the benches of the market place. They also impede the travel of ladies and gentlemen, very frequently forcing them from the sidewalk into the street.”⁵

It was within this context that racial violence and terrorism commenced in Danville on November 3, 1883. Just three days before the election, a black man apparently jostled a white male on the sidewalk as they attempted to pass one another. According to reports, words were exchanged, and the white male drew his revolver and opened fire. More gunfire and scuffling occurred; when the dust and powder had settled, three African Americans lay dead with six others wounded. Four whites were wounded and one killed.⁶ White vigilantes, in what became known as the Danville Riot, took control of the town and warned blacks not to be on the streets on Election Day. Proclaiming victory in advance, the vigilantes declared that they would win “votes or no votes, with double barrel shotguns, breach loading shotguns and Smith and Wesson double-action.”⁷

Events such as the Danville Riot were repeated throughout the South in the post-Reconstruction period. A generation removed from slavery, African America remained locked in a brawl with the larger American society over its very existence. While a number of white Americans prospered during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era by benefiting from limited political, social, and economic reforms, conditions for African Americans reached their lowest point in the post-Emancipation era. In such a climate, a small cadre of blacks began grasping the need for organization in the fight to stop the reversal of African American civil and political rights. In turn, this group began calling for the formation of a national civil rights organization. Those involved in the movement to create this organization represented a new generation of blacks born in the last days of slavery or the first years of emancipation. They understood the rights guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments and were willing to defend them. Together, they actively worked to expand the national government’s policies to cater to their needs while remaining politically independent. They understood the necessity of organizing from within the African American community, and used global politics, public memory, and the press to achieve their goals.

Through violence, intimidation, and the invocation of racial politics, Danville’s white minority was successful in reducing the number of black voters and reclaiming its position of power in the city’s political and economic sectors. The events of Danville in the autumn of 1883 offer a poignant illustration of the ways in which southern states had been systematically overturning the limited power that African Americans had gained during Reconstruction. Since 1876 and the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, the South had resumed its plans for racial and social engineering to the extent allowed by the U.S. Constitution, existing laws, and northern public opinion.⁸ Violence was a key element in the redemption of white control. As historian Edward Ayers noted, unprosecuted white lawlessness and the “violence of lynching was a way for white people to reconcile weak governments with a demand for an impossibly high level of racial mastery, a way of terrorizing blacks into acquiescence.”⁹

The violence and intimidation against blacks employed throughout the history of the United States had not stopped during Reconstruction. In 1884, African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune declared, “it is not necessary . . . to recapitulate the incidents of Reconstruction history which naturally led up to the finality of 1876. It is sufficient to know that anarchy prevailed in every Southern State; that a black man’s life was not worth the having; that armed bodies of men openly defied the Constitution of the United States and nullified each and every one of its guarantees of citizenship to the colored man.” Fortune also asserted that it is important to remember that the Republican Party permitted armed insurrection during Reconstruction, and in that period “thousands of black men . . . were shot down like sheep and that not one of the impudent assassins was ever hung by the neck until he was dead.”¹⁰

The mob violence and lynching from 1868—1876 that Fortune discussed in his 1884 article became more pervasive in the South and took on an even more savage character in the post-Reconstruction era. During the 1880s, the practice of lynching became transformed from acts of extrajudicial “justice” that harbored no particular racial overtones into a systematic, ritualistic ceremony where thousands of blacks of all ages and genders would be slowly executed by mutilation, torture, and burning in a public forum. By 1882, lynching had become a national problem, and both the Chicago Tribune and the Tuskegee Institute began keeping records of the acts of violence. Northern politicians and the public, however, were reluctant to involve themselves in any form of southern affairs as public sentiment increasingly favored the burying of the “bloody shirt.” With the nation’s energy directed toward reunification, the status and protection of African America became only a negligible factor in that process.¹¹

This reign of terror against black individuals and the community throughout the South was accompanied by the slow, methodical creation of a system of de jure and de facto segregation now known as Jim Crow.¹² Although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed African Americans full and equal enjoyment of public accommodations, theaters, and other public amusement, the “law was disregarded with impunity.”¹³ As early as 1877, the young black journalist John E. Bruce remarked that though the black American had been freed and enfranchised, “he is only nominally free. His rights are abridged; he is an American only in name. The doors of public schools are closed against his children, [and] common carriers, hotel and places of amusement, refuse to recognize him as a free man; no matter what his rank or station may be, he cannot enjoy the privileges which the Constitution . . . guarantees to the humblest citizen.”¹⁴

Even while individuals such as Bruce chastised the nation for the slow and methodical encroachment on black rights, such encroachments continued to expand despite judicial questioning of the constitutionality of segregation. Beginning with Tennessee in 1881, states had steadily been passing statutes segregating African Americans on railroad cars, in depots, and on wharves. By 1880, five major cases concerning African American civil rights had reached the Supreme Court—two of them dealing with discrimination in inns and hotels, two with theaters, and one with railroad cars.¹⁵

African Americans responded to these social conditions in numerous ways, including the promotion of self-help, racial solidarity, economic nationalism, emigration, and political agitation. Around 1883, new individuals appeared on the scene who challenged the strategies of the older black leadership and aimed at gaining and defending civil and political equality. For example, in that year T. Thomas Fortune became the head editor of the New York Globe. Fortune, born a slave in Florida, watched his father, Emmanuel Fortune, and his Republican colleagues struggle against nefarious forces during Reconstruction. Soon after the election of Hayes and the end of Reconstruction, the younger Fortune left the South, settled in New York, and founded the New York Globe (subsequently named the Freeman and the Age), which quickly became the most widely read black paper of the era. Using the memory of his youth in Reconstruction Florida and his newspaper as his pulpit, the sometimes-cantankerous Fortune became one of the most outspoken critics of southern racism, a promoter of racial solidarity and race pride, and an uncompromising advocate for the civil and political rights of African Americans. He castigated disfranchisement, election fraud, both of the political parties, mob violence, the convict lease system, inequities in school funding, and the rise of segregation.¹⁶

During this same period, vocal editors such as Harry C. Smith and W. Calvin Chase began publishing the Cleveland Gazette and the Washington Bee respectively. Others such as T. McCants Stewart, Richard T. Greener, John E. Bruce, John Mitchell, Jr., William S. Scarborough, Booker T. Washington, Fannie Barrier Williams, Ferdinand L. Barnett, and Ida B. Wells began assuming leadership roles.¹⁷ As Richard T. Greener, Harvard University’s first black graduate, observed, “young Africa, stronger in the pocket, expresses its contempt for the lofty airs of the old, decayed colored aristocracy.” This new group, though not cohesive, generally turned its energies inward, promoting self-determination and race enhancement.¹⁸

Extremely important in this group of “young Africa” was the large crowd of journalists, such as Fortune, Wells, Bruce, Mitchell, and Chase among others, who were gaining more respect during the period. As African American elected officials progressively lost the fragile footing they held in the political arena during the post-Reconstruction era, the black press increasingly became the voice of the race, expressing racial pride and encouragement as well as attacking all forms of racism and exploitation. From the late 1880s into the first decade of the twentieth century, the black press became more and more important as a voice in the community, and the editors of the increasing number of black newspapers and journals commanded more respect and gained a greater following because of the perspicacity and range of their analysis.¹⁹ Through their actions, the editors of the period often became active participants and leading organizers in the political activity of the race.

However, one month prior to the violence of Danville, this group of individuals—and black America as a whole—was dealt a judicial blow that confirmed the “revolution gone backward” previously signaled by unprosecuted violence in places such as Danville.²⁰ In mid-October of 1883, the Supreme Court reached a decision on the five cases (commonly referred to as the “Civil Rights Cases”) that had been pending since 1880. In a four-to-one decision, the Court ruled that neither the Thirteenth nor Fourteenth Amendment authorized the pub...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Aceldama and the Black Response
• Chapter 2. “Stand Their Ground on This Civil Rights Business”
• Chapter 3. Interregnum and Resurrection
• Chapter 4. Not Just “A Bubble in Soap Water”
• Chapter 5. To Awaken the Conscience of America
• Chapter 6. Invasion of the Tuskegee Machine
• Chapter 7. An Army of Mice or an Army of Lions?
• Chapter 8. “It Is Strike Now or Never”
• Epilogue
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments