Essential The Official African American Thread#2

[Black Lightning]

Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born the son of free black parents on June 20, 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. His parents had recently moved to Cleveland from Fayetteville, North Carolina in response to the growing restrictions placed on free blacks in that slave state.
By 1866, Chesnutt worked part time in the family store while regularly attending Cleveland’s Howard School for Blacks.

In 1872 Chesnutt was forced to end his formal education at the age of fourteen because he had to help support his parents. However, the school’s principal invited him to stay at the school as a distinguished pupil-teacher and turn his modest salary over to his father.

By sixteen, Chesnutt was employed in Charlotte, North Carolina as a full-time teacher and in 1877, returned to Fayetteville, North Carolina as the assistant principal of Howard School. In 1880 Chesnutt became the school’s principal.

In search of more lucrative employment, Chesnutt resigned his school-administrator post in 1883 and moved to New York City where he worked as a stenographer and journalist on Wall Street. By 1887, Chesnutt returned to Cleveland and was admitted to the Ohio Bar. As a teacher, lawyer, businessman and writer, Chesnutt was a prominent member of Cleveland’s African American elite. By 1900, however, Chesnutt gave up his business and professional life to write and lecture full-time.

Chesnutt was one of the first black American fiction writers to receive serious critical attention and acclaim for portraying blacks realistically and sensitively. In 1899 he wrote his first major novel, The Conjure Woman. Other books followed including The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line published also in 1899, as well as a biography of Frederick Douglass first released in that same year. Another popular publication of Chesnutt was a novel entitled The House Behind the Cedars that he published in 1900. Many of Chesnutt’s publications reflect a similar and distinct shunning of condescending characterizations of African Americans and challenging of the usual sympathetic portrayals of slavery. Charles Waddell Chesnutt died in Cleveland in November, 1932.

 

[Black Lightning]

The 10th Cavalry was one of the original six regiments of the regular army set aside for black enlisted men. These were authorized by Congress in the act of July 28, 1866 reorganizing the army for post-Civil War service, mainly against native peoples in the West. Colonel Benjamin Grierson, a music teacher with no pre-Civil War military experience, was the 10th’s first commander. Grierson distinguished himself by leading a daring cavalry raid into Mississippi during General Grant’s Vicksburg campaign of 1863. The regiment was organized at Fort Leavenworth and later Fort Riley, Kansas, with the last company assembled and in the field by October 1867. It served under Grierson for more than twenty years, until his promotion to be brigadier general in November 1888.

The 10th served against the Cheyenne in Kansas at the end of the 1860s, then against the Kiowa and Comanche in Indian Territory, and in the Apache campaigns of the early 1880s. It was involved in the pursuit of Geronimo in 1886, but did not take part in his capture. Its only Medal of Honor recipient in the West, Sergeant William McBryar, received his award for 1890 operations against Apaches who resisted confinement to a reservation. Nine of the 10th’s seventeen fatalities came against the Apache.

Lieutenant Henry Flipper, the first black graduate of the U.S. Military Academy (1877), served with the 10th until 1882. Flipper was discharged after a court-martial conviction for conduct unbecoming an officer. He received a posthumous pardon from President William Clinton in 1999.

During the Cuban campaign in 1898, the 10th participated in operations at Las Guasimas on June 24 and on San Juan Hill on July 1. Sergeant Major Edward L. Baker received the Medal of Honor for rescuing a wounded comrade under fire at the base of Jan Juan Hill. Four others—Corporal William Thompkins, and Privates Dennis Bell, Fitz Lee, and George Wanton-- received the medal for bravery in an amphibious operation that sought to land insurgents at Tayabacao on the south shore of Cuba. Seven soldiers of the 10th were killed in that campaign.

From the turn of the century to World War I, the regiment was in Nebraska and Wyoming (1902-1907), then the Philippines (1907-1909), and Fort Ethan Allen, near Burlington, Vermont (1909-1913). The latter assignment included a practice march in the summer of 1913 from Vermont to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. The regiment served on the Mexican border from 1916 to 1922. While participating in General John Pershing’s punitive expedition against Mexican Revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa, it lost nine killed (two officers and seven enlisted men) in a firefight with Mexican forces at Carrizal on June 21, 1916. It was still a horse cavalry regiment when it was assigned to be part of the 2nd Cavalry Division in October 1940. The 10th saw no action in World War II and was deactivated in North Africa in May 1944 with its personnel transferred to other service units.

 

[Black Lightning]

Organized in the fall of 1942, Iowa, the all-black Thirty-Second and Thirty-third Women's Auxiliary Army Companies would become the first contingent of WAACS assigned to a military installation in the United States during World War II. Composed of nearly 200 auxiliaries and seven officers, company members completed six weeks of intensive training in Iowa before reporting to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, on December 4, 1942. At the time, the army post was the largest black military post in the country. There, the units were assigned to the Ninth Service Command and the post headquarters, respectively.

Under the command of the first group of Fort Des Moines's graduating class of black commissioned officers—Irma Jackson Cayton, Vera Ann Harrison, Frances Alexander, Violet Askins, Natalie Donaldson, Mary Kearney, and Corrie Sherard—auxiliaries ably performed clerical and administrative work as stenographers, typists, telephone switchboard operators, clerks, messengers, reception ists, and motor pool drivers and mechanics. The positions held by the WAACs and the duties they performed cohered with the racial and gendered employment policies developed by senior Army leaders and Women's Auxiliary Army Corps officials, relieving the men of the U.S. Ninety-third Infantry Division also stationed at the military outpost to undergo extensive field training in the Arizona desert.

Upon their arrival, auxiliaries of the Thirty-second and Thirty-third companies quickly enhanced the training programs at Fort Huachuca. The successful performances of Auxiliaries Priscilla Taylor and Reba Caldwell while working with a Ninety-third Infantry division convoy during its desert training exercises garnered admiration and praise from the post commander, Edwin Hardy, and division personnel. And WAAC recreational officers Geraldine Bright and Mercedes Jordan created All WAAC Musical Revues, Glee Clubs, and USO comedies, providing precious moments of levity for the uniformed servicewomen and men training at the desert installation. Yet the formal presence of the WAAC company servicewomen and officers and the duties they performed while stationed at the military post were subject to intense scrutiny grounded in prevailing sexual stereotypes and innuendo at nearly every turn.

The Thirty-Second and Thirty-Third Post Headquarters Companies continued to serve at Fort Huachuca, Arizona before being disbanded in late 1945. However, many of its senior officers were subsequently reassigned to other military installations throughout the United States or deployed for overseas duty with the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in Europe later in the war.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Octavius Valentine Catto

Octavius Valentine Catto (February 22, 1839 – October 10, 1871) was a black educator, intellectual, and civil rights activist in Philadelphia. He became principal of male students at the Institute for Colored Youth, where he had also been educated. Born free in Charleston, South Carolina, in a prominent mixed-race family, he moved north as a boy with his family. He became educated and served as a teacher, becoming active in civil rights. As a man, he also became known as a top cricket and baseball player in 19th-century Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Catto became a martyr to racism, as he was shot and killed in election-day violence in Philadelphia, where ethnic Irish of the Democratic Party, which was anti-Reconstruction and had opposed black suffrage, attacked black men to prevent their voting for Republican candidates.

Young Catto was first enrolled at the Robert Vaux Primary School and then Lombard Grammar School. When his family moved to New Jersey for a time, he entered Allentown Academy, located there. Back in Philadelphia by 1854, he became a student at the Institute for Colored Youth (now Cheyney University) and graduated as valedictorian in 1858. Catto furthered his studies in Washington, D.C., and upon his return, became an instructor of literature, mathematics, Greek, and Latin at the Institute for Colored Youth.

When the Confederate Army invaded Pennsylvania in 1863, culminating in the Battle of Gettysburg, Catto responded to the call for emergency troops by raising one of the first volunteer companies, the 5th Brigade of the Pennsylvania National Guard. He served as major and inspector general in the brigade. Catto helped raise eleven regiments of “Colored Troops” in Pennsylvania who were then trained at Camp William Penn before being sent to the warfront.

Even while in uniform, Catto founded the Banneker Literary Institute and the Pennsylvania Equal Rights League in October 1864. He was a member of several other civic, literary, patriotic, and political groups, including the Philadelphia Library Company, 4th Ward Black Political Club, and the Franklin Institute. After the Civil War, Catto started a Philadelphia protest movement that led to passage of the 1867 Pennsylvania law that prohibited racially segregated public transportation. Later the same year, Catto and his childhood friend, Jacob White Jr., formed the city’s second black baseball team: the Philadelphia Pythians of which he was a co-manager and a player.

On Election Day, October 10, 1871, Catto was murdered along with several other blacks in a Philadelphia riot when local African Americans attempted to vote as a result of the state’s ratification of the fifteenth amendment. During the riot, Catto was confronted near his home by Frank Kelly, a Democratic Party operative who fired several shots at Catto, with one bullet piercing his heart. Kelly escaped Philadelphia after the shooting but was found six years later in Chicago, Illinois and extradited to Philadelphia for trial. At trial on April 23, 1877, six prosecution eyewitnesses—three whites and three blacks—identified Kelly as the shooter. Despite their testimony, an all-white jury acquitted Kelly. - See more at: Catto, Octavius Valentine (1839–1871) | The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

 

[IllmaticDelta]

Mildred Fay Jefferson

Mildred Fay Jefferson (April 4, 1926 – October 15, 2010[1]) was an American physician and political activist. The first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School and the first woman to become a member of the Boston Surgical Society, she is known for her opposition to the legalization of abortion and her work as president of the National Right to Life Committee.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

William Augustus Hinton

William Augustus Hinton (15 December 1883, Chicago, Illinois – 1959, Canton, Massachusetts) was an American bacteriologist, pathologist and educator. He was the first black professor in the history of Harvard University. A pioneer in the field of public health, Hinton developed a test for syphilis which, because of its accuracy, was used by the United States Public Health Service.


International recognition

Hinton became internationally known as an expert in the diagnosis and treatment of syphilis. His serological test for syphilis, which proved to be more accurate than currently accepted tests, was endorsed by the U.S. Public Health Service in 1934. Hinton's test also was simple, quick, and unambiguous.

In 1936 Hinton published the first medical textbook by a black American: Syphilis and Its Treatment. He was adamant about the role of socioeconomics in health and called syphilis "a disease of the underpriveleged."

Hinton turned down the NAACP's 1938 Spingarn Medal award because he wanted his work to stand on its own merit; he was concerned that his work would not be as well received if it was widely known in his profession that he was black. "Race should never get mixed up in the struggle for human welfare," he would later say.[4]

In 1948, in recognition of his contributions as a serologist and public health bacteriologist, Hinton was elected a life member of the American Social Science Association. The serology lab at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's Laboratory Institute Building was named for him.[5]

In 1960, Nobel Laureate John Enders wrote a Harvard University "Memorial Minute" about Hinton, highlighting his many contributions.[6]

In 2015, the University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville named one of its inaugural college societies after Hinton. The Hinton college went on to consistently perform at higher standards than the university's other colleges, such as Hunter, and two other less successful colleges.

American Bacteriologist and Pathologist

William Augustus Hinton was an American bacteriologist and pathologist who made significant contributions to the areas of public health and medicine. Dr. Hinton overcame poverty and racial prejudice to become the foremost investigator of his time in the area of venereal disease, specifically syphilis. He developed a blood serum test called the Hinton test that accurately diagnosed the presence of syphilis. He is also noteworthy because he was the first black professor at Harvard University Medical School, and he authored the first medical textbook by a black American to be published, Syphilis and Its Treatment (1936).

William Hinton was born in Chicago, Illinois, on December 15, 1883. He was the son of former slaves who imparted a strong belief in the importance of equal opportunity for everyone. Hinton spent his younger years in Kansas and was the youngest student to ever graduate from his high school. He initially attended the University of Kansas, but had to leave after two years so that he could earn enough money for school. He then attended Harvard University and graduated in 1905. Hinton delayed medical school and accepted a job as a teacher to earn money. Because of his belief in equal opportunity without special treatment, he refused a scholarship reserved for black students. This was to be a common theme throughout his life.

Hinton graduated with a medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1912, completing his degree in only three years. After graduation, he worked for the Wasserman Laboratory, a biological laboratory that was associated with the Medical School at that time. Hinton was named chief of the laboratory when it was transferred to the Massachusetts Department of Public Health in 1915. Hinton was an excellent teacher and was appointed as an instructor in preventive medicine and hygiene at Harvard Medical School in 1918. He taught at Harvard for over 30 years until 1949, when he was promoted to the rank of clinical professor. Hinton was the first black person to become a professor at Harvard Medical School in its 313-year history.

An expert in the study of disease detection and the development of medications to combat those ailments, Hinton is best known for his advances in specific tests used to detect syphilis. His "Hinton Test" greatly enhanced syphilis screening by reducing the number of people who were falsely believed to have the disease. These false positives were common with standard tests of that time. This breakthrough significantly reduced the number of patients who had to undergo needless treatment. In 1934, the U.S. Public Health Service reported that the Hinton test was the most effective test for syphilis at that time. He later developed the Davies-Hinton test for detection of syphilis in blood and spinal fluid.

During his professional career, Hinton published many important articles and books in the field of medicine. He was a dedicated scientist who believed in his principles. He declined the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1938 because he wanted to be rewarded for the quality of his work, not his race. He was also concerned that his productivity as a researcher would be compromised if his colleagues knew he was black. It is believed that Hinton could have had a very successful private practice, but he chose to serve in the field of public health. Hinton had diabetes, which strained his eyesight and strength. This caused him to retire completely from active service in 1953. He died in 1959.

 

[Michael9100]

 

[Black Lightning]

Lyles Station, Indiana, is a community of African Americans located about five miles east of Princeton, Indiana, in Gibson County. It flourished from about 1880 to 1913, when it boasted an independent, self-sustaining community of about 800 black residents.

The roots of Lyles Station began around the 1840s when two free African Americans from Tennessee, Joshua Lyles and his brother Sanford Lyles, purchased land near the Wabash, White, and Patoka Rivers in southwestern Indiana with help from local Quakers. They and their families improved and farmed the land, so that by the Civil War their holdings consisted of hundreds of acres. Other newly relocated blacks joined them. According to tradition, Lyles aided fugitive slaves coming north from Tennessee during the antebellum period, offering them a safe haven to either settle in or to rest until they continued on to other locations on the Underground Railroad. The community was then known as the Switch Settlement.

Around 1860, the settlement established its first church, the Hardshell Baptist Church. The community’s first school, a subscription school, was founded in 1865 and met in the same cabin as the church. The school was later moved to a three-room building before being replaced by a larger school in the twentieth century.

After the Civil War and emancipation, the community’s population rapidly increased as former slaves from Tennessee came north, joined by migrants from northern cities. Joshua Lyles continued to act as a booster for the community. In 1870, Lyles donated land to the Old Airline Railroad to establish a train station on the Louisville, Kentucky-to-St. Louis, Missouri line. The station built in the area of the community was named after Joshua Lyles in 1886 shortly after his death, and the settlement became known as Lyles Station.

As a result of the railroad’s presence, more and more African American families settled in the area. In 1887, a second church, Wayman Chapel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, was organized by its residents. Unlike many AME churches in the nineteenth century, Wayman Chapel was not founded by one of the AME’s missionaries, but by its own congregation. By the early twentieth century, Lyles Station’s 55 households boasted 800 residents, an elementary school, two churches, two general stores, a lumber mill, and a post office.

In 1913, however, the Patoka and Wabash rivers flooded, leaving much of Lyles Station under water. After this catastrophe, the community’s population and prosperity began to decline. After the end of World War I, the Lyles Consolidated School was built for the community’s children; due to dwindling enrollment, it closed in the late 1950s, but was reopened in 2003 as a museum. In 1999, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

The community is still home to about half a dozen families, many of them descendants of the original nineteenth-century settlers.

 

[Black Lightning]

Bridget “Biddy” Mason, born a slave in Mississippi in 1818, achieved financial success that enabled her to support her extended family for generations despite the fact that she was illiterate. In a landmark case she sued her master for their freedom, saved her earnings, invested in real estate, and became a well-known philanthropist in Los Angeles, California.

Although born in Mississippi, Mason was owned by slaveholders in Georgia and South Carolina before she was returned to Mississippi. Her last owner, Robert Marion Smith, a Mississippi Mormon convert, followed the call of church leaders to settle in the West. Mason and her children joined other slaves on Smith’s religious pilgrimage to establish a new Mormon community in what would become Salt Lake City, Utah. At the time Utah was still part of Mexico.

In 1848 30-year-old Mason walked 1,700 miles behind a 300-wagon caravan that eventually arrived in the Holladay-Cottonwood area of the Salt Lake Valley. Along the route west Mason’s responsibilities included setting up and breaking camp, cooking the meals, herding the cattle, and serving as a midwife as well as taking care of her three young daughters aged ten, four, and an infant.

In 1851 Smith and his family and slaves set out in a 150-wagon caravan for San Bernardino, California to establish yet another Mormon community. Ignoring Brigham Young’s warning that slavery was illegal in California, Smith brought Mason and other enslaved people to the new community. Along the trek Mason met Charles H. and Elizabeth Flake Rowan, free blacks, who urged her to legally contest her slave status once she reached California, a free state. Mason received additional encouragement by free black friends whom she met in California, Robert and Minnie Owens.

In December 1855 Robert Smith, fearing losing his slaves, decided to move with them to Texas, a slave state. The Owens family had a vested interest in the Mason family as one of their sons was romantically involved with Mason’s 17-year-old daughter. When Robert Owens told the Los Angeles County Sheriff that slaves were being illegally held, he gathered a posse which including Owens and his sons, other cowboys and vaqueros from the Owens ranch. The posse apprehended Smith’s wagon train in Cajon Pass, California en route to Texas and prevented him from leaving the state.

After spending five years enslaved in a “free” state Bridget Mason challenged Robert Smith for her freedom. On January 19, 1856 she petitioned the court for freedom for herself and her extended family of 13 women and children. Los Angeles District Judge Benjamin Hayes took three days before handing down his ruling in favor Mason and her extended family, citing California’s 1850 constitution which prohibited slavery.

Mason and her family moved to Los Angeles where her daughter married the son of Robert and Minnie Owens. Mason worked as midwife and nurse, saved her money and purchased land in the heart of what is now downtown Los Angeles. Mason also organized First A.M.E. Church, the oldest African American church in the city. She educated her children and with her wealth became a philanthropist to the entire Los Angeles community. Bridget “Biddy” Mason died in Los Angeles in 1891.

 

[Black Lightning]

Jonathan Jasper Wright, the first African American to serve on a state Supreme Court, was born in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Susquehanna County in the northeastern corner of the state. In 1858, Wright traveled to Ithaca, New York where he enrolled in the Lancasterian Academy, a school where older students helped teach younger ones. He graduated in 1860 and for the next five years taught school and read law in Pennsylvania.

Wright’s first known political activity came in October 1864 when he was a delegate to the National Convention of Colored Men meeting in Syracuse. The convention, chaired by Frederick Douglass, passed resolutions calling for a nationwide ban on slavery, racial equality under the law and universal suffrage for adult males. When Wright applied for admission to the Pennsylvania bar, however, he was refused because of his race.

In 1865 the American Missionary Association sent Wright to Beaufort, South Carolina to organize schools for the freedpeople. Wright taught and gave legal advice to the ex-slaves. In 1866 he returned to Pennsylvania and was now, with the backing of a new Federal civil rights law, accepted into the bar as the state’s first African American attorney. Wright returned to Beaufort in January 1867 and worked as a legal advisor for the Freedman’s Bureau. He soon became active in Republican politics and was chosen as a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention that met in Charleston in January 1868. Later that year he was elected to the South Carolina state senate representing Beaufort. In 1870 the Republican-dominated legislature in Columbia named him a justice of the state supreme court even though he was 30 and had little courtroom experience. He joined two white Democrats on the bench.

By 1876 white conservatives, using fraud, intimidation and violence, managed to gain control over South Carolina’s government. However, it was Wright’s concurrence in a February 1877 decision confirming the authority of a Democratic claimant to the governor’s chair, Wade Hampton, which ended Republican rule, reconstruction in South Carolina and Wright’s tenure as a state Supreme Court Justice. When the new Democrat-controlled legislature attempted to impeach Wright for corruption and malfeasance he at first denied the charges and vowed to defend his name and record. By August 1877, however, realizing he would not win, Wright submitted his resignation.

Wright moved to Charleston where he practiced law, then to Orangeburg where he established the law department at Claflin College. Jonathan Wright died of tuberculosis in Orangeburg in 1885.

 

[Black Lightning]

Just one block away from President’s Square, now Lafayette Square, in Washington, D.C. stood the Wormley House, one of the most prominent private hotels and social clubs of its time, and the only one owned by an African American.

Well-known caterer James Wormley purchased properties on I street between 15th and 16th Streets, NW, Washington, D.C., in the early 1850s and developed these properties into a successful restaurant and hotel business. The business quickly became a favorite among the nation’s top military and political leaders of the era, as well as musicians and literary figures such as Gen. George McClellan, Mississippi Senator (and later president of the Confederacy) Jefferson Davis, and Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. In May and December of 1860, Lt. Gen. Winifred Scott stayed with Wormley for a month while in town on business. In 1861 English writer Anthony Trollope wrote after a stay, “My landlord told me he was sorry I was going...No white American citizen, occupying the position of landlord, would have condescended to such comfortable words...” Wormley was commissioned in 1867 by Secretary of State William H. Steward to house the Japanese Commission at his hotel for six weeks.

In 1869 Wormley purchased another building at the southwest corner of 15th and H Streets, NW. By 1871 he had expanded the structure and opened another hotel and social club. This hotel, named Wormley House, became the flagship of Wormley’s businesses. It was private and reserved for the most distinguished guests. The five-story building was lavishly furnished and had all the amenities its clients needed right on the premises, including a barbershop, bar, cafe, and restaurants. Wormley’s other properties on I Street included the Wormley Annex and the Branch Hotel. Three county residences in Maryland produced food for the restaurants, and a rack track on Pierce Mill Road in Tenleytown, Maryland, was reserved for Wormley guests to race their horses.

The Wormley Hotel catered mostly to the upper class of political white men in the city and their guests. Private dinners were often held in the large grand dining rooms. One of the most notable was the grand dinner held in honor of the marriage of Amadeo I, the king of Spain, to Donna Vittoria, with entertainment provided by the U.S. Marine Corps Band, conducted by John Philip Sousa in 1870.

The 1876 disputed presidential election between Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was secretly discussed at the hotel. The agreement reached at the end of those discussions later became known as “The Wormley Compromise” which led to the removal of federal troops from the South and the end of Reconstruction.

The hotel hosted famous guests outside of the political realm, including Frederick Douglass, John Mercer Langston, and Thomas Edison. Wormley was also the private confidant and nurse to some of the most famous individuals of the nineteenth century. He cared for Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Vice President Henry Wilson, and Presidents Abraham Lincoln and James Garfield.

James Wormley died in Boston, Massachusetts, after a surgical procedure on October 18, 1884. Wormley House continued to operate until its sale in 1893.

 

[Black Lightning]

True Reformers Bank, The (1888-1910)

The Savings Bank of the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers was the first bank owned by African Americans in the United States. It was founded on March 2, 1888 by Reverend William Washington Browne and opened on April 3, 1889. Although the True Reformers bank was the first black-owned bank chartered in the United States, the Capitol Savings Bank of Washington, D.C. was the first to actually open on October 17, 1888.

Born in 1849, Browne was a former Georgia slave who escaped joined the Union Army in the North. After the Civil War, he founded the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers, a black fraternal organization. In 1887 when Browne visited Charlotte County, Virginia to establish a local branch of the True Reformers, he encountered problems. The branch arranged to keep its savings with a white shopkeeper in the county, but with racial tensions high after an 1887 lynching, the shopkeeper told other white residents that local blacks were organizing and raising funds, and the branch was forced to disband. Browne decided the True Formers would have to found and run a bank itself so that its finances could not be monitored by whites.

The Savings Bank of the Grand Fountain United Order of True Reformers Bank opened a year after its founding, initially operating out of Browne’s home at 105 West Jackson Street in the Jackson Ward district of Richmond, Virginia. The first day’s deposits totaled $1,269.28. In 1891, the bank moved several blocks away to 604-608 North Second Street. The bank grew and survived the financial panic of 1893, during which it was the only bank in Richmond to maintain full operation, honoring all checks and paying out the full value of accounts.

Rev. Browne died in 1897 but the bank continued to thrive after his death, expanding into a number of other services including a newspaper, a real estate agency, a retirement home and a building and loan association. New branches opened as far away as Kansas, and by 1900 the bank was operating in 24 states, owning property valued at a total of $223,500.

After the turn of the century, the bank's prospects began to falter under its new president, Reverend William Lee Taylor. Distant branches were poorly regulated, and the strict rules the bank had required for its operations in its first years were allowed to grow lax. Under Taylor, the bank made large, unsecured loans to finance lodge projects. Those loans often defaulted. When the bank’s cashier, R.T. Hill, was discovered to have embezzled $50,000 from the company, the resulting scandal brought down the bank, and most account holders lost their savings.

The bank examiner of the banking division of the State Corporation Commission ordered the closure of the bank on October 20, 1910. True Reformers Bank was placed into receivership six days later.

 

[Black Lightning]

The Pearl Incident in 1848 was the single largest recorded escape attempt by enslaved people in United States history. On April 15, 1848, 77 slaves attempted to flee Washington, D.C. by sailing away on a schooner called The Pearl. They planned to sail south along Potomac River and then north up the Chesapeake Bay, cross overland to the Delaware River and then to the free state of New Jersey, a distance of nearly 225 miles.

The mass escape attempt was organized by both black and white abolitionists in Washington, D.C. Free blacks Paul Jennings, the former slave of President James Madison, and Paul Edmonson, whose wife and 14 children were still enslaved, were the initiators of the escape. They enlisted the help of William Chaplin, a Washington, D.C. white abolitionist who in turn contacted Philadelphia abolitionist Daniel Drayton, Captain and owner of The Pearl, and pilot Edward Sayres. Wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith of New York provided financial backing for the escape.

With the help of numerous members of Washington’s free black community, 77 enslaved men, women, and children from across the city and surrounding areas slipped away from their places of work or residence on the evening of April 15 and made their way to The Pearl at a wharf on the Potomac. They boarded the ship which set sail down the Potomac River and then turned north into Chesapeake Bay. The wind was against the schooner, however, forcing it to anchor for the night. The next morning, numerous Washington, D.C. slaveholders, realizing their slaves and The Pearl were missing, sent out an armed posse of 35 men on the steamboat Salem. The posse caught up with The Pearl near Point Lookout, Maryland, boarded the vessel, and took the slaves and the ship back to Washington.

Supporters of slavery were outraged at the attempted escape. An angry mob formed and for the next three days lashed out at suspected white abolitionists and the entire free black community of Washington in what would be known as the first Washington Riot. The mob focused much of its wrath on Gamaliel Bailey and his antislavery newspaper The New Era. Convinced that Bailey had helped plan the mass escape (he had not), the mob broke several windows of the newspaper’s office, but were held off by the police from harming Bailey.

Once the Washington Riot ended, the slaveowners sold the attempted escapees to slave traders from Georgia and Louisiana, who promptly took them to New Orleans, Louisiana. Two of the Edmonson children, Mary and Emily, were purchased and freed with funds raised by Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, New York. Drayton, Sayres, and Chester English, the ship’s cook, were arrested and indicted for helping the slaves escape. They hired noted education reformer and Massachusetts Congressman Horace Mann as their main attorney. Drayton and Sayres were charged with 77 counts each of aiding a slave to escape and illegally transporting a slave.

A jury convicted both Drayton and Sayres but freed English believing he played no role in the attempted escape. The captain and pilot were given prison sentences because neither could pay their fines and court costs which totaled roughly $10,000. After the men had served four years of their prison sentence, Massachusetts Senator and prominent abolitionist Charles Sumner petitioned President Millard Fillmore for their release. The President pardoned Drayton and Sayres.

The Pearl escape attempt had unexpected consequences. A provision of the Compromise of 1850 enacted by Congress ended the slave trade in the District of Columbia although it did not abolish slavery there. The Pearl incident is also said to have inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe in her writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was published in 1852.

 

[IllmaticDelta]

James Monroe Trotter

James Monroe Trotter (February 7, 1842 – February 26, 1892) was an American teacher, soldier, employee of the United States Post Office Department, a music historian, and Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C. Born into slavery in Mississippi, he, his two sisters and their mother Letitia were freed by their master, the child's father, and helped to move to Cincinnati, Ohio. He grew up in freedom, attending school and becoming a teacher.

During the American Civil War, Trotter enlisted in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the state's second black infantry regiment, and was quickly promoted; he was the second man of color to be promoted to the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Army. After the war, he married and moved with his wife to Boston. He was the first man of color hired by the Post Office Department (now the United States Postal Service) there and worked with them for many years. He wrote a history of music in the United States which is still in print. In 1886 he was appointed by the Republican administration as the Recorder of Deeds in Washington, D.C., the highest federal position available at the time for African Americans.

His son William Monroe Trotter became a rights activist and was founder and editor of the Boston Guardian, a progressive African American newspaper.

James Monroe Trotter promoted racial advancement in the 55th Massachusetts Regiment in which he served, in his seminal and pioneer work Music and Some Highly Musical People , and in his protests against racial intolerance that he experienced in his position in Boston’s postal service. He believed that African Americans should promote themselves, and he used the press to encourage them to do so. He followed abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass as recorder of deeds in Washington, D.C., becoming the second African American to hold that post.

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William Monroe Trotter

William Monroe Trotter (sometimes just Monroe Trotter, April 7, 1872 – April 7, 1934) was a newspaper editor and real estate businessman based in Boston, Massachusetts, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He was an early opponent of the accommodationist race policies of Booker T. Washington, and in 1901 founded the Boston Guardian, an independent African-American newspaper, as a vehicle to express that opposition. Active in protest movements for civil rights throughout the 1900s and 1910s, he also revealed some of the differences within the African-American community. He contributed to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Born into a well-to-do family and raised in Hyde Park, Massachusetts, Trotter earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key there. Seeing an increase in segregation in northern facilities, he began to engage in a life of activism, to which he devoted his assets. He joined with W.E.B. DuBois in founding the Niagara Movement in 1905, a forerunner of the NAACP. Trotter's style was often divisive, and he ended up leaving that organization and founding the National Equal Rights League. His protest activities were sometimes seen to be at cross purposes to those of the NAACP.

In 1914 he had a highly publicized meeting with President Woodrow Wilson, in which he protested Wilson's introduction of segregation into the federal workplace. In Boston, Trotter succeeded in 1910 in shutting down productions of The Clansman but he was unsuccessful in 1915 with screenings of the movie Birth of a Nation,which also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan in favorable terms. He was not able to influence the peace talks at the end of World War I, and was in later years a marginalized voice of protest. In an alliance with Roman Catholics, in 1921 he did get a revival screening banned of Birth of a Nation. He died on his 62nd birthday after a possibly suicidal fall from his Boston home.

*William Monroe Trotter was born on this date in 1872. He was an African American news publisher and activist and perhaps the most militant of the known civil rights activist of the 19th century.

An honor student from Boston, Trotter was the first Black member of Phi Beta Kappa. Between 1897 and 1906 he worked as an insurance and mortgage broker in Boston, Massachusetts. He founded the Boston Guardian, a militant newspaper, in 1901, for the purpose of "propaganda against discrimination." In 1905, Trotter assisted in founding the Niagara Movement but refused to join the NAACP because he felt it to be too moderate and instead formed the National Equal Rights League.

In 1919, Trotter appeared at the Paris Peace Conference in an unsuccessful effort to have the organization outlaw racial discrimination. The State Department had denied him a passport to attend, but he had reached France by having himself hired as a cook on a ship. Because of his strident unwillingness to work with established groups, the Civil Rights Movement has been slow to recognize Trotter. But many of his methods were to be adopted in the 1950s, notably his use of nonviolent protest. In 1903, Trotter deliberately disrupted a meeting in Boston at which Booker T. Washington was scheduled to speak; his arrest was to gain publicity for his militant position.

He also led demonstrations against events, plays, and films that glorified Ku Klux Klan. William Monroe Trotter died on April 7, 1934 in Boston.

Trotter is best known for his strident opposition to the racially conciliatory policies advocated by Booker T. Washington and his call for a renewed emphasis on liberal arts education in contrast to Washington’s promotion of manual training. Less well-known is his equally forceful opposition to all forms of racial discrimination and segregation.

Trotter’s public challenge of Washington’s policies began in 1901 with his founding of the Guardian, and the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which was a forum designed to attract potential opponents of Washington including, most notably, W.E.B. DuBois. Trotter’s first personal encounter with Washington came in 1903 when he interrupted the Tuskegee, Alabama educator’s address to a National Negro Business League meeting at Boston’s AME Zion Church. Trotter referred to Washington as “the Great Traitor” and “Benedict Arnold” and subsequently was arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct. Trotter spent 30 days in jail because of the conviction. Some civil rights leaders believed that Trotter’s arrest had been orchestrated by supporters of Washington; Trotter quickly became the national symbol of opposition to Washington’s Tuskegee Machine, an organization of Washington supporters who exercised almost dictatorial power over the African American community.

In July 1905, 29 opponents of Washington, including Trotter and W.E.B. DuBois, met in Niagara Falls, Canada to form the all-black Niagara Movement, the first organization to challenge Washington’s power, and the first black-oriented civil rights organization formed in the twentieth century. During the meeting, this group drew up a manifesto, demanding voting rights for African Americans, an end to racial segregation and discrimination, and better health care, housing, and schools for the nation’s black population.

 

[Black Lightning]

Dred Scott, was an enslaved person noted mainly for the unsuccessful lawsuit brought to free him from bondage. The decision rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 in the Dred Scott case, said that no blacks slave or free were U.S. citizens and allowed slavery in all U.S. territories. The decision helped propel the United States toward the Civil War.

Scott was born into slavery in Southampton, Virginia, around 1795, the property of the Peter Blow family. He was given the name “Sam” but took the name of his older brother, Dred, when the latter died. Scott was taken by the Blow family to Huntsville, Alabama where they settled on a nearby farm. When farming proved unsuccessful, the family in 1830 relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. In 1831 his owner, Peter Blow, died, John Emerson, U.S. Army surgeon, bought him and took him to Fort Armstrong, in 1833 when Emerson was assigned there. In 1836 Emerson was transferred to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory (later Minnesota Territory) and Scott was taken with Emerson.

In 1836, Scott who was approximately 41, married a teenaged slave, Harriett Robinson, at Fort Snelling who was owned by another U.S. Army officer, Major Lawrence Taliaferro of Virginia. Scott and Robinson gave birth to their first child, Eliza, in 1838 and a second daughter, Lizzie, in 1840. The U.S. Army reassigned Emerson to Jefferson Barracks, south of St. Louis in 1837 and Fort Jessup, Louisiana, in 1838. The Scotts were brought briefly to Louisiana where Emerson married Irene Sanford, a native of New York. The Emersons and Scotts returned to Fort Snelling later in 1848 and remained there for four years until 1842 when Emerson permanently left the Army and settled in St. Louis with the Scott family. By this point Scott had been in free territory nearly a decade, Harriett even longer, and their two children were born free.

In 1843, Emerson died and left his estate to his widow, Irene Sanford Emerson. When Scott offered to purchase his freedom for $300 in 1846, Emerson refused his offer. He then obtained the assistance of two St. Louis attorneys who helped him to sue for his freedom. His 1846 lawsuit was filed in the St. Louis Circuit Court and went to trial in 1847.

Scott lost this case, but later that year he won a second trail. By this point Scott received financial support and legal representation from the sons of Peter Blow, his former owner, who had become anti-slavery advocates, Irene Sanford Emerson's brother, John Sanford, and her second husband, Dr. C.C. Chaffee, a Massachusetts abolitionist. All of them the Scott case as an important challenge to slavery.

In 1850, a Missouri jury decided in favor of the freedom of both Dred and Harriett Scott on the grounds that they had illegally been held as slaves while living in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Two years later, in 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the lower court’s ruling and the Scotts who had been living away from Irene Sanford, were immediately returned to her. The Missouri Supreme Court’s decision was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. By this point the case garnered national attention. One of the attorneys for Scott was Montgomery Blair who would emerge as a leading figure in the newly created Republican Party.

On March 6, 1857, the United States Supreme Court finally ruled in Dred Scott v Sandford [Sanford was misspelled by a court clerk]. In a 7-2 decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, the majority of justices said that Scott and all slaves and free blacks were not citizens of the United States and therefore had no standing in the courts. Shortly after the decision was handed down Mrs. Emerson freed Scott. The case itself led to the nullification of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, allowing the expansion of slavery into formerly free territories and the legal principle that African Americans, slave or free, were not citizens of the United States. The backlash to this decision strengthened the abolitionist movement and further divided the North and South, leading four years later to the U.S. Civil War.

After he was freed, Dred Scott went to work as a porter in the St. Louis area. He died from tuberculosis in September 1858. Harriett Scott died eighteen years later on June 17, 1876.