Upbuilding Black Durham: Gender, Class, and Black Community Development in the Jim Crow South

By Leslie Brown

In the 1910s, both W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington praised the black community in Durham, North Carolina, for its exceptional race progress. Migration, urbanization, and industrialization had turned black Durham from a post-Civil War liberation community into the "capital of the black middle class." African Americans owned and operated mills, factories, churches, schools, and an array of retail services, shops, community organizations, and race institutions. Using interviews, narratives, and family stories, Leslie Brown animates the history of this remarkable city from emancipation to the civil rights era, as freedpeople and their descendants struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom.

Brown paints Durham in the Jim Crow era as a place of dynamic change where despite common aspirations, gender and class conflicts emerged. Placing African American women at the center of the story, Brown describes how black Durham's multiple constituencies experienced a range of social conditions. Shifting the historical perspective away from seeing solidarity as essential to effective struggle or viewing dissent as a measure of weakness, Brown demonstrates that friction among African Americans generated rather than depleted energy, sparking many activist initiatives on behalf of the black community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 17, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807877531

Leslie Brown

Leslie Brown is assistant professor of history at Williams College.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Introduction

1: Seek Out a Good Place - Making Decisions in Freedom

A Natural Extension of My Home

Durham Is the City of the New South

Great Complaint among the Colored People

2 : Durham’s Narrow Escape - Gendering Race Politics

The Harvest Will Come in Due Time

A Live and Let Live Philosophy

A Cancer Gnawing at the Heart of This Republic In 1898, Booker T. Washington ...

Christian Men, and Not Cowards

3: Many Important Particulars - Are Far from Flattering The Gender Dimensions ...

The Sisters and Mothers Are Called to the City

Laboring under False Impressions

Our Greatest Desideratum Is Good Character

Lifting as We Climb

In the Hands of the Missionary Women

4: We Have Great Faith in Luck, but Infinitely More in Pluck - Gender and the ...

The Company with a Soul and a Service

Women Were Not Supposed to Be in the Forethought

Our Territory

The Negroes Gather Capital by Pennies

5 : We Need to Be as Close Friends as Possible - Gender, Race, and the Politics ...

Not One Act of Disloyalty Was Recorded among Them

A Power in the Uplift of the Race

Education Will Best Fit Them for Service to God and Their State

The Harvest Is Great, but the Laborers Are Few

6 : Helping to Win This War - Gender and Class on the Home Front

You Have to Put Dignity On

An Even-Greater Migration

Workers Whose Lives Are So Haphazard

If the Colored People Can Be Moved

The Universal Mother

7: Every Wise Woman Buildeth Her House - Gender and the Paradox of the Capital ...

An Ordinary Man

Emphasizing Virtue in Our Early Girlhood

Not Criminal Always, but Untrained

A Much Needed Service

Votes for Mothers, Votes for Children, Votes for Teachers

8: There Should Be . . . No Discrimination - Gender, Class, and Activism in the ...

Back on the Breadlines Again

The Colored People Have Been Treated So Dirty

9: Plenty of Opposition Which Is Growing Daily - Gender, Generation, and the ...

No Action of Any Sort until ‘Pussyfooting’ Has Been Exhausted

The Upper-Crust Negroes Have Failed to Take Any Steps

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

001

The John Hope Franklin

Series in African American

History and Culture

Waldo E. Martin Jr. &

Patricia Sullivan, editors

002

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Jacquline Johnson

Set in Janson Text

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Parts of this book have been reprinted with permission in revised form from the following works: Leslie Brown, Sisters and Mothers Are Called to the City: African American Women and an Even Greater Migration, in Stepping Forward: Black Women in Africa and the Americas, edited by Catherine Higgs, Barbara A. Moss, and Earline Rae Ferguson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002); Leslie Brown and Anne M. Valk, ‘Our Territory’: Race, Place, Gender, Space, and African American Women in the Urban South, in Her Past Around Us: Interpreting Sites for Women’s History, edited by Polly Welts Kaufman and Katharine T. Corbett (Malabar, Fla.: Kreiger Press, 2003); Leslie Brown and Anne M. Valk, Black Durham Behind the Veil: A Case Study, OAH Magazine of History 18 (January 2004); and Leslie Brown, African American Women and Migration, in The Practice of U.S. Women’s History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues, edited by S. Jay Kleinberg, Eileen Boris, and Vicki L. Ruiz (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Leslie, 1954-

Upbuilding Black Durham : gender, class, and Black community

development in the Jim Crow South / Leslie Brown.

p. cm.—(John Hope Franklin series in African American history and

culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3138-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8078-5835-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78775-3

1. African Americans—North Carolina—Durham—History. 2. African

Americans—North Carolina—Durham—Social conditions. 3. African

American women—North Carolina—Durham—History. 4. Sex role—

North Carolina—Durham—History. 5. African Americans—North

Carolina—Durham—Biography. 6. Community life—North Carolina—

Durham—History. 7. Social change—North Carolina—Durham—

History. 8. Social classes—North Carolina—Durham—History.

9. Durham (N.C.)—Social conditions. 10. Durham (N.C.)—Race

relations. I. Title.

F264.D9B83 2008

305.896’0730756563—dc22 2008008444

cloth 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

paper 12 11 10 09 08 5 4 3 2 1

For family and friends,

and Annie

Acknowledgments

My father grew up in the Jim Crow South and never learned to read or write. But I am finishing a book that discusses the distance between our lives. From then to now, there were countless people who encouraged, pushed, shoved, protested, threatened, cajoled, and enticed me to finish this project, just as there were countless people who did the same thing on behalf of black education in the age of Jim Crow.

Many people have parented, befriended, mentored, and allied with me. It would take another book to mention them all. I begin by thanking my parents, the late James and Louana Brown, who made sure that education was a central part of my life experience. The late Grace and Clifford Knight and the late Ben Wiggins reinforced that priority, and special thanks go to Marjorie J. Wiggins, who reminded me that the elders would be proud. Thanks also to my sister and brothers, Cece, Brian, Martin, and Raymond; to Uncle Jerry and Christine; and to Thomas Daddy Mack McLester.

This work would not have been possible without the cooperation and interest of the people who agreed to share their life stories, among them, Addie Marie Faulk, Constance Merrick Moore, Mabel Harris, Johnnie McLester (who turned out to be my aunt), Josephine Dobbs Clement, Theresa Jan Cameron Lyons, and Loretha Parker. Thelma Bailey Lanier and Julia Lucas adopted me, opening their homes (and refrigerators) to me. They provided more wisdom and knowledge than scholarship alone could offer, and they kept me on track when I wandered. Their insights, which came from their years behind the veil, helped me to link the past and the present. They are missed.

In everyone’s life there are special groups of people who are the cheer-leaders. I met mine at Skidmore College. They include Joanne Zangrando, Mary Lynn, and the members of the Department of American Studies; Tad Kuroda in the Department of History; the staff and students of the Higher Education Opportunity Program; and the Student Affairs staff. I owe special gratitude to Fran Hoffmann, Phyllis Roth, and the Spiders; to Robbie Nay-man, Steve Earle, Jon Stein, John Ramsey, Ann Knickerbocker, Sue Layden, and Mimi and Ralph Ciancio; and to Mary Nell Morgan, who told me that I was just crazy enough to do this thing.

I could not have gotten through the fire of writing without the range of people who made the journey as personally fulfilling as it was professionally fulfilling. Tim Tyson (and Perry), Christina Greene (and Jim), Jennifer Morgan and Herman Bennett, Lisa Waller (and Sydney), Deborah Montgomerie (and Simon), Matthew Countryman, Karen Ferguson, Alex Byrd (and Jeannette), Charles McKinney, Celia Naylor, Stephanie Smallwood, Rod Clare, and many others created an interracial community that made scholarship a part of the political struggle. The Center for Documentary Studies provided an intellectual home and framework to understand how scholarship could be useful outside as well as inside the academy. The researchers and staff members of the project Behind the Veil: Documenting African American Life in the Jim Crow South made this project seem urgent and important. No one else knows how hard that work really was. In addition, Iris Hill, Paul Ortiz, Darnell Arnoult, and Greta Niu brought cheer and intellectual engagement to the Behind the Veil project—they took it seriously and made it fun.

Bill Chafe, Ray Gavins, Nancy Hewitt, Jacquelyn Hall, and Bob Korstad always believed that there was some substance in my work and treated me as a friend and colleague. Each of them read chapter after chapter over ten or more years. Thank you all for never telling me you were bored. Special appreciation goes to Nancy and Ray, whom I admire as model scholars, colleagues, and friends. I send a shout-out to Steven Lawson, who read more than his share of material, and to Anne Firor Scott for saying, So what if they don’t like your work; do it anyway.

Faculty members at Duke University and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill created a welcoming and stimulating environment, including Claudia Koonz, Syd Nathans, Jan Ewald, Kristin Neuschel, Peter Wood, John Thompson, Barry Gaspar, Charles Payne, Monica Greene, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Judith Bennett, Cynthia Herrup, Jackie Hall, and Suzanne Lebsock hosted and sustained the Feminist Women in History group, an opportunity for graduate and faculty women to engage each others’ work and build a scholarly community in a noncompetitive setting where the M&Ms flowed with ease. Beverly Washington Jones, Alice Jones, and Freddie Parker in the Department of History at North Carolina Central University set me on the path to research in Durham and steered me in the right direction.

The professionals who staff research libraries rarely receive the profound recognition they deserve for their guidance and knowledge. At Duke University, Bill Erwin, Linda McCurdy, Zachary Elder, Christina Greene, Alex Byrd, Janie Morris, Virginia Daley, Elizabeth Dunn, Bob Byrd, and Nelda Webb led me to the rich sources in the manuscripts collection, allowed me access to unprocessed papers, and provided critical assistance. Lynn Richard-son at the North Carolina Collection at the Durham County Library provided invaluable assistance and made it possible for me to collect wonderful photographs. I thank Doris Terry Williams and Dorothy Phelps Jones at the Hayti Heritage Center at North Carolina Central University for their collegiality and advice and for allowing me to use the collections, and I thank Andre D. Vann for lending me so many useful materials from his rich collection of Durham memorabilia. The staffs of special collections and manuscripts departments at the University of Maryland, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, the Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the North Carolina State Archives provided wonderful research experiences. The interlibrary loan staff at the University of Missouri at St. Louis and Washington University in St. Louis worked miracles.

Along the way, I had the good fortune to be surrounded by great colleagues at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, including Priscila Dowden, Adell Patton, Mark Burkholder, Gerda Ray, Andrew Hurley, and John Wolford. The chairs of the Department of History at Washington University, Derek Hirst and Hillel Kieval, always provided support, and John Baugh, the director of African and African American studies, ran interference when necessary. Henry Berger, Iver Bernstein, Howard Brick, Andrea Friedman, Maggie Garb, Steve Hause, Gerald Izenberg, David Konig, Peter Kastor, Linda Nicholson, Tim Parsons, and other history faculty made my stay at Washington University a worthy effort. Rafia Zafar, Mary Ann Dzubak, Gerald Early, Wayne Fields, and James McLeod made me a part of the campus contingent of political troublemakers. I’ll miss the faculty of the Program in African and African American studies at Washington University —namely, Chris Bracey, Rudolph Clay, Jackie Dace, Garrett Duncan, Gerald Early, Ron Himes, Kim Norwood, Lester Spence, Mungai Muntoya, Shanti Parikh, Carl Phillips, Iyabo Osiapem, Priscilla Stone, Joe Thompson, Wilmetta Toliver-Diallo, and Sonia Stevenson—for their camaraderie, their good taste in music, and their faith in me. Robert Vinson and Rafia Zafar I single out for being good listeners. David Rowntree I thank for bringing excitement to the West Campus Library. Raye Riggins, Adele Tuchler, Sheryl Peltz, Molly Shailkewitz, and Margaret Williams, administrative staff and assistants, are forces of nature.

Particular recognition goes to Washington University’s dean of Arts and Sciences, Edward Macias, for providing opportunities for leave to work on my book and for finally giving me the boot.

While at Washington University, I was fortunate to have a bright, energetic, and eclectic group of undergraduate and graduate students. Their liveliness, inquisitiveness, intellectual power, and teaching and research skills sustained my own enthusiasm for history. In ways they will never know, they saw me through the final stages of this project. Among them, Keona Ervin, Lorenzo Thompson, Michelle Repice, N’Jai-An Patters, Carmen Brooks, Michelle Purdy, and Dan Scallet kept my spirits up. On the other side of the river, Ellen Nore and Shirley Portwood, aka the Strawberry Ice Cream Gang, created the women’s history reading group at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and allowed me to participate even when I showed up only for lunch and dessert. Other SIUE faculty extended to me their friendship and unofficial membership in the department of historical studies: Laura Milsk Fowler, Michaela Hoenecke, Michael Moore, Norman Nordhauser, Eric Ruckh, and Allison Thomason. And thank you to Scot Fowler for making things work.

Many people helped me to develop a scholarly voice as I worked on this book. I am grateful to Catherine Higgs, Rae Ferguson, Val Littlefield, and the participants in the Black Women in the Old World and the New conference, sponsored by the Ford Foundation at the University of Tennessee, and to Pat Sullivan, Waldo Martin, Emilye Crosby, and the participants in the Summer Institute on Civil Rights at the Du Bois Center at Harvard University. Eileen Boris, Jay Kleinberg, and Vicki Ruiz saw value in my work, as did Kathy Corbett and Polly Welts Kaufman. I owe much gratitude to Kathy Corbett for introducing me to Maine and good writing. I hope my pages provided additional covers through those Maine winters.

An ever-lengthening list of scholars have inspired me and influenced my work, including Tera Hunter, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Darlene Clark Hine, Chana Kai Lee, Nell Irvin Painter, Jacqueline Rouse, Paula Giddings, Francille Wilson, Michele Mitchell, Deborah Gray White, Robin D. G. Kelley, Stephanie Shaw, Temma Kaplan, Leon Litwack, Walter B. Weare, Drew Faust, Kevin Gaines, Glenda Gilmore, David Cecelski, Laura Edwards, and Cliff Kuhn.

John Hope Franklin Series editors Pat Sullivan and Waldo E. Martin Jr. and University of North Carolina Press senior editor Chuck Grench believed in this project and that I could do something I never envisioned myself doing. To them, and to David Perry, Paula Wald, Katy O’Brien, and other staff at the press, I owe more than I can ever pay. Thank you also to Elizabeth Kenyon for last-minute research assistance.

This book was made possible by the financial support of grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the John Hope Franklin Center for African and African American Documentary; the North Caroliniana Society; the Department of Women’s Studies, the Department of History, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University; the Missouri Historical Society; and the Office of the Graduate Dean at Washington University and at the University of Missouri at St. Louis.

What do you say about the people who take you in when you feel abandoned? Thank you, Valorie, for walking with me in a green place, and Martha, for asking too many questions.

And then there are the people who sustain you. Pat Totten, Ken and Gretchen Davidian, Jessica Weiderhorn, Stephanie Gilmore, and Betsy Kaminski are friends for life; Kathy, Cathi, Dean, and Carl will always be neighbors; and Anita, Marylyn, Chase, Mary Ann, Emma, Betty, Celeste, and especially Connie are always with me.

Andrea Friedman and Marsha Sanguinette and their sons (my godchildren), Oscar and Corey, made me part of their family. Oscar and Corey brought joy to my life that I had not known before. Thank you for rowdy afternoons, family dinners, video games, and PG-rated movies and for your love, dedication, and embrace. Alex and Jeannette Byrd and the little Byrds, Benja and Jenna, made great allies, friends, and vacation companions. For hours we lolled in the pool, shared books, talked about history and politics, ate some of the best chicken imaginable, saw some of the worst movies ever made, searched for Jonah, and hung out in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen in rural Kentucky. What good times! My out-laws, I mean in-laws, the Valks —Jim and Judy, Eli, Laura, Hayley, Reggie, Heidi, Conrad, Jackson, Bennett, Jean, Hank, and Caroline—welcomed me with good humor to the family.

Last, I want to thank my partner, Annie Valk, who for more years than I can imagine has comforted me and loved me more than I deserved. My best friend, companion, and soul mate, Annie has traveled this long road, walking, running, cheering, and crying with me every step of the way. With humor and grace she has read every word and symbol I have written. She not only has championed, endured, suffered, and tolerated me and this manuscript since graduate school but has done so with an unfailing love and devotion that have sustained me through hard times and lifted me up. Every day she makes me and my life better, fuller, and stronger.

If there are strengths to this work, they are due to all of the persons I mention above and many I have forgotten to list. If there are any weaknesses or errors in this book, they are my fault, each and every one of them.

Prologue

Robert George Fitzgerald met freedwoman Cornelia Smith in Chapel Hill, Orange County, North Carolina, in the fall of 1868. He described her in his journal, using the language of the day, as a fine-looking octoroon. He was conscious of her color and beauty, but he also was struck by her modesty and spirit. Robert impressed Cornelia, too. A freeborn black from Pennsylvania, he had volunteered for the Union cause and enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War. Though he had suffered an injury that affected his vision, he returned to his studies at Ashmun Institute (later Lincoln University) in Pennsylvania and then answered the call to teach in the South at emancipation. Robert ran a local freedmen’s school and became a leader in the black community. A courageously active member of the Union League, an organization dedicated to politicizing freedpeople, he attended rallies, wrote songs to celebrate Republican victories, and ran for a place on the school board. Cornelia and Robert married in August of 1869. The morning after the wedding, she traveled to the nearby town of Hillsborough. She is to sew for several ladies, a very pleased Robert wrote in his journal. She is anxious to do all she can for me. She is to be away three weeks. Northern philanthropists had withdrawn their support for Robert’s school the year he and Cornelia wed. Viewing himself as a soldier in a second war, this time against ignorance, Robert continued to teach, even though few of his students could pay. So it was Cornelia who cooked, sewed, and borrowed to support herself, Robert, and his school.¹

Among other aspirations, freedpeople hoped that they might distance themselves from the exploitations of slavery. To do so, they had to redefine black womanhood—for instance, shed the burdens of labor and reproduction that black women had carried in the past and gain the entitlements accorded to white women: the precepts of domesticity and the right to protection and the right of their children to be sheltered and shielded by wage-earning men. Such freedoms assumed a black manhood that could protect and provide for families and, by extension, communities in new ways. The closer a family could come to these ideals, the farther away its members journeyed from the degradations of the past. Robert and Cornelia set out on this road, but from the beginning their progress required more resources than the usual gender roles could provide. In communities across the South, African American women like Cornelia Fitzgerald provided significant resources to make the dreams of freedom come true. To provide for her family and to support the racial cause, Cornelia had to generate income by working outside the home, while at the same time raising her children, and, in traveling from place to place for work, she was exposed to the dangers—sexual insult and assault by white men—that black women always had known. And persistent threats against Robert made them both vulnerable to racial violence.²

In marrying and supporting a black activist, Cornelia aligned herself with the cause of racial destiny and mixed among the black social and political circles of Orange County. Yet for all she celebrated, Cornelia knew freedom had a double edge. Cornelia had wed a Union soldier, but she did not relinquish her association with her former owners. Indeed, she took pride in being the favored daughter of Marse Sidney Smith. Born enslaved, the daughter of a prominent white man, she was a gift to his sister, her aunt, Mary Ruffin Smith. But the unmarried Mary Smith believed that her brother’s offspring represented an insult to white southern womanhood, for which she personally suffered. Thus Cornelia grew up in limbo. Mary Smith closely supervised her upbringing, even as she held the child at arm’s length. She thought Robert Fitzgerald an acceptable suitor and blessed the marriage. Knowing the South and white southerners, Cornelia might have thought it expedient to maintain a connection to the white side of her past. In an unsettled racial world, an amicable relationship with whites, even former slaveholders, could prove beneficial. It was Cornelia’s hope that the patrician status of her father would enhance her own rank in the postwar world, and she embraced her Smith ancestry ambivalently, half proudly and half resentfully—more the first than the second, as the past receded and new struggles emerged. Then, too, the Fitzgeralds told such stories of a free northern lineage that Cornelia clung to what she could in order to measure up.³

Optimistic and irrepressible, Robert encouraged his family to join him in North Carolina. His parents, Thomas and Sarah Ann Fitzgerald—respectively, a free black mulatto of Irish ancestry and a woman of Swedish and French descent—sold their Pennsylvania lands and used cash in a cash-poor region to buy an Orange County farm. The enterprising Fitzgeralds found their niche in reconstructing the South as entrepreneurs, educators, and activists. While his neighbor’s fields lay fallow, Thomas made several good crops, which he sold at Durham’s Station, a railroad crossing on the east side of the county. Richard was the brother with a sharp eye for business; he and brother Billy opened a brickyard in Chapel Hill, the state’s university town, taught the trade to freedmen, and did well financially in dealing with whites whose bitterness increased with their need for credit. Robert’s sister Mary Jane joined the legions of missionary schoolteachers crisscrossing the state who brought literacy and learning to budding black communities. Protected in the North from the kind of exposure to insult and abuse that Cornelia had known, Mary Jane had come to North Carolina from a different antebellum history than most of the black women she met. Still, she joined them on the front lines in a struggle with ex-planters for control over black childhood, with one side determined to entrap them as laborers and the other working to encourage them as students.⁴

All of the Fitzgerald women worked, but for themselves, their family, and the race, rather than for whites, and from that vantage point, they watched the racial milieu of freedom evolve. Robert’s mother, Sarah Ann, and her daughter Agnes opened a restaurant across the street from the courthouse in Hillsborough, where, at the nerve center of Orange County politics, they watched their customers act out a new racial order. As a seamstress, Cornelia Fitzgerald plied a skilled trade, entering the private and semiprivate spaces of the county’s prominent white (and black) women. Here, out of the public gaze, clients revealed their most candid temperaments and moods and their secret plans.⁵

Armed with ability and strategically positioned, the Fitzgeralds were public freedom figures who experienced both the perils and the possibilities of emancipation. Ambitious and shrewd, the family was loathed by whites, who viewed the Fitzgeralds’ accomplishments as a sign of racial defeat. They were the Ku Klux Klan’s worse nightmare: evidence that African Americans could gain the privileges of whiteness, especially of white manhood. Southern whites watched their advantages dissolve, while the Fitzgeralds lived out black liberation with those who had known little more than bondage. As black entrepreneurs, they reversed the racial tradition of economic dependency, earning enough to be autonomous of whites and enough to hold the pecuniary upper hand in negotiations. Any of the Fitzgeralds could pass for white, and they associated with black people, making a lie of any attempt to make race distinctions. It was no secret in small towns like Hillsborough and Chapel Hill that the Smith men had asserted their sexual rights in regard to Cornelia’s mother, the enslaved Harriet Smith. That they had raped her belied their images as benevolent white patriarchs, which were constructed to vindicate slavery. That Cornelia had married a black carpetbagger with a passion for radical politics belied her devotion to her master and mistress. Finally, Sarah Ann’s marriage to Thomas Fitzgerald, now the family patriarch, reversed the paradigm of antebellum society that took the authority of white men for granted. Sarah Ann, a white woman, had turned away from her race to marry a man of color.⁶

Fixated on reclaiming power, southern whites seized on the premise of racial purity, historicized across generations, to undo black emancipation. Juxtaposed and elevated over black women on whom white men wielded the sexual advantages of power—assault and rape—white women embodied the essence of white purity by virtue of their personae, allegedly chaste and untouchable. Frightened, also, that autonomy could enable black men to seek revenge for whites men’s sexual victimization of black women and girls, southern whites made the protection of white women a motivation for fierce resistance to black freedom and a rationale for denigrating African Americans. ⁷ The men and women of the families Fitzgerald bore witness, as ex-planters and the Klan attempted to regain the upper hand through violence. There had been a hanging in Hillsborough the year Cornelia and Robert had married. Cy Guy was murdered, lynched by a mob a hundred strong, purportedly for a scandalous insult to a white woman. In Chapel Hill, an ex-Confederate colonel, Julian S. Carr Jr., bragged that he had horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in sheds because she supposedly insulted and maligned a Southern white lady. Both acts bore the markings of sexualized assaults performed in the name of white supremacy. The Fitzgerald brothers armed themselves against night riders and the Ku Klux Klan more than once, and the potential for violence did not wane.⁸

In 1870, the year Mary Pauline Fitzgerald was born to Robert and Cornelia, violence rather than votes determined victories at North Carolina polls. Against that backdrop, Pauline (as she was called) merged the Fitzgerald and the Smith families—northern and southern, immediate and extended, free and freed, black and white, women and men. She represented the first generation of African Americans born into freedom. But she was born into a family under stress. Not only interracial stress, but internal tension about class, caste, color, and status strained family ties as the Fitzgeralds learned about each other. Robert’s relatives were appalled at his marriage to Cornelia, in spite of the strength of the partnership, the families’ love for Mary Pauline, and the efforts of Cornelia to please the Fitzgeralds. Their daughter-in-law’s ambiguous status as the daughter and favored slave of a southern white man confused and offended the sensibilities of Robert’s family. As to her aristocratic claims, the Fitzgeralds viewed Marse Sidney Smith as a drunk, lost to the cause of the Old South, and his sister, Mary Ruffin Smith, as a middle-aged spinster who had allowed Cornelia few freedoms and no education. Cornelia could not read. And she was freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, not by her owner-family. The Fitzgeralds, conversely, were literate, educated, and free for as far back as they knew their family history, and they looked down on Robert’s wife.⁹

The almost-white Cornelia passed the color test. But she had remained a slave until emancipation, and she lacked the prestige of the free black lineage the Fitzgeralds had carried south. Robert never quite recovered from this misjudgment in his family’s eyes. As far as the Fitzgeralds were concerned, Cornelia carried, if not personified, the obliquity of the black woman’s past in slavery. She may well have been modest, as Robert described her when he met her, but her birth within the plantation household attested to slavery’s immorality, the experience of sexual insult, abuse, and assault that her mother had known, and the indecorous possibility that Cornelia also had been a victim. They projected onto Cornelia a dissolute legacy, sullied and violated. Inasmuch as Cornelia’s virtue might be questioned, so could the Fitzgeralds’ respectability for associating with her, or so the in-laws feared. Cornelia maintained only limited ties to her own mother and sisters, but tensions within the family around her ancestry strained ties. Gentility required the aristocratic Fitzgeralds to maintain at least a social distance from their inferiors. A fourth-generation Fitzgerald, Pauli Murray, confirmed in later years that her grandmother was never accepted by her husband’s family and her children were snubbed accordingly.¹⁰

Cornelia’s relationship with her in-laws might have improved if her birthright had carried the value she imagined. In her private writing, Murray suggests that Robert married for the money. But the hundred acres of uncleared land that Cornelia inherited from her aunt was a pittance compared to the Smith estate left to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Not just the minimal size of the plot, but the negligible value of the gesture damaged Cornelia’s claim as a Smith descendant and translated into an income too small to measure against the wealth the Smiths had made on black people’s backs. It mattered even less against the Fitzgeralds’ claims, as Richard speculated successfully for land on the east side of Orange County. Nonetheless, as Cornelia’s secured capital, her land offered her family some stability during the economic downturns in the 1870s. Perhaps the most important capital African Americans could hold, land owned free and clear signified autonomy and distance from whites while providing her family a safety net, a resource, and a refuge that most other black families lacked. Cornelia still had to defend against white neighbors who tried to scare her off, but she and her children stayed on the Chapel Hill property as the tumult of freedom played out.¹¹

Despite the familial tensions, a shared desire for safety gave both Fitzgerald brothers reason to leave the west side of Orange County. Word spread that Durham’s Station, the crossroad where Thomas sold his goods, offered expanding opportunities for work and gaining wealth. With a flood of black people arriving for the same reason, Robert and Richard Fitzgerald moved to Durham, where they both established brickyards. But they clung to their inclination to set themselves apart. They built houses apart from each other and away from the black settlement growing by the tracks just south of the center of town.

Their destinies also diverged. Successful brick maker Richard detached himself from his in-laws, as he and his family joined an intimate circle of families who shared Richard’s goal of building wealth. Increasingly blind, Robert Fitzgerald depended more and more on his workers and on the women of his family. But he also flailed against the vicissitudes of racism. Like so many black veterans found, the federal government refused him a disability pension for injuries suffered in military service. Then, ignoring Robert’s legal rights and his claims to his land, white Durham officials seized a significant part of his property to build a cemetery, a segregated one for whites. So, again, it was Cornelia who stepped in to bridge the gap between income and need. She traveled the road between Chapel Hill and Durham, cooked for her husband’s workers, and supervised the children. She rented some of her inheritance to tenants, sold lumber off some acres, and farmed, collected eggs, sewed, and bartered to pay for her children’s schooling.¹²

It was a courageous and praiseworthy act for Cornelia to labor on behalf of her family. Because most black families struggled financially, most African American women had to work, if not at a specific job, then in the informal economy, trading and selling their services and goods. One example of the necessary flexibility that African Americans brought to gender roles, women’s work—more specifically, their public presence—also violated tenets about women’s appropriate place in society: in the home, raising children. Unable to support his family, Robert could not fulfill the role of black manhood, a particular failure for a black aristocrat and one that subjected his wife to the hazards that black women continued to meet on the public roads and streets.¹³

Black people measured their distance from slavery by their autonomy from whites, and Cornelia’s labor, however necessary, propelled the Robert Fitzgeralds further down the slippery slope of class. Robert and Cornelia Fitzgerald began married life as members of the black aristocracy from two sides of black society. His failures, her work, and the loss of his business and land doomed the family to a status inferior to the Richard Fitzgeralds. As Murray described it, her grandfather’s family fell into the category called the respectable poor because of their financial condition, socially positioned well outside elite circles. The distinctions between the rich Fitzgeralds and the poor Fitzgeralds grew wider as the next generation came of age. Having grown wealthy, Richard Fitzgerald easily afforded to send his daughters to Fisk University, the prominent black college in Nashville, Tennessee. Cornelia sent whatever she could scrape together—including eggs and chickens—to pay Pauline’s tuition at St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the child worked for the rest. There were no other children in school except me, I worked right along with the men and women from 25 to 30 years old, she wrote of her experience.¹⁴

But, in spite of her academic promise, Pauline Fitzgerald could not finish her education, something the Fitzgeralds valued so highly. In 1885, when Cornelia bore the last of their six children and the government rejected Robert’s claims to a pension, their firstborn shouldered the family’s financial burden. That year, Pauline Fitzgerald left school, put up her hair, put on a long grown-up dress, and went to take the county examination for teachers. She received her teaching certification nine days before she turned fifteen and immediately went to work at a Durham school for blacks. Barely an adult herself, Pauline accepted the title of race woman, charged with nurturing the next generation, in addition to her responsibilities as a daughter supporting her aging parents, her younger siblings, and their families. Her sister Sallie Fitzgerald followed suit. By their occupation and community status, Pauline and Sallie pulled the Fitzgeralds up into the aspiring class of black strivers, determined to challenge white supremacy but not always able to escape it completely.¹⁵

The Fitzgeralds came to the postwar South from different directions and carrying dissimilar burdens but sharing ambitions for family and race. They left a set of critical markers on North Carolina’s landscape after slavery that attest to the edginess of race politics after emancipation. Drawn together and pulled apart by the challenge, they moved into the maelstrom of the twentieth century with a shared agenda for freedom but along different paths. But the Fitzgerald family history is more than an interesting story about the hopes and fears of freedom. Theirs was a family upbuilt at the moment of emancipation, fashioned in the midst of the racial state of affairs unfolding before them. They created themselves as a unit out of separate pasts, sharing the common experience of slavery and holding common aspirations for freedom. As freedom participants, they also collaboratively upbuilt institutions, founding schools and businesses that lent permanence to black liberation. A microcosm of black community development in process, the families Fitzgerald looked forward to the benefits of freedom, but the mutability of race, gender, and class in the South’s political economy created contrasting circumstances for the two families. The gender ideologies of freedom conflicted with the gender realities of freedom to create differential status designations that applauded the rich Fitzgeralds and marginalized the poor Fitzgeralds.

Upbuilding black communities required African Americans to travel the distance between their nightmares and their dreams. Freedom’s people may have hoped for autonomy, but the racial circumstances of emancipation required vigilance against white animosities. They may have wanted to protect African American women and girls, but racism imposed a poverty that required black female labor in order to survive. They may have anticipated participating in politics, but the persistent threat of violence made the polls dangerous terrain. In the end, only half of the Fitzgeralds attained their objectives. Richard Fitzgerald, the entrepreneur, gained national prominence as a successful black businessman; Robert, the teacher and political activist, moved into relative obscurity. Cornelia Fitzgerald, despite her contributions, could not escape her mother’s past, nor could she free her daughters from the social and economic burdens that African American women continued to bear well into the twentieth century.

Introduction

Within and without the sombre veil of color[,] vast social forces have been at work,—efforts for human betterment, movements toward disintegration and despair, tragedies and comedies in social and economic life, and a swaying and lifting and sinking of human hearts which have made this land a land of mingled sorrow and joy, of change and excitement and unrest. So wrote the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, his treatise on African American life in the South after emancipation. Using the veil as a metaphor for the color line, Du Bois wrote of the racial divide as a fragile, restrictive, translucent barrier between blacks and whites. Impressing the paradigm of racial affairs in the United States and particularly in the South, the veil accounted for black folks’ sense of twoness, Du Bois argued, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.¹

By the time The Souls of Black Folk was published in 1903, a generation of African Americans had come of age with a sense of entitlement to freedom, inheriting their parents’ freedom dreams. They expected to manage their own families and demanded to control their own labor; they desired learning and wished to send their children to school; and they wanted to participate in their communities’ politics as contributors and citizens. But they encountered the veil, and in this era of Jim Crow, African Americans who sought to rend the veil were captured by webs of rules and rituals, by doublespeak, and by disinformation intended to deny black humanity.²

On the black side of the veil lay a place that few white people knew existed and still fewer tried to understand but that all African Americans recognized even if they did not wholly dwell within it. Here, in the chaos of emancipation, black folk survived on mutual aid, wit, and hard work. They embraced themselves as whole beings, not just as citizens—and not just as family, but as community. They founded institutions, wove together a national and international network of association, and fashioned an astute culture of oppositional politics. All the more remarkable, black people of African descent intentionally created a future. Proud that the first generation born in freedom had survived to come of age at the turn of the century, they recognized this as an enormous achievement by people whose freedom was under persistent attack. Subsequently, each generation engaged in the work of racial destiny, not just as a collective act of survival and of thriving in the face of racism but also as the individual and cooperative work of upbuilding for themselves.³

Defined by Du Bois as the social and economic development of black communities after slavery, upbuilding was the literal and figurative construction of the structures African Americans used to climb out of slavery. Like architects, surveyors, and contractors, black folk upbuilt families, homes, organizations, institutions, and enterprises and erected atop a foundation laid in the past the physical and psychic spaces of black freedom. These efforts required black people to engage in internal discussions about themselves and their expectations of each other as free persons. Upbuilding required their labor and that they contribute diverse resources, keeping common goals in mind. But upbuilding also demanded that African Americans reformulate identity and accordingly that they sort out the meaning of gender and class in determining the roles that each one should play. Thus the institutions they created and the spaces they populated also spoke to distinctions of gender and class as well as the commonalities of race experience and community.⁴

In response to black aspirations, white southerners imposed a racial peace on the region through a troubling set of racial codes known as Jim Crow, which resided but did not remain on the other side of the veil. The jocular term belies the profound abuses perpetrated in the name of white racial supremacy: the lynching of black men, the rape of black women, the burning of black schools and churches, the bombing of black neighborhoods, the destruction of black towns, race riots, and random violence attest that Jim Crow was homegrown oppression and terrorism, an American apartheid sanctioned by all three branches of government. A mockery of black hopes, Jim Crow attempted to appropriate black life and labor by any means necessary. To make the case for black inadequacies, Jim Crow portrayed black people as inhuman, irresponsible, and immoral, diametrically distinct from whites and therefore unable to measure up to their standards of character. Insisting that the Negro is a Negro and always would be just that and nothing more, whites translated antiblack rhetoric into officially administered discrimination in the arenas of democracy—employment, education, and elections—and sustained it for over a hundred years. Enforced by violence, Jim Crow was purposeful, not only keeping African Americans in a subordinate place in American society but pushing them further down, if not eliminating them altogether.⁵

The system produced a whole list of disparities between blacks and whites, shored up the arbitrariness of white power, and perpetuated injustice and black poverty for most African Americans. Electing to ignore the ambiguities of race to lump all blacks into one disparaged mass, Jim Crow exploited the differences among African Americans as a form of repression. The history of race relations bears this past as an impediment to equality. Racism shaped the contours of the spaces within which black people lived and the context within which they persevered.⁶ Pauli Murray wrote from the black side of the line: We were bottled up and labeled and set aside—sent to the Jim Crow car, the back of the bus, the side door of the theater, the side window of a restaurant. We came to know that whatever we had was always inferior. We came to understand that no matter how neat and clean, how law abiding, submissive or polite, how studious in school, how churchgoing and moral, how scrupulous in paying our bills and taxes we were, it made no essential difference in our place.⁷ Insidiously, when Jim Crow battered one black person, it assaulted them all. In turn, the negative act of one reflected on all African Americans, while the positive act of one was viewed as an exception. But it was Jim Crow’s duplicity that made for some of its most damning practices. By forcing black people to encounter the color line differently, Jim Crow doubled its effects of vilification: on the one hand, an insult against black womanhood was also an insult against black manhood, and vice versa; on the other hand, by forcing black men and women to encounter the color line differently, Jim Crow caused tension in their relationships with each other. At the turn of the nineteenth century, black female and male leaders, for instance, squared off against each other with regard to race progress. Clubwomen claimed that men did little toward race progress, and the latter blamed the women of the race for not progressing enough. These harsh gender assessments not only reflected anxieties about the meaning of masculinity and femininity but also crossed class lines, with those of the better classes heaping scorn on the less fortunate for holding the race back, and those of the lower classes becoming resentful of how status measured the growing distance among African Americans even within community.⁸

Because Jim Crow presented a confounding adversary, unity against it could emerge in a moment but dissipate just as quickly. In fact, unified action was not necessarily the most effective means of struggle against an amorphous enemy. Even as black folk looked forward together, they had to work collectively and separately on discrete parts of the upbuilding project while facing their own sets of challenges.⁹ Disunity represented structural cracks in black communities but also revealed how different contingents of African Americans adapted to racial conditions that expanded and contracted with possibilities. Accordingly, intraracial tensions could operate as creative or complementary forces as well as adversarial ones. Friction might waste energy, but it also generated the sparks that lit new initiatives, new forms of resistance, accommodation, and protest, and new strategies of survival, endurance, and achievement. In this way, upbuilding black communities was the process of internal exchange and dissonance, just as communities themselves were sites of those same dynamics.¹⁰

In 1912, W. E. B. Du Bois praised the upbuilding of Black Durham, a small southern city, for its exceptional progress that characterizes the progress of the Negro American out of the feudal darkness of the past and into an era of capitalist stability. African Americans in Durham, the town to which the Fitzgeralds had moved, owned and operated several brickyards, a textile mill, a lumber mill, a foundry, a furniture factory, a cigar factory, a library, a hospital, a college, scores of churches, a number of schools, and an astonishing array of retail services, shops, and stores, community organizations, and race institutions. A coterie of entrepreneurs, including Richard Fitzgerald, embraced public political leadership, and their wives and daughters modeled female respectability. Yet, as Du Bois noted, the significance of the rise of a group of black people to the Durham height and higher, means not a disappearance but, in some respects, an accentuation of the race problem. For the Durham Group, as its notable residents were called, created exactly what southern whites despised: a prosperous black society marked by the elements that whites believed black people could not achieve. Yet Durham’s open secret was that, just below the surface of unity and prosperity, class conflicts simmered. Engendered by frustrated expectations, black Durham’s internal clashes characterized its development, sometimes stimulating creative initiatives and sometimes stymieing progress.¹¹

This book is about a people and a place and the entangled process of making them both and together after emancipation. It is a community study of African Americans that describes how freedpeople and their successive generations in Durham, North Carolina, struggled among themselves and with whites to give meaning to black freedom. The upbuilding of black Durham was one of the most significant black enterprises of the twentieth century. Once a sleepy village, by the end of the nineteenth century Durham was the richest city in North Carolina, one where at least some African Americans, including some among the Fitzgeralds, benefited from the shift from an agricultural economy to one based on manufacturing. With no antebellum foundation, Durham constructed itself into a New South city of industry built on the virtues of hard work, enterprise, and propriety and made out of Fitzgerald bricks.¹²

At least that was the public image presented by the town’s boosters. Loosed from Old South hegemony, civic leaders dissociated Durham from the region’s unprogressive elements: industrial rather than agricultural, built on free labor instead of slave labor, and not leisurely paced. A local newspaper crowed in 1886: Nothing stands still. There is very little loafing in Durham. A man who stands on the street corner and gazes at the sky is apt to be run over. The word ‘Durham’ is synonymous with ‘business.’ Work is offered to all who desire it.¹³ Meanwhile, the state newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, unfurled the official veil: It has not been regarded as desirable . . . that the Negro worker should be considered as on the same plane as white men pursuing the same vocations in life. No matter what any calling any white man may choose in the South there is a wide and recognized gulf between him and the Negro workman.¹⁴ Despite the promises the New South might have offered, white leaders determined that the new political economy would differ little from the one that had come before. Defining workers by race and gender in a way that protected white male supremacy, whites ensured that African Americans remained subordinate to them.¹⁵

If Durham was a New South wonder, then black Durham was a New Negro wonder flourishing in a milieu of racial animosity, its successes positioned at the intersection of W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. In fact, in 1911 Washington, the Tuskeegean, called Durham the city of cities to look for the prosperity of Negroes, preceding Du Bois’s praise written in 1912. Both admired the black community’s new group economy that Du Bois described, grounded in teaching and preaching, buying and selling, employing and hiring, and both acknowledged Richard Fitzgerald as a model black businessman.¹⁶ In the nadir of race relations, then, black Durham emerged as a symbol of black nationalism and black pride by the end of the nineteenth century. Modern buildings, owned and occupied by African Americans, rose against a backdrop of repression. Nationally, black Durham was viewed as a symbol of what African Americans could do on their own when left alone by whites.¹⁷

When, in 1921, whites destroyed Greenwood, the black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as Black Wall Street, African American leaders sought a new beacon of hope. E. Franklin Frazier found a black city on a hill in Durham, a place to exemplify the triumphant climb out of