Southern Cultures Volume 15 Omnibus E-book: Includes all four issues of Southern Cultures, Volume 15, including The Food and Music Issues

By Harry L. Watson and Larry J. Griffin

This Omnibus E-book brings together all four issues of Southern Cultures Volume 15, published in 2009.

Volume 15 of Southern Cultures explores Lee's Tomb, how Southern evangelicals kept sin from sacred spaces, the power of memorials, W.E.B. Du Bois's unusual connection to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, sundown towns, the African American architect who designed one of the South's elite institutions during Jim Crow, and both the Mississippi Delta and Core Sound Workboats in photographs.

It also includes two theme issues with multimedia content, "The Edible South" and "Music." "The Edible South," our first food issue, includes the favorite foods of our favorite writers, Drum Head Stew from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, girls' tomato clubs, Wormsloe plantation, select short films on food from our friends at the Southern Foodways Alliance on the bonus DVD, and more. Our Fall special issue is our third music issue includes a never-before-published interview with "Son" Thomas, a brief history of the boogie, Ella May Wiggins, Top Ten best of jazz, blues, country, and rock greats, Emmett Till in music and song, and more.

Enhanced with the 20 music tracks from the bonus CD, "Cool-Water Music," it brings together yet another eclectic mix of folk, blues, country, and alternative rock, from Pete Seeger to Whistlin' Britches to Charlie Louvin and George Jones to the Rosebuds. A feast!

Southern Cultures is published quarterly (spring, summer, fall, winter) by the University of North Carolina Press. The journal is sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for the Study of the American South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UNC Center for the Study of the American South
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781469615684

Book preview

Southern Cultures Volume 15 Omnibus E-book

Includes all four issues of Southern Cultures, Volume 15, including The Food and Music Issues

Edited by Harry L. Watson and Larry J. Griffin

Spring 2009

Summer 2009

Fall 2009

Winter 2009

ISBN: 978-1-4696-1568-4

Published by UNC Press

Southern Cultures

Volume 15, Number 1, Spring 2009

Harry L. Watson and Larry J. Griffin, Editors

Published by the

University of North Carolina Press for the Center for the Study of the American South

at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Center for the Study of the American South

Joseph M. Flora, interim director

Editorial Board

Edward L. Ayers University of Richmond

E. M. Beck Sociology, University of Georgia

Catherine W. Bishir North Carolina State Archives

Merle Black Political Science, Emory University

James C. Cobb History, University of Georgia

Peter A. Coclanis History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Thadious Davis English, University of Pennsylvania

Pam Durban English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

William R. Ferris History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Wayne Flynt History, Emeritus, Auburn University

Thavolia Glymph History, Duke University

Rayna Green National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

Ferrel Guillory The Program on Public Life, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Peggy Hargis Sociology, Georgia Southern University

Trudier Harris English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fred Hobson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lisa Howorth Square Books, Oxford, Mississippi

Anne Goodwyn Jones English, University of Florida

Michael Kreyling English, Vanderbilt University

Louis Kyriakoudes History, University of Southern Mississippi

Malinda Maynor Lowery History, Harvard University

Jocelyn Neal Music, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Michael O’Brien History, University of Cambridge

Ted M. Ownby History, University of Mississippi

James L. Peacock Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Theda Perdue History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

C. David Perry University of North Carolina Press

John Shelton Reed Sociology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Louis D. Rubin English, Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Anne Firor Scott History, Duke University

Bland Simpson English, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Vincas P. Steponaitis Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Steven Stowe History, Indiana University

John M. Vlach American Studies, George Washington University

David Wilkins American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota

Charles R. Wilson Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

Southern Cultures Copyright © 2009 Center for the Study of the American South

Indexed in Humanities International Complete.

Contents

Front Porch

by Harry L. Watson

Did you know that W. E. B. DuBois was a favorite author of the United Daughters of the Confederacy? They didn’t either, for they came to admire the outstanding African American intellectual under the cloak of invisibility.

Essays

The Discovery of an Architect: Duke University and Julian F. Abele

by William E. King

In 1937, the English novelist Aldous Huxley was traveling through North Carolina by auto one hot summer day. He described ‘a pleasant but unexciting land’ when ‘all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest.’

Sundown Towns and Counties: Racial Exclusion in the South

by James W. Loewen

In 1987, Oprah Winfrey broadcast her television show from Forsyth County, Georgia, which had expelled its black population seventy-five years earlier.

Photo Essay

Take Time to Appreciate: The Mississippi Delta Region, 1994–2002,

by Bruce J. West

A lush and exotic landscape—a setting encouraging and supporting heroic transformation—nurtures all endeavors.

Mason-Dixon Lines Tobacco Mosaic: Lexicon and The Sharecroppers

poetry by Davis McCombs

He crouched in the shade of the barn, thinking and mumbling, and the wind ripped the words from his mouth . . .

Southern Voices Having His Say: Memories from Lemuel Delany Jr.

interviewed by Kimberly D. Hill

Periodically this jackass that y’all call Senator Jesse Helms was on the television talking about the outhouses that the colored folks had and laughing about the tubs that they had to bathe in.

Not Forgotten How W. E. B. DuBois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest

by Bruce E. Baker

Nearly a century ago W. E. B. DuBois won an essay contest sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy—or at least, DuBois’s writing won the contest.

Books

John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed, with William McKinney

Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina Barbecue The Definitive Guide to the People, Recipes, and Lore

reviewed by Fred Sauceman

The Reeds and McKinney have crafted a book that ranges from the roasted meats of Homer’s Iliad to yellow page ads in the restaurant sections of North Carolina telephone directories. Holy Smoke is a book not only of many flavors but also engaging scenes.

James L. Peacock

Grounded Globalism: How the U.S. South Embraces the World

reviewed by Leon Fink

A Ugandan boy is lovingly adopted by a Peace Corps volunteer. An Indian wedding at the Carolina Inn features a groom entering on a white horse (substituting for an elephant) while a priest chants in Sanskrit.

Heather Andrea Williams

Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom

reviewed by Robin Bernstein

The existence of any white children in black classrooms proved that the schools offered an education whose clear value motivated some white families to violate racial taboos—and assume physical risk for that violation—to learn alongside black children, and often from black teachers.

Andrew H. Myers

Black, White & Olive Drab

Racial Integration at Fort Jackson, SC, and the Civil Rights Movement

reviewed by Alex Macaulay

What effect, if any, did armed forces integration have in the area around the South Carolina post during the Civil Rights Movement that followed in the fifties and sixties? The answer seems to be ‘not much.’"

Jennifer Ritterhouse

Growing Up Jim Crow

How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race

reviewed by Clara Silverstein

Black and white children recounted playing together, then being confused by the pressure to give up their friendships as they grew older. Blacks remembered how normal childhood disputes could take on frightening repercussions if white adults became involved.

Roger D. Abrahams, with Nick Spitzer, John F. Szwed, and Robert Farris Thompson

Blues for New Orleans: Mardi Gras and America’s Creole Soul

reviewed by Perry Kasprzak

New Orleans as a city that ‘came into being with a kind of antic doom embedded into it,’ founded as it was in a hostile New World swamp, is brought into bright focus by Nature’s recent, temporary, reclaiming of the land, and Man’s persistent desire to rebuild the city.

Anya Jabour

Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South

reviewed by Katy Simpson Smith

As a regional phenomenon, southern girlhood is as culturally resonant as it is understudied. From the myths surrounding Virginia Dare to the surreal pageantry of modern debutantes, the South has shaped its young women in its own ritualistic image.

Gordon Harvey, Richard Starnes, and Glenn Feldman, editors

History and Hope in the Heart of Dixie

Scholarship, Activism, and Wayne Flynt

reviewed by Charles W. Eagles

As a scholar and as a Christian, Flynt advocated reform of Alabama’s regressive tax system, helped found Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform, supported better and equal funding for public schools, served on the board of directors of the Alabama Poverty Project, and spoke out against powerful special interests.

About the Contributors

front porch

At the end of Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison’s wrenching novel of the African American experience, the nameless narrator has locked himself alone in an all-white basement room, endlessly replaying Louis Armstrong’s haunting lament, What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue? Despairing to the point of madness, the narrator has suffered devastating disappointment in one version after another of the black man’s place in white America, from the regimented uplift preached by Booker T. Washington, to earnest striving in menial employment, to the angry radicalism of the Communist Party. Everywhere he has been unseen, misunderstood, ignored, dismissed, marginalized. Invisible in all the ways that matter, he ends his story as a black drop in a white sea, with nothing left but jazz to sort out his pain.

For many generations in the white South, the notion of invisible black people must surely have seemed odd. Whatever whites thought about them, blacks were always there, variously laborious, rebellious, resistant, fearsome, loving, saintly, demonic, and on and on. The list of adjectives could be endless, but absent or unseen would not be on it. But Ellison was not writing about the exterior visibility of black bodies. Echoing Paul Laurence Dunbar’s famous poem, Masks, he referred to an unrecognized inner self, hidden behind protective layers of evasion, denial, stoicism, laughter, song, and endless equivalents. Seeing that black reality has been rare indeed for whites, and not just southerners—the dual result of willful blindness on one part and painstaking disguises on the other.

Most of the features in this issue of Southern Cultures explore some rarely seen facets of the southern black experience. Invisibility of one kind or another runs through many of them. Invisibility is ruthlessly imposed in one example, defensively adopted in another, unsuccessfully exploited in a third. Even taken together, these stories cannot embody the whole southern black experience, but they do illuminate some overlooked corners.

First-time visitors to Duke University invariably comment on the majesty of its Gothic chapel, the towering centerpiece of an entire campus assemblage of delicately dappled stone cloisters and quadrangles. Every detail is perfect, from the soaring arches to the gargoyles. For those familiar with many campuses, Duke plainly evokes the foundational spaces of Anglo-American academic culture, Princeton most directly, with ancient Oxford and Cambridge looming behind it.

opposite:

In Kimberly D. Hill’s Southern Voices interview, Lemuel J. Delany tells how several renowned people, including Cab Calloway (here), often spent time in his childhood home. From the Carl Van Vechten Photographs at the Library of Congress.

Bruce J. West’s photo essay, Take Time to Appreciate, reveals his admiration for people in harmony with their environment. Mr. Fortner, 1994, photographed by Bruce J. West.

How many knew that this reverential quotation from Western Civ, squarely planted in the Jim Crow South for a lily-white university, was designed between 1924 and 1935 by an African American? His name was Julian F. Abele, a classically trained architect who designed Duke’s Gothic West Campus and its Georgian East Campus for the Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer. The firm’s other commissions included Beaux Arts icons like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Harvard’s Widener Library, and countless private mansions, including the New York home of university benefactor James B. Duke. I lived in the shadows, Abele observed of his professional training at the University of Pennsylvania, and this acknowledgement of invisibility was doubly true at Duke, where knowledge of Abele’s identity was largely unknown until recently. Duke University Archivist Emeritus William E. King shares Abele’s story with us and recounts the arduous sleuthing that was necessary to bring it to light. There is a story (which may be untrue, King tells us) that Abele never saw his masterpiece because he refused to submit to the humiliations that segregation imposed on black travelers to the Jim Crow South. Invisibility protected Abele from insult, but it also protected Duke and the white South from the disconcerting reality of his superior talent and achievement.

James W. Loewen describes an extreme form of invisibility from roughly the same era, in which small towns and even whole counties violently expelled black residents and warned black visitors against remaining within their limits after sundown. These sundown towns proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, but defied some preconceptions of a century later. They were rare in the Deep South, for example, where blacks were essential to the local labor force. They were far more common in the rural Midwest or in upland southern regions like the Ozark hills. Why did towns that were nearly all-white already take such extraordinary measures to make dark faces completely invisible in fact as well as metaphor? And why do those who remember them tend to mislocate them, sometimes inventing integrated histories for places where blacks were banned and all-white histories for places that were half black? Loewen cannot answer all these puzzles, but building on his recent book, Sundown Towns, his fascinating essay documents the ugly fundamentals of this most extreme form of American apartheid.

You might call Lemuel Delany’s invisibility a relative matter. In 1992, his aunts Sadie and Bessie Delany wrote a best-selling memoir, Having Our Say, that also lit up television and Broadway. In Southern Voices, Mr. Delany tells his part of the Delany family saga to Kimberly D. Hill of the Southern Oral History Program, sharing his view that his aunts’ fame has now obscured a larger family history of education and achievement dating back to the end of slavery. Finally having his say, Mr. Delany also has choice words for Civil Rights leaders and a variety of other targets, proving that the family gift for quick wit and lively personal observation did not stop with his aunts.

Speaking of discoveries, did you know that W. E. B. DuBois was a favorite author of the United Daughters of the Confederacy? They didn’t either, for they came to admire the outstanding African American intellectual under the cloak of invisibility. Initially unknown to DuBois or the Daughters, major portions of an article he published on the Freedmen’s Bureau turned up in a plagiarized essay that won a prize from the Columbia, South Carolina, chapter of the UDC in 1912. Bruce E. Baker tells us how DuBois unmasked the imposter in the pages of The Crisis, undoubtedly to his amusement and the Daughters’ mortification. The process by which the plagiarist softened and distorted DuBois’s opinions to create a winning entry in the UDC essay contest are among the most fascinating parts of Baker’s story, which is all revealed in this issue’s Not Forgotten.

Bruce J. West’s photo essay, Take Time to Appreciate, is a counterexample of African Americans made more visible by the camera. Mostly focused on black residents of the Mississippi Delta, West’s photos bring his subjects from the shadows to the foreground. In them we see the simple urgency of Mrs. L. V. Hull’s painted epigrams and the pivoting gaze of Reverend H. D. Dennis, trance-like while witnessing his own visions, quizzical as he regards ours. Paradoxically, it is West’s white subjects who are more truly unmasked: a grande dame’s serene privilege now exposed to critical appraisal, a storekeeper solid yet gentle in his doorway. West admires his subjects’ harmony with their environments, but his camera ensures that they will not remain in the shadows.

In Not Forgotten, Bruce E. Baker tells how a college student plagiarized W. E. B. DuBois in a winning essay on the Freedmen’s Bureau and other topics for a United Daughters of the Confederacy contest. Tolson’s Chapel, which housed a Freedmen’s Bureau school, courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Poet Davis McCombs rounds out our issue with two reflections on the culture of tobacco. He writes of loss and leave-taking, poignantly evoking the cabalistic language and tireless recollections of a vanished way of life. McCombs does not say if his sharecroppers are black or white; that part of them remains invisible and perhaps irrelevant. To him, it only matters that they are gone now and cannot sustain their lost world, however seductive their memories. As parts of the traditional South withdraw inescapably into history, McCombs reminds us of the pain inflicted by what he calls the sound of the end of the world.

Ralph Ellison did not write about tobacco culture, and he probably would not have treated it with nostalgia if he had. The cotton South was a prison for his narrator, and Invisible Man drew its power from the insight that northern cities offered little improvement. You could say that the decline of black invisibility is directly linked to the destruction of tobacco and cotton plantations and view the end of that world with relief. But then you might remember the ancient wisdom and dignity of Bruce West’s Delta faces, and recall the mixed loss and gain that comes with the passing of this world. The ultimate lesson is to keep your eyes open. You might miss something if you don’t.

HARRY WATSON, Editor

ESSAY

The Discovery of an Architect

Duke University and Julian F. Abele

by William E. King

In 1937, the English novelist Aldous Huxley described a pleasant but unexciting land when all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest. Duke’s West Campus, courtesy of Duke University Photography.

In 1937, a distinguished visitor touring the United States, the English novelist Aldous Huxley, was traveling through North Carolina by auto one hot summer day. He described a pleasant but unexciting land when all of a sudden, astonishingly, a whole city of gray Gothic stone emerged from the warm pine forest. He was thrilled by the academic city with the dominating leaping tower of the huge cathedral and the spreading succession of quadrangles. He called the campus genuinely beautiful, the most successful essay in neo-Gothic that I know.¹ Huxley, like generations of succeeding travelers, had come upon the campus of Duke University. Like most visitors through the years, Huxley was unaware that the dramatic new campus had been designed by the architectural firm of Horace Trumbauer of Philadelphia, where Julian F. Abele, an African American, was chief designer.

The Philadelphia Inquirer devoted only three paragraphs to Abele’s death in 1950, but it covered a weekend of celebration honoring him in June 2002, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Free Library of Philadelphia, at which Abele [pronounced able] received posthumous credit for the design of the central section. During the construction of Duke University in the 1920s a few administrators knew Abele was chief designer in the firm, but his race was not common knowledge. By 2000, however, Abele and his achievements as an African American were the centerpiece of the university’s seventy-fifth anniversary celebration. How these celebrations came to be is a story of unusual interest.

Neither the Trumbauer firm nor Julian Abele left an archive. Scattered sources, infrequent newspaper articles, and reminiscences by family and friends created over decades constitute the primary sources of information about Abele. His story was one discovered bit by bit, looking backward. The Duke University component, outlined in this essay, was an exercise in archival practice and historical discovery over time.²

Julian Francis Abele (1881–1950) was born into a respected and talented African American family in Philadelphia. His father, born a freedman, worked in the U.S. Treasury Customs House and thus had the means to give his children a valued education. In 1897 Abele graduated from Philadelphia’s Institute for Colored Youth, a prestigious Quaker institution, where his Aunt Julia Jones, who taught drawing, steered him toward a career in architecture. In 1898 he earned a Certificate in Architectural Design from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts. In 1902, Abele graduated from the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1903, he received a Certificate of Completion in Architectural Design from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In the latter three institutions Abele was the first of his race to earn a certificate or a degree, a magnificent achievement, though, as Abele noted later in his life, I lived in the shadows. The shadows of practice, custom, and personality would claim Abele for decades.³

Julian Francis Abele (here) earned a Certificate in Architectural Design from the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Arts in 1898, graduated from the School of Architecture of the University of Pennsylvania in 1902, and a year later received a Certificate of Completion in Architectural Design from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Yet, later reflecting on his career, he said, I lived in the shadows. Portrait from Construction of Duke University, 1924–1932, University Archives, Duke University.

Horace Trumbauer (1868–1938), a Philadelphia native, was heard to say, I hire my brains. Acknowledged as a premier builder of Gilded Age palaces, often in the grand French style, Trumbauer had no higher education, having dropped out of school in his teens. He learned the profession as an apprentice draftsman and through voracious reading. When he began his own firm in 1890, he hired exceptionally qualified personnel and held them to very high standards. Extremely self-conscious about his lack of education, he deliberately sought anonymity, preferring to work one-on-one with his wealthy clients and relying on their recommendations for commissions. The firm had a reputation for designing statement homes for wealthy patrons in the expanding Philadelphia suburbs and at their summer residences in Newport, Rhode Island, and New York City. Talented but aloof, Trumbauer gained accolades in New York City before he did in his home-town, where his colleagues did not elect him to membership in the Philadelphia chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) until 1931.⁴

Trumbauer recognized Abele’s talent, brought him into the firm in 1906, and promoted him to chief designer in 1908. Trumbauer needed Abele’s formal training and Abele needed a patron in the status-conscious business and social milieu of Philadelphia. The two complemented each other in personality and talent, developing true respect and friendship in the process, but each also trapped the other in a peculiar set of circumstances. Trumbauer excelled as the front man but he avoided publicity and public appearances. Abele, an African American, was essential to the internal operation of the firm, but his non-public position obscured his deserved reputation. Abele himself was not elected to membership in the Philadelphia chapter of the AIA until 1941. Gradually the roles and talents of Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele have been rediscovered and their reputations given their due.

Duke University architect Horace Trumbauer (here, in front of Duke Chapel, c. 1932) once said, I hire my brains. A premier builder of Gilded Age palaces, often in the grand French style, Trumbauer had no higher education, having dropped out of school in his teens. He learned the profession as an apprentice draftsman and through voracious reading. Portrait from Construction of Duke University, 1924–1932, University Archives, Duke University.

The most well known public buildings designed by the Trumbauer firm are the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Free Library, and the Widener Library at Harvard University. Many of the private commissions in Washington, D.C., are now ambassador’s residences and several estates have been converted to college use such as Monmouth University in New Jersey. The grand Whitemarsh Hall, with 147 rooms built for Eva and Edward Stotesbury in Chestnut Hill outside Philadelphia, has been demolished. The Elms, built for Edward Julius Berwind in 1901 before Abele joined the firm, is part of the mansion tour on Newport’s millionaire’s row, open to the public through the auspices of the Preservation Society of Newport County. The campus of Duke University is the firm’s largest and probably most-viewed commission today.

The Trumbauer firm designed the residence of tobacco magnate James B. Duke in New York City, expanded his summer residence in Newport, and planned a never-built residence at his estate in Somerville, New Jersey. This, presumably, is why the firm received the commission to design the new campus for the expanding institution of Trinity College in J. B. Duke’s native city of Durham, North Carolina. Trinity College became Duke University in 1924 and, subsequently, two new campuses were built: a Georgian-style red brick campus for the Woman’s College and a Gothic-style native stone campus for the professional schools and undergraduate men. The Trumbauer firm designed and supervised the construction of each campus between 1924 and 1935.

Correspondence in the records of the University Archives shows that university officials understood Abele’s role as chief designer of the campus, but it was not public knowledge that he was African American. An early letter, dated June 30, 1927, from Frank C. Brown, professor of English, University Comptroller, and liaison between the university and the Philadelphia firm, to Horace Trumbauer specifically refers to Abele by name. Illustrating the technical detail in the correspondence, Brown asks Trumbauer to share his concern with Abele about the desire for fifty-two-inch centers for the stacks in the library of the Woman’s College, now known as East Campus. But most importantly, Brown requests that the half-stacks, as drawn, be redesigned to extend against the ends of the building to maximize the library’s book capacity. This much-needed correction was made.

On October 1, 1940, Alfred S. Brower, Administrative Assistant to the Comptroller, wrote Mrs. James A. Thomas, widow of James B. Duke’s business associate and chair of the committee that planned the campus memorial to the Duke Family. Part of that memorial included a memorial chapel and burial place for the Dukes to be added to the original plans for the signature Chapel, centerpiece of the campus. Brower’s letter informed Mrs. Thomas that the Executive Committee of the Board of Trustees had approved the interment of her husband’s ashes in the new crypt located below the memorial chapel. Brower forwarded Abele’s business address to Mrs. Thomas, suggesting that she consult Julian F. Abele, who prepared the plans for the building and who with his understanding of . . . all its details would be in a position to advise you of the manner of interment and recognition her husband so richly deserved.

Trumbauer (front row, center) recognized talent and brought Abele (in shadow in the back row, fifth from the left) to the firm in 1906, promoting him to chief designer in 1908. Trumbauer needed Abele’s formal training, and Abele needed a patron in the status-conscious business and social milieu of Philadelphia. The two complemented each other in personality and talent, developing true respect and friendship in the process. Trumbauer’s firm, c. 1907, Duke University Archives Photograph Collection, courtesy of Julian Abele Jr.

The most conclusive contemporary evidence of the role of Julian Abele in designing the university is a series of letters between William Blackburn, then assistant professor of English, and Robert F. Flowers, Vice President in the Business Division, Secretary, and Treasurer of the University. Upon the completion of the new campuses, President William P. Few tapped Blackburn to write a commemorative volume on the architecture of the university. Few wished to have information available to answer a myriad of queries about the spectacular new campus, but it is reasonable to speculate that he also wished to have the Gothic and Georgian styles so prominently displayed placed in their proper historical context through consultation with the designer. Flowers handled the details of Blackburn’s travels to interview Abele and in a letter dated October 5, 1935, Blackburn thanked Flowers for his courtesies, noting that without having seen Abele he would not have been in a position to satisfactorily complete his assignment. The University Archives also has a signed letter from Abele to Few, dated December 19, 1939, forwarding a list of the decorative shields about campus and noting his work with Blackburn. The Duke University Press published The Architecture of Duke University, by William Blackburn, in 1939. Julian F. Abele Jr. later proudly showed the University Archivist his father’s gift copy of Blackburn’s book inscribed by then-president Robert F. Flowers, who was grateful for facts about the architectural inspiration of the two campuses.

The best known public buildings Trumbauer’s firm designed are the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Free Library, and the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library at Harvard University (here, c. 1917). Many of the private commissions in Washington, D.C., are now ambassador’s residences, and several estates have been converted to college use. Photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

The university community most probably learned of Julian Abele some four decades later in 1974 with the publication of a pamphlet, Spire and Spirit: Reflections on Inspiration and People in the Duke University Chapel, by Alice Phillips. Writing about her experiences as Chapel hostess, Phillips included a chapter provocatively entitled Le Noir, recounting how she had learned of Abele’s role in designing the Chapel. The pamphlet, however, had limited circulation.⁵

The Trumbauer firm designed the residence of tobacco magnate James B. Duke (here) in New York City, expanded his summer residence in Newport, and planned a never-built residence at his estate in Somerville, New Jersey. Afterward the firm received the commission to design the new campus for the expanding institution of Trinity College in J. B. Duke’s native city of Durham, North Carolina. Portrait by Underwood ’ Underwood Studios, New York, from Construction of Duke University, 1924-1932, University Archives, Duke University.

The 1980s marked the campus-wide discovery of Julian Abele. President H. Keith H. Brodie and his wife Brenda learned of Abele when they were the guests of the President of the University of Pennsylvania, whose residence was designed by Abele. The most surprising information about Julian Abele was a letter from the Honorable Julian Abele Cook Jr., United States District Judge for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, to President Brodie. On September 25, 1985, Judge Cook wrote Brodie acknowledging a campus newspaper article he had read about the impending fiftieth anniversary of the Duke Chapel. His letter began As a parent of two children with Duke connections (Julian Abele Cook III—’83 and Susan—’88) . . . I hope that your plans [for the anniversary celebration] will incorporate the name, as well as the contributions, of my paternal granduncle, Julian Abele, who was the chief designer of this magnificent edifice and many of the other buildings on the east and west campuses. He added, Unfortunately, very little recognition has been given to this outstanding Black architect. I am hopeful that you will rectify this omission in the months to come. Thus unknown to the administration a great-grandnephew of Julian Abele had graduated from Duke and a great-grandniece was currently enrolled. President Brodie responded excitedly, writing, When you next visit Susan, it would be my privilege to meet you. Carol Annette Dibble Cook, Susan’s mother, visited the University Archives, shared fascinating genealogical information about the family, including how to contact Abele’s children, and loaned family photographs for copying.

The Abele and Cook families’ connection to Duke became public knowledge in an ironic and dramatic fashion in April 1986. That spring students protesting the university’s investment in South Africa built a shantytown in the main quad. A letter to the editor of the campus newspaper complained that the ugliness of the crude shelters violates our rights as students to a beautiful campus. Susan Cook responded, noting that she too enjoyed being a student at a beautiful campus but upon reflection the writer should acknowledge that joy over a beautiful campus was ridiculously superficial . . . compared to the ugliness and brutality of racism. Revealing that the designer of the Duke campus was African American and her great-granduncle, she stated that she did not think Julian Abele would object to the shanties amid the Gothic splendor because he had been a victim of South African-like apartheid in his own country. Abele, she reported, had not even traveled to view the campus he had designed because of his revulsion at the Jim Crow segregation prevalent in the South in his lifetime. Susan Cook’s revelation and identity caused considerable discussion on campus.⁶

In April 1987 Julian F. Abele Jr. was a guest of the university at the annual meeting of the Friends of Duke Chapel. During the visit Abele met with President Brodie, visited the University Archives, and walked about the campus having lengthy conversations with the University Archivist.⁷ The picture of Julian Abele that emerged from the conversations with his son reiterated much of what was in the published record, but it was instructive to hear firsthand of family outings to local museums, concerts, parks, and to football games at the University of Pennsylvania. He said his father enjoyed his work, never taking a vacation. He also reported that his father never talked business at home, confessing that it was Julian Abele Cook who told him much of what his father accomplished. His father did travel to Boston on business, but it was Abele Jr.’s understanding that his father did not visit Duke because of its location in the South. He was too proud a man to subject himself to legal segregation.

Julian Abele Jr. explained the role of an architectural firm’s chief designer as one who critiqued everything that went out so that it would have his blessing and the reputation of the firm behind it. He speculated that the current interest in his father’s work was probably the result of growing interest in black history and in the prestigious buildings that he designed. He praised his father’s humility, noting that Julian Abele Sr. was very willing to labor in the background with no personal rewards. That fit his personality. It’s just the kind of man he was.

In 1924, Trinity College became Duke University, and two new campuses were built: a Georgian-style red brick campus for the Woman’s College (above) and a Gothic-style native stone campus for the professional schools and undergraduate men, including the Union of West Campus (below). Trumbauer’s firm designed and supervised the construction of each campus. Architectural renderings from Construction of Duke University, 1924–1932, University Archives, Duke University.

African American students at Duke quickly took notice of Abele’s role in designing their campus, and through the leadership of Andrew Jones of the Black Graduate Professional Student Alliance and Christopher Foster of the Black Student Alliance, they organized to grant Abele overdue public recognition. President Brodie approved commissioning an official portrait of Abele. This, the first portrait of an African American on campus, would be displayed prominently in the main lobby of the Allen administration building, which was most likely the last campus building Abele worked on before his death. Finally, an oil portrait of Abele would join the one of Trumbauer that had been on display on campus since 1930. Plans were made to uniquely honor Abele at the annual spring banquet of African American students in 1989. The banquet was named the Julian Abele Awards and Recognition Banquet, and two of its principal awards were renamed the Julian Abele Scholarship and the Julian Abele Award for an outstanding black faculty member or administrator.

In the spring of 1986 students protesting the university’s investments in South Africa built a shantytown in the main quad. A letter to the editor of the campus newspaper complained that the ugliness of the crude shelters violates our rights as students to a beautiful campus. Susan Cook, responded, noting that she too enjoyed being a student at a beautiful campus but that joy over a beautiful campus was ridiculously superficial . . . compared to the ugliness and brutality of racism. She also revealed that the designer of their campus was African American—and her great-granduncle—and stated her belief that Julian Abele would not have objected to the shanties. Yearbook photograph, courtesy of Duke University Archives Photograph Collection.

Campus awareness of Julian Abele brought similar recognition to a much larger audience. North Carolina Architecture, a generously illustrated, scholarly work coauthored by Catherine Bishir and photographer Tim Buchman, featured the construction of Duke University and noted the contribution of Trumbauer and of Abele in particular. Bishir praised Abele’s harmonious marriage of seemingly incongruous elements—the regular Beaux Arts plan of intersecting axes and open and closed quadrangles, and the irregular forms and varied motifs of the late Gothic Revival style. In November 1997, Preservation North Carolina and Mark Spano Communications, Inc., in association with University of North Carolina Television, broadcast Far Fetched ’ Dear Bought: Four Architects Who Changed North Carolina. This film production, featuring Abele as one of the influential architects, has been shown repeatedly on public television. Also in 1997, the North Carolina Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects posthumously honored Abele for the design of the East and West Campuses of Duke University.⁸

Julian Abele Jr. praised his father’s humility, noting that the senior Abele was very willing to labor in the background with no personal rewards. That fit his personality. It’s just the kind of man he was. Julian Abele Sr.’s portrait (here), the first of an African American on campus, is now displayed prominently in the main lobby of the Allen administration building, likely the last campus building he worked on before his death. Portrait courtesy of Ayse Erginer.

Ironically, now that Abele had been recognized as being among the first African American architects of renown, and his title as chief designer acknowledged, Horace Trumbauer seemed relegated to a secondary role. Noting exaggerations in the record from what he saw as a cult of Abele, Frederick Platt, who was working on a biography of Horace Trumbauer, carefully and correctly explained the complicated personal and professional relationship between the two. According to Platt, Trumbauer and Abele’s relationship was one of courage, integrity, professionalism, and shared complementary talent, but the responsibility for the firm rested clearly with Trumbauer. Those who studied the history of the Philadelphia firm, knew architectural history, and considered that history in the context of the times, understood the nature of their personal relationship.⁹

As the seventy-fifth anniversary of the creation of Duke University approached in 2000 campus personnel began planning an appropriate celebration.¹⁰ Since the discovery of Julian Abele was very much part of contemporary campus culture, and the architecture was the signature of the university, it was decided to make the first ever campus exhibit on Julian Abele a centerpiece of the celebration. The exhibit, Julian F. Abele: The Designer of a New University, was mounted in the public viewing area of Perkins Library during April and May of 2000. Its seven cases were organized around five themes: The Abele/Jones Family and His Early Years; At the University of Pennsylvania, 1898–1902; Horace Trumbauer (1868–1938); The Architectural Firm and the University; and A Georgian-Style Campus for the Woman’s College. The family of Julian Abele Cook Jr. loaned personal photographs of Abele’s parents, siblings, and a wedding portrait, and Julian Abele Jr. loaned original sketches by Abele as a youth and a signed watercolor. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania loaned two architectural renderings of the Duke campus signed J. Abele, and an unsigned large watercolor of an unidentified building that the University Archives was able to identify as the Fifth Avenue mansion of James B. Duke, also designed by the Trumbauer firm. The exhibit also included numerous letters by and about Abele, documents, scrapbooks, photographs of construction, and illustrative postcards from the University Archives.

Prior to the Perkins Library exhibit, observers most often credited the Trum-bauer firm with commissions of wealthy northern entrepreneurs with an occasional mention of the Duke Chapel. The Perkins exhibit quite naturally emphasized the design of Duke University in the context of the firm’s varied commissions. Duke University, the largest commission of the firm, is perhaps unique among institutions of higher education in incorporating different design styles for two campuses built at the same time.

President Nannerl O. Keohane hosted a reception May 1, 2000, to celebrate the exhibition. Noting the unique contribution of the Trumbauer/Abele design team in the history of Duke University, Keohane quoted President William P. Few’s remark to the graduating class of 1931, that these buildings have been constructed to be the home of the soul of the University and in the belief that these appropriate and beautiful surroundings will have a transforming influence upon students generation after generation and even upon the character of the institution itself. The buildings, said Keohane, remind the campus community of the seriousness of our mission while defining a sense of place that fosters camaraderie, spiritual and intellectual growth, a sense of infinite possibility and infinite yearning. Keohane revealed that Trumbauer himself had been scorned in some Philadelphia circles as the architect for Jews, Catholics, and Methodists but that fortunately he was broad minded and his eye for talent was color-blind. Abele’s story, she noted, was one tinctured by reserve and perhaps forced modesty because to have the impact he knew he could have, he had to sublimate his ego, work for others, and keep out of the limelight . . . . The president said that being a proud, talented professional raised in Philadelphia, Abele might well have been deterred from traveling to Durham by the South’s Jim Crow laws but that she would like to think he did, quietly, perhaps staying with a Durham family. Concluding her remarks, Keohane observed that our architecture expressed the soul of a great intellectual community; it is the direct product of the soul of a hard-working, inspired, and too-little-known Philadelphian whose life and career we celebrate today.

The campus of Duke University is unique among institutions of higher education in incorporating different design styles for two campuses built at the same time. Architectural rendering of an aerial view of the Gothic (West) and Georgian (East) campuses by the firm of Horace Trumbauer, Architect, c. 1925, from Construction of Duke University, 1924–1932, University Archives, Duke University.

A later development in the evolving story of Julian Abele and the university is most significant. In February 2005 Smithsonian magazine published an article on Julian F. Abele, Out of the Shadows, that suggested the oft-repeated claim that Julian Abele never saw the Duke campus because of his disdain for Jim Crow laws may well be false:

In the early 1960s, John H. Wheeler, a prominent black banker in Durham, North Carolina, told George Esser, then executive director of the North Carolina Fund [a statewide initiative to fight poverty], that he recalled Abele coming to visit the campus during construction. What’s more, in a 1989 interview, Henry Magaziner, son of Abele’s friend and Penn classmate Louis Magaziner, recalled Abele telling him that a Durham, North Carolina, hotel had refused to give him a room during a trip to the university, while accommodating his white associate, William Frank.¹¹

President William P. Few remarked to the graduating class of 1931 that these buildings have been constructed to be the home of the soul of the University and in the belief that these appropriate and beautiful surroundings will have a transforming influence upon students generation after generation and even upon the character of the institution itself. Architectural rendering of the Chapel Campus (West Campus), from Construction of Duke University, 1924–1932, University Archives, Duke University.

One reference is to a possible visit during construction and the other is most likely to a later period when Abele and Frank were partners running the firm. Rumors had circulated in the Durham African American community for years about an Abele visit but with no real attribution. The Magaziner account was buried in a series of interviews on file at The Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Susan Tifft’s thorough research through oral histories answers, perhaps, the biggest question about Abele on the university campus. Although each reference is a secondhand account, it is gratifying to the university community years later to believe that Julian F. Abele did indeed see the grandeur and lasting legacy of his creation.¹²

The story of the relationship between Abele and Duke University has played out over almost nine decades, and undoubtedly more detail and insight will be added in future biographies of Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele. It is a drama of talent, education, personality, internal and external business relations, geography, personal and societal relationships, family dynamics, race, and one’s legacy—whether in reputation or stone. It is a compelling personal story. The architectural design of Duke University is the gift of a truly talented man and his team.

NOTES

1. Duke Alumni Register, September 1937, 238.

2. Unless otherwise cited, sources for this article are from the Julian F. Abele Biographical File, Duke University Archives, Durham, NC. Early accounts of the discovery of Julian Abele in the 1970s and early 1980s are based on friendship and personal recollections, while later articles are based on more scholarly research. For further reading, see Randy Dixon, Forgotten Black Designer, in Douglass Jocko Henderson’s Philly Talk, undated (1970?), 26–27, and Thomas Hine, Black Architect Gave Shape To An Idea, The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 27, 1982.

3. Dreck Spurlock Wilson, ed., African American Architects: A Biographical Dictionary 1865–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–4. Wilson is the most knowledgeable researcher about Abele. His entry on Abele also contains a list of the commissions of the firm during Abele’s tenure. James T. Maher, Twilight of Splendor: Chronicles of the Age of American Palaces (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1975), 372.

4. Interview with former Trumbauer firm employee Valentine B. Lee Jr. by William E. King, November 13, 1980; William E. King, If Gargoyles Could Talk (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1997), 99–101.

5. Alice Phillips, Spire and Spirit: Reflections on Inspiration and People in The Duke University Chapel (Unknown Binding, 1974), 6–8.

6. Letter to the Editor, Duke Chronicle, April 15, 1986.

7. William E. King, Duke University Archivist Emeritus, started the institutional archives in 1972 and retired in 2002.

8. Catherine W. Bishir, photographs by Tim Buchman, North Carolina Architecture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 397–400; Far Fetched ’ Dear Bought: Four Architects Who Changed North Carolina, VHS, narrated by Charlie Rose (Research Triangle Park: UNC-TV, 1997).

9. Frederick Platt, Horace Trumbauer: A Life in Architecture, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (October 2001): 338.

10. Dates in the history of the university can be confusing. Like all institutions of higher learning, Duke traces its history to its earliest origin in 1838, the date on the official seal. There has been an institution in continual operation since the decade of the 1830s, but it has had several different names and a significant relocation when in 1892, as Trinity College, the school moved from Randolph County to Durham, NC. The relocation occurred because of the financial support of Durham tobacco entrepreneur Washington Duke. On December 29, 1924, by action of the Board of Trustees, the name was changed to Duke University, reflecting major support of the Duke Family and especially James B. Duke, whose gifts permitted the transition of the college to a university.

11. Susan E. Tifft, Out of the Shadows, Smithsonian (February 2005): 100 ff.

12. Susan Tifft (Duke AB ’73), an experienced journalist and award-winning author, taught part-time as Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. Increasing allusions to Abele on campus piqued her interest in his life. Tifft’s article presents an excellent synthesis of the various published information on Abele. She takes on complex questions such as the personality and racial identity of Abele, his education and preferred style of architecture, and the complementary roles of Trumbauer and Abele in the architectural firm easily, and with clear context and captivating prose. It is in family history, however, where her indefatigable research adds to Abele’s biography.

ESSAY

Sundown Towns and Counties

Racial Exclusion in the South

by James W. Loewen

In her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou (here) characterizes Mississippi with the phrase, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here, Nigger, Mississippi. In reality, sundown towns were rare in most of Dixie, and the places they did spread reveal interesting facets of the region’s racial history after Reconstruction. At the Clinton Inauguration in 1993, courtesy of the White House.

Between 1890 and 1960, thousands of towns across the United States drove out their black populations or took steps to forbid African Americans from living in them, creating sundown towns, so named because many marked their city limits with signs typically reading, Nigger, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You In ___. In addition, some towns in the West drove out or kept out Chinese Americans, and a few excluded Native Americans or Mexican Americans. Sundown suburbs developed a little later, most between 1900 and 1968, many of which kept out not only African Americans but also Jews.¹

This is a misunderstood phenomenon, especially as manifested in the North. African Americans surely never uprooted by choice, and investigation reveals that most white towns are so by design. In Illinois, for example, 502 towns were all white or almost so, decade after decade; many still are. Research confirms the formal and informal racial policies of 219 of them. Of those, 218, or 99.5%, kept out African Americans. About 500 Illinois communities—two-thirds of all incorporated municipalities larger than 1,000—were sundown towns. Some still are. Oregon, Indiana, and some other northern states show similar proportions.²

These facts remained hidden because of our cultural tendency to connect extreme racism with the South. In reality, sundown towns were rare in most of Dixie, and the places they did spread reveal interesting facets of the region’s racial history after Reconstruction. The later development of sundown suburbs in the South emulated northern patterns of race relations. Although we must take note of the gated communities now spreading across the South, the decline of sundown suburbs and towns may show that the region is moving beyond municipality-level and countywide residential exclusion at a faster clip than the Midwest and Northeast.

DEFINING A SUNDOWN TOWN

Sundown towns are (or were) all white by design. To determine whether a community is or was a sundown town, considering racial composition is paramount. Towns with no African Americans on their census rolls pass this first test, of course, but so do towns with non-household blacks. Izard County, Arkansas, for example, had 191 black residents in 2000, but only two African American households; the rest were inmates of the state prison. Live-in servants in white households also do not violate the taboo against independent black residents.

A town or county with very few African American households decade after decade, or with a sharp drop in African American populations between two censuses, is a sundown town if their absence is intentional. Credible sources must confirm that whites expelled African Americans, or took steps to keep them from moving in. Such local sources as county histories, WPA files, and even centennial coffee-table books may acknowledge that a community drove out its African American population or took steps to ensure that none ever entered. More often, though, residents do not write such things down, but conversation can be revealing. Credible details about what happened, gathered from more than one person, confirm a town’s sundown status. Newspaper articles, tax records, or the manuscript census can corroborate oral histories. Information from written and oral sources in nearby towns is also valuable.³

Although communities need not be all white to qualify as sundown towns, this countywide or municipality-level segregation is different from other types of smaller-scale segregation. Many communities kept African Americans from living in white neighborhoods but were not sundown towns unless they drew their municipal boundaries to exclude the black neighborhoods entirely. Neighbors across from the Sojourner Truth Homes protest desegregation in Detroit, Michigan, 1942, courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

Towns need not be quite all white to be considered sundown. When Boone County, Arkansas, expelled its African Americans in a 1909 race riot, for example, one remained as a servant to a white family. Alecta Caledonia Melvina Smith boasted she was the best nigger ever born, ’cause all the rest was run off.⁴ Some-times the sole black resident might be the shoeshine boy, living in the basement of the hotel. White residents invoked such exceptions to exemplify the rule to newcomers. Thus, a community