Black Postmaster in a White Town the Lynching of Frazier Baker and His Daughter

By Dr. Fostenia W. Baker

Frazier B. Baker a married, 40 year-old African-American schoolteacher and the father of six children was appointed postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina in 1897 under William McKinley the 25th President of the United States. Local whites objected and had undertaken a campaign to force his removal. When these efforts failed to dislodge Baker, a mob attacked him and his family at night at their house, which also served as the post office.

Baker and his infant daughter Julia Baker died at his house after being fatally shot during a white mob attack on February 22, 1898. The mob set the house on fire to force the family out. His wife and two of his other five children were wounded, but escaped the burning house and mob, and survived.

On December 10, 2018, U.S. Representative. James Clyburn, D-S.C., introduced a bill to rename the Lake City Post Office after Baker, saying it would ensure that his story won’t be forgotten.

The state’s entire congressional delegation co-sponsored the bill, and President Donald Trump signed it into law December 21, 2018.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669868804

Dr. Fostenia W. Baker

Frazier B. Baker a married, 40 year-old African-American schoolteacher and the father of six children was appointed postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina in 1897 under William McKinley the 25th President of the United States. Local whites objected and had undertaken a campaign to force his removal. When these efforts failed to dislodge Baker, a mob attacked him and his family at night at their house, which also served as the post office. Baker and his infant daughter Julia Baker died at his house after being fatally shot during a white mob attack on February 22, 1898. The mob set the house on fire to force the family out. His wife and two of his other five children were wounded, but escaped the burning house and mob, and survived. On December 10, 2018, U.S. Representative. James Clyburn, D-S.C., introduced a bill to rename the Lake City Post Office after Baker, saying it would ensure that his story won’t be forgotten. The state’s entire congressional delegation co-sponsored the bill, and President Donald Trump signed it into law December 21, 2018.

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Copyright © 2023 by Dr. Fostenia W. Baker.

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Rev. date: 05/22/2023

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In memory of my father, Maryland Leon, who told me the story of Frazier and his family lynching episode. As his eldest child, I am fortunate and blessed to have had this opportunity for his sharing history with me.

He was a hard worker, a meaningful role model with strong work ethics, and taught his children to be independent.

Also in memory of my mother, Pecola W. Baker, who encouraged me to complete this book.

CONTENTS

Foreword

Author’s Preface

A Note About Lynching

A Word About Racial Designations

Timeline Of Baker Life, Lynching, And Aftermath

Chapter 1     Black Patronage (1865–1877)

Chapter 2     A Controversial Appointment

Chapter 3     White Outrage

Chapter 4     Warning Shots

Chapter 5     Flames by Night

Chapter 6     A Postmaster’s Stubborn Persistence

Chapter 7     The Lynching (February 22, 1898)

Chapter 8     Widow and Children Flee to Charleston

Chapter 9     Helping the Baker Family

Chapter 10   Federal or State Court?

Chapter 11   Indictment

Chapter 12   The Trial (April 10–April 22, 1899)

Chapter 13   The Move North

Chapter 14   What Happened to the Surviving Children

Chapter 15   Lavinia Baker Speaks

Chapter 16   The Lynching Acknowledged

Chapter 17   Dr. Fostenia Baker Asks for Justice

Appendix A: A Timeline of Racial Injustice

What Local Newspapers Said at the Time

Known African-American Postmasters, 1880s

Bibliography

Appendix B: List of Figures

Appendix C: Known African-American Postmasters, 1800S

Appendix D: How President McKinley Met His Death

Appendix E: About Lake City, South Carolina

FOREWORD

I FIRST MET DR. Fostenia Baker many years ago at Howard University in the office of a mutual friend, Clair Louise Gidney. She thought I might be useful in helping Dr. Baker continue her research into her family history. As an author, lecturer, and historian who frequently receives requests such as these, I thought my contribution would be relegated to just quickly answering a few questions, but it turned into something more for me as I shared with her my research and advice. At this meeting and in subsequent telephone conversations through the years, Dr. Baker, already quite accomplished in her own right, related to me the poignant and mesmerizing story of an ancestor of hers, Frazier B. Baker, who was the African American postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina, in 1898. Bitterly resentful that a black man had received a federal appointment to such an important post and supposedly fearful of any semblance of negro rule, nightriders had deliberately set fire to the town post office, which adjoined the Baker home, trapping him, his wife, and their six children inside. As the family fled the burning structure, the nightriders tried to shoot them down. Baker was fatally wounded. His wife, Lavinia, and several of the children were wounded. The youngest child, Julia, was killed.

Under the caption Negro Murder and Politics, the Literary Digest for 1898 called it the most atrocious case of mob murder this year. This horrible and tragic event is at the heart of Dr. Baker’s book, Black Postmaster in a White Man’s Town. Her book, however, does much more than recount the bare details of what today is seen as a lynching; it is as well the story of a quest to secure a measure of justice in the form of public recognition, acknowledgment, and awareness of the crime that occurred so long ago. Her book not only chronicles those efforts but also recounts the journey of inner healing from the callous brutality that scarred several generations of the Baker family. Dr. Baker’s masterful text is written with the hand of the scholar as well as the heart of a family member who, herself, was born in South Carolina and understands all too well the tortured racial past of the Palmetto State. And as the world has seen recently with the killing of nine African Americans at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, there is still a troubled present to contend with.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Baker for all the years of research, writing, and at times, even heartache that she spent in uncovering what became an intimately personal chronicle and sharing it with a wider audience. When I met her at Howard back then, I had no idea that I would share, in a small way, her journey across the decades to produce such a fine and enduring narrative of a largely forgotten past.

C. R. Gibbs

Author, Lecturer, and Historian of the African Diaspora

Washington, DC

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

A S A TEENAGER in Effingham, South Carolina, I often overheard frightening stories about white men running blacks off the road as they traveled to the store on dark nights. This troubled my spirit, and I began spending time in hearing distance of my father.

One morning, as I walked the main road to the school bus stop with my siblings, I noticed a parcel of land with soil that had not been tilled for farming. At the end of the day, I approached my father about the parcel that was not being farmed.

Who owns the land? I asked my father.

Uncle Frazier, he replied.

Who is that?

Pa’s brother, he answered. Pa was Fairchild Baker, my grandfather and Frazier Baker’s half brother.

Who owns the land at present? I was curious and wanted to know more.

I don’t know, said my father. Pa tried to save the land, but it got away from him.

I was beginning to tire of pulling information in bits and pieces, but I asked, How did Uncle Frazier lose his property?

That’s when my father opened up and, like a flash flood, told me the story of a lynching that had happened eighteen years before he was born but still had an impact on our household. He said that a minister was sent to encourage Frazier to leave his position as postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina. The murder of Uncle Frazier and his baby daughter Julia had affected my father’s Christian life. For many years as a child, I had heard him make negative statements about ministers, saying, There are some preachers who can preach, but I don’t trust none of them because of what happened to Uncle Frazier and Julia.

He would now say, Preachers are dirty people. One sat up in Uncle Frazier’s house and tipped the white people off to set that house on fire. I began to understand why, although my mother was an avid churchgoer, Daddy only attended funerals.

In 1987, Robert Hux, a white professor at Francis Marion College in Florence, South Carolina, called to talk to my father about the story of the Frazier Baker lynching. This alarmed my father. Though it had happened eighty-nine years earlier, he thought trouble would come to the family if he shared information about the lynching. He believed the KKK was involved in some way.

I never forgot his telling me the story in my teen years, and his persisting fear of the past made me know for sure that I needed to tell the story. The enduring imprint the incident left on my father’s mind was a burden on my heart.

When I finally began writing the story of Frazier Baker, I asked my father to once more tell me the story of his brother’s tragedy. It was hard for him to talk about the charred bodies of his brother Frazier and Frazier’s twenty-three-month-old daughter Julia. Even in his old age, I could feel his sorrow as he talked about the incident. I’ve pulled the story together here, from public documents and from what my father told me, as his father told him.

That was a bad night, he said. His father, Fairchild, sometimes assisted Uncle Frazier with the mail in the post office. But Pa wasn’t there on that night.

The story haunted our family, which lived in terror for decades. Justice eludes our family to this day.

––Dr. Fostenia B. Baker

A NOTE ABOUT LYNCHING

F OR MANY, THE word lynching conjures up images of victims killed by hanging, but the term encompasses the taking of individual life by a mob under a wide variety of extralegal circumstances. In addition to the traditional noose, mobs riddled their victims with bullets, burned them to death, and mutilated their bodies. The victims of lynching bees in America were not always black; whites and Hispanics were often lynched when accused of cattle rustling on the nation’s Southwestern frontier in the nineteenth century, and white Tennesseans in 1916 went so far as to hang a circus elephant named Mary from a railroad crane after the mistreated animal had fatally trampled an inexperienced trainer (Pete Daniel 52-54). But the overwhelming majority of lynching victims were African-American males in the southern United States and the vast majority of lynch mob participants were whites.

In the closing decade of the nineteenth century the nation experienced a meteoric rise in lynchings. In the peak years of racial violence, between 1889 and 1899, one person was lynched every other day (Williamson, Crucible 117-18). An increasing number of the victims were black males in the Deep South states, many of them accused by white mobs of having made sexual advances against white women. Pioneering African-American anti-lynching activists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett argued as early as 1892 that the widespread charges of rape were unfounded. Historians and other investigators of lynching have since confirmed her assertions, conclusively demonstrating that the alleged ‘epidemic of rape’ did not in fact exist.

The timing of Frazier and Julia Baker’s deaths in 1898 places the Lake City lynching on the cusp between the peak in lynchings in the late-1880s and 1890s and the cementing of de jure segregation in the South. Four years of Civil War and a decade of Reconstruction had failed to remold the South along lines of racial equality. In the two decades following the redemption of the South by native white leadership, the door to equality wedged partially open by blacks and Union troops during Reconstruction was shut closed forcibly by a unified white South. Suffering under the stigma of regional cultural and political marginalization and entering a period of increasing economic difficulty, many frustrated whites found an outlet in reaction. They targeted their rage against blacks, believing they sought to abandon their traditionally subservient place in their quest for equality. In this climate of reaction, whites lynched thousands of African Americans.

––David C. Carter, Assistant Professor of

History, Auburn University, Alabama,

from The Lynching of Postmaster Frazier Baker

and His Infant Daughter Julia in Lake City,

South Carolina, in 1898 and Its Aftermath

From the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, the term lynching did not have any racial implications. Targets included Tories, horse thieves, gamblers, and abolitionists. But starting in the 1880s, mob violence was increasingly directed at African Americans. Between 1882 and 1964, nearly five thousand people died from lynching, the majority African-American. The 1890s witnessed the worst period of lynching in US history. The grim statistical record almost certainly understates the story. Many lynchings were not recorded outside their immediate locality, and pure numbers do not convey the brutality of lynching. Lynchings, which were often witnessed by large crowds of white onlookers, were the most extreme form of Southern white control over the African-American population, regularly meted out against African Americans who had been falsely charged with crimes but in fact were achieving a level of political or economic autonomy that whites found unacceptable."

––The Murder of Postmaster Baker, History Matters

A WORD ABOUT RACIAL DESIGNATIONS

A BOSTON POST STORY in 1899 uses the phrase uppity nigger. In the book History of Lake City, South Carolina (1976), author Margaret L. Carter uses the terms Negro, Negroes, and colored folk. Elsewhere in the country, there was a progression from negro to Negro until, in the late 1960s, first Black and then black, and White and white, became more acceptable as Negro began to feel too reminiscent of the Jim Crow days. In 1957, the South Carolina Supreme Court prohibited calling a white person a Negro, contending that it was libelous per se and the affronted party did not have to prove damages. More recently, African American, with and without the hyphen, have become more common.

In quoting or summarizing material from historical newspaper accounts, I have kept the terminology used at the time and, otherwise, have tended to stick with the word most commonly in use at the time being discussed but haven’t made a fetish of being correct.

TIMELINE OF BAKER LIFE,

LYNCHING, AND AFTERMATH

1802

T HE EMPLOYMENT OF African Americans as mail carriers was banned by Congress in 1802. A well-planned slave rebellion in 1791 in the French colony of St. Domingue, now Haiti, closely watched by the American press, had contributed to a growing fear among Southern whites that American slaves would organize a rebellion . . . Congress . . . in an Act of May 3, 1802, declared that after the 1 st day of November next, no other than a free white person shall be employed in carrying the mail of the United States, on any of the post-roads, either as a post-rider or driver of a carriage carrying the mail.

This prohibition endured until March 3, 1865, when Congress directed that no person, by reason of color, shall be disqualified from employment in carrying the mails (13 Stat. 515).

—US Postal Service, "African American

Postal Workers in the 19th Century"

1858 [approximate]

Birth of Frazier Benjamin Baker, eldest son of Isaac Baker, farmer, in the last decade of slavery, in Lynchburg, South Carolina.

1863

William Cooper Nell is appointed a clerk at the Boston, Massachusetts Post Office. Nell is not only the first known African American employee of the US Post Office Department, but also the first known African American civilian employee of the federal government.

—US Postal Service, "African American

Postal Workers in the 19th Century"

1865–1869

Andrew Johnson, president

In 1867, Congress made universal male suffrage one of the conditions for southern states to be readmitted into the Union and put federal troops in the South to maintain law and order. In 1870, the 15th Amendment guaranteed the right to vote regardless of race. For the first time in the nation’s history, African American men had political power. In many areas of the South, African Americans comprised the majority of voters. In three states––Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina––most of the population was African American. After the Civil War, the black vote was decisive in the election of several Republican presidents, including Pres. Ulysses Grant in 1868. In keeping with the political patronage system of the nineteenth century, more than 1,400 African Americans were appointed to political office in the South by the victorious Republicans, in what historian Eric Foner termed America’s first attempt at a functioning interracial democracy.

—US Postal Service, "African American

Postal Workers in the 19th Century"

1869–1877

Ulysses S. Grant, president

1869

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass worked together on abolition but then had a bitter split over who should be first to get the right to vote—women or blacks.

During a heated meeting in New York City’s Steinway Hall in 1869, Stanton wondered, Shall American statesmen . . . so amend their constitutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, bootblacks, butchers and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South? At which point, Douglass rose, paid tribute to Stanton’s years of work on civil rights for all, and replied, When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung from lampposts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and rage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down . . . then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.

Blacks won the right to vote with the 15th Amendment in 1870; women won theirs with the 19th Amendment, in 1920, a half-century later. Each of their causes would stutter-step along at sometimes different paces, but usually in some loose if not formal concert.

—Mark Leibovich, "Rights vs. Rights:

An Improbable Collision Course,"

New York Times, 2008,

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/

weekinreview/13leibovich.html

1877–1881