“Three-fourths of the 900,000 African-American veterans who served during World War II were coming home to communities in the old Confederacy. This was the world of Jim Crow, where black citizens were relegated to the margins of American democracy and expected to be the bootblacks and mudsills of the nation’s economy.” Richard Gergel, “Unexampled Courage”
A recent Washington Post Sunday magazine carried a lengthy article adapted from Steve Luxenberg’s “Separate: The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation” titled” The North, the South, and the Origins of Jim Crow.” During the 1830s numerous white entertainers donned black face and sang in a parody of what they claimed was black dialect. The most famous, Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, dressed in mismatched shoes and threadbare gold pants and billed himself as the “Original Jim Crow.” “Daddy” Rice performed a ludicrous off-balance jig during a ditty called “Jump Jim Crow” that contained the lines,“Weel about and turn about and do jis so/Eb’ry time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow.” By the end of the decade “jumping Jim Crow” became a synonym for compromising one’s principles and Jim Crow a synonym for separate accommodations in public facilities, such as locomotives. Historian Luxenberg found an October 12, 1838 notice in the Salem Gazettereferring to the “Jim Crow car at the end of the train.” Even after the Civil War, in the North as well as Dixie, African Americans were often segregated on trains and steamships; as Luxenberg wrote, “the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson ruling [was] written by a New England-born justice for a 7-1 majority dominated by Northerners.”
Prudence Crandall
In 1832 Canterbury, Connecticut schoolteacher Prudence Crandall, the wife of a minister, admitted 17 year-old African-American Sarah Harris to her private school for girls. When white parents withdrew their daughters, Crandall, with the support of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, turned her institution into exclusively a boarding school for young women of color until retaliatory actions by townspeople, including nuisance lawsuits and the poisoning of the school’s well, forced the Crandalls to leave town.
Growing up in Fort Washington, PA, I was aware of a small cluster of homes three blocks from us inhabited by black folks who took in foster children from Philadelphia. Some went to my elementary school, and I’d see them wearing clothes my brother and I had outgrown that Midge had given to our cleaning lady Ada Jenkins. In fifth grade my safety patrol corner was a block from where they lived, and I knew many by name. Bernard Johnson was a playmate. My first encounter with racism, I believe, was when the principal left Charlie Gaskins, the best player in our class, off the softball team. In seventh grade at Upper Dublin were classmates from the black community of North Hills, and I became friends with Percy Herder and Bernell Nash and had fantasies about five-foot-ten, full-breasted Beatrice Addie Green (even the names seemed exotic, given my white bread suburban upbringing). In the gym locker room I gaped upon spying Percy’s silk, yellow briefs with tiger stripes. My first epiphany regarding Jim Crow realities was a year later when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. A neighbor from Alabama blamed outside agitators, but scenes on TV exposed that as a lie.
C. Vann Woodward
In grad school at Maryland, C. Vann Woodward’s “The Strange Career of Jim Crow” (1955), based on lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, was must reading and led many of us to Woodward’s more substantial “Origins of the New South, 1877-1913” (1951). In the wake of Brown v. Board of Education(1954) Woodward traced the history of Jim Crow laws, which until the 1890s were more common in the North than in the South, where racial separation in public places was custom rather than law. Then when Populists began looking to bring African Americans into their movement, conservative “Bourbon” Democrats passed legislation to create, in Woodward’s words, “legally prescribed, rigidly enforced, state-wide Jim Crowism.”
Photographer of urban ruins Cindy C. “Cupcake” Bean, whose shot of a Lake Michigan sunset with steel mills in the background appears in “Gary: A Pictorial History,” wrote: “Crouching in the darkness of an abandoned house, I sat in the middle of a room filled with toys. The sun was sinking casting ominous shadows in the room. I sat next to the horse on springs and looked at it…it sadly stared into nothingness as I photographed it. I felt lost…lost in a room full of toys.” At first glance the horse on springs appears quite lifelike.
abandoned Glen Park church; photo by Cindy Cupcake
In the Jeopardy category “the 1870s,” I knew four of five answers, including Boss William Marcy Tweed and cartoonist Thomas Nest as the first to draw images of a donkey for Democrats, but fanned on one about a botanist who developed the russet potato, so-named due to its reddish-brown color. It was Luther Burbank, but I guessed George Washington Carver. Known as the “Peanut Man,” Carver also did research on sweet potatoes at Tuskegee Institute but not russet potatoes. One contestant guessed “Russet.” Along with Boston Massacre victim Crispus Attucks and educator Booker T. Washington, Carver was extolledduring the Jim Crow era as a nonthreatening Negro, but that should not detract from his remarkable discoveries.
At Chesterton library Steve Luxenberg’s “Separate” was in the New Books section, but I opted for Richard Gergel’s “Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sergeant Isaak Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring.” On February 12, 1946 (“The Great Emancipator” Abraham Lincoln’s birthday), Sergeant Isaak Woodard, wearing his army uniform, was returning on a Greyhound bus to his home in Augusta, Georgia upon receiving an honorable discharge after three years of military service as a longshoreman in the Pacific and came under intense fire in New Guinea. Sitting with a white G.I., passing a bottle back and forth, and talking too loudly to suit a passenger nearby, he was removed by the driver and arrested by Batesburg, South Carolina police chief Lynwood Shull. While having him in custody, Shull and other police beat Woodard severely with nightsticks, and later Shull jabbed him in the eyes with a billy club for answering “Yes” rather than “Yes sir.” The beating permanently blinded Woodard.
Isaac Woodard after beating; below, Julian Bond
The outrage mobilized black veterans and led to President Truman desegregating the military by executive order. After an all-white jury acquitted Shull, conscience-stricken Federal Judge Waring began issuing landmark decisions that challenged Jim Crow laws. His dissent in a 1951 case pertaining to segregated schools became the model for the unanimousBrown v. Board of EducationSupreme Court judgment overturning the Plessy “separate but equal” precedent and ordering the Topeka, Kansas school board to desegregate its schools. The role of the NAACP was crucial in publicizing and litigating the Woodard case. In “We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal team That Dismantled Jim Crow” (2018) Margaret Edds highlights the role of two NAACP attorneys who developed a legal strategy that found a receptive audience in federal judges in key civil rights cases.
Similar atrocities against returning World War I veterans occurred without such dramatic repercussions. Woodard’s blinding was not an isolated incident. In a chapter titled “Reign of Terror” Gergel documents horrendous occurrences in Georgia, Louisiana, and Tennessee. In the course of his research Gergel came across a statement by Julian Bond that the Isaac Woodard incident triggered the modern civil rights movement. Interviewing the civil rights icon and University of Virginia History professor, Gergel wrote:
Bond recalled from memory the story of Woodard’s blinding and described a photograph he remembered from his childhood. As Bond described the image, he began to weep openly. Composing himself, he apologized for the tears but stated that after all the years, “I still weep for this blinded soldier.”
A decade later, a photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body would shame the nation and provide propaganda for the Soviet Union.
Gergel’s use of the word mudsills, meaning those at the lowest social level, led me to this quotation by Abraham Lincoln, whose background was not far removed from those whom he described:
By the 'mud-sill' theory it is assumed that labor and education are incompatible; and any practical combination of them impossible. According to that theory, a blind horse upon a tread-mill, is a perfect illustration of what a laborer should be -- all the better for being blind, that he could not tread out of place, or kick understandingly. According to that theory, the education of laborers, is not only useless, but pernicious, and dangerous. In fact, it is, in some sort, deemed a misfortune that laborers should have heads at all.
Before being inducted into the army Woodard had laid railroad tracks, delivered milk, took construction jobs for two dollars a day, and got hired at a sawmill, Doolittle’s Lumber. Gergel wrote: "He worked as a 'log turner,' a backbreaking and dangerous job that earned him but $10 a week. Because they faced such dismal employment options, it is not surprising that despite the perils of service in the armed forces, Woodard and many other African Americans residing in the rural South viewed military service as a promising alternative."
Bill Hudnut
In the Winter 2019 Traces Editor’s Note, Ray Boomhower described his 28-year association with the magazine, including playing a role in soliciting reader opinion on what to call it, finally settling on a name similar to Steel Shavings. Pictured are numerous past covers, almost half of which contain articles of mine, including my one cover story on Gary pugilist Tony Zale. My most recent pays tribute to Gary civil rights pioneer Reverend L.K. Jackson, the self-styled “Hell-raiser from the East,” “Servant of the Lord’s Servant,” and “Old Prophet.” A current article describes the civil rights contributions of Republican Bill Hudnut, who served as mayor of Indianapolis for 16 years, beginning in 1976. At a time when most downstate politicians shunned Gary mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher Hudnut embraced him as a valuable ally and in 1980 supported Hatcher’s successful bid to become president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Several African Americans compete in Unit 154 duplicate bridge events, though not commonly in Chesterton, including Richard Hatcher’s wife Ruthellyn, and the Gary game has far more tables than ours. In 1932 blacks formed the American Bridge Association (ABA) due to being barred from American Contract Bridge League (ACBL) events, especially in the South. In 1967 the ABCL included in its by-laws a rule stating that nobody could be denied membership on the basis of race, color or creed. The ABA still exists and holds biannual tournaments.
photos by George Sladic, above, and Paul Kaczocha
George Sladic and Paul Kaczocha posted photos of the Lake Michigan lakefront, reminding me that visitors still don’t have free access to Mount Baldy due to possible sinkholes and that this is a dangerous season for intrepid or naïve visitors wandering onto ice formations that often break off from the shoreline. In fact Paul’s dog had to swim to shore when trapped that way.
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