February 11 - February 15, 2017
February 11: Booker T. Washington Commemorative Half Dollar, 1946
His name has already appeared in two of the posts from the first 10 days of this month. His face was the first of African heritage to appear on a United States coin. It’s time to talk about Booker T. Washington.
He was born enslaved on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia, near Roanoke, inheriting his lack of freedom from his mother, as she did from hers and her mother received from hers before that. His father was white, a resident of a nearby plantation. His last name was apparently Taliaferro, pronounced “Tolliver” in Virginia, a name as old as the Commonwealth itself. Young Booker was an adolescent when his mother told him that Taliaferro was the name given him at birth; he adopted it as his middle name, abbreviated with a T so familiar that when it followed the name Booker in a Memphis funk band or a professional wrestling ring, everyone knew where it came from.
Booker T. Washington’s last name came from his mother’s husband, who he met in West Virginia following his removal from the county of his birth in 1865, when he was 9. The Union Army had occupied the area, allowing those promised freedom by the Emancipation Proclamation to finally collect. Once in West Virginia, Washington enrolled in school, learned to read, and set himself on his way to college at the institutions today known as Hampton University and Virginia Union University.
He was only 25 when he was chosen to run a school recently conceived and funded by the state of Alabama. It was called Tuskegee Normal School, though it is today called Tuskegee University. Tirelessly working to fund the school, then operating on a shoestring, Washington courted Northern philanthropist and titans of commerce with a rhetoric not unlike TV personality Mike Rowe’s: that southern African-Americans could improve themselves through training, a willingness to work hard at industrial jobs, and a mastery of the commonplace to find steady work in the post-Reconstruction Southern economy.
Washington’s gospel of personal responsibility, hard work, and industrial education resonated, both with southern blacks who had found little opportunity in the region’s primarily agricultural economy and with northern whites, who approved of Washington’s focus on work and education while still primarily working within the roles that African-Americans were expected to fill.
In 1895, Washington enunciated his ideology at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, a speech that has become known as “the Atlanta Compromise.” He called for southern African-Americans to abandon their goals of elevation in the political and social spheres in favor of making an honest, and separate, living:
“Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the state legislature was more sought than real estate or industrial skill; that the political convention or stump speaking had more attractions than starting a dairy farm or truck garden ... Cast down your bucket where you are — cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded. Cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.”
Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech also used a tactic that had long been used against African-Americans. He defined immigrants, then streaming into the United States from southern and eastern Europe in particular, as “the other,” appealing to white Americans in hopes that they would see the Americanness of African-Americans as a closer connection than the white skin of the arriving immigrants:
“To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides. Cast down your bucket among these people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared your forests, built your railroads and cities, and brought forth treasures from the bowels of the earth, and helped make possible this magnificent representation of the progress of the South.”
His appeals to White America made him the first nationally-revered African-American celebrity. Money poured in to his school in Tuskegee, and thousands appeared in auditoriums from small towns to Carnegie Hall to hear him speak. At the same time, even as many older and more conservative African-Americans in the South found great merit in his slow-moving, accomodationist, compromise approach to racial politics, many well-educated younger African-Americans in the North expected more out of their future than a chance to till fields, clear forests, and build railroads with no progress towards real political and social power.
Booker T. Washington appears to have supported some of the more aggressive goals and tactics of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, but only quietly. Though his fame never ebbed, his political power and legacy was short-lived. Washington’s focus on African-Americans succeeding in familiar roles in the South meant that his gospel had little relevance during the Great Migration, when southern blacks moved north seeking both economic stability that the agrarian south could not offer and civil and bodily security that its institutions refused to grant.
Thirty-one years after his death, Booker T. Washington became the first African-American to appear on a United States coin, as Congress took advantage of a commemorative coin program geared to collectors. The profits would be used to make Washington’s Virginia birthplace into a national monument. The coin was designed by an African-American sculptor named Isaac Scott Hathaway, a professor at Tuskegee’s Department of Ceramics. It sold poorly, and many were melted or simply placed in circulation.
February 12: Slave Trade Abolished by Great Britain Token, 1807
And I do hereby further declare all indentured Servants, Negroes, or others, (appertaining to Rebels,) free that are able and willing to bear Arms. -- Lord Dunmore, hiding on a ship off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia, November 1775
The smoke had barely cleared from Lexington Common when revolutionary tumult followed in Virginia. The battles of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775. The next day, Lord Dunmore, the Scottish-born British royal governor of Virginia, seized the colony’s gunpowder stores, located at the familiar octagonal gunpowder magazine in the middle of what is today Colonial Williamsburg. Virginians filled the streets in protest over this usurpation of power. As weeks became months, anger towards the governor intensified. On June 8, 1775, Dunmore fled Williamsburg, taking refuge aboard a ship bobbing and creaking in Norfolk harbor. Months passed, and the Virginia rebels grew stronger. By November, Dunmore’s tenuous hold on Virginia grew desperate. He declared martial law and pronounced that any enslaved Virginians who could find their way to him to enter His Majesty’s forces would be freed.
The rebels of Virginia, who were fond of borrowing the hyperbolic language and iconography of slavery in defense of their uprising, declared that any slaves who returned to their masters would be pardoned but those who did not would be summarily executed.
Perhaps a thousand slaves took Dunmore up on his initial offer. He formed them into a hastily gathered and poorly trained military force called Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment, which was defeated in the only battle it entered. Smallpox killed more formerly enslaved soldiers than bullets and bayonets did, and by the time Dunmore pulled up his anchor and escaped to British occupied New York, just 300 former slaves survived to go with him.
As the Revolution went on, many white Loyalists were driven from the homes or escaped before trouble arrived on their door step. Some took their slaves with them, some left them behind to fend for themselves. Other enslaved men, women, and children found their way to British occupied areas in both north and south; often they were returned to their masters, but after the 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation, signed by Sir Henry Clinton as the commander-in-chief of British forces in North America, more were enrolled into the British forces fighting against the rebels. By 1779, much of the armed action was taking place in the Southern theatre, increasing the numbers of enslaved Americans British forces encountered. Once placed in the British military structure, most African-Americans were given non-combat roles. The largest force of black Loyalists was the Black Pioneers, a regiment charged with work like construction of roads and fortifications.
After the war’s mainland combat operations ended in 1781, the situation for African-Americans was chaotic. Many slaveowners, both Patriot and Loyal, sought to recover their former property, unleashing slave hunters to track down and return the enslaved men and families who had disappeared. African-Americans of all backgrounds were captured, re-enslaved, or even enslaved for the first time. Many who had escaped to the relative safety of British lines knew that the only way to preserve their security was to leave the United States entirely.
About 3000 African-Americans became African-Canadians in the spring and summer of 1783. Loyalist Americans had escaped to Nova Scotia over the course of the war, and at war’s end many black Loyalists joined them (inspiring the miniseries “Book of Negroes,” which I will see one of these days). A settlement named Birchtown became the first town in North America composed entirely of free African-Americans. Soon after arrival, the evacuated black Loyalists realized that they had been had: the land they were given was nearly unarable, while wealthy white plantation owners had been given choice plots. Competition for jobs among poor whites and the black loyalists, for whom agriculture was a non-starter, was intense, inspiring the Shelburne Riot of 1784, the first race riot on the continent. Anger simmered. Discontent grew. And the weather was terrible.
Thomas Peters was born in modern-day Nigeria before being captured, sold, and transported against his will to North Carolina in 1760. When the war arrived in Wilmington in 1776, he was enslaved at a flour mill. He escaped to British lines and placed in the Black Pioneers, serving with distinction and promoted in rank before his evacuation to Nova Scotia in 1783. Peters heard of a British effort to relocate the poor blacks of London to an area in west Africa called Sierra Leone soon after its initial founding in 1787, the same region that was the home of many of the Africans who were sold into slavery in the sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia in the mid 17th century. Vestiges of that culture survives today among the Gullah-Geechee people, including language, music, dance, and vivid oral history.
Peters traveled to London in 1791 to beg the British government for redress for the crowded and poor black Loyalists of Nova Scotia. He successfully pled his case for permission to emigrate to Sierra Leone to members of the British establishment, interacting with Sir Henry Clinton and other former and current military leaders, many of whom had by then shown significant interest in the growing abolitionist movement. Upon returning to Nova Scotia, Peters gathered a group of about 1200 former American slaves. The following year, they emigrated together to Sierra Leone’s new capital of Freetown.
Within months, Peter was felled by malaria, but his legacy as the “George Washington of Sierra Leone” survived him. Even today, particularly among the Krio (Creole) population of Sierra Leone, he is considered the preeminent national hero. Over the next decade, more former Americans followed, and Sierra Leone’s population grew.
In 1807, to mark the end of British involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, private coiners in England produced penny-sized copper tokens to circulate in Sierra Leone. The reverse of the penny was inscribed “sale of slaves prohibited in 1807 AD under the reign of King George III” in Arabic, a language no one in Sierra Leone spoke. The message was to serve as a warning to slave traders who traveled from east Africa to the markets of the Atlantic coasts: your business here is over. The obverse depicts an Anglo and African shaking hands with a joyous village in the background under the words We Are All Brethren. Just three decades earlier, most who would spend these coins had been enslaved Americans.
February 13: Douglas National Bank (Chicago and Dunbar National Bank (New York) Notes)
There are few drivers of economic growth as important as well-funded, properly regulated banks. Without access to banking, small businesses cannot borrow money to grow, entrepreneurs cannot take their measured risks, would-be homeowners cannot get mortgages, and people of all sorts have no place to secure their cash, investments, and valuables.
As the Great Migration caused African-American communities to coalesce in most larger Northern cities, lack of access to banking became an acute impediment. While most Southern blacks were still working in farming occupations, either sharecropping as tenants or tilling their own land, those who gathered in the North were mostly forced to leave agriculture behind. Many found work in service industries, but those with entrepreneurial hopes were often crushed before they started. New to the cities, faced with racial discrimination everywhere, and burdened by an absence of credit history, those who would be shop owners, manufacturers, or run other sorts of businesses had little choice but to work twice as hard to pay off loan sharks or other less than desirable lenders. Just getting started in business was hard enough without that obstacle to overcome.
The first African-American owned banks were founded in 1888, well before the Great Migration started in earnest. As with most banks in this era, they were small affairs, poorly funded and without much oversight. The National Banking Acts of the 1860s offered a new framework to local banks, trading greater oversight for the backing of the Federal government, including the opportunity to issue their own Federally-printed paper money. More than 12,000 local banks either became National Banks or were founded under that structure before the first African-American owned National Bank was opened in Chicago in 1922.
The Douglass National Bank (named for Frederick Douglass, who was already dead by then) was opened on the South Side of Chicago by serial entrepreneur Anthony Overton, who owned a cosmetics company and a life insurance firm, as well as a newspaper (The Chicago Bee) and magazine (The Half Century) oriented to an African-American audience. The Overton Building, constructed in 1922 and 1923, took up most of a city block and housed all of his businesses in its four stories, including the Douglass National Bank on the ground floor. It was considered the business centerpiece of a neighborhood called the Black Metropolis, today better known as Bronzeville. Ida B. Wells, the reformer and investigative journalist who was among the founders of the NAACP, and Rube Foster, called “the father of black baseball,” both lived in the neighborhood. Louis Armstrong moved nearby the year the Douglass National Bank opened.
Perhaps the best known African-American bank of the era was the Dunbar National Bank of New York, named for the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and funded by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It opened in the ground floor of the Dunbar Apartments in Harlem, on Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Boulevard between 149th and 150th Streets, in September 1928. The complex housing the Dunbar Apartments was new and innovative, including amenities such as a playground and nursery to appeal to the growing African-American middle class. W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and the polar explorer Matthew Henson (who will turn up in a later piece this month) all moved into the Dunbar after it opened in 1926; Du Bois asked for a rent reduction in 1935, during the pits of the Depression, and was turned down.
On September 8, 1928, Du Bois was invited to the bank’s grand opening by President John D. Higgins, who wrote “this is a bank without prejudices, whether of race or sex or religion or economic status,” defining it as an institution intended to “contribute, steadily and wisely, along with other agencies, to the betterment of business conditions here in Harlem” as the Harlem Renaissance reached its height. Literature, art, and music flourished in the neighborhood alongside of business, creating an environment of achievement and pride. Though the founding of financial institutions dedicated particularly to Harlem’s African-American community exemplified this spirit, the all-white board of directors of the Dunbar National Bank did not. While the bank had all black tellers and staff from the day its doors opened, a point of pride that the bank leadership advertised in the NAACP magazine The Crisis, black executives were not appointed until 1929. One of them, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, was the son of Blanche K. Bruce, former US Senator and Register of the Treasury.
These National Bank Notes from the Douglass National Bank of Chicago and the Dunbar National Bank of New York were crisp and new at a moment of great hope for the burgeoning African-American middle class. Neither bank survived the Great Depression, and for all intents and purposes the black middle class didn't either. The Douglass National Bank went into receivership in 1932, the Dunbar National Bank followed in 1936. Urban African-Americans were especially hard hit by the Depression: often first to get laid off and last to be re-hired, facing discrimination from government agencies and increased competitions in their neighborhoods from continued northerly migration. The New Deal ameliorated their plight somewhat, expanding Roosevelt’s base and changing the loyalties of many African-American families who had been Republicans for generations.
Neither one of these scarce and collectible bank notes is worth as much as what $5 placed in a bank at 5% interest since 1933 would be today, but whoever had them in 1933 likely was in no position to be doing anything with paper money but spending it to keep themselves fed, warm, and dry.
February 14: Hardy Billiard Hall Token & the Tulsa Race Riot
The posts I’ve written so far this month have begun one of three ways.
Sometimes the object comes first, something familiar, interesting, and relevant. A little bit of research enables me to hang some flesh on it, make it personal, and fit it into a broader historical context.
Sometimes the history comes first, could be a person or an era, and I try to build the story in a way that allows an already familiar object to be shoehorned into it.
Sometimes I go seeking for an object to represent a story that needs telling. The Lincoln plaque that was given away to audiences seeing The Birth of A Nation in 1915 was one of those -- I had never encountered it before, in person or any other form.
Today’s post fits most closely into the third category. The story of the Tulsa Race Riots is important to know and devastatingly tragic. But could there possibly be any numismatic tie-in to such a short, dreadful event?
Perhaps the most avidly collected numismatic items from Oklahoma are trade tokens. There are hundreds upon hundreds of them, for all manner of small businesses: Indian trading posts, Wild West bars, car washes, grocers, you name it.
Settling upon the field of Oklahoma trade tokens, also known as “good-fors” (as in “good for one drink”), I found a map of the neighborhood devastated by the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. It was called Greenwood, a dense business district populated almost entirely by African-Americans. It earned the name “Negro Wall Street” at the time for its prosperity, with every little street lined with businesses, restaurants, shops and hotels, along with the people who made them succeed. Scanning the listings of Tulsa trade tokens, I tried to find ones that looked to be from the right era that were issued by merchants whose addresses more or less lined up with the streets in Greenwood.
I found a few, but ended up focusing on one for a deeper research dive. It looked to be of the right era. The business name was Hardy Billiard Hall, located at 111 N. Greenwood Avenue, then at the very heart of Tulsa’s African-American business district. Marked “good for 5 [cents] in trade,” this token’s value meant it was probably good for a mug of beer. This token served as both wager and witness to games of pool and conversations any one of us would have loved to have seen firsthand.
The owner of this little pool hall was named Ples L. Hardy. His first name, sometimes abbreviated “Pleas," was short for Pleasure. His 1917 World War I draft card listed the same address as the one on the token, along with his place of birth (Coffeeville, in Upshur County, Texas, now a ghost town) and his occupation: “own pool hall.” Ples was short, single, and 26 years old.
As it turns out, he was also an ex-con, of a sort. Ples’ entrepreneurial streak caught him afoul of a local ordinance forbidding the manufacturer of alcohol, 7 years before Prohibition was the law across the land. Tulsa’s police nabbed him for bootlegging and threw him in jail. In September 1913, a Tulsa judge declared the law unconstitutional, and the dismissal of the case made national news.
By 1921, Tulsa was a tinderbox. Segregated by law, prone to lynchings and mob violence, the city opened its arms to the Klan more than it did to African-American veterans returning home from Europe. Since the end of World War I, the whole city had been on edge.
It’s impossible to know where Ples Hardy was on Memorial Day 1921, but it’s a fair guess that he was at his pool hall. That Monday night, May 30, 1921, some kind of incident happened in a downtown Tulsa elevator -- an accident, an assault, or a lover’s quarrel -- between a 19 year old African-American named Dick Rowland and an acquaintance of his, 17 year old Sarah Page, a white elevator operator. Whoever followed Rowland onto the elevator got the feeling Page was upset and called the police.
The next day, Tuesday, May 31, they tracked young Dick Rowland down on Greenwood Avenue, near Hardy’s pool hall. Rowland was dragged to jail. Character witnesses in both the white and black communities stuck up for him, but concerns that he would be lynched grew. That night, a group of a few dozen black men showed up at the jail to defend Rowland from the mob they expected. Many of them were armed. Confronted with a crowd of African-Americans with guns in the middle of town, white Tulsans formed a mob of their own. By 11 PM, the crowd outside the jail numbered more than 2000 people. Afraid and expectant, both sides of crowd bristled. A shot was fired. A riot followed.
When the sun came up on Tulsa on Wednesday, June 1, the entire Greenwood neighborhood had been reduced to ashes. Some 300 people were dead. More than 1250 houses had been destroyed, along with hundreds of black-owned businesses, a hospital, and the junior high school. The most prosperous African-American community in the country had been obliterated.
The Hardy Billiard Hall and the block that surrounded it -- barbers, a drug store, a cafe, a theatre -- was an ashen wasteland. O.W. Gurley, an African-American real estate mogul, owned the hotel across the street from the pool hall. He recalled the rioters were “white men, they was wearing khaki suits, all of them... they rattled on the lower doors of the pool hall and the restaurant... There was a deal of shooting going on, somebody was over there with a machine gun and shooting down Greenwood Avenue.”
Hardy’s business didn’t survive, and when I found him missing from the 1930 census I presumed he didn’t either. Then I found his World War II draft card: Pleas Hardy, aged 51, still living in Tulsa and working at a “cold drink stand” on Greenwood Avenue. As it turns out, when 1930 rolled around, Pleas was in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. The records exist of his crime, but I haven’t gotten them yet; I’d bet after his business was burned to the ground, his old experience in the bootlegging game was too profitable to ignore.
Ples Hardy lived until 1966, by which time the tokens he used to use at the pool hall were worthless brass junk. He probably knew some of the people that today eat lunch at a Tulsa greasy spoon called Wanda J’s Next Generation Restaurant. There’s a plaque on the building to mark Hardy’s business, which sat on that exact spot: “Destroyed 1921, Not Reopened.” For years, most of the country forgot about what happened in Tulsa. Everyone on Greenwood Avenue remembered.
February 15: Our Colored Troops - World War I Military Medal
We begin today with a dispatch from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania dated July 11, 1919. World War I had been over for exactly eight months, and Americans of all classes were basking in the glory of victory. Harrisburg, a bustling industrial town on the Susquehanna River and the state’s capital, had refilled with troops returning home.
On page nine, below the fold in a section called “In Whirl Of Society and News of Personal Interest," beneath a piece about a local five-year old breaking her collarbone while visiting her grandparents and an update on Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lynch Montgomery’s dinner party, there appeared a headline reading “Muse Lures Colored Cook from Her Pots and Pans to Poetry.” The article began:
“Louisa Virginia Johnson, cook for Governor and Mrs. Sproul, who knows how to give a fried chicken the proper VanDyke shade of brown and can make sweet potatoes look like a Turner sunset when she does them Southern style, has turned her artistic endeavors to poetry ... ”
“Today, after laying aside the nutmeg grater and the sugar sifter, she produced a poem which she entitled ‘A Plea for the Negro Soldiers.’”
They have fought and spilt their blood
On the foreign fields of France,
They have won the world’s respect
In the battle of No Man’s Land.
Let all the world know
The race that are jim-crowed.
Of all the hardships they endured, of all the segregation,
You can’t find a single traitor
Among the Negro nation.
If you could trust him at the front
Then why not treat him right?
Give him his right that he has won
Speak of the brave deeds he has done.
Then respect our colored heroes!
Give them a hearty welcome home!
Speak kindly of what they have done
Give them the honor they have won.
Then true democracy will exist
In America as well as France!
Give the Negro what is due him!
Give our brave boys a chance!
Let peace abide forever more
Let freedom float from shore to shore
Until all nations will live in peace
And all racial conflicts cease!
We are of a darken race we know
But the Great God has made us so.
We know we are counted in his sight
But on earth we ask for equal rights.
Equal rights for our colored heroes
They went to give their life and all
Those who their country need for service
They did not shirk beneath the call.
By the time Ms. Johnson had written her poem, “our colored heroes” had become a popular phrase nationwide. A few weeks earlier it appeared atop an editorial in the Tombstone (Arizona) Weekly Epitaph, which noted “Uncle Sam is genuinely proud of all who served him in the great war, and when ‘all’ is used it means every patriot, without distinction of race or creed.” That spring a popular newsreel called “Our Colored Heroes” ran in theatres nationwide, made after an outcry ensued over another moving picture called “America’s Answer” had debuted in November 1918, celebrating the American doughboys but without showing the face of any one of the 400,000 African-American servicemen who answered his country’s call.
The phrase also headlined an angry letter to the editor in St. Louis that proclaimed “St. Louis should be ashamed of herself. Her white people are so full of that old Southern hatred for the colored man that she did not go to one minute’s trouble or to one penny of expense to receive her colored boys, who gave themselves to Uncle Sam that they might to go France and fight for democracy, the same as the white boys of this city,” white boys who had been welcomed home with a parade that had excluded their African-American comrades.
The feeling of exclusion percolated through African-American communities nationwide. Black men had served valiantly, including Croix de Guerre recipients William Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts, black men who received France’s highest military honor but were passed over for American decorations. Johnson died in 1929. He finally received his Purple Heart in 1996 and the Congressional Medal of Honor in 2015. In 1918, while he was still alive to appreciate the black community's adulation, he was featured in a popular full color lithograph depicting his exploits. The print was entitled “Our Colored Heroes.”
The segregation that infected the ranks of the United States armed services until after World War II stung particularly badly after the equality the troops tasted in the cities and towns of France. Lauded as heroes in Paris, African-American servicemen were merely faces in the crowd while white units marched down the streets of their hometowns with banners and brass bands.
This medal appears to have been an attempt to celebrate the African-American veterans of the Great War in some modest way. These were made privately and sold cheaply, perhaps to commanding officers or hometown welcome committees. They were distributed nationwide; stories exist of examples given out at a VFW chapter in New Orleans, by a preacher in Arkansas, and elsewhere. The reverse of the medal was also used on three somewhat chintzy brass medals struck to commemorate the postwar peace. The obverse of this medal, which was initially distributed on a ribbon to closely resemble an official military decoration, depicts an eagle and an African-American solider with the inscription “Our Colored Heroes.” The Statue of Liberty appears tiny on the horizon, so far away that it can barely be seen at all.