February 21 - February 25, 2017
February 21: The NAACP Spingarn Medal
Today is John Lewis’ 77th birthday and would have been Barbara Jordan’s 81st. They not only share a birthday, a lifetime dedication to civil rights, and the honor of having been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, but they have something numismatic in common: the NAACP Spingarn Medal.
The Spingarn Medal was instituted in 1914 by a wealthy New Yorker named Joel Spingarn. When he died in 1939, a bequest in his will funded the medal in perpetuity. The first recipient was a son of Charleston, South Carolina, Ernest Everett Just, who chaired the biology and zoology departments at Howard University. His scientific genius was recognized while his career was in its infancy, but he was never offered a job at one of the more celebrated American research universities. Disappointed with the opportunities for advancement in the United States, he went to Europe in 1929 and never worked in this country again. He remains revered as a founder of Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
The names of those who have been awarded the Spingarn Medal is a who’s who of African-American high achievement: W.E.B. Du Bois. Mary McLeod Bethune. George Washington Carver. Carter G. Woodson. Marian Anderson. Ralph Bunche. Thurgood Marshall. Martin Luther King, Jr. John Hope Franklin. Alvin Ailey. Oprah. Every one of the Little Rock Nine. Each of the 108 recipients could be singled out for a biography.
Barbara Jordan was recognized with the Spingarn Medal in 1992. After attending segregated schools her entire childhood in Houston, segregation also kept her from attending the University of Texas; she attended Texas Southern instead. In 1966, the year Texas Western made history by becoming the first basketball team with an all-black starting five to win the NCAA tournament, she made history by becoming the first black woman ever elected to the Texas Senate. Six years later, she was elected to the US House of Representatives. After three terms which saw her rise to national prominence, she retired from politics and became a professor at the school that Jim Crow made impossible for her to attend.
John Lewis won the Spingarn Medal in 2002, and it’s fair to wonder what took the NAACP so long. Born into a family of Alabama sharecroppers, he helped integrate the lunch counters of Nashville at age 20, was one of the original Freedom Riders at 21, and was the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington at 23. When he came through my neighborhood as a Freedom Rider, he got off a Greyhound bus in Rock Hill, South Carolina and was beaten to within an inch of his life for daring to walk into a white waiting room. In 2009, the KKK member who beat him apologized on national TV, and John Lewis forgave him with open arms.
On the same trip, KKK members allied with Bull Connor firebombed his bus outside of Anniston, Alabama. Lewis was beaten again when the bus got to Birmingham. He was beaten in Selma on Bloody Sunday 1965, at the far end of the Pettus Bridge. But since his election to Congress in 1988, he hasn’t been beaten once. When Barack Obama gave Lewis a picture of his inauguration, he signed it “Because of you, John. Barack.” In 2011, President Obama gave Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Because of my profession, I’ve seen many of the rarest and most famous medals in American history, but I’ve never laid eyes on a Spingarn Medal. It turns out one was sold at a small antique auction in New York just last year, the one given to Duke Ellington in 1959. Missed by people like me, ignored by most auction attendees, it sold for about four grand, about half as much as Ellington’s red silk jacket.
(PS: it’s also Nina Simone’s birthday. Go turn some up in her honor, and if you haven’t ever heard Mississippi Goddam, today is the day to hear it for the first time.)
February 22: Reuben Taylor Emancipation Token, 1862
Since today is George Washington’s birthday, I want to talk a little about an object that depicts his face and the city that bears his name.
Washington, as we all know, was a wealthy Virginia planter before he became a Continental Army general or the first President of the United States. He was also a slaveowner, and we should be able to process the dichotomy that he ostensibly gave this country its freedom while fighting tooth and nail to withhold freedom from certain individuals. But this isn’t about him. This is about Reuben Tylor.
Reuben Tylor was born in Virginia in the mid 1830s. He didn’t know exactly when, and neither do we. In fact, despite my best exertions, I can’t tell when he died either.
The object associated with him does disclose another date, one Tylor (or Tyler) likely considered far more important than his date of birth: the day of his emancipation.
The first Federal legislation regarding emancipation was not Lincoln’s January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, nor the 13th Amendment, which ended legal slavery in the United States when ratified in December 1865. Instead, it was the little known District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which became law on April 16, 1862. That was the day that Reuben Tylor became a free man.
Policy regarding Washington DC, then as now, was entirely controlled by the Federal government, and thus every political controversy that has confronted the Federal government has been visited dramatically upon the municipal government of the District of Columbia. With most pro-slavery Southerners no longer seated in Congress, passing anti-slavery legislation was not politically difficult during the Civil War, though any anti-slavery bills that covered the precariously balanced border states were considered too hot to handle. Instead, the Senate and House both easily passed a bill providing for the emancipation of all those enslaved within the District of Columbia. The bill was written as a model for what a compromise effort towards emancipation could look like: providing for compensation of $300 per slave to those who held them in bondage, along with a $100 bounty to each slave if they would promise to pull up stakes and immediately leave the country, bound for Liberia or elsewhere.
About 3100 slaves were freed by the act. Reuben Tylor was one of them.
The badge he wore was intended to be used by Union solders as a dog tag. Sold by private sutlers, merchants who traveled with the soldiers, these badges were typically stamped with the soldier’s name, rank, home state, regiment, and company. Apparently some sutler got the idea to sell these in Washington DC to the newly emancipated; about a half a dozen of these, made with the same George Washington bust on the obverse and similar punches on the reverse, exist, all made out for those freed on April 16, 1862.
The badges could have offered the freed slaves a measure of security. Washington DC was surrounded by slave states in April 1862, and since both Maryland and northern Virginia were held by Union forces when the Federal Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on January 1, 1863, Tylor would have been liable to capture and re-enslavement in either state as late as the passage of the 13th amendment in 1865. While he would have received emancipation papers when freed, this sturdy metallic token could have been worn far more prominently.
Tylor is an unusual spelling, one that could be rendered either Taylor or Tyler in more official documents. Only one Reuben Tylor pops up in the sources of this era: a laborer who lived on Tin Cup Alley in Southwest Washington. The 1871 city directory listed Mr. Tylor with an asterisk next to his name; the front matter of the directory makes clear that names marked with a * were “colored.”
The 1870 census for the neighborhood that included Tin Cup Alley (also known as Willow Tree Alley) lists a former slave named Reuben Tyler, born in Virginia. The census taker guessed he was about 34. He shared his tiny abode with a 28 year old man named Sandy Tyler who “drives waggon,” Amelia and Sarah Tyler (aged 31 and 28) whose occupations were listed as “keeping house,” little 12 year old Adeline who attended school, and an infant named John W. Tyler.
Referring back to the 1871 city directory, we find a “driver” living on Tin Cup Alley named Sanders Tyler: Reuben’s brother Sandy, who spelled his last name just a touch differently.
Their street, described as “the toughest street within the borders of Washington” in a 1904 newspaper article, was a tiny alley between 3rd and 4 1/2 Streets going east or west and B (now Independence) and C Streets going north and south. Today, their former home is underneath the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, the home of the Department of Health and Human Services, across the street from the National Museum of the American Indian and a literal stones-throw from the US Capitol.
In the 1880 census, Reuben Tyler is called age 50; his wife Millie (Amelia) is listed as 40, and young John was listed as 10; clearly the census taker was not too concerned about precision. The 1879 city directory says that Reuben was working as a sawyer and his wife Milly did washing, both living at 59 F Street, SW. The city directories of 1881 and later no longer list Milly though, suggesting she passed away.
Soon after that, Reuben himself disappears from the record. Perhaps he moved North with the first waves of what became the Great Migration, blending in with the hundreds of documented Reuben Tylers and Taylors listed in later censuses. Maybe he found a roommate, or lived with a child, and census takers just happened to miss him. Further research might determine an answer, but it might not. But at least we know that he lived, both in bondage and in freedom. This brass badge bridges that widest of all gaps.
February 23: W.E.B. Du Bois, 40th Anniversary of NAACP Button, 1949
He’s been mentioned in my posts this month about Haiti’s war for independence, the NAACP Spingarn medal, African-American banks of the 1920s and 1930s, and the one about James C. Napier. He could have very easily been written about in two or three others. Today’s his birthday, so he gets the focus more or less to himself: W.E.B. Du Bois.
Du Bois’ biography and career is too intimidatingly interesting and intricate to sum it up in a Facebook post. He was born in Massachusetts in 1868 and received a first class education. He became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895 and remained one of the most noteworthy and influential blank intellectuals for the rest of his life. His stature has arguably only grown since.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was a pretty odd duck, truth be told. He insisted that people who had been close friends and colleagues for decades call him “Dr. Du Bois.” He was relentlessly organized, which is probably the reason for his amazingly prolific academic output: hundreds upon hundreds of books, memoirs, essays, research papers, editorials, in addition to thousands of letters and the long-time editorship of the NAACP magazine The Crisis. If you credited him with inventing the modern infographic, no one would blame you; his charts looked like something you’d see on CNN on election night. He was a champion of unifying all people of color worldwide, including African-Americans and Africans but expanding even beyond them, yet remained a divisive character for the lines in the sand he drew, the political fights he picked, and the ideologies he espoused. He defies easy characterization and refused to be pigeonholed. The completely original ideas he enunciated remain vivid and revolutionary even today. One can only imagine how crazy they must have seemed a century ago.
His first academic project after becoming Dr. Du Bois was to go to Philadelphia, during a one year fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and investigate the city’s African-American community as a sociologist. His paper, entitled The Philadelphia Negro (1899), was among the earliest scholarly expositions in the field that would become African-American studies. He wrote about prejudice, acknowledging it “is not to-day responsible for all, or perhaps the greater part of the Negro problems, or of the disabilities under which the race labors” while also pointing out that “it is a far more powerful social force than most Philadelphians realize.” He described crime in the community as the product of an “atmosphere of rebellion and discontent that unrewarded merit and reasonable but unsatisfied ambition make” while asking “how long can a city teach its black children that the road to success is to have a white face?”
Partially in the hopes of answering that question, Du Bois was among the founders of the NAACP a decade later in 1909. It grew out of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights effort that sought something more than the separate-and-not-really-equal society Booker T. Washington envisioned, where African-Americans received some modicum of economic opportunity in exchange for staying out of the way in the political process. Du Bois demanded absolutely equality on every plane, but more than that, being able to be both proudly American and celebrating the unique heritage of being of African descent in this country, what he called “proud enduring hyphenation.”
Du Bois’ life of activism married historical research to criticism of current events, digging into the past struggles of African-Americans while equating them to the violence and racism they continued to face in the 20th century. Some called him a propagandist for the cause of equality, and it wasn’t a charge he turned away. He traveled extensively, becoming a missionary for his vision, one where the battle for equality and opportunity in America was only a small part of the battle against colonialism and prejudice worldwide. He at times embraced philosophical communism, though acknowledging the ruthlessness and prejudice that accompanied that ideology in every modern real-life manifestation.
At the end of the 1940s, even academic curiosity about Marxism was looked at with a side-eye. Du Bois ended up an object of suspicion over his writings critical of the negative aspects of capitalism, as well for associating with people whose socialist leanings were well known. He resigned from the NAACP in 1948, just before its 40th anniversary, distancing himself from the organization he helped found because he had become a detriment to their fundraising and political effectiveness.
In 1951, Du Bois’ work on behalf of an anti-war group called the Peace Information Center put him squarely in the crosshairs of the McCarthyites, who had him indicted for “failing to register as a foreign agent.” Albert Einstein’s offer to serve as a character witness ended that trial before it started, but Du Bois remained under careful examination through red-tinted glasses. His life of activism has been sullied by allegations of anti-Americanism when, in fact, his career had been devoted to the most American of all ideals: equality.
In 1951, promoters from the private sector pushed Congress to authorize a new commemorative half dollar depicting George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, a naked money grab after the commercial failure of the Booker T. Washington commemorative half dollars coined from 1946 to 1951. The new Carver-Washington half dollars were coined from silver leftover from melting down the unwanted Booker T. Washington half dollars. Congress bit on the Red Scare language inserted in the bill, requiring “all proceeds ... to oppose the spread of communism among Negroes in the interest of the national defense.” The same slander that had been hurled against Du Bois was now a matter of United States law: that African-Americans were particularly liable to communist thought and were thus a threat to the United States.
W.E.B. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana on August 27, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial the next day.
February 24: African-American Barbershop Tokens
I just got my hair cut, so how about we do one on barbers.
The concept of the African-American barbershop is probably familiar to most people today. If you haven’t actually been to one, you’ve probably seen the one in Coming to America or Barbershop with Ice Cube and Cedric the Entertainer. It’s a space like no other, where the social and community functions are every bit as essential as neatening up beards or executing a perfect fade. (And I’ve never been offered a mixtape while getting my hair cut by a white barber.)
African-American barbershops have not only been around since before the Civil War, but for decades barbering was a nearly exclusively African-American profession. The low barriers to entry (my dad used to tell me about the $5 clippers he bought during his Army service that, along with a milk crate, allowed him to make a dollar per trim) meant that entrepreneurs of modest means could hang out a shingle. While most served a white clientele exclusively at first, barbers started opening shops dedicated to African-American customers a generation after emancipation, giving rise to the neighborhood black barber shops of modern lore.
The first tokens that can be definitively traced to businesses owned by African-Americans were issued by barbers during the Civil War. Researcher John Ostendorf covered these in definitive fashion in a 2014 article in the Civil War Token Journal. He identified the tokens of 8 different African-American barbers who were active in the 1860s, four of whom were from Cincinnati, four of whom were from Nashville.
Among them, Daniel L. Lapsley of Nashville left the deepest footprint in the historical record. He was born in Kentucky about 1834. He was likely born enslaved, but was probably freed at a young age; the census describes him as “mulatto,” which typically meant he had a white father. He was one of the founders of The First Colored Baptist Church of Nashville. He was a natural entrepreneur, and while his first venture was a barber shop, one can imagine how being a barber laid the groundwork for the long careers in business and politics that followed.
In March 1864, two weeks after the CSS Hunley met its demise off Charleston, Lapsley and his business partner, Alfred McKay, announced that they had acquired a pre-existing business called the Sewanee House Shaving Saloon. The shop, located in the Sewanee House hotel, featured “a fine bath room” and, perhaps most importantly, the owners let all potential clients know that “we have just received a barrel of Bay Rum for the benefit of our customers.” Some of his tokens were struck as early as 1863, indicating that the Sewanee House location may not have been his first. He issued tokens for the Lapsley and McKay partnership, but also issued tokens as “D.L. Lapsley & Co.” This was a man who always had several irons in the fire.
According to the 1865 Nashville City Directory, Lapsley had opened another barber shop at 94 S. College Street, an address that’s today at the corner of Broadway and 3rd Avenue, halfway between the Hard Rock Cafe and the Johnny Cash Museum and just a few blocks from the city waterfront.
Period newspapers, including The Colored Tennessean and the Nashville Union and American, list Lapsley as a county delegate to the state convention of the Radical Republicans in 1865, 1868, and 1871, and he likely served many other years as well. Throughout the South, the Radical Republicans were a black majority party, helping to elect African-Americans to the House and Senate for the very first time. The 1868 county delegation that included Lapsley was composed of 7 African-Americans and 6 whites.
By 1870 he was serving as Justice of the Peace, an office that required a decent education and a reputation as a trustworthy man in the community. He held onto that position until 1882, even after the end of Reconstruction. Federal documents list him as a letter carrier for the US Postal Service in 1873, the same year his marriage to Josephine Avery was listed in the Nashville papers. In directories from the late 1880s, Lapsley is listed as a teacher and an attorney before disappearing from the Nashville documentary record.
The end of Reconstruction in 1877 made life miserable for many African-Americans in the South who had previously become well-established. Facing disenfranchisement, greater business challenges, and a far more threatening public sphere, many moved North or West. In fact, when Lapsley had been a member of the State Colored Men’s Convention in May 1875, the convention formed the Colored Emigration Society on the last day of their meeting, and appointed a few members to go investigate the conditions for African-Americans in Kansas. In 1877, the same group chartered the Lincoln Colonization Society. Lapsley was among those “appointed ... to go to Kansas and select suitable lands for colonization purposes.”
Daniel L. Lapsley was somehow able to stick it out in Nashville for another decade despite the rising wave of discrimination that followed Reconstruction. At the end of the 1880s, Lapsley left the town he’d called home for most of his life, heading west to Omaha, where he continued practicing law and started dabbling in real estate. He was even appointed an election judge in Omaha, overseeing the Republican primary in the Third Ward in the 1890 election.
The man who was once a hustling young barber, deacon, and politico in Nashville moved even further west around the turn of the 20th century, resurfacing in Portland, Oregon in 1900. While the census of 1900 lists him as an attorney, now widowed and living with his daughter and son-in-law, by 1903 he was working as a checkman (as in a coat check) at the Portland Hotel.
I wonder if anyone lingered long enough when grabbing their coat to let the old man tell them a story.
February 25: Charleston First Scots Presbyterian Church Communion Token
In December 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously observed that “the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning.”
America’s religious history is as vital as America’s racial history to understanding the big picture of this country’s story. Most of us got a little taste of the beginnings of America’s religious history in grade school: Puritan pilgrims in new England, Quakers in Pennsylvania, Catholics in Maryland, Anglicans in Virginia, and Scots Irish (also known as Ulster Scots) Presbyterians, mostly on the Appalachian frontier.
The First Great Awakening (remember “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” by Jonathan Edwards perhaps?) shook up American Christianity a great deal in the 2nd quarter of the 18th century. The Second Great Awakening arguably had an even greater impact right around the turn of the 19th century, as former members of old-line denominations and new immigrants joined dissenting denominations like the Methodists and Baptists.
While mainline Protestant sects were well-established in most Eastern Seaboard towns by then, the Baptist and Methodist preachers instead rode all over the countryside, traveling to revivals and converting folks as they went. Both of these groups targeted African-Americans, both free and enslaved. Certain congregations could not handle the influx of African-Americans to their churches, inspiring independent sects like the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the very first Protestant sect founded by African-Americans. The AME Churches tended to spring up where there were notable communities of free blacks. Mother Bethel AME Church in Philadelphia was the first. Remarkably, the second was in Charleston, South Carolina: the famous Mother Emanuel AME Church, founded in 1816 (or 1817).
In 1822, after a free black man named Denmark Vesey was charged with starting a slave revolt and executed, African-American churches in Charleston were sent underground. After 1834, they were banned entirely by law. Despite harsh penalties if caught, many of these congregations were kept alive and reemerged after the Civil War.
In the meantime, more mainline congregations in the South began to permit the attendance of both enslaved and free African-Americans to their churches. Slave owners believed enough in the humanity of their slaves to want them to find salvation without believing enough in their humanity to want them to be free. The numbers of black attendees to churches in Charleston and elsewhere swelled. This placed preachers in the seemingly untenable situation of presenting the same sermon concurrently to two groups with very different ideas on salvation: those who are enslaved and those who are doing the enslaving.
Unsurprisingly, these congregations were segregated during services, with African-American attendees confined to balconies, side boxes, or walled-off pews in the back. As numbers of black parishioners swelled, the seating arrangements caused friction. Displacing white attendees was frowned upon. Some congregations took the step of banning African-American attendance entirely.
One church in Charleston that welcomed larger and larger numbers of mostly enslaved black attendees was the First Scots Presbyterian Church. Founded in 1731, during the First Great Awakening, many (perhaps most) of the parishioners were slaveowners, and over the course of the 18th and early 19th centuries a number of them proselytized to their slaves, swelling the numbers of African-American Presbyterians.
This created an issue unique to the Presbyterians. In many traditional Presbyterian churches (along with related denominations like the Dutch Reformed), access to the sacrament of Communion was limited by tokens, handed out after an examination of worthiness to partake following 1 Corinthians 11:27. Those that passed were given a token, usually pewter or lead, to be returned at the time of the Communion service. At Charleston’s First Scots Presbyterian, the tokens were made of silver (a pretty fancy touch in this era), depicting the Communion table on one side with the inscription “Do This In Remembrance of Me,” from the Last Supper, while the other side showed a burning bush with the Latin phrase Nec Tamen Consumebatur, meaning “and yet, it was not consumed” from Exodus 3.
White parishioners had issues with using the same tokens as black parishioners, and some apparently believed the valuable silver tokens were likely to be stolen by their fellow congregants rather than returned in exchange for the Communion. In 1836 or 1837, the First Scots Presbyterian Church sent off to Philadelphia to have lead tokens made with the same design expressly for the use of their African-American members. These relics of antebellum religious segregation are extreme rarities today: in 20+ years in this business, I’ve seen two of them. The silver ones, ironically enough, are much more common today expressly because they were stolen .... by invading Union troops. When Charleston was sacked, the silver tokens were swiped and kept as souvenirs. The lead ones had no intrinsic value. It’s something of a miracle that any survive at all.