February 26 - February 28, 2017
February 26: Magnolia Plantation Good For Token
As the end of Black History Month approaches, it’s worth pondering two questions and the relationship between them: why is there such a thing as Black History Month and what does it mean to be “black?”
I feel fairly comfortable weighing in on the first question, since I both consume history and (to some extent) teach it. Black History Month exists because stories of Americans of African descent were, for centuries, systematically excluded from mainstream history. I’ve written 25 stories here so far this month. How many did you learn in high school history? How many stories like them did you learn? Did stories of African American achievement or interest represent a proportion of the history you learned that was fairly equal to the proportion of African-Americans in this country’s population? The answer, of course, is that African-Americans have been long underrepresented in writing and teaching about American history. It’s a structural problem that has still not been entirely overcome. While history should celebrate the men and women inside the US Capitol, neglecting the story of those who built the building refracts America’s historical litany of winners into a funhouse mirror of unearned privilege that projects every third-base birth into a triple.
The second question is among the most sensitive in American history. We’re one of just a small number of countries (South Africa is another) that has ever had a legal definition of race, or, more properly, has had several evolving and often-changing legal definitions of race. At least a few of the men and women enslaved at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello were legally white at the time they were enslaved, as less than 1/8 of their ancestry was African. A hundred years later, after Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, they would be considered black; whites were those “who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian.” Everyone else, including Native Americans, were black by state law.
Today, it hardly needs to be said that the concept of a binary dichotomy of race is silly, an unnuanced view of a social construct that long masqueraded as science. Rather than congratulate ourselves for grasping this as modern Americans, it’s perhaps more useful to point out that this understanding has long been commonplace in other nations. It’s even been understood with more nuance in certain parts of our own country.
Near Natchitoches, Louisiana, the map shows an area called the Cane River Creole National Historical Park, consisting of a few preserved plantations that have barely changed since before the Civil War. Deep within French Louisiana, in a part of the country where people of French, Spanish, African, and Choctaw heritage had been intermarrying for generations before the Louisiana Purchase, the Cane River Creoles or “Creoles of Color” occupied a unique place on the social scale. The Cane River Creoles are Catholic, marking them as descendants of families who had occupied the area since before 1803. Though they are African-Americans, they are also descended from several other groups and many continue to speak French in the home.
Before the Civil War, the Cane River Creoles enjoyed a social standing close to that of white planters. Many owned land; some even owned slaves. After the Civil War, as Jim Crow set in, their once exalted position slipped. By the end of Reconstruction, the Creoles of Color were no longer viewed as distinct from other African-Americans on the basis of their long family histories, shared Catholic faith, or historic legacy as freemen. Segregation began creeping into their society as soon as France sold Louisiana, as local free Creoles of Color found themselves no longer welcome in the militia. The creeping ended in the early 20th century, as segregationists had only two columns to divide people into. The Cane River Creoles weren’t quite white enough to be white.
One of the plantations preserved at the Cane River Creole National Historical Park is Magnolia Plantation, which had been owned by the Hertzog family since French times. Many free Creoles of Color lived adjacent to the plantation on their own land, or lived as tenants who raised and sold their own crops on rented land. Other non-Catholic African-Americans whose families arrived after 1803 lived as sharecroppers, paying rent in crops but subsisting with precious little money. Some also lived and worked on the plantation as farmhands and employees.
The Hertzogs operated a little store on the plantation, one where Creoles of Color were welcome to shop and socialize. Other local African-Americans were paid in tokens for their work or crops, forcing them to not only live without cash, but to purchase their necessaries at the company store, allowing the plantation to profit from both their labors and their consumption. The brass token shown has never left the plantation; it remains there today in the collection of the National Park Service. Many of the descendants of the Cane River Creoles also remain, living exceptions to rules that have continued to change while they've stayed the same, steeped in their own fascinating history.
February 27: Congressional Gold Medals in Black History
As we near the end of the posts marking Black History Month, there’s a whole class of numismatic mementos of African-American history that feel like they should be discussed together, along with their common inspiration: the cycle of indignity and apology.
The African-American fighting men who traveled abroad for two world wars knew that the segregation and Jim Crow they faced at home was wrong, but for many the contrast between being cheered on the Champs d’Elysee and being jeered in their hometowns was too much to tolerate. Eugene Bullard was a World War I aviator from Columbus, Georgia who flew for France because his own countrymen wouldn’t let him fly a plane. He finished the war with a chest full of medals and decided to stay in France rather than return home to a place that disdained him. He signed up to fight for France in World War II, was injured in Spain in 1940, and moved back to the United States. In his homeland, he was beaten at a concert held to raise money for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Five years later, France invited him to solemn service beneath the Arc de Triomphe to relight the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The year Charles de Gaulle made him a Knight of the Legion of Honor, he was rediscovered operating the elevator at Rockefeller Center and asked to appear on the Today Show. He agreed to appear on the show, wearing his elevator operator’s uniform.
Upon his passing in 1966, the man known in France as “the Black Swallow of Death” was buried at a cemetery in Queens, in a section reserved for French veterans.
In 1994, he was posthumously given a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force, and a few weeks later the state of Georgia declared a Eugene Bullard Day.
The famous Tuskegee Airmen were trained to fly both fighters and bombers beginning in 1941, when the entire armed forces of the United States remained segregated. Having been excluded from aviation roles in World War I, the men of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group were eager to see combat and resentful of the segregation they continued to face. At the end of the war, officers of the 477th attempted to integrate an all-white officers club at Freeman Field in Indiana, resulting in 162 arrests. Coleman Young, later mayor of Detroit, was among them. Despite a defense team that included Thurgood Marshall, Lt. Roger Terry was convicted of “jostling” after coming into physical contact with an officer, demoted, and discharged dishonorably.
In 1995, Lt. Terry’s rank was restored, and the $150 fine he paid was refunded.
In 2007, the Tuskegee Airmen were honored with a Congressional Gold Medal.
In 1940, labor leader (and winner of the NAACP Spingarn Medal, as discussed last week) A. Philip Randolph threatened an enormous march on Washington if President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t use his executive power to combat racial prejudice in the defense industry hiring practices. Roosevelt followed with Executive Order 8802, which forbade prejudicial hiring standards and also required all branches of the armed forces to create units for African-Americans. The Marine unit formed after FDR’s action was known as the Montford Point Marines, named for the all-black camp where they attended basic training in Jacksonville, North Carolina. David Dinkins, later mayor of New York City, was a Montford Point Marine. He and 20,000 others served in World War II and the years after, until the Marines were integrated in 1949. Bigotry against the Montford Point Marines was the primary factor in their stations being far from combat in the Pacific, on far-flung islands away from the action. PFC Kenneth Tibbs was serving as a Captain’s Orderly when he became the first African-American Marine to die in combat, on Saipan on June 15, 1944, the same day Americans stormed the beaches of Normandy.
In 2012, the Montford Point Marines were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.
In 1939, Marian Anderson was among the most famous singers on the planet. When Howard University invited her to sing in Washington, DC, most venues would not accommodate the large crowds she drew. As it turned out, the venue selected for her concert, the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, would not accommodate them either -- because Marian Anderson was black. Washington was a Southern town, and the South was segregated. The DAR was for white ladies, and Marian Anderson would not be permitted to attend, world-famous or not.
Even when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR, they refused to change their policy. So she sang at the Lincoln Memorial instead, attracting a crowd of 75,000 in person and millions more on the radio. The NAACP recognized Marian Anderson with the Spingarn Medal that year.
In 1977, Marian Anderson was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.
Following the legal integration of America’s public schools by virtue of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, nine African-American kids in Little Rock were enrolled in the previously all-white high school in town. Aged 15 to 17, they were confronted with the most heinous in-person bigotry imaginable. The National Guard was deployed to keep them from attending school. President Eisenhower ordered the 101st Airborne to accompany the children and make sure they made it into their new school safely. They were made miserable every day they attended Little Rock Central High School, confronted with hatred that few could face.
In 1999, the Little Rock Nine were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.
Other individuals or groups could be named who were abused and hated during the prime of their life, then honored decades later, indignity followed by apology and adulation.
These particular events may have happened in the past, but the same cycle repeats over and over throughout history. Retrospect often gives unpleasantness like bigotry a crisper focus than it would ever have in the present, but we should wonder: what indignities of today will demand apologies in the future? Will there be a Flint Water Crisis commemorative gold medal someday? An Unfair Housing Policy gold medal? An Abbeville Educational Corridor of Shame gold medal? An Unnecessary Use of Force gold medal? It doesn’t take much turning of the lens to bring current events into focus sharp enough to recognize indignities that should have long ago been consigned to the scrapheap of history.
February 28: Rosa Parks, Montgomery City Lines Bus Token
For the last story of this month, I want to revisit a familiar tale, symbolized by an object that can only be described as mundane.
We’ve all ridden a bus. If you’ve gotten on one after you were of school age, you’ve probably swiped your card or ticket, nodded to the driver, and headed back to grab the first free seat you could. You may have even dropped change or tokens into a fare box and heard them jangle and ring until they satisfactorily land.
In 1949, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson had a singularly unpleasant experience on a bus. She had just moved to Montgomery to take a teaching position at Alabama State College shortly after finishing her master’s degree in Atlanta. Having grown up in Georgia, she was accustomed to segregation. She got on a nearly empty bus one night and took a seat in the fifth row, ahead of the division between the whites-only front and the blacks-only back. Despite the bus being all but unoccupied, the driver vigorously upbraided her and threw her off the bus. It stung Robinson badly.
She joined an organization of local African-American professional women called the Women’s Political Council. Rising to the presidency of the organization in 1950, she led a pivot in the council’s mission, from its concentration on civil engagement and support for women to a more targeted attack on Montgomery’s segregated public transportation system. The council failed in its efforts towards the hiring of more black bus drivers, but succeeded in working towards more bus stops in predominately African-American neighborhoods and even managed to push for more African-American police officers in town. Progress was slow, but steady.
The 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision was a tipping point. Robinson and the other women of the WPC knew segregation’s days were numbered. She wrote the mayor of Montgomery and let him know that if segregated busing continued, they would pursue a bus boycott.
In March 1955, Claudette Colvin was arrested on a Montgomery city bus for refusing to give her seat, located in the back of the crowded bus, to a white person who was standing. Her youth and her sass led the WPC to consider her an unpalatable face for the boycott they’d been planning. Other women followed Colvin’s example and also got arrested: Aurelia Browder, arrested in April 1955; Mary Louise Smith, arrested that October at age 18; Susie McDonald, a woman in her 70s; and Jeanette Reese. These five filed a class action suit that came to be named Browder v. Gayle, the defendant being Mayor W.A. Gayle of Montgomery.
Before that court case was filed in February 1956, one more woman sat down and refused to get up.
Rosa Parks had staged her first protest against the segregated buses of Montgomery in 1943, simply by entering the bus through the front door instead of the back. The bus driver told her to get off and get back on the correct way, then drove off without her. By 1955, she was an old hand in the struggle for civil rights: experienced, respected, and 42 years old. She was the perfect face for the boycott. After telling the bus driver “I don’t think I should have to get up,” she was placed under arrest.
That night, Jo Ann Gibson Robinson made over 50,000 mimeographed leaflets at Alabama State College. The boycott was on.
It continued until December 1956, when Browder v. Gayle had worked its way to the Supreme Court, enabling the justices to find bus segregation just as unconstitutional as school segregation. The Montgomery Bus Boycott may not have ended segregation on the buses on its own -- the court decision did that -- but the earnest protest of thousands of residents of Montgomery galvanized a nation against Jim Crow. Capitalizing upon that moment drew new leaders to what would become a national movement, including a local pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. The origins of the Civil Rights struggle are centuries old, but a half dozen women from Alabama set the spark that put the notion of legal discrimination up in flames.
One of these little bus tokens, just like the ones in use during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, might cost you a few dollars at a coin show or on eBay. They’re neither rare nor particularly avidly pursued, and there are dozens or hundreds of similar items across the various specialties of collectibles and material culture, inexpensive but ephemeral objects that serve as tangible relics of stories and personalities that should never be allowed to pass from memory.
The very nature of collecting makes it a hobby wrapped up in privilege: it is not a pastime for the working class or the underclass, but of the leisure class. Therefore, humble objects like these get relatively little attention from either collectors or academics. The pieces I’ve written about this month have ranged from being nearly valueless (this token is pretty close to that end of the spectrum) to values in the tens of thousands of dollars. Anyone with the time and inclination can find items across the value spectrum worth studying and cherishing. For those who care about preserving history as it should be preserved, rather than yielding the past to those who seek to control the future, we have a patriotic duty to seek these items out and save them.
Next month is Women’s History Month, and I fear I won’t have the time to chime in on it every day (I’ll try to do a few). Consider that a gauntlet thrown. There is no reason in the world that a similar series of posts couldn’t be produced to highlight the achievements of American women.
One final thought: though this token is of interpretive value as African-American history, it’s also women’s history. And all of these objects represent American history. African-Americans have been here since before the Pilgrims landed. Women have been in America for thousands of years before either arrived. No matter who you are, if you’re an American, all these stories are part of your story. And they all deserve the attention that has thus far eluded them.