Authors: Betty DeRamus
However, in the South, where white women have been enshrined as symbols of virtue
and chastity by men still mourning the loss of the Civil War and the erosion of their
power, rape can mean many things. A black man can be considered guilty of assault
with intent to rape by showing up in a woman’s backyard, sitting next to her on a
trolley or looking at her in the “wrong” way.
1893:
Henry Smith is lynched in Paris, Texas, after he is accused of brutally murdering
the four-year-old daughter of a local policeman. The only evidence against the mentally
retarded man who does odd jobs is that he was once arrested by the policeman. Rumors
circulate that he assaulted the child and then killed her. A local Methodist bishop
claims he tore the girl apart with “gorilla ferocity.” However, an autopsy finds no
evidence of rape. The girl had been choked. Some ten thousand people show up to watch
Smith tortured with branding irons and set on fire.
1908:
A white woman named Mabel Hallam accuses George Richardson, a black man, of raping
her. Later, the Springfield, Illinois, woman admits to a grand jury that she lied
to cover up an affair with a white man. By then, two blacks have been lynched during
a two-day rampage. The victims include William Donnegan, eighty-four, a black man
who owns half a block of real estate and has a white wife. A mob drags him from his
porch and hangs him.
1915:
The Birth of a Nation,
the film that sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, premieres in the Atlanta Theater.
It is based on Thomas Dixon’s novel and play
The Clansman.
Among other things, it depicts a lust-mad black man pursuing a white woman until
she leaps to her death. The Klan then kills him. A light-skinned black woman also
has an affair with a white abolitionist senator. In Chicago, minors cannot see the
film, and twenty-five thousand people gather at the Massachusetts state capitol demanding
it be banned. However, the film creates a sensation in many places, including Atlanta,
where people pay two dollars to see it even though the regular price of a movie is
only fifteen cents. In the film, white actress Mary Alden darkens her face with cork
to play a light-skinned black woman.
1921:
A mob armed with rifles, shotguns, kerosene and even machine guns burns Tulsa’s thriving
black community, Greenwood, to the ground. Between seventy-five and three hundred
people are killed in what was known as Black Wall Street (Greenwood Avenue) after
an apparently unfounded complaint that a black man had attempted to assault a white
woman in an elevator.
1923:
A mob attacks a small black town of about two hundred in Rosewood, Florida, after
an unidentified black man supposedly sexually assaults a white woman. Homes are burned,
and the inhabitants are chased into the wilderness.
1924:
Eugene O’Neill’s play
All God’s Chillun Got Wings,
which deals with race mixing, raises such a storm that the
New York World
demands that the Board of Aldermen in New York suppress it. Political leaders are
urged to do something about the play because it depicts “an act which is illegal in
more than half the country…to be represented in a manner indicating approval.”
1925:
The Negro-Caucasian Club is organized at the University of Michigan and lasts five
years, possibly the first interracial student association on any American campus.
The original membership includes twenty-six students and faculty, black and white,
who want “to encourage a spirit of friendliness and fair-mindedness between the races,
and to study and discuss, impartially, the problems arising in relations between them.”
In the mid-1920s, there are about sixty black students at Michigan, of whom fewer
than ten are women, in a student body of about ten thousand.
1931:
A fight breaks out between young white men and black men riding a freight train in
Jackson County, Alabama. The white men demand that the black riders leave the car,
but the blacks put all of them except one off the train. The bloodied white men notify
the sheriff, who searches the train. They turn up the nine black riders, ranging in
age from thirteen to twenty, a white youth and two young women, Ruby Bates and Victoria
Price. As the black men are about to be transported to the Scottsboro, Alabama, jail,
Bates claims the blacks raped her and Price. In the subsequent trials, the jury finds
each man, with the exception of the thirteen-year-old, guilty, and they are sentenced
to death. Supporters get them a stay of execution and appeal the case to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
In November 1932, the Court orders the case retried on the grounds the state failed
to provide the men with adequate counsel. During the new trials, which begin in March
1933, Ruby Bates retracts her story, but the jury discounts it and two defendants
are again convicted. Two years later, the U.S. Supreme Court reverses the convictions
on the grounds that blacks have been improperly excluded from the jury. The next round
of trials begins in 1935 and by 1937 all charges have been dropped against four men;
the rape charges against one man are dropped but he receives twenty-five years for
assaulting a deputy sheriff. One man receives seventy-five years for rape, another
ninety-nine years and the third a life sentence. However, the defendants are paroled,
one by one, and in 1950, Andrew Wright, the last Scottsboro boy still in prison, goes
free. In 1976, George Wallace pardons Clarence Norris.
1933:
On June 15, a white woman named Effa Brooks and a black man named Abraham Manley
marry in New York City, but their marriage certificate describes Effa as “colored.”
Her father is listed as Benjamin Brooks, her mother’s first husband, who was black.
However, Effa later changes her story, claiming she was nearly grown before her mother
told her she had a white father, a wealthy financier. For most of her life, the olive-skinned
woman chooses to live as black and represents herself as such to the black community.
She and her husband run the Newark Eagles, a baseball team in the Negro National League.
1937:
The management of a Detroit theater makes singer Billie Holiday smear dark greasepaint
on her high-yellow face while she performs with Count Basie. Apparently, the management
worried that, in a certain light, Billie might look like a white woman jamming with
black musicians.
1955:
The bloated and battered body of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black Chicago youth
visiting relatives in the South, is found in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie River, murdered
after supposedly whistling at or flirting with a white woman in Money, Mississippi.
His mother has the body shipped home to Chicago so mourners can view the boy’s swollen
lump of a face and unrecognizable body. According to author Maryanne Vollers, the
two local men acquitted of the crime, Roy Bryant and J. W. “Big” Milam, later sell
a story describing Till’s murder to
Look
magazine.
1958:
A poll finds that 96 percent of whites disapprove of marriages between blacks and
whites.
Two Virginians, Richard Loving, a twenty-four-year-old white man, and Mildred Jeter,
an eighteen-year-old who is black and Native American, decide to marry but can’t do
it in their home state: mixed marriages are banned in Virginia. Loving and Jeter grew
up near each other in the town of Central Point in rural Caroline County. It is a
community where people with the surnames Loving and Jeter have lived for centuries
and where racial mixing is common. Tolerance has not always been the rule, though.
In 1736, a slave named Andrew was hanged for the alleged rape of a white indentured
servant, although the evidence suggested she consented to the act. Both parties were
first convicted of adultery, but the court changed the sentence for Andrew after some
people complained. Andrew was hanged, but there is no record of the Caroline County
Court punishing other black men for such an offense.
Mildred Jeter, a tall, soft-spoken woman, and Richard Loving, a brickmason who loves
racing cars on country tracks, marry in Washington, D.C., which has no laws against
intermarriage. They move back to Virginia, where Loving builds a white cinder-block
house. Six weeks after their marriage, Sheriff R. Garnett Brooks and two deputies
enter the Lovings’ house through an unlocked door. They shine flashlights into the
couple’s eyes and wave a warrant charging them with violating Virginia’s law against
marriage between whites and blacks. The law defines a white person as someone without
a trace of any blood but Caucasian, something that is impossible to prove.
Found guilty of a felony, the Lovings are sentenced to one year in jail, but are told
their sentence will be suspended if they stay out of Virginia for twenty-five years.
In his ruling, Judge Leon M. Bazile justifies Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage
by declaring that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and
red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with
his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated
the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
The Lovings leave Virginia for Washington, D.C., but dislike city life. They soon
return to Caroline County in the northeastern part of the state, a place with sharp
contrasts in weather and plenty of loblolly pines, gum and cypress trees, rain and
history. They have three children and live as fugitives for nine years. Friends and
family shelter them.
At the time, their kind of marriage is almost as rare as lettuce in a butcher shop.
In 1960, there are only 51,000 black/white married couples in the entire United States.
The Lovings are determined to be among them. They file a class action suit, which
is denied, and then take their case to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia. It,
too, upholds Virginia law. However, the American Civil Liberties Union takes the case
to the U.S. Supreme Court, which strikes down the Virginia law as a violation of the
Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The justices describe it as a
law with no purpose other than discrimination. This ruling not only ends Virginia’s
ban on interracial marriage, but wipes out similar laws still on the books in fifteen
other states.
1959:
John Howard Griffin, a white novelist from Texas, shaves off his straight hair, darkens
his skin with oral medication, a sunlamp and a topical stainer, and tours the South
as a black man. In his 1961 book
Black Like Me
Griffin talks about bus drivers who refuse to let him off at his stop, his inability
to cash traveler’s checks, being advised not to look at movie posters of white women,
his failure to find a nonmenial job and, most bizarrely, numerous white men who offer
him rides so they can quiz him about his sex life. Griffin claims one man even asked
to see his penis.
2003:
The family of the late senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina acknowledges in December
that Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired teacher, is the daughter of Senator
Thurmond, known for his strong segregationist stands, and a black teenager who worked
for his family as a maid in 1925. Under the laws of the time, he could have been prosecuted
for “fornication,” defined as extramarital sex, and fined at least one hundred dollars.
2004:
According to an Associated Press story, in a Gallup poll commissioned by the AARP
and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rightsnearly 90 percent of whites, 73 percent
of blacks and 76 percent of Hispanics say race relations have improved somewhat. The
same poll finds 73 percent of Americans approving of interracial marriage.
2004:
The Justice Department announces that it is reopening an investigation into the unsolved
1955 Emmett Till murder because two documentaries about the case suggest other people
might have been involved besides the two original and now dead suspects.
I
saac Berry’s story—about running away from slavery to meet a white girl who had offered
him sips of cool water and chunks of red-hot preaching—sounds like a tall tale whispered
around campfires.
Yet it has been passed from one generation of the Berry family to the next, as timeworn
and true as an old man’s Bible.
Berry, a fiddle-playing, ox-driving, horseshoe-making slave, began walking from Missouri
to Michigan in the spring of 1858. He met his first major challenge when he stopped
to shave by a stream in the Illinois woods. Two white men tramping through the woods
confronted him.
“Looks like we got ourselves a runaway,” one said. “See if he’s got some money.”
As they drew near, Isaac pulled out a Bowie knife as long as a slave’s scream.
“I got weapons, and I’m goin’ to defend myself,” he said, according to the memoirs
of his daughter, the late Kate Pointer. “It gonna be your life against mine.”
“We just hoboes,” one of the men said.
They began backing away and finally turned and ran. Things might have gone differently,
though, if they had understood that Isaac was not only running away to avoid being
sold off like a hog as his brother, Harve, had been. He also was keeping a promise
to Lucy Esther Millard, a white preacher’s daughter who had stirred up feelings that
could leave a brown-skinned man bleeding on bluegrass. She had been his neighbor in
Palmyra, Missouri, and she had vowed to find him once he fled to Canada.
For what Isaac was planning he could have been whipped until the sun got tired of
shining on fat fields and thin slaves. He could have been dragged by dogs, castrated
or buried up to his neck in Missouri mud, sugar sprinkled on his head to draw flies.
Until well into the twentieth century, real or imaginary relationships between black
men and white women—a suspicion of rape, the whisper of love—became grounds for lynching
and mutilating black men. But Lucy was in Isaac’s plans now and, no doubt, in his
head—feet propped up, eyes shiny with backdoor secrets, brown hair yoked into a bun
but reflecting the light. There was no way he could make her memory get up and go
home.
It was Juliann Berry Pratt, Isaac’s owner, who had warned him that it was time to
go. Her husband, Jim Pratt, she told Isaac, was going to sell him down the river,
a threat that could make even the hardiest slaves shiver. The river was the Mississippi,
and it led to the Deep South, often to Louisiana. It might mean spending eighteen
hours a day plucking cotton bolls from prongs with tips that could slash like knives
while carrying a bag of cotton on your shoulders. Or it might mean chopping sugar
cane, which had to be slashed at just the right slant so it could grow again and cut
without pausing in the steaming heat. The life expectancy of sugar cane workers brought
south from border states like Missouri ranged from seven to nine years.
Why did Juliann urge Isaac to run? According to family legend, she was Isaac’s half-sister,
both of them the children of Uriah George Berry of Livingston County, Kentucky. In
the 1850 Kentucky census, Uriah Berry is listed as a merchant with property worth
eight thousand dollars, which made him the most prosperous man in his area. Uriah
Berry died in the mid-1850s, and under the terms of his will, neither Isaac nor his
pale-skinned sister, Nancy, were to be whipped or sold. Such arrangements were common
in families where mulatto slaves cooked meals, groomed horses, scrubbed floors, emptied
chamber pots and fanned away flies while the darker-skinned slaves often plowed and
picked crops. Yet customs meant nothing to Jim Pratt, an Irish-born riverboat gambler
whom Juliann had met while selling her family’s molasses near Frankfort, Kentucky.
A compulsive gambler, Pratt always needed money and raised it any way he could. He
already had sold Isaac’s brother, Harve, to pay a debt and sold the horse Isaac had
raised from a colt. As the man of the house, he controlled all the money and made
the decisions. After warning Isaac of what her husband planned to do, Juliann, according
to family stories, handed Isaac a gold coin and told him to take her horse, ride it
as far as he could and then turn the horse loose. That meant leaving Palmyra, Missouri,
Isaac’s home, as well as leaving his mother, Mary Clara; his two remaining brothers,
John and Elijah; and his sisters, Nancy and Mary, family members who might be sold
and scattered, too, one day.
Isaac was a slave, but his life had been different from the lives of slaves who were
beaten with hot elm switches for failing to pick one last sprig of cotton or for looking
their masters’ wives in the eye. Yet, according to historian Richard M. Dorson, who
interviewed Isaac’s daughter, Kate Pointer, “[Isaac] was afraid. He had always been
afraid.” He could wander ten miles from his home near Palmyra, but not one hundred
or one thousand. He could plow a field, play a fiddle, shoe a horse or carve a canoe,
but when his name later appeared on a
WANTED
poster, he couldn’t read it. He had his own revolver and could hunt deer and wild
turkeys, selling the meat to a woman who ran a hotel in St. Louis. This was how he
saved enough money to buy food after he ran away. The woman would give him a dollar
and a half for the deer’s saddle, and he would take the rest of the meat home to his
family, who mostly lived on ham bones and hog heads. And when he took up his fiddle
and began to play that old half-sad, half-snappy music, he could lap up joy and even
taste hope. Yet in some way those little glimmers of good times, those shots of liberty,
were more a curse than a blessing. And he could have been hanged or shot if people
knew that Lucy had sworn nothing would separate her from his smile.
A few days after Juliann gave him a gold piece, Isaac told the Pratts he was going
to play his fiddle at a dance.
Isaac had taught himself to coax a sound from his instrument that no fiddler in the
area could match. He regularly made money playing at weekend dances: his favorite
songs were “The Devil’s Dream” and “Old Aunt Kate Ain’t Got No Shoes.” Slave narratives
describe Saturday-night dances where people high-stepped and stomped away the drudgery
of working from 4:00
A.M
. until sundown. Dancers did the promenade and jig, some dancing with glasses of water
on their heads to see who could keep moving the longest without spilling water. They
danced the pigeon wing, swinging their partners around and around in the moonlight
under old oaks. Some danced awhile, slept and then leapt to life again, keeping time
with beef rib bones while fiddlers and banjo pickers played.
But for Isaac these dances were more than a chance to lap up joy by watching people
doing reels, waltzes, polkas, quadrilles and buck dances. He had made important friends
at these gatherings, free blacks such as Albert Campbell, who lived in Quincy, Illinois,
just across the Mississippi. Campbell promised to help Isaac escape. He said he would
have a lantern on the Illinois side of the river and turn it up and down three times
when he was ready to pick up Isaac in his boat.
On a Saturday in April 1858, Isaac packed for his journey, stuffing only a few pieces
of the past in his knapsack. He took his revolver and bowie knife to fight off slave
catchers, his fiddle and razor to pump up his spirits and cayenne pepper for the tracking
dogs. To muffle their scent and confuse the hounds on their trail, runaway slaves
sometimes rubbed raw onion on their backs, waded in water, tied pine brush to their
legs or put red pepper in their shoes or around the bases of trees in which they hid.
“That was one of the secrets of the Underground Railroad,” according to Marguerite
Berry Jackson, Isaac’s late granddaughter. “Cayenne pepper.”
On his way to the banks of the Mississippi, Isaac had to pass through tall grass prairie,
the sea of grass that was a real sea millions of years ago. Jim Pratt had made extra
money renting out Isaac to new German-speaking settlers struggling to make homes on
the flat prairie. The German immigrants would rent Isaac for a year to bust up their
sod. The ground had hardened almost to stone and grass speckled with red, purple and
cream-colored wild hyacinth grew high enough to reach out and shake your hand. With
a heavy hammer, ax and plow, Isaac broke up the hard-faced earth, disappearing inside
swirls of dust and sunshine. “One of the places where he was rented must have been
close to the Millards,” Jackson notes.
That was how Isaac met the Millard sisters, Lucy and Clarissa, who brought water to
him in the fields. The Mormon Church has no records documenting that Lucy and Clarissa’s
father, Solomon Nelson Millard, became a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints during the turbulent, war-torn nineteenth century. However, the Berry family’s
oral history and Lucy’s marriage records suggest he did.
Most religious services for slaves featured white preachers telling slaves to obey
their masters and mistresses and not steal their chickens. There was no mention of
souls or salvation. However, when Lucy came to the Pratt farm to visit Juliann—her
only friend—Juliann suggested Lucy read the Bible to Isaac. That was how he learned
the ways of God—a mixture of hail and fire raining on Egypt, walls tumbling to the
roar of trumpets, lightning running along the ground. He also learned about another
Palmyra, in the western part of Lucy’s native New York. In the early 1800s, this Palmyra
was a stomping ground for all kinds of preachers trying to win converts to their churches.
The stretch of New York where it sat was called the Burned-Over District because religious
fires swept through it so many times, scorching every soul in their path. People there
claimed they could talk to the dead and hear taps from beyond the grave—possibly because
nineteenth-century people were sometimes mistakenly buried alive. Meanwhile, a farm
boy founded The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
While Lucy read the Bible to Isaac, the two of them fell under each other’s spell.
There is no way to tell how Isaac managed to rise above his fears and dream of loving
a white woman who had crisscrossed the country with her kinfolks, watched an elephant
drown and learned that it was possible to keep turning the pages of your life, creating
one adventure after the next. Nor is there any way of knowing whether Lucy Esther
Millard, a young woman who believed in grabbing life by the throat, realized how much
she would have to give up to spend her life with a slave. Since her family had previously
lived in Michigan, she would have known that the Detroit River was the gateway to
free Canada and a new life. So as she and Isaac talked, they apparently made plans
to meet in the Detroit / Windsor, Canada, area.
On the day that Isaac ran off from his master, he stopped at the Mississippi River,
smacked his horse and sent it home to Juliann. Then there was nothing to do but wait
for Campbell’s signal indicating he was coming with his boat—three blinks and then
another blink.
But even after flashing his light, Albert Campbell never sailed across the Mississippi
to rescue Isaac. It was early spring, and the river had swollen, its foam-flecked
waves rising up to splash at the sky. It was not a flood, but it must have stirred
up images of twisted trees and drowned houses and barns. Isaac stayed on the river’s
west bank until the sun rose that Sunday morning.
He couldn’t fight the Mississippi’s angry waves and whirlpools, so he stayed in the
brush along the river for another day, watching and waiting.
His savior was a white family on a flatboat.
He watched a white man, woman and two small children dock on the Missouri side of
the Mississippi and gather firewood to cook their breakfast. Finally, he approached
them and offered them his five-dollar gold piece to ferry him to the Illinois side.
He said he had a job in Quincy and needed to get to it. They took him across.
He came ashore at Quincy, Illinois, which begins at the Mississippi, leaps over steep
bluffs, levels out on the uplands and trails off into woods and farmlands. When slavery-fighting
men set up a church there, they called it the Lord’s Barn. One night, a mob gathered
in front of the barn to wipe out the slavery fighters. However, somebody warned them
the mob was coming, and they hid clubs, hatchets and muskets under the pulpit. The
deacons led the assault when the congregation rushed out to greet the mob.
But there were no slavery fighters to help Isaac that morning.
He saw a hollow log by the river and decided to climb inside and wait for dark. But
he soon changed his mind about hiding in a place with only one way in and one way
out, shimmying up a pine tree instead. He nodded off in the tree and awakened to see
a rifle-carrying bounty hunter riding up to the log. When he thumped the log to see
if it sounded hollow, a rabbit ran out. The bounty hunter galloped away.
Isaac was in a part of Illinois usually heavy in springtime with the husky, wood-rich
aroma of sassafras, pine and dog fennel. He would have waited for nightfall before
knocking on Albert Campbell’s door. According to family stories, Campbell gave him
a crudely drawn map that traced the way to Chicago and from there either to central
Indiana or southern Michigan, where he was supposed to find the Purdues, another free
colored family. Both possible stops were named Coloma. (An old log building served
as the official Underground Railroad station in the tiny Quaker village of Coloma,
Indiana.) Most likely, Albert’s wife stuffed Isaac’s knapsack with food that would
keep on the road—slices of cold cornmeal mush, macaroni pie, hardtack bread made from
nothing but flour and water and toasted on a stick or “fat cornbread” made from cornmeal,
salt, soda, hot water and crisp pork rinds.