24
Hay, “Clarence King,” in Hague,
Memoirs,
128.
25
S. F. Emmons, “Clarence King,”
American Journal of Science
(Mar. 1902): 224-37.
26
HA to Frank Emmons, 17 Mar. [1904], box 12, S.F. Emmons Papers, LC.
28
Copies of the sales solicitations can be found in A2, folder A3, King Papers, HEH.
29
FKH to D. C. Gilman, 27 Oct. 1903, A2, King Papers, HEH.
30
FKH to King Memorial Committee, 16 May 1904, A2, King Papers, HEH.
31
“A Brilliant American,”
New York Tribune,
May 12, 1904, 8.
32
“A Memorial Volume,”
New York Times Book Review,
June 25, 1904, 443.
33
J. D Hague to Mrs. Howland, 18 Jan. 1902, 28 Jan. 1902, 8 Apr. 1902, 21 Apr. 1902, Letter Book L27, Hague Papers, HEH; Charles Scribner’s Sons display ad,
New York Tribune,
Nov. 12, 1902, 3.
34
“A Mountaineering Classic: King’s Fine Chronicle of the Exploration of the Sierra Nevada Reprinted after Thirty Years,”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle,
Dec. 5, 1902, 14.
35
JTG to JH, 27 June 1904, reel 19, Hay Collection, LC. One can only wonder what King wrote to his mother over the years. The correspondence is not known to survive.
36
“State Courts,”
New York Times,
Mar. 13, 1902, 11; Plaintiffs’ Trial Memorandum, 16.
37
FKH to JH, 5 Apr. 1902, quoted in O’Toole,
Five of Hearts,
365.
38
On the auction see “Monet’s Paintings Bring Good Prices,”
New York Herald,
Mar. 14, 1903, and
Catalogue of Valuable Paintings and Water Colors to Be Sold at Unrestricted Public Sale by Order of the Executors and Trustee of the Estates of the Late Clarence King, William H. Fuller and Theodore G. Weil, the Trustees of H. Victor Newcomb
(New York: Press of J. J. Little, 1903).
39
The print still hangs in the home of Ada’s great-granddaughter, Patricia Chacon.
40
S. F. Emmons paid $100 for a Gustave Doré watercolor of a French landscape: see
Catalogue,
lot 30 ; Hague to JTG, 5 Mar. 1902, box 1, King Papers, HEH. See also “The King and Fuller Sale,”
New York Times,
Mar. 12, 1903, 2.
41
The copy of
Catalogue
that has been microfilmed as a part of the Archives of American Art collection is annotated to include the sales prices of the various lots. The total of $34,905 for King’s paintings is substantially below the figures later cited by Ada King and the Gardiner estate in
King v. Peabody et al.
Those figures likely include the additional sums realized for the sale of his books, textiles, and other collectibles.
42
Plaintiff’s Bill of Particulars, Dec. 8, 1931.
43
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 172, 181-82.
45
Testimony of William G. Winne, Memorandum for Defendants, 10, 16; Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 17.
46
Winne Deposition (19 Nov. 1931), 2.
48
W. E. Burghardt DuBois, “The Black North: A Sociological Study,”
New York Times,
Nov. 17, 1901, 10; J. Clay Smith Jr.,
Emancipation: The Making of the Black Lawyer, 1844-1944
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 624 (app. 2).
49
“Afro-American as a Race Name,”
New York Times,
Feb. 25, 1893, 6.
50
On Waring, see A. Briscoe Koger,
The Negro Lawyer in Maryland
(Baltimore: A. B. Koger, 1948), 7; “Black Baltimore 1870-1920, Everett J. Waring: Personal Life,” Maryland State Archives,
http://www.mdarchives.state.md.us/msa/stagser/s1259/121/6050/html/17454000.html
(accessed Oct. 10, 2005); and Smith,
Emancipation,
143-44. Before graduating from law school, Waring had a brief career as an educator, a newspaper editor, and a federal examiner of pensions.
51
Smith,
Emancipation,
145; “Black Baltimore”; Richard R. Wright Jr.,
The Philadelphia Colored Business Directory, 1913
(Philadelphia: Philadelphia Negro Business League, 1914), 87, citation courtesy of Randall Burkett. On
Jones v. United States,
see
Jones v. U.S.,
137 U.S. 202 (1890).
52
Winne Deposition (19 Nov. 1931), 2. Whatever compelled Waring to drop the case, he was not the sort to give in easily or cave to intimidation. As one brief account of his career noted, he “defended or assisted in defending nineteen first degree murder cases, and not a single hanging resulted”; see Wright,
Philadelphia Colored Business Directory,
87. The determination of Bridgham’s race comes from his record in the 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Manhattan, New York County, NY, SD 1, ED 1299, sheet 1B,
Ancestry.com
(accessed Aug. 18, 2007).
54
Winne Deposition (19 Nov. 1931), 2.
55
On J. Douglas Wetmore’s family, see 1880 U.S. Federal Census, Jacksonville, Duval County, FL, SD 18, ED 34, 17; George W. Wetmore, record no. 7377, Freedmen’s Bank Records,
Ancestry.com
(accessed July 28, 2005).
56
Johnson,
Along This Way,
76. On Johnson’s use of “D.” as the inspiration for the protagonist of
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,
see Joseph K. Skerrett Jr., “Irony and Symbolic Action in James Weldon Johnson’s
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,
”
American Quarterly
(Winter 1980): 540-58. On “D.” as J. Douglas Wetmore, see Eugene Levy,
James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 16n23, 63n29. Wetmore’s father, George, the son of an Englishman, described himself as “very light” and worked as a hostler and later as a policeman in Jacksonville.
57
Wetmore to Booker T. Washington, 23 Sept. 1904, cited in Levy,
James Weldon Johnson,
62n28.
58
See Shira Levine, “ ‘To Maintain Our Self-Respect’: The Jacksonville Challenge to Segregated Street Cars and the Meaning of Equality, 1900-1906,”
Michigan Journal of History
(Winter 2005),
http://www.umich.edu/
˜
historyj/papers/winter2005/levine.htm
. Wetmore wrote to W. E. B. DuBois shortly after the publication of DuBois’s
The Souls of Black Folk
in 1903, addressing the author as his fellow black man and asserting that not since Frederick Douglass had their people had such a voice. See David Levering Lewis,
W. E. B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868- 1919
(New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 292.
59
On Wetmore’s involvement with
Florida v. Patterson,
see Levine, “‘To Maintain Our Self-Respect.’ ”
60
“Wetmore Here for Good,”
New York Age,
Apr. 26, 1906, 1.
61
Johnson,
Along This Way,
222 ; “Wetmore Here for Good,” 1.
62
For more on the Afro-American Council, see Shawn Leigh Alexander, “ ‘We Know Our Rights and Have the Courage to Defend Them’: The Spirit of Agitation in the Age of Accommodation, 1883-1909” (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 2004).
63
“Negroes Ask Roosevelt to Act in Race Riot,”
New York Times,
Oct. 11, 1906, 4.
64
For weeks, local residents of the deeply segregated town had provoked the soldiers, and on a hot mid-August night in 1906 a handful of soldiers allegedly went on a nighttime shooting spree through the town. When the troops refused to identify their guilty comrades, Roosevelt dismissed “without honor” all 167 of the black troops stationed at Fort Brown on the night of the shooting, including six who had received the Medal of Honor. Wetmore argued that Roosevelt had no right to punish the black soldiers without a formal court-martial or trial. See “Negro Soldiers to Sue on Roosevelt’s Order,”
New York Times,
Nov. 17, 1906, 6; “Col. Bacon Challenges Dismissal of Troops,”
New York Times,
Jan. 3, 1907, 3; Gerald Astor,
The Right to Fight: A History of African Americans in the Military
(Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1998), 79-89.
Subsequent investigations cast doubt on the soldiers’ involvement in the nighttime shootings; in 1972 President Richard Nixon directed the army to redress the wrongs by granting retrospective honorable discharges to the men involved and a token payment to the one surviving soldier.
65
Wetmore’s letter to the editor of the
Evening Post
is reprinted in
New York Age,
Nov. 15, 1906, 5.
66
See, for example, the ads that ran in the
New York Age
beginning on May 23, 1907, 5.
67
In 1904 Perry represented the heirs of George T. Downing, a “mulatto” resident of Newport, in a bizarre lawsuit against some of New York’s most formidable public figures. Perry charged that the Adirondack land upon which the Morgans and Vanderbilts had built their summer camps actually belonged to the Downing heirs, who had inherited property deeds given to a group of black beneficiaries in the 1840s by the abolitionist Gerrit Smith. When the state of New York passed a law in 1846 that required all “men of color” to possess $250 in real estate in order to vote, Smith redistributed his own property to enfranchise a group of black New Yorkers. “Negro’s Heirs Claim Vast Game Preserves,”
New York Times,
Nov. 18, 1904, 6; “Tale of Gerrit Smith behind Adirondack Suit: Downing Heirs’ Story Runs Back to Eccentric Philanthropist,”
New York Times,
Nov. 19, 1904, 11; “The Rev. Rufus L. Perry Dead,”
New York Times,
June 20, 1895, 16. The New York State law regarding property qualifications for enfranchisement was repealed in 1868. See Franklin Johnson,
The Development of State Legislation Concerning the Free Negro
(1919; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 148-49.
68
Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks v. Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks
(60 Misc. 223, 111 N.Y.S. 1067).
69
Plaintiff’s Trial Memorandum, 181.
70
Winne Deposition (19 Nov. 1931), 2.
71
Johnson,
Along This Way,
241.
72
On Wetmore’s real estate career, see “The Real Estate Field,”
New York Times,
Feb. 21, 1914, 16; “Hotel Langwell Sold to Investors,”
New York Times,
Feb. 24, 1923, 19; “Latest Dealings in Realty Field,”
New York Times,
Mar. 11, 1923, RE15; “Big Loft in Trade,”
New York Times,
June 10, 1924, 35.
73
Johnson,
Along This Way,
390.
75
“ ‘Doug’ Wetmore, Prominent Lawyer, Commits Suicide by Shooting Self with Revolver at His Summer House,”
New York Age,
Aug. 2, 1930, 1.
77
James Weldon Johnson,
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
(1912; repr., Dover thrift ed., New York: Dover, 1995), 90.
78
Ibid., 99-100. Johnson published his book anonymously in 1912. Ada probably did not read it, and neither she nor anyone else would associate the book’s protagonist with Wetmore; scholars working with Johnson’s papers would not discover that connection until more than half a century later.
79
I have been unsuccessful in locating any official name change notices for Ada Todd and her children in the New York records.
80
Trow’s Business Directory of the Borough of Queens, City of New York, 1904
(New York: Trow Directory, Printing & Bookbinding, 1904), 42 ;
Trow’s Business Directory of the Borough of Queens, City of New York, 1906-7
(New York: Trow Directory, Printing & Bookbinding, 1906), 20.
81
Trow’s Business Directory of the Borough of Queens, City of New York, 1908-9
(New York: Trow Directory, Printing & Bookbinding, 1908), 12.
83
Martha Hodes, “Fractions and Fictions,” in Stoler,
Haunted by Empire,
264; Goldberg,
Racial Subjects,
37.
84
Todd Household, 1910 census.
85
Virgil H. Hite and Ada N. King, Certificate and Record of Marriage, 17 Mar. 1913, certificate no. 6793, New York City Department of Records and Information Services, Municipal Archives; World War I draft registration card, Virgil Hite, Miller County, AR, 5 June 1917,
http://content.ancestrylibrary.com
/iexec/?htx=View& r=5542 & dbid = 6482 & iid =AR-1530561- 0258&fn=Virgil&ln=Hite&st=r&ssrc=&pid=23882999 (accessed Aug. 18, 2007); see the entry for Virgil Hite, 1910 U.S. Federal Census, Murfreesboro Town, Thompson Township, Pike County, AR, SD 4, ED 96, sheet 1A,
http://content.ancestrylibrary.com/iexec/?htx=View&r=5542&dbid
=7884 & iid = ART624 _ 60-1317& fn =Virgil+A& ln = Hite & st= r& ssrc= & pid =191642392 (accessed Aug. 19, 2007); see the entry for 942 Third Ave., 1910 U.S. Federal Census, New York, NY, 19th Ward, SD 1, ED 1136, sheets 1A and B,
http://content.ancestrylibrary.com/Browse/view.aspx?dbid=7884&path=New
+York.New+York.Manhattan+Ward+19.1136.1 (accessed Aug. 19, 2007); see the entry for 942 Third Ave., 1900 U.S. Federal Census, Manhattan, New York County, NY, SD 1, ED 654, sheet 14A,
http://content.ancestrylibrary.com/Browse/view.aspx?dbid=7602&path=New
+York.New+York.Manhattan.654.34 (accessed Aug. 19, 2007).