University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO DISFRANCHISEMENT AND THE NEGRO IN
BUSINESS

WHEN I began my work in Tuskegee in
1881 the coloured people of Alabama had
just been deprived—in a way that is
now familiar—of many of their political rights.
There were some voting but few Negroes held
office anywhere in Alabama at that time. The
Negroes set great store by the political privileges
that had been granted them during the Reconstruction
Period, and they thought that when they
lost these they had lost all.

Soon after I went into Alabama a new President,
James A. Garfield, was inaugurated at Washington.
A little community of coloured people not
very far from Tuskegee were so impressed with
the idea that the new Administration would do something
to better their condition, especially in the way
of strengthening their political rights, that, out of
their poverty, they raised enough money to pay the
expenses of one of their number to Washington, in
order that he might get direct information and return
and report to them what the outlook was. This

incident struck me as the more pathetic because I
happened to know the man who went on this errand.
He was a good, honest, well-meaning fellow, but
entirely lacking in knowledge of the world outside
his own community. I doubt that he ever got near
enough, even to the inauguration ceremonies, to see
the President, and I am sure he never got inside the
door of the White House. He returned to his people,
at any rate, with a very gloomy report and, although
it was never quite clear whom he had seen or what
he had done, the people understood what it meant.

The people did not say much about their loss.
They preserved outwardly, as a rule, the same
good nature and cheerfulness which had always
characterised them, but deep down in their hearts
they had begun to feel that there was no hope for
them.

This feeling of apathy and despair continued for
a long time among these people in the country districts.
A good many of them who owned land in the
county at this time gave it up or lost it for some reason
or other. Others moved away from the county and
there were a great many abandoned farms. Gradually,
however, the temper of the people changed.
They began to see that harvests were just as good
and just as bad as they had been before the changes
which deprived them of their political privileges.
They began to see, in short, that there was still hope
for them in economic, if not in political directions.

The man who went to Washington to call on the President
is still living. He is a different person now, a
new man, in fact. Since that time he has purchased
a farm; has built a decent, comfortable house; is
educating his children, and I note that never a session
of the monthly Farmer's Institute assembles at
Tuskegee that this man does not come and bring
some of the products from his farm to exhibit to his
fellow-farmers. He is not only successful, but he is
one of the happiest and most useful individuals in
our county. He has learned that he can do for himself
what the authorities at Washington could not do
for him, and that is, make his life a success.

A large part of the work which Tuskegee Institute
did in those early years, and has continued to do
down to the present time, has been to show the
masses of our people that in agriculture, in the industries,
in commerce, and in the struggle toward economic
success, there were compensations for the losses
they had suffered in other directions. In doing this
we did not seek to give the people the idea that
political rights were not valuable or necessary, but
rather to impress upon them that economic efficiency
was the foundation for every kind of success.

I am pointing out these facts here in order to
show how closely industrial education has been connected
with the great economic advance among the
masses of the Negro people during the last twenty-five
years. If the effect of disfranchisment of the

Negro was to discourage and in many instances to
embitter him, industrial education has done much
to turn his attention to opportunities that lay open
to him in other directions than in politics. It has had
the effect of turning attention to the vast quantities
of idle lands in many parts of the South and the
West, and in many instances, has helped him take
up these lands and make himself an independent
farmer. It has turned attention to the opportunities
in business and led him to perceive that in the South,
particularly, there are opportunities for better service
to his own race, which he can perform and more
profitably than any one else.

The fact is, that the coloured people who went into
politics directly after the war were, in most cases,
what may be called the aristocracy of the race.
Many of them had been practically, if not always
legally, free, made so by their masters, who were
at the same time their fathers, by whom they had
been educated and from whom they frequently
inherited considerable property. They had formed
their lives and characters on the models of the aristocratic
Southern people, among whom they were
raised, and they believed that politics was the only
sort of activity that was fit for a gentleman to
engage in. The conditions which existed directly
after the war offered these men the opportunity to
step in and make themselves the political leaders of
the masses of the people.

In the meantime, however, between the close of
the war and the period to which I have just referred,
there had grown up a middle class among the coloured
people. This class is composed, for the most part,
of men who had been slaves before the War. Some of
them had been house servants and had the advantage
of intimate contact with their master's family;
many of them had been slaves of that class of planters
sometimes referred to in the South as the "yeomanry";
others had been field hands on the big
plantations. The majority had had very few opportunities
before the War, except such as they obtained
in practising the different trades, which were carried
on about the plantations. It is from this class that the
greater portion of the Negro landowners have sprung;
from this class that the greater number of mechanics
formerly belonged, and it was from this class that
the majority of the business men of the Negro race
have arisen.

A farmer, who became the owner of a large plantation
of a thousand acres or more, necessarily became
something of a business man. Very likely he opened
a store on his plantation in order to supply the tenants
on his land. That was the case, for instance, with
the Reid brothers, Frank and Dow, who live in
Macon County, Alabama, about twelve miles from
Tuskegee at a little place called Dawkins. The father
of these young men had for a long time leased and
worked a large plantation of some 1,100 acres. He

was enabled to send his sons to school at Tuskegee
and, after their return from school, they leased 480
acres more and subsequently added to that by purchase
605 acres, making a total of 2,185 acres of
land under their control. A larger portion of this
land they sublet to tenants and, as the necessities of
the community they had established manifested
themselves, they established successfully a store,
a cotton-gin, a blacksmith shop, and a grist-mill.

Frequently, in the early days some young coloured
man who had worked in a restaurant or as a waiter
in a hotel, after saving a little money, would start a
business for himself in a small way. Gradually he
would accumulate more capital and enlarge his
business. That was the case of my friend, John S.
Trower, of Germantown, Philadelphia, who is now
one of the leading caterers in the city of Philadelphia,
and, also, with William E. Gross, proprietor of the
Gross Catering Company, of 219 W. I34th Street,
New York. In Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore,
and Washington, there are a number of noted
Negro caterers who began life in the small way I
have described.

Among the earlier caterers of New York was Peter
Van Dyke, who owned a place at 130 Wooster Street.
He became wealthy and left his children and
grandchildren in good circumstances. Another of
these early caterers was Boston Crummell, father of
the late Alexander Crummell, one of the first Africans

to be ordained as a priest by the Episcopal Church.
Boston Crummell was born in West Africa and
brought to America when he was a child. It is an
interesting fact that his son, Alexander Crummell,
after having studied in Queen's College, Cambridge,
England, went to Africa, as one of the first coloured
missionaries sent out from this country to Liberia.

Thomas Downing, who kept the once famous
"Downing Oyster House," was one of the early
Negro caterers of New York. His son, George T.
Downing, built the Sea-Girt House at Newport,
Rhode Island, and was afterward a caterer in Washington,
where he became a friend of Charles Sumner,
Wendell Phillips, Henry Wilson, John Andrews,
and others of the anti-slavery party of that time.

Charles H. Smiley, who was born at St. Catherine's,
Canada, and was at one time one of the leading caterers
of Chicago, began his life in Chicago as a janitor,
but was employed during his spare time as a waiter
at dinners and parties. Francis J. Moultry, who
in 1909 was still conducting a large catering establishment
at Yonkers, New York, got his training and
accumulated his capital for his business career as a
waiter in New York City. Mr. Moultry was at that
time one of the large taxpayers of his city. He
owned stock in several of the Yonkers banks and is
proprietor of what is or was a few years ago the largest
apartment house in Yonkers. Mr. Moultry owned
valuable reality in various portions of the city and

has more than once been on the bond of more than
one of the county officers.

The training which many of the coloured servants
received, both before and after emancipation, gave
them a certain capital in the way of experience with
which to go into business on their own account.
Perhaps the most successful coloured hotel-keeper
in the United States has been E. C. Berry of Athens,
Ohio. "Hotel Berry," as I learned when I
visited Ohio, has had an almost national reputation.
Mr. Berry was one of the most respected
citizens of the town in which he lives and so successful
has he been in conducting his hotel that it
is regarded by the citizens as one of the institutions
of the town.

Mr. Berry was born in Oberlin, Ohio, in 1854.
When he was two years old he was taken by his
parents to the little town of Albany, which is about
seven miles below Athens. At that time, there were
a number of lines of the Underground Railway,
which, starting at different points on the Ohio River,
passed through Albany and Athens. At Albany
there was early established what was known as the
Enterprise Academy for coloured children, and it
was at this Academy that Mr. Berry obtained his
schooling. He first came to Athens when he was
sixteen years old, and went to work in a brick-yard
at the small sum of fifty cents per day, which
was soon increased to one dollar and twenty-five

cents. With the money that he earned in this
way he helped to support the members of his family,
who were still living in Albany. Eventually he
secured employment in Athens in a restaurant, and
it was the training he received there that enabled him
later on to start a little place of his own.

Mr. Berry was successful in business from the first,
and, finally, after giving the matter due consideration
and talking it over with friends in the city, he
made up his mind to open a hotel. It was an entirely
new thing at that time to see a coloured man in the
hotel business in that part of the country, and Mr.
Berry knew that he was going to meet with opposition
on account of his race. He determined to
overcome this prejudice by making his hotel more
comfortable than any other in the city, and by giving
his guests more for their money than they were able
to get anywhere else, not only in the city but in the
state. One thing I remember which impressed
me as indicating the care and thoughtful atttention
which Mr. Berry gave to his guests was the fact
that at night, after his guests had fallen asleep, he
made it a practice to go to their rooms and gather up
their clothes and take them to his wife, who would
repair rents, add buttons where they were lacking,
and press the garments, after which Mr. Berry would
replace them. Mr. Berry's hotel, I may add, is said
by Mr. Elbert Hubbard, the lecturer, who has had
an opportunity to test the quality of a large number

of hotels in different parts of this country, to be one
of the best in the United States.

There are a number of other successful hotel men
among the members of my race of whom I have made
the acquaintance in different parts of the country.
Joseph W. Lee, who, until he died a few years ago,
kept the very popular and successful hotel at Squantum,
a summer resort just outside of Boston, was one
of these.

Negroes both before the War and after, entered
very easily into the barber business, and there is no
business, I may add, in which the Negro has met
more competition from foreign immigrants. In
many cities, both North and South, the Negro barber's
trade is almost wholly confined, at the present
time, to members of his own race. It is interesting
to observe however, that this has in no way lessened
the number of Negro barber shops, and the fact is an
indication of the increasing economic welfare of the
masses of the Negro people. In spite of the competition
which I have mentioned, some of the largest
and best conducted barber shops in the United States
are carried on by Negroes.

As an illustration, I might mention the shop of
George A. Myers, of Cleveland, Ohio, whose place of
business is fitted up, not only with all conveniences
that you will find in other first-class shops, but also
with some that you will not find there. For instance,
when I was last in his shop, he had devised an

arrangement by which a customer could be connected
at once by telephone with any one he wished to
speak to, and that without leaving his chair. He
has also provided a young woman stenographer, to
whom patrons can dictate business letters if they
desire, without interrupting the work of the barber.

Another business in which the Negro early found
an opportunity to be of service to his people is that
of undertaking. As far as they were able, the Negro
people have always tried to surround the great
mystery of death with appropriate and impressive
ceremonies. One of the principal features of the
Negro secret organisations has been the care for the
sick and the burial of the dead. The demand that
these organisations sought to meet has created a
business opportunity, and Negro business men have
largely taken advantage of it.

One of the first men to perceive the opportunity
for coloured business men in this direction was Elijah
Cook, a Negro undertaker of Montgomery, formerly
a member of the State Legislature of Alabama. Mr.
Cook was born a slave in Alabama. He was several
times sold on the auction block during slavery, and
at one of these sales he was separated from his
brother, of whom he has never since heard. He
was taught the carpenter's trade, however, and, after
he had served his apprenticeship, was permitted to
hire his time for $25 per month. When the Civil
War broke out, Mr. Cook still paid his master's

wife the stipulated sum per month and continued
to do so faithfully until he was emancipated. He
was a leader in founding the first coloured school in
Montgomery, which was held in a basement,
under a dilapidated church. He himself was one
of the first scholars and, after working hard all day,
was a faithful attendant of the night school.

Right after the War there was no coloured undertaker
in Montgomery and frequently the corpses of
the coloured people were hauled to the cemetery
in rough wagons. Mr. Cook seeing this, bought
a hearse and went into the undertaking business
for himself. He accumulated a small fortune
during the twenty years or more that he was in
business, and became one of the respected citizens
of Montgomery.

James C. Thomas, who, at the time I write, is said
to be the richest man of African descent in New
York, made a large part of his fortune in the undertaking
business. Mr. Thomas came originally from
Harrisburg, Texas, where he was born in 1864.
In 1881, while he was employed by a steamer plying
between New Orleans, Mexico, and Cuba, yellow
fever broke out in New Orleans. The boat he was
on came to New York to escape the quarantine.
It was thus, quite by accident, that Mr. Thomas
became a New Yorker.

There have been Negro undertakers in New York,
I have been informed, for over 150 years. There were

several Negro undertakers in New York and Brooklyn,
at the time Mr. Thomas went into business, but
the larger part of the trade, which should have come
to the coloured undertakers, went to white men.
In 1909, Mr. Thomas had one of the largest businesses
of any undertaker, white or black, in the city of
New York. He was, in addition, the owner of a
number of valuable properties in New York City
and owned stock in the Chelsea National Bank of
New York.

I shall have occasion to make mention, in another
connection, of the success the Negro has had as a
banker, real estate dealer, and as a druggist, and in
some other forms of business. As illustrating,
however, the variety of enterprises into which the
Negro had entered, I might mention the fact that one
of the best conducted grocery stores in the city of
Montgomery is run by Victor H. Tulane, who started
in business in 1893 in a little building, twelve by
twenty in size, with no experience and a capital of
$90. Mr. Tulane, in 1909, was doing a business of
forty thousand dollars a year. He has been for a
number of years one of the trustees of the Tuskegee
Normal and Industrial Institute.

During my visit of observation and study in the
State of Mississippi in the fall of 1908, I found that
the largest book-store and, I was told, the only one
at that time in the city of Greenville, Mississippi, was
conducted by a coloured man, Granville Carter.

Mr. Carter told me that at one time there had been
as many as five book-stores in the town but he had
succeeded, by close attention to business and offering
his books at prices more favourable than his rivals,
in outliving them all, until at the time I was there,
his was the only book-store in the town. He told
me that he handled the entire book business of
the county and that he sold books in several of the
adjoining counties. He regularly employs four
helpers to assist him in the business and at Christmas
time he has been compelled to increase this number
to ten.

In Jackson, Mississippi, H. K. Rischer had had
for nearly twenty years, at the time of my visit,
a practical monopoly of the bakery business. Mr.
Rischer's bakery was one of the first concerns of its
kind to be established in Jackson. His business,
which amounts to about $30,000 a year, gives employment
to twelve persons and was first established in
1881.

While it is true, as I have already pointed out, that
the disposition of the Negro people to turn their
attention more and more to practical matters and
to business manifested itself at about the same time
that I came to Alabama and has grown with the
increasing interest in industrial education, it is
likewise true that only since 1897 or 1898 has
there been any marked and rapid increase in the
amount of business conducted by coloured people.

When the National Negro Business League met in
Boston, 1900, there were but two Negro banks in the
United States; at the present time there are nearly,
if not quite, fifty such institutions.

In order to illustrate the improvement of the general
mass of the coloured people in the South during
the ten years since 1899, I shall take as an example
the city of Jackson, Mississippi, where in the summer
of 1898, a special study was made of the economic
condition of the people. Up to 1896, Negroes who
represented at that time more than half of the population,
were not reckoned in the business life of the
town. Few of them owned property of any kind.
At the present time, the Negro population is less than
half of the total population of the town, and the
8,000 Negroes who make their homes there, own, it
is estimated, one-third of the area of the town,
although this area represents but one-eleventh of the
value of the city property. Negroes own, for instance,
according to the tax records of the city, $581,580
worth of property. Over one-third of the 566
Negroes on the tax books were assessed for more than
$1,000 and six of them for more than $5,000. The
largest single assessment amounted to $23,800.

A careful investigation brought to light the fact
that about one-half the Negro families of that town
own their own homes, while more than two-thirds
of the houses in which the Negroes live are in the
possession of their own race. Next to the possession

of property, the amount of money deposited in banks
by Negroes is an evidence of their economic condition.
In speaking of this matter during the summer of
1908, the president of one of the prominent white
banks said that Negroes had just begun to save their
money during the last ten or twelve years. He was
in a position to know, for Negroes had deposited in
his bank more than $25,000. Altogether Negro savings
in Jackson banks amounted, at the time, to
something over $200,000, more than one-third of
which was in the hands of the Negro banks.

Perhaps the most successful Negro business man
in Jackson, at that time, was Dr. S. D. Redmond.
Dr. Redmond received his medical training at the
Illinois Medical College and the Harvard Medical College.
When he settled in Jackson ten years ago he
had practically nothing. At the time this is written he
is president of the American Trust and Savings bank,
the oldest of the Negro banks in Jackson and a
stockholder in three banks controlled by the white
people, as well as in the electric power and light company
which lights the city streets. He owns two
drug-stores, one of which is situated on the chief
business street of the town. He receives rent from
more than one hundred houses.

There were in 1908 more than one hundred business
enterprises conducted by Negroes in Jackson.
Among them were the two banks already mentioned,
four drug-stores, two undertaking companies, two

real estate companies, Mr. Rischer's bakery, four
shoemaking and repair shops, one of these doing the
largest business of its kind in the town. One millinery
shop, besides numerous stores, barber shops, and
other smaller business concerns of various kinds.
Forty-five of these, including five contracting firms,
did something like $380,000 worth of business during
the year 1907–1908, and gave employment to two
hundred and thirty persons.

It used to be said, before much was known about
Africa, that the condition of the African people had
remained the same in all parts of Africa through
thousands of years and nothing furnished so convincing
a proof of the inability of the African to
improve as the fact that during all this time he has
not changed. I have already suggested, in what I
have written, that an enormous change has taken
place in the condition, in the feeling and in the
ambitions of the coloured people in this country,
since they obtained their freedom a comparatively
few years ago.

The Negro came out of slavery with a feeling that
work was the symbol of degradation. In nearly all
the schools conducted by Negroes in the South at the
present time, Negro children are learning to work.
The Negro came out of slavery with almost no capital
except the hard discipline and training he had
received as a slave. In the years since that time,
he has not only become a large land-owner, and, to

a large extent, the owner of his own home, but he has
become a banker and a business man. He came out
of slavery with the idea that somehow or other the
Government, which freed him, was going to support
and protect him, and that the great hope of his race
was in politics and in the ballot. In the last decade
the Negro has settled down to the task of building
his own fortune and of gaining through thrift,
through industry, and through business success that
which he has been denied in other directions.

Many of the men to whom I have referred in this
chapter, if I had time to relate their histories, would
illustrate in their own lives the changes to which I
refer. For instance, L. K. Attwood, the president of
the Southern Bank, the second Negro bank in
Jackson, Mississippi, was born a slave in Wilcox
County, Alabama, about 150 miles from Tuskegee,
in 1851. He was sold on the block when he
was eighteen months old. His mother bought
him for $300 and moved with him to Ohio.
In 1874, he graduated from Lincoln University,
Pennsylvania. Two years later he was admitted
to the bar in Mississippi. He served two terms
as a member of the Mississippi Legislature
from Hinds County, and has held the positions of
United States Commissioner and United States
Deputy Revenue Collector for the Louisiana and
Mississippi districts. He is one of a group of professional
coloured men who have found that business

pays better than politics. In addition to his connection
with the bank, Mr. Attwood has been actively
identified with a number of other Negro enterprises
in the town. He has amassed considerable property
and is generally respected as a shrewd and aggressive
business man among the people of his community.

While I am on this subject, I should, perhaps, mention
one other notable example of the business men
who have found a larger opportunity in business than
they did in politics. C. F. Johnson, of Mobile, Alabama,
Secretary and General Manager of the Union
Mutual Aid Association, was for many years Secretary
of the Republican State Executive Committee
of Alabama. He was for a time, also, secretary to the
Collector of Customs at the port of Mobile, but
when Mr. Cleveland was elected President he gave
up that position and took the position as elevator man
instead. One day after he had been there for some
time the new collector, who had been appointed by
Mr. Cleveland, noticed him there and, thinking the
time had come to complete his political house-cleaning,
dismissed him from that position. Because the
new man whom the Collector had to take his place
did not do the work satisfactorily, he asked Mr. Johnson
to return. Johnson said he would come back
if he could have the appointment for four years, but
the Collector would not agree to that, so Johnson
went permanently out of office and into business.
He was largely responsible for the organisation of the

company of which he has been general manager and
is now one of the wealthiest coloured men in the
State of Alabama.

So far as I have been able to learn, no coloured
man has ever been classed among the millionaires,
though several men have had the reputation of being
in that class.

A few years ago there was a coloured man by the
name of Wiley Jones in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who
owned a street railway, a stable of trotting horses,
and private trotting park. When he died it was
learned for the first time that he had investments in
real estate in a number of large Western cities, but
his estate did not reach, as I remember, more than
one hundred thousand dollars. John McKee, of
Philadelphia, was reputed to be a millionaire, but his
estate in Philadelphia, when he died, amounted to
but $342,832. In addition to this he owned land in
Atlantic County, New Jersey, which was assessed at
$20,650. He also owned a tract of coal and mineral
land in Kentucky, which was assessed at $70,000,
which he hoped would eventually be of great value.
Colonel McKee gave directions in his will that the
rents and incomes of his estate should accumulate
until the death of all his children and grandchildren.
It was to be used to establish a college for the education
of fatherless boys, white and coloured.

Perhaps the nearest approach to a coloured millionaire
was Thorny Lafon, of New Orleans, who died

December 23, 1893, leaving an estate appraised at
$413,000, the bulk of which was divided among the
various charities of the city of New Orleans. I
understand, however, that Mr. Lafon had disposed
of a considerable portion of his estate in order to
found various charities before his death.

Mr. Lafon was born in New Orleans, December
28, 1810, of free Negro parents. He began life as a
school-teacher; then he ran for a time a small drygoods
store on Orleans Street. As he accumulated a
little money he began loaning it out at advantageous
rates of interest, and went from that into land speculations,
which made him very wealthy. Before he died
he became much attached to the late Archbishop
Janssens and, under his direction, as I understand,
began disposing of his fortune for philanthropic purposes.
Before his death he had established an asylum
for orphan boys called Lafon Asylum, and after his
death he bequeathed the sum of $2,000 in cash and
the revenue amounting to $275 per month of a large
property at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets.

Other legacies were in favor of the Lafon Old
Folks' Home, previously established, the Charity
Hospital, of New Orleans, the several universities
for coloured children in New Orleans and a number
of charities in charge of the Catholic Church.

In this benevolent way the two largest fortunes
which members of my race have yet accumulated
were dispersed.