In 1939, Ellen E. Armstrong pulled off one of the slickest tricks the performing world had ever seen.
Born in 1914, the 25-year-old daughter of J. Hartford and Lillie Belle Armstrong took over her father’s business – a feat in itself for any woman of the time – and transformed herself into the world’s first headlining African-American female magician.
J. Hartford and Lillie Belle: “the wizard & the witch” as they’re labeled in the photo
As the only heir to the couple dubbed “the most royal colored entertainers of the century,” Ellen took up her birthright early on, joining her parents in performing at the age of 6. Their tagline “Going Fine Since 1889” During set changes, Ellen would wander through the audience, touch her little index finger to a person’s forehead, and divine what they were thinking about the person sitting next to them. Whether it actually worked, or simply served as adorable comic relief, Ellen’s confidence was boosted, and her act grew to include sleight of hand and card tricks too. Never one to shy away from showmanship, she even created her own signature act, “Chalk Talk,” where she told stories through squiggles and doodles. Each time she’d add a new chalk mark, the doodle would transform into a new character or scene in her story.
The family business. Ellen, J. Hartford, and Lillie Belle appear in an beautifully printed tour poster.
Just Lillie Belle & Ellen. “Daddy’s Babies” is inscribed below them.
Taking audiences on a journey was Ellen’s talent, regardless of the medium, and “The Celebrated Armstrongs” enjoyed incredible success and critical acclaim as “America’s Greatest Colored Magicians” touring the East Coast, Cuba, and even Europe. But all of that came to a screeching halt in 1939 when J. Hartford Armstrong, “King of the Colored Conjurers,” died suddenly.
Ellen was only 25, and fresh out of college. She could have chosen many paths. Instead, she would rightfully inherit the throne of the King of the Colored Conjurers and his substantial $8,500 in props, taking up her mantle as the unrivaled “Mistress of Modern Magic.”
And she was absolutely terrified.
American culture has long held taboos against women practicing magic, and even the Salem Witch Trials held a Black women in particular contempt. Even if Ellen’s magic was simply for entertainment’s sake, it was still risky to practice alone, travel alone, and own property alone in the early 20th Century.
But for the next 3 decades, Ellen’s risktaking paid off.
Ellen’s newspaper ads were hilarious, boisterous and entirely unexpected from the lady pictured at the top.
She married in 1940, but Ellen’s headlining act was her only baby and her sole bread and butter. Many of the tricks she performed like the Miser’s Dream, the Mutilated Parasol and the Sand Frame, where a photograph of famous African-American boxer Joe Louis appeared from thin air, are still classics today.
When her “Modern, Marvelous, Matchless Merrymaking March Through Mysteryland” finally came to a close, Ellen retired in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and in 1979, died unceremoniously. Aside from the tricks she practiced, and a handful of her tour posters, little of Ellen or her groundbreaking performance remains. And though that means there’s often very little for me to tell, I am so grateful to feature women like Ellen (and men like Black Herman) here at The American Blackstory, ensuring that if I have anything to do with it, they’ll never disappear.
A letterpress poster touting Ellen’s act printed by historic small press Bower Show Print.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Browse the Armstrong Family Papers including photographs, news articles, and letters documenting their lives at the University of South Carolina Libraries.
Listen to podcast “Stuff Mom Never Told You” and their episode on Ellen’s Magical Marvels.
From the local newspaper to the locals themselves, Montgomery’s white folks liked to turn Georgia Gilmore into a fat joke.
They had no idea they were mocking the heart and soul of a movement.
The delightful and effervescent Georgia Gilmore
The Black folks close to her knew Georgia Gilmore had presence. And it had nothing to do with her size.
She was quick-witted, clever, motherly, industrious, and every morsel from her kitchen tasted absolutely divine.
Georgia’s skill was in high demand in Montgomery’s households and lunch facilities, but the hypocrisy everywhere else in town was real. Even though Montgomery’s bus system was almost entirely reliant on domestic workers like maids, nannies, seamstresses (like Rosa Parks) and cooks like Georgia, those women took the brunt of racial abuse from drivers and passengers. By the time Rosa’s turn came around, Georgia’s personal bus boycott had already begun.
She’d gone through the mortifying motions so often it was automatic: fare at the front, walk of shame to the back. So when Georgia dropped her fare into the box in October 1955, and the driver barked at her to get off and get on again through the back door, she was more than rattled. Georgia was furious. Powerless to do any different, Georgia begrudgingly backed out. When her feet touched the pavement, the driver shut the door and drove away. She vowed to never be humiliated that way again.
So when flyers went out alerting Black Montgomerians that an upstanding woman had been jailed for protesting the Montgomery Bus System, Georgia hightailed it to Holt St. Baptist Church where those in support of taking action gathered. She was one of nearly 5,000 there on December 5, 1956 who launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first mass public demonstration of the Civil Rights Movement, and she was proud to be counted among its most crucial participants. “After the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well the bus didn’t have any need to run,” she said. “It was just the idea that we could make the white man suffer. And let the white man realize that we could get along in the world without him.”
Georgia praying in the Holt St. pews.Holt St. Baptist Church as it stands today.
“After the maids and the cooks stopped riding the bus, well the bus didn’t have any need to run,” Georgia said. From the LIFE Picture Collection: “Two white women sit in an otherwise empty bus during the African-American boycott of bus companies throughout Montgomery, Alabama. Grey Villet/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
By simply existing in her Blackness, Georgia had taken some of her power back from her oppressors. And hungry for more, she put her skills to work.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott drew supporters from outside communities too, because even Black people that didn’t live in Montgomery still had to sit in the back of its buses. Georgia had worked as a cook and a midwife, but mass fundraising against racism was brand new to almost everybody participating. But not all were in the position to participate publicly. They cooked, cleaned and cared for the children of white racists, and were suddenly forced into a choice between supporting their people and maintaining a livelihood. Carpools were formed to transport workers and named based on their geographical locations around town. But all of those car clubs needed money for gas, insurance, upkeep, all the costs one takes public transportation to avoid. Georgia rallied all of those domestic workers who wanted to help quietly into the “Club from Nowhere,” a group of women who turned plates, pies, pastries, and whatever their culinary speciality into cash money for the movement.
Georgia serving up just desserts in her kitchen.
The Club from Nowhere provided all sorts of strategic cover. A Black maid or cook carrying food was about the least suspicious person in the Jim Crow South. Should any member be questioned about the money they carried after selling their goods, they could answer in two totally truthful ways: say that it was from selling food, OR that it came from/was being taken to “Nowhere.” Finally, white allies who couldn’t realistically attend a planning meeting to donate could write a check to “The Club from Nowhere” without revealing the true recipient of that support. Eventually, the Club from Nowhere was bringing in $200+ dollars a week (about $2K today), more than any other fundraising effort in Montgomery.
Nowhere was brilliant, and through it, Georgia came into her own, cooking and hustling for the movement. For the 382 days that the Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted, Georgia Gilmore found one way or another to support it.
The most obvious, and you’d think innocuous, was by walking. “Sometime, I walked by myself and sometime, I walked with different people, and I began to enjoy walking, because for so long I guess I had this convenient ride until I had forgot about how well it would be to walk,” she said. “A lot of times, some of the young whites would come along and they would say, ‘N*gger, don’t you know it’s better to ride the bus than it is to walk?’ And we would say, ‘No, cracker, no. We rather walk.’ I was the kind of person who would be fiery. I didn’t mind fighting with you.”
Three months into the 381-day boycott, African Americans are photographed walking to work instead of riding the bus. Montgomery, Alabama, February 1956. Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images
All that fire and fight made Georgia an excellent witness on the stand when Montgomery County Grand Jury indicted Martin Luther King Jr. (and over 100 others) for violating Alabama’s anti-boycott laws. Nobody had a better story to tell than Ms. Georgia who’d been left on the side of the road out of spite. She made an indefensible case for why Montgomery’s buses needed to be desegregated: “When I paid my fare and they got the money, they don’t know Negro money from white money,” Georgia testified.
But that visibility also made Georgia an easy target.
She appeared in the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser repeatedly after that, always as the aggressor, always as a laughingstock.
The Alabama Journal, November 3, 1961: “Huge Negro Woman Draws Cursing Fine.”
The Montgomery Advertiser, on the same story: “A hefty Negro woman who weighed in excess of 230 pounds was fined $25 today in city court on charges of cursing a diminutive white garbage truck driver.”
Hattie McDaniel as America’s cinematic “Mammy” in a press image from “Gone with the Wind.”
As the Safiya Charles of today’s Montgomery Advertiser writes, “he worked a twist on the sassy Black mammy archetype. And he rendered the white male truck driver her victim.”
But Georgia would not be deterred by outside opinions. Because her home was full of love. Though the papers called her the most derogatory names, the people who came from far and wide to buy Georgia’s plates of fried chicken and macaroni and cheese, or sit at her table sipping sweet tea called her “Georgie,” “Tiny,” “Big Mama,” and “Madear.”
(Those near and dear guests of her kitchen included Martin Luther King, Aretha Franklin, Sam Cooke, and even Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy.)
On December 20, 1956 the boycotts ended after the Supreme Court ruled the buses’ segregation unconstitutional, but Georgia’s reputation had been so utterly tattered that she was certain her days of working in Montgomery were through. Between her activism, her testimony, her attitude, and the press, she couldn’t even get home insurance.
Georgia & Dr. King were featured in the Alabama Journal, but click through for a closer look at how even with a positive spin, the language used to describe Georgia isn’t exactly complimentary.
Georgia deserved to be rewarded for her courage and dedication to the movement, not left in shambles because of it. “She was not really recognized for who she was, but had it not been for people like Georgia Gilmore, Martin Luther King Jr. would not have been who he was,” Rev. Thomas Lilly who participated in the boycott, said. Dr. King himself repaid at least some of that debt with the most valuable piece of advice Georgia ever received. “All these years you’ve worked for somebody else, now it’s time you worked for yourself.” She did, and she never worked for anyone else again.
Still at it decades later, on March 3, 1990, in preparation for the 25th anniversary of the March from Selma to Montgomery, Georgia cooked up her famous macaroni and cheese and fried chicken to feed the revelers. Hours later, she passed and had the honor of watching her table from above as hundreds gathered to grieve her and commemorate so many walks for freedom with one last meal from from nowhere.
The historic marker at the former home of Georgia Gilmore in Montgomery, AL. Mickey Welsh / Montgomery Advertiser
PBS series “Eyes on the Prize” has captured interviews with members of the Alabama civil rights movements, and you can find Georgia’s here: INTERVIEW 1 (1979) | INTERVIEW 2 (1986)
Listen in to the personal accounts of many who had the pleasure of eating in Ms. Georgia’s kitchen, including her son, Montgomery City Councilman Mark Gilmore, in NPR’s “The Kitchen of a Civil Rights Hero. “
The Freedom Riders exist in American culture as an almost mythical group of heroes, a collective of brave souls, iconic and sympathetic champions of equality.
Don’t worry. You won’t read anything different here.
Indeed, the Freedom Riders were all of those things. But they were also 436 individuals who each woke up one day, unwilling to wake up to another where Black people were second-class citizens. As Diane Nash, a founder of the SNCC told us, most had put their affairs in order, and all had signed waivers releasing the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) from any liability should they be injured or killed.
Ruby Doris Smith wasn’t just one among the collective, she led by example.
Born in 1942, she was one of seven born to beautician Alice and pastor/handyman J.T., both gainfully employed and fully involved in their community, raising their brood in all-Black schools, churches, and other social settings. With the luxury of safe and comfortable financial and social circumstances, wanting for little and surrounded by friendly faces, the Smith children grew up with certain expectations of the world, and against that backdrop, the scenes of white supremacy and racial violence outside of the Smiths’ little bubble seemed absolutely horrifying. Even as a child, Ruby Doris knew she’d been put here with purpose, and once told her sister Catherine, “I know what my life and mission is…It’s to set the Black people free. I will never rest until it happens. I will die for that cause.”
Ruby Doris’s journey started with small protests. She’d throw rocks back at white children who would tease her friends and siblings. When a white sundae shop clerk handed her an ice cream cone with his bare hand, she refused, perfectly aware that cones served to white customers came wrapped in tissue. Those were only embers of the fire still yet to come.
Whipsmart, Ruby Doris graduated high school at 16, and just kept leveling up at the historic Black women’s university of Spelman College. In 1960, Ruby had been at school less than a year and already found her calling. That was the year four well-dressed young Black men walked up to the F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, cemented their place in history and ignited a movement by simply sitting down.
The Greensboro Four: David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Jibreel Khazan and Joseph McNeil
That kind of defiance was right up Ruby’s alley, and she jumped head first into organizing her own publicity-making protests. “Kneel-ins” at white churches were a particular specialty of hers, but outside of holy places, Ruby Doris wasn’t afraid to be loud about her rights. “Have integration will shop, have segregation will not,” she’d chant outside of shops and grocery stores, even if no one else protested with her. By 1961, Ruby Doris had been arrested more times than she could count for her repeated rabble-rousing, and had no intention of stopping as she signed on to become the executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group that had just begun organizing what they would call “Freedom Rides.”
The KKK firebombed a Freedom Rider bus in May 1961, just outside of Birmingham.
When Ruby Doris set out on her own bus ride from Nashville to Birmingham on May 17, the KKK’s Anniston, AL firebombing had occurred just days before. Diane Nash said, “It was clear to me that if we allowed the Freedom Ride to stop at that point, just after so much violence had been inflicted, the message would have been sent that all you have to do to stop a nonviolent campaign is inflict massive violence.” So undeterred, they pressed on, and as expected, they were indeed met with more massive violence. Ruby Doris was badly beaten, but still rode on from Birmingham to Jackson, MS. And since nothing else so far had kept busload after busload of Freedom Riders from riding into the Deep South, the powers that be decided they’d try another tactic: brutal imprisonment. Parchman State Penitentiary was a Mississippi maximum security prison, and everything about the Freedom Riders’ imprisonment there was designed to be torturous to the hundreds whose rides landed them at those facilities.
Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson after departing Alabama Greyhound Stations. Ruby Doris Smith is on the second line, fourth from left.
Michael Booth, a member of the Civil Rights Movement remembers, “With the intention to intimidate and instill fear, the women were packed onto a flatbed, in the middle of the night, similar to that which animals are transported in. They were forced to stand the entire drive from Jackson to Parchman, going through Money, Mississippi, the place where Emmett Till was murdered. In a continued effort to break their spirits, when the women were processed into Parchman they were forced to walk through a very large pool of cockroaches before being photographed and fingerprinted. The women were imprisoned on death row where the ‘most cruel and unbelievable things’ were perpetrated on the Freedom Riders. [One woman’s] cell was only 13 footsteps from the gas chamber. The lights were left on 24 hours a day so that the prisoners didn’t know what time it was or what day it was.”
Ruby Doris didn’t document the horrors perpetrated on her at Parchman, but others remembered being scarred by what they saw done to her. The woman jailed next to the gas chamber, Dr. Pauline Knight-Ofusu, watched as Ruby Doris was “dragged barefooted down a concrete hallway to be thrown into a shower and scrubbed with a wire brush. Post traumatic syndrome is a given for every Freedom Rider,” she said. Traumatized, but still not broken. After 45 days in Parchman, Ruby Doris went right back to disrupting the way only she could.
The Kennedys were legislating the bus situation, the lunch counters had been desegregated thanks to the efforts of the protestors, but there was more work to be done. Even hospitals had “white only” entrances, and after months of organizing elsewhere, that’s where Ruby Doris turned her attention. When a receptionist tried to bar protestors from the white-only door, quipping that they weren’t sick anyway, Ruby Doris marched right up to the desk, looked that woman straight in the eye as she vomited, and replied, “Is that sick enough for you?!”
Truth is, Ruby Doris was sick. Dr. Pauline knew back at Parchman that Ruby had ulcers and diabetes. When Ruby Doris was elected as the first female executive secretary of SNCC under Stokely Carmichael, she was a wife, mother, and had a full time job. Her anxiety kept her so tightly wound that she kept a collection of glass bottles in her office specifically to break and sweep up before getting back to work. By the time she was 25, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson was dead.
Officially, a rare blood disease and terminal cancer claimed her life on October 7, 1967, but everyone involved in the movement knew her real cause of death. Stanley Wise, another leader in SNCC put it plainly: “She died of exhaustion… I don’t think it was necessary to assassinate her. What killed (her) was the constant outpouring of work with being married, having a child, constant struggles that she was subjected to because she was a woman… she was destroyed by the movement.”
Officers of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee listen as Stokely Carmichael, right, chairman of the organization, speaks at a news conference in Atlanta, May 23, 1966. Pictured left to right are: James Forman, outgoing executive secretary; Cleveland Sellers, program secretary; and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, the organization’s first female executive secretary.
Note that Mr. Wise speaks of her death in terms of assassination because Ruby Doris was truly a driving force in the movement, and her sudden loss was deeply felt. What I’ve mentioned to you here is only a fraction of what she accomplished in her 25 years. She led voter registration drives in dangerously racist Mississippi, and single-handedly organized the SNCC’s Sojourner Truth Motor Fleet to keep the organization mobile. The work she did for Civil Rights was incomparable, and so was her mere presence. In eulogy, Stokely Carmichael said Ruby Doris “was convinced that there was nothing that she could not do… she was a tower of strength,” and on her headstone, her own words were engraved: “If you think free, you are free.”
Social media personality Nakia Smith coined a saying: “My hands are loud enough.”
So instead of me, a hearing person, introducing you to Black American Sign Language, here’s Nakia speaking for herself.
On her social channels, she goes by Charmay, but as a woman who’s Black, deaf, and Black and deaf, she’s used to having multiple identities, each with its own unique set of circumstances and challenges to navigate.
But why does “Black and deaf” fall into a separate category?
Because Jim Crow didn’t give passes for disabilities.
Accommodations for deaf people have always been drastically behind those for the hearing, and it wasn’t even until 1817 that the first school for deaf children—the first in the entire Western Hemisphere, actually—was opened. Because that same school wouldn’t accommodate African-American students until 135 years later in 1952, racism essentially stripped Black deaf people of any community at all. In some southern states like Louisiana, deaf schools weren’t desegregated until 1978. Physically unable to communicate with people who looked like them, and legally unable to learn with people who communicated like them left Black deaf people in a very small circle. Within it, they built a community, schools, and a rich language of their own.
Austin’s Blind, Deaf & Orphan School is one example of the segregated learning facilities for Black deaf students, and the same institution that Charmay’s grandfather Jake attended.
Americans typically think of the “Black version” of things as lesser, and English is no exception (see: the wholesale invalidation of Ebonics and African-American Vernacular English [AAVE]). Linguist John McWhorter explains, “The educated white person has often internalized a sense that it’s wrong to associate black people and ‘bad grammar’ at all. There’s a dissonance that person permits, which is to read southern white speech depicted in all of its glory and accept that as ‘the way they talk,’ but to bristle at Black people depicted speaking the same way. Human minds tolerate a lot of dissonance of that kind!”
Those concepts translate over to sign language quite fluidly because BASL uses different signs than ASL, but it’s visually different in practice as well. Where ASL largely uses one hand for signs and communicates around the shoulders and midsection, BASL uses two hands to sign in the face and forehead region more frequently. BASL users also employ a lot more of their personal space for communicating than ASL users do, with signs that use big motions around the body. In other words, as our friend Charmay says, “The biggest difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning.” Teraca Florence, a former president of the Black Deaf Student Union at Gallaudet University, says “Our signing is louder, more expressive. It’s almost poetic.”
Charmay’s social channels are filled with videos documenting the history and celebrating users of BASL because she realized that many people in deaf and hearing communities didn’t even know Black American Sign Language existed. Because this is the Internet, for every bit of praise, Charmay received even more criticism. Even white deaf people weren’t fully in support, asking questions like “Why further divide the deaf community?” But questions like that were just more proof that her voice absolutely needed to be heard, because they were evidence of history repeating itself over a lack of shared experience. Felecia Redd, a Black deaf interpreter says, “I’m always told by deaf African Americans, ‘I am Black first; then I’m deaf.’ White deaf people are deaf first and then white.”
BASL didn’t develop out of Black people’s need for specialized communication. It developed out of their need to communicate AT ALL. It’s not a variant of ASL, “Black ASL could be considered the purer of the two forms,” says Ceil Davis of Gallaudet University. Because African-Americans weren’t allowed access to any advancements in hearing technology, they could only refer to the original curriculum used by Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet when he opened the first school for the deaf. From that curriculum, Black ASL developed nuance, syntax, slang, idioms and other language fundamentals that simply don’t exist or function differently in ASL, giving the Black deaf community something truly unique. That is, until schools integrated, and Black deaf students had no choice but to conform to ASL. Instead of being welcomed into the broader community, Black deaf students were only further marginalized, mocked and teased for having developed a separate language due to the racism forced upon them.
Dr. Carolyn McCaskill of Gallaudet University was a Black deaf student who integrated into all-white schools. She discusses her experiences code-switching as a Black deaf person, and shows you what that looks like too.
Even though Black deaf people are now “integrated” in the broader deaf community, many of the challenges they faced are unchanged. “In the United States, less Black people from the age of 25-64 are deaf—a rate of 1.8%, compared to the overall population at 2.3%,” according to the National Deaf Center. Of course, that means fewer translators in comparison as well. So when Black deaf people have to navigate places that already demonstrate unconscious bias against them, like say, doctor’s offices, they also find themselves facing a double language barrier as well. LeeAnne Valentine complained of constant abdominal pain to her hearing white doctor via white interpreter, but was routinely dismissed. When she visited the same doctor with a Black interpreter, her experience was night and day.
“She actually interpreted what I said, with the intent and the tone, plus my emotions,” LeeAnne said. “And she conveyed that to the doctor… and he finally took some action.” As a result, LeeAnne was rushed for emergency gallbladder surgery. Health services employees routinely report BASL users misunderstanding information about COVID and vaccines, if they receive it at all, because televised broadcasts rely on mostly white interpreters as though ASL is the only way for deaf Americans to communicate. Inherently tense social interactions like encounters with the police take on a whole new layer of complexity for Black deaf people. “Black Lives Matter” is even signed differently in BASL than ASL because Black people have an entirely different relationship to the movement than white people do. Even today with more accommodation than ever, the same physical and social barriers exist for Black deaf people, just in more modern spaces.
Dozens of Black deaf people ask the question “Am I Next?” in this short PSA.
That’s where Charmay comes in. There’s no more modern space than TikTok. And with 402K followers, she’s speaking truth to power to an audience bigger than her ancestors could have even imagined. She’s the 5th generation of BASL users in her family, and like so many things precious to the Black diaspora, her language has only been handed down by oral tradition. Without Charmay and other visible BASL users on social media, university collections, and privately funded documentaries, the world might not know BASL existed at all. “Historically, so much has been taken away from us, and we’re finally feeling that ‘this is ours,’” she said. “‘This is mine. I own something.’” And she’s one of many claiming every bit of her history and guaranteeing its future with the power of her two Black hands.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Spend 30 minutes getting to know the intricacies of being a Black person signing in America, and if you like that, watch the rest of the series for more legacies of African-American language at Talking Black in America. If you’re hooked, continue down that rabbit hole with “What Counts as Standard? On Black English and Black American Sign Language,” a compelling conversation between a linguist and a writer.
Gallaudet University has a complete series on Black ASL, and this video links to the full playlist. Fair warning, it’s totally 90s style production, but there’s SO much insight from Black ASL users and so much story to see here.
Good Morning America presented an extensive overview of BASL, its history and how its users are preserving their language today.
“I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign.” Get even more insight on the life & times of Charmay & more Black ASL users past & present at the New York Times.
By the time Lila Miller graduated Cornell University in 1977 in pursuit of her dream, she was ready to walk away from it all. Her Doctorate of Veterinary Medicine included more than her fair share of lessons in adversity.
Like so many women and Black people before her, Dr. Lila was deterred from pursuing her passion at all by others who were certain that her success was an impossibility. “There were hardly any women or people of color who were veterinarians [at the time],” she recalls.
When her persistent studies earned her a spot in Cornell, Dr. Lila got an up-close-and-personal look into why. Of the 65 students in Cornell’s veterinary program, only 14 were women, and only one other was Black. Those two women were disparagingly nicknamed “the Black panthers” by a professor, and the only time Dr. Lila can remember being called the n-slur was on campus.
Dr. Lila Miller (left) and Dr. Rochelle Woods (right) were the first two Black women to graduate Cornell’s school of veterinary medicine.
Unfortunate as they were, the external factors were predictable. But there’s only one way to find out you’re deathly allergic to horses. Dr. Lila’s reaction was so severe that she had to be hospitalized, but there’s no skipping the equine section of your veterinary degree, so once again, she had to push through.
It’s enough to bring anyone to their breaking point. So Dr. Lila did what any industrious college student folding under the pressure should do. She paid a visit to the Dean. And was greeted with even more pressure. “He told me, ‘Lila, you’re a guinea pig in this program. If you don’t finish it, they’re not going to let any more Black students in for the foreseeable future,’” she says.
Carrying the weight of her entire race wasn’t fair, but there it was. So instead of dropping out, Dr. Lila just pushed through even faster, graduating as one of the first two Black women ever admitted to Cornell’s program AND a year ahead of her class.
Finally relieved of all that pressure, Dr. Lila found that little had changed. “Cornell was very grueling and when I graduated I was drained and didn’t feel qualified to go into private practice and didn’t want to undergo the rigors of an internship either,” she said. “ In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to be a veterinarian any more.”
Dr. Lila’s mentor happened to be overseeing the New York shelter system, and an invitation to join him while she considered her options suddenly blossomed into her life’s work. “I realized the impact of any improvements I could make would be far greater than I could make for the individual animals I would treat in private practice.”
Within 5 years of joining the NY ASPCA, Dr. Lila had revised old protocols and written new ones that established more humane euthanasia, spay/neuter processes, ongoing animal health care and adoption criteria, and became supervisor of the entire program. In those years, she discovered that the entire national system was in equal disarray. To give you an idea of the scope, before her protocols were written, animals that appeared healthy were treated as such, foregoing vaccinations, blood tests, deworming, and other care that’s now simply a given for animals anticipating forever homes.
July 10th is Dr. Lila Miller Shelter Day in New York City. When she won a $25K award for her lifelong service to animals on that day, she donated it back to the New York shelter system. What a lady.
Dr. Lila is the reason why. She’s called “The Mother of Shelter Medicine” in veterinary trade circles, because her dedication to improving care for our furry friends combined with the visibility and authority her position at the ASPCA brought led to sweeping changes across shelters and the industry itself nationwide. Before her groundbreaking work, “shelter medicine” didn’t even actually exist. In addition to developing the first ever industry-wide veterinarian-written shelter protocols, Dr. Lila Miller is the co-author of the ONLY three textbooks on the subject, and returned to Cornell to teach the world’s FIRST college curriculum in shelter medicine. She’s an expert in identifying abuse in surrendered animals, and champion of companion animals. In fact, her expertise in that regard has been so critical, she’s the world’s first veterinarian appointed to the human National Board of Medical Examiners. Of course, Dr. Lila’s also on ALL of the veterinary boards you’ve never heard of, and she’s even made another big board. In recognition of her tremendous service, an image of Dr. Lila with one of her charges graced Times Square on Dr. Lila Miller Shelter Medicine Day.
Though she retired in 2019, Dr. Lila is still active in teaching, consulting, chairing, speaking, and of course, inspiring. She’s currently out there in the world lobbying for more changes in veterinary medicine like publicly funded veterinary clinics for ANY client, reducing the financial barriers to studying veterinary medicine, and the inclusion of shelter medicine, anti-cruelty training, and animal behavior into the curriculum of every veterinary college.
When asked what makes a good veterinarian, she responded “A universally compassionate person who doesn’t lose sight of doing what is right for the patient even though it isn’t always possible.”
Of course, when you’re Dr. Lila, impossible is nothing.
“The inherent value of the animal should not depend on its ownership,” the guiding principle of Dr. Lila Miller’s work. (Quote Illustration courtesy of Chewy.)
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Spend an hour hearing from Dr. Lila herself on her experiences, her achievements, her hopes for increased diversity in veterinary medicine, and so much more!
Cornell University honors their most illustrious veterinary alum in a featurette here.
Dr. Lila can’t change everything. Though she opened doors for humans and animals, Black veterinarians still struggle in the field. Read their stories at TIME Magazine.
Actually, maybe a few, but we’ll just stick with one today. For a liquor native to Mexico, the industry is awfully white.
“I thought to myself, ‘The liquor industry is filled with celebrity hotshots and you don’t see a lot of women, especially minority women taking on this industry by themselves’.”
So Rikki Kelly took her shot, and with it, the Fort Worth native became the first Black woman in Texas to own her own tequila brand, and only the third in the United States.
“When I created Ego Tequila, my goals were to make sure it was smooth in quality, approachable for newcomers and tequila loyalists, and out of the ordinary. I believe I understood the assignment,” she quips.
But the assignment wasn’t always easy. The liquor industry’s legal barriers alone are formidable, especially when you have NO funding or business experience. “I came into this industry with not a lot of knowledge and no guidance,” Rikki said. “From working with a distillery in Mexico to developing a consistent brand to securing accounts with wholesalers/retailers, everything was a learning process for me.” In fact, Rikki barely even had drinking experience when she launched Ego Tequila three years ago at just 24 years old. But she wouldn’t let any of that get in the way of her dream.
Rikki’s only startup capital was her weekly paychecks, so she stuck with a toxic, dysfunctional day job until she could make her dream come true. It’s a situation she’s not alone in. Even though Black women start more businesses in the United States than white women or white men, Black women are the most underfunded. Even when there’s verifiable data that they may have the cure for cancer, Black women can’t get funded, while others have gotten rich and famous as total frauds. According to an article in Forbes Magazine, “In the last 20 years, while women-owned businesses have increased by 114%, women of Color owned companies increased by 467%. Out of the 1800 Black-owned businesses that are created every day, only 20% make it above the poverty line. Why? Because of lack of equal access to capital.”
But that wasn’t Rikki’s only brush with inequities in business. “Being a Black woman in this industry, I feel sometimes it’s hard to be taken seriously. There are some people that see my brand and see me and they can’t put two and two together,” she says. “They think, ‘there’s no way you can develop a solid brand like this.’ When I’m talking about the brand, people assume I work for a distribution company or I’m just a brand representative. So the struggle has definitely been real, but I take it in stride and I don’t let it affect me because at the end of the day, this is my story and I’ve worked so hard to create this brand.”
Even though she stood out from the competition herself, Rikki’s Ego Tequila needed to do the same on shelves. Where most tequilas come in tall, slender bottles, RIkki chose one with more weight. Where most other tequilas have brightly colored or clear labels, Ego bears a rich blue and Aztec-inspired elements, because representing the culture where her product originated had just as much importance to Rikki as the product itself. “I knew it needed to stand out. And if we get some people hooked because of the beautiful bottle first, then we can retain them as fans of the juice,” she said.
After all, when it comes right down to it, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, whether you’re a human or a tequila. And Ego delivers the best of both worlds.
Shirley Chisholm, first African-American presidential candidate?
Everybody knows that in 1968 Shirley Chisholm was the first African-American candidate to run for United States President, right?
Right! She actually gets a brief mention in American history books, so surely that’s right…
…right?
Not even close.
64 years before Shirley, a man you’ve never even heard of tossed his hat into the presidential ring. His name was George Edwin Taylor and the reason you’ve never heard of him is because radical Black independents don’t make the history books.
But before we get into the specifics, let’s start at the beginning, because George lived a life that came full circle.
Born in 1857, he was only two years old when Arkansas passed the Free Negro Expulsion Bill, ordering all free Black people to vacate the state of Arkansas, or else find themselves re-enslaved for a full year to cover their own relocation fees. So to be clear, the offer was leave on your own now, or be enslaved and ultimately put out a year later. Of the state’s 700 free Black people, all but 144 took option A.
George’s mother was one of those people, and fled to the free state of Ohio where she and her son could live in their peace. But their shared peace was short-lived when she died just three years later. George was a 5-year-old orphan, with nothing and no one to call his own. For three years, he survived as a street urchin, until he was finally taken in by one family, assigned to another through foster care, and went on to a Wisconsin prep school. Even if he’d stopped achieving there, folks would have considered George a success for his time, his race, and his circumstances.
But for better or worse, George had a penchant for pushing the envelope, and good enough simply wasn’t. Over the next 20 years, he excelled in writing and operating an assortment of news publications, which gave him an intimate knowledge of political issues facing African-Americans and the country as a whole. And that knowledge came in handy in 1904 when the National Negro Liberty Party asked him to him run as their leading man.
Presidential race poster for George Edwin Taylor, the first African American ticketed as a political party’s nominee for president of the United States, running against Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 .
One bill that was supported by the National Negro Liberty Party. I wish I could tell you that it passed, but there’s no new news here. Read this document and many more on the party at the National Archives.
Here’s the kicker. Founded in 1897, the National Negro Liberty Party, formerly known as the Ex-Slave Petitioners’ Assembly, originated in Little Rock, Arkansas, where George had been born 40 years earlier. After the Free Negro Expulsion Bill that drove George & his mother out of Arkansas, it’s no wonder folks assembled politically against the state’s tyranny, and absolute kismet that the man who would come to represent those people nationally was born amongst them.
The Ex-Slave Petitioners’ Assembly was originally formed seeking legislative reparations of any sort after the “40 acres and a mule” that were promised did not materialize and “the poverty which afflicted [African-Americans] for a generation after Emancipation held them down to the lowest order of society, nominally free but economically enslaved,” as Carter G. Woodson put it in The Mis-Education of the Negro.
After years of trying (and failing) to push bills through Congress, the National Negro Liberty Party decided they’d shake another branch of government. And George was JUST the man for the job. He didn’t have the statesmanship of men like Frederick Douglass or W.E.B. DuBois. Their visibility among Black and White Americans helped them to temper their passions and find delicate ways to deliver harsh words to hearts and minds.
George’s National Appeal unofficially undermined any chance he might have had at running for office with the Democrats or Republicans. Read it in full at the Library of Congress.
George wasn’t that dude. He’d been both a Democrat and Republican, until they’d both offended him by rejecting proposals brought to them by Black delegates, backing candidates with clear racist platforms, and failing to take up issues that only affected people of color, but when George went full scorched earth against the Republican Party by printing “A National Appeal, Addressed to the American Negro and Friends of Human Liberty,” it was game over for any affiliation he might even hope to gain with those parties. He was officially a radical independent.
The National Negro Liberty Party shortened their name to remove “Negro,” as every American ought be in favor of liberty, and delivered their party’s demands:
Universal suffrage regardless of race
Federal protection of the rights of all citizens
Federal anti-lynching laws
Additional black regiments in the U.S. Army
Federal pensions for all former slaves
Government ownership and control of all public services to ensure equal accommodations for all citizens
Home rule for the District of Columbia
A very reasonable platform, but one that even George knew was unlikely to be taken seriously. “Yes, I know most white folks take me as a joke,” he said in interviews. “But I want to tell you the colored man is beginning to see a lot of things that the white folks do not give him credit for seeing. He’s beginning to see that he has got to take care of his own interests, and what’s more, that he has the power to do it.”
That Election Day was not a day of power for us. George’s name wasn’t added to a single state’s ballot. Though estimates say he received as many as 70,000 write-ins, none of that can be verified because his votes weren’t tallied in individual state records that only counted Democrats and Republicans. In fact, the only real success that George personally reaped in his presidential bid was that he came out of it alive. “He was a black man running on a third-party ticket in a country that had little interest in black men or third parties,” Trinity College historian Dr. David Brodnax said.
Between that sad but true reality and all the bridges that George had burned to get there, his national political ambitions were essentially one and done, go big or go home. But he actively continued making what strides he could by continuing his publishing career, supporting local politicians and community organizations, and empowering the Black community. He’d implored that same community on Emancipation Day in 1898 to “press on until [you have] reached the top of the ladder and then reach up to see if there isn’t another ladder on top of that one.” Then, in spite of his own certain failure, he took a leap that extended that ladder just a little further for those who’d climb next, even if American history never acknowledged his steps.
Only a handful of places immediately come to mind as somewhere a hat can transcend accessory to become ceremony.
Royal weddings and the Kentucky Derby have their own hat stories, but they’ve got nothing on the history and tradition a hat carries atop an African-American woman’s head.
Flash back to the Middle Passage, 1518.
Before Africans were transported on ships to the British Empire, the Americas, and all over the colonized world, they were shaved bald. Officially, shorn heads prevented lice and the sanitation issues bound to arise when people are chained in excrement.
“The American Slave,” an illustration in a 1900 issue of Pearson’s Magazine depicts an enslaved man being restrained for examination, shaving, some other nefarious purpose, or all of the above. Read more about violations of bodily autonomy regularly practiced during the Transatlantic Slave Trade at the African-American Intellectual History Society.
But there’s more to the story. Shaving a person’s head is the easiest way to dehumanize them. Throughout the centuries, it’s been used as a tool of war, degradation, and shame. The mighty Sampson lost his identity when his hair was shorn. Even Nazis knew to shave and commodify their captives. And American slavers did the same, profiting from the hair, teeth, and even living bodies of the enslaved.
But on glorious Sundays, away from the strict eye of their captors, the enslaved could adorn their shaved heads in any way they pleased. The hair once decorated with beads, shells, feathers and dyes in Africa, was replaced with elaborately tied wraps, some of which used techniques that had been carried across the Atlantic. Community and individuality were both reclaimed, all in a single piece of fabric.
Flash forward to the French colonies, 1685.
The French held a great deal of land in what’s now North America, and enacted the Code Noir enforcing specific (and outrageous) rules on the conduct of Black people throughout their colonies. In 1786 Louisiana, Code Noir was made even more outrageously specific when the governor, lobbied by his white female constituents, ordered that all women of color, free or enslaved, must cover their hair with a scarf or handkerchief called a tignon, devoid of any added embellishments like feathers or jewels. You see, white enslavers had so abused Black women that it had gotten hard to tell who was who anymore. A fair-skinned, well-dressed woman could be an upstanding white woman, a free Black woman, or the slave girl of a wealthy French family, and of course, treating them all the same would be disgraceful. Forcing only enslaved women to cover their hair would create visible classes among Black women, and that wouldn’t do either because the whole point of Tignon Law was to prevent Black women from thinking too highly of themselves and presenting themselves accordingly. Actually, the governor’s exact words were “too much luxury in their bearing.”
How tignons were MEANT to appear is seen in the painting of Dominican women, Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants, by Agostino Brunias, c. 1764–1796.
How tignons turned out. An unknown Creole woman painted by François Fleischbein in 1837.
Those actions backfired in the biggest way when tignons caught the eye of one Empress Josephine Bonaparte who began wearing her own as a fashion accessory. The tignon turned into a trend, and the racist society snobs of Louisiana were right back to square one.
Flash forward to modern day Civil Rights, and today’s story.
Members of the National Association of Fashion and Accessory Designers, an organization created by Mary McLeod Bethune (front center) and others to battle mainstream, white gatekeeping throughout the fashion industry . In 1975, Mrs. Vanilla Beane was inducted into the NAFAD Hall of Fame. Also, the hats, OK?!
African-American churches were the lifeblood of the movement. There, boycotts were organized, flyers were printed, and the people were fed, physically and spiritually, throughout their tireless fight. Those churches were also the only place African-Americans could truly serve as leaders in a culture where work, school, and leisure were segregated. African-American women in particular acted as pioneers and again, head coverings played their part. Women in leadership roles or married to leaders needed to be identifiable among crowds of their congregations and onlookers. A beautiful hat is also a symbol of dignity, status, and taste. Women who marched in the Montgomery Bus Boycotts came dressed not in their typical domestic uniforms, but in their Sunday best, knowing the optics of both their personal presentation, and of violence against a church-going woman. Nothing speaks to religious piety, humility and grace like a woman with her head covered. And when you couldn’t change your skin color, the one thing you could change was your clothes.
Dr. Dorothy Height, immortalized on a US postage stamp, wearing one of Mrs. Vanilla Beane’s hats.
Civil rights pioneer Dorothy Height knew all of this, and there was only one lady she trusted to capture all of that history for her: Vanilla Powell Beane.
If you’ve ever seen a photograph of Dorothy, you’ve almost certainly seen Mrs. Vanilla’s handiwork.
In 1950s Washington D.C., Mrs. Vanilla was barely out of her 20s, just a working woman with no grand designs towards civil rights, history, or fashion. She didn’t even have hat-making experience. “I [worked] in a building where they sold hat materials, so I bought some and decided to see if I could do it.”
Today, she’s the 102 year old proprietor of Bené Millinery & Bridal Supplies, having built a reputation as hat maker to not only Dorothy Height, but other past and present African American women in power like D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and poet laureate Maya Angelou.
Vanilla Powell Beane, then and now.
Her shop opened in 1979 and prior to COVID shutdowns, Mrs. Vanilla still worked 40+ hours per week, crafting hats and styling customers. When she started making hats, segregation and Jim Crow was still very real. But today, her diverse range of hatwear sits atop a diverse range of heads, and she’s glad to teach any woman her “rules”: “Don’t match the hat to the outfit. Just buy a hat you like and the outfit will come. Never wear your hat more than one inch above your eyebrows. Slant it to look more interesting and possibly even risque.”
A VERY small selection of some of Mrs. Vanilla’s favorite hats.
“She’s at the shop six days a week, and whenever we celebrate her birthday, she typically wants to stay open so people can stop by and get a hat to wear to the party,” Mrs. Vanilla’s granddaughter Jeni Hansen said. Mrs. Vanilla wholeheartedly agrees that it’s the shop and customers that have kept her going. At her age, she’s seen, experienced and overcome so much, including the deaths of her husband and son along the way, and of course most recently, a global pandemic affecting small businesses like never before. But Dr. Dorothy Height’s mother Fannie once said, “No matter what happens, you have to hold yourself together.”
Through Bené Millinery and her extraordinary work in a slowly dying art, Mrs. Vanilla has held herself—and the D.C. African-American culture together through hats, and thankfully, shows no signs of hanging up her own.
Mrs. Vanilla poses in front of creations in her shop, in a photo taken when she was a mere 90 years old.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Early last year, Mrs. Vanilla gifted Rep. Cori Bush a hat in recognition of Bush’s work on Capitol Hill. The two ladies shared a chat and showed us a bit of Mrs. Vanilla’s past and process here.
See more of Mrs. Vanilla’s work, her shop and her legacy here.
Artist Ben Ferry was so delighted to meet Mrs. Vanilla in her shop that he created a whole art collection featuring the lady herself, her work, and her shop. The cover image for this post shows Mrs. Vanilla posing next to Ben’s work. See the collection here, and read the story of how these two opposite creatives attracted here.
September 19 was designated “Vanilla Beane Day” in the District of Columbia. Read the full proclamation, issued on Mrs. Vanilla’s 100th birthday, here.
Bené Millinery is still working to get online, but in the meantime, browse around and plan an in-person visit by appointment on their website.
Learn more about the history of Black hair, its care and its coverings around the globe and throughout the diaspora at BET.
It’s still not illegal to discriminate against a Black woman’s natural hair in the United States. Find out more about the steps being taken to pass The CROWN Act nationwide.
Beautiful, gentle, brave, graceful, larger than life…
…the Venn Diagram of amazing ladies and admirable dinosaurs is a circle.
At least that’s the premise behind the wildly successful digital art of Nyla Hayes.
“I fell in love with the Brontosaurus, which I lovingly referred to as ‘long neckie’,” she says. “Their beautiful long neck mixed with their size, gentle nature and bravery was so cool to me. And that’s basically what I want to show for my artwork, how beautiful and strong and powerful women can be.”
Pretty cute, right? You have no idea.
In the 4 years that she’s been creating and selling her work, Nyla’s “Long Neckie Ladies” and subsequent spin-off collections have earned her around $6 million in digital currency and the distinction of being TIME Magazine’s first ever artist-in-residence.
Nyla Hayes is 13 years old.
A tremendous part of her success is, of course, her medium. Nyla’s “Long Neckies” are NFTs (non-fungible tokens). I know this topic can be confusing, so let me attempt to break it down, because even the name is indecipherable, let alone understanding what it actually is. “Non-fungible” is essentially “one-of-a-kind.” Cash is fungible. You can trade it for lots of different things of equal value. When you buy an NFT, you’re buying a guarantee that you are the only owner of that thing. So what sorts of things are sold as NFTs? Anything you can save in digital form. Even tweets.
(I never said these were all worthwhile ways to spend money.)
So when you buy one of Nyla’s pieces, you’re buying her original digital art file, like buying an original painting in real life. Where NFT art differs from physical art though is that depending on the ownership agreement, an NFT may be yours to reprint, recreate, manipulate or display in whatever way you wish. (I say this depends, because when Budweiser entered the NFT market, their agreement demonstrated that “ownership” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s yours.)
What also makes NFTs so very different from physical art is that anyone can create, sell and get paid for them on the open market. NFT’s have all but eliminated the “struggle” from being an artist. Gone are the days of constantly buying new materials, of seeking shops and galleries to sell your art (minus their cut, of course), and all the overwhelming business aspects of making money from your creativity.
Without the accessibility that NFTs bring to the art market, Nyla would never have broken through.
“We really didn’t have enough money to do something with my art,” she recounts.
But when NFTs emerged, her path suddenly cleared.
In March of last year, Nyla released her first NFT collection, simply titled “Long Neckies.” It was only the beginning.
Her “Long Neckie Ladies,” a collection of 3,300 diverse women with long necks, launched July 27, 2021. It sold out in 11 hours to the tune of nearly $2 million, many of which came from celebrity pockets.
But even bigger things (and final sale prices) were on the horizon.
Nyla’s work caught the eye of Keith Grossman, president of TIME Magazine. TIME was contracting artists to recreate their Women of the Year covers and thought Nyla perfectly embodied a digital, female, diverse, and future-forward dynamic they wanted to include in the project.
She created 1,000 unique portraits of 100 women who graced the cover of TIME Magazine, and her work was so impressive, so successful, and so iconic that they offered her a residency. “Since launching Long Neckie Ladies, Nyla has inspired many individuals within the NFT community and established herself as a leader amongst the next generation of emerging artists,” Grossman said. “We are thrilled to announce her as our first Artist-in-Residence for TIMEPieces and are excited to see how she applies her talent to our brand.”
A small selection of Nyla’s Long Neckie Women of the Year.
There, she’ll have access to the resources, training, tools, and more “essentials needed to advance her career through NFTs.” Considering what she’s managed to accomplish on her own, the support of a media organization with the power of TIME Magazine means the sky’s the limit for Nyla.
The major difference between racial terrorism in the North and the South was the publicity.
Escape to the North and you may avoid a spectacle of a lynching, but that still didn’t make you welcome.
Take the case of Harlem, NY.
Now considered one of the most historic African-American communities in the United States, it was once entirely white and there were a lot of folks invested in keeping it that way.
Real estate investors, to be specific.
The neighborhood just north of Manhattan was booming in the late 1800s. Oscar Hammerstein’s first opera house, the world’s largest gothic cathedral in St. John the Divine, and Columbia University all opened or began construction in Harlem within 8 years of each other. Property was being snatched up left and right to support new expensive apartments, some priced up to 800% more than those in Manhattan. Harlem was destined to be the height of luxurious living.
The Harlem Opera House Entertainment District, St. John the Divine, and Columbia University Library, all built at the bounds of Harlem & Manhattan.
But the city was growing everywhere, and by 1904, developers and dwellers were already on to New York’s next hotspot. All those high-dollar rents were plummeting as whole buildings purchased in anticipation of continued growth suddenly stood empty.
But Philip A. Payton Jr. had been biding his time. After a few odd jobs and small business ventures, he’d discovered a passion for real estate. And then spent his last dime on classified ads.
“COLORED TENEMENTS WANTED | Colored man makes a specialty of managing colored tenements; references; bond. | Philip A. Payton, Jr., agent and broker, 67 W. 134th.”
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. A 1907 New York Age classified ad taken out by Mr. Payton reads almost the same as his first.
Whatever property did come his way would have to come cheap. And racism was about to get Philip out of the red.
“My first opportunity came as a result of a dispute between two landlords in West 134th Street. To ‘get even’ one of them turned his house over to me to fill with colored tenants,” Philip recounted to the New York Age.
The race to own Harlem was on. With a few rent payments in his pocket, Philip purchased even more luxury properties at rock-bottom prices to pass on to new, Black tenants.
And the locals were not happy about it. White New Yorkers weren’t willing to share their space with people of color and their white brokers knew it. If things kept up at this rate, they’d have even more empty buildings on their hands, so the brokers started biding their time too. The second Philip sold some of his predominantly African-American tenements to free up some cash, the white brokers snatched it up, evicted his tenants, and made the buildings white-only again.
Well, Philip knew how to be slick too.
Two buildings managed by those white brokers were up for sale on the same row, sandwiching the ones he’d sold. He bought those two buildings, evicted all of the white tenants, replaced them with Black ones, and created the exact crisis the white brokers were trying to avoid. Suddenly in the middle of a Black block, the white tenants fled and their brokers had to put the buildings back up on the market.
Guess who bought them for even less than he sold them for.
In the midst of all of this buying and selling, Philip recognized that he couldn’t take on the entire Harlem real estate establishment, so he formed an organization that could. On June 15, 1904, the Afro-American Realty Company was chartered and funded. With 50,000 shares issued at $10 each to wealthy African-Americans, the Afro-American Realty Company bought properties throughout the neighborhood, turning Philip’s vision into whole blocks of thriving Black families.
He saw Black folks using the circumstances stacked against them to come up. The New York Times saw a “Real Estate Race War.”
The Afro-American Realty Company didn’t last, but the trend did. Philip opened the Philip A. Payton Jr. Company, and spurred by his continued success in the neighborhood, many of Philip’s former AARC co-investors followed suit. By 1905, newspapers reported on the shifting demographics in Harlem like a plague had descended. “An untoward circumstance has been injected into the private dwelling market in the vicinity of 133rd and 134th Streets.” the New York Herald reported. “Flats in 134th between Lenox and Seventh Avenues, that were occupied entirely by white folks, have been captured for occupation by a Negro population… between Lenox and Seventh Avenues has practically succumbed to the ingress of colored tenants.”
Though their language left something to be desired, the Herald wasn’t wrong about the tidal wave of African-Americans who seemed to own Harlem overnight. By 1915, just over a decade after Philip first moved to an all-white block himself, census records showed nearly 70,000 Black residents had moved in right behind him. In 1917, he officially staked his claim in Harlem with the biggest purchase of property by Black broker that New York had ever seen. Philip bought six buildings at $1.5 million, naming them all for historic Black figures, building more community from that sense of pride.
For his lifetime of groundbreaking development, Philip was called the “Father of Harlem,” and though he died at 41 years old, just a month after his historic $1.5 deal, the foundation he laid lived on. It’s no coincidence that in 1920, the Harlem Renaissance officially began. Even the National Institutes of Health recognize that psychological safety—”the belief that you won’t be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes”—leads “to increased proactivity, enhanced information sharing, more divergent thinking, better social capital, higher quality, and deeper relationships, in general, as well as more risk taking.”
Free from the fear of their homes falling under constant threat from the whims of white people, whether they were southern night riders or northern bankers, African-Americans finally had the luxury of creating something beautiful, and in doing so, absolutely changed the world.
Philip and Mrs. Payton went from rags to riches in Harlem, and were even presented in print like they were royalty.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Though the New York Times ran articles about him and what he was doing in Harlem, their Overlooked series is the first to truly acknowledge its positive impact.
Philip wasn’t the only wildly successful Payton. Read through an accounting of his accomplishments, as well as those of his siblings at Westfield State University in the town where the Paytons once flourished.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 