It’s also home to my favorite place to indulge in a tradition that’s been almost entirely erased.
But it’s not exclusive to Atlanta.
It fits in a teacup.
So, how is tea Black History when the only drink more common is water? (And maybe Coca-Cola?)
It’s community. Comfort. Contemplation.
It’s all the things enslaved Black people were forbidden.
But today, the husband/wife duo at @justaddhoney are reclaiming all of that.
Their tea room, steps from the Eastern Beltline, is only 7 years old, but there’s centuries of subversion behind it.
I didn’t know that when I stepped in or out with my very first cup and bag.
MOST people don’t because like so many Black traditions, this one grew in secret.
All that remains of it are stories handed down by a few surviving families, a handful of objects, and the businesses born from its legacy.
Every February 15th, after the enslavers’ lavish Valentine’s events, Black Americans held their own tea parties.
But they weren’t allowed to gather en masse so invitations took clever shape.
While the ladies prepared to host, the men visited neighboring houses to “borrow a tea cup.”
One-by-one, guests arrived with their plantation china hand-me-downs for a simple pleasure nearly everyone else in the world freely enjoyed.
But even “freedom” didn’t mean moving freely.
Between southern slave patrols and Jim Crow laws, there was no safer place to meet, whether with white abolitionists or each other, than over an intimate cup of civilization.
A six-piece tea & coffee service set owned by Edwin Frederick Howard and Joanna Louise Turpin Howard, prominent members of the free African American community of Boston, who used it to serve abolitionists Frederick Douglass & Wendell Phillips. Courtesy of NMAAHC Smithsonian.
And when the Black church became a pillar for the Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t the only service turned strategy.
Segregated tea rooms transformed a practice once secret by necessity into a public revenue stream for Black women, America’s first working experts in the household arts.
Tea’s significantly shaped every corner of the world we live in.
But after today, I’m certain your next cup hits just a little differently, especially filled by people whose ancestors always tasted its power.
Black History’s served in all sorts of varieties at justaddhoney.net. 🖤
Look closely in my “Black Bags” posts and you’ll find the occasional Easter egg.
This might be my favorite of them.
In my last post, peeking from behind my neatly wrapped @denimtears parcel, very real postcard photographs—some even embossed with the studio’s logo—have stories of their own.
These are the faces of the Met Museum’s Superfine exhibit and Denim Tears, hidden behind the veil of American History.
An immaculate gentleman, fitted even to the buttons on his heeled shoes.
Sisters in satin and lace, gazing from a beautiful Victrola.
Lovers—maybe even honeymooners?—riding a donkey cart in Mexico.
A bespectacled musician accessorized with elbow-length gloves, perhaps to hide the wear to her hands?
A woman dressed all in black, whose ruffled lace waistcoat is only outdone by the exquisite jeweled bracelet and ring on her hands.
Photographs of Black people from days past already seem rare.
Photographs of them dressed in and surrounded by such luxury feel priceless.
But these five only scratch the surface of my collection.
And Superfine, hosted in the Met Museum’s premier gallery, only housed a fraction of the finery owned, made and inspired by Black Americans.
Denim Tears is their legacy.
And all three—the photographs, the exhibit, and the brand—bear witness that creative, adventurous, romantic, bespoke, affluent, and deserving have never been synonymous with “white.”
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Get your African Diaspora Goods at denimtears.com
For more photos like these, follow curator at the @schomburgcenter and author, Kimberly Annece Henderson at @emalineandthem.
Just around the corner from the likes of Chloë and Alexander Wang, a simple, black sign stands in sharp contrast to its Spring Street neighbors, holding space for an unexpected commodity:
“AFRICAN DIASPORA GOODS.”
There wasn’t a matching sign outside of Gallery 999 at the Met Museum, but my involuntary double-take was surely the same.
Especially after I’d barely escaped the museum gift shop with my life.
Spanning multiple tables outside of the Superfine: Tailoring Black Style exhibit, @denimtears wouldn’t even let me come up for air.
Union Jack and American flag sweaters redesigned in Pan-African green, red, and black.
Plush, leather watermelon wallets in collaboration with Commęs des Garçon and logo baseball hats reminiscent of 1990s Ralph Lauren.
A single t-shirt featuring Andre Leon Talley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Andre Walker, makeup-smudged at the collar, hung deep on a rack.
I snatched it like the last loaf of bread before the apocalypse.
And despite being almost that poor… NEXT STOP: 176 Spring Street.
Between the Met Museum merch table and a Denim Tears ensemble featured in the Superfine exhibit (which remains in the Met’s permanent collection), the thread was clear.
Bespoke, imaginative clothing in luxurious fabrics, designed for Black bodies but accessible to anybody with swag (and the money to pay for it).
But on Spring Street, brand new themes like a Black Poseidon threatening a schooner daring to sail the Middle Passage, or cheeky Cotton Club dancers, come to life on shirts.
The brand’s signature cotton wreath design adorned sweats in every color, a symbol of cotton’s significance to the fashion industry, and a tribute to the enslaved people who made that possible.
Even the Denim Tears name honors the trials and tribulations Black people have overcome while still serving as the standard in fashion and culture.
If money and carry-on capacity were no object, I’d have taken one of everything.
Before I even walked into Denim Tears, I was a fan.
Since I walked out, that’s MS. Princess of Black Power, you ragamuffins.
Death looms so large over Georgia’s Lake Lanier that people say it’s haunted.
Since it was filled in 1956, it’s estimated that nearly 700 people have lost their lives in its waters or at its banks in boating accidents, drownings, and unexplained events. Official reports list at least 24 people as “missing” there because what lies below the lake’s surface makes searching it nearly impossible.
Beneath those unrecovered souls, wrecked boats, discarded nets, and silty waters lie the charred remains of the Africa-American community of Oscarville, GA.
Before 1912, Oscarville’s people thrived as farmers, teachers, ministers and tradespeople of all sorts.
Harrison, Rosalee, Bertie, Fred, Naomi, and Minor Brown were among the thriving residents of Oscarville, in a photo taken in 1896.
Their world started to unravel on September 5th of that year, when a white woman accused a Black man of entering her bedroom and attempting rape. When a local preacher mentioned that perhaps the woman had not been entirely forthcoming in her account, suggesting the encounter may have been consensual, he was nearly beaten to death right in front of the Oscarville courthouse.
Tensions between the segregated populations of Forsyth County were so high that the Governor of Georgia activated the National Guard to stand patrol and keep the peace.
Just 4 days later, that fragile peace was shattered when another white woman was found dying in the local woods, an apparent victim of yet another sexual assault.
The only evidence police turned up was a pocket mirror claimed to be property of a 16-year-old boy named Ernest Knox. Hardly a smoking gun, but enough to satisfy the white folks of Oscarville, especially when Ernest confessed to the crime and gave up the people who were going to help him dispose of the body. Suppose it didn’t matter much that Ernest made that confession from the bottom of a well just before he was nearly drowned in it.
Ernest and 3 supposed co-conspirators—Oscar Daniel, Oscar’s 22-year old sister Trussie, her boyfriend Big Rob—plus an alleged witness, were all transported to the county jail in Cumming, GA. But there was no point. A mob estimated in the thousands stormed the jail, killed Big Rob, and dragged his body into the street. He was hung from a light post and used as target practice while the others inside could only listen to their potential fate.
A newspaper photo depicts all of the suspects for the rapes of two white women were still alive in their custody. Left to Right: Trussie Daniel, Oscar Daniel, Tony Howell (defendant in the first case), Ed Collins (witness), Isaiah Pirkle (witness for Howell), and Ernest Knox.
Trussie accepted a plea bargain in exchange for testifying against her brother Oscar and was forced to be his executioner (see the sub-headline in the article above). Charges were dropped against the witness. But Big Rob was already dead, and Ernest and Oscar were doomed to the same fate.
On October 25, 1912, Oscar Daniel and Ernest Knox were publicly lynched before a crowd estimated at as many as 8,000 spectators. People gathered around the gallows for picnics, and PBS reports that one of the boys was so small a special noose was created to ensure the momentum wouldn’t decapitate him and splash anyone’s Sunday dress with blood.
You don’t even have to imagine the scene. You’ve probably seen the images of vast crowds gathering under the feet of a Black man. Though these images are rarities now, in 1908, they were so frequently mailed, the U.S. Postmaster was forced to ban them. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” TIME Magazine’s Richard Lacayo writes.
A postcard shows the sprawling crowd gathered for the 1893 lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, TX.
But the terror didn’t end with two lynchings. Over the next few months, each sunset brought nightmares to Oscarville.
“Night riders” went door-to-door demanding that Black people vacate the town. When some people didn’t comply, the threat escalated. Their homes were shot into, animals killed, crops destroyed. Anyone who remained after that fled their property in the middle of the night as it went up in flames. Nearly 1,100 African-Americans—around 98% of Forsyth County’s Black population—were forced out of Oscarville, some still paying on property they’d abandoned until it was foreclosed.
Of course, all of that land was immediately seized by you-know-who.
And nearly just as quickly, things started going wrong.
In 1915, a boll weevil infestation killed crops on Oscarville’s land that was illicitly seized by white farmers and banks. Though they ultimately survived the weevils, being one of the few regions in the state to escape total decimation made them eager to share their methods. (It was chicken poop. They got a bunch of chickens to poop in the soil.) Perhaps too eager. They gained the attention of the mayor of Atlanta, who was developing a dam to ensure the city’s water supply, hydroelectric needs, and flood control. He spent 2 years working with the Army Corps of Engineers to seize nearly all of that recovered farmland. What little was actually purchased was far undervalued, and left the handful of African-Americans left who owned their land through generations with nearly nothing.
When the dam was complete, the waters completely submerged charred buildings, cemeteries, bridges, and any trace left of those who lived and died in Oscarville. Then they named those waters after a Confederate soldier. Though Oscarville is the only Black community under Lake Lanier, it wasn’t the only one Black people were run out of. Towns, Union, Fannin, Gilmer and Dawson Counties all have a history of violently exiling its Black residents. Even today, only 4% of Forsyth County’s almost 250,000 residents are Black.
So is Lake Lanier haunted? No one can truly answer that question.
A diver captures footage of some of the structures lost under Lake Lanier, both visually and on sonar.
Local news coverage shows the efforts to keep African-Americans and their civil rights out of Forsyth County still alive and well in 1987.
Learn more about the tragic history of Forsyth County, GA in Patrick Phillips’ book, Blood at the Root, then pick up a copy from our friends at Marcus Books.
Get more local articles and historic sources from a story originally published by the Forsyth County News.
The terror in Oscarville and ongoing racial terrorism documented in Forsyth County and throughout the South is detailed at History.com
Read more about the taking of Oscarville and the forming of Lake Lanier at CNN.
Forsyth County church leaders took it upon themselves to create the Forsyth County Descendants Scholarship, “simply an act of love that will be helpful to some descendants whose families have suffered. Is it enough? Of course not. But it is a step.” Learn more & donate here.
Explore an interactive map and see the stories of documented racial terror lynchings throughout the States created by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Writers, photographers, dancers, artists, musicians and so many others Black creatives are represented here at The American Blackstory.
Today, we recognize the keepers of all that Black magic.
Marcus Books is the nation’s oldest Black-owned bookstore, serving San Francisco, Oakland, and now, the world, for over 60 years.
For any small business to survive for that length of time is extraordinary.
For a humble bookstore to do so amidst government suppression, a number of foreign wars, several waves of American social sea change, San Francisco gentrification, technological advances, and many economic recessions is almost unbelievable.
And it all started by accident.
Julian and Raye Richardson met each other at Tuskegee University back in the 30s where Black creativity was thriving around them. Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver were among the university’s professors at the time, and Julian attended classes with Ralph Ellison. When the couple moved to San Francisco, Julian opened a print shop while Raye earned her doctorate in literature at UC Berkeley. Raye’s love for books spilled onto the Richardsons’ friends and neighbors, and soon they found themselves loaning her collection out from the back room of Julian’s print shop. The operation grew until Marcus Books, named for Marcus Garvey, was born.
“My dad in his print shop would want to share books with his friends and never got his books back so he said, ‘Let’s start selling books,’” the Richardsons’ daughter Karen Johnson said. “I asked him, ‘Will white people let you sell Black books?’ He said, ‘It’s not about them. This is what we need.’”
Blanche, another of the Richardsons’ daughters, explains the urgency behind that need. “They shared a love of reading Black books and found them difficult to find and purchase. They realized that for a Black community to be progressive, it must have its own bookstore as a source of information about itself.”
Blanche Richardson, daughter of Julian & Raye, manages the Marcus Books in Oakland.
A simple, admirable, and aspirational goal, no doubt, but some didn’t see it that way.
Hoover’s memo on “black extremist bookstores”
In October 1968, J. Edgar Hoover issued a COINTELPRO memo warning against “increase in the establishment of black extremist bookstores which represent propaganda outlets for revolutionary and hate publications and culture centers for extremism.” In response to the perceived threat, Hoover ordered every FBI office nationwide to “locate and identify black extremist and/or African-type bookstores,… determine the identities of the owners; whether it is a front for any group or foreign interest; whether individuals affiliated with the store engage in extremist activities; the number, type, and source of books and material on sale; the store’s financial condition; its clientele; and whether it is used as a headquarters or meeting place.” Marcus Books was absolutely one of those places, as within its walls organizations like the Black Firefighters Association, the Association of Black Policeman, the Black Nurses Association, and many more were formed to support the Black working class.
Proudly proclaiming that their “very existence was born out of an awareness of anti-Blackness plus a sense of duty to provide a space where we are not simply respected but affirmed” has always put Marcus Books squarely in the sights of American white supremacists. Marcus Books is a family-owned and operated business, and even the Richardsons’ granddaughter Jasmine Johnson says that the bookstore’s entire staff has been met with “white-only-water-fountain-level racism” often. When Marcus Books was supported in 2020 through a GoFundMe after they couldn’t raise the several million dollars to purchase the Fillmore Street location that housed their first official storefront, they were met with racial aggressions, including but not limited to people hiding behind Twitter profiles trolling and undermining their posts with comments like “Why can’t a Black owned bookstore save themselves?”
Kids from an Oakland school hold their selections donated by Marcus Books, in front of a mural on the shops building depicting Malcolm X armed next to a shelf of Black literature. It alludes to his quote: “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.”
The folks at Marcus Books have an answer to both the question and the racism they face. ““It’s pretty deeply connected to what happens when you qualify anything as Black. You’re met with suspicion or dismissal. The publishing industry has had a history of framing us as a ‘diversity section,’” Jasmine explains. The African-American Literature Book Club listed over 200 Black-owned bookstores in the 90s. Today, that number is only 118. And Marcus Books’ experience in San Francisco is only further proof that America doesn’t truly value literary diversity. Though many other San Francisco bookstores have been listed as historical landmarks, despite all of the history and culture built there, Marcus Books has never been awarded that designation.
But with authors like Malcolm X, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Terry McMillan, Walter Mosley, Muhammad Ali, Ishmael Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, Tannarive Due, Randall Robinson, Nikki Giovanni, E. Lynn Harris, and so many more who’ve passed through their doors and graced their shelves, Marcus Books isn’t just a Black bookstore; it’s an American treasure that celebrates Blackness, in a culture that’s actively censoring that celebration in literary spaces elsewhere. In times like these and many other tumultuous eras, Marcus Books endures, inspires, and encourages us to do the same, reminding us that the “call to write our own story, now more than ever, continues.”
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
A PBS short documents Marcus Books through a tour of the store, interview with the owner, and bits of the business’s history.
In the spectrum of great black publications like JET Magazine and EBONY, there’s one often left out of the conversation: Sepia Magazine.
For almost 40 years, Sepia pushed the boundaries of design, content, and photography in black publications, positioning itself as a LIFE Magazine for black readers.
Where Jet covered a wide range of general interest topics, and Ebony documented current events in news, culture and entertainment, Sepia took a decidedly different tack, turning its pages into a in-depth, photojournalistic view into the lives of everyday black people and celebrities in arts, music and civil rights in particular.
First published one year after Ebony in 1946, Fort Worth, TX headquartered Sepia entered the black publishing landscape during a curious time for America. Although they’d suffered racism in their own armed forces, black soldiers and the valor with which they fought for a country that still hadn’t afforded them full civil rights had been recognized globally and back in the States. Those unexpected but significant gains in equality, and the fact that a newly enfranchised black populace naturally wanted to be more informed about its government, led to one of the biggest black publication booms in American history.
And while Ebony and later, Jet, had things covered on the national front, the pages of Sepia were where black Americans could feel seen and heard. Headlines like “The Black School That’s the Best in Los Angeles,” “The Ghetto Through the Eyes of Youthful Photographers,” and “The Black Chinese: How Africa and the Orient mixed in the U.S.” are just a small smattering of the diverse topics Sepia featured. So keenly were they attuned to the mindset of the middle-class black American that they soon became the highest selling magazine among that demographic. That targeting strategy paid off two-fold in that black soldiers still fighting wars abroad could browse its pages for a true temperature check on the state of affairs at home, and vice versa.
Sepia’s dual and rather polar audiences provided the opportunity to establish a dialogue unlike that of any American publication. Their column “Our Men in Vietnam” gave black soldiers a platform to sound off about their experiences in the United States military. Whether writing about the continued racism in their ranks, or having personal reservations about their role in white Western imperialism, black soldiers found a safe space in Sepia’s column that encouraged them to send their “experiences, heartaches and joys while fighting communism” and black Americans could sympathize with them like never before.
Although Sepia’s staff and content was primarily black, its original owner was a Jewish man, and that culturally rich start to the magazine led to content that eventually expanded to include Hispanic and Asian Americans as well, as their communities often faced the same institutional racism. It also gave Sepia an interesting new perspective from which they could tackle issues of racism – one they pushed to its absolute limit in their stunning exposé, “Life As a Negro.”
After controversially semi-permanently darkening his skin, a white Sepia contributor named John Howard Griffin traveled the Deep South for 6 weeks as a black man, and so eye-opening was the experience that when the magazine series ended, he expanded upon it in his iconic 1961 book, Black Like Me. John himself admitted that upon undertaking this “anthropological study” as he called it, he was embarrassed to find that even “[his] own prejudices, at the emotional level, were hopelessly ingrained in [him].” In response, one black reviewer wrote “since there are white people who doubt everything a Negro says, perhaps now they will hear us when we say the plight of the American Negro is a disgrace.” In the 1977 reprint of his book, John’s epilogue astutely and mournfully pointed out that in the years since that original printing, his “personal experience was that whites still didn’t hear.”
The 7-month long series further solidified and legitimized Sepia’s place in the American landscape and the black American experience it so richly captured. With its ambitious journalism alongside beautifully photographed moments, Sepia simultaneously shared the essence of black America and exposed a quintessentially American contradiction that John Howard Griffin himself articulated so well: “those who embrace the strangely shallow dream of white supremacy are the true killers of society based on freedom, equality and justice.” Sepia published its last issue in 1983 after being bought out by Ebony and quietly shut down, but in the 37 years that it graced newsstands, black households, and trenches worldwide, the magazine carved out a space where blackness had permission to be complex, curious, and most of all, authentic.
A single backhoe’s load of dirt in early 2018 was all it took to unearth 95 battered and discarded skeletons and a history that the Imperial Sugar Corporation, the State of Texas, and the entire southern United States might have preferred remain buried.
But they had been well-warned. Reginald Moore, a former prison guard and caretaker of the state’s Old Imperial Farm Prison Cemetery had spent over 25 years researching the history of prisons, plantations and slavery in the southeastern “Sugar Bowl of Texas,” and he’d pleaded with city officials to conduct archaeological surveys before continuing development. He cautioned them that eventually, the dark history of the region’s sugar economy would come back to haunt the town just outside of Houston so aptly named Sugar Land.
Sugar caning had a long-standing reputation of being such miserable, back-breaking work that farms couldn’t even pay people to work the fields. It didn’t take long for most of the local sugar plantations to go entirely bankrupt once their unwilling workforce found freedom in 1865 when Texas was emancipated.
But the enterprising owners of a successful plantation that would go on to become the Imperial Sugar Company had another gambit to play. Since 1844, their neighbors in Louisiana had engaged in a practice known as “convict leasing.” Despite its relatively unassuming name, convict leasing was state-sanctioned slavery that was mutually beneficial for both plantation owners AND southern states. The enactment of “Black Codes” in southern states ensured a constant supply of prisoners (and thus constant income) by frivolously jailing black men for things like failing to get their employer’s permission to change jobs or flirting with white women, and plantation owners now had hassle-free labor with an added bonus: unlike slaves, leased convicts were easily replaceable and didn’t need to be well-fed or particularly cared for at all. If they died, plantation owners buried them where they fell, chains and all, and simply requisitioned another.
Victims of the “Black Codes” at work as prison laborers. Children.
And so in 1878, just 13 years after slaves were freed in Texas, the Imperial Sugar Company became one of the largest convict lease owners in American history, buying rights to the ENTIRE state’s prison population, and gaining a brand new nickname that reflected the horrific conditions that convict leasing allowed them to inflict on workers: “The Hellhole on the Brazos.” One inmate wrote that Imperial’s prison guards routinely reminded them that “the men did not cost them any money and the mules did,” a mentality that led to treatment so bad that “nobody was relieved until he dropped in his tracks.”
The painful legacy that Reginald Moore had begged Sugar Land officials to face was now one that they couldn’t look away from.
“The Sugar Land 95” (94 men and 1 woman) unearthed that day ranged from 14 to 70 years old, all with significant trauma to their bones. Despite outcry by 225 Texas historians asking the Fort Bend county officials to “make choices that acknowledge the national significance of this discovery… a burial ground [like which none other] has been found,” after DNA collection and artifact cataloguing, the Sugar Land 95 were reinterred back at the Fort Bend ISD construction site where they were found, with a memorial ceremony planned for this Spring.
When he spoke to the school district on behalf of the Sugar Land 95 he’d long fought to see acknowledged, Mr. Moore mourned that they were “being treated today in death the way they were treated when they were alive,” but took comfort in knowing that finally their truth could not be denied: “They existed.”
“A contract for convict labor, used during the convict leasing system that forced thousands of African Americans to work as forced labor after slavery ended specifically asks for ‘Negro workers.’” (Read on at USA Today)
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
Read details of Reginald Moore’s campaign for justice for the Sugar Land 95 at Texas Monthly.
The Houston Chronicle dives into the dark history of contract labor surrounding the “Hellhole on the Brazos.”
Sam Collins of the Convict Leasing and Labor Project speaks about their purpose and the history of convict leasing and the Sugar Land 95 on the Texas State Capitol, built by convict laborers.
In 2009, Douglas A. Blackmon’s book “Slavery By Another Name” won the Pulitzer Prize, and it’s another excellent source should you want to learn more about the convict leasing system.
Caleb McDaniel, a historian at Rice University, has been one of the most vocal allies of preserving the entire site where the Sugar Land 95 were found. Find his official statement and petition (endorsed by the 225 historians referenced above) here.
“Would a Negro like to pursue a little happiness at a theater, a beach, pool, hotel, restaurant, on a train, plane, or ship, a golf course, summer or winter resort? Would he like to stop overnight at a tourist camp while he motors about his native land ‘Seeing America First?’ Well, just let him try!”
That was the state of affairs according to the NAACP’s magazine in 1947, as they warned black people against buying into the Great Northern Railway & National Park Service’s ad campaign encouraging Americans to vacation close to home. And lest someone doubt it, they need only look to examples of the plain warnings posted just outside thousands of “sundown towns”:
“N—–, Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On You.”
These weren’t just occasional backwoods towns. As late as the 1960’s there were still as many as 10,000 active sundown towns documented in the United States, some that were well-known and well-populated like Glendale, CA and over half of the incorporated towns in Illinois.
It was a difficult dilemma for black people who’d been encouraged to buy cars as soon as they could to avoid the humiliation of being forced to the back of public transportation vehicles, but couldn’t freely use those cars to travel beyond the relative safety of their immediate surroundings. If they did, they often packed extra food, gas and portable facilities to avoid being forced in dangerous situations for necessities.
Victor Hugo Green had done his share of getting around. As a postal worker, and later World War II soldier and music manager, he’d learned to navigate where he was welcome and would repeatedly visit those same establishments for both his own safety and to contribute to their continued success.
After some close calls himself and hearing stories from strangers and friends alike about running into racism whether traveling for business or pleasure, he decided that he’d curate a book to help “give the Negro traveler information that will keep him from running into difficulties, embarrassments and to make his trip more enjoyable.”
When he ran his inaugural 10-page issue in 1936, it was titled the “Negro Motorist Green Book,” and it primarily focused on lodgings, gas stations, restaurants and travel advice in New York, but by the very next year, it was popular enough to reach national distribution. By picking the brains of his fellow postal workers and offering to pay the Green Book’s readers $1 for providing new leads, Victor grew his publication annually until he left for the war in 1940, and when he returned in 1946, he began expanding the Green Book to include safe spaces in international destinations like Mexico, Canada, the Bahamas and Europe. By 1949, the Green Book was up to 80 pages including ads, many of which were from black female entrepreneurs who found freedom and greater personal wealth in running their own businesses and benefited from the word-of-mouth.
But what the Green Book omitted was as much a warning as inclusion was a welcome. Not a single restaurant was featured in Alabama in the 1949 issue. In Texas, only Austin and Waco were included in ANY Green Book. On the contrary, New Mexico was highlighted as a state that primarily practiced “cash over color.” The information contained (or not) within the pages of the Green Book was so extensive and reputable, a member of the Little Rock Nine even called it “one of the survival tools of segregated life.”
Recognizing that ultimately, black travelers just wanted to have positive experiences, Victor always ensured that the tone of the Green Book, while cautious was always uplifting, and he often featured travel quotes like his twist on Mark Twain’s “Travel is fatal to prejudice” to reassure black travelers that eventually things would change. In fact, at their peak of printing 15,000 copies annually, Victor himself once wrote, “There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published… It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”
Victor passed away in 1960 and didn’t live to see the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing discrimination on the basis of race, but his hope was indeed realized. With the passage of the Act, the dire necessity for his guide slowly decreased, and after nearly 30 years in circulation, the Green Book was finally retired in 1966, having made a whole era of travel possible for black people who wanted to take their growing freedoms on the road too.
Twice, Robert Abbott had risen to his full potential only to be thwarted by the color of his skin.
He’d studied the printing trade in college, but when he graduated, the only jobs he was offered were in unskilled labor for which he was overqualified.
He’d gone back to school and graduated with a law degree, but before he could build his own practice, an established Chicago lawyer informed him that he was “a little too dark to make any impression on a court.”
So Robert combined his talents and went to work for someone who’d never stand in his way: himself and the people who looked just like him.
What started with a 25 cent investment and a 300-copy first run printed from Robert’s landlady’s kitchen grew to 250,000 copies per week and became the most highly circulated black newspaper in the country.
When Robert read white mainstream papers, he was disheartened that the primary news of black people revolved around their crimes, lynchings and the riots against them. He knew better.
His newspaper painted black people in a whole new light. He featured black successes, ran news of black interest, promoted black landlords and properties, rallied for black equality, and once his paper’s distribution reached over 100,000 with nearly two-thirds of that beyond Chicago, he created a whole campaign designed to improve the lot of black readers everywhere. Having noticed that a large number of the derogatory stories and negative events around black people were coming from Southern states where slavery (and thus its effects) had lingered, he appealed to those affected readers to move to Chicago where there was more freedom, a richly cultured and diverse black community and most importantly, personal opportunity.
The “Great Migration” as the surge of black Southerners to northern states was called, began in 1915, but Robert put an urgency to it, even calling for a “Great Northern Drive” on May 15, 1917 as a mass protest exodus of sorts. Between 1916 when The Defender’s campaign began and 1918, Chicago’s black population more than tripled from 40,000 to 150,000, a growth rate that many today and back then largely attributed to Robert’s successful advertising.
It’s no surprise that such a positive force for black people quickly drew the wrong kind of attention and in many southern states, The Defender became anathema. Just before World War I, the U.S. government investigated Robert on charges of sedition after he called for black servicemen to demand equal rights in the military. Klansmen began attacking anyone black seen reading the The Defender, news outlets refused to carry it, and for a very short time, the paper was in jeopardy.
But by then, Robert was a master at using his hustle to overcome adversity.
He bundled the paper in luggage and distributed it among black railroad porters who created a network that gained him an even greater readership than he’d had before. They’d deliver individual copies to riders covertly, redistribute weekly editions among themselves, or drop off whole stacks in local black barber shops, churches and community centers where they’d be seen and shared by up to 500,000 black readers per edition.
While the Defender had long grown from its kitchen production, its distribution eventually had such a high volume that it had to be moved to its own building entirely, becoming the first black newspaper with its own printing press, and in the early 1920’s, its founder who originally couldn’t break into the printing industry became one of America’s first self-made black millionaires.
Robert Abbott died in 1940, but by 1956, The Chicago Defender had become the largest black owned daily newspaper in the world. Although it’s circulation is much smaller now, (as are most newspapers) it’s still in print today, and the goals of its founding principles are just as relevant in 2019 as they were in 1905 when one man determined to overcome racism made a difference for millions.
“The Chicago Defender’s Bible”
1. American race prejudice must be destroyed; 2. Opening up all trade unions to blacks as well as whites; 3. Representation in the President’s Cabinet; 4. Hiring black engineers, firemen, and conductors on all American railroads, and to all jobs in government; 5. Gaining representation in all departments of the police forces over the entire United States; 6. Government schools giving preference to American citizens before foreigners; 7. Hiring black motormen and conductors on surface, elevated, and motor bus lines throughout America; 8. Federal legislation to abolish lynching; and 9. Full enfranchisement of all American citizens.
KEEP GOING BLACK IN HISTORY:
The Chicago Defender continues its legacy of reporting on positivity in the Black community still today.
THE AMERICAN BLACKSTORY 