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George Hrbek was a White Lutheran minister in Selma during the early civil rights era… a minister who once got into a fistfight with the president of the White Citizens Council, and who would pull his car over to confront groups of robed Klansmen. This not-entirely nonviolent minister also played a small role in helping found the Selma chapter of Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Hrbek’s destiny was not to stay in Selma, however: he moved up to Chicago, where he helped found a White antiracist spiritual community focused on educating White folks about systemic racism. He did so with the input and blessing of Martin Luther King, who was tackling discriminatory housing policies and economic disparities in the city. King believed that Hrbek was on the right track: real change would require White people to deepen their understandings of racism as something that was not merely an attitudinal problem of personal prejudice, but a systemic problem built into the very structures of American society. This was a vision that the Black Panther Party could get behind as well. George Hrbek soon became a comrade of Fred Hampton, and members of the Rainbow Coalition came through his White antiracist spiritual community from time to time. Shortly after Hampton’s assassination, George relocated to Cleveland, where he has lived and worked ever since. There, he has leveraged local religious networks to support antiracist programs and policy changes, with the goal of making citywide and regional impacts. He turned 90 during the twenty-five hours of interviews on which the following story is based.
Youth: The Roots of an Antiracist Life
Born in 1931, George Hrbek was raised amongst a large extended Czech family in New Jersey, whose elders had emigrated from Bohemia. George’s great-grandfather was a musician who had been excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, partly because the church insisted that the money the band made playing for weddings and funerals should be turned over to the church… whereas he insisted on giving it to the musicians who had families to feed. Excommunication made finding work impossible, and thus began the immigration story of the Hrbek family… as well as an intergenerational opposition to institutionalized religion. George’s grandfather embraced Marxism and joined the Communist Party, and George’s father became a committed New Dealer and an agnostic. Every Sunday during George’s childhood, the large extended family would gather for dinner at his grandmother’s house, where George remembers being entranced by the passionate political debates of his elders. As George recalls:
“At home, we ate our family meals together. Always. And my dad insisted that after we ate we had to spend a half-hour, at the table, talking about the world, what was going on in the country. Social issues, politics, literature. I hated it! I wanted to be out playing stickball or something! What was very important was that I used to listen to my grandfathers and my uncles get into these political discussions, talking about social issues . . . and I was fascinated by those discussions. They talked a lot about the social conditions of miners, and the conditions of Blacks. And I remember my mother’s mother saying to me – they lived on Long Island, and I’d go out there every summer – she said to me, ‘Georgie, if I were a Negro, I’d burn the whole damn country down!’ And I felt I needed to know what she meant by that. So I was picking up this sense that we had some responsibility to deal with injustice . . . I picked that up from my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, my parents.”
George was deeply shaped by his father’s seriousness and his extended family’s passion for justice… but also by his mother’s playfulness. She was a pianist who came out of the 20’s flapper era, who had met George’s father on a party boat during Prohibition. George credits the humor and playful spirit he inherited from his mother for helping him stay in the movement for the long haul, and for navigating and de-escalating many a difficult circumstance. He smiles remembering her:
“She was the fun one in the family. I don’t think she ever lost her flapper identity! She loved to dance. She delighted in all the simple things. She used to sit at the piano and play Saint Louis blues. She was an avid reader. She kept a sense of humor well and alive in our family life, and was my great encourager and affirmer. I think I look more like her than my dad . . . I’m probably more like her in personality.”
For the first four years of his life, this extended Czech family was George’s world. Then, his New Dealer father took a job in Warm Springs, Georgia, working as an architect for a passion project of Franklin Roosevelt. The small town had mineral hot springs that Roosevelt hoped could benefit children with polio, and George’s dad helped design and construct a free therapeutic center, which was funded by Roosevelt’s March of Dimes program. Roosevelt visited so frequently that his retreat home was called the “Little White House.” George remembers the president as an avid swimmer – George learned to swim in the pool Roosevelt swam in – and that he always ate his meals in the large dining hall with the residents. Every Christmas and Easter, Roosevelt also threw parties for the people working on the project:
“One Christmas, my parents and I were in the line of guests to be greeted by FDR and Eleanor. When we got to the seated president, he sat me on his lap. I was four-and-a-half years old. I have no idea what he said to me. Thinking back now, I think… ‘Wow, I sat on President Roosevelt’s lap!’ But at the time I wasn’t wowed. The big thing for me was that they were handing out Santa Claus ice cream popsicles to all the kids! That’s what I had my mind on!”
Much more formative for George’s life than being around the President of the United States was the experience of walking down the sidewalk. Warm Springs had dirt streets that turned to mud in the rain, and the sidewalks were made of elevated wooden planks. George had never seen Black people until he moved to Warm Springs, and watching them step off the sidewalks into the mud when White people walked by disturbed him. As George recalls:
“When I asked my dad why that was, he spent quite a bit of time with me, trying to explain to me in some way that I might understand what Jim Crow was about. He told me it was wrong, that it had to change, and that it was going to change. That was my first conversation about race, at age four and a half.”
By the time George was six years old, the project at Warm Springs had completed. He moved back to New Jersey, living in a world that was almost entirely White. However, the image of Black people having to step into mud stayed with him… as did his father’s words.
A Troubled Teenager is Called to the Ministry
Shortly after his return to New Jersey, George began struggling in school, and was suspended numerous times as a child. The juxtaposition between a large, caring family where everyone was affirmed and supported in expressing themselves, and the rigid, disciplinary school system that practiced corporal punishment was too great. In 4th grade, George had to go to the bathroom badly, but the teacher wouldn’t let him no matter how much he asked. Instead of peeing in his pants George went over to the corner of the classroom and relieved himself. He had a gleam in his eye recalling this story: “I never had any problems after that!” George laughed: “The strategy worked.”
The rigid discipline, however, continued. In fifth grade, the children had to line up and march back to the classroom after recess. Once, some of the kids tripped George. His teacher, seeing only that he was out of line, yelled at him to go stand in the corner of her classroom and face the wall. She then berated him in front of the class, grabbing him by his chin with one hand and his hair with the other and shaking him. He yelled: “Let me go! Let me go!” When the teacher kept shaking him, he punched her in the stomach. When he was in 6th grade, another teacher ordered George to hold his hands out on the desk, to be hit with a yardstick. As she raised her arm to swing, George grabbed the straight pen out of his inkwell and held it up. Her hand swung right down onto the pen. After that incident, George wasn’t allowed back into school until he had a psychiatric evaluation – which, perhaps to the teacher’s ire, found that he was a “healthy, all-American boy.” Recalling that moment, George laughed: “I did not do that intentionally. But I was not sorry about it!”
When George was 13, the passionate discussions at the dinner table turned to religion. He came up with a clever way to avoid participating in the subject. He exclaimed that since his agnostic family had never taken him to a church, he knew nothing about religion, and therefore couldn’t participate in the conversation. He should be allowed to go outside with his friends. However, George’s father turned the tables on him, in a way that would shape the rest of George’s life: he exclaimed that for the next eight Sundays, they were going to go to different churches, so that George could learn something.
They went to Presbyterian, Baptist, Dutch Reformed, and Methodist churches, until one Sunday they arrived at a Lutheran church. To his surprise, the pastor who came out to greet them was a young man who George knew from the streets. The kids were always organizing sporting events for themselves, and Arthur Hawlicheck – a Czech in his late-twenties who the teens thought of as a cool guy – would always cheer them on and volunteer to umpire their baseball games. Hawlicheck always dressed in Levis, and George had never known he was a pastor. “I was fascinated by that,” George recalled, referring to the way Hawlicheck embodied kindness and community in his daily life, without emphasizing his status. “And I went back to that church on my own. He became a mentor for me, at a critical time in my life.”
The sermon George heard on that first day at Hawlicheck’s church spoke directly to the anger he felt at an education system that “treated kids like shit”:
“What I heard – and what I think Hawlicheck meant me to hear – was that you are created by God, and there’s nobody who can add to your worth as a human being, and there’s nobody who can take away from your worth. You’re gifted; every human being is gifted. And when I heard that, I decided I wanted to go back and talk with this guy.”
Arthur Hawlicheck took George Hrbek under his wing. George was passionate about justice, and the pastor helped the young man frame the pursuit of justice within the context of Jesus’s teachings. George was especially drawn to how Hawlicheck lived those teachings, and found himself thinking that he wanted to live that way too. And so, the rebellious teenager who despised the rigid and oppressive school system began thinking about becoming a minister. Although George’s parents were agnostics, they saw how good the church was for their son, and affirmed his choice. A few years after George’s baptism, his parents had a series of chance encounters with Hawlicheck in the neighborhood tavern. The conversations they had there convinced them to join the church as well. George chuckles at this recollection: “My dad used to kid around and say, ‘we had a little child who led us.’”
Before Seminary… Birmingham
At the end of George’s sophomore year in high school, his father went into partnership with an architect he had worked with on Roosevelt’s project in Warm Springs. The new project was in Birmingham. And so, George’s dad arranged for him to take his final exams a month early. Then George headed south on what was to be an epic month-long road trip with his father. They took their time: George’s dad, the New Dealer son of a Marxist, wanted to make the journey an educational experience for George. And so, they visited the mining towns and the mills. They drove through Black neighborhoods, past Black schools and hospitals, so George could witness the disparity with his own eyes. As George recalls his father saying, “I want you to see what’s happening.”
“For a month, we journeyed south. We slept in fleabag hotels; we slept by the side of the road. It was a really great experience for me to spend that time with my dad. And it gave me a broader exposure to the South. Not only Jim Crow, but how Whites were exploited also. And it further convinced me that I couldn’t ignore that… whatever shape or form that took in my life, I couldn’t ignore that. And it made being in Birmingham all that much more difficult for me . . . I went to a segregated high school. I hated it.”
It wasn’t long before George was being kicked out of class for pushing back on the Jim Crow narratives in his history classes… and on Lost Cause mythologies of the Civil War in particular. But this wasn’t all he pushed back on: soon, George Hrbek’s passion for justice and dignity would lead not only to suspensions, but to his first arrest.
“I got on a streetcar. Every seat was taken… so I stood. At the next stop, this White guy gets on… he walked right past me and moved the ‘Colored’ sign one seat back, and made these two women get up. I immediately reacted, I moved the sign back and told him to give the women their seat back. The man shouted a bunch of epithets and then took a swing at me. We got in a fistfight and I got arrested and taken downtown, and my dad had to come and get me. My dad got the brunt of it – the sergeant told him that he had to keep his kids under control. But once we left the police station, my parents affirmed what I did. They told me I had done the right thing.”
Seminary: Rebellion Against Institutionalized Religion
After graduating, George attended a small Lutheran college in Indiana, with plans never to return to the South again. Although he remembers being quite average academically, he enjoyed the social life that college offered. In addition to carousing with his friends, George sang in the traveling college choir. He was assistant editor for the school newspaper… alongside editor (and soon-to-be renowned civil rights minister) Joseph Ellwanger, whose family would soon have a profound influence on George. He was also a starter on the basketball team, and worked as a fry cook at a popular hamburger joint during the off-season. During the summer he took on a series of jobs that also influenced his understanding of the world:
“I worked in a marina one summer, down in Florida. And then one summer I worked at a cannery in Wisconsin – for Dole – which had big farms up there. And I worked with migrant farm laborers, harvesting peas and cabbages. And then I worked up in North Dakota, on a cattle ranch . . . that was all due to my dad, who encouraged me to do that. So if I’m going to talk about my education, I have to talk about those experiences, that gave me a more global sense, a sense of different cultures, and a sense of what people were really struggling with.”
Although George enjoyed his college years, he was still searching for something deeper. He hoped he would find it in seminary, (during which he worked at a cocktail lounge, and as a cab driver.) However, unlike his previous experiences in the Lutheran church, the seminary was rigid and dogmatic. As George recalls:
“The theology I heard there was not the theology I had embraced. They taught us in seminary that we should not be too close to the people. That people should only see us pastors at our best . . . I always felt that church ought to be the one place where you can be really open and honest, where you can be who you are and be loved and accepted . . . I began to feel very cynical. I told myself, ‘Well, I have to get through this institution if I want to be a pastor.’”
After an escalating series of events, George was expelled from the seminary. In his speech class, the professor assigned him to give a speech on the topic “What do Blacks Have to do to Succeed?” George was expected to argue that Black people needed to lift themselves up by their bootstraps. Instead, he argued that “you couldn’t lift yourselves up by your bootstraps if you didn’t have boots to begin with.” When the professor lowered George’s grade based on the content of his speech, George forthrightly reminded the professor that the grade was about the quality of the speech, not the position it took. Even though George was polite – as he had been in high school when he critiqued Lost Cause mythologies – such feedback was not appreciated.
On another occasion, George told a different professor that he wasn’t going to buy his book, because he didn’t think what was inside was worth the money. But the final straw leading to his dismissal was getting married over the summer, to a woman named Gertrude, with whom he would soon have four children. Seminary students weren’t allowed to marry until they graduated: George was out. He spent two years working as an elementary school teacher and basketball coach at an inner-city parochial school, during which he questioned his calling to become a minister. And yet, when he had the chance to return to the seminary, he took it.
Seminary offered George the opportunity to immerse himself in the work of figures who represented the spiritual lineage he aspired to. Chief amongst them was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who ran a network of underground seminaries during the era of Nazi control, as part of the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement. He had lived briefly in the U.S., worshipping in Black churches, studying Black Spirituals, and teaching Sunday school in Harlem. Instead of staying safe in the U.S., he returned to Germany to organize against the evils of Nazism. In these dark times, Bonhoeffer taught underground anti-Nazi congregations the Spirituals as a way to generate the inner strength needed to forge ahead. Bonhoeffer rejected the term “Christian,” because of how seriously he felt it had been misappropriated and misunderstood. Instead, he talked about being a follower of Jesus. For Bonhoeffer, the teachings of Jesus offered a way to show up for good in the world, to move through fear and do the right thing no matter the obstacles. His underground congregations provided Jews passage out of Germany at great risk. Bonhoeffer was hung by the Nazi regime a mere month before Germany’s defeat, after being accused of participating in an assassination plot against Hitler. George read everything he could by this great German theologian and master of organizing spiritual communities in the face of fear and oppression.
Over time, George also connected with a handful of like-minded students… including John and Joseph Ellwanger, who came from Selma, and whose father was the president of the Black Lutheran Academy and College, and the Association of Black Lutheran churches in the Selma region. The White Ellwanger family was, in other words, extremely well connected to Selma’s network of Black churches. George admired the Ellwangers, and during his time in seminary, took two road trips down to Selma with Joseph. Joseph Ellwanger would later become the only White person who Martin Luther King invited into high-level discussions with President Johnson and Governor George Wallace during the Selma campaign.
George admired the Ellwangers’ work in Selma, but was dismayed when, upon graduating, he was tasked with starting a church there. He wanted to get as far away from the Jim Crow South as possible. “I have to confess to you,” George told me, “the last place I wanted to go to when I graduated from seminary was Alabama. When I got assigned to go to Selma, I was not happy. And especially to start a White church! But I look back on it now and see how fortunate I was.” George’s early life had laid all the right foundations for a deeper journey into racial justice. Now, that story was about to begin in earnest.
Selma: Initiation into the Movement
At age 27, George began growing a congregation: Saint John’s Lutheran Church, in Selma. The year was 1958 – two years after the Montgomery bus boycott, but also two years before the sit-ins turned the civil rights struggle into a truly region-wide, mass movement. Through his connections to the Ellwangers, George arrived in Selma with connections to the Black community. The Ellwangers, working with a group of Black pastors and lay leaders, planned an integrated ordination for George. The ceremony was held in a small chapel on the grounds of a Methodist orphanage… the only location where an integrated ordination service could legally be held. George recalls the moment: “It was okay. I’m not too much into tradition.”
For George, his own ordination was not the most important moment of the day… although sharing the moment with his family was a deeply meaningful experience. What excited him the most was the opportunity to meet Rosa Young at the reception. The granddaughter of slaves was a legendary advocate for Black rural education and trainer of Black teachers. Her enormous efforts involved collaborating with the Lutheran church to found roughly 50 one-room schoolhouses throughout the Southern Black Belt, as well as a Black high school and junior college in Selma. As George recalls, “She was considered the mother of Black Lutheranism and was part of the high school and college staff. I had read her book about her life. So after the ordination service, at the social reception, I asked if she might be willing to meet with me.” Rosa Young didn’t hesitate: she told him they could meet the very next day.
And so, the day after his ordination George found himself sitting on the front porch of one of Selma’s great Black community leaders. He expressed his concerns to her: “I’ve been sent down here to start a White congregation. I call it Caucasians for Christ,” he joked. Then getting more serious, George expressed that creating a segregated church was deeply troubling for him. “It goes against everything I believe,” he told her. George remembers Rosa Young’s response vividly:
“She just looked at me and said, ‘Do it.’ I asked her why. She didn’t analyze it, she just said emphatically: ‘Pastor George. Just do it.’ And then she repeated again, calmly: ‘Do it. At the right time… I’ll let you know.’ I had no idea what she meant and I asked her to explain, but she just laughed and said, ‘Don’t worry, Pastor George!’ She kept it simple. She didn’t make anything complicated. . . . But what I think is that she had some confidence in me. She thought that I would deal forthrightly with the Whites who became members of the church.”
And so, George got started:
“I rented a room in the YMCA. I set up fifteen chairs. And I started advertising that we were going to start having services there. Nine people came that first Sunday. When thirteen people came I set up twenty chairs. Pretty soon we had fifty people gathering at that YMCA room. And we in a sense became a congregation then.”
George grew his congregation by becoming deeply involved in the community… just like his mentor, Arthur Hawlicheck, had done. George worked with youth, and consulted with the child welfare system in Selma. He and his wife Gertrude took in foster children. He spoke up for better schools and hospitals in the Black community… a moral stance that could be admired even within the confines of Jim Crow. He didn’t make waves by directly challenging segregation, and his community involvement, charisma, and religious leadership soon made him popular. A passionate speaker, when the new YMCA opened he was invited to be the dedicatory speaker. When the statewide banker’s association asked him to speak at their annual conference, George gave a speech titled “The Injustice of Economic Disparity.” His challenging of the status quo seemed to bring admiration: George was named one of Alabama’s “Young Men of the Year.” Because of his community involvement, more progressive (or less conservative) Whites were drawn to the congregation. And because Craig Air Force Base was just outside of Selma, many White military families from the North gravitated towards George’s church. Perhaps as Rosa Young had suspected, the congregation helped to build a more open-minded White community, at least relatively speaking.
Meanwhile, George was also meeting quietly with Black civil rights leaders who had much bigger plans. John Moss, a Black high school teacher, recruited him to help develop the Selma chapter of Martin Luther King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group met clandestinely . . . often at the soon-to-be famous Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church, from which the 1965 Selma march was launched. Martin Luther King visited to help generate interest in the chapter and brainstorm future actions, and George met him briefly, just to shake his hand. George and his wife Gert also hosted Black students from the Lutheran college as dinner and dialog guests. During those gatherings, they had to close all the shades and sneak people into their house: while it was legal for Whites to have Black maids and servants in their homes, meetings of a more friendly nature were illegal. Recalling this, George remembers feeling guilty: “The Blacks who were participating were in much more danger than we were. We weren’t taking nearly as big a risk.”
One day when George was driving, he passed by a group of robed Klansmen. He pulled over to ask them what they were doing, and then confronted them… something he could probably only get away with because he had become a popular community leader. When a friend of his was captured by the Klan, tied to a tree, and beaten, George didn’t stay silent. “In my naiveté – I sometimes like to call it my holy naiveté,” he said chuckling, “I contacted the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
“It was Bobby Shelton. I told him I wanted to meet with him, and Shelton set up a meeting at a local mom & pop diner in his hometown of Tuscaloosa. I was really angry. Shelton considered himself a Christian, so I confronted him with how he was out of step with the tenets of his own faith. Which of course went nowhere. Shelton was kinda a congenial guy and he was forthright in his racism and what he felt. And I was very frank with him about how I felt about the Klan. It probably didn’t do any good.”
Just like calling for better Black schools and hospitals could be accepted even within the Jim Crow system, so too could challenging groups like the Klan, whose violent tactics not all segregationists agreed with… but tolerated. When I asked George if he knew that he would have to take a stronger stance one day – one that directly challenged Jim Crow – he replied, “Yeah, I knew at some point that the bubble had to burst.” On the one hand, he was trying to follow through on Rosa Young’s advice to focus on building the church, which meant not making too many waves. However: “I was unhappy about what I was not doing… and I was really happy when that time came, to get off the fence.”
George began to get off the fence once the congregation became large enough that they decided to build their own church. George’s dad was the architect. After the new church’s dedication ceremony,
“Rosa contacted me and said, ‘Now’s the time.’ I wanted to ask her, ‘What do you mean, now’s the time? But I just said, ‘Okay.’ And then, at our first Sunday service… here she comes, with thirty or forty Black Lutherans, parading to the service! And just came in like everybody else.
“Of course, the cops arrived within 5 minutes. I was leading the service, and a police officer yelled at me: ‘What are all these niggers doing here?!’ I simply said: ‘Worshipping.’ And then I invited them to worship with us as well. I think the police didn’t know what to do… there were some prominent members of the community in our church, and half of the families were military. So they just left. Nothing like it had ever happened in Selma before.
“We had Eucharist at that service, and I wondered if that would cause any problems… you know, everyone communing together, drinking out of the same common cup. But it didn’t. It turned out to be just a wonderful event. We had the usual kind of thing… after-service coffee hour, fellowship, there was a lot of interaction and so on. But the next day it broke loose. Word got around quickly.”
At first, George was primarily concerned for Rosa Young’s welfare. He worried that she was more vulnerable to violent reprisal than he and his family were. However, the wrath of the White community turned instead towards George. His period of being a highly sought-after speaker came to an abrupt close. He was kicked out of the White Clergy Association. The mayor even called George into his office: “He asked me if I was going to let ‘nigras’ come into my church. I responded, ‘It’s not my church. It’s Jesus’ church. You have to take it up with him.” None of this bothered George much: aside from reprimands from officials who he didn’t admire anyway and a handful of threatening phone calls, the backlash was surprisingly minimal. In fact, the public attention surfaced other sympathetic Whites, some of whom reached out to him. This included members of Selma’s Jewish community:
“Art Lewis, who was Jewish, owned the Buick dealership on the other side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He contacted me and said, ‘Some of the members of the temple would like to meet with you, but we have to do it clandestinely.’ And so they arranged a meeting in the garage of the Buick dealership, with about 20 Jewish men from the Temple. They apologized for not meeting publicly. They encouraged me to speak out more forcefully against Jim Crow, and even offered me financial support. I told them to contribute to SCLC instead.”
Following that meeting, George was invited to speak at a Sabbath Day service. He didn’t take the invitation lightly: the Jewish community was already a target in the Jim Crow environment, and inviting George to speak was a risky move for them.
Beyond the Jewish community, there were some White folks in Selma who opposed
Jim Crow but were not open about it due to fear of retribution. George’s church became a place for such people to gather. There were a small handful, however, who were outspoken. This included the town pharmacist, George Carter. Carter spoke out forcefully against his own church for supporting segregation. When Ross Barnett – Mississippi’s rabidly racist governor – came to town, Carter invited Hrbek to attend a luncheon with the governor. Hrbek was puzzled by the invitation and declined, to which Carter responded by saying, “Aren’t you my friend?” And so Hrbek went.
When Ross Barnett was introduced, there was thunderous applause… and then a few minutes into the speech, George Carter jumped up onto his chair and yelled, “Ross Barnett! You’re a SON OF A BITCH!” As Carter was roughly removed from the audience, Hrbek understood why his friend had wanted him to attend. And yet, Carter was tolerated. Hrbek laughs: “Maybe because he was the only pharmacist in town!” And then more seriously: “Or maybe Selma was just willing to put up with a few people like that, and just say ‘Well, they’re our town crackpots, we’ve all got a few of them.’” Many years later, Hrbek returned to Selma for the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March. He was surprised to see that Carter’s Drugstore was still there. Carter had passed away, and when George asked the new owner – who was a White man – why he had kept the name, he responded: “Mr. Carter was a great man. No way would I change the name of this drug store.“
The time for George to get fully off of the fence came two and a half years after he arrived in Selma, when a White Baptist preacher gave a speech at a White Citizen’s Council barbeque for high school students titled “Better Dead than Intermarried.” The event made the front page of the Selma Times Journal, which also reprinted a summary of the speech. George felt that he had a moral duty to respond. He personally delivered a rebuttal to the editor, Ed Fields… who showed up that evening at George’s home and begged him to retract it: “George, please take this back. If you don’t I’ll publish it, but I really don’t want to. I like you, and I don’t want your family to get hurt.” When George refused, his rebuttal to the Baptist preacher was printed on the front page. It was one thing to say that Black people deserved better schools, and that the Klan’s violence was unacceptable. To argue that interracial marriage, and thus implicitly interracial dating and sex were acceptable… that supported an intimacy that went far beyond sitting together at lunch counters or attending school together. George Hrbek had broken the White South’s greatest taboo. “All hell broke loose. That was the end of my acceptance in Selma. I was physically attacked, a cross was burned…” He shrugs: “You know, that kind of thing.”
Shortly after the article was printed, George walked into an appliance store run by Joe Smitherman. Smitherman was the head of the White Citizens Council (and the future mayor of Selma.) He made it clear that George wasn’t welcome… by assaulting him. George had practiced boxing as a teenager as a way to let off steam, and quickly turned the tables. His eyes twinkled and his voice was gleeful as he told me: “I decked the head of the White Citizens Council right in the face!” However, there were more frightening moments. Once, a group of men ambushed George in a narrow hallway. George was able to push through them and make a run for it, but such moments left him shaken. One of the mothers of the foster children he and Gert cared for asked to meet with him, and then held a knife to his belly and accused him of turning her daughter into a “nigger lover.” “I told her that if it made her feel any better, she should go ahead and kill me. And her hand started shaking and she put that knife down. And then I started shaking like a leaf… AFTER I left!” Reflecting back on this time, George once again expressed that he was naïve: “I was in my twenties when I moved to Selma. I wasn’t in touch with my mortality.”
Although there was no way he could know it at the time, George’s reaction was a transformative moment in this woman’s life:
“She never forgot that. Eight years later, I was in Oklahoma, and I got a letter from her… a long letter, asking me to forgive her, and saying that that was a changing point in her life. She thanked Gert and me for the love and care we gave to her daughter. That was powerful. It had an impact on me . . . She later lived with my sister in Birmingham, for four years.”
Although George’s broad, public popularity had collapsed, the moment brought a certain kind of joy: “I could finally live out my commitment more authentically. And the Black community, they embraced me like never before. It was a liberating time.” He laughs: “When segregationists are calling you the enemy, you’re doing something right!” Of critical importance was that when George Hrbek took his stand, it did not isolate him. He had the Black community. He had kept in contact with friends doing good work elsewhere, such as Joseph Ellwanger, who had become involved in Birmingham’s civil rights efforts. And whereas other White ministers had been run out of town by their congregations when they took a stand for racial justice, George Hrbek’s unique congregation stood by his side. This included the head of the local IRS office, a man named Charles Glass. When the White Citizens Council pressured Charles to leverage his social standing and organize the congregation against George, he told the Council to go to Hell.
Most importantly, George’s own family was immensely proud of him for taking a stand. His most significant source of support was his wife Gertrude. As George recalls,
“She was raised on a farm in North Dakota. It was an environment where women were just expected to get married, have kids and take care of the house. She had no previous experience in wrestling with race relations. But when we went to Selma, she was like a rock. Outspoken and forthright – if she didn’t think something was right, she would say so. She supported me in everything I did. And she built powerful relationships with the women in the congregation – they related to her.”
Their children were too young to be in school, and thus avoided the kind of harassment that caused other parents to cave to pressure. George’s parents, of course, had his back and showed their love. As George’s sister, Janet Griffin, expressed to me:
“The church told him that he could have been the youngest president in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod if he would just quit his radical ways. He gave up so much power within the power structure to speak out . . . George showed me what it meant to follow Jesus, to do what Jesus would have done, instead of just believing some formula that’s supposed to get you into Heaven.”
However, the Southern District of the Lutheran Church had other ideas for George. They told him there was a large church – Our Savior in New Orleans – that was willing to be a forerunner in church desegregation efforts. They thought George was the right pastor for the job. George expressed that he wanted to continue his work in Selma, but the Southern District was insistent. Under pressure, he and his family packed their things. After four years in Selma, they left in late 1962… just as the movement was escalating. Leaving Selma, and losing the chance to be part of its great civil rights struggle left George with a sense of regret. And yet, he emphasizes: “People hear that you were in Selma and they kind of romanticize it . . . But I guess I just don’t feel that way. I was just fortunate enough to be there. It meant a lot to me in terms of my own growth. But I don’t know how much I contributed.”
Out of Migrant Ministry… a Deeper Understanding of Racism
The church in New Orleans was a big status bump for George as a pastor: he would now head a large, established church, with his own staff, a parochial school with 150 students, and a comfortable parsonage for his family to live in. George quickly came to regret accepting the position, however. He had met with the church leadership to make sure they were truly invested in their desegregation effort… but it turned out the leadership hadn’t discussed their plans with the congregation. When George began the desegregation effort by welcoming a kindergartener from a Black Lutheran family into the church-affiliated school, the congregation turned on him. The leadership, unprepared for the backlash, left George to go it alone. In a mass meeting, 90 percent of the congregation voted for a resolution stating that they were an exclusively “Caucasian church.” George resigned in protest. Returning home from a family vacation, he found that the congregation had moved his family out of the parsonage. He took a job selling office supplies to make ends meet.
The uproar over this short-lived desegregation effort went far beyond the congregation. The Bishop of the Southern District requested a meeting with George, and when he arrived, he found that the entire, all-White council was there. “It was unbelievable,” George recalled. “They had all the chairs circled around, with me sitting alone in the middle.” The effort at intimidation was so obvious that he found it almost laughable. He wasn’t willing to play their intimidation game: “They accused me of being the shepherd deserting the sheep. I simply said, ‘No, that would be you.’ And I got up and left.”
George wondered if his time as a minister had come to an end. His doubt, however, was mixed with an anger that made him more determined than ever. The scandal made waves throughout the national Lutheran community and, ironically, turned George into a highly sought-after minister. It was, after all, the civil rights era: George Hrbek was soon flooded with offers from other Lutheran churches in the South that were trying to desegregate. But after getting burned by the New Orleans congregation, he was wary. He decided to give being a pastor one more shot… but in a new environment, outside of the South. In 1964, George accepted a position in a small congregation in Altus, Oklahoma, at a church that was also named “Our Savior.” There was no way he could have known that the experience he was about to have would take his understanding of racism to a much deeper level.
George began to get more experimental with his ministry during his time in Oklahoma. In his second week with the new congregation, he expressed that there was an important task to be addressed, and requested that volunteers meet with him the following evening. Fifteen men showed up in work clothes, assuming that the task was about repairs to the church. Instead, George shared that his intention was to find ways to link the church and the community. He requested that the congregants go out to the bars and bowling alleys of the town, and strike up conversations to learn what people were concerned about. The group was astounded – and George was impressed when they threw themselves into the task despite their surprise. They returned two hours later, full of excitement. George says that this moment “opened everything up, changed what the congregation was willing to do and wanted to do in terms of getting involved in the community.”
When George noticed that the congregation had been uneasy around some longhaired San Francisco hippies who visited the congregation, he grew his own hair long. When the congregants finally asked him why he wouldn’t get a haircut, he gave a sermon about how the congregation had treated the hippies, and the importance of being welcoming to all people. During one service, George recruited two high school students in the audience to interrupt him and debate the content of his sermon. When it caused an uproar, George told the congregation that the interruption was staged… and proceeded with a sermon in which he told the congregation that “This is a place where we can be free and honest and can express our doubts – as well as our faith – without fear of condemnation. We don’t all think the same thing, and we can talk about our differences here.”
After a year of working with his new Altus congregation, George was approached by the director of the Peace Corps – Sargent Shriver – about participating in a domestic pilot program called VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America.) George was to lead a team that would work supportively with the migrant farm families who came into the Altus region each year, to harvest cotton and cucumbers. George readily accepted, and after attending a series of trainings around the country, was sent a team of five volunteers. They understood that the migrants were being ripped off by the growers, and were passionate about helping the migrants fight back. However, George urged them to be patient: “I know you want to tackle these problems, but I want you to get started by spending a month getting to know the families. Listen to them. Get to know them and what their priorities are.” During our interviews, George explained his position to me: “We could see priorities but it was from our perspective. I wanted to know from them! Because I suspected that their priorities would be different from ours.”
Indeed, it turned out that whereas the volunteers were focused on big-picture changes, the priorities of the migrant farmworkers were about their immediate needs. By listening to those concerns, and then collaborating with the migrants to fix them, George Hrbek and his group were able to build trust. As George recalls: “I think our whole approach gave us a legitimacy within the migrant community. Because we didn’t go in as White saviors, we went in to listen to them, and then to advocate for what they felt we should advocate for. So we took our directions from them.”
The first big trust-building moment came over the simple issue of fixing an outdoor light bulb that had burned out, leaving the migrants to navigate in the dark if they had to use the outhouse:
“We gathered those who served as a planning group to address this problem… how we would gather money to buy a light bulb, who would purchase it, who would climb the pole to install it, etc. When the installation time came, the whole camp gathered. When the light was screwed in and lit, there was a mighty uproar – ‘Ole! Gracias Dios!’ On that day, more than a light bulb lit up for the migrants, for the VISTAs, and for myself.”
The installation of the new light became the first step on the road to organizing for better conditions: working on land known as “tornado alley,” these migrants soon pushed for, and gained, access to tornado shelters. And then they kept going.
Malnutrition in the migrant camp was another severe problem. During our twenty-five hours of interviews, I never saw George more emotional than when he described the conditions in these labor camps. Entire migrant families lived in one room, on dirt floors with tin roofs. There were only two outhouses for the entire camp. He had never seen such poor conditions, not even in the depths of the Jim Crow South. Babies who he first assumed were just one month old turned out to be six-month-olds suffering from extreme malnourishment. One day a migrant laborer came into George’s office and laid a baby on his desk. The baby was dead. The migrant worker had taken his baby to a doctor’s office, where he was forced to go through the back entrance because he wasn’t White. He was then refused help for hours while his baby died in his arms. The man wept uncontrollably.
Although half a century had passed since that moment, George’s face was ashen as he recalled it. He said with emotion: “And so… that became my focus. And it became the congregation’s focus.” Through George, the congregation became active in advocating for healthcare and education for migrant children. In fact, migrant rights became so much of George’s focus that when Martin Luther King urged ministers from across the country to come to Selma, George decided not to go. He felt it was important to stay invested in the work that was right in front of him… and which was much less visible than the high-profile Selma movement. When George’s congregation urged him to go to Selma and offered to fund his travels, George replied that there was a Selma right there in Altus, Oklahoma. George Hrbek chose not to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that momentous moment in the civil rights movement, and to this day he stands by that decision.
Within a year of working to support the migrant farmworkers, George helped co-found the Southwest Oklahoma Migrant Ministry, and began officially ministering to the migrant workers. It was through his work with the Migrant Ministry that George Hrbek was contacted by the Farm Workers Movement based in California. Soon, Eliseo Medina – a United Farm Workers representative who traveled the country to spread the movement and cultivate nationwide boycotts – visited the migrant workers. Medina helped George and his volunteers understand the broader history of organizing for migrant rights, and helped them grasp some cultural issues they needed to be more sensitive to, including cultural and gendered notions of pride that needed to be considered when seeking to discover and support the needs of the workers. Through Medina, George began advocating not only for serious concrete physical needs such as tornado shelters, but for issues of basic dignity and respect, such as advocating for food that acknowledged the cultural traditions of the migrants. (Years later, when George had relocated to Cleveland, he and Eliseo reunited over grape and lettuce boycotts being waged in that city, during which Eliseo fasted for 14 days. George offered him a tortilla Eucharist to break his fast.)
More importantly, Eliseo Medina helped the migrants understand that they were part of something much larger than what was happening in Oklahoma, and helped them broaden their visions for what they wanted to accomplish and believed they could accomplish. César Chávez also came to visit for a couple of days, but George emphasized that it was Medina who really had an impact: the farmworkers movement was new, and many of the migrant laborers in Oklahoma had not yet heard of Chávez. As George put it, “It’s not like he came in like the guy on the white horse or something.” But Medina, Chávez, and the Farmworkers Movement were responsible for helping the migrant workers of Oklahoma realize that they could do far more than tinker around the edges of injustice, such as gaining the bare minimum right to tornado shelters and enough food to keep their babies alive.
Working with the migrant farmers ushered in one of the most important periods of antiracist growth in George’s life, and guided him towards more sophisticated understandings of racism that would shape his future work. Through his desire to better understand the problems facing the migrant laborers, he began studying the history of U.S. relations with Mexico and Latin America. “I began reading,” George told me. “I learned that we overthrew democratically elected governments, because the corporate world operated better in countries where there was a dictatorship.” As George wrestled with this history, the many military families in his congregation forced him to wrestle with what was happening in Vietnam. Veterans of the war brought brutal experiences back home, and George and the congregation began participating in antiwar demonstrations and antiwar advocacy work. He began to see that White supremacy was not only a problem that hurt Black Americans, but was a system that was used to justify oppression around the world… used to justify war, and to maintain brutal international systems of labor.
Oklahoma was also where George began to develop a deeper understanding of racism as a systemic problem. Up until this time, he had viewed racism as primarily an issue of personal prejudice. From that perspective, solving racism meant changing people’s attitudes. However, getting up close and personal with such an intense form of racialized labor exploitation guided George towards an understanding of the ways that racial inequity was an essential ingredient in one of the country’s most important economic sectors: agriculture. He began to see that racism was not merely a personal attitude of bigotry but was part of the very structure of key sectors of the economy. During his time in Selma, so much of the focus had been on voting rights that it had shielded him from this deeper analysis. George’s realization came just as the civil rights movement was transitioning away from the most egregious inequities of Jim Crow in order to focus on the systemic racism that existed throughout the country: inequities in housing, schooling, healthcare, economic opportunity, and of course, policing. George’s evolving thinking was in sync with the larger tide of history.
In the summer of 1967, George was contacted by the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America. A decision had been made to support a program to address racism in Chicago, and they wanted George to head the program. They told him that there was a church, based in a mansion in Hyde Park, which had a very small congregation. George and his family could live there as long as he pastored for the church and used the mansion as a base to develop the Chicago Project. Although George loved working with the migrant farmworkers, he felt the Chicago Project was an opportunity to continue the work he had begun in Selma. It felt more in alignment with what his life experiences had prepared him for. Before making a decision, he talked it over with his congregation: “God bless them,” George told me. “They urged me to do it. They thought it was my calling.” And so, after three years in Oklahoma, George and his family moved to Chicago, where he would put his deepened understandings of systemic racism to work.
The Mansion: Building a White Antiracist Spiritual Community
It was 1967 when George Hrbek arrived in Chicago, during a transitional moment in the civil rights era. Urban rebellions were erupting across the country, typically initiated by police brutality in Black communities. Those communities were sinking deeper into poverty as the jobs of Black workers – unprotected by discriminatory unions – were mechanized or sent overseas, and as Whites fled to redlined suburbs and took the tax base of cities with them. Civil rights successes against Jim Crow had not touched these nationwide, systemic problems, which were often dealt with by pouring yet more police into Black neighborhoods. George arrived in Chicago shortly after Stokely Carmichael had issued his famous call for Black Power: what was “freedom”, Carmichael asked, if Black people remained economically destitute and powerless in the face of systemic inequity? The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had grown out of the sit-in movement, had recently asked their White members to leave and to focus on educating and organizing White communities for racial justice. And Martin Luther King had initiated the Chicago Freedom Movement to fight discriminatory housing and racialized poverty in Chicago, and was beginning to build a national, multiracial antipoverty movement focused on systemic change.
As George settled into the Hyde Park Lutheran Church – soon to simply be called “the Mansion” – a Baptist minister by the name of Al Pitcher reached out to him. Pitcher was a professor at the University of Chicago’s famous department of religion, and was an advisor to Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson. Pitcher told Hrbek: “I can arrange for you to meet with Martin Luther King. You can bounce your ideas off Dr. King and he’ll give you feedback.” George’s jaw dropped. He was astounded to have such an opportunity.
Shortly afterward, George found himself sitting with Martin Luther King in the basement of a union hall. It was just the two of them. Martin listened intently while George expressed a concern they both shared: if White people – even sympathetic White people – thought that overcoming racism was only a matter of changing attitudes, further progress would be impossible. A focus on individual, personal prejudice would obscure the racial inequities that were built into the core institutions of society. George told Martin that his plan was to build a program and a community that would help White people wrestle with the nature of systemic racism. As George told me: “I wanted to help them understand that we weren’t just talking about Jim Crow in the South. We were talking about policies and practices in Chicago, in the North, everywhere. That was my intention and that was what I shared with King.”
“I felt somewhat embarrassed that I was sitting with this important person. We spent an hour and a half together, and I shared with him what my thinking was, and what I thought the project should do. And he gave me some really good feedback. He affirmed it. And he especially affirmed that I should focus on the White community.”
George laughed:
“He STRONGLY affirmed that part! And he urged me to focus on young people. He also felt this ought not just be lectures, but that we needed to find a way to dramatize systemic racism, and give people the kinds of experiential learning that would help them understand . . . He helped me refine my thinking. I was really impressed that he gave me so much time. I thought I might meet with him for 15 minutes, because this guy was busy!”
Shortly after that meeting with King, George Hrbek launched his program: a combination of weekend and weeklong intensives, during which participants lived and worked and learned together. They cooked and ate together over meals that echoed George Hrbek’s childhood of passionate political discussions over the dinner table. Gert once again played a vital role: her ability to build strong relationships of trust with the women who came to the Mansion was central to the inclusive and immersive community-building experience that emerged there. As George put it:
“We were fostering relationships. Music, singing, people sharing their journeys, doubts, struggles, commitments. Community building. It was providing a space, where people felt FREE . . . We were crafting new music in our worship services. We were creating new services that were expressive of our commitments and what we were trying to do.”
White participants in the Mansion process not only learned about systemic racism, but engaged in self-reflection about their own racial upbringing and identity, shared the stories of their lives with one another, and envisioned their own future antiracist growth. George emphasized that “Nothing was rushed. We weren’t rushing things. We made room for silence. We tried to keep it going in a smooth way . . . We wanted it to be at the people’s pace.” Groups were limited to 20 people to ensure that everyone received attention and experienced connection. The professors and pastors in George’s network, along with the local Lutheran seminary and college, helped spread the word. Eager students arrived, many of them working on ministerial degrees… future religious leaders who could bring an understanding of systemic racism and the need for White people to work for change into their future congregations and organizations. These students then spread the word to their friends. It was these young people who dubbed the three-story church “the Mansion.” One visitor recalls the space as being in somewhat “glorious disrepair”:
“A long driveway built for horse-drawn carriages ran along the north side of the property on its way to the ancient 2-story carriage house. The driveway passed the old side entrance, built several feet above the ground so guests could dismount directly onto the covered porch. On entering the mansion from the front, instead of turning left to the big room where the church services were held, you could climb the grand staircase to the upper ballroom, where a massive chandelier hung from the high ceiling . . . I remember fireplaces and chimneys everywhere, and old detail work in tile and wood spoke of former glory.”
The weeklong intensives began with a bit of an initiation… an attempt to dramatize systemic racism, as Martin Luther King had suggested. When participants first arrived, they were divided up into three groups. One group lived on the top floor: they got to decide the dinner menu… and who would do all the cooking and cleaning. The top floor group passed their decisions down to the people on the second floor, who were responsible for communicating this plan to the group who had been placed in the basement, and managing the implementation. The basement group was responsible for the actual labor, as overseen by the second-floor group, while the third-floor group was shielded from having to deal with any direct grievances from the laboring group. “After a single day,” George said laughing, “the people in the basement were not happy campers! Then we’d get the whole group together and get them to reflect on the experience, what it felt like, including what it felt like to be on top. That’s how we began to get them to think about White domination, and about systemic racism.”
To introduce systemic racism, George collaborated with another White antiracist Lutheran Pastor named Joseph Barndt. They used a parable originally attributed to Saul Alinsky and Irving Zola, creatively adapting it to better portray how ineffective attempts to fight racism were when they ignored systemic racial inequity. The two pastors went on to collaborate for years. As George recalls: “He and I once holed up in a motel for the weekend. We had butcher paper up on the wall, mapping ideas out… I learned a lot from Joe.” Here’s the parable, in George’s words:
“There was a town, by a river. One day there was a man, fishing, and he sees a baby floating down the river. He drops his fishing pole, jumps in the water, pulls the baby out, gives the baby resuscitation, and takes the baby back to town for warmth, nourishment, and medical care. Then he goes back to fishing. And all of a sudden he sees TWO babies… He calls to some other people and two people jump into the river to pull out the two babies. Pretty soon there’s a whole rescue operation going on, because babies are floating down the river! Some people are jumping in the river, others giving resuscitation, others gathering milk and blankets, others taking donations, others driving babies to the hospital… and then finally someone asked the key question: Why are there babies floating down the river?! So the town has a big meeting, and they send a delegation up the river to find out why. A day later the delegation comes back and says: There’s a big catapult launching babies into the river! And so the town gets in an uproar: We’ve got to dismantle that catapult! But then someone says: ‘Uh-oh. We can’t do that.’ Someone else says, ‘Why not?’ ‘Because our factory here makes parts for that catapult. And our livelihood is dependent upon that catapult.’ The dilemma… That was one of the little parables we used to get people to realize the nature of systemic racism.”
George found this parable helpful as a way of introducing some key concepts. One was that when the town (White people) sought to dismantle the catapult (systemic racism), their response was to be afraid that their own interests were tied up in that system. The town members still felt compelled to pull the babies out of the river, however: as George’s collaborator Joseph Barndt expressed to me, “It’s the fulfillment of the White need to rescue, rather than empower communities of color… which is what’s involved with going up the river.” The parable directed the White audience towards some important questions: if the town members were spending huge amounts of time and energy and resources rescuing babies, was their investment in the catapult truly in their own interest? What were the real-life examples of rescuing babies from the river, instead of dismantling the catapult? What were the ways that White people wasted time and energy and resources “fighting racism,” that actually allowed racial inequity to continuously perpetuate itself? For George, getting White people to wrestle with such questions was an essential first step towards developing an effective antiracist practice of the sort that might one day actually dismantle “the catapult.” Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer once put it: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
After spending some time learning and building community together, participants of the Mansion’s intensives then traveled to Black and Brown neighborhoods, where they met with grassroots leaders fighting systemic racism in their communities. Going into those spaces, seeing the effects of systemic inequity with their own eyes, and listening to the people suffering from it and fighting it had a powerful emotional impact that no amount of study and discussion could bring. As George put it, for these workshop participants – most of whom had lived segregated and comparatively affluent lives – these intensives were “an urban plunge to see the effects of racism and meet some of the people working to deal with issues of racism.” It was an effective model: although the programs at the Mansion were focused on educating White people rather than directly organizing them, the experience inspired participants to organize. George Hrbek has been deeply moved by the decades of incredible work that many of these workshop participants went on to engage in. He sees that work as the true legacy of the Mansion.
Over time, some activists moved into the Mansion and made it their home. For those who desired to live there, George asked: “What do you want to BRING to what we’re doing? What will you add?” One seminary student named Michael Koch wanted to create a community newspaper: and thus, the paper “Incite!” was born. It was a monthly paper, complete with political cartoons, an op-ed section, reporting on local social justice struggles, and stories about goings-on at the Mansion. As George recalls: “It had a broad circulation. Mike really got it out. It went out to churches and social justice organizations. It was meant for the White community.”
Another seminary student named Charles Numrich wanted to develop a social justice theatre project: and so Charles moved in, and set up a theatre in the basement. The actors were made up of community members. As Charles recalls:
“I took a room in the basement, created a small black box theater right next to it, and named it Phoenix Theatre. The basic idea was that I could . . . create theatre around the issues that were most pressing at the time. Those issues included exposing white suburban groups to inner-city realities, the struggle against racism, political and social inequality, and so many of the other serious social issues that faced us in the late 1960s. We presented theater productions almost every weekend for the groups that came to visit the Mansion. We also did theater productions for worship services on Sunday mornings. We did live performances as well as multimedia productions . . . My first published volume of plays was titled Finding a Way, the plays of Hyde Park Lutheran Church 1971 to 1973.
Of course, the Mansion was also a church. At one of the church services, some Black Power youth showed up and demanded that George turn the building over to them, in the spirit of reparations. George said, “Well, I have a very brief response: Fuck you.” The room fell into a silence deep enough to hear a dime drop. But then George continued: “My longer response is that if you want to discuss this with me, we can meet after this worship service is over.” The youth were soon operating their community-organizing project out of a space in the basement, and even sharing the printing materials used by the Mansion’s “Incite!” for their own publications. George laughs: “The congregation never forgot that moment! I’ve often thought about why I responded that way. It was just automatic. But I think I wanted to do something they didn’t anticipate… It was a way of getting their attention.”
Many of the participants of the intensives joined the congregation, creating a close-knit, thriving White antiracist spiritual community at the Mansion. These church services “attracted many young people who were disillusioned with institutionalized religion,” as George put it, “and were searching for more authentic expressions of spirituality.”
“If you came to the Mansion on a Sunday morning, you didn’t participate in a traditional Lutheran worship service… and I had already begun to move in that direction when I was in Oklahoma. It was Jesus-oriented, but very open to everybody, a place where everybody could share what was on their hearts and minds. A lot of what we sang wasn’t out of a Lutheran hymnbook. People were writing their own songs. There was guitar music. The members of the theatre group were dramatizing the gospels. And I wasn’t in any way acting like a traditional Lutheran clergyman. I didn’t preach from a pulpit. My quest was to get to know Jesus, and I shared that . . . I had developed my own understanding of historical Christianity, and how it became co-opted by empire, and a lot of what emerged had an empire mentality. I expressed what might be called a ‘radical’ Christianity. But I didn’t use that word. I was just trying to teach Jesus.”
There’s no better way to understand the sense of community at the Mansion than through the words of the community members themselves. Melanie Morrison – who went on to found Allies for Change – was one of the activists who made a home for herself in the Mansion. As Melanie recalls,
“It was an intense community of people who were asking all kinds of questions, studying, and also finding ways to celebrate… to celebrate even the smallest breakthroughs! There was a lot of music. Some of it was music coming out of the Black Freedom Struggle. George had friends who were writing contemporary hymns, which were addressing the issues of the day. That was wonderful music. It was not a somber place! There was a lot of joy. A lot of caring for one another.”
Like so many other White people who came to the Mansion, Melanie had been raised in a segregated world, and that reality was part of what many community members had to wrestle with. In Melanie’s words: “I grew up in racial apartheid.” Honestly reckoning with that fact wasn’t easy. For people like Melanie, moving to Chicago was a shock. She saw severe, racialized poverty for the first time:
“So I went through a kind of faith crisis while I was living at the Mansion. But the gift of living at the Mansion was that that was honored. And there was a context in which that could be explored. And the faith crisis had to do with… I mean, how am I supposed to find hope when I don’t see change, I just see things getting worse by the day. So I had a real crisis of hope. And I remember late, late night conversations with both George and Gert about that. They understood that crisis. And they made space for me living through it, and they also shared with me their own struggles, and where they themselves found hope . . . The worship was not distinct from the struggles that were causing that faith crisis for me . . . I heard an interpretation of the scriptures and Biblical stories that really helped nurture a rebirth of faith and a rebirth of hope in me.
“What I so enjoyed and benefited from were the endless conversations at the dinner table, about really difficult subjects… about economic oppression, and police violence, and what was going on at the trial with Bobby Seale . . . They had a commitment to mentoring young people. When I say mentoring, I mean a mentoring into critical thinking. A nurturing of agency . . . George enjoyed asking provocative questions: so if you sort of made a statement at the dinner table, he would say, ‘how can you back that up?’”
George’s younger sister Janet, who spent a month at the Mansion and was a civil rights activist in Birmingham, added yet another dimension to the role these long conversations over dinner had in the Mansion community: George would weave the big topics of conversation and the questions that were alive in the community into his sermons, where he would “bring it all together.” Eyes gleaming with joyful memories, Janet also recalled a unique fusion of communal living, celebration, and worship:
“One thing he would do, when we had a party… everybody got together, and we’d eat and we’d drink and we’d sing and we’d party… And George would bring the whole group together, and have Communion, at the end of the night. And it would bring everybody together. It was the most beautiful experience. You felt a oneness with people. Everybody might have been off having their own conversations about this and that, but at the end… to be able to be in a circle, and take bread, and drink wine . . . The Eucharist isn’t used that way, it’s become so formalized. But George would make that Communion probably what it was originally all about. It brought people together.”
George Hrbek & The Chicago Black Freedom Struggle
As George helped to nurture the White antiracist spiritual community at the Mansion, he also developed ties with figures in Chicago’s Black Freedom Struggle scene… just as he had built his church in Selma in communication with Rosa Young, and while supporting Selma’s SCLC. Now, he plugged into SCLC’s Chicago campaign, and especially Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket. Every Saturday, George took the members going through his antiracist intensives to attend the Breadbasket gatherings, which typically started with a mass meeting of a thousand people, ninety percent of who were Black. But during a few months of heightened activism – including collaborating on huge anti-Vietnam War protests and important local elections – George met with Jesse Jackson’s crew more intensely:
“There were perhaps five of us. We would meet three or four days a week in the backroom of a cocktail lounge on Hyde Park Boulevard. It was Jesse Jackson, Al Pitcher, and Al Raby, a well-known community organizer in Chicago . . . The lounge owner was Black. He made that space available to us. We would walk through the bar to get to the backroom. It was a rather upscale lounge . . . we would touch base, hear what people were doing, figure out where we needed to collaborate and so on. It was a sharing time. Kinda freewheeling. Everybody would drink. When I went to those meetings, I would have a couple of gin martinis. By the time I got home I was half-crocked.”
George felt that he was valued because of his ability to mobilize White support through his church network and Mansion community. Still, he confessed: “I gotta tell you how I felt about being at those meetings. I felt like George the Least,” he laughed. “I thought I was really fortunate to be invited to those meetings! Because they were doing things at a much, much greater scale than I was doing.”
In early April of 1968, with the support of Jesse Jackson, George hosted a retreat for 70 Lutheran pastors at a Lutheran camping site. Jackson himself was supposed to be there, but the Black Freedom Struggle in Memphis Tennessee was escalating, and Jesse rushed to Memphis to be with King. George was at the retreat just north of Chicago when the dreaded moment arrived: “I got the call… that telephone call, while I was at that conference.” George was the one who had to tell the other pastors that Martin Luther King had just been assassinated.
“We all left immediately to get back to our communities, because we knew what was going to happen… Chicago was going to explode. I came back to the Mansion. By then everyone had heard the news. And the community in the Mansion… people just wanted to be together; to mourn together. So that’s what happened. The Sunday morning gathering was enormous. Not only the chairs were full, the floor was full; people leaning against the walls. People were trying to comprehend it. It was a time of mourning… and confusion.”
Shortly after King’s death, the 1968 Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago. During the intense protests that followed, Rennie Davis and David Dellinger – two members of the Chicago Seven – paid visits to the Mansion. SDS members poured in. Julian Bond came through. George recalls being “out there every day. I was out in Lincoln Park when that thing just blew up. I got out of there by sprawling over the hood of a car.” It was during this time that members of the Rainbow Coalition started coming through the Mansion. William “Preacherman” Fesperman of the Young Patriots Organization – a poor White Appalachian group in alliance with the Black Panthers – came through twice. Jose Cha-Cha Jimenez of the Puerto Rican Young Lords came through to speak with the Mansion community. Cha-Cha invited George to a Young Lords meeting, to “hear their articulation of the issues they were concerned about . . . I felt honored to be invited to come. I wasn’t going to say anything unless I got asked to say anything. I was there to listen, and to learn.”
However, George’s strongest connection to the Rainbow Coalition, by far, was to Fred Hampton himself. George had met Fred Hampton while Fred was a high school senior leading demonstrations against segregated swimming pools. An NBC reporter named Ted Elbert and his wife Joan made the introduction. (Ted later reported from the inside of the Wounded Knee Occupation. He and Joan had greeted George at the Mansion as part of the welcoming committee… with a fifth of Jack Daniels.) As George recalls:
“I met Fred at a meal at the Elbert’s home, which they organized to introduce us to one another. The next time I saw Fred – he was the president of the youth component of the NAACP. And the summer after he graduated, he went to Milwaukee, because there was a national meeting of all the leaders of the NAACP youth groups throughout the nation. They met at a primarily Black Roman Catholic Church, where the priest was Father Groppi, and he worked with a group of young Black men called The Commandos. So Fred was exposed to this more radical group. And when he came back from that experience, he hooked up with the Panthers.”
George Hrbek and Fred Hampton met for lunch after Hampton had emerged as a Panther leader. By this time, George had developed an extensive church network, and was speaking regularly to churches in the Chicago area about the historical Jesus, his nonviolent anti-imperial spiritual practice and philosophy, and how White Christian Americans should be called by Jesus’s teachings to reckon honestly with systemic racism.
“Fred asked if I could help him get some speaking engagements in front of some White audiences. Which I did. I organized for him to meet with some churches. And then I organized for him to meet with the whole student body of Concordia College . . . I drove him to these engagements, and also introduced him. Fred didn’t pull any punches in front of White audiences. He wasn’t theoretical. He talked about his own raw experiences, even coming from the suburbs. And he used those personal experiences to legitimize what he was doing with the Panthers.
“I probably met with Fred five or six times for lunch, in addition to taking him to speaking engagements . . . He was interested in what I was doing at the Mansion, and he said he’d love to come sometime. He visited three times. He would sit and listen… and then he would share. I’ll tell you… when he gets in front of an audience! But when he’s with a small group, he had a whole different approach. Then it wasn’t about speeches, but discussion. He really valued dialog.”
On those few occasions, the Mansion, with its more intimate space, became an opportunity for Fred Hampton to dialog with a receptive White audience. However, George describes the Mansion audience as “intimidated.”
“They were intimidated in a way where they didn’t want to appear to disagree with what he said. Many of the questions members of the Mansion asked were about the programs the Panthers ran; the breakfast programs… the safe stuff. But the audience seemed to avoid questions that would challenge Fred.”
George shrugged:
“They wanted to express solidarity with him.”
During the twenty-five hours of interviews on which this writing is based, George Hrbek expressed more fondness for Fred Hampton than for any other single person, with the exception of his own family:
“When I met with him, it was more about personal conversations than conversations about the movement. He shared a lot with me personally, his feelings, his thoughts. Fred was extremely committed to the Panthers. He said, ‘George, they’re going to get me.’ He told me that when they did, he wanted to be buried in Louisiana, in the cemetery of the Baptist church his grandparents had belonged to. He repeated this to me just two months before he was assassinated . . . I took it to some degree seriously. What do you say to a person who says ‘I think they’re going to get me?’ I tried to show him that I understood why he would feel that way, but also expressed that he’d be fine. I don’t think I felt guilty. But I had an awareness that I could have responded differently. I don’t think I had a very thoughtful response to his concern.”
When Fred was indeed assassinated, the funeral was massive, and George “went through the line like everyone else.” His mentee, Melanie Morrison, remembers picking up Noam Chomsky and Dr. Spock from the airport to drive them to the funeral. “After the murder,” Melanie recalls, “some of us went to stand in front of the Black Panther offices, as White people to offer some protection.” George traveled down to Louisiana for the smaller family funeral: “I mourned.”
Things came crashing to a halt for George at the Mansion in 1971. When he had arrived in Chicago in 1967, Martin Luther King had asked George about what kind of support he had:
“King was concerned about some of the things I might face… He wanted to know what the Lutheran groups funding the project wanted to see me do, and he was right to be concerned about that because their ideas were not my ideas. What I later discovered was that their ideas about an antiracism program was stuff like opening hunger centers… I didn’t want to be involved in that kind of charity, that false generosity that lets the system off the hook. If you’re worried about hungry people, you have to address WHY people are hungry! So if you want to deal with racism, you have to deal with the White community.”
To return to the parable, George was concerned with dismantling the catapult, while the church hierarchy was interested in pulling babies out of the river. As George recalls,
“For three-and-a-half years, the implementation of the Mansion’s mission prevailed with little opposition. There were two raids by Chicago police’s infamous red squad, and it was infiltrated by at least one police informer. But that was it. However, over time, backlash emerged. There was a core of White clergy who really tried to undermine what we were doing. These were kind of the orthodox right-wing groups within the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod. They were putting out publications that were highly critical of what we were doing; highly critical of me. The message was that the Mansion programs – and my ministry – were radical departures from Christian orthodoxy, and needed to be shut down as unrepresentative of the Lutheran Church. However, I think much of the backlash was because we were focused on the White community . . . They expected us to do charity work. It was publishing ‘Incite!’, combined especially with my association with Fred Hampton, that really led the church to bring the heresy charges.”
In 1971, George was brought before a Lutheran council to be tried for heresy. He sat before thirty-one members of the church hierarchy, all dressed in either clerical collars or business suits. Thirty of them were White, and one Black. The council asked George if he was now or ever had been a member of the Communist Party. They asked him a series of detailed questions to see if he had a literal interpretation of the Bible: did he believe that Jonah had truly been swallowed by a whale? George was determined to go out with a bang, so he requested to answer all of their questions at once. He proceeded to give a two-hour speech laying out his beliefs. When he finished, the sole Black member of the church hierarchy sprang to his feet in applause. George believes that this was the only thing that saved him from an official heresy charge: the council worried that after such a strong endorsement from the single Black leader present, that a charge of heresy could appear racist.
However, George was stripped from his position at the Mansion, effective immediately. He took a job loading trucks on the night shift to keep his family afloat, and they moved into public housing. It was an exceptionally difficult time. A seminary student who George had mentored, named Bill Weed, became the new pastor. Bill was able to keep the Mansion running… for a couple of years. Long after the Mansion dissolved, however, the strange twists and turns of history took the building’s fascinating story in a new, unexpected direction: it became the Hyde Park home of Barack and Michelle Obama.
Cleveland: Putting Down Roots
George was forty years old when he finally arrived in the city where he would put down his roots: Cleveland. In 1969, a young pastor named Richard Sering had been hired by the Lutheran Human Relations Association to develop a plan to engage Lutheran congregations in the racial justice issues that were alive in that city. Sering had been the pastor of a Black Lutheran Church in St. Louis, where he was engaged in civil rights efforts. Before moving to Cleveland to initiate the program, Sering stopped by Chicago and spent four days at the Mansion… perhaps as a way of learning something about the work he was about to engage in. A year later, Sering was looking to expand the capacity of the program – called Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry – and when he heard that George had been forced out of the Mansion, quickly gave him a call.
The decades that George went on to spend with Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry (LMM) are packed with enough activity to write a book about. But to summarize, his first task was to create a supportive re-entry program for people who had been released from The Cleveland House of Corrections. The program was later expanded by LMM into what became a nationally recognized reentry program, for all people returning to Cleveland from throughout Ohio’s prison system. To create this program, LMM consulted and hired those most impacted by the system: former prisoners. Likewise, when local congregations expressed concern about disability rights in Cleveland, LMM hired members of the disabled community to create a task force. A demonstration of 200 people – many of them wheelchair users – created pressure to make public transportation accessible. When LMM engaged around homeless issues; they built relationships with homeless people and hired people who had experienced homelessness themselves. The major lesson from these decades of work was that George, and LMM, always took on these issues by being in relationship with, and taking leadership, from those most impacted. As George puts it:
“We didn’t grow by sitting around in some kind of smoke filled room figuring out what we were gonna do. It was people from out of the congregations coming to us and asking for assistance. It was a bottom up approach. We spent a lot of time building relationships in grassroots communities, and especially in Black communities. Members of those communities were represented on our board. We built grassroots relationships and support for what we were doing. Everything we did grew out of grassroots issues, challenges, and concerns.
“Our core group at Metropolitan Ministry did a lot of reflection together. Paulo Freire had a huge influence on us. We all read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Everybody who joined our team read that book . . . some of us even met with him for a few days in Binghamton, New York. We were doing community building. When we hired new people to LMM, even before they did an orientation, we had them share their story with us… and we shared our stories with them. We got to know each other. We needed to be to each other what we were trying to be in the community. And we needed to foster that internally.”
Although this was a time in George’s life that was full of possibility, the early years with LMM were hard ones when it came to George’s personal life: it was during this time that his marriage with Gert came to an end. In George’s words:
“We had a good marriage and the end was not contentious, but a time of confusion and sadness for both of us. I take full responsibility for it. Thanks to Gert’s graciousness, we have remained friends through the 45 years since. I am grateful for that.”
George kept moving forward. “In Chicago,” he told me, “we had more of an impact on people, on individuals. In Cleveland, we had more of an impact on policy, on the city, on the county.” LMM also put on educational presentations about racism for Lutheran schools and congregations. These programs examined racism from a personal, historical, and systemic lens. When presenting to students and congregations, George worked alongside Black colleagues who brought their personal experiences to the table. He also helped to set up a community garden, called Rurban… a combination of Rural and Urban. At Rurban, farmers mentored members of the urban community in learning to grow and harvest their own plots, and those members were invited to travel to the farms and participate in harvests there as well. Launched in 1976, Rurban continues to this day.
Of the many, many issues and programs that George would get involved with over the years, perhaps the one closest to his heart was a theatre project. When George moved to Cleveland, he gravitated towards its oldest and most diverse neighborhood: Ohio City. The neighborhood – now gentrified (as George says, “We fought it. But it came through like the railroad”) – had once attracted poor White migrants from Appalachia to Eastern Europe, and was home to a thriving LGBT community as well as Black, Latino, and Native American communities. There was a strong sense of hospitality and community engagement. However, the neighborhood also had a soaring poverty rate, along with all of the accompanying difficulties. “Back in the mid-70s,” George recalls,
“There were small groups of kids… young, just 11,12 years old, who were engaged in a lot of vandalism. And many adults in the neighborhood started to have negative feelings about all kids. At that time I was having coffee each Tuesday morning with a Jesuit priest, to talk about what was going on in the neighborhood. And we asked ourselves if there was some way we could creatively deal with this issue of older people being down on kids. We wondered if we could give older people a different way to experience the neighborhood kids, and thought that maybe the arts could be a way of doing that… so we came up with the idea of young people doing theatre performances for the neighborhood, including of course the adults.”
The city gave them a grant of $800 to put on a summer youth theatre project, and they started searching for someone to direct the program. By this time, George had entered into a serious relationship with a woman named Stephanie Morrison, who was the sister of Melanie Morrison… the former Mansion community member quoted earlier in this story.
“So I said to my buddy, ‘I know somebody who would be perfect for this.’ And he said to me, ‘Oh, a woman would never want to do it in this neighborhood. But I know I guy who I think could do it.’ So I took a risk, and told him to interview both of them and choose whoever he thought was best. And things turned out as I hoped… he came back and said ‘This woman is dynamite!’ So Stephanie was hired to establish the theatre.
“Steph and I went out to the projects, and we came up with 13 diverse young people who wanted to be involved, aged 13 to 16. It was a substantial commitment for them, four hours a day, five days a week for eight weeks . . . We didn’t talk immediately about the theatre production. We created an opportunity for them to talk about themselves and what drew them there. Then, we took a look at the social issues inherent in the show. And then discussed those issues, gave them a chance to talk about where they’re at in terms of those issues. And the third thing, was to bring in resource people to talk about those social issues… if we talked about homelessness, we’d bring in homeless people, or people who had been through homelessness . . . Our first show was Godspell… about half Black and half Latino youth. Jesus was played by a Latino. We had a full house each night! It was such a success that we traveled to East Lansing and other communities in Michigan to put on the show, which was a great experience for those kids. We didn’t have to recruit after that!”
George and Stephanie were married the following year, and she went on to run Near West Theatre (originally Near West Side Shared Ministry Youth Theatre) until 2017. The theatre – recently moved to a multimillion-dollar location within the Gordon Square Arts District, which it partnered to create – is still going strong, and still embodying its original mission of empowering young people, creating a positive connection between youth and adults, building community, and using theatre to educate about social issues on a sliding scale that’s affordable to everyone.
For fifteen years, George also served as pastor to Calvary Lutheran Church, a predominantly Black church in Cleveland. Because the church had a growing population of Liberian refugees, George got involved in refugee resettlement work. He also played an early role helping to establish International Partners in Mission (IPM), which recognized the problematic, paternalistic nature of much missionary work, and sought an approach that was more in alignment with how George had worked with the migrant laborers in Oklahoma.
Sometimes through IPM and sometimes through other initiatives, the 1970s ushered in a period of George’s life that included much global travel. In fact, just before the invitation to Cleveland, he had been invited to Germany to meet with students, clergy, academics and corporate leaders regarding immigration and social justice in Germany. In 1971 he was invited to the World Peace Conference in Moscow, where he met Hortensia Allende… soon to be the living symbol of Chilean opposition to the dictatorship of Pinochet. At George’s invitation, Hortensia visited Cleveland to advocate for the U.S. to open its doors to Chilean political refugees… during which she stayed at George’s home. Her advocacy played an important role in the U.S. agreement to accept Chilean refugees, and LMM personally resettled 12 Chilean refugee families. In 1988 George spent time in Israel and Palestine, which he summarizes as “a plunge into complex and difficult political, cultural, religious, and economic realities.” In 2003, 2011, and 2015 he was invited to El Salvador, and to Kenya in 2013 to listen and learn from IPM’s grassroots partners. During those visits George especially enjoyed teaching movement songs, and was requested to orient the partners towards Paulo Freire’s work. Each of these journeys are stories unto their own.
IPM’s founders – Jim Mayer and Paul Strege, who had been missionaries in India and Japan – had actually floated the idea for a new, Freirean type of missionary work years ago at the Mansion, during a New Wine Exchange event… yet another group George helped get off the ground. The name came from a parable of Jesus, that you couldn’t put new wine in old wineskins. The New Wine Exchange was a national network of clergy and lay leaders, who met for years to brainstorm how the “old wineskin” of the church wasn’t meeting the needs of the day. Indeed, much of George’s life could be summarized as a search to create a “new wineskin” for the church, which would embody how Jesus might respond to contemporary issues… and to systemic racism, in particular.
Into the Present
“I’ve gotten a lot of awards,” George laughed as our interviews came to a close. “I keep them all in a box in the basement . . . I mean, I appreciated the awards, but I was getting recognized individually for something that a lot of people helped build! So I have somewhat of an aversion to awards.” This was exactly the type of attitude that had drawn me to George in the first place.
I first met George in January of 2021. I had just launched the White Antiracist Ancestry Project – my own personal attempt to use history to help strengthen the surge of interest in White antiracism following the uprisings of 2020. A friend of mine in Cleveland who knew George sent me an article about him and said, “You’ve got to meet this guy.” The article was less than a year old at the time: and there was George, nearly 90 years old, interrupting a Cleveland City Council meeting shortly before Covid closed everything down. The council tried to continue on with their business, but George Hrbek’s booming pastor’s voice drowned out the proceedings. Cleveland had just cracked down on a church that was sheltering homeless people from the cold, leading to a large protest that evening. George told the story of Lorraine Van De Venter, a homeless woman who had frozen to death on the streets. He demanded that she, and others like her, be seen as fully human and treated with dignity and respect. His voice was a moral thunder: “She was our neighbor and a member of our community!”
When I first met with George, I immediately gravitated towards his humor and his rebellious spirit, his spiritual and movement wisdom, and of course his passion and his compelling story. Although I had already lined up numerous movement elders to work with – including SNCC leaders I deeply admired – I decided to throw myself into George’s story first. Outside of a few short articles that briefly traced the chronology of his life, George Hrbek’s story didn’t seem to have ever been told with the depth it deserved. The lessons to be learned from his life felt especially relevant during a time of backlash against the very notion of systemic racism, and during a moment when young activists are seeking antidotes to burnout, including through building stronger movement communities that can be sources of inspiration and joy that sustain their commitment to justice for the long-haul. That, and George was getting old. I wanted to get this man’s story into the historical record. It has been a great joy and a blessing to work with him, and I’m especially grateful for his incredible patience as I circled back to moments in his life again and again, searching for the details that would make it all come together.
As we closed out our interviews, I asked George what his single most important piece of advice would be for young antiracists today. He replied: “We all need community or we burn out. You’ve got to have people you can talk with, reflect with, eat with, cry with, laugh with, joke with!” When I asked, “What builds strong community?” George said:
“You need to really spend time in community and be with one another. You’ve got to encourage people to listen to each other, help one another, lift one another up, support one another. You build community not by telling people what to do or how to do it, but by helping people figure out for themselves how to tackle the things they care about, to realize that they have the knowledge, the resourcefulness, the gifts, and the wisdom to address their issues of concern and to shape their future – – and that we are in this together.”
As for his own growing edges, at age 90: his eyes gleam and he says with joy, “I’m always learning! There’s a whole new generation of young people out there for me to learn from.”
In loving memory of George Hrbek, June 20, 1931 – February 19, 2023.
In the depths of the winter of 1819, three slaves fled a Louisiana plantation. Heading west, they sought freedom across the Sabine River, the border into Spanish Texas. The slave master James Kirkham followed quickly on their heels, hoping to convince Spanish officials to return the people he considered to be his property. Before crossing the Sabine, Kirkham stopped at a tavern, where he met a man named Moses Austin who was also travelling to Texas. Austin was headed to the same destination: San Antonio, where he planned to ask permission from Spanish authorities to settle American families in Texas. Austin believed such settlement would be profitable because the land was excellent for developing a slave-based cotton economy. The slave catcher at the tavern was exactly the kind of man Austin hoped would purchase land in his new settlements. The two men decided to make the long journey to San Antonio together.
Austin’s plans were connected to major events in world history. New technology coming out of the British Empire had recently allowed for the mass production of cheap cotton cloth, and the British had begun supplying a voracious global market with fabric that was lighter, softer, more durable, and easier to clean than anything most people had ever had access to. Cotton production quickly became one of the most profitable enterprises in the world. When the War of 1812 ended, hundreds of thousands of White Americans flocked to the territories that would become Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In one of the largest mass migrations in American history, they established the cotton plantations that soon provided the raw material for the British manufacturing industry. Slaves who had once grown rice and tobacco now worked in the cotton fields from before sunup to after sundown. As the profits to be reaped from slavery skyrocketed, America’s commitment to the institution strengthened beyond anything the American Revolutionaries a generation earlier could have imagined.
By 1819, the price of good cotton growing land in the South had become unaffordable to all but the wealthy. Across the Sabine River in Spanish Texas, however, was land as excellent for growing cotton as any in Mississippi: and it was cheap. If Austin could convince the Spanish officials of Texas to allow him to build American settlements, settlers would come. They would purchase the land from Austin, and he would become a wealthy man. Moses Austin, however, would soon be killed. And although his son Stephen would make his father’s dream a reality, it would not be in Spanish Texas, but in a newly independent Mexican nation that fiercely opposed slavery. Although Mexico, like Spain, invited American settlers into Texas, Mexico pushed back hard against Americans bringing their slaves. Tensions soon grew between American settlers fighting to expand slavery, and Mexicans fighting to abolish it. Those struggles would soon be at the heart of the Texan Revolution, Texan independence… and the acceptance of Texas as a new American slave state.
Indigenous Texas; Mexican Independence
When Moses Austin rode into Texas in 1819, the Mexican War of Independence had been raging for nearly a decade, and Mexico would soon emerge victorious. However, neither the Spanish nor the Mexicans had ever been the masters of Texas. That title belonged to the Comanches.
The Comanches had gained fantastic wealth and power by monopolizing the horse trade on the Great Plains, sweeping from Texas up to Canada. The northern plains were too cold to breed horses, and numerous indigenous peoples looked to the Comanches – the master horse breeders of the central plains – to supply them with enough horses to be successful in trade, travel, hunting, and war. The Comanche reach was vast, extending even beyond the indigenous plains: they supplied the British in Canada, and the French in Louisiana. Horses were vital, and the French and British were willing to offer the best weapons available in exchange… weaponry superior to Spanish arms. In addition to this wealth and firepower, Comanches were raised hunting and fighting on horseback. Their abilities in war were practically mythic. So was their ferocity. Spanish attempts at enticing Comanches into missions were, at best, a dismal failure.
Indeed, the Spanish Empire had only been able to maintain a presence in Texas by paying tribute to the Comanches… but when the Napoleonic Wars washed over Europe in 1803, Spain’s ability to pay such tribute was greatly diminished. When the Mexican War of Independence erupted in 1810, it disappeared entirely. Meanwhile, as Comanche relations with the Spanish deteriorated in Texas, Americans were pouring south and building a cotton empire that would surpass even India by 1820. The hundreds of thousands of American migrants required an endless stream of horses and mules to plow the fields, turn the cotton gins, and haul the cotton bales to the ships that would take them across the Atlantic. The Comanches responded to this vast new market, and to Spain’s failure to pay tribute, by decimating Spanish settlements and driving Spanish herds to American trade posts on the border of Texas. Comanche raids were massive: in 1817, a single, thousand-strong war party stole ten thousand horses and mules. Comanches systematically removed Spanish wealth and channeled it into American hands. In doing so, they played a crucial role in the rise of the American South as the primary supplier of cotton to the British Empire, and in the demise of Spanish power in the Southwest.
When Moses Austin arrived in San Antonio, the capital city was filled with refugees from the countryside, where Comanche raids had destroyed the ranches and haciendas. The Mexican War of Independence had also ravaged the city: many local Tejanos – as the Mexicans of Texas were called – had joined the rebellion, often because they were upset at the Spanish government’s inability to protect them from Comanches. The Spanish had crushed the rebellion in Texas, killing hundreds of rebels in San Antonio alone. Rebel families all across eastern Texas had fled into the vast territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Entire towns were depopulated overnight. With ranchers and farmers either fleeing the Comanches or the Spanish, San Antonio’s food supply vanished. Attempts at resupplying were intercepted by Comanches. The governor of Spanish Texas, Antonio Martínez, reported that soldiers were deserting because “they were dying of hunger.” So were their horses.
It was two days before Christmas in 1820 when Moses Austin and the slave catcher James Kirkham rode into San Antonio. At first, they were not received well: Governor Antonio Martínez distrusted Americans, who had refused to stop arming and paying Comanche raiders. However, Austin produced a Spanish passport, and explained that he was a former Spanish subject in the Louisiana Territory, before it was transferred to France, and then to the U.S. When these transfers were made, the King of Spain had declared that any Spanish subjects of the area could resettle in any part of New Spain. Austin requested resettlement in eastern Texas… and that he be allowed to start a settlement of 300 American families there, focused on the production of cotton. Austin promised that all settlers would become Spanish subjects.
The governor took a few days to discuss the matter with local Tejano leadership, as well as with the military commander of the Texas province, Joaquín de Arredondo. Arredondo had come to believe that there was no military solution to Comanche power in Texas, especially after the region’s near-total depopulation during the Mexican War of Independence. Texas could only be secured by building up the non-Native population and economy. Former attempts to entice settlers to the dangerous region had failed. With Spanish power collapsing in Texas, General Arredondo hoped that Austin’s settlement could entice a growing population to the region, as well as resources and industry. If the Americans helped a cotton economy take root, Tejanos could participate as well. Perhaps the opportunity would entice settlers from the rest of the Spanish New World. If the population grew, the Comanches could be forced to cease their raids. Ranches, haciendas and farms could be rebuilt. It was the best option the general could imagine. The rest of the Tejano leadership agreed. Moses Austin got his contract.
Kirkham did not get what he wanted: he was informed that his slaves had headed deeper into Mexico. There was nothing to be done. On the journey home, Kirkham made a deal to purchase some mules that had been smuggled from the royal corral. When he told Austin, the two men had an argument, with Austin believing that Kirkham’s actions would jeopardize his contract. In the middle of the night, Kirkham stole off with all the horses and supplies, leaving Moses Austin to trek on foot through a cold winter. He was gravely ill by the time he made it home, and died shortly after. For the moment, it appeared that the contract Moses Austin had made with the Spanish amounted to nothing.
Stephen Austin & the Struggle Over Slavery in the Mexican Constitution
Shortly before the Spanish defeat, a group of Tejanos rode into Louisiana, carrying with them Spanish pardons for all Tejano families who had rebelled and fled into American territory. The group also planned to meet Moses Austin, and travel with him back to Texas to help him choose the land for his settlement. Instead, Tejanos were greeted by his son, Stephen, who rode back with them as the inheritor of his father’s project. As the group approached San Antonio, they received news of Mexico’s victory. Governor Martínez assured Austin that nothing had changed: with or without the Spanish, the Tejano leadership supported his father’s settlement plans.
Austin went to work advertising his settlement in newspapers throughout the South. The ads described rich lands, perfect for growing cotton… and affordable to the average American. The advertisements made it clear that settlers would receive additional acreage if they brought a wife, additional acreage for each child, and additional acres for each slave. What Stephen Austin was offering was enticing. It was a chance for average White Americans who couldn’t afford good cotton lands to become landowners and cotton producers. The land was so cheap that an average farmer who could otherwise never afford to purchase slaves could do so with the money they saved. Austin was offering the average White southerner a chance to get ahead. And yet, many who found Austin’s plan enticing still had their doubts: for they saw Texas as a violent, lawless land, promising little certainty. It was too big a risk.
By the time Austin began running his advertisements, American newspapers had been reporting on Comanche raids and the Mexican War of Independence for a decade. They had also been reporting on the pirates who raided Spanish slave ships heading for Cuba, and who smuggled those slaves into the U.S. through Texas. In the eyes of many Americans, Texas was a haven for “bands of outlaws in arms, tribes of Cannibal Indians,” and “gangs of daring smugglers,” to quote one newspaper. Newspapers also reported that Tejanos were on the edge of starvation, “afraid,” one paper wrote, “to venture a mile on the account of the Indians.”
Texas was also viewed as a place that slaves escaped to… and a place without a legal structure to enforce their return. Americans reading Austin’s advertisements didn’t doubt that he was selling excellent land for a cheap price: but he needed to convince them that Mexico would be willing and able to protect them and their property… and especially their slaves. Austin was flooded with letters from potential settlers, asking him about Mexico’s stance on slavery, and if the new nation had given Austin assurances that slavery would be legally protected. Austin quickly realized that settlers would not take the risk of moving to Texas without such assurances. Governor Martínez urged him to travel to Mexico City: with officials busy creating a new government, Austin’s presence in the capital would be the only way to get their attention. And so, in the spring of 1822, Austin set off on the 2000-mile journey.
Austin was in luck. Following independence, Mexico had immediately formed a commission to study the security of the frontier states of California, New Mexico, and Texas. Mexican officials especially feared the enormous population imbalance at the Texan border. 400,000 Americans had just migrated to the cotton lands of the South, but in the wake of Comanche raids and the War of Independence, there were a mere 2,500 Mexicans living in Texas… most of them hundreds of miles from the border. Officials realized there was little they could do to prevent Americans from forcing their way into Texas. In the words of the commission: “The most important problem is the security of the Province of Texas . . . It would be an irreparable loss to the Empire if this beautiful province is lost. In order to save it there remains only one recourse – to populate it.” The commission issued a dire warning: “If we do not take the present opportunity to people Texas, day by day the strength of the United States will grow until they leave their center and annex Texas, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Nuevo Leon like the Goths, Visigoths, and other tribes assailed the Roman Empire.” Mexico, at its founding, foresaw its painful future.
When Austin arrived in Mexico City in April of 1822, all Mexican legislators agreed that settlement was necessary, and that Americans were realistically the only people who would migrate to Texas in large numbers. Mexican legislators also agreed, however, with something that would make Austin’s project impossible: they all wanted to abolish slavery. The ideals of the Mexican War of Independence had called for the equality of all peoples, and had been explicitly antislavery from its inception. Mexico now sought to craft legislation that was consistent with the principles of its independence struggle.
In August, the Mexican congress opened debates over Texas settlements. When it came to the issue of American settlers bringing slaves, some congressmen responded with calls for the immediate abolition of slavery throughout Mexico. Francisco Argandar, the representative from Michoacán, roared: “If they wish to come, they will do it under the condition that they will not have slaves! This will be the highest honor of the Mexican nation.” Others, however, sought a middle ground. Concerned that total abolition would make American settlement impossible, these legislators proposed allowing Americans to bring their slaves, and then gradually phasing out slavery once settlement in Texas had succeeded. Austin, understanding that no Mexican legislators were willing to take a hardcore proslavery stance, met with as many legislators as he could to try and at least lengthen the amount of time that slavery in Texas would be allowed to exist. When Congress began debating a plan to gradually abolish slavery over the next ten years, Austin tried to intervene, writing: “I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years . . . but I do not think I shall succeed.”
On January 3, 1823, Mexico passed legislation allowing American settlers to bring slaves, while gradually phasing slavery out after settlements had been established. Austin’s settlement was also granted official recognition by the Mexican government. However, Austin still struggled to attract settlers, because new antislavery measures made it obvious that Mexico hoped to abolish slavery in the near future. In July of 1824, a national law was passed banning the slave trade: “Commerce and traffic in slaves,” read the bill, “proceeding from any country and under any flag whatsoever, is forever prohibited in the territory of the United Mexican States.” Any slaves brought into Mexico against this law would be freed by “the mere act of treading Mexican soil.” The language of the bill, however, left an opening for slaves to be brought into Mexico – just not sold there – leaving an opening for Americans to bring slaves who had been purchased in the U.S. However, for American settlers hoping to participate in the slave-based cotton economy, it made little sense to purchase land in a country where the support of slavery was clearly unstable… even if the land was cheap.
Austin pinned his hopes on the Mexican constitution being developed in 1824. The Texas representative, Erasmo Seguín, was a powerful ally of Austin’s settlement plans: in fact, Seguín had personally guided Austin into Texas. Seguín’s priority was creating safety and stability for Tejanos, which meant growing the population and developing the economy. If that meant allowing slavery in Texas, Seguín would accept it. As debates over the constitution raged, Austin wrote to Seguín: “There are two obstacles which slow down emigration to this province and the entire nation . . . One is the doubt that persists if slavery is permitted, the other is religion.” Austin knew that the matter of Catholicism was beyond his control, but he urged Seguín to do everything in his power to allow Americans to “bring and keep their slaves.” Seguín would have done this even without Austin’s constant pressure. Under his urging, and that of other Tejanos, Mexico’s constitution of 1824 made no mention of slavery: it left the divisive issue up to the states.
With the issue of slavery now under state control, most states immediately abolished it. Texas was the major outlier, but even there Austin’s plans encountered trouble. Because Texas did not have a large enough population to become a state, it was merged with the state of Coahuila… meaning that decisions about the Texas frontier would be made by the large population far to the west of Texas, and not by the Tejanos who supported American settlement. Austin and his Tejano allies thus turned their attention towards influencing the legislation coming out of Saltillo, the capital of the new state of Coahuila-Texas.
American Settlers Push Back on Mexican Abolition
As Austin worked to influence Mexican legislation in favor of American settlement, he also continued to build that settlement. He secured financial investments from major cotton merchants, promising massive returns for the cotton gins and equipment they provided. He petitioned Mexican officials for the right to build seaports, arguing that only direct cotton shipments to Europe would bring prosperity to Texas. In order to secure slavery in a nation that wished to abolish it, Austin drew up codes for extreme punishment to deter runaways. A White person aiding a runaway slave would be forced into hard labor and fined $1000 – a fantastic sum at the time. Slaves could receive 100 lashes merely for stealing. Such policies helped slave owners feel at least somewhat reassured that their human property would be safe in Austin’s settlement. Within a few years, slaves made up a quarter of the population, and Austin’s settlement was producing an annual 200,000 pounds of cotton. It was a start to Austin’s vision, but nowhere near the 45 million pounds produced yearly in Alabama.
Austin also developed militias to drive out local indigenous peoples. Referring to the local Karankawa tribe, Austin ordered the militia to “pursue and kill all those Indians wherever they are found.” The small and relatively powerless tribe was decimated. When it came to the larger Tonkawa tribe, Austin convinced them to move with a peace treaty, combined with the threat of violence. The Comanche, on the other hand, were untouchable… but they were good trading partners. The settlers in Austin’s colony continued to purchase horses from Comanches, just as they had done in the South… and the Comanches continued raiding Mexican settlements in order to provide those horses.
Tejanos had hoped that American settlement would help stop Comanche raids; instead, it just brought the American market closer. Still, Tejanos held out hope that a flourishing cotton economy would benefit them as well: Austin had doubled the non-native population by bringing in two thousand settlers and slaves within three years. Those two thousand bodies cleared rivers for navigation and trade, and began building a network of roads. Settlers initiated a robust trade between Texas and New Orleans. The infrastructure they created in a few years was greater than anything Spanish negligence had produced in the past century. And so, even when hundreds of Comanches ransacked San Antonio for six days in 1825, Tejanos held out hope. When Stephen Austin met his goal of settling 300 families that year, Tejanos granted him the right to build additional settlements.
Meanwhile, the state of Coahuila-Texas began writing its constitution. In June of 1826, Austin received a letter from Baron de Bastrop, the only representative of Texas at the state congress. Bastrop warned that the congress was preparing to insert an antislavery article into the state constitution: “If I cannot succeed in removing it, or at least modifying it,” he wrote, the American settlements “will be completely ruined.” Soon, Austin would see for himself what the antislavery threat was. The proposed Article 13 of the new Coahuila-Texas constitution read: “The state prohibits absolutely and for all time slavery in all its territory, and slaves that already reside in the state will be free from the day of the publication of the constitution in this capital.”
Liberal and conservative legislators in Coahuila had come together to support Article 13, with the liberals being ideologically opposed to slavery, and the conservatives seeing abolition as a way to destroy the growing American settlements that they viewed as a threat. Tejano leaders panicked. San Antonio’s town council sent an emergency appeal to the state congress, warning that the immediate abolition of slavery would be a “deathblow” to Texas. Austin followed their lead, sending a petition to congress warning that abolition would cause American settlers to quickly abandon the territory. The potential for economic development would be destroyed in Texas for many years to come, he wrote. Austin also sent his younger brother, James “Brown” Austin, to the state capital of Saltillo to work directly with Tejano leadership, and to keep him informed of developments.
Soon, rumors were swirling in Austin’s settlements that the slaves were about to be freed. Fears of slave rebellions spread: settlers worried that if slaves knew they would soon be free, they would worry about their owners rushing them back to the U.S., and would fight to prevent that. Settlers began turning against Austin, feeling that he had given them false assurances that Mexico would protect slavery. Some prepared to leave. As Austin struggled to keep his settlement from falling apart, the rumors that slavery was about to be ended in Texas spread through southern newspapers.
From the state capital, Brown Austin sought to buy time. If congress could put off emancipation for a few years, perhaps a different legislature would be more favorable. Hoping to pull at the heartstrings of antislavery legislators, Brown went so far as to argue that freeing slave children would actually hurt them. As long as they were slaves, children would be fed and sheltered, he argued… but if they were freed, they would become impoverished vagabonds, starving in the street, and forced into a life of crime. Brown argued that such children should continue to be enslaved at least until they were teenagers and able to support themselves. Meanwhile, Governor Blanco wrote to the congress, warning them that Austin’s settlers would probably rebel if slavery was immediately abolished. The governor urged them to forbid the importation of more slaves, while allowing the settlers to keep the slaves they already had.
Heeding the warning of a possible rebellion, the final version of Article 13 in the Coahuila-Texas constitution allowed American settlers to keep their slaves. It even gave them a six-month window in which to purchase new slaves. However, any children born of slaves would be born free, and slave children born before Article 13 would be freed when they became young adults. This meant that there would be no future generations of slaves in Texas. The new state constitution did not immediately abolish slavery, but it did put an end to the expansion of slavery in Texas and ensure slavery’s slow death.
Upon hearing the news, American settlers on their way to Texas stopped in their tracks and turned around: Article 13 was a deal-breaker for further settlement. And the antislavery measures didn’t stop there: after the six-month period allowing new slaves to be brought into Texas expired, Coahuila-Texas imposed an ongoing census of the enslaved population in Coahuila-Texas, to ensure that new slaves were not being brought in. A five hundred peso fine – the peso was equivalent to the dollar at the time – was imposed on anyone caught transporting a pregnant slave back to the U.S., where their children would be born into slavery. Finally, new legislation mandated that when a master died, a minimum of ten percent of their slaves must be freed. The American settlers and their Tejano allies responded to these laws by simply ignoring them, knowing that there was little the state congress could do to enforce the laws along the distant Texan frontier. Even so, the new antislavery laws had the effect of preventing further American immigration into Texas. Austin would have to do more than simply ignore the laws if he wanted to grow his settlements.
In March of 1828, roughly a year after the passage of Article 13, Austin called together a meeting of leading figures in his settlement to “seek a way around the problem of emancipation,” to use the words of historian Andrew Torget. The group came up with a scheme: they would ask the state legislature “for a law guaranteeing that all labor contracts signed in foreign countries would be honored in Mexico.” They would claim that this was an effort to bring in non-slave labor from the U.S., and that they needed such a law so that American workers could trust that contracts they signed in the U.S. would be honored in Texas. Once the law was in place, however, they would simply force slaves in the U.S. to sign official lifetime “contracts” before crossing into Texas. Tejano legislators quickly embraced the plan: they waited for a moment when the Coahuila-Texas government was overwhelmed by other issues, and pushed the bill through while the Congress was too distracted to examine it closely. Austin then contacted his cotton merchant allies in the U.S., who funded advertisements telling American settlers that all they had to do was obtain official work contracts for their slaves. With this loophole in place, Americans once again began migrating to Texas.
The abolitionist spirit in Mexico, however, remained a problem for Austin’s settlements. In 1829, Spain attempted to reconquer Mexico. In order to deal with the invasion, Congress granted President Vicente Guerrero emergency powers. Guerrero – a man of indigenous and African heritage – used these powers to circumvent the Mexican Constitution and declare the immediate abolition of slavery throughout Mexico. As the news of the presidential decree moved across Austin’s settlements, so did talk of revolution. Mexican military officials warned the Coahuila-Texas government that they did not have the power to suppress an uprising, and the government panicked: even those who despised slavery begged President Guerrero to exclude Texas from his antislavery decree in order to prevent an uprising they didn’t have the power to control. Fearing an American revolution in the north, Guerrero caved in and excluded Texas from his decree of abolition. Even if he hadn’t, however, it wouldn’t have mattered: Guerrero had abused his wartime powers, and was soon overthrown. All of his decrees were voided.
Rising Tensions: Mexico Pushes Back on American Settlement
Even though revolution had been averted in 1829, events in the early 1830s moved the American settlers quickly in that direction. When General Manuel de Mier y Terán was sent on an off-the-records mission to assess the American settlements, he issued a dire warning to Mexico City: American settlers greatly outnumbered Mexicans in the region. They had far more economic might and displayed no concern for Mexican laws. They traded almost exclusively with the U.S., as did their Tejano allies. The Texas settlement had essentially become an extension of the U.S. reaching into Mexico. General Terán warned Mexico City that it needed to take urgent steps to reassert Mexican authority in Texas by suspending any further U.S. immigration.
The events leading up to the Texas Revolution now unfolded rapidly. In order to encourage immigration to Texas, Mexico had originally granted Americans a tax-exempt status for seven years. In 1830, that period ended. Mexico’s new president, Anastasio Bustamante, heeded General Terán’s advice and used the new taxes gathered in Texas to build military outposts. Such outposts were often constructed at the mouths of major rivers where trade occurred, and were used to enforce tax collection. Congress also forbade any further American immigration to Texas.
All of this increased tensions with the American settlers, and none of it did anything to prevent further arrivals. Instead, in 1831 the global cotton market hit a new high. In order to take advantage of soaring profits, cotton production ramped up dramatically in the South, and thousands of Americans poured over the border into Texas to take advantage of the cheap cotton-growing land. They understood that the move to Mexico came with instability around the question of slavery, but the higher profits to be gained in the 1830s made the risk worth it to thousands of settlers. Indeed, between the time that Mexico forbade further American immigration in 1830 and the outbreak of the Texas Revolution in 1835, the American population more than doubled in Texas, from 10,000 to over 21,000.
In 1832 another event transpired that pushed the American settlements further towards revolution: the Coahuila-Texas government outlawed the use of the “work contracts” American settlers had been using to bring in slaves. In doing so, the last semi-legal means of bringing slaves into Texas was closed. American settlers and their Tejano allies responded by petitioning Mexico City for separate statehood from Coahuila, so that Texans could create their own laws. When that statehood was denied, Austin travelled to Mexico City himself, hoping to convince legislators in person. He got nowhere. In his frustration, Austin sent a letter to his Tejano allies urging them to form an independent state government even without Mexico City’s approval. The letter was intercepted, and Austin was thrown in jail for treason.
Meanwhile, Mexico was in turmoil: ever since its independence in 1821, the nation had been torn between the forces of federalism and centralism, or of greater state and local control versus a more powerful central government in Mexico City. As Austin languished in jail, Mexico’s new president, Santa Anna, made a move to totally centralize the nation: he abolished the constitution, decreed that the states would now be run by his own personal appointees, and set himself up as a dictator. This predictably led many states into open revolt, but because Santa Anna was famous as the general who had helped push back the recent attempt at Spanish reconquest, the military was deeply loyal to him and helped him crush the popular uprisings. Mexico thus slipped into a civil war with the centralists on one side, and the federalists on the other.
When Austin was released from jail in August of 1835, tensions were skyrocketing in Texas. Santa Anna had sent more military reinforcements to the newly constructed and widely hated fortresses. The greater military presence and recent attempts at collecting taxes from the American settlers had pushed many of the settlers to fiercely oppose Santa Anna. The settlers, of course, had always sought stronger independence, especially when it came to creating their own laws regarding slavery. That desire for Texan independence now led Texans to support the federalist cause in Mexico’s civil war.
The Texas Revolution
By October, violence was breaking out between American settlers and the Mexican soldiers stationed at the military outposts. Leaders amongst the settlers and the Tejanos, determined to form an independent Texas at long last, formed a General Council tasked with creating a new government. One of the very first laws they passed was to make it illegal for any free Black people to enter Texas. Furthermore, all Black people in the settlement who were free were to be immediately enslaved. The Council also appointed Sam Houston to be the general of the Texan army, and sent Austin to the U.S. to secure funds and generate public support for the revolution.
Austin’s deep connections to cotton merchants made him the ideal figure for this work, and it would indeed be these cotton merchants who funded the Texas Revolution. They also helped to circulate newspapers throughout the South filled with sensational stories framing the Texan independence struggle as a race war, with White American settlers being pitted against the racially inferior Mexican forces of Santa Anna, who was coming to incite slave revolts and murder the White population. Such newspaper accounts led thousands of White Southern men to rush to the defense of Texas: such men would make up a full 40 percent of the Texan rebel army. These reinforcements were badly needed, for slave revolts had begun breaking out in Texas as the potential promise of freedom approached in the form of Santa Anna’s army, and many of the settlers were more occupied with preventing slave uprisings than preparing for war. In one instance, a hundred slaves suspected of planning rebellion were rounded up, and either whipped nearly to death or hung.
The Texans waited in terrified expectation as news of Santa Anna’s ruthless crushing of revolts in Zacatecas and Coahuila reached them. Soon, Santa Anna’s forces approached the Alamo. The 150 defenders of the small fortress had been expecting reinforcements that had never arrived. They had been weakened by dysentery and were running low on food and water. Santa Anna knew this. His army was ten times larger than the forces at the Alamo. It was clearly only a matter of time before the Texan rebels would surrender, but on March 6, 1836, Santa Anna attacked anyway. After the attack, when Mexican soldiers took the few survivors as prisoners, Santa Anna ordered them to be hacked to death, and the bodies of the dead to be piled up, doused in oil, and burned. Shortly afterwards, when the town of Goliad was captured and 400 American soldiers had surrendered, Santa Anna ordered them to be massacred. When these atrocities were reported in the U.S., it set White American hearts aflame, and facilitated a deep anti-Mexican hatred that laid foundations for future war.
Texas declared its total independence from Mexico just days before the attack on the Alamo. Their declaration was deeply influenced by America’s Declaration of Independence, and the Texas Constitution that followed weeks later was also modeled on America’s. Although many leading American settlers and Tejanos had started the struggle for independence seeking separate statehood within a federalist Mexico, the White Americans who had recently flooded into Texas to take advantage of the cotton boom had no such interest. Neither did the White Southern men who had rushed to defend Texas in a “race war” against Mexicans and liberated slaves… and who made up nearly half of the rebel army. More than anything else, however, it was the knowledge that they were about to face the brutality of Santa Anna that led the more established American settlers like Austin to make the decisive break from Mexico.
As for the Tejano leadership: of the fifty-nine delegates making these decisions, only two Tejanos had been included. By the time of the Texas Revolution, Tejanos made up a mere fifteen percent on the non-Native population. If the Texans succeeded at independence, Tejanos would find themselves a small minority in a majority White nation. Furthermore, the Americans who flooded into Texas during the Revolution had been inspired by the fierce anti-Mexican rhetoric whipped up in the U.S., and the flood of recent American immigrants taking advantage of the cotton boom of the 1830s had none of the experience of working closely with Tejanos that earlier settlers had. The days of American settlers collaborating with Tejano leaders were fading fast.
As the Texas delegates rushed to create their new government, news of Santa Anna’s massacres burned their way across the Texas countryside. Thousands of Texans stopped whatever they were doing, leaving their tools in the fields and food at the table to flee for their lives. They not only feared the Mexican army, but the growing threat of slave rebellions as Santa Anna neared. The general had every intention of freeing the slaves, writing to his minister of war: “There is a considerable number of slaves in Texas also . . . who according to our laws should be free. Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?” As Santa Anna neared Texan plantations, slaves began fleeing to his lines, and plantation owners began rounding up their slaves and driving them towards the U.S. in massive numbers. As they did, torrential rainstorms broke out, and thousands of Tejanos, American settlers, and slaves became trapped together as rivers flooded and blocked their path of escape.
Meanwhile, General Houston ordered the Texan army into a full retreat. Greatly outnumbered, his army threw their cannons into the Guadalupe River so they wouldn’t be slowed down, and burned any supplies they couldn’t carry to prevent Santa Anna’s forces from gaining access to them. Houston’s retreat was also strategic: he wanted to fight on more familiar ground closer to the American settlements, and in a more wooded terrain that gave his army an advantage over the Mexican cavalry.
As Santa Anna pursued Houston’s retreating army, he displayed his greatest weakness: Santa Anna was overly confident, and in his overconfidence he divided his forces to search for the retreating Texan army. Soon afterwards, Houston’s army had a moment of luck: they captured a messenger carrying Santa Anna’s plans and location. Realizing Santa Anna had divided his forces, Houston reversed his retreat. Once again displaying his overconfidence, Santa Anna had camped his men in a dangerous location: in the middle of a plain with a lake on one side, and a marsh on another. He also allowed his men to rest without establishing an adequate lookout, creating an opening for Houston’s forces to launch a devastating surprise attack. On April 21, 1836, the Texan rebels slaughtered Santa Anna’s forces. With shouts of “Remember the Alamo!”, they shot down Mexican soldiers as they tried desperately to retreat across an unforgiving marshy terrain. While the Americans buried their own, the Mexican dead were left to rot, leaving the landscape strewn with skeletons. Mexican prisoners of war were sold into slavery.
When Santa Anna was taken prisoner, the Texans negotiated with him: they would spare his life and allow him to return to Mexico City if the dictator ordered the rest of his army to retreat… and if he used his influence to urge the Mexican government to accept an independent Texas, with an expanded border at the Rio Grande rather than the traditional border at the Nueces River. Santa Anna agreed. As the Mexican army retreated, slaves fled to join their ranks. Santa Anna had also been forced to agree to return all such escapees. However, none of Santa Anna’s agreements held legitimacy in the eyes of the Mexican nation: they had been made by one man under threat of death, not by Congress or the people of Mexico. Santa Anna’s deals with the Texans were viewed as cowardly and disgraceful, and he was forced from power. Mexico did not accept Texan independence… and it would not return slaves. From this moment on, Mexico became widely seen as a southern sanctuary for those fleeing the horrors of Texan cotton plantations.
Texas: An Isolated Slave Nation in an Era of Global Abolition
In the summer of 1836, Sam Houston, hailed as the revolution’s great war hero, was elected president in a landslide. President Houston immediately began advocating that Texas join the United States: the vast majority of White settlers identified as Americans and desired Texas annexation, and becoming part of the U.S. could prevent Mexico from attempting to retake Texas. Statehood would also lead to further migration, and thus to greater wealth and development in Texas. President Andrew Jackson, however, refused to consider it… precisely because his own intelligence experts were telling him that reconquest by Mexico was likely. Jackson urged Congress not to consider Texas annexation, lest in embroil the U.S. in a larger war with Mexico.
Even more important than concerns over war with Mexico were concerns over the expansion of slavery. Tensions had been rising between the slave and the free states for over a decade by the time of the Texan Revolution, but there was a relative balance of power between the North and the South in Congress. Admitting Texas to the union would tip that balance towards the political interests of slavery, leading congressmen from the North to fiercely oppose annexation. Neither President Jackson nor his successor Martin Van Buren were willing to stoke the fires of the growing North/South divide. Annexation was thus off the table. However, President Jackson, recognizing the fierce support for annexation in the South, officially recognized Texan independence from Mexico on his last day in office.
In order to create more pressure for annexation, Stephen Austin, now the Texan Secretary of State, developed a plan. He warned American legislators that if Texas was not accepted as part of the U.S., that it would quickly emerge as a rival to American cotton interests. To make the threat real, Austin immediately sought direct trade relations with Europe… relations that Texas, if it were to remain independent, would certainly need. Before the revolution, nearly all of the cotton from Texas went to the cotton markets of the American South, from where they were shipped internationally. Under this system, the South profited, but Texans lost about half of their potential earnings paying American middlemen. If Texas was to survive as an independent nation, it would require more profitable, direct trade with Europe… and if that were to happen, Texas would indeed emerge as a rival to U.S. cotton. Austin, however, wouldn’t live to see if his attempts to pressure the U.S. into annexation would work: he caught a deadly case of pneumonia in the cold winter winds on 1836.
Meanwhile, Texas diplomats arrived in London, hoping to forge a relationship with the world’s greatest military and economic power, and its greatest consumer of cotton. Texas was completely broke after the revolution, and hoped to secure loans from Great Britain, as well as diplomatic recognition and direct trade. By the mid-1830s, however, Great Britain had adopted a strong anti-slavery stance. Texans hoped that the promise of a vast new source of cotton would tempt the British Empire to exclude Texas from its antislavery efforts, but this was not the case. The Empire had no interest in supporting a new nation founded on pro-slavery principles, and refused to recognize Texas as a legitimate nation at all. Unable to secure direct trade, loans, or even basic diplomatic recognition from the world’s greatest consumer of cotton, President Houston realized that Texas had no means to pressure the U.S. into accepting annexation. Texas would have to blaze its own, separate path.
In a world that was steadily moving towards abolitionism, Texas, rather than emerging as an influential cotton empire, found itself internationally isolated. Unable to secure loans from either the U.S. or Great Britain, Texas found itself with no revenue to form a government. Texas attempted to remedy the problem by taxing imports, but that only led to mass smuggling. Texas then attempted to tax its own citizens, but had no means to enforce such tax collecting. The new nation was unable to run a postal service, pay its government officials, and was even forced to dissolve the small navy it had built during the revolution… which led to even more smuggling, especially of slaves from Cuba. In what became a symbol of the struggles of independent Texas, the Texan Congress literally met in a barn.
Despite the Republic of Texas’s struggles with finances and international support, White Southerners poured into the new nation in greater numbers than ever before. The cotton economy was still booming, and as always, Southerners were attracted by cheap Texan land. And now that Texas was free from the laws of Mexico, it finally offered slave owners a secure investment. In fact, the Texan Constitution offered far stronger support for slavery than the U.S. Constitution did… and unlike in the U.S., there was no growing abolitionist movement or North/South divide to threaten the future of slavery. Indeed, one of the goals of Texas’s new constitution was to ensure White Southerners that the practice of slavery would be fiercely protected: according to the constitution, neither Congress nor slave owners themselves were allowed to emancipate slaves, or to place any limitations on the importation of slaves from the U.S. With such protections in place, both the White and the slave populations tripled in Texas between 1837 and 1840 alone. Almost all of these migrants wanted a part of the Texan slave-based cotton wealth: the crop made up 95 percent of the new nation’s exports.
Despite the enormous influx of American immigrants, Texas had failed in its quest for American statehood, failed at its need to secure international relations, and failed to become financially secure and even form a functioning government. Thus, when it came time for the next presidential election, the anti-Houston candidate Mirabeau Lamar won a landslide 96 percent of the vote. President Lamar cast aside the idea of annexation entirely. If Texas were to become an American state, he warned it would be subjected to the growing influence of abolitionism. It was better to remain independent, and to be a refuge for slaveholders as abolitionism grew in the U.S. Lamar envisioned an independent Texas that would grow in strength over time, and which would push westward, stretching “from the Sabine to the Pacific” as he put it in his inaugural address. As one article described Lamar’s dream: American slaveholders “will look to Texas as the Hebrews did to the Promised Land for a refuge and a home.”
Houston had also declined in popularity because of his attempts at making peace with indigenous groups rather than waging war on them. Houston’s indigenous policies were partly personal – he had been adopted by Cherokees during his youth – but primarily practical. Texas was in no position to take on a powerful indigenous nation like the Comanches. However, as settlers pushed further and further into indigenous territories, raids on Texan settlements became more common. Mirabeau Lamar promised Texans protection… in the form of explicitly exterminationist campaigns. In Lamar’s first message to Congress, he called for “an exterminating war” on indigenous warriors, “which will admit no compromise and have no termination except in their total extinction or total expulsion.” After decimating the small Indian populations in eastern Texas, Lamar authorized war on the powerful Comanches to the west, leading to mass violence. Although the Comanches did retreat into their vast territory, the western frontier of Texas was devastated in the process, and the struggling new nation was pushed further into bankruptcy.
Things did not get any easier from there. In 1839, a depression hit, and cotton profits were soon cut in half. With its economy based on a single crop, the nation teetered on the brink of economic collapse. Texas slashed its entire military budget and stopped all repayments on its vast national debt, ensuring that it would never receive the foreign loans it desperately needed. Then, storms in 1842 and 1843 destroyed much of the cotton crop. Immigration from the U.S. ceased. As Texas weakened, fears of slave revolts escalated. Many slaves escaped into Mexico during these years.
Mexico, of course, took note of all this. Although the nation was still locked in a state of continuous rebellions and coups between the forces of centralism and federalism, Mexicans of all political persuasions agreed that retaking Texas was vital. They also worried that time was running out. Many Mexicans worried that slaveholders in the U.S. were not only planning to annex Texas as soon as circumstances allowed… but were aiming to take other parts of Mexico as well in order to bring new slave states into the Union and tip American political power decisively in favor of slavery. In the words of Mexico’s minister to the U.S., Manuel Gorostiza: “The fundamental purpose of the plot is to take possession of the entire coast of Texas, reunite it with the United States, make Texas into four of five slave states, in order to obtain by means of the new senators and representatives that these states name the preponderance in the Congress in favor of the South, therefor to sacrifice the interests of the North to those of the South and to prepare for a separation from the North which sooner or later must happen, and is already believed to be near.” Although there was no such concerted plan, many Mexicans, like abolitionists in the United States, feared otherwise.
However, Mexico quite simply did not have the power to retake Texas, especially given the tripling of the Texan population since the revolution. Despite this fact, in March of 1842, 700 Mexican soldiers retook San Antonio, while separate forces took the towns of Goliad and Refugio. These small Mexican forces knew that they would not be able to fend off the far larger forces Texas was capable of mobilizing, but that was not the point. The Mexican army sought to gain the support of the now marginalized Tejano population and turn them against the Americans. And by holding the towns, the Mexicans had forced Texan men to abandon their cotton crops at the height of the planting season to join militias, thus threatening the year’s cotton harvest. The Mexican forces, having served their purpose, vanished before the Texans ever arrived. Then, in September, a Mexican army of 1200 took San Antonio again. President Houston – who had been re-elected after Lamar’s failures – ordered a Texan force of 700 into Mexico to retaliate. When the Texan army was captured, the weakness of the nation was further revealed.
Abolitionist Pressures From the British Empire & American Annexation
The world’s greatest consumer of cotton saw an opportunity in the chaos of Texas. Manufactured cotton products made up a full half of the British Empire’s monumental exports, and 82 percent of that raw cotton came from the southern United States. However, the British Empire had adopted an antislavery stance, abolishing the practice in its own colonies, and even using its immense navy to hunt down slave ships and pressure other countries to abandon slavery. The Empire was also seeking alternative sources of raw cotton that did not depend on slave labor. And although Texas was deeply committed to slavery, when Great Britain looked at the struggling new nation, they imagined that Texans might be open to abandoning slavery… in exchange for the support of the British Empire. British diplomats hoped that by funding a slave-free cotton empire in Texas, and by shifting British imports away from the American South and towards Texas, that they could create pressure on the American South to let go of slavery as well. British diplomats also imagined that a strong Texas, in alliance with the British Empire, could be one of the best ways to prevent further American westward expansion and the growing power that came with it.
Texans, however, had a deep distrust of the British. Ever since Texan independence, British abolitionists had heaped scorn on their society: one member of the British Parliament had even floated the idea of funding a colony for free Blacks in northern Mexico, in order to inspire more slaves to escape and thereby destabilize “the piratical society called the State of Texas.” Antislavery activists in London discussed plans to secretly send abolitionists to work in Texas. Although neither of these ideas ever got off the ground, they became attention-grabbing headlines throughout Texas and the American South and stirred deep anti-British sentiments. Such stories also created enough paranoia to fuel widespread conspiracy theories that the British Empire was going to fund the Mexican army to reconquer Texas, although there was no evidence for such plans.
Then, in the summer of 1843, British representatives openly discussed their desire to abolish slavery in Texas at the World Antislavery Convention. Although what was said at the convention did not represent the goals of the British government, the news that swept through Texas like fire did not make such distinctions. Texans, imagining an imminent threat from Great Britain, panicked. Even Texans like ex-President Mirabeau Lamar, who feared American abolitionism and who dreamed of building an independent, slave-based Texan empire extending to the Pacific, now embraced annexation to the United States as the best way to preserve slavery. The Houston administration made a renewed push for annexation, this time emphasizing how the collapsing Texan economy made it increasingly more vulnerable to the British.
During this time, American President John Tyler was receiving his own intelligence about the British desire to influence Texas in order to deal a blow to southern slavery and prevent westward expansion. In this context, the United States entered secret negotiations for Texas annexation in the fall of 1843. President Tyler was deeply concerned with preserving slavery, and saw the annexation of Texas as a means to strengthen slave interests in the U.S. However, in order to gain the support of northern Congressmen, his administration presented the issue as a national security concern: would they really allow the British Empire to develop a base of power just to the west of the U.S.? With the issue of annexation framed as preventing a British threat, support for annexation in Congress grew. To keep up the pressure, President Houston openly pursued a stronger relationship with the British Empire as the American Congress debated annexation.
Then, in February 1844, everything changed. The man who had built up support for annexation in the Senate – Secretary of State Abel Upshur – was killed in an explosion. His successor, John Calhoun, brashly championed annexation as a way to strengthen slave interests in the U.S. Overnight, the support that Secretary Upshur had built by framing annexation as a national security issue vanished. Northern senators were furious at the deception, and on June 8, 1844, annexation was soundly rejected in the Senate.
The issue of annexation, however, was not yet settled. In November, James Polk won the presidential election running on a platform of western expansion, including the annexation of Texas. In one of his last acts as president, John Tyler, arguing that the American public had voted in favor of annexation when they voted for Polk, was able to push an annexation deal through Congress. He did so using legally questionable means that required a bare majority vote rather than the traditional two-thirds. Texas immediately accepted the American offer of statehood, and officially joined the union on December 29, 1845.
Postlude: Towards the Confederacy
The American acceptance of Texas as its twenty-eighth state was a major act of aggression towards Mexico, quickly followed by another, in the form of the U.S.-Mexico War. During that war, Tejanos who had originally supported American settlements in a desperate hope to develop the area and gain protection from Comanche raids now fought the very settlers they had once tried to support. Amongst them was Juan Seguín, the son of Erasmo Seguín… the man who had originally guided Stephen Austin into Texas.
When the U.S.-Mexico War ended in 1848, vast amounts of conquered Mexican land was added to the United States. The following decade would be defined by struggles over the expansion of slavery into these territories… struggles that led directly to the Civil War. When that moment came, Texas joined the Confederacy, explaining that they opposed “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color,” and thus left the U.S. as a means of “holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery.” The same ideology that had done so much to create Texas itself later drove it into the Confederacy. By that time, there were 182,000 slaves in Texas – making up a full third of its population – and Texas had turned itself into the dominant cotton-growing region in the U.S. It remains so today.
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When the United States invaded Mexico in 1846, the soldiers who marched through what are today Mexico’s northern states encountered desolation. The U.S. Army marched down abandoned roads, past burned-out villages and through deserted ghost towns littered with corpses rotting in the sun. In the words of historian Pekka Hämäläinen, “It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. invasion got underway.”
And indeed, it had. The destruction of northern Mexico was the work of the indigenous masters of much of the Southwest: the Comanche. The Comanche had not only prevented the Spanish Empire from pushing further into what would become the United States… they had turned the Spanish colonies of New Mexico and Texas into virtual colonies of their own. Shortly after Mexico liberated itself from Spain, Comanche war bands pushed deep into the interior of the newly independent, but war-weakened country. They forged war trails a thousand miles long that pushed through Mexico’s deserts, mountains and jungles. Comanche warriors raided cities within a mere three-day ride of Mexico City itself. Because of the Comanche, the U.S. Army found the road to Mexico’s capital essentially wide open.
Why, and how, did the Comanche unleash such devastation in Mexico… and by doing so unintentionally lay foundations for American conquest? The story begins a century and half before the U.S.-Mexico War, when the Comanche began to forge an indigenous empire based on dominating the trade in horses and bison hides across the Great Plains, and beyond.
The Emergence of the Comanche
In 1680, the Pueblo Indians living in the Spanish colony of New Mexico revolted. They forced the Spanish out of the region, took control of an enormous number of Spanish horses, and began a lucrative horse trade. The trade in horses moved north from New Mexico, following well-worn indigenous trading routes that moved along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains at the point where the mountain region gradually melted into the Great Plains. Because horses were not found in the Americas before European contact, the indigenous peoples living in the middle of what would later become the United States had not yet encountered the animals. The introduction of horses was a revolutionary moment: tribes who gained access to horses gained immediate and profound advantages in their ability to travel great distances, engage in more extensive trade, hunt, and wage war.
Within a decade, this indigenous horse trade reached the Shoshone peoples living where the Great Plains sweep through modern-day Wyoming and Montana. Bison hunting was at the center of Shoshone life, and horses made the hunt far easier. However, trading in goods that came from Spanish territories also exposed the Shoshone to diseases that were widespread across the massive, interconnected landmasses of Africa, Europe, and Asia… but that had never existed before in the Americas and which Native Americans thus had no immunities to.
As Shoshones fell prey to the kind of contact-induced epidemics that killed millions of Native Americans, a large group splintered off and headed south along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains… following the flow of horses to its source in New Mexico. This group was probably seeking to escape the epidemic, but it also appears they were seeking to establish themselves within the horse trade that had such clear potential to revolutionize indigenous America. As they approached the source of horses in New Mexico, they formed an alliance with the Utes, after which Utah is named. The Utes had long raided horses from the Spanish – who had recently reconquered New Mexico – and they shared their expertise in how to use them in war, hunting, trade, and travel. Over the next generation, the two allied tribes raided so many horses from the Spanish in New Mexico that the settlers no longer had enough horses to mount a defense. The Spanish were soon cursing the new group from the north as “Comanches”… the Ute word for “enemy.”
Mastering the Southern Plains; Dominating the Horse and Bison Trade
Newly rich in horses and knowledge of the Spanish borderlands, in 1720 the Comanches headed east onto the Great Plains of the Southwest, where immense horse herds could be sustained on the seemingly infinite grasslands. Once on the plains, the Comanche herds grew rapidly. Their horses allowed them to hunt bison with great effectiveness, and the Comanche soon realized that if they focused all their energies on hunting bison and expanding their herds, that they could dominate the regional trade in horses, bison hides, and bison meat. Knowing that they could trade these goods for all the food they needed, the Comanche turned away from farming and foraging, in order to focus exclusively on horses and bison.
In their effort to monopolize the horse and bison trade and eliminate trade competition – especially for the food sources they relied on – the Comanches went to war against their main competitor on the southern plains: the Apache. The Apache had thrived on the plains as farmers, but once they were at war those farms became a military liability. Whereas the nomadic Comanche had no farms or villages to attack, the Apache had to defend the places where they were rooted and which they counted on for food and shelter. By sweeping into Apache villages in the dark of night, destroying their food storages, killing their livestock, burning their homes, and quickly disappearing into the night, the Comanche wore down their competitors on the plains. They combined this type of swift, guerilla style attack with massive frontal assaults that focused on killing as many Apache men and enslaving as many women and children as possible. Following a practice that was widespread amongst indigenous peoples in the region, some of these slaves were sold on the thriving New Mexican slave markets, while others were adopted or married into families and eventually became Comanches themselves. By 1740, the Apache had been forced out of the plains regions of modern day New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. Some fled further south onto the plains of Spanish Texas, while others moved to the Rio Grande area and the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border region.
After defeating the Apache, the Comanche emerged as the masters of the southern Great Plains… a land soon known as Comancheria. They quickly became the primary suppliers of horses and bison products in the region, and began building a massive trade network through which they were able to extend their reach far beyond their own territory. In the 1740s, when the French settlers of the Louisiana Territory sought horses and bison robes, the Comanches supplied them by using other indigenous groups as intermediaries between the two regions. In return, the Comanches received manufactured French products… including iron axes, metal tipped arrows and lances, and most importantly guns that were superior to anything made by the Spanish. The Comanche then used this superior firepower to raid Spanish-controlled New Mexico for horses, which they then sold to the French, who then gave them more weapons. By 1750, this cycle had created busy commercial routes connecting Comancheria and French Louisiana.
By 1750, the Comanche population had grown to fifteen thousand… and it was rapidly increasing. The main driver of their population boom was an abundant food supply, based on the Comanche’s ability to trade cherished horses and bison robes for plentiful and diverse foods. Their horse herds were probably upwards of thirty thousand, and that was rapidly expanding as well. By this time, Comanches had broken up into dozens of bands consisting of large extended families, so that their horses would have enough space to graze and find water. This rapid population growth, combined with the desire to acquire new markets, created pressures to expand into new territories. The Comanche bands to the south thus pushed into the vast plains of Spanish Texas, where a million wild horses roamed… and just as importantly, where isolated and vulnerable Spanish missions and presidios held abundant supplies of tamed horses ready for the taking. Because training wild horses was a high-skill task requiring weeks of labor, in their efforts to monopolize the region’s horse trade, Comanches sought out vulnerable and abundant supplies of domesticated horses that could immediately be traded. Over the following century, this would lead Comanches to constantly push into new raiding domains.
When the Comanche arrived on the southern plains of Spanish Texas, they encountered their old Apache competitors who they had forced south. Once again, they set themselves to forcing the Apache out of the region. This time, however, the Apaches were allied with the Spanish. The Comanche responded by forming an alliance of their own with the smaller indigenous groups of the region, who felt marginalized by the Apache/Spanish alliance. The Comanche-led alliance – which the Spanish referred to as the Norteños – attacked Spanish missions and presidios with indigenous armies that were up to two thousand warriors strong and armed with French guns. Reinforcement armies sent from Mexico City were defeated by well-armed Comanche warriors, who were by this time some of the best horseback riders on the continent. They were faster than the Spanish, could fight better on horseback than the Spanish, and used guerilla warfare tactics that the Spanish were unable to adjust to. The Comanche forced the Spanish to realize that they were not the strongest power in Texas. In an attempt to appease the Comanche, the Spanish severed their alliance with the Apache, who fled to the region of the current U.S.-Mexico border. Now completely forced out of the plains and alienated from the Spanish, the Apache initiated decades of systematic raids on the Spanish settlements of what is today northern Mexico.
In 1763, however, the Spanish saw their luck turn around… or so they thought. In that year, the French were forced to turn over the Louisiana Territory to Spain after suffering defeats in the Seven Years War. With the French gone, Spain assumed the Comanches would lose their access to guns, gunpowder, and ammunition. They assumed that Comanches would be forced to turn to the Spanish for European manufactured goods, and would be forced to cease their raiding in order to build better trade relations with Spanish territories in order to gain access to those goods. The Spanish further assumed that once the Comanches ceased their raids, that they would be able to strengthen their colonies in New Mexico, Texas, and Spanish Louisiana… thus hemming the Comanche in to the west, south, and east.
The Comanche, however, had other ideas. By this time, they had dominated the entire portion of the Great Plains that was suitable for breeding and raising horses. On the northern plains, the winters were too cold for baby horses to survive, which made breeding impossible. Even on the central plains just north of Comancheria, winter blizzards could sometimes freeze entire herds. The Comanches understood that their northern neighbors required an endless stream of new horses if they wished to survive economically and militarily… and Comanches set out to supply them.
By providing horses to the indigenous peoples of the northern plains who traded with British Canada, the Comanche also secured access to British markets… and British guns. Meanwhile, Spain found itself unable to control the borders of Spanish Louisiana, and French and British smugglers with an interest in weakening Spain pushed into the prime-trading region of the lower Mississippi. The Comanche were thus soon receiving mass amounts of guns from the north as well as the east – one record reveals seventeen horseloads of guns during a single trade deal. Whereas the Spanish had hoped to hem the Comanches in on three sides and cut off their access to guns in 1763, in 1767 a Spanish report warned that Comanches were better armed than Spanish troops.
By the 1770s, the Comanches were selling coveted British and French manufactured goods at trade fairs in New Mexico. Instead of the Comanches turning to the Spanish for manufactured goods, Spanish settlers now turned to the Comanche. However, such trade was not the Comanche’s top priority: that was providing horses to plains Indians, the French, and the British… and the New Mexicans had plenty of horses. Having freed themselves from any dependence on the Spanish markets of New Mexico, Comanches now sought to bend the Spanish colony to their own purposes. Over the course of the 1770s, Comanches launched over one hundred raids into New Mexico, stealing thousands of horses and trading them to the French, British, and the indigenous peoples of the Great Plains.
Comanche raiding parties also sought to systematically weaken the Spanish colony by destroying ranches, farms, food storages, irrigation systems, and slaughtering entire herds of livestock. Their destruction was strategic: by depriving New Mexico of resources, food, and its ability to be productive, the Comanche made New Mexicans dependent on Comanche trade even as Comanches assaulted them. At the same time, they always made sure to leave ranches and farms with just enough resources to replenish their horse herds… so that they could be raided again in the future. Comanches also murdered hundreds of fighting-age New Mexican men during their raids and enslaved New Mexican women and children, some of whom were sold throughout the Comanche’s extensive trade network, and some of whom were used as a source of labor within Comancheria to tend the ever expanding herds of horses and tan the endless bison hides. Entire communities fled in fear. New Mexican settlements vanished from the map. By 1780, only the capital of Santa Fe remained untouched, but the city was overflowing with refugees. The Governor’s Palace had strings of dried Indian ears hanging above its portal to signify Spanish dominance over the region’s indigenous people, but indigenous peoples who had once feared the Spanish now gravitated towards Comanche alliances and markets and spoke more of the Comanche language than Spanish. Spanish officials had planned for the colony of New Mexico to ship surplus goods south into Mexico; instead those goods headed east into Comancheria. New Mexico had become a Spanish colony in name only.
Peace With the Spanish
By this time, the Comanche population had exploded to 40,000… more than the populations of Texas and New Mexico combined. Comancheria encompassed the vast southern plains. Comanches raided New Mexico to the west and Texas to the south at will, removing the resources and enslaving the inhabitants of those lands and channeling them to allies and trading partners to the north and the east. But in the late 1770s, they encountered major obstacles: the American Revolution cut off the supply of guns coming from the French and the British. Droughts forced former allies to migrate into Comancheria, leading to wars along once secure Comanche borders. And then in 1781, right at the height of their powers, a wave of smallpox swept through Comancheria. Half of the Comanche population was dead within two years. Comancheria descended into a realm of horror and sadness. In 1783, the greatly weakened Comanches made the pragmatic decision to open up peace talks with the Spanish. The Spanish, who were unaware at the extent of the epidemic, readily accepted: perhaps their colonies might survive after all.
The Comanche offer of peace came at the perfect time, for the Spanish had just decided to overhaul their relations with Native Americans. With the American revolutionaries victorious, the Spanish immediately foresaw the westward expansion of the United States… and they knew that if Native Americans were hostile to New Spain, that American settlers could ally with them, arm them, and push Spain out of the Americas. If, on the other hand, Spain built positive relations with Native Americans, their alliance could be the best way to prevent westward expansion. And the Comanches would be the most important allies to have when the time came.
The Spanish were serious enough about peace to back off their policies aimed at “civilizing” the Comanches and converting them to Catholicism. They even made efforts to build the new partnership around Comanche cultural norms. In Comanche culture, trade was viewed as a bond that signified mutual support, friendship, and even a sense of extended family. Trade that appeared to be based in greed or coercion had quickly destroyed former attempts at peace: for the Comanches, that included Spanish attempts to sell inferior products, inflate prices, or refuse to trade goods that they possessed in abundance. In their effort to maintain peace with the Comanches, Spanish officials went to great lengths to conform to these norms, and to engage in the generous giving of gifts that Comanches viewed as a sign of friendship. Realizing that Comanches believed that frequent personal and physical contact was critical for strong relations between peoples, Spanish officials journeyed into Comancheria, and welcomed Comanches into the very cities they had recently come close to destroying. There, the officials publicly embraced Comanche leaders for all to see.
The Comanches took the peace equally seriously: Comanches allowed the Spanish onto their plains to hunt for bison. A small group symbolically asked for baptism. And when a group of Comanches broke the peace by raiding into New Mexico, the famed Comanche chief Ecueracapa personally executed the leader of the raid. Ecueracapa later sent his own son to become the son of the New Mexican governor: the governor adopted him as his own and committed to instructing him in the language and ways of the Spanish. Trade flowed freely between Comancheria and Spanish Texas and New Mexico, and Comanches, Texans, and New Mexicans freely visited one another’s lands. It was a remarkable turnaround.
American Expansion; Spanish Collapse; and a Troubled Mexican Independence
American Westward expansion went into full swing in 1803, after President Thomas Jefferson facilitated the American purchase of the Louisiana Territory. Spain had been unable to prevent American settlers from pushing west into Spanish Louisiana, and had sold the territory back to France… which then quickly sold it to the United States. The purchase doubled the size of the young country. Whereas Spain had once hoped that Spanish Louisiana would act as a buffer that would prevent American expansion into the Southwest, they now hoped that a strong Comanche nation, allied with New Spain, would serve as that buffer. Comanches, the Spanish thought, would push back hard against encroaching American settlement.
The first Americans, however, did not come as settlers, but as traders… and the Comanches welcomed that trade. Already in the 1790s, American merchants had been evading Spanish officials to journey into Comancheria for the Comanche’s famous horses and bison hides. By that time, the Comanches had been organizing their society around horses for nearly a century, and had become the recognized masters of horse breeding and training. Just as so many peoples before them, the Americans gravitated towards the Comanche horse trade. Before the Louisiana Purchase had even been made, Americans had purchased thousands of horses from the Comanche. Now that the new American border went right up to the Comanche’s doorstep, trade boomed… especially because Congress, in an effort to break the Comanche away from its alliance with New Spain, sent emissaries to Comancheria to showcase America’s wealth and promise access to it.
The Spanish looked on in dismay as Comanches embraced American trade. By this time, Comanches had also repaired their relationships with the northern plains tribes they had been at war with. Comanche trade was once again orienting itself to the east and the north, leading the Spanish to fear a return to the days of Comanche conquest. And then, things got much worse for the Spanish. In 1808, Napoleon invaded Spain, cutting off Spanish resources flowing to its possessions in the Americas. Generous trade with the Comanches became impossible. Then, in 1810, Mexico initiated its War of Independence. New Mexicans – many of whom spoke Comanche, had adopted aspects of Comanche culture, and were more a part of Comancheria than New Spain – embraced Comancheria when the war erupted, and were able to keep the peace with Comanches. Relations between the Comanches and Spanish Texas, however, quickly collapsed. Comanches responded by systematically raiding the Texan colony: using American guns, they removed much of the wealth of Texas and sold it to American merchants. They destroyed what they could not trade. Within the span of a few years, Texas had ceased to be a Spanish colony. It had become the realm of the Comanche.
Thus, when Mexico emerged as an independent nation in 1821, the entire northeastern section of the new country was Comanche-dominated. The Spanish had been unable to control the Comanches, and Mexico was even less able to do so: hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had died during the war for independence, and its economy was shattered. Mexico’s all-important silver mines – one of the great treasures of the Spanish Empire – had been destroyed. Part of Mexico’s postwar plan had been to develop the nation by taxing foreign trade, but high taxes simply led to smuggling and tax evasion. Mexico had expected to secure foreign investment in the wake of the war, but investors looked at Mexico and saw an economically risky environment. Investment didn’t come. In a state of desperation, Mexico took out enormous, high-interest loans from the U.S. and European powers: they quickly defaulted, leaving Mexico’s credit in shambles.
As Mexico’s economic turmoil descended into political chaos, officials were more concerned about internal rebellions closer to Mexico City – or even worse, the very real threat of reconquest by Spain – than they were about the Comanche. Even so, these officials viewed building peace with the Comanches as essential. Like the Spanish, the Mexicans saw American expansion into their territory on the horizon… and they viewed Texas and New Mexico as an important buffer zone between the United States and intrusion into the core of Mexico. In 1821, Mexican officials journeyed into Comancheria, where they spoke before a grand council attended by five thousand Comanche. After three days of deliberation, the council agreed to a truce with the Mexicans. The following year, a delegation of Comanche chiefs journeyed to Mexico City to attend the coronation of Agustín Iturbide as Emperor of Mexico, and to sign a formal peace treaty. The treaty promised generous trade with the Comanches. The Comanches – partly to show their strength to Mexico – promised to raise an army of twenty-seven thousand warriors to fight Spain if it sought to reconquer Mexico.
Political and economic turmoil in Mexico, however, meant that the new nation was unable to live up to the treaty it had signed with the Comanches. As trade with Mexico disintegrated, Comanches returned to raiding with a vengeance. Raiding parties began pushing south of the Rio Grande into present-day northern Mexico… and now, they took not only horses, but slaves. Comanches had been hit by new waves of smallpox in 1799, 1808, and 1816, and they turned to slave raiding to repopulate their dwindling numbers and keep up with the demand for horses and bison hides. Mexican men were usually considered too dangerous to enslave and were typically killed during raids unless they had specialized skills. Mexican boys, however, were put to work taking care of the Comanche’s immense horse herds and tanning the endless flow of bison hides. Mexican women were highly prized as slaves because they could give birth to Comanche children and help to regrow the Comanche population: light-skinned women were especially prized because they, and their children, were more resistant to the smallpox that continuously reduced the Comanche population. These slaves were gradually absorbed into the Comanche population, eventually being adopted into families, intermarrying with Comanches, and ceasing to be slaves… a process that fueled continuous slave raids to replace the slaves who had become Comanches. By the time that the U.S. invaded Mexico, most Comanche families had one or two Mexican slaves.
Trails of Tears; Rebellion in Texas; Slave Raiding in Mexico
While Comanches were turning northern Mexico into a vast slave-raiding domain, trade with the United States boomed. Comanches saw an almost inexhaustible demand in the U.S. for the horses and bison hides they offered, and the more that demand grew, the more of an incentive they had to enslave Mexicans to tend to their horses and tan their bison hides. Comanches also returned to using Texas as a vast horse-raiding territory. These ever-expanding raids led Mexico to make a fateful decision: desperate to populate Texas in order to drive the Comanches out of the region, in 1824 Mexico opened Texas to foreign immigration. Mexico even offered generous land grants and tax exemptions to encourage settlement… and loyalty. They would get one, but not the other.
Mexico had opened up floodgates it could not reverse. Americans began pouring into Texas, but they did not settle throughout the region as Mexico had hoped for. Rather, Americans settled in the east… away from the Comanche raiding territories of the southern plains, and close to the markets of Louisiana and New Orleans that they remained tied to. These Americans brought slaves with them, established cotton plantations, and quickly developed a flourishing cotton industry that was essentially an extension of the American South. Within ten years more than a dozen new urban centers had developed in American-settled eastern Texas. Rather than pushing Comanches out, however, these settlers provided yet another market for Comanches to sell horses to by systematically raiding the Mexican farms, ranches, and villages of western Texas and northern Mexico. Seeing that the plan to entice immigrants to settle Texas was not only a failure but a grave threat, Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, and banned any further immigration from the United States in 1830. The new laws simply propelled Americans in Texas towards a state of rebellion.
As rebellion simmered in Texas, another momentous event was unfolding: in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law. The act led to the forced removal of Native Americans into designated “Indian Territory,” west of the Mississippi. The primary targets for removal were the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, whom White Americans had deemed the “Five Civilized Tribes.” These tribes built permanent towns, practiced farming and raising livestock, and traded extensively with White settlers. They formed centralized governments and created written constitutions. Many adopted Christianity and intermarried with Whites. In their efforts to prove that Native Americans could be just as civilized as Whites – and thereby achieve security for their people – the Five Civilized Tribes also took up cotton cultivation, purchased Black slaves, and participated in the cotton trade that was at the center of the global economy.
By so fully assimilating, the Five Civilized Tribes discredited the primary excuse that White Americans used for stripping Native Americans of their land: the notion that Natives were incapable of “developing” the land and making the land “productive.” With this excuse for indigenous dispossession gone, all that was left was violent racism and greed. The Five Civilized Tribes lived on prime cotton-growing land in the Southeast, and the Cherokees had recently-discovered gold on their land. President Jackson agreed with White southerners that they, not indigenous peoples, deserved access to such wealth. The President saw only two solutions: the extermination or forced deportation of Native Americans.
Indian removal led to the infamous Trails of Tears… not one trail, but many, as numerous tribes were rounded up into unsanitary detention centers where they died in large numbers, were forced to march hundreds of miles through harsh winters during which they died of cold and starvation, or died during fierce battles to keep their territory. A full half of the Creeks died on their Trail of Tears, one third of the Cherokees did, and other tribes suffered similar losses. Indian Removal was nothing short of an ethnic cleansing campaign to ensure that the wealth of gold and cotton would remain the domain of Whites only. The Five Civilized Tribes – as well as many others – were pushed right up to the borders of Comancheria on their forced death marches… where they then all had to compete for resources the Comanche had long monopolized. Forced onto arid lands where they could not farm, these tribes pushed into Comancheria to hunt bison. The Comanche waged war on these desperate refugees for infringing on their territory. As the displaced tribes fought for their very survival as a people, the death toll climbed on all sides.
The warfare was unsustainable and disastrous for all. All sides desired peace and sought to find a way forward within their new circumstances. Within a few years, the wars shifted into alliances. The Comanches began hosting massive intertribal gatherings and trade fairs, calling the tribes together for communication and commerce. Many displaced tribes became intermediaries for the vast commercial operations of the Comanches. Like so many before them, the new arrivals turned to the Comanche for the horses they depended on for trade, travel, hunting, and war. They began adopting the Comanche language as the language of trade and intertribal diplomacy, and became deeply influenced by Comanche culture. As displaced tribes adapted to their new circumstances by building strong ties with Comanches, many of their members moved into Comancheria itself, intermarried with the Comanches, and even became Comanches themselves.
The tribes displaced by Indian Removal not only expanded the Comanche population and trade and alliance network, they also provided the Comanches with a massive slave market. The Five Civilized Tribes came from the Deep South, and arrived with 5000 Black slaves who they had brought with them on the Trail of Tears. They now sought slaves to help rebuild their nations in a new land… and to repopulate their decimated tribes, much as the Comanche had done in the wake of numerous smallpox epidemics. Comanches did not have a conception of race – anyone could become a Comanche as long as they adopted Comanche culture; but anyone could become a slave. Comanches had incorporated White renegades and refugees and escaped Black slaves into their tribe as well as Mexicans and numerous indigenous peoples… and, they also enslaved members of these groups. In response to the new market in slavery coming from their recently-made allies, Comanches were soon capturing Black runaway slaves and White settlers to trade to displaced tribes… who often kept the Black slaves, but ransomed back their White captives to White American communities, who were willing to pay high prices. Much more importantly, however, this new market led Comanches to escalate their slave raiding in northern Mexico.
Other factors pushed Comanches to raid deeper into northern Mexico as well: the development of widespread peace with surrounding tribes allowed large numbers of Comanche warriors who had previously focused on protecting Comancheria to instead make long raiding expeditions. Because bravery in battle and the generous distribution of goods taken during raids was an essential part of gaining access to prestige, sex, and marriage for young Comanche men, times of peace led to great eagerness amongst young men to prove themselves on raids. Finally, the massive indigenous trade fairs hosted by the Comanche attracted an increasing number of American merchants, leading Americans to build permanent trading posts along the eastern edges of Comancheria. The Americans had an unquenchable thirst for bison hides, and the trading posts allowed for massive amounts of hides to be stored. Endless streams of merchants came and went from the trading posts, taking bison hides to all corners of the United States. As Comanches supplied the endless flow of hides, more American weapons than ever before flowed into Comancheria. Although the Comanche had traded bison hides for generations, never before had they sought to meet the demands of such a massive market. Comanches once again deepened their slave raiding into northern Mexico: using American guns, they took Mexican slaves to tan the bison hides they sold to the Americans. Comanche profits and power soared. Bison herds started to wear thin.
Meanwhile, full-scale revolution in Texas had broken out. Calls for independence became widespread in Texas in 1835, shortly after General Santa Anna transformed the Mexican presidency into a dictatorship that was willing to use ruthless military force against all who resisted him. White American settlers saw this development as a grave threat to their land holdings and the practice of slavery on which they made their fortunes. Following White American skirmishes with Mexican soldiers, Santa Anna led his forces into Texas to crush the rebellion. After massacring the rebel force at the Alamo – despite their being on the verge of surrender – Santa Anna ordered the few prisoners of war to be hacked to death, and the hundreds of bodies piled up, doused in oil, and burned. Amongst the bodies was famed frontiersman Davy Crockett. The event was widely reported in the U.S. as a brutal episode in an unfolding race war between heroic White Texans and savage Mexicans. It set White American hearts aflame and facilitated anti-Mexican sentiments that in turn laid foundations for war.
Overly confident in his success, Santa Anna divided his forces as he pursued the fleeing rebel army. He then failed to establish a sufficient night watch, leading to his ambush and defeat. White American settlers claimed the independence of Texas, and although Mexico refused to recognize it, there was little they could do. By the time the U.S. invaded Mexico a decade later, there were 100,000 White Americans and 27,000 Black slaves living in Texas. The growing population discouraged Comanche raids within Texas, and gave Comanches an even further incentive to reorient their raids towards Mexico. White Texan officials, understanding that a weakened Mexico was good for an independent Texas, offered Comanches supplies and unrestricted travel through their lands on their way into Mexico.
The Destruction of Northern Mexico; Comanche Collapse
In the decade between Texan independence and the U.S.-Mexico War, Comanches unleashed raiding expeditions more massive than anything before in their history. Historian Brian DeLay documents a minimum of forty-four large raids into Mexico between 1834 and 1847: most had between two to four hundred warriors, but some were eight hundred to a thousand strong. These were highly organized expeditions that moved across multiple Mexican states. They proceeded according to carefully laid plans, moving from one target to the next, hitting ranches, haciendas, mining communities, and towns. Scouts and spies rode ahead to ensure effective attacks. Raiding parties not only took slaves and horses, but – as had long been their practice – murdered fighting-age men, destroyed food supplies, burned homes, and killed any livestock they themselves did not use for food during the course of the raid. To avoid being tracked, raiders scattered in many directions after their attacks, reconvening at planned locations. Each warrior often rode with three or four horses that were specially bred for war: such horses possessed superior speed and endurance and were not for sale, allowing Comanches to keep a military edge. When warriors were pursued they would ride a horse to exhaustion, abandon it, and switch to a fresh horse. Comanches nearly always outran their pursuers. These raiders removed a full million horses from Mexico in the years leading up to the U.S. invasion.
Northern Mexicans, of course, were not passive in the face of Comanche onslaught. They did what they could to develop local militias, and wealthy hacienda owners fortified their properties and hired small private armies. What they needed, however, was assistance from Mexico City in rebuilding the old Spanish presidio system and manning the frontier fortresses with fresh troops. Such support did not come: the federal government decided to use its meager resources to fight rebellions closer to the nation’s capital rather than protect its periphery. Because the farms, ranches, and towns of northern Mexico were isolated and sparsely populated, they were sitting ducks for expert guerrilla warriors like the Comanches. Although Mexican militia did sometimes succeed at ambushing and killing large numbers of Comanche, this only led Comanches to return and visit extreme retaliation. Comanche violence led to a mass exodus of farmers, ranchers, and rural Mexicans away from the countryside and into safer urban areas, leaving vast portions of northern Mexico unpopulated, unproductive, and open to assaults leading deeper into Mexico.
With Mexico City failing to assist its northern states and local militias woefully unable to fight the Comanche, states experimented with other solutions. In the late 1830s, the states of Durango, Sonora, and Chihuahua passed bills offering bounties for Indian scalps. Soon, scalp-hunting wars raged across northern Mexico, with squads of mercenaries typically ambushing Apaches… who had raided across northern Mexico for decades after being pushed out of the plains by the Comanche. Because Apaches lived in the north Mexican region, they were easier targets than the Comanche, who only travelled into Mexico in large raiding parties before departing again to Comancheria. Mercenaries almost never took Comanche scalps. Indeed, Comanches, seeing an opportunity to make a profit by attacking their old Apache enemies, joined the scalping wars and sold many Apache scalps themselves. The states of Chihuahua and Coahuila then decided to offer tribute to the Comanche – offering their goods freely in exchange for a cessation of raids. Paying tribute, however, continued to deprive those states of resources and simply pushed Comanche raiding parties into other states… especially those further south.
By the late 1830s, northern Mexicans were boiling with anger at their government’s inability and unwillingness to protect them. Starting in 1837, a wave of rebellions rippled across Mexico’s northern states: most wanted to withhold their taxes to the Mexican government so they could develop their own military forces and protect against raiding parties. Some rebels talked of secession. Whereas Mexico City had been unwilling to send military reinforcements to help push back the Comanche, they quickly sent the Mexican Army to defeat the uprisings. Mexicans were soon slaughtering each other instead of fighting the Comanche. By 1840, northern Mexico’s fighting forces had been decimated, leaving the region even more open to Comanche assault. It was at this moment, in the early 1840s, that Comanche war parties pushed all the way into states in central Mexico, including southern Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, and Jalisco. Comanche war trails now stretched one thousand miles long… through Mexico’s northern deserts and up into Central Mexico’s high mountains and jungles. Comanches raided cities a mere 135 miles from Mexico City itself.
The states Comanches now pushed into were not only closer to Mexico City, they were wealthier than Mexico’s impoverished north. When they cried out for support, the Mexican government responded as it never had to the poorer northern states. But it was too late. In 1845 the United States offered statehood to Texas, and soon afterwards launched a predatory war on Mexico that was about pure imperial land acquisition. Military and political officials were well aware of the devastation Comanches had unleashed in northern Mexico, and they sought to take advantage of it. When the U.S. Army marched across the Rio Grande, they encountered a Mexican cavalry riding weak, sickly horses… the only ones Comanches had left them. The cavalry simply withdrew, and the Americans proceeded deeper into Mexico without a fight.
To return to the quote from historian Pekka Hämäläinen with which this story began: “When U.S. troops pushed deeper into northern Mexico in the summer and fall of 1846, they entered the shatterbelt of Native American power. The U.S. Army marched south on abandoned roads littered with corpses, moving through a ghost landscape of ruined villages, decaying fields, horseless corrals, and deserted cattle herds . . . It was as if northern Mexico had already been vanquished when the U.S. invasion got underway.” Northern Mexicans felt little loyalty to Mexico City by the time the Americans arrived, and many hoped that the Americans would protect them against the Comanches given that their own country would not. Many cities in northern Mexico put up no fight at all: in fact, Mexican elites invited American military officials to dine with them, and residents sold the U.S. Army supplies and worked for them as guides. American violence soon changed this initial reception, but during the war there were important battles that clearly would have been won if Mexican forces had been just a little stronger. Northerners blamed Mexico’s defeat on the failure of Mexico City to protect the nation’s frontiers from Comanche onslaught.
First in Texas, and then in Mexico, Americans arrived – in the words of Hämäläinen – “to seize territories that had already been subjugated and weakened by Comanches.” The “stunning success of American imperialism in the Southwest can be understood only if placed in the context of the indigenous imperialism that preceded it.” The Comanche had unintentionally facilitated American Westward expansion and conquest, but it was not westward expansion that conquered the Comanche. During the same year that Texas joined the United States, a two-decade long drought hit Comancheria. Springs and creeks that were essential for life dried up. The luscious grasses that supported immense horse and bison herds turned to a crisp. Bison herds that had already been overhunted by Comanches and their indigenous allies for American markets collapsed into starvation; those bison that didn’t die migrated to the northern plains where there was more moisture. Comanche horses also starved, and Comanches began eating their herds to survive. Comanches had endured many short droughts, but nothing like this. In an astoundingly short time, Comanches lost their monopoly over the horse trade that had sustained their power for more than a century They lost their ability to provide bison furs to the vast American market. The bustling American trading posts on the borders of Comancheria closed down and moved elsewhere. Trade with indigenous peoples to the north dried up. Famine ravaged the Comanches during the 1850s. By the time the next wave of smallpox hit them in 1862, Comanches had already lost half their population. American westward expansion halted during the Civil War years. By the time it began again in the late 1860s, there were only 5000 Comanche survivors, against whom the U.S. waged total war.
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Excluding the Downtrodden: European Border Crossers, and the Immigration Act of 1882
The year was 1882. The land borders of the United States had never been policed, but this was about to change. That year saw the passage of the federal government’s first comprehensive Immigration Act, and marked the beginning of an over forty-year effort by the federal government to create a framework for who should, and should not, be allowed into the country. The Immigration Act of 1882 began this process by forbidding the immigration of “any convict, lunatic, idiot, or any person unable to take care of himself or herself.” Although the language of “any person unable to take care” of themselves was vague and open to interpretation, it was understood to refer to impoverished people, or “paupers.” What was less clear was whether it included people with chronic illnesses, or even the elderly. Further immigration acts would be more specific.
The point of these first restrictions was to prevent the immigration of anyone who might become a “public charge,” meaning anyone who was judged incapable of providing for themselves, and would instead rely on community charity, government assistance… or institutionalization in prisons or asylums. The context of America’s first Immigration Act was an economic depression that rocked the country from 1872 to 1878, followed by the mass displacement of millions of Europeans starting in the early 1880s, caused by the second industrial revolution. Economic anxieties combined with the sheer volume of new immigrants created political pressures to be selective in who was let into the U.S., and who was not. Ironically, the Immigration Act of 1882, targeting impoverished people and people with mental and physical disabilities, was passed just a few years before the Statue of Liberty was erected… and just one year before poet Emma Lazarus composed these familiar words: “Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses.”
Many immigrants immediately wondered if the Immigration Act would apply to them or the family members they travelled with. Who exactly would immigration officials judge to be an “idiot” or a “lunatic”? If younger immigrants were travelling with older parents, would those parents be deemed a “person unable to take care of himself or herself” because of their age? If immigrants arrived with few possessions, or were sick and disheveled after an arduous overseas journey, would they be judged as sickly and impoverished and potentially turned around?
Because of these fears, many European immigrants – mostly English and Irish at the time – began avoiding America’s seaports, and instead sailing for ports in southern Canada. From there, they simply crossed the border into Maine, Vermont or New York. Because the vast majority of immigrants came from overseas and landed in America’s seaports at the time, the language of the Immigration Act of 1882 referred to people who were “not a citizen of the United States who shall come by steam or sail vessel.” What this meant was that, technically and legally, immigrants who would have been excluded at America’s seaports could in fact cross legally over America’s land borders… for they were not entering the U.S. “by steam or sail vessel.” Furthermore, the Immigration Act of 1882 only called for the deportation of people with criminal records back to where they came from. All other excluded immigrants were allowed to sail to wherever they wished as long as it wasn’t the U.S. This led many immigrants who were turned away at America’s seaports to simply sail to Canada, and then cross into the United States.
Within a matter of months, articles were being published about European immigrants taking advantage of this loophole. For example, 11 months after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1882, the New York Times reported that 28 “helpless and starving” recent immigrants from Ireland had been found in the streets of Buffalo, New York, having just crossed from Canada. These immigrants, according to the article, were “destitute, having neither money nor friends, and . . . too feeble, by reason of age or infirmity, to support themselves.” These were exactly the sort of immigrants that America’s first comprehensive Immigration Act had sought to exclude.
Pressure mounted throughout the 1880s to revise the Immigration Act of 1882, so that it included America’s land borders. The Immigration Act of 1891 did exactly this: not only did it forbid excluded immigrants from crossing America’s land borders, it also called for the deportation of all excludable immigrants when they arrived at America’s seaports. This meant that not only criminals would be shipped back to the ports from which they came, but that all excluded immigrants would, depriving them of the opportunity to book passages north to Canada.
The Immigration Act of 1891 also added new categories of excludable immigrants, including “those convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude,” “people with loathsome or contagious diseases,” and polygamists. It also banned people “likely” to become impoverished, rather than just those who already were. This especially impacted women who were travelling alone, given the common assumption that women relied on men for financial support. In reality, immigration officials hardly had the resources to seriously enforce additional restrictions and the inspections they required. European immigrants, however, didn’t know that, and they often decided to play it safe. These further exclusions predictably convinced more Europeans that they should enter the U.S. by secretly crossing the Canadian border, despite the fact that the Immigration Act of 1891 had closed the previous loophole regarding “steam or sail” vessels, and made such crossings illegal.
With that loophole closed, immigration officials were suddenly tasked with policing America’s land borders. Understanding that this would be extremely expensive and enormously difficult, immigration officials at first looked for other alternatives. They reached out to Canadian steamship lines and negotiated a deal in which U.S. immigration authorities would inspect immigrants departing at Canadian ports, but who were bound for the U.S. The plan was a spectacular failure: departing immigrants simply had to state that their destination was Canada, and there was nothing that U.S. authorities could do. Immigration officials also made deals with Canadian railroads to inspect immigrants headed into the U.S., but immigrants easily avoided such inspections: they simply had to purchase round-trip tickets and claim they were merely visiting; have a non-immigrant purchase a ticket for them; or just take a train to a border town and walk over somewhere out of sight.
By 1898, immigration officials conceded that they had failed to prevent restricted European immigrants from entering the U.S. through Canada’s ports and railways. It was only at that point that they began calling for immigration inspection points directly along the Canadian border. By 1901, those border inspection points were in place. A veteran inspector named Robert Watchorn was charged with coordinating and training inspectors; by the summer of 1902 he reported that “not a train or boat or any railroad or regularly charted boat route enters the United States in this jurisdiction without being inspected.” Not a day passed, he wrote, “without one or more alien immigrants being removed from a train or boat and returned to Canada, or deported to Europe.” During that year, 4,985 European immigrants were inspected along the Canadian border, and 2,028 were turned around. In the words of historian Patrick Ettinger, “The era of direct border enforcement had begun.”
During these same years, landing at Canadian ports also became more difficult: between 1900 and 1902, Canada passed its own restrictive immigration bills, which mirrored those of the U.S. For restricted European immigrants, sailing to Canadian ports was thus no longer an easy option: this led them to turn towards Mexico. Border crossings through Mexico would soon lead to border policing along the southern border as well. And with both land borders policed, restricted immigrants would soon become more sophisticated and ingenious in their methods of crossing. Border policing would in turn evolve to meet that immigrant ingenuity.
Europeans, however, were not the first excluded immigrants seeking to cross into the U.S. via Canada, or Mexico. That would be the Chinese.
America’s First Undocumented Immigrants: Chinese Women, Sex Workers, and The Page Act of 1875
Although the Immigration Act of 1882 was the federal government’s first comprehensive immigration law – laying out broad categories for exclusion which applied to people of all races and nationalities – the government had passed earlier immigration laws targeting a specific ethnic group: the Chinese.
Although states had long passed their own immigration legislation, the very first federal immigration law in U.S. history – meaning the first that could have impacted the borders of the country as a whole, and how they were policed and who could cross them – was the Page Act of 1875. This act primarily aimed to exclude cheap Chinese labor and Chinese sex workers. White Americans had pushed to exclude Chinese immigrants since the early days of the Gold Rush, demonizing them as an inferior race and arguing that they created unfair competition. Although Chinese immigrants faced mob violence and laws were passed banning them from gold mining, they continued to arrive as a series of wars, rebellions, and natural disasters rocked their homeland. Desperate communities sent their young men abroad despite the prejudices they would face, hoping that they could send money home. Excluded from most forms of work, Chinese men took on the hardest, most low-paying and backbreaking forms of labor – including draining the swamps, digging the ditches, and building the irrigation channels and levees that allowed California to develop some of the richest farmland in the nation. In addition to laying the foundation for a multi billion-dollar agricultural industry, Chinese laborers built the railroads of the American West, which turned the region into an economic powerhouse.
The Page Act was aimed at excluding this “unfair labor competition.” It failed… partly because the act only forbid the importation of Chinese workers against their will. This represented a belief in Congress that many Chinese workers were part of an Asian slave trade, which had indeed been developed by Europeans after the abolition of the African slave trade in their empires. Although an Asian slave trade was taking place just below America’s borders in Cuba and the Caribbean Sea – something that had generated enormous media coverage during the buildup to the Civil War – the Chinese who ventured to America were not a part of it. Because they came voluntarily, the Page Act did not exclude them.
The exclusion of Chinese sex workers had a more painful impact… for following the Page Act, Chinese women travelling to the U.S. were assumed to be sex workers unless they could prove otherwise. This was often impossible, given that immigration officers had anti-Chinese sentiments and treated wedding certificates, photos, and other evidence of family ties as fraudulent. Wives and daughters who had risked everything to make an excruciating journey overseas were thus often shipped right back to China. The Page Act was portrayed as a bill cracking down on prostitution, which was indeed widespread in the almost entirely male Chinese immigrant community. However, California was a heavily male state populated by miners and sailors, and prostitution was widespread in general. By specifically targeting Asian sex workers for exclusion, and then using that as a means to exclude Asian women, the Page Act aimed, in part, to prevent the birth of Chinese babies on American soil, who could potentially claim citizenship rights.
Because the Page Act failed to exclude Chinese workers (due to the fact that they came voluntarily), it did not create an incentive for them to avoid America’s ports and to cross America’s land borders as undocumented immigrants. Although it did create such an incentive for Chinese sex workers and for Chinese women, there are no records of such undocumented crossings. Chinese sex workers – and the women who were accused of sex work – were, however, America’s first excluded immigrants, and those who found ways into the country would have been the first undocumented immigrants. If any of these women crossed into the U.S. over the Canadian or Mexican borders, however, their crossings remain invisible to history. The Page Act thus did not contribute to the history of border crossing and border policing.
America’s First Undocumented Border Crossers: The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
On May 6, 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. By targeting all Chinese workers for exclusion – whether they engaged in skilled or unskilled labor – it succeeded where the Page Act had failed. The Chinese Exclusion Act continued to allow Chinese merchants, diplomats, students, teachers, and travellers to visit the United States. It also allowed Chinese who were residents before 1882 to remain, and to leave the United States and return… as long as they had certificates showing proof of residence.
Because there were so many exceptions to Chinese exclusion, the act created a market for forged documents – falsified papers proving residency, student status, etc. Many Chinese residents who were barred from reentry also successfully appealed their cases in court. Because most Chinese who would have been excluded either turned to the law or sought forged documentation, the Chinese Exclusion Act – like the Page Act – did not create the pressure and the incentive for large numbers of Chinese workers to avoid America’s ports and to instead cross the land borders. There was a major exception, however: Canada had been using Chinese labor as well, and Chinese railroad workers who were residents of the U.S. had travelled to Canada to help build the railroads there. Because they had left the U.S. before the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, they did not carry official certification of residency with them, and therefore could not legally return to their own homes. Although plenty of other Chinese workers in Canada also had a strong incentive to illegally cross the border into the U.S. to pursue work, that incentive would have been especially strong for literal U.S. residents who simply didn’t have their papers. Thus, whereas Chinese women and sex workers were the first undocumented immigrants to enter through America’s ports, it is likely that Chinese workers in Canada – and especially those simply attempting to return home – were America’s first undocumented immigrants to cross over America’s land borders.
That said, the Immigration Act of 1882 was pushing excluded European immigrants over the Canadian border from the east at precisely the same time. The Immigration Act of 1882 was passed on August 3, a mere three months after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Although passed three months later, because Europeans were being immediately turned around at America’s ports, they quickly sailed to Canada. This wasn’t the case with the Chinese, who sought either fraudulent documentation or to argue their cases in court as their means of entry. This fact, combined with the far greater immigration numbers of Europeans, means that the Immigration Act of 1882 pushed more Europeans across the border than the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 pushed Chinese.
The European border crossers, however, were not technically illegal: once again, the Immigration Act had assumed that immigrants would arrive at America’s seaports and thus only forbid their entry through those seaports. They would not technically be crossing illegally until the Immigration Act’s revision in 1891. Another major difference between the two groups of border crossers was race: even after 1891, the Whiteness of undocumented European immigrants allowed them to cross borders and live in American society with far less suspicion. Anyone who appeared to be Asian, on the other hand, was immediately suspected of crossing into the country, or being in the country, illegally. Undocumented Chinese immigrants had to take far more precautions when crossing the border. They also had to take on far greater expenses… and risks.
Undocumented Border Crossings Increase: The Scott Act of 1888
In 1888, Chinese exclusion was further strengthened by the Scott Act, which forbid Chinese workers in the United States from returning if they left… even if they had acquired official certificates of residency from immigration officials. 24,443 Chinese residents had travelled abroad after acquiring these documents at the time of the Scott Act’s passage. The sudden voiding of these official certificates meant they could not return home; it also meant that forgeries which might have previously been accepted as proof of residency would no longer be effective forms of entry. This predictably led to a spike in undocumented Chinese migration… and because immigrating through the ports was now more difficult, much of that migration began to flow over America’s land borders for the first time.
Because Chinese could still enter through Canadian ports, and because Chinese communities existed on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border, entering through Canada made the most sense to many Chinese. After arriving in Canada, they found supportive Chinese communities who knew the geography of the borderlands well, and who could guide them to Chinese communities on the American side. Indigenous peoples were also sympathetic, and sometimes served as guides. Indeed, just as Chinese border crossers were guided into Chinese communities, they were also guided onto Native American reservations… where Chinese had settled, and on a few occasions even married into indigenous tribes.
Although some Chinese crossed the border by trekking through the heavily wooded and unpopulated Cascade Mountains in small groups, most chose to venture through the hundreds of small channels and islands of Puget Sound. Puget Sound’s geography led it to be known as a “smuggler’s paradise,” through which all manner of illicit goods – and especially opium – were brought into the U.S. Men in the business of smuggling saw an opportunity to make money off the Chinese Exclusion Act, and would have seen even more of an opportunity in the Scott Act. Crossing the border with them was dangerous, however. Smugglers along the Canadian border were primarily White American or Canadian men who brought Chinese across the border for profit, not some sense of solidarity. To avoid being caught in an illegal act, they were known to kill or throw their “human cargo” overboard. Undocumented immigration was extremely dangerous from its very beginning.
Although these crossings had been occurring since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, it was only after the Scott Act of 1888 that they received substantial congressional attention. Border officials were soon reporting regularly on the smuggling of undocumented Chinese immigrants across the Canadian border. In 1890, one border official testifying before a congressional committee estimated that an average of 2500 undocumented Chinese were crossing the Canadian border annually. This was a miniscule number compared to the 455,302 immigrants who entered the country legally that year, but anti-Chinese racism made even small numbers loom large.
Although border officials familiarized themselves with the workings of smuggling operations, they felt that the odds were stacked against them. The length of the border and the difficulty of its geography made it impossible to adequately police. The fact that Chinese border crossers could simply blend into Chinese communities soon after their crossings made their capture almost impossible unless they were apprehended immediately. And the fact that the Chinese exclusion laws ordered that Chinese be deported to the “country from whence they came” meant that all that border officials could do if they captured Chinese crossing from Canada was send them back to Canada… where they could easily cross again. This was another incentive for Chinese to avoid entering through American ports, where being shipped back to the “country from whence they came” meant returning to China. In the congressional hearings of 1890, border officials urged that the language of the law be changed to allow for deportations to China, even if undocumented Chinese were crossing from Canada or Mexico. During this year, the House and the Senate also urged the President to negotiate with Mexico and Canada to pass their own Chinese exclusion laws, so that Chinese couldn’t simply enter through the ports of those nations and then cross into the U.S.
Although neither Mexico nor Canada agreed to exclude Chinese immigrants, in 1885, Canada had already imposed a $50 fee on Chinese seeking residency. This infuriated many anti-Chinese Americans, who felt that Canada was making money off of undocumented Chinese immigration into the U.S., given that many of the Chinese who paid the $50 immediately crossed the border. However, when Canada increased that fee to $100 in 1901 – roughly $3000 in today’s money – the cost became prohibitive. The smuggling rings that dealt in undocumented Chinese immigration organized for Chinese to land in Canadian ports, but once the fee increased, it began to make financial sense to find an alternative route. This became even more true in 1903, when Canada increased the fee to $500.
Thus by 1901, Chinese were excluded from American ports by law and from Canadian ports by exorbitant fees. Their alternative route was clear… as it had been for the Europeans who were excluded from entering Canadian ports by immigration laws passed between 1900 and 1902. Just as those Europeans had begun sailing for Mexican ports and had then crossed the Mexican border into the U.S., so too would the Chinese… at almost precisely the same time.
Away from the Canadian Border, and Towards the Mexican: A New Century Begins
Given growing anti-Chinese sentiment in Canada, smuggling rings had long predicted that it would become more difficult to smuggle Chinese immigrants across the Canadian border and into the United States. Throughout the 1890s, they had experimented with landing Chinese in small fishing villages along the coast of Mexico, and then guiding the migrants across the border. At around the same time, Chinese were arriving on the eastern Coast of Mexico from Cuba, where 142,000 Chinese had recently been enslaved… a full half of whom had been worked to death. When slavery was abolished in Cuba in 1886, Mexico began recruiting Chinese labor from the island to help build Mexican railroads. When their work was completed in Mexico, many of these Chinese pursued work across the U.S.-Mexico border. Thus, although large numbers of undocumented Chinese immigrants only began crossing over the U.S.-Mexico border once crossing through Canada became too costly in 1901, they were hardly the first Chinese to take that route.
Chinese migration to Mexico escalated for another reason at this time. Mexican President Porfirio Diaz had dreams of industrializing his nation, and he had seen that both Canada and the U.S. had accomplished industrialization using the labor of immigrants. Although U.S. officials pushed for Mexico to pass its own Chinese exclusion laws, Diaz believed that Chinese immigrants could help build Mexico’s railroads, just as they had done in the U.S. and in Canada. President Diaz thus signed a treaty with China in 1899, creating direct steamship service between the two countries for the first time in order to bring Chinese labor into Mexico.
As Chinese workers flowed into Mexico, many of them found employment working in mines and building railroads in the sparsely populated U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Chinese communities quickly developed in Mexican border cities. Such communities already existed on the American side of the border, where Chinese labor had also been used in mines and on railroads. By the time that Chinese immigrant smuggling rings began turning away from Canada in 1901, Chinese communities already existed on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. These communities facilitated the crossings of undocumented Chinese immigrants, just as they had in Canada.
Thus, a number of factors led the U.S.-Mexico border to emerge as a major space of undocumented border crossing during the opening years of the twentieth century: Mexico began recruiting Chinese labor, much of which soon crossed into the United States. New Canadian laws pushed both Chinese and European immigrants towards Mexico. By 1900, these Europeans were arriving not only from the Northwest, but from Southern and Eastern Europe as well… “new” European immigrants who were racially stigmatized in the U.S. Finally, a rising anti-Japanese movement in the United States began pushing Japanese immigrants towards the Mexican border, and immigrants from current-day Syria, Lebanon, and Turkey were also joining the immigrant flow, fleeing persecution and war. These diverse immigrants all turned to the Mexican border for the same reasons: they all feared exclusion due to racial prejudice, or because of the poverty and physical ailments their home conditions had inflicted upon them. Immigrants from around the world feared exclusion precisely because they were the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
With More Border Policing Comes… More Sophisticated Smuggling: The Immigration Act of 1903
The opening years of the twentieth century were also the years in which the U.S.-Mexico border emerged as a major space of border policing. During congressional debates in 1902, immigration officials assured Congress that America’s land borders could be effectively controlled… as long as they were given enough manpower. Their testimonies convinced Congress to increase funding for enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border. When the Immigration Act of 1903 was passed, it not only added new categories of excluded immigrants – anarchists, epileptics, prostitutes, and anyone associated with the business of prostitution – it also doubled the tax that immigrants paid to enter the country, which effectively doubled the funding for the Bureau of Immigration.
This increased funding was used to expand the number of official entry points along the U.S.-Mexico border – accompanied by new inspection stations and immigration inspectors – from a mere three before the Immigration Act of 1903 to twenty-one by 1909. The funding was also used to create a mounted unit of roughly seventy-five border officers to patrol the stretches between these official entry points on horseback. In the words of historian Patrick Ettinger, “the United States had begun drafting the outlines of a resource-intensive border enforcement policy,” which would lead to the founding on the Border Patrol two decades later. This increased border enforcement escalated the dynamic between border enforcement and border smuggling, in which smuggling became more sophisticated as policing became more sophisticated; and policing became more sophisticated as smuggling became more sophisticated.
Much of that smuggling originated in immigrant home countries, where organizations developed to guide potentially excluded countrymen and women towards safer lands. Once in Mexico, immigrants from around the world were guided to hotels and saloons where they would receive coaching on how to cross the border into the United States. Chinese smuggling rings dominated this scene: no surprise, given their two decades of experience with exclusion and undocumented entry by this time. Chinese communities on both sides of the border were often the backbone of local undocumented immigrant smuggling efforts, regardless of whether those being smuggled were Chinese, Japanese, European, or Middle Eastern.
By this time, border officials had already developed the strategy of focusing on the main entry points between Mexico and the United States, in order to push undocumented border crossers away from safer routes and towards harsh desert terrain. In the words of one federal official, the goal was to “at least make attempts to cross the border dangerous,” so that fewer immigrants would try to cross. One outcome of this policy was that people desperate to build a life in a safer land began dying in the desert. Another was that as the journey became more dangerous, more immigrants decided that they needed professional smugglers. These smugglers sought to avoid dangerous routes themselves, and instead sought ways to cross into the U.S. within just a few miles of border cities and their inspection points… or even right through them. By studying the practices and routines of the inspection points, border officers, and mounted patrol units, they developed ingenious methods of undocumented entry.
At this time, the vast majority of people crossing the border were Mexicans, who had always crossed freely to participate in work, trade, entertainment, and to visit friends and family. At busy points of entry, immigration inspectors couldn’t possibly inspect everyone: they would only stop someone if their appearance or behavior caused the inspector to suspect them of being an excludable immigrant. One of the major signs that someone might be an immigrant in the first place was that they were carrying luggage, but there was a simple way around this problem: because Mexicans crossed the border freely, smugglers simply hired local Mexicans to carry an immigrants luggage across the border for them. Another obvious sign that someone was from a foreign land was if they wore traditional clothing or hairstyles. These had to be abandoned if immigrants wished to blend in.
The ultimate way to blend in, however, was to appear Mexican. Passing as Mexican was a major strategy used by brown-skinned immigrants from around the world. Undocumented border crossers from Greece to the Middle East and especially China simply dressed as Mexican workers to move across the border. In order to blend in, these immigrants would often walk across with a group of local Mexicans who smugglers worked with. These Mexicans would talk to the immigrant as they walked, and the immigrant might nod or laugh in order to make it appear as if they understood Spanish. Smugglers sometimes took such acts farther by taking advantage of the racial stereotypes of border inspectors, such as the stereotype of the “drunken Mexican.” For example, one tactic to help an undocumented immigrant blend in was to teach them a Mexican song, and then have them stumble across the border with a group of Mexicans who were singing and acting drunk… and who would appear to border inspectors to simply be out for a good time. Complicating matters even further for border officers was the fact that there were a large number of actual Chinese Mexicans living in the borderlands by this time – Chinese who had settled in Mexico, married into Mexican families, spoke fluent Spanish, and dressed in Mexican clothing. Undocumented Chinese immigrants, if caught, could simply claim to be a member of this group… as long as they dressed the part, learned some Spanish, and developed a convincing story of their life in Mexico. Such strategies of racial passing and racial blurring would have been impossible in predominantly-White Canada.
Besides the strategy of racial passing, it was important for all immigrants seeking to cross the border – regardless the color of their skin – not to appear sickly or impoverished. Doctors specializing in how to make people appear healthy set up shop in border towns, and smugglers would sometimes provide immigrants with nice clothing and even “show money,” so that if they were stopped they would appear healthy and financially stable. The clothing and the money were, of course, returned shortly after crossing the border. Besides such appearances, bribery and corruption was widespread along the border, with everyone from train conductors to lawyers and even border inspectors and chiefs of police getting paid by smuggling rings to help undocumented immigrants cross the border. Such corruption was especially common in small border towns, where smuggling was an important and socially accepted part of the economy, and where everyone was connected and often willing to do one another favors. One final method of crossing right under the noses of border inspectors was to tunnel in: when old buildings in border towns were demolished, long tunnels leading under the border were sometimes discovered.
Border enforcement evolved to meet all of these different smuggling strategies… at least somewhat. Because it was easy for locals to do other locals favors in small border towns, it was later decided that border police and border inspectors should be hired from outside of the region in order to crack down on corruption. In order to discover the methods of immigrant smugglers, officers sometimes went undercover, posing as immigrants themselves. In an effort to defeat the “racial passing” technique, border inspectors began inspecting an increasing amount of Mexicans. One of the most effective forms of border enforcement, however, was the cultivation of informants: for the right price or under the right pressure, informants could offer valuable information on when and where undocumented immigrants would be crossing and who was helping them. Finally, in more remote areas, expert trackers were hired by the mounted patrol unit. In the on-going interplay between smuggling and policing, smugglers who chose those more dangerous routes through remote regions learned to travel over rockier terrain, where the signs of their passage were less visible.
Despite these early attempts at policing, excluded immigrants continued to find their way across the U.S.-Mexico border. Only the violence of the Mexican Revolution, followed by the total closure to European immigration during the First World War, would put an end to these first waves of undocumented border crossings. Those cataclysmic events would also create new waves of immigrants… and new forms of border crossing, and policing.
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In the dark morning hours of March 9, 1916, the Mexican Revolutionary leader Pancho Villa rode his troops across the border into New Mexico. In revenge for President Wilson supporting Villa’s enemies in the Revolution, they burned portions of the city of Columbus to the ground. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had already fled into the United States since the start of the Revolution in 1910 – a million would by the Revolution’s end – the attack on Columbus led to the first positioning of U.S. troops along the border.
The attack also led President Wilson to order military forces into Mexico itself, to hunt down Pancho Villa. These forces included a regiment of Black troops… the so-called Buffalo Soldiers stationed in the Southwest. Some of these Black troops justified their involvement by stressing how revolutionary nationalism in Mexico had caused Mexicans to turn on most foreigners, including the Black Americans who had fled to Mexico first to escape slavery, and at that time, Jim Crow. Indeed, Mexico’s revolutionary nationalism focused on glorifying Mexico’s indigenous heritage, but often did so in such a way that it portrayed blackness itself as something foreign that didn’t belong in Mexico. The American forces were also helped by Chinese immigrants in Mexico… communities that had either fled America’s Chinese Exclusion Acts and anti-Chinese violence, or who had been invited into Mexico directly from China to boost Mexico’s labor force. These Chinese communities suffered greatly during the Mexican Revolution: in one case, a nationalistic mob attacked a Mexican Chinatown and slaughtered 300 Chinese in a single day. More anti-Chinese murders took place during the Mexican Revolution than in the entire twentieth century United States. Chinese in Mexico thus had every reason to work as spies and saboteurs for the invading American forces… or the Punitive Expedition, as it came to be called.
Already, there are multiple stories here: the story of Chinese communities in Mexico; of Black Americans and of blackness in Mexico… and of Pancho Villa, who himself had Black ancestry and developed ties with Black American leaders even as he fiercely embraced expelling all Americans from Mexico, regardless of their race or ethnicity. But these are stories for some other time. This short story is about the little-known Japanese-Mexicans who became involved in the Punitive Expedition.
First it should be said that the Japanese in Mexico were a unique group that did not suffer from the same anti-foreigner sentiment as did other groups, due to the fact that Mexico looked at Japan as a potential foreign ally. Whereas China at the time had essentially been chopped up and divided amongst major European and American powers and was in a state of internal chaos, Japan had arisen as the single, powerful example on the global stage of a non-White nation holding its own in a world dominated by White supremacist notions of colonialism and control. Japan had not only not been colonized, it had defeated Russia in 1905 and was at the time making great imperial strides forward during WWI… although at the rest of Asia’s expense. Many Mexican revolutionaries looked up to the Japanese and certainly did not want to alienate Japan from Mexico. Indeed, many Japanese living in Mexico were trusted by Villa’s forces; some were considered to be valuable weapons smugglers.
The U.S. government soon became embarrassed at the Punitive Expedition’s inability to track down Pancho Villa. Month after month passed, but Villa and his troops evaded the American forces at every turn. As America faced the probability of entering the First World War, the nation’s inability to even locate – much less capture or kill – an underfunded, ragtag enemy right on their doorstep sent an uninspiring message to the American public and to allies abroad about U.S. military capabilities. American intelligence agents thus began reaching out to Japanese-Mexicans, partly because they had been embraced by Villa as potential allies, and partly in the hopes that they would not be as nationalistic as indigenous Mexicans, and might be more willing to become informers on Pancho Villa’s whereabouts and next moves. Intelligence agents soon contacted a man named Gemichi – or “Gustavo” – Tatematsu, who had been a servant of Pancho Villa and knew his family. Another Japanese-Mexican by the name of Lucas Hayakawa also knew the Villa family, and had already worked as an informer for the U.S. Army in the border city of El Paso. The Bureau of Investigation (later the FBI) began employing these two Japanese-Mexicans three months into the Punitive Expedition, on June 14.
Before sending Tatematsu to gather information on Villa, the Bureau of Investigation sent him to California to gather intelligence about Japanese communities in America and their sympathies towards Mexico. The mission was a way of feeling out Tatematsu’s trustworthiness. The Bureau quickly came to believe that Tatematsu would not divulge anything that would hurt Japanese communities, but they decided to move forward with him regardless of their concern that he was holding back on them. Because Hayakawa had already been an informer, he didn’t need to be put through this period of testing. By July, the two men were considered ready for the mission, and were sent into the north Mexican state of Chihuahua with the cover story that they were delivering important letters to Pancho Villa. At the same time, the Bureau also sent another Japanese-Mexican, Hidekichi Tuschiya, to try and infiltrate Pancho Villa’s forces. Tuschiya worked independently of Tatematsu and Hayakawa partly so the Bureau of Investigation could compare and contrast their information and have a way to better judge the quality of their information.
Meanwhile, while the Bureau cultivated these Japanese-Mexican informants, General Pershing – who was leading the Punitive Expedition – cultivated a network of about sixty spies in Mexico. Although these spies included Mexicans, Americans, and Chinese, it was the Japanese-Mexicans who were given the most sensitive mission due to the greater ease with which they could enter Villa’s camps. In the words of the Punitive Expedition’s Intelligence Section: “The Japanese were utilized largely as confidential agents in enemy country as their relations with the de facto government and the Villistas were such that they could visit either camp with impunity.” The Army sent four Japanese-Mexicans to Chihuahua to search for Villa: men by the names of Fuzita and Suzuki focused on gathering intelligence, while two others named Dyo and Sato searched the mountains for Villa.
On June 28, Dyo and Sato made contact and were led into Villa’s encampment. The revolutionary leader recognized Dyo immediately and expressed joy that he had not been killed by the enemy Carrancista forces during a previous capture. Dyo and Sato were accepted as trusted allies and given a tour of the encampment, which held 700 soldiers. On June 30, Dyo and Sato accompanied this force when they smashed a 300 man Carrancista column, and watched as Villa took prisoners and had slices of their noses and ears chopped off, with the warning that if men who had been so marked were ever found supporting Carrancista again, they would be shot on the spot. The two Japanese-Mexican informers were soon incorporated into Villa’s personal staff. They were armed and accompanied him in another successful attack on the Carrancistas, after which Villa began making plans to take over a major mining center. During this time of planning and strategizing, Fuzita and Suzuki rejoined Dyo and Sato. Together, they plotted the best way to poison Pancho Villa.
The plotting assassins had been provided with poison tablets with no taste or smell, and had already successfully tested them on a dog. Their window of opportunity was July 12-14, before Villa’s encampments would be on the move again. The assassins were expected to administer the poison and stay with the encampment until Villa’s death was certain. Understanding the risks, they undertook a Japanese death farewell ceremony before proceeding. Dyo then took an opportunity to poison Villa’s coffee, but then watched as Villa – who understood he could be poisoned at any time – had one of his men drink half of the coffee first, and then watched for any reaction. Seeing none, Villa then drank the other half. The Japanese-Mexican agents, however, knew that this poison did not set in immediately and took three days to cause death. Worried that Villa would not die but would be made seriously ill and that they might become suspects, the men fled.
Just over a month later, on August 25, a strange article was published by the Associated Press, stating that “A Japanese physician by the name of Nodko claims to have brought about the death of Villa by slow poison given under the guise of medical treatment, according to the Chihuahua local papers today.” Two days later, the U.S. Army sent Dyo and Fuzita on a new mission to determine Villa’s actual state, but the answer became obvious when Villa staged a surprise attack two weeks after the article was published. It’s possible that the article was just being used by Villa as a way to keep his planned attack invisible and throw his enemies off guard. The fact that it highlights a Japanese assassination attempt – although a concocted one – seems like more than a coincidence, and it might have been a sign from Villa that he understood who had tried to kill him.
In a likely attempt to erase any evidence of this assassination plot, the reports on the activities of these Japanese-Mexican agents were deleted from the Punitive Expedition’s intelligence files. However, the Bureau of Investigation had also come into contact with the Japanese agents working for the Army, and had written a report about their activities which was sent to the Attorney General, who then sent it to the Secretary of War. An investigation ensued, and it is likely that General Pershing, who was in charge of the Punitive Expedition, ordered the files destroyed before the investigation could take place. Military authorities also requested that the Bureau of Investigation ensure that no word of the assassination plot reached reporters. The story did not see the light of day until the 1970s, when the combination of Vietnam and Watergate crushed White American’s faith in the trustworthiness of institutions they assumed operated according to basic principles of justice and fair-play… a delusion that few people of color had. It was only at that moment that the FBI and various military intelligence agencies were forced to begin opening their documentation to the public… to some extent at least. As for the Punitive Expedition, it was unable to ever track down Pancho Villa, and pulled out of Mexico in February of 1917, after almost a full year of futile searches.
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Martin Luther King stepped out onto the balcony, smiling and laughing at his friends below as they got into their cars to head to dinner. King had just been teasing one of his top aides, Andrew Young, which had turned into a playful wrestling match. Other aides had ganged up on Young, mercilessly tickling him. A wild pillow fight had broken out, with Martin chasing his brother A.D. King around the room as if they were kids again. Out on the balcony now, King leaned over the rail and chatted with Jesse Jackson about music. He laughed as Andrew Young started goofily shadowboxing with the 6’4, 348 pound James Orange… who had almost become a pro-football player before joining King’s organization, where he helped King build positive relationships with young people and gang members living in disenfranchised Black ghettos across the country.
King had been living in a state of constant despair and exhaustion recently, concerned that the civil rights movement was falling apart. Outside of the South, conditions for African Americans were worsening. New technologies had wiped out millions of jobs in steel, auto, meatpacking, tobacco, mining and cotton industries, and African Americans were the first to be let go. Unions often excluded them, and hiring discrimination made it difficult to find new work. Seeking a way out of poverty, masses of Black men went to Vietnam: although African Americans were only 13 percent of the nation’s population, Black men made up almost 40 percent of Vietnam’s soldiers. They were given the most dangerous missions and were killed at twice the rate of their White comrades. As jobs vanished from America’s cities, White people found new opportunities in suburbs that systematically excluded African Americans. Very few White Americans understood that poverty and segregation had actually worsened outside of the South for African Americans during the civil rights movement, and many lost their sympathy for the continuing struggle for civil rights. Politicians thus felt less and less pressure to support that struggle, and even had an increasing incentive not to. As riots erupted in impoverished Black ghettos where police brutality ran rampant, politicians responded by demonizing African Americans for embracing a “culture of poverty” and “criminality.” Such rhetoric helped lay the groundwork for the devastating system of mass incarceration that would even further eviscerate Black communities in the decades to come.
It was for these reasons that Martin Luther King was despairing. But what he was seeing in Memphis had raised his spirits: here was a living, breathing example of the labor and civil rights movements coming together as one. Here was a concrete manifestation of King’s vision for solving poverty. And in a time where Black communities were often fracturing around their different ideas of how to move forward, here was a Black community that had united across their divisions of class, religious denomination, and age, in order to fight for the right to a living wage and humane working conditions for Black workers. Success for the striking sanitation workers in Memphis would put the movement on the right track again by creating a powerful example of the fusion of racial and economic justice. It would be the perfect start to the enormous Poor People’s Campaign planned in Washington the following month.
King smiled. A bullet blasted through his jaw, ripping off his chin, cutting through his jugular vein and spinal cord, and slamming him onto his back. His dear friend Ralph Abernathy had been in the room with him and rushed to his side, cradling his head: “Martin, Martin, this is Ralph. Do you hear me?” Abernethy saw Martin Luther King’s lips quiver and thought he was trying to respond. King’s eyes stared blankly out into space. An undercover agent named Marrell McCullough grabbed towels from a hotel cleaning cart as he bounded up the stairs, and tried to use them to stanch the wound as a pool of blood spread across the balcony. As howls of anguish erupted from the street below, the local reverend who had invited King and his friends to dinner, Billy Kyles, threw a blanket over King to try and keep him warm as King’s skin began to grow pale.
A group of radical Black Power youth from a gang called the Invaders had just left the motel after meeting with King, where they discussed lending their street cred to an upcoming, nonviolent march. Having been shot at before, the Invaders scattered in all directions, thinking that it was they who were being attacked. One of their comrades, Charles Cabbage, had just gotten in his car when he heard the crack of the rifle shot. He slammed on the gas, only slowing down once he was sure he was far from danger. Turning on the radio, however, he heard that the gunfire had been aimed at King. The radio said to be on the lookout for a light blue or white Mustang. Cabbage was driving a light blue Mustang. Cabbage had just fled the scene. He hit the gas again, hid the car in his backyard, and covered it with tree branches as helicopters began to circle overhead. The young Black Power militant who had just been negotiating with King was soon overpowered by an immense nervous breakdown. His muscles began to freeze and spasm. While Cabbage slipped into an incapacitating seizure brought on by the trauma of the loss of King combined with the fear that he was a suspect, the real assassin slipped quickly across the border, out of Tennessee, and soon out of the country.
Back at the scene of the crime, Lorene Bailey, who owned the Lorraine Motel with her husband Walter, froze when she heard the crack of the rifle and realized that King had been shot. Having King stay at her motel had been the pride of her life, and now he had been killed there. Her husband later said that she began shaking wildly, “like a leaf in the wind.” Later that night a blood vessel to her brain burst and she collapsed, fell into a coma, and died a few days later. King’s brother had been in the shower and hadn’t heard the shot; he emerged to find his worst nightmare unfolding in front of him and fell to the floor sobbing. A.D. King would drown in a pool the following year. Although there was no evidence of murder, King’s brother was a good swimmer, and many of his friends couldn’t help but wonder. A few years later a Black man walked into Ebenezer Baptist Church, where the King brothers had spent their childhood, and shot and killed their mother as she was playing the organ. Martin Luther King’s father had just lost two sons, and now he had to watch with his own eyes as the body of his beloved wife, Alberta Williams King, slumped across the organ.
Martin and A.D. King had called Alberta Williams King a few hours before Martin was killed, “just to pester her,” their father Daddy King later wrote: the two brothers would try to disguise their voices and pretend to be someone else when they called their mother, and then break into howls of laughter. Martin told his mother that things were better in Memphis than he had expected; that the news reports were exaggerating the danger he was in; and that she need not worry. However, just a few weeks before this, Martin had made a point to sit down with his parents and ground them in the reality that he likely would not live much longer. He told them that large amounts of money were being offered to professional killers. Martin told his parents that they needed to spiritually prepare themselves for his impending death. By the time Martin sat his parents down for this talk, they had long lived in fear. For years, every knock on the door or telephone call they received felt like it would be news of their son’s death. Now, later in the evening, at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, they heard the news they had long feared on the radio. Martin’s parents wept silently. Daddy King later wrote of he and his wife: “Neither of us could say anything. We had waited, agonizing through the nights and days without sleep, startled by nearly any sound, unable to eat, simply staring at our meals. Suddenly, in a few seconds of radio time, it was over.”
Back in Memphis, James Lawson was one of the first to be notified about King’s death who wasn’t actually present at the scene. He received a call immediately afterwards, as he was sitting down to have dinner with his family. Lawson had been studying nonviolent resistance in India when the Montgomery bus boycott broke out, and had rushed back to the United States to meet with King. He became perhaps the greatest trainer of nonviolent resistance in the country; training a group of students in Nashville who later became an important force in the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and helped to found SNCC. Lawson had moved to Memphis, and it had been he who had convinced King to come and support the Black garbage workers who had gone on strike. Fearing riots, he immediately rushed to Memphis’s most popular Black radio station and recorded a tape that was played throughout the night, urging people to honor King’s legacy and mourn with their communities rather than taking their rage out into the streets. After leaving the radio station, Lawson sat alone in his car, gripping the steering wheel. Even this profoundly spiritual, philosophical spirit, this student and warrior and mentor of nonviolent resistance, felt an overwhelming sense of rage. He understood better than anyone how disastrous King’s death would be for the trajectory of the country. Lawson wanted to break down and scream and weep as he gripped his steering wheel, but he knew he had work to do. It would be Lawson who called the man who had emerged as perhaps Martin Luther King’s greatest mentor, during the Montgomery bus boycott: Bayard Rustin.
Rustin received the news from Lawson before the national news networks had picked it up, and quickly boarded a flight to Memphis. In mid-flight, the airplane received orders from President Johnson to turn around and bring Rustin to Washington D.C. The President sought Rustin’s advice on the appropriate federal response to King’s death. Rustin warned Johnson that he needed to do something that would assure America’s poor that hope was on the horizon, and that he needed to honor King by passing legislation focused on the economic justice issues he died fighting for. Thurgood Marshall — who had just become the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice — expressed a similar opinion, warning the President that the nation had slipped into a deep “mood of depression” that required immediate and meaningful action. When Rustin finally arrived in Memphis, he told the striking garbage collectors that what they were doing represented a “totally new stage” in the civil rights struggle. The fusion of the struggle for racial justice with labor rights would be the path forward to wiping out poverty in the United States, he said. They must continue. Rustin — the master organizer of the March on Washington — stayed in town to orchestrate a completely silent march of 42,000 people. Shortly afterwards, the striking garbage collectors succeeded at winning basic labor rights, such as being paid for overtime work, gaining access to promotions previously available only to Whites, setting up a grievance procedure so they could challenge their bosses when they had been wronged without being fired, and forming an officially recognized union.
As for President Johnson, he leveraged the pressure created by King’s death to pass the last major piece of civil rights legislation of the 1960s: the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It was, in part, a reaction to Martin Luther King’s Chicago Campaign of 1966, where he pushed for an end to the rampant housing discrimination that existed throughout the entire country. Johnson had tried to pass a fair housing act after King’s Chicago Campaign, but with 70 percent of White Americans telling pollsters that they opposed opening up their neighborhoods to African Americans, Congress overwhelming refused to support the bill. Now, it succeeded by just one vote. The Fair Housing Act made it a crime to deny anyone the right to buy or rent property based on race, but just like the Brown v. Board of Education ruling 15 years earlier, it had weak enforcement powers and didn’t lead to nearly as much change as many had hoped. In the words of historian Jason Sokol: “From the perspective of many political leaders, the bill was significant primarily because it allowed them to boast that they had enacted a major civil rights law,” and thereby create the illusion that they were honoring Martin Luther King. Like so much civil rights legislation before it, the actual effectiveness of the Fair Housing Act was not the point.
Meanwhile, riots rippled through 125 cities across the nation, with some lasting over a week. 72,800 Army and National Guard troops were deployed, and 50,000 soldiers stood ready for deployment on military bases around the country. It was the largest domestic deployment of military force since the Civil War. By the end of the week, the nation had sustained over $100 million in property damage, much of it explicitly targeted at White owned businesses with known histories of discrimination. 21,000 Black people were arrested. 40 people were killed, 2,500 were injured, and over 5,000 people were left homeless. Almost all were Black.
In the Black ghettos of the nation’s capital, Stokely Carmichael — who had unleashed the call for Black Power two years earlier while marching with King — roamed the streets, attempting to calm the growing and angry crowds. Although Carmichael and King were portrayed as total opposites, the two men had developed a deep friendship, with King being almost a fatherly figure to the young Black Power militant. They both had a deep love for Black culture and history and Black rural folk traditions. Both were students of philosophy. When White Americans heard “Black Power” they tended to imagine a Black version of the violent domination signified by White power, but what Carmichael meant was having equal access to political power, economic power, and cultural power… meaning cultural empowerment and Black self-love. Having power meant to not be disempowered; it meant to not be politically powerless and economically destitute. For Black Power activists, cultural empowerment also meant not watering down Black speech and Black feelings in order to gain concessions or respect from Whites. White people were often angered, scared and confused when Black people expressed their honest thoughts and feelings about their oppression, and these reactions contributed to the demonization of Black Power and to the backlash of White “moderates” against the completion of the civil rights movement.
For King’s part, the notion of Black Power was not new to him, and indeed it had deep historical roots reaching back across the generations. At a mass meeting during the Montgomery bus boycott a decade earlier, King had told the crowd “…until we as a race learn to develop our power, we will get nowhere. We’ve got to get political power and economic power for our race.” Ending segregation had always been just the beginning for Martin Luther King. While the two men had many disagreements, Carmichael also felt many commonalities with King. He had been moved by King’s deep and obvious love for Black people, and by his ability to connect with them in communities across the nation. He had personally witnessed King risk his life over and over again. When the media began portraying Carmichael as an enemy of King, Carmichael had reacted by praising King whenever he could.
Now, in the Black ghettos of D.C., Stokely Carmichael stopped a young man who had begun breaking windows. He took his gun. He prevented a group of security guards from being attacked. When Carmichael stood up to speak to the growing crowds on the streets, they chanted “Black Power!” and he replied, “Brother King is dead; keep a cool head!” Stokely urged them to de-escalate the tensions on the streets by returning to their homes. But he also said that White America had killed the opportunity for nonviolence when they killed King; that King had been the only force advocating nonviolence that Black Power militants like himself admired and would listen to. A race war might be coming, Stokely told the crowd. Don’t be undisciplined and riot. Channel your anger into disciplined preparation for race war. Untold numbers of Black Americans agreed… and they took action. King’s death transformed the Black Panther Party for Self Defense from an organization based in Oakland — with a second chapter in L.A. — into an organization with dozens of highly militant and effective chapters across the nation. As Black America prepared to physically defend itself, the FBI cracked down with an even fiercer brutality than it had shown to its most profound enemy: Martin Luther King.
A few days later, Stokely Carmichael, his fiancé Miriam Makeba, and his friend Cleveland Sellers drove to Atlanta, passing through numerous cities under martial law, to attend King’s funeral. Unable to contact King’s family, they rose extremely early to try and get into the church. The crowd outside Ebenezer Baptist Church, however, was already swelling to 60,000 — mostly poor African Americans. It looked as though those let into the church were primarily White dignitaries from across the country, which infuriated Carmichael and Sellers. They pushed through the crowds and waited for the King family to arrive at the entrance, and then audaciously jumped in behind them. The guards at the entrance were surprised, but recognizing Stokely, let them through. These legendary Black Power militants who loved King sat a few rows behind the King family, in the same aisle with the governor of New York state and the mayor of New York City. Looking around, they were disturbed to see many political figures who had never supported King. They were troubled to see so few Black freedom fighters, including no one else from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee… although one of its great leaders, James Foreman, was indeed in the audience, sitting alongside a man he had profound disagreements with: the president of the NAACP, Roy Wilkins. Carmichael and Sellers — with all the alertness of true soldiers — then noticed someone hiding in the back of the church: another SNCC member, understanding that grassroots folks like himself wouldn’t be let in, had snuck into the church in the middle of the night.
Another Black luminary who pressed through that vast crowd to become one of the merely 1,300 entrants into Ebenezer Baptist Church was James Baldwin. Baldwin’s memory of King’s assassination was already a haze: in his words, it had “retired into some deep cavern in my mind.” The famed author did what he could to squeeze through the crowd, inch by inch, until the wall of people simply became impenetrable. Not only was every inch of street and sidewalk and lawn occupied… so were the limbs of the trees. The crowds had overflowed onto the rooftops of houses. Baldwin later wrote: “Every inch of ground, as far as the eye could see, was black with people, and they stood in silence.” He was finally able to wave down someone at the entrance of the church, and was literally lifted over the crowd. Inside the church he described “a tension indescribable — as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack.” Soon, busloads of sanitation workers — who Martin had died defending in Memphis — poured in. They had travelled unstopping through the night, and had not even had time to change out of their work clothes. Ultimately, 120 million Americans — out of the 1968 population of 201 million — watched the funeral service on television. Martin’s wife Coretta decided to let her husband deliver his own eulogy. A recording of his voice, from a church service exactly two months before his death, unfolded before the vast audience:
“I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long… Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize… that’s not important… I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others. I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody. I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question. I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry. And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked. I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison. I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity…”
Today’s most famous leader of SNCC, Congressman John Lewis, was not inside the church that day. Lewis had received the news of King’s death while at a rally for Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign. One of Kennedy’s aides had pressed through the crowd to find Lewis and tell him before the news broke. Lewis felt time pause. He would later write that a part of his spirit seemed to die that day. Lewis gathered himself together and huddled with some of Kennedy’s aides. They all decided that the presidential candidate needed to inform the crowd. In an age before news transmitted instantly over the internet and smartphones, it would be Kennedy’s televised address that broke the news to many people across the country. Kennedy soon called King’s wife, Coretta Scott King, to offer her any help necessary. He put a private jet at their disposal, arranging transportation for the King family to the funeral, and for King’s body to be transported from Memphis to Atlanta. He also reserved large sections of several hotels in Atlanta to ensure that the thousands of people who would be coming to the funeral would have places to stay. Referring to his brother’s assassination a few years earlier, Robert Kennedy commented that he had experience with this sort of thing.
At 3AM on the night before the funeral, John Lewis led Robert Kennedy personally into Ebenezer Baptist Church, where they viewed King’s body alone, in the quiet of the night. Lewis, feeling that he had had a final, meaningful moment with King, decided to give up his seat at the funeral the following day so that someone else could attend. He would later stand with King’s family as Martin’s casket was lowered into the ground. Like many African Americans, John Lewis then threw himself full force into supporting Robert Kennedy’s candidacy for president, feeling that he was the best hope now for the continuance of the struggle for civil rights. Such hopes were soon shattered: Robert Kennedy would be assassinated two months later, just after giving a major speech alongside Cesar Chavez. Like Martin — and so many others in the civil rights struggle — Robert Kennedy had foreseen his own death, telling an aide that “There are guns between me and the White House.”
As for Coretta Scott King: as Martin had leaned over the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he had chatted with Jesse Jackson below. It was Jackson who first called Coretta, but he couldn’t bring himself to break the news: he said King had been shot… but that maybe he would be all right. Although King had not died immediately, he had obviously sustained a mortal would. King’s aide Andrew Young intervened and told Coretta that her husband did not have long to live and that she needed to get down to Memphis. The mayor of Atlanta and a contingent of police rushed her to the airport to board a plane, and it was at the airport that Coretta received the news that her husband had already died. She decided to not board the plane, but to console their four children in the comfort of their own home. King’s friend Andrew Young later wrote that he suspected that Martin and Coretta had prepared their children for this moment, just as King had prepared the rest of his family. One of Young’s most vivid memories of the days following King’s death was of King’s children telling him: “Daddy wouldn’t want us to hate the man who killed him. He was just an ignorant man who didn’t know any better.” And: “This man didn’t know our Daddy, did he? Because if he had known Daddy, he wouldn’t have shot him.” Coretta, however, was worried about their youngest child, the five-year-old Bernice, affectionately nicknamed “Bunny.” Bunny was very quiet and Coretta worried about what she was going through: one time Bunny was flipping through a family photo album and innocently asked her mother who would be killed next.
Coretta had lived with the likelihood of her husbands death ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which their house had been bombed. Ever since that moment, the threat of death had been constant, and she had been the number one force in Martin’s life helping him to proceed on the path that he needed to walk, through the dark valleys of doubt and fear. In 1963, as they watched the news coverage of President Kennedy’s assassination, Martin had said, “This is what is going to happen to me.” He had believed it already, but knowing that the very president of the United States couldn’t be adequately protected increased King’s belief that nothing in the world could save him. Coretta knew it to be true. Just as her husband often told crowds that the movement needed to continue even if he didn’t make it — even once he was no longer there with them — so too did Coretta say this in her own speeches to packed audiences. In the last months of Martin’s life, it was clear that the threats were escalating. When he left for a speaking tour to promote the Poor People’s Campaign, he gave his wife a synthetic rose — a flower that would always last, in case he didn’t return.
On April 5, the day after Martin’s death, friends and relatives flooded into the King family’s home. Many of them later recalled the strong smell of coffee as pot after pot was brewed — for many had not slept the night before. They recalled the endless boxes of tissues being brought in as others were being emptied out. They recalled the two men who stood at the door — one White and one Black — each of whom gave a big hug to every single person who entered. Some felt slightly star struck by the guests — especially the famed singer, actor, and activist, Harry Belafonte — who arrived, he told Coretta, to help her do “the menial things:” washing dishes and helping her take care of the kids. He also helped her choose Martin Luther King’s funeral suit and ensured that her family would be financially secure in the years to come… for Martin Luther King had died with only $5000 in his bank account; enough to pay for his family’s needs for a few months. King brought in enormous sums from his speaking tours, but he gave it all back to the movement.
Some of those present at the King family’s home that day probably wondered who the slightly uncomfortable looking and unfamiliar White man was who kept ducking into the King’s bedroom with Belafonte to check on Coretta and the kids. That was Stanley Levison. Levison was an ex-Communist and a wealthy Jewish businessman from New York. Together with Ella Baker and Bayard Rustin, he had been involved in an effort to fund movements in the South that were trying to get off the ground… including the Montgomery bus boycott. From that moment on, Levison had been King’s invisible confidant, the man who King always knew he could call if he woke up at 3AM filled with fears or with new ideas he wanted to explore. Although King and his mentor Rustin had drifted apart in the years since the Voting Rights Act was passed — over a difference of ideas regarding where the movement should turn to next — King’s relationship with Levison had never wavered, because Levison had no interest in pushing King’s ideas or strategies in a certain direction. He simply wanted to help King talk through his difficult emotions and refine his own thoughts. King, knowing that Levison didn’t want anything from him in return — such as to influence his ideas or to gain status through associating with him — trusted Levison more than anyone else to be brutally honest with him. One of King’s good friends and most important aides, Andrew Young, later said of Levison: “Of all the unknown supporters of the civil rights movement, he was perhaps the most important.” Levison joined his friend Belafonte in ensuring that Martin’s wife and children would have no economic difficulties, and he continued to fund a variety of movement causes until the day he died.
At a rally in Memphis the following day, Coretta told the striking sanitation workers and their supporters that the struggle must continue until every person was truly free, until every person could live a life of dignity. “His campaign for the poor must go on,” she said. And then her voice cracked. “How many men must die before we can really have a free and true and peaceful society?” On April 8, she led the mass march in Memphis that had been organized by Bayard Rustin and James Lawson. Many Black Memphians later said that listening to Coretta Scott King had inspired the crowd and grounded the rage that so many of them felt. As cities around the nation burned, Memphis stayed quiet, and many felt this was largely due to the influence of Martin Luther King’s powerful wife.
In Atlanta the following day, April 9, an old wooden cart drawn by mules — symbolizing the labor and poverty of Black sharecroppers — carried Martin’s body from the church where he had been raised, five miles to Morehouse college, where he had studied. Coretta walked at the front of a funeral procession that drew a crowd of 150,000… 140,000 of whom were Black. John Lewis walked alongside the wooden cart that bore King’s body. King’s mentor at Morehouse, Benjamin Mays — who had met personally with Gandhi in 1936 and helped transmit the tradition of nonviolent resistance to Black America — gave the eulogy: “He believed especially that he was sent to champion the cause of the man farthest down. He would probably say that, if death had to come, I’m sure there was no greater cause to die for than fighting to get a just wage for garbage collectors.”
On May 2, Coretta stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where her husband had been shot. Looking out over the crowd below, she launched the Poor People’s Campaign. The campaign went down in history as disorganized and ineffective; partly the result of the trauma the organizers had just endured. Often unsaid, however, is that many who attended — including representatives of Native American reservations, poor White communities, and Latino neighborhoods and migrant labor camps — returned home with fresh ideas, having plugged into a multiracial, nationwide network of antiracist and antipoverty activists. Many who participated emerged as new leaders of Chicano and Native American civil rights struggles. Meanwhile, Coretta was flooded with invitations to speak across the world, and later wrote that her travels were “a humbling reminder that our mission was respected on a global stage.” Indeed, just as freedom fighters across the world had looked to Gandhi, they now looked to the example of King. Martin had died fighting for humane working conditions for Black garbage collectors in a single city. But he also died having provided lessons for all people committed to building a just and humane world… lessons for people of all races, and even of all nations.
As Anne Braden crisscrossed the nation raising support to free her husband, the love of her life was unbeknownst to her locked away in solitary confinement. Although they wrote to each other often, Carl worried that Anne already had far too many burdens to bear, and therefore didn’t reveal how difficult his circumstances truly were. Carl used his time in solitary to develop an ascetic quality in himself, composing and reflecting on ethical goals. Anne meanwhile cultivated a large, national network of supporters through her travels, writings and journalistic connections. Civil rights activists and labor organizers across the country understood that if the Bradens could be charged with being part of a Communist conspiracy simply for helping a Black family move into a White neighborhood, that they could be charged with subversion for their activities as well. Freeing Carl Braden thus became a major cause: although his bail was the highest in Kentucky’s history, it was raised in seven months. Carl was released in the summer of 1955. Eight months later, the Supreme Court ruled that the state sedition laws that had been used to target the Bradens were unconstitutional. All charges were dropped. The prosecutor of the Bradens, Scott Hamilton, had hoped to rise to fame through building a sensational anti-Communist case. He instead found his career discredited. A few years later, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
Anne and Carl could not, however, simply return to their old lives. They were now highly public and ruthlessly demonized figures throughout the White South. In order to stay safe and be in a supportive environment, they moved into a Black neighborhood, where their children wouldn’t have to see their parents being constantly ostracized. However, the very public nature of their demonization affected their ability to become involved in the civil rights movement as it began to ignite. Carl had been released just months before the Montgomery bus boycott began, and although the Bradens attended a few of the early meetings, their continuing legal battles and dire economic circumstances took all of their energy and prevented a high level of involvement. Once the case was dropped and the Bradens had more energy to put into the movement, they found that many civil rights activists were wary of associating with them. Even with the case dismissed, the Bradens were still widely viewed as Communist subversives, and the early civil rights movement was desperately trying to prove itself to have no such affiliations. The Bradens therefore developed a practice of playing behind-the-scenes roles and staying out of sight.
The SCEF: Rallying White Southern Support
In 1957, shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott ended, the Bradens joined the Southern Conference Education Fund, or SCEF. The SCEF was an organization dedicated to building White southern support for integration, and had thrown their full support behind the Bradens during their sedition trial. Its monthly newsletter, the Southern Patriot, was subscribed to by supporters of civil rights across the nation. During Carl’s incarceration, the Patriot had published articles by Anne and had helped her gain a national audience. The executive director, Jim Dombrowski, was a somewhat saintly theologian in Anne’s eyes. He became a significant mentor to her, and a lifelong friend to Carl.
The SCEF was suffering in 1957. The Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling of 1954, coupled with the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-1956, had led to a massive White backlash. In the context of this backlash, White southerners who had previously spoken in support of integration now felt forced into silence. Previously viewed as eccentrics, the cost of speaking out in an era in which segregation seemed seriously under threat now included character assassination, social isolation, economic retaliation, and physical threats. In this context, support for SCEF evaporated. The readership of the Southern Patriot plummeted. Dombrowski told Anne that “SCEF must expand or die.” The Bradens became essential to keeping the organization alive.
The SCEF hired Anne and Carl to scour the South for potentially supportive Whites, and to find ways to help them step forward. In Anne’s words, “I knew white people were there somewhere, and we had to get to them. A lot of the whites who had been active earlier in the South had been caught in the witch hunts and run out.” The president of the SCEF, Aubrey Williams, put it this way: “I know there are more white people around the South that think like we do, but you have to get out and find them. They are not going to come to us. We need to go out and beat the bushes and find people, and that’s what we want you and Carl to do.” Aubrey also gave Anne a warning: “…this whole question of how you can get white people in the South to really deal with the issue of segregation has broken the hearts of most people who have tried. I just hope it doesn’t break yours.”
And so, to use Anne’s words, the Bradens became “travelling agitators.” As they travelled, they found that many sympathetic White Southerners were older, had been active in the pre-McCarthy, New Deal era, and now felt a sense of isolation and futility as White Southerners became more reactionary. However, this older generation also had a racially paternalistic attitude and a belief in “gradual” racial progress that was unacceptable to the new generation of racial justice activists, and especially to African Americans during the civil rights years. Although it was dismaying to discover that these were often the most progressive White Southerners, SCEF went to work providing them with a desperately needed support network and a hard-to-find extended community by creating mailing lists and regional gatherings. It was also critical for White Southern supporters of integration to develop connections with local Black leadership, which the regional gatherings served to do as well. These gatherings emerged as critical spaces in a segregated landscape: it was here that many African Americans encountered the first White people they had ever met who were committed to racial justice; and where many White people had their first opportunities to hear Black people speak frankly about race relations and what they needed from their potential White allies.
Although often frustrated even by those White southerners who supported integration, Anne was simultaneously empowered by building ties with this primarily older generation. Many of them had experienced waves of racial progress and repression throughout their lives, and they provided Anne with a deepened sense of southern social justice history and an empowering sense of being part of a lineage. Virginia Durr played this role for Anne more than anyone else. A generation older than Anne, Virginia was a White Southern aristocrat whose husband, Clifford Durr, had worked in the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal. The couple lived in Montgomery, and Clifford had played an important background role in the Montgomery bus boycott by offering expert legal advice and mentorship to the Black lawyers who represented Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and others.
Even with their economic and social privilege and proximity to power, the Durrs still experienced intense isolation as White Southern supporters of the civil rights movement. Virginia – someone who loved throwing fancy salons and dinner parties, and who now deeply missed being able to do – combatted her isolation partly by keeping up a voluminous correspondence with like-minded Whites across the nation. Writing to a friend in the fall of 1959, Virginia said, “I have made a new friend, Anne Braden… Who sees life in Alabama as I do, but with even deeper insight, much deeper I think. She is a lovely and charming and gentle person with a brilliant mind and is such a comfort to me.” A few months later, she wrote: “Anne Braden is arriving here on Sunday to stay with me, and Mrs. Martin Luther King is having a big female party for her.” And another letter days later: “Anne Braden has been here recently and she is a perfect darling and I love her and I think she is a very good writer too. After she was gone, the Attorney General came out with a huge warning to all the people of Alabama to beware of her as she was so dangerous.” Virginia and Anne soon became fast friends.
Virginia told Anne stories about how White people in Montgomery who dared to consider integration were hounded: they were constantly followed as they drove; they received threatening phone calls; and their names, phone numbers and businesses were published in the papers. The story of Juliette Morgan had an especially strong impact on Anne: after expressing her support for the civil rights movement, Morgan found herself berated by her friends and family. Everyone distanced themselves from her, and even those who supported her position refused to reach out for fear of retaliation themselves. After a few years of intense isolation, Morgan took her own life. In a letter to Virginia Durr, Anne reflected: “I could so easily have been Juliette Morgan… There was so much in her early life that was just like mine.” If Anne hadn’t gone away to college and discovered fellow thinkers and mentors; if she had expressed such views without having any supportive community; despair might have completely consumed her as well. Anne wrote that being attacked on a daily basis was difficult, but even worse was living in a world where everyone around you constantly told you that you were wrong. In such an environment, it was only having a community of support that allowed a potential White antiracist to not succumb to doubting their own convictions and understandings, and wondering if perhaps they were wrong after all.
The Southern Patriot
When the Bradens joined the SCEF, Carl did most of the travelling at first while Anne stayed home with the children and worked to revive the SCEF’s Southern Patriot. As the new editor, Anne essentially turned the monthly newsletter into a report about what she felt were the most important developments in race relations that month. To facilitate this goal, she subscribed to Black newspapers from across the nation, in order to keep up with events in various localities. She then used her role as writer and editor to interview and thereby build connections with key figures in local movements. Whenever Anne wrote about local actions, she made sure that the community received extra copies of the paper, because she knew that it made people feel more empowered when they saw that their actions were newsworthy.
Anne made a special effort to highlight White actions, partly so that Black people could recognize that White support was in fact a possibility and a potential game-changer, and partly because antiracist White Southerners usually felt isolated, invisible, and demoralized. In Anne’s words, “If whites were doing anything, we said so. Once they saw something in print [and realized] it was significant enough for somebody to notice it, that made it more likely that they could keep struggling.” The Bradens were critical of the leftist press that wrote endlessly about the White backlash to civil rights, but focused almost no attention of those Whites who were standing up for racial justice. Without those stories to inspire potentially supportive White people to stand up; the feeling of futility was strengthened. Anne’s journalism was an excellent example of how good reporting could bring new people into the struggle, and could keep those struggles alive.
It also kept people alive… literally. For example, when leading Birmingham activists Fred and Ruby Shuttlesworth tried to enroll their children in an all-White school; Fred was severely beaten and Ruby was stabbed. Fred Shuttlesworth commented, “if it had not been for Carl and Anne Braden, I’m sure I would have been dead.” Instead, he lived to facilitate the famed 1963 showdown, when high-pressure fire hoses and attack dogs were loosed upon Black students. In the years leading up to that, it was often the Bradens who got the news out about the violence the Shuttlesworths faced; the Bradens who could tap into their national media network and make sure that what was happening to Black people in Birmingham was getting media attention in the North, even when papers in the South refused to report on it. Like many others, Fred felt that without Anne shining her journalistic light on the violence he faced, he would have been relegated to a darkness in which he could have been killed and few would have ever known or cared. Anne’s powerful and honest portrayals of Black freedom fighters and civil rights actions made the Southern Patriot essential reading for anyone interested in the movement. She tripled the amount of subscriptions in just two years.
Building Ties with Black Freedom Fighters
As the Bradens sought to organize Whites, they simultaneously worked to deepen their ties with Black civil rights leaders. Fred Shuttlesworth became their first major supporter. In Shuttlesworth’s words, “white people were the missing link” in bringing meaningful racial change to the South. Like the Bradens and the SCEF, Shuttlesworth believed that White Southerners needed a support system to break through their isolation. He believed that the anticommunist hysteria was being used to silence potentially supportive White voices, and that finding White allies necessitated fighting the political repression they faced, which would allow them to speak up. Anne’s first meeting with Shuttlesworth was at a hotel, where he was temporarily living after White supremacists had bombed his home. When they got in a cab together to go visit his church, Shuttlesworth whispered to her with a twinkle in his eye: “You know this is illegal? We aren’t supposed to be riding in a cab together.” She immediately loved his mischievous and courageous spirit. Shuttlesworth joined the SCEF board and became the most important early link between SCEF and the Black freedom struggle. E.D. Nixon, the brilliant organizer from Montgomery and Rosa Parks’ primary political partner, soon joined as well.
In September of 1957, Anne met Martin Luther King himself, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee. Founded in 1932, Highlander was originally a training ground for labor organizers before switching its focus to racial justice in the early 1950s. The school’s co-founder, Myles Horton, was raised in an impoverished White sharecropping family in Tennessee, and originally envisioned the school as a place of self-empowerment for the Appalachian poor… a place that would help them discover the means to combat the injustices they faced in life. Horton emphasized the importance of anticipating movements and laying the groundwork for their success. Anticipating the Brown v. Board of Education ruling a year in advance – as well as the subsequent escalation both of the civil rights struggle and the White backlash – he began shifting the orientation of the school towards racial justice. Highlander thus became a unique Southern space, bringing people of all races together to discuss the intertwining problems of poverty and racism.
During his visit to Highlander, King expressed that he needed a ride to a Baptist convention he was attending in Louisville; where Anne happened to live. She offered him a ride, and they entered into a long, meandering conversation as they drove through the twisting mountain roads of eastern Tennessee and into Kentucky. Martin later told his wife Coretta that he was blown away by Anne: he had never before imagined that a White southern woman could so thoroughly break from her past. She was a symbol of possibility; a living, breathing example of southern whiteness liberated from the shackles of prejudice. Martin dove into her writings and wrote to her that he was deeply moved by them. Anne and Carl befriended Martin and Coretta over the next few years, and the Bradens would sometimes stay at the King’s home in Atlanta during their travels across the South. As Martin’s prominence rose, enemies of the movement often pointed to his connection with the Bradens as proof that he associated with and was influenced by communists. His own advisors worried that his association with people widely believed to be subversives would damage the reputations both of King and of the movement, and urged Martin to break his ties with the Bradens. He refused.
As Anne deepened her ties with Martin Luther King, she also built a strong friendship with Ella Baker… the director of King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC.) Anne had met Ella briefly in 1955, during her travels to gain support to overthrow Carl’s sedition charge, but the two women had not stayed in touch. Those were the months leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott. At the time, Ella Baker was based in New York, working closely with Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison in an organization called In Friendship, which focused on fundraising for civil rights actions as they erupted in the South. The hope was that with outside support, one of these actions would grow into a movement – which of course happened in Montgomery. In Friendship provided crucial outside support for the boycott, during the first months before it gained national attention. Like her colleagues Rustin and Levison, Baker helped to create the SCLC after the boycott ended, with the hope that the organization could help facilitate “many Montgomerys” throughout the South. As a master organizer, Baker became the director of the almost entirely male, ministerial organization. King hesitated to hire her, knowing that the other members expected the director to be a man: but Rustin and Levison – who had both become highly trusted advisors to King during the boycott – told him that if he was serious about the SCLC, there was only one person for the job. Baker would subsequently become a fierce critic of the misogyny she encountered amongst King and his colleagues, as well as of the homophobia King’s colleagues showed towards Rustin.
Baker also famously critiqued King’s charismatic leadership style, which she believed drew energy away from the development of the kind of grassroots leadership that actually empowered communities and sustained movements. When the sit-ins erupted in 1960, Ella Baker saw a golden opportunity to build an organization that focused on developing many leaders at the local level: it was she who hosted the famous gathering that brought together student leaders from many cities across many states; leading to the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Baker left the SCLC soon afterwards to take on a background mentorship role, supporting the students in building what soon became the most important civil rights organization in terms of grassroots leadership: SNCC.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
By the time the sit-ins erupted, Anne Braden and Ella Baker had become very close, sometimes even retreating to a wooded cabin together to sip whisky, discuss life, and allow their thoughts to settle and coalesce so they could re-enter the movement at a higher level and stay with it for the long-haul. Ella wrote to Anne about her high hopes for the student gathering, which brought together 200 student leaders from 12 southern states. Anne and Ella were of the same mind regarding the students: in Anne’s words, it was important to “go easy on the advice and heavy on the assistance,” in order to gain their trust and allow them to cultivate their own ideas and actions and fully step into leadership. Anne had just had a new baby and was unable to attend the historic gathering from which SNCC emerged; if she had attended she would have been one of only a dozen Whites.
Anne was, however, able to attend SNCC’s second mass meeting, in October of 1960; during which she stayed in Martin and Coretta’s home. In the words of her biographer Catherine Fosl, Braden struck many of the students as a kind of “renegade southern lady”: she was soft-spoken and ladylike; she always wore dresses and was well put together… and yet she possessed a fierce flame of resistance. Although on the surface she appeared a respectable southern lady to the core, she also totally defied gender norms by travelling alone, throwing herself into passionate public debates, and standing up to powerful men. Once, while at a strategy session in the King families home, Anne demanded that Coretta be included: Martin was surprised, but he immediately acquiesced. Her respectable-yet-independent-and-rebellious persona was attractive to many young female freedom fighters – both Black and White – and Anne quickly became a role model for many of them. In the words of the White Southern Freedom Rider Joan Browning, Anne “showed me that one could be a loyal Southerner and a respectable woman while fighting for social justice. The fact that Anne was Southern to the bone and had that wonderful slow Southern speech helped me redefine myself.” The fact that the Bradens clearly had the respect of luminaries like Shuttlesworth, King, and Baker also deeply impressed the students, and helped them reconceptualize the role of Whites in the Black freedom struggle.
Many SNCC students came to know Anne through her personal interviews with them, as she documented this new phase of the movement in detail. Whereas the mainstream press focused on the sensationalism of mass arrests and White supremacist brutality, the Southern Patriot reported the intimate stories of how students conceptualized, built, and sustained a movement… from their own perspective, and through their own voices. In the famed SNCC organizer Julian Bond’s words, “Anne helped to define who we were to the Patriot audience and to a broader audience as well. That was very helpful to us because it was the definition we held of ourselves as this vanguard challenging not just the segregation system but older organizations too, like the NAACP.”
Anne and Carl were also critical in teaching media skills to SNCC members. They introduced them to their vast media connections… to the 320 news outlets the Bradens were connected to, including religious, labor, agricultural, student, liberal and left publications. These connections helped SNCC get their stories out. The SNCC students also had little experience with fundraising; once again, the Braden network proved crucial. In Julian Bond’s words, the Bradens “widened our list of political and fundraising contacts and exposed us to journalists and writers whom we didn’t know about.” Once the violent drama of the Freedom Rides broke out in the spring of 1961, the images of burning buses turned SNCC into a household name that was capable of raising far more funds than the Bradens and the SCEF. The Bradens, however, were crucial in the first year of the organization’s existence.
Anne’s primary goal with SNCC was to build White Southern student leadership and support. At Anne’s urging, SCEF set aside funds for a new staff position at SNCC. The position was for a White student, whose task would be to travel the South, organizing other White students on college campuses. It was a dangerous job – in fact, it would take Anne a full year to find someone to fill the position. She finally found her man in Bob Zellner, a working-class college student and former street fighter who had been raised by a reformed Klansman. Zellner had been run out of town for his support of civil rights and felt he had little to lose: he thus reported to SNCC headquarters in Atlanta in September, 1961. Going onto White campuses where his message was not welcomed, he had to find ways to function in secret. Realizing that he needed to prove himself to dubious members of SNCC, he often put his body on the line and repeatedly risked his life, taking many brutal beatings to protect his Black comrades. In doing so, Zellner built a deep camaraderie with his fellow SNCC organizers. This protégé of Anne Braden was the very last White person to leave SNCC when it became an all-Black organization in the late sixties: some Black Power militants in the organization argued that he alone should be allowed to stay, but Zellner left of his own accord. He had, however, only held the White student organizing position for two years; his friend Sam Shirah had then taken over. Shirah had more success than Zellner: by 1963, following the brutal Freedom Rides and infamous footage from Birmingham, it became easier to mobilize White Southern students. They became a small but noticeable presence amongst civil rights workers.
Continuing Attacks
During this entire time, the Bradens had remained under attack. When they emerged as regional organizers for integration through their work with SCEF, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) – which equated civil rights work with a communistic undermining of the proper order of society – turned its gaze on the Bradens with a vengeance. In the summer of 1958, HUAC issued subpoenas to twenty leading White labor and civil rights organizers, which of course included Anne and Carl. After the Supreme Court rolled back some of the restrictions it had placed on anticommunist prosecutions just two years earlier, Carl was sentenced to a year in prison, in the winter of 1959. His appeal went to the Supreme Court, where it was rejected in February 1961. In a symbolic gesture, Carl presented himself to the federal authorities to serve out his year on International Workers Day, May 1. On May 4, the first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C. Fred Shuttlesworth called Anne – whose own trial had been postponed, and was never returned to – hoping that she could help round up more Freedom Riders; she almost thought of going herself but there was no one else to care for the children.
Thus, as the Freedom Rides were going on, Anne once again tried to mount support to free her husband. The first person she turned to was Martin Luther King. He had, of course, heard of Carl’s imprisonment, and when Anne came to visit he asked her how he could help. Anne asked Martin if he would be willing to develop a petition to free Carl, given that a petition coming from him would gather far more support. It was a lot to ask for: Martin’s stature had grown by this time, and taking such a public stance of support for a “subversive” figure could harm his ability to cultivate a relationship with President Kennedy and with major funders. Martin told her that he would have to think on it. In the following days he seemed to avoid and ignore her calls, which he usually returned promptly. He finally called Anne back and said that he had to pray a lot over this question: he worried that it might hurt the movement, but he knew it was the right thing to do. Martin not only signed the petition, he invited Anne to give a lecture on nonviolent resistance at SCLC’s annual convention. Anne knew that Martin could have found better speakers on the subject than she, and thought that it was his way of showing some of his colleagues that he wouldn’t be influenced by their constant warnings to sever his ties with so-called subversives. Opponents of the civil rights movement circulated photos of Anne speaking for the SCLC across the South to prove that King had communist affiliations… an outcome that King was surely aware of in advance. In deciding to so seriously and publicly honor Braden, he had gone against the advice of virtually everyone in his organization.
Freedom Summer & Beyond
In 1963, SNCC shifted its energies in Mississippi away from the nonviolent resistance embodied by the sit-ins and Freedom Rides, and towards voter registration. With 96 percent of Black Mississippians unregistered and facing barriers that were impossible to surmount, SNCC developed an ingenious strategy: in order to dramatize their exclusion from democracy, Black Mississippians would hold their very own – unofficial but symbolic – Freedom Vote. They would create their own political platform, run their own candidates, and cast their own votes from officially monitored booths located in the safe spaces of Black churches, in Black communities. SNCC representatives would then attend the Democratic National Convention, where they would present these votes as evidence of their exclusion from democracy… and they would use this as pressure to unseat some of the segregationist candidates, and to gain their own seats.
Building up this entire democratic infrastructure on their own was a phenomenal undertaking, and the truth was that by 1963 many SNCC workers were burnt out. They had been in the trenches for a few years, facing violence, and often watching their friends get killed. They had experienced a lot of trauma and needed outside support if they were going to continue. By this time in the movement, many White students in the North were mobilizing, and SNCC called on them to head south and support the Freedom Vote. They also knew that having White students from universities like Yale and Stanford would lead the Justice Department to send FBI agents to monitor White supremacist retaliation to the Freedom Vote… something they didn’t feel obligated to do when it was Black life under assault. Everyone also knew that some of these White students would be killed, and that when they were, it would draw massive outside attention to their cause, and with it pressure for federal intervention… something that no amount of Black death had ever accomplished.
The freedom votes were cast in the summer of 1964: The Mississippi Freedom Summer. As White students from the North flooded into Mississippi to support the effort, the state saw its most violent year since Reconstruction: there were at least six murders of civil rights workers, 80 reported (and far more unreported) beatings; 65 buildings bombed; and over 1000 arrests of civil rights workers by police officers enforcing Mississippi’s White supremacist traditions. Most infamously, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered after barely 24 hours in Mississippi; and it was only the fact that two of them were White that drew intense national scrutiny during the excruciatingly long search for their bodies. Although understanding that White deaths would lead to a national outcry had been part of SNCC’s strategy, once those deaths actually came to pass, it was incredibly painful for Black SNCC workers to witness how different the response was compared to their many Black comrades who had been killed… and whose deaths had remained invisible. This bitter reality – combined with the fact that many of these White students harbored their own unconscious racial and class prejudices despite their high level of commitment – was an early factor in pushing SNCC towards becoming an all-Black organization two years later.
During this time, SNCC members escalated their discussions about how Whites could best support the civil rights movement, and the notion that White allies should focus their energies on organizing White communities began to predominate. Serious change would only happen if White people – the vast majority of Americans, and the group that held by far the most political and economic power – changed their racial beliefs and attitudes, and began actively supporting racial justice. James Foreman – one of the great visionary leaders of SNCC – said that such a change would be truly revolutionary, and that White SNCC supporters were in the best position to play this role. Foreman also believed that young White allies needed more opportunities to take on leadership roles, and that it would be easier for them to do so as organizers of White communities.
Such ideas had long shaped Anne’s own stance: in 1951, after giving a series of speeches at Black churches, she was told by an important civil rights leader that the Black community already understood what she was talking about: what she needed to do was talk with Whites. Anne’s focus on developing White support for racial justice had been what had drawn civil rights luminaries like Fred Shuttlesworth to her in the first place: as he had said when they first began working together, “Whites were the missing link.” Despite Anne’s agreement with SNCC’s gradually shifting understanding of the role of White supporters, she was disturbed by the idea of racial separation: while she believed that Whites should focus on generating White support, she also believed that they needed to be in deep relationship with Black communities and organizations in order to do so with any degree of success. If White supporters of racial justice were segregated from Black communities, it would far too easy for them to perpetuate unconscious racial prejudices and take inappropriate actions. It was through relationship, more than anything else, that prejudice was broken down and mutual understanding, trust, and solidarity was developed. Anne, however, did not equate Black Power with racial separation… as did almost all other White journalists. She properly understood Black Power as Black self-empowerment, and was one of the few White journalists in the nation who helped to translate an accurate interpretation of Black Power to a White audience.
Many White SNCC organizers took the message to organize White communities very seriously, and when SNCC became an all-Black organization, many of them flooded into SCEF. During this time, SCEF started the Southern Mountain Project in Appalachia to organize poor Whites. However, the young members who had just left SNCC offended the local sensibilities with their long hair, casual interactions, and revolutionary rhetoric. When Black SNCC students had gone down into the Mississippi Delta to organize sharecroppers, they had also learned to dress and talk and socialize like sharecroppers in order to connect and build trust. The White students in Appalachia failed to do the same with the White communities they sought to organize.
Anne also noted that these White organizers often faced a “reentry problem.” In her words, “This happened to whites who’d been in Mississippi, where every white face was an enemy. They just didn’t like white people! You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.” Unlike Anne and other White Southern supporters, many of these students from the North didn’t grasp how difficult it was for White Southerners to liberate themselves from the traditional prejudices they had been saturated in all their lives. They lacked the ability to be compassionate and to empathize and connect with them as human beings. They also often embraced dogmatic political beliefs that split hairs: as these new organizers flooded into the SCEF, it fell prey to vicious infighting and quickly disintegrated. The Bradens abandoned the organization before its total collapse, as did its executive director James Dombrowski and Fred Shuttlesworth, who had done so much to connect SCEF with the heart and soul of the Black freedom struggle. The fact that a decades old organization that had been under constant attack by powerful government forces was so quickly undone from squabbling on the inside would pain Anne for the rest of her life.
In the late 60s, as local politicians sought to draw attention to themselves, they ranted about running the Bradens out of Kentucky and even passed out anti-Braden bumper stickers at political rallies. Once again, the couple was arrested on sedition charges. This time, however, the court was packed with supporters. When the judge asked, “are you now, or have you ever been a Communist,” the room erupted in laughter. The charges of communism had by that time become a bad joke from a notorious era of civil liberties infringements, even if segregationists continued to cling to it. In Anne’s words, “I realized at that moment that the 1950s were finally over.” State sedition laws were finally – and permanently this time – declared unconstitutional. The Bradens would never again face legal attack for their activism.
Although the days of McCarthyism were finally over for the Bradens, the FBI counterintelligence programs originally established to target communists now turned its full-force against the Black freedom struggle. Anne felt that Black freedom fighters in the late 60s faced far more government repression than had ever existed in the McCarthy era. Entire communities were wiretapped, infiltrated, and given disinformation that turned them against one another. Anne now used what she had learned from her battles with McCarthyism to attack the repression that Black freedom fighters faced. When Angela Davis was infamously incarcerated, Ella Baker introduced Anne to Angela’s mother, and Anne turned her journalistic expertise towards the effort to free Angela… who Anne soon became something of a mentor to. As the Klan rose again in the mid-70s, embracing the old White Citizens Council Rhetoric that it was White people who were truly being oppressed by neighborhood and school desegregation, Anne mentored that generation. When the horrors of mass incarceration rose in the 1980s and 1990s, Anne mentored that generation. Until the day she died in 2006, Anne could often be found sitting cross-legged on the floor, talking with each new generation of freedom fighters throughout the night… always trying to push them further, so that they could meet the new obstacles that each passing decade brought with it.
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February 1, 1968: it was a cold, rainy day in Memphis, Tennessee. Two of the city’s 1,100 garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had been at work all day. They were cold, exhausted, and covered in grime. The garbage collectors not only moved trash cans, they had to pick up all the garbage off the streets or on the lawns of the areas they covered, loading it into bins which they carried on their shoulders or on top of their heads. The bins were old and often had holes in them, and when it rained, the workers would get covered in grimy, trash-saturated water. They were not provided with showers at work, forcing them to return home to their families covered in filth. It was dirty, low paying work: and in the Tennessee of 1968, that meant work fit only for Black people.
The work was also backbreaking. If residents had cut down trees on their properties, it was up to the garbage workers to chop them up and haul them away. Memphis had no standardized trashcans at the time: people just loaded their garbage into large barrels, which they were not required to take to the curb. White residents took the hard labor of the Black garbage collectors for granted, and often thoughtlessly left the lids off the garbage barrels, which then quickly filled up with rain. The workers would get in trouble if they poured the garbage-saturated rainwater out on a White person’s property in order to lift the barrels, or if they rolled the barrels across their lawns. And so, they had little choice but to lift these enormously heavy, water-laden containers. Such work led to many injuries.
The families of the garbage collectors lived in poverty. Many of them had formerly been sharecroppers in Mississippi, who had hoped that they could escape the backbreaking labor of the plantations by escaping across the Mississippi border to Memphis. Job discrimination, however, forced them into only the lowest forms of employment. Although away from the plantations, the sanitation workers in Memphis found that many of their supervisors were White men who had once been plantation supervisors… perhaps hired because of their “expertise” at managing Black labor. These supervisors had a plantation mentality, which included expecting their workers to work from sunup to sundown. The garbage collectors only got paid for an eight-hour day, but the work often took longer, and they were required to finish it or be fired. In conditions of rain, it could take up to twelve hours.
Conditions worsened further in January of 1968, when Henry Loeb became the new mayor of Memphis. Loeb had run a campaign based on enforcing “law and order.” Although most people today think of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign when they hear that phrase, the roots of “law and order” rhetoric came from the Jim Crow South. In the White South, civil rights protestors were regularly described as a disorderly threat to “peaceful race relations,” and those who broke the Jim Crow laws in sit-ins and freedom rides were condemned as law-breaking criminals. By the mid-sixties, public figures would be denounced for using explicitly racist language, and early law and order rhetoric was used as a way to signal an anti-civil rights message to White voters while also being able to deny any racist intentions. Over 90 percent of White Memphians voted for Loeb, while virtually no African Americans did. Like Richard Nixon, Loeb calculated that if he could win enough of the White vote by using non-explicitly racist appeals, he could ignore Blacks entirely. Which is exactly what he proceeded to do.
Loeb combined his law-and-order message with a message of fiscal responsibility, vowing to slash taxes by cutting back on city costs. Once again, this was race-neutral language that was used to hold back the progress of Black communities: for Loeb, “fiscal responsibility” included reducing the amount of garbage collectors, which meant that less men had to do the same amount of labor, meaning more overtime work that the garbage collectors would not get paid for. For Mayor Loeb, cutting costs also meant refusing to repair broken vehicles. The garbage collectors constantly warned the city that many of their trucks had bad brakes, which could be especially dangerous in stormy weather. Some trucks needed to be replaced entirely. Whereas previous administrations would at least discuss these concerns with the garbage collectors, Mayor Loeb decided to totally ignore them. Completely unconcerned with getting Black votes, he balanced the city’s budget on the backs of the city’s poorest and least politically powerful members.
Given all of these conditions, the two garbage collectors, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were exhausted. As the truck drove, they would normally ride on the sides, jumping off at each house to collect the trash. On February 1, however, with the cold rain blasting down on them, they needed to take cover. There was only enough room in the front of the truck for the driver, and they couldn’t even get a brief respite from the storm by taking shelter under an overhang somewhere because White residents would issue complaints about Black workers lounging about in their neighborhoods. Such “lounging” in White areas was a fireable offense. And so, Echol Cole and Robert Walker decided to take cover in the back of the old, dilapidated garbage truck. As the truck drove to the next destination, the trash compactor malfunctioned and suddenly turned on. The driver slammed on the brakes and rushed to stop it, but Walker and Cole were already being pulled into the compactor. One of them was about to jump free when the compactor caught his raincoat and pulled him in.
The Garbage Collectors Get Organized
Fury rippled through the community of garbage workers. Henry Loeb had been mayor from 1960 to 1963 as well – before being defeated in his first re-election bid – and these workers had dark memories of his unwillingness to invest in the repairs necessary to keep them safe. Two men had also died during Loeb’s first term, in accidents that would have been prevented if the mayor had valued Black life enough to invest in minor repairs. In the week that followed the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker, the anger amongst the garbage workers intensified when they discovered that the city had offered almost no compensation to the families of the deceased men, leaving their wives and children destitute. During that same week, drainage and sewage workers – who, along with the garbage collectors, made up the cities sanitation division – found out that their paychecks had been slashed after they had been told to go home because of a storm, despite the fact that they had been assured they would receive a full paycheck. For workers who lived week-to-week, an unexpected day without pay could mean not being able to put food on the table.
On Sunday, February 11, an infuriated 900 Black men crammed into the Memphis Labor Temple to express their grievances. Most had never attended a union meeting before, because they were afraid they would get fired if they attempted to unionize. A man named T.O. Jones stepped forward to address them. Jones had been born in Memphis in 1924, joined the Navy as a young man, and had worked in the Oakland shipyards after completing his military service. While in the shipyards, he had experienced the power of unions to provide workers with better wages and working conditions. When Jones returned to Memphis and became a garbage worker in 1959, he tried to convince his fellow workers to unionize. Despite his determination, he met with little success. In 1963, Jones was finally able to bring a few dozen men together to discuss unionization… but Mayor Loeb, then in his first term, sent informers to infiltrate the meeting. Everyone who attended was promptly fired.
After the firings, T.O. Jones reached out to local attorneys, union leaders, and ministers, who convinced Loeb to allow the men to return to work. Jones, however, decided not to return. Understanding that he would just lose his job again if he continued to organize, he began working as a janitor and focused his energies on organizing the garbage collectors from the outside. Jones began holding secret meetings to protect the identities of the workers, and spent years meeting one-on-one with them in the hopes of convincing each individual to support unionization. He borrowed money so that he could have more time to organize, went deeply into debt, and destroyed his relationship with his wife in the process. Unable to fire him, politicians offered to pay Jones off to stop his organizing, but he refused. By the time that Echol Cole and Robert Walker were killed, Jones had been trying to unionize the garbage collectors for almost a decade. He had sacrificed everything. In the process, he had also gained the trust and respect of the garbage workers. Now, T.O. Jones laid out their demands.
The workers wanted old and unsafe equipment fixed or replaced, Jones said to the 900 men, so that they would no longer have to fear that yet another worker would be killed. They wanted assurances that they would still get paid on rainy days, so they could predict their incomes and reliably feed and shelter their families. They wanted the right to unionize without fear of being fired, so that they could protect themselves and fight for decent working conditions. They wanted access to job promotions within the city’s sanitation division, which were currently available only to Whites. And they wanted a modest raise.
When the crowd approved these demands, Jones rushed from the Labor Temple to meet with the director of Public Works, who managed all jobs that involved keeping the city clean. The director ignored the demands completely: following the fiscal responsibility narrative of Mayor Loeb, he told Jones that the budget was out of balance, and that nothing could be done. He refused to negotiate in any way whatsoever. When the garbage collectors – who were waiting at the Labor Temple for a response – heard that their concerns had been so casually dismissed despite their very lives being at stake, their fury boiled over. Men who were previously too frightened to unionize now spontaneously decided to strike. They felt their conditions were so bad that they had little to lose. When a minister who was present asked if they were actually prepared to sustain a strike, one of the men exclaimed that it didn’t matter: “We don’t have anything no how.”
What followed was a sort of “Montgomery moment.” Twelve years earlier, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and less recognized leaders like E.D. Nixon and Jo Anne Robinson had anxiously waited during that first morning of the famous boycott to see if Black Montgomerians would actually stay off of the buses. Now, the garbage collectors anxiously waited to see how many people would actually refuse to go to work. The response was incredible: out of workforce of 1,300 men, only 75 showed up to work on the first day of the strike. Half of these were men who simply hadn’t gotten the word that a strike was on, and many of them walked away from work halfway through the day. Only thirty men showed up on the second day. Those who stayed immediately became social outcasts: many Black Memphians were connected to the garbage collectors through their churches and communities, and they understood how hard they worked and how bad their conditions were. One man’s wife even left him because he refused to join the strike… an action she interpreted as a selfish unwillingness to stand up for the Black community.
For the garbage workers, this felt like an inspiring and successful start. Virtually all of them had joined the strike, and they had gained widespread community support. However, more experienced labor organizers were concerned that the garbage workers were setting themselves up for failure. They were striking during the month of February, when seasonal agricultural work was dropping off in the surrounding areas. Unemployed agricultural workers could easily be enticed to replace the garbage collectors, especially if they were migrant laborers who wouldn’t be subjected to community pressure to support the strike. February was also cold, meaning that if garbage didn’t get collected, it would take a while for it to start to smell. A strike during the hot summer months, when uncollected garbage would quickly start to stink up entire neighborhoods, would have created much more public pressure to negotiate with the garbage collectors in order to end the strike quickly.
Among those who were concerned was Jerry Wurf, the president of America’s largest union for public employees – the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union – or AFSCME, which was headquartered in Washington, D.C. Jones had built a relationship with Wurf during his nine years of trying to organize the Memphis garbage workers, and Wurf had pledged his support. Jerry Wurf was a Jewish man who had grown up on the Lower East Side during the Great Depression, and was a fierce fighter for social justice and one of the nation’s most dynamic union leaders. Not only had the AFSCME supported successful strikes by sanitation workers in other cities under his leadership, Wurf had also desegregated the union, and supported people of color and religious minorities in taking on leadership roles. He was exactly the type of outside support the Memphis garbage workers needed if they were going to succeed. However, the spontaneous nature of the strike in Memphis broke all of Wurf’s rules for an effective strike. It was not well timed. It was the product not of strategy, but was compulsive. Most importantly, the financial backing the strikers would require to pay for the needs of their families had not been prepared for, meaning that the garbage workers would very quickly feel the burning economic need to return to work.
Wurf was concerned that if AFSCME sank money and resources into a failed strike, that it would damage the union’s reputation and jeopardize its effectiveness as a whole. However, when the high level of solidarity and determination amongst the garbage workers became clear, Wurf felt compelled to support them despite the risks to the larger labor struggle. He immediately sent an interracial team of advisors to Memphis. And so, thanks to groundwork laid by T.O. Jones over many years of what often seemed like fruitless labor, the Memphis garbage collectors quickly found themselves backed up by one of the nation’s major unions. They also quickly found themselves welcomed into a large union hall where they could hold their daily mass meetings: Memphis had a Firestone Tire factory that was highly organized by the United Rubber Workers union, which opened their space to the garbage workers.
Thus, on the third day of the strike – Tuesday, February 13 – AFSCME officials from Washington D.C. met with Mayor Loeb to negotiate on the workers behalf, while 1,300 sanitation workers attended a mass meeting at the union hall of the United Rubber Workers. The negotiations with the mayor broke down quickly: the garbage workers were breaking the law by striking, Loeb exclaimed, and he refused to negotiate with lawbreakers. He left the meeting and informed the press of his position of no compromise. In response, the workers decided to march five miles to City Hall. They flooded into the City Council chambers – built to hold no more than 400 people – while the Council was in session. They demanded to speak with the mayor themselves.
Mayor Loeb appeared. A wealthy White man from the Jim Crow South, he was accustomed to giving orders to Black people. He expected to be obeyed. Loeb now commanded the garbage collectors to get back to work. And then something happened that he had never experienced: the Black workers laughed in his face. The mayor was shocked. He screamed at them: “Go back to work!” The boos of the workers echoed through City Hall. Infuriated, the mayor hardened his position… and the workers became even more determined.
The White Media Responds
Whereas Black Memphians learned about the strike through their churches, communities, and personal connections with the garbage workers, White Memphians relied on White-dominated newspapers that dismissed Black voices. In fact, both of Memphis’s two major, White newspapers – the Commercial Appeal and the Press-Scimitar – failed to interview the garbage workers entirely, and instead based their reporting on racist assumptions. White Memphians treated the Black population very well, the papers asserted… a claim that was itself a denial of Black voices, as a way of assuaging White feelings. Given that local race relations had been “just fine,” some “troublemakers” must have come along to stir up the previously contented Black population. On the first day of the strike, the White media identified the “troublemaker” as T.O. Jones, who was blamed for starting the strike… despite the fact that it was the workers as a nearly unanimous whole who had decided on the action. Then, when the AFSCME got involved, the media began reporting that a big union based in Washington, D.C. was the cause of the strike… even though it was Jones who had contacted the AFSCME, and even though the AFSCME had felt dubious about supporting the garbage workers. White Memphians tended to uncritically assume that their news sources were accurate, and therefore had no understanding of why the garbage collectors were striking, and why their garbage wasn’t being collected. They easily fell prey to a false narrative.
As union representatives continued their attempts to negotiate with Mayor Loeb, the mayor spun a narrative that the strike was really about the crafty AFSCME officials taking advantage of gullible Black workers. This union, the mayor claimed, understood that if the garbage workers in Memphis were unionized, those workers would have to pay union dues. This “outsider” union, in other words, was really just after the worker’s money. Of course, it was true that union members would have to pay union dues if they wanted an effective union: after all, it was only those dues that allowed for unions to pay for the needs of worker’s families during a strike or to rent a union hall. The local papers failed to ask any garbage workers how they felt about unionization and paying union dues, and simply accepted the mayor’s false and politicized words as truth.
Mayor Loeb also opened all of the negotiations with the union up to the media, which turned the meetings away from being honest discussions and instead into performances for the public. The union representatives were tough men who had worked in mines and steel mills; they possessed a working-class swagger and a fiery way of negotiating that came off as overly aggressive on camera. The mayor strategically kept his cool during these televised meetings, and used the presence of the media to promote his message of law and order and to prove that he would not compromise with these “outsiders.”
Within days, a headline in the Commercial Appeal read: “Memphis is Being Used.” The article echoed the mayor’s narrative: “Make no mistake about it. Memphis was a carefully selected target for the garbage strike.” A cartoon portrayed a fat union leader standing on a pile of garbage with a sign reading: “The Right to Strike is Above Public Health.” The strikers were portrayed as loud, angry, lazy Black people demanding things from hard-working White people… even as television stations showed footage of strikers picketing in the cold rain day after day, and lying their bodies down on hard, oily streets to prevent garbage trucks from moving. The White press never explained why Black workers would make such obvious sacrifices. None of this was a surprise to African Americans: even when it came to Martin Luther King himself, the images the White southern media used were always of him looking angry; and certainly not looking peaceful, calm and composed. The White media – in Memphis and throughout much of the nation – enforced the mentality of segregation and Black dehumanization, on a daily basis.
Civil Rights Organizations Get Involved
On the evening of February 15, with negotiations with the mayor going nowhere, AFSCME officials made one last effort. They arranged to meet privately with Mayor Loeb in his home, and warned the mayor that his position of no compromise was only making the workers more determined. Indeed, the mayor’s hardline position had gained the attention of other unions, which now sought to support the garbage workers as well. To bring this point home, the AFSCME representatives brought with them the president of the United Rubber Workers, as well as a representative from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. Collectively, they represented a huge working class population. These men all emphasized to the mayor that a slight raise for the garbage workers, and a commitment to fix their equipment, was a miniscule expenditure for the city. He could end the strike now… or it was going to escalate.
For Loeb, however, the racial and class hierarchies he believed in were at stake. The garbage workers were also asking for access to promotions within the sanitation division that he thought should be available to Whites only. If Loeb caved on that, it would chip away at the racial hierarchy in other professions as well. And if he agreed to raise the wages for the garbage workers, he worried that it would be an incentive for more African Americans and working class people to demand raises –and to unionize – as well. Mayor Loeb rightfully understood that if he didn’t take a hardline stance on this, that it would upset the business leaders of Memphis, who would worry that their employees would be incentivized to fight for better conditions. If Loeb wanted the support of the city’s elite, he needed to hold a hard line. He therefore refused to budge. The union representatives then gave him one last warning: so far, this had only been a labor dispute, they said. But if the mayor didn’t end this now, civil rights organizations were going to get involved. The Black population of Memphis was up in arms over the treatment of the garbage workers, and the mayor could easily find himself with a movement on his hands.
Indeed, the very next day – Friday, February 16 – the Memphis NAACP chapter held a press conference and charged the city with “racial discrimination in the treatment of the sanitation workers.” The chapter had a long history of supporting direct, nonviolent action, including a strong involvement in the sit-in movement. They now endorsed the strike. On Saturday, February 17, the first truly mass meeting was held. No longer was it only the striking sanitation workers meeting in a union hall: Black ministers and civil rights leaders gave speeches alongside labor leaders, to an audience of 2000 people. On Sunday the 18th, anxious Memphis City Council members met secretly in an effort to prevent the relatively small labor dispute from escalating into a major social conflict. They endorsed giving the workers a small raise if they returned to work… but when the mayor found out, he condemned the Council, and they backed down. On Monday the 19th, after it had been made absolutely clear that negotiations with the mayor and City Council were impossible, the AFSCME and the NAACP began a formal alliance. The NAACP called for a boycott of downtown businesses, in order to put pressure on business owners… who would then put pressure on the mayor to end the strike. Things had, indeed, escalated. But they were also just getting started.
Showdown at City Hall
On Thursday, Feb. 22, Fred Davis – one of Memphis’s three Black City Council members – arranged to hold a hearing where the Council could discuss the strike with the garbage workers, union leaders, and supportive ministers. The hope was to find a way for the City Council to bring an end to the strike. Soon, the room designed for 400 was overflowing with 700 strikers. “Do you want a union?!”, one of them yelled, and the rest shouted back, “YES!” If they had ever truly doubted it, the Council was now forced to witness that unionization was not being forced on the workers, but was something they were demanding. Some of the workers then began to heckle the Black Council members: Why hadn’t they spoken out in support of the strike? Why hadn’t they stood up to the mayor? Fred Davis responded that he had to represent both White and Black Memphians. One of the ministers confronted him: “You can’t do it. You’re with us or not.”
Concerned about the rising tension in the room, one of the Council members proposed moving the meeting to a larger auditorium. The much-respected local civil rights leader O.Z. Evers, however, stood up and urged the men to “stay until Council recognizes the union and recognizes they can overrule the Mayor.” Sensing the energy in the crowd, union leaders took the microphone and insisted that they would not leave until the Council acknowledged that they had the power and the commitment to support the workers. The strikers began to sing freedom songs, ministers called their churches, and soon enough food was arriving – spread out across tables where city lawyers normally sat – to feed the 700 strikers who refused to leave City Hall. As police began surrounding the building, City Council members huddled, recognizing that they needed to do something to prevent a major social conflict. They promised the workers that they would spend the evening drawing up a resolution allowing for union recognition, and would present it to the City Council for a vote the following day. They would use their power to go around the mayor. The strikers cheered. They left City Hall, looking forward to the next morning.
The leading headline the next day, however, read: “Committee Gives In to Sit-In of Strikers, but Loeb Holds Firm.” The article condemned the Council for giving in to “a belligerent show of force,” and exclaimed that “Mr. Loeb’s stand is what will maintain law and order.” An accompanying cartoon portrayed the garbage workers as dark, dirty, sinister figures sitting atop piles of stinking trash. The City Council members, realizing that they would face a massive political backlash of angry White voters, quickly changed the resolution they were going to vote on: instead of a resolution on union recognition for the garbage workers, the resolution recognized Mayor Loeb as the sole decision maker on all matters regarding the strike.
That afternoon, a thousand garbage workers and their supporters – feeling in a celebratory mood – gathered in an auditorium to watch the Council members sign the resolution… with no knowledge that it had been changed. When the resolution was read, and the majority of Council members quickly signed it, the workers were shocked. For a moment, they sat in stunned silence. Police quickly appeared and whisked the Council members away as the workers rose to their feet in anger. A Black Air Force veteran held up the cartoon from the morning paper and shouted to the audience, “This is what they think of you!”, and then, “You’ll get only what you’re strong enough to take!” Others shouted that it was time to reach out to Black Power militants: “If they want trouble, we’ll give them trouble!” At that point, a pivotal member of the civil rights movement rushed forward. James Lawson – who had trained the students who led the sit ins and freedom rides and who had helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – urged the crowd to sit down for a moment. Now a local minister, Lawson said to the crowd: “Lets look at this for a few minutes and see what we’re going to do next.” They decided to march to a nearby church to hold a mass meeting and plan their response.
Led by T.O. Jones, the crowd poured out of the auditorium and onto the street, ready to march. Outside, however, they encountered hundreds of police who blocked their path. They were told they lacked a marching permit. James Lawson immediately got on the phone with the police director, and warned him that these men were angry and needed to blow off some steam if they were realistically going to remain nonviolent. A march would help them do that, while denying the march would add fuel to the fire. Other civil rights leaders rushed to the mayor’s office to warn him that he needed to allow this march to prevent a riot. To his credit, Mayor Loeb ordered the police to allow the march to go forward.
The police ordered the enormous crowd to take up no more than one lane of traffic… but once the march began, it predictably spilled out onto the whole street. Once it did, a long line of police cars quickly appeared, driving bumper-to-bumper, each one with five officers armed with rifles and holding their billy clubs ready. The line of cars began pushing up against the crowd, aggressively trying to force them back into one lane. James Lawson – a veteran of violent police attacks – warned those around him to keep their cool: the police were trying to provoke the marchers in order to create an excuse for a crackdown. Suddenly, there was a scream: one of the police cars, slowly moving alongside the crowd, had come to rest on a woman’s foot. When the car didn’t move, the crowd rushed over, collectively trying to lift the vehicle off her foot… an action the police later described as attacking the car.
It was at this point that orders were given for officers to don their gas masks. In a move that was clearly premeditated, police cars suddenly appeared from the side streets along the march. Officers poured out of the cars, spraying mace into the eyes and up the noses of whoever they could reach, beating them with their batons, and shoving them off of the street. Total panic ensued as the marchers fell to the ground, blinded, struggling to breath, their skin peeling off and burning with excruciating pain. Mace was a chemical that had originally been developed for war, and it was now being used on completely peaceful protestors who were simply fighting for humane working conditions. A number of ministers had been trying to de-escalate the energy of the march by politely conversing with nearby officers; those officers now suddenly turned on them. As people in the crowd ran screaming in all directions, Civil Rights Commissioner Jacques Wilmore – who was there in an official capacity to observe the march – looked on in shock: he noted that one of the Black police officers, with a look of profound shame on his face, was purposefully spraying mace into the air instead of at his community members. When an officer approached him, Wilmore showed the officer his government badge… and was maced anyway. In Wilmore’s words, “The police officer just saw the color of my skin… he just operated automatically, at that moment the enemy was anybody with a black face.” Even Black shoppers coming out of stores found themselves attacked.
As hundreds of beaten, bleeding and half blinded African Americans fled back into their communities, a collective sense of horror rippled through Black Memphis. It was a turning point. An immediate, intense sense of unity spread throughout the entire Black community that transcended class, age, and any religious or political differences. The strike of the garbage workers had now become the major, social upheaval that union representatives had warned the mayor he would be wise to prevent.
Headlines the next day revealed the chasm between White and Black Memphians: newspapers claimed the police had used “extreme restraint” and “self control.” After all, one paper wrote, “They had guns, but they didn’t shoot.” The mayor praised the police for maintaining “law and order.”
The Youth, The Invaders, and Black Power
In the wake of the attack, the garbage workers adopted the iconic civil rights slogan, “I AM a Man,” and began twice-daily marches – once in the morning and once in the afternoon – to City Hall holding those iconic signs. The signs were an assertion of their dignity and humanity; a way of saying that Black lives mattered. City officials warned the strikers that any union representatives or workers speaking out on behalf of the strike would now be arrested. In response, 150 ministers gathered to create the Community on the Move for Equality (COME), to be led by James Lawson. With the workers and union leaders no longer able to speak publicly in support of the strike, Lawson and this new ministerial organization now took on the role of public leadership. The organization included a full half of the city’s Black ministers, and they urged their congregations to boycott downtown stores. Memphis was forty percent Black, and the impact of the boycott was soon painfully felt. Pickets of downtown stores were organized as well, driving away many White customers who felt uncomfortable walking through the racially tense atmosphere.
Other community members took a different sort of action. By this time, the strike was a month old, and the mayor had been able to hire 317 workers. Most were outsiders, but 62 were men who had broken with the strike. On Saturday, March 2, two of these strikebreakers were assaulted, and another had a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window of his home. Bricks shattered the windows of businesses associated with Mayor Loeb. Dozens of piles of trash were poured out onto the streets and lit on fire, forcing the fire department to make fifty-two runs on Saturday night alone.
In the week that followed, such actions escalated. The police attacks had radicalized the youth, and many of them were on fire with indignation. On March 5, the garbage workers once again flooded into the City Council, and when they refused to leave, 121 people were arrested. Masses of Black youth marched to City Hall, linking arms and blocking the police from taking the workers away. When they eventually opened a corridor in the crowd for the arrested workers to pass through, the youth cheered for their elders, proud of them for fighting so hard for their dignity. In such an atmosphere, school felt irrelevant, and many Black high school students began skipping classes and organizing their own marches to City Hall. Some of those marches looked like the marches of their elders, with the youth singing freedom songs… but in others, students marched through the city, symbolically overturning trash cans; or marched through downtown chanting “Black Power!” Some youth roamed the city looking for police cars, smashing their windows and in some cases totally destroying them.
Many of these youth, burning with a desire to take action, were drawn to a street gang called The Invaders. The Invaders sported Afros and African amulets, listened to the psychedelic rock of Jimi Hendrix, and experimented with hallucinogens for fun and for political and spiritual expansion. They had chosen their name because they felt that White Memphians treated Black people as if they were dangerous, alien beings. The Invaders emphasized Black unity, and sought to build bridges between youth who were fighting over different turfs in the Black ghettos of Memphis. They wore jackets with their logo emblazoned on them; these jackets soon became hip amongst Black students, even if they weren’t members of the gang.
The Invaders were influenced by local, Black Power-inspired community organizers like Charles Cabbage, who had studied history at Morehouse College. Like other Black Power activists, Cabbage had been drawn to the anticolonial freedom fighters in Africa and Asia who were breaking free from the chains of European colonialism during the same years that the civil rights movement was igniting in the United States. Like most Black freedom fighters – including luminaries from Du Bois to King – Cabbage viewed the Black freedom struggle in the United States as one manifestation of a larger; long-standing assault on global White supremacy. By 1968, Cabbage had concluded that a full-scale revolution was necessary in the United States, just as it was in the lands colonized by Europeans. Like some other Black Power revolutionaries, Cabbage and his comrades believed that only the most oppressed people would be willing to take the ultimate risks to organize total revolution. Cabbage had therefore abandoned his original attempt to organize Black college students and had returned to organize the Black ghettos of Memphis. Cabbage emphasized ideas inspired by anticolonial freedom fighters, including that oppressed people can only regain their full sense of dignity if they attack their oppressors head on. Cabbage believed that nonviolence could only bring about limited change, and that even then, oppressive forces would only cave in to nonviolent action if they perceived that if they did not, more violent, revolutionary actions would be taken. As the strike of the garbage workers became increasingly intense, Charles Cabbage and The Invaders started to view themselves as representing a more pervasive, violent threat that lurked in the background if strategies of nonviolence failed. It was only that threat, they believed, which would force White Memphians to compromise.
In the midst of these developments, two visionary freedom fighters arrived in town. One was Roy Wilkins, the president of the NAACP. Wilkins had spent a lifetime in the struggle: he had first traveled through Memphis in 1929… investigating African American working conditions. He now told the audience that when you work over forty hours a week and get paid so little that you still depend on welfare to survive, “that you ought to stay here and fight until hell freezes over.” The other speaker was Martin Luther King’s great mentor, and the master organizer of the March on Washington: Bayard Rustin. Rustin was renowned as one of the greatest strategists of nonviolent resistance not only in the nation, but in the world, and he had famously been sent down to Montgomery to support the young Martin Luther King navigate the boycott that initiated the movement.
Rustin had always urged King to build strong connections between the labor movement and the fight for racial justice. He now told the crowd that Memphis embodied the labor/civil rights unity that he and King had always fought for. Memphis was an example of where the movement needed to go from here, in order to fulfill the ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and a truly robust democracy. Rustin told the crowd of 9,000: “This becomes the symbol of the movement to get rid of poverty… this fight is going to be won because the black people in this community and the trade unions stand together.” Rustin added, “I am sure your papers do not report and debate the truth of what’s happening here,” but “people who believe in justice and democracy are behind you.”
Indeed they were. On March 17, White Memphians woke up to a newspaper headline that shocked them: “King to Lend Vocal Support at Rally.” A man many of them greatly feared was going to be arriving in town the very next day: Martin Luther King.
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Bibliography
This story was based primarily on Michael K. Honey’s profoundly moving book, Going Down Jericho Road. I’m grateful for his generous feedback on this piece. Other works consulted include:
Anne Braden is one of the greatest examples we have of a White Southerner, steeped in the culture of segregation, breaking free from that culture and becoming a powerful voice for Black liberation. Born in 1924 and raised in a well-off family in Alabama, Anne questioned segregation as a child and again while in college, before finally making a clean break with White supremacy as a journalist in the mid-1940s. When the civil rights movement broke out a decade later, Anne was one of the few figures that White Southerners could look to as an example of how to liberate themselves from their own oppressive culture and beliefs, and to work for racial justice. Her life, however, has lessons for us all: for we all benefit from understanding how White people can break free from the grip of racism, stand in solidarity with people of all colors, and come together to build a better world.
Childhood: the First Stage of Questioning
Like many Southerners, Anne Braden grew up in a deeply religious household. As a child, she was moved by Christian teachings of universal brotherhood and sisterhood and of loving one’s neighbor. In her church hung an image of Jesus, surrounded by all the children of the world, of all colors, learning his teachings together. The image stood out to the young Anne because in her experience, children of different colors did not learn together or go to church together. The world that she lived in didn’t seem to match up with Jesus’s teachings.
Nor did segregation match up with Anne’s sense of fairness as a child. When Anne’s clothes were worn out, her family passed them down to a little Black girl who was bigger than Anne… so the clothes were not only worn out but were too tight. Growing up in a paternalistic culture, the fact that little Black kids were often given the discarded clothes of little White kids was viewed by the adults in Anne’s life as an act of compassion and generosity. But the young Anne viewed it as unfair. She imagined being the little Black girl, and she knew she wouldn’t be happy to have to wear those tight, worn-out clothes. However, when Anne asked questions about the poverty she saw amongst African Americans, the adults in her life told her that Black people were a “simpler race” with fewer needs, and were “happy with the way things were.” Anne, however, could never fully believe this.
Anne would later insist that she was not an exceptional child for questioning segregation. Rather, this process of questioning was a normal part of growing up in the White South. However, in the decades before the civil rights movement forced the conversation, White Southerners rarely discussed segregation: it was simply an accepted fact of life. Those who did dare to question it found themselves marginalized and isolated, or even forced out of the region under threat of violence and economic retaliation. Anne didn’t become aware that people questioned segregation at all until she went to college… an opportunity many White Southerners, and especially White Southern women, did not have. In the White South, with its culture of silence around racial disparity, there were few opportunities for children to explore their concerns about fairness and justice. As they grew up, they usually acclimated into the culture of White supremacy they were raised in. Anne Braden often emphasized that the same would have happened to her had other events in her life not unfolded.
College: Laying the Foundations for an Anti-Racist Consciousness
When Anne was a teenager, she began to worry that she was unpopular and unattractive. She realized that boys were often attracted to girls who made them feel like THEY were the smart ones, and so she began to downplay her intelligence. Indeed, she quickly became popular after making this decision. When the time came to go to college, she still had boys on her mind, and so rejected the idea of going to a women’s college. However, World War II had begun while she was in high school. In 1940 Congress initiated a peacetime draft, and Anne realized that given the likelihood of the U.S. entering the war, that few men would be on campus. She changed her mind and made a decision that would alter the course of her life: she decided to go to a women’s college after all.
In an environment where she didn’t feel the need to downplay her intelligence, Anne was able to find herself. Instead of rejecting her love of learning, she embraced it, later writing that “I don’t think I knew the excitement of an idea until I got to college.” She studied literature and journalism and became the editor in chief of the college newspaper, writing about her great passion for moral ideals and the tremendous struggles against fascism and for democracy happening overseas. Anne won many awards for her work and graduated from Stratford Women’s College as valedictorian.
It was at Stratford that Anne discovered her first female mentors… women who served as role models and who helped Anne expand her vision of her own possibilities as a woman. Anne had grown up in a society where the roles of women were profoundly limited, and where life was even further restricted by notions of individualism that reduced the purpose of life to personal success. The female professors Anne was drawn to, however, emphasized that life was just as much about building stronger communities, and ultimately a better world. Personal happiness was found not through individualistic pursuits, but through contributing to the world and building meaningful connections with others. It was a vision that resonated with Anne, and reminded her of the Christian teachings she felt so compelled by.
Anne had been five years old when the Great Depression began, and although her own father held a steady job and their family was economically secure, she had strong memories of endless streams of beggars getting off the trains going door-to-door begging. She was also aware, as a child, that African Americans rode these trains as well, but never dared to beg in White neighborhoods. As a teenager, she understood the rising threats of fascism overseas; of global destabilization; and finally of world war. The notion of a life devoted to something larger than ones own self spoke to Anne’s religious sensibilities, but it seemed especially important given the dire times Anne was living through. She was drawn to these professors, and they took her under their wings. One of them began inviting Anne to intellectual gatherings, where Anne was introduced to the professor’s sister, Harriet Fitzgerald. Harriet became the first person Anne Braden met who did not merely disagree with segregation, but took an active stance against it.
Harriet had a female lover in New York, and may have had romantic feelings for Anne as well. She made a special effort to help Anne cultivate herself as an intellectual – introducing her to the works of influential thinkers of the era, including Freud and Marx – and sought to help Anne overcome the prejudices she was raised with. Although Anne did not share Harriet’s romantic desires for women, she was able to experience a deep emotional support from Harriet that made all of her previous experiences with men seem superficial. Anne described their connection as a kind of intense intellectual excitement she had not yet experienced, later expressing that “before I met Harriet, I never knew that kind of excitement was possible between two human beings. Later I told her that I didn’t think I would have ever been able to have the kind of relationship I had with Carl [her future husband] had it not been for her. Never after that have I felt any sexual interest in someone who did not excite me intellectually.”
Anne had a major racial awakening when she went to visit Harriet in New York. Harriet – hoping to help Anne break free from her segregationist upbringing – arranged for her to have dinner with a Black woman from the South, under the pretense that they had similar intellectual interests. Anne later wrote: “I went to the meeting with some misgivings. Never in my life had I eaten with a Negro.” Anne later realized that the woman was well aware of how she would have felt as a White woman from the South, and was consciously trying to put Anne at ease. The Black woman was, essentially, working with Harriet to help Anne process, work through, and eventually break free from her White supremacist upbringing.
The two women soon fell into deep conversation… and once they did, Anne ceased to think about the fact that she was White and her conversationalist was Black. They were simply two people having an excellent conversation. Suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, Anne became aware of the fact that she had forgotten about race entirely. A shockwave rippled through her: there was no actual “race problem!” It was an illusion. She later wrote that at this moment, “some heavy shackles seemed to fall from my feet.” The chains that prevented her from being able to embody the spiritual visions she was drawn to as a child – of loving one’s neighbor as oneself; as striving for universal sisterhood and brotherhood – were starting to break.
By this time, Anne had transferred to Randolph-Macon Women’s College – a larger school, where she would be even more intellectually challenged. Here, she studied dance, became aware of the deep connections between her physical, mental, and spiritual health, and fell in love with the Russian authors Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. She began running with an “artsy” crowd, and amongst this crowd – many of whom consciously thought of themselves as outsiders – it was common to oppose segregation. Anne’s conversation in New York, combined with her participation in this crowd, led her, for the first time, to develop a conscious stance against segregation. A third and final element in the development of that consciousness during her college years was World War II: as Anne later wrote, “We were aware that in fighting Hitler, we were fighting a racist ideology, though I don’t think we used that word ‘racist.’ It didn’t escape people I knew that those ideas about racial superiority were akin to what we had here in the South.”
By the time Anne graduated from college in 1945 – shortly before the end of the war – she had developed an anti-racist consciousness. However, she had not yet acted on that consciousness, nor did she know how too. She had yet to meet people who were engaged in actual struggle, and was not even aware that major struggles against racial oppression were sparking up all over the South. All of this would soon change.
Journalism: Coming Face-to-Face With Brutal Realities
Following her graduation, Anne returned home to live with her parents and became a full time reporter examining local political issues. When fascism was finally defeated overseas, a sense of euphoria swept through her: democratic ideals had won the day! Authoritarianism had been defeated! However, as Black GI’s returned from the war, they made it clear that they had not fought and died overseas fighting Hitler’s racist authoritarianism, only to return home and be subjected to the racist authoritarianism of Jim Crow. They would not rest until democracy was extended to their people as well. Lynchings skyrocketed as Black men in uniform fought for the basic rights to democracy for Black Americans. As a reporter who had to chronicle these events, Anne’s euphoria about the success of democracy quickly faded.
She sank into depression. Without her college community and her easy access to professors and mentors, Anne didn’t know where to turn. Her concerns could not easily – or even safely – be discussed. Like many White Southerners who were troubled by segregation, Anne felt alone. Not yet aware of the communities and organizations that embodied her newly found anti-racist values, she turned inwards. Without community, she threw herself into work and into writing… but also into isolation.
It did not help that she was back home. As African Americans increasingly stood up for their rights after the war, many White Southerners reacted by taking increasingly stronger stances for keeping things the way they were. Anne’s father was one of those people. Both of her parents were deeply disturbed by Anne’s newfound anti-racist perspectives, and her father expressed that he regretted ever sending her to college. During one of their many arguments, Anne expressed that she supported a federal anti-lynching law. Her father exploded: “We ought to have a good lynching every once and a while to keep the nigger in his place!” Although he later regretted saying it, the outburst shook Anne to her core. She had always seen her father as a gentle and loving man, and she felt confident that he would never actually join a lynch mob. Still, here was an otherwise good-hearted man who had justified murder in his own heart and mind. It was one of the key moments in Anne’s life that caused her to think of White supremacy as something that distorted the souls of White people; that caused them to act against the spiritual and ethical values they believed in, and that made it impossible for them to live out truly ethical or spiritual lives. White supremacy, for Anne, became something that White people needed to free themselves from.
Anne escaped the tensions of her home by taking a job in Birmingham in the summer of 1946, reporting on the events at the courthouse. Bull Connor – who would later go down in history for ordering fire-hoses and attack dogs to be turned on civil rights protestors in 1963 – was the police commissioner. Well known for his brutality, Connor’s police forces had recently murdered five Black veterans who had dared to stand up for their rights after returning from war. Anne witnessed Black veterans lined up at the courthouse, trying to register to vote. The same men came week after week, without success. She wanted to write an article about these voter registration attempts, but the newspaper didn’t consider it worth reporting on.
As Anne covered the events at the courthouse, she was forced to realize that there was not one legal system, but two. There, she saw that if a Black man killed a White man, the outcome for the Black man – no matter what the circumstances, such as clear cases of self-defense – would be execution. On the other hand, she saw that if a White man killed a Black man, the judge would almost always rule that the killing had been justified. She saw that if a White man raped a Black woman, the case was simply dismissed: it was not even worth discussion. But if a Black man so much as looked at a White woman in an “improper” way, it was usually ruled as “assault with intent to rape.” Braden reported on one case in which a Black man was charged with “assault with intent to rape,” when he had looked at a White woman in an “insulting way” from across the street. It would be nearly a decade until the case of Emmett Till – murdered for whistling at a White woman in the summer of 1955 – brought such injustices before the eyes of the nation, and helped to ignite the civil rights movement.
One day, a deputy at the courthouse began flirting with Anne. Hoping to impress her, he opened a cabinet drawer and pulled out the skull of a Black man who – he hinted, with a proud gleam in his eye – he had helped kill. He told her that the murder would, of course, never be solved. Anne later wrote: “I looked at the skull. It became larger before my eyes. It filled the room and the world. It became a symbol of the death that gripped the South.” The death – the murder – that her own, loving father supported. Anne was filled with horror and rushed out of the room. The violence against Black people in the Deep South was so casual it was usually not even deemed worthy of reporting or discussing, but now Anne found herself facing it fully. It was too much for her. After eight months of facing brutal truths in Birmingham, she took another newspaper job in the Upper South: in Louisville, Kentucky, where she had been born before moving to the Deep South as a baby. It would be in Louisville that she encountered civil rights activists for the first time, and met people who helped pull her into the movement.
Carl Braden
When Anne first arrived in Louisville, she felt a great sense of relief at the absence of brutality that she perceived. Unlike the constant, casual violence of the Deep South, there had been no outright racial violence in Louisville for a long time. The buses were not segregated. African Americans could vote, which meant that there were politicians who actually represented Black interests. Unlike in the Deep South, Black issues were not made invisible to the White community, but were actually reported on. There were even White people who openly opposed racial oppression. However, most spaces were still segregated, including parks, hotels, restaurants, theatres, hospitals, and schools. And as was true throughout the country, African Americans were restricted to living in impoverished neighborhoods, and suffered from rampant job discrimination. However, the mere fact that there was any degree of desegregation and any degree of Black political power was what initially jumped out at Anne.
On her first day of work at the Louisville Times – March 31, 1947 – Anne was introduced to her new colleagues… including the man who would become her future husband, Carl Braden. Unlike Anne, who had been born into a very comfortable upper-middle-class life, Carl had been born into a struggling working-class family. His father had been a railroad worker who worked such long hours he almost never saw his family. A union man, he lost his job when Carl was eight years old for participating in a failed strike demanding better working conditions. For months afterwards, the family ate almost nothing but beans. One of Carl’s dominant childhood experiences was of hunger – in the deep, psychological sense of not knowing when you would be able to get food to relieve it. For Carl, hunger meant growing up early. He became deeply aware of injustice… of the fact that many people, like his family, worked hard and still had nothing, and yet were harshly judged as poor White trash by families exactly like Anne’s. Carl joined gangs and learned to fight when he was very young. Like so many others, he also learned to drink and smoke to alleviate the pain of having ones dignity ripped away. He would continue to drink, smoke, and fight until World War II, when he decided to swear off it all to better commit himself to his work as a journalist and labor organizer.
Carl had been a very thoughtful child – a voracious reader who spent hours listening to the conversations of his large extended family, who often gathered around the kitchen table for discussion. Carl’s father was an agnostic socialist who had named his son after Karl Marx; whereas his mother and her extended family were all devout Catholics. Carl’s father was not anti-religious, but believed that matters of the afterlife and questions about God were beyond the human capacity to understand. He stayed quiet when conversations turned towards religion, but often mentioned at the end of religious conversations that Jesus’s teachings seemed right in alignment with socialism to him. The young Carl agreed with his father. They were all talking about loving thy neighbor, about the brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind that his future wife Anne had also been drawn to as a child. Carl’s heroes, growing up, were Christian saints on the one hand, and socialist leaders on the other. To him, they seemed to hold the same ideals.
When Carl was not out roaming around with his gang getting into fights, he was at home absorbed in books. His parents had only gone to elementary school, and they pushed their children to do well in school so they could have a better life than them. Carl went to a Catholic school, and when he was thirteen the nuns encouraged him to put his intellectual abilities in the service of God and to begin studying to become a priest. Carl accepted this as an honor that would help him fulfill his young desire to live a life of social responsibility. However, by the time he was sixteen, he found himself rebelling against the church, and soon dropped out of school entirely. He had not turned against the church’s teachings, however, but was rather rebelling against the structures of authority within his church, school, family, and ultimately, society. Looking for work as a young, rebellious, working-class intellectual, Carl gravitated towards journalism, just as Anne would later do. He was given the task of reporting on the police department, where he witnessed incredible corruption and brutality. Eight years older than his future wife Anne, Carl was soon reporting on the Great Depression, including the intense labor struggles of local impoverished coal miners… all while still a teenager. The combination of his upbringing and the things he witnessed as a reporter led him to become a devoted labor organizer.
Interracial Organizing and the Commitment to Activism
When Anne was first introduced to Carl, he was covering labor issues for the newspaper, while she was covering education. However, from time to time, Anne would help Carl on his labor reporting. When she showed interest in the subject, he began giving her books to read on socialism and the history of labor organizing. She was soon attending union meetings with him. Anne had been raised to believe that people like her family were well off because they were smart, disciplined, and hard working, and that if people were poor it meant they had made bad decisions or were lazy. Anne had long doubted these class prejudices, and understanding the history of labor organizing – and getting to know the organizers themselves – destroyed them completely. She came to see the working class as another exploited group suffering from negative stereotypes, who, like African American freedom fighters, were dignified, intelligent, and fighting hard for the right to live a decent life. Carl helped Anne commit herself to ending class oppression, and she helped him commit himself to the battle against White supremacy.
One of the unions that Carl introduced her to – The United Farm Equipment Workers – was interracial: it demanded equal treatment for Blacks and for Whites within the union, as well as in wages and working conditions on the job. It was one of the first places Anne was exposed to where Blacks and Whites were equal in the way they spoke to one another. In the South, it was dangerous for African Americans to speak openly and honestly with Whites, especially when it came to criticizing racist attitudes. The United Farm Equipment Workers union was the first place where Anne experienced African Americans speaking frankly to Whites. It was the first place where African Americans would call her out, correct her, and point out any racist assumptions or behaviors she had. She later expressed that she must have been “like a bull in a china shop” during this period, when she was navigating interracial and Black spaces for the first time. She had had almost no experience interacting with African Americans, and did not even know how to correctly pronounce “Negro…” because everyone around her had always said “nigger.”
Anne came into contact with civil rights organizations during this same period. As a reporter covering education, she investigated the efforts of the local NAACP to desegregate Kentucky’s colleges, and used this as an opportunity to begin building relationships with the NAACP. The increase in civil rights militancy as Black veterans returned from war had doubled the number of NAACP chapters in Kentucky, and Anne soon found herself attending civil rights meetings. Once again, she found herself in spaces where Black people would not automatically defer to her and stay silent when they disagreed with her, which, up until this period, had been her entire life experience as a White person. It was a dramatic experience for Anne, forcing her to realize that all of her previous interactions with Black people had been false and inauthentic: they had never felt safely able to show her, as a White person, their true thoughts and feelings. Anne came to value these interracial organizing spaces as crucial spaces of authenticity and honesty. But, most importantly for her, she felt they were spaces where Black people would treat her as a human being… instead of showing her only the façade of deference.
As Anne moved beyond mere interactions with Black people in these organizing spaces, and began developing actual friendships, she felt her commitment to racial justice deepen. She also felt increasingly alienated from the world she had grown up in, from her family, and from her previous friends. She later described this year – 1947 – as a painful period of “turning myself inside out” and being pulled “up by the roots.” She began looking at her previous values as a type of prison that she still had yet to fully escape. By 1948, she had discarded many old beliefs and attitudes, but she was not yet sure what they would be replaced with. One of the answers came through re-evaluating her work. Anne now questioned whether journalism was the greatest service she could offer. Deciding it was not, she quit her job and threw herself into a life of organizing and of activism.
The Case of Andrew Wade
Anne and Carl quickly came to feel that they were meant to be together, and married in the spring of 1948. Anne was twenty-four years old. She later wrote that “we were joining our lives to bring about a better world.” Being together made them both much stronger and more effective: Carl used to say about their dynamic that “one and one made more than two.” The two of them stepped away from the newspaper together, deciding that they wanted be fully engaged in social issues, rather than just writing about them. Throughout the late forties and early fifties, they dedicated themselves to a number of causes. They created a Labor Information Center, and taught publication skills to union members. They organized against the growing nuclear arms race, and gathered support for W.E.B. Du Bois – the founder of the NAACP and one of the greatest Black intellectuals of all time – when he was put on trial as a “subversive” for opposing the escalation of the Cold War. Anne played a major role in the Interracial Hospital Movement, which developed after a Black man who had been in a car accident died because a segregated hospital refused to serve him. It was the first civil rights campaign in which Anne played a major organizing role, and it succeeded at desegregating Kentucky’s hospitals.
Anne also began working with the radical Civil Rights Congress, travelling and speaking about racial inequities in the justice system and the ways that Black men were often sent to death for false accusations, while White men regularly got away with the murder and rape of Black people. For these activities, she was briefly incarcerated for the first time, at the age of twenty-six. Her arrest led her to realize that her racial convictions placed her “at odds with a power structure from which she had always previously benefitted,” to use the words of historian Catherine Fosl. Anne also received an important piece of advice which would give direction to the rest of her life: after reporting to the founder of the Civil Rights Congress – William Patterson – about her activities speaking at Black churches and writing in Black newspapers, Patterson told her that it was White people whose minds needed to be changed, not Blacks. She contemplated his advice. Working to organize White people to understand and oppose racism eventually became her life’s work.
Anne Braden was thrown into infamy, however, before she had a chance to embrace the work she would one day be most remembered for. In March of 1954, a Black World War II veteran named Andrew Wade approached the Bradens for help. Wade had been trying to purchase a home outside of the segregated Black communities of Louisville – he simply wanted a nicer, larger home for his growing family than was available in Black neighborhoods. Wade had a successful business, and came close to closing a deal on a few houses… but as soon as he met the real estate agents and they saw that he was Black, he was rejected. Wade asked some of his White friends if they would be willing to purchase the house under their name, and then transfer it to him. They refused. Wade then approached the Bradens. He did not know them personally, but they had developed a reputation for supporting Black causes by that time. They did not hesitate to support him.
The Bradens understood that the move would cause controversy, but they also believed the plan would work. Louisville was segregated and unequal, but it wasn’t violent. Compared to the Deep South, race relations were very quiet. As for Andrew Wade, he expected that his White neighbors would be angry at first, but would eventually come to know and respect him and his family. The intensity of the events that transpired took them all by surprise.
The house that Andrew Wade selected had recently been built by a man named James Rone. Rone was not a large-scale builder, but a working man with calloused hands in his mid forties, who had acquired some land with the dream of building a small community. He was building up other houses on a street he had proudly named after himself – Rone Court – including one for his son Buster. Building up this little community out in the countryside was his big dream, and Anne felt guilty for not telling him they were purchasing a home for a Black family. Anne valued honesty and trustworthiness very deeply, and was troubled by purposefully deceiving someone. Reflecting later on her feelings, she realized that while buying into White supremacy made it impossible for White people to live out their own ethical and spiritual values, White supremacy also made it impossible for her, as a committed antiracist, to be perfectly ethical. She could not simultaneously deal honorably with Andrew Wade and James Rone at the same time.
When the Black Wade family moved in instead of the White Braden family, James Rone panicked. He called his friends, and Andrew Wade watched from his new house as car after car arrived at the Rones. There were soon twenty cars, and a crowd of people milling around James Rone’s home. They did not, however, approach the Wade’s house. At around midnight the crowd instead headed over to the Bradens.
Carl answered the door, and James Rone asked if he had sold the house to “coloreds.” Carl said that he had. Rone explained that there weren’t any Black people out there. The Braden’s sale must have been a mistake. Carl responded that color shouldn’t matter; that Black people, like all people, should have the right to move wherever they could afford to move. Someone in the crowd then yelled, “But I’ve saved up for years to buy the house I own out there!” They were concerned that if Black people moved into the neighborhood, the value of their homes would dramatically decline. Carl replied that Andrew Wade had also spent years saving so that he could buy a decent home. Perhaps they should realize that they all wanted the same thing. At that point a large man stepped up to Carl and asked him if he had any children. Carl said “Yes,” and the man replied, “Well, you’d better watch out.” Carl, who had spent much of his life fighting, felt his muscles tense up. He told them that they needed to leave. They did.
Reflecting on these events in her memoir of this moment – The Wall Between –Anne did not feel that James Rone had purposefully sent a mob to threaten them. She believed that he had panicked at the thought that all of his property would decline in value; panicked at the thought that White people who associated with Black people would be looked down on and that he would lose the standing he so desired to have; panicked when all the racial prejudices he had inherited washed over him and caused him to be fearful of blackness. One moment, he had felt safe and secure, felt that all of his long-sought ambitions were finally coming true… and the next moment he felt the world crashing around him. He had panicked and called his friends, just trying to figure out what to do, but once word got out, it was beyond his control. It wasn’t him who had stepped forward and threatened their children. Anne wrote: “The crowd at Rone’s house became almost transformed into a mob because these people did not know what else to do with their frustration, because acting as a unit and together gave them back some of the sense of security they had lost.” In the following days she called the local pastors, trying to gain support. They said they would lose their congregations if they supported integrated neighborhoods. Anne wrote that even the pastors “were guided by what he thought his neighbor thought, by what he thought his neighbor expected of him,” rather than by what they truly believed in and thought was right.
Anne called James Rone the following day to try to resolve the tensions. She asked him to just give Andrew Wade and his family a chance. They were all good people. Surely they could all get along. Rone replied that he was in a difficult situation, emphasizing that “Everybody out here is blaming me.” His response helped Anne understand that Rone had to prove to his friends and neighbors that he was not part of this; that he did not support a Black family moving into the neighborhood. And each person that joined the mob, likewise, felt that they needed to prove the same thing to their friends and neighbors. Anne wondered, “How much so-called prejudice is maintained from generation to generation because every man must prove to his neighbor that he thinks as he thinks his neighbor thinks?” It was “a vicious circle of social pressure.” Indeed, a few years later – after it had all died down – some White families came forward and said that they would not have minded the Wades living there at all: but they were afraid of being socially ostracized, and so maintained their silence.
The Braden’s were soon receiving a continuous stream of death threats: the phone rang every five or ten minutes; and because the Bradens were worried about the Wades, they felt compelled to pick up each and every call. Anne, however, noticed a pattern in the threatening voices, and realized that it was likely only half a dozen people calling on rotations, hoping that if each of them only called once an hour, their voice would not be recognized. This decreased her stress, but then a call came in saying that “something” would happen today. And then: in six hours. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. The calls kept coming. Fifteen minutes. Carl was unfazed, staying focused on his reading in the living room. He said that if they were really going to be attacked they wouldn’t be warned. Anne later reflected that Carl had long ago learned to shrug off physical threats. But it was her first time confronting them. She took the kids and left the house in case a bomb had been planted.
Meanwhile, James Rone and his son Buster went to talk with Andrew Wade, trying to convince him to sell the house back to them. Andrew said: “I’m not trying to force myself and my family on you. You don’t have to be my friend or ever come on my property if you don’t want to. But how can you say I don’t have a right to live in the same neighborhood as you? Try to put yourself in my place for a minute. I’m an American citizen. I fought for my country. I’m a person, like you. I want a decent house to live in. Will you say that in a democracy I can’t have a decent house to live in, that I can’t live where I want to, just because my skin is a different color than yours? We can all get along in the same world. That’s what democracy means.” He turned to Buster and said that perhaps he was too young to have fought for his country or to have seriously contemplated democracy. But did he understand?
Buster Rone nodded and shook Andrew Wades hand. He helped burn a cross in front of his house the next day. Andrew ran out with a gun and yelled, “You are burning your own American flag!” He requested that police watch the house for the rest of the night, but none came. In the middle of the night, bullets blasted through the front of the house. Andrew threw his wife Charlotte to the floor and watched as a car sped away. The next morning, Anne asked him if he would stay. Andrew said: “A principle is at stake. You don’t just run away from something like this.” Journalists contacted the Bradens, asking why they had bought a house for a Black family in a White neighborhood. The Bradens responded: “We feel that every man has a right to live where he wants to, regardless of the color of his skin. This is the test of democracy. Either you practice what you preach, or you shut up about believing in democracy.” The story became front-page news in Kentucky.
A mere week later, the Supreme Court passed the Brown v. Board of Education ruling – on May 17, 1954 – outlawing segregated schools and signaling the beginning of the end to segregation everywhere. Brown led to massive resistance throughout the White South. White Southerners who had always assumed the stability of White supremacy now realized they were going to have to stand up and fight for it. Many White folks in Kentucky – unable to directly attack the Supreme Court or the federal government – took their anger out on the Bradens, condemning them as “traitors to their race.” At best, the Braden’s were accused of “wanting to stir up trouble.” They knew that purchasing a house for a Black family in a White neighborhood would create problems, so that must have been their intention. At worst, the Bradens were accused of being Communist-inspired subversives who were trying to exploit racial tensions in order to tear American society apart. They were hell-bent on trying to start a “race war.” That accusation, as crazy as it sounds today, would later have major ramifications.
Meanwhile, the Wades met the solid wall of economic resistance that Whites came to use throughout the South in order to cripple anyone who failed to conform to White supremacist traditions. Andrew Wade suddenly found that all of his loans were cut off. His business was boycotted. Not even the newspaperman or the milkman would deliver to his home. A police guard had been put on the Wade house after shots had been fired into it, but when no other acts of violence occurred, they were soon pulled off. Cars filled with angry Whites shouting threats constantly drove by the house. Understanding that there was a very real threat of violence, an organization called the Wade Defense Committee was formed. Armed supporters of Andrew Wade moved in to stay on the lookout and protect the home.
After the shots had been fired into the Wade home, Anne and Carl decided to have their young children sleep in the hallway at night, where they were least likely to by hit by bullets if the same happened to their house. The threats on the phone kept pouring in, and as the weeks wore on, Anne found herself completely torn down. She often couldn’t fall asleep until dawn, and later reflected that she eventually descended into a state in which she had no energy to have any emotions whatsoever – no energy for fear, no energy for courage. As the threats poured in, she simply reacted in a cold, calculated way geared towards survival. Andrew Wade urged Anne to carry a gun to protect herself, but she refused. She felt that if she ever shot and killed somebody that she would never be able to live with herself, even if it had been done in self-defense. However, one day while Carl was driving with the kids, a car blocked the road in front of him, while another pulled up from behind to prevent him from reversing. He was told, once again, that something was going to happen to his kids if he didn’t resolve the situation with the Wades. It forced Anne to reflect more seriously on the nature of self-defense: even if she would rather die than kill someone, she couldn’t justify risking the lives of her children. Andrew Wade, who had built up a small arsenal in his home, immediately supplied her with the weapon.
And then, suddenly, things died down. A week passed without the Bradens or the Wades receiving any threats. Both families began to feel that the whole nightmare might be over. It was Saturday, June 26, 1954 – six weeks after the house had first been purchased – that Anne felt relaxed enough to go to sleep before midnight. On that same evening, Andrew Wade, feeling that the threat had subsided, took his family out to have fun for the first time since they had moved onto Rone Court.
The children of Andrew and Charlotte Wade had been staying with Andrew’s parents during this time because of the potential threat of violence. Despite feeling that things were starting to calm down, the Wade parents dropped the children off with their grandparents before returning home. As the Wade’s turned onto their street, they noticed that not a single light in any house was on. It was perfectly dark. Entering their home, Andrew asked the members of the Wade Defense Committee who had been keeping watch if there had been any unusual activity. They said that just a few minutes earlier, they had seen some strange flashing lights coming from a few different directions… as if people in different locations had been using flashlights to communicate with one another. As they began discussing what this might have meant, a bomb detonated underneath the home.
The explosion ripped through the two bedrooms where the children would have been sleeping if they had not been with their grandparents that night. Miraculously, everyone had stepped out onto the porch to discuss the meaning of the flashing lights, and no one was injured. Despite the thunderous explosion, none of their neighbors came out to see what had happened. The bombing had clearly been expected.
Andrew rushed to call Anne and warn her that her home might also be attacked that night. Waking up from one of the first times she had been able to fall asleep at night for weeks and weeks, she rushed outside and noticed that the streetlight, which had been on when she went to bed, had been broken. Carl’s job had him working late that night, so Anne was home alone with the children. She looked under the porch and searched everywhere where a bomb could have been planted. When Carl returned home, they spent the rest of the night sitting up armed on the porch. Nothing happened. Anne, however, had been pregnant during this time. The stress of the bombing was the straw that broke the camel’s back and caused her to miscarry, leaving her with a profound sense of sadness.
With their house now in ruins, the Wade home was no longer habitable. For Andrew, however, it was still a symbol. He vowed to remain – even if he had to sleep in a tent, he said – and many in the Black community urged him to stand his ground. In the first days after they purchased their home, the local Black newspaper had interviewed Andrew. Predicting the difficult path ahead, he had said, “We intend to live here or die here.” He was buying this home both for the sake of having a decent home for his own family, but also to help break a barrier for other African Americans. The news had taken the local Black community by storm: here was a Black family that had found a way to escape the Black ghettos of Louisville. Here were White folks who were ready to fight for Black people. It gave them hope.
However, after the bombing, there were also many in the Black community who urged Andrew to place his family first and leave the house behind, in order to be with his wife and children in a safe space. He told them, “A man owes his children many things… I owe mine a freer world.” But the fact was that Andrew had been losing Black support ever since the extent of the White backlash had become apparent. Louisville had a reputation as a racially progressive city – in terms of the South – and many local Blacks originally expected the Wades to receive more support from progressive Whites. When the expectations of such support proved to be an illusion, many Blacks felt that Andrew Wade had trapped himself in a lost cause that was pointless to support. Black leadership backed off as well, not wanting to damage their ties with White political and economic power.
As for Andrew’s wife, Charlotte Wade, she loved her husband, but she had never shared his optimistic view that they could succeed. Andrew wanted to take civil rights issues head on, believing that they could be changed. But Charlotte’s experiences in life had taught her that segregation was undefeatable. White people were dangerous and to be avoided. She could never even fully trust the Bradens. Charlotte preferred to retreat into the safety of an all-Black world, in order to avoid potential trouble. Anne viewed this as a perfectly understandable human reaction on Charlotte’s part. But she also felt that such a retreat – as compared to Andrew’s stance of opposition – was part of what allowed White Southerners to succumb to the racist myth that Black people were “content” with their “natural” position in the order of things. And yet, even though it was Andrew who was the confrontational militant and it was Charlotte who retreated, Anne Braden wrote that Charlotte’s eyes burned more fiercely with indignation: for at least her husband had hope. For her, the injustice was permanent… and her anger, therefore, even more intense.
Over the next few years, Andrew rebuilt the house. Even after the bombing, he believed that all the tensions would eventually die down. As the rebuilding neared completion, he went and talked with all the neighbors. They expressed regret at what had happened, but none was willing to say so publicly. Charlotte had warned Andrew that she would never move back in, but he hoped that over time she would change her mind. She didn’t. She told him that she would never be able to sleep comfortably at that house ever again; that she would forever worry that a bomb could detonate underneath them at any moment. They returned to living in an all-Black community.
The Trial: Thrown into Infamy
Shortly after the bombing, Anne appeared in court to serve as a witness in the investigation that was taking place. When she was called to the stand, she expected to be questioned about the threats to her family. Did she know who made them? Did she have any insights into who might have been involved in the bombing? Anne, however, was not asked these questions. Instead, she was grilled on her political beliefs. Had she been a member of any “subversive” organizations? Did she associate with Communists? What kind of literature did she read? Anne found herself at the center of a highly publicized, anti-Communist witch-hunt during one of the most politically repressive periods in U.S. history: McCarthyism.
During the period of McCarthyism, right-wing forces exploited the growing tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States that developed in the wake of the Second World War. They used those tensions to whip the American public into a state of fear: Communism, they said, would spread rapidly across the globe unless severe measures were taken. They warned that Communists had already infiltrated deep into American society, and were working with the Soviet Union to undermine the United States from the inside. After using this wildly unsubstantiated myth to whip the public into a state of fear, these forces then used that fear as an excuse to destroy causes they opposed – including civil rights and organized labor – under the pretense that such causes were Communistic. It was easy to manufacture the connection because Communists were, indeed, major supporters of racial justice and labor rights. Because Communists were highly involved in those causes, anyone devoted to those causes would have worked around and known Communists themselves. In the period of McCarthyism, anyone who was around Communists was framed as a Communist sympathizer, which was then equated with being an enemy of the state. This is what was now happening to Anne and Carl Braden.
It was especially easy for White Southerners to believe that civil rights activities were Communist inspired, because from their perspective, attacks on segregation were subversive. Civil rights activists were trying to undermine society as they knew it, and as they believed it should be. Wasn’t that exactly what Communists were allegedly trying to do? Additionally, before the civil rights movement, most White Southerners assumed that Black people were happy with the way things were. This assumption, as Anne had painfully discovered, was born out of the fact that in a violent White supremacist culture, it was dangerous for African Americans to communicate their true thoughts and feelings to the White people they interacted with. This belief led many White Southerners to assume that “outside agitators” – rather than African Americans – were the true forces behind civil rights actions. Such beliefs now played out as Anne sat in the courtroom: it was assumed that Anne and Carl Braden had manipulated Andrew Wade into buying a house in a White neighborhood.
It was in this context that prosecutor Scott Hamilton stepped forward at the trial, and explained to the jury that there were two theories about the bombing. One theory was that people who resented Blacks moving into a White neighborhood had set the bomb. The second theory was that the bombing had been part of the Braden’s Communist plot, and that they had set it themselves in order to inflame racial tensions. The prosecutor plunged into an effort to prove this second theory. All evidence that opposed it was ignored. Andrew Wade and the Wade Defense Committee had taken detailed notes about the threats they had faced, but when they provided a list of potential suspects, it was dismissed. When Buster Rone admitted to being one of the people who had burned the cross in front of Wade’s home, his actions were viewed as irrelevant rather than being viewed as a clear sign of hostility. Even the fact that one of Rone’s friends worked in an explosives factory was ignored by the jury. Anne and Carl soon found themselves charged with sedition. That charge – essentially a charge of attempting to overthrow the government – carried a prison sentence of twenty-one years. Bail was set at $10,000 each… a phenomenal amount of money for 1954.
Anne later reflected: “I had challenged a whole settled world, a way of life, and this world had struck back. What had I expected?” She now realized that she had participated in so-called “subversive activities” from a place of privilege: “I thought I had examined the values of the world in which I grew up, and found many of them wanting and established new values.” However, “my nerves and reflexes still expected the protections and immunities that went with the place in society to which I had been born.” Unlike African Americans, she had grown up trusting the police; grown up believing that the law would protect her. The fact that those expectations were still embedded in her meant that when she began organizing for labor rights and racial justice, that she did so, to some extent, naively. She did not feel that her participation had been courageous: she felt like she had just not understood the risks.
Anne assumed that it would be impossible to pay her $10,000 bond. She suspected that her parents were capable of posting it, but due to their serious disagreements about segregation, Anne did not expect them to post bond, nor did she feel she had any right to ask them for their support. Within a week, however, her father had bailed her out. Anne warned him that she would never change her position; but her father bailed her out because he loved her regardless.
When Anne and Carl had been arrested, Anne’s parents had taken the children. Anne was fine with her parents keeping the children for a little while, but not for long. She understood that she and Carl might be locked away for many years, and worried that her children would adjust into the culture of White supremacy if they stayed with her parents during that time. She struggled to raise the issue, however, because she knew it would be very painful for her parents to hear that she didn’t trust them to raise the children. They had already suffered so much after Anne’s arrest: friends and neighbors had come to their home to support them as if there had been a death in the family. They sympathized with her parents the same way they would if a child had gone insane, or had fallen into a life of criminality despite the best efforts of the parents. Anne also wrote that her parents, although not fully conscious of it, probably understood deep down that “they were a part of this world that had turned savagely on the daughter they loved and sought to destroy her.” Her parents had their own difficult burden to bear.
Anne’s father took it upon himself to raise the issue of what would happen to the kids. “Anne,” he said hesitantly, “I hope just one thing. No matter what happens – if you can’t raise these children yourself – I hope you will let us have them.” Anne sat silently. Her father went straight to the point: “I know you don’t want us to have them.” He explained that he had gone to talk to their pastor about the dilemma. “I told him, ‘Anne Gambrell [her middle name] doesn’t want us to have her children because she is afraid I will give them my prejudices.’ And I told him – and I had tears in my eyes when I said it – ‘I will promise her this: I will never, never give her children my prejudices!’” Anne and her father were both crying. It was the first time he had ever admitted his own racism. However, Anne later wrote that “no matter how much he meant what he said, no matter how hard he tried, a child living with him would soak up his prejudices.” She couldn’t allow that to happen.
Anne now devoted all of her energy to raising Carl’s bail, but she had become infamous, and struggled to find support. After their arrest, authorities had raided the Braden’s home. They had a large personal library that contained a wide range of political and philosophical literature, including socialist and Communist texts. Their library also contained books by Russian authors such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, who Anne had studied in college. This literature was confiscated and paraded before the public as proof that Communists had infiltrated Kentucky, leading intellectuals and students of philosophy or political science throughout the state to hurriedly take such literature off their own shelves and sink it in the nearest river. The Bradens had been warned by their friends that such a raid was surely immanent, and that they should purge such literature from their home. Anne had defiantly told them, “I’m not going to let anyone make me start burning books.” As always, the Braden’s stood their ground, but they were now considered dangerous people to associate with. Many who were sympathetic worried that if they donated money, that they would be viewed as supporting subversive causes, and could be attacked themselves.
Anne’s own friends worried that it would be dangerous for them to associate with her too closely at this particular time, and some even wrote to her asking her to keep her distance until things died down. Within the Black community, many were initially silent about the Braden case as well, because they feared that taking on the burden of being red-baited as subversives – in addition to the stresses they already faced – would cripple their own struggle for freedom. However, although not many Black people publicly stood up for them, behind the scenes, Black trust in the Bradens grew as Black communities and Black freedom fighters observed what the Bradens were being forced to endure.
Despite the lack of support, Carl had friends who felt they owed him more than they could ever repay. They put their house up for bond, and he was released. Within days, however, he, Anne, and the White members of the Wade Defense Committee were arrested for the separate crime of bombing the Wade house. Carl’s trial was first: he was sentenced to fifteen years and immediately thrown in jail. For weeks afterward, Anne lived in a haze as she awaited her own trial. She would later have almost no memory of these weeks: she was so overwhelmed and traumatized that everything melted into a dark blur. She couldn’t fight anymore. She felt that she couldn’t win anyway. Segregation was too big to defeat. The struggle was meaningless. Anne’s lawyer urged her to appeal Carl’s case, so that higher, more sympathetic courts could examine it, but Anne, in her state of despair, told him there was no point. But there was a point, he assured her: what had been done to the Bradens was what happened in police states, not in democracies, and the higher courts wouldn’t stand for it. If the Braden’s didn’t challenge it, her lawyer emphasized, what had just happened to them would happen to others. They had a duty to prevent that.
She pulled herself together and agreed to appeal. Once it was clear that higher courts were going to review the Braden’s case, Anne found her own trial postponed until the higher court rulings revealed which way the case would go. Feeling a glimmer of hope again, she rose from her dark place of despair, and began to organize to free Carl. Anne travelled endlessly – sometimes accompanied by Andrew Wade – meeting with sympathetic communities and organizations throughout the country and sharing their story. She began to develop the enormous antiracist network that was so pivotal for her future work.
As Anne Braden travelled, the energy of history seemed to swirl around her. Emmett Till was murdered, and the brutal images of his mutilated body led to international outcry. African Americans mobilized, pressing for school desegregation in the wake of Brown. The White Citizen’s Council arose in response to the Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools; quickly growing in power and attempting to destroy what would soon blossom into a full-fledged revolution for racial justice. White Southerners who sympathized with civil rights were attacked and silenced with an ever-increasing level of viciousness. The NAACP was condemned as a Communist organization and was crushed throughout the South. Rosa Parks would soon make her famous stand in Montgomery, and the eloquence of Martin Luther King would soon inspire the nation. And Anne Braden… she found herself pulled deep into the swirling vortex of events that would, within a decade, wield a deathblow to Jim Crow.
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Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings of nonviolent resistance had a famous and profound impact on the civil rights movement in the United States. That impact was facilitated in part by the journeys of two of Martin Luther King’s future mentors – Howard Thurman and Benjamin Mays, who were good friends with King’s father – to meet with Gandhi in 1936. However, the Black American interest in Gandhi goes all the way back to 1919, when the Indian freedom struggle exploded in the wake of World War I after the British Empire failed to extend greater autonomy to India despite the Indian participation in the war. Gandhi’s interests in the Black American freedom struggle date back even further – to the 1890s – when he first studied the abolitionist movement that destroyed slavery. This article traces those earlier connections between Gandhi and Black Americans, in the decades before Black Americans took the important step of travelling to India to meet with the Mahatma directly.
Gandhi’s Study of Abolitionism and Booker T. Washington
In the decade before the Civil War, many of the abolitionists fighting against slavery were also missionaries. Some of these missionaries travelled to India, where they inspired Indians and other South Asians struggling against colonialism to examine the lessons of the fight against slavery in the United States. A few decades after the first South Asians looked to the lessons of abolitionism, a young lawyer named Gandhi engaged in his own study of the abolitionist movement. Gandhi was famously inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, which argued that moral people who believed in justice had a duty to break unjust laws, and that in such cases imprisonment should be worn as a badge of honor. Gandhi wrote his first article praising Thoreau in 1907, just months after beginning his first civil disobedience campaign in South Africa. In the words of historian Nico Slate, “Gandhi studied Thoreau’s opposition to slavery in order to combat racial oppression in South Africa.”
Gandhi also engaged in a serious study of Booker T. Washington. Washington was the most influential Black American leader during the time that Gandhi spent in South Africa… the same years in which segregationist Jim Crow laws swept the South, enforced by a continuous wave of lynchings. In an environment in which Black Americans were being systematically stripped of the rights they had won after the Civil War, Washington warned that to push “too hard” for their rights would only lead to a fiercer White backlash, and to a further loss of rights. Believing that fighting for civil rights would actually be counterproductive, Washington argued that Black Americans should invest their energies in developing the types of skilled labor that could allow them to lift themselves out of poverty and invest more in their communities. It would be a slow process, but through self-uplift and self-improvement, he argued that Black Americans could convince White Americans that they were, indeed, worthy of equal rights. As a young lawyer fighting for the rights of Indians in South Africa, Gandhi came to believe that Washington’s ideas could be useful there as well. He argued that the Indian community, through patience and hard work, could prove themselves worthy to the English. Gandhi’s ideas, of course, later evolved in a much more revolutionary direction: he wrote his first article on Booker T. Washington in 1903, years before he led his first civil disobedience campaign in which he advocated the breaking of unjust laws.
Booker T. Washington also influenced Gandhi’s perception of Blackness. When Gandhi arrived in South Africa as a young lawyer, he carried with him the notion that people of African ancestry had created no great civilization. Indeed, in Gandhi’s early career, he fought for the rights of the Indian community in South Africa partly by arguing that Indians – with their history of building great civilizations – should not be subjected to the same laws as “uncivilized” Africans. Gandhi’s immense respect for the ideas of Booker T. Washington, and of Washington’s personal story of rising from being a slave to a great leader, was an early factor in helping him to gradually transcend these racist views.
Washington also emphasized the dignity of all labor. Physical labor, he said, was the foundation of any community and of society itself. Black Americans, he said, should never look down on themselves as lowly laborers, but should value the contributions they made. Their labor deserved both self-respect and respect from society. This notion helped the young Gandhi reevaluate his elitist assumptions regarding caste. Partly under the influence of Washington, Gandhi began to shift the way he used the word “civilized” to describe who was civilized and who was not. He would soon be arguing that what was truly uncivilized was to degrade those who engaged in physical labor… and to refuse to engage in such labor oneself, although happily reaping the fruits of it. As Gandhi began to found his ashrams, which served both as spiritual communities and as training grounds for nonviolent resistance, he mandated that all participants engage in the physical labor that was necessary to run the community.
In other words, abolitionists and Black Americans helped Gandhi re-evaluate prejudices that he held around race as well as class, while also contributing to his understanding of nonviolent resistance. These were no small contributions.
W.E.B. Du Bois and the Global Color Line
As Gandhi was developing these ideas, on the other side of the planet, a renowned Black American scholar was developing a system of thought that would play a major role in drawing Black Americans and South Asians together. In 1903 – the same year that Gandhi published his first article on Booker T. Washington – W.E.B. Du Bois published what quickly became one of the most influential pieces of literature in the entire racially oppressed and colonized world: The Souls of Black Folk. In that text, Du Bois wrote one of the most well-known lines in all of Black American literature when he prophesized that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
By “color line,” Du Bois was referring to lines of racial division, be they physical, legal, or in the minds and emotions of human beings. However, he was not only speaking of the plight of Black Americans: for it is only the first half of the sentence that attained fame and became so often quoted. In it’s entirety, the sentence reads: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line, the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the Islands of the Sea.” For Du Bois, the color line was global. It referred to the ways in which people of European ancestry embraced White supremacy to justify the colonization and racial oppression of people of color throughout the world. The problem of the twentieth century, in other words, was the problem of global domination, based on White supremacy.
For Du Bois, that global problem required a global solution; and a big part of that solution involved colonized and racially oppressed peoples around the world building relationships of solidarity with one another. Du Bois envisioned India playing an important role in such solidarities, and worked to build relationships with Indians and other South Asians during the first decade of the twentieth century. When Du Bois helped found the NAACP in 1909, he ensured that the renowned civil rights organization built ties with India as well.
Du Bois edited the official publication of the NAACP, The Crisis. The subtitle of The Crisis was A Record of the Darker Races, which emphasized the connectedness of the ‘darker races’ of the world. Over the following decade, Du Bois ensured that The Crisis found its way into the hands of Indian freedom fighters, as well as anticolonial freedom fighters around the world. The publication soon became popular across South Asia, and often included articles by South Asians, who embraced the notion of a global ‘color line.’ As the Indian revolutionary Lala Lajpat Rai put it, while lecturing alongside Du Bois during World War I: “The problem of the Hindu and of the negro… are not local, but world problems.” Through his herculean efforts, W.E.B. Du Bois, more than any other figure, ensured that meaningful connections were built between India and Black America. Those connections ensured that a foundation for communication was already in place by the time Gandhi burst onto the world stage, in the wake of World War I.
Gandhi in the Black American Press
The notion of a global solidarity amongst the ‘darker races’ picked up steam in the aftermath of the First World War. Many colonized and racially oppressed people viewed the war as a massive weakening of Europe, and thus as a crucial blow to White global domination. Representatives of the world’s racially oppressed and colonized people – including W.E.B. Du Bois – rushed to Paris in the wake of the war, hoping to influence the peace treaty. At the Paris Peace Conference, President Woodrow Wilson argued that the key to world peace would be the principle of self-determination, the global right to not be dominated, but to rule one’s own land. The ‘darker races’ of the world wanted assurances that such a principle would apply to them as well. Would the colonies be granted the ability to determine their own fate? Would racially oppressed people in the United States? When it became clear that the principle of self-determination was meant almost exclusively for those of European ancestry, freedom struggles erupted in many colonies, including India. Mahatma Gandhi – having left South Africa during the war – now rose to global fame as the leader of the Indian freedom struggle. It was in this context that Black Americans focused their attention on Gandhi for the first time.
From the start, Black Americans watched Gandhi’s actions very closely. They debated whether Gandhi’s strategy of nonviolent resistance could be used in the struggle against White supremacy in the United States. In 1921, a writer for the Black newspaper, The Chicago Defender, weighed in: “We believe that some empty Jim Crow cars will some day worry our street car magnates in Southern cities when we get around to walking rather than suffer insult and injury to our wives and children.” Such words predicted the Montgomery bus boycott by more than thirty years. In 1922, the executive secretary of the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson, called Gandhi “a prophet and a saint,” and exclaimed that “If non-cooperation brings the English to their knees in India, there is no reason why it should not bring the white man to his knees in the South.”
However, the 1920s was a decade of profound racial violence in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan rose to its greatest prominence, with over two million members in a nation that, at the time, had only one hundred million people. In the context of widespread and brutal violence, it was difficult for most Black Americans to imagine nonviolence as an option. The famous Black American sociologist Franklin Frazier summed up the perspective of many Black Americans when he asked readers of The Crisis to imagine that “there should arise a Gandhi to lead Negroes without hate in their hearts to stop tilling the fields of the South under the peonage system; to cease paying taxes to states that keep their children in ignorance; and to ignore the iniquitous disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws.” Frazier prophesized, “I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women in the name of law and order.” Frazier made clear to his audience that he did not disagree with Gandhi’s strategies: he simply considered White supremacy in America to be far more brutal than it was under the British in India. Black Americans also doubted that the Indian freedom struggle was comparable to their own, given that they were just a small minority in the United States, whereas the Indians were obviously the vast majority in their own homeland.
Black Americans in the early 1920s thus paid close attention to Gandhi, despite doubting that nonviolent resistance would function in their own context. They did so because figures like W.E.B. Du Bois – who himself did not endorse Gandhi’s strategies for Black Americans – hailed Gandhi as a great spiritual leader, who, through his immense integrity, had been able to unify a profoundly diverse nation. In the 1920s, Black Americans studied Gandhi as a model for leadership, seeking to learn lessons about how to unify their own people, who often splintered into many different, competing camps. However, like many people around the world, Black Americans often romanticized Gandhi, envisioning that his spiritual purity – more than his political genius – had unified India. They also often overestimated the extent of Indian unity: intense caste prejudices remained, and clashes between Muslims and Hindus persisted. Gandhi called off his first campaign of nonviolence in 1922 after nearly two-dozen police officers were killed in a clash. Even as Black Americans viewed Gandhi as a symbol for the possibility of unity, Gandhi himself often felt that the movement he led was very far from achieving that goal.
Marcus Garvey and Afro-Asian Unity
Within Black America, the Afro-Caribbean community watched Gandhi especially closely. Like Black Americans in the South, many Afro-Caribbeans migrated to cities in the American North to take jobs during World War I. As Caribbeans, many of them were themselves subjects of the British Empire, and were deeply critical of that empire and of the wrongs of colonialism. Because of this, they paid close attention to anti-colonial freedom struggles around the world… and especially in India. Many Afro-Caribbeans believed that freedom for India – the “crown jewel” of the British Empire – would be a decisive blow against British colonial rule everywhere, and would facilitate the decolonization of other lands. The thousands of Afro-Caribbeans who migrated to Black American neighborhoods during the war played a major role in bringing such anti-colonial critiques into the Black American consciousness.
Of the Afro-Caribbeans to champion India’s cause in the United States, none was more prominent than Marcus Garvey. From Jamaica, Garvey had travelled the world as a young man. Noticing that people of African ancestry were oppressed and impoverished wherever he went, Garvey developed the desire to liberate people of African ancestry around the world. He envisioned a united African diaspora working together towards a common goal. Whereas many Black Americans emphasized that they were a small minority in the United States, and that this distinguished their own freedom struggle from anti-colonial freedom struggles, Garvey emphasized the massive numbers of the African diaspora. Black Americans were not a small minority, he said: they were members of a larger group, 400 million strong. This message was profoundly inspiring to Black people across the world, and it helped Garvey’s movement grow into the largest movement for racial justice to take place between the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement.
However, Garvey had many fierce critics. Many of them argued that the notion of uniting the diverse cultures, languages, and religions of the African diaspora was an impossible, utopian fantasy. In response, Garvey sometimes pointed out that India was a massive and enormously diverse land, full of many languages and cultures and religions… and yet it had attained unity, through the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. India, for Marcus Garvey, became a symbol for the possibility of expansive unity. Garvey argued that this expansive unity had only become possible because the Indians had rallied around a single leader, which had helped to hold the diverse peoples of India together. The African diaspora needed to do the same, Garvey said… and the leader they needed to rally around would be him.
Garvey envisioned a united African people working alongside a united Asian people, and he envisioned the Indian freedom struggle as a step in that larger process. Because of this, Garvey reached out to Indians and other South Asians just as W.E.B. Du Bois had done, inviting them to lecture with him and publish in his journal, The Negro World. Garvey sent Gandhi a number of telegrams in the early 1920s, some of which Gandhi published to show Indians that people around the world were supporting them. Inspired after reading Marcus Garvey’s autobiography, Gandhi wrote an article in 1926 titled Race Arrogance, in which he denounced “…the injustice that is being daily perpetrated against the Negro in the United States of America in the name of and for the sake of maintaining white superiority.” Over the following years, as Gandhi developed more ties with Black Americans who he greatly respected, he would speak up for their cause in ever-stronger terms. He told reporters that slavery had never truly ended in the United States. During World War II, he wrote an article titled “British and American Nazism,” and wrote to Franklin Roosevelt to tell him that his claim to fight for freedom and democracy was preposterous, given that Black Americans were denied both.
Foundations of a Pilgrimage
During these same years, W.E.B. Du Bois had entered into correspondence with one of Gandhi’s closest friends and disciples, a man named Charles Freer Andrews. Du Bois and Andrews began their correspondence in 1925, and the two men met for the first time in 1929 when Andrews arrived in the United States. While in the U.S., Andrews toured Black universities, lecturing on the teachings of Gandhi. He cultivated ties with Black American leaders. And when he returned to India, he told Gandhi about the brilliance of those leaders, and ensured that they were personally connected. Andrews hand-delivered letters from W.E.B. Du Bois to Gandhi, and Gandhi immediately wrote back to Du Bois:
Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being a slave-owner. But let us not think of honour or dishonour in connection with the past. Let us realize that the future is with those who would be pure, truthful, and loving. For as the old wise men have said: truth ever is, untruth never was. Love alone binds and truth and love accrue only to the truly humble.
Shortly after Andrews’ visit, India embraced the goal of total independence from the British Empire, and Gandhi led the entire nation in a massive civil disobedience campaign. Black Americans were riveted. With the power of the Ku Klux Klan waning by the late 1920s and with lynchings on the decline, it was easier to imagine the possibility of nonviolent resistance. The Black American press was soon publishing hundreds of articles on Gandhi. Calls for a Black Gandhi became increasingly common. Thus, the foundations for the Black American pilgrimage to India to meet with the Mahatma were laid.
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Bibliography
This story was especially influenced by the profound scholarship of Nico Slate. I am extremely grateful for his feedback and support.
“Typed draft of an article published as “Gandhi and the American Negroes” in Gandhi Marg. Du Bois writes of his interactions with Gandhi and the growing influence of non-violent protest on the Civil Rights Movement.”