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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822372233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/19/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 376 |
| File size: | 24 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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CHAPTER 1
The World That Cotton Made
1901–1916
Selma was a small but bustling town, perched high on the banks of the Alabama River. The wide, murky waters meandered west from the state capital of Montgomery through the Black Belt and Dallas County before making their way down to the Gulf city of Mobile. Home to 8,713 residents in 1900, Selma was the county seat and the hub of Black Belt agriculture. It was, according to the Selma Morning Times, "a cotton town." The white, fleecy bolls ran the local economy, and cotton's annual cycle forged an inseparable relationship between the wider county and the city.
At the turn of the century, cotton supplied the direct or indirect livelihood of almost all of Dallas County's 54,657 residents: black tenants produced the year's crop; white landlords, wholesalers, and merchants made their business in its trade; and black servants and draymen and white industrial workers labored for the wages it supplied. Neither agriculture nor demographics had changed much in the forty years since the Civil War. In 1900, 83 percent of Dallas Countians were black, and most were bound to the cotton fields under tenant contracts.
White supremacy — the interlocking system of political, economic, and social control that protected white privilege — had long governed life in rural Dallas County. White landlords, wholesalers, and merchants dictated the terms, under which black men and women worked the fields for nearly nothing. Racial customs, enforced with violence when necessary, kept black tenants in their place. Along with cotton's ongoing dominion, the rise of Jim Crow, with its state-sanctioned legal segregation and disfranchisement, marked a new era for white supremacy at the start of the twentieth century. These developments further cemented the grossly unequal economic relationship between black and white Dallas Countians.
African Americans responded to the barrage of attacks by mobilizing their own resources. Building off of traditions of landownership, education, and self-sufficiency, black residents forged a semiautonomous world within the dictates of Jim Crow segregation. Selma University, the educational institution of the Alabama Colored Baptists, helped create a strong black middle class made up of doctors, educators, undertakers, business owners, and trades people. Churches, fraternal lodges, and benevolent societies offered support to black men and women, and small corner groceries and shops bound neighbors together. As their legal and political rights shrank, African Americans turned inward to protect their communities and foster black economic and social independence in whatever ways they could.
A Cotton Town
"The hopes of a whole year are tied up in a cotton crop, and when the first boll bursts open and its white silken fibre is exposed to the morning sun, a whole section is awakened into life," proclaimed the Selma Morning Times. It was August 1903, and the newspaper was anticipating the opening of the year's cotton season. Water Avenue, the main street of Selma, was where the buying and selling of cotton and goods took place. Despite its proximity to the Alabama River, clouds of dust still billowed behind streetcars and mule-drawn wagons, and stray cotton lint perpetually hung in the air. Wholesale establishments, commission houses, and cotton warehouses lined both sides of the bustling street. Nine wholesale grocery establishments, including R. H. and W. C. Agee Company, V. B. Atkins and Company, and C. W. Hooper and Company, garnered recognition throughout the Black Belt. Salesmen from the wholesale companies traveled through the surrounding counties, selling goods to the hundreds of crossroad clapboard stores and plantation commissaries dotting the countryside. Potholed dirt roads and limited transportation made the country stores the main source of goods for rural customers, and, with the help of wholesale merchants, they stocked everything from ribbons and coffee to kerosene oil. The trade area of Selma's wholesalers extended throughout the entire Black Belt, sixteen counties in a hundred-mile radius.
Wholesale merchants had cotton to thank for both their profits and their influence. In addition to selling goods, wholesalers doubled as commission merchants and cotton buyers. Landowners needed the annual profits of cotton to buy supplies and necessities and extend credit to their tenants, and wholesale merchants brought the complementary roles of cotton buying and grocery selling under one roof.
Sharecropping had first emerged after the Civil War. Along with completely upending the South's defining institution, four years of war had devastated the region's towns and farmlands. Landowners still needed the now-freed people to grow cotton, so they contracted with black tenants to live on and work their land each season. Landowners then turned to merchants for credit, a necessity in the cash-strapped region. Advancing merchants or plantation commissaries would furnish tenants with seeds and supplies to make the crop. Settlement came at harvest time each fall. Tenants turned over the bales from their summer's work to the advancing merchant or landlord, who then, in turn, brought the cotton to a cotton buyer or to the wholesale house with which they carried credit. Selma's wholesale establishments were known to charge 15 percent to advance credit and goods to merchants and plantation commissaries. People lived on borrowed money all year long, and the only payday in Dallas County came when the cotton was ready in the fall.
As the cotton gins across the county cranked into gear each September, Selma's streets sprang to life. Droves of cotton-laden wagons crowded the warehouses and compresses. Wholesale merchandising establishments worked late into the night. At M. Meyer and Company, clerks finalized purchases of cotton from farmers who had traveled long distances, while laborers unloaded the crop from the wagon and replaced it with provisions bought for the next year. A short distance away, the Dallas Compress Company packed the bales into smaller parcels, which were then stored in warehouses, like Erhart's, before being sold to buyers at the Selma Cotton Exchange.
Directly south of Water Avenue, the wharfs on the Alabama River overflowed with cotton bales. A storefront on the southern side of Selma's main street gave wholesale merchants direct access to the wharf from the back of their establishments. There, black draymen loaded thousands of bales onto steamers like the Nettie Quill and the Helen Burke, which departed for Mobile. Then the bales were loaded onto other ships bound for cotton mills in the East. The remaining bales shipped out of town on the railroads; the main depot was located just east of the wharf.
While business on Water Avenue hummed with the dealings of cotton, the retail shops on Broad Street boomed off of the resulting income. Jewish families, whose fathers and grandfathers had come south selling goods as peddlers, ran many of Selma's most illustrious department stores. Simon Eagle had opened Eagle's Department Store in 1885 and began selling New York fashion to Black Belt citizens. The store was especially popular one March when Mr. Eagle decided to get rid of his out-of-season surplus by tossing straw hats off of the second-floor balcony. His three sons followed their father into the business, and the high-class clothing store grew to occupy over half a block on Alabama Avenue.
Shoppers could also buy choice fabric and the finest, New York–made, ready-to-wear clothes at Isidore Kayser and Company, Rothschild's, and the Liepold Brothers. J. C. Adler's Furniture Company furnished Selma's fine homes, while Mr. Adler also shaped public opinion through his editorship of the Selma Morning Times. The Jewish-owned Schuster Hardware and Bloch Brothers Hardware sold tools and farm implements to farmers who had come to town for business on Water Avenue. Meanwhile, Benish and Meyer Tobacco, Thalheimer Liquor, and the American Candy Company traded in pleasures, not necessities. Each fall, Selma's business quieted as Jewish-owned stores closed to observe the holidays of Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. As an integral part of Selma's prosperity, Jewish merchants and their families lived alongside, socialized with, and married into white Protestant families.
The sheer volume of religious institutions bordering downtown must have assured out-of-town visitors that Selma's white citizens were indeed on the heavenly path. The First Presbyterian Church could be seen from downtown, with its redbrick bell tower rising above the dust clouds billowing down Broad Street. A half block to the west, on the corner of Dallas Avenue, the Baptists worshipped in their newly erected Gothic-style sanctuary. St. Paul's Episcopal Church shared a block of Lauderdale Avenue with the First Baptist Church, even if the congregations shared little else. The Methodists, just one more block west on Dallas Avenue, were also worshipping in a new building. Their turreted redbrick sanctuary came into being after the old Church Street Methodist Church's steeple had unceremoniously fallen through the roof. Just to the north of First Presbyterian, the stained-glass Star of David at Temple Mishkan Israel marked the home of Selma's Jewish community. Together, these downtown sanctuaries were where the most prominent white families worshipped.
An array of social and civic clubs kept Selma's upper and middle classes well connected. Men debated matters of the day and listened to speakers in groups like the Elks, the Exchange Club, the Rotary Club, and the Kiwanis Club. While Jewish businessmen were part of all of Selma's notable organizations, they also took their leisure at the Harmony Club, a Jewish social club located on the upper floors of a three-story building with arched windows on Water Avenue. Abe Eagle, one of the three sons in charge of Eagle's Department Store, would unwind from a day's work with a game of cards at the Harmony. His daughter, June Eagle Cohn, remembered her mother dialing up the Harmony to instruct her father, "Abe, come home to supper!" While their husbands discussed business and politics, the wives gathered in social clubs like the Selma Study Club, the Ossian Club, and the Council of Jewish Women, improving their minds and organizing civic projects.
Dealings in cotton made Selma the economic hub of the western Black Belt, and that, in turn, supported a sizable professional class of bankers, lawyers, and doctors. At the start of the twentieth century, the People's Bank and Trust Company, the City National Bank of Selma, and Selma National Bank served the financial needs of area residents and businesses. The three bank presidents often appeared on the rosters of local business campaigns, and they maintained especially close relationships with the wholesale merchants. Selma was also the medical center of the west-central Black Belt, home to numerous hospitals and private medical practices. These institutions over time consolidated into the Vaughan Memorial Hospital and the Alabama Baptist Hospital for white patients, while the Burwell Infirmary and the Good Samaritan Hospital served African Americans. A cadre of Selma attorneys represented the citizens' legal interests at the Dallas County courthouse. The surnames Craig, Keith, Mallory, and Vaughan carried through generations of Selma attorneys, who often operated as father-and-son law offices.
In the spring of 1901, a stray match ignited a bale of cotton around midday at the Babcock Cotton Warehouse. "Bankers, merchants, mechanics, and firemen," reported the Selma Morning Times, all grabbed buckets of water and "worked like demons" to prevent the flames from spreading through downtown. Over nine hundred bales of cotton worth thousands of dollars went up in smoke. The volunteer firefighting force revealed the townspeople's common interest. Businesspeople, professionals, railroad workers, and farmers alike understood that Selma's fortune grew directly from Black Belt soil and cotton's value. The local Chamber of Commerce bragged that the city drew an annual revenue of almost $8 million from the cotton crop. "Can any other city of its size show so fine a revenue from a single crop?," it asked.
But not all of Selma's white citizens lived in the world of New York fashion, society, and Greek Revival mansions. The Louisville and Nashville, the Southern, and the Western Railway companies all ran tracks through the Black Belt's main cotton town, and smoky engines chugged cotton bales into Selma from the surrounding hinterlands before shipping them out again to large industrial centers. Wholesale merchants owned property next to the main railroad lines and built private side tracks to funnel carloads of goods directly into their warehouses. Machinists, blacksmiths, and engineers employed at local railroad shops kept the trains running, and their wages of three dollars per day helped support Selma's businesses. One Southern Railway Company payday in 1901 put $30,000 into the hands of its employees. Skilled railroad positions, reserved for white workers, provided a solid but not extravagant living for railroad families. Most lived in modest wood frame houses in East Selma. Agriculture-based industries like the Buckeye Cotton Oil Company, People's Cotton Oil Company, and Dallas Compress Company sustained other working-class families on the eastern side of the city, along with wood and coal companies, the ice company, and local sawmills.
The poorest of Selma's white residents worked in the Cawthon and Estelle cotton mills on the outskirts of town. The white mill workers often came from surrounding rural areas or from out of state. Fieldwork guaranteed a hard life with little money, and the textile mills offered cash wages to struggling families. Workers at the Estelle Cotton Mill lived in one of the fifty-four company shotgun houses or duplexes in the mill village on the west side of Valley Creek. They shopped at the company store, sent their children to the company-sponsored school, and attended church at the village's Methodist-Episcopal Church. Across town, workers at the Cawthon Mill lived in similar company houses on St. Phillips, Mechanic, and Range Streets. Children, like sixteen-year-old Grace Cooper and her thirteen-year-old cousin Shellie, served in the ranks of the companies' workforce. They tended spindles and looms at the mill in East Selma along with their mothers, while both of their fathers worked as flagmen for the Southern Railway.
Selma's textile industry offered little in job security. The Cawthons, a local family, controlled both of the city's textile mills in 1902, but hard times led to repeated changes in ownership. The mills shut down during the depression in 1908. When the newspaper sent a reporter to investigate conditions, they found "inmates" of the mill village lacking heat and other basic necessities. The company commissary and nearby shops had cut off workers' credit, and many were forced to move. Over the next twenty years, the mills went through a series of name changes — Sunset Mill, Valley Creek Mill, Selma Manufacturing Company, and the California Cotton Mill — with each new owner. Only steadily deteriorating housing, low pay, and no security remained consistent for the workers.
Outside of town, the fields that fueled Selma's cotton empire and bustling department stores stretched for miles across Dallas County and out into the Black Belt. All aspects of cotton's growth depended on rural black families, and in 1900 Dallas County plantations looked much like their antebellum predecessors. African Americans operated almost 89 percent of Dallas County's 7,141 farms. Ninety-four percent of black farmers operated under some form of tenant contract; only 390 black families held any ownership in their land.
South of the Alabama River and east of Selma, J. A. Minter, a fourth-generation planter, owned eleven thousand acres of fertile farmland. The family had moved from North Carolina around 1819, when Alabama gained statehood, and had been working the land ever since. Minter had over 160 African American tenants growing cotton on his property when he decided to build his own gin in 1901. Like many Dallas County landowners, he preferred black laborers over poorer whites. While white tenants would expect the same privileges as white people in the Black Belt, he explained, African Americans would not question the little that tenant life offered. It was this "good and cheap labor" of black citizens that created and sustained Selma's white elite. The cotton grown by black tenants filled the coffers of Dallas County landlords, wholesalers, and merchants, and the profits then trickled through Selma in business dealings and wages. As the Selma Morning Times straightforwardly explained, "These lands would be worth nothing if the Negroes were moved off of them."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Why the Vote Wasn't Enough for Selma"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Illustrations viiAbbreviations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
Interlude. The Constitution of 1901 6
1. The World That Cotton Made: 1901–1916 11
Interlude. World War I and Making the World Safe for Democracy 34
2. "Our Country First, Then Selma": 1917–1929 39
Interlude. The Great Depression 61
3. Plowing Under: 1932–1940 67
Interlude. Craig Air Force Base 91
4. Becoming White-Faced Cows: 1941–1952 95
Interlude. "I Like Ike" 120
5. Segregation's Last Stand: 1953–1964 124
Interlude. 1965 150
6. Making the "Good Freedom" 1965–1976 157
Interlude. Closing Craig Air Force Base 187
7. "Last One Out of Selma, Turn Off the Lights": 1977–1988 192
Interlude. Superintendent Norman Roussell and School Leveling 216
8. Two Selmas: 1989–2000 222
Interlude. Joe Gotta Go 244
Epilogue 248
Notes 255
Bibliography 317
Index 335
What People are Saying About This
"With sheer ambition and narrative deftness, Karlyn Forner sets a new standard for deeper explorations of U.S. history. By plumbing Selma’s past—not over the customary two months in 1965, but over more than a century—Forner gives us a 'civil rights movement' that is longer and broader than we ever knew. Deeply researched, brilliantly framed, and fearlessly candid, this is that rare history that also speaks loudly in the present tense.”
“Karlyn Forner’s valuable and informative Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma provides with great depth much-needed context for a struggle that is too often reduced to a 1965 protest march, and raises with great relevance for today the often-avoided issue of the undone work necessary to secure meaningful change. This is much more than a book about Alabama's civil rights struggle. Read it and learn.”
"Although scholars have explored questions of voting rights and economic justice for black residents of Selma, Karlyn Forner's study provides new details and fresh insights into the evolution, impact, and legacy of the fight for voting rights. Sure to appeal to a wide audience, Why the Vote Wasn’t Enough for Selma is truly exceptional in terms of its breadth, depth, vision, and scope."