My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations - Hardcover

Berry, Mary Frances

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400040035 ISBN 13: 9781400040032

Publisher: Knopf, 2005

Synopsis

“My face is black is true but its not my fault but I love my name and my honest in dealing with my fellow man.”
~Callie House (1899)

In her groundbreaking new book, My Face Is Black Is True, historian Mary Frances Berry resurrects the forgotten life of Callie House (1861-1928), ex-slave, widowed Nashville washerwoman and mother of five who, seventy years before the civil rights movement, headed a demand for ex-slave reparations.

House was born into slavery in 1861 and sought African-American pensions based on those offered Union soldiers. In a brilliant and daring move, House targeted $68 million in taxes on seized rebel cotton (over $1.2 billion in 2005 dollars) and demanded it as repayment for centuries of unpaid labor.

Dr. Berry tells how the Justice Department, persuaded by the postmaster general, banned the activities of Callie House’s town organizers, violated her constitutional rights to assembly and to petition Congress, and falsely accused her of mail fraud; the federal officials had the post office open the mail of almost all African-Americans, denying delivery on the smallest pretext. Berry shows how African-American newspapers, most of which preached meekness toward whites, systematically ignored or derided Mrs. House’s movement, which was essentially a poor person’s movement. Despite being denied mail service and support from the African-American establishment of the day, Mrs. House’s Ex-Slave Association flourished until she was imprisoned by the Justice Department for violating the postal laws of the United States; suddenly deprived of her spirit, leadership and ferocity, the first national grassroots African-American movement fell apart.

Callie House, so long forgotten that her grave has been lost, emerges as a courageous pioneering activist, a forerunner of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. My Face Is Black Is True is a fascinating book of original scholarship that reclaims a magnificent heroine.

About this title

About the Author:

Mary Frances Berry was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She received a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Howard University, a doctorate in history from the University of Michigan, and a juris doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School.

Dr. Berry has received many awards for her public service and scholarly activities, among them the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins Award and Image Award, the Rosa Parks Award of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Ebony Magazine Black Achievement Award.

In addition to having been the chairperson of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission for eleven years, Dr. Berry is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches history of American law. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter 1

Prologue

When I was twelve, I became an outlaw, a transgressor of racial boundaries. That summer I did the ironing while taking care of the Abbotts’ infant boy. They lived in an all-white well-off Nashville neighborhood founded as a streetcar suburb in the late nineteenth century. On a July afternoon when Mrs. Abbott came home, I showed her a phonograph record I had taken from the shelf and played while I worked. Excitedly, I told her how I just loved the music, but the more I talked, the more agitated she became. Suddenly she snatched the record from my hands and practically exploded. “You had no business touching those records, and you shouldn’t be listening to such music in the first place.” I told her I was sorry, but she still seemed angry. I knew I had misbehaved terribly, but I did not understand how or why listening to that music was wrong.

I did not tell my mother, but when I finally told my Aunt Serriner, she worried aloud that I might become labeled a troublemaker. “Gal,” she said, “don’t be getting out of your place, stay out of those white folks’ things.” I stayed out of “white folks’ things” thereafter, or at least kept silent when I did not. However, the episode forever clouded my pleasure upon discovering Beethoven and his Symphony Number Nine.

Callie House did not stay out of “white folks’ things” either. She was also a racial outlaw. An African-American laundress from Tennessee, she became the leader of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century poor people’s movement that sought pensions from the federal government as compensation for slavery. Her movement, federal officials concluded, “is setting the negroes wild.” They thought that if they did not stop her, when African Americans understood that the government would never grant pensions, the nation would “have some very serious questions to settle in connection with the control of the race.” Consequently, the government harassed Callie House for exercising her constitutional right to petition the government and to mobilize others in the cause. When she would not relent, calling her “defiant,” the Post Office Department and the Pension Bureau redoubled their efforts to smear and confine her. Her organization was the first mass reparations movement led by African Americans.1

Callie House and the ex-slave movement did not accept the preachments or adopt the meek attitudes that Booker T. Washington counseled at the time. Today, some people argue against reparations because those who experienced slavery are no longer among the living. It is worth remembering that thousands of ex-slaves devoted years to pressing the reparations cause. They organized support networks and helped one another through very difficult times. That they bore the marks of bondage, as living ex-slaves, did not help them. Whites and elite African Americans ridiculed their pleas for redress, and the government disrespected their claims.

The first homes I knew, the orphanage on Laurel Street and the house of my mother’s eldest sister, Aunt Everleaner, where I lived in the 1940s, lay a few streets away from where Callie House resided until her death in 1928. There in South Nashville, down in the valley, looking up to the state capitol on the hill, we both became troublemakers. Commercial development has, for the most part, overtaken the neighborhood, erasing every vestige, every physical structure of that time and place. The address at which Callie House lived has long been occupied by a public housing unit. This book tells her story.
Chapter 1

We Need a Movement

We are organizing ourselves together as a race of people who feels that they have been wronged.

Callie House
(1899)

Callie House knew hard work. Born a slave, now a washerwoman and a widow with five children, she was at the bottom of America’s social and economic ladder as she stood proudly before a cheering crowd of African Americans. The National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association had just elected her its first and only female officer. Addressing the convention delegates who had honored her with their votes, she talked about the thousands of people she had met on the road in the cause of compensation for slave service. House spoke of organizing local branches and collecting petitions to submit to Congress. She told them of her long hours spent “among strangers laboring to the best of my ability for the rights which my race is justly entitled to.” This woman of modest means but great courage would soon become the association’s leader. For her work, she would be praised by poor African Americans, ridiculed by the race’s elites, and targeted by high government officials, who feared her influence with the masses, and eventually land in jail. But on this November day in 1898, as she stood before supporters, newly elected assistant secretary of the nation’s largest reparations movement, all things seemed possible.1

Callie House came to prominence in the period historian Rayford Logan labeled the nadir, the lowest point along the long, rough road African Americans had traveled since Emancipation. Women were legally barred from voting, and black men suffered disenfranchisement through subterfuge and violence. Booker T. Washington advised against political activism. But many like Mrs. House chose another course. By the early twentieth century, her organization, the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty and Pension Association, according to federal officials, would swell to about 300,000, determined black people petitioning a government that barely recognized their existence and demanding a law ordering reparations for slavery.2

Through cajoling and explaining, House inspired the old ex-slaves to exercise their rights as citizens to demand repayment for their long suffering. She urged them not to give up despite continued oppression and listened as they shared stories about their lives under slavery. Often in tears, aging and ailing men and women recalled being treated as less than human during their years of unpaid labor for masters who sexually abused slave women, broke families apart, and who had “the power to whip them to death.”3

Although steeled for the effort to gain reparations, House and her cohorts were living in desperate times and still reeling from a bleak, awful past. House’s life experiences made her intimately familiar with the plight of those she referred to as the “ignorant, bare footed and naked” among her fellow ex-slaves. From family accounts, she was born into slavery in Rutherford County near Nashville, Tennessee, in 1861. (Her birth, like that of other slaves, was not officially recorded.) There, in a landscape of rolling hills, cereal and tobacco production, and horse farming, slave owners depended upon the labor of the approximately 13,000 blacks who constituted about 50 percent of the total population of the county.

Whether slaves had masters who, as one Tennessee slave put it, “gave them rations and warm clothes to wear” or scraps and rags that did not cover their nakedness, their lives in bondage etched indelible memories of suffering and abuse. A collective consciousness born of brutal experience shaped the reactions of Callie’s family and other slaves when freedom finally came. One Tennessee ex-slave remembered that on the plantation where she lived they could go to church, where they were admonished to obey their masters. She went to services “barefoot with a rag tied around her head and a dress that came up to her knees,” which was all she had to wear. She also was “whipped with a bull whip” and was not ashamed to say, in old age, that she “still had scars on her back put there by the master.” Another Tennessee ex-slave told of being sold away from her husband, whom she had never seen again. At the slave yard they told her to take off her clothes and roll down the hill so the prospective buyers “could see you had no bones broken or sores on you.”

The coming of the Civil War finally brought freedom but not an immediate response to the suffering. In 1862 and early 1863, when Callie House was a toddler, the Union Army swept through Tennessee, which had joined the Confederacy. In their wake the slaves made a mass move toward freedom. Her family was among the thousands of so-called contraband—slaves who either ran away or whose masters fled at the Union approach—in their wake. When the Union soldiers, whom the children called “the Blue Men,” came, slave men, women, and children followed along behind them. The women did laundry and cooking for the soldiers; the army gathered up the black men to work as laborers, digging ditches and building fortifications. Refugees slept where they could and ate what they could find. Then the Union decided to recruit blacks as soldiers. Callie House’s father, Tom Guy, like many other freed men, probably joined the Union Army in the 29th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment. The unit served in the area at the Battle of Stones River at the end of 1862 and the beginning of 1863. In heavy fighting that the Union won, more than a third of the Union and Confederate troops were killed, wounded, or captured. In November and early December 1864, the 29th Regiment also helped repel the Confederate drive into Tennessee, ending at Franklin just south of Nashville. The fighting and the federal occupation devastated farms and communities in much of the surround-ing area, including Rutherford County. The numbers of refugees—contraband—fleeing slavery increased to a torrent.

House’s family and other African Americans tried to gain and maintain their freedom without being demoralized by the uncertainty all around them. African-American mothers and fathers begged Union officials to help them regain...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400040035
• ISBN 13: 9781400040032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336