The Reconstruction Acts of 1867 entirely upended society in the American South, enfranchising Black men across the states of the former Confederacy and placing those states (except Tennessee) under the authority of the U.S. military. The acts created five military districts in the South, requiring new state constitutions to be drafted and the 14th Amendment ratified. While Black Southerners rejoiced at their citizenship status and set about exercising their newly won rights, federal occupation and Black suffrage was widely opposed by the region’s White population. Seeing Blacks casting ballots, negotiating labor contracts, and bearing arms panicked many former slaveowners. But even while residents branded federal occupation as “bayonet rule,” they were quick to seek U.S. troop intervention when feeling threatened by freedmen engaging in politics.

In 1867, Whites in St. Landry Parish, La., were rattled by the emergence of a well-regulated Black militia, which engaged in public drills, marches, assorted military pageantry and, perhaps most important, guarded Republican meetings from local belligerents (the Ku Klux Klan, etc.) and safely escorted Republican voters to the polls for elections. No doubt, St. Landry’s White citizens wouldn’t have resisted a return to the antebellum status quo, with Black Southerners essentially returned to a state of bondage—something they believed was unattainable as long as a Black militia remained mobilized.

Serving as commander of the Fifth Military District, which consisted of Louisiana and Texas, was Civil War hero Maj. Gen. Winfield S. Hancock. In December 1867, planters in St. Landry petitioned Hancock to send them an entire company of U.S. Cavalry “under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.” White Democrats across Louisiana railed against federal occupation in newspapers and in public speeches, but they nonetheless fully recognized that most U.S. soldiers harbored only a tepid commitment to Reconstruction.

In their petition, the planters claimed they had been satisfied with their previous post commander, Captain William W. Webb. Men like Webb—and White officers in general—had reservations about occupying what they considered domestic soil populated by American citizens. Few were willing to involve themselves in strife between the parties, even when clashes would turn violent and deadly.

The petition below, signed by hundreds of local citizens, was just one of dozens sent to Hancock in the fall of 1867.     

Parish of St. Landry, LA
Opelousas, December 27, 1867

Sir: The undersigned citizens…impressed with the importance and necessity of the pacific influence of a small organized military force in our midst, respectfully request the commanding General to station at this place, a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under the command of a prudent and discreet officer.

During the time that Capt. W.W. Webb of Co. E. 4th U.S. Cavalry, was stationed at Opelousas, there were no disturbances; quiet reigned everywhere, and the community felt a sense of perfect security. [He] was eminently qualified for his positions. His firmness, justice and discretion, to say nothing of his affable manners, and conciliatory deportment, rendered him generally acceptable, and gave him a commanding influence, which he used for the promotion of the general good. When, several weeks ago, Gen. [Joseph A.] Mower, then commanding, thought proper to remove Capt. Webb’s command…our citizens respectfully protested, in a written memorial, of which no notice seems, so far, to have been taken…

In point of numbers, this is the most important rural population in the State. This Parish alone has registered about five thousand voters; and there are probably one thousand more male adults, who could not, or were not permitted to register. This large population is sufficiently compact to admit of easy and rapid concentration. It is about equally divided between the two races, who, under the influence of artful demagogues and designing men, are daily placed in positions of more decided antagonism. The failure of the crops of the past year, and the great difficulty of engaging situations for the future, have rendered the colored population restless, dissatisfied and uneasy. They are taught to believe, by unscrupulous leaders, that great injustice is done to them, and that the whites are their enemies. They are becoming more idle and vagrant under these influences, and consequently less obedient to the law. Larceny is becoming epidemic among them….They are just now in that condition when a few incendiary leaders could excite them to deeds of violence and great outrage. This is what we wish to avoid; and we think we are not mistaken in the remedy we suggest.

Such is the general respect for the authority of the U.S. Government, particularly as administered by the able and patriotic Commander of the Fifth Military District, that the mere presence of a Company of U.S. Cavalry, under a proper officer, would impart a…feeling of security, and effectually prevent the outbreak of public disturbance.     We beg leave to assure [you]…that it is not from a mere sense of personal fear, as to the result of such an outbreak…that we invoke the presence of the military arm of the Government; but it is because we think the general interests of the Parish, the State, and the nation, would…be materially injured by any collision between the races….          

In forwarding the petition to Hancock, the local Freedmen’s Bureau agent, Oscar H. Violet, insisted there was no cause for alarm and that the “armed assemblages” of freedpeople were peaceable and used their arms to withstand coercion into unfair labor contracts. Violet acknowledged the validity of the Black militia but nevertheless urged Hancock to dispatch a cavalry unit without delay. He complied, and the troopers began disarming and demobilizing the militia after arriving.

In February 1868, this force, accompanied by Violet, disrupted a meeting of the Opelousas Republican Club, proclaiming it illegal and ordering the freedpeople in attendance to disarm. Chafing at “garrison duty,” the unit’s commander was vocal in opposition to armed meetings of freedpeople and ordered them to cease. Black Republicans could no longer carry their arms in public. The local Black militia had been so weakened, in fact, it prompted one of the most horrific massacres in U.S. history.

In September 1868, the beating of a local freedman’s school teacher by White assailants spiraled into a clash between Black militiamen and St. Landry citizens. Disarmed and demobilized, with no federal troops willing to come to their aid, the militiamen were simply outgunned. White extremists, some of whom even had signed the 1867 petition, combed the parish capturing or killing any freedperson unfortunate enough to cross their path.

In what was known as the Opelousas Massacre, 21 captured militiamen were marched to a mass grave in a nearby woods and killed by firing squad, spawning weeks of racial violence and the slaying of an estimated 200 freedmen. In many ways, the 1867 petition and demobilization of St. Landry’s Black militia had made that possible.

J. Jacob Calhoun is a UVa. Ph.D. candidate.

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of America’s Civil War magazine.

They came for Wyatt Outlaw in the dark of night. Burning torches lit their white robes and hoods, masking their identities but illuminating the evil intentions in their hearts. They snatched Outlaw from his home in front of his family, dragged him down Main Street in Graham, N.C., mutilated his body, and hanged him from a tree in the courthouse square. His “crime” was being a Black man active in the Union League and holding public office in Alamance County. His death was recorded as “misadventure” at the hands of persons unknown. 

Depredations like this and worse occurred by the thousands throughout the violent South against newly freed African Americans in the years after the Civil War, perpetrated by White supremacist groups collectively known as the Ku Klux Klan. In Klan War: Ulysses S. Grant and the Battle to Save Reconstruction (Knopf, 2023), Fergus M. Bordewich chronicle this devastating chapter in American history and the determined efforts by President Ulysses Grant to break the violent grip of the Klan during Reconstruction. Hard-won legislation, championed by Grant, and the dedicated efforts of resilient federal judges and juries backed by the gleam of Union Army bayonets broke the power of the Klan. But unlike Grant’s Civil War campaigns, the victory was not decisive. The seeds of domestic terrorism cultivated after the war have periodically found fertile ground in American society during times of social and political turbulence. Bordewich’s book is excellent history and a timely warning.

Why did you decide to do a book about Grant’s war against the Klan?  

“Klan War” evolved naturally from several of my previous books in which I wrote about the significance of slavery and race in the Early Republic, the development of the Underground Railroad, the Compromise of 1850, and most recently in the Civil War, in “Congress at War.” I wanted to show what homegrown American terrorism looked like, how it was defeated by Grant, and what its consequences were. 

Much ink has been spilled about the supposed failures of Ulysses S. Grant’s presidential administrations. Should the efficacy of his presidency be reevaluated in light of his war against the Klan? 

Definitely, it should. Grant’s deep personal commitment to the extension of full citizenship and human rights to Black Americans made his one of the most ambitious and consequential presidencies in our history. Overall, his presidency was mixed: as is well known, some members of his administration were corrupt, his efforts to acquire Santo Domingo did not succeed, and his enlightened Indian policy did not ultimately prevail. But after Reconstruction, his reputation was ruthlessly destroyed both by resurgent advocates of the Lost Cause and their Democratic allies, who disdained him precisely because of his commitment to Black civil rights and Reconstruction.

How important was Nathan Bedford Forrest in the formation, organization, and spread of the Ku Klux Klan? 

Forrest was a wealthy prewar slave-dealer and a war criminal as well as a talented cavalry commander. But he was not the founder of the Klan. He was recruited by its early organizers to serve as its first “Grand Wizard.” Traveling around the South, he served as a sort of reactionary Johnny Appleseed: wherever he went, new Klan “dens” sprang up behind him, and violence soon followed. Most probably, he also encouraged the Klan to develop the guerilla cavalry tactics that were its trademark. Of course, those tactic were used not against soldiers but against unarmed, helpless, and isolated freed people and white Republicans. 

How does Grant’s war against the Klan equate to a battle to save Reconstruction? 

Without Grant’s decisiveness, both military and legal, the Klan would have continued to overwhelm the embryonic two-party system in the former Confederate states. The Klan’s political goal was to destroy biracial democracy in the South; Grant’s was to protect it. When the Klan was finally faced by federal soldiers instead of hapless civilians, it caved.  

Most people associate Klan depredations being inflicted against poor, rural, uneducated Blacks. You argue that the opposite is true. Explain. 

Many rural freed people were certainly victims of the Klan. But the Klan’s primary target was the new class of (mostly) once-enslaved men who rose to positions of local and later county and statewide political leadership. Their “ignorance” is a racist trope. Many were at least as well educated as their white neighbors. Some had university educations. White Republicans were also targets of the Klan. The last thing that southern reactionaries wanted to see was viable biracial government in which Blacks exhibited equal or even superior talent to white men. 

What was it about the Klan that attracted prominent White community leaders to its ranks? 

There’s a common idea that the Klan was made up of hoodlums, louts, and thugs. Such men did join the Klan, along with poor white farmers and other workingmen. But it was founded and almost everywhere led by the so-called “better class” of men in their communities, commonly former Confederate officers, landowners, lawyers, doctors, even journalists and ministers. Such men saw themselves as the “natural” leaders in their communities. Their stated goal was to permanently enshrine white supremacy, a term which Klan members proudly embraced. 

You argue that by 1872 the organized Klan was in retreat. Why wasn’t its defeat decisive?  

Once Grant broke the Klan as an organized movement, northern interest in the South’s problems rapidly waned. Especially after 1874, funding for both occupation troops and federal prosecutors shriveled, as white supremacist “redeemers” steadily recaptured state governments. With reactionary Democrats in control, terrorism was no longer necessary to subvert the rights of the freed people. That would now be done mainly by political means.  

Who were the front-line heroes in Grant’s war against the Klan? 

While many federal soldiers and law officers struggled heroically against the Klan, two stand out. Major Lewis Merrill of the 7th Cavalry led the crackdown on the most Klan-infested counties of South Carolina. A West Point graduate with legal training and a sterling record hunting down Confederate guerrillas in Missouri during the Civil War, he was the perfect man for the job. Keeping the Klan on the run with his veteran troops and penetrating it with spies, he secured thousands of arrests. On the legal side, Grant’s attorney general, Amos Akerman, a passionately committed Georgia Republican, brought immense energy to the prosecution of the Klan. 

You warn that the Klan bequeathed to America a model for using terrorism as a means of social control. Are we hearing echoes of the 1870s in our current social and political discourse? 

My book is one of history, not present-day politics. But a few conclusions are inescapable. The United States is not so exceptional that it is somehow absolved from the potential for organized terrorist violence of the type we have seen in other countries. The story of Reconstruction and the Klan war further demonstrates that rights that we take for granted—as freedmen did in the 1870s—can be taken away again. There are forces in today’s America that have the potential to undermine our most basic democratic processes and institutions, as we saw on January 6, 2021. We must remain vigilant if we are not to let our democracy slip through our fingers.

This article first appeared in America’s Civil War magazine

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Reconstruction is a tough story to tell. The promise was so great and the ending so disappointing. It’s hardly a surprise that it took a century and a half to open a national historical park portraying what happened. In January 2017, a site was established as a national monument and rededicated as Reconstruction Era National Historical Park in 2019. The location is in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, where Reconstruction can be said to have begun and for a long while succeeded. Rich Condon arrived as park ranger a year later, around the start of the COVID-19 lockdown. The temporary closure of the National Park Service site gave him time to acclimate to his new situation and to the touchy subject matter with which he would be dealing.

The attempt to reconstruct the South after the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves didn’t go according to plan. But what was that plan? What were the goals at the start?

Here in the South Carolina Sea Islands, U.S. troops arrived in November 1861. They drive out a large portion of Confederate troops and White plantation owners. What’s left are about 10,000 African Americans. They make up 85–90 percent of the population.

A lot of questions start to surface. The U.S. troops are being asked: Am I free? Can I go to school? Can I carry a rifle? There are goals of providing education, building schools. There’s the goal of eventually arming newly freed African American men. You have the start of the 1st South Carolina Volunteer Infantry, the first Black regiment to don the U.S. Army uniform. Things like land ownership and labor reform. All that’s part of Reconstruction.

What’s special about this site is that all that stuff happens here starting in 1862 through the rest of the war, when it isn’t really happening in many other places throughout the South. This becomes what historians have called a rehearsal for Reconstruction. All those goals are outlined here, and they attempt to execute them during the postwar period in many other places across the South. The success rate varies. Here, it’s a massive success. It takes hold and lasts probably the longest of anywhere.

How did the grand designs for Reconstruction go wrong?

For a long time, Reconstruction was portrayed as a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was defeated. It was dismantled and defeated in large part by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts, the White League—groups of White supremacists who did not want to see African Americans in U.S. Army uniforms. Seeing them in a position of authority didn’t sit well for people who used to call a lot of these men “property.”

Reconstruction takes root and is doing well for a while. In most places it’s lasting 12-plus years. If you look at most definitions of Reconstruction, people look at it beginning with the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the passing of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery and ending about 1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes is elected president and pulls U.S. troops from the South.

Here we have a much broader definition. We start in 1861 with the arrival of U.S. troops and we extend it to about 1900, because even in the 1880s and 1890s, there are Black public officials being elected to office. Where it goes wrong is some of these more isolated areas like the South Carolina Upcountry, where you have the Klan presence—White supremacist violence and voter intimidation. In many parts of the North, White Northerners were losing interest in Reconstruction. All these are contributing factors to the process going into a steady decline.

In the end, what were the most significant changes, good and bad?

We see the legacy of Reconstruction in a lot of different places, even into the 20th and 21st century. Some of the good changes: African American land ownership. African American citizenship. “Citizenship” was defined largely by Black U.S. military veterans from the Civil War before 1868. Before the passing of the 14th Amendment in 1868, “citizenship” was not clearly defined.

The bad side is that at the end of Reconstruction, you have the start of the Jim Crow era, which lasts well into the 1960s. Here in South Carolina, the 1868 state constitution was a restructuring of society. It allowed African American men to vote. It extended public education to everybody, regardless of sex or race. Almost 30 years later, in 1895, a new constitution is passed in which segregation is codified, in which African Americans are seen as less than citizens and are largely disenfranchised. This was happening across the South at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th century, and the ripple effects of that last much longer than people like to remember.

This is one of the newest national historical parks. Can you talk about how it came to be?

There was plenty of interest in the local community of having a park here addressing Reconstruction. Broad and diverse support ranged from community leadership to churches to average citizens. They have a vested interest in this story being told.

This site was established initially as a national monument through an executive order in January 2017, and it becomes a national historical park in March 2019. And really what that did was allow for the expansion of this story. It allowed for the establishment of the Reconstruction Era National Historic Network, which is operated by the park. We have national parks across the country that are part of this network. We also have sites that are not managed by the federal government that have a Reconstruction story to tell. It allows this story to become more familiar to people across the nation.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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How do you manage to maintain a balance in your portrayal of controversial subject matter like this?

We talk about the hopes and successes of Reconstruction, but we also talk about the dismantling, and that includes things like racial violence, attacks on African Americans and their allies in the South. We talk about the reactions to things like African American progress, to moving from the state of enslavement to freedom to working toward equality. I think we give it a fair treatment, which in other places it had not been given in a long time.

I’ll note that we didn’t have a lot of violent push back on the Sea Islands during Reconstruction. That’s because the population remains about 90 percent African American, so you don’t have groups like the Klan or the Red Shirts operating. You also didn’t have bridges that connect these islands to the mainland until the 1920s.

Can you describe briefly what’s most important about each of the distinct sites that make up the park?

We have three, you could say three or four, sites. We have our main visitor center in downtown Beaufort. There is a plethora of things we can cover here, one of them being African American financial autonomy. The Freedman’s Bank, one of the first in the nation, is still standing. We can talk about land ownership and labor reform. The majority of the homes and lots in this area are African American–owned by 1864–1865.

Out on Saint Helena Island, a 15-minute drive from here, we have the Penn Center Historic Landmark District. We operate a site there called Darrah Hall, and we also have an easement agreement with Brick Baptist Church right across the road. At Darrah Hall, education is the big story. The people who attended classes there at Penn School, who were enslaved just a couple of months earlier, were prevented by law from learning to read and write. This is their first opportunity to change that. Knowledge is power. That’s the last thing a plantation owner wants the people he calls “property” to have.

The last one is Camp Saxton, down in Port Royal, about 4 miles south of here. This is the site where the 1st South Carolina was recruited and trained for service, the first Black men to wear the U.S. Army uniform.

You learn, in a larger sense, how military service, especially for African Americans, is kind of this direct pathway toward citizenship. During Reconstruction, when the nation’s trying to figure out who deserves citizenship, 200,000-plus African American veterans raised their hands: we fought for this country and prevented it from falling apart.

Here is also the site where about 5,000 African Americans gathered on January 1, 1863, for an impartation of the Emancipation Proclamation. They’re hearing the words that declare their freedom for the first time.

This story appeared in the 2023 Autumn issue of American History magazine.

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In the war over civil rights, the two sides faced very different tasks. The enforcers of segregation were committed to maintaining the status quo everywhere. This put them at a disadvantage because they had so much territory to defend. The civil rights movement, by contrast, usually could pick the time and place of engagements. Once a campaign got under way, it also generally could set the tempo of action. Authorities could respond with harassing actions, ranging from traffic tickets to injunctions to even banning the state’s chapter of the NAACP, and they often resorted to violence. But even so, the initiative remained almost always with the forces of desegregation.

One of the best examples of the variety of novel operations available to the Movement was the Freedom Rides. In them, a small band conducted the equivalent of a daring but almost suicidal foray behind enemy lines. The best military analogy may be the Doolittle Raid, the American bombing attack on Japan early in World War II. In April 1942, just five months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, sixteen American B-25 bombers, each with a crew of five, took off from an aircraft carrier in the North Pacific—a job that their pilots had never done before and for which the planes had not been built. They flew toward Japan without their usual escort of fighter planes, making them enormously vulnerable if detected. What’s more, they left behind some of their defensive machine guns, in order to make the planes lighter and so extend their range. The fliers knew their mission was dangerous. Indeed, some of them would be captured by the Japanese and kept on starvation diets. Three of those taken prisoner were executed as war criminals.

The point of the American raid was not to inflict significant damage, but simply to boost the morale of the American public and damage that of the Japanese public by showing that the American military could retaliate for Pearl Harbor. The planes did in fact bomb the Japanese capital and five other cities. A less predictable consequence was the effect on the embarrassed Japanese military. As the military historian Adrian Lewis puts it, “The Doolittle Raid caused the Japanese to act rashly, which led to their defeat at Midway”—which became a major turning point in the war.

Likewise, the Freedom Riders—a small group of committed activists organized in May 1961 by James Farmer, national director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—rode buses from Washington, D.C., into the Deep South. They traveled light and penetrated deep into enemy territory, unprotected, to take their segregationist enemies by surprise both in their tactics and in their strategy. The sit-ins had taken place mainly in urban areas in the Upper South—Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia. The purpose of the Freedom Rides was, like a military raid, to carry the flag of the cause into previously untouched areas, even into rural areas of the Deep South. “We somehow had to cut across state lines and establish the position that we were entitled to act any place in the country, no matter where we hung our hat and called home, because it was our country,” Farmer explained.

Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1968

by Thomas E. Ricks, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 4, 2022

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A secondary goal was to get the attention of the Kennedy administration and try to push it off the fence on the issue of civil rights. The organizers had some reason to believe that the administration was ready to move. Just as the first Freedom Ride was getting under way, Robert Kennedy was preparing a speech on civil rights. It would be his first formal address as the attorney general in his brother’s fledgling administration. When he delivered it at the University of Georgia on May 6, 1961, he appeared to endorse the civil rights movement. “If one man’s rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered,” he stated. It was high time, he said, for the South to make some “difficult local adjustments.”

But even as Kennedy spoke, he was being overtaken by events. Before the month was out, the Freedom Rides would push him to put action behind his words challenging the South to begin making difficult changes. Unfortunately, he would fail that test.

From D.C. to the Deep South

A persistent advantage of the civil rights movement was that it was innovative and so was able to keep its opponents off-balance. Tactically, the Freedom Rides were “something new,” recalled Floyd Mann, then the director of the Alabama State Police, “something that the state police had not been confronted with in the past. We’d had local demonstrations by local people, but this was the first time we’d had an interstate movement on the part of people. It was just totally something new to law enforcement in Alabama. . . . It caught them . . . off guard.”

The situation was ripe for exploitation. The Supreme Court had ruled in December 1960, in Boynton v. Virginia, that state segregation laws could not be used against interstate travelers. Yet court rulings and legislation mean little if they are not implemented on the ground. In this case, the Interstate Commerce Commission had failed to enforce the high court’s ruling. Waiting rooms, restaurants, and toilets across the South remained segregated.

Carrying out the Freedom Rides involved far more than simply boarding a bus. All too often, the civil rights movement is remembered only for its visible actions, such as marches, speeches, and other public events. That neglects the key fact that successful civil rights campaigns almost always were based on extensive planning and reconnaissance. It was essential to know beforehand what you were getting into, where your confrontations were likely to take place, and who your local allies might be. So before launching the Freedom Rides, CORE dispatched a young staff member, Tom Gaither, a Black South Carolinian and veteran of sit-ins, to scout the planned route. Gaither had been one of the people to conceive of the Freedom Rides, inspired in part by a biography of Gandhi he had been reading. His task was to travel the planned route, make maps of bus terminals, and find places where the Freedom Riders could safely stay overnight between their bus rides. Gaither also assessed the state of racial tension in each town. He reported back that he was most worried by two cities in Alabama—Anniston and Birmingham.

Raids and other commando operations, moving fast and light through enemy territory, require “troops with above average combat skills and high training levels,” admonishes the military expert James Dunnigan. The same was true for the men and women who volunteered for the initial Freedom Ride foray, for whom the equivalent of combat skills was a deep and abiding commitment to the cause.

CORE held preparatory meetings in Washington, D.C., for its handful of recruits. Gaither told them what he had seen on his recon- naissance assignment. A lawyer briefed them on the legal issues they would face, focusing on what to do if and when arrested. The presence of Black riders in “White Only” areas of bus terminals would force local authorities to face the contradiction that their segregation laws were at odds with national law governing interstate travel. A social scientist discussed the culture of the white South. In military terms, they were being introduced to the terrain of their area of operations.

The recruits then went through three days of intense role-playing, with racial taunts and drinks being thrown. After experiencing this, one volunteer dropped out, a sign that the exercise was effective. Acting out the scenarios had the obvious function of preparing people for what they might face, but it also gave the Riders a sense of one another personalities and characters, always helpful for a unit going into combat. On the night before they left Washington, the Riders went out for Chinese food, a taste that was new to John Lewis. “It was like the Last Supper because you didn’t know what to expect going on the Freedom Ride,” he remembered.

Historians differ on the number of Riders who left the capital on the first day, Thursday, May 4. It seems to have been thirteen to fifteen Riders, and three accompanying journalists—about the same as the number of aircraft in the Doolittle Raid. There is no question that, in terms of social movements, it was a small group. Yet as Gandhi had taught, “it is never the numbers that count; it is always the quality, more so when the forces of violence are uppermost.” The greater the chance of a fierce reception, the more imperative it is that nonviolent activists are disciplined and cohesive. Indeed, for his famous Salt March in 1930, Gandhi restricted his column to seventy-eight people, all well trained and deeply dedicated. But as it proceeded hundreds of miles toward the sea, his small group was greeted by crowds as large as fifty thousand.

The Freedom Riders departed Washington, D.C., in two groups—one taking a Greyhound, the other a Trailways bus. The plan was for both groups to hop buses from city to city. Their route had been designed to place them each night in towns with Black communities where they could find refuge, and also where they could meet with local groups and explain their mission with the hope of sparking longer- lasting local actions. The plan was to reach New Orleans by bus on May 17. As it happened, that geographical endpoint was never reached, but in the process the Riders achieved their strategic goal by forcing the segregation power to show the world the degree of violence it was willing to use to enforce the suppression of the rights of Black people. In addition, the fact that segregationists would attack white people got the attention of Americans nationwide.

And so they rolled south, at first not attracting much attention, but braced for the violence they knew was inevitable. “I was like a soldier in a nonviolent army,” recalled John Lewis. On May 6, as Attorney General Kennedy spoke at the University of Georgia, they traveled across southern Virginia from Petersburg to Lynchburg.

The Ride passed without incident until Tuesday, May 9, when Lewis, in the lead, stepped off a bus in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and walked into the waiting room marked “White.” White toughs waiting there punched him to the floor and began kicking him. Albert Bigelow, Lewis’ assigned seatmate, a white grandfather from Connecticut, inter- posed his body, and soon he was clubbed down as well. Then a white female Rider stepped up and was knocked to the floor. Lewis was proud that they had passed the test of not being provoked to respond to violence. After this incident, Lewis had to leave the Ride for an interview in Philadelphia about getting a fellowship in Africa or India. He did that, then returned home to Nashville, planning to rejoin the Freedom Ride in Birmingham.

The situation grew even more perilous in Winnsboro, South Carolina, a mill town with a huge Confederate memorial and a reputation for hard-core racism. Henry “Hank” Thomas, a Black Rider and a Howard University student, was arrested at the bus station for trespassing by being in the white waiting room. But making a legal case was not always the purpose of detaining someone. The charge was dropped, and Thomas was released around midnight and driven by a police officer to the bus station—which was about to close, and where a group of surly whites waited outside holding sticks and baseball bats. The police officer ordered Thomas out of the car. Thomas began thinking about old movies he had seen “about blacks being taken out of southern jails in the middle of the night.”

As Thomas reluctantly stepped out of the police car, a Black man rolled up in his own vehicle. It was driven by the courageous Reverend Cecil Ivory, a civil rights activist leader and pastor of a Presbyterian church in Rock Hill who had been asked by CORE to keep an eye on the Howard student while he was in jail. Ivory, who used a wheelchair as a result of childhood injuries to his spine, told Thomas to hop in. “He didn’t have to tell me twice,” Thomas recalled. “We hightailed it out of there.” Good planning and organization pay off in ways that no one but the participants might ever notice—but that can mean the difference between life and death. For Ivory to intervene, several things had to happen: CORE had to know that Thomas was detained, had to have someone to contact with that information, and had to hope that the person contacted would prove reliable in a hazardous situation, as Ivory did.

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On Oct. 31, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a pair of highly controversial cases in which, all indications suggest, a majority of the justices will rewrite the rules on who gets into institutions of higher education and will toss out the standard that has held for the past 44 years.  

The issue is whether colleges and universities can put a thumb on the scale in weighing whether a letter of acceptance goes to applicants from racial or ethnic groups historically underrepresented in the student body (such as Blacks or Latinos).  

Public v. Private 

The justices will be hearing two cases because the rules are different for public and private institutions. Under the 14th Amendment, states must provide equal protection to all persons, so the challenge to the affirmative action policies at the University of North Carolina, a state institution, claims that it unconstitutionally discriminates against white and Asian applicants. That constitutional guarantee does not limit the actions of private schools, but there is a companion case attacking Harvard University’s admission policy claims, which also claims the impact on white and Asian students is the kind of racial discrimination that the 1964 Civil Rights law bans at schools receiving any sort of federal grants or aid money. 

It will be the first time the justices rule on whether the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to affirmative action at private schools. But for public universities these are not new arguments and goes back almost 50 years.  

The justices first heard arguments in the matter in 1974, in the case of Marco DeFunis, a white student who had not gotten into the law school at the University of Washington. Early in the litigation, a Washington state trial court found enough merit in the argument against affirmative action to order the university to admit DeFunis. He was close to graduation when the justices debated the case, and a bare majority decided that, because of that, there was no real controversy remaining and so they need not issue a ruling.  

University of California v. Bakke 

The Supreme Court finally addressed the issue of the constitutionality of affirmative action head on in the 1978 landmark Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Allan Bakke decided relatively late in life that he wanted to go to medical school — a factor that led a dozen schools to reject him; despite his meeting other standards for admission, the schools felt that starting medical school at age 33, he would end up having significantly fewer years to practice medicine than would younger applicants.  

Bakke sued the University of California at Davis, claiming that he would have been admitted had the school not set aside 16% of its slots for “victims of unjust societal discrimination.” Though the program did not specifically mention race, no white applicant had ever been given one of those slots. Giving special privilege to applicants in that category, Bakke argued, meant the school was violating the ban on racial discrimination in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and that he was not getting the constitutionally guaranteed equal protection of the law. 

It was a dicey question for the justices, and in various combinations they issued six different opinions. Four focused on the Civil Rights Act and held that using race in the admission policy was unlawful. Four held that there was no difference between the equal protection clause and the demands of the Civil Rights Act, and that “chronic minority underrepresentation in the medical profession” justified an affirmative action admission policy.  

Justice Lewis Powell had a unique view of the dispute, but since he managed to get one set of justices to go along with one part of his view and the other set of four to go along with another part of his conclusion, it was he who wrote the decision that became the official court pronouncement. Powell decreed that “the state certainly has a legitimate and substantial interest in ameliorating, or eliminating where feasible, the disabling effects of identified discrimination.” His opinion noted that a university could determine that a diverse student body provided everyone a better education, and so in its admission decisions could consider race and other factors that might have made an applicant unfairly disadvantaged.  

But, he went on, “ethnic diversity, however, is only one element in a range of factors a university properly may consider in attaining the goal of a heterogeneous student body.” The program at Davis, with firm quotas for historically disadvantaged students, he said, went too far and so was unconstitutional.  

Despite the fact that it stuck down the affirmative action plan at UC Davis, Bakke was an important holding for affirmative action because it made clear that affirmative action to help minorities was legally permissible as long as the schemes had some flexibility built in. But with six separate opinions supporting the outcome, lower courts _— and colleges and universities themselves — got little guidance in knowing for sure what was allowed and what was not.  

Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education 

That help did not come until nine years later, and in a case that had nothing to do specifically with higher education: Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, in 1986.  

The city of Jackson, Michigan, had deliberately been hiring minority teachers to bring better racial balance to its public school faculties. When it needed to reduce the total teaching staff, it kept on the job some of those minority teachers, even though some white teachers who were let go had more seniority. White teachers sued, saying the policy denied them equal protection of the law.  

Five of the nine justices agreed. In explaining why Jackson’s layoff policy was not allowed, the opinion (again by Justice Powell) laid down the standard for judging future affirmative action cases: There must be “a compelling governmental interest” in setting up the program and it must be “narrowly tailored to the achievement of that goal.” Courts in weighing the constitutional validity of such plan must use “strict scrutiny,” applying “a standard more stringent than reasonableness.” 

U.S. v. Fordice 

Then in 1992, the high court went further. In United States v. Fordice, they found there were situations where affirmative action at public universities was not only permissible but required. By an 8-1 vote, the justices found that though Mississippi had eliminated the ban on Blacks attending its three most prestigious higher education institutions, it had not done enough to integrate the student body. Given the “segregative effects” of the state’s history of discrimination, the court said the three top-tier schools had to take affirmative action to get enroll more Black students. 

Still, opponents of affirmative action in higher education continued to attack the policy, in instance after instance insisting that the particular program did not meet the test laid out in Wygant. And the justices erected a very fine line between what schools could do and what they could not.  

Affirmative Action’s Last Wins 

That parsing began in 2003 with two cases with very different results handed down the same day. They OKed the affirmative action plan at the University of Michigan’s law school because it evaluated each applicant individually and the fact that an applicant could diversify the student body race was simply one factor in that evaluation.  

But at the same time, they held that the admissions policy of the university’s undergraduate school was unconstitutional because it did not use such individual assessment: It simply added an extra 20 points to the evaluation score of all Black, Latino and Native American applicants. To gain admission, a propsective student needed to earn 100 points.)  

In 2016, the court similarly OKed the affirmative action policy at the University of Texas.  

The Beginning of the End? 

But the Justices were already setting the stage for the decision that may be coming: that affirmative action plans must stop — at least at public institutions.  

In the 2003 Michigan law school case, the majority opinion written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that “race-conscious admission policies must be limited in time” and said that the “court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.” And in the court’s 2016 opinion upholding the University of Texas affirmative action program, Justice Anthony Kennedy also pointed to a time when such preferences would not be allowed, telling public universities that they had an ongoing obligation “to assess whether changing demographics have undermined the need for a race-conscious policy.” 

At the end of the current term, with a notably more conservative Supreme Court deciding the cases against UNC and Harvard, the age of affirmative action may well soon be over. 

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It was meant to be a vacation to visit his relatives in Mississippi, yet this family vacation quickly turned sinister when 14-year-old Emmett Till, alongside friends and cousins, sought to buy bubble gum from Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market in 1955.  

Till’s savage murder became a turning point in the civil rights movement, as did the outcome of the killers’ trial. The reverberations of this act of racist cruelty are still felt strongly today. 

Emmett Till’s Murder 

A Chicago native, Till supposedly broke the strike racial mores of the Jim Crow South and purportedly whistled at and flirted with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman who, along with her husband, Roy, owned the market.   

Though the exact details of the encounter have never surfaced, on Aug. 28, four days after the grocery store incident, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, abducted the teen under the cover of darkness from the home of Till’s great-uncle Moses Wright.

The two men proceeded to brutally beat the teen, and, according to the PBS series “American Experience,” took him to the edge of the Tallahatchie River before shooting him in the head. They then fastened barbed wire and a large metal fan used for ginning cotton around his neck and pushed his body into the river. 

Till’s heavily mutilated body was not discovered until days later, with Wright only able to identify Till by his signet ring, which had belonged to Emmett’s father, Louis Till. 

Despite Bryant and Milam being immediately arrested for the crime, they perversely became something of celebrities in the South. When the two could not afford attorneys, five local lawyers volunteered their services to represent the men pro bono, and reporters often played up the “good looks” and “tall statures” of the suspects.  

Carolyn Bryant’s False Allegations 

Carolyn Bryant testified — without the all-white, all-male jury present — that Emmett had grabbed her hand and, when she pulled away, followed her behind the counter, clasped her waist and, using vulgar language, told her that he had been with white women before. 

However, days after the arrest Carolyn told her husband’s lawyer that Till had insulted her but made no comment about physical contact,” Timothy B. Tyson, a Duke University professor and author of “The Blood of Emmett Till,” told The New York Times. 

Five decades later, she told the FBI that he had touched her hand. Nearly a decade after that, Carolyn told Tyson that her long-ago allegations of Till grabbing her and being menacing and sexually crude toward her were “not true.” 

Regardless of Caroyln’s inconsistencies, the men accused of Till’s murder were acquitted. The following year they admitted, somewhat gleefully, in Look magazine to the killing. Because of double jeopardy, they could not be retried.  

Till and the Civil Rights Movement

Till’s death had a galvanizing effect on Black America and brought nationwide attention to the racial violence and injustice prevalent in the Jim Crow South.  

His mother’s insistence on having an open coffin at his funeral to show the brutality of white racism and to this day remains a haunting reminder of the barbarism of hate. 

“In order to come to grips with this tragedy, she saw Emmett as being crucified on the cross of racial injustice,” said Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “And she felt that in order for his life not to be in vain, that she needed to use that moment to illuminate all of the dark corners of America and help push America toward what we now call the civil rights movement.” 

The Emmett Till Case today

In 2022, Till’s relatives discovered an August 1955 warrant for Carolyn Bryant’s death that had never been served. A note on the back of the warrant said that she hadn’t been served because she was no longer in that Mississippi county. Police at the time also told reporters that they didn’t want to “bother” a mother of two by arresting her.

Later, in July 2022, reporters tracked down Carolyn Bryant, now Carolyn Bryant Donham, 88. She was living in a Kentucky and, when confronted, refused to comment on Till’s death or the unserved warrant.

This hat was worn by a participant in the June 1966 March Against Fear, a 220-mile trek between Memphis,Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, by civil rights activists demonstrating on behalf of Black voter registration and against chronic racist violence in the Delta region. The march originated as a solo gesture by James Meredith, a U.S. Air Force veteran who had come to national attention in 1962 when, amid days of rioting by whites on the Oxford, Mississippi, campus of the University of Mississippi, he desegregated that institution, which had rejected him twice.

Four years later, waving off major movement organizations, Meredith proposed to encourage Black Americans to register to vote and to protest racism by walking from Memphis to Jackson accompanied only by Black men on what he called the “Meredith March Against Fear.”

On June 7, his second day of marching, Meredith, walking stick and Bible in hand and escorted by police, was on Highway 51 near Hernando, Mississippi, when from hiding former hardware clerk Aubrey James Norvell of Memphis shotgunned the activist, wounding him in the back, legs, and head. Meredith was hospitalized in Memphis. Tried for assault, Norvell became the first white person in Mississippi convicted of shooting a Black person, according to the Desoto Times.

Spurred by the shooting, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee organizer Stokely Carmichael and other activists, along with everyday people, crowded the route to Jackson. On the way, Carmichael gave an impromptu speech in which he popularized the slogan “Black Power!”

By the time the demonstration reached Mississippi’s state capital on June 26, 1966, Meredith had returned to the march, now a procession of an estimated 10,000 marchers.

Meredith, now 88, lives in Jackson with his wife, Judy Alsobrooks.

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Air Force Maj. Fred V. Cherry, the pilot of an F-105D Thunderchief shot down by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 22, 1965, was sitting in a dark 10-by-12-foot cell in North Vietnam. His left foot was wrapped in a cast and his left arm in a sling. Suddenly the cell door opened, and a guard ushered in another prisoner of war, Navy Lt. Porter Alexander Halyburton, a radar intercept officer on a two-seater F-4B Phantom II hit by anti-aircraft fire on Oct. 17, 1965. Cherry was the first African American service member captured in North Vietnam, while Halyburton came from a middle-class Southern family that employed Black servants.

A prison guard ordered Halyburton: “You must take care of Cherry.”

Neither man knew what to make of the other. Cherry, 37, explained that he was an Air Force major who flew an F-105. Halyburton, 24, found that hard to believe as most Blacks he knew worked as laborers. He had never met an African American who outranked him. Cherry didn’t believe his new cellmate was American. He presumed that Halyburton was a Frenchman left over from France’s colonial rule, which ended in 1954, and most likely worked for the North Vietnamese as a spy.

The North Vietnamese Attempt to “Divide and Conquer”

During their first night together at Cu Loc Prison, Halyburton tried to make conversation by asking Cherry questions about his background, flight origin and the date he was shot down, which seemed to confirm Cherry’s suspicions that his cellmate was a spy.

Yet it didn’t take long for Cherry to recognize the North Vietnamese strategy in putting them in the same cell.

The guards knew both men were from the South, he recalled in an oral history collection of Black Vietnam War veterans, edited by Wallace Terry and published in 1984. “They figured under those pressures, we couldn’t possibly get along—a white man and a Black man from the American South.”

Prison authorities believed that if they couldn’t get Cherry and Halyburton to cooperate through torture, harassment or isolation, they would play upon the turbulent race relations in America by using Cherry as a propaganda tool to exploit racial tensions in the U.S.

He was repeatedly told by his interrogators that whites were racists and colonizers and that he had more in common with Asians. The guards evoked the words of Malcolm X, who openly criticized American involvement in Vietnam.

Despite their captors’ effort to exploit the racial divide, the two Americans gradually established trust in one another and developed a close bond as they shared stories about their home, families and the military service that had brought them to this point.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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Cherry’s Journey to Vietnam

Cherry, the youngest of eight children, was born in Suffolk, Virginia, on March 24, 1928, of African American and Native American heritage. He grew up in a poor farming family that lived in a swampy area during the Great Depression, a time when racial segregation and discrimination were strictly enforced by state Jim Crow laws.

Although poor Blacks and whites lived side by side in Cherry’s farming community, Blacks weren’t regarded as equals. “You go over to the white farmhouse to get some homemade butter, and you had to ‘Miss’ and ‘Mister’ them,” Cherry said in his oral history interview. “Whites always called Blacks by their first name. It was sort of understood you had your place.”

In Cherry’s racially segregated public schools, white children rode half-full buses, while he and his siblings walked three miles to their school. In the impoverished agrarian South, where survival often trumped protest and confrontation, Cherry was taught that progress was possible through hard work and tenacity—if you were willing to endure the personal affronts.

As a young man, Cherry became fascinated with U.S. Navy aircraft practicing carrier landings at a nearby base and later found inspiration in the stories of the Tuskegee Airmen, Black fighter pilots in World War II. Cherry went to Virginia Union University, a historically Black college in Richmond. Before graduating he took qualifying examinations for flight school at Langley Air Force Base in nearby Hampton. He was the only African American among the 20 applicants and achieved the highest score.

Cherry flew more than 50 combat missions during the Korean War and rose to the rank of major after serving in various posts at home and abroad. He was deployed to Southeast Asia in the early days of the Vietnam War.

On his 52nd combat sortie over North Vietnam, Cherry led a flight of four F-105D Thunderchief fighter-bombers of the 35th Tactical Fighter Squadron that took off from Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base on a mission to destroy a surface-to-air missile installation 15 miles northeast of Hanoi. After crossing the Laotian-Vietnamese border, Cherry descended to treetop level, flying low to avoid radar detection. Just three minutes from his target, he saw muzzle flashes from the rifles of enemy ground troops. Cherry then heard a loud thump. His aircraft shook and swerved. Locking the control stick between his legs, the pilot used both hands to try to steady his Thunderchief as the plane jerked.

Cherry saw the SAM installation ahead with several missile-launching batteries in a circular formation. Undeterred, he pressed the attack, releasing his payload of cluster bombs on the target and setting off series of explosions. In his rearview mirror, Cherry saw the SAM site being consumed by massive fireballs.

Straining to gain altitude in his damaged F-105, he immediately headed for the Gulf of Tonkin 40 miles east, where he intended to bail out and be picked up by the Navy. Suddenly, smoke began pouring out of the instrument panel. Multiple warning lights flashed. Any hope of reaching the sea was gone. The aircraft exploded and flew out of control.

Cherry ejected from his crippled Thunderchief at 400 feet and 600 mph. The violent expulsion from the high-speed aircraft left him with a broken left wrist, a broken left ankle and a shattered left shoulder. He parachuted onto a small grassy hill just two minutes from the coast. Almost immediately, the injured American pilot found himself surrounded by a dozen armed Vietnamese militiamen and civilians.

Cherry was disarmed, stripped of his gear and marched off with his elbows tied behind his back. The constraint caused excruciating pain to his broken shoulder. The captive was driven to what appeared to be a school and interrogated under torture for hours. Throughout his grueling captivity, Cherry firmly adhered to the U.S. Military Code of Conduct, giving only his name, rank, serial number and date of birth.

That night, he was taken to Hoa Lo Prison, whose Vietnamese name translates roughly to “fiery furnace” and was infamously known to POWs as the Hanoi Hilton, a caustic reference to the torture that took place there. The more Cherry refused to cooperate, the more abusive his interrogators became. His arms were twisted behind his back and forced upward, pulling his already shattered left shoulder from its socket. Cherry endured daily interrogations and torture over the next few days. His left ankle became badly swollen and his shoulder contorted, but he was denied medical care as punishment for his refusal to cooperate.

One month after his capture, Cherry was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, sardonically dubbed by the POWs as “the Zoo,” where he would soon meet Halyburton.

Halyburton’s Journey to Vietnam

Halyburton, born Jan. 16, 1941, grew up in the small college town of Davidson, North Carolina, then an intellectual suburbanite’s enclave steeped in patriotism, Southern charm and insidious racism.

He was raised by his mother and grandparents in a town that largely opposed desegregation. His community and, by extension, his family believed that Blacks were intellectually inferior and could only do manual labor.

Halyburton’s grandfather, although regarded as being charitable and respectful toward his Black housekeeper and her family, did not treat them as equals. They were welcome to enter the home through the front door but were not allowed to share the family’s bathrooms.

Halyburton attended the Sewanee Military Academy in Tennessee and Davidson College. There he was inculcated with an appreciation for discipline and structure. Yet his interests also included literature, poetry and the power of prayer.

He considered going into journalism, but with the escalating Cold War and the possibility of being drafted, Halyburton decided to volunteer. Inspired by a fraternity brother’s experiences as a naval aviator flying the F-4 Phantom II, he enlisted in the Navy after graduating in 1963.

“Haly,” as his buddies called him, completed the preflight program on Oct. 10, 1963, and was later assigned to fighter squadron VF-84 aboard the carrier USS Independence. There he trained as a radar intercept officer, which made him responsible for navigation and identifying targets while riding in the backseat of a Phantom.

On Halyburton’s 75th mission of the war, aircraft from the Independence took part in a large airstrike to destroy a rail bridge at Thai Nguyen, 75 miles north of Hanoi, the farthest north Halyburton had ever flown. Anti-aircraft fire hit his F-4. Halyburton ejected before the plane crashed, but his pilot, Lt. Cmdr. Stanley Olmsted, was killed.

As his parachute drifted down, Halyburton could hear groundfire directed at him from a nearby village. After landing, he attempted to make his way up the nearest hill, hoping to be rescued by Navy helicopters, but he was soon captured by North Vietnamese militia and sent to the Hanoi Hilton.

Halyburton endured days of interrogations that lasted for hours at a time. Then he was given a choice: Cooperate and receive better treatment or refuse and be taken to a place where conditions were worse. Thinking there couldn’t possibly be anywhere worse than the Hanoi Hilton, he chose the latter. Halyburton was transferred to Cu Loc Prison, “the Zoo,” on Nov. 27, 1965.

Shared Sufferings

On Dec. 24, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson paused the bombing campaign and sent a 14-point peace plan to North Vietnam’s President Ho Chi Minh. In the event that peace was declared, the North Vietnamese were to provide injured American POWs with medical care.

Cherry finally had surgery on his shoulder and was placed in a torso cast. Yet without the benefit of antibiotics, the incisions became infected. On Jan. 31, 1966, negotiations on the 14-point peace plan broke down and the fighting resumed. Afterward, Cherry was left to rot in his cell with no medication or treatment.

Although Halyburton was able to shower periodically, Cherry wasn’t allowed to shower for four months due to his condition. Halyburton fed and bathed his cellmate, changed his dressings and cleaned his wounds. One day he noticed that ants had invaded Cherry’s scalp where mounds of gunk had developed. Standing with him in a quarter inch of slime in a makeshift cold-water shower, Halyburton undressed Cherry and soaped and scrubbed his hair again and again until the greasy gobs and dead ants floated in the slime around their feet.

When Cherry developed a fever and began hallucinating, Halyburton begged prison authorities to save Cherry’s life. Not wanting their only Black American POW and valuable propaganda asset to die, the North Vietnamese relented, and Cherry underwent a series of crude surgeries at a hospital to treat his infections.

As the two men struggled to survive, Halyburton realized that he too had benefited from their time together. The Navy lieutenant had neared a dangerous abyss of despair during his torturous days in isolation before meeting Cherry. Thus, while Halyburton had saved Cherry’s life, Cherry had given Halyburton a purpose and the will to persevere.

In an email to journalist James S. Hirsch, author of 2004 book about the two POWs, Halyburton wrote: “Caring for Fred…I realized how trivial [my concerns] were by comparison and how he bore his pain and suffering with such dignity…The task of caring for him gave a definite purpose to my immediate existence…I received much more from him than I was able to give.”

On July 6, 1966, 52 POWs, including Halyburton, were paraded through the streets of Hanoi in a propagandistic attempt to demonstrate the North Vietnamese people’s anger at the U.S. bombing campaign. Thousands of agitated civilians descended upon the American captives and attacked them with bricks, bottles, stones, garbage and fists. Halyburton returned to his cell battered and bruised.

Shortly after Halyburton’s brutal beating, Cherry was brought back from the hospital, where he had undergone a “sadistic” cutting of dead flesh without anesthesia. As his blood dripped all over the floor, Cherry collapsed into the arms of his friend. “Fred,” Halyburton exclaimed, “what in the world did they do to you?” Both men remembered that they shed “a tear or two” that night as they dwelled on their sufferings.

Four days later, on July 11, 1966, Halyburton was transferred to another prison, known as the Briarpatch, 33 miles northwest of Hanoi. “Tears started to roll down my eyes,” Cherry recalled. “We cried. And he was gone…I never hated to lose anybody so much in my entire life. We had become very good friends. He was responsible for my life.”

Discussing his friendship with Halyburton years later in an email to Hirsch, Cherry said: “He was white and he was from the South, but he taught me that you can grow up in that environment and separate the good from the bad and the right from the wrong. He was one who did that.”

After Halyburton’s departure, the North Vietnamese continued to press Cherry to make public statements regarding racial intolerance in the United States, but he refused. Cherry spent 702 days in solitary confinement and was tortured for 93 days in a row.

Lifelong Friendship

On Jan. 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed after years of negotiations. As part of the agreement, all American POWs were to be released from captivity. After more than seven years in hell, Cherry and Halyburton were going home.

Cherry attended the National War College in Washington and later worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He retired from the Air Force as a colonel in 1981. In July 1987, President Ronald Reagan appointed Cherry to the Korean War Veterans Memorial Advisory Board. He later became CEO of Cherry Engineering and Support Services and director of SilverStar Consulting. In 1999, Cherry was featured in a public television documentary, “Return with Honor,” narrated by Tom Hanks. The film looked at the American POW experience in Vietnam.

Halyburton completed his graduate work in journalism at the University of Georgia and was assigned to work at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He retired from the Navy in 1984 with the rank of commander. Halyburton stayed at the Naval War College, teaching various subjects including strategy and policy and the Military Code of Conduct.

Cherry and Halyburton remained lifelong friends. They often gave talks together on their experiences in Vietnam. Cherry died of cardiac disease on Feb. 16, 2016. Two years later, his hometown honored Cherry by naming a Suffolk middle school after him. Cherry is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, where he was laid to rest with full military honors. Halyburton resides in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his wife, Martha, and their three children.

Daniel Ramos is a freelance writer who focuses on military history topics. He has written Fighting for Honor, about the roles of five ethnic groups in the military, currently being edited for publication. Ramos works at September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York as an interpretive guide/educator.

This article appeared in the June 2022 issue of Vietnam magazine.

Too excited to sleep—come morning she would be starting high school, and under very dramatic conditions—Elizabeth Eckford, 15, spent the night of September 3, 1957, preparing for her first day of classes at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas. Like her mother and sisters, Elizabeth was an expert seamstress. Once again, she ironed the pleated white skirt she had made, taking care to touch up the navy blue and white gingham trim she had added when she ran short on white fabric. With bobby socks and white buck loafers, her outfit would present the ideal look. She was a little nervous; last evening on television, the Eckfords had watched Governor Orval Faubus announce that to protect everyone involved and to “preserve the peace,” he was activating the state’s National Guard units and stationing them at Central.

In the morning, as usual, Birdie Eckford inspected her children, making sure all six had notebooks, sharpened pencils, and lunch money. Then, also as usual, she read to them from the Bible, this day choosing a particular passage—the 27th Psalm—and giving those words heightened emphasis. “The Lord is my light and my salvation,” Mrs. Eckford read. “Whom shall I fear?” 

As Birdie was reading, husband Oscar nervously paced the room, chomping on an unlit cigar. A night-shift maintenance worker at the Missouri Pacific Railroad station, he should have been asleep, but he too was wound up. Saying goodbye to her parents and siblings, and with a swirl of her skirt Elizabeth walked out the front door. She knew the route to Central by heart; she had passed the school countless times on her way to her grandfather’s grocery store. 

A New World

Three years before, the U. S. Supreme Court had ruled school segregation unconstitutional. Some states of the former Confederacy, like Virginia, vowed to respond to the federal mandate to integrate with “massive resistance”. Less so Arkansas. In 1955, Little Rock School District Superintendent Virgil Blossom proposed to integrate Central High—gradually. During the summer of 1957, working with Arkansas NAACP president Daisy Bates, the city school board sought young Black volunteers for that momentous action

Of Little Rock’s 3,665 secondary school pupils, 750 attended the two facilities allocated for Black students, Dunbar Junior High School and Horace Mann High School. In 1955, Dunbar High had transformed into a junior high and Horace Mann opened as the new senior high for African American students. White students were free to attend Central High, Hall High, or Little Rock Technical High.  

As a first step, administrators reviewed student records at Dunbar and Horace Mann. Based on grades, attendance, and emotional maturity, Bates and board members chose and interviewed several hundred prospects. From among 200-some volunteers, the adults narrowed the ranks to 17. When organizers explained that, owing to the fraught situation, that participants would not be able to engage in extracurricular activities; that community backlash could get their folks fired, and that the effort to integrate Central could get violent, the list dwindled to ten: Minnijean Brown, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Jane Hill, Thelma Mothershed, Melba Patillo, Gloria Ray, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, and Carlotta Walls. Like her nine schoolmates, Elizabeth Eckford was not particularly political. She just wanted to attend a modern, well-funded high school.

On September 3, Bates gathered the stalwarts at her home in Little Rock. The next day volunteers were to meet again at her house, ride together to Central, and, accompanied by Black and white clerics from local churches, walk into the high school at about 8:30, she explained. After the teens left and Bates was rushing about, it dawned on her that she had counted only nine volunteers. No one had contacted the Eckfords, who had no phone. Bates made a mental note to get with Elizabeth and her parents later that day, but in all the tumult the NAACP leader forgot. 

THe journey to central high

Wearing sunglasses against the bright morning, Elizabeth took a city bus to 12th and Park Streets, two blocks from the front entrance to Central. Just before 8 a.m., she walked south on Park toward the school. She heard crowd noises that became a roar. Armed soldiers were lining the periphery of the school grounds. Up ahead, students were passing through the military picket line. “I saw the Guard break ranks as the students approached the sidewalks,” she later recalled. She walked to the point where she thought Guardsmen were letting students through. 

When she stepped toward the school doorway, however, two soldiers suddenly closed ranks, obstructing her path. Believing she had picked the wrong entry point, Elizabeth walked further down the line to another sidewalk. 

As she again tried to enter the school, Guardsmen crossed their rifles. Still supposing she simply had not found the right spot, she continued to a walkway near the school’s main entrance. Across Park Street from the National Guard line a mob of angry white protesters was milling. Finally, Elizabeth understood what the soldiers had been trying to convey. Again blocking her path, men with guns solemnly shunted her toward the mob. 

“It was only then that I realized that they were barring me,” she said later.

Horrific welcome

“They’re coming!” a voice shouted. “The n——s are coming!”

Elizabeth’s knees began to tremble. 

“Don’t let her in!” someone else shouted. 

As she stepped into Park Street, hundreds of angry whites fell in behind her. Reporters and news photographers were walking backwards in front of Elizabeth and the mob, taking notes and pictures. 

Intending to reach the bus stop at 16th and Park, Elizabeth strode briskly. Her parents had taught her to look to adults for help, so she scanned the crowd for a visage that showed a trace of empathy, focusing on an older white woman. “It seemed like a kind face, but when I looked again, she spat on me,” Elizabeth recalled. “Safety, to me, meant getting to that bus stop.”

The Arkansas Democrat had assigned photographer Ira “Will” Counts, 26, to cover the desegregation of Central High. As he was documenting the chaos, Counts noticed directly behind Elizabeth a hysterical white girl spewing hateful language. He framed Elizabeth in the foreground, slightly blurred, with her snarling tormentor in focus. “I just hoped I had enough film,” Counts later said. As the white teenager was screeching “Go back to Africa!” Counts squeezed the shutter, counterposing Hazel Bryan’s unhinged ferocity and Elizabeth Eckford’s despondent composure.

Reaching the bus stop, Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bench there and stared downward. She tried without success to shut out her surroundings.

“I could hear individual voices, but I was not conscious of numbers,” she said. “I was conscious of being alone.” 

Screeches of  “Go back to the jungle!” and “Drag her to a tree and lynch her!” bombarded Elizabeth. Reporters circled her, forming a protective ring. Benjamin Fine of The New York Times sat on the bench and put an arm around her. He lifted her chin and whispered, “Don’t let them see you cry.” The sight of a white man comforting a Black girl further inflamed the mob.

Friendly faces

Daisy Bates heard about Elizabeth’s predicament on her car radio and sped to Central. She didn’t arrive in time to help, but Grace Lorch happened onto the fracas in time to intervene. Lorch, 50, a prominent white figure in the local civil rights movement, had just dropped her daughter at a junior high near Central. Aware of that morning’s action, Lorch drove by to see how it was progressing. When she saw the protesters, she parked and ran to the scene. Charging into the crowd to get to Elizabeth’s side, Lorch called out the mob. “She’s scared!” Lorch shouted. “She’s just a little girl! “Six months from now, you’ll be ashamed of what you’re doing.”

Across Park Street stood Ponder’s Drug Store, whose soda fountain was a popular Central High hangout. With Elizabeth in tow, Lorch strode toward the pharmacy, intending to use the phone there to call a taxi. Protesters surged at them, spouting slurs. The staff had locked the store doors. 

“Won’t somebody please call a taxi?” Grace Lorch pleaded. 

No one did, but a northbound bus arrived on Park Street and the driver opened its doors. Lorch helped her companion board and sat with her. Lorch asked the girl her name; Elizabeth, in deep shock, did not respond. After a few stops, Grace asked if she would be all right. The girl said yes, so Lorch disembarked to catch a southbound bus and retrieve her car. Elizabeth later admitted to being relieved when her rescuer left, since she knew that many in Little Rock thought Grace and husband Lee Lorch to be left-leaning activists, perhaps even communists.  

Birdie Eckford taught laundry technique at the Arkansas School for the Blind and Deaf Negro on Markham Street. Elizabeth got off the bus there. “There are times when you just know you need your mama,” she said later. She hurried downstairs through soapy, bleach-tinged clouds of steam to find her mother peering out a window through moist eyes. Birdie had been following her child’s ordeal on the radio. She and Elizabeth embraced without speaking. 

The Others

As planned, the other student volunteers had arrived around 8:30 that morning at the corner of Park and 13th, accompanied by the ministers. They, too, walked a gantlet of abuse to the Central High doors, where the Guard unit’s commander declared that at Governor Faubus’s order the students could not enter the building. 

Later that day, at Daisy Bates’s house, the NAACP chief met Elizabeth for the first time, Elizabeth glaring at the older woman with what Bates described as “cold hatred in her eyes.”

“Why did you forget me?” the 15-year-old demanded. Bates apologized profusely.

For two weeks, the volunteers stayed out of school as NAACP leaders and their lawyers went to court; when volunteer Jane Hill’s father’s boss threatened to fire him, her parents pulled her out of the project. On September 14, President Dwight D. Eisenhower summoned Faubus to Newport, Rhode Island, for a brief meeting at which Faubus assured the president he would allow the Black students to enroll. Then, withdrawing the National Guard and leaving security to the Little Rock police, the governor complained that the federal government was pressuring him to integrate his state’s high schools.

Another Try

Daisy Bates began planning a second attempt to enroll the remaining student volunteers. She started calling parents. The Eckfords now had a telephone at their home. To Bates’s great surprise and relief, Elizabeth and her parents agreed, albeit reluctantly, to stick by the effort. The promise of a superior education trumped fear.   

On the morning of September 23, escorted by Little Rock police, state troopers, and four Black journalists, the volunteers entered Central High School through a side door. Another mob, 1,000 strong, had gathered at the main entrance. Protesters raced to the side door and attacked Black newsmen. Through the morning, the mob showed no signs of relent. Before noon police officers ushered the volunteers out through the same side door and rushed them to safety in official vehicles.

That evening, President Eisenhower issued a proclamation ordering opponents of integration to “cease and desist.” The next day, by telegram, Little Rock Mayor Woodrow Mann begged Eisenhower to send Army troops to his city. An unenthusiastic Eisenhower realized Faubus had backed him into a political corner. The president federalized the Arkansas National Guard and approved deployment to Little Rock of 1,000 paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division of the U.S. Army. On September 25, 1957, covered live by network television, the nine Black students, surrounded by soldiers, climbed the front steps at Central High on what proved the easiest part of their mission. 

Torturous school year

A hard core of racist schoolmates numbering 150 to 175 spent the rest of the 1957-58 school year tormenting the volunteers. White girls scattered broken glass in the showers as Black classmates washed up after gym class. A favorite form of physical insult was stepping on Black students’ heels. A student hurled sharpened pencils at Elizabeth. An assailant threw acid in the eyes of volunteer Melba Pattillo, saved from blindness because a Guardsman rushed her to a sink and rinsed away the acid.

None of the nine shrank from the test. Birdie Eckford lost her job; Jane Hill’s dad lost his. Little Rock shut down its schools 1958-59. The Eckfords managed to hire a tutor, but Elizabeth came up several credits shy of a diploma. She completed high school by moving to St. Louis, Missouri. She sank into a withering depression. She overdosed on sleeping pills—the first of several suicide attempts. Chronically blue, she nonetheless graduated from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, with a B.A. in history. She moved home to Little Rock. She enlisted in the U.S. Army. She lived in Indiana, Georgia, Washington, and Alabama. In May 1974, Elizabeth Eckford, 32, returned to Little Rock to stay. 

“Other places, for me, weren’t any better,” she said. “They were just different places.”

She became a recluse, rarely leaving the house other than to shop and do laundry. For hours she lay in bed facing the wall. Therapy and medication lifted her spirits a bit, but it took an unexpected meeting to dispel the fog enveloping her.

After repeated coaxing, Elizabeth agreed to attend the 40th anniversary of the Nine’s enrollment in 1997. Will Counts, who had photographed Elizabeth and Hazel Bryan in September 1957, was encouraged by a historian friend to try to bring the women together for another picture as part of the commemoration.  

Making Amends

Hazel Bryan Massery, who had stayed close to Little Rock, had come to regret her actions at Central High as a 15-year-old. She claimed to have “amnesia” regarding that behavior but acknowledged its caustic effects. She volunteered with young Black mothers and counseled minority students. When Counts invited Massery to pose for a photo marking the anniversary, she enthusiastically agreed. 

So did Elizabeth Eckford.  

Will Counts drove Hazel to Elizabeth’s house, where the women cordially greeted one another. Hazel apologized repeatedly. The two discovered they shared a love of flowers. Hazel said she hoped to have a chance to step out of one picture and into another. Counts drove them to Central High where he photographed them side by side smiling. The portrait ran on page 1 of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and later, combined with Counts’s 1957 photo, as a popular poster entitled “Reconciliation.”

For several years, the pair spent time together taking in flower shows, shopping, and meeting for lunch. They made public joint appearances. Elizabeth put depression further behind and became a teacher. Eventually it came to light that Hazel had remained friends with white students who had abused the Black volunteers. Elizabeth broke off contact. 

Remembering THat Day

Elizabeth Eckford continued to speak with schoolchildren, though sometimes the encounters left her overcome by emotion. While talking to a student group in a restaurant outside Little Rock, she suddenly bolted. “I’m sorry,” the group leader explained. “She’s having an episode.” She kept up her public appearances but set limits: no crowding, no hugging, no loud noises. 

In April 2007, during an annual Sojourn to the Past tour, Elizabeth found herself scheduled to speak at Central High. The Sojourn program, begun in 1999 by California history teacher Jeff Steinberg, annually takes a group of Black and white students on a week-long bus tour through the South to visit civil rights landmarks and hear from veterans of the struggle. 

On the way to Little Rock from Memphis, Tennessee, chaperones told the students of Elizabeth’s stipulation about the ban on loud noises. As an alternative, Steinberg showed the group the American Sign Language gesture for cheering. When Elizabeth walked onstage at Central, the children rose, lifted their arms, and waved their hands in a standing ovation. 

Nearly 50 years after her harrowing walk into unwanted immortality, Elizabeth Eckford again was in the midst of raised hands—not ending in fists or raised middle fingers but conveying silent appreciation for her achievement and strength of character.

Eugene Jacques Bullard, a former infantryman of the French Foreign Legion, set a precedent when he obtained his flying certificate on May 5, 1917, for it qualified him as the first black airman in American history. Significantly, however, the volunteer from Columbus, Georgia, had earned his flying status from the French Air Service, which he served as a fighter pilot in Escadrilles N.93 and Spa.85 from August 27 to November 11, 1917. Bullard’s native United States would not allow black airmen to fight for their country until 1943, when the first of a contingent trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, were formed as the 99th Fighter Squadron and shipped out to North Africa. That unit and the 332nd Fighter Group that followed would prove their worth in the last two years of World War II.

Besides establishing an outstanding record for successfully defending U.S. bombers against enemy fighters, several of the Tuskegee Airmen went on to distinguished postwar careers in the U.S. Air Force. One of them was Colonel Charles Edward McGee, who shared highlights of his long career with Aviation History senior editor Jon Guttman.

Aviation History: Could you tell us something of your childhood and education?

McGee: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 7, 1919. My mother passed away at my sister’s birth, when I was little over a year old. We spent time in Cleveland and with grandparents who were in Morgantown and Charleston, West Virginia. When I was in third grade, my father was teaching at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida. We spent a year there, then back to Cleveland until 1929, when he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he was doing social work.

AH: Your father seems to have been a fairly prominent citizen.

McGee: Yes. In addition, he was an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister. We never had a lot, but I never remember being hungry or not being clean. I don’t have any recollections of specific actions of bigotry, except that schools were segregated, and when we were in Florida, we lived in a small house that was out on the edge of town. Also, because of the level of schooling for blacks in the South, when we returned to Cleveland, I had to repeat third grade. I became a Boy Scout in Illinois, and when my father’s ministry took him to Keokuk, Iowa, in the mid-1930s, I spent my second through senior years of high school there. In the fall of my senior year, he returned to south Chicago and I graduated from Du Sable High School in 1938. My family didn’t have the money to send me to college then, so I worked for a year with the Civilian Conservation Corps in northern Illinois, where I learned engineering and contour farming. I was then able to attend the University of Illinois in 1940. I took engineering and was also in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program and a member of the Pershing Rifles.

AH: What were your feelings when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor–on your birthday–brought the United States into the war?

McGee: My father was preaching in a church in Gary, Indiana, in 1941, and I had taken a summer job in the steel mill there. I was also in the Coleridge Taylor Glee Club. We were driving to sing at a church in south Chicago at 4 that Sunday afternoon when we heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We went on with the show, but I knew that one way or another we were going to be involved in the war.

AH: When did you first become interested in flying?

McGee: I don’t recall even seeing an airplane when I was young. It was about the time I was in college that the Army was beginning to recruit nonflying personnel—communications, engineering, armament and mechanics—for a one-squadron black experiment at Chanute Field. Word of that was spreading through the black community. Well, I already had a draft card, so I filled in that pilot’s application. I was sent over to a couple of places in Indiana to take the examination, and when I passed that, in April 1942, I had to take a physical. I’d also been going with a girl from Champaign, Illinois, Frances E. Nelson, and that summer we became engaged. In my expectation of the call to arms, I did not go back to school in September—I continued working. Frances and I were married on Saturday, October 17, and Monday morning’s mail had that letter I knew was going to come. On October 27, I was sworn into the enlisted reserve, and a few weeks later, I got the call to go to Tuskegee.

AH: What were some of your first impressions of Alabama?

McGee: The trip down was my first real experience of the South. As the train left southern Illinois, you had to change your location in the car. We knew there were certain barber shops or restaurants to go to in Chicago, but you could feel the change in atmosphere and approach as you entered the Deep South—you knew that whatever happened, the law was not going to uphold whatever your position was. When you were a black man from the North, you especially had to be careful what you said and did. You learned to be extra careful when stopping to fill up your car, and even avoid some filling stations. To a degree, the southern blacks were concerned about how a northern Negro was going to act, and a lot of conversations dealt with what you needed to know and where to go to keep out of trouble. One of my classmates happened to be from a well-to-do family who owned a drug store in Montgomery, Alabama, and he helped steer me into the black community, because you didn’t go into the downtown area very much.

AH: Why did the Army choose that location?

McGee: In those days, there was a great fear around the country that when you get large groups of blacks together, there’s got to be trouble. There were places in the North, like Colorado, California and Illinois, that were turned down for the location. On the other hand, the Tuskegee Institute had already had a successful civilian pilot training program, so when the Army began its 99th Squadron experiment, Tuskegee, with flight instructors who began flying in the 1930s, got the contract.

AH: What was the Tuskegee training facility like?

McGee: By the time I got to Tuskegee in the fall of 1942, the airfield had been completed, although they had been training on it even while it was under construction. The 99th had completed its 33-pilot cadre by the time I got there. At that time, too, Colonel Noel F. Parrish was the white commander. The previous commander, Colonel Frederick Von Kimble, was not very supportive of the program, but he was relieved and replaced by Parrish, who had been directing operations. He believed in the program and the people.

AH: How did your training go?

McGee: I entered preflight training as part of Class 43-G, but I was one of several who skipped upper preflight, perhaps because of my college studies, and ended up graduating in Class 43-F. Primary training was at Moton Field, a grass strip just outside the city of Tuskegee, in the Stearman PT-17. We then went on the Army airfield, which was where our white instructors were. We did basic training in the Vultee BT-13A and advanced training in the North American AT-6. My wife came down and worked as a secretary for a Dr. Kenny in the Tuskegee Institute hospital while I was going through training, but I usually only saw her on Sunday afternoons.

AH: How did you do in training?

McGee: I remember having a queasy stomach in the first few flights and talking to the flight surgeon, who just said, ‘Quit eating fried foods for breakfast.’ I did, and I never had another problem. My first check was on February 11, 1943, and the lieutenant said it was unsatisfactory. I had two more flights with an instructor, then tried again on February 14 and passed the check. We used Eglin Army Air Field in Florida for gunnery training. I finished my last flying in the AT-6 on June 25, graduated on June 30, and on July 6 I had my first Curtiss P-40 ride. I also took blind flying in the AT-6, to improve my instrument proficiency. I qualified as expert in gunnery but not nearly as well with handguns.

AH: Where did you go from Tuskegee?

McGee: I left Tuskegee in August for squadron and group formation flying and aerobatics at Selfridge Field, Michigan, where the 100th, 301st and 302nd squadrons of the 332nd Fighter Group were being formed. We were fully combat ready in the P-40L and P-40N by October-—and that’s when the decision was made that the group was going to fly the Bell P-39Q. It had the engine in the back and had less horsepower than the P-40, but we young pilots just used to say, ‘If the crew chief can start it, then I can fly it.’ We trained on P-39s through November, and in early December we left Selfridge Field by train under classified orders, arriving at Newport News, Virginia. We left Newport News on a big convoy that zigzagged across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean. My ship, with the 302nd Squadron, went to Taranto, Italy, then we trucked over to the Naples area, where we began flying from Montecorvino.

AH: When did you begin combat flying?

McGee: We began operations on February 14, 1944, patrolling Naples Harbor to the Isle of Capri, and we also did coastal patrol. My first patrol was on February 28. We moved up to Capodichino on March 4, and did the rest of our tactical patrolling from there. The P-39Q was too slow and essentially a low-altitude aircraft–we flew at 10,000 to 15,000 feet, and by the time we reached even that altitude to intercept intruders, they were usually back in Germany. It was frustrating. Meanwhile, the men of the 99th were flying their P-40s with the 79th Fighter Group and shot down several aircraft over Anzio, earning the right to be called fighter pilots.

AH: When did that situation change for you?

McGee: In May they decided we were going to go to the Fifteenth Air Force. As the Allies advanced north, the bombers came up from Africa to bases in Italy, but they were getting their tails shot off over targets like Ploesti, so four single-engine fighter groups were picked for the escort. There were the candy-striped 31st, the yellow-tailed 52nd, the ‘checker-tail clan’ of the 325th and the red-tailed 332nd.

AH: How exactly did the 332nd choose red?

McGee: As I understand it, red paint was what was readily available. I think on the first couple of planes they just painted the rudder, but one of the pilots in the 332nd said, ‘That’s not enough.’ As it turned out, the gunners on the Boeing B-17s and Consolidated B-24s loved it because they could easily tell who was friendly at high altitude over the target area.

AH: I notice that May 5 in your flight log has a star beside it.

McGee: That was the day I first flew the Republic P-47D Thunderbolt. An even bigger day was May 23, when the group moved to Ramatelli on the Adriatic side and we began long-range escort flights. They took a farmer’s field, set up headquarters in the farmhouse, laid down pierced-steel planking, set up a couple of squadrons on one side of the field with their tents, and one on the other. P-47D No. 280 was assigned me for most of my flights at that time. It was just after that time that the 99th was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group, so all four of the black squadrons were together.

AH: I understand that the 99th was not happy with that?

McGee: Well, you see, they had been in combat about a year, and we had only been there five months. They also felt that they had achieved a certain degree of integration by flying with the 33rd and 79th groups. Even though the 33rd’s commander, Colonel William Momyer, didn’t like them and his reports were all mediocre, the 79th’s Colonel Earl E. Bates saw them as more pilots for his group and let them operate alongside the rest of his squadrons. The 332nd Group’s commander, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., had commanded the 99th, and they were pleased to be serving under him again, but there was a little resentment among their more experienced pilots over the fact that the other squadron commanders and group staff had already been picked. But B.O. [Davis] was very strong, sincere and severe–he laid down the law and things moved along.

AH: When did you fly your first escort mission into Germany?

McGee: That was a mission to Munich on June 13, and my feeling was, ‘We’re finally doing the job we came to do.’ We were still flying the P-47, and for such long-range penetration missions, we’d usually have a group carry the bombers out and another group would take them back. The P-47 was fine with B-24s, but not so good with the B-17, which could fly higher in an attempt to avoid anti-aircraft fire. We always liked to be a couple thousand feet above the bomber stream to do our S-turning, but even when its supercharger cut in at 19,000 feet, the P-47 would become sluggish trying to get above the highest B-17s. All that changed on July 1, when I took my first flight in the North American P-51C-10. I flew my first long-range mission in the Mustang on July 4, escorting bombers to Romania. We could take a P-51 up to 35,000 feet and it would still be maneuverable.

AH: Were you assigned a particular plane?

McGee: My usual P-51C was 42-103072, which as I recall bore the ‘buzz number’ 78. I christened it Kitten, which was my wife’s nickname, and my crew chief, Nathaniel Wilson, kept it purring, too.

AH: What was the squadron’s makeup?

McGee: Usually, each squadron would have 18 aircraft take off–16 and two spares. If everything went well as we climbed and formed up, the group leader would tell the spares to go on back to base. But if anyone was having engine trouble, then the spares would go wherever needed. The commander of the 302nd was Captain Edward C. Gleed. After he became group operations officer, the squadron was led by 1st Lt. Melvin T. ‘Red’ Jackson, then V.V. Haywood. In September 1944, I was promoted to first lieutenant and became a flight leader.

AH: Who led the missions?

McGee: Sometimes the squadron commander or operations officer led the formations, sometimes the group operations officer, and when the leader had a problem, someone next in line would be designated to assume the lead.

AH: Do any particular missions stick out in your memory?

McGee: They were all long flights, usually five hours and at least one I recall that was six hours. On those flights, you find that the cockpit really gets small and you can sweat through a leather flight jacket sitting up there under the sun. We were glad when we got off the target and we could be less rigid in keeping formation with one another. Fighter sweeps were great fun.

AH: When did you initially encounter aerial opposition?

McGee: I first saw Messerschmitt Me-109s over Markersdorf, Austria, on July 26, 1944. In his briefings, B.O. was very explicit about the way we operated. If enemy planes appeared to attack, the flight commander would designate who would go after them. The rest of us stayed with the bombers, doing S-maneuvers, and we were glad that we weren’t bomber pilots, who had to hold a tight formation as they made their final runs over the target, through enemy flak and fighters. On this occasion, the Germans didn’t attack the formation. In another sighting, 2nd Lt. Roger Romine was told to get them and got a kill.

AH: What about your aerial victory?

McGee: That was during the bombing mission to the Czechoslovakian oil refinery at Pardubice, north of Vienna. Their tactic on that occasion was to try to fly through the bomber stream and keep on going. We were pretty much over the target area when we spotted a Focke Wulf Fw-190 and I got the word, ‘Go get him.’ I fell in behind him, and he took all kinds of evasive action, diving for the ground. We were down over the local airfield–I remember seeing a hangar on fire out of the corner of my eye—when I got in behind him and got in a burst that must have hit something in the controls. He took a couple more hard evasive turns and then went right into the ground. I stayed low getting out, to stay out of the sights of enemy groundfire. During that time, I saw a train pulling into a little station, so I dropped my nose and made a firing pass at the engine. Then, when I thought I’d pulled away from where I thought all the ack-ack was, I began climbing back up. Romine was my wingman on that occasion, and somewhere in all that jinking he had lost me and had gone up to rejoin the formation. He saw the Fw-190 crash, though, and confirmed the victory for me. [McGee’s opponent was from Jagdgeschwader 300, three of whose Pardubice-based Fw-190As attacked the 5th Bomb Division and damaged two bombers before being driven off.] The 302nd’s 1st Lt. William H. Thomas got another Fw-190 and 1st Lt. John F. Briggs of the 100th Squadron downed an Me-109 on that mission. Unfortunately, Romine got killed after his 97th mission—in an on-the-ground accident in his airplane–in November 1944.

AH: Your flight log also credited you with an enemy plane on the ground at Ilandza, Yugoslavia, on September 8.

McGee: Yes, on some days, we were assigned a fighter sweep over an enemy airfield to go in and catch anything we could there. I was only credited with destroying one, but we damaged a great number of enemy aircraft on the ground.

AH: How many missions did you fly?

McGee: I flew a total of 136, of which 82 were tactical and 54 were long-range, high-altitude missions. I flew my last mission over Brux, Germany, on November 17, 1944, and it was a long one–about five hours, 45 minutes. Then, on November 23, I was shipped back to Tuskegee to replace a white twin-engine instructor. Training was now taking place for the 477th Bomb Group. I learned a number of years later that in 1945 the 302nd was disbanded; the 332nd went back to being a three-squadron group and its aircraft were assigned to the other squadrons. My Kitten went to the 301st Squadron, was renumbered 51 and flown by Lieutenant Leon Speers, who was shot down on April 24, 1945, and taken prisoner.

AH: What was it like teaching bomber pilots back at Tuskegee?

McGee: I think the first twin-engine instruction had already begun in the summer of 1943. Twin-engine pilot training started in the Beech AT-10 Wichita—what a clunker—then we switched to the North American TB-25J, a stripped-down B-25J. That was a marvelous plane, with great big radial engines, a lot more power—a wonderful training platform.

AH: What did you do later?

McGee: After Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945, the 332nd Fighter Group was disbanded and the 477th was preparing for the Pacific. At that time, the group was under a white commander, who told the black pilots that as trainees they could not use the officers club and he was designating a separate club for them. He ended up having 101 of the officers arrested for refusing to sign the paper stating that they had read and understood his directive on the use of clubs. The investigation that followed led to the commander’s being relieved, and Colonel Davis was brought in. Under B.O.’s leadership, the 477th was made into a composite group, with two squadrons of B-25Js and two squadrons from the 332nd Group, the 99th and 100th, flying P-47Ns. Shortly after Davis took over the group, it was moved to Lockbourne Air Base in Ohio, but the war in the Pacific ended on September 1, 1945, before the group was deployed. As the U.S. Army Air Forces started to close the Tuskegee facility, I joined the 477th Group at Lockbourne as assistant base operations and training officer in 1946. About the time that the U.S. Army Air Forces became the U.S. Air Force in 1947, they deactivated the composite group and reactivated the 332nd Fighter Group.

AH: What were your duties after World War II?

McGee: I had gone to Atlanta, Georgia, to take the examination to become a regular officer. I never heard a thing from it, but I was enjoying the flying, so I stayed in the Air Force as a reserve officer. They told us that we couldn’t fly all the time, so I picked the maintenance officer school at Chanute Air Force Base [AFB]. When I graduated, I got orders to go to my first integrated assignment—Smoky Hill AFB, at Salina, Kansas, as officer in charge of the base maintenance shops for the Boeing B-29 equipped 301st Bomb Wing of SAC [Strategic Air Command]. All the officers and technicians were white, but I got along perfectly fine with them. You wore your ribbons on your uniform in those days, and they knew I was a combat veteran.

AH: What were you doing when the Korean War broke out?

McGee: In May 1950, I got orders to go to the Philippines. I was grounded in a pilot reduction, but I had taken the flight officer’s program exam and had a ‘hip pocket warrant’ in operations, so I ended up as a base operations officer at Clark Field. Then, on June 25, the North Koreans invaded South Korea, and anyone who had experience on the P-51—or F-51, as it had been redesignated—was put on flight status. I was assigned to the 67th Fighter Bomber Squadron [FBS] of the 18th Group, which, with the group’s 12th FBS, was sent to Johnson AFB, Japan, to pick up F-51Ds without transition—because the F-51s given the Philippine air force were in such condition that it would take $1,500 each to put them in safe shape. On July 29, 1950, I took my first flight in a Mustang since November 1944. We flew to Ashiya, across Tsushima Strait from Korea, and began flying bombing and strafing missions while the Corps of Engineers built a strip for us outside Pusan. I flew to the K-9 strip to check on construction progress and spent the night under the wing of my plane.

AH: What were your combat activities once K-9 was established?

McGee: We’d be bouncing all over the place, flying interdiction missions against bridges, trains and trucks. I expended lots of bullets, napalm and rockets against supplies, troop movements, etc. The North Koreans fired as much at us as we fired at them, the heaviest fire coming from emplacements overlooking the valleys. I was the 67th’s maintenance officer. Then, on August 5, 1950, our CO, Major [Louis J.] Sebille, was fatally hit by anti-aircraft fire near Hamhung and crashed his Mustang into a concentration of enemy ground troops, for which he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. After that, [Major Arnold] ‘Moon’ Mullins became CO and I became the operations officer and continued flying missions. During an attack on the Kigye Valley on September 16, I was hit in the wing. I got back to Pusan with a 1-inch hole and damage to the left wing spar—it needed major repairs.

AH: Where did you go after the United Nations counteroffensive broke out of Pusan in September 1950?

McGee: We flew out of a forward strip in Pyongyang—until the Army got to the Yalu River and the Chinese intervened in late November. We then operated out of our main strip at K-10 in Suwon, where we were joined by No. 2 Squadron, South African Air Force, also flying the Mustang. I helped give them their first theater indoctrination, then they flew their own missions. I also spent 30 days serving as air liaison for the 19th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Division.

AH: Did you have any problems with the South Africans, given their policy of apartheid?

McGee: No, I actually made some good friendships among them. We built a comradeship from the commonality of flying and fighting side by side.

AH: Did you have trouble with Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15s?

McGee: No, we didn’t think about enemy planes—most jets were flying at high altitude.

AH: How long were you in Korea?

McGee: On February 20, 1951, I flew my 100th mission, then went back to the Philippines for assignment to the 44th FBS as operations officer. There, I checked out in Lockheed F-80s. I loved jets from the first roll—I’d just read the tech order and was ready to go flying after 13 landings. After a couple months of flying, I became the CO and my wife was on her way. During that time, too, we had a West Pointer from the Thirteenth Air Force assigned to my squadron, 2nd Lt. Frank Borman. A nasal problem had grounded him, and the flight surgeon was reluctant to release him. I bootlegged some time for him and got the flight surgeon to put him back on flight status. Borman worked out all right and later became one of the early astronauts.

AH: Did you still fly missions?

McGee: We flew air defense missions for Formosa in our F-80s in 1951 and 1952. They used to love us to fly up and down over the rooftops of the capital city of Taipei—it showed our presence. They had an airstrip where we’d land to refuel. We’d stay three days, then fly back to the Philippines. The 44th did a lot of transition and theater training for recalled pilots on their way to Korea. I came home in May 1953, went to staff school and served in the United States, flying Northrop F-89 interceptors and Lockheed T-33s. In 1959, the exams I took back in 1945 finally caught up with me, when I got a letter saying, ‘Would you like to accept a Regular commission?’ I was then a colonel in the reserve, but I so enjoyed flying that I accepted the Regular USAF rank of lieutenant colonel and went to Italy to assist in Jupiter missile deployment. After two years commanding the 7230th Support Squadron at Gioia del Colle Airbase near Taranto, I came home again, to Minot, North Dakota. A significant sign that times were changing was the assignments I received. They were based on background experience. In 1964, I was assigned to Tenth Air Force headquarters at Richards-Gebauer AFB near Kansas City, Missouri, and my wife and I received on-base housing more openly than the first time. Then, in 1967, I got an assignment to the Pentagon, but those orders were changed to Vietnam. It involved training for two complete squadrons in the McDonnell RF-4C. I ended up commanding the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron [TRS] at Tan Son Nhut AFB, near Saigon. The other, the 12th TRS, went to Udorn, Thailand.

AH: How long did you fly recon missions over Vietnam?

McGee: One year and 173 missions, predominantly over the northern part of South Vietnam. Some were over Laos and North Vietnam, but we didn’t get to MiG Alley—the folks from Thailand got that run.

AH: What were the greatest dangers for an unarmed reconnaissance plane?

McGee: The worst place was Mu Gia Pass when it was raining and foggy, and you relied strictly on your radar operator in those mountains. In the RF-4C, speed was our only protection when the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese threw groundfire at us. During night flights we’d see the tracers coming up behind us. Often, too, we’d get to the target area at high altitude, then we’d go down and fly at 360 knots at low altitude, in patterns to photograph the area. We’d raise that speed to 420 or 460 knots over a highly defended area.

AH: Were you ever hit?

McGee: Late in 1967, I was flying a day recon mission over one of the roads in Laos. It was a suspected infiltration route, but I’d received no intelligence of heavy defenses. As I was letting down, however, I took a high-caliber hit in my left wing, which left a big hole. I was losing fluids, though I couldn’t tell which ones. I had to divert to the nearest base on the coast, Da Nang, and it was the only time I had to make a front-end engagement landing, using my tail hook to make sure we wouldn’t run off the runway. It turned out we needed major repairs. I took the film out of the plane and hitched a ride with a general who happened to be going to Saigon in a twin-engine North American Rockwell T-39. When I got back, I turned in the film and resumed flying the next day.

AH: Were you concerned about your plane going down?

McGee: Well, the shooting got your adrenaline up—you’d put on more speed, which was about all you could do. Was I scared? Our military training set us up with the idea that you’re trained to do a job. You were too busy to dwell on the danger while you performed. Hopefully, you would get home in one piece.

AH: Were you at Tan Son Nhut when the Communist Tet Offensive broke out on January 31, 1968?

McGee: When the Tet Offensive broke out, most of the squadron pilots were at our walled compound off base. There were only six of us on base, and for three days we flew all of the squadron’s missions, since there was no movement allowed off base. We didn’t lose a mission. Soon hutches were built for us to live in on the base. At one point, the VC started mortaring the place. We had foxholes, but I’d just put my helmet over my head and stay in bed. Who knew where a round would land? Six or seven of the 16th’s planes were hit in revetments—some burned, some sustained shrapnel damage.

AH: When did you leave Vietnam?

McGee: My tour was up in May 1968, and after being given the choice, I went on a wonderful year’s tour in Heidelberg, Germany, as air liaison officer to Seventh Army Headquarters. I was promoted to colonel and became chief of maintenance for the 50th Tactical Fighter Wing. I got to fly F-4C Wild Weasels, F-4E air defense fighters and the F-4D, which I flew at Mach 2. Eventually, back in the States, Maj. Gen. Paul Stoney, commander of Air Force Communications Service, asked me if I’d like to take command of Richards-Gebauer AFB. I’d always wanted this administrative task, so on June 24, 1972, I got my opportunity, and with it came getting a ‘key to the city of Belton.’ It ended too soon, though. Due to a mandatory retirement policy based on 30 years unless you were made a general officer, I retired on January 31, 1973.

AH: What did you do as a civilian?

McGee: I spent 8 1/2 years in business and became vice president of real estate for the Interstate Securities Company, where my administrative training in the military fit in perfectly. After the corporation was sold, I got a degree in business administration; then I became director of Kansas City Downtown Airport. After a second retirement, I was selected as a member of the Aviation Advisory Commission. After my wife passed away in 1994, I moved east to live with my daughter, who is a television editor, here in Maryland.

AH: I presume you’ve kept in touch with fellow Tuskegee Airmen?

McGee: I was national president of the association from 1983 to 1985, and was a charter board member when Tuskegee Airmen, Inc., was established in Washington, D.C., in 1972. I’ve attended all but two annual conventions since then. I also do church work and participate in the Air Force Association. My approach to life was, and still is, ‘Do while you can.’

This article was originally published in the March 1999 issue of Aviation History magazine. For more great articles subscribe to Aviation History magazine today!

Stephen H. Sachs, prosecutor of the Catonsville Nine anti-Vietnam War protestors, died Jan. 12, 2022 at age 87.

Born in Baltimore in 1934, he graduated from Haverford College in Pennsylvania and served in the U.S. Army from 1955-57. Following in the footsteps of his father Leon, director of the Baltimore Jewish Council and a renowned arbitrator, Sachs studied law at Yale and became a law firm partner.

In 1967, he was appointed U.S. attorney for Maryland in 1967 by President Lyndon B. Johnson and rose to fame the next year for prosecuting the Catonsville Nine, a group of Catholic antiwar activists who stormed a Selective Service office in Maryland and burned draft records.

Although Sachs empathized with the activists, he stressed that their belief in their own righteousness did not justify breaking the law. “One can believe, as I do, that the nine were men and women of conviction and courage. And also believe, as I do, that they dishonored a cardinal American value,” he wrote in a 2018 op-ed in the Baltimore Sun. 

“The self-righteous presumption of the nine that they deserved acquittal because they were ‘right’ also fractured a central value of the American democracy,” he wrote, adding that the First Amendment “teaches that no one man or woman, no one sect, no one political party, no true believer, no zealous partisan, no ideologue – no one has a corner on the truth, a pipeline to God. The distinguished federal judge Learned Hand may have put it best: ‘The spirit of liberty,’ he said, ‘is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ There is a modesty, a humility, in this maxim.”

“Respect for the law is what keeps this country together. So therefore I can’t accept people who violate the law, even if their motives are, to them at least, pure,” Sachs later said.

Sachs served as Maryland Attorney General from 1979 to 1987. He then joined a Washington law firm and retired in 2000.

Remembering his legacy, Maryland Attorney General Brian E. Frosh, quoted in The Washington Post, said, “I consider him of the greatest attorneys general of Maryland.” V

Captain Alexander Smith was one of the most highly decorated indigenous Canadians of World War I. While more than 4,000 men of the First Nations served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF), few were officers. Smith ultimately rose to the rank of captain in the army and later became chief of his Cayuga tribe.

The eldest son of a Six Nations Cayuga chief, Alexander George Edwin Smith was born on Aug. 12, 1879, on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Ontario. As a young man Smith joined the 37th Haldimand Rifles, a militia unit with many indigenous members. By the outset of World War I he’d served in the rifles for 18 years and been promoted to captain. Smith volunteered for the CEF. He was assigned to the 20th (Central Ontario) Battalion, 4th Infantry Brigade, 2nd Canadian Division, as a lieutenant, despite his militia rank and experience. After initial training in Britain, Smith’s unit shipped out to France in September 1915. Two months later Smith was back in Britain for medical treatment after having been deafened during close calls with German artillery shells.

Smith returned to his unit in France in June 1916. On July 1 Anglo-French forces launched the Battle of the Somme, though the divisions of the Canadian Corps didn’t make their combat debut for another 76 days. On September 15 the Canadian 2nd and 3rd divisions, along with nine British divisions, pressed the attack until September 22. Then, following three days of artillery preparation, the Canadians resumed attacking on September 26. The next day Smith led his company in a supporting attack for a main effort by the 8th Battalion (90th Winnipeg Rifles). Advancing in front of his company’s main body with a party of soldiers armed primarily with hand grenades, Smith captured a German trench and 50 prisoners. Twice during the course of the attack he was buried by earth thrown up by shell fire. He was awarded the Military Cross for his actions.

Diagnosed with shell shock, Smith was again evacuated to Britain. In April 1917 he returned to Canada and was assigned to the 1st Depot Battalion at Ontario’s Niagara-on-the-Lake training camp. Among the recruits he trained there for the French army were some 23,000 Polish-born volunteers from both Canada and the United States. France later awarded Smith the Colonial Order of the Black Star (Officer class) for his contribution to the French war effort. He was one of only five Canadians to receive the decoration.

After the war Smith succeeded his father as chief of the Cayuga tribe. His injuries left him with permanent disabilities, including hearing loss and chronic headaches. Despite his war hero status, the veteran officially remained a ward of the state, his $49 a month disability pension doled out by the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs. With the help of his sons and nephews, he tried to run his 100-acre farm, but eventually it proved too much. In 1942 he moved to Buffalo, N.Y., where he died at age 75 on Aug. 21, 1954.

Alexander’s brother, Charles Denton Smith, was also a captain in World War I, with the 18th (Western Ontario) Battalion, in the same brigade as his brother. Charles Smith was also awarded the Military Cross, for heroic actions on Nov. 9, 1918. On that day he led his platoon in an attack against German positions near the Belgian village of Frameries, personally taking out both a demolition party and a machine gun and crew. Another notable member of this remarkable family was Alexander’s son Harold. After his father moved to Buffalo, Harold too moved to the United States. He ended up in Hollywood, where he landed bit parts playing Indians. Changing his screen name to Jay Silverheels, he achieved on-screen immortality as Tonto to Clayton Moore’s Lone Ranger. MH

This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of Military History magazine. For more stories, subscribe and visit us on Facebook.

No case has tested the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court more than 1962’s Baker v. Carr. The Court had to hear a second set of oral arguments six months after the first, then hand down six opinions for eight justices. The ninth justice, Charles Evans Whittaker, found trying the case so upsetting he had a nervous breakdown and skipped the final vote. He resigned right after the decision and soon after died. Yet Chief Justice Earl Warren called Baker v. Carr the most important decision rendered in his 16 years on the High Court.

https://www.historynet.com/brown-v-board-of-education.htm

Baker occurred because Charles W. Baker, mayor of Millington, Tennessee, nine miles north of Memphis, tired of his town getting the short end of the state legislative stick. He signed on as lead plaintiff in a suit the League of Women Voters and other reform organizations organized. The goal was rebalancing state-level representation of residents of cities and suburbs. Memphis, Nashville, Knoxville, and environs had 63 percent of Tennessee’s people but only 13 of 33 state Senate seats. A rural voter enjoyed disproportionate clout: the Memphis area’s seven state senators each represented 20 times the number of residents the senator from farm-filled Moore Country did.

Tennessee’s constitution called for reapportioning the legislature every ten years, but the state still was basing voting districts on the 1900 census. The 1920 census had shown for the first time more Americans living in cities than in rural areas. That shift held, unacknowledged in legislatures. Rural lawmakers were using their legislative majority to starve cities with skinflint outlays for public needs.

The condition was nationwide, with urban- ites shortchanged in as many as 40 states. The 6 million living in the Los Angeles County area had the same punch in California’s legislature as a rural district of 14,000. Burlington, Vermont’s capital (pop. 33,155), had one rep in that state’s lower house; so did Vermont’s least populous district, with just 38 residents.

The situation was profoundly anti-democratic, but city folk had scant recourse. Neither of the routes normally open to political reformers was available to them. Asking legislatures to reapportion to reflect population reality was futile, since rural lawmakers hated to yield power. Going to court was ineffective; judges’ hands were tied by a 1946 Supreme Court mandate in Colgrove v. Green that redistricting was a political question courts were to eschew.

After Baker’s challenge was denied, the justices decided to rethink that 1946 precedent. In oral arguments in April 1961, the lawyer asking that Tennessee’s districts reflect population claimed the extant setup so diluted urban residents’ power as to deny them equal protection as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Lawyers for Tennessee Secretary of State Joe C. Carr admitted to the inequalities but insisted the matter was one for the state to address, leaving federal courts no role.

https://www.historynet.com/american-history-transformation-of-the-us-supreme-court.htm

In conference, the justices split harshly, haranguing one another. Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, both dissenters in Colgrove, were joined by Warren and William Brennan in backing mandatory redistricting. Felix Frankfurter, who had written the Colgrove decision, was adamant about upholding its ban on federal court action; he feared that too much intervention in everyday life would cost courts the public’s trust. He had immediate support from conservative John Harlan. Tom Clark hesitated to let federal courts wade into what he saw as political disputes, and Whittaker, though sympathizing with those for redistricting, would not lend a fifth vote to override Colgrove. Potter Stewart ended the discussion by saying he could not make up his mind.

That meant additional oral arguments—three hours in October, in the court’s first-ever morning session. Whittaker was still wrestling with his decision, but Stewart indicated he was leaning toward siding with those who saw in Tennessee’s apportionment a 14th Amendment problem. Clark was in the Frankfurter camp but in trying to write a dissent listing options for would-be redistricters, he realized none existed and tentatively switched sides

Even with Whittaker still on the fence, the Warren side now had a comfortable six votes—if they could hold Clark and Stewart. To achieve that tricky end, Warren’s means was to assign the job of writing the majority opinion to Brennan, rather than to Black or Douglas, longtime foes of malapportionment. Brennan carefully crafted a holding that would not alienate those two wavering pillars.

He acknowledged that the courts had to stay out of political questions, but then focused on the core—and never previously addressed—question of just what constituted a political question. He explored six themes, saying a matter was “political” if 1) the Constitution assigned the decision-making power to a specific department; 2) no judicial standard exists for resolving the issue; 3) any decision would involve making policy beyond the courts’ powers; 4) the court cannot resolve the issue without displaying “lack of respect” for the political branches; 5) “an unusual need” militates against questioning a political decision already made; and 6) a potential for embarrassment impends if various branches of government are making conflicting rulings.

Applying those factors, the decision Brennan wrote did not order Tennessee to redraw its legislative map but did tell reformers they could make their 14th Amendment claims in federal court. That careful solution garnered six votes, but three added their particular views. Douglas underscored that all barriers to apportionment challenges had been removed, Clark said Tennessee was so malapportioned the court should have concluded that it was violating the Constitution, and Stewart insisted that the ruling still left lower courts free to OK a rational apportioning scheme not based on population. Harlan and Frankfurter each wrote dissents. Frankfurter’s was his final opinion in 23 years on the court; he suffered a stroke seven days after Baker was decided and four months later resigned.

https://www.historynet.com/the-nine-greatest-supreme-court-justices.htm

Reapportionment advocates had little trouble winning challenges in lower courts. And when states sought relief from the Supreme Court in those redistricting rulings, they got no support. Just ten months after the Baker v. Carr decision, the court in a case that originated in Georgia enunciated the “one person, one vote” standard.

The next year the justices applied that principle to drawing district lines for the U.S. House of Representatives. Four months later the Court decreed states could not follow the national pattern of a Senate with representation for geographic areas but had to redistrict both houses of their legislatures only by population. “Legislators represent people, not trees,” Warren wrote. (By then Whittaker and Frankfurter had been replaced by Byron White and Arthur Goldberg, two justices who joined the camp seeing a more expansive role for the federal judiciary in enforcing the guarantees of the 14th Amendment.)

Either under pressure from court cases or the realization that failure to act would trigger such suits, within two years of the Baker decision 26 states had reapportioned their legislatures; 46 had by 1966. That’s why Theodore Olson, solicitor general under President George W. Bush, says, “the decision in this case changed the way we are governed in this country in a very dramatic way.”

This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of American History magazine.

American-born Josephine Baker has become the first Black woman inducted into the French Panthéon, the nation’s hallowed mausoleum of heroes and France’s highest honor.

The push for Baker to be honored in the Panthéon began in 2013, and on Tuesday the entertainer, civil rights activist, and French Resistance hero joined the likes of 80 other luminaries, including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Marie Curie.

At the request of her family, Baker’s body will remain in Monaco and her presence in the Panthéon will be commemorated with a plaque on a cenotaph. The symbolic casket, reports the New York Times, carried soil from the United States, France, and Monaco — places that shaped Ms. Baker’s life.

Standing before Baker’s flag-draped coffin, French president Emmanuel Macron presided over the ceremony, declaring that “France is Josephine.”

“She broke down barriers,” Macron continued. “She became part of the hearts and minds of French people … Josephine Baker, you enter the Panthéon because while you were born American, deep down there was no one more French than you.”

Born Freda Josephine McDonald, Baker grew up amid Jim Crow and racial segregation in St. Louis, Missouri, before moving to New York City as a teenager to perform with an all-Black dance troupe. It was there that Baker was discovered by a talent scout from Paris and in 1925, at the age of 19, she moved to the French capital.

Almost immediately, her love affair with the European nation began.

“When I was a child and they burned me out of my home,” she told the crowd during the March on Washington in 1963. “I was frightened and I ran away. Eventually I ran far away. It was to a place called France. Many of you have been there, and many have not. But I must tell you, ladies and gentlemen, in that country I never feared. It was like a fairyland place… when I was young in Paris, strange things happened to me… I could go into any restaurant I wanted to, and I could drink water anyplace I wanted to, and I didn’t have to go to a colored toilet either, and I have to tell you it was nice, and I got used to it, and I liked it, and I wasn’t afraid anymore that someone would shout at me and say, ‘******, go to the end of the line.'”

For the next decade Baker became a staple among the city’s intellectual and artistic elite, becoming a “fixture in shows at Les Folies Bergères, a famous music hall. She was a symbol of the Jazz Age, dominating France’s cabarets with her sense of humor, her frantic dancing and her iconic songs like “J’ai Deux Amours” or “I Have Two Loves,” referring to “mon pays [my country] et Paris,” writes NPR.

In France Baker found the dignity and freedom so often denied to Black men and women in the United States, and as Nazi Germany invaded her beloved adopted nation, the entertainer was determined to fight back.

Before the fall of France in June of 1940, Baker, alongside French actor Maurice Chevalier, performed for French troops stationed along the Maginot Line.

Refusing to dance for the Nazis, Baker used her influence as a shield—stashing weapons and hiding Resistance fighters and Jewish refugees at her chateau, Les Milandes, outside the French neighborhood of Lapeyre.

Laurent Kupferman, who wrote and directed the documentary “Josephine Baker, a French Destiny,” told NPR that the entertainer used her fame to glean information at Axis embassies and that she undertook spy missions, passing between free France in the south and the occupied Vichy zone.

Despite her stardom, her visits home to America were punctuated by the continued humiliations of segregation and discrimination, leading her to become a vocal civil rights activist in her later years.

“I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents,” she told protesters at the March on Washington rally as she stood alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.”

In 1975, Baker passed away at the age of 68 after collapsing on stage during a performance in Paris. In the subsequent days, the streets of Paris thronged with thousands of fans saying their goodbyes.

“She did not defend a certain skin color,” Macron said on Tuesday. “She had a certain idea of humankind and fought for the freedom of everyone. Her cause was universalism, the unity of humanity, the equality of everyone ahead of the identity of each single person.”

In March 2021, a 21-year-old man killed eight people, six of them Asian, at three Atlanta area massage parlors. Cops attributed the rampage to the White perp’s hatred of his own sex addiction, but local Asian Americans saw more: “xenophobia” aimed at them, as Georgia state Representative Bee Nguyen put it. The slaughter was the most savage of a year-long spate of incidents in which Asian Americans going about their lives were insulted, harassed, or beaten, often to the tune of rants about Covid: “You are infected,” “You are the virus,” et cetera ad nauseam. “We’ve gone from being invisible to being seen as subhuman,” wrote U.S. Representative Grace Meng (D-New York).

This story began over 150 years ago.

Until 1848 there were no Asians to speak of in the future- or then-United States. The Pacific was 7,000 miles wide, and imperial Chinese edicts forbade emigration. The Gold Rush changed that. Word of a “Mountain of Gold” in California spread to the British outpost of Hong Kong, and by 1851, 25,000 Chinese had defied distance and the law to take a whack at the mountain.

These immigrants took up trades besides mining. Some 10,000 Chinese laborers helped build and blast the Central Pacific Railroad, the first transcontinental line’s western leg, over and through the Sierra Nevada range. Charles Crocker, the magnate who employed them, noted approvingly that his crews’ ancestors had built the Great Wall of China. As California turned to agriculture, Chinese labored on farms. In cities and towns, they ran laundries and restaurants. By 1870, there were 63,000 Chinese in the United States, almost all in the West. 

Typical Chinese immigrants’ jobs and enterprises paid meagerly, but required little or no investment, and offered greater return than farming stones in Taishan, the impoverished district adjacent to Hong Kong from which most migrants came. Initially, America’s Chinese were overwhelmingly male. Chinese fraternal organizations steered them to jobs and collected dues as a payback. Émigrés sent whatever surplus remained home to their families; many intended to return to China. Typical of sojourning immigrants, they kept to themselves, as much as possible holding to the old ways.

Chinese were a new race in the American mix, and their long queues, mandated by the ruling Manchu dynasty, made them doubly conspicuous. But so long as times were flush, they were welcome enough. 

In his western travelogue Roughing It, Mark Twain called the Chinese “quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and…as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.” Bret Harte’s ominously titled poem “The Heathen Chinee” in fact describes White card sharps being outsmarted by an Asian mark. After the Panic of 1873 brought bad times, however, the goodwill vanished and the gloves came off. 

By doing scut work for low wages, the Chinese, it was alleged, were depressing the American labor market. This was not always so: The Central Pacific paid White and Chinese workers the same $35 a month—though Chinese required no company-provided meals because they cooked for themselves. The prime anti-Chinese demagogue on the West Coast was Denis Kearney, a San Francisco drayman who was himself an immigrant from Ireland. A fellow radical described him as “a man of strict temperance in all except speech.” In rabble-rousing stemwinders delivered at the Sand Lots, a vacant parcel next to City Hall, Kearney excoriated wealthy Whites, but always signed off with “The Chinese must go.” Kearney’s vehicle, the Workingmen’s Party of California, managed by 1878 to win a quarter of the seats in the state senate and hold a fifth of the state assembly.

Congress took note of burgeoning anti-Chinese sentiment. In 1880 the United States signed a treaty with China allowing Washington to limit inflow of Chinese laborers in a “reasonable” manner. In 1881, Congress showed what it saw as “reasonable” by approving a bill, sponsored by Senator John Miller (R-California), slamming the doors for 20 years. President Chester Arthur vetoed the measure early in 1882, saying that two decades was an unreasonably long time and “a breach of our national faith.” Congress countered with a ten-year hiatus. Arthur accepted. The one-decade ban was renewed in 1892 and in 1902 made permanent. An unanticipated effect of excluding Chinese was to create demand for Japanese laborers, triggering demands to exclude them, too. Unlike China, Japan was a modernized militant nation that would take a formal rebuke amiss. So President Theodore Roosevelt brokered a tacit deal, “the gentlemen’s agreement,” whereby America agreed not to stop Japanese from coming here provided Japan agreed to prevent them from leaving there. It took a world war to relax the Chinese ban—a bit. In 1943, as a gesture to our ally Chiang Kai-shek, Washington allowed Chinese to trickle in at a rate of 105 persons per year.

The Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 ended national immigration quotas. The gates opened wide. Chinese came in families, not just as lonely men, and from the entire Middle Kingdom, not just Taishan. A gauge of the new diversity: bland Cantonese restaurants serving made-in-America dishes like chop suey were joined by eateries offering fiery dishes from Sichuan and elsewhere in China. The 2018 census estimated there to be over five million Chinese Americans. (The count of Asian Americans, meaning everyone with roots from Pakistan to the Philippines, topped 20 million.) The days when Chinese laborers competed for low-wage jobs are long gone; for years Chinese Americans have been known for the traits Twain enumerated, making them a “model minority”—i.e., one that causes no trouble. The reputation adheres to Americans from near (Korea) and not-so near countries (India). This is what Rep. Meng had in mind when she said that Asian Americans hitherto have been “invisible.” 

Two recent developments have brought Asian Americans into focus. One is Covid, obtusely nicknamed by Donald Trump the “kung flu.” The evidence is powerful that the Chinese government systematically concealed what it knew about the origin and spread of the coronavirus from its own people and to the world. That is on the heads of Xi Jinping and cronies, not the heads of Chinese people there or anywhere else. It is nevertheless no surprise that the ignorant, the demented, and the criminal take the pandemic out on random Asian passersby—more so when the pandemic itself is overstressing police departments.

Meanwhile, the idea of unfair Asian competition has been revived, not in regard to sweat labor, but to high-end educational slots. Asian American students are overrepresented in elite institutions, from the California state university system to New York City’s specialized public high schools (Stuyvesant High School, the jewel in Gotham’s crown, is 74 percent Asian). Efforts to modify conditions, by boosting enrollment of underrepresented minorities, get pushback from Asian American voters and parents. California Asians broke heavily against Proposition 16, a 2020 ballot measure to allow reinstatement of affirmative action in state university admissions. Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, a group called Students for Fair Admissions has been suing Harvard since 2014, alleging the existence of tacit quotas that cap Asian admissions. The plaintiffs have asked the Supreme Court to rule on their case. 

When people are oppressed by inner demons or by competition, fair or unfair, they look for scapegoats—and the most convenient are people who do not look like themselves.

This story appears in the August 2021 issue of American History Magazine. To subscribe, click here.

Offstage, Elvis Presley was the opposite of the type conventionally associated with the music of which he is universally considered the supreme exponent. He was not remotely rebellious, delinquent, or “animalistic” (a term used in denunciations of his performance style). He was shy and deferential and devoted to his parents. “Nice” is a word often used to describe him. 

Presley had had no intention of becoming a rock ’n’ roll singer and he never really considered himself one. He sang rock ’n’ roll songs, but he sang all kinds of songs. He understood that pop music was a business in which a lot of money could be made; if rock ’n’ roll could make him more, he was happy to sing rock ’n’ roll. “I have to do what I can do best,” as he said. But he didn’t sing only for the money. He sang because he was a singer, and his enormous popularity exposed people to genres of popular music they otherwise might not have paid attention to.

Presley was born in East Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1935. His father, Vernon, was a laborer who moved from job to job. The Presleys lived for a time in a Black neighborhood in Tupelo (though in a “White” house). They did not consider themselves, and there is no evidence that they were, racially intolerant. Elvis was an only child—a twin brother was stillborn—and he was especially close to his mother, Gladys. Gladys was dynamic; people liked her. But the family was somewhat insular. In school, Elvis was a bit of an outsider and sometimes got picked on. He stood out not because of any special talent, but because, as a teenager, he dressed up: bolero jackets, a scarf worn as an ascot, dress pants with stripes down the sides. His demeanor remained reserved and respectful. In 1948, the family moved to Memphis, where Presley attended Humes High. (Schools were segregated by law in Tennessee.) The summer after he graduated, in 1953, he walked into the Memphis Recording Service to cut a record.

The Memphis Recording Service was more than a recording facility. Its founder, Sam Phillips, had a vision. Like Presley, Phillips came to Memphis from the deeper South. He was born in 1923 in a small town in Alabama called Lovelace Community, near Florence. His father was a flagman on a railroad bridge over the Tennessee River. Phillips got his start in radio, working in Decatur and Nashville and finally, in 1945, making it to Memphis—in his mind what Paris was for Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. In 1950, he opened the Memphis Recording Service in a tiny space on Union Avenue a block away from Beale Street, the heart of the Memphis music scene.

“We record anything—anywhere—anytime” was the studio’s slogan. This meant a lot of church services, weddings, and funerals. But Phillips’s dream, the reason he set the studio up, was to have a place any aspiring musician could walk into and try out, no questions asked. Phillips would listen and offer suggestions and encouragement. If he liked what he heard, he would record it. For a fee, the performer could cut his or her own record.

Phillips was patient with the musicians; he was adept with the technology; he was supportive. He thought that music is about self-expression. He liked blues songs especially, but he liked any song that sounded different. The pop sound in 1950 was smooth and harmonic; Phillips preferred imperfection. It made the music seem spontaneous and authentic, qualities that would become key attributes of rock ’n’ roll. Word got around, and musicians no one else would record, many of them Black, turned up at the Memphis Recording Service. Phillips was the first to record Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, and B.B. King. A musical genre boils down to a certain kind of sound, which is why songs can be covered in different genres. As much as anyone, Phillips helped create the sound of rock ’n’ roll.

To have his recordings pressed and distributed, Phillips relied on independent labels such as Modern Records and Chess. But he found the men who ran those outfits untrustworthy—he felt that they tried to poach his artists or cheated him on royalties—and so in 1952, he started up his own label, Sun Records. That was relatively late in the history of independent labels. 

Presley came in to make a record for his mother. At least, that’s the legend; according to a friend, the Presleys did not own a phonograph. He paid $3.99 plus tax to record two songs, “My Happiness,” which had been a hit for several artists, including Ella Fitzgerald, and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” an Ink Spots song. Whether Phillips was in the booth that day or not later became a matter of dispute (he insisted that he was), but someone wrote next to Presley’s name, “Good ballad singer. Hold.” A year later, Phillips invited Presley back to try out a ballad he’d come across. The song didn’t seem to work, and, per his standard operating procedure, Phillips had Presley run through all the material he knew, any song he could remember. After three hours, they gave up. Phillips decided to pursue the experiment, though, and he put Presley together with a couple of country musicians, Scotty Moore, an electric guitarist, and Bill Black, who played stand-up bass, and invited them to come into the studio, which, on July 5, 1954, they did. 

They began the session with a Bing Crosby song, “Harbor Lights,” then tried a ballad, then a country song. They did multiple takes; nothing seemed to click. Everyone was ready to quit for the night when, as Elvis told the story later, “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago and I started kidding around.” The song was “That’s All Right, Mama,” an R&B number written and recorded by Arthur (Big Boy) Crudup. “Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them,” Moore said. Phillips stuck his head out of the booth and told them to start again from the beginning. After multiple takes, they had a record. Phillips was friendly with a White disk jockey, Dewey Phillips (not related), who played some R&B on his show on WHBQ in Memphis. Sam gave the acetate to Dewey and Dewey played it repeatedly on his broadcast. It was an overnight sensation. 

To have a record that people could buy, they needed a B-side. So Presley, Moore, and Black recorded an up-tempo cover of a bluegrass song, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” and in July 1954, Elvis Presley’s first single came on the market. In his promotional campaign, Phillips emphasized the record’s appeal to all listeners, pop, country, and rhythm and blues. “Operators have placed [“That’s All Right”] on nearly all locations (White and Colored) and are reporting plays seldom encountered on a record in recent years,” he wrote in the press release. “According to local sales analysis, the apparent reason for its tremendous sales is because of its appeal to all classes of record buyers.” [author’s emphasis]

The trade press picked this up, for, three months after a Billboard article about R&B and White teenagers, it was exactly what the industry was primed to hear. “Presley is the potent new chanter who can sock a tune for either the country or the r. & b. markets,” Billboard noted. “…A strong new talent.” 

(Crudup never got a dime from Presley or Sun, but as it happened, Crudup had borrowed much of the lyrics and music for “That’s All Right, Mama” from a Big Joe Turner boogie-woogie number called “That’s All Right, Baby,” recorded in 1939 with Pete Johnson on piano.) 

Phillips was reported to have said, “If I could find a White man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.” He denied it. But it is clear that if he was looking for such a person, he would not have picked Elvis Presley to be the one. Phillips called Presley in as a ballad singer, and that is what Presley believed he essentially was. Presley’s favorite among his own songs was “It’s Now or Never,” which is neither bluesy nor rock ’n’ roll, but Neapolitan. Musically, “It’s Now or Never” is a cover of “O Sole Mio.”

“That’s All Right, Mama” started as a joke. Moore and Black thought it was a joke, too. It worked, but it was completely unpremeditated. Presley later admitted that he had never sung like that before in his life.

It is interesting, though, that he remembered the song and that Moore and Black knew how to play it. They just never assumed it was a song that White artists performed. Rock ’n’ roll was not “manufactured” by Phillips, Moore, Black, and Presley in Memphis any more (or any less) than the drip paintings were “manufactured” by the artists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner and art critic Clement Greenberg on Long Island. They tried something out, and then they tried to figure out why it worked.

“That’s All Right, Mama” was only a regional hit, and not even No. 1 in Memphis. “Blue Moon of Kentucky” was equally popular. Presley didn’t make it onto the national charts for another year; by then, many White performers had stopped refurbishing R&B songs in a pop style and had started imitating them. In 1954, WDIA became a 50,000-watt station reaching the entire mid-South, and by 1955, more than six hundred stations in 39 states were programming for Black listeners—which suggested that not only Black people were listening. Producers could see where the sound was headed.

So when, for example, Pat Boone walked into Dot Records, in Gallatin, Tennessee, in the summer of 1955—before Presley had had a national hit—he was shocked to be asked to sing a rhythm and blues song. Like Presley, Boone saw himself as a ballad singer. But he recorded Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame” and it went to No. 1 on the pop chart. The same summer, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” went to No. 1 after it was heard in the movie Blackboard Jungle. Black performers began to benefit from the popularity of the new sound, too. In May 1955, Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” for Chess Records; Chess rushed the record to top New York disc jockey Alan Freed, and it went to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 5 on the pop chart. Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” was released a few months later. By January, it had reached No. 17 on the pop chart. Boone and Presley both covered it. Boone’s went to No. 12, Presley’s to No. 20 as the B-side to “Blue Suede Shoes.” 

Presley was therefore just one of a number of singers, Black and White, trying to meet the demand for songs with an R&B sound. And among those artists, Presley was originally identified not with rock ’n’ roll, but with country, or “rockabilly,” music. The first article about him in a national publication—in Life in April 1956—referred to him as a hillbilly singer. What transformed him into a breakthrough figure in the evolution of pop music? 

A big part of the answer is television. In 1948, 2 percent of American households had television sets. In 1952, it was about a third. But by 1955, 65 percent of households had television sets, and 86 percent had them by 1959. Primetime in those years was dominated by variety shows, hosted by people like Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen, Milton Berle, and Perry Como, that booked musical acts. Since most viewers received only three or four channels, the audience for each show was often enormous, in the tens of millions. Television exposure became the best way to sell a record.

On television, the performer’s race is apparent. Many sponsors avoided mixed-race television shows, since they were advertising on national networks and did not want to alienate White viewers in certain regions of the country. This was true to some extent for advertisers on broadcast radio as well, but there were hundreds more stations. Listeners need not feel trapped. In the first years after it went national, American Bandstand did not book any Black acts. There were few local television stations, and they did little programming. Television desegmented the media audience all over again. Radio had opened the door to music for different audiences; television closed it. 

Presley was made for television, and not only because of his race. With a microphone and in front of an audience, he was transformed from a shy young man who tended to mumble into a gyrating fireball with an unbelievably sexy sneer. He made his first television appearance on Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey’s Stage Show on CBS in January 1956, but his big break came in June, when he sang back-to-back versions of “Hound Dog,” the second time as a slow-motion bump-and-grind routine, on The Milton Berle Show. Forty million people watched. Berle later claimed he received 500,000 negative letters from viewers—and that was when he knew that Presley was a star. Presley sang “Hound Dog” the same way in September in his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sixty million people watched that show—83 percent of all television viewers. By then, “Hound Dog,” with its B-side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” had become the first single to top all three Billboard charts.

The same month, Presley’s first LP, Elvis Presley, was released by RCA Victor; it went to No. 1 on the pop albums chart and stayed there for ten weeks. The song that introduced Europeans to Presley, “Heartbreak Hotel,” entered the British pop charts in May 1956. 

In October, Presley’s album was released in Britain on the HMV (His Master’s Voice) label and went to No. 1 there as well. The revolution was accomplished. 

On the level of reception, White performers were adopting a “Black sound.” That is how the charts made things appear. On the level of production, it was a different story. For there is no such thing as a “Black sound” or a “White sound.” “Hound Dog,” which turned out to be one of Presley’s biggest hits, was originally released on the Peacock label by a Black singer named Willie Mae (Big Mama) Thornton in 1953, when it went to No. 3 on the national R&B charts. Thornton didn’t write the song, however. It was written by two Jewish 20-year-olds living in Los Angeles, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, on commission from Thornton’s producer at Peacock Records, Johnny Otis. Peacock was based in Houston, as was Thornton, but the song was recorded in L.A. (Everyone believed that Johnny Otis was Black. In fact, he was Greek-American; his given name was Ioannis Veliotes. He used to say he considered himself “Black by persuasion.”) 

As Leiber and Stoller tell the story, they wrote “Hound Dog” “in a matter of minutes.” They thought they had written a raunchy blues number, but when they brought it into the studio, Thornton insisted on crooning the lyrics. Leiber had to sing it for her so she could hear how it was supposed to sound. Otis sat in on the session and played the drums—he was also a musician—and took co-writing credit. 

If Thornton’s singing on that record comes across as a parodic imitation of the blues style, that is why. She was copying a sound. 

Leiber and Stoller would go on to write many standards of the rock ’n’ roll era, including “Kansas City,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “Yakety Yak,” and “Stand By Me.” “Hound Dog” would be covered well over 200 times, including in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, and by four country and western artists. It inspired a parody version, known as an “answer” record, called “Bear Cat,” sung by Rufus Thomas, a Black R&B singer, and recorded on the Sun label by Sam Phillips. 

But Presley didn’t cover Big Mama Thornton’s version. He decided to add the song to his repertoire when, during his unsuccessful first Las Vegas gig, he saw it performed at the Sands by an all-White Philadelphia act called Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who recorded on the Teen label. The group had rewritten Leiber and Stoller’s lyrics to change it from a song about a lover who won’t go away to a song about, actually, a dog. It was a gag number, in other words, and that’s how Elvis performed it—in the goofing-around spirit in which he first sang “That’s All Right, Mama.” When he sang “Hound Dog” on The Steve Allen Show, a basset hound was brought onstage, and Presley sang to the dog. 

Presley’s bump-and-grind performances of the song on Berle’s and Sullivan’s shows were therefore tongue-in-cheek, a joke—because Freddie and the Bellboys’ version of the song had erased any sexual content. At that point, the song’s chain of custody extended from the Jewish 20-year-olds who wrote it for a fee, to the African American singer who had to be instructed how to sing it, to the White lounge act that spoofed it, to the hillbilly singer who performed it as a burlesque number. Presley’s version of “Hound Dog” isn’t inauthentic, because nothing about the song was ever authentic. Presley recorded “Hound Dog” in July 1956, in a session—which he directed—requiring 31 takes. The B-side, “Don’t Be Cruel,” has a completely different, doo-woppy, country sound. “Don’t Be Cruel” was written for Presley by Otis Blackwell, who would give him two more songs with the same sound, “Return to Sender” and “All Shook Up.” Blackwell was Black.

Most musicians’ tastes are much more eclectic than their fans’. If he had nothing else to do, Presley sang gospel, as did Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash, three other Sam Phillips discoveries. (A recording of the four of them jamming in the studio in 1956 was discovered and released several years after Presley’s death.) Muddy Waters sang “Red Sails in the Sunset.” Robert Johnson sang “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby.” James Brown liked Sinatra and disliked the blues. Leadbelly was a Gene Autry fan. Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” was a cover of a country and western song called “Ida Red,” recorded in 1938 by a White band, Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. Race had a lot to do with the music business in the United States. It had much less to do with the music.

This article was originally published in the October 2021 issue of American History Magazine. To subscribe, click here. 

Besides his career in statesmanship and governance, eminent New Yorker John Jay fought valiantly against bondage 

The USS Confederacy limped into the harbor at St. Pierre, Martinique, on December 18, 1779. A storm had broken the 36-gun warship’s masts, damaged its rudder, and killed a crewman. Among passengers debarking from the frigate that Saturday was U.S. Minister Plenipotentiary to Spain John Jay, en route to his new posting in Madrid. Accompanying Jay was his wife Sarah, her slave Abbe, a nephew of theirs, and Jay’s personal secretary. Awaiting repairs to Confederacy or a replacement vessel in which to continue their trans-Atlantic journey, Jay and party explored the French-held island. Sarah wrote home about the sugar-producing colony’s superb markets and exquisite beauty. Her spouse took note of a contrasting side of Caribbean life that also caught the attention of Captain Joseph Hardy, commander of Confederacy’s complement of U.S. Marines. In his journal that December, Hardy, in the spelling and locution of the day, explained that passengers and freight moving to and from ships in St. Pierre’s harbor traveled in canoes “rowed by five or six Negroes whose Lives appear to be as wretched as any part of the Human race. Some of them are chained by one leg to the Boat and others shews the stripes of cruelty on their Body’s in this manner these unhappy Mortals row in these Boats for Weeks without 10 hours intermission and as Naked as the moment of their Birth not even the Galley Slaves in Barbary is more misirable.—It is not only these that feels the stripes of inhumanity but many on shore are to be seen with a heavy Iron ring around his Neck from which leads a heavy chain to another ring around his Waist and from that another Ring round his anckle and others dragging by one foot 50 or 60 lb. of Chain and in this situation are obliged to go thro’ their usual service.” 

Martinique’s sugar industry ran on slave labor. The fervently religious Jay, convinced the rights of man extended to all men, was haunted the rest of his life by such scenes, which literally put flesh on a reality that had surrounded him all his life. Jay, born in New York City, had spent his childhood in Rye, New York. He had grown up in wealth, his family connected by blood and wedlock to elite New York clans of Dutch and French descent. 

All owned slaves; in time, so did John Jay. His father, Peter Jay, and his grandfather, Augustus Jay, a French Huguenot, had been prosperous merchants, fastidiously diversifying holdings that included investing in slave ships, a common and profitable colonial-era practice. In terms of numbers of slaves living and working within its boundaries, New York City rivaled Charleston, South Carolina. In 1740, five years before Jay’s birth, enslaved persons had made up almost 20 percent of the total New York population. Jay’s visceral reaction to the slave-driving he witnessed in Martinique was not enough to dissuade him from buying a 15-year-old slave named Benoit and taking the youth along to Spain and his other postings. 

In September 1780, while in Spain negotiating to gain that monarchy’s support for the American cause, Jay pondered the horrors he had seen on Martinique. In a letter to friend and New York State Attorney General Egbert Benson, Jay wrote, “The State of New York is never out of my mind and heart. An excellent law might be made…for gradual abolition of slavery. Till America comes into this measure, her prayers to Heaven for liberty will be impious. This is a strong impression, but it is just. Were I in your legislature, I would prepare a bill for the purpose with great care, and I would never leave moving it till it became law or I ceased to be a member. I believe God governs the world, and I believe it to be a maxim in his as in our court, that those who ask for equity ought to do it.”

The conflicted Jay had acted fitfully against slavery, backing a failed abolition provision in New York’s 1777 state constitution. Early in the Revolution, he had worked with his friend Alexander Hamilton to convince General George Washington to allow bondsmen to toil as laborers and later to carry guns for the American cause, with freedom their reward if the rebellion succeeded. 

Like many fellow revolutionaries, Jay took as gospel Enlightenment rhetoric extolling the innate rights of man. He avidly ingested such philosophy and political theory entering adulthood in the 1760s. He began acting consciously to make those ideals manifest in his homeland as part of the rebellion against Great Britain. His early steps against slavery had been theoretical and tepid. Now, having seen the phenomenon unvarnished, John Jay meant to eliminate its scourge in New York. 

Jay started his personal crusade in Europe, just after the signing of the Treaty of Paris. In November 1783, Sarah’s slave Abbe ran off, going to ground in the French capital. Jay wrote to a friend that Abbe’s flight “was not resolved upon in a sober moment.” He explained that he “had promised to manumit her on our Return to America, provided she behaved properly in the mean Time.” He surmised that “Indulgence and improper Company have injured her. It is a Pity.” Jailed as a runaway bondswoman—the empire kept human chattel on a tight rein—Abbe fell ill. She was returned to her owners, whose best efforts at care could not keep her alive.  

Soon after Abbe died, Jay wrote a manumission contract for Benoit, now 19, in which Jay declared, “hav[ing] served me until the value of his services amount to a moderate compensation for the money expended for him, he should be manumitted; and whereas his services for three years more would, in my opinion, be sufficient for that purpose.” 

Jay made good on that proposed arrangement and in later years repeated the gesture with other slaves that he bought, often paying his enslaved workers wages in the bargain.

Early in 1785, Jay and other New York leaders, including Alexander Hamilton, founded the “New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated,” better known as the New York Manumission Society. Pursuing the larger aim of abolishing slavery in New York, the Society legally assisted enslaved people and former slaves against kidnap and worked to ensure their rights as citizens of New York. The group also educated free Black children. Organizers elected Jay their first president.

Almost from its founding, the Society began pushing a gradual emancipation bill in the state legislature. Contrary to similar measures elsewhere, this proposal would manumit the currently enslaved, though, as a palliative to owners, to gain freedom men would have to serve 25 years of indenture and women 22. Enthusiasm for the concept eroded amid resistance to the details. Slaveholders and their allies balked at the indenture arrangement. Others worried about how freedmen would fit into society, some voicing doubt of manumitted Africans’ readiness for citizenship and suffrage. In a bitter 1785 defeat, the bill foundered on the shoals of property rights, economic stability and racism. 

Not only had Society members assumed naively that egalitarian principles expressed during the Revolution regarding all persons would persist in peacetime, they had readied no effective retort for proslavery arguments. But they did succeed in 1785 in getting New York to ban import of slaves into the state. Unsatisfied with that baby step, Society members began laying groundwork for more campaigns. Jay corresponded at home and abroad with fellow abolitionists. These exchanges often found Jay on the defensive. Reassuring Dr. Benjamin Rush of his group’s commitment, Jay wrote that he “wish[ed] to see all unjust and unnecessary discriminations everywhere abolished and that the time may soon come when all our inhabitants of every colour and denomination shall be free and equal partakers of our political liberty.” Answering Welsh moralist Richard Price, Jay wrote, “That men should pray and fight for their own freedom, and yet keep others in slavery, is certainly acting a very inconsistent, as well as unjust and, perhaps impious part; but the history of mankind is filled with instances of human improprieties.” The best anyone can do is to persevere against evil and dutifully work toward a just society, he added. 

In 1787, the Manumission Society founded an African Free School in lower Manhattan to educate the children of free Blacks. Many society members belonged to the Society of Friends, or Quakers, by now a strong voice on behalf of abolishing slavery. In running its school, the manumission organization embraced Quaker practices such as visiting students’ homes to enforce moral behavior in the household. To counter racist assumptions about Blacks, the Society carefully recruited and selected the students it enrolled. The Free School operated until 1835, when the New York City school system absorbed it.

Meanwhile the organization encouraged members and all others to manumit persons held in bondage. Society officers believed that “the good Example set by others, of more Enlarged and liberal Principles, and the face of true Religion, will, in time, dispel the mist which Prejudice, self Interest and long habit have raised….”—an awkward sentiment, given that Jay and many other members owned slaves. 

Many slaves confiscated from Loyalist owners during the Revolution and held by the state government had been sold back into bondage. The Society demanded and got an amendment stipulating that all remaining slaves still held by the New York government be freed. And the Society’s efforts to find and unshackle freed Blacks who had been kidnapped and sold south led in 1788 to a ban on exporting bondsmen and -women for sale to buyers in slave states, infuriating slaveholders. 

On September 26, 1789, the Senate unanimously confirmed John Jay as the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Jay resigned the Manumission Society presidency, but informally continued his abolition work.  

In New York, a proslavery legislative backlash arose. When Society member Matthew Clarkson introduced a gradual emancipation bill in 1790, that piece of legislation stalled, as did kindred efforts to strangle the slave trade. In 1792, the backlash broadened. That year Jay did as many Federalists suggested and challenged four-time governor George Clinton at the polls. Jay seemed poised to win until opponents played the abolitionist card. Jay would not renege on his principles. “Every man, of every colour and description, has a natural right to freedom,” he declared. “And I shall ever acknowledge myself to be an advocate for the manumission of slaves.” Clinton won a fifth term.

Events began to work in abolition’s favor. America’s conflict with Algerian pirates who enslaved White Americans refocused discussion: Why go to war over enslaving Whites but not Blacks? Slavery suffused the debate over ratifying the Constitution, which nowhere contains the word “slavery” but instead refers to enslaved persons, leaving inspecific the governmental role regarding abolition of slavery. 

These debates also raised the issues surrounding the end of the foreign slave trade, slated in the U.S. Constitution for 1808, and the formulation of the Three-Fifths Compromise, an equation that increased Southern states’ political power by mandating that slaves be counted in the national census as three-fifths of a White person. Against this backdrop, New Yorkers debated what kind of society they wanted and worried about bondage’s potentially negative economic impact. Thanks to the Manumission Society’s work and a growing population of free Blacks, journalists were filling the state’s periodicals with reports of Blacks integrating successfully into the majority society. Meanwhile, the Haitian Revolution, which began in 1791, was eventually to overturn French rule and emancipate Haiti’s slaves, heightening concerns about slave revolts as a feature of a slaveholding society. In New York, the state’s White population growth had shifted north and west, coming to be dominated by farmers and merchants who owned no slaves and were not about to support slave interests through taxes or other means.  

While Jay was in England during 1794-95 negotiating a treaty to ease tensions with the crown, New York held another gubernatorial election. Jay’s friends nominated and won him the office, advocacy he may or may not have known of. Jay returned having accomplished his diplomatic mission to find himself governor-elect—and pilloried for what became known as “Jay’s Treaty,” an achievement that may have benefited the abolition cause by helping to “nudge New York past an obstacle to gradual abolition,” according to historian David N. Gellman. Although Jay’s treaty focused on issues that lingered between America and Britain after the 1783 Treaty of Paris, that document ignored the matter of compensation to colonial slaveholders for slaves said to have been “stolen” by the British during the war. Gellman argues that after the American colonies’ fight for liberty from Britain, Jay and others felt loath to compensate slaveholders for enslaved persons who sought emancipation by fleeing to and fighting for the British. 

Proslavery forces continued to challenge every abolition bill floated in New York. Jay, determined to keep his 1780 promise, thought it prudent to absent himself from the public process, lest he become the focus of debate. In January 1796, state Representative James Watson, acting as Jay’s proxy, introduced a gradual abolition bill. The measure stalled when slaveholders argued against citizenship rights such as suffrage for manumitted persons. Naysayers insisted the state compensate former owners for freeing their bondsmen. However, abolitionists had learned their lessons. The Manumission Society had begun making effective use of the legal system to free numerous slaves and to rescue free Blacks at risk of kidnap back into bondage. The cost to appeal the resulting court rulings was giving slaveholders pause. Emergence of governmental and charitable aid to the needy was weakening the argument that, once freed, help for indigent Blacks would create an unworkable drag on the state. 

Most importantly, abolitionists realized that they needed to find a way to work with slaveholders. A 1798 effort also stalled, mainly over remuneration, but abolitionists engineered a compromise.

On March 29, 1799, the New York legislature passed a gradual emancipation bill taking effect that July 4. Children born to enslaved mothers after Independence Day 1799 would be free but would have to serve their birth mothers’ masters under indenture until age 28 for males, 25 for females. As of July 4, slaveholders would have to register children newly born to enslaved mothers, not only to record manumissions but also to document emancipation as a defense against attempted kidnap or transport south. Abandoned slave children would become wards of local jurisdictions. The bill allowed unrestricted manumission of elderly or unproductive slaves. Jay’s son William wrote years later that his father felt “no measure of his administration afforded him such unfeigned pleasure” as that bill’s passing and enactment.

Jay had achieved what he envisioned almost 20 years before, but that achievement continued to come under attack, as did free Blacks’ political rights. A gap in the 1799 bill had relegated Blacks born into slavery in New York before 1799 to continued enslavement. In 1817, Jay’s eldest son Peter, a member of the legislature, worked with Governor Daniel Tompkins to order that, effective July 4, 1827, those born before 1799 would be deemed free. Another son, William Jay, fought slavery nationally and as a judge stated that he would not abide by any laws requiring the return of fugitive slaves. Jay’s grandson John Jay II maintained a similar stance.

Retiring in 1801, John Jay continued to correspond with fellow abolitionists, at times lending support while trying to avoid national political entanglements—save for an episode in 1819. That year New Jersey lawyer Elias Boudinot, who had founded the American Bible Society, wrote to Jay asking about the constitutionality of extending slavery into Missouri, which had petitioned for statehood. “I concur in the opinion that it ought not to be introduced nor permitted in any of the new States; and that it ought to be gradually diminished and finally abolished in all of them,” Jay replied. “To me the constitutional authority of the Congress to prohibit the migration and importation of slaves into any of the States does not appear to be questionable.” Because Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution mandated in 1788 an end to the foreign slave trade in 1808, Congress had the right to restrict slavery, he continued, claiming “that from and after that period [1808], they were authorized to make such a prohibition, as to all the States, whether new or old.” He went on to explain, “It will, I presume, be admitted, that slaves were the persons intended. The word slaves was avoided [in the U.S. Constitution], probably on account of the existing toleration of slavery, and of its discordancy with the principles of the revolution….” 

He encouraged those trying to keep slavery out of Missouri, but, pleading poor health, declined to join that fight. On May 17, 1829, John Jay died of a stroke in Bedford, New York. In 1854, Empire State newspaperman Horace Greeley wrote, “To Chief Justice Jay may be attributed, more than to any other man, the abolition of Negro bondage in this state.”

This story was originally published in the October 2021 issue of American History Magazine. For more great stories, subscribe here.

In his youth, Lawrence Joel faced many challenges beyond the color of his skin. Born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he spent his early years in poverty. The Great Depression took such a toll on Joel’s family that his parents separated six years later. Joel was raised by foster parents.

After graduating from high school in 1945, Joel joined the Merchant Marine. He enlisted in the Army a year later and went to jump school. Joel spent most of his tour in postwar Italy. Following his discharge he hoped to become a beautician but found his opportunities limited and returned to the Army in 1953. According to Time magazine, which interviewed Joel for a 1967 article on Blacks serving in Vietnam, he “was convinced that you ‘couldn’t make it really big’ as a Negro on the outside.” He became an Army medic, a role well-suited to his quiet, peaceful personality and desire to help others.

In 1965, Joel, then a 37-year-old specialist 5, was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade, and sent to Vietnam. On Nov. 8 he accompanied an infantry company into a Viet Cong stronghold northwest of Saigon. Joel was unarmed and carrying a medical aid bag filled with bandages, syrettes of morphine, plasma and instruments.

this article first appeared in vietnam magazine

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After disembarking from helicopters, the lead squad was hit by withering fire from a well-hidden and much larger Viet Cong force. Nearly every man was killed or wounded. The remaining squads scrambled for cover to engage the enemy in what became a bitter 24-hour firefight.

Ignoring enemy fire, Joel rushed forward to reach the wounded and dead. As he darted from man to man, a machine-gun bullet struck him in the right leg. He paused long enough to rip open his pants, stuff a bandage into the wound and administer morphine to himself.

Hobbling across the battlefield, Joel patched up bullet wounds and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Finding a man who needed blood, Joel knelt in full view of the enemy to hold the bottle high enough to administer life-saving plasma amid a hail of bullets. Joel saw one soldier with a chest wound bubbling out his last ounces of blood. He pressed a plastic bandage bag over it hoping to congeal the blood—and silently praying for a miracle. The soldier survived.

A second bullet lodged in Joel’s right thigh, but he dragged himself over the battlefield to treat 13 more men before his supplies ran out. Joel sent word that he needed more. While waiting, he shouted words of encouragement to men who seemed to have no hope. A soldier who crept forward with the supplies noted Joel’s ripped trousers and bloody, bandaged legs. “You better head back to the rear and get treatment,” he said.

“I’ll be all right,” Joel responded. As another platoon charged forward to dislodge the entrenched enemy, Joel followed, knowing there would be many more wounds. Throughout the day and into the night, he limped and crawled under deadly fire to aid and comfort his comrades, even though they urged him to get down and head to the rear for treatment. Joel refused.

The next morning the battlefield was littered with more than 400 Viet Cong bodies. Nearly 50 Americans were dead. Many more were wounded. Joel moved about the battlefield to search for the wounded and recover the dead. He finally collapsed. According to Time magazine: “Joel recalls looking at himself: hands encrusted with blood to the wrists, legs thick with edema and dirty bandages. He lay under a tree and cried for the first time since he was a boy in Winston-Salem.”

An officer found Joel and ordered him to the rear for treatment. His comrades, stunned by his display of courage, compassion and determination, nominated him for the Medal of Honor.

President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the medal on March 9, 1967. Joel was the first living Black American to receive the award in combat since the 1898 Spanish-American War and the first medic to get it in Vietnam. In 1984, at age 55, Joel died of complications from diabetes. He was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. V

Doug Sterner, an Army veteran who served two tours in Vietnam, is curator of the Military Times Hall of Valor database of U.S. valor awards.

This interview appeared in the October 2021 issue of Vietnam magazine.

Passengers on this “railroad” never forgot their life-or-death journey from bondage.

Arnold Gragston struggled against the current of the Ohio River and his own terror the first night he helped a slave escape to freedom. With a frightened young girl as his passenger, he rowed his boat toward a lighted house on the north side of the river. Gragston, a slave himself in Kentucky, understood all too well the risks he was running. “I didn’t have no idea of ever gettin’ mixed up in any sort of business like that until one special night,” he remembered years later. “I hadn’t even thought about rowing across the river myself.”

Slaves had been making their way north to freedom since the late 18th century. But as the division between slave and free states hardened in the first half of the 19th century, abolitionists and their sympathizers developed a more methodical approach to assisting runaways. By the early 1840s, this network of safe houses, escape routes and “conductors” became known as the “Underground Railroad.” Consequently, a cottage industry of bounty hunters chasing escaped slaves sprang to life as lines of the railroad operated across the North—from the big cities of the East to the little farming towns of the Midwest. Above all else, the system depended on the courage and resourcefulness of African Americans who knew better than anyone the pain of slavery and the dangers involved in trying to escape.

In a 1937 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Gragston recalled that his introduction to the Underground Railroad had occurred only a day before his hazardous trek, when he was visiting a nearby house. The elderly woman who lived there approached him with an extraordinary request: “She had a real pretty girl there who wanted to go across the river, and would I take her?”

The dangers, as Gragston well knew, were great. His master, a local Know-Nothing politician named Jack Tabb, alternated between benevolence and brutality in the treatment of his slaves. Gragston remembered that Tabb designated one slave to teach others how to read, write and do basic math. “But sometimes when he would send for us and [if] we would be a long time comin’, he would ask us where we had been. If we told him we had been learnin’ to read, he would near beat the daylights out of us—after getting somebody to teach us.”

Gragston suspected such arbitrary displays of cruelty were meant to impress his master’s white neighbors and considered Tabb “a pretty good man. He used to beat us, sure; but not nearly so much as others did, some of his own kin people, even.”

Tabb seemed especially fond of Gragston and “let me go all about,” but Gragston realized what would happen if he were caught helping a slave escape to freedom—Tabb would probably shoot him or whip him with a rawhide strap. “But then I saw the girl, and she was such a pretty little thing, brown-skinned and kinda rosy, and lookin’ as scared as I was feelin’,” he said. Her plaintive countenance won out, and “it wasn’t long before I was listenin’ to the old woman tell me when to take her and where to leave her on the other side.”

While agreeing to make the perilous journey, Gragston insisted on delaying until the next night. The following day, images of what Tabb might do wrestled in Gragston’s mind with the memory of the sad-looking fugitive. But when the time came, Gragston resolved to proceed. “Me and Mr. Tabb lost, and as soon as [dusk] settled that night, I was at the old lady’s house.

“I don’t know how I ever rowed the boat across the river,” Gragston remembered. “The current was strong and I was trembling. I couldn’t see a thing there in the dark, but I felt that girl’s eyes.”

Gragston was certain the effort would end badly. He assumed his destination would be like his home in Kentucky, filled “with slaves and masters, overseers and rawhides.” Even so, he continued to row toward the “tall light” the old woman had told him to look for. “I don’t know whether it seemed like a long time or a short time,” he recalled. “I know it was a long time, rowing there in the cold and worryin’.” When he reached the other side, two men suddenly appeared and grabbed Gragston’s passenger—and his sense of dread escalated into horror. “I started tremblin’ all over again, and prayin’,” he said. “Then one of the men took my arm and I just felt down inside of me that the Lord had got ready for me.” To Gragston’s astonishment and relief, however, the man simply asked Gragston if he was hungry. “If he hadn’t been holding me, I think I would have fell backward into the river.”

Gragston had arrived at the Underground Railroad station in Brown County, Ohio, operated by abolitionist John Rankin. A Presbyterian minister, Rankin published an anti-slavery tract in 1826 and later founded the American Anti-Slavery Society. Rankin and his neighbors in Ripley provided shelter and safety for slaves fleeing bondage. Over the years, they helped thousands of slaves find their way to freedom—and Gragston, by his own estimate, assisted “way more than a hundred” and possibly as many as 300.

He eventually made three to four river crossings a month, sometimes “with two or three people, sometimes a whole boatload.” Gragston remembered the journeys more vividly than the men and women he took to freedom. “What did my passengers look like? I can’t tell you any more about it than you can, and you weren’t there,” he told his interviewer. “After that first girl—no, I never did see her again—I never saw my passengers.” Gragston said he would meet runaways in the moonless night or in a darkened house. “The only way I knew who they were was to ask them, ‘what you say?’ And they would answer, ‘Menare.’” Gragston believed the word came from the Bible but was unsure of its origin or meaning. Never­theless, it served its purpose. “I only know that it was the password I used, and all of them that I took over told it to me before I took them.”

The dangers increased as Gragston continued his work. After returning to Kentucky one night from a river crossing with 12 fugitives, he realized he had been discovered. The time had come for Gragston and his wife to make the journey themsleves. “It looked like we had to go almost to China to get across that river,” he remembered. “But finally, I pulled up by the lighthouse, and went on to my freedom—just a few months before all of the slaves got theirs.”

The work of the Underground Railroad involved a network of white abolitionists, dedicated slaves like Gragston and free African Americans such as William Still of Philadelphia. The youngest of 18 children, Still was born in 1821, moved to Philadelphia in the mid-1840s and went to work for the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as a mail clerk and janitor. He rose to prominence in the city’s burgeoning abolitionist movement and served as chairman of the General Vigilance Committee of Philadelphia. Still was closely involved in the planning, coordinating and communicating required to keep the Underground Railroad active in the mid-Atlantic region. He became one of the most prominent African Americans involved in the long campaign to shelter and protect runaways.

In The Underground Rail Road, a remarkable book published in 1872, Still recounted the stories of escaped slaves whose experiences were characterized by courage, resourcefulness, pain at forced partings from family members and, above all, a desperate longing for freedom. For Still, aiding runaway slaves—and helping to keep families intact—was a deeply personal calling. Decades earlier, his parents had escaped slavery on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. William’s father, Levin, managed to buy his freedom after declaring as a young man that “I will die before I submit to the yoke.”

William’s mother, Sydney, remained in bondage, but she fled with her four children to Greenwich, N.J., only to be seized by slave-hunters. Sydney and her family were returned to Maryland, but she escaped a second time to New Jersey. She changed her name to Charity to avoid detection and rejoined her husband, but their reunion was tarnished by the knowledge that she was forced to leave two boys behind. Her angry former owner promptly sold them to an Alabama slaveholder. William Still would eventually be united with one of his enslaved brothers, Peter, who escaped to freedom in the North—a miraculous event that after the war inspired William to compile his history, hoping it would promote similar reunions.

The work of the Underground Railroad became the focal point of pro- and anti-slavery agitation after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Part of that year’s grand legislative compromise aimed at halting the slide toward civil war, the law required federal marshals to capture escaped slaves in Northern free states and denied jury trials to anyone imprisoned under the act. Abolitionists and supporters of slavery—each for their own reasons—tended to exaggerate the extent of the railroad’s operations, historian James McPherson observes, but there was no denying its effectiveness. As the decade progressed, the Fugitive Slave Act gave the work of the Underground Railroad new urgency.

Perhaps no one embodied the hunger for freedom more completely than John Henry Hill. A father and “young man of steady habits,” the 6-foot, 25-year-old carpenter was, in Still’s words, “an ardent lover of Liberty” who dramatically demonstrated his passion on January 1, 1853. After recovering from the shock of being told by his owner that he was to be sold at auction in Richmond, Hill arrived at the site of the public sale, where he mounted a desperate struggle to escape. Employing fists, feet and a knife, he turned away four or five would-be captors and bolted from the auction house. He hid from his baffled pursuers in the kitchen of a nearby merchant until he decided he wanted to go to Petersburg, Va., where his free wife and two children lived.

He stayed in Petersburg as long as he dared, leaving only when informed of a plot to capture him. Hill returned to his kitchen hideout in Richmond before learning that Still’s Vigilance Committee had arranged—at the considerable cost of $125—for him to have a private room on a steamship leaving Norfolk for Philadelphia. Four days after departing Richmond on foot, he arrived in Norfolk and boarded ship—more than nine months after escaping from the auction. “My Conductor was very much Excited,” Hill later wrote, “but I felt as Composed as I do at this moment, for I had started…that morning for Liberty or for Death providing myself with a Brace of Pistels.”

On October 4, Hill wrote Still to inform him that he had arrived safely in Toronto and found work. But other matters preoccupied him. “Mr. Still, I have been looking and looking for my friends for several days, but have not seen nor heard of them. I hope and trust in the Lord Almighty that all things are well with them. My dear sir I could feel so much better sattisfied if I could hear from my wife.”

But the Christmas season of 1853 brought good news. “It affords me a good deel of Pleasure to say that my wife and the Children have arrived safe in this City,” Hill wrote on December 29. Although she lost all her money in transit—$35—the family reunion proved deeply moving. “We saw each other once again after so long, an Abstance, you may know what sort of metting it was, joyful times of corst.”

During the next six years, Hill frequently wrote Still, reflecting on his experiences in Canada, the situation in the United States—and sometimes passing on sad family news. On September 14, 1854, Hill wrote of the death of his young son, Louis Henry, and his wife’s heartache at the boy’s passing. In another letter, Hill fretted about the fate of his uncle, Hezekiah, who went into hiding after his escape and ultimately fled to freedom after 13 months. Hill’s letters are replete with concern for escaped slaves and the volunteer “captains” of the Underground Railroad who risked imprisonment or death to assist runaways. Still acknowledged Hill’s spelling lapses but praised his correspondence as exemplifying the “strong love and attachment” freed slaves felt for relatives still in bondage.

Despite enormous difficulties, some families managed to escape to freedom intact.

Ann Maria Jackson, trapped in slavery in Delaware, made up her mind to flee north with her seven children when she learned alarming news of her owner’s plans. “This Fall he said he was going to take four of my oldest children and two other servants to Vicksburg,” she confided to Still. “I just happened to hear of this news in time. My master was wanting to keep me in the dark about taking them, for fear that something might happen.”

Those fears were well-founded. Upon learning of his planned departure for Mississippi, quick-thinking Jackson gathered her children and headed for Pennsylvania. The presence of slave-hunting spies along the state line complicated the family’s escape, but on November 21 a volunteer reported to Still that Jackson and her children, ranging in age from 3 to 16, were spotted across the state line in Chester County. From Pennsylvania, the family continued north into Canada. The 40 or so years Jackson had spent in slavery were at an end.

“I am happy to inform you that Mrs. Jackson and her interesting family of seven children arrived safe and in good health and spirits at my house in St. Catharines, on Saturday evening last,” Hiram Wilson wrote to Still from Canada on November 30. “With sincere pleasure I provided for them comfortable quarters till this morning, when they left for Toronto.”

Caroline Hammond’s family faced different challenges. Born in 1844, Hammond lived on the Anne Arundel County, Md., plantation of Thomas Davidson. Hammond’s mother was a house slave and her father, George Berry, “a free colored man of Annapolis.”

Davidson, she remembered, entertained on a lavish scale, and her mother was in charge of the meals. “Mrs. Davidson’s dishes were considered the finest, and to receive an invitation from the Davidsons meant that you would enjoy Maryland’s finest terrapin and chicken besides the best wine and champagne on the market.” Thomas Davidson, Hammond recalled, treated his slaves “with every consideration he could, with the exception of freeing them.”

Mrs. Davidson, however, was a different story. She “was hard on all the slaves, whenever she had the opportunity, driving them at full speed when working, giving different food of a coarser grade and not much of it.” Her hostility would soon evolve into something more sinister.

Hammond’s father had arranged with Thomas Davidson to buy his family’s freedom for $700 over the course of three years. Working as a carpenter, Berry made periodic partial payments to Thomas Davidson and was within $40 of completing the transaction when the slaveowner died in a hunting accident. Mrs. Davidson assumed control of the farm and the slaves, Hammond remembered—and refused to complete the transaction Berry had arranged with her late husband. As a result, “mother and I were to remain in slavery.”

The resourceful Berry, however, was undeterred. Hammond recalled that her father bribed the Anne Arundel sheriff for permits allowing him to travel to Baltimore with his wife and child. “On arriving in Baltimore, mother, father and I went to a white family on Ross Street—now Druid Hill Avenue, where we were sheltered by the occupants, who were ardent supporters of the Underground Railroad.”

The family’s escape had not gone unnoticed. Hammond remembered that $50 rewards were offered for their capture—one by Mrs. Davidson and one by the Anne Arundel sheriff, perhaps to protect himself from criticism for the role he played in aiding their escape in the first place. To flee Maryland, Hammond and her family clambered into “a large covered wagon” operated by a Mr. Coleman, who delivered merchandise to the towns between Baltimore and Hanover, Pa.

“Mother and father and I were concealed in a large wagon drawn by six horses,” Hammond recalled. “On our way to Pennsylvania we never alighted on the ground in any community or close to any settlement, fearful of being apprehended by people who were always looking for rewards.”

Once they were in Pennsylvania, life for Caroline and her family got much easier. Her mother and father settled in Scranton, worked for the same household and earned $27.50 a month. Hammond attended school at a Quaker mission.

When the war ended, her family returned to Baltimore. Hammond completed the seventh grade and, just like her mother, became a cook.

As she recounted her experiences as a slave in a 1938 interview with the Federal Writers’ Project, Hammond looked back on a life of 94 years with justified pride and satisfaction.

“I can see well, have an excellent appetite, but my grandchildren will let me eat only certain things that they say the doctor ordered that I should eat. On Christmas Day 49 children and grandchildren and some great-grandchildren gave me a Christmas dinner and $100 for Christmas,” she declared. “I am happy with all the comforts of a poor person not dependent on anyone else for tomorrow.”

Not surprisingly, freedom produced the same bliss and relief for a number of Underground Railroad passengers.

Hill’s correspondence with Still is suffused with the escaped slave’s profound joy in his new life. Even as he mourned the loss of his son, Hill reflected on his contentment. “It is true that I have to work very hard for comfort,” he acknowledged in a letter to Still in 1854, but freedom more than compensated for his grief and hardship.

“I am Happy, Happy.”

Robert B. Mitchell is the author of Skirmisher: The Life, Times and Political Career of James B. Weaver.
 

During the summer of 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt had fled Washington, DC’s swelter. He was vacationing at Sagamore Hill, his family home at Oyster Bay, New York, 25 miles east of New York City, when in burst Natalie Curtis. In the Manhattan socialite’s wake stepped a Yavapai Indian chief. The chief, whose name was Pelia, was carrying an enormous handwoven basket, a gift for the president. Curtis had brought Pelia to plead his tribe’s case.

The Yavapai, an Arizona tribe, had a longstanding grievance. In the 1870s, Pelia told Roosevelt, federal authorities had uprooted the Yavapai from a reservation in the Verde River Valley to another far southeast. On their harsh 180-mile winter trek, some 100 Yavapai had died. Federal officials promised that maintaining good behavior would get them back to Verde River. Instead, the Yavapai had spent 25 years docilely living alongside other Apaches distinctly different in culture and temperament. The Yavapai felt that they could never truly be themselves until they were in a separate community and back on the land that traditionally had been their home. Now their former reservation was full of squatters, the Indian leader told the president. 

“Chief, tell your people that the White Chief will see that they have justice,” Roosevelt replied. He had the band’s former reservation cleared of squatters, and by 1905 the Yavapai had returned to the Verde River Valley.

To gain the intimate access that made this correction possible, Curtis, 28, had used her family connections. The Curtises and Roosevelts were of an ilk; Natalie’s family summered next door to J. West Roosevelt, a cousin of the president’s. An uncle of hers was an ally of Roosevelt’s in the campaign to reform the civil service.

That bold intrusion on a vacationing president was typical of Curtis, who refused to live by the narrow expectations of the Victorian world into which she had been born in 1875. 

“In this moment of resurgent feminism, she is an inspiring reminder,” novelist Ellen Heath wrote in a 2018 online essay. “Natalie Curtis was one of the earliest, daring women who stepped bravely into the New World at the beginning of the 20th century.”

Natalie Curtis’s family, in patrician parlance, was not rich but merely well-to-do, though still gilded by lineage. Father Edward, a society physician, was a Son of the American Revolution and a descendant of two presidents of Harvard. Edward Curtis’s grandfather had represented Rhode Island in the U.S. Senate and served as chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court, and Edward’s father had been president of New York’s Continental Bank. Dr. Curtis, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most widely known physicians in this country,” had assisted on Abraham Lincoln’s autopsy. He was the Equitable Life Assurance Society’s medical director. When not treating affluent patients, he was pioneering in photomicroscopy—taking pictures through a microscope. He and his family inhabited the Greek Revival mansion on Washington Place in Greenwich Village that Edward, oldest of four sons, had inherited from his late father. Natalie attended Brearley, the highly selective secondary school for girls.

The Curtises, who had ties to Transcendentalism, a 19th-century socioreligious movement that rejected conformity and urged each person to find a role in the world, saw themselves politically as Progressives. But progressivism was one thing. Sending a daughter to college was another, and the Curtises declined to educate Natalie beyond 12th grade. However, she had talent at the piano and as a composer was impressive enough for her parents to enroll her at the National Conservatory of Music, whose faculty included some of New York City’s premier musical luminaries. Observing the young woman’s progress at composition and playing, teachers encouraged her to study in Europe. She did, first in Paris and then at Bayreuth, Germany. Hand strain and doubts about her talent kept her from the stage. G. Schirmer published songs she had composed using as lyrics well-known poems, but Natalie Curtis decided her life’s work was not to be strictly musical.

Asthma led Curtis to a career. When her brother George, an asthmatic, took doctors’ advice and relocated to Arizona for its dry climate, Natalie followed. Traveling the Southwest, she met journalist Charles Lummis, an advocate for American native peoples. Lummis, who lived in Islata, a Pueblo village on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, fiercely opposed federal policies that for decades had discouraged, even banned, Indians from maintaining and practicing their traditions, such as living by the assumption that land belonged to all, constituting a shared resource everyone had a duty to preserve.

Through Lummis, Curtis met many Southwestern Indians. Their music enthralled her. Before meeting Indians, she wrote later, she “was not prepared to find a people with such definite art-forms, such elaborate and detailed ceremonials, such crystallized traditions, beliefs, and customs.” Indian women’s corn-grinding songs and lullabies entranced Curtis, as did men’s Flute Dances and songs associated with traditional kachina dolls. She decided she would transcribe tribal melodies and lyrics and introduce them to mainstream America. In 1903, armed with a $38 Edison recorder and a supply of blank 25-cent wax cylinders on which to record, Curtis set up shop on the Hopi Moqui reservation in northern Arizona, hoping to be able to collect corn-grinding songs. 

The task was not easy. Reservation officials were pressuring, even forcing, Indian children to attend a school that barred the Hopi language, the singing of traditional songs, and the painting of bodies. The school’s white superintendent, Charles Burton, zealously enforced federal policies designed to muscle Indians into joining white society. School officials even sheared young Indians’ uncut hair—a particular outrage because Indians saw hair as a symbol of power and identity, the human equivalent of the sweet grasses gathered for incense and seen as the hair of Mother Earth. Hopi men historically had twisted their locks into elaborate figure-8 buns, but by 1900 more typically were wearing their hair loose to the shoulders. “Their long hair is the last tie that binds them to their old customs of savagery, and the sooner it is cut, Gordian like, the better it will be,” Burton wrote.

In this environment, Indian women hesitated to perform for Curtis out of fear that she would snitch to reservation authorities. “Are you sure you will not bring trouble upon us?” a chief asked.

“A friendly scientist on an Indian reservation advised me that if I wished to continue my self-appointed task of recording native songs, I must keep my work secret, lest the school superintendent in charge evict me from the reservation,” Curtis said. She persisted, gaining Indian women’s trust by approaching them as a fellow performer, singing songs she knew in return for hearing theirs and accurately transcribing their material without using her recorder.

this article first appeared in American history magazine

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From its first days, the United States had struggled with how to treat indigenous people. Most Native American tribes had been fighting forever among themselves for resources, land, and power; European colonization and Manifest Destiny added better-armed Whites to that mix. As early as 1790, Congress had passed the NonIntercourse Act, meant to keep the peace on the frontier by establishing Indians’ right to occupy—though not legally own—their tribal lands and banning individuals from claiming that land. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs began overseeing tribes’ welfare in 1824. 

That stewardship, emphasizing coexistence, was initially benign. But soon, around 1830, the government began removing Indians from their traditional lands and relocating them to reservations—parcels reserved for a given tribe or band. The U.S. Army began to deploy troops to subjugate tribes responding with hostility to White settlement, leading to more treaties and more reservations, a pattern shattered by the 1887 General Allotment Act, identified with primary sponsor Senator Henry L. Dawes (R-Massachusetts). Instead of allowing tribes to coexist with the American mainstream, the government now meant to assimilate Indians, if need be by force. 

The Dawes Act ordered reservations defined by treaty broken up and subdivided. The Bureau of Indian Affairs was to assign individual Indian families plots to own and work, as White settlers had done in taking title to portions of federal allotments of western lands. Indians, of course, did not believe in private land ownership. To counter and extirpate this profoundly anti-capitalist sentiment, the government undertook to eliminate Indian culture. Even the Indians Rights Association, formed by well-meaning Whites in 1882 to pressure Washington to treat indigenous people with more dignity, had as its aim “to bring about the complete civilization of the Indians.” Differences in social structure and tradition, as well as historic animosities and rivalries, kept tribes from allying in their own collective interest until the mid-1900s.

This was the churn into which Natalie Curtis was inserting herself. Most anthropologists then studying Indian folkways were seeing themselves as preserving a mode of living doomed to extinction. Mass culture had reduced the Indian to a sideshow performer in Wild West extravaganzas such as those promoted by former buffalo hunter Wild Bill Cody. Curtis wanted to keep Indian cultures alive and vibrant on their own terms. Her mission, she said, was to fight for “the right of the American to be himself, to express his own ideas of beauty and fitness.”

Curtis’s surreptitious but successful venture into recording corn-grinding songs led her to conceive of a broader, deeper effort documenting Indian culture—a project too large to pursue on the sly. Emboldened by President Roosevelt’s decision to aid the Yavapai, she wrote to him urging that he replace Indian school superintendent Burton. “The Indians dislike him,” she told the president. “He is generally considered inadequate to his position.” Unmoved by Curtis’s complaints about Burton, Roosevelt responded with significantly more enthusiasm to a request from Curtis that he arrange for her to obtain untrammeled access to Indians so she could study their cultures in the open.

The package of materials that Curtis provided to Roosevelt, which included one of her song transcriptions, had pointedly couched her proposal’s potential impact in cannily prescient market-driven terms. 

“If the arts of the Indians of the Southwest are fostered intelligently who knows but what, in time, Arizona may become distinctively famed for her pottery and silverware, in the same way that Venice is for her glass and Dresden for her porcelain,” Curtis wrote. Roosevelt responded to her tactically astute overture with an invitation to pay a call at the White House, where during a meeting Curtis pushed her agenda, arguing that to “educate a primitive race the would-be educators should first study the native life in order to preserve and build upon what is worthy in the native culture.”

Roosevelt immediately got on board. 

“Within hours of their meeting Roosevelt provided her with the necessary letters to research on Western reservations free from official interference,” Curtis biographer Michelle Wick Patterson writes.

Extolling Curtis’s arguments to Interior Secretary Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the president ordered Hitchcock to bring Curtis and Indian Affairs Commissioner William Jones together and to “do everything possible to develop the Indians’ artistic capacity along their own lines.” With brashness and fervor, Curtis had spurred a 180-degree shift in official policy on Indian culture. By 1913, the Interior Department’s Indian education branch had a supervisor of music. “The preservation of Indian music may not have occurred had it not been for the efforts of Natalie Curtis,” music historian Lori Shipley says.

Besides brass, Curtis had timing. Roosevelt once had held Native Americans in the same ill regard many Whites did. “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are,” he said in an 1886 speech. “And I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” However, he was capable of changing his mind and positions. By the 1890s, Roosevelt, now a U.S. Civil Service commissioner, was insisting Indian candidates get preference when government Indian schools were filling administrative and faculty vacancies. The country’s most famous adoptive Westerner encountered Curtis’s effusive advocacy as his views on government’s role toward Indians evolved.

There was little political risk in TR’s new platform. By the time Curtis bearded him at Oyster Bay, Roosevelt had already seen a clear advantage to embracing Indian causes. Whites were becoming less fearful of Indians. This made siding with tribes less of a political liability and, in one way, a political advantage. An 1890 U.S. Army massacre of some 150 Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, had effectively ended tribal violence toward Whites. Additionally, Roosevelt, elevated to the White House in 1901 by William McKinley’s assassination, was looking to a presidential run of his own in 1904. The Republican ticket needed more votes among Roman Catholics, whose church had sent missionaries to convert Indians to Rome for generations. The church and the federal government had been partnering since 1874 to educate Indian children; schools run by the church’s Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions enrolled some 2,500 students. Helping Indians could draw more Catholics to the Republican Party.

With multiple factors inclining Roosevelt to endorse her project, Curtis needed only money. As it had accomplished regarding presidential access, her family’s social network put largesse within reach. During her trip east in 1903 Natalie described her grand idea to investment banker George Foster Peabody and heiress Charlotte Osgood Mason. Each saw Curtis’s work with Native Americans dovetailing with their good deeds.

Peabody, after running Edison Electric and overseeing its merger into General Electric in 1906, had retired to devote himself to social causes and politics. His charitable activities included funding a Young Men’s Christian Association branch in Columbus, Georgia, and donating the land on which the University of North Carolina at Greensboro was built. He was a trustee and underwriter of historically Black Hampton University, in Hampton, Virginia, where he established an enduring collection of works on African American history. Mason came from old New York money on her mother’s side and had married physician Rufus Osgood Mason, of similar caste and circumstance. Upon his death in 1903, her fortune and philanthropy greatly expanded, with a focus on Black writers.

Once Peabody and Mason agreed to contribute to Curtis’s project, she went into the field. In Maine she transcribed war, dance, and love songs of the Passamaquoddy and the Penobscot. In St. Louis, Missouri, she recorded Navajo, Klalish, and Crow elders brought to the World’s Fair for “Anthropology Days.” In late 1904, she began a four-month tour of Western reservations, relying on charm to bring off recording sessions but also occasionally paying for performances by Winnebago, Cheyenne, Sioux, Hopi, Pima, Navajo, Yavapai, and Apache singers. Her usual approach, she wrote, was to explain to a chief that “the olden days were gone; the buffalo had vanished from the plains; even so would there soon be lost forever the songs and stories of the Indians.” She explained that “the White friend had come to be the pencil in the hand of the Indian” to immortalize that heritage.

Along with cataloging her recordings, Curtis distilled the works she had collected into a single print volume aimed, unlike existing academic works on Indian culture, at ordinary readers. 

In 1907, Harper Brothers published The Indians’ Book, whose 500-plus pages presented songs and stories Curtis had collected from 18 tribes, augmented by her notes on her travels and explanations of how the contents illustrated each tribe’s unique ways. Curtis refused to Westernize the material. The result awed readers. “The music of the Indian has before no such record,” a reviewer for the Omaha Daily Bee wrote. “No emotion is absent, no expression wanting.” That year, The Indians’ Book led Dial magazine’s list of recommended Christmas gift books; “a revelation,” the entry read. The Washington, DC, Evening Star review began, “It appears to us that to overpraise this work might well be deemed impossible.” In a rave, a New York Times reviewer called the volume “the most intimate portrayal of Indian life and nature that has yet been attempted.” 

Curtis sent copies to influential friends, including TR, who replied, “These songs cast a wholly new light on the depth and dignity of Indian thought, the simple beauty and strange charm of the vanished elder world of Indian poetry.” Subsequent editions of The Indians’ Book featured the president’s remarks as a frontispiece. The volume, which is still in print (see p. 59), remains the standard work on Native American song.

Natalie Curtis amplified her advocacy for Indian culture by tirelessly promoting her own activities. She lectured, performing Indian songs and poetry in settings her personal connections opened, such as the homes of conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Union Pacific President E.H. Harriman, and prominent suffragist Eva Ingersoll Brown. She appeared at the 25th-anniversary dinner of the New York League of Unitarian Women, and before members of the Washington, DC, Society of Fine Arts. In an era when ethnographic writing was generally the province of little-known, arcane journals, Curtis was writing about Indian culture for mainstream magazines Harper’s, The Outlook, and The Craftsman. Her articles cast Indians in a romantic light that went far to erase the once-ubiquitous image of indigenous peoples as backward savages.

A proto-folklorist, Curtis argued that “the music of America is not found in universities and schools but out in the great expanse of territory that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans, and from Canada to Mexico.” At George Peabody’s prodding, she widened her focus to African American culture and in 1910 began recording songs from Black students at Hampton Institute. In 1918, a year after marrying artist Paul Burlin, she began publishing what would be the four-volume Negro Folk-Songs. After World War I the couple moved to the French capital so Paul could pursue an interest in Expressionism. On October 23, 1921, a speeding motorist struck and killed Natalie on a Paris street. She was 46.

On for the Long Haul

That The Indians’ Book is still in print and still enlightening readers is perhaps the clearest testament to the importance of Natalie Curtis’s work. Her book introduced many musicians to Native American music’s complexity and sophistication. For instance, Italian composer/conductor/pianist Ferruccio Busoni used tunes in the book as the basis for his “Indian Fantasy,” premiered in 1915 by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, and “Red Indian Diary,” a still-performed suite of short piano pieces. In 1950, New York Times book review editor Donald Adams, encountering The Indians’ Book, recommended it to readers as offering “great value to amateurs in American ethnology and to anyone who wishes to learn something about the true nature of our predecessors on this continent.” A reader review on Amazon.com praises The Indians’ Book as “proof that the social engineers and bureaucrats did not kill the spirit and culture of the rightful inhabitants of this land.” GoodReads.com recommends it as “an American treasure and classic that preserves and honors not only Native American tribes but the compassion and vision of Natalie Curtis herself.” (To hear Curtis’s recordings, visit bit.ly/NatalieCurtisRecords)

Curtis’s less direct—but arguably more important—impact lay in the extent to which her efforts on behalf of Indians opened paths for subsequent scholarship. Ethnographers, archeologists, and linguists, mostly employed or funded by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of American Ethnology, amassed at the Smithsonian Institution an archive of Indian songs, stories, and details on customs and practices. This occurred because Indians had assurance that they would not in the name of assimilation be persecuted for sharing their culture. Theodore Roosevelt distilled his young friend’s impact in the October 1919 issue of The Outlook, describing Natalie Curtis Burlin as one “who has done so very much to give Indian culture its proper position.” —By Daniel B. Moskowitz

This story was originally published in the August 2021 issue of American History. To subscribe, click here.