Wallace Turnage: Activism in the Black Church of Postbellum New York
Escape from EnslavementWallace Turnage was born around 1846 into enslavement in North Carolina. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Turnage joined the mass movement of slaves who took freedom into their own hands. He ran away four times before successfully escaping in August 1864 at the age of seventeen from a Mobile slave jail. He walked, waded, crawled, ran, and swam to freedom, ducking alligators, river snakes, and Confederate forces while enduring days on end without food or water, making his way haphazardly to Mobile Bay where he took refuge behind Union military lines.1In his old age, Turnage wrote a post-emancipation narrative detailing his flight to freedom. Though he concludes his narrative in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, we can use historical documents to piece together the remainder of his life’s narrative. Census data and city directories offer clues about where Turnage lived and how he earned a living. From there, we can begin to glimpse the rhythms of Turnage’s daily life and understand the ways in which Turnage and New York’s wider Black communities resisted racial strictures in the urban North.Post-Emancipation in "Little Africa"After serving in the Union military during the Civil War, Turnage moved to New York City in 1870, joining postbellum America’s emerging urban Black working class. Turnage rented rooms at 526 Broome Street in what is now Greenwich Village, but what was then known as “Little Africa”. Many residents began to move farther uptown by the early 1870s, but a wave of Black refugees, such as Turnage, migrating north from the former Confederacy brought newcomers to the neighborhood.2 Due to limited educational opportunities and occupational discrimination, most residents of Little Africa were employed in similar labor industries as cooks, waiters, and laundresses.3 They formed networks of friendships based on these shared experiences.White authors, including Jacob Riis in his How the Other Half Lives, wrote with relish about Little Africa’s notorious reputation for danger, poverty, and debauchery.4 This drew the attention of both city leaders and middle-class social reformers, who took this as evidence of the social decay of the neighborhood’s residents.5 As such, Little Africa was also highly surveilled by New York’s police. To young Turnage, who grew up on rural plantations in the deep South, he likely approached the streets of lower Manhattan with an unsettling mixture of excitement and trepidation.Turnage alternated jobs, working as a waiter, a janitor, and a glassblower making lamps for the city’s streetlights. Despite the hope of economic betterment, he earned a wage of just a few dollars per week and was excluded from joining the city’s racially-segregated trade unions. He married Sarah Ann Elizabeth Bird in 1875, and the couple moved into a tenement building at 113 Thompson street.6Abyssinian Baptist Church: Community Building and ActivismDespite its notorious reputation, Little Africa was also home to several well-established churches. These institutions created a community and stability that ran counter to what many white New Yorkers felt they knew about the neighborhood.7 Turnage belonged to Abyssinian Baptist Church on Waverly Place, whose congregants numbered in the hundreds. The church was an expression of the Black community’s vitality in New York City, an act of resistance in and of itself, and one of the only institutions which Black New Yorkers could definitively call their own.8The community Turnage found within Abyssinian Baptist Church was a line of defense against the hostile racial discrimination that Black congregants met on a daily basis. In addition to Sunday services, Abyssinian offered clubs, classes, and entertainment such as prayer meetings and choir rehearsals nearly every day of the week. Sundays were an all-day affair, with events scheduled for the morning, afternoon, and evening.9Turnage also joined the Hamilton Lodge of the Grand United Order of Odd Fellows. Fraternal orders such as this were integral to forging and sustaining community among northern Black, working-class communities, offering a site for the expression respectability. In one instance, the Hamilton Lodge paid the fee for a plot for Turnage and his wife to bury their daughter Fanny, who tragically died at the age of one from tuberculosis. In fact, four of Turnage’s children died in the span of seven years, each of whom is buried at Cypress Hills Cemetery. The child mortality rate of New York’s Black communities was the highest of any race during this time in the city, and it was likely that many families of the Hamilton Lodge understood all too well the pain the Turnage family experienced.10Relocation to New JerseyWhen the Panic of 1873 led to mass unemployment and a decade-long depression, Turnage moved his family to Jersey City. However, he crossed the Hudson every day to continue to work and attend church in Manhattan until his death in 1916 at the age of seventy.11 His daughter, Lydia Turnage Connolly, carefully preserved the original manuscript of his post-emancipation narrative in a black clamshell box. Following Lydia’s 1984 death, her friend discovered the manuscript when going through Lydia’s personal belongings and donated it to a historical society in Connecticut. Finally, in 2007, nearly a century after it was written, Turnage’s narrative was published for the first time.Citations and Further Reading1 David W. Blight, A Slave No More (Orlando: Harcourt, 2007), 55, 87.2 David Quigley, Second Founding (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), 82.3 Gerald W. McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 18.4 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 12.5 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 13.6 Blight, A Save No More, 117.7 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 19.8 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 19.9 McFarland, Inside Greenwich Village, 22.10 Blight, A Slave No More, 121.11 Blight, A Slave No More, 118.
Jackie Robinson: Funding Black Entrepreneurship in the Civil Rights Era
Navigating RaceJackie Roosevelt Robinson was born on January 31, 1919. Just two generations removed from slavery, his parents eked out a living as sharecroppers in Georgia. When his father left the family a year after his birth, Robinson’s mother moved her five children to Pasadena, California. Despite the affluence of the surrounding community, Robinson grew up with little financial security, as his mother worked various odd jobs and made use of wealthfare services to support the family.1Robinson's athletic career began in high school and continued initially at Pasadena Junior College (PJC) and then UCLA where he excelled in football, basketball, track and field, baseball, and tennis.2 Most of his teammates were white, and Robinson needed to learn how to navigate racial tensions from a young age.By 1942, with the United States now entrenched in World War II, Robinson was drafted into a segregated Army cavalry unit. His military career was soon derailed, however. In July 1944, Robinson boarded a “Whites Only” Army bus, despite the fact that the Army was ordered to integrate its bus lines. When Robinson refused to move, the driver summoned the military police, and he faced a court-martial for insubordination.3 Robinson was eventually acquitted, but his court-martial proceedings stand out as illustrative of Robinson's ongoing impatience with racial barriers, a character trait that would drive much of his life’s purpose after baseball.Breaking the "Color Barrier"When Robinson was honorably discharged in 1945 at the close of World War II, the Brooklyn Dodgers selected him to play for the Dodgers farm club, the Montreal Royals, for the 1946 season. When Robinson signed a contract with them for $600 per month, he became the first Black baseball player in the International League since 1884. Despite early success, the moment Robinson arrived in racially-segregated Florida for spring training, he was subjected to an onslaught of racial discrimination. When he was excluded from staying at a hotel with his white teammates, Robinson instead stayed with Joe and Dufferin Harris, an African American couple active in local politics, who introduced Robinson to civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Though Robinson spent much of his youth protesting discrimination he faced in his own life, this was his first interaction with organized civil rights activism.4In 1947, the Dodgers finally called Robinson up to the major leagues. When he made his Dodgers debut on April 11, 1947, Robinson became the first player to break the color line as 24,237 attendees watched on. New York’s Black baseball fans quickly flocked to see him play, and Robinson quickly became a star on the Dodgers team. By 1950, his salary was the highest of any Dodger ever at $35,000.5Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robinson was often the target of racial slurs and rough physical play from opposing major league teams. In 1947, the St. Louis Cardinals threatened to walk out if Robinson played. In a later Cardinals game, Enos Slaughter left Robinson with a seven-inch scrape on his leg. Philadelphia Phillies players were known to yell racial slurs at Robinson from their dugout.6 He also received a string of death threats throughout his career. These moments of violence and intimidation, however, did not dissuade Robinson from addressing racial issues publicly. In 1953, Robinson wrote a piece for Our Sports magazine openly criticizing segregated hotels and restaurants that served the Dodger organization.7After ending several seasons with World Series losses, Robinson won his only championship when the Dodgers defeated the New York Yankees in 1955. He retired after the following 1956 season.8 Robinson’s impact on the game of baseball cannot be overstated as his major league debut brought an end to approximately sixty years of segregation in professional baseball. However, while Robinson is best known for breaking baseball’s “color barrier”, he himself believed that his community work in retirement was notable in its own right, if remembered less today.Funding Black EntrepreneurshipAfter 10 years of playing in the major leagues, Robinson dedicated his retirement to leveraging his national profile in the fight for civil rights. Robinson’s activism centered more locally on championing Black New Yorker’s economic advancement.9 When the Second Great Migration brought a wave of Black Southerners to New York between 1940 and 1970, white middle-class residents fled for the suburbs. As the city divested much-needed resources from New York’s predominantly Black neighborhoods, Black communities endured decaying and dangerous infrastructure and racist redlining practices that perpetuated economic disadvantage. Robinson responded by funding institutions of economic aid for New York’s Black communities that lay outside of the municipal government. In 1964, Robinson co-founded Freedom National Bank, a Black-owned and operated commercial bank based in Harlem. In 1970, Robinson established the Jackie Robinson Construction Company to invest in housing for low-income families in the city.10 Robinson himself witnessed the inequities wrought by structural racism and sought to help communities of Black New Yorkers combat these inequities through entrepreneurship, house ownership, and building intergenerational wealth.On October 24, 1972, Robinson died at the age of 53 of a heart attack at his home in Connecticut.11 His funeral service on October 27, 1972 at Riverside Church in Morningside Heights attracted 2,500 mourners. Thousands of New Yorkers lined the procession route to Robinson's burial here at Cypress Hills Cemetery. Twenty-five years after Robinson’s death, the Interboro Parkway that runs through Cypress Hills Cemetery was renamed the Jackie Robinson Parkway in his honor.Citations and Further Reading:1 Jules Tygiel, Extra Bases: Reflections on Jackie Robinson, Race, and Baseball History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 3.2 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 4.3 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 22.4 Jules Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 104.5 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 182-186.6 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 198.7 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 201.8 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 328.9 Tygiel, Baseball's Great Experiment, 343.10 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 11.11 Tygiel, Extra Bases, 13.
Elizabeth Jennings: "Nineteenth Century Rosa Parks"
"Nineteenth Century Rosa Parks"Nearly a century before Rosa Parks was arrested on a Montgomery bus, Elizabeth Jennings ignited a movement to desegregate public transit in New York City. On a Sunday morning in July 1854, Jennings and her friend Sarah E. Adams boarded a “Whites Only” horse-drawn trolley car at the corner of Pearl and Chatham Streets in lower Manhattan on their way to church. In the 1850s, the city’s streetcars were owned and operated by private companies, and many required Black individuals to ride in separate cars.1 New York’s segregated public transportation was a symbolic reminder to Black New Yorkers of their second-class citizenship. Cars designated for nonwhite passengers ran significantly less frequently and, without reliable access to public transportation, Black New Yorkers were forced to walk almost everywhere. This limited their ability to participate in the daily rhythms of the city and to connect with their community.That morning, the white conductor immediately ordered Jennings and Adams to disembark. When they insisted on their right to ride, the enraged conductor grabbed both women and violently pulled them from the car. When Jennings climbed aboard a second time, the conductor summoned a police officer, who accused Jennings of trying to start a riot and himself dragged her from the car.2When Black New Yorkers heard of the violence against Jennings, they were outraged. Her letter detailing the incident was read aloud at a mass meeting in church the next day, where a committee was appointed to bring her case before the courts. Jennings was the daughter of Thomas Jennings, a businessman and leader in New York’s Black community.3 Thomas Jennings and several other Black leaders devised a strategy: they would leverage local media to influence public opinion and rally New York’s Black communities to their cause. They lobbied newspapers like the New York Tribune and Frederick Douglass’ Paper to publish the incident from Jenning’s perspective. With an eye towards bringing a high-profile suit against the streetcar company, her father also appealed to Black New Yorkers for monetary aid to pay the legal fees.In February of 1855, Jennings v. Third Ave. Railroad was heard before the Brooklyn Circuit of the New York State Supreme Court. The court ruled in Jenning’s favor, deciding that it was illegal to forcibly evict her on the basis of her race, and awarded Jennings $225 in damages.4 This was a stunning legal victory for New York’s Black communities, and created a moment for grassroots mobilization and community-building among the city’s Black residents. This victory, however, was quickly tempered with the harsh realities of discrimination. The court’s decision did not lead to an immediate and total desegregation of the city’s streetcar lines, and conductors continued to forcibly remove Black riders. In response to this continued injustice, New York’s Black leaders formed the Legal Rights Association (LRA).5Launching the Legal Rights AssociationThe creation of the LRA was a turning point in the nascent Black politics of the urban north in the nineteenth century. It departed from previous community organization strategies by relying on local petitions and public letters, organized civil disobedience, and legal challenges, a strategy which would later serve as a model for future civil rights organizations, such as the NAACP, which was founded in on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1909.6 At weekly meetings, participants gave and heard speeches, discussed the changing conditions of public transit, debated resolutions, and crafted petitions. Moreover, their lawsuits generated courtroom spectacles that ensured segregation would remain in the public eye.Beyond the LRA, national events continued to impact New York’s Black communities and brought more urgency, as well as inherent danger, to their organizing efforts. Just five years before Jennings was physically removed from a New York streetcar, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. It was now legal for slave catchers to return escaped slaves residing in free states to their Southern enslavers. This Act placed African American communities in Northern cities in considerable danger, particularly in New York, where a large number of escaped slave refugees lived.7 Moreover, in 1857, just two years after Jennings’ victory, the Supreme Court ruled against Dred Scott in his suit for his freedom. The Court further argued that citizenship rights did not extend to African Americans.8 That same year, New York’s Seneca Village, the first settlement of African American landowners in the city, was razed under the premise of eminent domain to make way for the creation of Central Park.9 As the nation escalated towards civil war, the LRA sought to both protect and rally their community of Black New Yorkers.The LRA’s activism efforts did not, however, yield a steady, progressive increase in rights. Court action was a useful tool, albeit with mixed results. Many companies continued to operate whites-only cars and expel Black riders. Still, the LRA brought a newfound urgency to New York’s Black communities in their agitation for civil rights. In the process, it provided a site for social bonds and intra-community communication to be strengthened.Outlawing Public Transit Segregation in New YorkIn 1861, six years after Jenning’s case was decided in her favor, the LRA finally succeeded in legally overturning segregated streetcar policy in New York. Unfortunately, this victory proved to be more symbolic than reality. Only seven months after the decision, a Black man was again attacked on a Sixth Avenue streetcar by a conductor and a white passenger.10 This incident was a sobering reminder to Black New Yorkers that legal victories did not necessarily translate into public acceptance.After her trial, Jennings continued her career as a teacher and married Charles Graham in 1860. In 1895 she opened a kindergarten for New York’s Black children, which she operated out of her own home until her death on June 5, 1901.Citations and Further Reading1 Kyle G. Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 147.2 Leslie M. Alexander, African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 126.3 Volk, Moral Minorities, 147.4 Volk, Moral Minorities, 148.5 Volk, Moral Minorities, 148.6 Volk, Moral Minorities, 153.7 Alexander, African or American?, 122.8 Alexander, African or American?, 134-5.9 Alexander, African or American?, 173.10 Alexander, African or American?, 129-30.
Eubie Blake: A Lifetime of Activism Through Music
Breaking Into the Performance IndustryJames Hubert “Eubie” Blake was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1887. His parents, Emily Johnstone and John Sumner Blake, were born into enslavement in Virginia, and his father served in the Union Army during the Civil War.A master storyteller, in his old age Blake often enjoyed relaying the story of how his parents first purchased a pump organ at the price of 75 dollars, making payments of 25 cents every week, with which young Eubie spent hours honing his musical talent as a boy.1 Blake’s first big break came in 1907. He was hired to play the piano at Gans’ Goldfield Hotel, the first club in Baltimore that catered exclusively to Black clientele.2 In 1912, legendary composer James Reese Europe invited Blake to join his orchestra’s vaudeville performance as a pianist playing ragtime, a popular musical style of the time with roots in America’s Black communities.3Shuffle Along Brings Black Artists to Mainstream New YorkFollowing World War I, Blake and fellow composer Noble Sissle began working on a musical revue called Shuffle Along in New York City. When it premiered in 1921, Shuffle Along was the first hit musical on Broadway about African Americans and that was written, composed, and performed by an all-Black team.4 The show included popular songs that are still familiar to audiences today, such as “I’m Just Wild About Harry" and “Love Will Find a Way”.Shuffle Along was lauded by comtemporary activists and critics alike for the fact that it “did not bother to make concessions to white taste or to theater cliches."5 Others were not so enthralled. Rudolf Fisher, a prominent doctor and author, lamented that Shuffle Along brought flocks of white audiences to his favorite Black establishments in Harlem. Nevertheless, the show was a huge success and ran for a total of 504 performances.In fact, Blake’s Shuffle Along was so monumental that some historians place the show’s introduction to Broadway as the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance movement (Black Music 1). The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual, artistic, and activist movement of the 1920s that placed an emphasis on Black heritage in the form of music, literature, fashion, dance, art, politics, and scholarship. With its epicenter in New York City’s Harlem, this movement consisted of a network of speakeasies, theaters, cabarets, cocktail lounges, and literary societies frequented by New York’s Black community. Moreover, Black leaders in New York aimed to leverage this cultural revival to secure economic and social equality with white Americans.6 With the production of Shuffle Along, Blake undoubtedly left his thumbprint on America’s Black musical theater, and his community’s broader struggle for full citizenship.Ragtime Revival Complicates Blake's LegacyBlake’s success during the era of the Harlem Renaissance is tempered by the fact that later generations of activists often expressed frustration with his earlier work. Younger generations in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s voiced that Blake’s 1920s musicals capitalized on harmful stereotypes of Black stage humor. Blake himself reflected that, once the critical acclaim of Shuffle Along brought his work to a wider, and whiter, audience, as an entertainer he felt pressure to cater to white audiences.7However, when ragtime experienced a revival in the 1970s, Blake and his compositions returned to the limelight. In 1969, he released The 86 Years of Eubie Blake album and opened Eubie!, a revue featuring a history of his music over the decades, on Broadway in 1978, which went on to receive three Tony nominations.8Blake’s relationship with activism and New York’s Black communities was at times complex. Some of his contemporaries voiced frustrations that Blake’s fame brought white audiences into Black nightclubs and theaters, one of the few public spaces in New York where Black communities were not excluded at the time. Conversely, in his later years, Blake felt pressure from his own community to act as an ambassador on behalf of Black musicians. With the revival of the ragtime musical style in the 1970s, many activists looked to Blake as a statesman of Black music who could stand in as a representative for Black composers. This was particularly true of Black composers in New York, where Blake helped develop a specifc "New York style" of ragtime with its own set of unique characteristics.9 This is in tension with the fact that Blake personally preferred classical music over Black-inspire genres like ragtime and jazz.10Blake continued to perform publicly until his death on February 12, 1983 in Brooklyn.11 His headstone was commissioned by the African Atlantic Genealogical Society and is engraved with the musical notation of “I’m Just Wild About Harry”.Citations and Further Readings1 Ken Bloom and Richard Carlin, Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm, and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 11.2 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 35.3 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 67.4 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, vii.5 Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., “Music in the Harlem Renaissance: An Overview,” in Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays, ed. Samuel A. Floyd, Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 10.6 Floyd, Jr., “Music in the Harlem Renaissance," 2-3.7 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 362-3.8 Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 392.9 Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve, Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington: An Oral History of American Music (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 49.10 Bloom and Carlin, Eubie Blake, 364.11 Brooks, Lost Sounds, 393.
Rosetta LeNoire Brown: Theater Activism in 1960s Harlem
An Aspiring Stage PerformerRosetta LeNoire was born on August 8, 1911 in Harlem. Her love for performing was nurtured by her godfather Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, who helped her overcome rickets as a young girl by teaching her to dance.1By the 1930s, LeNoire was an aspiring young performer, and the country found itself in the midst of the grueling Great Depression. In New York City, the situation was dire. With a struggling economy, artists found themselves largely unemployed, especially among New York’s hard-hit Black communities. It was under these circumstances that the Lafayette Theatre staged Orson Welles’ production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 1936. This was not a typical retelling of the classic Elizabethan play. It featured a 19th-century, voodoo-inspired setting in Haiti and was performed by an all-Black cast, including 25-year-old LeNoire, who played the part of a witch.2 The show was incredibly popular, and launched LeNoire’s career as she went on to act, sing, and dance in several more Broadway and off-Broadway theater productions.Founding New, Radical Organizations for ChangeIn 1968, frustrated by stereotyped portrayals of Blackness on the New York stage and inspired by the Civil Rights Movement sweeping the nation, LeNoire used her own personal finances to found the AMAS Repertory Theatre Company. Located in East Harlem, LeNoire committed this local artistic community to interracial and color-blind casting, a concept that was revolutionary at the time. She described it as a nurturing space “dedicated to bringing people of all races, creeds, colors, religions and backgrounds together through the creative arts.”3 With AMAS, LeNoire became a successful and groundbreaking producer, working with the likes of Stephen Schwartz, Scott Joplin, Maya Angelou, and Eubie Blake. LeNoire’s own Bubbling Brown Sugar, the first revue to pay homage to the music of New York's Harlem Renaissance, received a Tony Award nomination in 1976 for Best Musical.4 The theater continues to thrive today in the West 42nd Street theater district.Family Matters Challenges Black StereotypesThough LeNoire considered the New York stage to be her life’s work, she also went on to act on the small screen, starring in sitcoms Gimme a Break! and Amen. She is perhaps best known for the role of Estelle “Mother” Winslow on Family Matters. The show’s focus on the multigenerational Winslow family served as a counterpoint to the prevailing stereotype in 1990s America that Black youth were “lazy and irresponsible” and their parents “welfare dependent."5 A fixture of the Friday evening network lineup, Family Matters ran for nine seasons and was the second-longest running American sitcom with a predominantly Black cast.LeNoire died on March 17, 2002 at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in New Jersey at the age of 90.Citations and Further Readings1 Linda Kerr Norflett, “Rosetta LeNoire: The Lady and her Theatre,” Black American Literature Forum, 17, no. 2, Black Theatre Issue (Summer, 1983), 69.2 Norflett, “Rosetta LeNoire," 69.3 Norflett, “Rosetta LeNoire," 70.4 Samuel A. Hay, African American Theatre: an Historical and Critical Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 51.5 Shiron V. Patterson, “Just Another Family Comedy,” in African Americans on Television: Race-ing for Ratings, ed. David J. Leonard and Lisa A. Guerrero (Denver: Praeger, 2013), 162.
