Community Agency, Work, and The Great Migration Phenomenon in Houston, Texas, 1900-1941

“Beautiful People” Community Agency, Work, and The Great Migration Phenomenon in Houston, Texas, 1900-1941 The following essay outlines African American self help in the first half of the twentieth century. Specifically, it highlights two well‐known self‐help strategies utilized by internal migrants who moved to Houston, Texas, between the years 1900 and 1941. Motivated by the city’s numerous socioeconomic determinants, African American newcomers from eastern Texas and Louisiana uprooted to Houston for three fundamental reasons: to better provide for their families; to become beneficiaries of individual and collective civil liberties, thereby spurring racial advancement; and to regularly visit loved ones back in the nearby countryside. They not only found decent‐paying jobs, better schools, spirit‐filled congregations and numerous social clubs; in doing so, newcomers showed their gratitude by helping others, even when unable to adequately do so. Motivated by cultural tradition, familial/community obligation, and political climate, internal migrants provided for both their communities of origin in the surrounding hinterland and recent places of settlement in Houston. Migrants and established residents —whose parents moved to the city as slaves right before or immediately following the Civil War as freed people—alike, regardless of class, ethnicity, hue, and political affiliation, invested in the welfare of others, through charitable means and relationship building, and in doing so, helped formulate two well‐ known self‐help strategies. From the days of slavery to the end of World War I, African Americans utilized accommodation as an effective political posture; then from the end of World War I to the end of World War II, Blacks adopted the “New Negro” philosophy of the interwar era. Both philosophies— sociopolitical and socioeconomic in nature—relied upon self‐help agency as a transformative measure. African American agency, the means of building, caring for, stimulating, and loving, has sustained people of color for millenniums, inevitably, precipitating new forms of protest in recent years, including the highly‐successful modern Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1881 in the town of Clinton, a tiny farm community west of the Guadalupe River, just ninety miles north of the Gulf Sea in DeWitt County, Texas, Jennie Belle Murphy—known to friends and family as Ladybelle—was raised by relatives, perhaps after the death of her mother, Rachel Thomas. The teenager with a passion for sewing, gardening, and service left home at the turn of the century to study domestic science at Guadalupe College, a private Baptist school for African Americans in Seguin, Texas. Already a sought after seamstress, Murphy worked to help defray tuition and board costs, even on occasions doing alterations for the spouse of the school’s president, David Abner, Jr. Murphy, possibly while still attending Guadalupe College, married Benjamin Jesse Covington of Falls County, a recent Meharry Medical College graduate. Born in 1869 in tiny Marlin, Texas, a cotton-farming community twenty-four miles south of Waco and one hundred and twenty-one miles south of Dallas in the middle of the Blackland Prairie region in central Texas, the studious, handsome chocolate-complexioned son of former slaves was bedazzled by the caring, lovely, tall, fair-skinned beauty. The couple married on September 30, 1902, in Seguin, perhaps following the completion of her studies, and settled briefly in Wharton and Yoakum near Jennie Covington’s hometown before moving to Houston in 1903. 1 Covington, who described herself as “a plain woman from the country,” no longer struggled to make ends meet, being the wife of one of the most well-known professionals in the City of Houston. So prominent were the Covingtons by the late 1900s that luminaries such as educators Booker T. and Margaret Washington, contralto singer Marion Anderson, entertainer and activist Paul Robeson, concert tenor Roland Hayes, writer and activist William Pikens and boxing champion Joe Lewis enjoyed the splendor of their stately two-story home on Hadley and Dowling streets while visiting the city. A caring Covington used her local and national connections to draw attention to the plight of the poor, especially African Americans. The privileged, empathetic woman made it her life’s mission to care for others as her aunt and uncle, Jane and Will Jones, provided for her. For the next sixty-five years the upper middle-class homemaker from the country worked to improve the lives of thousands. 2 Civic leader and humanitarian Jennie Covington helped establish numerous social service agencies that reached out to African Americans in need. Covington, housewife Martha Sneed, educator Mary L. Jones, and other community organizers founded the Blue Triangle Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in 1920, and through the years provided Houston Blacks, especially women and girls, with an employment office, cafeteria meals, a travelers aid program for recent migrants in need of assistance, public aid to families in need, recreation facilities for children, a camp retreat and educational and Christian conferences. Because of the generosity of Covington and others, the Blue Triangle YWCA during its existence, from 1920 to 1998, served over 30,000 people. 3 Her commitment to young people motivated others to open the Darcus Home for Delinquent Girls, another facility for African Americans. Homeless mothers, schoolchildren, the poor, and the unemployed benefited from her volunteer efforts at the Houston Settlement Association, Bethlehem Center, C. U. Luckie Elementary School Mothers’ Club, Antioch and Bethel Baptist Churches, and Married Ladies Social, Art & Charity Club. As a Bethlehem Center volunteer, she headed the center’s Social Service Advisory Committee, a group that investigated family welfare matters in the African American community. 4 Jennie Covington promoted racial cooperation and equality as well. She worked with educators on the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation, serving as its chair for at least a decade. Whites founded the first Commission of Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta in April 1919 as a response to the turbulent postwar racial climate. Statewide commissions with local committees sprang up across the South over the next few years, with the Texas commission forming in 1920. The commission addressed lynchings, inequitable healthcare, racial intolerance and mutual cooperation between the races. A committed Covington also served as cofounder and first head of the Houston Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an affiliate of the state commission. Later in the 1950s, Covington chaired the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation. 5 While the presence of Covington, Prairie View College administrator W. R. Banks, and other members of the African American elite was noteworthy, the commission failed to adequately address racial bias in Texas since the group’s white conservative moderates opposed racial equality. To most white members of the commission, the problem had less to do with white hostility, but rather ineptitude on the part of people of color. At the same time, Covington and other African American community leaders rarely challenged the racist views of whites. They generally took an accommodating position on racial matters, hoping instead to win white approval for present-day individual victories and more substantive changes over time. Covington eventually realized the sobering fact that white Texans, for the most part, cared very little about toppling racial injustice. 6 Disillusioned and frustrated, Covington, in later years, publicly denounced the pro-segregationist platform of Texas politicians, civic leaders, and businesspeople. Like National Association of Colored Women founder Mary Church Terrell, Covington as a grey-haired senior, grew frustrated and angry. Racial bigotry, according to Covington, remained the most perilous challenge in the South, largely because of intolerance on the part of whites and inaction on the part of African Americans. A determined, mature Covington nevertheless advocated racial equality for people of color, even planting seeds of protest in her offspring, including grandson Thomas Dent, the eldest child of Ernestine Jessie Covington Dent, the only child of Dr. and Mrs. Covington, a classically-trained musician and music teacher who married Dr. Albert Dent, the future president of Dillard University. Award-winning writer and activist Tom Dent, like his grandmother, Jennie Covington, earnestly sought racial liberation for people of color, becoming a major grassroots and national leader in the modern Civil Rights Movement. Covington, once a Booker T. Washington accommodationist, years later following World War II, sponsored many of the philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois integrationists such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 7 Numerous groups and individuals relied on the ancient self-help model, community agency, for the race’s survival. Women’s auxiliaries at churches and Roman Catholic nuns, clubwomen and boy scout leaders, medical professionals and social workers worked to improve conditions in African American neighborhoods and communities. So too did unskilled laborers, uneducated washerwomen and domestics, educators, ministers and priests, newspaper publishers and journalists, jazz and blues artists, businesspeople, civic leaders, attorneys, politicians, and students. Agency involved intergroup relationships, intraracial coalitions, cross-cultural ties and, sometimes, interracial community efforts. African Americans crossed lines of demarcation in an effort to give support and hope to others in need, even when in need themselves of respect, kindness, equitable schooling, good city services, fair wages, civil rights and social justice. 8 This essay discusses African American agency in Houston between the years 1900 and 1941. The self-help efforts of African American migrants like the Covington Family hastened change for the city’s African American community. Throughout the first half of the century, African Americans in the new industrial center subtly challenged the institutions, employers, and laws that relegated them to a debased position in society. As a result, a quietly heightened social protest consciousness and self-help emotion gave momentum to future possibilities. Blacks, increasingly aware of their abilities and resources, quietly worked for change. Houston’s African American migrants and established residents collectively sought to improve the material conditions of others in need through familial support, neighborhood improvement, education, church work, social clubs, civic organizations, medical care and the media. “Beautiful people,” a phrase my late father used to describe family, friends and community leaders he admired and respected, mainly for their notable deeds, aptly depicts the migrant community agents highlighted in this essay. Beautiful people, they were in the face of adversity and discouragement; even when their hopes waned, they still gave of themselves for the good of the community. 9 Building on the work of James C. Scott, whose research forces scholars to look more closely at the terms protest and resistance, this essay calls these “hidden” acts of resistance important; if for no other reason, passivity or undercover aggression ensured the group’s survival. 10 The author places these migrant community servants in two categories. The conservative Booker T. Washington constructionalists or accommodationists who dominated African American life for fifty years, from the end of slavery to the end of World War I, espoused economic independence and a cautious political philosophy that publically appeased white segregationists. The death of Washington in 1915 and emergence of a second movement signaled the slow death of this heralded group. Influenced heavily by W.E.B. Du Bois, the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), World War II and The Great Migration, and the emergence of the Universal Improvement Association and its national spokesperson, Marcus Garvey, the moderate to radical “New Negroes” of the interwar era advocated a more aggressive approach to racial segregation, one that combined cultural consciousness, stayed militancy, integration and economic autonomy with social justice. On occasions, New Negroes utilized constructionalism as well. 11 The two mainstream political voices of African America in the early twentieth century had profound implications on Black life and culture, including that of self-help agency. Individually and collectively, the camps advocated the use of agency as an important means to a successful, fruitful end. Mostly, the two philosophies pushed people of color to embrace socioeconomic independence and collective consciousness, the dual notion that articulated the following: (1) individual successes strengthened the community and motivated others to seek attainable goals; and (2) through the idea of shared responsibility, African Americans would help others in the community attain success. Of course New Negroes went further, pointing out that African Americans had an obligation to challenge white America to end racial oppression. While somewhat more radical in nature, the latter group essentially built upon the established, inherent doctrine of accommodating freed people of color. 12 The two camps did something else in Houston and across the country: through their acts of selfhelp agency, that is, through their efforts to improve conditions within their communities, both influenced the emerging modern Civil Rights Movement. As Jacqueline Ann Rouse, Stephanie Shaw and other historians of African American agency assert, earlier forms of activism in the form of community building gave momentum to the later modern Civil Rights and Black Power movements. By providing their families with hope, stable homes, spiritual resolve and educational opportunities, migrants to Houston planted fertile seeds of fervent rebellion and protest in the psyches and souls of offspring, tools deemed invaluable for the radical integrationist and social-justice efforts of the 1950s through 1970s. Building on the successes and failures of foreparents, the civil-rights generation would confidently demand real, lasting change— economic, legal, political, educational, as well as global transformation. 13 Houston’s emerging industrial economy, especially after World War I, propelled migration streams and unprecedented population growth among whites, African Americans, and Latinos of Mexican ancestry, and from all socioeconomic classes as well as Christian religions. The city’s success in commerce, railroad and waterway expansion, and oil refining following the Spindletop oilfield find outside Beaumont, Texas, in 1901, put in motion the city and Upper Texas Gulf Coast (UTGC) manufacturing region’s twentieth-century economic surge. Houston-based industrial firms grew from seventy-eight in 1900 to four hundred and seventy-five by 1930, employing 26,213. In 1940, six hundred manufacturing firms employed 27,500 workers. Total bank deposits grew from five million in 1900 to over two hundred million in 1940. The city’s improved business and manufacturing pursuits, stemming from ship channel trade, oil refineries, oil equipment and tool businesses, cotton compresses, steel foundries, railroads, service companies and petrochemical plants created a demand for both menial wage earners and professionals. 14 As migrants flocked to the city for jobs, Houston’s overall and African American population figures swelled, although real growth occurred within the white community as Black percentage growth in the city’s overall population plummeted from 38 percent in 1890 to 21 percent in 1930. Houston grew from a medium-sized United States city in 1900 of 44,633 to the South’s largest metropolitan center of 596,163 in 1950, with the city’s Black population mounting from 14,608 in 1900 to 124,760 in 1950. Houston, the second largest city in the state in 1900 behind San Antonio and the eighty-fifth largest in the nation, had become by 1930, the most-populated city in Texas, the second in the South, behind New Orleans, and twenty-sixth in the United States. In 1950 Houston had become the largest urban center in the South and fourteenth largest city in the nation. 15 Whether a recent migrant to the city or second-generation established resident, or an unskilled laborer or middle-class professional, African Americans accepted their greatest obstacle, racism, as a fact of life. In fact during this period, they preferred racial separation to integration. If for no other reason, segregation afforded African Americans the opportunity to maintain a separate identity, one far removed from ridicule, contempt and self-inflicted hatred. Equally important, they felt more at ease when in the presence of other African Americans. Whites perhaps reminded them of their inferior status; African Americans were therefore compelled to avoid constant reminders of this fact. More than likely, African Americans felt protected and even invulnerable inside their segregated homes, church houses, restaurants, clubs, businesses, and schools. 16 Fear also motivated the first generations of free people of color to accept the white status quo, even if acceptance carried with it deeply-rooted psychological and spiritual scars. Although the guise of accommodation forced African Americans accepted this as fact, slavery and segregation ironically afforded them with the necessary survival skills that allowed them to subtly challenge their oppressors, even while outwardly acknowledging their inferior status. The survival strategies created in slavery and freedom created the basis for African American community agency in the migration phenomenon. 17 Even before Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise speech in 1895, Houston-area Blacks supported appeasement as a practical doctrine of survival and resistance. Born in Navasota in Grimes County on October 25, 1872, James Delbridge Ryan completed his initial education at Prairie View College in 1890. That same year at the age of seventeen he relocated to Houston and began teaching mathematics for the Houston school system. A decade later he began a long career at Colored High School (now Booker T. Washington High School) in Fourth Ward, first as a math instructor. In 1912 he became the school’s principal. He later earned a master’s from Wiley College and became principal of the new Jack Yates High School in Third Ward in 1928. The racial inequities were obvious to Ryan. He discussed them at great length at a Colored Teachers’ Association of Texas convention presidential address in 1927. By the 1920s, for example, Colored High School had an enrollment of 1,000 but seats for 500. While white schools saw state of the art science laboratories by the late 1920s, many African American schools had no science textbooks or equipment. African American teachers and administrators earned one-third to one-half less in pay than their white peers. Still like most Blacks at the time, Ryan never challenged white peers, administrators, or city officials to reform African American schools, pay equal salaries, and eradicate racial disparities. 18 Instead, Ryan looked to the community for answers. When the school district refused to hire fine arts instructors and athletic coaches. “Professor Jimmie,” as many beloved students called him, used his own money to fund programs, purchase school supplies, and finance the careers of skillful instructors. James D. Ryan persuaded mail clerk Will J. Jones in 1912 to form choral clubs at African American schools for a modest fee which Ryan himself paid. Jones, a former student of music at the reputable New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, loved teaching music. Regrettably, the school system at the time refused to pay the salaries of African American music teachers. Will Jones served African American schoolchildren for twenty-two years before the district officially recognized him as a music teacher. By the 1930s, African American schools, largely because of generous benefactor James D. Ryan, enjoyed choirs, music departments, bands, and textbooks. Ryan was also instrumental in the formation of the district’s athletic programs for African American high schools. For example, before 1925, Ryan purchased uniforms and equipment for the Colored High School football team. 19 Ryan always found ways to meet the needs of schoolchildren. A passive James D. Ryan used his personal finances and influence to improve Black schools and initiate policy. The actions of Ryan and other publicly passive educators actually paid off. Many of their students at Booker T. Washington, Jack Yates, and Philllis Wheatley went on to have fruitful and lucrative careers in medicine, dentistry, nursing, accounting, library science, mortuary science, music, journalism, business, higher education, and teaching. 20 By the second decade of the century, the constructionalists who had dominated African American life and culture since Emancipation, saw the rise of a second group of activists. The message of thrift and self reliance struck a cord with many in the community, including, ironically, a growing number of dissidents. A growing number of men and women looked to the popular “New Negro” Movement that followed World War I. Prompted by political and cultural changes, African Americans nationwide increasingly challenged the conformist creed of James D. Ryan and others who championed the Booker T. Washington platform. 21 Growing racial tensions also spurred discontent in the African American community. Several riots predated Red Summer, with one being the Houston Riot of 1917. The Houston Riot occurred on the night of August 23, 1917, when one hundred armed infantrymen, angry over racist treatment, a police beating involving a fellow soldier presumed dead, and a circulating rumor that the camp would soon come under attack, disobeyed orders and marched through two neighborhoods, a working-class suburb, the Brunner addition, at Brunner Ave. and San Filipe, and a section of the Fourth Ward, spraying and bayoneting randomly innocent bystanders and police. In the end, nineteen died, including thirteen white and Hispanic Houstonians, four police officers, one Illinois national guardsman, and four African American troops. Twenty others were wounded. Three tribunals indicted one hundred and eighteen men, finding one hundred and ten guilty. Sixty-three men received life sentences, while nineteen died by hanging. Disillusionment over continuous charges of racism, the murder spree and swift courts-marshal sparked the new movement in the city, one involving a younger cadre of activists who appealed to the conventional wisdom of Ryan and other constructionalists, eventually founding a local branch of the NAACP in 1918. Bolder and less dependent on white approval, Houston’s “New Negroes” espoused African American social justice, primarily through litigation. 22 While most “ New Negroes” of the period both distanced themselves from the politics of Booker T. Washington, and, at the same time, occasionally utilized the safety valve of constructionalism, a few “New Negroes” demanded immediate equal treatment under the law, especially the right to vote and equal pay. These individuals rarely appeased whites. To the contrary, the actions and statements of so-called extremists like Richard Randolph Grovey made people, including Blacks, nervous. Born in Brazoria County in 1889 to the middle-class farm family, Grovey moved to Waco to attend high school, graduating in 1910, and that same year, entered Tillotson College in Austin, earning his degree in 1914. After a brief stint as a rural principal, Grovey married a Prairie View College coed studying to become a schoolteachers, permanently settling in Houston, only months before the Houston Riot. Tired of taking orders and feeling undervalued, Grovey left his skilled position at Houston and Texas Central Railroad and enrolled in barber school, in time opening a barbershop in Third Ward on Dowling St. down the street from the Covington home. He took the conversations he heard at his place of business, and by the late 1920s, founded a political-action organization, the Third Ward Civic Club, one that intersected community needs with labor organizing. Unlike most middle-class African Americans, Grovey attracted working-class laborers to his organization, a decision he relished up to his death in 1961. He respected the rank and file and bitterly recognized their need to collectively organize on their jobs. By the mid-1930s, Grovey left the organization he founded to actively organize for the local CIO. 23 Prior to his departure, however, he ruffled feathers when he filed a lawsuit against election judge Albert Townsend, charging the official with violating his constitutional rights when he refused to issue him a ballot in 1932. With the financial backing of a businessman with mobster ties Julius White, and legal expertise of attorneys Carter Wesley and Jasper Austin (Jack) Atkins, he took the case to the Supreme Court. A loophole allowed his lawyers to forego the Texas Court of Appeals and Supreme Court and take the case directly to the United States Supreme Court. In Grovey v. Townsend (1935) the court however ruled in favored of the defendant, arguing that the white Democratic primary law did not violate African Americans’ constitutional rights if the primary itself was operated by a private group, not the state. This challenged two earlier Supreme Court rulings, both of which originated in Texas and addressed the constitutionality of the white primary law, formed in 1923 (Nixon v. Herndon,1927; and, Nixon v. Condon, 1932). 24 Instead of rallying behind Grovey, members of the community expressed anger for generating what they perceived to be negative attention from the media and white community. Residents, mostly middleclass professionals, threatened him, criticized his wife, verbally attacked his children, and stopped patronizing his barbershop. Even members of the NAACP, including, according to daughter Nell Grovey Cole, attorney Thurgood Marshall, branded Grovey a dangerous lunatic, mainly because they saw the defeat as a devastating blow to their plan of attack, although they did eventually see victory with the Smith v. Allwright decision (1944). Still retired guidance counselor Nell Grovey Cole remembers the pain and humiliation the family suffered at the hands of schoolteachers, neighbors, acquaintances and strangers on the city street who saw R. R. Grovey as selfishly pretentious and unqualified to lead the city’s fight for racial equality. For her, the “New Negro” Movement represented painful contradictions in a community she called home. Nevertheless, the four Texas white primary cases that reached the Supreme Court had important implications for the Brown decision of 1954, the unofficial start of the modern Civil Rights Movement, since it proved to activists that African Americans could in fact successfully challenge local and state laws that harmed them as citizens. 25 In conclusion, migrants and established residents gave back to their communities in numerous ways. In doing so, they offered African Americans alternative solutions to the pressing problems and challenges facing their families, neighborhoods and larger society. Interestingly these institutions and selfhelp programs did something else. They precipitated the rise of an articulate, educated, confident and somewhat militant group of race leaders who through nonviolent, quiet means, along with more combative, self-defense methods, contested racial oppression. Increasingly, political action for African American Houstonians meant confrontation. The emerging direct assault on white hegemony would differ considerably from the accommodating posture of Old Guard elites like James Ryan who generally believed that direct confrontation had unpleasant consequences for African American individually and collectively. Ironically, as New Negroes came on the scene, many of their views mirrored those of the Old Elite. In fact, even within the ranks of this new Houston militancy, differing viewpoints, class bias, and sexism threatened the untied assault on white supremacy. The constructionalists and New Negroes did something else: they inspired later generation of activists and activism in Houston, the United States and around the world. Human-rights leaders Eldrewey Stearns, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, MLK, Jo Ann Robinson, Malcolm X, Roy Wilkins, Bobby seales, Angela Davis, Maulana Karenga, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba and other hunan-rights activists owed much to their predecessors. Beautify people they were, for their commitment to both community building and social equality in the face of unending racism. 26