Her name might not be in Who’s Who Among African Americans, or have household recognition like Madam C.J. Walker, but Ida Hagan broke barriers not only for her race, but her gender. From a young age, Hagan bore the burden of being the only Black person in the room. Perhaps this garnered the tenacity required of her in 1904, when her appointment as deputy postmaster of the post office in Ferdinand, Indiana drew intense local resistance and national attention. This would only be the first stop on her professional journey, and she would go on to become a pharmacist and labor union organizer.
Born May 24, 1888, Ida Priscilla Hagan grew up in the Pinkston Settlement, a free Black settlement west of Ferdinand. It was founded in the mid-1800s by her great-grandfather, Emanuel Pinkston Sr. In 1897, the Huntingburgh Argus wrote that “There are 5694 white children in the district schools of Dubois County and our little colored girl whose name is Ida Hagan. Ida is eight years of age and is a pet pupil in District No. 4 in Ferdinand Township.” She graduated with honors from the Gehlhausen School in Ferdinand Township in 1902, with the Huntingburgh Independent claiming that she was “the first colored pupil in Dubois county [sic] to graduate from the district schools in this county.” Hagan was also reportedly the first Black resident in the county to attend a public high school, Huntingburg High School.
Pinkston Settlement Cemetery, tombstone with American flag is Ida Hagan’s grandfather, Ben Hagan, Sr. Photo courtesy of the author.
Her life would change when she met Swiss-born Ferdinand physician, Dr. Alois Wollenmann. After his wife, Fidelia, died during childbirth, he hired Hagan to help care for his two sons and assist in his drug store, the Adler Apothak. The store also served as the town’s post office, of which Dr. Wollenmann was postmaster. Hagan remained with the Wollenmann family during the week, and on the weekend she would return to the Pinkston Settlement. In 1904, at age 16, he appointed Hagan deputy postmaster.
It was unclear to residents and newspaper editors around the state why Dr. Wollenmann appointed a Black girl, despite receiving job applications from white girls. Threats were made to burn the doctor in effigy and boycott his office, but the doctor did not seem alarmed and showed no inclination to yield to the “unwarranted prejudices” of critics. The English News on August 19, 1904 noted of the appointment “The patrons of the office are much incensed at the appointment of a colored person for assistant, and especially since the lady was not even a resident of the town.”
The Logansport Daily Reporter noted of Hagan:
In an interview she said that people were glad to see her working in their houses and she cannot see why they object to her working as a deputy in the post office. She said that if she had known her appointment would have the storm that it has, she would not have accepted, but that now she will hold on to it, and the doctor will keep her, she does not propose to be driven out if she can help it.
Nevertheless, Hagan withstood the pressure and excelled at her job, endearing herself to the community with her efficiency, kindness (especially for the infirm and elderly), and ability to speak the Low German spoken by many of the locals.
Dr. Alois Wollenmann in his office, Ferdinand News, September 26, 1891, accessed Newspapers.com.
While working at the store, and under Dr. Wollenmann’s tutelage, Hagan took a home study course in pharmacy offered by Winona Technical Institute, the precursor to Butler University. She received her Indiana pharmacy license in 1909. She was just 20 years old, an accomplishment for anyone that young, let alone a Black woman. According to John Clark (Assistant Professor at the College of Pharmacy, University of South Florida), Keenan Sala (Indiana State Archivist), and Dr. Gregory Bond (Assistant Director of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy), Hagan became the first known licensed female Black pharmacist in the state and likely the youngest in the nation.
Hagan could certainly be described as a trailblazer in the field of pharmacy, joining Harriet Marble, Julia Pearl Hughes, and Anna Louise James as some of the first Black women in pharmaceuticals. These young women were privileged and attended schools like Howard University, Meharry Pharmaceutical College, Brooklyn College, among other notable universities. Hagan, however, took home study courses while working at the drug store and post office, and caring for Dr. Wollenmann’s children.
On October 17, 1903, tragedy struck when Dr. Wollenmann fell ill with tuberculosis. In an attempt to heal, he temporarily left his sons in Hagan’s care and returned to his native Switzerland to recuperate and visit with his sister. In his absence, he reappointed Hagan deputy postmaster to manage duties. However, just weeks after his return to Ferdinand, he passed away at the age of 48. Upon his untimely death, Hagan became acting postmaster, one of the first Black women in Indiana to hold this position. The Indianapolis Recorder noted on July 27. 1912 “Ida’s honesty and integrity has won the respect and confidence of the community in which she lives and the position tendered her is a tribute paid not only to Miss Hagan, but to the race.”
Hagan held the position until she resigned weeks later, possibly stemming from her impending marriage to Alfred Roberts, a typesetter for the Indianapolis Recorder. Ida joined Alfred in the capital city, where she began her new life as a pharmacist at the Eureka Drug Store on West Street.
In 1915, Ida Hagan Roberts moved to Gary, accepting a position as a pharmacist for Dr. Arthur Adams who had just opened The Adams Pharmacy. The Recorder published an article about the new store, stating:
This is a pleasing, and remarkable Race Enterprise, in which the colored citizens of Gary, should be very proud of indeed, and not only the citizens of Gary, but those citizens of Chicago who visit Gary frequently and who have been segregated by white people in seeking a place for refreshments, and which you and your friends are always welcome. . . . Dr. Arthur is a well-known citizen in not only Gary, but through the state, and is worthy of the support and confidence of every race loving Negro.
Ida Hagan, photo sent to author’s mother, Imelda (Uebelhor) Becher.
In 1925, Ida filed for divorced from Alfred Roberts, and on September 29, 1926, she married Sidney Whitaker, a railroad porter working for the Pullman Company, and moved to Detroit. He is likely the reason she became involved with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), founded in 1925 by the elder statesman of the Civil Rights Movement, A. Philip Randolph. BSCP was the first predominantly-Black labor union, composed of highly-educated porters and maids hired by George Pullman to work on his sleeping cars. Pullman workers were expected to work long shifts for low pay and in poor working conditions, especially compared to white workers. The BSCP challenged these inequities.
Six weeks after the union was founded, wives and relatives of porters formed the BSCP Ladies Auxiliary. These women became labor conscious activists, demanding consumer, and workers’ rights. They were credited with helping to make the BSCP the first successful national Black trade union in the nation. Ida served as president of the Detroit Division of the Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP, which generated financial support and advocated for public policy measures, such as grade labeling of canned food products. She was involved in the Auxiliary until the 1950s, when the rise in ownership of private automobiles, improved air transportation, and construction of interstates minimized the need for railroads.
Ladies Auxiliary of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters of Detroit 11th anniversary gathering, courtesy of the Detroit Tribune, May 27, 1956.
At the age of 76, Ida continued to lobby for equal rights. John Dotson, Pulitzer Prize winning writer for the Detroit Free Press, reported on March 10, 1965, that she joined 10,000 protesters in Detroit, marching in solidarity with those in Selma, Alabama agitating for Black voting rights. She summoned her BSCP Auxiliary friends to join her in the local march, telling the paper “’I just hope and pray that this is an awakening for those who don’t know what we’re up against.’” Ida Whitaker joined college students, who cut class to attend the orderly march. The paper summarized:
Detroit’s [march] wasn’t like the ‘glorious day’ of the March on Washington, but you got the feeling that this one meant more.’ Ida remained active in civil rights, religious and civic causes the remainder of her life. She saw results from her hard work and was quoted as saying, ‘It’s better to wear out than to rust out.’
Ida Hagan (left), courtesy of Ferdinand News; Ben Hagan, Jr. & Larkin Pinkston, courtesy of Imelda (Uebelhor) Becher.
Ida (Hagan) Whitaker died on February 8, 1978, and was buried alongside her husband, Sidney, at Mount Olivet Cemetery in Detroit. The Detroit Public Library was unable to locate obituaries for either of them. After an intense search for an obituary in all available Detroit newspapers, and with the help of many different sources, it is questionable that their obituary was ever published. The Michigan Death Records provide only the date of her death. She was childless, her brother never had children and he preceded her in death, so no one was left to tell her story.
No one, that is, but us.
On Saturday, May 31, 2025, the State of Indiana will honor Ida Hagan Whitaker with a Historical Marker, to be installed in Ferdinand, at the former site of Dr. Wollenmann’s Adler Apothak and the Ferdinand’s Post Office.
Sources Used:
Databases
Ancestry.com
Hoosier State Chronicles
Newspapers.com
Experts/Advisors:
Dr. Gregory Bond, National Institute on History of Pharmacy
Dr. John Clark, University of South Florida, Pharmacy
Rosemary Stewart
Eric Uebelhor
Newspapers Detroit Free Press Detroit News Detroit Tribune English Times Ferdinand News Indianapolis Recorder Jasper Herald Logansport Pharos
Organizations
Christ the King Catholic Church, Detroit
Detroit Catholic Archdiocese
James Cole Funeral Home
Michigan Dept. of Licensing & Regulatory Affairs
St. Benedict Catholic Church, Detroit
St. Frances D’Assisi, Detroit
St. Rita’s Catholic Church. Indianapolis
Repositories
Butler University
Detroit Public Library (Burton Historical Collection)
Dubois County Museum
Indiana Historical Society
Indiana State Archives & Records Administration
Indiana State Library
Indiana University Indianapolis University Library
Jasper–Dubois County Public Library
Lake County Public Library
Michigan State Archives
Michigan State Library
Plainfield-Guilford Township Public Library
Secondary
Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998)
Gary Alan Fine, “The Pinkston Settlement: An Historical and Social Psychological Investigation of the Contact Hypothesis,” Phylon 40, no. 3 (3rd Quarter, 1979): 229-242, accessed JSTOR.org
Misc.
Imelda (Uebelhor) Becher’s Scrapbook
Indiana Bd. of Pharmacy
Michigan Bd. of Pharmacy
Michigan Chronicles
Michigan Death Records
Midwest Druggist
Pamphlet, “Miss Virginia Brooks: 20th Century Joan of Arc,” 1913, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Iowa City, accessed Wikipedia.
“West Hammond has been electrified of late by what a woman—a woman of intelligence, of action and indomitable courage—can accomplish.”
-Munster Times, 1911
The woman described by the Times was one Virginia Brooks, also dubbed “Joan of Arc” of the burgeoning village of West Hammond. She was determined to end the mistreatment of vulnerable residents and expel corrupt politicians from West Hammond (now Calumet City)—an Illinois town that overlapped into Indiana. Brooks did this by delivering speeches in barrooms, confronting law enforcement officials, and founding her own publication. After realizing the limitations of protests and the press, Brooks embraced the Women’s Suffrage Movement as means of change, leading the charge alongside suffragists like Ida B. Wells.
Brooks was in her early 20s and studying music in Chicago when she received a notification that drew her to West Hammond. According to the Indianapolis News, upon her father’s death, she and her mother, Flora, inherited property in the village. Alerted to $20,000 worth of special assessments against it, they made a trip to the area to investigate. Virginia was stunned by the dilapidated condition of the village and prevalence of casinos and barrooms. Thus, began her reform work.
In early 1911, West Hammond was on the precipice of becoming a city, pending a special municipal election. However, Brooks, with the help of her mother, mounted a campaign to maintain its status as a village. Should the area become a city, vice would essentially be institutionalized and corruption amplified. Preventing this would be quite the feat, as the Times wrote, “The political machine was dead against” the women and their allies.
Brooks gathered locals at Mika’s Hall to discuss the upcoming election. She and organizer August Kamradt spoke to the primarily Polish audience about how city leaders used taxpayers’ money for their own gain, leaving sewers and sidewalks crumbling. Brooks’s sentiments were extremely well-received, and she persuaded attendees to sign a petition asking the State Attorney of Cook County to investigate public officials’ use of tax money.
West Hammond’s 4,000 residents, many of whom were European immigrants, seemingly had little choice but to pay constantly-increasing rent and “special assessments,” which impoverished them further. Despite this, the Huntington Herald noted that male villagers were fairly apathetic until “this young girl. . . . Virginia Brooks has set in motion the levers that work mighty changes.” As the election approached, she spoke at barrooms late into the night, promising that if local efforts failed, she would “appeal to the president and the White House. And if that, too, is useless, she will take the law in her own hands.”
Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1911, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
Brooks’s radical strategies elicited death threats. She laughed these off, although she did appreciate the young men who “formed a bodyguard” around her. On election day, she appealed to voters until the moment they stepped into the voting booth, which was monitored by two deputies Brooks had summoned to prevent fraud.
Despite the valiant fight, Brooks’s faction lost the election, and voters opted for city government by a vote of 227-196. In a scene seemingly plucked from a movie, just as victors celebrated into the night with a bonfire and parade, detectives from the State’s Attorney’s office infiltrated West Hammond. Brooks’s petition had born fruit. The Chicago Tribune reported that the detectives served subpoenas to “keepers of alleged disorderly houses and places where slot machines were found.” Opponents retaliated with more death threats and libel suits. Brooks was far from alone in her convictions, however. One “Taxpayer of West Hammond” wrote to the Hammond Times that “If ‘Virginia is crazy,’ the rest of us should ‘get the bug’ and help to clean things up.”
Following the election, Brooks leveraged another tool in her fight—the media. She established a semi-weekly publication called the Searchlight. Brooks told the Chicago Tribune that she would only publish articles that were backed by evidence, with the goal to “fight the grafters primarily and promote the interests of the working people who make up the bulk of the population.”
The Inter Ocean (Chicago), April 6, 1911, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
In addition to leveraging the press, Brooks engaged in physical confrontation as a means to effect change. In March of 1911, she and her “broom brigade,” composed of about twenty women, halted a paving project at One Hundred and Fifty-Fifth Street. With municipal contract in hand, Brooks and her squadron—equipped with mops, rolling pins, and brooms—sat on piles of bricks, refusing to move for hours. They sat in protest of the city’s decision to hire laborers to install “graft bought” bricks of poor quality five inches too low. Not only that, but the city charged tax payers an exorbitant amount to do so. When workers’ attempts to appeal to the women failed, they summoned the police. Local newspapers reported, perhaps somewhat sensationally, that a fight for the ages ensued. The Indianapolis News relayed:
When the women refused to leave, the police tried to drive them off with clubs, and a hand-to-hand conflict followed. Several of the women were put out of the battle with slight injuries and their male supporters, who came to their aid when the police attacked, were badly beaten.
After combat and bloodshed, the police left and returned with arrest warrants. Virginia Brooks gladly went to jail, hoping her arrest would engender more support for the cause. She was correct, as the Hammond Times reported that the following day, “broad shouldered, firm mouthed women” returned to the work site and resumed the stand-in.
The intensity of the fight carried over to Brooks’s April 3rd trial, for which she was charged with disturbing the peace. According to the Times, the courtroom floors and walls were lined with observers, many of whom were women who “shoved and crowded among the men” to take in every word. Officer John Okraj testified that Brooks had struck him in the face after being placed under arrest. The Times reported that Brooks, “an excellent witness in her own behalf,” testified that Officer Okraj likely didn’t know his own strength, and that he hurt her when he forcefully grabbed her neck. Her response was “but a primitive action, an instinctive motion, which anyone would make when attacked from the rear.”
Ultimately, the jury found Brooks guilty, but she was fined only $1. Just as jurors convicted her, she received word that State Attorney Wayman pledged to investigate graft charges in the village. This investigation likely spurred the indictment of City Clerk Martin Finneran in May. He was charged with collecting and depositing taxes from the Michigan Central Railroad into his personal account one week after he was dismissed from the office of West Hammond village collector. And, just a few months after Brooks’s trial, her battle against exploitation and “exorbitant special assessments” paid off. The Hammond Times reported that a county circuit court judge ruled in her favor regarding the work at One Hundred and Fifty-Fifth, resulting in a 30% reduction “of the original cost and an extra assessment of about $5,000.”
Pamphlet, “Miss Virginia Brooks: 20th Century Joan of Arc,” 1913, Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department, Iowa City, accessed Wikipedia.
Overjoyed taxpayers organized a band concert in celebration. Her widely-publicized achievements attracted love interests and generated about fifty marriage proposals, according to the Chicago Tribune. She responded “‘I wouldn’t marry the best man alive'” because “politics comes before love with me.”
Instead, Brooks focused on ousting the old village leadership to ensure that the newly-dubbed city would be managed by reputable councilors. According to the Evansville Press, in August 1911, she threatened the village council president that if he refused to convene a municipal election she would “expose the whole outfit.” The paper reported tellingly that immediately after her threat, the “president announced that he was sick and would have to go to the hospital for a couple of months.”
While awaiting word of a municipal election, Brooks led the charge in another election. She convened a mass meeting at Mika’s to persuade residents to vote against a new proposal by the village board. It would tax residents to build a private power line, which would solely benefit the Interstate Electrical Company. Despite being issued “mutilated ballots,” indignant voters managed to defeat the board’s proposal. The Indianapolis News noted that Brooks hired carriages to take voters to the polls, resulting in the “biggest vote ever known in the city’s history.” In fact, local papers suggested that such a resounding defeat could result in her nomination for mayor of West Hammond.
The Times (Munster, IN), April 2, 1912, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
Realizing that this could never be achieved without the female vote, Brooks embraced the women’s suffrage movement, which she had previously dismissed as unnecessary. Mass meetings and protests could only go so far without women’s voting rights. In the spring of 1912, she infiltrated Chicago restaurants to lay out the urgent need for enfranchisement. The Munster Times noted “instead of waiting until her audience came to her she took her speech to the places where sufficient numbers of persons were gathered to make audiences for her.” Her speeches were met with resounding applause from diners.
Immediately after this brief crusade, organizers asked Brooks to speak at the Indiana’s Women’s Franchise League annual convention in Indianapolis. Of the prominent Hoosier suffrage leaders, like Dr. Amelia Keller and Grace Julian Clarke, the Indianapolis News reported that Brooks “easily attracted the most attention at the convention.” She described for her fellow suffragists how she had mobilized for reform, gripping them with the story of hand-to-hand combat in West Hammond. However, she had recently embraced a strategy more familiar to audience members—many of whom were upper-middleclass women— lobbying state senators. Brooks told convention-goers, “The women need the ballot, and the country needs women voters . . . We don’t want to mix in the dirty politics of the men, but we do want to work with them to make things better.”
Dr. Hannah Graham, president of Indiana’s other major suffrage organization, the Equal Suffrage Association (ESA), invited Brooks to speak at an ESA meeting, along with union leader Frank Hayes, Indianapolis Mayor Lew Shank, and prominent Black attorney F.B. Ransom. Perhaps this meeting of the minds and exchange of ideas inspired Brooks to pursue law. According to the Indianapolis Star, Brooks told Dr. Graham, “I have property, and in my fights against corrupt politicians a knowledge of law certainly would help me.” Dr. Graham revealed that she was currently studying at the Indiana Law School and suggested the two drive there that very day. Brooks took her up on the suggestion and met with faculty, telling them she wanted to study law to aid the “poor Polish people in West Hammond.” She became the third woman to enroll in the junior class.
Brooks’s experience mobilizing at the local and state level served her well at the famed National American Woman Suffrage Association parade in Washington, D.C. She joined thousands of women from across the country on March 3, 1913, the day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration. Hoping to draw widespread attention to the need for enfranchisement, the women paraded throughout the nation’s capital, some in costume and others hoisting banners.
Virginia Brooks and Ida B. Wells at the 1913 National American Woman Suffrage Association parade, courtesy of Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1913, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
Brooks and Belle Squires led the Illinois delegation. According to Ron Grossman’s 2020 Chicago Tribune article, organizers ordered Brooks’s friend and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells to march at the back of the parade with the other Black suffragists. Rather than concede, Wells opted to sit out altogether, despite Brooks’s insistence that they march together. At the last minute, Wells ran towards Squires and Brooks, and the three women flanked the head of the delegation. Despite violence perpetrated against some of the marchers, the 1913 parade catalyzed public support for women’s suffrage and reinvigorated the movement.
The parade may have been the zenith of Brooks’s activism. Just one month later—despite her earlier pronouncements about marriage—she wed Chicago Tribune photographer Charles Washburne and the couple relocated to Chicago. Brooks said of West Hammond, “‘The fight is over there, and I guess we have won. We are going to settle down.'” She went on to write for the Tribune, volunteer at the Hull House, and lecture at chautauquas. She drew upon her experiences to author books about social issues like My Battle With Vice and The Little Lost Sister. Around 1918, Virginia relocated to Portland, Oregon with her mother and son, Brooks. After months of illness, she passed away at the age of 42, just a few months before the stock market crash. She likely would have agitated relentlessly for relief like Hoosier reformer Theodore Luesse did during the Great Depression. Despite a life cut short, Brooks demanded accountability and fearlessly effected change in The Region.
Sources:
“The Right Sort of Courage,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 5, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Villagers Swarm to Gathering,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 26, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks, West Hammond’s Joan of Arc,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 28, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Death Threats Against Girl,” Fort Wayne News, January 31, 1911, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl is Defeated in Reform Fight,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1911, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Village is to Become City in May,” The Times (Hammond, IN), February 1, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Sued by City Officials,” News-Democrat (Paducah, KY), February 4, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
Editorial by “A Taxpayer of West Hammond,” “Ought to Clean Up,” The Times (Hammond, IN), February 6, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks Starts as Editor to Rid Her Town of Election Frauds,” Bridgeport Times and Evening Farmer, February 13, 1911, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“One Girl’s Sunday Fight to Clean Up ‘The Rottenest Town in the Country,'” Chicago Sunday Tribune, March 5, 1911, 47, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl Routs Paving Gang,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1911, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Riot in Village; Girl is Jailed,” The Times (Hammond, IN), March 25, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Girl Leader of Mob Thrown in Jail After Day of Bloodshed,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), March 26, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Comedy Injected in Trial,” The Times (Hammond, IN), April 4, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks is Fined by Jury,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1911, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
United Press, “Village Joan of Arc After the Grafters,” Evansville Press, August 16, 1911, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Brooks Still Active,” South Bend Tribune, May 25, 1911, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks Wins Another Battle,” The Times (Hammond, IN), July 11, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks vs. Woman Suffrage,” The Times (Hammond, IN), August 14, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“New War Stirs West Hammond,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1911, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Mass Meeting Across the Line,” The Times (Hammond, IN), November 1, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Bond Issue in Fought,” The Times (Hammond, IN), November 7, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Virginia Books Wins Fight Against Bonds,” Indianapolis News, November 8, 1911, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks of Hammond,” Indianapolis Star, November 15, 1911, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Settlement was Nicely Remembered,” The Times (Munster, IN), January 5, 1912, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Virginia Brooks Campaigning,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, January 10, 1912, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Suffrage ‘Joan of Arc’ Speaking to Restaurant Guests,” The Times (Munster, IN), April 2, 1912, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“New Constitution Desired by Women,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
Betty Blythe, “Miss Brooks, Suffrage ‘Joan of Arc,’ Tells How She Rules West Hammond,” Indianapolis Star, April 4, 1912, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Graft is Scored by Miss Brooks in Ballot Plea,” Indianapolis Star, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Women Ignored by ‘Constitution,'” South Bend Tribune, April 4, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Man Thrown into Ditch,” Indianapolis News, April 23, 1912, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Warm Supporter Cause of Suffrage,” Indianapolis News, April 24, 1912, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Miss Brooks Plans to Study Law Here,” Indianapolis Star, April 25, 1912, 10, accessed Newspapers.com.
Chicago Daily Tribune, March 5, 1913, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
Virginia Brooks, My Battles with Vice (Macaulay Co., 1915), accessed Archive.org.
“Mrs. Virginia Washburne, Writer, Lecturer, is Dead,” Oregon Daily Journal, July 15, 1929, 7, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Prominent Woman Dies,” The Oregonian, July 18, 1929, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
Ron Grossman, “Flashback: Fighting for the Vote and Against Vice: Virginia Brooks was the Chicago Area’s Own ‘Joan of Arc,'” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 2020, accessed chicagotribune.com.
Dr. Robert L. Anthony teaching Lincoln students, accessed https://lsfcccrawfordsvilleindiana.com/.
In addition to the struggles of daily life, Black Americans had to wage an often losing battle to secure suitable education for their children. They had historically been deprived of that which affords an understanding of one’s rights and enables one to secure a livelihood. Crawfordsville’s Lincoln School embodied this decades-long fight. However, like other segregated schools, students went on to achieve success and make a name for themselves, despite inequities.
After the Civil War, education for Black pupils was conducted in piecemeal fashion. In an article for the Indiana Magazine of History, Professor Abraham C. Shortridge noted that around 1862 the Indiana State Teachers’ Association began to lobby for “colored schools,” but lawmakers failed to take action. Shortridge lamented that it looked as if in the ensuing years:
the black children were doomed to run the streets for another term of two years while their fathers and mothers continued to pay their taxes, by the aid of which the children of the more favored race were kept in school ten months of the year.
However, in 1869, after much deliberation at a special session called by Governor Conrad Baker, the Indiana General Assembly approved an act that admitted Black children to public schools.
The new law stated that township trustees “shall organize the colored children into separate schools, having all the rights and privileges of other schools of the township.” Should there not be a large enough population to warrant a separate school, the law stated that “Trustees shall prove such other means of education.” According to historian David P. Sye, “other means” often included sending children to “private school or in some cases giving them books, giving money back to the parents, or just nothing. The courts did not help in this situation.” This was the case in Crawfordsville, as Black children were educated privately, at institutions like Bethel AME for years after the act was ratified.
The Crawfordsville Weekly Journal reported in the 1870s that Black children studied under Harmon Hiatt in the church’s basement. Little is known about what pupils studied, but it is clear that school conditions were poor, as the Weekly Journal reported in 1873 “complaints are made that the old church in which the school is held is not properly heated during the cold weather.” The school board trustees did nothing to remedy this. In fact, eight years later, 126 students attended the house, which was designed to accommodate only 48.
In the summer of 1881, the city council voted to build a school for Black children at Spring and Walnut Streets. Students attended first through seventh grade (although at times eighth grade was offered) at Lincoln School before attending integrated Crawfordsville High School. Lincoln pupils studied traditional grade school subjects like arithmetic, reading, and writing. However, much like at the AME church, school conditions were poor and the teacher-to-student ratio abysmal.
Black residents refused to accept this institutionalized inequality. According to the Crawfordsville Review, in April 1892 parents submitted a complaint to the school board, stating that they would withdraw their children should there be no remedy to Lincoln’s “proximity to two or three houses of ill fame in the neighborhood, and the inmates of which have no regard for the ordinary decencies of life and set dangerous examples for children.” Trustees responded that they could secure “no better” accommodations.
The following year, the CrawfordsvilleDaily Journal reported that conditions had not improved, alleging that the principal was abusive and that it was difficult to find qualified teachers, resulting in many students being unable or unwilling to come to school. The paper noted that, “in view of the fact that all the neighboring cities have race co-education,” the school board was considering transferring Black children to the white elementary schools. Just weeks later, the Journal reported the board decided to maintain segregation and remedy the issue by appointing a “brawny white teacher.”
The Black community challenged this “solution” in 1894, gathering at Second Baptist to discuss Lincoln School, which was “quite inferior in many respects to the other schools of the city,” according to the CrawfordsvilleDaily Journal. They felt that it was a “farce” to tax the community, only to provide such abysmal education. Meeting attendees formed a committee to “to wait on the Board of Trustees, laying before the body our grievance.”
The trustees remained unmoved by their formal petition, spurring another strategizing meeting. Attendees advocated for either appointing Black educators and administrators—as had been the case in previous years—or sending children to white schools. Neighboring towns, like Lebanon, Greencastle, and Frankfort, had successfully integrated schools. However, meeting attendees preferred the appointment of Black teachers, stating:
It needs no argument to prove that for colored children, colored teachers are manifestly superior to white teachers since the latter have no sympathy in common with colored children, do not associate at home, at church or on the street with colored patrons and are diametrically opposed in conduct and natural feeling. (Crawfordsville Weekly Journal)
They won a small victory when the board appointed Black educator Mr. Teister to “take charge” of Lincoln.
Despite parents’ persistence, the school experienced a shortage of teachers and its facilities remained inadequate until its closure. In oral histories with students who attended in the 1930s and 1940s, many recalled there was only one educator to teach seven grades. Not only were there not enough teachers, but far from enough space. Madonna Robinson recalled:
It was cramped up, because they would have like two rows of maybe the third and fourth grade here, and then in the other room was the fifth and sixth grade, you know, there were two classes in one room, very cramped, no windows in the front, just had windows in the back of the school, no windows in the front. It wasn’t much fun to me.
Some students felt unprepared for high school due to the disparities at Lincoln, and struggled to catch up to other students.
Portrait of Wilbur De Paris and Sidney De Paris, Onyx, New York, N.Y., ca. July 1947, courtesy of Library of Congress.
Alumnus Elsie Bard told interviewer Eugene Anderson “The teachers had quite a few children to really be teaching, and couldn’t devote their full time to them right, but that’s what they had to work with, so they did the best they could.” The lack of supervision meant that children often played the piano, rehearsed plays, and acted. Madonna Robinson recalled “It just wasn’t school to me. . . . It just seemed like a place to go practice plays.” Similarly, Leona Mitchell remembered that teachers liked to have “little plays and dramas and things and we learned to sing,” adding “we were always doing oh some kind of little skit.” Perhaps this creative, formative environment helped foster the musical prowess of jazz greats Bill Coleman and Wilbur de Paris, who achieved national success and performed with legendary recording artists.
De Paris learned to play trombone as a child and performed in the Crawfordsville High School band. He later relocated to New York City. According to the Syncopated Times, by the 1930s de Paris recorded with jazz greats Benny Carter and Louis Armstrong. In the 1950s, his New New Orleans Jazz Band had become “one of the most exciting groups of the era.” His brother, Sidney—likely also a Lincoln School alum—played in his band and was a successful musician in his own right, recording with artists like Jelly Roll Morton. Arguably, Wilbur achieved greater success than his brother and a 1958 Indianapolis Star article described him as “possibly the world’s greatest jazz trombonist,” having “performed with almost every legendary jazz figure of the century, and played in almost every spot in America where jazz was allowed to seep in or burst out.”
Bill Coleman at Cafe Society, mid-1940s, William P. Gottlieb Collection, Library of Congress, accessed Wikipedia.
Bill Coleman also achieved acclaim as a jazz trumpeter. He and the de Paris brothers met as students at Lincoln. Coleman gained success playing in Europe and, according to his Washington Post obituary, spent most of his life in France as “’one of the numerous black musicians here as refugees from segregation.’” He played with famous performers like Fats Waller and Billie Holiday.
Alum Blanche Patterson achieved local success in music and was an officer of the Indiana State Association of Negro Musicians. Her obituary stated she “developed a state-wide reputation as a musician” and “organized a program which brought numerous Negro instrumental and vocal music groups to Crawfordsville.” Patterson was likely better known for her business prowess, owning and operating the Petite Beauty Shop in Crawfordsville’s Ben-Hur building, described by the Indianapolis Recorder as “one of the finest beauty parlors in the State.” Additionally, she was a member of the National Beauty Culture League of Indiana and later became a chiropodist.
In addition to the arts, Lincoln students excelled at athletics under the guidance of principal George W. Thompson, a former Indiana University athlete. According to the Indianapolis Recorder, in 1913 the school’s baseball team won all of its games and its track team earned the highest number of points among all Crawfordsville grade schools. The paper reported that white schools had “refused to meet them on the field, but patience and diplomacy by Prof. Thompson won over prejudice and when our boys won in the recent meet . . . Wilson school boys (white) placed a card in the local papers praising them for their fairness and superiority.”
Tuttle vs. Lincoln soccer game, 1907, accessed https://lsfcccrawfordsvilleindiana.com/.
According to local historian Charles L. Arvin, Black residents began moving to the eastern part of Crawfordsville. In 1922, Lincoln School relocated to South Pine and East Wabash Avenue to accommodate them. Alumnus Patty Field stated that many moved to that side of town for job opportunities at factories.
The school closed in 1947 and the building was later converted into a recreation center for the Black community, and it served as a meeting space for the Baptist Church and Mason’s Lodge. By the 1970s, Parks and Recreation Department monthly reports showed that nearly 1,000 people used the center’s playground in just one month, and that thousands attended its summer program. In addition to two basketball courts and workout equipment, the center had pool tables, swings, slides, and a softball diamond. Field recalled “even when we got older and had kids, Lincoln [recreation center] was our safe place.” However, the Parks Department decided to close it down in 1981. Lincoln alum Madonna Robinson described the decision’s impact on the Black community, saying “it was really a sad thing that they took it away from them, because they don’t have any where to go now.”
However, Lincoln’s legacy as a site of refuge, community, and self-advocacy will not be forgotten. In 2025, with the help of local partners like Shannon Hudson, IHB will install a state historical marker commemorating the school. Check back for dedication details.
For sources used for this post, see our historical marker notes.
Ada Harris, courtesy of The Drift 1925 (Indianapolis, Indiana: 1925), Butler Yearbooks, p. 62, accessed Digital Commons @ Butler University.
“My greatest ambition is for my race. I want to see my people succeed. I want to see them have an equal chance.”
– Ada B. Harris[1]
In the late 1800s and early 1900s the neighborhood of Norwood, which lay Southeast of downtown Indianapolis, was one of the most vibrant Black communities in the area. Originating during the Civil War, the 28th U.S. Colored Troops (USCT) drilled a Camp Freemont near present-day Norwood, and, at the end of the war, many returned to the area and set down roots. The neighborhood was bolstered by the Great Migration during which Black Americans moved North to seek better economic opportunities and flee from Southern racial violence and discrimination.[2]
Living in a highly segregated society, the Norwood community struggled with poor infrastructure, poverty, and subpar sanitation during its early years. However, by 1909, something had changed within Norwood. The Indianapolis Star wrote, “A few years ago. . . Norwood was a moral blot on the map of Marion County. . .Today Norwood is a placid collection of homes. The stranger is accorded courtesy, and lawbreaking is almost unknown.” The article continued by discussing the infrastructure improvements noting, “Where a few years ago the settlement had no place for amusement, the town now boasts of a Boys’ Clubhouse, a dancing pavilion, run for the club’s benefit, and a little park with seats, grass and flowers.” When the newspaper talked with residents about the improvements and its origins, they found that, “with the same sureness that all roads lead to Rome, each circumstance goes directly to one source— Miss Ada Harris.”[3]
Reformer and educator Ada B. Harris embraced the Progressive Era philosophy of improvement and applied it to her community, championing a myriad of causes. An accomplished woman, Harris’s list of achievements is long enough to merit two blog posts examining her work as both an educator and progressive reformer. This post explores Harris’s decades-long career as a teacher and principal at Norwood’s Harriett Beecher Stowe School and her efforts to establish communal spaces and amenities for the Norwood neighborhood. In doing so, she boldly challenged local racial prejudice and elevated the welfare of Black Hoosiers in the segregated city.
Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry at Fort Lincoln, District of Columbia, ca. 1863, photographed by William Morris Smith, Prints and Photographs Division, accessed Library of Congress.
Harris was born on August 15, 1866, in Campbell, Kentucky to Robert Harris and Hannah Tolliver. She moved with her mother to Indianapolis as a child and graduated from Indianapolis High School (later renamed Shortridge High School) in 1888.[4] Upon graduation, Harris began teaching at School No. 5 in Norwood. At the time, School No. 5 was one-room schoolhouse that operated independently from the Indianapolis Public School System (IPS). It was one of the few schools that hired Black teachers and taught Black children in the segregated city. Harris stepped into a leadership position early on and was officially appointed principal by 1903, the same year the community decided to rename the school Harriett Beecher Stowe School No. 5 after the abolitionist.[5]
“Norwood Colored School Named for Harriett Beecher Stowe,” Indianapolis News, September 7, 1902, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
Under Harris’s leadership, the school grew exponentially. In 1896, Harriett Beecher Stowed enrolled approximately 53 students. By 1903, enrollment was listed at over 150 pupils. Education was a core priority for the Norwood community. Ada B. Harris and other Indianapolis residents were inspired by author and activist W. E. B. Du Bois’s ideology. He argued that education, economic independence, and political activism were key to achieving full civil rights for the Black community. This philosophy turned educational settings such as School No. 5 into one of the central battlegrounds for the blooming Civil Rights Movement and struggle for equality in Reconstruction America.
The Indianapolis News described Harris as “a thorough teacher, loved and honored by every child of her school.”[6] Harris endeavored to provide students with a quality education and instill a sense of social responsibility in them. She hosted annual Thanksgiving dinners for the students, which “consisted of turkey, cranberry sauce, scalloped oysters, vegetables, pumpkin pie, ice cream, and cake.”[7] She also introduced sewing classes, organized and directed the school plays, and founded a parent’s club to involve them in their child’s education.[8] Steeped in the ideals of civic virtue, Harris attempted to instill those same morals into her students. In March of 1913, she and twenty of her students visited the county treasurer and filed their parents’ taxes. She emphasized that it was every citizen’s obligation to pay taxes and impressed a feeling of responsibility in the children.[9] Surely, the parents appreciated the field trip as well that year.
In 1912, Norwood was annexed by Indianapolis and the school incorporated into the Indianapolis Public School system.[10] School No. 5 became IPS No. 64, and Harris remained principal until her resignation in 1924.[11] In addition to teaching at No. 64, Harris also served as a vocational instructor for Emmerich Manual Training High School in 1921.[12] After resigning from School No. 64, Harris attended Butler College at the age of 60 and earned a college degree to “prepare herself for the more recent demands of the city schools.” Harris then accepted a teaching position at Rockville High School, but unfortunately suffered from a series of strokes and spent limited time at Rockville before passing away on September 9, 1927.[13] Throughout her career, Norwood residents praised her dedication to its students, and she consistently went above and beyond to provide them with not only a quality education but prepare them for their adult lives.
Perhaps one of Harris’s most impactful endeavors was establishing and leading the Boys’ Lookout Club. Established in 1904, the club’s objective was “the upbuilding of character and the general improvement of their [the boys] social condition.” Harris achieved this through teaching different skills related to social responsibility and civic virtue such as “good deportment in the home and public places, [and] kindness to animals and kindred subjects.”[14] The Boys’ Club met twice a month after school and early on they began fundraising to purchase land for a public gymnasium, reading room, and park for the community. A brilliant grassroots organizer, Harris led club efforts to solicit subscriptions for the land from Norwood residents. Her efforts proved wildly successful. In less than a year, the club bought land on Prospect Street for $2,000 to serve as the official Boys’ Club grounds. The property had a four-room farmhouse, a small brick building, and a barn, which was transformed into the Boys’ Club Pavilion. The club worked to transform the space, and it soon opened as a public park and picnic grounds for Norwood.[15] In an area with poor infrastructure and investment, the Boys’ Club grounds served as a key communal space for residents to relax, hold events, and socialize with one another.
“Boys’ Club of Norwood Plans Better Club House,” Indianapolis Star, June 16, 1909, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
Harris and the Boy’s Club soon set their sights on building a gymnasium. In August of 1907, the club organized a four-night carnival to fundraise for the gymnasium. In 1909, while reporting on the Boys’ Club, the Indianapolis Star wrote that “Miss Harris has so carefully handled the business affairs of the club in the past that she has already received promises of the support of many of the leading colored men and women of Indianapolis,” for the gymnasium. The gymnasium was successfully opened by 1910.[16] Harris’s ability to fundraise and organize for both the gym and club grounds demonstrates her strong leadership skills and influence. A grassroots endeavor, these efforts also show Norwood residents’ strong resolve to transform the area, which had received limited investment and infrastructure amid segregation, into a vibrant community. This community-driven mindset is still present in Norwood today through groups such as the Norwood Neighborhood Association which has advocated against the gentrification of the area.
In 1911, Harris organized a children’s library association to fundraise for a community library on the Boys’ Club grounds.[17] According to the Indianapolis News, this was in response to the Norwood school library burning down two years prior. Harris personally started the book collection for the library and began soliciting book donations. The library was opened officially in September of 1912 and the Indianapolis Star heralded it as the “first colored library in Indianapolis.”[18] The library opened with a collection of 1,000 books and opened professional opportunities for Black residents including Willa Resnover, who served as Norwood’s first librarian.[19] Ultimately, Harris’s leadership and exceptional fundraising abilities mobilized the Norwood neighborhood to invest in their community and, in response to segregation, create their own communal spaces to socialize, relax, and connect with one another.
Even after Harris’s death in 1927, the fruits of her grassroots organization and educational leadership have continued into modern day. Harriett Beecher Stowe School No. 64 operated and served the Norwood neighborhood for over a century, closing in 2009. Pride Park stands on the former property of the Boys’ Lookout Club and, in 2024, will be receiving new playground equipment. Modern-day Norwood residents take pride in the neighborhood’s roots and seek to honor its legacy by fostering the community’s tight-knit bonds and spearheading efforts to preserve its rich history. Many residents, such as Madonna Shaffner, can still trace their roots back to the 28th Indiana Infantry. Others have advocated for the establishment of “an intergenerational heritage center that would both honor Norwood’s past and provide a high-quality venue for community strengthening services and programming.” In many ways, the current residents echo and continue Harris’ legacy, seeking to continually improve Norwood’s housing, infrastructure, public services, and public education. Much of the community’s vibrancy and qualities can be attributed to a single dedicated teacher.
Part II examines Harris’s work as a progressive reformer beyond the classroom. It explores her work establishing a fresh-air tuberculosis camp, championing Black women’s suffrage, and patriotic homefront work during World War I. Stay tuned!
Notes:
[1] Indianapolis Star, August 1, 1909, 33, accessed Newspapers.com.
[3] “Former ‘Bad’ Town Now an Ideal Spot,” Indianapolis Star, August 1, 1909, 25, accessed Newspapers.com.
[4] “High School Commencement,” Indianapolis Journal, February 4, 1888, 3, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[5] “Dedicate a Flagpole,” Indianapolis Star, September 8, 1903, 10, accessed Newspapers.com; “Harriet Beecher Stowe: Flagpole Raised with Ceremony at Norwood School,” Indianapolis Recorder, September 12, 1903, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; A Historical Sketch of School No. 64, 1953, Indianapolis Public Schools Digital Collection, accessed Indianapolis Public Library; History of Harriet Beecher Stowe School 64, 1969, Indianapolis Public Schools Digital Collection, accessed Indianapolis Public Library.
[6] “The Norwood School Trouble,” Indianapolis News, January 16, 1899, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
[7] “Dinner Served at School,” Indianapolis News, November 26, 1903, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
[8] Indianapolis News, April 3, 1909, 5, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pupils appear in Play,” Indianapolis Star, June 9,1902, 14, accessed Newspapers.com; “Present One-Act Playlet,” Indianapolis Star, June 11, 1910, 14, accessed Newspapers.com; “A Successful Entertainment,” The Freeman, April 2, 1898, 8, accessed Google Newspapers.
[9] “To Pay Parent’s Taxes,” Indianapolis News, March 8, 1913, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
[10] “Norwood School Now Public School No. 64,” Indianapolis Recorder, October 12, 1912, 2, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
[11] “Resignations,” Indianapolis Star, June 18, 1924, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
[12] “Instructors Appointed,” Indianapolis Star, September 28, 1921, 15, accessed Newspapers.com.
[13] “Former Teacher is Dead,” Indianapolis News, September 17, 1927, 39, accessed Newspapers.com.
[14] “Boys’ Club at Norwood,” Indianapolis News, May 21, 1904, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
[15] “Building for Norwood Youth,” Indianapolis News, June 23, 1906, 8, accessed Newspapers.com; “Gymnasium for the Norwood Youth,” The Freeman, July 7, 1906, 4, accessed Google Newspapers; “Negroes may Have Club,” Indianapolis Star, July 22, 1906, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.
[16] Advertisement for a Boys’ Club Carnival, Indianapolis News, August 10, 1907, 11, accessed Newspapers.com; “Boys’ Club of Norwood Plans Better Club House,” Indianapolis Star, June 16, 1909, 9, accessed Newspapers.com.
[17] “For Library at Norwood,” Indianapolis News, April 24, 1911, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
[18] “City’s First Colored Library is Dedicated,” Indianapolis Star, September 23, 1912,12, accessed Newspapers.com.
[19] “Norwood Library,” Indianapolis Recorder, May 6, 1911, 1, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles; “Norwood has a Library,” The Freeman, September 21, 1912, 8, accessed Google Newspapers.
Indiana, a state claimed as “free” from its statehood in 1816, was nevertheless the 7th highest non-southern state with racial terror lynchings, with 18 separate incidents. When searching through Indiana newspapers, many stories emerge of outlaw vigilantes who terrorized and brutalized African-Americans, sometimes for nothing more than alleged crimes. Since many were lynched before they received equal justice under the law, many of their lives ended tragically through injustice under the lariat.
While the vast majority of lynching occurred in the south, a sizable portion occurred in the Midwest. Indiana, a state claimed as “free” from its statehood in 1816, was nevertheless the 7th highest non-southern state with racial terror lynchings, with 18 separate incidents. One way historians have uncovered these horrific crimes is with newspapers. When searching through Indiana papers, many stories emerge of outlaw vigilantes who terrorized and brutalized African-Americans, sometimes for nothing more than alleged crimes. Since many were lynched before they received equal justice under the law, many of their lives ended tragically through injustice under the lariat.
One of the earliest lynchings in Indiana newspapers was chronicled by the Marshall County Republican on November 23, 1871. Three African-Americans, whose names were only given as “Johnson, Davis, and Taylor,” were accused of the murder of the Park family in Henryville, Clark County. Matthew Clegg, “a shystering lawyer” from Henryville, had a dispute with the Parks and when he likely had them murdered, he pushed the blame to the three local African-American men. When the grand jury couldn’t find enough evidence to indict them, the local vigilance committee took matters into their own hands. They broke through the jail, grabbed the three men, placed nooses around their neck, and dragged them through the street. They were then strung up next to each other on a tree. The Republican described their bodies in painful detail; Taylor’s description was the most gruesome: “His form was nude, save the slight remnants of a white shirt that was stretched across his lower limbs, while the hangman’s knot under his chin threw his head back in, a gasping movement, and his white teeth and distended lips grinned with a fiend-like scowl . . . .” It is unclear from the newspaper account if anyone was tried for the lynching.
In 1886, the Indiana State Sentinel reported the lynching of Holly Epps, who had been accused of the murder of a local farmer in Greene County. Around 12:50 on the morning of January 18, a “crowd of masked men” brandishing “sledgehammers and various other implements” descended on the Knox County jail. After failing to cajole the sheriff to open the door, the horde broke in, smashed through the jail cell, and dragged Epps out into the cold of night. Using the closest tree they could find, the mob strung Epps up and “for fully fifteen minutes he struggled for life, when death came to his relief.” The mob left his hanging remains on the courthouse grounds to be found by the county prosecutor. The sentiment of the citizens of the county, as recorded by the Sentinel, was one of satisfaction. “Citizens of all classes justify the lynching, and the moral sentiment is that the Greene County vigilants did a justifiable act in summarily removing the fiend from the face of the earth,” the Sentinel commented. The lynch mob were never prosecuted for their actions.
The 1889 lynching of Peter Willis in northern Kosciusko County received weird and contradictory coverage in the Indianapolis Journal. In its July 22, 1889 issue, the Journal ran a nondescript blurb about Willis’s lynching at the hands of a mob after he was charged with assaulting a little girl. The South Bend Tribune and the Indiana State Sentinel also ran stories with the same details. Then six days later, completely disregarding its previous coverage, the Journal published an editorial claiming “the assault and lynching episode referred to by the Sentinel [as well as the Tribune] never occurred, and is wholly an imaginary tragedy . . . .” The editorial further noted that “the only truth contained in the item is the superfluous information concerning the geographical location of Kosciusko county, which it says ‘is not in Mississippi or South Carolina,’ . . . and the further assertion that ‘it is the banner Republican county of Indiana.’” There’s nothing named Kosciusko in South Carolina and only a town named that in Mississippi; it was the Sentinel’s and Tribune’s way of saying it was in Indiana and highlighting that this can happen in the north. If the Journal thought they could drive a wedge of doubt through their phrasing, they were wrong. Furthermore, the fact that a county has Republican leanings says nothing about whether a lynching can occur there. This editorial was likely a political device to stave off criticism against a northern, Republican-leaning Indiana county. Sadly, it was misleading people about the unlawful execution of a person who had not yet been proven guilty in a court of law.
The beginning of the new century brought with it the same kinds of lawlessness that led to lynching, despite the Indiana General Assembly passing anti-lynching laws in 1899 and 1901. George Moore, an African American accused of assaulting two women and fleeing law enforcement, was lynched on the evening of November 20, 1902. He was “hanged to a telephone pole” in Sullivan County after a mob of roughly 40 men fought against the sheriff’s department. Moore had been a fugitive, attempting an escape to Illinois when he was captured by authorities in Lawrenceville, Illinois. The mob “beat him over the head with their weapons” before they hanged him. Governor Winfield T. Durbin was troubled by the situation and tried to stop it, but the requisite military and law enforcement officers couldn’t get there in time. It was another instance of mob violence instead of real justice, and the Indianapolis Journal said as much two days later in an editorial. “It is no excuse for mob law to say that the legal penalty in such cases is inadequate,” the Journal declared, “That is not for any mob or any community to say. If the penalty is not severe enough let the law be changed in a regular way, but while the law stands it should be observed.”
It is a common notion that lynching, much like racism, was a southern phenomenon in the United States. These select stories from Indiana newspapers illustrate just how wrong that notion is. The prejudice that people felt motivated them to take the law into their own hands, with disastrous consequences. Justice should be applied by democratic institutions, not by mob rule. That’s how we ensure the principle of equality under the law. But animus against African Americans was stronger than the virtue of justice. As a group of preachers declared in a 1910 article for the Indianapolis Recorder:
. . . so long as wild men will be permitted to roam at will with ropes, shot and torch, so long will a cloud of national shame hang over the government. It is known that almost all of the lynched are members of the colored race, and in many instances the color of their skin is their only crime. It is also known that in the section of the country where almost all this barbarous and un-Christian practice is loved and cherished the colored people have no voice at the courts of mercy.
In knowing these stories, we can begin the process of healing. It will neither be swift, nor easy, but it is vital for our democracy. We owe it to the names engraved on each corten steel beam in Montgomery, Alabama, of at least 18 are from the Hoosier state.
Thanks for watching. Please click “like” in you enjoyed this video and make sure to subscribe to keep updated on all new videos. To learn more about Flossie Bailey, check out Nicole Poletika’s article from the Indiana History Blog. Learn about other stories of lynching at Chronicling America and Hoosier State Chronicles. The links are in the description. Finally, have you visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice? Were you aware of lynchings in Indiana before? What do you think we can do today to advance peace and justice? Leave your answers in the comments below. We want to hear from YOU.
Articles from Chronicling America and Hoosier State Chronicles
William Dudley Pelley with Silver Shirt “L” emblem on shirt, courtesy of the William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion of America Collection, Indiana State Library.
William Dudley Pelley tapped into a small, but growing contingent of Americans who admired Hitler’s fascist agenda, particularly his oppression of the Jewish population. With the formation of the Silver Shirts in 1933, Pelley not only cultivated a degree of power and influence, but amassed a small fortune through his “‘fanatical and misled followers.'”[1] Using his North Carolina printing press, the “little Fuehrer” disseminated fascist tenets and groomed a Christian-based militia, with the goal of overthrowing the American government.[2] Throughout his life, Pelley spun together political ideologies and spiritual dogmas to suit his needs.
After evading serious punishment following a House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities hearing, he transferred his operation to Noblesville, Indiana in 1940. There, he established the Fellowship Press with the assistance of former state policeman and Klan leader Carl Losey. However, the men underestimated the resistance they would encounter in the conservative Indiana town, already humming with the manufacture of war munitions.
Hoosiers hotly rejected Pelley’s extremist propaganda. Their resistance, along with congressional investigations and consistent local media reporting, helped stamp out the efforts of “America’s No. 1 seditionist,” who posed a tangible threat to America’s national security during a period of global unrest.
William Dudley Pelley in American Magazine (March 1918), accessed Ancestry Library.
The son of a Methodist minister, William Dudley Pelley was born in 1890 in Massachusetts, where he developed an affinity for the written language. According to Jason Daley’s Smithsonian Magazine article, Pelley wrote prolifically in his youth and by the age of 19 had developed “ideas about how Christianity would have to morph if it were to survive in the modern world.”[3] He quickly parlayed his literary skills into a career, writing short stories for publications like the Saturday Evening Post, Washington, D.C.’s Sunday Star, and Red Book Magazine.[4] Pelley experienced some success as a script writer in Hollywood, where he likely learned the value of image. He employed his trademark goatee, bespoke suits, and plume of cigarette smoke to project an air of poise and authority. Through his persona, Pelley convinced others that he was a visionary, quite literally.
In 1929, Pelley detailed an existential experience in his American Magazine article, “Seven Minutes in Eternity—the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over.”[5] He claimed he had communed with spirits and even Jesus Christ himself. Perhaps the instability of the early Great Depression years attracted some Americans to the man who claimed to possess answers about the future. By 1931, Pelley garnered enough support that he was able to move to Asheville, North Carolina, where he opened a publishing company.[6] Initially focused on metaphysical topics, he pivoted to right-wing fringe issues via publications like The New Liberator (later Liberation).
Letterhead from letter to Mr. Sallume, December 9, 1933, William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Shirt Legion of America Collection, S1050, Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, Indiana State Library.
According to WNC Magazine, in 1933—the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany—Pelley put these ideals into practice by forming the Silver Legion of America. Better known as the Silver Shirts, Pelley envisioned the group to operate as a “‘Gentile American Militia.'”[7] The Silver Shirts emulated Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (the “Brown Shirts”) paramilitary organization, as uniformed Legion members quietly mobilized across the country in defense of racial purity. They were guided by Pelley’s alarmist publications, which espoused a mosaic of “isms,” including isolationism, anti-Communism, and, most staunchly, anti-Semitism. The New Republic described his ideology as “‘a mad hodgepodge of mystic twaddle and reactionary, chauvinistic demagogy.'”[8]
Pelley’s publications not only drew the attention of a congressional committee that investigated un-American activities, but ultimately led to his arrest for financial crimes.[9] Perhaps these charges were unsurprising, considering members had to divulge their income, banking institution, and real estate holdings on their membership questionnaire.[10] In 1935, a jury found Pelley guilty of violating North Carolina’s “Blue Sky” laws after he misrepresented the value of Galahad Press’s stock. In other words, he bilked investors for personal gain.[11] However, Pelley managed to avoid prison time after agreeing to a set of conditions, which included “good behavior for five years.” Such probation terms would prove difficult for a man of his temperament.
In fact, his legal woes and notoriety seemed only to embolden Pelley. Just months after his sentencing, Pelley announced his candidacy for president via the national Christian party, running on the platform of “Christ and the Constitution.”[12] His ill-fated run garnered less than 2,000 votes. As he had many times, Pelley didn’t dwell on the loss and instead shifted focus. He turned his attention back towards expanding the Silver Shirt Legion.
According to the Legion’s handbook, entitled One Million Silver Shirts by 1939, the group sought to make it illegal for American Jews to own property in “‘any city but one in each state.'”[13] The handbook also proposed dismantling President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs. It called for the repeal of congressional measures enacted to bolster the depressed economy, such as the Social Security Act and National Labor Relations Board. And, Pelley instructed his 25,000 followers, if doing so “‘meant force it meant force.'”[14] According to Daley’s Smithsonian piece, in 1938, the organization “began a big membership push and started showing signs that it was moving towards violence.”[15]
Indeed, National Guard officer and ENT specialist Dr. Samuel Rubley, of Logansport, Indiana, later testified that he requested the Silver Shirts dispatch him to Detroit.[16] There, he reportedly mobilized a Legion “cavalry,” tapping into the growing Klan presence in the region. Dr. Rubley taught classes like horsemanship to Klansman, as well as reserve officers and their wives. These efforts were undertaken, he said cryptically, in an effort to prepare to “‘defend their homes.'” He anticipated that “the snows would be dyed red in Detroit,” as the nation would again be at Civil War over clashing political ideologies. Dr. Rubley admitted later that he had been “listening too much to ‘alarmists'” and “‘became inflamed for a while until it became a little too fantastic.'”[17]
Dr. Rubley’s statements certainly lent credence to the sentiments of an unnamed columnist in the Indiana Bremen Enquirer, who wrote:
that Mr. Pelley should be able to muster a group of followers calling themselves Americans, who had so little understanding of the fundamental basis of Americanism, is a sorry commentary upon the intelligence and understanding of a considerable sector of the American people.[18]
The individuals described in the editorial sought to foment unrest in the name of patriotism and the doctrine of isolationism. While the United States had officially maintained neutrality in World War II, by 1940 it supplied money and munitions to aid Allied resistance efforts. As France struggled desperately to hold off Nazi forces, President Roosevelt delivered an address warning of the dangers of an American “fifth column.”[19] This column was comprised of subversive elements, who tried “to create confusion of counsel, public indecision, political paralysis and, eventually, a state of panic. . . . The unity of the State can be sapped so that its strength is destroyed.” The “fifth column,” Roosevelt asserted, operated like a “Trojan Horse,” which would ultimately betray “a nation unprepared for treachery.” Those inside the bowels of the horse not only opposed war against Hitler, but attempted to undermine efforts to halt his advancements.
The House Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (HUAC)—better known as the Dies Committee—formed to investigate such subversive groups, including the German-American Bund and Communist Party USA. In 1939, the committee opened an investigation into Pelley, finding that he had been “operating on a nationwide basis,” and that his exploits spanned cities like Detroit, New York, Boston, and even Windsor, Ontario and Villa Acuna, Mexico.[20] Via this network, the committee determined that he disseminated material from the German Ministry of Propaganda, suppressing or misrepresenting its origins to Legion members.[21] The Dies Committee also highlighted his failure to pay his income tax, despite “publishing and distributing for personal profit.” This lucrative material included “booklets and pamphlets containing scurrilous statements, half-truths, re-prints of propaganda of a foreign power, and un-American and unpatriotic material, statements and propaganda.”
Poster, Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, In Our Own Backyard – Resisting Nazi Propaganda Exhibit, courtesy California State University, Northridge, accessed calisphere.org.
By the fall of 1939, Pelley faced a two-front war. The Dies Committee subpoenaed him to appear for a hearing and North Carolina Judge Zeb Nettles signed off on a warrant for his arrest, having violated the terms of probation with his behavior.[22] This behavior, Judge Nettles alleged, consisted of consorting with “‘enemies of American institutions,'” attempting to overthrow the government via his publications, and leveling “‘disgusting epithets at the office of the President of the United States.'”[23] But Judge Nettles and Dies Committee members would be remiss if they expected Pelley to turn himself in. He had apparently been laying low in the State of New York to prepare for another charge of embezzling funds from the Legion.[24] In fact, famed columnist and radio commentator Walter Winchell received information that Pelley, whom he deemed a “Shamerican,” had disguised himself and was hiding in Yorkville, NY. Winchell had heard Pelley was “in need of a physician because he is suffering from fear and shock.”[25]
Perhaps breaking under unrelenting pressure, the ever-elusive Pelley emerged publicly and appeared before the Dies Committee in Washington, D.C. in February 1940.[26] Despite Winchell’s reports, when Pelley at last took the stand before the committee, he was the pinnacle of poise.[27] When pressed about his un-American activities and denouncement of the Dies Committee, he had quite the about-face. Amused columnists noted that Pelley now “thoroughly approves the committee’s work” and offered a “handsome apology” for his past actions. The Palladium-Item reported that Pelley told the group demurely that “‘meeting the committee face to face and finding out what a fine group of Christian gentleman you are'” had changed his mind. He tried to assure the committeemen that, in fact, the Legion was actually a pillar of democracy, as one of its goals was to halt Communism in America. Unfortunately, Pelley conflated Communism with Judaism, and openly admitted his anti-Semitism.[28] However, he assured HUAC that since its committee had proven they took the Communist threat seriously—just by virtue of the committee’s formation—he would gladly dissolve the Silver Shirts.
“Pelley’s Wait Before Surrender to Dies Seen as Legal Move to Escape Prison Term,” Evansville Press, February 10, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
Pelley’s assurances rang hollow and, as he stepped off the witness stand, Washington police arrested him on behalf of North Carolina officials.[29] He was released on bond after a couple days. In the unfolding months, the Dies Committee renewed its scrutiny, listening to testimony that Pelley had planned to march on Washington with the goal of becoming dictator of the United States.[30] With the walls seemingly closing in, Pelley sought to relocate.
Just days before Christmas 1940, two moving vans departed Biltmore, North Carolina. Throughout the evening, they transported files and printing equipment to a former box factory in Noblesville, Indiana, where former state police officer and Klan member Carl Losey awaited.[31] William Dudley Pelley had appointed Losey president of his new publishing company, Fellowship Press. Newspapers speculated that Losey’s close friend and former Klan Grand Dragon, D. C. Stephenson, would assist in the new endeavor once he was released from his prison sentence for murder. Stephenson vehemently denied any connection to Pelley.[32]
“Noblesville Stirred as Silver Shirt Founder Seeks to Locate Plant in City,” Anderson Dailey Bulletin, January 4, 1941, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
Having experienced the notoriety that came with the Stephenson trial, Noblesville residents wanted nothing to do with the Silver Shirts leader. Regarding Pelley’s move, one editorialist wrote, “We do not want our state to become a center of agitation for intolerant anti-Semitism, American Fascism, and sympathy for Hitler’s Nazism.”[33] Losey tried to assuage their concerns by telling reporters that the forthcoming publication was “‘strictly a magazine for businessmen.'”[34] It would focus solely on political and national events, he assured, saying, “‘I feel that the people are not getting all the truth out of Washington and we propose to get and publish the truth.'”
Pelley himself told the Indianapolis News on Christmas Day that no “‘deep and dark exploits'” were afoot, that his press would only print commercial and “esoteric and metaphysical books.”[35] Seemingly aligned with the caring spirit of the season, he told the paper that he had indeed dissolved the Silver Shirts and would “‘conform my activities to the support of the Dies committee and the government’s efforts to keep this country neutral and at peace.'” Pelley failed to assuage the Dies Committee, however, who sent an investigator to Noblesville, just a couple days after these statements. They sought to investigate the leader of what they dubbed the “New Front,” and learn more about how Pelley financed the operation, the contents of the publications, and the activities of his friend Losey.[36]
An exasperated Pelley told the Indianapolis News that he came to “Indiana for a supposed period of respite from the investigations and persecutions out of Washington and elsewhere covering the last eight years.”[37] He had been living with like-minded benefactors in Indianapolis and commuting to his Noblesville company, despite trying to minimize his role there.[38] The Indianapolis Star reported that Noblesville residents had mixed opinions about Pelley’s presence, with a minority willing to give him a chance to prove the legitimacy of his press. Many others felt like one editorialist, who wrote that the city was “‘heavy at heart,'” and that:
‘If Mr. Pelley and his associates have selected Noblesville as a screen for unfair practices, they will find it extremely difficult to foster such literature upon the community. We sincerely hope they will devote their time and energies to beneficial works that will be a credit to local residents.’
Governor M. Clifford Townsend had no qualms about denouncing Pelley’s activities. While he did not mention Pelley by name, he released a statement on December 28 stating, “‘I feel that it is the opinion of the people of Indiana that there is no place in this state for any organizations or groups which advocate in principle, policies or practice any un-American doctrine.'”[39]
Noblesville Ledger owner D.M. Hudley, too, had no tolerance for Pelley. Before buying the box factory, Pelley, using a fake name, approached Hudley about purchasing the Ledger outright, enticing him with a $10,000 cash down payment.[40] Once Hudley discovered Pelley’s identity and intentions, he turned him away and reported him directly to the Dies investigator temporarily residing in Noblesville. The investigator also had an ally in the Indiana post of the American Legion. Legion representative William E. Sayer stated that the organization was monitoring Pelley, as it “‘is interested in seeing that no Fascist organization or any other group of that type is established in Indiana.'”[41]
Word of Pelley’s presence spread, eliciting a flood of newspaper editorials and even some threats from disapproving Hoosiers. A writer for the Bedford Daily Times stated passionately:
“Hoosiers, notwithstanding, are firm in their belief of freedom of the press. . . . But, if Mr. Losey is supported directly or indirectly by Mr. Pelley, then it is high time that action be taken to rid our state of both! We of Indiana cannot afford to have the good name of our state so besmirched, and it is better that we act early, than late. Borers are not so easily stopped after they have begun their task–they soon work under cover and then, the damage is done.”[42]
Another editorialist wrote to the Richmond Palladium-Item that Indiana, due to its central location, was fast-becoming an “important manufacturing center of military equipment and supplies.”[43] Given this, the writer found it especially “disquieting” that a “notorious American Fascist” had moved his company to the area. One Elwood resident stated in The Call-Leader that “Mr. Pelley’s very presence lends anything but dignity to the situation” and that “As far as Hoosiers generally are concerned, this ‘fountain of Fascism’ can bubble elsewhere.”[44]
“Noblesville Stirred as Silver Shirt Founder Seeks to Locate Plant in City,” Anderson Daily Bulletin, January 4, 1941, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
Losey claimed that the deluge of resistance included a letter “‘threatening to blow the place up and attempting to kidnap his night watchmen.'”[45] Days later he requested that Noblesville police officers investigate individuals who threw a rock through the plant windows in the early morning hours before fleeing in an automobile.[46] Losey increased secrecy around the plant’s efforts and tried to temper concerns by telling the Indianapolis Star that Fellowship Press’s magazine would focus on isolationism. He noted that “‘The object of our publication is to keep America Christian and to keep American boys out of a foreign war.'”[47]
The first issue of Pelley’s new publication, the Weekly Roll Call, confirmed Hoosiers’ skepticism. It included conspiratorial, anti-Semitic cartoons. One depicted Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins ignoring the economic plight of Americans, while providing idyllic homelands for Jewish refugees.[48] Hoosier retailers demonstrated their opposition to such material by refusing to distribute the Roll Call. The Indianapolis Star reported that “Sale of the first issue, placed on the stands late last week, was slight, with ‘plenty of leftover copies.'”[49] Floundering, Losey was let go, and Pelley took full control of Fellowship Press.[50]
Indianapolis News, July 28, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
He leveraged his press weeks later, seemingly to resurrect the Silver Shirts. In April 1941, North Carolina authorities appealed to Indiana for help in extraditing Pelley, on the grounds of violating the terms of his probation. Pelley printed and circulated 10,000 copies of a letter requesting support from Silver Shirt Legion members, who resided in twenty-two states.[51] Alas, his devoted readership failed to mobilize and ultimately he returned to North Carolina to answer to the charges.
With Pelley’s case pending, an event occurred that would change the course of history. On December 7, 1941, Japan bombarded an American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The surprise attack prompted President Roosevelt to issue his “Day of Infamy” speech and Congress to declare war on Japan. In an editorial, Pelley wrote solemnly, “It is time for patriotic wisdom, calmness and courage. We must devote ourselves towards winning the war. Let no one capitalize on the war.”[52] He announced the suspension of Roll Call, stating that for the foreseeable future, Fellowship Press would only print biographies and spiritual material. Of the Silver Shirts, he would ensure that they were at the military’s beck and call. The Noblesville Ledger suggested his pandering stemmed from fear that the patriotic fervor would negatively influence his upcoming hearing in North Carolina.
Courtesy of The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals, accessed iapsop.com.
Although Pelley suspended the Roll Call, his press continued publication of The Galilean, marketed as a spiritual magazine. [53] With the U.S. fully entrenched in war, the U.S. Post Office barred its distribution and U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Pelley’s arrest on the grounds that it violated the Espionage Act of 1917.[54] He was charged with attempting “to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces of the United States of America.'” On an April morning in 1942, FBI agents pounded on the door of George B. Fisher, who had previously donated $20,000 to the Silver Shirts. They were correct in their belief that Pelley was laying low at his Darien, Connecticut residence. The Silver Shirt leader arose from bed, was handcuffed, and transported to the Marion County Jail. That same day, his 21-year-old son entered the Army.[55]
As Pelley sat in jail, awaiting friends to transfer bail money—one offered to sell his $27,000 Meridian Street property—he chain smoked and expounded on his philosophies to the police marshal. With characteristic bluster and showmanship, he gladly “posed for photographs, amiably answered most questions and skillfully parried others.”[56] Bail money arrived a few days later and the Indianapolis News reported that he “was neatly dressed and puffing on a pipe when he was brought from his cell.”[57] Pelley reunited with his daughter, Adelaide, at the federal building in Indianapolis, where his sedition trial would take place.[58]
Indianapolis News, July 20, 1942, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
In late July 1942, Pelley and two Fellowship Press associates arrived at the federal court in Indianapolis for the “first major sedition prosecution in America since Pearl Harbor.”[59] They faced several counts, including attempts “to interfere with the operation and success of military and naval forces of the United States and to promote the success of its enemies.”[60] At the time of their trial, these enemies were undertaking the systematic deportation of Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka extermination camp in Poland. “Final Solution” architect Heinrich Himmler had recently instructed doctors to conduct medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camps.
As millions experienced unspeakable suffering abroad, Hoosiers were summoned to determine the fate of William Dudley Pelley and his c0-conspirators. The all-male jury hailed from cities around Indiana and belonged to a variety of professions, including engineering, farming, and insurance sales.[61] The trial captivated the nation, as many wondered if the untouchable Pelley would finally experience harsh consequences.
Check back for Part II to learn Pelley’s fate, would ultimately be decided in an Indianapolis courtroom. We’ll also delve into “Soulcraft,” the theology Pelley developed later in life. Based out of Noblesville, Soulcraft Press published works about his new spiritual belief, which incorporated the occult and the extraterrestrial—not unlike the emergent religion of one L. Ron Hubbard.
Notes:
[1] “Pelley Forces Trial Here After His Seizure as Enemy of U. S.,” Indianapolis News, April 4, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “America’s No. 1 seditionist” quote from “Pelley’s Case May Not Take So Much Time,” Noblesville Ledger, July 30, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[2] “‘Little Fuehrer’ Moves In,” The Republic (Columbus, IN), December 27, 1940, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
[3] Jason Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 3, 2018, accessed smithsonianmag.com.
[4] “William Dudley Pelley,” U.S., World War I Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918, June 5, 1917, accessed Ancestry Library; William Dudley Pelley, “Idols Mended,” The Red Book Magazine (November 1922): 83-87, accessed Archive.org; William Dudley Pelley, “There Are Still Fairies,” The Sunday Star (Washington, D.C.), July 8, 1923, 2, accessed Archive.org; George C. Shull, “Pelley, Man Who Died for Seven Minutes, Says Pyramid Predicts Career End in ’45,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
[5] William Dudley Pelley, “Seven Minutes in Eternity—the Amazing Experience that Made Me Over,” The American Magazine (March 1929): 7, accessed Archive.org.
[6] Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer.”
[7] Jon Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist: William Dudley Pelley’s Obscure But Infamous Silver Shirt Movement Lives on in His Paper Trail,” WNC Magazine (January/February 2018), accessed wncmagazine.com.
[8] Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist.”
[9] “Charge Breaking of Blue Sky Law,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), August 22, 1934, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
[10] Silver Shirt Enrollment Application, 1930s, William Dudley Pelley and the Silver Legion of America Collection, S1050, Rare Books & Manuscripts Division, Indiana State Library.
[11] “Pelley, Summerville Convicted by Court,” News and Record (Greensboro, NC), January 23, 1935, 4, accessed Newspapers.com; “W. D. Pelley is Declared Guilty,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), January 23, 1935, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Silver Shirt Duo Sentenced Today,” Salisbury Post (North Carolina), February 18, 1935, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[12] “Pelley for President: Silver Shirt Man to Run,” The Sentinel (Winston-Salem, NC), September 10, 1935, 11, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pelley Sees ‘Theocratic State’ in U.S.,” Asheville Times (North Carolina), January 25, 1936, 10, accessed Newspapers.com; Elliston, “Asheville’s Fascist.”
[13] “Anti-Semitic Silver Shirt Handbook Flays New Deal, Urges Axis, U.S. Unity,” Indianapolis Star, December 29, 1940, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
[14] George C. Shull, “Pelley, Man Who Died for Seven Minutes, Says Pyramid Predicts Career End in ’45,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; Quote from “Jury Hears of Pelley ‘Oracle,'” Indianapolis News, July 29, 1942, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[15] Daley, “The Screenwriting Mystic Who Wanted to Be the American Fuhrer.”
[16] “Guard Captain Testifies Before Dies Committee,” Star Press (Muncie, IN), April 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Hoosier Tells of Silver Shirt Plot,” Indianapolis News, April 5, 1940, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
[17] “Guard Captain Testifies Before Dies Committee,” Star Press (Muncie, IN), April 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[18] “UnAmerican Troublemakers,” Bremen Enquirer (Indiana), March 7, 1940, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
[20] “Head of Silver Shirts Misused Assets of Publishing Firm, Dies Probers Told,” Reading News (Pennsylvania), August 29, 1939, 16, accessed Newspapers.com.
[21] “Pelley is Accused of Disseminating Nazi Propaganda,” Nashville Banner (Tennessee), October 3, 1939, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
[22] “Committee Tries to Subpoena Head of Silver Shirts,” Evening Courier (Camden, NJ), August 24, 1939, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[23] “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[24] “Pelly [sic] is Cited to State Court,” Rocky Mount Telegram (North Carolina), October 19, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Tax Collector Receives Check for Pelley Taxes,” Asheville Citizen Times, November 4, 1939, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Behind the Scenes in Washington,” Lancaster Eagle-Gazette (Ohio), December 8, 1939, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
[25] “Winchell Says W.D. Pelley is in N. Y. Town,” Asheville Citizen-Times, February 5, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; Walter Winchell, “Broadway,” Evansville Courier, February 14, 1940, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
[26] “Pelley Surrenders to Dies Body; Ask He Be Held for Court Here,” Asheville Times, February 6, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[27] Richard L. Turner, “Pelley Angers Dies Probers; Tells Income,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), February 8, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[28] “Silver Shirts Get $240,000 from Friends,” The Times (Munster, IN), February 9, 1940, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.
[29] “Pelley Nabbed for Violation of Probation,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), February 11, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Silver Shirt Leader Gains Jail Release,” Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN), February 12, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[30] “Silver Shirt Linked with Army Group,” Vidette-Messenger of Porter County (Valparaiso, IN), April 2, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[31] “Furniture En Route,” Indianapolis News, December 20, 1940, 25, accessed Newspapers.com; “Rumors that Stephenson to Get Pardon,” Noblesville Ledger, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[32] “Rumors that Stephenson to Get Pardon,” Noblesville Ledger, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[34] “Silver Shirts Leader Mentioned in Noblesville Magazine Mystery,” Indianapolis Star, December 20, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[35] “Pelley Denis Any ‘Mystery,'” Indianapolis News, December 25, 1940, 18, accessed Newspapers.com.
[36] “Noblesville Firm to Publish Books,” Palladium-Item (Richmond, IN), December 27, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com; “Dies Committee Watches Pelley,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 2, accessed Newspapers.com; “Committee Sends Man to Open Inquiry,” Noblesville Ledger, December 31, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[37] “Pelley Denies Contact with Stephenson,” Indianapolis News, December 27, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[38] Donovan A. Turk, “Losey, Pelley Await Dies Quiz; Hold ‘Christian Crusade’ is Object,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[39] Edward L. Throm, “Says Indiana Has No Place for Disloyal,” Indianapolis Star, December 28, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[40] Daniel M. Kidney, “Dies Aide Says Pelley Tried to Buy Hoosier Newspaper,” Evansville Press, December 31, 1940, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
[41] “Legion Watches Publishing Firm,” Indianapolis Star, December 30, 1940, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
Dr. George Buckner, Gift of Zachariah Buckner (Son of George Washington Buckner), 1965.136.0000, Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, accessed emuseum.org.
Lauana Creel approached the porch and rang the doorbell of a prominent Evansville citizen she had arranged to interview. The WPA’s Federal Writer’s Project had tasked her with interviewing formerly enslaved Americans in order to document their experiences and perspectives. On this particular day, Dr. George Buckner would be the subject of a series of interviews.
Creel learned that George Washington Buckner was born into slavery on a small farm in Greensburg, Kentucky around 1853. He lived in a single-room cabin with his mother, step-father, and many siblings. In poor health and lacking surgical or medical assistance, his mother became bed-ridden. Given these circumstances, the trajectory of his life was seemingly implausible. From obtaining higher education, to becoming a physician and political activist, to building up his own community, Dr. Buckner exemplified what was possible despite being born into that “peculiar institution.” The Evansville Press aptly noted that he experienced “a world which offered few opportunities for men of his race. He overcame these severe handicaps and his influence for the improvement of the lot of all Negroes has been powerful.”
A one floor, wooden slave cabin near Lexington, which would be similar to the one George Buckner spent most of his childhood in. Photo courtesy of the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center, accessed uky.edu.
During his childhood, George was “presented” to his master’s son, “Mars” Dickie Buckner. Despite being roughly the same age, George was required to do whatever Mars requested, like polishing his boots and putting away his toys. Although his “master,” Mars also served as a playmate and companion of George, who later described their relationship as sympathetic and loving. Unfortunately, George’s only playmate passed away from illness. Mars’s death caused George Buckner great sadness. He claimed to have seen Mars’s ghost one night, pressed against the window of the room in which he died. The death of Mars affected George deeply, and drove him to become a physician.
Compounding his loneliness, Buckner’s sister was sold to another family when the master’s daughter got married. Buckner told Creel, “It always filled us with sorrow when we were separated either by circumstances of marriage or death. Although we were not properly housed, properly nourished nor properly clothed we loved each other and loved our cabin homes and were unhappy when compelled to part.”
While Buckner experienced personal tragedy, the nation had also plunged into crisis. Several of Buckner’s uncles fled North to enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War. In his interview, Buckner talked about the night they decided to escape enslavement and join the war effort, stating:
I had heard my parents talk of the war but it did not seem real to me until one night when mother came to the pallet where we slept and called to us ‘Get up and tell our uncles good-bye.’ Then four startled little children arose. Mother was standing in the room with a candle or a sort of torch made from grease drippings and old pieces of cloth . . . and there stood her four brothers, Jacob, John, Bill, and Isaac all with the light of adventure shining upon their mulatto countenances. They were starting away to fight for their liberties and we were greatly impressed.
Ultimately, Jacob was too old to serve and Isaac too young, but George’s two other uncles were accepted into the Army. According to the WPA interview, one was killed in battle and the other fought and returned home unwounded. Black individuals like George’s uncles, helped end the war and the institution of slavery.
When the war ended, George was not yet a teenager and struggled to survive. He taught himself to read with a spelling book, and his literacy became a valuable skill. In 1867, he furthered his education by taking courses through the Freedmen’s Bureau, an agency created immediately after emancipation to help Black individuals get jobs, learn basic skills like reading and writing, and help them understand their rights. He began working for the Bureau in Greensburg, Kentucky, teaching other young, formerly-enslaved individuals to read and write. Buckner told Creel that he boarded with a family in a cramped cabin, sleeping in a “dark uncomfortable loft where a comfort and a straw bed.”
Freedmen’s School in New Bern, North Carolina, collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, accessed nmaahc.si.edu.
Buckner furthered his education after moving to Indianapolis, where he encountered Robert Bruce Bagby, principal of the only Black school in the city. Buckner said Bagby was the “first educated Negro he had ever met.” Bagby himself was born into slavery in Virginia, and his parents purchased their family’s freedom in 1857. He then earned a college degree and joined Indiana’s only Black regiment during the Civil War. After studying at Bagner’s school, Buckner made ends meet by working at restaurants and hotels as a “house boy,” or domestic servant. After earning enough money working menial jobs, Buckner went on to study at the Terre Haute Normal School (later Indiana State University), graduating in 1871.
He went on to teach Black students at Vincennes University. While he was earnest about advancing his educational career, another part of him longed to do something else. He wanted to provide essential medical care, motivated by the loss he experienced in his own life. He recalled:
I was interested in the young people and anxious for their advancement but the suffering endured by my invalid mother, who had passed into the great beyond, and the memory of little Master Dickie’s lingering illness and untimely death would not desert my consciousness. I determined to take up the study of medical practice and surgery which I did.
Image of Terre Haute Normal School, courtesy of William Elmer Henry, Legislative and State Manual of Indiana for 1903 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford, State Printer, 1903), p. 324, accessed Internet Archive.
In 1890, Buckner earned his M.D. from the Indiana Eclectic Medical College in Indianapolis (which became part of Indiana State University). Dr. Buckner practiced medicine in the city for a year, cultivating a positive reputation among the Black community. He transferred his practice to Evansville, where he spent the rest of his life. This likely made him the first licensed Black doctor to practice in the city. Buckner’s role as a physician was crucial, since Black patients could only be treated by Black doctors, many of whom lacked the same resources as white practitioners. According to a UCLA study, Black men comprised only four percent of all doctors and physicians in the U.S. during the time Buckner practiced. He was a vital member of the Black community, someone who they literally could not have lived without.
He also aided his community in other ways. Understanding the importance of education through his own experiences, Buckner dedicated himself to helping other young people get an education. He helped establish the Cherry Street YMCA to give Black children a place to play and learn. He was also the principal of the Independence Colored School, putting his educational background to good use. Buckner served as a trustee at the local Alexander Chapel AME church. He enlisted the help of hundreds of Black residents in the Colored Akin Club in preparation for a local municipal election.
While Evansville provided a change of pace for Buckner, from the hustle and bustle of Indianapolis, there he encountered not only casual racism, but threats against his life, for some of his political views. Buckner was an ardent Democrat, which made him a minority in the Black community. In a local Democratic newspaper, he wrote a column called “Colored Folks” and became well known for his outspoken views. He staunchly supported Woodrow Wilson and, later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A contentious issue that he fought against during his time was vote-buying, a process whereby a local political machine used intimidation or bribery to sway voters to their side. Black Americans were often a target for their perceived desperation. According to Bucker’s interview, he viewed vote-buying as a serious roadblock for self-determination and encouraged them not to be persuaded by bad actors, stating:
The negro youths are especially subject to propaganda of the four-flusher [fraud; huckster] for their home influence is, to say the least, negative. Their opportunities limited, their education neglected and they are easily aroused by the meddling influence of the vote-getter and the traitor. I would to God that their eyes might be opened to the light.
Buckner’s Democratic leanings were not always looked on kindly, as he describes having to hire a bodyguard to keep him and his family from harm. He told Creel that he brought security to professional and social events to:
prevent meeting physical violence to myself or family when political factions were virtually at war within the area of Evansville. The influence of political captains had brought about the dreadful condition and ignorant Negroes responded to their political graft, without realizing who had befriended them in need.
Despite criticism and threats, his bravery and moral conviction also opened new avenues for advancement. He caught the attention of several prominent Democrats in Indiana, including John W. Boehne, with whom he would develop a friendship. Boehne was a Congressman and Mayor of Evansville from 1905 to 1908. This connection helped further Buckner’s burgeoning political career.
Dr. George Buckner, courtesy of Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs Division.
In 1913, the Wilson Administration tasked U.S. Senators from Indiana with selecting the Minister to Liberia. According to the Indianapolis Star, Dr. Buckner was appointed because he “stands high among members of his race, while his Democracy is vouched for as the right brand by the Democratic leaders of the Indiana ‘pocket.’” The paper noted that the “number of negroes who would be willing to fight and die for the Democratic party” was notably small. In fact, former Rep. John W. Boehne, who endorsed Buckner for the appointment, stated that Buckner was loyal to the party “’at times when it almost cost a negro his life to be a Democrat.’”
The Star reported a few months later that “Secretary of the Treasury McAdoo is hearing echoes of a political insurrection among Indiana negroes over the appointment” of Buckner, whom they felt was “not entitled” to “this big job.” Other Black residents cheered the announcement, throwing a reception to celebrate Dr. Buckner’s breaking of racial barriers, regardless of political affiliation. His appointment occurred, fittingly, just days before Evansville’s Emancipation Day celebration, at which the “newly appointed United State Minister to Liberia” spoke.
In the early 1800s, the American Colonization Society sought to establish a colony, Liberia, in Africa in which thousands of freed Black individuals could establish a community.* By the time Dr. Buckner arrived in Liberia, it was known as “the negro republic.” The Tacoma Daily News described it as “the only country in the world that is owned and governed by negroes.” To say Black Americans thrived in Liberia would be inaccurate. According to the Daily News, the Afro-American League of Evansville submitted a petition to U.S. Congress, alerting legislators to challenging conditions, which included the climate, predatory animals, diseases, resistance from natives resulted in hardship, and even death. Additionally, Liberia was caught in the crosshairs of international conflict that would culminate in World War I.
In its petition, the Afro-American League noted that Liberia was situated between “the British and the French possessions, which are continuously encroaching upon her territory.” War exacerbated the conditions in Liberia, especially as “merchant vessels have ceased to appear upon the coast of Liberia, where our own people in the dark continent are struggling for existence and where this war is causing untold numbers to perish.” The League appealed to Congress, asking that “the European and American capitalists be prohibited, if possible, from plunging Liberia into the yawning abyss they have apparently created for her.”
George Buckner’s son showing off a gift his father received in Liberia. “The King’s Chair” is hand-carved and is meant to symbolize honor. “Gifts to a Slave Turned Diplomat Given to Museum by His Son,” Evansville Press, May 10, 1965, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.
It was this backdrop from which Dr. Buckner began his diplomatic career. Many foreign actors were trying to change Liberia’s nominally “neutral” stance on the war. The Evansville Courier reported that although Buckner did not witness war actions, “he saw evidences of war all along the trip. On the west coast of Africa he saw the remains of a wrecked German cruiser, sunk early in the war, and at Gibraltar he saw the British battleship Inflexible, which was damaged in the engagements in the Dardanelles.” Buckner tried to maintain an independent attitude, difficult, considering his inexperience with diplomacy.
He was frustrated with the rampant corruption and gerrymandering of the political system, which exacerbated dysfunction and unrest. This was something that past ministers to Liberia also noted. Dr. Buckner also suffered from two attacks of African Fever. He resigned from the post prematurely in 1915. Despite some hardships, he told Creel that he “cherishes the experiences gained while abroad.” According to one newspaper, Buckner told a friend privately, “I had rather make less money and remain where I can give my children a father’s advice.” Buckner had four children and clearly prioritized raising them over his diplomatic post. This was quite the sacrifice to make, considering his post granted him a salary of $5,000 (about $154,619 today). The EvansvillePress praised his work as a diplomat, noting his “honesty and integrity are unassailable.” Similarly, the Pennsylvania Altoona Tribune marveled that although born into slavery, “Today he is a physician with a splendid practice and a diplomat chosen by the administration to look out for its interests in the African country most identified with the negro race in the United States.”
Buckner’s children at the opening of The Buckner Tower senior citizens apartment complex, courtesy of Evansville Press, January 27, 1969, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.
After resigning from the post, the Evansville Courier reported that Dr. Buckner served as a member of a medical board that “examined Negro registrants during World War I.” He continued his work as an Evansville physician, working fulltime into his 80s. Buckner died in 1943 and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery. The City of Evansville, which had at times been hostile to him, helped cement his legacy by dedicating a public housing project for the elderly in his name. The building was located at the former site of the Buckner family home. In 2022, his alma mater, Indiana State University, named him a Distinguished Alumni Honoree. He is remembered as an influential and accomplished Black man at a time when people of color were treated with overt discrimination. He told interviewer Lauana Creel “Yes, the road has been long. Memory brings me back to those days.” But, despite the hardships he faced throughout his life, Dr. Buckner cherished his freedom and maintained, “Why should not the negroes be exalted and happy?”
Sources:
Much of the information regarding Buckner’s life come from his interviews with Lauana Creel. It was through her work with the Federal Writer’s Project that firsthand accounts of Buckner’s life are available.
“George W. Buckner,” 1880 United States Federal Census, accessed Ancestry Library.
William Elmer Henry, Legislative and State Manual of Indiana for 1903 (Indianapolis: Wm. B. Burford, State Printer, 1903), p. 324, accessed Internet Archive.
Louis Ludlow, “Indiana Negro Selected for Liberian Post,” Indianapolis Star, June 29, 1913, 1, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Intends to Lash Capitalist and Labor Lobbies,” Indianapolis Star, September 17, 1913, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Receives Instructions: New United States Minister to Liberia,” Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), September 20, 1913, 14, accessed Newspapers.com.
Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), September 23, 1913, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
“An Honor to the Colored People,” Evansville Courier and Press, October 10, 1913, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“George W. Buckner, Minister Resident and Consul General to Liberia,” Altoona Tribune (Pennsylvania), January 2, 1914, 2, accessed Newspapers.com.
“A Letter from Liberia,” Evansville Courier, June 6, 1914, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Will Liberia Survive?,” Tacoma Daily News (Washington), March 2, 1915, 6, accessed Newspapers.com.
Louis Ludlow, “Negro Republic is Bumping the Rocks,” Fort Wayne News, March 5, 1915, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Glad to See the Good Old U.S.,” Evansville Courier, June 6, 1915, 4, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Dr. Buckner May Resign,” Indianapolis News, June 15, 1915, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
“George Buckner Sr.,” 1920 United States Federal Census, accessed Ancestry Library.
Interview with George Buckner, conducted by Lauana Creel, Ex-Slave Stories, District #5, Vanderburgh County, “A Slave, Ambassador and City Doctor,” Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, vol. 5, Indiana, Arnold-Woodson, 1936-1938, Federal Writer’s Project, United States Works Projects Administration, accessed Library of Congress.
“George W. Buckner,” 1940 United States Federal Census, accessed Ancestry Library.
“Dr. G. W. Buckner, Former Minister to Liberia, Dies,” Evansville Press, February 18, 1943, 3, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Dr. Buckner,” Evansville Press, February 19, 1943, 8, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Gifts to a Slave Turned Diplomat Given to Museum by His Son,” Evansville Press, May 10, 1965, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.
Kathie Meredith, “New Building for Elderly to Get Name of Slave-Born Envoy-Doctor,” Evansville Press, May 9, 1968, 29, accessed Newspapers.com.
“Dr. Buckner Gifts Shown at Museum,” Evansville Press, August 17, 1968, 12, accessed Newspapers.com.
Evansville Press, January 27, 1969, 11, accessed Newspapers.com.
Edna Folz, “Dr. Buckner, a Dynamic Revolutionary,” Evansville Press, February 14, 1972, 13, accessed Newspapers.com.
John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1979).
“Evansville Doctor Was a Democrat during Unpopular Era,” Evansville Press, June 5, 1987, 19, accessed Newspapers.com.
Darrel E. Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), accessed Scholarworks.
“Dr. George Washington Buckner,” Indianapolis Recorder, March 31, 1990, accessed Hoosier State Chronicles.
Roberta Heiman, “An Evansville Ambassador,” Evansville Courier and Press, February 22, 1998, 46, accessed Newspapers.com.
Enrique Rivero, “Proportion of Black Physicians in U.S. Has Changed Little in 120 Years, UCLA Research Finds,” UCLA Newsroom, April 19, 2021, accessed UCLA Newsroom.
The following post contributes to an IHB blog series celebrating the upcoming presentation by New York Times editor Amisha Padnani on her Overlooked project. Overlooked tells the stories of remarkable women and people of color whose deaths were never reported by the New York Times in its 168-year history.
Learn more and register to attend Padnani’s presentation for free as part of the October 5, 2024 Hoosier Women at Work History Conference.
Emma Molloy was not your average reformer. Her advocacy of women’s suffrage, women in the workplace, temperance, and prison reform was so radical that women’s and reform groups ostracized her. Nevertheless, she continued to write and speak prolifically in the 1870s and 80s, engendering a reputation as “one of the most effective woman orators of the west.”[1]
Born in South Bend in 1839, Molloy’s childhood was a lonely one. Her mother died when she was just eleven, forcing her to live in boarding homes. She found solace in writing and won awards for submissions in local newspapers as a teenager. Around that time, she married a printer, and the couple traveled the country, working various jobs. However, her husband’s alcoholism cost them employment, breeding resentment that he took out on his wife. After his untimely death due to the disease, Molloy committed herself to lobbying for temperance and protecting Indiana divorce laws.
Her second marriage was a happier one, and led to professional and personal fulfillment. She became the business partner of her husband, Edward, helping edit and print the South Bend National Union. Molloy’s editorial influence created a more nuanced publication, as her personal anecdotes and heartfelt obituaries balanced Edward’s political and economic reporting. In addition to writing and managing the household, she undertook business aspects of the publication, which included collecting payment and soliciting advertisements—earning praise from Harper’s Bazar.
The ambitious Molloys moved to Elkhart, where they co-founded the Observer in 1872. Emma came fully into her own in the city, growing into a prolific political reformer and public speaker. In her editorials, she encouraged women’s independence and entry into the workplace, writing “woman’s true sphere is in any latitude of occupation that she is capable of.” She wrote:
I am told that women are not as thorough on details as men are. Well, let a woman educated as a reporter, walk beside the male reporter, and she will see twice as much in a walk down the street as he will, and can draw just as largely upon her imagination too in reporting it. . . . As for the girls employed in our office, I find them as efficient as men , and much more reliable, for they never get on a spree.[2]
Molloy refused to downplay her contributions. In an address for the Women in Country Journalism Congress, she described the:
. . . many days and nights of persistent toil at the case, in the editorial chair, and sometimes at the press. To help out I have set type all night after working at other branches of the business all day, and I am certain my husband, capable and industrious as he is, would not have been where he is to-day without my aid.[3]
Molloy also used her publications to advocate for women’s right to divorce and the need to abolish “legal marital slavery” through legislation. This, along with temperance, would reduce wives’ financial hardship and abuse. She had been one of these wives herself, after all.
Realizing the ballot was necessary to effect this change, she advocated for women’s suffrage. Her fiery speeches and emphasis on women’s involvement in politics set her apart from other suffragists and temperance leaders at the time. According to the Ribbon Worker, she first demonstrated her “oratorical gifts” in Elkhart, which soon garnered here invitations to speak in various Indiana cities and eventually across the country and abroad. The Rochester Union Spy described one of her lectures as a “feast of reason,” adding:
We were ourself surprised at the breadth of her views, and the profundity of her reasoning. It must be conceded that intellect, as well as virtue, has no sex, and that women who try can reason just as closely and as logically as their brethren.
Similarly, the South Bend Tribune wrote “By reason of her native eloquence and the force of her arguments she attracted large audiences wherever she went.” Molloy not only delivered passionate speeches and editorials, but went door to door, canvassing neighbors for the cause of temperance. This resulted in one Elkhart bar owner throwing eggs at her.
Biographer Martha Pickrell noted that some newspaper editors and WCTU members found Molloy’s strategies and emphasis on women’s political involvement too extreme. In 1877, Molloy wrote to the Woman’s Journal that she had been ousted from local temperance efforts, noting “in my own State, the greater portion of the women of the Union regarded me as ‘dangerous to their work.’” She added that:
God made me so radical and . . . so adverse to suffering that when I see a way to avoid it, for myself or anyone else, I cannot help making a suggestion as to the means, even though it may be shocking to conservative ears.
Perhaps feeling ostracized, she pivoted to prison reform and evangelical preaching. Because of her experiences with those suffering from addiction, she viewed prisoners as humans, worthy of humane conditions and a second shot at life after incarceration. In the late 1870s, Molloy visited Indiana prisons and lobbied for better conditions, such as proper ventilation. She served as a maternal figure for those incarcerated and often encouraged them through correspondence. She wrote “Too often he finds himself thrown upon the world homeless, friendless, illy educated to grapple the with the world. It is very hard for an ex-convict to get employment.” In her efforts to reduce recidivism and help with rehabilitation, Molloy worked with Quakers and WTCU members to establish the Ex-Convicts’ Aid Society, with the goal to create halfway houses in northern and southern Indiana for released prisoners.
Emma Molloy marker dedication in Elkhart, September 4, 2024, courtesy of author.
In her final years, Molloy moved to the West Coast and undertook the cause nearest to her heart—preaching Christianity. She once again leveraged her public speaking skills, but this time from a church pulpit. Although she could not officially be ordained, she essentially served as a preacher and helped build up struggling churches in smaller towns.
Molloy died in 1907. Her death garnered scant obituaries and one published in her native South Bend misspelled her name. We hope that this Indiana Overlooked profile helps restore the agency and legacy of a woman so ahead of her time. Suffering had not made her bitter, but empathetic, and ready to take up the sword to prevent the suffering of others. For this, she should not only be remembered, but emulated.
[1] “Well Known Woman Gone,” South Bend Tribune, May 15, 1907, 5, accessed Newspapers.com.
[2] Emma Molloy, Woman’s Congress Address in Chicago, October 1974 in Martha Pickrell, “A Woman in Country Journalism,” Traces of Indiana and Midwest History 12, no. 2 (Spring 2000): 27, accessed Indiana Historical Society.
[3] Emma Molloy, Address on Women in Country Journalism, Woman’s Congress, Chicago, Illinois, October 15-17, 1874, published in Woman’s Journal (November 28, 1874) in Pickrell, p. 93.
The Talking Machine World, January 15, 1921, 27, accessed archive.org.
Historians of blues music and folk culture consider Mamie Smith to be the first African American woman to record blues vocals. In 1921, only a year after this historic recording, Smith performed to sold-out crowds in Indiana. Newspapers covered the release of Smith’s records and her Indiana performances extensively. We were interested especially in a spring 1921 performance by this African-American star in Richmond, Indiana, a Ku Klux Klan stronghold at the time.
Before 1920, African American entertainer Mamie Smith, who was born in Cincinnati, worked in Harlem as a chorus girl and cabaret singer. Here she met the black pianist, singer, and composer Perry Bradford who had found success in theater and minstrel circuits in New York. Bradford, who was interested in preserving African-American musical traditions in recordings, convinced Fred Hager, recording director of the obscure label OKeh Records to take a chance on recording Mamie Smith. Bradford convinced Hager that African American music lovers were an untapped market and that “they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle correctly.”
“A studio headshot portrait of American blues singer Mamie Smith,” photograph, circa, 1923, Frank Driggs Collection/Getty Images accessed “Mamie Smith and the Birth of the Blues Market,” All Things Considered, NPR.
In February 1920, Smith recorded “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down” for OKeh Records. Blues music historians consider this to be the first blues recording by an African American woman. Record producer Hager received boycott threats if he recorded Smith or any other African American singer. In the face of the controversy, Bradford convinced Hager to continue backing Smith, as opposed to the white singer Sophie Tucker, who Hager was alternatively considering. Bradford recalled:
Mr. Hager got a far-off look in his eyes and seemed somewhat worried, because of the many threatening letters he had received from some Northern and Southern pressure groups warning him not to have any truck with colored girls in the recording field. If he did, OKeh Products – phonograph machines and records – would be boycotted. May God bless Mr. Hager, for despite the many threats, it took a man with plenty of nerves and guts to buck those powerful groups and make the historical decision which would echo aroun’ the world. He pried open that old ‘prejudiced door’ for the first colored girl, Mamie Smith, so she could squeeze into the large horn – and shout with her strong contralto voice.
Smith recorded another set of songs penned by Bradford for Okeh in August of 1920. The track “Crazy Blues” became massively popular and in less than a year the record sold over a million copies. According to long-time music writer Jas Obercht, Smith’s “Crazy Blues” “could be heard coming from the open windows of virtually any black neighborhood in America.” Okeh Records called it “a surprise smash hit.” According to New Orleans jazz musician Danny Barker:
There was a great appeal amongst black people and whites who loved this blues business to buy records and buy phonographs. Every family had a phonograph in their house, specifically behind Mamie Smith’s first record.
Indiana newspapers ran ads for Mamie Smith’s records not long after the release of “Crazy Blues.” Often the ads for Smith’s records were also attempts to sell phonographs as Barker mentioned in the above quote. A downtown Indianapolis music store ran this advertisement in the Indianapolis News in November:
The C. W. Copp Music Shop ran an advertisement in the South Bend News-Times in December for the hit “Crazy Blues,” but also let an interested public know that they stocked other Mamie Smith records. Hoosier interest in Smith’s records continued into the new year. In March of 1921, the same South Bend music shop ran several advertisements for five new Smith records and the Hammond Times ran an advertisement for Okeh Records releases, featuring Smith, and to sell listeners the phonograph to play them on:
According to Obrecht, Mamie Smith recorded 22 songs this year and “between sessions, she kept a grueling schedule of concert appearances.” The Talking Machine World magazine reported that Smith and a revue of entertainers were going to perform in all the major U.S. cities. By April 1921, many Hoosier music fans were familiar with Mamie Smith, as we can see from the newspaper ads. So when the news broke that she was booked to play in Indiana, the coverage continued almost daily until the performance.
According to the Talking Machine World she performed in Indianapolis and Evansville on this tour, but a search of Hoosier State Chronicles and our recent work to digitize the Richmond Palladium Sun-Telegram shows that she also performed to sold out crowds in Richmond and South Bend. This is especially interesting considering 1920s Richmond was only about 5% African American, while perhaps as many as 45% of white males belonged at some point to Whitewater Klan #60, an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. We wondered, what brought Smith to Richmond and how was she received?
The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram ran a notice of Smith’s Saturday, April 23, 1921 performance at the Coliseum for weeks before the date. Here are some great examples:
On April 21, 1921 alone there were three ads for Smith’s upcoming performance and records, including this extensive listing of popular songs:
Richmond Palladium and Sun Telegram, April 21, 1921. Hoosier State Chronicles.“Famous Colored Star Sings Here Saturday,” Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, April 18, 1921. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Advertisements were not the only coverage of Smith’s upcoming appearance in Richmond. On April 18, 1921 the Richmond Palladium Sun-Telegram reported on the “forthcoming appearance here of Mamie Smith, the popular phonograph star of the colored race, and her All-Star Jazz Revue next Saturday night at the Coliseum,” and called it “the greatest jazz concert that has ever been sent on tour.” The newspaper called Smith “a phonograph star of the first rank” and claimed that she “has done more than any other singer perhaps in America to popularize the genuine ‘blues’ song of the day.” The writer continued to laud Smith for her ability to make songs into “living, potent things charged with a pulsing and individual rhythm.” The paper reported that the popularity of her record had made Richmond residents excited to see her perform live and that they were expecting a “sold-out house when she reaches this city.”
Jazz Revue Seats On Sale Wednesday,” Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, April 18, 1921. Hoosier State Chronicles.
Perhaps the most interesting article in the Palladium was the one that appeared the following day, April 19, and covered not Smith but the revue company traveling with her. Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds were the headlining, crowd-drawing act, but her tour included other acts as well: dancers, vaudevillian comedians, and minstrel performers. The appearance of a newly-minted blues and jazz star on the same stage as the historically popular minstrel performers marks and intersection of trends in African American music and performance history. While minstrel performers had both conformed to stereotypes out of employment necessity and defied them through their self-presentation (learn more), Mamie Smith’s rise to stardom ushered in a new era of music divas who presented themselves as upper class, educated, rich, and demanding of respect.
Obrecht writes:
While blues music had been performed in the American South since the very beginning of the twentieth century, no one had made recordings of it before, largely due to racism and the assumption that African-Americans couldn’t – or wouldn’t – buy record players or 78s. “Crazy Blues” changed all that, sparking a mad scramble among record execs to record blues divas. The stars they promoted in this short-lived era of “classic blues” were not the down-home country singers who’d record later in the Roaring Twenties, but the glittering, glamorous, and savvy veterans of tent shows, minstrel troupes, and the vaudeville stage. These mavericks defied stereotypes…
“Colored Star Wears Exprensive Creations,” Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegram, April 22, 1921. Hoosier State Chronicles.
As if in response to this very idea, on April 22 the Palladium followed the coverage of the revue with an article detailing the glamorous appearance and presentation of Smith. The newspaper stated that through her record royalties “the popular young colored star is enabled to indulge her fancy in the latest creations both from Paris and New York, and in each city in which she has appeared a gasp of astonishment has greeted her every appearance, for her gowns are described as riots of color and beauty.”
In a telling sentence, the article called Smith “one of the most gorgeously dressed stars of the musical comedy world.” This notes both the respect for her appearance and success and a misunderstanding of her role in music history. While African American music fans were connecting to Smith’s sincere and authentic portrayal of the blues music that they grew up with, this white Midwestern newspaper still saw her as part of the vaudeville and perhaps even minstrel genres — understandably perhaps since it was marketed as such. While Smith had come from such a tradition, through her work with the blues and and jazz performers she had transcended her past. Black newspapers understood her importance much earlier than white newspapers. On March 13, 1920, the Chicago Defender wrote:
Well, you’ve all heard the famous stars of the white race chirping their stuff on the different makes of phonograph records . . . but we have never – up to now – been able to hear one of our own ladies deliver the canned goods. Now we have the pleasure of being able to say that at last they have recognized the fact that we are here for their service; the OKeh Phonograph Company has initiated the idea by engaging the handsome, popular and capable vocalist, Mamie Gardner Smith.
Similarly, the African American gospel, jazz, and blues music Thomas A. Dorseyexplained, “Colored singing and playing artists are riding to fame and fortune with the current popular demand for ‘blues’ disk recordings and because of the recognized fact that only a Negro can do justice to the native indigo ditties such artists are in demand.”
There were African American audience members at the Richmond performance, who likely had a better understanding of the significance of Smith’s success. The Richmond PalladiumSun-Telegram reported: “The best seats are selling fast from the plat at Weisbrod Music company as white and colored folk alike are wager to see and hear the ‘Queen of the Blues,’ a capacity house is predicted for Saturday night.”
Unfortunately, there are no extant issues of the historic African American newspaper the Indianapolis Recorder for this period. It would be interesting to explore the differences in the coverage of Smith’s performances between a white and black newspaper and perhaps this could be accomplished using the Chicago Defender, but is outside the scope of this post.
As expected, Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds sold-out the Richmond Coliseum, which held 2,500 people, for the April 23, 1921 performance. The next year, the KKK also sold-out the same venue. The Richmond Palladium and Sun-Telegramreported on December 12, 1922 that a crowd awaiting a Klan rally “taxed the space at the Coliseum waiting for the ceremonies quite a long time before the Klansmen finally arrived.” So how was the white population of Richmond able to enjoy an African American musician one year and then attend a Klan rally the next?
While this contradiction may seem surprising, there was (and some argue still is) a tendency for white Americans to de-contextualize African American music from African American culture. That is, the white residents of Richmond were able to appreciate black music while continuing to oppress black people. There has been much written on this topic (two good places to start are Imamu Amiri Baraka‘s The Music: reflections on Jazz and Blues and Perry Hall’s “African American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation“) and an extensive analysis of Smith’s career through this lens is outside the scope of this post. However, advertisements continued after her performance, from which we can draw that she was a hit regardless of why. Notice the advertisement claims that there was “a capacity audience.”
While we were unable to find an article reviewing the Richmond performance or the crowd’s reception, it likely went well because she returned to Indiana the next month. On May 31, 1921, she performed to another capacity crowd at the Oliver Theater in South Bend. The South Bend News-Times covered her performance in much the same manner as the Richmond Palladium. The paper noted in various articles, her fame, her genius, and her status as “the first colored girl artist to attain world-wide fame as a singer and phonograph record star.”
Mamie Smith’s importance to music history is hard to overstate, according to a story on NPR’s All Things Considered for which famed activist Angela Davis (now a professor at University of California/Santa Cruz ) was interviewed. Davis summed up Smith’s importance succinctly:
“The recording of ‘Crazy Blues’ led the way for the professionalization of black music, for the black entertainment industry, and indeed for the immense popularity of black music today.”
Detroit, Michigan, March 30, 1965. Two men meet at a small press conference before the funeral of a slain civil rights activist. Their meeting seems like an unlikely pairing for us today—one a slick haired, brash, and controversial labor leader and the other a measured, eloquent, and inspirational pastor who had galvanized the civil rights movement. The former was there to present a check for $25,000 for the latter’s work on racial equality. Their stories varied tremendously but, at this moment, they intersected, manifesting all the complicated and contradictory impulses of American life during the middle of the twentieth century. Those two men were Jimmy Hoffa and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Music: “The Things That Keep Us Here” by Monomyth, “Almost A Year Ago” by John Deley and the 41 Players, “Crate Digger” by Gunnar Olsen, “Crimson Fly” by Huma-Huma, “Dreamer” by Hazy, “Eternity” by Lahar, and “I Am OK” by Vishmak
