By T. DeWayne Moore
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| The staging at Heathman Plantation for Southern Living magazine invokes a bubolic fascination with the South, a mythic version of a bygone era. Notice the silences, and how space is filled with nostalgia and longing. What don't you see? |
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| An African American family of sharecroppers in the Delta circa 1935 |
By maintaining good relationships with local whites and welcoming the support of the city fathers, she also established a pragmatic program to make the most of their generous patronage. Indeed, she learned how to not only survive but thrive under the city’s more paternalist system of Jim Crow, providing her students and others the ideological tools to wage psychological war against white supremacy. Coleman certainly possessed an intense passion for the literature and poetry of Harlem Renaissance writers such as black radical Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, who celebrated black beauty and deplored racism, and Langston Hughes, whose work attempted to depict the “low-life,” or the essential truth of black life at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder. Coleman delivered lectures from memory on the works of black intellectuals who highlighted the beauty of black life, even among the poorest sharecroppers, which served to counter the negative racial stereotypes that buttressed the myth of white supremacy.
Lizzie Coleman was one of three women who founded the Mississippi Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs (MFCWC) in 1903.[5] Following a regional meeting of the Southeastern Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (SACW), women’s club work swelled in Mississippi and prompted the three women to recruit several of the state’s black women’s clubs to work with the MFCWC. In line with the NACW motto—“Lifting as We Climb”—the MFCWC organized for the “binding together” of women for “social, moral, religious, industrial, and educational betterment, with the fundamental object of raising to the highest plane, home, moral, and civil life.”[6] Coleman, indeed, inspired many Mississippi clubwomen to work on a variety of fronts—“improving home and family life, combatting illiteracy, education and protection of our youth, providing for cultural, recreational, religious, economic and social needs”—to improve African Americans’ quality of life. Though such endeavors in social activism were perhaps typical of middle-class clubwomen, their work was also intrinsically political considering the socioeconomic context of Jim Crow. Coleman and other respectable clubwomen launched notable campaigns to redress the separate, yet wholly inferior resources, available to blacks. In the main, however, she supported and nurtured the black community through the building of quality educational institutions, which taught students to question racial stereotypes and oppose the state’s racist political structure. Her students would grow up and help start the Delta Council of Negro Leadership and enjoy significantly greater access to the franchise in the Queen City.
Lizzie Coleman may have also been influenced by the messages of emigrationism, racial pride and self-defense espoused by African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who enjoyed a good deal of popularity among African Americans in late nineteenth century Greenville. In April 1894, he delivered a lecture at St. Matthews AME Church on Nelson Street on the subject of “The Dark Continent,” according to the Times of Greenville, one of which he could speak with some authority, having recently returned from a long sojourn in Liberia and Sierra Leone.[7] Africa was “one of the more paradisiacal portions of earth” that he had ever seen, and upon his return, he got serious about promoting his vision of emigration. In light of the hardening of social Darwinist-infused white supremacy, Turner concluded that the situation of blacks would never get better in the United States. “I have said, and say yet,” he asserted in a letter to the editor of the Indianapolis Freeman, “that there is no more hope for the black man in this country to become a civil and political factor, than there is for a frog in a snake den. And any man who is too idiotic to see it ought to go and hang himself.”[8] According to historian Mary G. Rolinson, some blacks in Greenville tried to become agents for the African Colonization Society, believing that many blacks would emigrate if given applications and a contact.[9] John Chapple, pious member of Mt. Horeb Missionary Baptist (MB) Church and editor of the upstart weekly newspaper Delta Lighthouse, mentioned an African American convention “to consider plans for emigrating” to Liberia. In his opinion, emigration was a “very wise step,” considering the decrepit state of race relations in the Magnolia State.[10]Though two ships with a total of five hundred or more emigrants sailed to Liberia in the mid-1890s, many returned to America with complaints about disease and poor economic prospects. Bishop Turner nevertheless continued to promote his back-to-Africa program, but other church and secular leaders had begun speaking and writing against emigration. One journalist considered it “out of the question.”[11] Most black folks did not want to emigrate to Africa, and no durable power existed to compel them. Having been born in the United States, blacks folks had the right to stay and exercised that right despite the utter disregard for their human and civil rights. The powerful myths associated with Africa---the unbearable heat and swampy land made it rife with disease and death—also dissuaded scores of African Americans.[12] “If, as Bishop Turner says,” one Mississippi newspaper commented, “the social, political and civil status of the negro is declining, the improvement of that status rests with the negro himself…and he can do it a good deal better in the United States than in Liberia.”[13]
Having resolved themselves to casting down their buckets in the Delta, many African Americans in Washington County embraced the message of self-reliance and economic nationalism espoused by Booker T. Washington, who visited Greenville on his first educational tour through the South. Six thousand people met the Tuskegee Wizard at the train station, and he delivered speeches to throngs of people both inside and outside the courthouse.[14] Washington and his entourage attended a banquet that evening at the Pythian Temple, an event which John Strauther considered “the most successful affair of the kind ever given in Greenville.” As later noted by Washington, the symbols of black economic power in Greenville and Mound Bayou provided strong evidence against the “white supremacist arguments of black retrogression.”[15]
It was most evident on his tour of the black homes and businesses. Washington visited the large bookstore at 209 Washington Avenue operated by Granville Carter, who had outlasted other bookstores, expanded his sales opportunities into other counties, and become one of the most prosperous African Americans in Greenville.[16] He opened Carter’s Book Store in the early 1880s, and over the next decade it grew into the city’s “headquarters for holiday goods…in every line,” including glass and china ware, fireworks, dolls, and other toys.[17], and it remained a fixture in the local community until his retirement in 1927. In 1930, Granville Carter owned a $1,500 home in Greenville.[18] The Times affirmed that “he was always trusted” in his business of selling books, stationary and children’s toys to both blacks and whites. Though many blacks were “beaten up and given no chance” in Mississippi, the success of Carter demonstrated that the people of Greenville were “always ready to acknowledge service whether from black skin or white skin.”[19] Carter had filed bankruptcy in 1898, but he reopened at the same location and, according to the Times, operated an “A1 Book and Periodical” store at 207 Washington Street, and “he always kept on hand a large and complete assortment of school books, slates, pens, pencil, rulers, ink, and in fact all school supplies.”[20]
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| The New York Times, June 12, 1910. |
While black doctors and dentists, a black printer, and several black funeral home operators setup shop in buildings on Nelson Street or the fringes of downtown, and a black-owned newsstand and black shoe shiners regularly served whites along the business district on Main Street and Washington Street, the majority of black women worked as cooks and maids, bringing the streets to life in the mornings as they made their way to white homes. In 1906, the Delta Savings Bank opened its doors on Walnut Street with the help of several black business leaders, particularly landowner and undertaker John Strauther, who opened the city’s “first modern scientific funeral establishment” and, “by his thrift and industry,” amassed a small fortune in land holdings.[23] As grand master of exchequer in the Grand Lodge of Colored Pythians, Strauther had brought the fraternal organization out of a large deficit to a surplus of $30,000.[24] The bank thrived for several years under his leadership, but it suffered after his passing a few years later as well as the forced exile of Bishop Edward Lampton, who had allegedly requested that the white telephone operator use courtesy titles when addressing his daughters. The bank, in fact, survived largely through the patronage of black prostitutes who serviced an exclusive white clientele and cajoled them to make deposits.[25] The brothels on Blanton Street (changed to North Street after 1910 at the request of the Blanton family[26]) conducted a brisk business in the notorious red light district of Greenville, where all prostitutes had to get a health certificate each week.[27] The bawdy houses were supplied with alcohol from surrounding saloons, and on some nights each of the brothels might entertain more than one hundred randy clients. “On Sundays,” one local complained, “these places fairly run over with the men and boys of our town, drinking and carousing.” Though absent from the thoroughfares leading to the depots and steamboat landings, “where decent people are compelled to pass at all hours,” the “houses of prostitution” served as much more than a place where men could quench their sexual appetites.[28]
The Blue Front was the place to go in Hollandale.
The red light district also allowed its white patrons to propagate lies about black women’s inherent sexual inclinations and indiscriminate tastes. The relatively-hedonistic stereotype of the “Jezebel,” a sexually-insatiable temptress, had its roots in the antebellum South, when slave owners auctioned off and bred black women, who had no control over their own bodies, to maximize profits. “Emancipation did not end the social and political usefulness of this stereotype,” argues historian Melissa Harris-Perry, who succinctly points out that “access to black women’s bodies was an assumption supported both by their history as legal property and by the myth of their sexual promiscuity.”[29] The sexual temptress, indeed, was not the only negative stereotype attached to black women, but it served as a powerful promotional device for Greenville’s brothels—savage, wild animals of lust, ready to go anyplace, anytime, with anyone.[30] The hardening of racial stereotypes at the end of the nineteenth century projected clear messages about black women to white men—telling them, since they are all prostitutes, “it is all right to solicit black women and girls for sex.” It also sent unambiguous messages to black women—saying “this is how it is,” white men can rape you; “this is who you are,” a whore; “this is what you’re for,” satiating the sexual desires of white men.[31] Danielle McGuire has recently examined sexualized violence and the defense of black womanhood in the South and found it served as a catalyst in the black freedom struggle. The unpunished rape of black women—in many ways similar to lynching—functioned as both a psychological and physical tool of intimidation, which buttressed male domination as well as white supremacy. And yet, sexualized violence has yet to be included in the history of the black freedom struggle. McGuire’s recent study “At the Dark End of the Street” argues that white males used sex as a weapon of terror to not only undermine the black freedom struggle, but also to maintain both white privilege and the power to control access to black and white women’s bodies.[32] 
The old red light district along Blanton Street ran into Nelson Street, the black business section where African Americans “made their way until segregation ended,” or what Wilmoth Carter called “Negro Main Street,” which some locals once referred to as “the black wall street of Greenville, Mississippi.”[33]
Notes
[1] John Barry, Rising Tide, 134.
[2] L.C. Holmes, “Lizzie Coleman,” in History of Blacks in Greenville, Mississippi, from 1868 to 1975 (Greenville Travel Club, 1975), 8.
[3] “Lizzie Coleman Dies Suddenly at School Exercises,” DDT, May 28, 1931, p.8.
[4] “Jerry and Lizzie Coleman,” 1900 US Census, Greenville, Washington, Mississippi; Roll: 832; Page: 26A; Enumeration District:0082; FHL microfilm: 1240832.
[5] Ursula J. Wade Foster, a faculty member at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (Alcorn A & M, now Alcorn State University) and Mattie F. Rowan, the first lady of Alcorn, were the other two women.
[6] Tiyi Morris, Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South: Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015), 9.
[7] The Greenville Times, April 14, 1894, p.3.
[8] Andre E. Johnson, The Forgotten Prophet: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and the African American Prophetic Tradition (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 76-77.
[9] Rolinson, Grassroots Garveyism, 33.
[10] BDH, Sep 24, 1899, p.2.
[11] BDH, Dec 1, 1898, p.4.
[12] Johnson, The Forgotten Prophet, 77.
[13] BDH, Dec 1, 1898, p.4.
[14] “Large Crowd Hears Speech of Booker T. Washington,” TDD, Oct 15, 1908, p.6.
[15] David H. Jackson, Jr., Booker T. Washington and the Struggle Against White Supremacy: The Southern Educational Tours, 1908-1912 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 71-72.
[16] Booker T. Washington, “Negro Disfranchisement and the Negro in Business,” Outlook 93:6 (Oct 9, 1909): 310.
[17] The city council had purchased some books for local schools from Carter in 1884; see, TGT, Mar 8, 1884, p.3; TGT, Dec 7, 1889, p.5.
[18] Granville was born in Tennessee in around 1952, but he had moved to Greenville by 1870. At the age of eighteen, he worked as a domestic servant in the homes of whites, where he gained an appreciation of literature and history; see, 1870; Census Place: Greenville, Washington, Mississippi; Roll: M593_752; Page: 9A; Image: 21; Family History Library Film: 552251; 1930; Census Place: Greenville, Washington, Mississippi; Roll: 1171; Page: 8B; Enumeration District: 0008; Image: 150.0; FHL microfilm: 2340906.
[19] John Barry, Rising Tide, 179.
[20] TGT, Apr 11, 1891, p.1; “Notice of Bankruptcy,” TGT, Nov 26, 1898, p.2.
[21] James Lawrence Nichols and William Henry Crogman, Progress of a Race: Or, The Remarkable Advancement of the American Negro, from the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance, and Poverty of the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence, Honor and Trust (Naperville, IL: J.L. Nichols & Company, 1920), 229.
[22] “National Negro Business League.,” DDT, Aug 10, 1905, p.1.
[23] “The Delta Savings Bank,” DDT, Mar 10, 1909, p.1; DDT, Oct 8, 1910, p.49; “Six Early Banks Had Fewer Debts,” DDT, Oct 31, 1951, p.60;
[24] “Grand Lodge of Colored Pythians,” The Greenville (MS) Times, July 13, 1907, p.9.
[25] Levye Chapple Sr. et al., History of Blacks in Greenville, Mississippi, 1868-1975 (Greenville, MS: Greenville Travel Club, 1975), p.2.
[26] Ben Wasson, “Crescent City Remembered,” DDT, May 29, 1977, p.13.
[27] Salvadore Signa, interview by Roberta Miller, December 1, 1976, Washington County Library System Oral History Project: Greenville and Vicinity.
[28] TGT, July 22, 1905, p.1.
[29] Karn Williams, review of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, by Melissa V. Harris-Perry, (Washington, DC) Afro-American Red Star, Sep 24, 2011, p.C8.
[30] Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 21-30.
[31] Jessica Spector, Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate about the Sex Industry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 20.
[32] Danielle L. McGuire, “At The Dark End of the Street: Sexualized Violence, Community Mobilization and the African-American Freedom Struggle,” PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2007.
[33] Dr. L. Jordan Jackson, Triggering The Memories (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris Corporation, 2012), 52; Wilmoth A. Carter, “Negro Main Street as a Symbol of Discrimination,” Phylon (Fall 1960): 237.
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