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The Boston NAACP and the Decline of the Abolitionist Impulse

MARK SCHNEIDER


BOSTON'S PROGRESSIVE RACIAL IMPULSE became exhausted by the end of the 1920s. The city's chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1912 and guardian of the abolitionist flame, for nearly a decade had kept the issue of racial justice before the public. But by the end of the 1920s, the Boston NAACP branch had virtually collapsed. The early 1920s had been a time of hope for African Americans. They expected that their loyal participation in the World War—as had been the case after the Civil War—would secure their full rights as citizens. Warren G. Harding's election to the presidency, along with big Republican majorities in Congress, promised civil rights victories. But the success they sought was not to be. In Boston, the NAACP branch acutely felt the impact of a changing national agenda, made more palpable by internal racial tensions, rivalry with William Monroe Trotter's National Equal Rights League, and the chapter's inability to combat employment discrimination. Despite Boston's liberal race relations in most cases, the resulting stagnation left intact unresolved tensions that finally exploded in the 1960s and 1970s. 1
      Four related developments signaled the demise of Boston's preeminence in national civil rights matters. First and foremost, black Bostonians could not end the pervasive employment discrimination that relegated them to the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. Because most other northern cities welcomed African Americans of the Great Migration into their factories, blacks heading north largely avoided Boston, thus restricting the city's black population and its political clout. Second, black Bostonians felt betrayed by the political process when Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge failed to fight for the Dyer anti-lynching bill, despite their persistent efforts to secure his support. Third, although Boston NAACPers helped stop segregation at Harvard, this proved largely a defensive victory with mostly symbolic impact. Finally, Boston's NAACP chapter, the only integrated one among over 300 association branches, stumbled into a financial squabble with the national office in New York that thoroughly demoralized its members. Boston's relatively liberal racial climate—African Americans attended integrated schools, entered public facilities freely, and encountered little trouble with police as private citizens—gave no cause for continued, locally driven efforts. The city's civil rights community fragmented and new organizations emerged in the politically radical 1930s. 2
      Curiously, historians have been slow to focus attention on the activities of the NAACP, one of the most important civic organizations in American history. This neglect applies especially to study of the organization's local branches. Charles Flint Kellogg wrote the first volume of a history of the NAACP, covering the first decade after its founding in 1909, but he died before completing the project. There are some good studies of individual association leaders and important issues related to the association, but just as labor historians have moved away from studying trade unions to analyzing working-class communities, historians of African America have concentrated lately on individual black communities. Despite this general trend away from institutional histories, the time is ripe to complete Kellogg's plan: the NAACP and its branches deserve attention as the oldest and most important civil rights organization in American history.1 3
      In the history of the NAACP the Boston branch always constituted a special case. White descendants of abolitionists made up the majority of its prominent early leaders: the branch's first president was Francis Jackson Garrison, youngest son of William Lloyd Garrison, who served from 1912 to 1916; Moorfield Storey, Charles Sumner's secretary during the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, served as national president of the NAACP during its first two decades and always maintained his prominence on the Boston scene; and attorney Albert E. Pillsbury, nephew of the New Hampshire radical abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, contributed his legal skills. In 1911, Boston hosted the NAACP's first national gathering outside New York. In the decade that followed, the Boston branch was the association's largest and strongest. It also remained the most integrated—almost every other branch had become, by 1920, almost entirely African American. 4
      The racial mix in the Boston branch set it up for its most fundamental difficulties. Almost ironically, the legacy of strong abolitionist work among white Bostonians laid the groundwork for this trouble. Unlike other NAACP branches, in which black leaders quickly took the reins and black members comprised the majority of the rank and file, the Boston branch persisted throughout its first decades to look like a mid-nineteenth-century abolitionist convention—well intentioned and predominantly white. The paternalist paradigm suggested by the white leadership was not bound to last in the era of the "New Negro." 5
      From the very beginning of the Boston branch, however, there were a few very powerful black figures working alongside the white leadership: Butler Roland Wilson, an attorney who handled many civil rights cases for local plaintiffs; his wife, Mary Evans Wilson; and local ministers such as Reverend Benjamin Swain. Born in 1860, Butler Wilson graduated from Atlanta University and from the Boston University School of Law. As he established himself as a lawyer and preeminent member of Boston's Afro-Brahmin upper class in the 1880s, he also made a name for himself by editing the black community newspaper The Hub with his colleague Archibald H. Grimké, who later became president of the NAACP's Washington, D.C., branch. Wilson joined his social group in their rejection of the accommodationist policies of Booker T. Washington, the nation's preeminent black leader and the founder of the Tuskegee Institute; Washington excited controversy among African Americans with his conciliatory strategy in general and his emphasis on manual education for black students in particular. Wilson joined in the inauguration of the NAACP Boston branch in 1912 and continued to serve the association over many years: as branch executive secretary from 1912 to 1926, as branch president from 1926 to 1936, and on the national board of directors in the 1920s. Mary Wilson, a physical education teacher, wrote for the association's branch bulletin and traveled the New England and northeast regions for the NAACP in its early years. During the World War she organized the Women's Service Club to aid black men in uniform.2 6
      William Monroe Trotter, editor and founder of the weekly black community newspaper The Guardian and a central figure among Boston's Afro-Brahmin elite, typified the absence of black participation in the Boston branch. Trotter not only chose to stay out of the organization himself—concentrating his efforts on his National Equal Rights League—he also drew other black activists away from the NAACP. A Harvard graduate and the son of a veteran from the 55th Massachusetts infantry regiment, Trotter took a strong anticonciliatory stand throughout his career. He was the first black activist to challenge Booker T. Washington's accommodationist strategies. Similarly, while Trotter supported the aims of the NAACP, he regarded it with some suspicion as at best a white ally of his own civil rights organization. Consequently, until about 1920, Trotter's position at the center of Boston's black community gave him the ability to sway many of the city's African Americans away from the NAACP. Although this position became increasingly tenuous as the NAACP became black-led itself, his skepticism marked the Boston branch well into its first decades.3 7
      Immediately following World War I, Mary Wilson organized a membership drive that brought in about 2,500 new black members to the Boston NAACP. This peak in growth coincided with the phenomenon known as the Great Migration, roughly 1915 to 1929, during which perhaps a million migrants left the South to find new work in northern cities. These migrants, pushed out by the persistence of Jim Crow and the failure of the cotton crop, were attracted both to the relative freedom of the North and jobs that paid two or three times the prevailing wages in the South. Ironically, the surge in numbers this brought to Boston's NAACP branch did not parallel any such surge in numbers—or prosperity—for the city's black population as a whole: the issue of employment discrimination, a product of the city's specific history and ethnic rivalries, kept any such growth in check. During this era black population increases in other northern cities far outpaced those of Boston, where the black population grew from 13,564 in 1910 to only 20,574 in 1930. The black percentage of Boston's population remained at 2 percent for these twenty years, and in 1930 the city ranked only fortieth in total black population. During the same period, New York's African American population jumped from 91,709 to 327,706 (from a city 1.9 percent black to one that was 4.7 percent black), while Detroit's black population soared from 5,741 to 120,066.4 8
      Throughout the North, southern migrants worked the hard and heavy jobs in the country's expanding industrial sector, toiling in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the stockyards of Chicago and Omaha, the auto plants of Detroit, or in the diverse manufacturing centers of New York and Philadelphia. In Boston, however, white workingmen barred African Americans from shipyards, auto plants, machine shops, and other manufacturing or commercial establishments that paid well. As Harvard graduate student Percy Julian noted: "Here in Boston you open to [the Negro] the door to a grand Opera House, but in nine cases out of ten you shut upon him the door to a factory which would afford him the means of a ticket."5 Consequently, despite the generally favorable civil rights climate in Boston, African Americans remained at the bottom of the working class. 9
      Writing in 1914, the social worker and sociologist John Daniels observed that little had changed since the census of 1900. He found that the overwhelming number of black workers were restricted to menial jobs—servants, waiters, hostlers, porters, and laundry workers. Higher up on the social scale one might find occasional longshoremen, postal employees, teamsters, or Pullman porters. In 1928, Eolyn C. Klugh surveyed young Boston colored women who possessed some high school education and discovered that 40 percent were elevator operators. Of the remaining women, most worked as clerks, stenographers, or typists in the civil service or at black-owned businesses because whites refused to hire African Americans. Only sixteen women taught in the public schools. Boston's leading black writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Dorothy West, captured this bleak employment picture in her short story, "The Typewriter." West described a middle-aged janitor whose dreams of upward mobility had long since faded and who escaped into a fantasy world (like James Thurber's character Walter Mitty) by imagining himself a wealthy businessman.6 10
      This dilemma challenged Boston's civil rights activists. Unable to break down the factory doors, they opposed employment discrimination in the marginal areas that they could affect. Even the realms in which they did have some hope—diversely represented by menial labor, petty clerical, and professional—were further curtailed by the reigning conservative constitutional law: Boston advocates could find no legal wedge to pry open private business and white-only unions. The very concept of compelling an employer to adopt fair employment practices did not surface until the radical era of the Depression and only gained substantial ground with A. Philip Randolph's threatened March on Washington in 1941. 11
      So the NAACP did what little it could. It hounded several occupational training schools that had accepted black applicants only to expel them after discovering their true ethnicity. Among the very first actions of the Boston group was to shame a cooking school and a dental school into readmitting rejected African American candidates. They failed in an effort to force General Electric to take on a black student from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a student engineer. When the Underwood Typewriter Company told an African American woman that they did not accept "colored people," Butler Wilson, pessimistic about the prospects of a lawsuit, lamented that "This is a private concern and I know of no way to reach them."7 12
      The Boston branch encountered another trouble area in Boston hospitals, which traditionally refused to accept African American trainees. The practice came to a head in 1927 with Thelma Pearl Perry, a twenty-one-year-old graduate of Cambridge Latin School who worked as a clerk but yearned to be a nurse. She complained to the NAACP that not even City Hospital would accept her as a student nurse. Her complaint coincided with that of Dr. Cornelius N. Garland, an African American physician who maintained a small clinic on East Springfield Street. In 1928 he tried to expand it into the Plymouth Hospital, a facility designed to serve the African American community. Civil rights activists divided over this proposal. Moorfield Storey originally backed Dr. Garland but later withdrew from the controversy. Trotter opposed the idea, thinking it a concession to Jim Crow practices. The Boston NAACP itself hesitated to act on the matter; Butler Wilson wrote a letter to the editor of the Boston Herald offering a "we're still considering it" line. The proposal had practical as well as ideological problems: Boston's small black community, unlike those of larger cities such as New York and Chicago, could not support such an institution. Ultimately, Boston's African American medical community convinced City Hospital to integrate, and the Plymouth Hospital plan died.8 13
      These efforts to increase African American job opportunities revealed the intractability of employment discrimination in Boston and the relative powerlessness of Boston's NAACP. Furthermore, as industry in greater Boston went into decline, Mayor James Michael Curley consolidated the job patronage system, rewarding loyal voters and fellow Irish Americans with jobs on the city payroll or in the transportation and utilities departments. The Irish union bosses kept the construction trades within their communities, and the railroad brotherhoods maintained racially exclusive clauses in their national charters. For a time, the NAACP organized a Committee on Industrial Opportunities, which maintained a listing of employers who hired black people. They hoped to prove the reliability of black labor to prospective employers. But as Elizabeth Pleck, Stephen Thernstrom, and Gerald Gill have all demonstrated, local employment opportunities for African Americans remained few, exacerbated by the small size of the black community and the pressure of white trade union and political leaders to hire "their own" people.9 14
      The discrimination case with which the Boston NAACP had the most success—and the best instance of collaboration with the national organization—actually pertained to elite educational opportunity rather than fundamental employment opportunity. Against a background of growing anti-immigrant feeling that culminated in the immigration restriction bills of 1922 and 1924, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell took several decidedly exclusionary measures. At the opening of the decade, Lowell and others in his social and political circle were alarmed in general at the rising tide of immigration and in particular at the takeover of Boston politics by raucous Irishmen such as James Michael Curley, who had won election to a second mayoral term the year before. Concurrent with these forces, Lowell proposed a 15 percent ceiling for Jewish admissions to Harvard and surreptitiously banned blacks from the freshman dormitories. The latter decision resulted from a new mandate requiring freshmen—that is, all white freshmen—to live in the dorms. The ban eliminated the possibility that white southerners would end up rooming with black students, which would later be Lowell's excuse for the action.10 While only a handful of elite black students would feel the hurtful effects of this decree, its symbolic force, if left to stand, would have established an ugly policy of racial segregation at the nation's most prestigious university. 15
      In the fall of 1921, five African American students were admitted to the freshman class, including Edward Wilson, Butler Wilson's son, and Pritchett Klugh, the son of NAACP backer Reverend David S. Klugh. William J. Knox, Jr., a New Bedford youth whose family was active in the NAACP, received an assignment to Standish Hall. He quickly received an evasive letter requesting that he surrender his key, citing an unspecified misunderstanding. The trusting student never suspected that the problem was his skin color, until a clarifying letter from the same administrator arrived. Knox and graduating senior Edwin Jourdain, Jr., protested directly to President Lowell. Lowell replied frankly that he was barring blacks from the freshmen dorm, but he added disingenuously that he did this only to mollify the sentiments of southern students.11 His statement lacked weight, since the small group of southerners at Harvard knew northern customs; no extant evidence indicates that these students inspired the segregation. Butler Wilson noted that when his son won the class billiards trophy, the southern students were warmest in their praise for him.12 Responsibility for the segregation fell squarely on Lowell's shoulders and reflected the increasing conservatism of the Brahmin aristocracy. 16
      Word of the new policy quickly circulated among Harvard students, faculty, and alumni. In response, NAACP national president Moorfield Storey and The Nation's Lewis Gannett initiated a petition among prominent, liberal Harvard graduates. The petition appealed to the tradition of antislavery Harvardians such as John Quincy Adams and Civil War colonel Robert Gould Shaw. The Boston NAACP branch organized a committee chaired by its treasurer, George Bradford, and by the summer of 1922 the petition to Lowell had accumulated 143 signatures of prominent alumni.13 17
      Unfortunately for Lowell, the next black student excluded from Harvard dormitories was Roscoe Conkling Bruce, Jr., son of Harvard's 1902 class orator and grandson of Mississippi senator Blanche K. Bruce. The treatment accorded to young Bruce amplified the protest begun by the Boston committee, triggering a movement among African American Harvard graduates across the nation. Bruce's father wrote to Walter White at the NAACP office in New York and the association began gathering protest messages. Washington, D.C., municipal court judge Robert H. Terrell, former diplomat Archibald H. Grimké, and Boston attorney William Henry Lewis all contributed statements. "Is the stock of the Puritans indeed dead?" asked Crisis editor W. E. B. Du Bois, the university's first black Ph.D. The day has come, he declared, "when the grandson of a slave had to teach democracy to a president of Harvard." The association released James Weldon Johnson's letter to the press. "Harvard's surrender of its tradition ... to the slaveholder's prejudice intensifies the very problem which you as Harvard's spokesman are professing to meet." The New York and Boston papers covered the story throughout the winter and early spring of 1923, thus further embarrassing the university's embattled president.14 18
      The campaign succeeded. In April 1923, the Board of Overseers discreetly reversed Lowell without appearing to disagree with him. There would be no limit on admissions based on race or ethnicity. Black students would be admitted to the dormitories, but students would select their own roommates rather than have them assigned, thereby avoiding the possibility of pairing a racist with a black student. Through its involvement in this Boston area crisis, the NAACP helped establish itself as the nation's preeminent civil rights organization; unfortunately, the local branch nonetheless accrued little benefit.15 19
      For the most part, the Boston NAACP found itself rarely in sync with its parent organization. The national association, facing a nation so bitterly hostile to black aspirations, mostly had to focus energy and resources on the more urgent problems of the franchise, segregation, lynching, false imprisonment, and the southern sharecropping system. One of the leading battles in this array did involve members of the Boston branch, and Massachusetts politics generally, quite closely. After the 1920 election, NAACP activists geared up for a concerted national battle on behalf of the Dyer anti-lynching bill. Congressman Leonidas Dyer's bill made lynching a federal crime, allowed the heirs of victims to recover up to $10,000 from counties where a lynching occurred, and provided for the punishment of law enforcement officials who participated in the extra-legal killings. Based on an earlier draft of an anti-lynching bill by Boston NAACP founding member Albert E. Pillsbury, this strong measure attracted widespread African American support. At a crucial juncture in April 1922, Butler Wilson persuaded national secretary James Weldon Johnson to work through Senate Majority Leader Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts. For the rest of the campaign, the national association cooperated with Lodge, a strategy that ultimately proved disappointing.16 20
      Nationally, the NAACP at first reacted cautiously to the Dyer bill. Moorfield Storey, its national president, held the improbable distinction of being a former president of the American Bar Association who had been a leader of the anti-imperialist movement. From the founding of the NAACP in 1909 to his death in 1929, he was the country's leading civil rights attorney, playing an important role in four significant Supreme Court cases. A cautious legal tactician, Storey was sensitive to the constitutional questions raised by a bill that would vigorously assert federal power in an area previously reserved to the states. A familiar list of Supreme Court decisions had weakened the Fourteenth Amendment since Reconstruction, seemingly restricting its applicability only to positive action taken by a state to deny an individual his rights as a U.S. citizen. The Dyer bill attacked inaction by states and constitutional critics called attention to this feature. Storey recognized the complications raised by the Dyer bill, but in a series of letters to James Weldon Johnson and George B. Wickersham, U.S. Attorney General in the William Howard Taft administration, he convinced himself that the Dyer bill was a valid measure.17 21
      Johnson never entertained such doubts, believing the constitutional question represented a red herring thrown up by the bill's opponents. He met several times with candidate and then President Warren G. Harding, who condemned lynching. Johnson had helped put a general anti-lynching plank in the Republican 1920 platform. Recognizing the new political opportunities, Johnson placed passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill at the top of the association's agenda in 1921. After a hard-fought campaign, the bill passed the House during a raucous session in January 1922; votes adhered almost exactly to party lines. 22
      Southern Democrats in the House opposed the measure for openly racist reasons. On the floor, they defended the lynching of "niggers" as a necessary check on the assumed propensity of black men to rape white women. In the Senate, the bill confronted a more intellectually challenging opponent. William Borah of Idaho, a Progressive Republican and member of the Judiciary Committee, opposed lynching but held reservations regarding the bill's constitutionality. Since Borah chaired the five-man subcommittee assigned to the bill, Johnson hoped the old lion of the Senate would lead the fight for passage.18 23
      Late in April 1922, Johnson spoke at Boston's Twentieth Century Club and at Unity House in Park Square. During his visit, Butler Wilson persuaded Johnson that Borah could not be trusted and that it would be wiser to have Henry Cabot Lodge champion the bill. Lodge was a complex figure: a bedrock of the Yankee business establishment, the man who sunk President Woodrow Wilson's campaign for the League of Nations, a "broad-gauged" imperialist and Big Navy man, and a sponsor of anti-immigration legislation. He had, however, led the fight for a Federal Elections bill in 1890 that would have protected the vote of African Americans in the South. Lodge faced a tough election fight in November and regarded Borah as a political opponent who threatened party unity.19 24
      Accordingly, Butler Wilson and Johnson met with Lodge early in May. They offered him a pro-Dyer petition signed by prominent politicians and leaders of professional groups. Duly impressed, Lodge presented the petition to the Senate a few days later and a meeting with Borah gave Johnson and Wilson grounds for optimism, although the Idaho senator remained undecided over the bill's constitutionality. Wilson, Johnson, and their Washington colleagues "felt decidedly encouraged after their visit to the Capitol." Johnson thanked Lodge for his support in a letter; with the letter, he enclosed news articles about the burning of three black men in Texas.20 25
      In The Guardian, William Monroe Trotter charged that NAACP leaders, by their inaction, had needlessly let the bill get bogged down. Working his own angle on the issue, Trotter visited Lodge at his Beacon Street office soon after Lodge's meeting with the NAACP. The move was a striking one for both parties, since Trotter had vilified Lodge in his newspaper in 1906 after the Brownsville, Texas, affair: Lodge had refused to back a congressional investigation into this infamous case, which resulted in the dishonorable discharge of many African American soldiers. That Lodge showed Trotter every courtesy during their 1922 meeting suggests his interest in courting—at least to some degree—the Massachusetts black vote, however small. Trotter, unaware of and thus overlooking Borah's importance, urged Lodge to speed matters up by pressing Judiciary to report the bill out quickly.21 26
      Lodge did as Trotter suggested. Borah, still waiting for promised NAACP briefs on the constitutional question, telegrammed Johnson to send them in at once. Wilson, Storey, and William Henry Lewis, another prominent African American attorney from Boston, had not completed their arguments. Johnson rushed to Washington with the hastily completed briefs to find Borah newly enraged at Lodge—and perhaps hoping to hurt him by turning against the bill. This Borah did, joining the two Democrats on the subcommittee to oppose the bill. "Trotter gummed the case up by his action," Johnson complained bitterly to a colleague. Since African American newspapers covered the progress of the bill closely, the association issued a press release explaining their strategy and diplomatically rebuking Trotter.22 27
      Congressman Dyer compounded the problem by alienating Lodge. Speaking in Boston, he told his audience that they were well placed to pressure Lodge because he needed their votes in November. "I would gladly vote for a Democrat if he were willing to help in this great cause," he declared. Even Butler Wilson's rock-ribbed Republicanism was showing the strain. In a speech to the NAACP national convention in Newark, New Jersey, he concluded that "if the Republican Party does not keep the faith, it ought to be wiped out of office."23 28
      Not bound by its subcommittee report, the full committee approved the bill eight to six, albeit with a nod to the possibly unconstitutional features. The convincing argument had come from New York attorney Herbert K. Stockton; his approach focused on a different line of precedents, which affirmed that federal law could be brought to bear against local law enforcement in conspiracy with criminals.24 With this hurdle cleared, the battle moved on to the Senate vote. 29
      Lodge's support for some version of the bill was genuine. In correspondence with the Massachusetts Civic Alliance, a law-and-order group that opposed the bill, he decried lynching as "a disgrace to our civilization" that mocked law and order. Yet NAACP leaders sensed that he gave it a very low priority. When a New York Tribune article reported that Republican leaders were prepared to abandon the bill, Johnson and Wilson wrote concerned letters; Lodge reassured them the report was false.25 30
      NAACP leaders encouraged a vigorous public relations campaign on the bill's behalf. In June, the Boston Transcript and Boston Post backed the bill. The Springfield NAACP sent a batch of telegrams to Lodge in July, and Johnson addressed a concerned Springfield meeting in August, hoping to keep the issue alive. Johnson, Speaker of the House Frederick H. Gillette, and Dyer addressed 800 people at Springfield's auditorium. Assistant secretary Walter White met with New Bedford's mayor and generated thirty-five telegrams to Lodge. Yet, when the Senate reconvened in September, Lodge had abandoned his post. He assigned the bill to Samuel R. Shortridge of California, an obscure first-termer easily tricked by southerners who manipulated him into yielding the floor. By the time Shortridge got it back, Lodge and other prominent Republicans had left the floor. There was no quorum, and the bill passed over to a special post-election session.26 31
      Perhaps as a sign of his concern for the black vote, Lodge arranged a meeting for Trotter with President Harding just before the election. In November, Lodge barely squeaked past his Democratic opponent while Republican gubernatorial candidate Channing Cox cruised to an easy victory. Lodge had lost Boston by a two to one vote. He won majorities in only three wards, and lost Ward 13, which was 25 percent African American. Boston blacks apparently had done what they could to punish Lodge for his faithlessness.27 32
      When the Senate reconvened, southern senators commenced a well-organized filibuster. Senator Oscar Underwood of Alabama told the majority leaders that the Senate would conduct no business until the bill was withdrawn. At a Republican caucus meeting on December 2, the bill's supporters gave in. The Dyer bill was dead; two years of NAACP campaigning came to naught. Lodge told reporters that the bill should have passed and that the Republicans only reluctantly gave in to take up the shipping, appropriation, and farm bills. Johnson had met with Lodge that morning; he recalled the senator's promise that the party would not back down. Following their meeting, Johnson and Lodge exchanged angry letters, but all the NAACP secretary could do was mourn Lodge's betrayal in his New York Age column.28 33
      For Senator Lodge, the Dyer bill's defeat was a minor concern; he was a veteran politician without emotional investment in the matter. For Boston African Americans, however, the defeat represented a serious blow that further eroded their political voice. Nationally, the Democrats remained under the domination of their southern allies and, locally, the party lay in the grip of the same Irish politicians and trade unionists who blocked black employment opportunities. Even the Progressive and Regular wings of the Republicans had disappointed African Americans. In Boston, however, the episode marked a significant step in the long process of unhinging the African American electorate from the Republican party. In the next decade, the Curley machine would find loyal lieutenants among black Bostonians. 34
      While most efforts early in the 1920s had found the Boston branch and the national organization more or less out of step, the middle of the decade actually found the two in direct conflict. The significant difference in racial makeup—while the Boston branch remained mostly white in leadership the rest of the NAACP had become predominantly black—undergirded general and specific difficulties. Most important, the branch's white leaders could not identify with its largely African American membership base. More immediately, a serious financial misunderstanding with the national office demoralized local white activists and helped drive them into retirement or out of the organization altogether. This incident, a tragi-comedy of errors, brought to a close the domination of Boston's abolitionist descendants over the city's reform tradition. The corresponding rise of an African American leadership over the city's branch, however, revealed in the end that Boston's small black community possessed little national influence. 35
      In the winter and spring of 1925, several Boston contributors to the NAACP complained to the national office that they had not received receipts for their donations. Checking the New York accounts, auditors discovered that other longtime Boston donors had given money to the local branch—amounting to $450—that never made its way to the national office. Further, the local branch, against NAACP procedures, had deducted from their transfers to New York the expenses of collecting for a special defense fund, had retained membership fees that belonged to New York, and had failed to report the names of its donors. Assistant secretary Walter White drew up an account of these transgressions in a report complete with appendices marked legalistically as "exhibits." He pointed to the "gravity" of the situation and mailed the report to all members of the Boston executive committee.29 36
      This indictment profoundly distressed several veteran Boston NAACPers. Older men from prominent Brahmin families, their roster included George G. Bradford, Ingersoll Bowditch, and Rolfe Cobleigh. To their minds, they stood accused of embezzling the unaccounted funds. The accusation inverted the paradigm of paternalist race relations. In the past, wealthy whites who contributed money to black institutions demanded a strict accounting of how their funds were allocated. Now, the shoe was on the other foot. The Boston branch set up an auditing committee, with Bradford as the chair.30 37
      Within a few months the Boston leaders accounted for all the apparently missing money, in one case producing a canceled check that New York had failed to credit. The Bostonians admitted to sloppy bookkeeping; they had remitted lump sums that, when broken down, showed at least that they were honest. They also acknowledged some less-than-frugal expenses: they had spent money on membership drives and had paid staffers for work typically done by volunteers. But now the matter should come to an end, they declared, and both sides move forward in good faith.31 38
      This response did not satisfy Walter White, who took a hard line against all that the Boston report did not say. In a memo to James Weldon Johnson, White insisted that the Bostonians had missed the point. No one had questioned their integrity. The real problem was the appropriation for local administrative purposes of money belonging to New York—funds, whatever the actual amounts, needed for other critical NAACP cases.32 Equally important, White argued, any hint of financial mismanagement jeopardized future fundraising activities, the viability of the NAACP, and the very cause of civil rights. One example that would bear White out was a fund established by Charles Garland, a young Harvard graduate from Carver, Massachusetts, to advance liberal causes. The Garland Fund, on the board of which Johnson sat, ultimately financed the course of action that led to the Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954.33 The association needed to protect its reputation for fiscal integrity to encourage similarly vital donations. 39
      An exchange of letters between Boston leader Rolfe Cobleigh and Arthur Spingarn of the NAACP's national legal committee further heightened tensions between Boston and New York. Cobleigh, whose position as editor of The Congregationalist magazine suggested his prominence and rectitude, complained that New York's original inquiry, "reading like a grand jury indictment, gave a strong suggestion of misappropriation of funds." Because it was mailed to all local board members, the charges could prove damaging to several individuals' reputations. Nonetheless, following White's memorandum, Johnson wrote the Boston branch a careful, seven-page letter, asserting that it had failed to conform to association procedures and persisted in raising the false issue of the personal integrity of the branch's leadership, which the New York office did not question.34 40
      The distressed Boston leaders were now ready to quit. Cobleigh, Bradford, and Reverend Benjamin Swain advised national president Moorfield Storey that they had had enough. Storey wrote immediately to Johnson and Mary White Ovington, the chair of the national board. What should have been a teapot tempest instead had produced a major crisis involving the three highest officers of the NAACP. "I am appalled to find that a situation has grown up between the Boston office and the New York office which threatens the most disastrous consequences," Storey began. He insisted that the board of directors pass a conciliatory resolution and urged Johnson personally to send a mollifying letter to Butler Wilson. He emphasized the underlying local political problem: "Trotter stands aloof with his forces in a critical attitude," waiting to pick up the pieces of the local branch should it collapse. Boston's membership base had shrunk from 3,000 to 300 in a few years. If the national office did not show that it trusted its local leaders, all would be lost in a city that could still contribute, at least financially, to the national movement.35 41
      Johnson believed that New York's interpretation of the dispute was right, but he yielded the principle to keep Storey's confidence. "If Mr. Storey had not been drawn into this," he told Ovington, "I would not feel that the entire matter was worth the energy and time it is now consuming." At its December meeting, the board of directors voted the conciliatory resolution that Storey sought, and Johnson wrote Butler Wilson the letter that Storey had suggested. For their part, the Bostonians carried off a praiseworthy meeting for the national defense fund, and Johnson gratefully acknowledged a $2,000 check that placed Boston among the high donor cities.36 42
      This dispute represented a turning point in Boston's influence over the national civil rights movement. The city that once had played a central role in the founding of the association now constituted a backwater, alienated from the national office and largely out of step with the national movement—despite its ability to provide substantial financial contributions. The dispute over financial accounts, in part, reflected all-too-common bureaucratic turf battles within the NAACP, ones familiar to any reform movement at any time. In part, it also reflected racial antagonism within the movement that pitted the national office, whose staff was all black, against its only white-led branch. The NAACP had begun as a putatively integrated movement, but over its first decade it had evolved, without deliberate planning, into an essentially black organization, assisted by white legal and financial advisors. The association pointedly did not keep racial statistics on its membership, but attendance at national conventions revealed the racial background of those most committed to the movement. Only the Boston chapter had commented upon this development. Between 1919 and 1920, Bradford and Johnson had exchanged several thoughtful and concerned letters regarding the changing racial character of the association.37 43
      In the aftermath of the dispute, a more telling disagreement broke out between William Pickens, the field secretary, and Joseph Prince Loud, the white president of the branch, in 1926. Pickens had raised substantial funds for the association through a "Colored Baby" contest, in which supporters offered contributions to the association on behalf of their favorite baby photo. Loud refused to sanction this segregated activity, and Pickens wrote him testily that all the other branches of the association happily participated.38 Such incidents revealed the inability of the older white liberals of the 1920s to accept the increasingly African American character of the movement they had helped found. 44
      The old Garrisonian impulse had faded in Boston. Nothing better represented this change than the death of Moorfield Storey, one of the last co-workers with the original abolitionists, in 1929. Mary Wilson had passed away in 1928. Trotter, who had strong family ties to the abolitionist movement, simply trailed into insignificance by the late 1920s and died—probably a suicide—in 1934. No new generation of young activists came forward to take up their banner. In the politically conservative, disillusioned days of the late 1920s, civil rights advocates could not organize new active campaigns. The national association, by necessity, turned to confront the Ku Klux Klan, an organization without roots in Catholic Boston. The city became "Jim Curley's Boston" and offered few leadership opportunities for black Bostonians. 45
      In the next decade, new, more radical organizations appeared, addressing practical economic issues that Trotter and the NAACP had failed to address adequately. Emblematic of its decline, the NAACP launched no major campaign in Boston until the 1960s and 1970s. The migrants who arrived in the city after World War II, however, created a larger African American community powerful enough to demand a hearing on its civil rights. After World War II, a new generation of activists helped create the state's Commission Against Discrimination. Ruth Batson and Tom Atkins challenged school segregation in Boston through the NAACP, leading to the city's well-known battle over busing.39 Despite its decline, the Boston branch of the NAACP never disbanded, and in the 1960s it found revitalized purpose. If the NAACP had been organizationally weak in Boston for many decades, its historic legacy, ideological purpose, and organizational persistence realized the unfulfilled dream of its founders. Though weak and largely ineffective after its first decade, the NAACP's Boston branch ultimately became the vehicle through which the city dragged itself, kicking and screaming, into the era of a tolerant and a more racially diverse Boston. 46


MARK SCHNEIDER, adjunct professor at Tufts University, is the author of Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890–1920 (1997). He is currently working on a history of the NAACP before the Civil Rights era.


NOTES

1. Charles Flint Kellogg, NAACP: A History of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, 1909–1920 (Baltimore, 1967), vol. 2; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, "The NAACP as a Reform Movement, 1909–1965: 'To Reach the Conscience of America,'" Journal of Southern History 59(Feb. 1993):3–29. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1869–1919 (New York, 1993), is among several recent studies of Association leaders. See also Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909–1950 (Philadelphia, 1980).

2. Mark Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 1890–1920 (Boston, 1997), 133–159; Robert C. Hayden, Boston's NAACP History, 1910–1982 (Boston, 1982).

3. Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1970).

4. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920–1932 (Washington, D.C., 1935), pt. 2, table 10, p. 55.

5. Percy Julian, quoted in Gerald Gill, "Struggling Yet in Freedom's Birthplace," unpublished ms in author's possession.

6. John Daniels, In Freedom's Birthplace: A Study of the Boston Negroes (1914; New York, 1968); Eolyn C. Klugh, "Colored Girls at Work in Boston," Opportunity (Oct. 1928):295–299; Dorothy West, "The Typewriter," in Harlem Renaissance Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York, 1995).

7. NAACP Annual Report, 1913; James C. Evans to NAACP, Apr. 10, 1923, 1923–1924 Boston file; Butler Wilson to James Weldon Johnson, July 29, 1925, June–Aug. 1925 Boston file, Box G-88, Papers of the NAACP, Library of Congress (hereafter, NAACP Papers, LC).

8. Thelma Pearl Perry to NAACP, Jan. 24, 1927, Boston file; Butler Wilson letter in Boston Herald, Feb. 21, 1928, in Boston 1928 file, Box G-88, NAACP Papers, LC; Boston Transcript, Feb. 17, 1928; Fox, Trotter, 264–266.

9. For the general political and labor situation, see Jack Beatty, The Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1874–1958) (Reading, Mass., 1992); and James R. Green and Hugh Carter Donahue, Boston's Workers: A Labor History (Boston, 1979). On employment discrimination see Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Black Migration and Poverty: Boston 1865–1900 (New York, 1979); Stephen Thernstrom, The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880–1970 (Cambridge, Mass, 1973); and Gill, "Struggling Yet in Freedom's Birthplace."

10. Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century: The Making of a University to a Nation (New York, 1986), 86–89.

11. Raymond Pace Alexander, "Voices from Harvard's Own Negroes," Opportunity (Mar. 1923):29–31.

12. Butler Wilson to James Weldon Johnson, Jan. 23, 1923, Harvard University File, Box 1 C-270, NAACP Papers, LC.

13. George Bradford to James Weldon Johnson, Feb. 28, 1923, Harvard University 1922 file, Box 1 C-270, NAACP Papers, LC; Fox, Trotter, 261–263; William B. Hixson, Jr., Moorfield Storey and the Abolitionist Tradition (New York, 1972), 119–122.

14. James Weldon Johnson to A. Lawrence Lowell, Jan. 11, 1923; News release, Jan. 12, 1923; Johnson to Moorfield Storey, Jan. 15, 1923, Harvard University 1923 file, Box 1 C-270, NAACP Papers, LC.

15. George Bradford to James Weldon Johnson, Apr. 10, 1923, Harvard University 1923 file, Box 1 C-270, NAACP Papers, LC.

16. Zangrando, NAACP Crusade, 51–71.

17. Hixson, Moorfield Storey; Moorfield Storey to George B. Wickersham, Jan. 15, Jan. 22, Mar. 21, 1921; Storey to Walter White, May 13, 1921; Storey to James Weldon Johnson, Aug. 5, 1921; Storey to Johnson, Mar. 16, 1922, Papers of the NAACP, microfilm ed., pt. 1, reel 24 (hereafter NAACP, LCM).

18. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933; New York, 1968), 361–366.

19. Boston Herald, Apr. 24, 1922; NAACP Board of Directors' Minutes, May 1922, pt. 1, reel 1, NAACP, LCM; Secretary's report for May, pt. 1, reel 4, NAACP, LCM; John A. Garraty, Henry Cabot Lodge: A Biography (New York, 1953).

20. NAACP Board Minutes, May 1922, pt. 1, reel 4, NAACP, LCM; James Weldon Johnson to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 8, 1922, microfilm reel 80, Papers of Henry Cabot Lodge, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter LodgeMMHS).

21. NAACP Secretary's report, June 1922, pt. 1, reel 4, NAACP, LCM; Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 51, 116; William Monroe Trotter to Henry Cabot Lodge, May 21, 1922; Lodge to Trotter, May 22, 1922, reel 80, LodgeMMHS.

22. James Weldon Johnson to Herbert Seligmann, May 21, 1922, Box 24, James Weldon Johnson Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University; NAACP Secretary's report, June 1922, pt. 1, reel 4, NAACP, LCM. See, for example, New York Age, June 3, 1922; and Baltimore Afro-American, June 9, 1922. The Guardian survives only in random issues.

23. Baltimore Afro-American, May 19, 1922; NAACP Convention Proceedings, Newark, 1922, pt. 1, reel 8, NAACP, LCM.

24. Claudine L. Ferrell, Nightmare and Dream: Antilynching in Congress, 1917–1922 (New York, 1986), 248–262.

25. Henry Cabot Lodge to Eben Burnstead, May 23, June 4, 1922; Lodge to James Weldon Johnson, July 8, 1922; Lodge to Butler Wilson, July 11, 1922, reel 80, LodgeMMHS.

26. NAACP Secretary's report, July 1922, pt. 1, reel 4, NAACP, LCM; J. A. Archibald and others to Henry Cabot Lodge, July 22, 1922, reel 80, LodgeMMHS; New York Age, Aug. 19, 1922; Johnson, Along This Way, 366–370.

27. William Monroe Trotter to Henry Cabot Lodge, Oct. 27, 1922; Lodge to Trotter, Oct. 28, 1922, reel 80, LodgeMMHS; Boston Globe, Nov. 8, 9, 13, 1922.

28. Johnson, Along This Way, 370–373; "Views and Reviews," New York Age, Dec. 16, 1922.

29. Medora W. Gould to NAACP, Mar. 20, 1925; Walter White to Butler Wilson, Apr. 30, 1925, Boston Jan.–May 1925 file, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

30. Ingersoll Bowditch to James Weldon Johnson, May 5, 1925; George Bradford to NAACP, June 30, 1925, June–Aug. 1925 file, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

31. Report of Ingersoll Bowditch, July 3, 1925; George Bradford to James Weldon Johnson, Aug. 1, 1925, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

32. Walter White, "Memo to Mr. Johnson, re Boston Financial Matter," Oct. 2, 1925, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

33. Mark V. Tushnet, The NAACP's Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (Chapel Hill, 1987).

34. Rolfe Cobleigh to Arthur Spingarn, Oct. 2, 1925; Spingarn to Cobleigh, Oct. 21, 1925; James Weldon Johnson to Cobleigh, Oct. 21, 1925, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

35. Moorfield Storey to James Weldon Johnson and Mary White Ovington, Nov. 27, 1925, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

36. James Weldon Johnson to Moorfield Storey, Dec. 1, 1925; Storey to Johnson, Dec. 2, 1925; Johnson to Mary White Ovington, Dec. 4, 1925; Johnson to Butler Wilson, Dec. 15, 1925, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

37. Schneider, Boston Confronts Jim Crow, 152–159. Mary White Ovington, the white chairman of the board, also commented on this at the 1921 Detroit convention. See 1921 Convention Reports, pt. 1, reel 8, NAACP, LCM.

38. Joseph Loud to William Pickens, Jan. 27, 1926; Pickens to Loud, Jan. 30, 1926, Box 1 G-88, NAACP Papers, LC.

39. Ronald P. Formisano, Boston against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill, 1991).

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