Читать книгу Cedric Robinson - Joshua Myers - Страница 10

Before landing in Oakland, the Whitesides had already embarked upon a remarkable journey in the post-emancipation South. Cap’s father, Benjamin Whiteside, was born enslaved in 1847 and had migrated to Mobile from Cooper’s Gap, North Carolina after the Civil War.⁹ Cap’s mother, Clara Mercer, who had been enslaved in Virginia, had also managed to find a new beginning in Mobile, settling in a house with her widowed mother. We do not know the details of the circumstances that led either of them away from the only places they knew to a place that was the dreaded “deeper” South, the destination of many in the domestic slave trade. But Black migrations south after the war were not unheard of as many sought family members from whom they had been separated, while others merely wanted to test the meaning of freedom away from the familiar plantations that had been the source of their exploitation and their pain.¹⁰ Mobile became such a space – with its Black population increasing by 65 percent in the years after the war – for many to practice these experiments in freedom. But such experiments were often fraught. In Mobile, as well as other recovering Southern cities, one would not have been able to escape the possibilities of violence and of a kind of class warfare that sought to control and manage the kind of militancy that might presage true societal transformation.¹¹

In 1870, at the age of nineteen, Clara Mercer married Benjamin Whiteside. Twenty-three years later, Cap was born, becoming the youngest of seven children, amid the erosion of Reconstruction and at the height of Redemption – the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that solidified Jim Crow was handed down a month before his third birthday. Finding work as a drayman in industrial Mobile, Benjamin would soon put enough money aside to secure a family home and open a delivery business. Soon thereafter Clara became a restaurateur, serving home-cooked meals out of an adjacent property on N. Jackson Street. As Mobile’s harbor activities recovered from the war, this growing Black population became a source of the necessary labor force required to make the port city attractive to international capital.

Throughout the 1870s, the Black population would struggle to consolidate the political power that manifested as a possibility during Reconstruction. In Mobile, this meant an intra-racial battle between an elite, moderate wing, often aligned with the “radical Republicans” and a mass-based militant assertion of self-determination that struggled to find a political footing within the Republican Party (which often meant alliances with the Democrats). This latter element included working-class freedmen, such as draymen like Benjamin Whiteside, who went on strike in 1867 to demand fairer treatment.¹² In cases where that militant segment did find its political voice in the Republican Party, with prominent personas like Lawrence Berry and Alexander Allen, their political maneuvering often went awry, with many living out their last years in public disgrace. Berry turned to alcohol, and committed suicide, with the encouragement of the white press, while Allen ended up in jail on murder charges after a mob descended upon a bar he owned. He would perish while incarcerated. Years of harassment and ridicule were the costs for advocating for the Black poor in Mobile.¹³ Their deaths were part of a campaign of racial terror. It was defined by cases like that of elderly Black leader and minister Sam Gaillard who, after being sent to a chain gang for refusing to be degraded and referred to as “boy,” subsequently refused to work and was shot down after uttering the last words, “I can die, but I won’t work.”¹⁴ In response, other leaders counseled moderation, a tactic to defuse the situation. A Republican paternalism directed the city’s part in Reconstruction. But it was, perhaps predictably, a moderation that was still too much for the white supremacist assumptions that informed Democratic power.

With Reconstruction and Black political leadership undermined through white violence and greed by the mid-1880s, a Black business class emerged situating itself along Davis Avenue in the Seventh Ward. A détente with Jim Crow, however, led some of them to adopt the self-help, apolitical posture of Booker T. Washington. But arguably this class – only representative of about 1 percent of the population – was not the true foundation of Black life in Mobile. The richer valences of Blackness resonated in the cultural and social lives of the masses who lived a rougher material existence that was nevertheless replenished by a deep spiritual well. On the occasion of a funeral, the community of Samaritans, a social order, would appear for the public ceremony in all-white, with “white broad-brimmed hats with long white veils,” a rite reminiscent of African pasts not long past.¹⁵ Death, even under the hard circumstances of life in the early days of Jim Crow, was a time to fortify bonds and togetherness. Like the churches and other social organizations, the creation of community-based and service-oriented businesses was also grounded in this pursuit of a measure of autonomy, care, and protection. It was necessary in conditions where the exploitative realm, the requirements of capital’s expansion, was both grossly unfair and often deadly. While such a business class, even those who were political, could not fully negate the political and economic conditions that placed the vast majority at the behest of capital, they were part of a community ethic that was critical to the Black community’s sense of order.¹⁶

Though not as financially successful as Washington acolyte, pastor, and insurance man Christopher First Johnson nor as well known as labor leader and store owner Ralph Clemmons, the Whitesides were a part of this economy which served Black Mobile, achieving, in fact, a semblance of economic independence. But, soon after, their failing health forced a primary school-educated Cap to emerge as the family’s economic glue, a situation that was made more urgent after his older sister and mother passed in the first half of the 1910s. Facing the possibility of financial disaster, he sought and attained full-time employment at a cigar factory and would soon begin a family of his own, but not without further turmoil. Cap married Cedric’s bloodline maternal grandmother, Corine Cunningham, in 1916. Their family apparently included some Native American and French ancestry. She had lived in Mobile with her mother and grandmother before moving into the Whiteside family house and caring for her father-in-law, Benjamin. After giving birth to Cap’s three daughters in quick succession, the marriage abruptly ended and Cap later married Cecilia, whose assault would serve as the impetus for abandoning their lives in Mobile.

The rich textures of institutional and associational life in Black Mobile extended the militancy of the Reconstruction era to the period of the Nadir – often beyond and against the middle-class pretensions of Washington’s followers. This political tradition was at once representative of Black resistance writ large and deeply connected to the contexts of Nadir-era Alabama. And Cap was its product. His generation, those who lived at a time in Alabama where the 1901 state constitution openly mandated segregation and disfranchisement, responded most famously with a streetcar boycott, which was followed by a contentious strike of Mobile’s back longshoremen, who were affiliated with the International Longshoremen’s Association.¹⁷ This threat of Black organizing and self-assertion led directly to a spike in racist violence, including a number of lynchings within the Mobile city limits. The Whitesides would have remembered the scene of Richard Robertson’s 1909 extrajudicial murder by hanging, a violent spectacle that took place across the street from the historic Christ Episcopal Church in downtown Mobile. The Nadir was real in Mobile, even as the city fathers often brandished the city as a paragon of progress and a “new South.”¹⁸ But those labels, products of boosterish corporate imaginations, could not assuage the discontent that led to Black out-migration during the late 1910s and 1920s – a retreat northward and westward that the Whitesides would soon join.