The fight against discrimination on public transportation in Florida at the turn of the twentieth century helped to transform black leaders from nineteenth century activists into modern civil rights protesters. Although the movements at the turn of the century and the ones that dominated the South after World War II were not directly connected through a continuum of leadership and institutions, activists in the early twentieth century laid the intellectual and philosophical foundations of the modern civil rights movements. These important protests coincided with increased migration and urbanization of blacks and poor whites in Florida, but also provided that space where the merging of disparate groups of black leaders could communicate and subordinate gender and class demands to race.
C. Van Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 17-27; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, “The Boycott Movement Against Jim Crow Streetcars in the South, 1900-1906,” The Journal of American History 55 (March 1969): 745-75.
2.
Howard N. Rabinowitz, RaceRelations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 329-39.
3.
United States v. Stanley, 109 U.S. 3.
4.
For good examples of this idea within the context of Florida and the Gulf South Region, consult: James G. Hollandsworth, “Damned Sons of Bitches: The First Demonstrations for Black Civil Rights in the Gulf South,” in Sunbelt Revolutions: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1886-2000, Samuel C. Hyde Jr. ed. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 21-41; and Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden History of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2005), xiii-xxii.
5.
Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” The Journal of American History75 (December 1988), 786-811; Robert Korstad, Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 1-12.
6.
Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: The Free Press , 1984), ix.
7.
Michael K. Honey, Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 1-12; Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
8.
Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke,” Signs14 (Spring 1989), 610-33; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “ African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs17 (Winter 1992), 251-74; Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 31-60.
9.
Fon Louise Gordon, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880-1920 ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 56-59; Barbara Y. Welke, “When All the Women Were White and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1885-1914,” Law and History Review 13 (Fall 1995), 261-316.
10.
Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 182-3; Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law, and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 ( Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 358-65.
11.
Florida Times Union, May 23,1887.
12.
Rob Schorman, Selling Style: Clothing and Social Change at the Turn of the Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1-17; Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 17-47.
13.
Daily Florida Union, March 16, 1876.
14.
For a vivid first person account of this type of use within the “smoking cars,” consult James Weldon Johnson's autobiography Along this Way, 64-65, 86-87.
15.
Both men were well-known figures within and outside the AME Church. Payne at the time was the bishop in charge of the Florida district, and Turner was a bishop in the Georgia district. Payne was in his seventies when he was removed from a train in Florida and forced to carry his bag and walk back to Jacksonville. This ejection made Southern Republican and AME newspapers and inspired a groundswell of support for Payne, who refused to sue the railroad company and instead used the pulpit to admonish them and conservative whites in the South.
16.
Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 281-88.
17.
Huntsville Gazette, April 29, 1882; Philadelphia, The Christian Recorder, August 3, 1882; The Weekly Pelican , January 1, 1887.
18.
Tera W. Hunter, To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 115-16.
19.
Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 31-32.
20.
Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 31-32.
21.
Williams v. Jacksonville, Tampa and Key West Railroad., 26 Fl. 533, 8 So. 446.
22.
Williams, 26 Fl. 533, 8 So. 446.
23.
Williams., 26 Fl. 533, 8 So. 446; Welke, “When All the Women Were White,” 281. As for notions of Victorian era sexuality, see Kevin J. Mumford, “ Lost Manhood Found: Male Sexual Impotence and Victorian Culture in the United States,” Journal of the History of Sexuality3 (1992), 33-57; and Steven Seidman, “The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered ,” Journal of Social History24 (1990), 47-67.
24.
Gail Bederman , Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 31-41 .
25.
New York, Freeman, April 30, July 23, 1887.
26.
Freeman, July 9, 1887; Emma Lou Thornbrough, T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 105-16, 119-22.
27.
State of Florida “Chapter 3743 [No. 63],” Laws of Florida 1887, 116-17; Florida Times-Union, May 23, 1887, August 4, 1895; Welke, “ When All the Women Were White,” 274. Black leaders were able to place in the language of the legislation a requirement that both blacks and whites could not violate the separate accommodations.
28.
The application of the term “Jim Crow” to separate accommodations goes back to the 1840s when abolitionists noticed that white passengers in the North demanded separate cars for free black passengers. Reporters of the Liberator used the term to denote not only the separate car but also the racial insult and second-class status that this policy promoted. See Boston, Liberator, November 5, 1841, April 28, 1843, August 1, 1845; and Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 106-7.
29.
Gregory Mixon , “Henry McNeal Turner Versus the Tuskegee Machine: Black Leadership in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Negro History79 (Autumn: 1994), 363-80; Melbourne S. Commings, “ The Rhetoric of Bishop Henry McNeal Turner,” Journal of Black Studies12 (1982), 457-67; see Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African American Religion in the South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press , 2001), 234-35.
30.
Jacksonville, Metropolis, June 18, 1901; Jacksonville, Florida Times Union, June 18, 1901.
31.
Metropolis, November 6, 1901; Florida TimesUnion, November 6, 1901.
32.
Metropolis, November 8, 1901; Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 63.
33.
This was the father of James Weldon Johnson, future Secretary of the NAACP. At this time, JWJ was living in New York with his brother Rosemond. Later in life, when he wrote his autobiography Along This Way, he recalls traveling back and forth to Jacksonville in 1901; however, he does not mention this protest or his father's role in these activities.
34.
Metropolis, November 8, 1901.
35.
Metropolis, November 9, 1901.
36.
Metropolis, November 11, 1901.
37.
Metropolis, November 11, 1901; Florida Times Union, November 11, 1901; Atlanta, Constitution, November 11, 1901.
38.
Cleveland Gazette , April 12, 1902; Savannah Tribune , November 16-23, 1901; Washington, D.C. , Colored American, November 30, 1901; Indianapolis Freeman, November 30, 1901 .
39.
Wichita Search, November 23, 1901; Savannah Tribune, November 23, 1901; Indianapolis Freeman, December 7, 1901; Florida Times Union , July 20, 1905.
40.
Gross Earnings of the Main Street Railroad Company1900-1902, Box 38; from M. E. Satchwell to George Baldwin, February 25, 1902, in George Johnson Baldwin Papers (BP), Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The North Jacksonville Line would remain in black hands until 1903, and then two white owners took it over and continued to hire black employees while desperately trying to sell the company to investors in New Jersey. Throughout this time, they advertised this as the “black” owned streetcar, even though most black residents knew otherwise.
41.
Baldwin to Stone and Webster, March 5, 1903, Box 39, BP; Baldwin to Stone and Webster, April 10, 1903, Box 39, BP; Wetmore to William W. Osborne, April 10, 1903, Box 39, BP; Tucker to Baldwin, October 21, 1904, December 31, 1904, Box 40, BP.
42.
Everywhere else in the South that enforced segregation, ordinances required separate compartments, and signs denoting black and white patrons had to be visible and strictly enforced.
43.
Kenneth W. Goings and Brian D. Page, “African Americans Versus The Memphis Street Railway Company: Or, How to Win the Battle but Lose the War, 1890-1920,” Journal of Urban History30 (2004), 131-51.
44.
Tampa Tribune, June 16-21, 1904; Wetmore to Baldwin, August 2, 1905, Box 41, BP.
45.
Tampa Tribune, June 16-21, 1904; and Wetmore to Baldwin, August 2, 1905, Box 41, BP.
46.
Tampa Tribune, June 16-21, 1904; and Wetmore to Baldwin, August 2, 1905, Box 41, BP.
47.
Tucker to Baldwin, December 31, 1904, January 28, 1905, Box 40, BP; Tampa Tribune, July 12, 16, 20, 1904 .
48.
Tucker to Baldwin, January 20, 1905, Box 40, BP; Tucker to Baldwin, October 21, 1904, December 31, 1904, Box 40, BP.
49.
Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, June 6, 1905.
50.
See Richard L.McCormick, “The Discovery That Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism, ” American Historical Review86 (1981), 247-74.
51.
Pensacola Journal, April 14, 15, 26, May 10, 1905.
52.
Pensacola Journal, April 26, 30, 1905.
53.
Pensacola Journal, April 14, 15, 18, 19, 26, 30, 1905.
54.
Knight to Baldwin, April 17, 1905; Knight to Baldwin, April 24, 1905; and Baldwin to Knight, April 24, 1905, Box 55, BP.
55.
Baldwin to Stone and Webster, June 6, 1905; General Notice to Motormen and Conductors, June 30, 1905, Box 41, BP.
56.
Resolutions in Condemnation of the Iniquitous “Jim Crow” Streetcar Law, June 12, 1905, Box 41, BP; Baldwin to Stone and Webster, July 17, 1905, Box 55, BP. Not only did Baldwin rely on Wetmore's services, but he also subscribed to the local black paper to keep informed of all the events . Baldwin to Tucker, June 7, 1905, Box 41, BP; Pensacola Journal, May 14, 1905; Baltimore, Afro-American, July 15, 1905; Pensacola Journal, July 25, 1905.
57.
Baldwin to Goodly A. Webb, June 14, 1905; George Wells to Baldwin, May 17, 1905; Baldwin to Stone and Webster, July 17, 1905, Box 55, BP.
58.
Louis A. Perez, “Introduction,” in José Martí in the United States: The Florida Experience, ed. Louis A. Perez (Tempe: Arizona State University Center for Latin American Studies, 1995), 1-8; Gary R. Mormino and George E. Pozzetta , The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors in Tampa, 1885-1985 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 79; Nancy A. Hewitt, Southern Discomfort: Women's Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s-1920s (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 2001), 70.
59.
Resolutions in Condemnation of the Iniquitous “Jim Crow” Streetcar Law, June 12, 1905, Box 41, BP.
60.
Wetmore to Baldwin, June 23, 1905, Box 41, BP; Baldwin to Stone and Webster, July 7, 1905, Box 41, BP; New York Age, July 20, 1905. In coverage of the boycott in the black press, Waldron and Wetmore are reported to be in cooperation. According to the letters to Baldwin from Wetmore, Wetmore seems as if he is not enchanted by Waldron and wants to earnestly help to avoid a boycott, and he claims Waldron is out for political influence and self-promotion. Wetmore mentions in his letters that he would be attacked if people knew the relationship that he and Baldwin had for the previous year.
61.
Baldwin to Stone and Webster, July 12, 1905, Box 41, BP; Wetmore to Baldwin, June 14, 1905, Box 41, BP; Wetmore to Baldwin, June 9, 1905, Box 41, BP; Stone and Webster to Baldwin, June 14, 1905, BP; Baldwin to J. E. Hartridge, June 6, 1905, Box 41, BP; Wetmore to Baldwin, June 8, 1905, Box 41, BP.
62.
Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, July 20, 1905; Jacksonville, Metropolis, July 20, 1905 ; Washington, D.C., Washington Bee , July 29, 1905, August 12, 1905; Baltimore, Afro American, July 29, 1905, August 5, 12, 1905; Pensacola Journal, July 25, 1905; New York Age July 20, 27, 1905.
63.
Florida Supreme Court, “Purcell v. State: Introductory Statement and Result of Suit,” “Opinion: Judgment Affirmed” (June Term 1905), Florida State Archives, Tallahassee Florida; The State of Florida vs. Andrew Patterson, Florida Reports 50(1905), 126-27; Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, July 21, 23, 25, 26, 30, 1905.
64.
Florida Supreme Court, “ Purcell v. State: Introductory Statement of Nature and Result of Suit” (June Term 1905), Florida State Archives, Tallahassee, Florida.
65.
There is also an element of skin color that plays a role. The black newspapers identify Wetmore as a man of light complexion. They conclude that because of this he could have passed for white, but chose to identify himself as black. The papers believed he was brave and heroic for this decision. Clearly if the papers take this issue on in this way, the readership of the paper one should assume was middle class.
66.
Jacksonville, City Council Minutes , October 17, 1905, 501-2; Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, October 18, 1905; Pensacola, City Council Minutes, September 27, 1905; Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union, September 7, 8, 1906; Tucker to Baldwin, November 13, 1905, Box 41, BP; Wetmore to Baldwin, November 13, 1905, Box 41, BP; Crooms v. Schad 51 Fla. 168, 40 So. 497; Patterson v. Taylor 51 Fla. 275, 40 So. 493; New York Age, August 10, 1905; State of Florida, Acts and Resolutions Adopted by the Legislature of Florida ( DeLand, FL: E. O. Painter Printing Company, 1915), 99-101; Florida East Coast Railroad Company v. Geiger, 64 Fla., 60 So. 753.
67.
Wetmore to Baldwin, June 26, 1905, Box 41, BP; Wetmore to Baldwin, November 15, 1905, Box 41, BP.
68.
It is hard to tell whether the boycott truly ended after this compromise. Since the reporters were on the payroll they may not have reported a continuing boycott. There was no coverage of any future boycotts in Jacksonville in the black press nationally; since the earlier ones were covered one would have to assume that both Waldron and Wetmore supporters agreed to the terms of the compromise. There is no indication of any boycott in the rest of Baldwin's papers. The story of Wetmore's passing in New York is mentioned in James Weldon Johnson's autobiography; Wetmore is the frequently mentioned childhood friend “D.”
69.
“The Niagara Movement: Declarations of Principles, 1905 ” in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1877-1963 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corp. of America, 1981), Reel 10.
70.
“Minutes, August 27” in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Papers of W.E.B. Du Bois, 1877-1963 (Sanford, NC: Microfilming Corp. of America , 1981), Reel 10.
